I Think He Won the Game
Marco:
I have found a great use for the Vision Pro.
Casey:
This is going to be good.
Casey:
I don't think I even knew you had yours back or do you not?
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
I've had it back.
Marco:
It has been in its little marshmallow pod for a month or two at least since last time I used it.
Casey:
I thought you had loaned it to somebody.
Casey:
That's why I did.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I loaned it to a friend for like two or three weeks earlier in the spring.
Marco:
I got you.
Marco:
But, you know, I've had it back now for a while.
Marco:
It took me a while to like, you know, actually motivate myself to, you know, actually reset it back up as me and, you know, charge it, update and all that stuff.
Marco:
Because like, you know, every time that you put it on and it's either discharged or it needs a software update, that's an excuse for you or that's kind of a requirement for you to like, all right, let me take it off.
Marco:
I'll let it do its thing.
Marco:
And I'll come back to it.
Marco:
And I never come back to it.
Marco:
This last few days, I have been strictly constrained to lying on the couch because I got a vasectomy.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter for everyone to know this, but it's minor surgery and more men in this country should do our part for birth control since especially women's options are being needlessly and horribly limited.
Marco:
So anyway, it's no big deal.
Marco:
I have been laid up on the couch for a few days, and I was told, you know, don't do anything.
Marco:
Like, don't sit at a desk.
Marco:
Don't walk around.
Marco:
Like, don't lift heavy things.
Marco:
Don't do anything.
Marco:
And honestly, really, men out there, it really isn't that bad.
Marco:
If you're on the fence, just do it.
Marco:
I was scared, and it was fine.
Marco:
And it's totally fine.
Marco:
Anyway, I had to lay on the couch for, you know, a couple days.
Marco:
And I am really bad at doing nothing.
Marco:
Like, I just want to get up and do it.
Marco:
I want to work.
Marco:
I want to do stuff around the house.
Marco:
I want to walk the dog.
Marco:
Like, there's a million things I want to be doing.
Marco:
But I had to lay on the couch.
Marco:
And when you're lying on the couch, it's really not that comfortable to use a laptop, you know, when you're like really lying down.
Marco:
It's also, you know, in a situation like this, you might not necessarily want to be putting things in your lap.
Marco:
Except frozen peas.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And by the way, those were great.
Marco:
noted way better than the uh than the special amazon underwear with the ice packs um i can say a bag of frozen peas works better than that noted as you save you 40 bucks uh anyways that is true because i suffice to say i will be following in your footsteps uh at the end of the summer so this is this is good advice all right well after the apocalypse i guess it'll be up to me to repopulate the planet yep
John:
It'll be all little Syracuses.
John:
It'll be great.
Marco:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
Anyway, this was the perfect use case for the Vision Pro.
Marco:
I got to like lie down on the couch and like, you know, I didn't want to, you know, if you're lying down on the couch in most living room arrangements, including mine, you're not, you can't look directly at the TV.
Marco:
The TV is like off to your side.
Marco:
oh contraire yeah i think i have that moved down but anyway go on oh yeah because you're like more diagonal um anyway we have a more you know a more like standard like you know linear couch to tv layout easy places to put your speakers yeah i know how it is yeah
Marco:
Anyway, so I've been watching stuff in the Vision Pro and kind of messing around with it as basically lying on the couch, being able to look straight up and have a virtual screen projected straight up above my head.
Marco:
I've been like watching WBDC session videos mostly and stuff like that.
Marco:
But like a long time ago, when Federico Vitici had to spend a lot of time in hospital beds for a while,
Marco:
That's when he fell in love with the iPad because the iPad was easy to use in a hospital bed.
Marco:
And that was like a huge computing win for him.
Marco:
I can say with confidence that the Vision Pro is not necessarily as big of a win for general purpose computing as the iPad is in that context.
Marco:
But it does serve an interesting role in that you can compute while you are lying down and you can do so while holding nothing in your hands and barely even moving your hands.
Marco:
And so there are decent numbers of cases where that can be very useful to people.
Marco:
It is a lot harder to get a lot of things done in the Vision Pro, to be honest.
Marco:
And there's a lot less software and a lot of totally missing apps that you just have no way to run in there.
Marco:
Like the iPad.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But like, man, it actually was like, you know, I actually really came to appreciate it during these two days for that purpose.
John:
I thought you were going to say that the person who did the procedure used the Vision Pro to do it.
Marco:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
No, I sure would not have appreciated that.
John:
Maybe they did.
John:
You don't know.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad that it took a little minor surgery to get you on the Vision Pro bandwagon.
Casey:
Welcome.
Casey:
We're happy to have you.
Casey:
So all kidding aside, you said you were watching some developer videos.
Casey:
Is there anything else or any moments that you've had that you're like, hey, this is actually pretty great?
Marco:
I also did watch the talk show live in there.
Marco:
It was actually really cool to see it that way.
Marco:
It worked very well.
Marco:
In fact, Casey...
Marco:
you can even hear you talking at the very very end like when the lights everything's up and the lights come up because you were apparently sitting like right next to the camera rig right at the end you hear casey say something like right before the audio cuts out yeah i was sitting right by the camera rig because it blocked my view of the stage yeah well but i survived
John:
I was like, if you wanted to see the show from the perspective of where I sit, that's the 3D thing that they put out.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so and I'll tell you what, like, you know, so the talk show live.
Marco:
So our friend Adam Lissagore at Sandwich and this other company, I forget the name of it, Spatial something.
Marco:
Something Gen maybe.
Marco:
Yeah, I think that's it.
Marco:
They did a live.
Marco:
So Sandwich has a new app called Theater.
Marco:
It's kind of like the big screen equivalent of their television app where you can watch arbitrary videos inside like cool settings or in the case of television inside retro TV sets in the Vision Pro.
Marco:
So they made this theater app and they did a live broadcast of John Gruber's The Talk Show Live at WWDC event in stereo video.
Marco:
So in 3D video.
Marco:
It's really cool.
Marco:
And first of all, it's an interesting and remarkable technical achievement that they were able to do this live event this way with what appear to be two very small companies, relatively speaking, while Apple has currently broadcast zero live events to the Vision Pro.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell, there have been no other live events broadcast to the Vision Pro ever.
Marco:
And it was really compelling.
Marco:
And I don't want to speak for them, but from what I heard, it sounded like the engagement numbers were pretty good to my ears.
Marco:
There really is a cool potential for the Vision Pro for spatial video broadcast of live cool events.
Marco:
And I just hope someone else ever does it.
Marco:
Because that really is a really cool idea.
Marco:
It worked very, very well.
Marco:
It turned out great, and I would love to watch other concerts or productions or other live events this way.
Marco:
Obviously, sports people are never dying to watch sports this way too.
Marco:
There is so much potential there, and so I hope that potential is realized because obviously if this one or these two small companies could get together and do this –
Marco:
Obviously, there's nothing stopping Apple or major sports leagues or major content providers from doing this themselves.
Marco:
There's still a long way to go in a lot of the technical angles of it.
Marco:
But this was literally just like this was a fixed camera at a fixed location.
Marco:
It was like you were sitting in the front row and you just saw a fixed viewport and it was 3D.
Marco:
And it was a little bit low resolution and a little bit low frame rate, but it looked great.
Marco:
It looked like you were there.
Marco:
It was a really cool thing to see.
Marco:
And so I really hope we see more of this coming to the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Well, that's really awesome.
Casey:
I do plan to at least take a quick watch of it.
Casey:
You know, John and a few of our friends and I were all sitting front row because Gruber was kind enough to, you know, leave some reserved seats and whatnot.
Casey:
And so the view of the camera is basically what Syracuse and I had seen.
Casey:
You know, we were on either side of it, but basically what we had seen for the show.
Casey:
And it was a good show.
Casey:
It ran long.
Casey:
I was surprised that the Apple execs were willing to give Gruber two hours.
Casey:
Not that he's undeserving, just that I feel like typically they're getting antsy at like 90 minutes.
Casey:
But it was a full two hours and it was good.
Casey:
So yeah, you should definitely check it out.
Casey:
And they have a rendered or mastered in 4K YouTube version, like a standard 2D YouTube version, which I also have not watched yet.
Casey:
I mean, since I was there.
Casey:
But nevertheless, if you don't have a Vision Pro, don't feel like you're entirely missing out.
Casey:
You can just watch it on YouTube.
Marco:
It's also a podcast.
Marco:
There was a podcast version today as well.
Marco:
And content-wise, I got to say that I really enjoyed this live talk show.
Marco:
They were interviewing John G. and Andrea, Jaws, and Federighi.
Marco:
And I think it went great for all three of them.
Marco:
And I think John Gruber had a really good balance of like...
Marco:
Questions to kind of let them flex and show off and tell us a few more cool details, but also some hard questions that kind of, you know, had them have to answer for certain things or have to explain certain things.
Marco:
It was a really good balance of that.
Marco:
And so I really enjoyed it.
Marco:
Highly recommended for anybody who listened to this show.
Casey:
You know what else is highly recommended?
Casey:
Our interview, which we were lucky enough to do, this is, we're recording this on Friday.
Casey:
It was Tuesday that we sat down with Holly Borla and Ben Cohen, both Swift compiler engineers or in that vicinity.
Casey:
Core team.
Casey:
Yes, with core team.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
It was, I wasn't nervous going into it, but you know, you don't know how it's going to go and having, you know,
Casey:
And I thought that Holly and Ben did a phenomenal job.
Casey:
I thought it was really great.
Casey:
They are very willing to get in the weeds, but they don't jump immediately there.
Casey:
You know, they're extraordinarily good communicators, both of them.
Casey:
It was really, really great, and I had an absolute blast.
Casey:
I don't want to speak for you two.
Casey:
Well, maybe I do a little bit, but I could have gone...
Casey:
easily another hour, probably another two if we had the space and the time.
Casey:
I don't know if Holly and Ben would have liked that, but I would have.
Casey:
It was a lot of fun and it was really, really great.
Casey:
And that is not behind any sort of paywall or anything like that.
Casey:
It's just a little bonus episode that we released a couple of days ago now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's primarily for programmers.
John:
Like if you're a programmer, we do go heavy into programmary stuff.
John:
It helps if you know about Swift, Apple's ecosystem.
John:
We went very deep because we to take advantage of the people we got to speak to.
John:
That was the best use of our time, because if you're talking to experts, you don't ask them just the basic stuff.
John:
But we have heard from some people who are like, look, I don't develop for Apple's platforms or maybe I'm not even a programmer.
John:
And they still found it interesting to get a feel for things because we did cover stuff at a higher level as well as getting way down to the nitty gritty.
John:
So please check it out.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
It was really, really fun.
Casey:
And I think you would enjoy it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
This is the customary WWDC or post WWDC all follow-up all the time episode.
Casey:
So unless we somehow absolutely fly through this, I'm just setting the stage now.
Casey:
This is all follow-up, but that's okay.
Casey:
We got to clear the deck so we can get back to regularly scheduled programming in the next episode.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Microsoft has had a bit of a roller coaster over the last few days or last couple of weeks, really.
Casey:
So on June 7th, there's a Verge article, Microsoft Changes Recall, which is their thing which records your screen and lets you ask questions of what you saw where.
Casey:
Anyways, Microsoft changes recall to be opt-in and improves the security from The Verge.
John:
As we predicted, by the way, in the pre-WWDC episode, that they would have to change it to opt-in.
John:
And we weren't just kidding.
John:
That was obvious next move.
John:
And they did it almost immediately after we released the show.
John:
Yeah, and that's the right move.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
They also said, we are adding additional layers of data protection, including just-in-time decryption protected by Windows Hello enhanced sign-in security.
Casey:
So recall snapshots will only be decrypted and accessible when the user authenticates.
Casey:
In addition, we encrypted the search index database.
Casey:
That was June 7.
Casey:
Fast forward just barely under a week.
Casey:
It's now June 13th.
Casey:
Microsoft delays recall again.
Casey:
Won't debut it with the new Co-Pilot Plus PCs after all.
Casey:
Reading this time from Ars Technica, Microsoft will be delaying its controversial recall feature again, according to an updated blog post by Windows and Devices VP Pavan Davoruri.
Casey:
And when the feature does return, quote, in the coming weeks, quote, Pavan writes, it will be as a preview available to PCs in the Windows Insider program, the same public testing and validation pipeline that all other Windows features usually go through before being released to the general public.
Casey:
That was the 13th.
John:
So it went from a flagship feature to a big controversy to not being opt in to not shipping at all, except as a Windows Insider sort of beta preview.
Yeah.
John:
Really, this has soured the whole Copilot Plus PC launch for the Snapdragon ARM processor and everything.
John:
It's just what should have been such a clean win for them.
John:
Hey, we have good laptops now.
John:
A software feature.
John:
And I think actually a software feature with the potential to be a good software feature is just...
John:
done so poorly with you know this is what it's so important to like pick the right defaults to know your audience to know how to frame things like the same basic feature could have been released without all of this if it had been implemented better if it had been off by default if it had been like not present on the enterprise version of windows like you have to really know who who is able who wants this who's willing to give it a chance and who absolutely does not want this
Casey:
on their computers and microsoft really blew this one sure seems like it all right so intel and amd's copilot plus pcs won't have the copilot ai features at launch whoopsie doopsies it's reading from the verge microsoft's new windows ai features like auto super resolution for smoother gaming aren't exclusive to qualcomm intel's lunar lake and amd's strix point chips will have enough ai co-processing performance too
Casey:
But when Intel and AMD's new Copilot Plus PCs arrive this fall, no one is promising they'll ship with all or even any of the new AI features.
Casey:
Each of those laptops will require free software updates before they get Microsoft's Copilot Plus AI features, and those updates won't necessarily even arrive before the end of 2024.
