ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Moving on, I have a quick HDMI update. If you recall... You mean a homey update? A homey update, that's right. I have a homey update.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Oh, speaking of, I don't think I'll remember to put in the show notes, but somebody had actually done a recreation of my god-awful diagram on an actual physical Newton, which was delightful.

00:00:18 ◼   ► And if the chat room can find it, I will put in the show notes, but I won't be able to dig it up.

00:00:23 ◼   ► And I would say it looks better than yours, by the way. It probably does. It probably does.

00:00:28 ◼   ► So yeah, my homey update. I had said last episode that I had seemed to kind of thread the needle and ride the line on doing a slower frame rate, yet still having 4K, I think Dolby Vision if I'm not mistaken.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Because, if you recall, I have old HDMI cables in the walls, and the Apple TV was not happy with whatever situation I had going on.

00:00:54 ◼   ► And I was able to get 4K Dolby Vision, but at like 30Hz or something like that. I don't remember the details, doesn't matter.

00:00:59 ◼   ► Well, as it turns out, over time... Oh no, I think I had it at 50Hz.

00:01:03 ◼   ► And over the next few days, as we continue to use the Apple TV, which all in all I really, really like, as it turns out, the 50Hz Dolby Vision wasn't good enough, and I had to keep cranking it back and cranking it back.

00:01:13 ◼   ► And I think I ended up at either Dolby Vision or maybe just HDR at 30Hz until I finally got my fancy new 8K certified, as Jon had a very good chuckle about, 8K certified HDMI cable from Monoprice.

00:01:27 ◼   ► And sure enough, I've had that plugged in for a couple days now, and everything is better.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Now, I've only done it by draping it over the TV and draping it down the side of the mantle above which the TV sits.

00:01:37 ◼   ► Please, I know it's too high, leave me alone. So it's not installed properly yet, but at least at this point I'm not getting flashes of blackness and disappearing audio.

00:01:48 ◼   ► So I know you are all very concerned about it, and I am happy to say that I knew HDMI cable didn't indeed fix the problem.

00:01:54 ◼   ► I understand how we got here and why we're here, but I almost want to go back to a time where if something changed about the cable, well guess what? You gotta change the cable.

00:02:04 ◼   ► It's a whole different connector, it's a whole different situation. Now that we have 34 different versions of it, not literally, but feels like 34 versions of HDMI and 307 versions of USB-C, that's frustrating.

00:02:18 ◼   ► I kind of miss the old days when it was simpler and you would just have to throw all your cables away every two minutes.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Yeah, there was downsides to that as well. I feel like before stuff is even out it's so complex. I had to order a new Wi-Fi access point today.

00:02:35 ◼   ► It turns out if you go under your deck to try to boost your Wi-Fi range outside and you mount under your deck, well mount is generous, you rest on a beam under your deck an indoor access point that is not rated for outdoor use.

00:02:55 ◼   ► Oh, that does not end well, does it?

00:02:57 ◼   ► And if it then rains heavily for four days in a row, apparently it doesn't survive that.

00:03:06 ◼   ► So I had to order a new access point today. Long story short, I had to figure out what Wi-Fi 6 means.

00:03:14 ◼   ► Is something that has Wi-Fi 6 on its name, does it support all of the parts of it or not?

00:03:21 ◼   ► How many of the different parts matter? How many of them are going to be backwards compatible if I have a multi-access point situation? There's all sorts of complexity there.

00:03:29 ◼   ► I heard too earlier, I was listening to Back to Work with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, and Merlin was mentioning that apparently there's, as part of the new Thread radio standard, which I'm not entirely sure if Thread is actually out and finished yet.

00:03:44 ◼   ► I know it's in the new stage, but I don't know if it's done, but apparently there's Thread radios in certain little gadgets and stuff.

00:03:53 ◼   ► But there's also HomeKit compatible versions of Thread, and not all Thread radios are even HomeKit compatible.

00:04:01 ◼   ► There's so much of these asterisks and exceptions to all of our new tech recently.

00:04:07 ◼   ► A port can't just be a port. A cable can't just be a cable. There's all these, "Okay, you got an HDMI cable, great. Well what kind of HDMI cable? What version port are you pulling it into on one end or the other end?

00:04:20 ◼   ► What spec does the cable have? We've seen all this too with USB-C, with Thunderbolt. There's so many little nitpicky crappy little details and gotchas and checkboxes and exceptions to so much of our tech now.

00:04:38 ◼   ► Maybe the world of throwing away our SCSI1 cables to upgrade to SCSI2, maybe that wasn't that bad, because at least you knew what you had, you knew what would work, and if it didn't physically fit, it wouldn't physically work. And that was roughly it.

00:04:54 ◼   ► That wasn't it at all. You don't have SCSI cables that fit perfectly and still nothing worked because you didn't turn your devices on in the right order.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe SCSI was a bad example.

00:05:03 ◼   ► SCSI is definitely a bad example.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Alright, John, tell me about raised blacks in the Apple TV and Dolby Vision and all that jazz.

00:05:12 ◼   ► Yeah, Kai Cantillo wrote in to say that the raised blacks in Dolby Vision on Apple TV that are fixed in the latest Apple TV are apparently fixed in the latest Apple TV hardware because he checked with the old Apple TV 4K but with the new TV OS and it did not fix the issue of raised blacks.

00:05:33 ◼   ► So somehow the raised blacks fix is part of the hardware. This is just one testimonial from one listener, but that seems really weird to me that there was some kind of problem that could only be fixed by a new revision of the hardware and wasn't fixed by TV OS.

00:05:50 ◼   ► But there you have it. If anyone else has different results, feel free to write in. But we were wondering and we got an answer.

00:05:55 ◼   ► Well, now we know. Tell me about one in two fan iMacs, please.

00:05:59 ◼   ► This is a YouTube video. We talked about this last week, I think, of the low-end iMac has just one fan, or maybe two weeks ago, and the higher-end ones have two fans.

00:06:08 ◼   ► So someone did a test and said, "What kind of difference does that make?" And it turns out it makes a much bigger difference than I would have thought.

00:06:14 ◼   ► So much so that it's all the more baffling why Apple only put one fan in the low-end one.

00:06:19 ◼   ► So what happens in the low-end one is that one fan turns on a lot more, spins a lot faster, and is generally more annoying and noisier. And even despite all that, the thing runs hotter.

00:06:31 ◼   ► So take a look at the video to see the results. I mean, obviously, you're running like sort of torture test benchmarks to really just maximize the CPU or maximize the GPU.

00:06:39 ◼   ► It's not representative of normal usage. I'm sure normal usage, one of these new iMacs, whether it has one fan or two, is generally pretty quiet. But pushed to the limit, that one with one fan, it seems to me, it would be better if it had two.

00:06:52 ◼   ► So word to the wise, if you're considering one of the fancy-colored new iMacs, among all the other reasons to consider the higher-end one, like having the extra ports and everything, consider it for this reason, too. Apparently, it's quieter and cooler.

00:07:03 ◼   ► All right, and this is your time to shine. Tell me about, if you don't mind, Jonathan Dietz's Apple Silicon cost estimate spreadsheet.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Yep, so this is all Jonathan's work, not mine. He is knowledgeable of the industry and tried, based on what we know from these rumors.

00:07:21 ◼   ► What the rumors say, try to come up with some monetary amounts for the various options for JDC die and the 4C one and all the different approaches. There's lots of detail in here. We'll put a link in the show notes. This is a public Google Sheet that anyone can look at.

