433: Before We Leave the Dump
03 Jun 2021We funded a study that concluded that we are awesome.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Casey’s HDMI HOMI Update
- HDMI cable types
- Wi-Fi 6
- Dolby Vision and raised blacks (via Kai Kontio)
- iMac Fans
- Jonathan Dietz’s Apple Silicon cost-estimate spreadsheet
- Apple Podcasts issues:
- 🤮 Apple’s Self-Serving Puff Piece 🤮
- WWDC 2021 Predictions
Sponsored by:
- ExpressVPN: The fastest and most reliable VPN. Get an extra three months free with a 1-year package.
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Hullo Pillow: Your favorite pillow, guaranteed.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- HOMI update 🖼️
- Apple TV HDR black-level fix
- iMac-fan follow-up
- Jade cost estimates
- Sponsor: Hullo Pillow
- Apple Podcasts issues 🖼️
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Apple-funded study: Apple’s great!
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- WWDC hopes and dreams
- Ending theme
- Post-show
HOMI update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, I have a quick HDMI update. If you recall-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You mean a homie update?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A homie update, that’s right, I have a homie update. Oh, speaking of, I don’t think I’ll remember to put in the show notes, but somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had actually done a recreation of my God-Awful diagram on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an actual physical Newton, which was delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat room can find it, I will put in the show notes, but I won’t be able to dig it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would say it looks better than yours, by the way. It probably does,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it probably does. So yeah, my, my homie update, uh, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said last episode that I had seemed to kind of thread the needle and ride the line on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing a slower frame rate yet. Uh, still having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4k, I think Dolby vision, if I’m not mistaken, because if you recall, I have, you know, old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey HDMI cables in the walls and it, the Apple TV was not happy with whatever situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had going on and I was able to get 4k Dolby vision, but at like 30 Hertz or something like that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t I don’t remember the details, it doesn’t matter. Well, as it turns out over time, or no, I think I had it at 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hertz. And over the next few days, as we continue to use the Apple TV, which all in all, I really, really like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out the 50 Hertz Dolby Vision wasn’t good enough and I had to keep cranking it back and cranking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it back. And I think I ended up at either Dolby Vision or maybe just HDR at 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hertz until I finally got my fancy new 8K certified as John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a very good chuckle about, 8K certified HDMI cable from Monoprice And sure enough, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had that plugged in for a couple of days now and everything is better. Now I’ve only done it by draping it over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the TV and draping it down the side of the mantle above which the TV sits. Please, I know it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high, leave me alone. So it’s not installed properly yet, but at least at this point, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not getting flashes of blackness and disappearing audio. So I know you are all very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concerned about it. And I am happy to say that a new HDMI cable did indeed fix the problem. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how we got here and why we’re here, but I almost want to go back to a time where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if something changed about the cable, well, guess what? You gotta change the cable. Like it’s a whole different connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a whole different situation. Now that we have 34 different versions of it, not literally, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels like 34 versions of HDMI and 307 versions of USBC. Ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s frustrating. I kind of miss the old days when it was simpler and you would just have to throw all your cables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away every two minutes. Yeah, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides to that as well. Indeed. I don’t know, I feel like before stuff is even out, it’s so complex. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to order a new wifi router, or not, wifi access point today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turns out, if you go under your deck to try to boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your wifi range outside, and you mount under your deck, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount is generous, you rest on a beam under your deck,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an indoor access point that is not rated for outdoor use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that does not end well, does it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it then rains heavily for four days in a row,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently it doesn’t survive that. So I had to order a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new access point today, but I was, long story short, I had to figure out what Wi-Fi 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means. Is something that has Wi-Fi 6 on its name, does it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support all of the parts of it or not? How many different parts matter? How many of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be backwards compatible if I have a multi-access point situation? There’s all sorts of complexity there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I heard too earlier, I was listening to Back to Work with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Merlin was mentioning that apparently there’s, as part of the new Thread radio standard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’m not entirely sure if Thread is actually out and finished yet. I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know it’s in the new stage, but I don’t know if it’s done, but like, apparently there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thread radios in certain little gadgets and stuff, but there’s also HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compatible versions of thread, and not all thread radios are even HomeKit compatible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just, I’m like, there’s so much of these like, asterisks and exceptions to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of our new tech recently. Like, a port can’t just be a port, a cable can’t just be a cable. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all these, okay, you got an HDMI cable, great. Well, what kind of HDMI cable?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What version port are you pulling it into on one end or the other end?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What spec does the cable have? You know, we’ve seen all this too with USB-C, with Thunderbolt, like there’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many little like nitpicky, crappy little details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gotchas and checkboxes and exceptions to so much of our tech now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, like I’m with you, Casey, like maybe the world of, you know, throwing away our, you know, SCSI-1 cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to upgrade to SCSI-2 or whatever, Maybe that wasn’t that bad because at least you knew what you had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you knew what would work And if it didn’t physically fit it wouldn’t physically work and that and that was roughly
⏹️ ▶️ John That wasn’t it at all you have scuzzy tables as cables that fit perfectly and still nothing worked because you didn’t turn your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John on in The right order yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s cuz he was a bad example
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s definitely a bad example.
Apple TV HDR black-level fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about raised blacks in the Apple TV and Dolby Vision and all that jazz.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Kai Conteo wrote in to say that the raised blacks in Dolby Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Apple TV that are fixed in the latest Apple TV are apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed in the latest Apple TV hardware because he checked with the old Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV 4K but with the new TV OS and it did not fix the issue of raised blacks. So somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John the raised blacks fix is part of the hardware. This is just one testimonial from
⏹️ ▶️ John one listener, but that seems really weird to me that there was some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of problem that could only be fixed by a new revision of the hardware and wasn’t fixed by tvOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there you have it. If anyone else has different results, feel free to write in, but we were wondering and we got an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, now we know.
iMac-fan follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about one in two fan iMacs, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a YouTube video. We talked about this last week, I think, of like the low-end iMac has just
⏹️ ▶️ John one fan, or maybe two weeks ago, and the higher-end ones have two fans. So someone
⏹️ ▶️ John did a test to see what kind of difference does that make? And it turns out it makes a much bigger difference than I would have thought, so
⏹️ ▶️ John much so that it’s all the more baffling why Apple only put one fan in the low-end one. So what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens in the low-end one is that one fan turns on a lot more, spins a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, and is generally more annoying and noisier. And even despite
⏹️ ▶️ John all that, the thing runs hotter. So take a look at the video to see the results. I mean, obviously you’re running like sort of torture
⏹️ ▶️ John test benchmarks to really just, you know, maximize the CPU or maximize the GPU. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not representative of normal usage. I’m sure normal usage, one of these new iMacs, whether it has one fan
⏹️ ▶️ John or two is generally pretty quiet, but pushed to the limit, that one with one fan, it seems to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be better if it had two. So word to the wise, if you’re considering of the fancy colored new iMacs
⏹️ ▶️ John among all the other reasons to consider the higher end one like having the extra ports and everything, consider it for
⏹️ ▶️ John this reason too. Apparently it’s quieter and cooler.
Jade cost estimates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this is your time to shine. Tell me about if you don’t mind, Jonathan Dietz’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Silicon cost estimate spreadsheet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. So this is all Jonathan’s work, not mine. He is knowledgeable
⏹️ ▶️ John at the industry and tried based on what we know from these rumors, right? What the rumors say,
⏹️ ▶️ John try to come up with some monetary amounts for the various options for Jade C-Die
⏹️ ▶️ John and the 4C1 and all the different approaches. and there’s lots of detail in here. I pulled out a few, we’ll put a link in the show notes. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a public Google sheet that anyone can look at. In the left-hand column, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are a bunch of labels. Some of them I added a note
⏹️ ▶️ John to to explain what they are after talking to Jonathan. So like, for example, one of the things, like
⏹️ ▶️ John row 15 is die cost, and that is, according to Jonathan, an estimate of how much Apple would pay
⏹️ ▶️ John TSMC for each good working die, right? So if you’re wondering, like, what does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John pay to just get the thing sort of off the printer, so to speak. And then there are things like the chip cost,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the die cost plus all the other expenses, except the unpackage memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, there is the package cost, which is the chip, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the other stuff, plus the memory on the thing. And of course, the package cost changes based on how much memory you put on the package,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So just to give a few numbers thrown out of this spreadsheet,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jade C-Die, which the rumor, according to the rumors, is sort of like the building block
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of the higher end Apple Silicon chips. Jonathan’s estimate
⏹️ ▶️ John of how much does that cost Apple for each Jade C die that comes out of TSMC is $128. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then the RAM, the memory costs, this is LPDDR4, the RAM costs are,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get eight gigabytes of RAM, it’s like 34 bucks. And if you get 32 gigabytes of RAM, it’s 136 bucks. So if you get 32 gigs of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John already the RAM is more expensive to Apple. again, they’re buying this from
⏹️ ▶️ John the suppliers, the RAM is more expensive than the chip. And then if you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do the package cost, which is the RAM, the main system on
⏹️ ▶️ John a chip, all the packaging, all the other parts combined there, if you had an eight gigabyte one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is basically like the thing that goes on the motherboard. An eight gigabyte Jade C-Die
⏹️ ▶️ John would be 162 bucks, 16 gigabyte would be 196 bucks, and 32 gigabyte would be 264 bucks. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the MacBook Pro-ish chip, right? So those are pretty low
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers. Obviously, Apple’s cost is not the same, but when Apple was buying these chips from Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John they were more expensive than this. And then at the other extreme, Jade 4C die, which is the big honkin’ one,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, for the Mac Pro, this using the HBM2E, the high bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, instead of using the LPDDR. There’s some nuances about memory that we’ll get to in a second, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John for a 32 gigabyte version of those. Actually, let’s do the chip cost
⏹️ ▶️ John first. So the chip cost is $606. And remember, that is roughly comparable
⏹️ ▶️ John to what we were talking about before, like the Xeon, because remember, the Xeon doesn’t have any memory on it. The Xeon doesn’t have GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, right? Or if it does, it doesn’t have a good GPU. I had the same question, and I never looked up
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer. Does the Xeons have any integrated GPU on them or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing? I’m not sure. I mean, there’s a lot of different Xeons. There’s a lot of different families. The ones that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses like in the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro, they don’t have GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is like, how much does Apple pay TSMC to get something roughly like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Jade 4C die, hot off the press? $606, which is a far cry from
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re probably paying Intel for that Xeon. And then of course you add the memory costs, and again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, if you get 64 gigs of HBM2E, that’s $560, which so now the memory, even at 64 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John is similar to the price of the chip. And then the packaging
⏹️ ▶️ John costs are even more here because it’s a more complicated package. So the package costs for a J4C
⏹️ ▶️ John system on a chip with 32 gigs of RAM is $886 and with 64 gigs of RAM is $1,166. Again, these are all
⏹️ ▶️ John estimates, guesses based on rumors, you know, so take
⏹️ ▶️ John this with all the grain of salt. But let’s say this thing really does cost, say $1,200 when Apple buys it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They get a thing that they can put on a motherboard on a Mac Pro. it’s hard for
⏹️ ▶️ John me to believe that they’re gonna mark that up to add $7,000 to the price of your Mac Pro, because that would be a heck of a
⏹️ ▶️ John markup. Isn’t that hard to believe? It is though, because Intel, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the highest core count Xeon plus 64 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM, Intel is not selling you that, or no one is selling you that for $1,200 total.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see, we’ll see what the markup is. Here’s a couple paragraphs about the RAM that I thought were interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John just laying it out there just this is not our predictions this is Jonathan’s predictions just to see how
⏹️ ▶️ John right he ends up being or if this is all just way off because again this is just based on rumors so Jonathan says
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing that the sheet meaning the Google sheet doesn’t fully explain is the memory situation I’m pretty sure there will only be a single Jade
⏹️ ▶️ John C die floor plan the Jade C chop will only have 16 GPU cores enabled this is like what Marco said
⏹️ ▶️ John not due to yields on TSMC at 5 nanometers which are apparently fantastic but because without GDDR
⏹️ ▶️ John or HBM memory there is no way to feed more execution units than that. Sticking with LPDDR memory
⏹️ ▶️ John and an organic interposer will make that variant way less expensive and help keep it within the thermal envelope.
⏹️ ▶️ John The single tile Jade seed die for the 16-inch MacBook Pro will get up to 64 gigs of unified memory but it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be tiered. Two stacks or up to 32 gigs of HBM2E
⏹️ ▶️ John along with two packages are up to 32 gigs of LPDDR5. Each tile will also include dual channel DDR5
⏹️ ▶️ John memory controller which will support ECC RAM for the Pro Max which would then enable up to 1 terabyte of DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Jade 2C die and 2TB for the Jade 4C die variant. So there’s a lot of predictions about
⏹️ ▶️ John different kinds of RAM for different Macs and support for ECC, RDIMs, and using HBME
⏹️ ▶️ John or LPDDR5 depending on the machine. I have a hard time believing that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would have that kind of variety even in the Pro Macs that we know about like a Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac, a big Mac Pro thing, maybe a smaller Mac Pro thing. a lot of variety.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because, you know, again, look at the entire low to mid range of their line. There is no variation.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same thing in every single one. And to think that they’re going to mix three different kinds of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and like all these different kinds of chips on the high end, I find it hard to believe. But Jonathan has
⏹️ ▶️ John planted his flag and you can check out his spreadsheet and we’ll see how things turn out.
