540: The Points Don’t Matter
22 Jun 2023Vision vs. vision, AR privacy considerations, a good tech week in the Liss household, and a not-so-good one for the Arments.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Good SwiftUI days
- Follow-up:
- Vision Pro
- Privacy considerations (via Brandon Jones)
- Designing for Spatial Input
- Vergence & accommodation in eyesight (via Christopher Masto)
- visionOS SDK is out
- John Ternus on external GPUs on The Talk Show
- Apple adds passkeys to Apple ID & iCloud logins
- macOS 14 Sonoma
- iOS 17
- Apple [kinda] explains why third-party Watch faces aren’t supported
- Apple’s new beta install system
- DPReview has been purchased Gear Patrol
- Vision Pro
- Safari 17 Link Tracking Protection
- DockKit
#askatp:- Having seen Vision Pro, are we more enthusiastic about Apple’s automotive adventures? (via Nick)
- Do we use any sort of app uninstaller? (via
markblndr) - The age-old debate about using separate vaults for 2FA gets rekindled by Dave Copeland
- Post-show: Casey’s happy technology week, and Marco’s not-so-happy technology week.
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Chapters
- The SwiftUI high
- Overcast for visionOS? 🖼️
- visionOS privacy vs. apps
- visionOS input design
- ATP Membership
- Vergence vs. accommodation 🖼️
- Sponsor: Rocket Money
- Good documentation?!
- Ternus vs. GPUs
- Apple IDs get passkeys
- Keychain Access warning
- Mac notification rewrite?
- CloudKit vs. iCloud Drive
- Crosswords in News+
- New watch-face excuses
- New beta-installing system
- DPReview bought by GearPatrol
- Safari 17 untracks URLs
- DockKit
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: Vision vs. Apple car
- #askatp: App-uninstaller apps
- #askatp: 2FA really two-factor?
- Ending theme
- Casey’s updates
- Butt-crack problems
The SwiftUI high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in a really good mood tonight. Good! You know, when you’re writing SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes things don’t go your way. Sometimes you hit walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can’t figure out why something isn’t updating or you can’t get something to look or work right or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the case may be. Today, I had an incredibly good SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day where I’m like, I was like firing on all cylinders, like getting everything working. Like I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually would like, you know, go like, yes! when I got something working to nobody and you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alone in the house in a room by myself, you know, clapping to myself. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good day. I feel so good right now. This is like the Swift UI high. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, things are working, things are looking good. I’m actually making progress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I just have to rewrite the entire rest of the app, but the things I’ve been working have been really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that, how’d you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln? No, all kidding aside, that’s really fantastic. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good SwiftUI day. A good SwiftUI day, like I really just like the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a 10x developer and I think that’s mostly been put in the, you know, recycling bin as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that we think are true. But when I’m having a good SwiftUI day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like one of those mythical 10x developers. I get so much done in so little time like when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and SwiftUI are holding hands and skipping together, it is the best.
Overcast for visionOS?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five minutes before the show, I finally got the Vision OS SDK downloaded and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed and I got to run Overcast, like the current version of Overcast, not the new Swift UI rewrite. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run that in the simulator, just like in iPad window mode. And hoo boy, do I have a lot of work to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny, like earlier I had tried, hey, let me see if I, should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I be doing a Mac Catalyst version as well? I decided last week I mentioned like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna do the native app kit version because it just wasn’t worth the amount of trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be and I’m looking at catalysts like I might do catalysts I don’t know but it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that’s like a decent amount of work and then I look at Vision OS like oh no this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be a lot of work but you know well we’ll see I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad version seems to work. I wouldn’t say it’s good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but neither is the iPad version that runs on the Mac now for M1 Macs. Like, that’s not good either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. It’s not that good. And I know that because it’s just an iPad app running in a window.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s only so good that can be. And so, you know, it’s fine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than not having anything. It’s certainly better than my horrendous web app, but it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly as good as something that has like any care put into it at all to customize it for the platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And I would like to just keep that Running on the Mac like in the way it is now and just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweak things a little bit You know give it a nice toolbar give it you know a couple little things But I don’t think I can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that without making a catalyst app And that’s making catalyst app is harder. It’s a whole separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco target a whole separate binary You got to submit it to the Mac App Store everything separate from the iOS app like it’s kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different beast that’s probably not worth the amount of trouble, but Vision OS, I’m looking forward to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I have a lot of work to do, and I’m really glad it isn’t coming out like, you know, next week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or next month or anything like that. Thank goodness we have a lot of time because we’re gonna need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I actually think you’re selling yourself a little short. Overcast for Apple Silicon on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really not that bad. The only complaint I have about it, which you probably can’t fix, is that, you know, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve discussed many times, I’m a devout spaces person, and Overcast lives in in one of the spaces on one of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitors. And the media keys work fine as long as Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on a visible space. But if I like hit play when Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on a different space that I’m not looking at, when I come back to the space that Overcast is on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s when it starts playing, which again, I don’t know that there’s really anything you can do about that short of going the whole Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey route, but that drives me bananas. Other than that, I actually think it’s really not bad at all. It’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than serviceable. It’s actually even pretty decent. So you’re selling yourself short.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s bad, but I mean, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is coming from the guy who was like, yeah, my iMac reboots itself like, you know, three times a day, but it’s not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, stop. At least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m being generous, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and that media key thing, I don’t think I can do anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try, but like I made some change early on in the M1 Mac era.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which made it much better. Yeah, yeah, I remember, I don’t remember what it was specifically, but I remember you doing it and it made it much better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it didn’t get us 100% of the way there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was some like, some, you know, change to one of the remote control command things or some audio session thing, I forget what it is, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like little tiny detail. But I mean, I’ve found personally, I’ve found Mac media key handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, not just in Overcast, like even just with Apple’s own music app has been so buggy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I usually don’t use media keys anymore. Like it works so infrequently, I usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just switch over to the music app and hit space bar, because it’s just so unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if I hit play, pause on my keyboard at any given time, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, usually nothing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m just like, that’s, that’s not worth the hassle. I’ll just like, I just, I just give up on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I think the problem for me with media keys, normally I feel like they work okay. But if there’s a scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I have multiple things that I could ostensibly want to play pause. So let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have Apple music open. I have a YouTube video open in Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the Mac it, I don’t know how it’s supposed to intuit which one I want, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like it always guesses the wrong one. Yeah. And so like, you know, I want, I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just opened up a tab in Safari that happens to have a YouTube video in it, but music is playing. So I want to pause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my music so I can watch the YouTube video. And what ends up happening inevitably is it plays the YouTube video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while the music is still playing. It’s like, no, I wanted the other one. Uh, so yeah, that’s, it’s, uh, it’s a hard problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to solve. Like, again, how can you possibly know which one I want to control with this one button? But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just funny to me that it seems to consistently choose the wrong one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. to add eye tracking to macOS, then it’ll tell what you’re looking at and play pause that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true, that’s true.
visionOS privacy vs. apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And speaking of eye tracking, we have a lot of follow up to do and it starts with Vision Pro. And Brandon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jones has some feedback for us and information for us. You want to talk about this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. This is something that was in the WWDC videos, but Brandon Jones did a good job of summarizing sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of the implications of it all. So I’ll read. These are from several Mastodon posts that have sort of compiled here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s Vision OS significantly limits how applications are allowed to interact with the user, especially regarding
⏹️ ▶️ John their new gaze-based input and I think it’s worth talking about. The summary is, if you want to do AR
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, you must give Apple full rendering control. A lot of it centers around Apple’s choice to both make eye
⏹️ ▶️ John tracking central to the headset’s input and simultaneously declare it to be too private to be exposed to apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John which to be fair is pretty sensitive data. We’ve talked about this before when we were talking about the WGC sessions that like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was saying you couldn’t you wouldn’t get like eye tracking data you couldn’t tell where the user was looking and
⏹️ ▶️ John how that might be you know preclude certain types of games or whatever because it’s a privacy concern. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the same as where your cursor is and Mac OS or whatever gaze data is more sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John because you haven’t even yet decided to do anything. It’s just where your eyes are wandering. Anyway, that’s the principle behind that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And also, and not just that, but also like, you know, the vision pro is also looking at your entire room and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of your surroundings and, and, you know, parts of your body and everything. And so not only can apps not tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you are looking until you choose to click on something, but also they can’t see your room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the and they don’t even know necessarily like where the walls are in in like regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app modes. And so yeah, a lot of these details, you know, we’ll get to but that’s that’s like the gist of it is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, your app, your app can say here’s a here’s a button, let me know if someone taps it, but it can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you’re like hovering over it by looking at it or selecting or anything like that. So there’s all sorts of implications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this that are pretty interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. So continuing here from Brandon summary, in the Safari session, that described a whole new
⏹️ ▶️ John element highlighting pattern that discards the web’s built-in hover APIs in favor of one handled entirely by the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John in the name of not leaking gaze data. But it’s not just the web that gets this treatment. If you want to display anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the user’s space, you don’t get to render and shade it yourself. Instead, you hand off meshes and high-level
⏹️ ▶️ John materials to the OS and it renders it for you. The relevant W3C session, if you wanna learn about this by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John is 10096, build great games for spatial computing. Although I haven’t actually watched the session, but I do wonder if they talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, shooting things with your eyeballs. Anyway, Brandon continues, from the OS perspective, this is an attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John approach. They can handle object selection and highlighting without ever exposing gaze or hand data. Now let me just
⏹️ ▶️ John summarize what this part is talking about here. Like, so when you look at something, you might want it to highlight,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as the controls do, the little buttons and stuff or whatever, but hey, whatever you’re doing, say you write an app and it’s got a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of 3D objects and you want like the thing that the person’s looking at to highlight so they know when they make the pinch gesture,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will do it. If you, as the application developer, were able to actually render the
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D objects, you’d be like, okay, well now, you know, if they’re looking at it, I have to make it glow.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’d have code for that. But you don’t know when they’re looking at it. The OS handles all the rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. And because the OS has handed the meshes and like, it doesn’t, you know, it says, here you go, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the raw materials OS, you render it, the OS can decide when to highlight
⏹️ ▶️ John your button, your 3D object or whatever, without your app knowing, because that’s all happening on the rendering side.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t get to choose like, oh, when I, When they look at it, I want, you know, this to look like this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, the OS handles that entirely, which is very unlike 3D APIs in the normal sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you, yes, you construct the objects or whatever, but you also choose how to render them. And not
⏹️ ▶️ John so in Vision OS, and that’s so the OS can do things like highlight without your app knowing. To continue,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can light the scene without exposing environment data. What that means is, what Marco was just saying, how they don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John your room looks like. Like if you’re doing it in AR mode, they take like your room, whether, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, So you have like your walls are painted red and you have lots of lights on that’s gonna bounce a bunch of red
⏹️ ▶️ John light around That is incorporated into the rendering of whatever you put in there If you have a little
⏹️ ▶️ John 3d object in your app or your little windows or whatever The red light bouncing off the walls influences how
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re rendered But because you as the app developer don’t even have access to the surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John room You couldn’t do that The OS does it for you the OS sort of treats your room as kind of I imagine the kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John a cube map or whatever and lights the objects that you put in front of the user
⏹️ ▶️ John so they look like they’re incorporated into the room without your app ever having any idea what
⏹️ ▶️ John the room looks like because you don’t have to render that you don’t have to figure out what the lighting should be you don’t have to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John like make it look like that object is really on the coffee table given the rooms lighting the OS does that for you
⏹️ ▶️ John continuing from Brandon here they can occlude virtual objects without exposing room geometry again they can
⏹️ ▶️ John you know they know what’s blocked by your coffee table or or whatever. Brandon says, want to try to experiment
⏹️ ▶️ John with different input models or try out an advanced new rendering technique? Sounds like you simply can’t, at least not in any AR
⏹️ ▶️ John environment. Apple is offering more flexibility if you’re doing a VR app, but there is no camera
⏹️ ▶️ John slash gaze data allowed. So I thought this was really interesting. And like, it’s the sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John technical side of this that allows Apple to do two things. One, to handle
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the drudgery for you. Like, I don’t want to, you know, I just have an iOS app. I don’t want to figure out how my little floating
⏹️ ▶️ John window should look like it’s well integrated into the room. But two, even if you’re writing a full fledged native Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John OS app with a bunch of 3D objects and whatever, you know, whatever you come up with, a cool app that
⏹️ ▶️ John would only work in Vision OS, you both don’t get to render those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, you don’t have to, the OS will handle it for you. And this is, you know, a great example of how
⏹️ ▶️ John privacy focused Apple is, that this sort of like fundamentally defines the
⏹️ ▶️ John application programming interface for 2D and 3D stuff on Vision Pro, entirely in
