488: Pebbles on the Scale

23 Jun 2022

HomePod Mini vs. the world, the M2 MacBook “Pro”, CarPlay’s ambitious plans, and the state of SwiftUI.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: Marco’s HomePod journey continues
  • HomePod mini
  • USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter
• Follow-up:
  • iPad Pro (2018) has 4GB or 6GB RAM
    • The offending party has been sacked
  • Apple educational discounts & software bundles
    • Pro Apps Bundle for Education
    • Education Store
    • Macintosh SE/30
  • Your beloved hosts have a violent reaction to the 13” MacBook Pro
  • Bart Reardon’s System Preferences experiment
    • AMFI Launch Constraints
  • Copy/Paste adjustments in Photos
    • macOS Ventura Preview
  • Gaming on the Mac on The Talk Show Live
  • macOS Ventura hardware support via Mr. Macintosh
    • Christina Warren’s take
  • iOS and head-related transfer functions (via Josh Hunt)
  • CarPlay and Android Automotive
    • Real-time operating system
    • The Verge talks to car manufacturers
    • Decoder with Mercedes-Benz CEO
• WWDC Platforms State of the Union
  • SwitchGlass
• Post-show:
  • John’s mouse problems
  • Casey’s AT&T → Verizon journey
    • Verizon coverage map

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

Chapters

1. The HomePod saga continues
2. Follow-up: iPad RAM
3. Follow-up: Educational discount
4. M2 13” MacBook “Pro”
5. Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp130)
6. System Settings/Preferences
7. Copy/pasting Photos adjustments
8. Gaming and GPU architecture
9. Ventura’s support of old Macs
10. Sponsor: Memberful
11. iPhone HRTF
12. CarPlay
13. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
14. SwiftUI: The way forward?
15. Ending theme
16. John’s mouse
17. Casey’s Verizon ad

The HomePod saga continues

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, I have a minor HomePod update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, did you source a new to you big ass HomePod?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or did you do a factory reset? Because a lot of people suggested that. Hey, just factory reset those suckers. They’ll be good as new.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have done that before. I did it, I think about two months ago, actually, recently. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have done that before and it seemed to last maybe a week or two before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it reverted back to the old buggy behavior. And so I think it was probably just coincidence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or like, you know, some other, you know, anyway. And I have yet, I’ve so far as yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not gone through the route of trying to get replacement big home pods because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my theory is that the problems are partly, you know, my physical units having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems and flaking out and dying, but also partly I think there’s a major, you know, software neglect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going on and those old home pods were slow as crap to begin with. so clearly they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like struggling to run the software they came with, let alone whatever it’s been updated to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. So anyway, I did, as I mentioned, I had briefly tried a B&O

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product. It was kind of embarrassing because I started playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the music from it and I was like, okay, well, you know, this thing, it looks fantastic and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it sounds okay, but it doesn’t sound the way it should,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco especially for its price. like small speakers and I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just for comparison let me let me see so just for comparison I put next to the expensive product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a HomePod mini and the HomePod mini sounded as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good in most ways and better in some ways I see the landscape

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now I now see what you know those kind of products are for again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They looked great, but they are not for sound. And the HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mini, for how poorly it fills a large room,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it actually does sound better than almost anything else that is reasonably small. And for this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purpose, I want it to be, and need it to be, reasonably small. Because this is going on my kitchen counter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with other stuff that has to share the counter with it. And so I set up a stereo pair of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco HomePod Minis that I happen to have already for various rooms in the house I could move in there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so far it’s fine it definitely is way faster to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco respond to things like touch controls seat controls airplay sources being sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to it Siri itself is no worse might even be slightly better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in its response time and so far the stereo pair of HomePod minis has not broken itself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so so far I kind of seems like maybe I’ll just deal with the HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minis until some kind of large HomePod comes out again that will fill the room better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wouldn’t hold your breath on that. I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Why can’t the rumor mill be about all that? Like I haven’t heard anything from the rumor mill

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s credible about like new bigger HomePod coming at some point. But in certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco areas, especially if like I, you care about the mid-range of sound. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, how clear and distortion free and energetic do vocals and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say electric guitars sound? You You know, that’s things that… It’s surprisingly hard to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speakers and headphones that sound good, like, really good and smooth and undistorted in those ranges.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know why, I’m not enough of an engineer to know, but there must be some reason why that’s difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And Apple has really nailed that in almost all of their recent audio

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco products. You know, like, even the AirPod Pros, these little tiny things that go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in your ears, sound better than many other things that are their size or even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slightly larger. The AirPod Max’s, even though I don’t like their comfort, it doesn’t work for me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their sound is amazing for what they are. Like, it’s really, really great. And the AirPod Max

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is one of the best sounding pairs of headphones I’ve ever heard. And that’s saying a lot. I’ve heard a lot of really nice headphones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that is up there with, you know, some of the best ones. But the speaker market, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, countertop, self-powered speaker with some kind of voice assistant, ideally, so you could yell things at it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from across the room. HomePod’s still the best. And even the HomePod Mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is better than most of what’s out there. And that’s really saying something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because the HomePod Mini is fine. But like, you know, compared to like other speakers, like regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speakers that are not smart and self-powered and standalone, and generally much larger, the HomePod Mini is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not super special. But for its size, it’s great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and compared to its competitors, it’s great. The reason I keep bringing it up here is partly because it’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on in my life and it’s technical and therefore it belongs in the show. But also, I want all of you to keep buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco HomePods so that Apple will keep making better ones. So please go out there, respond to the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at Apple, please go out there, buy a HomePod Mini. It costs less than some of the dongles

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve sold in the past. Just go out there and get a get a HomePod mini and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, we’ll see how this industry goes. But so far, even the mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is better than most of what’s out there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, with this big HomePod, you’ve got like a product that apparently has like inherent flaws that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it eventually die over time, but you really like it, but they don’t sell it anymore. What does that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound like to you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It sounds like your spatula.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, cheese grater. Yeah, cheese grater. Cheese grater, the Oxo cheese grater that they no longer make that has a fatal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flaw that causes it to crack over time, but I really like it. I haven’t found one that’s better. So I feel like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an appropriately Marco scaled version of the cheese grater. You just need to, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you need to do is set up a persistent search like I have for this OXO cheese grater. And every time one comes up for sale, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just buy it and put it into a storage facility in your house. And then what you do is you factory reset your home

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pods. You set them up. The second they turn flaky, you chuck them in the garbage, pull up another pair, plug them in and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go from there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That would, I know this is partly a joke, But that would actually I would actually reasonably consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that if I could get the you know a decent amount of factory wrapped ones for a reasonable price if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They were you know Stand-alone objects like your cheese graters. The problem is these are devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that exist in a software ecosystem And so if as I suspect part of the problem is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco software No new hardware is going to solve that They’re going to be just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as flaky or maybe almost as flaky no matter what I do and then if I happen to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know have a good week here and there, maybe that’ll be fine, but how much am I willing to tolerate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the occasional good week when, so far the HomePod Mini, granted I’ve only had this setup

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with these particular HomePod Minis for a few days, but that setup is better. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ll see how it goes over time. I hope it’s better over time. And I hope Apple doesn’t abandon that product line

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as well, but we will see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is funny to me that the HomePod Mini is what, 100 bucks? Yeah. Something like that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you are not kidding. My favorite USB-C digital ADV multiport adapter, 70

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bucks. It’s not that different. It’s so ridiculously expensive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah, like for all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, you know, yes, I know you can get a little crappy Echo whatever for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like 50 bucks. Trust me, the HomePod Mini sounds way better than that. We even,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we have one of the, like the ball-shaped mid-range Echos, like what used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be the only Echo at that product line spot, like, what’s like about a hundred bucks, we have one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of those. The HomePod mini sounds better than it. And two HomePod minis for 200

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bucks sounds better than lots of things that are much more than that. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, not as good as the big HomePod, not, and this is why it’s why I’m so sad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but considering what it is and what it costs, the HomePod mini

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be one of the best values Apple has produced in recent history. Like it’s, it’s just, It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so good compared to other things like it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for quote, only a hundred bucks, you know, even though that is expensive for the crap home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco speaker market, this isn’t a crap home speaker. This is like a mid-range home speaker, and it’s quite good at that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was kind of surprised. Like I tried two different B&O things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of them was about as good as a HomePod full size. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even as good as it, just about as good at it. It cost more than a laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it was like four times the size. That just shows you how good the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first HomePod was. That it could be like a quarter the size of that thing. Something like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an eighth or sixth, whatever it is, of the price, like way less money, way less size,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and sounded actually slightly better. Apple’s audio engineering is really good recently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’ve been pumping out some really great speakers and headphones recently. And it’s great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the areas that they are in as much as I am, like the AirPods. And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco areas that they started and then pulled out of are just making me so sad. I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go back in, please, because man, Apple speakers are really, really good. Just please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make more of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s tough, because you are the one guy that wants the big HomePods and nobody else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like I remember when they came out, I was super interested in them, because in principle, it sounds like something I would really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like, I hate silence. I always have to have something on, typically music, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t like it when the house is quiet, which I know is probably the antithesis of John. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I always like to have music playing. And I looked at the HomePod when it first came out, and what was it, like 350 bucks for one of them or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like that? It was absurd how expensive it was. And even though I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ostensibly do this for a living, and buying Apple stuff is sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of my job. It’s actually Marco’s job, but it’s sort of kind of my job. And I couldn’t justify

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it for 350 bucks, one, let alone two of them. And I’m not saying that like you’re wrong to have bought them. I’m just saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think this is a product that in many ways is for me, but I couldn’t get over that price tag,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey man. It was just so expensive. Lyle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Troxell Yeah. And this is the kind of thing, and I’ve talked about this before, I’m not going to go into great length here, but But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you can somehow justify and afford and have the space for a stereo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pair of any of these things, whether it’s HomePod minis, big HomePods, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rest their souls, or like Amazon Echoes, most of these things support stereo pairs now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Get the stereo pair, even if, like if there was a model for 200 bucks and a model for 100 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re better off getting two of the $100 ones and putting them in a stereo pair with a bit of space between them than getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the one $200 one. when you have that amount of space between them and you can actually create stereo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco separation physically, not just relying on, hey, we’re gonna have some drivers point to the side and bounce things off the walls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and hope that sounds good. Like if you can actually have space between them, it sounds so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much better. Even if each one has to be like a smaller or lower end model,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re generally better off doing that. And again, like the HomePod mini’s in stereo pair, not bad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not bad. Like not amazing, but for 200 bucks, amazing.

