384: Equal Emphasis

0:00:00I went a little freaked out because our server was just

0:00:04massively hammered with a huge load spike, eight minutes ago,

0:00:08and the load average went up to like 150, and I couldn't

0:00:11figure out, looking at all the logs, like what the hell's

0:00:13going on, why is this all of a sudden very heavily loaded,

0:00:16no clue why.

0:00:17Now, we still have all of our listeners on the livestream,

0:00:21we have over 1100 listeners on the livestream, and the load

0:00:24is 0.5.

0:00:26And I'm a little scared that I don't know why.

0:00:30- Is that something updating the location database?

0:00:33(laughing)

0:00:35Is it like the Linux equivalent of photo analysis thing?

0:00:39(beeping)

0:00:41I don't know about you two, but I feel overwhelmed

0:00:43with the amount of content.

0:00:44I know we've just seen at this point the keynote

0:00:46and the State of the Union, and that's all,

0:00:48but it seemed like there was more.

0:00:50Now obviously this is a big year, there's a lot of big

0:00:52important announcements, but it just seemed like,

0:00:54even setting aside how important and momentous certain

0:00:56announcements were, there was just more content.

0:00:58And I have to think it's because the stuff was prerecorded.

0:01:02When you do things live, there is a certain amount of slack

0:01:05in terms of, I don't know, walking around the stage,

0:01:08gathering yourself for the next sentence you're going to say,

0:01:10certainly the transition between presenters walking off

0:01:13the stage and a new person walking on, that takes longer

0:01:16than a cut, any kind of live demo has way more slack in it

0:01:20than a prerecorded thing where everything is perfect

0:01:22down to the second, and I think even though the keynote

0:01:26was not particularly long, it was like an hour and 50

0:01:28minutes or something, they packed a lot of stuff in.

0:01:30I feel overwhelmed with the amount of good, cool, new stuff,

0:01:35and I hope we manage to talk about it all.

0:01:37If we miss your favorite thing, don't worry,

0:01:39we'll keep talking about the WWDC if history has been

0:01:42a guide for the next several weeks.

0:01:44- Yeah, 'cause usually in the summer there's not a whole

0:01:45lot of news, especially as you get into July and August,

0:01:48there's not a whole lot of news, so we will have plenty

0:01:50of time to cover whatever we don't know,

0:01:51whatever we don't have time for this week.

0:01:53Although we do have more time than usual 'cause we're not

0:01:55live for the first time in, what, three or four years?

0:01:58- Yeah, I know, Jon, you're extremely relieved to be doing

0:01:59this at home, but I think I speak for Marco in saying

0:02:02that I'm pretty sad that we're not in front of all

0:02:05of our friends, well, not all of our friends,

0:02:07but many of our friends in San Jose or San Francisco

0:02:09or what have you, but I'm glad that 1,200-ish of you

0:02:12are joining us right now and hopefully many, many more

0:02:14once this is released.

0:02:16I gotta say, as quick overall impressions,

0:02:19whoo, that was a lot.

0:02:20It was a lot and it was fast.

0:02:22You know, it's funny, I was one of the first to lament

0:02:26the really lame demos and to complain about how the,

0:02:31I don't wanna see, what was it, it was an anchor,

0:02:34Anki, the caller, whatever it was, yeah.

0:02:38But they gave us a chance to breathe,

0:02:40and without those demos, this was fast.

0:02:42I was trying to take notes as I was listening

0:02:45and trying to keep up with Twitter and different slacks,

0:02:49and it was just so much, so, so fast,

0:02:53which ultimately is very, very good.

0:02:55And obviously there's a lot to cover.

0:02:58I don't feel like I've properly processed any of it.

0:03:00I feel like I've processed less of it than when I'm there,

0:03:04perhaps because all I do is talk about it all day long

0:03:06with everyone I can see, and what with me being at the beach

0:03:09with my family, I didn't talk about it all day long.

0:03:11I just watched the keynote, watched the State of the Union

0:03:12and otherwise ignored it.

0:03:14But I don't know, I feel like my head is swimming,

0:03:17and I don't know what to make of it one way or the other.

0:03:19- Yeah, it's interesting, the format was so different

0:03:22this year, forced by COVID-19 and everything.

0:03:24And by the way, I really respect the intro by Tim Cook,

0:03:28the kind of, where he sat down on the little stool

0:03:30behind the empty auditorium and talked to the nation

0:03:34about what was going on.

0:03:35It was really well done, it was very tasteful,

0:03:38and I think Tim did a really good job of handling,

0:03:40this is a tricky time, this is tumultuous in a lot of ways.

0:03:43And so that was handled well, I thought.

0:03:46And then as for the format of the presentation itself,

0:03:49being this kind of, I think pretty clearly pre-recorded,

0:03:53presentation is almost the wrong word for it, I guess?

0:03:59It was basically a pre-recorded video introduction.

0:04:02It felt in some ways like a combination between

0:04:06a cool demo and a more fun version

0:04:10of a corporate training video, almost.

0:04:14I don't mean that in a bad way, I know that

0:04:16can be interpreted badly, I don't mean that in a bad way.

0:04:18It seemed very produced, but if you look back

0:04:22at recent years of Apple presentations,

0:04:27we've said in almost every presentation that over time,

0:04:31it has felt a little bit more artificial

0:04:34and a little bit higher budget than what they appear

0:04:37to be letting on with the artifice of it.

0:04:41I don't know, it's hard to explain, but the presentations

0:04:44that have been in person, in auditoriums so far,

0:04:47for the last few years have been increasingly

0:04:50corporate feeling, and they've had more and more

0:04:52pre-produced video segments that they keep cutting to

0:04:55and everything, and so it has felt more,

0:04:58almost like a commercial.

0:04:59And I think this format change that they were forced

0:05:03to make this year is actually a positive thing

0:05:06in the sense that it actually kind of fully admits

0:05:10and embraces what it has been inching towards all along,

0:05:13which is pre-produced, very high budget,

0:05:16very high production value commercials, basically,

0:05:19but done in a slightly more down-to-earth way.

0:05:22And I think that better reflects the size

0:05:26of the company today, it better reflects the importance,

0:05:29the financial importance and the size of the community

0:05:33and everything, it kind of better reflects

0:05:35what the company is today, rather than trying to

0:05:39keep this train going of this old presentation style

0:05:43that Steve Jobs used to do, back when the world

0:05:46was very different, the company was a lot smaller,

0:05:49he was obviously still alive and still doing them.

0:05:52And until today, Apple was still trying to replicate that,

0:05:56and it was losing steam, like the old format,

0:05:58I feel like, was losing steam over the last couple years,

0:06:01and was starting to feel really stale.

0:06:02And so there are parts of that that I miss

0:06:05with this new format, and they might go back to it.

0:06:08Once the virus is under control and they can have

0:06:11large gatherings, maybe they'll go back to the old format,

0:06:13I don't know, but I feel like this new format

0:06:15is a more honest and accurate representation

0:06:19of what they actually are today, as opposed to trying

0:06:23to continue on the way it used to be of like,

0:06:26hey, we're still the same old company,

0:06:28run by these fun hippies, hey, everyone's cool.

0:06:31'Cause that wasn't really accurate anymore.

0:06:34- I don't know if I see that distinction

0:06:35you're pointing out, I mean, I understand what you're saying

0:06:37and I know why this format couldn't have as much

0:06:39of the spontaneity, 'cause it's not live, right?

0:06:41But I don't see that big of a difference,

0:06:44other than it being tightened up and all the ad libs

0:06:47being removed, obviously it feels less friendly

0:06:51and personable than having it live, but there are good

0:06:55presentations and bad ones when they're live,

0:06:57and I think there's nothing wrong with the format,

0:07:00I think just sometimes the chemistry doesn't combine.

0:07:04What you really need for a good live keynote

0:07:05is the same thing you need for any good you need.

0:07:08People who are excited about the things

0:07:10that are announcing, the things that are announcing

0:07:11have to be really good, and to the degree that they're not

0:07:14and the presenters are feigning excessive enthusiasm,

0:07:17that can make it feel a little bit off,

0:07:18but this time around, setting aside the weird format

0:07:22of people filmed individually and then sliced together

0:07:24for obvious reasons, they had a lot of good announcements.

0:07:28But I feel like this format necessarily tamped down

0:07:31on some of the enjoyment that we normally get,

0:07:33like even Federighi only got in one dad joke

0:07:37about the social distancing about the birds, right?

0:07:39He usually has nine of those, and they work well,

0:07:42and I think his personality comes through,

0:07:45to the degree that any presenters are allowed

0:07:47to have their personality come through,

0:07:50whether it's in their attitude or their cadence

0:07:53or the jokes that they manage to get into the presentations,

0:07:56I don't know what the filtering mechanism is

0:07:59for those jokes, do they decide, does someone else decide,

0:08:01like I enjoy all of that, and I think where I agree

0:08:04with Marco is that I think this year's,

0:08:06I think they did a really good job with this year's format,

0:08:08given the constraints.

0:08:10It didn't feel weird and awkward, like we all know

0:08:14that they had to be filmed ahead of time,

0:08:15we all know they were all filmed separately,

0:08:17and if that wasn't clear, they explained it

0:08:19in the little thing at the end that explains

0:08:21all the precautions they took during filming.

0:08:23But each one of the segments felt like that person

0:08:25could have been on stage, modified for the obvious fact

0:08:28that there's not going to be any applause, pauses,

0:08:30and they're not going to make any stumbles,

0:08:32and all the demos are going to be perfect,

0:08:34because if they're not, they just do them over again, right?

0:08:36So if anything, I think this format pulls,

0:08:39I mean, like you said, this pulls a little bit

0:08:41of the humanity out of it, but I don't think

0:08:43that's necessary, like I think you can just leave

0:08:46different takes in and leave a little bit of slack

0:08:49and let Craig make a few more dad jokes,

0:08:51and we're back to the best they've ever been.

0:08:54- It was actually very nice to not have

0:08:56any third-party demos on stage,

0:08:59'cause those always drag so much,

0:09:02and it seems like no one in the room wants those,

0:09:05except Apple apparently, like they would go over

0:09:09like a lead balloon, nobody actually wants them.

0:09:11- But they did them, they had demos of third-party apps,

0:09:14just not done by third parties, they showed Office briefly,

0:09:17they showed Lightroom, they showed Photoshop,

0:09:19like that's how Apple I think always wishes those demos go,

0:09:22but once you invite an executive from another company,

0:09:24you kind of have to let them talk a little bit

0:09:26about something or other, and that's death.

0:09:28- Yeah, so like this new format that didn't have any demos,

0:09:32I mean I don't know, assuming they continue this format

0:09:34for a little while, 'cause the virus isn't going anywhere

0:09:36anytime soon unfortunately, so that I'm sure

0:09:38whatever fall or winter releases they do,

0:09:41whatever events they do, I would say probably at least

0:09:44until next spring, is most likely gonna follow

0:09:46a similar format as this, and so when products get released,

0:09:50when they usually have like game demos and stuff,

0:09:52like hey, look at the new iPhone or iPad,

0:09:54how fast it can run these games,

0:09:56I hope they consider not having the third party demos,

0:10:00'cause this works so much better without them.

0:10:02- All right, so we got a lot to go through,

0:10:03we should probably start, and we're gonna attempt,

0:10:05as I say every year, we're going to attempt

0:10:07to do it chronologically, and then we're going

0:10:08to fail miserably, and it started pretty much

0:10:12with iOS 14 and widgets, which I think the most interesting

0:10:16bombshell from that whole conversation,

0:10:19I don't think it even happened during the keynote,

0:10:21but rather during the State of the Union,

0:10:23where they said widgets are going to be SwiftUI only,

0:10:25which in retrospect I'm not terribly surprised by,

0:10:29but I certainly did not expect whatsoever,

0:10:32and it makes sense, it seems to be,

0:10:34because they can serialize and save off

0:10:36the state of the widget, and then just kind of replay it

0:10:39later and so on and so forth, but I was very surprised

0:10:42to see that, that being said, the widgets looked pretty good

0:10:46and you can put them on the home screen,

0:10:48you can do, what do they call them,

0:10:49like IntelliSmart widgets or something like that,

0:10:51or Smart Shelf, I forget what it was called,

0:10:53where you stack, Smart Stack, you stack a few of them

0:10:56on top of each other, and then the OS and the device

0:10:59will just do, show the one it thinks is most relevant

0:11:02based on how important each individual widget thinks it is

0:11:05at that particular moment.

0:11:06I don't know, all this looked really, really good.

0:11:08I don't know, there's nothing I can think of

0:11:11that I'm like, yes, finally I can have this

0:11:13on my home screen, but I do think that this is one

0:11:15of the lowest hanging fruits that they could have picked,

0:11:19not from an engineering effort perspective,

0:11:21but from a, come on guys, you really haven't done

0:11:23anything in Springboard in, what, 10 years?

0:11:25Can we do something?

0:11:26And they did something, and it looks good.

0:11:29- Yeah, this has been a requested feature

0:11:30for years and years, 'cause the grid of icons

0:11:32was a great thing to start with,

0:11:33but if you had told someone in 2007

0:11:35that we'd still have the grid of icons in 2020,

0:11:37you'd be like, really, nothing different?

0:11:39It's like, well, folders, but really?

0:11:41The folders just look like the little, you know,

0:11:43widgets on the home screen, you know,

0:11:46pioneered by Android, used by lots of phones

0:11:49in various ways, basically just can I have something more

0:11:51on my screen instead of just a grid of apps

0:11:52or a grid of folders, and finally, you can do that.

0:11:55Like, they kept creeping up on it, putting these widgets

0:11:57in the little thing that's to the left, right?

0:12:00But now that you, and the widgets are still there,

0:12:02but now you can put them on your home screen,

0:12:03and you can have them take up the same amount of room

0:12:05as four apps, the same amount of room as, what, eight apps?

0:12:08So they're either squares or they're big rectangles,

0:12:10maybe they can be even taller.

0:12:12Yeah, actually, you can do a grid,

0:12:13a four by four grid of 16 apps, I think.

0:12:15Anyway.

0:12:16- Hexagons coming next year, so you can tessellate them.

0:12:18- Yeah, no, that'll be just like the watch,

0:12:20just this giant scrolling cluster of frog eggs.

0:12:25Anyway.

0:12:25(laughing)

0:12:28But yeah, this is long overdue, and it will,

0:12:31and it's the biggest change to Springboard in years, right?

0:12:36I think even bigger than the folders.

0:12:37This is gonna change how people's home screens look and work

0:12:40because in those widgets, you can add functionality

0:12:43that you don't have, would normally have to go

0:12:45into an app to get.

0:12:48I'm sure someone with more watchOS experience

0:12:50like Underscore would know better,

0:12:52but looking at the API for this, it looks a lot like

0:12:56the UI for stuff on the watch where you give a timeline

0:13:01of information if it's the type of thing.

0:13:03Am I thinking of the watch or am I misremembering, Marco?

0:13:05- Yep, yep.

0:13:06It's basically how complications work,

0:13:08where you provide the timeline of what kind of data

0:13:11should be displayed at what time in the future,

0:13:14to a certain range in the future,

0:13:15and then it automatically displays it,

0:13:17and so you don't have to, and often can't,

0:13:20manually update it constantly.

0:13:23- Yeah, and your app isn't running all the time,

0:13:24and it's basically an energy efficient way

0:13:26to not have all these apps running all the time,

0:13:28but still allow them to put content there.

0:13:29Now obviously, that doesn't work for all things.

0:13:31Like obviously, sometimes you don't know the future

0:13:33and can't put out timeline to that far,

0:13:35but anyway, it's a very flexible API

0:13:37to try to be power efficient and CPU efficient

0:13:41to not have apps constantly churning

0:13:43while still giving much more information and functionality

0:13:47directly on your home screen.

0:13:49As part of this also, further home screen changes,

0:13:53they added the app library, which is a better,

0:13:56more or less a better way to organize your apps

0:13:58without organizing them.

0:13:59So the spatial interface that we've had for ages

0:14:01where you arrange your home screen

0:14:02and have these little icons,

0:14:03Craig made a good point in the presentation,

0:14:05it's like yeah, most people arrange their first screen

0:14:07or maybe their first screen or two,

0:14:09but after that, it's just chaos, right?

0:14:10Unless you're really obsessive or you have very few apps,

0:14:13by screen five, things are just a mess.

0:14:16Now I would say that part of the reason that's true

0:14:19is trying, as we've mentioned on the show many times,

0:14:21trying to organize your home screens is a nightmare.

0:14:24It's a UI nightmare.

0:14:25See previous episode where I described the experience

0:14:29in excruciating detail, but it's terrible.

0:14:32It's a hot potato, there's no place to put things down,

0:14:34you accidentally drop things, things scooch off the edge,

0:14:36it's terrible.

0:14:37You used to be able to arrange your home screen

0:14:38in the iTunes interface,

0:14:39even that wasn't a great interface.

0:14:41I would kill for a Mac user interface

0:14:45that lets you rearrange your home screen icons.

0:14:48Just like a real Mac user interface

0:14:50that's sort of non-destructive with save

0:14:52with an area off to the side where you can just chuck things

0:14:55to keep them in holding patterns

0:14:56and with like multiple selection ranges

0:14:59and like just, it's an app for rearranging squares,

0:15:02literally, that's all it is,

0:15:03but a decent app for rearranging squares

0:15:07on a large screen with a mouse and keyboard,

0:15:10God, I would kill for that.

0:15:11If that existed, I think people's home screens

0:15:14would be better organized past the first screen or two.

0:15:17Widgets will kind of help with that,

0:15:18but all it will do is let people have even cooler

0:15:22first one or two or three screens,

0:15:23but by screen five, it's still gonna be chaos.

0:15:26So Apple's solution is, you know what,

0:15:27you can just hide those screens.

0:15:29You can just say, I don't wanna see in screens five,

0:15:31six, and seven or whatever of my home screens,

0:15:33just don't even put them in the little swipey thing.

0:15:36How will you get to those apps?

0:15:37Oh, the app library, what has them organized by recency

0:15:40and by category and there's an alphabeticalist thing.

0:15:42This is above and beyond the search

0:15:43where you have to type stuff.

0:15:44This is like an organized into bins or whatever.

0:15:47I feel like this is a slight abdication

0:15:49of Apple's responsibility to make it possible

0:15:51for human beings to actually organize their app icons.

0:15:54They're saying, you know what, give up

0:15:56because we're never gonna make it easy,

0:15:58so just hide those screens and it's like spatial organization

0:16:01for screens one, two, and three, and then browser mode

0:16:05and automatic categorization for the rest.

0:16:07And maybe that works fine, maybe no one would ever

0:16:09carefully arrange five screens, but honestly,

0:16:12I find it frustrating to rearrange my screens one and two.

0:16:14Often I look at them, I was recently,

0:16:16speaking of the Hey app, which we're not today,

0:16:18I was trying to find a place to put the Hey app

0:16:20because I have an account and I'm in the free trial period

0:16:23and I wanted to try it out and I didn't want it

0:16:24to be buried 20 screens ago.

0:16:26So it's like, oh God, how do I find a place for that

0:16:28in my screens one and two?

0:16:30What thing do I move and what am I gonna accidentally

0:16:33screw up when I move it?

0:16:34That's just me rearranging the screens

0:16:35that Craig says that people do arrange.

0:16:37So I still think this is a problem, but all that aside,

0:16:40I'm very glad at this, the biggest change to Springboard

0:16:45in maybe ever, but certainly in the last several years.

0:16:48So I endorse these changes, I just really do wish

0:16:52there was an easier way to arrange your home screens.

0:16:54- Yeah, I'm really curious to see what these widgets

0:16:57look like for something like Overcast actually

0:17:00to put Marco on the spot, because my understanding is

0:17:02there's no way to interact with these widgets.

0:17:05And presumably in the case of Overcast,

0:17:07you could just use like a now playing widget

0:17:09that's like a system level thing.

0:17:11But let's just for the sake of discussion,

0:17:13say that that didn't exist.

0:17:14I don't think Marco, there's any way for you to put

0:17:16like a play, pause, rewind, fast forward or anything

0:17:18like that in a widget, which could be extremely useful.

0:17:20I guess the next best thing you could do is put a list

0:17:23of podcasts to kind of hop into and play or no,

0:17:25but I guess that's still interactive too.

0:17:28That kind of bums me out that there's no interactivity.

0:17:30It totally makes sense from an engineering perspective,

0:17:32but from a user perspective, I'd like to be able

0:17:35to lightly interact with some things.

0:17:37And I think I'd seen James Thompson say something

0:17:39about how the pcalc calculator widget wouldn't be possible

0:17:43for this exact same reason.

0:17:44And that's, it's fine, but it's a little bit of a bummer.

0:17:46But on the grand scheme of things,

0:17:48I'm still really into this widget stuff.

0:17:50I think the app catalog, whatever app library thing

0:17:52sounds good too, because as Craig put it,

0:17:55jiggle mode is a little bit challenging to say the least,

0:17:58just like you were saying, Jon.

0:17:59So all in all, the new springboard stuff looks real good.

0:18:03- Yeah, I think it's useful, as we alluded to earlier,

0:18:06it's useful to think of the new widgets

0:18:07more like watch complications than like miniature

0:18:11app interfaces, because they are, I mean,

0:18:14and again, this could change as we learn more about them

0:18:17and as we get time to play with them as developers

0:18:19and maybe changes happen over the summer.

0:18:20But it sure seems actually in many ways less functional

0:18:24than the previous widgets have been.

0:18:26And by the way, Overcast has a widget that no one uses it

0:18:30because it's not very useful, but I have a widget.

0:18:33It has a play/pause button.

0:18:34Getting that to work was a crazy hack,

0:18:37but it has a play/pause button and it does show

0:18:39like the next two or three upcoming podcasts

0:18:42and a play/pause button and that's it.

0:18:44But almost no one uses it because it's kind of awkward

0:18:46to use widgets in the previous versions of iOS.

0:18:50So I think, I honestly can't think of a good reason

0:18:53to have one in this new system for Overcast.

0:18:55I don't think it makes sense unless I would,

0:18:57again, like I could show the next upcoming podcast,

0:18:59but if I can't tell which one you tapped on,

0:19:00if you tap on it, then that's not of much use.

0:19:03So I'm probably just not gonna have a widget

0:19:06in the new system, but I'm looking forward

0:19:08to what other types of apps are able to do with them.

