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

434: A Squirmy Soup of Rectangles

Our WWDC 2021 spectacular!

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

Chapters

  1. WWDC
  2. Sponsor: YES PLZ (code ACCIDENTAL)
  3. WWDC
  4. Sponsor: 1Password
  5. WWDC
  6. Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
  7. WWDC
  8. Ending theme
  9. Federighi’s iPad toss

WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hello everybody and welcome to our WWDC 2021

⏹️ ▶️ Marco live, but not in person, but still live spectacular. Although most people who hear it won’t hear it live, but some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you are hearing it live. So here we are. It’s our live spectacular.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been in a crabby mood all day for no reason whatsoever. You ever have one of those days like, you know, it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mondays, even though it’s, uh, well, I guess, is it Monday? What is the, yeah, it is Monday, isn’t it? Holly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m, I’m loopy. Um, didn’t sleep well last night and again nothing in particular just you know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a random night where I didn’t sleep well been kind of grumpy all day and I went through the keynote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and and I’ve just very briefly I thought okay that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine and then I watch the State of the Union I was like no actually there’s more here than I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I took my 11 pro and I put the beta on it so this is an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey older phone well not older you know I mean it’s not my daily phone but the beta on it. And I’ve only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiddled with it for a few minutes, but I think I was unreasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey grumpy when watching the keynote. And I actually think there’s a lot more and more interesting stuff here than I initially thought.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would be curious to hear if you guys were willing and interested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in providing some sort of broad overview. Did you at all feel grumpy ever? Or am I just a crab

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apple or, or is there more here? I’m trying to, I’m trying to self censor so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have to bleep me later. I’m trying to make your edit better, man. You’re welcome. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was curious, you know, do you guys, if you’ll do a very brief opening statement, if we are even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey capable of such a thing, how was your general sentiment of the entire day?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it, I have, I had a similar opinion as I think many of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reactions I saw online at first and, you know, during like on Twitter and stuff, which was, it was,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed kind of boring from a developer’s perspective. there is a bunch of stuff from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a user’s perspective, but from a developer’s perspective, there wasn’t a lot that was shown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off in the keynote. And the State of the Union really honestly didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expand on that very much. Like I kind of expected like, hey, we’re gonna get to all the really deep technical stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the State of the Union. And it kind of didn’t. But once you start looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the API diffs and the new APIs and stuff like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it becomes a lot more of an update, of a meaningful update at that kind of level.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I would almost compare it to like a speed bump update in the hardware, where you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t necessarily, there’s not like a lot of like in your face, like wow, massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new thing for developers here, but there is a lot of under the hood stuff that has been updated, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it is not gonna affect everyone. You know, it might only affect you if you use certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs or whatever, but a lot of it is stuff that I think everybody would use and has been waiting for. Things like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, Swift having async await and actors, like that’s a pretty significant change to the APIs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we all use. And so that’s a huge thing that’s going to affect all of us in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco various ways. And there’s stuff like underlying framework changes. There’s this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely new text engine. They revamped store kit. There’s all sorts of stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that many apps will find themselves benefiting from at some point. And then there’s always the whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like little miscellaneous API niceties that come up. I noticed there’s now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an API for decoding and thumbnailing images. Stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that, off the main thread.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things like we’ve all had to paste snippets from Stack

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overflow into our code base or import little single class libraries and functions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do these very common tasks. And to have that built in is just a little nicety. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a whole bunch of stuff like that. There’s a meaningful update to SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t, at first glance, call it super revolutionary, but it’s a nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point update to SwiftUI, basically. And so we have a lot of stuff here,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of which is especially headline-grabbing for developers, for the most part. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of just general niceties that form this speed bump update

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the software, basically. And in a year that was probably massively disrupted by all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the COVID work from home stuff, I would imagine like this is pretty good considering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that. So I’m happy with it so far. I mean, again, this is day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I haven’t had time to look at it yet. Happy with it so far. And also I think developers kind of need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a break. Like, you know, it’s kind of like the iOS 12 year where like iOS 12,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we kind of all got like a free summer that was mostly a summer off if we wanted it to be. because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there weren’t that many breaking new features that we had to implement.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think this is gonna be one of those summers as well, which the whole world needs right now. We need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a time off, a break. And I think this is gonna be that kind of thing where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one hand, I don’t see a lot of new ground for apps to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have new capabilities that weren’t possible before and to open up new markets. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a lot of that kind of change. But I also don’t see a lot of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap that we all have to adopt that’s just kind of a churn, like new system-wide

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI themes or stuff like that. Like that kind of stuff where you’re kind of obligated as a developer to do a bunch of work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of like blocks the rest of your feature work until you do that. There’s not a lot of that either.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ultimately, I think it’s gonna be a really nice kind of lower key summer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fall where we’re gonna be able to work on actual features of our apps and making the apps better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we want to, as opposed to doing a bunch of churn work to keep up with the platform. The downside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there’s not a lot new for us to do. And until we can require iOS 15, a lot of the little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco niceties won’t really be available to us either. But that’s not a bad thing for this summer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it’s funny you brought up the last year because it occurred to me earlier today,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I meant to bring this up earlier, that this feels like, the last two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDCs feel like what you would expect given the timelines of COVID overlapping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these two events. So last year’s WWDC, COVID really became a thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in March. And granted, I am sure that that is the crunch time for Apple to really and properly get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything across the finish line. But at that point, they had had quite a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the year even, or most of the season perhaps, to work on these new features. And last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey year’s WWDC was very impressive. I mean, widgets alone, I think was a really big deal and there was plenty more beside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. This year, I feel like certainly at a glance, I don’t feel like there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot to be excited for for developers at a glance. And I didn’t even think there was that much to be excited

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for as a user at a glance. But I think part of that is because this was a full

⏹️ ▶️ Casey year of COVID that Apple had to work through. And Apple is famously a company that does not do remote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey work well, or didn’t anyway. And so I think it’s not really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that surprising, like you had said, Marco, that this year is perhaps less splashy than last year was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since that train had already left the station for WWDC 2020, and there was nothing they can do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stop it. This year, they had to fight with all of the uncertainties

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the whole of 2020 in order to deliver anything. But again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think that my initial take was wrong. And the more I think about it, the more I think there is some really interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff here. John, I interrupted you. I’m sorry. What was your quick opening statement?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we always talk about WWDC as this sort of balancing act, specifically the keynote, where,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially when it’s all virtual like this, the keynote is expected to be viewed by many, many

⏹️ ▶️ John people and, in many ways, targeted at a much larger audience. Like when we’re there in person, it’s like, yeah, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John in the room, but we understand that the keynote is not just for us. Like it’s a whole week-long conference that’s just for us.

⏹️ ▶️ John The keynote is kind of for the public or whatever. So there’s always this balance between how much developer focused content

⏹️ ▶️ John versus how much Apple just saying here’s you know Because part of WWDC is there’s a new version of

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. There’s a new version of tvOS new version of Mac OS Here’s what they’re called. Here’s the features they have right? Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John those features require developers to do stuff But sometimes they’re just new features and this is the time when Apple announces

⏹️ ▶️ John those things, right? So we expect there’s gonna be a lot of content that’s like, oh look, here’s a new

⏹️ ▶️ John feature in the OS It’s our feature and there’s no SDK for it and just FYI. It’s there,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But sometimes there’s tons of developer-facing features. Oh, we’ve invented, Xcode is

⏹️ ▶️ John released, or we’ve invented a new programming language and you’re all gonna be using it soon. Or, you know, Apple Silicon,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like sometimes is big developer focus, right? And then on top of that, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the context of, you know, what we talked about the past couple episodes of developer sentiment and the

⏹️ ▶️ John Epic trial and all the, you know, legislative stuff going on and antitrust here and

⏹️ ▶️ John in Europe and all those stuff like that sort of looms as a shadow over this. And last week, I think it was

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco more or less predicting like there’s not going to be any overtures in this WWDC keynote

⏹️ ▶️ John to try to extend the olive branch or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John to developers. And for the most part, that was right. But I think Apple still has to kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John walk that line. We want developers to be excited about the new stuff we’re going to announce.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a developer conference. So it’s not like we’re going to have this sort of mournful tone where

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh, I know

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everyone doesn’t like

⏹️ ▶️ John us, but here’s some new stuff, right? So they have to, you know, be enthusiastic, but they also,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult for them to sort of find the right balance. And it really depends on who the audience is. Maybe you don’t care about any of this

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and you think your relationship with Apple is awesome and you’re just super excited. Like that audience needs to be served

⏹️ ▶️ John as well. You know, and some developers are cranky about it and they need to be,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, I think it was a difficult situation, right? So, and they

⏹️ ▶️ John always have some kind of gag openings. This time they had a gag opening that was like, You know, if developers could design the intro

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, how would it be? And depending on your point of view, it’s like, oh, this was a fun little, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John cause they do those gags all the time. It’s obviously well-produced, highly polished, pretty funny as far as these

⏹️ ▶️ John things go. But if you’re in a cranky mood, you watch that, you’re like, well, I’m not excited about

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC. So these people who are supposed to be developers being excited makes me cranky. But if you’re actually

⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiastic about, you know, what’s going to be announced and looking forward to it,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, yeah, it’s a little funny opening. And I think that is sort of the difficulty of this year’s WWDC.

⏹️ ▶️ John Aside from all the COVID stuff that you talked about, aside from all the like, what do they have to announce and what do they not have to announce? There

⏹️ ▶️ John is that difficulty of how does, how does Apple present itself to the world and to its developers

⏹️ ▶️ John amidst that larger context? And I think Apple did an okay job of it. Um, and I think there was a slightly different

⏹️ ▶️ John tone in the state of the union than there was in this one, but in general, there was just a lot of stuff for them to announce. So mostly it was

⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, we’re going to describe all the things. And the final thing I’ll add is like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John no hardware this year, right? So that was that we brought this up in a couple of past shows

⏹️ ▶️ John without an Intel road map or any external sort of third party hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John limiter or gate on Apple’s releases. If Apple doesn’t tell us when they’re ready

⏹️ ▶️ John with their whatever new chip that’s going to go in the new Pro Max, we just don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John What is the new hardware just not ready? Maybe, or maybe they’re going to announce

⏹️ ▶️ John it two weeks after WWDC. And the only reason they didn’t do it now is because they had so much content. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that we were saying like, this is boring and you know, there’s not that too much exciting stuff. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re, they were padding it. There was a lot of stuff in it. And, you know, I’m trying to wrap up this intro as fast

⏹️ ▶️ John as we can, because I think as we go through this keynote, there was actually a lot of things. Granted,

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them are end user features, but still, it’s not like they spent 10 minutes on an AR table demo. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like they had five game developers come up and show their games, right? It was just thing

⏹️ ▶️ John after thing after thing and they didn’t even, as usual, they didn’t even hit on like 50% of the stuff that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John available. State of the Union, which we’re probably not gonna get time to cover much of, I think didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John go, like, didn’t have too much extra technical detail mostly because they spend a long time

⏹️ ▶️ John going into much more depth on a few topics that they decided were important. Which is

⏹️ ▶️ John a different approach than they’ve done in the past where they do sort of a survey course of like quick hits on technical stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t mention at all in the keynote, right? And each little quick hit would be like, and here’s a new thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Go to the session to see more. And here’s another new techie thing. Go to this session to see more. And here’s another new techie thing. Instead, they really concentrated

⏹️ ▶️ John on a handful of things they thought were important and really spent time with them, which is reasonable because

⏹️ ▶️ John again, there’s a whole week worth of sessions. And I’ve gone through the sessions sort of like, you know, bookmarked them or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever to like know the ones that are going to watch. There’s a ton of really interesting, good sessions.

⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, like Marco said, most of them being like, oh, here’s a framework that you already use, but it has

⏹️ ▶️ John new features, and you’re going to want to use them because the new features are like things that you’ve always wanted to do or things

⏹️ ▶️ John that weren’t possible before, or just enhancements that just make you smile. If you have any experience with the API, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John wow, that’s great. Like, even something as simple as like SF Symbols, now you can do in multiple colors. Cool,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I saw that in the Apple apps during the keynote, and I was wondering what the deal with that was. And now I can, A, use

⏹️ ▶️ John them myself and B, make my own. That’s not a big deal to anyone who’s not a developer, But that’s exactly the content that you would

⏹️ ▶️ John expect to see at WWDC. So, uh, sorry for making this go longer, but yeah, let’s, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John we need to dive into the announcements because there actually are a lot of small things.

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WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s dive in. Opening video, I don’t think there’s really that much else to say about it other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than, hey, there was a DeLorean. That was neat. I actually enjoyed the Memoji,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Memoji audience that Tim walked out in front of. I mean, it’s cheesy and weird, but given that we live

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a weird time, I thought it was kind of cute. And then here we are at iOS 15.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there were several themes. There was stay connected. There was focus, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to get these right now. Stay connected, explore the world around you, and one other that I apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t take good enough

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John notes. I don’t think you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to remember these themes because we will never see them again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, good talk. So let’s start with FaceTime. There’s spatial audio for FaceTime, which, again, if I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a device that supported spatial audio, I’d be more enthusiastic about this. But it seems clever. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding is if you’re in a multi-person FaceTime call, they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey arrange the people on screen in a particular way. So let’s say the three of us were on a FaceTime call. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps, uh, John is to the left-hand side of the screen and Marco’s to the right-hand side of the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, as I hear John speaking, it will be panned a little bit to the left

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand, to the left, uh, headphone. So it sounds like he’s coming from my left

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or slightly anyway. And then if Marco talks, it’ll sound like he’s coming from my right ever so slightly. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it helps you, I guess, have a little bit of spatial awareness as to the conversation and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes it feel. one would assume more real. It’s a little thing, but I think that’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was a good use of spatial audio because I’ve been a little bit down on trying to use it for TV or music or

⏹️ ▶️ John other contexts where like the audio was professionally produced to be a certain way. And now this thing is trying to mess with it to

⏹️ ▶️ John make it sound like it’s coming from a place that it’s not, but it’s, you know, like that doesn’t appeal to me, but this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a perfect application. Like in a FaceTime call, you’re probably not

⏹️ ▶️ John playing high fidelity music to each other. Although they did emphasize that if you don’t like this feature, you can turn

⏹️ ▶️ John it off. But, you know, it’s just people talking. And there were a bunch of features

⏹️ ▶️ John related to FaceTime that were just like making it easier to hear people talking. The noise canceling, the,

⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe that was the thing I was thinking of turning off, the thing with the leaf blower, where they’re trying to like isolate the person’s voice

⏹️ ▶️ John and remove background noise. And then spatial audio. Like if you’re, you know, if you are talking to your

⏹️ ▶️ John whole family on an iPad, spatial audio making voices slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John more distinguishable by position, it’s fine, it’s cool. Like, I mean, you know, Grant, you

⏹️ ▶️ John probably can recognize the voices of your family anyway, but like, this is a perfect application

⏹️ ▶️ John of this type of thing, and I’m glad to see it spread throughout

⏹️ ▶️ John their product line. And to that end, one of the things is that the grid view, which is now a feature because

⏹️ ▶️ John the previous floating boxes and everything, some people found unappealing, so now you can

⏹️ ▶️ John have a plain old grid view. And one of the things they added to the grid view is kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like the tvOS high contrast selection that we talked about on a previous show.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I knew you would

⏹️ ▶️ John be so happy about this. That has come to FaceTime. Now the person who’s speaking can get a nice

⏹️ ▶️ John white outline around the little round rack that they’re in, which is neat.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m liking these, it makes some sense. I don’t know if this is just coincidence or if it’s just that

⏹️ ▶️ John prioritization, but with COVID, everyone working from home, a lot of the features that we’re about to talk about with

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS with this whole stay connected thing are features that would help if you

⏹️ ▶️ John are spending a lot of time working from home doing like, you know, video conferencing with people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a really good direction to go. I mean, obviously, you know, the sooner they can get this out, the better because people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do this for a long time. And if anything, it might be a little bit late for the like, massive wave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of COVID shutdowns. But you know, first of all, COVID isn’t over yet and it’s probably a long time from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being totally over in all places in the world. Um, but also, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re in for an era of a lot more remote work than we had before. Because I think a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will choose to, you know, if their businesses will allow them to, and I think many will,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a lot of people will choose to stay, mostly or entirely remote, who have been remote for this past year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think this will actually be really nice if they can get people to use it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco On that point, getting people to use it, I mean, FaceTime has always been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very good for like, you know, one-to-one, you know, family and friends use. It’s looking great for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still haven’t really seen anybody that I know use group FaceTime.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean, one reason for that is because it was, until this, Apple device only, but the fact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they made a web view for FaceTime, like a web participant interface for FaceTime,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a pretty big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I couldn’t believe it when I heard that. And they actually mentioned Android, if I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistaken, during the keynote. And it won’t be native, like you had said, but the fact that it’s even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible is tremendous. You know, when we used to travel, you know, do you remember that? Do you remember going places? That was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun. When we used to travel, you know, when we would hand the kids off, and typically, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we would have like one set of grandparents have them for a couple days, and then the other set have them for a couple days.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my in-laws are all on Android devices. And so we would use Google Duo, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fine, to be honest. And then we would use FaceTime with my family. But to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just one system on my end anyway that works for anyone would be really, really nice. And so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very curious to see what the implementation feels and looks like on Android. I’m sure it won’t be stupendous,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if it’s at least decent, that’ll be really great. And Apple also pointed out, by the way, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are still encrypting end to end, even on the web.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think one very limiting factor here is going to be that it seems like the web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version, I think, only is available through the FaceTime links feature, where you schedule calls

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a web link in advance. I don’t think there’s going to be, at least from what they showed today, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think there’s going to be a way for people on Android or web or Windows or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to initiate a FaceTime call themselves, or to have FaceTime talk between each other without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody on an Apple device being in the call.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they might. Here’s the thing about the web thing. I know other companies have done web-based teleconferencing

⏹️ ▶️ John before, like Google Hangouts or whatever, right? And all those systems, like to use them at all, for the most part, they want

⏹️ ▶️ John you to be logged in with whatever their identity is. Like, so you’re logged into your Google account and then you can initiate a Google

⏹️ ▶️ John Hangout or whatever the hell they’re calling the things these days, meetings, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you are like, you know, a bunch of people who don’t all have Apple devices, what are the chances that

⏹️ ▶️ John your friends or relatives who have Android devices are logged in somewhere with an Apple ID?

