00:00:00 ◼ ► you have a safe in your house? If you do, what do you keep in it? I'm gonna say something that is
00:00:06 ◼ ► probably could come back to regret. We do have a safe, and last I checked, it is not locked.
00:00:13 ◼ ► That's the problem with having a safe. We have two. One of them is locked, and the other one,
00:00:20 ◼ ► yeah, but the other one is the one that we've been using for years. We got—oh, it's a long story,
00:00:24 ◼ ► I'm not even gonna go into it, but yeah, that's the problem with having a safe is, like, when you
00:00:27 ◼ ► want to get into it, you don't want to have to go through all the trouble unlocking it, so you just
00:00:30 ◼ ► leave it unlocked. It seems like such a good idea when you become a responsible adult to keep things
00:00:36 ◼ ► like passports and—because, you know, I don't use my—I'm not James Bond, I don't use my passport
00:00:42 ◼ ► very often. Keep that in there and, you know, other, you know, truly, truly, inarguably important
00:00:48 ◼ ► papers. But, you know, and then it turns out you do take your passports in and out, you know, and
00:00:54 ◼ ► you need them sometimes, and, you know, maybe it's easier to just have a very heavy box.
00:01:07 ◼ ► Yeah, but anyway, this Trump thing is fascinating to me. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it,
00:01:14 ◼ ► but it is—in some ways, it is the most bananas Trump story of all time, which is something,
00:01:21 ◼ ► right? I mean, because that's, you know, we're talking about a man who's—that's his middle
00:01:25 ◼ ► name is—you're not going to believe this. But basically, I don't know, what do you think is
00:01:35 ◼ ► He's the kind of—I mean, he is definitely the kind of guy, though, that goes to a hotel and
00:01:38 ◼ ► scoops up all the towels as he leaves, right? I think it could be just as simple as that.
00:01:49 ◼ ► grandize himself. Or hoard it, you know? Like, because you remember—and I think the New York
00:01:55 ◼ ► Times included it in their story, one of their, you know, numerous stories this week. But Maggie
00:02:00 ◼ ► Haberman, who's been on the Trump beat for the Times since 2015, when he first started running,
00:02:06 ◼ ► one of the reasons she got the job as the Times' lead Trump reporter on the campaign trail was that
00:02:15 ◼ ► she'd been following him, like, I think she was at the New York Post and a couple other New York
00:02:19 ◼ ► papers. She went from being a New York reporter who covered Trump to being a national reporter
00:02:25 ◼ ► when he became a national figure. And so she knows what she's talking about, but like she said—and
00:02:29 ◼ ► you've seen pictures of his Trump Tower, Fifth Avenue office. It's not quite like that TV show
00:02:34 ◼ ► Hoarders, but it was cluttered with memorabilia. He kept things. Apparently, one of his prized
00:02:46 ◼ ► report as, you know, it was so cluttered with memorabilia that it was kind of difficult to walk
00:02:51 ◼ ► around, you know, to sit in front of him. I think that the answer is kind of simple in that he's a
00:02:57 ◼ ► lunatic. He is—he's a crazy person, and that's what some of us have been saying all along, right?
00:03:06 ◼ ► It's not, "Oh, I have liberal politics, and he's going to institute conservative politics,
00:03:12 ◼ ► and therefore you say things like, "Oh, he's a lunatic." Like George W. Bush was not a lunatic.
00:03:18 ◼ ► Definitely not. Dick Cheney, not a lunatic. I mean, it—wrong, I think. I disagree on certain things.
00:03:26 ◼ ► I think in hindsight they were clearly wrong on like the Iraq War, but I think it was in some more
00:03:36 ◼ ► interests. You know, they're not lunatics. Wrong, warmongering, possibly you could just say—you
00:03:43 ◼ ► could even say bad people, you know, that their intentions were immoral, but not lunatics. Trump,
00:03:51 ◼ ► I think, that's the whole problem is the man is a lunatic. And I think that the people who like him
00:03:59 ◼ ► or who just hate the liberals, you know, that want to own the libs, and they just so dislike
00:04:05 ◼ ► liberals and they're so into the Fox mindset that the only thing that really matters is owning U.S.
00:04:10 ◼ ► liberals, that if the guy is sticking it to the liberals, he's their guy. And that's it. And they
00:04:16 ◼ ► sort of have a mindset when people say, "Listen, this man, look at what he's doing. He's a lunatic."
00:04:20 ◼ ► They think something like this. Nobody likes a lunatic. Nobody would vote for a lunatic to
00:04:29 ◼ ► lead a country. We like this guy, and we'd like him to lead the country, therefore he's not a
00:04:35 ◼ ► lunatic. He can't be. He's a very stable genius. And you just can't understand his level of genius.
00:04:42 ◼ ► He's playing 12-dimensional chess. I don't know the names. It's the same way that I don't know
00:04:46 ◼ ► the names of the rules of grammar, but, you know, like when you take Philosophy 101 in college,
00:04:51 ◼ ► there's a name for that fallacy, you know, like that five-step—there's some kind of name for it,
00:04:56 ◼ ► and it's, you know, but there's a big hole in the logic, which might be that your entire premise that
00:05:03 ◼ ► no one would support a lunatic for president is wrong, right? And if you look back at a lot of
00:05:09 ◼ ► historical figures who are universally deemed as being madmen lunatics, they had popular support.
00:05:18 ◼ ► Yeah. Well, and Boebert's another one, right? I mean, Boebert's another—a person who is
00:05:22 ◼ ► absolutely off the deep end, who, you know, her supporters think, "Oh no, she's great. She's,
00:05:27 ◼ ► you know, she's getting in there and she's making changes." No, she's just like flailing around like
00:05:42 ◼ ► to the nation's holiest of holy top secret nuclear secrets. But somehow I think in his lunatic mind
00:05:51 ◼ ► that over the years there were some of these things that came to his desk, and then he was like,
00:05:55 ◼ ► "I'd like to take this up to the residence," and they're like, "Well, sir, you know, actually the
00:05:59 ◼ ► stuff in these red folders we really should just keep here in the Oval Office." And who knows?
00:06:03 ◼ ► Maybe they don't even show them those in the Oval. Maybe those are, you know, they're talking about
00:06:07 ◼ ► some of these things that you're only supposed to even have eyes on them in a "secure facility."
00:06:12 ◼ ► I presume the Oval Office counts as a secure facility, but maybe they only look at those
00:06:17 ◼ ► down in that room in the basement of the White House, you know, with the Situation Room. But
00:06:27 ◼ ► classified stuff, and I guess you have the right to take it up to the residence. And I think he just
00:06:31 ◼ ► stuffed it in a sock drawer. It is seemingly universally agreed that one of the things he had
00:06:37 ◼ ► was the letters, handwritten letters he got from Kim Jong-un. I think he just, I don't think he
00:06:43 ◼ ► wants to sell it. I think he wants, he just wants to have it. It's a crazy mine. And he's like,
00:06:48 ◼ ► "Nuclear code." And I know it would be juicy and awful. I hope it's, I actually hope it's not true.
00:06:53 ◼ ► I hope it's just crazy and just hoarded the stuff even though it's illegal. I hope he gets in all
00:06:57 ◼ ► sorts of legal trouble for it. I don't want to believe that he was hoping to hand it over to
00:07:03 ◼ ► the Saudis or something like that, but I also would not be shocked, right? Would you have to
00:07:16 ◼ ► But I also think that to go that path, you have to attribute to him more thought than I think goes
00:07:23 ◼ ► into it. I think he's just a crazy person and he's like, "This is so cool, right? I've got like,
00:07:28 ◼ ► I've got like this, the greatest secret documents about our nuclear system, something, something.
00:07:35 ◼ ► That's mine. That's mine now. And that's it." It's the converse of him taking stuff into the
00:07:43 ◼ ► toilet and flushing it down, right? It's like, "I don't know what this is, but it looks bad.
00:07:53 ◼ ► Yeah, I was like, "Those are real?" Who sent those? The cleaning crew? Is that how they got those?
00:08:03 ◼ ► I guess, but that, you know, she reported this months ago. And it's, you know, it's a—to get
00:08:10 ◼ ► a little serious here, a little bit serious, as the Trump thing ended, to get it put our media
00:08:16 ◼ ► critic hats on, there's a repeated criticism both of reporters, like from the Post, the Washington
00:08:23 ◼ ► Post and New York Times, who have books coming out about Trump or have had them come out.
00:08:34 ◼ ► same side of the fence, who have books coming out or had books coming out. The argument of,
00:08:39 ◼ ► "Why didn't you say these things at the moment if you were so concerned about his damaging the state
00:08:47 ◼ ► of the country and the world, as opposed to waiting until you got a book deal and then the
00:08:52 ◼ ► stuff comes out two years later?" And, you know, I don't know what to say about that because I can
00:08:58 ◼ ► imagine, you know, wanting it. I'm not sure. Honestly, I'm not that sure how much difference
00:09:03 ◼ ► it would have made, particularly towards the end when they controlled both houses. I mean,
00:09:09 ◼ ► they weren't going to—they controlled the Senate. I mean, they would have blocked anything
00:09:12 ◼ ► that happened. So, you know, the guy already got impeached and nothing happened. So, what else
00:09:22 ◼ ► Right. And you can argue that the Ukraine impeachment, which again looks a lot worse now
00:09:28 ◼ ► than when it happened, but in the way that you couldn't—if you scripted all of this the last
00:09:36 ◼ ► seven years as a TV series, you just—it would have to be done like Dr. Strangelove style as a farce
00:09:50 ◼ ► Because of—just everything comes back and it's like, well, this isn't realistic at all,
00:09:56 ◼ ► that the country—of all the countries in the world, the one that the lunatic president tried to
00:10:03 ◼ ► blackmail into digging up dirt on his political opponent before he gave them military aid that
00:10:12 ◼ ► everybody agreed we needed to give them would, as soon as the guy was out of office, get invaded
00:10:19 ◼ ► by Russia. Which was exactly the scenario that had everybody agreeing, you know, we need to supply
00:10:27 ◼ ► the Ukraine with some aid because, you know, this other guy Putin is also a lunatic and it seems
00:10:38 ◼ ► Yeah, there was somebody posted something from The Onion. I mean, of course, you know, like,
00:10:43 ◼ ► you keep finding things from The Onion that approved—that have come true, but it was something
00:10:49 ◼ ► about the hat-check person or the coat-check person at Mar-a-Lago wondering if anyone's
00:10:53 ◼ ► going to come and collect this briefcase full of nuclear goods. So I kind of agree, though,
00:11:04 ◼ ► that whatever you want to say about the Ukraine impeachment, it was maybe borderline. I really
00:11:09 ◼ ► do think it was an impeachable offense because I really think that trying to get political dirt is
00:11:16 ◼ ► truly impeachable. I do. But after the insurrection, the fact that they still didn't impeach him right
00:11:25 ◼ ► on the spot— Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, that's it. We're sending those articles over again
00:11:30 ◼ ► because we're voting yes now. If they didn't impeach him then, then I agree that somebody
00:11:35 ◼ ► like Defense Secretary Mark Esper piping up right on the spot to say, "I just got fired and I need
00:11:43 ◼ ► to tell you this man is a lunatic and he's trying to—he's really, it seems to me like he's trying
00:11:50 ◼ ► to start a trumped-up war, no pun intended, against Iran in the hopes that it'll make the country
00:11:57 ◼ ► distract." And I don't think—how is that going to have more of an effect? So I kind of feel like,
00:12:04 ◼ ► yeah, you probably should have done that, really, like, just in case it would have made a difference,
00:12:09 ◼ ► but holding it for your book probably isn't that big a deal. But anyway, Maggie Habermann reported
00:12:14 ◼ ► months ago because somebody else sort of got the story too and she had it so she put it out—her
00:12:18 ◼ ► book isn't out yet—that Trump—everybody knows this by now—that Trump had a habit of ripping up
00:12:30 ◼ ► Not at all, yeah, really, boy. And then somebody else got more on this story last week and so
00:12:37 ◼ ► Maggie Habermann released another report before her book, but with pictures she had obtained,
00:12:42 ◼ ► which again, like you said, immediately I think, "Holy crap, somebody has pictures." And then you
00:12:47 ◼ ► can zoom in. It certainly looks like his handwriting. That's the Sharpie, the all caps,
00:12:54 ◼ ► does look like his handwriting. I mean, if I work there, you know, I mean, I don't know what the
00:12:59 ◼ ► security's like. I guess you could take—can you take your phone in? I guess. Well, I guess we now
00:13:03 ◼ ► know you can't? I don't know. That was a good—that's always been a question to me. What, you know,
00:13:08 ◼ ► do you—if you're like a butler, you know, in the White House, do you get to carry your cell phone
00:13:13 ◼ ► around? It's—I don't know. I just don't know. But somebody had pictures and, you know, she's
00:13:19 ◼ ► obviously staking her reporting reputation, you know, that these are real and that somebody took
00:13:25 ◼ ► pictures of ripped up paper. And I will say for anybody out there who isn't aware of this, hasn't
00:13:30 ◼ ► googled it, hasn't seen the pictures, I will assuage any worries in your mind. The pictures
00:13:35 ◼ ► do seem to be clear toilet water. Yes, yeah. It looks like he was just flushing paper down.
00:13:43 ◼ ► Yes, not like he was doing his business. Boy, if you like—if you really wanted to make sure it
00:13:49 ◼ ► went, no one was going to get it. Right. Yeah, you should have mixed it all together. Yeah.
00:13:56 ◼ ► A little bit of number one, a little bit of number two, and a little—just the whole thing. A little
00:14:07 ◼ ► What do you think he has—the list that came from the FBI was kind of funny, because there's
00:14:18 ◼ ► all this serious stuff where it's like this stuff was labeled, you know, whatever the codes are for
00:14:24 ◼ ► the holiest of holies, top secret stuff. Some of the stuff was just regular top secret. Some of it
00:14:28 ◼ ► was just confidential, but all boxes of stuff. Other things, seemingly for whatever reason,
00:14:34 ◼ ► you know, it leads your imagine—you know, let your imagination run wild. They're just like box
00:14:55 ◼ ► this is something that I read on Twitter, so I don't—who knows if it's how true it is, but
00:15:00 ◼ ► that guy, Jack Przobek—I can't, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name—but he somehow got
00:15:06 ◼ ► these hacked emails that were macrons and gave them to the Trump people. And then like the next
00:15:16 ◼ ► day or, you know, shortly thereafter was allowed into the White House press. Well, oh man. See,
00:15:22 ◼ ► yeah, now I didn't know that. Now it makes a little bit more sense, and it also makes sense
00:15:26 ◼ ► why he would consider that a souvenir. Yeah, right. I mean, you know, and I would think that,
00:15:33 ◼ ► like any mob boss, he wants leverage. But it's like his imaginary leverage, right? And the other
00:15:41 ◼ ► thing too I always come back to is—and I know that he, bizarrely, and again, you can't make this up,
00:15:47 ◼ ► before he got into politics, he was a well-known occasional figure in pro wrestling, which you
00:15:55 ◼ ► really can't make up, but I've always thought that professional wrestling really does explain Trump's
00:16:01 ◼ ► view of how the world works. It's not quite fake, but it's also just, you just say what you want to
00:16:10 ◼ ► happen and then that happens. If the plot line is that the other guy wins the title because the ref
00:16:17 ◼ ► got distracted and looked the other way and our hero got hit over the head and lost his championship
00:16:24 ◼ ► belt, that's Trump losing his presidency. The hero who lost his belt can just sort of stamp his feet
00:16:30 ◼ ► and get the crowd behind him and then steal the belt back and now he's the champion again, right?