00:07:36 ◼   ► In the left-hand column, there are a bunch of labels. Some of them I added a note to, to explain what they are after talking to Jonathan. So for example, one of the things like row 15 is die cost.

00:07:51 ◼   ► And that is, according to Jonathan, an estimate of how much Apple would pay TSMC for each good working die. So if you're wondering, what does Apple pay to just get the thing off the printer, so to speak.

00:08:03 ◼   ► And then there are things like the chip cost, which is the die cost plus all the other expenses, except the unpackaged memory. And then finally, there is the package cost, which is the chip, all the other stuff, plus the memory on the thing.

00:08:18 ◼   ► And of course, the package cost changes based on how much memory you put on the package.

00:08:23 ◼   ► So just to give a few numbers thrown out of the spreadsheet, Jade C die, which according to the rumors, is sort of like the building block of all of the higher end Apple Silicon ships.

00:08:35 ◼   ► Jonathan's estimate of how much does that cost Apple for each Jade C die that comes out of TSMC is $128.

00:08:43 ◼   ► And then the RAM, the memory costs, this is LPDDR4, the RAM costs are, if you get 8GB of RAM, it's like $34. And if you get 32GB of RAM, it's $136.

00:08:54 ◼   ► So if you get 32GB of RAM, already the RAM is more expensive to Apple, again, buying this from the suppliers, the RAM is more expensive than the chip.

00:09:05 ◼   ► And then if you try to do the package cost, which is the RAM, the main system on a chip, all the packaging, all the other parts combined there.

00:09:14 ◼   ► If you had an 8GB one of these, this is basically like the thing that goes on the motherboard.

00:09:19 ◼   ► An 8GB Jade C die would be $162, 16GB would be $196, and 32GB would be $264.

00:09:27 ◼   ► So this is the MacBook Pro-ish chip, right?

00:09:30 ◼   ► So those are pretty low numbers. Obviously, Apple's cost is not the same, but when Apple was buying these chips from Intel, they were more expensive than this.

00:09:38 ◼   ► And then at the other extreme, Jade 4C die, which is the big honking one in theory for the Mac Pro, this using the HBM2E, the high bandwidth memory instead of using the LPDDR.

00:09:49 ◼   ► There's some nuances by memory that we'll get to in a second.

00:09:52 ◼   ► But anyway, for a 32GB version of those, actually let's do the chip cost first. So the chip cost is $606.

00:10:00 ◼   ► And remember, that is roughly comparable to what we were talking about before, like the Xeon.

00:10:05 ◼   ► Because remember, the Xeon doesn't have any memory on it. The Xeon doesn't have GPU on it, right?

00:10:10 ◼   ► Or if it does, it doesn't have a good GPU. I had the same question and I never looked up the answer.

00:10:14 ◼   ► Does the Xeon have any integrated GPU on them or nothing?

00:10:17 ◼   ► I'm not sure. I mean, there's a lot of different Xeons. There's a lot of different families.

00:10:20 ◼   ► The ones that Apple uses in the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro, they don't have GPUs.

00:10:25 ◼   ► So this is like, how much does Apple pay TSMC to get something roughly like the Jade 4C die hot off the press?

00:10:33 ◼   ► $606, which is a far cry from what they're probably paying Intel for that Xeon.

00:10:39 ◼   ► And then of course you have the memory cost. And again, the memory, if you get 64GB of HBM2E, that's $560.

00:10:47 ◼   ► So now the memory, even at 64GB, is similar to the price of the chip.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And then the packaging costs are even more here because it's a more complicated package.

00:10:55 ◼   ► So the package cost for a Jade 4C system on a chip with 32GB of RAM is $886, and with 64GB of RAM is $1,166.

00:11:05 ◼   ► Again, these are all estimates, guesses based on rumors. So take this with all a grain of salt.

00:11:10 ◼   ► But let's say this thing really does cost, say $1,200 when Apple buys it, they get a thing that they can put on a motherboard on a Mac Pro.

00:11:18 ◼   ► It's hard for me to believe that they're going to mark that up to add $7,000 to the price of your Mac Pro.

00:11:24 ◼   ► Because that would be a heck of a mark up.

00:11:26 ◼   ► Isn't that hard to believe?

00:11:28 ◼   ► It is though, because Intel, if you buy the highest core count Xeon plus 64GB of RAM,

00:11:37 ◼   ► Intel is not selling you that, or no one is selling you that for $1,200 total.

00:11:41 ◼   ► So we'll see, we'll see what the markup is.

00:11:44 ◼   ► Here's a couple paragraphs about the RAM that I thought were interesting.

00:11:47 ◼   ► Just laying it out there, this is not our predictions, this is Jonathan's predictions, just to see how right he ends up being, or if this is all just way off.

00:11:55 ◼   ► Because again, this is just based on rumors.

00:11:57 ◼   ► So Jonathan says, "One thing that the sheet, meaning the Google sheet, doesn't fully explain is the memory situation.

00:12:01 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure there will only be a single Jade C die floor plan.

00:12:04 ◼   ► The Jade C chop will only have 16 GPU cores enabled, this is like what Marco said,

00:12:08 ◼   ► not due to yields on TSMC 5nm, which are apparently fantastic, but because without GDDR or HBM memory, there is no way to feed more execution units than that.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Sticking with LPDDR memory and an organic interposer will make that variant way less expensive and help keep it within the thermal envelope.

00:12:24 ◼   ► The single tile Jade C die for the 16" MacBook Pro will get up to 64GB of unified memory, but it will be tiered.

00:12:31 ◼   ► 2 stacks, or up to 32GB of HBM2E along with 2 packages are up to 32GB of LPDDR5.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Each tile will also include dual channel DDR5 memory controller which will support ECC RAM for the Pro Max,

00:12:44 ◼   ► which would then enable up to 1TB of DRAM for the Jade 2C die and 2TB for the Jade 4C die variant.

00:12:50 ◼   ► So there is a lot of predictions about different kinds of RAM for different Macs and support for ECC, R-DIMMs,

00:12:56 ◼   ► and using HBM here, LPDDR5 depending on the machine.

00:13:01 ◼   ► I have a hard time believing that Apple would have that kind of variety, even in the Pro Max that we know about,

00:13:07 ◼   ► like a Pro iMac, a big Mac Pro thing, maybe a smaller Mac Pro thing, like that's a lot of variety.

00:13:14 ◼   ► Again, look at the entire low to mid range of their line.

00:13:18 ◼   ► There is no variation, it's the same thing in every single one.

00:13:21 ◼   ► To think that they're going to mix 3 different kinds of RAM and all these different kinds of chips on the high end,

00:13:26 ◼   ► I find it hard to believe.

00:13:28 ◼   ► Jonathan has planted his flag and you can check out his spreadsheet and we'll see how things turn out.

00:13:34 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week by HulloPillow.

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00:15:27 ◼   ► [music]

00:15:31 ◼   ► Moving right along, Apple Podcasts app and show notes apparently are broken again.

00:15:35 ◼   ► Cool.

00:15:36 ◼   ► I wanted to put this in here because I wanted to ask Marco about it.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Do you know what the deal is for us?

00:15:40 ◼   ► People complain to us a lot about like, "Hey, I tried to go to your show notes in the Apple Podcasts app

00:15:44 ◼   ► and they either don't appear or they appear but they're totally unformatted and there's no links."

00:15:50 ◼   ► And for those who don't know, as the song that plays in our podcast describes,

00:15:54 ◼   ► you can find the show notes at atp.fm, which is a website, and there in your web browser,

00:16:00 ◼   ► you can then click on the links.

