This Is Casey Actual
Marco:
We have a slightly different live stream set up this time.
John:
I didn't even check that.
John:
Let me see.
Marco:
We're still streaming to the audio channel, basically, like the IceCast MP3 server.
Marco:
Still streaming to that.
Marco:
But our wonderful application I use over here, Audio Hijack,
Marco:
a while back added support to also stream to rtmp rtsp whatever whatever the streaming protocols are that you can stream to twitch and stuff or youtube live or whatever else and so they have this thing so i i figured for you know high volume wbdc season this would be a good opportunity to test out one of these and and between
Marco:
So YouTube Live and Twitch, the reason I went with Twitch is because, to the best of my knowledge, YouTube Live requires you to create the video entry in their CMS before you can stream.
Marco:
And you have to do that each time.
Marco:
You create a new one each time.
Marco:
Whereas Twitch, you just have a channel, and you can just put in your stream key as the authentication token in the streaming app, and you can just hit go whenever you want.
Marco:
And you don't have to do a new setup each episode or each time you want to hit go.
Marco:
So for my purposes, Twitch was way easier for this purpose, even though we don't actually intend to use Twitch as a major platform for any other reason.
Marco:
But for this particular purpose, it seemed to go well there, so...
Marco:
I do intend to use this setup next week during WBDC to provide extra capacity, which is the whole reason I did it in the first place.
Marco:
Because typically WBDC shows usually really max out our live stream server and some people can't get through or drop the connection or something.
Marco:
So the Twitch version should be much more reliable.
Marco:
I should note also this is an audio only stream.
Marco:
It's generating some kind of like basic visualization.
Marco:
Also, that's also a built in feature of Audio Hijack.
Marco:
But it's not showing our faces or anything.
Marco:
So you're not missing a video version of it.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm going to be doing this next week.
Marco:
And if this actually proves to be useful, maybe we'll do more of it in the future.
Marco:
But it'll at least be this week and next week.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up because we probably have a big episode.
Casey:
I wanted to briefly mention and say thank you to those who signed up for FastMail using my referral because this is the first of the month and that's when FastMail reports in on your referral earnings.
Casey:
And I am happy to say I now have a year of free FastMail, baby.
Casey:
Woo!
Casey:
I'm excited.
Marco:
Pretty soon you'll have that big payout that you'll be like, oh, I got it now.
Marco:
I got to have them pay me out because it's too much.
Marco:
I'll never use it in 100 years.
Casey:
If I could only be so lucky.
Marco:
Oh, that should be how we fund your XDR, even though, I mean, I know that joke's kind of over because you got the other monitor, but it would be kind of a great way, you know, somehow to accumulate $5,000 of referral credit on FastMail.
Casey:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
FastMail would be a sponsor again.
Casey:
That would also be a much easier route.
Marco:
I feel like when somebody's a sponsor, that's like your salary.
Marco:
You're getting paid to do your job.
Marco:
Whereas affiliate money feels like free money.
Marco:
It feels like fun money.
Marco:
I wasn't expecting it.
Marco:
I didn't do anything for this.
Marco:
This just arrived in my inbox.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And so it arrived in my inbox this morning that I got $63.50 in referral cash.
Casey:
So that means I have next year, because I've already paid for this year, but I have next year for free.
Casey:
So keep it coming, folks.
Casey:
That's www.caseylist.com slash fastmail is a redirect to my referral page if you are interested.
Casey:
And all self-serving plugging aside, I am still extremely happy with Fastmail.
Casey:
I'm very glad that I switched.
Casey:
I have been really pleased with it.
Casey:
And that is the truth.
Casey:
I'm not saying that because I've been instructed to.
Casey:
I'm not saying that because I just want free service.
Casey:
That really honestly is the truth.
Casey:
So if you're interested at all.
Marco:
Working towards the XDR.
Casey:
Something like that.
Marco:
Three dollars at a time.
Casey:
Three bucks at a time, maybe.
Casey:
But I really have been enjoying it.
Casey:
And even if I can't afford an XDR, I do still have this LG 5K to my right-hand side.
Casey:
And it would be much nicer if it was a second...
Casey:
if it was a second studio display so uh you know you could always do that so atp.fm slash join and case list.com slash fastmail all the referrals uh we got some extremely important feedback from a bunch of different people so i can't cite just one uh this is i think mostly for marco actually the price is right is available for free at least in the states potentially elsewhere on pluto tv which is something i'd never heard of
Casey:
No sign up is required, or so we were told.
Casey:
I did not confirm this.
Casey:
And it is all the Bob Barker era, which honestly, I don't know how well that holds up at this point.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it is what is probably considered to be the golden age of Price is Right.
Casey:
So should Adam fall under the weather again, you can go to Pluto.tv and you can check out The Price is Right.
John:
But it's got ads on it, right?
John:
And it doesn't have period-specific ads, which would be cool.
John:
That would be very cool.
John:
Slightly more cool.
John:
Instead, it's got modern ads, which are not cool.
Marco:
Yeah, and it has like, you know, modern, I think like, you know, bargain basement streaming service ads, which are all, you know, it's like, these are not, you know...
Marco:
things that are fun or novel to watch in any way like so i actually i actually did go and watch a few minutes of it and it was interesting uh i didn't know about this entire service pluto tv um and i heard also there's there's like a roku channel but i think that's just this like there were seems like there's a few different front ends that are just all going to this service um
Marco:
but it was it was really interesting watching because what what i saw was a version of it that was even even from before i watched it was like bob barker when his hair was still brown or at least it was colored brown um but like it was like you know an old old version i think from the 70s you know before my time and uh and of course you know he was he was being kind of a jerk to the contestants and it was like oh yeah this is i'm not sure how well this holds up um but it was it was very entertaining to see
Casey:
We got some relatively long feedback, but I found it to be absolutely fascinating from an anonymous person that works for an Apple Fitness Plus competitor.
Casey:
And I'm going to read a lot, but not all of this verbatim.
Casey:
And again, I just found this to be absolutely fascinating.
Casey:
So this was with regard to the Apple Plus Studio Tour that I was embittered that wasn't really a studio tour at all.
Casey:
And, you know, how they go about making these videos.
Casey:
And so this individual writes,
Casey:
After taping a show, from the control room comes what is called the line cut.
Casey:
This line cut is not the show that will be distributed.
Casey:
It is more like a blueprint, a reference for the editors to work with.
Casey:
Some directors even request their audio recorded as a separate track so they can give directions to the editor, like, don't use this camera or resize this shot.
Casey:
It's like having your own private DVD commentary track.
Casey:
The line cut goes to the assistant editors.
Casey:
They recreate the cut using the raw footage from the camera cards.
Casey:
It's a rather automated process, although depending on the show's setup, sometimes it's done manually.
Casey:
You want to work with the uncompressed footage and no color correction since there will be a proper color pass once the cut is locked.
Casey:
The line cut is both compressed and has a temporary color filter.
Casey:
So once the cut is rebuilt as a multicam project, it goes to the editor.
Casey:
Why an editor still?
Casey:
Well, like you mentioned in the podcast, many times we have to correct mistakes, replacing segments that had to be re-shot or cut around smaller blunders.
Casey:
But there's a lot more than that.
Casey:
For instance, even with the best crew, there tends to be a slight delay between the director calling a camera and the shot actually changing.
Casey:
This is not a big deal for an awards show, but with a workout video, you might have missed the beginning of a move or the trainer pointing out something that is very important and could prevent users from injury.
Casey:
And there's also some creative stuff.
Casey:
Perhaps the director called a shot, and then it turns out that one of the other cameras found something much better.
Casey:
The process is more involved than it might seem, and often the show is very different after it goes through editing.
Casey:
So I thought that was all fascinating, that even if they're doing kind of a screw-it-will-do-it-live sort of thing, they still will go back in most cases and re-edit everything.
Casey:
using this kind of quasi-director's commentary as a blueprint, which was super cool.
Casey:
This is tangentially related.
Casey:
This is Casey talking.
Casey:
This is tangentially related, but I found it to also be completely wild.
Casey:
Well, sorry.
Casey:
I didn't want it to sound like that was a very awkward turn of phrase.
Casey:
I didn't want it to say, well, fix it in post.
Casey:
Marco, please use a different line for that.
Casey:
That's your director's commentary right there, baby.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
No, I didn't want it.
Casey:
I felt like it sounded like I was still reading verbatim.
Casey:
And in an awkward way, only I could.
Casey:
I've ruined everything.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So this was a little tidbit that I also found interesting that's tangentially related.
Casey:
I had no idea this was a thing.
Casey:
So now this is no longer Casey talking, and this is back to the individual.
Casey:
Isn't it funny?
John:
shush just go with it just go with it this is casey actual we all learned the meaning of that from ballastar galactica i've already forgotten no i've never seen it what you've never seen ballastar galactica what you're gonna have to wait for casey to come back i'm sorry this is this is the feedback person i don't understand i don't know how you're still surprising me i don't know i you i you i'd start to say casey's seen some stuff he's seen things not like people say never all right fine
Casey:
So that was all that this person said.
Casey:
This is Casey talking.
Casey:
That was all that this person said.
Casey:
And so I had to figure out what the crap is an Amulet Hotkey DXZ for.
Casey:
And so, of course, I went digging about and I found their marketing site or whatever, which was very enterprising and not entirely helpful.
Casey:
But I eventually got to the following little snippet.
Casey:
So it's a box and it's PCOIP, which I presume means personal computer over IP.
Casey:
And so from their site, the PCOIP host includes USB audio and video from the host, and then, excuse me, encodes USB audio and video from the host, and then compresses and encrypts the data for transmission across standard IP networks to the Xero client.
Casey:
The Xero client then decrypts and decompresses the data and delivers it to the desktop monitors and peripherals.
Casey:
The Xero client also passes user-generated USB and audio data to the PCOIP host.
Casey:
Only the display pixels are sent to the client, so no sensitive data ever reaches the client.
Casey:
So this is a box that has two network cables, two RJ45 jacks for redundancy purposes.
Casey:
Also available, gentlemen, two SFP jacks, which are fiber connectors, just in case someone was bananas enough to use fiber in the home.
Casey:
But who would ever do that?
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
It can support, it has four HDMI ports.
Casey:
So it can do four 1920 by 1200 displays or two 34 by, excuse me, 3440 by 1440 displays.
Casey:
And it has four USB-A ports for like keyboards and microphones and things of that nature.
Casey:
So this is a little box that you plug it in your house, and it's basically like you're using a Mac Pro that literally is miles and miles and miles away, but it's as though you're sitting in front of it.
Casey:
And I was talking to a couple different people that do work like this, and they said that in modern times, it is nearly indistinguishable from being in front of the computer, which to me is utterly bananas, because I'll use VNC to go from the downstairs to the upstairs, and it is very distinguishable from sitting in front of the computer.
Casey:
So I found this to be absolutely fascinating.
Casey:
Maybe it's just me.
John:
Did you ever use a X window system when you were in school or was that out of fashion by the time you got there?
Casey:
I did some, but not a ton.
Casey:
And when I did, well, so when I think of X window, I just think of a graphical user interface like Gnome or what was the other one that was popular?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I think of that as X windows, but are you talking about like the more traditional definition where you can have like windows running remotely, but shown locally?
Casey:
Is that what you mean?
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's another way to use... It's a way to use a GUI on another computer that's not the one you're sitting in front of.
John:
You're sitting in front of an extern, but the much more powerful computer that is elsewhere, I mean, maybe across the country, maybe in a different building, is where you're actually running your things.
John:
And, I mean, even Nextstep had something similar to this.
John:
The...
John:
I'm not quite sure how xWindows does a thing, but the way Next used to do things is would display PostScript.
John:
So instead of sending pixel buffers across the wire, because we didn't really have bandwidth for that back in the day, like VNC was slow.
John:
Slow or ugly, because it would like massively compress everything.
John:
It would send the PostScript scan.
John:
PostScript is just like a, you know, it's a programming language.
John:
So you could send an ASCII text and it would send the PostScript commands over to the Xterm.
John:
The Xterm would run a PostScript engine and execute those.
John:
So it was...
John:
sort of a you know a lossless compression instead rather than sending the pixels that get rendered you send the rendering commands um i figure what they call it ns host nx hosting or i figure what it was called the next step and i think x might have done x11 might have done something similar with sending commands but honestly i don't know how it worked but anyway um that was this is what this reminded me of like sitting in front of a computer that's not the big fancy computer using a bigger fancier computer with a gui
Casey:
But again, there's no computer, no local computer involved here.
Casey:
Like, I mean, I guess, strictly speaking, this Amulet hotkey thing is a computer.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
But there's no, like, traditional computer at your local station.
John:
I mean, the X-Term was also not really a computer, but also, you know, they're Turing-complete machines that have networking and do a thing.
John:
It's just that they're very small nowadays.
John:
But yeah, but the X-Terms had no, you know, not much power.
John:
I don't think they had any local storage.
John:
They just had a big...
John:
uh, Ethernet port in the back and enough compute to do the job they were asked to do.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I just, I just thought this was really wild and really cool.
Casey:
I remember, I've told this story many times on the show, but I, it just makes me think of it when you bring up like VNC and stuff.
Casey:
I remember vividly the first time I saw someone use VNC, I was sitting in my dorm room and a friend from like way on the other end of the hallway said,
Casey:
came into my room and he was like, oh, you know, can I ask you something real quick?
Casey:
And then he asked me a question.
Casey:
And then, you know, he just sat down to chill out for a little bit.
Casey:
And then all of a sudden he says, oh, shoot, I left my music playing in my room.
Casey:
Can I use your computer for a second?
Casey:
I was like, what?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so he goes to some website that looked like, I think it was like an IP address or something like that.
Casey:
And, you know, with a port number tacked on the end.
Casey:
And all of a sudden, he's looking at another computer.
Casey:
And I was like, what is this magic?
Casey:
What is happening here?
Casey:
And sure enough, he paused the music in his room from my room.
Casey:
And it was amazing.
Casey:
It was like nothing I'd ever seen.
Casey:
This was like late in 2000, maybe early 2001, something like that.
Casey:
And I just thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Casey:
It was amazing.
Marco:
By the way, that was the intention.
Marco:
I guarantee you that was no accident.
Marco:
Oh, whoops.
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
I'm visiting a fellow nerd.
Marco:
I'm a nerd.
Marco:
And I accidentally left my music playing.
Marco:
Oh, excuse me.
Marco:
Let me show off.
Marco:
Yeah, that was totally no accident.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
John, you discovered a WWDC in-person info slash schedule slash stuff in menu even.
Casey:
And I saw this via Paul Hudson.
Casey:
Maybe you'd seen it from there from somewhere else.
Casey:
But we have a little bit of details for those that are attending.
John:
Yeah, this is the, you know, the lottery that they ran basically said, hey, do you want to come to California and watch some videos with us?
John:
And the interesting thing is they asked people to sign up to enter this lottery, not knowing much more than that, that you're going to have to come to California.
John:
You're going to come to Apple Park, whatever that means.
John:
You know, you have a random chance of doing it.
John:
And we're going to watch the keynote video.
John:
And I think maybe they said State of the Union.
John:
They said videos, plural.
John:
But now I think the people who won this lottery and who entered and won this lottery now started to get their sort of itineraries.
John:
And so a couple of people tweeted pictures of it in typical Apple fashion.
John:
It's just a bunch of white line art on a black background.
John:
But...
John:
I'll just go through the steps here.
John:
There's check-in at 7 a.m.
John:
Apple Developer Open House also at 7 a.m.
John:
And the locations are interesting.
John:
So the check-in is Apple Park Visitor Center.
John:
We know where that is.
John:
We talked about it in the previous show.
John:
Apple Developer Center is that building that we thought was going to be whatever...
John:
Tantow Road.
John:
I don't remember the name of that thing.
John:
Talked about it on a previous show.
John:
Breakfast is in Apple Park Cafe Max.
John:
So that is the big cafeteria thing with the two giant glass doors that's in the ring building.
John:
So if you're on this ladder, you are going to go to the ring building and you're going to eat in that big cafeteria thing.
John:
Like we talked about...
John:
A couple shows back, some anonymous person was telling us about events where they had like friends and family come to Apple Park and they had them basically corralled into the Cafe Max area and some other adjoining areas so they could use the bathrooms that are attached to Cafe Max and everything.
John:
So that's where everyone will be.
John:
Then it says time for the keynote at 10 a.m.
John:
And the location for that just says Apple Park.
John:
Who knows what that means?
John:
Are they going to, again, people keep thinking they're going to the middle of the ring and there's going to be a screen set up under the rainbow stage.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But they will, you know, breakfast is inside the ring.