00:16:37 ◼ ► He thinks everything works that way. You just say what you want to happen and it happens and
00:16:41 ◼ ► nothing is really based on actual cause and effect. It's like he thinks you can screen write the whole
00:16:49 ◼ ► world, which is sort of how pro wrestling works, and that's why people like to watch it. Most
00:16:53 ◼ ► people understand that that's fiction. I'm trying to remember that magazine. I used to subscribe to
00:17:00 ◼ ► this years ago. I ran through the late 80s into the early 90s, I think, and they went after Trump
00:17:06 ◼ ► a lot. It was a funny, funny magazine. Oh, it was Graydon Carter's thing. I can't believe I
00:17:11 ◼ ► forgot it either. Yeah, but anyway, somebody posted a clip from that from 1989 and it was Trump
00:17:19 ◼ ► saying something about, even back then, saying that he should be the one to negotiate some sort
00:17:26 ◼ ► of nuclear treaty. Yeah, like the START treaty. The S-P-A-R-T, yeah, nuclear treaty. Because
00:17:41 ◼ ► Oh, now I gotta find Spy Magazine. Spy Magazine, yeah. Yeah. That was because I kept thinking
00:18:03 ◼ ► In these boxes. Oh man, what a bananas story. And it's just sitting there. I like it. I like too,
00:18:12 ◼ ► when he announced the raid, that he snuck into his statement, "My beautiful home." "My beautiful
00:18:17 ◼ ► Mar-a-Lago." Like they've sullied it. Like the FBI came in and shit all over the carpets.
00:18:32 ◼ ► ... And again, we've gotten these books from defense secretaries and off-the-record comments
00:18:39 ◼ ► from Joints Chief of Staff and these perspectives at the highest levels. But I really do think
00:18:45 ◼ ► probably the best stories come from the actual working class people. Like whoever took those
00:18:50 ◼ ► photos of the ripped up stuff in the toilets in the White House. The staff. Oh yeah, those are
00:18:55 ◼ ► the people who should be writing books. Yeah, just like you said, the doorman at Mar-a-Lago.
00:19:01 ◼ ► You just know that he's seen some stuff. Like some real stuff. He's probably got leverage on that guy,
00:19:09 ◼ ► too. Oh man. Also, I don't even want to tell you, I'd even give the money to the Trumps. I would pay
00:19:16 ◼ ► the money to the Trump Media Corporation to get a tape recording and listen to it of Eric Trump
00:19:24 ◼ ► calling his father to tell him that 40 FBI agents have showed up at a warrant and are going,
00:19:32 ◼ ► getting everything they want out of Mar-a-Lago. Is that how it happened? Is that what happened?
00:19:37 ◼ ► Yeah, it was Eric. Because he wasn't there. I knew that. Right. He wasn't there. He was
00:19:40 ◼ ► up in Bedminster, I guess. You know, because the weather's miserable in August in Palm Beach.
00:19:46 ◼ ► Nobody his age is still in Florida. Yeah, but it did come out that they strategically planned
00:19:52 ◼ ► the raid for when he wasn't there. And I think the fact that it was a Monday, you know, because they
00:19:57 ◼ ► knew the place was mostly closed or whatever. But yes, it was reported as fact that it was somehow,
00:20:02 ◼ ► I don't think Eric was there per se. I don't know, you know. But he heard first. Right. The first
00:20:07 ◼ ► person, you know, somebody there realized, well, we better call the boss. And the first person they
00:20:12 ◼ ► got a hold of was Eric, who I guess was at work somewhere in the vast Trump organization. And it
00:20:21 ◼ ► was Eric Trump who called his father to let him know. And I would just love, oh, God, I would pay
00:20:26 ◼ ► so much money. I would just make it my ringtone. Every time my phone rings, I would turn the ringer
00:20:34 ◼ ► switch up so I could hear it. Dad! Dad! Dad! It's me. And then he says, "Who?" Anyway, let me tell
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00:24:11 ◼ ► What we talked about wasn't real world. Well, I don't know. Sometimes it doesn't seem like it.
00:24:20 ◼ ► Lunatic former president who still has support of his party, who's acting like he's going to
00:24:25 ◼ ► run again, has stashed the nation's nuclear secrets in a basement at a resort. Or do you
00:24:35 ◼ ► want to talk about system preferences and Matt hoods? I'm not sure what the bigger mess is.
00:24:59 ◼ ► And then August is like, Hey crap, this stuff's supposed to ship soon. Let's get real about it.
00:25:04 ◼ ► Right? Because here we are middle of August. I'm guessing just on history, ever since Apple moved
00:25:17 ◼ ► a lot of people even who listen to the show may not even remember the days, the first like what,
00:25:21 ◼ ► four years when iPhones came out in like June, but ever since they moved it to September,
00:25:28 ◼ ► it's been like the first or second week of September, they did this, they kept that schedule
00:25:33 ◼ ► during COVID when everything was remote. So I don't think it's very hard to predict that
00:25:38 ◼ ► they're probably going to have the iPhone event on Wednesday, September 7th, or Tuesday,
00:25:46 ◼ ► September 13th. Now I follow this stuff because I try to look at the flights, I figure I'm going out
00:25:52 ◼ ► there. But the reason I say Wednesday is that if it's that week, the Monday is Labor Day. And
00:25:59 ◼ ► traditionally, I don't think Apple's ever held an event. They like to hold them on Tuesdays,
00:26:02 ◼ ► generally, for whatever reason, that's their PR scheme. But they won't hold it on a Tuesday,
00:26:08 ◼ ► if the day before is like a holiday like Labor Day. I don't know if that's for their benefit,
00:26:17 ◼ ► travel on a holiday or combination of everything. A friend of the show, Renee Ritchie, reminded me
00:26:23 ◼ ► that probably in the old days before it was at their own facilities, it was probably a union
00:26:27 ◼ ► thing too, right? Like if you're holding the event at like a union facility, you can't tell those
00:26:32 ◼ ► guys to come in on a Monday. The other thing they will do if you look historically, I think they
00:26:45 ◼ ► That event was on a weird schedule because it was the first one to move to the fall, but at least
00:26:57 ◼ ► since 2012, it's early September. But they also won't hold it on a Tuesday if the Tuesday is
00:27:02 ◼ ► September 11th. And again, nobody at Apple PR has ever told me why. I think for our lifetimes,
00:27:20 ◼ ► That's coming up. That's like, you know, what, three, four weeks from now. So iPhone's getting
00:27:24 ◼ ► real. Our friend, everybody's friend, I mean this sincerely, the undisputed king of Apple
00:27:29 ◼ ► rumor reporters, Mark Gurman has reported recently that iPad OS, what number are we at? 16.
00:27:37 ◼ ► 16. Will not debut alongside iOS 16 in September, but they're going to push that back to October
00:27:44 ◼ ► when the Mac, yearly Mac OS updates typically shipped. I think the reason why for anybody who's
00:27:50 ◼ ► been using the betas over the summer is it's pretty clear, a little bit behind. But anyway,
00:27:55 ◼ ► that stuff's all getting real and we could talk about all of it. Which one do you want to talk
00:27:59 ◼ ► about first? You want to talk about the Mac? I guess that's what we let off with, so probably
00:28:07 ◼ ► ought to. So I'll say this, I'll start with this. I think overall, as this year's annual updates
00:28:15 ◼ ► have settled in, I kind of feel like it's a relatively thin year. Like I don't, and I don't
00:28:23 ◼ ► mean this as a complaint. I think some people really wish that every year Apple could just blow
00:28:27 ◼ ► our minds away with major new tent pole features on every platform or some kind of major new feature
00:28:34 ◼ ► that's on all the platforms. That's just not how stuff works. Sometimes you need incremental years,
00:28:44 ◼ ► I, the only beta that I have installed is, and it is in particular because it looks the most
00:28:50 ◼ ► different, is iOS. And I think, I mean, I think at least, I mean, it's not just cosmetically, but
00:28:57 ◼ ► like the lock screen makes a big difference because obviously that's something that you
00:29:00 ◼ ► interact with every time you open your phone. So that one seems to me a little big anyway.
00:29:06 ◼ ► Yeah. And then of course the center, nope, center stage is not the right word, stage manager. I will
00:29:12 ◼ ► never get this dual use of stage. Again, it's just like you with spy and secret. It's all filed under
00:29:27 ◼ ► You know, doing it, I'm doing it again, but for a while I kept saying the name of that.
00:29:32 ◼ ► Yeah. So I, we can knock the Mac out of the way first because the, the two big changes on the Mac
00:29:41 ◼ ► that, that spring to mind is system preferences is now system settings. And it's more than just
00:29:48 ◼ ► a name change, which is good. I think that they held off on renaming preferences to settings
00:29:55 ◼ ► when they redid the interface, you know, it, it, it feels fair, looked shaky right from the initial
00:30:03 ◼ ► beta at WWDC and meant enough to me that I actually brought it up on stage with Jaws and
00:30:10 ◼ ► Craig Federighi at my live show two days after, you know, it debuted. And I, I still, it's probably
00:30:18 ◼ ► one of my favorite segments of that whole show. Cause I thought it was, I thought Craig Federighi's
00:30:23 ◼ ► response was really interesting. I don't think, I still don't think I agree with him, but I thought
00:30:30 ◼ ► it was as good, like, what do you, you know, I don't think I quite asked it like this, but one,
00:30:45 ◼ ► and anybody who didn't watch that segment of the show, I I'll, I'll make a note to myself. I'll
00:30:50 ◼ ► put a link and I'll put a link that jumps right to that segment of, of the show. But he had a
00:30:57 ◼ ► good explanation, which I, again, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but that it's more than
00:31:02 ◼ ► just, Hey, this is what settings looks like on iOS. iOS is the one with a billion users or over
00:31:10 ◼ ► a billion users and the Mac should seem more familiar to them. So let's make the Mac settings
00:31:18 ◼ ► look as much like iOS as possible. That's a factor. He admitted, you know, familiarity is
00:31:22 ◼ ► something in mind, but that basically they thought system settings had grown from 20 years ago when
00:31:30 ◼ ► Mac OS 10 debuted to the point where it was much more simple back then. And now some of the panels
00:31:36 ◼ ► in the modern system preferences have views within views and sometimes views within views,
00:31:43 ◼ ► within the views. Right. Yeah. Right. And then some of them, I never know exactly how to get out of.
00:31:48 ◼ ► Yeah. You know, and, and a lot of times I think anybody listening who's ever done anything with
00:32:00 ◼ ► and then there's accessibility in there. And that was my initial reaction when seeing that they had
00:32:06 ◼ ► basically scrapped the whole thing and pulled over the settings from iOS was that, well,
00:32:11 ◼ ► I always had trouble in there. Like I always had trouble finding things even when I went and when
00:32:16 ◼ ► I organized the icons alphabetically. I, you know, don't always remember exactly what one thing is
00:32:23 ◼ ► called. And then, then I'm still searching through this long list of things, looking for the
00:32:27 ◼ ► particular icon that makes me go, Oh, it's that one. Or, and then, you know, and then over time
00:32:33 ◼ ► they'd change the icons a little bit. And so, you know, that doesn't help that much anyway. And so
00:32:39 ◼ ► every time I go in there, I feel like I'm, I spend a solid 15 seconds at least, which doesn't seem
00:32:45 ◼ ► that long when you say it like that, but seems like a long time when you're just looking for a
00:32:49 ◼ ► freaking icon, trying to find the thing that I'm looking for. And so I was like, well, you know,
00:32:55 ◼ ► maybe this would be for the better and it doesn't seem like maybe that panned out. One of the things
00:33:02 ◼ ► I've been slow to learn doing the gig that I do, you know, is I, when you have a good tip,
00:33:10 ◼ ► you can't repeat it often enough to the audience. And I think like, Oh, I told people about that
00:33:17 ◼ ► a while ago. I shouldn't tell them again. Cause every time I have like one of my favorite tips
00:33:22 ◼ ► for iOS or macOS and I'm like, ah, you know what? I'll tell people again, even though I know it
00:33:27 ◼ ► brought this up before I get all sorts of emails from people saying, Oh my God, that's the most
00:33:31 ◼ ► amazing tip I've ever gotten. So let me tell everybody my favorite tip about system preferences.
00:33:39 ◼ ► Right. Just in time for it to go away, which is that in system preferences, you open it up,
00:33:45 ◼ ► you go up there to the menu bar and go to view. And the second little section there is, or it,
00:33:51 ◼ ► yours is probably says organized by categories. And then you go one item down, it says organized
00:33:57 ◼ ► alphabetically. Right. And it just read number. It just reorders all the preferences and it does
00:34:02 ◼ ► away with the two with three groups. Yep. You know, you tell people this and they're like, what?
00:34:17 ◼ ► Well, I do think I don't want to get off on a sidetrack about it, but I do think that it,
00:34:22 ◼ ► it, it speaks to the fact that the menu bar has been sort of forgotten. I was going to say
00:34:31 ◼ ► devalued. It de-emphasized is a lack of, is maybe the best way I can put it. It, it, to me,
00:34:38 ◼ ► defines the Mac interface. It is the one it's one thing that is absolutely unchanged since 1984,
00:34:55 ◼ ► edit. You know, that some of these menus have been the same for close to 40 years. And as an,
00:35:03 ◼ ► and windows copied it mostly, you know, the big difference is that they put the menu bar in the
00:35:10 ◼ ► windows instead of at the top of the screen. And it, you know, it fits the metaphor, the
00:35:15 ◼ ► windowing metaphor of windows versus Mac, where the app is a window as opposed to just having
00:35:27 ◼ ► complex software and, or, or even simple software, right? Like text edit, which is a great app,
00:35:34 ◼ ► right? It, and it is sort of a canonical example of like, if you wanted to introduce somebody who'd
00:35:40 ◼ ► never used the Mac to the basics of the Mac, just have them explore text edit to sort of get a feel
00:35:47 ◼ ► for how a Mac app should work and look like and be organized and do something that everybody can
00:35:53 ◼ ► understand. It's just a way to make text documents with simple styles. But for complex apps, like,
00:35:58 ◼ ► you know, professional apps like Photoshop and BB edit and Xcode, right? The final cut,
00:36:06 ◼ ► some of the most complex apps, apps that you actually can pay hundreds of dollars to take
00:36:11 ◼ ► courses to learn because they're so complex and do so much organize everything through the menu bar
00:36:18 ◼ ► that, you know, and you can put much used features and toolbars and expose them in other ways,
00:36:23 ◼ ► but that everything you can do is somewhere in the menu bar and it's organized, you know,
00:36:29 ◼ ► the way like a library is organized in sensible ways, you know, like, oh, if it has something to
00:36:34 ◼ ► do with saving or opening, it's in the file menu, right? And, you know, the view, like,
00:36:40 ◼ ► changing which things are on screen, go to the view menu. It's so great. But I feel like overall,
00:36:45 ◼ ► the trend has been towards putting things in the window and toolbars and that people just have sort
00:36:52 ◼ ► of gotten out of the habit of poking around the menu bars. Right? I don't know. But anyway.
