587: No Dots Are Going to Help Me
16 May 2024Apple’s accessibility announcements, returning to an old scanner friend, and leaping into the iPad discourse.
Episode Description:
- New member special: ATP Neutral: Car Shopping
- Pre-show: Marco is back in the ScanSnap world
- Raven scanner (defunct)
FujitsuRicoh ScanSnap iX1600
- Follow-up:
- Apple apologizes for iPad “Crush” ad
- AppleCare+ for educational-discounted products (via Carter Sanderson)
- iPad nano-texture glass
- Arun Maini interviews Ternus & Joswiak 1 2 3 4
- Editors’ note: Thanks to Elon’s Big Business Brain™, we now have to link to all the
tweetsX’s in this whole 🤬 thread, becauseTwitterX won’t show threads unless you’re logged in. Well done, Elon. Great work. 👏🏻 … 👏🏻 … 👏🏻 Now we’re junking up our show notes because we 💙 our listeners more than we hate him. And we really hate him.
- Editors’ note: Thanks to Elon’s Big Business Brain™, we now have to link to all the
- iPad Pro Smart Folio angles
- Smart Folio Keyboard reliability
- Apple stickers (via Scott)
- The M4’s “next-generation ML accelerators” (via Wade Tregaskis)
- M4 Neural Engine: 38 trillion ops/sec vs. M3’s 13 trillion ops/sec
- M4 with 1 disabled P-core vs. M3 with no disabled P-cores
- Apple announces new accessibility features
- John’s brief iPad Pro review
- iPad Pro dissatisfaction
- Ask ATP:
- Will the M4’s new display driver set us up for a 2-external-display computer with M4? (via Rumee Ahmed)
- Why is there so much discussion about CPU power in iPads but not iPhones? (via Mike Runcieman)
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Meta wants to be the Microsoft of headsets
- Post-show: John’s latest remote IT software adventure
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- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy, and safe to remove your personal data online. Use code atp at checkout for 20% off.
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Chapters
- Back to ScanSnap
- ATP Neutral
- “Crush” ad: our bad
- John’s AppleCare+ pricing
- iPad nanotexture is different
- Joz, Ternus on bendability
- John’s new iPad Pro
- Smart vs. Magic Keyboard
- Apple stickers on Dells
- M4 follow-up
- Accessibility announcements
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code atp)
- Apple ID woes
- The iPad discourse
- #askatp: M4 supports more displays?
- #askatp: iPad vs. iPhone power debates
- Ending theme
- An IT story
Back to ScanSnap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so happy to be back in the ScanSnap world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wasn’t aware that you left it.
⏹️ ▶️ John you weren’t in the ScanSnap world?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is the line of Fujitsu. Well now, what I learned is that, as I had to buy a new one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, what I learned is that they’ve now rebranded as Ricoh. I guess Ricoh probably bought Fujitsu or somehow bought their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assets of that business or whatever. There’s a little note in the box that they’ve rebranded due to ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing or whatever. So now what was Fujitsu ScanSnap is now Ricoh ScanSnap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And anyway, so I briefly mentioned the show probably something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four years ago when I had first moved out to the beach during early COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I needed some kind of document scanner like I have always used. Fujitsu had gone kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a while without any major updates. And there was this new one that I had gotten ads for all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Raven. What I liked about it was that it was standalone. Like the Fujitsu had always,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d always kind of been annoyed that I had to run their software on my Mac to make anything work. And the Raven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanner was one of those many products like we were just talking about with the R1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those many products where it’s just an Android tablet that happens to be bolted into a scanner body.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s this whole touch screen on the front that very slowly would navigate you through, you know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scanning operations it had. And it was just, it was literally just an Android touch screen. And it like, when it would do software updates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d even see like the Android logo. Like it was a very thinly veiled Android touchscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, it was fine. The touchscreen was very slow. It was very annoying having to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait for your scanner to boot for like 45 seconds every time you wanted to use it. Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of an annoyingly slow product. I wasn’t that happy with it. Eventually I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought my ScanSnap to the beach and everything was better. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in the new Long Island house and I need a scanner. and I pull out the Raven out of storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I plug it in, it’s acting a little weird. Turns out, they’re gone. They’re out of business, and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire scanner basically has stopped working, even though it was never that fast to begin with. Now it’s extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow, and throws a bunch of errors, and can’t really do anything because the company is basically gone. And most of the web backend appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be either absent or barely functional.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, seriously? Because raven.com, is this not it? Because I’m looking at it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Click on any link on the page.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Help Center, hmm. SSL version or cipher mismatch this Chrome. Downloads, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, that exists. But no, I take your point though. So this is mostly defunct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so yeah, that’s gone. And today I’m like going through all these, I have like, I’m going through like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month and a half of mail. I said I have been accumulating on my desk as we’ve been doing all this house stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, I really want a scanner. And Amazon had the latest ScanSnap for same day delivery. I’m like, great, done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Back to ScanSnap. Let me tell you, it is glorious. So now, ScanSnap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has fully standalone Wi-Fi models where you don’t have to install their weird software on your Mac. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have it scan directly to a Dropbox folder or whatever. It’s so fast, it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. It’s a lot smaller and folds up nicer than the Raven. Also, so happy to be back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the ScanSnap world, even though now it is apparently the Ricoh ScanSnap world. But it is still as good as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever when you get a new one and set it up as Wi-Fi only.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s interesting to me, I don’t scan everything and I keep a lot more paper than I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to and or should, but I probably should go more in this direction with my life. This,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume, does what I would think of as duplex scanning. Maybe that’s not the right term for it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it scans both sides at the same time, and it just shoots them through. Like it has an automatic feeder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s sucking the paper in one by one by one, scan, scan, scan, and it’s amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast. Like it is, you know, these are a few hundred dollars. It is overkill for what many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, but once you get used to this style of document scanner, where it just looks like a little inkjet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printer and it just shoots them through, rather than having like a giant flatbed thing that might have a feeder on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top, maybe, like this kind is so much faster and so much better. And what it does is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you stick a stack of paper in it, you hit go, and it scans them all into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OCRed PDF files. Oh, that’s fancy. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not the right tool for the job if you were trying to like scan your old photo negatives or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, it’s doesn’t, I think you might be able to, like you can scan photos with it, but it’s not very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. It’s not super high resolution. And it doesn’t have a lot of the more advanced like color options that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a flatbed scanner would have for scanning photos. If what you wanna do is scan paper to get it out of your life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a scan snap and get a shredder. It’s a continuous operation from one to the other. The paper is then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone from your life. It is wonderful. Like it scans everything to PDFs and it goes right to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox, no software, it’s fantastic. It is a great way to get paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much out of your life as it can, because the reality is, I love, whenever we talk about printers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or scanners, we hear from the young people. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same people are like, I haven’t written a check in my entire life. And it’s like, okay, well, that’s wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, you do occasionally still have to write checks. I had to write one to a plumber literally three days ago. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a common action, but I do still have to write checks. Sometimes. Similarly, I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to deal with paper. Sometimes I get mail. I’m an adult. I get envelopes. I have to deal with them. Sometimes it’s some kind of important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco document that they need to hold on to in some form. Like I get paper. I had to deal with it. I also use a printer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to print things sometimes. Like so even though we are in this modern tech life where we have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notion of like I don’t even need cash anymore. I don’t even need a wallet. Like I just have my phone. Everything’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone. I don’t even need paper or like that’s a wonderful theory and some people are able to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people in the world still need these legacy technologies like paper and cash and checks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You just need these sometimes. And so it’s really very satisfying as a technologist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have really good tools to deal with the paper in your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah, well, I have a HP printer that is very old. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like it just fine. It has a scanner on it. And it’s not a bespoke super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast scanner. doesn’t scan in duplex or anything like that, but it has a scanner. And one of the things I really like about it is this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey printer can scan to a SambaShare, you know, to a network share. And so I like to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure I could work around whatever the ScanSnap does if it doesn’t support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, like if you install the ScanSnap desktop software and connect it via USB instead of Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do all sorts of stuff. Like then you can do automations and all sorts of stuff. Like there is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option available to you. I just prefer to have it be standalone I don’t have to not have their software on my computer anymore.
ATP Neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we need to do a little bit of happy housekeeping. There is a new member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for those of all six of you that enjoyed our prior show, neutral, well, we’ve sort of kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of done a new episode and for everyone else, I guess you can just ignore it. But we did ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neutral colon car shopping and this was an idea or a seed of an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea that I had that John has watered and sprouted into a full-fledged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode. And John, do you want to give us a nickel tour of what you came up with?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. The idea is something we often discuss in the show, which is basically if your current car poofed out of existence and you
⏹️ ▶️ John had to get a new one, what would you get? And then when we were talking about the topic, we’re talking about how many
⏹️ ▶️ John different parameters you can put on that. And in typical ATP fashion, we decided to answer the question
⏹️ ▶️ John subject to a large set of parameters. So we didn’t just answer it once. We answered it many times over,
⏹️ ▶️ John starting off fairly practical and ending being somewhat absurd. absurd. So if you want to hear us ruminate
⏹️ ▶️ John on what we would personally get to satisfy the needs of cars or the wants of cars
⏹️ ▶️ John in our life, if we had to get a car right now, that’s what we talk about. And yeah, we did a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast of that, believe it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Not just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about car buying, we talked about cars, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So you can go and check the show notes, if you remember, just to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see if any of the links there, you know, tickle your fancy and you can, you know, skip around and listen. I really enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I thought it was a lot of fun. It was funny seeing where the three of us agreed, and as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would expect, where all of us disagreed. But nevertheless, it was a fun episode. So you can consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, what was this, the 14th episode of Neutral? I forget where we left off. Something like that. So it’s the spiritually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 14th episode of Neutral. And John, if you weren’t a member, what do you have to do? Go to
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm slash join. And I will add, if one of us, well, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I or Casey ever get a new car, we’ll probably do another member special about it. We can’t keep up that pace with Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John car, by the way. So his new car, as we’ll just mention on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It’ll just be, oh, Marco got another new car. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
“Crush” ad: our bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. And we got to talk about the Crush ad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Apple has officially and formally apologized for it. Reading from The Verge, Apple has apologized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after a commercial meant to showcase its brand new iPad Pro drew widespread criticism among the creative community.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In a statement provided to Ad Age, Tor Marin, Apple’s vice president of marketing, said the company, quote unquote, missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mark. The full quote is, creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, our bad. And then Charlie Chapman added on Mastodon, pour one out for the ad director shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the WWDC opening video right now showing a thousand developers being squeezed by a car crusher into the new Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI. Well done. Well done. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John luckily they have time to cancel that now, but yeah, I hope they don’t. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, we’ll talk about WDAC when WDAC arrives, but the AI sauce that they’re pouring over everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John surely some of that sauce will be poured over Xcode. Anytime AI these days
⏹️ ▶️ John is said in association with the thing that you do for a living, It makes people nervous.
John’s AppleCare+ pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we had some feedback, well, we actually had a lot of feedback with regard to your AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus conundrum with your educationally discounted iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Carter Sanderson was one of the first or perhaps the most eloquent of all the ones we got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know why John picked this particular one, but you get the prize, Carter. And Carter writes, the reason John only had the option
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to purchase the two years up front AppleCare Plus in the EDU stores, because the AppleCare Plus is also discounted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just the iPad itself. John could have had his cake and eaten it too after the two years when the AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expires, there’s a 30-day window in which you can enroll in a monthly AppleCare and continue paying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as long as you’d like. This is actually slightly more bang for your buck, even without the educationally discounted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AppleCare. Alas, it’s too late to fix it now because once AppleCare is canceled, it can never be added back with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the 30-day grace period mentioned above.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and Apple has a document about extending your AppleCare Plus coverage. I believe this wasn’t always the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was some point in the past of AppleCare where if you got the two-year one, and you didn’t have the option to add
⏹️ ▶️ John month to month after, but I could be misremembering that. But anyway, yeah, I just end up paying full price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said, I could just return and get the EDU price or whatever, but I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to, because it’s too much of a hassle. argument
iPad nanotexture is different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall where this was stated, but I did hear or read Jason saying something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the nanotexture glass. I think it was mostly John, but maybe all of us were wondering, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, how does that work since, you know, the prior example of nanotexture glass, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the studio display or not, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it? Cinema display? Pro display. I couldn’t get it right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, those displays, Apple made it very clear that you aren’t supposed to touch them. You have to use the special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bespoke rag to clean it. And Jason says, the nanotexture glass is an entirely different process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPad. It’s a chemical etch that’s designed to survive greasy fingers and Apple pencils.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there you have it. At the very least, Apple is saying, this is not the same thing. We use the same name for it as we do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this one stands up to fingers and pencils, and we’ll surely find out if that is the case.
Joz, Ternus on bendability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, with regard to thinness and durability on the iPad, Arun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maini, forgive me, I’m not entirely sure what the correct pronunciation is, anyway, he is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big YouTuber. He interviewed John Ternus and Greg Joswiak, presumably at the top of the Tribeca apartment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loft thing that they have in New York, but one way or another, this is like, I think, a strewn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across four different tweets. But Arun asks, years ago, we had a phase where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every company was trying to cut every millimeter off of phones, and then that became an unpopular opinion. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are going super thin with the tablet, to which Greg Joswiak replies, sometimes I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you saw when people were reacting poorly to what some other device manufacturers were doing when they were making them thinner is that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were making them less capable. They were giving poor battery life or less features or poor quality. We engineers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we engineer our products to last for years and years and years. So we don’t tend to make those compromises
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that others make to do those sorts of changes. We love to defy physics, if you will, and figure out how to make things smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and lighter and make them that much better as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Such a marketing guy answer when he
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey says, well, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John some other people were doing and they were making them thinner, they were making them less capable and giving them bad battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Arun should have interrupted and said, no, no, I was referring to the iPhone 6 that bent. You guys
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one. And by the way, it also
⏹️ ▶️ John had bad battery life because it was so thin because the battery was thin.