John:
So it makes sense that the video watching would be somewhere near there as well.
John:
Lunch is back to Cafe Max.
John:
State of the Union, again, back to Apple Park, whatever that means.
John:
meet the teams in cafe max i don't know they're gonna have a bunch of engineering teams hanging out at tables and you get to go talk to them um and then there's a bunch of tours all happening at the same time you can tour apple park hills you can tour the fitness center area casey would be interested in that get a real tour of the fitness center area um or you can tour cafe max i mean you've already been there for like uh you know meals and meeting the team so i guess you can see how they make pizzas and put them in the fancy boxes um
Marco:
Yeah, that kind of seems like the overflow option.
Marco:
That's like you didn't get into the other two, you know, so you'll fall back too.
John:
Anyway, and then Apple Design Awards at 430, location listed as Apple Park.
John:
This is interesting.
John:
So it seems like a full day.
John:
They have a lot of activities for everyone to do.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
This implies to me, and I'm reading heavily between the lines, but I think they're trying to keep this as open air as they reasonably can for the big groups.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, Cafe Max, like you had mentioned, John, has, from what I've seen, I've never seen it in person, but from what I've gathered, those two humongous, humongous, humongous doors that open incredibly wide and get a ton of airflow, I would assume, through there.
Casey:
And plus, doesn't the ring have like natural heating and cooling such that there's like a ton of airflow anyway or so we were told something like that?
John:
Yeah, we should find a picture of this because we keep saying doors, but they're not doors.
John:
The whole side of the building moves.
John:
It's like a four story high piece of glass.
John:
The whole side of the building just opens up and it basically becomes a pass through.
John:
Like imagine a section of the ring that only has the roof on it.
John:
It's kind of like that.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
And so that you could claim is quasi outdoors.
Casey:
And then they just say Apple Park.
Casey:
So if it is indeed somewhere in the center of the ring, well, that's certainly outdoors.
Casey:
And then, you know, that means everything is to some reasonable definition outdoors.
Casey:
And if you're going to do something where a bunch of people from a bunch of places are gathering...
Casey:
If it were me, I would want as much of this to be outside as possible.
Casey:
And then if you're doing something inside, it would only be in smaller groups.
Casey:
Like if you wanted to tour the fitness center, which is itself presumably a very large space, but still indoors, you would probably want a subset of those that are there doing that.
Casey:
So this seems to me like they're trying to play this as reasonably and safely as possible.
Casey:
We'll see what ends up actually happening.
Casey:
But I mean, I approve in principle as someone who is still a nervous net about COVID stuff because Michaela can't get her shot yet.
Casey:
This seems like as good as one can hope.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But there's a menu too.
John:
Yes, that's the most important part.
John:
They're not going to get boxed lunches, guys.
John:
I guess you're at Cafe Max and you can get freshly made food.
John:
But there's two menus.
John:
I guess it's kind of like a dinner menu and a breakfast menu.
John:
So here's the most interesting thing about the dinner menu.
John:
There's lots of options, I'm sure.
John:
They're all very good.
John:
But they have kind of all caps, like, category above each one.
John:
And the categories, I feel like this is Apple sort of stating what they believe are the major categories of food.
John:
You know, kind of like the six genders.
John:
Here's what they are, right?
John:
The major categories of food are vegan,
John:
italian grill pangea indian pacific rim romana latin and two desserts yeah so i mean that covers us the whole world of food vegan italian grill pangea indian pacific rim romana latin dessert dessert i don't think we missed anything did we because pangea like pangea is everything like it's a giant mega continent that included all the other continents so technically anything not covered by the other categories is covered by pangea
Marco:
Wait, I'm a little curious, though.
Marco:
The Pangea option is salmon.
Marco:
Why would they name the fish dish after a large landmass?
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, most of the Earth was water when Pangea was around.
John:
You just had the big, giant continent, and maybe there was salmon in that water, and it seems unlikely.
Marco:
I mean, I think they're river fish anyway.
Marco:
I don't know that much about fish.
John:
Yeah, well, they go back and forth.
John:
but still like it seemed like a weird thing to have like the one seafood dish be named after a large landmass yeah and so the vegan was vegan thing is kung pao tofu and vegetables italian lasagna grill is uh barbecue brisket pangea seared salmon indian is chicken tikka masala pacific rim is thai green chicken curry romana is romana quattro that was a pizza
John:
Carne asada burrito is Italian, and then two desserts are dark chocolate panna cotta and vegan mixed berry chocolate.
John:
This is a very fancy-sounding menu, and assuming this food is, it's got to be better than the box lunches, so I feel like these people are getting a more premium experience.
John:
Would you eat the lasagna?
Casey:
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Casey:
Okay, John, how do you feel about house-made pasta sheets layered with bolognese, bechamel, I'm probably pronouncing this all wrong, parmigiano, served over tomato sauce?
Casey:
How do you feel about that, John?
John:
I have had bad luck with Italian food in California.
John:
California's a big place.
John:
I have been to only a tiny, tiny portion of it and then mostly had boxed lunches, so it's not a judgment on whether, you know, about an entire state.
John:
All I'm saying is that for the tiny, tiny amount of experience I've had in California, I have not had good luck with Italian food.
John:
I feel like I would probably go with something that would have a higher chance of being good.
John:
So maybe the burrito, which the few tiny areas in California that I have been to are known for having good burritos.
John:
I feel like there's a higher chance of that one being good.
John:
I probably would not pick a lasagna.
Casey:
A burrito filled with carne asada, Spanish rice, black beans, pico de gallo, and mozzarella cheese served with red and green salsa and corn tortilla chips.
Casey:
That does sound solid.
John:
That sounds a little weird.
John:
You know, I don't know.
John:
I don't think I would pick the Italian out of this choice.
Casey:
I would absolutely choose barbecue brisket.
Casey:
Slow-roasted beef brisket glazed with our house-made barbecue sauce served with three-cheese macaroni and cheese.
Casey:
I mean, even if the brisket stinks, the mac and cheese is probably going to be passable at worst, so sold.
Marco:
Do hyphens cost a lot of money in California?
Marco:
You're such a grunt.
John:
What should be hyphenated here?
Marco:
Like every other word.
John:
I mean, these have to be like standard dishes in Cafe Max or just ask Apple people.
John:
What's good that they make there out of this choice?
John:
They'd know which one to pick.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think I would see the Pacific Rim, the Thai green chicken curry sounds good.
Marco:
I also might go the vegan Kung Pao tofu and vegetables.
Marco:
To me, like, you know, for whatever it's worth, I haven't been to the ring yet.
Marco:
But we did go to the visitor center there and they have like a little coffee shop there.
Marco:
And I remember that being very good.
Marco:
And also, years ago, we were lucky enough to go to the Infinite Loop campus at one point, and I ate at Cafe Max there, and that was excellent.
Marco:
Yeah, it really was.
Marco:
And so I'm hoping that they've continued the tradition with the new building, and they probably have.
Marco:
Their record on the food they serve their employees, as far as I know, is pretty solid.
Marco:
So I would expect this to all be pretty good, really.
Casey:
Yeah, I went to, this was not with the two of y'all, but I went to, I think it's called Alves.
Casey:
I probably pronounced that wrong as well.
Casey:
But it was, I was told it was like a rough draft for what became Cafe Max in the ring.
Casey:
And that was super fancy as well.
Casey:
And that was really good to my recollection.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Yeah, to me, I would do barbecue brisket.
Casey:
Maybe the seared salmon.
Casey:
Seared salmon served over roasted vegetable... I almost said quino from the commercial.
Casey:
Quinoa salad.
Casey:
Did you ever see that commercial?
Casey:
Quino.
Casey:
What is a quino?
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
But that's probably what I would choose.
Casey:
But no, I mean, this looks pretty decent now.
Casey:
However...
Casey:
I have also not spent an overabundance of time in California, and I think I can still be so bold as to say finding a decent, nay, passable bagel in the entire state of California is challenging from everything I've understood, both from locals and from my own experience.
Casey:
John, how do you feel about the San Daniele prosciutto bagel, everything bagel, San Daniele prosciutto, mascarpone cream, heirloom tomato, and micro horseradish?
John:
I mean, random bagels I just avoid everywhere, definitely.
John:
In California, I would avoid them.
John:
Although, again, fresh fruit, can't go wrong with that.
John:
Berry's parfait, hard to mess that up.
John:
This is, I guess, the breakfast menu we're looking at here.
John:
Although, something occurs to me looking at all this.
John:
So, part of Apple having...
John:
You know reportedly good food for its employees Is unlike Google and Facebook and stuff like that.
John:
It's not free the employees pay for the food now Maybe they're they're they're paying a subsidized price, but they do pay money is my understanding for their food But looking at this big list here.
John:
I don't see any prices
John:
So if you won the lottery and got to go to this, you know, come to Apple park and watch WWC videos with us, do you get this food for free or are they going to make you pay?
Casey:
I would hope they did it for free, but Apple is cheap.
Casey:
So I wouldn't be surprised.
John:
Well, like the employees have to pay and they're Apple employees, but you're just guessing this is a one time special thing.
John:
So maybe it's all free.
John:
This is this is what we need reporting on.
John:
We need people on the ground.
Marco:
We need photos.
John:
We need to say, did you pay and get a group together and everyone get one of the entrees and tell me, tell us which one was the best.
Marco:
Next week, everyone else is going to be talking about the new AR framework or whatever, and we're going to be talking about whether you had to pay for your San Daniela prosciutto bagel.
John:
Well, once you're on Thursday, Thursday of WWDC week, people start thinking about the food a little bit more.
John:
Not that people are going to be there until Thursday, but I'm saying eventually you get tired of sessions and it's time to talk about the food.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, so we should, for completeness sake, we should read this.
Casey:
So the aforementioned prosciutto bagel, smoked salmon and caviar bagel, almond butter and avocado toast, very on brand for California, fresh fruit, berries parfait, overnight oats, and assorted mini breakfast patries, as well as a beverage selection of Cafe Max juices, coffee, tea, and water.
John:
I'm going to go with the assorted breakfast pastries.
John:
That's one of my favorite parts of WWC back when we would go to it in person is assorted breakfast pastries.
Casey:
Indeed.
John:
Really hard to screw up like extremely over buttered sugar glazed pastries with fruit inside them.
Casey:
Well, this is this is what people tune in for.
Casey:
This is the important work.
Casey:
So I'm glad, John, that you spied that.
Marco:
Isn't it weird to you that the only breakfast bagel options contain either meat or fish on top?
Casey:
No, it's a lox.
Casey:
It's a lox bagel or something that vaguely resembles a lox bagel.
Casey:
Prosciutto is not lox.
Casey:
No, no, no.
John:
It's a very confused California-ified.
John:
I mean, that bagel is not going to be a bagel anyway.
John:
It's going to be really hard, dense, not very good bread.
Casey:
Well, that's true.
Casey:
I'm talking more about the smoked salmon one.
Marco:
I do wonder what is micro horseradish made from tiny horses.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I have so many questions.
Casey:
No, the smoked salmon bagel with caviar, because of course, that to me is some fancy person's, you know, I'm too cool for you artisanal take on a lox bagel, you know, with cream cheese or whatever.
Marco:
Totally.
Casey:
What are you going to do?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, John, let's talk about what everyone has been dying to talk about.
Casey:
Let's talk about your Mac Studio.
John:
So I mentioned last year that I had my Mac Studio, but I hadn't even opened the box and that I should do that.
John:
And when I did, I had to give a report on the fan noise and everything.
John:
And so I figured if I'm going to open it up and hook it up to something, I should probably do the migration as well because it's a time-consuming process.
John:
So that's what I did.
John:
I opened it up.
John:
I connected it to my 4K monitor.
John:
And then I had to hook it up to my iMac to start doing the migration.
John:
And I realized when I was hooking it up that I had done all this preparation, got all this stuff together, doing the AV preparation, doing my Mac Studio preparation.
John:
I didn't think about getting a cable to connect
John:
the Mac Studio to a 2015 5K iMac.
John:
That 5K iMac has on the back of it a bunch of USB-A ports, an Ethernet port, and a bunch of Thunderbolt 2 ports, which look like a mini display port, like that's the shape of the connector.
John:
And I swore that I had, you know, a Thunderbolt 2-3 adapter, like one of the white Apple dongles, and a Thunderbolt 2 cable.
John:
And I was close.
John:
I had the adapter.
John:
In fact, I have two of those adapters.
John:
so i was excited about that but i don't have a thunderbolt 2 cable i'm like well you know i thought i had a thunderbolt 2 cable laying around but i know i did a big cable cleanup recently so who knows where that is but i was like well worst case scenario i know where i can get one i have a thunderbolt display upstairs and i looked all over the house couldn't find one i'm like all right time to go get the thunderbolt display so i go up there move all the boxes get up the giant thunderbolt display box open it up and the cable is stuck to the back of that monitor
John:
oh no it's not it's like it's the rat tail that comes off of it and the other end is is not removable it's just inside the monitor so that was sad so i'm like all right well i did some math it's a little bit of math mike okay ethernet one gigabit right uh how much data is on the ssd how long will it take i came up with like an estimate like four hours i'm like that's not that bad um
John:
And this is another time to sing the praises of Migration Assistant.
John:
I don't remember when the last time I used it was, but use it again here.
John:
I plug the machines in, Ethernet, follow the instructions, you know, and then it brings up the Migration Assistant thing and gives you an option of what I want.
John:
And then while it's running, it has like this little, you know,
John:
blue link thing that you can press it says like connection info or connection details and it shows you all the connections that are available to it that it that it's speed tested and I just plugged an ethernet cable so I said it said ethernet speed tested to you know 900 megabits or whatever it's like almost a gigabit right
John:
And then it said peer-to-peer, speed-tested to 50 megabits.
John:
And then it said Wi-Fi, speed-tested to 40 megabits.
John:
I think peer-to-peer is like when it does the sort of airdrop peer-to-peer wireless network without going through like the Euros, essentially.
John:
And these are two machines that are like two feet away.
John:
But it was great that it showed me all the options and showed me that I was using the fastest one.
John:
And then it even had a tip that said, hint, to make this go faster, connect through Thunderbolt.
John:
I'm like, yeah, I know.
John:
Thanks.
John:
That's cool.
John:
I didn't know it had that whole thing.
John:
it's it's really cool it's really nice and and then it says just connect the thunderbolt to make it go faster and i was like that probably means that if i did have a thunderbolt 2 cable i could just plug it in like while it's running and it would just swap to it and go faster um so it started running and it's like it took a long time to even get an estimate because it's counting files it's like millions of files or whatever and eventually gives an estimate like you know 20 30 minutes into it and says it's going to be like four or five hours i'm like oh well you know i'll just let it run um
John:
But then I realized, well, I can just go get a Thunderbolt 2 cable.
John:
And I was like, well, do I know where I can find one?
John:
Do I want to drive to the Apple store?
John:
And then I remembered the Marcos solution or maybe also the Casey solution, which is do that courier thing where you pay $10 and someone drives it to your house like in an hour.
John:
Yep.
John:
So I did that.
John:
Apple had a six foot long Thunderbolt 2 cable, which I was worried they wouldn't even have, but they did.
John:
I just ordered it on my phone and paid the extra nine bucks for them to courier it to my house.
John:
And someone came to my house with a Thunderbolt cable in a little tiny baggie.
John:
And then I plugged it into the computer, the back one computer with the little two to three adapter and then in the back of the iMac.
John:
And it noticed the connection was there.
John:
It speed tested it to like 800 megabytes per second, which is faster than one gigabit for people doing the math.
John:
And then it switched to it and it started to go way, way faster.
John:
So that's pretty cool.
John:
I was really impressed with what they've done with Migration Assistant.
John:
Of course, it successfully did the job, but every step of the way, it told me all the different ways that I could
John:
let it do what it was doing, and even in mid-flight, I could buy something and plug it in and let it finish the sort of second half of the migration much faster.
John:
And, you know, the migration worked, right?
John:
So I booted up and started setting up all the things, deleting all the Intel-only apps, making sure I had M1 versions of everything, you know, transferring licenses to software from the iMac to that one, doing all the stuff, you know, transferring my Backblaze license over to that thing, inheriting backup state.
John:
Got everything all ready to go.
John:
And part of the reason why I was deciding to do this migration and set up this thing, aside from just checking that the Mac Studio was what I expected and that it worked, was that I got a surprise email from Apple that said, hey, guess what?
John:
Your studio display, remember we said June 22nd?
John:
Well, actually, it's coming June 1st.
John:
Oh, that's today.
John:
It was very exciting.
John:
Yeah, so it did come today, and I did set it up.
Marco:
Oh, wow.
John:
So now I've got the whole system all configured.