00:37:04 ◼ ► Right. And I think, yeah, and I think that trend started in the early, before the iPhone. I think
00:37:10 ◼ ► the whole Mac OS X era sort of shifted towards putting more stuff in toolbars, you know, and
00:37:16 ◼ ► the Mac toolbars of that early Cocoa era were great, you know, and they had cool things like,
00:37:22 ◼ ► and they still do, that you can customize them and reorder the way that the things work. But they
00:37:27 ◼ ► sort of shifted to, you know, and I think it probably is friendlier, you know, and I think
00:37:32 ◼ ► it's a better way to expose the most used features to the most typical use cases. But I think it's,
00:37:40 ◼ ► you know, I definitely think the mobile era of not having menu bars has accelerated it.
00:37:55 ◼ ► And I don't, I hate the ribbon. I absolutely hate the ribbon. Every time I bring it up and
00:37:59 ◼ ► think about it, you know, I mean, I consider it sort of a usability nightmare because every time
00:38:03 ◼ ► I go in, I never find like, oh, all the things on the ribbon are nothing that I want. They're never
00:38:07 ◼ ► the thing that I'm looking for. And, but every time I bring it up, people say, oh no, you just
00:38:14 ◼ ► It, the ribbon versus Cocoa toolbars is a good direct comparison though of the philosophical
00:38:23 ◼ ► differences between the companies, right? So, so Apple's Cocoa toolbars only had room for,
00:38:38 ◼ ► I guess you could cram more in there, but for the most part, and by default, like with default
00:38:42 ◼ ► toolbar settings, you know, maybe fewer than 10 buttons up there. Whereas the ribbon was like,
00:38:50 ◼ ► how much stuff can we fit in here? Including making some of the controls like L-shaped,
00:38:56 ◼ ► you know, like they're like Tetris pieces so that they can get more stuff in there, which again,
00:39:04 ◼ ► it's not to my liking, it's not to my taste, but I get how some, that's why some people love Windows
00:39:10 ◼ ► and love Microsoft's philosophy of sort of maximalist interface, right? Like put as much
00:39:17 ◼ ► in there as possible. Anyway, that's my tip of the day, go to the view, organize alphabetically.
00:39:24 ◼ ► And, and as I said, I've, I've tried it that way too, and it doesn't seem to improve it for me.
00:39:36 ◼ ► I think that's what I use mostly on iOS. So I think I'm just going to end up doing that much
00:39:48 ◼ ► a traditional Mac app system preferences or looks a lot more like iOS with this new system settings
00:39:55 ◼ ► and macOS 13 Ventura, Ventura, Ventura. We were saying it on the rebound slightly more Ventura,
00:40:10 ◼ ► Yeah. I was saying, cause it was Jesse, the body venture, speaking of pro wrestlers who
00:40:15 ◼ ► turned into politicians. Can you believe, you know, tell me him becoming the governor of Minnesota
00:40:37 ◼ ► governor of California. Christ. I would have, I was surely the best Republican governor I can
00:40:42 ◼ ► think of. Oh, he was great. I mean, I'm not saying I agreed with everything and you know,
00:40:46 ◼ ► well, it's a real shame you could, cause I feel like he could have gotten elected instead of
00:40:50 ◼ ► Trump. It's just that damn, damn rule about being born in Austria. Yeah. So it's more than just the
00:40:56 ◼ ► look of it. It's there's, there's right from the get-go, there's some serious fit and finish
00:41:01 ◼ ► problems with system settings on the developer betas of macOS Ventura. And I brash what I brought
00:41:07 ◼ ► up on my live show. And I mentioned specifically that the trackpad, classical trackpad preference
00:41:13 ◼ ► panel has some really cool, they're like videos or animated GIFs or something. I don't know if
00:41:18 ◼ ► they're actual, but they look like videos that show a human hand making the complex gestures,
00:41:23 ◼ ► like, so then if you're like, what do you mean a three finger pinch? And they're like, oh,
00:41:28 ◼ ► do this. And it's like, oh, if you do this, you'll get, you know, expose mode or, or whatever
00:41:33 ◼ ► happens. And that all of those niceties were missing. And he said, yeah, he knew what I was
00:41:37 ◼ ► talking about and said, well, that's on our list. That's the thing about these summer betas is it is
00:41:42 ◼ ► a legitimate excuse to say these are betas. Right. Right. That's why I assume a lot of these things,
00:41:48 ◼ ► well, you know, a lot of these things that are just obvious glitches. Well, some of them are
00:41:54 ◼ ► glitches and some of them seem to be more, I mean, I guess I would define them as growing pains as
00:42:00 ◼ ► opposed to glitches where you are taking an iOS element and shoving it into Mac OS and they're,
00:42:06 ◼ ► they're not compatible, at least currently anyway. I mean, they, you know, it works technically,
00:42:13 ◼ ► but it does not look pretty at all. And, and it's not a thing. It doesn't seem, it seems like you,
00:42:18 ◼ ► you would have to redesign the entire control in order to make it work right on Mac OS. And that
00:42:23 ◼ ► hasn't been done yet. Right. And I think it goes back to 2007 and the original iPhone or, you know,
00:42:31 ◼ ► 2006 when Apple spent the whole year creating what would be the original iPhone and deciding what the
00:42:38 ◼ ► interface would look like. And it didn't, it looked Appley, but it didn't look Mac-like really at all.
00:42:47 ◼ ► I don't know that there was really anything in original iOS 2007 that you'd say that looks
00:42:55 ◼ ► exactly like the Mac, you know, the, it used a different font even it was all in the system
00:43:02 ◼ ► font was all Helvetica at the time. And the Mac was Lucida Grande, Grande, they're talking about
00:43:07 ◼ ► something I'd never learned how to pronounce, but famously most famously, I would say I almost like
00:43:12 ◼ ► iconically instead of check boxes, they had these now famous little pill shaped left, right sliders
00:43:20 ◼ ► that would turn green when they're on and off, which if you just think about that control
00:43:24 ◼ ► specifically, why did they not use check boxes? And I think, I think there's a couple of reasons.
00:43:30 ◼ ► I think one reason is check boxes on the Mac and windows and every GUI system I've ever used tend
00:43:37 ◼ ► to be very, very small buttons. It's just the nature of them and making them bigger would be
00:43:43 ◼ ► weird. And the fact that they're small works because a mouse or a track pad is a very precise
00:43:53 ◼ ► pointer. Right. And again, if tossing out tips that are, have an expiration date on the Mac,
00:44:02 ◼ ► on the Mac in any good UI, the label of a check box is a clickable part of the check box. So if,
00:44:10 ◼ ► if there's like you're in a preference and there's a check box that says use Bluetooth,
00:44:15 ◼ ► if you click on the words, use Bluetooth next to the check box, that will toggle the check box too.
00:44:21 ◼ ► So it's actually a bigger clickable target than you might think. And it's a great little affordance
00:44:27 ◼ ► that's been in the Mac interface as long as I can remember. There's no downside to it. So even if
00:44:32 ◼ ► people, most people have no idea that you can click the label, it is bigger than it looks, but
00:44:38 ◼ ► they, you know, the iOS layout, it didn't cause it's so up and down, right. And almost everything
00:44:45 ◼ ► you do on the iPhone is held vertically. You know, it made sense. And so these little sliders
00:44:52 ◼ ► instead of check boxes, much bigger, fatter fingertip size shape that you can just tap to
00:45:00 ◼ ► move. But the other thing about them is you don't, you can't, you don't have to tap them.
00:45:05 ◼ ► You can just slide the actual little slider, which is cool, right? Like one of the, right?
00:45:19 ◼ ► Well, like you think back to the first year with the iPhone and it's like, what did we do with our
00:45:20 ◼ ► iPhones? Why did we love them? There was, there was no app store. And it's like, well, I can remember,
00:45:26 ◼ ► I did, I read, I used Safari a lot and, you know, loading web pages over the edge network.
00:45:33 ◼ ► Jon Streeter But even back then, yeah, we were doing limited web pages, right? Because,
00:45:52 ◼ ► Dave Yeah, I forget the URL for that one. I definitely had it bookmarked because it loaded
00:45:56 ◼ ► great. m.twitter.com was so minimal that it didn't even include avatars. It would just say,
00:46:05 ◼ ► instead of saying molt and having your robot avatar, it just said molt, right? Because the
00:46:12 ◼ ► Jon Streeter Yeah, that was an asset that had to be downloaded. And that was, that took too
00:46:17 ◼ ► Dave It took way too long. But it was, it was great. But we used the web. And then for the most
00:46:22 ◼ ► part, we just played with the interface. We just slid buttons. And we scrolled things that were
00:46:31 ◼ ► scrolling and we sat there for a year saying, "This is amazing. You just put your finger on it."
00:46:49 ◼ ► Dave I wasn't interested in seeing more tweets. I was just interested in feeling the pull to
00:47:00 ◼ ► Jon Streeter Yeah, it was like one of those, it was a fidget tool, you know? I mean, it was...
00:47:11 ◼ ► that is, I, but I think fidget tools are, I love to do, I like to click my pen. It dries, of course.
00:47:22 ◼ ► and have a door on my office is I like to click, I like to click a pen. I like a clicky keyboard.
00:47:32 ◼ ► Fidgeting is, it's a human thing. It's, you know, if you don't like to fidget with anything,
00:47:41 ◼ ► Dave Right, but I remember like just going shopping and I'd be in the line at the supermarket
00:47:46 ◼ ► and just playing with the interface and just playing with the sliders. And that was cool.
00:47:50 ◼ ► It showed off the interface. But anyway, that's what I'm going is they redid everything. They
00:47:55 ◼ ► didn't use any pop-up menus, no menu bar, no pop-up menus. Everything was like full screen
00:48:02 ◼ ► things. They were all, every user interface element was sort of redesigned from the ground up
00:48:08 ◼ ► for touch. And it made sense to do that. And the converse is not quite equivalent. Like
00:48:17 ◼ ► desktop style UI controls do not work on a small pocket touchscreen phone. They really don't. And
00:48:26 ◼ ► I think that's part of the reason Windows Phone never took off before the iPhone, even though they
00:48:31 ◼ ► didn't have a touchscreen, they used a stylus because they used these user interface style
00:48:37 ◼ ► controls that needed precision, which is why they used a stylus. But I just don't think it worked
00:48:43 ◼ ► well mentally. It was too backwards thinking. The converse isn't quite true. You can put iOS style
00:48:49 ◼ ► controls on a desktop interface and it's not like, "Oh, I can't even use this because it's
00:48:54 ◼ ► literally too small for me to accurately poke." Because you have the precision pointer, you can
00:49:01 ◼ ► use a bigger, fatter, sloppier button shape. But it's still, it's not right though. It's not right.
00:49:09 ◼ ► It doesn't make it right. And it's sort of like... I mean, that was one of my huge complaints about
00:49:26 ◼ ► it was going to be both on touch and on the desktop. Everything was too big on the desktop.
00:49:32 ◼ ► All the controls were too large. And we've talked about this before, but they would have one
00:49:39 ◼ ► settings thing that was really for touch, and then in the background, you could still get the
00:49:44 ◼ ► control panels. Right. It really did seem at the time... And that's the most interesting version
00:49:48 ◼ ► of Windows I can remember in my career writing during Fireball because I thought it was
00:49:53 ◼ ► fascinating what they're doing, and they came up with a different look. But it just seemed so clear
00:49:57 ◼ ► to me that they should have bitten the bullet and forked it into its own new OS. Okay, Windows isn't
00:50:03 ◼ ► going anywhere. We're as committed to it as ever, but here's our new operating system that's meant
00:50:11 ◼ ► for touchscreen devices, and let it be there what iPad OS is to Mac OS. Fundamentally different in
00:50:20 ◼ ► certain ways. And yes, people are going to bitch that there should just be one operating system.
00:50:25 ◼ ► Shut up. Right? It doesn't work. You know, you can't have it all. You can't have it touch...
00:50:31 ◼ ► Yeah, right. I don't think it does. And I... Well, it doesn't seem like... It seems like this
00:50:37 ◼ ► proves the point. Yeah. But anyway, the Twitter thread, there's a fellow named Nicky Tonski,
00:50:47 ◼ ► Daring Fireball, but haven't yet. Just... It's a well-illustrated... It's... I actually think
00:50:53 ◼ ► sometimes a thread on Twitter is just a terrific way of posting things like this, because Twitter...
00:51:01 ◼ ► You know, the thread view is pretty good on just about every client I use. And Twitter does make
00:51:08 ◼ ► it really easy to paste in screenshots and screen recordings even, you know, because some of the
00:51:15 ◼ ► things in his thread are movies. It's so easy. I don't know... It's so much easier than writing
00:51:20 ◼ ► a blog post and trying to get all that stuff in there, yeah. Right. My CMS isn't necessarily
00:51:25 ◼ ► optimized for making it as easy as possible to paste images and screenshots. I know newer ones
00:51:30 ◼ ► like Medium probably make it easier. But still, there's like the... You have to upload the file
00:51:36 ◼ ► somewhere and get the URL. And Twitter, you just paste it in. It's just a... It's so easy to make
00:51:42 ◼ ► an illustrated little thing like this, where he just sort of went through and found... I mean,
00:51:48 ◼ ► it just looks sloppy, right? It's just unfinished. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of... Like I said
00:51:56 ◼ ► earlier, there's a lot of different things going on here, and it's hard to... You couldn't point
00:52:03 ◼ ► to any one particular problem and say, "Well, if they fix this..." Some of them look like legitimate
00:52:10 ◼ ► images, bugs. But also, there's so many design problems. Yeah. Just controls that don't look
00:52:16 ◼ ► fit and finished and buttons that are in... Like going back to Federighi's thing about views within
00:52:24 ◼ ► views, one of the problems with the old system preferences is that the shape of the window
00:52:28 ◼ ► doesn't... You can't just grow it to make it longer. And one of the... And I think it was
00:52:32 ◼ ► an astute observation by him that because of the phones and iPads and touch, people are used to
00:52:38 ◼ ► scrolling and putting things in a long vertical list if there's a lot of stuff to list. People
00:52:45 ◼ ► intuit that now. And you can make panels now that instead of trying to fit everything on screen in
00:52:52 ◼ ► this window that has to fit on the smallest Mac screen, like a 13-inch laptop, with the size
00:53:00 ◼ ► scaled up, right? Because you can scale up a 13-inch laptop to not have that many points on
00:53:07 ◼ ► screen. And there's no scrolling. And so if there's a subview, like going inside privacy to
00:53:15 ◼ ► accessibility and inside accessibility to allowing screen recording, and now here's a list of the
00:53:21 ◼ ► apps that you've permitted to do screen recording, and there's only room to show like four at a time,
00:53:27 ◼ ► and you have to scroll this little tiny box within a box just to see which app is bitching about not
00:53:33 ◼ ► having permission to do screen recording even though you need it to or something like that.