Follow-up: iPad RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, let’s do some follow-up. iPad Pro’s 2018 edition,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like my beloved one, which I am really trying to resist throwing away, figuratively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey speaking, and getting a new one, but that’s neither here nor there. How much RAM does it have, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Does not have 8 gigs. I was misled by one of the higher-up Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John results for trying to find out this information. We’ll put a link to the bogus link that, the bogus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John page that misled me. We’ll also put a link to the Wikipedia page, which I did check first. I usually do, but they have like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that sidebar in Wikipedia where they have the specs, right? And the sidebar didn’t have the RAM unlike

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some other iPad pages. So I just gave up and did a different Google search. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Wikipedia page does say the answer in the body of the text. Of course, it would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nice if I could have just gone to the official Apple site and looked it up. And I probably could have if I had dug way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into like the tech specs. I’m sure it’s on something.apple.com somewhere, but it certainly isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the product page because they don’t like to list the RAM. Anyway, this is relevant because we were talking about why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only the M1 iPads support stage manager. Good job. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got it. Working on it. Yeah, all that practice and I still almost fumbled it the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. And it was like, okay, well this one, you know, this iPad Air with 64

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs of storage, it’ll run it without even using swap. So obviously it doesn’t require a swap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe it requires RAM and it’s like, well, it doesn’t require RAM because that has eight gigs, but so does this old iPad, but no, The old iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had either four gigs or six gigs of RAM, not eight. So the leading theory now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, that we kind of poopooed last week is that it seems like it’s the RAM, because all of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPads that support stage manager have eight gigs of RAM or more, and the ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that don’t support it have less RAM. There was a little bit of stuff flying around the Internet about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the sort of Apple internal developer mode to enable stage manager on lesser iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know obviously that exists because as the Craig Fitter you said and you know some of the statements

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from Apple like they tried it on the other iPads and they found it unsatisfactory and again see last week’s episode about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Where Apple can choose to spend its money to try to should we try to get it to work on the old iPads or should? We just you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plow bravely forward and eventually it will work on all of our future iPads So anyway, our bad iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro 2018 does not have 8 gigs of RAM

Follow-up: Educational discount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, you’ve been on a journey, you’ve been on a journey trying to get some cheap software. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the latest?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A lot of feedback from people about their experience using Apple educational discounts and in particular this software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bundle that comes with a bunch of fancy Apple Pro applications for a very low price. Some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people said that they bought it and what they ended up getting was like a PDF sent to them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John via email after they purchased that had a bunch of promo codes that you would redeem and in which case, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously you can redeem them on whatever Apple ID you you want it, they’re just promo codes, you know, that’s kind of weird that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come on a PDF. But anyway, a lot of people have that experience. Other people said that if you buy it with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, the software comes pre-installed on the Mac and it’ll be licensed to whatever Apple ID you first set up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac, and that sounds weird to me, especially if they don’t warn you about that. And apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can also buy this bundle separately from a Mac, so you don’t have to, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John offered as sort of the, whatever they call it, the come on at the end of configuring your Mac when you go through all the configuration,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pick the RAM, pick the storage. It says, hey, do you want to add this, right? But it’s also a separate product. It’s called the Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apps Bundle for Education. It is $200 and it includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Compressor, and Main Stage. So if you do want to buy it separately, that eliminates the possibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they’re going to pre-install it on some Mac or something, in which case probably they’re sending new codes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John redeem. But this is all moot because if you go to the Apple Educational Store, and we’ll actually put a link

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to it in the show notes, I’m not sure how they confirm that you’re a student, but I think anyone can get to the store page. At

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the very top of the store page, it says, save on a new Mac or iPad with Apple education pricing. Great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I will. And then the subheading is, available to current and newly accepted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers, blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s available to students and their parents. So I don’t need to involve my son in this at all. I am a parent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a newly accepted college student. I get the discount. Another thing though,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I’ve been going through this thing, oh, discount, it’ll be cheaper, right? These discounts do not look like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they were back in the day. And when I say back in the day, I’m talking about when I pulled off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fairly amazing feat for which I feel like I’m not adequately recognized of convincing my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} parents.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Convincing my parents to use my sister’s college educational

⏹️ ▶️ ^John discount. My sister is four years older than me. She left for college just as I was, you know, entering into high school, right? She’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off to college. She gets an educational discount. And I convinced my parents, hey, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should buy a new Mac from the college like computer store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using my sister’s discount. Give that Mac to me and then let her

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use our Mac 128K upgraded to a Mac Plus that we’d been using in the house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And that’s what they did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I got an SE30, right? And the SE30, I think like the regular retail price, starting price

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like $4,300 in 1989 dollars or whatever. Do the math on that and be terrified, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the educational discount was like, educational discount I think was like 12, 13, $1,500 off. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was huge. I think the educational discounts now are like, oh, you save 100 bucks on a MacBook Air.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You save 50 bucks on a MacBook Air. Like it’s not what it used to be. Obviously the prices aren’t what they used to be either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now I’m curious, did someone look that up? Yeah, I mean, even when I was like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, starting in the Mac market in the early 2000s, I remember the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco educational discount being something like 15%, which is substantial when you’re looking at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of those larger, higher-end models. And that was always like, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco first couple Macs I bought, I was only able to buy because I was getting discounts like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because that made a big difference for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, when I bought my first Mac, my Polybook, I had Erin buy it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey she was a K-12 teacher at the time and if memory serves, we saved like 150 bucks on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and we did it during WWDC week and so it was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the back-to-school sale had started at that point, which I don’t think it does during WWDC week anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But anyways, the back to school sale had started, so she ended up getting a free iPod

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Touch out of the deal. And that was the first Mac and first iOS device that we had in the house, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they gave you an entire iPod Touch and like 150 bucks off, what was one of the cheapest Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you could buy at the time? Like it was bananas, and it is not that good anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I should probably actually look to see if it’s even less than the friends and family discount, because I have friends and family discounts that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I could get. I mean, it’s not that far, it’s a MacBook Air that I’m getting, like, who cares? But I’m just curious what the discounts would be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I finally did look it up, so $4,369 was the base price for the SE30 on launch. That is $10,298 in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John today’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} dollars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’ve been buying $10,000 computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey since before it was cool. And by the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} way, didn’t tell him about the keyboards. If you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wanted to get the Apple extended keyboard, that was, let’s see, like $200 in 1989, which is like $471.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Can you imagine paying $471 for a keyboard? It was a hell of a keyboard. The floaty iPad keyboard’s like 350, isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it? I was gonna say, how much is the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Magic Keyboard?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that holds the whole thing, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has all, you know, it’s like, it’s more, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} apparatus. Although, surely the Apple, the Apple Extended 2, I bet your keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lasts longer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the Apple Extended 2 probably outweighs it by a lot, too, and you could use the Apple Extended 2 to fend

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} off a logger, but you couldn’t do that with the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, so my plan now is I’m gonna buy the Pro App Bundle for Education, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that really is a pretty big discount. like half off more than half off maybe even though I don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John care about main stage and probably don’t care about compressor but I’ll buy that for myself separately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I’m a parent and then just buy the Mac for my son when I can order that’s the other thing to follow up on last week

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like oh I’m gonna get the order the new m2 MacBook Air on Friday and Marco was like I don’t think it’s on sale on Friday

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s just the the one with the fan and I didn’t yeah sure enough it was it was the MacBook 13-inch MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro with an m2 in it which I do not want and I did not order and I think the m2 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Air is going to go on sale what next month july who knows

M2 13” MacBook “Pro”

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am so glad first of all to be right because you know everyone likes being right. I’m so glad though

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that all the reviews are Basically panning that computer saying like look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the m2 is amazing But why are you shipping it in this ancient enclosure with these ancient

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ports and the ancient touch bar and no magsafe? All the reviews basically say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you shouldn’t buy this just wait for the MacBook Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The good thing of the review say I feel like it’s kind of like the people who like the Mac mini or you with the the home bots like, look, if you really love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Touch Bar, better get it while you can, because it’s only gonna be around for the next seven years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as Tim Cook continues to sell the same computer for seven years. But anyway, this is probably the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, right? Like it is gone from every other newer model. So, if you like the Touch Bar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the reason to buy this, because you can’t get the Touch Bar anywhere else. It’s only gonna be on this model, we assume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And again, Tim Cook may sell this model for another five years, but we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This model makes me so angry and what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} makes me angriest… Oh no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t get me started. Don’t get me started. I will fight you over who is more angry about this stupid computer because I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so angry. What makes me angriest about it is not the touch bar. You would expect, based on my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco past here, you would expect I would be super mad that there’s still something to talk about. I’m not. What makes me angriest about this computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is how many people buy it because they’re swayed by the marketing of the name Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when they would actually be better served by the Air. is what drive me nuts. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve seen so many people buy this computer because they think, oh well, I’m a pro, I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run, I’m gonna be editing podcasts, therefore I’m a pro. It’s like, no, you don’t understand,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you don’t need it. This will benefit you nothing at all, and you’re missing out on these other good things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the air. That’s what bugs me about it. The people who buy it mostly are buying it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because of a marketing benefit that they perceive that’s not actually there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the expense of things they actually would enjoy more about the Air. That’s why it bugs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hmm, I don’t know. That’s a pretty narrow definition of people. I’m not sure anybody care, both cares enough about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Pro name to be attracted to this and also doesn’t know that, you know, doesn’t know what the deal is with this computer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, how quickly you forget what corporate buying looks like. Oh, these are professionals. I must get the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pro. What’s the cheapest Pro? Oh, here we go. That looks fancy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This one’s enterprise ready. Cause it says Pro, we’re an enterprise. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pros, we need this computer. The other, the other thing that is, you know, If you want a touch bar, this is probably the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. This is, I am assuming, the last Apple laptop that will have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the old design in terms of the shape of the case. And you maybe think, what do you mean shape of the case? It’s just one of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rectangular ones. It’s not a shape at all. It is. So when they redid the 14 inch and the 16 inch, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever, the new ones with the little round feet and everything, that’s the new design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is the last of the old design, which had kind of a long taper and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sharp edge on the ends. all of Apple’s laptops are shaped like this for many, many years, and this is the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one. And I have to say, this design, the, you know, whatever, you wanna call it the Johnny Ives special,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure how much he was involved, but we always attribute this design to him, the one with just the USB-C shaped holes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the sides, no mag safe, no HDMI, no so on and so forth, the shape of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer is more attractive than the shape of the current computers. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t make it a better computer, but if you really wanna get the last of this design, you know, they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all be the more utilitarian looking design once this one goes away. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, if you want to get the last of a bunch of extremely questionably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John valuable attributes, like the touch bar, the lack of ports and the shape, although I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to say, I think the shape is more attractive, but that’s just, you know, it’s kind of a blessing and a curse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every time you see the more attractive shapes, yeah, but you weren’t useful. Where was your SD slot?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Where was your mag safe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This computer makes me so irrationally angry. Like it is in service of no one except

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple. And I guess the three people that like the touch bar. Like it’s, it is not useful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is old. Nobody should be buying this thing. I mean, I know it’s not old on the inside, but like the design is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey old. Living the only USB-C lifestyle is no fun. Like it’s doable, but it’s no fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you’re going to get a pro, get a 14 inch MacBook Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like Marco was saying, most people can probably just get an Air and they will be fine, and at least Sierra has MagSafe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like, this is such a stupid fricking computer, and it makes me so unreasonably and irrationally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey angry that it exists. I don’t know why it upsets me so much, but it gets me so mad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that this is still a thing. Like, just kill it. Kill it from the lineup. It is in service of no one. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not good for anybody. All people are gonna do is buy it and be disappointed. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just no. At least with the MacBook Adorable, which was a piece of garbage when it was brand new, and I love that thing, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey though it was a piece of garbage, It was good at being thin and light. It was good at nothing else, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was very good at being thin and light and frustrating you over having only one port. It was good at those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things. This is good at nothing. It makes me so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mad. Well, as Marco said in past episodes, we don’t actually know that yet until we get the M2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MacBook Airs and can stress test them because the stress

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} testing is like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe the M2 MacBook Air throttle, thermal throttles more than the old one did, in which case the Pro would be better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for sustained performance, which is what Apple said about it in the presentation, oh, if you want sustained performance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get this one, right? Were they hinting at the fact the M2’s throttle more? Or did they just say that for the hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it? And the second thing is, the M2 MacBook Pro has a bigger battery. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much of a difference does that make in battery life? We won’t know until we get the M2 MacBook Air and people test the battery life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it. So it is possible that the function this serves is shoring up some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John deficiencies in the M2 MacBook Air that didn’t exist in the M1 MacBook Air, but we don’t know that yet.

