630: Time to Spiral
13 Mar 2025Mac Studio benchmarks, Mac Pro chip rumors, the value of products with colors, and the rumored UI redesigns that may come to this fall’s Apple OSes.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco went to the bank wrong
- Follow-up:
- Vision Pro Corner
- New Adventure episode: Deep Water Solo
- Spatial Gallery
- Metallica immersive special is coming
- iPad Air corner
- “2× bass” false alarm
- Appeal
- Affordable big screen (notes John Spurlock)
- 🗣️ ARE YOU LISTENING APPLE PEOPLE LIKE COLOR 🗣️ (via Ryan Manly)
- Portrait-only iPad apps (via Matt Rippetoe)
- More on colors (via Yossi Kanner)
- MacBook Air’s keyboard has new mute iconography
- Regarding the “Hidra”
- ATP #562: Do You Have a Dragon?
- Interview with Srouji (timestamp link)
- Lernaean Hydra
- ATP #562: Do You Have a Dragon?
- Gurman on the M4 Ultra & Hidra
- Early M3 Ultra benchmarks from Geekbench 6
- GPU: M3 Ultra Metal: 259,668
- 10% faster than M2 Ultra Mac Studio’s best at 231,757
- 20% faster than M2 Ultra Mac Studio’s average at 209,003
- CPU:
- M3 Ultra single core: 3,144
- ~10% faster than M2 Ultra Mac Studio’s best at 2,813
- ~20% slower than M4 Max MacBook Pro’s average at 3,921
- M3 Ultra multi-core: 28,119
- ~25% faster than M2 Ultra Mac Studio’s average at 21,373
- ~10% faster than M4 Max MacBook Pro’s average at 25,647
- M3 Ultra single core: 3,144
- More from Ars Technica
- GPU: M3 Ultra Metal: 259,668
- Apple is working on a larger iMac? (AKA John tries to save face)
- Threads timeline setting update
- Thoughts on Feedback
- Vision Pro Corner
- Apple is allegedly “dramatically” redesigning the UI for its next OSes
- Post-show: John’s speaker update
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Some Volkswagen news
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Chapters
- Banking incorrectly
- Vision Pro content update
- Sponsor: TRMNL (code ATPFM)
- iPad follow-up
- Color
- iPad follow-up
- Color
- New Mute-key icon
- “Hidra” rumors
- M3 Ultra benchmarks
- Sponsor: BetterHelp
- 27-inch iMac bet
- John’s Threads timeline
- Apple bug-reporting
- OS redesigns imminent?
- Ending theme
- John’s speakers
Banking incorrectly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I uh, so I mentioned last week that I was, I had to go to the bank to get cash for the restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had like never Had to deal with cash before Turns out I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did in fact do that wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get monopoly money? I and I I would like to state for the record that Marco put into our internal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes pre-show Marco went to the bank How did you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you think I might have forgotten exists
⏹️ ▶️ John You did not pass go and did not collect $200? Withdrawal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slips or something equivalent?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coins. Oh, whoopsies. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had to go back today a second time like, oh, I also need coins to fill the drawers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought about it, but like, you know, to get pennies, what that means, like a roll of pennies is 50 cents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what that means is I spent $2, I got four rolls of pennies. I got four rolls of pennies. Like, we’ll see if I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually use them. So we’ll see. But maybe they’ll be illegal or banned by the time I actually open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for full service. Who knows? We’ll find out. But yes, I did indeed get pennies because it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because coins are generally worth so little, getting anything but quarters costs basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing. And even the quarters aren’t that expensive. And especially once you get down to like, you know, dimes, nickels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pennies, like these are very inexpensive. I spent less than $100 to fill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the chains that we are probably going to need for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you clarify the semantics of that statement? Don’t the coins
⏹️ ▶️ John cost the amount indicated by their denomination?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but it turns out since coins are worth so little relative to rectangles of paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cotton and stuff, it turns out you can have a lot of change for $70.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get four quarters by just paying a dollar, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s amazing how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re following
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your math here. What did you end up carrying the cash and coinage in? Did you just put it in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Peak Design, well, maybe not a Peak Design backpack, that’s a little canceled right now, but did you put it in some sort of backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or did you take a duffel or what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the funny thing. So when I went to get cash, I had brought my, yes, Peak Design everyday backpack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what? I’m not going to let one murderer ruin my backpack. It’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re all good dogs, Brian.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t really a backpack centric murder either. so I feel like the backpack is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and like, you know, what kind of shoes was the guy wearing? Are those ruined too? Like, no, it doesn’t matter. Right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John he was wearing Hanes underwear. Now you can’t wear Hanes underwear anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was wearing a cotton t-shirt. You can’t wear cotton. Anyway, so no, I’m not going to let that ruin my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backpack. It’s a great backpack. So I went in there with a giant backpack to get what was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant amount of cash, as it turns out, volume one. Today, I went in there to get change and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had nothing. I’m like, I’m just getting change. Coins are heavy. It turns out. Yes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I walked- It’s like they’re made of metal. I walked out with like, I just put them in like, you know, I was wearing like a light jacket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just put them in my jacket pockets and I’m like, you know, lumbering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out the door.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I’m doing every part of this wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my gosh. You’re jingling like a school janitor with a too big keychain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I had my kid with me and as we’re walking out he’s like, it looks like we’re robbing the bank. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, don’t joke about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. You’re the world’s worst bank robbers, they only ask for change. Yeah, we robbed the bank for 70 bucks worth of coins.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t escape quickly because you’re too weighed down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So you’ve had some learnings,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the business people say. You’ve learned some lessons, and hopefully you won’t need to get cash, at least for a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while, I presume. I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We’ll find out. I guess we’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Yeah. Take a penny, leave a penny.
Vision Pro content update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We have a lot of follow-up to get through. In fact, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked John to cut some of the follow-up and he was very gracious about it. So we’ll see. Maybe if we can plow through it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll make John’s Night by getting through all of it, but we’ll see what happens. And I’m going to start by ruining John’s Night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by doing Vision Pro Corner. We have a few quick pieces of information to talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, there’s a new Adventure episode. Adventure is one of the series, like it’s the kind of sort of TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey series that Apple has put together for Vision Pro. And there’s a new Adventure episode called Deep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Water Solo. This is about a rock climber, mountain climber fellow who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is climbing up the side of a cliff in somewhere in Spain. I forgot already.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is very well done. It’s again, like eight to 10 minutes, something in that neck of the woods. And I really enjoyed it. I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these ones that have a bit more of a story to them. The rodeo one from a few weeks back, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that was an adventure episode or something else, but that one, I feel like they tried to put a story on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but it didn’t really land. This one, they did a pretty good job of the story. And one of the things I really liked about it, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, it’s not really much of a spoiler. This guy is trying to scale a cliff. And one of the fun things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Vision Pro is what with it being 3D, they’re doing like an animation or like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an overlay on. It might have been a rendering. Maybe it was a photo of the rock cliff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and showing where he’s going to scale the rock cliff. And you can see that these renderings, like it’s very obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re in 3D space, right? Like there’s a path, a line going up the rock cliff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s jiggy-jaggy and a dashed line where he needs to jump somewhere. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see that that’s floating above the rock face. And is that a big deal? No, absolutely not. But is it neat? Yeah, it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of neat. So you can check that out if you’re interested. Marco, I know you’re going to be pausing the show in order to put on your Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you probably haven’t touched in three months in order to try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I might touch it for the next item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, maybe not the next item, but the one after. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gallery is our next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John item. Oh, yeah. I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. That is the Vision OS exclusive app that is only in the beta for now. It was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the first beta, it is in the second, and I think we’re on the third beta now. I wanted to very briefly talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is, it was billed as Apple giving us more spatial content. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know I do this every time, but it’s important to understand the difference. Immersive is what we were just talking about, where you look around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the perspective of the camera is changing. You’re kind of of controlling the camera, if you will, because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking around a 180-degree scene, right? Spatial is when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a rectangle with depth. And it’s honest-to-goodness depth, as far as you can tell, but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a rectangle with depth. If you look around, you’re looking away from that rectangle with depth. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, the Spatial Gallery app, my two-second review, it really is just a gallery.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s almost no Chrome to the app whatsoever. It’s just a series of videos and images, all of which have at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some amount of spatial content. Some of the individual, so there’s these panes that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swoop through the air, right? They’re individual panes for each of the different gallery items,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures, videos, whatever. But some of these panes are actually kind of like Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stories where they’ll show one photo for a little bit and then another photo for a little bit, and then it’ll automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advance to the next photo for a little bit. So as an example of that, they had some behind the scenes stills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Severance, which by the way I am now caught up on and it’s real good. No
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no spoilers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No spoilers, no spoilers. It’s real good though. So they had some behind the scenes stills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Severance. They were neat, like nothing dramatic, but it was still neat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see. There’s no playback controls that I could tell, like even when you’re watching a short video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, that’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s also kind of funny because the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes if you’re looking at it full screen versus in like a pane. You can blow these up to be more full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen and the audio sounds different. This is similar to being on like a FaceTime call when you’re in an environment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or rather than just looking at floating heads. I loved that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were some, basically advertisements. Like one of the first things in the list is a video for Red
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bull. And at the top, there’s a little pill that says, open the Red Bull app or download and open the Red Bull app or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case may be. And I just think it’s kind of funny. It’s like Price is Right all over again. Like the greatest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trick the devil ever played was convincing us that Price is Right wasn’t an hour-long commercial. Well, it’s a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, right, where it is cool, new, interesting content, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still also advertisements in part. There was a really good one on Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they had, I forget the model, but like a particular early, early, early race car, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed a couple of videos of that, which was really neat. All of this was dated the 3rd of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey March, if I’m not mistaken, and the impression that Apple gave was that they would be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular content updates, just like they gave in February of 2024 when we got our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vision Pros. It is now the 12th of March and there’s nothing new. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I respect that they’re trying in theory, but come on, you got a new app for it. Let’s do it, let’s move.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More stuff, more stuff. That being said, and now I have Marco’s attention,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have just announced either earlier today or yesterday, I forget as we record, but it doesn’t matter, there’s going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roughly 30 minute Metallica Immersive Special. Reading from,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe their press release, this project marks a new foray into immersive technology using ultra-high resolution 180
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree video in spatial audio to give fans unprecedented access. From vantage points as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey close up as the snake pit to wide angle views, it brings the live show to a whole new level. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to achieve this, Apple built a custom stage plot featuring 14 immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video cameras using a mix of stabilized cameras, cable suspended cameras, and a remote controlled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera dolly system that moved around the stage. Hello, sign me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. It continues filmed during our final M72 stop. Oh, I’m sorry, this is from Metallica’s website, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Filmed during our final M72 stop of 2024 in Mexico City. It features full performances of Whiplash 1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Hello Hokies, Enter Sandman. All captured exclusively in Apple immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video. Holy pants, I want this in my life. I want it now. And as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be here this coming Friday as we record this, I am excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we pirate it? Deep cut, I know. Yeah, I, this is great, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think. Like, you know, we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some reservations. I mean, first of all, like, you know, okay, I’m not a huge Metallica fan, but like, fine. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to see this because what I’ve been saying for months is concerts and events
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, Envision Pro would be great. My, so on one hand, I’m very happy to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. I am a little concerned about like, what choices did they make for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco production? Like how much jumping between cameras are we gonna get? How much movement of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera are we gonna get? What I think I want is basically a fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera. Like from the perspective of being a little bit above a really good seat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the audience, like near the front of the stage, a little bit higher than the audience so no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one’s head’s in your way. But like basically I want the experience of being there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think what they will probably end up doing for the most part is overproducing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything because that’s Apple’s style. Apple’s very overproduced. And I don’t know how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creative control Metallica had versus Apple’s usual production team, who knows? We don’t know the details. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is a good step. It is, I laughed when I read that it was just three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another content snack? Another demo? Another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey trial? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come on, like, do the whole concert. Like, what? You set all that up for three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I could not agree more. Content stack is such a great turn of phrase for it. It’s so incredibly true.
⏹️ ▶️ John After three songs, the audience actually wanted to see the show. They said, get these cameras out of here. They’re blocking our view.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It could be, but I just want to reiterate what Marco said, though. Like, some of my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that I’ve seen in the Vision Pro is the Concert for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one like the Alicia Keys thing and I think it was Raya Reva, forgive me, I forget the artist’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name. But there was, to Marco’s point earlier, there was a little bit of hopping around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with different camera angles and whatnot. However, what I really like about being immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can pitch the camera for all intents and purposes is that if they’re focusing on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drummer but the bassist is just barely outside where you’re looking right now, you know what you can do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can turn your head. And as you turn your head, you can now look at the bassist. You know what I mean? And so this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who is a concert film aficionado, one of the things that drives me bananas about concert films
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that a lot of times, either somebody’s soloing or maybe some, and you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to focus on them, or maybe, you know, the guitarist is soloing, but actually quietly in the background, that bassist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is killing it. And I’d rather look at the bassist for a minute. You know what I mean? And this is where like the old DVD technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with like different camera angles. Do you remember that way back in the day?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody ever actually use that besides the adult film industry?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Phil Collins had, I think it was Phil Collins. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John want to say it was Phil Collins.
⏹️ ▶️ John People used it by accident probably by hitting a button on the remote. They didn’t know what it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. That’s so true. But anyways, but DVDs way back in the day, kids ask your parents, DVDs way back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the day, a handful of them allowed for you to actually change the camera angle and it was really neat. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you kind of sort of get that same sort of thing here. And again, like Marco said a few moments ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live performance, be that music or stage or or what have you, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just screaming, may we please see this immersive video? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I would go so far as to say I agree with Marco on just give me a stationary camera and never move it. I think it’s neat to be able to move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or see different perspectives from time to time. But I wholeheartedly agree with Marco’s implied point, or maybe you said it explicitly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t want to cut every three seconds. And some of the early Apple stuff, that’s what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a cut, cut, cut, cut. And by the time you get your bearings as to where your body feels like it is in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3D space, then suddenly you’re on something else. You have to reorient yourself in a way that is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true in 2D, but much more dramatic in 3D. And so all of that to say, I’m super duper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited. One of the first things I plan on doing Friday morning, as someone who enjoys, I’m not a humongous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Metallica fan, but I like Metallica a fair bit. And as a graduate of Virginia Tech, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to love Enter Sandman. And if you’re not familiar, don’t worry about it. But suffice to say, I am real excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try this on Friday. And I’m excited that Marco, you might actually dust off your Vision Pro and try it too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also like I watch a lot of concert broadcast usually fish occasionally goose occasionally somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, but usually those two and By the way goose is on fire on this tour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They They’ve had some some staffing changes in their percussion section over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last year And I think they have ended up in a very good spot where not only like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this so the the the new drummer Just is working his but he like he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never stops moving you look at this guy in the video you’re like, how is he doing that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three hours? It’s amazing. So, you know, this is like Taylor Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of athleticism required, like, you know, for this drummer to be doing what he’s doing for as long as he’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s really impressive. So, Goose, oh my God, they’re on fire right now. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I watch a concert broadcast or a concert video, they do like switch around. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll usually be like, you know, live switching, like somebody will be directing the live broadcast, just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like a sports broadcast would would be in a, there’s like a director saying, all right, take camera three, take camera two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they ever go back and like really edit, you know, what switches they made for like the published
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video. So, you know, they’re just kind of guessing, hey, right now the bass player’s doing something fun, we’ll switch to him for a few,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a few seconds here and there, and now we’ll go back to the guitar, okay, let’s take a wide shot to show the lights, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what you see is a bunch of like really close-ups of the musicians that even if you were there in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a front row seat, you wouldn’t have that good of a view. And especially you’ll see things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like right behind the drummer or you’ll see like a shot down to see like into the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player where normally the keyboard players keyboards are usually blocking the view from the audience of really seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the keyboard is doing. That kind of concert that that kind of concert filming technique with multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras and switching between is actually very different and in some ways better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a view in person when you’re actually there in a great seat for the concert. It’s a really interesting thing. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost a different thing than being there in person. But when you are there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in person, you are getting the experience that the band is actually creating and that their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artistic team around them is creating. Like the lighting, the staging, and if there’s any background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decoration or movement or screens or animations, like you’re getting that. Like in the sphere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re getting that whole thing. That’s a whole different thing. When you have a multicam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live directed, switched between kind of format that’s being broadcast, that is a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing in certain ways, but it is a different thing than attending the concert. And when you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just looking at your fixed view from the audience, you are getting the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience that they were trying to create at that time. You’re getting the cool light show. You’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a little bit, you know, trippiness if you’re in a jam band situation. Like you’re getting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s, you know, if you’re watching some kind of over the top rock band, and there’s like fire on the background. You’re seeing that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it’s full-scale spectacle that it was meant to be seen at. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m watching something in an immersive video like this, I would rather have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audience experience because that’s something that, you know, the multi-cam situation where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re seeing a quick close-up of the guitar, then quick close-up of the keyboard, then quick close-up of the drums, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think is optimizing for what TV screens and computer screens are good at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small, high resolution screens that are not super immersive. They’re not taking up your whole field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of view, but they can display really, really great content at a smaller size. So you can zoom in, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see, oh, look at that. Like the way the light’s reflecting off those strings. That’s pretty cool or whatever. Oh, wow, I didn’t realize his fingers were moving that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast or, you know, whatever it is. In the Vision Pro, the immersive format, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can offer is the full experience of being there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something that other screens can’t do. and the Vision Pro can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you wanted to simulate what it’s like to actually be in the sphere watching those cool animations at the ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale that they’re at, you can largely do that with the Vision Pro. You can’t even come close. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I watched the videos later of some of the fish shows that I saw at the sphere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the videos were great, but it was nothing like being there, not even close because they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show what was an immersive performance in a rectangle in front of me. And it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. Like it doesn’t communicate it well. I hope that Apple will take advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the Vision Pro can uniquely do here, which is show an immersive experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whatever, you know, Metallica snack they’ve made here, it sounds like it’s probably gonna be closer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, you know, the multi-cam kind of style. We’ll see how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes. I do think there’s a place for that, but I hope that’s not all they ever do. I hope what they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer also is the audience perspective, just give me a fixed perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s so much potential there because people go to live events because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get that perspective when they go. And there’s so many people who would love to enjoy live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco events who can’t go or the events already happened in the past or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a huge market there. And so again, I will again urge Apple, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good, this is a start. There is so much more here to be taken advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of and I hope they do.
