catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

384: Equal Emphasis

23 Jun 2020

Our WWDC 2020 special! (Three hours wasn‘t enough.)

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Intro, format, style
  2. Widgets, Springboard
  3. Sponsor: Basecamp
  4. Translate
  5. Messages
  6. Home
  7. CarPlay, CarKey
  8. Safari
  9. Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
  10. App Clips
  11. Emoji search
  12. Scribble
  13. iOS color picker
  14. StoreKit testing
  15. Sponsor: ExpressVPN
  16. iPadOS
  17. watchOS
  18. AirPods
  19. macOS Big Sur
  20. Macs with Apple silicon
  21. Ending theme
  22. Because 3 hours wasn’t enough

Intro, format, style

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little freaked out because our server was just massively

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hammered with a huge load spike eight minutes ago and the load average went up to like 150 and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t figure out looking at all the logs like what the hell’s going on why is this all of a sudden very heavily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loaded no clue why now we still have all of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our listeners on the live stream we have over 1100 listeners on the live stream and the load is 0.5 and I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I’m a little scared that I don’t know why.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that something updating the location database? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like the Linux equivalent of photo analysis D. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know about you two, but I feel overwhelmed with the amount of content. I know we’ve just seen at this point

⏹️ ▶️ John the keynote in the state of the union and that’s all, but it seemed like there was more. Now obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a big year. There’s a lot of big important announcements, but it just seemed like even setting aside how important and momentous

⏹️ ▶️ John certain announcements were, there was just more content. And I have to think it’s because the stuff was pre-recorded.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you do things live, there is a certain amount of slack in terms of, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John walking around the stage, gathering yourself for the next sentence you’re going to say. Certainly the transition between

⏹️ ▶️ John presenters walking off the stage and a new person walking on, that takes longer than a cut. Any

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of live demo has way more slack in it than a pre-recorded thing where everything is perfect down

⏹️ ▶️ John to the second. And I think even though the keynote was not particularly long, it was like an hour

⏹️ ▶️ John and 50 minutes or something, they packed a lot of stuff in. I feel overwhelmed

⏹️ ▶️ John with the amount of good, cool, new stuff. And I hope we managed to talk about it all. If

⏹️ ▶️ John we missed your favorite thing, don’t worry. We’ll keep talking about WWEZ if history has been a guide for the

⏹️ ▶️ John next several weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because usually in the summer, there’s not a whole lot of news, especially as you get into like July and August, there’s not a whole lot of news. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will have plenty of time to cover whatever we don’t know, whatever we don’t have time for this week. Although we do have more time than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usual because we’re not live for the first time in what, three or four years?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know, John, you’re extremely relieved to be doing this at home, but I think I speak for Marco in saying that I’m pretty sad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re not in front of all of our friends, well, not all of our friends, but many of our friends in San Jose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or San Francisco or what have you. But I’m glad that 1,200-ish of you are joining us right now and hopefully many more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey once this is released. I got to say as quick overall impressions,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was a lot. It was a lot and it was fast. It’s funny, I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the first to lament the really lame demos and to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey complain about how the, I don’t want to see, it wasn’t Anker, Anki,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco college, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. Yeah. But they gave us a chance to breathe, and without those demos, this was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast. I was trying to take notes as I was listening and trying to keep up with Twitter and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different slacks and it was just so much so, so fast, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately is very, very good. And obviously there’s a lot to cover. I don’t feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I’ve properly processed any of it. I feel like I’ve processed less of it than when I’m there,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps because all I do is talk about it all day long with everyone I can see. What with me being at the beach with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my family, I didn’t talk about it all day long. I just watched the keynote, watched State of the Union, and otherwise ignored it. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I feel like my head is swimming and I don’t know what to make of it one way or the other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s interesting, like the format was so different this year, you know, forced by COVID-19 and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, I really respect the intro by Tim Cook, the kind of, where he like, you know, he sat down on the little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stool behind the empty auditorium and,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of talked to the nation about what was going on. Like it was really well done. It was very tasteful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think Tim did a really good job of handling, like, this is a tricky time. This is tumultuous in a lot of ways. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that was handled well I thought. And then as for the format of the presentation itself,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like being this kind of, I think pretty clearly pre-recorded, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of presentation is almost the wrong word for it, I guess. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like basically a pre-recorded video introduction. It felt in some ways like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco combination between like a cool demo and a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more fun version of like a corporate training video almost. I don’t mean that in a bad way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I know that can be interpreted badly. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It seemed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very produced. But you know, if you look back at recent years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple presentations, we’ve said in almost every presentation that over time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has felt a little bit more artificial and a little bit higher budget

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what they appear to be letting on with like the the like artifice of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it I don’t know it’s hard to explain but like the the presentations have been in person in auditoriums so far

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last few years have been increasingly corporate feeling and they’ve had more and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more pre-produced video segments that they keep cutting to and everything and so it has felt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more almost like a commercial. And I think this format change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they were forced to make this year is actually a positive thing in the sense that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually kind of fully admits and embraces what it has been inching towards all along, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-produced, very high budget, very high production value commercials, basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but done in a slightly more down to earth way. And I think that better reflects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size of the company today. It better reflects the importance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the financial importance and the size of the community and everything. It kind of better reflects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the company is today rather than trying to keep this train going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this old presentation style that Steve Jobs used to do back when the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world was very different, the company was a lot smaller, he was obviously still alive and still doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And until today, Apple was still trying to replicate that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was losing steam. Like the old format, I feel like, was losing steam over the last couple years and was starting to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel really stale. And so there are parts of that that I miss with this new format,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they might go back to it. Once the virus is under control and they can have large gatherings, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll go back to the old format, I don’t know. But I feel like this new format is a more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest and accurate representation of what they actually are today, as opposed to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to continue on the way it used to be of like, hey, we’re still the same old

⏹️ ▶️ Marco company running by these fun hippies. Hey, everyone’s cool. Because that wasn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ John accurate anymore. I don’t know if I see that distinction you’re pointing out. I mean, I understand what you’re saying and I know why this format

⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t have as much of the spontaneity because it’s not live, right? But I don’t see

⏹️ ▶️ John that big of a difference other than it being tightened up and all the ad libs being removed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously it feels less friendly and personable and having it live, but

⏹️ ▶️ John there are good presentations and bad ones when they’re live. And I think there’s nothing wrong with the format,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think just sometimes the chemistry doesn’t sort of combine. Like what you really need for a good live

⏹️ ▶️ John keynote is the same thing you need for any good. You need people who are excited about the things that

⏹️ ▶️ John are announcing, and the things that are announcing have to be really good. And to the degree that they’re not, and the presenters are

⏹️ ▶️ John feigning excessive enthusiasm, that can make it feel a little bit off. but this time around, setting aside the

⏹️ ▶️ John weird, you know, format of people filmed individually and then sliced together for obvious reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ John they had a lot of good announcements. But I feel like this format necessarily tamped down on

⏹️ ▶️ John some of the enjoyment that we normally get. Like even Federighi only got in like one dad

⏹️ ▶️ John joke about the social distancing about the birds, right? He usually has nine of those and they work well.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think his personality comes through, you know, to the degree that any presenters are allowed to

⏹️ ▶️ John have their personality come through, whether it’s in, you know, sort of their attitude or their

⏹️ ▶️ John cadence or the jokes that they managed to get into the presentations. I don’t know what what the filtering

⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism is for those jokes. Do they decide to someone else decide? But like, I enjoy all of that. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John where I agree with Margo is that I think this year’s, I think they did a really good job with this year’s format, given the

⏹️ ▶️ John constraints. It didn’t feel weird and awkward. Like we all know that

⏹️ ▶️ John they had to be filmed ahead of time. We all know they were all filmed separately and if it wasn’t that if that wasn’t clear they

⏹️ ▶️ John explained it in a little thing at The end that explains all the precautions they took during filming But each one of the segments

⏹️ ▶️ John felt like that person could have been on stage modified for the obvious fact that there’s not going to be any applause

⏹️ ▶️ John pauses and they’re not gonna make any stumbles and all the demos are Gonna be perfect because if they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John they just do them over again, right? So if anything, I think this format pulls I mean, I like you said

⏹️ ▶️ John pull this pulls a little bit of the humanity out of it but I don’t think that’s necessary. Like I think you can

⏹️ ▶️ John just leave different takes in and leave a little bit of slack and let Craig make a few

⏹️ ▶️ John more dad jokes and we’re back to the best they’ve ever been.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was actually very nice to not have any third party demos on stage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because those always drag so much. And like it seems like no one in the room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants those except Apple apparently. Like they would go over like a lead balloon. Nobody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually wants

⏹️ ▶️ John them. But they did them, they had demos of third party apps, just not done by third parties. They showed Office

⏹️ ▶️ John briefly, they showed Lightroom, they showed Photoshop, like that’s how Apple, I think, always wishes those demos

⏹️ ▶️ John go, but once you invite an executive from another company, you kind of have to let them talk a little bit about something

⏹️ ▶️ John or other, and that’s death.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So like this new format that didn’t have any demos, I mean, I don’t know if they, assuming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they continue this format for a little while, because the virus isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately, so that, you know, I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whatever fall or winter releases they do, whatever events they do, I would say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably at least until next spring, is most likely going to follow a similar format as this. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when products get released, when they usually have like game demos and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, look at the new iPhone or iPad, how fast it can run these games. I hope they consider

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having the third party demos, because this works so much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better without them. All right, so we got a lot to go through, we should probably start and we’re going to attempt, as I say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every year, we’re going to attempt to do it chronologically and then we’re going to fail miserably.

Widgets, Springboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It started pretty much with iOS 14 and widgets, which I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the most interesting bombshell from that whole conversation, I don’t think it even happened

⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the keynote, but rather during the State of the Union, where they said widgets are going to be SwiftUI only,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which in retrospect, I’m not terribly surprised by, but I certainly did not expect whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes sense, it seems to be because they can serialize and save off the state of the widget

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then just replay it later, and so on and so forth. But I was very surprised to see that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, the widgets looked pretty good. And you can put them on the home screen. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do, what do they call them, like smart widgets or something like that, or smart shelf. I forget what it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was called, where you stack, smart stack, you stack a few of them on top of each other. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OS and the device will just show the one it thinks is most relevant based on how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey important each individual widget thinks it is at that particular moment. I don’t know. All this looked really, really good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, there’s nothing I can think of that I’m like, yes, finally I can have this on my home screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do think that this is one of the lowest hanging fruits that they could have picked,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not from an engineering effort perspective, but from a, come on guys, you really haven’t done anything with Springboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in what, 10 years? Can we do something? And they did something and it looks good.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this has been a requested feature for years and years because the grid of icons was a great thing to start with. But if you had told

⏹️ ▶️ John someone in 2007 that we’d still have the grid of icons in 2020, You’d be like, really?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Nothing

⏹️ ▶️ John different? It’s like, well, folders. But really? The folders just look like little, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John widgets on the home screen, you know, pioneered by Android, used by lots of phones in various ways.

⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, it was, can I have something more on my screen instead of just a grid of apps or a grid of folders? And finally, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John do that. Like, they kept creeping up on it, putting these widgets in the little thing that’s to the left, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But now that you, and the widgets are still there, but now you can put them on your home screen and you can have them take up the same amount

⏹️ ▶️ John of room is four apps, the same around around is what, eight apps? Right, so they’re either squares or they’re big rectangles,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they can be even taller. Yeah, actually you can do a grid, a four by four grid of 16 apps, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hexagons, coming next year so you can tessellate them. Yeah, no, that’ll be just like the watch,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll just be this giant scrolling cluster of frog eggs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. But yeah, this is long overdue,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it will, you know, And it’s the biggest change to Springboard in years,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? I think even bigger than folders. This is gonna change how people’s home screens look and work

⏹️ ▶️ John because in those widgets, you can add functionality that you don’t have, would normally have to go into

⏹️ ▶️ John an app to get. I’m sure someone with more watcherwise experience like

⏹️ ▶️ John underscore would know better, but looking at the API for this, it looks a lot like

⏹️ ▶️ John the UI for stuff on the watch where you give like a timeline of information if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing is that, am I thinking of the watch or am I misremembering,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Margo? Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically how complications work, where you provide the timeline of what kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of data should be displayed at what time in the future, like to a certain range in the future, and then it automatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco displays it, and so you don’t have to, and often can’t, manually update it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and your app isn’t running all the time. And it’s basically an energy efficient way to not have all these apps running all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ John but still allow them to put content there. And obviously that doesn’t work for all things. Obviously, sometimes you don’t know the future

⏹️ ▶️ John and can’t put out timeline to that far. But anyway, it’s a very flexible API to try to be power efficient

⏹️ ▶️ John and CPU efficient to not have apps constantly churning while still giving

⏹️ ▶️ John much more information and functionality directly on your home screen. As part of this

⏹️ ▶️ John also, further home screen changes, they added the app library,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is more or less a better way to organize your apps without organizing them. So the spatial

⏹️ ▶️ John interface that we’ve had for ages where you arrange your home screen and have these little icons. Craig made a good point in the presentation.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, yeah, most people arrange their first screen or maybe the first screen or two, but after that it’s just chaos,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Unless you’re really obsessive or you have very few apps, by screen five, things

⏹️ ▶️ John are just a mess. Now, I would say that part of the reason that’s true is trying, as we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned on the show many times, trying to organize your home screens is a nightmare. It’s a UI nightmare.

⏹️ ▶️ John See previous episode where I described the experience in excruciating detail, But

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s terrible. There’s, it’s a hot potato. There’s no place to put things down. You accidentally drop things, things scooch off the edge,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s terrible. You used to be able to arrange your home screen in the iTunes interface. Even that wasn’t a great interface.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would kill for a Mac user interface that lets you rearrange your

⏹️ ▶️ John home screen icons. Just like a real Mac user interface that’s sort of non-destructive

⏹️ ▶️ John with save, with an area off to the side where you can just chuck things to keep them in holding patterns and with like

⏹️ ▶️ John multiple selection ranges and like, like just, it’s an app for rearranging squares, literally, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all it is. But a decent app for rearranging squares on a large

⏹️ ▶️ John screen with a mouse and keyboard, God, I would kill for that. If that existed, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John people’s home screens would be better organized past the first screen or two. Widgets will kind of help

⏹️ ▶️ John with that, but all it will do is, you know, let people have even cooler first one or two or three screens.

⏹️ ▶️ John But by screen five, it’s still gonna be chaos. So Apple’s solution is, you know what? you can just hide those screens.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can just say, I don’t wanna see in screens five, six, and seven or whatever of my home screens. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even put them in the little swipey thing. How will you get to those apps? Oh, the app library, what has them organized

⏹️ ▶️ John by recency and by category. And there’s an alphabetic listing. This is above and beyond the search where you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to type stuff. This is like an organized into bins or whatever. I feel like this is a slight abdication

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s responsibility to make it possible for human beings to actually organize their app icons.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re saying, you know what? give up because we’re never gonna make it easy. So just hide those screens

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like spatial organization for screens one, two, and three, and then browser

⏹️ ▶️ John mode and automatic categorization for the rest. And maybe that works fine. Maybe no one would ever carefully

⏹️ ▶️ John arrange five screens, but honestly, I find it frustrating to rearrange my screens one and two. Often when I look

⏹️ ▶️ John at them, recently, speaking of the Hey app, which we’re not today, I was trying to find a place to put the Hey app

⏹️ ▶️ John because I have an account and I’m in the free trial period and I wanted to try it out. And I didn’t want it to be buried 20

⏹️ ▶️ John screens ago. I was like, oh God, how do I find a place for that in my screens one and two?

⏹️ ▶️ John What thing do I move? And what am I gonna accidentally screw up when I move it? That’s just me rearranging the screens

⏹️ ▶️ John that Craig says that people do arrange. So I still think this is a problem, but all that aside, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John very glad at this, you know, the biggest change to Springboard in,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe ever, but certainly in the last several years. So I endorse these changes. I just really do wish

⏹️ ▶️ John there was an easier way to arrange your home screens.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really curious to see what these widgets look like for something like Overcast,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, to put Marco on the spot, because my understanding is there’s no way to interact with these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey widgets. And presumably, in the case of Overcast, you could just use a now playing widget that’s a system

⏹️ ▶️ Casey level thing. But let’s, just for the sake of discussion, say that that didn’t exist. I don’t think, Marco, there’s any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way for you to put a play, pause, rewind, fast forward or anything like that in a widget, which could be extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful. I guess the the next best thing you could do is put a list of podcasts to kind of hop into and play.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or no, but I guess that’s still interactive too. That kind of bums me out that there’s no interactivity. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally makes sense from an engineering perspective. But from a user perspective, I’d like to be able to lightly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interact with some things. And I think I’d seen James Thompson say something about how the PCalc

⏹️ ▶️ Casey calculator widget wouldn’t be possible for this exact same reason. And it’s fine, but it’s a little bit of a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bummer. But on the grand scheme of things, I’m still really into this widget stuff. I think the app catalog, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app library thing sounds good too. Because as Craig put it, jiggle mode

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little bit challenging, to say the least, just like you were saying, John. So all in all, the new Springboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff looks real good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s useful, as we alluded to earlier, it’s useful to think of the new widgets more like watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complications than like miniature app interfaces. Because they are there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, again, this could change as we learn more about them and as we get time to play with them as developers and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes happen over the summer, but it sure seems actually in many ways less functional than the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous widgets have been. And by the way, Overcast has a widget that no one uses it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not very useful, but I have a widget, it has a play pause button. Getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to work was a crazy hack, but it has a play pause button and it does show like the upcoming,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next two or three upcoming podcasts and a play pause button and that’s it. But almost no one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses it because it’s kind of awkward to use widgets, you know, in the previous versions of iOS. So I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly can’t think of a good reason to have one in this new system for Overcast. I don’t think it makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless I would, again, like I could show the next upcoming podcast, but if I can’t tell which one you tapped on, if you tap on it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that’s not of much use. So I’m probably just not gonna have a widget in the new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, but I’m looking forward to what other types of apps are able to do with them. I’ve never been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a heavy widget user, but I would love to do things like have a weather widget showing on my home screen. There are certain things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like weather that I just always want to be displayed. Maybe, you know, like some of the examples they were showing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like showing your upcoming calendar events. That’s stuff I would actually use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know? And so I’m looking forward to just having a new fun thing to play with.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, Android people, I know you did it first, Opera did it first, et cetera. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, but this is new to us, so we’re gonna be super excited about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is actually not the first Android thing that is now gonna be new to us, We’ll get some more in a little while.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that because these widgets seem like they’re not particularly interactive right now,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way. When they were in the sort of today view, it kind of made sense that they wouldn’t be constantly

⏹️ ▶️ John interactive because you don’t even see them half the time. They only sort of load on demand. But if it’s going to be on your home screen all the time,

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously Apple doesn’t want you churning away and burning CPUs. So they’re very conservative with the first implementation. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it wouldn’t surprise me with a few years from now that you can finally get essentially a now playing

⏹️ ▶️ John screen on the home screen with active play, pause, fast forward, rewind controls, and you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny miniature interface to overcast and the home screen. Does not seem unreasonable for me because it would

⏹️ ▶️ John only be running when the screen is turned on and when the screen is turned on and they’re on their home screen, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John any different than if they, uh, the screen is turned on and they happen to be in overcast. It’s the same amount of CPU usage,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re like playing audio or something like that. And speaking of that, to show that they’re not afraid of having

⏹️ ▶️ John things running on top of the home screen and other places, picture in picture, which, you know, was from the iPad now available on

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone. So if you’re watching some video and you want to go someplace else, you can still see the video in a little floaty

⏹️ ▶️ John window, just like you can on the iPad. And if they, if they’re okay with a bunch of video showing, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it should be okay with play, pause, fast forward,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco rewind buttons and a widget.

⏹️ ▶️ John Neither one is going to kill your CPU exactly. So it’s nice to see that coming over. That’s sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ John something they had already implemented, but they, but you know, didn’t have on the phone because like, oh, the phone is so small. Would people want

⏹️ ▶️ John that? Answer, yes. Everybody wants that on their phone. Plus, phones are pretty big these days.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One small thing about the widgets that I can’t let go of, apparently, I think the old API is probably deprecated,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? And that’s also a little bit of a bummer. Like on my iPad and in Notification Center

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my iPhone, I like using this app, Vidgets, V-I-D-G-E-T-S. And what that does is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like an iStat menus for your phone or your iPad. And on the iPad, I actually have it on my home screen. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for someone like me who has empathy for the machine, sorry, John. It actually is very convenient to know if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actively downloading something and is it actually going quickly. And that’s not going to be possible anymore

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that refreshes itself once a second. And for all the reasons that you just cited,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s too computationally expensive, too energy expensive, that’s not going to be possible anymore and that’s too bad. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being said, I understand why from an engineering perspective and it makes perfect sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do think that there are probably going to some cool new widgets with new functionality.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m really anxious to see or excited to see how the auto ordering works on those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stacks. But I should stop belaboring this widget thing. We should probably keep moving along. What

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the next thing that they talked about? Translate,

⏹️ ▶️ John actually. The compact UI for Siri and calls.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Also, the call

⏹️ ▶️ John one has been, people wanted that since multitasking was introduced. It’s like, when a call comes

⏹️ ▶️ John in, why does it take over my whole screen. Everything else that happens, you can have a banner or you can

⏹️ ▶️ John have an alert, you know, like the modern notification system on iOS has existed for a long time and calls

⏹️ ▶️ John have just said, no, we are something special because I don’t, I’m not sure if you know this, but what you’re actually holding

⏹️ ▶️ John is something we call a phone. And when you get a call, since I’m a phone, it’s the most important

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I do. So I’m going to black out the whole screen and nobody likes that. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey modern,

⏹️ ▶️ John other modern smartphones don’t do that and now the iPhone won’t either. It actually

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shows the notification.