0:19:11I've never been a heavy widget user,

0:19:13but I would love to do things like have a weather widget

0:19:15showing on my home screen.

0:19:16Like there are certain things like weather

0:19:17that I just always want to be displayed.

0:19:19Maybe, you know, like there were some of the examples

0:19:21they were showing, like showing your upcoming calendar

0:19:23events, that's stuff I would actually use.

0:19:26And so I'm looking forward to just having a new fun thing

0:19:31to play with, and yes, Android people, I know,

0:19:34you did it first, Opera did it first, et cetera, I know,

0:19:37but this is new to us, so we're gonna be super excited.

0:19:40(laughing)

0:19:41And this is actually not the first Android thing

0:19:44that is now gonna be new to us,

0:19:45that we'll get to more in a little while.

0:19:46- Yeah, I think that because these widgets are, you know,

0:19:49seem like they're not particularly interactive right now,

0:19:52it doesn't mean they'll stay that way.

0:19:53Like when they were in the sort of today view,

0:19:55it kind of made sense that they wouldn't be

0:19:57constantly interactive, 'cause you don't even see 'em

0:19:58half the time, they only sort of load on demand.

0:20:00But if it's gonna be on your home screen all the time,

0:20:02obviously Apple doesn't want you churning away

0:20:04and burning CPU, so they're very conservative

0:20:06with the first implementation, but it wouldn't surprise me

0:20:08with a few years from now that you can finally get

0:20:11essentially a now playing screen on the home screen

0:20:14with active play/pause, fast forward, rewind controls,

0:20:17and you know, like a tiny miniature interface

0:20:19to overcast in the home screen.

0:20:20Does not seem unreasonable for me,

0:20:22because it would only be running when the screen

0:20:24is turned on, and when the screen is turned on

0:20:26and they're on their home screen,

0:20:28it's not any different than if the screen is turned on

0:20:31and they happen to be in overcast.

0:20:32It's the same amount of CPU usage, you know,

0:20:34if you're like playing audio or something like that.

0:20:35And speaking of that, to show that they're not afraid

0:20:38of having things running on top of the home screen

0:20:40in other places, picture in picture, which you know,

0:20:42is from the iPad now available on the phone.

0:20:44So if you're watching some video and you wanna go

0:20:46someplace else, you can still see the video

0:20:48in a little floaty window, just like you can on the iPad.

0:20:51And if they're okay with a bunch of video showing,

0:20:53I think it should be okay with play, pause,

0:20:56fast-forward and rewind buttons in a widget.

0:20:58Neither one is gonna kill your CPU exactly.

0:21:01So it's nice to see that coming over.

0:21:03That's sort of like something they had already implemented,

0:21:05but you know, didn't have on the phone,

0:21:07because like, oh, the phone is so small.

0:21:08Would people want that?

0:21:09Answer, yes, everybody wants that on their phone.

0:21:11Plus phones are pretty big these days.

0:21:13- You know, one small thing about the widgets

0:21:14that I can't let go of apparently,

0:21:16I think the old API is probably deprecated, right?

0:21:19And that's also a little bit of a bummer.

0:21:21Like on my iPad and in Notification Center on my iPhone,

0:21:26I like using this app, Vidgets, V-I-D-G-E-T-S.

0:21:29And what that does is it's like an iStat menus

0:21:31for your phone or your iPad.

0:21:32And on the iPad, I actually have it on my home screen.

0:21:34And it's in for someone like me

0:21:36who has no empathy for the machine, sorry, John.

0:21:38It actually is very convenient to know

0:21:40like if I'm actively downloading something

0:21:41and is it actually going quickly?

0:21:44And that's not gonna be possible anymore

0:21:46because that refreshes itself like once a second.

0:21:49And for all the reasons that you just cited,

0:21:51you know, it's too computationally expensive,

0:21:52too energy expensive.

0:21:53That's not gonna be possible anymore.

0:21:54And that's too bad.

0:21:55That being said, I understand why

0:21:58from an engineering perspective,

0:21:59and it makes perfect sense.

0:22:01And I do think that there are probably gonna be

0:22:04some cool new widgets with new functionality.

0:22:06And I'm really anxious to see or excited to see

0:22:09how the auto ordering works on those stacks.

0:22:12But I should stop belaboring this widget thing.

0:22:14We should probably keep moving along.

0:22:16What was the next thing that they talked about?

0:22:20Translate, actually.

0:22:21- Yeah, the compact UI for Siri and calls.

0:22:24Also, the call one has been,

0:22:26people wanted that since multitasking was introduced.

0:22:29It's like when a call comes in,

0:22:31why does it take over my whole screen?

0:22:33Everything else that happens,

0:22:35you can have a banner or you can have an alert.

0:22:36You know, like the modern notification system on iOS

0:22:39has existed for a long time.

0:22:40And calls have just said, no, we are something special

0:22:44because I'm not sure if you know this,

0:22:45but what you're actually holding

0:22:46is something we call a phone.

0:22:48And when you get a call, since I'm a phone,

0:22:50it's the most important thing that I do.

0:22:52So I'm gonna black out the whole screen

0:22:54and nobody likes that.

0:22:55And other modern smartphones don't do that.

0:22:57And now the iPhone won't either.

0:22:59It actually shows as a notification.

0:23:01Imagine that.

0:23:02And same thing for Siri.

0:23:04You can now activate Siri and do things with it

0:23:06without it blanking over the whole screen.

0:23:08That may or may not actually make Siri any better.

0:23:12There's a separate section on Siri supposedly being better.

0:23:15But yay for catching up with modern practices

0:23:18in terms of notification UI.

0:23:20- Yeah, I'm so happy to see this.

0:23:23- Yep.

0:23:24- As with many nerds who have been complaining

0:23:25about this for years, phone calls today are,

0:23:29there are some special considerations for a call.

0:23:33Unlike many other notifications that we get,

0:23:34it is a synchronous thing.

0:23:36This call is happening right now.

0:23:37You need to answer it right now.

0:23:38You can't just wait until later and go.

0:23:40So there is some degree of special treatment that they need.

0:23:43And I'm sure there's probably some regulations too

0:23:45about how calls have to behave on certain phones

0:23:47in certain countries just from legacy or emergency reasons.

0:23:51But for the most part, this is a computer that you're using

0:23:55and you don't want anything to be able to do

0:23:58a full screen takeover that you didn't tell to happen.

0:24:01And that's what calls have done until now.

0:24:04And this also includes FaceTime calls

0:24:06and anything else that uses the system VoIP API.

0:24:09A full screen takeover on your computer

0:24:13that is caused by someone else calling you

0:24:16that you have no control over,

0:24:19I mean, in many ways it has been and can be used

0:24:22as like a DDoS attempt for someone's device.

0:24:24But it does seem kind of ridiculous to think about

0:24:29why that would be the case these days.

0:24:30And so it is wonderful that Apple has finally

0:24:33recognized that and made this change to be like,

0:24:35all right, you know what, phone calls are now demoted

0:24:37a little bit in the UI so that they don't

0:24:40blackout the entire screen of your phone

0:24:43whenever some idiot calls you.

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0:26:15Translate, Translate looked really cool.

0:26:17I know that Google Translate is a thing.

0:26:18I know it's very good.

0:26:19I, as with everyone, haven't had the opportunity

0:26:22to use any sort of translation service for a while.

0:26:25But it looks really, really neat.

0:26:27The one thing I wish is that when you were doing

0:26:30the conversational mode, it seemed like it would be

0:26:32the perfect opportunity to put your phone in landscape

0:26:35and set it between you and the person.

0:26:37And I feel like the opposite person's UI

0:26:41should be flipped 180 degrees.

0:26:43Does that make sense?

0:26:43Right now, you would have to do the like,

0:26:46hold it up to your face and then hold it up

0:26:48to the other person's face so they could read

0:26:49the translated version of what you said was

0:26:51and then bring it back to your face

0:26:52so you can read what they said.

0:26:53It seems like such a good tabletop sort of mode

0:26:56where the UI is split in half and one person

0:26:59gets each half facing the correct way.

0:27:02But with that quibble aside, it looks really nice.

0:27:04And all the translation is happening on device now,

0:27:07which is also excellent.

0:27:09- I wonder what they're using for the translation.

0:27:11Like, we're all used to using Google Translate

0:27:13and doing natural language translation

0:27:15is actually very tricky and Google has spent a long time

0:27:17trying to make their translation better.

0:27:18Apple has it as a feature check mark.

0:27:20Yeah, we've got translation.

0:27:22But how, how are they doing it?

0:27:23Presumably, they're not using Google Translate.

0:27:25Have they developed it in house?

0:27:26Did they license something?

0:27:27Is it as good as Google's engine?

0:27:28This is always the question with all these things.

0:27:30So I'm glad Apple has checked that box.

0:27:32I hope they continue to improve Translate.

0:27:35You're just, we're talking about the Translate app,

0:27:37but translation is also built into Safari.

0:27:40Strangely, as far as I'm aware,

0:27:42it's not built into Messages, right?

0:27:44Am I wrong about that?

0:27:45- I think that's correct.

0:27:46- Yeah, I believe it's only in the Translate app

0:27:48and then separately in Safari.

0:27:49- Yeah, so I mean, it seems like a natural inclusion

0:27:51for a future version of Messages.

0:27:53So you can have a message conversation

0:27:54and then just tap on the thing and say,

0:27:56"Please translate this," but we'll see.

0:27:57But anyway, it's good that Apple is another catch up

0:28:00in this area.

0:28:01And surprisingly, like for the Safari thing,

0:28:04that's one of the features I hear cited a lot.

0:28:06It's also one of the reasons I go to Chrome.

0:28:08Like, I'm, you know, I use Chrome for some things

0:28:09in Safari for others, but sometimes I'll be using,

0:28:11you know, one of the things I use Safari for,

0:28:13I'll be doing that, and I'll land on a page

0:28:15that I need translated, and I could just go

0:28:17to translate.google.com and put it in the URL

0:28:19and blah, blah, blah, but it's so much easier in Chrome

0:28:20'cause it just prompts you, and now it's that easy

0:28:22in Safari, too.

0:28:23It's, you know, it's a reason a lot of people cite it

0:28:25for using Chrome, is that, oh, Chrome will translate stuff.

0:28:27Right, and you can say, "Well, you don't need Chrome

0:28:29"to translate it, you can, in Safari, just go,"

0:28:31and they don't wanna hear it.

0:28:32They're just like, "Chrome just asked me

0:28:33"if I wanted to translate it and I say yes."

0:28:35So now, Safari does that, too.

0:28:37Again, caveats about the potential quality

0:28:39of the natural language translation, which Google has worked

0:28:41for years and years on, and Apple just getting started,

0:28:43but I'm glad the future exists.

0:28:46- So, messages.

0:28:47I am really excited about the changes coming to messages.

0:28:51It seems like they were very polarizing,

0:28:53and there were a couple of, like, sticks in the mud

0:28:55that I saw fly by on Twitter that were not into it at all,

0:28:58but I love the idea that we're gonna have threading.

0:29:01What were some of the other features that they added?

0:29:03Oh, pinned conversations. - Pinned conversations,

0:29:05yeah, and putting little cute photos on your group messages.

0:29:09I mean, both of those, the pinned and the photos,

0:29:11are great examples of features that are clearly responses

0:29:15to how people use messages.

0:29:17Like, if you're a heavy messages user,

0:29:20inevitably you have certain message groups

0:29:22that are just permanent, one for your whole family,

0:29:25one for a particular group of friends, one for your parents.

0:29:28And if you're frequently using messages,

0:29:32a busy day, your parent group could get pushed down,

0:29:34and you wanna check in with your parents again at night,

0:29:36and you gotta scroll and find the parent group

0:29:38or try and type in the names again or something like that.

0:29:41Having pinned conversations and having cute little icons

0:29:44for your pinned conversation groups lets you just say,

0:29:46look, I'm always going to want to talk to my immediate

0:29:49family, my parent, my in-laws, my group of friends,

0:29:52my, you know, soccer team, whatever.

0:29:54Like, just pick a set of those and pin them,

0:29:57'cause you're always gonna wanna go back to them,

0:29:58and then there's everything else.

0:29:59And then the threading, if you're in a big group

0:30:02conversation and people are communicating asynchronously,

0:30:05sometimes you want to respond to something

0:30:08that was said a long time, it's like the point of threading.

0:30:09Sometimes you want to say, what are you actually

0:30:11responding to, what are you saying ha ha to,

0:30:13what is that lol about, like, I need to know.

0:30:15So we can, you know, so threads are a thing,

0:30:18and they can have good implementations and bad, I think.

0:30:20Today we have enough experience, these type of interfaces,

0:30:24that you can strike a reasonable balance.

0:30:26We'll see how, what this balance is,

0:30:27'cause they're saying, yes, you can,

0:30:29essentially threading information will be there,

0:30:31but the messages will, of course, still appear linearly,

0:30:33and you can sort of group them by thread,

0:30:35so I'm not sure about the UI,

0:30:37but it's kind of like translation.

0:30:39Any amount of threading is better than none.

0:30:42If people don't like it, just don't use it,

0:30:44and it generates to the non-threading form,

0:30:45but I think people will like it and use it,

0:30:48again, as evidenced from using things like Slack,

0:30:49where people were very nervous when threading appeared,

0:30:52but now people use it in what I think

0:30:55is a pretty natural way, like,

0:30:58there's not a lot of threading about threads,

0:30:59people just sort of use them and understand them

0:31:01and appreciate them, they haven't overwhelmed Slack

0:31:04and made it unusable, nor do they go entirely unused,

0:31:08and I hope messages will turn out the same way.

0:31:10- Yeah, I like seeing that Apple's really taking messages

0:31:14as seriously as it deserves,

0:31:17and there's also, which we'll get to in a little while,

0:31:19there's the new Messages app on the Mac,

0:31:21which is now built with Catalyst

0:31:23and has apparently feature parity with iOS,

0:31:25which is a first, and what I like about this is,

0:31:28messages is incredibly highly used.

0:31:31I mean, even with the stats they gave,

0:31:33that kind of blew my mind, they said that there's a

0:31:3540% increase in messages sent since last year,

0:31:38and twice as many group messages,

0:31:40so that's kind of incredible for one year of growth

0:31:42on something that's a pretty mature platform,

0:31:45but messages are so big, so I see, with Overcast,

0:31:49one of the analytics that I capture is,

0:31:51when you do a share with the activity sheet,

0:31:54I save as an analytic, like,

0:31:56what type of shared destination did you use?

0:31:58So it's things like copy to clipboard,

0:32:00send to messages, that kind of stuff,

0:32:02and send to messages destroys everything else.

0:32:05It is so much more, so far and above,

0:32:08well more used than any other kind of

0:32:12shared destination in the app.

0:32:14And so, and like, when I designed the share panel,

0:32:17I was thinking people would be like

0:32:18sharing social networks and everything,

0:32:20and they do, but it's nowhere close to messages.

0:32:24Like, not even close.

0:32:26I think we, as like podcasters and, you know,

0:32:30public Twitter personalities, I think we,

0:32:33we might underestimate how many people

0:32:36communicate with their friends and family

0:32:38only via messages and stuff, as opposed to doing anything

0:32:42on the public social networks,

0:32:43or they do so much more of it in messages

0:32:45than on public social networks.

0:32:46It's so big, and so for Apple to invest in it seriously,

0:32:50and not to just let it languish and let it fall behind

0:32:53alternatives like WhatsApp and stuff like that,

0:32:55is really important, and so I'm glad to see

0:32:57they're doing that here.

0:32:58- Yeah, Apple has said in years past

0:33:00that messages is the most used app on the entire phone.

0:33:03Like, you remember we were saying, it's a phone,

0:33:04so it should have the phone message taken over.

0:33:06Really what it essentially is, is a messaging device.

0:33:09Like, that's basically what people use their phone for.

0:33:12They don't use it for phone calls,

0:33:13they don't use it to browse the web or read Twitter,

0:33:16and like, if you had to say to a first approximation,

0:33:18what are these devices for?

0:33:19Again, just go into public, when you can someday again,

0:33:22and look at what people are doing on their phone.

0:33:25Chances are good they're using messages.

0:33:26It is the most popular app by a lot.

0:33:29So, yeah, I always felt like their conservatism

0:33:32with the evolution of messages is very similar

0:33:35to the home screen, which obviously is not really an app,

0:33:38but everyone uses, you have no choice,

0:33:40it's there when you turn on your phone.

0:33:42You don't wanna screw it up, and in the case of messages,

0:33:46it's a high volume service, and history has shown

0:33:50that making changes to it is a little bit fraught.

0:33:53Witness messages in the cloud, which was delayed on release

0:33:56and I think is still a little bit buggy.

0:33:58So you really don't wanna mess it up,

0:34:00but you do have to try and kinda key up with the Joneses.

0:34:03So I think Apple is still lagging behind

0:34:05and is still not able to confidently make

0:34:09these kinds of changes.

0:34:11Every time they make one,

0:34:11we're all nervous that it's gonna screw up,

0:34:13but it is important for them to keep trying.

0:34:15So thumbs up on this change.

0:34:17Hopefully it doesn't, hopefully it's stable and works well.

0:34:21- Yeah, the one change that I'm most excited for

0:34:23is threading because on some group text messages

0:34:26or group iMessages, I should say,

0:34:28there are definitely times that I get a little lost,

0:34:30especially if I'm coming back to something later.

0:34:32So I have a group thread or a group chat

0:34:37with a couple of other car nerd friends of mine,

0:34:39not you guys, and there's oftentimes

0:34:43where one of us will come back,

0:34:45not having seen the chat for a couple hours,

0:34:47and the two remaining people will have been chatting

0:34:50for the last two hours and there'll be 50 messages there.

0:34:53And often I wanna reply, if it's me that's coming back to it,

0:34:55I wanna reply to something that happened way back when,

0:34:58and that's very hard to do without reestablishing

0:35:01a new context and so on and so forth.

0:35:03And so I'm really excited for threads.

0:35:06However, I just recently was trying to send a Twitter link

0:35:11to a group chat that was myself

0:35:16and just a couple other people.

0:35:18And so I went and I looked for the icon that was myself

0:35:23and one of the people in this group chat.

0:35:26It just so happened to be my brother-in-law.

0:35:28So I look for an icon that has like my brother-in-law

0:35:30and a little teeny blob,

0:35:32and you'll have several circles for the group chats

0:35:34and the little teeny blob of his picture.

0:35:36And I just quickly went there, pasted and hit send.

0:35:40And then I realized I had sent to a different chat

0:35:43that was much wider, that had many more people

0:35:46than just him in it, he was in the other one,

0:35:48but I misfired on account of just looking for him

0:35:51and then immediately firing.

0:35:53And it was not the sort of thing that I wanted to misfire

0:35:55to this larger group, and I'm not going to give

0:35:56any more details than that, but I felt real dumb

0:35:59and I really regretted it.

0:36:00So being able to have a special image for group chats

0:36:05that you can actually add in and specify is awesome.

0:36:08With all that said though, the only problem here

0:36:11is that this particular, my particular brother-in-law

0:36:15is an Android user.

0:36:16And so I'm assuming that since we can't even rename

0:36:19group chats that are SMS or I guess MMS only,

0:36:22I'm assuming none of these features will be coming

0:36:24to the messages representation of group MMSs,

0:36:28and so I'm still screwed either way.

0:36:30- I'm actually really curious what you sent him.

0:36:32Like the less you say about it,

0:36:34the more suspicious it becomes.

0:36:36(laughing)

0:36:37Maybe I don't want to know.

0:36:38- No, I'll tell you after the show.

0:36:39- Oh God.

0:36:40- But yeah, I'm really excited for all the messages changes.

0:36:42I'm super duper excited to hear that there's parody

0:36:45on Mac OS, Big Sur, spoiler alert,

0:36:47or Bug Sur, depending on who you ask.

0:36:49But anyways--

0:36:50- What an amazing typo.

0:36:52- Oh God, what a good typo.

0:36:53But anyway, I'm really excited for that.

0:36:55Trying to plow right along as quickly as possible.

0:36:57Maps got some updates, including cycling directions

0:36:59and EV routing, two things I don't care about.

0:37:01Now Marco, I know you are super excited

0:37:03about the EV routing changes,

0:37:04especially while you use CarPlay in your, oh, sorry.

0:37:08(laughing)

0:37:09- Tesla's already got EV routing that's customized to it,

0:37:12so he's not really missing out on that,

0:37:13but it is a continued shame that Tesla hasn't found a way

0:37:16to square that circle with CarPlay.

0:37:18- Yeah, it's basically, it's adding to apparently

0:37:21just BMWs and Fords so far, but more cars coming later,

0:37:25the ability to build in charging stops to your routes,

0:37:29which is what Tesla's map and its cars

0:37:31have done since day one.

0:37:32So it's nice, I can tell you, that's a wonderful feature.

0:37:36It is very nice, it won't affect me at all,

0:37:37but it is very nice, and yeah, man, it really stung,

0:37:41we'll get to CarPlay in a second,

0:37:42it really stung when Craig said about CarPlay,

0:37:44it's available on basically every new car.

0:37:47(laughing)

0:37:50I think Tesla might be the only remaining holdout

0:37:52of any major car brand now, like I'm pretty sure,

0:37:56I can't think of any other car brand

0:37:58that does not offer CarPlay at all.

0:37:59I mean, hell, Porsche even offers it

0:38:01for their cars made in the '60s.

0:38:02(laughing)

0:38:04We can't even get it on Tesla.

0:38:05And that is becoming increasingly a problem

0:38:09for Apple people who have Teslas.

0:38:11Whatever is causing them to not wanna do that,

0:38:16I wish they would work it out.

0:38:18- Moving right along, we can talk about the Home app,

0:38:21and it's getting adaptive lighting,

0:38:23which is I guess sort of kind of,

0:38:25but not really night shift, but for your physical lights

0:38:28instead of your computer and your other devices,

0:38:32which is pretty cool.

0:38:33The face recognition thing, so I think I blanked

0:38:35when that was coming across, so it won't alert

0:38:38when it sees somebody that it knows at your front door,

0:38:41is that correct?

0:38:42- It will alert and tell you who it is.

0:38:45- Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa.

0:38:46- Yeah, this is like feature parody,

0:38:48a lot of these home features are sort of feature parody

0:38:50and APIs for things that are just expected

0:38:52from home automation.

0:38:53This is more catch-up stuff, like in any sort of

0:38:56camera system, probably has some kind of

0:38:58face recognition in the library,

0:38:59and this is HomeKit support for that.