Casey:
Microsoft said, Intel, Lunar Lake, and AMD Strix PCs are Windows 11 AI PCs that meet our Copilot Plus PC hardware requirements.
Casey:
We are partnering closely with Intel and AMD to deliver Copilot Plus PC experiences through free updates when available.
John:
I mean, this is like, oh, so Qualcomm's having problems.
John:
The ARM, the big coming out party for Windows on ARM with good laptops is not going well.
John:
And Intel and AMD, as we noted on the pre-WDFC episode, they have their own processors that also qualify for this.
John:
And they're not here to rescue anybody because Microsoft doesn't have the software features ready for them yet.
John:
It seems like Microsoft was like, this is going to be, I mean, I don't know, this is our chance to make ARM a thing.
John:
You know, we won't even support the Intel AMD things, or maybe it was just poor planning.
John:
But this whole launch, I guess it's just a 2025 thing.
John:
And they're hoping we'll just ignore it until then.
John:
I'm very disappointed.
John:
Obviously, I want Windows to go entirely to ARM.
John:
That seems like it's not happening, but they can't even get the Intel and AMD versions of these features out.
Marco:
You just want it for the games.
John:
I do.
John:
100%.
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
I mean, I think this shows, though, like a massive architectural change and all new processors and all new hardware.
Marco:
It's a big ordeal.
Marco:
Like, you know, it shows, yeah, Apple was able to do it, but it took a ton of work.
Marco:
And that's just one company who could get aligned behind it.
Marco:
The PC ecosystem does not work that way at all.
Marco:
Think about the uphill battle they have here.
Marco:
They have an architecture transition that most of their customers don't want, that totally screws some of their biggest partners in Intel and AMD.
Marco:
Dealing with a company, Qualcomm, that is certainly not like super easy and friendly to deal with by most metrics that we hear about.
Marco:
But mainly selling into companies that kind of don't want this, selling to users that kind of don't want this with a bunch of software that's not ready for it.
Marco:
So, yeah, they kind of have a tough environment to get this through.
Marco:
They've tried this before.
Marco:
It didn't work.
Marco:
Obviously, things are a little bit different now.
Marco:
Technology is better.
Marco:
The translation slash emulation story is better.
Marco:
So I think they have a better chance now, but it's still far from an easy thing.
Marco:
And what they're doing is trying to convince a whole bunch of companies and a whole bunch of customers to take a move that many of them don't want to take.
John:
Yeah, so the recall thing doesn't help with that because that's like just an additional thing to deter you.
John:
You didn't even know this was on the table as a thing that could make you not want it.
John:
But guess what?
John:
We added a thing that's scary and you don't want on top of that.
John:
And the thing is, I don't think they're framing it as an architecture transition.
John:
It's more like here's another way that you can run Windows.
John:
And it's complicated by the fact that they keep bringing up AMD and Intel.
John:
And AMD and Intel do have hardware that competes.
John:
Which is why it's not a transition.
John:
It says, look, these are new software features in Windows, and by the way, they're also supported on a new architecture, and you shouldn't have to know which is which, but the reason for you to buy an ARM PC is undercut by Intel and AMD having competitive SoCs, which they will soon-ish.
John:
And then those PCs won't have all the features that you're rolling out in software.
John:
Like, again, it seems like their role is to, like, in 2027, if Microsoft paint a picture of what the PC market would look like, I guess it's like you can buy a Windows PC with AI features and it will either have an x86 processor or an ARM processor.
John:
Yeah.
John:
What is their ideal percentage of the market?
John:
Is it 50-50?
John:
Is it 60-40?
John:
Is it 90-10?
John:
It doesn't seem like they're even trying to make a transition because as you noted, a transition would totally screw over into AMD and they don't want to do that.
John:
But I don't honestly know what they're trying to do here, but whatever it is, they're doing it poorly.
Casey:
UTM, which is a general purpose emulator, won't be in the App Store, excuse me.
Casey:
So this is a post from one of the authors, I guess.
Casey:
Thomas, after an almost two-month-long review process, Apple has rejected UTMSE from the iOS App Store as well as from notarization for third-party App Stores.
Casey:
Yikes.
Casey:
Their reasoning is that rule 4.7, which Apple recently introduced that allows for Delta PPSSPP and other emulators to be allowed, does not apply to UTMSE.
Casey:
The App Store Review Board determined that, quote, PC is not a console, quote.
Casey:
Regardless of the fact that there are retro Windows and DOS games for the PC, that UTMSE can be useful in running.
Casey:
Additionally, Apple's stance is that UTMSE is not allowed on third-party marketplaces either because rule 4.7 also applies to the notarization review guidelines.
Casey:
So rule 4.7 covers mini apps, mini games, streaming games, chatbot, plugins, and game emulators.
Casey:
Then there was an update later on from UTM.
Casey:
Apple's reached out and clarified that the notarization was rejected under rule 2.5.2, and that 4.7 is an exception that only applies to App Store apps, but which UTM SE does not qualify for.
Casey:
And then you can see more on Michael Sy's blog.
Casey:
Finally, UTM writes, we will adhere by Apple's content and policy decision because we believe UTMSE, which does not have just-in-time compilation, is a subparse experience and isn't worth fighting for.
Casey:
See a blog post that I think, I'm pretty sure we talked about this in the past, but about why Dolphin the, what is that, a Wii emulator?
John:
is that right yep mq um why it isn't coming to the app store and so utm continues uh we do not wish to invest any additional time or effort trying to get utmse in the app store or third-party stores unless apple changes their stance i'm not loving this not loving this at all so this is this is something because like so what apple rejecting stuff from the app store whatever like even just it's weird that they're rejecting because they allow delta and this is an emulator that doesn't have a jit so it should fall within the rules but it's a pc emulator and pcs aren't consoles remember we talked about the definition of like retro console games what do all those words mean
John:
Apple has now said after two months, PC is not a console.
John:
Fine, whatever.
John:
But they also rejected it from the notarization process, which is an overloaded term in the Apple world, that they do for things going to third-party app stores.
John:
So they can't even get this into a third-party app store.
John:
And Apple's only supposed to reject things from third-party app stores for using private APIs and for security reasons.
John:
They could maybe make an argument that there's some sort of security issue with this thing of like, well, it's an emulator and...
John:
like it can download arbitrary but like i just i don't understand how they're going to defend this to say oh remember when we said we're just going to check for private apis and security also we're just going to make decisions like we don't want this emulator in any stores not even ours i don't know i don't know why they would do this like why do they care if a thing that emulates windows and dos games is on a third-party app store
Casey:
This doesn't make any sense to me, and maybe there is a completely fair and logical reason, but I can't put my finger on it if so.
John:
If there is, I feel like they would have communicated it to the UTM authors.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
They would have said, here's why, because the virtualization framework you're using has a security flaw and it would allow people to root phones or something.
John:
Just say that if it's the case, but they haven't.
Casey:
Not a great look.
Casey:
Not a great look at all.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple and Meta could face charges for violating EU tech rules.
Casey:
Apple and Meta could soon face charges.
Casey:
I'm sorry, this is from The Verge.
Casey:
Could soon face charges from the European Commission for violating Digital Markets Act or DMA rules.
Casey:
The commission is reported to be targeting Apple over its steering rules that charge developers for pointing to third-party purchase options.
Casey:
Meta's charges will reportedly revolve around its ad-free subscription for Facebook and Instagram in the EU.
Casey:
The commission will be using preliminary findings, according to Reuters, meaning that the companies can make changes to try to correct things before the commission makes final decision.
Casey:
Apple is set to be charged first, Reuters reports, and the Financial Times says we can see the charges in the coming weeks.
Casey:
They can charge something like 5% of annual revenue or something like that.
Casey:
So this is like pretty serious money if they choose to go that deep in it.
John:
Yeah, this is a leak.
John:
I mean, we talked about this right after Apple rolled out its DMA compliance.
John:
And we said the EU is is investigating to see if what Apple did is actually compliant.
John:
And we're coming to the part where we're going to get that answer.
John:
And it seems like this is a leak from the EU to say our answer is going to be no.
John:
What Apple did is not compliant.
John:
This doesn't even mention things like rejecting UTM from third party app stores.
John:
This is just talking about, you know, the steering rules and taking money from developers for going to third party purchase pages and stuff like that.
John:
We'll see what the ruling says.
John:
They're always kind of slow to move and a little bit back in time.
John:
Like they can't keep up with all the violations that Apple is doing.
John:
But yeah, that's always the risk with these things is they make a rule.
John:
Apple says they comply and then the EU takes its time to say, but have you really complied?
John:
And their ruling is coming and it doesn't look good for Apple.
John:
Say it again like you mean it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's not looking good for Apple.
Casey:
And I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
I have such mixed feelings about this.
Casey:
And depending on when you catch me, sometimes I think the EU is being a bit heavy handed.
Casey:
And then I'll tell you 10 minutes later that Apple deserves everything it's getting.
Casey:
And right now I'm leaning more towards, well, you kind of deserve it.
Casey:
But ask me again in 10 minutes, like I said.
Marco:
That right there, that is the risk of failing to self-regulate and creating a need for governments to step in.
Marco:
Because when governments do step in, they're not going to get everything right.
Marco:
They're going to do things because these are largely not technology people.
Marco:
Certainly, whatever technology people who talk to the government and influence them are going to be only from a certain side of it.
Marco:
So when governments are forced to regulate tech...
Marco:
they don't always do what's good for everybody or what's good for us in the industry or what's good for our customers.
Marco:
And that's the risk.
Marco:
But for Apple failing to self-regulate to an acceptable degree for all these years, and I think getting worse over time in a lot of these areas...
Marco:
they have invited the government regulation risk by their own failure to self-regulate.
Marco:
And that's the risk of doing that.
Marco:
Yes, they've made some extra money here and there on their various app store cuts and anti-competitive behavior they've done there.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
They also provoked governments to regulate them.
Marco:
Now they have to accept the consequences of that.
Marco:
I think it would have been a better long term strategy to hold back a little on the anti-competitive behavior and maybe avoid some of this regulation.
Marco:
But I mean, hey, I'm not the CEO of Apple.
Marco:
So they didn't take my advice, obviously.
Marco:
And we'll see how it turns out.
Marco:
But that's, you know, they rolled the dice themselves.
Marco:
And this is what they got.
John:
And they're still kind of betting that their compliance, people call it malicious compliance.
John:
It's not quite that bad, but it's like, can we plausibly comply with this in a way that makes all the alternatives they're trying to introduce unattractive?
John:
And as we've discussed in the episode about the DMA compliance, even if they were complying with the letter of the law here, they are not complying with the spirit.
John:
They have worked very hard to arrange things to make the alternatives unattractive.
John:
basically impossible for them to be more attractive than what Apple offers because of the rules that Apple itself makes.
John:
They made rules to make all the other options at best on equal footing with Apple's, but most of the time worse.
John:
And that is not the spirit of the law.
John:
The spirit of the law is supposed to allow competition.
John:
It's not supposed to allow Apple to make a set of rules that doesn't allow anything better to ever exist.
John:
And rejecting apps like UTM from third-party app stores is just...
John:
icing on the cake so uh so far they've been betting they can get away with this uh the penalties are supposedly huge but like all government things this everything happens slowly we've waited how many months for the eu to say whether they're compliant they're probably going to say that they're not and who knows how much longer we'll have to wait after that for apple to say okay well what about now now are we compliant and this could just go on for ages so you know the wheels of government move slowly
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Casey:
So, uh, achievement unlocked.
Casey:
I was a little, little itty bitty spec in the keynote in the actual WWDC keynote.
Casey:
Um, we were seated fairly far away from the screen, which is fine.
Casey:
I'm not complaining, but my eyes are not good enough to have been able to discern, uh, you know, the, the wall in the wall of icons of vision pro apps.
Casey:
Does mine exist there?
Casey:
And I mean, given that there's not too many, you would think so.
John:
And that was all of them on screen.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
And eagle-eyed viewers have pointed out to me, and I think, John, I think you made this very helpful image.
Casey:
No sarcasm.
John:
I did make it for you.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But there at the top of the screen is Call Sheet.
Casey:
So I was actually with my friend Steve that did that icon.
Casey:
Jelly did the kind of default one for iOS.
Casey:
Steve did the default one for Vision OS.
Casey:
And I was with him just an hour ago, and we were both sharing a happy moment about how we had made it into the keynote.
Casey:
So that's very, very exciting, and I was very pleased to see that.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
Congrats.
John:
Thanks.
John:
That was the good news.
John:
That was the good news to you, Casey.
Casey:
Now some not-so-great news.
Casey:
Now some not-so-great news.
Casey:
So Apple TV's Insight feature, which is like the Amazon X-ray thing, which for a brief window of time I thought completely Sherlocked me, and then the more I've learned, the more I think.
Casey:
That's not true, I say as I knock on wood.
Casey:
Anyways, that feature apparently will also use your iPhone, which admittedly, like taking off my selfish hat for a second, this sounds really slick.
Casey:
So reading from 9to5Mac, when using the existing remote app on iOS,
Casey:
Apple will populate your iPhone's display with the info provided by Insight.
Casey:
This means you won't need to obstruct your view on the TV with the Insight panel, but instead you can view and interact with Insight entirely on your iPhone.
Casey:
Again, taking off my selfish hat, that is very freaking cool.
John:
Yeah, I thought I thought you were totally safe because, you know, no one wants to junk up their screen with stuff that blocks the view.
John:
When someone wants to ask something, just look it up on their phone.
John:
Obviously, call sheet is still way more full feature than the inside feature and has tons of tons of information, you know, anyway.
