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488: Pebbles on the Scale

 

00:00:00   - So I have a minor HomePod update.

00:00:03   - Oh, did you source a new to you big ass HomePod?

00:00:08   - Or did you do a factory reset,

00:00:09   'cause a lot of people suggested that,

00:00:10   hey, just factory reset those suckers,

00:00:12   they'll be good as new.

00:00:12   - I have done that before.

00:00:14   I did it, I think about two months ago, actually, recently.

00:00:17   So I have done that before, and it seemed to last

00:00:20   maybe a week or two before it reverted back

00:00:24   to the old buggy behavior.

00:00:25   - Cool. - And so I think it was

00:00:26   probably just coincidence, or like,

00:00:29   You know, some other, you know, anyway.

00:00:31   And I have yet, I have so far as yet

00:00:34   not gone through the route of trying to get

00:00:37   replacement big home pods because

00:00:39   my theory is that the problems are

00:00:41   partly, you know, my physical units having

00:00:44   problems and flaking out and dying.

00:00:46   But also partly I think there's just a major,

00:00:48   you know, software neglect going on.

00:00:50   And those old home pods were slow as crap to begin with.

00:00:53   And so clearly they were like struggling

00:00:55   to run the software they came with.

00:00:58   let alone whatever it's been updated to now.

00:01:00   So anyway, I did, as I mentioned,

00:01:03   I had briefly tried a B&O product.

00:01:06   It was kind of embarrassing because

00:01:08   I started playing the music from it

00:01:12   and I was like, okay, well, you know, this thing,

00:01:13   it looks fantastic and it sounds okay,

00:01:18   but it doesn't sound the way it should,

00:01:21   especially for its price.

00:01:23   Sounds like small speakers.

00:01:25   And I'm like, just for comparison, let me see.

00:01:27   So just for comparison, I put next to the expensive product

00:01:31   a HomePod Mini.

00:01:32   And the HomePod Mini sounded as good in most ways

00:01:38   and better in some ways.

00:01:40   I see the landscape now.

00:01:42   I now see what those kind of products are for.

00:01:46   Again, they looked great, but they are not for sound.

00:01:50   And the HomePod Mini for how poorly it fills a large room,

00:01:57   it actually does sound better than almost anything else

00:01:59   that is reasonably small.

00:02:01   And for this purpose, I want it to be,

00:02:03   and need it to be reasonably small.

00:02:05   Because this is going on my kitchen counter

00:02:07   with other stuff that has to share the counter with it.

00:02:10   And so I set up a stereo pair of HomePod minis

00:02:14   that I happen to have already for various rooms in the house.

00:02:16   I get moved in there.

00:02:17   And so far it's fine.

00:02:20   It definitely is way faster to respond

00:02:24   to things like touch controls, seat controls,

00:02:27   Airplay source is being sent to it.

00:02:29   Siri itself is no worse.

00:02:32   Might even be slightly better in its response time.

00:02:35   And so far the stereo pair of HomePod minis

00:02:37   has not broken itself.

00:02:39   So, so far, it kinda seems like maybe I'll just deal

00:02:43   with the HomePod minis until some kind of large

00:02:46   HomePod comes out again that will fill the room better.

00:02:49   - I wouldn't hold your breath on that.

00:02:51   - I know, my God.

00:02:52   Why can't the rumor mill be about all that?

00:02:56   I haven't heard anything from the room bill that's credible

00:02:58   about new bigger HomePod coming at some point.

00:03:01   But in certain areas, especially if, like I,

00:03:05   you care about the mid-range of sound.

00:03:07   This is like how clear and distortion-free

00:03:10   and energetic do vocals and, say, electric guitars sound?

00:03:15   That's things that it's surprisingly hard

00:03:18   to get speakers and headphones that sound good,

00:03:20   like really good and smooth and undistorted in those ranges.

00:03:23   I don't know why I'm not enough of an engineer to know.

00:03:26   but there must be some reason why that's difficult.

00:03:29   And Apple has really nailed that

00:03:31   in almost all of their recent audio products.

00:03:35   Even the AirPod Pros, these little tiny things

00:03:39   that go in your ears, sound better than many other things

00:03:42   that are their size or even slightly larger.

00:03:45   The AirPod Maxes, even though I don't like their comfort,

00:03:48   it doesn't work for me,

00:03:49   but their sound is amazing for what they are.

00:03:52   It's really, really great.

00:03:53   and the AirPod Max is one of the best sounding pairs

00:03:56   of headphones I've ever heard, and that's saying a lot.

00:03:59   I've heard a lot of really nice headphones,

00:04:00   and that is up there with some of the best ones.

00:04:03   But the speaker market, the countertop, self-powered speaker

00:04:08   with some kind of voice assistant ideally

00:04:09   so you could yell things at it from across the room,

00:04:12   HomePod's still the best, and even the HomePod Mini

00:04:15   is better than most of what's out there,

00:04:18   and that's really saying something,

00:04:21   because the HomePod mini is fine,

00:04:23   but compared to other speakers,

00:04:25   like regular speakers that are not smart

00:04:27   and self-powered and standalone

00:04:28   and generally much larger,

00:04:30   the HomePod mini is not super special,

00:04:33   but for its size, it's great,

00:04:36   and compared to its competitors, it's great.

00:04:39   The reason I keep bringing it up here

00:04:41   is partly because it's going on in my life

00:04:42   and it's technical and therefore it belongs in the show,

00:04:45   but also, I want all of you to keep buying HomePods

00:04:48   so that Apple will keep making better ones.

00:04:50   So please go out there, respond to the people at Apple.

00:04:52   Please go out there, buy a HomePod mini.

00:04:55   It costs less than some of the dongles they've sold

00:04:57   in the past, like just go out there and get a HomePod mini.

00:05:01   And yeah, we'll see how this industry goes.

00:05:04   But so far, even the mini is better

00:05:08   than most of what's out there.

00:05:10   - You know, with this big HomePod,

00:05:11   you've got like a product that apparently has

00:05:14   like inherent flaws that make it eventually die over time,

00:05:17   but you really like it, but they don't sell it anymore.

00:05:20   What does that sound like to you?

00:05:22   - It sounds like your spatula.

00:05:23   - No, cheese grater.

00:05:25   - Cheese grater, yeah.

00:05:25   - Cheese grater, the OXO cheese grater

00:05:27   that they no longer make that has a fatal flaw

00:05:29   that causes it to crack over time, but I really like it.

00:05:31   I haven't found one that's better.

00:05:33   So I feel like this is an appropriately

00:05:35   Marco scaled version of the cheese grater.

00:05:38   (laughing)

00:05:39   What you need to do is set up a persistent search

00:05:41   like I have for this OXO cheese grater,

00:05:42   and every time one comes up for sale,

00:05:44   you just buy it and put it into a storage facility

00:05:46   in your house, and then what you do

00:05:48   is you factory reset your home pods,

00:05:50   You set 'em up, the second they turn flaky,

00:05:51   you chuck 'em in the garbage, pop 'em in the other pair,

00:05:53   plug 'em in, and go from there.

00:05:55   - I know this is partly a joke,

00:05:58   but I would actually reasonably consider that

00:06:01   if I could get a decent amount of factory wrapped ones

00:06:04   for a reasonable price, if they were standalone objects

00:06:09   like your cheese graters.

00:06:10   The problem is these are devices

00:06:11   that exist in a software ecosystem.

00:06:13   And so if, as I suspect, part of the problem is software,

00:06:18   No new hardware is going to solve that.

00:06:21   They're going to be just as flaky,

00:06:22   or maybe almost as flaky, no matter what I do.

00:06:25   And then if I happen to have a good week here and there,

00:06:29   maybe that'll be fine.

00:06:30   But how much am I willing to tolerate

00:06:32   for the occasional good week when,

00:06:34   so far the HomePod Mini, granted,

00:06:36   I've only had this setup with these particular HomePod

00:06:38   Minis for a few days, but that setup is better.

00:06:41   And so I'll see how it goes over time.

00:06:43   I hope it's better over time.

00:06:45   And I hope Apple doesn't abandon that product line as well.

00:06:48   But we will see.

00:06:50   - It is funny to me that the HomePod Mini is what,

00:06:53   100 bucks? - Yep.

00:06:54   - Or something like that?

00:06:55   And you are not kidding.

00:06:57   My favorite USB-C digital AV multi-port adapter, 70 bucks.

00:07:01   (laughing)

00:07:02   It's not that different.

00:07:04   It's so ridiculously expensive, gosh.

00:07:06   - Yeah, like for all of, you know,

00:07:09   yes, I know you can get a little crappy Echo whatever

00:07:12   for like 50 bucks.

00:07:14   Trust me, the HomePod Mini sounds way better than that.

00:07:17   We have one of the ball-shaped mid-range echoes,

00:07:22   what used to be the only echo at that product line spot,

00:07:25   which is about 100 bucks.

00:07:27   We have one of those.

00:07:29   The HomePod Mini sounds better than it.

00:07:31   And two HomePod Minis for 200 bucks

00:07:34   sounds better than lots of things

00:07:36   that are much more than that.

00:07:37   Again, not as good as the big HomePod.

00:07:40   This is why I'm so sad. (laughs)

00:07:43   But considering what it is and what it costs,

00:07:47   the HomePod mini might be one of the best values

00:07:50   Apple has produced in recent history.

00:07:53   It's so good compared to other things like it.

00:07:57   And for quote, "Only 100 bucks,"

00:08:02   even though that is expensive

00:08:03   for the crap home speaker market,

00:08:05   this isn't a crap home speaker,

00:08:06   this is like a mid-range home speaker,

00:08:08   and it's quite good at that.

00:08:09   I was kind of surprised.

00:08:10   I tried two different B&O things.

00:08:14   One of them was about as good as a HomePod full size.

00:08:19   Not even as good as it, just about as good at it.

00:08:23   It cost more than a laptop,

00:08:24   and it was like four times the size.

00:08:28   That just shows you how good the first HomePod was.

00:08:31   That it could be like a quarter the size of that thing,

00:08:34   something like an eighth or sixth,

00:08:36   whatever it is at the price,

00:08:37   like way less money, way less size,

00:08:40   and sounded actually slightly better.

00:08:42   Apple's audio engineering is really good recently.

00:08:45   They've been pumping out some really great speakers

00:08:48   and headphones recently, and it's great in the areas

00:08:52   that they are in as much as I am, like the AirPods,

00:08:56   and the areas that they started and then pulled out of

00:09:00   are just making me so sad.

00:09:01   I just go back in, please, because, man,

00:09:04   Apple speakers are really, really good.

00:09:06   Just please make more of them.

00:09:08   It's tough because you are the one guy that wants the big home pods and nobody

00:09:13   else. Like I remember when they came out,

00:09:15   I was super interested in them because in principle it sounds like something I

00:09:18   would really like because I hate silence.

00:09:21   I always have to have something on typically music, but um,

00:09:24   I don't like it when the house is quiet,

00:09:27   which I know is probably the antithesis of John. But, um,

00:09:30   I always like to have music playing and I looked at the home pod when it first

00:09:33   came out and what was it like 350 bucks for one of them or something like that.

00:09:36   It was absurd how expensive it was.

00:09:38   And even though I ostensibly do this for a living

00:09:42   and buying Apple stuff is sorta kind of my job,

00:09:47   it's actually Marco's job, but it's sorta kind of my job.

00:09:50   And I couldn't justify it for 350 bucks.

00:09:52   One, let alone two of them.

00:09:53   And I'm not saying that you're wrong to have bought them.

00:09:56   I'm just saying I think this is a product

00:09:58   that in many ways is for me,

00:10:00   but I couldn't get over that price tag, man.

00:10:02   It was just so expensive.

00:10:04   - Yeah, and this is the kind of thing,

00:10:05   and I've talked about this before,

00:10:06   I'm not gonna go into great length here,

00:10:08   but if you can somehow justify and afford

00:10:12   and have the space for a stereo pair

00:10:15   of any of these things, whether it's HomePod minis,

00:10:18   big HomePods, you know, rest their souls,

00:10:21   or like Amazon Echoes, most of these things

00:10:23   support stereo pairs now, get the stereo pair,

00:10:26   even if, like, if there's a model for 200 bucks

00:10:29   and a model for 100 bucks, you're better off

00:10:31   getting two of the $100 ones and putting them

00:10:33   in a stereo pair with a bit of space between them,

00:10:35   than getting the one $200 one.

00:10:37   When you have that amount of space between them

00:10:39   and you can actually create stereo separation physically,

00:10:42   not just relying on, hey, we're gonna have some drivers

00:10:44   pointing to the side and bounce things off the walls

00:10:46   and hope that sounds good.

00:10:47   Like if you can actually have space between them,

00:10:49   it sounds so much better, even if each one

00:10:54   has to be like a smaller or lower end model.

00:10:56   You're generally better off doing that.

00:10:58   And again, like the HomePod minis in stereo pair, not bad.

00:11:02   Not bad.

00:11:03   Like, not amazing, but for 200 bucks, amazing.

00:11:07   (electronic beeping)

00:11:08   - Oh, let's do some follow-up.

00:11:10   iPad Pros 2018 edition, like my beloved one,

00:11:13   which I am really trying to resist throwing away,

00:11:17   figuratively speaking, and getting a new one,

00:11:19   but that's neither here nor there.

00:11:20   How much RAM does it have, Jon?

00:11:22   - Does not have eight gigs.

00:11:23   I was misled by one of the higher-up Google results

00:11:28   for trying to find out this information.

00:11:29   we'll put a link to the bogus link,

00:11:31   the bogus page that misled me.

00:11:34   We'll also put a link to the Wikipedia page,

00:11:35   which I did check first, I usually do,

00:11:37   but they have like that sidebar on Wikipedia

00:11:39   where they have the specs, right?

00:11:41   And the sidebar didn't have the RAM

00:11:42   unlike some other iPad pages.

00:11:45   So I just gave up and did a different Google search.

00:11:47   But the Wikipedia page does say the answer

00:11:50   in the body of the text.

00:11:52   Of course, it would be nice if I could have just gone

00:11:54   to the official Apple site and looked it up.

00:11:55   And I probably could have if I had dug way into

00:11:58   like the tech specs, I'm sure it's on something.apple.com somewhere, but it certainly isn't on the product

00:12:03   page because they don't like to list the RAM.

00:12:05   Anyway, this is relevant because we were talking about why only the M1 iPad support stage manager.

00:12:12   Good job.

00:12:13   You got it.

00:12:14   I'm working on it.

00:12:15   Yeah, all that practice and I still almost fumbled it the first time.

00:12:21   And it was like, okay, well this one, this iPad Air with 64 gigs of storage, it'll run

00:12:25   it without even using swap so obviously it doesn't require swap maybe it requires RAM

00:12:30   and it's like well it doesn't require RAM because that has 8 gigs but so does this old

00:12:32   iPad but no the old iPad had either 4 gigs or 6 gigs of RAM not 8 so the leading theory

00:12:38   now you know that we kind of poo-pooed last week is that seems like it's the RAM because

00:12:43   all of the iPads that support stage manager have 8 gigs of RAM or more and the ones that

00:12:49   don't support it have less RAM there was a little bit of stuff lying around the internet

00:12:53   about the sort of Apple internal developer mode to enable stage manager on lesser iPads.

00:13:01   You know, obviously that exists because as the quick fitter you said and you know some

00:13:05   of the statements from Apple, like they tried it on the other iPads and they found it unsatisfactory

00:13:09   and again see last week's episode about where Apple can choose to spend its money to try

00:13:13   to, should we try to get it to work on the old iPads or should we just you know plow

00:13:17   bravely forward and eventually it will work on all of our future iPads.

00:13:20   So anyway, our bad, iPad Pro 2018 does not have 8 gigs of RAM.

00:13:24   Jon, you've been on a journey, you've been on a journey trying to get some cheap software.

00:13:29   What's the latest?

00:13:30   A lot of feedback from people about their experience using Apple educational discounts,

00:13:34   and in particular this software bundle that comes with a bunch of fancy Apple Pro applications

00:13:38   for a very low price.

00:13:41   Some people said that they bought it and what they ended up getting was like a PDF sent

00:13:45   to them via email after they purchased that had a bunch of promo codes that you would

00:13:50   redeem and in which case obviously you could redeem them on whatever Apple ID you wanted,

00:13:54   they're just promo codes, that's kind of weird that they come on a PDF.

00:13:58   But anyway, a lot of people had that experience.

00:14:01   Other people said that if you buy it with a Mac, the software comes pre-installed on

00:14:04   the Mac and it'll be licensed to whatever Apple ID you first set up on the Mac and that

00:14:08   sounds weird to me, especially if they don't warn you about that.

00:14:12   Apparently you can also buy this bundle separately from a Mac.

00:14:17   It's offered as the come on at the end of configuring your Mac when you go through all

00:14:22   the configuration, pick the RAM, pick the storage.

00:14:24   It says "hey do you want to add this?"

00:14:26   But it's also a separate product.