0:39:02Activity zones specify the region of the camera's view

0:39:06that you're actually interested in.

0:39:08More catch-up features, but these are sort of necessary

0:39:11stuff to be a player in this game that you have to support,

0:39:15so good on Apple for catching up.

0:39:18I'm really curious to see how this works,

0:39:19because I have some Nest cameras,

0:39:22and first of all, their zone detection is garbage,

0:39:27and their motion detection and everything,

0:39:30their Nest cameras seem unaware that the sun

0:39:34moves throughout the day, and as a result,

0:39:38shadows happen and shadows move across rooms

0:39:41very slowly throughout the day as well,

0:39:44and Nest's face recognition is also total garbage.

0:39:47So I'm really curious to see how this works out

0:39:49in practice with these products.

0:39:51This has been the kind of thing that companies

0:39:53have advertised for years, as John said.

0:39:56There used to even be apps for your Mac

0:39:58to let your Mac webcam do many of these same functionalities.

0:40:01They've never worked that well.

0:40:03So yeah, this is very much a wait and see for me.

0:40:06Certainly, this is the kind of thing like,

0:40:08you'd expect Nest being Google-owned

0:40:10to be good at that kind of stuff, and they're super not.

0:40:13So we will see, I hope it works out well.

0:40:16Also, I thought it was very entertaining

0:40:18that during this home segment, I'm pretty sure

0:40:20Casey's garage door opener Raspberry Pi was Sherlock'd.

0:40:23(laughing)

0:40:25- You know, everyone has been saying that,

0:40:27but I have had a Homebridge-powered home kit front end

0:40:32for my Raspberry Pi garage door opener doohicker

0:40:38since, I don't know, like a week or so after I installed

0:40:41just the Raspberry Pi detection and the LED thing.

0:40:44So I'm not entirely clear what this is buying me

0:40:47other than more prominence, and I guess maybe alerting

0:40:51if the garage door's left open.

0:40:52Is that the only new stuff?

0:40:54- I don't know, it breezed by really fast,

0:40:57so it's a little hard to know yet.

0:40:59- I think it is alerting, which coincidentally,

0:41:01I don't think I talk about this on the show,

0:41:02but I did set up a home kit automation

0:41:07that when it detects that everyone has left the house,

0:41:12it will then read the state of the garage door,

0:41:16and it will send me a push notification saying either,

0:41:19you know, you're good, the garage door's closed,

0:41:20or oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, it's open.

0:41:22And that's actually a fairly challenging thing to do,

0:41:24because using the out of the box shortcuts functionality,

0:41:29you can't send a push notification based on a home kit event.

0:41:33So what I'm actually doing is calling an API

0:41:37that I have on my server via HTTP

0:41:40that's then basically just proxying that to PushOver,

0:41:43which is a really cool app that has its own front end

0:41:46to sending push notifications to your phone.

0:41:47So when the last, between Aaron and I,

0:41:50when the last of us leaves,

0:41:52the home kit will check the state of the garage door,

0:41:53make an HTTP request to my server,

0:41:55which makes a HTTP request to PushOver.

0:41:57I guess I could skip that hop, but my API is--

0:42:00- This is so complicated.

0:42:01- It's the most casey answer,

0:42:03the solution to this problem ever.

0:42:05But anyways, my API's so much simpler.

0:42:08And so it'll send a push notification to my phone,

0:42:10which is super cool, and I was very proud

0:42:11of figuring out a way to get around the limitation

0:42:13that you can't send yourself a push from a home kit,

0:42:17from a home kit automation.

0:42:18Anyway, it is super cool that they're getting

0:42:22a little bit more support for that sort of thing.

0:42:24Moving on, let's talk about CarPlay,

0:42:26because it makes me so happy to hear you suffer.

0:42:29I mean, it makes me so happy.

0:42:30- You jumped ahead, you skipped CarKey, the App Store,

0:42:34iPad OS, AirPods, WatchOS, and Privacy.

0:42:37- Can I skip all, I'm just going off the show notes, man.

0:42:39- No, you're not following in the notes document.

0:42:41Mark, you don't know what's going on.

0:42:42- No, I'm following keynote order.

0:42:44- Well, okay, so the key, we're,

0:42:46the document is taking precedence here,

0:42:49because we're gonna skip stuff in the keynote.

0:42:52But if you have better notes,

0:42:53you could have put them into the document.

0:42:54- Okay, we know, your document knows better than Apple

0:42:57what order things should be presented in.

0:42:58- No, I'm just saying that the document

0:43:00is what Casey's going off of,

0:43:01and he can't see what you're looking at.

0:43:03- Thank you, John.

0:43:04- If you had put what you're looking at in the document,

0:43:06then we could all see it.

0:43:07- It was broadcast to the world.

0:43:09- I know.

0:43:10- All right, we'll bicker about it later.

0:43:11We'll bicker about it later.

0:43:12But the next thing in the document is CarPlay.

0:43:14- You can reorder it in the edit.

0:43:15You have ultimate power here, Mark.

0:43:16(laughing)

0:43:18- Oh no.

0:43:19The next thing in the document is CarPlay,

0:43:21and I guess there is some new,

0:43:23some support for some new styles of app.

0:43:25I think they said, like, basically fast food apps

0:43:27you can now put in CarPlay,

0:43:29which I'm not entirely clear why, but whatever.

0:43:30- EV charging apps.

0:43:31- EV charging, there were a couple others.

0:43:34Yeah, parking, EV charging, and quote, quick food ordering.

0:43:38Whatever, however that's defined.

0:43:40So yeah, that's cool.

0:43:41- They also did a demonstration of car,

0:43:44I don't know what the Apple marketing term is,

0:43:46but basically you can unlock your car with your phone.

0:43:47- Car key.

0:43:49- Car key, okay, there you go.

0:43:50- Yep, and does that use the U1 thing?

0:43:52- No, so they said, so the first version of it

0:43:55that's going on the 2021 BMW 5 series does not use the U1.

0:44:00It seems to be using something much closer,

0:44:03maybe NFC based it seems,

0:44:05because you have to be very close to it.

0:44:07But then they said at the end, they said that

0:44:09in the future, future integrations will use the U1

0:44:13so that you can keep your phone in your bag

0:44:15or in your pocket and not place it directly against the door.

0:44:19So it does seem like it's probably NFC based to start

0:44:22and will be enhanced with the U1.

0:44:23'Cause what they need is,

0:44:25they don't wanna use something like Bluetooth

0:44:27because Bluetooth can have things like,

0:44:30first of all it could be too long range

0:44:32and there could be issues with like,

0:44:34somebody could set up like a Bluetooth repeater

0:44:36or something, so if you're in a restaurant,

0:44:38they could set up like a repeater outside the window

0:44:40and unlock your car from further away

0:44:42than you actually are and drive off.

0:44:44Well, the ultra wide band in U1, it's immune to that.

0:44:47Like it can't have those kind of attacks.

0:44:49It's like the way it works, it can detect that

0:44:51and rule those out.

0:44:52And so they need to use, I'm guessing what they're using

0:44:55is NFC for this first version

0:44:58because that is like only close proximity

0:45:01and it's easier to enforce that way.

0:45:02Whereas once they have a better integration

0:45:04using the U1 chip, they can detect like,

0:45:07okay this is in your pocket,

0:45:08so it's maybe 12 inches away from the receiver

0:45:11but that's close enough, we'll let it unlock.

0:45:13So, but that is, they didn't give a date for that.

0:45:16They just kinda said like, soon.

0:45:18- Yep.

0:45:19Safari, some pretty big changes to Safari.

0:45:22The thing, it made me so happy

0:45:24and oh, the schadenfreude was so strong.

0:45:28Just watching them discuss the privacy report feature.

0:45:32So this is a new thing where you can,

0:45:34on any website I guess, you can go and look at

0:45:37what Safari thinks it's doing,

0:45:39the website is doing in terms of tracking you.

0:45:41And so, there was an example, like a quick demo on stage

0:45:45and they said, or in the video or whatever,

0:45:48and they said, okay let's see what's tracking us.

0:45:49And right there is DoubleClick and Google Analytics

0:45:52like featured front and center.

0:45:54Which was so amazing.

0:45:55But basically this will let you see

0:45:57what is a website trying to do

0:45:58or how many different trackers there are

0:46:00and I guess not what they're doing with your information

0:46:02but how many people are trying to slurp up your information.

0:46:05And I think part of the reason,

0:46:07this is not a very earth-shattering idea

0:46:10but I think part of the reason why websites

0:46:12can get away with slurping up all this data

0:46:13is because most people, even I as a developer

0:46:17and former web developer, I don't really have a good view

0:46:21for how much data is being sucked up

0:46:23every time I go to a website.

0:46:25And so, I think making this more prominent

0:46:29is presumably going to have,

0:46:32and hopefully going to have a tangible impact

0:46:35on a lot of websites.

0:46:36Now, it may be that the only impact is

0:46:37instead of using third-party stuff

0:46:39that all becomes first-party and it's all proxied out

0:46:41and it gets even grosser.

0:46:44But in the same way that like the location services prompts

0:46:47made it more obvious and the Bluetooth prompts

0:46:49made it more obvious when an iOS app

0:46:52was trying to do something that could,

0:46:54but not necessarily is, but could be nefarious,

0:46:56this will hopefully make it much more obvious

0:46:59when all of these websites are doing things

0:47:01that are almost exclusively nefarious things.

0:47:03And so, I am really, really looking forward

0:47:05to hopefully seeing changes across the web

0:47:07for the better because of this.

0:47:09- Well, keep in mind, it's not just telling you

0:47:11what the trackers are, it's telling you

0:47:12which trackers it blocked.

0:47:13They have, you know, their intelligent tracking preventions

0:47:15that are built into Safari.

0:47:16You're supposed to look at this and A,

0:47:17be terrified that all these trackers are there

0:47:19and B, be thankful that Safari says,

0:47:21"Look at all these things I blocked for you.

0:47:22"My intelligent tracking prevention system blocked."

0:47:24X, Y, Z, you know, like that's the pitch.

0:47:27So it is both sales pitch and knowledge.

0:47:29And it's good because if you were to look at this

0:47:32and just say, "Oh, here are all the trackers."

0:47:33Your question would be,

0:47:34"So what am I supposed to do about that?"

0:47:36Like, I don't like it, what am I supposed to do about it?

0:47:37Now when you look at it, it will say,

0:47:39"Here's what Safari already did for you."

0:47:41And it will make you feel better.

0:47:42It may also change your opinion of the site

0:47:43that it had all these things that had to be blocked,

0:47:45but mostly I think it's building an understanding

0:47:49in the public, not so much what you're being tracked about,

0:47:52but the fact that Safari has features that prevent that

0:47:55and that's why you should use Safari

0:47:56instead of Chrome or whatever, right?

0:47:58Whereas if Safari just does that behind the scenes,

0:48:00which it has been, maybe you don't appreciate that

0:48:03and it's not like a selling feature of Safari.

0:48:06Similar to this, another feature that lots of other browsers

0:48:09have that Safari now has,

0:48:11which is password compromise detection.

0:48:14Safari through its key chain integration

0:48:16will store passwords for various websites

0:48:18and Apple will now be keeping track

0:48:21of these big metadata jumps to say,

0:48:24"We know that this many passwords were leaked

0:48:26"from this website on this date,"

0:48:28and they'll just update that database

0:48:30and they'll be able to tell you,

0:48:31"By the way, we saw that your email address

0:48:33"and this password were compromised on this website,

0:48:35"so you should probably change it."

0:48:36If you reuse your passwords,

0:48:38it may be a little bit overwhelming to see,

0:48:41"Oh my God, I have to change my password on 20 websites

0:48:43"'cause I use my dog's name as the password

0:48:46"on all 20 of these websites."

0:48:48That can be overwhelming

0:48:49and I don't know if it'll make people

0:48:50just throw up their hands,

0:48:51but in theory, if you were using good, unique passwords

0:48:54for each website, when one gets compromised,

0:48:56you'll at least know that password is burned

0:48:58and maybe you should change your password.

0:49:00And I know from using, I guess, Firefox, maybe Edge,

0:49:03I don't know, some third-party browsers that are not Safari,

0:49:07on my Mac, I've gotten these notifications,

0:49:09mostly for websites that I haven't logged into

0:49:12since the early 2000s or even the '90s,

0:49:14but if I get a notification,

0:49:15I'll go over to it and change the password.

0:49:17It was probably a garbage password

0:49:19that I haven't used in a decade anyway,

0:49:21but it's good to know,

0:49:22or I'll go over there and close the account.

0:49:23That's the other reminder.

0:49:24It's like, "I still have an account on that website?

0:49:25"Let me just delete that account."

0:49:26That's another solution to the problem.

0:49:28So I'm glad this has come to Safari

0:49:29because it's a useful feature,

0:49:30but I do worry about regular people being overwhelmed

0:49:33when the one password they use on every website

0:49:35is compromised and they're like, "What do I do now?"

0:49:38Well, what can you do?

0:49:40- Yeah, and it's also been a feature of 1Password as well.

0:49:43Like they check with like, have I been pwned

0:49:45in the various sources and do a similar warning?

0:49:48Going back a minute,

0:49:49just before we leave the privacy warning thing,

0:49:51first of all, this is basically what the Ghostery plugin did

0:49:54back forever ago.

0:49:55It is really nice to see like the list of trackers

0:49:57on websites that are being blocked

0:50:00because this is kind of a pattern

0:50:02that Apple has followed a lot to great success, I think,

0:50:05where as Casey, you were saying a minute ago

0:50:08that a lot of times your data's being tracked

0:50:11or leaked or creepily captured,

0:50:13and you have no idea

0:50:15what is just happening behind the scenes

0:50:17in ways that aren't visible to you.

0:50:19And one consistent strategy Apple does

0:50:21in these kind of contexts is shine a light on it

0:50:24when it happens.

0:50:25Either to just outright ban or block such behavior,

0:50:30or in cases where that's impractical or impossible,

0:50:33Apple likes to reveal that behavior to you

0:50:35so that you can make decisions

0:50:37and you can be more in control

0:50:38and that bad actors can be discovered

0:50:41and shamed or controlled out of the bad behavior.

0:50:45And so in this case, web tracker's part of the reason

0:50:48why it's been such a big business forever,

0:50:51and continues to be and look needed to be,

0:50:52is that pages can track all sorts of creepy crap

0:50:55using JavaScript in the background

0:50:56that you have no idea is even running.

0:50:58So anything that shines a light on it

0:51:01and calls out exactly what it's doing,

0:51:04any sites or bad actors that care about how they look

0:51:10and that might hear from the users about what's going on,

0:51:13they'll be forced to consider better behavior,

0:51:16and even the ones that don't care,

0:51:17at least users who care themselves can be more in control,

0:51:20can see what's going on,

0:51:21can be more aware of what's happening,

0:51:23and can maybe take technical countermeasures on their end,

0:51:26like running a blocker or something like that on their end

0:51:28to control such things.

0:51:29So anytime Apple can shine a light on creepy behavior

0:51:33and put control back in the user's hands,

0:51:35that's a very good thing,

0:51:36and it's exactly what they've done here.

0:51:38And in fact, there's also a thing later on

0:51:39that I don't think we'll get to separately,

0:51:41so I'll ruin it here,

0:51:42we're doing the same thing in iOS 14,

0:51:45whenever the camera or microphones are being recorded from,

0:51:48there's now a recording dot in the status bar,

0:51:51and that's great, 'cause that's another thing that,

0:51:54they've had the permissions dialogue for,

0:51:57do you want this app to access the camera and microphone

0:51:59for a couple years, but once you get permission,

0:52:02you didn't know when it was doing that.

0:52:04So for instance, an app like a social network

0:52:06that records pictures or videos,

0:52:08you would give it permission,

0:52:09'cause obviously you need that to work.

0:52:11But do you want it to be turning on your microphone

0:52:13and your camera when you don't know it?

0:52:15Probably not.

0:52:16So a very useful thing here to control some privacy,

0:52:20potential leaks or violations, is give people an indicator.

0:52:23Same thing with location access,

0:52:24it's always an indicator.

0:52:25So yeah, anything that Apple can do to shine a light

0:52:28on potential privacy invasions or risks

0:52:32and give users knowledge and control,

0:52:35that is always successful,

0:52:37and I'm glad to see that happening in more places.

0:52:39- Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

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0:54:52- I feel a little bit like I'm in the matrix

0:54:58for this next item here.

0:54:59You guys both tell me what I'm misremembering.

0:55:02Let's talk about App Clips for a second.

0:55:04I could swear, I'm assuming this was not a dream,

0:55:07this was reality, that this is a feature

0:55:10that Apple already had and already announced.

0:55:12What the heck am I remembering

0:55:13that it was so similar to this?

0:55:14- Android. - I haven't had it.

0:55:15- And yep, Android did this exact same thing.

0:55:18- I have this distinct memory of an Apple keynote

0:55:20of them announcing essentially the exact same feature

0:55:23as App Clips, but not by that name.

0:55:24I don't know, I'm getting old.

0:55:27Anyway, App Clips is cool.

0:55:29If it already exists in an alternate universe,

0:55:32an alternate version of the matrix,

0:55:34then that's what I'm remembering and I'm sorry.

0:55:36But it's a way for you to do a thing with an app

0:55:41that you don't have installed without the hassle of going,

0:55:44pulled up to the parking meter,

0:55:45it says I have to download the whatever app.

0:55:47Oh, I can use the QR code, always taking me to a webpage.

0:55:50The webpage has a button, okay, download an app store.

0:55:52Okay, I'm on the app thing, I'm downloading it.

0:55:54Okay, I'm opening the app.

0:55:55Okay, I'm launching it, it wants me to sign in.

0:55:57Okay, I have to create an account.

0:55:58All right, I've made the account.

0:55:59Okay, now I've launched the app.

0:56:01Now I'll scan the QR code again

0:56:03and now I can pay for parking.

0:56:04Oh, now I have to enter my credit card number.

0:56:06App Clips is trying to stop that from happening.

0:56:08If anyone has ever tried to use like just that one example,

0:56:11a parking app, you don't know what the hell

0:56:13parking app this place is using.

0:56:15You don't care what parking app it's using.

0:56:16You just wanna park your car.

0:56:18So they're trying to streamline that process,

0:56:21which is pick your phone up and put it close to a thing

0:56:25or scan a thing or whatever and just immediately say,

0:56:28we know what app this is supposed to be.

0:56:30We're not even gonna bother downloading the whole app.

0:56:32We're just gonna download this tiny portion of the app

0:56:33that you need to do your parking

0:56:35and in Apple's perfect world.

0:56:37We'll integrate with Apple Pay

0:56:38and we'll integrate with Sign in with Apple.

0:56:40So you don't need to create an account

0:56:41and you don't need to enter a credit card number

0:56:43and it's all secure through things

0:56:44that you trust Apple to do

0:56:45and you didn't have to download an entire app.

0:56:47As one of our friends said in Slack

0:56:48when the segment came on,

0:56:50I'm going to delete a ton of parking applications

0:56:53because you don't need to have the parking application.

0:56:55You don't need like one parking app for every single thing

0:56:58and have to constantly be updating them

0:56:59and God knows what those things are doing.

0:57:01Just use the app clip.

0:57:02It's 10 megabytes maximum size.

0:57:05Apple, of course, being Apple,

0:57:06has its own special QR code that's round

0:57:09because QR codes are for squares

0:57:11and it's got a little picture of a phone in the middle.

0:57:14It looks a little bit like the maze from Westworld,

0:57:17but it's somewhat disturbing,

0:57:18but try not to think about that.

0:57:20Spoilers for Westworld.

0:57:21- I thought it looked kind of like the Touch ID thing.

0:57:23- Yes, it does.

0:57:24- Yeah, it's like if your fingers were perfectly round.

0:57:27- Yeah, and you can get the full version of the app

0:57:31if you want.

0:57:31Unfortunately, they can prompt you

0:57:32to get the full version of the app,

0:57:33so I'm afraid that every single app clip,

0:57:35all it's going to do is immediately prompt you

0:57:36for the full version of the app,

0:57:37but I'm sure Apple has some kind of countermeasures there.

0:57:40Things that you do in the little app clip

0:57:42can be carried over to the full app

0:57:44so it doesn't just forget that you exist.

0:57:45It knows what you did previously with it.

0:57:47And of course, it's not just for parking.

0:57:48It's for any kind of thing where you don't care enough

0:57:51about the interaction to become a quote, user of the app.

0:57:54You just want to do the thing.

0:57:56I love this feature in principle.

0:57:59In practice, given that we don't live in an all-Apple world,

0:58:02I expect to still encounter lots and lots of things

0:58:05that don't know about app clips.

0:58:08We still encounter 30-pin connectors in hotels, right?

0:58:10So I'm not optimistic about app clips

0:58:12changing my life anytime soon,

0:58:14but I want to live in that world,

0:58:15even though it's probably going to be a long time coming.

0:58:18- Yeah, I would love for this to be a success

0:58:21the way it was demoed.

0:58:23I hope that sometime in the next three years,

0:58:27I have that kind of interaction they demoed.

0:58:29But I think it will take about that long

0:58:30before it will happen,

0:58:32and I think it will also be far from universal

0:58:33for all those reasons.

0:58:35I had to use one of those parking apps a couple weeks ago,

0:58:38and it was from one of the biggest vendors

0:58:42of such parking meter things,

0:58:43and the app is a horrendous mess, because of course it is.

0:58:46And it claims to support Apple Pay,

0:58:48but the Apple Pay just kept failing for no specified reasons

0:58:51so I had to enter a credit card and everything.

0:58:52And it was just, I had an account,

0:58:54I had to sign in all this crap,

0:58:56again, all to park at a parking meter

0:58:58that used to take quarters until a few weeks ago.

0:59:00So, (laughs)

0:59:03I would go to the bank and get rolls of quarters

0:59:05every few months, 'cause it was just easier

0:59:07than dealing with all these crappy apps.

0:59:11But yeah, so in an ideal world,

0:59:13when everyone makes amazing apps

0:59:15that take advantage of all the Apple's latest technologies

0:59:17and they actually try to collect

0:59:18as little information from you as possible,

0:59:20and they don't want you to create an account,

0:59:21they don't want to market to you,

0:59:22and they actually just want things to go quickly,

0:59:24this will be great.

0:59:25I hope that world someday exists, today it doesn't.