John:
But still, Apple did apparently provide a way for you to look up this information without junking up your screen.
Casey:
This next one I did not see when I was going through the show notes literally three hours ago.
Casey:
So this must be another late breaking news.
Casey:
And it makes me miserable.
Casey:
So apparently Insight isn't using like metadata on Apple TV or Apple TV plus provided media.
Casey:
It's using ML to identify actors and songs.
Casey:
Please tell me it ain't so.
John:
This is very late breaking news from Digital Trends YouTube channel that I watch for TV reviews.
John:
And they're doing like a news segment and they're always talking about Apple TV.
John:
I think this is info straight from Apple, apparently, that instead of doing what Amazon does, which is, of course, higher armies of people.
John:
to watch every single show on their streaming service and manually annotate when every single actor is on the screen so that the little pop, like, that's what they do.
John:
It's like, who's visible on the screen now?
John:
Who's in this scene?
John:
X-Ray shows that in the Amazon video thing.
John:
I thought that's what Apple was doing.
John:
They'll just do it for their own shows because I believe this is limited to Apple TV+.
John:
But according to this video that we will link in the show notes, apparently, no, they're using machine learning to identify both the actress faces and the Shazam thing to identify the songs because that's all they show.
John:
And this is very limited feature.
John:
They show the actors who are on screen.
John:
And if there's music, they show the song that's playing.
John:
And I mean, what they said in the video that we'll link is that that means Insight could potentially be sort of an OS-wide thing on tvOS and not just in Apple TV+, because if they're just looking at the video and identifying faces, you know, and it also means, well, okay...
John:
Is it going to be able to identify faces of people when they have, you know, makeup on or they're dressed as like a, you know, a fantasy creature or something or their backs to the camera or they're in shadow?
John:
I'm really curious to see, A, if this is actually true and B, how well this feature works as compared to the let's just brute force it method of Amazon of having people enter all that information.
Casey:
Yeah, this makes me very sad.
Casey:
I mean, well, again, as a user, that sounds incredible and really, really useful.
Casey:
But as a developer of a competing product, that's making me hear a very, very sad trombone.
John:
And it makes Apple happy because they don't want to spend money.
John:
And hey, we don't have to pay hundreds of people to watch thousands of hours of content and manually annotate it.
John:
Why don't we just let computers do it for us?
Casey:
indeed that is uh well we'll see what happens uh but selfishly i hope not unselfishly yeah let's go all right so you had cast about john i think it was you john maybe it was marco but i'm presuming it was john it was all of us it was all of us there you go uh to how do we disable sports well it wasn't me because i actually kind of like this but anyway how did disable do you like the sports that you didn't you didn't chime in do you do you like them you're like oh i didn't know that my favorite college football team something happened to them do you does that happen i
Casey:
i i like it on the occasion it's a team that i care about now it will if memory serves not even i don't other than f1 i'm not really paying attention to sports at the moment um so anyways if it's a team that i don't care about or especially a sport i don't care about then i find it frustrating and annoying like i think you guys do uh but if it's at least a sport that i care about like let's say it's a close game between two teams i don't really care that much about
Casey:
then I don't mind that so much at all.
Casey:
But so like if it's two college football teams, for example, that are having a close game, yeah, maybe I'll be interested in that.
Casey:
But if it's two, I don't know, baseball teams that are having a close game, could not care less.
Marco:
See, here's why this thing has irritated me so much.
Marco:
You know, people wrote in to say, oh, just unfollow all the sports teams.
Marco:
You must have launched Apple Sports and followed sports teams.
Marco:
And so I went in there and nope, sure didn't.
Marco:
um then some other people said oh you have to go unfollow your local teams in the apple news app under their sports section so i went there and nope i didn't have anything there either this is literally just an opted in feature that they added to tv os for i think everyone because nothing about any of my apple activity would suggest that i ever want to watch or ever have watched sports using an apple device
Marco:
So I guess this is just opted in for everyone.
Marco:
And what drives me nuts is Apple is, or at least used to be, so careful about respecting the user experience when doing something really immersive, like watching a drama on TV.
Marco:
I've been sitting there watching these really serious TV shows, often, by the way, not even using the Apple's TV app, often in other apps like the Max app.
Marco:
And then this sports pop-up pops up in the corner.
Marco:
Like, I never would have enabled that.
Marco:
I never did enable that.
Marco:
I've never watched sports on an Apple device.
Marco:
I don't follow any sports teams on any device, let alone an Apple device, because I don't follow any sports.
Marco:
They are just intruding upon the sanctity of a full-screen TV episode, a drama that I'm watching on my TV with their premium experienced, allegedly premium experienced Apple TV platform and box.
Marco:
That is so against their ethos.
Marco:
That is so gross.
Marco:
Apple used to never do stuff like that.
Marco:
And there are so many paper cuts like this creeping into their products in the effort of ever increasing services engagement and revenue.
Marco:
It is really irritating me.
Marco:
And it just seems like the standards of the company around things like this are just going down and down and down over time.
Marco:
And it makes me sad.
John:
You can see why they would want to throw this in people's face because no one's ever going to find it like to turn it on manually.
John:
But the normal way to do that, which is still irritating, but is way better than what they did is on first startup after the OS update or on the first time you go back to the home screen after the OS update, pop up a one time thing.
John:
You hope it's one time.
John:
Pop of a one-time thing that says, hey, by the way, it looks like you just upgraded to tvOS123.
John:
There's a new feature that will show you sports scores when something exciting happens.
John:
Do you want to enable that?
John:
Yes, no.
John:
Right?
John:
But they didn't do that.
John:
They just literally apparently turned it on.
John:
And, you know, as Marco mentioned, those places that you mentioned to look, you should look there because I did add favorite teams to the sports app.
John:
I'm like, that must be it.
John:
So I deleted them.
John:
And I looked in Apple News and I didn't have anything there.
John:
But the actual location of this feature, thanks to Jason Snell, is in tvOS, go to settings, apps, TV, and then find the item that says exciting games in the notification section and turn that off.
John:
That is the thing that they turned on for you.
John:
No one would ever find that on their own to turn it on manually, which is why you'd have to prompt them on first boot after the new OS or whatever.
John:
But they just turned it on from everybody.
John:
And as Marco mentioned, like of all the things to...
John:
intrude on a full screen watching television experience that they need to come up with like sort of company-wide guidelines that like look unless someone has manually opted into it you cannot ever pop up anything on the screen unless it's like their house is on fire like the home kit can pop up things if there's a smoke alarm going off i'll allow that or like a security camera but other than that sports scores are not the same as your house on fire
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I can totally understand why this would be very frustrating.
Casey:
And I do not like how buried it is.
Casey:
Let me just repeat what you said.
Casey:
Settings, apps, TV, exciting games.
Casey:
That's not where I would look to find this at all.
Casey:
But what are you going to do?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got a phenomenal flex from Matthew Willoughby, who is extremely excited about finally being able to get a rest day.
Casey:
And they sent us a picture of an Apple Watch Ultra where it says, you've received this award.
Casey:
This is your longest move streak.
Casey:
You've received this award for your longest move streak, which lasted 3,338 days.
Casey:
This was sent on such a day that I guess, John, you computed that 3,338 days before when this was sent was April 23rd of 2015.
Casey:
Does that have any significance?
John:
That was the day the original Apple Watch first launched.
John:
On the previous episode, I said, hey, this move streak thing where you're allowed to have rest days, I bet there's someone out there who got a Series 0 watch and has had a move streak going since that day and somehow didn't lose their streak every time they upgraded watches and has just...
John:
thankful that finally they can get a rest day this person truly does exist it's matthew willoughby yep this he's wearing an apple watch ultra so he has upgraded from the series zero through a series of apple watches to the ultra he is his move streak has lasted the longest that any apple watch move streak could possibly last for someone who bought this watch at retail because that was literally day one of the release of the apple watch it's impressive it's very impressive yeah he says and i quote all caps i can finally have a rest day yes matthew you can
Casey:
You've earned it.
Casey:
I'm not sure that's what he said.
Casey:
I think what he said is, I can finally have a rest day.
Casey:
It's something more along those lines.
John:
Apple should fly someone to his house.
John:
Like the gamification of fitness.
John:
I think he won the game.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple ID has been renamed to Apple account as was foretold.
John:
As the prophecy foretold.
Casey:
So Apple in one of their newsroom posts says, with the releases of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11, Apple ID is renamed to Apple account for a consistent sign-in experience across Apple services and devices and relies on a user's existing credentials.
John:
They did it.
John:
So they did this.
John:
And now, make a marker, listener here, how many years will it take us to not say Apple ID on this program?
John:
Infinite.
John:
Infinite years.
John:
It's going to be a while.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's start doing some OS-based follow-up.
Casey:
And let's start because John wrote pretty much all these show notes.
Casey:
Where do you think we're going to start?
Casey:
We're going to start with Mac OS.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Tell me about Mac OS 15 Sequoia with the Apple Pencil and iPad in sidecar mode.
Casey:
So what's the ask here?
Casey:
What are we talking about?
John:
Technically, we started with tvOS because we wanted to get your glory slash sadness in.
John:
But anyway, yes, Mac OS is the next one up.
John:
So we're talking before, like we're talking about math notes.
John:
Like, do you think you could use math notes with handwriting in Sequoia if you use an iPad in sidecar mode?
John:
Like, they should do that.
John:
That would be really cool.
John:
Uh, and apparently that already works.
John:
Uh, you know, not in Sequoia, but if you take your iPad and use it in sidecar mode as a second monitor, which I did with my iPad and have an Apple pencil, you can go into, for example, the notes app and scribble yourself a little sketch.
John:
on your ipad even though you're using the mac os version of notes because then you're just using your ipad as a secondary screen but it's basically a touch screen on your mac it even does the hover effect with the cursor and everything that already works now i didn't try it with math notes on sequoia um mostly because math notes and sequoia in the very first developer beta is super duper buggy but i'm hoping this will mean that if you really want to hand write math notes on your mac and you have an ipad you can do it
Casey:
That is very cool.
Casey:
That's super neat.
Casey:
Chris Chalberg writes with regard to iPhone mirroring in Sequoia.
Casey:
Is iPhone mirroring a way to rearrange your iOS home screen more easily?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Possibly, right?
John:
Yes, I hadn't thought of it, but I would much rather use a mouse pointer than my finger because A, it doesn't obstruct everything, and B, I have pixel perfect precision as I try to drag.
John:
It will still be that weird game of bumping around icons and stuff, but...
John:
This actually is a big upgrade in my ability to rearrange my home screen without pulling my hair out.
John:
We'll see how it goes.
John:
And also the thing with being able to leave space, I hope it doesn't make the icons as squirmy and as collapsible as they were before.
John:
So I am actually looking forward to trying this.
Casey:
John, I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
Remind me why people like, what is this network locations thing?
Casey:
Like I've heard of this and I remember talking about it having left and everyone was upset, but I don't think I've ever used it.
Casey:
So can you give me like a two second tour of what network locations is, please?
John:
Yeah, I don't use it either.
John:
But I believe the idea is that when you are in different locations, you might have different network setups.
John:
When I'm at work, I use works DNS servers.
John:
I have a VPN.
John:
Wi-Fi is ahead of Ethernet in my network order.
John:
Like,
John:
All sorts of stuff like that.
John:
And you don't want to have to manually switch all this networking stuff, network locations.
John:
I don't know if it's actually location aware, but it does let you have a pop-up menu that says, I'm on this network now.
John:
I'm on my home network.
John:
I'm on my work network.
John:
I'm on my traveling network where I use a VPN or whatever.
John:
I believe that's what the feature is for.
John:
The reason it's a story is because it disappeared when they redid the settings app and when system preferences became system settings, network locations disappeared.
John:
The functionality was still in the OS, but the GUI for it was gone.
John:
And the story is now, thanks to Raycat, let us know, network locations are back in the GUI in Sequoia.
John:
So if you missed them, they are there.
John:
They're still kind of buried in the network pane, but it's better than trying to do it from the command line.
Casey:
We do have some sad news, though, from Rob.
Casey:
Bad news, Syracuse.
Casey:
It looks like the password field is still right aligned in the passwords app, at least on iOS.
John:
And it's the same on macOS.
John:
I installed Sequoia.
John:
I was using the beta.
John:
I launched the password app.
John:
It's just so weird.
John:
If you stick the insertion point at like...
John:
the beginning of the word yeah it is the beginning it's the first letter of the word and you type a character the character appears to the left of your insertion point that's very weird which makes sense if you think about it but like when you're typing it's like this is not how typing should be like again I think this is possible on the web using modern web technology but no one would ever do this
John:
they're like why just it's it's literally a form there are labels and there are text fields username colon field password colon field it doesn't have to be this hard apple just use regular text fields you're breaking my brain i should file a bug on it now i guess like you know you gotta get those bugs in early hell i mean i don't know why i didn't file it for the year and a half since this or two years whatever it's been since i'm gonna file it now like you made a whole new app it's all new can we fix the text fields please
Casey:
Our friend MB Bischoff writes, with regard to Sequoia window tiling, window tiling in Sequoia can be disabled or set to happen only when option is held down.
Casey:
Also, it can optionally leave margins between windows.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
I didn't know any of that.
John:
Yeah, I'm shocked if there are any settings related to this.
John:
I was afraid I would just have to, like, find some hidden P-list key to turn it off.
John:
But if you can find it in system settings, it's a little bit hidden.
John:
There are three whole options to do it.
John:
And I was playing with the tiling.
John:
I don't know if I know all the options, but it seems kind of limited.
John:
It didn't seem like a lot of flexibility for the tiling where I can do eighths and thirds and grids and stuff like that.