⏹️ ▶️ John just to clarify, that’s what I was referring to. I wasn’t referring to what quote, other device manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John did when they made their devices thinner. In fact, I’m not sure other device manufacturers really were as obsessed as thinness
⏹️ ▶️ John as Apple was back in the days. But by all means, frame this as something that other device manufacturers did,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s why you get paid the big bucks, Jaws. Yeah, I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out what other products could he have been talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t go. I mean, I’m sure there were like I’m sure that’s that’s the thing about this. I’m sure there were. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John his statement is accurate. It just neatly sidesteps the implied context of the question,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what what marketers do. So I’m not a non-sarcastic thumbs up. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John very impressed by that little spin move. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Joss is a pro. He is a pro and this is not his first rodeo. Then with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad thinness and durability, John Ternes replied, the main logic board runs right down the center in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the two batteries in the iPad Pro. That’s really helpful from a thermal dissipation standpoint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we can spread heat evenly. We also have a cowling over the main logic board, a metal cover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that helps with thermal spreading, but also effectively creates a central rib that runs through the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that tremendously improves the stiffness of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is great. I love hearing about heat. I love when the Apple says anything about dealing with heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is smart to put the hot thing in the middle so it can spread from side to side instead of jamming it all to one side like the logic board
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be. That’s great. And the fact that they made a little structure out of it that makes a little rib that makes it stiffer, that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming, I haven’t seen the teardowns yet, but I’m assuming this rib runs the length, the long length
⏹️ ▶️ John of the iPad, right? And that’s a potentially clever hack
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think most YouTubers will try to bend it along the long edge to get more leverage, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why they reinforce it because a big vertical rib going down the middle doesn’t help as much with bending in the
⏹️ ▶️ John other direction, but I don’t think most YouTubers will bend it in that direction. So another smart move. I haven’t seen any good
⏹️ ▶️ John bending videos though. I haven’t actually been seeking them out, but just FYI, Apple has actually done some stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with these very thin iPads to address the bending.
John’s new iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually to that end, did you receive your iPad? Do you want to go grab it and bend it now?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did not want to bend it. I have received it. In fact, I can give some updates on it in this next item here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying to think, is there a person on earth more likely to resist bending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad? Exactly. John probably has it in a protective pouch surrounded by-
⏹️ ▶️ John do have a pouch for it, but I- Oh my God. Of course you do. I was the type of person who, when I
⏹️ ▶️ John took it out of the whatever cellophane that they they wrap it in or whatever. I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John be careful not to put any fingerprints on the side that I’m never gonna see because the case will be covering it. You know what I mean? Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John backside. Because why put a fingerprint there? Just put a fingerprint there and then cover it with the case for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. All right, so you are a Smartfolio fan. Now, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would please, because their names mean nothing to me, can you remind me exactly what Smartfolio is?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not a keyboard, is that right? It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, it’s not a track pad. It’s not anything, it’s just a thing that puts some flat, gummy,
⏹️ ▶️ John protective material on both sides of the iPad. They’ve had this product ever since they went to the
⏹️ ▶️ John flat-sided iPad Pro. It’s just like, it makes a little sandwich out of it. I like it because it protects
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And also the top part of it is like in three segments and you can like fold it into like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John triangular shaped tube type thing to prop up your iPad. And when they talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about the product in the event video, They said, and the new iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Smartfolio, supports more angles or something. I looked at the pictures of it and I’m like, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly like my existing Smartfolio. I don’t understand the angles thing. But when I got my
⏹️ ▶️ John Smartfolio case, which came like two days after we recorded, before the iPad. Of course. You could see a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back of the box that showed how the angles worked. And now that I actually have my iPad as well, I put it in the Smartfolio
⏹️ ▶️ John and it does indeed work that way. So you can make the little triangle behind it when it’s in like landscape mode. and it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly upright, but tilted back away from you a little bit. Well, now there’s three different positions
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can put it in. There’s like kind of the middle position, which is the same as the one and only position with the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro Smart Folio. And then there’s one that’s farther back and one that’s farther up. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John great for me because when I use, like I said, I use the Smart Folio to prop my iPad up when
⏹️ ▶️ John I watch TV with it in bed, which is the main thing that I do with my iPad, right? And very often the little
⏹️ ▶️ John triangle is not quite at the right angle for me. So I like prop it up by like putting my finger
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath the back of it, or I smush the pillow that it’s on or whatever. And this is great, I won’t have to do that anymore. I can just
⏹️ ▶️ John pick one of three possible angles, which again, I’m pretty sure one of them is more tilted and one of them is
⏹️ ▶️ John less tilted. So I can’t wait to use this. I just got my iPad Pro today, so I haven’t done anything with it other than
⏹️ ▶️ John set it up, which is a whole other story. We probably don’t have time to get into it, but suffice it to say that process
⏹️ ▶️ John is still not smooth. And I did put it in the case and I did prop it up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I did try out the pencil and stuff like that. But anyway, I’m looking forward to using this for real to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John some video probably tomorrow night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, this is relevant, but earlier today I saw a reel from MKBHD on Instagram and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MKBHD seems to have a kind of happy, funny obsession with magnets,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he has I forget the name for it, but it’s like greenish blackish like film that will show magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fields or kind of show magnets effectively. And he has this reel where he he puts this on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back of the prior gen iPad Pro in the new one. And I’m doing this off memory, but I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the new one, there’s like either a series of magnets or kind of like a rib, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, of magnets where this Smartfolio can connect. So that’s what gives it, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the extra like stops or the way he described it, it almost sounded like it was infinite. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not trying to say that’s the case. It’s just, that’s kind of what it sounded like. But it’s worth checking out this like minute and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half reel just to see where these magnets are, because he has a pretty good diagram of it at the end too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ll put that in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Although I’m going to ding his team for in the end, they had a, like, and here’s where all the magnets are. And the magnets didn’t show the ribs
⏹️ ▶️ John that he was talking about in the main video. So slight miss
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there. Oh, whoops. Yeah. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s not, having used the thing is, there’s three distinct positions. You can feel them. Like there’s basically three sets of magnets
⏹️ ▶️ John where the little back thing attaches to, and they’re, you know, low, medium, and high. So, but yeah, a great, I give it
⏹️ ▶️ John a great thumbs up. It’s an unexpected advantage of this iPad. And it really does feel thinner, but
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, when you put the cover on it, It gets a lot thicker real quick. The one thing I will say though is, I do have Procreate
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do have the pencil and I did try the barrel rotation thing and I could not for the life of me. Do a
⏹️ ▶️ John barrel! Yeah, I could not get it to work. I have the latest version of Procreate that’s on the App Store, but I think maybe the version
⏹️ ▶️ John they demoed in the event is not out yet because they also did the pencil squeeze thing and squeezed and it brought
⏹️ ▶️ John up a menu and squeeze does not bring up a menu in the current App Store version of Procreate
⏹️ ▶️ John unless I have like a bad CDN or something, but I did go directly to the Procreate page in the app store and it didn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John update. So I don’t know what to tell you, but yeah, the pencil, the squeezy pencil thing is real great. The
⏹️ ▶️ John haptics are real nice and gentle. Thumbs up on the pencil as well.
Smart vs. Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we weren’t talking about a keyboard, but now we are because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an anonymous genius writes, in regard to the Smartfolio keyboard, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey markedly less reliable over time than the Magic Keyboard. The wires that connected the keyboard to the smart connector interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ran through the folds, and over time, the constant folding and unfolding makes them fail. I’m a retail technician,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I don’t have hard numbers, but anecdotally, we see way more dead Smartfolios than Magic Keyboards, to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point that there was a silent repair program to cover these failures for three years from purchase on almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all models. Meanwhile, the Magic Keyboard rarely comes in for anything other than physical damage or damaged keys. It’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad though, the Folio was nice and light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be clear though, there are other reasons why Apple retail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff might see a lot more smart keyboard Folios coming in. The Magic Keyboard’s number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they cost a lot less, and number two, they’ve been out for many more years. And so there’s probably way more of them out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there in the field, and the average age of them is probably higher compared to the Magic Keyboard, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much newer and much more expensive. So there are other factors there, but that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is true that the Smart Keyboard Folio did not last very long. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, I think I had two of them die over the last, you know, whatever, however many years since 2018.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also like the Magic Keyboards don’t hold up that well either. By most people’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, at least, at least like, you know, the Surface doesn’t hold up that well. Like they do seem to at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco function, but they seem to age very poorly in terms of like surface finishing and the materials
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peeling and stuff like that. So I think that reason alone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a good enough defense for why the new Magic Keyboard has seemingly replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for the Smart Keyboard Folio. I do think that like as we’re seeing people get them and some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are posting like comparison photos, it does look like the decision Apple probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for getting rid of the Smart Keyboard Folio is that, you know, A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a replacement that costs more, and you better believe the Magic Keyboard does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have only a 30 whatever percent profit margin to Apple, like that their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main products have. It probably has a way bigger profit margin than that. Accessories usually do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a huge profit center. Like whenever, you know, when you’re selling devices at retail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you always want to get the, what they call attachment sales. And this is accessories, warranty plans,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stuff like that, that you sell along with like the main thing the person came for, the phone, the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer, whatever. Like you wanna get those attachment sales because they have way higher profit margins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the device itself. So, Apple wants to push people towards the higher priced product. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes sense that when they, for the first new line of iPad Pros that existed after the Magic Keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can say, you know what? We’re just not gonna make that merely $200 one. Now you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to buy the $300 one. but also the overall bulk with the Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the new ones is similar to the overall bulk with the Smart Keyboard Folio on the old ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the combination of them making way more money from the Magic Keyboard probably, and also it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being reasonably similarly sized and weighted to the previous Smart Keyboard Folio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combo probably led them to conclude we can go without the Smart Keyboard Folio this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, even though the Smart Keyboard or the Magic Keyboard is newer, we’ll see, but
⏹️ ▶️ John thus far there is no silent three year repair program for that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think that that speaks to how bad the reliability must have been that Apple actually had a official program
⏹️ ▶️ John of replacement extending past when people expected it to. So it’s not just because there’s more of them and because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re older, but also there was a repair program. So maybe there’ll be a repair program for the Magic Keyboard as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m reserving judgment on whether the new Magic Keyboard combo is actually good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I get a chance to actually operate one. So I’ll go to an Apple store sometime soon and try to see one in person because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Smart Keyboard Folio was really a great combo. That with the 11-inch made such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an amazing, like, you know, portable, ultra portable setup. And like, and one thing I’m a little scared about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when I did try the original 11-inch Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I very quickly returned it, but when I did try it, I found that the key layout was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more cramped than the Smart Keyboard Folio keyboard on the 11-inch. It seemed like a keyboard that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was designed more for the 13-inch iPad, and they kind of wedged it down to the 11, whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Smart Keyboard Folio was great even on the 11. And I worry that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco according to our friends, like Jason Snell has mentioned this in a couple of podcasts, it seems like the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys and key layout seem to be the same between the new Magic Keyboard and the old one, or at least roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same. So I’m a little concerned whether the 11-inch will feel too cramped. It seems like a slam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dunk if you’re a 13-inch user, but for the 11-inch, I still have reservations. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, but I think it’s all in the eye of the beholder to a degree, because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 11-inch iPad Pro, the, you know, the MT1, and I’ve had this Magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keyboard since it was available in I think early 2020. And I don’t find,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, it’s not spacious, the keyboard, but I can’t remember a time I’ve been trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to type and been like, oh, son of a gun, I am, this thing is so cramped, you know, or anything like that, which isn’t to say that you’re wrong. It isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say that Jason’s wrong. It’s just, I’m used to it. And it’s not something that I find bothersome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey personally. So your mileage may vary. And you know, if you have an Apple store nearby, I encourage you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give it a shot. Marco, remind me, maybe we covered this last week and I completely forgot. Did you, did the Arment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family order any, like did Tiff grab one or anything like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I asked her cause she draws in Procreate a lot. And I asked her, she still has the M1 13 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just going to say that instead of 12.9. retcon that because it’s easier. So she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has the M113 and I asked her like, hey, you know, here’s the new features with this new pencil. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that interest you? How would that affect you? And she said basically like, yeah, it would be nice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like the additional dimension, especially like the turning of like the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long nibbed virtual pens and stuff like that. That’s kind of what she had in mind, like that, you know, to have that extra dimension
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like being able to turn it like a shape tip as you’re doing a stroke would be helpful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but she also said, I don’t really need it that much. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Armament family, outside of me being a gadget hound and wanting everything new constantly, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything Apple makes, there’s really not much drive in my family for iPad upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until and unless one breaks, because we don’t push the boundaries, which we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to in a little bit. My iPad usage, if I had the new iPad, would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not change at all. all the things that I can’t do on an iPad now, I wouldn’t be able to do with the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And all the times that I would choose to use a Mac instead of an iPad, the new one wouldn’t change that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So, and that’s how the whole family is like that. It’s like, yeah, we use iPads for certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of them are particularly demanding on the hardware. And so as long as they continue to work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine. Yep, that’s
Apple stickers on Dells
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Scott writes with regard to Apple stickers. I work at a large company where most people use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows PCs. While Macs are technically supported, getting one requires that your manager approves it explicitly, and some won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A very important function of Apple stickers in this environment is to cover up the Dell logo on laptops that belong to people who are protesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the injustice of not being granted a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We actually heard this from a number of people that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very common for people with corporate-owned PCs to put Apple stickers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their like dells and HP’s and stuff. That’s incredible. Like that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like if Steve Jobs were still around, if he saw that, that would be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason we wouldn’t get stickers anymore. He would, he would take away the entire sticker program after seeing one laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like one Dell laptop with an Apple sticker on it. He’d be like, that’s it. No more.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re done. Cut them off. Cause they’d all be on slightly crooked and that would drive him insane. Yeah. There will be multiple issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John You ever see anyone trying to place a non-symmetrical sticker, hell, even a symmetrical sticker in
⏹️ ▶️ John the dead center of the back of a laptop? It’s much harder than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s interesting.
