Field Day at Apple Park
Marco:
I packed totally wrong for this trip.
Casey:
Oh, tell me more.
Casey:
This is our pre-show then.
Casey:
I'm already interested.
Casey:
What is going on?
Marco:
So first of all, hi, everyone.
Marco:
I'm in California on vacation.
Marco:
Not really.
Casey:
Always on vacation in California.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I'm in California.
Marco:
Apple summoned a few of us out kind of at the last minute last week.
Marco:
And so we made the pilgrimage to this wonderful event.
Marco:
And frankly, I'm pretty impressed by the event, which we'll get to in a little bit.
Marco:
But anyway, I didn't bring the bell.
Marco:
or the vibroslab or my computer's hat what are you even doing i know it's been wrong it's been so long since i've traveled to this conference i forgot how to do it i'm so sad yeah and i had to borrow an ethernet cable from underscore yeah he had it in his pocket yeah of course it was you know he pulled he had a special pocket in his jacket just for ethernet cables you joke but that is possible did he have did he have a bell did you ask
Marco:
I don't care about the Vibraslab.
Marco:
Well, so we just can't talk about network attack storage or certain file storage mechanisms.
John:
Well, I looked at the sessions and I did a search for file and I did a search for time and I was very disappointed.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
I noticed you avoided the acronym.
John:
I'm trying to make it not have to use the bell.
Casey:
Thank you.
John:
I don't know if that'll last for the whole podcast, but I'll do what I can.
John:
We have a professional discipline going on here.
John:
And if I mess up, you have to make the noise with your mouth, Marco.
John:
So be prepared for that.
John:
It's your punishment for forgetting the bill.
John:
I do want to add, though, if people are feeling bad for me and Casey, that we were also both invited by Apple but had to decline for various reasons.
John:
So don't feel like just they love Marco and they don't love us.
John:
They love us all.
John:
Almost equally.
Marco:
Almost equally.
Marco:
Or at least they tolerate us all almost equally.
Casey:
That is probably more accurate.
Casey:
We each got a call from Apple PR, and it was the most... Well, it's not that I'm being hyperbolic, but it was extremely heartbreaking to say to Apple after I got this call that... All kidding aside, not to turn this into analog, but I've been waiting for this call for years to be recognized as someone who talks about Apple, and Apple maybe should...
Casey:
occasionally remember exists.
Casey:
I was going to say pay attention to.
Casey:
Don't even do that.
Casey:
Just remember that I exist from time to time.
Casey:
And I got this phone call and it was like, oh my gosh, I finally arrived and I can't come.
Casey:
So it was both amazing and devastating.
Casey:
And it was the most roller coaster of a 10 minute phone call I've had in a long time.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Yes, John and I were offered, and like John said, we couldn't make it for very uninteresting reasons.
Casey:
But nevertheless, our field reporter, Mr. Marco Arment, is at the show.
Casey:
Our West Coast correspondent.
Casey:
Our West Coast correspondent.
Casey:
I like that even more.
John:
There you go.
Casey:
So as our official West Coast correspondent, Marco, could you please give us an update on the goings-on at WWDC?
Marco:
It's really quite good.
Marco:
So before we get into the keynote, just a quick overview of what the event actually is, how it actually went.
Marco:
And don't worry, we'll save the food for later.
Marco:
We will get to the food.
Marco:
First of all, this event is kind of the grand opening of the developer center, which is the building we've been talking about.
Marco:
It's kind of across the street from Apple Park next to the visitor center.
Marco:
And it is no expense has been spared.
Marco:
No detail has been overlooked.
John:
Well, there was the crooked E in the El Cap.
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
One detail was overlooked, but it was fixed by what the developer of Halide fixed it, I think?
Marco:
Yeah, I believe so.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, was El Cap a buggy release?
Marco:
Were they trying to maybe suggest something?
Marco:
I forget.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Leopard was perfectly straight, and that was not great.
Marco:
Yeah, I didn't see a lion room.
Marco:
I think somebody duplicated it and then lost it.
Marco:
So anyway, the general building, the developer center, is clearly set up for lots of these, I think, largely still theoretical meetings, but that in the future will become much more real of like,
Marco:
They summon you out there because you have a great new app that uses, say, CarPlay, and they want to bring you out there to teach you how to use CarPlay better or something like that.
Marco:
It seems like the kind of thing that you wait for them to call you.
Marco:
You don't call them, maybe.
Marco:
Maybe you could reach out through
Marco:
you know dev relations if you had some reason to come be there it seems like it's it's kind of like a combination of like a tech talk and a lab kind of space where you can you can kind of bring your app to them and they can like instruct you on some new api that they're making or you know if you're if you're one of the developers that's selected to do like a keynote appearance for your app or keynote mention of your app like hey you know so and so use this new api and they did the whole conversion in two days like that's that's a place they can bring you and you know
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's, I think, largely a different and much smaller part of the company that makes those kind of decisions.
Marco:
When you deal with the developer relations people, who this whole building is kind of run by developer relations, they seem like they're really just extremely genuinely friendly and happy to help us.
Marco:
It is kind of – you do have to kind of set aside all the political and app store policy stuff in order to fully enjoy it.
Marco:
But I'll tell you, when you're in person, you do fully enjoy it and you do put that aside because clearly the developer relations team really is super into their job.
Marco:
It seems like it's possibly one of the more fun jobs at Apple if I had to guess.
Marco:
It seems like they really are super into just being helpful.
Marco:
They call themselves evangelists for a lot of the positions, and I think that's a decent word to describe what they do.
Marco:
The whole building really exuded that quality of just they love their jobs, they want to create fun stuff for us, they want to help us out, and
Marco:
none of the bs about the policy stuff really enters the discussion in that building um and and that's good you know it's first of all that isn't their job and second of all it's nice to have a reprieve from that and and to just be able to enjoy this as a developer you know as an engineer and not worry about all that all the you know weird politics stuff so it was actually really nice um
Marco:
I think time will tell how this building gets used in the future.
Marco:
How easy is it?
Marco:
If you want to come to one of these labs in this building or if you want help that would require coming out here, how easy is that to do?
Marco:
Do you have to...
Marco:
Do you have to wait for them to ask you?
Marco:
Do you have to wait months to get in there?
Marco:
How does that work?
Marco:
How does this scale?
Marco:
Do they end up building more of these?
Marco:
I think those are all open questions right now.
Marco:
They already have similar kinds of buildings in India and China.
Marco:
And then there's also these accelerators in different places.
Marco:
That's a slightly different concept.
Marco:
It's interesting to see how this expands in the future and how it's used in the future.
Marco:
But so far, it's pretty great.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
And so that was the developer center, but you got a tour of that, what, yesterday as we recorded this, on Sunday?
Marco:
It was this morning.
Casey:
Oh, it was this morning.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
I wasn't there early enough for yesterday, so I took it this morning.
Marco:
Overall, it was great.
Marco:
And so for the event today, just some basics of how this worked.
Marco:
My experience was a little bit different than the developer experience.
Marco:
I had the media badge, and so we had a slightly different track, but it was overall a lot of overlap.
Marco:
So
Marco:
you know we you know we check in and um we were led right into apple park like right into the main campus and they led us all for like the pre-keynote waiting area right into cafe max like the the place where the giant doors open up and like in the ring and and like you basically have like the giant employee cafeteria there um so the developers were on like the main floor the media was on this like little like upper deck area
Marco:
We weren't able to go into the middle of the ring, but we were able to see the middle and take pictures of it through the glass and everything.
Marco:
And we saw that giant rainbow stage and the beautiful mountain backdrop behind it.
Marco:
I mean, it's a beautiful place.
Marco:
I think one of the reasons why they might have chosen to have this event here is in part to kind of show it off and in part to just kind of wow us because...
Marco:
Being actually in the ring building is something we've talked about in the past.
Marco:
It didn't seem like they were ever going to let random members from the public into that.
Marco:
And so it was really great just being let in.
Marco:
It felt like a special thing.
Marco:
It felt like we were being shown the secrets by just being in this campus.
Marco:
And certainly there's a lot of probably recruiting value to that, I would say.
Marco:
Also, just like amping up developers.
Marco:
There's a lot of value that they have in energizing us to really feel good about Apple, to really feel good about their platforms, to inspire and energize developers to make new stuff.
Marco:
And that's harder and harder to come by as...
Marco:
As the company gets bigger, as the platforms get more mature and older and therefore kind of less exciting in certain ways, and again, as app store policy stuff kind of crushes certain people's spirits or bad experiences along the way could really affect that.
Marco:
And so it's harder and harder to come by things that energize and motivate developers.
Marco:
for established platforms from giant corporations.
Marco:
It's very hard to motivate us like that.
Marco:
And this does that.
Marco:
This really very much does that.
Marco:
Being able to come to this event in this special place and see this special building and be let in.
Marco:
I understand now why they built this ridiculous thing because that also energizes all their employees and inspires them and gives people something to aspire to.
Marco:
Not every employee is even working in this building, but you can at least aspire to maybe someday be in one of the departments that works there.
Marco:
There's a lot of value to this and to see it as
Marco:
an outsider as a non-employee even though it was obviously very tightly controlled we're not like wandering the halls or anything but just to be there and to see that was really quite nice and then the actual keynote watching was not on the rainbow stage it was it kind of used cafe max
Marco:
as like the back seating area and then expanded outwards through those open doors with you know probably about a thousand seats maybe two thousand seats something like that all straight up and then there was a giant stage like kind of outside the ring so you started in cafe max and kind of expanded out into the outer area of the ring oh i did see the fence but i couldn't get close enough to take a good picture of it
Marco:
it looks incredible so anyway um the projection of the theater like the all the details of that were all amazing like i couldn't believe how good the sound was considering the acoustics of the environment like you are throwing sound across a huge field of people against a curved glass building and
Marco:
the just managing like the sound reflections of that like that would have been horrendous to try to engineer that but they did it i was especially impressed like the screen they were projecting onto was incredibly bright and colorful in direct sun oh that's that's not easy i don't think they were projecting onto it wasn't it a like a micro led display where where the leds are not so micro
Marco:
Yeah, whatever it was, whatever technology the screen was using, you're probably right.
Marco:
It probably couldn't have been projection because I can't imagine how they get that kind of brightness.
Marco:
But it was clearly visible.
Marco:
There was no glare, no reflections.
Marco:
Maybe it had nanotexture.
Marco:
But it was just an incredible, very high production value.
Marco:
And then I don't know how the live stream started, how the broadcast stream started, but five minutes earlier than the stated start time,
Marco:
Tim Cook comes out on the actual physical stage in person.
Marco:
And everyone cheers.
Marco:
And he kind of introduced the event in that five minute span.
Marco:
And Craig came up for a minute or two there, too.
Marco:
So Tim and Craig were up there, you know, rallying everybody up.
Marco:
Everyone cheered for them.
Marco:
Then they left.
Marco:
And then the video actually started.
Marco:
And there were no other people on stage after that point.
Marco:
I assume you didn't see that little intro on the live stream.
Marco:
nope that's correct yeah so anyway yeah user in the chat wolf says tim cook was the warm-up act to tim cook yes that's exactly what happened well done i also heard reports of drones flying overhead did you see any there was one drone that started out kind of over in the middle and then kind of flew up it was clearly like apple's drone meant for you know probably taking some b-roll for the for the actual event
Marco:
but yeah anyway it was it was great and then so after the after the keynote which was awesome and I looked out so much so I was they sat the media in the back so all the developers were in the front well the back most you know 10 or 20 rows were in the shade because the building shaded it nice and so I'm sitting you know I brought like sunscreen and TSA stole my sunscreen I had to buy new sunscreen and like hats sunglasses like all this stuff and
Marco:
and they even they and apple gave out goodie bags to all the developers that included a hat sunscreen a water bottle masks so we i now have two of those like special apple store masks and so anyway we are the very first row that's in the shade as it starts and then as as it progressed the sun just added more rows that were in the shade so we never lost the sun meanwhile i looked seven rows ahead of me was phil schiller sitting down he was in direct sun i had a better seat than phil schiller
Marco:
oh i don't even know what to make of this like maybe if he came back on our show more often maybe he would be moved into the into the good seats instead of the cheap ones yeah although i did confirm that he was not in fact on the roof you know he he he is actually still on the grounds in apple park um yeah i had a nice little chat with him later on he yeah he's cool oh that's nice
Casey:
Real time follow up.
Casey:
It is a I'm being told from an anonymous source that it is the screen was an LED wall.
Casey:
So take that to mean what you will.
Casey:
But as you guessed, it is not projection.
Casey:
It was actual LEDs.
Marco:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Marco:
And they were like whatever screen, whatever it was, it was fantastic.
Marco:
so anyway and then after after the presentation um the developers went back into cafe max to have a big lunch thing and then they i believe they watched state of the union in that same giant venue with the big screen um press was led out instead of lunch we went to the steve jobs theater and i've never been there before oh no way
Marco:
Yeah, and we just went to the lobby, like the upstairs big circle of glass.
Marco:
We didn't actually go down into the theater area, but the upstairs glass circle room was converted into basically a hands-on area for the new MacBook Air, which again, we'll get to that in a little bit.
Marco:
And that's where...
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
I'll just tell you this now before I give you my impressions.
Marco:
The hands-on areas at Apple events, they're full of all of the video people.
Marco:
Everyone who runs YouTube channels and video media, all of them are like
Marco:
crammed around the product with their giant cameras trying to get the perfect shot and trying not to get it to anyone else in the shot and so you know those of us who are not video people will kind of just like hang back you know give them a give them a little while and they take forever but you know I understand give them a little while to like get their video shot and you know get their perfect everything and they had all the different colors of the MacBook Air around around this giant circle of concrete and the one blue one that was close that was like the entire half of the room I was in the one blue one it kept being mobbed by the video people finally
Marco:
I finally get my chance.
Marco:
The one person ahead of me just steps away from it.
Marco:
I go up and I ask the handler, oh, can I see this?
Marco:
And they say, oh, hold on.
Marco:
We have to wait.
Marco:
And that's the moment that Tim Cook is coming up for a photo op with that MacBook Air.
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
so i had to wait for tim cook and that's not this is not a fast process did he take a video of it because he take out a camera taking a video of him introducing right for his channel yeah so and like when you see so you know tim cook as he approaches like the the room everyone starts cheering people start mobbing in that direction was he crowd surfing yeah
Marco:
I just stood exactly where I was already standing, which, by the way, I will say this exact same thing happened when I was looking at the Mac Pro in 2019 when I was like right next to Tim Cook then.
Marco:
And this is hilarious because like, I mean, I don't even like Tim Cook that much.
Yeah.
Marco:
wow but like you know okay you know so when he enters the room like it's it's like us you know he's a celebrity everyone cheers everyone moms everyone shouting hey Tim you know everyone's asking questions like the guy next to me asks Tim are we in a simulation what that's what it's like to be Tim Cook
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
He gave some neutral response like, no, I think this is the reality, something like that.
Marco:
But anyway, so I'm just standing around and everybody is like shoving me, trying to get close to TeamBook.
Marco:
And I'm like, I just want my turn with this freaking MacBook Air.
Marco:
I saw all the other ones.
Marco:
I just want to see the blue one.
Marco:
and they and it's right there right in front of me and because and like i am right there and my hope is that i photobombed every single one of these people's shots that they're trying to get a picture of tim cook handling his macbook i mean why like you know tim walks up and he's like he's like there were people trying to shoot him from like across across the room with this long lens and so he was kind of doing press poses and it was it was kind of like remember that episode of parks and rec where they have like the the political candidate
Marco:
And he just kind of sits in a room and smiles like a robot.
Marco:
And you're like, what is he doing?
Marco:
Clearly, Tim has done this a lot.
Marco:
And so he walked up very slowly to the MacBook Air.
Marco:
And he takes selfies with everybody on the way out.
Marco:
So it takes him a very long time to get there.
Marco:
so by the time he gets there he walks right up and he like opens the lid holds the macbook air up he sets it down and types nothing on the key he was typing like random characters into a computer that was just showing the desktop there were no apps open but he he convincingly looked like he was typing something and like he used the trackpad to move it was like he was doing nothing but the whole purpose was to be photographed and he obviously knew this and was prepared for this and everything it was just it was a funny thing to see very close up
Marco:
because they were only like it was like one person in front of me and then tim so it was very we were very very close and it's just all the video people trying to shove their lenses next to my head and i'm just standing there smiling like i took like two pictures and i'm like i'm done i'm gonna keep standing here also i couldn't move because i might you know there were a million people behind me locking me into my position so i was like i'm just gonna enjoy this for a little while until the crowd dissipates a bit
Marco:
so i might be on some like you know some random news channel around the world like in their background footage of tim cook launching the new macbook air you should look uh disgruntled when is it gonna be my turn right tim cut the line and you know what i never got a turn
Marco:
It was just so mobbed.
Marco:
I mean, I could have walked around to the other side of the room and gotten a different blue one with the different mob video people around it for two hours.
Marco:
But I was like, all right, I saw enough of it.
Marco:
So I didn't actually touch the blue one.
Marco:
I did handle a silver one for a while, and I got a lot of impressions on that, but we'll get to that later.
Marco:
Anyway, after that, we all went back to the visitor center.
Marco:
We had some lunch there, downloaded the betas, bought some shorts for my kid, stuff like that.
Marco:
And then that's it.
Marco:
And then we came home.
Casey:
So you did not have an opportunity to watch the State of the Union?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Oh, I watched it in the visitor center.
Marco:
Like I was eating lunch and sat with a few friends of ours, underscore, and watched the State of the Union together.
Casey:
Gotcha.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I don't even know how to verbalize this.
Casey:
So like, did this feel like WWDC to you?
Casey:
I know that we can barely remember what the real or traditional WWDC was like.
Casey:
It was, you know, in 2019 was the last time it really happened.
Casey:
But did this feel anything at all similar?
Casey:
Did it feel totally different?
Casey:
How much, if it was different, was that because you're now fancy press lad or is it different because it's different?
Casey:
Like, can you compare and contrast to 2019?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
This is clearly the way forward.
Marco:
This is definitely how they're going to keep doing it, or at least how they should keep doing it.
Marco:
Frankly, when you see how well this worked and how happy the Apple people all seem to be about how well it was working, and you look at all the advantages it has to them, there's no conference center involved.
Marco:
There's no downtown involved to work with for any of this stuff.
Marco:
You have a smaller scale event that's a big in-person celebration for whoever can make it, whoever they can get in here.
Marco:
But then mostly it's an online conference.
Marco:
Because they said the number, I think it was like 20 or 30 million developers that they have.
Marco:
And even the biggest conferences they would hold in person held like 6,000 people.
Marco:
And so it's a drop in the bucket.
Marco:
And we've been talking for a while.
Marco:
Clearly what they have to do is...
Marco:
keep doing it online like we saw when they were forced to do it online for covid we saw how good it became and all the session videos and like the session production is so great and it's better for everybody it's better for the presenters they don't have to like get all nervous about doing stuff live um it's better for you know certainly people who are watching at home because we have higher production values we can see things better they can edit things if they didn't quite work right the first time um they you know they can do different camera angles they can have more you know there's just it's so much better
Marco:
as like for conference videos to be the pre-produced kind that they have now so the only difference is like well how do you solve the like the fun of an in-person event the community angle maybe like those are those are hard to solve for sure but i think this is clearly how they're going to try to do that um where it's you know
Marco:
some press a bunch of developers and they they have they have it kind of be like a celebration of apple a sales pitch for apple a pitch for working for apple maybe as i was saying earlier with like you know recruitment angle of apple park being so cool um so i think this is clearly the way forward and anybody who who is holding on hope for the you know the return of a 6 000 person thing in a conference center i think that's not going to happen we'll see i
Marco:
Maybe they can grow this version of this a little bit more.
Marco:
How many people were there?
Marco:
I don't think they publicly said – I heard it was about 1,000, maybe a little more than that.
Marco:
I think maybe they could double it roughly.
Marco:
I don't think it would go to 5,000 ever, but I could be wrong.
Marco:
I mean we'll see.
Marco:
Apple Park absorbed that many people in a pretty graceful way, it seemed.
Marco:
It wasn't totally outrageous.
Marco:
It wasn't crammed in.
Marco:
It wasn't overcrowded.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
But this is clearly the way forward.
Marco:
And I think, honestly, it's the way to go.
Marco:
Because such a small percentage of the developer community is able to come out to these at all.
Marco:
to make it way better for all the remote participants, which is the vast majority of people who use this content, and then have a little bit of fun stuff they can do in person for certain things like this, I think that's a good balance.
