537: Worse Than All of Our Toilets
01 Jun 2023Hopes for WWDC’s announcements, exit interviews for the outgoing OSes, and how a Virginia man destroyed a car and computer in a single weekend.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Phish season
- Follow-up:
- The Anonymous Corner
- Some anonymous thoughts on mail delivery to Apple Park
BELIEVEshirts are at Apple Park- Rank-and-file engineers also hate Radar
- Why does Apple bother with responses at all? (via Matthew Fenselau)
- Not all subscriptions are created equal, notes Claude Zeins
- More on “no subscription” hardliners
- Myth and Oni were given to Take Two Interactive
- The Anonymous Corner
- Exit Interviews
- WWDC Preview & Predictions
- Post-show: Casey destroyed Erin’s car & computer
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Chapters
- Goose month
- Deliveries to Apple Park
- Feedback about Feedback
- Subscription-cancellation exceptions
- More Feedback feedback
- Sponsor: Judo
- No subscriptions == not paying?
- Bungie follow-up
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Exit interview: iOS 16
- Exit interview: iPadOS 16
- Exit interview: watchOS 9
- Exit interview: macOS Ventura
- Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp60)
- Rumors & predictions
- Ending theme
- Destroying a car & computer 🖼️
Goose month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you have you loaded your phone with the appropriate number of fish concerts to last?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever you might be doing over the next few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, they’re always there Fish season was a little bit light so far most of their concerts most of their summer touring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t happened yet But it’s been it’s been very strong goose month I’m still in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goose season now and then fish season will resume once their tour resumes in I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s duck season. No, it’s wabbit season. No, it’s duck season. No, it’s wabbit season
⏹️ ▶️ John disappointing that Goose doesn’t spell the name wrong like Fish does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s true. How would they spell it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like how would they? They would just fit better with
⏹️ ▶️ John Fish, don’t you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I guess. I think I’ve made the speech to you previously, Marco, but just to let you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reiterate how good you have it as a Fish fan, I am overjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is currently the summer concert tour season for Dave Matthews Band
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because over the last year or two, to Dave Matthews Band has been doing with Sirius XM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Friday night concert series. So I can make backups for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my own personal use of the recordings as broadcast over Sirius XM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I actually get soundboard recordings of live concerts. I get one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each week, just the Friday night one. And I have to make sure I record it as it’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for personal use only. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yes, of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get that one concert each week that sounds really good. And then if I cared enough to grab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the others, I’d be getting two microphones on a pole in the audience. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meanwhile, while I’m doing this like an animal, you pay what is, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, the number doesn’t matter, but my recollection is it is not that much money. That’s about 10 bucks a show. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s really not that bad. I mean, obviously it adds up over the course of a summer, but it’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you don’t have to buy them all. I mean, I do, but it’s 10 bucks per three hour show. It’s really not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you get a soundboard recording that’s presumably mixed or mastered. I don’t know the difference, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds pretty darn good, all things told. Sounds great. Meanwhile, I get one pretty decent recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week for the summertime, and I’m like overjoyed by this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Phish live concerts that I buy, and by the way, Goose have been following the same playbook. Like they put all their concert stuff on Bandcamp
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks. You know, it’s pay what you want, 10 buck minimum. And it’s, and they’re also like just as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding. And these shows, like they, if you ever, if you ever listened to like a released live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album by a band. Like a lot of times bands will release their own live albums of like one really great show they did or they do a compilation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds that good. Every show sounds that good. Like they’re all properly mastered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mixed. It’s pretty good. So now I have two great bands in my life that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this and you still have kind of half of one at best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one seventh of one. I mean, not that they record every night of the week, but you know what I’m saying. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, it’s not fair, man. It’s not fair. And Dave Matthews, and Fish was there first, unquestionably, but Dave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matthews band was one of the first mainstream bands that like allowed taping and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so forth. And they were for the time fairly internet forward, but then Fish just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, was like, Oh, really hold my beer. I’ll show you how it’s actually supposed to work. And Dave Matthews band is, is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is nothing in comparison, which is funny because I thought, I thought, and I very well could have this wrong, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Red Light Management, Korn Kapshaw and his group, I thought they managed both bands, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I could be lying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might, who knows. I think what we have now learned here is that you need to listen to better music.
Deliveries to Apple Park
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s do some follow-up. We have some, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to take the bait because we don’t have time. We have some anonymous feedback. We actually have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole section of anonymous feedback. And it starts with anonymous feedback with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple mail delivery. Deliveries to an Apple building address should work, but the shippers will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually deliver items to a dedicated shipping and receiving warehouse instead of the listed address. Executives have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey levels of mail processing. Each executive may have different instructions for what to do with deliveries before they even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leave the warehouse, including opening the items and doing security screening with chemical testing tools. Then they go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the executive assistant for the recipient. Some executives have multiple levels of assistance. In summary, I’d expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mail to John Ternus addressed to Apple Park to get to his assistant at least, which is pretty exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, who knows, but I’m not gonna count my chickens, but that’s pretty cool. And then a certain somebody put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very cool and very interesting image in the show notes. I don’t know that it’ll necessarily make it as chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey art or anything like that, Would you mind describing this for me, please, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the tracking on the shirt that’s going to John Ternus. It was delivered or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says, delivered to agent for final delivery. Anyway, whatever that means. It’s the US Postal Service. On May
⏹️ ▶️ John 27th, today is the 29th. So I feel like this shirt has an entire
⏹️ ▶️ John work week to somehow make it out of the shipping and receiving warehouse and to the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John executive assistant. And then if that executive assistant decides to pass it on, we’ll see. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a dim hope that John Ternus may see the shirt before WWDC, but it feels kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John slim, especially if there’s multiple levels of, you know, assistance in front of him
⏹️ ▶️ John in the mail or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we did what we could. The real tragedy here is that if there’s gonna be a Mac Pro announcement of some kind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if presumably John Ternus would be involved in such an announcement, they probably would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already filmed it before the shirt arrived to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John him. Oh, that’s true. That’s true, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t think about that. I really don’t think he’d be wearing it in the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s unlikely, I’ll give you that. But at least it could have been possible had we done it maybe a month ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you, I cannot, I agree, it would never happen in a trillion years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John t-shirt, he doesn’t, oh, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but still, can you imagine how amazing that would be? That would be, when the Connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Boys fell off their chairs, justifiably, when Tim Cook was standing in front of their show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey art at WWDC a few years ago. Can you imagine him wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our shirt? Like, again, it would never happen, but how amazing would that be? That would be so
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we had ATP show art in the background of showing the podcast up at a WDC session.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had the Marco adding his own content to the proceedings by ringing the bell
⏹️ ▶️ John on the file system thing. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah. Right? So I feel like we’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ John our share of influencing the Apple keynotes. Yeah, I guess. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, and we have from an additional anonymous Apple employee, they wanted us to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that they have already spotted someone wearing a Mac Pro Believe shirt at Cafe Max, which is the cafeteria
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Apple Park. And additionally, we got feedback. I don’t know if it was we or me got feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with somebody documenting the fact that they were wearing the Believe shirt in front of the Infinite Loop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visitor Center. I think it was maybe it was an Infinite Loop, one of the visitor center’s signs. So they were definitely on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple campus with the Believe shirt, which made me very happy.
Feedback about Feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing with anonymous stuff, but no longer about the shirts, we have some feedback about feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey An anonymous Apple engineer with regard to Apple’s bug system writes, I wish to express how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply I feel similarly frustrated with the bug resolution process. On my end, if I get a bug from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a developer and want to ask them a question, I can say, please ask the developer a technical question XYZ, and then assign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the radar to a black hole. I have no idea if my technical information will be conveyed the way I wrote it. I can’t see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the developer says, other than the initial report. Everything else is through an intermediary. Often the response from the developer seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally unrelated to what I’d hoped to correspond about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like prison. Right? Isn’t this how you write to prisoners? Seriously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so, so true. Well, we can at least share your frustration, anonymous person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it seems like a black hole to us as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Isn’t that great? That’s what we said. We said this last episode, but just to reemphasize it, that the system doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work for us outside of Apple and doesn’t work for the people inside Apple either. Like the thing about frustrating is they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see anything we write except for the initial report and they’re not allowed to converse directly. So they had to throw
⏹️ ▶️ John their information over the wall to an intermediary and cross their fingers and hope that it’s a game of telephone that it all went through.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they get a response back. It’s like, what, what does this response mean? But they didn’t see what we sent.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, this is not a way to run a bug tracking system. It doesn’t like, there are better ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, I know secrecy is like, well, we can’t have these people talking to each other. Cause once you get someone inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, talking to someone outside Apple inevitably there’ll be leaks and blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, just figure it out. There are ways
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this to allow people to communicate effectively without everybody leaking secrets, I believe it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, the people in the middle could also accidentally leak things because they see what the person on the inside said.
⏹️ ▶️ John So putting one more layer there doesn’t necessarily make it so that leaks are impossible anymore. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just that they would become more vague sort of game of telephone leaks that are mangled a little bit in transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Burrus Matthew Fenselow writes with regard to bug reporting, and I refuse to read this feedback because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I understand his point, I refuse to acknowledge it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I put it in there. It’s not, it’s not, I think there’s an answer to this. I’ll read it. Okay. As an outsider, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems crazy to me that Apple would spend any time responding to non-security related bug reports from developers who don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have on the order of at least hundreds or thousands of sales in the App Store. While I’m sure that John produces extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John high quality reports, it would be, it would seem completely illogical for Apple to vote resources to reports from a developer
⏹️ ▶️ John that is making incredibly niche apps. It seems like any serious bug is going to either be picked up by one of the large developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John or it will be so ubiquitous that will receive tons and tons of reports. So it seems like it would be really wasteful to be paying much
⏹️ ▶️ John attention to the long tail of individual small developer reports. So this is what might be
⏹️ ▶️ John what it seems like, but there’s a few assumptions, unstated assumptions that are not true. One of them is that
⏹️ ▶️ John large developers are gonna find the bugs, right? That they’re most likely to find because they sell lots of copies
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. I’m not even sure what the logic is, but I have to tell you that the first people to use a new
⏹️ ▶️ John API are not going to be the biggest developers. Microsoft Office is not leaping on that API that they
⏹️ ▶️ John introduced to WWC on day one. It’s individual developers who have the sort of agility
⏹️ ▶️ John and flexibility to try out the new API or someone writing a brand new app that from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John on that day, they can jump on the new API. So big developers are not going to find the bugs first. And the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John just because a small developer who sells no apps finds a bug, doesn’t mean that bug
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t also exist in Microsoft Office, in Adobe Photoshop, in the big applications, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like there’s a separate set of APIs written for apps that don’t sell a lot. I use the same APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John as the apps that sell, you know, millions and millions of copies, right? So it doesn’t really matter where the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John comes from. It’s not like they’re like, oh, we wouldn’t bother servicing their needs because I’m a dinky developer and I don’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I am a dinky developer and I don’t matter to Apple, but the bug I found has really no relation
⏹️ ▶️ John to how many apps I sell or anything like that. It’s like this bug, this bug
⏹️ ▶️ John could be in Apple’s apps. This bug could be in the, like if there’s a bug in some framework, I’m not using obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks, right? This bug could potentially affect everybody. And as for a security-related
⏹️ ▶️ John versus non-security-related, any bug could potentially be security-related depending on how bad it is, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it seems like it’s a waste of Apple’s resources to pay attention to bug reports from dinky developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the correct take on that is like, it’s a waste of Apple’s time to
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicate an employee. Like we talked about the person who’s like from a big gaming company, they have dedicated Apple engineers and a
⏹️ ▶️ John slack with them. Like that would be a waste of Apple’s time. They’re not gonna give individual developers like me or
⏹️ ▶️ John even Marco with like a smallish number of sales compared to the gigantic companies. They’re not gonna dedicate
⏹️ ▶️ John employees to that. They’re not gonna give them the white glove treatment. They’re not gonna handhold them or whatever, you know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for bug reports, the source of the bug, like how many apps are sold by the person who had the bug doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter that much. Where it comes in a little bit is like, okay, well, this bug is stopping Microsoft Office from running
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly on our new OS. So they’ll pay attention to that. But that’s not the nature of most bugs. Most bugs are not like
⏹️ ▶️ John a showstopper where we literally can’t ship our product until you fix this bug. Most bugs are just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, this doesn’t work right, and until it does, we’re gonna have to do this weird workaround, or
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to do it the old way instead of the new way, or something like that. So I get what Matthew is saying, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there are some other factors that he was not considering that make bug reports, even from a dinky
⏹️ ▶️ John developer, almost as valuable as bug reports from big developers. And again, the only
⏹️ ▶️ John difference being if there’s a showstopper that is stopping a big developer product from working at all.
Subscription-cancellation exceptions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Claude Zines writes, last episode, Marco noted, quote, people learn that trick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of canceling your app store subscription immediately, and then you still get your free month. Something worth noting is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that for Apple’s own apps, when you cancel any of their free trials, you do not get to continue to use the app or service for the duration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the trial. It ends and you’re locked out of those privileges. I’ve not tried this on Final Cut for iPad, but it is the case for every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple One service. I’m not a developer, but I don’t believe the end trial immediately option is available for developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s absolute cuckoo bananas. Yeah, I think this is correct on all counts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It is, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t have any control over this and that is the way it works for Apple One, I’m pretty sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it is. Yeah, and it’s Apple One and I believe Apple Music trial, like whatever, all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different Apple service trials that they spam the crap out of you from settings with, or from the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps themselves, they all work that way as far as I know, which, and I knew that, I just kind of forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mention it during this discussion, but yeah, that is totally correct. their trials end immediately, ours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t and can’t. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside with regard to Claude Zines, I’ve probably brought this up at some point in the past, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty sure this is the same Claude that was kind of the star of 110100,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which Sandwich Video, our friends at Sandwich Video did a couple of years back. This was, do you remember this? They, it was Wistia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, paid them $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000 to make the same commercial three different ways. And Claude was the director for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these. It is the coolest documentary. I freaking loved it. Again, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pre-pandemic, I think. It was a while ago now, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so worth your time. If nothing else, watch the three two-minute commercials and it’s hilarious to see the differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the three. If that’s not the same, Claude, then I’m sorry, but I’m pretty sure it is. And you should check that out. We’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. Did you guys see this when it went around? I don’t think so. Doesn’t ring a bell. Oh man, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now you two have homework, but nevertheless, we shall move on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a pretty calm time of year. We have tons of time for homework. Yeah.
More Feedback feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing occurs to me, I was really studying the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple engineer talking about bug reporting and how it works, the fact that they only see the initial report and everything else is through an intermediary.
⏹️ ▶️ John That means like essentially the most valuable piece of information in my bug report on my weird window bug
⏹️ ▶️ John is in a like subsequent comment, right, it’s like the fifth comment down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They don’t get to see that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John They only get to see whatever the intermediary just decides to pass on, if anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing I saw recently with people sending us feedback, I forget where it was, but it was like, one of the best things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do for, or maybe it wasn’t for us, maybe it was just in general, one of the best things you can do for reporting bugs is every time Apple has a new release
⏹️ ▶️ John of a new OS, just copy and paste the bug as a new report and say, this still happens
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS 17, and by the way, I previously reported this in feedback, whatever, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know that’s dumb, like you’re copying and pasting, and it seems like it might be annoying, but that keeps it
⏹️ ▶️ John fresh because there’s this whole recency bias where bugs filed right after a release are given more attention
⏹️ ▶️ John than bugs filed later. And what that would mean for me is that what I should do is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John summarize and coalesce all of my comments. Cause if you look at my bug report, it’s like, here’s my bug, I think it’s like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s another video showing it. Here’s what I discovered today. Next week I tried this and I discovered this. Ooh, I had a breakthrough.