John:
It's more like just left half of the screen, right half of the screen, top bottom, limited top bottom stuff, because when you do the top, you end up going to the spaces thing.
John:
But anyway, margins between windows, I am a big fan of, but I know some people don't like it, so hey, make it a toggle.
John:
If you don't like margins, no margins.
John:
If you do like them, there they are.
John:
It doesn't let you adjust the margins, which they should,
John:
And my dream of having full Windows Server access to make a real window manager continues to be a dream.
John:
But for now, all those people who like Windows style Windows tiling, they will get thrown a bone in Sequoia.
Casey:
We have a miracle.
Casey:
A miracle has happened in Sequoia.
Casey:
Steve Trout and Smith noticed that there's an update to the Chess app.
Casey:
Yes, in macOS, there's been a Chess app, what, forever, I think, or at least in the month?
John:
I believe it was there in Next as well, but don't quote me.
John:
It was in Next app.
John:
It's a very old app.
Casey:
Right, so apparently the renderer has been updated, and according to Steve Trouton-Smith, it's the first time since macOS 10.3 Panther, which is 21 years ago.
Casey:
My goodness.
John:
Wow.
John:
We'll link to a poster by Cable Sasser that shows the old renderer and the new one.
John:
The new one, I'm assuming, is using a reality kit, and it looks nice, and the old one looks super dated.
John:
And remember, the old one was new in macOS 10 10.3.
Yeah.
Casey:
21 years ago so the chess app not only will the chess app not die it's seems like it's getting more update than a lot of other apps in mac os these days indeed uh with regard to icloud keychain and browser integration in sequoia jonathan freese noticed that a clean install of mac os sequoia has what appears to be pre-installed extensions for passwords and uh john you've put in a bunch of json in our show document so can you talk about this please
John:
Yeah, he just sent like the path to like, you know, a JSON file.
John:
And it was like slash library slash Google slash Chrome slash native message host slash com dot Apple dot password manager dot JSON.
John:
Like, OK, but does that say that there the extension is pre-installed or is that just information about where they might get it?
John:
And I looked at it and.
John:
If you look at the JSON, it's got a name and a description, and it's got a path.
John:
And the path is to the cryptex thing I think we talked about in the past shows.
John:
The system has these cryptexes, which are like sub-images that are allowed to be overlaid on top of the cryptographically secure OS image so that the combination of them is also cryptographically secure.
John:
And the cryptexes are so that Apple can update those separately from the whole OS so they don't have to do a full OS update when one little thing changes.
John:
And it looks like it's called password manager browser extension helper.
John:
Is that the full extension?
John:
It looks like it.
John:
I mean, it's a dot app.
John:
It's, you know, dot app contents, macOS.
John:
I think that Apple is literally bundling the iCloud.
John:
Like Jonathan says, the iCloud keychain extensions for Chrome and for Firefox.
John:
I guess I should.
John:
I mean, I had limited time with the developer beta.
John:
It seems pretty solid, but like a lot of the new features are buggy or entirely missing like the AI stuff.
John:
So I'll have to look into this, but that would be a bold move.
John:
pre-shipping like you know really just saying hey uh you know third parties have to make you install their browser extensions to use it for their password manager but we can just ship them we'll just everyone who gets this yeah and honestly i think well in one respect i think it's a good idea because you get explaining to anybody that like you know uh you can use iCloud Keychain it does two-factor it does this it does that a they don't know what iCloud Keychain is and they say oh um but i use Chrome
John:
no problem just install the iCloud keychain chrome extension i would never trust someone to some you know someone who's not a tech nerd to be able to find the correct non-scammy real live apple iCloud keychain i don't even know what it's called i i have to check a hundred times before i install it to make sure this is actually from apple or is this going to steal all my passwords pre-installing in the os is the right way to go uh must be nice to be the platform owner
Casey:
Indeed, you can just make these things so much easier.
Casey:
There is incredibly great news for a lot of developers, particularly macOS developers.
Casey:
For the longest time, if you wanted to have a virtual machine on your computer, maybe of an old version of macOS or something like that, you couldn't sign into iCloud.
Casey:
So that means on this VM, you couldn't do anything that relates to iCloud because it wouldn't let you sign in.
Casey:
And that's still true of...
Casey:
of all the existing or the already released versions of Mac OS.
Casey:
But Sequoia virtual machines will allow logging into iCloud, which is super duper exciting for those that have that need.
Casey:
That's not me personally, but that is really great.
Casey:
No joke.
Casey:
So reading from Ars Technica, as long as your host operating system is Mac OS 15 or newer and your guest operating system is Mac OS 15 or newer, VMs will now be able to sign into and use iCloud and other Apple ID related services just as they would when running directly on the hardware.
Casey:
That's very cool.
John:
I think they mean Apple account-related services.
Casey:
Ah, that's true.
Casey:
They already did it.
John:
It begins.
Casey:
It begins.
Casey:
And then there's a doc on Apple's developer site.
Casey:
Using iCloud with macOS virtual machines and reading from that doc, when you create a VM in macOS 15 from a macOS 15 software image, blah, blah, blah, virtualization configures an identity for the VM that it derives from the security information in the host's secure enclave.
Casey:
Just as individual physical devices have distinct identities based on their secure enclaves, this identity is distinct from other VMs.
John:
Yeah, so this is a thing that pretty much only Apple could do because they are the ones who are the keeper of all the software that interacts with this secure enclave.
John:
The reason it didn't work before is because the VMs didn't have access to that and you need that to sign into iCloud.
John:
And you may be thinking, who cares if you can sign into iCloud?
John:
So many things and so many apps require an iCloud login, not just like in-app purchase or stuff like that, but anything that uses CloudKit or any of Apple's cloud services.
John:
It was very difficult to do what iOS users take for granted of being able to have like a simulator or a VM where you can test your software.
John:
especially for mac os when you if you want to support like two versions back you had to keep around old macs running old versions and that's a little bit more cumbersome than keeping around old phones because the macs are just bigger and you got to have a keyboard and mouse attach them and everything right we're like can't it would be great if we could just do this all in virtualization oh but we can't because even though you can and have been able to virtualize mac os for years the inability to sign into iCloud put a big damper on that now it's not great that this requires you have to be running sequoia to run the vm and the only os you can run in the vm
John:
is sequoia or later so it doesn't help people now but two years from now you'll be able to run the two-year-old version of mac os in a vm so i mean you can quibble with how they did it or whatever but obviously it kind of requires support in both the os and the vm thing so i can see why it requires 15 on both and in a few years this will fix itself i'm just glad this finally came they heard the cries of their developers next stop mac os simulators in xcode dare to dream
Casey:
That would be cool.
Casey:
And I mean, there's no reason not to, right?
Casey:
I mean, the reason is it takes work, but hypothetically, there's no reason that Apple couldn't do it.
Casey:
All right, let's move on to Apple Intelligence.
Casey:
Rick Knoller writes with regard to Apple Intelligence and third-party mail apps.
Casey:
Could you add your Gmail account to the Apple Mail app and then hide it?
Casey:
That might allow Apple Intelligence to access that info, but you wouldn't have to use it or see it in mail.app.
John:
Yeah, I do this on my Mac.
John:
I think I mentioned this before.
John:
I have a weird arrangement.
John:
Apple Mail on my Mac, which is an app that I do not use.
John:
I occasionally launch it and I have my Gmail account configured with this ancient Google thing that has been in there forever where you can pop from your Gmail account.
John:
it's very strange and they still support it i keep waiting for it to break but the old pop protocol where you just say what's new since the last time i checked and it downloads the messages individually right that exists for gmail and i use it to basically make a network backup of my gmail right an incremental network backup so i launch apple mail every once in a while it downloads all the messages into into a pop local mailbox and i just stick them into a folder called gmail archive it's you know the
John:
tertiary backup of my gmail and that what that means is apple intelligence on not my mac but on my future mac will be able to have access to my mail to use that to give it the context that it needs to do smart things but on my phone i don't do that and so the suggestion from rick is something i'm going to try i configured my gmail account
John:
not with pop, but just, you know, the default way you can configure it on your phone.
John:
I haven't figured out how to hide the account.
John:
I just ignore it and I'm into my other inbox.
John:
I'm not in like the all inboxes view or whatever.
John:
And I hope what that means is that my phone will also see my mail.
John:
Now, unfortunately,
John:
I don't ever want to use Apple Mail and I'll set my, you know, my default email client is set to the Gmail app.
John:
But I hope this means that Apple Intelligence, again, not on my current phone because it's only a 14 Pro, will be able to be smart about my email even though I don't use Apple Mail.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Xcode AI code completions.
Casey:
In the documentation for Xcode 16, it reads, Xcode 16 includes predictive code completion powered by a machine learning model specifically trained for Swift and Apple SDKs.
Casey:
See, Objective C. Predictive code completion requires a Mac with Apple Silicon and 16 gigs of unified memory running Mac OS 15.
John:
So not a double whammy.
John:
So A, Xcode 16, if you want the cool code completion, you have to also be running macOS 15, which has not always been the case.
John:
Usually when there's new versions of Xcode, you can run them on the current stable OS, and they work and have all the features, but not this year.
John:
And the second thing is, hey, you want code completion?
John:
Hope you didn't buy a base model MacBook or MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM, because the cool, smart code completion requires 16 gigs of memory.
John:
In other words, it requires a Copilot Plus PC?
John:
Ooh.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Yeah, that's tough.
Casey:
But I mean, here we are.
Casey:
With regard to more with regards to the hardware and requirements, David Steer writes, I'm curious as to why Apple Intelligence works on M1 chips, but you need an A18 Pro to use it on iPhone.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, the M1 is roughly equivalent to the A15 Bionic, which means anything after iPhone 13, including iPhone SE third generation, could possibly have the necessary power, but crucially not the required amount of RAM.
Casey:
Do you think it's possible that Apple's notoriously stingy RAM provision could be coming back to bite them in the era of AI?
Casey:
It's true that lack of backwards compatibility could help them manage server capacity or drive customers to upgrade their devices, but they'll need to balance that with the difficult messaging that their new flagship features are not available to the vast majority of their user base.
John:
yep 100 it's the ram uh i mean uh gruber asked that on the talk show and they were typically cagey about it but they did confirm it's lots of factors including the ram it's 100 the ram like that's why the 15 pro can do it and the other ones don't yes the 15 pro does have a better neural engine than the 14 pro but not that much better uh but what the 15 pro has is more ram and
John:
It seems to me that getting any of this stuff to work on a phone with the limited amount of RAM that's on a phone, because I believe the 15 Pro has, what, 8 gigs?
Casey:
I believe that's right.
John:
So we just got done saying that on the Mac, to get a somewhat pedestrian AI feature, like code, a completion of where it writes some code for you or whatever, you need 16 gigs of RAM.
John:
And they're trying to get this to work on a phone with 8 gigs.
John:
They cannot get it to work on a phone with six, apparently.
John:
Like RAM is the thing here.
John:
If you bought a base model MacBook Air after hearing people rave that you can do everything on this, you can buy an eight gig MacBook Air, you can do Xcode, you can do all your development.
John:
Well, you don't get the AI features that you want from the new version of Xcode because you need 16.
John:
And we discussed on a past show how the rumor was that all of the phones for this year in September are going to have eight gigs of RAM.
John:
This is why.
John:
And even 8 gigs is probably pushing it because that's the same amount as the 15 Pro.
John:
Why didn't they go to 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 or 16?
John:
Whatever.
John:
AI eats RAM.
John:
It needs a lot of it.
John:
RAM takes battery.
John:
RAM takes space.
John:
RAM produces heat.
John:
Like...
John:
Apple is stingy because they're cheap, but also stingy because, especially in a portable device, RAM has a cost to it.
John:
Well, now they're rolling out tons of AI features, and I don't think Apple wants the only phone that can run this stuff to be
John:
the very tippy top flagship, because even the iPhone 15 can't run it.
John:
Only the 15 Pro can run it.
John:
That is not ideal.
John:
It's nice on the Mac that it can run all, you know, all the AI features can run all the way back down to the M1.
John:
So kudos to those teams.
John:
But like the Macs, you know, Macs have more stuff.
John:
They have more battery.
John:
They have more memory.
John:
They have more CPU.
John:
And even though the Xcode code completion requires 16 gigs, Apple intelligence, broadly speaking, as far as I know, does not require 16 gigs.
John:
So a lot of the Apple intelligence features will work with 8 gigs, just not the Xcode thing, it seems.
John:
But yeah, this is definitely chickens coming home to roost.
John:
Apple being stingy with RAM seems like it's fine.
John:
Every time someone probably made an internal argument, we should put more RAM.
John:
They say, it's fine.
John:
I'll show you.
John:
We even got some inside information ages ago.
John:
They said, we did tests with, this is about SSDs.
John:
And it turns out one SSD chip isn't actually that bad.
John:
It's not noticeably worse than having the two SSD chips.
John:
So we didn't do it.
John:
They reversed that decision because of, you know, presumably public outcry or did they just want to hear people whine about it anymore.
John:
But all the previous cases where they said actually eight gigs of RAM is fine.
John:
They need to keep up with the pace of the industry, even if it doesn't seem like it's strictly necessary.
John:
They can lag behind a little bit, but you can't just ignore it forever and saying there will never be another thing that we need to do that requires more RAM than we have now.
John:
Here's AI saying, guess what?
John:
We found a use for all that RAM.
John:
That always happens.
John:
There's always something over the horizon that requires more resources.
John:
Usually, it's just games.
John:
Honestly, games will always eat everything you give them, right?
John:
But sometimes, there's applications that everybody uses, although at this point, everybody games to some degree or another.
John:
Something is going to want those resources, right?
John:
computers are never fast enough and never have enough RAM.
John:
So you have to keep up with the industry.