⏹️ ▶️ John service of privacy and not letting apps get at information that they don’t have to have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, you can imagine if they didn’t put all these protections in place, look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrifying, awful, morally bankrupt way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad tech and surveillance tech over the years have exploited even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smallest bits of information they can collect from you, they can infer about you. Anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you give them, they’ll try to sniff your browser configuration and try to fingerprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, obviously the IP address stuff, there’s so much stuff they try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to derive from any little bit of data they get about you. Imagine if they could see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your room, everything around your room, everything about it. They could derive where you were, they could derive who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are very, very easily, even more easily than they do now. Then imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gaze data, imagine if they could track your eyes in real time as you browsed a webpage. If you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithmic generated content is bad now, imagine if they had that much data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on exactly where you look and when and how. Imagine what they could create,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of hellscape, like the web would become even more horrible than it is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with data they could generate based on well this will generate not only the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clicks, but this will make people look at it more. Like, it would be a terrifying hellscape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more than it is now. And so, having this level of focus on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AR environment is something that I don’t think any other major tech company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would even consider, let alone put this much effort into and have this much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conviction about, because you know this is going to, in some ways, hurt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app development on Vision OS. And I have more to say about that later, but you know, talk about like principles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and courage, like to, to this heavily restrict such fundamental data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about your apps, environment and interaction from being visible to apps and to put as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort into it as they did to keep those things separate and private. That really takes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of dedication on this front. And again, I think it’s the right call. I mean, this, this platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is extremely early. It’s really hard to say at this point what will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best decision in retrospect? What will work out long term? Will they have to loosen up on some of these things over time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t really know yet. It’s way too early to say, but I think this is going to prove to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good move even though it will create a bit of pain in the buttery for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain development tasks and things like that. Certain things will become a little bit tricky that you have to work around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or certain features or interactions that you’ll have to either not do or stick with the stock way that they’re done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than doing your own custom thing. But again, I think overall this is probably the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move and only Apple would have done this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if they didn’t do this, the ad tech companies would be reading the spine of every single book
⏹️ ▶️ John in your bookshelf, reading the publications that are sitting on your coffee table, doing face recognition
⏹️ ▶️ John against everybody in your family, listening to every sound that plays, like determining
⏹️ ▶️ John where you live based on looking out your windows at the angle of the sun and cross, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John calibrating with Google Earth because you didn’t give a location date
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Oh, they’re watching you. They’ll be watching, they’d be watching your arms, your skin, like your fingerprints. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would, anything they could see, they would use. And they could see a lot from something that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a broad view of the world. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the flip side of that is that, you know, like, so this is, it makes certain things and apps more difficult, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John make the experience more coherent. Not having control over the rendering means every
⏹️ ▶️ John object that is rendered in augmented reality, everything that is supposed to be floating in the middle of your room or sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John on your coffee table will be rendered in a consistent way. If you control that rendering yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John app developers could do whatever they wanted with the rendering and the texture mapping and the shading and the shadowing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And would they all choose to do things in the same way with the same level of skill? Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not. And that would lead to a more of a hodgepodge inconsistent experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John even not in any kind of malicious way, But just if app A developer makes different
⏹️ ▶️ John choices about how to shade things than app developer B and you have them both running at the same time, it’ll look, they’ll look different. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if they both try to incorporate themselves into the room somehow, they would look different from each other due to different decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas in the OS does it, it’s gonna be consistent across every single application because it has to be because the
⏹️ ▶️ John apps literally don’t control the rendering the OS does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, look at on iOS, you have many different visual styles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many different interaction styles. And even in the absence of any kind of malice, what you get is a world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a lot of like web apps and electron apps. And the way they behave on that, we all know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this by using them, they behave in subtly different ways in lots of little implementation details, lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of feels, lots of looks, lots of behaviors. They’re just different from the system defaults.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Imagine that in AR. Like, you know, it’s easy when we see, we’re seeing this new platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, we’re seeing it in PR demo mode. We’re seeing Apple’s polished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that they showed during the demo, we’re hearing about the press demos that everyone else got, that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these carefully walked through events that were carefully polished for those demos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we’re not seeing yet is what’s going to happen when this gets exposed to the world and we get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every crappy developer trying to make crappy corporate apps for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It’s not going to be that perfect. The more Apple puts in place at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start to try to control the basics, the better this platform can be. And something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how an object is rendered in your room, that probably should be consistent. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you imagine different objects on screen at different times from different apps, or different styles or different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco renderers that are being used, different libraries that are being used between different apps, if one of them is using like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever the AR version of Electron will become, like rElectron or whatever, you know, if somebody is using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our Electron apps today, their corporate BS app, because they don’t want to write it for three different AR headsets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to have a different rendering style. Like, the light might hit it differently, it might have different textures,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or different, like, edge behaviors, or different interaction behaviors, like, there are so many ways that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be really disorienting, or just crappy looking and sloppy. And so much about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR needs to be both consistently rendered, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rendered with a lot of sophistication, in order to prevent pretty basic fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems like motion sickness or disorientation or things like that. And so you can imagine like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s something, if there’s some custom renderer out there used by our Electron apps that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit crappier than Apple’s built-in one, and you know it would be, it could cause weird problems for a lot of people. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of environment is very sensitive and needs to be controlled a lot. And to have Apple control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of that rendering pipeline from, again, from this early point of view that who knows what we’ll think in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this early point of view, that sounds like the right call.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, plus, what you’re looking at isn’t constrained to a small or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at best medium sized box in front of you, right? Like, I’m looking at two 5k screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even still, all of the UI wonkiness that’s happening is contained in those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two rectangles. Granted, it’s not real. But when you’re suddenly you’re not real,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. Yeah, right. When you’re when you’re busting all of these things into your quote unquote real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life. I mean, again, I know it’s not exactly true, but that can be quite a bit more jarring than when it’s limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just a couple of rectangles that are directly in front of your face. And so I think having that consistency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes sense. And, and I really applaud Apple because I think I could imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other companies going for AR and just, you know, shrugging at all the privacy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, what I commend Apple for is they clearly have really thought it through. Now, as Marco said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, ad tech in tracking and surveillance tech, they are as slimy as they come. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure they’ll find a way around some of these protections, but it sure sounds like Apple’s put a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of thought into making sure this is safe for users, which as a user, you know, whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get one of these immediately or later or whatever, I really appreciate that. You’re getting one immediately. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the three of us is gonna have to, and I’m not sure which one of us is gonna be without a chair when the music stops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m definitely, do you see how crappy my app looks? I have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we always knew you’d find an excuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think given that I’m a professional iOS developer, I don’t think it’s an excuse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you a professional XR OS? I mean, Vision OS developer? I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m giving you a hard time. We’re probably all in for one. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John John, tell me about- Actually, before we move on, for the people who listen to what Casey said before
⏹️ ▶️ John and think, I don’t care that all my apps on my screen have different UIs. In fact, I think that’s a strength. I like the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John each app can have its own UI. It’s not so much like, oh, people will be confused that apps
⏹️ ▶️ John have different UIs and they won’t know how they look. It’s, it gets to more of what Casey was saying, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not just confined to his screens, they exist in the world of his screens. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John is some consistency in that world. The OS controls like the, you know, the shadows on the windows, for example, or whatever, although some of
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s overwritable. But the whole point of augmented reality is that everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John even the stupid little rectangles, even the stupid little flat rectangles that are just a phone app or an iPad app, even
⏹️ ▶️ John those that are apps that have nothing to do with virtual reality or 3D, it’s just a plain
⏹️ ▶️ John old app, the rectangle is supposed to be floating in the air in your room.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not true of any of the windows on your screen. They’re not supposed to be in your room. They
⏹️ ▶️ John are supposed to be, and literally are, on a monitor that’s in your room. But they do not incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John anything from your room in there. They’re not like floating above your desk. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of the monitor. So everything in Vision OS, when you’re in AR mode and not in
⏹️ ▶️ John VR mode, where you’re seeing your room and everything, is supposed to look like it is in that room.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the consistency they’re going for. Not that everything on the screen has to look the same. You can make wildly different apps. Take all
⏹️ ▶️ John those wildly different apps that Marco was talking about on iOS, you can run them all in Vision OS. But when those little rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ John are floating in the air, they better look like they’re floating in the room that you’re in. The rectangles themselves will be
⏹️ ▶️ John wacky and have stupid banner ads and whatever the hell they are, but they have to look like they’re in your room. And of course, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John for 3D objects, for actual apps that take advantage of Vision OS and aren’t just little floating flat iOS and iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, same deal, but even for the flat ones, the rectangles have to look like they’re in your room. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that goes all the way up to the, I was playing with the Vision OS demo thing too, the basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the window backgrounds, like someone was pointing out like, hey, there’s no light mode and dark mode in Vision OS. You wanna know why?
⏹️ ▶️ John The window material, the thing that windows are made out of in Vision OS is this weird, magical,
⏹️ ▶️ John translucent, frosted glass, watch your mohousie. And they have a bunch of like demo
⏹️ ▶️ John rooms that you can flip like kitchen during the day, kitchen at night, living room at night, living room,
⏹️ ▶️ John try all the different lighting. It’s like, how can this window be legible in all this different lighting? What color is this window?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a white window? Is it a dark window? I can’t really tell. It’s the OS handles this
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Like, because if you tried to do it yourself and you said, well, my app is always a black window with white text.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you put it in a pitch black room when no one can see the window anymore, just like the text is floating in midair, the OS is handling
⏹️ ▶️ John so much stuff for you to maintain the illusion that things really are
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated into your reality. And the final point I’ll make of this is that by Apple doing all of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple gets better at doing this, when the new hardware comes out, when they revise their software, when they get
⏹️ ▶️ John better and better at making it look like it’s photorealistically floating in your actual room,
⏹️ ▶️ John every app will benefit from that because the apps never controlled that rendering to begin with. It’s not like if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John does an app and doesn’t update it for three years, it’ll look like a cruddy, you know, old version that doesn’t look like… No,
⏹️ ▶️ John every app, since they control the rendering, will advance along with Apple doing this stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is definitely the right choice. I do definitely think they should expose gaze data in full VR for games,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those are two, you know, entirely separate things. One has an awareness of your surroundings and the other has no… It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even have any awareness of your surroundings, at which point I have no problem passing my gaze data to the
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting game of letting it know which thing I’m looking at the shoot. So hopefully Apple will figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to separate those priorities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think this is one of those things where Apple needs to see how are we going to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I’m not the first to say that the Apple Watch, you know, Apple had ideas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how we were going to use it, both in terms of just regular use and in terms of developers. And over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, they refined, you know, what they thought the watch was for based on what people we’re actually using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the watch for. And I suspect we’re going to see a lot of that with the Vision Pro. And if there’s a cry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, oh, we really would like to do such and such, but we need eye data,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then presumably Apple will figure out a way to facilitate it. Be that only in VR mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you’re saying, or maybe there’s some sort of way to do it in AR mode that’s privacy conscious, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have some sort of like a dialogue that you have to approve that says, hey, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this app really, really, really wants your location. I mean, eye tracking data. And, you know, is that okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you? And any of those things, I don’t know if they’re the right answer, but they are answers. So,
visionOS input design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of gaze and things like that, we have some links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some various WWDC sessions, particularly 10073 Design for Spatial Input.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about this, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this is just like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I design things for Vision OS, assuming I’m making a native app for it and not just running one of my existing ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things that caught my eye was they showed the minimum area for UI elements.