⏹️ ▶️ John chances seem pretty low, especially if they don’t have any Apple devices, and that is Apple’s identity system. So

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that someone else would initiate a call, but they don’t have any Apple devices,

⏹️ ▶️ John they would have to make an Apple ID, log in, and then maybe, we don’t know if this is true,

⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe there’s a web interface to FaceTime where if you’re logged in with your Apple ID, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can initiate a FaceTime call. But even before we get to whether that is the case or not,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, what are the odds that someone is going to sign up for an Apple ID. So it’s nice that they did the

⏹️ ▶️ John web version. If their real play was like, we want to be the

⏹️ ▶️ John end all be all video communication thing for the world, regardless of platform, like what

⏹️ ▶️ John they finally came around to after many years with Apple TV Plus, which is like, look, we can’t just be on our own devices. We

⏹️ ▶️ John have to be in every single television. We have to be on Roku. We have to be everywhere. They’re not doing that yet

⏹️ ▶️ John with FaceTime. This is a baby step in that direction. But if they wanted to do that, they gotta make an Android

⏹️ ▶️ John app. I gotta let people send and receive calls from like their Google account and it doesn’t seem like they wanna

⏹️ ▶️ John do that. So this is kind of weird because a lot of the features they rolled out are sort of catch up with Zoom,

⏹️ ▶️ John like where you can blur the background and you can, you know, share documents and watch things

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. I’ll talk more about this in a little bit. Tons of awesome features that I love that I’ve wanted for years and years,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the sort of cross-platform heterogeneous, non all Apple family play

⏹️ ▶️ John is still questionable. Like, I like the FaceTime links, and I like the fact that they’re doing something.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems like it’s kind of, if you were in a friend group or family that was like this, and everyone was doing

⏹️ ▶️ John it on FaceTime, and you got this link, and you have to use the web view, and everyone else is in the native app, it just

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t feel like you’re on equal footing with everybody else. And I feel like you’d probably

⏹️ ▶️ John resent that and say, why can’t we all just use Zoom? That stinks everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, people who choose to use Android or Windows probably aren’t super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into having a first class experience with their computing devices. Oh, here we go.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, but at least they feel like everyone’s used to using Zoom or used to using whatever they use. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. It really depends on the group. When I think about my use of video conferencing, I have to use

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Teams at work because that’s what everybody uses. And at least that’s homogeneous, where it’s like, look, everyone in my

⏹️ ▶️ John company uses Teams, so everyone’s going to be on Teams. We can all complain about Teams together and commiserate. Other

⏹️ ▶️ John things for school stuff for my kids, that seems to be all on Zoom. And with my family,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s FaceTime because we’re mostly Apple. So there is kind of this idea that within a particular group,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a platform that we all agree on. It’s just that all the things that I described, it’s an equal

⏹️ ▶️ John experience. Maybe not a great experience, but an equal experience for everybody. And this FaceTime thing is now going to

⏹️ ▶️ John be, some of the participants get fancy native apps on their iPad or iPhone, and some

⏹️ ▶️ John people are looking at a web page that hopefully works on their Android phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say also the audio stuff they mentioned very briefly. John mentioned voice isolation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ML-based filtering, for like filtering out background noise. That’s a really cool thing. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the first, you know, software to ever do that, but it’s not that common yet, and Apple can probably do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty good job of it. So I’m looking forward to hearing that. Also, they threw in right at the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco end there, there’s also an option for what they call wide spectrum sound, which picks up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all frequencies of audio, because normally all of these video chat and audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chat apps, They normally apply very, very heavy filtering and gating to the audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to cram it down into the smallest bitrate possible, and they optimize it for speech,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they throw out anything that is probably not speech frequencies. And so to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this option to not do that, I think it’s gonna sound incredible because we’re so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco accustomed to phone calls and phone call-like experiences sounding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they do with the very aggressive voice-only compression. to turn that off and to actually hear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the audio frequencies without all the aggressive filtering and gating and everything, is probably gonna sound

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible. So I’m actually really excited to try that out.

⏹️ ▶️ John That actually relates to the other thing, which is the share play business, right? So one of the places where what you’re describing

⏹️ ▶️ John comes into play is if you’re on a Zoom meeting or whatever, and there’s a song you want someone to play and you like play

⏹️ ▶️ John it on your phone and you hold your phone up to the microphone or something, it sounds awful, right? Because it’s taking like music and then

⏹️ ▶️ John just trying to narrow it through whatever filters they have to just be speech, and plus it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like going out of a tinny speaker into a microphone, right? If what you actually want to do is

⏹️ ▶️ John have multiple people on a, you know, video conference together, either listening to or watching something at

⏹️ ▶️ John the same time, why bother even trying to smuggle it over the connection that you’re talking over if it

⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that is available on the internet? We can all watch it together. Let’s all watch Ted Lasso together, right? And then we’re all

⏹️ ▶️ John watching presumably full Fidelity streams from our own location that are synchronized with each other. Again, lots of other

⏹️ ▶️ John sites and apps have done this, services like Netflix. And I know a bunch of people who have done this. My kids have

⏹️ ▶️ John done it, where you simultaneously watch with a bunch of friends. Again, mostly because of COVID, because you can’t all be in the same house.

⏹️ ▶️ John But just the basic functionality. Like, this all makes sense in the context of COVID. But even setting aside

⏹️ ▶️ John COVID, all of these features are features that are useful outside of the context of COVID.

⏹️ ▶️ John To be able to share media at full fidelity, to be able to share documents, screens,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, screen sharing. Oh my god, like, how many times do I do tech support for my parents, where They have to point

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one

⏹️ ▶️ John of their iOS devices cameras at the screen of another iOS device. I can

⏹️ ▶️ John screen share on the Mac, but when they have a problem with their iOS device, it’s like, and then I’m trying to correct their, you know, I can’t see

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen anymore and it’s not in focus and it’s a really difficult job, screen sharing on iOS. Like the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that we have this incredibly high bandwidth connection between each other, where we can see each other in real

⏹️ ▶️ John time and video and the only thing we were using it for is to just see people’s faces. It’s so great to finally

⏹️ ▶️ John say, let’s share a document. Let’s look at charts, let’s share a song, let’s watch a video at the same

⏹️ ▶️ John time. I really hope this gets wide adoption because this is exactly what I wanted. I always hated the feeling

⏹️ ▶️ John that I was connected with somebody, but the only things I was allowed to send over this connection was just

⏹️ ▶️ John a picture of myself. And I’ve wanted to do anything else, like if we’re on a call with the family, and even if we just want to look at

⏹️ ▶️ John some recent pictures, oh, did you see that picture I recently added to the shared album? Oh, Uncle Joe isn’t in the shared album. Oh, I can

⏹️ ▶️ John add you. Can I just show the picture right now so we can all look at it together? Because we’re all on a FaceTime call and somehow I can’t bring

⏹️ ▶️ John up a photo this is gonna be a big quality of life upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ John for sort of communication over the internet for people who have iOS devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, SharePlay is really exciting for those kind of like, I think like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how many people are gonna do what Apple demoed with like watching a movie together. I think it’s great to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that capability. But again, like I think because group FaceTime seems to have not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really taken off so far, that might be kind of optimistic. Like the whole time I was watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I was thinking back to iMessage apps and like when that debuted.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple had this idea that how this would work in practice where people would install

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these iMessage apps and then like coordinate stuff inside iMessage and pick your takeout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco orders like from your takeout order iMessage app all together. And in practice, nobody really did that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think with FaceTime, with SharePlay and FaceTime, I think that’s probably gonna be how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ends up. I bet most people are probably not gonna be using it to watch movies and stuff together, but if you can use it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things like screen sharing more easily or showing a photo, like that is probably gonna be a really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice improvement and that’s gonna be probably very widely used.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with both of you guys that having some ability to screen share is likely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a tremendous and very, very awesome feature. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Plex done, you know, watched together a couple of times. And this was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly with my brother-in-law and his fiance and it does work well. And I, you know, I’m sure apples would work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just as well, if not better. Uh, it works well. And I actually enjoyed watching a couple of movies that way. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the thing of it was, was I don’t think I would necessarily enjoy having a FaceTime

⏹️ ▶️ Casey call with video all happening while we’re watching a movie. You know, like I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to be able to watch something together, especially something as long as a movie,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t want to have like my face on screen the entire time. I want, I want to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like get the movie going and, you know, do the play pause thing where if they pause, it pauses me, if I pause,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it pauses them. But I want to be able to like chat about the movie or something over iMessage. I don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily do that over FaceTime. And I hope that that’s the thing they always showed it, or at least when any recollection I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that they always showed it as, Oh, we are video chatting and simultaneously watching Ted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lasso, which is just not something I’m personally into. But it very well could be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it will work in this more flexible way. We just don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. And it is worth noting that in the State of the Union, which we’re probably not going to get to today, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey did mention that there’s a whole API for this. So you can, as an app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey developer, do your own cut of this. And in fact, they had… I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey swear they said it was a demo app. Some people Twitter said it was notes, but they had something where they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were doing like a digital whiteboard with three different people on iPads with pencils, all drawing on the same whiteboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time. And if I understood them right, the implication was that this was all done using these new APIs. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I have no particular need for this for anything that I’m working on, I’m very interested

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see what does this API look like? Can you provide some arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey data that Apple will just sync in real time so you can do this like whiteboard app? Or is that just, is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being treated as video? You know, how’s that all working under the hood? And I’m very curious to look into it, but I haven’t had time yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John And related to that are the things where they will gather up items shared with you, like via messages, if someone sends

⏹️ ▶️ John you a photo or whatever and sort of pull them into the apps that they belong in. Things people, if they send you a

⏹️ ▶️ John link, those are visible in Safari. If they send you a podcast thing, that’s visible in Apple Podcasts. If they send you a TV show, visible

⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple TV. Like sort of this unification, because we all have this experience of like, where was that thing? Did

⏹️ ▶️ John someone email it to me? Because we’re old, we’ll look on our email. Was that in a message? Now I have to go to messages and

⏹️ ▶️ John try to scroll backwards in a message thread or do a search. And if that content was just

⏹️ ▶️ John simply surfaced where we, you know, if it was a photo, it will be surfaced somewhere in the photos app. And if it was a link to a website,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be for surface somewhere in Safari. It’s not quite where we want to be in terms of what if I don’t use the podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John app? What if I don’t use Safari? What if I, you know, I use Netflix and not Apple TV? Like, but baby steps

⏹️ ▶️ John here, but like, just, I feel like all of these features are sort of raising the bar, raising the floor

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, what can we expect as the baseline feature set? And the baseline feature set of sort of communication on the internet has really

⏹️ ▶️ John gone up in recent years, especially with the sort of COVID-forced advent of

⏹️ ▶️ John video conferencing. A thing that not too many decades ago, it’s like, well, that’s great if you have a good connection,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re not gonna be doing it normally. And now it’s just kind of like status quo of like at the very least real-time

⏹️ ▶️ John audio communication, maybe with some grainy video. And I would say within all the apps like

⏹️ ▶️ John Slack and Teams and everything, the expectation that you can share some portion of your screen, either your whole screen

⏹️ ▶️ John or a window, or share a document or do stuff like that, that’s sort of what people expect from their devices.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, again, Apple is held back by the need to have

⏹️ ▶️ John all Apple devices or have some subset of the people be on the web, and so that’s still a problem for them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But within smaller circles of people who all do have Apple devices, even if it’s just within a single

⏹️ ▶️ John family or just two or three friends, the expectation that there’s things you can

⏹️ ▶️ John do when communicating that are richer than just sending plain text

⏹️ ▶️ John messages or sending photos back and forth or maybe doing a FaceTime call that you can sort of integrate all these things together. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think people will just become accustomed to doing that. I think a lot of the features that Apple is doing here are catch up with things that

⏹️ ▶️ John people already are accustomed to doing from their work experience. So I think this is necessary

⏹️ ▶️ John changes for the times, but also I look forward to this sort of,

⏹️ ▶️ John I said, raising the floor of like, this is just what kids will eventually expect when they’re adults.

⏹️ ▶️ John That of course you can do this from all your devices with all your friends, even if it’s in a different app, depending on your platform.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So next, we learned a little bit about messages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’ve revamped a few things in there, particularly like the way photos look, for example.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey As you mentioned, I think, John, it was a second ago, there’s like shared with you that you can see in messages and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey News and other places as well. They made a very brief mention and showed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I understood it right, it looked like when somebody sent a picture of like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an event that you were also at to you via iMessage that it like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow ended up inside photos as kind of like that group, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, everyone’s at this, everyone’s at the keynote. We all took pictures of each other and we sent them to each other and it all just ends up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the right spot in photos. I really wish they had expanded upon that. I don’t know much about it, but that looked very interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. And it seemed like, in a way, it was like baby steps into like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family sharing across multiple families, you know what I mean? Like a broader family sharing. And I thought that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like what I just said before, that if things are sent to you, rather than having to go to the message app

⏹️ ▶️ John to dig them out, because they are photos, that information will be surfaced in the photos app. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know, and I

⏹️ ▶️ John suspect not, that they’re not like, oh, they’re suddenly part of your photo library, right? I think it’s just sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of a view into data that exists like wherever messages stores it. I’m not sure when we all

⏹️ ▶️ John get these devices and start actually using them to communicate, it should become clear, but it definitely doesn’t seem like,

⏹️ ▶️ John because you wouldn’t want, it’s kind of like the old Google Contacts thing. You wouldn’t want every single picture someone sends you via messages

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a permanent addition to your photo library, right? And so I’m pretty sure that’s not what they’re doing, but it is nice

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to just go to photos and click on shared with me and be able to scroll through a list of photos and find that thing that was sent to you a week

⏹️ ▶️ John ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So next we talked about focus. And like I said earlier, at first glance, I was kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, okay, but I do have iOS 15 beta on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey old iPhone. And I played with this more than I played with anything else about the only thing I’ve played with really.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at a glance, I really like it a lot. So what this is is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have do not disturb today. And imagine you had N

⏹️ ▶️ Casey number of peer things that are equivalent to Do Not Disturb, but set up differently.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So out of the box, it comes with Do Not Disturb, driving, sleep, and then personal and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. Some of these are set up, some of them aren’t. But the idea is, oh, and you can also create a completely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and totally custom one. They also have a couple of other example templates, fitness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gaming and reading. But if you create a totally custom one, you get to choose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a color and an icon, kind of like shortcuts. Then it says, okay, notifications from people. choose the people

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want notifications from when this focus is turned on. So if you’re in this mode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s say it’s work or whatever, then you can say, well, I want Marco and John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Aaron to be able to blow through, and I want to be able to receive their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications. But my parents and my brothers, they’re not good enough, they can wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wouldn’t see notifications from them. So you can choose whatever context you want. Then says, okay, notifications

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from apps. Choose the apps you want notifications from when the focus is turned on. So it’s the same story. So maybe I want notifications

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Slack, but I don’t need notifications from Twitter. Really, probably nobody ever needs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notifications from Twitter, but you get the idea. So you can choose what apps you would like to have notifications

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from. Then in certain contexts, both apps, and we learned this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in State of the Union, apps can say, well, this particular notification is really time-sensitive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Say your DoorDash order has just arrived or something like that, or your Lyft is here. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very curious to see if shady developers will abuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the snot out of this. I certainly hope not, but do expect it. I guarantee

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you they will.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But the idea is, if you’re a good, honest developer, then you’ll say, most of these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lifted notifications are just marketing or what have you. They’re not that big a deal. But this one, that your driver’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, that’s time sensitive. And so in the focus, you can optionally say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, if there’s something time sensitive, if it’s from an app that I haven’t specifically blessed to be in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this focus, then you can say, okay, we can allow that to come through.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I believe in iMessage, it will say, hey, this person is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to focus. And it’s very much like do not disturb while driving. This person is trying to focus, but if this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really important, tap this link or whatever, tap this button and we’ll allow you to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bust through that. And again, I’ve only played with it for a few minutes. I haven’t spent a lot of time with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but this looks really, really cool. And it seems like a very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey appley and very well done balancing of flexibility with,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God, I don’t want to spend 30 minutes setting up this focus, you know, because I can, I can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fathom ways that it would be nicer to have more granular customization, but then you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be spending all this time setting up all of your different focuses and tweaking them just right. and unless you’re CGP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cray, that’s probably not something you wanna bother with. And this seems like it’s really struck

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right balance between flexible and also not a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pain to set up. Now, do either of you guys, I don’t think you do, John. Marco, do you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the beta on anything yet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only on a test iPhone. It’s my old iPhone 7, actually. Wow, okay. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even signed into my real Apple ID. It’s like a test ID that I have signed into nothing. Purchased nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to like, it’s weird. It’s always kind of funny, like trying to get files and stuff to it. Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not my Apple ID. So it’s like, I feel like air drop stuff over. It’s anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But ultimately I am very, very happy to see this focus. Focus.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re focus on focus. Because I love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do Not Disturb. And that has really, like just using Do Not Disturb and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto DND settings, like for every night, like when I’m asleep, That was such a big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS quality of life improvement. And the one big complaint most people had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Do Not Disturb was we would like more granularity on what this means.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like they’ve given that to us and more with this focus system. This I think is gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be probably the most noticeable and noteworthy change

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS power users in all of iOS 15. Because every power user I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses do not disturb in some way. And so to have these kind of like multiple contexts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can set different modes you wanna be in for different conditions, and to have each one of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be more customizable to begin with, that’s a great thing. As for the notification

⏹️ ▶️ Marco priority system, I do think that will be largely either abused or ignored by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many apps because everything about notifications is largely abused

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by tons of apps, and the rules are never enforced against them. So I do expect it to be widely abused,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco including by Apple for their own promotions for all their own ads built into the system. Like I guarantee you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be abused. That being said, if you ignore, or if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect much out of the notification priority features, and if you instead just look at the focus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system as a whole and its customizability and its rules and everything, I’m very excited about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the challenge with all these systems, like, you know, where, I mean, by iOS 15, 15, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the time when you get down to, okay, now it’s time to actually even add more flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ John on top of the notifications. And I think one of the prerequisites of this system is like what they added

⏹️ ▶️ John in past releases, you know, when a notification comes up, at that moment,

⏹️ ▶️ John in that notification, you can take actions to be like, don’t show me these anymore, you know what I mean? Like, as opposed to

⏹️ ▶️ John digging through, you know, an app or whatever. So that’s trying to meet the challenge of these features. And the challenge

⏹️ ▶️ John is, what if you’re not an iOS power user? We want people who

⏹️ ▶️ John just buy a phone and use it to also see some benefit. Now you might look at this and say, this is just for the

⏹️ ▶️ John people who want to tweak everything just so. That’s a power user feature and it’s great. We want those to be in the OS, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John By 15, that’s when you start adding those. But I think Apple also feels a need to try to make it

⏹️ ▶️ John so these features are useful to other people. Some of that involves annoying prompting. Do not disturb is a great example.

⏹️ ▶️ John We all use it. We all probably can’t live without it. I think we’ve all met people who have been iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John users for years who have no idea that Do Not Disturb exists. And very often those same people will complain, I hate

⏹️ ▶️ John all these notifications that I’m getting. And I shut down my phone at night so the notifications won’t wake me up.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you tell them about Do Not Disturb that you can set times when you don’t wanna be disturbed and it won’t bother you.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re like, really? And I’m like, yeah, it really works, right? So that’s the level most people at is they don’t even know about Do

⏹️ ▶️ John Not Disturb, which is the simplest of simple things, let alone this whole world, right? So to get people

⏹️ ▶️ John on board with features like this, Apple has to sort of in the onboarding, prompt them and say, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, is there some time you don’t want to be disturbed? Maybe tell me about it now. Or at the time you get a notification, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John do you, you know, want to see notifications like this from now on? Kind of like the whole thing of like, oh, this app was tracking

⏹️ ▶️ John your location in the background. Do you want to keep letting it do that? We find that annoying because we’re like, yes, I already made that decision. Why are you

⏹️ ▶️ John asking me again? But the reason Apple prompts for this is they want to let more people benefit from

⏹️ ▶️ John these features than just the people that know about them. And there is some fallout for the expert users

⏹️ ▶️ John of being like, why are you bothering me with this? But I feel where Apple’s coming from. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of these features with the apps giving notification types so that we can

⏹️ ▶️ John filter out or whatever, yes, they will be abused by third-party apps. They’ll say everything I have to say is the highest possible

⏹️ ▶️ John priority. But because if Apple has done a good job with this feature, which I think they’ve done a middling job, because

⏹️ ▶️ John you can, at the time you’re annoyed, take action. And if an app does that

⏹️ ▶️ John to you a bunch of times, you can take action and say, stop sending these. And also because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John seems so proactive in like inferring behavior and saying, we’ve noticed that this app has

⏹️ ▶️ John spammed you with a bunch of notifications. Are you sure you wanna allow it to have notifications? And prompting you, extra extra

⏹️ ▶️ John prompting you with a button right in your face saying, no, I don’t wanna see them anymore. It will allow

⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of feedback loop between the user and the annoying app. Even if they have no

⏹️ ▶️ John idea, would have no idea otherwise how to go into settings and disable the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then as for Apple’s notifications, I think Apple will actually correctly categorize

⏹️ ▶️ John all the notifications. I think part of the bind Apple has been in is they wanna send these notifications, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes because they just wanna upsell things and make money because some business unit needs to have more people sign up for a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I get that. But also sometimes, like even just for like the notifications I got today

⏹️ ▶️ John from the developer app, like there are notifications that they wanna send you And

⏹️ ▶️ John I want that app to be able to send notifications, but not all notifications are equal. I think most

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple apps that aren’t directly tied to trying to get more people to pay for a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John will in fact, and even the other ones, will correctly categorize their notifications and prioritize

⏹️ ▶️ John them and say, this one’s informative, this is the highest priority. I don’t think the Apple apps will say, the highest possible

⏹️ ▶️ John priority is to say, hey, you might want to sign up for, you got a free month of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John TV or plus or whatever. Maybe I’m wrong. they will mark that as highest priority. But I think these

⏹️ ▶️ John notification levels are exactly what Apple needs to do the writer thing

⏹️ ▶️ John with

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco their own notifications.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’re gonna send them. They want to be able to send them, but they would love to be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John identify, categorize them and say, this is a notification that’s not a big deal, this is a casual one, maybe you look at this if

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want to, and then allow it up to the user, especially the power user, to perhaps filter out the ones that are reminding

⏹️ ▶️ John me the 19th time that some app is using my location always, and do I still want to do this? They didn’t say that that was

⏹️ ▶️ John something you could do in the OS, but that’s what I’m thinking in the direction we’re going. If apps categorize their stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if I have enough control to filter them out, maybe power users will have to see less of the stuff that

⏹️ ▶️ John is annoying us as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just, I really, really like this focus feature, and I barely played with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but I’m really, really into it. And I’m starting to have, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it, iOS 5 with Notification I’m having bad thoughts,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco guys. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so. Bad thoughts. And oh my gosh, I still, oh, iOS 5 was rough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think Marco and I both, if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I recall correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the one that we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey installed beta 1 at WBDC. And then immediately regretted it. Deeply regretted it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say that because iOS 15, and in general this whole release is not

⏹️ ▶️ John so many major new features, lots of small ones, that it actually will be way more stable than iOS 5. And it

⏹️ ▶️ John probably will be more stable than iOS 5 was. But I think there’s a whole bunch of weird

⏹️ ▶️ John API differences in UIKit that will make your apps render weirdly. And so I would still recommend

⏹️ ▶️ John not installing the beta. But yeah, I can see where you’re coming from, Casey, that you want this. I want to get

⏹️ ▶️ John in on this new focus stuff ASAP, but it’ll be here before you know it. So just be patient.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, on the topic of installing the first beta too, many of the new features in iOS 15

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are social features that kind of require all the people you talk to to be on 15

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be very useful to you. So like, I don’t think this is a big summer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like non-developers to have much reason to install the beta.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should all share your test Apple IDs with each other.