Sponsor: TRMNL (code ATPFM)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Terminal. This is the wonderful E-Ink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display that I was talking about back in December that I bought myself before they were a sponsor, now they’re sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our show. So this is what Terminal is. This is basically a small E-Ink display with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice white case or a black case that you can just stick on your desk or on your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall or in your kitchen or whatever, and it just displays ambient information. Now because it’s E-Ink,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a glowing screen, so it looks great anywhere. It’s very, know, kind of, you know, non
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intrusive visually, and it can display whatever you want. They have an entire gallery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what they call recipes for displaying stuff from different services. So of course, you can have the basics clocks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weather calendars, I have a countdown to the data restaurants opening plus weather and plus quotes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the office online. All of those were already in their recipe gallery for that, like there’s 1000s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people, I think people have made for this. So you probably don’t even have to make your own. But if you want to make your own, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. There’s a whole open easy API for this. And it’s super easy to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I personally haven’t, but I know Casey was looking at that. And it’s just there’s so much going on here. They have an unbreakable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pledge, which means if they ever go out of business, they open source all their code, you don’t even have to use their infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t want to like they have a really great setup there. And I love that it looks nice enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pass the historical commission restrictions in most households, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, at least according to data from the ATP hosts here. So I love the Terminal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a great looking product. It works well. You can hack it a bunch, or if you don’t want to, or you don’t have time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just use what they have built in, and it’s fantastic. So check it out today. It’s 129 bucks. And with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this promo code, use code ATPFM for $15 off. Terminal, it’s T-R-M-N-L.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically Terminal with no vowels in it. Delete all the vowels. So the domain name is useterminal.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use code ATPFM for 15 bucks off. Thank you so much to Terminal for just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being awesome and for sponsoring our show.
iPad follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk iPad Air. Apparently, the 2x base thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a false alarm. Tell me about this, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was something I mentioned. The MacRumors had said that the iPad Air 13-inch is missing the 2x base feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that the previous version had, but apparently that story has been pulled. I don’t know why they didn’t just update it and put
⏹️ ▶️ John a retraction on it on MacRumors or something, but it seems like it was just a false alarm. So in case anyone was worried
⏹️ ▶️ John that the 13-inch Air has a regression in this way, it seems like no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had some feedback with regard to the appeal of the iPad Air because you know the three of us were kind of scratching our heads saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why and John Spurlock wrote in and said one reason I’m glad the iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exists and just ordered one is the larger screen size. I Use mine mostly for music like sheet music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the 13-inch makes a huge difference as does the $550 savings versus a similar iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because there is no 13-inch regular iPad. That’s the point there They’re like if you want a 13-inch it’s great that the Air
⏹️ ▶️ John exists because otherwise you’d have to buy a Pro and they’re really expensive at any size and the 13
⏹️ ▶️ John inch one even more so.
Color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryan Manley writes, I was a big iPad pro guy. I’ve had three big ones and one small one. I went to the M2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Air last year mostly because I wanted the blue one. I’m literal proof that colors drive buying decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, face ID is the biggest thing I miss. Are you listening? Lack of colors are at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we please, please have colors, please? Pretty please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, especially man, like now that we’re seeing all the iPad or the MacBook Air reviews of sky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue which is just bluish silver like oh man what a missed opportunity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like an actual sky blue one that would be amazing. I currently drive a sky blue car like that would be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would look awesome and it seems like they just didn’t do it. I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish oh please Apple sometime soon maybe the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation give me cellular nanotexture and a color that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually a color. That would be amazing. And again, and I think this is an important feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Ryan here, like people often make buying decisions based solely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or significantly on visual appeal, colors, styles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know, we know people, sometimes we have been people who have bought a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple thing mostly because, you know, We wanted it. And why do we want it? Sometimes we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted it because it was a cool color or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, like, you know, something cool, like anything, just give us anything, a, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t, I’m not saying every color has to be bold. I’m saying make any color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bold. Give us one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I, I, you know, we bought Aaron’s car like nine months ago or something like that, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were trying to find a car that we wanted and I will give you one guess. And we worked with several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different dealers during the time. And I’ll give you one guess what each dealer’s first question was. Well, after,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you looking for in terms of what model? What color do you want? Which shade of silver do you want?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty much. But that is almost always the first question. Then a friend of mine was looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an F-150 Lightning, actually, and he ended up just getting one. It’s a really nice truck, although I’m not a truck person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I was kind of living vicariously through him because I enjoy buying cars with other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. And oftentimes, the question was, what color do you want? And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it’s not an apples to apples comparison between a car and a computer. Well, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re John buying a $15,000 computer, but nevertheless, you know, it’s still important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your point, Marco, that it makes a big difference. And you know, my M3 Macs, MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro that I’m talking to you through right now, I feel like it was time for me to upgrade and update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, last year, two years ago, whatever it was. But I definitely Insta-bought when I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there was that, you know, deep, deep black, which granted is not a bold, vibrant color, but it just had such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nostalgia for that black book that I wanted so badly back in 2008 or thereabouts that I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have it. And granted, I’m kind of taking the wind out of my own sails when I’m talking about black, but the same thing would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be true. If there was like a vibrant blue, I’d probably rock one. And certainly if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Mac, which maybe I’d be a little more conservative with the computer, you bet your bottom that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would 100% rock a very bold blue iPhone. And a couple few years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was 13 or thereabouts, we had a reasonably decent blue iPhone Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I recently gave that to Declan as a, you know, phone without service to use as like a noisemaker at night
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. And man, every time I look at that thing, I’m just, oh man, I miss that blue. I miss that blue so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and in defense of the, you know, the current black color on the MacBook Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why people went nuts for that is because it was new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was extreme, it was more extreme than,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that we had silver and space gray forever. And silver is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aluminum, great, that’s the color I usually get. Space gray was just darker. It was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, do you want light gray or medium gray? The new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they’re calling this gray, is a much darker gray. It’s not black, but it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to black. And so it was, for the first time, it was like, oh, finally, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bold, a more bold choice exists besides these two kind of just lukewarm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you want this kind of lukewarm thing or that kind of lukewarm thing? The MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now available in one bold color, which is that the super dark navy blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost black, and then three just total bland,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco milk toast, Tim Cook roommates chat kind of colors, like just the most boring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bland, like we are afraid to express anything whatsoever with our color schemes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s three of them. I understand, as I think we’ll get to, many people want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and choose to buy the boring colors. That’s why the iMac is offered in silver, even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also offered in all those other colors. But they offer it in other colors too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who want color in their life. Why would a company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whose logo was a rainbow for so long, why would they wanna offer color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their products? Because it’s nice and people buy them and people love it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes people happy and it adds some emotional appeal to what is otherwise your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work computer or whatever. Like it gives people some fun in these tools that are just machines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise. Apple has not shied away from colors across their product lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. They’re actually really good at colors. When they choose to do real colors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do a great job and doing colored aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve been doing it since the iPod mini, like it’s been a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. They’ve, they know how to make good colored aluminum in all sorts of different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors, saturated colors, pastels. I think they can, they do a really good job when they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they have the resources, they have the ability, they have the talent to pick good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors. Use it. Give us something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some option. Because we keep hearing from people who could buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more expensive pro version of an iPhone or a Mac and they don’t. They get the smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, more consumer branded one or whatever because it’s available in more colors than gray,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use that enthusiasm and you can actually upsell people. You could even like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they actually have done this in the past. They could even have like you know the cheapest configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only available in silver, gray, gray, and gray and then they could have like the next step up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the iMac used to be this way. I think I’m not sure if the current generation is but the M1 generation was like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then the step up like the mid the mid-tier specs that one’s available in three more colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Like they can do stuff like that. There’s so many ways to do this that would work out better for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So just come on, color! Bring color back to the world. We, trust me, we need it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. Like, the world could use some. Please, for the love of God, God, bring color back.
iPad follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Ripouto writes with regard to your question, Marco, about portrait-only iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps. Would you actually, would you mind just recapping what the query was from you last week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So basically I’d said last week, one of the things I’d gone through with the restaurant was I had an iPad set up to play music and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run the app for the mixer to control volume and stuff. And the mixer’s app would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only run in portrait on iOS. It’s not an iPhone-only app. It was an an iPad native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build, but it would only run in portrait. And the problem was, I’m like, I couldn’t find any way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iPadOS on any sized iPad, even on a big one, to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two portrait-only apps side-by-side with the iPad physically in landscape. But I figured by this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the screens are so big now maybe they can do that. And turns out I could not find a way. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matt Ripto and many other people have actually written in to point out that it turns out you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually run to portrait only iPad apps in landscape side by side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Stage Manager, which is something I didn’t even think of. I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sage Manager would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same restrictions, but it turns out it doesn’t. So this is both helpful in the sense that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, I can actually do this, I think. I haven’t actually tried it, but I can do it. Apparently a lot of people are gonna say this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t think I will do it because this is an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, again, this is being used by all the bartenders, all the staff who are working back there, they’re not all gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad experts. I think the stage manager environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the little, like, what if it gets swapped? Or what if it gets disabled? Or what if a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different app gets pulled up and then that scene is messed up? Like, can I trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are not iPad power users to be able to use stage manager and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it back? I don’t know. I don’t know if I wanna take that risk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder if you could automate this with shortcuts. I genuinely don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But- Let’s make it even more complicated. Well, didn’t you already buy the iPad mini though? Like, isn’t this kind of, the ship has
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sailed here. Yes. So you’d have to like return the iPad mini or find another use for it and buy a bigger one. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, you know, this is the problem with iPadOS, we’ve talked about it many times. You really want to build
⏹️ ▶️ John something complicated out of a set of understandable building blocks. Like if I asked you on your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you put two windows side by side? You’d say, yeah, because you learned long ago how to move windows around on your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and how to resize them. And using those basic tools of like window controls and resizing and moving and
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging, despite the fact that Mac apps continue to try to make the title bar disappear or make it difficult,
⏹️ ▶️ John like try grabbing the top of your Chrome window. But anyway, because the
⏹️ ▶️ John fundamental building blocks of manipulating windows on the Mac are simple to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John and learn and are incredibly flexible, almost anybody can take two windows and put them side by side. Maybe they don’t know about
⏹️ ▶️ John the cool shortcuts with like where you can tile them and blah, blah, but they don’t need to know those shortcuts. They know what
⏹️ ▶️ John windows are, they can see them, they can move them, chances are good they’d be able to recover. But the instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John for doing it in Stage Manager highlight how that is not the case on the iPad. First of all, Marco couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John discover it, which I mean granted he didn’t even think of Stage Manager, which is itself its own problem, all this weird mode that goes
⏹️ ▶️ John But second, even if you had said, let me try Stage Manager, would you have tried this? Fabian wrote in with an example
⏹️ ▶️ John video. He says, here’s an example with Monument Valley 3, which is an iPad native portrait only app
⏹️ ▶️ John and Nintendo music, an iPhone app running in iPad compatibility mode. After activating stage manager,
⏹️ ▶️ John launch app A, locate app B via the dock app library or spotlight, hold down the shift key
⏹️ ▶️ John and tap on app B. If you don’t have a keyboard, hold down the icon of app B and drag it onto the quote
⏹️ ▶️ John stage. Like no one’s gonna figure this out. It’s way too complicated. And for what, to what end?
⏹️ ▶️ John What does this complexity give you the ability to do? It gives you the ability to do
⏹️ ▶️ John a very finite, limited subset of what you can do by simply moving windows around. Like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t want to rehash
⏹️ ▶️ John everything about iPadOS being a problem, but it’s a problem.
Color
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, going back to colors for a minute, Yossi Kanner writes, tech pundits love to complain that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t make devices with real colors, yet it seems people actually buy the plain black or silver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option. I had an iPhone 12 mini and a 13 pro in blue colors they came in and hated them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since then, I’ve gone back to the more neutral colors and much happier. Now granted, there isn’t much color in Apple’s current lineup, but choosing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a colorful iPhone or iPad is a much bigger decision than say, getting a colorful case. I think Apple’s making the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice here. Yossi, I appreciate your feedback, but you are wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want a colorful phone. Well, no, so this is, it’s not a either or situation. No, you’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John In every case, everyone advocating for color says, of course, they should continue to make a neutral color or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple neutral colors, because that is probably, he’s right, that’s what most people will buy, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s like, again, not every product will be your best selling product. Not every color will be your best selling
⏹️ ▶️ John color, right? You put the color in for excitement, right? A lot of, cars are the best example, and you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John were talking about a bunch of things, Like cars are like the second most expensive things most people will ever buy next to their house if they ever
⏹️ ▶️ John own a house, right? And cars are purchased massively based on their appearance,
⏹️ ▶️ John which doesn’t make sense. You’re like, oh, well, something’s so expensive as a computer, do I care how it looks? Are you kidding? The two
⏹️ ▶️ John most expensive things people buy, cars and homes, are purchased so much based
⏹️ ▶️ John on their appearance. It’s ridiculous. It’s almost as if the more expensive things get, the more we buy based on how
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks, not less, right? So there’s no argument to be made that you shouldn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John these fancy colors because people will just pick the neutral ones. Fine, it gets them in the showroom, right? Like they’re not even gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy that car but they wanna come and see it because it’s shiny and red or the car they’re gonna get is silver but they wanna look at the cool red
⏹️ ▶️ John one, right? Or you wanna go into the neighborhood with the fancy houses even though you’re not gonna buy one of those but you wanna buy one next to it so you
⏹️ ▶️ John can look at the fancy house. Yeah, most people are gonna buy the neutral colors. They should always
⏹️ ▶️ John offer the neutral colors. Look at the iMac. It comes in a huge range of really nice colors and there’s just one neutral color and
⏹️ ▶️ John that one neutral color is enough because that neutral color is fine And if you want an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John that is neutral and won’t clash with your decor, there’s one for you to buy. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a problem that needs to be solved. It’s not like they shouldn’t offer colors because most people will not buy them. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why they should offer them. Most people won’t buy them, offer them anyway, to get people in the door and to get people excited.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also like, we hear this argument a lot whenever we are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advocating for something that is not gonna be Apple’s largest seller of its category or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we always hear people trying to excuse Apple’s logistics and be like, well, look, they don’t wanna keep that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many SKUs. Or like, well, no, not a lot of people buy that one. You know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of degrees of precision or of ratios here that matter. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, not a lot of people. What does that mean? Like, do more people buy a theoretical, you know, orange
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air than would buy the Mac Pro? Probably. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still have the Mac Pro. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say while you were talking about like, oh, bring us color in your life. I’m thinking, well, you know, the next product due to be updated,
⏹️ ▶️ John is everyone ready for a lime green gigantic cheese grater?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, but seriously, like, if you look at, if you use that logic of like, well, they shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make things that most people won’t buy or that most people don’t need, you know, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. Well, then they should only make the silver MacBook Air and no other Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like by that logic, why do any of these other models exist? Most people use the silver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air. Okay, then just make that, buy these. Of course, that logic makes no sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have more options for lots of reasons and enough people buy them to make them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth making. Like it doesn’t take that many people to buy something at Apple’s scale for it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth making in a certain configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if it isn’t worth making on its own, you still have to make it. The same reason they make all those other computers and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you need to have a diversified product line that people feel confident in. So even if they’re gonna buy the silver
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air, they feel more comfortable buying that knowing that there’s an entire line of Mac laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John that covers all their needs, as opposed to like, oh, I was gonna buy a laptop, but that company only makes one and I’m worried
⏹️ ▶️ John about getting entrenched in the Apple ecosystem considering they only make one laptop and what if my needs ever don’t fit within
⏹️ ▶️ John that one laptop, doesn’t make you confident. Like you have to diversify your product lines. We’ve talked about how
⏹️ ▶️ John diversified should they be, you know, with respect to the iPhone, how many iPhones is enough iPhones to cover the market and the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Macs or whatever. but the answer is never just make the one or two that are the most popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s even if every single one, except for the one or two most popular loses money, you should still do
⏹️ ▶️ John it because overall you will make more money by having a full featured product line It gives people confidence.