Sponsor: Hullo Pillow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Hullo Pillow. Have you ever tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a buckwheat pillow? This is totally different than the pillows most of us are used to. Instead of being like a squishy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag of fluff or duck feathers or whatever, which tends to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collapse under the weight of your head and make your neck bend in weird places, the Hullo Buckwheat Pillow is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like a bean bag. This allows you to adjust its shape and thickness, and so you can support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your head and neck however you want to. want to, you just move the fill around and it stays where you put it. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hullo stays cooler and drier compared to typical pillows. You know, the air just flows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right through it, so it tends to breathe a lot better. You don’t have to keep flipping your pillow over. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried this, I love it, my wife loves it, she actually stole mine. It’s an incredible thing. It’s really cool if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want like a nice, supportive, cool, sleeping, like beanbag pillow. And you can adjust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it however you want. You can unzip the side, you can add or remove fill, you can buy more from the website if you need some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later on. It’s amazing. People have been sleeping on these things for centuries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve actually been used extensively in Japan. You might even see them on the pillow menu at fancy hotels that are fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to have pillow menus, I guess. And this is all made in the USA with quality construction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and materials, a certified organic case, and buckwheat is grown and milled right here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the US. So see for yourself. You can sleep on it for 60 nights. If Hello isn’t right for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just send it back and they’ll give you a full refund, no questions asked. Go to hullopillow.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. That’s H-U-L-L-O-P-I-L-L-O-W dot com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you try more than one, you get a discount of $20 per pillow depending on the size. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco orders are fast, free shipping, and 1% of all profits are donated to the Nature Conservancy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So once again, hullopillow.com slash ATP. Check out a buckwheat pillow, it’s great in the summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Hullo for sponsoring our show.
Apple Podcasts issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Apple Podcasts app and show notes. Apparently they’re broken again. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to put this in here because I wanted to ask Marco about it. Do you know what the deal is for this? People complain to us a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about like, Hey, I tried to go to your show notes in the Apple Podcasts app and they either don’t appear or
⏹️ ▶️ John they appear, but they’re totally unformatted and there’s no links. And for those who don’t know, as
⏹️ ▶️ John we, as the song that plays on our podcast describes, you can find the show notes at at ATP.fm, which is a website.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there, in your web browser, you can then click on the links. But in any decent
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast app, while you’re listening to the podcast, you can also look at the show notes, somehow within
⏹️ ▶️ John your podcast app in Overcast, you swipe to the left and you’ll see the show notes. And in the show notes, we put links.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like for example, there’ll be a link to Jonathan’s spreadsheet. So while you’re listening to the show, you can look at the spreadsheet that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about. Apple Podcast, the brand new fancy version, apparently shows our show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but ignores all the HTML and formatting. So it’s just a bunch of texts. So you can’t click any links because it
⏹️ ▶️ John removes all the links and also all the indenting and the formatting. So it just looks like a bunch of, you know, just randomly
⏹️ ▶️ John spaced text lines. And I’m wondering, is this like, is this intended behavior as Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, we will refuse to render HTML in your show notes. Like I don’t see the
⏹️ ▶️ John point of show notes if you can’t include links, because that’s kind of, I mean, I guess you could put a summary
⏹️ ▶️ John or description or something, but like for shows like ours and for the tradition of many shows, things
⏹️ ▶️ John you talk about on the show, it’s great to give people links to them. And I know we have a website that you can go to
⏹️ ▶️ John and do the same thing, but it’s nice to be able to do it from within the podcast app. So Marco, do you have any insight into this or is this just?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, plenty. I’m just gonna try to limit myself for time. All right. Yeah, because this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not gonna be a major topic tonight, but Apple Podcasts has been going through a lot of changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some more of which I think we’re about to get to, but just for the show notes thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple Podcasts app, I don’t think has ever supported actual rendered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTML show notes, or at least it hasn’t supported them for a while. What it’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is the dumbest, simplest, calling strip tags
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from PHP. It’s literally just stripping away the HTML tags. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even fixing the whitespace problems that result from doing that. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody’s like, you know, CS 101 project of like how to use a reg X to strip HTML. It’s like the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible way to do it. And, you know, if they actually wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not support HTML in this field that is very clearly supposed to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, HTML inclusive in almost any other app, I would hope they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put some effort into making it at least look more reasonable than it does. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the real reason for this is that the design of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast app is increasingly diverging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the way podcast listeners expect things to be who have listened to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for more than a year. There’s these multiple worlds of podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The world of like big professional podcasts and mass market appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely doesn’t use show notes. Like if you look at the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes for a big name podcast that people in your life, you as the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerd, that somebody in your life would come to you and be like, oh, I just started listening to podcasts, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blank. You know, whatever podcast would be in that name, in that blank spot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look up that podcast, look up its episodes and see if it uses show notes well, if at all. See if there’s any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTML anywhere in them or any attempt to provide useful information or links or anything? And the answer’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be no almost every time. Because show notes, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chapters, or not running reruns in your own feed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not running crappy ads, this is the kind of thing that’s increasingly being relegated to…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Germany. Yeah, Germany, and the nerdy areas of podcasting, like where we live, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nerdy podcasts that care about details like this and try to put production effort into that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as opposed to the mass market podcasts that barely even have links half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, like for each episode, like you’re lucky if there is a permalink to an episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Apple Podcasts app being used mostly by the mass market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, and most of the nerds don’t use the Apple Podcasts app anymore, it has driven them away if they were there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin with, the Apple Podcasts app is serving its audience in the sense that it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lowered its standards dramatically for the like metadata production
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of podcasts. And so this doesn’t really impact most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerdy podcasts like us because most people listening to our podcasts who would care about such things as show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly aren’t using Apple Podcasts. That being said, this is not good enough and they should fix this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the weird downside of this is Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, I don’t know if the current version does, but most of the recent versions of Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have supported the technique of pasting in links, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco URLs as text, and then it like auto links the bare URL that’s in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the text and turns it into a link, but then you have the giant, ugly, like HTTP, big URL,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raw text showing to the user. It has supported that for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So unfortunately, what this means is that if people want their links to show up in Apple Podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show notes, they really should just enter them as bare links like that. The downside is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes them giant and ugly in every single other app as well. That’s not a great situation. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna hopefully be able to just be stubborn here and not do that and continue producing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show notes the way they look good in the apps that all of you actually use, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly, you know, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro, like, you know, it’s like, it’s the nerdy apps, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because those apps are much more appealing to nerds like us and nerds like you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the meantime, Apple is gonna keep doing whatever they’re doing with Apple Podcasts and best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of luck to them. It’s turning out great for me. I’ve had a lot of new users to Overcast in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last couple of weeks, thanks to Apple Podcasts. So they can keep doing what they’re doing. I wish they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a little bit better just for their own sake and for the sake of the business, but the path they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, I don’t fully understand. And I don’t think, I think it has diverged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a lot from the world of podcasts and the way we expect podcast apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work that we live in.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kind of weird to me that the premium podcasting services that have Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ John exclusive podcasts and all these other ones with their own apps and everything don’t seem to
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything to take advantage of their proprietary nature and make
⏹️ ▶️ John their podcasts better in terms of the interface. Having
⏹️ ▶️ John deep support for chapters and show notes, that’s just basic stuff that we can do on OpenRSS.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if some company controlled the entire stack, like you can only play these in our app and we control
⏹️ ▶️ John our app, you can do all sorts of fancy things with podcasts. You don’t have to wait for some kind of industry-wide
⏹️ ▶️ John consensus for additions to the RSS feed that are supported by a reader.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just do whatever you want. It’s your own thing. And you can make the listening experience even better. I mean, we do
⏹️ ▶️ John chapter images and links to chapter images. Like they don’t even support functionality equivalent to what
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do in a real podcast client. It just seems like they’re sort of, I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they think that’s not important. Maybe for these mass market podcasts, people just hit play and that’s it. And only like you said, nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts that have all these additional features. But I, maybe it’s because I’m nerdy. I listened to like
⏹️ ▶️ John a mass market, big podcast, like This American Life. And they’re talking about something, maybe they’ll be talking about a website
⏹️ ▶️ John and I will instinctively go to try to find the link to the website. I’m like, oh, this podcast doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ever link to anything they talk about. No. Right? And it’s just, like, when you’re listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you just go to Google and you type in words that you heard on the podcast. But they know the link to
⏹️ ▶️ John this website or this author’s book or whatever. Like, anyway, I find it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t understand. Like, the big podcasts out there have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco substantial production staffs. You know, we make this show as three people. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts out there that have a lot of listeners have way more than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their shows. They have a staff, they have a process, they have larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco budgets and big companies backing them often. I don’t understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t put in the basic effort to make their metadata, the titles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show notes, why don’t, and chapters, they could do that. The big dynamic ad insertion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms don’t support chapters, not because it’s hard, it’s actually trivially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. It’s easier to alter the duration of chapter markers than it is to alter the duration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the MP3. But they don’t support it because none of their clients have ever asked for that, because none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them use chapters, because I don’t know why, because they couldn’t be bothered. Meanwhile, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies go around investing in platforms and trying to get these big efforts together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are like, oh, we wanna be able to show timed metadata and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop up links and promos during certain time since the shows, wouldn’t that be great? And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, we can already do that. Like that’s literally what chapters are. The standard has existed for like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. Like, this is not, you don’t need to create some giant new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform to do this. Today’s platforms can do it, you’re just not doing it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know why. I assume it’s mostly just, you know, ignorance that these things exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even once they learn that these things exist, people like us in Germany yelling at them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still don’t do it. I don’t understand. But I think a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of the flaws in Apple Podcasts specifically I think can be traced to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can often tell when an app has had its design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken over by the business people. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see this in so many apps, so many services. When you look at the way Apple Podcasts has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the direction they’ve taken recently, and I can tell you this is a widely held opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the emails and tweets and reviews I’m getting from my app as people flee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Podcasts over the last few weeks. It sure seems to me and a lot of those people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who tell me, the new Apple Podcasts app seems to be designed by people who don’t listen to podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think that’s unreasonable of an assumption. I think it’s very clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the business people take over an app’s design, it starts to prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the goals of the company that makes the app over the goals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what the users might actually want. And it starts to treat the users more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheep to extract more money from, rather than like let’s make the best app we can to attract more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users. And that is, I think, where Apple Podcasts is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going, unfortunately. And again, while this is kind of good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for apps like me in the sense that it drives listeners away from them and towards me, I also don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love that they’re kind of poisoning the ecosystem with mediocrity and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just really frustrating a lot of podcast listeners out there. Because some portion of those podcast listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who get frustrated by the Apple Podcasts app will go and find apps like mine. But I think a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portion of them will just be frustrated with podcasts and never realize they even can go look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some other app and just kind of be upset with it and maybe listen to fewer podcasts in the future. And I don’t want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d rather have a podcast be good and compete with them based on them being good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than accept they’re like they’re fleeing disturbed fans who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upset about the terrible things that they’re doing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they get better. I hope they work through their issues they’re having, because ultimately it’s not good for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business if the biggest app in the business is not doing so well with quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, 99% Invisible is a podcast that I really enjoy, and their show notes are like the summary blurb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a link to the web where they have like a blog post for each episode. And that’s where like all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the useful information is, which is in contrast to what we do, which is put all of the useful information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. Imagine that, right where you can see them. Wouldn’t that be convenient? Ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very frustrating. Well, you know what else might be frustrating if we were participating in it, but we are not, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple Podcast subscriptions have been delayed to this month. I don’t remember when they were originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slated to come out, but they’re apparently coming out sometime in June.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it was late May originally, but I mean, honestly, this is not surprising. I don’t think it’s that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a deal. I think it’s gonna be a few weeks of a delay, but they’ve had a lot of issues with the rollout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. They’ve had a lot of backend issues, a lot of issues with people’s logins, server issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a period last week where this show just disappeared from Apple Podcasts for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day. And this has been happening to many people’s podcasts. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it feels like as a podcast service administrator,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like they’re doing some kind of large migration or rollout across a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of servers and podcast accounts and stuff like that. And it seems like part of this migration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or update process that they’re doing on the backend pulls every show out of Apple Podcasts for a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it is migrated to something. Because it’s happened to almost everyone I know who has a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at different times, like on a rolling basis across the last few weeks, there’s been all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of problems with Apple Podcasts. So again, this is something that I don’t take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of joy in. I want them to be better because they represent such a big part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the ecosystem that if anything about Apple Podcasts is bad, it affects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire ecosystem in a pretty big way. So I hope they get their crap together here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what this shows, and I don’t intend here to insult the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Podcasts team specifically, because the impression I always have gotten from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, and not from the actual people because they don’t tend to talk, but the feeling I’ve gotten,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little things I’ve heard here in there, little things I’ve picked up here and there. I think the Apple podcast team is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. It seems like they’ve always been really under-resourced for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problems that they have to deal with. I think this lands right at management. Whoever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is above them and responsible for things like resource allocation and timing and release timing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think all this lands on them. It seems like this team has been just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally underwater after this launch that feels to have been maybe a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit rushed. And that’s to a team that normally doesn’t have a ton of resources to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot and move very quickly to begin with. So I hope management has learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this a little bit, and I hope they clean up this mess quickly.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at squarespace.com slash ATP. Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace makes it very easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anybody, regardless of their skill level and nerd level, to make exceptional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professional websites. And they take care of all the really hard stuff for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. There’s no coding required. You don’t have to know HTML and JavaScript and CSS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of that stuff. There’s no servers to maintain. They do all that for you. There’s no software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrades or patches to apply to your system. They do that too. You don’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping everything up and running. They do that too. None of that is on your plate. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can focus on your business or your podcast or your storefront or your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portfolio. you’re building a website for, you can focus on that. And you can use their intuitive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to use visual previewing tools so that you don’t ever have to see a line of code. You do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, you know, drag and drop and, you know, visual effects and live previewing and everything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing to make websites on Squarespace. You can also see for yourself without giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them a dime. Next time you want to make a website for something, whether it’s something simple, like a few pages of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information for your business, or something that’s traditionally pretty hard to host yourself like a store or a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can do all that on Squarespace. Next time you have an idea for one of these, start a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Squarespace. And you don’t have to give them a credit card. So in case you forget about it, don’t worry about it. Start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a free trial with no credit card required and build the site and you will see how incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy it is how far you get in like an hour. It’s really incredible. See for yourself at Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comm slash ATP. When you decide to sign up, Be sure to head back there to Squarespace.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP and use offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. That’s Squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP offer code ATP for 10% off your first purchase. Thank you so much to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace for sponsoring our show. Make your next move with Squarespace.