John:
So I had the Mac Studio on the desk next to the 4K, and that was also for me to hear the fan noise.
John:
And the fan noise was amply represented on YouTube.
John:
It sounds in person like it does in those YouTube videos.
John:
It is a thing that you can hear.
John:
Mine did not have any of the sort of high-pitched, terrible noises.
John:
It was just more of the, you know, that you hear in the videos.
John:
And it was very quiet.
John:
My wife did not care about it at all.
John:
She's like, I don't care about noises as much as you do.
John:
It's, I don't, whatever.
John:
I don't care.
John:
Does anybody?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
um i did mess with the fan speed things i have several fan control apps some of which i already own from messing with fans on my mac pro and some of which i bought or tried trials of just to mess with this and you know just my my mac studio just like everyone else is idling at like 1300 rpm the minimum speed is 1100 so the first thing i did was said how quiet are the fans at 1100 because you just manually turn into 1100 or also on one of my apps you can just set a bunch of rules that says
John:
if the you know if this temperature sensor is or the average of these temperature sensors is below this value put the fans at this speed and you know make a bunch of make basically make your own fan curve right and so i did that and i made a curve such that they dropped down to 1100 you know when the thing is idle um
John:
And, you know, this could be manufacturing variability.
John:
Again, we mentioned that multiple Mac Studios can have different power supplies made by different companies.
John:
But on my Mac Studio, if this was the only Mac Studio I had ever seen, my theory would be they make the fans idle at $1,300 because at $1,100...
John:
Whatever way the electrical power is fed to the fans at 1100, it adds an extra little seasoning of high-pitched whine to the fans.
John:
So yes, the fans get quieter.
John:
You can hear them spin down.
John:
They get quieter.
John:
But there's this high-pitched whine that comes in.
John:
It's almost like...
John:
Almost like the electrical system does not want to feed electricity, whatever it needs, the amperage, the volts, whatever, to make them go at 1,100 RPM.
John:
That introduces a high pitch wind.
John:
When they go up to 13, no more wind.
John:
Is the wind from the fans moving that slowly?
John:
Is the wind from the electronics in the fan?
John:
Is the wind from the power supply?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But my particular Mac Studio at 1,100 RPM,
John:
sounds worse than at $1,300 because that high-pitched whine comes in.
Marco:
That's so weird.
Marco:
The more we hear about the fan system on the Mac Studio, the more of a weird miss it seems to be.
Marco:
When you look at the other...
Marco:
M1 Max and M1 Pro products, like all the laptops and everything, it just seems like they didn't need that level of noise for that enclosure and that chip.
Marco:
And I don't know what happened there, but it really seems like an odd miss for them.
John:
Yeah, and again, just like the people on YouTube, I don't think I ever saw a temperature over 35 Celsius, which I have no idea what that is in real temperature.
John:
But all I know is that it's low.
John:
It's low for the insides of a computer.
John:
The highest temperature sensor was 35 Celsius.
John:
And not that I was doing anything particularly big with it, although I was downloading all my photos from iCloud and running a Backblaze backup.
John:
But it's still like...
John:
The fans never, just like everyone else on YouTube, they idle at 1,300 RPM and they just stay around 1,300 RPM just forever, right?
John:
It does not get hot.
John:
So it's not as if like, oh, this machine is so hot, they painted themselves into a thermal.
John:
The machine does not get hot doing normal things at all.
John:
And yet the fans, there they are at 1,300 RPM doing their thing.
John:
And like I said, 1,100 on my particular Mac Studio is worse.
John:
Some people have, I've heard videos on YouTube of like, listen to this high-pitched whine.
John:
But it wasn't when they artificially dropped the fan speed down.
John:
It was just at other speeds it was doing that line.
John:
So anyway, I decided having it on a desk for like a day doing the migration and then a day setting out stuff.
John:
I'm like, I think I'm going to start this thing underneath.
John:
Like I've got this 3D printed purchased on Etsy cage for the Mac Studio that I talked about.
John:
I did put a link to it in last week's show notes.
John:
So if you were looking for it, just look for last week's show notes as a link to this Etsy thing.
John:
It exactly fits the Mac Studio.
John:
It's meant to mount a Mac Studio to the underside of a desk.
John:
So I figured I'm not even going to bother putting this on a desk.
John:
I know it will bother me a little bit.
John:
Let me just put it under.
John:
And also it will free up desk space for my wife's desk because, you know, the iMac didn't have another box that took up space, right?
John:
It just had this, you know, the screen.
John:
So preserving that sort of appearance for her.
John:
So I did put two problems with this.
John:
3D printed thing.
John:
One, I've got a really big honking keyboard tray on this desk, and the space behind the keyboard tray where I would mount the Mac Studio, there's not enough space to do what the little...
John:
sling wants you to do they want you to slide the mac studio into it like so you know screw the thing to the underside of the desk it's like a little you know little shelf and then slide the mac studio in i can't do that because the desk the back of the desk has a piece of wood across it right it's got a hole for like cables to go through but it's got a piece of wood there's not enough room for me to get the mac studio behind the thing and slide it in
John:
you know so i have to put the mac studio in the sling and then screw it to the top with the mac studio in there and the only way to get it off would be to unscrew it because i can't slide it out again right so i use my uh experience watching car rebuilding channels and did i don't know what they would call it like lots of lifts have another little mini thing inside them that you can use to like press up against the transmission if you unbolt the transmission but you don't want the transmission to fall down you have to like you know use a hydraulic jack or lift it to press up against it so i used a camera tripod and
John:
with no camera on it and i put it to the right height and then crank the neck up and press the mac studio up against the underside of the desk in its little thing uh after drilling pilot holes and then you know screw the thing in right so the first problem was i had to do that whole weird procedure to jack the thing up and screw it in second problem is after i screwed it in i'm looking at it and i'm going hmm
John:
I know nothing about 3d printing.
John:
I think this is like the second 3d printed object I've ever touched in my life The first being a really cool dog cow that somebody made
John:
But I don't know how sturdy the plastic resin crap stuff is for 3D printing.
John:
And I'm looking at it and I'm going, this thing is held on by six screws.
John:
The screws are not going anywhere.
John:
They're well screwed into the desk.
John:
They're very secure, right?
John:
But the plastic ears that they're screwed into, I could totally see those just snapping off from fatigue.
John:
I don't know how durable that is or whatever.
John:
So now I feel like I have to add like sort of safety wires.
John:
I'm going to get the security wire that's holding my outdoor camera on.
John:
I need to get like a length of like two lengths of metal wire to also kind of screw up to the desk, say if the plastic cracks
John:
at least the thing won't fall to the ground to land on my dog who loves to lay down there, right?
John:
It'll be caught by the security wire.
John:
So I do need to sort of reinforce that.
John:
But otherwise, it's bolted under the desk.
John:
It's out of sight.
John:
You can still get to the SD card slot because it's sort of like you reach into the keyboard tray.
John:
And you can get to the front USB-C Thunderbolt ports and the back ones you'd have to crawl underneath.
John:
But I don't have anything to plug into them yet.
John:
And it's a good thing I bolted it where I did because I put it basically right dead center in the desk behind the keyboard tray because the monitor cable that comes with the Apple Studio display is very short.
John:
If I had put it to the side, if I had put like the Mac Studio in the corner, I would have screwed it in.
John:
I would have been very sad because I wouldn't be able to connect the display because the...
John:
How long is it, like three feet or something, Casey?
Casey:
Something like that, yeah.
Casey:
I wouldn't describe it as very short, but I would by no means describe it as long.
Casey:
Certainly not long.
John:
Well, I mean, if you got it and you were saying, I'm going to hook this up to my Mac Pro.
John:
No, you're not, because your Mac Pro, there's no way your Mac Pro is that close to your monitor.
John:
It's probably on the floor or to the side.
John:
It's really short.
John:
it just it fits fine with the thing underneath where it is because the hole that's in the back of my desk is like right in the center as well so i go from the monitor behind the desk through the hole straight into the thing same thing with the power cord it's nice also by the way that the power cord is dead center on the mac studio because that works out for me sorry the cabling all worked out perfectly but i did not expect the uh the cable to be that short on the mac studio
John:
And so, yeah, under the desk, I can still hear it.
John:
I know it's there, but it's so quiet that you wouldn't notice.
John:
I feel like even with under the desk, it is still noisier than a 2015 5K iMac at idle.
John:
Because, you know, 2015 5K iMac at idle, I can't hear anything.
John:
2015 5K iMac doing anything or loading Facebook in a tab?
John:
Yeah, that sounds like something, you know.
John:
aircraft carrier or whatever airplane taking off um but no it's it's it's pretty good where it is as long as it stays up there i think i'll be happy with it the apple studio display my wife's reaction when she saw it it's like why is that so small because she's used to the imac with the giant bezels in the chin right i'm like i swear to you it is exactly the same size i can get out of tape measure it's 27 inches um but it looks it looks much smaller um
John:
Stand is nice.
John:
It doesn't feel quite as gritty as the XDR stand, but, you know.
John:
And the fact that it doesn't rotate.
Casey:
Did you get the fancy stand or did you get that?
John:
Yeah, I got the fancy height adjustable one.
John:
I was trying to pick which height to put it at.
John:
But that works well.
John:
Let's see.
John:
The camera, worse than I thought.
John:
Like, I saw the videos.
John:
We talked about it on the show.
John:
I was not prepared for how bad it would look.
John:
Like...
John:
I mean, part of it is what we see, you know, you see photographs of it on Twitter that are recompressed and you see YouTube videos that are themselves compressed.
John:
But seeing it in real life, boy, it just makes a complete mess out of my face.
John:
I look like I'm in an impressionist painting.
John:
Like, it's just so posterized, right?
John:
So just...
John:
really bad um it almost makes me think that like you know looking up at my fancy 4k logitech magnetic snap-on thing that there's a third-party opportunity for something similar to this product something that magnetically attaches to the top of the top of the studio display that has a tiny little usb-c cord that's just long enough to reach down into one of the studio displays usb-c ports
John:
i would probably buy that product because boy this camera is stinky um i mean i was warned but anyway we'll just ignore it speakers sound good monitor itself looks good although i do notice it's kind of weird that like okay so you're looking at the monitor right now so tell me if you notice this
John:
From my normal sitting position, if I look at the bottom edge of the monitor, past where the pixels end, there's like a little, you know, the little part of black.
John:
Do you see a little bit of the silver case, like kind of smiling at you on the edges?
Yeah.
Casey:
No, but I do have the light on.
Casey:
It's throwback.
Casey:
I am in my sleepy shirt, but the light is on.
Casey:
And even with my phone splashed, I don't know, but my eyes are garbage.
Casey:
And I can't say I've ever noticed that now.
Casey:
Not to say you're wrong, I just, I have never noticed.
John:
Yeah, it's almost like you can see a hint of the silver surround, like there's a ton.
John:
tiny tiny silver rim around the whole display rather than i look at the xdr the black sort of covers everything and you can't see any of the silver from normal viewing angles but the studio display you can see a little sliver of the silver kind of around the whole display but mostly notice it on the bottom because of the angle that the thing is i don't know i'll look at it more it's like it's not it's not distracting or anything it's just something i noticed that is different than the xdr
John:
um let's see what else about the studio uh max studio setup um i'm annoyed by photos because you know i didn't bother copying my photo library i'm like oh i call it photos i'll just redownload it all so i hook up the library make it the system library i can put it on the main ssd now because it's nice and big i set it to download photos and it says downloading 145 000 photos right and that's what it says for the next day or two
John:
downloading the number never changes there's no indication of progress no indication that it is making any progress there I am an activity monitor looking at the network packets going by saying is it doing anything is it downloading anything is something happening this is ever going to finish so I don't know I'll let you know in a week or two I mean it's like you know it's like a terabyte of photos so it's not going to happen overnight but I wish I knew
John:
If it was working at all, and if it was, I wish I could make it go faster, more terrible interface from photos.
John:
But yeah, other than that, everything seems to work well.
John:
As far as my wife's concerned, she went away and came back, and she has a different-looking computer, but all her same stuff is on it, and it's a million times faster than it was, but she doesn't care about that for the most part.
John:
I guess it's quieter now because she can open more tabs on sites that have terrible ads that used to cause her 5K iMacs fans to spin up until the thing looked like it was going to take off from the desk, and now it will just...
John:
quietly sit there grinding the uh cpu with those terrible ads but other than that uh i give it a i mean my my hopes are that this is going to be her computer for the next you know seven or eight years 10 years you know 2015 imac lasted her into 2022 so that's pretty good run i hope this will last just as long because i don't see why it shouldn't she's happy with this setup she likes a keyboard and a mouse she likes a 27 inch 5k monitor with speakers built in and a camera she doesn't care that much about the camera being crappy but it is
John:
As long as that little thing stuck to the underside of the desk doesn't get any noisier over time and stays stuck to the underside of the desk, I think it'll be fine.
John:
I've got plenty of room to grow.
John:
I haven't even filled any of the Thunderbolt ports.
John:
She's got a big USB hub on the desk and she's got the USB-C Thunderbolt ports all waiting to receive fancier backup disks and all sorts of other stuff.
John:
So, thumbs up so far.
Casey:
I am glad that both of you are happy.
Casey:
And I can't believe that you're not complaining about the fan being in the same room that you occupy.
John:
Well, Marco can tell me if he hears it on the microphone.
John:
With my headphones on, I can hear my Mac Pro, which is a few feet away from me, but I can't hear with my headphones on the thing way back there.
John:
When I sit in front of her computer, I can hear it, but just barely.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect it to be a problem for a podcast.
Marco:
It would have to be a pretty loud fan for that that I think you would have other problems with.
Marco:
Again, it seems odd to me that both the Mac Studio and the Studio Display both have weird, seemingly unnecessary flaws.
Marco:
The Studio Display has its really terrible camera that somehow happened, and the Mac Studio has this really odd fan noise situation that seems unnecessary.
Marco:
I'm surprised at both of these products.
Marco:
We were very excited about them when they were announced because spec-wise, they seem great, and they fill important roles in the lineup.
Marco:
When you look at Apple's other recent launches, they've been basically flawless.
Marco:
The MacBook Pros, basically flawless.
Marco:
Before that, the M1 series, the M1 iMac, the M1 MacBook Air, and the 13-inch weird MacBook Pro that shouldn't quite be a pro, the little Mac Mini with the M1, all of those products,
Marco:
basically perfect like so it's it's just it's odd to have these two you know sort of flagship products uh have these these really weird downsides that that seem totally avoidable um but i don't know i don't know what happened there but you know hopefully uh you know we'll see with the mac pro when that ever comes we'll kind of see how the story rounds itself out
Marco:
I also think we are still kind of missing the M1 Pro-based Mac Mini, which seems like it should exist and yet doesn't.
Marco:
Maybe that would answer some of the questions and close some of these gaps.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But we'll see how the story closes out.
Marco:
But this seems like an odd place for it to be in right now.
John:
Yeah, like if the Mac Studio was as quiet as the M1 Mac Mini, and obviously there's just more stuff in there.
John:
If you compare the size of the M1s and the M1 Mac Mini, it's so much smaller than, you know, the Pro or the Ultra that's in this thing.
John:
So I get it.
John:
But like, if it was that quiet, I would have a lot more fondness for its very small form factor.
John:
And as it stands now, it's great that it's small so I can shove it underneath my desk.
John:
But if it was, you know, 50% bigger, but also silent, I would just put it on the desk.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's kind of like the only reason, you know, I'm glad that this is small and I can smuggle on a desk is because I want to get that fan as far away from me as possible.
John:
But yeah, it's not not clear to me what like they needed this much sort of heat removal stuff and that they had to wedge it in there with two small diameter high speed fans rather than one much more lazy, large diameter fan.
John:
And if they had just done it like a chimney with cold air in the bottom, hot air on the top of the large diameter fan instead of
Marco:
like they could have made a lot of different choices but it seemed like some stuff was sacrificed on the altar of making it look like a big mac mini which is air in the bottom hot you know cool air in the bottom hot air at the back yeah and but like what like you can get that exact same chip not the ultra i know but like you can get you can get the max that exact same chip in the 13 inch macbook pro and it's silent
Marco:
That's why it's so odd to me.
Marco:
But the reality is, very selfishly, I'm not upset too much about this because I don't want that computer now.
John:
Maybe it is the power supplies that we were talking about before.
John:
There's DC voltage coming from the batteries inside a MacBook Pro, right?
John:
So there's no power supply circuitry to turn AC into DC and all this stuff.
John:
Maybe is that the big difference?
John:
Is it just the giant analog circuit board and the associated...