New Mute-key icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of the MacBook Air the m4 MacBook Air has a new mute button icon The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey f10 key instead of being the outline of a speaker It’s now the outline of a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a slash through it and I may sound like I’m snarking But actually I do think this is an improvement. This
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely improvement I very frequently find myself like having to double take to make a second because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the same keycaps on my keyboard I think all the Apple ones do to make a second glance to see like the f11
⏹️ ▶️ John has got a little the little sound wave coming out, distinguish it from, you know. So anyway, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a trend that will rebel across all of their keyboards, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey good improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, it gets my stamp of approval.
“Hidra” rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to the quote unquote Hydra chip, in ATP 562, do you have a dragon?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently, we discussed and linked to, I do remember actually this interview, a Johnny Srujee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interview from July 2023, in which he was asked, in so many words, what are the next challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in processors that Apple should tackle to get to the real next generation of processors?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey His answer, after disclaiming about future products and blah, blah, blah, was basically, one of the things that is going to be important
⏹️ ▶️ John this relates to the Hydra HIDRA chip because some people
⏹️ ▶️ John think that it should be pronounced Hydra and then people like to remind you that the mythical beast, the Hydra from
⏹️ ▶️ John mythology is a multi-headed creature that I think if you cut off one of the heads to grow back or whatever. Oh, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John this sound like packaging is interesting. Multi-headed beast, M4 Extreme chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not gonna be an M4 Ultra for the Mac Pro. Could use one of TSMC’s various new technologies for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing what AMD calls chiplets or whatever, various like multiple independently
⏹️ ▶️ John manufactured chips combining into a larger thing for a super mega chip for the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John That all sounds well and good and I’m certainly rooting for the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Extreme type thing to come in the Mac Pro, but I don’t actually know if HIDRA
⏹️ ▶️ John is an alternate spelling of the mythical Hydra because that Hydra is with an H-Y every place that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen it. And also there is at least one thing called HIDRA which is an island
⏹️ ▶️ John in Norway or something. So code names are weird. This code name
⏹️ ▶️ John could be about the island in Norway. It could be about the multi-headed beast. It could be an
⏹️ ▶️ John intentionally misspelled version of the multi-headed beast, or it could be something else entirely. But I just want to throw that out
⏹️ ▶️ John there because so many people said, you dummy, Hydra, it’s a multi-headed beast, M4 Extreme confirmed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know if the code name has anything to do with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. Mark Gurman writes with regard to the M4 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Hydra, Apple’s Ultra processors have always been developed by fusing two max chips together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to double the performance across the system. That requires a so-called ultra fusion interconnect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system. The M3 Max has that feature while the M4 Max does not. Let’s pause
⏹️ ▶️ John a second here. This is the second thing that I’ve read, one translated from French, that is flat
⏹️ ▶️ John out stated that the M4 Max does not have an interposer on it. What are they basing
⏹️ ▶️ John this on? Does German have a de-lidded M4 Max that he’s looking at? Does
⏹️ ▶️ John someone have die shots of the M4 Max that shows it’s not there? I don’t know. It’s frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John me that this has just been, and now it’s just like asserted as truth. And second, the M4 Max has it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Last time I saw any die shots of the M3 Max, sorry, the M3 Max, any die shots of the M3 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was in the context of a story of someone saying, hey, look, no interposer on the M3 Max. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, did they just crop the picture and it’s there or is it not there? No answer. I wish I could fix this myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t I don’t have these chips. I don’t have the equipment. I can’t do it Somebody out there Like and I google
⏹️ ▶️ John search for it so much, but just try Google searching for m3 space max
⏹️ ▶️ John Die shot like but just it’s impossible. I can’t it’s all just so much garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John in the search results. I can’t find it anywhere So, please I would love for someone to actually determine if any of this
⏹️ ▶️ John is true German you can’t just say the m4 max doesn’t have an intro did Apple confirm that then tell me that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple confirmed it to you And again, I will reiterate, even if the M4 Max doesn’t have an interposer,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the M3 Max didn’t either. But when they manufactured the ones that are gonna do for the Ultra, they
⏹️ ▶️ John put it on there because it’s a different chip, because it’s got Thunderbolt 5 and all sorts of other stuff. Anyway, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just annoys me. So, sorry, continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey German continues, though I previously speculated that Apple might have used the M3 Ultra to differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a future M4 Ultra Mac Pro, that now seems less likely given the lack of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra Fusion development. an M3 Ultra refresh for the Mac Pro or a future M5 Ultra, if that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generation gets this interconnect capability, is more plausible. The main benefits of the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are PCIe expandability and extra ports, hardly enough to be a true differentiator for 99.99% of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple knows this and its marketing team was dismayed when a higher-end Extreme chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with double the performance of the ultra processors was nixed years ago. That would have given the premium price more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a justification.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the, I put this part in here because I like the idea of the marketing team at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John having so much influence over the company and sway over the products that it’s a disappointment
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was no like good chip in the Mac Pro could actually influence product design. And that may sound ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re from a company where you’re like, well, we make the product and the marketing team sells it. But my vague
⏹️ ▶️ John impression with the little knowledge I have about inside of Apple is that actually the marketing team
⏹️ ▶️ John or the product marketing team is surprisingly powerful within the company. So I really hope this is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope the marketing team was dismayed. I was dismayed. A lot of people were dismayed. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John the marketing team’s like, how are we gonna sell this? It’s a Mac mini in a giant case. And then, you know, everyone just shrugged.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, fingers crossed. M4 Extreme WWDC 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did you call it last week, Marco? A breakout box for the studio?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not even a breakout
⏹️ ▶️ John box. It’s in the same box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a PCI Express enclosure for the Mac studio. I mean, it’s PCI Express
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hotel. Yeah, and it’s certainly, you know, if the plan is indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Mac Pro to get some kind of extreme chip that the studio doesn’t get or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t fit or whatever, that would kind of explain because like when you look at the Mac Pro now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does kind of look like a seat filler. It’s like this. This is a role that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to ostensibly wants to keep serving. And here is a computer that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sort of serves it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That exists and is not Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sort of serves as role, but like it does kind like the current Mac Pro Does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not differentiate itself enough from Mac studio except for a very very very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small market of people who? Happen to use PCI slots, but not GPUs in those PCI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots like so like that’s that is a market But it’s not a very big market, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they also Are able to you know have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger? extreme chip that could then presumably also not only have better performance and maybe you know better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU grunt but also presumably could address more RAM and having a higher higher resource ceilings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more Thunderbolt bandwidth and you know all the other things that you get from having more of these of these chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would help differentiate because then people like John who just need a bunch of processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or GPU grunt who won’t fill the PCI slots you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it becomes served and now there’s only one John and even he wouldn’t buy this because it’ll probably $25,000. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like scientific computing, there’s AI research and training and stuff like that, where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything where you’re working with huge amounts of memory, huge data sets, big throughput, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are industries and uses for what would be a theoretical like extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quad chip and the resources that would presumably go along with it. It’s not again, not these are not massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco markets, but they’re profitable. And certainly Apple itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would probably use them. So, you know, there’s lots of reasons for them to make a computer like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it does seem like the current Mac Pro is basically a bench warmer, waiting for a better one to come out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is more differentiated above the studio. If that is the case, granted, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wishful thinking. You know, this is wishful rumor casting, like we, or wish casting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess people call it. Like we want this to be true. So it kind of makes us believe the rumors more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do hope that the Mac Pro isn’t just what we see today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that they do actually make the extreme version at some point, and maybe not every CPU generation, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, we’ll see about that. I will say though, when it comes to that performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we get into the next item about the M3 Ultra benchmarks, I’m a
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know, before we go on to that, I just wanna say that it’s not just wishcasting, it is the thing that often
⏹️ ▶️ John gets us into trouble when it comes to the Mac Pro, because it is like, yes, people want this and it’s desirability
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And, but the real downfall is like, well, how
⏹️ ▶️ John would what Apple is doing make any sense if not for X? And that leads you to
⏹️ ▶️ John things like this kind of hope because for example, why in the world would they not revise
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra at the same time as the studio? It only makes
⏹️ ▶️ John sense. The only reason they wouldn’t do that is because, you know, based on what they said, there might
⏹️ ▶️ John not be an Ultra in every generation, there’s not gonna be an M4 Ultra, they’re not revising the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time as the Studio, therefore, it only makes sense that the Mac Pro is not getting the M3 Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not getting the M4 Ultra because Apple has hinted that doesn’t exist. M4 Extreme WWC
⏹️ ▶️ John confirmed, right? And yet when we do that and try to make sense of what Apple has said and what they have done,
⏹️ ▶️ John very often we find ourselves foiled by like, oh, here we are, WWC 25, and guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John They just announced the new Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra. and then we all just smack ourselves in the forehead and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that doesn’t make any sense. And Apple will be like, we know.
⏹️ ▶️ John The things they’ve been doing with the Mac Pro have not made a lot of sense recently. And so we
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be careful not to fall into that trap of, cause that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’ll be there in my Believe cert. And if they put a Mac Pro with M3 Ultra months after the studio
⏹️ ▶️ John got the M3 Ultra, like what in the world is the point? What are they even doing? anyway.
M3 Ultra benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, M3 Ultra benchmarks. Next item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So this is from Geekbench6. I mean, I’m happy to read off all these numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What’s the best way to-
⏹️ ▶️ John I can characterize it for you. Right? So here’s the deal. So I’ve looked these things up. Now, some caveats to
⏹️ ▶️ John start. This is super early. I don’t know if people even have the M3 Ultra Studio now. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the embargo’s lifted, but I think a few people have them. But anyway, the thing about Geekbench is just the benchmark.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyone can submit scores to it. Very early in the the life of any model of computer, there are few
⏹️ ▶️ John reported scores. At the time I gathered these numbers, there was only a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ John purported M3 Ultra scores being reported. You know, you get the app and it reports your
⏹️ ▶️ John scores over the network to their server, right? When they show the scores for computers that have been out for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, they’re showing an average, which I would argue is also maybe not the best because people could like
⏹️ ▶️ John super cool and overclock them and throw off the average and do all sorts of weird stuff. But anyway, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John in some cases we have multiple scores here for like, here’s the best or here’s the best
⏹️ ▶️ John score I could find for this. And here’s the average score of the few ones they have attached there. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the final caveat is of course, how exactly representative is Geekbench of anything that you care about?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll link it in the show soon, our second article, they try to do a few more different benchmarks, try to be more
⏹️ ▶️ John representative, but here’s the upshot. In GPU, which honestly is the main thing I was
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at the M3 Ultra for, because the number of CPU cores isn’t that different, The cores themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John are M2 versus M3. It’s not that big of a deal. But in GPU, maybe they’ve done something
⏹️ ▶️ John big here. And based on the Metal scores, and Metal is the API you care about if you’re in the Apple world,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is 10% faster than the M2 Ultra, than the M2 Ultra’s
⏹️ ▶️ John MaxStudio’s best score. And it’s 20% faster than the M2 Ultra’s average score. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the M2 Ultra’s MaxStudio’s been out for ages, so the average is probably accurate, but I wanted to give it the best
⏹️ ▶️ John chance here. Like the M2 Ultra’s best score is within 10% of the M3 Ultra. The M2 Ultra, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio, was released in June, 2023. So here we are in 2025, and Apple’s releasing a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John that is 10 to 20% faster in GPU. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a big boost in that many years, right? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John encouraging, especially since you can get more metal score,
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least, by just putting in more GPU. Maybe it was a cooling issue. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John literally a die size issue because they really are running up against the reticle limit even when doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John two maxes stuck together type of thing. But it seems like only a month or two ago when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking on the show about all these people have these grand fantasies of Apple putting out a GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna rival a 4090 and stuff. And instead they put out a GPU that is a low
⏹️ ▶️ John double digit percentage faster than the one they put out in 2023. Extremely disappointing still
⏹️ ▶️ John people will say and they’re right in that regard. Well It’s actually extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive to try to get something with this much GPU power with fast access to 512 gigs of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and that is true But it’s just further narrowing the use
⏹️ ▶️ John case and making you know, as if I wasn’t attracted to the m3 ultra anyway But certainly if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John buying this thinking well, I just want to get the best GPU Apple sells This is it but it’s not the best by much
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely disappointing and then the the single core score of course is not great 10% faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than the m2 ultra again a 2023 computer 20% slower than the m4 max That’s not a small number
⏹️ ▶️ John Single core is I mean we know that like we know the m4 is amazing in single core We know this uses m3
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. It is what it is And then in multi-core 24% faster
⏹️ ▶️ John than the m2 ultra 24% since 2023 in multi-core? 9% faster in
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core than the M4 Max. 9% faster than the max of the current generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s supposed to be half the chip. It’s not half the chip because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s two M3 Maxes for the M3 Ultra. It’s not great in
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core. If you want the fastest multi-core, you gotta get the M3 Ultra. Yeah, by 9%. I
⏹️ ▶️ John will say one more time. Geekbench is not reality. Geekbench is a benchmark. Benchmarks are
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly representative. If you look at the Ars Technica article, you will find some real-world things that it can do much
⏹️ ▶️ John better than that. You’ll find some real-world things that it can do much worse. So as always, if you care about how long it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a thing, export a Final Cut project, you know, do text-to-speech, run an
⏹️ ▶️ John AI model, do those things, measure those things, and say, how much faster is it and how much
⏹️ ▶️ John am I getting? but M3 Ultra does not look like a particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John compelling upgrade from the M2 Ultra and the M4 Max, Max Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John looks really attractive unless you really need that extra 10 to 20% GPU and an extra 9%
⏹️ ▶️ John of multi-core. And if you don’t need that, you get 20% faster single core. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like the Ultra here, again, what I was saying earlier, like the Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really about the other higher RAM limits, more Thunderbolt bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if those kinds of things are what’s holding your work back, then maybe this is for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, look, you know, if there’s a way for me to spend money to get more performance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will often be prone to that. I would not in a million years choose the Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my needs because the Max is actually doing a better job,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be better for my needs by a mile. and it would cost half as much on the processor. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, again, it’s not to say there’s nobody who this is for, but this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably for people for whom CPU performance is critical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, this is probably mostly for people who need more RAM or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who need that extra GPU, but again, the GPU does not compare that well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, you know, also what we’re seeing, and this is kind of what worries me about the rumors about the Mac Pro getting an extreme,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, extreme chip with double the ultra or whatever, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips don’t seem to be scaling that well past the max core counts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve seen this from all the generations so far that have gotten the ultra chip. Or was there an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was. And I was going to say that when you were talking about the other thing, that even though
⏹️ ▶️ John you said quad and we keep talking about it in that context, I continue to think and hope, I thought this was
⏹️ ▶️ John what the M3 Ultra was gonna be, but anyway, I continue to think that they’re better off making
⏹️ ▶️ John a chip that is bigger and better than the Max and putting two of those together, rather than trying to put four
⏹️ ▶️ John of anything together, because they’ve never been able to do it. And you’re right, like just, if their overhead’s killing them
⏹️ ▶️ John on the two-chip ones, and it was killing them on some of the earlier two-chip ones, don’t try to go, there’s a reason they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do the four, right? So I’m just hoping they make two really big chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and stick them together, rather than trying to take four of any of the existing chips and stick them together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because as we’re seeing, we saw this with all the Ultra so far, the Ultra being two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maxes stuck together does not give you twice the performance. On the GPU, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes can come close. On the CPU, it’s way off. And because, again, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different bottlenecks, there’s different trade-offs, there’s different, things don’t scale perfectly, because they’re complicated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s not how things work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they screwed up the GPU. So the GPU gets close. I forget which generation, one of the generations, they actually screwed up the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John part, real bad and it was way worse than it needed to be. I think that was the M1 where they messed it up and they fixed it in the M2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s all these different, you know, bandwidths and caches and things that just make it more complicated than just doubling everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what you’re getting is, you know, you get twice the cost, at least, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the manufacturing side. You know, certainly the retail price reflects, you know, definitely twice the cost,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re not getting twice the performance. And in many cases, you’re getting a lot less than twice the performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it does seem like, again, You will know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need this, and odds are if you don’t know that you need this, you don’t need this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re not hitting the RAM limits on your maxed out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco max chip computer, you probably don’t need this. If you’re not like absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maxing out the GPU total speed all the time, you probably don’t need this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this is for certain people, not for us. And if you just want a really fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general purpose computer, an M4 Max based computer is most likely going to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a better and possibly even faster overall performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether that’s the MacBook Pro or the Mac Studio, you can have it in both, and it seems to be the same chip in both, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. So you want a laptop that’s the fastest computer for you? Great. You want a desktop version? You have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option too. You want one with slots? Too bad. But right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M4 Max is the place to be, And the M4 Ultra, or the M3 Ultra, is for
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27-inch iMac bet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a few years ago now in on March 10th of 2022, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an exchange that was had on this very program on episode 473, fan boats and coattails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I believe Marco is going to play that exchange right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually the IMAX screen is going to be larger than 24 inches. And when it does 27 inch, I will come back. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all I’m saying. I’m not saying that tomorrow there’s going to be a 27-enzyme act, despite this hole in the lineup or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just the 24. It went up from 21. The low-enzyme act used to be 21, so they made 24, which is a nice in-between
⏹️ ▶️ John size and keep. But eventually, two or three years from now, they’re going to be like, 24, really? Everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much bigger, and they’ll work their way back up to 27 and 5K. JSLinus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You really just infinite time scaled us on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this? It’s not infinite.