0:59:28- There were a couple of interesting things said,

0:59:30one in the State of the Union,

0:59:30and one, I believe, in the keynote.

0:59:32In the keynote, they basically said, in so many words,

0:59:35that a single entity like Yelp could make branded app clips

0:59:40for many, many, many, many different restaurants,

0:59:43which, didn't they go through this big,

0:59:46what sort of movie for this, this big exodus,

0:59:50they caused a big exodus of people and developers

0:59:53who just spit out a zillion copies

0:59:56of what are effectively the same app.

0:59:58Several years ago, I thought they really cracked down on that

1:00:00and now they're basically saying,

1:00:01"Hey, have fun, do that again."

1:00:02- Well, I think the way they worded it,

1:00:05it sounded like they would let Yelp do it

1:00:07and possibly other partners,

1:00:09but it didn't sound like anybody

1:00:11would be able to vend multi-business clips.

1:00:14It sounded like it was only a thing

1:00:15that some people would get to do, like Yelp.

1:00:17- That's not surprising.

1:00:18And the other thing that was said

1:00:19during the State of the Union,

1:00:20it was not mentioned during the keynote,

1:00:21but I thought it was a very clever solution

1:00:23to what could be an annoying problem,

1:00:25is that if I understood it correctly,

1:00:28all clips get what's called

1:00:31ephemeral notifications permissions.

1:00:34So when you use an app clip,

1:00:37you are automatically giving that app clip

1:00:40the ability to send you push notifications for eight hours.

1:00:42And then at the end of those eight hours,

1:00:44it's automatically revoked

1:00:45and it can't send you push notifications anymore,

1:00:48which I thought was really clever

1:00:49because something like a parking app,

1:00:51which I cannot agree with you more,

1:00:53I don't live in a very urban area,

1:00:54so I almost never run into this,

1:00:55but the couple of occasions I've gone to places

1:00:58that do use these things,

1:00:59it is the most frustrating thing in the world

1:01:00to have to download the app

1:01:02and do that whole dance that you described.

1:01:04But anyways, if you have one of these parking apps

1:01:06and your time is about to expire,

1:01:08you're gonna wanna get a push notification saying,

1:01:10"Holy crap, go get your car."

1:01:11And so having these clips

1:01:14have this short-lived notification access,

1:01:17I think is really smart.

1:01:17You don't have like a Catalina/Vista style,

1:01:21"Would you like to give this app permission

1:01:22to notify you at some point?"

1:01:24It's just given implicitly.

1:01:27I do wanna know,

1:01:29and I'm curious to hear preferably via Twitter

1:01:31because I don't need a thousand of these same emails,

1:01:33but for those who do use Android phones,

1:01:35have you seen slices or whatever the Android equivalent is,

1:01:38have you seen that be used frequently?

1:01:41Or was that the,

1:01:43it was announced a couple of years ago

1:01:44and did it just flash in the pan and then go away?

1:01:46I'm very curious if those actually took off

1:01:48'cause that's basically our future in a nutshell.

1:01:51- I was also thinking too,

1:01:53I hope there's ways that other apps

1:01:56can use these for good use.

1:01:57Like I was thinking, 'cause one thing App Clips does,

1:02:00not only is it useful in the real world,

1:02:02but it also says you can launch it from Safari,

1:02:04Messages, stuff like that.

1:02:06And so I was curious to see if maybe this could be

1:02:10something like if I could use it as a share link previewer.

1:02:13So like if Overcast could have a clip

1:02:16that could play any share link in a really nice way.

1:02:19But I guess it's-- - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:02:21- I suppose I'm supposed to use Messages apps for that,

1:02:24right, are those still a thing?

1:02:25I guess those are still a thing.

1:02:27But I don't know, I'm interested to see

1:02:29beyond the obvious things of parking meters,

1:02:32what else can you do with this feature?

1:02:34'Cause it is pretty cool.

1:02:35And again, the parking meter industry

1:02:38might be very slow to adopt it,

1:02:40so I'm curious to see what more creative people

1:02:42can do with it.

1:02:43- Yeah, and it's very general purpose.

1:02:45Like if you look at how it's done,

1:02:46you make an app clip target,

1:02:47it's as far as I can tell essentially arbitrary code

1:02:50within the limits of the available APIs and space,

1:02:53again, 10 megabytes maximum size.

1:02:55The notification thing is great, like you said, Casey,

1:02:57because the whole point of this experience

1:02:59is not to have to have a million steps.

1:03:02And so even just asking if we can do notifications

1:03:04is just one extra step that would make it more of a hassle.

1:03:07But I do worry about giving any kind of application

1:03:10implicit permission to give you notifications,

1:03:13even if it's only for eight hours,

1:03:14just because it seems like there's potential for abuse

1:03:18in once, again, Yelp, I don't wanna pick on Yelp,

1:03:21but a lot of people have some complaints about them.

1:03:23Once they get in there, for that as eight hours,

1:03:25they're spamming you with things and making money

1:03:27by being able to spam you with notifications

1:03:29that you couldn't stop, because I'm sure you can stop them

1:03:32if you turn them off somewhere,

1:03:33but people won't know how to do that.

1:03:35Anyway, I hope it all works out.

1:03:38It sounds like a good plan.

1:03:39It's a feature that the iPhone should have,

1:03:41because Android's had it forever.

1:03:43And I hope we can live in a world where parking

1:03:47gets closer to the role of quarter, a seize of use.

1:03:50- Real-time follow-up from the chat room,

1:03:52the handful of Android users that are in there

1:03:54saying that slices is not a thing as far as they're aware.

1:03:57Not to say that it literally isn't a thing,

1:03:59but I mean by that is they don't see slices

1:04:01in the real world very often.

1:04:03Or if they do, it's used in some other context,

1:04:04like you were alluding to, Marco,

1:04:06that they weren't aware that it was a slice

1:04:07in the first place.

1:04:09Moving on, emoji search is apparently going to be a thing

1:04:12at least on iPad, which is very exciting.

1:04:14I didn't see any demo of this, I don't think.

1:04:16I don't know if I just looked away in the half second

1:04:18that they showed it, but I'm excited that it's at least

1:04:22theoretically going to be a thing now, because it should be.

1:04:25- Yeah, I've got that info secondhand too, Marco.

1:04:27Do you remember it firsthand?

1:04:28Are we in the chat room, are we making this up?

1:04:29Emoji search is there, right?

1:04:30- Yeah, I haven't actually seen it yet.

1:04:33- It's on iPhone only, not an iPad.

1:04:35- Oh! - Let me see.

1:04:36I have it installed.

1:04:37By the way, I guess this is me admitting,

1:04:40I've installed beta one on everything

1:04:41except my main computer.

1:04:43- Your main computer?

1:04:45What are you talking about? - Why?

1:04:47- So, bear with me here.

1:04:49Oh yeah, here it is, search emoji.

1:04:50Yep, it's here.

1:04:51All right, so. - On which device?

1:04:52- On iPhone with iOS 14.

1:04:54- But you put iOS 14 on your carry phone?

1:04:58Are you, do you hate yourself?

1:05:01Do you like being miserable?

1:05:03- You've got a vacation brain.

1:05:04- So here's the thing. - Oh my God.

1:05:06- Here's the thing, yeah.

1:05:07I'm at the beach for a while.

1:05:09- See, I called it. - Right?

1:05:10(laughing)

1:05:12- It's an excuse for everything.

1:05:13Listen, I'm at the beach.

1:05:14- That's so true, so true. - Explain.

1:05:17Normally, when the beta one comes out, I am traveling.

1:05:22'Cause we're at WBC and we have this busy week

1:05:26full of all this travel and lots of mobile use

1:05:29and it's critical that your phone works

1:05:31while you're traveling and everything.

1:05:32Right now, I'm just sitting here.

1:05:34I'm doing very little that requires

1:05:38my phone to work perfectly.

1:05:40And I wanted, first of all, Apple's been very aggressive

1:05:45in recent years about the public beta time

1:05:47and I wanted to make sure that Overcast worked

1:05:51with the beta as soon as possible.

1:05:53The very first thing I did when the beta booted up

1:05:55earlier today was launch Overcast and start playing around

1:05:57and just make sure it all works.

1:05:59Because I know that in, they said quote July

1:06:03is when the public betas will happen,

1:06:04including watchOS for the first time ever.

1:06:07So that could mean two weeks from now.

1:06:10This could be really soon.

1:06:12Beta two could be the first public beta.

1:06:15So I really wanna make sure that I have time on it

1:06:19before that happens so I can know

1:06:21whether there's gonna be problems.

1:06:22Because no matter what people think people should do,

1:06:26people will put beta, the first public beta,

1:06:28they will put that on their carry phones

1:06:29and they will run my app and if it breaks,

1:06:32they will complain to me and make bad reviews

1:06:34as opposed to just saying oh it's the beta,

1:06:35it's my fault, right?

1:06:36So I need to know that pretty soon.

1:06:38But yeah, it's mostly because I'm not traveling right now

1:06:40and I'm not gonna travel for the foreseeable future

1:06:43because everything.

1:06:44So it made sense for me, like I wanna dive in head first,

1:06:48I wanna get going on this, so might as well.

1:06:50So I put the beta on all of my devices

1:06:53that I don't necessarily need to function perfectly,

1:06:56which is everything except my iMac.

1:06:57So I have it on my 16 inch, iPad Pro, watch and phone.

1:07:02- You mean like the Xcode beta is what you're talking about.

1:07:04I was gonna confuse when you're saying you installed

1:07:06an iOS beta on your Macs.

1:07:07Like you just made the Xcode, the SDK and everything right?

1:07:10- And I also, I'm trying to install Big Sur on my 16 inch.

1:07:14It actually hasn't completed yet and I think it failed,

1:07:16I have to try it again.

1:07:18- Equal accent on both syllables I'm gonna say.

1:07:20- Big Sur?

1:07:22- Big Sur.

1:07:22- Big Sur.

1:07:23- Not Big Sur, not Big Sur.

1:07:25- Big Sur?

1:07:27Oh my God, please stop. - Big Sur.

1:07:28(laughing)

1:07:29When someone in the presentation said fast company,

1:07:31I thought the same thing.

1:07:32He said it like the British would say Top Gear.

1:07:34He said, fast company, Top Gear.

1:07:36No, it's fast company, equal emphasis on both syllables.

1:07:39Top Gear, the way we say it in America.

1:07:41Anyway.

1:07:42- So what is the OS supposed to be?

1:07:45- I think it's Big Sur.

1:07:47I'm not from there but that's how I would say it.

1:07:49- You accented the second,

1:07:49you accented Sir more than the Big there.

1:07:51- Big Sur, it's equal.

1:07:53(laughing)

1:07:53- Every time you said it, it's different.

1:07:56- Let me give you the two ways, ready?

1:07:57Big Sur, that's accent on the first one.

1:08:00Big Sur, accent on the second one.

1:08:02And Big Sur, equal accent.

1:08:04(laughing)

1:08:04It's not equal. - Am I drunk?

1:08:05What is happening?

1:08:07And how did I say it?

1:08:08- You said Big Sur.

1:08:09- Big Sur. - Like Top Gear.

1:08:10(laughing)

1:08:12- We gagged.

1:08:13- We're not saying Big Sur on this program

1:08:16unless someone from California tells us

1:08:17that's how we're supposed to say it.

1:08:18- This is how it sounds.

1:08:19We're not gonna say Big Sur, we're gonna say Big Sur.

1:08:21- Us mispronouncing the name of Mac OS

1:08:23really says until someone from California

1:08:25tells us how we're supposed to say it

1:08:26is part of the experience of Mac OS releases.

1:08:30- Did you know it's actually called Bondi Beach?

1:08:32Moving on, so Scribble gets pencil dragged to select text.

1:08:35- Wait, wait, wait, no, you skipped over Emoji Search.

1:08:37We got off of this big tangent.

1:08:39Emoji Search, I feel like there should be

1:08:41a business tell-all book to explain

1:08:43why it has taken so long to get an Emoji Search.

1:08:45(laughing)

1:08:46This is a major institutional failing of Apple as a company.

1:08:51It's not a complicated feature.

1:08:53Everybody needs it.

1:08:55How long have we all spent scrolling horizontally

1:08:58through that list trying to find the stupid emoji

1:09:01with the zipper on the mouth

1:09:02and there's a million yellow circles and you can't find it.

1:09:05Emoji Search, why did this take so long?

1:09:09Not everyone is like Casey who has memorized

1:09:11the entire grid of umpteen emoji

1:09:13and knows exactly where it is.

1:09:15We're all scrolling forever.

1:09:17What happened?

1:09:18It doesn't matter now, we've got it now.

1:09:20It's like, all right, fine, but what happened?

1:09:22This should be a case study.

1:09:23Someone from Harvard Business School will look into this.

1:09:25(laughing)

1:09:27You can totally ignore the butterfly keyboard era.

1:09:30Skip all that if you wanna know

1:09:31why there was no Emoji Search.

1:09:33We just don't know what happened with Emoji Search.

1:09:35It makes no sense.

1:09:36(laughing)

1:09:38It's such an easy feature.

1:09:39- Now all kidding aside, is it not on iPad?

1:09:42Marco, do you have your iPad nearby?

1:09:43What is the situation on iPad?

1:09:44- I think it's iPhone only according to the chat room,

1:09:47which is always right.

1:09:47- Why?

1:09:48- I mean, that'll be part of the case study, presumably.

1:09:51- Yeah, seriously, Harvard Business School,

1:09:53let's get a report on that.

1:09:54- As far as I can tell, there's a lot of stuff

1:09:56that's in iOS 14 that is not in iPad OS,

1:10:00and the explanation is they didn't get around

1:10:04to doing it on iPad OS.

1:10:05In terms of prioritizing, you can imagine

1:10:07why they would prioritize iOS before it.

1:10:09Historically, there have been many times

1:10:11where a feature appears on iOS,

1:10:13back when it was both on the iPhone and the iPad,

1:10:15only on the phone and on the iPad.

1:10:17Those priorities make some sense to me.

1:10:19Again, you know, emoji search should have been on both devices

1:10:21years ago, but I think there are similar limitations

1:10:24in some other features that are available on iOS 14

1:10:27that are not yet available on iPad OS.

1:10:29So I'm sure they'll catch up eventually.

1:10:32- I can verify it is not on iPad.

1:10:34- Oh, okay, I was just gonna say,

1:10:35I'm hearing conflicting reports about that,

1:10:37but if you're saying it's not there, then it's not there.

1:10:39- I mean, it wouldn't surprise me

1:10:40if it popped in in a future beta, too.

1:10:41That's the kind of thing that,

1:10:42maybe it didn't make beta one.

1:10:44- That's also true.

1:10:45Now you did the, what is it, control,

1:10:47how do I say it, John?

1:10:48Oh God, I'm gonna get in trouble.

1:10:50Command, control, space, is that right?

1:10:52Not control, command, space?

1:10:53- It's control, delete.

1:10:54- Command, control, delete.

1:10:56(laughing)

1:10:57- Anyway, did you try that three finger gesture, Marco,

1:11:00on the iPad?

1:11:01You didn't hit the little globe, you did control.

1:11:03- Oh no, hold on.

1:11:04I hit the little globe.

1:11:05Oh, face ID, microphone's blocking it, hold on.

1:11:08(laughing)

1:11:10All right, so I'm gonna hit, so let's see,

1:11:12command, space, bring it, wait,

1:11:13command, space is regular.

1:11:14- Command, control, space,

1:11:15to bring up the special character thingy.

1:11:17- Command, control, space, special character thingy,

1:11:20there is no search box here.

1:11:21- Huh, okay.

1:11:22- It is just a little hover over emoji blob.

1:11:25- Okay, thank you for trying.

1:11:26Also in the bucket of real time follow up,

1:11:28Jason Snell, who knows a little bit about California,

1:11:30says that it is never big sir, it's big sir.

1:11:34- Yeah, equal emphasis.

1:11:35- Big sir.

1:11:36- No, equal, equal emphasis on both.

1:11:38I would say the same way we say top gear,

1:11:40but you don't say it that way, we all say top gear,

1:11:42because we watch the British show and that's ruined us for it.

1:11:45- See, I'm not sure that I can trust the Californians,

1:11:47because they also all told us, including Jason,

1:11:49back in the Mojave times that it was Mojave, not Mojave.

1:11:52But then like half the year, everybody was saying Mojave,

1:11:55including some people from California.

1:11:56- But they were doing it wrong, it is Mojave, he was right.

1:12:00- But it seems like Californians can't even agree

1:12:02on their own pronunciations,

1:12:03'cause like other Californians were saying Mojave,

1:12:05other Californians were saying Mojave.

1:12:07- They're not California natives, they're transplants.

1:12:10(laughing)

1:12:12- Oh my goodness, moving on.

1:12:14All right, so we've got Scribble, which is what,

1:12:17Inkwell or whatever, or what was the thing in Newton that--

1:12:19- It's Transcriber from Windows Mobile.

1:12:21- Oh my goodness. - From 2002.

1:12:23- Newton did it first, speaking of Opera, yes.

1:12:25It's yet more features of Newton finding their way

1:12:28to the iPad, which is great.

1:12:30Like, you know, it's taken long enough,

1:12:32but it's definitely great.

1:12:33Handwriting recognition came, now you can use

1:12:35your Apple Pencil to enter text into text fields

1:12:38without tapping the little thing on the keyboard

1:12:40that comes up, right?

1:12:42So that's great, and also the drawing,

1:12:44turning your shapes into perfect shapes.

1:12:46I remember that being demoed on the Newton in 1990 Mumble.

1:12:50Here it is on modern iOS devices, and it looks pretty good.

1:12:55I'll have to try it in the Notes app,

1:12:56because the Akili heals of all these kind of,

1:12:59do handwriting and will recognize it and turn it into text

1:13:04and do drawings and will recognize it and turn it into shapes

1:13:07is like, you want it to be flexible after that, right?

1:13:11So they did some demos, like, look, I can swipe select text,

1:13:14which is a new feature with the Pencil, and move it around,

1:13:16because I know that it's text and stuff like that.

1:13:19But, you know, they drew like a pentagon,

1:13:22and they drew in a line, you know,

1:13:24that turned into a line with arrow ends.

1:13:25What if you want to make that line with arrow ends shorter?

1:13:27How easy is that to do?

1:13:28Can I grab it, is it a vector that I can shorten it?

1:13:30Do I erase it with an eraser tool

1:13:31and squish the two ends together?

1:13:33Like, stuff like that tends to fall apart

1:13:35unless there's some, there's considerable effort

1:13:37put into making it flexible.

1:13:38So I hope that all works out, you know,

1:13:42as I imagined in my opinion,

1:13:43isn't just like a sort of write once, edit never interface.

1:13:47But yeah, I bet Pencil users love this,

1:13:50because there's nothing worse

1:13:51than having that software keyboard come up

1:13:52and pecking away at it with your Pencil tip.

1:13:54If you can just write into a text field, that'll be awesome.

1:13:57- Yeah, this is a great feature.

1:14:00I don't think I will personally use it,

1:14:01'cause I'm not much of a hand writer,

1:14:03but it's just really cool for even people like me,

1:14:05for like the twice a year that we might want to use it.

1:14:08And then for people who do kind of, you know,

1:14:09hand write natively and prefer that as an input mechanism,

1:14:13this is great for them, because you know,

1:14:15you can just hand write everywhere,

1:14:16and it just kind of works.

1:14:17I too, when you were describing

1:14:19the handwriting improvements and stuff,

1:14:22I was also hoping for a little bit more dynamic movement

1:14:26of what you wrote after you wrote it

1:14:27in like the big handwriting views.

1:14:29Maybe that's somewhere they can go in the future,

1:14:31but it does seem, it seemed kind of like

1:14:33their main innovation here was in recognition

1:14:36and in the ability to select and like move it

1:14:40as an image almost, but not to like reflow the text

1:14:44or make the shapes dynamic and stuff like that.

1:14:47So maybe we'll get that down the road.

1:14:49- Yeah, I'm really excited to try this out.

1:14:51It looks, I agree with you Marco,

1:14:52I don't see myself using it often,

1:14:53but I do think it's a really cool feature,

1:14:54especially for RSI, it might be nice too

1:14:57that you're not sitting there typing,

1:14:59you can be writing, which is super cool.

1:15:01I felt briefly bad for a friend of the show,

1:15:04Steve Trouton Smith, because his new app,

1:15:06is it Pastel, is that right?

1:15:08- Yep. - Is that right?

1:15:09I think that's right.

1:15:10Pastel has been Sherlocked, although he seemed

1:15:11actually fairly excited about it, which was good,

1:15:13because if he's not sad, then I'm not sad,

1:15:15because there's a new system-wide color picker on iPad

1:15:19and maybe iPhone, I'm not sure, but it's certainly on iPad,

1:15:23and that's basically what Pastel does,

1:15:25is try to be a system-wide, as much as he can,

1:15:27a system-wide color picker.

1:15:28- It's not just a new one, this never existed before,

1:15:30as far as I'm aware, so this is a color picker on iOS.

1:15:32- Yeah, true, yeah, yeah.

1:15:34- Which is convenient to have for sharing colors

1:15:36between apps, which is exactly what his app does,

1:15:37so he was basically Sherlocked, but that happens.

1:15:41If you're gonna make any kind of app

1:15:42that extends the system in any way,

1:15:43chances are good that Apple added sooner rather than later.

1:15:46He ran into Sooner.

1:15:48(laughing)

1:15:49- It's very true.

1:15:50- 'Cause I think he just released Pastel

1:15:51a few weeks ago, so it's like, ooh, that's tough,

1:15:53but what can you do?

1:15:55- And then it's in here in the next spot in the notes,

1:15:58so we'll talk about it now.

1:15:59I don't think it was actually brought up

1:16:00until the State of the Union,

1:16:02but possibly my favorite feature from this entire day,

1:16:06and I'm saying that--

1:16:07- That's why I put it in here,

1:16:08'cause I think it's a big feature for developers.

1:16:10- Yep, and I say that with only a modicum of hyperbole.

1:16:13Local store kit testing, praise be to the gods.

1:16:18My dreams have come true.

1:16:21I cannot believe it is happening.

1:16:23So what does this mean if you're not an iOS developer?

1:16:25So when you're writing iOS apps, in all likelihood,

1:16:28you're going to be doing some sort of subscription

1:16:30or in-app purchase or something like that,

1:16:31and those APIs are, I find them to be challenging

1:16:36in a lot of ways, and testing them particularly

1:16:38is very frustrating, and it's always been frustrating.