Marco:
analog noise and additional heat like well but but my but my macbook pro is powered by a you know very small fanless silent little white power brick too so like that doesn't seem to be the only difference yeah but it's external like that
John:
that can radiate heat out into the room and the tower works may not be sound when i was hooking stuff up i was hooking up a usb hub just to have i have old like usb3 hub to just you know put lightning cables and crap on so it's on the desk right and i was gonna hook that up and i took i took my wife's one off i'm like oh this one looks kind of cruddy and dusty let me go get a newer one that i had in the attic so i go up the attic and bring down the newer one
John:
And I'm like, oh, I don't need to, you know, I should get, I should use all new stuff.
John:
So I took out the old one entirely, took out the cable, the USB hub, and of course the external brick thing that they all come with, right?
John:
And I get the brand new stuff and I hook it all up and I'm crawling on a desk, connecting it together.
John:
And I plug in the brick into the UPS because this also runs, the USB from the UPS also runs through this.
John:
So I don't want it to go out when power goes out.
John:
because that's how the mac knows to shut down anyway um and when i did that i started to hear this like buzzing ticking noise from inside the power brick which i just recognized as like analog electronic noise like some you know uh you know coil of wire in there is doing something or whatever and i unplug it from from the uh the ups and it's still making the noise because some capacitor in there was slowly discharging or whatever i get
John:
put this hold this to your ear okay hold the brick it was making noise so even like that little external power brick you're like oh i have this white little power brick or whatever it's possible to screw that up too if you just have a cheap type power brick that anything can make i hate analog electronics i wish everything was digital i know it's not the world we live in right but you know you need the analog electronics to power the digital things but things like a power brick
John:
they they can have problems too and if that little ticking annoying thing was inside a computer it would just you know drive you mad because it's like what is that noise what is that doing that anyway the short version is i i just swapped back for the previous power brick was it was exactly the same for the previous usb hub but this one didn't make any noise when i plugged it in so
John:
analog electronics man it's just nothing but trouble well so far desktop laptop seems to be winning again well if you're if your white power brick was making noise you probably wouldn't hear it when it's on the floor i but i was crawling around like with my ear practically touching the thing i was like no this it doesn't sound healthy to me i need to get the one that doesn't make this noise
Marco:
Well, and also another benefit to the laptop lifestyle is things are more modular.
Marco:
If that white power brick starts making noise, I can just replace it.
Marco:
You can't quite easily do that with the power supply inside your desktop.
Marco:
That's what Apple cares for.
Marco:
Hopefully, I don't ever have to use it.
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Casey:
Now we have finally gotten to the time that we should talk WWDC.
Casey:
And it is this coming Monday as we record.
Casey:
It is just a few days away as we record on Wednesday night.
Casey:
It is this coming Monday.
Casey:
We should talk about our hopes, our predictions.
Casey:
And I had a lead off question that I'd like to ask both of you.
Casey:
And let's start with Marco.
Casey:
Why is it in person at all this year?
Casey:
Why is this year different from other years?
Casey:
Is it for the big splash reveal for like a Mac Pro?
Casey:
God help me.
Casey:
Or AR glasses?
Casey:
Or do they just want to dip their toe in the water?
Casey:
Like, what do you think the reason is for in person?
Marco:
I think Apple likes in-person events a lot.
Marco:
I think they do the remote events during COVID because they had to.
Marco:
And I think they want to get back to having in-person events for press and things like NWBC as soon as they can, reasonably and responsibly.
Marco:
And it's certainly up for debate whether this counts as that time or not.
Marco:
But, you know, setting that aside...
Marco:
I think they love the in-person events.
Marco:
In-person events, when you have a big launch like this, or whether it's something super significant like a new platform, like an AR headset, or whether it's just the year of software updates, that's also a big deal to them and to us.
Marco:
And so I don't think it needs to be a major hardware or platform release year for them to want an in-person event and for an in-person event to be really cool and fun.
Marco:
I think it's interesting that we have this kind of hybrid where like the keynote is almost certainly pre-recorded.
Marco:
And so the keynote watching is going to be like, you know, basically a movie and watching, you know, projected on a screen and we're just watching a movie.
Marco:
That's kind of interesting.
Marco:
But I do think they want to have in-person events.
Marco:
I also think the more little bits and pieces we pick up and they kind of trickle out, the more it seems like,
Marco:
This is also the launch party for the developer center.
Marco:
And they clearly want to show that off and to officially open it up and officially announce what it is, what it's supposed to do long term.
Marco:
And they want to have a big party to open up their new developer center.
Marco:
I think that's what this is.
Marco:
And from the little bits and pieces we've heard where it seems like it's going to be kind of a permanent home for developers,
Marco:
developer relations and some kind of labs sort of things um and maybe they could bring in developers at certain times for you know access to certain you know early hardware early software whatever the case may be it seems like this is going to be a big thing for them going forward and they want to unveil this all to us at one big party here's the developer center enjoy here's what it's for
Marco:
So I think all of that kind of goes into play for this particular year's event.
Marco:
That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if this is also a test balloon of sorts to see if all future WWDCs might be done this way.
Marco:
Because we've talked at length all the time about all the different downsides of...
Marco:
trying to wedge this conference into a city with a large convention center and getting everyone into all the hotels and everything's so expensive for everyone.
Marco:
And even if you fit 5,000 or 6,000 people in the convention center, you still are excluding thousands of other people who want to come but either can't afford to or can't get a ticket or can't get there, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
And so I think it's clear even before COVID, over the last few years, that WWDC...
Marco:
probably should change in a way to make it even more and more inclusive and more and more accessible to more people and they they certainly did their best with an in-person conference with having live stream sessions and all the recordings going up super fast and all the transcripts and all that stuff you know they really amped a lot of that up over those last few years of being in person but
Marco:
None of that compared to what they were able to do since COVID with having it be full time remote with just huge, hugely more accessible content because it had to be finally making labs accessible remotely, you know, all that stuff that they that they added.
Marco:
And I think this might be their vision of how it goes forward now that we can have in person events.
Marco:
And now they have this new developer center that seems to probably have a capacity in the hundreds rather than in the thousands at most possibly, you know, I would bet it's in the low hundreds.
Marco:
But maybe maybe this is part of their vision of like rather than having that big event, they pretty much produce the whole conference as if it's remote every time.
Marco:
And it's mostly remote.
Marco:
but it has this small in-person component that is partly for press and partly for certain groups of developers they want to have out there, students maybe, scholarship winners, certain feature developers, certain newcomers, things like that.
Marco:
So that's, I think, why they're doing it.
Marco:
And I think this is probably going to be the path forward.
Marco:
It would greatly surprise me if we ever had another WWDC in San Jose or San Francisco.
John:
It reminds me a little bit of press junkets for car reviews, right?
John:
So WWDC is run, you know, it's a developer conference.
John:
So Apple has a developer relations department or whatever they call it.
John:
It's people's job it is to interface with developers.
John:
And there's a lot of overlap between that, like developer relations.
John:
and and marketing you don't want to call it marketing but it is a form of marketing because you want people to develop for your platform you want to convince them to develop for your platform you want to show them how cool your platform is how successful they can be on your platform you want to support them that's what developer relations is so it is very much uh you know a marketing type of position and when you're doing any kind of marketing like a car company that wants you to tell you about the here's the new corvette or whatever having people in person is really important because that's you know just the way people work
John:
You know, you'll bring them to a beautiful place.
John:
You'll show them your car.
John:
You'll let, you know, a famous F1 driver drive them around a track in your car.
John:
You'll let them run on a drag strip.
John:
Like, you'll do all this stuff because you want to give these human being, journalists, press, whatever, a positive experience and for them to associate that positive experience with your car and then hopefully go back and write something nice about your car.
John:
Now, it's not like, you know, any decent car journalist is going to say, well, they brought me to a beautiful place in Italy.
John:
Therefore, I'm going to say this car is great, right?
John:
but humans being humans there is some small amount of the positive experience you had they will influence even if unconsciously what you write about it and so it is smart if you're doing something related to marketing to get people in person it is easier to impress upon them that your product is good you can explain to them in person you can answer their questions there and you can give them a positive experience
John:
Way easier to do that in person than remote, right?
John:
So I think anyone involved in any marketing position for any product in any company always wants to get, particularly the press, but even also just in this case, developers, like actual people, get them to where you can control their experience.
John:
Get them to come to your beautiful campus so that you can plan a day for them.
John:
Look at that menu we just read.
John:
Look at all the fun activities they're going to have you to tour the fitness center.
John:
Everyone's going to be nice and it's just going to be sunny and beautiful because it's California, right?
John:
That is super important.
John:
That is never going to go away.
John:
And so I feel like, you know, you would say, oh, they'll just have in person for press.
John:
Right.
John:
But for developer relations, they want granted a tiny subset, but they want developers to also have that experience.
John:
They want someone to say, oh, I won the lottery for WWC to come in person and I had such a great time and I met some fun people and I did cool things and I learned a lot and I got to eat good food.
John:
That will make them feel good about developing for the Apple platforms or make them feel better than they did before.
John:
Make them feel better than the people who just had to watch it sitting at home, right?
John:
So, and that, you know, and you ramped it all up.
John:
It's like, well, that's why WWC kept getting bigger.
John:
They made it as big as they possibly could without turning it into like Oracle World or whatever, right?
John:
They didn't make it 20,000 people, but they didn't keep it at like one or 200.
John:
They could have.
John:
They went all the way up to like, what, 5,500 or whatever is kind of where...
John:
wwc maxed out and they didn't want to make it any bigger than that they could have made it bigger they could afford to make it bigger they could have gone to bigger venues but they wanted to get as many developers as there as possible without totally destroying the conference because every developer that is there that still has a good time if they can provide a good experience those developers
John:
It's a developer relations.
John:
They want developers to feel good about the Apple platform.
John:
So I don't think it's just going to be press in person.
John:
Yes, of course they want the press to be in person and they have a whole separate experience for them.
John:
They also want some developers to be in person and they want it to feel special for them.
John:
And I feel like a, obviously a smaller in-person presence, whether it's COVID related or whether like Marcus said, like they'll just keep it small.
John:
You're going to feel even more special if you're one of like 300 versus being one of 5,500, whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think there will always be an in-person component when they're able to do it.
John:
I don't know if they're going to ramp back up to 5,000.
John:
It really depends on who is making the calls there.
John:
I know there are probably people who ran WWDC for years who, if they had their choice, would want to go back to 5,000 people if they could, you know, COVID allowing some point in the future, right?
John:
but there might be some people who say, let's keep it around to 300 and we'll just cycle through those 300s.
John:
I think it's tougher now because there are so many more developers than there used to be.
John:
WWDC more or less maxed out, but the number of developers on Apple platforms just kept increasing and increasing with the iOS and the iPhone and everything.
John:
It's huge now.
John:
It's almost like the difference between 5,000 and 300 is nothing.
John:
Percentage-wise, it's like the third decimal point or something.
John:
To first approximation, nobody gets to go to WWDC.
John:
if you consider they have how many millions of developers or how many millions of developer account um so it could be they keep it small and they say percentage wise we're pretty much the same percentage you didn't have a chance before and you don't have a chance now but people who do come they're going to have a good experience we're going to make sure we have a good experience maybe they'll always continue to have it at apple park because that's an environment that they totally control and they don't have to rent out and they don't have to pay for box lunches so there's that
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I asked the question because I don't think, and now we're getting into predictions and whatnot, I don't think we're seeing any real AR Glass sort of announcement or release or anything like that.
Casey:
I don't even think in all likelihood that we're going to get anything that's a strong indicator or teaser or anything like that.
Casey:
But nevertheless, if they were to do some new thing like AR Glass's,
Casey:
I can absolutely see them saying, come hell or high water, we're going to have people in person to do it because we want to hear the cheers.
Casey:
We want to hear people going nuts.
Casey:
And so I don't think it's going to happen, but it is an easy thing for me to imagine that that is why they want to do something in person.
Casey:
But I don't know if that's realistic.
Casey:
I don't think it is.
Casey:
So what do we want?
John:
Well, wait, before you move on to the AR thing, right?
John:
So if you think about hardware things that they've introduced at WWC, they tend not to want to let the people who are attending WWC really get near them.
John:
Think of the iMac Pro.
John:
Think of the Mac Pro.
John:
They were there and they were announced and you could see them, but you weren't even allowed to touch the iMac Pro.
John:
And the Mac Pro, they had people demoing them for you, but they didn't really want you to use them.
John:
So the idea that they're going to, you know, if they were going to introduce the AR glasses,
John:
it's like we want to have people there so if you're picturing people there like oh i'm gonna wait in the line and i'm gonna strap this thing in my head and i'm gonna try it out that doesn't seem like a very apple thing to do but on the other hand if they don't do that it's not like you can have someone wearing the headset and you know waving things around and then you get to look on a screen to see what they see that doesn't give you the experience either you have to actually put it on your head but i don't think apple would want you to put it on your head and if they did want you to put it on your head
John:
they'd be much more likely to do that with a group of a couple hundred people and that brings up another question about this by the way do it does anyone know how many people have been invited to go to not press but how many like regular people have been invited to go to apple bar not at all no i don't think that information has come out i mean maybe maybe it's 5 500 people i don't know like we're talking about this as if it's going to be a few hundred how many people can fit in cafe max and
John:
How many people are in the ring building?
John:
It's really a mystery.
John:
Like, you know, if you you could ask all your friends and maybe do an estimate and say, you know, random sampling, how many people try to apply and how many people got in.
John:
But it's it's difficult because it's not actually random if you're just asking your friends.
John:
It depends on what circuit you're driving.
John:
Like Paul Hudson, for example, I think didn't get in until someone at Apple got a clue and said, you should invite Paul Hudson.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
And he got invited.
John:
So yeah, it's still a lot of questions about this.
John:
But I think the in-person thing is entirely to do with that you must have people in person if you want to do effective marketing to either developers or press.
John:
And it has nothing to do with what is or isn't going to be announced.
John:
fair enough all right so what do we want what do we what do we want what do we expect how do you want to skin this cat well every wwc for in the in recent memory there's a new version of ios new version of mac os and also a new version of ipad os and maybe a new os like i didn't even put tv os on this list i guess it's tv os and then reality os uh did i miss an os we got tv os reality os is another another one
John:
audio os watch os watch os there's another one watch os um anyway yeah there's there are new versions of the major operating systems and every once in a while there's a new operating system like reality os if they do the ar thing or whatever i hope they don't call it ros the i think the code names and all the code is that it's reality os
John:
But anyway, what do we want from like, let's start with the big one.
John:
What do we want from a new iOS, from a new Mac OS?
John:
Like, do we have anything that we really want out of any of these OSs?
John:
Or is it just more like, well, whatever they give us will be nice.
John:
Don't screw it up and fix all the bugs.
Casey:
That.
Casey:
I think for iOS, something I have been...
Casey:
fiddling with a little bit more recently is shortcuts both on ios and ipad os and i like i like to create shortcuts to control kind of system level things or things in the house so a couple of examples of this is i've been dabbling with tail scale recently which is very very interesting and maybe we can talk about that another time but i've been dabbling with it and i wanted to control tail scale a little bit more and
Casey:
and control VPN settings on the phone a little bit more because tail scale is sort of, but not really a VPN.
Casey:
And there's no real good hook in shortcuts to control VPN settings.
Casey:
And additionally, I wanted to, uh, you know, I've been doing a lot of Apple fitness plus workouts recently has been talked about a lot recently.
Casey:
And I, I have a shortcut that when the, when I, when I, when I stop exercising, uh,
Casey:
then it will automatically turn the ceiling fan in the living room off if it's not hot outside, which is pretty slick.
Casey:
But I also wanted to be able to say, okay, well, when I start a workout and you see that the Apple TV is on and playing Apple Fitness, then go ahead and turn the fan on.
Casey:
But there's no way to do that.
Casey:
Like, there's no way to query what the state of the Apple TV is or not any good way of doing it anyhow.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I feel like more robust hooks for shortcuts would be really, really cool.
Casey:
Um, and I can't believe I'm saying that cause I mean, I've used shortcuts since it came out and since it was workflow even, but I'm not a, I'm not a particularly robust user of it, but I've been getting into it a lot more recently and I found it really is quite powerful if you want it to be, but I wish it could get its tentacles into more places and
Casey:
And similarly, similar idea, widgets.
Casey:
I like widgets.
Casey:
I use them on both iPad and on my phone as well.
Casey:
But I do wish that they were even just marginally interactive.
Casey:
And on certain size widgets, you can have like a couple of touch targets or something like that.
Casey:
I wish they could be updated more frequently and not by magic, but by, you know, by the widget being asked if it wants to update or perhaps being told to update.