⏹️ ▶️ John It turns out it only happens when more than one user is logged in. Like that’s the headline, right? So the next time I filed this bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again is probably futile, but whatever. The next time I filed the same bug, the bug will be when multiple users logged
⏹️ ▶️ John in when knowing doesn’t work. Or like, that’ll be the name of it. because you just, we’ve mentioned this before, but you can’t edit
⏹️ ▶️ John bug reports. So they see what I initially wrote in the description, but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change that after the fact, and apparently they don’t see anything else that I write, they just see the stuff that’s passed on. And we had a comment
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room, somebody said, when I was at Apple, my team read every bug report, but we couldn’t communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John back directly. All correspondence went through Dev Relations, and they were like 20 people for the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John company, so there was your bottleneck. No idea if it’s still like that, though. So yeah. More reports of the dysfunction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love like, you know, the advice of like, if your bug gets stuck, just file a copy. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine if your toilet worked that way. You know, like, if somebody, oh, just send some potatoes down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like, I don’t know, like what the advice would be. Like, I mean, fortunately, I guess Apple’s bug reporting process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works worse than all of our toilets in all of our houses. But it sure reminds us of some similar themes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, the idea is like you’re gaming the system because if you know that special attention is to pay two bug reports to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen in the 48 hours after a new release goes out. You filing a dupe in that period
⏹️ ▶️ John gets your thing to be seen, you know, by the time when you know more people are looking at it and
⏹️ ▶️ John paying attention, which is terrible for Apple because like all that means is just more, more pebbles
⏹️ ▶️ John on the pile of the giant mountain of pebbles that is bug reports. Like the reason they’re so perpetually behind and leave things
⏹️ ▶️ John unresponded to for years and years is they just have too much to deal with. And the advice from the inside is,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, if you want to take advantage of the broken system the most, add to our problem by filing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco more and more of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey same report.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And like I said, working around the idea that they don’t see my subsequent comments, I now have to
⏹️ ▶️ John periodically coalesce all of my comments and discoveries on my bug into a new description under a new bug
⏹️ ▶️ John and just keep that cycle going. It’s dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am pretty sure, I’d have to try to verify this with a birdie, but I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure anything that you or I or whomever puts in the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does make it to the associated radar that’s internal to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, unquestionably, things in the radar do not go back out toward us, and that’s not really a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s part of the problem. I thought, though, that as you add comments, I could swear that does bubble back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the internal radar, but I’m not 100% sure. Maybe an employee can write us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe this is on a per-team basis. Maybe the anonymous feedback from the Apple engineers’ information
⏹️ ▶️ John is out of date or only applies to their team. Again, within Apple, there is not as much consistency as you might
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine, right? from department to department, team to team, so on.
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No subscriptions == not paying?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of people were very grumpy. I think it was at Marco. Maybe it was gone, but at some one of us saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who don’t subscribe to things just don’t want to pay. Somebody put this in the show notes. So I guess there’s a retort coming.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I put it in there to give Marco a chance to clarify what he meant. I know what I think he meant,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is why I didn’t comment on it during the episode. But I think we should let Marco, if he wants to clarify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Honestly, I don’t have that much to say. There There are some people who wrote in to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, I will pay, I just don’t, I object to subscriptions on grounds XYZ.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is, again, in most of the instances where people said that, what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went on to say with what they would pay, what price would they pay, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ends up being maybe two years worth of a subscription price. And it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t really work. And people brought up all sorts of examples of, What if I only use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app every so often? What if I’m fine with the old version? And you can bring up counter examples to any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software pricing model where it doesn’t work as efficiently for those examples. But as we discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, last week when we were talking about this, as we discussed, all the other models for paying for software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are also imperfect and also have usage cases or models where they don’t really work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well for the user or the developer. All of these systems have flaws. All of these systems have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use cases that are not great in them. But I think given the modern software ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the platforms we are all developing on are constantly changing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both the software and the hardware that our apps are running on change at a pretty aggressive pace here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple land. And the expectations of what your apps will do are constantly going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. I know this because I’m an app developer. And I know like, for instance, Overcast generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets very good star ratings reviews in the App Store. I took a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after, was it I was 15 that introduced widgets or 14?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I don’t remember. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget. I took a while to implement widgets because I was behind in my development, which is the theme of the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years of my life. But anyway, I was behind. I took a few extra months to implement before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like after the OS came out, I didn’t have them for a few months. And I started getting a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant amount of one star reviews that were destroying my review average. Like it was enough. It It was enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a difference. So we have to keep updating our apps. People say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I can just buy this version and use it for years and years and years. You say that, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, as a collective, that’s not what you do. What people actually do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect apps to be updated on a regular basis, indefinitely into the future. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best model that has the least dysfunction in it to pay for that is either advertising
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or subscriptions or some choice between either one. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is funded these days. I know it’s not perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when you say I object to subscriptions, usually the use case you’re citing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is either, I really just don’t wanna pay you that much money, or it’s something that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly uncommon use case that we can’t accommodate everything and make it perfect for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a different model would have more of those problems more things that didn’t fit into it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the model we have. And if you want to pay for software, and not just have it be ad funded, or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, creepy data funded, if you want to pay for software, this is the way to do it for most people for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most apps most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two things there. One, the implied thing and all your statements is there is that given the choices
⏹️ ▶️ John we have from Apple, like Apple doesn’t allow infinite number of business models, it only supports certain
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. So the one that a lot of people cite is old style upgrade pricing where you pay one price and then you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John discounted price to upgrade to the next major version because you bought the previous one. Apple doesn’t support that in any reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John way. So even though people may like that model, it’s not an option for us
⏹️ ▶️ John currently in any of the app stores. Outside the app store it is an option and it’s widely practiced there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not inside. The second thing is I think the main objection people have was when you said, when people say they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to pay a subscription, what they really mean is they don’t want to pay anything. And people object and say, that’s not true. I do want
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay something. And then they go on to explain all the stuff that you were just addressing about, well, I want to pay two years worth, or I want to pay a small
⏹️ ▶️ John amount and never have any future updates or whatever. And my most charitable interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ John of Marco’s typically somewhat extreme statement is that people are
⏹️ ▶️ John really saying they just don’t want to pay is basically that given the limited
⏹️ ▶️ John options we have for certain classes of applications, subscriptions or ads are the only way
⏹️ ▶️ John that those apps can be a feasible ongoing concern. And if you say you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay in one of those ways, what you’re effectively saying is you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay at all because there is no other option for you. And there is no other option for the app, right? We understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John you would pass money to the developer in exchange for what you want. But what we’re saying is, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John for a given app and a given context, that would not work. If everyone did
⏹️ ▶️ John that, the app would disappear in a year because the developer would not be able to afford to continue making it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s, I don’t think he’s saying that you’re lying and that you’re trying to pretend you would
⏹️ ▶️ John pay money but really you wouldn’t. I believe people when they say they would pay money it’s just that the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay it either isn’t supported by Apple or it is supported but is not sustainable for app developers for
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons Marco described. And you can debate it on an individual app basis because we’re all just speculating like, we think
⏹️ ▶️ John this would not be sustainable, would be, Casey’s app is a great point. he’s got a potential
⏹️ ▶️ John for ongoing costs to him if that API that is currently free becomes expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s got a plan for that now, but you could say, well, the app is free now. He shouldn’t worry about it, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ John risky for the developer, right? And you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John why don’t you just try it? And if they start charging, you can start charging us and it’ll be fine. And it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a judgment call. It’s by debating it or whatever, nothing is cut and dry. But I feel like that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing we’re trying to express here is we’re trying to find a business model where it’s sustainable for the app to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to exist, and then find the customers who are willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John support that model. And the two are tied together, because you have to find something that enough people are willing to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for. And as we said in the past, you’re always gonna leave some people out, either because the model they want
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t supported by Apple, or because the developer thinks that the model they want won’t support
⏹️ ▶️ John their app development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, we’ll go with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple of more things that relate to subscriptions didn’t quite get to. One, this isn’t relevant to Casey’s app, which is why we
⏹️ ▶️ John never discussed it, but it’s worth mentioning. If you have a document-based application
⏹️ ▶️ John that has some kind of file format, which CallSheet does not, there is the complaint about subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, hey, if I make a bunch of documents with some application and it’s a subscription application,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I decide that I don’t use that application anymore, that’s fine. I stopped paying
⏹️ ▶️ John a subscription, but also I can no longer even open the documents that I made over the the past
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever number of years when I was subscribing it. So basically people say, they’re holding my file formats hostage.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t even continue to just look at them. Like say it is like a graphics program where you draw stuff or whatever, and it’s a subscription,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you subscribe for four years, and you draw a whole bunch of stuff, and you’re like, okay, well, I’m done with my drawing now.
⏹️ ▶️ John As soon as you stop paying, you can’t even open those documents. You could export them or whatever. But anyway, that’s the idea, that the file
⏹️ ▶️ John format locks your stuff up. People may not remember back in the bad old days of, or the good
⏹️ ▶️ John old days, depending on how you look at it, of paying $500 for MacWrite 2.0,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then next year having to pay $200 more for the upgrade price for the next version,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would also do the file format thing where the next version of MacWrite, well, maybe not MacWrite, Word is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John The next version of Microsoft Word would save all its documents in Word 6 format,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you couldn’t open Word 6 documents if you had Word 5. So even though you’re perfectly happy with Word 5, and Word 5
⏹️ ▶️ John can continue to open all of your Word 5 documents, Anytime anyone sends you a Microsoft Word document, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can’t open this, can you resave it to me in 5.0 format? And they go, what? And so eventually you need to upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John So file formats have always been a weird kind of lock-in slash dragging you into the
⏹️ ▶️ John future of making you pay more money. But I do get that in any application that has a file format,
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions, especially if you can’t export your data in a sort of a non-proprietary format, subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ John do kind of hold your files hostage. That at the very least, if you ever want to like look at them again or
⏹️ ▶️ John open them or edit them again, you have to pay subscriptions. On the flip side of that, I think subscriptions do fit that
⏹️ ▶️ John pattern in one way, in that if it’s like $5 a month, like Final Cut Pro is or whatever, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, the second I stopped paying, I can’t open my Final Cut products. Yeah, but if you paid for Final Cut for two months and you paid $10,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you have a year gap and you wanna open one again, just pay five more dollars for a month. It’s so much cheaper than having
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy the new version of Final Cut Pro for $300, just to open your documents again, because the old version you had no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John even runs on the new Mac you got or whatever. So everything has its ups and downs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think the current model we’re in is perfect. Again, I think there’s lots of models
⏹️ ▶️ John that are suitable for some applications that Apple simply does not support. If you want to see how different models work,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the Mac software market, such as it is, I know it’s small, outside the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store. Lots of different models exist there, including old style upgrade pricing, more flexible
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions, more forgiving subscriptions, all different kinds of subscriptions. Like Panic does this weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you pay a certain amount of money, you get a certain number of updates as part of that. However long it takes them to put out that
⏹️ ▶️ John update or something, I forget the exact model. But people try all sorts of things to try to find
⏹️ ▶️ John the right combination of model that funds the development of the application combined
⏹️ ▶️ John with model that customers are willing to pay for. And we’re all just trying to do the best we can
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Sometimes you screw it up in one direction or another and we course correct.
Bungie follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to tell me about what Zumphrey had to say?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just about my speculation about what Bungie owns and what they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Zumphrey wrote in to say, just confirming that both Myth and Oni were given to Take Two Interactive after the
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft acquisition. Take Two is a game publisher. So Myth, a beloved game franchise, beloved
⏹️ ▶️ John by me anyway, and Oni, a less beloved game that I’d also played,
⏹️ ▶️ John were Bungie games, but they were given or sold or whatever to Take Two Interactive.
⏹️ ▶️ John According to the folks maintaining myth and you may be wondering who the heck is maintaining myth. There’s like a Open source project
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of basically re-implement myth that has existed for years and years and it still exists We’ll put a link to it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes Anyway, according to the folks maintaining myth take two still wants far too much money for both myth and Oni
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since they’ve let both rot for them to be purchased back by either fans or bungee because I’m assuming the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who maintain myth like wouldn’t be great if we Could get the rights back to myth and like be the official maintainers of myth and sell a new version
⏹️ ▶️ John and take twos like sure give us, I don’t know, $50 million or whatever they want, it’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Sunfreek continues, but yes, Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, and Destiny have always been owned owned by Bungie, Mythodonny owned
⏹️ ▶️ John by Take Two, and Halo is owned by Microsoft. So there you have it.
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Exit interview: iOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what time is it? It is time for our first ever OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exit interviews. So I started this tradition on our show a few couple years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving exit interviews to the outgoing iPhone right before the iPhone event of each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall. So we can kind of review like, you know, how was this past iPhone? You know, after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year of using it, what do we think of it? you know, what is it, you know, what are we hoping for for the next one as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a result of, you know, shortcomings of the current one, et cetera. And so I thought this would be the first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would be a good time for us to do that same thing for this past year’s Apple platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OSs because they are all about to be sort of replaced, you know, I know it’s gonna be in beta for a while, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wanted to do quick exit interviews before we get to our dub-dub predictions for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the past year of OSs. So that would be iOS 16, iPadOS 16, WatchOS 9 and MacOS Ventura.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not doing tvOS because nobody cares and nothing ever changes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. True story. Yeah, I mean, sorry, that’s the reality. So I figured,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s start out with the big one. Let’s start with iOS. Not iPadOS yet, we’ll get to that. But iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 16 was a pretty significant update in a lot of areas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like user-facing features and APIs. And the APIs, as I’m developing now, I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewrite my entire app in SwiftUI. And SwiftUI got a bunch of really useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes. And there’s a whole bunch of little API tweaks that happened in iOS 16,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and small. SwiftUI’s entire navigation paradigm changed, which I think it went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from one horrible thing to something that is mostly not horrible, which is pretty impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A bunch of smaller stuff changed as well. A bunch of new utilities, a bunch of new layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities. It was a huge update for SwiftUI. and for various other like small areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the APIs. And also user-facing features, the lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, like the lock screen customization, having multiple lock screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having lock screen widgets, that was all new in iOS 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there were a whole bunch of other smaller stuff, live activities came a little bit later, that was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an iOS 16 thing, it kind of came late, but it got there. There were a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to like the way focus modes could do stuff. I forget, did we have focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modes in iOS 15? Or was it still called Do Not Disturb then?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s been around for more than one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. I thought so, yeah. But the focus mode became an API that apps could integrate with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as did I believe Share with You. I think that also came in iOS 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then Messages got a huge upgrade with being able to edit, being able to mark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as unread. So there were, it was a pretty big update. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say overall, oh, pass keys, I forgot about pass keys, like there’s so much, like there’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there have been so much in iOS 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certain things I think didn’t come out so well. One of the major changes was the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they added this automatic dictation. You know, before, while you’re dictating with the little Siri microphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing into a text field, you would have to say things like period and new line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they added a thing that tried to make that automatic. Frankly, I changed it back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, they made it a setting, and I changed it back because I found it too unreliable. And I found, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still now just say period, new line. But I’m glad they at least were working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. Otherwise, I think that’s the biggest stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the home app got redesigned and everything, but for the most part, those were the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major themes, I think, for the user and developer side. And I would say overall, iOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a pretty good year. It was a pretty solid release. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really had a lot of major problems with it. Like there haven’t really been, you know, major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unstable features. And this is honestly, you know, we’ve, you know, listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that when Apple has software quality problems, we will be brutal and we will call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them out on it constantly until they fix them. I think Apple software quality is in a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good place these days. I really think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that. So here, I was just wanting to say about iOS. Okay, okay, okay. About
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 16. I think it’s a great example for people who are new to the platform or new
⏹️ ▶️ John to the earth. You may think, like we say every year, you know, every
⏹️ ▶️ John year the iPhone’s pretty good and you know, usually iOS is pretty good. Like one of the things you didn’t mention at all is like, is iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John crashing? Are there stability issues? Are there data loss issues? Like we don’t even talk about this stuff related to iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was the upgrade terrible? Did it brick people’s phones? Like you just don’t hear about those things. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like that goes, this is a great example of the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the most important to Apple that makes them the most money also gets the most resources, makes perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. But it wasn’t always that way. Those of us who have been in the Apple ecosystem for longer remember when
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS was not 60% of Apple’s profits or revenue, I forget which one it is, but it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John that iOS was a tiny little sliver because the iPhone was brand new. And there were iOS releases
⏹️ ▶️ John that were terrible, that did crash, that were just like everything was broken and it made everything worse, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant mess. That was a long time ago. It’s like we’re talking about like, you know, iPhone OS version five, or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John back when it was called firmware.
