00:00:11 ◼ ► This is episode number 570, and it's brought to you by OpenCase, Squarespace, and FitBot.
00:00:20 ◼ ► I'm John Voorhees, filling in for one or the other of Mike or Steven, and I have with me
00:00:44 ◼ ► We just had a really interesting conversation in the Pro Show for Connected Pro members.
00:00:48 ◼ ► The first part was kind of philosophical, you know, talking about user interfaces on mobile
00:01:21 ◼ ► Now, Mark Gurman is back saying, home device with square display and AirPods 5 with cameras
00:01:31 ◼ ► Both the home device and AirPods will include cameras that constantly monitor its surroundings.
00:01:36 ◼ ► How do you guys feel about always-on-cameras starting to spread more and more outside of
00:01:45 ◼ ► Interesting rumor, an interesting question, especially on the heels of last night's MetaConnect
00:01:51 ◼ ► event, where Meta announced multiple pairs of glasses with cameras, an update to the existing
00:01:58 ◼ ► line of Meta Raybans, but also the brand new Meta display glasses, like actual augmented reality
00:02:06 ◼ ► glasses that have a little display in one of the lenses and project UI in front of your eyes.
00:02:16 ◼ ► So we know about the HomePod with the screen, and we knew that Apple was exploring the idea
00:02:22 ◼ ► AirPods with cameras, I still, I find this rumor quite strange, if only because I don't understand
00:02:37 ◼ ► I kind of feel like it's going to end up shooting video of things that are on the sides of you,
00:02:44 ◼ ► I mean, you're walking down the street and you can see the left and right of you, but not
00:02:50 ◼ ► And I also, I guess, look, Federico, the thing to me that I got to maybe take issue with
00:03:20 ◼ ► But also, like, I guess the idea is to have always-on visual intelligence always available.
00:03:31 ◼ ► I would assume, obviously, you would need an iPhone always on you because, you know, they
00:03:44 ◼ ► And I guess the idea would be that you're looking at something, you can ask Siri a question about
00:03:58 ◼ ► I got to imagine that if this is happening, especially with the AirPods, that the resolution of this
00:04:04 ◼ ► camera is going to be very low because in order for the batteries to last on AirPods while
00:04:11 ◼ ► shooting and transferring video to an iPhone, seems to me like that's a really big technical
00:04:28 ◼ ► I don't think, my hot take here is that if they're going to do this, these cameras, you're
00:04:39 ◼ ► Because, like, we know, for example, with the Meta glasses, that you can take pictures,
00:04:47 ◼ ► So, is Apple going to, if you're going to take pictures with these AirPods 5, are you, are
00:05:19 ◼ ► You know, it would be like, it could tell you, oh, you know, you think to yourself, where did
00:05:34 ◼ ► It's like, you know, little things like that, or maybe it's not even like technology where
00:05:39 ◼ ► you could, where you could use something like find my anyway, but it's something like, where
00:05:54 ◼ ► But I do think that there are boundaries where people are going to have a problem with this.
00:06:22 ◼ ► I think like if I had a home pod with a camera in it on my kitchen counter where I'm either
00:06:48 ◼ ► It's just like potentially absorbing more information than people would necessarily want to give it.
00:07:02 ◼ ► And, uh, we've been doing this, you know, the, Mike and Steven started this years ago, uh, relay, uh, for St. Jude.
00:07:20 ◼ ► And this is the seven, this is the seventh year that the relay community is rallying together to support St. Jude.
00:07:30 ◼ ► So, you know, St. Jude, I think a lot of listeners probably already know is based in Memphis, Tennessee, where, where, uh, Steven and his family are from.
00:07:41 ◼ ► And so this is obviously something that's very close to, to him and to his family, but it's, it goes well beyond, you know, the, the environs of Memphis, Tennessee, because St. Jude not only operates all throughout the United States, but they work with hospitals and researchers worldwide to help bring healthcare to kids all around the world.
00:08:08 ◼ ► It also extends to some of the financial difficulties that families find themselves in when they have a child with cancer, because obviously that, that sort of thing can really be a drain on, on people financially.
00:08:26 ◼ ► And, you know, Relay has been doing just an amazing job for now for seven whole years, raising money for this incredibly important cause.