00:16:02 ◼   ► But in any decent podcast app, while you're listening to the podcast, you can also look at the show notes,

00:16:07 ◼   ► somehow within your podcast app in Overcast, you swipe to the left and you'll see the show notes.

00:16:12 ◼   ► In the show notes, we put links. Like, for example, there'll be a link to Jonathan's spreadsheet.

00:16:16 ◼   ► So while you're listening to the show, you can look at the spreadsheet that we're talking about.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Apple Podcasts, the brand new fancy version, apparently shows our show notes

00:16:24 ◼   ► but ignores all the HTML and formatting, so it's just a bunch of text.

00:16:27 ◼   ► So you can't click any links because it removes all the links and also all the indenting and the formatting.

00:16:32 ◼   ► So it just looks like a bunch of, you know, just randomly spaced text lines.

00:16:35 ◼   ► And I'm wondering, is this like, is this intended behavior?

00:16:38 ◼   ► As Apple said, by the way, we will refuse to render HTML in your show notes.

00:16:43 ◼   ► Like, I don't see the point of show notes if you can't include links because that's kind of,

00:16:48 ◼   ► I mean, I guess you could put a summary or description or something, but like for shows like ours

00:16:52 ◼   ► and for the tradition of many shows, things you talk about on the show,

00:16:56 ◼   ► it's great to give people links to them.

00:16:58 ◼   ► And I know we have a website that you can go to and do the same thing,

00:17:01 ◼   ► but it's nice to be able to do it from within the podcast app.

00:17:03 ◼   ► So Marco, do you have any insight into this or is this just?

00:17:06 ◼   ► Oh, plenty. I'm just going to try to limit myself for time.

00:17:09 ◼   ► All right.

00:17:10 ◼   ► Yeah, because this is not going to be a major topic tonight.

00:17:12 ◼   ► But Apple Podcasts has been going through a lot of changes,

00:17:16 ◼   ► some more of which I think we're about to get to.

00:17:18 ◼   ► But just for the show notes thing, the Apple Podcasts app,

00:17:23 ◼   ► I don't think has ever supported actual rendered HTML show notes,

00:17:28 ◼   ► or at least it hasn't supported them for a while.

00:17:30 ◼   ► What it's doing here is like the dumbest, simplest, like, you know, calling strip tags from PHP.

00:17:38 ◼   ► It's like, it's not, it's literally just stripping away the HTML tags.

00:17:41 ◼   ► It's not even fixing the white space problems that result from doing that.

00:17:46 ◼   ► It's like somebody's like, you know, CS 101 project of like how to use a regex to strip HTML.

00:17:52 ◼   ► It's like the worst possible way to do it.

00:17:54 ◼   ► And, you know, if they actually wanted to not support HTML in this field

00:18:01 ◼   ► that is very clearly supposed to be, you know, HTML inclusive in almost any other app,

00:18:06 ◼   ► I would hope they would put some effort into making it at least look more reasonable than it does.

00:18:12 ◼   ► But anyway, I think the real reason for this is that the design of Apple's Podcasts app

00:18:20 ◼   ► is increasingly diverging from the way podcast listeners expect things to be

00:18:29 ◼   ► who have listened to podcasts for more than a year.

00:18:31 ◼   ► There's these multiple worlds of podcasting.

00:18:35 ◼   ► The world of like big professional podcasts and mass market appeal largely doesn't use show notes.

00:18:43 ◼   ► Like if you look at the show notes for a big name podcast that, you know,

00:18:49 ◼   ► that people in your life, you as the podcast nerd, that somebody in your life would come up to you and be like,

00:18:54 ◼   ► "Oh, I just started listening to podcasts. I love blank."

00:18:58 ◼   ► You know, whatever podcast would be in that name, in that blank spot,

00:19:02 ◼   ► look up that podcast, look up its episodes and see if it uses show notes well, if at all.

00:19:06 ◼   ► See if there's any HTML anywhere in them or any attempt to provide useful information or links or anything.

00:19:12 ◼   ► And the answer's going to be no almost every time.

00:19:15 ◼   ► Because show notes like chapters or not running reruns in your own feed or not running crappy ads,

00:19:24 ◼   ► like this is the kind of thing that's increasingly being relegated to...

00:19:28 ◼   ► Germany.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah, Germany and like the nerdy areas of podcasting, like where we live, you know.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Nerdy podcasts that care about details like this and try to put production effort into that

00:19:38 ◼   ► as opposed to, you know, the mass market podcasts that barely even have links half the time for each episode.

00:19:46 ◼   ► Like you're lucky if there is a permalink to an episode.

00:19:48 ◼   ► So the Apple Podcasts app being used mostly by the mass market people

00:19:55 ◼   ► and most of the nerds don't use the Apple Podcasts app anymore.

00:19:57 ◼   ► It has driven them away if they were there to begin with.

00:20:00 ◼   ► The Apple Podcasts app is serving its audience in the sense that it has lowered its standards dramatically

00:20:06 ◼   ► for the metadata production level of podcasts.

00:20:11 ◼   ► And so this doesn't really impact most nerdy podcasts like us

00:20:16 ◼   ► because most people listening to our podcasts who would care about such things as show notes

00:20:20 ◼   ► mostly aren't using Apple Podcasts.

00:20:22 ◼   ► That being said, this is not good enough and they should fix this.

00:20:25 ◼   ► Because one of the weird downside of this is Apple Podcasts for...

00:20:31 ◼   ► I don't know if the current version does,

00:20:33 ◼   ► but most of the recent versions of Apple Podcasts have supported the technique of pasting in links,

00:20:41 ◼   ► like URLs as text, and then it like auto links the bare URL that's in the text and turns it into a link.

00:20:48 ◼   ► But then you have the giant ugly like, you know, HTTP, you know, big URL raw text showing to the user.

00:20:54 ◼   ► It has supported that for a while.

00:20:56 ◼   ► So unfortunately what this means is that if people want their links to show up in Apple Podcasts show notes,

00:21:02 ◼   ► they really should just enter them as bare links like that.

00:21:05 ◼   ► The downside is that makes them giant and ugly in every single other app as well.

00:21:10 ◼   ► That's not a great situation.

00:21:12 ◼   ► So we're going to hopefully be able to just be stubborn here and not do that

00:21:17 ◼   ► and continue producing our show notes the way they look good in the apps that all of you actually use,

00:21:22 ◼   ► which is mostly, you know, Overcast, Pocketcast, Castro.

00:21:26 ◼   ► It's like the nerdy apps because those apps are much more appealing to nerds like us and nerds like you.

00:21:33 ◼   ► And in the meantime, Apple is going to keep doing whatever they're doing with Apple Podcasts and best of luck to them.

00:21:40 ◼   ► It's turning out great for me.

00:21:42 ◼   ► I've had a lot of new users to Overcast in the last couple of weeks thanks to Apple Podcasts,

00:21:46 ◼   ► so they can keep doing what they're doing.

00:21:48 ◼   ► I wish they would do a little bit better just for their own sake and for the sake of the business,

00:21:52 ◼   ► but the path they're on, I don't fully understand.

00:21:56 ◼   ► I think it has diverged quite a lot from the world of podcasts and the way we expect podcast apps to work that we live in.

00:22:07 ◼   ► Fun.

00:22:09 ◼   ► It's kind of weird to me that the premium podcasting services that have Spotify exclusive podcasts

00:22:15 ◼   ► and all these other ones with their own apps and everything

00:22:17 ◼   ► don't seem to do anything to take advantage of their proprietary nature and make their podcasts better in terms of the interface.