Casey:
I haven't looked at how the widget system works in a while.
Casey:
Maybe Marco, you have more insight onto this, but I wish they were a little more interactive and a little more robust.
Casey:
And I think that both of those would be really cool.
Casey:
I'm sure there's other things I'm not thinking of.
Casey:
I mean, bug fixes, reliability, et cetera, but recently just, this is a complete recency bias, but recently those are a couple of things that have ground my gears.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, what are you looking for in iOS?
Marco:
What I want most from iOS is just more maturation of the frameworks and the tools.
Marco:
And the good thing is that's almost always what happens.
Marco:
So I think I'm very likely to get that.
Marco:
The widget system is actually pretty good.
Marco:
Some of the rumors are that we might be able to get them onto the lock screen on the phone, and that would be great.
Marco:
I've wanted...
Marco:
some kind of additional customization of the iphone lock screen for a while now any kind of widget advancements to make them potentially slightly interactive would be very nice that being said based on the way they work i actually don't expect that to happen
Marco:
same yeah um because they seem like they just want to be like these serialized pre-rendered swift ui views and uh to have any kind of like like you know when your widget's showing on screen none of your code is running like the the os is basically showing the timeline of views that you have given it but the reason why widgets don't have active you know buttons and things in them is that your code is not running when those are on screen necessarily
Marco:
And I think that side of how they're implemented is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
So I'm not expecting interactive widgets, really.
Marco:
But maybe certain ways to make them a little bit more lively, certain advances in things like the timeline views, maybe some ability to use some basic animations in a controllable way.
Marco:
That kind of stuff could be nice.
Marco:
But for the most part in iOS, what I want is...
Marco:
Make Xcode better.
Marco:
Make SwiftUI better.
Marco:
Right now, using SwiftUI on iOS is still a very frustrating rollercoaster.
Marco:
When you're on the happy path and you're doing things the way they do it on the conference slides, it works great.
Marco:
And the second it touches the real world, you just slam into walls everywhere and...
Marco:
It's very difficult to use SwiftUI in the real world without hitting major problems that require huge amounts of deep dives and hacks and workarounds and Googling and everything else that is a very frustrating time waste and often requires you to rip out parts of SwiftUI and rewrite stuff in UIKit.
Marco:
This framework is now a couple years old.
Marco:
It's still very, very young.
Marco:
Please make SwiftUI significantly better, and I think and I hope they will.
Marco:
So that's pretty much it for me for iOS.
Casey:
Yeah, I'd like to build, though, on what you said about SwiftUI, because I have had a pretty decent experience, all told, with SwiftUI, almost the entirety of Masquerade as SwiftUI, and
Casey:
It has caused me to relearn a lot of things and to think of things differently.
Casey:
By and large, it is pretty good.
Casey:
But SwiftUI smells so deeply to me like it is being dog-fooded some more than WatchKit was.
Casey:
Sorry, trigger warning, Marco.
Casey:
But it doesn't seem like it's being properly dog-fooded.
Casey:
Dog-fed?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Dog fed?
Casey:
I'm not sure where to go from here, but you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
I feel like a lot more dogfooding would go a long way.
Casey:
And it really seems like SwiftUI is one of those things where, as an academic adventure, it is interesting and fairly robust.
Casey:
But as soon as you try to do real-world things with it, it starts to fall down, just like you were saying.
Casey:
It starts to fall down relatively quickly and relatively spectacularly.
Casey:
Again, I say that, and I'm being a little hyperbolic, because Masquerade is SwiftUI, and it does work, and I did have to jump through hoops, but it wasn't completely egregious, but it was way more than I should have for a framework that's already a couple years old.
Casey:
So I could not agree more that I want to see a deep concentration on SwiftUI, and I want to have them tell us
Casey:
I think they made it public that the weather app rewrite was SwiftUI.
Casey:
What they didn't make public and what we have heard through the grapevine is that it was a freaking mess.
Casey:
Frame rates were garbage and they had to do a bunch of fixes specifically to make the weather app work better.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
One way or another, I think a lot more dogfooding on SwiftUI would be really, really healthy and help us do our jobs better.
Casey:
And so often with Apple, they'll throw something across the fence and say, here, this is good enough, right?
Casey:
Just be thankful for it and buzz off.
Casey:
And in reality, it's just not.
Casey:
And so I really, really, really hope that the State of the Union is basically, here's all the ways that we've made SwiftUI better.
Marco:
Yeah, because SwiftUI, I mean, there are just so many very large shortcomings and frustrations with it in use right now.
Marco:
Like, yeah, we need significant improvements on the API front.
Marco:
We need a ton of bug fixes.
Marco:
We need tons of new ways we can control behaviors and appearances.
Marco:
We need major advances in the tooling side of it.
Marco:
SwiftUI right now has...
Marco:
Not only does it crush your machine performance-wise, but when things go wrong, you get these really terrible error messages or error behaviors that are inscrutable and almost none of it's documented, almost none of it's discoverable.
Marco:
So you have a SwiftUI view.
Marco:
You have all this dot chaining going on to do pretty much everything.
Marco:
How do you know what dot chain you can apply where?
Marco:
Well, the correct thing is for the tooling to assist you with various autocomplete things and good documentation.
Marco:
And the reality is the tooling breaks constantly and doesn't really help you very much.
Marco:
And the documentation is almost non-existent and very kind of abstract.
Marco:
There's not really like examples anywhere.
Marco:
And so everything's very abstract and hard to know what to look for.
Marco:
So the answer, really, is you have to Google everything.
Marco:
Like, everything.
Marco:
And the Google results you get are not Apple's documentation, because it mostly doesn't exist and isn't helpful.
Marco:
What you're actually getting is, like, various, you know, Swift by Sundell posts and stuff like that, because...
Marco:
Everyone is asking these questions and they're so incredibly non-obvious when you're in the coding environment and in Apple's documentation and everything.
Marco:
So you have to go to blog posts and Stack Overflow and everything because it makes no sense.
Marco:
It's not discoverable at all.
Marco:
In the same way that I feel like
Marco:
All these dot chaining operators in SwiftUI, they have the discoverability problem of swipe gestures and pinch gestures in touchscreen interfaces.
Marco:
It's like, how do you do this thing?
Marco:
Oh, well, you just type in dot accessibility modifier, whatever.
Marco:
It's like, okay, but how would I have ever known that if you didn't tell me?
Marco:
Because that's visible nowhere.
Marco:
And it's all for the same goal of like we have these pretty code samples that look so simple.
Marco:
They're so visually simple.
Marco:
And he's just like, you know, tuxi-wise that are super minimal and all gestural are so simple looking and clean, right?
Marco:
But then, okay, well, how do I use it?
Marco:
Oh, you got to Google for it.
Marco:
So I really and I think a lot of that is just inherent to both what's currently in fashion and software development and also the design of Swift UI in general.
Marco:
And so I don't expect that to change at a deep level, which is unfortunate because it needs to.
Marco:
But at least within the bounds of what they are likely to do.
Marco:
I would hope for at least some slight improvement in those areas.
Marco:
But that being said, even that, even hoping for slight improvement given reality, I think that's a tall order.
Marco:
So my more realistic expectation is at least give me more dot modifiers and crap that I'll have to Google that will allow me to do the behaviors I need to do in my apps that will avoid me having to dive into UIKit.
John:
Since we're in the Swift UI corner here, I think it's something I've been stewing about.
John:
I almost wrote something about it, but I didn't feel like I could nail it down to the point where I could write something.
John:
But I had nailed it down to the point where I can blabber about it on a podcast.
John:
You mentioned like the dot chaining and everything like that.
John:
But Swift UI isn't just syntactic sugar for the normal things that you would do in UIKit.
John:
Its whole point is that it's declarative instead of imperative.
John:
You describe the way things are rather than saying, if this happens, then do that or whatever.
John:
And sometimes when you parachute someone is used to messing with UIKit into that environment, they sort of recreate imperative programming by sprinkling state on top of their SwiftUI views and adding conditionals inside them and basically doing imperative programming in a declarative way.
John:
It's like, look, I have if it's the same thing.
John:
And now I just got to do is make sure the right state gets sprinkled down to the right places.
John:
And it's just like I'm writing imperative code, but you're not.
John:
It's trying to be declarative, and you end up making the structure that gets fed to this larger thing.
John:
And that's not just fashion.
John:
There is a point to that.
John:
They emphasize this in the first round of SwiftUI things, that the machinery that runs your declarative thing, the fact that you don't have to write the machinery, the fact that you can't write the machinery, has advantages in terms of fewer bugs, because...
John:
it's you know you're just essentially creating a structure and then the machine assuming the machine is relatively bug free runs your structure and you don't have to worry about maintaining state and everything it all happens automatically and then they can compress all your views into one thing for efficiency purposes and like there are advantages it's not just oh declaratives and style let's do that there are technical advantages to it which they touted heavily those advantages are real but of course what you just all discussed is okay but they're also disadvantages
John:
And when I look at the disadvantages, what SwiftUI looks like to me is another declarative style technology that I have a lot of experience with that lots of people would describe exactly the same way Marco just described SwiftUI, which is I can't figure out how to do what I want.
John:
The documentation is not useful for me.
John:
There aren't enough examples.
John:
And anytime I want to do anything, I have to Google.
John:
And the name of that technology is chat room anyway, seven seconds away.
John:
It'll take too long.
John:
CSS.
Marco:
That's right.
John:
Cascading style sheets.
Marco:
So here's the question.
John:
CSS has way better documentation out there than Swift UI.
John:
CSS one came out in 1996.
John:
So it's a little bit older than Swift UI, but here, so here's the question about Swift UI, right?
John:
So it could be two possible things could be here, right?
John:
Um, CSS today now is amazing, but still people need to Google for like how to center stuff vertically or whatever.
John:
Anyway, um,
John:
So SwiftUI, some people look at it and say, no declarative UI description system is ever going to be sufficient to write a full featured application.
John:
Because inevitably, in any good application, there's some point where you want to do some weird ass thing that you have no way to declare.
John:
To Marco's point, there's not a dot modifier for it.
John:
And you need to basically say, from this piece of code, when this thing's happened, I'm going to run some regular old style imperative code to reach over there and do a thing, right?
John:
Because I just need to do that.
John:
And the designers didn't think of it, but I need to do it.
John:
And if your framework is imperative...
John:
It's real easy to add three more lines of your own code, override a handler, do an extra thing like that fits right in the system.
John:
That's how the whole system works.
John:
You get to write your own code and your code looks a lot like the framework code.
John:
It's just you overrode it and called super, right?
John:
But in a declarative system, yes, you can write your own declarative things, but it's way weirder.
John:
And sometimes you can't get to the machinery you want to get.
John:
it so some people would say swift ui is never going to go all the way you're never going to get a top to bottom swift ui app like they're trying to make you're always going to need some imperative code or some way to get at the engine or some way to extend the engine that's the way swift ui needs to evolve right or that it'll never be it'll never be good enough for a whole system because declarative is really good for making views and it has some lots of advantages but it's never going to be the whole app
John:
But the other possibility, and both of these things can be true at the same time, is CSS, for the longest time, frustrated people to hell because you could do a lot of stuff, but you would never think of the way you had to do it.
John:
Like vertical horizontal centering of elements, making things equal width, but not much wider than this.
John:
And there was a long period of time when there are ways to do that in CSS that was like wizardry that made no freaking sense.
John:
But then they had like...
John:
min width and max width wow that made everything a lot easier didn't these hacks are neat right but still lots of stuff was hard right you know and again 1996 css one spec or whatever year that was right it took a long time to get to where we are now like what is the swift ui equivalent of flexbox to give just one example if you if you don't know all these css terms maybe this is not landing for you but if you are a web developer think of how much harder it was to do the things that flexbox does before flexbox
John:
What is the equivalent of Flexbox in SwiftUI?
John:
What's the equivalent of box sizing border box in SwiftUI?
John:
What's the equivalent of min and max width in SwiftUI, right?
John:
Now, granted, it doesn't map one to one because SwiftUI has a lot of the things that CSS didn't have for years and years.
John:
But there are absolutely situations in SwiftUI that remind me totally of how hard it was to do crap in CSS before, quote unquote, modern CSS.
John:
Or if you couldn't rely on Flexbox being present.
John:
I'm at the point now where I will just, you know, when I'm doing like the ATP store page, like I refuse to do it the old fashioned way to support some old browser.
John:
So I'm sorry if our store page looks crappy to you.
John:
But, you know, most modern browsers actually do support Flexbox.
John:
So I use it.
John:
Right.
John:
And it makes everything so much easier than it was before.
John:
I know how to do it the old way, but it's a headache now.
John:
And that's where I feel like Swift UI is.
John:
And so the question is, does Swift UI just need its flex box moment?
John:
Does it just need the new set of operations and operators and, you know, remodeling and rethinking of how a major component works?
John:
Because box sizing is a big part of CSS.
John:
And they've taken several runs at box sizing to try to get it to match the mental model of the programmer.
John:
So...
John:
It could be that SwiftUI just needs a few more iterations on that of them figuring out how people, how can we make SwiftUI better match how people think about doing things.
John:
But on the other side is, but maybe no declarative system like SwiftUI is ever going to be able to do all the things we need a GUI framework to do.
John:
And there will always need to be an imperative framework.
John:
And so we should decide, figure out, what are we doing here?
John:
Does UIKit continue forever in parallel track with SwiftUI?
John:
Is SwiftUI just a view system for UIKit?
John:
I know they bridge together really well.
John:
So does AppKit and SwiftUI.
John:
It's neat that you can bridge them, but it's not...
John:
it's not a compelling developer story until you explain to people.
John:
So we just, did we just continue like this forever where our apps are a hodgepodge of UI kit and Swift UI, whichever is the least frustrating.
John:
And by the way, half of these places that are UI kit started as Swift UI until we hit a wall and had to turn back.
John:
That's not a great experience.
John:
So, you know, Swift UI, some people look at it and say, Oh, it's like three or five or whatever years old.
John:
It should be mature by now.
John:
But if you look at CSS, uh,
John:
You know, I can't do the math in my head because I'm bad at math, but it was around a long time before it was not maddening.
John:
And it's arguably still kind of maddening.
John:
But, you know, SwitchWide does look a lot like CSS to me, for good and for ill.
John:
CSS has the advantage of being like...
John:
not owned by a single vendor and so it kind of won by default because it's the way we style things on the web so tough luck and we all just worked on it until it was less sucky but swift ui does not have that advantage swift ui is not even the only framework within a single company's thing there's many other choices so it kind of has to like win a little bit on the merits uh and if it is not a plus for apple's platform then like why are they even doing it like
John:
Are you just annoying your existing developers, not attracting any new ones?
John:
The whole promise of 50Y is that it's a better way to develop, that it would attract developers to your platform.
John:
And right now, I feel like it's not quite doing that job.
Casey:
Well, I mean, it's such a cliche and common thing to say.
Casey:
When SwiftUI works, that's a poor way of phrasing it, I guess.
Casey:
When you're doing things that SwiftUI is happy with, it is amazing.
Casey:
And I am a terrible designer, but I can make things that look, I think, pretty decent using SwiftUI, whereas doing the same thing in UIKit is difficult for me.
John:
uh i guess i'm a novice level you know ios developer i don't know but there are things that i find it's certainly more verbose there's more moving parts you know like it's yes but but you know it's like margar said after you make that thing you're like whenever you're doing this tutorial it's like now add an icon and now do this and then like if you like when you're with a new developer and you say you're showing them ui kit and you're going through tutorials like
John:
now make a table view and now add an icon next to it and now make the every third one red and you know like whatever you're just doing things and then at a certain point the person you're teaching will go you know it would be cool like I think this would look better if we lined up the baseline of this text with that text and UI kit you can do it and Swift UI it's like nope sorry
John:
Like you, you have to rewrite, you have to rewrite the entire Swift UI engine to do that because they have no idea where each other's baselines are.
John:
And it's basically impossible.
John:
Give up.
John:
Whereas that's not true.
Casey:
It is something you can do.
Casey:
In fact, Paul Hudson has a post about it that I've read.
Casey:
I'm just making an example.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I take your point.
John:
Even the thing of like making, making equal size buttons with the widest one being as wide as the longest label.
John:
Like there shouldn't be a tutorial page for that.
John:
That should be so easy to do.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
No, I agree.
Casey:
And I think SwiftUI has potential, and I see potential in SwiftUI, and I really believe, and maybe this is a false hero, but I really believe if Apple had to make their stuff using SwiftUI, suddenly they'd facepalm and say, oh...
Casey:
Oh, this sucks.
Casey:
Oh, we got to make this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this all way better in order to make this workable.