⏹️ ▶️ John They say that it is 60 points, but the elements can be smaller than 60 points with margins.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so there’s two little diagrams. They showed like a button and a 60 point square. And they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, so the button doesn’t fill the 60 point square. In fact, there’s an eight point margin on either side, making
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual button, dun dun dun, 44 points, which a number that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stuck out to me. Wasn’t that exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same size that they used to say it was like on the original iPhone, the minimum size of your buttons should be 44 points.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I thought that was interesting. And also interesting that the eye tracking is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John less precise than our meaty fingers because they want the hit area to be bigger than 44. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the hit area is 60, but the visual thing is 44. Now you may be hearing this and saying, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell does 60 points mean in an environment where my window is floating in midair
⏹️ ▶️ John and can be pulled closer and farther away from the user and the person can walk around? Like, what, does points mean
⏹️ ▶️ John anything? On a screen it means something because no matter how far away your iPhone screen is to you, you have to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John your finger to it to touch it. And once your finger touches it, 44 points given Apple’s DPI
⏹️ ▶️ John and blah, blah, blah, is roughly the same size for across their phone lines. It’s varied a little bit, but you can see how point
⏹️ ▶️ John size for touch targets, having a standard makes some sense. But how does having a point size
⏹️ ▶️ John on an AR app make any kind of sense? Well, Apple continues in that same session to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John this. We’ll put timestamp links of these two different offsets. You can see those parts if you don’t wanna watch
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole video. Apple says, the system provides dynamic scale for app windows. you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John how the window scales larger as it moves away and smaller as it moves close. Dynamic scale makes your UI
⏹️ ▶️ John fill the same field of view and preserve the size of the targets no matter where the window is positioned. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see this in the video, but think of it this way. Normally, when objects get farther away from you, they look smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, you know, just perspective, right? What Apple does is as you push a window away
⏹️ ▶️ John from you, it makes the window bigger. So no matter how far you push it away and vice versa,
⏹️ ▶️ John or how close you pull it to yourself, but always fills the same proportion of your field of view. That is a
⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic scale mode for Windows. So 60 points makes sense, because it’s like, go ahead, put that window wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want. I am gonna make sure that in the world of this AR thing, that
⏹️ ▶️ John button is always 60 points. You can’t make it bigger by pulling the thing towards you. You can’t make it smaller by
⏹️ ▶️ John pushing the thing away. It’s gonna be 60 points no matter what, because you have to be able to target it with your eye and their
⏹️ ▶️ John judgment of what is comfortably eye trackable given their current eye tracking technology in people’s eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John is 60 points. So that’s really weird if you see it happening like they show in the video. From your perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems okay, right? But if you were to look at it from the side, like if you were to, you know, they give you like
⏹️ ▶️ John a view in the 3D world of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there was another 3D camera over here looking at, you can see the window getting bigger as it gets pushed away and smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John as it gets pushed forward and it looks really weird. You can use fixed scale instead. And in that
⏹️ ▶️ John case, it behaves like a regular 3D thing where when you push it away from you, it gets smaller. When you pull it towards you, it gets bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I thought that was super interesting. And that answers a question that I hadn’t really thought about until, you know, actually try using
⏹️ ▶️ John these apps in the simulator. Like, can you make an app unusable because it’s too far
⏹️ ▶️ John away from you? And in their default mode, they try to make sure that doesn’t happen. Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the points do matter, but everything’s still made up.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, hey you, you ATP listener. Hi, hey, it’s me. We are sponsored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week by ATP Membership. Now, if you’re hearing this, you’re probably not a member, because members get an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad-free version of the show. So all these little promos that I’m sticking in like this, and of course the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular sponsor reads, are not included in the member version of the show. You can add that feed to any podcast player you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t care what you use, well, I care, but you know, the rest of us don’t care so much. And all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that’s just eight bucks a a month or whatever that multiple is per year. Now, we also give you a bootleg version
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes everything we do in the live stream and it’s unedited, raw audio, you know, doesn’t have chapters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does have Casey swearing and it does have, you know, whatever we talk about, you know, before and after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show. Maybe I’ll cut it from the published show because it might not fit or whatever, but we’ll put it in the bootleg.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of people love that perk. You also get occasional discounts on merchandise during some of our sales. for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re paying to support the show. And look, we love you for listening, no matter how you support us. You can support us by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to the show with the sponsors in it. That is very great. And we thank you for that. If you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join and become a member for eight bucks a month and get those cool perks, you can do that too. It’s a different way to support the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We love all of our listeners equally. But certainly if you want to do membership, we strongly encourage that. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco atp.fm slash join to learn more about that. Thank you so much. And now back to
Vergence vs. accommodation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Christopher Masto had some information on how our eyes work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will likely cope with Vision Pro. And so this begins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the two techniques your eyes have to focus on stuff. There is, and I read up on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this earlier, I’m probably getting some of these details wrong, but the general idea is there’s vergence and accommodation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, vergence is your eyes ever so slightly, they’re pivoting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along a vertical axis. So, you’re not going literally cross-eyed, but your eyes will come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closer together a little bit as you’re focusing on something far away. I think I have that right. And they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spread out a little bit, so to speak, as you’re focusing on something closer. And that’s vergence. Then, accommodation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is basically, hey, you have a lens inside your eye that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is used to focus things. And Christopher writes that the discrepancy between the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of the sources of discomfort in VR because everything is at the same eye-squish distance, the same vergence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regardless of the binocular distance. And so this creates what’s called the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vergence-accommodation conflict, or VAC, which is a visual phenomenon that occurs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the brain receives mismatching cues between vergence and accommodation of the eye. This commonly occurs in virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reality devices, augmented reality devices, 3D movies, and types of stereoscopic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey displays. The effect can be unpleasant and can cause eye strain. We’ll put links to all of this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Last week we talked, I was talking about the, you know, the two different things that we focus and it was the moving and the squishing
⏹️ ▶️ John and these are the actual names for them, right? And to be clear, the squishing in mammals anyway, the squishing is tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little muscles in our eyes are squishing the lens of our eye. There’s like a, you know, a little lens that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make flatter to change how the light is focused on the back of your eye where where the retina
⏹️ ▶️ John is. And that’s, you know, as your lens gets less squishy as you get old, you have trouble focusing as
⏹️ ▶️ John much. Basically, there’s a measurement of like, how much can you squish the lens in your eye? It’s like really round
⏹️ ▶️ John or really flat. And that distance, like how much you can squish it is measured, it’s like measured in diopters or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. As you get older, you have less range of squishing. So the squishing thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is the accommodation and the vergence is like Casey said, the cross-eyed type thing. If something’s real close to you, your eyes kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of point towards the bridge of your nose. something’s far away, your eyes point straight out. Now, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some stuff I don’t actually know. Everyone who has sent in information about this has said,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, I use VR stuff, and in VR stuff, the vergence distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the vergence is the same. Like, there is no, like, pointing your eyes straight
⏹️ ▶️ John forward to look at things that are far away, or going cross-eyed to look at things that are close. Every single thing that is seen
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen in most VR headsets is at the same vergence level.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s this vergence accommodation conflict type thing. Because you think you’re looking at something farther
⏹️ ▶️ John away, but your eyes are, I might’ve got it backwards that it’s the same accommodation. Anyway, the discrepancy between the
⏹️ ▶️ John vergence and accommodation because one of those two things is fixed. Now, is that how
⏹️ ▶️ John it is in the Apple Vision Pro? Is everything at the same focal distance regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of how far away it is? Will the Apple Vision Pro suffer from Virgin’s accommodation conflict.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what, again, session 10073, design for spatial influence, had some things to say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not sure what this means. I can interpret this both ways. So at four minutes, they said, we should also consider
⏹️ ▶️ John depth when thinking about eye comfort. Depth is a unique feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of spatial experiences. Placing your content near or far away creates different feelings in your projects.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, that seems like a reasonable truth, regardless of this whole virgins
⏹️ ▶️ John accommodation thing. They continue, but our eyes focus on one distance at a time and changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the focus depth frequently can create eye strain. Now, wait a second. How would you
⏹️ ▶️ John change the focus depth of anything inside the headset if
⏹️ ▶️ John the focus depth is always fixed at a particular depth, no matter how far away anything is?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’re trying to say this, hey, you know, don’t bring things close and far and make the person focus at different distances.
⏹️ ▶️ John but if the Apple Vision Pro is just like most headsets, no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John how close or far the objects are from you in the virtual world, your eyes never have
⏹️ ▶️ John to refocus. And to be clear, like we said last week, the screens are fractions of an inch from your eyeball,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the focal distance due to lenses in the headset is not inches from your eyeball, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The focal distance is like, I don’t know, like six feet in front of you or something, or nine feet, whatever it is. Like there is a, in
⏹️ ▶️ John most headsets, there is a fixed focal distance, and that focal distance is far in front of you. That’s why we were saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re not gonna get myopia from looking at screens that are a fraction of inch away, because the focal distance is farther. And how
⏹️ ▶️ John is the focal distance farther? There are lenses in the Apple Vision Pro, even if you don’t wear glasses. There are additional
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses that you add onto that if you wear glasses, but even if you have perfect 20-20 vision, the Apple Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John has lenses inside of it that set the focal plane of, you know, hey, if you wanna see
⏹️ ▶️ John the images on that screen, focus your eyes as if they’re looking at something six feet in front of you, whatever the focal distance
⏹️ ▶️ John plane is. So Apple continues, look to keep interactive content at the same depth
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it feel effortless to switch between UI. By maintaining the same Z position, your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to adapt to the new distance. Again, I am confused. Z distance, by the way, is like how far is it
⏹️ ▶️ John from your face? Like, is it really far in the distance or is it really close to your nose? And they’re saying, hey, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make things different. Z distance is keep things close together so your eyes don’t need to adapt to a new
⏹️ ▶️ John distance. They could be talking about a versions accommodation conflict saying, hey, when you put things closer
⏹️ ▶️ John and farther away, people’s eyes will instinctively try to refocus on them. But unfortunately in our headset,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything is at the same focal distance and that will cause vergence accommodation complex. So don’t make people do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could also interpret it as saying, wait a second, it’s possible to focus my eyes at different distances inside
⏹️ ▶️ John this headset? Now there is technically a way they could do that because they know where your eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John are pointing individually. They could tell where, like how, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what your vergence is, like, you know, if two laser beams came out of both of your eyeballs, where would the laser beams
⏹️ ▶️ John meet? And that is the distance where you’re looking, like, you know, the vergence distance that you’re looking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they know where your eyes are looking and which direction they’re pointing, they could calculate that, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they would have to mechanically move the lenses inside the headset to refocus at the
⏹️ ▶️ John new focal distance where your eyes are, but I don’t think they’re doing that because A, they would have bragged about
⏹️ ▶️ John it a lot, And B, focusing and refocusing in response to where the
⏹️ ▶️ John virgins of your eyes would have to be really fast, like super expensive mirrorless
⏹️ ▶️ John camera fast and would make noise and would have motors and would destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life or whatever. So I don’t think they’re doing that. So my interpretation of this, my best guess is, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a fixed focal distance inside the Apple Vision Pro. Everything, no matter how far away
⏹️ ▶️ John it is from you, is at that focal distance. And that means this
⏹️ ▶️ John headset does suffer from convergence to combination conflict because your eyes will expect
⏹️ ▶️ John things farther away. They will expect you to focus on them at a different distance, but you won’t have to, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then this whole session is trying to say, hey, don’t do that. Don’t put one thing really far away and then one thing close, then far
⏹️ ▶️ John away, then close because people’s eyes will constantly be trying to focus on them and they don’t need to do that on our headset.
⏹️ ▶️ John If we actually had a headset or were able to try it, this is a thing that we might look into, but for now we’re just speculating.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I thought this was fascinating because it’s a topic that Apple pretty much entirely didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John touch on. I didn’t hear anybody who tried the headset talk about this either. And I personally
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any experience with headsets to say how bad virgin’s accommodation conflict is or if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s tiring or eye straining or whatever, but that’s definitely something we will follow up on when Marco gets
⏹️ ▶️ John his headset in case he maybe gets his.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you not in for one, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Maybe, we’ll see. Oh, come on. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. No, I think, you know, when you look at the design of Vision OS, how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be structured so far, so first of all, I think people have, I forget whether Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said this or whether people have analyzed it, but it seems like the default physical, like, fixed focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance of the Vision Pro seems to be something like 2 meters in front of you, like 2 to 3 meters in front of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. If you look at the design of Vision OS, when new windows are shown, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the home screen icons are shown, etc, they all seem to be shown at about that distance from you. it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like what Vision OS is doing is kind of having like a default distance from your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face that it renders things at. And that is almost certainly the actual accommodation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance that the optics are designed to simulate. And so if you leave things at that distance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your eyes, that like the default distance it’s placing things from you, I’m guessing you don’t get VAC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least it’s as minimized as it can be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the problem in AR mode is the whole whole rest of the room also exists. And the wall is farther, and the coffee table
⏹️ ▶️ John is closer. And so if you do choose to look at them and try to quote unquote focus on them, it will feel weird
⏹️ ▶️ John because you don’t have to focus on them. Because that’s part of the unreality of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it look like the room, or does it look like a screen? Well, if you’re looking at the room and you’re looking at the coffee table, you will
⏹️ ▶️ John have vergence and accommodation such that you can focus on the coffee table that’s a foot and a half and away. In the headset,
⏹️ ▶️ John with a fixed focal distance, you won’t. You’ll just put your eyes over there, You point your eyes at it and it will already
⏹️ ▶️ John be in focus. Except if your eyes try to adjust with the expectation that it will not
⏹️ ▶️ John be. Anyway, so but yeah, you’re totally right about where like even when you put the windows to the side,
⏹️ ▶️ John it tilts them. It’s trying to maintain that radius of like this is the this is the non VAC region.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re anywhere in here, there is no conflict. And anything that is closer or farther away
⏹️ ▶️ John is potentially conflicting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think I’m not an expert in this. I mean, I’ve just read some of the same articles that you probably have. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like this effect, like the eye strain and discomfort that can result from VAC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like it’s magnified more when you’re holding or looking at stuff that it’s simulating to be too close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you rather than too far away. It seems like the closer the thing is, it magnifies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem. So it wouldn’t surprise me, if that’s the case, to see Vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not give you lots of ways to pull things that close to you and instead try to stick with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this distance and a little bit further from or a little bit closer, but not a lot closer. And there’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that go into that too. I kind of had this funny thought a minute ago, like what if we keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing all these simulated rooms in Apple’s demos or simulator and everything, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone has all these rooms that have a good amount of empty space a few meters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead of where you’re sitting. And I was thinking like, if this actually becomes like a really meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing platform that lots of people are using to get a lot of work done, Can you imagine people possibly starting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to rent out offices that are just circles? Like the wall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just a circle that is a three meter radius around you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just go in VR at that point. Just turn on the Yosemite. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then you could just, if you’re sitting inside your three meter donut room, you could place anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on any of the walls. You can even have your coffee sitting three meters away from you over here and you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a picture of your family sitting three meters away over there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wore three meter long arms. I don’t know if that quite works.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann the simulator,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was playing with the Vision OS simulator and Xcode. It just came out like, I don’t know, hours
⏹️ ▶️ John before we recorded, so I didn’t have that much time to play with it. But you can fly the camera around. And one of the first things that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was, I flew the camera around to the side of a window to see if it had depth. And I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I looked at it edge on, and it basically disappeared. The other thing I tried to do was take Windows and bring
⏹️ ▶️ John them right up to my nose. And I think maybe I just don’t know how to do that in Vision OS. Obviously everything in
⏹️ ▶️ John the simulator is weird. If you ever tried to use an iPhone app in the simulator, it’s weird. And this is 10 times weirder because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using like a mouse and a keyboard and a scroll wheel to substitute for eyeballs and pinching. It’s super weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I couldn’t like, it wasn’t conducive to that. I could zoom in,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could zoom the camera in, but I was like just flying the virtual camera like in the simulator. I don’t think you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to fly the virtual camera that way when you’re wearing it, because when you’re wearing it, you’d have to push your head
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to the thing. But this is another thing to try. Like again, with the idea of the things, the floating
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangles or whatever, trying to look like they’re positioned in space, there’s that button, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I forget which button it is, whether it’s the digital crown one or the other button, that like re-centers all your crap in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think if you were sitting on the couch and had the windows in front of you at the intended focal distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John And then just got up and walked forward two steps and shoved your face into Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would let you get as close as you want, but it would be useless. Because now all you can see is three
⏹️ ▶️ John letters of the Safari window. And if you press whatever button that is, it would recenter things nine feet away from
⏹️ ▶️ John or six feet away from where your head is now. So that recentering and redistancing thing, you know, makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. And it’s also why everyone that you see in one of these demos, they’re not using, they’re not like, again, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John walking through their house, walk and talk Aaron Sorkin style, and using 17 apps while they walk and talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re sitting on a couch, they’re sitting at a chair, they’re stationary so that the things can be placed into the real
⏹️ ▶️ John world with them, but also maintaining that focal distance. I don’t know if there even is a mode
⏹️ ▶️ John where, like, as you walk, your windows follow you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maintaining the six feet distance or whatever, because you’re probably walking to a wall or do something terrible.