00:14:27   It's called the Pro Apps Bundle for Education.

00:14:29   It's $200 and it includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Main Stage.

00:14:35   So if you do want to buy it separately that eliminates the possibility that they're going

00:14:39   to pre-install it on some Mac or something, in which case, probably they're sending new

00:14:43   codes to redeem.

00:14:44   But this is all moot because if you go to the Apple educational store, and we'll actually

00:14:48   put a link to it in the show notes, I'm not sure how they confirm that you're a student,

00:14:51   but I think anyone can get to the store page.

00:14:53   At the very top of the store page it says, "Save on a new Mac or iPad with Apple Education

00:14:58   Pricing."

00:14:59   Great, I think I will.

00:15:00   And then the subheading is, "Available to current and newly accepted college students

00:15:06   their parents as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers, blah, blah, blah.

00:15:09   So it's available to students and their parents.

00:15:12   So I don't need to involve my son in this at all.

00:15:14   I am a parent of a newly accepted college student.

00:15:17   I get the discount.

00:15:19   Another thing though, you know, I've been going through this thing, "Oh, discount, it'll

00:15:22   be cheaper," right?

00:15:24   These discounts do not look like what they were back in the day.

00:15:27   And when I say back in the day, I'm talking about when I pulled off the fairly amazing

00:15:31   feet for which I feel like I'm not adequately recognized of convincing my parents to use

00:15:38   my sister's college educational discount.

00:15:42   My sister is four years older than me.

00:15:44   She left for college just as I was entering into high school.

00:15:47   She's off to college.

00:15:48   She gets an educational discount.

00:15:49   And I convinced my parents, "Hey, you should buy a new Mac from the college computer store

00:15:57   using my sister's discount.

00:16:00   that Mac to me and then let her use our Mac 128k upgraded to a Mac Plus that we've been

00:16:06   using in the house and that's what they did. And so I got an SE30 right and the SE30 I

00:16:11   think like the regular retail price starting price was like $4,300 in 1989 dollars or whatever

00:16:17   do the math Matt and be terrified right. But the educational discount was like, educational

00:16:22   discount I think was like $1,200, $1,300, $1,500 off it was huge. I think the educational

00:16:28   discounts now, we're like, oh, you save 100 bucks on a MacBook Air. You save 50 bucks

00:16:31   on a MacBook Air. Like, it's not what it used to be. Obviously, the prices aren't what they

00:16:35   used to be either. Now I'm curious, did someone look that up?

00:16:37   Yeah, I mean, even when I was, when I was like, you know, in the, starting in the Mac

00:16:40   market in the early 2000s, I remember the educational discount being something like

00:16:44   15%, which is substantial when you're looking at some of those larger, you know, higher-end

00:16:49   models. And, and that was, that was always like, you know, the first couple of Macs I

00:16:53   I bought, I was only able to buy because I was getting discounts like that.

00:16:58   Because that made a big difference for me.

00:16:59   Yeah, when I bought my first Mac, my poly book, I had Erin buy it because she was a

00:17:05   K-12 teacher at the time.

00:17:07   And if memory serves, we saved like $150 on the Mac.

00:17:11   And we did it during WWDC week.

00:17:14   And so it was, the back to school sale had started at that point, which I don't think

00:17:18   it does during WWDC week anymore.

00:17:20   But anyways, the back to school sale started.

00:17:23   So she ended up getting a free iPod touch out of the deal.

00:17:26   And that was the first iOS device, first Mac and first iOS device that we had in the house

00:17:31   because they gave you an entire iPod touch and like 150 bucks off.

00:17:34   What was one of the cheapest Macs you could buy at the time?

00:17:37   Like it was bananas and it is not that good anymore.

00:17:39   Yeah, I should probably actually look to see if it's even less than the friends and family

00:17:43   discount because I have friends and family discounts that I could get.

00:17:46   I mean, it's not that bad.

00:17:47   It's a MacBook Air that I'm getting like, who cares?

00:17:48   But I'm just curious what the discounts would be.

00:17:50   I finally did look it up.

00:17:51   So $4,369 was the base price for the SE30 on lunch.

00:17:56   That is $10,298 in today's dollars.

00:18:00   - You've been buying $10,000 computers.

00:18:02   - And by the way, it didn't come with the keyboard.

00:18:04   If you wanted to get the Apple extended keyboard,

00:18:05   that was, let's see, like $200 in 1989,

00:18:09   which is like $471.

00:18:11   Can you imagine paying $471 for a keyboard?

00:18:13   It was a hell of a keyboard.

00:18:14   - Well, the floaty iPad keyboard's like 350, isn't it?

00:18:16   - I was gonna say, how much is the iPad Magic Keyboard?

00:18:19   But that holds the whole thing and it has all,

00:18:21   you know, it's like, it's more, it's an apparatus.

00:18:24   Although, surely the Apple-- - You're not winning me over.

00:18:26   - The Apple extended 2-- - I bet your keyboard

00:18:27   lasts longer.

00:18:29   - Yeah, the Apple extended 2 probably outweighs it

00:18:31   by a lot too and you could use the Apple extended 2

00:18:33   to fend off a longer but you couldn't do that

00:18:35   with the other thing.

00:18:35   Anyway, so my plan now is I'm gonna buy

00:18:39   the Pro App Bundle for education

00:18:40   'cause that really is a pretty big discount.

00:18:42   It's like half off, more than half off maybe.

00:18:45   Even though I don't really care about main stage

00:18:47   and probably don't care about compressor

00:18:48   I'll buy that for myself separately because I'm a parent and then just buy the Mac for

00:18:54   my son when I can order.

00:18:55   That's the other thing to follow up on last week.

00:18:56   It's like, "Oh, I'm going to get the, I'll order the new M2 MacBook Air on Friday."

00:19:00   And Marco was like, "I don't think it's on sale on Friday.

00:19:02   I think it's just the one with the fan in it."

00:19:04   And yeah, sure enough, it was the MacBook, 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 in it, which

00:19:09   I do not want and I did not order.

00:19:11   And I think the M2 MacBook Air is going to go on sale, what, next month, July?

00:19:15   Who knows?

00:19:16   I am so glad, first of all to be right,

00:19:18   'cause you know everyone likes being right,

00:19:19   I'm so glad though that all the reviews

00:19:23   are basically panning that computer saying like,

00:19:26   "Look, the M2 is amazing, but why are you shipping it

00:19:29   "in this ancient enclosure with these ancient ports

00:19:31   "and the ancient touch bar?"

00:19:33   - No mag safe.

00:19:34   - All the reviews basically say,

00:19:36   "You shouldn't buy this, just wait for the MacBook Air."

00:19:39   - I mean, but the good thing that the reviews say,

00:19:41   I feel like it's kind of like the people

00:19:42   who like the Mac Mini or you with the HomeBots,

00:19:44   It's like, look, if you really love the Touch Bar,

00:19:46   better get it while you can, 'cause, you know,

00:19:48   it's only gonna be around for the next seven years

00:19:50   as Tim Cook continues to sell the same computer

00:19:52   for seven years, but anyway,

00:19:54   this is probably the last one, right?

00:19:56   Like, it is gone from every other newer model,

00:19:58   so, you know, if you like the Touch Bar,

00:20:01   that's the reason to buy this,

00:20:02   because you can't get the Touch Bar anywhere else.

00:20:04   It's only gonna be on this model, we assume,

00:20:06   and, you know, again, Tim Cook may sell this model

00:20:08   for another five years, but we'll see.

00:20:10   - This model makes me so angry, and what makes me angriest--

00:20:13   Don't get me started. Don't get me started. I will fight you over who is more angry about this stupid computer because I am so angry.

00:20:19   What makes me angriest about it is not the touch bar. You would expect, based on my past here, you would expect I would be super mad that they're still showing me the touch bar. I'm not.

00:20:27   What makes me angriest about this computer is how many people buy it because they're swayed by the marketing of the name "Pro" when they would actually be better served by the air.

00:20:38   That is what drives me nuts.

00:20:40   'Cause so many people buy this computer

00:20:42   because they think, oh well, I'm a pro,

00:20:45   I'm gonna run, I'm gonna be editing podcasts,

00:20:48   therefore I'm a pro.

00:20:48   It's like, no, you don't understand, you don't need it.

00:20:51   This will benefit you nothing at all

00:20:53   and you're missing out on these other good things

00:20:56   with the air.

00:20:56   That's what bugs me about it.

00:20:58   The people who buy it mostly are buying it

00:21:01   because of a marketing benefit that they perceive

00:21:05   that's not actually there at the expense of things

00:21:08   they actually would enjoy more about the Air.

00:21:10   That's why it bugs me so much.

00:21:12   - Hmm, I don't know,

00:21:13   that's a pretty narrow definition of people.

00:21:15   I'm not sure anybody both cares enough about the Pro name

00:21:18   to be attracted to this and also doesn't know that,

00:21:20   you know, doesn't know what the deal is with this computer.

00:21:22   - John, how quickly you forget

00:21:23   what corporate buying looks like?

00:21:25   Oh, these are professionals, I must get the Pro.

00:21:27   What's the cheapest Pro?

00:21:29   Oh, here we go, that looks fancy.

00:21:31   - This one's enterprise ready 'cause it says Pro,

00:21:33   we're an enterprise, we're pros, we need this computer.

00:21:35   - The other thing that is, you know,

00:21:37   If you want to touch bar, this is probably the last one.

00:21:39   This is, I am assuming, the last Apple laptop

00:21:43   that will have the old design in terms

00:21:46   of the shape of the case.

00:21:47   And you maybe think, what do you mean shape of the case?

00:21:49   It's just one of these rectangular ones.

00:21:50   It's not a shape at all.

00:21:52   It is.

00:21:52   So when they redid the 14 inch and the 16 inch,

00:21:56   whatever, the new ones with the little round feet

00:21:57   and everything, that's the new design.

00:22:00   This is the last of the old design,

00:22:01   which had kind of a long taper

00:22:04   and then a sharp edge on the ends.

00:22:06   All of Apple's laptops were shaped like this for many, many years, and this is the last

00:22:10   one.

00:22:11   And I have to say, this design, whatever you want to call it, the Johnny Ives special,

00:22:15   I'm not sure how much he was involved, but we always attribute this design to him.

00:22:18   The one with just the USB-C shaped holes on the sides, no MagSafe, no HDMI, so on and

00:22:24   so forth.

00:22:25   The shape of that computer is more attractive than the shape of the current computers.

00:22:31   That doesn't make it a better computer, but if you really want to get the last of this

00:22:35   You know, they'll all be the more utilitarian-looking design once this one goes away.

00:22:41   So yeah, if you want to get the last of a bunch of extremely questionably valuable attributes

00:22:49   like the touch bar, the lack of ports, and the shape — although I have to say, I think

00:22:53   the shape is more attractive, but that's just, you know, it's kind of a blessing and a curse

00:22:57   every time you see the more attractive shapes.

00:22:59   "Yeah, but you weren't useful.

00:23:00   Where was your SD slot?

00:23:01   Where was your MagSafe?"

00:23:02   This computer makes me so irrationally angry. Like it is in service of no one

00:23:08   except Apple and I guess the three people that like the touch bar. It's it

00:23:12   is not useful. It is old. Nobody should be buying this thing. I mean I know it's not

00:23:17   old on the inside but like the design is old. Living the only USB-C lifestyle is

00:23:22   no fun. Like it's doable but it's no fun. If you're going to get a Pro, get a 14

00:23:26   inch MacBook Pro or like Mark was saying most people can probably just get an

00:23:31   and they will be fine and at least the air has magsafe like this is such a

00:23:34   Stupid freaking computer and it makes me so unreasonably and irrationally angry that it exists

00:23:40   I don't know why it upsets me so much

00:23:42   But it gets me so mad that this is still a thing like just kill it kill it from the lineup

00:23:48   It is in service of no one. It is not it is not good for anybody

00:23:51   All people are gonna do is buy it and be disappointed

00:23:54   Like just know at least with the MacBook adorable

00:23:57   Which was a piece of garbage when it was brand new and I love that thing

00:24:00   even though it was a piece of garbage,

00:24:01   it was good at being thin and light.

00:24:03   It was good at nothing else,

00:24:05   but it was very good at being thin and light

00:24:07   and frustrating you over having only one port.

00:24:09   It was good at those things.

00:24:10   This is good at nothing.

00:24:13   It makes me so mad.

00:24:15   - As Marco said in past episodes,

00:24:16   we don't actually know that yet

00:24:18   until we get the M2 MacBook Airs and can stress test them

00:24:21   because the stress testing,

00:24:22   I think maybe the M2 MacBook Air thermal throttles

00:24:25   more than the old one did,

00:24:26   in which case the Pro would be better

00:24:28   for sustained performance which is what Apple said about it in the presentation

00:24:32   "oh if you want sustained performance get this one" right? were they hinting at the

00:24:35   fact the M2's throttle more or did they just say that for the hell of it? and the

00:24:39   second thing is the M2 MacBook Pro has a bigger battery. how much of a

00:24:44   difference does that make in battery life? we won't know until we get the M2 MacBook Air

00:24:47   and people test the battery life on it. so it is possible that the function

00:24:51   this serves is shoring up some deficiencies in the M2 MacBook Air that

00:24:55   didn't exist in the M1 MacBook Air, but we don't know that yet.

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00:26:52   [music]

00:26:56   Tell me about system settings and system preferences.

00:26:59   Bard Reardon actually tried taking system preferences from Mac OS 12 and putting it on Ventura.

00:27:06   like the application, I mean, the little icon.

00:27:09   -But you can do that? -Yeah, I didn't think you could.

00:27:12   -Interesting thing about that I got to in a second,

00:27:13   but anyway, but if you do that,

00:27:15   system preferences runs just fine on Ventura,

00:27:17   and everything works on it.

00:27:19   He says, "You could even have them both open at the same time

00:27:23   and changing setting in one updates in the other."

00:27:25   -That's bananas. -I mean, it makes perfect sense,

00:27:27   because, like, that's just a GUI.

00:27:29   It's a GUI wrapper for underlying functionality,

00:27:32   and from Monterey to Ventura,

00:27:34   the underlying functionality has not changed so much that, you know, the old one won't work anymore.

00:27:39   Like the new system settings, it's a new GUI, it's a new GUI wrapper, but it's not like everything

00:27:44   underneath that has been ripped out and replaced, it's just the GUI wrapper over it. So it makes

00:27:48   sense that they would both work. Obviously that's not going to hold true over the long term because

00:27:53   things do change under the covers and the GUI has to be updated to talk to different subsystems or

00:27:58   whatever, but apparently right now it does work in both. And what I was going to say about copying it,

00:28:03   All right, you can take, you know,

00:28:06   system preferences from Monterey and just grab it

00:28:08   and make a copy of it and then just put it over on your,

00:28:10   you know, on your Ventura Mac.

00:28:12   But what you can't do with it on any recent Mac

00:28:15   on a Mac running Ventura or Monterey is you can't put it

00:28:18   in the same place as system settings

00:28:19   because system settings, I believe,

00:28:21   is probably like under system library core services,

00:28:24   something or other, right?

00:28:25   It's in the read only snapshot of the system volume

00:28:30   that boots the OS.

00:28:31   I think we talked about this many, many shows ago,

00:28:32   but modern versions of Mac OS boot from a read-only snapshot

00:28:37   of a cryptographically sealed volume

00:28:38   so it can be assured that nothing can modify

00:28:41   the running operating system.

00:28:42   There are parts of the operating system

00:28:43   that are outside that read-only snapshot

00:28:45   because they have to be written

00:28:46   and they wanna be updated more easily

00:28:48   without rebooting and stuff like that.

00:28:50   But I think system preference is not one of those things.

00:28:52   I think it is part of the OS.

00:28:54   And so you can't put system preferences

00:28:56   in the same directory.

00:28:57   You may be thinking, who cares where I put it?

00:28:59   I'll just put it in the application folder.

00:29:00   I'll put it on my desktop.

00:29:01   I don't care where it is, but Ventura adds a new security feature that does not allow

00:29:07   system applications to be run from any place other than where they're supposed to be.

00:29:13   This is like a malware type of thing that says, "Hey, system settings shouldn't be out

00:29:18   there."

00:29:19   Like if malware could somehow extract system settings from the read-only volume and modify

00:29:23   the binary and then run it again, because you may have a binary that has some kind of

00:29:26   privilege or uses a private API or whatever.

00:29:29   If you could modify that binary, some malware can find a way to exploit the system by modifying

00:29:34   the executable of some part of the OS.

00:29:38   But you can't modify it when it's on a read-only snapshot.

00:29:40   So you'd have to copy it off of the read-only snapshot, then modify it, but then you can't

00:29:44   run it anymore.

00:29:45   And this is part of a larger framework.

00:29:46   I forget what it's called.

00:29:47   I think I put a link later in the show about it.

00:29:50   What is it called?

00:29:51   AMFI?

00:29:52   Something like that?

00:29:53   Oh, God.

00:29:54   I'll find it and link it somewhere.