00:08:39 ◼ ► It's happening on Friday, noon Eastern time, which is my time zone, but, you know, check your, check your calendars and your time zone apps to get the time in your area.
00:08:51 ◼ ► That's what I say, shenanigans and hijinks that will be for a very good cause to help people to, uh, to raise money for St. Jude.
00:08:59 ◼ ► Now, over this course of the seven years, they're closing in on four and a half million dollars, which is just like mind boggling to me that, that Relay has done this.
00:09:09 ◼ ► I mean, it just really, I think to me confirms what a strong community Relay has and the people in it who really care about this cause and rally together to do more than just like, you know, Mike and Steven could do on their own by donating their money, but also raising money on their own.
00:09:27 ◼ ► Cause you can do that as part of this and participating through listening to the shows and talking to their friends and employers to get matching gifts and all that sort of thing.
00:09:43 ◼ ► And if you haven't donated yet, just go to the, uh, the website and check it out because you can go to St. Jude.org slash Relay and make a donation because any, really any amount goes a long way.
00:09:56 ◼ ► I mean, it's really important to, to get these donations in and help the kids and really no date donation is too small to, to be part of this and tell your friends about it because, uh, we're closing out.
00:10:09 ◼ ► We're halfway through September and they're going to be doing this for the rest of the month.
00:10:13 ◼ ► And it'd be really cool if we could raise even more money than ever before for St. Jude.
00:10:26 ◼ ► And if you want a case that truly takes advantage of MagSafe, you need to know about open case.
00:10:41 ◼ ► It means that your accessories are not going to slide around and sheer off the border of the open space cradles MagSafe accessories and prevents them from sliding off during everyday use.
00:10:51 ◼ ► It also reduces bulk and weight because the accessory sits inside the case instead of top of it.
00:10:57 ◼ ► It means the whole thing has a thinner profile and a lighter weight than usual and it optimizes MagSafe charging.
00:11:13 ◼ ► Open case has its own suite of accessories that fit perfectly, but it should also work with most third-party MagSafe accessories that fit.
00:11:25 ◼ ► The open space makes a ledge where you can wedge an accessory like a wallet for an impromptu stand.
00:11:34 ◼ ► Unlike traditional cases that cover everything up, open case lets you enjoy the color, especially orange, of your new iPhone while still keeping it protected.
00:11:45 ◼ ► I use a MagSafe wallet and having it slide off as you try to put your phone in your pocket really stinks.
00:11:56 ◼ ► Open case is thinner, lighter, prevents accessories from shearing off, optimizes MagSafe charging, and more.
00:12:26 ◼ ► All right, John, I don't know if you noticed, but this website called MagStories published a whole bunch of reviews for operating systems.
00:12:36 ◼ ► Yeah, so it's a website where there's one guy from Italy that is actually pretty good and all the other ones are like, eh, passable.
00:13:18 ◼ ► I mean, there's also like, technically speaking, there's Audio OS, which is not an official name.
00:13:35 ◼ ► So we are going to put in the show notes there are going to be links to all of the Mac Stories reviews that we've done.
00:14:18 ◼ ► I do find that Liquid Glass on the iPhone in particular can have legibility issues in places, especially in apps like photos and music, where you've got backgrounds that tend to be the backgrounds that Apple can't predict.
00:14:46 ◼ ► And I think, you know, I think when I first tried it in June, I thought this is a style that might look dated pretty quickly.
00:14:59 ◼ ► I still think that that's a possibility that it'll just look like, you know, 70s bell bottoms in the 90s.
00:15:10 ◼ ► I think that maybe what we're seeing is the first steps into, as we talked about a little bit in the pro show, a more vibrant and more animated UI that will be something that we see more of in the future on all of Apple's devices, but not just Apple's.
00:15:27 ◼ ► I think, you know, this is kind of the direction I expect that we'll see other platforms go in more in the future.
00:15:42 ◼ ► I mean, it's like I said, and sometimes in music, you know, things will get a little funky.
00:15:47 ◼ ► But and I've seen search bars that will, depending on the colors, you know, if they're light colors in particular, sometimes the search bar will kind of disappear almost.