⏹️ ▶️ John Imagine that. And same thing for Siri. You can now activate Siri and do things with it

⏹️ ▶️ John without it blanking over the whole screen. You know, that may or may

⏹️ ▶️ John not actually make Siri any better. There’s a separate section on Siri supposedly being better, but yay

⏹️ ▶️ John for catching up with modern practices in terms of notification UI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m so happy to see this. Yep. As As with many nerds who have been complaining

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this for years, phone calls today are — there are some special

⏹️ ▶️ Marco considerations for a call. Unlike many other notifications that we get, it is a synchronous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. This call is happening right now. You need to answer it right now. You can’t just wait until later and go — so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is some degree of special treatment that they need, and I’m sure there’s probably some regulations, too, about how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco calls have to behave on certain phones in certain countries, just from legacy or emergency reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But for the most part, this is a computer that you’re using, and you don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything to be able to do a full-screen takeover that you didn’t tell to happen. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what calls have done until now. And this also includes FaceTime calls and anything else that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses the system VoIP API. A full-screen takeover

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your computer that is caused by someone else calling you that you have no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco control over? In many ways, it has been and can be used as a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco DDoS attempt for someone’s device, but it does seem kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculous to think about why that would be the case these days. And so it is wonderful that Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally recognized that and made this change to be like, all right, you know what? Phone calls are now demoted a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit in the UI so that they don’t black out the entire screen of your phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever some idiot calls you.

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Translate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Translate. Translate looked really cool. I know that Google Translate is a thing. I know it’s very good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, as with everyone, haven’t had the opportunity to use any sort of translation service for a while,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it looks really, really neat. The one thing I wish is that when you were doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the conversational mode, it seemed like it would be the perfect opportunity to put your phone in landscape

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and set it between you and the person. And I feel like the opposite person’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI should be flipped 180 degrees. Does that make sense? Because right now, you would have to do the like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold it up to your face and then hold it up to the other person’s face. They could read the translated version of what you said was, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring it back to your face, you can read what they said. It seems like such a good tabletop mode where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the UI is split in half, and one person gets each half facing the correct way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But with that quibble aside, it looks really nice and all the translation is happening on device

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, which is also excellent.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder what they’re using for the translation. Like, you know, we’re all used to using Google Translate and doing natural

⏹️ ▶️ John language translation is actually very tricky and Google has spent a long time trying to make their translation better. Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John it as a feature, check mark, yeah, we’ve got translation, but how? How are they doing it? Presumably they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John using Google Translate. Have they developed it in-house? Did they license something? Is it as good as Google’s engine? This is always the question

⏹️ ▶️ John with all these things. So I’m glad Apple has checked that box. I hope they continue to improve Translate.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just were talking about the Translate app, but translation is also built into Safari.

⏹️ ▶️ John Strangely, as far as I’m aware, it’s not built into Messages, right? Am I wrong about that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I believe it’s only in the Translate app and then separately in Safari.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, it seems like a natural inclusion for a future version of Messages, so you can have a message conversation

⏹️ ▶️ John and then just tap on the thing and say, please translate this, but we’ll see. But anyway, it’s good that Apple is another

⏹️ ▶️ John catch up in this area. And surprisingly, like for the Safari thing, that’s one of the features

⏹️ ▶️ John I hear cited a lot. It’s also one of the reasons I go to Chrome. Like I use Chrome for some things and Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John for others, but sometimes I’ll be using, one of the things I use Safari for, I’ll be doing that, and I’ll land on

⏹️ ▶️ John a page that I need translated. And I could just go to translate.google.com and put it in the URL and blah, blah, blah, but it’s so much easier

⏹️ ▶️ John in Chrome because it just prompts you, and now it’s that easy in Safari too. It’s a reason a lot of people cite it for

⏹️ ▶️ John using Chrome. It’s like, oh, Chrome will translate stuff, right? And you can say, well, you don’t need Chrome to translate it. You can, in

⏹️ ▶️ John Safari, just go, and they don’t want to hear it. They’re just like, Chrome just asked me if I want to translate it, and I say yes. So now

⏹️ ▶️ John Safari does that too. Again, caveats about the potential quality of the natural language translation,

⏹️ ▶️ John which Google has worked for years and years on and Apple just getting started, but I’m glad the future exists.

Messages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, messages. I am really excited about the changes coming to messages.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems like they were very polarizing and there were a couple of sticks in the mud that I saw fly by on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter that were not into it at all. But I love the idea that we’re going to have threading. What

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were some of the other features that they added? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pinned conversations. Pin conversations,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. And putting little cute photos on your group messages. I mean, both of those, the pinned and the photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John are great examples of features that are clearly responses to how people use

⏹️ ▶️ John messages. Like if you’re a heavy messages user, inevitably you have certain message

⏹️ ▶️ John groups that are just permanent. One for your whole family, one for a particular group of friends, one

⏹️ ▶️ John for your parents. And if you’re frequently using messages a

⏹️ ▶️ John busy day your parent group could get pushed down and you want to check in with your parents again at night and you got to scroll

⏹️ ▶️ John and find the parent group or try typing the names again or something like that. Having pinned conversations

⏹️ ▶️ John and having cute little icons for your pin conversation groups lets you just say look I’m always going to want to talk

⏹️ ▶️ John to my immediate family my parent my in-laws my group of friends my you know

⏹️ ▶️ John soccer team whatever like just pick a set of those and pin them because you’re always going to

⏹️ ▶️ John go back to them and then there’s everything else and then the threading if you’re in a big group conversation and

⏹️ ▶️ John people are communicating asynchronously sometimes you want to respond to something that was

⏹️ ▶️ John said a long time it’s like the point of threading sometimes you You want to say, what are you actually responding to? What are you saying ha ha to?

⏹️ ▶️ John What is that lull about? I need to know. So we can, you know, so threads are a thing. They

⏹️ ▶️ John can have good implementations and bad. I think today we have enough experience these type of

⏹️ ▶️ John interfaces that you can strike a reasonable balance. We’ll see how, what this balance is, because they’re saying yes, you can,

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially threading information will be there, but the messages will of course still appear linearly, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John can sort of group them by thread. So I’m not sure about the UI, but it’s kind of like translation.

⏹️ ▶️ John any amount of threading is better than none. If people don’t like it, just don’t use it, and it degenerates

⏹️ ▶️ John to the non-threading form. But I think people will like it and use it, again, as evidenced from using things like Slack, where

⏹️ ▶️ John people were very nervous when threading appeared, but now people use it in what I think

⏹️ ▶️ John is a pretty natural way. Like, there’s not a lot of fretting about threads. People just sort of use

⏹️ ▶️ John them and understand them and appreciate them. They haven’t overwhelmed Slack and made it unusable, nor

⏹️ ▶️ John do they go entirely unused. and I hope messages will turn out the same way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I like seeing that Apple’s really taking messages as seriously as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it deserves. And there’s also, which we’ll get to in a little while, there’s the new Messages app on the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is now built with Catalyst and has apparently feature parity with iOS, which is a first.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what I like about this is like, Messages is incredibly highly used. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even like the stats they gave, that kind of blew my mind. They said that there is a 40% increase in messages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent since last year, and twice as many group messages. So that’s kind of incredible for one year of growth on something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty mature platform. But like, messages are so big. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see with Overcast, one of the analytics that I capture is when you do a share

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the activity sheet, I save as an analytic, like what type of shared destination did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use? So it’s things like copy to clipboard, send to messages, that kind of stuff. And send to messages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroys everything else. it is so much more,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far and above, well more used than any other kind of shared destination in the app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and like when I designed the share panel, I was thinking people would be like sharing social networks and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they do, but it’s nowhere close to messages. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even close. I think we as like podcasters and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco public Twitter personalities, I think we might underestimate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many people communicate with their friends and family only via messages and stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as opposed to doing anything on the public social networks, or they do so much more of it in messages than on public social

⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks. It’s so big. And so for Apple to invest in it seriously, and not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just let it languish and let it fall behind alternatives like WhatsApp and stuff like that is really important.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m glad to see they’re doing that here.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple has said in years past that messages is the most used app on the entire phone. Like you remember

⏹️ ▶️ John saying it’s a phone, so it should have the phone message taking over. Really what it essentially is, is a messaging

⏹️ ▶️ John device. Like that’s basically what people use their phone for. They don’t use it for phone calls. They don’t use it to

⏹️ ▶️ John browse the web or read Twitter. And like if you had to say to a first approximation, what are these devices for? Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John just go into public when you can someday again and look at what people are doing on their phone, chances

⏹️ ▶️ John are good they’re using Messages. It is the most popular app by a lot. So yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ John always felt like their conservatism with the evolution of Messages is very similar

⏹️ ▶️ John to the home screen, which obviously is, you know, not really an app, but everyone uses, you have no choice. It’s there

⏹️ ▶️ John when you, you know, turn on your phone. You don’t want to screw it up. And it’s, and in the

⏹️ ▶️ John case of Messages, it’s a high volume service. And history has shown that

⏹️ ▶️ John making changes to it is a little bit fraught. Witness messages in the cloud, which was delayed

⏹️ ▶️ John on release and I think is still a little bit buggy. So you really don’t want to mess it up. But you

⏹️ ▶️ John do have to try and kind of keep up with the Joneses. So I think Apple is still lagging behind and is

⏹️ ▶️ John still not not able to confidently make these kinds of changes. Every time

⏹️ ▶️ John they make one, we’re all nervous that it’s going to screw up. But it is important for them to keep trying. So

⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up on this change. Hopefully, it doesn’t. Hopefully, it’s stable and works well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the one change that I’m most excited for is threading because on some group text

⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages or group iMessages, I should say, there are definitely times that I get a little lost, especially if I’m coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to something later. So I have a group thread or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a group chat with a couple of other car nerd friends of mine, not you guys.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s oftentimes where one of us will come back not having seen the chat for a couple of hours and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two remaining people will have been chatting for the last two hours and there’ll be 50 messages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. And often I want to reply, if it’s me that’s coming back to it, I want to reply to something that happened way back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when and that’s very hard to do without reestablishing a new context and so on and so forth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’m really excited for threads. However, I just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently was trying to send a Twitter link to a group chat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was myself and just a couple other people. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went and I looked for the icon that was myself and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the people in this group chat. It just so happened to be my brother-in-law. So I looked for an icon that has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like my brother-in-law and a little teeny blob, you know, and you’ll have several circles for the group chats and the little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey teeny blob of his picture. And I just, you know, quickly went there, pasted and hit send.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I realized I had sent to a different chat that was much wider, that had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many more people than just him in it. He was in the other one. I misfired on account of just looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for him and then immediately firing. And it was not the sort of thing that I wanted to misfire to this larger

⏹️ ▶️ Casey group. And I’m not going to give any more details than that, but I felt real dumb and I really regretted it. So being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to have a special image for group chats that you can actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey add in and specify is awesome. With all that said, though, the only problem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here is that this particular bro, my particular brother-in-law is an Android user. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming that since we can’t even rename group chats that are SMS or I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MMS only, I’m assuming none of these features will be coming to the messages representation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of group MMSs. And so I’m still screwed either way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually really curious what you sent him. Like the less you say about it, the more suspicious it becomes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I don’t want to know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’ll tell you after the show. Oh, God. Yeah, I’m really excited for all the messages changes. I’m super duper excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear that that there’s parody on Mac OS, big sure, spoiler alert, or bug sure, depending on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who you ask. But anyways.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco What an amazing typo.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, what a good typo. But anyway, I’m really excited for that. Trying to plow right along as quickly as possible. Maps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got some updates, including cycling directions and EV routing, two things I don’t care about. Now, Marco, I know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are super excited about the EV routing changes, especially while you use CarPlay in your, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John Tesla’s already got EV routing that’s customized to it, so he’s not really missing out on that, But it is a continued

⏹️ ▶️ John shame that Tesla hasn’t found a way to square that circle with CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s basically, it’s adding to, apparently just BMWs and Fords so far, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more cars coming later, the ability to build in charging stops to your routes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what Tesla’s map and its cars have done since day one. So it’s nice, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell you, that’s a wonderful feature. It is very nice, it won’t affect me at all, but it is very nice. And yeah, man,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really stung, we’ll get to CarPlay in a second, It really stung when Craig said about CarPlay, it’s available

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on basically every new car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Tesla might be the only remaining holdout of any major car brand now. Like, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty sure I can’t think of any other car brand that does not offer CarPlay at all. I mean, hell,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Porsche even offers it for their cars made in the 60s. We can’t even get it on Tesla.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is becoming increasingly a problem for Apple people who have Teslas. I,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, whatever, whatever is causing them to not want to do that, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish they would work it out.

Home

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, we can talk about the Home app, and it’s getting adaptive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lighting, which is, I guess, sort of, kind of, not really a night shift, but for your physical

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lights instead of your computer and your other devices, which is pretty cool. The face

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recognition thing, so I think I blanked when that was coming across, so it won’t alert

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it sees somebody that it knows at your front door, is that correct?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will alert and tell you who it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, la, la, la, la. This is like feature parity. A lot of these home features are sort of feature parity and APIs

⏹️ ▶️ John for things that are just expected from home automation. And, you know, this is more catch up stuff. Like in any sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John camera system, probably has some kind of face recognition in a library. And this is, you know, HomeKit support

⏹️ ▶️ John for that. Activity zones specify the region of the camera’s view that you’re actually interested

⏹️ ▶️ John in. You know, more catch up features, but these are sort of necessary stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, to be a player in this game that you have to support. So good on Apple for catching up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really curious to see how this works because like, so I have some Nest cameras and their,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, their zone detection is garbage and their motion

⏹️ ▶️ Marco detection and everything, they’re like, you know, Nest cameras seem unaware that the sun

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moves throughout the day. And as a result, like shadows happen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and shadows move across rooms very slowly throughout the day as well. and Nests

⏹️ ▶️ Marco face recognition is also total garbage. So I’m really curious to see how this works out in practice with these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco products. This has been the kind of thing that companies have advertised for years, as John

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said. There used to even be apps for your Mac to let your Mac webcam do many of these same functionalities.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve never worked that well. So yeah, this is very much a wait and see for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certainly, this is the kind of thing like, you’d expect Nests being Google owned to be good at that kind of stuff, and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super not. So we will see, I hope it works out well. Also, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it was very entertaining that during this home segment, I’m pretty sure Casey’s garage door opener, Raspberry

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pi was Sherlocked.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, everyone has been saying that, but I have had a Homebridge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey powered home kit front end for my Raspberry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pi garage door opener do-hicker since, I don’t know, like a week or so after I installed just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Raspberry Pi detection and the LED thing. So I’m not entirely clear what this is buying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me other than more prominence and I guess maybe alerting if the garage door is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey left open. Is that the only new stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It breezes by really fast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So it’s a little hard to know yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it is alerting, which coincidentally, I don’t think I talk about this on the show, but I did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up a HomeKit automation that when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it detects that everyone has left the house, it will then read the state

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the garage door, and it will send me a push notification saying either, you’re good,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the garage door is closed, or oh my God, it’s open. That’s actually a fairly challenging thing to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do because using the out-of-the-box shortcuts functionality,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t send a push notification based on a HomeKit event. So what I’m actually doing is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey calling an API that I have on my server, that via HTTP,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s then basically just proxying that to Pushover, which is a really cool app that has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey its own front end to sending push notifications to your phone. So between Aaron and I, when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last of us leaves, HomeKit will check the state of the garage door, make an HTTP request to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey server, which makes a HTTP request to Pushover. I guess I could skip that hop, but it’s my API.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the most casey answer to this problem ever. But anyways, my API

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so much simpler. And so it’ll send a push notification my phone which is super cool And I was very proud of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey figuring out a way to get around the limitation that you can’t send yourself a push from a home kit From

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a home kit automation anyway It is it is super cool that they’re getting a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit more support for that sort of thing Moving on let’s talk about carplay because it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me so happy to hear you suffer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so hey you you jumped ahead you skipped car key the App Store store, iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS, AirPods, watch OS, and privacy. Did I skip all? I’m just going off the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, man.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, you’re not. You’re not following in the notes document. Marker, you don’t know what’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on. No, I’m following keynote order.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, OK. So the document is taking precedence here because

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to skip stuff in the keynote. But if you have better notes, you could have put them into the document.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OK. Your document knows better than Apple what order things should be presented in.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, I’m just saying that

⏹️ ▶️ John the document is what Casey’s going off of, and he can’t see what you’re looking at.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you had put what you’re looking at in the document, then we could all see it. It was broadcast to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. All right, we’ll bicker about it later. We’ll bicker about it later. But the next thing in the document

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is CarPlay. You can reorder it in the

⏹️ ▶️ John edit. You have ultimate to power

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey here, Mark. Oh, God.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no. The next thing in the document is CarPlay.

CarPlay, CarKey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess there is some support for some new styles of app. I think they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said basically fast food apps you can now put in CarPlay, which I’m not entirely clear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John why, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John EV charging

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey EV charging, there were a couple others.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, parking, EV charging, and quote, quick food ordering, however

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s defined. So yeah, that’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They also did a demonstration of, I don’t know what the Apple marketing term is, but basically you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can unlock your car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone. Car key. Car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John key, okay, there you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco go. Does

⏹️ ▶️ John that use the U1 thing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. So they said, um, so the first version of it that’s, that’s going on the 2021 BMW

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five series does not use the U1. It seems to be using something much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer, maybe NFC based it seems, um, because it’s, you have to be very close to it. But then they said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end, they said that, uh, in the future, future integrations will use the U1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you can keep your phone like in your bag or in your pocket and not like place it directly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco against the door so it does seem like it’s probably NFC based to start and will be enhanced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with U1 because what they need is like they don’t want to use something like Bluetooth because Bluetooth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can have things like it first of all could be too long range and there could be issues

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like somebody could set up like a Bluetooth repeater or something so if you’re in a restaurant they could set up like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a repeater outside the window and unlock your car from further away than you actually are and drive off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the ultra-wideband in U1, it’s immune to that. It can’t have those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of attacks. It’s like the way it works, it can detect that and rule those out. And so, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to use, I’m guessing what they’re using is NFC for this first version, because that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like only close proximity and it’s easier to enforce that way. Whereas, once they have a better integration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the U1 chip, they can detect like, okay, this is in your pocket, so it’s maybe 12 inches

⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from the receiver, but that’s close enough, we’ll let it unlock. So, but that is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t give a date for that, they just kinda said like, soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep.

Safari

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safari, some pretty big changes to Safari. The thing, it made me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so happy and the schadenfreude was so strong. Just watching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them discuss the privacy report feature. So this is a new thing where you can,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on any website I guess, you can go and look at what Safari thinks it’s doing, the website

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is doing in terms of tracking you. So there was an example, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quick demo on stage or in the video or whatever, And they said, OK, let’s see what’s tracking us. And right there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is DoubleClick and Google Analytics like feature front

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey center, which was so amazing. But basically, this will let you see what is a website trying to do, or how many

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different trackers there are, and I guess not what they’re doing with your information, but how many people are trying to slurp up your information.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think part of the reason, this is not a very earth shattering idea,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think part of the reason why websites can get away with slurping up all this data is because most people,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even I as a developer and former web developer, I don’t really have a good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey view for how much data is being sucked up every time I go to a website. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think making this more prominent is presumably going to have,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hopefully going to have, a tangible impact on a lot of websites. Now, it may be that the only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey impact is, instead of using third-party stuff, that it all becomes first-party, and it’s all proxied out,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it gets even grosser. But in the same way that the location services prompts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it more obvious and the Bluetooth prompts made it more obvious when an iOS app was trying to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that could, but not necessarily is, but could be nefarious, this will hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it much more obvious when all of these websites are doing things that are almost exclusively nefarious

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. And so I am really, really looking forward to hopefully seeing changes across the web for the better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, keep in mind, it’s not just telling you where the trackers are. It’s telling you which trackers it blocked. They have their intelligent tracking

⏹️ ▶️ John prevention is built into Safari. You’re supposed to look at this and A, be terrified that all these trackers there and B, be

⏹️ ▶️ John thankful that Safari says, look at all these things I blocked for you. My intelligent tracking prevention system blocked X,

⏹️ ▶️ John Y, Z. Like that’s the pitch. So it is both sales pitch and knowledge. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John good because if you were to look at this and just say, oh, here are all the trackers, your question would be, so what am I supposed to do about

⏹️ ▶️ John that? Like, I don’t like it, what am I supposed to do about it? Now, when you look at it, it will say, here’s what Safari already did for

⏹️ ▶️ John you and it will make you feel better. It may also change your opinion of the site that it had all these things that had to be blocked But mostly

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s building Building an understanding in the public not so much

⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re being tracked about But the fact that Safari has features that prevent that and that’s why you should use Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of Chrome or whatever, right? Whereas if sorry has just just does that behind the scenes which it has been

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you don’t appreciate that and it’s not like a selling feature of Safari similar to this

⏹️ ▶️ John another feature that lots of other browsers have that Safari now has which is password compromise

⏹️ ▶️ John detection. Safari through its keychain integration will store passwords for various websites

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple will now be keeping track of these big metadata jumps to say

⏹️ ▶️ John we know that this many passwords were leaked from this website on this date and they’ll just update

⏹️ ▶️ John that database and they’ll be able to tell you by the way we saw that your email address and this password were compromised

⏹️ ▶️ John in this website so you should probably change it. If you reuse your passwords it may be a little bit overwhelming

⏹️ ▶️ John to see oh my god I have to change my password on 20 websites because I use you know my dog’s name

⏹️ ▶️ John as the password on all 20 of these websites that can be overwhelming and I don’t know it’ll make people just

⏹️ ▶️ John throw up their hands but in theory if you were using good unique passwords for each website when one gets

⏹️ ▶️ John compromised you’ll at least know that password is burned and maybe you should change your password and I know from using

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess Firefox maybe edge I know some third party browsers that are not Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac. I’ve gotten these notifications mostly for websites that I haven’t, you know, logged into since the early

⏹️ ▶️ John 2000s or even the 90s. But if I get a notification, I’ll go over to it and change the password. Like it was

⏹️ ▶️ John probably a garbage password that I haven’t used in a decade anyway, but it’s good to know or I’ll go over there and close the account.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the other reminder. It’s like I still have an account on that website. Let me just delete that account. That’s another solution to the problem. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad this has come to Safari because it’s a useful feature, but I do worry about regular people being overwhelmed

⏹️ ▶️ John when the one password they use on every website is compromised. And they’re like, what do I do now?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what can you do?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s also been a feature of 1Password as well. They check with, have I been pwned, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does various sources and do a similar warning. Going back a minute, just before we leave the privacy warning thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, this is basically what the Ghostory plugin did back forever ago. It is really nice to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the list of trackers on websites that are being blocked. Because this is kind of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pattern that Apple has followed a lot, to great success, I think, where as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, you were saying a minute ago, that a lot of times your data’s being tracked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or leaked or creepily captured, and you have no idea. It’s just happening behind the scenes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that aren’t visible to you. And one consistent strategy Apple does in these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of contexts is shine a light on it when it happens. to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just outright ban or block such behavior, or in cases where that’s impractical or impossible,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple likes to reveal that behavior to you so that you can make decisions and you can be more in control,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that bad actors can be discovered and shamed or controlled

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the bad behavior. And so in this case, WebTracker is part of the reason why it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been such a big business forever and continues to be and looking to be, is that pages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can track all sorts of creepy crap using JavaScript in the background that you have no idea is even running. So anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that shines a light on it and calls out exactly what it’s doing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will, you know, any sites or, you know, bad actors that care about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they look and that might hear from the users about how about what’s going on, they’ll be forced to consider better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behavior. And even the ones that don’t care, at least users who care themselves can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be more in control, can see what’s going on, can be more aware of what’s happening and can maybe take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical countermeasures on their end, like running a blocker or something like that on their end to control such things. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime Apple can shine a light on creepy behavior and put control back in the user’s hands,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a very good thing, and that’s exactly what they’ve done here. And in fact, there’s also a thing later on that I don’t think we’ll get to separately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ll ruin it here. We’re doing the same thing in iOS 14. Whenever the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera or microphones are being recorded from, there’s now a recording dot in the status bar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s great, because that’s another thing that like, you know, they’ve had the permissions dialogue for,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, do you want this app to access the camera and microphone for a couple years? But once you get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco permission, you didn’t know like when it was doing that. So for instance, an app like a social network that records

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures or videos, you would give it permission, because obviously you need that to work. But do you want it to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be turning on your microphone and your camera when you don’t know it? Probably not. So a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very useful thing here to control some privacy potential leaks or violations is give people an indicator.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing with location access, it’s always an indicator. So yeah, anything that Apple can do to shine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a light on potential privacy invasions or risks and give users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge and control, that is always successful. And I’m glad to see that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening in more places.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t agree more.