00:53:38 ◼ ► Well, you could just put them all in a big scrolling view and you scroll down and you can
00:53:42 ◼ ► make room for these things, which sounds good and it is a good idea. But now it's like as illustrated
00:53:48 ◼ ► by Nicky Tonski's thread, there are some subviews within views where there's like a done button at
00:53:53 ◼ ► the bottom and it's half cut off. So I guess you can click it. He doesn't actually say,
00:54:00 ◼ ► can you click the top of the button? I would presume from my experience using gooeys that
00:54:05 ◼ ► when you experience a bug like that, if a little bit of the button's available and you click the
00:54:10 ◼ ► little bit of the button, it'll still work. But no, he doesn't. He doesn't want them there,
00:54:16 ◼ ► I think. Yeah, looks like it, but it does not feel to me. And I know how long I know Apple has great
00:54:24 ◼ ► and lots of engineers, although famously, I think we all know that having lots of engineers doesn't
00:54:30 ◼ ► help you shift one project faster. There's the mythical man month, which sort of proves that you
00:54:37 ◼ ► can't just, it really is in some regards like trying to throw more women at the problem to
00:54:54 ◼ ► But they do have talented engineers. I know they care, but it does not look to me at mid August
00:55:10 ◼ ► why do you, I don't know. Why do you think that is? I mean, they just, they didn't have enough time
00:55:17 ◼ ► or, but I don't, I don't understand exactly why this would be, I mean, it, and it happened before,
00:55:25 ◼ ► right. I mean, but it, you know, in a much less critical application because when they did news
00:55:33 ◼ ► and somewhat, what was the other thing? I can't remember. They did, they did a few things when
00:55:37 ◼ ► they first demonstrated news and stocks are, are like, they're the same app. Really. There's,
00:55:44 ◼ ► if you there's like Steven Trout and Smith has dug in, you know, like you can kind of see how
00:55:49 ◼ ► they're the same app. It's just that news is general news and stocks is stock business,
00:55:54 ◼ ► specific news and stock tickers. News and stocks. And I forget the other catalyst apps,
00:56:01 ◼ ► home, home was one that was sort of a, a, a back wall still. It's not really, but home.
00:56:06 ◼ ► When those, when those first came over, they were, and then they're still not perfect, but they were
00:56:15 ◼ ► NatH - But even home, which I don't like, no, I really don't. I don't, I really don't feel
00:56:20 ◼ ► like they've nailed the metaphor, the organizing metaphor for the app, which is a challenge.
00:56:24 ◼ ► Jim - It's better in the beta, but on, you know, the iOS beta anyway, but it's not, yeah,
00:56:32 ◼ ► NatH - I don't mean to be dismissive or snarky about it because I think it's very difficult,
00:56:37 ◼ ► but you know, that it, and as the user interface designer in me doesn't have an answer for it,
00:56:43 ◼ ► an easy answer, I think it would be a mountain of work and a great achievement to, to do a new
00:56:48 ◼ ► version of the home app that has an organizing principle that is visually cohesive and makes
00:56:54 ◼ ► sense for all the various things that you, that, that the home app can do. But it's like the home
00:57:00 ◼ ► app on Mac, I have problems with it, but it doesn't seem sloppy. It's not like things are
00:57:05 ◼ ► only half visible or the controls pop off to the side, you know, or that the label for a control
00:57:14 ◼ ► is separated by inches from the button that toggles it, right? Because that's one of the
00:57:19 ◼ ► things that's so weird in settings because the Mac screen is fundamentally wide, not tall and skinny.
00:57:26 ◼ ► And so a lot of these things that make sense, even on the biggest iPhone ever, Apple's ever made the
00:57:30 ◼ ► 13 Pro Max Plus, you know, whatever the current monster size iPhone is, when you're holding it
00:57:37 ◼ ► vertically, it's not that wide, right? It is actually a very narrow screen from left to right.
00:57:44 ◼ ► And so, you know, you can have a left justified label and a right justified switch that toggles
00:57:51 ◼ ► that setting, and they're not that far apart. Whereas on, in, in Mac settings in Ventura,
00:57:57 ◼ ► a lot of the labels are so far apart that it's almost hard to visually tell they go, you know,
00:58:04 ◼ ► which one goes with which. And that's, it's, my eyes have gotten so much better, but that's with
00:58:09 ◼ ► my retinal detachments, that sort of telling which lines go across is still a little, it's always,
00:58:16 ◼ ► it's going to be tricky for me for the rest of my life. It just, I kind of need alignment help.
00:58:26 ◼ ► I mean, I worry about, I also worry about like, there seems to be this sort of mishmash of,
00:58:47 ◼ ► which is really fun because app in app kit for Mac, where there's a combination push button
00:58:52 ◼ ► with a dropdown on the right so that you can have a push button with a menu on the side.
00:59:01 ◼ ► it's not, I don't think that any of that's written in app kit. I think it's all Swift UI,
00:59:05 ◼ ► which is part of the, this is the way, this is the, this is the, you know, this is where the
00:59:10 ◼ ► puck is going. I think, again, he didn't say this. I don't think anybody, cause it was a Steve Jobs
00:59:15 ◼ ► quote would, would bring it up, but one way to encapsulate my take on Craig Federighi's defense
00:59:21 ◼ ► of this is this is where the puck is going and we want to get ahead of it. And, you know, we know we
00:59:26 ◼ ► have lots of work to do, but I just, why do it now? Right? Right. Like, I guess that's what you're
00:59:31 ◼ ► asking is why, why isn't this still a secret, secret project in Apple for next year? Exactly.
00:59:36 ◼ ► Exactly. Because I think this, this in between is just a mess. I mean, like if you're going to
00:59:42 ◼ ► change, you know, simple thing like check boxes or now those toggle switches, just do it and do
00:59:51 ◼ ► it across the board. They're all, they're all toggle switches now. Don't like have, well,
00:59:56 ◼ ► we just changed the settings app and now they're toggle switches in the settings app and everywhere
01:00:01 ◼ ► else, they're still, they're going to be check boxes. Right. So I, I, I color me skeptical about
01:00:06 ◼ ► the whole idea, but I'm willing to admit that I'm, I'm a, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and a
01:00:12 ◼ ► traditionalist on UI design. And I have, you know, I'm more of a Mac by far a Mac person than an iOS
01:00:19 ◼ ► person. So I'm biased a little against the general idea of, of doing this to system settings, but I
01:00:27 ◼ ► try to always have an open mind about it. I really do. And so I'll go with it, but even going with it
01:00:33 ◼ ► and accepting it, this isn't, this isn't, it should be the best possible implementation of this idea
01:00:38 ◼ ► possible. It should be as, and, and, and again, we are complaining about a beta, but, but it's,
01:00:45 ◼ ► it's extremely sloppy for where it should be at this point, right. Presuming that it's going to
01:00:50 ◼ ► ship it by the end of October or, you know, even if it was even later, you know, they've said this
01:00:55 ◼ ► year, they always seem to ship, you know, the, the things they announced for the Mac at WWDC in June
01:01:01 ◼ ► shipped by November. Right. It's, it's supposedly going to ship. I just feels to me like a project
01:01:09 ◼ ► that whatever the point came in, I guess like early May where they're like saying what's in,
01:01:16 ◼ ► what's out this year. This one to me feels like, keep going team. We're behind you on this. This
01:01:23 ◼ ► is the way, but we're going to punt this to Mac OS 14 next year, next year at this point, I expect
01:01:31 ◼ ► this to be precise, have at it. And then they don't say anything at WWDC. And then next year
01:01:38 ◼ ► here, here's the new system settings in Mac OS, whatever they call it, 14. It goes back to me.
01:01:44 ◼ ► This again, I don't have any inside information on this. I'm not getting this from any friends or
01:01:48 ◼ ► little birdies, but just my spidey sense that it's relative. Everything's are relatively thin this
01:01:56 ◼ ► year. And so they needed stuff. And maybe I mean this, I'm not trying to make it crack wise,
01:02:02 ◼ ► but that maybe they've moved this up to have something to show and say is new. And again,
01:02:08 ◼ ► I'm going to, this is going to irritate some people, but I think, and this is informed somewhat
01:02:15 ◼ ► by friends who work at Apple, that I think two years of lockdown and work from home is,
01:02:24 ◼ ► this is when it's caught up to them. And it, you know, like I, and I've commented about this in
01:02:33 ◼ ► some ways and people have objected on the grounds of how can you, a person who's worked at home for
01:02:38 ◼ ► 15 years, complain about people at Apple who want to work at home. And I get that. And that's,
01:02:44 ◼ ► but that's why I don't work at Apple, right? Like I never pursued a career like that because I know
01:02:50 ◼ ► I don't want to go into an office every day and I never enjoyed that. But I also fundamentally
01:02:56 ◼ ► believe that it's true that for a collaborative project, collaborating in person is far more
01:03:01 ◼ ► effective than collaborating remotely. I really, I don't think, I don't know that that's ever going
01:03:07 ◼ ► to change in my lifetime. And it certainly, I don't, well, I'm not convinced that, well,
01:03:11 ◼ ► I don't, I've never worked in software development, particularly. I mean, I've done some,
01:03:20 ◼ ► my wife worked in a newsroom for years. I feel like a newsroom is a very good example of where,
01:03:32 ◼ ► which I absolutely, I absolutely hate and I think is really, really bad for most kinds of work.
01:03:39 ◼ ► I think it's actually really good for a news organization. And then the other thing is working
01:03:43 ◼ ► in the office. And I would argue, well, I mean, maybe it's slightly different now, even with,
01:03:49 ◼ ► you know, with Slack and stuff like that, but I still think it's slightly better to work in
01:03:52 ◼ ► an office if you're working in a news organization, but I'm not sure that software development is the
01:03:58 ◼ ► same kind of thing when, I mean, do you really need to hear people having a conversation over
01:04:05 ◼ ► the wall? Well, I hope, all right. So, and again, I've opened a can of worms and there's a lot to go
01:04:11 ◼ ► through. So open floor plans, definitely. I get it very bad for a lot of people distraction wise.
01:04:17 ◼ ► And for me in particular, it is, especially if you need to concentrate. And I realized that Apple
01:04:22 ◼ ► Park, you know, there were, you don't hear so much about it, but maybe that's also largely because of
01:04:26 ◼ ► COVID and people haven't been there. But the fact that the old infinite loop campus was largely
01:04:33 ◼ ► organized around everybody having their own office, or maybe in some cases sharing an office,
01:04:38 ◼ ► you know, like me and you would share an office or something like that when it got crowded.
01:04:42 ◼ ► But then, you know, their head count has exploded where they've bought up almost everything in
01:04:46 ◼ ► Cupertino. Anything that looks like an office in Cupertino now is probably an Apple building.
01:04:51 ◼ ► And most of them are older buildings. And, you know, I'm sure that they come in and make them
01:04:56 ◼ ► as nice as they can. Apple has, you know, money to spend. But the open floor plan at Apple Park,
01:05:01 ◼ ► I know is controversial. And people, you know, there were rules originally about you have to use
01:05:06 ◼ ► this is the chair that Johnny Ive wants everybody to use. And again, you know, I get it aesthetically,
01:05:12 ◼ ► that's great. But in terms of, you know, chairs are really personal, you know, they really are.
01:05:22 ◼ ► minor comfort level, there are very real reasons why, you know, a couple of different bodies.
01:05:32 ◼ ► you know, a lot. There's no sponsors this week from mattress companies. But I, you know,
01:05:37 ◼ ► but if you sleep eight hours a day, you should get a really, you should get a mattress that really
01:05:42 ◼ ► that you both enjoy. And that makes you feel good. It makes your back feel good every morning.
01:05:46 ◼ ► You and if you're going to sit in a chair all day, you really are, or even half the day,
01:05:49 ◼ ► if you'd like to stand half the day or whatever you really should, you know, it's really important
01:05:53 ◼ ► for your health to have a chair that's comfortable for you. I get it all with the open floor plan,
01:05:57 ◼ ► and that it's distracting. I think I, my take on this, and this is informed by talking to people
01:06:03 ◼ ► at Apple, I think that that where they're trying to move to where it's sort of a hybrid, hey,
01:06:08 ◼ ► everybody can work from home a couple days a week, but you have to come in a couple days a week,
01:06:12 ◼ ► is trying to acknowledge that for some things, especially for like engineers and programmers,
01:06:18 ◼ ► being able to work from home and not have any distractions and just go heads down on a project
01:06:24 ◼ ► with no distractions other than what your dog or whatever else is in your house. But if you can,
01:06:29 ◼ ► you know, you know, you can probably be interrupted less at home than at the office. And obviously,
01:06:40 ◼ ► And I think that's the big thing, honestly, because, and particularly when we've reached
01:06:49 ◼ ► anywhere close to where you work. Because it is, you know, working from home, it's very easy to get
01:06:56 ◼ ► distracted. There's laundry, there's dishes, there's dogs, there's kids. There's all kinds
01:07:00 ◼ ► of different, it's not a heck of a lot better than working in the office. It's different kinds
01:07:05 ◼ ► of distractions, obviously. If you have an office at home, it becomes a lot easier because you can
01:07:09 ◼ ► just go in and close the door and lock yourself, which is sometimes what I actually have to do.
01:07:18 ◼ ► when I commuted up to Seattle, it was an hour and a half both ways. So that's why I stopped.
01:07:27 ◼ ► Tom; The other thing that's so true about human psychology is once you get used to a thing,
01:07:32 ◼ ► it is so much harder to go back than just imagining it in the first place. And you see this every year
01:07:38 ◼ ► with new iPhones, right? If somebody upgrades from a two-year-old iPhone to a brand new iPhone,
01:07:43 ◼ ► and then they go back to their old iPhone because they haven't wiped it yet, it's like, "Ah, crap,
01:07:46 ◼ ► some of this stuff feels slow," right? It's like, "Ah, man, I've really gotten used to how much,"
01:07:55 ◼ ► that does look smoother." But then you go back to the older phone and it's like, "Oh, man,
01:07:59 ◼ ► now I'm ruined forever." Well, once you've worked from home for over a year in 2020 and 2021,
01:08:07 ◼ ► all of a sudden, the exact same commute, or even if your commute is better than it was in 2019,
01:08:13 ◼ ► because the roads still aren't anywhere near as full in California, in the Bay Area, it still
01:08:20 ◼ ► feels—you feel it in a way that you didn't when it was like, "Well, this is the way it has to be."
01:08:25 ◼ ► I get it. So, I'm not trying to simplify this into any sort of argument that Apple should go back to
01:08:30 ◼ ► the way things were in 2019 with everybody coming into the office exactly like that. What I'm trying
01:08:35 ◼ ► to argue is a very subtle point, which is that I think that for 2020 and even 2021, we didn't see
01:08:43 ◼ ► the effects of work from home on Apple's software because there was—all these ideas were already
01:08:51 ◼ ► in place. And it might have even been more effective to just send—have everybody at home
01:08:58 ◼ ► and just work on these things that are already in place. Most—I think most things that are worth
01:09:04 ◼ ► mentioning in a keynote, almost, if not all of them, have been in the works for over a year.
01:09:11 ◼ ► Every—you know, any new feature on any of these platforms that's worthy of being mentioned in a
01:09:18 ◼ ► WWDC keynote almost certainly has been in the works behind the scenes for over a year. And so,
01:09:25 ◼ ► these years-old ideas, having people at home and having more time to concentrate uninterrupted,
01:09:32 ◼ ► maybe even made them more effective. And that—and there was lots of, "Hey, Apple," you know,
01:09:36 ◼ ► the consensus largely that I saw was, "Work from home is great for Apple. Look, this last few years
01:09:44 ◼ ► of iOS and macOS have been just fine." But I think that the part that's missing is where do the ideas
01:09:53 ◼ ► for the next two, three years come from and not being together as a team and having teams together
01:10:06 ◼ ► really right, but somebody else can say, "Oh, but and this," or, "What if we did—you know,
01:10:13 ◼ ► okay, just like that, but what if we did this?" And those sort of collaborative, "Oh, yeah,
01:10:19 ◼ ► we should go with it. Let's propose this," you know, sort of things. It's not that they didn't
01:10:25 ◼ ► happen at all over WebEx, but I just don't think they happen the same way. And I kind of feel like
01:10:31 ◼ ► this is the year it kind of caught up to us. And I'll even draw the analogy to inflation
01:10:37 ◼ ► globally in the world, that in the early days of the pandemic, when governments in the U.S.