00:29:55   It's a generic system for putting more constraints

00:29:58   on executables that run.

00:30:00   And one of the constraints you can put on it

00:30:01   is this executable can only run from this directory.

00:30:04   - That's really cool.

00:30:05   John, tell me about copying and pasting edits

00:30:08   and adjustments and things like that in Photos.

00:30:10   - I was excited about the newly announced feature

00:30:13   for photos for Apple's Photos system,

00:30:16   where you can take an adjustment kind of like in Lightroom

00:30:18   and then apply it to a bunch of photos at once.

00:30:21   And that feature was listed on the iOS features page,

00:30:24   on the iPad OS features page, but I couldn't find it on the Mac's photos page, so I wondered,

00:30:28   "Is this not coming to the Mac?"

00:30:30   Well, first of all, it turns out it is on that page.

00:30:32   It's just farther down than I had gone.

00:30:33   I found what I thought was the photos section that was talking about the shared family photo

00:30:37   library thing, but that wasn't the only section about photos.

00:30:41   So it is coming to the Mac version of photos, which is good.

00:30:44   But second, a feature very much like this exists in the current version of Mac photos,

00:30:49   but you might not know about it.

00:30:51   In fact, a lot of people reported that this existed

00:30:53   and I said, "Where is that menu item?"

00:30:55   And I launched photos and I saw it,

00:30:56   I'm like, "Why is it always disabled for me?"

00:30:58   The menu item is copy adjustments and paste adjustments.

00:31:00   I'm like, "Well, it's right there in the menu.

00:31:02   "How have I never seen this?

00:31:03   "Why have I never used it?

00:31:04   "And more importantly, why is it always grayed out?

00:31:07   "How come I can't copy adjustments?"

00:31:08   So I went, I would like edit a picture,

00:31:10   I'd make adjustments, and then I'd go back

00:31:13   to the main screen where all the photos are,

00:31:15   I'd click the photo and I'd say copy adjustments.

00:31:17   But no, it's grayed out.

00:31:19   I'm like, "Maybe you have to crop it."

00:31:20   So I crop it, go back to the main screen,

00:31:21   try to copy adjustments, like no, it's still grayed out.

00:31:24   What does it want me to do?

00:31:25   I made so many adjustments.

00:31:26   Turns out, you can only copy adjustments

00:31:30   when you're in the edit mode.

00:31:31   I have no idea why.

00:31:33   Like what, you have to literally be in the edit mode.

00:31:35   So you edit it, you go into the edit mode

00:31:37   where you got all the sliders on the right hand side,

00:31:38   then you can copy adjustments.

00:31:40   But from any other view, even if it's like zoom full screen,

00:31:43   if it's the little tile mode,

00:31:44   if you're looking at the library, if you're looking at album,

00:31:46   you cannot copy adjustments.

00:31:48   Doesn't make any sense, all right?

00:31:49   So that's first silly thing.

00:31:51   Second thing is you can only paste adjustments

00:31:54   when you are in the edit mode on a photo,

00:31:56   which means you can only apply the adjustments

00:31:58   to one photo at a time.

00:32:00   So that's why they're touting this feature.

00:32:02   Oh, now it works sanely.

00:32:04   I'm assuming.

00:32:05   Copy adjustments from other views

00:32:08   and then paste them into multiple photos at the same time.

00:32:10   Instead of having to go into edit mode, copy adjustments,

00:32:13   go out of edit mode, go into edit mode,

00:32:14   another picture, paste adjustments.

00:32:16   I still maintain that the Mac Photos app

00:32:20   seems to have been designed by people

00:32:22   who never use the Mac Photos app.

00:32:24   - So Evan, can you imagine, like, you can select an item,

00:32:27   like there's so much UI to select a photo,

00:32:29   and it knows which photos have adjustments,

00:32:31   'cause I think they put a little badge on the thumbnail

00:32:33   showing like little lines with sliders or whatever,

00:32:35   it knows that there are adjustments there,

00:32:37   and there's that menu item in the image menu

00:32:39   saying copy adjustments, like no, you can't use it

00:32:41   unless you go into edit mode.

00:32:43   It does not make any sense.

00:32:45   You know how Apple came up with the pro workflows team or whatever it is where

00:32:49   allegedly they brought people like actual professionals from like Hollywood and

00:32:53   places and like, you know,

00:32:55   music professionals and brought them in house either hired them or just asked

00:32:59   them to do their work in, you know, at Apple.

00:33:01   So they could understand what they're doing a little bit better.

00:33:03   I feel like we need to have like adopt an Apple designer day or something where

00:33:09   you have somebody from Apple come into your home. No, no, Tim, Susie,

00:33:14   whatever your name may be, come into the home.

00:33:16   Why don't I show you exactly how I use the Home app

00:33:20   and why it is a pile of (beep)

00:33:23   like let me show you exactly what I'm talking about.

00:33:26   - They just redid the whole Home app,

00:33:27   you got what you wanted.

00:33:28   - I know, okay, maybe that wasn't the best example,

00:33:30   but you know what I'm saying, like,

00:33:31   oh, I would like to edit six photos in the exact same way.

00:33:35   How would you do that?

00:33:36   Oh, look, there's no way to do that right now.

00:33:42   I feel like sometimes Apple just lives in this fantasy world where everything is always their stuff.

00:33:47   They're on these phenomenally fast internet connections that are six feet from the home office.

00:33:53   I'm mostly snarking, but I kind of wonder if they really need to have somebody adopt designers or something

00:34:02   and just be like, "Look, look, look. This is how actual people use your software."

00:34:06   Like real honest to goodness actual people.

00:34:08   Not you folks, like actual people

00:34:12   that use it in the real world, in mixed environments.

00:34:14   You know, I just don't think that they have the awareness

00:34:17   that they showed in that regard.

00:34:18   - I would just take someone from the photos team

00:34:20   and I'd give them like a hundred photos.

00:34:22   And I would say, these photos are taken,

00:34:24   each one of these photos is taken

00:34:25   in one of seven locations.

00:34:27   Use the info pane to set, use whatever you want.

00:34:30   Use any features as application

00:34:32   to set the location for these photos.

00:34:34   But they're not in any order,

00:34:35   so you can't do them in batches.

00:34:36   So you have to do them one at a time, right?

00:34:38   So you click on a photo, and then you go to the info pane,

00:34:41   you type in the address, and I'd give them the 10 addresses.

00:34:43   Here are the 10 addresses, and as you go through each photo,

00:34:45   I'll tell you which one is which address.

00:34:47   And by like the 15th one, they'd be like, huh,

00:34:50   there's only 10 addresses,

00:34:51   and they all begin with separate letters,

00:34:52   but I have to type out the whole address every time.

00:34:54   - Oh, gosh. - That seems suboptimal.

00:34:56   And half the time, when I'm trying to type in the address,

00:34:58   it deselects the text field, and it's no longer focused,

00:35:01   and my character's going to nowhere,

00:35:02   and I have to click it again.

00:35:03   And after they've done 100 of those, I would say,

00:35:06   How do you feel now about your location setting feature

00:35:08   in this application?

00:35:09   Like, does it help you in any way whatsoever?

00:35:13   - What have we learned today?

00:35:14   - Yeah, 'cause it's really just, you know, very hostile.

00:35:18   - I need to go back and rerecord

00:35:19   that section about the home app.

00:35:20   What I should have said,

00:35:21   and hey, you DVD is reminding me in the chat,

00:35:22   I should have used the music app as my example,

00:35:24   because all my great googly moogly

00:35:27   is that thing a pile of turds.

00:35:28   Oh, it is so bad.

00:35:29   I hate it so much, but that's okay.

00:35:32   Speaking of things that are a pile of turds,

00:35:34   "Hey John, tell me about gaming on the Mac."

00:35:36   - This is something that,

00:35:37   I think it was in the keynote even, right?

00:35:39   Where Federighi was, oh no, he was on a talk show, right?

00:35:42   It was talk show live, which we linked to last week

00:35:44   and we linked to again, everyone.

00:35:45   Federighi was touting as part of his like,

00:35:48   let's talk about gaming on the Mac,

00:35:50   the uniformity of the graphics architecture

00:35:52   across Mac, iPad, and the iPhone.

00:35:55   Saying, you know, hey, we have a great solution

00:35:57   for developers, if you develop your application

00:35:59   using your game, using our fancy graphics APIs,

00:36:03   you basically get all these platforms for free

00:36:05   because they all use the same gaming.

00:36:06   Now that the Macs are on Apple Silicon,

00:36:08   have the same GPUs and metal is everywhere,

00:36:10   so on and so forth.

00:36:11   So yeah, it might be weird to use our APIs,

00:36:14   but our APIs are actually really good.

00:36:15   And if you do that work once,

00:36:16   you get access to all of these Apple platforms.

00:36:18   Isn't that great?

00:36:20   And when he said that pitch,

00:36:22   obviously what I was thinking of,

00:36:24   or whatever it was, whatever I was thinking of, right?

00:36:26   I was thinking of the Mac Pro.

00:36:27   Like, what does this mean for AAA gaming

00:36:32   And the thing we've talked about so much is like the Mac Pro,

00:36:36   how much GPU is going to have in it?

00:36:38   Is it going to support third-party GPUs?

00:36:41   Making this pitch makes me think either the Mac Pro is not

00:36:45   part of the gaming pitch, which kind of makes sense

00:36:47   because who's going to buy a Mac Pro to play games?

00:36:48   I mean, what kind of person would do that?

00:36:50   It's ridiculous.

00:36:52   Or this is a hint in the direction

00:36:54   that Marco was always saying is that the new Mac Pro will

00:36:57   absolutely not support third-party video cards.

00:36:59   Because you can't make this pitch about unified gaming

00:37:01   architecture and then ship a Mac Pro and say,

00:37:03   oh, and by the way, you can put AMD,

00:37:05   I guess Nvidia's not gonna have them,

00:37:07   but you can put these AMD graphics cards in there.

00:37:09   That's not a unified graphics architecture.

00:37:11   The whole point of this is they all use these Apple GPUs

00:37:13   with the features that Apple GPUs,

00:37:15   and Apple revs their GPUs,

00:37:17   it's like across the whole system.

00:37:18   So I just thought that was interesting.

00:37:20   And it puts one or two more pebbles on the scales

00:37:23   saying new Mac Pro does not support third-party GPUs at all.

00:37:27   - Yeah, I just, I don't see how anything

00:37:31   is pointing that direction because so much of the Apple Silicon architecture is really

00:37:37   looking like, yeah, there's not going to be third party GPUs. Like, we'll be lucky to

00:37:42   get expandable GPUs on cards or something like that. Even that, I think, is in question

00:37:48   for the new Mac Pro. Even that, I wouldn't assume we will get. But third party GPUs,

00:37:55   I think are even a greater step past that of unlikelihood.

00:38:00   I think we're not gonna see that.

00:38:02   No part of the architecture points to that at all.

00:38:04   - Oh, not, I mean, this statement would make it say

00:38:07   that potentially it's a thing

00:38:08   that Apple wasn't going to support,

00:38:09   but if you put in slots, third parties can sell a card for it

00:38:13   and third parties will make a driver for it

00:38:14   and Apple can't really control that.

00:38:17   - Well, can Apple Silicon even support GPU drivers?

00:38:20   I mean, it already doesn't support eGPUs.

00:38:23   Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think it can support GPU drives, but we'll see. We'll see what they do there.

00:38:27   Like, the reason I wouldn't want to rehash this, but the reason it is coming up is because

00:38:30   it seems like

00:38:32   you won't be able to match the GPU grunt that you can fit in a 2019 Mac Pro

00:38:37   in it by any stretch of the imagination

00:38:39   with just the GPUs that are integrated into any kind of, you know, Mac Pro system on a chip, right?

00:38:46   Just because you can put more than one of them into the machine, but for you can put four

00:38:50   very big, very hot GPUs inside of 2019 Mac Pro,

00:38:54   you can't match that with a system on a chip,

00:38:56   you just can't, right?

00:38:57   And so it's either Apple doesn't care

00:38:58   that you can't match it, so what?

00:39:00   Tough luck, who cares?

00:39:00   'Cause the benchmarks of the applications

00:39:02   that we care about are actually faster without it,

00:39:04   or that Apple has some kind of external GPU solution,

00:39:08   which could be an Apple GPU on a card,

00:39:10   or the Apple sells you four of them

00:39:11   for the price of a few cars,

00:39:13   or it could just be no GPU support at all for the slots,

00:39:16   and the slots are just there for something else,

00:39:18   or it could be no slots.

00:39:19   Anyway, see you many months of past episodes.

00:39:21   - Yeah, given that the Apple Silicon architecture

00:39:25   is so intimately about unified memory

00:39:28   shared between the GPU and the main CPU,

00:39:31   I'm not saying it's impossible.

00:39:32   I mean, it's certainly possible,

00:39:33   but I would be very surprised

00:39:35   if any sort of external GPU is supported.

00:39:38   Anything is possible, but I would be very, very surprised.

00:39:41   All right, so macOS Ventura has dumped,

00:39:46   dropped and dumped at the same time as apparently "Drumpt,"

00:39:48   has dumped a whole bunch of hardware.

00:39:52   And I will go through the list as per Mr. Macintosh.

00:39:55   It has dropped the 2015 through '16 MacBook Pro,

00:39:58   the '15 through '17 MacBook Air,

00:40:00   the 2016 12-inch MacBook, that's too bad,

00:40:04   the 2014 Mac Mini, the 2013 Mac Pro,

00:40:07   and the 2015 iMac, all no soup for you, so sorry.

00:40:12   - Yeah, so Christina Warren says

00:40:14   that the most egregious one that they dropped,

00:40:16   and I disagree with this, but it is funny,

00:40:18   The most egregious one that they dropped is the 2013 Mac Pro that they sold until December

00:40:22   2019.

00:40:23   That they should have stopped selling in 2017.

00:40:27   You could have active AppleCare and no OS updates.

00:40:30   So if you bought, if you were one of the poorest suckers who bought a trash can in Mac Pro

00:40:35   in December 2019, your AppleCare is still good and you can't get any more OS updates.

00:40:40   But I mean honestly that computer was, you know, it's a 2013 computer that basically

00:40:45   - They never changed, aside from like

00:40:47   some different configuration options, right?

00:40:49   So, all right, maybe they read the GPUs once,

00:40:51   I don't remember.

00:40:52   - Nope, they sure didn't.

00:40:53   They just dropped below in configurations.

00:40:55   - Oh yeah, there you go, that's right.

00:40:56   - When was the, was it Connected Live

00:40:59   that you presented Steven with the Mac Pro?

00:41:02   What year was that?

00:41:02   - It was our show.

00:41:03   - Oh, it was our show, okay.

00:41:04   - Yeah, that was the last, that was 2019, I think.

00:41:07   - Was it 2019?

00:41:07   There you go. - There it was, yeah.

00:41:08   - There it is. - It was still for sale.

00:41:10   I got it from Apple.

00:41:11   - This computer was a joke gift on a live podcast.

00:41:15   - Oh, I know, I know, I'm just saying though,

00:41:17   that is an example.

00:41:18   If you got AppleCare for Steven,

00:41:20   then he is that guy, he is the one.

00:41:22   - I did not.

00:41:23   - Oh, how cheap, how cheap are you, man?

00:41:26   Come on.

00:41:27   (laughing)

00:41:28   - Yeah, I actually kinda like one of those for my museum,

00:41:30   but I was never gonna pay the prices

00:41:31   they were still going for.

00:41:32   And anyway, dropping support for these,

00:41:34   I feel like the one that probably hurts the most,

00:41:37   maybe surprisingly, are the MacBook Pros.

00:41:41   MacBook Pro and MacBook Air maybe.

00:41:42   Like a 2016 MacBook Pro doesn't feel so old

00:41:47   that it shouldn't be getting OS updates.

00:41:49   I know 2016 was like a long time ago,

00:41:50   but just like, 'cause the MacBooks didn't change for so long

00:41:53   and there was that dark time and you're like,

00:41:54   well, I have one of the, you know,

00:41:56   isn't the 2016 the one where they fixed the keyboard?

00:41:58   I forget.

00:41:59   - 2019 was the--

00:42:00   - 2019 was the fix the keyboard.

00:42:02   Yeah, anyway, just because so many people have laptops,

00:42:05   right, and people are used to Mac OS supporting Macs

00:42:09   pretty far back in time,

00:42:10   but obviously the Apple Silicon transition,

00:42:13   I think has hastened the demise of a lot of these computers,

00:42:16   just because kind of like the 32 to 64 bit thing

00:42:21   dropped a lot of support.

00:42:21   It's like, you just want to get on the other side

00:42:23   of this sort of discontinuity.

00:42:26   And so, yeah, these older Macs are having support dropped.

00:42:30   That is a thing that usually routinely happens.

00:42:32   I just think we've been in a,

00:42:34   we were in a period for a while

00:42:36   where Mac OS wasn't dropping a lot of old hardware.