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WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hear me out for a second. Do either of you guys use Scribble on the iPad? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing where you can use the pencil to handwrite in a field that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey supposed to be typing into, and it will automatically convert that handwriting into text. Do you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use that, John, at all?

⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald No. The whole reason I use a computer is as stated in the past, so I don’t have to use my handwriting to enter text. Trevor Burrus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. What about you, Marco? Do you ever use that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Marconi No. I always have the keyboard on my iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, the reason I ask is because the next thing they spoke about was live text. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this is more broadly useful by a fair margin, but it struck me as a very similar thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I forget that Scribble even exists, and then I’ll use it like here or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there and think, wow, this is so freaking cool, even if it’s not the most efficient way to get text in the iPad, it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking cool. And then I’ll forget about it again. Well, live text seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is even cooler, but I wonder if I’ll have the wherewithal to use it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like ever. And so what is it? So live text is you can take like an image,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so in your camera roll or coming off the camera, and you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the like click and drag text selection on text that it finds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the image. And it’s not like overlaying like Google Translate does where it overlays

⏹️ ▶️ Casey text like computer generated text on top of the text that’s in the image itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a very hard thing to do verbally, but you’re actually taking like the loop and all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and selecting the text in the picture, there’s no overlays or nothing, you’re just literally selecting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the text in the picture and you can like copy and paste it. You can do this on past photos. You can do this on a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture you’ve just taken. You can do apparently visual lookups. So you can like, you can ask something,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri or photos or something. You can ask it what kind of dog you’re looking at, what kind of flower, what’s this piece of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey art, what’s this book, uh, different landmarks and stuff like that. This looks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely cool. It looks like, what is it, TextSniper or something like that? Yeah, TextSniper,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is an app that somebody had mentioned on a podcast not long ago, and is super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link in the show notes. It looks like it’s that sort of a thing, but built into the OS. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a technical perspective, it is mind-blowingly cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a lot of catch-up slash Sherlocking of existing apps on other platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So most of these features have existed elsewhere in various forms. on iOS, I had an app

⏹️ ▶️ John that I just uninstalled, sorry, that did the same thing. It would do OCR in your photo

⏹️ ▶️ John library so your searchers could find it. But of course, it had to do it in its own app. And it took a long time to grind through your photo library.

⏹️ ▶️ John Having this built into the actual photo library and having it basically be an OS-level function is great. And the demos

⏹️ ▶️ John they showed were pretty impressive, because OCRing straight-up computer text is not that difficult. But they showed it OCRing

⏹️ ▶️ John a handwriting font. It does a really good job. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s mostly for situations where you have an image and not text. Surprisingly, in this modern age, or perhaps

⏹️ ▶️ John not surprisingly, because bandwidth is so relatively cheap, you will find yourself coming across

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of places where you see an image of text. I mean, Twitter alone is just filled with it, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes you just want that text. And yeah, we mentioned the app TextSniper. I downloaded and installed TextSniper

⏹️ ▶️ John today on a friend’s recommendation. Why? Because the developer app on macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John does not let you copy and paste text from like WWDC session titles or descriptions. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m talking about sessions or pasting in descriptions in various Slack channels and we’re talking to stuff, but I couldn’t copy and paste it,

⏹️ ▶️ John tech sniper to the rescue, right? So I love for this to be, sorry tech sniper, but I love for this to be an OS level

⏹️ ▶️ John function. This is sort of the fate of all features that would be great as OS

⏹️ ▶️ John level functions. Apple will eventually get around to it, right? That’s just the nature of a platform.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t begrudge Apple that, like that’s what platforms should do.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’m very happy to see this being integrated into photos, this being, presumably,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe is it an SDK that you can use in your own apps? Probably, they do that with most of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco their other.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there already was an SDK to do this with some of the ML Vision stuff from a couple years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but it does a really good job. Like Casey said, the UI for it is really neat. The stuff with

⏹️ ▶️ John photo lookup, I hope that works better than it does. It sounds like it better than it does currently, because it sounds like it’s an enhancement

⏹️ ▶️ John of existing thing. Like very often I’ll try to find pictures of my dog and I’ll just do dog search in the photos

⏹️ ▶️ John app and I’ll be disappointed that it misses some obvious dog. Or I’ll look for book or something like. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think it was about that. I think it was only about text that was in the images. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You’re both wrong. What it was. So this is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have taken a photograph of a dog. What is this dog? Is it a Shar-Pei? Is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a Shih Tzu? Is it a Beagle? Tell me what breed of dog it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or here’s a leaf. What kind of leaf is it? You already know to some degree what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, or I guess you don’t even necessarily know what it is. My point is you’re not looking through your photo library to find a beagle, it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other direction. You have a photo of a beagle in front of you and you want to know what breed is this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have sheep, I want brick.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is all kind of combined into the same thing, but yeah, it’s basically just like an enhancement.

⏹️ ▶️ John End users don’t make these distinctions we’re trying to make about what tech and what SDK is this. They just know that they

⏹️ ▶️ John have photos on their phone. How easy it is to find the picture of the photo you want, and how easy is it

⏹️ ▶️ John to know what this is a picture of? And there’s a bunch of stuff in this keynote about that, even like the

⏹️ ▶️ John AR stuff of like, where am I in the city based on photos and stuff. Like this is, you know, part of,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the WWDC sessions, these are individual frameworks, individual SDKs, individual APIs, but if you look at it

⏹️ ▶️ John from the user of the phone, this is just like, things that my phone can suddenly do. And if they work well, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John miraculous and delightful. I tend to lean on both Google Photos and Apple Photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John hoping that their intelligence is enough to let me find it. The book example, I took a picture of my,

⏹️ ▶️ John one of my hardcover copies of The Stand, and I wanted to find that picture, but I have tons of pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m like, you know, well, the good thing about this with LiveText is I could have just typed The Stand and would find it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John LiveText didn’t exist when I was doing this search. So good for LiveText, that would have saved me this. But what I did type was book,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I was shocked to know that like, a picture of a hardcover book sitting on a table, Apple Photos couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John identify that as a book. I mean, maybe it was a weirdly shaped book, maybe like whatever, it’s ML. Like you don’t know why it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John find it as a book. Maybe it just didn’t index that thing. But anyway, improvements in that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John when it works, it’s great. And it’s frustrating when it doesn’t. Improvements that are welcome. And Live Text is gonna be a huge improvement in that

⏹️ ▶️ John because I can tell you from experience with that other app, which I think was called Memo or something, OCRing text

⏹️ ▶️ John out of your photos is incredibly powerful. Like when you’ve lost all hope of finding a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, if you can just remember a word or two, we will narrow it down so fast. And it’s just such a relief

⏹️ ▶️ John versus scrolling through months and weeks and trying to find it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m really, really into trying this. And I just haven’t had the chance to try

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on my test phone yet, but it looks super duper cool. All right, there were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some miscellaneous other things that I think for the most part are kind of not that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, but somebody, I guess John added some information about secure paste. Do you want to tell me about that?

⏹️ ▶️ John I grabbed a bunch of random blank off web pages and threw them in here. This wasn’t in the keynote, but I’m trying to lump them in the right

⏹️ ▶️ John sections. This was about how you can do copy and paste, I assume, without making that

⏹️ ▶️ John little, you know the little notification that comes down that says an app has like copied or pasted something?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is like, you know, an API that lets people avoid that. It basically lets

⏹️ ▶️ John you, basically lets an app not see what’s on the paste board or the clipboard

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever they call it on iOS. I can’t tell if they’re using Next terminology or Mac terminology. The app can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John see what you’ve put there until you choose to paste, and then suddenly it comes out of some secure area and flows into

⏹️ ▶️ John the app, and that will avoid the little popover thing. I don’t know the details of it, but I like the idea, like, you know, we all

⏹️ ▶️ John notice when all of a sudden, I guess it was, what, 14? When that little notification, the little white capsule

⏹️ ▶️ John kept coming down from the top and showing us the things we’re pasting, and everyone flipped out about it when it first came out because some

⏹️ ▶️ John apps were like copying and pasting over and over again because of like bugs in the code, or maybe they were doing nefarious stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then a year later, now we have a way to do copy and paste in a more secure way to avoid that

⏹️ ▶️ John whole issue. So I just like things like that at WODC. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is cool. I didn’t know about that. All right, so then they have explore the world around you. And I think we could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully blow through this pretty quickly, famous last words. Wallet got a bunch of improvements, mostly emphasizing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, taking your keys or using, you know, Apple Wallet as a key for all sorts of things, cars, hotels, work,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amusement parks like Disney World. Apparently they will let you, and I don’t know if this is like a region limited thing, I would assume

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, but you can scan like a driver’s license or another, and some other sort of identification card.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but apparently you will be able to do something with the American

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TSA to like communicate your driver’s license information to a TSA checkpoint without

⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to actually have your license on you, which is kind of neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it said that the ID support is in quote, participating US

⏹️ ▶️ Marco states, and the TSA is quote, working to enable support.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing that like, this is gonna be great if everywhere that you go adopts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But that’s a big if, it’s the kind of thing that like, I can see this working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably better in Europe. And I can see the US just having like, massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco state to state differences and just it becoming kind of like a, I don’t know. I’m pessimistic,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not for Apple in this case, I’m pessimistic that US state governments

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all coordinate and get their crap together to actually support this in a meaningful way.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. If we look at like the who supported the COVID exposure app, like Massachusetts, a

⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly forward-looking, you know, techno literate state didn’t support

⏹️ ▶️ John it until like a year into COVID and anything having to do with ID cards, every state has their own policy

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re not going to let any tech company tell them how they want to deal with IDs in their state. So it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ John when they say we have single sign on for cable companies And it’s supported in select cable companies,

⏹️ ▶️ John which includes Charter.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just

⏹️ ▶️ John Charter. No, not Comcast, not Verizon, not AT&T, just Charter. And so whatever the Charter

⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent of states, Rhode Island, there’s going to be three states that support this. The TSA thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope I’m wrong about this. I hope more states adopt it, but it’s just so hard to do that. TSA thing, I have more hope for just because look

⏹️ ▶️ John at how Apple Wallet and the boarding pass thing went. There’s not that many airline companies, and they are

⏹️ ▶️ John not states. And so it’s easier if you can get the airline companies on board to persuade

⏹️ ▶️ John the TSA, a bunch of big donor, one of the cases where our completely

⏹️ ▶️ John bought and sold government works for us, well, having these big companies that give a lot of money to re-election campaigns

⏹️ ▶️ John get what they want. So maybe TSA will be slightly easier if they’re able to ram

⏹️ ▶️ John this through because they’re big money donors. I’m trying not to be depressing, but it’s reality.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I feel like the ID stuff, I mean, one of the contexts that you might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to have an ID is if you get pulled over by a police officer. Now, are you going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to want to hand your unlocked phone to a police officer? Are you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John nuts?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they might have a thing where it locks onto that screen or something. But yeah, there are a lot of unanswered

⏹️ ▶️ John questions. But don’t worry, no police officer is going to accept that as

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco valid identification when he comes to you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like it’s a very ideal thing if we could get to a world where somehow we could do this all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco conveniently and securely that was accepted everywhere. But in practice, I think you’re gonna have to carry your ID with you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still. And so it’s a nice thing to try to get rid of your entire wallet, you know, just like Apple Pay with credit cards. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a nice thing to want to get rid of your entire wallet in practice. This will be convenient for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco places where this is accepted, but there’s still gonna be enough places where it’s not that you’re gonna have to still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry your ID with you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I agree. They spoke about the weather app for a little while. It aesthetically looks really good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems like the dark sky influence has been very heavy on it, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes total sense. But I don’t have too much to say other than it looks good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t see any sort of API for dark sky information, which was a bummer. But it very well could be that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey missed it. Again, we’re recording the night of the keynote.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like we thought. The first party weather app is better thanks to dark sky. Yay. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, absolutely. Maps got a handful of upgrades. are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new maps, the fancy pants, new apps are coming to several new countries. Uh, over the next few months,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s an interactive globe, which is cool. I guess. However, one thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that blew my freaking mind is in certain. And of course it’s like San Francisco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and nowhere else in certain locations. They have like dramatically improved.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say imagery, but like rendering. And it looked as though they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were painting, the paint on the roads is being shown

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the map. So like, if you zoom into San Francisco, you can see dashed lines

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in between lanes. You can see crosswalks. You can see stop written

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the road. I don’t know how this is happening. This is the coolest freaking thing I’ve ever seen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just think it’s fascinating and so neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably going to be one of those things like it’s great in California. What? Cause like their satellites can actually see the paint on the road

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s still painted. Whereas, you know, you bring it to an area with weather and it’s like, all the paints all rubbed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off from all the ice and crap that we have here and all the potholes and like, is it going to render all the pothole patches?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? No, I think I’m looking at, I don’t have any idea where this is in San Francisco, but I happen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be on Bryant street and you can see where there’s a left hand turn lane with the left hand turn,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, arrow on it. There’s a four way crosswalk. There’s a median, which apparently has two trees within

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Like this amount of detail is extremely cool. And then I guess when you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey directions, it has, it’s again, it’s a very difficult thing to describe verbally, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will show like overpasses and things in 3d space. So when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going in a, in a, in a place where you have like clover leaves or all sorts of different things, all happening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on top of each other, you’ll be able to see that in 3d space, which will make it so much easier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to look at your phone or CarPlay and then look at reality around you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, Oh, I get it. I see what I’m supposed to do. I just think this is extremely, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, but unfortunately, only 10 cities this year. And I concur with both of you that even though Philly, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of them, I’ll believe it in the Northeast in particular when I see it. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is super, super cool. And they also had like a nighttime mode where they do like some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny, funny in a a good way like clever things with lighting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it looks like the moon is shining really brightly. Maps has actually been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good for me. I use Maps almost always. The only time I don’t use Maps is when I’m going on a longer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trip, when I know traffic will be a problem and then I’ll use Waze. But Maps is really good and it’s only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting better. I mean, remember how much and how badly we used to make fun of Apple Maps because it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trash? They’ve turned that ship around and they’ve turned it around nicely. I just think this was very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cool stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, as usual, it’s all gonna come down to how good is it in your area? Because that’s one thing that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple Maps has always been inconsistent in that way. Like, you know, even from the very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning, when people were complaining about it a lot more, as you said, there were areas where it was great, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then there were areas where it wasn’t. And so I hope they’re able to actually deliver,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, greatness in more places than just the Bay Area. I actually, I was kind of disappointed,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they showed the Bay Area as their example area, I’m like, you know, are they not aware of the optics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this specific problem? Like, I feel like that was just kind of inviting this kind of criticism. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have been nicer to show somewhere else that they had made really good because yeah, we know it’s going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be great in the Bay Area, but you know, is it going to be great where all the rest of us actually live?

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re still iterating on the basics to like setting aside the things announced in WWDC. I’ve noticed over the past several months

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple Maps has been getting more detailed and more specific with just its voice directions when

⏹️ ▶️ John driving in the car. Go past this light and at the next light do a thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Or even just the new intonation of the voice assistant when it’s time for you to make

⏹️ ▶️ John a slight left turn. Have you noticed that over the past several months? No. Like in 700 feet, make a slight left

⏹️ ▶️ John turn. And then when you actually get to the turn, the voice says, make a slight left turn.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s just so satisfied that you’re going to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But no, but just like more voice things. stay in the left lane to stay on this road, right? Like stuff like that,

⏹️ ▶️ John that it used to just not say anything about before. It would just tell you when the turns were. That kind of enhancement is

⏹️ ▶️ John super important. And I have to say, like again, being consistent based on your area, I’m not in an obscure area.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still, on a weekly basis, do competitions between Google Maps and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Maps.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I have

⏹️ ▶️ John to say that Google Maps still is better about understanding where the traffic is and routing

⏹️ ▶️ John me around it in a sane way. Apple Maps very often takes me on just, you know, Mr.

⏹️ ▶️ John Toad’s wild ride. Like I have

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no idea where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John taking me. It’s like, are you kidding? What are you doing? Apple, like gets me there. It’s not like wrong about the roads,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it is making poor choices. So I’m excited about the enhancements. I really

⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple Maps has been getting better, setting aside everything at W3C, and then this on top of all the enhancements

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve making just day over day, week over week, year over year, you know, outside

⏹️ ▶️ John the app. I think Apple Maps really is getting better, but it still has some weaknesses against Google.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really quickly with transit, there’s better Apple Watch integration. And what I thought was really neat was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess they didn’t already have disembark notifications, or at least they brought it up at the keynote.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you’re on the subway and you’re coming up to your stop, it’ll, you know, touch,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll boop boop you on your wrist or whatever and say, hey, it’s time to get off the subway. But what was really neat for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I haven’t been to New York City in a long time, but I was a pretty decent subway navigator, especially for someone who’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never lived there. But inevitably, anytime I popped out of the subway, I would look around and ask, where the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hell did I just pop out into the real world again? I have no idea what block I’m on. Where am I, which way is north, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way is south? You know, who’s on first, I don’t know, who’s on third.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will often need to like walk half a block up in one direction to see, oh, I went from 45 to 46,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, now I know which direction I’m going. Like you have to like see the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey block street sign before you realize.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I’m glad it’s not just me. That makes me feel actually quite a bit better. But anyway, so there’s now exit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey assistance What that means is, well, so they said, yo, you pop out of the subway and you need to look around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out where you are. And I thought, okay, okay. If that makes sense, you know, presumably they’ll just use GPS or something like that. Oh no, no, no, no.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What they’ve decided to do, which I think is super cool and hopefully useful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you take your phone and you kind of look like do a scan, like a panoramic of the buildings

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are near you, and then it’ll say, oh, you’re on the corner of 47th and sixth.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You need to go this way and put an AR like arrow on the screen to show you exactly which way you want to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey walk. What a cool and clever implementation. And especially since in cities,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes GPS is really spotty, especially, you know, big tall cities like New York.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is super duper cool. And I really look forward to trying this in 15 years when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I finally get back to the city. I just think this is super neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the actual solution to this kind of problem is for the like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual transit authorities to mark in the sidewalks when you get out, like what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey direction you are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s actually, like back when I was working in the city, there was a brief time where somebody did that. Like they were like just kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco guerrilla, like spray painting compass arrows on the, like right on the sidewalk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you get out. And it was amazing. And of course, you know, the MTA took them all, like got rid of them all. In

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the absence of like obvious help from subway and city authorities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this easier with with just like a sign or a thing like that on the sidewalk. This solution by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is one of the most ridiculously overly engineered things I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever seen, like to solve such a simple problem, but I see why they had to solve it because the cities won’t do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the idea of like, okay, instead of having a compass rose painted on the ground when you got out of a subway station,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna build this entire like AR vision network to look at all the buildings

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around you and make a giant database. Like that’s, it’s completely ridiculous, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but that is the future. If they ever get around to having some kind of glasses, this is exactly what you want. You want

⏹️ ▶️ John people’s names hovering over their head and you want arrows showing you where you have to go. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, we’re not there

⏹️ ▶️ John yet, but like, yeah, by all means, please do lay down the groundwork for us. I don’t know how many people will do it and take out their phone and if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John easier than, you know, but like, I would just be happy if the stupid compass and the phone worked better. Like when you have map on directions and

⏹️ ▶️ John you hold your phone flat and you just want the compass to rotate so that it, like what I’m always want is I want the

⏹️ ▶️ John map on my phone to be aligned with the map in real life. So if I come out of the subway station

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m looking at my map and it’s in the process of giving me directions, please rotate the map so

⏹️ ▶️ John that the direction I’m facing matches, you know what I mean? And sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John it does that and sometimes it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, you can be very confusing. So I would be happy if just that worked, but

⏹️ ▶️ John hey, if AR is, we can jump all the way to show me where the arrow goes, I’ll take that as well. I just want to know where to go.

