643: You Go to Squircle Jail
10 Jun 2025Impressions and analysis from WWDC 2025: Apple’s new universal UI design with “Liquid Glass”, all of the new 26-series OSes using it, and the potential of the new Apple Intelligence APIs.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Initial Switch 2 Reactions
- WWDC
- Post-show: RIP, John’s Mac Pro
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s latest paper on the limitations of LLMs
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- Clic for Sonos: Elevate Your Sonos Experience with Clic
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Chapters
- John’s Switch 2 review
- WWDC intro
- Apple Intelligence
- Sponsor: Clic for Sonos
- New design
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- iOS
- Sponsor: BetterHelp
- watchOS
- tvOS
- visionOS
- macOS Tahoe
- iPadOS
- Developer tools
- Closing impressions
- Ending theme
- Post-show
John’s Switch 2 review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should dive right in and we should do, we should cover something really important. John, how do you like your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice. That’s all, that’s all you have to say for it is it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody. Oh, interestingly, I had a little bit of excitement on that delivery that it was supposed to, I think I was
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to get a day off, but I didn’t because target is bad and they felt bad about it and then refunded
⏹️ ▶️ John all of my shipping. So it was nice. Oh, that’s good. Anyway. Yeah. Um, I mean, the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve done with it is, uh, fiddled around in the updated versions of the Zelda games and then
⏹️ ▶️ John of course played Mario Kart World. And I don’t know, I’m still out of Mario Kart World. Not sure about the
⏹️ ▶️ John new jumping on stuff and grinding mechanics, but maybe just because I’m bad at it so far. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I had the exact same reaction on both counts. Like, I don’t know about this, but I bet it’s because I suck at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the real issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that. I’m very much used to the much more traditional, like Mario Kart 8 courses
⏹️ ▶️ John that are much more like the earlier 3D Mario courses. Whereas these, it’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that it’s open world. I just feel like the courses are designed a little bit differently. Like there shouldn’t be water on Rainbow
⏹️ ▶️ John Road. I’m gonna go out and say that. No water on Rainbow Road. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because Rainbow Road is supposed to be a rainbow road. And it’s like, okay, but in Mario Kart
⏹️ ▶️ John World, every track has a water section. I’m like, no, Rainbow Road should not have a water section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I feel like, I don’t know. Tradition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Somebody had noted that it’s not Rainbow Road anymore or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this myself. Is this, is this a political kowtowing? Cause if so, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John like I just think everything said like everything’s different in this one or whatever. Anyway, I mostly like it, but yeah, the hardware is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I actually have a, we’ll talk about switch to at some point in a future show because I have a lot of things to say about the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware and setup experience that I’m sure you do too, but we
⏹️ ▶️ John have time for that today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fine. Uh, I will say, so we got ours, um, on launch day and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch to you entered the house and then it was basically, Declan basically said, well, this is mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ran away. Did you expect otherwise? No, I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m exaggerating. He didn’t actually say that, but that was kind of the net effect of what happened. And I can tell you when I was 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years old and I saw a new Nintendo enter the house, I did the exact same thing to Marco’s point. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyways, my, I’ve only had maybe half an hour, an hour of playtime with it. I, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hardware. I feel like it fixed pretty much any wrong with our original switch. I have not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had never upgraded past the original 2017 switch. So I never had an OLED switch or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. We never had any of the ones that doesn’t Mount in the dock what it’s at a switch light or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that So this is quite an upgrade I feel like the graphic fit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out with the graphics fidelity again as someone who only has a switch in the house is great I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really digging that everything looks awesome on Mario Kart world and that’s basically the only thing I played
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then this is the first time that anyone in the house including me has done gameplay with online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and live chat And so, uh, the, the switch to has game chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can connect with a friend and play with a friend and so on and so forth. And I’ve been listening to Declan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing Mario Kart world with a friend of his, who’s also a rising fifth grader and hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if nothing else, this switch was worth the cost to hear the ridiculous vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he uses. And I don’t mean like colorful expletives or anything like that, but, and I can’t even think of a specific example, but there’s, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never heard Declan say the word bro more times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, God, yeah. Welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? And so it is hilarious witnessing this happen. But no, so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so very, very good. I am really, really impressed with it. Really, really dig it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am excited that we should talk about it more another time.
WWDC intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then we start with the cheesy Apple video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that leads us into WWDC. So I was setting myself up. I was bracing myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this. I thought it was going to be an utter disaster and oftentimes they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cutesy and silly and they win me over just barely the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, parachuting out of the plane example, which I believe was last year. That won me over more than just barely, but not by a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This one starts with hair force one, Craig Federighi driving an F1 car. driving an F1 car around the top of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Park, and I was sold from frame three. I was all in, I was loving every second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, which really pains me to admit, because I know I should be all, man, that’s a thing, man, man, man. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved it, and when he took off the helmet at the end, and his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous hair, well, his hair isn’t normally ridiculous, but in this context, his hair was like a foot and a half tall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was so stupid, and I loved every second of it. I thought it was hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m guessing though that I am the only one that felt that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I think it was… So okay, going into this, I did feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, a little conflicted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because like part of me going into this is all of my angst about Apple’s relationship with developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Part of it was, you know, my kind of disappointment as an Apple commentator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the state of Apple intelligence leading into this. But also, I am a developer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC is exciting. Because there’s always stuff that allows me to make my app better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or make my life as a developer easier or opens up new markets or whatever. So it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting. And by the end of this, I was very excited. But at the beginning, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was kind of like, oh, I don’t know how this is going to go today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. At the beginning of the whole event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco or the beginning of the video? Yes, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of the whole event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When this video played.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making sure. And so it was, I feel like they had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set the tone. And one thing we said last week is, we did not expect them to set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tone with anything but projecting 100% confidence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they were not gonna set the tone by addressing court cases or the developer relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Apple intelligence being delayed from last year. They were not going to set the tone from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of that. They were gonna set the tone the way they always do. And that’s what this video did. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set the tone with a cheesy, like ridiculously over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top, insanely overproduced and probably very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video showing off Craig and Tim doing something kind of dumb and kind of funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what they always do. They succeeded. I liked it as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always like it, which is, I guess that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good opportunity to set up my notes window and resize windows on my desktop. before actually to start paying attention more closely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, they had fun with it. It’s almost like, you know, oh, how cute. Good for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John It was well executed, but I feel like I was kind of in the same place. Not that I was expecting anything, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, conciliatory or any recognition whatsoever that there’s any problem with the relationship between Apple and developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they could have gone in another direction to at least do something developer
⏹️ ▶️ John focused. And I think the thing that bothered me the most about this, it certainly isn’t execution, which is really good. It was clever
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was well done. And I liked how they integrated their products with the loud noise and stuff. It was the fact that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was an ad, essentially a side door ad for their new movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just, there’s so much Apple TV media promotion in WWDC already,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the opening video to be like advertising their F1 movie, that has nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with, like I give it to you, you can put it in the keynote. You can put it in the keynote in the Apple TV section, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the intro movie, it basically bought, if there was no F1 movie, I think I wouldn’t have had this
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint because I would’ve been like, oh, a fun thing where they imagine driving a car on top of the whole park, isn’t that funny? But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a movie tie-in. So anyway, I wasn’t too grumpy about it, but that’s the one thing that bothered me about it, surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it was an ad for a movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ll see more ads later but that’s alright
Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we start with Apple intelligence where they say we are looking forward to sharing more about high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syria That’s not how they said it But whatever they meant, you know The new Siri in the coming year and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they quickly announced they’re opening up access for any app to tap directly into the on-device LLM that’s core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple intelligence. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John actually before we go on from that first part This is the one thing that I did have time to to grab down. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John as close as they got to Acknowledging that
⏹️ ▶️ John announced at last year’s WWC They did not ship a fact that we all know so it’s not like you know They
⏹️ ▶️ John need to say we all know they know we know we know they like whatever right so there but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is as close as they got to Acknowledging that and this is direct quote from I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe it was Federico saying this He said and as we’ve shared
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s that as we’ve shared part to say we’ve already told you this so you already know this So this is not new information,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we are actually going to remind you which I think this is the The one concession to reality
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is going to remind you of a thing you already know Just because not to say anything out of it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be weird So anyway, and as we’ve shared we’re continuing our work to deliver the features
⏹️ ▶️ John that make Siri even more personal This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar
⏹️ ▶️ John and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year That’s it That’s as close as you’re gonna get this whole presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John to acknowledging the fact that last year’s the Apple intelligence Announcement on those features in
⏹️ ▶️ John particular ones that everybody wanted like making Siri better did not ship That’s as close as you get in the whole presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John even later when they start talking about swift assist and everything I don’t think you get any closer than that to
⏹️ ▶️ John saying yeah Isn’t it a shame that we talked about this last year and just couldn’t ship it. Well, anyway here we are again, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest for the rest of the presentation The reality that they didn’t ship all that stuff is no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John acknowledged or relevant, but I do give them props for, you know, putting Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John at the front, kind of getting it over with, with their enhancements that we’re going to talk about in a second
⏹️ ▶️ John and adding two sentences of reality recognition to say, we
⏹️ ▶️ John both know that we screwed up, but we also know that we’re not going to say that to you. So anyway, let’s go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So then we quickly launch into design and they had a brief
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s it for Apple Intelligence? You’re not going to talk about the things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that they added?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to get there. I’m trying to go chronologically. Have you ever been on the show before?
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the Apple Intelligence part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so obviously, like John mentioned earlier, there was a lot more elaboration in State of the Union
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what the Foundation Models API is. But it is, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, first of all, it is exactly what was rumored and it was exactly what we However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not a bad thing and that is not an underwhelming thing because what was rumored and what we expected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was also what me and many other developers were also hoping for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks really good. Like so what they have announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is direct access to the foundation model on the device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Foundation LLM or multiple models for all sorts of different tasks, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text manipulation, things like summarization, recommendations. There’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I was hoping for, which was the speech transcription model that also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears. I haven’t had time to play with it yet to really confirm its abilities, but that also appears to be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promising. They basically opened up all of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local AI processing to developers to use locally for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is not seemingly a way to use private cloud compute, although it’s too early to know a lot of the details yet, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this literally just was announced, and we haven’t had time to build stuff and dive too much into the examples and code yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, most of the sessions hadn’t happened yet, so we will probably have a bunch of follow-up, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correcting some of these things. Basically, it looks very much like an awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opening up of the foundation models that are on the device for developers to use for free. That is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we focus a lot on like the flashier features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there, but like what will actually make a day-to-day difference in a lot of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is underlying tech getting better. And this piece is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful. Because this is like what the story of Apple and being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a developer platform, if you ignore or set aside all of the financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BS that they pull, if you just look at the story of being an Apple developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason we’re all here, well there’s two. Number one, we use Apple devices ourselves and developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tend to want to develop software for the devices they use themselves. Also though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple gives really good APIs to do really complex things easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your apps. They’ve done this for the entire history. This is what good developer platforms do. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t the only people in the universe to do this, but I think Apple tends to be pretty class-leading in a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs they offer in terms of the capabilities and how good they are and how well they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perform versus how little effort it takes to use a lot of them. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’ve done here, it sounds fast in a keynote, now you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access our models locally. That sounds like a single sentence thing. That’s a very big thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because so many apps will now be able to do basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI type stuff in what seems like a fairly unrestricted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local fashion to just make the apps a little bit nicer or a little bit more capable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe a lot more capable, depending on what they are. Like, you know, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various things like I could do with this in my app. Like if the speaks transcription API is as good as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope it is, and I don’t know yet, but it looks promising, I can offer transcriptions for podcasts. Now there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of hoops to jump through to do that. Like for instance, every podcast copy that is downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be different because of dynamic insertion. But so there’s a bunch of hoops to jump through, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or technical realities to overcome. But I can have transcriptions if I use that transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API. You know, obviously, again, asterisk, asterisk, you know, complications, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be there. If I’m given a transcription, I can maybe offer summaries, or I can maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to detect where do topics change in the podcast, and maybe insert automatic chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marks. Like there’s all sorts of things that you can do once you have access locally to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool AI features like this, because then you don’t need to worry about your costs, or network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connectivity or network speed or running your own servers because it’s happening locally in the device. The same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I don’t pay to access AirPlay because it’s something that the devices do. I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer AirPlay and it’s you know free to me to offer that. For AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features to be built in and you know local and free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlocks a lot of potential. You know as I mentioned last episode like any app that offers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of things that you drill into which is I don’t know if you’ve noticed a lot of apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they can offer text summaries of the things in that list. I don’t know how fast the API is yet, but you know, maybe they can, certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they can do offline or they can do in advance or whatever. So like maybe they can offer text summaries of things you drill into in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list. Basic usability improvement there. Yeah they’re not always perfect. You know, we see like, see it like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail, you know, it’s not always perfect, but it’s pretty useful a lot of the time. And in a lot of contexts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will provide value. So I think we are not fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appreciating yet what a difference this is going to make to have access to local AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for free. I think in retrospect, a year or two from now, we’re going to look back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this as a very, very big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll talk about the technology behind it probably next week’s episode when we talk about State of the Union because it actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting the way they’re exposing this, not just the individual APIs, but just in general
⏹️ ▶️ John how you can talk to models and get results back from them with a little apple flavored, swift
⏹️ ▶️ John flavored twist to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And also like, you know, looking at some of the stuff in state of the union about the way the API APIs are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not just a very, very simple, like you provide text and it gives you back an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer. It’s way more powerful than that. There’s all these like, you know, structured data responses, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hook in intermediate steps that it can like, it can ask your app for more information in certain ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to provide certain data sources. Like there’s a lot in this API that looks incredibly promising.
⏹️ ▶️ John The guardrail features to try to make it not be awful. You can add your own guardrails because they know theirs won’t be enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco dive into more detail next week probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but this, again, this, the foundation models thing, that alone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there was no redesign, if there was nothing else, no fancy iPad app, you know, windowing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there was none of the other stuff we saw today, that alone is such a big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that could keep a lot of developers busy the whole year.
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New design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, we moved on to the design, and we start with a CoverFlow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rendition of the processors, I think, A6 through A18 or thereabouts. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to be hinting that they used their own office for a lot of the inspiration for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Like Apple Park itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was the theme of, look at all this glass in Apple Park. You think we could be inspired by all this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a choice. But here we are. Then, when they brought out Marco’s best friend forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s his first appearance.
⏹️ ▶️ John When has he been in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stuff before?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, it’s like three or four or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Maybe it’s just the new glasses they’re throwing at me, but anyway, there he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. So, anyway, so he says there’s going to be a more harmonious experience. Yeah, they use that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word a lot. Right, and inspired by the physicality and richness of Vision OS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what to make of of this because like on the one side, if those are the words that make the most sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then use the words that make the most sense. But I don’t know, they have this like air of like hoity toitiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and. They just seem Apple design.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John What a surprise. I mean, I think that may try and explain their inspiration. Makes sense. Like the most
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting thing to me and all these videos they’ve done a couple of times now is the, uh, so this is, he’s standing,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone told me he’s standing on like a cafeteria or something. He’s not standing in his design studio. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have some tables set up and on the tables are, it’s hard to tell, are these
⏹️ ▶️ John objects that the design team created when exploring the sort of idea space, as they
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, to think of the next design? Or are these sort of after the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John objects that they created after they decided on the design to try, let’s make physical objects
⏹️ ▶️ John to convey to the public, this is the feeling that we want the design
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you. The objects are various rectangular solids of colored glass
⏹️ ▶️ John and also a bunch of clear glass, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what that glass, clear glass or clear plastic things that have semi-circular rounded edges
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. So you’ve got kind of hockey puck discs with rounded edges and lozenges with rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John edges and those things are sitting on top of flat things that are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that have pictures on them or whatever. Watch the video, they show them a couple of times.