M4 follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wade Tregeskis writes with regard to the M4’s next generation ML
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accelerators. The ML CPU extensions were AMX, or Apple Matrix Extensions, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume, starting with the M1. They’re basically custom matrix instructions as kind of an extension
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Neon, which is its own thing. They were never officially documented, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple rejects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any apps for their app stores anyway, which use them directly. As far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officially the only way to use them is through Apple frameworks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is a pretty good guess at what those next generation ML accelerators are. The keyword is next generation, which
⏹️ ▶️ John shows that they already had ML accelerators, but these are new ones. NEON is the ARM SIMD thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John single instruction, multiple data, where you take instruction like add, and you apply it to like 17
⏹️ ▶️ John integers all packed together into a thing or whatever. So that’s the idea. One instruction, and then you have
⏹️ ▶️ John these really big registers that hold multiple smaller pieces of data. Modern CPUs have all had
⏹️ ▶️ John them since the Altevec and MMX days ages ago, ARM has them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently Apple added these AMX instructions, which are ones that Apple made up
⏹️ ▶️ John for its own SOCs. And you know, them not officially being part of ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John and them not being exposed to the developer lets, gives Apple the flexibility to change those whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like, because you know, the only officially supported way to get at them is through Apple frameworks. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to me probably what the next generation ML accelerators are, which, I mean, You haven’t really heard
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ever talk about in the M1, M2, or M3, their ML accelerators in the CPU, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess they were there since the M1.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max Laves writes, “‘The Geekbench Core ML’ and E scores for the M4 iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are only incrementally better than the M3, according to Tom’s hardware.” Quote, Apple’s M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was rated for 18 trillion operations per second at floating point 16. I’m assuming that’s what FP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stands for, floating point 16 precision. but the M4 is rated for 38 trillions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operations per second, but with int eight. That means if equalized to int eight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey precision, we’re looking at a 5% improvement in total operations, or excuse me, trillions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of operations per second for the M4 over the M3. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I was thinking of and couldn’t remember the details of last time. Like, oh, that 38 trillion number, but the previous one was 18, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there was something about 16 versus 32 bit. No, it turned out it was 16 versus eight bit. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, same type of deal. There wasn’t this huge leap from 18 to 38 trillion. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller leap combined with a different thing that they were measuring. So there you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, the M4 with one disabled performance core versus the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M3 with no disabled performance cores. Looking at Mac rumors and reading from Mac rumors, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Geekbench 6 listing is accurate, the M4 with one disabled performance core is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still around 13% faster than the M3 in multi-core performance and up to 35% faster than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M2 in the previous generation iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, this is what we guessed once we saw the single core Geekbench scores for the M4 last time. We’re like, oh, maybe an
⏹️ ▶️ John M2 with all the performance scores will beat it, but no, the single core and the M4 is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so yeah, it can beat all of its predecessors with one performance core tied behind its back.
Accessibility announcements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we obviously have a lot of iPad stuff to discuss, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have some neat to discuss first. Apple, what is this, World Accessibility Day? I think that’s today as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record, or something along those lines. Forgive me if I’ve gotten the exact name wrong, but they have announced in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honor of that, new accessibility features, including eye tracking, music, haptics, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vocal shortcuts. So there were several of these that were announced today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and John has picked out a few. Now, John, I’m happy to read through this if you’d like, and you can chime in, or do Do you want to handle it? How would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you like to proceed?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it, I’ll just comment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s start with eye tracking, which is coming to the iPad and the iPhone. Powered by artificial intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye tracking gives users a built-in option for navigating iPad and iPhone with just their eyes. Eye tracking uses the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey front-facing camera to set up and calibrate in seconds. And with on-device machine learning, all data used to set up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and control this feature is kept securely on device and isn’t shared with Apple. Eye tracking works across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPadOS and iOS apps and doesn’t require additional hardware accessories. With eye tracking, users can navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the elements of an app and use dwell control to activate each element, accessing additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features, excuse me, functions such as physical buttons, swipes and other gestures solely with their eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Turns out the Vision Pro is feeding back into iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like in the Vision Pro world, this reads as like, hmm, just really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John makes you think like, I know that like no additional hardware, this is an accessibility feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada yada. Like the context of this is just, you know, another alternate way to control your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad or iOS device. But in a world where the Vision Pro exists, you’re like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like the main interface or pointing interface anyway in Vision Pro. Granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John very different sensors, very different, you know, it’s a different thing. But I read this and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, you know what? I think it might be actually kind of neat to essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John have Vision Pro caliber eye tracking on an iPad when doing
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated stuff. Now, I imagine that’s not possible because there’s not a thing strapped to my face. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like it’s gotta be using like the camera, whatever it’s using, it’s using sensors that are
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer in number, farther away from my face, not as expensive, like all that stuff. So it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not nearly as accurate as in the Vision Pro, but I’m intrigued by the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ John having my eyes as an additional input method on Macs, on iPads, that just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like to see how that could work if that technology ever gets good enough to approach
⏹️ ▶️ John the quality that it exists in the Vision Pro right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That could be very, very interesting. Music haptics makes songs more accessible. Music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haptics is a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music on iPhone with this accessibility feature turned on. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Taptic Engine in iPhone plays taps, textures, and refined vibrations to the audio of the music.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why everyone should be in their seat in the sphere, Marco, so they can feel the vibrations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, honestly, it’s a way
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re sitting down if you can see. I mean, and to that end, again, I read this feature and yes, you understand, you
⏹️ ▶️ John understand the purpose of this, the accessibility purposes of this is clear. I think maybe there
⏹️ ▶️ John is usefulness for everybody who it’s, you know, is it the kind of like a subwoofer in your pocket, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if this could be added to regular, it’d probably kill your battery, but I’m also intrigued to try this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, because like, so the way the haptic engine works, it’s basically a little subwoofer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is basically a speaker that just has a very, very low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequency that it vibrates usually with, you know, very precise control of like, okay, we’re going to make it move in and out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but boom, now, you know, like that, that’s one big movement of what is basically a speaker driver,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to, you know, what, what you would do for actually playing music, you’ll be, you know, tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tons of, you know, vibrations that are, you know, split second long. So the haptic engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be used more dynamically to do all sorts of things. So I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco felt this yet or tried this yet or have any details on it besides what’s in the press release but that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they’re doing it, like some kind of like special, basically like a special bass version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the music. Maybe, I don’t know if they’re filtering out certain low frequencies to just, or maybe doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beat detection to like make the beats do like the big vibration moves in the motor, but however they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, It’s that’s it is based on, you know, treating it like a big speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, probably. And I’m really curious to see what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, the Taptic Engine is essentially designed not to move air, though, like they want the Taptic Engine itself
⏹️ ▶️ John to be quiet. But as we know, as we all know, who have phone, oh, the Taptic Engine is trying to be quiet. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have like a speaker cone. It’s not moving air itself, but it does vibrate the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if that device itself is in contact with anything that can become a speaker cone very easily. If you ever put your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone on top of like a tissue box and the vibration motor goes off, it turns the whole tissue box into a speaker, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, you know, so that there is there, the tension between Apple probably wants the Taptic Engine to make no noise
⏹️ ▶️ John on its own, but it does actually have to shake the phone. So that’s, that’s why it kind of works as a, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and anything can become a speaker if you shove a vibrator up to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh. All right. We got to move on. Uh, there are new features for a wide range
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of speech with vocal shortcuts. iPhone and iPad users can assign custom utterances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Siri can understand to launch shortcuts and complete complex tasks. Listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for atypical speech, another new feature, gives users the option for enhancing speech recognition for a wider range of speech.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does that include Mario? I don’t know. Uh, listen for atypical speech uses on-device machine learning to recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user speech patterns designed for users with acquired or progressive conditions that affect speech,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such as cerebral palsy, amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or ALS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or stroke, these features provide a new level of customization and control.
⏹️ ▶️ John You made the comment about Mario, but again, this is great for accessibility for all the people who obviously need
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but for everybody, having it, well, first of all, the voice shortcuts,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just plain for everybody. Like we all
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to say different things to our phones and have it do cool stuff, Siri is pretty bad at that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is just good for everybody. And atypical speech, we hear from people who, for example, speak
⏹️ ▶️ John English with a very thick accent that Apple’s devices are not great at understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John them, even when it ostensibly has like a localization for like Scottish English or whatever. Atypical
⏹️ ▶️ John speech. Shots fired.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying like, this is not me saying, this is people, Scottish people say,
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple devices and they don’t understand what I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And you’re just asking the question, Scott. Yeah, anyway, calling it atypical is obviously a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the great terminology here. But all I’m saying is that I’m arguing in favor of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John devices being better at understanding variations within the same language, because we all have
⏹️ ▶️ John accents of some kind, and some of our accents are thicker than others. And I really feel like, especially in America,
⏹️ ▶️ John where we have maybe not as many accents as the UK, but we have a larger place
⏹️ ▶️ John with more people who have each kind of accent. And some of those people might be having trouble talking to Apple devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is all good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple also, I mean, I don’t know if this is what they’re talking about here, but Apple’s also very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typically compared to the rest of the industry at dealing with speech patterns like stutters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or very slow speech or having like, you know, a lot of times, like if you have a stutter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes you a while to get a sentence out, a lot of other products will time out and they’ll like, you know, they’ll try to answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your partial question or fail in some other weird way. has historically been very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that kind of thing. So I don’t know if that’s included in what they’re calling atypical speech here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re already very good at that, and so I’m guessing they’re gonna keep pushing in that direction and keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting better there too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it’ll wait and make sure it gets your entire question out before it gives its totally wrong answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still a lot of other work to be done on the voice interaction with Apple products.
⏹️ ▶️ John I send these to Merlin when I find them because he is haunted by the terribleness of Syria, and I had some good ones
⏹️ ▶️ John recently. These are just from people online. This is just a screenshot. So it’s showing
⏹️ ▶️ John the text that Siri recognized. So recognition is not a problem, right? Here’s an example of
⏹️ ▶️ John the text. Turn off focus mode. That’s the command to Siri. Can you guess the
⏹️ ▶️ John response? Of course you can’t. Sorry, I can’t do that. Great. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’ve tried this with CarPlay and it hasn’t worked, I think, but I can’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having tried it with just Siri on my phone. Not surprised it doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John though. Here’s one more. How long does it take for Neptune to orbit the sun?