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Good documentation?!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the Vision SDK is out. There is at a glance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some really fricking good documentation. I think hell may have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frozen over my friends because Apple’s been like firing on all cylinders about documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s been very strange. But we’ll link to dive into featured sample apps where they have a series
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sample apps including happy beam where you shoot hearts at grumpy clouds, if I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this properly. But anyways, but it’s, it’s a full on walkthrough of the code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only here’s what we did, but why we did it like brav fricking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, no sarcasm. This is excellent. So I’m gonna have to dig into this at some point when I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well over my head, deep in call sheet stuff. But yeah, this looks, this looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really good and it’s worth checking out. And then it’s also worth noting, I think John had noticed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jonathan White, I believe former Apple employee, pointed out that if you have a PlayStation 5 or Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey controller hooked up to your Mac, that you can use that to navigate in the Vision OS simulator.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is vastly preferable to trying to use the tiny little camera controls they have in a little floating palette. Again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very awkward
⏹️ ▶️ John to use, to try to use a non, you know, a VR headset simulator with a mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John and a keyboard. The main reason I put this post in here is because he posted like an animated GIF
⏹️ ▶️ John of like one of the little, you know, they have virtual rooms for you to be in in the simulator, because obviously there’s no headset
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at your room. So they have a bunch of virtual rooms for you to try. And it’s just a box floating in space. And he takes the
⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation controller, whatever, and just flies the camera in and out of the room. And you can see it is just a giant black void with
⏹️ ▶️ John a living room sitting in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going back a second, in case you’re talking about like all their good documentation for this, which I’m very happy, I haven’t seen it, but I’m very happy to hear that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fantastic. And then explaining why. You know, I think what’s very important here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they want us to develop apps for this platform that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit and make sense and are good, but we not only have never tried this platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we also won’t have a chance to try this platform for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s half true. Did you see, you might not have seen, but I think it was Underscore that pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that somewhere, I don’t know where, there was There’s Apple documentation that said, starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next month, you can do the lab thing that they have at like five or 10 locations around the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. So that is, I mean, and I still think your point, Marco, is fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but breaking news, apparently it is as early as July, if we all read this right, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one could go to, you know, Cupertino, London, et cetera, et cetera, and actually try your stuff on Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that helps, but that’s a very limited, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know, when you look, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, when the iPhone app store came out, we had already had iPhones for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we already, and before that, we had had smartphones for a while. Yeah, they sucked, but we had other, you know. So like the concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a smartphone and what smartphone software should be was fairly known. And then we all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had iPhones for a year. And so we knew how iPhone software should behave and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it should be designed. And yeah, it was a learning process. You know, we didn’t get it all right, right at the start, but we had a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headstart. When the iPad came out, we didn’t have a chance to use them before it launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the world. However, we kind of assume like, this is probably like a giant phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of use that as a starting point. And yeah, our initial apps sucked, but they, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t that far off. You know, and, and again, it was a learning process with this, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other major, you know, VR, AR kind of headset, that’s had any success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all besides like very, very specialized, you know, narrow markets has been gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focused. And so we kind of have some idea like, Hey, if you want to make a VR game, here’s some principles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you might want to follow, or here’s some things that work and don’t work. That’s fine. But the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of a spatial computing environment, you know, the, of like using an AR environment for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general purpose computing, that is still really in its infancy in the rest of the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most of us have not used that. And none of us have used specifically the vision pro for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this purpose yet. And so to try to make software for this platform that we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no experience with and that can’t really be simulated very well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even if it was, even if the simulator was really good, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could get into, they said they’re gonna offer dev kits at some point, and we mentioned we don’t really know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that means or what the dev kits will be able to do, but if the dev
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit is anything less than a full-blown environment that has all of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in apps already working and everything, which it probably will be, like, I can’t imagine that will… those will all be ready yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I expect the dev kit to be basically like the simulator, um, in terms of what it has and what it doesn’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, like, in terms of other apps and everything, and you’re not gonna be able to, like, install stuff, really, besides your own app. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re not gonna get a good experience of, like, what it’s like to actually really use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for computing. And because it’s so radically different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve used before, Apple needs to really step up above and beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with things like documentation and tooling and explaining the human interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guidelines, explaining why they’re doing things, explaining how things should be designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why things should be structured this way, because we don’t know, because we can’t use this platform yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the good thing is, it sounds like that’s what they’re doing. And it’s going to take a whole lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersing ourselves in this documentation and in the simulator and in the tools and reading up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experimenting with things for us to get stuff right. And it’s still not going to quite be right when we get it because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have no experience actually really using the hardware and using the software and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figuring out how things work and how things should behave, how things should feel, how things should look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so much of that. When you look at the iPhone, there’s so much kind of built in like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, here’s how things related on the screen Here’s how navigation works. Here’s how things should be structured.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the different conventions that we use We know none of that with vision OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and until we’re actually able to use it with real apps with our real data With you know, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our actual world trying to get things done in our in our real lives We’re not gonna have those feelings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of naturally inherent to us So, it’s gonna be a learning process, but in the meantime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple really has to step in. And so I’m very glad that it seems like they are doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, very much so.
Ternus vs. GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about the John Ternus external GPU question that was surfaced at the talk
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about it last week, I think. Asked about external GPUs, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Ternus said he doesn’t quite see how they would incorporate that into their system
⏹️ ▶️ John of built-in GPUs or whatever. It was kind of closing the door on external GPUs and also
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that it just didn’t even seem to make sense to him. It occurs to me, thinking about that question
⏹️ ▶️ John and the talk show in general, that maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ John is also a question that could have been asked to Craig Federighi, because Ternus is the hardware dude, right? And you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, external GPUs, that’s a question for him, right? Because if he’s like, oh, you’re gonna make a Mac Pro, are we gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John support external GPUs or not? And how can we incorporate those? That’s the hardware guy, right? But there is a
⏹️ ▶️ John software component to this. As far as I’m aware,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing inherent about any of the M whatever SOCs that precludes
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of, for example, using an external GPU for compute,
⏹️ ▶️ John like setting aside the video stuff. I don’t know what the deal with that is, but just like just doing it for compute if you’re trying to do like
⏹️ ▶️ John AI model training or something like using GPUs for a computer or whatever, especially in the Mac Pro where
⏹️ ▶️ John you actually have card slots and all that other thing, right? So the hardware may be capable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can’t actually use any of those GPUs to do anything unless you have a driver
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. And that is a software question that Ternus doesn’t really control. That’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Federighi side. It’s like, hey, are we going to support on Apple Silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple Silicon native drivers for let’s say AMD graphics cards. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, Craig Federighi, like his organization maybe writes all those drivers or whatever, certainly it falls under
⏹️ ▶️ John the umbrella of what kind of things does macOS support? Because, you know, in my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John right now, I’ve got a bunch of drivers for my AMD graphics cards and they came with the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the operating system, that’s Craig. So it would have been interesting to pose the same question
⏹️ ▶️ John to, obviously, you know, I’m not gonna make the whole talk show just to be the giant Mac Pro show. That would be what it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John like if I was hosting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann it. I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, and that’s why Apple does not give you executives to interview.
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, that’s, you know, it’s just an interesting thing to think about that there’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John to it than just like, oh, you know, when you designed the Mac Pro hardware, you didn’t make it support this, or you’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the SoC has the GPU on it, it can’t do that. As I think we’ve talked about many times in the past, Intel GPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel CPUs had integrated graphics for years and years. And Macs with Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs with integrated graphics also supported discrete graphics. In fact, Apple had this wacky thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the OS where it would use the discrete versus using the integrated and go back and forth and all that stuff. And of course, in the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, actually the Xeon, I don’t think doesn’t have an integrated GPU, but anyway, you could have put
⏹️ ▶️ John like, instead of a Xeon, put like an i9 or whatever, i7 Whatever the most recent one that you put something with an
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated GPU and still use the external GPUs Apple did all that work For
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel, but that work is a software work. That is not hardware work So that
⏹️ ▶️ John would be an interesting thing to to muse on as we go in the next round of the of the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John To see if Apple changes course on this To see if it would even be technically possible to change course For
⏹️ ▶️ John example with just a new version of Mac OS with a bunch of drivers that suddenly lets you plug in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know GPUs I don’t think it’s gonna happen obviously on the the M2 Ultra Mac Pro because all of their slots
⏹️ ▶️ John have Bandwidth star and they would need external power connectors to power a big GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada yada But I was just thinking about this that it you know So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a hardware question. It’s also a software question.
Apple IDs get passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple has added pass keys to Apple ID and iCloud logins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they are dog fooding this or allowing us I guess to dog food it I haven’t really messed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with pass keys at all So I don’t really have much to say about this, but I applaud Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for actually making it possible
⏹️ ▶️ John They say this this from a six-color story They said that the future has been rolling out as of yesterday and can be tested
⏹️ ▶️ John on devices running iOS iPad OS 17 or Sonoma betas And
⏹️ ▶️ John some other people have said if you run, if you’re running Ventura and you use Chrome, because Chrome, the latest versions of Chrome know about passkeys,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could actually do it on Ventura with Chrome. That’s funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John they say it’s rolling out, and that must, it must not have rolled out to me because I tried for a while earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the point where it would let me use a passkey or prompt me, like by going to the iCloud login page, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t have access to that feature yet. So it’s coming eventually, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t able to try it. I have used passkeys with other things, like in Chrome, because again, Chrome supports them with other services
⏹️ ▶️ John that support passkeys. And it’s fun and it’s nice. I use them in addition to names and
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords. I haven’t yet had the guts to take any of the services that support them and say, you know what? Forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John my password and do everything with passkeys. Although honestly, it shouldn’t really be that scary because
⏹️ ▶️ John we all know how the world works. Like, oh, well, what if passkeys break or don’t work or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll do exactly the same thing you do when you forget your password, which happens to all of
⏹️ ▶️ John end, your email address is the ultimate key to your stuff because people forget their passwords. You’ll never forget your passkey, but
⏹️ ▶️ John say there was a bug and the computer screwed up and the computer, you know, forgot your, quote unquote, forgot your passkey.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just gonna use the forgot password link and have them email you something, yada, yada, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not great. But in theory, once the passkey feature is worked out and all the bugs are
⏹️ ▶️ John ironed out and it basically works reliably, you don’t have to worry about forgetting anymore. And I think humans
⏹️ ▶️ John forgetting is going to happen way more often than iCloud Keychain, like deleting stuff accidentally.