Marco:
And we never have to go to a convention center again.
John:
So it makes sense from a media perspective, because what you had is a typical media experience.
John:
Because the first day, there's no sessions anyway for people who don't know.
John:
It's just always the keynote in the State of the Union and then maybe a hands-on in media briefings, right?
Yeah.
John:
So that totally makes sense that you have the same thing.
John:
But for the non-media experience, people travel to California to see the cool Apple campus, sit in a seat and watch a pre-recorded video.
John:
And yes, they got a tour of the Apple Developer Center and some other stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
But like I do.
John:
That's not WWDC.
John:
That's more like, you know, Apple Park tourism.
John:
right and apple park tourism is cool and fun but i feel like it's not the same thing as wwdc was which is basically what you're saying is uh they can continue to do this apple park tourism thing but they should have the media there in person to you know for the reasons i described last week because when you're marketing to people you want them to be there in person uh and you can do hands-on stuff or whatever have the conference be online and then have uh you know field day at apple park
Marco:
But ultimately, I think that's actually fine.
Marco:
So anecdotally, we did a tour of the developer center with a random group of other developers.
Marco:
And at the end, they asked where everybody was from.
Marco:
And the people who were there mostly hadn't traveled very far to get there.
Marco:
There were a lot of people from Oregon, Seattle, other parts of California.
Marco:
And there were a few people from much further away.
Marco:
One person was from France.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
For the most part, I think the economics and the cost-benefit ratio change a lot for the idea of flying all the way here and putting yourself up in a hotel solely to have Apple Park tourism.
Marco:
That being said, the number of people who want that is not zero.
Marco:
And I think they clearly – like if they want to have a few thousand people out here, I think it fulfills –
Marco:
their desire to have a big fun event to celebrate all the stuff they're doing they want to have developers come in person they want to have some kind of component like that for lots of reasons that i think are pretty good reasons and so this fulfills that need and gives people like a fun thing to aspire to one day and you know maybe you don't go every year i mean i don't
Marco:
even in the past few years of conference center WBDCs, most people weren't coming every year.
Marco:
But maybe it's something that you do a couple times in your career as a goal or once in your career.
Marco:
Because just to say, I went there, I saw that place, I was there once, it was great.
Marco:
I think that, because that's really what the in-person conference was becoming anyway.
Marco:
But just with the conference center set up, it was just becoming a somewhat cumbersome version of that and a limited version of that.
Marco:
And this is just so much nicer.
Marco:
You don't want to fly to California to see a convention center.
Marco:
You want to fly to California as an Apple developer to see Apple's campus, to see Apple Park, to go to the ring.
Marco:
That's what you want to see.
Marco:
And in previous conferences, you almost never would see Apple's campus unless you go way, way, way back.
Marco:
But in the modern era, you would never have the kind of access we had today with the old setup.
Marco:
And now you do.
Marco:
And it just makes it so much cooler.
Marco:
And it gives you the tourism angle of something cool to see
Marco:
almost as a totally separate thing from the actual conference, which is something that you do on your own time and your hotel Wi-Fi later.
John:
Was the bash at Infinite Loop in 2008 or something?
John:
I saw James Thompson posting some pictures.
John:
Like, I know time is relative, and you say way, way, way back.
John:
It wasn't still in the 2000s that when they did the, they used to call it the beer bash.
John:
That's how politically incorrect it was.
John:
And that was actually on the Infinite Loop campus, and they would bring developers there, and they'd sit on the grass and do stuff.
John:
2003, maybe.
John:
I don't know.
John:
In the 2000s, I think.
John:
But yeah, I guess that's ancient history now.
Marco:
That's up to you.
Marco:
You can offer private podcasts, maybe.
Marco:
certain special content whatever it is you want access to with your membership they can support that and they integrate with all the tools you already use and they are used by some of the biggest creators on the web because memberful is just so easy to work with they are by far the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience
Marco:
And it's great to diversify your income stream to have something other than just, you know, ads or whatever else.
Marco:
It's super great.
Marco:
It's super easy to work with.
Marco:
They have a great support team if you need it.
Marco:
And their goals are always aligned with your goals.
Marco:
For instance, they don't try to like, you know, weirdly upsell you on weird stuff.
Marco:
They just try to simplify your memberships, help you grow your revenue.
Marco:
They are very passionate about your success.
Marco:
And you always have access to a real human.
Marco:
And you own everything about the experience.
Marco:
You own the branding.
Marco:
You own your audience, your membership.
Marco:
Payments even go directly to your own Stripe account.
Marco:
So they really respect creators, your ability to be independent, your ability to control the experience, and to really own your audience.
Marco:
And it's just super great to work with Memberful.
Marco:
You know, making a membership system, I can speak from experience here, on your own is not fun.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of edge cases that you don't want to deal with, and it's a pain.
Marco:
So Memberful makes all of that super easy and is just a great platform to work with.
Marco:
So see for yourself by starting a free trial at memberful.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Visit there today, memberful.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Go there to sell audience memberships, and it's just the best way to diversify your revenue.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Memberful for sponsoring our show.
Bye.
Casey:
All right, so there was a lot covered.
Casey:
There was a lot, a lot covered.
Casey:
It was basically like a two-hour keynote, wasn't it?
Casey:
I didn't actually look at the time.
Casey:
We are going to, famous last words, attempt to blow through a lot of this as quickly as possible, and then we will have plenty of time to talk about it over the coming weeks.
Casey:
Also, we don't plan to cover the State of the Union today.
Casey:
We'll probably cover that next week if we can get through our follow-up in a timely manner.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
We're just going to try to plow through in semi-chronological order.
Casey:
um we start with i was 16 and craig and i know we've said this many times in the fast craig is just leaning into this presenter role man i just i keep getting flashbacks to him with the shaky hand over the magic mouse and he is like the king of presenters now he is so good and uh i am leaning into these ridiculous like segues and montages or whatever uh it made me very happy but
Casey:
He started talking about an all-new lock screen, which had been rumored for a while.
Casey:
And it sounds like there's widgets on the lock screen now.
Marco:
Yeah, this is really interesting.
Marco:
So what they've effectively done here is widgets are now powered by widget kit.
Marco:
Sorry, they've always happened.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
Complications on the watch are now powered by the same code.
Marco:
So now...
Marco:
You write a complication using WidgetKit, and that same thing runs on the phone lock screen and the watch.
Marco:
Same code.
Marco:
It can run in both places, and you can customize it in certain little minor ways.
Marco:
It's all the SwiftUI code, and it's great.
Marco:
I installed the beta on a little test phone I have here.
Marco:
I played with it for a few minutes.
Marco:
That's the only thing I've played with so far because I haven't had too much time.
Marco:
It's pretty great.
Marco:
You have a lot of customization.
Marco:
This is so wonderful.
Marco:
And by the way, it was amazing sitting next to Underscore as they were demoing this because it looks just like Widget Smith in so many ways.
Marco:
One thing that shocked me the most, they had this new home screen customizability designs
Marco:
And they have all these little things where like, oh, the picture can have elements that obstruct part of the time.
Marco:
So the time gets kind of layered into elements of the picture so that it's partly covered up.
Marco:
They're leaning hard into that, I think, because it's novel.
Marco:
I don't know why you'd want your time to be partially covered up, but cool.
Casey:
I thought it looked very cool.
Casey:
I understand what you're getting at, but I still thought it looked really cool.
John:
They're trying to make the person stand out.
John:
They always show that.
John:
They did it on the watch faces, too.
John:
Basically, if you have a picture of one of your kids or your spouse or something, the person is slightly in front of the little bottom of the time.
John:
So you can still read it because the numbers are big, but it makes the person pop.
Marco:
Right, right.
Marco:
So anyway, there is tons of customization.
Marco:
One thing that surprised me greatly is that they are offering different fonts.
Marco:
That, I thought, was a huge surprise.
Marco:
Yeah, and colors.
Marco:
Colors, I figured they would do because the watch does colors, right?
Marco:
The watch does not do fonts.
Marco:
So that I thought was really surprising.
Marco:
And it's good because it'll be it'll offer a lot of variety and personalization.
Marco:
And people always want personalization.
Marco:
And when you are, you know, the world's biggest corporation and you make these devices that like so many people have iPhones and Apple Watches, like so many people have these devices that to have more personalization we've seen before, people eat that up.
Marco:
People want that.
Marco:
And you need that.
Marco:
And the lock screen before has been so tightly controlled and sterile.
Marco:
Really, it's time for this.
Marco:
I'm very, very glad they've added this.
Marco:
And I think we're going to see a lot of great customization.
Marco:
And even though I think the actual...
Marco:
utility value it will depend a lot on how you use your phone it'll depend on how often do you see your lock screen versus just blow right past it and unlock your phone and go do something in your phone right so that's going to depend a lot on your usage pattern for me i don't know how it'll how it'll fly necessarily but i'm really happy to see this as a thing uh i i think people are going to love this they're going to use the crap out of this
Marco:
And we're going to see some really cool lock screen widgets and designs and customizations and everything.
Marco:
And this is just great on all fronts.
John:
I think the utility of it really ties into the whole focus modes thing where you can have multiple lock screens based on your focus mode.
John:
Yeah.
John:
the idea that you can have one for work and for home right and so what i i mean maybe this is bad but like the thing i immediately thought of is like all right so work focus so first of all what you'd put on the lock screen and your work focus is like your work calendar which maybe you don't need to see the other times like uh you know some work related messaging things or like a a little widget that shows you the status of some service or whatever and stuff like that and don't have the you know
John:
picture of like your favorite Marvel character or something like they have maybe a work related background that's more serious and business like and the reason why you might be looking at your lock screen is because back in the old days when we had meetings in conference rooms and your phone is on the table you just tap your phone look at the lock screen you're not unlocking it because you don't want to pick up your phone and unlock it because that would be rude during a meeting but
John:
But you might want to glance at the lock screen.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
I feel like that's the main scenario where you're looking at your lock screen but not unlocking.
John:
Maybe you just pretend you're checking your time, but what you're really checking is to see if that person responded to that email that you sent before the meeting.
John:
But you want to do it in a discreet way and not unlock your phone.
John:
I think they're leaning into the focus modes and having apps be aware of the focus modes and having the apps change based on the focus modes and everything.
John:
It's really it's just got to be, you know, a catnip for the right kind of person who really wants to essentially have like a day phone or night phone, a work phone and a home phone.
John:
It's the same phone, but it's transforming itself based on your context in more and more ways.
John:
And the lock screen is definitely part of that because.
John:
you know, customizing your lock screen for work related stuff lets you essentially not junk up your personal phone.
John:
If you're using your personal phone at work, which many people do, you know, usually has an MDM thing profile on it where they have control of it, but you don't want to junk it up too much, but you want it to be useful and work.
John:
And it's great to have your work phone transform back into your personal phone sort of in terms of,
John:
you know, the picture of your kid and your wife and the widgets you want to see and your sports scores and everything like that.
John:
And all that stuff is, you don't have to like come up with this weird compromise that is serious enough for work, but, you know, has enough of the stuff that you want at home.
John:
Now you can have two totally different experiences.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a really good point.
Casey:
And it also looked like, if I understood it correctly, you can swipe side to side to get the different lock screens, a la Apple Watch.
Casey:
I might have that wrong.
John:
After you do a long press, I think.
Casey:
Is that what it is?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I was worried about that.
John:
I don't know if you've tried this yet, Marco, but like, long press on the lock screen?
John:
I'm always afraid of accidental activation because I know that my...
John:
parents butt dial me enough as it is somehow i don't know how they do it i think maybe it's like the delay that we talked about in the past show where it's wait you hit the power button and it doesn't go to sleep immediately because it's waiting to see if you're double tapping it and maybe that's enough for them to like fat finger it or whatever but anyway i'm we'll see how it is you know park do you have the beta casey do you have the beta installed no i haven't put it on i do so
Marco:
You do have to long press.
Marco:
Because right now, if you swipe to the right, you get the camera.
Marco:
And if you swipe to the left, you get your Today widget kind of view.
Marco:
So you do have to long press to switch them.
John:
But it's a long press on the locked screen, right?
John:
Yes.
John:
So that seems weird to me and a little bit maybe prone to accidental activation.
John:
But I suppose we'll all find out when we try.
John:
But like I said, there's no more force touch.
John:
No more press hard on your thing.
John:
Apple removed that.
John:
Even removed it from the watch, didn't they?
John:
or is it yeah it's gone i think it's gone from all modern up-to-date hardware and that was a little bit more of a barrier to accidental activation because you had to press hard and i understand why they got rid of it you know the sensors and everything it's in the bending of the screen and not being able to do the ipad and yada yada it's fine uh we'll just see how it works out but that was the one reservation i had the other thing i noted about this whole lock screen thing is you know margaret just said before like
John:
Apple realizing belatedly, I would argue, how much people want to customize their phones.
John:
And in particular, the features for the lock screen recognize that people want to customize their phones in ways that quote unquote don't make sense or don't have utility, right?
John:
Like that you say, well, you know, why would you want it that way?
John:
And the answer is, well, I want it the way I want it.
John:
And that's what Apple is finally giving people.
John:
So the example here is like,
John:
Notifications.
John:
Rather than notifications filling your screen when you have a lot of them, we know that a lot of people have like a picture of a loved one on their lock screen and they don't want the UI covering that picture of the person.
John:
And so let's jam all the notifications down into this little stack.
John:
it's like well i can see less stuff i've got this whole phone screen why am i moving everything down that's what people want they don't want stuff covering the pictures of their kid right you see people do with their home screens they put like you know on their actual home screens they put a picture of their their you know spouse or child or something and they arrange the the icons in the home screen so it doesn't cover up the person's face it's like well you're wasting half your whole screen it's like i'm not wasting it i want to see this is what i want to see i don't want the stuff i don't want the ui blocking the picture that i put there so let me do that and they're
John:
they're letting that happen on the home screen in fact you can hide the notifications entirely if you want it's like well what's the point of your phone if you can't see notifications like that's not why i want my phone i just want this cool picture of my dog on my phone that's what i want and i don't want notifications covering my dog's face good old huckleberry yeah and yes and oh and also worth mentioning um the live activities api um this is a thing where you can have like a live a widget on the on the lock screen that is live updating and interactive and
Casey:
Yeah, this looks really cool.
Casey:
This is so, like, if you have a basketball game that you're watching the score of, or there's a lift about to pick you up, and it will update, like you were saying, live, to some degree of liveness, it will update live, and you can actually see the progress of these things happening.
Marco:
Yeah, this is something that they said is coming in an update to iOS 16 later this year.
Marco:
So that's actually not in the launch version, and I don't think we have any API for it yet.
Marco:
But they mentioned in the State of the Union that when you have a live activity thing running, your app is running continuously, or at least some part of your app.
Marco:
Maybe it's just the extension that's running that.
Marco:
But you have continuous access, and you have a regular SwiftUI view there.
Marco:
So you can live do whatever you want there.
Marco:
So I think you're right.
Marco:
I think like things like, like, um, you know, your, your ride sharing things is on its way.
Marco:
You can track that.
Marco:
Like there's so many times where you have to like keep unlocking your phone to go check something or something tries to send you a million notifications to update you on the progress of something that's happening.
Marco:
And so for this to be able to help reduce some of that, uh, clutter and friction and everything, I think that could be really cool.
John:
So we'll see how this turns out.
John:
Tiny window with a baseball game in it from the MLB app.
Marco:
yeah like live video in real time you unlock you you tap your phone and you can see in a little thumbnail the the baseball game you're watching yeah and and you know this is obviously also you know we've heard recent rumors that the ios that the iphone 14 might have an always on screen option at least the 14 pro might um i think this is clearly in preparation for that like because that changes things you know the the utility of this think about it when you have you're always on screen on your iphone 14 pro possibly then
Marco:
I would imagine it would be similar to the Apple Watch always on screen where like when the screen is not like fully on, everything's in some kind of dimmed mode where maybe you like lose the fill colors on things and everything gets less bright and everything.
Marco:
But I bet there's going to be something like that for the iPhone 14 or at least some future iPhone.
Marco:
And this is clearly like setting up this great feature to have, you know, some like one extra Swift UI modifier to make it work on the always on screen.
John:
and that's why hiding notifications entirely may be a feature because if some future iphone did have an always on screen and then you're just it's your phone is sitting on your table you maybe you don't want notifications to pop up even if it's just metadata because you can't see the text because the phone hasn't been unlocked you don't want to know who the message is from or that you got a message so if you want to use always on home screen which i assume will be an option just like it is on the watch maybe that's another case where you would turn off notifications entirely on the lock screen
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
As we continue along, there was some talk about focus, which we've, I think, at least slightly covered.
Casey:
There was a new concept of focus filters.
Casey:
And so this is, for example, you could only show tabs that have been somehow marked as relevant to work or marked as relevant to home or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Similarly, conversations and messages, accounts in the mail app, events in your calendar, and apparently there's going to be a new API for that as well.
John:
Yeah, so this is an example of a single phone being a home phone and a work phone.
John:
Like, you know, having in the mail app, having multiple email accounts, right?
John:
But you want to use one mail app.
John:
A lot of people do this.
John:
They say, well, I'll use two different mail apps.
John:
One will be my work mail app and one will be my home mail app because I don't want my home, my work email mixing.
John:
I don't like the fact that the two accounts are in there.
John:
But if you had a mail app that was aware that used this new API...
John:
It could just completely hide the work ones when you're not at work and vice versa.
John:
And same thing with calendars.
John:
I mean, again, you could do this manually.
John:
Oh, every calendaring app has a way for you to disable and re-enable calendars.
John:
But now it can do it based on your focus mode.
John:
This is an API that people have to adopt and we'll see how widespread it is.
John:
But it's really setting up a scenario where you can use a single phone for it.
John:
I'm just using home and work, but you can imagine a million different contexts like, you know, vacation mode or vacation.
John:
You know, a workout mode or meditation mode or, you know, some doing something with your hobby or photography mode is just many, many options.
John:
A lot of people don't do this.
John:
They're just like my phone is my phone.
John:
I set up the way I want it and it's fine.
John:
But for the people who do want this, having this woven deeper into the system, it doesn't take anything away from people who don't want to use it, but sounds great for the people who do.
Marco:
Yeah, I do think this is going to be possibly a tricky thing for a lot of apps to implement, like just making the UI for this.
Marco:
I haven't looked at the API yet, but I assume they have to give us a list of your focus modes and then have us offer you checkboxes.
Marco:
Do you want this to show in work mode?
Marco:
Do you want this to show in walking your dog mode?
Marco:
And then, you know, I imagine this is going to be one of those things that users, especially users of power user apps, they're going to demand this from like from they're going to demand their app support this.
Marco:
And I'm kind of worried, like, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to support that given my user base and overcast.
Marco:
But but yeah, it's a good idea.
Marco:
And I think, you know, we'll see how we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Here comes one of my favorite portions of the keynote.
Casey:
I am not being sarcastic.
Casey:
Messages.
Casey:
Messages finally got some love and I am here for it.
Casey:
We're getting an iMessage anyway.
Casey:
We will be able to edit messages.
Casey:
We will be able to undo a sent message and we will be able to praise B. We will be able to mark a thread as unread.
Casey:
Marry me, Craig Federici, please and thank you.
Casey:
I am so excited.
Marco:
When they announced the editing and especially the undo send, that got the biggest applause of the day.
Marco:
From the developers that were there, that was by far the biggest applause.
John:
When you control the entire system, because iMessage is Apple's thing, they write the apps, they write the servers, they write everything.
John:
They can do stuff like this.
John:
How can I edit?
John:
I already sent it.
John:
How can I undo a send?
John:
They control everything.
John:
They can do it.
John:
And they finally did.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
No, this is so great.
Casey:
I'm really, really excited for this.
Casey:
Like, I'm into editing messages.
Casey:
I think that'll be very convenient, especially because I am an old man and I try to write messages that are, you know, that is decent English and not, you know, complete childlike wording and whatnot.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Nevertheless, undo send, like whatever.
Casey:
I'm sure that'll be helpful from time to time.
Casey:
But marking a thread as unread, I'm so excited for because I want to see what people want from me.
Casey:
But oftentimes I don't want to respond right that second.
Casey:
And the way I remember to respond is by not having marked it as read.
Casey:
So I do, you know, it used to be a forced press, and now it's like the long press, and it'll pop up the little quick view window so you can read it.
Casey:
But then you've got to be really careful.