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System Settings/Preferences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tell me about system settings and system preferences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bart Reardon actually tried taking system preferences from Mac OS 12

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and putting it on Ventura, like the application I mean, the little icon. You can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, I didn’t think you could.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The interesting thing about that, I’ll get to in a second, but anyway, but if you do that, system preferences runs just fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Ventura and everything works on it. He says, you could even have them both

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open at the same time and changing setting in one updates in the other. That’s bananas. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it makes perfect sense because like that’s just a GUI, like it’s a GUI wrapper for underlying functionality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And from Monterey to Ventura, the underlying functionality has not changed so much that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the old one won’t work anymore. Like the new system settings, it’s a new GUI, it’s a new GUI wrapper, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not like everything underneath that has been ripped out and replaced, it’s just the GUI wrapper over it. So it makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sense that they would both work. Obviously that’s not gonna hold true over the longterm because things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do change under the covers and the GUI has to be updated to talk to different subsystems or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently right now it does work in both. And what I was gonna say about copying it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can take system preferences from Monterey and just grab it and make a copy of it and then just put it over on your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ventura Mac. But what you can’t do with it on any recent Mac on a Mac running Ventura or Monterey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can’t put it in the same place as system settings because system settings I believe is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like under System library core services something or other right? It’s in the read-only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John snapshot of the of the system volume that boots the OS I think we talked about this many many shows ago

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But modern versions of Mac OS boot from a read-only snapshot of a cryptographically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sealed volume So it can be assured that nothing can modify the running operating system There are parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the operating system that are outside that read-only snapshot because they have to be written and they want to be Updated, you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more easily without rebooting and stuff like that, but I think system preference is not one of those things I think it is part of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the OS and so you can’t put system preferences in the same directory You may be thinking who cares

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where I put it. I’ll just put it in the applications folder I’ll put it on my desktop. I don’t care where it is, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ventura adds a new security feature that does not allow system applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be run from any place other than where they’re supposed to be. Which is like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John malware type of thing. It says, hey, system settings shouldn’t be out there. Like if malware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could somehow extract system settings from the read-only volume and modify the binary and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John run it again. Because you may have a binary that has some kind of privilege or uses a private API or whatever. If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you could modify that binary, some malware can find a way to exploit the system by modifying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the executable of some part of the OS. but you can’t modify it when it’s on a read-only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John snapshot. So you’d have to copy it off of the read-only snapshot, then modify it, but then you can’t run it anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this is part of a larger framework. I forget what it’s called. I think I put a link later in the show about it. What does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it call it? AMFI, something like that. Oh God, I’ll find it and link it somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, it’s a generic system for putting more constraints on executables that run. And one of the constraints

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can put on it is this executable can only run from this directory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool.

Copy/pasting Photos adjustments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, tell me about copying and pasting edits and adjustments and things like that in photos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was excited about the newly announced feature for photos for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s photo system where you can take an adjustment kind of like in Lightroom and then apply it to a bunch of photos at once.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that feature was listed on the iOS features page on the iPadOS features page.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I couldn’t find it on the Mac’s photos page. So I wondered, is this not coming to the Mac? Well, first of all, it turns out it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is on that page. It’s just farther down than I had gone. I found the photos what I thought was the photo section that was talking about the shared

⏹️ ▶️ ^John family photo library thing But that wasn’t the only section about photos. So it is coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the Mac version of photos, which is good But second a feature very much like this exists

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the current version of Mac photos But you might not know about it in fact a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Reported this existed and I said where is that menu item and I launched photos and I saw it I’m like why is it always? Disabled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me the menu item is copy adjustments and paste adjustments and like well, it’s right there in the menu

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How have I never seen this? Why have I never used it? And more importantly, why is it always grayed out? How come I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copy adjustments? So I went I would like edit a picture I’d make adjustments and then and then I’d you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Go back to the the main screen where all the photos are I’d click the photo and I’d say copy adjustments But no, it’s grayed out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m like, maybe you have to crop it So I crop it go back to the main screen try to copy adjustments like no, it’s still grayed out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What does it want me to do? I made so many adjustments It turns out you can only copy adjustments

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re in the edit mode. I have no idea why. Like what? You have to literally be in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the edit mode. So you edit it, you go into the edit mode where you got all the sliders on the right hand side, then you can copy adjustments.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But from any other view, even if it’s like zoom full screen, if it’s the little tile mode, if you’re looking at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the library, if you’re looking at album, you cannot copy adjustments. Doesn’t make any sense, all right? So that’s the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John silly thing. Second thing is you can only paste adjustments when you are in the edit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mode on a photo, which means you can only apply the adjustments to one photo at a time. So that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re touting this feature. Oh, now it works sanely. I’m assuming. Copy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John adjustments from other views and then paste them into multiple photos at the same time. Instead of having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go into edit mode, copy adjustments, go out of edit mode, go into edit mode, another picture, paste adjustments.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I still maintain that the Mac Photos app seems to have been designed by people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who never use the Mac Photos app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, can you imagine like you can select an item, like there’s so much UI to select a photo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it knows which photos have adjustments because I think they put a little badge on the thumbnail showing like little lines with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sliders or whatever. It knows that there are adjustments there and there’s that menu item in the image menu saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copy adjustments. You’re like, no, you can’t use that unless you go into edit mode. It does not make any sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know how Apple came up with the pro workflows team or whatever it is, where allegedly they brought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people like actual professionals from like Hollywood and places and like, you know, music professionals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and brought them in house, either hired them or just ask them to do their work in, you know, at Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So they could understand what they’re doing a little bit better. I feel like we need to have like adopt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an Apple designer day or something where you have somebody from Apple come into your

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} home.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no, Tim, Suzy, whatever your name may be, come into the home. Why don’t I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey show you exactly how I use the Home app and why it is a pile of shit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like, let me show you exactly what I’m talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} They just redid the whole Home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got what you wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know, okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example, but you know what I’m saying? Like, oh, I would like to edit six photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the exact same way. How would you do that? Oh, look, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way to do that right now. Hmm, I feel like sometimes Apple just lives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in this fantasy world where everything is always their stuff. They’re on these phenomenally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fast internet connections that are six feet from the home office. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m mostly snarking, but I kind of wonder if they really need to have somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adopt designers or something and just be like, look, look, look, this is how actual people use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your software. Like real honest to goodness actual people. Not you folks, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actual people that use it in the real world, in mixed environments. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just don’t think that they have the awareness that they should in that regard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would just take someone from the photos team and I’d give them like a hundred photos. And I would say, these photos are taken,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each one of these photos is taken in one of seven locations. Use the info pane to set,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use whatever you want. Use any features as application to set the location for these photos. But they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not in any order, so you can’t do them in batches. So you have to do them one at a time, right? So you click on a photo,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then you go to the info pane, you type in the address. and I’d give them the 10 addresses. Here are the 10 addresses, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as you go through each one, I’ll tell you which one is which address. And by like the 15th one, they’d be like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John huh, there’s only 10 addresses, and they all begin with separate letters, but I have to type out the whole address every time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems suboptimal, and half the time, when I’m trying to type in the address, it deselects the text field,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s no longer focused, and my character’s going to nowhere, and I have to click it again. And after they’d done 100 of those, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, how do you feel now about your location setting featuring

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} this application?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Does it help you in any way whatsoever? What have we learned today? Yeah, because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really just, you know, very hostile.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I need to go back and re-record that section about the home app. What I should have said, and HeyUDVD is reminding me in the chat, I should have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey used the music app as my example because all my great googly moogly is that thing a pile of turds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, it is so bad. I hate it so much, but that’s okay.

Gaming and GPU architecture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Speaking of things that are a pile of turds, hey John, tell me about gaming on the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This was something that, I think it was in the keynote even, right? Where Federighi was, oh no, he was on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a talk show, right? It was a talk show live, which we linked to last week and we linked to again everyone. Federighi was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John touting as part of his like, let’s talk about gaming on the Mac, the uniformity of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the graphics architecture across Mac, iPad, and the iPhone. Saying, you know, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have a great solution for developers. If you develop your application using your game, using our fancy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John graphics APIs, you basically get all these platforms for free because they all use the same game. Now that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Macs are on Apple Silicon, have the same GPUs and metal is everywhere, so on and so forth. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it might be weird to use our APIs, but our APIs are actually really good. And if you do that work once, you get access to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these Apple platforms. Isn’t that great? And when he said that pitch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously what I was thinking of, or whatever it was, whatever I was thinking of, right? I was thinking of the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, what does this mean for AAA gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the thing we’ve talked about so much is like the Mac Pro, how much GPU is gonna have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in it? Is it gonna support third-party GPUs? Making this pitch makes me think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either the Mac Pro is not part of the gaming pitch, which kind of makes sense because who’s gonna buy a Mac Pro to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John play games? I mean, what kind of person would do that? It’s ridiculous. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a hint in the direction that Marco was always saying is that the new Mac Pro will absolutely not support third-party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video cards because you can’t make this pitch about unified gaming architecture and then ship a Mac Pro and say, oh, and by the way, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put AMD, I guess NVIDIA is not gonna happen, but you can put these AMD graphics cards in there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not a unified graphics architecture. The whole point of this is they all use these Apple GPUs with the features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple GPUs, and when Apple revs their GPUs, it’s like across the whole system. So I just thought that was interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it puts, you know, one or two more pebbles on the scale saying, new Mac Pro does not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support third-party GPUs at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I just, I don’t see how anything is pointing that direction because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much of the Apple Silicon architecture is really looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, yeah, there’s not gonna be third-party GPUs. Like, we’ll be lucky to get expandable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco GPUs on cards or something like that. Even that, I think, is in question for the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pro. I wouldn’t, even that, I wouldn’t assume we will get, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco third party GPUs, I think, are even a greater step past that of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unlikelihood. I think we’re just, we’re not gonna see that. No part of the architecture points to that at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, not, I mean, this statement would make it say that potentially it’s a thing that Apple wasn’t going to support, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you put in slots, third parties can sell a card for it and third parties will make a driver for it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like Apple can’t really control that, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, can Apple Silicon even support GPU drivers? I mean, it already doesn’t support eGPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think it can support GPU drives, but we’ll see, we’ll see what they do there. Like the reason, I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know in a rehash this, but the reason it is coming up is because it seems like you won’t be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to match the GPU grunt that you can fit in a 2019 Mac Pro in it by any stretch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the imagination with just the GPUs that are integrated into any kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, Mac Pro system on a chip, right? Just because you can put more than one of them into the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John machine, but for you can put four very big, very hot GPUs inside of 2019 Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can’t match that with System on a Chip, you just can’t. Right, and so it’s either Apple doesn’t care that you can’t match it, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what, tough luck, who cares? Because the benchmarks of the applications that we care about are actually faster without it, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple has some kind of, you know, external GPU solution, which could be an Apple GPU on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a card, or that Apple sells you four of them for the price of a few cars, or it could just be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no GPU support at all for the slots, and the slots are just there for something else, or it could be no slots. Anyway, see many months of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John past episodes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, given that the Apple Silicon architecture is so intimately about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey unified memory shared between the GPU and the main CPU, I’m not saying it’s impossible. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s certainly possible, but I would be very surprised if any sort of external GPU is supported.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anything is possible, but I would be very, very surprised.