01:10:43 ◼ ► around the world, you know, pumped money into the economy and sent people checks, just mailed people
01:10:58 ◼ ► lead to inflation. But it doesn't lead to inflation right away when the economy is so massive, right?
01:11:04 ◼ ► It comes due 18 months, two years later, right? I just feel that this sort of—you know,
01:11:19 ◼ ► And I think it's possible to put too much, you know, to—it's possible to be tying to—there
01:11:37 ◼ ► Because there are lots of different—I mean, there are lots of different studies that seem
01:11:42 ◼ ► to indicate that working from home is, well, psychologically better for people and also does
01:11:46 ◼ ► not seem to damage productivity at all. And there are plenty of organizations—obviously, you can't
01:12:08 ◼ ► different locations and working and collaborating on software projects and creating great stuff.
01:12:15 ◼ ► Right. And, you know, again, I'm not trying to make a simplistic argument against work from home.
01:12:23 ◼ ► it used to just be him, you know? He, like, you know, took on some other project, changed it,
01:12:41 ◼ ► all these other previously big companies like Tumblr and—I forget what else—WordPress owns.
01:12:51 ◼ ► a majority share of the internet in terms of, like, what sites people actually use runs on
01:12:56 ◼ ► WordPress, and they have been completely distributed without a central office from day one.
01:13:06 ◼ ► But Apple's culture, I think, involves the sort of collaborative—some collaboration. And I think
01:13:11 ◼ ► there are—I will also say there are probably a lot of talented, talented engineers and other people
01:13:19 ◼ ► at Apple who could work remotely full-time because maybe where their skill set is and their
01:13:27 ◼ ► personality is and what they're best at doesn't contribute to the benefits of in-person collaboration
01:13:34 ◼ ► at all. You know, that they could just fully be a full member of the team and be more productive,
01:13:40 ◼ ► right? You mentioned productivity. Measurable productivity, getting more done every week,
01:13:47 ◼ ► week in, week out for their career, and they live in Iowa because that's just where they grew up,
01:13:54 ◼ ► and, you know, bought a massive, beautiful house for the cost of, you know—yeah, for the cost of
01:14:02 ◼ ► a parking spot in the Bay Area. Totally get that. I just think, though, that there's some people at
01:14:07 ◼ ► Apple who thrive on the in-person collaborative nature creatively as a spark. And that, you know,
01:14:15 ◼ ► you mentioned newsrooms. You go back, you know, look at, like—I think they actually shot all the
01:14:21 ◼ ► president's men in the Washington Post newsroom somehow. I don't know how they—while they—either
01:14:37 ◼ ► the local paper a number of times, and it's almost all that—well, you know, now it's a—I think
01:14:46 ◼ ► they've moved since because they had, you know, like when she first started there in the mid-'90s,
01:14:51 ◼ ► they had just built this big, beautiful facility, you know, akin to, you know, sort of like Apple
01:15:02 ◼ ► Or MetaVrida, like the Metaverse took over or something, you know, like they were immediately
01:15:09 ◼ ► obviated. They had a, you know, they had a big Chihuly hanging in the lobby and, you know,
01:15:14 ◼ ► a cafeteria and everything, and it was just—it was super depressing over the years just to see
01:15:18 ◼ ► it shrink like crazy, and then they finally moved out. But, you know, when they first started there
01:15:23 ◼ ► for the number of years—for the first few years, it was crowded, everybody's desks were a mess,
01:15:37 ◼ ► it wasn't like they were raised cubicle walls or anything, but these were reporters, too, and so
01:15:43 ◼ ► they are by and large a group of fairly gregarious, talkative, in-your-face people, and
01:16:00 ◼ ► - Cast everybody in the same light, but still. - Right, and so like if your job is being a
01:16:04 ◼ ► reporter who's more or less on breaking news, whether it's like the entertainment beat or local
01:16:08 ◼ ► politics or national politics, and breaking news is happening, and then being able to shout at your
01:16:13 ◼ ► colleagues and somebody says, you know, "Oh my God, they had torn up pictures in the toilet."
01:16:20 ◼ ► "Oh, wait, stop, I gotta stop," you know, and then you can, you know, don't even—don't push the
01:16:26 ◼ ► you're working on a schedule where everything is published daily or, you know, now with internet
01:16:37 ◼ ► - Yeah, and then somebody says, "I've got a source in the mayor's office. Let me call them,
01:16:41 ◼ ► I will get back to you. You keep working on this, but I'll see if I can get somebody on the mayor's
01:16:45 ◼ ► office to confirm or deny," blah, blah, blah. You know, and then there's other people, like,
01:16:49 ◼ ► deep investigative reporters who write, like, sort of, you know, these investigative reports
01:16:55 ◼ ► about long-standing problems with the lead pipes in the schools or something like that,
01:17:00 ◼ ► who would not benefit from working in that open floor plan and get an office somewhere else and
01:17:06 ◼ ► just, you know, go off for six months and do this deep research. I get it, you know. I don't know,
01:17:11 ◼ ► I just—it's just a spitball theory, and it just sort of matches of why sort of seemingly
01:17:32 ◼ ► - I know this firsthand from people I know at Apple, and I've read this, it is a general thing
01:17:40 ◼ ► nationwide and even worldwide as we try to, you know, everybody collectively is figuring out
01:17:55 ◼ ► that managers tend to be way more, decisively more, "I would like to have more people back
01:18:02 ◼ ► in the office, and people who aren't managers are more, I would prefer to keep working more at home."
01:18:08 ◼ ► And it makes intuitive sense because let's say, let's just assume it's not bad managers,
01:18:13 ◼ ► it's good managers. But how do you become a manager who's a good manager and who enjoys
01:18:18 ◼ ► being a manager? I think by definition you're a people person. You thrive on face-to-face
01:18:25 ◼ ► interactions. You feel energized by it, whereas lots of other people, you know, are somewhere on
01:18:32 ◼ ► the introvert scale. And even if they are personable and people say, "Yeah, I love working
01:18:38 ◼ ► with her, and I love working with so-and-so," but those people find it exhausting to interact
01:18:46 ◼ ► face-to-face or tiresome. They don't, you know, they're spending energy on face-to-face
01:18:50 ◼ ► interaction, not drawing energy from it, which is what I think good managers do. So of course,
01:19:11 ◼ ► personally, me, feel productive working from home, and I can see that I'm producing lots of stuff,
01:19:16 ◼ ► but is the team firing on all cylinders? You know, and collaborative stuff is traditionally done in
01:19:24 ◼ ► person. I guess everything's traditionally done in person, but you know, there's a reason movies
01:19:28 ◼ ► are done in person, you know. I don't know. I could be all wet on this. It could have nothing
01:19:38 ◼ ► I just say, the other thing is I feel like we've spent all these years coming up with these remote
01:19:42 ◼ ► communication tools, and we still are facing this, you know, "No, you gotta come to the office"
01:19:49 ◼ ► thing, because it is a traditional work mode. And because it also, I mean, you know, you talk about
01:20:02 ◼ ► Chris: And insist on having people there so they can, you know, stand over their shoulder and
01:20:07 ◼ ► breathe down their neck all the time. And we just, you know, it's like the productivity thing where
01:20:11 ◼ ► if you look at those productivity charts and you look at like how computers have improved
01:20:15 ◼ ► productivity and yet none of that has transferred into improved wages for the people who are
01:20:24 ◼ ► Chris; Or more recreational time, yeah. And so, from that perspective, I find it extremely
01:20:30 ◼ ► frustrating because it just seems like we've made all this progress and yet things don't,
01:20:34 ◼ ► you know, we still have these people who are insisting that they have to be done the same way.
01:20:37 ◼ ► And then the other thing I think is similarly, the commute I think is completely just destructive to
01:20:42 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah, and in the Bay Area particularly, and the real estate situation and the whole area
01:20:50 ◼ ► too. Again, I don't mean to simplify a truly complex thing that, you know, and I also think
01:20:55 ◼ ► though to tie it off, I do think it'll work itself out because fundamentally, and I know
01:21:00 ◼ ► it's dissatisfying in the moment if somebody out there is listening and works at Apple and is now
01:21:07 ◼ ► having to go in three days a week and only, you know, and they're like, maybe you're getting mad
01:21:12 ◼ ► at me because you're like, even doing two days a week or whatever it is, the office is still
01:21:18 ◼ ► annoying to me and those are my least productive two days of the week. I get it if that's your
01:21:28 ◼ ► I still believe this. Our mutual friend Guy English said this, I think it was 2013 on his blog,
01:21:34 ◼ ► but that the single biggest problem Apple faces is talent retention. And that was true then and
01:21:40 ◼ ► that was sort of in the wake of Steve Jobs dying and sort of, you know, for lots of reasons,
01:21:47 ◼ ► everything seemed to be in flux. The iPhone was still explosively growing. What's the future of
01:21:51 ◼ ► the company? The biggest problem they face is talent retention because the fundamental premise
01:21:57 ◼ ► of Apple as a company is that they make the best computing devices and anywhere where they fall
01:22:05 ◼ ► short of that is a problem for them because that's where the whole brand comes from. That's where the
01:22:10 ◼ ► customer loyalty comes from. And how do you keep making the best products and devices, software and
01:22:16 ◼ ► hardware going forward? It's obvious, but you have to have the best people working well together.
01:22:21 ◼ ► I mean, it's not complicated, but if the best people really want to insist that they don't
01:22:30 ◼ ► want to work in the office, they're going to go elsewhere. You know, competition, the market will
01:22:35 ◼ ► sort that out because the talented people are the ones most likely to be able to find gainful,
01:22:46 ◼ ► Credo, right? I mean, organizations don't necessarily listen to the market. They like to
01:22:52 ◼ ► pretend that they do. But I mean, Apple could just say, "Well, we're still not going to change,
01:23:06 ◼ ► well, that's just the way it is, right? The band kept playing on the deck of the Titanic.
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01:26:07 ◼ ► Nice. I heard a Vin Scully story. I forget what he told, but it more or less something, something
01:26:12 ◼ ► he was talking about early in his career. What was the most embarrassing thing he ever did? And
01:26:17 ◼ ► something like ship, I forget what he said, like a law, some kind of thing. I don't know what exact
01:26:22 ◼ ► words, but it was clear that he still wouldn't say it while relaying the story, but he accidentally
01:26:28 ◼ ► said "shit" instead of something while somebody hit like a screaming line drive over the third
01:26:32 ◼ ► base. Thought he was going to get fired. You know, he's like, you know, it was like one of his first
01:26:37 ◼ ► years announcing the Dodgers. Nobody said anything. And he was like, maybe nobody heard it. And then
01:26:42 ◼ ► he went out to eat a week later and a guy at the restaurant was like, "I don't know if we should
01:26:46 ◼ ► serve you." And he's like, "Why?" And he said, "Because you put profanity on the airways." And
01:26:50 ◼ ► then they slapped him on the back and everybody laughed, you know, but he was like, "Oh,
01:26:53 ◼ ► everybody did hear." So what else do we got? So we did the Ventura system settings. Stage manager
01:27:03 ◼ ► I have not. Or the iPad one. Yeah, because I heard the iPad was still rough. So I wasn't ready for,
01:27:18 ◼ ► rough enough that I really wonder how good a shape it'll be in by October. Like some really
01:27:23 ◼ ► weird bugs. And I've recognized that these, you know, have to be fixed, but you know how,
01:27:28 ◼ ► like, you can hit again, if anybody doesn't know this, my God, what a great tip, but you hit the
01:27:32 ◼ ► command backtick on the Mac and it cycles through the windows in the current application. So if
01:27:39 ◼ ► you've got three windows open in TextEdit and you hit command back backtick or the tilde key,
01:27:45 ◼ ► it'll cycle through those three windows. Well, on my Ventura installation, the command backtick
01:27:51 ◼ ► doesn't do anything. It just doesn't even whether I have that, that's a recently, and I think that's
01:27:58 ◼ ► in the most recent release, but wasn't in there earlier. Is that right? I believe so. Right.
01:28:02 ◼ ► Yeah. But I got to assume that's just a, that's a bug. They're not getting rid of command.
01:28:08 ◼ ► You don't get to switch windows anymore. You're going to use, right. Sorry. I do think though,
01:28:14 ◼ ► here, the thing that I forget who popped this idea into my head, but it is when you step back
01:28:21 ◼ ► and think about it, the fundamentally thing that's most interesting about stage manager,
01:28:31 ◼ ► but it's really interesting that it is I've poked around with it enough. And if you watch the
01:28:37 ◼ ► keynote, you know, it was clear enough that it really kind of is the same idea on Mac and iPad,
01:28:47 ◼ ► when you're using center stage, it's pretty similar. It is, you know, as much as it can be
01:28:55 ◼ ► between the two platforms with different concepts of what a quote unquote window is. But I think
01:29:00 ◼ ► it's fundamentally interesting that on iPad, it's sort of a power user mode, right? Like, okay,
01:29:06 ◼ ► you're a more advanced iPad user. You'd like to sort of have multiple apps on screen at once,
01:29:11 ◼ ► and you've got a lot, you know, a couple of windows or apps worth of stuff going on at a time.
01:29:16 ◼ ► Here's an interface to manage this visually that you, you know, it's not on by default, and it's
01:29:23 ◼ ► more complex, significantly more complex than the basic iPad idea of one thing on screen at a time.
01:29:31 ◼ ► On the Mac, it's sort of like a simplified mode, right? Like, okay, you've got a jumble of windows
01:29:38 ◼ ► open on your desktop, and you feel it's cluttered, and it's distracting. Here's a way to sort of
01:29:42 ◼ ► reduce the clutter, and the advantage of it versus spaces for like having multiple desktops is that
01:29:52 ◼ ► you can make a new space, and then the new space is obviously it's fresh. There's nothing in it,
01:29:57 ◼ ► but you can quickly clutter that space up too. Stage Manager is a way that it sort of enforces
01:30:03 ◼ ► a lack of clutter because there's only so many things that you can take out of the strip on the
01:30:09 ◼ ► side. I think that's what they're calling it, the strip. You can only take so many windows out of
01:30:13 ◼ ► the strip at a time, and otherwise things go back into the strip to keep it organized. That's kind
01:30:19 ◼ ► of interesting to me that, you know, that Apple sees this as the same interface works on both
01:30:24 ◼ ► platforms, but on one it's the simplified decluttering mode, and on the other one it's the
01:30:30 ◼ ► power user do more things at once mode. It's also interesting to me that, you know, it might be,
01:30:39 ◼ ► it feels like the sort of shift that might be permanent, you know, that iPadOS on an annual
01:30:46 ◼ ► basis might be more on the macOS October schedule than the iOS September schedule, as iPad sort of
01:30:56 ◼ ► does grow more Mac-like than being a big iPhone-like. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see,
01:31:04 ◼ ► like, I mean, they've struggled with how to define multitasking on the iPad for a long time, and
01:31:10 ◼ ► I feel like they keep trying stuff that doesn't always work perfectly. It doesn't make it as
01:31:27 ◼ ► But it is the one platform where they still don't seem to have had their "that's it" moment, right?