00:16:04 ◼ ► I know I actually this week my dad called me and he was really concerned about iOS 26 because he was he had heard that it was a drastic change and that and he wondered whether he would still be able to use his iPhone.
00:16:26 ◼ ► And so I I texted him a bunch of the side by side side screenshots that you had done between 18 and 26 and had him look at them.
00:16:36 ◼ ► And and his reaction to it was what's changed, because, I mean, I mean, I suppose you could be accused of even one of the problems with doing a review of design is people can say, well, you didn't pick out the best examples.
00:16:53 ◼ ► But they the changes, as I, you know, I explained to him, like, you know, search bars moving to the bottom and I explained to him the check marks replacing done and a few other kind of very fundamental UI elements that I thought would be the kind of things that he would run into regularly.
00:17:11 ◼ ► And I think that by and large, most people won't have problems with those, although I do think people will run into at least some visual glitches here and there.
00:17:22 ◼ ► I mean, it's just I think it's just a system that hasn't been fully, fully refined yet and that it'll hopefully get better over the course of the 26 releases and on into the future, because I don't think like glass is like I think we're seeing the start of liquid glass, not the end of liquid glass.
00:17:42 ◼ ► And that liquid glass is going to be a design language that is going to get refined over at least the next two or three years easily.
00:17:53 ◼ ► The iPad for me, what I for me on the iPad, I find myself, despite the fact that I've been focused almost exclusively on Mac OS for the last three months, I found myself using my iPad Pro 11 inch more over the summer than I typically would during a Mac review season.
00:18:13 ◼ ► And I mean, typically in the summertime, I'm kind of tied to my desk, which is where I install the latest beta and live in it day after day.
00:18:23 ◼ ► And when I did have a break from testing Mac OS, I would oftentimes take my iPad down to a local coffee shop and just catch up on things.
00:18:34 ◼ ► And I really did find that having the windowing has made a world of difference because it's not just me going to the coffee shop and checking my email and responding to a few people or reading a couple of articles in RSS.
00:18:49 ◼ ► It's now I can go through the RSS and more easily take the URLs and drop them into Notion and then maybe text you about them and then check my email and get a piece of information from there and then do some searches on the web.
00:19:04 ◼ ► And it's just, you know, you could do all those things before, but now with windowing, it's just easier to kind of set up an environment, even on a screen that's not the biggest one available on the iPad and use those and move around those apps in a more productive way than I could before.
00:19:25 ◼ ► And so, yeah, I found myself just loving that and bringing it with me wherever I could to use it as much as possible.
00:19:32 ◼ ► I expect now that we are done with the review season, that's only going to increase for me.
00:19:37 ◼ ► I'm going to be using it a lot more, not just, you know, when I'm out and about, but also just around the house, too.
00:19:42 ◼ ► And for context, aside from the review season, like in your day to day, what computers do you use for working your setup?
00:19:53 ◼ ► Yeah, so I have a Mac Studio, an M1 Mac Studio is my main computer on my desk, and that's where, like, most of my Mac Stories work happens.
00:20:14 ◼ ► So when I'm not in review season, I move between those two quite a bit, and the laptop really is just what allows me to get away from sitting in the same chair.
00:20:33 ◼ ► I've got a Mac Mini that I've been testing from Apple, too, but it's not, like, something that I'm using constantly, the way I am the other ones.
00:20:50 ◼ ► I want to know if you've tried Spotlight and where you think it might fit in your life.
00:20:57 ◼ ► I have tried it, and I think as soon as I have the time, because, so right now, I'm still using, on loan from Apple, an M3 Ultra Mac Studio.
00:21:16 ◼ ► I only have Tahoe on the MacBook Pro because I was waiting for the final release to put it on the Mac Studio, which has been, for the past few months, my main production machine for recording podcasts.
00:21:42 ◼ ► I am here to tell you that there's a problem with the M3 Ultra and getting Tahoe installed on it.
00:21:51 ◼ ► I read on MacRumors, and I can get you the link, that there's a bug that's preventing Tahoe from being installed on the...
00:22:06 ◼ ► I tried Spotlight on the MacBook Pro, and what I love about it, obviously, is the idea of triggering shortcuts from Spotlight, but also not just shortcuts, actions for apps and passing input to those actions.