⏹️ ▶️ John My guess is that these are sort of finished products to say these
⏹️ ▶️ John convey the spirit of the interface that we made. Maybe they made objects like that when they were exploring
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but they look so finished. And I think this is like a sensible
⏹️ ▶️ John way for designers to try to tell people the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you say on your screen should evoke the same feelings as this stuff. And also they go
⏹️ ▶️ John through later trying to explain how like these things are supposed to be like on top of your UI So here
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing on a table where there’s like a placemat that is like your content And then there are
⏹️ ▶️ John these clear plastic things that is our UI we’re putting on top of it. That’s what we’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to make I Like that. I like the idea of physical objects to to to
⏹️ ▶️ John introduce what is a non physical interface because that’s pixels on a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John But now we get into okay, so that is that a good inspiration? Is that a good girl goal should an interface be
⏹️ ▶️ John inspired by those things that are on the table? And I think that is maybe up in the air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I’m guessing this was all just created for for the video
⏹️ ▶️ John and like after the fact like not not while they were developing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. This is design marketing not design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not design design. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m guessing there’s no way those are all glass. I’m guessing that’s acrylic because glass should like chip and be heavy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco without that. You never know with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. You’re right, it should absolutely be like, you know, Lexan or acrylic or, acrylic is actually hard to make without bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, I honestly don’t even know. Maybe those are all made of diamond, knowing Apple. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a gigantic man-made flawless diamond the size of a sub sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so, well, the video, the idea that they’re showing, and you just have to watch the video to see
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but like, think about if you had like a hockey puck
⏹️ ▶️ John with semicircular rounded edges made entirely of clear glass. And you put that hockey puck
⏹️ ▶️ John on top, I’m so old, on top of a newspaper.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What’s a newspaper?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, put it on top of a piece of paper with text. You’ve probably done this. Have you ever had like a big chunky like Shaw-Colm’s
⏹️ ▶️ John magnifying glass when you were a kid? Right, like the big one with the handle. It’s just a big sort of lens of glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you lay that on the table on top of a piece of print and then you move that magnifying glass around or move
⏹️ ▶️ John that clear hockey puck around, what you see is the thing that’s right underneath it being magnified, racing
⏹️ ▶️ John by the lens and sort of distorting around the edges. That is their inspiration for a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John UI. Oh, a clear thing. And when either it moves on top of a surface or the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s underneath it moves underneath the thing, you see the details of the thing that is whirring by
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath, distorted and warped and rapidly moving somewhat magnified through
⏹️ ▶️ John the clear thing, which is a cool, interesting effect for like an art gallery. But in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John user interface, the most interesting thing to me, and I think the thing I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John expect from the rumors and the thing I think everyone who was doing mock-ups, including like Sebastian DeWitt, so we talked about last time,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think about was that Apple has spent years and years making
⏹️ ▶️ John translucent things, like, you know, just look at your dock right now if you’re not on Tahoe or like any other sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of clear thing on your iPhone or whatever, making things that reflect, not reflect, that
⏹️ ▶️ John convey what is behind them without causing the details of that thing behind them
⏹️ ▶️ John to impair legibility. And I don’t just mean legibility in terms of text, but legibility in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, can I see the shape of the button or the icon or whatever? So you want
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing behind to quote unquote, show through or influence it, but it should look really smeared
⏹️ ▶️ John and frosted. And even Sebastian’s thing last week with the physicality thing, very frosted, very frosted over,
⏹️ ▶️ John very smoothed out because that’s what Apple has always done. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a sensible choice when you need to be able to see the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John is in that clear thing. And Apple was like, actually, we really
⏹️ ▶️ John want a lot more of the contrasty details of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things below to show through, including the motion. So if you scroll something behind, like a
⏹️ ▶️ John current generation frosted glass thing, yeah, the frosted glass will change based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John average brightness and color space of the thing that’s behind it. But if you scroll something behind one
⏹️ ▶️ John of these clear lozenges, either the physical things on the table or the interface elements, boy, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John moving that Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass over a magazine page. You see a lot of stuff flying by.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of contrasty edges, lots of details, lots of motion back there. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ John shows through a lot more and with a lot more, I’m not going to say animation, but with a lot more of the motion
⏹️ ▶️ John visible. It’s like, you know, shower glass. OK, so if you have a shower,
⏹️ ▶️ John there have been over over my lifetime, at least many different generations of fads
⏹️ ▶️ John for how do we make shower glass that is somewhat privacy preserving? When I was a kid in the 70s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably remember this. The kind of like scalloped things that have these little scalloped things. It was like it would
⏹️ ▶️ John make everything wavy and distorted. So it’s like, well, light goes through it, but you can’t really see anything because it
⏹️ ▶️ John just becomes like a, you know, an impressionist painting. There’s also frosted glass
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s flat. There is just the trend of like 100% clear glass where you can see everything and there is no privacy, except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the soap scum that you’re supposed to scrape off each time. But nobody ever does. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John gone through a bunch of those in its UI. And in this generation, they’re saying we mostly want to see the person in
⏹️ ▶️ John the shower. Like we want we want to see a lot more of the person in the shower than we have
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past. So their their shower door is not leaving as much to the imagination
⏹️ ▶️ John as their past ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s worth if you are able to, it’s worth installing this on a test device to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how it works in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I interrupt you right there, please? Don’t put this on your carry phone. For the love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of everything that is good and holy, do not put this on your carry phone. Or your main Mac, please. Or your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey main Mac. An iPad or something expendable, whatever, that’s different. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually have put it on my iPad because I don’t need my iPad to get work done. But in order to survive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need a functional phone and a functional Mac. And anything that you think you need to survive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t even start sniffing around at betas until at the very least the public betas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even then I wouldn’t do it. We have to go through this every year. It’s probably too late for all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, but I’m telling you, do not put the beta on any device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you consider important. Don’t do it. Learn from Marco and Mai’s mistake from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from probably both of our mistakes in iOS 7, especially when it comes to a redesign because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything tends to look a little wonky. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Sorry, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I did it. It’s really rough, by the way. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really… There are a lot of little UI glitches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout the system apps and it’s rough. I will say, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are a developer, you might want to do it. So, okay, don’t do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you might want to do it because it is so using this UI on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is first of all, very informative when you compare to the videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything we saw, you know, the videos, everything is like zoomed way in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it shows everything in slow motion. Look at how amazing this is. And it’s all about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content, which, oh my God, I have so much to say about that. But your content, we’re getting out of the way for your content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need to see more of your content. It’s like what if the apps functionality is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps content? Okay. Anyway, so a lot of zooming in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at the things you really should see it on the way it works on a real phone and you should actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it to get to get a sense of what this design is like, what things look and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel correct, what things look and feel, you know, wrong or old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My entire app with a one year old design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks ancient in this system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just wait till you see what they did on Mac OS because I made an app last year too that requires
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous, the current version of Mac OS literally requires the very latest version of Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and the buttons don’t even look right. The buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have a lot of work to do. But, you know, so a couple of things. So first of all, John was right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, you know, the glass and everything and, you know, the way it kind of warps things around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think some of that hopefully will be tuned down a little bit throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the summer as they get feedback. The same way like iOS 7 Beta 1, the fonts were way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinner than what ended up shipping, which was still thin, but it was less crazy thin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because like the very first beta, which was the design department’s baby, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so illegible in so many ways because the fonts were so thin everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that before it shipped, they kind of increased the Helvetica weight there a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although on that topic, which has come up a few times in the past, we’ve gotten questions about it, the idea that they come up with a new design
⏹️ ▶️ John and they go too far, and then they scale it back, which is what happened with iOS 7, and it’s happened with a couple other things they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. Sometimes it’s frustrating, and
⏹️ ▶️ John some listeners have expressed this to say, well, why do they have to overshoot and fix it? Why
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t they overshoot and fix it themselves before they show it to us, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes I think of that as well. It’s like, don’t ship something that you obviously know has problems
⏹️ ▶️ John just hoping you can like get away with it or something because you think it’s cool and then scale it back. Why not do that yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John before you show it to us? But there is actually one reason to,
⏹️ ▶️ John like one reason to actually try to overshoot by a tiny bit. You shouldn’t try to overshoot by a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in a lot of the cases they have overshot by a lot and they shouldn’t have done that. But the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to overshoot by a little bit is because if you go too, don’t go far enough, if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John as daring as you thought, you’ll end up, it’s pretty easy to do that. Let’s ship something that doesn’t go so far. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John is there any place where we’re hurting legibility? Is there any place where we think someone might find this objectionable? Let’s turn it down,
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it down, turn it down, turn it down. What you end up shipping is something that doesn’t actually look that different than what you
⏹️ ▶️ John had before, because you’re afraid to be too different, because the current thing that’s out there is the status quo, and anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John you deviate from that, you’re afraid people won’t like it. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John overshoot by just a tiny bit and then turn it back, you can sort of dial it in. But if you undershoot,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no idea how much to turn it up. And it’s very difficult to turn it up and say like, well, let’s make it
⏹️ ▶️ John more extreme and more extreme. And then you’re like waiting for people to yell about it. And by the time you get close to it, maybe it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John last beta and then people start yelling. So do you back it off a notch from there? Or are you just hearing residual
⏹️ ▶️ John yelling? So like, I have some sympathy for the idea that it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ John to overshoot slightly and tile it back than it is to undershoot because you could undershoot by a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John and then not know how much turned up and it will basically make you timid. You’ll end up coming out with something that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this looks exactly the same as the current thing because you already had translucency that showed through the background
⏹️ ▶️ John that was very frosted over and you’ve continued to do that. That said, I think if you
⏹️ ▶️ John ship something that you know makes a legible text in a bunch of places in your UI and you’re like, oh, don’t worry, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it down, turn it down before you ship it. Like stuff like that where it’s like, this is obviously legible, we cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John ship this. I don’t need to see that. You don’t need to put that out and say, oh, we’re just gonna back it off a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit. Now, back that off internally, because illegible text or too low contrast
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff are things that you should be able to detect behind the scenes. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of this redesign suffers from that. I would argue that maybe even the
⏹️ ▶️ John thin text is like, well, maybe this will be okay, because it’s not as obvious as some of the worst appearances
⏹️ ▶️ John in this. If I was still doing Mac OS X reviews, and we haven’t gotten to Mac OS yet, but if I was doing Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X reviews, or whatever the hell it’s called these days, Mac OS reviews, for this OS, I would just
⏹️ ▶️ John be lining up screenshot after screenshot of areas where this design falls on its face, where the old
⏹️ ▶️ John design did not. And those are easy to find everywhere. Obviously in the first beta it’s gonna be easy to find, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve got a lot of work to do to shape this up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think in particular, So some of the super clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glass, so there are actually multiple glass translucency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects in play here, which is similar, by the way, like the last few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS releases have had kind of like translucent material APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could use that did a similar thing of like, you know, the way like stuff could scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under navigation bars and toolbars and you get like those kind of blurred colors. They do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now, they have multiple materials in the new design. And some of them appear to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be basically, you know, the maybe slightly evolved version of that. And it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, you know, thin frosted glass. And when stuff goes under it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets a little bit blurred and a little bit, you know, smeary, but not, it doesn’t like jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out at you and it maintains pretty low contrast under it. So the text on top of the surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t need, you know, super bold contrast to be legible. Then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have what looks like, you know, the clear gumdrop of acrylic moving over something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it warps like crazy on the edges of it with whatever’s behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What goes behind it gets so bright with, like, vibrancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they call the effect. Like, the vibrancy is cranked way up. So, as you scroll something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colorful behind one of these, it almost looks like there’s an LED behind it, Lighting it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up into the blob of material. Those look kinda
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nuts. And that, where this shows up the most in the UI so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is tab controllers, previously known as tab bars. They look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unhinged. When you move around a tab, you pick a tab and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moves it over the blob of liquid.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wiggles the whole thing wiggles and shakes and scales. Like it’s like you thought the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John island was goopy. Now just picking a different item on a bottom bar. Forget about like even just
⏹️ ▶️ John like the clear piece of water that you’re moving from the left to the right. That’s there and that’s ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John and it warps everything. But then after you pick the new thing, the whole thing goes a wonka, wonka, wonka.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s nuts. Or like in the mail app, for instance, you open up a message,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you have a navigation stack. It pushes something in from the right. you go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the root to the list and the list bounces a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did this with messages, like in the current version of messages does that. Have you noticed when you scroll in messages, all the little bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ John shake around, like they’re loosely attached to the background? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know about that. Oh, that was added since iOS 7, I think, because that was part of the, like the springs, kind of gravity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just noticing more because it’s on Mac OS now and it really bothers me when things shake around like that, but it’s just, yeah. They love
⏹️ ▶️ John for things to look like they are loosely attached to whatever they’re attached to. And I’m not sure that’s the look they want to go for, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John reminds me of shoddy workmanship.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are places where that’s a good thing. Like it can be used well. Like the dynamic island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think, you know, or things like scroll bouncing, which is great. But
⏹️ ▶️ John with scroll bouncing though, the thing, the pain, the virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John paper scroll that you are scrolling, that springs. What doesn’t happen and what shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John happen is, oh, all the text on the page also slides within the container of the page to go back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ John to get like closer and farther from the edge of the paper. So the paper, the thing you’re scrolling feels solid. It just shakes
⏹️ ▶️ John as if it’s on a spring, but the stuff inside it is firmly attached to the background. And that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John that adds an air of solidity to like pull and refresh and spring scrolling. That is not the case
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have things like your interface elements shaking around on their background, like the tab bar or the
⏹️ ▶️ John the bubbles and messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the the tab bar here is so over the top. And it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it’s annoying because the animation is also It also just takes a while. Like you have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it to stop jiggling. Why? Like it’s just, and I mean yeah, maybe I’m sure you can keep using the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m sure it’ll register your touches and respond before it’s done animating that, but like why is animation so long for something that is literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like switching tabs in an app? That’s such a common thing. So it just, the tab controller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just, it looks totally ridiculous. It’s also completely illegible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s, when you have anything behind it, that uses the super clear glass effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is comically illegible. So I, I, this is exactly the kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are likely to dial back a little bit over the summer. We’ll see if they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they do because if, if this design ships the way it is in 1.0, like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, we’re going to have a lot of people using whatever the accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings are to like reduce motion, reduce transparency. And I feel like if, if many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people use those settings, just because the new design drop legibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much that they have to, that is a design failure. Like people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the accessibility tweaks to the design should do so for accessibility reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because the new design goes so far that way more people all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need those accommodations. And so I hope like I was hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this design I was hoping they would take the opportunity here with this new design to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a design that works better for more people without using special flags to turn stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off and they definitely did not do that in fact they’ve gone the opposite direction that I think more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will have to use the flags to turn stuff off with this new design and and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just I mean this design is not about legibility at all and maybe it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but certainly legibility is not what they were going for or unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they unless they really don’t know how to do it, but I think they just don’t care. I think what we’ve seen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen Alan Dye’s style over time. His style is all about minimizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hiding controls as much as possible to make room for content to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bleed through behind stuff. I don’t think that’s super effective, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does look nice in certain marketing shots. That’s obviously what he knows how to design for. That’s obviously what he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cares about the most. more above actual usability and there’s nothing inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong with trying to make stuff that looks really cool. I just think it is of course a balance and there are parts of this that do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really cool and parts of it that are perfectly usable and there’s also a lot of parts that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really sacrificed legibility and usability for looks. That is Alan Dye’s style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so congratulations he succeeded but and to be clear I am overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am excited to get into this design and to start wrapping my app around it basically, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is It’s it’s certainly very opinionated, and I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder like the outgoing design of iOS 7 through 18
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Largely defined by its lack of personality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it had all the personality stripped out of it. And what that created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was basically a blank slate for all the app developers and big companies and everything out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there to define their own styles in apps pretty effectively. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you go to different apps now, you know, on the outgoing era, the outgoing design, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go through different apps and you can figure out how to use them just fine but they do have their own styles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their, and you know, companies have their own like visual language and branding and it mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works and it’s mostly fine because the system does not impose a strong opinion. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this new design the system is suddenly imposing a very strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion. So in this environment though again this is not iOS 6 anymore like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not you know 2007 or whatever anymore like this is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an environment where we have this entire ecosystem built up from a decade of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system being fairly neutral and bland, which let the apps develop their own visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vocabularies. Now the new system UI design is going to much more significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clash with everyone else’s visual vocabularies they’ve built up. And so what you’re gonna see I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is a pretty big, maybe a bifurcation of like, you’re gonna have a lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indie developers like us who try to use the new design, but then you’re gonna have all the big company apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just totally snub it and basically disable all of it or fight against it or reimplement stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from scratch, which is terrible for lots of reasons, including accessibility. So I think there’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What Apple did here was they took a really big, bold stance to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grab back design authority from their ecosystem. But I don’t know if the ecosystem’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna follow suit, and I don’t know if they have the position to do that from. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the super roughness of beta one has me a little bit concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like about about Apple’s own UI quality here. Like, are they going to be able to polish this up and ship it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to to like a finished relatively bug free state in their own apps in their own system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by September? Like, maybe, but it’s it’s a tall order. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very aggressive move.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ve kind of shaded into the iOS section of this was when you’re talking about this design you’re mostly talking about in the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS. And we’ll get to that in a second. But two things first on the accessibility front, which you just mentioned again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I saw again, there’s some people debating this as the keynote was going by and they’re like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John how is this accessible? You can’t read any of the text, blah, blah. It’s terrible because ability and people are like, Oh, actually, Apple’s really good with accessibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at all the options they have to reduce transparency, increase contrast,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, uh, reduce animations. They have like tons and tons of accessibility options and all their OS isn’t They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the best companies in the world about accessibility. Um, but Marco, you made the point that like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if everybody needs to enable certain accessibility options for it to be legible or almost everybody, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you’re like, who’s using your default design. And the way I like to think about it as coming from the other angle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, if you turn on a bunch of the accessibility options, which I’ve experimented with turning on, for example, on Mac iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it makes everything uglier. And why should, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the accessibility out? Why? If you haven’t, you need accessibility options. Why should you sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John beauty? Why should beauty only be for young people with perfect eyes who can tolerate low contrast and can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John out texts? Like, why, why do you have to give that up? I think that a good
⏹️ ▶️ John design would be both accessible and beautiful. Why, why do you not get to have that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you need literally any accessibility options? Because yeah, the the accessibility options, if you enable them, do the
⏹️ ▶️ John things they say, they do reduce transparency. They do reduce motion. They do increase contrast,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do so in an extremely strong way. Some of them have adjustability, but not all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them have adjustability. And it’s so clear that the designers design it the way
⏹️ ▶️ John they want it to work and then design accessibility options to like look okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one is sitting there saying, let’s sweat over the 75 possible combinations of these accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John settings, making sure every combination of these settings, you need A and C but not B, you need B and C, you need
⏹️ ▶️ John B and D, whichever combination of accessibility settings you like or need,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one is sitting there saying, well, we need every combination of these accessibility settings to also look beautiful. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do not look beautiful. Turning on even a one of these usually makes everything uglier, and you get the feeling that
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody cares what it looks like when any of those accessibility options are turned on, other than measuring,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the contrast better now? Okay, good job, done, right? Is the transparency reduced? Okay, job done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no one cares what it looks like. Why should I have to give up beauty for accessibility? I feel like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t, maybe I’ve picked up like this animosity towards Alan Dye from Marco over
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the years, but like I look at
⏹️ ▶️ John him in this thing, I’m like, can’t you make an OS that is beautiful and
⏹️ ▶️ John accessible and as accessible as possible out of the box? Obviously, you’re still gonna need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John options. Like you’re not gonna make it so it’s perfect for everyone, but like that’s the lesson of like Oxo Good Grips, that if you design
⏹️ ▶️ John something for accessibility, if you do a really good job, you don’t have to change anything about it
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell it to people who don’t need any accessibility. Opt-ins are like, oh, this is just a better peeler. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they don’t know it was designed for people with arthritis. They’re just like, this is just the best peeler that I’ve ever used.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s success. Success is not, I’ve made this peeler that young people with perfect skin
⏹️ ▶️ John and amazing dexterity can use, but anyone else, you need to buy the accessibility handle and stick it on. And by the way, the accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John handle is big and ugly and loose and doesn’t come on the color you want and doesn’t match your kit in
⏹️ ▶️ John the kitchen. It doesn’t fit in your drawers. That’s kind of how I feel about the accessibility options in this thing. I think they are
⏹️ ▶️ John too far away from legibility, accessibility, readability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, like their, their default is too, is not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the options, the accessibility options that you turn on, uh, make
⏹️ ▶️ John everything just look so much worse. And that’s a shame. And then the second thing is we’re shading into
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS stuff. You mentioned the floating toolbars at the bottom. I don’t know if I need to draw diagrams
⏹️ ▶️ John about this for future shows or something. I’ve complained about it before, but it’s hard to explain visually. But one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re doing across all of their OSs, but including on iOSs, and they showed it in
⏹️ ▶️ John the keynote, a thing that used to be just the bottom centimeter of the screen with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of options on it, like the tab bar or whatever, that thing will now be a
⏹️ ▶️ John floating lozenge that floats over your content. That’s the whole thing on the tables. You got like a clear plastic acrylic or plastic,
⏹️ ▶️ John it floats over your stuff. But what that means, and they talk about it in the keynote, is now you can see your content behind
⏹️ ▶️ John and around that. It doesn’t go edge to edge, but it’s like, oh, our devices have curved edges now. So now this lozenge correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John matches the curved edge. So this floating lozenge is just floating. It’s not touching the bottom of your
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. It’s like, you know, I don’t know, a few millimeters up from the bottom of your screen. It’s a few millimeters
⏹️ ▶️ John from the left of your screen. It’s a few millimeters from the right of your screen. It is floating with margins around it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That, like, I don’t know why they’re so in love with that. Because like now you can see more of your content.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, first of all, no, I can’t. If I have a webpage and there’s a footer with links in it, now that footer
⏹️ ▶️ John with links is behind the toolbar. And yes, there is a Safari option that they added back when they tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to redesign to Safari in this way a few OS’s ago, that’s like, oh, your webcage can sense how
⏹️ ▶️ John much of the bottom of it we’re covering up. And you could essentially set safe area insets for your webpage so you
⏹️ ▶️ John draw your footer above that bar. Well, if I’m drawing my footer above the bar, what the hell good
⏹️ ▶️ John is the rest of the quote unquote content down there because I can’t put anything there. I can’t put anything for people to read because
⏹️ ▶️ John the bar is covering it. Can I put something in the two millimeter sliver at the bottom? Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I put something in the two millimeter sliver on the right and the left? Maybe, but probably not. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that space is not mine. My content cannot go there, even if I’m displaying a photo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if I’m displaying a photo, What if this photo has some text at the bottom? Or I wanna see what’s at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the picture, I have to like yank the picture up so it springs like, I’m, oh, I got, I’m all up, can
⏹️ ▶️ John I get, can I get it, can I get the photo entirely out from behind that thing? Or will the thing shrink out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John way and get a little bit smaller? That’s not my content area. You’re putting your floating glass thing over
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and I know you love it when like my content shows through your floating glass thing and makes it look cool or whatever, but what
⏹️ ▶️ John if I wanna see what’s there? What if I wanna draw on what’s there? Do I have to move your little thing out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John way so I can draw in that section in my drawing app, that is not my content area. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is much better when it’s just a bar because then you know your content begins at the top of that bar. So
⏹️ ▶️ John not only does my content actually begin at the top of that bar because that area is useless to me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t really begin there because it’s gonna display it there by default. And if I try to yank my content
⏹️ ▶️ John up so I can see the actual bottom of my content obscured, then what goes behind your floating toolbar?