⏹️ ▶️ John Good question. Maybe, maybe Siri’s going to send us to the web or whatever. Here’s what Siri responded.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can manage medications in the medications app. What? My word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just this is pre-WWC. We got to get all these cheap shots while we can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we still will be able to after.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing beats my seven C’s question. We, Adam still jokes about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. I spent a while looking at the Neptune one to try to figure out how did it get medications? I can’t, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving along vehicle motion cues can help reduce motion sickness. With vehicle motion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cues animated dots on the edges of the screen represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory conflict
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without interfering with the main content. Using sensors built into iPhone and iPad vehicle motion cues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recognizes when a user is in a moving vehicle and responds accordingly. The feature can be set to show automatically on iPhone or be turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and off in control center. And there’s a little demo video that we will put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. I guess what this is indicating is what the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or vehicle is doing in terms of like how it’s affecting your body. So when you brake, there’s dots that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of float to the top of the screen. I don’t know if there’s a better way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco picture. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, those JavaScripts you’d insert into your MySpace page that would make it snow on the page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like that, but considering the motion of the car. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car is making a right turn, the inertia of your body wants to shift to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the left. And so it kind of shows those snowflake dots on your iPhone screen kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of breezing to the left a little bit, it’s that kind of thing. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess the idea is to kind of guide your motion perception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into not being confused and not thinking it’s looking at a still screen when it’s feeling motion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and actually kind of showing, hey, look, here’s whoosh, little snowflake moving to the left. If that works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a great feature. I mean, half the people I know, I think would use that feature if it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because lots of people have motion sickness when looking at screens in cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is very relevant to my life. Not because I get motion sick, but I do. I get very motion
⏹️ ▶️ John sick. This is relevant to my life. This isn’t relevant to my life because I would never look at a screen in a car
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be insanity. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey would get so sick.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know this from
⏹️ ▶️ John experience. No dots are going to help me. Yeah, and that’s what they’re going for. The idea is that they even say this
⏹️ ▶️ John in the paragraph before this is like, um, one of the causes of motion sickness is your inner ear feels something that
⏹️ ▶️ John your eyes don’t see reflected in front of them. They expect when you, you know, inner
⏹️ ▶️ John ear feels you yanking to the left, you better see stuff moving to the right. You know what I mean? Like you, but when there’s a mismatch,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get sick and it doesn’t take much to get, you know, I can’t read a book, I can’t look at a phone, I can’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in a plane and a car and a boat, nothing, nothing, nothing. And that’s no problem. I just don’t do that. I know what I have to do. I have to look
⏹️ ▶️ John out the front window. I have to do all this stuff, right? But you know who doesn’t know that? Or rather, who knows that, but their brain is
⏹️ ▶️ John not yet developed enough to do anything about it? My children. We go on long car
⏹️ ▶️ John trips, they all look at their devices, then they get motion sick and complain that they’re motion sick. And I say, you know why you’re motion
⏹️ ▶️ John sick? Because you’re looking at your phone. And so they’ve proven they will not stop looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John their phone. They’ll do it until they get sick and then they’ll put their phone down and go, oh, I feel sick again and again
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, because teenagers’ brains don’t work right yet. But this,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, maybe I can persuade them to turn this on and I will let you know if it works. I will let you know, because they’re certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna look at the phones like, can you just put on these dots? They might be like, oh, these dots are covering my screen. I don’t like it. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it works, it will give them a way to be teenagers who make poor choices and
⏹️ ▶️ John be slightly more comfortable at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it seems like it’s designed for car use. And Apple already has like some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what we now call AI, but what we previously call some ML algorithms to process the motion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data from the phone’s accelerometer and stuff into trying to detect whether you’re in a car, whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re riding a bike, whether you’re walking. So as far as I can guess, it probably wouldn’t be showing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dots all the time as you’re just walking around in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, you can turn it on manually, and, but you can also set it to auto detect when you’re in a car, which I’m assuming you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Yeah, or those ML algorithms for motion, which I think if it’s that unintrusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just leave it enabled, and it would only show when you’re in a car, and only when the car is doing kind of, you know, inertia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generating movements, that can be something that people leave on all the time and be totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. So I hope it works, because if, again, that’s a big problem. Like my wife would use it, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco son would use it for the same reason that John mentioned about your kids. Like, I think that would be a great feature if
⏹️ ▶️ John it works. Yeah, because people who don’t get motion sick easily will insist that they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get motion sick, period. Which is not true for any human who has a functioning working in their ear and is conscious. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John gets motion sick eventually. But if you don’t get motion sick easily, you think every time it happens to you is an
⏹️ ▶️ John anomaly. But it’s not. If you’re in a car and it’s moving around a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ John you stare at your phone, you will eventually get motion sick. It’s just a question of how long and how much movement it takes. And just people get surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John by it again and again and again. It’s like, yeah, most of the time you’re fine, but on the winding mountain road, you’re not fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John put the phone down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s inevitable apparently. Aye aye aye. All right. And then finally, or at least finally that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna talk about, There are some accessibility features coming to Vision OS. Accessibility features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming to Vision OS will include system-wide live captions to help everyone, including users who are deaf or hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of hearing, to follow along with spoken dialogue in live conversations and in audio from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps. With live captions for FaceTime and Vision OS, more users can easily enjoy the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unique experience of connecting and collaborating using their persona. So I think the implication here is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’ll be a little floating window that’s just not translating, but you know, showing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the people around you are saying, or perhaps the app you’re in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using is saying to you. So you get like a live transcript of what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around you, or perhaps even in your device.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think by the time we have, you know, essentially Apple Vision Pro caliber stuff in glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully the transcription quality will be such that this will be another killer
⏹️ ▶️ John app in addition to putting people’s names over them. Just like, if you’re hard of hearing or just going out into an environment
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s challenging to hear like a restaurant or a busy bar or something and trying to talk to somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to see the words that they’re speaking in text floating below their mouth or in a little cartoon speech bubble
⏹️ ▶️ John as they say it using your glasses that just look like glasses that is a future we can all buy
⏹️ ▶️ John into because that’s just I mean people love subtitles on their televisions for shows that they watch now in their own houses
⏹️ ▶️ John because their dogs bark too much or whatever Having this out there in the real world is great Not so great that people are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John spend $3,500 and put on a giant pair of ski goggles to do it. But even in that context, like I said, for people who want to participate
⏹️ ▶️ John in meetings, obviously there’s an accessibility angle if you can’t actually hear them or have difficulty hearing them in the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if you can hear them, being able to see a hopefully accurate transcription of what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing in text form is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, our friend Shelley Brisbane over at Six Colors, well, she guest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey posted over at Six Colors talking about all this. And, uh, Shelly is awesome and she is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a vision impaired. And so she has some personal experience with a lot of this stuff and has a really great take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can read over at six colors, which we will link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And there are more features than what we listed. We just picked like some of the interesting ones, but there’s more stuff as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you mentioned that it’s like world accessibility day or whatever. That’s like explains why Apple does this announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John when they do. And I think that makes sense, but I, every time they do this, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like when they give like the, the science of technical awards before are the real Oscars. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Marco knows what that is, but they have a separate award show
⏹️ ▶️ John for the less phonogenic nerdy people. And they get their Oscars then. And then the
⏹️ ▶️ John real Oscars that air on TV that have the good looking celebrities, you know, where they give like best picture and best actor take place or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I always kind of feel like, well, why aren’t these accessibility features part of an event or a keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John or WWDC? And the answer is because this is the World’s Accessibility Day. So I give Apple a pass on it, but some of this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is so cool and so interesting. and so impactful on people’s lives that it feels like it should be just
⏹️ ▶️ John as important as whatever other features they’re going to talk about and the new OS is the WI Redeem.
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Apple ID woes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, John, do you want to talk about your purchase or do we want to just dive into the discourse?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’ll just briefly on my purchase. Like I just literally got it today and took a long time to set it up because
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is stupid. I’ll give my two second story on that. But like I haven’t actually used it much yet other
⏹️ ▶️ John than the setup process. So I’ll have more to say about it in the future. But you know, like the screen looks really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s really thin. It’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so similar to my previous one, except that it’s a little bit thinner. It also feels like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as wide and as tall. I don’t know if that’s the case. I’ll have to put them on top of each other and see.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I look forward to using it, especially with a little adjustable stand and the screen looks great. The setup process, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the problem, I’m having bad setup luck, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you bring your other iPad near or whatever? And I’m faced with that terrible screen that I never know the right thing to pick and I always pick
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong thing. It’s like, do you want to set up an iCloud? It’ll take 15 minutes, but then your apps will slowly be loading forever. Or do you wanna transfer from
⏹️ ▶️ John another device? All your data will be there and it will take 40 minutes or something. And I always pick other device cause I just want all
⏹️ ▶️ John my stuff. And then it takes hours and hours. But anyway, I picked other device. And then it’s like, oh, your system needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ John updated. Doesn’t tell me that until 15 steps into the setup process. So I ran an OS update.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it’s like, oh, find the other device. Oh, transfer from the other device. And it’s like, log into your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. And it’s like, your Apple ID is locked. As I’ve talked about recently in rec tips, my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID is always locked. Do you wanna unlock your Apple ID? and I try to unlock my Apple ID and it says, your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad needs to be reset. Whatever, it starts
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all over again. I went through this like
⏹️ ▶️ John six times. I’m an old pro at unlocking my Apple ID. And as I said in Rec Diffs, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be fooled into thinking you have to reset your password because you don’t. But anyway, it took me like five tries
⏹️ ▶️ John and each of the five tries was like, the whole iPad needs to be reset and has to restart through the process and unlocking
⏹️ ▶️ John my Apple ID and doing all this. What a headache. Like, why is my Apple ID constantly locked?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been this way for years. It’s not just because of the recent Apple ID thing that you’ve heard about. It’s been happening to me for
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years. So that’s why I’m not scared by it and know how to deal with it, but so frustrating. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 30 to 40 minute estimate for the data transfer is hilarious. It took, I think, three and a half hours, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s set up now. All right, so before we go any further, a couple of quick points of clarification.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, when you say your Apple ID is locked, that to me sounds like an American credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like your credit, what is it, credit report or credit profile or whatever, where you are choosing to lock it, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not what you’re saying, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so it’s, the message you usually get is, your Apple ID has been locked. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll say something like, for security reasons, but they never get into details. What’s the problem? Was someone
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to log in? Did we get the wrong password too many times? Is it because we think you’re in a foreign country? Like, they don’t tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just says your Apple ID has been locked or your Apple ID has been locked for security reasons and you have to unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And to unlock it, it makes you do things like, enter the phone number of your trusted device,
⏹️ ▶️ John get a text, put in a number, enter your Apple ID password, use a trusted device. There’s like 17
⏹️ ▶️ John different ways to unlock your Apple ID on every different device. I’ve been through all of them 50 times. Sometimes some of them work,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes some of them don’t. A lot of them eventually lead you to a screen where they want you to enter a new password. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do that. You can just hit cancel and try another route down the twisted phone tree
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the unlocking of your Apple ID. And the bottom line is, when your Apple ID is locked, you can’t do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with your Apple ID and Apple is the one locking it. They’re basically saying, we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you’re you anymore in this device or whatever. So you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John prove to us that you are you and you own this Apple ID before we will let you use your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID anymore. And this has been happening to me on and off for years and years and years. And I’m not the only
⏹️ ▶️ John one and it’s not a fun part of the Apple ID system, but it exists.
The iPad discourse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, the discourse is happening and it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like every year this storm is getting a little bigger and a little louder. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year it’s hit a bit of a crescendo, if you will. And I think John, but somebody put in the show notes, iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro dissatisfaction as the name of this section. And I think that that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate. And so in summary, I think all three of us can agree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and most people can agree, that the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware has been, and especially now, is bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is absolutely out of control good. It can be all things to all people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a hardware perspective. Yes, I’m sure you can nitpick here and there. Maybe it would be nice to have one more port. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’d be nice to have more battery life. But ultimately, without too much compromise, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro hardware is as close to perfect as I think we can get in the year 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, Casey, since you love to do this to me, we should all just realize that the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John has the fastest single core performance of any device Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has ever sold. Has ever sold. Faster than all your MacBook Pros, your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, your M2 Mac Pro, single core performance on the ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ John thin fanless iPad for your single cord non-parallelizable
⏹️ ▶️ John jobs, the iPad Pro is the king.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s bananas. I mean, I don’t know any other word to use to describe it. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s bananas. So anyway, so that is, I think, pretty much understood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by everyone who has ever looked at an iPad that yes, again, we could nitpick here and there, by and large,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad Pro hardware is currently solved. You know, maybe it’ll, over time, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll be different and get better and so on, but for right now, it’s been solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John And well, not so much solved as, it has shown steady progression. Every time a new iPad comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out, it’s a little bit better than before. And if you do that over the course of 14 years, you get from the original iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John to what we have now. It just keeps getting better in hardware wise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Screen gets better. And like we said, last show, it’s mostly just a big screen. Now it’s got the best screen Apple has ever sold.
⏹️ ▶️ John not the biggest, but the best looking screen with the best specs or whatever. It gets thinner, it gets lighter.