John:
You already mentioned the weather app.
John:
They are dogfooding, just not enough.
John:
But I feel like that's why SwiftUI has gotten better to the degree that it has, the little amount of dogfooding they're doing.
John:
it's a bad idea for them to dog food everything you know all at once right doing the weather app is a good first dog fooding uh let's not tell them to just like you know redo every app in swift ui like you know they did with it notification center where those widget things or whatever yeah those still annoy me i think the mouse over stuff in swift ui is still broken that's why i mouse over my notification things and
John:
It'll show the X to close it, but then when I go to click on the little thing to complete the reminder, that button will disappear.
John:
Does this happen to you as well?
John:
No, I don't think so.
John:
My faith in the mouse over abilities of SwiftUI is very low.
John:
But yeah, I think they will be doing more dogfooding, but I'm not sure you can just say, you just need to dogfood everything because then all they're going to do is make all their apps buggy.
John:
See also shortcuts for the Mac, right?
John:
Do you want them to dogfood it before it's ready?
John:
They have to balance the dogfooding with SwiftUI's team ability to make their framework better.
John:
And that's where I get to the question about SwiftUI is like, is this an inherently limited approach that is never going to be able to solve more than 80% of the problems, in which case you need to have an imperative story alongside it?
John:
Or are we just waiting for the flex box moment?
Marco:
Going back to a couple things you said.
Marco:
So like, you know, on the Mac, I think part of the problem we saw with shortcuts on the Mac...
Marco:
And I think we've seen echoes of this with lots of software developers who have tried to use SwiftUI for non-trivial Mac apps.
Marco:
It seems like the Mac implementation of SwiftUI is significantly less mature and less usable than it is on iOS and watchOS.
Marco:
And that makes sense in the sense that we know this is a framework that was born on watchOS and that then the other platforms kind of moved into them later in its development.
Marco:
it it's no secret that the mac software stack is is a pretty low priority for apple uh that you know even though the mac is having a pretty great renaissance right now mac os still gets way less time and effort put into it and still seems to have way more bugs than ios does and so a cutting-edge framework that is used
Marco:
for almost nothing on mac os uh that is mostly being developed on other platforms that's i think that's going to be a low priority for apple for the foreseeable future and so swift ui on mac os is is pretty rough um swift ui on ios is decent and swift ui on watch os where it was born is pretty great
Marco:
And I think part of the reason why is that, you know, SwiftUI on watchOS, there's a reason why this kind of framework works really well on watchOS.
Marco:
It's a much smaller problem surface that, you know, you have this smaller device.
Marco:
It's way more constrained.
Marco:
There is no better UI framework to drop down to for us.
Marco:
So it's kind of the only choice.
Marco:
And also, all of the limitations of it are things that you run into way less often on watchOS because you're not trying to customize every single little
Marco:
you know detail of the navigation bar or whatever like most of those things don't exist on watch os and so it's a very simple problem space and swift ui covers it very very well on ios you know it's much more problem surface to cover and it seems less mature and there's you know all these so much so many other edge cases to consider and so
Marco:
What I think, though, is the reason why we all keep trying to climb up this mountain, even though we keep getting killed.
Marco:
It's not like the mountain doesn't just gently ask us to leave.
Marco:
It just kills us.
Marco:
But the reason why we keep climbing up this stupid mountain is because when SwiftUI works, it's really nice.
Casey:
Oh, it's the best.
Marco:
Like, that's why we keep going through all this pain.
Marco:
I'm not saying that this is the wrong approach.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
And I'm not saying that I don't see the value in this.
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
I see it all the time.
Marco:
That's why I keep trying.
Marco:
Because I want the value it provides.
Marco:
And when it works, it's amazing.
Marco:
But we really need to dramatically increase the rate at which it works for us and start tackling some of these big, hairy, hard problems about things like
John:
discoverability documentation performance tooling um and just covering way more of the edge cases than we cover now yeah well i'm sorry we we got sidetracked yeah pulling pulling back out to the whole os question here i think like a broader os question that is tangentially related to switch ui is something we've discussed extensively on past programs uh specifically related to the mac is what is the mac development api story you got catalyst you got swift ui you had app kit um
John:
uh you know what's what's the deal like what is what that needs to be more coherent on an ios it seems like the the ui kit and swift ui it's not a dichotomy but like what is the deal with that is that parallel forever is that swift ui eventually taking over everything like what is the plan it's much more dire situation on the mac because app kit is getting like no love and
John:
and Catalyst is just UIKit in a different place.
John:
It's got its own SwiftUI problems.
John:
There was the 12.4 update that apparently broke everybody's existing shipping SwiftUI apps by making all the labels disappear in their Catalyst apps on the Mac.
John:
We saw that happen to, what, I think James Thompson's app had that happen, and Steve Trout and Smith had it happen to his app as well.
John:
You can't do that.
John:
You can't break people's existing apps in a point update.
John:
So I feel like the API story on macOS for sure, and maybe a little bit on iOS,
John:
This is not the year that they're probably going to make it more coherent, but that's kind of a long-term plan that I want to see them at least moving in that direction and sort of rationalizing that.
John:
But for the most part, when I look at this OS list, most of these OSs, with the exception of RealityOS, because who knows what that even is going to be,
John:
I would say they're mostly all moving in the right direction.
John:
It's just complaints about the speed.
John:
Obviously, iPadOS is moving in the right direction so slowly that we're pulling our hair out.
John:
We want more power.
John:
We want more flexibility.
John:
We get that in fits and starts.
John:
I think keyboard and cursor control was a big leap forward, but it's just we all want more.
John:
But no one's going to say it's moving in the wrong direction.
John:
If you look at iPadOS over the course of its entire existence as a named thing,
John:
It's been getting better in the ways that we want it to get better just more slowly.
John:
And every LOS that you list, including even macOS, for the most part is moving in the right direction.
John:
Again, two steps forward, one step back.
John:
Shortcuts on Mac, thumbs up.
John:
Shortcuts on Mac, the app, thumbs down, right?
John:
So give and take.
John:
The new notifications, dogfooding SwiftUI, that's a little bit janky.
John:
But, you know, like things are kind of moving in the right direction, getting a little bit better, adding features.
John:
And so if I look at most of these OS projects, they just do a year where every OS gets some new set of features.
John:
Oh, a fancier lock screen on iOS, some new stuff on watchOS.
John:
Hey, third-party watch faces, why not this year?
John:
Anytime now.
John:
iPadOS gets some more features for flexibility, just not as much as people want.
John:
macOS gets a little bit nicer, fewer bugs.
John:
You know, it's like...
John:
even tv os for the most part when they add features to tv os there are features that we say yeah please use the frame rate matching and better hdr support and like you know not that not that they advance rapidly i think directionally all these os is none of them are on like the wrong path like you're some would argue maybe ipad os is on the wrong but i think it's just on it's on the right path it's just going so incredibly slowly that it's annoying so
John:
I'm happy for all of them to move forward.
John:
What I would like in the direction they're already going.
John:
What I would like, though, is fewer steps back.
John:
Like, can we just get some clean wins?
John:
For example, if shortcuts didn't come to the Mac and the app hadn't been terrible, that would have been better, right?
John:
Or if some new feature comes out but doesn't bring with it a bunch of bugs or existing bugs from two OSs ago don't get fixed.
John:
Crap like that makes otherwise good year going along the paths they've made for themselves just makes everyone feel worse about it, right?
John:
And, you know, for many years, we've always, like, sort of bargained with the mythical Apple saying, like, can we just do an update where you just fix bugs?
John:
I don't need any features or whatever.
John:
But really, all this is saying is...
John:
like fewer steps back you do have to take some steps forward you should add features you should add refinements feel free to drop apps that aren't important anymore but like please fewer steps back fewer stumbles fix some old broken stuff like i feel like we can get that this year out of all these os's and reality os is going to be a big distraction
John:
Because it'll be brand new and who knows what it'll be.
John:
And it's tightly tied to hardware that may or may not be a flop.
John:
So that's a big question mark.
John:
But the whole rest of the stable of the OS is just keep doing what you're doing.
John:
Just do it a little bit better.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
So, Marco, are we going to see a headset?
Marco:
I think it's a crapshoot.
Marco:
I mean, the rumors have all pretty much consolidated on saying, whoops, we were wrong.
Marco:
Actually, it's not coming yet.
Marco:
Which is funny because, like, two weeks ago they were saying, it's definitely coming.
Marco:
Get ready, you know?
Marco:
So, you know, we'll see.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
At this point, every year that goes by, we always say, it feels like the headset's getting pretty close.
Marco:
Maybe this is the year of the headset.
Marco:
And then after the conference passes and we don't get it, we say, well, yeah, I guess it was too early.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I mean, again, I think whatever happens there or doesn't happen there...
Marco:
We don't know how it's going to end yet, as John was just saying.
Marco:
It could be a flop.
Marco:
It could be a really early thing that takes a while to really warm up.
Marco:
It's somewhat similar to the way the watch did.
Marco:
It could be like the iPad, which that's a whole thing.
Marco:
By the way, we've got to mention Federico's story before I forget.
Marco:
First of all, Federico's an amazing writer, and this is just a masterpiece.
Marco:
What we're talking about is Federico Faticci on MacStory's
Marco:
Wrote this big article a few days ago that he has been known as not only an iPad power user, I would say the iPad power user.
Marco:
He is the iPad Pro.
Marco:
If there is a human version of what is the iPad Pro, who is the iPad Pro?
Marco:
It's Federico Fatici.
Marco:
He has been using an iPad full-time for years and years and was always pushing the envelope on what you could do work-wise on an iPad and what it means to be an iPad Pro user.
Marco:
And he published this bombshell the other day of saying basically he kind of secretly switched to the Mac for the last few months.
Marco:
And has been doing all of his work on the Mac.
Marco:
And, you know, this big thing comparing, you know, what it's been like.
Marco:
And, you know, spoiler alert, he likes it a lot.
Marco:
And it really highlights quite how limited the iPad is still in software.
Marco:
And that's, like, the main, you know, he talks, you know, certainly about, like, the ports and the keyboard and the trackpad and stuff like that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Mainly the limitation on the iPad has always been software limitations.
Marco:
Things like multitasking ability and, you know, app store rules and inability to hook into certain behaviors and inflexibility in certain areas.
Marco:
You know, standard stuff that we know from iOS usage and iOS power usage in particular.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It was jaw-dropping, and I think that article should serve as a serious wake-up call to the iPadOS team.
Marco:
Things are bad if your biggest enthusiast just stopped using your platform for the last few months and kind of liked it better not using it.
John:
or it should be a wake-up call to the mac team because it's not clear to me from that article whether he would be happier if ios gained all the abilities the mac had or if has he actually said explicitly in the article what if the mac was more like the surface where you could take a laptop and bend the screen back and now it's a tablet and you can use a pencil on it but it's also a mac and so like who is closer which platform is actually closer to what vtg wants i think actually the mac is closer especially now that it can run ipad apps
John:
Not that Apple particularly seems to want to go in that direction, but there's an example.
John:
Microsoft, their OS is very different, but hardware-wise, they have a product line that does that, and people use it and like it.
John:
There is no reason the Mac couldn't do that, and the Mac is way closer to doing that than the iPad is.
John:
The iPad is so far.
John:
It would have to add so much more stuff to get to where...
John:
you know, the Mac already is, whereas the Mac just needs, it already has the ability to run iPads, just needs to add touch, a little bit of different window management, pen support, and then hardware design where, you know, it's more like a Surface.
John:
You've got an attachable screen, a full backable screen, all that stuff.
John:
I don't think Apple's going to do that, but it was an interesting perspective reading his article and saying he kind of wants a Microsoft Surface running macOS that can run iPad apps.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, I'll save most of that for another day because I want to talk about more of these OSs, but certainly it highlights just how limiting iPadOS is when you try to do non-trivial things with it the way he always does.
Marco:
And he's always been really good at like
Marco:
If there is a way to do something, he will find that way and he will make sometimes very ridiculous towers of hacks to try to get stuff to work the way he wants to on iPadOS.
Marco:
But really, iPadOS as a pro usage platform has always been very limited appeal.
Marco:
has always been fairly difficult to you know because similar to swift ui when you hit a wall you hit it hard and sometimes the process of getting over that wall the answer is either you literally can't do that or while you can do that it's going to require you know hacks x y and z to do it and you know you might actually not want to do that in the first place um so i i hope to see
Marco:
some movement in iPadOS because we really didn't see anything last year there.
Marco:
But at the same time, I'm not hopeful.
Marco:
I think iPadOS is lost and I don't see any signs that they have found their way yet.
Marco:
And I don't, as John was just saying, I'm not even sure they can
Marco:
find their way in the paradigm they've made for themselves to make it anything other than what it is right now and what it is right now you know what the ipad is and what it does for people right now is not zero it has plenty of value to plenty of people but i don't think they're gonna ever be able to push it into a place where it's more of a power user platform in the way we think of as mac power users like not the podcast the uh you know the concept
Marco:
I don't think it can be pushed in that direction, but we'll see if there's anything in that direction next week.
Marco:
But again, I'm not expecting much there.
Casey:
Since we're talking about this article, may I read for you my favorite part of the article?
Marco:
Yeah, please.
Casey:
The iPad is the only Apple computer that can transform from a tablet into a laptop.
Casey:
It's the only portable computer with built-in 5G connectivity, which I miss every day on the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Welcome to the club, Federico.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
Again, Macs are really close to that.
John:
It just, you know, it's using the same chip.
John:
A lot of them, you can throw that right in there anytime you want, Apple.
John:
One of us.
John:
One of us.
Casey:
I really enjoy my iPad.
Casey:
I'm still running the 2018 iPad Pro, the first one with Face ID.
Casey:
And by and large, it still works well.
Casey:
And I had a thing I had to do today, and I'm working on a keynote presentation for something that's uninteresting.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I was doing that on the iPad.
Casey:
Like I was using Keynote on the iPad and it was clunkier for me than using it on the Mac because I don't know where anything is.
Casey:
I don't know how to accomplish things, but I was able to do what I needed to, you know, in a place that looked nothing like a place that you would want to do work.
Casey:
And I was able to do that.
Casey:
And that's super cool.
Casey:
And I was able to do that.
Casey:
You know, I happen to be on Wi-Fi, but I could have used, you know, 5G or the LTE features of the iPad if I wanted to.
Casey:
Like the iPad is just like SwiftUI, as you said.
Casey:
The iPad is really, really, really great until it isn't.
Casey:
And man, is it frustrating when it isn't.
Casey:
But hopefully it'll get better.
Marco:
So moving on to what I actually have the most hopes for.
Marco:
So, well, before I get there, one thing I have low hopes for, and I hope they don't exceed it too much, is macOS.
Marco:
Because, again, I think Apple has shown when they tackle major macOS projects...
Marco:
recently they, they don't usually do a great job of it.
Marco:
They don't put a lot of time and effort into it to make it really high quality and really bug free and stable.
Marco:
Um, when they've tackled design changes in Mac OS recently, they've done kind of a, a two thirds asked job of it.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I would love to see them fix notifications.
Marco:
Like, the design of notifications still is awful on macOS since Big Sur, and they didn't touch it at all last year, it seems.
Marco:
I hope they fix that.
Marco:
Other than that, I want them to stop touching it until they get better at touching it.
Marco:
And I'm not sure that will ever happen, so please stop touching it.
Marco:
Moving on to where I'm hoping to see the most progress is watchOS.
Marco:
This is in part because, you know, watchOS is still a very limiting factor in what I can do with my app.
Marco:
And in part because as a user, I just want so much more there.
Marco:
WatchOS is the youngest platform of all of these still.
Marco:
And it still feels like the youngest.
Marco:
It is still the most constrained.
Marco:
It is still a minefield for developers to try to achieve anything.
Marco:
I still get emails and one-star reviews and tweets every single day that what it really boils down to is watchOS is preventing my app from being good and from even functioning at certain basic levels that my customers expect to function.
Marco:
And that would be in things like the ability to do background downloading reliably.
Marco:
The ability to execute an update in the background on a consistent schedule and somewhat reliably.
Marco:
The ability to have a complication maybe that would be a little more dynamic and have less throttling and fewer limits on it.
Marco:
That's what I want to see from watchOS.
Marco:
And as a user, I would love to see something to get me closer to custom watch faces.
Marco:
Whether it's actual custom watch faces, which...
Marco:
I would love, but I think I've been burned so often on that hope that I don't even hope for it anymore because I don't want to lose.
Marco:
But something that gets me closer to that.
Marco:
So maybe it's one large complication that takes up.
Marco:
Maybe you have the digital time in the top right quadrant and the whole bottom two thirds of it are one giant complication.