Apple-funded study: Apple’s great!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey May I be grumpy just for a moment and then we’ll talk about fun things? Sure. Did you see this thing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God, the disgusting like study they commissioned about how awesome they are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I just I really just need to get this off my chest. I promise I’ll make it quick. So Apple today posted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meeting pandemic challenges. Apple developers grow total billings. First of all, what the hell does that even mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sales in the App Store ecosystem by 24% to $643 billion in 2020. New study details how small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey businesses innovate on the App Store to reach customers around the world. This is the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nauseating, disgusting, although very cute animations in it, disgusting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey puff piece about how they don’t need to be sued into oblivion for antitrust. I’m sure that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right vernacular, but you know what I mean. God, it feels so gross. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure since Apple has been a big company for a long time, that they’ve done things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this for a long time. But I feel like, golly, this is a far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cry from what was it? Thoughts on Flash or whatever, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in some ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a similarly self-serving puff piece, but was executed in so much less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a, in just an incredibly less gross way. And I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, I see this and I understand what they’re doing and it just, it’s just so gross,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. I just, I don’t, I don’t like it. Am I being unfair?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so. I mean, I feel like in, and part of this is, you know, just the time and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale of the company, but I definitely feel like in the Steve Jobs era, when Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was going to be a jerk to you, he would just come right out and tell you, you know, he, he didn’t try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too hard to BS us when he was being a real jerk about something. something. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more honest about the jerkitude that he was conducting. We’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very different time now. We have a very different company, a much larger company, a much later time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, he’s been gone now for almost 10 years. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a very different context here. But I have a very low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opinion of Apple’s leadership right now. Very very low opinion. And it’s not because of the products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The products are pretty good. You know, I’m still excited about the products. We’ll get to that later. Like I’m still excited. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be excited next week about the products, but wow, do I have a low opinion of Apple’s, you know, political
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moves recently. And I have very low respect for Tim Cook.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My respect for Phil Schiller has decreased significantly since the Epic trial and the stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone on there. Apple is trying to defend a fairly indefensible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco position with their App Store politics and all the commission BS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all their requirements and all the anti-competitive stuff. What they’re doing is very transparent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re playing the politics game and they’re trying to really BS the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world into their point of view that their current practices with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store cut and everything are okay. And it’s just, it’s so blatant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost insulting to our intelligence. Like, they continue to have all these like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-serving puff pieces. Oh look, we commissioned another study about how awesome we are. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just gross. And, you know, it’s a big company. There’s a lot of people in the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really respect a lot of people in the company, and I really respect a lot of the stuff that comes out of the company. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for me, I have very conflicting feelings, because I love the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make. I love a lot of the stuff they do. And I know that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of really good people in that company that are not bullshit artists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way their executives have been recently. And I know there’s a lot of people in that company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not trying to insult our intelligence and value the things that we do as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers and things like that and, and are not super supportive of all the BS that the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been, has been spouting in this area. And I want to continue to be a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all of those people and all the things they make. But the people at the top are making it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard because they’re so completely full of shit and they’re insulting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our intelligence over and over again. And I just I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the regulation comes and the court battles work themselves out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the next couple years of appeals most likely like I hope this just this gets flushed out over a couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we can be done with this stupid issue and we can go back to enjoying the rest of the products because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a shame that the people at the top are throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away so much reputation and goodwill to try to defend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tiny part of the business that they don’t even need and it’s tarnishing the reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the entire rest of the company’s output that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are really good and making good stuff like their stuff is getting tarnished and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people are having a sour taste about the company because the couple of execs at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top are really defending this little garbage part of the business. It’s mostly about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extracting rents from casino games for children. Like, is that really worth it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s such a sour taste in my mouth and it’s yet another like just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like this side of the company and I hope that we, I hope this this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era of this app store drama ends soon so we can move on to something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And it’s, it’s so frustrating, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you had said, there’s so much about this company and the products that they make. And all of us know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of people that work there and so much about about it is admirable and is so great, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deserves our praise. And then the direction it’s gone lately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly with regard to legal issues. I just, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so frustrating. It makes it hard for me to enjoy the totality of what is Apple Inc. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, I’m probably getting unreasonably worked up about what is ultimately a company made to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remove my money from my wallet. But I don’t know. It’s, it’s our, as we’ve talked about in the past, it’s our team.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We like our team. We want our team to do well. And right. And I feel like it’s, it’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that our team is in a slump to just absolutely beat this metaphor to death, but it’s that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey willfully, our team is willfully getting rid of all of its like star players
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that it can get these untested and unproven people that are a lot cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. That’s a strategy and it may pay out, it may pay off, but it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good strategy. And I, I, I liked the, I liked the people we were already rooting for. Why do we got to go this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other direction? And I don’t know. I don’t, it’s just so frustrating. It makes it hard to be a fan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the totality of what is Apple. And I, again, I’m, I’m probably being unreasonably, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if emotional is a word or worked up or whatever, but I just, I, there’s so much about Apple stuff that makes me so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and, and so much that it enables me to do that makes me happy. It’s, it’s because of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that I can, that over the last year and a half, I’ve been able to keep up friendships and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family relationships and, and see people from far away. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember as silly as it sounds. I remember going to Singleton with you, Marco, in, I don’t remember what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year it was, like 2011, 2012, something like that. Maybe, maybe it was after that. I don’t remember if ATP was a thing or not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but anyways, we, we went to Singleton. You and I, you had been a couple of times. I only went once and this was right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after FaceTime and FaceTime audio were a thing. And I remember I was in Montreal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I could call Aaron on wifi for free, which sounds kind of dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, but at the time that was monumental, if I had gone just a few months before to Singleton, like if it was hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in spring instead of fall, the only way I could have spoken to Aaron was using something awful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Skype or like doing an international call or, you know, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s, that’s the way I remember. Maybe that’s not factually true, but that’s the way I remember it. And all I had to do to call Aaron was to a FaceTime audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call was easy peasy. And you know what? It just fricking worked. And I just, I, it’s stuff like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to lose sight of all the incredible things that Apple has done for people and for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I mean, God, my living is made through Apple. It’s either talking about Apple or building stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple platforms, but nevertheless, it’s just, it’s so frustrating. It makes me feel gross
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by association when I read these puff pieces, these absolutely disgusting puff pieces that you would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see come out of like, I don’t know, Adobe or Sun or, I don’t know, Some big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gross business. Some? I don’t know. I don’t know. That was a poor example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just some big gross, Facebook maybe, like some big gross business that none of us like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would do this sort of self-indulgent puff piece. And now Apple’s doing it. And it’s just, it’s gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like it. I want nothing more than to just be purely excited for WBDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week. Our next show is going to be the WBDC show. And I want nothing more than just to be happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and excited about that and to be looking forward to it in a more pure way. And this year I can’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like less excited than ever this year. And I hate that. I hate that they’ve put me in this position to feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of toxic feeling towards them as a company. Because they’ve just been so gross recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the court case and all this stuff. The things that they’ve said on the stand, the positions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve held, they’ve just been so gross. And then they go put out these self-serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studies that are just very thinly veiled political BS things. It’s just like I, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I don’t like feeling this way about this company that I otherwise like so much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think I am considerably less upset about this than both of you. I mean, obviously the context
⏹️ ▶️ John of this context of this press press release doesn’t exist in a vacuum, right? Part of the, the, the thing that you were both
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about this press release isn’t just the content of the press release, but the fact that, you know, that there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a counterpart. Oh, I see what this is about. It’s about the court case and the government
⏹️ ▶️ John action and all the other stuff. And that’s what kind of that combination makes us look different. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has always done PR stuff like this, and they have always bragged
⏹️ ▶️ John about the revenue they generate in the app store and how big of a check they give to developers. And this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John an elaboration on an established strategy of them saying, here’s what we think is good. And if you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John read the press release, unlike the court testimony, which, you know, many developers
⏹️ ▶️ John are rightfully upset about, because again, I think because Apple has to sort of present
⏹️ ▶️ John the information and the legal argument that will win them the case, or well, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not they have to, that seems to be what they’re doing, and that is necessarily, it cares less about
⏹️ ▶️ John your feelings, but this press release is more or less, you know, yes, it’s a puffy
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of saying Apple, you know, saying, hey, how great we are, but the things they say
⏹️ ▶️ John in it are not really wrong and not particularly objectionable and at no point do they
⏹️ ▶️ John do the things they did in the trial and in the various internal emails that we’ve seen where they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John act in nefarious ways or claim ownership of things that developers feel like are not theirs
⏹️ ▶️ John to claim ownership of or make disingenuous claims about the nature of the market and all this other stuff. It’s generally
⏹️ ▶️ John just a straightforward press release. I know where you’re both coming from emotionally speaking, but I have a hard time
⏹️ ▶️ John getting worked up about this press release. I mean, like, I think I was more worked up the first 17
⏹️ ▶️ John times they put up a slide that that said how many billions of dollars they paid to developers. And even that, through repetition, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John become sort of used to or whatever. So I’m with you on the, and we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to this maybe later in the show, I’m with you on the sort of reputational damage that Apple has to deal with in terms of its
⏹️ ▶️ John relationship with its developer base. And that is surely a big focus of the WWDC because this
⏹️ ▶️ John is their conference where they ostensibly talk to developers. But I’m mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John not bothered by this press release and mostly able to just look forward to the announcements of WWDC and see what it is that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does, if anything, to try to repair this relationship.
Sponsor: ExpressVPN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you ever been using Chrome and used their incognito mode? It’s probably not as incognito
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you think. Because like the Chrome browser itself, this is a Google product, and Google has made its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortune by tracking your movements online. There’s even a $5 billion class action lawsuit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against them in California, where it’s accused of secretly collecting user data. Google’s defense was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, incognito does not mean invisible. So how do you actually make yourself as invisible as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online Express VPN, because it turns out that even in incognito mode, your online activity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still gets tracked and data brokers still get to buy and sell your data. Because one of the main points they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base the tracking on is your IP address. Data harvesters use your IP to uniquely identify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and your approximate location. But with Express VPN, your connection gets rerouted through an encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server, and your actual IP address is masked from the sites you visit. So every time you connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ExpressVPN, you get a random IP address shared by many other ExpressVPN customers. That makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder for third parties to identify you or harvest your data. And best of all, ExpressVPN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is super easy to use. No matter what device you’re on, phone, laptop, even your smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV, all you have to do is tap one button for instant protection with ExpressVPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you really want to go incognito and protect your privacy, secure yourself with a number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rated VPN. ExpressVPN.com slash ATP to get three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra months for free. That’s ExpressVPN.com slash ATP to get that three extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months with a one year package ExpressVPN.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to ExpressVPN
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
WWDC hopes and dreams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s be happy. Let’s get excited about WWDC. And we can talk about predictions in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any which way, shape or form. I don’t know if we want to do it by like subject matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I guess broadly, as much as I’m down in the dumps about some of the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s doing right now, broadly, I’m really excited for this WWDC. I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is not an original thought, but you know, I feel like there’s a lot of smoke coming from Cupertino
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s looking like there might be some fire behind it. So I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this should be a pretty good one in terms of the consumer side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. I’m not terribly convinced it’s gonna be particularly remarkable from the developer side of things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the consumer side of things, I’m really looking forward to it. So I don’t know, is this the year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we get vastly improved iPad software? Is iPad OS really gonna come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into its own this year?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before we leave the dump real quick, a lot of people think that Apple will announce something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at WBDC that will help repair the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relationship in some way, whether it’s a change to App Store policies or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just want to go on record as saying, I don’t think there’s going to be anything of the sort. I think if they’re going to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be a totally separate thing that would not be held for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WBDC. That’s a whole separate thing, and I don’t expect anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. I think this is going to be, if anything, it’s going to be intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a diversion away from all of that to focus on the new tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and hopefully get all of us to temporarily forget how much they’ve angered us over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last year or two.