⏹️ ▶️ John What gets put there? This interface I find maddening because I can’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John of a single situation in which it benefits me as the user in any way. I’m only, there are
⏹️ ▶️ John only situations where I’m lucky enough that I don’t care what’s in that bottom centimeter. And so I can sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that content and I don’t have to try to stretch it up so I can see it. I’m very angry about this
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s a, they tried this with Safari and backed off and now they’re like, nope, we decided we’re just gonna force it on everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, I haven’t seen the W2C sessions yet but I don’t think there’s a solution to this. All of these sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John safe area insets and other crap that you can do is just ways for you to try to work around this. But as soon as you work around it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re left with two problems. One, what the hell do you put behind that clear bar? And two, how is this any better than what came
⏹️ ▶️ John before, which is when you had a clean separation between content and bar. Rant over, but like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is my least favorite feature of this entire redesign. It’s not the glassy stuff, it’s this floating bar
⏹️ ▶️ John concept, because I think it is just like bankrupt from a user interface perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because like what happens is, you know, you’re right, like, what are you gaining? Like they talk all about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they kept saying over and over again in this design. By the way, this design doesn’t seem to have a name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s referred to in a lot of different ways with generic terms like Apple’s new universal design language.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, it’s liquid glass. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco liquid glass is the material. The actual design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John does not have a name.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think people will just call it liquid glass because what else are you going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it? Right. But everything, so, you know, they constantly talk about freeing up space for your content. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more focus on your content. And these are terms that have been around since John Yehia was there. Like this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new design vocabulary. It’s all about like, get out of the way for your content. But the problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much of your content are you actually gaining by this? And again, John’s right. Like you look at like, you know, the new tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar area or bottom bar area for most apps. And what you’re getting, first of all, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not getting usable content. You’re getting a blurred background version of the content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t, it’s actually blurred with the way most of these toolbars are designed. So like, you know, you go to something like
⏹️ ▶️ John Blurred and distorted, it’s not just blurred, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warped. Yes, it’s blurred and warped, yeah. But it’s mostly just blurred. So you’re not actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to use that space, it’s just a visual design. But the problem is, and this is one thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we’re gonna see, iOS 7 and the resulting iterations of that design language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were fairly easy to design for. Translucency is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult to design for because it’s easy to come up with, again, marketing shots, it’s easy to come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with like ideal, you know, hand-selected example content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or example designs that show up nicely and you can scroll them to the right position, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like all these like big, beautiful, full-bleed images as your quote content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know. Images where you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care what is being obscured because you are obscuring the bottom of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, images where you’ve shot them way wider than you actually needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John them. Yeah, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John down there but in grass, don’t worry about it, I’ll never show you a picture where someone has a t-shirt on that you wanna read it’s under there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. But like, so when these designs hit the real world though, it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard to design using translucency. This is what, you know, Windows Vista tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this a thousand years ago. Like this is why the computer industry is obsessed with designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with translucency because it looks really cool in demos and marketing. But then you actually get to trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it in a software design and it’s very difficult and it doesn’t, it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not, It’s not very versatile. It does not adapt itself well to a lot of different circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I will add to this, that even if these floating bars were 100% opaque, you’d still have the content
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Like you’re letting my, you’re forcing my content to go behind a thing that obscures it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even if it was 100% opaque, and what you’re into is they’re not, so on top of it not being 100% opaque, now there’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John problem of the translucency destroying the legibility of the actual controls that are floating.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the content itself, the root problem is that you are forcing my content to go to the bottom of the phone screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you’re laying those acrylic things or whatever they are, you’re laying them on top of my content that I can no longer see.
⏹️ ▶️ John The bottom of my content is the bottom of the phone, but you just lay your crap on top of it. And I can’t, if there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John more place for me to scroll, I can’t ever see that part unless I stretch it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what ends up happening in the designs when you design the stuff, like first of all, it’s so hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to design legible text areas this way. And so you end up, you know, basically having two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worlds of design on the phone. You have like the idealized version of the design, which seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be only designed to look good with scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lists of large full bleed photos, which admittedly, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot of apps people use, that is a lot of Apple’s apps, but that’s not all apps. And when you define a new system’s design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language, you have to accommodate all apps. So again, there’s a question of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does this work with maybe more boring apps? So again, you look at something like Mail. I always love looking at Mail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because mail is like the average app. It is a list,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a table view or a list of text entries and you tap them and you go in and like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the content in mail? It’s text, it’s lists of text. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like marketing proof in a way. Like you can see how a design works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doesn’t work by opening up mail and you can see like, okay, here’s like how this hits the real world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The apps that many of us have to use on a regular basis or design on a regular basis. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does mail work? And Safari is also a great example because in Safari, you have to accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for not having any control over the content that’s being displayed. It’s because if you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, we’re gonna make room for all your content, has spotlight your content. Okay, what content?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Example content designed by Apple designers or real world content for this actually out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and uncontrolled and uncontrollable. And so, and mail and Safari are these perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco examples like they’re stress tests for designs. Because in Safari, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, again, when John was saying like, when they tried years ago, that weird floating bar, well, guess what, the new bar is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way worse. Also closing a tab is now an extra tap. Hope you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari thing, by the way, their solution back then was, oh, we’ll just add some new properties that, new web kit
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari on iOS specific properties, and just the whole world will just update their web pages. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John You just won’t be able to see the links that are at the bottom of a page. So many pages, when you scroll them,
⏹️ ▶️ John the links are close enough to the bottom of the web page that they will be obscured by the bar. And what are people supposed to do? They
⏹️ ▶️ John might not even know they’re there. Maybe with a translucent thing, they’ll see some blurry thing behind it, but they’ll be saying, how do I tap on
⏹️ ▶️ John that? It’s being blocked. Do I stretch it up with one finger and then tap on it? What if I can only, you can only like pull the page up so
⏹️ ▶️ John far before it’s, before it like stops moving. It’s just a bad idea. That’s why they didn’t do it. And here
⏹️ ▶️ John we are, we’re back here again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We really should move on from the design and I know we’re not going to be successful in it, but I’m going to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us move on and I’m going to offer my two cents, which is, and I need you to hear me out. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate it right now, but, but, but I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I’m going to love it by the time they get themselves under control. And I know we just talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, so I’m not going to belabor it, but I really think they way over kicked, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over indulge themselves. But I really do think that a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in principle does work. I don’t particularly disagree with anything that you two said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest with you. But that being said, I think that there’s a lot of potential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. And I feel like this, when it presents well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which admittedly is on Apple slides and Apple demos and not as much anywhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least not today anyway. When it presents well, it presents really well. and I really, really dig the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direction they’re going, I think the magnitude is way too much right now, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they need to dial it back. But I’m enthusiastic about it in principle. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna be really great. I ran call sheet against iOS 26, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately wondered if I’m going to be able to get anything done this summer, because, oh man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a lot to do. But-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, I think modernizing the OSes is good. I think bringing them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together tastefully in principle is good. I think we could definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on a three hour rant between the three of us as to where they went too far, where they didn’t go far enough, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they went too far. But in general, I like the direction where all this is going. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably most enthusiastic about the three of us and that’s fine. And I’m really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see how this turns out. And I hope by the end of the summer, I will be standing on top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your two carcasses laughing, saying, ha ha, I was right, even though I’m not so confident that’s what’s going to happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hopeful that I will be the one that is right with you to slain beneath me as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought that this was going to be a wreck and they would never fix it and it turns out they did. So we’ll see what
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iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s carry on with the keynote. iOS 26. Actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John on the topic of iOS 26 and actually touching on design, we were all scared they were going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the icon circles. They didn’t. Yay!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very good, actually. Thumbs up for that. We were all scared
⏹️ ▶️ John they were going to change the squircle. I don’t think they did. Casey, can you confirm the squircle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s the same, but I don’t have a discerning enough eye to be able to tell you with certainty, but I believe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it doesn’t matter. We all have to make new icons anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right. And so the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the thing they
⏹️ ▶️ John did do and it was they have an app for making icons, which is nice. That’s part of Xcode now, Icon Composer
⏹️ ▶️ John and their their idea for icons, which I think they’ve done with all their icons, but it’s not mandatory.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems like the direction they want to go is conceptual again with their little physical toys, conceptualize
⏹️ ▶️ John the icon as a layer of frosted glass pieces, each of which is essentially a solid color, solid
⏹️ ▶️ John filled vector image. And then it’s just like Photoshop layers. So you take three vector
⏹️ ▶️ John images or like, I think the one they showed was like for the weather app, blue background, white
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud, yellow sun. And you just have dials, how frosted do you want them to be? How translucent do you want to be? They
⏹️ ▶️ John put on little edges and glows, all the things that you would do in Photoshop layers. But your icon is essentially three
⏹️ ▶️ John vector, three vector template images that you combine or four or five or six, however many layers you wanna put
⏹️ ▶️ John and Icon Composer will turn them into a frosted glass looking icon, Apple’s on it with a bunch of their icons. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think those icons look pretty cool. They look like little pieces of frosted glass. But to Marco’s point earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a very opinionated style. They say, this is what we think icons should look like. It’s like, well, if you decided
⏹️ ▶️ John your icon should look like a bunch of stack pieces of frosted glass, that’s cool. There is a functional component to it because iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other iOS is essentially let you say, oh, but now that your icons are essentially a stack of template images
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re applying effects to, we can really easily make you a dark mode version and we can make
⏹️ ▶️ John you a clear version for our 20th anniversary phone, that’s gonna be a clear sheet of glass. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s nothing inherent, like it’s just data. It’s like vector shape, color component, and
⏹️ ▶️ John for the clear one, we just desaturate all the color component and make them very transparent. Like it’s a flexible way
⏹️ ▶️ John to make variants of your icon because they are structured icons. It’s not just a grid of pixels that you uploaded
⏹️ ▶️ John various sizes. That is clever, it’s interesting. It does give you the ability to do a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John new things with your icons. And also every single icon that exists that is not Apple’s icons is not one of those icons right
⏹️ ▶️ John how many apps are there on the app store? How many icons, quote unquote, need to be converted to this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we saw before, we have tinted icons today, we have dark mode, light mode icons. Not everybody did it. And not
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s gonna do this. And I feel like what they’re doing is producing this sort of sedimentary layers
⏹️ ▶️ John of icon design errors as they keep introducing new and different ways to make icons. I’m glad they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t change the shape. I’m glad they’re still squircles. I think this style is actually cool and interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now it’s gonna be like, oh, I can see that as an icon from this era in history. It’s like a Taylor
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift era store, but it’s the iOS icon era
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco store. It’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John all these different icons made over the years with different styles and only the very newest
⏹️ ▶️ John ones will be made of a bunch of layers of stuff. Like Casey, your thing is the clapperboard for call sheet.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could make that out of a bunch of pieces of translucent things, but like how many layers
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? Is the clapperboard just one layer? Do you make a bunch of the little stripes individual pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, do you like, do you deconstruct and then reconstruct your icon from frosted glass or do you
⏹️ ▶️ John just say, screw it, I’m keeping my icon the way it is, it’s fine?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I don’t know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the thing is that there’s how many apps and then in any app that’s worth its salt, weight and gold,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what euphemism I’m looking for, any app that’s any good is gonna have a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternative icons. And so yeah, this is a lot of work for icon designers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and again, like a lot of big companies are just not, they’re like most, I’d say most big companies are just not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. Most, I mean look, most, the thing is like iOS app development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most companies is not like the main thing they do. They have, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole, if they’re a big company they have a mobile team and like the specific,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like making a perfect, you know, icon that fits into iOS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low on their priority list because they want the same icon to be used everywhere across all of their properties and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their apps and all of their platforms and everything else. And then for small companies, usually they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t afford full-time iOS developers. They might contract out the building of an app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it’s like, well, you know, we had this app made for us three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. We have to call them back in now and spend even more money to now remake this app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the new theme and the new icon. So a bunch of them will never update or will take years to do it because they can’t afford to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so then it’s like, I think what we’re gonna have is a very like split.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We had the same thing with iOS 7, the exact same problem with iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or dark mode icons, you know, like the current version of iOS, it’ll tint your icons. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John have no choice. Like whatever your icon is, they’re gonna try to tint it. Then they’ll do something. And if you don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John how your icon looks, then change it, tough luck. Dark mode icons that are custom, you’ll do if you care about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now it’s like one more thing. It’s like, oh, well, if you really care, you’d make these layered frosted glass template icons that
⏹️ ▶️ John will look good in clear, in tinted, in light mode, and in dark mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of, they also are offering all clear app icons. I’m trying to be positive on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, so I’m not gonna talk about those anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re gonna go great with the 20th anniversary complete sheet of glass phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess so. The camera app did get simplified as we expected. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this in principle. I don’t love that in order to get to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pano or anything like that, you just need to know where to swipe, which is not great, but I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t really know what the alternative is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, this is, this is Allen Dye design. Like the previous camera app was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge amount of complexity, much of which was buried behind gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new camera app is a huge amount of complexity, much of which is buried behind gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t really get easier. It just got different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like, okay, fine. But like that’s, you know, again, he is the junk drawer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theory of design. Just sweep all the complexity into the junk drawer And it’s easy. It’s well-designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. It’s like, well, no. Good design can adapt to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reduce complexity, not just hide it under the rug. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hiding under the rug. So
⏹️ ▶️ John OK, I mean, it looks nice. I think they added some hierarchy. Like, it seems like they’re surfacing more controls that used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John more buried based on usage. So I give a thumbs up to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Either way, I’m really amixed about this. Because I think the good news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is unsophisticated users are going to have a better time with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until they wanna do anything but the norm. If they wanna do anything but a photo or a video, then they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be very confused very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s actually one of the things that argues for hiding everything in junk drawers in the camera app because so many people use it and
⏹️ ▶️ John them accidentally tapping something and not realizing it is probably half the problems that they get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. We talked about, excuse me, photos where they said, many of you missed using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tabs in the photos app,
⏹️ ▶️ John which- Unfortunately, we’ve totally ruined tabs from this point on. So sorry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, calm down. We already covered it. So anyway, so that’s the thing. That looked good to me. Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the tab bar thing we already discussed. The FaceTime, they talked about FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit, and then they talked about CarPlay. And I gotta tell you, I’m really excited about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look of new CarPlay and perhaps the best couple of features. Number one, tap backs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in CarPlay. I don’t know what the UI affordances for that. They showed it for a flash. So I don’t know how I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John back in CarPlay. So hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John Dingus, give that a thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, I don’t know. Pinned conversations and messages is really nice because there’s occasions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, obviously, Aaron and I send text back and forth all day long, even though we’re in the same house together. But there’s occasions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be in the car, and she has fallen off the most recent 10 conversations or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s much more burdensome to say, hey, Dingus, send a message to my wife.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you want it to say? Well, tell her, blah, blah, blah. And so anyways, having her always at the top is excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Widgets and live activities are, I am in full support of this, although I don’t know that that’s a need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have in the car specifically, but I dig it. iPhone widgets work in CarPlay, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is cool. They also plugged CarPlay Ultra. They said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first vehicles with CarPlay Ultra just launched last month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I presume- Were there
⏹️ ▶️ John more than one Aston Martin SUV?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they just mean that there’s more than one copy of the Aston Martin that has been sold. I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have sold three of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, so weird, but yeah, anyway, and when they showed the interior with the new look with CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it has a better chance of matching more cars interiors.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about that when we talked about CarPlay Ultra, like this sort of Fisher-Price candy-colored iOS 7 CarPlay next
⏹️ ▶️ John to the, you know, the punch through of the seat adjustment in the Acid Martin that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John match styles. This kind of glassy translucency, the companies that design their
⏹️ ▶️ John own car interfaces love this stuff. They love gradients, they love
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco translucency,
⏹️ ▶️ John so maybe this will be a better match for more other manufacturers’ UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it’s funny because they said, and this should be an almost verbatim quote, this is just the start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the CarPlay Ultra journey with many more brands around the world looking to bring this experience to market. Combining the marquees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the manufacturers, unique look and feel with the power of iPhone, which here again, I think what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nodding in the direction of, you don’t have to make it look 100% like Apple, you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John your own thing. Just 50%. Just 50%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And before we move on, I just wanted to point out that they, they did say, and I didn’t get a chance to write down the quote, but they said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when a call comes in, for example, it doesn’t take over the entire frigging screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that’s the most annoying thing in the world is when you’re driving and you’re, you’ve got, you have the map view
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and you’re trying to navigate and then somebody calls you and you can’t see your map
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. It’s infuriating. And now they have like a little toast style thing that pops up. I am here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. Then, Darren Adler came in to discuss communication and whatnot. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about how they did change the look of the phone app. There’s now call screening, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presume is opt-in, but it can automatically answer calls from unknown numbers, and it’ll triage that, and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ring through to your phone. The phone won’t actually ring until the caller has identified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves and tells the phone why they’re calling, which I’ll believe that if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see it, but in principle, I dig it. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you all kind of do that today? When I’m curious, I’ll do the thing where like, you let it pick up the voicemail
⏹️ ▶️ John you see the little text going, right? This is just more like automating that process even further for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold assist, which again, tentatively very excited. We’ll see what it’s like in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reality. But the theory here is that if you’re on hold, the iPhone will detect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the music that’s playing and it will let you do other things and even effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hang up the phone, not literally hang up the phone, but effectively hang up the phone. And then once a lot, and this is now a quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once a live agent becomes available, we’ll ring you to return to the call and let the agent know you’ll return shortly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is kind of really obnoxious, and I’m so here for it because, oh my gosh, when you have to wait on hold for an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour, it’s infuriating. And you know what? I think this is a pretty great idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, so now, I mean, this is maybe a wonderful moment in time where we’ll have this tool that will help us, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John realize this is an arms race, because now, so what this is doing is like, there’ll be a computer voice saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John Just a moment, Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will be back here in a moment. We’re ringing
⏹️ ▶️ John him now because you’ve left him on hold for an hour. It’d be great if they said that to the person, but those people won’t have it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John those people can also deploy a system is like, well, we’re not going to bother our operators until we know that we have a live person. So is
⏹️ ▶️ John their robot talking to your robot about who’s going to be back when and who’s going to be called when? You’re hoping at some
⏹️ ▶️ John point both of them will agree to ring the actual humans and connect them on the call. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, not. Yeah, this is. But anyway, I endorse this because this is a tool for the world that we
⏹️ ▶️ John live in. The world that we live in, sometimes you got to be in hope for a long time and you can’t just be sitting there listening to their terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ John like overdriven clipping music from whatever decade interspersed with
⏹️ ▶️ John a message that says your calls are important to them. Blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah. Yeah. Messages get some new treats. I’m an old, so I don’t care. They get backgrounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They get group chats, including polls, which actually could be kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John cool. Also be useful. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a request. Send and receive cash again. That could be useful. What I’m really digging is typing indicators for group
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chats, including who is typing. I’m here for that. You could also screen unknown senders when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it comes to messages, which is cool. Then we’ve got Leslie Okamoto who comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who talks about images and how you can mix emoji and make images using chat GPT within the image
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a theme of the sort of sprinkle throughout the rest of the thing is, we have a feature that we introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John last year that’s not that great. We’ve slightly improved it, hopefully it’s better. But by the way, we know we suck.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just let chat GPT do this. Because honestly, image generation, like if you’ve tried to use their
⏹️ ▶️ John image playgrounds or Genmoji and tried to get it to do something, you either luck out
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s one of the easy things that it can do, or it’s hopeless. You will never get it to do what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But chat GPT image generation is amazing and hopefully they’re exposing the latest and greatest
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that. Don’t even bother asking image playgrounds to make your image for you. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you want a studio jibblyified version a picture of yourself just as chat GPT, it’ll do it in two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside all of the intellectual property and artistic concerns, which are beside the point.