1:16:41And when I started really doing this professionally,

1:16:43in the IAP stuff professionally,

1:16:46it had gotten a lot better to test.

1:16:48Like, I know, Marco, you have probably war stories

1:16:51from now until the end of time to tell about this,

1:16:54but one way or another, what this allows you to do is,

1:16:57and they only showed it very briefly,

1:16:59but from what I can put together,

1:17:00you can basically approve or deny or change the state

1:17:06of a store kit, like an IAP purchase, when you're testing.

1:17:10So you can pretend like you're just buying

1:17:12this in-app purchase or perhaps a subscription,

1:17:15and then you can act as though you're Apple and say,

1:17:17"No, the card was declined," or, "Yes, it went through,"

1:17:20or, "Maybe the store is down entirely,"

1:17:23or something like that to help test all these scenarios,

1:17:25which is extremely hard to do today.

1:17:27I am genuinely incredibly excited for this,

1:17:30and if I'm incredibly excited for this,

1:17:31and I've only been doing this for a couple years,

1:17:33I cannot fathom how excited you are, Marco.

1:17:35- Oh my God, yeah.

1:17:36I mean, it's funny, when you implement App Store payments,

1:17:41if you've ever implemented anything else,

1:17:44especially if you've ever used,

1:17:45as I mentioned a couple episodes ago,

1:17:47if you've ever used Stripe, Stripe is awesome,

1:17:50for lots of reasons, in particular,

1:17:51because when you're implementing their payments,

1:17:53they give you a whole bunch of different test accounts,

1:17:56test credit card numbers you can use and stuff like that,

1:17:58so you can test all sorts of different conditions.

1:18:00They have a whole testing environment.

1:18:01It's very, very nice and easy to use.

1:18:04The App Store payment system is not.

1:18:08And the nicest thing I can say about it

1:18:11is that it has been extremely painful

1:18:14to develop against overtime, to test with.

1:18:18It's incredibly clunky and very hard

1:18:20to test certain conditions.

1:18:22A lot of the testing stack was buggy.

1:18:24A lot of the store kits cited on iOS,

1:18:26you'd have to have a whole dedicated device

1:18:28just to be signed into a developer,

1:18:30or just to be signed into a Sandbox account,

1:18:32because if you used your actual phone,

1:18:34it would screw it up so often in ways

1:18:36that you'd be getting Sandbox password pop-ups

1:18:39for the rest of eternity until you did a full restore.

1:18:42There were so many problems overtime

1:18:43with testing in-app purchase.

1:18:45Our friend Brent Simmons wrote a good article

1:18:49a few days ago about, during the App Store brew-ha-ha,

1:18:51basically saying originally when apps were either free

1:18:55or paid upfront, it was super easy to collect money,

1:18:58'cause from the app, you didn't have to do anything.

1:19:01You could set a flag in iTunes Connect

1:19:03to say, "All right, my app costs five bucks,"

1:19:05and it would handle it all for you.

1:19:06And as we move to the area of in-app purchase,

1:19:09and the whole era of that being the primary way

1:19:12that developers collect money,

1:19:13as opposed to a purchase upfront,

1:19:17we lost all that simplicity.

1:19:20Implementing in-app purchase is way more complicated

1:19:23and very error-prone.

1:19:25As we moved into subscriptions in recent years,

1:19:27that's even more complicated and even more error-prone.

1:19:30And so the importance of testing has only gone up,

1:19:33and so it really is nice to have something like this

1:19:36that is, I haven't had time to play with it yet,

1:19:38but it is most likely going to be a big improvement

1:19:40in testability for developing purchase flow

1:19:44and your in-app purchase handling and everything.

1:19:46And that was just so badly needed,

1:19:48and it will be so helpful to so many developers,

1:19:50so I'm very glad to see this.

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1:21:24(upbeat music)

1:21:28- I think we have to go through the iPadOS, WatchOS,

1:21:30and there's other things fairly quickly

1:21:32to get to the big stuff 'cause we're going kind of long here.

1:21:34- Well let's just blow by, yeah, right?

1:21:37Let's just blow by all that, I'm not even kidding.

1:21:39Let's just blow by it, let's just go to the back.

1:21:39- I think we should imagine stuff in iPad, but we can,

1:21:42I think we can get through them fast

1:21:43by just hitting these quick bullet points.

1:21:44You want me to do it?

1:21:45I can do it fast.

1:21:46- Yeah, you go ahead and we'll see how long the two of us

1:21:48can wait before we interrupt you, go ahead.

1:21:51- You're gonna get to say anything?

1:21:52But if you want it to go fast, you can't.

1:21:54(laughing)

1:21:56Yeah, here we go.

1:21:57iPadOS, we just mentioned that there are some things

1:22:01that are on iOS 14 that are not in the new iPadOS.

1:22:04It seems to lag behind a little bit,

1:22:05but the headlining features that were talked about

1:22:07are things that are unique to iPadOS.

1:22:09They basically try to enhance the interface

1:22:12in ways that make sense on a larger screen.

1:22:13So they touted the new set of sidebars,

1:22:16a lot of interfaces that used to be toolbars

1:22:17are graduating to full-fledged sidebars

1:22:19because why wouldn't they?

1:22:20iPads are huge, there's plenty of room for it,

1:22:22it's more convenient.

1:22:24Same thing with the top bars.

1:22:27They're not calling it a menu bar,

1:22:29but it has drop-down menus on it, kind of,

1:22:31but it's also kind of a toolbar.

1:22:32Anyway.

1:22:33- They're very menu-like toolbars.

1:22:34- Yeah, features that previously,

1:22:37I think we had talked about in some shows,

1:22:38like, oh, I didn't even know in the Files app

1:22:39you could change the list to you

1:22:40because you had to swipe down from the top

1:22:42to get some kind of thing to get it.

1:22:43Now it's much more obvious there's actual visual element

1:22:45on the screen that you can poke with your finger

1:22:47and guess what, a drop-down menu comes down from it

1:22:49and you can pick it.

1:22:50These are all worthwhile enhancements

1:22:54to make the interface more,

1:22:56I was gonna say more Mac-like,

1:22:57but more flexible, more feature-rich.

1:22:59They also improved their version of Spotlight

1:23:01with the search thing that has better search results in it.

1:23:04It gets all the other features that we talked about from iOS

1:23:06with the compact notifications and stuff,

1:23:09the Scribble we already talked about,

1:23:10which is their feature where you can write words

1:23:12into text boxes and things like that.

1:23:14Yeah, there's probably more iPadOS,

1:23:18but for the sake of time,

1:23:19because we gotta get to the Big Mac stuff quickly,

1:23:22we'll move on from there.

1:23:23WatchOS 7, I feel like they'll probably be really good

1:23:28under the radar episode about this,

1:23:29which I would recommend listening to,

1:23:30so underscore can tell us all about it,

1:23:32but the short version is SwiftUI complications.

1:23:34Complications used to be very limited in what you could do.

1:23:37SwiftUI gives you a lot more flexibility

1:23:39and you can have more than one complication of each type,

1:23:42which if you're a complication fiend,

1:23:43like underscore is great news for him.

1:23:46Face sharing, which we had rumored for a while back,

1:23:48is if you make a really cool watch face

1:23:51with just the right set of complications,

1:23:52color coded and matched and customized

1:23:54to look awesome on a particular face,

1:23:56you can share that with somebody

1:23:57and if you share it with them

1:23:58and they don't have those apps installed,

1:23:59it'll prompt them to install it.

1:24:01I said during the keynote that the modular face,

1:24:04which is like that digital time

1:24:06and then these two big places for complications,

1:24:08the modular face with custom third-party

1:24:12SwiftUI-driven complications is as close as we've gotten

1:24:15so far to third-party watch faces

1:24:17because third-party developers can control

1:24:19in a much more flexible way

1:24:21a larger portion of that screen.

1:24:22The time is still just the time

1:24:24and you don't have much control over that,

1:24:25but modular has big complications

1:24:27and if you can really use the full power of SwiftUI

1:24:30to fill that space, that'll be something.

1:24:32It's not Marco's custom watch face

1:24:35that's like a big circle with weird tick marks

1:24:38around it and everything,

1:24:38but it's progress in that direction.

1:24:41Anything else I'm missing from WatchOS?

1:24:43- It's making the existing restrictions a little bit nicer,

1:24:47but it does not fundamentally change

1:24:50almost any of the existing restrictions

1:24:52with that one big exception to certain apps

1:24:55of, as you said, that an app can now vend

1:24:57multiple complications.

1:24:59So before--

1:25:00- Of the same type, of the same size class.

1:25:02- Yeah, 'cause there's so many faces that have,

1:25:05as you said, they have that new round complication,

1:25:08that medium-sized circle,

1:25:09that the info graph face has four of them or whatever

1:25:12and so on, and before, an app could only say,

1:25:15all right, my complication for this size is this

1:25:19and that's all you would get.

1:25:21And so it made it hard for apps like Underscore's WatchSmith

1:25:26or apps that have really rich complication support

1:25:28like Carrot Weather, where you would maybe want to have,

1:25:32like suppose you use Carrot Weather,

1:25:33you'd wanna use, like okay, let me put the temperature

1:25:35in this circle and let me put the UV index in this circle.

1:25:39And you couldn't do that before

1:25:40because Carrot Weather could only say,

1:25:42all right, my complication for medium circle type is this.

1:25:45And now that is lifted,

1:25:47so apps that wanna make rich complicated experiences

1:25:51like WatchSmith or Carrot Weather or things like that,

1:25:54they can now do a lot more than they could do before.

1:25:56So that's really great for them.

1:25:58Beyond, and using SwiftUI for complications

1:26:00is also very nice.

1:26:01It's probably using the exact same feature

1:26:04as the widget support that we talked about earlier

1:26:05where it's this kind of pre-rendered SwiftUI archive view

1:26:10that it's minimal interaction

1:26:11which is how complications have always been

1:26:13and you have to give it this weird timeline

1:26:15of values to display 'cause you're not constantly running.

1:26:19Most of those restrictions were already there

1:26:21and are still there.

1:26:22So a lot of that on WatchOS is not gonna be a big deal.

1:26:26Where WatchOS had a lot more substantial advancement

1:26:30is in customer facing features.

1:26:32So that includes things like the new workout types,

1:26:35the pretty major feature of sleep tracking,

1:26:37the kinda cool feature,

1:26:38my stream cut out during the first part of it

1:26:40so I missed some of it,

1:26:41but the hand washing detection and guidance

1:26:42seemed pretty cool, especially given the world today,

1:26:45I thought that was a pretty cool feature.

1:26:47I do have some questions about the workout support.

1:26:49So one of the workouts I do a lot is with a trainer

1:26:53and so Apple has this, you can say there's fitness,

1:26:58breaking down into the warmup and cool down stretching,

1:27:04core exercises, stuff like that.

1:27:06Well, what if you do a workout that has multiple things?

1:27:09What if you do a workout that begins with a warmup stretch

1:27:11and then you do some core exercises

1:27:13and then you do some jogging or something

1:27:15and then you cool down with some stretches?

1:27:18Do you have to do four workouts

1:27:19to make that be counted properly?

1:27:21- Yeah, so when I do some of the exercising

1:27:24that I do at home, a lot of times some of the stuff,

1:27:28like I do it against like an exercise video

1:27:29and a lot of times one of the workout types

1:27:32is where you do half weightlifting and half HIIT,

1:27:36high intensity interval training, I think is what it's called.

1:27:39Anyways, that's what I'll do is I will do one exercise

1:27:43and the watch that's the weightlifting exercise

1:27:45and then I'll stop that one

1:27:47and then I'll do another second exercise

1:27:50that is the HIIT exercise and it's very annoying.

1:27:53I mean, in the grand scheme of things,

1:27:55it's not that big a deal,

1:27:56but every time I have to handle it that way,

1:27:57I'm just like, "Ugh, man, why can't I just figure it out?

1:28:01"Wouldn't that be nice?

1:28:02"You can figure out dancing apparently.

1:28:03"You can figure out whether you're dancing

1:28:04"with just your arms or your whole body or whatever.

1:28:06"Figure this out too, man, please?"

1:28:08- Yeah, the sleep tracking is another thing.

1:28:11Did sleep tracking already exist or has it been rumored

1:28:13so long that there's another thing

1:28:14that I just remember as existing but didn't?

1:28:15- Yeah, it has been supported by third parties

1:28:17for a number of years now,

1:28:19but it was never supported by Apple.

1:28:22- Yeah, so they've got that

1:28:24and I think the current hardware basically supports it.

1:28:26If you were, you said, "Wherever I watch a sleep,

1:28:29"when does it ever charge?"

1:28:30You charge it when you're taking a shower in the morning

1:28:32and surprisingly, that is a viable pattern.

1:28:35There's go-to-bed reminders.

1:28:37Parents may think this is gonna help

1:28:39their children go to bed.

1:28:40I really doubt it will,

1:28:41but for adults who want to brain hack themselves,

1:28:44the phone can try to wind things down for you

1:28:46and get you to go to sleep at a reasonable time

1:28:48and hopefully the sleep tracking will let you know

1:28:49whether you're getting garbage sleep or not.

1:28:51Rewinding for a second for the face sharing thing,

1:28:54one thing we missed was that Apple is going to curate

1:28:57a collection of faces.

1:28:59I think this is, it's not third-party watch faces,

1:29:03but it's important because people get paralyzed by choice.

1:29:06You can have a lot of different watch faces

1:29:07as your starting point

1:29:08and there's lots of different options for complications

1:29:10and you may not really want to sit there

1:29:13and mess with those things

1:29:14or know what complications are available.

1:29:16And so by having this basically app store for faces,

1:29:20all it is is a set of configurations

1:29:21and a bunch of humans will make these at Apple

1:29:25that look good or tailored to particular activities

1:29:28like running or sleep tracking or weather nuts or whatever.

1:29:32I don't know what they're gonna have, but anyway,

1:29:34it's great because if you go there

1:29:36and you see a thing that you like with Apple's integration,

1:29:38you can say, "I just want that watch face,"

1:29:40and you'll get it on your thing.

1:29:41And again, if you don't have the apps that it needs,

1:29:43it will prompt you to install them.

1:29:44And so even though this feature seems a little bit silly,

1:29:48I think it will actually benefit

1:29:49a lot of people's use of the watch

1:29:52because people tend to, it's the tyranny of the default.

1:29:55They just pick whatever default watch face

1:29:57they find appealing and maybe customize one or two things.

1:29:59And I feel like that is probably a suboptimal experience

1:30:02for most people when they could be having,

1:30:04A, they could have more different watch faces.

1:30:06I'm not sure how many people know

1:30:07that you can switch the watch faces on the fly

1:30:09based on your activity.

1:30:10And B, have sort of expertly built watch faces

1:30:13by someone who knows how to make

1:30:14an attractive, informative watch face.

1:30:16And you can, of course, customize from there.

1:30:18It's not like they're fixed, but I think it's pretty neat.

1:30:20- Yeah, it's nice.

1:30:21I mean, this is obviously not custom watch faces,

1:30:24which is what many of us still want

1:30:26and I certainly still want.

1:30:28This is an okay compromise for now

1:30:33to give people a little bit more variety

1:30:34and to make the current faces

1:30:36seem to last a little bit longer.

1:30:38Ultimately, though, we still want more.

1:30:40This does not remove the need for custom watch faces.

1:30:44It simply extends the time beyond

1:30:46which we might start complaining again.

1:30:48- I'm gonna skip the App Store privacy stuff

1:30:51for next week if you guys don't mind

1:30:53'cause I think it's not time pressing,

1:30:54but we will talk about it next week.

1:30:57A brief section on AirPods,

1:30:59just because there are a few things

1:31:00that are relevant to the stuff we've discussed

1:31:01on the show before.

1:31:03One is their 3D audio support.

1:31:05I forget how they branded it,

1:31:07but basically we talked-- - Spatial audio.

1:31:09- Yeah, we talked about this in the context

1:31:10of binaural audio and the PlayStation 5.

1:31:12This is similar.

1:31:13You have two things in your ears

1:31:16and software magic makes it sound like

1:31:18the sound is coming from different directions.

1:31:19Apple's version of this seems constant-reheading on

1:31:23and limited to what you'd imagine

1:31:25the television and movie sound standards

1:31:27like Atmos and DTS and surround sound.

1:31:30It's not like the PlayStation thing

1:31:31where you want 5,000 sound sources

1:31:33'cause there's no real context.

1:31:34It's not gaming focus is what I'm saying.

1:31:36It's for, hey, I'm watching a movie or TV show.

1:31:38I have my AirPods in.

1:31:40Can I give myself some rough simulation

1:31:43of what it might be like to be in surround sound?

1:31:45And that's what Apple's trying to do.

1:31:47They didn't mention anything

1:31:48about head-related transfer functions,

1:31:50so I'm just presumably they're using something generic.

1:31:52Because the AirPod Pros have accelerometers

1:31:55and gyroscopes and stuff in them,

1:31:57they can tell when you turn your head

1:31:59so they can keep the audio sounding normal.

1:32:01If you say you're in a movie theater,

1:32:03if we were in normal time,

1:32:04or in your house with surround sound,

1:32:06and you've got your speakers all going off

1:32:07because some movie has sound surrounding you,

1:32:09if you turn your head, the sound doesn't move.

1:32:12The speakers are in the same place in the theater, right?

1:32:14That's what surround sound is supposed to be like.

1:32:16If you hear a noise to your left and you turn to your left

1:32:18and the noise comes again,

1:32:20now you're facing it more and it sounds different.

1:32:22But if you have headphones in,

1:32:23if they didn't know when you turned your head,

1:32:25it would kill the illusion because you turn your head

1:32:27and now all of a sudden the sound turned with your head

1:32:29and that's not what's supposed to happen.

1:32:31So that's very clever and if it works well,

1:32:33this'll be super cool.

1:32:34I can't wait to try this except I, A,

1:32:37don't have AirPods Pro and, B, I don't like them

1:32:40because they go inside my little ear holes.

1:32:42So I really hope someday Apple makes a non-invasive,

1:32:47let's say, AirPod with these gyroscope features

1:32:53'cause I think this sounds neat.

1:32:53And then finally, automatic switching.

1:32:56This sounds like a dream as someone who uses AirPods

1:32:59with multiple devices all the time

1:33:01and is constantly going to Control Center

1:33:03to switch from one device to the other.

1:33:06Even though the switch is faster with the new version

1:33:08of the AirPods that I have

1:33:09and Control Center is not that far away,

1:33:12I would just like it to magically know what I mean.

1:33:14But I don't know how it's gonna know.

1:33:15Like automatic switching, they describe it as,

1:33:17"Yeah, it's easy, it'll just switch from device to device."

1:33:20But how will it know?

1:33:21Like in practice, my phone and my iPad

1:33:23are both on my nightstand.

1:33:24How is it gonna know?

1:33:25I guess it's whichever device I'm using.

1:33:27I have medium hopes for this feature.

1:33:29I really want it to work by figuring out

1:33:32which device I'm using and automatically connecting to it.

1:33:34But connecting is still not lightning fast.

1:33:37And if this thing starts getting it wrong,

1:33:38I'm gonna be angry.

1:33:40But the surprising amount of AirPod news

1:33:42for a non-hardware-focused keynote.

1:33:45- A couple of quick notes on that.

1:33:46First of all, I thought it was absolutely incredible

1:33:49that one of the things they said is that

1:33:51by some magic, they will detect when you,

1:33:54like let's say you're sitting in a chair

1:33:55and you're holding your iPad in front of you.

1:33:56If you twist slightly so that the iPad is to your left,

1:33:59by some magic, if I understood them right,

1:34:02they will detect that and change the profile of the sound

1:34:05coming into your AirPod Pros to reflect the fact

1:34:08that the screen is now a little bit left of center,

1:34:10which I thought was phenomenal.

1:34:12- They even said if you're on a bus,

1:34:14they'll figure out, oh, the bus is turning,

1:34:17but don't shift the sound because you're in the bus

1:34:20and you're stationary, like they're using GPS

1:34:22and other things to try, I mean, this is a use case.

1:34:23- I don't think, no, I think it was all accelerometer-based.

1:34:26The idea there was like, it's not GPS or anything,

1:34:29it's saying like, you know, they had to distinguish

1:34:30between you're in a moving vehicle,

1:34:33which generates a certain type of accelerometer input,

1:34:36or you are actually physically moving the device.

1:34:38It's like basically velocity versus acceleration,

1:34:40it's a whole thing.

1:34:41- But the phone has a GPS in it.

1:34:43They're not using the phone's GPS at all to figure that out?

1:34:46'Cause I imagine they could, you know what I mean?

1:34:47Like you're not, like the AirPods don't exist in isolation.

1:34:49You're watching something on a phone or an iPad,

1:34:51but you might have GPS, anyway.

1:34:52- No, I'm pretty sure it's a combination of the gyroscope

1:34:54and the accelerometer, it lets them do that without GPS.

1:34:57- Yeah, maybe, but anyway, it's a use case

1:34:59that the PlayStation does not have to deal with,

1:35:01because if you're using a PlayStation on a bus,

1:35:04you are a rarity, like it is not the Nintendo Switch, right?

1:35:07So, interesting problem and interesting solution,

1:35:11and I really hope they pulled it off,

1:35:13because it'll be super cool if they did.

1:35:15- Another quick note, I genuinely thought

1:35:17that the automatic switching was there

1:35:20since the original AirPods.

1:35:21I am clearly wrong, I'm not trying to say that I'm right,

1:35:24but I really thought, somehow it got in my brain

1:35:27that that was automatic, and I feel much better now

1:35:29knowing that it never used to be automatic,

1:35:31because it never worked for crap,

1:35:33and so now I understand why.

1:35:34I made up the fact, John style, apparently,

1:35:37I made up that feature, and it never ever existed

1:35:39until just today.

1:35:40- Well, it actually, for me, it has been slightly automatic

1:35:43sometimes between the phone and the watch.

1:35:46That's the only pairing that was kind of automatic,

1:35:48and the reason why might be a hint

1:35:50as to how they're doing this, that basically,

1:35:53when you, like, you gotta figure,

1:35:55like how are they gonna distinguish

1:35:56between which app it's using?