01:31:36 ◼ ► Is slideover still a thing? Because I don't see slideover anymore, and every time I've ever seen
01:31:51 ◼ ► "I'm not going to use multitasking on the iPad. I don't care about it." Even when I'm writing,
01:31:58 ◼ ► I'm fine command-tabbing back and forth between whatever text editor I'm using and Safari or
01:32:04 ◼ ► whatever I'm using to reference. And every time I implemented it, it was always by mistake.
01:32:11 ◼ ► Well, I've told this story before, but it's worth retelling. But my dear mother loves her iPad,
01:32:18 ◼ ► and I'm not throwing my mom under the bus as opposed to my dad, you know, under the trope that
01:32:24 ◼ ► it's the grandmother who's always got trouble. My mom is far more of an advanced computer user than
01:32:30 ◼ ► my dad, which is why she's the one who ran into it. My dad is super simplistic in his computing,
01:32:35 ◼ ► whereas my mom is more immersed in it and does more. But the problem she ran into multiple times
01:32:42 ◼ ► would be somehow Safari got into slide-over mode. And then she'd be in an email, and the email—she
01:32:48 ◼ ► likes subscribing to things like CNN emails, and they tell her what's news, and then there's a URL.
01:32:54 ◼ ► And then instead of what she expected to happen is she taps on the URL, and then she switches to
01:33:00 ◼ ► Safari in full screen, and that webpage opens. Instead, it would pop up in this slide-over that
01:33:06 ◼ ► comes over her email. And she couldn't even—not only did she not want it there, she didn't know
01:33:11 ◼ ► how to make it go away because it didn't have a close button, right? It was like you had to kind
01:33:15 ◼ ► of flick it away, but if you didn't flick quite the right way, it would just jump over to the other
01:33:21 ◼ ► side of the screen. And I remember a couple of years ago, there was actually an option somewhere
01:33:26 ◼ ► in settings—again, I'll never remember where. It's just to go back to the idea that you kind of just
01:33:31 ◼ ► have to search in settings to find something. But there used to be an option to just say,
01:33:35 ◼ ► "Don't ever use multitasking." Which was, I think, at least—again, it was a sign that the interface
01:33:43 ◼ ► wasn't good, that there was an option to turn it off. But at least they acknowledged it and put the
01:33:48 ◼ ► option in. But then they got rid of that option, I guess, a couple of versions ago where they thought,
01:33:54 ◼ ► "Okay, I don't think this is a problem anymore. We don't have to give people an option to turn
01:33:59 ◼ ► it off." But still, sometimes something happens. I don't get as many calls from my mom about getting
01:34:05 ◼ ► in the split screen. I think it's easier to dismiss now somehow. I think maybe the flicking
01:34:10 ◼ ► got a little bit more—let's take a flick that's more generally, that's just sort of in the right
01:34:16 ◼ ► direction as opposed to has to be this particular kind of flick. Well, and I guess the other thing
01:34:21 ◼ ► is in real—not slide-over, but split screen—you can just drag the divider between the two halves,
01:34:27 ◼ ► and if you just drag it all the way over to the side, you just end up with an app in full screen.
01:34:32 ◼ ► And that's so obvious that even if—I think I had to tell my mom to do it the first time,
01:34:39 ◼ ► but it's so obvious that she never—she couldn't forget it because it's, "Here's the thing.
01:34:49 ◼ ► Yeah, but that's the thing is that how does split screen fit in the center stage world?
01:34:58 ◼ ► If they had come up with the center stage—center stage—stage manager, god damn it. This is why I'm
01:35:09 ◼ ► come up with it years ago, would they have ever done split screen? It's just weird because in
01:35:22 ◼ ► These things, you can resize them, they're stacked, whereas split screen, they don't look
01:35:32 ◼ ► BRIAN: Yeah. I'm not sure they would have done it originally because of—just because of the
01:35:42 ◼ ► since we got—certainly since we got the iPad Pro, but also now that you can plug in an external
01:36:07 ◼ ► So, you have to have the M1, and presumably the M2 iPads are coming later this year, probably in
01:36:30 ◼ ► October when they might finish the iPad OS. And yeah, people sort of—you know, my idea to maybe
01:36:40 ◼ ► make people happy who really want stage manager elsewhere would be to just say, "Don't support
01:36:44 ◼ ► external displays and just have it on screen." But it doesn't seem like they're going that way.
01:36:50 ◼ ► It seems like Apple is sticking to no M1 or later. And it also seems like the displeasure
01:36:56 ◼ ► over that has died down, but maybe it'll come back up when iPad OS actually ships, right?
01:37:11 ◼ ► I don't think—well, I can't—I think maybe we talked about this the last time I was on the show,
01:37:15 ◼ ► but I feel like it's fine for them to make these decisions, honestly. I don't think—they
01:37:22 ◼ ► make—they largely make these decisions based on what they think works well. And just because you
01:37:28 ◼ ► want to run something crappily on your device does not mean that you should necessarily be able to do
01:37:32 ◼ ► that. I know. That's sort of what I wrote, and as people pointed—I can't remember the examples
01:37:38 ◼ ► they pointed to, but basically, if they don't do—Apple doesn't do many spite features, you know?
01:37:45 ◼ ► And they do do some marketing spite things that are cosmetic. So, like, the one that—it doesn't
01:37:54 ◼ ► seem like lots of people comment on it, and I think because so many people use one of their
01:38:01 ◼ ► personal photos as their iPhone wallpaper lock screen pictures, you know, that they don't use the
01:38:10 ◼ ► default wallpapers. But whenever you buy a new iPhone, the new—the iPhone comes with device-
01:38:18 ◼ ► specific wallpapers. And it—like, if you buy the iPhone 13 Pro, you don't get the iPhone 13
01:38:27 ◼ ► non-Pro wallpapers, right? There's, like, these custom wallpapers just for the device that I guess
01:38:34 ◼ ► Apple thinks are keyed to the actual physical nature, you know, like gold—shiny gold steel
01:38:48 ◼ ► supposed to match. But in terms of actual features, not just cosmetic things, they don't
01:38:54 ◼ ► tend to do that, like, "Oh, we're going to hold that cool thing just to get you to buy a new
01:38:59 ◼ ► device." No, because their overall mindset is they just—they really don't just want you to buy one
01:39:04 ◼ ► more Apple device, get your money, and never come back. They want loyal customers, right? It's the
01:39:10 ◼ ► same thing I go back to with, like, the seemingly faded conspiracy theory that new versions of iOS
01:39:20 ◼ ► deliberately tank your battery life, right? And there were some versions of iOS over the years
01:39:28 ◼ ► that didn't run great on older iPhones, but I don't think deliberately I think it was just
01:39:34 ◼ ► engineering and just shortcomings, just didn't quite do it. But they—the last thing they want
01:39:39 ◼ ► is for somebody with an iPhone to think is, "Apple really screwed up the OS and tanked my
01:39:46 ◼ ► scrolling performance and battery life. I'm going to go buy a new product from them," right? That
01:39:51 ◼ ► doesn't work that way. Like, the last thing they want you to think is, "Maybe I should look at a
01:39:57 ◼ ► Samsung phone," right? And what would be the best way to get an iPhone user to at least look at a
01:40:08 ◼ ► Tom: Yeah. I think they purposefully tanked my iPhone. It's not a way to get someone to buy
01:40:16 ◼ ► another iPhone. It really isn't. The idea that it was, I don't think comes true. And I really don't
01:40:22 ◼ ► think that they're withholding center or stage—I'm going to stop talking about this feature. I am.
01:40:28 ◼ ► Screw it. This is the last time. The new feature. The new windowing feature is definitely not trying
01:40:35 ◼ ► to get you to buy a new $1,000 iPad Pro. I really think that it just doesn't run well on the older
01:40:40 ◼ ► hardware. NatHAN Yeah. I think so, too. I mean, I think of, like, the fact that when you tilt larger
01:40:49 ◼ ► phones, you can get different UI effects. You know, you get more of an iPad type of layout,
01:40:58 ◼ ► so that the icons go in the bottom type of thing. Whereas, you know, with my Mini, if I tilt it,
01:41:03 ◼ ► nothing happens. So that does bring us to iOS 16. So that's one you're running. Now, are you running
01:41:26 ◼ ► NatHAN I put this in the notes. I think you probably saw it. But I've installed it on a spare
01:41:30 ◼ ► machine. And I should have probably sent it back by now. But sometimes I've still got my iPhone 13
01:41:36 ◼ ► Mini review unit from last year. So part of my August to-dos is to ship those phones back to Apple
01:41:54 ◼ ► NatHAN It's a couple of things. Number one, I have found iOS 16 to be extremely stable for
01:42:08 ◼ ► Dave It has been in very good shape. And I actually like some of the new features. I mentioned
01:42:13 ◼ ► MG Siegler opened my eyes to it. I had no idea. But they've added this feature for haptic feedback
01:42:22 ◼ ► Dave I can't go back. It is like... And on the Mini, to me, the very worst thing about the iPhone
01:42:31 ◼ ► Mini is that my fingers got used to the more generous, larger keyboards. And having the little
01:42:38 ◼ ► bit of haptic feedback, it makes me feel like I'm typing more accurately on the Mini. And just,
01:42:44 ◼ ► I love the size. I love... I've said this many times. I really hope one of my big hopes for
01:42:52 ◼ ► this year's iPhones, which is the sort of thing that for all the things that leak, some things
01:42:57 ◼ ► don't. We know so much about the sizes and stuff like that. But will the pros still use stainless
01:43:06 ◼ ► steel instead of aluminum or switching to titanium or something else? I find the steel to be so
01:43:12 ◼ ► heavy. Why would I want my phone to be heavier? And I know it's shiny. And I guess people like
01:43:18 ◼ ► that it's shiny and that it looks... But the fact that the Mini is aluminum... Because I bought the
01:43:25 ◼ ► iPhone 12 non-Mini two years ago. And I just love the weight. And I was so close to... I should have
01:43:33 ◼ ► bought the Mini. I really should have. And I was right that it's like I'm locked in. I'm going to
01:43:38 ◼ ► be locked in all year. I don't need the extra camera anyway. I didn't need the battery life
01:43:42 ◼ ► either. I never left the house. But the weight difference, even not the size, just the weight
01:43:49 ◼ ► difference between aluminum and stainless steel is so nice. The Mini, it's both smaller and it's
01:43:55 ◼ ► aluminum. And of course, I'm falling in love with it. The year that it's been widely reported for
01:44:07 ◼ ► I have long been a Mini fanatic. I mean, I had the... So I got the original iPhone SE. I guess
01:44:12 ◼ ► I had gone as far... I kind of forgot this, but I had gone as far as the 7. And then when the
01:44:17 ◼ ► SE, the original SE came out, I ditched the 7 for the SE and have not looked back particularly. I
01:44:23 ◼ ► had that phone for four years until the next, the second SE came out. And then I got that for six
01:44:32 ◼ ► months. And then the 12 Mini came out. Right. And then it's like the longer you go, the more of a
01:44:38 ◼ ► brick it feels like in your pocket because they keep getting bigger and they're using materials
01:44:42 ◼ ► like steel. And it really is... I guess people are... I don't... It doesn't seem like I see a
01:44:51 ◼ ► lot of people using an iPhone Mini out in the world. I still see... I still run into a few.
01:45:03 ◼ ► "Oh, I should have gotten that one." I wish you had because then it might have made another one.
01:45:10 ◼ ► I had the spitball theory back in... When these rumors first started that, "Hey, maybe they're
01:45:17 ◼ ► only going to do the Mini for one more year and then the next year they're not because it's not
01:45:21 ◼ ► selling well." And some of those supply chain things that they're like, "Oh, Apple cut orders
01:45:27 ◼ ► for the Mini 12 and... But upped their orders for the Max Pro or something like that." And
01:45:39 ◼ ► and especially like you. And I know Marco Arment is always on the fence. Oh, man, the Mini.
01:45:47 ◼ ► I had the spitball hopeful idea that maybe coinciding with COVID when stores were closed,
01:45:54 ◼ ► and even when they opened, a lot of people reasonably just were like, "I'm not going to
01:45:58 ◼ ► go to the store. I'll just order online." And you really had to see it and feel it to get, "Oh,
01:46:05 ◼ ► this is so much nicer and cuter and adorable." But I also think that one of the things...
01:46:12 ◼ ► I know Apple's timeline on these, especially iPhones, is so much longer than people think.
01:46:19 ◼ ► The lead time, the decision not to... Assuming it's true that all the rumors are true and there
01:46:24 ◼ ► will not be a new iPhone 14 Mini this year, that decision was made like two years ago. And I don't
01:46:31 ◼ ► know that they had sales data from the 12 Mini. And yes, by all accounts, it has sold disappointingly,
01:46:39 ◼ ► even by Apple's estimates, apparently. We don't know. Apple doesn't... Never, of course,
01:46:43 ◼ ► officially says anything like that. But it seems like that's probably true, that maybe it didn't
01:46:49 ◼ ► sell as well. But even if it had sold better, I don't know that... I think this decision was made
01:47:08 ◼ ► my hopeful idea that maybe once stores got reopened, there'd be like this shocking wave of
01:47:15 ◼ ► people buying the mini-sized phones apparently didn't happen. So maybe this one's wishful
01:47:21 ◼ ► thinking too. But my wishful thought is that maybe the current SE is the last, "Okay, we're
01:47:28 ◼ ► going to give you the home button interface, the touch ID button that you're familiar with and love.
01:47:35 ◼ ► But eventually we're going to move everybody to the iPhone X style. There is no more touch ID,
01:47:54 ◼ ► I mean, I would love to pay less for it. That was the great thing that I loved about the SE,
01:48:00 ◼ ► really. That was one of the phones that I would just buy outright and pay for it all up front and
01:48:16 ◼ ► Which is another interesting thing, because since they are discontinuing the mini and they are
01:48:35 ◼ ► supposedly if it's true, the non-Pro models and the big, the other, you know, for anybody who's
01:48:42 ◼ ► not staying up on the rumors, the idea is that there will still be four models, but instead of
01:48:47 ◼ ► the non-Pro having mini and regular size and the Pro having regular and max size, they'll just all
01:48:55 ◼ ► have regular and max and Pro and not Pro. So four phones, two regular size, two max size, and no mini,
01:49:06 ◼ ► but that the Pros are going to go up 50 bucks and then non-Pros will stay the same price,
01:49:11 ◼ ► but that they're already sort of have that $30 carrier fee weird charge that I still don't,
01:49:19 ◼ ► I still don't know what to tell people the prices of those phones. Like which one is the real price,
01:49:24 ◼ ► the one that Apple is saying that's like 800 bucks or the 831 that you get if you don't buy
01:49:30 ◼ ► it through a carrier. It's weird, but well, we'll see. Anyway, my fear about my spitball idea that
01:49:37 ◼ ► maybe the next SE will move past the home button. I have two fears on that. One is that because the
01:49:45 ◼ ► mini is unpopular, or not as popular as Apple had hoped, that they still want the SE to sell
01:49:52 ◼ ► in big numbers and that they fear that if the new SE, if the SE is only the mini, then people won't
01:49:58 ◼ ► want it because they'll think it's too small. And the other thing is that maybe I'm underestimating.