John:
You can't say we finally plateaued.
John:
Computers will never need more than eight gigs of RAM.
John:
It's AI now.
John:
Who knows what it'll be in 20 years?
John:
Apple, please give us RAM.
Marco:
I think this also should inform your purchasing decisions of Macs over time.
Marco:
I mean, if you buy a Mac today and you want it to still have cutting-edge features for as long as possible, this is a pretty big reason to not just leave it at the 8-gig default.
Marco:
Even 16, because LLMs as we know them are giant RAM hogs, and because we don't really know what the future will hold with features, there might be some really killer feature that comes out in two or three years that requires 16 gigs of RAM or more on the Mac to actually be usable.
Marco:
And even if Apple doesn't do it, someone else might.
Marco:
So this should inform your purchases even today, like...
Marco:
Sometimes you can kind of peer into the future and be like, well, I think we're on the cusp of something that's about to need a lot of resource X. In this case, we are there right now for RAM.
Marco:
We are in the early days of something that needs a lot of RAM.
Marco:
And so maybe for your next Mac purchase, get a little more than you otherwise would have.
Casey:
Apple's AI training data at machinelearning.apple.com, and we'll put the full URL in the show notes, of course.
Casey:
It reads, we train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web crawler, AppleBot.
Casey:
Web publishers have the option to opt out of the use of their web content for Apple Intelligence training with a data usage control.
Casey:
We never use our users' private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models.
Casey:
And we apply filters to remove personally identical information like...
Casey:
Thank you.
John:
So this is kind of the same answer that they gave on stage.
John:
We saw them twice talk about this.
John:
I think once in the iJustine interview and then again on the talk show.
John:
And as I said before, and I'll say again, their answer to how do you train your AI models is not great.
John:
It could be worse.
John:
I like the idea.
John:
They're saying we are not using your private or personal data.
John:
We're not training anything that you do.
John:
And they do use licensed data and so on and so forth.
John:
But they also always have this item.
John:
They say we use publicly available data.
John:
you know, oh, you can opt out.
John:
Well, it's kind of hard for us to opt out when this is the first we're hearing of the fact that you're training AIs on our data.
John:
So you already got it.
John:
You already did it.
John:
You already trained.
John:
Now, I think Applebot has existed as a pre-existing thing, and we could have been blocking things with robots that text or whatever.
John:
But if you care about this, if you didn't know that Apple was training its AI, you wouldn't have maybe been blocking Applebot because you're like, oh, Apple's not doing anything like that.
John:
I don't have to worry about it.
John:
Now, setting aside the legality and ethics of training on this type of data,
John:
And I'm still kind of surprised that Apple didn't use one of its greatest resources, money, to pull an Adobe and say, we do not train on publicly available information.
John:
We train only on information that we licensed.
John:
Cut deals with the people who have the information.
John:
Make a licensing deal with the New York Times.
John:
If you have to do it with Wikipedia, with Encyclopedia Britannica, with whatever, like...
John:
just having sort of consensual data sharing relationships.
John:
But apparently that is insufficient to train something as complicated as what they're attempting to do.
John:
So they've been training on publicly available information.
John:
They're crawling the web, looking for stuff and throwing it through this engine.
John:
And how that's going to shake out in the US anyway has yet to be determined because those cases are winding their way through the court system.
John:
I don't think Apple's really painting itself into a corner here because there are other companies that are much worse off
John:
If it turns out that that training on publicly available information requires some kind of legal arrangement or whatever, Apple will just make those legal arrangements like they're not doomed or anything like that.
John:
It just kind of surprises me that they didn't take an even more conservative approach than they have.
John:
And so it forces Apple executives to be on stage and they have to say.
John:
We use this, we use that, and we also use publicly available information.
John:
If you press them and say, what is publicly available information?
John:
I mean, they will say web pages, web pages that are on the web, your web pages.
John:
Do you have a blog?
John:
Is it on the web?
John:
Does it have stuff in it?
John:
We probably trained our AI on it, unless it contains profanity or credit card numbers or whatever, right?
John:
That is not an easy thing for a company like Apple to talk about or say.
John:
And in this case, they can't say, oh, but, you know, open AI, we push all the problems off onto them because this is Apple training its models, its foundation models, and presumably its future ChatGPT competitor on publicly available information.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what if you don't want your website to be included in Apple's AI models?
Casey:
Well, there's a knowledge-based document that we will link in the show notes that describes how you can modify your robots.txt in order to tell it to kindly bugger off.
John:
Yeah, just go back in time and do that like two years ago.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But we'll put a link in the show notes if you're interested.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tim Cook did a interview on the Washington Post and the Washington Post asked a lot of questions.
Casey:
John, you've extracted a few.
Casey:
Do you want me to play the role of Tim and you'll play the role of the Washington Post?
John:
You can't do both of them?
Casey:
I can.
Casey:
I thought we would play in the space.
John:
Can you do Kim Cook's accent?
John:
I can't do it.
Casey:
Good morning.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The Washington Post asks, did you take any special delight in calling it Apple intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence?
Casey:
To which Tim replied, it seems sort of a logical conclusion after looking at so many names.
Casey:
At least for me, I can tell you it wasn't a riff off of artificial intelligence.
Casey:
Wow, I'm struggling.
Casey:
It wasn't?
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
It was sort of calling it what it is.
Casey:
I'm sure a lot will be said about it, but it's probably not as it appears.
John:
As far as Tim's concerned, it's just like, oh, it's an Apple feature that's intelligent.
John:
It has nothing to do with AI.
John:
Okay.
John:
Oh, yeah, sure, Tim.
John:
Okay.
John:
I mean, at least for him.
John:
He's saying his perspective.
Casey:
Uh-huh.
Casey:
Uh-huh.
Casey:
Washington Post asked, what's your confidence that Apple intelligence will not hallucinate?
Casey:
To which Tim replied, it's not 100%, but I think we've done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we're using it in.
Casey:
So I'm confident that it will be very high quality.
Casey:
But I'd say in all honesty, that's short of 100%.
Casey:
I would never claim it's 100%.
John:
So this is interesting because, you know, as people have noted, like when you opt into OpenAI, you know, you have to explicitly say you're sending your data to them.
John:
And when it comes back, there's a little disclaimer underneath it.
John:
Like there isn't all these things that says, you know, check important information or this information might not be correct or so on and so forth.
John:
But this question was not about OpenAI.
John:
It was not about the OpenAI integration.
John:
It wasn't about that screen that has the disclaimer at the bottom.
John:
It was about Apple intelligence.
John:
And because Apple does have models, the chances of Apple's own stuff, not open AI, the stuff that stays on device or goes to Apple super duper private servers.
John:
What about that?
John:
Does that have a chance of hallucinating?
John:
As I continue to futilely point out, hallucinating is a terrible term because there is no distinction between a quote hallucination and a quote correct answer.
John:
The AI model is functioning the same way in both cases.
John:
It's not like, oh, it made a mistake.
John:
We know from the outside we can judge whether we think this is a good or bad thing.
John:
But the internal machinery is operating as expected in both cases.
John:
Everything from an LLM is either not a hallucination or a hallucination.
John:
There's no special like, oh, it did a bad, it did a good thing.
John:
It's just a big stew of words and probabilities, and it's a machine that is deterministic, that is fed various inputs and various parameters that tweak it, and you get output from it.
John:
And every time it does that, it is exactly as correct or exactly as incorrect as every other instance.
John:
But anyway, what it is saying is, can that machine produce stuff that is not useful because it doesn't
John:
fulfill the purpose if you're asking a question did it give you an answer that is correct did it actually give you something helpful did it understand what you were asking for and give it to you like we can judge what it does and this is tim cook saying some of the things that we ship as apple intelligence might not do the right thing now for genmoji
John:
What do you care?
John:
You ask for, you know, a turtle skiing down the Alps, then the turtle doesn't look like a turtle.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Right.
John:
No harm, no foul.
John:
Summarization, I guess it could get wrong if you ask it to summarize something and its summary is not accurate in a way that is significant.
John:
Like if it's a big article about like, you know, how much detergent you're supposed to use in the dishwasher and the article has a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about all the things that you shouldn't do and then at the end tells you what you should do and the summary decides that the best summary of this article is one of the bad things.
John:
The article is somehow concluding that you should do one of the things that is actually saying you shouldn't do.
John:
i would call that in tim's parlance here a hallucination because you asked it to summarize the article and it didn't it didn't summarize the article the way a human would because it it didn't understand the point of the thing and if you rely on that summary you'll put the wrong amount of detergent in your dishwasher or whatever right uh and this is another awkward proposition for tim cook to be put in this is a good question from the washington post have to say you're rolling out a bunch of these features
John:
Are they going to essentially malfunction and not do what they're supposed to do in a way that's not like, oh, we'll file a radar and we'll fix it?
John:
Because, you know, Apple ships software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do all the time.
John:
But those are bugs and they can fix them.
John:
There's nothing you can do when this happens.
John:
You could send this to Apple and say, hey, it summarized this thing wrong and they'll try to make it better next year.
John:
But it's not as simple as like this caused a crash or, you know, this thing was misaligned or a cosmetic error or whatever.
John:
This is a different realm where Apple is shipping products that
John:
might not function correctly and that there's nothing Apple can do about it except for like try harder next year with their next model that is trained on more data that they select from the web.
Casey:
So then the Washington Post asked, what makes you think OpenAI and Sam Altman specifically are trustworthy partners who share Apple's values?
Casey:
Very well phrased and a very good question to which Tim replied.
Casey:
They've done some things on privacy that I like.
Casey:
They're not tracking IP addresses and some of the things like that that we're very keen on not happening.
Casey:
I think they're a pioneer in the area, and today they have the best model, and I think our customers want something with world knowledge some of the time.
Casey:
So we considered everything and everyone, and obviously we're not stuck on one person forever for something.
Casey:
We're integrating with other people as well, but they're first, and I think today it's because they're best.
John:
It's another uncomfortable situation.
John:
People keep asking Apple about OpenAI.
John:
It's uncomfortable that feature exists.
John:
It's uncomfortable that OpenAI is what it is.
John:
Tim is trying to put a lot of a spin on it.
John:
They're doing some things with privacy.
John:
You know why they're doing that?
John:
Probably because Apple forced them to.
John:
I don't think they were doing that on their own.
John:
I think if you use ChatGPT through the web, they are tracking IP addresses and other stuff like that.
John:
But whatever they did with Apple, it just...
John:
there's there's baggage that comes with sam open and open ai uh and apple i guess they feel like you know this is this is on tim because you know he's the person to give a go no go on this type of thing saying this is what everyone's talking about we need to have it we don't have any of this we can't don't have anything that matches us internally and in fact we think it's a little bit dangerous but either way we have no choice we have to partner and you know the google deal didn't go through and they're still keeping the door open say it's not just open ai we'll partner with whoever and
John:
But yeah, they have to partner with this company and put a disclaimer on their little thing.
John:
It's the opt-in and there's a disclaimer that says it might be wrong, but they feel like they need to have it because they think that's what people want.
John:
I think they're right that that's what people want.
John:
I think the whole story would have been that they still don't have an AI chatbot, but I think the utility of AI chatbots is still...
John:
Maybe not.
John:
It's kind of like when something is good enough to work in a Disney context.
John:
I know Apple and Disney aren't the same thing.
John:
But when is it good enough to work in an Apple context where we have more expectations about... I don't know.
John:
The cultural expectations of an Apple product are different than a PC type thing or an Android phone.
John:
It's more...
John:
more cautious about uh you know like there's you know the app store is not the same as the open web let's put it that way right yeah apple runs the app store in a more uh cautious way than the open web runs which is bad and good in some ways and but here they are they're like we have to we have to provide this option and we have to awkwardly answer every press question about it by saying people want it they're the best one we're not stuck with them next question please yeah
Casey:
The aforementioned Steve Trouton-Smith asks with regard to Siri unsupported devices.
Casey:
And so Steve writes, I still have so many questions about Apple intelligence.
Casey:
Does Siri just not get better on anything below an iPhone 15 Pro?
Casey:
No improvement to the cloud-based Siri on older devices, HomePods, Apple TVs?
Casey:
It's a good point.
John:
I don't know the answer to that.
John:
I don't think anyone asked Apple that, and they should have.
John:
Obviously, the older devices can't run Apple intelligence on them.
John:
Certainly a HomePod can't.
John:
Talk about RAM limits, right?
Marco:
Which, by the way, for a device that is all about Siri and that is so reliant on Siri and is so bad with Siri, that's the device that needs it the most.
Marco:
It's such a shame that this is not going to get it.
John:
It makes me wonder, is a new HomePod coming with 8 gigs of RAM?
John:
Actually, I shouldn't say that.
John:
I don't actually know how much RAM a HomePod has.
John:
Do you know how much RAM a HomePod has?
Casey:
I have no idea.
John:
128 kilobytes?
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Wow.
John:
Maybe it does have 8 gigs.
John:
But anyway, here's the thing, though.
John:
For all the devices, like every iPhone except for the 15 Pro, it's not like Apple can't make Siri better for them because the whole magic of their...
John:
strategy for apple intelligence is that they run it on device if they can and if they can't they run it on basically a logical extension of your device that's the whole private cloud computing thing it is like a bigger iphone processor that is not in the room with you and
John:
And so that's the cloud, the transparency of like, we'll run a device or run there.
John:
But the software doesn't care where it runs because it's basically running on Apple Silicon with, you know, of a different size, right?
John:
Runs on big Apple Silicon in our data centers, runs on smaller Apple Silicon on your phone.
John:
It could be.
John:
That on devices like the HomePod or every phone except for the 15 Pro, it could just send everything to private cloud computing, which obviously would be slower and there'd be latency and so on and so forth.