00:22:28 ◼   ► Having deep support for chapters and show notes, that's just basic stuff that we can do on OpenRSS.

00:22:35 ◼   ► But if some company controlled the entire stack, like you can only play this in our app and we control our app,

00:22:41 ◼   ► you can do all sorts of fancy things with podcasts.

00:22:43 ◼   ► You don't have to wait for some kind of industry-wide consensus for additions to the RSS feed that are supported by a reader.

00:22:51 ◼   ► You can just do whatever you want. It's your own thing.

00:22:53 ◼   ► And you can make the listening experience even better.

00:22:56 ◼   ► We do chapter images and links to chapter images,

00:22:58 ◼   ► but they don't even support functionality equivalent to what you can do in a real podcast client.

00:23:04 ◼   ► Maybe they think that's not important.

00:23:07 ◼   ► Maybe for these mass-market podcasts people just hit play and that's it.

00:23:10 ◼   ► And only nerdy podcasts that have all these additional features.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Maybe it's because I'm nerdy.

00:23:15 ◼   ► I listen to a mass-market big podcast like This American Life and they're talking about something.

00:23:20 ◼   ► Maybe they'll be talking about a website.

00:23:22 ◼   ► And I will instinctively go to try to find the link to the website and be like,

00:23:25 ◼   ► "Oh, this podcast doesn't ever link to anything they talk about."

00:23:29 ◼   ► When you're listening, I guess you just go to Google and you type in words that you heard on the podcast,

00:23:35 ◼   ► but they know the link to this website or this author's book or whatever.

00:23:40 ◼   ► Anyway, I find it disappointing.

00:23:44 ◼   ► I don't understand. The big podcasts out there have substantial production staffs.

00:23:51 ◼   ► We make this show as three people.

00:23:53 ◼   ► Most podcasts out there that have a lot of listeners have way more than that on their shows.

00:24:01 ◼   ► They have a staff, they have a process, they have larger budgets and big companies backing them often.

00:24:08 ◼   ► I don't understand why they don't put in the basic effort to make their metadata,

00:24:14 ◼   ► the titles, the show notes, and chapters. They could do that.

00:24:19 ◼   ► The big dynamic ad insertion platforms don't support chapters.

00:24:23 ◼   ► Not because it's hard. It's actually trivially easy.

00:24:26 ◼   ► It's easier to alter the duration of chapter markers than it is to alter the duration of the MP3.

00:24:32 ◼   ► They don't support it because none of their clients have ever asked for that,

00:24:36 ◼   ► because none of them use chapters. I don't know why.

00:24:39 ◼   ► They couldn't be bothered.

00:24:40 ◼   ► Meanwhile, these companies go around investing in platforms and trying to get these big efforts together that are like,

00:24:47 ◼   ► "Oh, we want to be able to show timed metadata and pop-up links and promos during certain time-sensitive shows.

00:24:55 ◼   ► Wouldn't that be great?"

00:24:56 ◼   ► It's like, "Yeah, we can already do that."

00:24:58 ◼   ► That's literally what chapters are.

00:25:00 ◼   ► The standard has existed for 15 years.

00:25:03 ◼   ► You don't need to create some giant new platform to do this.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Today's platforms can do it. You're just not doing it, because I don't know why.

00:25:13 ◼   ► I assume it's mostly just ignorance that these things exist.

00:25:17 ◼   ► But even once they learn that these things exist, through people like us in Germany yelling at them,

00:25:22 ◼   ► they still don't do it. I don't understand.

00:25:25 ◼   ► I think a lot of the flaws in Apple Podcasts specifically can be traced to...

00:25:33 ◼   ► You can often tell when an app has had its design taken over by the business people.

00:25:42 ◼   ► You can see this in so many apps, so many services.

00:25:47 ◼   ► When you look at the way Apple Podcasts has taken recently,

00:25:53 ◼   ► and I can tell you this is a widely held opinion based on the emails and tweets and reviews I'm getting from my app

00:26:00 ◼   ► as people flee Apple Podcasts over the last few weeks,

00:26:03 ◼   ► it sure seems to me, and a lot of those people who tell me,

00:26:07 ◼   ► the new Apple Podcasts app seems to be designed by people who don't listen to podcasts.

00:26:11 ◼   ► I don't think that's unreasonable of an assumption.

00:26:16 ◼   ► I think it's very clear when the business people take over an app's design,

00:26:21 ◼   ► it starts to prioritize the goals of the company that makes the app

00:26:27 ◼   ► over the goals of what the users might actually want.

00:26:31 ◼   ► And it starts to treat the users more like sheep to extract more money from,

00:26:36 ◼   ► rather than like, "Let's make the best app we can to attract more users."

00:26:40 ◼   ► And that is, I think, where Apple Podcasts is going, unfortunately.

00:26:46 ◼   ► And again, while this is kind of good for apps like me,

00:26:51 ◼   ► in the sense that it drives listeners away from them and towards me,

00:26:54 ◼   ► I also don't love that they're kind of poisoning the ecosystem with mediocrity

00:26:59 ◼   ► and just really frustrating a lot of podcast listeners out there.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Because some portion of those podcast listeners who get frustrated by the Apple Podcasts app

00:27:07 ◼   ► will go and find apps like mine, but I think a bigger portion of them

00:27:12 ◼   ► will just be frustrated with podcasts and never realize they even can go look for some other app

00:27:17 ◼   ► and just kind of be upset with it and maybe listen to a few more podcasts in the future.

00:27:20 ◼   ► And I don't want that. I'd rather have Apple Podcasts be good and compete with them

00:27:25 ◼   ► based on them being good, rather than accept their fleeing,

00:27:30 ◼   ► disturbed fans who are upset about the terrible things that they're doing.

00:27:35 ◼   ► So I hope they get better. I hope they work through their issues they're having.

00:27:40 ◼   ► Because ultimately, it's not good for the business if the biggest app in the business

00:27:45 ◼   ► is not doing so well with quality.

00:27:48 ◼   ► Yeah, 99% Invisible is a podcast that I really enjoy,

00:27:51 ◼   ► and their show notes are the summary blurb and a link to the web

00:27:56 ◼   ► where they have a blog post for each episode.

00:27:59 ◼   ► And that's where all the useful information is, which is in contrast to what we do,

00:28:03 ◼   ► where we put all of the useful information in the show notes.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Imagine that, right where you can see them. Wouldn't that be convenient?

00:28:09 ◼   ► It's very frustrating.

00:28:11 ◼   ► Well, you know what else might be frustrating?

00:28:13 ◼   ► If we were participating in it but we are not,

00:28:15 ◼   ► is that Apple Podcast subscriptions have been delayed to this month.

00:28:19 ◼   ► I don't remember when they were originally slated to come out,

00:28:21 ◼   ► but they're apparently coming out sometime in June.

00:28:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it was late May originally, but I mean, honestly, this is not surprising.

00:28:27 ◼   ► I don't think it's that big of a deal. I think it's going to be a few weeks of a delay,

00:28:31 ◼   ► but they've had a lot of issues with the rollout of this.

00:28:34 ◼   ► They've had a lot of back end issues, a lot of issues with people's logins, server issues.

00:28:39 ◼   ► There was a period last week where this show just disappeared from Apple Podcasts for a day,

00:28:45 ◼   ► and this has been happening to many people's podcasts.