01:50:04 ◼ ► I don't, I, well, I mean, the screen size is larger though. Right. It is, but I don't know
01:50:09 ◼ ► what people, I don't know what it is that, I don't know why more people aren't buying the mini.
01:50:13 ◼ ► So they, I, you know. Well, I think it, I think it's, I mean, I think the SE is popular because
01:50:18 ◼ ► of price for the most part. So it's the cheapest phone that they make and it's still a good value.
01:50:22 ◼ ► And I think the other thing that might be a factor is you get with some older customers,
01:50:36 ◼ ► Did you see that story? So did you see him at the end of Endgame? He looked pretty old.
01:50:51 ◼ ► He went with like the 12 Pro or something like that, or 13. I can't remember which one he went
01:51:00 ◼ ► I think he, I think he got bad advice. I think so too. I think somebody led him astray.
01:51:05 ◼ ► But I truly wonder, cause I, you know, clearly even like, I don't know who the least technical
01:51:12 ◼ ► listener of this podcast is, but God bless you and I'm glad you enjoy the show. But whoever you are,
01:51:19 ◼ ► least, least technically minded person who enjoys listening to the talk show with John Gruber and
01:51:32 ◼ ► you're not the sort of person who's confused by change to the iPhone, right? You might prefer
01:51:39 ◼ ► Touch ID, but you, you're not confused by having no more Touch ID and swiping up from the bottom.
01:51:45 ◼ ► I worry it's so hard for me to be in touch with how many hundreds of millions or million,
01:51:50 ◼ ► tens of millions of people there are. My mom, definitely, my mom has right now the iPhone SE,
01:51:56 ◼ ► this, this current one, you know, when did it come out? Six months ago or 18 months ago, whenever.
01:52:03 ◼ ► I'm confused on that. Was it a year ago? Yeah. I don't know. Well, a little bit more than a,
01:52:07 ◼ ► a bit more than a year ago. She was due for a new phone. I knew it was coming and she just really,
01:52:11 ◼ ► They come out in the spring. She really just said, she just said, I just want one that works like my
01:52:16 ◼ ► old one. And I was like, this is easier for me and she's fine with it. So that's what she got and
01:52:20 ◼ ► she's very happy with it. I presume eventually they won't offer touchscreen iPhones anymore,
01:52:26 ◼ ► but I don't know how many years away that is. That might be, you know, that might be this,
01:52:30 ◼ ► like part of the new Apple dealing with a billion person user base for this product that they've
01:52:36 ◼ ► kind of got to stick with legacy, fundamental home button. Yes. The current SE came out in March of
01:52:44 ◼ ► this year. All right. Well, no, then maybe my mom has the previous one now that I think about it
01:52:48 ◼ ► because she didn't get it this year. So yeah, she's got the old, the previous SE, but if she
01:52:52 ◼ ► was in the market for a phone now she'd want the SE. Like if she dropped her cracked her phone right
01:52:56 ◼ ► now, she, she would get a SE. I'm not sure. I think my mom has to, has the current one.
01:53:01 ◼ ► Actually. I don't know what you, cause she sent me her old devices. She sent, I got a box full
01:53:05 ◼ ► of old devices cause I can't say no to anything. And one of her previous device was a 6S. And then
01:53:11 ◼ ► the one before that was the 3GS. And, and it's in, it's in beautiful condition because she,
01:53:20 ◼ ► I think it's very hard for anybody outside of JAWS we acts small leadership team to really know
01:53:28 ◼ ► how, how much of the SEs purpose, I mean, clearly the lowest price is a, is a number one, right?
01:53:36 ◼ ► That's, that's the job of the, that's the job the iPhone SE serves in the product line,
01:53:41 ◼ ► but how much of it right now is serving the desire for people to just replace their old iPhone with
01:53:54 ◼ ► feel more comfortable with a fingerprint sensor than a face sensor. Right? Like we've all,
01:54:03 ◼ ► people don't like change, you know? Yeah. I had a conversation somewhere. I think it was in a Slack,
01:54:08 ◼ ► I don't remember who it was with, but someone was like, Oh man, I don't want to get that face ID
01:54:12 ◼ ► thing. Get my face on the internet. That's not, that's not how it works. Right. But you know,
01:54:17 ◼ ► where do you start? Yeah. Start listening 353 episodes ago on John Gruber's the talk show,
01:54:25 ◼ ► 890 hours later, you'll be caught up. Actually, I guess that was in person. Cause I think Albert
01:54:30 ◼ ► was with me and we were like, no, no. Doesn't put your face on the internet. Well, anyway,
01:54:37 ◼ ► I fell in love with the mini again and I don't know what to do. I guess I just, I should just
01:54:40 ◼ ► stop. I know I should do it for four years. Like I did. No, I got to send it back to Apple. It's
01:54:45 ◼ ► a review unit. I should have sent it back. This is why it's not worth keeping these damn review units.
01:54:49 ◼ ► Yeah. That's right. Cause you just get tempted by other form factors. The other thing I've noticed,
01:54:55 ◼ ► and even on the mini, I kind of like it. It does seem like one of the under remarked upon changes
01:54:59 ◼ ► in iOS 16 is they're moving more stuff lower on the screen, like, you know, search boxes and,
01:55:05 ◼ ► and stuff like that. And you know, I think clearly it's about, you know, it on the mini,
01:55:10 ◼ ► it's not so big a deal, but on all of these phones, it's just, it's still better though.
01:55:19 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's a, it's a, it's a really interesting change that gets back to the way that on the
01:55:25 ◼ ► iPhone in particular, the physical ergonomics of it matter more than on any other device. And like,
01:55:34 ◼ ► why is the menu bar on the Mac at the top and not the bottom? You know, like in theory, you could
01:55:41 ◼ ► have the menu bar at the bottom and then the menus would pop up, you know, like the windows start menu
01:55:46 ◼ ► is at the bottom and pops up. You could do that. But I kind of feel that the menu bars role,
01:55:51 ◼ ► organizing all the features of whatever app you're using right now makes more sense to,
01:56:05 ◼ ► frequent, you know, the edit menu has the cut, copy and paste and undo at the top because they're
01:56:10 ◼ ► the most common things in the edit menu. And then the stuff at the bottom is usually the lead,
01:56:15 ◼ ► you know, look at the bottom of most of your menus. It's the stuff that you tend not to use.
01:56:19 ◼ ► And I feel like on the iPhone top bottom was sort of like 15 years ago, more common just because of
01:56:29 ◼ ► that thinking. Whereas as we've evolved and Apple's gotten more, you know, we've all habitualized to
01:56:35 ◼ ► it, they're really sort of thinking like, no, the actual physical ergonomics of putting stuff
01:56:45 ◼ ► Thumb reachability is more important than the sort of conceptual thinking of putting important
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01:59:23 ◼ ► year at once. Go to squarespace.com/talkshow. Last but not least, I wanted to fit in. This is your
01:59:31 ◼ ► area of expertise, the superheroes. I want to know what you think about Batgirl getting...
01:59:41 ◼ ► It was canceled. But is that the right time? After filming it, I mean, it was not done.
01:59:47 ◼ ► They had done primary shooting on it, is my understanding. And I don't think they had done
01:59:53 ◼ ► any of the sort of after effects or anything like that. But they had enough that they had done
02:00:04 ◼ ► like, they're saying, "Oh, it only got like 60% or whatever." I forgot how they do the numbers,
02:00:09 ◼ ► like six out of 10, which would be like a D. But it's not uncommon, it's particularly not uncommon
02:00:17 ◼ ► for DC movies to be released with scores that are lower than that. But when they show them initially,
02:00:27 ◼ ► they often get that and then they tweak them and they make them better. And so a movie that is
02:00:33 ◼ ► initially at that stage reviewed as a 60 comes out and it's an 80 or something like that.
02:00:41 ◼ ► An article I'd read provided several examples and I don't remember which ones they were, but
02:00:44 ◼ ► some of the DC Universe ones that were not so bad, many of them are quite bad, in my opinion.
02:00:51 ◼ ► I don't think they've done such a great job to date. So it could have been one of the decent
02:00:57 ◼ ► ones, but they decided that they were going to take a tax write-off instead. And they are...
02:01:02 ◼ ► And they're retooling their view of how they want to do movies and stuff, and I think that's okay.
02:01:09 ◼ ► They have decided they don't want to do sort of lower budget... And it was a lower budget movie,
02:01:21 ◼ ► HBO Max. And I think it's fine to redo your strategy, but it seems a little weird to redo it
02:01:32 ◼ ► right in the middle of a movie and not just say, "Okay, well, this is the last one." And then we're
02:01:38 ◼ ► redoing our strategy. Because you have gotten your fans sort of hyped up about, "Here's a movie about
02:01:44 ◼ ► a character that really hasn't been done much or well before and certainly hasn't had her own movie
02:01:53 ◼ ► and it is one of the few that is going to be led by a female and a woman who is of color."
02:02:17 ◼ ► corporate reshuffling where Discovery has acquired Time Warner, which is the studio in charge of all
02:02:26 ◼ ► the DC franchise and HBO and HBO Max, the streaming service, and CNN, Time Warner, and famously,
02:02:45 ◼ ► Yeah, right. So it raises concerns amongst fans, people who want either feature-length quality
02:02:53 ◼ ► movies, two-hour blockbuster movies that are good movies, or high-quality streaming content on HBO
02:03:02 ◼ ► Max, and why is the company that makes the Real Housewives reality—I don't even know if Real
02:03:13 ◼ ► Reality programming, which is very successful, but is that the right leadership to come in?
02:03:18 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, when you think of HBO in particular, and we think of what you want the DC universe to
02:03:24 ◼ ► be, even if it hasn't quite reached its best self yet, you don't think of reality TV stuff.
02:03:31 ◼ ► I mean, HBO is kind of famous for making some—a, some incredibly good and thoughtful content,
02:03:40 ◼ ► Right. Yeah, true. And that's what the brand stands for. HBO is to content what Apple is
02:03:48 ◼ ► to computers. The whole concept hinges on "we make the best stuff." And it's not that nobody
02:03:54 ◼ ► else makes good stuff, but that our stuff is good stuff. And that's—it's quality first,
02:04:09 ◼ ► making a CNN+ news streaming service before the acquisition, and then it launched—seemingly
02:04:18 ◼ ► rushed, I think, because they might have suspected, "Well, if we launch, they can't kill us."
02:04:23 ◼ ► Right. And it'll—I just know lots of people are going to sign up, and then they launched,
02:04:29 ◼ ► and then the acquisition went through, and like three weeks after it launched, the acquisition
02:04:39 ◼ ► And there were apparently very few subscribers. I mean, and it does seem—you know, sometimes you
02:04:47 ◼ ► have to try an idea and see. But it seems to me that, you know, lots of people are talking about
02:05:14 ◼ ► burner up on the monthly rates," maybe caught up to them, and then it went too high because
02:05:19 ◼ ► the price, you know—eventually you reach the point where people don't want to pay more,
02:05:39 ◼ ► but for the most part it's entertainment content. Disney famously, the whole company's brand for
02:05:51 ◼ ► don't want to spend extra money every month for news. And also, you know, I don't know—
02:06:06 ◼ ► of circle back to the opening of this show. I don't know, you know, the last maybe handful of
02:06:17 ◼ ► What would you like to hear more about? The lunatic in charge of both the nuclear man with
02:06:41 ◼ ► right? That's what he calls the whole area, the nuclear. At least if the worst he did was take
02:06:51 ◼ ► some of the paperwork about it with him in an unsecure way, it sure is better than doing
02:07:12 ◼ ► he had a red button installed on the desk that he could hit, and then a butler would come in with a
02:07:18 ◼ ► diet coke. And you know how he liked his diet coke? Apparently, everywhere he goes, he gets
02:07:37 ◼ ► And it comes, including at his own steakhouse in Washington, but every time he gets served a diet
02:08:02 ◼ ► but he is—but you know, and that—because that's the thing some of his supporters have always said,
02:08:10 ◼ ► If he's not smart, how did he get to be president? And it's true, he's smart and cunning in certain
02:08:23 ◼ ► We'll see how long. But he's also, I believe, savvy enough to know that he's very likely to
02:08:29 ◼ ► have his soda spit in. I think he knows. I think most likely it's spit. And I think, you know,
02:08:39 ◼ ► like that scene in Martin Scorsese's casino where the cops are ordering sandwiches from the mobster's
02:08:44 ◼ ► sandwich spot, and they're like, "Ah, yeah, officer, yeah, on the house, no money from you."
02:08:49 ◼ ► And then the mobsters making the sandwiches are spitting in them, and then they wrap them up.
02:08:56 ◼ ► Yeah, he's like, "See? See? That's how they get you. They do that." But anyway, they put a button
02:09:01 ◼ ► on the Oval Office desk, and he could just hit the button, and a guy would come in with an ice-cold
02:09:05 ◼ ► can of Diet Coke and open it in front of him. I bet that they put that button there not because
02:09:09 ◼ ► he wanted the Cokes, but to get the button out for launching the nukes. The man wants a button.
02:09:25 ◼ ► Could you say—I'll bet they're—I'm not making this up. Don't you think that when he got in,
02:09:38 ◼ ► Well, yeah, and where's—well, I just want to know where it is in case I need it. And they're like,
02:09:42 ◼ ► "What are you talking about?" And he's like, "You know, like, the button on 'Press Your Luck,' like,
02:09:46 ◼ ► the big red button that I hit to launch the nukes. The nuclear. How do I launch the nuclear?"
02:09:51 ◼ ► And they're like, "Girl, there really is no button. That's sort of a figure of speech."
02:10:05 ◼ ► we'll put the button on your desk. We'll hook it up to the nuclear eventually. But for now,
02:10:17 ◼ ► that's a little complicated." And I think he would nod his head and say, "Okay, but for now,
02:10:22 ◼ ► you can try the button, and it'll get you an ice-cold Diet Coke." And I think that that
02:10:28 ◼ ► might have been so distracting that he never really followed up on the hooking it up to the nuclear.
02:10:34 ◼ ► Yeah. Anyway, things after that got worse. There was a pandemic. You know, so the news—
02:10:41 ◼ ► The news has not been something people really wanted to pay for. I give this Zaslav credit.
02:10:58 ◼ ► Because no one was looking forward to that, whereas everybody was looking forward to Batgirl.
02:11:03 ◼ ► Not everybody, but lots of people. Lots of people were legitimately looking forward to Batgirl.
02:11:19 ◼ ► Yep. And I thought it was fantastic. You know, it's certainly, I think, the best Predator movie.