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App Clips

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel a little bit like I’m in the Matrix for this next item here. You guys both tell me what

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m misremembering. Let’s talk about app clips for a second. I could swear,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming this was not a dream, this was reality, that this is a feature that Apple already had and already

⏹️ ▶️ John announced. What the heck am I remembering that it was so similar to this?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Android had it. Yep, Android did this exact same thing. I

⏹️ ▶️ John have this distinct memory of an Apple keynote of them announcing essentially the exact same feature as App Clips, but

⏹️ ▶️ John not by that name. You know, I don’t know, I’m getting

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco old. Anyway, App Clips is cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John If it already exists in an alternate universe, an alternate version of the matrix,

⏹️ ▶️ John then that’s what I’m remembering and I’m sorry. But it’s a way for you to

⏹️ ▶️ John do a thing with an app that you don’t have installed, without the hassle of going, oh, I pulled over to the parking

⏹️ ▶️ John meter, it says I have to download the whatever app. I can use the QR code. Oh, it’s taking me to a web page. The web page

⏹️ ▶️ John has a button. Okay, download an app store Okay, I’m on the app thing. I’m downloading it. Okay. I’m opening the app.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, I’m launching it It wants me to sign in. Okay, I have to create an account. I made the account. Okay, now I’ve launched

⏹️ ▶️ John the app now I’ll scan the QR code again, and now I can pay for parking out now I have to enter my credit card number

⏹️ ▶️ John App clips is trying to stop that from happening If anyone has ever tried to use like just park just that one example

⏹️ ▶️ John a parking app You don’t know what the hell parking app this place is using. You don’t care what parking app it’s using

⏹️ ▶️ John you just want to park your car. So they’re trying to streamline that process, which is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Put your pick your phone up and put it close to a thing or scan a thing or whatever, and just immediately say,

⏹️ ▶️ John we know what app this is supposed to be. We’re not even going to bother downloading the whole app. We’re just going to download this tiny portion of the app that

⏹️ ▶️ John you need to do your parking and an Apple’s perfect world. We’ll integrate with Apple Pay

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll integrate with sign with Apple. So you don’t need to create an account and you don’t need to enter a credit card number, and it’s all secure through

⏹️ ▶️ John things that you trust Apple to do. and you didn’t have to download an entire app, as one of our friends said in Slack when

⏹️ ▶️ John this segment came on, I’m going to delete a ton of parking applications.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because you don’t need to have the

⏹️ ▶️ John parking app, you don’t need one parking app for every single thing and have to constantly be updating them and God

⏹️ ▶️ John knows what those things are doing. Just use the App Clip. It’s 10 megabytes maximum size.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, of course, being Apple, has its own special QR code that’s round because QR codes are for

⏹️ ▶️ John squares. And it’s got a little picture of a phone in the middle. It looks a little bit like

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks a little bit like the maze from Westworld, but it’s somewhat disturbing, but try not to think about that. Spoilers for Westworld.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Um, I thought it looked

⏹️ ▶️ John like the touch ID thing. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it does.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Or yeah, it’s like, it’s like if your fingers were perfectly round. Uh, but yeah. And, and, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you, you can get the full version of the app if you want. Unfortunately they can prompt you to get the full version of the apps. I’m afraid that

⏹️ ▶️ John every single app clip, all it’s going to do is immediately prompt you for the full version of the app. But I’m sure Apple has some kind of countermeasures there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, things that you do in the little app clip can be carried over to the full app so it doesn’t just forget that you

⏹️ ▶️ John exist and knows what you did previously with it. And of course it’s not just for parking, it’s for any kind of thing where

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t care enough about the interaction to become a quote user of the app, you just want to do the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I love this feature in principle. In practice, given that we don’t live in an all

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple world, I expect to still encounter lots and lots of things that don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know about app clips, you know, we still encounter 30 pin connectors on hotels,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? So I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John optimistic about that clips changing my life anytime soon, but I want to live in that world, even though

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably going to be a long time coming.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this I would love for this to be a success the way it was demoed. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope that sometime in the next three years I have that kind of interaction they demoed, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it will take about that long before it will happen because and I think it will also be far from universal for all those reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I had to use one of those parking apps a couple of weeks ago and it you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was from like one of the biggest, you know, vendors of such parking meter things. And the app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a horrendous mess because of course it is. And it does, it claims to support Apple pay, but the Apple pay just kept

⏹️ ▶️ Marco failing for no specified reasons. So I had to enter a credit card and everything. And it was just, it was just, I had an account, I had to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign in all this crap. All again, all to park at a parking meter that used to take quarters until a few weeks ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would go to the bank and get rolls of quarters every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco few months cause it every few months because it was just easier than dealing with all these crappy apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so in an ideal world when everyone makes amazing apps that take advantage of all that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco belated technologies and they actually try to collect as little information from you as possible and they don’t want you to create an account,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t want to market to you and they actually just want things to go quickly, this will be great. I hope that world someday

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exists. Today it doesn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Powell, Host, Reveal Music There were a couple of interesting things said, one in the State of the Union and one I believe in the keynote. the keynote, they basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said in so many words that a single entity like Yelp could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make branded app clips for many, many, many, many different restaurants, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t they go through like this big, like, what’s the word I’m looking for this, this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big exodus, they caused a big exodus of like, people in developers who may who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just spit out a zillion copies of what are effectively the same app, like several years ago, I thought they really cracked down

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that. And now they’re basically saying, Hey, have fun, do that again. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the way they worded it, it sounded like they would let Yelp do it, and possibly other partners,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it didn’t sound like anybody would be able to vend multi-business clips. It sounded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it was only a thing that some people would get to do, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yelp. That’s not surprising. And the other thing that was said during the State of the Union, it was not mentioned during the keynote, but I thought it was a very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever solution to what could be an annoying problem, that if I understood it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey correctly, all clips get what’s called ephemeral

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications permissions. So when you use an app clip, you are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey automatically giving that app clip the ability to send you push notifications for eight hours. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the end of those eight hours, it’s automatically revoked and it can’t send you push notifications anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I thought was really clever because something like a parking app, which I cannot agree with you more, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t live in a very urban area, so I almost never run into this, but the couple of occasions I’ve gone to places that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do use these things, it is the most frustrating thing in the world to have to download the app and do that whole dance that you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey described. But anyways, if you have one of these parking apps and your time is about to expire,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to want to get a push notification saying, holy crap, go get your car. And so having these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey clips have this short-lived notification access I think is really smart so you don’t have like a Catalina

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash Vista style, would you like to give this app permission to notify you at some point? it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey given implicitly. I do want to know, and I’m curious to hear,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferably via Twitter, because I don’t need a thousand of these same emails, but for those who do use Android phones,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you seen Slices or whatever the Android equivalent is, have you seen that be used

⏹️ ▶️ Casey frequently? Or is that, was that the, it was announced a couple of years ago and did it just flash in the pan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then go away? I’m very curious if those actually took off, because that’s basically our future in a nutshell.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was also thinking too, like there are, I hope there’s ways that other apps can use these for good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. Like I was thinking, because one thing App Clips does, you know, not only is it useful in the real world, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also says you can launch it from Safari, Messages, stuff like that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was curious to see if maybe this could be something like, if I could use it as a share

⏹️ ▶️ Marco link previewer. So like if Overcast could have a clip that could play any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco share link in a really nice way. I guess I suppose I’m supposed to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco messages apps for that. Right? Are those still a thing? I guess that’s the whole thing, but I don’t know. I was, I’m, I’m interested to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like beyond, beyond the obvious things of parking meters, what else can you do with this feature?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it is pretty cool. And, uh, and again, the parking meter industry might be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slow to adopt it. So I’m curious to see what more creative people can do with it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And it’s very general purpose. Like if you look at how it’s done, you make an app clip target. It’s as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially arbitrary code within the limits of the available APIs and space, again, 10 megabytes

⏹️ ▶️ John maximum size. The notification thing is great, like you said, Casey, because the whole point of this

⏹️ ▶️ John experience is not to have to have a million steps. And so even just asking if it can do notifications

⏹️ ▶️ John is just one extra step that would make it more of a hassle. But I do worry about giving

⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of application implicit permission to give you notifications, even if it’s only for eight hours, just because

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like there’s potential for abuse in once you know again yelp and I want to pick on yelp but a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John people have some complaints about them once they get in there they’re for that is eight hours they’re spamming you with

⏹️ ▶️ John things and making money by being able to spam you with notifications that you couldn’t stop because you know I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John sure you can stop them if you turn them off somewhere but people don’t know how to do that anyway I

⏹️ ▶️ John hope it all works out it sounds like a good plan it’s a feature that the iPhone should have because

⏹️ ▶️ John Android’s had it forever and I hope we can live in a world where parking

⏹️ ▶️ John gets closer to the rule of quarters, ease of use.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real time follow up from the chat room, the handful of Android users that are in there saying that Slices is not a thing as far

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they’re aware. Not to say that it literally isn’t a thing, but I mean by that is they don’t see Slices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the real world very often. Or if they do, it’s used in some other context like you were alluding to, Marco, that they weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey aware that it was a slice in the first place.

Emoji search

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Emoji Search is apparently going to be a thing, at least on iPad, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very exciting. I didn’t see any demo of this, I don’t think. I don’t know if I just looked away in the half second

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they showed it, but I’m excited that it’s at least theoretically going to be a thing now, because it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve got that info secondhand too. Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do

⏹️ ▶️ John you remember it firsthand? Are we in the chat room? Are we making this up? Emoji Search is there, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I haven’t actually seen it yet. It’s on iPhone only, not on iPad. Oh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t installed by the way this is I I guess this is me admitting I’ve installed beta 1

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on everything except my main computer your main

⏹️ ▶️ John computer

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what do you

⏹️ ▶️ John know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I so I bear with me here oh yeah here it is search emoji yep it’s here all right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which device on iPhone with iOS 14

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you put iOS 14 on your carry phone are you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you hate yourself do you like being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John miserable Vacation brain.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So here’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John here’s the thing. Here’s the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m at the beach for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I called

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, right

⏹️ ▶️ John Excuse for everything

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey listen,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m at the beach

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Normally I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I when the beta one comes out I am traveling, you know Cuz we’re at WBC and we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of this busy week full of you know All this travel and lots of mobile use and it’s critical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that your phone works while you’re traveling and everything right now I’m just sitting here. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing very little that requires my phone to work perfectly. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted, first of all, Apple’s been very aggressive in recent years about the public beta time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wanted to make sure that Overcast worked with the beta as soon as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The very first thing I did when the beta booted up earlier today was launch Overcast and start start playing around, just make sure it all works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I know that in, they said, quote, July is when the public betas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will happen, including watchOS for the first time ever. So that could mean like two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks from now. Like this could be really soon. Beta two could be the first public beta.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I really wanna make sure that I have time on it before that happens so I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know whether there’s gonna be problems. Because no matter what people think people should do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will put beta, the first public beta, they will put that on their carry phones and they will run my app, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it breaks, they will complain to me and make bad reviews as opposed to just saying, oh, it’s the beta, it’s my fault, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I need to know that pretty soon. But yeah, it’s mostly because I’m not traveling right now and I’m not gonna travel for the foreseeable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco future because everything, so it made sense for me. Like, I wanna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dive in headfirst, I wanna get going on this, so might as well. So I put the beta on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my devices that I don’t necessarily need to function perfectly, which is everything except my iMac.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have it on my 16-inch iPad Pro, watch, and

⏹️ ▶️ John phone. You mean like the Xcode beta is what you’re talking about. I was getting confused when you were saying you installed an iOS beta on your

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs. Like you just mean the Xcode, the SDK and everything, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also, I’m trying to install Big Sur on my 16-inch. It actually hasn’t completed yet,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it failed, I have to try it again.

⏹️ ▶️ John Equal accents on both syllables, I’m gonna say. Big Sur? Big Sur. Big

⏹️ ▶️ John Sur.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Not Big Sur, not

⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur. Big Sur? Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my god, please stop.

⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur. Someone in the presentation said Fast Company. I thought the same thing. He said it like the British

⏹️ ▶️ John would say Top Gear. I said, Fast Company, Top Gear. No, it’s Fast Company, equal

⏹️ ▶️ John emphasis on both syllables. Top Gear, the way we say it in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco America. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what is the OS supposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to be? I think it’s Big Sur. I’m not from there, but that’s how I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say it. You accented the Sur more than the Big there. Big Sur, it’s equal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John time you said it. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John let me let me give you the two ways ready Big Sur that’s accent on the first one Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ John accent on the second one and Big Sur equal accent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drunk. What is what is happening? And how did I say it? You said Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Big Sur hop gear.

⏹️ ▶️ John We can’t. We’re not saying Big Sur on this on this program unless someone from California tells us that’s how

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re supposed to say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. This is how it sounds. We’re not going to

⏹️ ▶️ John say Big Sur we’re gonna say Big us mispronouncing the name of Mac OS releases until someone from California

⏹️ ▶️ John tells us how we’re supposed to say it is a part of the experience.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you know it’s actually called Bondi Beach? Moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Scribble gets pencil drag to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John select. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ John wait, wait. No, you’ve skipped over emoji search. We got off on this big tangent. Emoji search. I feel like there should be

⏹️ ▶️ John a business tell all book to explain why it has taken so long to get an emoji search.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a major institutional failing of Apple as a company.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ John complicated feature. Everybody needs it. How long have we all spent scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ John horizontally through that list trying to find the stupid emoji with the zipper on the mouth and there’s a million

⏹️ ▶️ John yellow circles and you can’t find it. Emoji search. Why did this take so long?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like not everyone is like Casey who has memorized the entire grid of umpteen emoji knows exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John where it is. We’re all scrolling forever. What happened? I’m I’m not it doesn’t matter now

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got it now it’s like all right fine but but what happened this should be a case study someone from Harvard Business

⏹️ ▶️ John School look into this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can totally ignore like the butterfly keyboard era like skip all that we want to know why there was no emoji search

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we just

⏹️ ▶️ John what happened with the emoji search it makes no sense

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s such an easy feature

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now all kidding aside is it not on iPad or Marco do you have your iPad nearby what is the situation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s iPhone iPhone only according to the chat room which is is always right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’ll be part of the case study,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey presumably.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously, Harvard Business School, let’s get a report on that.

⏹️ ▶️ John As far as I can tell, there’s a lot of stuff that’s in iOS 14 that is not in iPad OS.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the explanation is they didn’t get around to doing it on iPad OS. In

⏹️ ▶️ John terms of prioritizing, you can imagine why they would prioritize iOS before it. Historically,

⏹️ ▶️ John there have been many times where a feature appears on iOS back when it was both on the iPhone and the iPad, only on

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone and on the iPad. Those priorities make some sense to me. Again, you know, MojiSearch

⏹️ ▶️ John should have been on both devices years ago, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think there

⏹️ ▶️ John are similar limitations in some other features that are available on iOS 14 that are not yet available on iPadOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m sure they’ll catch up eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can verify it is not on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. I was just gonna say, I’m hearing conflicting reports about that, but if you’re saying it’s not there, then it’s not there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if it like popped in in a future beta too. Like that’s the kind of thing that maybe it didn’t make beta one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s also true. you did the what is it control? What? How do I say it, John? Oh, God, I’m gonna get in trouble.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Command Ctrl Space. Is that right? Not Ctrl Command Space is Ctrl Delete.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, did you try that three finger gesture Marco on the iPad? You didn’t hit the little globe you did control.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hit the little globe. Face ID microphones blocking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so I’m gonna hit so see command space bring it away Command space is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John regular.

⏹️ ▶️ John Command control space to bring up the special character thingy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Command control space. Special character thingy. There is no search box here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Huh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. It is just a little hover over emoji blob.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Thank you for trying. Also in the bucket of real-time follow-up, Jason Snell, who knows a little bit about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey California says that it is never big sir, it’s big sir.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Equal emphasis. Big sir.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, equal. Equal

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco emphasis on both.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would say the same way we say top gear, but you don’t say it that way. all say Top Gear because we watch the British show

⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s ruined

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco us for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I’m not sure that I can trust the Californians because they also all told us including Jason back in the Mojave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco times that it was Mojave not Mojave but then like half the year everybody was saying Mojave including

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some people from California.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they were doing it wrong it is it is Mojave he was right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but it seems like Californians can’t even agree on their own pronunciations because like other Californians were saying Mojave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other Californians were saying Mojave. They’re not,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not California natives, they’re transplants.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness.

Scribble

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on. All right. So we’ve got a scribble, which is what inkwell or whatever, or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was the thing in Newton

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is transcriber from windows mobile? Oh my goodness. 2002. Newton did it first.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of opera. Yes. It’s yet more features of Newton finding

⏹️ ▶️ John their way to the iPad, which is great. Like, you know, it’s taken a long enough, but it’s definitely great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Handwriting recognition came. Now you can use your Apple pencil to enter texts into text fields

⏹️ ▶️ John without tapping the little thing on the keyboard that comes up. Right. Um, so that’s great. And also

⏹️ ▶️ John the drawing, turning your shapes into perfect shapes. I remember that being demoed on the Newton in 1990

⏹️ ▶️ John Mumble. Here it is on modern iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John devices, and it looks pretty good. I’ll have to try it in the Notes app because the Achilles heels of

⏹️ ▶️ John all these kind of do handwriting and we’ll recognize it

⏹️ ▶️ John and turn it into text and do drawings and we’ll recognize it and turn it into shapes is like, you want

⏹️ ▶️ John it to be flexible after that, right? So they did some demos. like look I can swipe

⏹️ ▶️ John select text which is a new feature with the pencil and move it around because I know that it’s text and stuff like that but

⏹️ ▶️ John you know they drew like a pentagon and they drew a line you know that

⏹️ ▶️ John turned into a line with arrow ends what if you want to make that line with arrow ends shorter how easy is that to do can I grab it is it a vector

⏹️ ▶️ John that I can shorten it do I erase it with an eraser tool and squish the two ends together like stuff like that tends to

⏹️ ▶️ John fall apart unless there’s some there’s considerable effort put into making it flexible. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that all works out, you know, as I imagined in my head and isn’t just like

⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of right once edit never interface. But yeah, I bet pencil users love this

⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s nothing worse than having that software keyboard come up and pecking away at it with your pencil tip. If you can just

⏹️ ▶️ John write into a text field, that’ll be awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I this is a great feature. I don’t think I will personally use it because I’m not much of a hand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco writer. But it’s just really cool for even people like me for like the twice a year that we might want to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And then for people who do kind of, you know, handwrite natively and prefer that as, as a, as an input mechanism,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is great for them because yeah, like you, you can just handwrite everywhere and it just kind of works. I too,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, when you’re describing the handwriting improvements and stuff, I was also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping for a little bit more dynamic movement of what you wrote after you wrote it in like the big handwriting views.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, maybe that’s somewhere they can go in the future, but it does seem, it seemed kind of like their main

⏹️ ▶️ Marco innovation here was in recognition and in the ability to select and like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move it as an image almost, but not to like reflow the text or make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the shapes dynamic and stuff like that. So maybe maybe we’ll get that down the road.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m really excited to try this out. It looks I agree with you, Marco. I don’t see myself using it often. But I do think it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really cool feature, especially for RSI. It might be nice to that you’re not sitting there typing, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be writing, which is super cool.

iOS color picker

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt briefly bad for a friend of the show, Steve John Smith, because his

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new app was pastel. Is that right? I think that’s right. Pastel has been Sherlocked,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey although he seemed actually fairly excited about it, which was good because if he’s not sad, then I’m not sad because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a new system wide color picker on iPad and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone. I’m not sure, but it’s certainly on iPad. And that’s basically what pastel does is try to be a system wide as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as it can, a system wide color picker.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just a new one. This never existed before, as far as I’m aware. So this is a color

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey picker on iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is convenient to have for sharing colors between apps, which is exactly what his app does. He was basically

⏹️ ▶️ John Sherlocked. But that happens. If you’re going to make any kind of app that extends the system in any way, chances are

⏹️ ▶️ John good that Apple added sooner rather than later. He ran into sooner. It’s very

⏹️ ▶️ John true. So Higgins just released Pastel a few weeks ago. So it’s like, ooh, that’s tough. But what can you do?