1:35:58Suppose if you are, like, holding your iPhone

1:36:00and tapping out a message while you're on your Mac,

1:36:03you know, while you're sitting at your Mac,

1:36:04and you don't want what you're playing on your Mac

1:36:06to all of a sudden pause and switch to your iPhone,

1:36:08there are ways they can do this

1:36:09with the way audio sessions work.

1:36:11So the way that whenever you, as an app,

1:36:14start playing audio back, for whatever reason,

1:36:16somebody hits play or whatever, you start playing audio.

1:36:19To do that, you first make a call to AV audio session

1:36:22to activate your session, and then that, you know,

1:36:25configures the hardware and everything,

1:36:26and then, and that's also the same place

1:36:28you tell the system whether, like,

1:36:30are you spoken word content,

1:36:31should you play in the background or not, et cetera,

1:36:34and then you start playing audio.

1:36:36So one thing they could do is merely use, like,

1:36:39whoever last started the most recent audio session,

1:36:42whatever device started that,

1:36:44that's the current active device.

1:36:45So that is almost certainly how it's always worked

1:36:49between the phone and the watch,

1:36:50and so this could just be them extending that same logic

1:36:53to Macs and phones and iPads and everything,

1:36:55and like, you know, to all that automatic switching as well.

1:36:57So whatever, my guess, I haven't tried this yet,

1:37:00but whatever device that you play audio from most recently,

1:37:05that will be the device that switches to.

1:37:07- All right, let's talk about Big Sur.

1:37:09- Big Sur.

1:37:10(laughing)

1:37:11Oh, you guys need practice.

1:37:12- Did I just do it?

1:37:14- You need to make it.

1:37:15Big Sur.

1:37:16It's not Big Sur, it's Big Sur.

1:37:18- Sur big?

1:37:18(laughing)

1:37:19You guys are very bad at this.

1:37:21Okay, well, just, we can call it Mac OSB.

1:37:25- Yes.

1:37:26- There we go.

1:37:27(laughing)

1:37:27- We can all agree on that.

1:37:28- Well, no, I don't think we can agree on that.

1:37:30All right, so let's start with,

1:37:32before we get into the hardware side of this,

1:37:35is just do the software.

1:37:36Mac OS Big Sur looks, has a new look,

1:37:40which happens every couple years in Mac OS

1:37:45if you're new to the modern Mac operating system.

1:37:48They change the look to varying degrees,

1:37:50usually on a multi-year interval.

1:37:52This is the biggest change in the look of Mac OS,

1:37:57probably since they went unlikable

1:37:59and got rid of the pinstripes.

1:38:00I feel like that is the only other comparable change,

1:38:02maybe the biggest change that they've ever made

1:38:05to the look of the modern Mac OS.

1:38:09And I tweeted when this was going on,

1:38:12this is kind of the Mac's iOS 7 moment.

1:38:16For people who don't remember,

1:38:17iOS 7 was when the previously very sort of

1:38:203D shiny photo real UI of iOS

1:38:24switched to a very flat minimalist interface

1:38:27when Johnny Ive took over the software team.

1:38:30And it was very extreme and very different

1:38:32from what came before it,

1:38:33and very upsetting to some people.

1:38:35And then in the years that followed,

1:38:37iOS 7's look was pulled back from those extremes

1:38:39and made more moderate.

1:38:40Hopefully Apple has learned from that.

1:38:42But if you look at screenshots of Big Sur,

1:38:44it looks different.

1:38:48You're not gonna confuse it for a Catalina Mac, I think.

1:38:53And it leans on not just more minimalism,

1:38:57but even more transparency,

1:38:59even more compressing of elements.

1:39:01I don't know how, before I try to characterize it,

1:39:05because then we're gonna just go look at the screenshots,

1:39:06Margot seemed the most upset about it,

1:39:08so I wanna give him time to tell us

1:39:10why he hates the new look.

1:39:11- I'm not sure whether I'm going to hate it yet,

1:39:15but it is, I have to live with it.

1:39:17That's another reason why I put it on my laptop,

1:39:19or I'm trying to put it on my laptop if it ever completes,

1:39:21because I do want to spend time with it

1:39:24before I say for sure that I hate it.

1:39:26But certainly on first look, I'm really hesitant.

1:39:29I'm skeptical about it, because frankly,

1:39:33I don't like Alan Dye's style as a UI designer.

1:39:36Alan Dye was also the designer of iOS 7.

1:39:38He's been the UI designer since Johnny Iov

1:39:40was put in charge of everything.

1:39:41And Johnny Iov left, Alan Dye didn't.

1:39:43He is still the designer there,

1:39:46and he has a habit of designing things like Johnny

1:39:49to look really good,

1:39:52but often at the expense of functionality.

1:39:54And so for a UI, that can be things like contrast,

1:39:57legibility, discoverability,

1:40:01having control look like controls, things like that.

1:40:03And a lot of times, I think his style of design,

1:40:06or at least I don't know if he's personally doing all this,

1:40:08but the era of design under him,

1:40:10it really fails in those ways.

1:40:13It hides things.

1:40:15One of the things I hate is that in the Catalina version

1:40:19of the music app, and this continues into the BS version.

1:40:22In the Catalina version,

1:40:24it used to be that when you're playing a song,

1:40:29it would show you the time elapsed

1:40:31on one side of the now playing bar,

1:40:33and it would show you the time remaining

1:40:34on the other side of the now playing bar.

1:40:36And granted, I listen to songs from bands

1:40:40where the duration of the song can vary a lot,

1:40:42maybe you could say.

1:40:44And so I am often looking at the time in a song,

1:40:48and maybe they assume that everyone listens to pop music,

1:40:51where every song is three minutes long,

1:40:52and you say, "You don't need this anymore,"

1:40:53but that's not true for everyone.

1:40:55And in the Catalina version of the music app,

1:40:59those time durations fade out

1:41:02when you're not hovering over it.

1:41:03So most of the time you look at it,

1:41:05and it's just this big empty square showing title,

1:41:07but no time, and you hover over it, and the time appears,

1:41:10and the time is really tiny.

1:41:12These really little tiny times in the corner,

1:41:15in the middle of this giant expanse of a window.

1:41:18And so it's hiding functionality,

1:41:20and he even said this in the video today,

1:41:23about something about how the controls fade away

1:41:26so that you can focus on your content,

1:41:28and that's one of his critical design principles.

1:41:30And I hate this principle because it's so overused.

1:41:33It is junk drawer theory of design.

1:41:35It is just hide things, and that is always better.

1:41:38But no, hiding things isn't always better.

1:41:40And in this case, in the case of my music app nitpick here

1:41:44with the time elapsed and time remaining labels,

1:41:47like you're on a Mac, you have space.

1:41:49It was always there before,

1:41:51ever since the dawn of MP3 players,

1:41:53and no one had a problem with that.

1:41:55It's not like, what are you gaining

1:41:56by hiding the time playing in a music app

1:42:00on a now playing screen that has tons of space?

1:42:02You're not gaining anything,

1:42:03you're just hiding it for the sake of minimalism,

1:42:04for its own sake, and assuming that's better.

1:42:07And now people who actually use that information

1:42:10or want to see that information, it's now harder to get.

1:42:13Now you have to hover over it to see it,

1:42:15and then it just vanishes for no reason.

1:42:17And I'm afraid of that aesthetic

1:42:19expanding to the degree that it has expanded in Big Sur.

1:42:24It really does seem like that is now so dominant,

1:42:28so entrenched in their design philosophy and their actions,

1:42:32that, and Mac OS has been doing this slowly over time,

1:42:35things like scroll bars disappearing and stuff like that.

1:42:37Like, we've been heading on this path for a little while,

1:42:40but I worry that we've now gone really far

1:42:43in that direction, where now so much is hidden

1:42:46behind hover states and just hidden

1:42:49for the sake of being hidden.

1:42:50And it's now going to be, I think, even harder to tell.

1:42:54Like, what is a control?

1:42:56What is active?

1:42:57Like, when I saw, they showed a few screenshots and stuff

1:43:02of apps like Mail, where you have a big tool bar

1:43:04across the top with a whole bunch of buttons.

1:43:06And when I saw those, it just looked like a visual mess

1:43:10to me, like not having any more structure to the icon bars,

1:43:15having a lot of the color removed from them,

1:43:16so it's just like, here's a list of monochrome icons.

1:43:19It made it harder for me to see, and it looked,

1:43:22it was hard to even tell, like, what is a button?

1:43:24What is clickable?

1:43:25Wickshooter's icons are showing me status

1:43:27versus Wickshooter actually behaving as buttons.

1:43:30I worry that we've taken a really big step backwards here.

1:43:33But all that said, I do wanna actually use it

1:43:37before I really judge it further.

1:43:38But right now, I don't feel good about it

1:43:41upon first glance.

1:43:44- You can see where, what the appeal is

1:43:47to a certain kind of designer to this type of interface.

1:43:50So using SF symbols, the font,

1:43:53with a bunch of vector drawings for a bunch of stuff,

1:43:55having configurable accent colors to each app,

1:43:59if you choose to be in multicolor mode,

1:44:01can have its own highlights.

1:44:02Like, if you're on the Mac now,

1:44:04you can choose what your accent color is

1:44:05for your operating system.

1:44:07It defaults to, like, bluish.

1:44:09You can also say multicolor in Big Sur,

1:44:11and that will let individual apps

1:44:13have a different accent color.

1:44:14So notes could be yellow, and mail could be blue,

1:44:16and so on, if you want that.

1:44:18But the whole idea is, you design the app,

1:44:22and you specify, this is a sidebar, this is the icon,

1:44:25this is the text, this is a toolbar, here are the icons,

1:44:28and that a system like this allows all those things

1:44:31to be flexible.

1:44:32Accent color is flexible 'cause they're all template images.

1:44:34They're scalable 'cause they're vector

1:44:36'cause they all come from a font.

1:44:37You are sort of just telling me the what,

1:44:39and the OS is determining the how,

1:44:41and that gives you, as a designer,

1:44:43a lot of flexibility to change the way things look

1:44:46and to have the UI be more flexible

1:44:48than, for example, the hand-drawn, pixel-perfect,

1:44:50you know, old days of the old iOS,

1:44:52where it was very inflexible and almost like an old game UI

1:44:55where it was just like a bunch of raster graphics,

1:44:56and if the whole OS changes, look,

1:44:58you have these other apps that were, like,

1:45:00made in the days before the OS changes, look,

1:45:02and they didn't fit in, this avoids that.

1:45:04That said, I agree with all the things,

1:45:06all the criticisms Marco had about this UI,

1:45:08and in fact, many of them are not new.

1:45:10Many of them are the same exact criticisms we had

1:45:12for the first version of iOS 7,

1:45:14not legible, controls didn't look like controls,

1:45:17you know, low contrast, stuff like that,

1:45:19and in fact, some of these complaints that I would add

1:45:21are the same ones that I had, personally,

1:45:24in 2007 for things like Leopard.

1:45:26Leopard introduced a translucent menu bar.

1:45:28I couldn't believe when Craig Federighi said,

1:45:30you know, they're adding translucent menu bar.

1:45:33It's on our Macs right now.

1:45:34If you're running Catalina, look at your menu bar.

1:45:36It is somewhat translucent.

1:45:38In Leopard, when this was first introduced in the betas,

1:45:41it was super translucent, like,

1:45:43it was practically like a sheet of glass,

1:45:44a sheet of frosted glass.

1:45:46They backed off of that, and when they shipped Leopard,

1:45:49it was less translucent, and there was, like,

1:45:51a P-list hack to override it to make it opaque again,

1:45:53and I had this big rant about it around the Leopard thing.

1:45:56Basically, the gist of it was that when Apple introduced

1:45:59translucency in Mac OS X,

1:46:02the idea was to use it for transient elements,

1:46:04so like when a sheet came down,

1:46:05it was translucent to show it was impermanent,

1:46:07like you're going to address this dialogue and dismiss it,

1:46:10that the transparency had a message, you know,

1:46:13this is, you know, permanent UI is solid,

1:46:15transient UI is translucent.

1:46:17That was the sort of thing they were going for.

1:46:19Then they made the menu bar translucent,

1:46:21and the menu bar is, or was at the time,

1:46:23arguably the most permanent fixture on the entire screen.

1:46:26It could not be hidden unless an app was in full screen mode.

1:46:29I know that's not true now,

1:46:29because you can automatically hide it, but anyway.

1:46:31The new menu bar in Big Sur is even more translucent

1:46:36than the one they chickened out of shipping in Leopard,

1:46:40and to the detriment, I think, of legibility and contrast.

1:46:44If you look at some of these screenshots,

1:46:46the contrast is bad.

1:46:48The legibility is bad.

1:46:49It is difficult to tell what's a button.

1:46:51The advantage of this design language

1:46:53is all the accessibility features that exist,

1:46:55and I think people forget this

1:46:56if they don't realize that thing is there.

1:46:58All those accessibility features are easier to implement,

1:47:01because you can crank up the contrast and the size

1:47:03in a flexible way that doesn't break the UI,

1:47:06because everything is sort of descriptive and simplified

1:47:09and vector and able to accommodate these things,

1:47:12but I think it's still a failing of the design

1:47:15if most people would benefit

1:47:17from going to the accessibility options.

1:47:19That's not to say going to accessibility options are bad,

1:47:22but the default experience should try to hit the fat part

1:47:25of the bell curve of your customer base,

1:47:27and I think this one does not.

1:47:28I think it is not going to be obvious

1:47:31to people what buttons are.

1:47:32This text is gonna be harder for people to read,

1:47:35and practically speaking,

1:47:36I don't care that much about what's behind my windows

1:47:39that I need it coming forward and impairing legibility,

1:47:42and Apple has struggled with this on the Mac

1:47:43for many, many years to strike the balance between,

1:47:46like in Yosemite, it looks really cool

1:47:48when the sideboards are translucent,

1:47:50but of course, you're not actually getting

1:47:52any additional information.

1:47:53It's entirely an aesthetic choice,

1:47:55so if that impacts legibility at all at a non-zero percent,

1:47:59it's not a great trade-off.

1:48:00Same thing with the menu bar.

1:48:02I like that my desktop background is back there,

1:48:05but I don't need to see the top centimeter of it

1:48:08through my menu bar if it impairs legibility.

1:48:10Like in the screenshots I showed you,

1:48:12if you have a desktop background,

1:48:13I guess it decides whether your menu bar

1:48:15is going to have white text or black text

1:48:17depending on how much it's showing through.

1:48:18Like that's how much of your desktop background

1:48:20shows through, that I think it inverts the text

1:48:23just to make it legible.

1:48:24It's not great.

1:48:26So I have serious concerns about this.

1:48:29It could be iOS 7 all over again

1:48:30where they go extreme in the beginning

1:48:32and then they tone it down.

1:48:33I feel like they should just learn from this.

1:48:35Like Marco said, hiding things,

1:48:38like the proxy icon for documents, by the way,

1:48:41maybe you don't know about this,

1:48:42but the little icon on the top of document windows

1:48:43that you can drag to do stuff with,

1:48:45that's hidden by default.

1:48:46No one was discovering that thing

1:48:48when it was visible all the time

1:48:49and now you're gonna hide it by default?

1:48:50You could say, okay, well if no one was discovering it,

1:48:52obviously it's not heavily used,

1:48:53so why should it be in people's faces?

1:48:55But it's a useful feature.

1:48:56You should let people know that it's there more prominently

1:48:59instead of just completely hiding it.

1:49:01The controls fading away when you don't need them.

1:49:04How do people know if they are going to need them

1:49:06if they don't even recognize them as controls?

1:49:08I'm also not a fan of that philosophy.

1:49:10I don't think it fits the Mac.

1:49:12That said, aesthetically speaking,

1:49:15rounded corners on all the windows,

1:49:17the general idea of using more trans-listenly,

1:49:19I'm mostly on board with the aesthetics, believe it or not,

1:49:21even the sort of the colors in the sidebar

1:49:23and stuff like that.

1:49:24I just feel like the usability,

1:49:27like the can I read what's on the screen,

1:49:29can I identify things,

1:49:31is it clear to me what they're going to do?

1:49:33You no longer have the benefit of literal decades

1:49:37of use of a Mac to understand what does a dialog look like,

1:49:40what does a button look like,

1:49:41because they've changed all those things so much,

1:49:43in fact, making them look more and more like iOS

1:49:45that I think is going to be quite jarring.

1:49:46Some things that I think people haven't actually realized

1:49:48if they haven't gone through Apple's web pages,

1:49:50things like dialog boxes have changed.

1:49:53When you specify a dialog box programmatically,

1:49:55for the most part, you say,

1:49:57I want a dialog, here are the buttons,

1:49:58here's the text on the buttons,

1:49:59here's some main text, here's some other text.

1:50:02You don't lay out those windows like alerts manually,

1:50:05you just specify that.

1:50:06So the OS has the flexibility to change them.

1:50:08I don't know, have you two have looked

1:50:09at what alerts look like in Big Sur?

1:50:12- Oh my God, it's hideous.

1:50:14- They look like iOS alerts.

1:50:16- Yes, and that, to me, is one of the biggest examples

1:50:20of why I think this is kind of an iffy

1:50:23and possibly wrong design philosophy to take,

1:50:25because one of the reasons why the new dialogs

1:50:29look so jarring and I think are a little bit worse

1:50:31is that they use centered text for everything,

1:50:33because iOS uses centered text for its dialogs.

1:50:36Centered text might look good in ideal screenshots

1:50:40where the text is very short.

1:50:41As soon as you have multiple lines of centered text,

1:50:43it looks terrible and it's harder to read.

1:50:45- Or you have a widow.

1:50:46I mean, it's like I'm reading suck.com all over again.

1:50:48Like this is not aesthetically pleasing.

1:50:51The translucency is off the charts

1:50:53and now you're gonna add the ability to have like red text

1:50:55like iOS has on buttons.

1:50:58It is not an upgrade for these features.

1:51:01Like the good thing is, you know,

1:51:02because they can change it once, they can change it back.

1:51:04But like again, the history cannot be, you know,

1:51:08like you may think most people have more experience

1:51:10with iOS, but people aren't presented

1:51:12with dialog boxes constantly in iOS.

1:51:15That's just not the experience.

1:51:16On the Mac, you see dialog boxes all the time.

1:51:18Someone with experience on the Mac has an expectation

1:51:21of what a dialog box looks like,

1:51:22what it does and where the controls are.

1:51:23And this is breaking all of that for a layout

1:51:26that is also not aesthetically more pleasing.

1:51:28So why do this at all?

1:51:30It is a downgrade all around

1:51:31as far as the alerts are concerned.

1:51:33- Well, and I think the why do it at all,

1:51:36Alan Dye answered that question,

1:51:38but I think it was a bad answer.

1:51:40You know, the way that this redesign was explained

1:51:44for the most part, one word that came up constantly

1:51:47was consistency.

1:51:49And you know, consistency with iOS is the,

1:51:52whether he said it or not, that's certainly the implication.

1:51:55But is this design being used

1:51:58because this is the great design for the Mac?

1:52:01Or is this design being used

1:52:03because it makes it look more like iOS?

1:52:04I think he very clearly answered the latter is the case,

1:52:08but because it might not be a better design for the Mac,

1:52:13I think that's a crappy reason.

1:52:14And I see, you know, I could see an argument,

1:52:18as you said, secondly, like, you know,

1:52:20yeah, a lot of people use iOS.

1:52:21Yeah, you know what, a lot more people use iOS than macOS.

1:52:23That is true, but the problems that, like, you know,

1:52:27and the Mac can be made more usable by taking some iOSisms,

1:52:32but not necessarily, like, the UI theme

1:52:34doesn't have to match necessarily,

1:52:36or it certainly doesn't have to match so closely.

1:52:38You know, people are not idiots.

1:52:39They can understand that dialog boxes look different

1:52:41between platforms, and they can understand, like,

1:52:44how to read two different dialog boxes.

1:52:45Like, that's, the level of matching there

1:52:49for the sake of matching is not necessary.

1:52:51If it happens to work out that you have a good design

1:52:53that is a great design on all the platforms,

1:52:56then cool, use it.

1:52:57But in this case, it seems like consistency

1:52:59has taken significantly higher priority

1:53:02than what's actually the best design for the Mac.

1:53:06- Or the best design for iOS, for that matter.

1:53:07I don't think these dialog boxes are good on iOS either.

1:53:09Like, that's the thing that burns me.

1:53:10Like, they even changed, you remember Sheets?

1:53:12This was an innovation of the original Mac OS X,

1:53:14where when you have a document modal thing,

1:53:16where it's a thing, Windows is gonna come out on the screen,

1:53:18and you can't interact anymore with that document window,

1:53:21but you can use other document windows.

1:53:22An example would be a save dialog.

1:53:25In the old Mac, when you initiated, you know,

1:53:27hit Command + S to save, it would be app modal,

1:53:29and you couldn't do anything else in that app,

1:53:30or for that matter, on the entire system,

1:53:32until you dismiss that dialog.

1:53:33But Mac OS X, you know,

1:53:34'cause it's a better, more modern multitasking

1:53:36operating system, introduced the idea

1:53:38that if you hit Save on a document,

1:53:40a sheet will come out, sort of,

1:53:42of that document's window title bar,

1:53:44and that document will be like,

1:53:46oh, you can't do anything with this document

1:53:47until you decide to either save or cancel, right?

1:53:49But other document windows,

1:53:51you could continue to interact with,

1:53:52and the sheet would just sit there attached to that one,

1:53:54and because it came out of the title bar,

1:53:55it was sort of physically attached to the window,

1:53:58and you understood, yeah,

1:53:59this window is busy doing a thing.

1:54:01They've changed how Sheets look

1:54:03to make them look more like iOS app modal dialogs,

1:54:05where it fades the background,

1:54:07and it shows in the center of the window.

1:54:09I don't think that's an improvement

1:54:11in terms of me understanding

1:54:13that this is blocking the whole window,

1:54:15because there are lots of things

1:54:16that can present like that,

1:54:17where they fade the content and show the window,

1:54:18and it's not clear to me it's associated with the document,

1:54:20but anyway, Sheets weren't broken.

1:54:22They fixed it by making it, quote-unquote,

1:54:24consistent with iOS,

1:54:25but iOS doesn't have document-based apps.

1:54:27Yes, it has window modal or app modal dialogs,

1:54:30and that's how they present,

1:54:31but this consistency is not worthwhile.