⏹️ ▶️ John The battery life has been held steady at what Apple thinks is an acceptable amount of battery life. And most people,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, agree. The hardware advances the way we expect a technology
⏹️ ▶️ John product’s hardware to advance. The one quibble we might have with the hardware setting aside the port limitations is
⏹️ ▶️ John it is getting more expensive over time, which doesn’t feel great. And that is more of a business
⏹️ ▶️ John complaint than a technological one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. However, with all that said, as amazing as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this hardware is, and it is amazing. What about that software though?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s where everything takes a turn. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s hard, it’s hard to talk or for me anyway, it’s hard to talk about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have wants and needs for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my computing platforms and they are not same as John’s, they’re not the same as Marco’s, they’re not the same as yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there are many like it, but this one is mine. That’s a reference, John. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, there’s a lot of times that I will have my iPad in hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I’ll go, ugh, this would be so much faster if I just run up the stairs and use my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t remember if I said it publicly or privately. I don’t remember if we were recording at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s happened enough that I confessed to Marco sometime recently again, maybe privately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I started wondering, should I have an iPad Air downstairs instead of an iPad? Or excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, not an iPad Air, a MacBook Air downstairs instead of an iPad. So then I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a laptop on both floors, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco immediately I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chastised myself immediately for this for a few reasons, which we can go into later if we really care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But suffice to say, the fact that I had that thought, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is kind of indicative that something isn’t really right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, there’s an argument, and I think Gruber did a really good job of presenting this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argument, that look, the constraints, the guardrails, the limits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iPadOS is a feature, not a bug. And I think unquestionably, there are many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably in all of our lives, where They find it refreshing to have those guardrails,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those limits, etc. My mom, for example, and I don’t pick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on her because of any reason other than she is a real-world example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey close to me, that she is perfectly capable of using a Mac, but she prefers having an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s easier, it’s simpler, it’s harder to screw it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there are millions of people like that. And I don’t, I don’t want any of the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to lose sight of that because there’s something to be, there’s something to be said for those people. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think any of the three of us are those people. And so for us, it’s whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use an iPad for anything, even remotely quote unquote serious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’m walking through molasses and it’s frustrating. And I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a native terminal. There are great terminal apps for iPad, but I wish I had a native terminal. I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had windowing the way I want to do windowing. I wish I had a clipboard manager.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish the files app wasn’t a pile of garbage. I wish so many things were iPadOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t mean that the iPad isn’t good. It doesn’t mean that it’s worthless. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, it will always, for me, kind of, sort of be a toy or be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for looking rather than doing. And when you remember what John said just a minute ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the fastest single core you said, the fastest single core processor that Apple has ever made. It’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new ones have the best screens Apple has ever made. It’s the thinnest device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has ever made. In so many ways, it has cellular, Marco. It has cellular and let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you, it is freaking fantastic. I have a cellular iPad. It has service. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. All of those things make it so wonderful and so powerful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet for so many professionals, not all, but a lot of us, and granted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ones that are the kind to have a podcast or to write code, for so many of us, it’s just a non-starter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s crummy. And I just wish that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not for the iPad, maybe not for the iPad Air, but if you’re going to call a device an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad professional, and yes, I know the professional doesn’t always mean pro, pro doesn’t always mean professional.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oftentimes just means nice, the iPad nice. But if you’re gonna call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the iPad Pro, and if you’re gonna put this ridiculous bananas hardware in it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can you let us do more with it, please? And Jason has been banging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the drum of, let’s allow macOS to be virtualized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside iPadOS. And he’s not backpedaled, but kind of clarified a few times recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Look, I’m not saying that this is the best solution,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it would be a wonderful pressure release valve. And Steve Trout and Smith, which we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably talk more about him in a moment, has said the same thing. Like, this is not the perfect answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This theory where you can virtualize Mac OS is not the perfect answer, but it’s an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s an answer that doesn’t require Apple to fundamentally rethink so much of iPad OS, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last 14 years, they seem to be very reluctant to do. And the times that they’ve done it, ahem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stage manager, have not been stellar. So that’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my summary and my own opinions about the discourse that’s going on right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As the iPad lightest user of the three of us, Marco, any comments from you? And then John, you can kind of bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us through full circle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I have infinite comments, but I’ll try to keep it reasonably contained. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I forgot which room I’m speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s kind of the reason we have podcasts. All right. So it can be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult for discussions like this to be productive in such a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t come down to, like, well, it works for me, why wouldn’t it work for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it works for me, and if it doesn’t work for you, it’s the wrong tool for your job, or you’re using it wrong, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a lot of people, the iPad is what they use on a regular basis, either as their only computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or their primary computer, or just one of the accessory devices in their lives, and they’re perfectly happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so anything that, when we get into like, you know, can the iPad be used for pro tasks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is a pro task? How could it be made better to make certain pro tasks better or certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just everyday tasks better? The reason these discussions come up, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re trying to get it to be more pro-like, well, why? One reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Apple releases a new product that has pro in the name and it costs a lot of money and has great hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs. And so we’re like, wow, I wish this product could work for me because it can be kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of off-putting if Apple, this company that you like, makes a product that looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really cool and they’re saying, look how amazing this is and you really want the hardware, but it doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, for your software needs. At the same time, lots of people use it just fine. And so it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult to discuss this without like inflaming somebody or inflaming some group. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that giant prefix, you mentioned earlier the difference between like a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and an iPad in certain contexts. I would say for your own personal purposes, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of it sounding ridiculous to have a MacBook Air on the bottom floor of your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not any more ridiculous than having an iPad on the bottom floor of your house because now they cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same price range.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a really good point, actually. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro does. The iPad spans all the way down to $350. That’s part of the reason we’re talking about this is we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the ones that go up to $3,700. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, and I’m not even talking about like the crazy high spec ones. I’m just saying like, if you want an iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a keyboard, you’re in MacBook Air territory. And it’s a lot of the same hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the frustrating things is that if you’re a Mac person it’s frustrating to look at the iPad Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad Pro for the same size and price class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a MacBook Air has much of the same hardware but some of it’s way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher end, like the display. way higher end on the iPad than on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similarly priced MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would also say that the cellular radio is a little bit better on the iPad than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air. That’s another thing too, like Apple has clearly shown at this point, it isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they haven’t gotten to it yet, they have actively refused and continue to actively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refuse to make cellular Macs. We are long past the point where they could have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They could have done it many times. We now know lots of things like, hey, it fits with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon because they do it in iPads. It fits within this price envelope because they do it with iPads. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fits within the size category because they do it with iPads. It fits within this battery life because they do it with iPads. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, when you look at the hardware between an iPad Pro and a MacBook Air, it’s so similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that there is no good excuse for why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do cellular Macs. They are just choosing not to. They are refusing to do cellular Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know their reasons. I wish they would change their mind on that. I hope someday they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it can be frustrating then like as a Mac person to look at the iPad Pro and say, why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have those amazing screens and an amazing feature like cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe even pencil support on our Mac laptops? So there is also that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle of like Mac people looking at the iPad and being a little bit frustrated. But the fundamental difference between these platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac is a generalist. A Mac can be pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to very good at almost anything. You don’t have to ask somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, hey, can you get your work done on a Mac? If they can get their work done on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, it can probably be done on a Mac in almost every case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people with most needs most of the time, they can do what they need to do with a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you are already in the Apple ecosystem, you can probably do almost everything you would need to do on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except maybe anything requiring like the Apple Pencil or something that’s only available in an iOS app, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instance. But for the most part, Macs are the generalists. They can do pretty much anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is never a time, if I am on a trip and I have with me my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, which I always have, and a Mac, which I almost always have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is never a time when I’m like, well, whatever I wanna do, I can’t get it done with these two devices. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to get an iPad to do this. Like that never happens. Whereas, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am using an iPad, I frequently run into things where, oh, I can’t do it here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This thing I have to do, I gotta do it on a Mac or maybe my phone, usually it’s my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or a couple quick notes here. Number one, it could be that you are capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing it on your iPad or perhaps your phone, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be way faster to do it on a Mac than just not even close to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the difference in time it would take to do something on the iPad versus doing it on the Mac. And secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said this earlier, but I just want to reiterate, there are people for whom the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the best solution and especially people who are like drawing with the Apple Pencil, for example. Again, you said this earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would venture, and I think this is what Marco was saying, there are considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more people that can almost always get their work done on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than those who are artists and illustrators and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at like what the iPad is good for, If you picture like a bar graph, with each bar being like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good it is at a certain task. How the Mac is good at different tasks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The bar graph basically forms what looks like a very like a rolling hills kind of thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac is like a rolling hills of bars that are just like, it’s pretty good at this, pretty good at that, it’s kind of pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at everything. Something that’s really great at. The iPad, when you look at that same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like virtual graph of tasks, it looks like skyscrapers in a city.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really good at certain things. It’s like great and zero, great and zero, like up, down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, like huge spikes that it’s like, it’s really good at some things and other things it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cannot do it all. Or the barriers to do it are so ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only the most advanced dedicated users could do them and would take the time to do them. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a Mac and you run into a snag with something, odds are you can probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get around it. First of all, odds are you’ll run into fewer snags, and you can probably get around it in some relatively straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. On an iPad, if you run into a limitation or a snag, you are usually out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of luck. You just can’t. Like this thing that you wanna do, it just won’t happen. You can’t. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re at the whims of the developers of iPad apps, which are always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an afterthought. Sometimes you’re at the whims of iPadOS itself, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate to tell ya, is also usually an afterthought to Apple. because that’s one of the other problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. iPadOS gets relatively little attention from Apple. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a relatively low priority. Believe me, as a Mac user, I can spot the signs of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People always expect, like everyone’s expecting that at WWDC this year, there’s gonna be some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of massive new upgrade to iPadOS to take advantage of all this new hardware. I hate to break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to you, that’s unlikely to happen. I would bet strongly against that. here’s what’s probably going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year at WBDC. We’re gonna hear all about a ton of new AI-based features and a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new improvements to iOS. Some of them are gonna be only on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not on the iPad. And the iPad might get them next year or the year after.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What the iPad will get this year will be a couple of like, you know, a trickle of kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco token updates just to keep it going and give it a small section in the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most of the attention has been focused probably on iOS for this year. If it is as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big of an iOS update as we think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one out there thinks this year that there’s no rumors about a big overhaul of iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ John to become more capable. That may happen, I’m just saying there aren’t actually current rumors about it. I really don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone is thinking that, especially since so many years of people wishing and hoping for that with no rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John and not getting it. I think this year, same deal. There are no rumors that I’m aware of that that
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming and I think people are mostly in despair about it. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. And this is the life of being an iPad power user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want this thing to be better at what you need it to do because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really amazing hardware. And it’s let down by software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which is Apple’s fault, some of which is not Apple’s fault, like third-party stuff. One of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cases where I could very easily use an iPad is when I’m running the sound for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco town meetings. it involves two laptops. One of them is like at the mixing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco console hosting the Zoom call. The other one is on a table being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the remote second host. So I can like kick people out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they come and spam it or whatever. That one has to not be playing any audio because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would just be echoing back into the room. On a Mac, you just hold the volume down button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way and it goes down to zero and you proceed with your day. on an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Zoom app on iPad, as far as I know, as far as I could tell, will not let you set it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no volume. If you turn the volume all the way down on the Zoom app for iPad, it will turn it back up to the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What? I didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I cannot find any way to override that, because there actually is an iOS API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to change the volume. It’s been deprecated for like 12 years, but it’s there, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it, I think. So you just can’t, unless I plug in a dummy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone a dummy headphone cable or something through the zero headphone ports it has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Right, if you just plug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the USB-C headphone adapter, even if there’s no headphones, would that be enough?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, but probably, who knows? I’d probably have to plug in a cable or something. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s little things like that. Whenever I use an iPad for anything other than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual couch browsing and email, I run into something like that. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you run into a wall with an iPad and usually there is not much you can do about it. Like in that context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to turn the volume all the way down for the Zoom call. Well, too bad. Maybe if you get a hardware hack, like get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a headphone dongle and plug in an empty wire, maybe, but what if I don’t have one of those with me right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now or I don’t own one? You know, like there’s been so many problems with iPadOS and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that there are so many frustrations with the iPad that a lot of people feel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but all the people out there who are using it every day just fine don’t feel them. and so it can be hard to discuss them, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those people who are using it just fine can so easily tell the people who want it to be different,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, you’re using the wrong tool, you should just use a Mac or whatever. And in the short term,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s generally true. That is the solution in the short term. If you are constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battling the iPad to get your power user work done, you should probably be using a Mac. That is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better tool for the job in a lot of those cases. And the iPad is fine to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to appeal to, you know, the cheaper iPads have a pretty broad base and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really expensive iPads, I think, have pretty narrow appeals and pretty narrow markets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it can stay this way forever. It probably will, because Apple is not investing heavily in iPadOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as we can tell from the outside. But if Apple wants to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push the iPad market further, if Apple wants to improve iPad sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and increase this market size for the higher priced models, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do something. But I don’t see them doing it. Again, I think it’s a low priority. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be frustrating every time new iPads come out, all of us people who are like not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite satisfied or not able to do our jobs on the iPad, we’re like, all right, hey Apple, by the way, we would love to use this cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware you’ve made. Can you just maybe give us feature or capability XYZ?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And every couple of years, Apple comes back and is like, We made it faster. I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks. However, that doesn’t really solve our problem. As fast as it is, it still can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do these basic features X, Y, and Z. Couple years later, Apple goes back, it’s like, now it’s even faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, okay, that’s, okay, thanks. But you know, you’re still not really changing anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that could broaden this market or make me or somebody like me able to use this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple’s like, okay, we hear you. Thanks. Okay, now this new model we come out with, it’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro than ever. It’s even faster. Like, oh my God, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s what’s happening, like every few years, we go through the same cycle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re gonna keep going through it. Ultimately, I think the solution is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the Mac continuing to get better. And for most people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not able to do your work on an iPad, you’re probably still not able to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your work on an iPad. You probably will never be able to do all of your work on an iPad with the current rate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of improvement of iPadOS and change and everything. And so the right tool for your job is probably some other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of computer, most likely a Mac. It sucks that Apple won’t make a Mac with a great OLED screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that price and size range. It sucks that Apple won’t make a Mac with cellular. It sucks that Apple won’t make a Mac that is convertible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a tablet. It sucks that Apple won’t make a Mac with pencil input. Like there’s all these different things that Apple won’t do because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they view the iPad as the tool to do that. And for all of us whose work is impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or very difficult on an iPad, it is kind of a slap in the face with all the cool hardware that the iPad line gets, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the reality of it. And for those of us who are that way, I strongly suggest, buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook Air for the same money and about the same size and weight. Buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook Air and use it wherever you use an iPad. It’s gonna be a lot better in a lot of those cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and just very quickly, I think I’ll speak for myself and I think I’m speaking for Marco that part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re begging to get better software on iPad or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPad is because I love the physical iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love the device. I feel like having something that is modular, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a drum that Federico’s been banging for a long time, having something that’s modular that can be now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thinnest device Apple makes if you want it to be, or it can be extremely thin and have a keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or it can be extremely thin and have just a cover around it like John has, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that it can be that flexible, the fact that it has cellular, the fact that it can do all these things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like it is, the hardware is capable of being all things to all people, if it wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be. And I want it to be because I’m jealous of the people that can do everything they need on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanna be able to do everything I can that I need on the iPad. I wish so desperately that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could, but right now, I just can’t, and that’s what sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the thing is like the iPad, it has to, you know, for those of us who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t do everything on the iPad, then it has to justify itself to us somehow. We like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want, we love this hardware. We want a reason and we and it isn’t just we don’t just want an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad that runs Mac OS. Like we also want the benefits of iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. That’s the frustrating thing. The thing is like you have to justify the iPad purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you have to justify carrying it around and keeping it charged and keeping it updated and keeping it maintained. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the accessories for it. But for most people, again, you have a phone already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re probably gonna have a Mac of some kind, like a Mac laptop already. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard for the iPad to justify itself to be brought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with you, to be purchased in the first place and then to be brought with you when traveling or when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going around and stuff like that. Because most things that you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an iPad, you can also do on an iPhone. And if you keep needing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Mac escape hatch to do things, it’s very easy to just fall back into, I’m just gonna bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPhone and a MacBook Air. And again, like that’s for most people, that is the better choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with that. I love that combination. There’s a reason it’s so popular. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very, very good combination. But again, if Apple wants to broaden the market for high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPads, they’re gonna have to do a lot more than just make it faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and just very quickly, and John, you’ve been very patient and I appreciate it, but just very quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also, and Marco kind of hinted at this or said this just a second ago, I don’t necessarily want Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just can iPadOS and give me 100% of the time MacOS and the iPad. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why Jason’s idea of virtualization I find so interesting and appealing because it gives me the escape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hatch, the option of MacOS. Again, I don’t think that’s the right-est answer, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if nothing else, It would give me the option to drop into Mac OS when necessary. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general stuff, for most of the time that I’m on the iPad, I prefer iPad OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want iPad OS to be that different. You know, one of the things when Swift first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out was that they claimed at the time, I’m not so sure they achieved the mission, but they claimed at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time that it was very good at, oh shoot, the name just flew out of me, progressive disclosure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. So, over time, you know, Swift should be simple to approach, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I’m not so sure it is, but go with me on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco theory. It’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But go with me on the theory, right? It should be simple to approach, and over time, as you want more and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more out of Swift, it will return with more and more tools with which to accomplish those tasks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s what I want out of an iPad. For most of the time I’m using the iPad, I want iPadOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want all the cruft and complexity of macOS. when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do or accept when I don’t have another choice and that’s when. And so, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone who’s listening to this to come away from the conversation saying, oh, well, you know, Casey and Marco think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads suck and that only doofuses can use them. Far from it. That’s exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opposite from what we’re saying. I love iPadOS and I love my iPad. I just wish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could do more with it. So John, we’ve been talking a long time. You’ve been so very patient. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. What should we really be saying right now? What should we be thinking?