Casey:
You don't push it again or anything like that, and suddenly it's marked as red.
Casey:
And then once it's marked as red, you are never going to get a response from me because it's been cleared.
Casey:
If I don't handle it right that moment, I'm never going to remember to go back to it.
Casey:
So marking a thread as unread, I am so genuinely excited for.
Casey:
This is going to be great.
John:
Yeah, me too.
John:
This is another example of a thing that sounds silly.
John:
Like your system is dumb.
John:
Your whole system is to remind you to do it later is to just mark it as unread.
John:
Well, it's not true.
John:
You read it.
John:
Why are you marking it as unread?
John:
That's a bad system.
John:
But it's like, that's what everybody does.
John:
Like when you give that feature to people, mark as unread, that's what people use it for.
John:
And though you may think that is, you know, inefficient or silly or people shouldn't use their inbox as a to-do list or whatever your mantra is, the fact is people want this feature.
John:
And so you should give it to them.
John:
And how people use it is up to them.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm genuinely super excited for this.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Moving along, there's going to be a shared with you API.
Casey:
There's some SharePlay stuff.
Casey:
The most interesting thing to me about SharePlay.
Casey:
Now, I have not done any SharePlay anything to my recollection since it's launched.
Casey:
However, I did a handful of times use Plex's equivalent feature—I don't remember their marketing name for it—to watch a movie with some family members.
Casey:
So we're concurrently watching the movie.
Casey:
If either one of us pauses, then the other one's playback will get paused, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
This is not unique to Plex.
Casey:
But my understanding of SharePlay up until today is that you had to have a FaceTime call going while all this was going on, which—
Casey:
is not necessarily what you want if you're trying to watch a film or a TV show together.
Casey:
That does not seem like what you would want.
Casey:
And what we did when we were doing this with Plex and with family was we were in a group chat.
Casey:
Well, my darn brother-in-law refuses to get an iPhone like an adult, but we were in a group MMS chat.
Casey:
And so we were just chatting back and forth, you know, sending text messages to each other.
Casey:
Well, now SharePlay will support doing exactly that.
Casey:
So you can start a SharePlay thing via messages instead of FaceTime.
Casey:
And then you still get the whole playback being paused and things of that nature, whatever's appropriate for the thing you're SharePlaying.
Casey:
But you don't have to have a FaceTime call going.
Casey:
So I'm excited for that.
Marco:
Yeah, and the shared with you API is going to be, I think, another thing that I'm going to have to add that for sure in my app.
Marco:
I heard that, I'm like, oh, thank God.
Marco:
Because when they announced share with you last year, where it just worked with Apple News, Apple Podcasts, stuff like that, I was like, man, I wish I could do that.
Marco:
Now they called my bluff, they added the APIs, and now I have to do it.
Marco:
So that's adding more to my work this summer, but I think that's going to be a good one, I think.
Casey:
And then we got some updates on dictation.
Casey:
Most of this I personally wasn't that jazzed about.
Casey:
However, one of the things they said is that, well, first of all, it's all on device using the neural engine.
Casey:
But there's an all new on-device dictation experience, which, and I quote, fluidly moves between voice and touch.
Casey:
Now that is kind of cool because there's a lot of times where I'll be dictating something and I know that Siri will never understand a word I'm about to say or something like that.
Casey:
And so it would be nicer just to type it and then continue dictation.
Casey:
And apparently you're going to be able to do exactly that.
Casey:
And the keyboard will stay open during dictation.
Casey:
You can dictate emoji, which I think will be more challenging than you would expect because so often you're not going to know the official Apple name for these things.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am here for this.
Casey:
I think this sounds all pretty good.
John:
and automatic punctuation that's a good thing that's the big one so you don't have to say what do you need from the store question mark you know you can actually just try it and hopefully that works pretty well yeah i mean i hope it does a good job with it because it's going to be tricky to figure out what kind of punctuation is required but even just the basics just ending a sentence when you pause or when it seems like it's the end of a sentence grammatically will go a long way uh because i as the recipient of many messages that are dictated i can tell you that most people do not
John:
use punctuation they don't say period they certainly don't say comma and they almost never say question mark and so it's just like this word salad that you have to figure out where the boundaries are um so this has can almost certainly have to be an improvement and like casey said the ability to fix it up on the fly um i mean if people aren't speaking the punctuation they're probably not going to fix it up on the fly but i appreciate the ability to fix it up on the fly i hope it works well the the thing they demoed where someone like highlighted some text with their finger and then spoke to change it i do wonder if
John:
If the mode that the phone is in may get out of sync with the mode that your brain is in, whereas you're not aware that the phone is still listening to you and you say something as an aside to somebody and then it takes that text and shoves it in the thing that you just highlighted.
John:
We'll see how that goes.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
They also talked about live text in video.
Casey:
So you can pause a video and then interact with the text on the frame, which I thought was kind of cool, and do quick actions like currency conversion or translation or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Translate app will also now have a translate camera.
Casey:
What is it that Google bought, like Word Lens or something like that?
Casey:
I forget the name of the app.
Casey:
Uh, it eventually got sucked into Google translate.
Casey:
And so, um, actually when Marco and, and, and Aaron and Tiff and me were all in Germany, we use this from time to time in order to like actually read a menu by having it translate, you know, basically a photograph of the menu into English.
Casey:
And so I think that would be cool.
Marco:
Translate is loose.
Casey:
I mean, it was, it was pretty rough idea.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
We had some unexpected results from using that.
Casey:
We did, but this was almost 10 years ago now.
Casey:
That was 2013.
Casey:
So, I mean, this was, this was a while ago.
Marco:
I will say, too, we kind of breezed right past the easier-to-use Siri app API.
Marco:
It's called the AppIntense API, which is kind of a replacement for SiriKit.
Marco:
It's like an all-new thing, Swift only, or primarily accessible through Swift, at least.
Marco:
And it basically makes it much, much easier to add Siri and shortcut and intent support to your apps.
Marco:
Before, we had this terrible intent definition thing, these intense extensions, and they were...
Marco:
fairly clunky to work with and they've now augmented that API it looks like this is a long term replacement but it's not fully replacing it yet so the new app intense API looks very very good I'm very much looking forward to seeing if I can use that and get rid of some of my massive amount of boilerplate generated intent code and stuff and so yeah that looks pretty good
Casey:
And then they also demoed in this section a visual lookup, and they talked about, they called it like lifting an object, but basically what you can do is, let's say you have a picture of Hops or Daisy or Penny, and if you want, you can touch and hold on their body on the picture, and it will intelligently...
Casey:
lift just them out of the picture.
Casey:
So, you know, it's like a very close crop of just their body out of the picture.
Casey:
And then you can like drag and drop it into messages or something like that, which if that works at all is super freaking cool.
Casey:
I don't know what I would use it, but the fact that you could do it is super cool.
Marco:
Yeah, this is the kind of thing.
Marco:
I'm sure in practice there's going to be a lot of situations where it cuts off your dog's leg or accidentally includes a tree from the background because it was blurred in just the right way and you happen to have a green dog or something.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm sure it's going to be very context dependent on how well it works.
Marco:
But even if it works decently some of the time, that's still a really cool feature.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to that.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We're trying to move kind of quickly now.
Casey:
They talked about wallet, which one of the cool things about that is that if you have your ID, your driver's license in the wallet, you can have an app ask, hey, is this person over 21?
Casey:
And you don't have to say, well, my birthday is such and such.
Casey:
Actually, Marco's birthday is coming up between our next recording.
Casey:
So happy 40th.
Casey:
That reminds me.
Casey:
But anyways, it will share, you know, oh, yes, this user is over 21.
Casey:
That's all you need to know.
Casey:
And they're also talking about keys and they're working with IETF to make that a whole like sharing protocol, which is cool.
Casey:
They talked about Apple Pay and Pay Later, which had been rumored as well, where you can split the cost of purchases into four equal payments spread over six weeks with no interest, no fees, etc.
Casey:
And that is transparent to the vendor.
Casey:
It's just you're using Apple Pay as far as they're concerned.
Casey:
And unbeknownst to them, you're kind of setting up a loan with Apple.
Casey:
Makes me feel a little weird.
Casey:
I'm not sure why Apple's into this, but I don't want to belabor the point right now.
Marco:
So do they make money on that by, like, if you miss a payment, then you charge interest like a credit card?
Marco:
Is that how that works?
John:
I guess that, but the more I look at it, I'm wondering maybe it was just a ploy to get people to use Apple Pay more often.
John:
And they just want... Essentially, it's a way to increase usage of their payment system, which they do collect fees for, but not actually a way to, like, collect interest.
John:
But it seems weird that, like, if you...
John:
If they're spreading the payments out, what happens if somebody doesn't pay?
John:
Do they send them to collections?
John:
Is there no interest ever?
John:
I didn't get a chance to look into it.
Marco:
I assume it's like a credit card where you get dinged a big fee if you don't pay on time.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Apple moving into somewhat usurious possibility, financial services.
Marco:
This stuff, I'm sure they're very happy about it.
Marco:
This stuff is just all gross to me.
Marco:
I wish they didn't have to move into this business.
John:
But they're not doing it like they outsourced it to Goldman Sachs last time.
John:
It's like Apple doesn't want to be in the business of being a credit card company.
John:
They just want to control the UX to another credit card company.
John:
It's kind of like Apple didn't become a carrier, but sort of bent the carriers to its will to the extent that Apple took control over the parts of the experience that it thought was important.
John:
But in the end, we still have to pay a Verizon bill or pay an AT&T bill.
John:
And Apple did not make the experience of dealing with Verizon or AT&T any better in terms of like paying the bill or dealing with, you know, coverage or rates and stuff like that.
John:
And same thing with Apple Pay, like the...
John:
or not Apple, the Apple card, right?
John:
It's a Goldman Sachs MasterCard in the end, and you're dealing with them, and they're the ones who are increasing your credit limit and dealing with billing issues and all that stuff.
John:
But Apple just puts this layer over the top of it.
John:
So this pay later thing, if it's Apple putting a layer over the top, I bet there's no interest or anything.
John:
It's just a way to get more people to use Apple Pay.
John:
But if instead it is a financial instrument from Goldman Sachs, you can bet your butt that if you miss one of those payments, it's time for big interest.
Marco:
And I'm sure Apple gets a cut of that kind of thing.
Marco:
The reason Apple does this kind of stuff is partly because they want to have a good experience of you paying for stuff.
Marco:
It's also services revenue.
John:
But I think Goldman Sachs is collecting the revenue.
John:
There's the fee for using the credit card that the merchant pays, and Apple surely gets part of that.
John:
Yes, they do.
John:
But I'm not sure about interest payments.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The bottom line is we all have credit cards, and this is a thing that exists.
John:
And Apple trying to make a better one, I think, is a reasonable thing to do.
John:
and we'll probably have follow up in the coming weeks to see is this just a ploy for Apple to get more people to use Apple Pay and there's no interest involved or is this just yet another system where you can pay later but if you don't pay you get interest I mean there are some businesses I mean should Apple launch their own line of gas stations I mean like people we all pay that sometimes charging stations maybe
John:
yeah right that'd be better but you know it's like it do you want them to be in the business of like fossil fuels because i mean that that's a gross thing that makes money it's like it's looking for an area like i mean payments and the phone makes sense as an area that you know mapping in the phone makes certain things are fit for apple's devices and trying to have you know and having a wallet on the phone makes sense having a card i this this all makes some sense to me but i don't actually know we'll find out later whether this is also a way for apple to make money for interest payments
Marco:
Anyway, I'm sure it's a great experience.
Marco:
It's also kind of gross, and I wish they wouldn't do this stuff, but I understand why they do.
Casey:
And they also have order tracking and wallet, starting with Shopify-related things, which, I mean, that seems a little bit of a weird place for it, but I can't think of a better place for it.
Casey:
So, I mean, we'll see.
Casey:
I'm a big-time, what is it called, parcel user, which I really like.
Casey:
And so we'll see if this is better or different or worse.
John:
I was confused by that part because, you know, Shopify will track anything you bought anywhere.
John:
It's very aggressive about finding out where you've purchased anything and telling you about how the shipments are coming and stuff like that, right?
John:
But when I saw the Apple thing, I was like, oh, they're just going to tell me about shipments that I use my Apple card for?
John:
Well, I'd never use my Apple card except for when I buy Apple stuff, so who cares, right?
John:
But then they said there was a Shopify integration thing, so...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm going to see how this is in practice.
John:
Is this just going to double the amount of alerts and I'm going to have, you know, Apple alerts about my shipments and also the shop apps alert for those very same shipments and I have to pick one of them?
John:
I'm a little bit confused by the extent of this feature.
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Casey:
Uh, family sharing.
Casey:
John, do you want to talk about this?
John:
We're not getting to the big future yet, but this was just some small stuff of like making it easier to set up, uh, you know, a phone for a kid while using another device that's nearby and a little bit more flexible, uh, settings for requesting approval for things.
John:
So you don't have to, this is, as someone who's used screen times on, uh,
John:
kids phones if you if you miss the notification which happens sometimes because you're in the middle doing something else a little notification comes down and says you know so and so wants an extra 15 minutes of screen time right if you don't catch that notification you have to go into settings like they say and when they describe this feature go into settings go into screen time go into the person's thing and then scroll down and find the thing and then prove it now first of all it took me a long time to figure that out right because it's not obvious you
John:
You see the notification and you're like, oh, I missed it, right?
John:
Or it went away because I have it set to go down and then after two seconds it goes away or I tried to tap it and it didn't hit it or whatever.
John:
I would just yell through the house, send it again because eventually I figured out where it was in settings, but sometimes it's easier to have them send it again anyway because you've got to dig into settings to find the thing or whatever.
John:
So now you can approve in messages, which makes much more sense because messages are persistent.
John:
So I'm not sure how this is going to work in practice, but it's got to be an improvement over the existing system.
Casey:
And then, so we have easier to manage accounts for kids.
Casey:
You can set age-appropriate content limitations, and there's a quick start setup.
Casey:
So let's say you have a new iPad.
Casey:
You can bring your own iPhone next to the iPad, and it'll say, okay, I see that there's, you know, your family on your iPhone.
Casey:
Who is this device for?
Casey:
Is it for you, for your spouse, for your kid, etc.
Casey:
?
Casey:
And that's pretty cool.
Casey:
And then they also mentioned something about a family checklist where they'll update or they'll make suggestions as how to update these settings as the kids get older.
Casey:
All that's pretty cool.
Casey:
But John, tell me the next thing that they talked about, because I can't believe that this is real.
Casey:
And apparently it's real.
Marco:
And this also, by the way, got a very large applause.
Casey:
I don't doubt it.
John:
So I did the math.
John:
Hypercritical number nine.
John:
No wildlife is an island was 4,105 days ago.
John:
11 years, two months and 26 days.
John:
And that's just the first time I podcasted about it.
John:
This has been something that, you know, that people have wanted from Apple for a long time.
John:
uh and we've talked about in the show and i know a lot of people are confused but basically the idea is you have a family uh and in the days before computers a family would take photos of a wedding of a vacation of just around the house or whatever and then you'd take those photos and you'd put them into photo albums and dad would not have a separate set of photo albums and mom would not have a separate set of photo albums there would be a family photo album
John:
you would take the family's picture it didn't matter who held the camera if your sister held the camera and took a picture and it was a cool picture that picture would go into the family photo album if dad took a picture mom doesn't matter who took it it would go into the family photo album and didn't make sense to have separate shelves of dad's photo albums mom's photo albums and each individual kid's photo you know maybe kids have their own photo albums with their friends but still the idea that it that you'd want to have some kind of sharing of photos within a family
John:
It's well established before computers and computers came along and OK, the first round, we're just going to have a bunch of pictures.
John:
But eventually you would think they would get around to adding a feature like this.
John:
And by the time I was complaining about it in 2011, I thought we're well overdue.
John:
Like we've got this whole thing of, you know, photos on our computers.
John:
We kind of got it down pat.
John:
iPhoto has been out for years we should have some kind of family photo library and now finally after years and years of complaining about this Apple has taken a swing at this feature a feature that has been added by many other people in the past specifically Google I think we've talked about on the show acknowledging the fact that families exist and sometimes people want to have photos in a shared library and that is distinct from sharing photos in an album or anything like that a shared library is just what it sounds like it's a photo library that works the same as any of your individual photo libraries work now if you
John:
Open your photo library on your Mac, on your phone, on your iPad, everything you can do to that photo library, organizing it, editing it, recognizing faces, labeling people, cropping photos, adding locations, tags, keywords, everything you can do to a photo library, a family photo library is that a photo library shared by a family.
John:
And that appears to be what they have.
John:
And it's complicated because you don't want every photo to go into the shared library.
John:
But you don't want to have to manually pick every single photo you want to go into the shared library.
John:
So there has to be some kind of smart way to do it.
John:
Like, well, OK, you know, photos when I'm in vacation mode, the photos should go into there or if I'm in the same location as someone else, they have all sorts of, you know, smarts trying to handle this.
John:
But the bottom line is the most important feature is if they got this part right, there should be a shared photo library and people should be able to take photos from their private libraries and put them into the shared libraries and vice versa.
John:
and yes there can be automated ways to do that but the basic functionality that has to work is that shared library has to exist it has to not corrupt itself or accidentally delete things that's not get super confused it has to not spew duplicates everywhere like all that stuff that's got to work and you have to manually be able to add and remove things and then everything after that is gravy because that's the question of like oh i don't want to use the automated features do i want to have this thing try to be smart and put you know the photos in there when it realizes we're all on vacation together in the same location or do i just want to do it all manually
John:
I haven't had a chance to look at this.
John:
Obviously, I haven't even installed any of the betas yet or whatever.
John:
But from everything I saw, it seems like they have implemented the straightforward thing.
John:
It is not some new, weird, obscure feature.
John:
It is just your photo library, but a shared one.
John:
And it seems like they're being very flexible about how things get into it and come out of it.
John:
So...
John:
that's what we're saying to someone i have like you know 145 000 photos riding on this feature right because i want for my personal usage i want almost all of my and my wife's photos to be in a shared library right now she's the one who owns the real photo library and i have this miniature photo library and i do this manually merging and stuff i want to eventually take all
John:
our you know our big family photo library that my wife currently owns and make it the shared one but i'm going to do that in steps so further updates for sure um probably in the fall because i don't really think i'm going to do this with the beta but if everything looks okay in the fall and everyone upgrades their os's i'm going to start the process of moving at least 145 000 photos into the shared library and then have the individual libraries be
John:
just the photos that individually individually so when i take pictures of like random stuff that i'm taking pictures of for like a podcast or you know other things like that those don't those currently stay on my phone and those won't go into the shared photo library but almost everything else will so i am really looking forward to this it is long overdue but i'm i'm glad they got it done and honestly i just want it to work and not destroy my photo library
John:
Oh, and also be full fidelity, not the photo, just photos themselves, because people were asking about that.
John:
Is it going to be the full fidelity?
John:
It's got to be.
John:
It's a photo library.
John:
But when I say full fidelity, I mean the literal decades of work that I have put into organizing my photo library, all the tags, all the faces, all the locations, all the edits, all the crops.
John:
That's gotta be preserved 100%.
John:
I'm hoping things like, what about all my book projects?
John:
What about all my like albums?
John:
What about all my slideshows?
John:
I hope, I really hope all of that transfers intact to the shared library.
John:
If it doesn't, I'm gonna be kind of sad because I make all these photo books and everything and I save the projects in what was iPhoto and now is photos.
John:
Because what if I wanna ever get one of those books reprinted, right?
John:
That's the whole point of digital stuff.
John:
If I have it all saved, I have the original photos, I have the book, I have the layout.
John:
As long as that is supported, I should be able to print that book again if a book gets damaged or lost or something happens to it or whatever.
John:
But if I can't transfer those books into the shared library, if only the photos go there, but now the books are stranded in the original library, but the photos that were in the book are gone, that's going to make me sad.
John:
If keywords don't go over, if any of the edits don't go over, like if things get corrupted when they go over, if I lose the raw version stuff, I lose HDR, like...
John:
I really hope this is what it seems like, which is full fidelity, all metadata, being able to transfer between any individual library and a shared library.
John:
So fingers crossed, but I'm super happy that they finally done it.
Marco:
And to be fair, they did specifically call out that edits, deletions, captions and keywords that would all be synced, that that would all be part of this.
John:
I know, but when they give that list, I'm like, well, but what about book projects?
John:
Right, yeah.
John:
You know, like, what about albums?
John:
What about slideshows?