⏹️ ▶️ John 13 was a bad release.
⏹️ ▶️ John they had been worse, but in general, because iOS gets so much attention and so much resources,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is warranted, I think, because of the importance, the importance it is to the company, Apple has,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is evidence of like, what happens if you put lots of people on something? What happens if some of your best people are on something?
⏹️ ▶️ John What happens if you put tons of money into it? What happens is that every year new iPhones come out and we go, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are pretty good. This is a good phone. We have quibbles. I mean, you know, it’s like these tiny differences that we debate, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, the phones, you know, don’t catch fire, don’t fail. The wifi things don’t go bad. The screens
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t burn in. They don’t delaminate. Occasionally they bend, but again, that was a long time ago. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John tend to be good. And iOS, the recent releases of iOS, for the most part, they’ve been pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I look back at iOS 16, the things you listed, even if I don’t care about any of those things, there’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John any negatives. Like iOS 16 erased all my photos. iOS 16 crashed all the time. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 16 burns my battery down. iOS 16 made something that used to work not work, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You hear about those things for, you know, let’s say Mac OS, but not so much for iOS. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and the iPhone continue to be great examples of what Apple can do
⏹️ ▶️ John when, you know, when they put the maximum amount of effort into it, when they think it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John to the company, when it is important to the company and they resource it as such. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John for a platform like iOS that’s like old and creaky and it’s not gonna be super cool like the VR platform or whatever, like it’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John bread and butter, but it’s really important to have that bread and butter because it keeps everything else going. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that iOS 16 was good. I agree. I don’t have any complaints about it. I enjoy the new features they added.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new features they added more or less work, you know, like all the stuff that you’re talking about, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the AI, not AI, sorry, the ML punctuation thing where it figures
⏹️ ▶️ John out But that’s a hard problem, but it doesn’t crash It doesn’t cause the screen to get all scrambled if you don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John it You can turn it off and in general the features they added like editing and marking is on Unread and
⏹️ ▶️ John unsending and all that stuff or whatever that stuff just works It works like they said it did in the keynote and makes the phone better
⏹️ ▶️ John and we just go like we just take it for granted Like yeah, another good iOS release. Good job So I hope Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John continues in that path and I kind of wish some of the other OS’s could get that treatment Obviously the other OS’s
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t sell like iOS does and I get it, but we can all dream
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I agree with both of you guys. The one complaint I have about iOS 16, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a desire for an improvement, I guess is a better way of phrasing it, is a lot of the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they added, I feel like either the configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is clunky or non-obvious, or there’s not enough configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like setting up your custom home screens, that’s very, very clunky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t love it. And plus for the longest time, they like forced you to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both wallpapers at the same time. I’m not sure if that’s true anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, no, they fixed that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. That’s another example of even when they make a fumble, like that new feature comes out that they’ve never had before. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they kind of flubbed the UI. They fixed it in a mid cycle release. We didn’t have to wait to iOS 17. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. But even still, like I wish there was a little bit easier to configure and perhaps more configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another thing that drives me absolutely bad is I have my phone set up to randomly rotate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through pictures of Aaron and the kids. And every time I lock the phone, it will find a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new picture to show you on the screen, the always on screen, which I have left on. It’ll find a new picture to show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and figuring out where or what picture that is, is like a 75 tap process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Underscore documented way back when. I don’t even remember how to do it, but it’s a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wish so badly if there was a way that you could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s like a triple, triple tap or something, but some way to say, please show this to me in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos. I would love for that. Oh, that
⏹️ ▶️ John actually on that point, but the photos thing, I think this is a great example of what money and resources
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t buy, which is like, you know, no matter how many people you put on it, how much money you put into
⏹️ ▶️ John it, when something is a 1.0, like the very first version of this lock screen customization thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to have all the features everybody want. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John thought of that, even if they thought someone said, Hey, you know, people see these photos on their home screen, they’re probably going to want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to find them in their photos collection. There’s probably not time to do that for a 1.0 given the size of the team that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John assigned for this brand new feature. So this is a lesson for people, all the people who have never written software for a living,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how much you care, no matter how much money you have, 1.0 is not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that you wish it did. And it seems like you could fix that by adding people or money. But there are many books about this that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can read if you care to understand why that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the case. Indeed. Yeah, I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree. One thing on that too is like, all of these home screen customization feature, or I mean, sorry, rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock screen customization features. Like the other day I was in a restaurant and the people at the next table over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them had shown the other person their iPhone and the other person was like, oh my God, how do you get that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up there? And they had no idea that lock screen widgets existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like a lot of these features, a lot of the iOS power features that have come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along in the last few years, they’re really hidden from people. Like, you know, I’ve said before how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody knows about how you can customize the complications on watch faces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Similarly, no one knows about lock screen widgets. When I look around in public and I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how other people have their phones set up, I almost never see anybody with any lock screen widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I think that whole system is still very hidden if you don’t know to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. And so I think that was one area that, you know, I recognize Apple’s resistance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards adding like setting screens in the settings app and stuff like that when not necessary and they want everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you just long press here and then this whole new world opens up. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, I hope that future OS’s maybe that we’re about to see in a week maybe improve that a little
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a hard problem because you don’t want to be like, oh, you have to go through this manual
⏹️ ▶️ John tutorial and like, you know, then you launch an iOS app and they want to, there’s like a 17 tap thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey some overlay is showing you every
⏹️ ▶️ John new feature they added and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it quote unquote discoverable, but at a certain point you just tune out and you’re like, okay, next, next, next. I just want to get to the point where I’m using the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple tends not to belabor the onboarding process of the phone. There’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John enough crap you have to go through. They’re not going to be like, oh, and by the way, did you know that on iOS 16, we added the ability to have widgets on your live
⏹️ ▶️ John screen? At that point, people are like, oh, I just want to use my phone, right? And it’s a hard problem because you don’t want to shove it in their face,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and you don’t want to force them to go through a big tutorial. it’s the nature of
⏹️ ▶️ John an OS when it gets as old. When the version number hits 16, there’s probably a lot of features in there that
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be more sort of power user expert features or features that get discovered
⏹️ ▶️ John by word of mouth or popularized by seeing somebody else that has them. And in some ways that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of inevitable. Like you should, every single feature on your phone can’t be easily discoverable because
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a nightmare, right? There’s always going to be things that are obscure. And that’s why Apple has things like in
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, Apple retail stores where you can like come and we’ll show you how to use your phone or your Mac or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we scoff at like, oh, people have to go there and they have to learn how to use their phone. Like people who don’t listen to tech podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John are not gonna discover this on their own, but maybe they will realize, hey, there’s like a free class I can go to at the Apple store where
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll tell me how to use my phone, and I bet they will cover stuff like this in that 30 minute class
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and people will feel like they get great value of it and they’ll love Apple. So I think those classes are a great idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John and those classes are way better than forcing everybody to go through like a tutorial level in video game parlance
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to learn how to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the new features of their phone. Cause most people do not care, especially at the moment they’re setting up their phone, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John later they will care. And when they choose to go to a class, learn about their phone, they’ll be happy about it. If
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple chooses to try to show them all the new features they added, they will not be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But there is kind of like a middle ground though. Like, you know, the lock screen customization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and widget thing, I just looked around the settings app. I don’t see anything about it anywhere in there. As far as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell, that entire, the entire section of the phone of lock screen customization does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not exist in the settings app. You have to get to it from the lock screen through that, you know, the long press or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like that’s, you know, look, they’ll add things to the settings app whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to. Have you set up a new phone recently with a new Apple ID? It is spammed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like crazy with all sorts of service upsells and other garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Services, it goes the other direction where they’re not shy about saying, did you know we have a new service?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like they already have a section called home screen. they could have one there called lock screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they could have this section renamed home and lock screen and have it be two sub screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they have obvious places for
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this particular problem is intractable, but you know, like another example is like when you swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John left or whatever, when you swipe to reveal the widgets that are to the left of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first home screen. Wait, do you swipe left on the home screen you don’t want or how, which direction is
⏹️ ▶️ John that? I don’t even, I actually, I don’t even know. We talked about this last time. I’m like, what do people mean when you scroll down?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What I mean is
⏹️ ▶️ John that, in the imaginary physical world of your phone, to the left
⏹️ ▶️ John of your first home screen is a screen with a bunch of widgets that you can put on it, right? How
⏹️ ▶️ John many people know that screen’s even there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s different. That’s a whole different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John section of widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the lock screen. It’s the other place, it’s a place where widgets were before you could put them on your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lock screen, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it uses different widgets, because lock screen widgets are a special type. The apps have to vend, and it can only be black and white. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I know. Well, what I’m saying is that screen, how many people don’t know that screen is there? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not like you open your phone for the first time and there’s a little blinky arrow saying, hey, did you know there’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John over there? I mean, I think they might’ve had some kind of discoverability thing the very first time that feature was added to iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was years and years ago. But right now, I think people might accidentally do and go, oh my God, what is this? What is this
⏹️ ▶️ John screen I’ve never seen before? Which like whatever Apple is the default, maybe they have like the photos widget, the weather widget is the default
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. That is quote unquote not discoverable. But if you see enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John using a phone you see them doing it and you see if you see someone do it, you can say, can I swipe in that direction and find a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of widgets and lo and behold, you can at the bottom of that screen is like a plus or an edit button or whatever. So a little bit more discoverable
⏹️ ▶️ John than the lock screen stuff. Um, but like I said, there’s always going to be examples of that. That’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of, what do you call it? Progressive disclosure or whatever they call it, where it looks simple to the person who wants it to be simple,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there is more complexity if you know where to find it and that we’re just trying to find the way to smooth that ramp between those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go back a half step to what John was saying about a version one. So I’m trying to, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to succeed, but I’m trying very hard to get call sheet out the door before WWDC, which means I probably should have submitted it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week and I haven’t yet, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, I have 18
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open tickets issues, whatever in GitHub of which I plan to only fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of them before I send it to the App Store or to review. So I have 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things for me to work on the moment I get this thing published. So John is exactly right. Now, granted, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just me, but still, that is how this works. And then one final thought on iOS 16, another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing where I’ve come to really like the features, but I feel like while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we simultaneously have gotten a lot more configuration than I expected, I want more configuration and that’s with focus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modes. And I think on analog at some point, I’ll talk with Mike about what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been doing with focus modes recently, because I’ve ended up in a situation, or well, that seems like it happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. I have chosen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherein, like the white cars, just like white cars, which do happen to you. I’ve chosen a situation wherein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m basically in a particular focus mode 24 seven, well, anytime I’m not sleeping, I’m in this one focus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. And it actually has been working pretty well for me. And like I said, I’ll unpack that on an analog probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later this month or whatever. But I’ve really even have come to really like focus modes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite a bit, but there’s things, and of course off the top of my head, I can’t think of what specifically they are, but there are definitely some things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I wish I could be either more explicit about or tweak just a little bit. Oh, a great example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to have a specific home screen for a focus mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everyone is reaching for their email client saying, oh, Contrera, you can do that. Well, not exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What I wanna be able to do is say, take these five or six apps and put them on my travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home screen when I’m in the travel focus mode, but that’s not how it works. What you need to do is dedicate a page,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always and forever, that is the only one that happens to be surfaced during the travel focus mode. Does that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sense? You can’t like have a bespoke thing that only shows up during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your travel focus and then it goes away. You have to have it there always. And you’re just choosing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of sort of highlight it or not. It’s a silly example, but it drives me bananas. And so stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, I wish we had a little more control, but as much as I’m harping on a few of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s because I love them so darn much. And iOS 16 really is really, really good. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heck, they could have done on uh… you know it’s uh… making i messages on read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that would have that was a good release for me right there and i mean that that’s all i need uh… so it is really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really quite good sand and i’ve i’ve been really pleased with it.