StoreKit testing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it’s in here in the next spot in the notes. So we’ll talk about it now. I don’t think it was actually brought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until the State of the Union, but possibly my favorite feature from this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire day. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I put it in here

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a big feature for developers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And I say that with only a modicum of hyperbole local store kit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey testing. Praise be to the gods. My dreams have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey come true. I cannot believe it is happening. So what does this mean if you’re not an iOS developer?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when you’re writing iOS apps, in all likelihood, you’re going to be doing some sort of subscription or an app purchase or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. And those APIs are, I find them to be challenging

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of ways and testing them particularly is very frustrating. And it’s always been frustrating and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I started really doing this professionally in the IAP stuff professionally, it had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten a lot better to test. Like I know Marco, you have probably war stories from now until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of time to tell about this, but One way or another what this allows you to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I and they only showed it very briefly But from what I can put together You can basically like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approve or deny or do you know change the state of a store kit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an IEP purchase? When you’re testing so you can pretend like you’re just buying this You know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-app purchase or perhaps a subscription and then you can act as though you’re Apple and say no the card

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was declined or yes it went through or you know maybe the the store is down entirely or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that to help test all these scenarios which is extremely hard to do today I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely incredibly excited for this and if I’m incredibly excited for this novel we’ve been doing this for a couple years I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot fathom how excited you are Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god yeah I mean the it’s it’s funny like when you implement

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app store payments if you’ve ever implemented anything else especially if you ever used, as I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned a couple episodes ago, if you ever used Stripe. Stripe is awesome for lots of reasons, in particular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when you’re implementing their payments, they give you a whole bunch of different test accounts, test credit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco card numbers you can use and stuff like that, so you can test all sorts of different conditions. They have a whole testing environment. It’s very,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very nice and easy to use. The App Store payment system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not. And that’s the nicest thing I can say about it is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has been extremely painful to develop against over time, to test with.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s incredibly clunky and very hard to test certain conditions. A lot of the testing stack was buggy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of the store kits cited on iOS, you’d have to have a whole dedicated device just to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco signed into a sandbox account because if you used your actual phone, it would screw it up so often in ways that you’d

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be getting sandbox password pop-ups for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of eternity until you did a full restore. There were so many problems over time with testing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-app purchase. And like our friend Brent Simmons wrote an article a few days ago

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like during the App Store brouhaha, basically saying like, originally when apps were either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco free or paid up front, it was super easy to collect money because from the app you didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do anything. You just set a flag in iTunes Connect to say like, all right, my app costs five bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it would handle it all for you. And as we move to the area of in-app purchase and the whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of that being like the primary way developers collect money as opposed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a purchase up front, we lost all that simplicity. And implementing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-app purchase is way more complicated and very error-prone. As we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved into subscriptions in recent years, that’s even more complicated and even more error-prone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the importance of testing has only gone up. And so it really is nice to have something like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this that is—I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but it is most likely going to be a big improvement in testability.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for developing purchase flow and you’re in a purchase handling and everything. And that was just so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco badly needed and it will be so helpful to so many developers. So I’m very glad to see this.

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iPadOS

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we have to go through the iPadOS, watchOS, and there’s other things fairly quickly if we were to get

⏹️ ▶️ John to the big stuff because we’re going kind of long here.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, let’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey blow by it. Us? Yeah, right? Let’s just blow by all that. I’m not even kidding. Let’s just blow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John by it. Let’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John go to Mac. I think we should imagine stuff in iPad, but we can – I think we can get through them fast by just hitting these quick bullet points. You want me to do it? I can

⏹️ ▶️ John do it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast. Yeah, you go ahead and we’ll see how long the two of us can wait before we interrupt you. Go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to get to say anything? If you want it to go fast, you can’t. All right. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John here we go. iPad OS. We just mentioned that there are some things that

⏹️ ▶️ John are on iOS 14 that are not in the new iPad OS. It seems to lag behind a little bit. But the headlining

⏹️ ▶️ John features that were talked about are things that are unique to iPad OS that basically try to enhance

⏹️ ▶️ John the interface in ways that make sense on a larger screen. So they touted the new set of sidebars. A lot of interfaces

⏹️ ▶️ John that used to be toolbars are graduating to full-fledged sidebars, because why wouldn’t they? iPads are huge. There’s plenty of room

⏹️ ▶️ John for it. but it’s more convenient. Same thing with the top bars.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not calling it a menu bar, but it has dropdown menus on it, kind of. But it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco also kind of a toolbar. Anyway. They’re very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco menu-like toolbars.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Features that previously, I think we had talked about in some shows, like, oh, I didn’t even know in the Files

⏹️ ▶️ John app you could change the list view, because you had to swipe down from the top to get some kind of thing to get it. Now it’s much more obvious.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an actual visual element on the screen that you can poke with your finger. And guess what? A dropdown menu comes down from it, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John can pick it. These are all worthwhile enhancements to

⏹️ ▶️ John make the interface more, I was gonna say more Mac-like, but more flexible, more feature-rich. They also improved

⏹️ ▶️ John their version of Spotlight with the search thing that has better search results in it. It gets all the other features

⏹️ ▶️ John that we talked about from iOS with the compact notifications and stuff, the scribble we already talked about, which is their

⏹️ ▶️ John feature where you can write words into text boxes and things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s probably more of our iPadOS, but for the sake of time, because we’ve got to get to the Big Mac stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly. we’ll move on from there.

watchOS

⏹️ ▶️ John WatchOS 7. I feel like they’ll probably be really good under the radar episode

⏹️ ▶️ John about this, which I would recommend

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco listening to.

⏹️ ▶️ John So Underscore can

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tell

⏹️ ▶️ John us all about it. But the short version is SwiftUI complications. Complications used to be very limited in

⏹️ ▶️ John what you could do. SwiftUI gives you a lot more flexibility and you can have more than one complication of each type,

⏹️ ▶️ John which if you’re a complication fiend like Underscore is great news for him. Face sharing, which

⏹️ ▶️ John we had rumored for a while back, is allowed if you make a really cool watch face with just the right set of complications,

⏹️ ▶️ John color coded and matched and customized to look awesome on a particular face. You can share that with somebody. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ John share it with them and they don’t have those apps installed, that’ll prompt them to install it. I said during the keynote that

⏹️ ▶️ John the modular face, which is like that digital time and then these two big places for complications,

⏹️ ▶️ John the modular face with custom third party Swift UI driven complications

⏹️ ▶️ John is as close as we’ve gotten so far to third party watch faces because third party developers can control

⏹️ ▶️ John in a much more flexible way a larger portion of that screen. The time is still just the time and you don’t have much

⏹️ ▶️ John control over that but modular has big complications and if you can really use the full power of SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ John to fill that space that’ll be something. It’s not, you know, Marco’s custom watch face

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like a big circle with weird tech marks around it and everything but it’s progress in that direction.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anything else I’m missing from watchOS?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s making the existing restrictions a little bit nicer but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not fundamentally change almost any of the existing restrictions, with that one big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exception to certain apps of, as you said, that an app can now vend multiple complications.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like before… Of the same

⏹️ ▶️ John type, of the same size

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco class.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so yeah, because like there’s so many faces that have, as you said, they have like like the like that that new round complication

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that medium-sized circle that like, you know, the infograph face has four of them or whatever and so on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And before an app could only say, all right, my complication for this size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this, and that’s all you would get. And so it made it hard for apps like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Underscore’s Watchsmith, or apps that have really rich complication support like Carrot Weather,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you would maybe want to have, like, suppose you use Carrot Weather, you’d want to use, like, okay, let me put the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco temperature in this circle, and let me put the UV index in this circle. And you couldn’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that before, because Carrot Weather could only say, all right, my complication for medium circle type is this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now that is lifted. So apps that want to make rich complicated experiences

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Watchsmith or Carrot Weather or things like that, they can now do a lot more than they could do before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s really great for them. And using SwiftUI for complications is also very nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably using the exact same feature as the widget support that we talked about earlier, where it’s this kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-rendered SwiftUI archive view that, you know, it’s minimal interaction which is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how complications have always been and you have to give it this weird timeline of values to display so you’re not constantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco running those most of those restrictions were already there and are still there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so a lot of that on on watch OS is not going to be a big deal where watch OS had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more substantial advancement is in like customer facing features so that includes things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the new workout types the pretty major feature of sleep tracking the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of cool feature my stream cut out during the first part of it, so I missed some of it, but the hand washing detection and guidance seemed pretty cool,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially given the world today. I thought that was a pretty cool feature. I do have some questions about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the workout support. So one of the workouts I do a lot is with a trainer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so Apple has this, you can say there’s fitness,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco breaking down into the warmup and cool down, stretching, core

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exercises, stuff like that. Well, what if you do a workout that has multiple things? What if you do a workout that begins

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a warmup stretch and then you do some core exercises and then you do some jogging or something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you cool down with some stretches? Do you have to do four workouts to make that be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco counted properly?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so when I do some of the exercising that I do at home, a lot of times

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the stuff, like I do it against like an exercise video and a lot of times one of the workout

⏹️ ▶️ Casey types is where you do half weight lifting and half HIIT, high intensity

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interval training I think is what it’s called. Anyways, uh, that’s what I’ll do is I will do one exercise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the watch, that’s the weightlifting exercise. And then I’ll do a, I’ll stop that one. And then I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do another second exercise. That is the, uh, hit exercise. And it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoying. Yeah. I mean, it’s in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal, but it, every time I have to handle it that way, I’m just like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh man, why can’t I just like, why can’t I just figure it out? Wouldn’t that be nice? Can you can figure out dancing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently you can figure out whether you’re dancing with just your arms or your whole body or whatever. Figure this out too, man. please.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the sleep tracking is another thing. Was or did sleep tracking already exist or has it been rumored so long that there’s another

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I just remember is existing but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t. Yeah, it’s it has been supported by third parties for a number of years now. But it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was never supported by Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so they’ve got that. And I think the current hardware basically supports it. If you were you said

⏹️ ▶️ John I give everywhere I watch asleep, when does it ever charge you charge it when you’re like taking a shower in the morning and surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ John that is a viable pattern. There’s go to bed reminders.

⏹️ ▶️ John Parents may think this is going to help their children go to bed. I really doubt it will. But for adults who want to brain hack themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone can try to wind things down for you and get you to go to sleep at a reasonable time. And hopefully the sleep tracking will let you

⏹️ ▶️ John know whether you’re getting garbage sleep or not. Rewinding for a second for the face sharing thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John One thing we missed was that Apple is going to curate a collection of faces. I think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, it’s not, you know, third party watch faces, but it’s important because people

⏹️ ▶️ John get paralyzed by choice. You can have a lot of different watch faces as your starting point, and there’s lots of different options for complications.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you may not really want to sit there and mess with those things or know what complications

⏹️ ▶️ John are available. And so by having this basically app store for faces, all it is is a set of

⏹️ ▶️ John configurations and you, you know, a bunch of humans will make these at apple that look

⏹️ ▶️ John good or tailored to particular activities like running or you know sleep tracking or

⏹️ ▶️ John you know weather nuts or whatever I don’t know what they’re going to have but anyway it’s great because if you go there and you

⏹️ ▶️ John see a thing that you like with Apple’s integration you can say I just want that watch face and you’ll get it on your thing and again

⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have the apps that it needs it will prompt you to install them and so even though this

⏹️ ▶️ John feature seems a little bit silly I think it will actually benefit a lot of people’s use of the

⏹️ ▶️ John watch because people tend to, you know, it’s the tyranny of the default. They just pick whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John default watch face they find appealing and maybe customize one or two things. And I feel like that is probably a suboptimal experience

⏹️ ▶️ John for most people when they could be having a, they could have more different watch faces. I’m not sure how many people

⏹️ ▶️ John know that you can, you know, switch the watch faces on the fly based on your activity and B have sort of expertly

⏹️ ▶️ John built watch faces by someone who knows how to make a, an attractive, informative watch face. And then you can of course customize

⏹️ ▶️ John from there. It’s not like they’re fixed, but I think it’s pretty neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not. I mean, this is obviously not custom watch faces, which is what many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us still want. And I certainly still want. This is an okay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromise for now to give people a little bit more variety and to make the current faces seem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to last a little bit longer. Ultimately, though, we still want more like this is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this does not remove the need for custom watch faces. It simply extends the time beyond

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which we might start complaining again.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to skip the App Store privacy stuff for next week if you guys don’t mind because

⏹️ ▶️ John I think

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not time pressing, but we will talk about it next week.

AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ John A brief section on AirPods, just because there are a few things that are relevant to stuff we’ve discussed

⏹️ ▶️ John on the show before. One is their 3D audio support. I forget how they branded

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but basically we talked about this in the context of binaural audio and the

⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 5. This is similar. You have two things in your ears and software

⏹️ ▶️ John magic makes it sound like the sound is coming from different directions. Apple’s version of this seems

⏹️ ▶️ John concentrating on and limited to what you’d imagine the sort of television and movie sound standards like

⏹️ ▶️ John Atmos and DTS and surround sound. Like it’s not like the PlayStation thing where you want 5,000 sound sources because

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no real context. It’s not gaming focus is what I’m saying. It’s for, hey, I’m watching a movie or TV

⏹️ ▶️ John show. I have my AirPods in. Can I give myself some rough simulation of what

⏹️ ▶️ John it might be like to be in surround sound? And that’s what Apple’s trying to do. They didn’t mention anything about

⏹️ ▶️ John head-related transfer functions. So presumably they’re using something generic. because the AirPod Pros have

⏹️ ▶️ John accelerometers and gyroscopes and stuff in them, they can tell when you turn your head so they can keep

⏹️ ▶️ John the audio sounding normal. Like if you’re in, say you’re in a movie theater, if we were in normal time, or in your house

⏹️ ▶️ John with surround sound, and you’ve got your speakers all going off because some movie has sound surrounding you, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you turn your head, the sound doesn’t move. The speakers are in the same place in the theater, right? That’s what surround

⏹️ ▶️ John sound is supposed to be like. If you hear a noise to your left and you turn to your left and the noise comes again,

⏹️ ▶️ John now you’re facing it more and it sounds different. But if you have headphones in, if they didn’t know when you turned your head,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would kill the illusion because you turn your head and now all of a sudden the sound turned with your head and that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s very clever and if it works well, this will be super cool. I can’t wait to try this except

⏹️ ▶️ John I A, don’t have AirPods Pro and B, I don’t like them because they go inside my little ear holes.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I really hope someday Apple makes a non-invasive,

⏹️ ▶️ John invasive, let’s say, uh, uh, AirPod with these gyroscope features. Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that sounds neat. Um, and then finally automatic switching. This sounds like a dream

⏹️ ▶️ John as someone who uses AirPods with multiple devices all the time and is constantly going to control

⏹️ ▶️ John center to switch from, you know, one device to the other, even though the switch is faster with the new version

⏹️ ▶️ John of the AirPods that I have and control center is not that far away. I would just like it to magically know

⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean, but I don’t know how it’s gonna know. Like automatic switching, they describe it as, yeah, it’ll just, it’s easy,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll just switch from device to device, but how will it know? Like, in practice, my phone and my iPad are both

⏹️ ▶️ John on my nightstand. How is it gonna know? I guess it’s whichever device I’m using. I have medium hopes

⏹️ ▶️ John for this feature. I really want it to work, like, you know, by figuring out which device I’m using and automatically connecting

⏹️ ▶️ John to it, but connecting is not, still not lightning fast, and if this thing starts getting it wrong, I’m gonna going to be angry.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the surprising amount of AirPod news for a non-hardware-focused keynote.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin A couple of quick notes on that. First of all, I thought it was absolutely incredible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one of the things they said is that by some magic, they will detect when you, like let’s say you’re sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a chair and you’re holding your iPad in front of you, if you twist slightly so that the iPad is to your left, by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some magic, if I understood them right, they will detect that and change the profile of the sound

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming into your AirPod Pros to reflect the fact that the screen is now a little bit left of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey center, which I thought was phenomenal.

⏹️ ▶️ John They even said if you’re on a bus, they’ll figure out, oh, the bus is turning, but don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John shift the sound because you’re in the bus and you’re stationary. They’re using GPS and other things.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a use case that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do. I don’t think, no. I think it was all accelerometer based. The idea there was like, it’s not GPS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything. It’s saying they had to distinguish between you’re in a moving vehicle, which generates a certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of accelerometer input, or you are actually physically moving the device. It’s like basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco velocity versus acceleration. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a whole thing. But the phone has a GPS in it. They’re not using the phone’s GPS at all to figure that out?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because I imagine they could, you know what I mean? Like you’re not like the AirPods don’t exist in isolation. You’re watching something on a phone or

⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad, but you might have

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco GPS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, No, I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of the gyroscope and the accelerometer. Let’s do that without GPS.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe. But anyway, it’s it’s a use case that the PlayStation does not have to deal with because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re using a PlayStation on a bus, you are a rarity. Like it is not the Nintendo switch.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So a interesting problem and interesting solution. And I really hope they

⏹️ ▶️ John pulled it off because it’ll be super cool if they did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another quick note. I genuinely thought that the automatic switching was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there since the original AirPods. I am clearly wrong. I’m not trying to say that I’m right, but I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought somehow it got in my brain that that was automatic. And I feel much better now knowing that it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never used to be automatic because it never worked for crap. And so now I understand why. I made up the fact,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John style apparently, I made up that feature and it never ever existed until just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Well, it actually, for me, it has been slightly automatic sometimes between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone and the watch. That’s the only pairing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that was kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatic. And the reason why might be a hint as to how they’re doing this. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically when you, like, you know, you got to figure like, how are they going to distinguish between which app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that’s using, suppose if you are like holding your iPhone and tapping out a message while you’re on your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac, you know, while you’re sitting at your Mac and you don’t want what you’re playing on your Mac to all of a sudden pause and switch to your iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are ways they can do this with the way audio sessions work. So the way that whenever you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an app start playing audio back for whatever reason, somebody hits play or whatever, you start playing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio. To do that, you first make a call to AV Audio Session to activate your session.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then that configures the hardware and everything And that’s also the same place you tell the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether are you spoken word content, should you play in the background or not, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you start playing audio. So one thing they could do is merely use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever last started the most recent audio session, whatever device started that, that’s the current active device.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that is almost certainly how it’s always worked between the phone and the watch. And so this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could just be them extending that same logic to Macs and phones and iPads and everything, like, you know, to all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that automatic switching as well. So whatever, my guess, I haven’t tried this yet, but whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco device that you play audio from most recently, that will be the device it switches to.

macOS Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Big Sur. Big Sur.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you guys need practice.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Did I just do it? Big Sur.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not Big Sur, it’s Big Sur. Sir Big?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ John guys are very bad at this. Okay, well, just, we can call it Mac OS BS. There

⏹️ ▶️ John we go. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can all agree on that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, I don’t think we can agree on that. All right, so let’s start with, before we get into

⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware side of this, let’s do the software. Mac OS Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ John looks, has a new look, which happens every couple years

⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS if you’re new to the modern Mac operating system. They change the look to

⏹️ ▶️ John varying degrees, usually on a multi-year interval. This is the biggest change

⏹️ ▶️ John in the look of Mac OS, probably since they went un-lickable and got rid of the pinstripes.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that is the only other comparable change. Maybe the biggest change that they’ve ever made to the look

⏹️ ▶️ John of the modern Mac OS. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John tweeted when this was going on, this is kind of the Mac’s iOS 7 moment. For

⏹️ ▶️ John people who don’t remember, iOS 7 was when the previously very sort of 3D, shiny,

⏹️ ▶️ John photo-real UI of iOS switched to a very flat, minimalist interface

⏹️ ▶️ John when Johnny Ive took over the software team. And it was very extreme and very different from

⏹️ ▶️ John what came before it and very upsetting to some people. And then in the years that followed, Iowa

⏹️ ▶️ John 7’s look was pulled back from those extremes and made more moderate. Hopefully Apple has learned from that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you look at screenshots of Big Sur, it looks it looks different.