1:54:35And part of the motivation to this,

1:54:37and part of sort of the meta-hidden secret theme of this,

1:54:40if you look at all the different screenshots,

1:54:42is it's pretty clear to me now

1:54:44that touch-based Macs are coming,

1:54:46because every control in here that has changed in some way

1:54:50is changed to make it not like,

1:54:52oh, everything is a touch control,

1:54:54but closer to being touch control,

1:54:56so the items in the drop-down menus

1:54:58are pushed a little bit farther apart.

1:54:59The toolbar items are spread a little bit from each other.

1:55:02These dialog boxes have a configuration

1:55:04where the buttons are way bigger than they used to be,

1:55:07so big, in fact,

1:55:08that you can imagine choking them with your finger.

1:55:10It doesn't mean that macOS is going to be a touch-based OS,

1:55:13because it's not, right?

1:55:14But the places where they changed it,

1:55:16like that's the thing about the macOS,

1:55:18like, oh, they'd have to change the whole UI

1:55:21to make it work with your finger.

1:55:22They don't.

1:55:23They just need it for your finger to be useful in the OS.

1:55:26You're never gonna use macOS just with your finger,

1:55:28because you'll never be able to find

1:55:30the tiny little controls in Final Cut Pro.

1:55:31Like, it's not gonna happen, right?

1:55:33You just need the fingers to be good for something.

1:55:35So the title bars got a little bit thicker.

1:55:37Look how big the title bars are in the Safari window, right?

1:55:39Look how big the buttons are in here.

1:55:40Why would they spread the menu items in a drop-down menu

1:55:43away from each other to the degree that they did?

1:55:45It's not like they suddenly introduced Max

1:55:46with taller screens.

1:55:48Menus aren't getting any shorter, right?

1:55:50It's so that it is viable to drag a window with your finger,

1:55:54to dismiss a dialog with your finger,

1:55:56to tap a menu in the menu bar

1:55:58and then tap a menu item with your finger, right?

1:56:00If that's not why they did this in Touch Max Never Come,

1:56:03I will not understand this change at all.

1:56:04But right now, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt

1:56:06and saying a lot of the spacing changes,

1:56:08which in general, the spacing changes on their own,

1:56:10I don't object to, a lot of them seem like

1:56:13a clear indication that Touch Base Max are coming.

1:56:16And I think that is a welcome change.

1:56:18It's just the aesthetics and the layout choices

1:56:22of a lot of the things they've changed

1:56:24do not seem like the right move.

1:56:28And somewhat related to that,

1:56:29all the more in an aesthetic front

1:56:31and in the consistency front,

1:56:32they've decided that now a good macOS app

1:56:35should have an icon that looks just like an iOS icon

1:56:37with a little squircle thing.

1:56:39Mac apps are allowed to have photorealistic things

1:56:42apparently on top of them,

1:56:44and they can break the border of the squircle,

1:56:46which iOS apps can't.

1:56:47That's their concession to Mac-ness.

1:56:49But boy, seeing that dock at the bottom

1:56:52with a big line of what for all the world

1:56:54look like iOS icons with weird things floating over them

1:56:56is very strange.

1:56:57In the past, Apple has had lots of different

1:57:02aesthetic policies, let's say,

1:57:04about what Mac icons are going to look like.

1:57:06And Mac developers, being the cats that they are,

1:57:10have mostly refused to be herded.

1:57:12Whenever I look down at my dock

1:57:16over the umpteen years of using the Mac

1:57:18after the Mac OS X transition,

1:57:19there's always been quite a molly collection of icons.

1:57:22Apple's icons tend to look consistent with each other,

1:57:24and that changes over the years.

1:57:25Then there's a bunch of ones that look like

1:57:27they're from two generations of the OS ago,

1:57:29ones that look like they were revised one generation ago.

1:57:32It's always going to be a molly collection.

1:57:35I kind of applaud Apple for leading by example,

1:57:39showing consistent icons.

1:57:41They did that in the classic Mac OS era,

1:57:42in classic Mac OS.

1:57:43Icons were supposed to be a diamond with a hand and a tool,

1:57:47and a lot of Mac apps followed that.

1:57:49There was some variation,

1:57:50basically diamond shape with some variations on top of it.

1:57:53There was a lot of consistency until,

1:57:55in classic Mac OS, people figured out,

1:57:56I can draw whatever the hell I want.

1:57:57I'm going to make a big alien's face with a tongue sticking

1:57:59out, and that's what they did, right?

1:58:01I think that will continue to happen.

1:58:03I'm not sure.

1:58:05We know where this is all going.

1:58:08People were putting up these snarky slides like,

1:58:09"Oh, is Mac OS merging with iOS?

1:58:11I thought you said it wasn't, but it looks like they are."

1:58:14This is the whole subject for another show

1:58:15that we don't have time to get into now,

1:58:16but there is an eventual convergence of hardware

1:58:21and software platforms in the Apple world.

1:58:23We are edging closer towards it.

1:58:26There will always be specialization,

1:58:28just as there is today, between the iOS and iPad OS.

1:58:31They are specialized for their devices,

1:58:33and the Mac OS will continue to be specialized,

1:58:34but this is the next step in that direction.

1:58:36I just think, as Marco pointed out before,

1:58:38and as the famous page that I put in one

1:58:41of my old Mac OS X reviews pointed out,

1:58:43you don't need things to look literally exactly the same

1:58:46to understand what they are.

1:58:48The example from the Bruce Toggazini book was extensions.

1:58:53In classic Mac OS, you saw puzzle piece icons,

1:58:55but there was like five different puzzle pieces,

1:58:57and no one looked at them and said,

1:58:59"Is that an extension?

1:59:00I can't tell, because it's usually the puzzle piece

1:59:01with one little prong on one side

1:59:03and a hole on the other side,

1:59:04but this one is a whole different,

1:59:05it looks like a puzzle piece."

1:59:07You can tell.

1:59:08It doesn't have to be literally the same puzzle piece

1:59:10for you to understand what it is.

1:59:12Ditto with buttons and dialogues and windows.

1:59:15As long as they look buttony enough,

1:59:18as long as, you know,

1:59:18it doesn't have to be literally exactly the same,

1:59:21so to the degree that Apple feels like it needs to do that

1:59:24for consistency and learnability,

1:59:26I think they're overcompensating in that direction,

1:59:30and I think they're, you know,

1:59:33I applaud the direction.

1:59:34I think there should be some kind of unification.

1:59:37It makes sense, especially in light of the hardware changes

1:59:38they're about to talk about,

1:59:39but I think they are taking it too far,

1:59:43they're taking it too literally right now,

1:59:44and I hope they back off a little.

1:59:46- You know what's funny to me?

1:59:47I intellectually agree with everything you guys have said,

1:59:51that a lot of these choices seem ridiculous.

1:59:53It's emphasizing the wrong things.

1:59:55I think it looks really good though.

1:59:57The only thing that I really am annoyed by,

2:00:00and I am unreasonably annoyed by this,

2:00:02and I don't know why,

2:00:03but when you pull down a menu in macOS right now,

2:00:08the menu itself is connected to the entry in the menu bar.

2:00:12So, you know, if you look at, say, Chrome,

2:00:15and you look at the bookmarks menu,

2:00:17the word bookmarks is connected to the items

2:00:20that are below that word,

2:00:21and now there's a little gap between the menu item

2:00:25and the menu bar and the menu itself,

2:00:28and oh my gosh, does this annoy me.

2:00:30I don't know why it annoys me so much, but it does.

2:00:33- The menu has rounded corners on the top,

2:00:35and it is also slightly wider than the menu.

2:00:38These are all just aesthetic choices

2:00:40that are mostly silly or whatever,

2:00:41they're like the rounded corner things.

2:00:43I tweeted that I was happy that the screen image itself

2:00:46does not have rounded corners,

2:00:48but classic macOS used to have rounded corners

2:00:50in the upper right and upper left corners.

2:00:52Like, they would just black out those pixels

2:00:53to make it look a little bit round.

2:00:56People still keep thinking that the future Macs

2:00:59will actually have rounded screens like the new iPads do,

2:01:01and maybe that's gonna happen,

2:01:02but it's neither here nor there.

2:01:04But yeah, I see your aesthetic objection

2:01:08to the disconnected menus in the rounded corners.

2:01:10I think it's fine, you know, it's not that big of a deal.

2:01:14The one part that I gotta kick out of

2:01:16is of course the dock in Big Sur

2:01:20looks a lot like of course the iPad OS dock,

2:01:25and it also happens to look like Switch Glass.

2:01:27I mean, there's a reason Switch Glass looks the way it does.

2:01:29It's not, you know, but interestingly,

2:01:32Switch Glass is going to fit in perfectly in Big Sur,

2:01:36and since my corner radiuses are adjustable,

2:01:39you can actually make it fit exactly if you want.

2:01:41- Oh, look at you.

2:01:42- Everyone buys Switch Glass,

2:01:43it is perfectly made for Big Sur.

2:01:44Unfortunately, my icon, well, my icon does fit in

2:01:47because it is an iOS style squircle, right,

2:01:50with little symbols on it,

2:01:51but it's a little bit more photo real,

2:01:53and it's not exactly head on,

2:01:54so maybe someday I'll have to change the icon to fit in,

2:01:57but maybe I won't, you know what I mean?

2:01:58I'll just be one of those motley icons

2:01:59that looks like it was made in previous eras

2:02:01'cause, you know, I intentionally made my icon

2:02:03look slightly different than the current style

2:02:05because I like the style my icon is.

2:02:07It looks really cool and likable,

2:02:08and you know, I might just keep it that way.

2:02:11Anyway, you shouldn't really show the dock icon

2:02:13in Switch Glass anyway, you should disable it.

2:02:15- Wow, overall though, I do think that this looks good.

2:02:20From a behavioral standpoint,

2:02:23I think a lot, if not all, of the complaints

2:02:25that the two of you had are completely reasonable

2:02:27and will bear fruit in the sense

2:02:30that we will think that these are problems.

2:02:32But just looking at it with a couple of quibbles

2:02:34here and there, I think it looks good,

2:02:36and I can't tell you why, but I do find it

2:02:41just assigned a kind of unconsciously,

2:02:43subconsciously appealing, subconsciously appealing

2:02:46that everything does look similar.

2:02:48I agree with what you said,

2:02:49that the Mac doesn't have to look like the iPad,

2:02:51and if the puzzle pieces all look like puzzle pieces,

2:02:54I'll understand what's going on.

2:02:55But I don't know, I kind of feel like it is nice

2:02:58to have what appears at a glance anyway

2:03:01to be the approximately same design language

2:03:05across all these disparate devices.

2:03:07So it all just feels like a different version

2:03:10of the same tool.

2:03:11Like one of these screwdrivers is a Philips,

2:03:14one is a straight, but they're still just screwdrivers.

2:03:17And I do like that, having not used Big Sur yet,

2:03:21having not used iOS 14 yet, I do like it.

2:03:23And I think it looks very modern.

2:03:27As with all new UIs, it's made the Mac I'm sitting

2:03:30in front of, the software portion of the Mac

2:03:32I'm sitting in front of, look old and busted,

2:03:34almost immediately.

2:03:35And I don't think that's a bad thing.

2:03:36I think that's a good thing.

2:03:38Marco, you haven't talked for a while,

2:03:39so I'd like to give you a chance to make any

2:03:41other final thoughts, but I think we should probably

2:03:43plow forward on the new look and start talking about

2:03:45some of the other features of Big Sur after Marco,

2:03:47you have a chance.

2:03:49- The only, I mean, I'm gonna have a lot of gripes

2:03:50about the theme.

2:03:52And I think, I'm glad John brought up Sheets being gone

2:03:57and being replaced, these weird like just blob overlays,

2:04:00'cause I think that's a huge regression.

2:04:02But ultimately, what I find concerning here

2:04:06is that the Mac has not had a great few years

2:04:10of software quality.

2:04:12We've had a lot of really like paper cut kind of issues

2:04:15with Mac OS, and that's why many of us,

2:04:19including us right here last week,

2:04:20were saying, boy, we just hope the Mac OS

2:04:22has a quiet year of just stability improvements

2:04:25and like a bug fix year, not any kind of major new features.

2:04:30And instead, Apple did a system-wide redesign

2:04:33that will require like all apps to be significantly redesigned

2:04:37and so what this does is they have basically placed

2:04:41a huge burden of like required work to keep up

2:04:46with the system on all Mac developers,

2:04:49including themselves, for anything like any kind

2:04:52of Mac OS-related software.

2:04:54Now, instead of working on quality, they and everyone else

2:04:58has to first work on this new theme,

2:05:01and then maybe if you have time left,

2:05:02then you can work on quality.

2:05:05And that's just the last thing that Mac developers

2:05:08and Apple as the biggest Mac developer,

2:05:10that's the last thing they needed right now.

2:05:12The biggest thing they needed right now is like,

2:05:14please give us a year off so we can work on quality.

2:05:17And instead, they're doing a system-wide redesign.

2:05:20And if you look at what happened when iOS had its,

2:05:23you know, had the iOS 7 change,

2:05:26so many apps had to be redesigned from scratch

2:05:29to look at all correct and reasonable and good

2:05:32and competitive on that platform,

2:05:35that we kind of had like two or three years

2:05:37of lost productivity in quality and features in iOS app

2:05:41because so much effort had to be expended

2:05:44to just keep up with the new direction the system

2:05:47was taking in and redesign to fit the new theme.

2:05:50And now, we're gonna have that same thing happen on the Mac

2:05:54where that really was not a thing that we could afford to do.

2:05:58Now, maybe this will all work out in the end.

2:06:01You know, maybe where we're going with, you know,

2:06:04the don't say ARM Macs and everything else,

2:06:07and unification with iOS apps running on the Mac,

2:06:11that all could be a great endgame,

2:06:13but this just threw a massive cost

2:06:16and a ton of instability into an ecosystem

2:06:19that doesn't seem like it was ready to bear that cost.

2:06:23- Yeah, I get where you're coming from,

2:06:24but I think, you know, what I really wanted was

2:06:29no big changes to the plumbing.

2:06:31Like, from the app developers' perspective, you're right,

2:06:33they're gonna burn a lot of time on this,

2:06:34and that's a shame.

2:06:35But if, you know, you're doing like a redesign on this

2:06:38in the surface level, what I care about is like,

2:06:41does the, you know, DNS responder not crash?

2:06:45Does the Bluetooth stack work correctly?

2:06:47Does the USB peripherals not unmount my drives?

2:06:50Like, those are the things I care about,

2:06:53the plumbing of the OS.

2:06:54And so if this, like, if all the time they spent on this

2:06:57is mostly on sort of like, you know,

2:06:59obviously all the ARM stuff and Catalyst stuff,

2:07:01it's sort of like surface level UI stuff,

2:07:03but the teams that work on like the, you know,

2:07:07like I said, the USB stack, they spent the entire release

2:07:09not adding any new features and just making it work.

2:07:12That's what I hope.

2:07:12But my optimistic scenario is like,

2:07:14this was a higher level in the stack big change.

2:07:19And what I was, what I meant when we were saying like,

2:07:22oh, I hope this release is just like, you know,

2:07:24no new features type of thing, is that under the covers,

2:07:27you don't say, yeah, we rewrote the entire

2:07:29Windows server again, and we have a new DNS responder

2:07:32this time, and the Bluetooth stack is all new,

2:07:35'cause that's the stuff that's burning me up.

2:07:37It's not like changing the UI stuff.

2:07:39In general, the UI stuff may be good, may be bad,

2:07:41but it's not gonna take down your entire system.

2:07:43I just need it to work fundamentally at a hardware level.

2:07:45So I still have hope that that's the case.

2:07:47Maybe that's also screwed up too.

2:07:48Who knows?

2:07:49They didn't talk about it in this release.

2:07:51They certainly didn't say anything about time machine

2:07:52APFS enhancements, but you know, the week is young.

2:07:55So I'm, I can't remember where you're coming from,

2:07:58but I'm still holding out hope.

2:07:59And also in terms of burning up time with the look,

2:08:02but that's part of, if you've been following Apple's APIs

2:08:04and using source lists and stuff like that, like this,

2:08:06yes, there are new APIs you have to adopt and stuff,

2:08:08but in general, I hope Mac apps will look reasonable-ish

2:08:13with minimal changes.

2:08:14Like that's the beauty of their recent changes have been

2:08:17that if you follow them, you don't have to redesign

2:08:20your entire app every time.

2:08:21Like the big iOS 7 transition is because people had

2:08:24pixel perfect hand-drawn raster UIs and iOS 7 threw that

2:08:29all in the garbage.

2:08:30Post iOS 7, I think, you know, as the iOS 7 evolved

2:08:34and the UI changed, people haven't had to throw out

2:08:36everything, I think they've learned that lesson.

2:08:38So like I said, the bones of this thing,

2:08:41using vectors for stuff, being able to change things

2:08:44like having the accessibility features be able to work well,

2:08:47easily increase contrast, easily increase size,

2:08:49have everything scaled to fit and everything.

2:08:51The bones are good.

2:08:52The individual aesthetic choices, I think a lot of them

2:08:55are bad, so I have some hope that we can recover from this.

2:08:59And honestly, I'm kind of a little bit with Casey

2:09:01in that like as quote unquote bad as this might be

2:09:04for all the reasons I outline, I am excited about

2:09:06there being a new look.

2:09:07I'm always excited about there being a new look.

2:09:09Like it's cool to see the Mac change the way it looks.

2:09:11It's just we also need it to work well, so we'll get there.

2:09:16- All right, in the interest of having the show end

2:09:19before next week, I'd like to speed round

2:09:22the next few items.

2:09:23Messages, Maps, both Catalyst.

2:09:26We talked earlier about Messages supposedly getting

2:09:29either near feature parity or complete feature parity

2:09:31with iOS since it is Catalyst now.

2:09:33That's excellent, I'm very, very excited about that.

2:09:36Maps, nothing about that revved my engine in particular,

2:09:39but hey, the better Maps gets, the happier I am with it.

2:09:44Safari, we talked about the privacy report

2:09:46and password compromise detections.

2:09:48Translation will happen in Safari.

2:09:50Apparently Safari extensions have been revamped

2:09:53and you can even import them from Chrome

2:09:56or Firefox extensions.

2:09:57- Is that true?

2:09:58That's a question mark.

2:09:59- No, I heard them say something about,

2:10:00I don't remember the exact verbiage,

2:10:02but basically you can take a Chrome or Firefox extension

2:10:05and use it in Safari is what I thought I had heard.

2:10:08- Yeah, they described it as the Web Extensions API

2:10:11and to quote, bring over extensions built

2:10:13for other browsers.

2:10:15I made a note to look up what the heck

2:10:16that Web Essentials API is,

2:10:17'cause it made it sound like there's some kind

2:10:18of standard API that I just don't know about,

2:10:20but it wouldn't surprise me.

2:10:21I don't know about any of this stuff.

2:10:22- Yeah, and in typical Safari fashion,

2:10:24you can limit it to individual websites

2:10:26and limit it by time.

2:10:27There's all sorts of controls on it

2:10:28and it's the first time you use it.

2:10:30It's all the security controls that you would expect.

2:10:32Chrome has similar ones, but Apple's bringing its twist to it

2:10:35so that's all good news.

2:10:37Yeah, and the new version of Safari has favicons

2:10:40in all the tabs, which John Gruber will love

2:10:42and apparently everyone will love

2:10:44'cause the whole reason he got keyed into that story

2:10:46is because people were saying the number one reason

2:10:48for using Chrome instead of Safari

2:10:49was because you couldn't have little icons in the tabs.

2:10:51It was just text in Safari,

2:10:53presumably for, again, aesthetic reasons,

2:10:55you know, omitting the icons.

2:10:56Well, we can't have all those weird colored icons.

2:10:58They ruined the vibe of this cool gray

2:11:01at one time brush metal thing

2:11:03and people are like, the icons add information.

2:11:05That lets me know what site it is.

2:11:06You know, so Chrome had icons and Safari didn't

2:11:09and Safari has finally come around on that.

2:11:11So that's all good news.

2:11:12And of course, Safari is super fast.

2:11:14- Yeah, and to be clear, Safari did have icons

2:11:18in the tabs before, but it was added fairly recently,

2:11:22but it was off by default.

2:11:23Now it's on by default.

2:11:24- Indeed, all right.

2:11:27So big news, what did Tim say something about

2:11:30we're going deep into the Mac?

2:11:32We are getting Apple Silicon, Silicon.

2:11:36- Not Silicon.

2:11:36- We're just gonna say Arm Macs.

2:11:39- Every time I get that wrong.

2:11:40I was trying not to say Arm Macs

2:11:41'cause they never said Arm Macs.

2:11:43- We're gonna say it because that's what they are.

2:11:45- Fair enough.

2:11:46We are getting Apple Silicon, there we go.

2:11:49We are getting Apple Silicon, we're getting Arm Macs

2:11:51and apparently we're getting, or at least

2:11:54as far as we can tell, at first we're getting

2:11:57what is basically the same processor as in the iPad Pros.

2:12:00We're getting an A12Z.

2:12:02- That's just the Pentium 4.

2:12:04- Yeah, that's just for the dev kit.

2:12:06You know, we'll see what actually ships.

2:12:08- Yeah, so what they announced is they are making

2:12:10a family of SOCs, a family of system-on-a-chips for Macs

2:12:15and that they didn't come right out and say this

2:12:16but eventually through the accumulation of everything

2:12:18they said they are Arm CPUs, surprise,

2:12:21just like they are on their iOS devices

2:12:23because they run the same binaries

2:12:24and the A12Z is the one they're testing with, whatever.

2:12:28And so the family of Mac SOCs is letting them

2:12:31letting you know that not just making one of these chips,

2:12:34there's going to be a family of them,

2:12:35presumably from small to large,

2:12:37from their weak lower powered thing to the higher power one.

2:12:40They did not commit to say,

2:12:42we're going to have chips that scale

2:12:43from our tiniest notebook all the way up to our Mac Pro.

2:12:45They did not say that.

2:12:46What they did say was that this would be

2:12:49a two year long transition.

2:12:51Their first Arm-based Mac would ship

2:12:53before the end of this year, if everything goes well.

2:12:56And that they, you know, as we said in the previous shows,

2:12:59trying to consult people with Intel Macs,

2:13:01they will continue to make and sell

2:13:03and announce new Intel-based Macs

2:13:04because what do you think they're going to do,

2:13:05not sell Macs for two years?

2:13:07That's what they're going to do.

2:13:08So they announced all of that.

2:13:09Hopefully everyone who listens to the show

2:13:10is already prepared for that

2:13:12because that's how these transitions go.