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WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are some improvements to AirPods. I don’t know if it’s really actually the original AirPods or just the AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro and Max, but there’s conversation boost with ambient noise reduction.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is particularly for those with hearing impairments. And I think that does require AirPods Pro. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the example I used was, you’re at a dining, like an outdoor dining table with your partner

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re trying to understand the waiter or waitress that’s helping you out,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, you can turn on this conversation boost thing where it will try to focus in on whoever’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking and boost just that, which I thought was super neat. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced notifications. So a lot of times, there’s actually, I was listening to Upgrade earlier, and there was a funny conversation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between Mike and Jason about this, but you can announce text messages. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to say that word, the assistant will pop in and say, oh, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just sent a text and he said he misses you. And that is a thing that some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people like, some people don’t, but now you can do that with notifications, which is kind of neat. But the most cool thing to me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was they’re doing improvements to Find My. So apparently, they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use the Bluetooth low energy beacon-y stuff to ride on the same network as AirTags.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can hopefully, if you lose your AirPods and it’s near somebody else’s iPhone, you can still find them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re even doing that like proximity view where you can hone in on it, home in on it. Where did I just have this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John conversation with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco you guys? Home in on it. Thank you. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there you go. So home in on it. And then there’s also a separation alert. So if you walk away

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your AirPods are not with you, it’ll start yelling at you and saying, Oh, you forgot me. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very curious to see how that works because like, I don’t care if I walk away at home, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do care if I walk away at a picnic table in a park that I was working at. So I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure how intelligent that is, but still, I think that’s a super neat idea and certainly long

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming. And then finally in the AirPod section, spatial audio on tvOS and also M1 Max,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was pretty cool. And then finally, Dolby Atmos audio is starting today

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple Music people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is all really cool. The Find My Network support, I think, was the biggest surprise for me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I didn’t realize that they would be able to do it. And it does make sense. They don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the U1. they can’t do the precise positioning, like, you know, with where you could like see it on your couch, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has Bluetooth so that you can at least get like a rough idea of distance to it. And, you know, the fact that it uses the Find

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My Network, so even if you like drop an AirPod, like as you’re running somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not even near your house, like you can still then find it later because it uses the Find My Network. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Only on AirPods Pro though. Regular ones apparently don’t have whatever Bluetooth line energy beacon thing they need. That makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s so frustrating. I really need to get it in there. See, I’m having the damn Apple TV problem again

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I really feel like I should just bite the bullet and get AirPods Pro, but it’s gotta be any day now, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve been rumored to have new AirPods and AirPods Pros for like the last year. Any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco day now it’s coming.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m playing the Apple TV game all over again. All right, moving right along before I get depressed about that. iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS. Home screen was, I think, one of the two big features. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put widgets on the home screen proper now, which, I mean, it seems pretty obvious that they wanted to ship that last year, just didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the time. App library comes to the home screen and including

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looked like an entry in the dock. I don’t know if I love that. I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco app library is in the dock.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see, I hope it’s optional or disappears some way, somehow after some amount of time, I don’t know. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the idea of the app library, not really digging it, living in the dock all the time. But we’ll see,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see, maybe it doesn’t. We’re not really sure. Multitasking. It is not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the complete rewrite and revamp that everyone I think was kind of hoping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, some quietly, some not. But as said, I think it was from Craig, but maybe it was somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else, easier to discover, easier to use, and even more powerful. And so now there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a multitasking menu. So hey, guess what? If you have nothing but gestures, nobody knows what the hell to do, but if you have buttons,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people can figure it out.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you also have to know which thing to tap to hit that menu, but yeah, you’re right. This is not an overhaul.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, apparently Apple, you know, that thing you described, easier, better, right? It is

⏹️ ▶️ John an enhancement of the existing system. And we all know the existing system could have used some enhancements.

⏹️ ▶️ John But still, Apple is very married to the idea that the way

⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS works when it comes to multiple things is that the screen is divided amongst multiple,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, apps that don’t exist in Windows, that don’t have any kind of Chrome, and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just slowly making concessions while still firmly resisting the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ John window Chrome or of windows. And I’m not saying they’re making the wrong decision, but like this WWC was a clear

⏹️ ▶️ John expression of their intent. We want it to work like this. You’re splitting up the screen among apps,

⏹️ ▶️ John but we recognize that the existing system for doing that has weaknesses.

⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s shore up those weaknesses. Let’s not fundamentally throw it all out and just everybody gets windows and they all have closed boxes

⏹️ ▶️ John on them, right? They didn’t do that at all. So this is yet another run at this exact problem. they said,

⏹️ ▶️ John we are gonna make this work. We are committed to splitting up your screen into pieces.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re gonna add keyboard shortcuts for it. We’re gonna add more discoverable

⏹️ ▶️ John UIs, more obvious UIs. So hey, do you want this to be on the left half of the screen or the right? And in particular,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the most important feature, I say this as someone who has not used this OS and is not an iPad power user, but my

⏹️ ▶️ John impression of the most important feature of multitasking is the ease with which you can take

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that was filling half the screen and get rid of it and pick a different thing to go there because it seems like that was way too

⏹️ ▶️ John complicated before. And this is a step in the direction that I talked about in the last show of making

⏹️ ▶️ John this a more generic system, right? So the splitting up of the screen is fine, but before

⏹️ ▶️ John there was this whole sort of marriage between the apps and once they were, two of them were in a pair, they kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John stayed in a pair, but you might have another instance of that app that’s not in the pair and it got all confusing. And now

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to me from looking at the demo and the keynote, more composable

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, Oh, so you got a bunch of stuff on the screen? At any moment, anything that’s in any portion of the screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can remove that thing and put a different thing there or remove that thing and expand the one that was there to fill the whole thing

⏹️ ▶️ John now. There’s some new things thrown in the mix. Oh, now there’s a shelf. You’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John the dock. You’ve got the shelf. You’ve got slide over. You’ve got the app library. You’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John the little menu that comes down. There’s a lot of stuff. It is still way more complicated than the simple,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, so you have a bunch of windows and they have title bars and you can drag them around, right? But this is

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s expression of their intent. They want to make this work.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think everything they’ve done is an improvement. But I think it’s not really,

⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways, it’s getting simpler, like what I just said. It’s simpler to be able to mix and match apps the way you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to. But by adding yet another UI element, which is the shelf for holding the little

⏹️ ▶️ John minimize thing, it’s still hard to explain this model to people.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it will be easier to use, but you can explain to somebody how windows work.

⏹️ ▶️ John How, you know, and even though we have all sorts of weird windows, like, hey, my Chrome window looks so weird and has these tabs on the thing and

⏹️ ▶️ John Finder windows look different than that and Safari windows are gonna look even weirder. We’ll get to it in a little bit. But you can more or less

⏹️ ▶️ John explain, windows exist. There’s usually some way to close them, to maximize them, to minimize them. You can resize

⏹️ ▶️ John them from all the different edges and you can drag them around somehow. And apps are gonna have multiple windows and you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, you can explain it. iPadOS is a lot more to explain, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a big step up from where they were. Now, the question is, is this enough?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think we’ll have to sort of defer to the iPad experts to say, does this sort of solve all the problems you

⏹️ ▶️ John had and now you feel it is powerful enough to do what you want?

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of like the notifications. The other question is, what about the people who aren’t power users? Does any of this

⏹️ ▶️ John help them at all or are they equally terminally confused? because very often, you know, I’ll have a

⏹️ ▶️ John relative accidentally put something into SlideOver and have no idea what happened to be super confused and just

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, whatever that was, I never want to see it again, right? Because they want the just

⏹️ ▶️ John full screen iPad experience and you know, you’ve been able to get that by turning off that preference to not do that. But I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a shame because I think, you know, the ability to look at more than one thing at a time shouldn’t be a power

⏹️ ▶️ John user feature and that is the challenge, right? You’re not just satisfying the power users, also, you want someone

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to do what I think comes naturally to everybody on a Mac or a PC, which is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna have two web browser windows and they’re both next to each other. Imagine that. Or I’m gonna have a web browser window over

⏹️ ▶️ John here and a document that I’m writing over here, next to each other. It shouldn’t be a power user

⏹️ ▶️ John feature. I’m not sure this achieves that, but I think it will achieve making

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad power users much less frustrated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this ultimately, I mean, I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet because I wanted to wait

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until at least tomorrow before I put the new beta on anything that’s logged into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my iCloud account. But I’m glad they went this direction at least. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they went the direction of, we’re going to have actual sort of visible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI for managing the multitasking windows on iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what they really needed, because before it was all just hidden behind these just gestures that you had to figure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, which were not necessarily always obvious.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still hidden behind a little thing that you have to know to tap on. Like it’s three dots, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So it’s- I know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s at least the dots, yeah. I mean, it’s not great.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s better than nothing, but it still is not the same. Like I was saying, they do not want to put a window chrome on, because window

⏹️ ▶️ John chrome is like always visible. Again, Apple seems to be allergic to window chrome on Mac OS as

⏹️ ▶️ John well, which we’ll get to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in a little bit. So the war

⏹️ ▶️ John on window chrome continues.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but like to have this be a button that you can tap and then do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things with or to. Like that is a huge advance for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the discoverability of the multitasking gestures and stuff. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can see why, there’s lots of reasons why they’re not just doing Windows on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. Like they’re not doing that for lots of reasons, many of which are good reasons. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the ones that a lot of people don’t necessarily think of, but that is pretty important,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the way iOS works with RAM and with virtual memory,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the fact that it lacks a swap file, means that every device has a hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM limit. And that means that there’s a limit of how many apps can be on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen at once. If they had like a free form windowing system, you would have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the capability as a user to put tons of windows on screen at once, more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the actual OS and its memory architecture would be able to support.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it would have to have really weird, arbitrary scene limitations, like maybe after you created your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sixth window on an iPad Pro, then it would close your, you know, your oldest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last used one or something. Like, it would have weird effects. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, it would do what it does now, it would freeze-dry them, right? Like, I’m not saying that I recommend doing that, but this is how

⏹️ ▶️ John it works today, is when you go to the app switcher, some of those apps, you see an image of the last live thing

⏹️ ▶️ John they updated when they had time in the CPU. some of those things are just cardboard cutouts of an

⏹️ ▶️ John app that is no longer running, right? And you can’t tell because it’s just the app switcher, right? But if you had a scenario where you describe

⏹️ ▶️ John where like an arbitrary number of overlapping windows were there, some of those windows would

⏹️ ▶️ John be owned by an application that is currently running and could in theory update them. And some of those windows would be

⏹️ ▶️ John fake cardboard cutouts, just basically an image of the OS save last time that app was running. And if

⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t like a video player or something, you might not notice like, huh, nothing’s changed in that window in a while.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I wonder if that

⏹️ ▶️ John app is actually running. But yeah, that limitation is,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s mostly historic. We’ve got 16 gigabyte iPad Pros now.

⏹️ ▶️ John This will eventually take care of itself through the march of time. But for now, it is a real thing. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think that’s the strongest reason to not have it, but it is certainly a practical reason today

⏹️ ▶️ John and for the foreseeable future until everybody’s iOS devices have 32 gigs of RAM or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s fair. But in general, I do think that there’s lots of things that are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fundamental to iOS apps, to iOS itself as the OS, to iOS hardware,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that make freeform windows more difficult than you might think. When you first think, oh, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should just have freeform windows, there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way. There’s the RAM limit, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen size limits, there’s app size limits, where apps just weren’t, iOS apps were not designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be below a certain size, and so you have to have these arbitrary limitations and how tall the windows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be. They also weren’t designed for things like live resizing. And so that makes things more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated. Like there’s a lot of reasons why free-form windows on the iPad would be a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big challenge and would possibly come with like massive weird side effects. So I understand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they’re not doing free-form windowing. And as long as they’re going to keep doing their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like screen kind of tile splitting arrangement that they’ve been doing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure does look like this is a pretty big improvement to making that more usable to more people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s still a lot of room to go, but this is a big improvement.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, you kind of left out the primary reason why they don’t want to just go with Windows

⏹️ ▶️ John is because the whole point is the iPad is not a Mac, right? And the people who love the iPad love it for many reasons

⏹️ ▶️ John that have to do with how it’s not like a Mac, right? The simplicity, you know, even when I talk about the, most of the

⏹️ ▶️ John time it’s complicated or whatever, the fact that it can be used more simply, the fact that it is sort of has fewer sharp

⏹️ ▶️ John edges, right? that there’s no point in the iPad if you’re just gonna make it a Mac without a keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It needs to stay an iPad. So I understand why Apple is going with this. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just, like I said in the last show, people want, I think, the flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac, but they do not want the Mac baggage that comes with it. And part of that baggage is, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, just plain old Windows menu pointer, like just the old interface, because we know that has a lot of sharp

⏹️ ▶️ John edges. We know people are not good at managing Windows, and it’s not a task that they relish, and generally don’t want to do it. And that’s part of

⏹️ ▶️ John why people love the iPad and the iPhone so much, because it doesn’t ask them to do those things. So, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not, what Apple is doing is not easy. And so, you know, if they make improvements every year, eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ll converge on a good solution. The only thing I worry about is

⏹️ ▶️ John adding interface elements and new proper nouns that people

⏹️ ▶️ John need to know or understand, maybe is not the path, but you know, baby

⏹️ ▶️ John steps. And speaking of that, they have the menu bar thing. Don’t call

⏹️ ▶️ John it a menu bar. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a menu bar.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this. And it wasn’t really brought up, but for a moment.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like I saw it on a screenshot or like a video of a device that was being used. And I was like, whoa,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoa, whoa, whoa, what was that? What was that? And we’ll put a link in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the show notes to a video from Steve

⏹️ ▶️ John Schultz. We have two videos showing what the interface looks like when you’re using it. And the weird thing is how it appears. Now it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John power user feature, I suppose. Like one of the things about Catalyst apps is they,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can define menus in them and the menus will appear on the Mac, but that same information is available

⏹️ ▶️ John to those Catalyst apps on iOS, but the iOS doesn’t have a menu bar, so how do you surface that? And apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you hold down the Command key, it will show you keyboard shortcuts, but it will also show you essentially a little

⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar floating on the not quite bottom of the screen, showing all the commands

⏹️ ▶️ John for file, edit, insert, format, in this screenshot and this thing. And the commands have

⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard shortcuts that you can type, but you can also tap them with your finger. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate

⏹️ ▶️ John across the menu bar and then up into the menu items. It’s a little bit strange. It’s a little bit of a power user feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is obviously not meant to be the main interface, but it is more or less in keeping

⏹️ ▶️ John with the function of the menu bar on the Mac, which is these days, most Mac apps don’t expect

⏹️ ▶️ John you to be going up to the menu bar over and over and over again when you’re using the app. The

⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar exists to hold the full functionality of the app, but in

⏹️ ▶️ John general, if you’re going to be efficient, there’s a few commands you’re going to use frequently. You’re probably going

⏹️ ▶️ John to use the keyboard shortcuts for them. And only when you’re like, where is that command, would you go up to the menus. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John extreme scenario being, say, you’re using a very complicated graphics editor, where you can never

⏹️ ▶️ John remember where the heck the grid snapping manager palette window is. You go up to the Help menu, you

⏹️ ▶️ John type grid, and you know, like. But I’m not saying it’s the junk drawer, but it is like

⏹️ ▶️ John the user accessible, visible place for all the functionality in the app. iOS has not been

⏹️ ▶️ John like that historically. And historically, the keyboard shortcuts are a thing that only people who had keyboards connected

⏹️ ▶️ John to their iPads even knew existed. And when they did, it was just a little overlay. This is a big step up. This is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John now we’re revealing to you a bunch of functionality in this transient interface element that’s not on the screen all

⏹️ ▶️ John the time. It’s not like you have this bar taken up, you know, there’s no menu bar. But when you ask for it,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, here are all the functions that we think are accessible or relevant to you in your current context.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know how apps are gonna deal with this. It would be nice if Apple sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John led in this direction. This is what a lot of people were disappointed about. It was like, oh, where’s Final Cut Pro for the Mac? Like where’s Logic Pro for the,

⏹️ ▶️ John or no, for iPadOS rather. Where’s, you know, where are Apple’s Pro apps for iPadOS to show us

⏹️ ▶️ John all how should we think about a full-featured Pro app on the iPad? How should, if you

⏹️ ▶️ John did have Final Cut Pro on the iPad, what would it look like? Would it have this menu bar thing? What would the interface

⏹️ ▶️ John look like? How should we do this? I mean, third parties are plowing bravely ahead and I’m sure they will adopt all of these

⏹️ ▶️ John features. And in fact, they have invented their own sort of menu systems and menu bars and palettes

⏹️ ▶️ John and even internal windowing interfaces. But thus far, Apple hasn’t really led in this area.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I am glad that they are at least thinking about it and providing some interface

⏹️ ▶️ John elements and some sort of access for power users to get this functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John from the keyboard, even if they don’t remember the keyboard shortcuts, even if there aren’t any keyboard shortcuts, just using the arrow keys

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So then they had a long segment about notes and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than anything else, like they said, oh, we’ll have tags, we’ll have this activity view thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but quick note, and apparently, speaking of completely undiscoverable gestures, if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe up from the bottom right of your iPad screen, then Notes is aware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the app that you’re using when you do that and will let you take notes on whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is you’re looking at. And this was a little fuzzy to me. I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a clear view of where the guardrails are for this, where the limits are for this. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically, for Safari, for example, if you do this quick

⏹️ ▶️ Casey note thing, it’ll take note of what page you’re on. It’ll let you drop the URL in there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real easily. And additionally, if you have text highlighted, or I guess maybe if you copy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey paste text into this note, When you go back to that page in Safari, it’ll actually highlight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that text that is in your note to tell you this is something you cared about before. I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to dig into this as well once I get this on my iPad and maybe a couple betas from now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In principle, this looks super cool because you can basically take notes on anything in your iPad. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey files are in the computer, but you can take notes on just about anything. And if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as smart as they say it is, It looks really, really slick, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to play with it before I say too much more about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m reminded of the, uh, my vague recollection of one of the features of NCSA Mosaic

⏹️ ▶️ John was that you could add annotations to web pages. Like this was a feature of the browser. And I suppose like

⏹️ ▶️ John if there was something on a web page, you could, maybe it was just annotations about the page itself, but the idea that as you were browsing the

⏹️ ▶️ John web, you could sort of mark it up with your own stuff. And then when you went back there, you could see your own notes. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what it’s trying to accomplish. I do wonder how they’re addressing sort of the challenge