00:42:39   And I think we're still in a period

00:42:40   where iOS isn't dropping a lot of old hardware.

00:42:42   What does 16 drop?

00:42:43   - So 16 is the first version to drop anything since,

00:42:47   so 14 and 15 both didn't drop anything.

00:42:51   16 is the first one that's dropped things

00:42:52   in three releases, and it's dropping everything

00:42:55   up through the seven, so the iPhone 8 and above

00:43:00   is supported.

00:43:01   - Yeah, so anyway, sorry for all you trashcan owners,

00:43:04   and sorry for all the people who've got

00:43:06   not-so-old Intel Mac steering drop,

00:43:08   but architecture trainers will do that to you.

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00:45:05   (upbeat music)

00:45:08   - This is an example of something that I swear

00:45:09   was mentioned in either the keynote

00:45:11   of the State of the Union,

00:45:12   but if you asked me to find where specifically it was,

00:45:14   I would come up blank.

00:45:15   But apparently, the iPhone is creating

00:45:18   head-related transfer functions for you?

00:45:21   - We first discussed this back when we were discussing

00:45:22   the PlayStation 5, I think maybe before it was even released

00:45:26   talking about the way the PlayStation 5 did 3D audio.

00:45:30   And there was the concept of the head-related

00:45:32   transfer function, which basically defines

00:45:34   based on the shape of your head and your ears,

00:45:37   how does sound out in the world bounce off of your head

00:45:41   and the insides of your ears to hit the things

00:45:43   that sense sound, your eardrums, right?

00:45:47   Everyone's got different head and got different ears.

00:45:49   And so sounds in the world are always filtered

00:45:53   through your weird little ears and head and stuff.

00:45:55   And when you hear something to your left, to your right,

00:45:57   a little bit above, a little bit below,

00:45:58   your brain has been trained to identify that sound

00:46:01   based on how sound hits off your head and ears.

00:46:04   So your brain is wired up a little bit differently

00:46:08   than someone else's brain because their brain

00:46:09   has been wired up to detect sound

00:46:11   based on the shape of their head and ears, right?

00:46:13   Just over time, like you learn where sound is.

00:46:15   So if you're gonna do 3D audio,

00:46:17   the best way to try to do it

00:46:20   is to define a personalized head-related transfer function

00:46:24   for each person based on the shape

00:46:25   of their head and their ears,

00:46:27   because you can't just play the same sound

00:46:29   out of speakers like for, you know,

00:46:31   in modern Apple Power Purlings for spatial audio,

00:46:33   you can use sort of an average head-related transfer function

00:46:37   that will work okay for most people,

00:46:39   but if you personalize it, it sounds even better.

00:46:41   And there was something that the Sony presentation

00:46:45   of the PlayStation was saying,

00:46:46   oh, well, we scanned 100 years

00:46:48   and average them in a computer and blah, blah, blah.

00:46:50   And like, maybe someday you'll be able to scan your ear

00:46:53   and get personalized 3D sound in your PlayStation 5.

00:46:57   I'm not sure whether it is on the PlayStation,

00:46:59   but apparently, iOS 16 has a feature like that

00:47:02   where they ask you to use basically the FaceTime camera

00:47:07   and you do the FaceTime thing,

00:47:08   but they also say, now please take the phone

00:47:10   and show it your ears, show it your left ear,

00:47:13   and then show it your right ear.

00:47:15   And it scans both your head and also your ear and tries to,

00:47:19   I'm assuming, use the depth camera to come up with a model

00:47:23   of the cragginess of your ear and the size of your head

00:47:25   to come up with a personalized head-related

00:47:27   transfer function now, we'll link to Josh Hunt's tweet

00:47:29   where he shows himself doing this,

00:47:31   and it's supposed to put like a little bracket

00:47:33   around where it sees the ear and has real trouble

00:47:36   finding Josh's ears.

00:47:37   And it's not because he has big, long, wavy hair

00:47:39   that's blocking them.

00:47:40   His ears are clearly visible.

00:47:41   It's kinda like one of those things where they ask a human,

00:47:43   find the ears in this picture.

00:47:44   I can find 'em, they're right there.

00:47:45   A little kid can find 'em.

00:47:46   I see his ear.

00:47:47   Though the phone is having real problems.

00:47:48   But anyway, there's like beta one, so.

00:47:51   We'll see how this goes.

00:47:51   I also, like Casey, have a vague recollection

00:47:54   of this being mentioned, but I have no idea

00:47:56   where this functionality is,

00:47:57   and I haven't installed iOS 16 yet.

00:47:59   - All right, so last week we were talking about CarPlay

00:48:02   and this new system that Apple's announced,

00:48:06   wherein they basically take over the entire car.

00:48:09   And I wanted to bring up a couple of things

00:48:12   that Jan-Juist van der Hoef brings up,

00:48:15   and I'm mad because I never thought about,

00:48:17   or I never actually said it during the episode,

00:48:19   but this is very well put.

00:48:22   In your discussion on CarPlay,

00:48:23   John hammered on the fact that all implementations still need a car manufacturer's stock UI for

00:48:27   when there's no phone available.

00:48:28   However, Google already has Android Automotive, which replaces the manufacturer's system entirely.

00:48:33   I've ordered a Polestar 2 that uses that system.

00:48:35   I believe that Audi is doing something similar.

00:48:37   To me, that is the future of car play, or at least Apple is going to need to have something

00:48:40   like that as an option for car manufacturers.

00:48:42   A friend of the show, Jelly, just took delivery of a Polestar 2, and I've been talking to

00:48:46   him about it.

00:48:47   And I knew that the Polestar was using Android Automotive, and I completely didn't get a

00:48:51   chance to or did or slip my mind to bring it up and I'm actually gonna skip

00:48:55   forward just a little bit because the other thing I meant to talk about which

00:48:58   I didn't mention last week Matt Volk points out and Matt writes there's an

00:49:02   interesting article from ours technical a while back that says that the gauge

00:49:05   cluster display cannot be run by a non real-time OS so reading from that

00:49:11   article supporting a car especially an Android car also means needing support

00:49:15   for virtualization Android can run the infotainment system but something else

00:49:18   needs to run the gauge clusters display behind the steering wheel. You know,

00:49:21   cause good cars have clusters behind the steering wheel. Nevermind.

00:49:24   Safety regulations mandate that the gauge cluster cannot run Android.

00:49:28   Android isn't a real time OS,

00:49:29   meaning it can lag if the processor is too slow and that's not allowed for

00:49:32   critical driving components like the speedometer. The solution,

00:49:35   this is bananas to me, but apparently this is, this is what they did.

00:49:38   The solution is to have the Snapdragon 80,

00:49:39   20 processor run two OS's virtual via virtualization with Android running the

00:49:43   center of infotainment screen and some other OS running the gauge cluster

00:49:46   to display. Android can still send the gauge cluster a UI overlay for things like media

00:49:50   info and Google Maps information, but the speedometer is off limits. And also in that

00:49:55   article it talks about how they were using Qualcomm processors and apparently since that

00:49:59   article has been written, Matt tells us that Polestar has dumped Qualcomm and is instead

00:50:03   using Nvidia for the Polestar 3 that is coming out soon-ish. Before we talk about what car

00:50:09   companies are going to do with this, any thoughts on all of those things that we just spoke

00:50:12   about?

00:50:13   a bunch of cars that use Android Auto as their OS.

00:50:17   But the thing about that that does--

00:50:18   Well, hold on.

00:50:19   There's two different things that-- this confused the crap

00:50:21   me when I was researching this.

00:50:22   There's Android Auto, which is basically

00:50:24   like what we think of as CarPlay.

00:50:25   And there's also Android Automotive.

00:50:27   Yes, they have a product called Android Auto

00:50:29   and a product called Android Automotive.

00:50:30   They're two different products.

00:50:31   Yeah, Automotive, sorry.

00:50:32   It's-- yeah.

00:50:33   What I mean is that a car manufacturer decides, hey,

00:50:36   we don't want to do our entire infotainment system ourselves.

00:50:40   Well, it turns out there's an Android variant

00:50:42   that we can run on our internal car stuff

00:50:45   that will do that for us, that ships with the car, right?

00:50:47   But kind of like Android everywhere on phones,

00:50:51   the beauty of Android, if you choose to look at it that way,

00:50:54   is that it can be customized.

00:50:56   So you buy a Samsung phone and it runs Android,

00:50:58   but Samsung customized the heck out of it.

00:51:00   When you use Android, you get the source code to Android

00:51:03   and you can customize it.

00:51:04   And that's what car makers do.

00:51:06   They use Android Automotive as the foundation

00:51:09   for the OS that's going into their car,

00:51:11   but they can make it look and feel however they want

00:51:13   and customize the heck out of it.

00:51:15   They're just not starting from zero, right?

00:51:16   That doesn't apply to CarPlay.

00:51:19   Apple's not gonna give you the source code

00:51:21   or whatever the car OS is and say,

00:51:23   "Oh yeah, just change it, put your logos on it,

00:51:25   "change everything around, we don't care, go ahead."

00:51:27   No, that's not how it's going to work with Apple.

00:51:29   So although it is true that many manufacturers

00:51:33   do base their in-car infotainment systems on Android,

00:51:36   it's because Android is Android and is open source

00:51:39   and they're able to modify it

00:51:41   that they are willing to do that.

00:51:42   Because if you look at these various cars

00:51:44   that use Android Automotive,

00:51:45   they don't all look exactly the same.

00:51:47   You can kind of tell they're all running Android Automotive,

00:51:49   but they're customized in ways that Apple basically

00:51:51   wouldn't let you do.

00:51:53   Now, that said, that doesn't mean

00:51:55   that Apple isn't pitching these people on,

00:51:57   hey, take our new CarPlay thing and build it into your car.

00:52:02   No phone needed, just you start up the car,

00:52:04   we don't care what kind of phone you have,

00:52:05   or if you have a phone of any kind whatsoever,

00:52:08   CarPlay will be running on your car, it'll be in your car,

00:52:11   and it will control all the stuff.

00:52:13   Maybe they have a real-time OS for the gauge cluster,

00:52:15   if that's a requirement.

00:52:17   They run all the screens, all that stuff.

00:52:18   That could definitely happen,

00:52:20   but it's not going to be like it is with Android on Motive,

00:52:23   because Apple is not going to give you the source code,

00:52:25   and they're not going to say,

00:52:26   go ahead, put your logos all over it,

00:52:27   and change everything about it.

00:52:29   - See, the most interesting part of this to me

00:52:31   is this distinction of that the gauge cluster

00:52:34   must run a real-time operating system.

00:52:37   So as a very quick reference for those of you who don't know,

00:52:40   a real-time operating system, the main difference

00:52:44   between real-time OSes and pretty much every other OS

00:52:47   that we think of that we use every day,

00:52:49   like iOS and Mac OS and everything else,

00:52:51   Windows, Linux, Android, those are all,

00:52:54   those have non-deterministic performance

00:52:57   under certain characteristics,

00:52:58   or they can have very complex performance characteristics.

00:53:01   Real-time OSes are made to be extremely predictable

00:53:05   and able to service their basic needs, whatever the I/O needs,

00:53:10   whatever the cycle is, whatever they're managing,

00:53:12   they're able to service those requests

00:53:14   in a defined, known, deterministic amount of time.

00:53:17   So that way, if you have something like a speedometer,

00:53:20   the OS will be guaranteed that the speedometer will update x

00:53:25   times per second no matter what.

00:53:28   So even if some app is running that's

00:53:30   trying to allocate a bunch of memory

00:53:32   or take a bunch of CPU time or whatever,

00:53:34   that can't happen on a real-time OS,

00:53:36   that can't slow it down.

00:53:37   It will always, always service those requests

00:53:41   exactly on schedule or within a very, very small variance,

00:53:44   and depending on how good it is,

00:53:45   that variance can be smaller.

00:53:47   But that's the gist of it.

00:53:48   And so the design of RTOS is totally different

00:53:51   than other ones because you have to do a lot of things

00:53:54   that you wouldn't think of such as memory allocation

00:53:57   can be non-deterministic, it can slow down,

00:54:01   or it can result in problems or failures.

00:54:03   So like real-time OS's usually have a lot

00:54:05   of statically allocated memory.

00:54:07   That's like, that's one of the biggest things.

00:54:08   And you know, static time slice based scheduling

00:54:10   or other you know, complex scheduling needs.

00:54:13   And so this is so different from the way

00:54:16   that our usual computing OS's are built and are optimized.

00:54:21   And so I think, so knowing that the gauge cluster

00:54:26   must run a real-time OS, my guess,

00:54:30   I know this is a little bit out there,

00:54:32   is that this is either what's left of

00:54:36   or what we will first see from Project Titan.

00:54:40   That realtime OS to run that part

00:54:43   of what we saw in the CarPlay demo at WDC.

00:54:46   That's my guess, that Project Titan

00:54:48   either was scaled down to just this

00:54:51   or this is gonna be the first thing we see from that project

00:54:54   but that what it is is some kind of realtime OS

00:54:58   to run those gauges that they showed off in the keynote

00:55:01   on these car screens.

00:55:02   So that way Apple can literally take over

00:55:05   the entire display of all of that

00:55:08   and be up to date with all the safety regulations

00:55:09   and everything and somehow be running two OSs.

00:55:13   Now there's some ways they can do this.

00:55:14   So this article mentioned virtualization.

00:55:17   Well, Apple's modern, you know,

00:55:19   Apple Silicon chips all support that.

00:55:21   Though chips in the iPhone probably do as well.

00:55:23   You know, they support it on the Macs

00:55:24   so I would imagine they support it on the iPhone

00:55:25   at the hardware level or at least they could fairly easily.

00:55:28   And so maybe the iPhone runs two OSes in parallel.

00:55:32   Maybe one of them is a little real-time OS

00:55:34   to run this CarPlay feature,

00:55:37   and the other one is like the rest of iOS.

00:55:39   Or maybe there's some kind of minor hypervisor

00:55:41   under both of them, I'm not sure,

00:55:42   I don't know the details of how that could work.

00:55:44   - Why is an iPhone involved?

00:55:46   - Because the iPhone, oh well, hmm.

00:55:48   - Like, 'cause it was gonna be built into the car.

00:55:50   Like obviously Project Titan wasn't gonna require you

00:55:52   to have an iPhone to drive the car.

00:55:54   And if they were, Apple was doing,

00:55:56   was rumored to be doing self-driving stuff

00:55:59   for Project Titan, and if they were gonna do an entire car,

00:56:02   you need some kind of real-time system

00:56:05   to run the car parts of the car.

00:56:06   It doesn't have to be fancy,

00:56:07   but presumably Apple would make it fancy.

00:56:09   So surely some kind of more restricted,

00:56:13   better real-time guarantee type operating system

00:56:16   or application environment was part of Project Titan, right?

00:56:19   But they wouldn't require you to have a phone with you

00:56:21   to drive the car, so there has to be silicon in the car

00:56:25   and software in the car to run the car.

00:56:27   So I would imagine that would be running the real-time OS

00:56:30   for the real-time systems, and that would be running,

00:56:32   maybe using virtualization, the non-real-time OS

00:56:35   for the other parts of the car.

00:56:37   - But would they want a car to have basically

00:56:40   like a built-in iPhone hardware

00:56:42   that presumably could never be updated?

00:56:45   - It wouldn't be, it would be like the A13

00:56:46   and the studio display, right?

00:56:48   So in all these cases, like even these cars

00:56:52   that run Android automotive, right,

00:56:53   they're running it so you can like,

00:56:54   I can change the fan speed on the climate control and I can turn the wipers on and I can do all those things

00:56:58   And then there's the you know

00:57:00   the sort of I figure what it's called like the can bus or something with the real-time system that does like stability control and anti-lock brakes and

00:57:05   That's separate from the Android automotive right but in all these systems

00:57:08   There's also the flash style thing that I referred to last time which is like and on top of all this

00:57:13   Hey

00:57:14   There's a rectangle that we'll cut out of our entire OS and carplay will display there or Android auto will display there

00:57:20   So like that is the third layer on top of this. It's the real-time OS

00:57:23   There's a thing that runs all the infotainment and maybe lays stuff over the gauge cluster

00:57:26   And then there's a system that says hey your phone can display stuff here because you are gonna want to have apps on your phone

00:57:32   And run down the newest version of Waze or whatever

00:57:34   That's going to get a chunk of that screen where whatever phone you own whether it be Android or an Apple phone can put

00:57:41   Stuff apps on that phone display it into part of that screen, but that's on top of the stuff that's built into the car

00:57:47   Hmm, that's interesting. All right, I could I could be convinced of that

00:57:50   - I mean, that's what modern cars do.

00:57:51   You buy a car with Android Automotive

00:57:53   and it supports CarPlay,

00:57:55   you're seeing your iPhone's crap being displayed

00:57:57   in a rectangle on top of Android Automotive.

00:58:00   - Yeah, 'cause this, to me, this sounds like

00:58:04   Apple's answer to Android Automotive.