Ventura’s support of old Macs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so Mac OS Ventura has dumped, dropped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and dumped at the same time, it’s apparently drumped, has dumped a whole bunch of hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I will go through the list as per Mr. Macintosh. It has dropped the 2015 through 16 MacBook Pro, the 15 through 17

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBook Air, the 2016 12-inch MacBook, that’s too bad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the 2014 Mac Mini, the 2013 Mac Pro, and the 2015 iMac. all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no soup for you, so sorry. Yeah, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Christina Warren says that the most egregious one that they dropped, and I disagree with this, but it is funny, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John egregious one that they dropped is the 2013 Mac Pro that they sold until December 2019, that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should have stopped selling in 2017. You could have active AppleCare and no OS updates.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} bought,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you were one of the poorest suckers who bought a trash can Mac Pro in December 2019,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your AppleCare is still good and you can’t get any more OS updates. But I mean, honestly, that computer was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s a 2013

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer that basically never changed aside from like some different configuration options, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all right, maybe they did run the GPUs once, I don’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nope, they sure didn’t. They just dropped the low-end configurations. Oh yeah, there you go, that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey When was the, was it Connected Live that you presented, Steven, with the Mac Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What year was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} that? It was our show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, it was our show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} okay. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was the last, that was 2019, I think. Was it 2019? There you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} go. There it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} It was still for sale. I got it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I got it from Apple. This computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} was a joke gift on a live

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast. Oh, I know. I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m just saying though, that is an example. If you got AppleCare for Steven, then he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that guy. He is the one. I did not. Oh, how cheap? How cheap

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} are you, man?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Come on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I actually kind of like one of those from a museum, but I was never going to pay the prices. They were still going for it. And anyway, dropping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support for these. I feel like the one that probably hurts the most, maybe surprisingly are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the MacBook Pros, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air maybe. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a 2016 MacBook Pro doesn’t feel so old that it shouldn’t be getting OS updates. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know 2016 was like a long time ago, but just like, because the MacBooks didn’t change for so long and there was that dark time and you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, well, I have one of the, you know, isn’t the 2016 the one where they fixed the keyboard? I forget.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 2019 was the- 2019 is when they

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} fixed the keyboard. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, just because so many people have laptops, Right, and people are used to Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS supporting Macs pretty far back in time, but obviously the Apple Silicon transition,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think has hastened the demise of a lot of these computers just because, kind of like the 32 to 64 bit thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dropped a lot of support. It’s like, you just want to get on the other side of this sort of discontinuity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so yeah, these older Macs are having support dropped. That is a thing that usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John routinely happens. I just think we’ve been in a, we were in a period for a while where macOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wasn’t dropping a lot of old hardware. And I think we’re still in a period where iOS isn’t dropping a lot of old hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What is 16 drop?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So 16 is the first version to drop anything since, so 14 and 15 both didn’t drop anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} 16 is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the first one that’s dropped things in three releases and it’s dropping everything up through the seven.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So the iPhone eight and above is supported.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so anyway, sorry for all you trash can owners and sorry for all the people who’ve got not sold

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Intel Macs doing drop, But architecture transitions will do that to you.

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iPhone HRTF

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is an example of something that I swear was mentioned in either the keynote or the State of the Union, but if you asked me to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where specifically it was, I would come up blank. But apparently the iPhone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey creating head-related transfer functions for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We first discussed this back when we were discussing the PlayStation 5, I think maybe before it was even released,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talking about the way the PlayStation 5 did 3D audio. there was the concept

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the head-related transfer function, which basically defines, based on the shape of your head and your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ears, how does sound out in the world bounce off of your head and the insides

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your ears to hit the things that sense sound, your eardrums, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everyone’s got different head and got different ears. And so sounds in the world are always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John filtered through your weird little ears and head and stuff. And when you hear something to your left, to your right, a little bit above,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little bit below, your brain has been trained to identify that sound based on how sound hits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off your head and ears. So your brain is, you know, wired up a little bit differently than someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else’s brain because their brain has been wired up to detect sound based on the shape of their head and ears, right? Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over time, like you learn where sound is. So if you’re gonna do a 3D audio, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John best way to try to do it is to define a personalized head-related transfer function

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for each person based on the shape of their head and their ears, because you can’t just play the same sound out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of speakers like for, you know, in modern Apple parlance for spatial audio, you can use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of an average head-related transfer function that will work okay for most people, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you personalize it, it sounds even better. And there was something that the Sony presentation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the PlayStation was saying, oh, well, we scanned a hundred ears and averaged them in a computer and blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like, maybe someday you’ll be able to scan your ear and get personalized 3D

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound in your PlayStation 5. I’m not sure whether it is on the PlayStation, but apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iOS 16 has a feature like that where they ask you to use basically the FaceTime

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera and you do the FaceTime thing, but they also say now please take the phone and show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it your ears, show it your left ear and then show it your right ear. And it scans

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both your head and also your ear and tries to, I’m assuming use the depth camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to come up with a model of the cragginess of your ear and the size of your head to come up with a personalized

⏹️ ▶️ ^John head-related transfer function. Now, we’ll link to Josh Hunt’s tweet where he shows himself doing this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s supposed to put like a little bracket around where it sees the ear and has real trouble finding Josh’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ears. And it’s not because he has big, long, wavy hair that’s blocking them. His ears are clearly visible. It’s kind of like one of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those things where they ask a human, find the ears in this picture. I can find them, they’re right there. A little kid can find them. I see his ear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the phone is having real problems. But anyway, it’s like beta one. So we’ll see how this goes. I also, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey, have a vague recollection this being mentioned but I have no idea where this functionality is and I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John installed iOS 16 yet.

CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so last week we were talking about CarPlay and this new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey system that Apple’s announced wherein they basically take over the entire car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I wanted to bring up a couple of things that Jan-Just van der Hoef brings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up, and I’m mad because I never thought about it or I never actually said it during the episode, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is very well put. In your discussion on CarPlay, John hammered on the fact that all implementations still need a car manufacturer’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stock UI for when there’s no phone available. However, Google already has Android Automotive, which replaces the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey manufacturer system entirely. I’ve ordered a Pulsestar 2 that uses that system. I believe that Audi is doing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey similar. To me, that is the future of CarPlay, or at least Apple is going to need to have something like that as an option for car manufacturers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A friend of the show, Jelly, just took delivery of a Pulsestar 2, and I’ve been talking to him about it. And I knew that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pulsestar was using Android Automotive, and I completely didn’t get a chance to, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slipped my mind to bring it up. And I’m actually gonna skip forward just a little bit, because the other thing I meant to talk about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I didn’t mention last week. Matt Volk points out, and Matt writes, there’s an interesting article

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from Ars Technica a while back that says that the gauge cluster display cannot be run by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a non-real-time OS. So reading from that article, supporting a car, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an Android car, also means needing support for virtualization. Android can run the infotainment system, but something else needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey run the gauge cluster’s display behind the steering wheel. You know, because good cars have clusters behind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the steering wheel, nevermind. Safety regulations mandate that the gauge cluster cannot run Android. Android isn’t a real-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey OS, meaning it can lag if the processor’s too slow, and that’s not allowed for critical driving components like the speedometer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The solution, and this is bananas to me, but apparently this is what they did. The solution is to have the Snapdragon 820 processor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey run two OSes via virtualization, with Android running the center infotainment screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and some other OS running the gauge cluster display. Android can still send the gauge cluster a UI overlay for things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like media info and Google Maps information, but the speedometer is off limits. And also in that article,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it talks about how, you know, they were using Qualcomm processors. And apparently since that article has been written, Matt tells

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us that Polestar has dumped Qualcomm and is instead using NVIDIA for the Polestar 3 that is coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out soon-ish. Before we talk about what car companies are gonna do with this, any thoughts on all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey those things that we just spoke about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there’s a bunch of cars that use Android Auto like as their OS, but the thing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} does- Well, hold on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s two different things though. This confused the crap out of me when I was researching this. There’s Android Auto, which is basically like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we think of as CarPlay. Then there’s also Android Automotive. Yes, they have a product called Android Auto and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a product called Android Automotive. They’re two different products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Automotive, sorry. What I mean is that like a car manufacturer decides,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, we don’t wanna do our entire infotainment system ourselves. Well, it turns out there’s an Android

⏹️ ▶️ ^John variant that we can run on our internal car stuff that will do that for us, that ships with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John car, right? But kind of like Android everywhere on phones, the beauty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Android, if you choose to look at it that way, is that it can be customized. So you buy a Samsung phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it runs Android, but Samsung customized the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} heck out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. When you use Android, you get the source code to Android and you can customize it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what car makers do. They use Android Automotive as the foundation for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS that’s going into their car, but they can make it look and feel however they want and customize the heck out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. They’re just not starting from zero, right? That doesn’t apply to CarPlay. Apple’s not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give you the source code or whatever the car OS is and say, oh yeah, just change it, put your logos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it, change everything around, you know, we don’t care, go ahead. No, that’s not how it’s going to work with Apple. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John although it is true that many manufacturers do base their in-car infotainment systems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Android, it’s because Android is Android and is open source and they’re able to modify

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it that they are willing to do that. Because if you look at these various cars that use Android Automotive, they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all look exactly the same. You can kind of tell they’re all running automotive, but they’re customized in ways that Apple basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let you do. Now that said, that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t pitching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these people and, hey, take our new CarPlay thing and build it into your car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No phone needed, just you start up the car, we don’t care what kind of phone you have or if you have a phone of any kind whatsoever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CarPlay will be running on your car, it’ll be in your car, and it will control, you know, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the stuff. Maybe they have a real-time OS for the gauge cluster if that’s a requirement. They run all the screens, all that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. That could definitely happen, but it’s not going to be like it is with Android Unmotive because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is not going to give you the source code and they’re not going to say, go ahead, put your logos all over it and change everything about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco See, the most interesting part of this to me is this distinction of like, that the gauge cluster

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco must run a real-time operating system. So as a very quick reference for those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of you who don’t know, a real-time operating system, the main difference between real-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OSes and pretty much every other OS that we think of that we use every day like iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Mac OS and everything else, Windows, Linux, Android, those are all, those have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-deterministic performance under certain characteristics or they can have very complex performance characteristics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Real-time OSes are made to be extremely predictable and able to service

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their basic needs, whatever the IO needs, whatever the cycle is, whatever they’re managing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re able to service those requests in a defined, known, deterministic amount of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that way, if you have something like a speedometer, the OS will be guaranteed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the speedometer will update X times per second, no matter what. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if some app is running that’s trying to allocate a bunch of memory or take a bunch of CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time or whatever, that can’t happen on a real-time OS. That can’t slow it down. It will always,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always service those requests exactly on schedule or within a very, very small variance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And depending on how good it is, that variance can be smaller. But that’s the gist of it. And so the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco design of RTOSs is totally different than other ones, because you have to do a lot of things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you wouldn’t think of, such as memory allocation can be non-deterministic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It can slow down, or it can result in problems or failures. So real-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco OSs usually have a lot of statically allocated memory. That’s one of the biggest things. And static, time-slice-based

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scheduling, or other complex scheduling needs. And so this is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different from the way that our usual computing OSes are built

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and are optimized. And so I think, so knowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that the gauge cluster must run a real-time OS, my guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know this is a little bit out there, is that this is either what’s left

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of or what we will first see from Project Titan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That real-time OS to run that part of what we saw in the CarPlay demo at WDC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s my guess that Project Titan either was scaled down to just this or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is gonna be the first thing we see from that project but that what it is is some kind of real-time OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to run those gauges that they showed off in the keynote on these car screens. So that way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple can literally take over the entire display of all of that and be up to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco date with all safety regulations and everything and somehow be running two OS’s. Now there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some ways they can do this. So this article mentioned virtualization. Well, Apple’s modern,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, Apple Silicon chips all support that. Those chips in the iPhone probably do as well. You know, they support it on the Mac so I would imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they support it on the iPhone at the hardware level or at least they could fairly easily. And so maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone runs two OS’s in in parallel, maybe one of them is a little real-time OS to run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this CarPlay feature, and the other one is like the rest of iOS. Or maybe there’s some kind of minor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hypervisor under both of them, I’m not sure, I don’t know the details of how that could work. Wait, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone involved?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because the iPhone, oh well, hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, if it was gonna be built into the car, like obviously Project Titan wasn’t gonna require you to have an iPhone to drive the car, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, and if they’re, Apple was doing, you know, was rumored to be doing self-driving stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Project Titan, and if they were gonna do an entire car, you need some kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John real-time system to run the car parts of the car. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but presumably, Apple would make it fancy. So surely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some kind of more restricted, better real-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guarantee type operating system or application environment was part of Project Titan, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they wouldn’t require you to have a phone with you to drive the car. So there has to be silicon in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the car and software in the car to run the car. So I would imagine that would be running the real-time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS for the real-time systems, and that would be running, maybe using virtualization, the non-real-time OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the other parts of the car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But would they want a car to have basically like a built-in iPhone hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that presumably could never be updated?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It wouldn’t be, it would be like the A13 in the studio display, right? So in all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cases, like even these cars that run Android Automotive, they’re running it so you can like, oh, I can change the fan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speed on the climate control, and I can turn the wipers on, and I can do all those things. And then there’s the, you know, the sort of, I forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it’s called, like the CAN bus or something, but the real-time system that does like stability control and anti-lock brakes. And that’s separate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the Android automotive, right? But in all of these systems, there’s also the flash style thing that I referred