John:
But at this point, tons of serious stuff, most of the serious stuff goes across the network anyway.
John:
That could make Siri smarter on devices that can't run Apple intelligence locally.
John:
I would vastly prefer that.
John:
My HomePod now is currently sending things over the network and taking a long time to do bad things.
John:
How about updating it and having it do everything through private cloud computing to the LLMs?
John:
I hope that's what they do.
John:
But I find it not encouraging that Apple never offered that as a thing that they're doing.
John:
Everyone was so excited and jazzed about Apple intelligence.
John:
No one really said...
John:
you know what about my home pods uh does you know maybe they just assume we all think we all understand that's what's going on but they didn't say it they didn't say we'll dynamically choose if we do it locally or remotely and of course on devices that can't do it locally we'll do it all remotely they didn't say that at all so we will all find out when we start installing the betas that actually have apple intelligence features in them on our unsupported devices
Casey:
Apple Silicon in Apple's private cloud computing servers.
Casey:
There's a blog post about this, which I did not have a chance to read, but I presume, John, you at least glanced at it.
Casey:
You know, I need some AI to summarize this for me.
John:
Well, so this was a question in the talk show live, which we talked about before.
John:
We'll link to the YouTube video so you can check it out.
John:
Or the Vision Pro video, if you have one.
John:
Get it out of its little marshmallow.
John:
It's a pretty big marshmallow.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Gruber asked them...
John:
What is the Apple Silicon that is running on Apple's private cloud compute servers?
John:
Like, what is it?
John:
And predictably, they did not answer that question, right?
John:
It's Apple Silicon.
John:
Yeah, there was no way they were going to answer that.
John:
Yeah, we talked about like maybe three or four shows ago, we talked about the rumor that said that Apple is...
John:
going to run data centers with m2 ultras in them or whatever and we thought that doesn't make any sense and again the private cloud computing thing explains that we talked about it in the wwdc episode now does make sense and using m2 ultras also makes sense because it's a chip they already designed uh the speculation has been that there hasn't been enough time for apple to make any kind of custom server chip they like they they sort of decided to do this too late because the lead times on silicon are so long
John:
and depending on how many how successful this effort is and how many servers they need it takes a certain number of products to justify making it a custom chip and m2 ultra despite being very power efficient and having lots of compute and so on and so forth is not the ideal chip for doing private cloud computing ai stuff it doesn't need the h265 decoder and encoder on there it
John:
probably doesn't need Thunderbolt since it doesn't have persistent storage.
John:
This is not a purpose-built server chip.
John:
Lots of other companies do have purpose-built server chips.
John:
Companies that run huge amounts of servers like Google and Facebook and Amazon, right?
John:
Apple...
John:
as far as we are aware on the outside even though they do run servers they don't have their own dedicated server silicon i feel like if they did they would have bragged about it so the rumor about them using m2 ultras makes sense there's a bunch of things on that chip that aren't being used and are just being wasted i think you know maybe two or three years ago they started the project to make a dedicated server chip and that'll come out in two or three more years after that but
John:
That is something to watch for because, you know, I can tie everything to the Mac Pro.
John:
It's a situation where they have to make a weird custom chip that has a limited application whose needs are different than all the needs of their other chips because server is different in the same way that the Mac Pro is different.
John:
Can they bring themselves to do that?
John:
Or will it just be, will their server farms just be the dumping ground for the unsold, cheap to produce inventory of the two years ago, pretty good Mac Studio chip?
Casey:
All right, Apple and OpenAI aren't paying each other yet, says Bloomberg.
Casey:
This is reported on Bloomberg and then covered on The Verge.
Casey:
But Gurman says, Apple isn't paying OpenAI as part of the partnership.
Casey:
Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI's brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments.
Casey:
ChatGPT will be offered for free on Apple's products, but OpenAI and Apple could still make money by converting free users to paid accounts.
Casey:
Today, if a user subscribes to OpenAI on an Apple device via the ChatGPT app, the process uses Apple's payment platform, which traditionally gives the iPhone maker a cut.
Casey:
Then back to The Verge, recapping, the report also says this deal isn't exclusive to OpenAI and that Apple is in talks with Anthropic and Google to offer their respective chatbots as an alternative option, with an agreement for Google's Gemini expected to be in place later this year.
John:
Yeah, Gruber also asked that on stage.
John:
Hey, which way is the money flowing in the situation?
John:
They obviously didn't answer.
John:
This makes some sense.
John:
Apple is in the power position here.
John:
Apple essentially owns billions of customers who have shown a willingness to spend money.
John:
OpenAI wants access to those customers.
John:
Apple's offer to them is we will literally build you into the operating system.
John:
You couldn't ask for a better customer acquisition tool than this.
John:
It's your job to convert those people by having a good enough product that people want to pay for it or whatever.
John:
It makes sense that there's no money changing hands either way, because on the other hand, OpenAI can say, well, you don't have anything like what we have and we're the market leader.
John:
And in the end, those two things cancel each other out, according to this rumor, and nobody pays anybody.
John:
And OpenAI helps to do lots of conversions and Apple, as always, hopes to take a lot of 30 to 15 percent.
Yeah.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then The Sane writes on the impact of Apple Intelligence.
Casey:
Do you think that the arrival of Apple Intelligence is pulling dev time away from the workflow features and shortcuts?
Casey:
Or might these be rolled together in a future release?
Casey:
I'm sorry for chuckling.
Casey:
It's just, I don't view those as...
Casey:
At all related, like the sorts of people who work on one, I mean, I guess in some cases could be the same people that work on the other.
Casey:
But from what little I know, and from what I know as a developer, I don't think that people that are really good at doing the sorts of things that workflow does are going to be necessarily very good at doing the sorts of things that Apple intelligence does.
John:
I put this question in here because a sort of company-wide fire drill effort like Apple Intelligence pulls resources from everything, even if it's not the same people, because so many people in so many groups across the entire company have shifted their focus because an edict has come down from on high that 2024 WWDC is going to be the coming out of Apple Intelligence.
John:
This really does, you know, it is a company-wide tax.
John:
And it was the right thing to do.
John:
They should have done this.
John:
Arguably, they should have done it earlier.
John:
But it does take away from things.
John:
The problem is, like, even if you're not a person who was taken off task by doing this, people you work with were taken off task.
John:
People have probably moved around, right?
John:
Priorities change.
John:
Maybe your thing that you actually did have time to work on and finish doesn't even make it into the OS because it's all hand-on-dex to debug the feature that somebody else wrote because that's the important one to roll out.
John:
You know, every and every release priorities shift around and the thing you might want to be developed might not get the resources that it deserves.
John:
But Apple intelligence is definitely one of those times every few years where there is a big movement within the company that has the potential to impact every aspect of the software stack that is released to WWDC.
Casey:
All right, let's talk iOS 18.
Casey:
There are some indentations on the bezel in iOS 18 when you engage Siri, I guess.
Casey:
So this is really, really difficult to verbally describe.
Casey:
I'm going to read a little bit from The Verge, but there is a GIF link that you can and should click because no matter how I describe it, it's not going to make a lot of sense.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
When you press the side buttons while running the iOS 18 beta, there's a clever new animation that makes it look like you're pushing the bezel into your screen a little bit.
Casey:
At first glance, there's not much purpose here other than to add a little whimsy.
Casey:
But it might also be a practical visual indicator if Apple eventually releases phones with solid state side buttons that don't move when you press them.
Casey:
And again, there's a link in the show notes to a GIF so you can see it in action.
John:
All right.
John:
So I kind of get having a visual indication that you successfully press the button is a good idea.
John:
People should do that on the web.
John:
They should do it in their iOS apps.
John:
I am shocked when this does not happen.
John:
I think during WWC, I was complaining to somebody, it might have been one of you, that the WWC, like the developer app where you can bookmark, uh,
John:
sessions that you might want to look at later when you tap the little bookmark icon it does not highlight in any way to show that you've tapped it you and i were talking about this over and over and over again and it's not clear whether you're toggling in on and off or whether you're just saying on on on or if none of those things are happening it's not a good ui
John:
That said, usually the feedback that you successfully press the button is that you feel it go in and out.
John:
And even for like the buttons that don't move like the iOS, like the iPhone 7 home button, that's what the vibration feedback is to let you know you have successfully pressed the button.
John:
Now, there's this visual bit of feedback where what it looks like is you're super strong and you have dented the side of your phone in momentarily.
John:
You've dented the screen and this little black region from the side of your screen right next to the button invades the pixels of the screen and just goes like you're shoving a little black rectangle into the screen region and then letting it go back out again.
John:
I'm not sure I find it aesthetically pleasing, but I do like the idea of visual feedback.
John:
But it also makes me worry that the non-moving buttons that have been rumored for ages maybe aren't that great and they need to add this.
John:
It's more clear that you press the button.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It looks a little bit weird to me.
John:
I think it looks really cool, honestly.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I actually thought it looked pretty neat.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, I haven't used it in my own hand, but it looked pretty slick to me.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Caleb Denman writes that in iOS 18, you can now change the width of the beam of the flashlight.
Casey:
It works on the 15 Pro, 14 Pro, and maybe any iPhone with a dynamic island.
Casey:
Uh, and I read this and I understood the words, but I was like, I'm sorry, what, how, what?
Casey:
And so a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson has helpfully recorded a short little video, um, which we will put in the show notes that demonstrates this.
Casey:
And, uh, I, I don't know that this is incredibly useful, except on the rare occasions when you're like trying to find something in the dark room and your partner or whatever is asleep and you don't want to blind them with the flashlight going full blast that actually seemed, this seems like it could be pretty useful.
John:
the interface to this is weird it's like you have like an x and y axis for swiping like the the y axis is brightness and the x axis is beam width and since it's a circle it's really more like beam diameter i'm not actually sure how they're doing it is there like a a matrix of of leds in there or something or i don't know apparently it's on it's on my phone so i'll try it out when i get the beta
Casey:
And then finally for iOS, Steve Trouton-Smith, as we've mentioned many times, writes, there are new APIs to provide a locked camera capture extension, which must be launched via a button on the lock screen, control center, or the action button.
Casey:
It cannot be launched by swiping sideways on the lock screen.
Casey:
There is a video about this from WWDC this year.
Casey:
I spent some time with my good friend, Ben McCarthy, and let me tell you, they were very excited about this for their app, Obscura.
Casey:
So you should definitely...
Casey:
I know Ben is definitely going to be playing with this soon.
John:
Yeah, that was my question on the WWC episode.
John:
Does swiping, I know you can put the button for third party things, but does it also work with swiping?
John:
Because I thought it would be weird that the button launches one camera app and the swiping launches another.
John:
That could also be a feature if you want to have two camera apps and remember that the swipey one is the default one and the button one is the third party one.
John:
but it does seem kind of strange like they're giving access to the lock screen they have an extension to do this they could just as easily have a setting somewhere that says hey do you want swipe to also activate the camera that you put in the little you know control center button thing or whatever but uh not in the first beta anyway and i didn't watch the video so maybe they just explicitly say no in ios 18 it's not going to be that way
Casey:
Let's move on to Marco's favorite platform, Vision OS and Vision OS 2.0.
Casey:
Vision OS 2.0 features that were not mentioned in the keynote.
Casey:
And there's a Vision OS 2.0 preview that Apple has.
Casey:
You can customize your home view, finally.
Casey:
And Apple writes, you can now personalize your home view.
Casey:
Simply pinch and hold to jiggle and arrange apps and bring them to your home view, including those from your compatible apps folder.
Casey:
very nice finally you can see your keyboard in any environment when you're immersed in an environment vision os2 recognizes and reveals your magic keyboard or macbook keyboard so you can keep typing away cool does it only recognize those keyboards or does it recognize sure sounds like it so i feel like they should have a keyboard recognizer and say is that a keyboard it's either probably rectangular you can probably find the edges but uh okay
Casey:
Guest user improvements.
Casey:
All I've read about this so far is what I'm about to read to you, but oh my word, I'm here for it.
Casey:
So it says, VisionOS 2.0 now lets you save your most recent guests' eye and hand data so they can easily skip their next setup, which is pretty cool.
John:
How many recent guests?
John:
Just one for now.
Casey:
Just one.
Casey:
Steve Trouton-Smith writes, the Enterprise APIs for Vision OS 2, which there was a session about Enterprise APIs in Vision OS 2 at WWDC.
Casey:
Anyway, so it's Enterprise APIs include things like access to the main camera, pass-through capture, and barcode or QR scanning, but only for in-house or business-to-business apps.
Casey:
You can't ship this stuff to the App Store.
Casey:
Very weird.
John:
It's interesting that they're making concessions for what appears to be their one enthusiastic customer base for the Vision Pro right now, which is enterprises that don't balk at the price and have apparently come up with useful applications for a high-quality VR XR headset thing.
John:
They're giving them much more access.
John:
If you need to get access to this hardware, more direct access to this hardware to make this Vision Pro be useful for use on your factory line or whatever you're having people do with this stuff, you can have it.
John:
It's just you can't distribute those things to the App Store.
John:
That's just your own private little world.
John:
They've always had sort of the enterprise certificates, and enterprises can have their own little...
John:
private per enterprise app store with their own distribution certificate and that is one case where apple has been a lot looser because it's not like the whole world it's just a very very narrow use case so it's interesting that they are immediately essentially uh giving up on a lot of the restrictions for the vision pro for uh customers that really really want it
Casey:
Finally, The Verge writes, more new features coming in Vision OS 2.0 that either weren't mentioned or flew right by.
Casey:
Placing app windows.
Casey:
You can place them further away than you could before.
Casey:
That's, I guess, for people with much better vision than I have.