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that we want to go into that immediately about how they can repair the relationship. But I feel like one category
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing there that fall that is a tech thing, but also would help repair the relationship in a strange way is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of Casey’s favorite things. If they announce vastly improved documentation, no, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, we’re taking a smaller cut of the apps or now you’re allowed to use your own payment. It’s not that I know what you’re getting at. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they do say, oh, and by the way, we here is the culmination of our secret year
⏹️ ▶️ John long, let’s fix all the documentation project. That would help. I mean, it’s I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a different thing. It’s like, Oh, how does that help? It doesn’t help me anything with my like your app that you rejected, or
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that you won’t let me use a payment method. But it does help like, make developers happier, like just giving
⏹️ ▶️ John them a good thing over here doesn’t make the bad thing go away. But it does make you feel a little bit better. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that category of stuff where it’s like, developer tools, or experience
⏹️ ▶️ John falls into the category of, and I’m mostly with Marco, of like, Apple’s gonna show us
⏹️ ▶️ John all the new things they have and try to get developers excited about it. New hardware, new software,
⏹️ ▶️ John and new tools for you to get your job done. And part of that is potentially vastly improved documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I’m predicting that at this point, but I think that is a plausible thing that they could announce. As opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John like what Marco was getting at, like saying, oh, and by the way, today we’re announcing you’re allowed to use any payment method because that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s yeah. I the documentation that would be amazing like that. I mean talk about what would get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know a massive applause in the room, but I just think it’s unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s the kind of thing that if they’re going to do it, they might do it more quietly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just over time and honestly, even if they announced some kind of new documentation effort. I’m not sure I would believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it unless I saw it. It might be like, oh, we’re gonna document all this stuff. Really, will you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How far back have you gone? Is it done yet? That being said, before I forget, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably never have an opportunity to bring this up otherwise, but I recently had to relook up some documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some of my favorite functions, the VDSP functions in the Accelerate library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have amazing documentation. Because these are mostly functions that do like math
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operations on large arrays of numbers. And they like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have things like, they have graphs that show like, if you apply this function, it’ll apply,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll like the results will look like this graph on your numbers. Like it’s actually really well documented,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is kind of funny because the functions themselves are comically unintuitive if you’ve never seen them before, like the names of the functions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the parameter names, like it’s all like, it looks like just garbage soup of letters that mean nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re new to it. but documentation’s really good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, clearly, some of the teams in Apple have the ability to make good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documentation. So that’s why, I don’t think the company is somehow opposed to it, I just think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not allocating the resources. I mean, this is yet another, I mean, this is kind of the story of Apple, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have infinite money, but they don’t have infinite engineering resources,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or time, or technical writing resources, like whatever combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources required to make good documentation. And I think it’s just a matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, management needs to allocate more resources to this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that might mean expanding certain departments in a big way that might be harder to do than just throw money at it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they can do it. There’s nothing stopping them from having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best documentation in the world. They could do it if they wanted to. And I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that someday management will want to, because that’s all it would take.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not gonna be super easy. I’m sure there’s hard challenges involved in expanding certain things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they want to make great documentation, they can. If anybody can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, it’s them. And I hope they start valuing that at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A man can dream. I don’t know. I got some interesting feedback after I wrote that post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in November about their piss-poor documentation, and it sounds to me like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are some pretty systemic issues within Apple that is preventing any sort of real, honest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to goodness improvement happening. Unless, you know, since I spoke with some of these people, maybe things have changed since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then. Certainly I wrote this blog post in hope that it would get passed around and something would happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because gosh knows that anything we say on this podcast, nobody ever hears it that matters. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we try. No, no, no, you’d be surprised. They hear it. But you know, like as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some podcaster once said, I forget who it was, success hides problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm, yeah, I have heard that somewhere. Wish I knew who it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t make that up, it’s from a book. Ha ha ha ha ha ha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It was a Pixar one, wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it, by Catmull? Yeah, Ed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Catmull’s book, yeah. All right, can we please, I’m the one who brought us to the dumps, let me bring us back out. All right, let’s talk about happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. Is this the year, John Syracuse, is this the year for iPadOS to really shine?
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually I prefer to start with hardware because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m picturing like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork for this episode just being like a bunch of trains just derailing and just
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re hovering around the topic it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and predictions
⏹️ ▶️ John and the reason I want to talk about hardware is this is always the debate of like how much does Apple want to talk about hardware at
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC because really unless the hardware has some new feature that they want developers to support like say they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John putting out a bunch of VR glasses like that’s hardware that is clearly has a developer focus. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is, oh, it’s just like a new laptop or something, there’s probably not much for people to
⏹️ ▶️ John do development wise that they differently to support the new MacBook Pros than the old MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pros, right? Or we assume based on the rumors, but Apple does choose to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John because as it often says, like developers are their biggest pro customers or whatever they say. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John most developers use laptops because most people use laptops and developers are people, you know, so it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros at WWDC makes sense. But beyond that, the times like I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, didn’t they do the Mac Pro WWDC? Yeah, like, like, oh, we’re gonna do the Mac Pro WWDC just because it’s been so freaking long,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s done, and we have
⏹️ ▶️ John announce it, right? It’s not a huge developer angle. It’s like, but anyway, if they have
⏹️ ▶️ John pro hardware, and it happens to be around WWDC, it seems like they want to
⏹️ ▶️ John announce it. But they also want to leave time for potentially software stuff. So we’ll talk about software in a in a bit, but I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John start by saying, what do you think hardware wise is, makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to announce at this event? We still don’t know because again, we, it’s not like these have Intel chips in them. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we have no timelines. We have no idea if the chips that we keep talking about those rumors, maybe they’ve been done
⏹️ ▶️ John for months. Maybe they’re not going to be done for six months. Like that really determines whether they can launch any hardware because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think they’re going to launch another crop of M1 based Macs. I think they’ve put the M1 in like every Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John they could think of. So it’s either the new better than M1 thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is ready in some reasonable timeframe or it’s not. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think we have any information. I certainly don’t personally have information on whether the
⏹️ ▶️ John new better than M1 thing is ready. So I’m just gonna assume that it is and say, assuming it is
⏹️ ▶️ John ready, what do we think they would announce? And the only prediction that I feel comfortable with is MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s gonna be a Mac Pro. I can’t even feel confident that there would be the non, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the Pro iMac or a bigger, you know, iMac. I feel like MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one and only thing that I have any reasonable feelings about appearing
⏹️ ▶️ John onstage in this thing and then beyond that, everything would be gravy. What do you think about hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I think you’re right that if it’s anything, it’s gonna be a MacBook Pro, preferably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the new 16 or what have you. But when’s the last time they did a MacBook Pro or really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any Apple laptop at WWDC, has that happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, when they’re ready, the original Retina 15 in 2012. WWDC, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, when they’re ready, and that is probably the most popular machine for
⏹️ ▶️ John developers who have a quote unquote pro machine. Oh, totally. Right, and so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it fits perfectly in the show, even though, again, there’s not anything you have to do. It’s like, it’s introducing a tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you think of your audience as developers, oh, here, developers, you were looking for a new tool to do your job, this one is
⏹️ ▶️ John way better than the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro, you know, and assuming the rumors are true, it’s got all the ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s got MagSafe, and it’s got SD, and it’s got a great screen, and it’s got an ARM processor. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a perfect product to announce at this time. And again, assuming the chip is ready, I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a shoe-in, and it makes perfect sense. But beyond that, like, is it important for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to announce the iMac that uses the same chip as that? Probably not, and they just announced
⏹️ ▶️ John the other iMac, so that doesn’t seem like it would work. I don’t think the super duper pro ones are ready yet. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, again, what am I basing that on? Nothing really, just the, you know, tradition that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro size thing always takes longer and is less important and they wouldn’t waste time with it at this show
⏹️ ▶️ John unless, you know, even with the M1, it’s not like they released all those M1 Macs at the same time. And you can say, well, what were they
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for? Maybe they were waiting for more M1 System on a Chips to be ready. Maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John just weren’t done designing those Macs. Like, but just because the, sort of the heart of the machine is
⏹️ ▶️ John ready, doesn’t mean they’re ready to release the Macs. So I just feel like it’s MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John if anything, MacBook Pro and then nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing that’s mostly right. The only thing I would add, like so yeah, I think you’re right, that probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the big iMac, because they just did iMacs, and I think if they were gonna do the big one, they would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it at the same time. I think the only thing we’re likely to see beyond the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be the higher-end Mac Mini that use the same CPU as the MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is rumored to be a product that exists in their lineup. We’ll see if it actually is. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense to have that. And then that could tie developers over for their high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop needs for a little while longer until the maybe iMac or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac Pro, whatever the big iMac is called, I assume iMac Pro, and then hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday the mini Mac Pro that uses the 2C and 4C Jade dies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that ties into the potential for like an Apple, a non-ridiculously priced Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor to connect to your MacBook Pro or a new Mac mini. If that thing exists
⏹️ ▶️ John at all and it’s remotely ready, yeah, sure, introduce it with the MacBook Pros
⏹️ ▶️ John and potentially the mini, right? That would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing, but I don’t think it’s gonna be ready yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, certainly not. But to that end, John, what would happen first, do you reckon? Do you think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will get a standalone non $35,000 monitor, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think that I’ll actually get documentation that doesn’t suck?
⏹️ ▶️ John Monitor. The problem with the monitor question is, I’m not sure that that product exists at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John like will ever be released. So it’s hard for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure the good documentation will ever be released.
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about documentation is, like you just noted, Marco, there are islands of good documentation. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a matter of spreading them. Like, you know, what makes, it’s not like, if they don’t have some sort of universal company-wide
⏹️ ▶️ John effort. It’s not like all the documentation is always gonna go from bad to good in one day. It would just be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation was previously like, you know, 50% acceptable and 50% unacceptable, then it changes
⏹️ ▶️ John to 60-40, and at what point do you say, yay, Apple has fixed their documentation, right? I hope the trend is positive
⏹️ ▶️ John and that it’s getting better and not worse after a long slide in the other direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s hard to say, like Casey trying to say it as a point in time. A releasing of a monitor is a thing that either happens or
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t and it’s an event. Good documentation is a journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh, I have regrets. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re right that a MacBook Pro would make the most sense. Certainly I have been itching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get myself an M1 or equivalent Mac. I don’t have any real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complaints about either my iMac Pro or my 13 inch MacBook Pro, but I, as I’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many times, I don’t want to upgrade the laptop until I can get a four port Apple Silicon chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I probably won’t upgrade the iMac until I get said laptop and realize how unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slow my iMac feels by comparison. So I’ve been kind of bracing myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this to be a very expensive year for me with Apple products. And thus far, the only thing I’ve bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one AirTag and an Apple TV. So Apple, remember when I said to you a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes ago that you used to be really good at taking money from me? Let’s get back to that. Let’s take some money from you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re supposed to get a new remote too. So there’s 60 more bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m too cheap. Just get it. The old one was good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna get so many emails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I don’t see any other hardware happening, although, honestly, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope, and this is gonna sound a little weird, my hope is that we don’t get any hardware, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that if we don’t get any hardware, that means we were so jam-packed with incredible software updates and improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on that they just didn’t have the time for the hardware and they’d have to do it at a different time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, none of us talked about the VR glasses, so I guess we’re just all in agreement that this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the year for that. The problem with the VR stuff is they keep doing so much work internally.