⏹️ ▶️ John within three years, there’ll be a 27-enzyme act.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JSLinus You really just finite time scaled us on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, that’s the bet. Three years from now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John we’ll bet it up to a dollar. My one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been three years. Yeah. For all the people who sent this in by Mastodon and other means,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you all know I had this on my calendar? Like, I think I put it on the calendar on that show. I always
⏹️ ▶️ John put these things on my calendar because I would never remember them otherwise. Yeah, I should have gone with five years. I should have stuck to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Double or nothing? Double or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing, yeah, I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John ask. So, well, so here’s the thing. Here’s the other thing that I didn’t think about when we’re making that. So first of
⏹️ ▶️ John all, I still say that they’re going to make a larger iMac for the reason that I was trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John articulate in that clip, which is like, look, even if they never add a larger
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac to the line, the one and only iMac that exists, assuming the iMac continues
⏹️ ▶️ John to exist at all as a product, which is not guaranteed, but continuing to exist at all, that one and only iMac will itself
⏹️ ▶️ John get bigger just as it got bigger from 21 inch to 24. But my three-year timeline was not asking
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. My three-year timeline was saying they’re gonna add a bigger iMac. Here’s what I didn’t anticipate. The
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac is close enough to being a monitor that you gotta add the gigantic Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor timescale modifier to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all of your calculations,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means Apple producing a new screen? That only happens once every 15
⏹️ ▶️ John years or whatever. So yeah, I blew it. It’s three years have gone by. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no bigger iMac. and honestly, I would not double or nothing for an additional two years,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s how, I mean, since then, what has happened with the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John display? Not anything. What has happened with the XDR?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing. What has happened with the iMac? Very little. So I still
⏹️ ▶️ John think there will be one, but I don’t think it will be in two years. And so just, I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope we don’t have to wait until the 24 inch just to become, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John inconvenient and expensive. And then they come up with like a 25 or a 26 inch just like kind of like bumped up from, so I hope we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to wait that long. But related to that, ever since Apple came out with the 24 inch and then said
⏹️ ▶️ John to everybody who would listen, we’re totally not making 27 inch, so buy this 24, no sense waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for 27, we’re not gonna make it, we’re not doing it, buy the 24, right? Which was true, they didn’t make a 27, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should have bought the 24, right? But ever since then, shortly after that, there have been persistent rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John about a larger iMac, which has been frustrating to me in this bet. So, German in August 2024 says,
⏹️ ▶️ John a larger iMac remains something Apple is exploring as well, but it’s unclear if that will be an M4 product
⏹️ ▶️ John or something that comes the following year or later. Yeah. February 2025, from German again,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will also probably eventually get around offering a larger iMac. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to reread that beautiful piece of German prose again. Apple will also, no, sorry, I screwed
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. I’m adding my own thing to it. Let me try again. Apple also will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually get around to offering a larger screen iMac, at least the hyphenated larger screen, although
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s debatable. Golly, that’s good. Like the rumors of larger
⏹️ ▶️ John iMacs have never gone away and not just like vague wishful thinking, but like from people like German who usually have sources
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet one has not shipped. So Marco gets $1. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can apply towards the price of the iMac that I bought a month ago for the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ John What color was that one? Green. There
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you go. See,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there you go. I would just like to point out that the Pro Display XDR, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while from what I gather from you two, still a very good monitor, release date as per Wikipedia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10th of December, 2019, which was almost 2000 days ago. Woof.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you made a dollar a day since then, you could buy less than half of one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could buy two stands.
John’s Threads timeline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, John, our, I, I think our long national nightmare may be over with regard to threads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your timeline setting. Can you tell me more about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John More digging back from the archives as discussed in ATP 616. I have no grippers,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was actually referenced this very thing. Uh, the verge reported on November 25th, 2024, that
⏹️ ▶️ John quote threads will now let users decide what feed they want to be their default when opening the app. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining on that show that they announced this as if it’s like a feature, like, here we go. You asked for it and you got
⏹️ ▶️ John it. and I didn’t get it. It’s like, oh, we’re rolling this out to people. You’ll probably get it eventually. And I’ve been patiently
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting and launching the Threads app and looking for my little grippers, which are the little three lines that let you know that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John drag reorder the order of the feeds. And you just put the one you want, the following feed
⏹️ ▶️ John on the top and it becomes your default feed. So that every single time you launch the Threads
⏹️ ▶️ John app, it doesn’t revert you back to the feed you don’t wanna see. You can change the default. They announced that in November, 2024
⏹️ ▶️ John as if it’s just a thing, but it wasn’t a thing. It was a thing in an article. It was a thing that some people have, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John was not a thing that I had. So exactly 100 days later on March
⏹️ ▶️ John 5th, 2025, I got the feature. The grippers were there. I’ve been checking, the grippers
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, yay, I can rotate it up. I don’t use threads as much as the other services, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that big of a deal, but I was just annoyed that like they announced this feature as if it was a thing they did,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just totally wasn’t, okay? And that was gonna be the story, except for that was on March
⏹️ ▶️ John 5th. Today is March 12th. and I just looked at my threads app and the gripper is gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other people are texting me and sending me images and saying, hey, look, I got it too. It’s rolling out for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John It did roll out to me for seven days and now it’s gone. That’s so cruel.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is cruel.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s so stupid. Like, look, are you going to honor my preferences or not? Are you gonna always put
⏹️ ▶️ John me on the thing I don’t wanna see because you think that’s better for engagement or whatever the hell? Or are you just gonna let me
⏹️ ▶️ John put it the way I want? And they just can’t decide how much study does this feature need? Either let
⏹️ ▶️ John me pick what my default feed is or don’t, but don’t pretend like you’re letting people pick and then just like randomly haphazardly
⏹️ ▶️ John roll it out. Like, are they just making sure it’s not gonna destroy their business to allow people to have a preference
Apple bug-reporting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, for follow-up this week, we got some feedback with regard to mostly me popping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off about feedback in the Apple world. This is formally known as Radar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a fairly long piece of feedback from an anonymous person, but I’d like to read it because I think there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of good stuff here. This person writes, I was an Apple engineer for almost two decades and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a third-party Apple developer for more than a decade. I heard Casey’s rant against Apple’s feedback assistant, and I can sympathize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a third-party developer, I also got the impression that my bug reports were ignored. Let me tell you what it’s like to be an Apple engineer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then come third party bugs during beta season. I may be assigned hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of bugs each week. Obviously I can’t possibly fix that many. So I triage well-written bug reports with clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instructions to reproduce the problem or first. If you’ve attached a small Xcode project that demonstrates the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even better. Unfortunately, there are lots of bugs without a clear problem, description, or instructions on how to reproduce it. Even worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are bugs so poorly written. I can’t even understand what’s wrong. Unfortunately, these bugs will probably be ignored.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so far, I think this makes sense. I mean, it’s not what I want to hear, but there’s only so much time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a day and in a week, and you do the things that you think are the easiest to accomplish. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so back to the anonymous person. If I have a question for the developer, I’m prohibited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from just contacting them. I have to send the question to Apple Developer Support. They contact the developer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually send me the reply. But I have occasionally contacted developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly for people I know. Multiple reports of the same bug are grouped together. The clearest is tagged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the original bug. The rest are listed as duplicates. OK, this is fine. Duplicates are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like votes. Oh, god. Duplicates are like votes. This is an important bug. A bug with hundreds of duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is important, since lots of people are hitting it. I’m supposed to fix high-priority bugs first. Crashes and data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loss are the highest priority, then features that don’t work, eventually working your way down to annoying malfunctions and UI glitches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The problem is many annoying but non-serious bugs don’t get fixed this way. So experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineers also work on the most annoying non-serious bugs. We also use Apple products and we want them to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work well. Bugs reported during the official beta period have the highest chance of being fixed since I’m supposed to be fixing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third-party bug reports. The rest of the year, I’m assigned to work on new features in next year’s release, not old bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in last year’s release. I mean, this stands to reason given Apple’s behavior, but oof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One thing that drives me crazy is Apple ignoring old bugs. New features get lots of attention and their bugs are fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New bugs that appear in old features regressions are also fixed. But bugs that have existed for years are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignored. If a bug somehow slips through QA and ships, the system ignores it. There’s no incentive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for engineers or teams to go back and fix old bugs. Stupendous. None of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is surprising. And some of it I genuinely do get, especially working at the, the vast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume that Apple works at, but having basically zero incentive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go back and fix things that are broken. That’s not a great look. I, I, it stands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reason given behavior, but it’s not a great look.
⏹️ ▶️ John CWOB. People do stuff like this. It’s like they’re explaining like, you don’t understand this is the situation. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you’re doing is explaining from a different side, the exact same problem. We’re both saying it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but you’re trying to like, trying to say like on the outside, we think it’s terrible on the inside. It’s like, well, here’s all the reasons. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, those are the reasons it’s terrible. Those are not justifications for it being
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. And nor are they unmovable, intractable things that can never change, and therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John it must be terrible. And the reason we know that it doesn’t have to be terrible is because other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John do similar things at, yes, similar volumes, and they do it better.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are companies that get more customer support feedback than Apple does, you know, in industries
⏹️ ▶️ John where that is more common, right? There are companies that also have technical platforms. Just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is possible to do this better, as evidenced by this big explanation of all of the dysfunction
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going on inside the company. If you fix some of that dysfunction, then it won’t be as terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what we’re saying. So I think, and I’m not saying that this anonymous feedback is trying to justify it
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, just like, because sometimes people do get indignant and say, you don’t understand. It has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John that way because reasons X, Y, and Z. I don’t think that’s what this person is saying. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco actually are just giving
⏹️ ▶️ John a different perspective of like, here’s how terrible it looks on the inside of the company as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, like, the only thing that needs to change about making this better is someone
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple in a position of power needs to decide that is something they want to improve and
⏹️ ▶️ John actually put resources towards it. And thus far that has not happened to a large enough degree to really make
OS redesigns imminent?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think we only have time for one topic today because this is likely to be a doozy and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a report from Bloomberg from the 10th, as we’re sitting here now, it is the 12th. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a report from Bloomberg, like I said, I believe this was German, and they write, Apple Inc. is preparing one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Mac for a new generation of users. The revamp will fundamentally change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons. As part of the push,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. The design is loosely based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Vision Pro software. The changes are coming as part of iOS 19 and iPadOS 19, codenamed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LUC, and macOS 16, which is dubbed Cheer. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go well beyond a new design language and aesthetic tweaks. The software will mark the most significant upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Mac, upgrade is doing a lot of work there, to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013. A key goal of the overhaul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Still, Apple is stopping short of merging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its operating systems, a step other tech giants have taken. The company believes it can make better Macs and iPads by keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their operating systems separate.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a little bit of editorializing in there, And I know on a recent episode, we talked about the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John for an iOS 19 overhaul to look like Vision OS. But at the time we were discussing that, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John purely in the context of, does iOS need an overhaul? Is it gonna look like Vision Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it gonna look like the imitation app or whatever? This new story this week is
⏹️ ▶️ John something so much more than that, because making a change to the visual look of iOS 19
⏹️ ▶️ John would be significant, especially if it’s like, you know, looking like the Vision Pro or Glass or Crew or whatever. But this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this, and the story is not just government. Other people have had this story as well. I don’t know if they’re just parroting him or
⏹️ ▶️ John have their own sources, but this is like a overhaul of
⏹️ ▶️ John the look and feel of all of Apple’s major platforms, the iOS, the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and the iPad, uh, to. And again, I don’t know how much
⏹️ ▶️ John of this is government editorializing with the goal of making them more consistent with
⏹️ ▶️ John each other or having more of a family resemblance. Let’s do a little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John germinology here and say, what do we think about this sentence?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, the, uh, what is it? The update includes updating the style of
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons. And with the fundamental change
⏹️ ▶️ John to the local operating systems to make the software platforms more consistent, right? Icons, menus, apps, windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John How, how in the world could you make the a look
⏹️ ▶️ John of icons, menus, apps, and windows consistent across the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, the iPad, and the Mac. Let’s talk about icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Icons on the Mac and on the iPad and on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John are already, I mean, am I wrong? They’re already consistent. They’re squircles. We talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John the squircle. They’re squares with rounded corners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, no, no, not on Vision Pro. Vision OS, they’re all circles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, I didn’t say Vision Pro. I just listed the ones German listed,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey iOS, iPadOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and macOS, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and icons also includes like the design of the symbols within the icons, which they’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a really good, there’s a huge library of consistently styled icons that they expand all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Apple designs their own icons that are not in SF symbols, they also match that style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So already icons are pretty consistent. And what you’re talking about is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app launch icons, but like even those, you’re right, are already mostly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms. Yeah, are they saying that like the mail icon on the Mac has to be literally
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel or pixel the same as the mail icon on the phone and the iPad? I mean, maybe it already is pretty close, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s that. Windows, the phone doesn’t even really have windows. It’s got sheets
⏹️ ▶️ John and cards and whatever, but it really doesn’t have windows. The iPad kind of sort of has
⏹️ ▶️ John windows, but not really. So, and you know, I’m not quite sure what they’re aiming at there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Menus, again, the Mac has a menu bar, the other operating systems do not, but they both have kind of pop-up
⏹️ ▶️ John menu things and those things do look a little bit different. I can’t tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John this story is so insistent that the goal of this is to sort of unify and make them more consistent
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other. I can’t tell if that is a real thing or not. All right, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like sources, I think I cut out most of the people said or whatever. I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John them in any kind of redesign, any kind of like cross OS redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see someone looking at it and saying, oh, it looks like one of the goals of this redesign was to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms look more similar to each other. But I feel like if you do any redesign, of course there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be a, like the redesign will span multiple operating systems.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will, the same ideas will be appear in all of them. I don’t think that means they’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them look more like each other. I just think it means if you do all three at once, of course there’s gonna be a family resemblance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so anyway, I can’t tell how big the consistency angle is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is one of the things that I’m gonna be looking at. If this story turns out to be true, was the consistency angle just someone
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at it and saying, oh, they all look similar because they were all redesigned at the same time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is Apple gonna get up on stage and say, we really felt it was very confusing that pop-up
⏹️ ▶️ John menus on your phone look different than pull-down menus on the Mac menu bar and users were really tripping up
⏹️ ▶️ John on that and it was really impairing the usability and functionality of our software. So now a
⏹️ ▶️ John pop-up menu on your phone looks exactly the same as a pull-down menu on your Mac and we feel like that that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John our platforms better. Or we just want there to be a family resemblance. So the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John already looked almost exactly the same but now they literally are exactly the same and you can tint icons in your phone and you can tint icons
⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac. I don’t know what to make of that. And then as for the circular icons,
⏹️ ▶️ John which Casey just brought up, Let’s just throw that out there as like a part of the doomsday scenario that we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John surely spiral into briefly. Icons on Vision Pro are circles, not squircles,
⏹️ ▶️ John literal circles. How can you
⏹️ ▶️ John decide with an iOS 19 release that now iOS icons on your phone are also circles?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can do that because they have noticed and they can redraw all their icons so they fit in a circle. But you can’t just take a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party icons and put them in a circle shape. you’ll cut off half of people’s icons
⏹️ ▶️ John because they don’t expect that to happen. So I don’t see any way
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can have a transition to circular icons on the phone without just
⏹️ ▶️ John massive upheaval and some kind of transition period where some of them are squircles and some of them are circles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, to what end? People were real confused that the icons on Vision Pro are circles
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re squircles on their phone. They had no idea what to do. No, everyone’s fine. They know what an icon is.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s nothing, this reminds me of that Bruce Tognesini thing that I put in my Mac OS Tinder reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John a few times from the original like Apple human interface guidelines. There was a section of that book
⏹️ ▶️ John that emphasized an important idea in interface design using the example of extension
⏹️ ▶️ John icons for classic Mac OS. Extensions were things that could like modify the system because you had no memory protections, you could do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell you wanted. Anyway, those were extensions. And in the later versions of classic Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, you would see the icons of the extensions that loaded during the startup process.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d see them march across to the bottom of your screen from left to right. And the extension icon that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple defined when they rolled out system seven with extensions and stuff was a puzzle piece. So it was, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, just picture like a rectangle, but it’s like a puzzle piece, kind of a squashed puzzle piece because you don’t have that much room for the little,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you call them, the little things that stick out in little notches, but it was a puzzle piece. But the thing is there was like
⏹️ ▶️ John four different puzzle piece icons that were possible with different arrangements of the little bulges
⏹️ ▶️ John and holes. No one was ever confused by that. Because a puzzle piece is
⏹️ ▶️ John a puzzle piece is a puzzle piece. If I throw four puzzle pieces in front of you, you’re like, well, one of those is a puzzle piece, but I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what the other ones are. Like, the other thing that they showed was the
⏹️ ▶️ John home icon for HyperCard. You go to the home button to go back to the home of your HyperCard stack for old people.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was seven different versions of that. They all look like little houses. Little square houses with a little triangular roof.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, anyone said, oh, click on the home icon. Click on the little picture of the house. No one said, well, I see