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about the iPad, the hardware last episode. We said it’s like, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just a hardware announcement. They’re not announcing a new version of iPadOS. That’ll come with WWDC. We’ll talk about it then.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you may be wondering why we’re talking about this topic now. Well, this is before WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John So whatever they’re going to do at WWDC, and again, there’s no rumors that they’re doing any kind of big overhaul, but maybe they kept it secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows? But anyway, this is the time when people remain
⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfied with the software story because they haven’t given us the new software story for this year yet, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason it’s kind of like seems to be louder each year is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Marcos characterization of what, you know, pro people have been wanting on the iPad is a little bit off. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been happening actually is people want to do more with their iPads. And Apple has been
⏹️ ▶️ John over the past many, many years giving us a slow trickle of expanded capability.
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS and before that iOS on the iPad has had its capabilities expanded
⏹️ ▶️ John year after year after year after year, just enough to keep that glimmer of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Not enough to be really useful, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially leading us on. If they just never added any capabilities to the iPad software
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, we would have given up, we wouldn’t have been so angry. I think the anger comes from the fact that we see that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making changes. They have added so much. Be able to use external drives, file
⏹️ ▶️ John access, all the pencil stuff, like just the stage manager, multitasking is
⏹️ ▶️ John not like they’re doing nothing, but they are not doing enough. And to characterize
⏹️ ▶️ John that, like not doing enough, like I think Vitechi had a good article this year. He said, it’s not an iPad Pro review.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why iPadOS still doesn’t get the basics right. Vitechi is a super duper iPad, you know, power user
⏹️ ▶️ John and has been for years and years, right? And he complains about the software situation all the time. And this year he
⏹️ ▶️ John got to the point where like, you know what, I’ve been complaining about this in everything that I’ve written about the iPad for years and years and years,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people can’t be expected to go back through the whole history and gather up all this knowledge. Let me just
⏹️ ▶️ John summarize in a single article what I mean when I say that the iPad is falling down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s the thing about that. I think that those of us who want more capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the iPad understand, at least certainly at a surface level,
⏹️ ▶️ John why the people who enjoy the iPad and don’t need any more capabilities do
⏹️ ▶️ John so. We understand because, again, as Casey said, it applies to us. We get it. We get the
⏹️ ▶️ John appeal of of the iPad, the simplicity, the people who do not care, that don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad to do anymore. They’re like, it’s fine, I don’t need any more software features. I like the iPad. We understand
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I think the reverse is not always true. And that’s part of the conflict here. The reverse is the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are happy with the software capabilities of the iPad don’t quite understand what is it that these
⏹️ ▶️ John people want? They keep saying they want it to be more pro and they want capabilities. What the hell does that actually mean? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I appreciate Petitchi literally writing down, it’s his list, but it is a good representative
⏹️ ▶️ John list. And you can read through this and say, this is what those people mean. So that both camps can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John each other to Marco’s point. So that it’s not as contentious, right? And again, I think the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John want more capabilities, we do understand the appeal of the people, the vast majority of people who enjoy their iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t need any more capabilities. There needs to be understanding the other direction. Steve Trout and Smith
⏹️ ▶️ John also wrote a thing, the iPad Pro Manifesto 2024 edition, which he gives his list of capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John that he would want out of it. There’s a lot of overlap between the lists. If you read both these articles, we’ll link them in the show notes. I think it will
⏹️ ▶️ John give you an idea of like, what is it that these nerds are talking about? Why do they want their iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something? Like they can’t even, like, my iPad does everything that I already wanted to do. And they don’t even have
⏹️ ▶️ John like the fancy iPad. So I’m like, if you don’t like the expensive iPad, just don’t buy it. It’s not for you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And as Marco said, the reason tech nerds in particular are always, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of, always wanting the iPads to do more is because we know, We know from the hardware specs,
⏹️ ▶️ John even before the Macs had the same stuff, we knew from the hardware specs as the iPad got more and more powerful, we’re like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? That’s a powerful general purpose computer in there. The hardware in there
⏹️ ▶️ John is getting to be laptop class. Now it is faster than many of Apple’s laptops, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John we see that and we know you can do more with that OS. Remember the iPad OS
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically direct, you know, it’s iOS with rebadged or whatever. See, Troughton Smith points
⏹️ ▶️ John out that it’s not even a separate project. I think it’s the same sort of OS root of files and it just decides what to run. You know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as separate as you might think it would be. And the EU has also decided that it’s not as separate
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as you might think. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it is derived from iOS. iOS was originally an operating system meant to run on a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone with incredibly weak hardware. No multitasking, one app at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ John no copy and paste, like just incredibly limited. And it has grown over the years. The phones have also gotten more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John over the years. But fundamentally it was an operating system Designed around
⏹️ ▶️ John the limitations of the hardware and then we look at the modern iPad Pro and we say what limitations of the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John What does an m4 base 16 gigabytes of RAM 1 terabyte SSD?
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing high resolution resolution 13-inch screen What it remind me again what the hardware limitations
⏹️ ▶️ John are on this device such that it has to have an entirely different model of?
⏹️ ▶️ John like multitasking and process management and everything to fit within the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that is vastly more powerful than any laptop ever has ever made like Like tech nerds understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s that’s why we see like this could do more The hardware is there
⏹️ ▶️ John the limitations the arguments for it weren’t there and so we wanted to do more there’s things we know we can’t do that we need
⏹️ ▶️ John to do as part of our weird work that we do and it’s frustrating and They’re you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John the fun conspiracy theories are like, oh, they don’t want to do that because they’ll eat into Mac sales or whatever Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think any of that is true first of all because Apple loves to eat into its own sales with the new product
⏹️ ▶️ John does it all the time You know It wants you to buy the new thing and not the old thing and if anything if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to subscribe to a conspiracy theory, which I don’t you should look at the Mac and say
⏹️ ▶️ John Why the heck is Apple not allowing? Why are you why they’re not making a touchscreen Mac because the Apple pencil like a convertible
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac that you use the Apple pencil with The Apple pencil works perfectly good in Mac OS You don’t even need to redesign the OS like it’s a precision pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John device and you could draw on it and you get a procreate on Mac OS because it runs iPad apps. And like, you know, why are
⏹️ ▶️ John they not doing that? Because they don’t want to cut into the iPad sales. Also not the reason, but a fun conspiracy theory. The real
⏹️ ▶️ John reason is Apple just has decided this is how they’ve divided their product line. They have the big no slide, is
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS and iPad OS merging? No, whatever. We’ll revisit that in a few years. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is how they’ve divided things up. And it’s just not satisfactory for a certain class of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, having said all that and thinking about this, It’s like the reason another reason people are
⏹️ ▶️ John angry about this was the whole iPad is the promise of the future of computing, right? This is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the post PC era. We’re all going to be using iPads. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is what computers are going to be like in the future. They’re not going to be like the Macs and the PCs of the days of
⏹️ ▶️ John yore. When Steve Jobs was still around, he introduced the iPad. It was so clear to me that essentially the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John is what he wished the original Macintosh could have been if technology was magic and it existed back then.
⏹️ ▶️ John a real computer for the rest of us. And this is the thing I think most people forget about the iPad. It’s true of
⏹️ ▶️ John our phones as well. But I think people realize it about the phones or maybe don’t because they just take it for granted. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like the reason people love the iPads, Casey got at it before is, it’s a computer that you can’t screw up as easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the thing that people love about the iPad versus a PC. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John people who know perfectly well how to use a PC, there are headaches involved using a Mac or a PC with
⏹️ ▶️ John that operating system and those capabilities that just don’t exist on the iPad. It feels as safe as a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can install software. There’s not really much you can do to mess it up. It’s very simple, right? That’s why people love their iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, we understand that about it. Here’s, there is though, surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of overlap between all the things that I’ve just discussed. Future of computing, why do people think that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it has fewer problems and the capabilities. A lot of this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerd discussion is like, just make the iPad do more. The hardware is capable. You’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John an operating system that does it. to virtualize Mac OS, which I don’t think is a good idea, but anyway, it’s just like, look, if you don’t want to figure it out,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, here’s a dumb solution that would work. And they’re right, it is a dumb solution to work at, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Apple’s going to do it and it’s definitely not the best solution, but it is a solution and we’re all desperate out here,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you can’t just say, make the iPad more capable
⏹️ ▶️ John and think that it is going to preserve all of the things that make people
⏹️ ▶️ John love the iPad and make people think it’s the future of computing, all of the problem-freeness. And I know like, you know, a little progressive
⏹️ ▶️ John disclosure. If you don’t care about it, it won’t be there. It’s like multi-tasking wasn’t the beginning. You can turn it off or
⏹️ ▶️ John if you never want to do these capabilities, they won’t bother you at all. There is some truth to that. And that is sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s challenge. How can you add capabilities without screwing up the iPad Pro? But to give just one example
⏹️ ▶️ John to show this is not as simple as you think it is. Last episode, I was complaining about, I was proxy
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining through
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey letting Steve Trout and Smith proxy complain through
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Like Final Cut Pro. Apple finally ported Final Cut Pro Marco had a good point
⏹️ ▶️ John that I was going to make as well Which is like Apple’s investment in the iPad is another big factor in this and their investment is
⏹️ ▶️ John not strong. Let’s say How long did it take them to make Final Cut Pro for the iPad a long time? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway Final Cut Pro. It’s a pro app. If you’re doing video work, you can do it on your iPad amazing It’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John You go to render a complicated project you switch out a Final Cut Pro to do literally anything else on your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and it stops you render And someone wrote it and said are you sure because logic
⏹️ ▶️ John has an option that says run in background Maybe they just didn’t turn on the run in background option, but no, Final Cut Pro does not have
⏹️ ▶️ John the run in background option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can guess why, by the way. It’s probably so in iOS, typically you’re not allowed to use the GPU if your app is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foregrounded. Logic would have no reason to use a GPU, whereas obviously Final
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. GPU limitations with Steve Trounsworth’s option there, whatever. Right. So and you may be thinking, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is another example. It’s iPadOS, an OS designed in a much more resource constrained environment
⏹️ ▶️ John has a policy that no longer fits with the hardware. Because if you get an M3 MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John with the same amount of RAM as an iPad, and it’s got a slower SOC, you can run Final Cut Pro on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and you can start that render on your MacBook Air, and you can switch to Safari and browse the web while it renders.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do anything else on your computer and you’ll be fine, right? And so tech nerds look at this and he’s like, they should
⏹️ ▶️ John just let you do that on iPad OS. Take off the training wheels, stop,
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of these limitations. allow applications with a special entitlement or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John to run in the background and do the same thing that a MacBook Air could do, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the end, that is what we’re asking for. But the complexity is this. If you allowed that to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John and you gave it to an iPad user, maybe they’re renting, they’ve, I don’t know, they’re using Final Cut Pro, but anyway, a typical
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad user, they start a render or whatever, then they go back to Springboard and look at
⏹️ ▶️ John that, your render’s still running. I don’t know how you can tell that because the multitasking models doesn’t really show you what other apps
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are doing. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had a problem, right? Then they launch a game and they try to play it. And the frame rates are garbage because
⏹️ ▶️ John that game was designed in a world where when you run a game on an iPad, it essentially gets to
⏹️ ▶️ John hog the GPU and it’s at the ragged edge of what it’s capable of. And it gets 30 frames per second, but only if it’s got the
⏹️ ▶️ John full GPU. And now the game is unplayable. And the kid’s like, my iPad is broken. Or the
⏹️ ▶️ John adult is like, my iPad is broken. What the hell? Is this game not work? I’m getting garbage frame rates.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you were on a Mac and started a Final Cut Pro render and then launched a game and it ran crappy, you’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, as a Mac user, I understand. There’s a limited pool of resources on my computer. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if I do something complicated that requires the GPU and then I try to play a game, of course the game’s gonna have a lower frame rate. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not how anyone thinks about the iPad, which is part of why people love the iPad, that they don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John think about mentally keeping track of resource utilization. They don’t have to think, when I launch
⏹️ ▶️ John a game on the iPad, I gotta make sure I’m not running big stuff in the background, otherwise this game’s gonna have low frame rates.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how people think. They love not having to know that because frankly, most people don’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We know that. We understand how a computer works. We’re computer nerds, right? People don’t wanna have to know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t wanna have to remember the rules. They don’t wanna have to have an intuition about what you can and can’t do. They just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to mindlessly do stuff on their iPad and have it all work the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. And the incredibly limited processing model on the iPad provides that experience
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. but it also makes it impossible to use the thing like we would use
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer with the same capabilities. So this is the problem in front of Apple. I’m not saying this is an impossibility, I’m saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the challenge. It’s not as simple as just open up the floodgates or put a big switch in settings that says
⏹️ ▶️ John I can do pro stuff or whatever. It is actually a challenge for them to balance these
⏹️ ▶️ John two things, to make the computer as iPad-like as possible and as bulletproof
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible while still allowing the capabilities to be exploited. Lots of them are
⏹️ ▶️ John easy, we don’t have to do this problem, like of just, you know, multiple audio tracks or whatever, that’s not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John tax the system so much, you should just allow that. But things like a Final Cut Pro render is really at the ragged edge of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, if you allow that to run in the background, this iPad is going to behave very differently for the user. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, even just like an iMovie render, if you don’t wanna use Final Cut Pro, like in a fantasy world where there was a fancy version of iMovie,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could do similar things, right? Maybe there is, I don’t even know. This, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a tension. There is a real functional user expectation
⏹️ ▶️ John tension between expanding capability. And that’s why PCs are the way they are. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it’s because their legacy and they’re old. No, the thing, the model under which they work, the things we
⏹️ ▶️ John actually do, the things they’re able to do is because they give you enough rope to hang yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what we need. We need enough rope to tie a complicated knot and hopefully not hang ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ John because we know how to manage the resources. We know not to run a heavy job here. And we know if we do this over here, then that will
⏹️ ▶️ John slow down over there. Like we know all these things as, you know, experienced PC or Mac users that
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad users do not wanna know. Or even if they do know, the relief of not having to think about them is what makes the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive. So yeah, virtualizing macOS is like, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John try to figure out all the hard problems, just let us do this. And you know, it takes over the whole screen, it takes over the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John device, and it gets suspended when it’s in the background or whatever, but that’s just really a terrible solution. Honestly, they should just