⏹️ ▶️ John They release all the software, all the AR kit, all the things, all the spatial audio. The software we get to see.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes we accidentally get to see the software that works with whatever their internal goggles
⏹️ ▶️ John are. Remember there’s various leaks about that over the years. But it seems like they never release the hardware. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure why. because unless the plan is we’re not gonna release any hardware until
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a James Bond style, like just look like a normal pair of glasses, like that’s gonna be a long wait, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They have apparently internally, things that look like VR goggles. Now that we, you know, it’s a big thing that goes in your head
⏹️ ▶️ John and yeah, it’s Apple-y and it’s nice and so on and so forth, but that’s what they’re working on. It’s like, well, are you ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John ship a product like that or not? Because if you were going to, it seems like WWDC would be the
⏹️ ▶️ John time to do it because it requires developer support for, you know, because writing software for VR is considerably
⏹️ ▶️ John different than running software for a Mac or your phone or whatever. Now would be the time. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t the year, like, do we just keep waiting? Cause I don’t, you know, all the rumors of their VR stuff have not been like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s totally different than any VR you’ve ever, it’s a VR thing, like VR, AR, like it’s a big thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in your head. It’s not something that looks like, you know, a simple pair of glasses with hidden screens
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. We’re not at that stage yet. So I haven’t heard any rumors, but you figure we would know more
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. But the problem is, I think we kind of get bored of like, yeah, that’s the thing Apple’s working on internally, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the car or whatever the hell they’re doing there. But, you know, it’s not like it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they release it, it’s like, oh, what a surprise, they shocked everybody. We’ve known for years this is the thing they’re working on, it’s just at any
⏹️ ▶️ John point they could decide, is this a shippable product or is it not? And thus far they’ve said not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if we just stop paying attention to it and they suddenly release it, I don’t, you know, I think we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep that in the back of our minds. That’s the thing that Apple can do at any time without any huge secret effort
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s no longer a secret, they’re really, I mean, not that they’re not trying to keep it, but like, everybody knows they’re working on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like everyone knows they’re working on a car thing. So that secret is out. It’s the only question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John what exactly is it? How much does it cost? Is it a product? Are you gonna release it? And they can make that decision
⏹️ ▶️ John at any time. I also think this is probably not the year for that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like the Mac Pro, like any year could be Apple VR year at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they just have to decide, like they did with the car, whether you’re gonna ship it or not. Again, with the card, they
⏹️ ▶️ John decided not. Not many times over, but presumably that will change eventually too. So
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming it’s not a VR year for hardware, which would itself take up a huge amount of the software thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John then we get to Casey’s thing is like, okay, well, if it’s just MacBook Pros or maybe no hardware at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is a big year for software, what is the big software, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey mentioned iPadOS, and my problem with the iPadOS rumor is that this is what everyone says
⏹️ ▶️ John every year. Like the iPad hardware gets a lot better. They’re like, boy, I can’t wait until this and OS take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of this. But most people do not have any concrete ideas of what that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be, except for the people who say, I just want Mac OS on my iPad, which is not really something that Apple seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in favor of. We all just want something about
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad OS to be worthy of the hardware that it’s on, to let
⏹️ ▶️ John users be more productive, to give them more flexibility. I did say
⏹️ ▶️ John more like a Mac, but I don’t mean a more like a Mac in terms of the interface I mean more like a Mac in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John The way that someone who is familiar with the platform can do lots of different things with
⏹️ ▶️ John it on iPad OS Lots of limitations in the US make it trickier to do things
⏹️ ▶️ John that the hardware is capable of but the software is it kind of gets in your way, right and so
⏹️ ▶️ John aside from The iPad OS gurus who themselves have you know, like Vatici or whatever have
⏹️ ▶️ John very specific ideas of exactly what kind of changes they want to iPadOS. I think most people,
⏹️ ▶️ John including me, understand that iPad hardware is as powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John as a Mac, like duh, it’s got the same chip at this point, but that iPadOS is
⏹️ ▶️ John not as quote-unquote powerful as MacOS in terms of letting you take advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ John that hardware in all the ways you can on the Mac. I mentioned this on a past episode. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as if iPadOS stops you from using all of that hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John within a single application, caveat that people have discovered that apparently you can’t use more than 5 gigs of ram within each app but
⏹️ ▶️ John that just seems like a software limit that’ll probably lift in the new version of iPadOS. But you can you
⏹️ ▶️ John know certainly do like a render or just eat up all your CPU and GPU time on your iPad and it will you’ll be using the
⏹️ ▶️ John full power of the system on a chip to do that thing plus or minus I suppose thermal throttling or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not what people are talking about. What people are talking about is on the Mac I can have 17 different things open and seamlessly
⏹️ ▶️ John move between them and the flexibility of downloading apps that aren’t from the App Store and and I can use AppleScript
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can use command line stuff. Like there’s so much more flexibility for literally the same hardware if you take like a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air with no fan and an iPad with no fan. And so I personally, when I think about
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS getting way better to finally take advantage of the hardware, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what that would look like. I don’t have a vision in my mind of, because my, it’s lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of imagination, it’s lack of me using iPadOS in this way. Mostly I use my iPad for very simple things.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know, like, say iPadOS 15 fulfills everyone’s dream. What the
⏹️ ▶️ John heck does that look like? What are people expecting? We keep just talking about it in vague terms, but I can’t picture
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of how that would change other than something really radical like, guess what? iPadOS has Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John now, not the Microsoft product, but like literal movable Windows. No more
⏹️ ▶️ John splitting your screen, no more this, no more that. And you can use command line scripting and there’s a terminal and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the the fantasy of like essentially an iPad OS that gains a bunch of features that only the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac had previously without becoming Mac OS, but I don’t see that happening. So I just, to me, I think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be another year where people are happy about the things they get in iPad OS. Oh, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John use widgets on the home screen now and all the features that were only on the phone are now on the iPad, plus there’s some cool new iPad stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the end, it’s like iPad, you know, a month after WOC, people are still saying iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS needs to go further.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m not expecting a lot on the iPad front. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem, I mentioned this before, but it does seem like Apple has kind of taken their foot off the gas in the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arena recently, like software-wise, as they’ve been so focused on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon on the Mac and everything else. But I don’t know, because I’m not an iPad power user,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly, I think I’m gonna stop talking about it right here so I don’t anger all the iPad power users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, it doesn’t seem like their pace of development on iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is aggressive enough to expect really big things to happen this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I hear what you’re saying and I don’t disagree, but I could swear that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t it last year we didn’t really get much on the iPad, but the year before we got a whole ton. My memory is so bad these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days, I can’t remember what’s what.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve all lost a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there’s that too. But I feel like it was WWDC 19 where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got something on iPad or several somethings on iPad, we got a whole bunch of new iPad stuff and actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cursor support was not a WWDC thing, but that’s happened since then. Uh, I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like. Apple seems to have been, and I, and I can’t cite my source.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all just gut feeling at the moment. I apologize, but Apple seems to have been in a two year tech talk sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. So like, you know, in 2019, we got a lot 2020, we didn’t get squat 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We getting a lot? I feel like we may be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t disagree with your pessimism, Marco, but I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am optimistic that I think this might be the year that we probably will not get everything we want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of us, including me, will probably grumble about how we didn’t get this or didn’t get that. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will be getting a lot on the iPad. More than just, oh, here’s your stupid widgets, leave us alone. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we’re going to get something more significant. I don’t know if that’s going to be a revamp of multitasking. of multitasking, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if it’s going to be windowing, I don’t know if it’s going to be a terminal or something more robust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with shortcuts, or I don’t even know what. Like John was saying a moment ago, like, what does this even look like? I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is why I don’t work at Apple, because I’m not smart enough. So I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curious to see what happens with iPad, and I will put my hat in the ring, and I will put my vote in the box
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that says it’s going to be a big year for iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ultimately, what iPadOS seems to really need is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that Apple’s been really bad at. You mentioned the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TikTok cycle, and I think it might actually be having the fate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Intel’s TikTok cycle of TikTok, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna keep adding more talks. But they try out ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna really put some effort into iPadOS, and we’re gonna really make it more powerful, and address power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user needs, and really make things easier slash better slash more capable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they do like 75% of it, and then they leave it alone for two years, and then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go a different direction, and do 75% of that, and then leave that alone for two more years, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then go a different direction, and do 75% of that, and then leave that alone for two more years, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed that they’re never really reaching, Like, they’re following through with the plan they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have at any given moment and really seeing it through to be really good and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mature the other apps on the system, to use all the new stuff, and to really make sure all the new stuff is rock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid and reliable and works. Like, that’s what we’re missing there. It’s, in addition to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fundamental basics of multitasking that they still struggle with. Like, there are still so many aspects of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad multitasking that are incredibly unintuitive to those of us who are not experts with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or incredibly clunky and hindersome, if that’s a word, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are experts with it. I still don’t even think they’ve nailed some of the basics of multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, but whatever direction they wanna go, whether it’s multitasking UI stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s down to other more boring things like file provider APIs, drag and drop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanics, stuff like that, a lot of that stuff they just haven’t followed through to make it good and reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, even years later. So I hope that whatever direction they wanna take with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad, I hope they figure it out pretty soon, because it seems like they haven’t quite figured it out yet. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once they do figure it out, I hope they actually follow through, and instead of doing a two-thirds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job of it, go all the way, finish it, make it work well, make it work reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the Mac worked as inconsistently and oddly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the iPad does, the Mac would not be as popular among people like us as it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why we have so much affinity for Apple’s platforms as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old-time Mac users, well, we aren’t as old-time as John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but you know. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe John didn’t jump all over us for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2004, yeah, you guys have been around the block.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the reason why we have so much affinity for this is because there’s so many little details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they got right early on and that have been right the whole time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that are mostly reliable and aren’t constantly shifting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the things they set forth to do on the Mac mostly work most of the time. And I feel like on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPadOS, I can’t say that. Not only do the things keep changing, but so many of the basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fail in weird ways or are broken in random point updates and some of them just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get fixed or never work all the way. or I don’t know, it just, it seems like it’s in a constant state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, all right, we did something two thirds of the way, and now the team’s gonna not touch it for two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then we’re gonna just do something different two more years from now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the bright spot in that, as was already mentioned, it didn’t come into WDAC update, is the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John trackpad and cursor support, right? If they had saved that for WDAC, it would be quite a wow announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that direction of the iPad platform, that it will become a platform that has
⏹️ ▶️ John pervasive and yet a very iPad specific support for cursors and trackpads and keyboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll keep iterating on that, try to make a better and better keyboard, right? I think they’ve done well with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve had a couple of years of trying to do keyboards on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and then adding cursor support and then putting in the trackpads. And I think they are fairly committed
⏹️ ▶️ John to that direction. The problem is those are sort of input methods that, and I think those are spread
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty well throughout Apple’s apps and the interface in an admirable way. what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting at, Marco, is that the fundamental interface paradigm of the iPad has problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is not sort of a modular, composable, understandable system
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives you flexibility. I’m not saying it has to be like the Mac, but we’ve talked about this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John The interface of the WIMP interface, Windows, what is it? I always forget what the I
⏹️ ▶️ John is for. Windows Input Menu Pointer? Intel, probably. No, it’s not Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone look up WIMP in the chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon menu pointer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Icon! Icon, yeah. So it’s so old that icons were a novel concept. Icons, wow, little pictures, what are they?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, overlapping windows in a menu bar and even like basics is like the dock, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, dialogue boxes, like the way the keyboard and the mouse interact with windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a very flexible interface, right? You can do a lot of things on a Mac just with that simple paradigm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And once you learn how that paradigm works and generally you have standard windows and you learn how the menu bar works and you learn how the dock works,
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of flexibility there. Flexibility for people to make their own workflows, flexibility for
⏹️ ▶️ John app developers to do their own thing, and flexibility for the users to combine them all to do their thing. And same thing with multitasking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Command tab, using the dock to switch apps, clicking on a window to bring an app forward, the variations that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do there. It’s an extremely flexible interface, which is why it has survived so long. Doesn’t mean the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to do that, but the iPad has its own sort of version of that, and the iPad’s version of that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not as obvious, not as generic, not as flexible, and not just, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, Marco, for the experts who know how to use it has tons of frustrations, like limitations.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think part of that is the inability to sort of expand the system in iOS, like to do even
⏹️ ▶️ John something as simple as my dinky Mac apps, which would be impossible in iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t do things like observe when apps come to the front and take action. It’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible for historic reasons on iPadOS, Right? So it’s up to Apple to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, to sort of rethink like, what are we doing on iPadOS? Cause you don’t want to give up. And I think iPad experts
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want them to give up and say, well, just forget it. It’s just going to be like Mac OS on a tablet. I know some people do want
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but the people who love the iPad, love it for a lot of reasons that are, make it different