⏹️ ▶️ John one picture of a house, but that other one looks different. Is that also a house? You can trust people
⏹️ ▶️ John to recognize a bunch of different puzzle pieces, a bunch of different house icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, you can trust people to recognize this is an icon on your phone, and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John an icon in Vision Pro, and this is an icon on your iPad, and this is an icon on your Mac, even if they’re not all squircles, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be fine. So I really hope that part of it is just family resemblance
⏹️ ▶️ John and not, you know, everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re already at everybody’s squircle. Maybe they should make Vision Pro squircle. Again, this rumor doesn’t mention Vision Pro at all. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell, or at least not the part that I snipped out of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John setting that aside, how do you feel about this OS spanning rumor
⏹️ ▶️ John as compared to how you felt about the iOS 19 rumor? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, this is a much larger, like, so what we heard with iOS 19 earlier, and we did that after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show, or the overtime about it, It sounded like there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mock-up of the camera app that somebody, was it John Prosser who did the mock-up?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Somebody. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it sounded like, okay, well, maybe this is something that they’re doing for certain apps. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the point I made was that Apple has always had multiple design languages depending on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app type. And there were different styles your app could be, whether it was a content viewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, or a single view app, versus a document app, versus productivity app. And they’ve always kind of had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve been juggling multiple styles. And so my thought at that time was, maybe this is just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new style that they’re going to, you know, add and make easy in the API’s and everything and maybe adopt for some of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. This is a pretty bold claim that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much bigger than that, that this is more about like the default look of the UI widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the and the styles and everything. And that’s a that’s a bigger thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like echoes of iOS 7, but I think we’re in a very different world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now than we were back then. First of all, this is a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger and more established and more entrenched world of apps now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the stuff that runs in Apple’s ecosystem is much bigger now, much more entrenched,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s much bigger companies now having a lot of influence and a lot of usage in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. So, for Apple to do something like iOS 7 today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even think they’re in a position to really do it very strongly for lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reasons. Number one, I don’t think they have the support from developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, on a large scale, adopt a new design language. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the small developers like us, they have done a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job of straining that relationship first of all. Number one is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are largely… we’ve been strained, let’s say. And that’s… they keep doing that and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to keep being a thing with their policy decisions and behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything like that. So there’s already like that relationship with small developers are strained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That relationship with big company developers is not only differently and maybe more strained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But big company developers have largely not stuck with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock look for anything. Big companies develop their own styles and their own looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their apps and they use them across platforms. They want their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style of their app to look the same on Android and iOS and maybe on PCs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the web or whatever the other platforms might be but especially Android and iOS. So they are already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like you know what that’s nice Apple, you have your default, you know, widget looks and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. We’re not going to use them, we’re going to override them to look like us. So the big companies, when you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how would this actually play out? The big companies are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be hostile or neglectful. They’re going to actively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against it or they’re going to just like never update to the new styles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. So all the apps that you use on your phone from big companies, like, they’re out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to do any of this stuff. They’re going to do their, they’re going to keep doing their own stuff. Small developers like us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of thing is usually a pretty huge workload on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. It’s a huge request and a huge burden to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put on third-party developers when the system theme significantly changes because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge amounts of, huge like you know UI chunks of our app will not work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, will not look right, they’ll have visual glitches, or it won’t work in the new format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so for us to adopt it, it’s a huge amount of work, oftentimes needing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty significant redesign of the app to adopt it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on that front, by the way, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting to the story by saying, well, SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John to the rescue, because SwiftUI is declarative and you can be less precise about exactly how things
⏹️ ▶️ John look, therefore it’ll be much easier for people who have fully adopted a Swift UI to accommodate the
⏹️ ▶️ John new look. There is a tiny, very, very small amount of truth to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But mostly, what I think Marco’s getting at from someone who has experience with
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this is, it’s not like your app won’t work when they change the default
⏹️ ▶️ John look of everything, no matter what API you use. Like, unless you’re really unlucky and you’re doing custom controls and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re along the straight and narrow, it’s like your app will work. But when they change the default look, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go through every single screen, every single button, every single
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey widget, because
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who actually pays attention to their app, like in any developer who doesn’t budget their time
⏹️ ▶️ John the same way a big company would, has tweaked everything within an inch of its life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just even if it’s just micro adjusting padding, or using a particular thing because of the way it happens
⏹️ ▶️ John to look in the default widget set and it looks nicer that way, when they change all the default widgets, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta go through every single thing that appears in your app, and make sure it still looks
⏹️ ▶️ John okay and good because it will, like the choices you made to use this style
⏹️ ▶️ John of picker versus that style of toggle and using overlay here and ZStack there
⏹️ ▶️ John and background here and why did you make those choices? Because they make the best appearance and behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John with the widget set that you developed it with. And if they change all the default widgets, you are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go back and revisit all that stuff even if you use SwiftUI from top to bottom. So that’s the burden
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re talking about here. Not that like all of a sudden my app crashes or it doesn’t load or you can’t hit a button anymore It just
⏹️ ▶️ John starts to look like this was clearly developed with a different widget set because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What this does to the developer community is it just drops a huge bomb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This will be all we can do this year with our apps That’s what because like what happens is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple does a new theme usually what happens is if you Don’t build with the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SDK So if your app that’s not updated yet in the store will continue running on the old theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’ll lots of people will launch your app And if you haven’t built with a new SDK which you can’t do Usually until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the week before release for public and maybe for test flight you can do a little bit earlier But anything with built with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old SDK will still look old.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did that happen with iOS 7 by the way? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so. Yeah, but then what what will then happen is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of your users when they update their phones, which might be day one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the beta, or at least it’ll be like, you know, certainly in the fall when the OS releases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app will look very, very old to them. And they will complain. And they will,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, they’ll accuse you of being abandoned. And you’ll start getting one star reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as I learned last summer, one star reviews in small numbers, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s life. In big numbers, that can destroy your business. Like that can be a pretty substantial,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your business on fire problem. So what developers have to do when the system theme changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this? See also when Dark Mode was added, that was a smaller version, but of a similar thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have to address that with our app. We have to adopt it, because the reviews will kill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us if we don’t. And they’ll kill us starting on day one at large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale. And even before that, we’ll start getting killed in the summer during the betas. But we will get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco killed if we aren’t there with the new redesign. So it’s imperative. It’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not like some optional thing we can adopt at our leisure or if we like it or not. We have to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what that means, that’s such a huge thing. As John was just saying, it’s so big because it touches like potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every screen, every control. That means that we really can’t do any other features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fall. Like that’s why it’s such a huge burden. It’s an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive lever for Apple to pull. Keep in mind also, it is similarly expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple, for all of their apps, all of their software, all of their UI. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this is true, this is a huge deal for the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco community, both inside Apple and for all of us outside of Apple. And it has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really be worth it. Like, because it’s so, again, it puts such a burden. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so expensive. And that will mean that all of the other features that we might want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add this fall are not gonna happen. Like that’s how, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly express enough how much of a burden this places on the community. You see this because if you recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the previous big redesign with iOS 7, it took a long time before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the apps on your phone, or before most of the apps on your phone were translated over. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are not made by enthusiasts and that don’t care how many one-star
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews they have often never get updated. Like, you know, the app for my mixer at the restaurant that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even work in landscape mode, that’s never gonna get updated for it, never. Like, there’s not a chance. You know, how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps on your phone are there from, you know, like, that are just part of some hardware that you bought or that, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like your dentist’s booking software or whatever. Like, none of that stuff’s ever gonna get updated. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you enter this era of just like transitional, crappy user experiences that are kind of blended old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, new world, or they can force the new theme on all the old apps that aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated, which will break them all. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no- I don’t know if it’ll break them all, but visually they might look unexpected, let’s say. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it will literally break most things. A new look will just cause things to look extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John awkward. Maybe some text will be truncated where you didn’t think, especially if they try to keep the metrics the same. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to recall back to something that you said, Marco, on I think a show or two ago, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John people might be remembering and thinking it conflicts with what you’re saying, but it actually doesn’t. you had mentioned how iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John was a gift to you when you were developing Overcast because it was so much simpler and required
⏹️ ▶️ John less like pixel perfect, you know, photo realistic artistic skills and more just to be able to work with
⏹️ ▶️ John like text and white space and solid colors and stuff. That was a gift to you because you were
⏹️ ▶️ John in the midst of developing an application that was not out yet. Yes. It’s a different situation when you
⏹️ ▶️ John already have an app and they change, they pull the rug out from under you and change the look of every single thing. So you built your
⏹️ ▶️ John app based on the widget set from, you know, iOS, whatever you were doing when you developed it and now here comes iOS 19
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything looks different. That’s gonna be true of this redesign as well. It will
⏹️ ▶️ John actually be an advantage for people who are just starting their app at the right moment because they will be the first to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to adopt this look and feel because they’re not converting a legacy app. They’re like, they’re there from day one,
⏹️ ▶️ John they hop right on board, their app is designed with this look in mind from the start, it is optimized
⏹️ ▶️ John and tweaked and made to look correct with the iOS 19 widget set, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And everybody who has an older app has to go and convert theirs and decide, oh, what do I do with this screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I picked this because in the old look, this looked best, but the new one, it doesn’t look good at all. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to add another screen? Can I use a different widget here? Can I use a sheet
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of this thing? So that’s true of any of these changes. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John you said before, Mark, was so true. And what I keep saying with to what end? Like, if you’re gonna make a big
⏹️ ▶️ John change like this, why? What is the benefit on the other side of this pain, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, what is it that is about your systems that needs to be, that demands this kind of overhaul?
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is where we kind of get a little bit into the spiraling, but like, before we get to that, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I will soon, I first wanna say the tiny optimistic part
⏹️ ▶️ John of this story for me personally. And that is that I have been
⏹️ ▶️ John unhappy with the direction that the Mac OS UI has been going in for many years now.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about system settings many times. I’m currently making an app using a bunch of the new Swift UI
⏹️ ▶️ John and Mac OS widgets and buttons and controls and forms and labels and
⏹️ ▶️ John text fields and all the things, right? And I don’t think they’re an improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John over what AppKit looked like a decade ago. I think they’re worse. I think they’re uglier. I think they don’t work as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So on the Mac, the answer to the question to what end? Could be
⏹️ ▶️ John in best case scenario, hey, all those things you don’t like about how the Mac is looking and working, now’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an opportunity to fix that. To say we’re going in the wrong direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John We shouldn’t have text fields with no borders with right aligned text in the passwords, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the toggle switches and settings and labels 20 yards away from there, the things that they’re labeling,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not good. uh let’s come up with a better look for that let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just make some more contrast and more visual hierarchy and not just have everything be dark gray everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John on the mac there is i think a need a problem that needs to
⏹️ ▶️ John be solved that the the current notion of modern mac os ui is ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John and works worse than it used to there’s that’s that’s my optimistic take is like
⏹️ ▶️ John you know I don’t think iOS and iPadOS are dying for a UI overhaul,
⏹️ ▶️ John and obviously it’s so much more important in the phones and such a more popular platform, but the Mac kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of has felt at sea for a while now with any new UI they roll out basically
⏹️ ▶️ John being met by the Mac’s biggest fans with either a shrug or a frown. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John in the early days of, especially the early days of Mac OS X, Aqua had everybody jazzed, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it had tons of detractors as well, but it was certainly exciting. And over the years, they have refined the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John interface and there were good years and bad years. Sometimes the dock was really shiny, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they added a stitch leather to the calendar app, you know, but like there’s been ups and downs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John always I feel like we’re sort of, you know, driving an unwinding road towards improvement,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for in the last, let’s say five to 10 years, where a bunch of, even just forgetting the
⏹️ ▶️ John widgets, a bunch of things that happened, like, do you remember, I don’t even remember which OS update this was. We’ve already established that we can’t remember the names of the
⏹️ ▶️ John OSS’s, but I think long time Mac users will have
⏹️ ▶️ John this feeling that it used to be easier to tell which window was active, which
⏹️ ▶️ John window was in front. They made an OS change where the front window was
⏹️ ▶️ John not as much more prominent than the windows behind it. Like they used to, in
⏹️ ▶️ John the old days, they’d have the windows would be, the background windows would be lighter and the front window would
⏹️ ▶️ John be darker. Sometimes the foreground window would have more detail than the background windows. The foreground window has always had a bigger shadow
⏹️ ▶️ John and still does, but they made some changes in recent years that really just kind of flattens out the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit and makes foreground and background windows look much more like each other. They have taken
⏹️ ▶️ John away borders on things, things like text fields. There are things in the Mac OS UI that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell are controls and sort of an iOS 7 style. There are problems,
⏹️ ▶️ John UI problems to be solved on the Mac. And in theory, this could be a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix them. now it’s time to spiral. How much confidence do we have that
⏹️ ▶️ John literally anything they do to any of these operating systems will be an improvement?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the bigger concern for me is like what they have demonstrated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac for the last decade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or pick any platform, really. No, but especially, see, the Mac, I think, is the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in danger with this. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they have shown with the Mac is that they currently do not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough resources devoted to the Mac, or possibly enough talent left in the
⏹️ ▶️ John company. Enough expertise. They don’t know what to do. Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve seen is that whenever they change the Mac UI recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s usually worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you see something like the new settings app, you’re like, okay, this was a dramatic redesign that happened recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s awful. Like there’s so many things about it that are unintuitive, ugly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broken, like it’s just like outright just awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially since it did achieve some of its design goals, which is to make an interface that
⏹️ ▶️ John scales better with more settings. Like I think they have achieved that, but every other aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of the redesign is bad. Like congratulations, you made a scalable system for adding more settings that
⏹️ ▶️ John is more scalable than hand tweaking every single screen, but literally everything else about it is worse than it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so like when you think of a redesign happening, It’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who made the Mac what we love. It’s the people who made the settings app. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those people redesigning the entire OS. Like that’s what we
⏹️ ▶️ John are going for here. So now think about I’m picturing in my mind’s eye. A new
⏹️ ▶️ John consistent, forget about it, whether it looks like vision OS with like glassy things on iOS, but like a new consistent thing. And all I picture
⏹️ ▶️ John in my mind, looking at my Mac screen is title bars that have of even fewer
⏹️ ▶️ John features and less contrast, title bars that are bigger, menu bars and title bars
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just bigger and featureless expanses of white and light gray. Like, you know what a pop-up
⏹️ ▶️ John menu looks like on the phone, whatever that thing is where it shows like a rounded rectangle with the lines through it? My pull-down menus
⏹️ ▶️ John from the menu bar look like that. Huge amounts of white space around each thing. Like the check
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes and radio buttons are gone. Everything is a toggle switch, like for consistency because people
⏹️ ▶️ John are confused. They’re not confused. Like that’s what I see like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John take iOS or iPadOS and make the Mac look like that, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not an improvement. It is worse. And that’s what I fear. I fear so badly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and in fact, Apple’s own marketing department and statements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been, Craig Federighi, like outright stating things like, we’re not gonna merge these OSs. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact, there’s rumor, government still says exactly that. But if you make the designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, quote, consistent, you are adopting design patterns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a platform that are not right for it. And that’s the same reasons that we all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know these platforms are not really meant to be merged, allegedly, or shouldn’t be merged. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing all this allegedly, and again, this is all through the German filter, so some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details or justifications or reasons might be wrong, but the information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about them having a big redesign of this is probably right. That’s based on German’s
⏹️ ▶️ John And OS spanning redesign, not just within one island.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but what we’ve seen from Apple over the years with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the stuff they’ve done to the Mac especially, that they use that term consistency. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a goal of theirs to make the Mac more like iOS, but not only does that not make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense, because the design, like they’re such different systems with such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different hardware and input and output methods and just information density