00:22:24 ◼ ► I have tried, for example, just whenever, when I set it up, I was like, hey, you know what?
00:22:33 ◼ ► I just searched for add link because I knew that was the name of one of the good links actions for adding a link to your read letter queue.
00:23:02 ◼ ► I pasted a link that I had in my clipboard, and instantly it was saved into my good links.
00:23:23 ◼ ► Whenever I wanted to do that in the past and trigger that functionality with a shortcut,
00:23:42 ◼ ► Even if it was only one action, I would have had to create it myself in the first place.
00:23:47 ◼ ► Otherwise, Raycast couldn't have seen it in my, that's how the third party integration with shortcuts works.
00:24:05 ◼ ► And that integration only exposes the actual shortcuts in the user's library, not even the app shortcuts.
00:24:14 ◼ ► Those are things that developers can bake into their apps and are only exposed in the shortcuts app.
00:24:20 ◼ ► They're not exposed to third party developers via the shortcuts CLI, the command line utility.
00:24:34 ◼ ► If you, if you open up the shortcuts app and you scroll to the bottom, you don't have, you don't have the list.
00:24:58 ◼ ► All of the actions that a third party app or a built-in app supports in shortcuts, those can also be actions that you can trigger from Spotlight without manually creating a shortcut for them up front.
00:25:13 ◼ ► So the add link action in this case needs an actual link that you need to save into your GoodLinks app.
00:25:24 ◼ ► You can just tab through it in Spotlight and, which is, by the way, a familiar interaction.
00:25:38 ◼ ► Here's the key difference is that Raycast, it's a simpler integration in that it's loading all of your shortcuts.
00:25:51 ◼ ► With this integration in Spotlight, you're triggering individual actions and you can pass input to specific parameters of the action.
00:26:01 ◼ ► So that is my, and like, I would say like, Michael S. Tahoe, liquid glass, like you wrote in your review, it's kind of there.
00:26:24 ◼ ► As people, I do not understand a lot of the time, and I'm not saying that those opinions are not valid, but I personally, I have limits.
00:26:35 ◼ ► And one of my limits is I struggle to understand when I sometimes think that people get so upset about the most mundane things that I would never get upset about.
00:26:45 ◼ ► And one of those things is people going absolutely crazy this summer over how horrible, terrible, devastating macOS Tahoe looks.
00:26:57 ◼ ► And I look at it, I'm like, yeah, it's got like a floating sidebar and some pill-shaped toolbars.
00:27:17 ◼ ► I would argue that in some respects it's better because those pill-shaped shapes around icons on the toolbar are persistent.
00:27:58 ◼ ► Not only does, you know, it's, I guess it's a poetic justice or something like that, that the Mac finally gets shortcuts automations.
00:28:13 ◼ ► So many of the ones that are in there are ones that you and I have talked about over the years on App Stories when we do our shortcuts wishlist episodes, which have gotten to the point where it's like, yeah, we're not going to do this episode anymore.
00:28:27 ◼ ► Just listen to the last year's because it seemed like none of them were ever going to come true.
00:28:31 ◼ ► But now we did get things like, you know, when you mount or unmount a drive or when you connect a connected display or you drop on or off a Wi-Fi network.
00:28:46 ◼ ► I think the core that people will use are scheduled shortcuts and folder shortcuts, which allow you to, you know, run a shortcut based on a change on the files in a folder, both, which is, which is great.
00:29:06 ◼ ► I think the two things I would mention to you about, about spotlight that you should try are the quick keys, which lets you assign a keyboard combination to a shortcut or to anything, really.
00:29:29 ◼ ► And that was my example in the review, which is that I can just type, you know, I can, I can summon spotlight and then type FP return and it launches the shortcut, which is really nice.
00:29:42 ◼ ► And, uh, and the other thing is, is, you know, how, when you don't really know where something is in a menu on the Mac, you can go into help and you can do search and it'll, it'll show you where it is in the menu system.
00:29:57 ◼ ► So, you know, if you want to print something or you want to like, I don't know, select everything or something specific to a particular app, you can do all of that from spotlight now too.
00:30:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm very jealous of, of the new spotlight and I am also very jealous of the new control center as it relates to customizing your menu bar.