00:28:49 ◼   ► Honestly, what it feels like as a podcast service administrator,

00:28:55 ◼   ► it feels like they're doing some kind of large migration or rollout

00:28:59 ◼   ► across a bunch of servers and podcast accounts and stuff like that,

00:29:03 ◼   ► and it seems like part of this migration or update process that they're doing on the back end

00:29:08 ◼   ► pulls every show out of Apple Podcasts for a little while as it is migrated to something,

00:29:12 ◼   ► because it's happened to almost everyone I know who has a podcast,

00:29:16 ◼   ► but at different times, on a rolling basis across the last few weeks,

00:29:21 ◼   ► there's been all sorts of problems with Apple Podcasts.

00:29:23 ◼   ► So again, this is something that I don't take a lot of joy in.

00:29:27 ◼   ► I want them to be better because they represent such a big part of the ecosystem

00:29:33 ◼   ► that if anything about Apple Podcasts is bad, it affects the entire ecosystem in a pretty big way.

00:29:39 ◼   ► So I hope they get their crap together here.

00:29:42 ◼   ► And I think what this shows--and I don't intend here to insult the Apple Podcasts team specifically,

00:29:50 ◼   ► because the impression I always have gotten from that, and not from the actual people,

00:29:55 ◼   ► because they don't tend to talk, but the feeling I've gotten,

00:29:58 ◼   ► little things I've heard here and there, little things I've picked up here and there,

00:30:01 ◼   ► I think the Apple Podcasts team is fine.

00:30:04 ◼   ► It seems like they've always been really under-resourced for the problems that they have to deal with.

00:30:11 ◼   ► I think this lands right at management.

00:30:13 ◼   ► Whoever is above them and responsible for things like resource allocation and timing and release timing,

00:30:20 ◼   ► I think all this lands on them. It seems like this team has been just totally underwater

00:30:27 ◼   ► after this launch that feels to have been maybe a little bit rushed.

00:30:31 ◼   ► And that's to a team that normally doesn't have a ton of resources to do a lot and move very quickly to begin with.

00:30:37 ◼   ► So I hope management has learned from this a little bit, and I hope they clean up this mess quickly.

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00:32:48 ◼   ► May I be grumpy just for a moment and then we'll talk about fun things?

00:32:55 ◼   ► Sure.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Did you see this thing that Apple posted today?

00:32:58 ◼   ► Oh God, the disgusting like study they commissioned about how awesome they are?

00:33:02 ◼   ► Can I just, I really just need to get this off my chest.

00:33:06 ◼   ► I promise I'll make it quick.

00:33:07 ◼   ► So Apple today posted meeting pandemic challenges.

00:33:10 ◼   ► Apple developers grow total billings.

00:33:12 ◼   ► First of all, what the hell does that even mean?

00:33:14 ◼   ► And sales in the App Store ecosystem by 24% to 643 billion in 2020.

00:33:19 ◼   ► New study details how small businesses innovate on the App Store,

00:33:21 ◼   ► reach customers around the world.

00:33:23 ◼   ► This is the most nauseating, disgusting, although very cute animations in it,

00:33:30 ◼   ► disgusting puff piece about how they don't need to be sued into oblivion for antitrust.

00:33:36 ◼   ► I'm sure that's not the right vernacular, but you know what I mean?

00:33:38 ◼   ► God, it feels so gross.

00:33:40 ◼   ► And I'm sure since Apple has been a big company for a long time,

00:33:46 ◼   ► that they've done things like this for a long time.

00:33:49 ◼   ► But I feel like, golly, this is a far cry from what was it, thoughts on flash or whatever,

00:33:55 ◼   ► which was in some ways a similarly self-serving puff piece,

00:33:59 ◼   ► but was executed in so much less, in just an incredibly less gross way.

00:34:06 ◼   ► And I don't know, I see this and I understand what they're doing,

00:34:10 ◼   ► and it's just so gross, man. I don't like it. Am I being unfair?

00:34:16 ◼   ► I don't think so. I mean, I feel like, and part of this is just the time and the scale of the company,

00:34:22 ◼   ► but I definitely feel like in the Steve Jobs era,

00:34:26 ◼   ► when Steve was going to be a jerk to you, he would just come right out and tell you.

00:34:30 ◼   ► He didn't try too hard to BS us when he was being a real jerk about something.

00:34:36 ◼   ► It was much more honest about the jerkitude that he was conducting.

00:34:41 ◼   ► We're in a very different time now. We have a very different company,

00:34:45 ◼   ► a much larger company, a much later time. I mean, he's been gone now for almost ten years.

00:34:51 ◼   ► So this is a very different context here, but I have a very low opinion of Apple's leadership right now.

00:35:00 ◼   ► Very, very low opinion. And it's not because of the products.

00:35:04 ◼   ► The products are pretty good. I'm still excited about the products.

00:35:07 ◼   ► We'll get to that later. I'm still excited. I'm going to be excited next week about the products.

00:35:10 ◼   ► But wow, do I have a low opinion of Apple's political moves recently.

00:35:15 ◼   ► And I have very low respect for Tim Cook. My respect for Phil Schiller has decreased significantly

00:35:23 ◼   ► since the Epic trial and the stuff that's gone on there.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Apple is trying to defend a fairly indefensible position with their App Store politics

00:35:34 ◼   ► and all the commission BS and all their requirements and all the anti-competitive stuff.

00:35:39 ◼   ► What they're doing is very transparent. They're playing the politics game

00:35:44 ◼   ► and they're trying to really BS the world into their point of view that their current practices

00:35:52 ◼   ► with the App Store cut and everything are okay. And it's so blatant. It's almost insulting to our intelligence.

00:36:00 ◼   ► They continue to have all these self-serving puff pieces. "Oh look, we commissioned another study about how awesome we are."

00:36:07 ◼   ► It's just gross. It's a big company. There's a lot of people in the company.

00:36:14 ◼   ► I really respect a lot of people in the company and I really respect a lot of the stuff that comes out of the company.

00:36:19 ◼   ► And it's hard for me. I have very conflicting feelings because I love the stuff they make.

00:36:26 ◼   ► I love a lot of the stuff they do. And I know that there's a lot of really good people in that company

00:36:33 ◼   ► that are not bullshit artists the way their executives have been recently.

00:36:38 ◼   ► And I know there's a lot of people in that company that are not trying to insult our intelligence

00:36:44 ◼   ► and value the things that we do as developers and things like that

00:36:48 ◼   ► and are not super supportive of all the BS that the company has been spouting in this area.

00:36:54 ◼   ► And I want to continue to be a fan of all of those people and all the things they make.

00:36:59 ◼   ► But the people at the top are making it so hard because they're so completely full of shit.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And they're insulting to our intelligence over and over again.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And I hope that the regulation comes and the court battles work themselves out over the next couple years of appeals, most likely.

00:37:20 ◼   ► I hope this gets flushed out over a couple of years and then we can be done with this stupid issue.

00:37:26 ◼   ► And we can go back to enjoying the rest of the products.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Because it's a shame that the people at the top are throwing away so much reputation and goodwill

00:37:39 ◼   ► to try to defend a tiny part of the business that they don't even need.

00:37:44 ◼   ► And it's tarnishing the reputation of the entire rest of the company's output.

00:37:50 ◼   ► That a lot of people who are really good and making good stuff, their stuff is getting tarnished

00:37:56 ◼   ► and people are having a sour taste about the company because the couple of execs at the top are really defending this little garbage part of the business.

00:38:06 ◼   ► It's mostly about extracting rents from casino games for children.