Marco:
We almost got that with the Series 7 last fall.
Marco:
But we didn't quite get that.
Marco:
I think so.
Marco:
Just some way that we can get a little bit closer to custom watch faces if we're not going to actually have custom watch faces.
Marco:
That would be great.
Marco:
More abilities for complications to be more dynamic.
Marco:
Working in more Swift UI technologies there.
Marco:
More timeline views in various places.
Marco:
Things like that.
Marco:
But ultimately, in general, I want watchOS to allow my app to do more things that customers expect it to be able to do.
Marco:
And that would especially be in the area of background downloads and background execution.
John:
john what do you want to do uh your uh apple watch that you can't do currently yeah and maybe i want to do uh did i tell you oh this that's some follow-up we should have added uh late time follow-up um last show we talked about apple fitness plus and like how they don't need the four by three things because no one's watching apple fitness plus on a four by three tv and then lots of people send feedback said yeah but what about the ipad the ipad is four by three and people watch apple fitness plus on the ipad so there you go that's why they need the four by three things
John:
And I said, you know what?
John:
Let me check it on iPad to see what it does.
John:
Does it actually fill the four by three?
John:
Does it letterbox or whatever?
John:
So I go pick up my iPad, which is like, I think the most recent, oh yes, the M1 iPad Pro.
John:
I pick up my iPad.
John:
I'm like, all right, fit, you know, pull down FIT.
John:
Well, it's not finding it.
John:
Do I not have fitness installed?
John:
I go to the app store, lunch app store, F-I-T-N-E, what?
John:
And it's showing me ads and other apps called fitness something.
John:
I'm like, no, no, I want like the, like that's where it is, right?
John:
It's an Apple fitness app.
John:
So I Google it.
John:
to use Apple Fitness Plus, use the fitness app.
John:
And it shows the one with the little activity rings.
John:
I'm like, yeah, it's the activity ring thing.
John:
So then I'm like, oh, is it in the app library?
John:
Why is it not finding it?
John:
I'm looking, I'm scrolling.
John:
There's a whole problem with find on iOS and iPadOS where you can search for an app even when you find it.
John:
You're like, but show me where it is.
John:
On what screen is it?
John:
And what folder is it buried in?
John:
I hate that so much.
John:
Because, yeah, you can launch it, but you'll never tell you where it is.
John:
Anyway, I'm not finding it.
John:
I can't launch it anywhere.
John:
So I go back to either a Mac.
John:
I forget what it was.
John:
I'm in a web browser.
John:
I find a link that says how to use Apple Fitness Plus.
John:
Go here to download the fitness app.
John:
And so it's like a link from a web page that I'm like, all right, well, this will launch me into the app store.
John:
So I open that link on my iPad.
John:
I think I messaged it to myself or something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm just, anyway.
John:
Open link in the iPad.
John:
It brings you to an app store page.
John:
It says Fitness Plus and says, sorry, your iPad doesn't have the features that would allow this app to be installed on it.
John:
What?
Casey:
What?
John:
So not only do I not have the fitness app, this is, remember, this is me just trying to see what Apple Fitness Plus, which I pay for, by the way, because I pay for Apple One.
John:
See what it looks like on an iPad.
John:
Not only do I not have the app on my iPad, I can't find the app in the App Store.
John:
It won't even show me the product page.
John:
And when I get a direct link to the Apple Fitness Plus product page, it says your iPad doesn't have the features to allow this to be installed.
John:
And it's at that point that I realized, wait a second, does Apple Fitness Plus not work if you don't have an Apple Watch?
John:
so to answer your question what features the watch would your non-existent watch would you like to have i'd like to be able to at least launch the apple fitness app without an apple watch yeah no i don't have an apple watch apple paired with this thing at all i understand that so i never do the answer to that question i have to ask you casey if you launch apple fitness plus on the ipad does it display 4x3 or is it 16x9 letterboxd
Casey:
I don't have my iPad near me.
Casey:
I want to say it's 16x9.
Casey:
If you'll permit me to go and run downstairs and come back in a moment, I can figure this out, or we can talk about it next week.
Casey:
But I just don't have the iPad in this room, and I apologize.
John:
Yeah, and I don't have anything against watchOS and Apple Watch.
John:
In fact, my wife, I told this story to my wife, she said, well, you know, she just got a Series 7, so she's got, I think, a Series 6 or a Series 5 that nobody's using in the family.
John:
She says, well, you can have that watch, but of course, you know, I'm not,
John:
i don't wear an apple watch not out of spider because i think it's a bad product i just don't like having a thing on my wrist which is kind of a barrier for a watch right yeah but maybe i'd just put it on for workouts or something i haven't actually uh gone into fitness plus but you know everything marco said about like
John:
making the os more amenable to the type of apps that third-party developers would like to do like having a podcast uh app on your watch that can do the things that you would expect a podcast app to do like download a podcast and let you listen to it would be amazing but it's a uphill struggle and not really you know the the user experience is bad the developer experience is bad the product is just not quite there yet so um
John:
I feel like the APIs will probably expand slightly lagging with the hardware.
John:
Like we just finally got the always on screens.
John:
Eventually we'll have enough surplus battery life.
John:
I hope to be able to do things like here is a straightforward, reliable API to download a file.
John:
Then we won't kill your application after two seconds.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
In early watchOS development, this has been an arc, a story arc for the entire history of watchOS.
Marco:
In the beginning, users expected watch apps to be able to have interfaces that worked at all.
Marco:
and we couldn't because watch kit was awful and it was doing the whole like you know remote to your phone thing and even when it moved the extension onto the watch a couple of versions in it still sucked and it was still laggy and weird and awful and limited and then we you know eventually over the long term swift ui came in and fixed that um
Marco:
In the audio playback area in particular, for a while, we couldn't really do good background audio solutions.
Marco:
They were buggy and limited and sucked, and that was preventing us from doing basic podcast and media apps that people would expect to happen.
Marco:
That has since been solved, fortunately, so that's pretty much done.
Marco:
I have a couple of minor little wishlist things there, but they're minor.
Marco:
For the most part, I can do what I want to do.
Marco:
Um, and then now we have like the, you know, the more specialized things, you know, if you want to have an app that you launch and you're using it actively and you close it and that's it, and there's no real background update needs for it, that's pretty well covered now.
Marco:
But now...
Marco:
People expect your app also, if you're going to have something like a podcast app or anything that has background updates for its data, you expect that to be reliable.
Marco:
You expect to be able to have a complication update on a regular basis, not be bugged out.
Marco:
I mean, geez, even as a user, I mentioned a while back when they launched the Apple Watch SE and family setup, I mentioned that we got one for our son, and that is his primary mobile iOS device.
Marco:
He has an iPad at home and on trips and stuff, but
Marco:
When he's out and about playing at the playground or whatever, he has his Apple Watch as his only device.
Marco:
He doesn't have a phone yet.
Marco:
And if we want to locate him or message him or have him message us, so anything that uses the GPS or the cellular, which we pay for and is part of advertised features of family plans, that works about 85% of the time.
Marco:
And sometimes with the Apple Watch cellular, and I've actually seen this on mine and on my wife's watches as well, so it isn't just a family setup thing.
Marco:
Sometimes the cellular on the Apple Watch just doesn't work.
Marco:
You just don't get messages delivered to you, and you can't be located, and it just doesn't work until you reboot the watch.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
And so it's like, like there's, it's parts of watchOS.
Marco:
They're just, they're so creaky.
Marco:
And I, I'm sure this is somehow related to some background demon being throttled or crashing or, or something like the platform just needs so much more maturation and advancement.
Marco:
And like,
Marco:
When we were asking three hours ago what I wanted on iOS, my list is so much shorter on iOS and it's so much more abstract.
Marco:
Like, oh, let's make SwiftUI better.
Marco:
But that wasn't really about iOS as much as about SwiftUI because iOS is so mature and so stable and has so much development happening for it over the last 15, 14 years, whatever it's been, that there's not much more to wish for there.
Marco:
They've done a really good job and it's very mature.
Marco:
Whereas watchOS...
Marco:
Some of the basics still don't work very well.
Marco:
And that's why I was very excited when I heard, I think it was from Mark Gerwin's newsletter last week, that there are allegedly pretty big changes to watchOS happening.
Marco:
And that makes me very, very happy.
Marco:
Because even if we don't get a lot of flashy user-facing features like custom watch faces...
Marco:
Any kind of large improvements to the underlying stuff behind the scenes, the APIs, the background restrictions, and even just the OS itself being updated in big ways, is badly needed on watchOS, much more so than the other platforms.
Marco:
So that's what I'm excited for, in short.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that all sounds great.
Casey:
And I like my Apple Watch a lot.
Casey:
There's not a ton I wish from it other than, as with all Apple platforms, like you were saying, stability and just do what I want you to do when I want you to do it.
Casey:
And even for the things that you're supposed to be able to do.
Casey:
So I totally hear you.
Casey:
TVOS is something that I use all the time.
Casey:
I don't...
Casey:
I don't have anything specific I feel like I want from it, but I will say that tvOS is another one of those situations where it feels like, does anyone at Apple use this?
Casey:
And Merlin said this a thousand times, and he's right.
Casey:
Does anyone at Apple really use tvOS or use it to watch anything other than Apple TV?
Casey:
Well, actually, even the Apple TV Plus stuff.
Casey:
It's such a pain in the hindquarters trying to find anything.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Does anyone use this for real?
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Do any of you use this?
Casey:
Yeah, the same thing with Apple Music.
Casey:
Like, does anyone at Apple actually use Apple Music?
Casey:
Because it could be so much better, and it isn't, and it's frustrating.
John:
Let me give you this.
John:
You've invoked the tvOS thing.
John:
spirits and now i have to give my most recent annoyance with tvos yes please the same story you've heard me say a million times but here's a concrete example watching severance with someone who hasn't seen it before i've seen it before but i've wanted to see it so we're going back through it and you know you watch an episode and then the next day let's watch the next episode so you launch tv and then up next you see a little little icon on the left that says severance great the system is finally working up next is showing me
John:
The thing I just watched.
John:
I mean, it's not on the top left, but, you know, I can still see it.
John:
It's above the fold.
John:
I can see it on the screen.
John:
I don't have to scroll.
John:
Let me just go down to Severance.
John:
But, of course, it shows you a little thumbnail.
John:
And there's always the question, were we on episode three or were we on episode four?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Well, surely TVOS knows.
John:
Surely it probably whatever it is, is probably going to be the episode that we want to do.
John:
But for whatever reason, it picked the wrong episode.
John:
It was clear when it was showing us scenes like, no, we've seen this one already.
John:
from you know from that screen you know you launch tv plus up next you go into you go into the left tile like i want to go back to the episode list of severance but if you hit back you're just back on that home screen again and you see your up next thing how do you get to the episode list for severance
John:
I don't know.
John:
That hierarchy just doesn't exist.
John:
I can go back into that same episode.
John:
I could scrub, scrub, scrub to the end and then go to the next episode.
John:
But it's like, is there no way to get to, oh, this is the wrong episode of show X. Take me to the list of episodes for show X so I can see them all in their titles and maybe little progress bars of how far I've done in them or something like that.
John:
It's not rocket science.
John:
TiVo was doing this ages ago.
John:
I hate it so much.
John:
And then my second mini rant is, I kind of like the new way that they expose turning captions on and off in tvOS.
John:
Like above the scrubber bar, there's a bunch of little controls.
John:
They're like, hey, we have all this room on the screen.
John:
Let's put some controls.
John:
But for the life of me, I have no idea how they expect you to get at those controls.
John:
I eventually get at them sometimes by flailing my thumb on the touchpad in random directions.
John:
But like, what do they want from you to get to that?
John:
It's like, is it up, but not uppy up?
John:
Because that takes you to the top, but not down.
John:
But it's like up and to the right, but just like, and there's no cursor.
John:
And I have no idea what I'm doing.
John:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
John:
The little caption bubble that's, like, above the time, above the scrubber line now and Apple TV Plus native player control?
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
You have to swipe up a couple times, if I recall correctly.
John:
Yeah, but, like, what is, like, I always think, like, did the first time not work or is it just taking a hint or I just have to, like, you know, Simon Says go up to the thing and is it to the right?
John:
I just, they haven't figured it out yet.
John:
Like, if this interface was, like, a menu system for a video game, every review would trash it.
Casey:
Yep, agreed.
Casey:
So yeah, tvOS, just start using it, Apple, and make it cool.
Casey:
That'd be great.
Casey:
And then I guess realityOS, if it's a thing, just sign me up.
Casey:
Let's see what you got.
John:
I mean, there is a downside for them calling it that.
John:
I know it's like the code name and it's all over the code and everything, but like...
John:
the the if this thing has any problems whatsoever let alone if it's a flop there's a lot of jokes related to reality os that are going to come sailing down on apple's heads do you think like distortion field related or other the reality of this os ain't so great ros maybe is a little bit better but i feel like they're really running they're really running this lowercase letter os thing into the ground
Casey:
It's our OS.
Casey:
That's what it is.
Casey:
It's not our OS.
John:
It's our OS.
Marco:
Oh, it's definitely not going to be ours.
Marco:
Believe me.
John:
Seeing the list written out here, do you remember when they redid this branding?
John:
Like, oh, I know you don't like macOS, all lowercase m-a-c, but it matches in the family.
John:
But seeing this list here, what stands out to you as the ugly duckling in many ways?
John:
iPad and TV.
John:
ipad because it's like well it starts with lowercase technically yeah but capital p none of the other ones do that you know it's like ios gets around it by just having the i but ipad os goes right to the capital p in the second letter it's supposed to just be the os that's capital but ipad is always lowercase i capital p they kind of broke the pattern and ipad os is like kind of the black sheep of this family too and it's just
Marco:
i mean i i would say i mean i know everyone's sick of everyone's ipad hot takes since federico's article came out but i mean i would say i don't think they've lived up to separating that out into its own name i think it should still be called ios because the ipad has not been significantly separated from the iphone and it still has all the same limitations so it might as well just be called ios
John:
Yeah, on this show, we call it iOS all the time.
John:
Every once in a while, we'll remember, oh, yeah, iPadOS should be a separate thing.
John:
But if it really was this thing, I don't think we'd have such a problem remembering it.
Marco:
Yeah, but the reality is calling it iPadOS was seemingly purely a marketing effort and not really reflecting enough diversion from iOS to really earn that name.
Casey:
All right, so we don't think we're getting a headset.
Casey:
Are we getting an M2 MacBook Air?
John:
That's another round of, like, late-breaking rumors of, like, you know, the redesign MacBook Air is surely coming at some point.
John:
It's conceivable that it could be announced at WWDC, but there's this whole noise around the M2, and it's like, well, it's not the real M2 is coming next year, and this is just going to be, like, an M1+, but Apple might call it M2, and...
John:
Just like last minute, massive confusion slash taking back things that, you know, the rumors were so strong and everyone's on the same page until like a week before the conference.
John:
Everyone's like, wait, no, we were totally wrong.
John:
Forget it.
John:
I don't know what's going on.
John:
That's exactly what happened.
John:
it totally did like they're like it's not m1 plus what like just get your story straight people like jeez i mean i still do believe that the macbook air rumors are probably pretty dead on we didn't see like we did with the with the macbook pros like what turned out to be a totally accurate leak of like the drawings of the case from that that ransomware attack or whatever but i totally believe the redesigned macbook air rumors and honestly
John:
I don't care if it has an M1 Plus or an M2 or if they call something that's an M1 Plus, they call it M2.
John:
Like, the MacBook Air is not hurting for performance, right?
John:
It's not... No one's saying, oh, MacBook Air, it's so slow.
John:
It's a great machine.
John:
If they put it in a slightly different form factor that maybe has one or two more ports or is better in some ways or has a better screen, yeah, even if they give it a notch.
John:
Like, I mean, I feel like it'll...
John:
The MacBook Air, as probably still Apple's best-selling laptop for a very good reason, it deserves to sort of take the leap into the new form factors.
John:
The MacBook Pro's got it there, and the new form factor, everybody loves it.
John:
It's different.
John:
It's quirky.
John:
It's got a notch.
John:
Do it to the MacBook Air.
John:
I really don't care what CPU has in it.
John:
That is my...
John:
I mean, this is not what Apple should be concentrating on, but my biggest hope for WWC is new MacBook Air announcement.
John:
I'm setting aside the Mac Pro because I can't even think that they're going to do anything about that.
John:
So I'm setting that totally aside.
John:
Obviously, I'd be way more excited about that, but I really don't think it's going to happen.
John:
And, you know, tease of a Mac Pro.
John:
Is that a thing that Apple does?
John:
I don't even freaking know.