Exit interview: iPadOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, let’s move on to iPadOS 16. This, obviously, many of the same features apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to iPadOS, although not any of the lock screen stuff. We’ll see if that happens this year, who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, I think the major headliners for iPadOS that were unique to it, or at least mostly unique
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it, were Stage Manager, and maybe Freeform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and kind of the new paradigm. Like, they had this whole thing called Desktop Class Apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what this kind of meant in practice was things like customizable toolbars and stuff that made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gave iPad apps a lot more of the abilities that Mac apps have always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had. And kind of made like system native UI for a lot of that stuff. But that’s kind of a longer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco term play for the iPad. Like I think a lot of this stuff with the iPad, they changed some things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some better external display support, they had like display scaling modes and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of that stuff seems to be giving the iPad, you know, slowly over time, giving it more and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abilities that are like a Mac in some way, or that can be closer to a Mac in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they largely succeeded, although it remains to be seen how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the market will use that, but at least, look, at least now Apple’s using it, you know, with their new Pro apps and stuff. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John Although Apple is not using all the features you just mentioned, the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco apps. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ron Smith has been commenting that both logic and final cut do not
⏹️ ▶️ John do use the resizable window thing that works with stage manager. I don’t think they even support split view.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, they’re 1.0s see previous discussion about 1.0s doesn’t mean they’re never going to but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple I mean stage manager does feel like it definitely fizzled like it was an idea they had but how multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John might be better. I continue to think it works better on the Mac than it does in the iPad. iPad people don’t seem to be big fans
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. Support from third party applications for it has not been wonderful, including from Apple itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s set that aside. But the other the other desktop class application stuff of like a more controls, better widgets,
⏹️ ▶️ John a way for you to have a kind of sort of menu bar type thing without rolling your own. Like that’s all good and positive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I mean, I feel like we’re going to get to eventually the summary of what we say about iPadOS every year, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware continues to be let down by the software because the hardware is so incredibly capable. And by that I don’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John mean power because the phone is incredibly powerful too, but it’s got a tiny screen and it doesn’t support a stylus
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can’t connect it to external displays and like it’s the the full picture of the power
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPad, the fact that it uses Mac SOC’s, the fact that you can’t get one with a really big screen and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John put a keyboard on it and you can connect to an external monitor and you can use a pencil with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The OS does not do that those capabilities justice. That’s always our complaint
⏹️ ▶️ John and they moved one tiny little inch closer to it with 16 by adding some of the desktop class application stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then one tiny little inch backwards by attempting to fix multitasking again with stage manager and
⏹️ ▶️ John having kind of land with a thud. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John not not I’m not even though iPad iOS also, you know, didn’t cause crashes
⏹️ ▶️ John and the features they added existed and we’re fine. The fundamental complaint about iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS that we have a complaint that we don’t have about iOS continues to exist and that we just
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like the the you no, the hardware is let down by the OS. Whereas on the phone, we feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware is well supported by the OS. The OS lets the phone do things that we think phone apps
⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to do for the most part. Not true on iPad OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think, because iPad OS, I would say specifically, the area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the software that makes it so frustrating for a lot of power users is specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multitasking. Like, and when you look at the way the phone, the phone doesn’t have things like split view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you don’t really, like, we’re able to enjoy the iPhone as, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always one app on screen. There is never more than one app. One app on screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we got picture-in-picture on the iPhone. Another example of a thing that said, you know what? We always know we’ve had the power to do it, but actually
⏹️ ▶️ John phone screens are big enough. We should support picture-in-picture, and they did. And that is a limit for multitasking that I take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of on my little tiny phone screen. But it’s not like, you know, on iPad, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS, you have an external monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, you have exceptions on the phone, like the dynamic island stuff, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, control center widgets, but you know, for the most part, the phone is, each app takes up the full screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, iOS is really good at that. That’s what it was made for. iPadOS still feels like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fighting you at every turn, and I appreciate that, you know, some of the changes they’ve made in the last couple releases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when they changed some of the, like, split view controls to put it into that little ellipsis dot thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the top of the windows, and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey some- Yeah, that was very good. Yeah, some of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things helped a lot. But I still, whenever I’m using an iPad, multitasking and window management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still are very clunky to me. And iOS 16, or sorry, iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS 16, attempted to change that in a big way with Stage Manager. And I think it just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it made anything better. I think it was a big sidestep in certain ways. I think it was a step back in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. I tried using it myself for maybe a few weeks on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage. Granted, I’m not an iPad power user, and that’s part of the reason why this stuff drives me nuts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I found it infuriating. Like everything, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only kept using it for that brief time so I could say I gave it a fair shot, and I hated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every minute of it, and it was fighting me at every turn. So I think that was a clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco misstep. I honestly think they would have been better off not shipping Stage Manager on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you wholeheartedly. I’m looking at the page that we’ll link in the show notes for features for iPadOS 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And other than stage manager, there’s not really that much here that I consider to be unique to the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think what there is has already been covered. They added a weather app. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long time coming. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, obviously I bought one of the new M2 iPads and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do like my iPad. I would not say I’m a power user though. I really, really like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having an iPad Pro for both casual use and couch use,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also on the go if necessary. It’s very rare that I would try to accomplish anything that vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like work on an iPad. In fact, it’s almost never, but in certain cases it can be done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I love my iPad. I love the hardware. I love that I was able to keep using the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart keyboard or whatever it is, the super fancy floaty keyboard from the 2018 iPad that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could still use it on my brand new iPad. But yeah, software-wise, it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stage Manager never clicked for me. Maybe it’s a perfectly good feature, and it’s just my brain doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operate that way. But what I’ve heard is that it’s not very good. And when I tried it, like I said, my brain just did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not click with it. And it’s funny, because looking at this page, the primary feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here is iCloud Shared Photo Library, which has been very good for me personally. I know we covered over the past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of months a lot of places where there were gotchas and oopses. But in my experience, it’s been great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been really happy with it. And I’d like to jump very briefly back to iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iOS, the dynamic island, granted, it doesn’t happen often that I’ve found an app that I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that supports the dynamic island, that I use the features in the dynamic island, but man, when it is there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you have an app that supports it, when it’s working properly, it is pretty freaking great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do love it. But with iPadOS, I mean, shrug, which kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sucks, right? Cause these are such powerful pieces of hardware, but like there’s nothing, I don’t have anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad to say about iPadOS, But whereas I can come up with a ton of great things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say about iOS, with iPadOS it’s kind of like, well, they didn’t ruin it, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, showing the iPhone getting a little bit more attention, iOS getting more attention, it reminds me of the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, so the iPad Pro didn’t get revised, because the Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is in the place of where the little Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sensor would
⏹️ ▶️ John be, and so on and so forth. So the rumor is like, hey, well, one way they might fix that when they eventually do fix it is they
⏹️ ▶️ John could move the Face ID sensor down into the display and put a notch on it, and people were like, notch on the iPad, why would they want that?
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be so dumb. But here’s the thing, as I said, when the notch came out in iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, this is Apple making lemonade out of lemons, right? Apple doesn’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have this gigantic sensor array there. It’s just they can’t get it to be invisible under the screen quite yet or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is what it is, and they’re trying to make the best of it, and they did great. And people love it. Oh, I love it at Amac Island. I love it when it works like you
⏹️ ▶️ John just said or whatever. But, you know, as I said, when the new phone came out, What people love
⏹️ ▶️ John is a new place for always visible system level UI to be on the screen. They don’t love a giant black
⏹️ ▶️ John hole in the middle of their phone, right? But you can get that, pretend it’s all screen. There’s no notch anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get all those features of the Dynamic Island in probably a more aesthetically pleasing form, but just dedicating
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the screen to have always visible system level UI like the Mac does all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads can do the same thing. We mentioned the three little dots, which was like the first after years concession
⏹️ ▶️ John of iPadOS Like okay, I guess we’ll have some visual UI that is like system level thing
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know every single freaking window in Mac OS has a three stoplights on it or whatever Just
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s so much room on big iPad screens Dedicate a portion of the iPad screen to something
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of system wide always visible UI like a dynamic island And I know you can’t well, we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a notch or whatever I feel like if they put a notch on the iPad to deal with the pencil situation that will finally give iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS like the excuse slash kick in the butt to add, you know, always visible system
⏹️ ▶️ John level UI to their interface like they’re they’re going they’re bending over Backwards to continue this model of like we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have window Chrome. We don’t have windows. We don’t have window controls I’m like, yeah, we know you don’t that’s what makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it so annoying to do anything And they’re grudgingly adding little grab handles and three little dots with a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re grudgingly adding a control to have like a menu bar and I feel like if you give the notch on the next
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad I think it will be kind of a shame because I don’t like the screen real estate being taken
⏹️ ▶️ John but I do believe people will see it as a net win because finally iPad OS will be forced to essentially copy
⏹️ ▶️ John the dynamic island and Then you’ll have the ability to have some kind of Visible UI for apps that aren’t the front
⏹️ ▶️ John most, you know, it frustrates me so much. Anyway, iPad OS do better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s pretty good,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I like I What I want from the iPad OS for me and I know that my needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and preferences are obviously not gonna be representative of everybody but every time I use an iPad, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly makes me want either a Mac or a phone. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish over time for that to be diminished and for me to really love what the iPad is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that’s just not me. Maybe it’s just wrong for me. But I’ve never quite gotten there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an iPad, or I’ve only gotten there for brief moments. And I would love for that to change. Anyway,
Exit interview: watchOS 9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about watchOS 9. This is actually, I don’t think there’s that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say about watchOS 9 because there’s not that much to say about most versions of watchOS because most versions of watchOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not that many visible changes to either the user stuff or developer APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think watchOS 9 was very similar. They did actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I recently was setting up, I was trying to customize the the metrics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that were displayed for certain workout types in the watch. And this used to be in the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on the phone. Which was really frustrating, because if you were already out on a run, for instance, and you’re like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap, I wanted to see the average pace, not the current pace or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was no way for you to change that if you were already gone. Now, with this new version, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved all that customization into the workout app on the watch. And they changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of stuff, and that actually took me forever to find. In case anyone out there, in case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to find that, you gotta hit the ellipsis button on the start workout blobs and it’s buried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way deep in there. You’ll see if you start hunting around in there. But anyway, the workout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app got a whole bunch of new stuff like that, a few new capabilities here and there, but for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, I think that was about it for obvious user-facing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features that you would actually see that were part of WatchOS 9, not just, you know, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the launch of the Apple Watch Ultra, there were certain abilities that the Ultra got, that, you know, the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, that other watches might not have gotten, or some of them came to both. But for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, WatchOS 9 was a pretty quiet release. And, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is, this is like every other release of WatchOS. The, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer APIs were also pretty quiet, you know, there were some, So, you know, whenever something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens to SwiftUI, that usually is spread to all the platforms that SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs on, sometimes except for Mac, but you know, for the most part, like whenever iOS gets a SwiftUI thing, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watchOS gets it too. So that helps at least, but for the most part, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, watchOS 9 was a pretty subtle release,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as, just alongside of almost every other watchOS release. The watch face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation is still really, you know, underwhelming and limited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still wish for third-party watch faces or at least very, very large complications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can have more control over or something like that. I think there’s so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that watch faces could be and watchOS 9 did basically nothing to really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I really like my Apple Watch, but that being said, I agree with you that there wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that much here. I did dedicate myself to being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit more religious about sleeping with my watch, but that quickly fell by the wayside because I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the watch on the charger in the evening when I shower because that’s the correct thing to do, don’t at me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I would never put it back on and or maybe I would put it on to charge while I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brushing my teeth or whatever. And then I would forget to put it back on or it wouldn’t charge by the time I passed out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, uh, so I, I tried to be very good about it for like a couple of weeks and then it fell off, fell by the wayside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t even realize, you know, you’re talking about the complication thing. Like I didn’t even realize that you could futz around with the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, with the, with the views on the workouts. I’m sure I knew this at some point, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t until you said something a moment to go that I was like, Oh yeah, can I do, Oh wait, where is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you got to go in and you got to hit the ellipsis. Then you got to hit the pencil. Like it is so not discoverable, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it is the watch. I can give them a buy on that, but no part of this was obvious to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I was just fiddling with it while you were talking. There is some cool stuff in here. But yeah, I mean, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Apple Watch. I don’t know that I yearn for that much more from it other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps a little bit more customization with regard to like complications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what complications fit where and so on and so forth. I would love third-party watch faces, but I mean, that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen the same time we get an Apple TV set, right? Like it’s just at this rate, it’s never gonna fricking happen. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in all, I like my watch, I like the hardware, I like watchOS, it’s not perfect, but it works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty well. And yeah, I mean, there’s not much to say. John, I know you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of thoughts about watchOS, so hit me with
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I just wanna chime in to say that I continue to believe third-party watch faces will happen eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope so. I’m not so convinced, but I hope so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too. One can hope.
Exit interview: macOS Ventura
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, the big one, macOS Ventura. I know John has nothing to say about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the big feature that we skipped over, even though it was on two out of the three OSs we’ve discussed already,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the iCloud Shared Photo Library, right? And that was another, this is the thing that Apple does,
⏹️ ▶️ John and when it’s a service, it makes sense. They roll out a feature across all their platforms. Because honestly, a feature like this wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make sense if it wasn’t rolled out across all platforms, because all the platforms support Apple’s iCloud Photo
⏹️ ▶️ John Library. They all have a photos application from Apple on them. Of course, if there’s gonna be some backend change, it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be on all of them, and it is. And I think the feature has been a rousing success, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as my library is concerned. It was able to handle my library. It didn’t destroy all my photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John The duplicate feature, a little bit scary as we had many weeks of follow-up on that, but in general, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John able to mitigate any problems there by backing up 30,000 photos. Not ideal, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be worse. And it’s a version 1.0. Like for example, now when I see it, find duplicates that aren’t really duplicates,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to tell it, no photos, those aren’t duplicates. But there is no option to do that because it’s a 1.0. So maybe in
⏹️ ▶️ John the next version they’ll say, oh now if it suggests a duplicate and you believe it’s not a duplicate, you can click
⏹️ ▶️ John another button that says, don’t tell me about this one again because it’s not actually a duplicate, right? That’s the type of feature you get in a 1.1, and
⏹️ ▶️ John a 2, or whatever, you know, however we’re versioning this thing. So I think that was a great new feature on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac is also an excellent example of the opposite of iOS. What happens on a platform that doesn’t sell a lot, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of people on it, that doesn’t have the very best people and the most money and the most resources, you get Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, which even though it’s incredibly mature, simply does not have
⏹️ ▶️ John the polish, stability, reliability, just general fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness that iOS or even iPad OS, hell, even watch OS have. To give just a
⏹️ ▶️ John random example that everyone’s been talking about for years, but only because it’s so glaring, when those little notifications appear
⏹️ ▶️ John in the upper right, setting aside that we think the UI is bad and they have buttons that only appear on hover, We’re like three
⏹️ ▶️ John years into that redesign, and when you drag your pointer over there with your mouse, and you try to
⏹️ ▶️ John click one of the buttons, the buttons disappear out from under your pointer. That’s not a 1.0 problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not something that was in the initial, you know, 0.0 release of this thing. This thing has been out for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John and no one can be bothered to fix it. It’s embarrassing every time I go and do that. Now everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John knows a trick, like, oh, put your cursor into the menu bar first, then sneak up on it from behind, and you’ll be able to like, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to flank the button or something. This is like years into this. That type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing would not stand on iOS. iOS has, they care more about it. They will make sure it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more polished. If some of that slips out in a 1.0, they’ll fix it within a couple weeks or a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like it’s gonna stay there for years. Parts of Mac OS are like that all over the place. Setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John the system settings redesign, which I think is terrible, at least that is a 1.0, and in theory they could fix it or whatever. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s just so much stuff that is unreliable, Has bad UI or
⏹️ ▶️ John both? And it’s not like we’re begging for tons and tons of new features to be added. I, again, I do like it when we
⏹️ ▶️ John have feature parity, we got the Catalyst version of messages, so we have the messages features parity finally.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, it just needs to, it needs to be good in the way that
⏹️ ▶️ John any boring iOS release is good. And they have not yet achieved that. What do we want out of macOS?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just make, you know, stability, speed, and fix the UI that’s bad. Yes, on top of that, we can add new
⏹️ ▶️ John features, but like, let’s achieve that first. and they don’t, they’re not getting it. Like setting aside my weird bug with the windowing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever, that’s just, who knows what that will end up being. That’s not a big deal. I’m talking more about the things like the notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John or the fact that system settings is so terrible and it’s 1.0, right? Maybe you let that one stew a little bit longer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or just any feature that’s been in the OS forever, basic stuff, how networking works, DNS resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just features that have been there for literal decades, right? That just either
⏹️ ▶️ John get flakier over time or don’t get enough attention paid to them or just plain don’t get any better,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the world moves on and that still, like the one that drives me nuts, I’ve talked about this before, I have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs within this same room here. And when I wanna copy a file from my Mac to the one that I can practically
⏹️ ▶️ John reach with my arm, how long does it take for me to mount that Mac as a shared thing in the Finder,
⏹️ ▶️ John open it up, drag it in there? Why can’t I reliably make an alias to that and reopen it? How many different ways are
⏹️ ▶️ John there with aliases and SIM links and internet addresses with SMB colon slash, slash, which one of those should I use? Which one
⏹️ ▶️ John will work reliably? Which one will stop working inexplicably? and why does it take so long to do that? Airdrop
⏹️ ▶️ John is faster, but that’s newer technology, but why does plain old file sharing through the officially supported
⏹️ ▶️ John SMB file sharing, why is that so slow? Why is it so bad? Why does it have so many bugs? Why do things not
⏹️ ▶️ John work? Why can I not reliably make like an alias to a network drive and have it
⏹️ ▶️ John mount on launch because periodically that alias gets stale or goes bad or dies or something? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John basic functionality, file sharing and mounting other Macs on your desktop as a volume should
⏹️ ▶️ John be so fast and so reliable and so brain dead simple and it’s not. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I want out of macOS. All that said, that’s just my general macOS rant because comparing to iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ventura in the pantheon of recent macOS releases, has been pretty okay. They didn’t break many
⏹️ ▶️ John new things. They didn’t, nothing terrible was in it. The stuff they did added
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly kind of sort of works. The things that I’m complaining about are mostly already there. System settings is crap,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know that. It did need to be redesigned and fixed. This is not the greatest redesign. I
⏹️ ▶️ John do feel like Mac OS is going through this weird phase where,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I was gonna say where Apple can’t decide what the UI is supposed to look like. It seems like they have decided, it’s just I disagree with their decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the way controls look in the SwiftUI Mac appearance, like the way buttons look, the way like pop-up
⏹️ ▶️ John menus look and everything, I think it’s bad. I think it’s not good. I think they don’t work well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they don’t look good. I think everything about them is bad. worse than the AppKit controls that they replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the direction Apple is going, and that stuff can change over time, so we’ll see if they course correct on that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But now we’re in this weird place where if you look at what the UI looks like in system
⏹️ ▶️ John settings, if that’s the future of Mac UI as opposed to the AppKit controls that I use in my app,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think all apps on macOS are going to start looking worse and working worse. Hopefully they
⏹️ ▶️ John will fix that. But right now we have half and half. Some of Apple’s old apps have AppKit style or even Carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John style controls in them. I mean, I know Carbon isn’t running anymore in 64-bit, but anyway, they have controls that look
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Mac OS from years past, and then other ones use SwiftUI and have SwiftUI-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac controls that look and work differently, usually worse. And they’re all coexisting. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’ll see if they get that straightened out. But I really do wish Mac OS could, they could find a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to give Mac OS the right kind of attention.