⏹️ ▶️ John of the web being that URLs don’t work the way they’re quote unquote supposed to.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the same URL can have very different content depending on all sorts of factors. URLs

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves are filled with garbage that may change. Sometimes the query string is super duper important. Sometimes it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not. You know, so if you have even just for the tab group stuff that we’ll get to a little

⏹️ ▶️ John a little later, if you are associating a note with a URL, the chances

⏹️ ▶️ John of you being able to ever get back to that exact URL may not be 100%. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so I do wonder

⏹️ ▶️ John how reliable, because people just expect it to work like if they’re just like logged into their Amazon account

⏹️ ▶️ John and wandering from product to product and they’re on their wishlist and put an annotation, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John they get logged out of Amazon and they go back to the product page and they say, where are my notes in this product? It’s like, well, it’s because you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not logged in and because you weren’t looking at the product page, you were looking at it in your wishlist. And that’s even in Amazon, which is pretty good about URLs,

⏹️ ▶️ John in that URLs actually are somewhat stable and do represent what it is that you’re looking at. Other websites

⏹️ ▶️ John are not so kind. And the URL has little bearing on what you’re looking at. And the same URL can have 20

⏹️ ▶️ John different things on it. And the same page can have 20 different URLs. And yeah, good luck.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems cool in theory. And if Apple can do some sort of smart normalization or some other

⏹️ ▶️ John way of sort of being fuzzy about it and saying, well, if this looks vaguely like the page where you annotations

⏹️ ▶️ John will give it to you. But yeah, we’ll have to try it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s most likely based on the system that almost no one knows about. The NSUserActivity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco API, which kind of gives apps the ability to say, like, okay, here’s what the user is currently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing in my app. Here’s what’s currently on screen or they’re currently working on whatever. And then you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it identifiers or metadata or whatever. And then you can, that’s how handoff works. Like it basically hands off that data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a Mac app or to the watch app or whatever, and then the app resumes from whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, identifier or metadata was in that that user activity object. But there’s a feature that no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one has known about except Merlin, I think, where you can like just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an app, like viewing something in an app, you can usually hold in the Siri button and say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco remind me about this in whatever time interval or whatever. And by saying, remind me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this, it looks at the current NSUserActivity of the current app that’s on screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually saves basically a deep link to that. And it works in a bunch of different places,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco voicemails, Safari, tabs, stuff like that. So it’s probably using that same system.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if that’s what it is, and now I don’t know how it gets from having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that link in the QuickNote to then going when the app shows the page

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to then highlight that proactively. I mean, maybe it has a new API

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that or something. Or maybe it’s just a private thing for Apple’s apps. But that’s probably how it works.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’d made the same assumption. It’s funny, on a more broad note,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems to me like over the last few years, more and more and more stuff is driven by NSUserActivity.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if your app is something wherein it makes sense to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey emit anything through NSUserActivity, It seems like ever increasingly, it is time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to embrace that API. It’s used for intents and widgets, if I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mistaken. It’s used everywhere. Like you said, Handoff, it’s used in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so many different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco places. Yeah, Siri, all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of stuff. All right, moving right along. Translate for iPad looked cool. You can do handwriting practice, which is neat, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for languages that don’t use letters that I’m used to. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an auto-translate feature with no button taps required. I think this would be a little socially awkward just plunk

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPad down on like a clerk’s counter, you know, when you’re trying to buy something in a foreign country, but hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it works, that’s super cool. Uh, so I really dig that. There’s also system wide translation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can select text anywhere in the system and you know, there’s a now translate option in that little pop over or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not pop over, but the little like toolbar thing, whatever, uh, is where you can translate text, which is neat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, you want to take us through some miscellaneous that you, you have accumulated.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is stuff harvested from Apple’s web pages and various tweets and stuff, um, muting notifications.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can mute an app or messaging thread temporarily for the next hour or for the next day. This, I’m assuming this is more

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of just in time stuff. Like I don’t want to stop this app from sending me notifications, but I don’t want it

⏹️ ▶️ John to bother me for the rest of the day. We get more enhancements

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and love this by the way. Like just muting an iMessage thread for an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour. Like if the, if like your friends are all talking about something like just flooding you with notifications in a thread that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you don’t want to turn off notifications completely forever, but you don’t really care or can’t deal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it right now during this hour, that’s a fantastic feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s another challenge of like, power users will know it and love it, how do you service this for people who otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t know about this feature? Because everyone will benefit from this, they just might not know, oh, if I have to hold down,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s another hidden UI versus present UI. If you present it as a button or an option that is obvious to people,

⏹️ ▶️ John they will definitely take it because it’s a useful feature. If you don’t, then maybe only, quote unquote, power users will

⏹️ ▶️ John find it. Apparently the text magnification loop is back on iPad OS, the little thing that shows you a magnified

⏹️ ▶️ John version. Oh, thank God. It was always a good idea because yeah, the iPad is bigger and I do

⏹️ ▶️ John like how they change the text selection to be sort of more, say more Mac-like, but like, you know, the iPad is bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ John It should have different rules about text selection, but bottom line is your finger is blocking part of it. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John whole point of that loop is, show me the thing my finger is blocking. So I’m glad that’s back. This

⏹️ ▶️ John one is super cool. I didn’t see any demo of this, but it’s just text from Apple’s webpage. Apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has some kind of built-in two-factor authentication system. So, you know, we’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John using whatever the Google Authenticator or Authy or all the other apps that

⏹️ ▶️ John let you store your two-factor authentication for various websites. Some services make you use their authenticator

⏹️ ▶️ John app, like Steam makes you use theirs. Some Microsoft sites make you use the Microsoft Authenticator, but then other ones are more generic.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apparently, Apple itself in the OS now has some way to generate two-factor codes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you integrate with it, it will do what the other two-factor systems

⏹️ ▶️ John could not, which is you can auto-fill the code, right? Rather than having to go to Authy,

⏹️ ▶️ John tap the code to copy it, go back to the place where you were, paste it into the little field, hope it handles your paste correctly,

⏹️ ▶️ John and all that stuff, the Apple one will be integrated right into the system. I

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of love it. I know it’s unfair to those other apps because they can’t do this kind of integration, but this is the kind of integration I want.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t be so sure. Sponsor of this very episode, 1Password. On iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like I’ve ever broken the code as to when it works completely and when it doesn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but generally speaking, at the very least, it will copy that six-digit code

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your clipboard, but a lot of times on iOS, it will actually properly fill in that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one-time use code automatically. So once you enter your username and password, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve used 1Password to do that in the iOS integration, you know, into one password to do that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or vice versa. Then when you proceed to the next screen and it asks for your code, a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of times it will actually enter, iOS will, you know, drop it in there for you and you don’t have to do anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. In worst case, you just paste, it’s already there waiting for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the web integration has always been good with this because of web extensions, which they’ve just got made better and better. Like that

⏹️ ▶️ John now you can have web extensions that span all of Apple’s platforms and web extensions do have the power to do this for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple one though is gonna be able to integrate with native apps, right? That, you know, one password doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have access to. So I’m glad they built this in. My fear is nobody will use this because we all

⏹️ ▶️ John already have our own, you know, people who use one password, like Apple is never going to match

⏹️ ▶️ John the feature set of one password. They’re just not gonna because that’s an entire company dedicated to this one feature I don’t use

⏹️ ▶️ John one password, but I use the Google authenticator. I’m not gonna move all my stuff to something else. Other people use Authy

⏹️ ▶️ John and they love Authy. How does the built-in Apple thing fit into this? Oh, and by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way, when I use Chrome on my Mac, it has its own password thing that’s not built into Apple’s thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a, Apple is late to this game. So I’m glad they’re doing something because I think this should

⏹️ ▶️ John be an OS level feature, but boy, they’re super late and I’m not sure. Kind of like a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff they’re trying to do in TVOS. I’m not sure they’re going to be able to get everybody on board.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, everybody, stop using your Morpho feature third-party apps and use the built-in one because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John built in and like the only way you get a benefit from this is if just everybody converts

⏹️ ▶️ John to supporting the built in one. And Apple hasn’t even been able to do that with Apple Pay, which is an amazing service that they weren’t particularly

⏹️ ▶️ John late to. So I’m not optimistic about the chances of this feature, but I like the idea of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, in general, I think this has all the same benefits and drawbacks of all the rest of Apple’s built

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in password management stuff. Where like, I’m a one password user, yes, they are sponsoring this episode, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been a user since way before that. And I do all the 2FA stuff in 1Password

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s amazing to have that and to have it be synced, not to worry about John losing his Google Authenticator

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. That’s a bad place to be. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why I haven’t converted over to use Apple’s system is that I like 1Password

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is reliable and because there is an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that I can go to that’s like the center of all this information. I can go there and easily manage it and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple seems to be allergic to the idea of making apps that expose their functionality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an app. There’s all this magic stuff that happens throughout the system, and a lot of it never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it to an app or never has an app made for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And so- It’s all in the Settings

⏹️ ▶️ John app. Yeah, kind of. A tiny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app called

⏹️ ▶️ John Settings. Yeah, well, yeah, but that’s a separate issue. There was a shortcut that someone posted that was basically like, it would put an icon on your home screen

⏹️ ▶️ John that said passwords, and all it would do is jump you into Settings to the password section. And most people had no idea that

⏹️ ▶️ John that section was even there. and you don’t even know where it is either because who can find anything in settings these days? So you’re right, if that was a separate app,

⏹️ ▶️ John A, it would be easier to find, and B, they could add features to that app instead, because now they’re stuck with like,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, if we own it, if it wants to do anything that the setting app can’t do, well, tough, because settings app can do like a series of

⏹️ ▶️ John screens that go from left to right, and that’s basically it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I’ve been in that settings area occasionally, and it’s miserable to try to actually use that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to find something or to edit or change something. It’s very clunky. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also issues that I’ve had with iCloud Keychain stuff with just reliability of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether iCloud Keychain works correctly on a device. And sometimes I have a device where it just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco breaks and my passwords just don’t autofill and I don’t know why or they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not there and it persists that way until that device gets restored or updated or whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still have basic reliability problems sometimes for me and that’s why I don’t keep anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco important only in iCloud Keychain. Like I will, I’ll use it for like, you know, if some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco website that I don’t intend to really use very much has, you know, a registration form and iCloud fills it in auto-filled

⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure password, I’ll be like, sure, whatever. Yeah, click, click, click, okay, whatever. But anything that I want to keep long-term, I keep in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one password because I still don’t feel like I can trust Apple system to really be reliable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like a safe data store yet. And I don’t know that this is going to change that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And anything that uses a 2FA authenticator, I’d rather have in something like 1Password where I know I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a form of backup of that seed code for that. So I don’t know, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see myself using this in the future, but maybe that’ll change, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it’s important that it exists because you know the barrier to getting someone in your family to use Two Factor.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, I gotta download an app, and which app do I have to use, and do I have to pay for this app? Just having something,

⏹️ ▶️ John anything built into the OS for Two Factor is really important for the people who otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know or care about this stuff. then they don’t have to get a separate app. They don’t care about the details. At least we

⏹️ ▶️ John have something. Again, assuming it meets some minimum level of reliability, which I think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is probably close to. Like, this is not as pure a win as the thing they did where like,

⏹️ ▶️ John when you get a, the messages app would extract the code and let you paste it in, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because that was just like, let me just save you a step. This should save even more steps, but it does require

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more buy-in than just merely existing and using messages.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we are running long, so we’ve got to pick up the pace a little bit. So we’ll just say, hey, you can build

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and release an iOS app from Swift Playgrounds. That’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Somehow.

⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing is, I personally don’t know any more about that. But yes, that is a big, huge deal, and they did

⏹️ ▶️ John not elaborate on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the one thing that I expected to have a lot more info in State of the Union, and there was a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more information, but that’s about it. But I think one thing, they didn’t show

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store Connect interface at all. You still have to, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you still have to use App Store Connect to manage everything. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would imagine you’re probably still gonna get all your rejection notices in App Store Connect too and probably not in Swift Playgrounds.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s clear at all. Like someone tweeted, I retweeted someone’s snarky tweet that says, so where

⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift Playgrounds do I enter my DUNS number? Because going from zero

⏹️ ▶️ John to I put an app on the App Store, it’s way more complicated than what they expose in Playground. So they showed

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, these products are cross-compatible with Xcode, which is awesome. It’s great that you’re not stuck.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you started on an iPad, you’re stuck in this little baby version of the thing. No, apparently the project will work in both places.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then they showed the settings. How do I look at my app settings? And it is so simplified

⏹️ ▶️ John in a refreshing way. Like if you ever looked at the Xcode settings for your project,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s huge. and there’s so much stuff and it’s just like it is a very developer interface. And on Playgrounds,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, oh, here’s a little popover with a couple of like on off switches like and nothing else is

⏹️ ▶️ John exposed. Now, it’s probably all buried in there because it’s cross compatible with Xcode. But yeah, many, many questions

⏹️ ▶️ John remain about this. But if we’re waiting for Xcode on iPad, this is not it. But hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can apparently develop a real live native SwiftUI app on your iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John and put it on the App Store. So this is a huge step. It is monumentally important, and

⏹️ ▶️ John we will learn more about it as we watch the sessions that detail this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really, I mean, this is massive. We don’t really have time to talk fully about it yet, and we don’t know enough about it really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk too much about it yet, but being able to build iOS apps on iOS is a huge deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a massive deal for so many reasons, and I don’t think we’re ever gonna get full-blown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Xcode on iPads, because what that means is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so contrary to how everything works on iOS. You know, with things like different files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and file management and different tools being all integrated together. Like, it’s the kind of thing that iOS is terrible at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not designed for. So I’m not expecting to ever get, quote, Xcode for iPad in the way that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know Xcode today and the way most developers build most apps of any complexity. But to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to build apps at all and put them on the App Store and get them rejected in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco four or five days for providing too little functionality, that’s really magical. And I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this becomes a thing that helps get people into app development more. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerns about SwiftUI being the education side of things, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI is something that looks very easy, but is not. And it looks very like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Swift. Well, right. Exactly. I mean, the whole idea of using Swift as an educational language, I think, is kind of comical.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But type one parenthesis in the wrong place, and God knows

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the error message you’re you’re gonna get from SwiftUI, but for people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are already, who know enough to use Swift and SwiftUI,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or can plow through the probably pretty steep learning curve on some of this stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if all you have is an iPad, then now you have access to make apps. That’s something you couldn’t do before.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s something that I honestly never thought we would get. So to have that at all is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even though there’s gonna be probably lot of little rough edges to what that means in reality,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still a great thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and it’s another tick in the scoreboard for SwiftUI. And, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this app that maybe I’ll release before I die, it’s entirely SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do like it, but there’s rough edges everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And honestly, I don’t think that many of those rough edges have been sanded down this release,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we’ll see over time. But nonetheless, it seems that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI is the thing that is most portable, which is an obvious thing to say, right? It was always

⏹️ ▶️ Casey designed to be portable, but widgets have to be SwiftUI. They said something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how these apps that you write on the iPad have to be SwiftUI. And apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are portable between Xcode in the iPad or in Swift Playgrounds, but it’s unclear exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how that works, and if you start to dip into traditional UI kit,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happens? So yeah, if you’re not on the Swift UI train, if you’re not at least being functionally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to read it, if not write basic stuff, I think it’s coming on time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you to learn. Moving on, I’m going to try to do this quickly and it’s not going to work. Privacy, mail

⏹️ ▶️ Casey privacy protection, hide your IP address, hide your location. App privacy reports are available.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri now has on-device speech recognition, which yes, is a privacy thing, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like it’s going to make Siri way faster. Also, I just said the name of that assistant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like three times in a row, I apologize.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the point is it’ll be way quicker as you tell it to shush as it’s trying to parse what I just said.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But I’m really- That is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive. By the way, we blew right past the mail-ins-to-fire thing. I do wanna get to that in a second. but like having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on-device recognition, it’s funny, most people have forgotten or never knew that iOS devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did very briefly have this feature. Right before Siri was released,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri came with the iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4, and I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3GS also, had on-device speech recognition for a limited

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of functionality. Even back then, before Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had this feature, it was based on the same feature that Macs have had forever. And you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do very simple, a limited set of tasks with on-device speech

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognition before, and it was great. And Siri was actually, in these ways of latency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and being able to do it offline, Siri was actually a step back in those areas. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are now finally closing that gap. And I am very much looking forward to this because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of my biggest problems with Siri is that it’s inconsistent. And my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco second biggest problem with Siri is that it’s often slow. Now where I really want this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on the HomePod. That’s where I really need this. But having it on the phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a good start.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder if the HomePod, I mean they touted it as

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John a feature of our neural engine. Is the HomePod not powerful enough for this? I wish it was, because yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John responding faster. I tweeted, I hope this is a dramatic change, because obviously everything in the demo looks really fast. And I got

⏹️ ▶️ John some replies saying, And yes, it is a dramatic change. So I give this a huge thumbs up. I really hope this works

⏹️ ▶️ John the way they showed it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, very much so. Marco, you said you wanted to talk about privacy again for a second?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The mail and Safari privacy protection features where they hide your IP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco address from tracking pixels and mail messages and from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something in Safari. I assume it’s just the identified trackers from the tracking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco detector thing in Safari. Because it’s obviously not going to be proxying all of your image loads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of your script loads through from everything you browse in Safari, that seems unlikely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And mail, I assume with mail, it’s probably, again, it’s probably only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking pixels that they can identify that way, probably not all mail images.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the idea that they’re doing something to effectively like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco proxy or VPN your image requests to hide your IP from people who send you mail,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a very good thing. How they implement it is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends a lot on how they implement it, like how effective this is, because one thing people can still do is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could still see like, if they generate a unique URL for each email that is sent,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they know if an image gets requested that’s in your email, they know that your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco email was delivered. Unless, the way it’s implemented is Apple loads all image

⏹️ ▶️ Marco requests for all of these tracking pixels, even if you haven’t opened any emails,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which would dilute the value of that somewhat as a data point. But that has its own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with how and when it was open and everything. So we’ll see how this is implemented. But overall,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of Apple Mail tackling the problem of mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking pixels is a great thing. Because if we think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web is bad with tracking everything, Mail is no better and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically mail, you know, with a few exceptions, like this is one of the advertised features of Hey, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a few exceptions, most mail clients have done nothing to very little about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to block, you know, email-based tracking for inline images. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people don’t use the settings that Apple has offered for years of just don’t load inline images,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most emails get totally broken if you don’t load inline images. So most people need those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or leave those on. On iOS it’s been on by default. I don’t know if it’s default on the Mac, but anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco To have something like this that can let you load inline images sometimes or most of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, but still block tracking for the really creepy ad tech side of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, that’s fantastic. They are going to anger so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco email spammers. I mean, marketers, excuse me, but I don’t care. Email

⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketers have stomped all over our privacy for so long with tracking pixels

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they deserve no sympathy. And I’m very, very happy to see Apple taking a stand on this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, definitely agree. All right, we had a section on iCloud, which was a little bit unexpected.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They have some account recovery tools now, which are great. Among

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things you can do is you can designate, say like a partner to be a recovery contact. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are like John and you lose the one and only phone that has Google Authenticator, or in this case, the one and only phone that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has your iCloud login, you can, on your new phone, say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I need to recover, and then the six-digit code that would normally go to your phone instead would go to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your partner, and you would have them read the six-digit code off to you, and then you can be let back into your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey device. Similarly, digital legacy, so if you pass away,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these are the people who are allowed to have your iCloud information, if not credentials,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that happens.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a when, not an if.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fair. No way, man. I’m living forever. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, that would be nice. But I think I’m realistic here.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a lot of these features, the recovery and the legacy features, some services, depending on, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John where you have your identity. Let’s say you have a Google account. Google has similar features. But

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has an identity system. It’s Apple ID. And you essentially need to use it to

⏹️ ▶️ John be in the Apple ecosystem and use all their stuff. And I imagine one of the biggest headaches for

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is people coming to the Apple Store or calling support and saying, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get into my thing. I forgot my password. And Apple, because they have real security, for the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s little to nothing they can do for you. And they can’t, Apple can’t solve this problem by giving