⏹️ ▶️ John It you’re not going to confuse it for a Catalina Mac, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it leans on not just more minimalism, but even even more

⏹️ ▶️ John transparency, even more compressing of elements. I don’t know how like

⏹️ ▶️ John before I try to characterize it, because I’m going to just go look at the screenshots. Margo seemed the most upset about it. So I want to give him time

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell us why he hates the new look.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure whether I’m going to hate it yet, but it is like, you know, I have to live with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s another reason why I put it on my laptop or I’m trying to put on my laptop if it ever completes because I do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to spend time with it before I say for sure that I hate it. But certainly on first look,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really hesitant. I’m skeptical about it because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly I don’t like Alan Dye’s style as a UI designer. Alan Dye was also the designer of iOS 7.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s been like the UI designer since Johnny Ive was put in charge of everything and Johnny Ive left, Alan Dye didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He is still the designer there and he has a habit of designing things like Johnny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look really good but often at the expense of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality. And so for UI, that can be things like contrast, legibility,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco discoverability, you know, having control look like controls, things like that. And a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco times I think his style of design, or at least I don’t know if he’s personally doing all this, but like, you know, the, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of design under him, um, it, it really fails in those ways. Like it is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it hides things like one of the things I hate is that in the, um, Catalina version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the music app, and this continues into the BS version in the Catalina version,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It used to be that when you’re playing a song, it would show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the time elapsed on one side of the now playing bar, and it would show you the time remaining on the other side

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the now playing bar. And granted, I listen to songs from bands

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the duration of the song can vary a lot, maybe, you could say. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco am often looking at the time in a song. And maybe they assume that everyone listens to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop music where every song is three minutes long as you don’t need this anymore but you know that’s not true for everyone and in the iOS version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in the Catalina version of the music app those time durations fade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out when you’re not hovering over it so most of the time you look at it and it’s just this big empty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco square showing title but no time and you hover over it and the time appears and the time is really tiny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these really little tiny times in the corner in the middle of this giant expanse of a window

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it’s hiding functionality and they and he even said this in the video today like that about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know the something about how the controls like fade away so that you can focus on your content you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s like that’s one of his critical design principles and I hate this principle because it’s so overused

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is junk drawer theory of design it is just hide things and that is always better but no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hiding things isn’t always better and in this case you’re hot like in the case of my music app nitpick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here with the time rate time elapsed and time remaining labels like you’re on a Mac You have space. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was always there before, ever since the dawn of MP3 players, and no one had a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with that. It’s not like, what are you gaining by hiding the time playing in a music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on a now playing screen that has tons of space? You’re not gaining anything, you’re just hiding it for the sake of minimalism,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its own sake, and assuming that’s better. And now, people who actually use that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco information, or want to see that information, it’s now harder to get. Now you have to hover over it to see it, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it just vanishes for no reason. And I’m afraid of that aesthetic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expanding to the degree that it has expanded in Big Sur. It really does seem like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now so dominant, so entrenched in their design philosophy and their actions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that—and macOS has been doing this slowly over time, things like scrollbars disappearing and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. We’ve been heading in this path for a little while, but I worry that we’ve now gone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really far in that direction, where now so much is hidden behind hover states

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and just just hidden for the sake of being hidden and it’s now going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think even harder to tell like what is a control how what is active

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when I saw they showed a few a few screenshots and stuff of apps like mail where you have like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big tool where across the top with a whole bunch of buttons and when I saw those it just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked like a visual mess to me, like not having any more like structure to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the icon bars, having a lot of the color removed from this, so it’s just like here’s a list of monochrome icons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It made it harder for me to see and and it looked, it was hard to even tell like what is a button?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is clickable? Which of these icons are showing me status versus which are actually behaving as buttons?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry that we’ve taken a really big step backwards here. But all that said, I do want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually use it before I really judge it further. But right now I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t feel good about it upon first glance.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can see what the appeal is to a certain kind of designer to this type of

⏹️ ▶️ John interface, right? So using SF Symbols, the font, with a bunch of vector

⏹️ ▶️ John drawings for a bunch of stuff, having configurable accent colors so each app, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John choose to be in multicolor mode, can have its own highlights. Like if you’re on the Mac now, you can choose what

⏹️ ▶️ John your accent color is for your operating system. It defaults to like bluish. You can also say multicolor

⏹️ ▶️ John in Big Sur, and that will let individual apps have a different accent color. So notes could be yellow,

⏹️ ▶️ John and mail could be blue, and so on, if you want that. But like, the whole idea is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you design the app and you specify, this is a sidebar, this is the icon, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John the text, this is a toolbar, here are the icons, and that a system like this allows all those

⏹️ ▶️ John things to be flexible. Accent color is flexible because they’re all template images. they’re scalable because they’re vector because

⏹️ ▶️ John they all come from a font. You are sort of just telling me the what and the OS is determining

⏹️ ▶️ John the how and that gives you as a designer a lot of flexibility to change the way things look and to

⏹️ ▶️ John have the UI be more flexible than for example the hand drawn pixel perfect, you know old days of

⏹️ ▶️ John the old iOS where it was very inflexible and almost like a an old game UI or just like a bunch of raster graphics

⏹️ ▶️ John and if the whole OS changes, look you have these other apps that were like made in the days before the OS changes look

⏹️ ▶️ John and they didn’t fit in. This avoids that that said I agree with all the things that all the criticisms

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco had about this UI and in fact many of Them are not new many of them are the same exact criticisms.

⏹️ ▶️ John We had for the first version of iOS 7 Not legible controls didn’t look like controls

⏹️ ▶️ John You know low contrast stuff like that And in fact some of these complaints that I would add are the same ones

⏹️ ▶️ John that I had personally in 2007 for things like leopard leopard introduced a translucent menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar I couldn’t believe when Craig Federighi said, you know, they’re adding translucent menu Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John on our Macs right now. If you’re running Catalina, look at your menu bar. It is somewhat translucent. In

⏹️ ▶️ John Leopard, when this was first introduced in the betas, it was super translucent. Like it was

⏹️ ▶️ John practically like a sheet of glass, a sheet of frosted glass. They backed off of that. And when they shipped

⏹️ ▶️ John Leopard, it was less translucent. And there was like a P list hack to override it to make it opaque again.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I had this big rant about it around the Leopard thing. Basically, the gist of it was that when Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John introduced translucency in Mac OS X, the idea was to use it for transient elements.

⏹️ ▶️ John So like when a sheet came down, it was translucent to show it was impermanent. Like you’re going to address this dialogue

⏹️ ▶️ John and dismiss it. The transparency had a message. This is permanent UI

⏹️ ▶️ John is solid, transient UI is translucent. That was the sort of thing they were going for. Then they made

⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar translucent. And the menu bar is, or was at the time, arguably the most permanent

⏹️ ▶️ John fixture on the entire screen. it could not be hidden unless an app was in full screen mode. I know that’s not true now because you can automatically

⏹️ ▶️ John hide it. But anyway, the new menu bar in Big Sur is even more

⏹️ ▶️ John translucent than the one they chickened out of shipping in Leopard. And

⏹️ ▶️ John to the detriment, I think, of legibility and contrast. If you look at some of these screenshots,

⏹️ ▶️ John the contrast is bad, the legibility is bad. It is difficult to tell what’s a button.

⏹️ ▶️ John The advantage of this design language is all the accessibility features that exist, and I think people forget this if

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t realize that thing is there. All those accessibility features are easier to implement because you can

⏹️ ▶️ John crank up the contrast and the size in a flexible way that doesn’t break the UI because everything

⏹️ ▶️ John is sort of descriptive and simplified and vector and able to accommodate these things.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it’s still a failing of the design if most people would benefit from

⏹️ ▶️ John going to the accessibility options. It’s not to say going to accessibility options are bad, But the default

⏹️ ▶️ John experience should try to hit the fat part of the bell curve of your customer base and I think this one does

⏹️ ▶️ John not. I think it is not going to be obvious to people what buttons are. This text

⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be harder for people to read and practically speaking, I don’t care that much about

⏹️ ▶️ John what’s behind my windows that I need it coming forward and impairing legibility and Apple has struggled with this on the

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac for many, many years to strike the balance between like in Yosemite, you know, it looks really cool

⏹️ ▶️ John when the sidebars are translucent, but of course you’re not actually getting any additional information. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John entirely an aesthetic choice. So if that impacts legibility at all, at a non-zero

⏹️ ▶️ John percent, it’s not a great trade-off. Same thing with the menu bar. I like that my desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John background is back there, but I don’t need to see the top centimeter of it through my menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar if it impairs legibility. Like in the screenshots that I showed, if you have a desktop background, I guess it

⏹️ ▶️ John decides whether your menu bar is going to have white text or black text, depending on how much it’s showing through. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how much of your desktop background shows through that. I think it inverts the text just to make it legible.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not great. So I have serious concerns about this. It could be iOS 7 all

⏹️ ▶️ John over again where they go extreme in the beginning and then they tone it down. I feel like they should just learn from

⏹️ ▶️ John this. Like Marco said, hiding things, like the proxy icon for documents,

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, maybe you don’t know about this, but the little icon on the top of document windows that you can drag to do stuff with.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s hidden by default. No one was discovering that thing it was visible all the time and now you’re going to hide it by default?

⏹️ ▶️ John You could say, okay, well if no one was discovering it, obviously it’s not heavily used, so why should it be in people’s faces? But it’s a useful feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should let people know that it’s there more prominently instead of just completely hiding it. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the controls fading away when you don’t need them. How do people know if they are going to need them if they don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John recognize them as controls? I’m also not a fan of that philosophy. I don’t think it fits the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, that said, aesthetically speaking, rounded corners on all the windows, general

⏹️ ▶️ John idea of using more translucently. I’m mostly on board with the aesthetics, believe it or not, even the sort of the colors and

⏹️ ▶️ John the sidebar and stuff like that. I just feel like the usability, like the can

⏹️ ▶️ John I read what’s on the screen? Can I identify things? Is it clear to me what they’re going to do?

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t, you no longer have the benefit of literal decades of use of a Mac to

⏹️ ▶️ John understand what does a dialog look like? What does a button look like? Because they’ve changed all those things so much. In fact,

⏹️ ▶️ John making them look more and more like iOS that I think is going to be quite jarring. Some things that I think people haven’t actually realized if they

⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t gone through Apple’s web pages. Things like dialog boxes have changed. Like when you specify

⏹️ ▶️ John a dialog box programmatically, for the most part you say, I want a dialog, here are the buttons, here’s the text on the buttons, here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John some main text, here’s some other text. Like you don’t lay out those windows like alerts, like manually.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just specify that. So the OS has the flexibility to change them. I don’t know. Have you two had looked at what alerts look

⏹️ ▶️ John like in Big Sur? Oh my God. It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hideous. I mean, they, they look like iOS alerts. Yes, and that to me is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest examples of like why I think this is kind of a iffy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly wrong design philosophy to take because Like you know one of the one of the reasons why the new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dialogues look so jarring and I think are a little bit worse Is that they use centered text for everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because iOS uses center text for its dialogues centered text Night might look good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ideal screenshots where the text is very short as soon as you have multiple lines in our text It looks terrible and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s harder to read

⏹️ ▶️ John or you have a widow I mean, it’s like I’m reading suck.com all over again. Like this is not aesthetically

⏹️ ▶️ John pleasing. The translucency is off the charts. And now you’re gonna add the ability to have like red text like

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS has on buttons. It is not an upgrade for these

⏹️ ▶️ John features. Like the good thing is, you know, because they can change it once they can change it back. But like

⏹️ ▶️ John again, the history cannot be, you know, like you may think most people have more experience with iOS, but

⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t presented with dialogue boxes constantly in iOS. That’s just not the experience. On the Mac, you see dialog

⏹️ ▶️ John boxes all the time. Someone with experience on the Mac has an expectation of what a dialog box

⏹️ ▶️ John looks like, what it does, and where the controls are. And this is breaking all of that for a layout that is also

⏹️ ▶️ John not aesthetically more pleasing. So why do this at all? It is a downgrade all around as far as the alerts

⏹️ ▶️ John are concerned.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think the why do it at all, Allen Dye answered that question, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it was a bad answer. The way that this redesign was explained,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part. One word that came up constantly was consistency.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, consistency with iOS is the, you know, whether he said it or not, that’s certainly the implication.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But is this design being used because this is the great design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac? Or is this design being used because it makes it look more like iOS? I think he very clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco answered the latter is the case, but because it might not be a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better design for the Mac, I think that’s a crappy reason and I see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I could see an argument as you said in second like you know yeah a lot of people use iOS yeah you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know a lot more people use iOS the Mac OS that is true but the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that like you know and the Mac can be made more usable by taking some iOS isms

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not necessarily like the UI theme doesn’t have to match necessarily or it’s really doesn’t have to match so closely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know people are not idiots they can understand that dialogue boxes look different between between platforms and they can and understand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to read two different dialog boxes. Like that’s, the level of matching there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the sake of matching is not necessary. If it happens to work out that you have a good design that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great design on all the platforms, then cool, use it. But in this case, it seems like consistency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has taken significantly higher priority than what’s actually the best design for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or the best design for iOS for that matter. I don’t think these dialog boxes are good on iOS either. Like that’s the thing that burns me. Like they even changed,

⏹️ ▶️ John you remember Sheets? This was an innovation of the original Mac OS X, where when you have a document modal thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s a thing, Windows is going to come on the screen, and you can’t interact anymore with that document window, but you can

⏹️ ▶️ John use other document windows. An example would be a save dialog. In the old Mac, when you initiated,

⏹️ ▶️ John hit Command S to save, it would be app modal, and you couldn’t do anything else in that app, or for that matter, on the entire system,

⏹️ ▶️ John until you dismiss that dialog. But Mac OS X, because it’s a more modern multitasking operating system,

⏹️ ▶️ John introduced the idea that if you hit save on a document, a sheet will come out sort of of

⏹️ ▶️ John that document’s window title bar, and that document will be like, oh, you can’t do anything with this document

⏹️ ▶️ John until you decide to either save or cancel, right? But other document windows you could continue to interact with, and the sheet

⏹️ ▶️ John would just sit there attached to that one. And because it came out of the title bar, it was sort of physically attached

⏹️ ▶️ John to the window, and you understood, yeah, this window is busy doing a thing. They’ve changed how sheets look

⏹️ ▶️ John to make them look more like iOS app modal dialogues, where it fades the background in and it shows in the center

⏹️ ▶️ John of the window. I don’t think that’s an improvement in terms of me understanding that this

⏹️ ▶️ John is blocking the whole window because there are lots of things that can present like that where they fade the content and show

⏹️ ▶️ John the window and it’s not clearly to me as associated with the document. But anyway, sheets weren’t broken. They fixed it by making

⏹️ ▶️ John it quote unquote consistent with iOS but iOS doesn’t have document based apps. Yes, it has window modal

⏹️ ▶️ John or app modal dialogues and that’s how they present but this this consistency is not

⏹️ ▶️ John worthwhile. And Part of the motivation to this, and part of sort of the meta hidden

⏹️ ▶️ John secret theme of this, if you look at all the different screenshots, is it’s pretty clear to me now that

⏹️ ▶️ John touch-based Macs are coming. Yes. Because every control in here that is changed in some

⏹️ ▶️ John way is changed to make it not like, oh, everything is a touch control, but closer

⏹️ ▶️ John to being touch control. So the items in the dropdown menus are pushed a little bit farther apart. The toolbar items

⏹️ ▶️ John are spread a little bit from each other. These dialog boxes have a configuration where the buttons are way

⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than they used to be. So big, in fact, that you can imagine poking them with your finger. It doesn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ John that macOS is going to be a touch-based OS, because it’s not, right? But the places where they changed

⏹️ ▶️ John it, like that’s the thing about the macOS, like, oh, they’d have to change the whole UI to make it work with your finger.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t, they just need it to be, for your finger to be useful in the OS. You’re never gonna use macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John just with your finger, because you’ll never be able to find the tiny little controls in Final Cut Pro. Like, it’s not gonna happen, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John You just need the fingers to be good for something. So the title bar’s got a little bit thicker. Look how big the title bars are

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Safari window, right? Look how big the buttons are in here. Why would they spread the menu items in a dropdown menu

⏹️ ▶️ John away from each other to the degree that they did? It’s not like they suddenly introduced Macs with taller screens. Menus

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t getting any shorter, right? It’s so that it is viable to drag a window

⏹️ ▶️ John with your finger, to dismiss a dialogue with your finger, to tap a menu in the menu bar and then tap a menu

⏹️ ▶️ John item with your finger, right? If that’s not why they did this and Touch Max never come, I will not understand

⏹️ ▶️ John this change at all, but right now I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and saying a lot of the spacing changes, which

⏹️ ▶️ John in general, the spacing changes on their own, I don’t object to, a lot of them seem like a clear indication that

⏹️ ▶️ John touch-based Macs are coming, and I think that is a welcome change, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John the aesthetics and the layout choices of a lot of the things they’ve changed do not

⏹️ ▶️ John seem like the right move. And somewhat related to that, a little more on an aesthetic front,

⏹️ ▶️ John and in the consistency front, They’ve decided that now a good Mac OS app should have an icon

⏹️ ▶️ John that looks just like an iOS icon with a little squircle thing. Mac apps are allowed to have

⏹️ ▶️ John photorealistic things apparently on top of them and they can break the border of the squircle which iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John apps can’t. That’s their concession to Macness. But boy, seeing that dock at the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ John with a big line of what for all the world look like iOS icons with weird things floating over them was very strange.

⏹️ ▶️ John In the past, Apple has had lots of different aesthetic policies, let’s say, about what

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac icons are going to look like. And Mac developers, being the

⏹️ ▶️ John cats that they are, have mostly refused to be herded. Like, there’s always,

⏹️ ▶️ John whenever I look down at my dock over the umpteen years of using the Mac after the Mac OS X transition, there’s always

⏹️ ▶️ John been quite a motley collection of icons. Apple’s icons tend to look consistent with each other, and that changes over

⏹️ ▶️ John the years. Then there’s a bunch of ones that look like they’re from two generations of the OS ago. Ones look like

⏹️ ▶️ John they were revised in one generation ago. It’s always going to be a Motley collection.

⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of applaud Apple for trying to, leading by example, showing consistent

⏹️ ▶️ John icons. They did that in the classic Mac OS era. In classic Mac OS, icons were supposed to be a diamond with a hand

⏹️ ▶️ John and a tool, and a lot of Mac apps followed that. There was some variation, but basically diamond

⏹️ ▶️ John shape with some variations on top of it. There was a lot of consistency until in classic Mac OS, people

⏹️ ▶️ John figured out, I can draw whatever the hell I want. I’m gonna make a big alien’s face with a tongue sticking out, and that’s what they did, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that will continue to happen. I’m not sure. See,

⏹️ ▶️ John we know where this is all going. Like, people are putting up these snarky slides like, oh, is Mac OS merging with iOS?

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you said it wasn’t, but it looks like they are. This is the whole subject for another show that we don’t have time to get into now, but

⏹️ ▶️ John there is an eventual convergence of hardware and software platforms

⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple world. We are edging closer towards it. There will always be specialization,

⏹️ ▶️ John just as there is today, between the iOS and iPadOS. They are specialized for their devices and

⏹️ ▶️ John the macOS will continue to be specialized, but this is the next step in that direction. I just think, as Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out before, and as the famous page that I put in one of my old macOS 10 reviews pointed out,

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need things to look literally exactly the same to understand what they are. The example from

⏹️ ▶️ John the Bruce Tagazzini book was extensions in classic macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John used to have puzzle piece icons, but there was like five different puzzle pieces and no one looked at them and said,

⏹️ ▶️ John is that an extension? I can’t tell because it’s usually the puzzle piece with one little prong on one side and a hole on the other

⏹️ ▶️ John side, but this one is a whole different, it looks like a puzzle piece, you can tell. Like it doesn’t have to be literally

⏹️ ▶️ John the same puzzle piece for you to understand what it is. Ditto with buttons and dialogues and windows,

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as they look buttony enough, as long as, you know, it doesn’t have to be literally exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the same. So to the degree that Apple feels like it needs to do that for consistency and learnability,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re overcompensating in that direction.

⏹️ ▶️ John I applaud the direction. I think there should be some kind of unification. It makes sense, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John in light of the hardware changes we’re about to talk about, but I think they’re taking it

⏹️ ▶️ John too literally right now, and I hope they back off a little.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trevor Burrus You know what’s funny to me? I intellectually agree with everything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys have said, that a lot of these choices seem ridiculous. emphasizing the wrong things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it looks really good though. The only thing that I really am annoyed by, and I am unreasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey annoyed by this, and I don’t know why, but when you pull down a menu in macOS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, the menu itself is connected to the entry in the menu

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bar. So, you know, if you look at say Chrome and you look at the bookmarks menu, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey word bookmarks is connected to the items that are below that word. And now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a little gap between the menu item in the menu bar and the menu itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh my gosh, does this annoy me. I don’t know why it annoys me so much, but it does.