⏹️ ▶️ John never gonna get the attention that iOS gets. It doesn’t sell as much, it doesn’t deserve as much attention. I get that. like the resources they
⏹️ ▶️ John do have, I wish they would put them on the more boring stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John of just fixing notifications, making system settings way better, and
⏹️ ▶️ John making basic things like file sharing that haven’t been touched in decades. Just like, hey, look at that with a modern
⏹️ ▶️ John lens and say, if we did this now, would it suck this bad? And I really hope the answer is no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think where I wanna get with macOS, I mentioned that with iPadOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna get to a place where I’m not constantly wanting to use a different platform when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using my iPad. What I wanna get to with macOS is, I wanna get to a point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where when I hear that Apple has redesigned or rewritten something in macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want it to not feel like dread.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well-founded dread, not just like pessimistic dread, but like proven by past experiences
⏹️ ▶️ John and continuing evidence that when they redo it, it’s not gonna be better, and we would like it to be better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One important difference is that when you look at all the other OS’s that we’re talking about today, watchOS, iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPadOS, even hey, throw in tvOS. One of the critical differences here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that those are all based on iOS and to some degree UIKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacOS is older and is different and the APIs are very different, the behaviors in the system, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities of the system are very, very different. It shows. It shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you see Apple’s attention to the OS’s and to their features and to their designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even though many, I’d say most, of the software quality issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that plagued them a little while back, I would say most of those issues are behind them. Again, like I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying earlier, I think their software quality is in a really good place overall these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. And that really is to their credit. Like, the number of platforms they have, that’s not easy. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do give them credit. Their software quality is substantially better now than it was 5-10 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s definitely in a pretty good overall place in absolute terms. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously there’s going to be things that are not so good in every set of software. And Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially in terms of design choices, seems really… it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of work in those areas. Again, quality wise, I’m not having to reboot stuff, stuff’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crashing. That stuff is mostly good. Things mostly work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But reaching for a button and having it disappear as your cursor guard started is just one level removed from crashing
⏹️ ▶️ John and losing data, right? Because this is like fundamental basic functions. When a button appears on the screen, I should be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John click it with my mouse pointer. And that’s just not the case for years on end. And
⏹️ ▶️ John surely everyone at Apple knows about this, but the fix doesn’t get prioritized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you look at trying to write, for instance, like as I’m doing this overcast rewrite,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve so far kept everything Mac and iOS neutral. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this huge amount of code that’s like, instead of using UI color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or NS color for color computations, I have things like platform color and trying to use Swift UI color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever possible, although I can’t use everything with it because it doesn’t offer all the variables and stuff. It can’t tell you RGB values
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever. Anyway, so I have all this like cross-platform glue code in there. And every time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch the Mac build of my test app, It looks ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because SwiftUI, the idea is you can share a lot of components between the platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can even maybe share like some certain layouts and stuff, and then you see the way it renders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, something that looks and works totally fine when it’s in iPad or iPhone mode, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in Catalyst mode on the Mac, you run it in Mac native AppKit mode, and it’s a train wreck. Or things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just randomly broken. and there’s more bugs. Like SwiftUI in the Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a pretty rough place still. And it makes it very difficult to use both.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not Apkit mode to be clear. That’s the thing that’s so fresh about the Mac. Apkit’s controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, Carbon went away and everything about it was all folded into Apkit. There was a time where
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, like a set of controls on Macs, buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, pop-up, everything, scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ John views, all those controls, those all existed, had tons of features, looked really
⏹️ ▶️ John good and were 100% consistent. And that period is over. Because now here comes the
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI version, which they’re different. And sometimes I feel like they’re different because they, you know, they’re different with reason. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone has decided they think this is better, but they’re just plain different. If, you know, running
⏹️ ▶️ John a SwiftUI app in Mac mode used all AppKit controls, it would probably
⏹️ ▶️ John still be weird to get it to work right. You know, you’d have to pay some attention to it, but at least it would be consistent.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not like that. SwiftUI’s Mac controls are kind of like modified
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad OS controls, kind of, sort of, but occasionally an actual AppKit control will peek its head
⏹️ ▶️ John out and it doesn’t make for apps that look consistent, that work consistently. And again, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the AppKit controls, universally, were better. They looked better, worked better, were easier to use, had more
⏹️ ▶️ John features, were more obvious, more intuitive. They were just better. And maybe, you know, again, SwiftUI is
⏹️ ▶️ John young, maybe they’ll fix it or whatever, but I feel like the people who are designing the Mac look and feel for SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand what makes good Mac controls. It’s kind of like iOS 7 all over again,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they have this aesthetic idea, only at least iOS 7 look kind of cool. The Mac ones
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even look good, and they don’t have a lot of features, and they don’t work well, and I think they’re fundamentally barking up the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong tree when they think a pop-up menu should be some text with a V and an upside-down V next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ugh. Yeah, and I think that’s like overall, What I want, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the Swift UIification of system settings and the rewrite of system settings on Ventura,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously you already mentioned how it’s garbage and it is, and system settings over the last year has not gotten any better. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still, it still feels like a really rough beta. It doesn’t even feel like a 1.0, it feels like a 0.8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. It feels like a rough beta and there should be still a lot more iteration on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both the design and the the bugginess of it but it kind of reflects the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general state of when Apple touches Mac OS especially in the UI area the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco results always seem really half-assed like it doesn’t seem like this is a nice you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unified design between iPad OS and iOS and the Mac no it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad OS and iOS have their cool nice design and the Mac is a half-assed clone of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or half-assed re-implementation of it that’s how it feels we can quibble about design choices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we do and we will but I want the Mac to stop feeling like every time they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch it they do a really half-assed job of whatever they were trying to do and and that is I don’t think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple has not shown that they have that level of rigor and care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac anymore software wise now hardware wise it’s been amazing recently with all the Apple silicon stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but software wise Mac OS is mostly coasting on what was established a very long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time ago. And the stuff they have changed, the stuff they have made new in recent years about Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS, especially design wise, has been pretty shaky at best and really feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very half-assed at worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re chipping away at that other stuff like the old the old, the old stuff like that old stuff. Granted, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John old, but A was internally consistent and B was really good. Like I do the same way we say we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think there’s a lot of people inside Apple who know how to make a good Mac app. I’m not sure how many people are inside Apple who have
⏹️ ▶️ John who who have ideas that I agree with about how to make a good Mac user interface. Like again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John basics, controls, buttons, windows, that whole nine yards. Because every time they touch an area, they take
⏹️ ▶️ John an app kit looking thing from decades ago, that looked old and creaky, but nevertheless had internally consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John and very good controls, and they replace it with something like system settings. Like notifications got replaced with a worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John an increasingly worse version of what was previously there. System settings got replaced with, granted
⏹️ ▶️ John the old one was old and creaky and needed to be expanded, But all those controls, all those
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful buttons and all those beautiful hand laid out things got replaced with just this boilerplate
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that looks worse than a webpage. And it’s like, if that’s your vision for the whole OS, I don’t want you to find any more
⏹️ ▶️ John old, creaky parts of the OS and replace them with that because you’re making them worse. They look worse, they feel worse, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are fundamentally worse, and they’re buggy, by the way, with all the bugs. It’s so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they work worse. Yeah, so it’s kind of like, I think about that with my own little applications, the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John I enjoy doing the little app-y things, the programming model is old and janky, but like the result is
⏹️ ▶️ John a window, like a settings window, that looks to me like a settings window in a Mac application. I look at it and
⏹️ ▶️ John I say, that’s a Mac settings. Other apps are like that, you know, Safari or other like
⏹️ ▶️ John good Apple apps, like they have Mac looking UIs, but some of them don’t. Some of them have weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would think, oh, is this a Catalyst app? And I’d be like, no, that’s 100% native, Swift UI, Mac OS only app.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just think it’s a Catalyst app because you look at those controls and think those don’t look like Mac controls, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s supposedly the future of Mac controls. I don’t know, I’m very frustrated with it. Like, I mean, I get done saying that Ventura
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t really fundamentally break everything, but everything they do touch in each new release
⏹️ ▶️ John is not an improvement on the old. It is just a replacement of the old with like a creaky 1.0 of the new, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like the new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the defense of Mac OS though, well, I mean, obviously you two both love it as well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a positive note, for all of Apple’s platforms, as they exist today and who knows what will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exist in a week, but for all of Apple’s platforms as they exist today, for me, and I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you too, macOS is the one where I am most at home. It is the one where I feel most comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is the one where it gets in the way the least. Now I’m not saying that’s true for everyone. In fact, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would argue for a lot of people, especially not olds like us. It’s probably either iPadOS or iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for me as a official old, I love sitting at my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that we’re old, it’s that we’re programmers. We’re computer nerds, we’re people who know and understand Unix stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s not true of the general public. That’s why we feel the most comfortable there. It’s also why other people feel the most comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John on their phones and iPads, right? So I don’t think it’s like an age thing of like, because it’s, you know, older,
⏹️ ▶️ John like we want something that’s older or whatever. Like iOS is pretty darn old at this point too. It’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is the system, Mac OS is the system where you have the most freedom. It has a command line. It has,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t constrain us on what we can do. You can have multiple windows, So the basic windowing system that you can move around, you can have always visible
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. You can put icons in your menu bar, like all sorts of things that maybe the modern Apple wouldn’t do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that are here for quote unquote legacy reasons. Mac OS is the platform that you use to develop for
⏹️ ▶️ John all of other Apple’s other platforms. Even, you know, I know you can, you know, develop on the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John apps on the iPad now or whatever, but I don’t think many people would choose to do that willingly just because you have
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more flexibility in a development environment and development tools and all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John if you develop on a Mac. So I think that’s why we like it. And it does mean that it is
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow interest. It does mean that we are on the fringe because we’re tech nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John who are into the things that the Mac can do better, but it’s not because we’re old or
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s something old fashioned about the Mac. It is just simply the most powerful and flexible platform Apple has.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. I was mostly making fun of myself and trying to be silly, but you are completely correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as always. And so I agree with you, but I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel so much more at home and so much more free on a Mac than I do on anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. And there is something amazing about having an iPad, especially if you don’t have it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the keyboard case, which I love, or the smart, fancy, magic, whatever keyboard. I know we went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through what means what like a couple of months ago and I always forget, but when you have an iPad and that thin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little sliver of a device with, you know, this beautiful screen and optionally a pencil, and you can be in middle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of anywhere because it has a cellular modem, not to get Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I started, but you can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere and do things on the internet and if you want to add a keyboard you can but you don’t have to. It is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I love the iPad for that. And I love that I have the whole of human knowledge in my freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket with my iPhone. And I can be fast on the iPad, I can be fast on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, but never do I feel as unconstrained, is that a word? You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never feel more free than I do on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel that way even on the 13-inch MacBook Pro screen in and of itself, which honestly is way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too small for any serious use, but you know what? It still works. I feel extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that way when I have my two 5K screens. You know, I’m sure this is the same for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys and your ridiculously expensive monitors. It’s just, I feel so free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I feel like I can get things done so much faster. And that’s what I love so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Mac. And just to very quickly pick out one thing on this, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly unimpressive marketing page, continuity camera. If you just bought an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor that maybe has a piss poor camera on it, continuity camera is pretty nice feature, especially when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you hoard old iPhones. So I have, I don’t use the like hub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features of the studio display for anything except a USB-C to lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable that’s plugged into my last year’s iPhone that sits on top of my studio display 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven. And every once in a while, it’ll take me like flipping to a different camera and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flipping back to the continuity camera to get it to work. But once I do that, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. It works flawlessly. It is amazing. And I know that for you guys, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have any camera to worry about on board the screen and I know you’ve had to add your own, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really love if you’re one of those seven idiots that keeps their old phones like I do, this is an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful feature that I use several times a month as I’m having chats with friends that are overseas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on. and I really have enjoyed continuity camera quite a lot.
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Rumors & predictions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is there anything else going on this week or should we just end here?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me do a little speed
⏹️ ▶️ John run of the last minute rumor slash preview things just because it’s mostly obvious stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and we can get to it quickly. Headset we’ve been talking about it forever. People
⏹️ ▶️ John keep talking more and more about it. A couple of things on that. One as pointed out I think on the talk show recently or maybe it was on Dithering
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget. One of the early tells of like whether Apple is going to actually release something that that has been
⏹️ ▶️ John heavily rumored is as the date approaches, if there’s no, if you don’t see any reports
⏹️ ▶️ John of a denial saying actually everyone thought this thing was gonna come out at WWDC, but
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor has it that actually it’s not now. That hasn’t happened. Whether or not Apple strategically leaks those
⏹️ ▶️ John to tamp down expectations, so people don’t go to a WWDC keynote expecting them to release
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple car, and that everyone’s all disappointed because they didn’t release the car, and afterwards every single story is about, there was no
⏹️ ▶️ John car, there was no car. That’s the kind of time when it would behoove Apple to strategically
⏹️ ▶️ John leak the information that there’s not gonna be a car this time. Well, they haven’t done that with the headset. So far,
⏹️ ▶️ John one week out, there is no story that says, everyone’s expecting the headset, but it turns out Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to reveal it. This is setting aside of when they’re gonna ship it or when it will be available or anything else like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone thinks the headset is coming and there hasn’t been no sort of rumor denial.
⏹️ ▶️ John Adding more support to it, Apple has apparently invited a bunch of, What this article phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John is XR media outlets, which is like, you know, AR VR, whatever. These are
⏹️ ▶️ John websites, publications that are focused on AR VR that have previously not
⏹️ ▶️ John been invited to Apple keynotes. So press from these websites like upload VR and
⏹️ ▶️ John what is this other one called? A road to VR.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John These people have previously not gotten press invites and this time they did. Why would these
⏹️ ▶️ John invite now? I wonder maybe it’s because Apple is going to reveal the headset. Steve Troutman
⏹️ ▶️ John Smith pointed out today that the OS behind this, which we’ve known has been, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, rumored to be called reality OS, whatever the trademark is, we had an item in the show, and so we didn’t get to it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like XR OS, XR OS Pro with XR being lowercase or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Troutman Smith says, it’s such an open secret that they didn’t even bother scrubbing the most recent references they
⏹️ ▶️ John left in their open source linker. And you can put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a link to GitHub where you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John an enum showing all the different and there’s a platform for iOS, TVOS, watchOS, BridgeOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS Mac, which that’s what Catalyst is, I believe. The final two enums are RealityOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and RealitySimulator. Undisguised, in GitHub, in parts, like that’s the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff that they would, in past years, try to remove from their betas, try to remove from their
⏹️ ▶️ John open source, but it’s like, look, W2C is next week. Why even bother hiding it? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing was internally called RealityOS, the enums are probably gonna be RealityOS, That’s what the symbols would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the branding will be XROS or whatever. By the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, can we just, I hope it’s Reality OS because that’s such a better name than XROS.