⏹️ ▶️ John In terms of just the quality chat GPT can do this better and Apple everywhere in their West is like we
⏹️ ▶️ John will not be able to get better enough to do doing this to announce this is WWC 25. So
⏹️ ▶️ John please add a backdoor side hatch escape hatch so that they can use chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hope they do this in a way where you’re not getting some babyified ancient version of chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not really good at it, or there are tons of guardrails or whatever. Because we’ve seen that before where asking chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly produces an amazing result, but asking through Apple’s intermediary does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think what they said on this and all the other features is like, yeah, when you do this, we’re sending
⏹️ ▶️ John your query to chat GPT. And if you upload an image, we’re sending that image to them. And like, they didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John as strong a privacy thing. They just said, look, you have to opt into this. So you are choosing to do this. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of no getting around the fact that you will be sending your data to OpenAI. And if you don’t want to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use this feature. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They made mention of the fact that you can do different image styles like oil painting, realistic image,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey etc., which they explicitly did not allow in the prior version of the image playgrounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, there’s an image playground API, which I thought there was at least a modicum of it in the past, but apparently there’s either more or new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API this year. Live translation, which I really dig. You can translate conversations on the fly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is is integrated into messages, FaceTime, phone, et cetera. It’s 100% on device. The words are translated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you talk and they’re spoken out loud for the call recipient. They did some demos of this and to their credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it did not appear to be sped up because the latency looked like crap, if I’m honest with you, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their credit, yeah, because if they were going to speed it up, they would have sped it up from that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would have, yeah, it looks slow. Well, here’s the thing about this. I love this. I love this being like a system level thing that’s everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and being on device, you know, like the latency is not network latency. It is just like, look, this is how long it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing about live translation models is the gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that you can’t run on your phone are just better. And so, and this is the type of like natural language,
⏹️ ▶️ John a real time translation is the type of thing that I really wish I would actually love to
⏹️ ▶️ John year after year get just the most monstrous model to do the translation for me that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John running on my phone because the data you’re sending back and forth, It’s low volume of data. It’s latency
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive, so that’s true, but you’re sending text. The only thing you care
⏹️ ▶️ John about is the round trip time, but there’s not gonna be any upload or download time. It seems to me that Google
⏹️ ▶️ John is way ahead on this in terms of the sophistication of the translation. We’re already seeing a couple people
⏹️ ▶️ John posting online about how people who spoke both of the languages saying this translation
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t that great, but the fact that it’s there at all is the important thing. If you need
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a pinch, if you’re in a foreign country, if you’re talking to somebody who you don’t understand their language, you want them to
⏹️ ▶️ John understand you, you’ll take anything that kind of gets the point across. And so I love that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is there, but like doing it all on device really feels like, one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things I would look for from Apple is like, I want the best translation in the world. And if I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a good network connection, do that. Fall back to your local model if you have to, but just give me the best. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I would even consider paying for that because of the gap between like not particularly sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-translation, and the world’s best is pretty big at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nevertheless, I respect that they’re doing it, I respect that they didn’t speed it up, et cetera. Then we get Kathy Lynn to talk about Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s lyrics translation, lyrics pronunciation, which is cool if you’re listening to something in a foreign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language. There’s AutoMix, which also sounded pretty cool, where it’ll seamlessly go from one song to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next, you know, similar to what a DJ would do, including using time stretching and beat matching. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s neat. Music Pins for things you wanna listen to frequently. I like that. Maps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets to learn your preferred routes and it’ll let you also search visited places. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds really useful to me. Like, oh, where did I get a bagel a few weeks ago? And I don’t remember the name of that place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, but I know I went there. If this works, then I think that would be really great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of these things, by the way, music pins and visited places. It amazes me how long it has taken to Apple to get around
⏹️ ▶️ John to these things, but I’m so glad they have. Like most third-party apps are much better about this. Recognizing,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like you recognize that not every button on the face of a controller is used with equal frequency. Recognizing
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in an app, like you’re probably gonna use one of your top two or three playlists
⏹️ ▶️ John way more often than the others. You’re probably in messages, gonna message the same handful of people way more than all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John words. The UI should reflect that. Same with the visited places. Yes, there’s a search field, you can search
⏹️ ▶️ John for stuff, but what you’re probably interested in is someplace you might’ve been before. So
⏹️ ▶️ John privilege that in the UI. Allow someone to pin the things that are used frequently. give a
⏹️ ▶️ John special place of privilege to places that people have been before because they’re highly likely to go there again,
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely than say every other place in the earth that they haven’t been. And that’s just basic obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John information hierarchy and customization. And yet it’s taken 26 versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS, not really, to get to that point. So kudos for them for finally adding
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it’s like, oh geez, I’d forgotten even, I’d almost given up even wanting to, and
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a way it’s up to pin playlist now, but like more prominently have a giant button up there. It’s like, yes, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the playlist I use all the time. Top left. Love it. Add it to every app, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we’ve got wallet. What do they talk about? Car keys, driver’s licenses, et cetera. Apparently, boarding passes are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, which I’m excited about. They this was the first Sherlocking that I saw. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said they’re going to be live, shareable live flight statuses. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joked in the show in our internal show notes, the RIP flighty flighty is an amazing app that does a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than just this. But it is a shot across the bow, nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it is, it’s raising the bar for the like Friday is for people who really care about and either fly a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John or really care about the details because it is just best in class. But what this does is someone who is never
⏹️ ▶️ John going to pay for flighty, it gives them a baseline level of functionality that
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t getting now, like live activities for your flight. Shareable flight status like every
⏹️ ▶️ John flight tracking app has that in it. But now this is something just comes with the OS. And I think that’s appropriate.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what comes with the US should be baseline level of pretty good. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you are a quote unquote pro user of flying or whatever, like then then you step up to a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party app. And so I don’t think it’s a Sherlocking at all. And like I honestly, for people who like
⏹️ ▶️ John fly very rarely, it’s almost impossible to convince them to pay for something like flighty because it is kind of like a premium
⏹️ ▶️ John expert level product. They just want the basics. And now now it’s built into their phone. I give us a big thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then they talked about Apple Pay, where you can use like point redemption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only or installments. And I guess you could already do that online, which I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John done. Now you can do it when you pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now you can do it in person. Additionally, they’re getting order tracking beyond just Apple Pay orders.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got to tell you, I have only seen this myself like once or twice so far, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with stuff that I’ve ordered with Apple Pay, where you get the order tracking information in the wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, I almost never see this personally. But apparently, this is going to to go beyond just Apple Pay orders and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to sniff through your email and try to find, you know, that sort of information, which I think is cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, jokingly, I said, RIP parcel in our internal show notes. And here again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s quite that simple, but it’s still quasi Sherlocking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a small degree. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the complication here with any of these things is like, okay, we’ll go through your email to figure this out. Where do you think my email
⏹️ ▶️ John is? Apple? It’s not an Apple mail. Oh, well, nevermind then,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it really, it like all of these things, like Google’s been employing this feature for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they want your mail to be in Gmail. Otherwise they can’t see your mail as easily or at all. And so, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, these sort of context aware things, I wish they weren’t so siloed, but it’s just the nature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the beast these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of features like this that Apple adds every year that are like, you know, kind of boil the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ocean problems of like, well, if we can get a whole bunch of, you know, different people and companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sometimes governments and some of these features on board with our system, this will be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have, you know, a mixed track record of actually doing that. Sometimes the things they do that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do work out. Usually there has to be a decent incentive for the other party, you know, or parties to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. And a lot of the things are like, we have a new, a brand new, like you were saying earlier, John, about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web stuff, like, you know, we’re going to declare a new CSS property to fix this layout bug on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John iPhone. Every
⏹️ ▶️ John web page will update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. It’s like, you know, if it’s like, we’re going to, we’ve declared a new standard. It’s superior to all the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards because it’s private and it’s secure and it only works on our devices. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be great as long as we get all these different companies or whatever to participate. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a much higher miss rate. So it’s great when they hit or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great like if they hit in a way that like the app or service or whatever that you use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens to work with it. Great. But a lot of these features we kind of have to view through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lens of like, well, that might be great like in 10 years when it gets adoption, if ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, maybe not necessarily anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John My impression with the order tracking is they’re doing what Google does, which is we will look at your entirely unstructured,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably HTML email, and we will rummage through it and try to find things that we think are information about
⏹️ ▶️ John orders. And we will extract that information from totally unstructured text data and turn it into
⏹️ ▶️ John a parcel alert type thing. Google’s been doing again for years. Google does a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good job of looking at any old email. And these companies that are sending you messages about your orders
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t in cooperation with Google. In fact, many of them, like Amazon, intentionally started omitting information from their email so they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want Google to know what you were ordering because they use that to sell ads against and there was this whole battle and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that’s what Apple is doing, that there is no standard that anyone needs to comply to. Apple will just rummage
⏹️ ▶️ John through your email, which is totally unstructured, and they’ll figure it out. And I trust
⏹️ ▶️ John Google much more than Apple to successfully extract order information from unstructured emails Just because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been doing it for years and years, and it’s not Apple’s strength, but it does. I think it does rely on you
⏹️ ▶️ John using Apple mail because otherwise Apple doesn’t have access to your mail. So there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we move on to, uh, gaming with an tie, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently over half a billion people play games on the iPhone and they’ve announced a new games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, which is the new destination to help you get more out of your games. Uh, apparently the app itself works with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a controller. If I understood the keynote, right. Which is kind of cool. And they talked a lot about how you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play games together, including first player games, but I kind of zoned out during this portion, so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey catch the specifics. I don’t know if either of you did, but in principle, it sounds good. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John cool. Yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a boil the oceans thing like Marco was talking about. As long as game developers use our new APIs, it’s like you can’t even get them
⏹️ ▶️ John to make games for your platform that aren’t just ports. Like to use the custom
⏹️ ▶️ John phone platform APIs to do things like challenges and leaderboards, if there’s any kind of game
⏹️ ▶️ John that has that, that wasn’t, it’s not iOS only, they already have their own system for that. They’re not gonna incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing. Like it’s just, it’s more so on the Mac that it’s like pulling teeth to get them to port the game at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on iOS, even though a lot of games are made for iOS, so many games are made for the very least iOS and Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John And some of them are just cross every platform. And those games are never going to use any of these Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John APIs, because if they want this feature, it has to work on PC, on game consoles,
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS, on Android, and they’re never gonna port to the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, some of this, so, okay, the games app, like, so one thing that struck me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is that it actually is useful, even like, you know, I just launched it on my beta phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is full of games that don’t support it, because it just came out, and these games haven’t updated yet, of course, because they can’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it actually does have value in the sense that, like, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically like a games launcher and games promotion area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The question for me, so, okay, it’s designed a lot like the TV app, where, okay, here’s the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games. You can continue playing the games you played most recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that buried three screens down to continue playing the game you played? But here’s some new games you might wanna play instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. I mean, you know they’re gonna do that, but I mean, no, right now it is above the fold, but it’s near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bottom of the fold. And there’s a huge promo slot above. Again, it’s just like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV app, the same kind of design. So it’s like, oh, I’m ready to sit down and play a game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me go into the games app. Who’s gonna do that? That’s my question, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that they didn’t make a totally decent looking app here that looks just like all of their other content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsing apps, but are phone users going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open up the games app to get to their games? They’re gonna launch the app that launches the app. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t understand who’s gonna open this. Like, okay, it’s nice that they basically have, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s basically Game Center, right? They basically took Game Center, made it nicer, made it modern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have leaderboards with your friends. I did like the idea of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco score challenges with friends, even in single player games. I think that’s a cool little thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John think all that stuff existed previously in Game Center as well. It’s probably the same APIs, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It’s certainly, at least some of it did. But the new app, again, it’s nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s polished. Again, it looks exactly like the TV app, but not that different from the App Store. At least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t look like green felt. Right. I just I don’t understand who is going to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep this on their front page of their phone and launch this Before launching candy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crush or whatever like I I think people who play iPhone games Dedicate space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their home screen to to put the game icons directly there Instead of adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different tap to open up another kind of heavy slow app by the way like if you navigate the bottom of The games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app right now. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has the new tab bar It’s really sluggish the animations are again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unhinged like so over-the-top like ridiculous navigating on this tab bar It’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s it lights up when you tap it like you can it anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out there RGBs Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you if you have this beta installed on a device open up the games app and just navigate between those tabs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it shows you right there like oh this tab bar design it could use some editing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway Yeah, it’s a fine app. I just don’t think people are going to actually use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of disappointed that the long shot rumor that they were going to bifurcate the App Store into games versus non-games
⏹️ ▶️ John and this would be the games app store, like basically end up being like Steam where this is the place where you go to find the games,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the games, download the games, install the, you know, like, but they didn’t do that bifurcation so instead it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John game center but not as embarrassing looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like if they actually did that, if they actually like took games out of the app store and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them only in games.app, I could maybe see that. But even that, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, what is this NFC app that’s showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up in my, I think it’s not. Someone miscategorized their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it kinda depends on the categorization in the app store too. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raises the question, what is a game? And there are a lot of apps that are in between, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vague as to is this a game or is this an app? So it, it raises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of weird little challenges like that. But again, I think it’s, it’s a totally fine set of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game center evolved functionality. I just, I don’t think people are going to actually use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some discussions about visual intelligence from Billy Sorrentino. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I didn’t, I didn’t really get this to be honest with you, but the idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same thing with visual intelligence, if I’m not mistaken, is where you could mash down on the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control on the newer phones and take a picture of something in front of you in the real world. And basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically ask, what is this? And now you can do that using the screenshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, button gesture things. So you can take a screenshot and you can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically ask your phone, uh, where can I buy this great, this great jacket, or you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scribble over like the little part of the image that you’re interested in and say, search for similar images online.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess that’s useful, but that’s not something I can imagine ever doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, they did point out that if you take a picture of like a poster that has event information,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will, it will suggest that you add that event to your calendar, which that I am very here for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s also chat GPT integration. And this is where they, the first time I recall them saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app intense, baby app intense app intense. You should look into app intense. Did I tell you the good word about app intense?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know what I am doing right now? I’m intending to tell you about App Intents. It’s all about App Intents,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we all expected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is like kind of a half, another one of these half measure features. They’re not, what we want is the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John they showed last year, which is why should I have to take a screenshot and feed it to the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and go into this modal thing? Shouldn’t it be able to just say, hey, Dingus, like find
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing for me, or where can I buy this lamp? And it will find the lamp in the image. It knows what’s on my screen. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing of manually making you take a screenshot and going into a mode and scribbling over the thing you want. and then potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John firing out the chat GPT because Apple’s own stuff can’t do what you want. It’s a very manual process. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John on the slope from, we just talked about with chatbots, like you could do your own web searches, open a bunch of pages
⏹️ ▶️ John and tabs, read all those pages, synthesize the information in your head and come up with the results,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you can have an LLM do all of that for you and just go to chat GPT and say, give me the X, Y, and Z, and it tries to do it and hopefully does
⏹️ ▶️ John something similar to what you did by saving you time or whatever, right? This is like, we can’t yet do that on
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone. Android does a much better job of this. is closer to this than we are, we would like to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, activate our voice assistant and say whatever it wants. It knows what’s on your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It knows what app you’re in. It knows all the app intents that are exposed. And you say, it knows all this stuff. You can just talk to it and it will do it. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have that. So they said, well, you used to be able to do it with the camera and say, here’s an image, do this. Now you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it with what’s on the screen. But first you have to take a screenshot and then you might need to annotate that screenshot. And then you might decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what things you wanna do. Do you wanna ask a question about it? Or do you wanna do an image search? And do you wanna do it with the Apple thing? or do you want to chat to
⏹️ ▶️ John me? That’s a lot of taps. But I’m glad to give the chat GPT backdoor. I hope again that that backdoor
⏹️ ▶️ John is at least as useful as launching the chat GPT app feeding it the screenshot you just took and asking
⏹️ ▶️ John it the same question there. But we shall see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this honestly, I’m more optimistic about the two of you on this feature. I think this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the simple version of what they showed, I think is very powerful right there. Like, you know, the simple thing of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, here’s a text about an event, screenshot it and, you know, make this account or I think that’s, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really advanced, what used to be called data detectors. But, you know, so we have that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds great. And then also, the kind of, you know, pluggable system made by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Intents of like, well, you can like have, if somebody screenshots, you know, a photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, I don’t know, a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John find this on eBay for me. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco specifically, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just search the web for it, but like, I want to buy this on eBay, specifically on eBay exposes an App Intent that will launch you into the
⏹️ ▶️ John native app with the search and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah. Yeah, I can see this becoming something over time that we use all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that actually ends up being incredibly, like just incredibly valuable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in little ways throughout the rest of our lives using iOS devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it’s just halfway there. Like, why do I have to initiate the screenshot? It’s already on the screen. You’re the phone, like
Sponsor: BetterHelp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by BetterHelp. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people today, we face immense pressure. We’re all pressured to perform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to provide, and to keep it all together. And so it’s no wonder so many people in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco US suffer from depression every year, and it’s often undiagnosed. It’s okay to struggle. Real strength
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes from opening up about what you’re carrying and doing something about it. So you can be at your best for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone else in your life. Talk to someone, a friend, a loved one, or a therapist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I personally have benefited from therapy. I can strongly recommend. It’s a great thing out there. And
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watchOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And then we moved on to watchOS, which wasn’t that much there, although what was there I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really good. This was presented by Stephanie Pustlewhite. They said they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a workout buddy, which I believe I thought was Anya from Fitness Plus, but I think it’s actually Sam.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, this is a dynamic generative voice that’s using voice data from one of the Fitness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus trainers, like I said, that will give you just the right encouragement. I dig this as an idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure the execution is there, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of doubt.