Keychain Access warning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me with regard to pass keys and passwords and things like that. Tell me what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there’s an app on Mac OS. It’s been around for I don’t know decade or two Called
⏹️ ▶️ John keychain access that it gives you a view of your Mac OS keychain It started off looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John just your local keychain and eventually I cloud keychain was introduced and they put that into the app It’s a pretty nerdy app.
⏹️ ▶️ John It hasn’t been updated in a really long time It’s scary and confusing and in general people should not mess with it
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s very easy to screw yourself up because you’ll say I I don’t know what this is. Do I need this? I’m gonna delete this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes you need it. Don’t, like, don’t. It’s like people used to go into a library folder
⏹️ ▶️ John on the early versions of Mac OS X and being like, library, what the hell is this crap? And just delete everything. It’s not a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John So on Sonoma, when you launch Keychain Access, it throws a dialogue in your face that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John manage your passwords and system settings. Go to passwords and system settings to manage your passwords and passkeys. Set
⏹️ ▶️ John up verification codes and view your security recommendations. And it has a big button, which is the default button, that says
⏹️ ▶️ John open passwords and the non-default button is open Keychain Access with a checkbox to say
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t show this message again. So for users who are used to using Keychain Access because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re nerdy and that’s the place where they go for passwords, they’re trying to tell them, hey, we have a significantly
⏹️ ▶️ John more friendly interface to passwords over here in system settings that you might not know about because it’s buried. Please
⏹️ ▶️ John use that one instead. If only that friendlier interface
⏹️ ▶️ John to passwords could be a standalone application that could replace Keychain Access. I don’t, maybe not replacing his keychain
⏹️ ▶️ John access does much more fancier stuff. So I hope they keep keychain access around, but I do like the idea that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are trying to herd users towards the nicer, friendlier interface that is in a totally different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, can I take this moment to thank the Xcode team or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the Xcode team is responsible for automatic certificate management. And in particular, whoever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple made that work for CarPlay apps as of a few years ago or a year ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not had to go into Keychain Access for probably two or three years now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to on a regular basis because I used to have to do all the provisioning certificates and everything and all that management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything and inevitably something would mess up and I’d have to go in there and clean up some garbage. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t had to do that in like two years. Nice. So thank you, whoever did that. Thank you.
Mac notification rewrite?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, there’s good news about Notification Center, we’re being told anonymously.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said last week, the two things I had to say about Sonoma was that my weird bug seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed, but also that the notification interface actually has buttons that you can click that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John disappear when you try to click them. So here’s some anonymous feedback on that in Sonoma. Notification
⏹️ ▶️ John Center has been significantly re-engineered for macOS Sonoma, probably in big part because it’s responsible for hosting
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets, which can now be added to the desktop. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the notification hover bug is finally fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before Sonoma, the notification center process would be responsible for all things related to widgets, including when to update them,
⏹️ ▶️ John the running of extensions and archiving and unarchiving of views. With Sonoma, they brought
⏹️ ▶️ John ChronoD, the chrono demon, to macOS. So now all notification center has to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually placing views on the screen. So here’s to rewriting a part of the system that had been broken for
⏹️ ▶️ John three years. I don’t know what chronoD, I think it’s some internal thing or whatever, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this matches with my experience. The notification center, the interface looks the same. It’s the same stupid,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, we can’t show you the buttons until you mouse over them because we’re afraid your little brain will explode. But now
⏹️ ▶️ John when you mouse over them, you can actually click on them. So there is some support for the idea that it’s not just my imagination
⏹️ ▶️ John that they actually made this particular user interface work. Now we can get back to complaining that this
⏹️ ▶️ John particular interface is dumb, but at least it’s dumb and working as designed.
CloudKit vs. iCloud Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there’s a couple of tidbits that we wanted to share with regard to iOS 17.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, if you recall, Apple has done for the last year or two, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey semi-private Slack for WWDC. I was going to say attendees, but that’s not really true. People
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who are interested in WWDC. And in there, somebody caught, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was eventually posted to MacRumors, that somebody from Apple said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as of iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, disabling the iCloud Drive switch will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no longer disable syncing in your app. It’ll be controlled by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the individual switch for your app, which means, Marco, that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can still sync with Cloud Kit and iCloud stuff, even if iCloud Drive is turned off because of some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of work provisioning. This is critical for Marco today, but not a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of call sheet also rides on Cloud Kit, And so this is critical for me soon. So I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very excited about this. This is very good news.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m very curious to see, you know, once I get running on 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get some real use it out there, like, because, you know, right now, as a quick reminder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just and I just verified. If I look at my iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Cloud Kit, state of like, whether I can save data in Cloud Kit, I track this in analytics, so I can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a decision in the future about whether to switch to that for sync. And right now I got 12 and a half percent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my user base saying no account. And I believe that’s the result you would get in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 16 and below when iCloud Drive was just disabled in addition to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually being logged into an iCloud account. And in that case, you can’t use CloudKit. So right now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 12 and a half percent. As my iOS 17 adoption goes up, which is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at like 2%, as as that goes up, I’m curious to to see if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number goes down. And my analytics system is not advanced enough that I could say like, you know, what, what is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value just for iCloud or iOS 17 people? I’m kind of curious to see how that tracks. Maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add something separate for that. But you know, we’ll see. Right now, this doesn’t help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me because that’s still way too many people to not be able to use iCloud with iOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and below. And maybe in a year from now, that’ll be different. You know, right now, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still can’t use this. I can’t rely on iCloud Drive being universal enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rather CloudKit being universal enough. But maybe next year I will. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope so. Either way, this is this is this is a very, very important step towards that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibility that that that might enable this possibility next year so looking forward to that.
Crosswords in News+
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also with regard to I was 17. Apparently there’s now a crossword
⏹️ ▶️ Casey puzzle like mini app within Apple News Plus. This I don’t even remember hearing rumblings of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until today. Maybe I missed it. But starting with I was 17 apples taking a page from the New York Times and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integrating crossword puzzles into the news app and puzzles will be available to Apple News Plus and Apple one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subscribers. This is from 9 to 5 Mac will link it in the show notes again news to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes sense to be in the news app is but this is sort of raising the bar for everybody else, you know, like, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John play them on Apple, adds functionality to be built into the US, but if they make a news app and part of news is the New
⏹️ ▶️ John York Times and part of the New York Times is the New York Times crossword, like, you can see how they got there. I still think there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of room for better third-party crossword apps, but it just goes to show that, you know, you never know when Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna come for your little section of the market. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, if it’s limited to News Plus subscribers, I’m not sure that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge threat to the market, but, you know, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like it’s, again, there’s third party opportunity there for sure, because A, you got all the
⏹️ ▶️ John free crossword apps, and B, what if people don’t want Apple News or Apple One, they just want a crosswords?
⏹️ ▶️ John just go to the app store and find one.
New watch-face excuses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Marco, we have news with regard to why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t allowing third party watch faces in watchOS 10. Do we? As per, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann does this actually say
⏹️ ▶️ John No. It does say something, but what it says is BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As per Mac rumors, in an interview with Swiss newspaper something or other published
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, Apple’s VP of technology, Kevin Lynch, and product marketing employee, Dierdre Kaldbeck, explained, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these quotes are machine translated from German. said that Apple puts, quote, a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of effort, quote, into every watch face to ensure that they work, quote, uniformly and simply, quote, and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple needs to plan ahead to make sure watch faces continue to work if we want to change something or add new possibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the most non-answer answer I’ve read in a little while. But what are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do? Because you know Apple would never change how someone integrates into their operating system, like say, a different
⏹️ ▶️ John system for writing widgets or entirely different system for writing apps for the watch. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, yeah. So, oh, we don’t want to do this because what if we change our mind about how the watch faces
⏹️ ▶️ John work? You change your mind about things all the time. That’s what WWDC is about. That’s what we’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John doing new OS has come out. It’s like, we can’t give you watch faces because what if we change our mind about the API?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like nothing has changed more than, you know, like going from, what was the previous one? The crappy one, is it watch
⏹️ ▶️ John kit to non watch kit? I don’t remember, like they change stuff all the time on every OS. That’s the nature
⏹️ ▶️ John of what they do as a platform owner. So that is not the reason why watch faces don’t exist. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a huge, put a huge amount of effort and we want them to work uniformly and simply. Like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John use this as an excuse for why you don’t want to have the App Store as well. This is, I mean, this
⏹️ ▶️ John may be the reason why they’re not doing it, which is basically saying it would be more work if we did it. I agree, it would be more work,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like it’s more work to run the App Store, but geez, please, third-party watch faces.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, yes, I know this is a machine translation, but first of all, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own faces don’t work uniformly or simply. So let’s let’s rule that out right now. They don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t. So that’s not a good reason, but also like everything that we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the way widgets are rendered and the way Swift UI works suggests that they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a really good like watch face kit using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the widget rendering system where your process isn’t even needing to run all the time. Just like complications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like widgets. Like you, you, you can kind of use pieces and they could give you like, here’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s clock hands for the current time or here’s a digital version of the time or whatever. They can give you components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can place them in your view and lay them out however you need to and and style them and you know with a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom ways like they could do that so easily with what they’ve already built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what they’re what they’re already shipping not even not even just brand new this year but like what they’ve already been shipping for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years so there really isn’t any technical merit to this argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason we don’t have third-party watch faces yet is because they don’t want to. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. There is no technical justification. There is no good argument. It’s simply they
New beta-installing system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has a new system for installing betas. Uh, anyone with a free Apple developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do it now. You don’t need to pay the $99 like you used to. Uh, there’s a writeup in ours technical about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Uh, basically you go fiddling in settings and select which beta train you want to be on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you reboot and you’re on that train, which is kind of neat.
⏹️ ▶️ John You used to be able to go to the developer website and download an installer basically, and you could still, I think you can get like a
⏹️ ▶️ John restore image for Apple Silicon only, uh, to do that, but that’s not what they want you to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want you to go to software update, which is buried in system settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you gotta know to click on the little I in a circle. Everything’s about the little I in a circle.
⏹️ ▶️ John That lets you pick, hey, I want beta updates. And importantly, it lets you pick which
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID you want to use as the Apple ID that has a developer account
⏹️ ▶️ John that is being used to download the thing. Again, it doesn’t have to be a paid developer account anymore. So you don’t have to pay $99 to get access to
⏹️ ▶️ John the betas. You can have a free developer account. But the question is, if you’re like us
⏹️ ▶️ John old school Mac users or developers, we have multiple Apple IDs. Which Apple ID is the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John has a developer account? And you want to configure that. Because if you don’t, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re trying to use your real Apple ID with a beta, when you, but another Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID has a developer account, you’ll end up in your other developer ID in the beta. You’ll be like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this isn’t my Apple ID. I want to be in my real Apple ID. But oh, I have to stay in this Apple ID because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the one that gets the updates from the beta. there are two separate things. You just have to, again, the little tiny I in the circle and the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John system setting interface lets you pick which Apple ID you want to be the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John gets the betas. And that doesn’t have to be the same Apple ID as the one you’re actually signed into in macOS or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know how this works outside of macOS because I’ve only done the macOS beta, but I think the new system
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit confusing, but it’s better than installing dev profiles, which is one option.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s maybe not better than downloading installers, but we’ll see. but just FYI, don’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trapped to actually using your developer Apple ID as your user’s Apple ID.
DPReview bought by GearPatrol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then finally, very, very good news. DP Review was purchased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Gear Patrol, so they are not going away into the sunset. They will live on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is great news.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was kind of a shame that they will live on after like half of their employees bailed to get new jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John which who could blame them? Obviously, the price for Gear Patrol is probably lower
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wait until after the site is declared to be shut down and have the employees but they’re also getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a less worthy asset, less valuable asset, because some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John good people who are at Deep Reviewer are no longer there. All in all, probably not handled
⏹️ ▶️ John the best, but it’s better than it just actually literally dying inside Amazon and nothing coming of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m rooting for its resurrection. I do wonder if Gear Patrol is actually dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. Will they try to hire back some of the people who left to go elsewhere? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently it will live on to fight another day.