John:
Like, there's all the things they didn't list, so we'll see.
Casey:
Yeah, the thing with iCloud shared photo library, like, in principle, I am super stoked for this.
Casey:
Because, Aaron, you know, the way things have worked out in our family is very similar to what you're talking about, John, in that I have the, you know, the source of record photo library installed.
Casey:
And Erin, I just make sure that she has the last like month or so photos, which normally is all she would ever refer to.
Casey:
But it stinks for her if she wants to go back in time to a while ago.
Casey:
She has to come find me and tell me, oh, can you find me a picture of such and such around such and such a time, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Like it would be so much better for her if she could just go back in time.
Casey:
the thing with iCloud photo shared for the library that worries me is I'm really, really scared that there's going to be some very, very odd limitations to it.
Casey:
I don't know what those would be specifically, but it wouldn't surprise me if like, there's no way to get a bunch of old photos in there or, or, you know, like you said, your albums and things don't come, come across the way you want them to.
Casey:
Also, like I was, I was sort of talking to a friend of mine earlier and, and he was saying that he's really excited to have his niece, uh,
Casey:
and pictures of her in a shared photo library with his parents, the niece's grandparents, and the niece's actual parents.
Casey:
But I don't think that's what this is for.
Casey:
This is, I think, only within a family-sharing unit, which isn't necessarily what everyone would want.
Casey:
It's fine for me.
Marco:
And it said up to five people, too.
Marco:
So if you have four kids and two parents, you're out of luck.
John:
Well, that's the thing.
John:
I'm not sure you want to share this with the kids.
John:
One of the things they mentioned was...
John:
that everyone can edit and have full access and i don't want my kids to have full edit access to the photo library they'll just go through and delete all the pictures of themselves that they don't like that's and that's not it's like tough luck right uh it's really you know it depends on everyone can define their family how they want in the five person limitation there's limitations on uh the size of the apple family thing anyway which is itself a problem because it's like they should be a little bit more flexible than they are but maybe there's server-side limitations or whatever but
John:
For my personal use, it's probably just going to be shared between my wife and I, and it's like that's enough for us to – because we're the organizers of the libraries anyway, and the kids have their own photos, but it's all just like them and their friends and pictures of the dog and other stuff like that that are their own private photos anyway.
John:
But occasionally there is some sharing.
John:
I will chuck down photos.
John:
If I could, I would like to give my kids read-only access to the family library because they ask me for pictures from this event or do you have pictures of me when I was in fifth grade or whatever.
John:
I have to go find it and airdrop it to them.
John:
Whereas if I could just give them read-only access to the family photo library, that would be great.
John:
But I don't want to give them full added access just to avoid any accidental or on-purpose destructive operations.
Casey:
It's almost as though you need a read-only photo gallery.
Casey:
Just going to leave that there.
John:
Can you make Peek of View support 145,000 photos in a shared library?
John:
Get on that.
Casey:
I mean, hypothetically, Peek of View supports whatever library you throw at it, but I take your point, and no thank you.
Casey:
Next was privacy, and they talked a lot about safety check.
Casey:
I don't feel qualified to talk about this, but I will say that I am pleased that this is a thing.
Casey:
I'm pleased that they spent time talking about it, especially since Apple to me has a somewhat Disney kind of aura about them where they really don't like talking about anything negative or anything that's not going to make you smile.
Casey:
And this is not a happy thing, but they've spent time on it and I'm, I'm happy for it.
Casey:
Uh, and so what this allows you to do is it's tools to get, to help you get away from abusive relationship and
Casey:
uh this especially like emergency reset which stops sharing your location it resets your privacy permissions it signs you out of iCloud on every device except the one that's in your hand and messages in FaceTime are only left on the device that's in your hand so one of the things they explicitly said which is true in my family I don't know if it is in y'all's but you know Erin knows my password I know her password for like her phone and things of that nature so
Casey:
I always, always, always ask her before I grab her phone and use it.
Casey:
She does the same for me.
Casey:
But if our relationship was different, there's nothing stopping me from opening up her phone and doing whatever I want to it.
Casey:
And so this is very, very cool that they seem to have, from what I can tell, they seem to have really thought this out.
Casey:
And they certainly enumerated a list of organizations that they've been working on this with.
Marco:
uh i i think this is super cool and i hope that no one ever needs it but i suspect many people will need it yeah this is the kind of thing i was so happy to see this because you know it i think we're lucky if we if we have never had to deal with anything like this um or know anybody who had to deal with anything like this but this is a real problem that you know if you think about if you're in an abusive relationship and you have to get out quickly uh which is usually how that has to happen um
Marco:
There are so many ways in our digital lives where an abuser who was your partner before could have access to your digital accounts in some way, have access to your iCloud account, have you in the family group, be the one who purchased all your iTunes goods or whatever, so you're in their credit card system, you are sharing location with them.
Marco:
That's a huge one, obviously, for obvious reasons.
Marco:
location sharing, location access, being able to track where you might have gone or what you might be doing with access to your Apple ID and other forms.
Marco:
Seeing any messages that are sent to you, that's obviously a big security risk in this kind of situation.
Marco:
The fact that Apple even thought about this as a problem and tackled it in what appears to be a pretty good, comprehensive way, that's fantastic to see.
Marco:
It's exactly the kind of thing that
Marco:
I couldn't imagine any other tech company doing this before Apple did.
Marco:
Now, to have this be something that Apple can offer in a really horrible time in people's lives, they need dramatic amounts of help.
Marco:
The risks are very high if anything goes wrong in this kind of situation.
Marco:
To have this be a tool at their disposal is great.
John:
So kind of like shared photo libraries, this is also an issue that people have been talking about for a decade or more.
John:
We'll put a link to a tweet from Jackie Chang where she talks about an article that she wrote 10 years ago and also a talk that she gave on this very topic.
John:
And it was relevant then and it continues to be relevant now.
John:
And, you know, she was kind of like her follow-up tweet.
John:
On the one hand, progress is slow.
John:
On the other hand, at least Apple is making some really impactful updates.
John:
like because probably because they themselves have had to help victims do all these things right this is this has been a thing that's been going on forever and you know if if you're in the situation you have apple devices i can imagine contacting apple and trying to go through the support and be like here's my situation can you help me can you do this can you do that and i'm sure they want to be helpful but it's the type of thing that without this feature built into the os it's very difficult to sort of do piecemeal or
John:
to expect people to have the wherewithal to sit on hold or to have the person on the other end of the phone understand what they're doing.
John:
So this is another long overdue change and it's good to see motion in the right direction, but this has been a problem for as long as we've had smartphones.
Casey:
They talked about the home app, and they made mention of Matter, which is the new technology that Apple has had a hand in developing that's supposed to be the one true smart home technology.
Casey:
In principle, and I don't know a lot about this, and I'm going to be watching my friend Eric Wielander's channel to see what he has to say about all this, because he does a lot of smart home stuff over on YouTube.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But the
Casey:
Apparently, Matter is based on HomeKit, which is news to me and deeply frightening because HomeKit does not work that well.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I misheard them.
Casey:
Maybe I misunderstood.
Casey:
But I'm a little bit worried about that.
Marco:
You didn't mishear.
Marco:
They actually said, we contributed HomeKit as the foundation of this new standard.
Marco:
Now, that being said, I've had mixed experience with HomeKit stuff.
Marco:
The actual straight-up HomeKit devices that are made for HomeKit and everything, like secure video and everything, and the Lutron Caseta integration, all that stuff has actually been pretty rock-solid for me.
Marco:
Where you start getting into trouble with HomeKit is when you have all these weird bridges or updates to things that were never designed for it, and you start adding complexity.
Marco:
You're running a Raspberry Pi somewhere with a HomeKit bridge to these other devices that never supported it.
Marco:
Shh.
John:
that's the kind of stuff that that tends to get people into trouble but the actual core home kit features for me have actually been pretty reliable i think it's more about the protocol and the requirements of devices to be back in the early days of home kit it was like oh it's too annoying to support home kit because we have to be so secure and closed off and you know do a bunch of stuff that requires expensive chips and it's much easier to use these cheaper standards and
John:
HomeKit had a lot of barrier to injury.
John:
So I'm hoping when they say HomeKit is the foundation, they just mean the sort of underlying security requirements and stuff, which at this point should be the bar for anybody doing any smart home stuff.
John:
But in the early days, it's a little bit more of just like Wild West, do whatever you want, make it work.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Yeah, Matter, we've talked about this in past shows.
John:
Sounds great.
John:
Show me the products.
John:
Show me the products working better than our current products.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Collide is built by like-minded security practitioners who saw in the past just how much MDM was disrupting their end users, often frustrating them so much they would just give up and switch to using their personal laptops without telling anybody.
Marco:
And that's obviously a terrible scenario for everyone.
Marco:
Collide, on the other hand, is different.
Marco:
Instead of locking down a device, Collide takes a user-focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your employees directly on Slack.
Marco:
After Collide, device security turns from a black-and-white state into a dynamic conversation that starts with the end-users installing the endpoint agent on their own through a guided process that happens right inside their first Slack message.
Marco:
From there, Collide regularly sends employees recommendations when their device is in an insecure state.
Marco:
This can range from simple problems like your screen lock isn't set right to hard-to-solve and nuanced issues like, hey, your 2FA backup codes are sitting in your downloads folder, and that's insecure.
Marco:
And because it's talking directly to employees, Collide is educating them about the company's policies and how to best keep their devices secure using real tangible examples, not theoretical scenarios.
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:
So the next section of the keynote, I get this feeling like this is one of those sections that sitting here today, we're like, wow, that's kind of weird and interesting.
Casey:
But maybe in a few years, this might be a really, really, really, really big deal.
Casey:
And believe it or not, that section is car play of all things.
Marco:
Yeah, who had that on their bingo card?
Casey:
Not me.
Casey:
So they're saying that, or the big piece I took away from this is that CarPlay is in the future.
Casey:
And I think they said the announcements won't even come until late next year of whatever models will support this.
Casey:
But CarPlay will take over
Casey:
everything.
Casey:
I'm talking about your instrument cluster, your main infotainment display, everything.
Casey:
Speedometer, tachometer, gear change, all of that will be displayed in a car-place powered display or series of displays.
Casey:
They want to take over everything.
Casey:
I think an exact quote, powers the entire instrument cluster.
Casey:
That is wild.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I mean, I'm here for it if it actually works.
Casey:
And CarPlay, for the most part, has been pretty good for me.
Casey:
It hasn't been flawless, but it's been pretty good.
Casey:
And I really like the idea of having a software company actually be in charge of doing the software for my car.
Casey:
Yet, at the same time, I am not at all keen on a software company being in charge of some of the critical pieces of the software for my car, because I almost want that to be done by someone who is much more familiar with a real-time system and so on and so forth.
Casey:
One way or another, I am very intrigued by this, and I'm very curious to see where this goes.
Casey:
And some guy I follow on Twitter, I think his name is John Syracuse, had a very funny quip about this.
Casey:
And I believe that that person said, is this the first time that Apple shipped anything from Project Titan?
Casey:
And it sure seems like it might be.
John:
I mean, I'm not as enthused about this.
John:
Like you would imagine an Apple car would look like this.
John:
If Apple had a car and they had the inside of it, it would have stuff like this in it.
Marco:
Well, and I think this raises the interesting question of like, if they can actually get anybody to do this, do they really need to make their own car?
Marco:
Like, isn't this like 80% of the value of them making a car?
John:
Maybe, but here's the thing.
John:
You just talked about how the problem with HomeKit was when you sort of have kind of a bridging thing to some other device that was never made to support HomeKit.
John:
these cars have to work without a phone in them so they have to have their own interface and that's been true of you know cars with screens it's like oh they've got their own thing but when you do carplay carplay overlays one of the screens with its own thing and then maybe there's like around the bottom and sides you see the rest of your interface but there's a section there's it's like flash on the web page there's a rectangle on this on this dashboard that is owned by apple now and they put their crap there but the rest of the stuff is there but the car has well that's not it depends so like on my car on the volkswagen i
Casey:
This screen is 100% taken over by CarPlay.
Casey:
There are still physical buttons around it because my car is old enough that buttons still existed when it was built, but there are physical buttons around it.
Casey:
But the entire screen area gets taken over by CarPlay.
Casey:
This is in contrast to Aaron's Volvo, which is exactly what you described, where the top half or maybe even two-thirds is the Volvo stock UI, and then the bottom third to one-half is completely taken over by CarPlay.
John:
Right.
John:
But still, it's like that that thing that it took over, you need to be able to drive the car without an iPhone.
John:
So there has to be a user interface to to operate the car, all features of the car there.
John:
And if you're going to take this Apple thing and say, like the thing that they showed, we're going to overlay not just your main screen, but also your instrument instrument cluster.
John:
And like, you know, sometimes when you still have either physical or the other non CarPlay controls, that's for things like HVAC or
John:
And the lights and the wipers like, oh, by the way, we want to do that as well.
John:
So it would be silly for you to keep those things visible from your interface because they're going to be in our interface.
John:
So basically, why don't you let us cut wallpaper over your entire interface?
John:
So that's I feel like that's not great because.
John:
you know i what is the interface to my car does every car have to come with two interfaces and apple wallpapers over the entire thing the second thing is i am a strong proponent of not having every single feature of the car be on a touch screen but apple can't put physical controls in my car all they can do is display things on a screen with carplay right and so they're never going to be able to make an interface that works well with my car and
John:
in like sort of built in cooperation with the people making the car we just talked about last time having physical controls in sync with the on sync on screen controls not having the same button in two different places deciding which things should be physical which things should be on screen which things should be hybrid that's the job of designing the interface to a car and i think the correct way to do that is not there are no more physical buttons and everything is on touchscreens but that's the only thing apple can do
John:
Because they can only put images on a screen unless they make their own car or unless they work hand-in-hand with the car maker, right?
John:
And then finally, I would say that Apple's forte over the past decade or so of user interface has not been in making interfaces that are good at conveying lots of information and are easy to see.
John:
Like, I'm just picturing, I mean, they showed lots of pictures of it and it looked okay, but like, when I think Apple interface, I think small, low-contrast text that I can't read, minimalism that hides information that I want to see, and, you know, mystery meat that I have to mouse over.
Marco:
A lot of rectangles would all look the same with a lot of text you have to read.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
And the one thing Apple has going for them is the car makers themselves are also not great at this, but they're getting better in fits and starts.
John:
So I'm not jazzed about this.
John:
I'm jazzed about the idea of having essentially iOS apps on my car screen so I can put up Waze and CarPlay as it sort of exists slightly expanded.
John:
I do not want Apple trying to paint over...
John:
a button-based UI for my entire car inside my car over the top of the interface for my car that has to be there so I can drive it without my phone.
Casey:
So I sort of agree with you, but I think the problem is that you and me are holding on to this desire and hope that the future is not 100% touchscreens, but it seems pretty clear to me that the future is 100% touchscreens.
John:
No.
John:
it's it's it's not i mean you see you see car makers bringing back physical controls they're bouncing back aside from tesla or whatever it's the reason like when ford came out this they put i mean ford's doing it a ham-fisted way but they put a big physical dial in the middle of their screen as sort of a statement of saying we believe that there is still a place for physical controls again do we want to steer with the touchscreen everything is not going to the touchscreen should the pedals be touchscreen you have to take off your socks and use your toes on them like
John:
that physical controls as long as we are physical beings physical controls must exist and a touchscreen is itself a physical control it is just one that that has specific use cases for which it is the best choice and many of the things you need to do in the car touchscreen is not the best choice they will always be some kind of hybrid until we're not driving them at all there will always be some hybrid of physical and touch controls and if all apple is doing is putting things on screens they can't participate in that synergy as well as i think they should be able to
John:
If they made their own car, presumably they would work all this out.
John:
Or if they work closely with the maker of a specific car, presumably they would work this out.
John:
But if they just say, oh, get into any one of your cars and we'll take over every single visible screen with an interface that has no awareness of what car it's in, I give that a big thumbs down.
Marco:
Well, I mean, to be fair, I think there's a couple of things that might tame this a little bit.
Marco:
So number one, most cars that have screens, even the ones that are having multiple screens, even the ones that are replacing their gauge cluster with a screen, they usually still also have physical controls.
Marco:
And so there's nothing precluding this from being touchscreen available from certain controls, but also having some knobs somewhere that you can use to adjust it.
Marco:
That's what my Model S has that, where there are certain controls that you can access through physical knobs and stuff, or on the touchscreen.
John:
screen that's why you get into the the conflict thing we talked about in the last show every screen you show on the touch screen invites an opportunity for conflict and forces the physical design to be stateless in a way that doesn't that isn't appropriate all you're doing is trying to work around the back it's all i know this control is going to be up on the apple thing and so we'll get out of sync if i don't make this a recentering stateless switch
Marco:
Well, fair enough.
Marco:
But still, having physical controls, even stateless ones, is still pretty great.
Marco:
But anyway, I think what's ultimately going to avoid the future that you are fearing here is I just don't see a lot of car makers being willing to admit to themselves, our UI design sucks so badly that we want to outsource the entire control of this to Apple.
John:
But they can, unless they require you to have a phone on you to drive.
Marco:
Well, right, but they would still have it.
Marco:
But I can't imagine that many car makers actually making the kind of car Apple wants them to make where they really do let Apple take over every single screen completely.
Marco:
That, to me, is very optimistic thinking.
Marco:
The way I look at this is much more like a concept car.
Marco:
This is Apple's concept car.
Marco:
This is a great...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But that car makers would be so, you know, self-reflective enough to recognize how much they suck at it and to be willing to give up control over the identity of their cars and the user experience of how they look 100% to Apple, I think it's not really going to happen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And to be clear, I think it is a good idea for Apple to be able to not just display on the screen that they display on now, but to also be able to take over the instrument cluster.
John:
And Marco, you said like cars that are moving to screens and instrument clusters.
John:
That is all of them.
John:
You know, it doesn't mean they're going to have touchscreens for everything, but all instrument clusters are moving to screens because that's a good use of screens.
John:
You're not going to touch it anyway, but you want to be able to have different gauges.
John:
And sometimes you want to see the map there.
John:
Right.
John:
And to be fair, most car makers are terrible at designing those things.
John:
They are awful.
John:
I mean, it depends.
John:
Some of them are getting better.
John:
I feel like where a lot of car makers fall down is in the rest of the stuff, like in just the boring things about adjusting your seats and their desire to have weird 80s or, I don't know, 2001 Web 2.0 swoopy gradients and stuff.
John:
It's like, what are you doing, right?
John:
So Apple probably would do better than them there.
John:
But that's small potatoes.
John:
That's not the really important stuff.
John:
But then...
John:
On top of all that is all the specific things that every particular car does.
John:
Lots of cars have very specific features and stuff.
John:
And Apple's not, you know, messing with the drivetrain or controlling the ABS or anything like that.
John:
And those features need to be exposed in some way.
John:
And Apple can't really be aware of them.
John:
And even if a car company did want to work with Apple that closely, I don't think they would.
John:
It's just too much work to expose every individual feature of every individual car through this Apple interface.
John:
And by the way, we still have to make our own interface because people need to be able to drive without an iPhone.
John:
So...
John:
i don't know we'll see what comes of this like it was so far out in the future you know end of 2023 models uh might have something like this but yeah i don't if if they do this the first car that does this it's going to be a lot like the tesla model where where it's like if you like everything to be all on screens and you want those screens to all be controlled by apple there's one car that does it but that's probably not going to be the deciding factor in you buying it because there's so much more to a car than what shows up on the screens
Casey:
It's interesting, though.
Casey:
I can see it going any number of ways, and so time will tell.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Fitness Plus no longer requires, or the fitness app, excuse me, no longer requires an Apple Watch, which is exciting for a certain John Siracusa.
John:
Yeah, that was a good turnaround time.
John:
One episode and they fixed it for me.
Yeah.
John:
heard the episode and it shoved into that i do wonder why they did that though this is just total coincidence i had no foreknowledge of this or whatever and i just happened to be annoyed by this feature that has existed forever and then they fixed it but you know it makes sense i i'll i want to see how that's implemented does that mean when i upgrade to ios 16 slash ipod os 16 i'll just have the fitness app because that's what all the help docs said it's like oh it's already installed on your phone or already installed in your ipad i was like no it isn't i don't see it anywhere so we'll see how it goes but thumbs up for that
Marco:
Before we move on to watchOS stuff, I did want to briefly cover one thing they very quickly mentioned for the iOS section, and it's actually part of all their OSes, I believe now, is something called rapid security response.