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Mac. That it’s not as complicated. There’s fewer things to worry about, that it is simpler. It’s just that I feel like Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John not found that happy medium. And that’s part of what I was getting at of like, oh, well, iPadOS to be more powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also don’t make it like a Mac, but also make it better than it is now, but also don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make it weird and complicated. It’s a tall order. Like I don’t fault Apple for having
⏹️ ▶️ John not figured this out because A, nobody has figured it out in the entire industry as far as I’m concerned, and B, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps trying. And I think cursor and keyboard support is a great move in that direction, but there’s still the fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John question of how do you have to change the interface paradigm of iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS in some way, if you ever want it to be anything approaching as flexible, generic,
⏹️ ▶️ John and understandable as the Mac. Again, it doesn’t have to be the same as the Mac, but it needs to have those qualities about it so
⏹️ ▶️ John that someone who learns iPadOS is not constantly frustrated by the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John and can also use it to do complicated things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see. So, John, do you think this is the year of iPadOS then?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I agree with you, Casey, that I think there’ll be more on iPadOS this year than there was in last, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even sure there’ll be anything as significant as cursor and trackpad support was, because I think that was very
⏹️ ▶️ John significant and done very well and had hardware to go with it. It just didn’t happen to neatly coincide
⏹️ ▶️ John with the WWDC announcement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. All right, what are we getting for iOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping we get an expansion to the widget system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is funny. I’m actually making overcast widgets like right now, not right this second, but like I was doing it earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. I’m trying to figure out like we know what they should even be because I feel like the widget system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a, like in iOS 14 was a really good first step, really good 1.0 of that system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I want better than a 1.0 now. Like it’s a year later, it proved to be pretty popular, pretty capable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amongst users, so I hope they took it further. What I’m mostly hoping to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a, first of all, a better flow for placing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them on your home screen that doesn’t make you inadvertently blow up your entire icon arrangement while moving them around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that might be too much to ask. But what I want to see is a smaller size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because right now the smallest size is basically two by two icons. I’d like to see one that’s maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one by two, like two wide, one tall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could fit more widgets on certain screens without having them take up so much space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for at least the larger sizes, I would like to see ideally some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved interactivity capabilities. Right now, the way widgets work when I was 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the smallest size, the only interactivity is you tap it and it launches the app. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger sizes, you can define tap zones within the widget, and then it still just opens the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, but then it tells you which tap zone was hit, and then your app can respond accordingly. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an image map.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Wow, good reference. Yeah, so I would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see maybe more interactivity there. But otherwise, outside of the widget system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the rest of iOS, I’m generally pretty happy with what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple tends to do with iOS updates, which is we usually get a couple of new capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually nothing really major, but a couple of things we couldn’t do before, maybe new app types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that become possible to make, new hooks in the system that we can now hook into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as third-party apps that previously were only accessible to Apple’s apps, stuff like that. So new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of apps that might be able to exist, and otherwise just general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements to the APIs in lots of mostly boring ways, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big, some small. I wanna see SwiftUI move forward. I’d love to see advances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in UIKit still because SwiftUI still can’t replace UIKit in many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that. I wanna see stuff like collection view and table view improvements, all that stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise for iOS, for feature-wise, I just kind of sit back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see what Apple gives us, and usually I’m pretty happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with you there. I don’t feel like there’s anything that I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to come out of iOS super badly. I agree with the ones that you cited.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, slightly more interactive widgets would be good. I very much agree with you saying there should be a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size widget. I completely agree with that. But I feel like the things I’m most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking forward to from an iOS perspective is actually the developer side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t necessarily need to go into it now or belabor it if we do, but async await is seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about to land. SwiftUI improvements I think would be extremely welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this new thing that maybe I’ll ship sometime before I die. I’m 100 percent SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I sit here now. I tell you, writing new stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in SwiftUI is extremely, extremely fun and extremely fast for me anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not good at it yet, but I can cobble together something that looks reasonably good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way faster than I could with UIKit. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love SwiftUI for that and how quick it is to iterate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So much about it, I really enjoy. But the second you want to do anything that even smells like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s custom, well, good fricking luck. It’s just you’re not going to have a good day. this is where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your day takes a turn right here. Though that one little teeny tiny thing you want to do with an animation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you’ve just cost yourself three days and 50 working hours or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. That’s where it’s frustrating. So I really hope to get improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in SwiftUI. I would love to see UI kit bindings for Combine, which is never going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really, really scared. I wrote a blog post about this a little while ago. I’m really scared that Combine is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically going to fade into the ether because I could see how politically that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a logical conclusion, especially for the people who are really trying to ram SwiftUI through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But I don’t know. I— Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI built on Combine?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, kind of. There are combined components within SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not personally say that SwiftUI is in its entirety built upon it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things like observed object and whatnot, that definitely is Combine. But I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you could, if you wanted to, you could jettison Combine while keeping SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really hope that’s not the case. I’d love to see an expansion of Combine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than it being kind of just fading into the ether, which is what I’m really fearful might be happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to look up what sync meant today. I combined like because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no background in this functional reactive programming world that this is I guess all based on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or your prescription Swift like I have absolutely no idea what any of the terms mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ostensibly they are English words but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t make any sense to people who have not like been you know exposed to them before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I’m like I’m like, all right, I have this object that I’ve made to be compatible with SwiftUI, and it has all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these, like, you know, at published properties or whatever. And I wanted to see, like, okay, I have this other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class that I want to react to changes in those properties. Maybe I can use those wrappers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so I learned from, I believe, a Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Sundell post that I found Googling. I learned that I have to do, you know, publisher name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot sync and that’s that means respond to changes okay that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total sense and then I then it said okay well I need to store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the object that it returns and the object that it returns is of type any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cancelable okay so I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look up what any cancelable means a type erasing cancelable object
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that executes a learn about what type erasure is. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of crap that you have to understand to understand what this means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love you so much, but this is when you stop Googling and… I almost said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bad word. This is when you stop Googling and call me. For the love of all that is good and holy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is nothing I would love more. Well, there’s nothing that you would hate more, but there’s nothing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would love more than to try to tell you how to do these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basic things in combined because everything you’re saying is 100% accurate. You are correct. It sounds like you at least slightly know what you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. There are other things that that you might want to know about, which we can talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another time if you’re so interested and so inclined. But seriously, I’m saying I should be saying this to you privately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the show, but I’m saying it publicly. So hopefully other people will shame you into compliance. Just call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me if or just send me a text as slack DM, whatever, we can walk through this and save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yourself so much time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some people like to learn on their own. I think Marco understands that combine is a,
⏹️ ▶️ John or RxSwift or whatever, are specific implementations of a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Marco just needs to understand the concepts behind the thing, kind of like you understand the concepts of
⏹️ ▶️ John objects and methods, or whatever concept you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John about, concepts of functional programming. Once you learn them, then you can say, okay, well, in this framework,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what we call this thing, and this is what we call that thing, and this is what we call this other thing, right? And so I think he’s just trying to get over
⏹️ ▶️ John conceptual hurdle. Not everyone learns best by having someone explain to them. Maybe Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John learns best by doing it on his own or whatever. But yeah, I think we’ve talked about this in the past, like
⏹️ ▶️ John how combined fits in with Swift UI and how committed Apple is to this particular concept of, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what do you call this? Marco called it functional reactive. Is there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think that’s about as generic as you get. It’s functional reactive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s called RX Swift. It’s for functional reactive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Why is it called combined? Because I understand. Because it’s like, you know, anyway, because they were trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a Half-Life reference and missed the pronunciation a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right. That’s Combine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that one. I finally got a reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John games. But I think the fact that we have wandered into DevTools here
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a comment on iOS in that it has reached a level of maturity unlike iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, but like Mac OS where the super obvious things that iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John was missing have mostly been knocked down, starting with copy and paste all the way up to like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, keyboards and better notification system. I think there is room in iOS for
⏹️ ▶️ John like end user features every year to like, let’s make the notification stuff a little bit better. Let’s, you know, adding
⏹️ ▶️ John flexibility, refining things. There’s even room for, you know, like, there are some paradigms
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be rethought on iOS, like the settings app that have just sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of never been rethought and just, you know, we allow developers like, well, developers can put setting in their apps if they want,
⏹️ ▶️ John but some settings can be in the settings app and we’ll just leave that that way forever. That could be rationalized
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point if Apple really cared. But in general, I feel like most of the improvements to iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John probably have to do with OS support for services. Like, so for example, you can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John a new feature, yeah, having to do with maps, but that’s like a combination of like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a part of that’s an iOS and part of that is on Apple server side with their map service, right? And then combined
⏹️ ▶️ John they make this new feature that I don’t know it has, you know works with air tags or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Some sort of feature that spans the entire stack and that is demoed as a
⏹️ ▶️ John feature of the new iOS But really it’s a feature that is the OS the services,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know That may be the hardware all combined into one thing, you know It’s the new stuff with the u1 how the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone might interact with VR glasses like all sorts of other stuff stuff. That’s potentially out there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond that, what we’re mostly looking for is how can how can it be? How can I make iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ John with less fuss? And that gets into okay, Swift UI is new, but it needs to improve how well that can improve how
⏹️ ▶️ John does combine fit into that? What about enhancements to UI kit? What about you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John better integration between UI kit and Swift UI and can there should be fewer things that I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go to UI get to do if Swift UI is maturing. And then on top of all that is Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John which, because it’s open, like if you’re wondering what’s new in Swift, just go to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what is it, Hacking with Swift? Paul Hudson’s website? Anyway, Swift is out in the open.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have no guesses about what’s coming in Swift. If you want to know, you can know right now. Like, it’s not a secret. It’s open source.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see the new version of Swift. You can see lots of blog posts explaining what’s in it. There’s tons of new stuff that’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple will announce it on stage for the people who don’t follow the Swift community. but it’s the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John the bright spot slash oddball. And, you know, cause even though WebKit is open source, Apple tends to like
⏹️ ▶️ John hold a lot of those changes back and a lot of it has to do with Safari, which itself is built on WebKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when they say, oh, the new iOS has a new browser that supports X, Y, and Z, they can keep that a secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the new stuff that’s coming in Swift for the most part, isn’t a secret. Even I suppose
⏹️ ▶️ John like when SwiftUI came out, we didn’t know about SwiftUI initially, but I think it was possible to know about function builders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s kind of snuck out right beforehand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but seeing function builders doesn’t tell you, oh, and by the way, SwiftUI is coming. That’s the kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of secret they can keep. But if you’re wondering what’s new in Swift, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s new. Apple should rightfully sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of promote it. And like Casey mentioned, Async Await. I think Actors
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming this year as well. And just general quality of life things, like the thing I mentioned a couple of shows back about
⏹️ ▶️ John removing an error, about not being able to do a thing because some class has self-reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, there’s lots of sort of quality of life improvements to Swift itself that they will probably tout
⏹️ ▶️ John at WWDC that are material. And in the context of iOS, it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not looking as an iOS developer for some major deficit that iOS has. What I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want is, help me make iOS apps, help me make new, better iOS apps, help me
⏹️ ▶️ John add features to my iOS app, help me to make iOS apps more quickly with fewer bugs. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a perfectly valid thing to do at WWDC. And we’re not going to get something on the level of SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John this year probably, but I think we just hope to sort of see iterations on everything
⏹️ ▶️ John involved in making an iOS app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hope so. And one of the things that I think I’m a little worried about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, show me how it makes this better. So as an example, I’ve done a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of work with actors, or not even work, like dabbling with actors. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was in the context of Scala, which I only barely knew at the time. And I kinda
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorta understand the purpose they serve, but I don’t want someone to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on stage and say, hey, here’s actors, aren’t these cool? Well, no, no, no, show me, show me why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these are cool and where this will help me and where this will make things better. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if that’s what we’re gonna get. You know, async await, I think it’s easier to understand why it’s cool and why it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be useful. But again, like show me an example of where this makes things better and don’t rely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Paul Hudson or John Sandel to do it. Like Apple, you do that. That’s what you’re there for.