⏹️ ▶️ John They did say you get to pick from voice assistants that are from the voice things. What they didn’t say is you can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John from the one that’s really perky that you want to kill and the one that’s more chill and like, but, but again, some people want like
⏹️ ▶️ John the most enthusiastic thing possible and some people don’t. And so I bet kind of like carrot weather where you can turn
⏹️ ▶️ John up and down the snark. Yeah. Best case scenario, they give you choices of things. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good feature. I think it’s a good feature as long as it’s optional and as long as you get to pick Because some people will really
⏹️ ▶️ John benefit from having someone encourage them in their ear But you just did your fastest mile your blah blah keep going
⏹️ ▶️ John and some people will want something much more tame but they do actually want to know like Uh, you know good job
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. That’s the you know, that was your third workout this week That would be like the carrot weather turn dial all
⏹️ ▶️ John the way down. It said a fact you ran three times this week That was your third run. That may be the level
⏹️ ▶️ John people want. They want to hear somebody tell them them that was your third run this week. They don’t want to hear. That’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John great. That’s your third run and it you know, like, but you know, let the person
⏹️ ▶️ John pick. So I give this feature a tentative thumbs up not knowing what any of the voices sound like except for the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that they did in the picture, but sure, and in the video, but I think the one in the video will definitely work for some people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s better smart stack stuff. They did they said something about volume, which I totally missed. There’s a wrist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flick gesture. So if you’re looking at the face of the watch and flick your wrist away that does something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was unclear to me what specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the volume thing is they’re going to dynamically adjust the volume of dings and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audible alerts on the watch based on your surrounding.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re not embarrass you quite as much when you’re in like a quiet room and it goes ding. Right. For the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John have sound on their phone on their watch, which boggles my mind, but you know, different strokes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And the wrist flick gesture was to dismiss notifications, silence alarms and dismiss the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stack, which is not that different. So the double tap gesture is more of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yes, confirm open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the risk flick is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey more of a cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then they’re apparently doing a pretty good job across all the platforms. I mean this genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not trying to snark. They’re doing a good job of keeping parody with at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least some of the features like messages, for example. So you’re getting live translations, conversation backgrounds, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new actions are being offered like share my location on Find My. Also, Notes is coming to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch, which sounds silly, but I actually am here for it. I dig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that. Yeah, it’s kind of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I have probably way too many notes, so I don’t know how the search affordance is going to be, or maybe it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be the few most recent notes, but either way, I’m excited about that.
tvOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we got tvOS which basically amounts to hey, let me tell you about all the good Apple TV plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that’s coming Oh, and we did some things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey moving on see
⏹️ ▶️ John again if you’re gonna have an ad for your TV shows put it in the Apple TV Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. I allow them to say we have a bunch of new shows coming out here They are at least it didn’t last that long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one again, you know tvOS like there actually are some There’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive great new feature the automatic sign-in API But
⏹️ ▶️ John how many years have we heard that Apple is going to fix the sign-in problem on Apple TV? This could be the year
⏹️ ▶️ John every year could be the year But man, we’ve been burned before because this is the main problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with TV OS especially if you are suckers like we are and buy new and every single year when they are not everything every time they
⏹️ ▶️ John come out with a new one we buy them which means we have probably more experience than most people with setting up new Apple TVs
⏹️ ▶️ John and Resigning into all your streaming apps is just like pulling teeth. It’s not like watching
⏹️ ▶️ John paint dry because it’s painful like pulling teeth. Every five or so
⏹️ ▶️ John years they say we’ve solved it you’re not gonna have to do that again and we’re centralizing the sign-in and we’ll just get everyone to work
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll just it’ll sign you in everything will be synced and we’re like this will be great and then and we try it and it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John two apps adopted and they’re not the two apps that you use and you have to spend an hour signing in. So try number three for
⏹️ ▶️ John automatic sign-in API. This time for Sure, I hope they do it because I hate signing in
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wish they would fix this. And it has gotten better over time, mostly through them allowing you
⏹️ ▶️ John to use your phone and your own iCloud key chain to do it from your phone. But still, that’s so painful. Please,
⏹️ ▶️ John please let this be the year that it really, really solves the problem because this is a big problem that needs to be solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but again, it depends on all the apps buying in and updating to use it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how, you know, how, if you look around at the group of streaming service apps on the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And how much they love Apple. Yeah, how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them seem like they care a lot about like fine details of user interface design
⏹️ ▶️ John and user experience? Or like doing anything to help Apple, which competes with them with its own streaming service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, exactly. Like this is part of, you know, part of Apple’s problem of basically declaring war on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire world at various times is that like these companies don’t want to help Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. And so like something like this, like, yeah, it would be great if they all adopt this, but I think odds are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. However, I disagree with you saying this was the one good feature. This is good if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re someone who uses profiles. We are not yet that family. Maybe we will be. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that really got me excited, even though this is not a need that I actually have myself, is permanently connect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to any speakers. So my understanding is if you had AirPods, if you had HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could say to the Apple TV some way, somehow, the particulars don’t really matter. I always want the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to play through this one or two HomePods. And that was the only way you could do it. If you had an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay speaker, you could selectively, every time you start the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go in and say, please use this AirPlay speaker for the purposes of playback. But then as soon as the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suspends, it would disconnect or forget that. And now if we’re to believe the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keynote, you can say some way, somehow, always, always, always, when I’m playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something on the Apple TV, AirPlay the audio to such and such speaker. And that’s really exciting for the three people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that need it. I’m not even one of them, but I’m excited for all three of you. All right. If you’ll permit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, which you won’t, but I’m going to try, let’s skip macOS, do VisionOS, and then let’s come back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS and iPadOS, because those are the big ones.
visionOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, since you haven’t interrupted me yet, Vision OS was done by Mike Rockwell. We got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some new experiences. Happy birthday to Underscore. There’s a widgets app in widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit. So, I’m sure Underscore is going to be very happy about that. Additionally, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember where your apps are, it will remember where your apps are, including widgets, even across restarts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think if I understood the implication here, I think what they’re saying is, if you have a room in the house where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically using Vision Pro or typically doing doing work or what have you. The way it works today is you can arrange where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is and put a slack window over to your left and Safari in front of you and pages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the right or what have you. But the moment you take the vision pro off, that’s largely forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at best, if you, if you put it back on, they will appear relative to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head in roughly the same spots, but that may or may not be what you want. And if I, if I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, right, I think what this is saying is Safari will always be, or what did I say, pages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will always be to the right of you about five feet away from that specific wall. In other words,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are going to stay stationary. I cannot talk. They’re going to stay stationary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 3D space and that will be persistent across restarts, I think is what they’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, at least the widgets are. I don’t know if the apps are doing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought they said that, but maybe I misunderstood.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they said the apps as well. Although it’s gotta be like somewhat like constrained Because if you’re sitting at your
⏹️ ▶️ John desk, everything will be in the same place. But if you’re in the same room, but say, at a different desk across the room, will that remember a
⏹️ ▶️ John second set of things?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I’m not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you sat down at that desk and you turned it on, all your windows are behind you at the other side of the room. That’s not useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I mean, in principle, I like this, in theory anyway. Then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got Haley Allen to come up and talk about spatial stuff, including you can have spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scene, spatial browsing in your web browser. And apparently, personas are dramatically better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe the term they used was that the enhancements were striking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, they look a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they did look a lot better to me. I haven’t put the beta on my Vision Pro yet, but I will at some point. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take a look. Also, you can do shared movies or games for people in the same space,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is super cool for the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John person. For all the families
⏹️ ▶️ John that has $3,500 headsets for every member of the family.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, I still think it’s very neat. They talked about some enterprise stuff, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the three of us doesn’t really matter, But the short of it is that you can get a common pool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Vision Pro devices and you can kind of share them amongst team members. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Light Shield, whatever it’s called, and all that stuff notwithstanding, and you know the inserts, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure how they’re going to manage that. But still, I dig it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think what they said too, like it was very clear that like, you know, you wonder like who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is using the Vision Pro because it doesn’t seem like it’s that many people. And what we heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we heard Mike Rockwell say, quote, hundreds of companies worldwide use Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro for something. Now that could be that they’ve sold 200 of them. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be that they sold them to 201 companies worldwide. But there are, and we saw the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Microsoft and HoloLens over the years. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are interesting theoretical uses for specialized industries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. We just don’t know how many of them are actually doing it. And in the case of HoloLens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer was not many. And then they shut it down because not enough people are doing it. But a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of these features are very clearly made for, like, okay, a team has one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visions pro to test something on, and they have 10 engineers who occasionally might have to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or something. So let’s make it easier to share them between people. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, because this is still a very, very niche, kind of specialized, extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive device. So, you know, the launched version of the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was atrocious at being shared between multiple people. Now, they do still have the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, as Casey said, about like the light shield size, the straps, the lenses inside, if you have prescription lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inserts, like they do still have all those problems of sharing those needs between people. But at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have made what appear to be substantial improvements in like the realities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and convenience of having multiple people share one, or at least trade off or temporarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share one Vision Pro. So, you know, they’re finding some kind of market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe for it. It still seems like it’s very optimistic, but they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding stuff. This is more than I expected to see in this release. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of expected there to be almost nothing like a tvOS level feature improvement to Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. And no, it’s something. They’re still working on it. There is stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here like the VR controller support and like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3D model viewing from Safari. There’s stuff like that that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why they couldn’t have gotten that for the launch, but I’m glad it’s here now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought the 3D thing in Safari was there at launch. What am I thinking of, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure. I think the difference is that you can do the 3D stuff within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the webpage, whereas previously you had to like download a USDZ or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. I might have those details wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because that kind of thing, like that’s huge. One of the great things that is possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Vision Pro is basically online shopping for things like, how big is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lamp I want to put on my table over there that I’m seeing on some shopping website? Will it actually be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too big? And you can take measurements, you can try, but like before, since basically nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supports the Vision Pro out there in the content world, you would see the webpage, and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of webpages now will have a view in 3D AR on your phone, but those things never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on the Vision Pro. So you have to, even if you own a Vision Pro, you have to take it off, take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone out, and look in the little six-inch AR view on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so hopefully this kind of thing will broaden the compatibility of that kind of thing, and maybe those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR views that are in every webpage now, maybe those will just work on Vision Pro now. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if true, that’d be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was their strategy with the GoPro and Insta360 thing. It’s like, there is existing content
⏹️ ▶️ John out there that in theory should be useful in the Vision Pro, like all those webpages you just talked about that you have to use the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John AR. Can we just change Vision OS so that stuff works? I hope that’s what they did with
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3D page stuff and not some new API, because no one’s gonna do new API for just Vision Pro users, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough of them. But surely for the GoPro and Insta360 and Canon video, These
⏹️ ▶️ John are existing video files made by existing cameras that are just out there that previously, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t the super special Apple format, the Vision Pro just ignored them. But now it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll take whatever data files you have. You took these videos, they exist in the world. We should be able to show
⏹️ ▶️ John them to you, quote unquote, correctly, like in the 3D way that they’re supposed to be shown in
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro, and now they can. That’s what they need to be doing with the Vision Pro. Not telling everybody, you should shoot all
⏹️ ▶️ John your video in a special format that looks best in Vision Pro, but just saying, what have you got? What have you got out there that we think would
⏹️ ▶️ John look good in a headset? We will learn how to read it, and so it becomes useful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then going back a half step to enterprise stuff, one of the things they said is that you can save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all your settings to an iPhone. And if I understand this right, what this means is, and I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is applicable outside the enterprise, let’s say that John comes to my house and puts on myVision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro and sets himself up as a guest user or what have you, I think by some magic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can, or John can save that information either to my phone or presumably to his phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the next time he puts on my vision pro, it can beam that information, you know, slurp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that information up from his phone or wherever such that he doesn’t have to do the whole, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I calibration and all that, because if you’re not familiar, if, if Aaron uses my vision pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which she does only under protest, cause she finds it very painful to use, like physically painful to use. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nevertheless, if she puts it on, she does the thing where you, you look at the different dots and you pinch your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of figure out where your eyes are and so I can get all that calibrated. If she pulls the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pro off at all and puts it right back on, guess what? She has to do that whole dance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over again. And it’s a pain in the butt. And so hopefully, this will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work a lot better such that I can have her save her profile to somebody’s phone and then it’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey load right up the next time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Paul Imagine that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro had the smarts in it of a $10 smart scale that when you step on and figures
⏹️ ▶️ John out who you are based on your weight.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Imagine if we had that.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about just a giant menu of huge blurry images that you can’t see correctly yet because it hasn’t converged to just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, Aaron, and you just look to the left for Casey and look to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right for Aaron.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, someday maybe we’ll even get settings syncing across macOS, can you imagine? We don’t have the technology for that
⏹️ ▶️ John today, but someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they don’t even, they have the iris ID or iID, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Yeah, I know, yeah. Just use that,
⏹️ ▶️ John they know who you are. They did, I think in Vision OS 2 They added like some kind of guest awareness
⏹️ ▶️ John and we talked about it on the show. But this seems like a step up. And like to Casey’s point, like it being portable on your phone is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John great for an environment where it’s like, OK, well, maybe there’s like a limit on the actual device. But if you have a bunch of employees in a company
⏹️ ▶️ John and they all have their phones, they just bring their settings with them, you know, so they could go to like some other random headset that they’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ John worn before. But because the settings are on their phone that they carry with them, it will sync, you know, again, the enterprise type
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of vision OS hoteling. If you know what hoteling means, I’m sorry. Yep, yep, yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep. I sure do. Bye.
macOS Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think we should probably now backtrack to Tahoe because I certainly have plenty to say about iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you’d rather reverse that, gentlemen, I’m happy to do that in reverse order. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John please, let’s do Mac OS, because I think there’ll be many future shows about Mac OS, but I’ll try to go
⏹️ ▶️ John semi-quickly here. This is the one thing I wanted to get installed and it was slightly painful, but I did get Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John installed and I have tried it because I needed a lot of questions and answers that were not answered in the thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe, they’re like, oh, it’s beautiful, the glassy water, blah, it’s like glassy, yes, yes, wait, whatever, there’s tile for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they kind of glossed over a lot of stuff like, and of course it’s got the new design and before they started talking about some features,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of which are cool. But what do they mean that it has new design? So number one item, I just got done talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John how they didn’t change the icons to be round in iOS or anything else. They’re not all round, they’re all, it looks like the same
⏹️ ▶️ John squircle type shape. Since I believe Big Sur on Mac OS, they’ve said, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should make all your Mac icons be squircles. But the squircle was actually like
⏹️ ▶️ John the standard Apple squircle was like inset within the square
⏹️ ▶️ John area that you’re allowed to make an icon. So you have like, you make icons of many different sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS. Let’s just say like 128 by 128, that’s your square. And the big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ John design was make a squircle inside the 128 by 128, but leave space all around it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So your squircle is not 128 by 128, your squircle is substantially smaller than that because there’s a significant white
⏹️ ▶️ John border around the entire thing, but that was the standard. Everyone gets squircle icons, all those squircle icons are smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than the full area of the thing. And so when I saw that they hadn’t changed the icon shape, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, well, that’s good for Mac OS because they’ve already been on this squircle standard. But of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John not every app adopted squircle shaped icons. If you just had an old school icon, and yours is 120 by 128, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could fill that whole 120 by 128 with content, or you could make a little thing in the middle, or you can make your icon shape like a frog,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever you wanted to do, it was entirely up to you. You can make it any shape you want. they recommended Squircle.