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to last time, which is like, and on top of all this, hey, there’s a rectangle that we’ll cut out of our entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS and CarPlay will display there, or Android Auto will display there. So like that is the third

⏹️ ▶️ ^John layer on top of this. There’s the real-time OS, there’s the thing that runs all the infotainment and maybe lays stuff over the gauge cluster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then there’s a system that says, hey, your phone can display stuff here. Because you are gonna wanna have apps on your phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and run them the newest version of Waze or whatever. That’s going to get a chunk of that screen where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever phone you own, whether it be Android or an Apple phone, can put apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on that phone, display it into part of that screen. But that’s on top of the stuff that’s built into the car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s interesting. All right, I could be convinced of that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, that’s what modern cars do. You buy a car with Android automotive and it supports CarPlay, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seeing your iPhone’s crap being displayed in a rectangle on top of Android Automotive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because to me, this sounds like Apple’s answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Android Automotive. They want their slice of this. They think they can do a better job of it. They might be able to, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It depends on how much effort they put into it. But to me, this sounds a lot like Project Titan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or what’s left of it. Yeah, if they had to have had the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system if they were planning on making a car. How far along do they go? How many dead ends do they go down?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is this the same as what they were doing or did they scrap all that and start over? We don’t know. The other thing, and we’ll get to the, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the car manufacturer said in a second from this Verge article, but the other thing that a bunch of people point out is multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years ago, maybe last year, maybe a year before that, Apple, one of the things Apple touted about CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, hey, CarPlay, now we can display stuff in more than one place. Right now, CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shows your stuff in a little rectangle on your dashboard, but the new version of CarPlay can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show stuff in two rectangles on your dashboard. So car manufacturers could support letting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your phone show some stuff in the gauge cluster, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s been true for a year or two now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think that’s a multi-year old feature. But how many cars have you seen that in? None. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems like either Apple hasn’t gotten a lot of uptake on that feature, which again is not this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we saw in the keynote, but just simply like, oh, I can just show stuff in two rectangles. So either car makers didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pick up on that feature, or it just takes so long for the car industry to do anything that everybody jumped on it instantly, and we’re only gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see it in cars that come out two years from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now. Could be either. I do want to go back a half step though. I strongly agree with you, Marco, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is the first evidence we’ve seen or the first effort we’ve seen that came out of Titan. I mean, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have no inside knowledge. I could be dead wrong about this, but I think you’re right, that this is the first bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of fallout in the happy sense from their car project. And it wouldn’t surprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me if it started as, let’s build a physical car and ends up as, and this is what you were saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a minute ago, that this is all we get from that entire humongous project is, you know, a car play

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey automotive, if you will, for lack of a better name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and this lines up perfectly with, honestly, with all the rumors that we heard about it. So, you know, a lot, they tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of things, a lot of turmoil, a lot of changes in direction, leadership, and everything else. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you remember, the most recent, you know, reasonably credible or strong, at least,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rumors we heard about Titan was about a year or two ago, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the rumor was they had pivoted to, quote, making software for other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco automakers. And we all made fun of that. Because we were like, that’s not something Apple would do. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want to make the whole widget. And it’s interesting, even in the live talk show at WDC this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year, John Gruber almost directly asked them why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they were doing this kind of new CarPlay thing when the Apple way of doing things normally is to make the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco widget. and the very long smiling pause from the Apple executives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to that question with no real response kind of suggested that they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still planning to make the whole widget, as in make the whole car. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s one small data point against this theory, or that maybe this isn’t the only thing they’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But looking at the current landscape,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if car makers, even if one or two car makers, You don’t need a lot to start, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if car makers are willing to give Apple full access to giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screens to control the vast majority of the experience, that’s a really good position for Apple to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in, because it lets them keep focusing mostly on their high-profit iPhone business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s massive lock-in to iPhone owners, because then, like, you know, everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in their life will start working totally differently and possibly worse if they ever switch away from the iPhone. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s something that lets Apple focus on the parts they like and take profit from the sources they already have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without entering the giant, messy, expensive, complicated world of the physical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco car design and sale and maintenance. Like that whole world is incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco messy, as we’ve discussed before. I see no reason for Apple to make their own car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also see no reason for Apple to get into the self-driving business in a major way. your way. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even that that that has also shown to be big and messy and, you know, possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not actually working for a long time and you know, things like that. Whereas this is an Apple can get into today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they could like they can start doing this and they are by all means, they are starting to do this today, they can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco start taking control of things and you know, prevent or at least you know, stave off competition from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Android that’s literally doing like a very similar thing here. So you know, they kind of have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do it on one level defensively there against Android, and it has all these pluses for them and for their users.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think this is Project Titan. And if they eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make their own car down the road, okay, I was wrong. I think this is it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they have to support Android Auto, though, because like all the cars support both things. Now it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supports CarPlay or Android Auto, right? And granted, the whole stat that has like, you know, 80% of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new car buyers or iPhone owners is because if you’re buying a new car, you probably have a lot of money, which probably probably means you buy a fancy iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But 80% is not 100%. Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t see them not supporting Android Auto in the way, like in like the dumb window today that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CarPlay is for other things. Like I see this as a replacement for Android Automotive, not Android Auto.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, but what I’m saying is like, it wouldn’t it be, it’s pretty weird for Apple to be making an OS that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a feature where it carves out a portion of the screen so that an

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Android phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can display its stuff from its apps there. I mean, but it’s the price of entry. And that gets to this final section

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. This is the article on the verge where they called a bunch of car manufacturers right after the WWDC keynote and said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hey, Apple had this thing today where they showed like Apple software running across the entire dashboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are you going to support that? And the car manufacturers predictably said, you know, no comment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or like a bunch of words saying, Oh, we believe in the full car experience. And we’re interested in what Apple does. And we’re very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happy partners with Apple and blah, blah, blah. There was very few like enthusiastic. Yes, totally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Our next car is going to have Apple across the whole dashboard. closest we got is from Polestar, which is a quote from Polestar’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PR representative. Apple CarPlay will come to Polestar 2 as part of an over-the-air update later this month.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re also thrilled to announce that the next generation of CarPlay will be coming to Polestar cars in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That is so vague. It’s like, well, does that mean the thing they showed on the screen? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is going to be a next generation of CarPlay, but it might just be the regular CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know. So I can I can translate this for you. No joke. So again, And our friend Jelly just got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Polestar 2, and it does not have CarPlay until literally today. He sent me a text just a few minutes ago saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that that update has finally landed. So as of today, his car will have what we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think of as CarPlay, the standard CarPlay experience. I read this as, we are thrilled to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey announce that the next generation of CarPlay, this new fancy thing where it takes over the dash, et cetera, et cetera, will be coming to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Polestar cars in the future. So that’s a yes. Additionally, Volvo, which is effectively the same as Polestar, except not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, said, at this time, we don’t have anything to share beyond that we plan to support this next generation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Apple CarPlay in future vehicles. So Volvo and Polestar seemed to be in on it. Everyone else that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talked to seemed extremely wishy-washy or heck no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they put a bunch of logos up there. Like they called a lot of the people from these logos out. Actually, the Decoder podcast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this related to the Verge, talked to, I think, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz or somebody fancy from Mercedes-Benz

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and had a longer discussion about like, part of the discussion was, hey, this Apple thing, are you gonna support it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mercedes kind of said the same thing that you’d imagine BMW would say The both these companies both Mercedes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John BMW have spent a lot of time and money and resources trying to come up with their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS to run their dashboards because both Mercedes and BMWs have really leaned heavily into screens

⏹️ ▶️ ^John across their new dashboards Mercedes going the heaviest where it’s like screens from edge to edge top to bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like just the whole dashboard not just like a giant tablet shoved into the middle of it like a Tesla BMW’s new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dashboard looks like an extremely unimaginative very long skinny screen from in front of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the driver all the way over past the midpoint of the car But they’re all running. I mean maybe they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are Android based or whatever, but they’re they’re very adamant that their OS’s look like Whatever a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John BMW OS or whatever a Mercedes OS looks like I can’t imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of the current BMW Mercedes designs Having that all replaced by Apple stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you know if you look at the keynote you look at what they showed on the dashboard and it looks like an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John UI. And you know, see previous episodes of my complaints about what an Apple UI looks like, but it looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple-y, right? It would be out of place in any of the interiors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of any current cars from these car makers. Because these car makers make the OS match what their interiors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look like. And their interiors mostly don’t follow that same minimalist Apple aesthetic. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John follow usually worse, or maybe uglier anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aesthetics, and they make their dashboard graphics and infographics and diagrams and instrument

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clusters match that. And so I think, you know, Polestar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they’re, if they’re a gung-ho and Volvo, presumably the cars that they put this in will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be designed so this Apple look and feel matches the interior of the cars. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually a Polestar is pretty close to that aesthetic already, but Mercedes, BMW, GM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Toyota, Ford, these makers or their car

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} interiors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do not look aptly, let’s say, and neither do their OSs, neither do their screens, neither do their internal clusters, neither

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do their infotainments. And a lot of these car makers don’t want the inside of their cars to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aptly. The Apple aesthetic that they showed, again, there could be more than one aesthetic, but what they showed at the WW’s keynote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that doesn’t match certain kinds of cars. Sometimes you want a car to be, think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like a big mean truck. We just talked about people who love their big trucks. You don’t want a delicate aptly UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your big mean truck. It just doesn’t or like a fancy sports car that’s look racy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Can I tell you guys a secret? What? I just don’t tell anybody, I honestly didn’t like the look of the car plate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gauges they showed off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what I’m saying, like Apple’s strength has not been the ability to convey information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a clear way. It’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} been about low

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} contrast text that nobody can read, hiding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that they think you don’t need to see. Like I think their strengths, their current strengths are not well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suited to do an instrument cluster. Like an instrument cluster is like, show me the information in a clear way that I can see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at different times of day and whatever. And we’re like, we can’t even read anything in our UIs on our phones that we can position any,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, I don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You have to hover over the transmission stick to see what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} you’re in. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gosh, don’t even.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Am I in drive, am I in reverse? Let’s see, let me just hover my hand over here. Oh, oh, there it popped in, there we

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll do pupil tracking. When you’re not looking at the speedometer, we’ll hide

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} the numbers. Just turn it off. Only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you look at it, we’ll make the numbers beautifully fade into view. What if they don’t fade into view? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try looking at it a little bit longer. Why don’t you just show the numbers all the time? We feel like the numbers are distracting you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from your content. We don’t wanna let the content be wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh gosh, stop. I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only show the numbers when your pupils land on the speedometer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh my gosh, it’s so bad because it could be true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love the idea of Apple designed stuff and when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I saw the reality of it, or when I think about the reality of modern Mac design, I’m just like, oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe that’s not what I want,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. But even, setting that aside, even if it was really good, cars have styles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that for each model within a make and for entire manufacturers have a different sort of style

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and not all of them match Apple. Like I said, Polestar I think does actually match Apple’s vibe,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but you know, Mercedes and BMW don’t, Volvo arguably doesn’t, Toyota and Honda

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certainly don’t. So that’s the beauty of Android automotive. These car makers can take that and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, make it look however they want. Just like Android phone makers can take Android and make it look like whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ugly thing they think they wanna make their Android phones look like. That is a feature of Android Unmotive that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John assume will not be a feature of anything like that from Apple because Apple does not really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the modern Apple as in the last several decades does not want you to skin their OSs. Back in the day they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it was super cool, but not lately.