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves a backdoor or by like, oh, Apple should be able to get in because that’s what people think. People think, well, you’re Apple. Of course you can

⏹️ ▶️ John give me my stuff back. Like, and the technical nuances of like why

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t and shouldn’t do that are lost on people. They just want their pictures of their kids back, right? So this is a human

⏹️ ▶️ John solution to that problem, which is we will encourage you to

⏹️ ▶️ John put other humans in the circle of trust for your thing. Obviously there are downsides, because you got to be

⏹️ ▶️ John careful you put in that circle of trust, but in situations where, like if they encourage it with the correct

⏹️ ▶️ John framing, like someone you really do trust or whatever, I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I don’t know, it’s a little bit fraught, but I’m glad this feature exists, just because I think a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John people do have someone, they do wanna have a backup. They don’t wanna just rely on their carefulness

⏹️ ▶️ John and their memory and their bank safety deposit box

⏹️ ▶️ John of recovery codes or whatever. Every kind of service that has an identity

⏹️ ▶️ John that has lots of valuable personal information should have systems like this that people can use

⏹️ ▶️ John if they want. Because without it, it’s all too easy to find yourself in a situation

⏹️ ▶️ John where very important, precious, you know, precious things to you, again, photos

⏹️ ▶️ John of your kids are lost forever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then I think it was after the keynote, somebody had discovered that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s going to be temporary iCloud storage for device transfers, which I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, wait, what, when I read this? So I think John put a blurb in the show notes. Now, when you buy a new device,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use iCloud backup to move your data to your new device, even if you’re low on storage. iCloud will grant you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much storage as you need to complete a temporary backup free of charge for up to three weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This allows you to get all your apps, data, and settings on your device automatically. What a great idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is awesome. My only thing I tweeted this as well is that I hope they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday soon extend this to software updates as well, because I know so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many like real life people who don’t pay for iCloud storage and their phones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are always full or very close to full and they don’t do software updates like they don’t update

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the latest iOS for like a year or more or they just do it until they’re until they get the next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone because their phone is not enough space to run the software update and this is such a great thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this for phone upgrades great also apply this to software updates that would be incredible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because so many people hold on to way too old a version of iOS only for this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason that their phone just doesn’t have enough space to update and and they don’t want to pay for iCloud. And so, yeah, to have like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a temporary thing that Apple can spare a bit of space for a day while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their phone updates, that would be pretty great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe Apple knows the metrics on that because people buy new phones once every year, two years, three years, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John but OS updates come way more frequently than that. What percentage of Apple’s phones are in this situation

⏹️ ▶️ John where they would need this temp storage? And because OS updates tend to roll out to

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone more or less at the same time and Apple pushes them super heavily, I wonder if they would end up over

⏹️ ▶️ John committing on storage. Again, Apple knows these numbers, we don’t, but it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John plausible that they might prefer the sort of, let’s say more evenly spread distribution

⏹️ ▶️ John and lower frequency of phone upgraders as opposed to OS updates, which are

⏹️ ▶️ John not evenly distributed and much more frequent.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we get into iCloud Plus because you can never have enough pluses. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, this was weird to me, not bad, just weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like if I were to summarize it, it’s an Apple provided,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t call it a VPN VPN. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John an

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple-

⏹️ ▶️ John Before you get through listing the features, like, so you just said iCloud Plus. We all saw that and we all thought,

⏹️ ▶️ John hmm, here’s a new brand for a thing that historically when Apple has done this,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a new thing that you can pay for. Like it didn’t, isn’t that what everyone thought when you see iCloud Plus? And that’s purely

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s choice of like, we are coming up with a new branding, we’re explicitly using a branding that we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John used before to imply that this is a service that you’re gonna pay for, and now we’re gonna list the features.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so go ahead, so you’ve got the private relay VPN thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’ve got a private relay VPN thing, you’ve got hide my email, which gives you like a randomized email that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will forward to your real email address. Apparently you can get custom domain or you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use custom domains with iCloud, which was new to me. I don’t believe this was mentioned on the keynote. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomeKit Secure Video, you can have unlimited cameras. I think you’re limited to five right now, if I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And the video does not take up, you know, any of your allotted storage, it’s considered separate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And gentlemen, I’m super excited to tell you that they have, and I’m quoting,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same low prices that they offer today.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is getting back to my intro. The only reason we thought this would be something you would charge for is

⏹️ ▶️ John because you started it by branding it like one of the things that you charge for. And then at the end, you’re like, oh, we don’t charge for it, aren’t you

⏹️ ▶️ John glad? It’s like, well, the only reason I thought you were gonna charge anything is because you made me think you were gonna charge something. So I don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, it seems like they do. So it seems like what they’ve done is rename

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud paid plans to iCloud Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, you have to already pay. Like that’s why they say the same low price. If you already pay

⏹️ ▶️ John for iCloud extra storage, then you get this extra stuff. But if you don’t pay for it, you don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But the branding is iCloud Plus is confusing to me. And I’m not begrudging them. Like I think

⏹️ ▶️ John these features are all good features, particularly the custom domains, especially, I mean it’s probably more of a

⏹️ ▶️ John techie thing, but like custom domains are a really good idea. I would encourage, especially everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s listening to a tech podcast, you should, and I say this as someone who doesn’t follow this advice myself, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you should, I kind of do, like I have my own domain, but anyway, you should have your

⏹️ ▶️ John own domain. Definitely for your website, probably also for email, but it’s a pain. Who wants to have, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not super techie, You don’t wanna like sign up for an email service. Oh, I gotta have my own email domain

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It’s just easier for me to just use one of the third party ones. Well, here you go. If you’re willing to

⏹️ ▶️ John tolerate Apple’s mail system at all, but don’t wanna have an email address that’s at me.com,

⏹️ ▶️ John at mac.com, at itools.com, at iCloud.com.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, apparently, somehow, through some system that we don’t yet know, you can just, I guess you

⏹️ ▶️ John register a domain? Do you pay for the domain? I don’t know how it’s gonna work, But having a custom domain that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not, I’m hoping that it’s not owned by Apple, would mean that in theory, if you ever move elsewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ John you could keep your same email address. We don’t have the details on this. We don’t know how it will work, but in theory, I like

⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I agree. All right, health. They added walking steadiness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a mobility thing. They added descriptions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of lab data, trends. You can share your health data with your doctor, And then you can also share your health

⏹️ ▶️ Casey data with family members so your family members can see, oh, this trend is that their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey resting heart rate is up a lot over the last month. Maybe you should encourage Nana to go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get checked out or something like that. It’s good stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good use of, like, they have all these sensors, especially with the Apple Watch, like literally strapped to you. And even just

⏹️ ▶️ John your phone in your pocket can pick up things like the walking steadiness. And so this is all

⏹️ ▶️ John extremely, like the health app, we don’t talk about it too much. It’s just been there and it’s slowly advancing, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John been a lot of buy-in on the health app. Most health applications on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John integrate with the built-in health app because it is made from the beginning to be integrated with. And it’s actually pretty good, and

⏹️ ▶️ John every year it gets a little bit better. And the more they integrate the sensor data, combined with diagnostic info, combined

⏹️ ▶️ John with finally somehow, depending on your country or state, getting integration with the actual healthcare

⏹️ ▶️ John system, like the doctors and everything, to the extent that they can succeed in that, it makes everything better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey WatchOS 8. Health, it’s got a new mindfulness app, including

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reflect, which asks you to reflect on particular prompts throughout the day. So the example they showed was, think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about something you love to do and why it brings you joy. There’s Sleep app, which now includes respiratory rate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s new workout types for Tai Chi and Pilates. They’ve gotten a new seemingly famous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fitness instructor, Jeanette Jenkins, who I personally had not heard of, but apparently she’s gonna be doing Fitness

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus workouts. And they’re also doing an artist spotlight series. So I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in most Apple Fitness Plus workouts, you know, you’ll get a smattering of different music. And for these,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire workout is one artist. Also in watchOS 8, they spent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of time on photos, which seems like an interesting choice, but one little tidbit they dropped was that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the photos face is the most popular watch face, which I thought was not surprising, but interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote that down too. Actually, I did think it was surprising, but it makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John It shows how much people who buy the Apple Watch really care about watches and watch faces.

⏹️ ▶️ John They just want a picture of their kids.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. They have support for when you have a photo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on your watch face, if it was taken with portrait mode, they do this like fake 3D,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they called it dynamic composition. I see this a lot on like Facebook and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Did that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem creepy to you?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not care for it. I’ve never really liked it personally.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like out loud said, when they scrolled and the face like inflated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not like that at all. Maybe I’m in the minority. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I didn’t really care for it either. You can apparently respond

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to things a lot better. So they talked about composition. You can use the digital crown

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to move your cursor while you’re entering stuff during like scribble. And they have gift search,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is exciting. I thought that was pretty neat. And also on one of the like word cloud slide sort

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. They mentioned that you can do multiple timers, which is very exciting too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s nice. I mean, for me, like, I mean, watchOS, I think, is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the section of this that seemed to have the least changes for developers to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey anything about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even possibly for Apple, you know, as well. It seems like a pretty quiet year for the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there was one big API change that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally I think will be nice. We didn’t get custom watch faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Still holding out hope. But I had complained maybe a month or two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago about how two years into having always on watch faces

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hardware, every app would just do the, it would just blur the background when the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch face went to sleep mode. And so now they have an API in watchOS 8

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where your app, so they kind of, they branded it as like always on screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, but that’s not quite what it is. What it is, is there’s an API to describe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how your app should look instead of just being blurred out when it is the foreground

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and the display goes into that like half sleep mode. So now you can specify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, okay, well, when it’s in sleep mode, make these modifications to the Swift

⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI interface. You know, this thing gets dimmed, this thing gets hidden, this thing gets blurred out because it’s sensitive info, like whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, you could now specify exactly how that will look for your UI. So that should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow things to be just much nicer for the always on screen watches. And I hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple has done that same thing to their own apps. Because like, this is bothering me like literally earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today I was trying to like do a stretch that I had to hold for some amount of time and and I had the Apple watch on. So I’m like, all right, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch a stopwatch app and I’ll hit go and I’ll just start the stretch. And as soon as the screen goes to sleep,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it blurred and you can’t even see this. And like really the stopwatch, like nothing, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m very glad to see this support coming and hopefully Apple has done their work to update their apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, HomeKit got a section. They talked about HomeKey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They apparently you can use one of the tubes to ask

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for something to be played on the Apple TV, which is kind of neat. They talked a little bit about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SharePlay stuff. They showed that if you’re going to sit down and watch TV,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can, and I wasn’t clear on the user interface here, but apparently you can like say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the four of us that live together, it’s only me and Aaron that are watching TV right now. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it’ll show like more adult offerings, I can say, Oh no, it’s me. It’s Aaron, it’s Declan and Michaela. And they’ll show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like more family friendly options, which I thought was kind of neat. You can use the HomePod Mini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Apple TV 4K speakers. You can do lossless audio on the HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini later this year. There’s voice recognition to know who’s talking to them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s Siri on third party devices. I said the thing again, there’s the two behind third party

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices, which I was very surprised to see. However, it requires the HomePod to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like the receiver of these communications because they don’t want to send them up to third party servers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the way I interpreted that was the thermostat can listen to your command, but it just probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sends the audio to the like to a HomePod. So you have to have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomePod somewhere in the house that is actually so it’s basically acting as a remote microphone to your existing HomePod,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not not like the like its own HomePod that talks directly to the Internet.

⏹️ ▶️ John But can the HomePod talk back to the thermostat and tell it to do something or is it just one way?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s one way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t they didn’t go into too much on that and that’s I don’t think it’s I don’t that feature is out yet like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of what they mentioned in the keynote and the State of the Union is Stuff that is actually not in the betas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet or and a lot of it They said like, you know coming later this year or coming this fall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So a lot of these features are things that we can’t actually see or test yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah Moving right along, there is Matter support in iOS 15. I think we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about this just last week, but this is the thing that was formerly connected home over IP or Troype. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now rebranded Matter, and there’s support for that in iOS 15, whatever that means. There’s a better Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch app for the home, which is really a low bar because the home app is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really bad. And then there’s package detection on video cameras. So it’ll let you know if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a package has been delivered. And then we get to macOS Monterey, No, we’re out of time. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, it’s been great, everybody. A thank you to our sponsors, Macworld and 1Password. And yes, please, we’ll talk to you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ John What are you trying to skip from

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mac OS? I’m kidding. You’re sitting on Mac all day. You love Mac OS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was expecting a much more violent reaction from the two of you. That joke

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John felt real. I don’t know why you’re down on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I appreciate Macs. Oh, here it is. So Mac OS Monterey. And they talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about several different things. There’s FaceTime improvements. There’s a low power mode, which is pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. Do we know any details about that though?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It said it reduces the clock speed of the CPU, reduces screen brightness, and does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to background apps. I don’t know the details, but that’s how it was described in its various feature pages.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And finally, I’ve been using these, on my Intel Max, I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using these turbo boost disabling utilities for years, because it really does make a very big difference to drop the clock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed maximum. It makes a huge difference in power usage. And you don’t necessarily need that all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. they’re much of the time you want full power, but it’s really nice to have the option to turn it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on when you wanna do things like operate a laptop in your lap and have it not melt your legs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or go on a very long flight and you wanna maximize your battery life as long as you possibly can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to have that built in. What’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flight? So to have that built in to the OS, like first of all, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy. Like they should have done this years ago. I’m glad they’re doing it now. And that’s gonna be great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because doing it like my nerdy hacky way is both difficult and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited. You know, if they doing it their way, where it’s built into the OS, they can be smarter about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like not running photo indexing and other like CPU intensive things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco during low power mode. So hopefully they’ve done a deep integration here with all the various

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like processing demons in the system. And that I’m looking forward to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though my current laptop, the M1 MacBook Air has such a ridiculously awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life that I probably wouldn’t use it right now on this hardware, but certainly in the future, I bet I will have hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I will use this on. And for everybody out there who still has Intel Macs, this is fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ John It would be nice if this thing worked the way 4G and 5G do on the phone, where basically it will

⏹️ ▶️ John not use 5G unless it thinks it really needs it to save battery life, even though it will show 5G in

⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar and the status bar, like when 5G is available, it will just use 4G

⏹️ ▶️ John until the OS thinks that it’s actually needs to send and receive data that would be beyond the bandwidth. I don’t know how it makes

⏹️ ▶️ John a decision, but I can imagine, well, first of all, I can imagine some people, especially with an M1, just

⏹️ ▶️ John putting in low power mode, like permanently all the time because it’s plenty fast to do what they do with their Mac just all

⏹️ ▶️ John the time and hey, bonus battery life. But most people would feel that if they tried to do

⏹️ ▶️ John something, like if they’re trying to build an Xcode, you don’t wanna be in low power mode or whatever because it probably spawns a lot of background threads.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it would be great if you could say, be in like auto mode, which is like, be in low power mode all the time

⏹️ ▶️ John until it seems like there’s a bunch of stuff queuing. Because you can,

⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS, either explicitly or implicitly by the framework you use, threads have priorities.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a big range of priorities. Setting aside the Unix nicing of processes

⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, macOS itself has specific priorities for different kinds of things that run. And so at

⏹️ ▶️ John any given time, macOS knows how much stuff is user-initiated high-priority stuff, how much stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John is background. It knows which processes are spawned from daemons versus which ones respond from interactive applications and

⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff. And so it can get a kind of idea of like, what load am I under? And then for the background processes,

⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of knows when’s the last time I ran photo analysis. So I can imagine, which they didn’t talk about here, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine a future enhancement of this auto mode, which is like just be in low power mode, essentially all

⏹️ ▶️ John the time, because I’m willing to sacrifice how up to date my photo

⏹️ ▶️ John analysis is by letting you only run it like, you know, at half the interval you normally

⏹️ ▶️ John would, right? by only letting you run it for five minutes out of every hour, right? It’s different than putting in a low

⏹️ ▶️ John power mode permanently because it would still do those high power, when you hit build and Xcode, it would ramp up to

⏹️ ▶️ John full power and then settle back down. And it wouldn’t stop photo analysis D from ever running, it would just make it

⏹️ ▶️ John run less frequently because with a low power mode as a manual switch, obviously it

⏹️ ▶️ John will prompt you to go into that when you get low on battery like the phone does, which is great. And some people

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna be running at all time, which is also good, but most people like human nature being what it is, you

⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be fast up until you realize you’re almost out of battery, and then you want it to be low power, but then you run out,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you would have actually been better served in that scenario with it being in this auto mode. So there’s room for enhancement

⏹️ ▶️ John here, and I’m optimistic about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so moving right along within macOS, focus is synced across all your devices, supposedly, so you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get all your different, you know, working, eating, playing, sleeping, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s awesome. Like, I love that we’re now in a world where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco major iOS features come to Mac at the same time. Like the fact that it’s even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco available in Mac OS now instead of like three years from now, that’s a good change. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very happy about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, agreed. Like the FaceTime stuff too, and a lot of that has to do, we mentioned, you know, like the weather

⏹️ ▶️ John app being enhanced in iOS. Like that’s, I think they rewrote the whole thing in SwiftUI. A bunch of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John is being redone in SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is much easier to be cross-platform, or like even

⏹️ ▶️ John just the messages app being catalyst or whatever it is, like the frameworks and how they span

⏹️ ▶️ John the platforms, whether it’s catalysts or SwiftUI, is what lets us have these features at the same time. Because it’s not like they made a custom

⏹️ ▶️ John app kit version of all this stuff. Like, why do we get all the FaceTime improvements? Well, I guess I’m assuming it’s essentially the same

⏹️ ▶️ John app on both platforms. Same thing with the focus stuff. Like the background daemons might have always been

⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing, but it’s always the UI that’s the stumbling block. And now that you can share some or all the UI across

⏹️ ▶️ John all their platforms, it’s a big payoff for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Quick notes and notes is also being updated to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the new fancy, you know, take a note on whatever you want stuff, which is very cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we talk about continuity and more specifically universal control.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holy freaking crap, this looked amazing. So to back up a half

⏹️ ▶️ Casey step, if you think about the way things are today is that you have Sidecar, which is you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can set an iPad next to your Mac and you can fiddle in Control Center and in System

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Preferences, I forget exactly where it is, and you can say, all right, I would like this iPad to be effectively an external

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display for my Mac. And then you can have that act like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an external display, you know, as though you plugged in another display to your Mac. I use it not infrequently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, and it works really, really well. It’s really, really well done, I really, really like it. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now you have universal control, which is like not really the same thing. It, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct me gentlemen, if I go off the path here, but it’s kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synergy, which you may have used years and years ago, like I did, but basically you can have your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad next to your Mac, but rather than having it be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, so it’s not the same as Sidecar, what you can do is you can drag, let’s say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re looking at an iMac and your iPad is to the right of the iMac. Well, you drag your mouse cursor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way to the right edge of the iMac screen. And I guess just keep pushing a little bit, like through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the muck, if you will, or through the air, and then suddenly you will be taking control

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the mouse cursor on the iPad. And so as you mouse around using the mouse that is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected to your iMac, you’re actually controlling the cursor on the iPad. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can even pick up and drag things like an image, for example, from the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to the left to where your iMac is and then paste it on your iMac. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then they were saying actually you can do this with three different computers and maybe more than that. So say you have your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your MacBook Pro to the left of your iMac. Well you can take and you’re using just the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and mouse associated with your iMac. You drag all the way to the right. You pick up an image. You drag

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the way to the left through the air, through your iMac, through the air again and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop it on your MacBook Pro Holy freaking crap, this looks so cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if it works at all, I will be deeply impressed.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the same functionality as continuity that we know and love. And it just shows how the interface

⏹️ ▶️ John to it can make such a difference. So we all know like whether we like this feature or not, oh, I bring up a webpage on my phone and

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly I see the little thing pop up next to the dock that it knows like I’m on a webpage on my phone. And hey, do you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to open that webpage on your Mac? For reasons we’ll get into a little bit, webpages may not be the best example because there’s another solution

⏹️ ▶️ John to that. But the idea is that that’s continuity. oh, my devices are aware