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and control designs and everything, they’re so different, it makes no sense to have them be the same. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also I don’t, I think they are being very condescending to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users to suggest that we need things to be more similar, otherwise we just don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our computers. Like they’re selling Macs in record numbers. People aren’t confused.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like people who buy the Mac know the Mac. Not every single person in the world understands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, but not every single person in the world understands any computing platform, including iPads and iPhones. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers, when people are motivated to have to use them for work or people like them, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure them out. That’s what we’ve done over the decades of computers existing. Like people figure them out. Not everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is perfect. Not everything needs to stay the same way it is forever, but people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are able to learn two different interfaces on two different devices. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fine to have the Mac look and work differently than the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why it’s a different platform. If you wanted everything to just look like iPhones, we’d all just use iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nobody would even need the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John So- I don’t want people hearing this and thinking, you’re saying, oh, well, people can just figure out the Mac. It doesn’t matter that it’s harder. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we said before on the iPad, talking about iPad and stage management and stuff, The Mac paradigm
⏹️ ▶️ John for doing what it needs to do is better and easier than, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad paradigm or the iPhone paradigm. It is better and easier to manipulate
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple things, multiple windows on the Mac than it is on the phone or the iPad. Obviously, it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ John than on the phone because the screen is tiny, but even on the iPad where you have a 13-inch iPad and a 13-inch MacBook Pro, dealing with Windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John iPadOS uses an interface, appearance,
⏹️ ▶️ John and vocabulary, and set of actions that is Byzantine and hard to understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John So having to learn something new on the Mac pays dividends because that new thing you’re learning
⏹️ ▶️ John is better than what you knew on the phone for dealing with multiple windows
⏹️ ▶️ John and a keyboard and track pad and you know, all the Mac stuff. Like it’s not the case that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac is difficult and worse but you should just suck it up. It’s the case that the Mac is
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the other choices because it lets you do
⏹️ ▶️ John more powerful things with a simple, easy to understand, consistent interface that by the way has been around
⏹️ ▶️ John for decades and is basically a lot of the skills that you know from Windows, Microsoft Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John transfer over for various reasons that are very similar to each other. Like we have not come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a better way to do many things with a powerful personal
⏹️ ▶️ John computer than Windows menus, pointer, blah, blah, blah. Arguably, touchscreen Macs would help with this a lot, but Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John being stubborn there. but setting that aside and setting aside any redesign that may, you know, one of the rumors is they’ll redesign
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS to be more friendly to touch. By all means, go for it. But that is a separate issue entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John from things like, I just mentioned the toggle switches. Was Mac OS crying out
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS style slidy sideways toggle switches? I’ve seen more people confused
⏹️ ▶️ John by the iOS toggle switch control than I’ve ever seen people confused by a checkbox.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it because people are old and checkboxes existed on paper forms, whereas most people didn’t interact with little toggle
⏹️ ▶️ John switches, unless they were dealing with audio equipment or something. People don’t always know which is the on and which is the
⏹️ ▶️ John off, which is why they have the little one that says ON, where you can see the letters on when it’s on. Like, is
⏹️ ▶️ John blue on or is gray off or is gray, like nothing in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John was saying, you know what the problem with macOS is? People can’t figure out checkboxes. They have no idea what a checkbox means.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t tell when it’s on, they can’t tell when it’s off. We need consistency. People on the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John settings app use those little toggle switches. How about we put them on the Mac? And so here I am making a Mac app in 2025
⏹️ ▶️ John and the setting screen in my app is filled with iOS style toggles because that’s the way Apple wants you
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things and they heard you in that direction with SwiftUI and macOS. And it’s not the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the world. And again, there are some advantages to it for scalability, but it is not a thing that macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John needed. It was not crying out for it. Users were not baffled by check boxes and radio buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’ve been seeing them their whole life, right? And they’re understandable and tractable. ditto
⏹️ ▶️ John for buttons and for windows and title bars and pull down menus. These
⏹️ ▶️ John are flexible components that could be improved upon and you can come up with maybe enhancements
⏹️ ▶️ John or ways to make them better or better window management systems and so on and so forth. But the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, we should get rid of all that and just use stage manager everywhere because stage manager is not burning up the world
⏹️ ▶️ John and these toggle switches are not appreciably making anything better. At best, they’re neutral. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I recognize these from my phone, therefore I know how to use them. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not making the Mac better and more powerful. It is just sort of like visual consistency for
⏹️ ▶️ John the sake of visual consistency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I don’t think that’s a thing that people need as much as Apple designers seem to think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. You know, these are very different platforms. They behave very differently in lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways. And I’m not saying that the Mac has no room for improvement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things that are confusing to a lot of people. That’s not what I’m saying at all. there’s lots of room for improvement for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t think people need a different skin on the UI. That’s not what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confusing them. What’s confusing them is things like, where do files go? How do I get to things? What the hell is a disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image? Like, there’s all sorts of other things. How do I find things in settings?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. And why does half the settings app not work? Literally, it doesn’t work. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is what we’re talking about. We’re gonna have those people redesign the whole thing. We’re not having,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Bruce talking to Zini here, we’re having those people redesign it. Not only do I not trust them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do a good job, like I literally, again, cause the settings app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is literally broken. Like many features of it do not work. They do, it does not work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So do we want those people redesigning the whole OS? Even if we liked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their visual concepts, which I don’t think we will, but even if we liked their visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concepts, they have not been trustworthy to execute correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make something that works. So that’s a huge worry for me. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at what people have, how people have reacted to this rumor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has gone over like a lead balloon. Yeah, people are not excited about it, not at all. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows where Apple’s reputation is in this department.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned earlier the developer issues of like, if they’re gonna drop a bomb on the developer community put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a massive burden on every iOS app developer in the world. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might be overrating their position here and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overestimating how much political capital they have in this environment. But then on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the technical side too, do they even have the talent on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to implement a new design?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or on iOS because for all of iOS 7’s faults, it was a very clear
⏹️ ▶️ John vision of what they wanted and they overshot it by a little bit, which arguably is what you wanna do. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna undershoot it, you wanna overshoot it so the fonts are a little bit too thin. Maybe the thing is a little bit too simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the buttons have too few borders and you just back it off six notches and you have an OS that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John use for a decade, right? But like I think the iOS 7, and by the way, it’s cheaper to make apps with it. I think the iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John transition, despite all the fuss about it, was largely successful. And I do agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that occasionally, you know, every decade or two, it’s good to refresh everything and come up with a new
⏹️ ▶️ John look, right? We’re just all scared now because we’re like, okay, but what new look? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you gonna do specifically? Because just saying we’re gonna do a big redesign, like, if, and to be clear
⏹️ ▶️ John and to be optimistic, if they make something that looks
⏹️ ▶️ John cool and attractive and new, we will be excited about it. customers will be excited about,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though people will grumble that they changed the way stuff looks or whatever, but like that is a source of excitement. It is, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John upside to this, like a setting aside, like to what end, what benefit are people getting or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John merely changing the way things look and a few minor behaviors,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do it well, it’s important to do that every once in a while and can get people
⏹️ ▶️ John jazzed and excited. It can be a differentiator. It could be like what the Apple wants the story
⏹️ ▶️ John to be when the new iPhone comes out with iOS 19 is like, and it’s got an all new interface that looks really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they want the story to be. And that is a plausible story. It absolutely can happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if functionally, they don’t actually improve anything on the phone, but it just looks a little cooler. And most people think
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks cooler, thumbs up. Same thing with the Mac. Oh, the Mac has been kind of the same for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Like I just said, there’s things about the current interface that bother me. Guess what? They
⏹️ ▶️ John have an all new look and redesigned for the Mac. And actually a lot of those problem areas have improved and the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John OS looks new and different and we’re excited about it. And I remember the times when
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS X versions would come out and we would be excited about how it looked. That started to, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John that started to veer off a little bit around the stitch leather thing, but in general, for many of the early years
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS X, each new OS would come out and we were excited to see how it looked and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had opinions, I like it, I don’t like it, but in general, it was like, oh, this is, the Mac looks all, it was part of the things that drove
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrades back when Apple sold the OS for $130, kids, if you remember back in those days, they used to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John the upgrades to macOS, it would make you buy it because you want the cool new
⏹️ ▶️ John look. And even if you didn’t think you liked the cool new look and when you first saw it, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John grow on you and eventually the old look would look old and you’d feel like you needed the new look. I think that’s a healthy
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenon, but there was a lot of getting lost in the wilderness there and
⏹️ ▶️ John then iOS 7 happened and then the OS has started to diverge. I do agree there’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of design unity between Mac OS, iOS and iPad OS than there has been, mostly between the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other things, but I fear what they will do. And that’s what I’m hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John from everybody who’s sort of in the know. Regular people don’t even know this is happening. They won’t know until they see the first ad for the phone or they go to the store
⏹️ ▶️ John and see the first phone with it, right, which is the way it should be, right? But people who are tech enthusiasts, I have not heard a single
⏹️ ▶️ John person say, I’m so jazzed about this. I haven’t even heard a single person say what I just said, which is there are parts of the current
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS that I don’t like and I hope this fixes them. Everybody is saying, oh my God, they’re just, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John so afraid of what they’re gonna do. I’m so afraid that they’re just gonna make everything worse. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should really reflect on that. And I mean, hopefully they use it to motivate them. No one believes in us. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks we don’t know how to make things better. Everyone is out there just crossing their fingers that we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John break the crap that they like now. Like a lot of people are feeling that way. Just fix the existing bugs and don’t break
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that I like, right? That is a very pessimistic position
⏹️ ▶️ John for customers to be in. And Apple, I don’t know if they do surveys of like their most enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ John customers, Apple should not have a, it should not like to see that in the server responses, the sentiment
⏹️ ▶️ John that their most enthusiastic customers are saying, please just don’t make anything worse. Please just don’t break
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that I like, you know, please just fix the bugs that have been there for five years. I don’t want any new features. Do a
⏹️ ▶️ John snow leopard release, blah, blah, blah. like the the
⏹️ ▶️ John occurrence of that sentiment has only been increasing in recent years among the enthusiast community and
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-enthusiast community, the regular people who buy most of their products, they are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be upset by any kind of change. But also if you do a change that they think looks cool, they will
⏹️ ▶️ John be motivated to get the new phone in cool colors with the new interface and so on and so forth. Now that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work out for them with iOS 18 and photos, which was in the grand scheme of things, a very small change didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John change the look and feel of the widgets everywhere. Just change one commonly used app in a way that I don’t think was
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but certainly wasn’t a clear win over the existing app. Multiply I
⏹️ ▶️ John was 18 photos by every single app and every single, uh, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, iPad and Mac. And 2025 is looking like a pretty scary year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Cause and keep in mind too, like the, like iOS seven did not go over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well with regular people. People hated it. Like when your parents’
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones would update, you’d get those calls. Like you would. Like you. What happened? Why does everything look like this now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, can I go back? Nope. And but also, you know, when you look at like iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say like, oh, well, they haven’t done a redesign in how many years ago that way? It’s been a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they’ve done a ton of incremental changes. If you look at like, go, if,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners, go do right now, go to a Google Image Search for something like iOS 7 UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And take a look around at screenshots of actually what iOS 7 looked like. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ancient by comparison to what we have today. It’s not that we’ve kept the same design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this time. Apple has iterated over time and we’ve iterated over time. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like we are in desperate need for a huge reset. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been changing and evolving designs over the last decade or whatever it’s been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are nothing like iOS 7 today. I wouldn’t say nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re clearly a derivative of iOS 7. But yes, the small details have changed literally everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think if you looked at this and said, is this more like from the iOS 7 lineage or from the iOS 1 through 6
⏹️ ▶️ John lineage? I know there wasn’t an iOS 1. I would say we’re clearly derived from iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yes, but it’s in only very broad strokes. If you look, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every stroke is broader than every stroke in iOS 7. But like, if you look at like what iOS 7 actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked like and shipped like, it’s, you know, we have gone so far since then. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is not this big need for this. And again, like the expense, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco burden that it puts on the entire ecosystem, including users, because like, I cannot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if listeners, if you didn’t have like parents in your life or older people in your life during the iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition, consider yourself like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you missed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why does my phone’s home screen look like a clown now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like, everything is lost, I can’t find anything, just please, how do I go back? People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hated it. Like regular people hated it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and people are always gonna hate that. It’s not their reason not to do it. And I do think people eventually got on board with it and got
⏹️ ▶️ John used to it pretty quickly because I think the iOS 7 design was fundamentally a good idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they overshot it a little bit. But that’s gonna happen. And I think it’s fine for that
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen, but you don’t wanna burn, You don’t want to do that if there’s not, if you’re not going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John some people excited about it, and if there’s not going to be benefits on the other side
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. So the benefits of iOS 17 are, you know, lower application development costs, a fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John new look that makes you stand out in the market, a differentiator between last year’s phone and this year’s phone. Like there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John there were upsides to it that made the pain worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s a couple of things that we need to explore. First of all, while I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with everything that you guys are saying broadly. I think, I can’t help but wonder hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John particularly espouse like, oh, the Mac is so much simpler and better than iPadOS to do things like window management.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And on the surface, I think that’s true, but I think we’re all three of us showing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our age because I would say for people who grow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up on touchscreen devices first, the indirection that comes from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mouse, from a keyboard in some cases, but certainly by not touching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that they’re interacting with, that has a burden that you, the three of us don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to deal with. Cause this is, we were brought up on that indirection, but for things like my kids,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like they’re using Chromebooks now and they seem fine with that, but they’re not really doing window management on their Chromebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like everything’s full screen. Right. And I think that they would find, and they’re smart kids, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would find the window management that I consider second nature to be burdensome and frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and old timey. And even though I personally agree wholeheartedly with what you’re saying, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that, that that’s a fair representation of everyone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that, that we should assume that we are completely right about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like I said, it’s in the context of doing what you do on a Mac. It is, if you’re, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to see multiple things at the same time, it is easier to accomplish that on the Mac. If you don’t need to see multiple things at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time, it is easier to accomplish that on iPad. So I think it’s really just a question of like, eventually your
⏹️ ▶️ John kids, if they get, you know, get older and get a job, they’re going to have to do more than have
⏹️ ▶️ John a single thing, full screen all the time. Like just inevitably your work will become more complicated than that. So when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John faced with that challenge, how do you want to tackle it? How do you want to accomplish that goal?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is not stage manager. The answer is some kind of normal window system. And as for the touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like we’re all for touchscreen Macs. Like again, if they have to change a Mac OS to make it accommodate touchscreens, fine. but then actually
⏹️ ▶️ John ship some touch Macs, right? Like this, it is frustrating that Apple has been stubbornly
⏹️ ▶️ John refusing to do touch Macs for reasons that don’t make sense anymore. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if the redesign accommodates that, that’s all the better. But like, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, when faced with a complex task, a simple
⏹️ ▶️ John set of tools is the best way to tackle it, allowing you to use those tools to solve your problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than taking a complex task and making a complex system that fits that complex task, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a key fits a lock, but in only one particular way does it fit,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a good way to solve that. So if I said you have to develop an app in Xcode, well, there’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John learning curve there. Now I said, now you have to do it on an iPad versus doing it on a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t matter if you were born yesterday or born 50 years ago, you will be more frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ John by trying to deal with all the different things that you have to deal with to develop an app in an
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode or any kind of ID like interface, you’ll be very frustrated trying to do that on an iPad versus trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the Mac once you learn all the things that you have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that that’s true. I really don’t. And I mean that genuinely because I, again, I came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the same lineage that you did, even though I’m not sure you agree on that, but I came from the same lineage that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you did. And so I, 1 trillion percent would be, I would nope out of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instantly because it’s impossible. but I’m not so sure that someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut from a different cloth would feel the same way. But I mean, there’s no way to answer this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s a question of the complexity of the problem. How many things do you need to be doing and seeing at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time? As that number decreases, you can get simpler interfaces. And by the way, I think the Mac does a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John job of accomplishing that. If I watch how my son uses his Mac to do things, he just full screens everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John three firmware swipes between them. Like it’s not as straightforward as an iPad perhaps, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a way of using a Mac that is foreign to me, but macOS does accommodate it and allows