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SwiftUI: The way forward?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wanted to briefly talk about the WWDC State of the Union and one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey particular part of it. There’s a bunch of little things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that may be worth talking about another time, but there was one piece that I thought was really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fascinating that I wanted to call out, and I wanted to hear what you guys had to say about this. Early on in the presentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I’m not mistaken, so let me back up, I’m sorry, a half step. So the platform state of the union is like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nerd keynote, right? So the one o’clock in the afternoon Eastern time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey keynote keynote is for everyone. It’s for nerds, it’s for non-nerds. But the platform state of the union,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is typically in the afternoon of the first day of WWDC, that is the nerds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey keynote, where they talk about code, where they talk about nerdy things. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the first things that they spoke about, so Susan Prescott was the MC, she did a brief thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about Xcode Cloud. And then they brought up Josh. I can never remember if it’s Schaefer or Schaffer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I apologize. But Josh S. came out and said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a couple of interesting things. But one of the things he said was he stood in front of a big white screen that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on that screen said Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit, and Interface Builder. These are all the technologies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you use to write iOS or Mac OS apps up until SwiftUI existed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And he stood in front of the screen, and he said, and I don’t have the exact verbatim quote in front of me, but he said in so many words,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these are all legacy, they will exist for a long time, but this is not the way forward. The way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey forward is Swift and SwiftUI. Then following that, it was Ben Cohen who did a feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Swift specifically, and Ben, and I believe this is a verbatim quote said, Swift is absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the best language to build apps across our devices. Then they leaned into SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as well, heavily throughout the rest of the presentation. I thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this was interesting because one of the things that all of us griped, not only the three of us on the show, but all of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as developers griped about after last year, and maybe even a couple of years prior, but especially after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last year, was what is the way forward Apple? If I’m developing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a new Mac OS app today, am I doing that with AppKit? Am I doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it with Catalyst, which is basically UIKit on Mac OS? Am I doing it with SwitchedUI? what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the right answer? And it seems extremely clear that Josh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Ben and the rest of the team at Apple are saying the right answer is Swift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and SwiftUI wherever you can and then fall back to these other things if you can’t use Swift and SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And on the one side, I deeply appreciate that they have put a line in the sand or a flag

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the dirt or whatever analogy you want to use, and they’ve said, this is the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That being said, they’re having SwiftUI write a bunch of checks that I’m not sure SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can cache. And I’m a little concerned. Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let me start with you since you are the most developy developer on Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey platforms of the three of us. What do you think about this? And if you wouldn’t mind starting by just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very, very briefly reminding us, what is What is your Swift and SwiftUI journey as of today?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As of today, I am writing as much new code as I can in Swift. I’m not going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back and rewriting working Objective-C code in Swift. However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m making grand plans in my head that I may never actually achieve of larger moves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. So that’s Swift. UI I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use 100% on the watch app because again the alternative was garbage. In the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app I’m using very little Swift UI so far and there are various reasons for that but very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco little of it so far. I have done other little like toy apps like little utilities I’ve made for myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and done those in Swift UI so I’ve used a little bit more there but not a ton.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think with this we have to separate a few different things. So first of all we have to see versus Swift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as as the language we are using. That is very clear. Swift is very mature now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That is the way forward. It has been the way forward for quite some time now. So the language

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you should be using for almost all code in your app, as long as you can, is Swift, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re writing a new code, it’s a no-brainer, use Swift. That simple, that is well-supported,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s a totally reasonable stance for them to take, and they’ve been taking it for many years now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so that, I think, set that aside. Okay, Objective-C, as much as I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Objective-C, and I still write some of it in parts of my app that use it, Swift is the way forward,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s a done deal. That fight is over, we’ve moved on, okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So then the question becomes, which UI framework? Are you using SwiftUI, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are you using UIKit or AppKit? That’s a much more difficult question to answer. That’s really what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re talking about here. It’s not about the language, it’s about the framework, and what you can do in the framework,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and what’s hard and what’s easy and what’s buggy and what’s mature. SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in releases before 16 and Mac OS Ventura,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I don’t have any experience with the new ones yet in that way, but SwiftUI before these,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this beta cycle has been very interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very bumpy of a ride. It has a lot of value when you’re on the happy path

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as we talked about before and when you hit a wall you hit it hard and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s often so frustrating that you have to basically go back and like rewrite the whole thing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UIKit or you know do ridiculous levels of hacks in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco order to work around some limitation of SwiftUI. Based on what I’ve seen so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the new stuff it seems like they are making progress towards removing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more and more of those needs for those hacks, but there are still a lot left. And some of them I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think are inherent to SwiftUI and just the architecture that it has and the whole idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of declarative UI framework. Like some of that, certain hacks are necessary just to fit into that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco paradigm. And so that’s gonna be a problem to some degree

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forever. And so the question is, when will we hit a point where, and or have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we already hit a point where we can mostly use SwiftUI and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to dip out of it very often and not have to hack around problems or limitations in it very often to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco point where we can say, all right, this is just what we’re using by default and, you know, most of the time we’ll be fine doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. And I don’t know that we’ve reached that point yet. SwiftUI is still very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco early. Still, you know, it’s what, about four years old, something like that? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in public, at least, you know, I know it was on the watch development for a few years before that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s very, very young in the public world. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not evenly aged and even mature on all platforms. It’s for instance, as we talked about last week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what you get with SwiftUI code is worse on the Mac than it is on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And what you get an iOS is worse than what you get on watchOS. You know, clearly there’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a hierarchy of maturity here. WatchOS is at the top. WatchOS SwiftUI, done,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s great, it’s fine, just use it. iOS SwiftUI, well, it’s okay most of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you know, you start hitting problems in certain edge cases or certain specialized needs or certain customizability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not possible or performance problems with certain types of collections or certain types of structures. So, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, there’s issues like that. And then you go to the Mac and it’s even more of those, like, well, you have more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems, more bugs, more limitations, more subpar implementations or subpar behaviors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or looks. And so I think this is a very optimistic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slide for Apple to say, this is the way forward, this is the best way to build apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today. Because it might be the best way to build their demo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps, like the Ice Cream Stand or whatever, their demo WBC session kind of apps. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be good for that, But it still seems to hit a lot of need for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hacks and walls and problems when it hits the real world. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it especially has a lot of those problems when you’re interacting with legacy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco codebases or the Mac. And so until they can really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco develop a lot of that, just with, you know, maturation over time basically, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if they can necessarily declare this. You know, they’re declaring this more as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a wish than a reality. And they might make it a reality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m sure they intend to keep going down the path that will make it a reality. Whether they can achieve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is a different story. Whether they are able to give it the quality and attention it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs in areas like the Mac, where it’s not quite the number

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one priority, that remains to be seen. Right now, if I were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco writing a brand new app today, I would absolutely, no doubt, try to do it this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way. And wherever I run into problems, rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than trying to dump SwiftUI and go back to UIKit or AppKit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would attempt to do the various mechanisms where you can drop out of SwiftUI and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use AppKit or UIKit wrapped in a SwiftUI view for certain parts of your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view hierarchies or whatever. So I would totally do this if writing you today. And in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am very tempted to try to rewrite large parts of my app UI this way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I think being on the happy path here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is going to make certain things easier in the future. You know, already my app is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a huge pile of burdensome technical debt because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my app is a huge pile of Objective C UI kit code that has some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Swift here and there, but is mostly still old Objective C UI kit code.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because there is so much UI in a podcast app, you have no idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You think a podcast app is three screens, I’m telling you it’s so much more than that. There is so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UI in a podcast app. And so I, you know, I’m feeling great burden

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all this legacy code. And I would love to move towards the ideal of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Swift UI, which is like, wow, I can I can probably collapse a lot of a lot of this code that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, you know, thousands of lines of just to see for UI kit into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hundreds of lines of Swift UI instead, that is hopefully cleaner and easier to maintain and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco possibly avoid certain bug behaviors or certain inconsistent states and things like that. I would love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do that and I’m gonna probably start attempting to do that like later this summer to see like hey can I can I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do this or not like kind of do like a feasibility study of just trying some things and see what happens but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reality is I don’t see any evidence yet that we’re near that point where that actually is that easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it seems like we are going in that direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there are still so many walls and limitations and hurdles and we’ll see what happens. They are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making progress. Every year they add a bunch of stuff and fix a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff and improve a bunch of stuff to SwiftUI and so they are making progress but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these are big shoes to fill. Like you’re asking people to throw away

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of the old frameworks that they know and all the what and everything they know about them for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco totally different not only a totally different library for making UIs but a whole different paradigm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of how you make UIs and how data flows through apps. And that’s really hard, complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff for all of us for them to implement and for us to learn and to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our mental models and behaviors and architectures for. That’s a huge thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s not going to happen in a few years. It’s going to take it’s going to take a decade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to really like move the industry over that way in a big way. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, they have been smart about it in the sense that they have made these little escape patches where you can do things in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco parts. And that’s very, very smart. Because if that wasn’t the case, this would be nowhere near where it is today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In terms of in terms of adoption and usefulness. But I still think this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is optimistic. Because again, also keep in mind that if you want to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Swift UI, with all of its new stuff, you know, you want to use the navigation tree stuff, great, that solves your problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I forward to trying that. But I can only do it when my app requires iOS 16, or Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ventura, you know, and so even then, like, if you’re, if you have a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to support, even one or two OS versions back, you know, this stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t quite use it yet. So you might not be able to use SwiftUI the way you want to, or you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might have to have even more hacks. So again, like, this is a process, this takes a lot of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We are not that far along this process yet. In the grand scheme of things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Swift UI is not mature yet. You can’t use it for everything yet. You shouldn’t use it for everything yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And for Apple to say you should use it for everything or you should probably use it for everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think is still optimistic. But I think we’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Let’s give a brief review of a capsule summary of when we talked about this in the past.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The analogy we used then was like the Mac OS X when it first came out. Mac OS X was based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Next Step OS, but it had a bunch of Apple classic Mac APIs thrown on top.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you had two groups of developers and two groups of apps meeting there. There was all the Next Step apps that were ported

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Mac OS X and they used what came to be known as the Cocoa API. It’s AppKit and all that stuff and Objective-C,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this weird language. And there were all the classic Mac applications that ported to Mac OS X’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Carbon API, which was like a cleaned up version of the classic Mac API. And for many, many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years in the early days of Mac OS X, Apple supported both Carbon and Cocoa. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had to support Carbon because the OS they tried, the next step-based OS they tried to put out before that based

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Rhapsody was a non-starter because basically Microsoft and Adobe said, yeah, we’re not rewriting our apps in Objective-C.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what you’re talking about. So you either let us run our existing apps pretty easily on your new OS or it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going anywhere. So that’s why Mac OS X exists. And that’s why Carbon exists because they had to make an OS so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John essentially Adobe and Microsoft could port their important applications with the minimum of fuss. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all those applications use the classic Mac OS API, not the Next Step API, right? So you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had Carbon and Cocoa, and you had to keep Carbon around because all your important apps were in it. And then there’s these weird little developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John writing things in Cocoa with this weird language Objective-C. And those two frameworks existed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John together for a long time, and Apple would do WWDC presentations, and they would add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a new control, and it would come to Cocoa first, and then Carbon would get it later, or they’d add a new API and it would only be in Carbon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it comes to Cocoa later. And Cocoa, people were writing AppKit apps with Cocoa and they would be annoyed that they had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drop down into Carbon to do something and vice versa. And then there was the years where the Apple would say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and we’re bringing this feature to both Carbon and Cocoa at the same time and the crowd would go wild. And they’d be like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t like the, we don’t like the fighting. We don’t like it when the other API gets it sooner because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the next people had big Objective-C code bases and the classic Mac people had big, even bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legacy code bases for their drawing applications like Photoshop and Office, right? And you know, there was some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cross pollination happening there. But at no point in these early years of Mac OS X