2:13:14No big surprises.

2:13:15Also, if you listen to the show,

2:13:17you would have heard our prediction be on the money

2:13:19about the developer transition kit,

2:13:21down to it being called DTK.

2:13:22It's a Mac mini and inside it is the equivalent

2:13:25of a Pentium 4, meaning it's a chip

2:13:27that probably will never ship in an Arm-based Mac,

2:13:30but it's what they've got handy right now.

2:13:32So they shoved an A12Z with 16 gigs of RAM

2:13:36and a 512 gigabyte SSD and quote,

2:13:38a complement of Mac I/O ports.

2:13:41I don't know what that means.

2:13:42They later clarified what that means, by the way.

2:13:45It's two USB-C, two USB-A, and HDMI and Ethernet.

2:13:50I think that's it.

2:13:51And so, notably absent is Thunderbolt,

2:13:54which again, we talked about kind of why that might be,

2:13:57but that's a topic for another day.

2:13:58But basically, this does not have that.

2:14:01This only has USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI and Ethernet.

2:14:08And because it's an A12Z, you would imagine

2:14:10that it has similar I/O capabilities to the iPad,

2:14:12which has the A12Z in it, so the iPad does not,

2:14:15to our knowledge, have Thunderbolt capability

2:14:16and neither does this developer transition kit.

2:14:18- Although interestingly, I noticed that they said,

2:14:21Craig said during the presentation,

2:14:23that this computer that we've been running on

2:14:25is the developer transition kit.

2:14:27Did he actually say it was the DTK?

2:14:30- They said it was Arm.

2:14:31There's lots of hand-waving about

2:14:33what are these demos running on.

2:14:35It was just clear that they're running on Apple Silicon.

2:14:38That was usually what they said.

2:14:39- It was running on a 6K XDR,

2:14:42which is not driveable via USB-C,

2:14:46so I'm wondering what that was about.

2:14:49But yeah, I think you're right.

2:14:50I think that was a technicality that this was

2:14:52a Mac running Apple Silicon, but it was not the DTK.

2:14:55- They were very careful.

2:14:56I was watching, because before they even announced the DTK,

2:14:59I was looking for a Mac Mini on their desks,

2:15:01and watch where all those cords go

2:15:03from those cinema display, those Pro Display XDRs.

2:15:07They go somewhere, but you never see them

2:15:09attached to a computer.

2:15:10So there's lots of clever staging in this supposed lab,

2:15:15which is really obviously like a set,

2:15:17or a carefully arranged corner of the lab.

2:15:20So if you want one of these developer transition kits,

2:15:25you give Apple $500, they give you one of these things,

2:15:28plus some exclusive access to private forums

2:15:31and stuff like that, and then you have to give it

2:15:33back to Apple, just like the weird Pentium 4 cheese graters.

2:15:36You get a weird Mac Mini case with iPad guts inside it

2:15:40with some weird IO ports, and then you give it back to Apple.

2:15:43This is only if you're one of the lucky few.

2:15:44There is a signup process.

2:15:46There are a limited number of these things going out.

2:15:48If you would like a developer transition kit,

2:15:51you put your name in the hat, you write a little paragraph

2:15:53of text telling Apple why you think you want this,

2:15:55and what your app is that you're going to port to ARM,

2:15:58and then you wait to hear from them.

2:16:01And they're shipping this week, so I guess we'll all find out

2:16:04if we win the lottery.

2:16:05- I say we because I put my hat in the ring.

2:16:07I have two Mac apps, and the reason I specified

2:16:10was that I want to talk about the process

2:16:12of porting them to ARM on my podcast.

2:16:14Marco, you also put your hat in the ring?

2:16:16- I did because I have Quitter, and Quitter really has

2:16:19to make sure it runs on day one.

2:16:22No, I'm just kidding.

2:16:23I put my name in the hat for forecast,

2:16:26and I also mentioned overcast, 'cause forecast,

2:16:28yes, I want to make sure forecast, which uses,

2:16:31it uses the lame MP3 encoding library under the hood,

2:16:34and that's very time critical and performance critical,

2:16:37and it's this low-level thing that's this third-party

2:16:39library, so I want to make sure that works.

2:16:41And I also want to make sure that overcast works correctly

2:16:43when it's run via the download from the app store thing

2:16:46that we'll talk about, I guess, sometime,

2:16:48because that's also a pretty important thing,

2:16:50and that I want to make sure all the low-level audio code

2:16:53works well and is performant and everything else.

2:16:55So yeah, so both things, but they seem to mostly care

2:16:57about Mac apps specifically, so I mainly made

2:16:59my little blurb about forecast.

2:17:01- Yeah, I really hope they have a lot of these.

2:17:03It'll be a shame if they have really, really limited supply

2:17:06and most people don't get them.

2:17:07I hope they just have enough to go around.

2:17:09I mean, I understand the limitations, but you know.

2:17:12Anyway, shipping this week, so that's good,

2:17:13and I hope that if they run out of them,

2:17:15maybe they can make more.

2:17:16If there's huge demand, they can make more

2:17:18and ship them out in the future, so I'm more than willing

2:17:20to pay 500 bucks to get this weird Mac Mini thing,

2:17:22even I have to give it back.

2:17:24I don't know if they're gonna have any credit,

2:17:26if you, I haven't looked into the details,

2:17:27if you give it back, you get some kind of credit

2:17:29towards something, you just lose that $500 forever,

2:17:31where they give you a special deal like they did

2:17:32on the Intel iMacs that you could buy

2:17:34after you return the Pentium 4 dev kits.

2:17:37But anyway, that's all straight up the middle.

2:17:38More stuff straight up the middle.

2:17:40Universal binaries, hey, binaries that have Intel code

2:17:43and ARM in them, this is part of Apple's 2 branding,

2:17:46it's called Universal 2.

2:17:48Why do you have to call it 2, just call it Universal,

2:17:50like the old Universal binaries were so long ago,

2:17:52no one will get it confused, it'll be fine.

2:17:54- Well, and they're still universal,

2:17:55it's like calling something more unique.

2:17:57It's not, it's just, it's still universal.

2:17:59- I'm sure maybe it's a slightly different tech,

2:18:01we'll see when we start taking apart the OS

2:18:03and seeing what exactly the executable format is.

2:18:06A lot of this is less relevant than it was before,

2:18:08because Apple introduced app thinning in recent years,

2:18:11where when you download from one of their app stores,

2:18:13they don't give you the whole universal binary,

2:18:15they just give you the one that has the executable code

2:18:18for whatever machine you're on, so it saves in size,

2:18:20and you don't have to download an app that's twice as big,

2:18:22which is nice, although it really wouldn't be twice as big,

2:18:24I don't think, anyway.

2:18:26But that's what we expect in these type of transitions,

2:18:29and there it is.

2:18:30- And the final one, I will collect my points

2:18:32for being right about being able to run x86 code

2:18:35on your ARM Mac, Apple's gonna let you do it,

2:18:37and they did a really amazing job, you know what,

2:18:39'cause they're really good at this,

2:18:40they reused the name Rosetta,

2:18:41but called it Rosetta 2 for some reason,

2:18:44and they do all the things, right?

2:18:46So can you run x86 apps unmodified on your ARM Mac?

2:18:50Yes, you can.

2:18:51What about plugins?

2:18:52Yes, you can.

2:18:53What about app extensions and drivers?

2:18:57If you use DriverKit, you can even run those.

2:18:59Older drivers are not supported,

2:19:01but they went all the way out to making sure

2:19:04that you can run all the types of x86 things

2:19:07that are reasonable to run.

2:19:09They do what they call translation, not emulation,

2:19:12but translation, and they do it either at install time

2:19:15or on first launch for app packages

2:19:17that are bundled in the .app thing.

2:19:20Basically, they will write out to disk

2:19:23the ARM equivalent of the x86 code,

2:19:26so it doesn't have to do that on the fly.

2:19:29And again, if they control the app store,

2:19:30they'll do it at install time,

2:19:31but if they don't, they'll just do it on first launch.

2:19:33There's also a dynamic translation available

2:19:35for things that are sort of just-in-time compiled,

2:19:37like the just-in-time compiler for JavaScript code

2:19:40in a web browser or something like that.

2:19:42They have all the things.

2:19:44Apple is really good at this.

2:19:45They've done it many times in the past,

2:19:46and whatever team did it last time

2:19:48for the Intel transition, presumably,

2:19:50all that expertise and institutional knowledge

2:19:52is still at Apple, and I have high hopes

2:19:53that this will be just as amazing.

2:19:55There was lots of concern that, oh, well,

2:19:58ARM CPUs aren't gonna be that much faster than Intel,

2:20:00so can they even handle this?

2:20:02Will it be feasible to run x86 software?

2:20:05Part of the reason that I predicted last show

2:20:08that they would have this feature

2:20:09is because it running slightly slowly

2:20:13is way better than it not running at all.

2:20:15Lots of apps are not performance sensitive.

2:20:17You just need them to run.

2:20:19Apple wasn't satisfied with that in the demo.

2:20:21They're not like, oh, don't worry.

2:20:22You won't lose your software.

2:20:23Your crap will run.

2:20:24They're like, look, we're gonna run

2:20:25an x86 game on modified, which, granted,

2:20:29it wasn't the most demanding game,

2:20:30and they ran it at 1080, but it was a fairly recent game.

2:20:33It was Shadow of the Tomb Raider,

2:20:34which was from 2018, and running it at low res, fine,

2:20:38but that was their demo of not only can you run

2:20:42x86 software, not only will your favorite,

2:20:45you'll be able to run Scrivener before they do

2:20:47the ARM port, and it will be fine,

2:20:49and you won't even notice.

2:20:50It'll be completely transparent to you,

2:20:52but you can run this game, which it's not saying

2:20:55you can run any game.

2:20:56Games are gonna, it's gonna be worse, right,

2:20:58but any, literally any real-time 3D game being viable

2:21:02is a fairly amazing demonstration of either the power

2:21:06of whatever ARM Mac that they were running an add-on,

2:21:08or the cleverness of the translation,

2:21:10but most likely both, so I'm pretty excited about that,

2:21:13and the other big theme software-wise with integration

2:21:17with this ARM stuff is, talked the last show

2:21:20about this being an opportunity to ditch old stuff,

2:21:23to say, well, transitioning to ARM,

2:21:25you might not even call them Macs,

2:21:26and you can deprecate all your old APIs,

2:21:28you can ditch all the things.

2:21:30It seems like all of their ditching has already happened,

2:21:33and instead they're saying, we're not taking away APIs,

2:21:37we're not breaking your crap unnecessarily.

2:21:40OpenGL is still there.

2:21:42Like, kernel extensions are still exported,

2:21:45still supported in Big Sur, not under Rosetta,

2:21:48but they are supporting, like, basically,

2:21:52anything that runs in Catalina, in theory,

2:21:55should continue to run in Big Sur.

2:21:57Now, will that hold after Big Sur?

2:21:59I don't know, but for now, they're trying to ease

2:22:01the transition by saying, we're not gonna break your crap

2:22:04completely unnecessarily.

2:22:06We already did all that, we already deprecated 32-bit,

2:22:08we already got all this stuff, OpenGL is still deprecated

2:22:11and will go away someday, but don't blame it on ARM.

2:22:14Like, ARM's not taking away your stuff.

2:22:17Again, the only exception are things like kernel extensions,

2:22:19where they really can't do anything about that.

2:22:21But, you know, USB drivers with Driver Kit, app extensions,

2:22:25your apps, all that stuff will work.

2:22:26This is before we even get to, like,

2:22:27how hard is it to port your thing.

2:22:29They are bending over backwards to make sure

2:22:31that you don't buy your first ARM Mac and say,

2:22:34oh, what the hell am I gonna run on it?

2:22:35And so I was very excited to see all that.

2:22:38- Yeah, that was, I'm extremely happy

2:22:41to give you your points.

2:22:42I was totally wrong, like I said last show,

2:22:44that I thought there wasn't gonna be any emulation,

2:22:46and I thought anything that was currently deprecated,

2:22:48like OpenGL, would just be gone under ARM Macs.

2:22:51And I was wrong on both of those fronts by a lot.

2:22:54And that's a very good thing.

2:22:57I'm very, very glad that they've chosen here.

2:23:00You know, there's a number of things,

2:23:02like, you know, we were worried about, like,

2:23:03might they introduce more strict security?

2:23:06Maybe everything has to be app store only,

2:23:08or it'll be a harder process to, like,

2:23:11compile your own software or anything.

2:23:13Nope, no changes.

2:23:14Like, it seems like there's actually no additional,

2:23:18like, security restrictions in the OS

2:23:21for anything that any normal person would ever do,

2:23:25you know, for the ARM Macs compared to other Macs.

2:23:27Like, here's how Big Sur runs.

2:23:30Big Sur seems to be not any more strict than Catalina

2:23:33in most ways, and it runs the same way,

2:23:35whether you're on Intel or Apple Silicon,

2:23:38whatever they're gonna call that.

2:23:39And so that's fantastic news.

2:23:42It is worth noting, though, that the Rosetta layer,

2:23:46they were very clear in labeling it transitional

2:23:49in a number of points in both the keynote

2:23:50and the State of the Union.

2:23:51So I would expect, just like the original Rosetta

2:23:54from PowerPC to Intel, I would expect this is going to last

2:23:57maybe three or four years and then be removed from the OS.

2:24:00So, you know, don't get too attached to anything

2:24:03that needs it, but it is nice for the transition.

2:24:05And then the other kind of big elephant in the room

2:24:08is that Windows compatibility was never mentioned,

2:24:11including in the virtualization layer,

2:24:12because the virtualization layer can only run ARM hosts.

2:24:15It cannot create x86 hosts.

2:24:18Virtualization and Rosetta are separate things,

2:24:20and they are not to be combined.

2:24:23And the ability, of course, to boot into boot camp

2:24:27is probably totally gone as well,

2:24:29because I don't think anything is able to use Rosetta

2:24:33quite to that level, like running an entire OS level.

2:24:38So Rosetta is for apps, not OSes.

2:24:40So if your workflow depends on virtualizing or booting

2:24:45into Windows, you're going to have a problem.

2:24:48And I don't know, what is the status of-- is there like an ARM

2:24:50port of Windows anymore, or does it matter?

2:24:52No, there totally is Windows for ARM.

2:24:54Like, here's the thing.

2:24:55They didn't mention anything about Windows, right?

2:24:58But they did-- like, the stand-in for Windows was Linux.

2:25:01So they showed an ARM version of Linux

2:25:03running in virtualization.

2:25:04The virtualization, by the way, is like the same way

2:25:06you do virtualization on x86, where you can take your x86 CPU

2:25:09that's in your Mac, and you can run any other x86 operating

2:25:13system sharing the CPU.

2:25:15Same thing with ARM.

2:25:16Take another ARM operating system,

2:25:17like they have their hypervisor and all this stuff that

2:25:19lets you take another operating system that runs on ARM

2:25:22and run it on the same thing that's running Mac OS,

2:25:25and they share the resources and work it out.

2:25:27So that's virtualization, and that works on ARM.

2:25:31But that doesn't help you at all with x86, right?

2:25:33So they showed that happening in Linux.

2:25:35They showed Parallels running Linux.

2:25:37And people might be confused.

2:25:38Say, oh, well, look at that.

2:25:39They're running Linux.

2:25:39It does support x86.

2:25:40That was ARM Linux.

2:25:42And Linux is on every platform, of course.

2:25:44So of course, there's an ARM port of it.

2:25:45Which, by the way, I think I'll probably

2:25:47use that for server development.

2:25:48That looks awesome compared to trying

2:25:50to make sure that PHP and everything installed properly

2:25:53with Homebrew on Mac OS, which changes and breaks every OS

2:25:56release.

2:25:57That's been such a pain in my ass most of the time.

2:25:59I'm actually very much looking forward to probably, hopefully,

2:26:02switching to that in the future.

2:26:03You could be doing that today.

2:26:04They showed Docker, same deal.

2:26:06You could be doing that today with VMware or whatever.

2:26:09But Windows does exist for ARM.

2:26:12And there is no technical reason why

2:26:13Boot Camp can't exist to let your ARM-based Mac boot

2:26:16into Windows for ARM, which you may be sad about.

2:26:19But it's like, oh, who the hell cares about Windows for ARM?

2:26:22None of my games will run.

2:26:22They're all x86, yada, yada.

2:26:23But I don't know what was preventing

2:26:27Windows from being demoed.

2:26:28I don't know why Boot Camp wasn't there.

2:26:30I continue to think that eventually Boot Camp will rise

2:26:33again as a way for you to boot Windows for ARM on your Mac.

2:26:37This is an interesting time.

2:26:38We've talked about this before.

2:26:40I'll take the other side of that bit.

2:26:41All right.

2:26:42Well, you might be wrong again.

2:26:43Feel free.

2:26:43[LAUGHTER]

2:26:44Oh.

2:26:45I think you will be able to boot ARM Windows on these Macs

2:26:48eventually.

2:26:48Part of this is predicated on the idea of everyone

2:26:52more or less moving away from x86,

2:26:53partly because Intel's been having problems

2:26:55with their process, but also partly

2:26:57because this is just the way things have been going.

2:27:00It's a slow change, but I feel like we're

2:27:02going in that direction.

2:27:03We may halt, and the progression towards ARM everywhere

2:27:06may just stop dead in its track and not get any farther.

2:27:08But over the past several years, there

2:27:11has been a steady drumbeat in that direction.

2:27:13Apple going full ARM, although it makes sense

2:27:15for tons of other reasons, is another--

2:27:17I'm not going to say another nail in that coffin for Intel,

2:27:19because Intel is still making stuff.

2:27:21But it could happen.

2:27:23Now, there are a lot of concerns about,

2:27:26is all my software going to run?

2:27:27Forget about my Mac apps or whatever,

2:27:29but what if I don't want to virtualize ARM Linux?

2:27:31What if I have a bunch of open source software for x86?

2:27:34What if I use some of that open source software for x86

2:27:36in my apps?

2:27:37And I need to-- like Lame in your library,

2:27:39how do I get that to build and everything?

2:27:41Apple itself is helping out on a bunch of open source projects

2:27:46by helping those projects figure out

2:27:47how to get their thing to build for ARM on Mac OS.

2:27:51That's always the tricky bit about this.

2:27:54When the Mac went Intel, it's like, oh, well,

2:27:57they'll have access to all this software

2:27:58because everyone runs Linux on Intel,

2:28:01and so I'll just be able to take any Linux open source project

2:28:03and build it for the Mac.

2:28:05It's like, no.

2:28:06It's a different compiler, different tool chain,

2:28:08different operating system.

2:28:09People had to do work to get insert name

2:28:12of your favorite open source thing to build on Intel Macs.

2:28:16They will have to do that same work to get it to build on ARM

2:28:19Macs.

2:28:19Just because Linux was running on Intel for years and years

2:28:22before the Mac transition didn't really

2:28:24make it that much easier, except for if there

2:28:26was CPU-specific code.

2:28:29But honestly, most open source stuff

2:28:30doesn't have CPU-specific code.

2:28:31And even stuff that does, like FFmpeg

2:28:33that may have SSE instructions, there

2:28:35are tools that will translate from SSE or MMX

2:28:39or whatever the hell the things are called.

2:28:41There's some other acronym I forget in the Intel--

2:28:43AVX.

2:28:44Yeah, AVX.

2:28:46They will translate from that to NEON or whatever the ARM SIMD

2:28:51engine thing is.

2:28:52Someone just needs to do the work to sort of hook

2:28:55all that stuff up.

2:28:55And so changing the source code, changing the make files,

2:28:58changing the compiler flags, all that good stuff,

2:29:00Apple is helping with that by having their engineers spend

2:29:03time on what they probably know from their experience

2:29:06with the App Store are the most frequently integrated open

2:29:09source projects.

2:29:10They've had a big slide with a bunch of them

2:29:12up that said like Blender, Boost, Nginx, FFmpeg, Electron,

2:29:17CMake, OpenCV, Node, Redis.

2:29:21You can look at the slide.

2:29:22And then I think at one point they

2:29:23highlighted certain ones are the ones that actually helped with.

2:29:26So this is like their to-do list.

2:29:28And then there are some things that it actually

2:29:29started helping with.

2:29:30But all this makes me hopeful that, yeah, there'll

2:29:34be a bumpy transition.

2:29:35But by the time this two years is out,

2:29:37I will be able to build all the same stuff that

2:29:40have been built on my Mac.

2:29:41Right now I have built and installed my Mac.

2:29:42I compiled Perl from source and installed it.

2:29:44I compiled MySQL from source and installed it.

2:29:47I compiled Postgres from source and installed it.

2:29:50This is what I do, compile from source, whatever.

2:29:52The fact that I can do that is because

2:29:54of during the transition someone made sure

2:29:57that all this stuff built on Intel-based Macs.

2:30:00I hope someone, and someone maybe Apple,

2:30:02does all the same stuff for the ARM transition.

2:30:04If not, it's going to be sad because I don't

2:30:06want to run Linux and virtualization

2:30:08to get all my Unix-y stuff.

2:30:10Speaking of that, as far as I can tell,

2:30:12all the Unix-y stuff is still the same.

2:30:13Mac OS is still Mac OS.

2:30:15It's got the terminal.

2:30:16It's got the shell.

2:30:17It's all the same.

2:30:19There's no big news in that area.

2:30:21Thank god.

2:30:23Yeah, and I was heartened by this presentation--

2:30:25It is a word.

2:30:25--of all the presenters and the meta message being

2:30:28that the Mac is still the place where you do crap,

2:30:31like run Docker and install weird-ass crap.

2:30:33And that's what the Mac's job is.

2:30:35And by having demos that showed people doing that,

2:30:38it made it clear that despite what Alan Dye may think,

2:30:41the Mac is still definitely very different from an iPad

2:30:44and an iPhone.

2:30:46Yeah, it's impressive to me.

2:30:49It seems like such an Apple move,

2:30:51as we discussed quite a bit last episode.

2:30:53It seems like such an Apple move to use this as a time

2:30:55to cut the fat and to just say, well,

2:30:57all that stuff that we've been trying to get rid of, it's dead.

2:30:59It's very dead.

2:31:00It's not just a little dead.

2:31:01It's real dead.

2:31:02And it seems that they did a very Microsoftian thing, which

2:31:07is to say almost everywhere, they

2:31:10didn't get rid of anything.