⏹️ ▶️ John The menu has rounded corners on the top

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and

⏹️ ▶️ John is also slightly wider than the menu. These are all just aesthetic choices that are mostly silly or whatever. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John the rounded corner things. Like I tweeted that I was happy that the screen image itself does not have

⏹️ ▶️ John rounded corners, But classic Mac OS used to have rounded corners in the upper right and upper left corners.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they would just black out those pixels to make it look a little bit round. People still keep thinking that

⏹️ ▶️ John the future Macs will actually have rounded screens like the new iPads do and maybe that’s going to happen

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s neither here nor there. But yeah I see your aesthetic objection

⏹️ ▶️ John to the disconnected venues and the rounded corners. I think it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know it’s not that big of a deal. The one part that I got a kick out of is, of course,

⏹️ ▶️ John the dock in Big Sur looks a lot like, of course, the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John OS dock. And it also happens to look like Switch Glass.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, there’s a reason Switch Glass looks the way it does.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a, you know. But interestingly, Switch Glass is going to fit in perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ John in Big Sur. And since my corner radiuses are adjustable, you can actually make it

⏹️ ▶️ John fit exactly if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want. Oh, look at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone buys Switch Glass. that it is perfectly made for Big Sur. Unfortunately, my icon, well, my icon does

⏹️ ▶️ John fit in because it is an iOS style squircle, right, with little symbols on it, but it’s a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John more photo real and it’s not exactly head-on, so maybe someday I’ll have to change the icon to fit in, but maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t, you know what I mean? I’ll just be one of those motley icons that looks like it was made in previous eras because I intentionally

⏹️ ▶️ John made my icon look slightly different than the current style because I like the style my icon is. It looks really cool

⏹️ ▶️ John and lickable and I might just keep it that way.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John you shouldn’t really show the dock icon and SwitchGlass anyway should disable it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Overall, though, I do think that this looks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. From a behavioral standpoint, I think a lot, if not all, the complaints that the two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you had are completely reasonable and will bear fruit in the sense that we will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that these are problems. But just looking at it with a couple of quibbles here and there, I think it looks good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I can’t tell you why, but I do find it just signed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kind of unconsciously, subconsciously appealing, subconsciously appealing that everything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does look similar. I agree with what you said that, that the Mac doesn’t have to look like the iPad. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the puzzle pieces all look like puzzle pieces, I’ll understand what’s going on, but I don’t know. I kind of feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it is nice to have what appears at a glance anyway, to be the approximately

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same design language across all these disparate devices. So it all just feels like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different version of the same tool. Like one of these screwdrivers is a Phillips, one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a straight, but they’re still just screwdrivers. And I do like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, having not used Big Sur yet, having not used iOS 14 yet. I do like it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it looks very modern. As with all new UIs, it’s made the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sitting in front of, the software portion of the Mac I’m sitting in front of, look old and busted almost immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. that’s a good thing. Marco, you haven’t talked for a while, so I’d like to give you a chance to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey make any other final thoughts, but I think we should probably plow forward on the new look and start talking about some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the other features of Big Sur after, Marco, you have a chance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m gonna have a lot of gripes about the theme, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m glad John brought up sheets being gone and being replaced with these weird blob

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlays, because I think that’s a huge regression. But ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I find concerning here is that the Mac has has not had a great few years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software quality. We’ve had a lot of really like paper-cut kind of issues with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac OS and that’s why many of us including us right here last week

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were saying boy we just hope the Mac OS has a quiet year of just stability improvements and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like like a bug fix year not any kind of major new features and instead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple did a system-wide redesign that will require like all has to be significantly redesigned.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what this does is they have basically placed a huge burden

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like required work to keep up with the system on all Mac developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco including themselves for anything like any kind of Mac OS related software.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now instead of working on quality they and everyone else has to first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on this new theme and then maybe if you have time left then you can work on quality.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s just the last thing that Mac developers and Apple as the biggest Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer, that’s the last thing they needed right now. The biggest thing they needed right now is like, please give

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us a year off so we can work on quality. And instead, they’re doing a system-wide redesign.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you look at what happened when iOS had its, you know, had the iOS 7 change,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many apps had to be redesigned from scratch to look at all correct

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reasonable and good and competitive on that platform, that we kind of had like a, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two or three years of lost productivity in quality and features in iOS apps because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much effort had to be expended to just keep up with the new, with the new direction the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was taking and redesign, you know, to fit the new theme. And now, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have that same thing happen on the Mac, where that really was not a thing that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could afford to do. Now, maybe this will all work out in the end. You know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we’re going with, you know, the, don’t say ARM, Macs and everything else,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and unification with iOS apps running on the Mac, that all could be a great end game,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this just threw a massive cost and a ton of instability into an ecosystem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t seem like it was ready to bear that cost.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I get where you’re coming from, I think what I really

⏹️ ▶️ John wanted was no big changes to the plumbing. Like from the app developers perspective, you’re right, they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John burn a lot of time on this, and that’s a shame. But if you’re doing a redesign

⏹️ ▶️ John on this in the surface level, what I care about is does the DNS

⏹️ ▶️ John responder not crash? Does the Bluetooth stack work correctly? Does the USB peripherals

⏹️ ▶️ John not unmount my drives? Those are the things I care about, the plumbing of the OS.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so if this, like if all the time they spent on this is mostly on sort of like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obviously all the arm stuff and the catalyst stuff and sort of like surface level UI stuff, but the teams

⏹️ ▶️ John that work on like the, you know, like I said, the USB stack, they spent the entire release

⏹️ ▶️ John not adding any new features and just making it work. That’s what I hope. But my optimistic scenario is like, this was

⏹️ ▶️ John a higher level in the stack, big change. And

⏹️ ▶️ John what I was, what I meant when we were saying like, boy, I hope this release is just like a no new features

⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing. Is it under the covers? You don’t say, yeah, we rewrote the entire Windows server again,

⏹️ ▶️ John and we have a new DNS responder this time, and the Bluetooth stack is all new, because that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that’s burning me up. It’s not like changing the UI stuff. In general, UI stuff may be

⏹️ ▶️ John good, may be bad, but it’s not going to take down your entire system. I just need it to work fundamentally at a hardware level. So I still

⏹️ ▶️ John have hope that that’s the case. Maybe that’s also screwed up too. Who knows? They didn’t talk about it in this release.

⏹️ ▶️ John They certainly didn’t say anything about Time Machine APFS enhancements, but the week is young. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I get where you’re coming from, but I’m still holding out hope. And also in terms of burning up time with the look, like

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of, if you’ve been following Apple’s APIs and using Sourceless and stuff like that, like yes, there are

⏹️ ▶️ John new APIs you have to adopt and stuff, but in general, I hope Mac apps will look reasonable-ish

⏹️ ▶️ John with minimal changes. Like that’s the beauty of their recent changes have been that if you

⏹️ ▶️ John follow them, you don’t have to redesign your entire app every time. The big iOS 7 transition is because

⏹️ ▶️ John people had pixel perfect, hand-drawn raster UIs, and

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7 threw that all in the garbage. Post iOS 7, I think, as iOS 7

⏹️ ▶️ John evolved and the UI changed, people haven’t had to throw out everything. I think they’ve learned that lesson. So, like

⏹️ ▶️ John I said, the bones of this thing, using vectors for stuff, being able to change

⏹️ ▶️ John things, like having the accessibility features be able to work well, easily increase contrast, easily

⏹️ ▶️ John increase size, have everything scaled to fit and everything. The bones are good, the individual aesthetic choices,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of them are bad. So I have some hope that we can recover from this.

⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, I’m kind of a little bit with Casey in that like, as quote unquote bad as this might be for all the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John I outlined, I am excited about there being a new look. I’m always excited about there being a new look. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John cool to see the Mac change the way it looks, it’s just we also need it to work well, so

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get there. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. In the interest of having the show end before next week, I’d like to speed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey round the next few items. Messages, Maps, both Catalyst. We talked earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Messages supposedly getting either near feature parity or complete feature parity with iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since it is Catalyst now. That’s excellent. I’m very, very excited about that. Maps, nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that revved my engine in particular, but hey, the better Maps gets, the happier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am with it. Safari, we talked about the privacy report and password compromise detections.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Translation will happen in Safari. Apparently, Safari extensions have been revamped. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can even import them from Chrome or Firefox

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John extensions. Is that

⏹️ ▶️ John true? That’s a question mark.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I heard them say something about, I don’t remember the exact verbiage, but basically you can take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Chrome or Firefox extension and use it in Safari is what I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thought I had heard.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They described it as the Web Extensions API. and to quote, bring over extensions to build

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other browsers. And I made a note to look up what the heck that Web Extensions API is, because it made it sound like there was some kind of standard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco API that I just don’t know about. But it wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t know about any of this

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Yeah. And in typical Safari fashion, you can limit it to individual websites and limit it by time. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of controls on it. And it’s the first time you use it. It’s all the security controls that you

⏹️ ▶️ John would expect. Chrome has similar ones, but Apple is bringing its twist to it. So that’s all good news.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the new version of Safari has fav icons in all the tabs, which John Gerber will love,

⏹️ ▶️ John and apparently everyone will love, is the whole reason he got keyed into that story is because people were saying, the number one

⏹️ ▶️ John reason for using Chrome instead of Safari was because you couldn’t have little icons in the tabs. It was just text in Safari,

⏹️ ▶️ John presumably for, again, aesthetic reasons, omitting the icons. But we can’t have all those weird colored icons.

⏹️ ▶️ John They ruin the vibe of this cool, gray, at one time, brush metal thing. And people are

⏹️ ▶️ John like, the icons add information. It lets me know what site it is. So Chrome had icons and Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t and Safari has finally come around on that. So that’s all good news. And of course,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Safari is super fast. Yeah. And to be clear, like Safari did have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons in the tabs before, but it was it was added fairly recently, but it was off by default.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now it’s on by default.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right.

Macs with Apple silicon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So big news. What did Tim say? Something about we’re going deep into the Mac. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are getting. Apple silicone, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco silicone, every time I get that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying not to say our max cause they never said our max.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, we’re going to say it because that’s what they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. Fair enough. We are getting Apple silicon. There we go. Uh, we were getting Apple silicon. We’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our max and apparently we’re getting, or at least as far as we can tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first we’re getting what is basically the same processor as in iPad pros we’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an a12

⏹️ ▶️ John Z that’s just the Pentium 4

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s that’s just for the dev kit you know we’ll see what

⏹️ ▶️ John actually ships yeah so what they announced is they are making a family of SOC is

⏹️ ▶️ John a family of system on a chips for Macs and that they didn’t come right out and say this but eventually through the

⏹️ ▶️ John accumulation of everything they said they are arm CPUs surprise just like they are on their iOS devices

⏹️ ▶️ John because they run the same binaries and their the A12Z is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ John you know the one they’re testing with whatever. And so the family of MacSoC

⏹️ ▶️ John is let them letting you know that like not just making one of these chips there’s going to be a family of them presumably

⏹️ ▶️ John from small to large from their weak lower powered thing to the higher power one. They did not commit to

⏹️ ▶️ John say we’re going to have chips that scale from our tiniest notebook all the way up to our Mac Pro they did not say that.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they did say was that this would be a two-year long transition their first

⏹️ ▶️ John ARM-based Mac would ship before the end of this year, if everything goes well. And

⏹️ ▶️ John as we said in the previous shows, trying to consult people with Intel Macs, they will continue to make and sell

⏹️ ▶️ John and announce new Intel-based Macs. Because what do you think they’re gonna do, not sell Macs for two years? That’s what they’re gonna do.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they announced all of that. Hopefully everyone who listens to the show is already prepared for that, because that’s how these transitions

⏹️ ▶️ John go. No big surprises. Also, if you listen to the show, you would have heard our prediction

⏹️ ▶️ John be on the money about the developer transition kit, down to it being called DTK, it’s a Mac mini.

⏹️ ▶️ John And inside it is the equivalent of a Pentium 4, meaning it’s a chip that probably will never ship in an ARM-based

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, but it’s what they’ve got handy right now. So they shoved an A12Z with 16 gigs

⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM and a 12 gigabyte SSD and quote, a compliment

⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac IO ports. I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ John means.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They later clarified what that means, by the way. It’s two USB-C, two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A and HDMI. and Ethernet. I think that’s it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notably absent is Thunderbolt, which again, we talked about kind of why that might be, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a topic for another day. But basically, this does not have that. This only has USB-C,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-A, and HDMI and Ethernet.

⏹️ ▶️ John And because it’s an A12Z, you would imagine that it has similar I-O capabilities to the iPad, which has the

⏹️ ▶️ John A12Z in it. So the iPad does not, to our knowledge, have Thunderbolt capability, and neither does this developer transition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit. Although, interestingly, I noticed that they said, Craig said during the presentation, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this computer that we’ve been running on is the developer-translucent dedicated. Did he actually say it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the DTK?

⏹️ ▶️ John They said it was ARM.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of hand-waving about, what are these demos running on? It was just clear that they’re running on

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon. That was usually what they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said. It was running on a 6K XDR, which is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drivable via USB-C. So I’m wondering what that was about, but yeah, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, I think that was a technicality that this was a Mac running Apple Silicon, but it was not the DTK.

⏹️ ▶️ John They were very careful, I was watching, because before they even announced the DTK, I was looking for a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John mini on their desks, and watch where all those cords go from those cinema display, those Pro Display XDRs,

⏹️ ▶️ John they go somewhere, but you never see them attached to a computer. Yep. So lots of clever staging

⏹️ ▶️ John in this supposed lab, which is really obviously like a set, or carefully arranged

⏹️ ▶️ John corner of the lab even. Yeah, so if you want one of these developer transition

⏹️ ▶️ John kits, you give Apple $500, they give you one of these things, plus some exclusive access

⏹️ ▶️ John to private forums and stuff like that, and then you have to give it back to Apple. Just like the weird Pentium 4

⏹️ ▶️ John cheese graters, you get a weird Mac mini case with iPad guts inside it with

⏹️ ▶️ John some weird I.O. ports, and then you give it back to Apple. This is only if you’re one of the lucky few. There is a signup

⏹️ ▶️ John process. There are a limited number of these things going out. If you would like a developer transition kit,

⏹️ ▶️ John you put your name in the hat, you write a little paragraph of text telling Apple why you think you want this and what your

⏹️ ▶️ John app is that you’re going to port to ARM, and then you wait to hear from them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re shipping this week. Oh, I guess we’ll all find out if we won the lottery. I say we because I

⏹️ ▶️ John put my hat in the ring. I have two Mac apps. And the reason I specified was that I wanna talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about the process of porting them to ARM on my podcast. Marco, you also put your hat in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ring? I did, because I have Quitter. And Quitter really has to make sure it runs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on day one. Wow. No, I’m just kidding.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put my name in the hat for Forecast. And I also mentioned Overcast. Because Forecast,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, I want to make sure Forecast, which uses the lame MP3 encoding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco library under the hood, and that’s very time critical and performance critical. And it’s this low-level thing that’s this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party library. So I want to make sure that works. And I also want to make sure that Overcast works correctly run via

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the download from the App Store thing that we’ll talk about, I guess, sometime. Because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also a pretty important thing and I wanna make sure all the low-level audio code works well and is performant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. So, yeah, so both things. But they seem to mostly care about Mac apps specifically, so I mainly made my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little blurb about Forecast.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I really hope they have a lot of these. It’ll be a shame if they have really, really limited supply and most

⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t get them. I hope they just have enough to go around. I mean, I understand the limitations, But,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway, shipping this week, so that’s good. And I hope that if they like run out of them, maybe they can make more.

⏹️ ▶️ John If there’s huge demand, they can make more and ship them out in the future. So I’m more than willing to pay 500 bucks to get this

⏹️ ▶️ John weird Mac mini thing. Even I have to give it back. I don’t know if they’re gonna have any credit. If you haven’t looked into

⏹️ ▶️ John the details, if you give it back, you get some kind of credit towards something. You just lose that $500 forever where they give you a special

⏹️ ▶️ John deal like they did on the Intel iMacs that you could buy after you return the Pentium 4 dev kits.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that’s all straight up the middle. More stuff straight up the middle. Universal binaries, binaries

⏹️ ▶️ John that have Intel code and ARM in them. This is a, you know, this is part of Apple’s two branding. It’s called

⏹️ ▶️ John Universal 2. Why do you have to call it 2? Just call it Universal. Like the old Universal binaries were so long ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John No one will get it confused.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine. Well, and they’re still universal. It’s like calling something more unique. No, it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still universal. I’m sure maybe it’s a slightly different tech. We’ll see when we start taking apart the OS and seeing what

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the executable format is. A lot of this is less relevant than it was before because Apple introduced

⏹️ ▶️ John app thinning in recent years where when you download from one of their app stores, they don’t give you the whole universal

⏹️ ▶️ John binary, they just give you the one that has the executable code for whatever machine you’re on, so it saves

⏹️ ▶️ John in size and you don’t have to download an app that’s twice as big, which is nice. Although it really wouldn’t be twice as big, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John think anyway. But that’s what we expect from these type of transitions and there it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the final one, I will collect my points for being right about being able to run x86 code on

⏹️ ▶️ John your ARM Mac, Apple’s gonna let you do it. and they did a really amazing job. You know what, because they’re really good at this. They

⏹️ ▶️ John reused the name Rosetta, but called it Rosetta 2 for some reason. And they do all the things,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So can you run x86 apps unmodified on your ARM Mac? Yes, you can.

⏹️ ▶️ John What about plugins? Yes, you can. What about app extensions and drivers?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you use DriverKit, you can even run those. Older drivers are not supported, but they went

⏹️ ▶️ John all the way out to making sure that you can run all the types of x86 things that are reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ John to run. They do what they call translation, not emulation, but translation,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they do it either at install time or on first launch for app packages that are

⏹️ ▶️ John bundled in the.app thing. Basically, they will write out to disk

⏹️ ▶️ John the ARM equivalent of the x86 code, so it doesn’t have to do that on the fly.

⏹️ ▶️ John And again, if they control the app store, they’ll do it at install time, but if they don’t, they’ll just do it on first launch. There’s also

⏹️ ▶️ John a dynamic translation available for things that are just-in-time compiled, like the just-in-time compiler

⏹️ ▶️ John for JavaScript code in a web browser or something like that. They have all the things. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is really good at this. They’ve done it many times in the past, and whatever team did it last time for the Intel transition, presumably,

⏹️ ▶️ John all that expertise and institutional knowledge is still at Apple, and I have high hopes that this will be just as amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was lots of concern that, oh, well, ARM CPUs aren’t gonna be that much faster than Intel, so can they even

⏹️ ▶️ John handle this? Will it be feasible to run x86 software? The part of the

⏹️ ▶️ John reason that I predicted last show that they would have this feature is because

⏹️ ▶️ John it running slightly slowly is way better than it not running at all. Lots of apps are not

⏹️ ▶️ John performance sensitive. You just need them to run. Apple wasn’t satisfied with that in the demo. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not like, oh, don’t worry, you won’t lose your software, your crap will run. They’re like, look, we’re gonna run an x86 game

⏹️ ▶️ John unmodified, which granted it wasn’t the most demanding game and they ran it at 1080,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it was a fairly recent game. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is from like 2018, and you know, running

⏹️ ▶️ John it at low res, fine. But that was their demo of like, not only can

⏹️ ▶️ John you run x86 software, not only will like your favorite, like, you know, you’ll be able to run Scrivener before they do

⏹️ ▶️ John the ARM port, and it will be fine, and you won’t even notice, it’ll be completely transparent to you, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ John you can run this game, which it’s not saying you could run any game, games are gonna,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna be worse, right? But any, literally any real-time 3D game being viable

⏹️ ▶️ John is a fairly amazing demonstration of either the power of whatever ARM Mac that they were running on

⏹️ ▶️ John that on or the cleverness of their translation but most likely both so I’m pretty excited

⏹️ ▶️ John about that and the other big theme software wise with integration with this

⏹️ ▶️ John ARM stuff is talk to last show about this being an opportunity to ditch old stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John to say well it’s transitioning to ARM you might not even call them Macs and you can deprecate all your old APIs you can

⏹️ ▶️ John ditch all the things. It seems like all of their ditching has already happened. And instead

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re saying, we’re not taking away APIs. We’re not breaking

⏹️ ▶️ John your crap unnecessarily. Open GL is still there. Like kernel extensions

⏹️ ▶️ John are still exported, still supported in Big Sur, not under Rosetta, but like there,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re, they’re supporting like basically anything that runs in Catalina in theory

⏹️ ▶️ John should continue to run in Big Sur. Now will that hold after Big Sur? I don’t know. But

⏹️ ▶️ John for now, they’re trying to ease the transition by saying we’re not going to break your crap completely

⏹️ ▶️ John unnecessarily. We already did all that. We already deprecated 32-bit. We already got over all this stuff. OpenGL is still

⏹️ ▶️ John deprecated and will go away someday. But don’t blame it on ARM. Like, ARM’s not taking

⏹️ ▶️ John away your stuff. Again, the only exception are things like kernel extensions where they really can’t do anything about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John But USB drivers with driver kit, app extensions, your apps, all stuff will work. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is before we even get to like how hard is it to port your thing. They are bending over backwards to make sure that you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t buy your first arm mac and say, Oh, what the hell am I going to run on it? And so I was

⏹️ ▶️ John very excited to see all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, that was I’m extremely happy to give you your points. I was totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong. And like I said last show that I thought there wasn’t gonna be any emulation. And I thought anything that was currently deprecated,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Open GL would just be gone under the under our max. And I was wrong on on both of those fronts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a lot. And that’s a very good thing. I’m very, very glad that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve chosen here. You know, there’s a number of things, like, you know, we were worried about, like, might they introduce

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more strict security? Maybe everything has to be App Store only, or it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a harder process to, like, compile your own software or anything. Nope, no changes. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like there’s actually no additional, like, security restrictions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the OS for anything that any normal person would ever do,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the ARM Macs compared to other Macs. Here’s how Big Sur runs. Big Sur

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be not any more strict than Catalina in most ways. And it runs the same way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you’re on Intel or Apple Silicon, whatever they’re gonna call that. And so that’s fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco news. It is worth noting though that the Rosetta layer, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were very clear in labeling it transitional in a number of points in both the keynote the State of the Union,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I would expect, just like the original Rosetta from PowerPC to Intel, I would expect this is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to last maybe three or four years and then be removed from the OS. So, you know, don’t get too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attached to anything that needs it, but it is nice for the transition. And then the other kind of big elephant in the room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that Windows compatibility was never mentioned, including in the virtualization layer, because the virtualization

⏹️ ▶️ Marco layer can only run ARM hosts. It cannot create x86 hosts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Rosetta are separate things and they are not to be combined. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability of course to boot into Bootcamp is probably totally gone as well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t think anything is able to use Rosetta quite to that level.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like running an entire OS level. So Rosetta is for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, not OS’s. So if your workflow depends on virtualizing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or booting into Windows, you’re going to have a problem. And I don’t know, what is the status of, is there like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ARM port of Windows anymore, or does it matter?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, there totally is Windows for ARM. Like, here’s the thing, they didn’t mention anything, they didn’t mention anything about Windows,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But they did, like, the stand-in for Windows was Linux. So they showed an ARM version of

⏹️ ▶️ John Linux running a virtualization. The virtualization, by the way, is like the same way you do virtualization on x86, where you can

⏹️ ▶️ John take your x86 CPU that’s in your Mac, and you can run any other x86 operating

⏹️ ▶️ John system sharing the CPU, right? Same thing with ARM, take another ARM operating system, like they have their hypervisor

⏹️ ▶️ John and all this stuff that lets you take another operating system that runs on ARM and run it on the same thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s running Mac OS and they share the resources and work it out, you know, so like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John virtualization and that works on ARM, but that doesn’t help you at all with x86, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So they showed that happening in Linux, they showed parallels running Linux and people might be confused, say, oh, well, look at that,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re running Linux, it does support x86, that was ARM Linux and Linux is on every platform,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course, So of course there’s an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco arm part of it. Which by the way, I think I’ll probably use that for server development. Like that looks awesome compared to trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make sure that like PHP and everything installed properly with home brew on Mac OS, which changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and breaks every OS release. Like that’s been such a pain in my ass most of the time that I’m actually very much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to probably hopefully switching to that in the

⏹️ ▶️ John future. You could be doing that today. Like they showed Docker, same deal. You could be doing that today with,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, VMware or whatever. But Windows does exist for arm. And there is no technical

⏹️ ▶️ John reason why Boot Camp can’t exist to let your ARM-based Mac boot into Windows for

⏹️ ▶️ John ARM, which you may be sad about, but it’s like, oh, who the hell cares about Windows for ARM? None of my games will run, they’re all like, say, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John yada yada. But I don’t know what was preventing Windows from being demoed.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why Boot Camp wasn’t there. I continue to think that eventually Boot Camp will rise

⏹️ ▶️ John again as a way for you to boot Windows for ARM

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on your

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. This is an interesting time. We’ve talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this before. I’ll take

⏹️ ▶️ John the other side of that bet.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco All right, well, you won’t be wrong again, feel free. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you will be able to boot ARM Windows on these Macs eventually. Part of this is predicated on the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John of everyone more or less moving away from x86, partly because Intel’s been having problems with their process,

⏹️ ▶️ John but also partly because this is just the way things have been going. It’s a slow change,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like we’re going in that direction. We may halt, and the progression towards ARM Everywhere may just

⏹️ ▶️ John stop Dennis’ track and not get any farther, but over the past several years, there has

⏹️ ▶️ John been a steady drum beat in that direction. Apple going full ARM, although it makes sense for tons of other reasons, is another,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say another nail in that coffin for Intel, because Intel’s still making stuff, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it could happen. Now, there are a lot of concerns about what is all my software gonna run? Forget

⏹️ ▶️ John about my Mac apps or whatever, but what if I don’t wanna virtualize ARM Linux? What if I have a bunch of open source software

⏹️ ▶️ John for x86? What if I use some of that open source software for x86 in my apps? And I need to, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John lame, in your library, Like, how do I get that to build and everything? Apple itself is helping

⏹️ ▶️ John out on a bunch of open source projects by helping those projects figure out how to get their thing

⏹️ ▶️ John to build forearm on Mac OS. Like, that’s always the tricky bit about this. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when the Mac went Intel, it’s like, oh, well, they’ll have access to all this software because

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone runs Linux on Intel, and so I’ll just be able to take any Linux open source project and build it

⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac. And it’s like, no. It’s a different compiler, different tool chain, a different operating system,

⏹️ ▶️ John people had to do work to get insert name of your favorite open source thing to build

⏹️ ▶️ John on Intel Macs. They will have to do that same work to get it to build on ARM Macs. Like just because Linux

⏹️ ▶️ John was running on Intel for years and years before the Mac transition, didn’t really make it that much easier.