Casey:
Volumetric windows, which are ones that let you view an app's content from all sides.
Casey:
They will tilt to face you, so you can use them while lying down.
Casey:
Ahem, Marco.
Casey:
The developers can opt out of this if they want.
Casey:
You'll also be able to resize them, which is cool.
Casey:
You can also offload virtual environments.
Casey:
Their icons will still be there, but if you're sick of Mount Hood, it doesn't have to take up space anymore.
Casey:
I am offended by this, The Verge, because that's my favorite one.
John:
And by space, they mean SSD space, right?
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
How big could those be?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Challenge accepted.
Casey:
And then while watching full screen videos in a virtual environment, you'll be able to lie down and recenter them above you.
Marco:
good stuff that's especially useful for you marco yeah there you go yeah that was one thing i had to like keep sitting up for the talk show live because like you know regular windows you can just hold down the home button and it'll just center whatever you're looking at as the center of the view but the fully immersive things seem to not have any like up and down rotational ability like so like i just keep like sitting up taller than i probably should have been that moment uh to watch the talk show then with regard to swift
Casey:
Swift has been moved out of Apple's GitHub account, and it is now in its own account, Swiftlang.
Casey:
S-W-I-F-T-L-A-N-G, Swiftlang.
John:
Ben Cohen actually mentioned this on our interview.
John:
So Apple writes on a blog post.
John:
But we didn't dive into it.
Casey:
Swift is migrating to a dedicated GitHub org at github.com slash Swiftlang.
Casey:
This migration reflects the growth and maturity of the Swift community and highlights Swift's versatility beyond Apple's own ecosystems.
Casey:
The migration to the SwiftLang organization will be phased over the coming weeks and months.
Casey:
Initially, the SwiftLang organization will include foundational elements of the Swift project, such as compiler and core tools, standard libraries and core APIs, samples, the Swift.org website, and official clients, drivers, and other packages.
John:
Since the dawn of Swift, it has been presented with the whole world domination joke I made in the interview as a language that is good for a wide range of things.
John:
And Apple didn't want it to just be, oh, this is the language you need to use to write for Apple's devices.
John:
They wanted it to be a general-purpose programming language that everybody can use.
John:
Now, their number one priority has been making it work for Apple's devices.
John:
So it's a 10-year-old language, and a lot of the effort in those 10 years has been spent to make it good for programming Apple's platforms, which makes sense.
John:
But during that time, there's been server-side Swift.
John:
There's been Swift on Linux.
John:
There's been attempts to evangelize Swift outside the Apple ecosystem.
John:
And all of those efforts have run into sort of stumbling blocks of saying, well, but...
John:
You know, our foundation isn't the same that you that you ship with that Apple ships with its platform.
John:
So we have to have our own alternate version of it or the server side stuff is a little bit weird.
John:
And it's clear that Apple's heart isn't into it.
John:
And the Linux version has a bunch of gaps in interoperability that, you know, don't exist on Apple's platforms.
John:
And if you keep chasing these things down at the very root, it's like Swift is, it's an open source project, but it's at, you know, github.com slash Apple.
John:
That's where it is.
John:
This is an Apple project.
John:
And yes, you allow people to use it on Linux and, you know, we could fork it because it's open source or whatever.
John:
But like people just didn't have faith that like Apple was serious about the idea of this being a language that is,
John:
As general purpose as C. C has a standards body and, you know, has committees adding features to it and C++ or whatever.
John:
But no one company owns C, right?
John:
And again, even though Switch is open source, say, well, nobody owns it.
John:
It's open source.
John:
If Apple ever goes evil, just fork it or whatever.
John:
But no one has the staff already.
John:
or the desire, or the ability to keep developing Swift outside of Apple.
John:
And so moving the language out of Apple's area into what I assume will be a different legal entity, a different governing system, or at least a different GitHub organization.
John:
Granted, the Swift core team is still staffed by Apple employees and stuff like that.
John:
So it's not as if Apple is giving Swift away to someone else who's going to parent it from now on.
John:
It will still be Apple driving this with their money and their employees.
John:
But this is an important, both symbolic and practical step to show Apple's dedication 10 years in to finally saying, no, we're actually serious about Swift.
John:
You know, as they said in one of the slides, replacing C++, not replacing C++ on Apple's platforms, replacing C++, period, everywhere, someday, maybe.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we got through almost everything we wanted to in the interview with Holly and Ben.
Casey:
But one of the major things, perhaps the only major thing that we didn't have a chance to talk to them about, but we really wanted to, was swift testing.
Casey:
So we were talking, I guess, a couple episodes ago about how we really would love to see, you know, XC test kind of go the way of the dodo.
Casey:
And swift testing is the new hotness, baby.
Casey:
And it looks pretty good, at least at glance.
John:
Yep, it's an open source thing.
John:
It's been out for a while.
John:
It was out before WWC.
John:
I could not remember for the life of me which one of the several testing frameworks it was.
John:
I should have just guessed the most obvious name, which is Swift-Testing.
John:
Glad to see that happening.
John:
It does use macros, and macros are still a little bit slow in Xcode, but maybe next year they'll fix that.
Casey:
all right home kit you can now pick your preferred home kit hub reading from the verge apple home users can rejoice over an update discovered in the first ios 18 beta the option to choose a quote preferred home hub quote this fixes the problem of your smart home deciding to run over wi-fi through a home pod when there's a perfectly good apple tv using ethernet sitting right there hallelujah how long has this taken
John:
yep like like home kit has always been like you don't have to worry about it we'll intelligently pick the right thing but very often in your home you know if you're a tech nerd which one of your devices has the best network connection and the best hardware and if it's apple stuff most of the time that's the apple tv if you have a recent apple tv it has the highest chance of being plugged into ethernet because it has an ethernet port if you bought the expensive one
John:
and if you keep buying a new one every year the processor does occasionally get better so no i don't want my original home pod to be my home on wi-fi right the the apple tv is always plugged in right my apple tv is always going to sleep or whatever but i don't just yes please i'm going to i'm going to designate my apple tv as my home github and i hope this uh improves matters
Casey:
yep all right let's talk carplay uh another one of marco's favorite things uh there are new carplay features uh these are uh detailed on a mac rumors post which we will link in the show notes uh there are contact photos and messages i don't think it ever occurred to me that that's not a thing until i read this and i was like holy crap that's not a thing is it so here we are um
Casey:
So that's very exciting.
Casey:
You'll get silent mode improvements.
Casey:
You can now choose to have silent mode on your iPhone immediately turn and automatically turn on or off when the device is connected to CarPlay.
Casey:
So that's cool.
John:
Speaking of that, again, I haven't driven my wife's car, so I'm not that familiar with this.
John:
But like, yeah, I always have my phone on silent.
John:
I mean, the little silent switches in the silent mode.
John:
and sometimes I forget that that means that most apps will not make noise.
John:
I watch YouTube on it, and YouTube ignores the silent switch and just plays audio, but sometimes I'll play something and be like, why isn't this making any sound?
John:
And it's because it's honoring the silent thing.
John:
So if you have the silent switch turned on, as a lot of people do with their iPhones, and you connect to CarPlay, does your phone refuse to make sound through the car's speakers?
Casey:
It doesn't do like, you know, bloop when you send a text message, for example.
Casey:
It just sends it.
Casey:
So that's the best I can think of.
John:
And so what this would do is say you can leave that switch to silent, but if you set the setting, what it would do is when you connect the CarPlay, it would be as if you had switched the switch to not silent and you'd hear the bloops.
Casey:
I think that's correct.
Casey:
It is hard for me to parse this, but I believe that to be correct.
Casey:
And another example is, I think generally speaking, and this could be my own settings, like my own focus modes and whatever, so I might be accidentally lying to you.
Casey:
But another example is, I don't think there's an incoming text message tone if you're in silence.
Casey:
So you'll see the little banner at the bottom of the CarPlay screen, but there won't be the standard ding or whatever you happen to have your text message set to.
Casey:
Uh, if you, if you have yourself in silent mode, moving on, uh, color filters can help individuals with color blindness to differentiate colors in the CarPlay interface.
Casey:
Voice control allows you to control CarPlay entirely with Siri voice commands through a connected iPhone.
Casey:
Sound recognition is expanding to CarPlay to provide notifications for driving related sounds such as car horns and sirens.
Casey:
And then there was a whole session about next-gen CarPlay.
Casey:
Now, I haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but a lot of people that had that we saw at WWDC were kind of punchy about it.
Casey:
And I'm not 100% clear as to why, but I think, John, you have some notes for me to read.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
Next Generation CarPlay will be highly customizable, allowing automakers to tailor the design of the system to uniquely match their vehicles.
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
Apple revealed a variety of different design options and layouts that will be available to automakers.
Casey:
Automakers will be able to show custom notifications on Next Generation CarPlay.
Casey:
Apple's website continues to say that the first vehicles with Next Generation CarPlay will arrive in 2024, but it has yet to provide a more specific time frame.
Casey:
and it did not provide any time-related updates in its WWDC sessions.
Casey:
Daniel Pritchard writes, It's 20 minutes of an Apple designer in a white room telling you, esteemed automaker UI designer, how Apple will generously let you, quote, customize your gauges and infotainment.
Casey:
Example, you can use any font as long as it's Apple's 1SF family, which has variable weights and metrics.
Casey:
So that's fine, right?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Apple still has not figured out what would make car makers happy.
John:
They only know what would make Apple happy.
John:
Like, you can choose any variation of a single font.
John:
Should be a non-starter.
John:
We're going to car companies and saying, you can customize it.
John:
Now, I know Apple doesn't want people to make their interfaces ugly, but have they seen a car?
John:
Car makers demand to be allowed to make their interfaces ugly or use whatever font is, like...
John:
corny looking to apple but fits with like the jeep brand or whatever not the gm is doing carplay but you know it's uh i don't know i don't know how this is gonna work out for i mean i still keep waiting for those next generation carplay cars to arrive surely there'd be like there's always somebody like the singular of the car world right who's like we are not the market leader we can differentiate ourselves by doing what apple wants when no one else would do it but it's
John:
I'm going to watch the session.
John:
I'm going to see how bad it really is.
John:
But yeah, people were watching it.
John:
I don't know if they're people in the audio industry or whatever, but the vibe seemed to be that Apple still wasn't quite getting what the car industry wants from them.
Marco:
I don't see how they could.
Marco:
It seems so far from Apple and what they could tolerate and the control and relationships they'd like to have compared to what the automakers want to do.
Marco:
I can't see...
Marco:
almost any automaker wanting to sign up for this like i think apple is very you know type a with their designs and the automakers tend to be very type a with their designs and tend to be pretty incompatible designs um and more more of it just i can't imagine anybody willing to be willing to give up that level of control so i i would expect this to have no significant effect on the adoption of this next-gen carplay
John:
I knew this as I was saying it, but just to save myself.
John:
Jeep, Chrysler, whatever, that's Stellantis, not GM.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
I meant to correct you, and then I got sidetracked.
Casey:
So thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else for follow-up?
Marco:
I think we did a great job.
Marco:
I'm proud of us.
Marco:
This week's overtime is Apple's Blue Ocean Revisited.
Marco:
This is relevant to a topic we talked about with John's blog post called Apple's Blue Ocean a few months back.
Marco:
We're going to revisit that with some updates.
Marco:
So you can hear that by joining at atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
Marco:
So long.
Casey:
So when I used to travel for work, you know, for WWDC, among many other things, the most recent time that I had been at WWDC was in 2019.
Casey:
And at that point, Michaela was like a year, year and a half old.
Casey:
It was a burden for me to be gone, right?
Casey:
Like Aaron can handle it, but it's a burden.
Casey:
Now, five years later, with Michaela just having graduated kindergarten, it's supposed to be considerably easier.
Casey:
And it's supposed to be almost not really.
Casey:
I'm not even sure that anyone would have even noticed I was gone.
Casey:
It's Michaela was doing a camp, doing just a little like half day camp every day this week.
Casey:
And so Monday we are upstairs at Apple Park, you know, getting our breakfast, which I don't recall if we talked about this the other day, but it was actually very tasty.
Casey:
And, you know, I'm getting to see all of my friends is the first time I'd seen John in five years.
John:
You don't recall if we talked about this.
John:
It was the last show.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
It was the whole segment.
Casey:
Yeah, sorry.
John:
This is a new low in your inability to remember what we talked about on the show.
John:
Yeah, this is pretty good.
John:
We talked about food.
John:
We talked about WWDC food.
Casey:
I forgot about the breakfast part.
Casey:
Yes, you're right.
Casey:
Okay, anyway.
John:
Go on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the point is I'm sitting there with John and other John and Marco and Underscore and a bunch of other people, and it felt so good to see all of these people I hadn't seen in so long.
Casey:
And so I get a phone call from Aaron, which is not –
Casey:
It's not that it's not allowed or anything like that.
Casey:
It's just she knew that I was going to have a very busy day and I was going to be doing a lot of different things.
Casey:
And so for her to call me was very alarming and unusual.
Casey:
She says, hey, I just picked up Michaela from camp.
Casey:
My car just died.
John:
You don't want to hear that.
Casey:
Okay.
John:
And remind us what car this is and how old it is.
Casey:
This is a 2017 Volvo XC90, which has somewhere around 40, 45,000 miles on it.
John:
That you purchased new.
Casey:
That we purchased new and have maintained as per Volvo specifications every moment since.
Casey:
So she says, yeah, you know, I heard something that something was like stuck in the wheel or something like there's a thunk, thunk, thunk sound.
Casey:
So I pulled over, looked around the car, didn't see anything, let it, you know, turned it off, let it sit for a couple of minutes, turn it back on.
Casey:
And I started to go and then the car just straight up died.