Marco:
I want to learn more about what this means.
Marco:
But it sounds kind of like some kind of faster and possibly more forceful or more automatic way to install security patches.
Marco:
So I don't know if this is something like an extension to XProtect where Apple can just silently disable a binary remotely on all their computers without issuing a software update if some malware gets out of control.
Marco:
If it's something like that or if it's something more like how...
Marco:
Like on Android, one of the ways Google gets around too many problems with their horrendous software uptake rate is that they've moved a huge amount of Android's logic and libraries and stuff to this thing called Google Play Services, which they can update much more frequently and easily than the actual base Android operating system that things are running on.
Marco:
So I wonder if this is something kind of in that vein where maybe Apple is moving certain security processes into something they can kind of force update without an OS update actually occurring.
Marco:
Maybe something like that.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
I do want to hear more about this in the future as we learn more about it.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right, so watchOS 9.
Casey:
There's going to be a remastered astronomy face, and I could hear your scream of excitement from here, Marco.
Marco:
When they said, you know, here we are, we're expecting, like, hey, maybe this is the year custom watch faces, or maybe they'll just give us one giant complication so we can make our own kind of that way.
Marco:
And instead, Kevin Lynch goes up there and he's like, we have four new faces.
Marco:
We've remastered the astronomy face, a new lunar face, playtime,
Marco:
which and then metropolitan where the font stretches out if you twist the crown oh my god like why don't you like fun right come on mark the apple the apple watch face situation is playtime it's like what are they doing like they're they're just playing around
John:
around this is what the people want they give the people what they want is it is it really what the people want they really just want pictures of their kids but either way i feel like if you don't want to use these faces don't use them i mean what are you gonna do they take away your uh your solar face that you like um i don't know i don't think so they don't i don't think they ever take away faces if these are just added in addition to it it's fine
Marco:
Is there anybody working full-time on Apple Watch faces?
Marco:
Do they have any full-time employees doing this?
John:
They just had a cool astronomy face where it goes to zoom in on the Earth and shows the clouds and everything.
John:
If that's what you want, there's a good implementation of that thing.
Marco:
No, I mean, frankly, I've almost given up because like, you know, I do wear the watch much more now than I have in previous years.
Marco:
I wear it almost every day for most of the day now.
Marco:
And I just I just use what the heck is this infograph infograph modular is a face I use.
Marco:
And I just I cover it with my with complications, one of which is my own in the big center spot.
Marco:
This custom thing I made for that's kind of approximates the solar face.
Marco:
And I just I cover the whole thing as like, OK, we're going to make this a an information process.
Marco:
display not a not an attractive watch face because apple is not capable of making attractive watch faces and they refuse to let us make our own and that is continuing i don't know i thought i thought metropolitan looked pretty good at a glance i mean the whole stretchy font thing was a little bit weird but i thought in general it looked good
Marco:
no uh anyway that's a hard disagree in case anyone was uh unable to determine what mark i mean there were a couple of interesting uh comments um kevin said that they're bringing rich complications to more faces so what i assume this means is back when they when they made the transition from the apple watch series 3 which is no longer supported even though it's still for sale which is funny but so that's great there
Marco:
Series 3 support has dropped from watchOS 9.
Marco:
Thank God we can stop supporting it soon in our apps.
Marco:
Anyway, so they're bringing rich complications.
Marco:
So when they went from Series 3 to Series 4 and they rounded the corners of the screen and everything, they also, I think, added more RAM.
Marco:
The processor became 64-bit.
Marco:
It was a pretty big upgrade, and that allowed them...
Marco:
to make complications multicolor and have those new, like, circular ones that have, like, the different... You know, it's much more rich complication design.
Marco:
Those complications are also able to be written in SwiftUI as of, I think, last year or the year before.
Marco:
Now, as I mentioned earlier, like, the...
Marco:
the new widget API to make home screen widgets on the iPhone, you now use that same code to make widgets for the watch.
Marco:
So they've modernized much about the widgets that are existing there, and it sounds like they're bringing that capability to more watch faces, maybe the older ones that predated the Series 4's introduction, that previously only had plain text complications, maybe that's now, more of those can possibly be these new colorful modern ones.
Marco:
So all of that, that's all good.
Marco:
Those are all good, solid updates to complications.
Marco:
So I'm glad to see that.
Marco:
Complications needed updates, so that's great, especially the ability to now use the same code with iOS lock screen widgets.
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
The actual watch faces, I think they're going to keep just kind of doing something to us around on those that I just...
Marco:
I've given up on that.
Marco:
They're never going to give me good watch faces.
Marco:
They cannot design them themselves to save their lives, at least if they have hands.
Marco:
So, oh well, I'm giving up on that.
Marco:
I'm going to just dive straight into continuing my use of Infograph Modular and covering it with complications that I can possibly make.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
There's also going to be share sheet and photos picker APIs on the watch.
Casey:
I'm not sure why that's super useful, but I encourage them to make the watch more functional.
Casey:
So that's cool.
Casey:
They spent some time talking about workouts.
Casey:
They had a really interesting discussion about how to get running metrics from just what your wrist is doing, which I thought was pretty cool.
Casey:
They're doing heart rate zones during workouts.
Casey:
You can do custom workouts.
Casey:
They'll detect triathlons.
Casey:
and fitness like i said earlier for all iphone users but it's only the move or red ring they don't have anything to do with standing and they don't have anything to do with exercise it's only the red ring but still thought that was neat uh they talked about some health stuff including uh some really interesting work they're doing with sleep uh they're talking about heart health and afib history and they're doing a lot of work with medications and tracking your medications quote discreetly and conveniently quote so logging reminders and
Casey:
using a camera to scan your pill bottles to enter them.
Casey:
They're talking about drug-to-drug interactions, including between medications and alcohol, for example.
Casey:
All good work.
Casey:
Anything else on iOS before we talk the Mac?
Marco:
Yeah, all of that stuff is great.
Marco:
The Workout app looks like it has a lot of good stuff for runners.
Marco:
I might try some of that myself.
Marco:
The AFib stuff is great.
Marco:
I mean, this is something that I've known people in real life
Marco:
who have problems with afib and i've recommended whenever i've heard anybody with this i've told them like hey you should consider getting one of the recent apple watches because the afib detection is really useful if if you have that condition it's very very useful and so to have afib history which they said we expect to receive fda clearance soon on the afib history feature so that means they don't have it yet
Marco:
So that means the AFib history feature might not launch on a particular timeline that we're expecting.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
But assuming that clears the FDA at some point, that's a great feature.
Marco:
That can really make a big difference in people's lives.
Marco:
That's a fantastic thing.
Marco:
I'm very, very glad they're doing that.
John:
The medication thing kind of reminds me of when they had menstrual cycle tracking.
John:
It's like, geez, finally, what kind of health-related things do huge portions of the population have to deal with?
John:
And so, yeah, medications.
John:
People take them.
John:
They exist.
John:
The health app should help you manage them.
John:
Not that there's plenty of third-party apps that do or whatever, but if they're going to build in this health system, improving the ability to keep track of what you're taking, remind you to take them, it's a no-brainer.
John:
I'm glad they finally got around to adding that.
Yep.
Casey:
so we got a bunch of hardware maybe not a bunch but we got some hardware and we got an m2 which i think we all thought was possible but personally i didn't think it was likely for today but sure enough we got an m2 we got a second gen uh apple silicon processor 20 billion transistors 25 more than the m1 100 gigs a second memory bandwidth which is 50 more than m1
Casey:
The memory limit for the Unified RAM is increased to 24GB, 8-core CPU for high performance for efficiency, 18% greater performance over M1, a 10-core GPU, which is between 25% and 35% faster than M1, 40% faster neural engine, 8K, H.264, and HEVC ProRes media engine.
Casey:
And all of this is going to start out in, as we did expect, the new MacBook Air.
Casey:
We didn't expect it for today, but we did expect that would be where the M2 launched, and sure enough, it did.
Casey:
MacBook Air, quick highlights.
John:
Let me talk about the M2 first.
Casey:
Oh, okay, sure.
John:
So if you have been following the rumors, it's kind of difficult to tell from the presentation.
John:
So is this the M1 Plus and they just put the M2 name on it or whatever?
John:
Because we don't have all the details of this.
John:
But honestly, it doesn't really matter much.
John:
Like the one thing that...
John:
The main thing that determines the performance of this chip is the process, right?
John:
And it's still 5nm.
John:
It's a newer 5nm one.
John:
I think it's the, whatever it's called, N5P or whatever that they use for the A16, maybe?
John:
Or the...
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Anyway, it's not three nanometers is the point, right?
John:
So you're not going to see some huge decrease in power consumption or whatever because the previous chip was, the M1 is five nanometers and this one is also five nanometers.
John:
It's just slightly better five nanometers.
John:
So to the extent that this uses less power while doing the same thing, that is the improvements in the five nanometer process and maybe some small improvements to the architecture, right?
John:
But beyond that, if you were looking for a chip that is one better than the M1, it would look a lot like the M2.
John:
It's a little bit bigger.
John:
Not much, but it's a little bit bigger.
John:
It's got a little bit more stuff in it and, you know, more GPU cores can support more RAM.
John:
The things that are in it are a little bit faster, but they're not one or two percent faster.
John:
They're significant bumps for a chip that we're not even sure if it's even using any different cores than the other one.
John:
It might even be using the same cores as the M1 and it's using also a five nanometer process, albeit a revised one.
John:
this m2 is completely worthy of the name m2 even though it's not three nanometers and even though it doesn't have double the number of cores or whatever like i'm completely satisfied with this m2 being one more than the m1 i did love the part later in the presentation when craig uh made fun of the uh
John:
The crack marketing team with their triumph for naming the M1 and the M2.
John:
But honestly, within Apple, it is a triumph to have a sane naming scheme for more than a few years in a row.
John:
So we'll see how they go with this.
John:
We'll see what the thing in the Mac Pro ends up being called and if they just sort of lose the plot and end up calling it the XP79.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, we do have the M1 Max, which is not the largest and maximum chip in the M1 lineup.
John:
It's, you know, the naming team eventually gets, you know, too far over their skis and has a problem.
John:
So, but this M2, I think it's good.
John:
It's, you know, it would have been better in 3 nanometers, fine, but Apple can't make that happen if 3 nanometer isn't ready, right?
John:
And 3 nanometer will be nice for an M3 some year.
John:
So,
John:
you know, this, it's a little, you know, we talked about it before.
John:
It's a little bit weird that Apple's most powerful computers have an M1 something in them.
John:
And now Apple's least powerful computers will have an M2 something in them.
John:
But that's just what we talked about before, the nature of the way you roll out chips.
John:
You don't start with the biggest one.
John:
You start with the smallest one and you work your way up to the higher power one.
John:
So I think this will just be the cadence from now on.
John:
Um, and looking at, you know, without knowing the details of the ship and just looking at the specs, um, I think it is a worthy successor to the M1, which was already fantastic.
John:
And this seems equally fantastic.
John:
Just maybe, you know, 10, 15% more.
Casey:
so new macbook air uh quick highlights huge applause by the way uh magsafe with two usbc connections uh 20 reduction volume 11.3 millimeters thick which is less than a half an inch to a little over two and a half pounds four colors including star or excuse me midnight which looks like the spiritual successor to the black book and holy crap it looks good
Casey:
Asterisk.
Casey:
High impedance audio jack.
Casey:
13.6-inch liquid retina display, as mentioned with the notch.
Casey:
500 nits, which is 25% brighter.
Casey:
A 1080p camera with two times the low-light performance.
Casey:
Four-speaker sound system.
Casey:
Spatial audio.
Casey:
A, quote, silent fanless design, quote.
Casey:
First-party compact two-port power adapter is available.
Casey:
Although I think I saw Quinn mention it was only like 35 watts or something like that.
Casey:
And then you can fast charge on the 67-watt adapter to 50% in 30 minutes.
Casey:
And this is starting at how much?
Casey:
$1,200.
Marco:
And they're keeping the M1 Air, the outbound, they're keeping it in the lineup just as we do with the iPhones at $1,000.
Marco:
And this is $1,200.
John:
It's still a good computer.
John:
By the way, the power adapter, if you scroll way down in the show notes, I think you'll see a picture of that power adapter.
John:
Yeah, it was rumored.
John:
It was another one of those rumors that leaked and turned out to be dead on.
John:
It was something we never got to, but from like weeks or months ago, we scrolled down on our document, like, oh, that's that power adapter that just announced today.
John:
It's interesting that they give you a choice of the power adapters.
John:
Like, if you buy the expensive MacBook Air, you get your choice of which power adapter you want.
John:
If you buy the cheaper one, you have to pay extra for the fancier ones.
John:
It's
John:
Anyway, so Marco, tell us what these things are like in real life.
Marco:
So the colors, I think, are the first and most obvious thing.
Marco:
One thing, we did not get the array of colors that was rumored last year when they first started rumors of the new MacBook Air.
Marco:
And we also did not get the whitish or white screen bezel and keyboard, which I think ultimately would have looked really cool and modern.
Marco:
And I kind of wish they had that.
Marco:
It would have made them look more like the small iMac.
John:
Yeah, I kind of like the way they look now.
John:
I mean, I get what you're saying.
John:
I think they would have looked great if they were sort of the iMac to go like the original iBook was.
John:
But they're clearly not that.
John:
And so, you know, I'm not a big fan of the white bezels and certainly not a fan of white keyboards.
John:
It's just they don't seem to hold, you know, they don't stay white for long.
John:
Maybe they still will go with that at some point.
John:
But, you know, what they went with is, I think, the safe choice for a laptop.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think part of the reason why they did it, I think, is because the new air screen has a notch, and so far all of our notches have been black, and I think making the notch in white, it would reveal the cutouts of exactly where the camera and stuff is in the top, and I think it would be uglier and more distracting possibly.
Marco:
So my guess is that's why they didn't go that direction, is because at whatever point the decision was made that this was going to be a notch display, that probably knocked that possibility right out.
Marco:
speaking of camera and the notch better camera than a 1600 apple studio display yes well that's not hard i mean you know oh and by the way there's that whole feature about using your phone as as a camera we'll get we'll get to that in a little bit yeah yeah uh anyway so um this the macbook air so i got to look at them i played with them except for the blue one but i get to look at the other ones and i saw the blue one from a few feet away
Marco:
So I will say the gray and silver ones, space gray and silver, look exactly like you'd expect.
Marco:
One thing that is different about them compared to the MacBook Pro is that the MacBook Pro has the black keyboard well around the keys.
Marco:
The MacBook Air, that keyboard, well, is metal.
Marco:
So it's just like it has been from laptops of yesteryear.
Marco:
The space between the keys has the body color of the metal.
Marco:
So it doesn't look as modern as the MacBook Pro does.
Marco:
It still looks slightly, I wouldn't say old, but it looks overall less exciting.
Marco:
When the iMac came out, it looked so exciting because it was so fresh and new.
Marco:
You had all these colors and you had all the white accents and everything.
Marco:
It just looked light and fresh and colorful.
Marco:
The new MacBook Air does not look that way.
Marco:
It looks like a low-end MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And it still looks good, but it does not have that excitement of, ooh, look at the way that thing looks.
Marco:
It feels fantastic.
Marco:
When you pick it up, it feels like nothing.
Marco:
It feels weightless.
Marco:
You can pick it up one-handed because it has the good new foot design.
Marco:
You can pick it up one-handed.
Marco:
You can lift the screen lid one-handed.
Marco:
The whole bottom won't come up with it, although just barely.
Marco:
You can tell the weight balance.
Marco:
They achieved that, but just barely.
Marco:
So it feels fantastic to handle.
Marco:
Just really great in the hand.
Marco:
The colors, as I said, I think I would probably go either Starlight, which is the new gold, which is nothing like the old gold.
Marco:
The old gold one was so bright it was almost orange in certain lighting.
Marco:
uh this one the starlight is very much like a very pale you know and it's i think it's the same color as the apple watch that has the same name and i think the doesn't the iphone base model don't they have the same names anyway so this is you know apple's new or apple's current colors for their low-end devices um so space gray looks just as boring as it always has um silver looks classic and it's probably what i'd go for
Marco:
The starlight is this pale gold.
Marco:
And then the midnight, which is what everybody wants to hear about, is the dark blue.
Marco:
It is very dark.
Casey:
Oh, it's dark blue?
Marco:
Yes.
Casey:
Oh, I did not catch that.
Marco:
Midnight, yeah.
Marco:
You didn't get that?
Marco:
It's a very dark navy blue.
Marco:
In a lot of lighting, it's going to look black.
Casey:
Oh, duh, this is the blue one you were talking about at the top of the show.
Casey:
It didn't even cross my mind that these are one and the same.
Casey:
Holy jimilies.
Casey:
Now I feel like an idiot, but it did not even cross my mind because it looks to me to be black.
John:
I kept wondering why you kept saying it was like the black book.
John:
It's like you realize it's dark blue, right?
Casey:
No, I didn't realize it was dark.
Casey:
I'm an idiot, but I didn't realize that.
Marco:
In non-bright lighting, it does look black.
Marco:
It's very dark.
Marco:
And it's so dark that you barely even see the Apple logo on the screen lid unless the lighting catches it exactly.
Marco:
It's very, very dark.
Marco:
And
Marco:
i hate to tell you casey it's a fingerprint magnet oh really that's too bad yeah it really really is and and that it was so fingerprinty when it like you know you don't see it as much on like the main keyboard deck but you see it a lot on the screen later but it's like you know if you see the back of it when it's closed um
Marco:
Yeah, and they were like, you know, they had handlers.
Marco:
When Apple has the hands-on areas, there's like a handler at each hardware piece.
Marco:
And after each person handles it, they wipe it down, like, you know, just for sanitary reasons.
Marco:
So even with that level of, you know, pretty consistently cleaning it, there were a lot of noticeable fingerprints on it.
Marco:
So we'll see how it is in practice in the real world, but it's pretty fingerprinty, and it's darker than you think it is.
Marco:
Whatever you see in pictures, think of it looking almost black.
Marco:
It is very, very dark in person.
Marco:
You don't see the Apple logo on the back very well, and it gets very fingerprinty.
Marco:
So frankly, I don't think I would buy it just for that alone, but a lot of people thought it looked cool who weren't me.
Casey:
Well, that's a bummer.
John:
It's interesting that there's the limitations that are in the air, right?
John:
So obviously they remove one of the limitations because we mentioned that's MagSafe now, which means you don't have to take up one of your USB-C ports with power, assuming you have your MagSafe connector with you, or you can use them if you need to.
John:
So that's great.
John:
Something I saw fly by on Twitter that it looked like it was a screenshot from Apple thing, still only one support for one external monitor, which seems like a weird limitation.
John:
I think we went a couple of rounds on this before.
John:
I don't remember the resolution.
John:
Is it like a limitation on the M1 that was just inherited by the M2?
John:
Is it a silly software limitation?
John:
Really, you can't have more than one screen if you buy an adapter, but it just seems like a...
John:
It seems like an inappropriate limitation because we know how powerful these machines are.
John:
The M1 MacBook Air, it was just, you know, phenomenally powerful compared to its predecessors.
John:
It doesn't seem like there's a reason that it should only support one external screen, but apparently that is still the case with this one as well.
John:
Selling the slower charger by default and making you pay more for the bigger, faster charger makes some sense, I guess, but it feels a little bit like you're being nickel-dimed.
John:
What was the other limitation?
Yeah.
Marco:
I will say, they updated the screen.
Marco:
It doesn't have P3 still.
Marco:
They said it has over a billion colors, but I guess it's still not P3.
Marco:
But it is 500 nits now, which is nice.
Marco:
The screen looked great.
Marco:
The only thing is, it does not have... The way I complained forever about how the MacBook Pro, since it went Retina...
Marco:
It wasn't quite a true 2x pixel match.
Marco:
You had to do scaling.
Marco:
And the new MacBook Pros that came out last fall fixed that finally, where you actually finally have true 2x pixels at default settings on new MacBook Pros.
Marco:
You still don't on the new Air.
Marco:
So it's still a lower end display.
Marco:
But I think, you know, given its role, given its price point, that makes total sense.
Marco:
That's a totally excusable flaw.
John:
The other limitation is the RAM limit, which they increased, yay.
John:
But going up to 24, it seems kind of like, oh, couldn't quite make it to 32.
John:
Power constraints, heat, you know, like maybe, hmm.
John:
Like the last time we had, last time I saw 24 anything, it reminded me, I made a joke about it on Twitter, like the...