00:30:20 ◼ ► I really hope that both of these features eventually find their way to the iPad, but, but I'll give you one more, John.
00:30:29 ◼ ► I know that this is an unpopular opinion if you're Craig Federighi, but I do think these two devices are going to come.
00:30:39 ◼ ► In the near future, I think all the signs are there, including a rumor as of yesterday, uh, by friend of the show, Ming-Chi Kuo, now a very active user on Twitter or X, the everything app.
00:30:53 ◼ ► Um, yeah, uh, saying that the 2026 OLED MacBook Pro late 2026 is going to have a touch screen.
00:31:05 ◼ ► At this point, if you're Apple and you've been making these two devices, these two platforms for such a long time and people were always telling you, hey, are you making a hybrid laptop?
00:31:26 ◼ ► And then over the past few years, slowly but surely, these two platforms are falling in love with each other.
00:31:34 ◼ ► They're borrowing from each other, they're sharing UI, they're sharing apps, they're sharing window design, now they're sharing window buttons.
00:31:54 ◼ ► You're giving the iPad a menu bar, although it's kind of a baby menu bar, not the real thing.
00:32:04 ◼ ► And now this rumor comes, and obviously in the process, the Mac has learned a whole bunch of tricks from the iPad.
00:32:33 ◼ ► Or do you imagine a scenario where the two things are, despite what was said years ago, are going to merge?
00:32:52 ◼ ► What do you think is harder to do to bring windowing to the iPad or to bring touch to the Mac?
00:33:05 ◼ ► Because you are starting from a much older foundation where, and sure, I mean, Apple has been on a trajectory, you know this, because you've been doing, this was your seventh Mac OS review?
00:33:30 ◼ ► And we've seen Apple progressively refine Mac OS to make touch targets bigger, simplify, you know, make it very similar to how things work on iOS and iPadOS.
00:33:46 ◼ ► But really, the biggest challenge is, it depends if you're thinking that you're making a laptop with a touchscreen, that's a conversation.
00:33:57 ◼ ► It's another conversation if you're thinking that they're making a Mac with a detachable touchscreen.
00:34:07 ◼ ► Because at that point, like the computer, is it inside the keyboard or is it inside the display?
00:34:16 ◼ ► And I'll give you one, one more, John, which is, this company literally just made a phone where the entire computer is in the camera bump.
00:34:32 ◼ ► And with, even if it's a MacBook Pro and requires more than just what could fit around a camera bump,
00:34:41 ◼ ► it's, at this point, it's probably getting to the size where it could fit in the screen.
00:35:43 ◼ ► And just like it no longer made sense for you and I to be writing about the same things twice,
00:35:49 ◼ ► it's probably not, it doesn't make as much sense for Apple to be developing the same things twice.
00:36:02 ◼ ► And if you're a Mac person, you would say, well, I don't want to lose what makes the Mac the Mac.
00:36:41 ◼ ► I want everybody to know about this, because this has been probably the hardest bug I've
00:36:48 ◼ ► While I was using Tahoe over the summer, literally the first or second beta that I tried, I saw
00:36:57 ◼ ► two third-party controls show up in my control center, or at least in the gallery that I could
00:37:04 ◼ ► add to my control center, which were for Music Harbor by Marcus Tanaka and Sequel, which is
00:37:13 ◼ ► It's nice to see, you know, that Marcus and Roman are both like on the ball and they've
00:37:43 ◼ ► I talked to a bunch of people to see if they had been seeing third-party controls and they
00:38:03 ◼ ► And this is like the first few days of September, about two weeks out from the release.
00:38:07 ◼ ► And I started talking to developers then and trying to get a sense for, are these just not
00:38:16 ◼ ► And I found a mixed bag of people who were either not supporting it or who were struggling
00:38:29 ◼ ► And then very shortly before the betas came out, I found a second control, which was for
00:38:39 ◼ ► And I thought, well, it must, because those two were showing up, it must not be broken.