Casey:
And she sent a video of her cranking it.
Casey:
I showed John and Marco and a handful of other people.
Casey:
And it was definitely, the motor was trying to turn over.
Casey:
Like the internals of the motor were moving without question.
Casey:
But it was not actually like properly turning over and operating under its own power.
John:
The cylinders weren't firing.
John:
I want to claim partial credit for my attempted diagnosis based on a phone video with bad audio of saying it sounded like it was something having to do with the belts because the starter was turning, like the starter was rotating, and it was causing some parts of the engine to rotate, but there was no explosions happening in the cylinders as far as we could hear, but it was turning and turning, and she said there was screeching noises, and I'm like, well, belts.
Casey:
That is what John theorized.
Casey:
And certainly the electrics were all working just fine.
Casey:
It was something mechanical.
Casey:
And then I called Volvo from California and said, hi, I'm sitting there standing in California right now.
Casey:
My wife is going to be coming in with her car in the back of a tow truck.
Casey:
Can you take care of her, please do something?
Casey:
You know, I call Volvo, I think on Tuesday and they're like, Hey, you know, we just haven't had a time to get to it, which I get.
Casey:
I mean, we dropped this on them unexpectedly.
Casey:
And, um, and then I call, I hadn't heard from anything from them Wednesday and
Casey:
And I'm starting to get concerned because the going theory from Volvo, which I did not understand, but what Volvo said to Aaron and she relate to me was that it was a starter related problem.
Casey:
As John had already said, we could hear the car trying to turn over to a degree in the video.
Casey:
So it didn't seem to me to be a starter, but I mean, I'm no professional mechanic.
Casey:
So I'm like, okay, whatever you say, but I'm, I'm seeing it's now Wednesday morning.
Casey:
late afternoon, Eastern time.
Casey:
And I haven't heard from Volvo about what the heck is going on.
Casey:
And we're supposed to be taking that car out of town this coming weekend.
Casey:
And so I'm thinking to myself, if there's a part that they need, we are bumping up against not being able to get the part and get it repaired before we need to go.
John:
Keep that thought here.
John:
If there's a part that they need, there may be a part.
Casey:
There might be just one part.
Casey:
So I call Volvo, and again, they're very, very kind.
Casey:
And he says, all right, so here's what happened.
Casey:
A pebble seems to have landed itself inside one of the tensioners for the serpentine belt.
Casey:
So the tensioners are like the pulleys, effectively.
Casey:
And a pebble got in there, which caused the serpentine belt to eventually sever.
Casey:
Actually, we were just at Volvo yesterday, and they handed me the serpentine belt to look at, and it just severed right in half.
Casey:
And I don't know how, but it did.
Casey:
And these things are thick.
Casey:
These are really designed not to do that, but nevertheless.
Casey:
So the serpentine belt severed, which in and of itself is a problem, but it is a fixable problem.
Casey:
But he said...
Casey:
And then... And I'm like, uh-oh.
Casey:
It caused a hole in the housing of the timing belt and then shredded the timing belt.
Casey:
God.
Casey:
At this point, I know we're f***ed.
Casey:
Because...
Casey:
If you're not familiar with what a timing belt does, and John, correct me when you're ready, but a timing belt is what keeps the internal bits of the motor working the way they're supposed to.
Casey:
So if you think about it, like if you put up a fist, right, and you're moving your fist up and down, that's like a piston in a car engine, right?
Casey:
Well, above your fist are valves, which are other pieces of metal.
Casey:
And the timing belt makes sure that never the two shall meet.
Casey:
So if the piston is all the way up, then the valve is also up.
Casey:
If the piston is down, then the valve can lower into the cylinder so it can let in gas or in air or let out exhaust, etc.
Casey:
If your timing belt, or in some cars, chain, gets messed up, the two can meet.
Casey:
And that means your engine is destroyed.
John:
There's basically a delicate ballet of metal going on inside your engines with lots of parts moving, and they have to move exactly in unison with each other, so no parts that are not supposed to hit each other will hit.
John:
That is what your timing system does.
John:
It is super-duper important to have your engine correctly timed.
John:
If it's off by a little bit, it can run badly.
John:
If the timing belt doesn't exist, it's a catastrophe.
John:
Because remember, there's explosions happening in your engine, shoving the metal parts...
John:
up and down very forcefully and if that's not done at the right time with all the other parts now you have metal parts being shot at each other using explosions which is the same thing that propels bullets out of guns it's not good for your engine
Casey:
Certainly not.
Casey:
So at this point, I lean forward, hands on my forehead, and Erin looks at me like a ghost, and she says, oh no.
Casey:
The very nice gentleman at Volvo says, the engine is a catastrophic loss.
Casey:
We're going to need to replace it.
John:
So you just need one part, Casey.
John:
The engine.
John:
Just one part.
John:
The engine is the part that you need.
John:
That is correct.
John:
That sounds important.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It is an important part of the car.
Casey:
I asked, well, that's like $10,000 plus, right?
Casey:
And he says, I haven't gotten an estimate yet, but yes, it is.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Fast forward a little bit of time, and suffice to say, the engine shot, we will need to replace it.
Casey:
I don't know exactly what the car is worth, but the estimate for the parts alone for a full engine replacement were north of $14,000.
Casey:
Then he said the labor is between 25 and 30 hours at $175 an hour, so that's roughly another $5,000.
Casey:
So we're looking at $20,000.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
And that would be like $15,000 all in instead of $20,000, which is better, but not that different.
Marco:
You might as well get a new one at that point.
Casey:
Right?
John:
And what the car rebuilding YouTube channels that I watch would do, because this is what they always do, is they would take that engine and they would throw away the parts that are dead, like...
John:
many of the cylinders most of the valves the entire top end of the engine all sorts of stuff like that but they would salvage all the other parts all the other things that are bolted onto the engine anything that wasn't broken they would salvage and they would buy the other parts or they'd buy a used engine and take the parts from the broken engine and stick them on to parts from a less broken engine and build a frankenstein's monster
John:
a conglomeration of working parts and and used parts and new parts to build a new working engine and the reason they do that is because they literally make money from their labor as opposed to having to pay hundreds of dollars per hour as casey has to do for this because they are making entertainment from repairing engines and
John:
but yeah if it was my engine i would want a brand new one uh and if i couldn't get a brand new one a used one with similar mileage probably seems fine but i think the most fascinating as someone who watches tons and tons of hours of car rebuilding channels the most fascinating thing about the story and i think everyone you told this to has said i've never heard of that happening right yes right it's kind of like your ipad and the windshield anyway yep um i saw a picture of it you sent a picture maybe you'll put it in the show notes you may be wondering how could this happen like the the
John:
the tensioner it's like a little pulley like a little you know disc that rotates on an axis right and it's got um strakes in it like fins right uh around the little wheel and the perfectly sized pebble like a pebble like a one in a million pebble got into this engine from the road because there's pebbles on the road all the time
John:
such that it wedged itself between two of the metal strakes or i can't tell if they're metal or plastic of this little wheel it would have to be a pedal pebble you know going at just the right time at just the right angle bouncing around off the road surface into this engine and wedging itself exactly between these two little fins on this wheel and getting stuck in there and then essentially serving as like a like a diamond cutter to shred you to shred your belts
John:
as it rotated as this little hard uh you know nugget of rock because it was like a little little like white piece of like quartz or whatever going around again and again and again until it just totally shredded your belt as they say on seinfeld one in a million shot doc that is some bad luck that is world-class bad luck it's really it's astonishing and also depressing
John:
I mean, I think he just put it in the chat room, so I think it'll be in the show notes.
John:
Just look at this.
John:
Just think of what has to happen for this little tiny... Because this is not the only engine, I can tell you, this is not the only engine to have pulleys like that on it.
John:
Every engine, every internal combustion engine has tons of these things all over it.
John:
You're like, why don't they cover them with plastic shielding?
John:
I mean, they're not usually super accessible, but for the most part, you can see them and get at them in the engine, in every internal combustion car on the road, and I've never heard of this happening.
John:
This is just...
John:
wow is that the pebble right there that's in the little pulley hole oh yeah yes it's that little tiny that little tiny rectangle oh my god because it's sticking out just a little bit and the belts are under tension that is the belt tensioner and it is essentially rotating with the belt slowly shredding it or maybe not so slowly because you know do the rpm calculation yeah because i was wondering like how a pebble would stay in a in that but yeah it is like right between those little fins oh my god
Marco:
like what kind of pebble is that shape to successfully wedge itself in there like it's got to be like have like flat sides and be like wow like if this was a plot to like how james bond was escaping somebody chasing him like we would say that's completely implausible like nobody would ever believe this would never happen you can't disable a car with a pebble that's stupid
Casey:
exactly you can't you can't you can't cause catastrophic catastrophic engine damage to a car with a pebble yeah i mean the engine grenaded itself because of a pebble so i told volvo and i was being deadly serious i want that pebble i want the twenty thousand dollar pebble
Casey:
I want to put that motherfucker in a shadow box, and I want that thing to be the $20,000 pebble somewhere in my house.
Casey:
Because as depressing as it is, you have to see it.
Casey:
I have to laugh at it, because it's just absurd.
Casey:
It's just absolutely absurd.
Casey:
And so we talked to Volvo about it, and they were like, yeah, we've heard of something like this happening once, maybe twice, in all of the years that they've serviced everything.
Casey:
Thousands of cars.
Casey:
And all Volvos basically have... I mean, it's not literally the same engine, but all Volvos from the last seven or eight years have effectively the same engine.
Casey:
And they're like, yeah, this has happened maybe one other time, maybe.
Casey:
And when I called in into our insurance company, who happens to be Allstate, and I got to tell you, I'm not feeling like I'm in good hands right now, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
When I called in into Allstate, they were like...
Casey:
Wait.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
It sounds like a great insurance fraud scheme.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
But, I mean, I'm not the one who – trust me.
Casey:
I do not want to defraud Allstate of a new motor.
Casey:
I'd rather have a functional car.
Casey:
But anyways, so we'll see what Allstate says.
Casey:
There's going to be an adjuster that's going to go look at it, and we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I just feel absolutely so incredibly terrible for Aaron because here it was.
Casey:
This was the first work trip – or first WWDC trip anyway.
Casey:
That was supposed to be fairly easy.
Casey:
And on day one, her car catastrophically dies.
Casey:
And then when we're... I'm on my way home from the airport when we get the news.
Casey:
Oh, you thought it was just a starter.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
It's going to be an entirely new motor.
Casey:
And that also brings up the question... It raises the question, is this going to be totaled?
Casey:
Because depending on how much the car is worth, which I think it's worth enough that they aren't going to total it, but they might just total the damn thing.
Casey:
And that's...
Casey:
fine, I guess, but certainly not what we had on our bingo card for this week.
Casey:
And we're not going to find out about it for another week or two.
Casey:
And now we have to rent a car to get to our vacation in a couple of days.
Casey:
It's just a mess.
Casey:
So with all that in mind, ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
I mean, is she okay not thinking this is her fault because this is absolutely in no possible way her fault?
Casey:
She's blaming herself some, but I have been extremely figuratively loud about the fact that you could not have done this.
Casey:
It was an act of God.
Casey:
There's nothing you could have done.
Casey:
You did nothing wrong.
Casey:
You, you, the only thing she did wrong was that she sent me a text to ask, can I call you instead of just frigging calling me immediately?
Casey:
Because that's how kind she is.
Casey:
She, I was, I was a little perturbed that she didn't just immediately call me, but, uh, but no, other than that, I mean, it's just, it was an unbelievably, it was unbelievably bad luck, but here we are.
Casey:
I mean, literally the Volvo people, I kid you not, the Volvo people said to us, you should play the lottery because your luck is incredible.
Casey:
It's just bad in this case, unfortunately.
John:
Your luck is incredible in the wrong direction.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Like, I mean, you couldn't do this if you tried.
Marco:
Like, it's just... Yep, yep.
John:
Wow.
John:
If you tried to search the ground for just the right pebble, find the best one, reach into the engine, and shove it in there, the pebble would just fall out because you didn't get it down to the fraction of a millimeter.
John:
Like, you couldn't manually find a pebble that would fit like this.
John:
and stick it in with your hand, let alone throw it.
John:
Because again, this wasn't stuck in by a hand.
John:
This was flung from the... So find a pebble that's just right and throw it into the engine such that it gets stuck well enough into the little thing to shred the belt.
John:
You'd be there for the rest of your life trying to do that.
Casey:
yep it couldn't couldn't agree more but here we are i'm really sad about it like all kidding aside i'm really really sad about it because it is a great car despite this story like it's been mostly bulletproof it's been very good to us i have a couple of minor complaints about it but all in all i really really like that car and to be honest if it was totaled we would probably get a u lightly used xc90 you know tomorrow and
Casey:
Because we really do like the car.
Casey:
And it occurred to me as I was thinking, what are we going to do?
Casey:
What are we going to do?
Casey:
I was thinking to myself, I really am not looking at spending $60,000, $70,000 on a new XC90.
Casey:
But then it occurred to me, well, the reason we bought this one new was because CarPlay was new, or at least in this model.
Casey:
And I insisted on CarPlay.
Casey:
And there really wasn't a used market at the time we bought it.
Casey:
But now, now there's a robust use market and it's not absolutely bananas prices like it was a year or two back.
Casey:
So I think if we were to replace it, we would get, you know, like a 2020 or 2021 XC90 and call it a day.
Casey:
And they're actually reasonably affordable if you get one with like, you know, 20,000 miles on it or something like that.
Casey:
But hopefully it won't come to that.
Casey:
Hopefully we'll get Allstate to buy us a new motor in the, you know, absurdly many thousands of dollars to have labored to put it in.