John:
The old days of the Mac, it had essentially 24-bit addressing because who would ever need more RAM than you can address with 24 bits?
John:
But it turns out eventually you didn't need more RAM to that.
John:
And then when that time came, a bunch of existing Mac applications would take their 32-bit values and use the upper six bits that weren't being used.
John:
Like you could take a pointer and you could put other crap in there, right?
John:
But all of a sudden, if that stuff becomes part of the address, it's like, oh, these apps that...
John:
you know expect that these bits are just for their use they're not going to work on a 32-bit machine so you had to buy 32-bit clean versions of the app like they'd be updated to be 32-bit clean so like we won't put weird crap in the top six bits you know and there was this uh mode 32 plug anyway um that's the last time i can remember seeing 24 uh you usually don't usually see things go like 8 16 32 for a reason but it seems like 24 is like
John:
What can we wedge into this size and power envelope that also seems like it's adequate?
John:
And honestly, I think it is adequate.
John:
But part of the thing that disappoints me with this in terms of capacity is, like, again, M1 is so powerful.
John:
M2 is more powerful still.
John:
there's no reason why you couldn't use a macbook air and use all that 32 gigs of memory if you did some big memory intensive test because there's plenty of compute available for it and sometimes some jobs that you need to do are actually more memory heavy than compute heavy right i know it's not a pro machine all right so it doesn't have to have you know 64 gigs or whatever but
John:
Being able to take the low-end machine and sort of stuff it with the particular thing that is important for what you're going to do with it is useful.
John:
And they're giving you that.
John:
You know, you can make it go up to 24 instead of making it go up to 16.
John:
And by the way, they charge you a huge amount.
John:
It's like 400 bucks for the 24 gigs, which is kind of disappointing.
John:
But I still think this...
John:
This machine, if you gave this machine a little bit more flexibility in terms of the options that you can put into it based on what people need, then you wouldn't need this next machine, which I still find a little bit confusing.
Marco:
Yeah, so they said the MacBook Air was the world's best-selling laptop, and then they said the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the world's second best-selling laptop.
Marco:
And I was wondering, as we kept seeing this, and as I've wondered in public for a while now, ever since,
Marco:
why does that computer still exist?
Marco:
But I think the answer is people seem to be buying it a lot.
Marco:
But they buy because it's cheap.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, and why do they buy something labeled Pro that has none of the modern Pro features?
Marco:
Maybe it's aspirational.
Marco:
Maybe it's the marketing.
Marco:
They just think they need it for some reason.
Marco:
But this computer, when they showed the slide of all the Macs at the end, it stands out because it's so old looking because it still has the old screen proportions without the notch.
Marco:
And it still has a touch bar.
Marco:
It looks really old.
Marco:
so you have you know the old the old style magic you know i guess quote old you know the 2019 era magic keyboard where it does not have the full height function keys or the big touch id button of the new ones it has still the skinny function row with the touch bar but it has the escape button you know that that version of the touch bar um
Marco:
So it has that.
Marco:
It has the old screen bezel with no notch in the top.
Marco:
So the top bezel looks significantly wider than the rest of them because it is.
Marco:
It has the same M2 and everything, pretty much all the same limitations except it has a fan.
Marco:
And they said, again, that the fan is designed, quote, to sustain the performance of the M2.
Marco:
So we will see what happens when people actually get these things.
Marco:
In the M1 generation,
Marco:
What we found in testing is that the MacBook Air that was fanless with the M1 really would hardly ever throttle unless you were doing some very heavy GPU and CPU maximization, like if you're doing video rendering, for instance.
Marco:
And so the difference in practice between having a fan and not having a fan with the M1 was pretty small.
Marco:
The M2, that ratio might be different.
Marco:
We don't know yet.
Marco:
We don't know how they've tuned it, what the thermal characteristics are under load yet of the revised cores and the revised process.
Marco:
So we will see.
Marco:
The calculation might be different.
Marco:
Maybe the new MacBook Air will throttle more than the M1-based one did.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
So time will tell on that.
Marco:
Maybe that's a reason to buy the MacBook Pro to get that little fan so that you can have sustained max performance for a longer time.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But
Marco:
And the battery is also a little bit bigger, too.
Marco:
They quote the MacBook Air at 18 hours of video playback.
Marco:
They quote the MacBook Pro at 20.
Marco:
So it's a little bit better battery life.
John:
Isn't the screen better, too?
Marco:
The screen, I don't think is... I think the screen is actually worse.
Marco:
But is it P3?
Marco:
You know, I don't know if they mentioned that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But anyway, so...
Marco:
This computer, I still think if you're looking at this 13-inch MacBook Pro, I think you should give a serious look at the 14-inch and see if you can reach for that instead because you get a lot more for that machine.
Marco:
They still sell this one, and apparently they sell a lot of them, so that's why they updated it, but I don't see why this machine is still sold.
Casey:
I am unreasonably angry that this is still a thing.
Casey:
Like, I don't understand why this is still a thing.
Casey:
And with the touch bar, like, get rid of the stupid touch bar at this point.
Casey:
I didn't hate the touch bar, but I didn't love it.
Casey:
But at this point, just get rid of the stupid touch bar.
Casey:
If nothing, like, I don't understand why this is a thing.
Casey:
I know the answer is because I sell them.
Casey:
But why is this computer still a thing?
Casey:
Just get rid of the darn thing.
Marco:
I mean, I think the answer is that, like, the 14-inch MacBook Pro starting price is $2,000.
Marco:
And this thing is, like, $1,300.
Marco:
So, like, I see why.
Marco:
Because that price gap is still really big.
Marco:
But I really think anybody who thinks you want or need this 13-inch MacBook Pro...
Marco:
Either see if you can do the 14-inch, which I know is a lot more money, or get the new Air, which is frankly a better feeling and it has the advantage of being silent no matter what you do to it.
Marco:
It probably has more modern other components too, like the screen looks more modern and everything.
Marco:
I think the Air is the better computer for most conditions where you'd be looking at this thing.
John:
Oh, yeah, no, for sure the Air is the better computer, but you can make a good version of this computer because, like you said, there is a big price gap.
John:
The good version of this computer would obviously not have a touch bar.
John:
It would just have a screen and a notch, and the screen would be a slightly better version than the one in the Air, and it would lean more heavily into its strengths, which would be the fan and the bigger battery.
John:
So what you'd have is something that is in price between the Air and the Pro that has some better components, I would probably lean on the screen, and that just is bigger and thicker and has more battery life.
John:
There is a place for that machine, right?
John:
The Air is the one that everybody should get.
John:
We all know that.
John:
It's great.
John:
Like, it does everything you're going to need.
John:
But if someone's like, I just need a little more battery life, but I don't want to pay $2,000.
John:
The 13-inch, maybe you don't call it Pro.
John:
I don't know what you name the machine.
John:
But basically, the machine I'm describing would be a good product.
John:
But this is not it, right?
John:
This is still... This is like the M1 MacBook Air.
John:
It's like, yeah, we did this already.
John:
It's the thing where you take an existing computer and you shove some different... Now they're doing it twice.
John:
We ripped out the guts of it.
John:
No, I just...
John:
yeah i think they need to this this computer needs more love it needs it needs another pass because i another pass and maybe another name um but because i don't i don't think the air there's always going to be a big gap between the air and the bottom end pro so there should be something there and i don't think the air can extend all the way up to that so you just you have to lean into the fact it's bigger it's thicker it's heavier and what do you get for that more battery better screen a fan
Marco:
i mean maybe maybe the the road here is going to be like you know in the same way that they're keeping around the m1 air at a lower price point i wonder if maybe next time they rev the macbook pro maybe it's this fall maybe it's you know a year after that or whatever maybe next time they're the macbook pro the the m1 pro 14 inch sticks around in the lineup and just gets pushed down by a few hundred bucks that would be amazing but i don't see that happening
Marco:
I recognize for non-low-end products, that's less likely, given their patterns.
Marco:
But if they still have a bunch of M1 Pros or M1 Macs sitting around that didn't go into anything by then, that would be some way to close this gap.
Marco:
Because right now, that gap is very, very large.
Marco:
I wish they would close it a little bit price-wise.
Marco:
Because again, this 13-inch MacBook Pro shouldn't exist.
Marco:
People who want to buy it should be able to buy the 14-inch.
Marco:
And so the more Apple can do to close that price gap over time, I think the better their lineup will be.
John:
indeed all right mac os mac os ace ventura pet detective or jesse the body ventura neither one of these things is particularly no they didn't say ventura i wrote down they said ventura i know i'm just saying like the the the pop culture things that spring to mind for people who are not familiar who don't have any preconceived notions for this place in california uh are not great but whatever you know new year new name
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So I really, this is just maybe for me, but I really enjoyed the little cameo from Kyle, the Fitness Plus trainer, when I think it was Craig was trying to find the right place to go to introduce this.
Casey:
I thought that was a fun little cameo.
Casey:
Anyway, stage manager.
Casey:
So you can activate it from control center and it shoves all of your accessory windows off to the side.
Casey:
And then they're all in the left-hand side, or perhaps this is configurable left-hand side, like different stacks or piles is I think the word they used.
Casey:
And you can cycle through the different windows in your pile by clicking on the left-hand side.
Casey:
And as you go between your different groups of windows and stage manager, it, quote, keeps windows arranged just as I left them, quote, Mr. John Syracuse.
Casey:
So, hey, stage manager is for people who have way too many windows and don't know what to do with them, John.
John:
When I saw this feature, I was like, this feature looks much more of a brief for an iPad than a Mac.
John:
And surprise, it was, right?
John:
Apple keeps trying to do things, and, you know, good.
John:
They keep trying to do things to make window management better on the Mac.
John:
But they've tried so many different things, and for the most part, those things remain in the OS.
John:
I don't think people even know how many different things are in macOS to try to help you with window arrangement, because a lot of them are kind of hidden, right?
John:
The snapping to edges of windows and grid positions, how many people even know that exists?
John:
That was added years ago.
John:
It's still there.
John:
You can hold on the option key to override it, right?
John:
The thing where you can tile the windows to be left half, right half, top half, bottom half, all that stuff that they made more visible in recent years in the green window widget, that's still there, too.
John:
it totally is in conflict with this stage manager thing because snapping something to be the left half of the screen now you've got this stupid weird angled blobs of piles that you're still able to recognize and so now we can't snap to the left end of the screen so is that feature either not going to exist or is it going to snap to the edge where the the thing is but what if you don't want to you know is it going to leave a gutter for that but what if you don't use that feature and don't want to have that gutter there now you're losing part of your screen space
John:
And then, of course, we have Mission Control, which has gone through many different names.
John:
It used to be called Expose, where you can get little tiles of windows and rearrange things.
John:
And all of those things exist at the same time.
John:
None of them really integrate with each other or related to each other in any way.
John:
They're just sort of a legacy of trying things.
John:
And every time I see them do something like this, I think, I mean, the Mac way to maybe find a better solution for this
John:
would be to provide much, much better APIs and hooks for third parties to tackle this problem.
John:
I know there's tons of apps like Moom and Magnet and all these other apps that use accessibility features to do this type of stuff, but none of those apps have the deep integration to the Windows server that you would need to really spark some innovation in this space.
John:
Because it's clear that Apple is not entirely sure how to...
John:
help here they keep adding features oh i forgot about spaces that's there too they keep adding features and things and you can use which ones you like and for the most part the good thing is if you don't want to use them they don't get in your way but it's just there's no there's no coherent vision it's just a bunch of stuff and the stuff never leaves which probably makes you happy if you still use it although you might get mad if they change spaces to not work the way you want it and then never abandon it never touch it again for five years or whatever but their their window management solution
John:
is scattershot now if this if this stage manager works for some people great there's a window management feature that previously they weren't giving any people help and then maybe this clicks with some people and it really helps them but for me personally this is not going to help me at all because it doesn't help that's not the way i manage windows at all uh and it is so much more appropriate to the ipad that it almost makes you think it was developed on the ipad and you say you know we can bring this to the mac too which you know i guess fair enough but it's i'm not excited about stage manager
John:
And as we're remembering position of Windows, good luck.
John:
What if I attach two new monitors and change the resolution on all of them and then I click one of those piles?
John:
Who knows what's going to happen?
Marco:
Spoiler alert, I think this was probably designed for iPad first.
Marco:
And I think maybe that also tells you who it's for.
Marco:
Maybe it's for people who start multitasking on an iPad and then want to upgrade to a Mac later.
John:
or want to have the familiar experience because like i know how it works on the ipad it's like well here's a mac oh i don't know what a mac is it's weird and confusing oh you could do window management the kind of the same way but not quite we'll get to that when we talk about the ipad but i just i i really wish i you know i
John:
Either that there was a more coherent vision where they sort of wiped the table clean and said, here's a new way to manage Windows and the Mac and or give third parties full access to the Windows server.
John:
Like, you know what I mean?
John:
Like actual hooks like down to low level things where they can do literally anything and not just like, you know, reaching in from the outside through accessibility APIs.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We move right along.
Casey:
There's spotlight improvements, including searching text inside of images, which is pretty cool, and also running shortcuts.
Casey:
Also, by the way, it's at the bottom of the iOS home screen, which is a little bit different.
Casey:
I think that'll be convenient, but that's definitely different.
John:
Does anyone have, again, Mario, you have the beta?
Marco:
Yeah, the page dots at the bottom become a search box after a second or two when it's displayed.
Marco:
So it starts out as page dots, and then it's a little, little tiny search.
Marco:
And so you tap in search, and you get this little thing, and then it pops up.
John:
I saw that because when they showed them the slide, they showed the dots and then they said, and, you know, and, you know, spotlight is right on your home screen.
John:
And then it faded into being that thing.
John:
And I thought, like, are they showing us where the dots used to be are now spotlight?
John:
But how do I know how many home screens I have?
John:
But literally, that was not a transition on the slide.
John:
That is what the UI does.
Marco:
yeah and like whenever you swipe pages it fades back into the dots for a second then it goes back to search and you can still to be clear you can still pull down on the home screen and spotlight still just come up so that your gesture memory will work the same way but now there's just like a totally an always visible thing there it says search and you just tap that and there it is yeah this is a discoverability thing because if you don't know about pulling down on the home screen it may take you a while to discover it but if there's a prominent widget that you has the word search in it maybe you have a better chance of seeing it
Casey:
mail was getting love yeah i am really excited about this uh you're getting undo send scheduled send followed up follow-up suggestions which by the way did not have a hyphen uh remind me and also quote the biggest overhaul of search in mail we've done in years quote which is exciting and
Casey:
Um, I'm curious, I don't think it will, but I'm curious for any services like fast mail that support these features natively.
Casey:
I wonder if mail will work with those server side features.
Casey:
I presume not, or if it will just do this all locally.
Casey:
And also if you like schedule a send on your Mac and then your Mac is asleep or perhaps off, then what happens?
Casey:
Like, does that email not get sent?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have questions about this, but I'm still, I'm, I'm excited that they're, they're giving mail some love.
Marco:
Yeah, and this, I am so, I should actually set up a mail account on my beta phone to see.
Marco:
But what I really want to see is like, how good is the search on iOS?
Marco:
Because, you know, the search in desktop mail has never been great, but it at least has been comprehensive.
Marco:
iOS mail has always had the challenge of, the iOS mail app, as far as I could tell, has never actually downloaded all your mailbox content to the phone locally.
Marco:
It does what it can.
Marco:
It keeps all the cache of the latest things, whatever, but it doesn't download everything in your entire IMAP account across all folders forever.
Marco:
When you do a search on the iPhone, historically, you hit search, and it first does a really fast search of whatever it has locally, and then it has to go start fetching stuff from the server.
Marco:
That's when it takes a while.
Marco:
It starts paging stuff in.
Marco:
It's slow.
Marco:
That also limits how good of a search it can be if you have a large mail collection.
Marco:
So if the new mail on the iPhone is actually going to download your entire history of mail, then it can actually index it all and do smart stuff with it.
Marco:
So we'll see how that plays out.
Marco:
But that's been one major architectural thing that has limited it so far.
Marco:
But the fact that they're even...
Marco:
Tackling this, I'm very happy to see this because the mail apps on all their platforms have been mostly stagnant for most of their lives.
Marco:
They occasionally get little tiny updates, but usually not much.
Marco:
This is actually really nice modern features that all these modern mail clients that only work on Gmail, they all support all these things.
Marco:
You know, the undoed send, the scheduled send, the remind me, which is I think also called snoozing in many other places.
Marco:
Like that's all great.
Marco:
And again, search has always been pretty rudimentary.
Marco:
And so to have them tackling these things, I'm looking very much forward to seeing how well these things work.
Casey:
Yep, me too.
Casey:
Safari gets a few different things.
Casey:
They get shared tab groups, which I could see actually being pretty convenient.
Casey:
Like there are times when Aaron and I will be working on like a vacation plan or something like that or looking at Airbnbs that we may want to stay at.
Casey:
And rather than just spamming each other via iMessage, we could just have a shared tab group with these tabs open.
Casey:
So I'm actually kind of excited for that.
Casey:
I don't think I'll use it often, but I think it'll be super convenient when I do.
Casey:
Passkeys, which is the Fido stuff we talked about, what was that, last week, week before?
Casey:
They spent a fair bit of time on that, and I'm excited to see that it's becoming more and more real.
John:
The news on the Fido stuff is basically like last year, and we talked about this, if you didn't hear it, it was on what?
John:
What number are we on now?
John:
486.
John:
Yeah, 484.
John:
Episode 484.
John:
You can hear us talk about FIDO.
John:
All that stuff is still relevant.
John:
The last time they announced this at last year's WWDC, it was all the same stuff, but last year they said, hey, these APIs are just for you to try.
John:
Like, we're not sure these are the final APIs.
John:
Try them.
John:
Give us feedback.
John:
Like, let us know what we're doing.
John:
Don't use these in production.
John:
They're not ready for you to actually implement this.
John:
This is just to try stuff out.
John:
This year they're saying...
John:
All the same stuff, but now you can use it.
John:
It's real.
John:
You can use it.
John:
Please implement the stuff.
John:
I haven't looked at the sessions yet, but that was my impression from seeing the keynote stuff is that what was last year just something for developers to try out is now real and people can put in products.
John:
I hope that's the case.
John:
I look forward to seeing the specific sessions on this to find out.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Gaming got a section, I guess.
Casey:
Like, this is a thing?
John:
When I watch these things, like, so if you follow console development, every game console and, of course, Windows, like, have all these, have APIs to do all of these things.
John:
you know whatever the apple's talking out of particular you can look at it and say oh that's like x from playstation or xbox but the apple version of it and this year was some upcoming stuff resource loading blah blah whatever like and it always is kind of fascinating to me that apple is putting in all this work to essentially create on their own a first class gaming api stack from top to bottom of
John:
uh just like you know sony does with playstation just like microsoft does with xbox and pc gaming right apple's doing that too uh the only difference is apple is doing that in service of essentially phone games right which are the mobile games are the largest part of the gaming market if you think it's just a sideshow it's not it's the biggest part but it's not the show as they say it is not you know triple a games it is not the high profile ones it is not it's kind of like not the
John:
not the blockbusters.
John:
And I say that only if your definition of blockbuster is like public consciousness and not money, because Apple's got plenty of blockbusters, but they're casino games for children.
John:
But it's weird that these APIs all look really good, but they work on Apple platforms, right?
John:
And only on Apple platforms.
John:
And I think they're good, and they would let people make lots of cool things, but nobody is going to really invest in
John:
writing against these pretty good apis for apple platforms for a game that is intended to run elsewhere so if you're writing a iphone type game or a game that's targeting the ipad or whatever yeah this is great they're the apis are good they're getting better all the time you know the industry standard industry-wide features eventually come to apple's platforms you get to use them they have great hardware um
John:
But if your goal is to sell your game to as many people as possible, you're going to use some cross-platform engine, you know, like Unity or whatever.
John:
And then Unity will adapt to these APIs and stuff like that.
John:
So it's not a shame that Apple does this, but I look and I'm like, wow, Apple spends a lot of money and time and has a lot of really smart peeking, making a lot of cool APIs.