⏹️ ▶️ John add touch and pen support to Mac OS and put cellular in Apple laptops and have that be
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But the iPad, the plain old iPad, can add capabilities
⏹️ ▶️ John and has been over the years. It should just add them faster and better, but eventually it will come up against
⏹️ ▶️ John this tension between adding those capabilities without ruining the iPad-ness. And that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is another social conflict because when people who like the iPad for what it is hear us talking, they think you’re gonna ruin
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad and they’re not 100% wrong. They’re only maybe like 80%. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we don’t want to ruin
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is possible to ruin the iPad by saying, it’s like a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do whatever you want, because that puts them back into the world where they have to think about this stuff. And honestly, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to think about it. And in general, it’s why PCs and Macs are such a mystery to so many people. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John something isn’t working and they don’t know why, they don’t want to have to diagnose it, they don’t want to have to figure out why.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is the magic of the iPad. It never asked them to figure out why it’s not working the way they expect, it never asked them to
⏹️ ▶️ John diagnose it, not never, but like way less than a Mac or a PC. So I don’t envy the task
⏹️ ▶️ John before Apple, but I do wish they would, A, put way more resources into it, and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John be a little bit less cautious because their current rate of advancement, the anger boiling
⏹️ ▶️ John up about the software situation on the iPad is just, it’s getting untenable for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John One stat to throw out there from one of the press things that might’ve been one of these interviews that we just read
⏹️ ▶️ John from before. I think Jaws said this, so I’ll take his word for the numbers. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you guys read this. What percentage of Mac users do you think own an iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say very low. I’d say like something like five or 10%, maybe. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe it was Jaws. And so again, this is directly from Apple, and I’m pretty sure he’s not picking up these numbers off the
⏹️ ▶️ John hip. He said more than half of Mac users own an iPad. What? Wow. I would not have guessed that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, the reason we’re thinking that is because we don’t realize how few Macs are sold. He didn’t say more than half of iPhone users. Okay, let’s get a
⏹️ ▶️ John grip here. He said more than half of Mac users, but still we as Mac users are thinking like, really? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think part of that is because, again, all of us have uses in our lives or in our families
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPad that are right in its sweet spot. That, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m watching video online for crying out loud. There are plenty of uses that are right in the sweet spot. So
⏹️ ▶️ John even the people who are complaining, those same people either have iPads or someone in their family has an
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, probably, that it doesn’t, they use it without requiring any of these complicated capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just use it right in that sweet spot for simple, low stress. So like we all are benefiting from
⏹️ ▶️ John that angle of the iPad. And I think that’s why there are so many iPads out there because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we’ll keep buying them, again, when the old one breaks or whatever, because we
⏹️ ▶️ John do use it in that way. But the tech nerd in us still says, yeah, but the really good ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John that hardware should be able to do more and it annoys us. and especially if you buy them and you
⏹️ ▶️ John keep opening this, otherwise update will be the one, or you keep trying to find a way to do your work, or Apple finally
⏹️ ▶️ John puts out a new app and you try it, but there’s one little limitation that’s bothering you or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not denying us everything. They’re just giving us just enough to keep leading us on, and we keep following
⏹️ ▶️ John them through it all. And in the meantime, we are all benefiting from all the things the iPad is good
⏹️ ▶️ John at. That attach rate, to use your terms from before, Margo, the attach rate of like, I wouldn’t say it’s attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac, but anyway, More than half of Mac users owning an iPad, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John very surprising to me. And then there was another thing that showed a chart for some third party thing saying like, the average age of
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads when they’re replaced. And as you can imagine, they’re older than you might think because iPads last a long time. And until someone
⏹️ ▶️ John sits on them or until the battery gets really bad or until they’re really slow and buggy, we just use them until they’re dead and then you get another
⏹️ ▶️ John one because we’ve got to have an iPad in the house because person XYZ uses it to watch TV
⏹️ ▶️ John or browse the web on the couch or whatever. That role is secure, but the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is so good, Apple should find a way to allow it to do more without
⏹️ ▶️ John destroying what’s good about it. I think it’s possible, and I think Apple is trying to do it, they’re just doing it way
⏹️ ▶️ John too slowly and probably with not enough resources.
#askatp: M4 supports more displays?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do a couple of quick ask ATPs or hopefully anyway Rumi Ahmed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes with the new m4 and it’s updated display drivers Is there a possibility now that the base chip can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support two external displays with a laptop lid open natively? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Think so, but I’m honestly not sure John. What’s what’s the answer here?
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s been a lot of stories about the New display driver which Apple talked about in the event and by talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean they said we have a new display driver
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right, they didn’t give any technical details
⏹️ ▶️ John and people are speculating as we speculated on the last episode. Is that because of the dual layer display? Is there some
⏹️ ▶️ John controlling on the SOC level to drive the two layer display? Or is there a driver chip between
⏹️ ▶️ John that handles that? And that’s not what this is about. Apple hasn’t told us, but the bottom line is there is a new display
⏹️ ▶️ John driver. So if you want to, again, have that glimmer of hope that maybe the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John has better external display to support than the M3 and M2 and M1, now’s the time to nurture that hope
⏹️ ▶️ John until we get an M4 based laptop and we find out what the real story is. But right now, Apple is not telling us.
⏹️ ▶️ John If someone inside Apple would like to tell us why the updated display driver was needed, is it for the tandem
⏹️ ▶️ John OLED? Is it unrelated to the tandem OLED? Can it drive more displays? These are answers I wanna know, but right now we don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there is hope. So nurture that hope while you still can.
#askatp: iPad vs. iPhone power debates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Runciman writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’d hate for Apple to think they’re good enough and let the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line languish.” It’s an interesting question. And on the surface, I want to dismiss it out of hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Mike’s not wrong. So what gives?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, as we said before, like I don’t think anyone is arguing that the hardware is good
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, they shouldn’t keep improving it. We love the hardware. We want them to keep improving. This is what we expect. This is the model.
⏹️ ▶️ John for hardware products. Every year, make them better, right? So no one is arguing for that. The question about
⏹️ ▶️ John why are we making these statements about the iPad and not the phone, we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John earlier that soon the phones will come with the same base RAM as all the low-end Macs or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer is actually pretty simple. It’s because it’s small and fits in your pocket. Like, that sounds dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because like, oh, what does the screen size matter? But it really, really does. Like, attaching a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John to your phone, a hardware keyboard and a trackpad, not really practical. Doing tons of things
⏹️ ▶️ John at once and doing complicated stuff on your phone, The screen is just a little bit too small to do
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of complicated stuff for right now We’re frustrated because we can’t do complicated stuff on the iPad and we
⏹️ ▶️ John think the power is there We think that because the power is there
⏹️ ▶️ John and the screen is there and the input devices are there like it’s Basically a laptop when you attach
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff to it, right? And even when you don’t you have all that screen area and how is that different the phone even if the phone literally
⏹️ ▶️ John had an M4 with 16 gigs of RAM in it. It’s still a phone. It’s too small. We don’t want it to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard We don’t wanna attach a full-size keyboard to it. You can’t do so much on the screen, right? So that just goes to show, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like there’s just like hardware burning a hole in our mental pocket. We’re like, oh, we’ve got an M4, we’ve gotta be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this amazing stuff. It’s because the whole device looks so much
⏹️ ▶️ John like this whole other device we have, the MacBook Air, that we know we can do it there. We
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t want to edit our Final Cut Pro project on even the biggest iPhone with no keyboard attached, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if the phone worked with a pencil, even if the phone had external hardware keyboard, it’s like, what are you doing? That’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, the screen is too small. It’s a handheld device, right? That’s the answer, that’s why. It doesn’t mean we don’t want the
⏹️ ▶️ John phones to keep getting more powerful, we do. Because they can do amazing stuff. And with the AI stuff, the amount of RAM they need is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna only increase. Like, but it’s literally the fact of the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the phone did not have a screen on it and we all wore little glasses and our phone projected an image onto
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever, then we’d be asking the same questions about the phone, maybe, because a lot of those limitations would be taken
⏹️ ▶️ John away. So that’s the reason, like the physical form factor. We are creatures with sense organs and
⏹️ ▶️ John hands and arms and the size of things is important. How we hold
⏹️ ▶️ John them, how we use them, how we do input with the keyboard, that is all not
⏹️ ▶️ John incidental. You don’t just look at it and say, it’s got this CPU with this much RAM and this much power, therefore, should be able to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. The input and output devices define the products. And we ask it about the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro because the input and output devices are big enough and powerful enough to do all the things that we want
⏹️ ▶️ John and not true on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s also, there’s a big mismatch, as we’ve been discussing this episode, between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what iPad hardware is capable of, just sheer spec wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and speed, and memory, and bandwidth wise, what the hardware is capable of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus what the OS will let you do with it. There’s a pretty big disconnect there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is actually very difficult to use the power that the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has because of the inherent limitations of what they will allow you to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just how people are choosing to use them. Whereas on a phone, first of all, phones have way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fewer resources than iPads, like way fewer CPU cores, way smaller processors, way less GPU power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less RAM. So phones are much smaller power envelope, much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if that wasn’t true though, by the way, even if they had, like I said, a 16 gigs of RAM and an M4, what they wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John is a big battery. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John put an M4, there’s a reason they don’t have an M4, but if you put that in there, they have the same number
⏹️ ▶️ John of CPU cores and everything or whatever, the size of the device dictates that it cannot have
⏹️ ▶️ John as big a battery as the iPad because it’s literally not as big. And that also limits
⏹️ ▶️ John what you can do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And so in our phones, like they have the smaller processors, fewer resources,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then what people are actually doing with their phones oftentimes is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really using a lot of the phone’s capacity. Think about just the massive amount of computation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco required just taking pictures. When people take pictures with their phones, like the amount of processing the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing, both live viewing of the viewfinder and then to actually take and process the photo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a huge amount of computation. And that gets ramped up every year as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone hardware goes up in capability. So phones actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are being, I think, more, like their resources are being utilized to a greater degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the average iPad in just the way people are actually using them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on-device AI is just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crank that up. Exactly. And I think that’s gonna be used a lot more on phones than on iPads, frankly, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people use their phones in different ways, in different contexts, and I think phones are gonna have way more of that. And even if we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look already, phones are already using a large amount of the resources that they have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas iPads, as John was saying, iPads are given laptop resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have laptop price tags. So it can be very frustrating when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t do all the things you wanna do on a laptop on an iPad. And it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of wasteful to have, if you have a recent iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a recent MacBook Air, they probably have the same processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or roughly the same processor, a similar processor. They probably have similar amounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of RAM, maybe similar storage. And so you’re looking like, all right, I have this aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slab that can do these things. And I have this other aluminum slab over here that is extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar, that can do a very different set of things. They’re made by the same company. They run a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same software. Why can’t they just both do the same things? It’s a more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frustrating, you know, it’s a more frustrating situation, like when you have these two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar products that have limitations that seem, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say arbitrary, but that seem forced beyond their need. The phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually, like the hardware for the phone is well suited to the tasks that people ask the phone to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s well suited to the phone’s physical realities and the price reality of a phone. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad versus MacBook, those statements don’t apply. Everything is less fitting for its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose and the iPad is just like dying for more ways to use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing hardware and the software just won’t let us use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned the price stuff though, by the way, I think you can price the most expensive iPhone up into MacBook Air territory,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that doesn’t change the physical reality of the device. It’s a small device with a small screen and a small battery and so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s excluded. Whereas with the iPad Pro to MacBook Air comparison, same size screen, similar size
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard, similar weight, similar dimensions. In general, the iPad tends to be more expensive if you spec
⏹️ ▶️ John them out to be the same. Some people find that frustrating, but the iPad also turns into a tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John and can use the Apple Pencil and has a better screen and has a faster
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU. You’re paying for the flexibility. That flexibility that you get, you don’t get that with the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air. Again, these are decisions Apple’s made in their product lines. You can imagine a touchscreen MacBook Air-sized device
⏹️ ▶️ John that is essentially a current M4 iPad Pro with everything fused together running macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that you could take the screen off. Apple has patents on that. Thus far, they haven’t done that. made a convertible touchscreen pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John equipped Mac. I think they 100% should do that. They haven’t done it yet. But setting that aside, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John separate from the issue of the iPad, right? And if they did that, you could say, well, this takes the pressure off the iPad. Now that we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John touchscreen pencil capable cellular Mac laptops, we don’t have to worry about the iPad. It can just stay
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as it always has. I still think that’s not true because I think there is room for
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS capabilities to grow without it becoming
⏹️ ▶️ John the disaster that it is the general purpose PC or Mac. And I say that humorously, I don’t think it’s a disaster,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s more difficult. And Apple, I think that Apple has been walking that path,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so far they haven’t screwed up the iPad, but they’re being so cautious about it. And they haven’t made
⏹️ ▶️ John a touchscreen Mac with pencil support and cellular. So we’re currently in the age of dissatisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ John about iPad software capabilities within the nerd community.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsor this week, Delete.me. Thank you to our members who support us directly. you can join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us at atp.fm.com. One of the big benefits of membership is you get to hear ATP Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a special bonus topic that we do after each episode now. This week’s bonus topic in ATP Overtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Meta wants to be the Microsoft of headsets. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of trying to get Meta Horizon OS to run on other hardware. So we’re gonna talk about that in ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime right now after the show. So thank you so much to our members. You can join if you wanna hear it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aty.fm join and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental, check podcast so long.