00:38:48 ◼ ► It must just be the developers either aren't supporting it or having difficulty supporting
00:38:52 ◼ ► And so that's what I wrote in my review, essentially, was that, you know, I only was seeing two and
00:39:00 ◼ ► And not long after I put out my review, I heard from one of the developers I had been talking
00:39:05 ◼ ► to on and off for quite a while about this and was told that there was a trick to make them
00:39:16 ◼ ► This trick is fascinating to me because in retrospect, it makes some, it both makes sense, but it's also
00:39:25 ◼ ► something I don't think anybody would necessarily try, which is you had to open, not the control
00:39:34 ◼ ► And when you open the widget gallery, if you go into your desktop and you right click and you, you
00:39:39 ◼ ► know, select edit widgets, it opens the widget gallery and then it will refresh your control
00:39:50 ◼ ► The moment I did it, I had 27 third-party apps with controls because as part of this, trying to
00:40:02 ◼ ► I went and made sure I had the latest beta of every single Mac app that I had, had been shared
00:40:09 ◼ ► And I still didn't see anything even after, you know, restarting and trying a bunch of other
00:40:25 ◼ ► I think what's going on, I think the reason I did see drafts and screen float, which kind
00:40:40 ◼ ► They were all part of a package, whatever, for some reason that seems to make a difference
00:40:45 ◼ ► because that's the only distinction I can think of between drafts, screen float and everything
00:40:52 ◼ ► And, and I guess the explanation here, I mean, it's obviously a bug, but the reason I think
00:40:59 ◼ ► the widget gallery seems to shake loose everything in control center is that they're all built on
00:41:07 ◼ ► There's something going on where, you know, control center is just not refreshing the gallery
00:41:23 ◼ ► I would never have found it if I hadn't talked to, uh, talked to one of these, uh, developers
00:41:28 ◼ ► privately about it, but, uh, now people, a lot of developers are sharing the article online
00:41:38 ◼ ► Cause people, you know, you look in the shit in their, their notes and it says, oh, we've
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00:44:09 ◼ ► I was thinking about this in the context of our friend, Brendan Bigley, who left his day job, you know, like six months ago.
00:44:26 ◼ ► And I know that Brendan, when he was working in Manhattan, would do a lot of what I used to do when I commuted into Chicago, which is that he would work on his phone, which to me is not the ideal place to work.
00:44:41 ◼ ► However, if you're in a commuting situation on a subway or a train or whatever, it actually is incredibly doable.
00:44:49 ◼ ► I mean, I remember back in talking to Brendan about this stuff, I remember back to the early days when I was writing at Mac Stories, you know, 2015, 2016.
00:45:07 ◼ ► I would sit down, grab a seat if I could, and I would just bang out stories on my phone and do research and flip between apps and all that stuff.
00:45:17 ◼ ► And usually I, you know, I could actually, I got to the point where I, if it wasn't a long story, I could kind of bang something out on the train and get it posted like a link post or a very short, very short news post, not like a review or anything.
00:45:45 ◼ ► But it became more of an in-between spaces device, by which I mean, you know, maybe I'm running errands or doing chores and I'm listening to a podcast or some music.
00:45:58 ◼ ► Or I'm waiting in line at the grocery store and I think of something that I want to do when I get home.
00:46:08 ◼ ► Or I read a few articles when I have spare time while I'm eating lunch or I watch a YouTube video, share the link into Good Links or whatever it is.
00:46:18 ◼ ► And it becomes more of an, it's become in that way a very much an in-between places type of device.
00:46:23 ◼ ► Whereas typically I'm instead, if I'm doing work work, I'm usually sitting either at a desk or with a laptop or even my iPad.
00:46:36 ◼ ► The phone is like a supplement to those things as well as just kind of an entertainment device.
00:46:57 ◼ ► And obviously the iPhone at the beginning used to be, and I feel so old saying this, but it used to be this hot new thing.
00:47:15 ◼ ► You know, we were all downloading iBeer and fart apps and stupid stuff from the, it was novel, it was fun.
00:47:33 ◼ ► And so the iPhone not only was like a revolutionary device, but it was also like this big deal and this like new, interesting toy that I would use as a way to think about content I could write.
00:47:59 ◼ ► Do you remember, John, the third-party email clients were not allowed up until a certain point?
00:48:11 ◼ ► You know, things like, I remember when it became a big deal that third-party developers could make a Dropbox-based text editor with Dropbox Sync.
00:48:35 ◼ ► Yeah, there was no way to, there was nowhere to save your text documents, but cloud storage allowed that to happen.