⏹️ ▶️ John him to work more like he’s used to. But there does come a point where he needs to see more than one window at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time. And as soon as you need to do that, you need to come up with some kind of solution. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve literally never met anybody who finds the way iPad handles multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John windows to be simpler, more understandable, and more flexible than the way Mac does. It’s not saying the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John is easier because people can get frustrated by the Mac too. I lose track of windows. I can’t tell when they’re visible, so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. But if your, if your thing you’re trying to do is complicated, the iPad is so
⏹️ ▶️ John limiting. You can do certain things. I can do two. I can do two with the slide over
⏹️ ▶️ John four, five, well, strange manager kind of, but it gets real hard, real fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the curve, you hit a wall, right? So again, it depends on the context for simple
⏹️ ▶️ John things. You know, iPadOS makes simple things easy, but it makes many hard things literally impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I, and I get you in, in. I’m not, again, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any one of the three of us would have a very different opinion about this if we were growing up now rather than 500 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other point I wanted to make is to be angel’s advocate rather than devil’s advocate, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. When-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco The most crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing you’ve ever said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I put the Vision Pro on a few hours ago in order to re-watch the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aforementioned, free, not free solo, whatever I called it, the adventure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode. And I briefly used the Vision Pro to do not entertainment things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I answered an email, which I think I answered with four words because it’s the world’s worst keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I did a handful of quote unquote productivity things. It was very little,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was some. And every time I put the Vision Pro on, I’ve said this many times, every time I put the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, I feel like I’m strapping the future to my face. And that’s both in the obvious ways. Like, oh, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey windows floating in freaking space. And the fact that when I look around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those windows are pretty solidly staying perfectly stationary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, they’re not hovering and bouncing around like my drone does when I put it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air. Like they are solid. And I still am stupefied that that is something that we can accomplish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2024 really, because this was a year ago now. But the other thing that makes it feel like the future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the, just the the whole vibe of the interface. And I don’t think I have the vocabulary to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better than that, but the way that transparency is used in depth is used and granted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those things are used because the vision pro lends itself to transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and depth, especially, but the whole just vibe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the O S leaving aside the fact that I’ve got the future on my face, the vibe of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey O S just feels kind of futuristic. And then I look at things like the invites app and granted the invites app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was kind of not great, but visually it’s a lot of transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and depth in a much smaller degree, but depth nevertheless. And it does, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve talked about before, does give a kind of Vision OS-y vibe. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like bringing that whole vibe to the OS broadly, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not disagreeing, especially Marco, with what you were saying earlier, it’s a big lift for individual developers like us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s asking a lot at a time where we’re all feeling pretty disgruntled about Apple, again, it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those things you said I completely agree with. But if you take it just at the surface, I think having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that vibe, the, was it Jon Prosser, I think you said, mock-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Photos app, like visually, I think that looked pretty cool and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looked kind of like the future. And I would not at all be surprised if Apple tries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get, if not literally that same approach that whole vibe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto iPadOS, onto MacOS, onto iOS. And perhaps that’s why it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t mentioned in Gurman’s report, is because we’re already there in VisionOS. And we’re bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that same, and I know I’ve said the word 17 times, I’ll say it again, we’re bringing that same vibe to these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other platforms. And honestly, taking off my developer hat and putting on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my consumer hat, that actually sounds kind of good to me, to be completely honest with you. I think I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be here for that. Now, as soon as I take my user hat off and put the developer hat on, I want to crawl
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a hole and die. Like I’m already too tired to deal with any of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a user’s perspective, I think that might be pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually in parallels with the early days of Mac OS X here. Like one of the things that was said frequently about
⏹️ ▶️ John Aqua, probably by me, but I’ll let it remember, was that Aqua looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John the interface that people would make up for sci fi movies back in the day. Like they make like a fake computer
⏹️ ▶️ John interface or some future computer and a sci-fi thing. And they’d make it, it would look nothing like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, at the time, like, you know, Windows or classic Mac OS, and it would behave nothing like it. It would have these gratuitous visual
⏹️ ▶️ John effects that people would look at it and say, that’s not what computers look like. This is all, you know, fantasy,
⏹️ ▶️ John sci-fi stuff or whatever. And Apple essentially said, we’re going to make a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John computer interface. Like the Genie effect was totally like a special effect movie thing. everything
⏹️ ▶️ John being transparent and shiny, candy colored, round, 3D looking photorealistic
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons and photorealistic icons. Like that’s not what computers look like. That’s some ridiculous movie person’s idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they literally made it. They made a movie computer, right? And what you’re saying about Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John OS is basically the same thing. Oh, it looks like the future because you’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of things in popular media, sci-fi stuff, that looks kind of like big
⏹️ ▶️ John translucent panes. I remember Minority Report had such an effect on this that in pop culture,
⏹️ ▶️ John even non-tech enthusiasts were saying, it’s like a Minority Report interface where Tom Cruise is swiping away
⏹️ ▶️ John clear panes of glass, you know, floating in front of him and like an AR interface or whatever. Things
⏹️ ▶️ John in popular media influence what we think, quote unquote, looks like the future. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision OS looks like the future because it looks like things that we’ve seen in sci-fi movies
⏹️ ▶️ John and as we all said, transparency in Vision OS makes tons of sense because it’s overlaying the interface on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of the world around you in a way that other things do not. Things with screens that are not strapped
⏹️ ▶️ John eyeballs don’t do that. And arguably, early versions of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X and later versions of Windows thoroughly explored exactly how translucent you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco before it becomes visually confusing. And we’ve learned
⏹️ ▶️ John lessons there. And we may suddenly unlearn those. But you’re totally right that if they can successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John make, essentially, the movie interface just like Aqua did, It will be exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John enough and cool enough that it will be a net benefit,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite all the people who are gonna flip out about how things look terrible, despite all the reviews that I wrote saying
⏹️ ▶️ John how this thing shouldn’t be translucent and this is hard to see and the information density has gone down and yada, yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they refined, they tweaked, they backed off, they figured it out, but that burst of excitement is something you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John replace. And despite the fact, as Marco said, that iOS is not crying out for a massive redesign,
⏹️ ▶️ John every n number of years, you should do this just to sort of clear
⏹️ ▶️ John the decks and freshen things up, even though it’s painful. It’s why you don’t do it every year. It’s why you don’t do it every five years.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when was iOS 7? I can’t do math in my head, but like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John every 10 or 15 years is a reasonable time scale to
⏹️ ▶️ John think about a rig redesign. The reason I’m spiraling about this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have faith that the redesign will be an improvement. Oh, it kills me to say that, but I just don’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I’ve still not met a single, not met, not seen a single response from somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John granted in my little circles of people who are similar ages and have similar experiences with Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John who are like, I’m excited about this. I think they’re gonna do a great job because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not excited. And I hope Apple, you know, takes that as a challenge and
⏹️ ▶️ John defies expectations and make something that we were like, oh, thank God, it’s actually really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, terminal and better help. And thanks to our members who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in overtime, we’re gonna be looking at affordable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EVs and physical controls, which is an interesting combination. We’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this new Volkswagen ID everyone concept we’re gonna be talking about, and some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical button news. So that’s in this week’s overtime. If you wanna hear us talk about that, you can join at.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks everyone and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was accidental John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
John’s speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you have a speaker update for us?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. Last episode I talked about my old speakers were dying. They fully died. Eventually they
⏹️ ▶️ John just would not make any more noise, which was bad. Um, and so I was looking at new speakers. I had
⏹️ ▶️ John some speakers in mind that I was going to get to ask the audience. If anyone has these speakers,
⏹️ ▶️ John how did they like them? And people did write in. Can I jump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in? It just occurred to, I don’t know why it just occurred to me. What if you’re only using these speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for games? Why does Fidelity really matter that much?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so as I said, last time I’ve had these speakers for like over 16 years. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m buying anything new electronics wise, like, oh, can I do better than the speakers I got 16
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago? It’s not that I’m against Fidelity. It’s just that I’m not listening to them all day long. So I’m not going to spend a huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money on them. They’re not that important to me, especially given my criteria, which I will reemphasize when I start
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about these new speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a lot of money to spend on speakers that you’re using for video games, if you ask
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not just video games. It’s not just video, like anytime I need to hear audio, if I’m watching a YouTube video, I need to hear the audio. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s not a high fidelity type experience, but you know, and I do occasionally listen to my music collection on my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac while I’m doing stuff. You know, it’s just, I’m not, I’m not, I don’t have music playing all the time like you do, but the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is I wanted to upgrade. I had old speakers, I wanted new speakers, I wanted the new speakers to be
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the old speakers. Not better in a thousands of dollars way, but better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that’s all the reason you ultimately need. I was just curious. All right, so I apologize for interrupting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like, again, I wasn’t looking for like, these have to be super high fidelity. I just wanted them to be better,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You know, you buy a new thing, you want it to be better than the old thing, especially if the old thing you have is really old.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I asked for people to give me feedback on the ones I was thinking of buying, and they did. But also people
⏹️ ▶️ John suggested many alternatives to the ones that I was looking at. Most of the alternatives they suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John I had seen and explored and chosen the ones that I was looking at because I didn’t like them. But two
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestions stand out, I don’t wanna talk about them. One of them is the Vanatu, V-A-N-A-T-O-O,
⏹️ ▶️ John transparent zero plus. I had actually looked at the speaker. I had mostly dismissed
⏹️ ▶️ John it based on looks, which was a big criteria for me. But so many
⏹️ ▶️ John people wrote in to say they either had these or had heard these,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they were impressed by the fidelity compared to the price
⏹️ ▶️ John and size, despite the fact that they are a little weird looking. These links to all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. All of these are not great looking to be honest with you. I don’t think any of these are good looking. These
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers are wedge shaped. So they’re angled, they’re angled, they’re more like a
⏹️ ▶️ John trap, is it a trap? Oh yeah, they’re more like a trapezoid than a rectangle. But they have this interesting feature where if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can see on the back, it looks like there’s like a handle back there, right? If you turn these over,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you flip them like 180 degrees, then the surface of the
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers is perpendicular to the table, right? So they, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re trying to have it both ways. These can be tilted back or these can be just straight up and down. And it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John for a strange arrangement. If you have them in your desk, you should probably have them tilted up towards you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t really like the handle, but I just wanted to point this out that people give lots of good reports on these speakers. In particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have good fidelity. A lot of people who are looking for speakers on their desks are measuring them as
⏹️ ▶️ John what they call studio monitors or things that will try to give you an exactly accurate and neutral
⏹️ ▶️ John near field listening experience for doing audio editing. So you know what it really sounds like as
⏹️ ▶️ John opposed to trying to change the audio to make it pleasing to your ears. It’s like, no, just, just
⏹️ ▶️ John show me the audio. It’s there because I’m the one changing the audio. I’m mixing the track. I’m adjusting the thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I need to hear what it really sounds like. So I want you to just be completely neutral, have a frequency
⏹️ ▶️ John response that doesn’t change. It’s just totally flat. Uh, because that is accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t looking for that. And so the fact that these Vanity Transparent Zero Pluses have
⏹️ ▶️ John that and are fairly inexpensive and small wasn’t that attractive to me, but I did take a second look at them,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I had dismissed them earlier for being ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, before, so first of all, before we lose, before we leave this, this is actually like to have the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco natively angled diagonally upward towards you is a great feature for desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers because that is the better angle. Normally you have to achieve it with some kind of stand or like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wedge kind of mount or something like, but so to have them actually just natively angled up like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a great feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John These may be tilted a little bit too much though, I feel like. Depending on the height of your desk and their position, they look a little slanty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A little, but I think it actually, that’s pretty close to what you want. Like my, I have my, I have the Kef
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or K-E-F, I still don’t know how to pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I always just say Kef.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have the, I think it’s the LSX2, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those have stands that like just stand them up and it’s at almost that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle. It isn’t quite that angle but it’s close. That being said I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do love the name you know transparent that’s what you mean like when transparent in audio terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means the speakers are not quote coloring the sound they’re not like boosting the bass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or boosting the treble like they’re they’re just giving you like the a reasonably flat frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequency response and that is you are correct what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people in studios want when they have studio monitors. It’s almost never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you want for your own personal listening. People usually would go for speakers that are, quote, more musical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which usually means a little more pleasant to listen to. But the name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparent, that means there’s nothing there. They add to that zero. So transparent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero still nothing there and then they say plus Plus what like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not transparent anymore. Well, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the old transparency I think is actually the second version of this and by the way the other Alternative that you will see and the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John some of these go in different arrangements is rather than taking them up They you physically raise them so they’re at the height of your
⏹️ ▶️ John ears and then you make them You know just 90 degrees to the table. That’s another alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John You obviously that’s why you often see studio monitors like up on a shelf in in studios so that the speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John are at the level of the ears of the person who is working on the thing. The other set of
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers that was recommended that I had also looked at a little bit before, but again, hearing lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have these in real life and like them a lot were the Atom Audio D3V. They
⏹️ ▶️ John look like little computer speakers. They’re very compact. They’re fairly inexpensive and again,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that people say about these is They are very neutral good
⏹️ ▶️ John for being studio monitor things these ones have going for them is they have ribbon tweeters, which are
⏹️ ▶️ John very it’s a different way of making the Speaker mechanism that makes the highest frequencies and it uses
⏹️ ▶️ John lighter weight materials that can start and stop moving more quickly sometimes people don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John ribbon tweeters because they find them too shrill or too harsh, but It may be they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John accurately portraying frequencies and transitions that they’re not able to hear on other speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ John are more musical and less transparent?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah well that’s on that response by the way like people who there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing more divisive and harder to like nail down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consensus on in the audio world than treble. Like treble response like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this because and there’s lots of good reasons for this like the amount of treble and how people perceive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it varies wildly across different speakers and headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it like it’s it’s so different and there’s a good reason why some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will say oh I want like I’m I like a lot of treble I want a lot of that detail otherwise things sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco muffled or dull or boring because you’re missing a lot of that high-end frequency response to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people a lot of that high-end frequency response that kind of you know sharp treble sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can sound harsh or grating. It can make it fatiguing to listen for long periods.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they say. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a reason, the reason we have such massively different opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across, you know, people for treble response is that people have massively different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing response to treble. Not only as we age we lose treble,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, pickup response, but also just different people have different like peaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sensitivities to how we are sensitive to different frequencies even when you’re young. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing, like anything people say about treble response or harshness or sharpness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or fatigue when listening to speakers or headphones, you basically have to discount all of that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of judge for yourself because whatever you prefer and perceive and even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear in treble is probably different from whatever that reviewer that you’re reading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perceives or prefers
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves. Although one thing you can look at from the physical instruction is again, ribbon tweeters tend to be better
⏹️ ▶️ John at the highs and the subtle transitions between the different frequencies because they can,
⏹️ ▶️ John they essentially, the moving parts have less momentum and mass. And so then a traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John tweeter, those, those Kanto tucks that you got, I think they had a ribbon tweeter as well. Like ribbon tweeters are very common.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, so if you like, if you like the highest of high frequencies, you may be drawn to
⏹️ ▶️ John a speaker that has a ribbon tweeter as a way to get that. The other aspect of these speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John that is different than most of the other ones that I’ve been looking at is they’re not ported Which means they don’t have a big hole in the back of the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John to allow air to go in and out to make sort Of a bassier noise from a smaller speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead they have a passive radiator, which is like a diaphragm that the diaphragm
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in and out It’s like a usually like a you know It’s circular region or whatever That’s like a drop a loose drum
⏹️ ▶️ John head and as the air pressure changes inside the speaker from it playing that little thing will move in in and out.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a different, it’s a different sound. Porting can be like boomier and make
⏹️ ▶️ John some sorts of strange noises when the volume is very high, but it also can
⏹️ ▶️ John give a very small speaker a lot more bass. And there’s factors about how close you put it to the wall that affect
⏹️ ▶️ John that and so on and so forth. But anyway, the Atom Audio D3V, a non-ported
⏹️ ▶️ John ribbon tweeter, small form factor, studio monitor type of thing with the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John control on the front. Not the best looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I gotta say, this definitely looks like someone who designed speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 95 was dragged to 2025 and said, use modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style to do the crap you’re used to doing, because that’s what this is. It looks straight out of 95 with just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sprinkle of modern stuff on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mind it that much. I don’t really like the shape. In
⏹️ ▶️ John general, I feel like I don’t like speakers that taper like footballs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many of them are like that. The whole, there’s a whole bunch of very popular studio monitors that their look
⏹️ ▶️ John of their whole product line is kind of like oblong, rounded, tapered type of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John This at least has a little bit of sharper edges, but yeah, I’m not a big fan. I don’t really like the passive