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The thing about actors is they might not have something. Like SwiftUI, they had a thing, right? And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a bunch of underlying technology that made that possible, but they didn’t tout the technology. They said, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI. They didn’t explain technology at all. It just looked like magic, right? If you didn’t know about function builders, like that doesn’t even look
⏹️ ▶️ John like valid syntax, right? So I think they mostly lean in that direction. Async await is an exception just because
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to what should I do for concurrency besides Grand Central Dispatch has been,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s been an open question for a while. And async await is the thing that is an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think a lot of people in the audience would be familiar with it from other languages if they have any experience. So I think that is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can say, hey, we have async await. Here’s a slide on what it
⏹️ ▶️ John gets you. Come to the session if you want to know more. Even if they don’t have any particular new API
⏹️ ▶️ John related to that. And actors, if there’s no new framework, like
⏹️ ▶️ John to your point to demo it, to show me why it’s in there, it might just be a word on a slide and you’d have to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John the follow-up session of what’s new in Swift to hear about actors. Because if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what actors are, you shouldn’t just dive in and start using them everywhere in your code. And if you do understand what they are, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ John have a very specific use case. Unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other features, like SwiftUI is like, this is a whole new way to write applications. Actors is not a whole new way to write applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please do not change everything in your application to an actor. You will be sad. Similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t start using async and wait everywhere in your application because you’ll quickly learn how async
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of infects your code like a virus and travels upwards in the call stack until everything is async and you don’t know what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on, right? So there’s a lot of new technologies. Like there’s a reason these are the technologies that Apple waited
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time to roll out. Like on day one, you didn’t have all this stuff because it’s important to get the fundamentals right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you can maybe do a Swift UI. And then and then maybe you can do async. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the appropriate prioritization of like, what’s the most important so on and so forth. So like, as time goes
⏹️ ▶️ John on, these more specialized, I don’t know, more
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially dangerous features, they’re there because there’s very important use cases where you absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John need them and there’s no better tool for it. But they’re not sort of like, I’m gonna build my entire application
⏹️ ▶️ John where every single function is gonna be asynchronous. Please don’t do that. Like, you know, if you wanna do that, go
⏹️ ▶️ John use node or something like, please. Like, it’s not, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can still basically build your applications the same way, but if there is, and I hope that’s what they do with actors if they
⏹️ ▶️ John have any session on actors at all, the whole session should be about, in what context would I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use an actor? And then show you a concrete one and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey here’s how it was before
⏹️ ▶️ John we used an actor, and it was a pain in the butt, and I had to do all the synchronization, I had to be careful, and oops, I forgot to do this on the right thread,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now I have a crasher. But if I use actors, this one thing, this one object in my code is an
⏹️ ▶️ John actor, And that makes a big difference, right? But actors are so early.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just saw the proposal for global actors going by. And I feel like you can’t even have a complete actor story until you can
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about how you can use it to protect global data as well. And it seems like that proposal is not going to be accepted
⏹️ ▶️ John in time for WWDC. So maybe actors won’t be heavily featured. But surely, I think, wait, we’ll at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so back to things that people actually care about. What about Mac OS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m sorry. Before I get to Mac OS, there’s one thing I did want to say. and I forget which one of you just mentioned it, but services
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and things like that. I would love, and it’s not gonna happen, but I would love to see improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to things like photos. I’m still not on iCloud Photo Library. You can shame me about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next episode. That’s fine, or maybe two episodes from now. But I would love to see the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that we’re all hoping for, like the idea and concept of a family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the context of photos. That would be amazing, and I would probably switch to iCloud Photo Library that day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like there’s a lot of cases, and that’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, actually, Fitness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus. Fitness Plus is another example. Again, this is somewhat a self-created problem, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not on a family plan or anything like that with Erin. But there are times that she would like to do a Fitness Plus workout,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s only associated with my Apple ID, not hers. And so she can’t without me doing it with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her, which we do do from time to time, and it is lovely. But there are times that I wanna do one thing, she wants to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another, and it’s just tough noogies for us. And again, to some degree that’s self-created problem, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just stuff, things like that, like being able to share a workout, or even if we both have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rights to use Apple Fitness+, only one person’s stuff can be shown on screen at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, and just little improvements to their services, as much as I kind of bemoan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’re so bent on services these days, if you’re gonna go down that path, then let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go and let’s do it right. And I feel like some improvements in that regard would be really, really welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Fitness Plus is a young service, so you would expect like this is the year. If you’re gonna, if, I mean, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John question about things like Fitness Plus. Yeah, Casey, if this would be the year that you’d get enhancements,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Fitness Plus is doing okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s not doing okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe this is not the year to expect like version two of Fitness Plus. Like SwiftUI, I think, you know, SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is doing pretty well and there’s going to be enhancements. But for anything like a service like that, the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much does Apple care about this? How successful is it? Is it going gangbusters and it’s like, yeah, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get that version two out there or is it kind of like, well, maybe let’s just wait and see on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the thing I would like to see, this is a little tiny thing, but Apple bought Dark Sky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re shutting down the API, like I think it’s this fall. It’s sometime fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, like in the next year. And Dark Sky was the best weather API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for so many apps, so many good apps, like good weather apps, so many of them used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was speculated like why Apple bought it and they’re shutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the API. I think the most direct reason they bought it is because they started using those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, immediate rain forecasts in their own weather app. But they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also shutting down the API and it’s like, okay, well, that’s kind of crappy because there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather APIs, but they’re not as good for, you know, a lot of people out there. And so one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would hope to see is maybe a system-wide weather API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available, you know, weather kit available to apps. That being said, I’m not expecting this. I don’t think they’re actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to do that. I think they’re just gonna shut it down because they don’t wanna, you know, it’s something they own, they don’t wanna deal with it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I bet that’s not why they bought it. But just like a little ray of hope, I hope that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually gonna have weather kit that you just have weather data and without having to get the user’s location
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and send your own API request to some other third-party service and pay for it. Ideally, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be part of the system. But yeah, honestly, I’m not holding my breath on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that is a service play. Like, if you think about what they do with Cloud Kit, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a play to say, it’s very specific because it’s weather apps. But things like Cloud Kit are like, OK, so you want to make an app in
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, and you have some data you want to store, and you want it to be cloud synced. And if we ask every single individual
⏹️ ▶️ John developer to figure that out on their own, it’s really actually a hard problem. So instead, we’ll give you Cloud Kit, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John one way that you can do that. If you don’t wanna be like Marco and write your own servers, you don’t have that skillset, maybe you’re a lone developer or a small
⏹️ ▶️ John team and you don’t have server-side expertise, use CloudKit and we’ll do a bunch of stuff for you. And the model is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get a bunch of stuff and a small amount of data essentially for free, which is actually a pretty good deal. You don’t have to run the servers,
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming the API works and everything and is reliable, Apple will run it for you, but they do charge money
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond a certain point. And a weather API would be similar, where that’s a potential moneymaker
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple, right? You know, it’s a, they bought a company that already had an API and you know, I can,
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand the weather getting rid of the existing one, but you could say, oh, here’s weather kit and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a way for someone to more easily make a weather app to give sort of more innovation in the weather
⏹️ ▶️ John app space without having to worry about the weather stuff. And then on top of that, we’ll charge
⏹️ ▶️ John you money for it. If your weather app becomes successful, we’ll start taking a cut of your profits because hey, we run the service. That’s how all the other weather
⏹️ ▶️ John things work anyway. That’s why all the iOS weather apps are subscription based because they have to pay somebody for the weather
⏹️ ▶️ John info. I think that makes perfect sense. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please don’t give Apple ideas for new ways to extract money out of developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, but here’s the thing. It’s just for weather apps. So it’s a limited space, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not sure how much money weather apps make in the grand scheme of things. So maybe it’s just too small potatoes for
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But like with or without Apple, every single weather app that gets weather info is paying somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John for that weather info. I don’t think there are many sources of free weather info that are good these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not a change to that market at all. But I see what you’re hoping for. My more
⏹️ ▶️ John realistic expectation is, oh, they bought Dark Sky. Now would be the year that you show off
⏹️ ▶️ John enhancements to weather functionality in iOS built on Dark Sky, like Apple’s first party stuff. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s the most likely end. But I agree with Marco that it would be fun if there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, I guess you can’t have Cloud Kit for weather stuff, hey, but you could do Weather Kit or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, where developers could tap into that for either free or low cost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it would be funny. I don’t really have any desire to run or write a weather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app today, especially since I love Carrot Weather so darn much. But if there was an API right there on the device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would at least consider it. Maybe Marco would too. We would have competing weather apps, you and I, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you one thing. When Weatherline shuts down in, I think, about another year or whenever that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to have the urge to write a weather app. I’ll tell you that. I don’t know. I shouldn’t do it. I hope someone else does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m definitely gonna be motivated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, you can get very, very similar functionality from what I know, and I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Weatherline particularly well, but I think you can get pretty similar functionality on the newest version of Carrot Weather, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know Weatherline very well, and maybe I’m underselling it. Nevertheless, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, anything else for iPad, iOS, anything like that, or shall we talk Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before we jump into the Mac, very quick diversion here into Watchland.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, that’s a thing too, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, watchOS. I want custom watch faces and I think now’s the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. Oh, it is the time, but yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve been so against this for so long. Every time I bring it up, you’re like, it’s never gonna happen. I’m glad you finally come around
⏹️ ▶️ John because custom watch faces absolutely have to happen. I don’t know if this is the year, so I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John as optimistic as you, but it has to happen. Like talk about iOS of like the obvious features that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that everyone wants. It has to happen. It just has to, like eventually they will get around to it. I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope this is the year, but if this is not the year, it’s gonna happen in the next
⏹️ ▶️ John five years. And if it doesn’t, everyone on WatchOS should be fired.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think, well, is there anybody on WatchOS? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why this feels like the right year for it is because the way they built widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS shows a pretty clear path on how they could do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that would be compatible with their power and control needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way widgets work on iOS is, you, like your process of your app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not always running and is not checked very often to refresh that widget’s contents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You as the app, you basically vend to the system upon request on a certain timeline,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a SwiftUI view, and then the system chooses how to render that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it basically like stores that view and just renders it. You give it a timeline, very similar to how watch complications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. You give it a timeline and say, all right, at this time, show this version of this view. And then in two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours, either ask me for another one or show this version of this view, whatever. You know, you give it the timeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how it shows stuff. And the point is, your process has never woken up to do that, and it’s all built on SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way they can make custom watch faces is you give them a SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view that includes variables in the view that are bound to things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the rotation of an hour hand, the rotation of a minute hand, the exact hour, minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and second. Like you could have a SwiftUI view that is bound to those values. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system could update that view over time for you, whatever it is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once a second if it’s showing on screen, maybe once a minute if it’s on the sleep version of the face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And your process doesn’t have to be running at all for that. The system could do all of that right within ClockKit and only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wake you up, like on the kind of schedule they would wake up a complication for data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates. And that would be an incredibly power efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to build watch faces that would let watchOS maintain almost complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control over what’s going on. But you as the app would still have a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of creative freedom to do whatever you want with that. You could even have things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like placeholders that you could place in your watch faces for standard complication types and sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s lots of different things they could do with this. I really hope they do it because what we saw with widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and combined with SwiftUI’s kind of native capabilities, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows a really good path on how to do this in a way that is compatible with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical priorities and goals. So they have all the tools to do it now. It is totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple’s hands to do this. There are no more excuses. That is like, it’s 100% ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t have to wait for like massive jumps in battery power or anything like that. They’re ready
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this now if they want to. So I hope they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the rumor when the widget stuff came out. There was even a clock rotation function call or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, this was originally designed as a clock, as a watch face API. But it’s just a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John fit, right, like you said. And then the other good thing about it that you didn’t mention, but that Apple loves, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John else you can do? You can make a watch face store and Rolex can make a watch face and charge a huge amount of money. So everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John can say they have the Rolex. Hey, I know they do this with everything. They may, oh, let’s make an iMessage store.
⏹️ ▶️ John make a tvOS app store like some app stores work better than other but and maybe watch face app store wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be that big a deal but you know i think there would because there are established
⏹️ ▶️ John brands and watch i think Rolex would be dumb not to make a Rolex a
⏹️ ▶️ John set of Rolex watch faces in the apple watch face store Rolex would never do it
⏹️ ▶️ John oh i don’t know but like whoever like there are brands that would want to sell it would it be i think it would be more successful
⏹️ ▶️ John than the iMessage store, but maybe less successful than TVOS. Either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should just do it. Apple knows how to make app stores. Apple loves, you know, having another platform for you to develop. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just another part of developing for the watch. I have a feeling that watch apps we saw from the part of the court leak
⏹️ ▶️ John documents that the watch store is, it’s not a ghost town, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing compared to, you know, the, the, the iOS store, the one that counts, right. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s kind of depressingly not great. And just because like, you know, how many people want apps on their watch? It’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John you just want to use the built in apps and use it as a fitness device and have some cool complications and maybe get a cool weather app. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not, it’s not that big a deal. But I feel like watch faces are similar. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John a market for there to be a watch face store. So Apple should totally do it. Even if it’s not super popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a big deal. Yeah, maybe this is the year I’m feeling slightly more optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John based on your enthusiasm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s there’s no way like the really high end brands like, you know, Rolex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, you know, Patek long, like they’re not going to do it, but I don’t know. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see dollar signs. I mean, first of all, you’d probably see it from places like Hermes, but I think you’d also see it from like the big fashion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands. It has some collaborations with like fossil and stuff like that. Like I swatch. Yeah, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, they’re a big brand. Look, they also a swatch group owns a whole bunch of different sub brands, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, regardless of the big brand influence, that would just be an incredible place for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be a new marketplace for developers and designers to make cool stuff. And I think it would really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breathe some life into the Apple Watch software scene, which needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life breathed into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could have been like MP3 player skins, where say you make the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey watch face that integrates
⏹️ ▶️ John with the overcast widget in a way that you can’t see the borders between them. If you could actually make them butt up
⏹️ ▶️ John against each other and sort of make it like a complication blends into the watch face because you get to control both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a little bit un-Apple-like, but it reminds me of like, you know, MP3 player skins where you could, you have control over the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole palette, you can really make something that is an integrated whole that, you know, is as ugly as you want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John As branded, the Frito-Lay watch face. Yeah, that’ll be the big popular one. It’s a giant Dorito
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, that would be amazing, and I bet people would use it, but no. I mean, even just beyond the big brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, again, I think this would be a wonderful thing for, you know, app makers and app designers to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with because the Apple Watch face game needs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of individualism added to it. It’s not, like now that so many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the Apple Watch, you need more individuality than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, you know, Apple’s half-assed attempt at making like three new watch faces a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can add to it. Like you need more than that. You need a richer set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of influences and and perspectives and ideas than just whatever you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five people in Cupertino can come up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. I definitely agree, but I don’t know. I really I’d like to go on record that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not want there to be custom watch faces, because then underscore will do nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the rest of his life, but make custom watch faces and I like his app.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what are you talking about? I like to make the wise faces now. He just can’t ship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I like his apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to probably got seventy
⏹️ ▶️ John five watch faces to ship right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s funny. All right. Mac OS, John, what do you want?
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this year for Mac OS, like the obvious thing is so we have all this,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are Mac hardware and yeah, we have a Mac OS that runs on them already, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same way that like the new IMAX are an example of hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John made with Apple Silicon in mind, right? In in a way that the Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John and the MacBook Air were not, because they were just kind of like, oh, it’s the old one with the guts ripped out. You can do a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John thing for Mac OS. Like what kind of things can you do in Mac OS knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John that our Mac exists? And that OS is this one that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be announced at WWDC because, you know, what the hell is that? Big
⏹️ ▶️ John Sur was, you know, they knew Big Sur was gonna be released before our Macs were out,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? but this OS, they know this is the one that’s gonna release when R Max exists. So for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there are gonna be cellular Max at some point, now would be the time to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS, the underpinnings of that in the OS. So if there’s any framework changes you’re gonna do, if there’s any sort of thing that you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John tell developers at with a hint, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, here’s a way that you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because like there’s a lot of APIs that exist for that already, but they could enhance them and people are like, huh, why are they enhancing that API? It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense, right? Cellular is just one thing I’m thinking of, but even just like APIs that take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the upcoming 128 core integrated GPU and whatever features that might
⏹️ ▶️ John have, like this is the Mac OS that can really sort of leverage
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon Macs. It’s complicated by the fact that if there’s no hardware associated with it, you kind of have to read between
⏹️ ▶️ John the lines. But I just feel like this is the OS that could be like
⏹️ ▶️ John optimized for our Macs in terms of all the features they can possibly support. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if there are any kind of frameworks or things that needed to be sort of recompiled or made better
⏹️ ▶️ John for the ARM Macs in a way that might have disrupted compatibility, this is the OS to do it in. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John besides that, I feel like it’s just the usual complaints about reliability,
⏹️ ▶️ John performance, like all sorts of stuff that came out in Big Sur that is not fully baked. Like there’s lots of complaints lately
⏹️ ▶️ John about the update system. I just read Jason Snell’s big thing about Enterprise Mac users complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, every time there’s a security update, to have to get a three gig download. Like the mobile, whatever it’s called,
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile update, like the update system that our Macs inherited from iOS essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John is not up to snuff for the Mac. We shouldn’t have three gig downloads for a small security
⏹️ ▶️ John patch, right? So hey, this is the OS where you can enhance that. Similarly, the time machine enhancements that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve done, those are great. It would be nice if there was some kind of interface to snapshots or some enhancements, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are features that already exist that Mac OS needs to take advantage of. And then just general reliability and
⏹️ ▶️ John performance type stuff, right? I think like normally you would say, oh, I just want Mac OS to
⏹️ ▶️ John be reliable, everything about it is good. But I think now we have enough sort of immature systems in Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John that they need to take that. And similarly, like SwiftUI, like it exists, it’s there, it’s better than, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a cool thing, but there needs to be a version too. And there are lots of parts of Mac OS that are like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I wanna see. And I think that’s what we will see. I don’t think there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ John again, like iOS, anything major that Mac OS lacks that everyone is just dying to see. It’s just like, take
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s there, make it more reliable, take the things that are immature, make them more mature, and
⏹️ ▶️ John really take advantage of the hardware that both exists now and the hardware that we’re gonna see in the next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To that end, did you see, somebody tweeted earlier, and I think Steve Trout and Smith retweeted it, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks like there’s going to be branch prediction in Objective-C message send.