⏹️ ▶️ John Except for if there was like, you know, CPU specific code. But honestly, most open source stuff doesn’t have CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John specific code. And even stuff that does, like FFmpeg that may have, you know, SSE instructions, there are tools

⏹️ ▶️ John that will translate from SSE or MMX or whatever the hell the things are called.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s some other acronym I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco forget.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey AVX.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, AVX. They will translate from that to Neon or whatever the ARM,

⏹️ ▶️ John like SIMD engine thing is, right? Someone just needs to do the work to sort of hook all that

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff up. And so changing the source code, changing the make files, changing the compiler flags, all that good stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is helping with that by having their engineers spend time on what they probably know from their experience

⏹️ ▶️ John with the app store are the most frequently integrated open source projects. They’ve had a big

⏹️ ▶️ John slide with a bunch of them up that said like Blender, Boost, Nginx, FFmpeg,

⏹️ ▶️ John Electron, CMake, OpenCV, Node, Redis. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can look at the slide. And then I think at one point they highlighted certain ones or the ones that actually helped with. So this is like

⏹️ ▶️ John their to-do list. And then there are some things that actually started helping with. But all this makes

⏹️ ▶️ John me hopeful that, yeah, there’ll be a bumpy transition, but by the time this two years is out,

⏹️ ▶️ John I will be able to build all the same stuff that I have built on my Mac. Right now I have built and installed on my Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John I compiled Perl from source and installed it. I compiled MySQL from source and installed it. I

⏹️ ▶️ John compiled Postgres from source and installed it. This is what I do, compile from source, whatever. The fact

⏹️ ▶️ John that I can do that is because of, during the transition, someone made sure that all this stuff built

⏹️ ▶️ John on Intel-based Macs. I hope someone, and that someone may be Apple, does all the same stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John for the ARM transition. If not, it’s gonna be sad, because I don’t want to run Linux in virtualization to get all my Unix-y

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Speaking of that, as far as I can tell, all the Unix-y stuff is still the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS is still Mac OS. It’s got the terminal, it’s got the shell. It’s all the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no big news in that area. Thank God. Yeah, and I was heartened by

⏹️ ▶️ John this presentation. It is a word. Of all the presenters, and the meta message being that the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John is still the place where you do crap like run Docker and install weird ass crap. And like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what the Mac’s job is. And by having demos that showed people doing that, it made it clear

⏹️ ▶️ John that despite what Alan and I may think, the Mac is still definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey very different from an

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and an iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s impressive to me. It seems like such an Apple move, as we discussed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit last episode. It seems like such an Apple move to use this as a time to cut the fat and to just say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, all that stuff that we’ve been trying to get rid of, it’s dead. It’s very dead. It’s not just a little dead, it’s real dead.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems that they did a very Microsoftian thing, which is to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost everywhere, they didn’t get rid of anything. They tried their darndest to hold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto stuff, even stuff like Open—what is it, OpenGL, right? That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco they’ve been saying— Paul Morgan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And CL, both. Trevor Burrus That they’ve been saying for years is going away, and they still held

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John onto it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Morgan And it is going away, just not this year.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I was extremely pleased to see the slide about how they’re going to contribute to FFmpeg

⏹️ ▶️ Casey among other things. I joke a lot about how much I use FFmpeg and I use it way more than any normal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey human should. But that to me is a very good indicator that they give a crap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they really don’t want this stuff to break. And the only thing that chaps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my behind to some degree about all this, other than the fact that I just bought this new laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the only thing that really, that really bums me out is the Windows,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows on Intel virtualization story seems to be non-existent. And one would assume

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there would be, that the VMware or Parallels will step up and do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of true-to-form emulation, rather than like, you know, hypervisor-powered

⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtualization. and it would presumably be very slow but workable. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am basing all this on several-year-old information, but when I last was doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not iOS development for a job, when I was doing Windows development for a job, I really preferred

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a Mac because Mac OS at the time, and I would assume that’s still true today, but I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS was a much better place to get my job done, even despite the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that I was doing most of my actual work in Visual Studio in a VM,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even despite that, it was just everything around it was so much better on the Mac. So what I did was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ran VMware Fusion all day, every working day, and that’s where I did my work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When it was Intel on Intel, it was reasonably speedy. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it was speedy enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that last I had heard a lot of people in the workplace had to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sort of thing because a lot of like line of business apps or bespoke apps for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular companies. And this is, in my experience, this gets much worse the bigger the company is. A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of these apps were Windows only, and they weren’t web apps necessarily. They were honest to goodness native

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps where you had to run them on a Windows computer. And again, I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully very out of touch. And hopefully all of these stupid apps and all of these different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey humongous companies have moved to be web apps now, and they don’t require like ActiveX and Windows Explorer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Internet Explorer, anything like that. But as of the last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I was in this world, running a VM was critical. It was absolutely critical.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And not being able to run a Windows VM that can run all of the software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Intel Windows can run, that’s a bit of a showstopper. And meanwhile, I keep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hearing all this rumblings from people who do use Windows that it’s gotten to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really good as a developer platform. And I can’t speak to it one way or another because I haven’t used Windows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in years and honestly, I don’t have any particular interest in it, but I have understood it to be really, really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot better now, quite a bit better now. And although I have no intention

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of going back to work and getting a Windows based programming job,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it still concerns me that, that not supporting Intel Windows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could cut out a whole bunch of otherwise very enthusiastic Mac users.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know, it’s all, I’m talking out my butt. But it worries me

⏹️ ▶️ John a bit. No, you’re right. You’re right to be worried. Because as someone who ran actual emulation of x86

⏹️ ▶️ John Windows on PowerPC, it is essentially too slow to be. You don’t want to do it. Like, you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John it to get by if you just need to run a particular app to do a thing, but you do not want to live in that all day. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John really that viable. So basically, if Windows does not also make a transition

⏹️ ▶️ John to ARM sometime in the next decade or so, the Mac will have lost an important capability.

⏹️ ▶️ John It will no longer be one machine that you can get to run, uh, you know, Mac stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. It will have gained some other things that we’ll get to in a second. But before we go to what I think is the final section of this,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, very surprising announcement related to our Macs, I just want to do a couple of moments of speculation

⏹️ ▶️ John about, so gathering the tea leaves of what they said today, what can we surmise about our

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs? Now a lot of people are upset about them not saying anything about our Macs other than

⏹️ ▶️ John the first one will ship before the end of the year and it’ll be two year transition, right? Uh, The developer

⏹️ ▶️ John I would again tell everyone the developer transition kit ignore that no no our Mac will ever

⏹️ ▶️ John be like that That’s just the developer transition kit. All they said is they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John making a family of so C’s and they love that it has good Performance and power trade-offs

⏹️ ▶️ John and yada Yeah, like all the stuff that we’d know but they did not get into any specifics including They did not get any

⏹️ ▶️ John thing where they bragged about how fast there are max are going to be there’s a good reason for that that. What would they be bragging

⏹️ ▶️ John about? They’re completely unannounced products. Just trust us that we have an ARM Mac and it’s really good, but we can’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ John you anything about it. Right? I, you know, you shouldn’t have expected them to come in to say anything more than

⏹️ ▶️ John they said, which was, it’ll be a new level of performance. It’s all sorts of vague things. But trust us here

⏹️ ▶️ John in Accidental Tech Podcast, when we tell you that, especially in the laptop line, Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John current ARM chips are already better in many regards than Intel’s Now Intel’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John standing still either, but Apple will be making our Macs on a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ John process size and they’ll be making chips that will probably beat anything that Intel has

⏹️ ▶️ John on, you know, in the laptop class of machines. What is Apple gonna do for the big machines? They

⏹️ ▶️ John said a two-year transition. They didn’t say a two-year transition except for the Mac Pro which will never transition. They didn’t say that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So presumably two years from now Apple’s gonna have some answer for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. So I would say, don’t be sad that they didn’t give you any benchmarks or say anything because they didn’t announce

⏹️ ▶️ John any hardware and they’re not gonna do that until it’s ready. And the second thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple is essentially committing to do the thing. Arm for all Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that leads me to the next point, which is in one of the slides they put up, they had a particular thing that caught my eye that

⏹️ ▶️ John said unified memory architecture, which is basically just a description of how every Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John A whatever system on a chip has worked. You know, it’s a system on a chip, there’s some RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ John and that RAM is used for both, there’s no dedicated VRAM. Like there’s not, like on my Mac Pro right

⏹️ ▶️ John now, I have a couple of video cards in there, and those video cards have their own dedicated video memory that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John on the cards themselves. It’s a different kind of memory, it’s addressed over a different bus, it’s right there on the card.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then my Mac has system memory, which is separate from that. Apple’s iOS devices have always had a

⏹️ ▶️ John unified memory architecture, where you just have one pool of RAM that started out really super small, has gotten bigger over

⏹️ ▶️ John time. And that’s used for everything. It’s used for video RAM, it’s used for the applications, it’s all, it’s a unified

⏹️ ▶️ John memory architecture, right? When we think about what I just said, that they’re going to do a transition

⏹️ ▶️ John of all of their Macs, and they emphasize many, many times, we know what Macs are used for, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John making this family of SystemAna chips to be good at all the things that Macs are used for,

⏹️ ▶️ John they bragged about the fact that Final Cut Pro already works, They showed it running three streams

⏹️ ▶️ John of 4K video, which is not impressive in terms of what the Mac Pro can do in terms of simultaneous streams of

⏹️ ▶️ John 8K video at high bit depths, right? So Apple is signing itself up

⏹️ ▶️ John for eventually making a Mac that can do what this Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro can do, but runs an ARM CPU. And I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ John sitting here trying to square that circle with a unified memory architecture, because if you know how you can outfit this

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, You can put like two dual GPU cards in there,

⏹️ ▶️ John each of which has umpteen gigabytes of its own dedicated VRAM, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple has to ship two years from now a computer that can match that

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of GPU horsepower with a quote unquote unified memory architecture?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m scratching my head and thinking, how is that gonna work? Now, to assuage

⏹️ ▶️ John some fears, In everything except for the super high-end use case, Apple’s probably pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John okay. When they showed that Shadow of Tomb Raider demo on their, whatever they were running it on,

⏹️ ▶️ John but honestly, I think their current line, the A12Z probably could have done that, right? A unified

⏹️ ▶️ John architecture where it’s a system on a chip, a single pool of memory, and an integrated GPU, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how the upcoming generation of consoles all work. The PlayStation 5,

⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox, what the, Xbox Series X, right? If you look at those chips, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially, they have CPU and GPU all in one big package and

⏹️ ▶️ John a unified pool of RAM for all that stuff. And they’re no slouches, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John anything up to, if you had a laptop that could play PS5 games at 4K,

⏹️ ▶️ John just like the PS5 can, you’d be like, that’s pretty good graphics for a laptop, right? So right up to basically

⏹️ ▶️ John that limit, you’re fine. But anyone who knows anything about game consoles is like, okay, well, game consoles are great, But

⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to have real gaming horsepower, of course you need a gaming PC. And gaming PCs

⏹️ ▶️ John are always, except for maybe on launch day of a console, more powerful than consoles. Because in a gaming

⏹️ ▶️ John PC, you can buy a video card that costs more than the entire PlayStation 5,

⏹️ ▶️ John stick it inside your gaming PC, and have way more horsepower.

⏹️ ▶️ John Add to that the fact that the Mac Pro has like umpteen PCI slots, whole point of this

⏹️ ▶️ John machine that it has PCI slots. What do you stick in those PCI slots if none of them can be filled with video cards?

⏹️ ▶️ John So my biggest hardware question that I’m looking forward to being answered in the next two years is how

⏹️ ▶️ John the hell do you replace the Mac Pro with an ARM equivalent machine if you don’t have support

⏹️ ▶️ John for discrete GPUs? Does Apple make its own discrete GPU? Do they continue to partner with

⏹️ ▶️ John AMD and work that out? Many of these things are technically possible, but as far as we’ve ever seen

⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple, They have never made an ARM system on a chip that has any support for external GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like their entire architecture doesn’t lend itself to that. So two parts to this. One, don’t flip out about integrated

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU. It’ll be great for everything if you’re not, if you’re just happy with up to and including PS5 performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John But two, be on the lookout for some big changes here. Either they don’t replace the Mac Pro or they’re gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ John some very impressive, very cool custom hardware that tries to match

⏹️ ▶️ John what today’s Mac Pro can do with, you know, thousands of dollars worth of GPU and VRAM

⏹️ ▶️ John inside there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a massive question. Because I, too, as soon as I said Uniform Memory Connection, I’m like, oh, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is what iOS devices have. And that most likely precludes any other GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from being used. No discrete, no external. And they could add that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they didn’t announce that today. And it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing they would do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the same time, the Mac Pro, and they did say that they were planning on completing the transition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in about two years. At the same time, the Mac Pro they announced last year, they…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think somebody even said as much explicitly that, like, this is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that they expected to be a one-off. When they unveiled the new Mac Pro last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, they expected this to be, you know, for the long haul. So I can’t imagine they were expecting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to last, at the time, only three years at most. that is not the impression I got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year at all from talking to people at the Mac Pro. People at Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have to imagine that there will be a story about the Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really what they said today sounds like it’s gonna go ARM, you know, by roughly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years from now. So there’s gonna be some kind of story where something that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes roughly that form factor and, you know, roughly that capability level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to exist in the arm world. And what form that takes, I have no idea. I think of the options

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you listed, John, I think the most likely that I can come up with is like, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a second generation MPX module that has Apple GPUs on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, as you said, maybe they partnered with ATI to make some.

⏹️ ▶️ John You think that’s the most likely? I think the most likely is that they have a system on a chip that has

⏹️ ▶️ John a huge number of cores and is super fast and it has wimpy integrated graphics and they just support

⏹️ ▶️ John discrete GPUs. Like that’s the they’ve never again they’ve never done that before there’s no precedent for

⏹️ ▶️ John it but it is technically possible like right now my Mac Pro’s CPU has a GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John inside it doesn’t it like doesn’t those Xeons have like integrate Intel’s integrated graphics in them or am I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy? Um I think some of them do I don’t think the ones they use do.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right but anyway like it’s like as we’ve seen on laptops It’s okay to have an integrated GPU on your CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John and also have a discrete GPU. That’s the thing Apple does have experience with on the Intel world. There’s no, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m saying is I don’t expect them to make, maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t expect them to make a custom system

⏹️ ▶️ John on a chip that rips out all of the internal GPU stuff, right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John so much is tied into that, like just for the Mac Pro. I expect them to make a system on a chip that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John the world’s beefiest iPad thing with like, you know, 50 cores or whatever, right? and

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe some integrated GPU stuff that the computer just ignores, and then just have support for plain old

⏹️ ▶️ John external GPUs, because there’s no way around it. Like you can’t, if you look at what they do with those GPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a reason you can put four of them inside this computer. It’s not just for the hell of it. And you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John fit those, there’s no system on a chip that can fit the compute power that you can have in the, you know, two of those dual

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU Vega two things. That’s just never going to happen. And it would be pointless in a case this big,

⏹️ ▶️ John because what are you filling all that space with? So I am actually pretty excited to see

⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re gonna come up with. Because remember, it’s not just competing with the Mac Pro today, it’s competing with where the Mac Pro is going to be in two years.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they’ve got that work cut out for them at the high end. Like I have no problem what they’re gonna do

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle. Well, I mean, it’s the Mac Pro. Where it’s gonna be in two years very well might be where it is today.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, but not for the GPUs. Like I think they are actually going to upgrade the GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like they,

⏹️ ▶️ John there will be new MPX modules that you can buy that will keep cranking things up. and they might even make

⏹️ ▶️ John a new Afterburner card. We’ll see. By the way, I looked this up before the show. I had mentioned that

⏹️ ▶️ John the consoles have a unified memory architecture, but I’m like, but wait a second, doesn’t the PS5 have like a slight bifurcation

⏹️ ▶️ John where it uses slow RAM and fast RAM? And I Googled for it intensely before the show and could not find it.

⏹️ ▶️ John M2 Mike in the chat reminds me. It’s because it’s not the PS5, it’s the Xbox. For cost-saving reasons, the Xbox

⏹️ ▶️ John Series X has like one pool of really fast RAM and one pool of slightly slower RAM, but that’s neither here nor

⏹️ ▶️ John there. Basically, they don’t have dedicated VRAM in this generation. They may have two different

⏹️ ▶️ John pools of slightly different speed RAM. But all this is to say that, uh, a, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, I have no problem believing that the ARM Macs

⏹️ ▶️ John that come out, like the ARM MacBook Pros will trounce any of the current Intel ones. So don’t worry

⏹️ ▶️ John about that. Now, we don’t know about the upcoming Intel ones because they, Apple announced, which is rare for them. We will continue,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they could have not said this and I would have told you that it was going to be or any way, but they said we were going to make

⏹️ ▶️ John new Intel Macs. And so I can totally see, for example, a redesigned iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John coming out as an Intel Mac and then that same exact case in design being also

⏹️ ▶️ John the first ARM-based iMac. That would be super cool and perfectly fine with me. And same thing with the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ John Pros. I think they will continue to evolve right up until someone rips out their guts and puts ARM guts inside

⏹️ ▶️ John them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think also, like, the GPU issue, you know, keep in mind that Apple’s been making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco processor designs for longer than they’ve been making GPU designs. Maybe taking a little bit of extra time to really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the GPU side of things going might help them. So that’s why I think it’s probably wise to assume

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just for like power efficiency reasons, but also for GPU sophistication reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the first arm Macs are likely to be the ones that use integrated GPUs and the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco arm Macs are the ones basically the 16 inch, the iMac, at least the iMac pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Mac pro, those are probably gonna be the last ones that switch over to ARM, because they need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of solution to high-end GPU stuff, whether it’s Apple in-house or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco discrete GPU support, and that maybe they needed a bit more time to get that right. So I’m guessing first ARM Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the low-power laptops and maybe a low-end iMac that is integrated only.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so getting back to what we were saying before, with Casey being said that the Mac will no longer be the machine

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can run Mac apps natively and run Windows apps natively have the best of both worlds.

⏹️ ▶️ John We may be losing that if Windows doesn’t follow Mac OS onto ARM.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even if Windows doesn’t follow, we are gaining two things, which is now if you buy a Mac, it will

⏹️ ▶️ John be a computer that you can run x86 Mac apps

⏹️ ▶️ John on with translation, ARM Mac apps on, ARM Linux or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, right, in virtualization. And also, apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all iOS and iPad apps

⏹️ ▶️ John unmodified. This is amazing. I don’t know if we all saw that coming. No. Because if you had said that, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John think of it this way. It’s, you know, we’ve always known this has been technically possible. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, because we know that you can run those apps in x86, that’s when you run Xcode in the simulator, it does that, right? But like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they wouldn’t do that. Can you imagine a little iPhone app and a little window on your Mac? That would be weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple just, they just went and did it. It’s just like, and not only did they go and do

⏹️ ▶️ John it, But if you are an app developer and you submit an app to the app store after

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever point, right? Apple will put that app into the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John App Store for you unless you opt out. So say you submit your iPad app and you forget to opt

⏹️ ▶️ John out. Your iPad app appears in the Mac App Store. Say you submit an iPhone app and you forget to opt out. Your iPhone app will

⏹️ ▶️ John appear in the Mac App Store. The Mac App Store just gained potentially, literally millions of applications.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I have no idea how this is gonna shake out, but it is probably the

⏹️ ▶️ John biggest, most consequential announcement in the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John ARM Mac thing. And it is, I think, thrown everyone for a loop because there are lots of good things that can happen, there are lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of bad things that can happen, but everybody is all in the mix now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is something I never would have seen coming. You know, I thought for sure that Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer to this was Catalyst, and that was it. And this basically opts everyone in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by default to an automatic, catalyst-y version of your app existing on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, and this is only on ARM Macs, like this won’t apply to Intel Macs, but it’s only on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARM Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but still.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why they run unmodified, because they’re built for ARM, like you upload your binary or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John to the app store for your iPhone app,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and that exact iPhone app, they just download

⏹️ ▶️ John those bits onto your Mac, it’s also on ARM CPU, and they just run it in a little friggin’ window with a weird menu

⏹️ ▶️ John bar and a bunch of other, it’s like, what? Like for games and stuff it makes perfect sense, but

⏹️ ▶️ John like the thing that kills me is like the iPhone apps, like I can imagine them doing with iPad apps, but I mean

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you know, go halfway, go full, but like, but anyway, what this means for Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote Mac gaming, is that, is there an iOS game that you think is cool?