John:
and no matter how good they are at it that's never going to you know help them get what they seem to want which is like oh let's have resident evil village show like that a game is out for every other platform is soon going to be on our platforms like big deal like apple seems to want to be like we're great we're big in games we have triple a games the cool gamers like our platforms like no
John:
they don't they like mobile gamers like your platform that's that's your business that's how you get 80 of your billions of dollars from the app store right like that's that's a thing and it's good to have a good gaming apis for that but they keep trying to make fetch happen they keep trying to be like no resident evil that's cool right kids
John:
and that's just their problem is not their hardware and the problem is not their well i'm gonna say it's not their api the problem is not the quality of their api the problem is that their apis are only their apis and aren't you know cross-platform and you could argue the same thing there's playstation specific apis there's xbox specific apis but
John:
I think there's more sort of commonality in that world than there is in the Apple world.
John:
With Apple, it's like top to bottom everything Apple proprietary.
John:
And any work you do to optimize specifically for Apple platforms is basically useless for you elsewhere, which is a shame.
Casey:
Continuity.
Casey:
I am genuinely excited about FaceTime handoff.
Casey:
So if you have a FaceTime call on your phone and then you walk up to your Mac...
Casey:
uh it'll see that your face your phone is nearby and that it's doing a facetime call and you can hand off the call from your phone to your mac which i'm really excited about i confess i thought that already existed no no no no definitely not i just i totally thought like it shows how often i do this type of thing maybe it only exists in for audio calls or something but yeah facetime handoff i don't think it exists at all
Casey:
Uh, continuity camera.
Casey:
This is a feature made for me and my crap ass camera on my beloved studio display.
John:
This is another thing where if you scroll down on our show notes, in fact, just below the giant WWDC things, we have a section called using the iPhone as a webcam.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And I actually tweeted a picture of my setup when I was watching everything today.
Casey:
And I had the show notes up.
Casey:
And in that picture, you can see exactly what you're talking about before WWDC happened.
Casey:
Well, anyways, you can use an iPhone as a webcam.
Casey:
I guess if it's a phone that's connected to your Apple ID and all that jazz, you don't even have to wake up the phone.
Casey:
There's no wires required.
Casey:
It supports center stage.
Casey:
It has a studio light mode.
Casey:
It is unclear to me whether or not that kicks on the flashlight on your phone.
John:
I think it's just the same weird brightening that the Apple Studio display taught us to do and makes our faces all look weird.
Marco:
This has been a feature of iPhone cameras for a little while.
Marco:
It's an extension of portrait mode.
Marco:
They take portrait mode and apply some machine learning.
Marco:
They introduced it a few years ago.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And then they also have something called desk view.
Casey:
And apparently if you have a phone that has the ultra wide camera on it, it will use the single image from the ultra wide camera, but split it into two images for the perspective of the person on the other end of the FaceTime call, where you see your face in one of the images and the desktop, your physical desktop, not your computer's desktop.
Casey:
I'm talking the physical desktop you place your hands on is also shown as like a second image.
Casey:
If this works at all, that's going to be super cool.
Casey:
And I immediately flashed back to Declan's kindergarten teacher last year because he was virtual all year last year.
Casey:
And she went through ridiculous hoops.
Casey:
This woman is an angel.
Casey:
And she went through ridiculous hoops in order to get it so that she could easily show the kids what's on her desk, what's on her screen, her herself.
Casey:
It was so complicated for her.
Casey:
And I felt so bad.
Casey:
And she did such an amazing job of it.
Casey:
And as it turns out, if it was this year, she could just slap an iPhone behind her screen and call it a day.
Casey:
Like, I just think that's super, super neat.
Marco:
Yeah, this is, we'll see, like, what are the limitations of the amount of image data it's getting off of that tiny little sensor on the ultra-wide lens and how much, you know, dewarping it's having to do to make this.
Marco:
Like, it's probably going to be fairly low resolution, especially as you get closer towards one side.
Marco:
But I think it's still a really cool thing that they're doing this at all.
John:
yeah although so this is kind of you know we have the apology mouse after they did the puck mouse this is i know this isn't actually an apology for the apple studio display camera given the timing but it is you know hey we sold a fairly expensive monitor with a not so great camera on it but you all have iphones right well if you're desperate you can do this and to sort of the you know the janky cherry on top is the fact that they're
John:
third party they're not even selling a first party like thing to attach your phone to your screen of your laptop it's all just a bunch of third party plastic things that like snap onto the magnet or whatever like they don't look good they look out of scale it's weird to have you know an iphone 13 pro max hanging off the end of your macbook air screen just to get a better camera
John:
it's weird to have your phone up there because what if you want to use your phone and not everyone has an old phone hanging around that they're going to use and just you look at all this and it's like apple just put better cameras in your computers for crying out loud like this like i it really it really boggles my mind at this point like how much does the best camera in the back of an iphone cost apple when they're 50 like how much could it possibly cost a hundred dollars whatever the price is just pass it on to the consumer and
John:
and put good cameras in your computers and that's what we're saying like the macbook air better camera than the apple studio display why because it's not a wide angle center stage thing it is a more narrowly focused you know like quote-unquote regular camera that's not great it's not an awesome camera but at least you have more resolution and less compromise than the wide angle one
John:
um and just like we talked about that this was in the show notes it was in the shots there's a third-party app called camo that does this right and obviously apple can do it better than any third-party app because they have system integration presumably it'll be you know more reliable and just faster and better like you know it's feel bad when an app gets sherlocked but this this is the type of feature that only apple can implement because they're the only ones who have access to these apis basically
John:
and you know the iphone is fairly a fairly closed platform all right so i'm not saying this is bad i'm glad it exists but apple this is not the solution to your bad cameras i believe that it is possible to do better with the cameras that you put in your max please make this feature essentially obsolete yeah this this is a glorious hack but it's a hack nonetheless and and if we can make it less necessary that would be wonderful
John:
although even if they put good cameras in the mac the one role that it does have and this is the way it should be advertised is don't hang your phone off the back of your computer now you have a mobile thing like oh i need to show you something i need to go over here and do this and do that that is what why this feature should exist it should never exist to say i'm going to take a computer that already has a camera facing me like this laptop and i'm going to replace it with this better camera that's in my very expensive phone it should
John:
you know, cause the advantage of a camera in your phone that your Mac is sort of seeing through is you can move it around or let me look over here and look over there.
John:
I'm going to go into this room and like, I don't know what the range is on the thing, but like having a mobile camera is useful.
John:
A mobile additional camera is useful, is also useful, but the ones that are built in should be better.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
I don't remember any talk of settings during the keynote, but there's been a lot of a big kerfuffle about it since the keynote ended.
Casey:
John, can you fill me in on what's going on here?
John:
I haven't looked at it myself either because I don't have betas installed, but I've seen at least one screenshot and heard some things from some people about it.
John:
This was rumored, and I can't even tell from the screenshot whether this part of it is true, but my assumption is that the application that used to be called System Preferences on your Mac, where you could change settings and stuff,
John:
has now been renamed to be settings which is what it's called on ios and ipad os and that makes sense again i can't confirm that from the screenshot but i'm assuming it's true but the real news is the app itself looks totally different what does it look like looks a lot like the settings app looks on your ipad it's on the left hand side there's a little scrolling list of uh things that are in order that only apple understands and on the right hand side is sort of the detail pane of the things showing up
John:
And from the people who have actually used this briefly in the beta today, what I've heard is that it's buggy and janky, as you would imagine for an app that has been completely replaced with a totally new interface.
John:
Maybe it uses SwiftUI and has weird problems.
John:
It does.
John:
Maybe the window doesn't resize quite properly.
John:
Maybe it's missing features that existed in the previous version.
John:
The one technical advantage I have is that it's my understanding that the preference panes now run in separate processes, which is better, so...
John:
they won't you know take down your thing when they crash or whatever but like i don't know i think that might have even been true in the existing system preferences anyway system preferences hasn't changed much since mac os 10 10.0 right it's always just been a grid of randomly organized icons with some options to move them around and some you know they add the search features with the little spotlight that actually puts a little like spotlight graphic or whatever but in the end it's just been basically a grid of icons and apple moves them around everyone so while
John:
Unifying that interface with the settings app on the rest of the platform makes sense to me.
John:
But unfortunately, the settings app on all Apple's other platforms, isn't that great?
John:
It's confusing.
John:
It's hard to find things.
John:
Unless you have really internalized Apple's thinking with how they break things up into groups, it's not easy to find things.
John:
Granted, there's a search bar at top.
John:
So anyway, I'm all for rearranging this.
John:
I don't spend a lot of time in the settings apps.
John:
I think this is the right move.
John:
Unifying it across all platforms is a good idea.
John:
But kind of like shortcuts for the Mac...
John:
It would also be nice if the app itself was a good app.
John:
And this seems like, at least in the very, very first beta from a few people who have used it on the very first day it's out, it seems like it might not be quite there yet.
Marco:
A couple of minor things.
Marco:
It's called system settings, not settings, which is weird.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
So close.
Marco:
Yeah, I understand.
Marco:
So it went from system preferences to system settings.
Marco:
Why not just call it settings?
Marco:
If the whole goal is to unify it across the other platforms.
John:
It's just called settings on the phone.
John:
Are they not settings for the system?
John:
What are they settings for?
John:
System seems redundant.
John:
Maybe they'll change that.
John:
You can change the name pretty easily.
Marco:
And they mentioned in State of the Union that they were using SwiftUI across more of their own apps.
Marco:
They specifically called out the new settings app as using SwiftUI.
Marco:
The wording of it was a little bit waffly before it sounds like it might not be all SwiftUI.
Marco:
And they also called out that they rewrote the font book app that apparently is entirely SwiftUI.
John:
that's probably that's probably pretty safe yeah i hope people are spending a lot of time in font book i mean i think a font book cannot be written in swift ui swift ui needs a lot more work than we think font book is you know that's that's the thing about with these rewrites like you know when you get a real like even a read a font book a font book if you launch it now on your mac it has a lot of features and a lot of things you can do with it how many of those are still going to be present in the rewrite same thing with system preferences people might not know but system preferences has like a menu in the menu bar that you can do things you can
John:
sort things differently you can hide preference panes there's a lot of junk in there and i'm not sure you don't need to bring that all over but some people are going to miss some of the features that are gone and yeah like this is the type of thing where i think someone had an idea a long time ago of what settings should look like and it hasn't really been revisited or rethought and now it's just sort of spreading everywhere and eventually it will be the same everywhere but i feel like it's not
John:
With the exception of having a sidebar, which is kind of like the iPad interface, like the phone just has the list of settings and you sort of go into and out of it because it's a long, sceny screen.
John:
But on the iPad, they have a sidebar.
John:
And on the Mac, they have a sidebar as well.
John:
And presumably the Mac window is resizable or whatever.
John:
But there are legacy concerns here for third-party preference pains and how they're going to work and how they lay themselves out.
John:
And just for the first-party ones, I don't like the idea that every time Apple redoes something, we should just assume there's going to be a year of using an app that a third-party developer would have been embarrassed to release.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, if you were...
John:
if you made a third-party app and it was like max shortcuts for an entire year it wouldn't get reviewed well like people would review it and say this app looks kind of like it's you know it needs more work it needs more polish right we don't but nobody reviews apple's apps like you don't have a choice you like a better shortcuts app tough luck right you like different settings app tough luck this is the one you get and so we just all have to stomach it for a year but honestly i mean and this is prejudging it's the very first beta like maybe this will be awesome by the time it's released but like
John:
I feel like the bar for when Apple does a new version of an app should be much higher than it is.
John:
It shouldn't be like, oh, it's okay that it will be, you know, cruddy for a year with a bunch of obvious bugs.
John:
That shouldn't be acceptable.
Marco:
Yeah, well, and also, you know, I think Apple has, you know, some reputational debt to possibly pay off or make worse here because when they've recently rewritten Mac apps,
Marco:
Like, think about Disk Utility.
Marco:
They rewrote Disk Utility, and the new version of it was much worse than the old one for a while.
Marco:
In certain ways, it might still be.
Marco:
They don't have a lot of great history of tackling major rewrites of stuff on macOS recently with high quality in mind.
Marco:
Usually the replacements are worse than what they replaced if it's a direct rewrite of something old.
Marco:
If they're getting better at that, great.
Marco:
They have to show us and they have to establish a new baseline of good performance there.
Marco:
It remains to be seen whether they're actually doing that or whether these rewrites will actually end up being worse.
John:
And also I have to say for existing system purposes, since I've been spending some time on setting my wife's new computer and everything, a lot of them over the recent years have basically had little web views inside them.
John:
In fact, some people like you can do this thing where you can bring up the WebKit inspector and start inspecting the little web views that you didn't know were web views.
John:
Sort of the expectation of polish of like, there's this pane that you're going to see that's going to be populated by WebKit views, but you won't know the WebKit views and there's no reload button.
John:
You don't see when there are errors.
John:
It shows up with like, when I go into the Apple ID stuff, I was trying to do with Apple ID or Apple Pay.
John:
Sometimes things just either don't display or...
John:
You have to know, like when it says your Apple ID settings need to be updated.
John:
You're familiar with that one.
John:
You get a little badge and it wants you to do something.
John:
You do the thing and you just have to know from experience.
John:
After you do the thing that it wants you to do, which is usually entering some password or something, you just have to wait like five to 17 seconds.
John:
and don't touch anything during this time but just there's no indication that anything is happening but just be aware that there are http requests in flight behind the scenes and there's nothing additional that you need to do and if you click away and go someplace else you will not have done it so just wait wait wait and if you're lucky then the screen will update it's like oh now we've done the thing sometimes you click into something it'll just be like a blank gray screen and nothing will work sometimes you'll try to add your apple card to apple pay and it will go through a bunch of things and it'll say sorry i couldn't add it try again or cancel
John:
And it'll be like that for an entire day.
John:
And you have no idea why, but tomorrow will work, right?
John:
These are unacceptable for a settings app.
John:
Settings app should be like, there's a bunch of stuff that you do and it works.
John:
If I change my DNS, it should change my DNS.
John:
If I change the screen resolution, it changes it.
John:
There shouldn't be like crashing bugs or display errors or inability to resize the window in the system settings app.
John:
It is like, I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the system setting app.
John:
It's not like I spend all day in there, but it's like, this is fundamental.
John:
This is just like,
John:
I feel like it should be like low degree of difficulty UI.
John:
You are changing some settings about the sound.
John:
The sound input should be X. The sound output should be Y. The volume should be this.
John:
That stuff should just work 100% of the time.
John:
And to be fair, the sound one does.
John:
But I feel that way about all of them, and especially the Apple ID stuff, which is so fraught.
John:
that whole world when i click on like my little face and go into the apple i do think feels so fraught to me and it's so delicate and i have to be so careful and some huge percent of the time something just doesn't work and i just know to come back in a day or two and then it will work that's not a good experience i really hope that gets better
Casey:
Can we move on to iPadOS 16, please?
John:
Let's do it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So first of all, speaking of segues, I enjoyed the Kyle cameo earlier.
Casey:
What was going on with the Baywatch-style slow run that was happening in this segway?
John:
Should have done running up that hill, but they didn't do it, and neither one of you gets that reference, so that's fine.
John:
Oh, someone made that on Twitter.
John:
I will find the link for the show notes and put it in there.
John:
For the people who do get the reference.
Marco:
I mean, I think this iPad OS 16 has the biggest finally moment of the whole keynote.
Marco:
There is now finally an Apple weather app for the iPad.
Casey:
Hooray!
Marco:
But no calculator.
Marco:
No, it can't handle that.
John:
Next year, next year.
Marco:
You got to save something for next year.
Marco:
at the system level, and it's fantastic.
Marco:
If you look at the API for it, you don't have to make web service calls or anything like that.
Marco:
You just call weatherkit.conditions or whatever, and it's an async thing, and when it returns, it gives you your weather.
Marco:
It's really, really great.
Marco:
That, I think, is going to be fantastic.
Marco:
That's such a big finally on the iPad weather front.
Marco:
I think weatherkit is a really, really cool thing, and it's glad to see that
Casey:
they didn't just buy dark sky to have weather data for themselves they also are you know continuing it as an api for people to use and that's that's great yeah and and i believe the pricing is pretty competitive if not great from what underscore said so uh yeah this is this is this is pretty awesome yeah it was half the price i think oh so it's even better yeah yeah i have a link to his tweet about it somewhere fair enough
Casey:
We get some collaboration features.
Casey:
We get Freeform app Sneak Peek, which is, I guess, like a whiteboard app, which looked really, really cool.
John:
Yeah, collaborative whiteboard, basically.
John:
They had a bunch of those collaboration stuff, like, threaded throughout the whole presentation.
John:
In fact, not just the iPadOS section of, like...
John:
all these different applications and APIs so you can have multiple people do a thing with your app at the same time.
John:
And it reminded me of like kind of an Apple version of what has always been the Google ethos for their entire sort of, you know, online office system.
John:
They don't call it that like Google Docs and, you know, Google Sheets or whatever.
John:
Google is, or Google Wave for that matter.
John:
And, you know, like a lot of things that Google does have inherently be multi-user and multi-user simultaneous or sub-eth edit to go back in the day.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Mac platforms, right?
John:
and apple has those futures on some of its apps and now it has more apis to make that better and i endorse this but the thing about collaboration is if it is buggy or broken in any way it just it might as well not even exist right because it scares people away or worse it doesn't scare people away and they use it and they lose data and it just makes people angry it really needs to work in a way that you don't think about it
John:
We have multiple people editing this ATP show notes document all the time and we never think about it.
John:
We just go do it.
John:
It happens all the time.
John:
No amount of our brain power is spent worrying about conflicts or bugs or I type this thing and it didn't save.
John:
Whereas I've done multiple collaborations and multiple people commenting on like a Word document and the latest and greatest version of Word on multiple platforms and it sucks so bad.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All you do is think about it.
John:
You end up messaging people in Teams and saying, can I go in the document?
John:
Have you added your comment?
John:
I don't see it yet.
John:
Oh, it does updates.
John:
Wait, no, did you save?
John:
I didn't save.
John:
The document's locked.
John:
I can't do a thing.
John:
Apple hopefully, you know, adds these APIs and does it as well as Google with an interface that's trying to be like Microsoft.
John:
Although I have to say with Microsoft's native apps, I usually preferred back at my day job to use the web version of Word or the web version of Excel because they had better, more reliable interfaces for multi-user collaboration than the native versions.
John:
And that is wrong and should not be that way.
John:
So where does Apple fall in this spectrum?
John:
Are they reliable?
John:
Would I rather use a web interface?
John:
Is there a web interface?
John:
I hope they do a good job with it because collaboration is a thing that I think we all take for granted, which is why they're adding these features.
John:
And I think it's a great thing to add.
John:
In particular, the freeform app I was excited about, not because I want to have an infinite whiteboard, but because whenever I'm on a FaceTime call with family, I miss the old iChat feature of like, let's look at pictures together because they want to see, oh, we went on a trip and there's a bunch of pictures.
John:
And then we end up having to like message the pictures to each other and then switch out of the FaceTime app to go look at photos.
John:
And my parents get confused about multitasking.
John:
They don't know how to get back to the call or whatever.
John:
I just want us to all be together and let's all look at the pictures together.
John:
And it seems like Freeform might be able to do that as one corner of its vast functionality.
John:
And if so, I will use it and like it.
Casey:
There was another mention about gaming, including a background download API.
Casey:
Game Center is still a thing, which I completely forgot existed, but here we are.
Casey:
There's some SharePlay stuff with gaming, and I guess a bunch of that arrives later this year.
Casey:
Then they started talking about the serious stuff for serious iPad people, including desktop class apps.
Casey:
They were very excited about undo and redo across the entire system.
Casey:
Availability view and calendar.
Casey:
Tons of files app updates.
Casey:
Inline find and replace.
Casey:
User customizable toolbars.
Casey:
And desktop class app APIs.
John:
As I said on Twitter, you've heard of Mac-assed Mac apps.
John:
Well, this is Mac-assed iPad apps.
John:
An iPad app, but with flexibility and features.
John:
Commensurate with the hardware that it is running on, in theory.
Casey:
In theory.
Casey:
All right, then there's going to be a reference mode, which is for photo and video editors to get reference color on screens that support it.
Casey:
And then I think everything from here on requires M1 iPads.
Casey:
I might have that wrong, but I think that's the case.
Marco:
I believe that's true, yes.
Casey:
One of the things that is new is display scaling, which I guess basically lets you make everything smaller if you actually have good eyes, which I do not.
John:
Well, it's super important for the stage manager feature because if you don't want your screen real estate in terms of information display being eaten up by that little column of stage manager things on the side…
John:
scale the whole interface and now suddenly you're what was previously filling your screen all those same pixels are there just squished a little bit to make room on the side for the stage managers thing and this i think this makes perfect sense would the piles be called actors because you know stage managers like you know you manage actors that's a very good actors are a different thing these are definitely piles
John:
But not like the disease.