00:48:44 ◼ ► And then of course, you know, life happened and the iPhone became the norm, became normal, became an everyday.
00:49:12 ◼ ► Like I, as you know, I have been working from the iPad for such a long time and I've taken the iPad through its many variations with me over the years.
00:49:22 ◼ ► I worked with an iPad from the hospital, from my car, from the beach, from the beach house, during vacation, at WWDC, in airplane seats, in airport lounges, like in other places.
00:49:41 ◼ ► As a tablet, you know, I love using the iPad Pro as a tablet, you know, when I'm watching a TV show or reading an article or reading a book or watching YouTube videos.
00:49:57 ◼ ► And this is where I think, if I were to consider my relationship with the iPhone, I think it's a pretty normal relationship.
00:50:11 ◼ ► Occasionally, if I want to, I can, you know, type out a quick blog post from my iPhone, which I have done.
00:50:19 ◼ ► I have all my shortcuts, all of my, you know, all of my automations are cross-platform.
00:50:35 ◼ ► But I've noticed one thing that is occurring now that I want to mention and one thing that I think will occur in the future.
00:50:44 ◼ ► The thing that is occurring now is that I have noticed something that I have been doing.
00:50:49 ◼ ► I like to kick off long-running LLM agentic tasks on my iPhone and leave them running on the iPhone while I'm doing something else.
00:51:01 ◼ ► Like, for example, right now, as I'm talking, Claude on my phone is looking at my email inbox.
00:51:10 ◼ ► I just leave it running on the phone while I'm doing something else around the house, for example.
00:51:15 ◼ ► And maybe I'm listening to a podcast also from my iPhone, but the Claude app is running on the phone doing its thing.
00:51:21 ◼ ► So that idea of, like, it's a pocket computer where you can leave AI tasks running in the background, I don't know.
00:51:28 ◼ ► But the future thing, I feel like my relationship with my iPhone will change dramatically next year with the folding one.
00:51:39 ◼ ► I think looking ahead at the future, I think me getting the iPhone Air this year will be an interesting test to see,
00:51:49 ◼ ► Am I going to use a lightweight, thinner iPhone more for tasks like reading articles or watching videos in bed
00:52:10 ◼ ► That will be an interesting evolution, you know, almost going into almost 20 years of iPhone.
00:52:45 ◼ ► I mean, I think there's a lot of cross-pollination that could potentially happen there.
00:52:52 ◼ ► To me, if it has the capabilities of an iPad, I could see myself carrying that in a small foldable keyboard
00:53:05 ◼ ► I mean, I remember vividly probably in 2015 or 2016, sitting in traffic in the back of a cab in Manhattan,
00:53:13 ◼ ► going to some lawyer meeting where I was doing a roundup of iPhone reviews for Mac Stories.
00:53:49 ◼ ► a young, promising lawyer, with your BlackBerry, you know, at some point in the mid-90s or early 2000s.
00:54:03 ◼ ► And so, in those days, I was an iPod Touch user because I still wanted to have the apps.
00:54:17 ◼ ► And as it would pull into a station, I had figured out the Wi-Fi passwords for all the coffee shops and other businesses near the train stops.
00:54:25 ◼ ► And so, I would jump onto the Wi-Fi in the period when people are getting on and off the train to refresh my Instapaper and things like that as I commuted out.
00:55:02 ◼ ► I still think it's like a little tiny miracle that we have this computer in our pockets.
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00:58:22 ◼ ► Oh, I think we can both do something amazing and something just absolutely, absolutely awful at the same time.
00:58:49 ◼ ► They are, they are, because I don't think they're going to do like the docking portable.
00:58:54 ◼ ► I think what Apple, I think what we're going to do as Apple designers is we're going to, we know better, Federico.
00:59:01 ◼ ► We are going to make an Apple TV adjacent box that can, you know, run laps around the PS5 and the Xbox Series X.
00:59:42 ◼ ► And so that you and I can write articles about how the games app on the games is buggy in 2027.
01:00:06 ◼ ► I think we're just going to take the, uh, the Apple TV and we're going to make it a disc instead of a square puck.
01:00:57 ◼ ► It has to be at least one generation older because we're cutting because of supply chain.