⏹️ ▶️ John I looked at that. It was a thing about the hardware having support for a feature that helps with the Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John message send. I totally believe that. There’s tons of stuff that’s been in every ARM chip that Apple has ever made for all
⏹️ ▶️ John its devices that are specifically tailored to make Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks and languages run quickly. I didn’t understand enough of the technical details. How does
⏹️ ▶️ John this one particular feature of the CPU help with Objective-C message send? But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s nothing new. And obviously, Objective-C is the past. We all know that. They should be adding features that make Swift faster at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s, you know, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John of being Apple Silicon, right? Oh, and speaking of making things faster, like if they want to talk about Swift compilation
⏹️ ▶️ John times, but unfortunately, because Swift is so open, I mean, I’m sure they’ll brag
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and say they improved it because they have improved it, but they’ve improved it in ways that are visible because the
⏹️ ▶️ John LLVM is developed in the open, Clang is developed in the open, Swift’s compiler is developed in the open. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of surprises there, but there’ll probably be bar charts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, in terms of Mac OS, I most definitely just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want, I know we say this every year, but I want my snow leopard year where they say, what was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it? No new features, just improvements. Just make everything better, please, please and thank
⏹️ ▶️ John They need to like notification center and the today view and what they’ve done with the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. There’s some things that need attention. I guess you could call that a zero new feature, but they added a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John UI stuff in Big Big Sur that is not fully baked, and I would like to see them take a second
⏹️ ▶️ John refinement run at a lot of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s like my only wishlist item. I feel like Big Sur is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what I was saying with iPad stuff earlier, it’s like they got 75% of the way done with the design and just stopped.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would love to see the notifications UI is ridiculously bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The touch targets are way out of whack, or the click targets, excuse me, way out of whack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole thing where you have to hover over the notification to see that little tiny X or the little options thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a pop-up menu because they can’t put two buttons on it. Before, there was room for two buttons. Now, sorry, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only room for one. Take a second round at all of that. And I would call that a new feature. Hey, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John improved notifications. We’ve improved that little sidebar thing. Even the menu bar, which they did
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of quote unquote improvements to in Big Sur to make it more flexible so you can have Control Center, which Control Center is cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can drag things off of it and everything. needlessly inflexible in terms of the order things are in the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. I really don’t expect them to address this. This is the type of thing they never address. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the next five years, someone should think, hey, what if I want the little magnifying
⏹️ ▶️ John glass for Spotlight Search to be the rightmost item on the menu bar? I don’t like them saying the date has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in the upper right and I can’t change that. I used to be able to change it and now I can’t and I don’t understand why. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s more of a five-year plan. But a one-year plan is like you’re saying, Margo, take all those features you had in Big Sur,
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe take a second look at some of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would say as a general goal, nothing should appear on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hover. I know that’s hard. I know I just killed Alan Dye with that statement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but nothing should appear on hover. If the UI has important functionality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should be visible. Period. Hover is good when you’re in like a full screen view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a video player. Okay, the rest of the UI doesn’t need that kind of treatment.
⏹️ ▶️ John was going to say, well, what if you just wiggle your mouse and the closed box would glint slightly?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you could turn on high contrast notification dismissal. It’ll put a white
⏹️ ▶️ John outline around the little x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, seriously, almost all of the problems I have with Pictures UI come down to that one thing of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that I need to use is hidden behind a delay that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears on a hover. So it’s either the proxy icon on a folder window or a document window,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which again, there’s no, I just put it on there, just leave it on, it’s fine. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hovering over one right now, it looks great as it is with it showing all the time. Just leave it there. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step one. And then yeah, step two is like the notification. Just like you have this stupid hover over thing with the X, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that should always be visible. And the design should be designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accommodate the things people actually need all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the top two or three options they want to do instead of burying them under a pop-up menu, put them in the dialogue.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the close button, which is a thing that people want to do, put that there. And the totally non-obvious ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John grab the thing and check it off the right edge of the screen, nobody knows about that except for nerds. And it’s a useful
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you can do sometimes. Yeah, they have better affordances for things you can do with notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can still do them, they’re just all harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not a day goes by when I don’t misclick either the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X button or the clear button or the options to go do something like. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing expands into clear all. I forgot about that. Like the little X sometimes it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John wider and becomes a clear all button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, which is different in both dimensions and size. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much about the notification design. It just encompasses everything that is terrible about the Allen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dye era of software design. And I really hope that they take a second pass at this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even for God’s sakes, finish your first pass because this is not finished. We’ve been using it for a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is not finished because it doesn’t work. So please, for the love of God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do something about this design and fix the most glaring problems. And for me, that’s notifications and document
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going long here, but I want to throw in Home OS before we go. That’s the rumor of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John an OS that runs on their HomePods and they have a OS that runs on their TV. There’s some leaks about Home
⏹️ ▶️ John OS or whatever, but hey, if they’re gonna rename something to be, because I think the HomePod now does
⏹️ ▶️ John run a variant of tvOS, am I correct in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that the big one runs something that was called AudioOS behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think the HomePod mini runs tvOS, but I’m not positive on that. Runs
⏹️ ▶️ John a tvOS variant, yeah. I mean, like, anyway, assuming that leak is remotely true, sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John unifying their home devices, the TV, the little speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever else they roll out, under a thing called Home OS. Makes some sense to me. If not, then just,
⏹️ ▶️ John because no one ever knew what the OS was called in the HomePods anyway. They’re not an app platform. It’s not that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that kind of unification could make sense. There’s no rumors about, we have in our, we’ve had in our
⏹️ ▶️ John document here for a long time, this rumor about future home Apple devices with screens or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John This doesn’t seem like the event where they would roll that out. But if they’re going to say, hey, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like the iPad OS announcement, like here’s a branding change that tells you in theory, our intentions
⏹️ ▶️ John for this platform. And there is, I forget what the name is, this is another topic we had, whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ John cross-industry effort to make all their home automation stuff compatible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It got rebranded at our new name. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was called like Matter or something. Anyway, that seems to be coming to a fruition of like the industry getting together and saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it hurts us all when all our devices don’t work with each other and everyone has to buy all these weird home bridge, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like let’s all sort of agree on some kind of standard because it’ll be better for everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who makes home automation devices. If and when that comes to fruition, I feel like Apple is a participant
⏹️ ▶️ John in that process and they will, you know, have a sort of a second coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out for their home devices. Oh, here’s a new line of, you know, stuff in your home,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it may be a bigger, a better big HomePod that Marco was predicting, or maybe the HomePod mini
⏹️ ▶️ John gets better and the thread radios were suddenly gonna start to use them and it works with all our things integrate with AirTag
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple TV and all of this works under this new standard that means you can buy all these peripherals that work together.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is the year for that, but it might be the year where Apple preemptively rebrands
⏹️ ▶️ John its in-home efforts under the umbrella of Home OS and then
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about potential future stuff. This is based on seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple tweets go by mentioning Home OS. If that turns out to be totally BS and not a real thing, I apologize for even talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. But either way, I think I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John predicting huge things expecting huge things from tvOS and HomePod. I expect them to be mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John and discussed in the context of their other devices and services and how they integrate,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think this is the year that Apple’s going to come out with their new home device
⏹️ ▶️ John with the screen and a new big HomePod and a rebranding of HomeOS. Because they just did the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV thing and unlike the iPad, when they put out the new Apple TV we
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t all like, boy, I can’t wait for the new tvOS to take advantage of this. Like, no, it’s already doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does the thing. We got a new remote. That was the big problem. It’s still ridiculously expensive. tvOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite Casey’s problems with HDMI cables, already has pretty much all the features. It supports all the HDMI
⏹️ ▶️ John standards. It does frame rate matching. It has a calibration app built in. Like, I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a product that’s in desperate need of some obvious feature, other than a price cut. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is going to be a big year for tvOS slash Home OS, but I think they will mention it as
⏹️ ▶️ John it integrates with their other products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, very quick aside. I think you might already know this, but I realized I’d never done that calibration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing within the TV, the Apple TV. And I went to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I plugged in my fancy schmancy HDMI cable and it said, oh, you’re using Dolby Vision, there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to calibrate, go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, that’s what it usually says. Oh, and speaking of this stuff, people have mentioned in the chat,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Home app, right? So where does the Home app fit into all this? No one likes the Home app.
⏹️ ▶️ John So bad. The Mac version is even more hilarious. That’s part of your home
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy. If you rename the thing Home OS and you say, and there’s a new Home app. Now, the Home app doesn’t run the Home OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John It runs on your iPad or on your iPhone or on your Mac or whatever. That’s a great time to
⏹️ ▶️ John enhance that. Because as of version one, it was reasonable. But now it’s just really kind of limiting. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if they’ll save the new redesigned Home app for their big rolling out of Apple as part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Matter Network or whatever the hell the thing. I hope I’m getting that name right. Did
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey chat room already correct me?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re right. Yeah, so if they want to take a second
⏹️ ▶️ John cut at the Home App, this is a great time to do it. If not, they might save it for the big coming out party.
⏹️ ▶️ John it? I mean, I’m sure we’re forgetting something. We’ve gone so long. We’re like, there’s tons of things Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John announce. I mean, hey, are they going to announce the car? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you imagine how it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John still on? It just
⏹️ ▶️ John rolls out on stage. That would be, yeah. I haven’t, honestly, I just haven’t been keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John up with the rumors, just because like, I mean, my focus is so narrow these days is I just want to see that MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I care so much about Mac hardware and so much less about other things. Well, my priorities are
⏹️ ▶️ John now Apple’s priorities. So don’t take that as any prediction about what’s going to be emphasized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and HelloPillow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at http.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks everybody and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John 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, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC extravaganza!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second consecutive time I’m not doing it next to you two. I’m very sad about that. I know you, I know John isn’t, but I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m kind of not either. I kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as I love doing the live shows in person, like I love a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but it’s so much work and it’s, and I get so stressed out about just the logistics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all working out okay. Not for me!
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you got a two-year break from being stressed out. I feel like I got a two-year break from being stressed out about travel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. Oh, so you’re ready to go now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, recharged to, like, endure the badness if and when it ever happens again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least there’s one more year where we don’t worry about, like, so do we just sit here during the theme song?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, that’s so true. What do we do during the theme song? Do we sing along?
⏹️ ▶️ John You look at the audience and appreciate the people who are singing. That’s what you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, no, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just stare at them awkwardly. I filmed them the first year. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco filmed them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So did I. That works the first year, but then like, you know, what do you do the rest of the time? Like, it’s too short for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to do like, you know, the rock band move, just leave the stage and come back. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should do like what the newscasters do. You know, like when the lights dim, like when we were kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the news would be over, the lights would dim, the newscasters would always talk to each other, like as the studio
⏹️ ▶️ John lights are dimming. Oh, yeah. They always had to look like they had like a side conversation. Really, they were probably just
⏹️ ▶️ John they hated each other and were cursing each other under their breath, they were complaining about like the director or whoever, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But whatever they’re talking about, it certainly wasn’t. Let’s discuss the latest news stories.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, let me, let me tell you, if we are not in person next year, then I am, I am committing all three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us and I have not spoken to either of you two about it. I’m committing all three of us to do one video episode next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No one wants to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Come on. Just for funsies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody, nobody needs to see video episodes. That’s not, that’s not why they go to the live shows. The live shows
⏹️ ▶️ John are kind of like the version of the bootleg is that you get to hear the sort of raw uncut thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I suppose sometimes you get to see toasters, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I suppose like if we had to do one of those two things, either a full blown live show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in person in a venue that we have to like set up all the logistics for and everything, or just record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our video one day, like I guess I could record the video. I guess that’s not that big of an ask.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would prefer the live show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really? I’ll do the damn video edit. I don’t even care. This will be the first time I’ve edited it at ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s just like what is the, I just, at least in a live show I feel like there’s a live audience that in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory is being entertained and it’s like yeah I went to a thing and I saw a thing because this is a thing that can only happen
⏹️ ▶️ John when we’re here in person. Whereas a video thing, that can happen at any time and no one actually wants to see us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hmm. Maybe if we did it in a hot tub. That’s a twitch joke you two won’t get. Correct.