John:
But anyway, MacBook Air, a redesigned MacBook Air.
John:
I hope that is announced and released, and I hope it is available for me to purchase for my son when he goes off to college in the fall.
Marco:
yeah i think that's actually i mean we've heard the rumors about the macbook air the m2 macbook air have been all over the map for the last year really i mean it was originally supposed to come out this past spring that didn't happen um and as john expressed better than i can the rumors have been very turbulent recently about the macbook air and in particular any any m2 based what's inside it right and any m2 based product you know where is the m2 chip what is it like even like what tsmc process what is
Marco:
the m2 yeah what process is based on what cores are or is it based on like this is now all been thrown up in the air with the rumor mill in the last few days even like it just seems like either the rumor mill was way off and they're now correcting themselves or something went really wrong and something got delayed and and you know who knows
John:
Well, I mean, the COVID supply chain stuff is obviously still messing with things.
John:
How long did I have to wait for my studio display?
John:
And that is not advanced technology.
John:
So all of Apple's plans, like so many other companies' plans, are really getting screwed up.
John:
And you would think, well, shouldn't have you had those screw-ups before?
John:
No.
John:
All the stuff that came out when COVID just started, that stuff, that ship had already sailed.
John:
The lag time on how long it takes hardware to go through, what we were seeing now, I feel like, is the real wreckage of COVID messing with stuff.
John:
Because
John:
The pipeline was already filled with products that were going to come out pretty much no matter what, but now it's just... I don't really blame Apple for these.
John:
It's kind of amazing that Apple's able to ship any new products at all considering how hard it is to get basic stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
But anyway, it feels like whatever is inside the new MacBook Air, it does feel like it's overdue or at least due.
Marco:
But as John said, even if it is just the M1 in like a slightly modified form for now, M1 plus, you know, who knows what they would M1.1, whatever they would call it.
Marco:
that's still amazing and the only limitation of the current macbook air really i i would say you know having used one myself for a while and loving it and then now using the newer things is that the macbook air's enclosure the physical enclosure is outdated like that's that's the main downside to it it doesn't have all the ports of the new of the higher end ones and i mean we don't actually know that it will but
Marco:
It has the old screen shape.
Marco:
It has the old keyboard shape.
Marco:
It has the old Touch ID key and the old proportions of the function.
Marco:
It looks and feels outdated because it is a fairly old design now.
Marco:
And so that's the part that we're hoping they update is the physical side of everything, the enclosure, the shapes, the keyboards, the case, all that stuff.
Marco:
That's what we want them to update.
Marco:
Whether it has an M1 or an M2, whatever that means, inside of it, I think is barely relevant at all, honestly, for that product.
Casey:
Yeah, well put.
Marco:
And so that, I hope that does come out soon.
Marco:
That being said, that is not necessarily a WWDC release.
Marco:
usually in wbc keynotes they don't usually do consumer hardware like that unless there's you know some really good reason and maybe it's like a very light software year but from the rumors it sounds like it's not going to be that light of a software year so they might not have time to do stuff like that i think they can they can release that with standard press interaction in july no problem and so if they don't want that to take up space in wbc or if it isn't quite ready yet
Marco:
that can wait.
Marco:
And if it doesn't hit July, then they'll do it in September or October or whatever.
Marco:
I think we're in the ballpark of that product being released, but when it will actually be released is kind of up in the air and it kind of doesn't matter.
Marco:
As for the Mac Pro,
Marco:
I think it's pretty clear from the last event that they want to tease the new Mac Pro soon.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to be waiting another year for it.
Marco:
I don't even think we're going to be waiting until the winter for it.
Marco:
It might be the winter before we can get one, especially given current supply issues.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I'm guessing that the Mac Pro is formally announced at this event.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
And I don't know how much detail we're going to get, but I think it will be announced and shown in some way and then said, we can order it this fall, you know, something like that.
Marco:
That's what I would expect to happen.
Casey:
My biggest nightmare is that they tease it and say almost nothing specific about it.
Casey:
And then we have to zap zapruder or however you pronounce it, that bad boy for the next six frigging months until we get answers.
Casey:
Please don't do this to me.
Casey:
Don't do it.
Casey:
Please don't do it to me either.
Casey:
Nothing or just show us everything because in the middle where these two have to go on for hours and hours and hours about it, please know.
John:
Please, please, you know, given how long it took me, like from the time I ordered my Mac studio to get one because I hesitated a little bit.
John:
Like I don't if they announce a Mac Pro, I'm not ready to order the second it comes out, which means that if I eventually decided after a week of two or having a hauling, I should probably order one of these.
John:
It's going to be like six months before I get it, because you thought trying to build all the parts that go in the Mac studio is hard.
John:
Whatever exotic stuff they have inside the Mac Pro is probably going to be worse.
John:
And yes, I know they sell far fewer of them, but it's shocking to me that the Mac Studio shipping delays are what they are, given how few people in the grand scheme of things are buying Mac Studios.
John:
The sales numbers for this weird little computer have to be like 1 20th what they are for the MacBook Air, even worse than that.
John:
And it's still months to get it.
Marco:
I'm still holding out hope that...
Marco:
Even though this is not something I would probably buy, we still haven't seen a really tiny Apple Silicon laptop yet.
Marco:
There is no 12-inch or 11-inch MacBook Air or whatever they would call it.
Marco:
That doesn't exist yet.
Marco:
I think it's very clear from both, first of all, from the 10-inch iPad or 11-inch iPad Pro.
Marco:
That's an M1 product.
Marco:
Actually, no, even the 10-point-whatever-inch iPad Air is now an M1 product.
Marco:
They can obviously fit this chip with a good battery and perfectly reasonable passive cooling.
Marco:
They can clearly fit that in much smaller enclosures.
Marco:
I think we've seen that the Magic Keyboard doesn't actually take up that much more physical space than the butterfly keyboard that preceded it, which we will not talk about today because I'm happy.
Marco:
And so I think it's very clear that they could make a really nice, super compact laptop from the M series of chips if they wanted to.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised they haven't yet.
Marco:
Before the M1 computers were announced, I was predicting they're going to come out the door with something super small as a statement.
Marco:
And then we were all kind of shocked when they just came out with the unmodified MacBook Air enclosure.
Marco:
They basically deleted the fan and kept everything else the same.
Marco:
And it was an amazing computer.
Marco:
Still is an amazing computer.
Marco:
But they haven't really blown the doors off in terms of
Marco:
what they can do physically with these new chips that we didn't already have a similar size class of before.
Marco:
So I would love to see something like that.
Marco:
I wouldn't say I necessarily expect it for this event, not only because, again, that wouldn't really be a WBDC thing, but also because we have heard absolutely zero rumors to that effect.
Marco:
And usually when they're announcing a new size of computer that has a display,
Marco:
We almost always get display leaks months ahead of time from various leakers and Ming-Chi Kuo and things like that.
Marco:
So it doesn't seem like this is a thing they're actually doing.
Marco:
But that is one kind of unfilled spot in the lineup that I think if they tackled it now, today, with Apple Silicon and with their modern having seen the light on the keyboard...
Marco:
I think they would do a really great job with it, and I think people would absolutely love that thing.
Marco:
Now, whether they would sell a lot of it is another question.
Marco:
What we heard kind of unofficially, the 12-inch MacBook allegedly sales fell off a cliff when the Retina MacBook Air came out.
Marco:
And so, you know, apparently when people, you know, they love that little 12-inch thing, love asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, that little 12-inch thing, but as much as they hated it, they kept buying them.
Marco:
But they loved it.
Marco:
But as soon as the 13-inch MacBook Air came out that was much more capable and less compromised, they all moved to that, allegedly.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Maybe this is a product that people think they want and actually don't buy in enough volume to matter to Apple, like the iPhone mini.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I still think it would be cool to have that, and I think a lot of people would absolutely love that computer.
Casey:
So, we'll see.
Casey:
That would make me at least consider doing the desktop-laptop-slash-laptop-laptop lifestyle that you're doing right now, because...
Casey:
Even though I don't feel like I have any need for a new MacBook adorable in my life, I loved that thing so much.
Casey:
It was such a piece of trash and I loved it.
Casey:
I absolutely loved it.
Casey:
And so that would make me think about getting it as like a satellite machine.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's so fun for that.
Marco:
Like, I saw somebody the other day, maybe that's why I'm thinking of it, I saw somebody the other day using an 11-inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
First of all, I loved seeing the light-up Apple logo on the lid.
Marco:
Yeah, I kind of missed that, too.
Marco:
I saw it, and I was like, wow, that is still, you know, the 11-inch MacBook Air came out in 2010.
Marco:
And that is still, 12 years later, a strikingly small computer, like when you see it in person.
Marco:
And it really had very few compromises.
Marco:
The 11-inch Air was way less compromised than the 12-inch MacBook.
Marco:
way less it had the regular keyboard mechanism it had a regular trackpad it had a lot of ports it was it was full of ports it had thunderbolt like it had a lot of stuff it was actually a pretty great computer for what it was it just had that really like squat screen that was that was the biggest compromises you gotta fit all your stuff in this little tiny
John:
you know tank window into the world it was if you know i think if you use one you like the bottom of the computer was pretty much no compromises but that screen that's i feel like that would be a tough sell in the modern age people just want more screen space
Marco:
Oh, yeah, but that screen bezel was so thick, you know, it was like a matted picture frame.
John:
I know, but it's the proportions.
John:
Like, it's just not – macOS does not lend itself well to that environment, especially if they default the dock to the bottom.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
But, you know, the 12-inch took it a little bit more, you know, closer to square rather than being so, like, you know, squat –
Marco:
And I think if they bring back the 12-inch Air with modern design and modern hardware and modern choices, I think they would do a really great job with it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, Marco, are you seeing a Mac Pro in this event or no?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I said earlier, I expect them to announce it and to show off something about it, possibly full details.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I expect them to at least announce it and tell us what the processor and card situation is there.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect to be able to buy it yet or to order it yet.
Marco:
And I would only expect to hear a base price.
Marco:
Are they going to show it?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
As in, here's what shape the thing is?
Marco:
Yeah, no, I would expect a full reveal of the thing, similar to when they did the trash can and the 2018 Mac Pro, where they announced it at WBC, but then you couldn't actually buy it for a little while.
Marco:
I think it's going to be very similar to that.
John:
What are you basing that on?
John:
Just rumors or you think it's the time for this?
John:
Because I don't I'm still think that's not going to happen.
John:
I would love it, but it just doesn't seem like it's in the cards for me.
Marco:
I think gut feeling.
Marco:
I mean, it does feel like it's about time.
Marco:
I mean, given given their own stated timeline, which they've followed pretty closely for the Apple slogan transition, they only have until November.
John:
I mean, they did tease it at the end of The Last Thing, so I think they would like to do it now, but I don't know if it's with all of the stuff happening.
John:
For me, my gut feeling is it feels like it's not time.
John:
But hey, prove me wrong, Apple.
John:
I'd love to see it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And again, I wouldn't expect to actually get one until fall or winter.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
But I think they will show it to us.
John:
I just need enough to make a shirt, so I need to know what it looks like.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Which quick aside, very, very late follow up.
Casey:
Some people have been tweeting pictures of their shirts.
Casey:
Mine have not come in yet because I always order on the later side.
Casey:
I haven't forgotten yet because I use my techniques, but I always order on the later side.
Casey:
So I haven't seen mine yet.
Casey:
But the ones that I've seen photographed, they look real good, particularly the Interposer shirt.
Casey:
I'm real excited to get mine.
Casey:
So they're
John:
yep i got all mine too and i was uh pleasantly surprised at how much fine detail i was worried about the detail in the back with the big uh the big soc for the ultra shirt with the little things i mean i know i have the spec of like can't be smaller than this size or whatever but all the detail that i wanted to show up showed up really well so i mean again maybe it'll maybe it'll fade with many washes or whatever but right out of the box it looks pretty darn good so yeah i got all mine good deal
Casey:
Well, I'm excited for next week.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
I'm sad that I'm not there.
Casey:
I mean, I understand it, but I'm sad about it.
Casey:
But I'm really stoked and I'm really, really fascinated to hear reports, you know, formal and informal about what this looks like, what it looks like for press, what it looks like for regular schmoes that are just showing up, you know, with permission from Apple, of course.
Casey:
Breaking news, apparently Gruber's doing the talk show and it's being hosted by Apple, which is fascinating.
Casey:
You actually sign up for a ticket lottery at apple.com, which is super, not bad weird, but weird, unusual maybe is a better word for it.
Marco:
Yeah, the developer center is the venue.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Okay, I missed that part.
John:
There's free tickets for everybody.
John:
Someone should tell Apple that 30% of nothing is nothing.
Marco:
Yeah, he said, we are going to record it inside the Apple Developer Center.
Marco:
Seating will be, to say the least, limited.
Marco:
So this will be interesting to see, like, what is the capacity of whatever room they're in in the Developer Center?
John:
Are they going to set up folding chairs?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Is there a little theater in there, like the Steve Jobs Theater?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Why doesn't he get to do it in the Steve Jobs Theater?
John:
No one else is using it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
We'll find out.
Casey:
Anyway, I'm just, I'm so, yeah, I'm so curious to hear about everything.
Casey:
And, and I'm really hopeful that come next year, you know, I'm, I'm personally, I'm super reluctant to get on a plane right now.
Casey:
I'm mostly on account of Michaela, you know, not being eligible for vaccination yet.
Casey:
I'm hopeful by next year that, that I will be more willing and that, you know, maybe I'll get a ticket to the big show and be able to go and experience it again.
Casey:
And,
Casey:
I am so, so jealous of anyone who is able to go, and I hope that if you're able to go, that you have a ton of fun, and let me, maybe not everyone, but maybe not the other guys, but let me know what you think, because I'm curious to hear it.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace.com.
Marco:
Iodine and HelloPillow.
Marco:
I cannot wait to go put my head on my HelloPillow.
Marco:
I'm so tired.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
We will be recording, hopefully, if it all goes to plan, on Monday.
Marco:
and hopefully releasing it late that night as soon as I'm done with the edit.
Marco:
So it'll be an exciting WDC week.
Marco:
If you want it even faster, you should join atp.fm slash join again.
Marco:
You should join to get the bootleg.
Marco:
Otherwise, it'll be probably a couple hours later.
Marco:
But yeah, we can't wait for next week, and we will talk to you then.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
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.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
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-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
Casey:
John, I have a question for you.
Casey:
I think I stole this from somebody who tweeted about it or emailed about it, but it was a fascinating question that I'd like to hear the answer to.
Casey:
Are you sleeping more now?
John:
No, I think we... Maybe I answered it on Rectifs, all these podcasts playing together.
John:
Not really, because I'm setting my alarm for the exact same time I always set it for, because the kids are still in school, so I have to wake up and, you know, get everything ready and make sure everyone has breakfast, and, you know, I've been...
John:
I've been cooking breakfast for the kids every morning.
John:
Tell me what the menu is.
John:
It's mostly pancakes.
John:
Tangier.
John:
Pancakes, fruit, mixing it up with different, doing some experiments with the pancake mixtures and stuff like that.
John:
But yeah, mostly pancakes.
John:
do you have any micro horseradish on your menu i do not um but but yeah no i'm my sleep is about the same which is to say probably still not enough because i'm still setting an alarm but once summer comes i'm hoping i'll be able to sleep in more that that was my next question are you taking the summer off so are you just sleeping until you wake up is that well that's dangerous for you because you wouldn't wake up till like two sleeping until i wake up come on what what
John:
universe is this do you have a family case i do until i wake up maybe if the rest of my family and my dog who left the house i haven't slept past 7 30 in like 10 years so i'm not i'm not saying i'm living the dream yeah no no i'm not i'm not sleeping until i wake up that's not a thing you're anyone considering having pets and or children
John:
and or a spouse uh not really i think uh but no hopefully i'll be able to sleep longer the kids mostly sleep in but the dog does not sleep in so daisy's getting you up at what time and neither does my wife yeah daisy wants to daisy will if if it's before six you can safely go to the bathroom and return to the bed if it is after six you cannot oh fair enough well and are you napping at all
John:
No, I'm not a napper.
Casey:
Yeah, I said that too.
Casey:
And that lasted like six months.
Casey:
And then suddenly I became a napper.
John:
I don't think I'll ever be a napper until I'm so old that it's just I can't tell what day it is anymore and it doesn't matter.
John:
But no, I don't do naps.
John:
I take a nap and then I wake up and it's like my entire life is ruined.
John:
I have no idea what's going on.
Casey:
That used to be me.
Casey:
What planet am I on?
John:
Is this real life?
John:
It's terrible.
John:
I just do not like it.