John:
I remember reading patents for piles ages ago for the Finder.
John:
This is not quite the same thing.
John:
Those are more like piles of files and folder.
Marco:
Well, I think they were called stacks.
Marco:
Pile is not an appealing term.
John:
No, they were called – I'm thinking back past stacks.
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
John:
There was a thing called piles and, you know, not –
John:
name not chosen for any release thing i think yeah so like on just like on your laptops and on your mac you can scale the screen resolution if you choose to that's a perfectly appropriate feature for ipads we should have had it years ago and now it is you know it's even better to come with stage manager
John:
And stage manager makes a lot of sense on the iPad as their attempt to improve multitasking.
John:
They didn't go with, it's just like the Mac, because again, the Mac has a huge list of features for managing windows, plus all the manual stuff.
John:
The iPad has a more coherent story.
John:
There's not a huge list of features.
John:
There's this.
John:
There's the previous thing, slide over and splitting the screen and everything like that.
John:
And now there's also this thing, which is like multiple overlapping resizable windows
John:
but not complete freedom.
John:
The system itself makes some decisions about the overlap, it seems for you.
John:
I can't tell from the demo whether those decisions are just the initial decisions, after which point you can manually move things as needed.
John:
I hope that's the case, because any kind of decision that the system makes for you to be intelligent, probably, knowing Apple, makes an arrangement that looks nice aesthetically, but when you have multiple overlapping windows,
John:
It's important, you know, based on what you're doing to see specific parts of specific windows to complete your task.
John:
And the OS can't know what those parts are because it doesn't know what you're doing.
John:
That's why windows are movable and resizable.
John:
So you can arrange multiple windows so you can see the parts of the windows that you need to see right now to do the specific thing that you're doing.
John:
And it will be very frustrating if the system arranges windows and you try to like move one up a centimeter so you can see this line of text that you're trying to grip from and it just slides back down.
John:
It says, no, no, no, you shouldn't be up a centimeter.
John:
You should be down a centimeter.
John:
This looks better, doesn't it?
John:
It's a better composition.
John:
It's like, no, I'm not making a screenshot for marketing.
John:
I need to see what's in that window.
John:
So let me arrange them how I want.
John:
So I don't know how this works, but I really hope that essentially you can manually override any decision it makes for you because the whole point of overlapping windows, overlapping resizable windows is,
John:
you have to be able to move them so you can see the stuff that you want it doesn't mean you have to be forced to move them all the time it can make smart decisions for you as initial default but i really really hope there's a way to to move them out because the alternative the other ones like tiling and everything you didn't have to worry about overlap nothing was ever obscured you just had to worry about sizing and even that you had control over you could
John:
decide how much of the screen the vertical screen you wanted for each one or you decided how well slide over was kind of limited but you had a little bit of control there but at least you didn't have to worry about overlapping once you allow overlapping there has to be manual control so i'm very curious to see how they've done this um and and all that said like i think it's the right decision not to force everyone to manually arrange everything because you know people are not good at that and don't like to do it that's why they zoom everything to full screen and the ipad shouldn't be that experience so the defaults will probably be
John:
fine for most people and even the defaults for overlapping are probably fine in a lot of cases but please please let me i i made a joke about the janitor people remember this back back in the day steve jobs i think it was steve jobs had made a derivative comment a few times about how having to arrange windows on your mac made him feel like the janitor it's like i don't want to have to be the janitor i want the computer to do it for me uh but you know that's
John:
That's a nice dream, right?
John:
But actual janitors in real life are human beings who have intelligence, whereas your window manager in your computer has no idea what you're doing and can't talk to you or figure that out.
John:
So yeah, if you're going to have overlapping windows, no matter how much the system does for you, iPadOS 16 at least is letting you finally be the janitor that we all want to be every once in a while.
Marco:
And to me, the biggest shock of this announcement, possibly my biggest surprise of the day today, is
Music.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
So, you know what just happened?
Casey:
Zoom crashed.
Casey:
Zoom crashed.
Marco:
No, it didn't.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
What just happened is, so I'm using the hotel internet, and when I got here approximately 24 hours ago.
John:
Oh, it timed out.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
I agreed to the terms of service and told it, like, give me the better internet for five bucks a day.
Marco:
Well, it's been 24 hours, and it just cut me right off.
John:
oh that's you have to insert five more dollars to continue this podcast this is the grim future that uh dystopian novels in the 80s describe you'll be using your computer and at a certain point it will say no sorry no more computer for you insert five dollars i mean honestly that's how a lot of in-app purchases work in games like that's that's directly we already have that it's terrible there's an energy mechanic and we have to wait a week before we can podcast again
John:
Or we can pay the podcast sooner.
Casey:
You gotta leave all this in.
Casey:
Do like a Jeopardy song or something.
Casey:
I don't know, man.
Casey:
This might be good enough for the real deal.
Casey:
You were saying what the most shocking thing was and then you died.
John:
We couldn't guess what it was.
Marco:
Alright, so anyway.
Marco:
So the most shocking thing to me this whole day was the reason why iPads have not been able to show a whole bunch of apps on screen at once is not because Apple is over-nannying you and saying you shouldn't have multiple windows.
Marco:
No, it's because iPads didn't have a lot of RAM until very recent models.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And so the way iOS has always worked, iOS has always had virtual memory, but it's never had swapping of the virtual memory back to disk.
Marco:
So what that means is it can do tricks with address space and stuff like you expect from any modern computer, but if it runs out of physical RAM, it wouldn't page out parts of memory to disk the way PCs and Macs have done for decades.
Marco:
And so what that has always meant is that iOS can only keep apps running if it can keep them 100% in RAM.
Marco:
And so what you wouldn't want is like on an iPad where you can show multiple apps, you wouldn't want one of the apps that's literally on screen to suddenly have to get kicked out of RAM.
Marco:
And so that has always limited what they can do with multitasking in the past.
Marco:
And so I think the reason, so the giant shock today is that they are adding virtual memory swap support to iPad OS.
Marco:
Now this is only on M1 Macs.
Marco:
And I think this is probably for performance reasons.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But also, M1 Macs have at least 8 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
So they already have a higher ceiling to begin with.
Marco:
And then the higher-end models, I think the bigger capacities of the 12.9 at least, have 16 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
And they even said that now a very demanding app, something like Photoshop for the iPad, is now going to be able to address up to 16 gigs if it's available.
Marco:
And that's amazing.
Marco:
Anyway, so now that they have Swap, they're able to run many more apps at once without kicking anything out of memory.
Marco:
And I think that was a prerequisite to having...
Marco:
any kind of window management option on the iPad where you could have more than two or three apps running at once.
Marco:
So to have that now is incredible.
Marco:
And that's one of those things that if you, you know, I would never would have thought that iOS would add swapping.
Marco:
I never thought that was ever on the table.
John:
Why are you so shocked by that?
John:
Because the reason I'm not shocked at all, in fact, I think it's long overdue, is because look at how Mac hardware with literally the same hardware, look at how M1 Macs perform.
John:
They're phenomenal.
John:
Of course, macOS 10 and macOS have always had swap, right?
John:
like they don't, you know, they don't bog down from thrashing constantly like the old Macs used to with spinning disks.
John:
The SSDs are fast and the OS is good about using memory, especially on a platform where you don't have to worry about 64-bit and 32-bits mixing, which hasn't been true of the iOS platforms in forever.
John:
Like, why wouldn't it have swapped?
John:
is there something about the performance of an m1 macbook air running way more ram hungry applications is there something about that 16 gig or 8 gig macbook air that seems so horrendous that you would never put it on an ipad no it's fine swap is way overdue on the ipad line and they were very cautious in rolling it out
John:
uh confining it only to m1 models which already have a reasonable amount of ram and i think it'll be great because like ssds are way faster than they were you know even just a few years ago and you know you don't want to swap but an ipad class machine with an m1 in it i think it's perfectly fine i don't think anyone will even notice especially since as you noted up until this point every single ios or ipad os app out there
John:
has lived in a world where it is, you know, moments away from using too much RAM and getting killed.
John:
Like, because there was no alternative.
John:
If you fill up the RAM, something's getting killed.
John:
It's either going to be you or other stuff that's running in the background, but eventually it'll be you if you keep using memory, which is not how it is on the Mac.
John:
If you have a Mac app that keeps using memory...
John:
It can use memory for a real long time before anything happens to it, right?
John:
But every single existing iPad OS app exists in this brutal world of low RAM.
John:
So they're going to be model citizens, at least initially, in this world with swap.
John:
We'll see how it goes after that.
John:
But I think, you know, this is long overdue.
John:
And again, look at how someone with like an 8 gig MacBook Air and ask them, like, do you notice your machine swapping a lot?
John:
Does it bog down and get slowed?
John:
No, these machines are phenomenal.
John:
The M1 is amazing.
John:
I think this will be...
John:
it'll be great.
John:
And I think it will actually take a long time for iPad apps to start abusing this.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And this is how, you know, if you look at what they announced, like you're able to have up to four windows on screen at a time per monitor.
Marco:
And you can have external monitors now with iPads where you have just more space, like the way monitors have worked on the Mac forever.
Marco:
So like, and that's a huge feature right there of like, wow, external monitors now
Marco:
are much more useful.
Marco:
And you can then theoretically have up to eight apps with their windows on screen at once.
John:
I didn't know that was a limit.
John:
You can only have four windows?
Marco:
What is this?
Marco:
Yeah, Craig said during the presentation, I can create groups of three and even four windows, and you can have up to eight apps running simultaneously with an external display.
John:
How many apps and windows do you think you can have simultaneously on an 8 gigabyte MacBook Air?
Marco:
Using apps that are... Are any of them Chrome?
John:
But I'm saying using apps that are not used to living in a world where they get killed if they use too much memory.
John:
Just like you can have so many windows open on a MacBook Air.
John:
You can have so many apps open, right?
John:
And they all run really well.
John:
And it's like...
John:
I guess, I mean, yeah, baby steps on the iPad.
Marco:
Keep in mind, too, iPads are really small screens.
Marco:
The 12.9 is the biggest, but when you're looking at the iPad Air, that's a 10.5-inch or 11-inch-ish screen.
Marco:
Four windows on an iPad Air, that's going to be cramped enough.
Marco:
I don't think you'd want a lot more than that.
John:
Some of them could be like...
John:
like a mini player for spotify up in the corner plus a little youtube thing playing in there like just you know when you have the ability to have multiple windows people can do things like they would do on you know on desktop platforms which is well some of my apps have a very tiny window just for a music player in the corner or you know just for the the thing that i'm watching in video and plus a little tiny sticky note over there like the windows add up if you are allowed to have small ones and can arrange things which this this whole thing this whole ipad os 16 uh
John:
you know the feature set the desktop class apps and everything makes me think once again that like it's kind of a shame that the biggest ipad you can get is the size of apple's smallest laptop screen because once you have an os where you want to have desktop class apps multiple windows external display to support cursor support keyboard support and the biggest screen you can get is 13 inches where's the 16 inch ipad pro
John:
Where is the, you know, I'm not even saying drafting table.
John:
Like, you know, 16-inch, who would ever want to lug around something like that?
John:
People lug around 16-inch laptops.
John:
They have a keyboard attached and they have a 16-inch screen.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Like, these still now, I feel like at this point, they've added enough features to the OS.
John:
Now the OS is asking the hardware to get bigger.
John:
Before, you could argue that wasn't the case unless you were an artist and just needed a bigger canvas.
John:
But you're like, well, you know, 16-inch, that would be wasted.
John:
But...
John:
Now that you can have multiple windows and the center stage stuff along the side and everything, it's time for a bigger iPad.
Casey:
Possibly.
Casey:
I'm surprised by external display support in the sense that we finally got it.
Casey:
It's one of those things that we've been waiting and waiting and waiting.
Casey:
We've been getting baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, but it's here.
Casey:
uh but yeah i don't know i'm a little bummed that all this is m1 only i i my understanding from having talked to a couple birdies is that that's not just to push people like me to upgrade that there there are components of the m1 that made this possible or portions of this possible um but nevertheless it might finally be time for me to retire my four-year-old 2018 ipad pro maybe it's time to upgrade although that's a bummer because i don't feel like now in in
Casey:
in the middle of summer is the right time to upgrade an iPad.
Marco:
Well, they just updated the Pro fairly, you know, the Pro was like, what, last fall?
Marco:
And then the Air was this past spring?
Marco:
I mean, that's pretty recent for that hardware.
John:
What part of the M1, besides having more RAM, do you think would be necessary for the features described here?
Marco:
I wonder, you know, the M1 ones, they probably have faster storage controllers and faster SSDs to begin with.
Casey:
I believe that's what it is.
Casey:
I'm not certain about that.
Casey:
I could have that totally wrong.
John:
I feel like the RAM limit alone is reason enough, right?
Marco:
The RAM is probably the biggest limit, but I bet like, you know, faster performance and the other stuff is probably part of it as well.
Marco:
Also, you know, the M1 models also support Thunderbolt out of their butts.
Marco:
And so I wonder if, you know, they just wanted that to be, you know, better for like, you know, supporting more displays out there.
John:
Oh yeah.
John:
Speaking of, of Thunderbolt, that's the other thing for iPadOS 16, the support for driver kit.
John:
So third parties can write drivers for hardware that you can't connect because it only has one port.
John:
I mean, again, these things are, they're so powerful there.
John:
You've got the OS is becoming more powerful.
John:
The hardware is more like driver kit.
John:
I, you know, I know, I know it's a, you do a breakout box and so on and so forth.
John:
I just feel like there's a lot of room on these iPads for more than one Thunderbolt port.
John:
All right.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Let's, let's wrap it up for today.
Marco:
We've been going a long time.
Marco:
Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
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, 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-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
is it finally time to talk about the important stuff the food yes tell me about the boxed lunches and boxed breakfast and boxed all the things
Marco:
All right, so I have to disclaim that the media people were like, we didn't have the same menu as the developers because we were not in the main Capimax area.
Marco:
We were on this little top deck area above it.
Casey:
Literally above everyone else.
Marco:
So we had very similar things.
Marco:
We had some of the same dishes, just this big buffet.
Marco:
You go up and take whatever you want.
Marco:
I did have a pastry for John.
Marco:
I had some avocado toast that included the micro horseradish.
Marco:
I had a bunch of – they had like vegan sushi.
Marco:
They had little turkey sandwiches, little egg salad things.
Marco:
There were so much and –
Marco:
i have to say and and there were two different meals like you know breakfast and lunch and i have to say the food was very very good um and you know even though it was clearly you know made in large quantity being served you know kind of at room temperature because that's how you do these large events it was miles above and beyond any conference center food i've ever had uh so much better anybody who has anything bad to say about this food uh has not traveled enough
Marco:
Or has not gone to enough corporate cafeterias or enough conference centers or enough hotels or anything because it was fantastic.
Marco:
I will say the micro horseradish was also micro in taste.
Marco:
I did not taste it at all.
Marco:
I didn't see any bagels available in our area.
Marco:
So I couldn't have tried those.
Marco:
I also didn't see the lasagna available.
Marco:
However, everything I had was great.
Marco:
They had all sorts of great like, you know, fruit flavors and spice flavors.
Marco:
And it was just it was really, really nice.
Marco:
They had like fresh squeezed juices, a whole coffee bar that I didn't even use.
Marco:
I went to Phil's earlier in the in the morning.
John:
They have Adwalla.
John:
That's the real question.
Casey:
No, well, it doesn't exist anymore, remember?
Casey:
It's gone forever.
John:
Maybe they had a strategic reserve.
Marco:
No, they had special apple juices, and not apple juice, but juices by apple, the company.
Marco:
But yeah, it was really great.
Marco:
And again, it's like yet another reason why, wow, this was way better than the old way of doing the conference.
Marco:
So I really hope they keep it this way because, yeah, among all the other benefits, the food is also a massive step up.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
So it was the appetizers for breakfast or for lunch you were talking about?
Casey:
Like the avocado toast, that was a breakfast thing?
Marco:
What I said was kind of an amalgamation of both.
Marco:
The avocado toast was there for breakfast.
Marco:
The vegan sushi was lunch.
Marco:
Some of the sandwiches were breakfast.
Marco:
They had this great falafel sandwich for lunch.
Marco:
They had turkey sandwiches.
Marco:
they had and you know and by by sandwich i mean like you know they had like little wedges pre-cut and you just go grab whatever you want so it was you know small pieces and you take whatever you want again and this is i'm sorry this is just the media section i don't know i didn't see like we weren't allowed to go to the developer section they might have had like larger portions and different things there as as we saw on that menu um but yeah it was just really good and even even the little croissant was really good they had these little like fruit cones they had the cute little caesar salads that were in these like almost like these little like crowns like it it
Marco:
It was just really good food.
Marco:
I was very, very impressed.
Marco:
I think I was even more excited about the food than I was about iPadOS.
Marco:
iPadOS was a pretty big update, but the food was just that much better than what I was expecting.
Marco:
It was very, very good.
John:
I saw a lot of pictures of people posting from the day before the keynote where they were visiting the developer center and they had a bunch of people holding trays with food.
John:
One of the things a lot of people took pictures of was they're holding trays with like
John:
basically donuts or donuts or some kind of pastries things.
John:
And I was so struck by it.
John:
So first of all, the tray was like, you know, sort of pale wood kind of bamboo looking thing with like a rectangular thing with like one inch high, like wall around the edges of the tray.
John:
And on it were these pastry slash donut things.
John:
And there were like eight of them.
John:
one two three four five six seven eight in perfect geometrical arrangement with like you know one inch board each one was on a square napkin and each square napkin had a one inch border around it and all of them geometrically it's like first of all if you saw that at a conference center if there was a tray they'd fit as many of those things on the tray as they could possibly fit and second of all they wouldn't be neatly arranged and perfectly centered in the napkins it was it looks so nice that you felt like no one want to touch it because by grabbing one you've now ruined the symmetry and
John:
And then these pastries look, look huge.
John:
And I don't know, they're not particularly to my taste, but they look like you were grabbing like a miniature personal cake for yourself.
John:
And they look very sticky and very gooey and very like, I don't know if it was a forced perspective thing or whatever.
John:
Like, I don't think it could finish one of those things.
John:
Like you have to take it and like cut it into four pieces and maybe four people could share one of them.
John:
But anyway, it looked, it looked very fancy, very ritzy and very caloric.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, no expense was spared.
Marco:
I mean, this is true, I think, of everything about Apple Park and the developer center and the visitor center.
Marco:
No expense is spared.
Marco:
And that makes sense for the world's richest company.
Marco:
Usually, Apple in many areas is quite stingy with some of their product decisions and everything.
Marco:
But they were not stingy with any part of building that building or the other buildings next to it.
Marco:
uh they were not stingy with any part of the food or this event or anything like it was it was incredible i mean heck the event was free like you know you pay to get yourself here but you know when you get there there's no ticket or anything it's free like it was really great um yeah very just overall i i have i have only amazing things to say about the event and the the campus and the buildings but yeah just the event in general
Marco:
This is such a clear win over the previous ways of doing things.
Marco:
And even though we didn't have to pay for tickets, and even though they were serving us all these expensive personal cakes, I suspect this still cost them way less money than renting out a conference center for a week and all the logistics involved in that.
Marco:
This is probably way cheaper for them, and it's way better.
Marco:
So again, I think this has got to be the only way to go going forward, and that'll be better.
John:
Thank you, Margaret, for demonstrating the thing I was describing on the last episode about press junkets for car journalists.
John:
Because you get people in person in an environment that you can control and you can give them a good time in a way that you can't.
John:
When you go to the conference center, I would imagine these conference centers have contracts that says you have to use R.
John:
one of our approved food suppliers and stuff like that and everything.
John:
I'm not sure this costs less money because it might have cost more, but at least Apple can get what it wants and has no constraints about it.
John:
Look, you want to have it in this convention center.
John:
Here's the deal.
John:
You can have it someplace else if you want, but if you want to do it here, you have to use our food vendor and you have to do this and you have to do that.
John:
And that makes Apple limited.
John:
Apple may have wanted to give us better Bach lunches, but they literally couldn't unless they didn't have it in Moscone or didn't have it in McHenry, right?
John:
Whereas if they have it on campus, all those limitations go away and they can do whatever the heck they want.
John:
even if it includes putting only four pastries on a tray that could hold 97 of them.