⏹️ ▶️ John they filed a bunch of trademarks for XROS or XROS Pro. Those may just be protective trademarks or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. The word reality, when it comes to 3D computer graphics stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John has a long history with SGI. And also I think maybe with MIPS
⏹️ ▶️ John and N64 which are also connected to SGI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Cisco had a product called iPhone and then trademark on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, no, no, I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why they can’t use it. I’m saying that’s why it is a fitting word because it has kind of a storied history in the world of 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But I’m not sure the word reality means anything to people. Of course, XR
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mean anything to regular people either because they don’t know the X is a placeholder for A and VR as we just discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John with these media outlets. In the end, the brain doesn’t matter that much. How many people know what the name of the OS is
⏹️ ▶️ John on their iPad or on their iPhone and the fact they changed names? It’s just, this is another example of Apple’s platform
⏹️ ▶️ John naming. They’re stuck on this lowercase letters with capital OS, which I’ve never really liked.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was fine for iOS, but then when they did Mac OS, all lowercase. Anyway, whatever. The point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mounting evidence that Apple will reveal the headset to WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John is now just, it’s like as close to 100% as you can ever get with that actual confirmation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s gonna happen probably. We’ll talk more about it next week. The other thing related
⏹️ ▶️ John to the headset, which is that the people who can’t keep secrets are
⏹️ ▶️ John now demonstrating they can’t keep secrets and can’t contain themselves by
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving subtle hints or rumors or stories about game developers being buddy-buddy
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple. So Hideo Kojima, the maker of the Metal Gear series, maker of Death Stranding,
⏹️ ▶️ John very famous, you know, creator of video games that many people know and love,
⏹️ ▶️ John has been seen around Apple campus supposedly. There’s been rumors that they’re working with Apple or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Sean Murray, the person who made No Man’s Sky, the video game, just
⏹️ ▶️ John tweeted today, like this morning, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John a single Apple emoji. That was the entire tweet.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing about being a famous game developer. Like Apple can’t fire them because they don’t work for Apple. Whatever deal
⏹️ ▶️ John they have with Apple is too far along to be canned, although Steve Jobs would kick somebody out of the keynote if they pissed him off enough,
⏹️ ▶️ John but he’s not around anymore. And what are you going to do? What are you going to say? Oh, now we’re not going to work
⏹️ ▶️ John with Hideo Kojima because he leaked something or because he was spotted at a Starbucks near Apple or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked a lot about, like, what are they going to try to pitch the headset for? And the thing that headsets are most
⏹️ ▶️ John well-known for in the world right now is games, despite Facebook trying to make it for doing meetings and stuff like that. VR
⏹️ ▶️ John games have been a thing for many, many years. The big gaming company Oculus was made as a gaming headset. and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. So we’ve wondered what Apple’s gonna do there. This smoke around
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, famous game luminaries orbiting this makes us think that Apple will have some portion of the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John where they will try desperately to convince you that in addition to all the other wonderful things that their headset does,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a great platform for gaming. And here are some famous game people to let you know that their famous games are gonna be on this new platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s better than nothing. On the last episode, I was saying how Apple needs to pay people money to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring their games to their platform. The thing is, you have to be, it’s all about consistency.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to do that, you have to do it consistently on an ongoing basis. You can’t just do the thing that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John always done, which is one big famous person or game shows their big
⏹️ ▶️ John famous product from three years ago, runs really well on a Mac. I know everyone who cares about game has
⏹️ ▶️ John already played it. Maybe you’ve even already played it in VR, but now that three-year-old game that you already played in VR
⏹️ ▶️ John is available on the Apple headset and that’s it. Right, or maybe two other games.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, just to compare that to what Microsoft had to do with the Xbox, they had to consistently over
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years and years, court game developers, pay game developers money, acquire game developers,
⏹️ ▶️ John be really dedicated to the production of games. And kind of in the way that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been trying to do with Apple TV plus television shows, where I feel like they’ve have actually put their money where their mouth is and paid
⏹️ ▶️ John to have lots of television shows produced. And when some of them didn’t turn out that well, They didn’t give up and say, oh well, we’ll try again
⏹️ ▶️ John in another decade. No, they made more shows with more people. And they found the people who knew how to make TV shows and they found stars
⏹️ ▶️ John who are good in television and writers who like, that’s what they would have to do with the game. So anyway, the rumors about these
⏹️ ▶️ John famous people orbiting around Apple makes me think that there will be a significant game portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the headset thing, where they will show some famous games and some famous game makers running on the headset.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that by no means is sufficient to make this a viable gaming platform, unless Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John actually follows through for the first time in their entire history when it comes to games. So fingers crossed in that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John headset, seems like it’s gonna be there. Nobody disagrees, one week out. If
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, if it’s not there, if there’s no rumors in the next week and the headset isn’t there, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think people are just gonna be sad and mopey walking away from that screen. So I think it’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel like, you know, if you look around the industry, you know, we touched on this a little bit last week, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is talking about new AI capabilities. Everyone, every large tech company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is investing massively in these new AI techniques, large language model based things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like generation, like there’s so much in these new AI techniques
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and abilities that we’ve gotten in the last year, basically in the industry, that we’re investing in super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily in every other company. And Apple, it seems like, is not probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready to show anything in that area yet. I hope they’re investing heavily in it. I hope they realize how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important it is. I hope they fix Siri, but it seems like none of that is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the table for this year’s WWDC and this year’s platforms. So in the absence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, I feel like we need something else that’s really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine if they didn’t have the headset this year, how angry the press would be after an entire keynote where they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t mention AI once?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as I said last time, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna find some little token things that they can call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI that they would have previously called ML or Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anything that you previously called ML, just swap the letters out. No one will know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. Yeah, exactly. But I feel like they need to have something to, and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not why these things are shipped and where they are, but they need to have something to distract the press
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from their lack of AI announcements that’s likely.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and it’s not just a distraction. It’s a new platform. It’s a big deal. It’s not like this is a diversion, don’t look over
⏹️ ▶️ John there. It’s just a happy accident that they have this massive new product that’s been rumored for years that unlike the car
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually going to be revealed to the public and that will really do a
⏹️ ▶️ John good job of tamping down the AI angst, which will still exist by the way. They will get asked about it, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I really, I have high hopes for this platform because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, first of all, look, I like Apple. I don’t want them to lose. Like I don’t want them to have a flop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also just as a technologist and as a developer, this is really baffling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me why this thing would be so amazing. And you know, like, you know, in my house, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco son has the Facebook Quest 2, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a totally fine product. It’s getting a little long in the tooth. I know German had a Quest 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little preview piece the other day. But you know, it is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC product. It’s like, here’s a thing that’s like this plastic piece of garbage that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has low resolution screens and it is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s uncomfortable on me, the optics aren’t great for my
⏹️ ▶️ John how often does it get used? How often does it get used in your house compared to like the plain old Switch? Or the iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it depends. Well, it kind of, I know what you’re getting at because it goes month at a time without being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used. But it is currently, there’s this adorable game called Gorilla Tag that my kid is super into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it basically seems, as far as I can tell, like just like a giant playground that’s mostly other kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are his age group just like running around, yelling, and jumping on stuff. And it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ingenious because, you know, one of the big problems with VR games is like if you have to move your legs in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game, you’re gonna walk into walls and stuff in real life. And so in this game, they simulate, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kids are basically simulated as gorillas with no legs. So they walk on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their arms. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Adam’s like, he’s up there like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swinging his arms. He’s getting the most buff shoulders for an 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because he’s like swinging his arms, moving around. It’s so funny and it seems to be only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco children who play this game. You can hear over the voice chat when you’re in the room, you hear the other kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no older kids or adults playing this game. It’s all children. And it’s so adorable. And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no combat or anything like that. It just seems like a nice, wholesome thing. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so right now it’s getting used a lot. Very heavily. But I also see the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. I personally can’t really use it very comfortably for a very long time. It is not good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my eyes. I do get a little bit motion sick with it. And I’m not usually a motion sick sensitive person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s saying a lot. And I don’t find the game experiences that compelling on it yet. And maybe that’s because I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a gamer much, and maybe I’m just missing stuff. But I haven’t found it that compelling. And you know, using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand controllers is clunky and stuff like that. And so, when I hear about the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headset rumors, and from people who know more about this than I do, The things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hand tracking, the eye tracking, the foveated rendering with higher resolution displays, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff that it’s pretty heavily rumored to have, sounds like it is going to be substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than what I have tried so far, which is this dumb thing. It should be like quadruple the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, at least quadruple, if not more. But, you know, it sounds like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is going to release here, or at least unveil here, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a small step above what we’ve seen, but a big step above what we’ve seen. And that has me excited because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while the existing products have not been compelling for me, again, I don’t believe Apple would ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something if it wasn’t, if they didn’t really believe it was compelling. And I can’t imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a high level Apple person using a Quest 2 and be like, yeah, this is pretty good. Let’s just match this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that would never happen. I guarantee you the Apple attitude towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those products would be about as positive as, you know, when Steve Jobs had to demo that Motorola Rocker phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it would be, you know, not glowing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there are higher end things in the Quest. The Quest is fairly low end. There are higher end, like PC gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John VR headsets, and Apple’s probably gonna basically match them, maybe be a little bit better. The software story may be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll probably be more refined, you know, higher performance, lower latency, hopefully, but it’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be 10 times better than any existing headset. The question is, like, how much does the, how much is Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John able to elevate it the way it usually does by, you know, just making the software
⏹️ ▶️ John better, having a more compelling story about use cases. And the other thing I’m really interested about it by
⏹️ ▶️ John the reveal of this is, it’s the most recent test of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s hardware design, you know, with respect to the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have complained about in the past, about their obsession with simplicity and removing
⏹️ ▶️ John ports and, you know, all that type of thing, like designing it to be a beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John object, a beautiful featureless object with adhering to certain aesthetic principles rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than making it usable, rather than recognizing what do people wanna use this for? And it
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to a head, particularly on devices that you wear. The watch did a pretty good job of
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I think, in that the watch does not have any sharp things that
⏹️ ▶️ John poke into your wrist, right? It generally fits on your body
⏹️ ▶️ John and the watch straps fit on your body in a way that recognizes the size and shape of human wrists
⏹️ ▶️ John and what they’re made out of. I think it does an okay job, but I do worry a lot about this headset.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m looking at is what does the hardware look like? Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the AirPods Max, the big over-ear headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which I think have a lot of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, those look really nice. But ergonomically, there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly obvious fumbles. One of the biggest ones is the ear cups have metal on them, which looks and feels
⏹️ ▶️ John great and premium, but it’s heavy. And this is the type of trade-off I’m looking to see. When
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple comes to a decision like that, well, we could make the ear cup things out of metal
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll be gorgeous and feel really good and be very durable and sturdy, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be really heavy and that could be wearing over time. What should we choose? we make them lightweight,
⏹️ ▶️ John but have it be not quite as premium looking? Or should we just go for the thing that looks and feels the best and not worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about the weight? And I think they made the wrong call on the AirPods Max. And for a headset, that type of thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John paramount. That also gets back to the whole, you know, compute module battery pack thing on your belt.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that would be the right decision. Rather than trying to build it into a thing that goes in your face, they recognize that
⏹️ ▶️ John after testing this thing for however many years, having lots of weight on your face doesn’t feel good.
⏹️ ▶️ John So let’s get that that weight away. And so when I’m looking at this thing, they want people to strap on their face. What
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna see is, again, the ideal is like, if I have to put it on my face, it better be the
⏹️ ▶️ John OXO Good Grips of headsets. I do not want any part of this thing to have been designed to
⏹️ ▶️ John look nice, to look symmetrical, to look like anime from the 90s. I don’t want it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want nothing about this to be like, I care about how I look. I want first and foremost, the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John priority to be comfortable on people’s faces, breathable, light, no places that pinch
⏹️ ▶️ John you, good visibility in the ways that you wanna have visibility, like just everything about it, doesn’t make you sweaty,
⏹️ ▶️ John has an easy way to put in the prescription lens thingies they’re gonna support, like just,
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, the watch you wear, but your wrist is fairly, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John far away from the sensitive organs that do all your sensing, like your nose and your mouth and your eyes and your ears, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This thing is on, it’s not just on your head, it’s on your face. And so this is a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John crucible for Apple’s worst predilections of like, we want it to be a beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John symmetrical solid with no features on it, made of sharp aluminum and really heavy, and like all that. And on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other side is, yeah, but I had this thing on my head while we’ve been testing it for the past three years and it sucks when it’s like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the number one thing I’m looking forward to is when they reveal this headset, I obviously I’m not gonna be able to tell by looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at it, but like when they reveal this headset, does it look like something that was designed to look beautiful? Or does it look
⏹️ ▶️ John like something that was designed to be comfortable. Ideally you do both. Like obviously the Apple ideal is, oh, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful and it’s also comfortable and it’s breathable and you don’t get sweaty and, and, and, and you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John motion sick because we made the latency low, like that’s the ideal. But in any design there are trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And historically, especially recently historically, Apple has made poor trade-offs when it
⏹️ ▶️ John came to those decisions. They reversed a lot of them on a laptop, so kudos. So they’re going in the right direction, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset team, like there’s nothing that the laptop team did that I can say, and that will transfer directly to the headset
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’ll, they’ll, you know, learn from like this totally separate, like totally separate development lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John So totally separate everything. So, um, that is the thing that I’m most looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John only because I don’t believe the Mac pro is going to be released, but you know, setting aside the Mac pro, which seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to happen. Speaking of rumors of things that aren’t going to happen, you know, that we did get the rumor that’s not going to happen and that hasn’t shifted.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, I want to see what this headset says about how
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is thinking about designing things that literally go on people’s faces,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that will give us a good idea of, you know, how much the company has learned over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years. All right, and for me personally, like, if Marco gets motion sick with it, I will get massively
⏹️ ▶️ John sick so easily, so this is probably not gonna be a product for me. Doesn’t mean I’m not interested in it. I’m interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, and I think Apple should make it and do it, and I look forward to the day when it gets to the level where I can
⏹️ ▶️ John use it without getting sick, but I have no illusions that that day is going to be, you know, next Monday.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s fine, like I’m not in the market for it. I just, that’s why I’m looking at it from a more academic perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John What does this product say about how Apple designs things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect Apple to be pretty good at things like avoiding motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sickness. You know, when you look at the software stacks of how to ensure like really high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance for what is effectively a giant game environment all the time, like even if you’re not playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a game in it, It’s basically a game, a game engine running, you know, for a lot of this stuff to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple is actually pretty good at the the level of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like top to bottom hardware, software integration to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things like super low latency input or output. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, but I’m sure they’re going to do really well, but I’m not sure technology is there yet
⏹️ ▶️ John to get this to the level where someone like me can wear without getting motion sick. I mean, I know there’s not a single
⏹️ ▶️ John headset that exists today that people say, and don’t worry, no one will ever get motion sick. It’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of who and by how much.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And unfortunately I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John at the far end of that spectrum. So I think Apple will do a good job because they do tightly control the hardware. But I just, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not at this point, I don’t think it’s technologically possible to make a
⏹️ ▶️ John consumer headset that does not cause people like me to get motion sick. And that’s not Apple’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not saying they should wait until it is. It’s just, it’s just a fact of life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, but it’s also Apple’s style to wait until they can do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes effectively no one motion sick and then release a product and only do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would not make people motion sick. Like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally see them doing that. And they, and you know, we’re looking at obviously much higher component costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this. We’re looking at a much higher power envelope and much higher end chips powering it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s possible, like maybe they have achieved that. I can’t imagine Apple would release something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a large portion of the population would get motion sick from.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’ll be small, but I think it could push up against double digits. Because I feel like that’s the true of
⏹️ ▶️ John the existing high-end headsets. It also depends on the software, obviously. This is another thing, you know, if you’ve used one of
⏹️ ▶️ John these headsets, that like the actual software that’s running on them, like the game frames,
⏹️ ▶️ John has a huge influence over whether you get motion sick. So it’s not just the hardware. And that is another area where I hope Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John do a good job in that like, you know, whatever their OS is or however apps work. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s filled with regular people who are employees and some percentage of the Apple employees who worked on this headset are just as susceptible
⏹️ ▶️ John to motion sickness as I am. So they know, they know how it breaks down. Even if it’s like, oh, they don’t let the public use it, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, there’s enough people working on this that Apple kind of knows which things are causing
⏹️ ▶️ John the most motion sickness. Like is the setting screens and XROS, is that causing motion sickness? What can we
⏹️ ▶️ John do to fix it? Like they’ve had years to work on this. So I think they’re gonna do the best they can. I just, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not willing to believe the technology has got to the point where I’m going to be in the fold. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John it will, right? But maybe not this year, but that’s fine. That, you know, I just hope they do a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I hope they do a good job with the fundamentals of the physical reality of it, because I think there’ll be many years before the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John reality becomes actual little glasses. And so if they get the fundamentals of the headset right, kind of like they got the fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomics of the laptop right with the PowerBook, keyboard pushed up, pointing device down