⏹️ ▶️ John of what’s going on in the other devices if I’m signing into the same Apple ID, so I can get that thing over here. The

⏹️ ▶️ John addition here is now with this magic traveling cursor is that your intent

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, hey, I would like to open that webpage here on my Mac, that normally that you’d express that intent by

⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac clicking on the little icon that’s next to the dock, right? Now the intent is, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to use the cursor to fly over to my other device, and we can do that in the same way those

⏹️ ▶️ John third-party apps because they all know about each other and you can sort of transition control from one device to another and

⏹️ ▶️ John grab something and bring it back. And that long trip across devices

⏹️ ▶️ John is expressing the same intent as if you had clicked on a little thing that’s next to the dock. It’s just doing it in a sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of more direct way. It’s more direct manipulation as opposed to like, oh, here’s an

⏹️ ▶️ John option for some functionality that we have to put in the UI somewhere and you can express your intent by clicking

⏹️ ▶️ John on it or something. Now just go get the thing and bring it back. But in the end, it’s doing the same thing, which is like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s something on that device, and you want it over here, and continuity knows about you, and you’ve expressed your

⏹️ ▶️ John intent to that drag, and now we’ll connect all the dots. And it’s more complicated than that when you’re dragging a file

⏹️ ▶️ John into another application, and they all have to be aware of this. And so the demo is not necessarily going to be universal

⏹️ ▶️ John across all your apps, especially in the beginning. But it’s super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John My question when I saw this demo is, how does this system know the relative

⏹️ ▶️ John positions of your devices? How does it know which one is on the right, which one in

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the middle, and

⏹️ ▶️ John which one on the left? Does it require a U1? Do you arrange it like you arrange

⏹️ ▶️ John displays? Because that demo where they dragged from an iPad across a MacBook Pro to an iMac

⏹️ ▶️ John only works if something understands how they are positioned on the table. Otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ John it gets very confusing real fast, right? Like, what if you had dragged from the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John to the laptop and then quickly picked up the laptop and put it on the other side of the iMac. Now how do you get to the iMac screen? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John how does it know where things are relative to each other? A lot of questions about this interface. But the demo, it was

⏹️ ▶️ John probably the most technically impressive demo. And I really liked the even though, you know, in the end, it’s like a simple

⏹️ ▶️ John magic trick. Right. But like it was it was like like you said, it’s like mind blowing before you think about

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the logistics of how it’s done. That when you bring the mouse cursor from a Mac onto

⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad, it shows up like as the iPad cursor is that little circle. It shows up as like a little circle,

⏹️ ▶️ John like like as a bulge, like there’s a membrane between the two and you have to press a little bit harder on

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to drag a little bit more on your mouse to burst through the membrane and now you’re onto the iPad a little bit disconcerting

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s I thought it was a very it’s a very clever interface you know

⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff they’ve done with cursor on the iPad is very clever and very iPad and very interesting and well done and this is just an

⏹️ ▶️ John extension of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I’m gonna be super sad when they say that oh this doesn’t work with Intel Max and it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey work with my two-year-old iPad you know it’s gonna be a real bummer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for me. a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bummer. You’re going to have to replace your hardware with new hardware. I feel so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John bad for you. You’ve definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not been looking for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John excuses to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to do it anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. Early today, I actually said to Erin, you know, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like there’s anything that I’m going to want to buy after this is over. And sitting here today, that is true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But knowing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco me, I’ll probably have some… Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was no hardware. Exactly. But knowing me, I’m sure I’ll have some thousand-dollar trinket I want by the end of today.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she just like rolled her eyes and groaned because she knows it’s probably Moving right along, AirPlay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Mac. So the Mac can now act as an AirPlay receiver. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could have, say, an iPad or something like that, and AirPlay not to your Apple TV, well, you could do it to your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV, but instead to your Mac, which is really, really cool. And apparently that’s both video and audio,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’m super excited by.

⏹️ ▶️ John I always forget this functionality doesn’t already exist. And I try to do it, I’m like, oh, you can’t do it. And there’s a million

⏹️ ▶️ John third-party apps that do it, but like it should have always been built in and now it is. So sorry for all the third party apps that have been filling

⏹️ ▶️ John this gap for years, but Apple eventually caught up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, shortcuts coming to the Mac, which is extremely exciting. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote down a few quotes that were said during the presentation. The future of automation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Mac is shortcuts. This is just the start of a multi-year transition, was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the word used. But they also said automator will still be supported. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure what that means for automator. I don’t really use Automator to be honest with you, and I don’t really use AppleScript

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either, so I’m not personally shedding tears about this. And Shortcuts definitely looks like it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be really, really nice, and it looks like it wasn’t just like a, you know, throw it across, chuck it over the wall sort of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. It looks like they actually spent some time on it. I’m excited about this. I don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much with Shortcuts, but the things I do with Shortcuts on iOS, I really, really would hate to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lose out on. And so being able to do similar things on the Mac would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really great. So I’m really into this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Automator is not long for this world, Casey. Just that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the implication. No, I don’t think so either. I agree with

⏹️ ▶️ John you. You know, the key is that shortcuts can import Automator workflows. So that’s a sign that Automator

⏹️ ▶️ John is going away eventually. I hope what I, when I saw

⏹️ ▶️ John shortcuts on the Mac, I’m like, OK, well, people seem to like shortcuts. And we needed an automation store in the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there are going to be differences, because there are different things you can do on a Mac. in particular, if you can import automated workflows

⏹️ ▶️ John and those automated workflows have like run shell script, like that’s, you know, obviously a thing that you can only do on the Mac. And I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John perfectly fine. My hope for shortcuts on the Mac is that potentially it would be

⏹️ ▶️ John easier to make an edit and deal with shortcuts in a Mac interface,

⏹️ ▶️ John because as someone who does actual programming for, I don’t mean to make it sound

⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but someone who does like traditional programming and not like automation for a living, I’m used to

⏹️ ▶️ John writing computer code. And I find that much more

⏹️ ▶️ John efficient than trying to use Automator or shortcuts to accomplish the same thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John in many ways, I find shortcuts frustrating. Obviously, I’m not the target audience for this, but what I hope is that, oh, now

⏹️ ▶️ John I have a Mac and a keyboard and a mouse cursor. Maybe it will just be less frustrating for me

⏹️ ▶️ John to deal with shortcuts or even just to debug shortcuts or to sort of step through them with a debug interface now

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m on a Mac with a big screen and multiple windows. I really hope that is a result of this because I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, as much as Shortcuts has been great on iOS, I don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ John give up the flexibility and the power of automation on the Mac so that it has to

⏹️ ▶️ John fit into the envelope defined by what automation is able to do on iOS. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like that’s not what they’re doing again, because you can’t import automated workflows. But I really hope Shortcuts expands

⏹️ ▶️ John to fill the problem space of the Mac, let’s say.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see that honestly happening. I mean, Shortcuts is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big Duplo blocks. Like you can build stuff with it that if you’re not a programmer, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can help you get more powerful use out of your devices, and that’s great. But you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a programmer, John, and I don’t think it’s ever going to satisfy, like programmers, we have much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different and more sophisticated standards when it comes to automation tools

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and scriptability and stuff like that, And I don’t think shortcuts is ever going to appeal to us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s not designed to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like just using it on a Mac, just being able to have a mouse cursor and a keyboard and multiple windows may

⏹️ ▶️ John make it easier to do, and it may be like some kind of better debugger. And the fact that it can import automated workflows means it must be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially run an arbitrary shell script or run an arbitrary Apple script. And that’s always been the escape hatch

⏹️ ▶️ John for programmers in these things is, I need to get the data from something that supports shortcuts, and

⏹️ ▶️ John then I can go off into my own land of me just running my command line stuff, and then I can feed it back into the app, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John So if I take a side diversion into, you know, a Python script or something,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where I can do all the actual work and shortcuts just kind of the glue to hold together. And we will see, I’m not deeply into Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John automation, but having some kind of story, you know, the future of automation on the Mac, having

⏹️ ▶️ John any answer to that question is better than the limbo we’ve been in for so many years where AppleScript exists

⏹️ ▶️ John and is still kind of supported, but it’s not clear that it’s long for this world and shortcuts, I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they put their stake in the ground. This is the future of automation on the Mac, like it or not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Safari got some under the hood changes, like better power efficiency.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a more unified extension, like API or interface or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than anything else, Safari got a visual like revamp. And earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this evening, as we were recording, I was fiddling with Safari on this iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I went into it wanting to and expecting to hate it. And I don’t think I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate it. I actually think I kind of like it. On the phone, I haven’t tried it on the computer yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is interesting where they showed the redesign on the Mac first and then said, oh, and by the way, it’s totally different on the phone too. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is on the phone is not the way it is in the Mac. On the Mac, they

⏹️ ▶️ John have really, really rethought how tabs work. I,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as soon as I saw this, I thought of, when was this, 2014? The last

⏹️ ▶️ John time they tried to make a radical change to the way tabs work on Safari, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John was the, uh, what I call toppy tabs. It was much less radical than this change,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they did not follow through on toppy tabs. It was a beta, they tried it, people

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t like it, they backed off. Went with more traditional tabs. This redesign

⏹️ ▶️ John is like nothing I’ve ever seen in terms of a tab interface. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, you know, we’ll have to see when we use it. You know, Casey’s tried it on iOS, and I think the iOS changes, which we’ll get to in a little bit,

⏹️ ▶️ John are a good idea, but the Mac changes, boy, I’m not sure their head is in the right place in

⏹️ ▶️ John terms of these changes. All right, so they made their pitch. They made their emphasis. They said,

⏹️ ▶️ John now, you know, this has been a trend in a lot of Mac apps, and web browsers have always done this to some degree,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re, you know, it’s kind of this false scarcity of screen space on desktop platforms or

⏹️ ▶️ John even laptops. Now the top bar in your web browser takes up even less room, leaving

⏹️ ▶️ John more room for your content. How do they pull this off? Well, if you look

⏹️ ▶️ John at an existing Safari window, if you have a bunch of tabs on it, you’ve got a top bar that has back,

⏹️ ▶️ John forward, my reload button,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco window widgets,

⏹️ ▶️ John an address bar and like extensions, right? And then under that bar, you have tabs,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have tabs at all, right? I said, we can save some space. if we combine

⏹️ ▶️ John the bar that has back forward and the window widgets and the address bar with the tabs, so

⏹️ ▶️ John instead of being one on top of the other, we put them all on the same row. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that was their pitch in this, you know, it’s a thing that they did, inarguably

⏹️ ▶️ John it saves space, but at what cost? Like, have we

⏹️ ▶️ John all, or do we all feel like we are massively cramped for vertical space on a webpage such that we can’t give up,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 44 points or one centimeter of space on our screen and the cost

⏹️ ▶️ John is Now that top bar it’s kind of like in the finder, but so let’s just jam everything in one thing So the

⏹️ ▶️ John window widgets are up there the you know back forward button are there

⏹️ ▶️ John the tabs have morphed into a tab Combination tab slash address bar

⏹️ ▶️ John such that when you click on one of the quote-unquote tabs it expands to become the address bar

⏹️ ▶️ John which causes the position of all the other quote unquote tabs to change as the thing expands

⏹️ ▶️ John and then if you had any extensions in the top of your bar now those are all buried under a pop-up menu

⏹️ ▶️ John which we know everyone Marco loves when you bury

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco things in

⏹️ ▶️ John a pop-up menu you don’t have a customizable toolbar anymore what you have is a tiny little

⏹️ ▶️ John little tiny space left over of like maybe where you can I don’t even know if you put anything there that’s third-party and then

⏹️ ▶️ John in the address bar you get an access to where your extensions used to be and every one

⏹️ ▶️ John of your tabs becomes the address bar when you click on it, causing all the other tabs to move around.

⏹️ ▶️ John At first glance, I think this is not an improvement and I’m trying to think like, is it not improving

⏹️ ▶️ John for me? Cause I have a lot of tabs. Is this an improvement for people who don’t have a lot of tabs? Hard

⏹️ ▶️ John to say. I think the squirminess of this UI will be disconcerting even

⏹️ ▶️ John to the most casual user who just doesn’t have thousands of tabs, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John The whole thing with tab groups, oh, now I can save a group of tabs, nobody’s gonna do that except for like the super

⏹️ ▶️ John nerds. Like that, I can look at that and say that is a power user feature that

⏹️ ▶️ John I think people have shown, not only do they not follow through with that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John organization, but I don’t think they even want to. Like to have to name

⏹️ ▶️ John tab groups and to manage them is asking more than it is to ask people to manage their

⏹️ ▶️ John windows and people already don’t wanna do that. So I do wonder about the wisdom

⏹️ ▶️ John of these decisions. I see the trade-offs, I see the pros, I see the cons, and I look at it and I think, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John not the right decision. Specifically, the squirminess of the UI, that every time you tap

⏹️ ▶️ John on a tab, the address bar expands or whatever. I mean, I can see if you just tap on it to switch it, it doesn’t do that, and maybe nobody uses the average

⏹️ ▶️ John address bar, maybe that’s what I’m missing, like that no one ever looks at the address bar and really just people are gonna click on these

⏹️ ▶️ John as tabs, now they’re just funny looking tabs. I don’t for me, certainly it doesn’t look like an upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ John And for casual users, I’m not sure this is an upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for Mac OS, I’m not loving it. Having never used

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, just looking at it, I’m not loving it. But on iOS, it moves the tab or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it moves the address bar down to the bottom in like a little floaty thing that disappears when you’re,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, scrolling or scrolling around the web page and it becomes like just the URL at the bottom of the screen. and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then when you scroll, what I guess back to the top or you tap at the bottom of the screen, then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a bar that shows the URL, the ellipsis more button, and then a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tab button. The tab interface is way better. What I also like is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this little pill box or this pill that’s at the bottom of the screen, that’s maybe 50

⏹️ ▶️ Casey points above the multitasking handle. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey grab that and slide it left or right, much in the same way if you grab the multitasking handle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and slide it left to right, it’ll go between recently used apps. Well, this is one way that you can go between tabs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have three tabs open. I have my website, Google, and ATP’s website.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as I swipe on the bar that holds URLs, I can flip between them. And additionally, if I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the rightmost one and drag from right to left, it’ll give me the option or it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey open up a new tab, which is kind of neat and convenient. So on iOS, or at least on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, I guess I should say specifically, it seems really nice actually, but I haven’t tried

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on iPad and I definitely haven’t tried it on the Mac and I am not expecting to like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on, certainly not on the Mac and 50-50 on the iPad. On the

⏹️ ▶️ John phone, it seems like they’re addressing reachability, which

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think is

⏹️ ▶️ John super important. And it’s kind of the same thing. We’re like, oh, now all the functionality is hidden behind

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, but it’s always kind of been that way on Safari. Like if you wanted to do anything, you’d first have to

⏹️ ▶️ John do something in Safari on iOS to get to the controls, and then your controls might be buried under two layers of

⏹️ ▶️ John menus somewhere. Now at least you can get, like it’s harder, I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean we all experience this. If you spend a lot of time like going into reader view or doing anything like that, it’s hard

⏹️ ▶️ John to go way up there to the top of the screen if you have one of the larger phones. Maybe Marco finds it easier

⏹️ ▶️ John than us, but it’s harder to get to the top. Your thumb tends to be closer to the bottom. And switching tabs, same deal. you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John first activate the thing that lets you get to the tab switcher and then you’re into the tab switcher, being able to swipe sideways, which you can

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of do with the existing interface too. But anyway, again, not having used this, but looking at it,

⏹️ ▶️ John I see how the trade-offs they’re making make sense on the phone that may make it actually

⏹️ ▶️ John more efficient to do common operations. Still at the cost of like what they’ve always been sacrificing,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, look, we don’t think people care about the address bar, we’re gonna hide everything behind two taps or whatever. Like all that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the same as it always been. I kind of like on the Mac, I would say on the larger

⏹️ ▶️ John phones, there’s room for a bar that is always visible on webpages. I know they’re like, we want that webpage

⏹️ ▶️ John to get the whole screen and we don’t wanna take any space from it and all the UI will disappear except for this very

⏹️ ▶️ John minimal little, like I know what they’re getting at, but our phones aren’t the size, they’re not 3.5 inch screens anymore. Like at what point

⏹️ ▶️ John do we decide that it is worthwhile to have an always visible user interface element that conveys

⏹️ ▶️ John information other than just that very, very subtle like thing with the address at the bottom they’re putting in there. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I agree mostly with the trade-offs as compared with the previous UI on iOS. But

⏹️ ▶️ John overall, I think there’s still a little bit too much of a time, too much, too much devotion

⏹️ ▶️ John to the idea that there should be literally nothing on the screen in Safari except for the web page. And I think that is

⏹️ ▶️ John an unrealistic goal and is not, like, it’s not, it’s not a goal worth chasing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m okay with having some visible UI and I think they may still be underselling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Yeah, I’ve been playing with it on my wonderful jet black iPhone 7 here,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t like the iPhone bar. Like I like having the controls

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bottom, you know, as John was saying with reachability on modern phones, that makes sense. I just don’t like the implementation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. You know, if you’re if you’re in like the compact mode where the bar has shrunk to like the rectangle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bottom, the transition when you show the bar makes it so much taller

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it drops this giant drop shadow around it too. So it ends up being this floating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blob with a huge shadow over a pretty big part of the web page that’s still showing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind it and under it. And so it kind of looks very cluttered in a way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m surprised modern Apple is so anti-clutter but instead they’ve actually increased clutter with this UI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also hidden controls under even more modes. So regular mode, as you’re scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down a web page, the bar is skinny. Suppose you want to reload the page. you have to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is to tap the bar to show it, which you had to do before, but then you have to tap the dot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot dot ellipsis button, and then under that is a reload button.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like, again, it’s like junk drawer design school here of like, let’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve our complexity you need by shoving things into junk drawers and modes and hover states

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all these, like, it makes it clunkier to use and it makes it adds more taps and adds more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time instead of just making common things visible. I don’t think this design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a success. I think I’m withdrawn like if they could if they just had a toolbar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bottom that was always tappable and ready to go. That would be an improvement. It wouldn’t look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as nice in marketing shots but it would be an improvement and it wouldn’t be it would only be like 20 points

⏹️ ▶️ Marco taller than the temporary bar they have there now. Like as you’re scrolling down with like the full time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar that just shows the URL and the lock for HTTPS like the thing that tap to reveal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the controls, the rest of the controls are not that much bigger. Just always show them then. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s what you’re going for, just always show them. I don’t see why, I don’t see what they’re gaining by this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And going back to the desktop Safari, I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what problem they’re solving.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I mean, they just said, it’s vertical screen space, apparently. You really need that one centimeter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But here’s the thing, like, again, as you both mentioned, like, there’s been so much obsession by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple design about making your content as big as possible, fill

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen as big as possible, shove everything else out of the UI, bury it all in junk drawers that you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even see the junk drawer’s handle until you hover over something and then maybe the handle appears. That’s been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their philosophy for so long, but for a web browser, what if my tabs are my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco content? My tab list that I have open is a huge part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the content I am looking at when I’m using a web browser on a desktop. I don’t have any need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bury my tabs or to shrink the amount of space they take up. I want my tabs to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge and I want to have as much real estate as possible to show as many tabs as possible with as many words in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their titles as possible. Like even on my massive, you know, playground sized monitor I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, like I still have, you know, my Safari window still has like right now I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight tabs open and this This is only the one that I have open for recording. The one I minimized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has so many tabs. I mean, there must be, let me see, ballparking maybe 20 tabs in my main current Safari

⏹️ ▶️ Marco window. And of course, they’ve all shrunken down to the point where they’re only icons now because I have so many of them and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should close some so I can get the text back. But with this new design, I will see the text for even fewer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them because they now have even less width in the UI to consume and to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco display the text to tell me what they are. This has been a challenge in web browser design ever since tabs were introduced.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ve had various things like adding the favicons and everything that eventually made the tabs more recognizable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you tried to cram more and more of them into a single window. But what they’re doing with this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesign is allocating vastly less space in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UI for your series of tabs that you’re trying to display. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s a step backwards in order to achieve a visual design that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even think is nicer. I mean, again, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever ideal they’re trying to get here, you know, they’re extending the background color all the way through the,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever’s left of the title bar. Okay, fine, but I didn’t need that. You know, window