00:58:07   This is, they want their slice of this,

00:58:09   they think they can do a better job of it,

00:58:11   they might be able to, I don't know,

00:58:12   it depends on how much effort they put into it.

00:58:14   But to me, this sounds a lot like Project Titan,

00:58:18   or what's left of it.

00:58:20   - Yeah, if they had to have had the system

00:58:22   if they were planning on making a car.

00:58:23   How far along did they go?

00:58:25   How many dead ends did they go down?

00:58:26   Is this the same as what they were doing

00:58:28   or did they scrap all that and start over?

00:58:29   We don't know.

00:58:30   The other thing, and we'll get to what the car manufacturer

00:58:32   said in a second from this Verge article,

00:58:33   but the other thing that a bunch of people pointed out is,

00:58:36   multiple years ago, maybe last year,

00:58:38   maybe a year before that,

00:58:39   one of the things Apple touted about CarPlay is,

00:58:43   "Hey, CarPlay, now we can display stuff

00:58:45   "in more than one place.

00:58:46   "Right now, CarPlay shows your stuff

00:58:48   and a little rectangle on your dashboard.

00:58:50   But the new version of CarPlay can show stuff

00:58:53   in two rectangles on your dashboard.

00:58:55   So car manufacturers could support letting your phone

00:58:58   show some stuff in the gauge cluster, right?

00:59:00   - Yeah, that's been true for a year or two now.

00:59:02   - Yeah, I think that's a multi-year old feature.

00:59:05   But how many cars have you seen that in?

00:59:07   - None.

00:59:08   - So it seems like either Apple hasn't gotten

00:59:10   a lot of uptake on that feature, which again,

00:59:11   is not this thing that we saw in the keynote,

00:59:13   but just simply like, oh, I can just show stuff

00:59:15   in two rectangles.

00:59:16   So either car makers didn't pick up on that feature,

00:59:19   or it just takes so long for the car industry

00:59:20   to do anything that everybody jumped on it instantly,

00:59:22   and we're only gonna see it in cars

00:59:23   that come out two years from now.

00:59:24   - Yeah, it could be either.

00:59:25   I do wanna go back a half step, though.

00:59:27   I strongly agree with you, Marco,

00:59:29   that this is the first evidence we've seen,

00:59:31   or the first effort we've seen that came out of Titan.

00:59:34   I mean, I have no inside knowledge.

00:59:35   I could be dead wrong about this,

00:59:37   but I think you're right,

00:59:38   that this is the first bit of fallout

00:59:40   in the happy sense from their car project.

00:59:43   And it wouldn't surprise me

00:59:45   If it started as let's build a physical car

00:59:48   and ends up as, this is what you were saying a minute ago,

00:59:51   that this is all we get from that entire humongous project

00:59:53   is a carplay automotive, if you will,

00:59:56   for lack of a better name.

00:59:57   - Well, and this lines up perfectly with,

00:59:59   honestly, with all the rumors that we heard about it.

01:00:01   So they tried a bunch of things, a lot of turmoil,

01:00:04   a lot of changes in direction, leadership,

01:00:05   and everything else, and if you remember,

01:00:08   the most recent reasonably credible, or strong, at least,

01:00:13   rumors we heard about Titan was about a year or two ago

01:00:17   when the rumor was they had pivoted to quote,

01:00:21   "Making software for other automakers."

01:00:24   And we all made fun of that.

01:00:25   'Cause we were like, that's not something Apple would do.

01:00:28   They wanna make the whole widget.

01:00:29   And it's interesting, even in the live talk show

01:00:33   at WDC this year, John Gruber almost directly asked them

01:00:38   why they were doing this kind of new carplay thing

01:00:42   when the Apple way of doing things normally

01:00:43   is to make the whole widget.

01:00:45   And the very long, smiling pause from the Apple executives

01:00:50   to that question with no real response

01:00:52   kind of suggested that they were still

01:00:55   planning to make the whole widget, as in make the whole car.

01:01:00   So that's one small data point against this theory,

01:01:03   or that maybe this isn't the only thing they're doing.

01:01:05   But looking at the current landscape,

01:01:11   If car makers, even if one or two car makers,

01:01:14   you don't need a lot to start,

01:01:16   but if car makers are willing to give Apple

01:01:20   full access to giant screens to control

01:01:22   the vast majority of the experience,

01:01:25   that's a really good position for Apple to be in

01:01:27   because it lets them keep focusing mostly

01:01:29   on their high-profit iPhone business,

01:01:32   its massive lock-in to iPhone owners

01:01:35   because then everything in their life

01:01:37   will start working totally differently

01:01:39   and possibly worse if they ever switch away from the iPhone.

01:01:42   And it's something that lets Apple focus on the parts

01:01:44   they like and take profit from the sources they already have

01:01:48   without entering the giant, messy, expensive,

01:01:51   complicated world of the physical car design

01:01:54   and sale and maintenance.

01:01:55   Like that whole world is incredibly messy,

01:01:59   as we've discussed before.

01:02:00   I see no reason for Apple to make their own car.

01:02:03   I also see no reason for Apple to get into

01:02:06   the self-driving business in a major way,

01:02:08   because even that, that has also shown to be big and messy

01:02:12   and possibly not actually working for a long time

01:02:16   and things like that, whereas this is something

01:02:18   Apple can get into today.

01:02:19   They can start doing this, and they are by all means,

01:02:22   they are starting to do this today.

01:02:24   They can start taking control of things

01:02:26   and prevent or at least stave off competition from Android

01:02:30   that's literally doing a very similar thing here.

01:02:33   So they kinda have to do it on one level defensively,

01:02:36   there against Android.

01:02:38   And it has all these pluses for them and for their users.

01:02:40   So I think this is Project Titan.

01:02:43   And if they eventually make their own car down the road,

01:02:47   OK, I was wrong.

01:02:48   I think this is it.

01:02:50   I think they have to support Android Auto, though.

01:02:52   All the cars support both things now.

01:02:55   It supports CarPlay or Android Auto, right?

01:02:56   And granted, the whole stat that has 80% of new car buyers

01:03:00   are iPhone owners, because if you're buying a new car,

01:03:02   you probably have a lot of money, which probably

01:03:04   means you buy a fancy iPhone.

01:03:06   But the 80% is not 100%.

01:03:08   - Oh yeah, I don't see them not supporting

01:03:10   Android Auto in the way, like in like the dumb window today

01:03:14   that CarPlay is for other things.

01:03:15   Like I see this as a replacement for Android Automotive,

01:03:18   not Android Auto.

01:03:19   - Right, but what I'm saying is like,

01:03:20   wouldn't it be, it's pretty weird for Apple

01:03:22   to be making an OS that has a feature

01:03:25   where it carves out a portion of the screen

01:03:27   so that an Android phone can display

01:03:29   stuff from its apps there.

01:03:30   I mean, but it's the price of entry.

01:03:31   And that gets to this final section here.

01:03:33   This is the Oracle and the Verge where they called

01:03:36   a bunch of car manufacturers right after the WWDC keynote

01:03:38   and said, "Hey, Apple had this thing today

01:03:40   "where they showed Apple software running

01:03:42   "across the entire dashboard.

01:03:43   "Are you gonna support that?"

01:03:45   And the car manufacturers predictably said,

01:03:47   "No comment," or a bunch of words saying,

01:03:50   "Oh, we believe in the full car experience

01:03:52   "and we're interested in what Apple does

01:03:53   "and we're very happy partners with Apple,"

01:03:55   and blah, blah, blah.

01:03:56   There was very few enthusiastic,

01:03:58   "Yes, totally, our next car is gonna have Apple

01:04:00   "across the whole dashboard.

01:04:01   "The closest we got is from Polestar,"

01:04:03   which is a quote from Polestar as PR representative.

01:04:06   "Apple CarPlay will come to Polestar 2

01:04:08   "as part of an over-the-air update later this month.

01:04:10   "We're also thrilled to announce

01:04:12   "that the next generation of CarPlay

01:04:14   "will be coming to Polestar cars in the future."

01:04:16   That is so vague.

01:04:17   It's like, well, does that mean

01:04:19   the thing they showed on the screen?

01:04:21   'Cause there is going to be a next generation of CarPlay,

01:04:24   but it might just be the regular CarPlay?

01:04:27   - No, no, I can translate this for you, no joke.

01:04:30   So again, our friend Jelly just got a Polestar 2,

01:04:33   and it does not have CarPlay until literally today.

01:04:36   He sent me a text just a few minutes ago

01:04:37   saying that that update has finally landed.

01:04:39   So as of today, his car will have

01:04:42   what we think of as CarPlay,

01:04:44   the standard CarPlay experience.

01:04:46   I read this as, "We are thrilled to announce

01:04:48   "that the next generation of CarPlay,

01:04:50   "this new fancy thing where it takes over the dash,

01:04:51   "et cetera, et cetera, will be coming to Polestar cars

01:04:53   "in the future."

01:04:54   So that's a yes.

01:04:55   Additionally, Volvo, which is effectively the same

01:04:57   as Polestar except not really,

01:04:59   said at this time we don't have anything to share beyond that we plan to support

01:05:02   this next generation of Apple carplay in future vehicles so Volvo and Polestar

01:05:06   seemed to be in on it everyone else that they talked to seemed extremely wishy-washy

01:05:11   or heck no and they put a bunch of logos up there like they called a lot of the

01:05:16   people from these logos actually the decoder podcast this related to the

01:05:20   verge talked to I think the CEO of Mercedes-Benz or somebody fancy from

01:05:23   Mercedes-Benz and had a longer discussion about like part of the

01:05:27   discussion was "hey this Apple thing are you going to support it?" and Mercedes kind of

01:05:31   said the same thing that you'd imagine BMW would say. Both these companies, both Mercedes

01:05:35   and BMW have spent a lot of time and money and resources trying to come up with their

01:05:40   own OS to run their dashboards because both Mercedes and BMWs have really leaned heavily

01:05:46   into screens across their new dashboards. Mercedes going the heaviest where it's like

01:05:51   screens from edge to edge top to bottom like just the whole dashboard not just like a giant

01:05:56   tablet shoved into the middle of it like a Tesla.

01:05:58   BMW's new dashboard looks like an extremely

01:06:00   unimaginative, very long, skinny screen

01:06:03   from in front of the driver,

01:06:04   all the way over past the midpoint of the car.

01:06:07   But they're all running, I mean,

01:06:08   maybe they are Android based or whatever,

01:06:10   but they're very adamant that their OSs look like

01:06:13   whatever a BMW OS or whatever a Mercedes OS looks like.

01:06:17   I can't imagine any of the current BMW Mercedes designs

01:06:22   having that all replaced by Apple stuff,

01:06:24   because if you look at the keynote,

01:06:27   you look at what they showed on the dashboard,

01:06:28   and it looks like an Apple UI.

01:06:30   And you know, see previous episodes of my complaints

01:06:32   about what an Apple UI looks like,

01:06:33   but it looks Appley, right?

01:06:36   It would be out of place in any of the interiors

01:06:40   of any current cars from these car makers,

01:06:42   'cause these car makers make the OS match

01:06:45   what their interiors look like,

01:06:46   and their interiors mostly don't follow

01:06:48   that same minimalist Apple aesthetic.

01:06:50   They follow usually worse,

01:06:53   or maybe uglier anyway, aesthetics.

01:06:56   And they make their dashboard graphics and infographics

01:06:59   and diagrams and instrument clusters match that.

01:07:04   And so I think, you know, Polestar,

01:07:07   if they're Gung Ho and Volvo,

01:07:09   presumably the cars that they put this in will be designed

01:07:12   so this Apple look and feel matches

01:07:15   the interior of the cars.

01:07:16   And I think actually Polestar is pretty close

01:07:18   to that aesthetic already,

01:07:19   but Mercedes, BMW, GM, Toyota, Ford,

01:07:23   these makers are, their car endures do not look appley,

01:07:27   let's say, and neither do their OSs,

01:07:29   neither do their screens,

01:07:29   neither do their internal customers,

01:07:31   neither do their infotainment.

01:07:32   And a lot of these car makers don't want

01:07:34   the inside of their cars to look appley.

01:07:37   The Apple aesthetic that they showed,

01:07:38   again, there could be more than one aesthetic,

01:07:40   but what they showed at the WWE's keynote,

01:07:42   that doesn't match certain kinds of cars.

01:07:45   Sometimes you want a car to be,

01:07:47   think of like a big, mean truck.

01:07:48   we just talked about people who love their big trucks.

01:07:50   You don't want a delicate Apple UI in your big mean truck.

01:07:53   It just doesn't match.

01:07:54   Or like a fancy sports car that's like a racy.

01:07:58   - Can I tell you guys a secret?

01:07:59   - What?

01:08:00   - I just don't tell anybody.

01:08:01   I honestly didn't like the look of the car play gauges

01:08:03   they showed off.

01:08:04   - That's what I'm saying.

01:08:05   Like Apple strength has not been the ability

01:08:08   to convey information in a clear way.

01:08:10   It's all been about low contrast text that nobody can read,

01:08:13   hiding things that they think you don't need to see.

01:08:15   Like I think their strengths,

01:08:16   their current strengths are not well-suited

01:08:18   to do an instrument cluster.

01:08:20   Like, 'cause an instrument cluster is like,

01:08:21   show me the information in a clear way

01:08:23   that I can see at different times of day and whatever,

01:08:25   and we're like, we can't even read anything in our UIs

01:08:27   on our phones that we can position anywhere.

01:08:28   It's like, I don't--

01:08:30   - You have to hover over the transmission stick

01:08:32   to see what you're in.

01:08:33   - Oh my gosh, don't even.

01:08:35   - Am I in drive, am I in reverse?

01:08:36   Let's see, let me just hover my hand over here.

01:08:38   Oh, oh, there it popped in, there we go.

01:08:40   - We'll do pupil tracking.

01:08:41   When you're not looking at the speedometer,

01:08:43   we'll hide the numbers.

01:08:44   - Just turn it off.

01:08:45   - Only when you look at it,

01:08:46   will make the numbers beautifully fade into view.

01:08:49   What if they don't fade into view?

01:08:50   Well, try looking at it a little bit longer.

01:08:52   Why don't you just show the numbers all the time?

01:08:53   We feel like the numbers are distracting.

01:08:56   The numbers are distracting you from your content.

01:08:58   We don't wanna let the content be wrong.

01:09:00   - Oh, gosh, stop.

01:09:01   - Only show the numbers when your pupils land

01:09:03   on the speedometer.

01:09:04   - Oh, my gosh, it's so bad because it could be true.

01:09:07   - I love the idea of Apple-designed stuff,

01:09:12   and when I saw the reality of it,

01:09:13   or when I think about the reality

01:09:15   of modern Mac design.

01:09:16   I'm just like, oh no.

01:09:18   Maybe that's not what I want.

01:09:19   I don't know.

01:09:20   But setting that aside, even if it was really good,

01:09:23   cars have styles that for each model within a make

01:09:26   and for entire manufacturers have a different sort of style.

01:09:30   And not all of them match Apple.

01:09:32   Like I said, Polestar I think does actually

01:09:34   match Apple's vibe.

01:09:36   But Mercedes and BMW don't.

01:09:39   Volvo arguably doesn't.

01:09:40   Toyota and Honda certainly don't.

01:09:42   That's the beauty of Android automotive.

01:09:44   these car makers can take that and make it look

01:09:47   however they want, just like Android phone makers

01:09:49   can take Android and make it look like whatever ugly thing

01:09:51   they think they wanna make their Android phones look like.

01:09:54   That is a feature of Android automotive

01:09:56   that I assume will not be a feature

01:09:58   of anything like that from Apple,

01:09:59   'cause Apple does not really, the modern Apple,

01:10:02   as in the last several decades,

01:10:04   does not want you to skin their OSs.

01:10:05   Back in the day they did, and it was super cool,

01:10:07   but not lately.

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01:12:09   I wanted to briefly talk about the WWDC State of the Union and one particular part of it.

01:12:20   There's some there's a bunch of little things that may be worth talking about another time.

01:12:25   But there was one piece that I thought was really fascinating that I wanted to call out.

01:12:30   And I wanted to hear what you guys had to say about this early on in the presentation, if I'm not mistaken.

01:12:34   So let me back up. I'm sorry.

01:12:35   half-step. So the platform state of the union is like the nerd keynote, right? So the one o'clock

01:12:42   in the afternoon eastern time keynote keynote is for everyone. It's for nerds, it's for non-nerds.

01:12:47   But the platform state of the union, which is typically in the afternoon of the first day of

01:12:53   WWDC, that is the nerds keynote, where they talk about code, where they talk about nerdy things.

01:12:58   And one of the first things that they spoke about, yes, Susan Prescott was the emcee,

01:13:05   She did a brief thing about Xcode Cloud,

01:13:07   and then they brought up Josh--

01:13:09   I can never remember if it's Schafer or Schaffer,

01:13:11   and I apologize, but Josh S. came out

01:13:14   and said a couple of interesting things,

01:13:17   but one of the things he said was he stood in front

01:13:20   of a big white screen that on that screen said,

01:13:23   "Objective C, AppKit UI Kit, and Interface Builder."