00:38:10 ◼   ► Is that really worth it?

00:38:12 ◼   ► It's such a sour taste in my mouth and it's yet another "I don't like this side of the company and I hope that this era of this App Store drama ends soon so we can move on to something else."

00:38:29 ◼   ► I couldn't agree more. It's so frustrating because, like you had said, there's so much about this company and the products that they make. And all of us know a bunch of people that work there.

00:38:42 ◼   ► So much about it is admirable and is so great and deserves our praise.

00:38:46 ◼   ► And then the direction it's gone lately, particularly with regard to legal issues, it's so frustrating. It makes it hard for me to enjoy the totality of what is Apple Inc.

00:39:00 ◼   ► And I don't know, I'm probably getting unreasonably worked up about what is ultimately a company made to remove my money from my wallet.

00:39:08 ◼   ► But I don't know, as we've talked about in the past, it's our team. We like our team. We want our team to do well.

00:39:13 ◼   ► And I feel like it's not even that our team is in a slump to just absolutely beat this metaphor to death, but it's that our team is willfully getting rid of all of its star players so that it can get these untested and unproven people that are a lot cheaper.

00:39:32 ◼   ► Okay, that's a strategy, and it may pay off, but it's not a really good strategy. I like the people we were already rooting for. Why do we have to go this other direction?

00:39:44 ◼   ► It's just so frustrating. It makes it hard to be a fan of the totality of what is Apple.

00:39:50 ◼   ► And again, I'm probably being unreasonably, I don't know if emotional is a word, or worked up, or whatever.

00:39:55 ◼   ► But there's so much about Apple stuff that makes me so happy, and so much that it enables me to do that makes me happy.

00:40:02 ◼   ► It's because of Apple stuff that over the last year and a half I've been able to keep up friendships and family relationships and see people from far away.

00:40:13 ◼   ► I mean, I remember, as silly as it sounds, I remember going to Singleton with you, Marco, in 2011, 2012, something like that.

00:40:21 ◼   ► Maybe it was after that, I don't remember if ATP was a thing or not. But anyways, we went to Singleton, you and I. You had been a couple times, I only went once.

00:40:28 ◼   ► And this was right after FaceTime, and FaceTime audio were a thing. And I remember I was in Montreal, and I could call Aaron on Wi-Fi for free.

00:40:39 ◼   ► Which sounds kind of dumb, but at the time that was monumental. If I had gone just a few months before to Singleton, like if it was hypothetically in spring instead of fall,

00:40:49 ◼   ► the only way I could have spoken to Aaron was using something awful like Skype, or doing an international call. Or at least that's the way I remember.

00:40:58 ◼   ► Maybe that's not factually true, but that's the way I remember it. And all I had to do to call Aaron was do a FaceTime audio call. It was easy peasy.

00:41:04 ◼   ► And you know what? It just frickin' worked. And it's stuff like that that I don't want to lose sight of all the incredible things that Apple has done for people and for me.

00:41:14 ◼   ► I mean, God, my living is made through Apple. It's either talking about Apple or building stuff for Apple platforms. But nevertheless, it's so frustrating.

00:41:23 ◼   ► It makes me feel gross by association when I read these puff pieces, these absolutely disgusting puff pieces that you would expect to see come out of like, I don't know, Adobe or Sun.

00:41:32 ◼   ► Or I don't know, some big gross business. I don't know. That was a poor example. But just some big gross business. Facebook maybe. Like some big gross business that none of us like would do this sort of self-indulgent puff piece.

00:41:47 ◼   ► And now Apple's doing it. It's just, it's gross. I don't like it.

00:41:51 ◼   ► I want nothing more than to just be purely excited for WBCC next week. Our next show is going to be the WBCC show. And I want nothing more than just to be happy and excited about that and to be looking forward to it in a more pure way.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And this year I can't do that. I'm less excited than ever this year. And I hate that. I hate that they've put me in this position to feel any kind of toxic feeling towards them as a company.

00:42:15 ◼   ► Because they've just been so gross recently with the court case and all this stuff. The things that they've said on the stand, the positions they've held, they've just been so gross.

00:42:26 ◼   ► And then they go put out these self-serving studies that are just very thinly veiled political BS things. It's just like, I don't like feeling this way about this company that I otherwise like so much.

00:42:38 ◼   ► Well, I think I am considerably less upset about this than both of you. I mean, obviously the context of this press release doesn't exist in a vacuum, right?

00:42:47 ◼   ► Part of the thing that you were both complaining about, this press release, isn't just the content of the press release, but the fact that there is a counterpart.

00:42:55 ◼   ► Oh, I see what this is about. It's about the court case and the government action and all the other stuff. And that's what kind of that combination makes us look different.

00:43:03 ◼   ► But in general, Apple has always done PR stuff like this. And they have always bragged about the revenue they generate in the app store and how big of a check they give to developers.

00:43:14 ◼   ► And this is just an elaboration on an established strategy of them saying, here's what we think is good.

00:43:19 ◼   ► And if you actually read the press release, unlike the court testimony, which many developers are rightfully upset about because, again, I think because Apple has to sort of present the information and the legal argument that will win them the case.

00:43:35 ◼   ► Or, well, whether or not they have to, that seems to be what they're doing. And that is necessarily, it cares less about your feelings.

00:43:42 ◼   ► But this press release is more or less, you know, yes, it's a puffy thing of saying Apple, you know, saying here's how great we are.

00:43:50 ◼   ► But the things they say in it are not really wrong and not particularly objectionable. And at no point do they do the things they did in the trial and in the various internal emails that we've seen where they, you know, act in nefarious ways or claim ownership of things that developers feel like are not theirs to claim ownership of or make disingenuous claims about the nature of the market.

00:44:11 ◼   ► And all this other stuff, it's generally just a straight forward press release. I know where you're both coming from emotionally speaking, but I have a hard time getting worked up about this press release.

00:44:20 ◼   ► I mean, like, I think I was more worked up the first 17 times they put up a slide that said how many billions of dollars they paid to developers.

00:44:27 ◼   ► And even that through repetition, I've become sort of used to or whatever.

00:44:31 ◼   ► So I'm with you on the and we'll get to this maybe later in the show, I'm with you on the sort of reputational damage that Apple has to deal with in terms of its relationship with its developer base.

00:44:41 ◼   ► And that is surely a big focus of WWDC because this is their conference where they ostensibly talk to developers.

00:44:48 ◼   ► But I'm mostly not bothered by this press release and mostly able to just look forward to the announcements of WWDC and see what it is that Apple does, if anything, to try to repair this relationship.

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00:46:39 ◼   ► [Music]

00:46:43 ◼   ► All right, so let's be happy. Let's get excited about WWDC.

00:46:45 ◼   ► And we can talk about predictions in any which way, shape, or form.

00:46:50 ◼   ► I don't know if we want to do it by subject matter, but I guess broadly, as much as I'm down in the dumps about some of the stuff Apple's doing right now,

00:46:59 ◼   ► broadly, I'm really excited for this WWDC.

00:47:02 ◼   ► I really, and this is not an original thought, but I feel like there's a lot of smoke coming from Cupertino,

00:47:08 ◼   ► and it's looking like there might be some fire behind it.

00:47:11 ◼   ► So I feel like this should be a pretty good one.

00:47:16 ◼   ► In terms of the consumer side of things, I'm not terribly convinced it's going to be particularly remarkable from the developer side of things,

00:47:23 ◼   ► but from the consumer side of things, I'm really looking forward to it.