Safari 17 untracks URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So Safari 17 has a bunch of new features, a plethora
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even of new features, but one in particular is very interesting, link tracking protection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my executive summary of this is, you know how you get those really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heinously long URLs whenever you share something from like Instagram or Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something, or Twitter or something like that. Well, apparently Safari 17 will do its best to strip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the query string entries that are clogging up those URLs and leave only the ones behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that matter. And I haven’t tried this myself, but it sounds good. I’m here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like all these blocking and prevention things, it really depends on how good a job it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John deleting stuff from your URLs. You take a URL and it’s going to say like, no, some of this stuff in this URL, we think it’s being used
⏹️ ▶️ John to track you, so we’re just going to delete it. Some websites are surely designed so that if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the tracking information, they don’t work right, and that’s crappy. But other times I do worry
⏹️ ▶️ John that this thing is going to delete something from the URL that it thinks is a tracking parameter, but is not. Because the only thing, the
⏹️ ▶️ John way it has to tell is based on the names. Apparently, Jeff Johnson found that there’s a queryparam.wplist
⏹️ ▶️ John file that contains a list of the URL query parameters to be removed. And it currently contains 25
⏹️ ▶️ John of the usual suspects and he lists a bunch of query parameter
⏹️ ▶️ John names. I do wonder if he can get specific like, oh, in this website, this parameter, or if it just looks for
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, any query parameter named, you know, GCLID,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is some Google thing apparently. But yeah, I hate it when, you know, ad blocking, privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever things cause a website not to work, because you’re trying to do a thing on the web,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to order dinner, you’re trying to buy movie tickets, you’re trying to book a reservation,
⏹️ ▶️ John you click a button to do a thing and nothing happens. You’re like, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John webpage broken? Is one of my blockers screwing it up? You know, same thing with someone sends you a
⏹️ ▶️ John URL and messages, you click it, you try to load the thing. It says, I tried to load it and it didn’t work. And they’re like, well, it works for me. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, it doesn’t work for me. And little do you know that Safari 17 stripped out a query parameter that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it was for tracking. And you can always turn off content blockers and blah, blah, blah, and I hate that dance, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I also hate tracking stuff. So I applaud the effort, but this is an extremely hard problem, especially since you have
⏹️ ▶️ John so little information. You’ve got a string, it’s shaped as a URL. It’s got query parameters.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, some names are commonly used for tracking. Is it okay to delete this?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann I don’t know, let’s try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m a little bit nervous about this feature, but I’m sure you’ll be able to disable it if you don’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. I mean, I agree with everything you said, but I’m excited. this hopefully will work really well.
DockKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dockit is a new thing that is coming with, I guess, iOS 17. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a WWDC session about it called integrate with motorized iPhone stands using Dockit. And the description
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begins, discover how Dockit can help your camera app create incredible photo and video experiences with motorized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stands. We’ll show you how your app can automatically track subjects in live video across a 360 degree field of view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Take direct control of the stand and blah, blah, blah. So this sounds pretty cool. I haven’t looked at the session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. This is one of those things where I don’t personally think I have a need for this at the moment, but I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally see how you could make like an incredible sunrise video, you know, with you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey panning as the sun is rising or something like that. I think this could be very, very, very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John The integration of this is exactly the thing they showed in the keynote, which is, hey, you can use continuity camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and FaceTime with Apple TV now. And it’ll follow you around? Yeah, so like you’re putting
⏹️ ▶️ John your camera like by your TV. I mean, imagine if Apple made a TV set. Anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ John of course the only tool it has to use is a center stage, which is just like a big wide fisheye lens and then we crop a portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. But now if you had one of these docket things integrated with FaceTime, integrated with Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you had a bunch of kids in front of you on the couch squirming around, it could actually turn the camera and use like the good camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and change how the picture is framed by literally changing how the picture is framed. Imagine if
⏹️ ▶️ John the docket didn’t just rotate but also tilt it and everything. You know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John working towards the idea of just everyone sits down in front of the TV and you can just do FaceTime with
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole family and it just makes sure everyone’s in the frame and zooms in on people when they talk and it all looks good.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a piecemeal way to do it, supporting continuity camera, having an API for these third party
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Could you actually find a TV that supports Apple TV, that supports
⏹️ ▶️ John DockKit, that supports FaceTime, that supports continuity camera and put this all together and in your living room with your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone and your set of cameras so that it works? Who knows? It’s not exactly an integrated Apple solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s more of the type of thing that people always say they want from Apple, which is like a geeky type endeavor where all the pieces
⏹️ ▶️ John are there to do something really cool. You just got to assemble them yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, this sounds very, very neat. And just to be clear, I don’t know what it sounded like when I said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but it sounded like John was saying docket. It is doc kit. And I might have made the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same mistake when I introduced this. So just to be absolutely clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two K’s in a row. Yes. It’s not hover, it’s hover, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t start with that again.
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#askatp: Vision vs. Apple car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick asks, do the capabilities of the Vision Pro make you more bullish about Apple’s potential in the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space? Assuming Vision Pro ships, Apple will demonstrate both delivering projects very long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in development and a ton of visual capabilities. The thing that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is most interesting to me about Vision Pro is the R1 chip, I believe it’s called. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? the real-time processing, because if I understand it properly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the R1 chip is running some sort of real-time OS on it or something like that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might be making things up here, so definitely check my work on this. But it runs a real-time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS, and that’s the sort of thing that you would need for a car safety computer or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I don’t necessarily think Apple’s going to do any actual automobile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally feel like that ship has probably sailed, to use a different vehicle metaphor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I do think that this is probably either, and I think I said this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either last week or the week before, I think this real-time stuff was either born out of the car project or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be used by the car project if it wasn’t born there originally. So does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it make it more bullish? I don’t know about that. But it certainly expands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the possibilities of things that Apple could potentially conquer. You know, it’s one thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screen used for infotainment. It’s another thing to do the gauge cluster. And obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has already announced they intend to do the gauge cluster. But all of us were very worried. I think, well, how does that work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when Apple doesn’t really have a real-time OS that will keep the speedometer on your screen and refreshing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly always? And well, now they have hardware and software to do it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s definitely interesting, although, again, I don’t personally think an Apple car will ever be released,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least I don’t think that’s sitting here now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this doesn’t give me any more confidence in the car project for one very important reason. With
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Vision Pro, your life is not on the line. I mean, at least I hope not. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the battery could like burst into flames in your pocket or whatever, but like the stakes are so
⏹️ ▶️ John much higher. I get what you’re saying, like, oh, Vision Pro, real-time stuff, Vision stuff, AR, like the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John matches there. like some related car thing, self-driving cars, car visual experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can see how this technology overlap, but there is no overlapping consequences, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is like you’re literally on your couch. And yeah, maybe the thing crashes and you can’t use an app right or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The stakes are just so much lower. And it’s not, you know, so look, Apple’s can ship things
⏹️ ▶️ John that have been in development for a long time. The car thing is not about the length of development time. The car thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is about the consequences if it’s not great. The consequences of the Vision Pro is not great is whatever the product that flops,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people aren’t gonna die. No matter what Apple does in the car space, unless it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a better car play, even just better car play, there’s higher stakes. But if they’re doing anything having to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with controlling a car or whatever, boy, that’s so much harder. And it’s an area that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has never really gone into. None of the things that Apple ships are so directly
⏹️ ▶️ John responsible for the life of the people who are using them as something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is actually controlling anything about a car. So I still think that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot of hurdles to overcome to figure out anything in the car space. Maybe a better analogy would be between
⏹️ ▶️ John health and cars, because health, you know, like the blood glucose thing or whatever is rumored, health and car,
⏹️ ▶️ John both things where people’s lives are on the line. Vision Pro, hopefully no one’s life is on the line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Going back to the real-time OS thing for a second, you know, when you look at, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we did hear rumblings back years ago that Apple was working on a real-time OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of the car project. Now, whether that was the same thing as the real-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS that’s running in Vision OS, we don’t know. I bet there’s some overlap. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet there’s at least some shared expertise there, and if not some shared code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although honestly there probably is some shared code as well. One thing we learned last summer when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of pre-announced that new CarPlay system with the gauge cluster, as you were just saying, Casey, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we, and Ars Technica did a good article about it. We talked about it on the show, about how like just by regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons, gauge cluster OSs have to be real-time OSs. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners wrote in to inform us that I didn’t even know this, that Apple’s modern chips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the modern Apple Silicon ARM chips are able to run in virtualization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two OSs at the same time. One of them can be a real-time OS and the other one isn’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is how, I think some part of Google’s stack for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cars, some part of it does this, I think. And so we were speculating at the time, hey, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future iPhone, iOS versions, will be able to run this real-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS as some slice of the resources of the chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then run iOS kind of side by side with it. And that little real-time OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could run the gauge cluster in CarPlay, if your phone is running CarPlay, without disrupting the rest of iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it sure looks like when you look at how Apple describes the architecture of Vision OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sure looks like it’s that exact same architecture with the real-time OS running on the R1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and running the kind of AR pass-through functions of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro, and then having Vision OS kind of running inside of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but the real-time OS is not disturbed. So if some part of Vision OS hangs or crashed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, your reality is not like kind of weirdly paused or warped or some way that could make you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sick or anything like that. So it seems like they’re doing that kind of split architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And maybe the car project produced the real-time OS and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gave them the foundations to do simultaneous real-time OS and other OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they didn’t use that to make a car, but they used it to make the AR headset and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future CarPlay stuff with the iPhone. So I think the car project,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still think the car project is as doomed as it ever was, but I think we’re also seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff falling out of it that is good and that’s being able to be used in other areas. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going back to the actual car project as a product possibility,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in addition to everything Jon said, which is correct, that I don’t think Apple is super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to make products that could potentially kill you. I think also when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look at the the general purpose computing landscape, who else is going to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AR headset that’s that has strong general computing possibilities?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Microsoft, maybe. Maybe Google with Android. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft did. It’s called HoloLens and it’s not it costs as much as the Vision Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah I understand it’s It’s useful in a couple of very narrow markets, but it’s not at all a mass market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And I don’t even think Microsoft even thought it would be. But you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically three companies, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, who even could make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a general purpose AR headset. And we’ve seen what they make in other areas, and they’re fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re not great. So if anyone was going to make a great AR computing experience, it was going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. Look at cars though, and I don’t see that strong need. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this have to be Apple? Lots of people make really nice cars. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple thought they could add to that market that would be so much better than what everyone else is making,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see it. I mean look, maybe I don’t have the imagination for it, maybe I’m not seeing something, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t know what amazing thing they had or thought they could do or still think they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do there. I don’t know. But I just don’t like the amazing computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prowess they have to make awesome computers that you know for general purpose use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see them having that same amazing advantage in making cars. We haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about the car project recently. It seems like it gets disbanded and regrouped like every two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something or even more than that. You know maybe it’s finally now kind of you know sizzling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. I don’t know. But I sure hope we don’t hear more about it, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because what we see now is like the headset, here’s something that probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco took a similar scope and scale of resources and time investment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what they were making was what is probably going to end up being a pretty great computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re really good at making great computers. And I can’t imagine them spending a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of time and resources making a car that would actually be worth all that time and resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even if the tech was directly transferable and exactly related which I don’t think actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John It wouldn’t matter because that’s just the tech in the end The product the car thing if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything with cars other than just like show the current speed and play songs from Your phone like if you’re gonna control
⏹️ ▶️ John some part of the car like all the self-driving stuff or whatever and even a safety system That’s the hard part
⏹️ ▶️ John Not like Oh implementing something that could you could implement self-driving on top of like a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John with a real-time OS and a chip and it controls and now you have to write the software to actually drive the car. That’s the hard part.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s the hard part both technically, because no one’s figured out how to do it, to, you know, even as well as a
⏹️ ▶️ John human at this point, but also it’s hard organizationally for Apple because they’re not accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ John to shipping products like that. And that’s why I’m saying success with the Vision Pro does not
⏹️ ▶️ John make me more optimistic about the car project because the things that are hard about the car project are not the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that Vision Pro is doing well. Again, even if you are willing to believe that the tech is directly transferable.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the hard part of the car project. The hard part of the car project is outside of the technical platform
⏹️ ▶️ John foundations. It’s everything else, like, okay, now drive the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention, now sell the car and service the car and provide repair parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a dealer network for the, like, there’s so much about cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple have a self-repair program. They’ll just send you a two-post lift in the mail in a big giant Pelican
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey case. Yeah, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two-post lift in a Pelican case, yep. That’s definitely it.
#askatp: App-uninstaller apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, all right. Mark Blender writes, do you have any sort of app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uninstaller such as AppCleaner on macOS or do you use any sort of it? I know the official way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uninstall something is simply to drag it to the trash, but I find myself perhaps unreasonably worried about leftover files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Leftover files are definitely a thing, but I haven’t run one of these in forever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Marco, let’s start with you. Is there anything on your computer that serves this purpose?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use anything like this. I don’t like having to install accessory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to serve accessory functions that I think shouldn’t need to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that’s kind of a broad statement, but like in general, like I don’t run a lot of different utilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my Mac that are like kind of always there or helping out some or replacing some system function. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most part, I like to use the built in stuff the way it’s meant to be used because that tends to not get me into trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It tends to not break stuff. we were as you know, john was saying earlier how, you know, sometimes like privacy, preserving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff or ad blockers, whatever can can break websites. I always worry that using apps like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might break something else. And I don’t see the need I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete stuff, you know, if something has its own uninstaller, I will run that uninstaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know, certain things that install hooks and parts of the system, you know, they’ll have uninstaller. So I’ll use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. For regular old apps, I’ll just delete them.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a big focus of my early Mac OS 10 reviews was talking about the next based Bundle system
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have a folder with a dot app extension and inside are a bunch of files And that’s how applications are made up and
⏹️ ▶️ John I was comparing it to like the classic Mac where you had resource forks which were their own sort of Structured
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where you could have different kinds of resources that belong to the application and they were individually editable with the resource editor
⏹️ ▶️ John but the the next bundle system did that but in the file system and You know because I’m an old-school Mac user
⏹️ ▶️ John uninstaller for something Windows users use Mac users don’t need to do that you just drag the app to the trash. But the reality
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS X was, especially in the early days, there were some apps that came with
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote installers which would spray files all over your drive. And also when you drag the app
⏹️ ▶️ John to the trash, obviously any file that wasn’t inside that app bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John is still on your computer because all you did was put the app bundle in the trash. And there has never been, to my knowledge, any part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac operating system in the post Mac OS X days that magically knows that when you
⏹️ ▶️ John drag an app to the trash, like it has to go clean up a bunch of other files or whatever. There’s no hooks
⏹️ ▶️ John for third party developers to do that. There’s nothing for the first party developers to do that. So this market for app
⏹️ ▶️ John cleaner things is like, hey, when you drag your app to the trash, do you know it’s leaving some files behind?