01:13:26   These are all the technologies that you use to write iOS

01:13:29   or Mac OS apps up until Swift UI existed,

01:13:32   and he stood in front of the screen, and he said--

01:13:34   And I don't have the exact verbatim quote in front of me,

01:13:36   but he said in so many words,

01:13:38   "These are all legacy.

01:13:39   They will exist for a long time,

01:13:41   but this is not the way forward.

01:13:43   The way forward is Swift and Swift UI."

01:13:45   And then following that, it was Ben Cohen,

01:13:47   who did a feature on Swift specifically,

01:13:50   and Ben -- and I believe this is a verbatim quote --

01:13:52   said, "Swift is absolutely the best language

01:13:55   to build apps across our devices."

01:13:57   And then they leaned into Swift UI as well,

01:14:01   heavily throughout the rest of the presentation.

01:14:04   And I thought this was interesting because one of the things that all of us griped, not only the three of us on the show,

01:14:09   but all of us as developers griped about after last year and maybe even a couple years prior, but especially after last year,

01:14:16   was, you know, what is the way forward, Apple? Like, what do you... if I'm developing a new macOS app today,

01:14:22   am I doing that with AppKit? Am I doing it with Catalyst, which is basically UIKit on macOS?

01:14:28   Am I doing it with Switched UI? What is the right answer?

01:14:32   And it seems extremely clear that Josh and Ben and the rest of the team at Apple are saying the right answer is

01:14:40   Swift and Swift UI wherever you can and then fall back to these other things if you can't use Swift and Swift UI.

01:14:47   And on the one side, I

01:14:49   deeply appreciate that they have put a line in the sand or a flag in the dirt or whatever analogy you want to use and

01:14:56   they've said this is the way.

01:14:59   That being said they're right. They're having SwiftUI write a bunch of checks that I'm not sure SwiftUI can cache and and I'm

01:15:07   I don't know. I'm a little concerned Marco. Let me start with you since you are

01:15:11   The most developee developer on Apple platforms of the three of us

01:15:16   What is what do you think about this and if you wouldn't mind starting by just very very briefly reminding us

01:15:21   What is your Swift and SwiftUI journey as of today?

01:15:24   As of today, I am writing as much new code as I can in Swift. I'm not going

01:15:30   back and rewriting working Objective-C code in Swift. However, I am making grand

01:15:37   plans in my head that I may never actually achieve of, you know, larger

01:15:42   moves like that. So that's Swift. SwiftUI, I use 100% on the watch app

01:15:49   because, again, the alternative was garbage. In the iPhone app, I'm using very

01:15:53   a little Swift UI so far.

01:15:54   And there are various reasons for that,

01:15:57   but very little of it so far.

01:15:58   I have done other little like toy apps,

01:16:01   like little utilities I've made for myself,

01:16:03   I've done those in Swift UI,

01:16:04   so I've used a little bit more there, but not a ton.

01:16:07   So I think with this,

01:16:09   we have to separate a few different things.

01:16:10   So first of all, Objective-C versus Swift

01:16:13   as the language we are using, that is very clear.

01:16:16   Swift is very mature now, that is the way forward.

01:16:20   It has been the way forward for quite some time now.

01:16:22   So the language you should be using

01:16:25   for almost all code in your app, as long as you can, is Swift.

01:16:29   Especially if you're writing a new code, it's a no-brainer.

01:16:32   Use Swift.

01:16:33   That's simple.

01:16:34   That is well supported, and that's a totally reasonable

01:16:36   chance for them to take.

01:16:37   And they've been taking it for many years now.

01:16:40   And so that, I think, set that aside.

01:16:43   OK.

01:16:43   Objective C, as much as I love Objective C,

01:16:46   and I still write some of it in parts of my app that use it,

01:16:49   Swift is the way forward.

01:16:50   and that's a done deal, that fight is over,

01:16:53   we've moved on, okay.

01:16:55   So then the question becomes, which UI framework?

01:16:59   Are you using SwiftUI or are you using UIKit or AppKit?

01:17:03   That's a much more difficult question to answer.

01:17:06   That's really what we're talking about here.

01:17:07   It's not about the language, it's about the framework

01:17:10   and what you can do in the framework

01:17:12   and what's hard and what's easy

01:17:13   and what's buggy and what's mature.

01:17:17   SwiftUI in releases before 16 and Mac OS Ventura,

01:17:22   'cause I don't have any experience with the new ones yet

01:17:26   in that way, but SwiftUI before this beta cycle

01:17:31   has been very interesting, very bumpy of a ride.

01:17:36   It has a lot of value when you're on the happy path,

01:17:40   as we talked about before, and when you hit a wall,

01:17:43   you hit it hard and it's often so frustrating

01:17:47   that you have to basically go back

01:17:48   and rewrite the whole thing in UIKit

01:17:52   or do ridiculous levels of hacks

01:17:56   in order to work around some limitation of SwiftUI.

01:17:59   Based on what I've seen so far with the new stuff,

01:18:03   it seems like they are making progress

01:18:06   towards removing more and more of those needs

01:18:09   for those hacks, but there are still a lot left

01:18:11   and some of them I think are inherent to SwiftUI

01:18:15   and just the architecture that it has

01:18:16   and the whole idea of declarative UI framework.

01:18:19   Like some of that, certain hacks are necessary

01:18:22   just to fit into that paradigm.

01:18:24   And so that's gonna be a problem to some degree forever.

01:18:29   And so the question is when will we hit a point where,

01:18:33   or have we already, hit a point where

01:18:35   we can mostly use SwiftUI

01:18:38   and not have to dip out of it very often

01:18:40   and not have to hack around problems or limitations

01:18:42   in it very often to the point where we can say,

01:18:44   all right, this is just what we're using by default,

01:18:46   and most of the time we'll be fine doing this.

01:18:50   And I don't know that we've reached that point yet.

01:18:51   SwiftUI is still very, very early.

01:18:55   Still, it's what, about four years old,

01:18:58   something like that?

01:18:59   - I believe that's right.

01:19:00   - In public at least.

01:19:01   I know it was on the watch in development

01:19:03   for a few years before that,

01:19:05   but it's very, very young in the public world,

01:19:09   and it's not evenly aged and evenly mature

01:19:12   on all platforms.

01:19:14   It's, for instance, as we talked about last week,

01:19:16   what you get with SwiftUI code is worse on the Mac

01:19:20   than it is on iOS.

01:19:22   And what you get on iOS is worse than what you get on WatchOS.

01:19:26   Clearly, there's a hierarchy of maturity here.

01:19:30   WatchOS is at the top.

01:19:31   WatchOS SwiftUI, done.

01:19:33   It's great.

01:19:33   It's fine.

01:19:34   Just use it.

01:19:35   iOS SwiftUI, well, it's OK most of the time.

01:19:38   but you start hitting problems in certain edge cases

01:19:40   or certain specialized needs or certain customizability

01:19:43   that's not possible or performance problems

01:19:45   with certain types of collections

01:19:46   or certain types of structures.

01:19:48   So there's issues like that.

01:19:49   And then you go to the Mac and it's even more of those

01:19:52   like well you have more problems, more bugs,

01:19:54   more limitations, more subpar implementations

01:19:57   or subpar behaviors or looks.

01:20:00   And so I think this is a very optimistic slide

01:20:05   for Apple to say, this is the way forward,

01:20:08   this is the best way to build apps today.

01:20:11   Because it might be the best way to build

01:20:14   like their demo apps, like the ice cream stand or whatever,

01:20:17   their demo WBC session kind of apps.

01:20:20   It might be good for that, but it still seems to hit

01:20:24   a lot of need for hacks and walls and problems

01:20:28   when it hits the real world.

01:20:30   And it especially has a lot of those problems.

01:20:35   when you're interacting with legacy code bases or the Mac.

01:20:40   And so until they can really develop a lot of that,

01:20:44   just with maturation over time, basically,

01:20:46   I don't know if they can necessarily declare this.

01:20:50   They're declaring this more as a wish than a reality.

01:20:55   And they might make it a reality.

01:20:59   I'm sure they intend to keep going down the path

01:21:02   that will make it a reality.

01:21:04   Whether they can achieve that is a different story.

01:21:06   Whether they are able to give it the quality

01:21:09   and attention it needs in areas like the Mac,

01:21:13   where it's not quite the number one priority,

01:21:16   that remains to be seen.

01:21:18   Right now, if I were writing a brand new app today,

01:21:22   I would absolutely no doubt try to do it this way.

01:21:26   And wherever I run into problems,

01:21:29   rather than trying to dump SwiftUI

01:21:33   and go back to UIKit or AppKit,

01:21:36   I would attempt to do the various mechanisms

01:21:39   where you can drop out of SwiftUI

01:21:41   and use AppKit or UIKit wrapped in a SwiftUI view

01:21:44   for certain parts of your view hierarchies or whatever.

01:21:48   So I would totally do this if writing it today.

01:21:50   And in fact, I am very tempted to try to rewrite

01:21:54   large parts of my AppUI this way

01:21:56   because I think being on the happy path here

01:22:01   is going to make certain things easier in the future.

01:22:05   Already, my app is a huge pile of burdensome technical debt,

01:22:10   because my app is a huge pile of Objective-C UI kit code

01:22:16   that has some Swift here and there,

01:22:18   but is mostly still old Objective-C UI kit code,

01:22:23   because there is so much UI in a podcast app,

01:22:27   you have no idea.

01:22:28   You think a podcast app is three screens,

01:22:31   I'm telling you it's so much more than that.

01:22:33   There is so much UI in a podcast app.

01:22:36   And so, I'm feeling a great burden of all this legacy code

01:22:40   and I would love to move towards the ideal of SwiftUI,

01:22:45   which is like, wow, I can probably collapse

01:22:48   a lot of this code that is thousands of lines

01:22:51   Objective-C for UIKit into hundreds of lines of SwiftUI

01:22:56   instead that is hopefully cleaner and easier to maintain

01:22:59   and possibly avoid certain bug behaviors

01:23:02   or certain inconsistent states and things like that.

01:23:04   I would love to do that and I'm gonna probably start

01:23:07   attempting to do that later this summer to see like,

01:23:09   hey, can I actually do this or not?

01:23:10   Kind of do a feasibility study of just trying some things

01:23:13   and see what happens, but the reality is I don't see

01:23:17   any evidence yet that we're near that point

01:23:19   where that actually is that easy.

01:23:21   that it seems like we are going in that direction,

01:23:26   but there are still so many walls

01:23:28   and limitations and hurdles, and we'll see what happens.

01:23:31   They are making progress.

01:23:33   Every year, they add a bunch of stuff

01:23:36   and fix a bunch of stuff and approve a bunch of stuff

01:23:37   to SwiftUI, and so they are making progress,

01:23:41   but these are big shoes to fill.

01:23:44   Like, you're asking people to throw away

01:23:47   all of the old frameworks that they know

01:23:49   and everything they know about them

01:23:52   for a totally different,

01:23:53   not only a totally different library for making UIs,

01:23:56   but a whole different paradigm of how you make UIs

01:23:59   and how data flows through apps.

01:24:01   And that's really hard, complicated stuff

01:24:04   for all of us, for them to implement

01:24:06   and for us to learn and to change our mental models

01:24:10   and behaviors and architectures for.

01:24:12   That's a huge thing.

01:24:14   And that's not gonna happen in a few years.

01:24:17   It's gonna take a decade to really move the industry

01:24:21   over that way in a big way.

01:24:24   And they have been smart about it in the sense

01:24:27   that they have made these little escape hatches

01:24:29   where you can do things in parts,

01:24:31   and that's very, very smart.

01:24:32   'Cause if that wasn't the case,

01:24:34   this would be nowhere near where it is today

01:24:37   in terms of adoption and usefulness.

01:24:39   But I still think this is optimistic.

01:24:42   Because again, also, keep in mind,

01:24:45   that if you want to use SwiftUI with all of its new stuff,

01:24:49   you know, you wanna use the navigation tree stuff,

01:24:51   great, that solves your problems.

01:24:52   I look forward to trying that.

01:24:54   But I can only do it when my app requires iOS 16

01:24:57   or Mac OS Ventura, you know?

01:24:59   And so even then, it's like,

01:25:01   if you have a need to support even one or two OS versions

01:25:05   back, you know, this stuff, you can't quite use it yet.

01:25:09   So you might not be able to use SwiftUI the way you want to

01:25:13   or you might have to have even more hacks.

01:25:14   So again, this is a process, this takes a lot of time.

01:25:17   We are not that far along this process yet.

01:25:22   In the grand scheme of things, SwiftUI is not mature yet.

01:25:25   You can't use it for everything yet.

01:25:27   You shouldn't use it for everything yet.

01:25:29   And for Apple to say you should use it for everything

01:25:31   or you should probably use it for everything,

01:25:34   I think is still optimistic.

01:25:37   But I think we're getting there.

01:25:40   - Let's give a brief review of capsule summary

01:25:43   when we talked about this in the past.

01:25:45   The analogy we used then was like the Mac OS X

01:25:48   when it first came out.

01:25:49   Mac OS X was based on the Next Step OS,

01:25:51   but it had a bunch of Apple classic Mac APIs thrown on top.

01:25:55   And you had two groups of developers

01:25:57   and two groups of apps meeting there.

01:25:58   There was all the Next Step apps

01:26:00   that were ported to Mac OS X,

01:26:01   and they used what came to be known as the Cocoa API.

01:26:04   It's AppKit and all that stuff,

01:26:05   and Objective-C is weird language.

01:26:07   And there were all the classic Mac applications

01:26:10   that ported to Mac OS X's Carbon API,

01:26:12   which was like a cleaned up version of the classic Mac API.

01:26:15   And for many, many years in the early days of Mac OS X,

01:26:19   Apple supported both Carbon and Cocoa.

01:26:21   They had to support Carbon because the OS they tried,

01:26:24   the next step based OS they tried to put out before that

01:26:26   based on Rhapsody was a non-starter

01:26:28   because basically Microsoft and Adobe said,

01:26:30   "Yeah, we're not rewriting our apps in Objective-C.

01:26:32   "I don't know what you're talking about."

01:26:33   So you either let us run our existing apps pretty easily

01:26:36   on your new OS or it's not going anywhere.

01:26:38   So that's why Mac OS X exists and that's why Carbon exists

01:26:40   because they had to make an OS

01:26:42   so that essentially Adobe and Microsoft could port their important applications with a minimum

01:26:46   of fuss.

01:26:47   And all those applications use the classic Mac OS API, not the Next Step API.

01:26:52   So you had Carbon and Cocoa, and you had to keep Carbon around because all your important

01:26:56   apps were in it, and then there were these weird little developers writing things, and

01:26:58   Cocoa with this weird language Objective-C.

01:27:01   And those two frameworks existed together for a long time, and Apple would do WWC presentations,

01:27:07   and they would add a new control, and it would come to Cocoa first, and then Carbon would

01:27:10   we get it later, or they'd add a new API,

01:27:12   and it would only be in Carbon,

01:27:13   and it would come to Cocoa later.

01:27:14   And Cocoa, people were writing AppKit apps with Cocoa,

01:27:17   and they would be annoyed that they had to drop down

01:27:18   into Carbon to do something, and vice versa.

01:27:21   And then there was the years where the Apple would say,

01:27:23   and we're bringing this feature to both Carbon and Cocoa

01:27:26   at the same time, and the crowd would go wild.

01:27:28   And they'd be like, yeah, we don't like the fighting.

01:27:31   We don't like it when the other API gets it sooner,

01:27:33   'cause the next people had big Objective-C code bases,

01:27:36   and the classic Mac people had big, even bigger,

01:27:38   legacy code bases for their drawing applications,

01:27:40   like Photoshop and Office, right?

01:27:43   And there was some cross-pollination happening there.

01:27:46   But at no point in these early years of Mac OS X

01:27:49   did Apple say, "By the way, just so you know,

01:27:52   "Objective C and AppKit, that's the future.

01:27:55   "And yeah, we had to do Carbon

01:27:57   "because we kinda need Photoshop and Microsoft Office,

01:28:00   "but even though those people say

01:28:01   "they're not going to ever rewrite their apps using AppKit,

01:28:05   "don't worry about it.

01:28:06   "If we're successful in 10 years,

01:28:09   they won't be using Carbon anymore.

01:28:11   But if they had said that, people would have been like,

01:28:13   are you kidding me?

01:28:13   They're, you know one's gonna rewrite Photoshop

01:28:17   in Objective-C or to use AppKit or Office in Objective-C,

01:28:21   or like, that's not gonna happen, right?

01:28:24   So you better keep Carbon around forever.

01:28:26   But it turns out through, well, confluence events,

01:28:29   one, Apple was extremely successful.

01:28:32   Starting around 2001, fast forward to today,

01:28:35   I'd say Apple's done pretty well for itself.