00:47:26 ◼   ► So I don't know, is this the year that we get vastly improved iPad software?

00:47:33 ◼   ► Is iPad OS really going to come into its own this year?

00:47:35 ◼   ► Before we leave the dump, real quick, a lot of...

00:47:38 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:47:40 ◼   ► Let me reenter the dump briefly.

00:47:41 ◼   ► Oh, I tried.

00:47:42 ◼   ► A lot of people think that Apple will announce something at WWDC that will help repair the developer relationship in some way,

00:47:52 ◼   ► whether it's a change to App Store policies or whatever.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And I just want to go on record as saying I don't think there's going to be anything of the sort.

00:48:01 ◼   ► I think if they're going to do that, it would be a totally separate thing that would not be held for WWDC.

00:48:09 ◼   ► That's a whole separate thing, and I don't expect anything like that.

00:48:12 ◼   ► I think this is going to be, if anything, it's going to be intentionally a diversion away from all of that

00:48:19 ◼   ► to focus on the new tech stuff and hopefully get all of us to temporarily forget how much they've angered us over the last year or two.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Not that we want to go into that immediately about how they can repair the relationship,

00:48:33 ◼   ► but I feel like one category of thing there that is a tech thing but also would help repair the relationship in a strange way

00:48:40 ◼   ► is one of Casey's favorite things.

00:48:42 ◼   ► If they announce vastly improved documentation, no, it's not like, "Oh, we're taking a smaller cut of the App Store,

00:48:48 ◼   ► now you're allowed to use your own payment."

00:48:49 ◼   ► It's not that. I know what you're getting at.

00:48:51 ◼   ► But if they do say, "Oh, and by the way, here is the culmination of our secret year-long let's fix all the documentation project,"

00:48:59 ◼   ► that would help.

00:49:01 ◼   ► I know it's a different thing. It's like, "Oh, how does that help me?"

00:49:03 ◼   ► It doesn't help me anything with my app that you rejected or the fact that you won't let me use the payment method,

00:49:08 ◼   ► but it does help make developers happier.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Just giving them a good thing over here doesn't make the bad thing go away, but it does make you feel a little bit better.

00:49:16 ◼   ► So I think that category of stuff where it's developer tools, developer experience,

00:49:22 ◼   ► falls into the category of, and I'm mostly with Marco, of Apple's going to show us all the new things they have

00:49:29 ◼   ► and try to get developers excited about it.

00:49:31 ◼   ► New hardware, new software, and new tools for you to get your job done.

00:49:35 ◼   ► Part of that is potentially vastly improved documentation.

00:49:38 ◼   ► Not that I'm predicting that at this point, but I think that is a plausible thing that they could announce.

00:49:43 ◼   ► As opposed to what Marco was getting at, saying, "Oh, and by the way, today we're announcing you're allowed to use any payment method,"

00:49:48 ◼   ► because that seems highly unlikely.

00:49:51 ◼   ► Yeah, the documentation in that would be amazing. Talk about what would get a massive applause in the room,

00:49:59 ◼   ► but I just think it's unlikely. I think that's the kind of thing that if they're going to do it, they might do it more quietly,

00:50:06 ◼   ► and just over time. And honestly, even if they announced some kind of new documentation effort,

00:50:11 ◼   ► I'm not sure I would believe it unless I saw it.

00:50:13 ◼   ► It might be like, "Oh, we're going to document all this stuff." Really? Will you? How far back have you gone? Is it done yet?

00:50:19 ◼   ► That being said, before I forget, I don't know, I would probably never have an opportunity to bring this up otherwise,

00:50:24 ◼   ► but I recently had to re-look up some documentation for some of my favorite functions, the VDSP functions in the Accelerate library.

00:50:33 ◼   ► And they have amazing documentation.

00:50:36 ◼   ► Oh yeah?

00:50:37 ◼   ► Because these are mostly functions that do math operations on large arrays of numbers.

00:50:42 ◼   ► And they have graphs that show if you apply this function, the results will look like this graph on your number.

00:50:53 ◼   ► It's actually really well-documented, which is kind of funny because the functions themselves are comically unintuitive if you've never seen them before.

00:50:59 ◼   ► The names of the functions and the parameter names, it looks like just garbage soup of letters that mean nothing if you're new to it.

00:51:07 ◼   ► But the documentation is really good. And so clearly, some of the teams in Apple have the ability to make good documentation.

00:51:17 ◼   ► So that's why I don't think the company is somehow opposed to it. I just think they're just not allocating the resources.

00:51:23 ◼   ► I mean, this is kind of the story of Apple, but they have infinite money, but they don't have infinite engineering resources or time or technical writing resources.

00:51:35 ◼   ► Whatever combination of resources is required to make good documentation.

00:51:40 ◼   ► And I think it's just a matter of management needs to allocate more resources to this problem.

00:51:47 ◼   ► And that might mean expanding certain departments in a big way that might be harder to do than just throw money at it.

00:51:52 ◼   ► But they can do it. There's nothing stopping them from having the best documentation in the world.

00:51:59 ◼   ► They could do it if they wanted to. And I hope that someday management will want to.

00:52:06 ◼   ► Because that's all it would take. It's not going to be super easy. I'm sure there's hard challenges involved in expanding certain things.

00:52:13 ◼   ► But if they want to make great documentation, they can. If anybody can do it, it's them.

00:52:19 ◼   ► And I hope they start valuing that at some point.

00:52:24 ◼   ► A man can dream. I don't know. I got some interesting feedback after I wrote that post in November about their piss-poor documentation.

00:52:32 ◼   ► And it sounds to me like there are some pretty systemic issues within Apple that is preventing any sort of real honest-to-goodness improvement happening.

00:52:41 ◼   ► Unless, you know, since I spoke with some of these people, maybe things have changed since then.

00:52:45 ◼   ► Certainly I wrote this blog post in hope that it would get passed around and something would happen because gosh knows that anything we say on this podcast, nobody ever hears it that matters.

00:52:54 ◼   ► But, nevertheless, we try.

00:52:56 ◼   ► No, no, no. You'd be surprised. They hear it. But, you know, as some podcaster once said, I forget who it was, "Success hides problems."

00:53:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I have heard that somewhere. I wish I knew who it was.

00:53:10 ◼   ► I didn't make that up. It's from a book.

00:53:12 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:53:14 ◼   ► It was a Pixar one, wasn't it? By Catmull?

00:53:16 ◼   ► Yeah, Ed Catmull's book, yeah.

00:53:18 ◼   ► All right. I'm the one who brought us to the dumps. Let me bring us back out. All right, let's talk about happy things.

00:53:23 ◼   ► Is this the year, John Syracuse, is this the year for iPadOS to really shine?

00:53:27 ◼   ► I actually prefer to start with hardware.

00:53:29 ◼   ► Good talk.

00:53:31 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:53:33 ◼   ► I'm picturing the artwork for this episode just being a bunch of trains just derailing and just like...

00:53:38 ◼   ► John, no. We're hovering around the topic. It's about W2W-sian predictions.

00:53:42 ◼   ► And the reason I want to talk about hardware is this is always the debate of like how much does Apple want to talk about hardware at WWDC?

00:53:48 ◼   ► Because really, unless the hardware has some new feature that they want developers to support, like say they're putting out a bunch of VR glasses,

00:53:54 ◼   ► like that's hardware that clearly has a developer focus. But if the answer is, "Oh, it's just like a new laptop or something,"

00:54:00 ◼   ► there's probably not much for people to do development-wise differently to support the new MacBook Pros than the old MacBook Pros, right?