⏹️ ▶️ John Two things about that. One, sometimes you want it to leave files behind. This was true in classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS and it’s true of Mac OS X. I want it to leave the preference file behind because if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John reinstall that app, I don’t have to reset all my settings. Preference files are tiny. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John always been tiny, even classic Mac OS. They’re definitely tiny now. Please leave that on my computer
⏹️ ▶️ John so that if I ever do decide to reinstall this app, it’ll be able to read those settings. Even if it’s a newer version, hopefully it’ll read
⏹️ ▶️ John an old version of its settings file. So that’s an example of residue that I want to leave behind. Second,
⏹️ ▶️ John app cleaner apps. Those have no idea how any individual
⏹️ ▶️ John app works. They’re making a best guess based on heuristics, based on maybe some knowledge of some specific
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. but I don’t want an app from a third party to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John know what things it can safely delete that other apps put there. Most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time you’ll be fine because it can say, oh, well, the preferences are in the preferences folder and anything in caches can be deleted and this, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing, but things get complicated when you get into more sophisticated applications or suites of applications where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not confident that a third party application even could know what the right thing to do is to delete this stuff. Hell,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even that confident that the uninstallers that people write work correctly. And so yeah, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John never use one of these app cleaner uninstaller type things. Now the final note is as the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac operating system in the post-Mac OS X era has matured over the many, many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has slowly but surely been removing every single kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that cannot be inside the app bundle. It used to be that whole swaths of common
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality could not be inside the app bundle. And now they’ve just been moving them all in there. extensions,
⏹️ ▶️ John secondary applications, helper apps, login launch items,
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar things, so much stuff that used to have to be outside your application that have to be sprayed
⏹️ ▶️ John into your slash library folder, the top level of your disk or until the slash library or whatever, all
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff now can live inside the app bundle. Which means that when you drag
⏹️ ▶️ John the app to the trash, a really good modern well-behaved app, you’ve deleted its login item, you’ve deleted
⏹️ ▶️ John its menu bar thing, You’ve deleted it’s like, you know, embedded helper application. You’ve deleted everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I mean, you may even have deleted its helper command line thing because they could have just put a symlink in user
⏹️ ▶️ John local that just symlinked into the bundle or whatever. Not every app is that well behaved, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the path that Apple has been paving is we have a way for everything to be inside, even
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari extensions. If you ship a Safari extension now, the way you do it is you embed the Safari extension
⏹️ ▶️ John inside an app. It’s not like the Safari extension goes into slash library slash Safari slash extensions and you have to remember
⏹️ ▶️ John to dig it out of there to get rid of it. No, it’s literally inside the app bundle in your applications folder. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where it is. And when you put the application in your applications folder the Mac OS scans it, finds the Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John extension and tells Safari about it. So Apple is trying to make it so that when you drag it to the trash,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not just an illusion that really you are trashing everything having to do with it. Finally, there are still
⏹️ ▶️ John some apps that spray things in various locations, which is why I use and recommend the app, what is it called, Launch Control,
⏹️ ▶️ John which lets you see the things that are outside the app bundle that apps may install. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only thing remotely like an app cleaner that I use. And all it does is show me what exists and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I use my knowledge and experience to know which things I can safely disable or delete. But app cleaner
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann dangerous than
⏹️ ▶️ John key chain access not app cleaner, launch controls even more dangerous than key chain access. Do not
⏹️ ▶️ John muck about it. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, it is very easy to break things. Instead, just ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John apps in this class and just hold on tight and wait until everything is actually moved into the app bundle for every app you
#askatp: 2FA really two-factor?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dave Copeland writes, in the discussion of Google Auth and syncing, there was an implication that keychain can perform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two-factor authentication. I’ve seen others say that one password can as well, but how is that a second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey factor? Doesn’t it turn a second factor into a first, since access to your computer and keychain means passwords
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 2FA? Shouldn’t 2FA be kept as a separate factor on an iPhone or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other device? I feel like I can take a stab at this, but John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it might Might have been you that have added some very relevant replies into the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John answer it, because it was answered by other people on Mastodon. So here’s Sebastian Cohen saying, this is all
⏹️ ▶️ John just two-step, not two-factor. This can still be valuable in case your credential entry
⏹️ ▶️ John gets intercepted, for example. So I know this is confusion about what is two-factor, what is two-step,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. You have to think about what is this protecting against. One of the things this protects against is
⏹️ ▶️ John if, say, your password is intercepted somewhere. your two-step thing, even though they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John both on your phone or both on your Mac or both on your whatever, saves you here because the thing that was intercepted
⏹️ ▶️ John or was dumped from some database or website or whatever is just your password. They don’t have the other factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though both of the factors are on your phone, like the password’s on there and the 2FA code is
⏹️ ▶️ John also on your phone, what they got was a cracked password dump from some website that had bad security.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just have your password. They don’t have the other thing. And Drew writes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the central threat model motivating 2FA is not that someone has access to your computer, it’s that they’ve captured
⏹️ ▶️ John your password from someone else’s insecure system. Given the centrality of email to the account 2FA management
⏹️ ▶️ John workflows, if someone has access to your computer, they can likely reconfigure your quote unquote true 2FA
⏹️ ▶️ John too. This goes back to what we were saying before. Your email account in the end for most services is the key to everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they have your phone, don’t worry about the fact that your password and your two-factor code are both
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same place in settings. Worry about the fact that they have your phone. that means they have access to your email,
⏹️ ▶️ John that means they can reset any password and all the 2FA stuff, it’s just, yeah. So you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about the threat modeling wrong if you think, if only my second factor was someplace separate,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be safe. There are cases where that’s true, but if someone has access to your computer, your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, as you, like if they have that kind of access, you’re probably screwed no matter what, unless you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really hardcore with the security keys and you never keep them in the same place as your phone, because how did they get your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t get your little YubiKey thing at the same time, like, you know, security is difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I will say that whether it’s just two-step or two-factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is better than nothing. It does protect against more scenarios than just a password, which is why I recommend it. Same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with passkeys. They have a different set of trade-offs. Passkeys, you don’t have to worry about forgetting them. They’re impossible to phish
⏹️ ▶️ John because the human does not choose when to submit them. The computer does, and the computer is not fooled by fake-looking emails.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, security is complicated, but two factor is not pointless. It is just different
⏹️ ▶️ John than you might think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Rocket Money. And thank you to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join, please do, at https.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Accidental, check podcast so long
Casey’s updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have some updates with regard to computers and cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So which one would you like to know first? Car. I don’t remember where we last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left our heroes. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you would ruin Aaron’s car. Yes, and you still don’t drive an EV somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider yourself a driving enthusiast?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because I would like to shift for myself, sir. And yes, I’m aware of the Toyota garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes, everyone says that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t decide if that’s delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were way ahead of the curve on that. We talked about this almost a year ago, I think, on the show. Remember? We were talking about the EVs
⏹️ ▶️ John with manual transmission. I think it was a prototype Mustang at the time. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. Anyways, pro tip. You do not, if you’re an Allstate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey customer anyway, you do not need to use SafeLite Auto Glass in order to replace your windshield.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And may I recommend that you do not use SafeLite Auto Glass to replace your windshield.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That good, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s been a nightmare. So we are on our second replaced windshield in as many weeks as we speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, the short, short version is somebody came out to install the new windshield. They said, Oh, they sent me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wrong thing. Your car has a heads up display. This windshield will not work with heads up display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we wait another week or two, a very nice gentleman comes to install the windshield at our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house. And he says, Oh, this isn’t the, this isn’t an OEM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey windshield. You know, it isn’t a Volvo produced windshield. It’s a third party windshield.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It should be fine. So, okay, great. And then the next time we get in the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is lit up with warning signs with regard to safety stuff. No lane keeping aid, no speed limit signs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no pilot assist, nothing. Stupendous. Okay. So we call safe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light. We go on the way there where I’m expecting them to do their super fancy calibration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the way there, all the warnings go away. Super. So I get there, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a 15, 20 minute drive away. I get there. I say to them, look, it wasn’t working. it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says it’s working, just can you hook it up to whatever computers you have and at least just tell me that it should be fine?”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they did. And they said, yeah, it should be fine. The next day, everything lights up again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stupendous. All right. So I go back to say, well, I call SafeLight back and say, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s me again. Can I have an OEM windshield, please? Because obviously everything associated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this is screwed. He said, sure. Hey, Hey, how long do I have to wait for that? Like a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a half. Stupendous. So we at least at this point have a windshield
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that from the outside looks good, but the heads up display is like blurry and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of the automated driving sensors work. It ended up that we drove like an hour and a half just a couple of days ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to the Blue Ridge Tunnel, which I think I’ve talked about in the past just for fun. It was on Father’s Day. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we took the Volvo because we took the dog with us. And yeah, we didn’t have any form of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cruise control Cause it wouldn’t even let you do like regular cruise control because it didn’t, it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to do automated cruise, you know, the, the distance following cruise and it was like, well, if I can’t do automated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cruise, there is no other cruise. And so that was kind of a pain, but whatever. So, uh, today, literally today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we went back to safe light in downtown Richmond and they put in a Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey windshield and they recalibrated everything and knock on wood. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything might be okay now, but it has been a week or excuse me, a month in two days, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe, since I slightly shattered Aaron’s windshield. And it is now hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed. What a nightmare. And as I’m going around and around through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Allstate, with SafeLite and all these other people, come to find out, and this is what I said earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Despite the fact that when you fill out a claim online with Allstate, they’re like, oh, it’s glass here. Go to SafeLite. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take care of it. Come to find out you don’t have to use SafeLite. And I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have gone to Volvo from the get-go and had Volvo do it, where Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably knows how to replace their own windshields and certainly should know how to calibrate the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goddarn thing. So I could have done that, but I had no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the Volvo people were very nice, but they were like, my guy, why didn’t you bring it to us? And I was like, my guy, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know I could. But sure enough, I could. So anyway, so pro tip, if you have a glass issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might want to investigate with your insurance whether or not you have to go to the safe light people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you might not have to. But that seems resolved as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Aaron’s computer, I don’t think I mentioned on the show, I might have mentioned it offhandedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the MacBook Adorable randomly came back to life after I let it sit for a couple of days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t do anything. I don’t know what happened. It just decided to work again. But that isn’t really a long-term
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution. I still don’t love the idea that with the MacBook Adorable dead, and even with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alive, potentially, I didn’t really have any sort of backup plan if my computer, you know, kicked the bucket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have the Mac mini that I use for Plex and channels, and it is more than computationally capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing a podcast recording if necessary, but it would be kind of a pain to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move it and attach, you know, monitors to it and so on and so forth. So I wouldn’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. So I was trying to figure out what the right answer is in order to replace a computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, replace Erin’s computer with something more modern, you know, preferably Apple Silicon and so on and so forth. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was hemming and hawing about what the right answer was. And it was, it seemed kind of wasteful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, you know, replace what is effectively her Kroger online shopping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. If it’s still puttering along, somewhat working, but out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey woodwork came, I don’t know if this person wanted to be anonymous and I will assume anonymity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to be safe. But out of the woodwork came a random person who I know through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet, but not extraordinarily well, who was kind enough to say to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have an M1 MacBook Air that’s collecting dust, would you like it? To which I said, oh my fricking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, yes, I would. Wow. So this exceptionally kind individual who if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would name generally, but I didn’t think to pre-clear this conversation with them, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipped, well, I paid for shipping because it was the least I could do. But they shipped this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, and it has arrived. I have loaded it with Aaron’s stuff. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word, it’s so much nicer than the adorable. I will always and forever love the adorable. I will always love that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer, always. But oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so much nicer than the adorable. It is so fast. And this particular model, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely, I said, I’ll take it. I had no idea how much RAM, no idea what disk it had in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it did not care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t matter. Even the lowest, tiniest configuration is miles better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook Adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And sure enough, it arrived, and because this person is a developer for a very big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technology-related company, not Apple, but someone in that kind of neck of the woods, this computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened to have a terabyte hard drive and 16 gigs of RAM. I could not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked for this to go any better for me. So thank you to the, whether or not you want it to be, anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual who has, well, I mean, I guess I paid for the shipping, but they still shipped me the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am so thankful for it, because now I have a backup computer, which now Marco is thankful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have a backup computer in case my computer has problems. And it is genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very nice, so much nicer than we need or deserve. And so thank you very, very, very much for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing that. It was extremely kind. And the best part of this, it’s a person my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann I opened the box. Well, first of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the silver, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, I opened the box and first of all, it came in the Apple box. I had no idea what was being shipped to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me other than that it was an M1 MacBook Air. That’s all I knew. And that I understood it to be in good condition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I opened the shipping box and sure enough, there’s the original MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box. Bonus points for this individual. I opened the box And there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are probably three lunatics in this world that would have done this. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them. I bet John is one of them. And this just wonderful anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey human not only kept that like shrink wrap, not shrink wrap, but you know what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That like plastic stuff that’s wrapped around the computer when it was shipped, when it was shipped from Apple. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only did they keep it, they put the friggin computer back inside it the best they could.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann I was overjoyed to see this. Oh, I do that too. When I, when I sell a