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle, in the center, It took them a few tries with their quote unquote portable computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that fundamental design was good and better than everything it became before it and has lasted and has
⏹️ ▶️ John stood the test of time. Touch bar notwithstanding. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I’m very interested to see John, what you specifically feel about the headset in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no small part because of the three of us, you’re the only one with eyeglasses. And I have to imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there will be a story around that, but it’s the story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyeglasses. What are you
⏹️ ▶️ John super special contacts. Right. I know, but you’ve also got glasses before when you take contacts out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but I never take my contacts out except when I sleep because otherwise I’m friggin
⏹️ ▶️ John And don’t you have reading glasses now, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I do. And that sucks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John hate every moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. We’re all enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to have glasses. Yeah, no. And by the way, I also do have contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, reading glasses don’t seem to be addressed by any VR headset I’ve ever seen. I mean, maybe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t follow the news as closely as you. Maybe I’m missing, like the ones that have customs things, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing is, everything in, well, things inside VR headsets are
⏹️ ▶️ John physically close to your eyes, bottom line. Like, even if you’re doing the outside camera view type of thing, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if for someone like Marco, whose eyes have difficulty focusing on things that are close by,
⏹️ ▶️ John there may need to be some lens help out there for, maybe, I don’t know what Marco’s prescription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not much, it’s like.75 magnification. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll probably be fine. And in fact, it’ll maybe help you, all the pixels blur together. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John another thing that, you know, every headset manufacturer knows, that people don’t have perfect vision, so you must accommodate for
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of, you know, diopter adjustment or prescription lenses. Prescription lenses is going farther than
⏹️ ▶️ John just like diopter adjustment, because you can have things like astigmatism that are not easy to do by just moving lenses back and
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. And anyway, I do hope Apple does a good job with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve also like, for like, I don’t know if this is, I don’t know what part of visual problems this is, but I had this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with both the Quest 2 and with the DJI headset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I briefly owned for that DJI FPV drone that I briefly owned, that I can never get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things set right so that the center of my field of view and the edges of my field of view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all in focus in one of those headsets. Like the edges, the outer edges of my field of view are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blurry. And I don’t know, again, I mean this is one of the, I have pretty good eyes overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet I still have problems like this because of this one minor flaw that I have. People have so many different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye conditions and lens shapes and different abilities and different needs for different corrections. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be a tough problem to solve. And frankly, I hope that, and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good faith that Apple has probably put a lot of effort into making this as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessible to different people’s eye needs as they possibly can compared to the rest of the industry because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the kind of thing they would care about. But I also don’t know what are the physical limits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what they can even correct easily. And maybe they just can’t correct for certain types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of conditions yet, and maybe they never can. And that’s why I’m a little worried about this product’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall accessibility, even if you get past issues of price, which is its own version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of accessibility. But even if you get past that, are there gonna be certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye conditions or other types of ability differences that make it impossible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this product? And would people with those conditions or abilities have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just this entire world of technology that they can’t access? Hopefully Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will do the best job they can for that. And Apple, I think of all the major tech companies, I think they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best work in accessibility by far. So hopefully they would accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as best as they possibly can all different abilities and needs. But this kind of product is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so specialized because it goes right on your face and is right on your eyes. and it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to measure your hand tracking allegedly, and what if you have motor difficulties? There’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potential accessibility limitations and challenges with this product that, again, I have a lot of faith in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to address those to whatever degree they can, but they might not be able to for certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ John think Microsoft is the leader in accessibility when it comes to gaming. They have tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John custom controllers, for more accessible custom controllers. They’ve gone way above and
⏹️ ▶️ John beyond what any other gaming company has done for, you know, to provide a more accessible interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to video games. You can play full fledged AAA, same video games as everybody else, but with
⏹️ ▶️ John controllers that if you look at them, they may not make sense to you until you see somebody using them. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have a controller at all. There’s third party controllers for iOS and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco TV and everything. Controlling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games on Apple platforms sucks equally for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, no, I mean, you can use your PlayStation controller, but Apple has basically seeded that market to third parties, but Microsoft has put
⏹️ ▶️ John considerable effort into it. This is another place where we can look at what Apple does and compare it to, well, I keep comparing them to
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft because Microsoft actually did break into the gaming market and showed what it takes to do that. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been so hard for them that they’re currently considering maybe bailing out. I’m not sure they’re gonna do that. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John what does Apple do in the area of accessibility? So they have people come up and say, okay, we’re gonna show the cool video games
⏹️ ▶️ John that we support on the headset or whatever. Do they take any time to say, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John since AR VR games demand more of you physically to be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to play them, here is our accessibility story for that. Because it is more demanding. You mentioned Adam waving
⏹️ ▶️ John his arms around or whatever. It’s physically more demanding to play most VR games
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not just sitting on the couch motionless with your thumbs on a thumbstick. And even that has accessibility issues because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of controls, lots of buttons. They’re not easy to hit depending on what kind of mobility
⏹️ ▶️ John you have and how much control you have your digits. That’s why they have those, you know, all sorts of accessible controls that Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll try to find a link to show notes, to show people what those are like, but they’re really cool. But yeah, VR
⏹️ ▶️ John also has that same story. And I’m not, you know, again, it’s a 1.0. You don’t expect Apple out the door to have this. It took Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years and years to get seriously into accessibility for console games. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna fault Apple if they don’t have a big story there, but it is, it’s what we talk about with these headsets
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. How many people are you removing from your market by
⏹️ ▶️ John requiring them to put something on your face, by requiring them to be able to wave their hands around, by requiring them to be able to stand up and turn
⏹️ ▶️ John their head or focus their eyes or all the other things that this headset will demand for you to do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything with it. How narrow are you, you know, how narrow is your market going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John when all is said and done? And again, for a 1.0, it might end up being pretty narrow. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know is sitting here today, and we’ve talked about this a lot, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no damn idea what the point of this is, but the closer we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to this phantom headset thing, leaving aside the fact that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot fathom looking in the mirror and saying, yes, this is worth $3,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much less saying to Aaron, hey, I think I want to spend $3,000 for something that may or may not ever be anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that aside—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Guarantee you buy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m sure I will. It’s for the business, Aaron. What do you want from me? It’s for the business. business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, at least I don’t tell myself I’m not going to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are two rumors related to this, by the way, related to Casey buying it and the price and whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The rumors are, one, that someone did a bill of materials check on it because now so many rumors have leaked that
⏹️ ▶️ John they know this is the vendor of the screens, this is the vendor of the, you know, they did a bill of materials thing and they said
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost of the thing is around $1,600. The other rumor is that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would be selling this at cost and not making its customary 30, 40% margins. So we’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 2000 maybe? Yeah, if those are
⏹️ ▶️ John both true, maybe the thing comes out as a $1,600 device. Like that they’re not, that it’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be even like a loss leader, that they might even lose a little bit. I don’t know if I believe that, but you know, it’s a thing that’s happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, occasionally in the game console world, it always happens, except for if you’re Nintendo. The
⏹️ ▶️ John other console makers, when their consoles first come out, they sell them at a small loss, and eventually they start selling at a profit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nintendo has been more like Apple and said, you know what, we always want to make a profit. But then Nintendo does that by cheaping out on the hardware. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does it by raising the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So we’ll see. So I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, Casey’s saying, oh, how am I going to spend $3,000 on this? There is a possibility,
⏹️ ▶️ John however dim it might be, that it won’t be $3,000. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with you. And I also agree with Marco that, I’m sure I’ll end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up getting one because I can’t resist. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you will. But all that said, I have crossed the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rubicon threshold from, what, really? into really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, what’s this going to be about? I’m excited to see what this is going to be. And so I’m, I’m really stoked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, uh, as we sit here and recording this a week from today. Uh, I am really, really stoked to see what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is this? What does it look like? What is the point? What is their spin? Are they just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to throw a bunch of random different styles of pasta against the wall and see what, what sticks like they did with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the watch? Are they going to have an extraordinarily mature and specific story about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am really excited to see what this is. I’m really excited to try one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever that may be. Maybe when that’s when, maybe that’s when I receive mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s when I get like an appointment at the Apple store, like we do with the watches. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super excited to hear, you know, for those that are able to try them at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because presumably whether or not the broader press does, you got to imagine like these, these XR, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, press people will, will, you know, probably some general video game press establishments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just about to say, you know, how much Apple loves YouTubers these days. Podcasts don’t exist, but the YouTubers, they’re where the cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids are. So yes, I’m curious to see what they have to say. I’m just, I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear it. And it, it almost, it’s almost a bummer that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the event for it because I am also excited for new iPadOS. I’m excited for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new iOS. I’m excited for whatever ridiculous part of California we’re getting on our max next.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I almost don’t care about those because I’m so hyper-focused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what this headset is and what does it mean for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I care a lot about those, but I think they are so overshadowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the hype and the attention and the anticipation because we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get a new platform in all likelihood. And that is a very exciting thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’m still excited for the boring stuff. One thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco related to that, in case
⏹️ ▶️ John this doesn’t end up being released, I just want to mention it now because it was one of the most fun rumors I saw and I just assumed I’d be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about it when it gets released, but maybe it’s totally false. But anyway, it was an iOS 17 rumor. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor was that on the multitasking switcher on iOS, they’ll have a button
⏹️ ▶️ John that basically removes everything from that screen. And now the question
⏹️ ▶️ John is, does it do the equivalent of force quitting every single one of those applications?
⏹️ ▶️ John or does it just remove all the pictures? I really hope this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John exists because then we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John which of those two things it does and it’s a great experiment for all the people who reflexively force
⏹️ ▶️ John quit applications, which again, people shouldn’t be doing, to see
⏹️ ▶️ John how Apple satisfies that user need. Because we discussed in the past, reflexively
⏹️ ▶️ John force quitting every application is bad for you and bad for your phone. But the desire to not have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of images cluttering up that screen is perfectly reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John desire. Those are two separate things, but people just don’t want the pictures there. So the only way they have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the pictures is by swiping them upwards, which by the way does something else, force quitting them. And then there are the people who want to force
⏹️ ▶️ John quit. Anyway, as we said in the past, force quitting apps is fine. Reflexively force quitting every single application every time
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re done using your phone, not fine. Those are two different things. So if they add this feature, I can’t wait
⏹️ ▶️ John to see what it actually does. I have a hard time imagining it will literally force
⏹️ ▶️ John quit every application. I think it will just get rid of the pictures. And I think people that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all people really want. But then then what about when an application is hosed and you do have to force
⏹️ ▶️ John quit it, that will cause you probably still have to swipe up. And so there will be some people who say, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use the button, because the button doesn’t actually force quit the applications. I still swipe everything upwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I don’t I think they they would actually make it like, you know, terminate all the applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, over time, when they when they first introduced that, you know, that mechanism,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your app was, quote, force quit, and not running in the in the switcher, or not available in the switcher, whatever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you couldn’t do things like background refresh, you couldn’t do things like background downloads, like there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you lost a lot of those abilities. And then over time, they have actually given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you more abilities to have your app open up for background activity when it is forced quit in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subsequent updates.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I wonder if- You may be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle of doing a background activity when you get a forced quit and that’s not gonna be good for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s not gonna be good, but maybe it would like, you know, call your termination block and give you a few seconds to close it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than instantly closing you up. You know, who knows? But, you know, if they would do something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t surprise me if there were also some tweaks to what your app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was able to do when it has been forced quit to make it less of an extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negative for the experience of using each app. But I think it still would actually terminate the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current executable of the apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see, we’ll see. But I think if those rumors are true, I think that they need to go a step
⏹️ ▶️ John further, which is like for the visual clutter thing, requiring someone to go back to that screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the one button to get rid of all the little pictures. Why not just let people say, hey, every time I
⏹️ ▶️ John lock my phone, get rid of all the little pictures, or put a maximum number on the little pictures, right? And I keep saying little pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John because, for people who don’t know, very often those little pictures of screens of apps are apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that have not been running for days. But like iOS keeps little pictures of what the screen looked like the last time it was
⏹️ ▶️ John running. And so as you scroll to the left and more and more of those things, like those things haven’t been running in ages. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not currently running, they haven’t been running, it’s just a little picture. So I think people just don’t want the visual clutter on that
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and requiring them to manually clean up that screen every time, a single button is better than having them swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but it’s not as good as saying, hey, just let me know, should I have a maximum of three items there every time the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen locks? You want me to remove all those little pictures? I think that would make people happier because at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s so many people who have trained themselves to clean up all the little pictures, they just need to do it. iOS can
⏹️ ▶️ John help them out there. iOS can get rid of those pictures for them automatically. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’ll see if this, if the rumor’s not true, then whatever, this has all just been a pointless discussion, but the rumor is true. I find this
⏹️ ▶️ John the most exciting and fascinating feature of iOS 17 that I’ve heard rumored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, you have pretty low standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a headset year, like whatever. No, but I’m actually hoping for other platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements as well. And I don’t need to be blown away with tons of user features. I just want to see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, the idea that was rumored about watchOS being potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty well revamped in a lot of ways, that’s very exciting to me. Because as I mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most years it seems like watchOS is barely touched. And I know that isn’t always the case, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of what features actually show up to users and developers, it’s pretty minimal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every year with watchOS. So the idea of there being a substantial update or change to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how watchOS works or looks or behaves is pretty promising to me because as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve, you know, really gotten into the Apple Watch in the last couple of years, in terms of, you know, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing it most days and not wearing my fancy watches as much, I think it still could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be so much better than it is. And there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that they just haven’t picked. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that this is a big harvest. To stretch that metaphor way too far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in general, what I want as a developer is just give me the next iterative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set of improvements for SwiftUI and Swift itself. Swift itself is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually doing pretty well. That happens kind of separately from the WBC cadence in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But give me just, you know, next version of SwiftUI and next version of Xcode. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a lot of weird little Xcode bugs this year. I have weird source kit crashing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background sometimes. Sometimes I have to reboot my entire Mac to get things to work correctly or to update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the simulator which is really scary. Whenever I work on a package like Blackbird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like my Overcast new sync engine, when you have a package open in Xcode and you try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to then open a project that uses that package, weird stuff happens and it basically doesn’t work. There’s all sorts of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little behaviors like that. Errors that stick around forever on Xcode even after you’ve cleared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. There are so many. So annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many little bugs like that and little limitations like that that make day-to-day stuff in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current version of Xcode less reliable or weirdly limited in some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. That’s the kind of stuff I wanna see fixed. Just improvements of developers’