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did Apple say, by the way, just so you know, Objective-C and AppKit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the future. And yeah, we had to do Carbon because we kind of need Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But even though those people say they’re not going to ever rewrite their apps using AppKit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t worry about it. If we’re successful in 10 years, they won’t be using carbon anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if they had said that, people would have been like, are you kidding me? You know, no one’s gonna rewrite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Photoshop in Objective-C or to use AppKit or Office in Objective-C,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or like, that’s not gonna happen, right? So you better keep carbon around forever. But it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turns out through, well, confluence events. One, Apple was extremely successful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John starting around 2001. Fast forward today, I’d say Apple’s done pretty well for itself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s been successful with its various platforms. Two, the phone came out based entirely on an Objective-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^John based API that looks a lot like AppKit called UIKit. And that made that skillset very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John popular and valuable. And then three, big applications ended up being written in these weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ass cross-platform UI things anyway. Like what the hell is Photoshop? Like I’m sure under the covers, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably got a bunch of Objective-C AppKity stuff, but their UI framework is not standard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AppKit controls and certainly isn’t carbon anymore. and that’s the little, you know, cherry at the end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this. Hey, whatever happened to carbon anyway? Well, after years and years of Apple saying, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support both carbon and cocoa, you know, they’re both great APIs, use the one that’s best for your code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John base, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It came time to do the 64-bit transition and despite developing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John promising, and I believe even maybe shipping to some developers a 64-bit version of carbon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually someone made the call, the very difficult call inside Apple to say, yeah, we’ve changed our mind. carbon

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not coming to 64 bit. We’re choosing this opportunity, this bittedness transition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say, you’re not going to be able to write a carbon app for 64 bit. Not for technical reasons, because we’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, it’s here, it’s working, but here’s how we’re kind of, it’s like someone who breaks up with you by just being a jerk to you constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until you break up with them, right? Like instead of actually having the conversation to say, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decided Objective-C and AppKit is the future. I know this is hard to hear, but that’s the future. Instead of doing that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they just said, carbon’s not coming to 64 bit. We still support Carbon, it’s great, but it’s not coming to 64-bit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you know that’s the end of Carbon because eventually all apps are 64-bit, eventually you can’t even run

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 32-bit apps anymore, right? Like the writing was on the wall. So everybody who had a Carbon app, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we didn’t know how to tell you this, but objective C. Remember that weird thing with the square brackets? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John learn that now. That’s your future. And I think that that legacy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like how they handled that, I think they learned from that because this presentation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was them trying to say in a nice way, this is the direction we’re heading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. Before we’re there, we’re not there yet. As Marco amply pointed out, we are not there yet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but we’re saying directionally, we’re headed that away. And that away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Swift and SwiftUI. Again, Swift is fairly well settled. I think they did that pretty well too. Like the first year Swift came

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out, all the WWDC slides had all their examples in both Swift and Objective-C.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But three years after that or whatever, the writing was on the wall, it’s gonna be Swift. And now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John objective C, what’s that? It’s the code that’s in the parts of your application you haven’t touched in a while. Swift is very well established.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the API question was an open one, especially on the Mac. This is where we’ve talked about it a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because the Mac had this weird thing where you had AppKit and then you had Catalyst, which was UIKit on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac, and then you had SwiftUI on the Mac. So you had three APIs, like how the hell am I supposed to write a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app? Or which one of these am I supposed to use? Because, you know, AppKit and SwiftUI would be bad enough, but now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s UIKit. So does that mean like AppKit is going away but it’s being replaced by UIKit and Catalyst

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the way forward, but then what the heck is SwiftUI? Or am I supposed to be mixing SwiftUI and UIKit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac and ignoring AppKit? Or is AppKit the one true way to do it and just mixing SwiftUI into that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This slide answers that question. Directionally, where we are going on every single one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of our platforms is Swift and SwiftUI. And unlike with the carbon thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they just said, oh, and by the way, AppKit won’t be supported next year, they had, what they said on this slide, They didn’t say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of this was legacy, that’s the subtext. But the text was, Objective-C, AppKit, and UIKit, and Interface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Builder are great technologies, they brought us to where we are today, and they will be supported for many, many years in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the future. Because remember, all these things, Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit, and Interface Builder, they’re all 64-bit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no big transition coming up in the side, and Apple itself has huge amounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of code written in Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit using Interface Builder. They are probably the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legacy code base of this stuff, especially now that, like, you know, Photoshop and probably Microsoft or whatever using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever weird OS framework, you know in-house things that they’ve they built right Apple is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John largest probably has the largest most important code base using these quote-unquote legacy technologies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So Apple can’t get rid of any of this stuff until unless they support all those apps and that’s not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happen for freaking ever so don’t worry about Happy you’re out using app kit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not working in two years or UI kit or you know objective C not running anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more like those apps will continue to function, you’ll be able to continue to build them, you have to be able to, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John directionally, we are going to Swift UI and Swift. And we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are very far from that. This is just a big directional sign in the sense, but I think it is a sign of maturity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say, to solve the question that we kept having, which is like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I have all these APIs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John available to me. What is the path forward? Because the Apple in all past years was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look, you can mix and match them and you can use them where appropriate. and if your app has this, you can use that and you can use this and it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John okay, but where do we go from here? Like, I don’t know where to put my effort. Should I continue to build,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, 50% of my app in UIKit and 50% in SwiftUI or should I just make it a pure AppKit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app with dollops of SwiftUI sprinkled in it? Or you’d say, I can’t make my app 100% in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SwiftUI, so what am I supposed to do? Knowing that essentially AppKit, UIKit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Interface Builder are not going to be the way forward is clarifying for everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John involved And it’s great for them to say that before those technologies are dropped, because I don’t think they’re gonna be dropped for like a decade,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So now there is clarity on both sides. Apple can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continue to do what it was doing, but now we actually know which direction they’re heading. What they were doing is every year we’ll make SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better. And hopefully, eventually, you’ll be able to use it to do everything your app can do. But we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so far from that now that even my dinky, stupid little app that has one thing on the screen, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t even implement Switch Glass in pure SwiftUI. today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I thought, I started messing with it again. I’m like, maybe I can, let’s see if I can add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some more SwiftUI to this. Then one of the first things I saw in one of the W2C Lounge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John channels, it was a SwiftUI channel, someone asked a question. Because just this year they said, hey, you can do a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John menu extra in SwiftUI, the little menu icons that you have in your menu bar, it’s called the menu extra.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can now do them using SwiftUI. Previously you couldn’t, you had to use the AppKit APIs to do that or the Catalyst APIs or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever. But now you can do it in SwiftUI. So someone was messing with this and they asked a question

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the WDC lounge, hey, can I have something different happen when I option click

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the menu bar icon? And they said, no, that feature doesn’t exist yet. Oh my gosh. That’s a feature of my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app. You option click on things and it cycles the paper. And the answer was not like, oh, here’s a workaround

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or you got to capture the keystroke yourself or whatever. It’s like, you literally can’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s the nature of declarative UI. If you don’t have a way to declare that’s the thing you want There

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is no, I’m just gonna drop down to AppKit and then catch the mouse events and look at the modifier keys, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is essentially how I do it, right? But there, you know, once you’ve dropped down to that level, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not in SwiftUI anymore. You’re in AppKit. Where’s all that stuff? That’s in AppKit, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s before we get into all the other things we’re talking about. And Marco mentioned like having to bump the US version. So I’m in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John midst of adding a major feature in my dinky app that has no features. But anyway, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty big feature to map already to add this feature to map. I’ve had to bump the minimum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS requirement from like 10.15 to 12. I’m not gonna release this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one until 13 is out because I don’t wanna require the latest OS for my stupid thing. And it kind of annoys me that I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have both of them out at the same time where I like I continue to bug patch the old version and do the new one or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this dinky app that has no features, I have to bump, it’s a SwiftUI feature, I have to bump the minimum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS version to 12. When I was adding features like, I’m gonna have to bump it up. Oh, now I have to bump it up to 11.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now I have to bump it up to 12. I’m hoping I never have to bump it up to 13, but I’m just like saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what more can I implement in SwiftUI in my dinky little app, right? That’s how far SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is from being a full solution. It is so far away from it that you can’t even do the most trivial application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it wants to be a well-behaved Mac application, which my thing tries to be. Like having sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some depth of features. It’s not just like, you know, the food truck application or whatever. Some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John depth of features like, oh, who would ever want to option click on the menu bar icon on the Mac. Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own menu bar icons on the Mac let you option click and do stuff. It’s not an obscure feature. Good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac apps do stuff like that. And it’s like, oh no, sorry, there’s literally no way to do that. Can I get mouse events? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no. Well, tell us why you want mouse events and we’ll implement it. It’s like, no, sometimes you need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to intercept events. Sometimes I need to like have access to the responder chain or see what modifier keys are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John held down or whatever. Why would you ever need to do that? Just tell us and we’ll make a SwiftUI modifier for it. It’s like, you’re never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be able to, you’ll be chasing your tail forever. There needs to be some sort of underlying way to do that. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the clarity of this presentation of the state of the union was directional.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is headed here. Now, developers, you know what we’re trying to do. We haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done it yet. We’re not saying we’ve done it yet, but you know what we’re trying to do. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re going to make decisions based on what Apple is trying to do, which is, you know, good thing, like Apple doesn’t tend to give you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John roadmaps. But if you know what they’re trying to do, then you can make much smarter decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about what you wanna do in your app. Doesn’t make it any more possible for you to make your app using SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely from top to bottom today, but it lets you make decisions about the future. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a very mature thing for Apple to do. And I think you haven’t seen a lot of people yelling about it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re glad to get some kind of roadmap. And unlike the carbon and cocoa era,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? They’re not saying like all your hard work from before, throw it in the garbage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and rewrite everything, right? But I think we’re all kind of used to the way Apple does things in the more modern era to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, I feel secure in my investment in my giant application that’s based on AppKit or UIKit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, that Apple is going to protect that. But in the meantime, I know for all my future

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work, here’s the direction I’m gonna be going in and I will continue to struggle to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use SwiftUI as much as I can, falling back to UIKit or AppKit when I need to, giving feedback

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Apple about the shortcomings and together we will continue that cycle. But now the directionality is clear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now I know that we’re not going to perpetually have SwiftUI layered on top of another more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John full featured API that’s like the real thing under the covers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I’m a bit of a SwiftUI apologist, because I do think there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to like there. But it’s been quite frustrating because the two or three things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have been delivered in this release, at least at a glance. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve only spent a little bit of time looking at it so far. But at a glance, none of these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey work for Masquerade. Like, they’re exactly what I need for Masquerade, but for various uninteresting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey reasons. They just don’t get me 100% of the way there. So for all of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey two or three things that I’m looking at, I’m probably going to have to continue to use my godawful hacks. This is sounding familiar, Marco. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t mean that to be insulting. I’m just saying, like, you know, I have this pile. I have my own pile of god-awful hacks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t want them there. I’d rather use the hashtag blessed way of doing things, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for whatever reason, it just isn’t 100%. I have my own, you know, you can’t right-click kind of scenarios

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and situations, and it’s frustrating. Even though so much about SwiftUI,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I really do like quite a bit, and I really do admire what they’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do with it, but like both of you have said, they’re just not quite there yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but we’re certainly not there yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think there’s going to be a long tail of like, you know, if we, if the goal state

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, oh, there is no sort of low level API, there is no app kit or UI kit under there. Because like, you know, eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if those APIs will eventually go away and it’ll just be Swift UI, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if it’s just Swift UI and if Swift UI is declarative and if it doesn’t have a way to do the thing, you’re stuck. Like there’s lots of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird things you can’t do. Like to give examples from Switch Glass, which is a little palette of icons lets you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John switch between applications. I have a bunch of weird ass invisible windows floating around there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So like when you move the palette off the edge of the screen, you can still slam the cursor against the edge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the screen and click. And you look like you’re missing the palette, but you’re actually hitting like the empty space between it and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John edge of the screen. That’s an invisible window that I own. And I transfer that click to the icon that you didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John click on. Same thing with activation, like with the auto hiding thing. There’s an auto hide region