01:02:56 ◼ ► It would have a layer on top of Bluetooth that allowed for low latency connections that you
01:03:15 ◼ ► but boy, I hope it has good connection using Apple's, uh, you know, local, local area networking
01:03:22 ◼ ► But, but if we're Apple and we think that we know better than anybody else, I think the
01:03:50 ◼ ► It's shaped, uh, like, uh, do you remember, are you familiar with the original banana prototype
01:04:10 ◼ ► I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Apple were to make the controller, they would use
01:04:21 ◼ ► So that if you wanted to make a game for Apple games, you would need to completely rethink
01:04:43 ◼ ► What if instead of doing buttons with symbols, like, you know, PlayStation has the shapes and
01:04:53 ◼ ► What if they did like symbols and letters, like both of them, like there will be a button
01:05:08 ◼ ► And then, and then, and then there will be, because Apple could say, and now we're making
01:05:18 ◼ ► You're always going to have your action button and your run button and your observer button,
01:05:29 ◼ ► And completely hemming in developers so that they couldn't make the games they want because
01:05:33 ◼ ► they always have to have the shoot button would always have to be the one on the top and
01:05:39 ◼ ► And I think they'll, well, we're going to, we're going to design a series of SF symbols
01:05:44 ◼ ► where it's just like a little, a little person, a little person jumping and another one with
01:05:49 ◼ ► like a little ray gun shooting and another one, you know, even we can put them on the sticks.
01:06:49 ◼ ► I heard, I, I, I know I'm skipping ahead to software, but what if you shook the controller
01:07:25 ◼ ► The, the, the, the home view of, of this, of Apple games is a home screen where you have
01:07:32 ◼ ► the icons for your games, but also the widgets for the games and the widgets are, they show
01:07:43 ◼ ► I was going to ask you if the, if the widgets were playable games themselves, but I like the
01:08:01 ◼ ► the Apple TV and we're going to ask developers to make all of their games available in the
01:08:44 ◼ ► Um, I think we just have to have, you know, just a bunch of soldered on storage basically.
01:09:19 ◼ ► And it's also, so ethernet is more expensive and it's also on the one terabyte model only.
01:10:02 ◼ ► Maybe we, maybe we rethink the games app and make, and make it difficult to find people's
01:10:09 ◼ ► games if they don't, if they don't play ball and, and they're like very, they're like very,
01:10:53 ◼ ► Um, however, uh, there's like a two 56 gigabyte default option and a one terabyte model option
01:11:26 ◼ ► These buttons have both symbols and text labels on them and they're based on SF symbols and
01:11:37 ◼ ► Um, this controller is low latency and it can be paired to other Apple devices and it comes
01:11:43 ◼ ► with a unique feature called shake to quit, which allows you to quit the game just by shaking
01:12:02 ◼ ► And if you don't have an iCloud account, you cannot save your progress with Apple games.
01:12:07 ◼ ► Um, and the final thing we said is that standalone games are available outside of the games app,
01:12:37 ◼ ► Uh, the handheld, um, I have fewer ideas for a handheld because I keep thinking about an iPhone in a
01:12:49 ◼ ► They're going to do, they're going to do the, the home console because they have the iPhone.
01:13:05 ◼ ► You know, I, and maybe here's the subscription idea for you for our console box is that of
01:13:39 ◼ ► I think that the controller is the place where if anything goes sideways badly, it'll be
01:14:00 ◼ ► First of all, I want to thank our sponsors this week, open case, Squarespace and FitBot.
01:14:10 ◼ ► Essentially, you're going to find all of the Mac stories links that we want you to click
01:14:39 ◼ ► You can find me and John on Mac stories.net writing, reviewing operating systems, doing all
01:14:48 ◼ ► the things we do, you know, running Mac stories deals, you know, doing, making shortcuts, making
01:15:00 ◼ ► in Memphis, and you can, you will be able to watch them, track them down, you can track
01:15:04 ◼ ► and down, and you will be able to see them live for the seventh podcast-a-thon, is that
01:15:30 ◼ ► So that is a, tomorrow, you know, receive your new iPhone, put on your new AirPods Pro 3 and
01:15:39 ◼ ► If you've got an iPhone Air, you will not be able to watch it for 12 hours because your