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Casey computer, I do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco same thing. Oh, fair enough. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apologize, Marco, for selling you short then. I thought you were a little more normal than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann No, I do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this extraordinarily tasteful individual, they did that. They sent me the power brick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t expect that. Not only did they send me a USB-C cable, I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it had been used at some point, but they have the dexterity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to somehow put it back in the little cardboard thing that it came in. Maybe they never used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John had… The trick
⏹️ ▶️ John is never take it out of the cardboard thing, just FYI. Someone who also packages products will just never take it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either they never did, and I’m mistaken, or they took the time to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look really close to the way it came from the factory. Again, this is a person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who gives a crap, and I am forever indebted to them and in love with them in a friendly way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Aaron’s computer problems are solved because now this incredibly kind individual has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent me a M1 MacBook Air, which I don’t deserve, but I am so thankful for. The best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of course of this whole story though is that Erin’s working on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Declan’s yearbook, it’s very weird the way his school does it. You order it online,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t get it until the summertime, you don’t like get to go around to your friends and have them physically sign it, but you can like electronically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sign it. It’s very unusual. But anyway, she’s been working on this for the last several days and you know trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to amass pictures because you can pay a couple of bucks to put in a few extra pages with your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own pictures and content in it. It’s like the world’s crummiest photo book, but it’s really cute. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin’s been working on this really, really hard. And I look over at her and she’s using the goddamn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adorable. And I’m like, Erin, what are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I was going to say, what
⏹️ ▶️ John did you do with that? What did you do with the Adorable? Apparently, you did nothing with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t do anything with it yet. I’ve also been well over my eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deep in call sheets Like, everything’s fine, but I’m trying to get this out the door and blah, blah, blah. So I didn’t do the due
⏹️ ▶️ Casey diligence of like hiding the Adorable or anything. Or even in Erin’s credit, I didn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a lot of conversation with her about it, other than saying, hey, your new computer’s ready. But anyway, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at her using this damn Adorable, and I’m just like, oh my God, how are you doing this to yourself? And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like, well, why don’t you use the new one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. This is the one I grabbed. I was like, OK, well, that’s fine. But anyway, so the car hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed, thanks to me just being basically a Karen to Safelite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and finally getting them to do the job properly. And then the computer’s fixed, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this incredibly kind listener. Someone in the chat is perhaps tongue in cheek, perhaps not saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am I gonna pay it forward and send you adorable to someone? I should, but I’m not, because I fricking love that computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I will keep it forever, even though it is a pile of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna give someone an unreliable crappy computer? That’s not paying it forward, that’s a punishment. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that’s my updates.
Butt-crack problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, you’ve had a better tech week than I have. I have had a terrible family device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, what’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so long story short, someone in my house who is not me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally sat on someone else’s iPad and caused what appears to be a crack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How bad, how big, how deep? Tell me more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so subtle that it could be easily confused for a scratch on the surface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s across like a third of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think we have developed a hierarchy here. Now, rock, paper, scissors style.
⏹️ ▶️ John So an iPad can destroy a car windshield, but a butt can destroy an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you touched your butt to the windshield of your car, it would just shatter. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Casey right off. Into a million pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done, John, well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so the owner of the iPad was extremely upset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the butt crack situation. And because the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the owner’s primary computing device, and they didn’t cause the damage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it would be inhumane to make them suffer with this damage forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is a crack, it is not a scratch. The pencil doesn’t work across it. There’s a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of little weirdness about it. And this person uses the pencil, So I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, this is an M1 11 inch iPad Pro, I have the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one as my iPad. I’ll just swap it. Now, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, because I use it so infrequently, but when I do, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need cellular usually, because of that, I had gotten the T-Mobile like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super cheap data plan on it. It was like five bucks a month or something. It was super cheap, way cheap. Normally we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AT&T family. It was way cheaper than AT&T’s cheapest option. So this was active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on T-Mobile for, I don’t know, a year or two. When I transitioned it over, that plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t carry over because it was some weird prepay thing and the eSIM instantly got lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I did the restore and everything and all this stuff. I’m like, ah, fine, who needs T-Mobile anyway? It isn’t that good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the new owner of what was previously my iPad actually used the cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty heavily. And oftentimes, while we’re on road trips, So it’s like, all right, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T-Mobile is not great for that, you know, coverage wise. I want this to be on AT&T now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we, let me just interrupt you very quickly and to go on a very brief tangent. I want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a T-Mobile customer so badly because they seem to actually treat their customers as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far as I can tell, like human beings rather than just another like, you know, cash machine to extract
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, try canceling an iPad plan. It’s not super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but I think I might’ve talked about this on the show. Like a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two ago, I did the T-Mobile try-on or something like that. I’ll probably forget to put a link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can download an app on your iPhone if you have an eSIM, and you can literally provision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your eSIM on your iPhone to have a T-Mobile data plan for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month. And so you can tell your iPhone, hey, use Verizon, AT&T, whatever, for your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existing, or excuse me, for phone calls, but use T-Mobile for data. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can even tell it, don’t fall back to your old carrier. So you know like, oh, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not getting data here, it’s because T-Mobile sucks. I tried this admittedly a year or two ago and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when T-Mobile worked, it worked really damn well. But let me tell you in the Richmond, Virginia area,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very spotty, very, very spotty. And I tried it thinking maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will switch in now. No chance, or at least maybe I’ll have to try again in a few years, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not right now. So it bumps me out because they really do seem, cancellation issues aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they seem to treat their people, their customers okay. But golly, the service around here anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no good. So anyway, I apologize, carry on. So you need to now cancel this plan that’s been orphaned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I can’t, anyway, long story short, T-Mobile makes it hard. You gotta like talk to a web chat person and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was complicated. Anyway, got that done. So now I have this iPad that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on T-Mobile that its new owner really needs it to be an AT&T. I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardest time ever trying to get this done. Now, one could argue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don’t I just fix the butt crack screen? I don’t know why, for some reason, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t get AppleCare on this iPad. I should have gotten AppleCare, I often do for family devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t on this for whatever reason. The out of AppleCare repair price for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an M1 11-inch iPad Pro for a screen is $600. Oh, gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, a new one of the same configuration is $1,100. So, you know, that’s less,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it certainly doesn’t feel like a good way to spend money. And I thought my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad use is relatively minimal. I don’t care about this crack, so I’ll take it as mine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no big deal, fine. Anyway, so switching the other one over, the good one, Trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get this iPad that was on T-Mobile to now be active on AT&T has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nightmare. I have had so many like, alright, resend the eSIM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please, like, try to get carrier settings to update. I have verified that T-Mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no longer active on T-Mobile, the plan I paid for has expired like weeks ago now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is definitely no longer active there. of their going back and forth AT&T both web chat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I brought it into a store and it’s like it’ll it’ll activate in just my house and then if I leave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my house and go anywhere else it deactivates as no service what it or it’ll activate for like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day and then the next day no service that doesn’t make any sense I finally have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right now where it partially works because I abandoned the e sim and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person in the AT&T store gave me a physical sim and that has made it work a little bit better than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eSIM has. But now, and like there’s like 8 of those messages stacked up in settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying AT&T wants you to install an eSIM. This whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, I’ve always had it work pretty well. Where I get a device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s only on AT&T from the moment I get it and I never have any problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have activated and deactivated so many iPads and watches for AT&T over the years and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great because you can do them all through the web interface, like no chat bots, no calling anybody. I don’t think it works with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, but for smartwatches and iPads, you can do that with AT&T. It’s all web-based. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go on, cancel, add new ones, no big deal. It’s super easy. This one, because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on T-Mobile before, has been a nightmare. So I strongly suggest people out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing that Casey just told you to do where you try T-Mobile, yeah, don’t do that. Definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has cost me so many hours, literal hours of going back and forth with either doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the eSIM dance, calling T-Mobile, going to AT&T. I have honestly thought I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just replace this iPad. It would be easier at this point to buy a new iPad and to save myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours of time than it would be, or you know, or to pay $600 to get the butt crack fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you would have told me like two weeks ago, hey, look, you can pay $600 to solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem or you’re gonna have two weeks of stress and like at least 10 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of waste of time I would have paid the $600 like knowing knowing now what I know then that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have been the better idea my time is that valuable right now I’m so crunched on all angles like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need I need to recover time from different places in my life this iPad is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruined by this weird cellular weirdness that I can’t get either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple or AT&T or T-Mobile to figure out it’s It’s been a nightmare. So yeah, word of advice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you get an Apple device, leave it on one carrier for its entire lifetime. Do not change carriers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And especially in the eSIM era.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be saying the same thing as you after that experience. But for what it’s worth, I have never, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet anyway, had any such problems. Like if you recall a year, year and a half ago, something like that, we switched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from AT&T to Verizon. I’m pretty sure we were, I don’t remember if we were on eSIMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for AT&T at this point. I think we were, but we went to Verizon eSIMS and that was all fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve put different SIMS on and eSIMS on and off iPads, if I’m not mistaken, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never run into this. I used to use T-Mobile physical SIMS years ago because they used to have this absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extraordinarily great prepay plan. It was like five bucks for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like five gigs that you could use over the course of like something like six months or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And that doesn’t seem like that much, but if it’s an accessory device that you’re not using to like watch YouTube nonstop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a few gigs will last a real long time and that was the best, but they don’t do that anymore. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t had these personal experiences, so I don’t wanna make everyone forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and always think that eSIM is garbage, but that experience is unquestionably garbage. Like that sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what do you do? Like if Apple can’t do it and if T-Mobile can’t do it and AT&T can’t do it, who do you turn to? Do you throw the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the ocean and start anew?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I posted the Amastadon maybe almost a week ago now. I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a bunch of people, many of whom have had similar problems, and they’re like, oh, well, you have to go to super high level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support with AT&T or Apple. One person said they had to go through AppleCare and get the whole device replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my gosh. Actually, multiple people said that. Multiple people said the AT&T, you got to get them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to properly register the IMEI in their system. It’s somewhere. It’s not associated right or whatever else. And I had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person in the store at least look at that, and they couldn’t figure out any problems with it. someone else said that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes all these levels of escalation through different customer support. And I’m like, how many more hours am I going to spend?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, honestly, I was looking at trade-in prices. I’m like, can I just trade this in? Like, how quickly can I solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem without going through hours more customer service and then mailing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off and being without it for a week and like all this stuff? Like, oh my God, like there’s so, and all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this for the stupidest problem of like the cell service doesn’t work. And for this iPad, cell service is a must.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s very frequently needed for this iPad. So like, I’m not gonna just not have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna tether. Believe me, we’ve been doing that for the last, like we just took a big road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trip, did a lot of that. It sucked. Oh, tethering is the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, I need cellular for this iPad and I’m seriously, I’m like about to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like it’s that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sucks, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, glad to hear your windshield and computer worked out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann For now,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann for now. See if your friend has any extra iPad Pros I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is your punishment for not selling me that iPad, Margo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want this one?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Yeah. If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need cellular. I mean, I don’t need the cellular, but it’s too late now. I already bought a brand new one, but I was ready to buy your
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 iPad Pro off of you. And you’re like, I want to keep it. I might need it for something. And look what happened. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can offer you the butt crack one for a good price. No. Because Apple’s trade in currently values it at $80. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John your chance to sell to me was before someone cracked it in half with
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann their butt. I’ll give it to you for $81. Pass. Wow! Even the… Who
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann wants a thing with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t use the pencil and you don’t look that closely, you’d never know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the little slivers of glass driving themselves into your thumb, you’ll barely notice.