⏹️ ▶️ John In Tahoe, they insist on Squircle. Every iMac icon
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tahoe is in a round wreck jail. Doesn’t matter what the icon is,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick any icon you want. For example, Script Editor, the editor app for
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleScript. I don’t know if you can visualize that icon because no one probably uses it anymore because AppleScript is somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John defunct, but not really. But it is a Squircle. It’s a white Squircle with a little
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleScript scroll icon on it, but like many past Apple icons, it has a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John leaning over the squircle. And the tool is a pen. And the pen
⏹️ ▶️ John is floating over the squircle on an angle, and it breaks the bounds of the squircle. The end of the pen
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up past the edge of the squircle. What Tahoe does with that icon, it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John your icon’s not a squircle, you go to squircle jail. So it takes the script
⏹️ ▶️ John editor icon, and it shrinks it and it draws a round rect
⏹️ ▶️ John around the existing round rect and it makes the background gray. So it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the script of your
⏹️ ▶️ John icon on a round rect.
⏹️ ▶️ John They insist that not only is your icon a squircle, but it is only a squircle. You must not break
⏹️ ▶️ John the bounds of the squircle. You go to round rect jail. That’s what these icons, what it will do your icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have icons for two of my three Mac apps that are not squircles. they’re going to round wreck jail,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not great. Not great at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… And to be clear, is this, this is even if the, if the app is not recompiled with the new SDK? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, this is the finder doing this, remember?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the… So, yeah, so all apps that don’t get updated are gonna have these gray jails around them?
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing. There’s like, okay, but like, but like I said, if your app is following the Big Sur guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is a quote unquote a squircle, it’s just a bitmap. It’s just like for the 128 by 128 size of your icon, It’s a 128 by 128 bitmap.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just so happens that there’s a transparent background and your squircle is embedded
⏹️ ▶️ John in it or whatever. But I put my non-recompiled, straight off the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John squircle hyperspace app, and I launched it. And in the doc, it showed
⏹️ ▶️ John just like it does today. It did not put a jail around it. So somehow it knows that my icon
⏹️ ▶️ John is a legit non-boundary broken squircle. And that’s all I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John right now is that it didn’t put it in the jail. So I’m not sure what it’s using to determine that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I know that my Mac App Store version of my app knows nothing about Tahoe, but on Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not in jail. So this is going to be a problem area. And
⏹️ ▶️ John your icons that are put in this jail, they look terrible. Apple’s icons look terrible, your icons will look terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you don’t want it. I don’t actually know the answer to this question. We’ll find out in future episodes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if I want to get out of this jail, what can I do? Do I have to make my icon a squirrel
⏹️ ▶️ John or can I preemptively squircle myself? Can I put myself in my own background
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, because then you at least get to pick your margins and like how you’re centered in the squircle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then will you just allow me to display myself that way? Setting aside the third thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, I still don’t know the answer to this, on macOS, can I use icon composer to make an icon out of a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of layers that it will put the translucent glass treatment on, blah, blah, blah? Can I do that or can I not do that? And if I do do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I say on all previous OSs use the, the, my existing icon. But when you’re on the new OS, use this new
⏹️ ▶️ John one. The icons, perhaps surprisingly, the icon situation is the
⏹️ ▶️ John most fraught on Mac OS. It’s really annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John and absurd. And one of, one of many things in Tahoe that turns out to be way uglier
⏹️ ▶️ John than you think is going to be at least in this first beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we got icons covered. Um, Then the menu bar is now completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transparent and I expected to absolutely grab and clutch my pearls when I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I don’t actually don’t think it’s bad. I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ve been here before and past OSs where they tried to make it super duper transparent, but something happens
⏹️ ▶️ John when you make it not there. Like there is no background. It is just, it is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no border. There’s no nothing. It’s just like the word file edit. Those are just sitting there. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no line underneath them. There’s no background behind them. It is gone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what that is essentially is the naked robotic menu bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because they’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the minimum we can ship? Because if you don’t like this, you could just do a
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop background that has a white stripe on the top of it. Now it’s annoying if you change resolution a lot, because that white stripe
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t be the right thickness all the time, but if you don’t change resolution a lot, you could chip, put it a desktop background
⏹️ ▶️ John on that gives you a menu bar that is a hundred percent white, which is the thing that was much more difficult to do back
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were like, oh, well the menu bar will incorporate colors from your whole desktop background and pull them up into it and smear
⏹️ ▶️ John them across. Like you couldn’t, you could try to influence that by putting a white thing behind it, but it would pull colors
⏹️ ▶️ John from elsewhere on your background and still kind of make it weird. But with this, with 100% clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John make the menu bar however you want. And by the way, if you really can’t stand this, if you turn on reduce transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS Tahoe, at least in the first beta, it will just give you a white menu bar again. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a super big fan of this. I think it’s kind of dumb because, well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as dumb as the floating toolbar. That is the winner of the worst decision that they’ve made in this redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does mean that the menu bar text now has to display legibly over whatever your background
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Because remember, it’s not doing anything to what’s behind the text. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, it’s real easy, and I would have done this if I was doing a review, to come up with a background
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes your menu bar 100% illegible. It’s real easy. just put something in there with a bunch of words, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John like put zebra stripes or put dots, or like it’s, and I don’t know if, like I haven’t actually tried it, so
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they detect that and try to do something about it, but like to what end?
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the benefit that I get from this? Why do I need to see my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John background behind the word file for the file menu? And by the way, when you mouse over it, a lozenge appears and like smears
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and so you actually, like when you’re mousing over it, it becomes more legible. I guess it lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you see more of your desktop picture If you really want to see that top sliver, of course, they could also accomplish that by having a normal menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar and having a desktop picture start at the bottom of the menu bar. But then, of course, they have auto hiding menu bar that
⏹️ ▶️ John so they need to move the image up like this just seems like a change because they felt like doing it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got the notch up there to taking some of the real estate. But I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me
⏹️ ▶️ John that much, like honestly, completely gone. And is, in my opinion, better than
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the almost completely gone things that they’ve done before. I’d prefer it if it was just white
⏹️ ▶️ John or black, because I don’t think it is valuable to see my desktop image behind the words in
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar, but because it is 100% clear, I have the option to not do that if I
⏹️ ▶️ John really care that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there’s allegedly more menu bar and control center layout customizations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They did a lot with changing the color of folders in Finder, and additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can add symbols. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John throwback, by the way. Yeah, so the colors is a throwback. when they introduced labels in Mac OS, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it was system six for the Mac two, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that the original implementation of labels, well, I’m not entirely sure, I’m old and I don’t remember. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they might’ve just changed the color behind the text, but anyway, at some point in classic Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you apply the label to a folder, it would color tint the folder icon itself. And at some point
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac OS X history, they said, oh, we’ll put that little circle next to it, you know, in the finder, like in list view, or like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t like tint the whole icon and coloring the icon is better. It just it makes the folder
⏹️ ▶️ John stand out more. It’s easy to pick out. It looks nicer. So I heavily endorse
⏹️ ▶️ John this change because I think labels are a great feature. And I think they’re being minimized
⏹️ ▶️ John in recent years has really hurt them. And also, I like adding the symbols to folders because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a thing that there’s apps that do this for you that will make a folder for you with an icon on it. But like because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple changes the folder icon like in every OS in subtle ways you’d end up with this hodgepodge of icons
⏹️ ▶️ John If they if they were made by like past versions of some app They all don’t match each other Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope what it’s doing. It’s all just like programmatic and structured saying here’s the symbol Here’s the label
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever OS you’re using. We’ll take the color. We’ll composite them together I think this is one of the better changes
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS. I look forward to having colored folders with cool icons on them Cool. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, on the menu bar in Control Center customization, it’s very much like
⏹️ ▶️ John when you try to customize Control Center on iOS or iPadOS, where you get that like the little widgets
⏹️ ▶️ John and the, you know, the dragging out the things, only they’ve extended that. They’ve significantly changed this
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of system settings. So if you think system settings haven’t changed at all, it has. This one lets you like
⏹️ ▶️ John find things like what the search feature is enhanced to find the the widget you want and then drag it from
⏹️ ▶️ John there to the menu bar or at least hit a plus button in the menu bar and select from a thing of widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very janky and broken in the first beta, but you can see that they’re doing something very different here. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it will probably be better than the existing system of just scrolling through that giant list and trying to find places where things are.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s hard to say in its current janky state, but it seemed to me that the search worked better
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is all new UI for dealing with the stuff in the menu bar. I couldn’t figure out how it worked at first
⏹️ ▶️ John glance, which is not a great endorsement of its usability and obviousness, but I’ll give them
⏹️ ▶️ John some benefit of the doubt that they’ll get this straightened out before it’s released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s now more continuity with other devices. You get live activities on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the menu bar, which I am here for. If they can make that work and it doesn’t look dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I dig it. Additionally, there’s now a phone app in macOS, so you can place calls and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They also spent a surprising amount of time talking shortcuts, including that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can run shortcuts automatically based on time of day, saving a file to a folder, connecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a display. This reminds me of what was it, Control Plane or something like that from many years ago, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may even still be a thing for all I know, which was, I think, the tagline, and we’ve talked about this on the show before, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey context-aware computing, which basically, based on what Wi-Fi you’re connected to and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what displays you have connected, would let you run different things. This was many, many, many years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but it was a great app. Um, there are intelligent actions where you can have it do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things using, um, their language model. Um, additionally, Spotlight has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a serious overhaul. Um, you can do all sorts of different things. You can browse your content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Including most relevant files. And that also includes intelligent suggestions, recent app system actions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including play podcast. You can send an email with parameters, and they did a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demo of how this works in app with our friend, Gus Mueller’s acorn, which was super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool to see. So congratulations to Gus. Then they also have a clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey history, which I never thought I’d see the day, but that’s pretty cool too. So I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John undersold that because it’s like, oh, and by the way, we have clipboard history built in. The way it’s implemented is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s, so it’s in spotlight, which may not be where you expect it. If you figure out all the shortcuts, It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John command space, command for down arrow return. Like it’s not that different than most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the clipboard managers you have. I do like that it’s built in, but it’s pretty hidden. Like I do wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John if people are gonna discover. I kind of wish that a clipboard manager was built
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I don’t know. I guess you have to make it part of Spotlight because where else would it be? But yeah, so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the biggest upgrade Spotlight has gotten in years. It’s not, it hasn’t suddenly become Raycast or even Quicksilver,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has gotten way more features than it used to have. Like in that world of things like, you know, Alfred Quicksilver,
⏹️ ▶️ John Raycast, what’s the other one? There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John launch bar launch bar. Yeah. Some of those things just have a tremendous number of features are incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John extensive. Again, those are third party apps. Those are more like the pro users. Spotlight is what most people use.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an OK app launcher. Now it’s also an OK clipboard manager and OK action thingy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s like I this is even just using it for two seconds. Like, oh, this is better. Like they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve made it better because There’s obvious prior art that they should copy from, and they did. And they made
⏹️ ▶️ John simplified versions of that stuff without as many features and tweaks or whatever, but I’m so glad to see it. It’s so good that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m actually debating whether I’m going to stop using Quicksilver and start using that instead for most of my
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I think I’ll still stick to Pastebot because I’m a little bit more sophisticated user of clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ John history. But having just gone through the years long effort to get almost everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ John in my family to use clipboard managers almost all the time, because they’re so useful, it’ll be so great though
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’ll be like, like you don’t even worry about if you have a spot on your new Mac, it’s just built in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and keep in mind that’s also, having all this functionality built into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Spotlight UI on the Mac, some of it appears to be available on iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS as well. I don’t know if we know any details about how much of it yet, but that’s like step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to getting on the iPad as well. And then you have clipboard history on the iPad, which was never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible in a good way before. It should be
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone too, is it? Do you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You have the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John OS called. You pull down spotlight, is there anything that looks like clipboard history in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there? No. I’m looking at an iPad, I don’t see squat, but I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am not understanding how to activate it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this might be- Hit
⏹️ ▶️ John command four, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what to tell you. Yeah, I mean, this might be a casey issue and maybe it’s there and I just don’t realize it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the UI in the iPhone looks exactly like it did before, just now everything’s slower and glossy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, so this is the thing, clipboard, we’ve talked about this before, clipboard history should be across all their platforms. It should be a baseline feature across
⏹️ ▶️ John all their platforms and I’m glad they added to some places, but it’s kind of weird in the year where they’re unifying everything that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But hey, but that’s step one. Step one is get it on any of their platforms and then slowly maybe they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add it to the other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then we continue on. There’s a games app, there’s some stuff about Metal 4 which I could not possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care less about. So John, unless you care. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Metal 4 thing, two things in that. One, I’ve briefly seen people go by saying that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a change on the level of DirectX 10 or OpenGL 3 and that it actually is a breaking change
⏹️ ▶️ John from the previous versions of Metal, presumably for good reasons. Not a big deal unless you’re a game developer or someone working
⏹️ ▶️ John on a game engine, but there’s that. And the frame interpolation, we talked about that when we were talking about DLSS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in the context of the Switch or whatever. For years and years, gaming cards have
⏹️ ▶️ John all had their own alphabet soup technology that would first upscale your image intelligently to make it look better,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then eventually upscale it and also add frames that didn’t exist, like synthesized frames, and we talked about that on past
⏹️ ▶️ John shows. Metal is a little bit behind here and that they already has some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of smart upscaling. And I think this is their first frame interpolation thing where it will generate frames for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely it is not state of the art, surely it is not best in class, but it is a thing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to have. So every time I look at anything having to do with metal, I’m like, Apple’s pretty good at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a shame they don’t do anything else with games, but like metal is actually good. If
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow they could convince the entire industry to make games based on metal, It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good performance. And the only thing holding it back is that it doesn’t have the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ John best game developers pushing and pushing it like all the other, you know, DirectX and Sony’s APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything and all those, the video card drivers for Windows. Like there’s that whole ecosystem that is driving
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of the industry forward. And Apple’s here all by itself, plugging away and all by themselves, they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty good job making a really good API that almost nobody uses and almost nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John cares about. That’s always a little bit behind everybody else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then this is when Vision OS actually happened, which we already spoke about.
iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we get to iPadOS and the rumor was that this was the year. We did it, Joe. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the second time I’ve made this joke in as many weeks, but nevertheless, we finally got functional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad multitasking, or so they claim. I was very skeptical. I was giving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my side eye, side eye, I was so skeptical, or my side eye was giving side eye, I was so skeptical. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gotta tell you, I think we might’ve done it. I think this might be it. And I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a iPadOS 26 on my iPad because I’m a fool and I don’t listen to my own advice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also because the iPad, like I said earlier, is not a critical device for me. This is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like there are a lot of problems with this beta in, in a general sense, like especially animations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like the whole liquid glass stuff is not great or whatever they’re calling the design system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of that is not squared away yet, but multitasking is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent. I am loving the little bit of time I’ve spent with it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know why it took 10 years, whatever it’s been, 15 years to finally just say to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, you know what? Maybe we should mimic the Mac and I’m stealing some of your thunder here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they really did was the Bono thing that we just talked about. This is like stories of surrender. Finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just said, give up windows that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John resize and move around. Guess what? Casey, you are the janitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s Steve. Steve Jobs derisively
⏹️ ▶️ John said, oh, you gotta manage your own windows, making you the janitor. Sometimes you just wanna move and resize
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff on your screen in a series of windows. And they tried for so long to come up with
⏹️ ▶️ John something better. And I think they did come up with a whole bunch of better things with limited functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the moment you want to do something that doesn’t fit within one of those paradigms,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into this weird world of like playing this game of figuring out, okay, within these constraints
⏹️ ▶️ John and within the things that it’s possible to do, now I have to bargain, okay, I can have two
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco apps side by side, I can have one
⏹️ ▶️ John slide over, and I can have this image here. It’s like, just at a certain point, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, give up and use Windows. Stories of surrender. Like, let us have Windows with window widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s so funny to me how they, we talked about this last time, that they did not want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have any kind of sort of always visible window control, because that’s against the iPad paradigm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people were like, well, but they’ve got those three dots in the top center of the thing. I’m like, oh, but that’s like the three dot menu,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and that is sort of like overlaying your content, but it’s so tiny and it’s not the same as having like,
⏹️ ▶️ John always visible things and ability to arbitrarily resize and move and you know what Apple did with this thing, they’re like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna take three dots. We’re gonna move them to the upper left corner, which already is a
⏹️ ▶️ John big change because having them dead center in the top is like, it’s saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just a little thing at the top of your window, just ignore it, it’s not, it’s overlaying your content, but it’s not a big deal. Moving it to the top
⏹️ ▶️ John left, it’s like, okay, Now there’s a dedicated spot for this. And make the three dots a little bit bigger and put them
⏹️ ▶️ John in a capsule, which is a trend, by the way, that I do like with this new design system that basically everything in the title bar area has
⏹️ ▶️ John a capsule outlined around it. Everything everywhere has a capsule. Yeah, it’s not a high contrast capsule,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not just like iOS 7, just like line art floating in space and good luck to you figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out what’s a button and what’s not. But anyway, they put the three dots in the upper left-hand corner, and now when you go over the three dots, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they turn into? Friggin’ macOS stoplight widgets. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, yes, there you go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you did it. You did it, there’s essentially a title bar. I mean, at the same time, Mac OS has slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John been losing its title bars. Now, iPad OS has half a title bar. You can drag
⏹️ ▶️ John windows around, you can close, minimize, and expand them with the stoplight widgets. You can resize
⏹️ ▶️ John them from the edges. You can put them wherever the hell you want. The very first demo they did, the very first demo the person did who was
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this, is she took a window, she dragged it halfway off the screen. She’s like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a thing you can do with windows. You dragged a window so it’s halfway, But you can’t see half the window. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like sometimes, sometimes that’s what you wanna do. Maybe for two seconds, maybe you just care about things in the left edge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do it all the time on Mac OS. It’s a thing you can do when you have control over the windows. You can literally put them anywhere you
⏹️ ▶️ John want, make them any size you want. Hell yeah. Now I don’t know how good this is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John because people are saying like, oh, you just made a worse Mac. Like why not just use a Mac at that point? But they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t because from my understanding, all the other modes are still
⏹️ ▶️ John there. They demoed one of them. They’re like, look, you just want everything to be a full screen. full screen. You don’t have to deal with any of this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can still do splits. And I think stage manager is also still there. So if you like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that. But also there’s this mode, which is take a bunch of windows, put
⏹️ ▶️ John them where the hell you want. Now maybe there’s still limits. Casey, can you tell me if you like 10 windows, does it start yelling at you? What’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the limit? I haven’t gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I mean, I can fuss around while we’re talking here.