⏹️ ▶️ Marco title bars have existed on desktops for some time. We’re all accustomed to them. Like, that’s something that’s just gonna break

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some web layouts and it’s not gonna really do anything for me. Meanwhile, the actual UI

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be harder to use because now I have less space to show my tabs, the buttons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all smaller, common functions are now hidden behind the junk drawer ellipsis button. Again, another

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode you have to enter, sub menus upon sub menus, upon delay states and hover states, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more junk drawer modes to shove stuff into, even common stuff that we use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time that we should have visible all the time. And then finally, shoving all this into the title bar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes less draggable space if you wanna drag the window around, or less clickable space

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to reactivate the window by clicking on the title bar in a way that doesn’t do something else by clicking it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that dead space in title bars before, that served purposes. It makes things easier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to grab and move, and it makes things less error prone, it makes the whole UI easier to use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By shoving everything into the title bars like they’re doing here, it continues the Big Sur design trend of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making less and less dead space in the bars to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like click and drag. So it actually makes the UI, I think, harder to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. Less accessible, less consistent to use, because you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more frequently click on something accidentally and make a mistake, or you’ll have to like slow the mouse down,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, going against Fitts’ Law, because you have to click a smaller and smaller click target because you’re trying to hit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the little border of the window so you can click on it without accidentally, you know, changing tabs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know who this design is for, because it seems like it’s designed for people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who who not only don’t use web browsers, but don’t use computers.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and they’re signing themselves up for difficult design problems for no reason. Like you mentioned the background color

⏹️ ▶️ John going up into the title bar. Why sign up for that? Now you have to somehow make

⏹️ ▶️ John all your tab text and address bar readable on top of arbitrary background colors. And granted, they

⏹️ ▶️ John sign themselves up for that for the menu bar too, and mostly have done an okay job of it after a couple of iterations. But why

⏹️ ▶️ John sign yourself up for that in your web browser? Now, all of a sudden, I’m looking at like one of the examples. this text, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John black text on an olive green background, it’s lower contrast. That’s a problem, right? I mean, people

⏹️ ▶️ John need to be able to read what those tabs are. And the squirminess is not just like, oh, it takes you longer to acquire

⏹️ ▶️ John a target or whatever. I really think that people’s mental model of tabs, like

⏹️ ▶️ John based on the name and how they’re used, is they’re kind of like tabs would be in a

⏹️ ▶️ John paper address book or whatever. When you really break that metaphor, when you

⏹️ ▶️ John break that sort of design constraint, you know, that these, this sort of spatial behavior of tabs

⏹️ ▶️ John by saying these aren’t tabs anymore. These are just arbitrary rounded rectangle regions that grow and shrink based on,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the fact that all of them expand into the address bar. Like I’m looking at the demos now. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think every time you do click on one of them, it does expand and to show the address bar. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is counter to the notion that they seem to be committed to, which is that regular people

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t use the address bar. Now you have no choice that every time you click one of these, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John low contrast, ever-changing colored round recs, it moves everything around. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John your model of like, oh, I have these tabs and I can switch between them, now it’s like, it’s just a squirmy

⏹️ ▶️ John soup of rectangles. I don’t like it. And a squirmy soup of low contrast rectangles. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John again, we’ll have to use this thing in real life to see what it’s like, but it just seems like they are,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think they may be right about the fact that no one drags windows anymore, that everyone just maximizes their windows or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you look at the top of like a Chrome window, they already have this problem of it being very hard to find a

⏹️ ▶️ John draggable region above the tabs. But at least in the Chrome window, the tabs are,

⏹️ ▶️ John they behave regular, the way regular tabs do is they divvy up the space and the only time they change size is when tabs appear or disappear.

⏹️ ▶️ John This combination of a tab with the address bar just seems like a real mistake to me. And the total removal of the

⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the toolbar, like we used to have a bunch of buttons in the toolbar and it was customizable. And speaking of that, yes, I

⏹️ ▶️ John have my reload button in the toolbar. It seems like my reload button extension is just totally

⏹️ ▶️ John pointless now because you can’t customize, as far as I can tell, the UI of what remains of the toolbar.

⏹️ ▶️ John What you can do is put things under the dot dot dot widget, but that’s for like actual web extensions like ad blockers and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ John that. The whole point of my extension was I want to put a button on the toolbar. There’s no, there ain’t no toolbar

⏹️ ▶️ John left for toolbar men like me. There, I’m trying to do a lyric reference. You’re not gonna get it, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s, yeah, there’s no point in my thing anymore because that’s just totally gone. But that’s the least of the problems with

⏹️ ▶️ John this UI. The other thing I wanna emphasize is they showed a demo of this as if it’s a feature and I’m not sure that it is. Oh, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got these tab sets that you can make and you can have these tabs and they’re synced across all your devices.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe all the time or maybe just optionally. Anyway, they had a Mac and like some other device or it was

⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad or something. They said, hey, you’ve got tab groups in both places. And they changed the active tab on the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad and the active tab changed on the Mac too that they weren’t even using. I

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of see what they’re going with there. Like if you do a bunch of work and you’re messing around and then you like move

⏹️ ▶️ John over to your Mac, you want it to be where you left off. But it seems perhaps ill-advised

⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, that you changing tabs on your iPad would in real time change

⏹️ ▶️ John an interface element on a computer, an unintended computer that you’re not in front of, you know, a few feet away.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m on board with state restoration, but I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John totally on board with the live thing. Like maybe it’s just the way I use things. Like I look at different web pages on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ John than on my Mac. Like I’m doing much heavier research on a phone with tons and tons of tabs, or on my

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac with tons of tabs, but on my phone I’m doing more limited work because the web pages look different on the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John and some of them don’t work that well on mobile. I don’t really want the literal

⏹️ ▶️ John same set of tabs across all my devices. Like seeing this redesign of Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John is making me, like I was watching this and feeling glad that well at least I’ll always have Chrome,

⏹️ ▶️ John which works like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a regular web.

⏹️ ▶️ John which works like a regular web browser. And yes, a bunch of stuff is synchronized, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John still just sort of works in a predictable way. And I don’t use Chrome at all on my iOS devices, so it’s kind of a separation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, this is all harsh words for, I haven’t used any of these things and you’ve used a few of them, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this Mac, this Mac Safari design, way more radical than toppy tabs. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of hope they back off on it. I don’t think they will, but I don’t know. I’m gonna try this

⏹️ ▶️ John more in future episodes for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if anything, the difference from Chrome could be a pretty big problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them for Safari adoption because Safari up till now has basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked and worked like Chrome, which is the same way that the Windows Edge and Firefox,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web browsers that have supported tabs in the modern era all look and work pretty similarly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until this point. So that’s what people expect. And Safari is not the world’s most popular web browser.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like people are going to come to this on the Mac and it’s going to be so different compared

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what they expect and what they are used to from their previous experience and experience from other platforms and other browsers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, Chrome is the world’s most popular browser. So they’ve now diverged in the UI so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco far from that that I fear that that actually might cost them like Chrome converts from sticking with Safari

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or coming to Safari in the first place because it’s too different. And it’s like people now have an idea of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how a modern web browser UI is supposed to look and work. and this doesn’t work that way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see. There will be more on this program, I am quite confident. All right, we are running

⏹️ ▶️ Casey along. So let’s try to speed it up a little bit. MailKit is a thing, apparently. It enables apps to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily and securely interact with the mail app for Mac OS. There’s going to be an API about it, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there’ll be a session or two about that. Then finally, at the end, we got a little smattering of developer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey technologies, which was great. There are some new APIs. There’s a rotor in SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s an XC test memory graph, which they didn’t really talk too much about, but it looks good. Focus is a thing in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI now, which is really great. They spent some time doing object capture, which requires

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac and some third-party software, but you can make 3D captures, 3D objects,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I’m actually, hold on. Object capture, I think, is one of the coolest things that I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think I fully understand yet. Same. If it’s what I think it is, which is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an easy API to use your camera to generate USDZ files,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me, I’m kind of surprised that it’s not built into things like messages. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine the, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco USDZ, as far as I understand it, I don’t know much about this world at all, but as far as I understand,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USDZ format, which they actually announced at WBC like five or six years ago, is basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it’s like an image format, but for objects in AR.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and they’ve had these things like on their website, whenever Apple releases a new product,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will have certain abilities where like, you’ll be able to view the product in AR on your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, so you could like stick the new Mac Pro on your desk and see how big it is, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve thought this is a dramatically useful technology that has been dramatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco underused so far by the market for things like, I’m actually just doing that for like online shopping.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Being able to see like how big is this object I’m looking at? Let’s stick it in my room on my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR desk table thing. And so like, there’s so much use for that. If they’ve just developed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an API that allows you to take a few pictures around an object and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically convert it to a USDZ file, that would have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive widespread use for just consumers of like showing each other objects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and messages and stuff. Like, so I hope that’s where this is going. It seems like it’s not there yet. It seems like it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a like basic API that you could use to make that app. But I hope that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s what this is, I hope that goes further soon and becomes more widespread.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there’s so many times when I would love to do that of like, okay, I have this object, I wanna like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’m like, you know, out and I wanna show my wife something from, you know, back at home. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, I’m in a store, maybe I’m going shopping or whatever. And so, okay, let me like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scan around this object with my phone and be able to send this to her and she can, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop it on her AR table with her phone and see how big it is and how it would look like. That kind of thing would be really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. And also just for, again, for online shopping, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the inventory management apps or apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that allow people to sell stuff online, if they could allow people to take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an object capture of a thing they’re selling and put that on their website super easily, that would be great too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for shoppers who have iOS devices. Like there’s so many uses if that’s what this is, like if it works

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well enough to do that. So I hope that this goes further.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you hit on the correct point, which is if it works well enough. If you’ve ever used it in any of these things,

⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s a reason the professional capture studios are way more complicated. It’s amazing that this does anything at

⏹️ ▶️ John all, but I think what you would end up with if you did that, first of all, you would probably

⏹️ ▶️ John not look silly, but question the time investment required to capture all the photos to make this,

⏹️ ▶️ John as you walked around the item in the store and tried to position it somewhere so you could get all the sides of it. And then what you would transfer

⏹️ ▶️ John is something that looks a little bit like a melted wax sculpture of the thing you’re trying to get like,

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re limited by the depth sensors and depth estimation with or without the IR sprayer or

⏹️ ▶️ John LiDAR and all of this stuff. But bottom line is it’s not, like making really good

⏹️ ▶️ John 3D objects is difficult. You’re not gonna do it in a couple of seconds. They have to take a lot of shortcuts and things do

⏹️ ▶️ John look a little bit lumpen. I would imagine any place that actually sells things, if they wanted to do this

⏹️ ▶️ John in a mall, would invest the time to get a good model made and not just as they showed in the demo

⏹️ ▶️ John video, have someone put a chair in the middle of a warehouse and walk around with an iPhone. That’ll work and you’ll get a model, but if

⏹️ ▶️ John your goal is to sell, you want it to look really good. Like Apple doesn’t do, for example, you just mentioned Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John product. Apple doesn’t do that with its products and they’re not gonna start, believe me. Like they’re not gonna start saying, oh, the new Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, we’re gonna walk around it with an iPhone and just put that up on our website. No, you’re gonna have a real polished

⏹️ ▶️ John 3D model because they want their products to look good. I think this is super cool that it exists and it’s amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John that we can all do it with our phones and it does make a much less expensive way to do

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially object capture. But I do wonder who is this for? Because every

⏹️ ▶️ John time I think, other than for people, you know, like you said, doing it as a fun thing as a consumer,

⏹️ ▶️ John stores wanna have a higher quality model. A game is gonna wanna have a higher quality model. No

⏹️ ▶️ John movie studios

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco using this for

⏹️ ▶️ John object capture. Like, it’s super cool, but I feel like it is limited by

⏹️ ▶️ John the capture device, which is a phone, which granted has lots of amazing sensors, but it’s not the same as

⏹️ ▶️ John like putting something at a table and spraying it with a million lasers in a controlled environment. Maybe I’m wrong, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is gonna be kind of as revolutionary as the measure feature

⏹️ ▶️ John on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John where yeah, it’s cool, but in the end, a ruler really works better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I echo your enthusiasm, both of you, but I think you’re talking about step 30 and we’re on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey step two, because I swear they had said at some point during the presentation that it requires

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some software called Cinema 4D. It requires Mac OS Monterey. So there’s a lot more involved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this than.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a software story. You know, I think this is more of a framework than an app, but like, but the point is like

⏹️ ▶️ John the sensors are the, you know, the sensors and the fusion of sensor input is the important

⏹️ ▶️ John Having a USD file doesn’t buy you anything. Although, maybe, can iOS just display USD

⏹️ ▶️ Marco files? Safari can. Like, it’s weird. Like, it’s supported in some places.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, but you’re right. They did show you them dragging a thing into Cinema 4D, and like, they were doing a chocolate croissant, and that chocolate

⏹️ ▶️ John croissant did not, A, did not like appetizing, and B, looked a little melty.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. I think that was state of the union, though. And also, USD is a Pixar format. It was, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a big announcement at DubDub several years ago to Marco’s point, where they said, oh, we’re supporting this, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can use it in Safari, like Marco said, and so on and so forth, but it’s actually a Pixar format. Swift,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently the majority of the top 1,000 apps are using Swift. They talked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Async Await and Actors very briefly in the keynote. They talked about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the App Store, which is, quote, safe and trusted. And they wanted us to know that they’ve paid $230 billion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to developers. We’re going to be getting what appeared to be A-B testing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and multiple different pages for your apps, for your app in the app store. So you can like tweak

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, give different features for different users, all sorts of different stuff there. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also introducing a concept of in-app events. So, you know, they said something about Pokemon Go and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey play Pokemon Go, but I guess like there’s some sort of big event coming up. Or what was the, what’s the Switch game

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that everyone loved that you have to like sell rice or something like that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Animal

⏹️ ▶️ John Crossing. You have to sell rice. That’s exactly what the game maker wanted you to come away

⏹️ ▶️ John from. Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, did I or did I not get one of you there? That’s all that matters.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s turnips, but it’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, okay, well, anyway, I knew it was a rice. I couldn’t remember what it was. Point being, if there’s like this big turnip

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sale or whatever going on on Thursday at 10 in the evening, then you can tell Apple that by some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism and they will potentially promote that in the app store on your device,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is kind of cool. They announced Xcode Cloud, which sounds super

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking awesome, except they won’t tell us how much it’s going to cost. And that kind of ruined it for me. But what is it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s basically Apple-run continuous integration and continuous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deployment. So you can have builds run in the cloud. You can have tests done in the cloud,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this being done in parallel. And you can go do the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey releases to test flight, all automated. It is very, very cool from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sound of it. We learned in the State of the Union, it is super duper integrated into Xcode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can today sign up to potentially be included in a beta, which I’ve already

⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. But that being said, they’re not going to make it real until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey next year. And I think they said pricing in the fall or something like that. And it’s a tough nut

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to crack because if you’re a little indie developer like me or Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re probably not going to be very expensive to do CI and CD. But if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re, I don’t know, Epic, for example, and you’re running these humongous games and testing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them across all these devices and running unit tests all the time and so on and so forth, it could get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really expensive for Apple to run this. So I don’t know what they’re going to do about pricing. That seems like a tough nut to crack.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really bummed that they didn’t even give a hint as to what it’s going to cost, although it’s understandable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if it’s cheap enough, this sounds super duper cool, I’m really interested in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John One question I have, and I probably kind of know the answer to this, but like, look, so if you’re doing development on a not

⏹️ ▶️ John so fast Mac with not too many cores, at a certain point, it may be faster

⏹️ ▶️ John for you to build your thing in Xcode Cloud. I say this as someone who knows exactly how long it takes to sort of submit

⏹️ ▶️ John anything to Apple, even just notarizing a Mac app takes way longer than it would if you did it locally,

⏹️ ▶️ John in my experience. But at a certain point, like on these graphs, there is a threshold beyond which

⏹️ ▶️ John it actually is faster to have your thing built in the cloud. Technically, that’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the wait times will be like on Xcode cloud or what kind of machines they’ll have building your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But I was trying to think of a scenario where Marco might be interested in this. Hey, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you could develop on your little Mac mini or your MacBook Air instead of your upcoming 40 core or

⏹️ ▶️ John ARM based Mac Pro. And if they use the 40 core or ARM based Mac Pro to do your builds,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you paid the maximum amount for Xcode in the cloud, maybe that would be attractive to you. Maybe not, maybe you still want the big

⏹️ ▶️ John honking Mac close by, but it’s just a possibility.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s something. I mean, it certainly would make development easier if you have a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air in the future and you have some massively complex project, or you just try to use SwiftUI to make one view.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are uses for that, but in practice, I don’t know if that will actually play out that way. But we’ll find out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this week. Mac Weldon, 1Password, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes Please. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join

⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental, they didn’t mean to No!

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental! Chase Webster Tech Podcasts So

⏹️ ▶️ John long

Federighi’s iPad toss

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you catch this reference? I think what Federighi was going for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he threw the iPad up in the air. Oh, was that a Prince reference? I think it was a Prince

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reference. So this, so for people who don’t know, this is most likely, I think it was referring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Prince did, I mean, Prince did all sorts of crazy stuff, but famously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when he was playing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, he played

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a bunch of of other famous people like Tom Petty, While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Prince basically came in and did an amazing guitar solo, totally upstaged

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else who was there. You gotta see the video, Will and June at Show Notes. And then at the end of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually right now, if you have not seen this video, it’s a silly spoiler,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you should seriously spend the six minutes and watch the video right now. We’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey waiting for you, go watch it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an incredible guitar solo. Even if you’re not usually into like, go somebody told me I have to watch his music,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t like, no seriously watch this, it’s fantastic. So anyway, so at the end of this thing, Prince

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t even part of like the first part of the song. He comes out, he does this amazing jam, doesn’t say or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sing a word, just does this amazing guitar jam, because Prince in addition to all his other talents was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an incredible guitar player. And then at the end of it, he throws

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guitar straight up into the air and then walks off stage and the camera pans

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and you don’t see where they go. You cannot see where the guitar went.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, what just happened? And he’s just gone. It’s like the most amazing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, mic drop style exit I’ve ever seen. Especially after such an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing guitar solo. So I think that was a reference because in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, June 7th, which is today, was Prince’s birthday.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I didn’t know that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that might’ve been a reference.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they have at the end of the credits of the video that no iPads were harmed during the filming of this thing?

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey did

⏹️ ▶️ John see that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Reference,

⏹️ ▶️ John because that was my question. So he threw the iPad up in the air, but the way he got the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John in the first place is it dropped down from above him and he caught it without looking at it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John I had to ask our resident visual effects expert, Todd Vaziri, how was that done?

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that a real iPad that he caught? Is that a CG iPad? Was it already in his hand and they just animated

⏹️ ▶️ John the falling? Lots of different ways they could have gone on this. They could have just dropped a fake iPad 17 times with a

⏹️ ▶️ John pillow underneath them out of view. I needed a ruling. Real, not real.

⏹️ ▶️ John The answer I got was inconclusive. So if anyone at Apple knows how

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad catch, not the throw, because the throw, like when you’re doing it on video is pretty easy, you just, you know, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the catch looked to me like it is conceivable that they did 500 takes of him

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do a no-look catch of an iPad and it just kept falling onto a pillow that was out of view.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And finally, all the coolness that Federighi got from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most likely Prince Guitar reference, I think was lost when he ended

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his prank call to the ice cream place with, gotta drop, bye. Oh, come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey give him a break. Is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, is that something, is that like, is that what young people are saying or something? I’ve never heard gotta drop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s corporate speak, it’s corporate speak.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That really? Yep. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was. He’s he’s still the coolest executive. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the bar is not high, but I agree. But I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a drop that that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow. It’s corporate speak. He’s got a drop or else we’ll have to put it in the parking lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John He did stand in the pond in his fancy shoes. I’m pretty sure I’m pretty sure that was real. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was nice. I’m pretty sure you can afford another pair.

⏹️ ▶️ John the pair. Thank you.