⏹️ ▶️ John radiator on the side. I do kind of like that they have an integrated tilted stand that looks like a
⏹️ ▶️ John foot, whereas opposed to you having to buy one, that’s the way they accomplish this. I think you can use it with or without the stand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it actually tilts, but they got a lot of good reviews. And here’s the thing there, for their size and performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good ratio. If you care about transparent-ish studio monitors that are small
⏹️ ▶️ John and sound really good, but don’t cost that much, these Adam Audio D3Vs are a good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would actually have probably considered them if I could have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tolerated to
⏹️ ▶️ John look a little bit better, which leads me to the speakers that I was actually looking at. And again, one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John main reasons I was looking at these speakers was because I liked the way they looked. and we just got done saying how silly it is. What,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re picking speakers based on how the speaker looks? That makes no sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes total sense, by the way. I bought my car based a lot on how it looks. I bought my house based a lot on how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks. Oh, that’s not true. You bought your car because you don’t know how to buy anything but a Honda, specifically in a core. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ John skipped over the ugly Honda core generations, if you noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m throwing a yellow flag on this one, but we don’t have time to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I like the way my car looks. You don’t have to like it, I like it. So anyway, the two
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking at the Kanto, K-N-T-O, Kanto Aura, all caps O-R-A, and the Kanto Aura 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, please give feedback if you have these speakers, tell me what you think of them. Tons of people wrote in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty much no one had anything bad to say about these speakers, other than the things that I already knew about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And actually, just to interject again, the Kanto Aura, the one that we’re gonna link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you open that page on Amazon, do you notice that there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey variations of this speaker? You know why? because it has f***ing colors. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, it has colors. You can buy speakers in colors. You can do black,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gray, indigo, which is I guess bluish to my eyes, but that’s all right. Moon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moss, pink, purple, red, and white. Imagine being able to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John colors. And you can distinguish all these colors, believe me. Yes. You will not be confused about
⏹️ ▶️ John which one is the blue one. It’s blue. And by the way, they also sell it in black,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the one I got. I was not offended by the existence of those colors at all. I bet most people do buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet most people do buy the black or white ones, but it’s still cool that the colors exist and they can change those colors every year if they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna mix it up a little bit. Anyway, I like how these speakers looked. I also like that they got good reviews. I
⏹️ ▶️ John also like the size of them. I was trying to decide between the Aura and the Aura 4. They’re basically the same exact speaker except for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Aura 4 is larger because the non-tweeter driver in it is four inches instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of 2.5 inches. And also there was the
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly ridiculous, but still weird thing that was driving me towards the Aura 4s is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Auras in theory only had 16 bit, 48 kilohertz and the Aura 4 support 24 bit, 96 kilohertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes no difference because these speakers cannot resolve anything that would let you distinguish that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t even have music in that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey resolution anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still it was driving me towards it. And on that front, by the way, someone who has the Auras, not the Auras 4s, wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John in to say, maybe they did a stealth upgrade of the guts of the AORUS because here is the audio MIDI setup
⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS with my AORUS attached and it lets me pick 24 bit 96 kilohertz. I don’t know if that is
⏹️ ▶️ John evidence that that speaker supports 24 bit 96 kilohertz or merely evidence that
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS will let you set that as the output. And then when it gets to the speaker, the speaker just down samples it to 1648.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the answer to that question, but just setting that aside, that was one of the things driving me towards it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John finally, one of the final things that would drive me towards the four versus the Aura was that
⏹️ ▶️ John the mid-range driver looks nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Aura 4 than the Aura. Look at the Aura next to the Aura 4. The Aura 4 has like, I think it’s metal, whereas the Aura has
⏹️ ▶️ John like a paper one and it just looks a little bit smoother and cleaner on the Aura 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know this sounds ridiculous to you. Again, you’re picking one speaker over the other because the speaker cone
⏹️ ▶️ John looks nicer. Believe me, especially if people have those Kef speakers or whatever, speaker manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John spend a lot of time designing the look of the speaker drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John in their speaker, even if they have grates on them. That’s why a lot of them come with magnetic, like, you know, you know, what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John call them? Grates or grills, yeah. They come with magnetic ones, so if you don’t want them on, you can just take them off
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no holes. And usually it sounds better without them. Yeah, these are visual items. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Kef doesn’t even include them, but they’re like, look at our beautiful speakers. They’re so beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and so concentric.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco KEF speakers are, okay, KEF speakers are awesome. Like I, as I have tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other brands here and there, including I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Genelec desktop speaker. They had those briefly.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another one of those stupid oblong, like lozenge shaped thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they’re fine. The KEF speakers, they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound so good. And not all of them, like I actually don’t like the LS50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line very much. Like they have a bit of a different sound profile that I don’t care for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the Q line and the LSX2, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really enjoy. And they have a totally different design where they have concentric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drivers where the tweeter is on the inside of the woofer. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just two concentric circles. It looks like one driver, but the tweeter is like the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part. then that vibrates separately from the outer part which is the woofer. It’s a crazy design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s a bunch of benefits to that in terms of like, it kind of widens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sweet spot of the sound and it avoids certain interference patterns. Like it ends up sounding really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what Kef is really good at to my ears is that musicality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like these are not flat frequency responses. They just sound really pleasant and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really good in a way that like, especially in mid-range and in vocals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t found anything that sounds this good in speakers. I have one pair of headphones that I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than this. That’s the Hi-Fi Man HE6 that I have from forever ago. I’ve never found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else besides those headphones and Kev speakers and only a few models of Kev speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sound that good in the mid-range. But fortunately, I don’t have to deal with like, these being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly, cause they’re not ugly. They’re great looking to my opinion. And you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re offered in colors, multiple colors. Every Kef speaker is offered in multiple colors. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the boring wood finish ones are offered in four different woods. And these have carpet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the outside of them. These have four different colors too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have lots of different styles because when people use things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they buy them for their homes, they want them to look like their
⏹️ ▶️ John personality. It’s a permanent fixture in your house. It’s gonna be a thing that you see all the time. So you do want it to look
⏹️ ▶️ John nice and match. You want it to look good and to have some options. And by the way, I think the Kefs, if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John them now and you’re like, Marco thinks these looks good. They’re a little bit puffy looking if you’re not used to what they
⏹️ ▶️ John look like. And the Kef does make other much, much larger tower speakers that are much more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and have lots more large drivers that don’t look like the little concentric things. And yes, other companies also have concentric
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers and they’re great. Everyone should make center channel speakers with concentric drivers. You hear me? But they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. But still, some other companies do have. In fact, I believe there are a couple, I was looking at some, when I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at other like desk computer speakers, they have computer speakers with concentric drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John too, not from KEF, but like from other much less expensive brands. It’s a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ John because it aligns the, you know, the high frequencies, low frequencies, and it’s very beneficial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, there’s a bright yellow version of the LSX2 now. This was not available when I purchased.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should look at the really big KEF Tower speakers. I think you might like them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, they look nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, the downsides of these Auras, what I had heard is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John when these are all small speakers, they’re kind of expensive. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have a bass or treble adjustment on the speakers, which everyone complained about and I knew I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like because I do like to have that basic adjustability on the speaker itself. These don’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew that going in. Everyone who owned them was happy with them. Some people did
⏹️ ▶️ John say that they heard the Aura 4 versus the Aura and they picked the Aura because they felt the Aura 4 had a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John too much bass. I mean, it makes sense. They’re basically exactly the same speaker except for the
⏹️ ▶️ John mid-range slash quote unquote woofer is just so much bigger on the Aura 4. So it can’t help but sound bassier because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the whole deal. Some people like the Aura 4, it’s better because it was bassier and could go
⏹️ ▶️ John louder because it has a more powerful amplifier and a bigger driver and all that other stuff. In the end, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided to get the Aura 4 because I did like the way it looked. No negative reviews from anybody really.
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured I could live with the lack of bass and treble controls. And I like the way, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 24 bit 96 kilohertz, even though it’s pointless. And I like the way the speaker cone, look, the metal speaker cone versus
⏹️ ▶️ John the paper one or whatever. So I did indeed get the Kanto Aura 4s.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are just a flat rectangle. And of course I needed them to be tilted up. If you are using
⏹️ ▶️ John computer speakers and you do not have them pointed at your ears, you are missing out on a lot. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John most computer speakers, if they’re designed at all, are designed for quote unquote near field listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is your head is pretty close to the speakers. Like you can reach them with your hands. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John not the case with, you know, stereo speakers or whatever, even home theater speakers that are filling your room
⏹️ ▶️ John with sound. These are going to be close to you. They’re often very directional, which means that if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John point in particular the tweeters at your ears, you are losing a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John frequencies that they’re putting out. And it’s not subtle. You can just take them and twist them. so they’re pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John directly at the back of the room and you hear the treble disappear and then point them back at your ear. So you need them to point
⏹️ ▶️ John at you and you can just twist them on your desk, but you also need them to point up at your ears. So you have a choice of either
⏹️ ▶️ John getting some speaker stands that elevates the speaker so they are at ear level, which I don’t wanna do because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like how it looks, or you get something that tilts them up. Luckily, Kanto,
⏹️ ▶️ John my first interaction with Kanto as a brand was I bought their speaker stands for my home theater speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John They make lots of speaker stands. Surprise, surprise, they make tiny little angled
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker stands for their tiny speakers. And so if you get the Kanto Aura, you can get the Kanto
⏹️ ▶️ John S2 speaker stands, which is a bent piece of metal that costs less than the one inside my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you buy the Aura 4, you should get the Kanto S4 speaker stand. Pro tip for Kanto,
⏹️ ▶️ John on your website, clearly indicate which speakers the stand works with.
⏹️ ▶️ John They try to do that, but they don’t mention the Auras anywhere. So I can just tell you from experimentally determining,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Kanto S4 speaker stands fit the Kanto Aura 4 perfectly.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Kanto Aura 4s have a little screw hole in the bottom, the stands have a little screw hole and they come with a screw
⏹️ ▶️ John and it fits directly in there and they exactly fit. And so I hooked up my speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John with a big long USB-C cable to my Mac, plugged everything in, turned everything on, tried it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what I think of these things. I wish they had a bass and treble knob.
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew I would. I knew it would be a problem. Part of that, like Marco basically
⏹️ ▶️ John covered this, all this exact stuff before. I’m old and I can’t hear treble as well as I used to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m 50, right? That’s just a fact of life. I also happen to like
⏹️ ▶️ John treble. The Kanto Aura 4 in their default mode
⏹️ ▶️ John sound too bassy to me. They sound bassy. They sound muddled. They sound muffled. To
⏹️ ▶️ John a young person, maybe they don’t, but to me, they do. which is fine. Very often, if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John computer speaker that has a bass and a treble knob, just turn the knobs until it sounds the way you want it to.
⏹️ ▶️ John No knobs, so you can’t do that. So I’m left with software solutions, which is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of good software solutions. This in particular, SoundSource from Rogo Miba, a piece of software I already own,
⏹️ ▶️ John can do this for you. It can provide a system-wide equalizer that applies to all
⏹️ ▶️ John audio across the entire system with customizable equalizer curves and yada, yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t wanna do it system-wide, iTunes itself, which is where I listen to my music or whatever the hell it’s called now, Music
⏹️ ▶️ John also has its own equalizer inside the Music app if you just wanna equalize the music and not
⏹️ ▶️ John every system sound. There are many other apps that do this that you can find. I like SoundSource because it does 5,000 other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve already put in like five feature requests for SoundSource. My main
⏹️ ▶️ John activity while setting these things up has been trying to figure out what equalizer
⏹️ ▶️ John curve do I want? I’ve been trying to sort of manually reproduce the Harmon curve, because I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do kind of like that. Was it Harmon Carden? The stereo manufacturer came up with
⏹️ ▶️ John a curve that they claim is what most people, they just let a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to things and said, do you like this better, worse or the same? And they came up with a curve that they thought, if you apply this curve,
⏹️ ▶️ John most people think it sounds better. This is what Marco was getting at with like, it’s not neutral. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it sounds exactly like what you’d expect from a design by committee to average.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These, everything designed with the Harmon Curve, because when they released that, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was then judged against that. And so for a long time, I think even still today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John People imitate it, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and every headphone and speaker is tuned to try to match the Harmon Curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly because they know they’re gonna be reviewed against it. And as a result, a lot of things end up sounding exactly the same. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, it’s a little bit less treble than I would like. And so most headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and speakers sound very boring to me as a result. And so, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with using EQ to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweak the sound the way you want it. I have an EQ in my system, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I was basically trying to reproduce the Harmon curve with my equalizer, because I found that that is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of what I want. And I was trying to find a good link. You would think there’d be like a good Wikipedia page on the Harmon curve, and there
⏹️ ▶️ John are a bunch of Wikipedia pages about target curves, and the Harmon itself has some pages about this, but there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here is the one definitive URL for the Harmon target curve. I was very disappointed in not
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to find it, I wanted to find the literal values like because I’m moving sliders. I’m like, I need to know where to move these sliders. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to just match the shape on this, you know, logarithmic graph where they have to carefully count the little
⏹️ ▶️ John lines to figure out what value that is. I figured someone’s got to have it like a Excel spreadsheet with the values
⏹️ ▶️ John for like 10 band EQ or something, but I couldn’t find it. But anyway, basically what it looks like is
⏹️ ▶️ John like a kind of an S shaped curve where like it’s high at the base then dips down low and then goes up high at the treble but
⏹️ ▶️ John then dips down at the very end of the treble.
⏹️ ▶️ John point is I was playing with equalizers to make these sound good and the upshot is
⏹️ ▶️ John that when I equal these things take very well to equalization because they have more than enough
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything. If I want tons of bass they have it. This is even without a subwoofer attached. If they want tons of bass and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I want they can do it and they also have pretty good treble so it’s just a question of how much of each thing do you
⏹️ ▶️ John want? How do you want to dial it in? I came up with a curve in SoundSource that I think I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John like. I’m still tweaking it a little bit it. And they just sound way better than my 16 year old speakers. Surprise!
⏹️ ▶️ John They cost way more and they sound way better. I think they look really nice too. I love the stands.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the other complaints about the Kanto Auras in particular, not the Aura 4s, is that they’re so small and light
⏹️ ▶️ John and that the knob on them is so stiff and you have to press the knob in to turn them on and off that you end up moving the
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker on your desk. That does not happen with the Aura 4s, especially on the stands,
⏹️ ▶️ John because all of Kanto’s stands They’re very heavy metal stands and the speakers are screwed to them
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have like grippy stuff on the bottom So I can press the power button and that doesn’t happen the
⏹️ ▶️ John one downside to the power button is I have to press it twice because when you first press it it always defaults to Like the 3.5 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John jack and the second presses do USB Which leads me to the final thing about this which is
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said before most of the time I spend with my old speakers during that 16 years The speakers were turned off
⏹️ ▶️ John like physically turned off with an off switch So every time my computer went to make a sound no sound would
⏹️ ▶️ John come out because they were sending sound to speakers that were turned Off that’s the way I like it. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John and when I want to hear music I turn my speakers on Now whenever I turn my speakers on
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to press the power button twice, which is a little bit annoying But the other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I discovered about this that I hadn’t thought about at all is after I was you know I got them all set up or okay. Let me just do some
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff turn my speakers off start working I think I clicked on something and it beeped. I’m like, how are they beeping?
⏹️ ▶️ John I turn the speakers off and I said, oh, that wasn’t the speakers beeping. That was my Mac beeping.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes I forget that my Mac has a speaker inside it, but it does. The Mac Pro does in fact have a speaker in
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’m like, Mac, why are you making noise? You’ve never done that before. You know the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because these speakers are connected with a USB cable. And when I turn these speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John off, Mac OS goes, well, wherever the hell that USB audio interface was, it’s gone now. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John falling back to the internal speaker. So to solve that problem, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John the analog hole solution, which is plug a stub headphone adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John into the headphone jack on the back of my Mac. And now it thinks it’s connected to some analog speakers through
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3.5 millimeter jack, but it’s not. So now my Mac is blessedly silent.
⏹️ ▶️ John system-wide EQ through SoundSource. I have speakers on my desk that I find very
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive. I hope they don’t collect too much dust. I’ll keep you updated on that dust situation. They sound so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John than my old speakers. And I actually have been, to Casey’s delight, listening to way more music at my
⏹️ ▶️ John desk, although I absolutely cannot, I was trying to develop my app this week, and at various
⏹️ ▶️ John points I said, wait a second, I need to turn this music off. What do you think I am? I’m not Casey List. I can’t, like my brain, I can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m an active listener, and my brain latches onto the music and stops doing the programming.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so there are only limited circumstances in which I can, I think we’ve talked about this before. I can do CSS
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m listening to music. I can’t really code and I definitely can’t write. So, but I have listened to a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of music when I’ve been working this week and I’m really happy with the new speakers. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, there is some improvement. Oh, and size wise, I’m glad I got the bigger ones. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John afraid they would be too big. They’re not. I think the small ones are a little bit too small and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think these big ones are a little bit too big, but they’re not so big that they dominate
⏹️ ▶️ John the desk in a problematic way. So if you’re looking for a speaker and have similar
⏹️ ▶️ John requirements to my ridiculous requirements that you just heard, and you like how these look, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they sound pretty good. And I like almost everything about them and I hope they will last another 16 years. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not as picky as me, definitely look at those Adam Audio things because they’re a little bit ugly, but they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are they like, $100 less, $150 less, $100 less than the ones I
⏹️ ▶️ John got and they supposedly sound better. So if you don’t want to be foolish like me and buy speakers based on how they
⏹️ ▶️ John look, but rather how they sound, go check out the Adam Audio D3V. And if you like the way they sound, they are