02:11:32 ◼ ► But I genuinely appreciated the way that it went straight through in the universe where the
02:11:41 ◼ ► Predator situation is real. It was plausible, right? It never got to cockamamie, which is where
02:11:48 ◼ ► all of these franchises tend to go, right? Because that was sort of the appeal of the original
02:11:55 ◼ ► Predator. Speaking, you know, of the former governors Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura,
02:12:00 ◼ ► right? Good way to launch a career in politics to be in a Predator movie. But it was, you know,
02:12:22 ◼ ► Yeah, but it messed with their infrared eyesight and, you know, and kind of cool, right? I like
02:12:37 ◼ ► Yeah, but Prey—so here's a question. I actually don't know. We did watch—the family watched it,
02:12:42 ◼ ► I enjoyed it, I'm glad it exists. It's a neat lower-key way of bringing the Predator series
02:12:53 ◼ ► and then when—but I guess I didn't follow it that closely because it's not a franchise that I'm
02:13:03 ◼ ► It just went to Hulu? But I thought that—this is an example of, you know, here's a movie,
02:13:10 ◼ ► and I don't think the budget was outrageous. First of all, they weren't spending a lot of money on,
02:13:26 ◼ ► And it is, you know, the lead is a woman who is a minority, and also, like, you can watch it in
02:13:35 ◼ ► Comanche. There's a Comanche—I don't know if it's a dub, I can't remember, but I think they—I
02:13:40 ◼ ► thought they said they filmed both. Anyway, you can turn on Comanche, which might be the better
02:13:43 ◼ ► way to watch it. We didn't—I was watching it with Hank, so we watched it in English. But—and
02:14:13 ◼ ► an all-time classic. It's very, very good. I'm so glad that it exists, and it is—but, and again,
02:14:18 ◼ ► I should maybe just give the elevator pitch. It's—some of the predators actually have been
02:14:23 ◼ ► visiting Earth for hundreds of years, and here's one who went to—what year does it take place around?
02:14:39 ◼ ► And one of the great things—I mean, again, I don't think that—I don't know, I hope it didn't even
02:14:43 ◼ ► get pitched, but, like, if this movie, that premise had been made when you and I were teenagers,
02:15:02 ◼ ► Right. And who can we get? Can we get Harrison Ford? How about Harrison Ford is like a pilgrim,
02:15:09 ◼ ► and he's on a boat, and then he comes in and kills them. No, it's just Comanche Indian,
02:15:15 ◼ ► 1710, North America, and, you know, terrific cast. It's a really interesting movie. You're talking me
02:15:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I just think they did such a good—I mean, I, you know, particularly because, like I said,
02:15:33 ◼ ► I think it's a franchise that, after the first one, you know, the second one's okay, and then,
02:15:38 ◼ ► you know, it gets really silly and gets, you know, goes downhill severely. I've heard moderately good
02:15:52 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Like, some people say, "Oh, no, it's not so bad," and other people say, "It's terrible."
02:15:57 ◼ ► So, I mean, I'm probably going to try and watch it just so I can sort of complete, you know—but
02:16:36 ◼ ► which people from Pixar you talk to. They always say, "Story, story, story, story, story."
02:16:42 ◼ ► And that they're famous for inventing 3D animation and turning the whole world of children's
02:16:47 ◼ ► animation from hand-illustrated to computer-animated, and the computers are what was novel
02:16:52 ◼ ► about Toy Story. And they're like, "You know what? That's just a—that's great, and we love that
02:16:56 ◼ ► stuff, and we think it makes for a better movie, but if we didn't have good story, this would be
02:17:00 ◼ ► terrible." And the "Alien vs. Predators" thing really seems like, wouldn't it be cool if "Aliens
02:17:04 ◼ ► vs. Predators" fought? And they're like, "Yeah!" And I think there's VFX people who did terrific
02:17:10 ◼ ► work, and there's—you could look at scenes—you could find scenes in those movies that are top-notch
02:17:15 ◼ ► action scenes and tense, tense, "Oh my god, I don't even know who to root for here, you know,
02:17:20 ◼ ► it's blah blah blah." But another problem with those movies, though, is the same problem,
02:17:24 ◼ ► was they still—they injected humans into it. It's like, "All right, how do we get some people
02:17:28 ◼ ► in here?" Where is it—wouldn't it be cool if the movie was just "Aliens vs. Predators" and there's
02:17:33 ◼ ► no people? Which was like the Wall-E story, the first half of Wall-E, where there were no
02:17:38 ◼ ► characters other than a cockroach and a robot, right? That's really hard cinematically, you know?
02:17:53 ◼ ► it still is an open question of, you know, I guess the problem—I presume the movie is actually just
02:18:02 ◼ ► terrible, that it's so bad that they looked at it and they're like, "This is so bad we should not
02:18:08 ◼ ► even put it on—just on HBO Max," which I think was the plan all along, that it wasn't going to have
02:18:14 ◼ ► a theatrical release. But they already have spent $90 million on it, and the idea is that they can
02:18:23 ◼ ► take a tax write-off on that. And the people who want "Batgirl" to be good, whether it's because
02:18:30 ◼ ► it has a female lead, because they just love DC superheroes, they just want more good superhero
02:18:38 ◼ ► movies. And, you know, why not? If you're a fan, of course you want every movie to be good, right?
02:18:43 ◼ ► No, who roots for a movie to stink? Sure. So you want it to be a good movie, and, you know,
02:18:49 ◼ ► people kind of latched onto this tax write-off, and it's like these rotten corporate bastards
02:18:56 ◼ ► are taking a tax write-off instead of releasing a good movie on HBO Max. I don't think it makes
02:19:01 ◼ ► sense, because it's like I don't think people understand that tax write-offs, they don't get
02:19:10 ◼ ► argument to me that, like, you know, it wasn't done, and so they would have had to spend a bunch
02:19:13 ◼ ► more money on special effects and whatnot. But it's not the bulk of it. And the other—I mean,
02:19:20 ◼ ► like I said, that 60% for an early cut is not that bad. You know, I don't know that it's going to be
02:19:30 ◼ ► a—I'm trying to think of, like, the best superhero movie—but, I mean, you know, Iron Man 1.
02:19:36 ◼ ► I don't think it's going to be something where you're necessarily—where universally everybody
02:19:48 ◼ ► "That was a solid superhero movie. That was enjoyable, and I didn't feel like I wasted my time,
02:19:57 ◼ ► - Right. You know, is it as good as the Han Solo movie? You know, which I thought was—I think is
02:20:17 ◼ ► watchable, but I don't think it's that great. And it's certainly nowhere near, you know—I mean,
02:20:26 ◼ ► - I don't know. I just feel like the Batgirl must be bad. And maybe not. Maybe they really—
02:20:38 ◼ ► thing. And the way it played out was on day one, they said very nice things about the directors,
02:21:09 ◼ ► - Right after the wedding, they got a call saying, "Oh, yeah, we're not doing your movie."
02:21:15 ◼ ► - They worked on Ms. Marvel, which I think was a really—you know, was a good show for Disney+.
02:21:23 ◼ ► that's the only thing that I've seen that they've done that I know of, and did a good job.
02:21:29 ◼ ► - And there was stuff, other stuff that people were looking forward to in the Batgirl movie,
02:21:36 ◼ ► - It's the same way that, like, real science came out at the same time as—what was the other one?
02:21:45 ◼ ► - Which is the one with Val Kilmer. But, you know, there's—it's like somebody comes out with a movie
02:21:49 ◼ ► about an invisible man, and then some other studio comes out with a movie about an invisible woman,
02:21:53 ◼ ► you know? And that these ideas come up, and it's like Marvel's gone in this multiverse thing,
02:21:59 ◼ ► and DC's going in a multiverse thing, and there's a multiverse in DC where Michael Keaton is still
02:22:06 ◼ ► - And so he's Bruce Wayne—or who knows, I don't know the plot if he's still actively Batman at
02:22:12 ◼ ► age 68 or whatever. - Yeah, I think he's just say, yeah, I mean, maybe they pull him out of
02:22:16 ◼ ► retirement, I think. - Right. But it's, you know, wouldn't that be fun? That's one of the things,
02:22:20 ◼ ► you know, wouldn't it be fun to see Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne again? That would be a lot of fun.
02:22:25 ◼ ► And all of these ideas are in there, and it's, you know, now it's just not coming out at all,
02:22:29 ◼ ► and it does seem—it just seems weird that you don't just let him finish it and put it on HBO
02:22:42 ◼ ► but it really curious me that on day one when they announced it publicly, they said very nice things
02:22:48 ◼ ► about the directors and the cast, and Leslie Grace is the name of the actress who was playing Barbara
02:22:54 ◼ ► Gordon/Batgirl, that they look forward to working with her again. It wasn't about the quality,
02:22:58 ◼ ► it's this financial situation and that they've incurred $55 billion in debt with this acquisition,
02:23:04 ◼ ► which is, I don't know if you know, that's a lot of money, and that, you know, they're taking a
02:23:07 ◼ ► tax write-up, but they look forward to working with everybody again. And they said all these
02:23:11 ◼ ► nice things, whereas in Hollywood, it's typically a cutthroat business. It's known as being a cruel
02:23:16 ◼ ► business, and you're hot until you're not, and then you're dropped, and, you know, whoever's
02:23:21 ◼ ► in charge, just is just a mean, you know, mean things happen to people all the time. They did
02:23:25 ◼ ► this, but I think what happened, I think very clearly what happened Hollywood-wide is the
02:23:30 ◼ ► unprecedented nature of a movie that's already been shot, $90 million have been spent, it's
02:23:36 ◼ ► nearly finished, and like you've said, the test screenings aren't catastrophic for it just to be
02:24:06 ◼ ► And then they gave it a black and white version. I mean, they gave that movie, which was, in my opinion, spectacularly bad. It was really incoherent. I completely agree. I mean, that really felt like a trip to the dentist. I mean, oh my. A trip to the dentist is shorter, at least. Way shorter. But I watched that one over like three nights, and I was like, "This has got to be almost over," and I'm like, "I'm going to bed for the night." Well, yeah, I mean, I watched the original, and then, you know, and then I kept hearing, "Oh, no, you got to watch the Snyder cut," and I was like,
02:24:39 ◼ ► I watched the Snyder cut, and that was one I had to watch by myself because my wife would not have
02:24:43 ◼ ► anything to do with it, but I watch, and I'm like, "I'm getting tired. How much is left? Maybe I should just stay up," and I look, and there's still two hours left. I was like, "Oh my God!"
02:24:51 ◼ ► So, yeah, if they released that and gave a couple versions, why not do this? But then what happened
02:24:57 ◼ ► the next day is Discovery had their earnings call, and Zaslav on the earnings call was a lot less
02:25:05 ◼ ► kind, not personally to the directors or the actors involved, but more or less set on the
02:25:10 ◼ ► earnings call. This movie was really, it was beneath our standards. I'm putting words in his mouth, but
02:25:15 ◼ ► shifted from this was all about the taxes and the debt to this movie was beneath the standards of
02:25:22 ◼ ► what we're trying to set for the DC franchise, which is a very different story because I think
02:25:26 ◼ ► what happened is all across Hollywood people are like, "Is this going to happen to me if I do a
02:25:30 ◼ ► project with Time Warner?" Because one thing I think is super true in a creative endeavor like
02:25:37 ◼ ► this—and yes, movies are about making money at some degree in the same way that selling computers
02:25:41 ◼ ► and writing software are about money—but the people who devote their lives to this really,
02:25:45 ◼ ► really care about their work and their craft. And I think in some sense, the Discovery thought,
02:25:52 ◼ ► you know, everybody got paid. Nobody's, the directors got their money and the actors got
02:25:56 ◼ ► paid what they were supposed to get, and I guess because it was going to be streaming anyway,
02:26:00 ◼ ► nobody was supposed to get a share of the box office, right? Everybody got paid, so it's all
02:26:04 ◼ ► good, right? But whereas I don't think they anticipated how the creative professionals,
02:26:16 ◼ ► Right! And it's like, hey, there are people in Hollywood whose career is miking the set to get
02:26:24 ◼ ► the dialogue recorded and that they take great care in doing it exactly right, you know, and
02:26:31 ◼ ► having the lighting be exactly right. And yeah, this thing you spent a year on, yeah, never even,
02:26:37 ◼ ► nobody's even going to see it. And people are like, "What?" And so I kind of felt like that's
02:26:41 ◼ ► why Zazzalov the next day went to, "Yeah, this one was really bad." So don't worry if you work with
02:26:48 ◼ ► Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to make sure that we can still get people to come work for us.
02:26:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, I don't think we'll ever know for sure, right? I mean, because it doesn't seem like
02:27:01 ◼ ► it's the kind of thing—I mean, maybe some of it might leak out, but it doesn't seem like it will
02:27:05 ◼ ► be—because I don't think they, you know, the people who made it, want it to be released in
02:27:09 ◼ ► its current form because it's probably not great yet, right? It's probably not. The special effects
02:27:15 ◼ ► aren't done. And, you know, and they often, when they, after they do, like, first screenings,
02:27:20 ◼ ► they're like, "Okay, we tweak this. We'll get them back in for reshoots. We'll do a couple
02:27:23 ◼ ► other things, and we'll make a, you know, at least a slightly better movie, if not a substantially
02:27:27 ◼ ► better movie." They don't want people to see it in its current form, so it's not going to get
02:27:31 ◼ ► released. It seems unlikely that it's going to get released and even leaked. So we'll never be sure.
02:27:39 ◼ ► But on the other hand, it certainly did raise my curiosity about what it actually looks like,
02:27:45 ◼ ► you know? Like, yeah, so I don't know. I agree with you, though, that because it's not like,
02:27:50 ◼ ► "Oh my god, it was totally finished," and you could just hit play, or it's, you know, like,
02:27:55 ◼ ► supposedly Kubrick's eyes wide shut. He died, like, 10 weeks before it came out and famously
02:28:02 ◼ ► liked to edit his movies right up to the very end, tweaking. And so, you know, I think most people,
02:28:07 ◼ ► they say it was officially finished, but if he hadn't had a heart attack, he probably would have
02:28:11 ◼ ► made just little nips and tucks here and there before it came out. It's not like that, right?
02:28:16 ◼ ► Like, where it was when he had his heart attack was totally playable in a Kubrick movie. You know,
02:28:21 ◼ ► Batgirl is clearly not in that state, and I don't know what—but it's—damn, the curiosity is so
02:28:27 ◼ ► high about it, right? Because wouldn't you—I would just like to see—can you show us, like,
02:28:42 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. Well, it was one of the—I think it was the last one of those, right? It was the one
02:28:46 ◼ ► with the—where they had nipples on the— Oh, that was Batman and Robin, where George Clooney
02:28:52 ◼ ► took over the role, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. And no fault of George Clooney's in particular.
02:28:55 ◼ ► He's perfectly fine, but— Yeah, and actually seems like a pretty good idea for Bruce Wayne.
02:29:01 ◼ ► Sure, yeah, I think he—yeah, I mean, honestly, I think Ben Affleck is pretty good. I don't blame
02:29:07 ◼ ► Ben Affleck at all. I think the story—you know, getting back to story—the story was just terrible.
02:29:17 ◼ ► Yes, yeah. I mean, he fits into that meme, right? Like, he's this guy who's just, like—and it works
02:29:23 ◼ ► for old Batman. Yeah, yeah, slump-shouldered. He's gotta freaking work with Aquaman now.
02:29:38 ◼ ► Anyway, that was a great discussion. Thank you, John. I hope you have a good rest of your summer.
02:29:59 ◼ ► Who was also mentioned. Guy—that's Guy English, friend of the show. But I'll bet Dan has time
02:30:04 ◼ ► to listen to podcasts, so congrats to Dan. Because he had a big summer, right? He had his next—
02:30:13 ◼ ► Released a book and had a baby. So, yeah, he needs some time off. I will also thank our sponsor. So
02:30:19 ◼ ► where do people get those podcasts, though? I mean, they could just type Rebound into their
02:30:30 ◼ ► reboundcast.com. I'll thank our sponsors one more time, our good friends at Trade Coffee.
02:30:36 ◼ ► I actually have run out of coffee as we recorded this show, so I can't slurp anymore. Ship Station,