⏹️ ▶️ John Run it on your Mac, zoom it to full screen, basically like, you know, games don’t have any sort of, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see a like game-like UI. This is gonna be amazing for basically any

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS game that you had enjoyed that you think you might also enjoy on your Mac, just run it. Whether it’s a little,

⏹️ ▶️ John like it threes in a little window where you’re swiping away, or a full screen immersive app. I don’t think there’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be any big renaissance of Mac gaming, but I immediately thought of games as the type of application where you don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John that it looks nothing like the Mac because it’s a game.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun, I think. And you know, there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are certain apps where it’s unlikely to come over. So I can imagine, things like big TV apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they have rights issues. Oh, you can’t display, we don’t have the rights to show this video on a computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, but we do on a tablet. Like, I’m sure they’re all gonna opt out. Like, all those big company apps, they’re all gonna opt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. But this is gonna be really great for mostly indie apps, and I think you’re right, games

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also. The fact that it’s opt-in by default and you have to manually opt out is great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most small developers won’t have any reason to opt out, so they’ll just do it. Which is very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from like, the proposition for developing a catalyst app was like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to go explicitly do this thing. Now, most of us, if there’s any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco demand for our apps on the Mac at all, we should make Catalyst apps,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or actual Mac apps, but the Catalyst apps will run on Intel Macs, and this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatic ARM port of iOS apps won’t. So if you want to address

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the customer base, obviously having an Intel port is pretty important for a while,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Catalyst is the way to do that, but this is a really, really cool alternative and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco puts a really good stake in the ground for the future when our Macs are commonplace. And then we’ll just have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive software library available for most Macs out there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so the fear that people have is that this is like the ultimate version of shovelware. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John developers didn’t even need to do anything and suddenly their apps are just swarming your computer if you want them to be. And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not Mac-like in any way. Like, they tried to do a bunch of stuff for like, oh, if you change in dark mode, we’ll support that because

⏹️ ▶️ John we support it on iOS. Like, that’s cool that it works, right? And oh, what if it has settings? Well, we’ll generate

⏹️ ▶️ John this weird, ugly, strange-looking UI on the Mac, and we’ll give you a menu, and you can go

⏹️ ▶️ John to preferences, and it’ll bring up the settings bundle with an interface. And there’s a quit command, which, as they said in the presentation,

⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that exists on the Mac. So if you want to reflexively quit all of your, you know, iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John apps on the Mac, you can do that too, right? And even app extensions work. They demoed, like, in the Mac version

⏹️ ▶️ John of Photos, you can hit the share sheet and pull up an app extension from

⏹️ ▶️ John an iOS app. So like there’s that cool, I don’t know if this is Mac version too, but it just came to mind, like

⏹️ ▶️ John that like machine learning thing that lets you erase stuff from pictures. Who makes that? Like, does Pixelmator make that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Somebody makes a really cool iPad app that lets you intelligently

⏹️ ▶️ John erase stuff from pictures. And I always thought that was cool. And every time I have occasion to use it, I find myself on my Mac. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John I could just download the app on my Mac and use that share extension to do that to my photos

⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac photos. Like, just like Rosetta, they did an amazing job of integrating this. But in the end,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a Mac app. It’s not gonna look like a Mac app. Like, this is the thing where there has

⏹️ ▶️ John been zero work done. Like, the person who made this app doesn’t even know you’re running it on a Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John That brings up a question that I thought would be answered in the State of the Union, but still wasn’t, is how the hell

⏹️ ▶️ John do you handle multi-touch? People might think, oh, well, if you have a trackpad, solves

⏹️ ▶️ John the problem, doesn’t it? Not really, because actual multitouch lets you

⏹️ ▶️ John put multiple fingers on the screen in arbitrary locations, but you just have one pointer. So maybe for

⏹️ ▶️ John pinch to zoom and stuff you put the mouse cursor, you know, you put the Mac cursor over the part that you want and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you do a pinch gesture on your thing and you’re pinching at that location, but what about actual multitouch where you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to put multiple fingers in arbitrary locations on an app? iOS apps and iPadOS

⏹️ ▶️ John can support that because they’re on touch screens. Eventually Max might be on touch screens and that’ll solve this problem. But in the meantime,

⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell do people do when they want to multitouch? The simulator in Xcode has this weird

⏹️ ▶️ John thing where you hold down the option key with the cursor and it makes these two little ghost fingers and this there’s a strange interface

⏹️ ▶️ John in the simulator to try to simulate multitouch but it’s not good. I don’t honestly don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know what will happen if you you know bring up like say Fruit Ninja or some other kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of thing that wants you to do like five finger swipe across fruit to cut it into five pieces. How do you play that game

⏹️ ▶️ John with a trackpad or a mouse? Maybe you can’t and maybe it’s just like, oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use games like that. Maybe they’re just hoping that touch max will come out before this is an

⏹️ ▶️ John issue. I don’t know what the deal is, but it was really weird for them to not say anything about it. They didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John demo it. They didn’t say anything about it. So as far as we know on keynote day, this is still a mystery.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s going to be really clunky if they take the same approach as a simulator. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this feels to me like one of those situations where most people at Apple just don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ Casey traditional mice, not even the Magic Mouse. I have no facts to back that up, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just feels like one of those situations where it’s like, oh, yeah, people use mice,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey huh? Like actual mice that they drag across their tabletop and their desktop. Huh, I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about those. It just seems like an afterthought. Now, who knows? it’ll be something that they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have thought about, I would hope, and maybe it’ll be better than it is on the simulator, I would hope, but gosh, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly right on the simulator.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s garbage.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, if they use trackpads, that doesn’t help. Like, trackpad is not a solution to multitouch

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not picking where in the UI to touch your fingers. That’s just not how it works. You have

⏹️ ▶️ John one cursor on the screen that’s in one location, and yes, then you can touch the trackpad with your multiple fingers and kind of sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of map them, but like it’s not that’s not a solution right that is a one step

⏹️ ▶️ John better than just having a mouse maybe although honestly with the magic mouse with the swipy stuff on it it’s not that big anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a problem that they need to solve again obvious solution is touch based max which i think are coming but in the meantime

⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the deal how is this going to work i guess we’ll all just download and install

⏹️ ▶️ John the betas and find out for ourselves but boy this was a weird one it has a a lot of really important

⏹️ ▶️ John implications for the business of making apps for the Mac. That thing I alluded to earlier about the unification

⏹️ ▶️ John of the APIs and what’s going to happen with AppKit and Catalyst and SwiftUI, we don’t have time to get into that in this

⏹️ ▶️ John very long show already. But stay tuned for future episodes for more discussion of those topics.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we have so much more to say about all this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also have all of WWDC yet to go. I mean, this is a typical Monday

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we got the keynote in the State of the Union. But I think all of the videos are dropping, in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one batch each morning. I could be wrong about that. It’s okay if I’m wrong. But one way or another, there’s going to be a bunch of new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos every single day for the next week or more. So yes, this is going to be a very busy summer for ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of talking about all this stuff. And it’s probably going to be a very busy summer for all three of us for different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons, working on leveraging all these new technologies. Before we go, I do think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is worth summing up very quickly, what kind of our thoughts. And I’d also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be curious to hear each of your favorite thing, feature, platform,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever that you saw today. For me, I am extremely impressed. I’m very sad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I wasn’t there in person. This seems like it would have been raucous if we were there and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that bums me out, not only for me but especially for the Apple engineers that have worked so hard on this stuff. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this one would have been incredible to see in person. I’m really sad about that. But overall,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a very impressive showing. There’s a lot here so much here for us still to unpack

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I had to pick a favorite thing There’s so much actually I am I have really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really excited as stupid as it may sound. I’m really excited about those messages improvements I think that’s gonna be super

⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome, and I’m really looking forward to trying that we’ll see how well it works in reality I’m excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for messages to be on the Mac as a catalyst app and hopefully have the feature parody that they’ve basically hinted toward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not said But overall this this was a really really great day for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple fans And I’m really looking forward to the videos that are coming over the next week John,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this was the best crop of WRC Announcements in a long time and I say that having come off

⏹️ ▶️ John last year, which was the Mac Pro, which I really loved There was so much good stuff in this presentation I’m the most

⏹️ ▶️ John excited about our max just because I’m really excited about arm CPUs and hardware and I’m excited about

⏹️ ▶️ John CPU transitions like yes I say this as someone who just bought a really expensive Intel Mac. I’m excited about our

⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, but honestly everything on iOS 13 I saw I’m like, that’s good. That’s good. That’s good. This is all

⏹️ ▶️ John good stuff The big sir stuff is slightly upsetting, but this is not my first rodeo I’m hoping they can get

⏹️ ▶️ John it all sorted out. Like I’ve seen all this before we all fretted over the leather stitching We

⏹️ ▶️ John fretted over Yosemite’s flattening We we fretted over the translucent menu bar when it was in leopard like

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’ll get worked out but overall all tons of exciting announcements. I

⏹️ ▶️ John share your sadness that we didn’t get to see this in person because this would have been I mean, can you imagine the

⏹️ ▶️ John buzz among all of us like discussing these things in a big stew of people like there’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John so much to be excited and or upset about. So I think this was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco an amazing,

⏹️ ▶️ John an amazing crop of WWDC announcements, one of the biggest ever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought the presentation was pretty good too. So fingers crossed for the future.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for me to pick. I am happy to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there is some progress happening on the Mac in some pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey big ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, yes. Even though, as John said, some of that is caused for,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a little bit of worrying or some of it, like some of the UI changes, as we mentioned, I think I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably don’t like as much. But, you know, we will get through that. I am excited as an iOS developer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very excited about that the the APIs and the UI designs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, what is what is like considered quote standard UI for iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is advancing pretty quickly and is advancing in a direction that makes it really toward the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac and iPad unification. And while unification I think is kind of crappy for Mac users,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS developers it’s wonderful because we get to you know take our apps that we mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco write for iOS and just kind of make them happen on the other platforms fairly easily. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see that kind of continue to march forward and to take significant strides is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good from the perspective of me as an iOS developer not necessarily as a Mac user.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m also really excited about something that we didn’t even have time to talk about today which is the the new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like app privacy opt-in stuff and tracking opt-in and privacy disclosure stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m actually looking forward to that because developers like me who don’t do creepy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff with your data, I think that will benefit us. And I certainly as a user, that’s another way, as I said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, to shine a light on bad practices to kind of help tamp them down and inform people what’s going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. That’s a huge way to do that that hopefully will work really well and we’ll see how that actually works out in practice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially in terms of enforcement. But I’m just, I’m excited about a whole bunch of small stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, I’m always a hardware nut, so I’m super excited about speculation about our Macs and what they might bring finally.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, otherwise, I, as a developer, there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here for me, which is good. That’s what this is for. Right. So I’m very much looking forward to the developer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of it. The user side of it, I think will end up being okay. But I do have the hesitations about the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco theming stuff. But otherwise, that’s it for me. So thanks a lot to our sponsors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, ExpressVPN, Basecamp, and Mac Weldon. and we will see you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to. Accidental, check the

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long

Because 3 hours wasn’t enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I am excited about the ARM transition, but I feel like it’s all so nebulous right now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it doesn’t even feel real. And I think as we start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing hardware and we start seeing the DTKs end up in people’s hands, I think I’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more and more excited about it. And I also forgot to mention a moment ago that store kit debugging. Mm-mm-mm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited for

⏹️ ▶️ John that. The thing about the ARM stuff is we know that there are new Macs that are going to be unlike anything

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve seen before coming. Like it’s one time we actually know, and we know in what way they’re gonna be different. They’re gonna have a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John different CPU, it’s gonna be system on a chips, and it’s just gonna be like, and

⏹️ ▶️ John again, they’re gonna be better. They’re gonna be faster, they’re gonna have better battery life. Like Apple wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t better. And

⏹️ ▶️ John of course they’re newer, just newer hardware is always better. So that’s what’s exciting. And they gave

⏹️ ▶️ John timelines, two year period, first Mac within this year. So things are looking

⏹️ ▶️ John super interesting

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for the future.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To that end, do you read the statement it’ll be a two-year transition to mean

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there will not be any Intel Macs sold in two years? Or any new Intel Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold in two years? Because that’s the only interpretation that I can come up with. But did I

⏹️ ▶️ John misread that? Not sold. I think that at the end of two years, their entire product

⏹️ ▶️ John line will be available with ARM CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whether they continue to sell Intel ones, of course they will, because you know, refurbs and maybe they’ll keep a model around and blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But it’s like we finished the transition, so pick a product line. Small laptop, medium laptop, laptop, iMac,

⏹️ ▶️ John desktop, mini, there’ll be ARM versions of all of those. That’s what I presume

⏹️ ▶️ John the definition is. And obviously any company making announcements two years in advance, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s what their plan is, we’ll see how it works out. You have to give them a little bit of leeway. It’s very difficult to

⏹️ ▶️ John plan something that’s complicated two years in advance, because lots of stuff can change totally unrelated to ARM

⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs that can, you know, change things. But yeah, I’m not going to hold them

⏹️ ▶️ John down to the day, right? But giving two years is like, look, this isn’t going to happen in six months, and it’s not even going to happen

⏹️ ▶️ John in a year. So and that should make people feel better about their Intel Macs that they just bought Casey. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’ll be supported for a long time, the real question is, when do they stop shipping

⏹️ ▶️ John a version of Mac OS that has Intel code in it? And that’s going to be even longer than two years.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it’ll be fine. I wanted to ask Marco, because a lot of people are going to ask this, and after show

⏹️ ▶️ John is a good place for you to chime in briefly. What does this do to your odds of creating a catalyst version

⏹️ ▶️ John of Overcast?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It certainly increases them. One thing that caught my eye in particular is the native split view support for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco three column mode. Because split view until now has been two column only.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so basically I’ve had to write my own split view for a number of occasions for a number of times.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s the significant challenge for UI unification and everything of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco old OS support. Right now I still support iOS 12. This is the first year I’ve ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco held on to the previous iOS version compatibility for any meaningful amount of time, because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco went 13 only very briefly last fall, and it got me in a lot of trouble, basically. I angered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, and I grossly underestimated how many new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco installations I would lose by requiring only the latest OS, because there were still a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on devices that couldn’t run iOS 13, and iOS 13 was so buggy that a lot of people didn’t adopt it very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly, and I can’t blame them. I actually recommended it. So, the real

⏹️ ▶️ Marco question for me is like, can I require 13 anytime soon even? And then if I require 13, can I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco require 14? Because 13 and 14 have the same device compatibility, I think. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can require 14 sometime like by midwinter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sometime during like an early part of the year, or if I decide, you know, if I just require

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it anyway, then I will be much more inclined to do a big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI redesign this year that will make Catalyst not suck.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That will use all this new stuff. I have other considerations too, like do I keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my custom font? You know, like right now, every time I turn off my custom font

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS, it looks like it’s, oh this isn’t Overcast anymore. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear the same thing from a lot of friends and users like you know I love the custom font but it’s hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to design and develop an app using your own custom font now that would look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good with all this new with all this new UI paradigm certainly I wouldn’t want to use a custom font on the Mac that would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look weird I think I don’t use the custom font on the watch that looks weird but do I use it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad or and the phone like it’s there’s issues that I have to work out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I so if I like ideally if I If I was starting from scratch today, making a whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch app or at least a whole scratch UI redesign, I would probably not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a custom font at all. I’d use system font for everything. I would try to make it as system default as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s lots of reasons why I would want to do that, but, you know, critical of which in this case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like you would get so much of this cross-platform UI with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little effort. And right now I don’t have the situation. now I have an extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly complicated surprisingly custom UI that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is specifically designed to work decently well on the phone to kind of work on the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not at all to work on the Mac and I for lots of reasons there is a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of of heft and and cruft in that API and in that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the UI that I have now and so I’ve been meaning for a while to like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically throw it away and start over and make something totally modern that would go from you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to three columns and and look good on the Mac and iPad and phone and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a that’s gonna be a lot of work that will require a newer OS than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I currently require at least one and ideally I’d be using SwiftUI maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I had to learn that and that’s in flux still so like there’s a whole bunch of stuff where like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years from now I almost certainly want to be there, but the path to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from here to there might be very messy and I am very hesitant to start down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that path.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was mostly asking and with the idea that you would be demotivated from the work that you

⏹️ ▶️ John just described by the fact that you could just run the iPhone version or the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco version right on your Mac without any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes. If that was not ARM only, if that also applied to Big Sur running on Intel,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be a very tempting procrastination win to just be like, you know what, I’m just going to not ever do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Because the reality is that’s not going to result in a lot of great Mac apps,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Overcast doesn’t need to be a great Mac app. Because it’s complicating everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just said, is that as much as I care about making Overcast this wonderful cross-platform, first-class

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple platform citizen, the reality is that it’s mostly an iPhone app. Almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one uses it on their iPads. No one uses the website, effectively no one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it basically is an iPhone app and I’m putting a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more effort into other platform support than it probably actually warrants.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not to say I’m not gonna do it because I want it, but ultimately Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be designed primarily and by far for the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And supporting any other platform is actually pretty strategically unimportant.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, you get that modernization that you just described eventually. You’ll have just a flexible UI that works on any

⏹️ ▶️ John screen size. It works on iOS, iPad, OS, and the Mac. And you can do that once and do it well, and you’ll cover

⏹️ ▶️ John most of the basics. Because in the end, Overcast is mostly a self-contained thing. It doesn’t need extensive

⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar structure and customizable toolbars and context menus. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what the interface does is well-represented by the actual interface. And in the end, people just want to listen to their podcasts and keep track

⏹️ ▶️ John of where they were across all the platforms. And so in the meantime, while you’re working on this big change, if

⏹️ ▶️ John people just run it on their iPhone version of their iMac, that’s solving the problem for them, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna keep listening to that podcast I was listening to before, and my podcasts are in overcast, so that’ll work out fine. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John looking forward to that. I use the web UI occasionally for that, but being able to just launch the iPhone app and have

⏹️ ▶️ John it sync and everything is way better than manually finding the episode and

⏹️ ▶️ John doing all that business with the web UI. Oh, I think we have to add this. Hello, people who managed to make

⏹️ ▶️ John it this far into the podcast. Congratulations, the few, the proud, who have made it to the end.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Maybe you

⏹️ ▶️ John listened to this whole podcast, that I should send a tweet and or email to the ATP guys

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell them they didn’t realize that they changed the version number. Well, yes, we did. In fact, I saw

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it in the app house screen when they first brought

⏹️ ▶️ John it up. This is, Big Sur is not 10.16. It is 11.0.

⏹️ ▶️ John People haven’t been keeping track of the naming. The Roman numeral 10 capital letter X

⏹️ ▶️ John left the Mac operating system a while ago, but they kept calling it 10 dot whatever. We

⏹️ ▶️ John made it up to 10 dot 15, but there will be no 10 dot 16. We’re going to 11, and they

⏹️ ▶️ John can do that because it’s just a version number. It’s no longer represented in the branded name

⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing, so you don’t have to change it to XI11, Roman

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco numeral,

⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. So that’s cool, but I bet it’s gonna break a bunch of people’s version number checks in their

⏹️ ▶️ John code, because that happens every time this happens. So when you’re porting to

⏹️ ▶️ John ARM and porting to Big Sur, don’t forget, if you weren’t already using all of the correct macros for your version

⏹️ ▶️ John number check, or instead of you’re doing something naughty, guess what? The number after the decimal point is not going to be greater

⏹️ ▶️ John than 15. In fact, it’s going to be 0. Look at the other number. It’s 11 now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also to save us from a lot of potential follow up that people have probably already written and already emailed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they got here, and they’re going to email us a second time saying, oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t listen to the end. Now we have two emails, thanks.

⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I enjoy when someone sends me a message and I know that they listen like 30 more

⏹️ ▶️ John seconds.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco In this case, if they

⏹️ ▶️ John listen three more hours, they’ll learn that in fact, we did all notice that it changed to 11. And I think that’s cool, honestly.

⏹️ ▶️ John When the number after the decimal point starts getting too big, it gets unwieldy. This is a perfect point to change to 11.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some of the chat suggested that maybe 11.0 is just for the ARM version. No, it’s gonna be for all of them. I say

⏹️ ▶️ John that based on no information, but I am super confident.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is kind of like maybe they should have considered making it 14 to match iOS, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it

⏹️ ▶️ John works. No. Ugh. The iOS already is in the midst of its own numbering problem, which is when

⏹️ ▶️ John you start to get into those high numbers, it gets weird. Mac OS gets to go to 11.0, and then they got.1 and.2.

⏹️ ▶️ John They got this long runaway of smooth, easy version numbers until they get up to 11.15, and

⏹️ ▶️ John then they have to change their mind again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so also to save us, as I was saying, from even more email, we are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much aware that there’s large things that we didn’t cover yet, such as, literally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right before we recorded, people discovered there’s this new, or Apple posted this new announcement about how later

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this summer they’re gonna have a thing where you can challenge App Store rules during your review or something. We saw that blow by,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were already recording. So we’ll look into that, and once there’s something to cover on the show, we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover that at some point. So there’s gonna be lots of stuff like that. There’s so much to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re already three hours in, There’s gonna be so much more to say. So we will get to it in later

⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John worry about that. Dwight, I gotta save myself again because apparently the chat room is telling me that 11.0 is just a marketing number and the

⏹️ ▶️ John real version is 10.16 under the covers. No! Is that true?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Wait, what? I assume that was a joke. I

⏹️ ▶️ John really, I don’t know. Well, we just saw the keynote, so we don’t know. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have Big Sur installed, so I can’t check. But I believe the About screen was showing me the real version over

⏹️ ▶️ John and I thought it was 11.0. Please don’t email us. By the time you listen to this show, we will have found out

⏹️ ▶️ John by actually installing the beta OS and we will have follow up next week.

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