⏹️ ▶️ John behave with a hundred windows open?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. All it That said, the phrase used in the presentation was, even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows. Doesn’t say how many. I’m sure it varies by model and by how much RAM it has too. Because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, keep in mind, like, you know, one of the things that has kept iPad OS until recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from having more advanced multitasking is like, you know, as we’ve discussed long ago, iOS has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no swap file for the virtual memory system. And so-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS does now. Right. Well, it does, but I think it’s only for like certain apps like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photoshop to try to use. I don’t think they actually try to use it for apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like in general. I don’t remember where that was lying.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the technology is there. I would be surprised if they just don’t start using it for the whole, look at this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe the iPad Pro now has more RAM, has more than eight gigs, right? Doesn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but they have certain models where it’s like, if you get the one terabyte, you know, iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you have more RAM. Then you get like 16 or whatever. Yeah, but whatever it is. So like, there is enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources now to run a bunch of iPads. I mean, the funny thing is that like, you know, you were saying how like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hallelujah, you can move a window partly off screen. Like for me, my like, oh my God
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moment was when they showed live window resizing of an iPad app. And it’s like, it’s so funny, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re celebrating these things
⏹️ ▶️ John that like. Things that happened in Mac OS in 2001. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, or like, you know, 30, yeah, like these like 30 year old things in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing that, you know, that happened on desktops and laptops. Like we’re celebrating them on the iPad finally coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2025. Because it evolved from a fixed resolution device
⏹️ ▶️ John that became a one or two different fixed resolution devices that became a single fixed resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad that became one or two different resolution iPads that became well-sized classes that ended up just like
⏹️ ▶️ John creeping up slowly on, look, just let people resize windows. And like on macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t arbitrarily resize windows. Some windows can’t get any smaller than a certain size because it will look
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. So the developer said, no, you can’t make this window any smaller because then it won’t work layout-wise. Like you have control
⏹️ ▶️ John over it and you have control over how the space is used when you resize it. But it’s kind of been like
⏹️ ▶️ John growing pains of the historical baggage of iPadOS is that it didn’t start as a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where people could take your window and make it any size they want within your constraints. It was the other way, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s only one, there’s one iPad and it comes in one resolution and that’s what you designed for. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of paying for that now with all the apps that are going to have to, that are probably gonna be pretty janky, arbitrarily
⏹️ ▶️ John resized until or unless the developers update them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that’s the other thing, because iPadOS didn’t start out having resizable windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the multitasking versions so far, if you had an older
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that wasn’t updated for whatever the current system was, it just wouldn’t be resizable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it wouldn’t be split-screenable or whatever. So we don’t know yet how many of those are still left.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it going to try to wedge those into the system or not? What’s going to happen if an app was designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for full screen on an iPad that doesn’t that big of a screen like an iPad mini and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you try to resize it there because they said this works on the mini. So how is that going to be handled?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the challenges that iPadOS has always had is that as they implement these different multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, iPad apps just aren’t updated that often by a lot of companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not supported at all or barely supported or they ship one once and then Google Docs style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take like forever, you know, to update to the latest stuff like, you know, two years later or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, and again, I mean, that’s again partly because of Apple declaring war on everybody ever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also just, you know, the economics of maintaining a really good iPad app are difficult for most companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to justify. So of all this stuff, like, I hope it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope people support it enough to make this stuff work. That being said, I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are going in the direction of just make multitasking work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it does on the Mac. Because there seems to be this, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this condescending view of what users can and can’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about computing. And they’ve tried over years, you know, the iPad has been a huge success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in usability for computing novices. you know, you have this simple device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t fill it up with malware, it’s easy, you just go into an app, when you’re done you hit the home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button or whatever now, and you go back, and you know, nice and easy. And then they’ve always tried to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that simplicity over there, while then adding special hidden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gestures or things to enter multitasking modes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve tried to make those multitasking modes really simple over time, But what but they haven’t really succeeded there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve been very difficult to use actually they’ve been both you know hard for novices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to figure out how they look and work and how to you know close windows and stuff and they’ve been limiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to power users who always want a more Mac like window experience. Now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying you know what for the users who want to be simple and full screen that’s still going to work that way great that’s how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always that was always an option and then for people who want to have multiple things on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, we’re just going to make it work like Macs and PCs have worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for decades. Because you know what? It turns out no one needs anything in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco middle. You don’t need, like, the people who are novices, who don’t know how to use multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windowing systems, they’ll use it the regular way, the full screen way. And for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, just give them the version of this that exists everywhere else in the computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. So I’m glad they finally got rid of that terrible middle that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucked for all sides of this
⏹️ ▶️ John think some people still do like the middle. I think the middle should still exist, but the problem, I think the reason the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle got so much slack is because so much flack rather is because there was nothing above it. And now that there is something
⏹️ ▶️ John above that, I think it’s like, well, if people like stage manager or people like split view, let them use it
⏹️ ▶️ John because above that is the thing that gives you much more flexibility. So I don’t I think the middle is perfectly fine
⏹️ ▶️ John now that there’s something above it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean the other thing to consider too is like how different of an experience is it when using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a trackpad? Versus when you’re using it by touch
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they have the new cursor that looks like an arrow not a Mac arrow This doesn’t have a stem, but it’s an arrow for more precise
⏹️ ▶️ John control like it’s really it’s it’s basically it’s recognizing Look you have an m4 iPad Pro. You have an
⏹️ ▶️ John m4 MacBook Air and you well you can’t get them with the same amount of RAM unless you get them maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John one terabyte one but Like that’s they’re basically the same hardware and the MacBook Air is so much more capable You could have so
⏹️ ▶️ John many things on the screen, do so many things at once. It’s a Mac, right? But hardware wise, why shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad be able to do a bunch of that stuff? So now a bunch of the limitations have been removed. I mean, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the next one, which is background tests. Oh, you’re exporting-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Hold on, hold on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So first of all, you asked me how many apps can I get open. Now I have an 11 inch iPad Pro from 2022, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was before they got super duper thin. And I got like seven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps open at once, but given that it’s an 11 inch screen, it’s useless at that many, like not because of speed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but because I just don’t have the real estate to really support that many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John apps. Yeah, now
⏹️ ▶️ John people can make like apps that are useful as like a widget size experience, you know what I mean? Like an app that is just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a mini player for music, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, I mean, and the other thing that was interesting was during installation or upgrade or whatever, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked me in so many words, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a screenshot, but it’s also in settings, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go into settings and then multitasking and gestures, it asked me roughly the same thing during setup and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it says now in settings is, at the very top of the screen, you have three different options, each of which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a thumbnail, and whichever one you choose then animates. Your choices are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-screen apps. Always use full-screen app. Let me try that again. Always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use apps full-screen and swipe home to switch between them. The middle option is windowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, which is what I have selected. Resize and arrange multiple windows in a single space to multitask with ease.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Learn more, which is a link. And then finally, Stage Manager, arrange windows across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiple groups for a focused multitasking experience. Learn more. And so, you do have all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three modes for sure. I suspect that Stage Manager is just like a limitation or an alternate version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the windowed apps thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you still have slide over?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, let me see. No, not now as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ John going to miss that because I use that a lot. That’s one of the middle modes that I use, which is full screen video, but with a slide over
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I pull out from the side. from the side, that is extremely useful to me and I’ll be sad if I can’t still do that, but you probably can, it’s probably just buried
⏹️ ▶️ John in there somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, I’m not sure. Again, just very briefly, super digging it, super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duper digging it. And it still doesn’t, I mean, there’s still plenty of things that I can’t do on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad that I can do on my Mac, but this makes doing a lot of things much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much easier because so often I wanted to have either two windows or which I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do, you know, with like a split screen or whatever, but oftentimes three windows, was effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impossible. You could do like a slide over dance on top of split screen, which was not fun. And granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been an hour that I’ve actually had to play with this. But so far, I am super into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I am overjoyed that they finally just threw their hands up and said, you know what, if you want to have window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management, then have freaking window management,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco shut up about it. And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so excited. So that being said, I think I interrupted you earlier, you were starting to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about long running stuff. So do you want to tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. Yeah, that was the limitation of people who complain about that you get this pro level app and you want you exporting your Final Cut project,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to leave it, you leave Final Cut in the foreground or the export will end. So they added background tasks that
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t immediately killed and aren’t super limited and they incorporated it into the live activities. It’s still kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of limited. It’s like, look, every app on the Mac, if you make it do a thing and then leave that app to go to another
⏹️ ▶️ John app and make that app do a thing and leave that app to go, all those apps just keep doing their stuff. There are various process
⏹️ ▶️ John controls and determinations from the developer and the OS about what cores they run on and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Mac way is not that, oh, when I clicked away from an app, the thing that it’s doing like
⏹️ ▶️ John stops or isn’t allowed to run, that’s not the Mac way. But the iPad way was like, oh, if you wanna do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background, because of the history, it came from a phone type device and a phone type OS with extremely limited resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here we are today with incredibly powerful iPad Pros and it’s ridiculous that they couldn’t do an export
⏹️ ▶️ John of Final Cut Pro in the background or something. So now they can, but they expose it through live activities as
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially, it’s kind of like the download list in Safari, here are the things that are running in the background. Because previously there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John zero of those. And now apps can put them there. I’m not sure that’s a scalable
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. Like there’s no place in Mac OS where you get like a pull down menu of all the things all the apps are doing. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John those are the apps, they’re all doing stuff. Like any app can do anything, it’s a Mac app. And an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS is like, if an app wants to do a thing and not be killed when it’s not in the foreground,
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to do this special thing and we’ll put you in this special list. It’s a step in the right direction, put it that way. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think it’s kind of like a baby step. I still think it’s weird and awkward to coalesce
⏹️ ▶️ John the, it’s almost like a miniature version of Activity Monitor that they only expect there to be four
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But like, have you ever looked at Activity Monitor on your Mac and see how many things are running?
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s that many things running in your iPad too, they just don’t show them to you. But from your apps, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John can elevate something important they’re doing. they’re doing an export and, you know, and final cut pro this
⏹️ ▶️ John app is now rendering this thing and that will appear in live activity. So I think it is a, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John good start. I worry a little bit that the interface is not scalable. If that list gets very large. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s one more, one more limitation knocked down. And, and by the way, like we fault iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ John for taking so long to do the obvious dumb thing. I give them some grace to have
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to find a better way. They just did not succeed. And so it took a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. They took a long time to recognize we don’t have any better ideas than
⏹️ ▶️ John windows and moving them around and window widgets or whatever. I mean, they can have a better idea about how to implement those windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll see if they did that, but they took a long time to finally surrender and they have and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see how it works. I haven’t actually tried it. I think there may be some awkwardness to the way they’ve implemented the things, but their heart
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the right place. I think this will satisfy a lot of people who are frustrated by the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John of iPadOS. Not all of them, because there’s still tons of stuff that a Mac can do better, and it is a little bit weird that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can buy an iPad for more than a Mac, and it is less capable, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, but nevertheless, I am super excited about all this. The Files app got updated. I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the Files app, probably because it’s a pile of crap, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John apparently a little- Maybe it’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John of a pile of crap now. It’s more Finder-like. You got colored folders, you got like a list view with disclosure triangles
⏹️ ▶️ John and list it, you know, as I snarkily tweeted that, turns out the Mac has some good ideas when it comes to multitasking,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they showed the files app, and I was like, turns out the Mac has some good ideas about file management too. List view with folders
⏹️ ▶️ John with disclosure triangles and labels, imagine. It’s still a little bit Fisher Pricey with the big
⏹️ ▶️ John icons and the preview things or whatever, but the files app getting some love is endorsed. And open
⏹️ ▶️ John with, and like just basic functionality we take for granted on the Mac, finally coming
⏹️ ▶️ John in dribs and drabs to the iPad, I think is just a thumbs up this. This is the cleanest win
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of the sections of the keynote, in my opinion, is the iPad section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, all the iPad stuff was a complete win. And then additionally, uh, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was the get podcasters like us to stop whining, uh, portion of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they also said, Hey, you know, occasionally people want to record content creators want to do stuff on the iPad. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we should do, we should allow for you to have local capture of microphones and video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then be able to share that using our fancy new files app. So hypothetically, I could, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll do this one day just to mess with Marco, I could take my setup and connect it to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we could record ATP, or I could record ATP on my iPad. Imagine that. It would be incredible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except maybe for Marco, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it failed. But… Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. Please, for the love of God, don’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will see. But anyways, it is a theoretical possibility, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am really, really excited about that because again, as we’ve all said so many times, these are such incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices that have been neutered by software for so long. And now there are still problems here and there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many ways, this seems like it is so, so much better now. And I am really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really excited for it. Again, in my very brief experience, it’s been excellent so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Granted, it’s first beta, so everything is slightly broken, but that’s, you know, that’s the way first betas always are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so incredibly excited for all of this iPad two extraordinarily enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, rewinding slightly. I forgot to mention this in the Mac OS section, although I think applies to more than just Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing that is baffling to me about this, the new redesign across all their OS is,
⏹️ ▶️ John is their, their decision on how to handle sidebars.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s on iPad OS as well. For the past, I don’t know, probably the past decade, if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John looked at any of the Apple platforms, they have in their drive to add more, to leave more room
⏹️ ▶️ John for your content. They’ve been shoving everything out to the side. So like the title bar on the Mac used to be a place that
⏹️ ▶️ John was controlled by the OS and apps didn’t draw anything there. And suddenly they’re like, well, but what if that’s not true?
⏹️ ▶️ John What if the three window widgets draw, but there actually is no title bar and actually the app can draw stuff up there all the way to the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge of the window. And same thing with sidebars. They’re like, well, why don’t we just let the sidebar, like everything runs
⏹️ ▶️ John full bleed to the edge. And there’s a thin dividing line between the sidebar and the content.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if the window has rounded corners, guess what? Your sidebar also has rounded corners because your sidebar runs
⏹️ ▶️ John full bleed edge to edge. In this new design, they’ve decided what the sidebar is, is
⏹️ ▶️ John a rounded rectangle that is inset with a margin around it, with a
⏹️ ▶️ John border around it. And that rounded rectangle sidebar is floating on top of
⏹️ ▶️ John and within the larger window. And the window widgets themselves are like
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the floating sidebar thing. Like what I’m saying is there’s a border there. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John left space between the inner rounded rectangle and the outer rounded rectangle. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s that space good for? It looks visually awkward. Nothing can draw there. Like your content
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t appear there. Not that it would be useful even if it did, but it doesn’t. And it adds this little
⏹️ ▶️ John extra ring around all sidebars of slightly different
⏹️ ▶️ John textures, slightly different color background, because again, the contrast between them is very low, but it’s there, it’s visible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure I dig this look on any of the OSes, but especially not on Mac OS, because I feel like you’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ John away pixels from content for no reason. Kind of like the floating toolbar, but like literally
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing there. Maybe if you had like a full bleed image in like preview and you had this sidebar,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, You’ll all see it in Xcode, because Xcode’s got a sidebar and guess what, it’s a floating round rectangle that floats
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of the window that incorporates the window widgets and it looks real weird. So you should fire up Xcode when you get this
⏹️ ▶️ John and see how you feel about it. And then the second thing is, the new design on macOS in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, rounded corners and everything, heavily rounded corners that in various places is not harmonious
⏹️ ▶️ John with the placement of the window widgets because they got to work on that. But here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not all Macs have rounded corner screens. In fact, most Macs, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey corners. Who uses
⏹️ ▶️ John those? Many. I mean, on an M4 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, I think not all the corners are round. I have it next to me, but it’s not open right now. Like some screens have square corners.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Pro Display XDR has square corners, but the rounding of the corners
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tahoe is so rounded that it makes me wonder, like if there is a Pro Display XDR successor,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it gonna have like one inch radius rounded corners like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the hardware? Classic Mac OS and the original Mac, they would just black out the pixels that are there in the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe they’ll do that in future OSes. But it is weird on Mac OS to see
⏹️ ▶️ John such heavily rounded corners. And it is unharmonious with the
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp squared edges that are on some edges of Mac screens, especially with our third party screen, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John but some first party screens are still like that as well. So I’m not entirely, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know why they did it. It’s trying to, everything is rounded. Everything has to be harmonious, but it makes me fear that they’re gonna take away
⏹️ ▶️ John those corner pixels. Cause it’s a lot of them. It’s not like, like Mac windows already rounded, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, the Mac menu bar used to be rounded with blacking out the pixels and stuff. But this is a much bigger radius
⏹️ ▶️ John than it was. I have some concern about that.