01:28:38   It's been successful with its various platforms.

01:28:39   Two, the phone came out based entirely

01:28:42   on an Objective-C based API that looks a lot like AppKit

01:28:45   called UIKit.

01:28:46   And that made that skill set very popular and valuable.

01:28:49   And then three, big applications ended up

01:28:52   being written in these weird ass cross platform UI things

01:28:55   anyway, like what the hell is Photoshop?

01:28:57   I'm sure under the covers it's probably

01:28:59   got a bunch of Objective-C AppKitty stuff,

01:29:01   but their UI framework is not standard AppKit controls

01:29:05   and certainly isn't carbon anymore.

01:29:07   and that's the little cherry at the end of this.

01:29:10   Hey, whatever happened to carbon anyway?

01:29:12   Well, after years and years of Apple saying,

01:29:14   we support both carbon and cocoa.

01:29:17   They're both great APIs, use the one that's best

01:29:19   for your code base, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:29:21   It came time to do the 64-bit transition

01:29:23   and despite developing promising,

01:29:25   and I believe even maybe shipping to some developers

01:29:28   a 64-bit version of carbon, actually someone made the call,

01:29:31   the very difficult call inside Apple to say,

01:29:33   yeah, we've changed our mind.

01:29:35   Carbon is not coming to 64-bit.

01:29:37   We're choosing this opportunity,

01:29:38   this biddedness transition to say,

01:29:42   you're not going to be able to write a carbon app for 64-bit.

01:29:44   Not for technical reasons, 'cause we've got it.

01:29:46   It's here, it's working, but here's how we're kind of,

01:29:48   it's like someone who breaks up with you

01:29:50   by just being a jerk to you constantly

01:29:51   until you break up with them, right?

01:29:53   Like instead of actually having the conversation to say,

01:29:56   we've decided Objective-C and AppKit is the future.

01:29:58   I know this is hard to hear, but that's the future.

01:30:00   Instead of doing that, they just said,

01:30:02   carbon's not coming to 64-bit.

01:30:04   we still support carbon, it's great,

01:30:05   but it's not coming to 64-bit.

01:30:06   And you know that's the end of carbon

01:30:08   because eventually, all apps are 64-bit,

01:30:10   eventually you can't even run 32-bit apps anymore, right?

01:30:13   Like the writing was on the wall.

01:30:14   So everybody who had a carbon app, it's like,

01:30:17   I didn't, we didn't know how to tell you this,

01:30:19   but Objective-C, remember that weird thing

01:30:21   with the square brackets?

01:30:22   Yeah, you better learn that now.

01:30:24   (laughing)

01:30:24   That's your future.

01:30:26   And I think that that legacy of like how they handled that,

01:30:31   I think they learned from that

01:30:32   because this presentation was them trying to say

01:30:35   in a nice way, this is the direction we're heading in.

01:30:39   Before we're there, we're not there yet,

01:30:41   as Marco Ampley pointed out, we are not there yet,

01:30:44   but we're saying directionally, we're headed that-a-way.

01:30:48   And that-a-way is Swift and Swift UI.

01:30:50   And again, Swift is fairly well settled.

01:30:52   I think they did that pretty well too.

01:30:53   Like the first year Swift came out,

01:30:54   all the WWDC slides had all their examples

01:30:57   in both Swift and Objective-C.

01:30:59   But three years after that or whatever,

01:31:02   the writing was on the wall, it's gonna be Swift.

01:31:03   And now, objective C, what's that?

01:31:06   It's the code that's in the parts of your application

01:31:07   you haven't touched in a while.

01:31:08   Swift is very well established.

01:31:10   But the API question was an open one,

01:31:12   especially on the Mac,

01:31:13   this is where we talked about it a lot,

01:31:15   because the Mac had this weird thing where you had AppKit,

01:31:18   and then you had Catalyst, which was a UI kit on the Mac,

01:31:20   and then you had SwiftUI on the Mac.

01:31:22   So you had three APIs,

01:31:23   like how the hell am I supposed to write a Mac app?

01:31:25   Well, which one of these am I supposed to use?

01:31:27   Because, you know, AppKit and SwiftUI would be bad enough,

01:31:30   but now there's UIKit.

01:31:31   So does that mean like AppKit is going away

01:31:33   but it's being replaced by UIKit

01:31:35   and catalyst is the way forward

01:31:36   but then what the heck is SwiftUI?

01:31:37   Am I supposed to be mixing SwiftUI and UIKit on the Mac

01:31:41   and ignoring AppKit?

01:31:42   Or is AppKit the one true way to do it

01:31:44   and just mixing SwiftUI into that?

01:31:46   This slide answers that question.

01:31:47   Directionally, where we are going

01:31:50   on every single one of our platforms is Swift and SwiftUI.

01:31:54   And unlike with the carbon thing where they just said,

01:31:56   oh, and by the way, AppKit won't be supported next year,

01:31:59   they had, what they said on this slide,

01:32:00   They didn't say any of this was legacy.

01:32:02   That's the subtext.

01:32:03   But the text was, "ObjectiveC, AppKit, and UIKit

01:32:06   and Interface Builder are great technologies.

01:32:08   They brought us to where we are today,

01:32:09   and they will be supported for many, many years

01:32:11   in the future."

01:32:12   Because remember, all these things,

01:32:13   Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit, and Interface Builder,

01:32:15   they're all 64-bit.

01:32:17   There's no big transition coming up in the side.

01:32:19   And Apple itself has huge amounts of code written

01:32:22   in Objective-C, AppKit, UIKit, using Interface Builder.

01:32:25   They are probably the biggest legacy code base

01:32:28   of this stuff, especially now that like, you know,

01:32:30   Photoshop and probably Microsoft or whatever using whatever weird OS framework, you know in-house things that they've built right

01:32:35   Apple is the largest probably has the largest most important code base using these quote-unquote legacy technologies

01:32:42   So Apple can't get rid of any of this stuff until unless they support all those apps and that's not gonna happen for friggin ever

01:32:49   So don't worry about it

01:32:51   Happy you're out using app kit not working in two years or UI kit or you know objective C not running anymore

01:32:58   Like those apps will continue to function you'll be able to continue to build them you have to be able to but directionally

01:33:04   we are going to Swift UI and Swift and

01:33:06   We are very far from that

01:33:09   This is just a big directional sign in the same

01:33:11   But I think it is a sign of maturity

01:33:13   To say to solve the question that we kept having which is like I don't know what I'm supposed to do

01:33:18   I have all these API's available to me

01:33:20   What is the path forward because the Apple in all past years was like look you can mix and match them and you can use

01:33:26   where appropriate and if your app has this,

01:33:27   you can use that and you can use this.

01:33:29   And it's like, okay, but where do we go from here?

01:33:31   Like, I don't know where to put my effort.

01:33:33   Should I continue to build, you know,

01:33:35   50% of my app in UIKit and 50% in SwiftUI,

01:33:38   or should I just make it a pure AppKit app

01:33:40   with dollops of SwiftUI sprinkled in it?

01:33:44   Or you'd say, I can't make my app 100% in SwiftUI,

01:33:46   so what am I supposed to do?

01:33:48   Knowing that essentially AppKit UIKit and Interface Builder

01:33:52   are not going to be the way forward

01:33:54   is clarifying for everybody involved.

01:33:56   And it's great for them to say that

01:33:58   before those technologies are dropped,

01:33:59   'cause I don't think they're gonna be dropped

01:34:00   for like a decade, right?

01:34:02   So now there is clarity on both sides.

01:34:06   Apple can continue to do what it was doing,

01:34:08   but now we actually know which direction they're heading.

01:34:10   What they were doing is every year

01:34:11   we'll make SwiftUI better.

01:34:12   And hopefully, eventually, you'll be able to use it

01:34:15   to do everything your app can do.

01:34:16   But we're so far from that now

01:34:18   that even my dinky, stupid little app

01:34:20   that has one thing on the screen,

01:34:22   I can't even implement Switch Glass

01:34:24   in pure SwiftUI today.

01:34:26   And I thought, I started messing with it again.

01:34:30   I'm like, maybe I can,

01:34:31   let's see if I can add some more SwiftUI to this.

01:34:33   And then one of the first things I saw

01:34:35   in one of the W2C Lounge channels,

01:34:38   it was a SwiftUI channel, someone asked a question.

01:34:40   Because just this year they said,

01:34:41   "Hey, you can do a menu extra in SwiftUI."

01:34:43   The little menu icons that you have in your menu bar,

01:34:46   it's called the menu extra.

01:34:47   You can now do them using SwiftUI.

01:34:49   Previously you couldn't, you had to use the AppKit APIs

01:34:51   to do that or the Catalyst APIs or whatever.

01:34:54   But now you can do it in SwiftUI.

01:34:55   So someone was messing with this,

01:34:57   and they asked a question in the W2C lounge,

01:35:00   "Hey, can I have something different happen

01:35:02   "when I option click the menu bar icon?"

01:35:04   And they said, "No, that feature doesn't exist yet."

01:35:06   - Oh my gosh.

01:35:07   - That's a feature of my app!

01:35:09   You option click on things and it cycles the behavior.

01:35:11   And the answer was not like, "Oh, here's a workaround,"

01:35:13   or, "You gotta capture the keystroke yourself,"

01:35:16   or whatever, it's like, you literally can't do that.

01:35:19   And that's the nature of declarative UI.

01:35:21   If you don't have a way to declare that's the thing you want,

01:35:24   there is no I'm just gonna drop down to AppKit

01:35:26   and then catch the mouse events

01:35:28   and look at the modifier keys,

01:35:29   which is essentially how I do it, right?

01:35:31   But once you've dropped down to that level,

01:35:34   you're not in SwiftUI anymore.

01:35:35   You're in AppKit.

01:35:37   Where is all that stuff?

01:35:38   That's in AppKit, right?

01:35:39   That's before we get into all the other things

01:35:41   we're talking about, and Marco mentioned

01:35:43   having to bump the US version,

01:35:44   so I'm in the midst of adding a major feature

01:35:48   in my Dinky app that has no features.

01:35:49   But anyway, a pretty big feature to my app.

01:35:51   Already, to add this feature to my app,

01:35:53   I've had to bump the minimum OS requirement

01:35:55   from like 10.15 to 12.

01:35:59   I'm not gonna release this one until 13 is out

01:36:01   'cause I don't wanna require the latest OS

01:36:02   for my stupid thing.

01:36:03   And it kind of annoys me

01:36:04   that I can't have both of them out at the same time

01:36:06   where I continue to bug patch the old version

01:36:08   and do the new one or whatever.

01:36:09   But this dinky app that has no features,

01:36:12   I have to bump, it's a Swift UI feature,

01:36:14   I have to bump the minimum OS version to 12.

01:36:16   When I was adding features,

01:36:17   like I'm gonna have to bump it up.

01:36:19   Oh, now I have to bump it up to 11.

01:36:20   and now I have to bump it up to 12.

01:36:22   I'm hoping I never have to bump it up to 13,

01:36:25   but I'm just like saying,

01:36:26   what more can I implement in SwiftUI

01:36:28   in my dinky little app, right?

01:36:30   That's how far SwiftUI is from being a full solution to this.

01:36:33   It is so far away from it

01:36:34   that you can't even do the most trivial application

01:36:37   if it wants to be a well-behaved Mac application,

01:36:39   which my thing tries to be,

01:36:41   like having sort of some depth of features.

01:36:44   It's not just like the food truck application or whatever.

01:36:47   Some depth of features like,

01:36:49   "Who would ever want to option click

01:36:51   "on a menu bar icon on the Mac?"

01:36:53   Apple's own menu bar icons on the Mac

01:36:55   let you option click and do stuff.

01:36:56   It's not an obscure feature.

01:36:58   Good Mac apps do stuff like that,

01:37:00   and it's like, "Oh no, sorry,

01:37:01   "there's literally no way to do that."

01:37:02   Can I get mouse events?

01:37:03   Like, "No."

01:37:04   Well, tell us why you want mouse events,

01:37:06   and we'll implement it.

01:37:07   It's like, "No, sometimes you need to intercept events.

01:37:09   "Sometimes I need to have access to the responder chain

01:37:12   "or see what modifier keys are held down or whatever."

01:37:15   Why would you ever need to do that?

01:37:16   Just tell us and we'll make a SwiftUI modifier for it.

01:37:18   It's like you're never gonna be able to,

01:37:19   you'll be chasing your tail forever.

01:37:21   There needs to be some sort of underlying way to do that.

01:37:23   But anyway, the clarity of this presentation

01:37:26   of the state of the union was directional.

01:37:30   Apple is headed here.

01:37:31   Now developers, you know what we're trying to do.

01:37:34   We haven't done it yet.

01:37:36   We're not saying we've done it yet,

01:37:37   but you know what we're trying to do.

01:37:40   And so if you're gonna make decisions

01:37:41   based on what Apple is trying to do,

01:37:43   which is, you know, good thing,

01:37:44   like Apple doesn't tend to give you roadmaps,

01:37:46   But if you know what they're trying to do,

01:37:48   then you can make much smarter decisions

01:37:50   about what you wanna do in your app.

01:37:53   Doesn't make it any more possible

01:37:54   for you to make your app using SwiftUI

01:37:56   entirely from top to bottom today,

01:37:58   but it lets you make decisions about the future.

01:38:00   And I think this is a very mature thing for Apple to do.

01:38:04   And I think you haven't seen a lot of people yelling

01:38:06   about it because we're glad to get some kind of roadmap.

01:38:10   And unlike the Carbon and Cocoa era, right?

01:38:13   they're not saying like all your hard work from before,

01:38:17   throw it in the garbage and rewrite everything, right?

01:38:19   And I think we're all kind of used to the way

01:38:21   Apple does things in the more modern era to say,

01:38:23   I feel secure in my investment in my giant application

01:38:27   that's based on AppKit or UIKit or whatever,

01:38:29   that Apple is going to protect that.

01:38:31   But in the meantime, I know for all my future work,

01:38:34   here's the direction I'm gonna be going in

01:38:35   and I will continue to struggle to use SwiftUI

01:38:39   as much as I can, falling back to UIKit

01:38:42   when I need to, giving feedback to Apple

01:38:44   about the shortcomings, and together we will continue

01:38:46   that cycle, but now the directionality is clear.

01:38:49   Now I know that we're not going to perpetually

01:38:52   have SwiftUI layered on top of another more full featured

01:38:55   API that's like the real thing under the covers.

01:38:58   - Yeah, I don't know.

01:39:02   I'm a bit of a SwiftUI apologist,

01:39:04   because I do think there's a lot to like there,

01:39:07   but it's been quite frustrating because the two or three

01:39:11   that have been delivered in this release,

01:39:15   at least at a glance,

01:39:16   and I've only spent a little bit of time

01:39:17   looking at it so far, but at a glance,

01:39:20   none of these things work for Masquerade.

01:39:22   Like they're exactly what I need for Masquerade,

01:39:25   but for various uninteresting reasons,

01:39:27   they just don't get me 100% of the way there.

01:39:30   So for all of these two or three things

01:39:33   that I'm looking at, I'm probably gonna have to continue

01:39:34   to use my godawful hacks.

01:39:36   This is sounding familiar, Marco.

01:39:37   I don't mean that to be insulting.

01:39:38   I'm just saying like, you know, I have this pile of,

01:39:40   my own pile of god-awful hacks and I don't want them there. I'd rather use the hashtag blessed

01:39:46   way of doing things, but for whatever reason it just isn't 100%. I have my own, you know,

01:39:51   you can't right-click kind of scenarios and situations and it's frustrating even though

01:39:56   so much about SwiftUI I really do like quite a bit and I really do admire what they're trying to do

01:40:04   with it, but like both of you have said, they're just not quite there yet and I don't know how long

01:40:09   it's going to take, but we're certainly not there yet.

01:40:12   - Yeah, I think there's going to be a long tail of like,

01:40:15   you know, if the goal state is,

01:40:17   oh, there is no sort of low level API,

01:40:19   there is no AppKit or UIKit under there,

01:40:21   because like, you know, eventually,

01:40:23   if those APIs will eventually go away,

01:40:26   and it'll just be SwiftUI, right?

01:40:28   But if it's just SwiftUI, and if SwiftUI is declarative,

01:40:31   and if it doesn't have a way to do a thing, you're stuck,

01:40:32   like there's lots of weird things you can't do,

01:40:34   like, again, give examples from Switch Glass,

01:40:36   which is a little palette of icons

01:40:38   lets you switch between applications.

01:40:40   I have a bunch of weird ass invisible windows

01:40:42   floating around there.

01:40:44   So like when you move the pallet off the edge of the screen,

01:40:47   you can still slam the cursor against the edge of the screen

01:40:49   and click and you look like you're missing the pallet,

01:40:52   but you're actually hitting like the empty space

01:40:54   between the edge of the screen.

01:40:55   That's an invisible window that I own.

01:40:57   And I transfer that click to the icon

01:40:59   that you didn't click on.

01:41:00   Same thing with activation, like with the auto hiding thing.