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a bunch of invisible windows sized and shape a certain size that when your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouse enters them, that the thing slides out. All that stuff, like being able to have a low level API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make invisible windows and to take events that happen in those invisible windows, like to sort of intercept

⏹️ ▶️ ^John low level events that happen in those invisible windows and chuck those events to a different responder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chain and have it be as if you had clicked on the button in a whole different thing. Like SwiftUI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has no facility to do that. SwiftUI doesn’t let you take like controls and let them span

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiple windows. Like it’s just like that plumbing is obviously under there sort of events tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything, but you don’t have access to that plumbing or at least you don’t in any sort of, you know, reasonable way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whereas AppKit is based on that plumbing. Everything you do in AppKit is like that. The AppKit has fundamental, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John major building blocks that are all about capturing, you know, NSEvent, capturing event, the responder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chain, instantiating windows, styling those windows, moving them around,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that is how AppKit is built and that is not how SwiftUI is built. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using AppKit to run a big SwiftUI view with a bunch of AppKit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crap around it, I can do that because of the interoperability. But if you took away AppKit, my app just doesn’t work anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? Or it’s worse, like, oh, sorry, you can’t do that because SwiftUI can’t, you know, take events

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from one window and chuck them into another. In fact, we don’t have events at all. You just have to tell me some state that’s changing. And it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do worry that they’ll sort of get to the 90% solution,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where normal regular apps, even the ones that let you option click on menu bar icons, those you can do in SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if you want to do something a little bit outside that, tough luck, we don’t want your apps on the Mac anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like it is an iOS, not to slam iOS here, but there’s a whole bunch of apps that are possible on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are not possible on iOS, because Apple’s decided, we don’t want that kind of app on our phones, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes it’s for good reasons, but sometimes it’s just like, oh, we don’t want that. Like system extension tile app type applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or applications that, you know, jailbreak type applications that put a little floating thing on your screen like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accessibility controls. Why can’t a third party app do that? No, that’s not something we want. In the same way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a long time, Apple didn’t want third party keyboards on the phone. So it’s not like this, we don’t progress in that area,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I do worry that the switch to Swift UI five, 10 years from now will further

⏹️ ▶️ ^John narrow the types of applications that are possible on the Mac and that will be sad for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Green Chef and Trade Coffee. And thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to our members who support us directly. You can join at p.fm slash join. We will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 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 it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Casey wouldn’t let him

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 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,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean to Accidental, accidental, tech podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so long.

John’s mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So, you know, my deal with my Microsoft mouse where it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} wasn’t working and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} bought a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John backup one and I got my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one replaced or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you have more mice or more keyboards or more cheese graters? I’m assuming cheese

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey graters.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cheese graters for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} This

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} mouse though, goodness, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like this mouse, but I have two of them now and both of them have something wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with them that annoys me and I don’t know what to do about it. buying this like $99

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mouse but it annoys me. Right so I can’t at this point I don’t even I can’t even keep track of which is the one that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John replaced and which is the one that I bought brand new as a backup but it doesn’t really matter. One of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the uh the scroll wheel which used to be dead silent now goes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you know starts making noise. Some some scroll wheels always make noise but this one isn’t supposed to make noise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One of the things I liked about it was they’re very smooth and very quiet and now it makes noise. So that’s one mouse’s problem. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s like, all right, well, why don’t you just use the other one? The other mouse, boy, does this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here, I’ll put a link in the chat. This is obviously massively amplified for you to get this noise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it is the weirdest thing ever. And I think this is the brand new one. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t be entirely sure. So play that and you can listen to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this sound that hopefully Marco just put into the show so you could hear it here’s what it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a keyboard tray it’s actually a middle keyboard tray it’s very sturdy and the mouse is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the right side of the keyboard tray on a mouse pad right? When I type on the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or when I tap my fingers on the keyboard tray but obviously the way I encountered is when I type on the keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every time I hit a keystroke, yes, there is the sound of the keystroke. Thump, you know, my finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hitting the keyboard, right? The keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, right? But also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something inside my mouse rattles. So the audio you heard, that low

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frequency thump, that is my finger pressing on the keyboard tray. That’s the low frequency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every other frequency you hear, that high pitched rattle thing, that’s coming from my mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with every single keystroke, that mouse makes like a death rattle. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} driving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me up a wall. It’s like having key clicks on on your phone, right? So I’ve, so these are my choices. Noisy scroll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wheel, so every time I scroll, it’s. Or every time I type, something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside the mouse rattles. And I spent so long trying to figure out what the deal with this thing was. Here’s what I finally tracked it down to, which doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really help me much. I can eliminate the sound by unplugging that mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the USB cable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s not like a physical like rattle, it’s a-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, but I think it’s a physical rattle having to do with the connector, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} know what I mean? Like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connector is loose or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh my God. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I unplug it from the USB cable, no noise. But I need it to be plugged into the USB table. One, because I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a wired mouse. And two, because the Bluetooth in these things is terrible and it’s incredibly jumpy. And the Bluetooth in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Mac is too far away from whatever. So I need it to be plugged in. I can’t, it’s not an optional thing. It’s the whole, one of the reasons I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this mouse It has a nice cord and tiny little connector and everything like it’s a wired mouse. I have a desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer It’s a wired mask. No, you know, no interference perfect responsiveness wired mouse great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it makes that terrible noise So I have to I keep swapping back and forth. I’m like which noise is annoying me more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And now I don’t know what to do because this is the mouse that I like after trying tons and tons of different mice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I Don’t want to buy a third one. What’s gonna be wrong with the third one? I did look up YouTube videos of how to crack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these things open because I’m like, if something’s rattling there, I’ll find it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll shove a piece of gum in there or whatever. I’ll find the rattle and I’ll fix it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s a bunch of plastic clips. It doesn’t look like it’s easy to open. I haven’t gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the point where I’ve torn the thing open, but I’m getting real close. So I just wanted to update everybody. The mouse situation is pretty grim

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over here. Two mice, both of which make annoying noises, and I don’t know what to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m so sorry, John. Oh, that is very sad.

Casey’s Verizon ad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you’ll permit me, I’d like to do a brief public service announcement that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is going to be slightly relevant for people who do not live in Verizon land, but is mostly for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who live in the United States, particularly people who can have Verizon Fios, which I know is a vanishingly small amount of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people. I was on a… So I went to AT&T

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from Verizon when the iPhone… Not when it first came out, but when the 3GS was new.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We ported our numbers, which at the time was a very odd thing to do in America. it was just starting to become popular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And we ported our numbers from Verizon to AT&T so I could get an iPhone and Aaron had some sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of ridiculous phone and then quickly got an iPhone thereafter. And that was in like 2008

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or thereabouts. And we’ve been on AT&T for years and years and years ever since.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We were on a grandfathered plan where we still had metered data. So we had a limit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to how much data we could use in a month. But it rolled over from month to month,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like minutes used to do back in the day, you know, with how much time you spent on the phone, you know, you would get like 100 minutes or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then if you didn’t use them all, you know, maybe your minutes would roll over. Well, our data rolled over. However, because it was a grandfathered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plan, they refused to give us 5G access. Then out of the blue, and supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they told us this was coming, although I don’t think they did, out of the blue, they raised our prices by $12

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a month, basically as a stick to get us off of the grandfathered old plans and get us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on their new fancy unlimited plans. And I’d already been contemplating switching to Verizon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey switching back to Verizon for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’d like 5G access. Second of all, I’d like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that super sweet millimeter wave or whatever it’s called, super high speed access, which we’ll talk about a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey little bit more and will be interesting for those of you who don’t live in America. And I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thought I could save money. And so I’d been getting physical mailings over the last few months that, hey, you’re a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fios customer. This is Verizon’s internet service and cable service, you’re a Fios customer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you jump your cellular to Verizon Wireless, you can legitimately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey save $30 a month if you bring your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cell phone stuff over to Fios. Like it’s $20, I think it’s $10 or $20 by default

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you have a gigabit internet, which I do. And then there’s like a bonus right now of an additional $20 a month. So I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saving and then I just received my first Fios bill since this happened. I’m saving 40 bucks a month

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by having Verizon Wireless and Verizon Piles, which is super cool. The other interesting thing is some of their packages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they have now include Disney Plus, which I was paying for separately for like eight bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a month or whatever it is. And what they don’t really make clear on the website is that you can mix and match their different unlimited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey plans. And so there’s, there’s this, the plan that has Disney Plus and also has Hulu and ESPN Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Apple Arcade, which I’m already paying for separately. But I wasn’t getting Hulu or ESPN Plus. So now I get that, which is kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cool. But they also have a different plan that doesn’t have all the entertainment stuff, but you get half off on a watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or a tablet or what have you. And if you remember, I whined and moaned for like six years about how I was paying for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my Apple Watch, like 15 bucks a month because of fees and taxes and so on and so forth. Well, because I don’t really run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anymore, I thought, well, I don’t really need my Apple Watch to have service, but my iPad, it would be cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if that had service. And so I’m getting that for only like 10 bucks a month, I think, if I’m not mistaken. So all told,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am once the initial bill where they absolutely fleece you with connection fees and activation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fees and so on and so forth. I’m going to be saving a whole pile of money. And then, if you do it right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now, they’re giving you $500 gift cards per phone that you bring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you bring your own phone. So hypothetically, I’m getting $1,000 of Verizon gift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cards that I can use for my service. So I’m getting like a year of service for free.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So… We’re sponsored this week by Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} and wireless. Right? I’m saying. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like that keynote thing where you two were all angry because they kept saying Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time. 5G, Verizon 5G.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s so, but apparently it worked, man, because I’m saving a pile of money and I’m super excited about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Did you save it extra quickly thanks to Verizon’s new 5G ultra-fast wireless network?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, it’s funny you bring that up, because there are, so I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey looked into a little bit what this millimeter wave thing is, that they did talk about, I think that same year that you’re referring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to. Mmm, wave. Yeah, that’s going to be the new name. I wish you hadn’t said that because now I cannot unhear it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, as it turns out, don’t be creepy, there’s what appears to be a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M-Wave towers in downtown Richmond. One of the places that I would occasionally park

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my body, which happens to be a park, unfortunately, the word’s there, but one of the places

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would go to work that was not my home is a park that is within eyeshot of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M-Wave enabled tower. And one of the things about M-Wave is that you really don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get M-Wave service unless you can literally see the tower from where you’re standing. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with all that said, because I’m a nerd and I have too much time on my hands, I decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to go, before I even tried working there, I tried to go to the M-Wave tower and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do a speed test just to see, okay, is this really as fast as people say? And I’m not going to be able to dig up the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey link, but like when Gruber reviewed, what was the iPhone 12 maybe, maybe it was the 13, he found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an M-Wave tower in Philly and he said, no, really, it’s bananas fast. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve done two different tests against this tower. Once when I was legitimately working and once when I just drove there because I’m a nerd.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Both of these tests, I was getting over two gigabits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey down. My fiber optic cable going to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey house, a physical cable going to my house, tops out at about a thousand megabits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey per second. I’m looking at my speed test results, 2,086 megabits per

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey second from the freaking air. How amazing is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that? Like, that is bananas. If I really want to download something, leaving aside like the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that there is eventually a cap on how much data I get despite it being called unlimited, I could probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do that faster through my telephone in a park

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey outside of Richmond than I could at my house with a gigabit Fios connection. Like, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bananas is that? And by the way, the upstream is 200 megabits per second, but nevertheless, How bananas is that? That

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is so freaking cool. Now, granted there are about three spaces in the Greater Bridgman

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey area where this works, but if you’re willing to drive to one of those three spaces, I just think that is freaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey amazing. That being said, despite all that, they limit you to 720p streaming because reasons.