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day-to-day lives. Fix the tool bugs, make things perform a little bit better if you can, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really fix the bugs first. and iterative updates to SwiftUI. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really hoping for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to see some SwiftUI improvements. I’ve actually been pretty happy with SwiftUI for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s definitely some things that are very frustrating and very janky. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of places where I wish I had more control than I’m allowed, especially like with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to the search field, which is what I’m running into a lot with call sheet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ended up needing to go, thanks to the help of Guy Rambeau I needed to end up going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to UIKit and like plucking the appropriate UIKit control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the view hierarchy, which is gross and I hate it, but I needed to do that in order to accomplish what I needed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. But for the most part, I haven’t had to do too much of that with SwiftUI. The new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey navigation stuff that you had brought up like an hour and a half ago, it took me kicking and screaming, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was kicking and screaming going to embrace it. But once I did, it actually makes everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, way easier and way, way nicer. It seemed completely overblown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also all of Swift UI, it’s always that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. No, you’re exactly right. But once I embraced creating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a enum that represents all of my different screens and then having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically an array of that enum that or enumeration or whatever that manages what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current navigation stack. Once I finally committed to that, it made so many things so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easier and I’m really digging on that. There’s definitely times where it’s annoying, but for the most part, it works really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, there’s a lot of stuff, both low-hanging and not, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to see get better. Marco and I have both been whining, we’ve been commiserating with each other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash whining publicly about how bad the error messaging still is in SwiftUI, and that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard problem to solve. It really, really is because we’re bending Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in half, breaking it and trying to put it back together again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I totally, genuinely sympathize with what the Swift and SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers are working against and up against. But as someone who is using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their work product, getting these completely unintelligible error messages, often being highlighted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on 50 lines away from where the actual error is, all too often,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I forget the way it’s phrased, but all too often, SwiftUI will just throw its hands up and be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, dude, I got nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’ll be like, this is wrong, but I can’t tell you why. Yeah, help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Help me, please. Give me give me give me 50 lines to narrow down on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I don’t think I’d like to do that. Just just figure it out. Just keep hitting command Z until you get something that builds and then slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the command shift Z back until something breaks, you know, stuff like that. And Marco, the thing you mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I’ve been running into more and more often, the Xcode errors that you fixed yet are still shown in the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the basically until you reboot your computer, at least restart Xcode. It’s driving me buddy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hopefully that’ll get better. But all in all, like I have been really enjoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing the SwiftUI work in call sheet and God knows like whether or not you think call sheet is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ugly, I can assure you that it would be way uglier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It would just be straight up ugly in UI kit. And there’s a lot of that is because I’m not as good a UI kit programmer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think SwiftUI makes making pretty interfaces much easier for someone like me who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a designer by any stretch of the imagination. And yeah, I echo what you’re saying, Marco, to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improvements in Xcode, improvements in SwiftUI, improvements in just what we’re able to do as developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any general way. Like all of that is welcome. And I’m really excited to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what lands. And I hope that even though I know the headset will overshadow all these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of times some of the boring stuff is some of the best stuff. Like, StoreKit 2 is not perfect, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really nice and a hell of a lot nicer than StoreKit 1 was. You know, silly stuff like that really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matters. And I hope we see some of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s like what I’m ultimately looking forward to is all those little tiny iterative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes. Like, for instance, there are still so much in the platform APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we can’t use async code yet. And it would be like any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time, you know, every new OS version And since async has been released, they’ve added a few more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco places you can use async code. I assume we will hopefully be in for the same thing this year that we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have more places we can use async code, more places that are that are made more Swift native,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more places that are more easily compatible with Swift UI, like all these these major platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and language shifts and framework shifts they’ve made over the last decade, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more places in the code where we can use them, where we can write the most modern kind of code possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift, Async, SwiftUI, all those, like, all the hooks that we get into various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system callbacks and frameworks and different UI components, like, the more they can modernize,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better. That makes developers’ lives easier. I have faith that they will do that again this year, because they do that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single year, and it’s wonderful. And that’s the kind of stuff that actually makes a bigger difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, to most developers’ lives than a new platform. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why, you know, it’s not going to get mentioned, it’s not going to get news It’s not gonna make anybody super excited,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except when we’re going through the API diffs or we see a session in the middle of the week, I’m like, oh my god, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one little tiny change to that one API call, that makes my life easier. That’s wonderful. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I most look forward to in WBDC is the big stuff, yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be game-changing for some people, not usually for everyone. It’s the small stuff that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s lives a little bit better once you can actually use that OS version. That’s the kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I really look forward to because that helps everyone. Even if you have an app type that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t benefit from any of the other big changes or a new platform that’s announced, you can still benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this one improvement to this file or network API or whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, couldn’t agree more. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coffee, and Judo. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Destroying a car & computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey I have to ask in the document under after show it says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey has destroyed Aaron’s car and computer in the span of one weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I can guess you know maybe there was a water spill in the computer but how did you spill enough water to destroy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah no I that is a little bit of not hyperbole but a little well I guess it is hyperbole it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a little bit exaggerated no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know right it’s funny it’s shocking I tell you Erin was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slated to go on her first girls trip since just before the pandemic, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks before the pandemic. She was slated to go to a place a couple hours away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home and that she was gonna spend the weekend there and have some time not being mom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which she freaking is deserved. She is owed that so badly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had a whole bunch of stuff that was going on the morning, Friday morning, that she was intending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to leave. So I am in the passenger seat of her Volvo. I forget why we took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her car, but we did. It was a little bit brisk that morning, and so I had a couple of ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sweatshirts actually on my lap, and then I had my iPad on top of that, which I brought with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I often do just in case I need it to like do something on the computer. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was putting the stack of two sweatshirts and iPad onto her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dashboard just very briefly as we were running in to drop Mikayla off. I I wouldn’t leave the iPad there, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s at a church. It’s not the sort of place where I’m really worried about something walking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I attempted to put the stack of sweatshirts and iPad onto her dash. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve just put something in Slack. You’re gonna wanna zoom a little bit. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s Erin’s windshield.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t know your own strength. You may be a Hulk. There is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant star-shaped crack in the right in the middle of this windshield. Not like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little chip you get when like a rock hits your windshield. like that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it radiates out the whole length of the windshield. It’s a big crack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s like a fairly large impact crater, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what you did? You know those tools they give you like if your car goes underwater and you can’t and you can’t roll down the window and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get out and it’s just a tiny pointy piece of metal that you whack into your window to free yourself? Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John You did that with your iPad, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corner of my iPad. That is exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John good for people to know if your car goes into a lake and and you can’t roll down the window and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t open the door because like the pressures, you know, the water pressure is keeping it closed, just take the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John of that iPad or I guess the iPhone if you take it out of your case and just whack that against the window and then swim to freedom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Erin is climbing out of the car. She’s getting Mikaela out of her car seat. I go to put this on the windshield, hand to God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentlemen. I hit the windshield. That is not up for grabs, obviously. But it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t even try to do fully work, but it was the littlest like ting, the littlest glance off the windshield.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not like I’m slamming the iPad into the windshield as much as we’re joking about me being the Hulk. I wasn’t slamming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad. It did hit the windshield, but it was the tiniest little glance off the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad leave your hand?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the iPad was in my hand, and it was in the magic keyboard that I can never remember the name of, the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard, magic keyboard, whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it upright? No, it was horizontal. I think I just happened to glance off the corner of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad just right. So Aaron’s getting out of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put the, I attempt to put the iPad and sweatshirt stack in her dash and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear tink and I see that did grow a little bit since I picked before that picture was taken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was mostly like that immediately. And so I do tink, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and she looks at me and she’s like, what? And then she goes, Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this amazes me because if you’ve driven a car, like, you know, you can like
⏹️ ▶️ John rocks can fly up from the wheels of a truck in front of you at 60 miles an hour on the and we’ll just leave a little chip, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destroyed it. I don’t know how, and I agree with you. It’s exactly accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay? Yeah, the iPad’s fine. She’s supposed to drive her own friggin’ car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two hours to go visit, have a weekend with her friends, and some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jackass over here decides to accidentally shatter her windshield. Erin, to her credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was extremely good about it. Like, she said to me, how did that happen? I heard the little ting. How could that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have possibly been the result of that little ting? She was very, very good about it. Much, much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than I would have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happened is somebody got Casey talking about the bug reporting process at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just thinking about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That or documentation, it was one of the two. But I absolutely destroyed her car. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel terrible about it to this day. I know I’m joking about it, but I really feel terrible about it. And again, I can’t say enough good things about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my wife, who has been an angel about this whole thing. I would have been such a turd if this had happened to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, and this is why she is, for a zillion reasons, the better person of the two of us. But she has been extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good about it, and hasn’t, she’s made fun of me for it, but she hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a turd about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full right to make fun of you forever about this. Oh, absolutely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now it also says in this bullet point that you destroyed her computer in the same weekend?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is definitely hyperbole. So Erin uses her actual computer, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall is my old MacBook Adorable, my old MacBook One, you know, the one port,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one USB-C only and a headphone jack MacBook, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love. I seem to recall that she previously had a MacBook Air that had some issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had been in the drink like six times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That were also, I believe, your fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Those unquestionably were my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco There is nothing up for grabs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we’re sitting on the couch and she, during the pandemic, Erin had started doing like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online grocery stuff through Kroger, where she goes on Kroger’s website, she picks out what she wants, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shop on her behalf, if you will, and then she drives up and they plunk all the groceries in the car. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s sitting there doing the Kroger order on her Macbook Adorable that was already in need of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reload. I don’t even remember what version of Mac OS is on it, but it’s years old at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been meaning to pull a Windows, if you will, and refresh everything and start a new, but I hadn’t gotten to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. She was using it. I’m sitting on the couch next to her watching her do this. I don’t remember why I was watching her. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think she was asking about which version of something I thought we should get. But all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sudden it freezes. And she’s like, oh, that’s weird. I said, oh, that’s a little weird, but I mean, it is a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adorable. It was a piece of garbage when it was new. I love that piece of garbage, but it was a piece of garbage. And then it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. Not good. So then she starts it up again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I see the Apple logo, and then I see a padlock. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not getting better. Not getting better. I think what it is, is FileVault
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking for a password, I think. But I tried every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey permutation of any of the passwords that she and I would ever normally use, and none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that like a firmware password? Do they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still support those? I have no idea. I mean, your guess is as good as mine. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I see this padlock. I’m like, okay, that’s, that’s something’s not right. So then I think, well, I can’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t looked back at this since that, that evening but I was like, all right, well, let me see if I can do like an Internet recovery and just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do some diagnostics or something like that. It’s able to start up, it’s able to go into the Internet recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, I’m able to download all that it needs for Internet recovery and then it fails
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time. I forget the error message off the top of my head, but it fails every time. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either the SSD has died or the logic board has had some catastrophic failure and the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is toast. So I actually, honestly, I didn’t destroy it. That was just made for a fun message for you to see in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, but I don’t think I destroyed it. And so that thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not been able to resuscitate it. If you have an idea for me, I am all ears. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thought about bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah? Yeah, get her a MacBook Air and.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, it’s funny you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that, because one of the tabs I have open on my computer, and I am not a John Syracusis, I only have a handful open right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, but one of them is a certified refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air Apple M2 chip with eight core CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 10 core GPU midnight for $1,530, which is I think what I’m gonna do. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular one has 16 gigs RAM and a half terabyte SSD. She probably needs neither of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what I haven’t mentioned to either of you, particularly Marco, earmuffs Marco, is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only functional computer that I have in the house, I guess other than the Mac mini, which I hadn’t thought about until just now, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only computer I have in the house right now is this one, is mine, is my MacBook Pro. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prone to occasionally putting computers underwater like I am, seems a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inadvisable for me not to have some other computer capable of podcasting somewhere in the house. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I told her, you know, whether or not she really needs a computer, because again, the only thing she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever really did on this computer was Kroger, and she could do that on like the iPad or my computer or what have you, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems prudent for us to have a backup computer for me just in case I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue. You are a computer professional, it is okay to have some kind of backup in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So my current plan, um, and I haven’t, I haven’t acted on this yet. And I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to try a little bit longer to see if I can resuscitate this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but my current plan is to probably just buy her a MacBook air, which is long overdue anyway, and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call it, call it a
⏹️ ▶️ John day. If you’re looking at refurbs, look at M1 and MacBook air. Instead of M2, because she doesn’t need the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 and you can ask her which form, like, cause she had that wedge-shaped computer before, she might want one. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 is going to be cheaper and it’s, it’s just as good for what she’s gonna be doing with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true, but she’s not- It’s not gonna be that much cheaper though. I haven’t looked, and I will look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Marco’s right. I don’t think it’ll be that much cheaper. She definitely deserves something better, even though I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think she needs it. I think you’re right, John. But more than anything else, I want this thing to last a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I agree with you that it’s probably not that different between the M1 and the M2, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my thought process is, I’ll get refurb, because she doesn’t need or want something brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. But nevertheless, I would like to get as good as I can reasonably get right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now without breaking the bank.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of like the M1, but I’ve said this before. I think the M1 is, a MacBook Air is a better machine than the M2, just
⏹️ ▶️ John like in terms of balance. So obviously the M2 is a little bit faster. And if you like the platform factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. But the M1, the M2 is like a little bit heatier and throttle-ier
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 was. They both don’t have fans and it’s fine. And it’s not a big deal, but I just, I feel like the M1 hit the sweet spot
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit better than the M2 does. So when I think about buying like a cheap laptop or something, I still think M1 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, even though the M2 is, and I got my son an M2 because you know, same thing, future-proofing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also that sweet MagSafe port, that means that you have one more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey port. Oh, that’s true too. Because now you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have three ports. Like when you have power connected, you now have two USB-C Thunderbolt ports that are free.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, she was using the MacBook One, so I don’t think ports are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But still, it’s still like, you know, in case this computer gets repurposed in your household down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a little bit more versatile to have the M2 one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly right. Somebody who was this, Gardner VH posted in the chat a link which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will put in the show notes. Here’s all the things that your computer can show on startup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is, I don’t think I can link to the heading, but the heading is lock icon. And if your Mac is using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a firmware password, the lock icon appears when you try to start up from another disk or volume, such as an external drive or Mac OS recovery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Enter the firmware password to continue. If I put in a firmware password, I have zero recollection of it. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried any permutation I can remember to get through this of both my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passwords and Aaron’s, and none of them worked. And also note that I just read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you, when you try to start up from another disk or volume, I wasn’t trying to do that. I was trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to start up from the internal SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Something has gone wonky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t get to the hardware diagnostics thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried. The computer’s behind me. can try it right now if you really want me to. I forget exactly how you start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on an Intel Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m happy to try
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s a hold down command D during boot or something. I don’t know, you can look it up. It’s in one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documents. But yeah, I think it’s just toast. I think either the SSD or the logic board
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it does say in this document that you can bring it into an Apple store with proof of purchase and they can reset it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. But that’s only if the firmware password that you never even set is somehow a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rather than being the symptom of a different deeper problem. So yeah, I’m guessing this is probably the end of this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and good riddance and you know Get her an m2 map. Okay, you just destroyed her car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the least you could do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly right. And I mean again, she doesn’t really care and I mean that in a good way Not that she’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just it’s not something that’s important to her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but everyone likes nice things, especially after you destroy their car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And by the way globe with warning symbol if memory serves, this is what it looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like This is on the same page right above lock icon actually. A globe with warning symbol is what I saw when I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do internet recovery and it failed on two or three consecutive, or well, no, I shouldn’t say consecutive. I went back and forth, but two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tries on that same night. I didn’t like bother plugging it into ethernet, which is a nightmare because it only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has one port, but I could have done that. I haven’t bothered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I really truly think that this thing is just fried. And I thought about bringing it to Apple just for the purposes of diagnosis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But even if they’re like, oh yeah, this is the problem. Like, what am I really going to do? What, what actionable information
⏹️ ▶️ John You can give it to them and they’ll recycle it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John about all it’s good for. Exactly. I mean, it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ John than throwing it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, there’s also reduce and reuse. It’s too late for reduce. You can reuse it. Maybe a doorstop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you can put it in the door pocket of one of your cars for emergency egress when you