Developer tools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we briefly got a little bit of talk about developers, Foundation Models Framework,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we had said, you can get from it plain text or structured Swift data, which we saw a little bit about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in State of the Union, which we’re not gonna get to today. App Intents with Visual Intelligence, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got Swift and SwiftUI that’s allegedly getting better. The aforementioned Icon Composer app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xcode, they’ve talked about how it’s got built-in support for chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and other models of our choosing, which sounds really great. The developer betas did come out earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. And then we had the ending song, which again, I really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hate, but I actually thought it was kind of amusing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is actually, the ending song, I think is a good example of how they can walk the line. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not actually doing anything to improve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco their relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John with developers and the stuff that we say, to be clear, right? They’re not actually changing any policies. They’re certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John not having a dialogue, reaching out. They’re not doing any of those things. So let’s be clear about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But is there something they can do to
⏹️ ▶️ John be nice to developers that is not, I’m not gonna say not substantive, but like is not one of like, no, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not actually solving the problem. And the choice to do this song at the end was a good example because
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what it is about. Like the lyrics in the song were singing positive reviews as written on
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store. They just pulled positive reviews from the App Store about apps and put them to music and put them in a
⏹️ ▶️ John song. I presume these are real App Store reviews, The apps themselves are real.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I recognized a whole bunch of them, okay? Here’s why this was
⏹️ ▶️ John a good choice at the very least. It was positive things about apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were third-party apps. So Apple is essentially has someone singing the praises of third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and does not center Apple in any way. It wasn’t singing
⏹️ ▶️ John about how great Apple is for having an app store, how great Apple is for giving you this opportunity. It was 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John customer, third-party developer love fest. These customers
⏹️ ▶️ John love these apps and Apple is nowhere to be seen. That sentiment
⏹️ ▶️ John is an example of them doing something that is potentially beneficial
⏹️ ▶️ John to the relationship between Apple’s developers. Not something important or big, like actually speaking with their
⏹️ ▶️ John mouth words and reaching out and saying, we understand you and changing policies, none of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had made this the opening instead of the F1 ad, I think it would have put me in a better
⏹️ ▶️ John mood for the whole rest of the thing. So I give the ending song a big thumbs up, not because it was just an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John song or amazingly fun or whatever, but because it showed happy customers and happy
⏹️ ▶️ John developers and did not center Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I mean, I enjoyed it, even though I didn’t want to, but I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you, Casey. I also, I thought, I’m like, oh no, this is gonna be stupid, but you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was fine, it was fun, I enjoyed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and imagine if one of your apps was one of those apps that got shown, you know, it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a nice thing. My reviews are not that kind. Well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they pick ones that didn’t have a lot of words because they had to fit into lyrics, but you know. Anyway, it was nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and slightly rewinding a bit for the Xcode stuff, and now we’re not talking about State of the Union now, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s worth mentioning that basically the Swift Assist feature that didn’t ship last year
⏹️ ▶️ John now has come back with a vengeance and is even better if the demos are to be believed. so didn’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John leave you hanging on that, but that’s a thing. And they saved it towards the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, and I know that’s mostly State of the Union stuff, we’ll talk about it next week, but I give a thumbs up to them
⏹️ ▶️ John not giving up on Swift Assist, but instead sort of essentially regrouping and coming up with something even better
⏹️ ▶️ John that I presume will ship for real. I installed Xcode and have launched it, and maybe I just didn’t activate
⏹️ ▶️ John that part or don’t know how it works. Actually, I think I tried it and it had some kind of error, so I guess the jury’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still out over whether it works because we’re only hours in here and I haven’t actually tried it, but if their demos
⏹️ ▶️ John are to be believed, SwiftAssist lives and it seems like even better than what
⏹️ ▶️ John they announced last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m really excited to play with it, but it appears as far as I can tell to only be on Tahoe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t plan to install anywhere for any reason anytime soon. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably won’t be able to play with it for a while, unfortunately, but in principle, it looked great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the phrase they used was, quote, we’ve expanded our vision for Swift Assist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is okay, great. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so far that, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did. It does more stuff than it used to. And you know, just like the other ones, a little help from my friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get the applicants by with a little help from its friends. Cause you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John models can’t do code stuff. Hey, chat GPT, can you help out here? Anthropic, can you,
⏹️ ▶️ John can we, you have good coding models. I think that’s a smart move. I think it’s like, stop. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an example of, I mean, either desperation or humility to say, we do not have
⏹️ ▶️ John the best coding model. When we’re gonna add this feature to Xcode, let’s just have a pop-up menu and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John use Claude, use Sonnet, use Chats GPT or use Apples. And then let people pick which one they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I wonder if maybe this is, I mean, I kind of expected the timeline to be longer on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but I wonder, you know, we heard, you know, six months ago or whatever, that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Craig Federighi was making everybody open the idea of using other people’s third-party models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they can make the best product with those. This seems like doing exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, given Apple’s position in AI right now, which is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weak still and not super competitive with any of the frontier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models for almost anything, that’s the right move. You know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for on-device local processing, Apple’s great at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably will remain class-leading for the foreseeable future at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that does everything Apple’s really good at. They’re really good at power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficiency. They’re really good at like single computing device excellence. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how can we make the best computer, the best phone, the best tablet? Like they’re really good at that. They’re not so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at like these giant big data problems where you need like cutting edge AI researchers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, you know, making the most smart things on these huge servers, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much less their style, and things like that have been less their style forever. So I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple always being really good at local models. And so in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time that may be forever, but in the current time where they’re not good at the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big frontier size models that run on big servers, partnering with other companies and creating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a platform for the other companies to run their stuff in a way that helps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s apps and Apple’s customers’ apps, that’s the right move. This could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the way they do things forever. Maybe they will never lead in big AI models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That might be okay if they do a good enough job being the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see how it goes over time, but for now, this was the right move, and I’m glad they finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really doing what appears to be a pretty big job of finally embracing that strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like Google and OpenAI are also ahead in small models that run on device
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just models are better at everything, including their little models. Google especially is always
⏹️ ▶️ John touting how small they can get their model. I mean, that’s been Apple’s whole thing too, but Apple Intelligence, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been a struggle for them to get their models down to the point where they can fit on their phones, which is part of why they expanded
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM. And even with the expanded RAM, it’s been a struggle to get the models down to that level.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, Google and OpenAI have been also working on that for their small models, especially Google for the little models
⏹️ ▶️ John they can run on device. So Apple is not even in the lead on small models, but they have great hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they can expose that great hardware to other people’s models, I think in this, the Swift Assist thing, I think these are all
⏹️ ▶️ John server models. Like they’re going out to the server for Claude and chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not, they don’t have like the local, I don’t know, I haven’t looked at it that much, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if those companies have optimized models to run on the phone or whatever, or locally on a Mac. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. But the fact that you have that option at all is like, now it just comes down to like, how good is the interface?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Dory’s still out on that. I tried to use it and like I said, it failed. And the demos I’ve seen in the State of the Union that we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about, I’m not entirely sure they’ve nailed the interface, but I don’t think anybody has at this point with these kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, help me code along type of things. What I can say is they put in a lot of work.
⏹️ ▶️ John added a lot of UI for this and it’s fairly sophisticated UI. So that extra,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially the extra year working on SwiftAssist seems to have paid dividends, assuming you can get it to work. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did open up, uh, I did open up Hyperspace on Tahoe in the Xcode beta. It would not
⏹️ ▶️ John build so that doesn’t bode well, but I’ll figure it out.
Closing impressions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overall overall impressions though. I mean for me the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad stuff was the star of the show for me. I am really really really excited about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as stated earlier I’m tentatively excited about the new design changes. I don’t love it at all right now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really do think they’re heading in the right direction Everything else was just good. I mean there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no particular surprises, but it was good and I’m looking forward to this to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting to work on it, even though I’m also kind of dreading it and And, uh, I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited to see what WWDC brings, which by the way, I think, and I haven’t looked into this, but it sounds like they may have dropped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the videos already. Is that right? Do we know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Couldn’t tell. Like, I know why people are saying that. Cause I saw it in the developer app too, but I didn’t try downloading like one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones. All right. Well, no worries either way. Overall, I think this was certainly not my favorite WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was decent. It was especially good given how in the doldrums
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of us felt and kind of still feel, but I thought this was pretty good. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start with Marco and then end with John. Overall impressions and or final thoughts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, I wasn’t expecting any changes to the developer relationship and we didn’t get any.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we got what we hoped we would get, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a huge upgrade to the on-device AI APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a system redesign. The system redesign, I think we were all going into it like a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, I don’t know about this. And I think it has proven to be warranted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, that the system redesign really goes very far in a certain, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinionated direction. It’s going to hopefully have some revision over the course of the summer. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are indeed going to have to do a ton of work in our apps to adopt it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to be an incredibly busy summer just to keep up with the redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even not even considering all the new API’s and stuff like that. Just getting our apps to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, fit in, not look broken and not look old with the new system design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to take the entire summer and that’s all we’re going to be able to do for most of us if we if we care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about design at least. So that that’s going to be a lot and there’s going to be a lot of drama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the summer as the design is hopefully tweaked. If it’s It’s not God help us all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it is, if it is tweaked or you know maybe things like you know tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bars might become usable. Right now they’re definitely not. Please don’t use the new tab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar in your apps unless it really changes. But anyway it’s going to be a very busy summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They delivered what appears to be very very strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical advancements in ways that will give a lot of us a lot to do even after we you know fix the design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’re gonna be busy and I think I’m very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to what I’m going to be able to do with these new APIs. They look again very promising.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I can do some really cool features with them once I’ve finished all my design work.
⏹️ ▶️ John John, I think WWDC keynotes at least maybe not all the sessions but keynotes are kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John at the point where the same point that iPhones are where basically everything leaks like you got
⏹️ ▶️ John all this information ahead of time. I think in past years they’ve said basically like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, someone who had access to the deck, here’s all the things they’re gonna talk about. So there’s not so many surprises these days,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s in the details to see what they’re gonna be like. I was most pleasantly surprised by iPadOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the direction it’s going. All the minor
⏹️ ▶️ John details, not minor details, but all the nitty gritty about the technical stuff that’s in the sessions,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s always fun. I always enjoy that. Everything just always gets better. We’ll talk about that in future episodes, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the keynote stuff, uh, the, the redesign, which was sort of the star
⏹️ ▶️ John of the show, as far as I was concerned, with the exception of the terrible tab bars, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John are terrible for additional reasons above and beyond the animation and the appearance, just like conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a bad idea. I think I’m okay with the redesign on iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPad. Granted, I haven’t installed there, but in all the things that I’ve seen in my, yeah, it could have been worse. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, tab bar aside, everything else I think will be fine. On Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, I would say, again, if I were writing a review, this is the most significant redesign of Mac OS since
⏹️ ▶️ John Aqua. I don’t think it’s even close.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at, for example, from 10.15 to 10.2, you’re like, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a big change, but they did it in little steps. We didn’t really have this big discontinuity of
⏹️ ▶️ John totally new thing. They slowly, they got rid of the pinstripes, they got rid of the translucency, They got rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John color. They darkened it up. They had a little bit leather. They removed the leather. They lightened it up They darkened it up. They
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothed it out. They had a little bit of vibrancy like small steps over years and years This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a break. This is we have a totally new idea Everything is up for grab everything changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like how it looks. I think it’s too bright I think the contrast is too low. I think it’s ugly. I don’t like how it works
⏹️ ▶️ John in certain thing areas I don’t like the the way the things like the dock
⏹️ ▶️ John show windows that are going behind them It looks busier than it used to be. I don’t like the new menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new finder icon is hideous and they need to fix it. I don’t like the round rack
⏹️ ▶️ John jail that they’re putting all the stuff in. It is clear to me now playing with it for even just an hour,
⏹️ ▶️ John that eventually all the old Mac OS will look ancient and this will look new because whenever you have a big break,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s true. But of all the OS’s, I mean, I don’t know if this surprises me or just fills
⏹️ ▶️ John my worst expectations. I like the new design the least on macOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you guys haven’t explored it yet, but let me tell you, there’s things, there’s tons of stuff in there. They’ve changed so
⏹️ ▶️ John many things. And also apps that are on your Mac right now that are not
⏹️ ▶️ John built against the Tahoe SDA, like pre-existing apps, just everything in them
⏹️ ▶️ John is different. And I understand they do that for compatibility, which is good, but like all my apps
⏹️ ▶️ John have pop-up menus, the buttons pop-up menus, Like every control
⏹️ ▶️ John looks different in old apps and new apps, even in places where they don’t seem like they do, because the button
⏹️ ▶️ John metrics haven’t changed, but the button appearance is different. So your face was, am I going to
⏹️ ▶️ John fully liquid metal my app and put conditional code in? Because by the way, the metrics have changed
⏹️ ▶️ John on a bunch of stuff too. Like I just launched a bunch of my apps and the metrics have changed enough that things that used to not scroll do
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll and things that were pixel aligned are no longer pixel aligned. It’s worst
⏹️ ▶️ John case scenario. And like, I would be happier to do that if I really like
⏹️ ▶️ John the end result. Boy, once I get my app updated for liquid metal, whatever, it’s gonna look awesome,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think it does. It doesn’t mean that in 10 years that I won’t be perfectly happy with how the Mac looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is gonna take some getting used to and I’m not really excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it’s making me do is it’s making me appreciate how my Mac looks now. because after
⏹️ ▶️ John so many years, things are boring, but like consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John and better in almost every functional way than the new thing they’re introducing. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the new thing looks newer and the old things will look old and it will look dated, but that’s just because it’s a change.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure there’s any place in the new look that I think is functionally
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the old way. Yet, I haven’t dug into all of it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s disappointing to me because the Mac is my favorite platform and I really wish I liked what they had done with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac more. And I have little faith that they’re going to change much of anything. I do hold out some hope that they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John fix the finder icon because hey, it’s just an icon and they can fix it and the new one is hideous.
⏹️ ▶️ John But everything else, I’m like, there’s no time. They don’t care about Mac OS. They’re not gonna change this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in that respect, I’m a little bit down because my favorite platform is bad. But everything else I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, wait till you use the iPhone version.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the screenshots it looked fine to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’ll see. A lot of it is fine. It needs a lot of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s very early and rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, and everything’s broken. When you turn off, if you turn on reduce transparency on the Mac OS, I
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to take a screenshot of it, but it’s one of those drawing glitches that you can’t screenshot. Things blink
⏹️ ▶️ John on your screen at like 30 frames per
⏹️ ▶️ John like flashing regions of posterization. It looks like your computer’s about to explode. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is grim, like it’s just the first beta, who cares? Like, I’m just saying like there are bugs in this beta that I’ve never seen
⏹️ ▶️ John before. Like visual, it’s almost like your graphics card is overheating. You think somebody think that
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS is gonna try it. Tall, tall, Tahoe and something, open accessibility, have a bunch of windows
⏹️ ▶️ John open and start toggling those switches and dragging windows around. It is madness. But those are just bugs. But I’m saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when everything’s working perfectly, I don’t like it. So it’s a contest. Will I be ranting on this show
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next five years about the tab bars in iOS? or will I be ranting about everything in macOS?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see which will win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no. All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Delete Me, BetterHelp, and Click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Sonos. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about, just the other day, Apple published a paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the limitations of LLM reasoning technology. We’re going to talk about that in overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can hear that and everything else we’ve done. If you join us, be our member at http.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much, everybody. And we’ll talk to you with probably a mountain follow-up next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, check podcast so long
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John Briefly before we get to the after show, or maybe this is the after show, I want to read you the
⏹️ ▶️ John message that Xcode put out when it refused to compile my unmodified application. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John And I want to tell you, I want to ask you if you’ve ever seen this message before, because for all I know it’s an existing message and I just don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what it means, but it’s one of those. So please help me. Conditional conformance of type
⏹️ ▶️ John blah to protocol layout does not imply conformance to inherited protocol sendable.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is an error that it won’t compile. And this is not in my code, it’s in third party code. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even change it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John never seen that message before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I feel like we could parse out what they’re saying, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John the conditional conformance is like, you know, layout where content
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey equals empty view.
⏹️ ▶️ John Conditional conformance to protocol. So the layout protocol, right? So that all makes sense. But it’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that does not imply conformance to the inherited protocol sendable. Like, okay, is that a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem that means you won’t compile my code? Like, or again, this is third party codes. I hope this
⏹️ ▶️ John library updates because I literally can’t build my app. And I didn’t touch anything. I didn’t change to Swift 6.2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I had, maybe I have to change it. Maybe defaults, anyway. I haven’t had time to look at this, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly distressing to me because I just assumed it would build out of the box if I just…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mine did, my call sheet did. We can explore that if you want, but honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t care because we didn’t get a chance to talk about the one thing that I want to talk to you about, John. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in the State of the Union, to be fair. And I know we’re not really talking to the State of the Union but I cannot resist. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last release for Intel. Apparently Tahoe is all you get. Then your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheese grater will float up to the attic in the sky. And by that, I mean the attic above your head. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we don’t need to belabor it too much since we were running very long already. But in short, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m perfectly happy with that. Like I was, we talked about this on the last episode. I was pleasantly surprised that Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John will support my Mac. That’s all. Like I mean, I, they were already, they’ve already gone longer than I thought they would have.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, again, if they had followed the past procedure, they should have ended support in 2024 and they didn’t. They didn’t end
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2025. They’re not gonna end it until next year. So I’m perfectly
⏹️ ▶️ John fine with that. And it’s nice, I really, this is not, sorry, every time I say this, I think people think I’m being sarcastic. I
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciate the fact that they announced this year that next year they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do this thing, which is not something they usually do. They don’t have roadmaps and like, and honestly, they don’t even usually
⏹️ ▶️ John make that decision. Like they could make that decision, but they’ve made the decision already that they’ve made the
⏹️ ▶️ John decision that Tahoe will support my Mac. Love it, great.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the things aside about me not liking Tahoe, but you know, anyway. And the next one won’t. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make your, now you can plan. Now you can be like, okay, I can start thinking about what I’m gonna replace
⏹️ ▶️ John this. If I care, if I need the, you know, like it lets people plan. It’s the thing that people always complain about Apple that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft and other PC companies would give you a roadmap. They would say, this year we’re doing this, next year we’re doing that, here’s where we’re gonna drop support
⏹️ ▶️ John for this. Even with deprecations, Apple’s like, oh, this thing is deprecated and it might go away
⏹️ ▶️ John sometime in the future and it might last a decade or next year it might be gone. Right, and they never tell you, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know. Like they put off the decision like a teenager and just like procrastinate and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, no, and then the last second they decide. But here they made a decision a year early and I really appreciate that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would have been nice if they tell me what the deal is with the Mac Pro sometime before this year ends. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware, WDBC is not really a thing. So you hurry on patiently waiting for them to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something, anything with the Mac pro, even if they canceled the Mac pro, that would give me some information. I’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just need, I need a little bit more information before I can make the decision about what my next Mac will be. That’s all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m glad you’re this chipper about it. And I think you should be, I don’t think there’s any reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John be. Yeah. I mean, don’t you think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was nice of them? And
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it’s a, you know, I’m just so excited that this, because if it didn’t support the, how I’d be like, well, great. The new OS isn’t going to
⏹️ ▶️ John support my Mac. And I have no idea what to buy because they haven’t told me about the Mac pro what the deal is with that. But I don’t have that