An IT story
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m sure all of us are probably the IT support for
⏹️ ▶️ John our immediate family slash extended family. Entire
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. I feel for my immediate family for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also for my children. Despite what my parents said when, you know, we got all these computers in the house and they immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John became mine and I’m the only person who understood how to use them. I’m the only person who could fix them. I decided what we got, blah, blah. I said, someday
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll have a kid and they’ll do the same thing that you’re doing to me and running rings around you and making you
⏹️ ▶️ John feel dumb for not knowing how to use your technology devices. And let me tell you, that did not happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John My kids do not care about computers. Because they take them for granted, right? They don’t know how to do anything. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to troubleshoot technology. And my son’s a CS major. He’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good student.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say, I thought he was a CS major. He
⏹️ ▶️ John He just doesn’t care about computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, those are different things. You can be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CS major and not care about the workings and dealings of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John computers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly not the debugging of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an older story. He’s back home now for the summer, but he was off at school. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s got an M2 MacBook Air that we got him for college. He’s had it since it was released. Did
⏹️ ▶️ John get that one on educational discount. And I set it up for him when he was at home, and he’s been using it at school. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every once in a while, he has some sort of problem where he needs my help setting it up, and I remote desktop into it and help him out or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, slow down. How do you orchestrate remote desktop?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Messages has a little feature cleverly hidden and their terrible interface somewhere, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the little eye in a circle next to a person’s name and there’s a little menu comes up or something that says, ask to share screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’ll do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that works consistently? Cause I haven’t tried this in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh no, it doesn’t work consistently.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does work. I mean, I usually blame the inconsistency on his weird school network or something. Like it disconnects,
⏹️ ▶️ John the audio disconnects, we keep getting disconnected, but eventually it works. Right? And it’s easy for him to do because
⏹️ ▶️ John he has messages and it’s easy. Towards the end of this year, you know, right, right around the
⏹️ ▶️ John times he was doing like finals and final projects He’s like my computer is not working Like the finder is crashing
⏹️ ▶️ John like just every time I try to do anything the finder just freezes and I get a beach ball Whatever. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m gonna take a look at this and I’m what my diagnosis fairly quickly was
⏹️ ▶️ John That I had I mean, so I had made a mistake I had failed him by not setting him up for success
⏹️ ▶️ John when I originally set up his I think it wasn’t in this laptop It was the one before this laptop. And I originally set up his
⏹️ ▶️ John homework laptop when he was in high school, because he had a laptop in high school as well. I think it was an M1 MacBook Air back then.
⏹️ ▶️ John I set him and my daughter up with a thing that I do not use myself and that my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t use, which is iCloud Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John Documents and Desktop Sync.
⏹️ ▶️ John option. Oh no. Oh no. Because my kids had, they had nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John All they ever used was Chrome, but they did occasionally throw things on their desktop, and they didn’t want their things to be backed
⏹️ ▶️ John up and they didn’t wanna be in a time machine vortex or whatever and they’re like, we don’t have any files, so I’m like, what are all those things on your desktop? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, but yeah, but those don’t count. Like, well, would you be sad if they went away? Anyway, I set them up with this and this turned out
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a good thing because many times it saved their butt because they don’t pay attention to stuff or whatever. And they had such
⏹️ ▶️ John light needs. It was like, you know, they put things on their desktop because they don’t know anything else that exists. Occasionally they’d put something in a documents
⏹️ ▶️ John folder, it all synced up, iCloud, it was piddling them out of data and they just didn’t back up their Macs because they
⏹️ ▶️ John were either using Chrome or, you know, not using Chrome, whatever, using a web browser, Safari or Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ John to do their school stuff, which is all through the web through Google thing, that’s why I’m thinking of Chrome, right? Or they
⏹️ ▶️ John were doing occasional random stuff locally and putting files in their desktop. Well, my son went off to college
⏹️ ▶️ John in this. Freshman year went okay. Sophomore year, he was getting into more heavy CS courses. And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we got to the place that, you know, the reason that I don’t use it, the reason I recommend people do not use it, the reason I don’t let my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife use it, It’s because I have no faith in iCloud Drive’s ability to sync
⏹️ ▶️ John files. It’s the reason I still use Dropbox for all its weirdness. I know how it works. It’s understandable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the most part, it does what it’s supposed to. iCloud Drive, none of those things is true about it. It’s just, it’s so bad. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hate it so much. And it was fine for light needs. But eventually what happened, you know, when
⏹️ ▶️ John I got on this computer to diagnose it, you know, top process was, you know, file provider D using a hundred percent
⏹️ ▶️ John of the CPU, finder locking up, nothing works. just totally
⏹️ ▶️ John hosed and frozen. And it was like, how am I gonna get him out of this remotely? So I did
⏹️ ▶️ John some heroics remotely to try to get it into a state where he could deal with stuff again. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to turn off iCloud Drive, which you’re like, oh, at least you can just turn it off and it cures everything. Turning it
⏹️ ▶️ John off also doesn’t work, of course, because once it’s totally hosed, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it off and it’s like, oh, updating things and it’ll hang for, and it’s like, he’s got stuff to do, he’s got finals,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t, and I’m remote, and like, I eventually, essentially successfully turned it
⏹️ ▶️ John off after like manually copying the files because he has a local account, my wife’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac studio, where the files are also synced and it wasn’t hosed. And so I copied them up into his
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Drive. I zipped them and copied to his Google Drive. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey clever. Then managed
⏹️ ▶️ John to turn off iCloud Drive by booting into single user mode and a bunch of like, I did some heroics and I got him out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the situation. And I said, look, your computer is essentially hosed, but I’ve saved all your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put these zip files back on your desktop. You can unzip them. iCloud Drive is disabled. Just get through these next two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you come home, I’ll wipe your computer, which is what I did. He came home, I wiped the computer, I started all over or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got into a same situation. Still in the end, I talked to him about this. I said, do you still
⏹️ ▶️ John want, you know, iCloud Drive syncing documents on desktop or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whatever? Totally,
⏹️ ▶️ John why not, dad? I mean, so here’s the thing. This is the kicker in the story. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John only Casey will know the answer to this, This is not 100% sure, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my leading theory. What caused this to happen? Well, why did it work freshman year, but eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John it fell over sophomore year? What was the straw that broke this camel’s back? Why did
⏹️ ▶️ John we exceed the meager limits of iCloud Drive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume too much storage was used, like iCloud has eclipsed its two terabyte plan
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a good guess. We were creeping up on it, and I did buy more storage. this is part of my trying heroic debugging.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were at like 90% and so I did buy another like two terabytes or whatever. But 90%, I don’t think that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem. Like there’s 10% of two terabytes is still enough room to grow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing there was like one problematic file that like would not sink and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silently broke the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you know, I would do LSOF to try to see which, if it’s hitting a problematic file, all the, all the usual debugging
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to try to figure out if it’s stuck on something or whatever. No, no, it’s something it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s two words, but it’s actually, it’s two words joined by an underscore?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure why you’re looking at me. I’m not mad, but I’m not clear why you’re looking at me to answer this, which means it’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious that I’m not thinking of. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t 100% know this is for the cause, but I’m gonna say 60 70 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John node modules. Does that name ring a bell? That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he was doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of courses this year that were done in node and anybody who’s ever used node,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you have multiple products over the place, if there’s a node modules directory, the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of files that are in that directory is astronomical. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if that those files are, because you’re a kid and don’t know, on the desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ John file provider D was like, I can’t even, I give
⏹️ ▶️ John up. This is too many files changing too often, too fast. And of course the
⏹️ ▶️ John the project they were doing had like some, they were using Yarn instead of NPM for God knows what reason. And they had
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Yarn command set up for like Yarn fix, Yarn fix dev, which was like reset the world and delete
⏹️ ▶️ John everything because otherwise the thing wouldn’t work after you change certain things. And I’m like, this is not the way to run a software project. If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what this is doing, like this should not be necessary. But the bottom line is, they were like nuking and
⏹️ ▶️ John paving constantly during their dev process and refilling the node modules directory and doing all sorts of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John File provider D is not up to that test. So the only reason I’m relaying the story just to tell you, hey, if you hear me saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t have faith in iCloud Drive and that you shouldn’t use it, this is exactly why. It’s fine if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a small number of files, but if you know what the node modules directory is, never use iCloud Drive, never.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can’t handle that volume of files. It can’t handle that many changes. It’s bad, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. Use Dropbox, use Mastro, use literally anything else. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John when iCloud Drive goes bad, like I said, you can’t even turn it off easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That hurts. So how were you doing, like, were you talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him through the, you know, reboot into safe mode dance and all that jazz? Or were you actually able to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, hold down the power button, just hold it down. And he’s like, I am, but it just reboot. Like it was in
⏹️ ▶️ John some like weird boot loop thing where it wouldn’t even let him get to the boot options menu. It was just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, you know, this is again, hard to diagnose remotely. I haven’t had him FaceTiming, holding his phone up to look at the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It was really
⏹️ ▶️ John badly hosed. And in fact, when all was said and done, and he brought it home, there were also, as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially unrepairable file system errors in APFS. Oh, gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How is that even possible?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just nuked the whole thing. FSCK would find the errors and say it was repairing them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you’d find the same errors in the second run. I don’t think they were the cause of the problem, because once I had turned off iCloud Drive, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John was fine. There was no more problems, right? But yeah, I just nuked the whole thing, just wiped everything on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John started over from scratch. And he didn’t lose any data because I had all of his files
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac Studio with iCloud Drive synced and I just copied them. I made him a local
⏹️ ▶️ John folder in his home directory. I said, anything that has the word node in it, put it in a local
⏹️ ▶️ John folder, that will not sync. So his desktop is still syncing and I told him don’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on the desktop. You can put like a PDF or Word document, whatever, but any coding you’re doing, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put it there. Put everything local. So we’ll see how this goes next year, but yeah, iCloud Drive, still not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco summary. Who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey woulda thunk it? Who woulda thunk it? Wow. That’s a journey. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I don’t know if we need to include this in the release version of the show, but something I have wondered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for myself is, would it make sense to have my dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey install Tailscale on his computer? either have me do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with my own credentials and have his machine basically be a node in my tail net, or alternatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have him install his own node in his own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tail net and then share that node with me so that if I need to remote desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into his computer, it is way easier. Now that’s not necessary in my case because I have my backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosting Synology in his basement and I’ve set that up such that I can crawl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through Tailscale onto his network, and I could log into his machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, I would never do this without permission, but I could log into his machine basically at a moment’s notice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it would be fine. But I wonder if it would make sense if you were willing to do all this, which it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you probably aren’t. But if you were willing to do all this, if it would make sense to have like Alex and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get on a tail net or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like that, such
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just one more thing to debug. No way. Like that’s the beauty of messages is that it’s built
⏹️ ▶️ John know if there’s any problem with it, it’s like there is weird school network, the weird school wifi,
⏹️ ▶️ John firewall rules they have. The last thing I wanna debug is another layer on top of that, which is, oh, tail scale. How
⏹️ ▶️ John is that interfere? Like, yeah, that’s why I recommend the messages thing. It is like, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is the base level. If you have two Macs and you need to help each other with them, use the messages thing as your first
⏹️ ▶️ John option because it eliminates all third party software, all third party networking stuff, it’s all first party. And if that
⏹️ ▶️ John works ever, even if it’s intermittently, use that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I get what you’re saying. I have no real argument for it, but just something to think about because tail scale is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reliable and is very good at poking holes through firewalls. Like that’s kind of one of
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like university networks are like, it’s like an adversarial
⏹️ ▶️ John situation. University networks aggressively are attacking what college students want to do with their computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like my, my, so take an example. My son can’t torrent his, uh, you know, uh, manga
⏹️ ▶️ John things at, uh, From school because they like they stop all of that. You know, I go tail scale We’ll get around
⏹️ ▶️ John it or ever wouldn’t surprise me if the smart IT people at university are also looking for and trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to detect and shut down tail scale stuff. So it’s a hostile environment over there.