01:41:03   There's an auto hide region

01:41:05   in a bunch of invisible windows,

01:41:07   window size and shape a certain size,

01:41:09   that when you go, when your mouse enters them,

01:41:11   that the thing slides out.

01:41:12   All that stuff, like being able to have a low-level API

01:41:15   to make invisible windows and to take events

01:41:18   that happen in those invisible windows,

01:41:19   like to sort of intercept low-level events

01:41:21   that happen in those invisible windows

01:41:23   and chuck those events to a different responder chain

01:41:26   and have it be as if you had clicked on the button

01:41:29   in a whole different thing.

01:41:31   Like SwiftUI has no facility to do that.

01:41:33   Swift UI doesn't let you take controls

01:41:35   and let them span multiple windows.

01:41:38   It's just like that plumbing is obviously under there,

01:41:41   sort of event tracking and everything,

01:41:42   but you don't have access to that plumbing,

01:41:44   or at least you don't in any sort of reasonable way.

01:41:47   Whereas AppKit is based on that plumbing.

01:41:48   Everything you do in AppKit is like that.

01:41:50   The AppKit has fundamental major building blocks

01:41:53   that are all about capturing, NSEvent,

01:41:56   capturing event, the responder chain,

01:41:58   instantiating windows, styling those windows,

01:42:01   moving them around, like that is how AppKit is built

01:42:05   and that is not how SwiftUI is built.

01:42:07   So using AppKit to run a big SwiftUI view

01:42:12   with a bunch of AppKit crap around it,

01:42:14   I can do that because of the interoperability.

01:42:15   But if you took away AppKit,

01:42:17   my app just doesn't work anymore, right?

01:42:19   Or it's worse, like, oh, sorry, you can't do that

01:42:21   because SwiftUI can't take events from one window

01:42:24   and chuck them into another.

01:42:25   In fact, we don't have events at all.

01:42:26   You just have to tell me some state that's changing.

01:42:28   And it's like, I do worry that they'll sort of get

01:42:33   to the 90% solution where normal regular apps,

01:42:37   even the ones that let you option click on menu bar icons,

01:42:39   those you can do in SwiftUI.

01:42:40   But if you want to do something a little bit outside that,

01:42:43   tough luck, we don't want your apps on the Mac anymore.

01:42:45   Kind of like it is on iOS, not to slam iOS here,

01:42:47   but there's a whole bunch of apps that are possible

01:42:49   on the Mac that are not possible on iOS,

01:42:52   because Apple's decided we don't want

01:42:54   that kind of app on our phones, right?

01:42:56   Sometimes it's for good reasons,

01:42:57   but sometimes it's just like, oh, we don't want that.

01:42:59   Like system extension tile type applications

01:43:01   or applications that, you know,

01:43:03   jailbreak type applications that put a little floating thing

01:43:06   on your screen like Apple's accessibility controls.

01:43:08   Why can't a third party app do that?

01:43:09   No, that's not something we want.

01:43:11   In the same way that for a long time,

01:43:13   Apple didn't want third party keyboards on the phone.

01:43:15   So it's not like this, we don't progress in that area,

01:43:17   but I do worry that the switch to Swift UI

01:43:20   five, 10 years from now will further narrow

01:43:23   the types of applications that are possible on the Mac

01:43:25   and that will be sad for me.

01:43:27   Thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:43:28   Memberful, Green Chef, and Trade Coffee.

01:43:32   And thanks to our members who support us directly.

01:43:34   You can join ATP.fm/join.

01:43:37   We will talk to you next week.

01:43:39   (upbeat music)

01:43:42   ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:43:44   ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:43:47   ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:43:49   ♪ Oh it was accidental ♪

01:43:52   ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:43:54   Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:43:57   'Cause it was accidental

01:43:59   It was accidental

01:44:00   It was accidental

01:44:03   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM

01:44:08   And if you're into Twitter

01:44:11   You can follow them

01:44:13   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:44:16   So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:44:21   ♪ I'm T-Marco ♪

01:44:23   ♪ Armin ♪

01:44:24   ♪ S-I-R ♪

01:44:25   ♪ A-C ♪

01:44:26   ♪ U-S-A ♪

01:44:27   ♪ Syracuse ♪

01:44:29   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:44:30   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:32   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:44:34   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:36   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:44:37   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:44:39   ♪ So long ♪

01:44:41   - So you know my deal with my Microsoft mouse,

01:44:44   where it wasn't working, and I bought a backup one,

01:44:46   and I got my old one replaced or whatever.

01:44:49   Do you have more mice or more keyboards

01:44:52   or more cheese graters?

01:44:54   I'm assuming cheese graters.

01:44:55   - Cheese graters for sure.

01:44:56   (laughing)

01:44:58   This mouse though, like I like this mouse

01:45:01   but I have two of them now

01:45:03   and both of them have something wrong with them

01:45:06   that annoys me.

01:45:07   And I don't know what to do about it.

01:45:08   I don't think I can keep buying this like $99 mouse

01:45:11   but it annoys me.

01:45:12   Right, so I can't, at this point I don't even,

01:45:14   I can't even keep track of which is the one

01:45:15   that was replaced and which is the one

01:45:16   that I bought brand new as a backup.

01:45:18   but it doesn't really matter.

01:45:19   One of them, the scroll wheel,

01:45:23   which used to be dead silent, now goes (imitates scroll wheel)

01:45:27   and like, you know, starts making noise.

01:45:28   Some scroll wheels always make noise,

01:45:30   but this one isn't supposed to make noise.

01:45:32   One of the things I liked about it

01:45:33   was they're very smooth and very quiet,

01:45:34   and now it makes noise.

01:45:35   So that's one mouse's problem.

01:45:37   And, you know, it's like, all right,

01:45:39   well why don't you just use the other one?

01:45:40   The other mouse, boy, does this thing.

01:45:43   There, I'll put a link in the chat.

01:45:45   This is obviously massively amplified

01:45:47   you to get this noise but it is the weirdest thing ever and I think this is the brand new one.

01:45:53   I can't be entirely sure so play that and you can listen to it.

01:45:57   So this sound that hopefully Marco just put into the show so you could hear it.

01:46:07   Here's what it is. I have a keyboard tray. It's actually a middle keyboard tray. It's very sturdy

01:46:12   and the mouse is on the right side of the keyboard tray on a mousepad right.

01:46:17   When I type on the keyboard, or when I tap my fingers on the keyboard tray, but obviously the way I encounter is when I type on the keyboard, every time I hit a keystroke, yes there is the sound of the keystroke.

01:46:30   Thump, you know, my finger hitting the keyboard, right, the keyboard that came with my Mac Pro, right?

01:46:34   but also something inside my mouse rattles.

01:46:39   So the audio you heard, that low frequency thump,

01:46:43   that is my finger pressing on the keyboard tray.

01:46:46   That's the low frequency.

01:46:47   Every other frequency you hear,

01:46:49   that high pitched rattle thing,

01:46:51   that's coming from my mouse.

01:46:53   With every single keystroke,

01:46:55   that mouse makes like a death rattle.

01:46:58   And it's driving me up a wall.

01:47:00   It's like having key clicks on on your phone, right?

01:47:02   So these are my choices.

01:47:03   noisy scroll wheel, so every time I scroll it's (imitates scroll)

01:47:07   or every time I type, something inside the mouse rattles.

01:47:11   And I spent so long trying to figure out

01:47:12   what the deal with this thing was,

01:47:13   here's what I finally tracked it down to,

01:47:14   which doesn't really help me much.

01:47:16   I can eliminate the sound by unplugging that mouse

01:47:20   from the USB cable.

01:47:23   - So it's not like a physical rattle, I guess.

01:47:27   - It is, but I think it's a physical rattle

01:47:29   having to do with the connector, you know what I mean?

01:47:31   like the connector is loose or something.

01:47:33   - Oh my God.

01:47:34   - So if I unplug it from the USB cable, no noise.

01:47:36   But I need it to be plugged into the USB table.

01:47:38   One, 'cause I want a wired mouse.

01:47:40   And two, 'cause the Bluetooth in these things is terrible

01:47:42   and it's incredibly jumpy and the Bluetooth in my Mac

01:47:44   is too far away from whatever.

01:47:45   So I need it to be plugged in.

01:47:47   It's not an optional thing.

01:47:49   One of the reasons I like this mouse is it has a nice cord

01:47:51   and tiny little connector and everything.

01:47:53   It's a wired mouse.

01:47:54   I have a desktop computer.

01:47:55   It's a wired mouse.

01:47:56   No interference, perfect responsiveness, wired mouse.

01:47:59   Great.

01:48:00   But it makes that terrible noise.

01:48:01   So I keep swapping back and forth.

01:48:03   I'm like, which noise is annoying me more?

01:48:05   And now I don't know what to do

01:48:08   because this is the mouse that I like

01:48:09   after trying tons and tons of different mice.

01:48:12   I don't wanna buy a third one.

01:48:13   What's gonna be wrong with the third one?

01:48:15   I did look up YouTube videos

01:48:17   of how to crack these things open.

01:48:18   'Cause I'm like, if something's rattling there,

01:48:20   I'll find it.

01:48:21   (laughing)

01:48:22   I'll shove a piece of gum in there or whatever.

01:48:25   I'll find the rattle and I'll fix it.

01:48:27   But it's a bunch of plastic clips.

01:48:30   It doesn't look like it's easy to open.

01:48:32   I haven't gotten to the point where I've torn the thing open

01:48:34   but I'm getting real close.

01:48:35   So I just wanted to update everybody though.

01:48:36   And our situation is pretty grim over here.

01:48:39   Two mice, both of which make annoying noises

01:48:41   and I don't know what to do.

01:48:44   - I'm so sorry, Jon.

01:48:45   Oh, that is very sad.

01:48:47   If you'll permit me,

01:48:50   I'd like to do a brief public service announcement

01:48:52   that is going to be slightly relevant

01:48:54   for people who do not live in Verizon land,

01:48:56   but is mostly for people who live in the United States,

01:48:58   particularly people who can have Verizon Fios, which I know is a vanishingly small amount

01:49:02   of people.

01:49:04   I was on a...

01:49:06   So I went to AT&T from Verizon when the iPhone...

01:49:09   Not when it first came out, but when the 3GS was new.

01:49:13   We ported our numbers, which at the time was a very odd thing to do in America, like it

01:49:17   was just starting to become popular.

01:49:19   And we ported our numbers from Verizon to AT&T so we could get...

01:49:22   So I could get an iPhone and Aaron had some sort of ridiculous phone and then quickly

01:49:25   got an iPhone thereafter.

01:49:28   And that was in 2008 or thereabouts.

01:49:30   And we've been on AT&T for years and years and years

01:49:33   ever since.

01:49:34   We were on a grandfathered plan where we still

01:49:37   had metered data.

01:49:39   So we had a limit to how much data we could use in a month.

01:49:42   But it rolled over from month to month,

01:49:44   like minutes used to do back in the day with how much time you

01:49:47   spent on the phone.

01:49:48   You would get like 100 minutes or whatever.

01:49:50   And then if you didn't use them all,

01:49:51   maybe your minutes would roll over.

01:49:52   Our data rolled over.

01:49:53   However, because it was a grandfathered plan,

01:49:56   they refused to give us 5G access.

01:49:58   Then out of the blue,

01:50:00   and supposedly they told us this was coming,

01:50:01   although I don't think they did,

01:50:03   out of the blue they raised our prices by $12 a month,

01:50:07   basically as a stick to get us off of

01:50:09   the grandfathered old plans

01:50:11   and get us on their new fancy unlimited plans.

01:50:13   - Cool.

01:50:13   - And I'd already been contemplating switching to Verizon,

01:50:16   switching back to Verizon for a couple of reasons.

01:50:18   First of all, I'd like 5G access.

01:50:20   Second of all, I'd like that super sweet millimeter wave

01:50:23   whatever it's called, super high speed access, which we'll talk about a little bit more and

01:50:27   will be interesting for those of you who don't live in America.

01:50:31   And I really thought I could save money.

01:50:32   And so I'd been getting physical mailings over the last few months that, hey, you're

01:50:36   a Fios customer.

01:50:38   This is Verizon's internet service and cable service.

01:50:41   You're a Fios customer.

01:50:42   If you jump your cellular to Verizon wireless, you can legitimately save $30 a month if you

01:50:51   bring your cell phone stuff over to Fios.

01:50:54   Like it's $20, I think it's 10 or $20 by default

01:50:57   if you have a gigabit internet, which I do.

01:50:59   And then there's like a bonus right now

01:51:01   of an additional $20 a month.

01:51:02   So I am saving, and then I just received

01:51:05   my first Fios bill since this happened.

01:51:06   I'm saving 40 bucks a month by having

01:51:09   Verizon Wireless and Verizon Fios, which is super cool.

01:51:11   The other interesting thing is some of their packages

01:51:14   that they have now include Disney Plus,

01:51:17   which I was paying for separately

01:51:18   for like eight bucks a month or whatever it is.

01:51:20   And what they don't really make clear on the website is that you can mix and match their different unlimited plans.

01:51:24   And so there's this the plan that has Disney Plus and also has Hulu and ESPN Plus and Apple Arcade,

01:51:30   which I'm already paying for separately. But I wasn't getting Hulu or ESPN Plus, so now I get that, which is kind of cool.

01:51:34   But they also have a different plan that doesn't have all the entertainment stuff,

01:51:37   but you get half off on a watch or a tablet or what have you. And if you remember,

01:51:41   I whined and moaned for like six years about how I was paying for my Apple Watch, like 15 bucks a month, because of fees

01:51:46   and taxes and so on and so forth. Well, because I don't really run anymore,

01:51:50   I thought well, I don't really need my Apple watch to have service but my iPad it would be cool

01:51:54   That had service and so I'm getting that for only like 10 bucks a month. I think if I'm not mistaken

01:51:58   So all told I am once the initial bill where they absolutely fleece you with you know

01:52:04   Connection fees and activation fees and so on and so forth. I'm gonna be saving a whole pile of money and

01:52:08   Then if you do it right now, they're giving you

01:52:12   $500 gift cards per phone that you bring if you bring your own phone

01:52:17   So hypothetically I'm getting a thousand dollars of gift of Verizon gift cards that I can use for my service

01:52:24   So I'm getting like a year of service for free. So we're sponsored this week by Verizon and wireless

01:52:29   Right? I'm saying. This is like that keynote thing where you two are all angry because they kept saying Verizon. Verizon 5g

01:52:34   Verizon 5g

01:52:36   Apparently it worked man because I'm saving a pile of money and I'm super excited about it. You save it extra quickly

01:52:41   Thanks to Verizon's new 5g ultra fast wireless network

01:52:45   it's funny you bring that up because

01:52:47   There are so I've looked into a little bit what this millimeter wave thing is that they did talk about that

01:52:53   I think that same year that you're referring to

01:52:55   Wave yeah, that's gonna be the new name. I wish you hadn't said that because now I cannot unhear it

01:53:00   So as it turns out don't be creepy

01:53:03   There's what appears to be a couple of wave towers in downtown Richmond one of the places that I would occasionally park

01:53:11   My body which happens to be a park

01:53:14   Fortress words there, but one of the places I would go to work

01:53:18   That was not my home is a park that is within eyeshot of the wave enabled tower

01:53:23   And one of the things about wave is that you really don't get wave service unless you can literally see the tower from where you're

01:53:31   Standing well with all that said

01:53:33   Because I'm a nerd and I have too much time on my hands. I decided to go before I even tried working there

01:53:40   I tried to go to the wave tower and do a speed test just to see okay

01:53:44   Is this really as fast as people say and I'm not gonna be able to dig up the link

01:53:48   But like when Gruber reviewed what was the iPhone 12? Maybe maybe it's the 13

01:53:52   He found an M wave tower in Philly and he said no really it's bananas fast

01:53:57   I was getting I've done two different tests against this tower once when I was legitimately working and once when I just drove there

01:54:03   Cuz my nerd both of these tests I was getting over

01:54:06   two

01:54:08   gigabits down

01:54:10   my my fiber optic cable going to my house a

01:54:15   Physical cable going to my house tops out at about a thousand megabits per second. I'm looking at my speed test results

01:54:22   2086 megabits per second from the freaking air

01:54:26   How amazing is that like that is bananas if I really want to download something?

01:54:33   at leaving aside like the fact that there is eventually a cap on how much data I get despite it being called unlimited.

01:54:38   I could probably do that faster through my telephone in the, in a park in

01:54:45   outside of Richmond than I could at my house with a gigabit Fios connection. Like how bananas is that?

01:54:51   And by the way, the upstream is 200 megabits per second.

01:54:53   But nevertheless, how bananas is that? That is so freaking cool. Now, granted

01:54:57   there are about three spaces in the greater Richmond area where this works,

01:55:02   But if you're willing to drive to one of those three spaces, I just think that is freaking amazing

01:55:06   That being said despite all that they limit you to 720p streaming because reasons

01:55:11   [BEEPING]