00:54:09 ◼   ► Or we assume based on the rumors. But Apple does choose to do that because as it often says, developers are their biggest pro customers or whatever they say.

00:54:17 ◼   ► And most developers use laptops because most people use laptops and developers are people.

00:54:22 ◼   ► So MacBook Pros at WWDC make sense. But beyond that, the times like, "Didn't they do the Mac Pro at WWDC?"

00:54:31 ◼   ► "Oh, we're going to do the Mac Pro at WWDC just because it's been so freaking long and it's done and we have to announce it," right?

00:54:36 ◼   ► It's not a huge developer angle. But anyway, if they have pro hardware and it happens to be around WWDC, it seems like they want to announce it.

00:54:45 ◼   ► But they also want to leave time for potentially software stuff. So we'll talk about software in a bit, but I want to start by saying,

00:54:51 ◼   ► what do you think hardware-wise makes sense for them to announce at this event?

00:54:57 ◼   ► We still don't know because, again, it's not like these have Intel chips in them so we have no timelines.

00:55:01 ◼   ► We have no idea if the chips that we keep talking about, those rumors, maybe they've been done for months, maybe they're not going to be done for six months.

00:55:07 ◼   ► That really determines whether they can launch any hardware because I don't think they're going to launch another crop of M1-based Macs.

00:55:14 ◼   ► I think they've put the M1 in every Mac they could think of. So it's either the new, better than M1 thing is ready in some reasonable timeframe or it's not.

00:55:24 ◼   ► I don't think we have any information, I certainly don't personally have any information on whether the new, better than M1 thing is ready.

00:55:33 ◼   ► So I'm just going to assume that it is and say, assuming it is ready, what do we think they would announce?

00:55:38 ◼   ► And the only prediction that I feel comfortable with is MacBook Pros. I don't think there's going to be a Mac Pro, I can't even feel confident that there would be the Pro iMac or a bigger iMac.

00:55:50 ◼   ► I feel like MacBook Pros is the one and only thing that I have any reasonable feelings about appearing on stage in this thing and then beyond that everything would be gravy.

00:56:01 ◼   ► What do you think about hardware for this show?

00:56:03 ◼   ► I don't know. I think you're right that if it's anything it's going to be a MacBook Pro, preferably the new 16 or what have you.

00:56:11 ◼   ► But when's the last time they did a MacBook Pro or really any Apple laptop at WWDC, has that happened?

00:56:18 ◼   ► And when they're ready, the original retina, 15 inches.

00:56:20 ◼   ► 2012.

00:56:21 ◼   ► WWDC, right? It's like when they're ready and that is probably the most popular machine for developers who have a "pro machine".

00:56:31 ◼   ► Oh, totally.

00:56:32 ◼   ► Right? And so I think it fits perfectly in the show even though again there's not anything you have to do to do.

00:56:37 ◼   ► It's like introducing a tool. If you think of your audience as developers, "Oh, here developers you were looking for a new tool to do your job.

00:56:43 ◼   ► This one is way better than the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro." And assuming the rumors are true, it's got all the ports and it's got MagSafe and it's got SD and it's got a great screen and it's got an ARM processor.

00:56:54 ◼   ► It's a perfect product to announce at this time. And again, assuming the chip is ready, I feel like that is a shoo-in and it makes perfect sense.

00:57:01 ◼   ► But beyond that, is it important for them to announce the iMac that uses the same chip as that?

00:57:08 ◼   ► Probably not and they just announced the other iMac so that doesn't seem like it would work.

00:57:12 ◼   ► I don't think the Super Duper Pro ones are ready yet. Again, what am I basing that on? Nothing really.

00:57:17 ◼   ► Just the tradition that the Mac Pro size thing always takes longer and is less important and they wouldn't waste time with it at the show.

00:57:26 ◼   ► Even with the M1, it's not like they released all those M1 Macs at the same time.

00:57:30 ◼   ► And you can say, "Well, what were they waiting for?" Maybe they were waiting for more M1 system-mounted chips to be ready.

00:57:36 ◼   ► Maybe they just weren't done designing those Macs. But just because the heart of the machine is ready, doesn't mean they're ready to release the Macs.

00:57:45 ◼   ► So I just feel like it's MacBook Pro. If anything, MacBook Pro and then nothing else.

00:57:50 ◼   ► I'm guessing that's mostly right. The only thing I would add, so yeah, I think you're right, that probably not the big iMac because they just did iMacs and I think if they were going to do the big one, they would have done it at the same time.

00:58:03 ◼   ► I think the only thing we're likely to see beyond the MacBook Pro might be the higher-end Mac Mini that uses the same CPU as the MacBook Pro.

00:58:12 ◼   ► That is rumored to be a product that exists in their lineup. We'll see if it actually is. I think it makes sense to have that.

00:58:19 ◼   ► And then that could tie developers over for their high-end desktop needs for a little while longer until the maybe iMac or iMac Pro, whatever the big iMac is called, I assume iMac Pro.

00:58:32 ◼   ► And then hopefully someday the mini Mac Pro that uses the 2C and 4C JADIs.

00:58:38 ◼   ► That ties into the potential for an Apple, a non-ridiculously priced Apple monitor to connect to your MacBook Pro or new Mac Mini.

00:58:46 ◼   ► If that thing exists at all and it's remotely ready, yeah, sure, introduce it with the MacBook Pros and potentially the Mini, right?

00:58:56 ◼   ► That would be amazing, but I don't think it's going to be ready yet.

00:58:58 ◼   ► No, certainly not. But to that end, Jon, what would happen first, do you reckon?

00:59:02 ◼   ► Do you think that we will get a standalone non $35,000 monitor or do you think that I'll actually get documentation that doesn't suck?

00:59:11 ◼   ► Monitor. The problem with the monitor question is I'm not sure that that product exists at all, like will ever be released. So it's hard for me.

00:59:19 ◼   ► I'm not sure that good documentation will ever be released.

00:59:21 ◼   ► That's facts.

00:59:23 ◼   ► The thing about documentation is, like you just noted, Marco, there are islands of good documentation. It's just a matter of spreading them.

00:59:30 ◼   ► It's not like if they don't have some sort of universal company wide effort, it's not like all the documentation is going to go from bad to good in one day.

00:59:37 ◼   ► It would just be like documentation was previously like 50% acceptable and 50% unacceptable and it changes to 60/40.

00:59:46 ◼   ► And at what point do you say, "Yay, Apple has fixed their documentation."

00:59:49 ◼   ► I hope the trend is positive and that it's getting better and not worse after a long slide in the other direction.

00:59:56 ◼   ► But it's hard to say, like Casey trying to say it as a point in time.

00:59:59 ◼   ► Releasing of a monitor is a thing that either happens or it doesn't as an event.

01:00:02 ◼   ► Good documentation is a journey.

01:00:05 ◼   ► Oh my gosh, I have regrets.

01:00:09 ◼   ► I think you're right that a MacBook Pro would make the most sense. Certainly I have been itching to get myself an M1 or equivalent Mac.

01:00:19 ◼   ► I don't have any real complaints about either my iMac Pro or my 13-inch MacBook Pro.

01:00:24 ◼   ► But as I've said many times, I don't want to upgrade the laptop until I can get a four-port Apple Silicon chip.

01:00:31 ◼   ► And I probably won't upgrade the iMac until I get said laptop and realize how unbelievably slow my iMac feels by comparison.

01:00:40 ◼   ► So I've been kind of bracing myself for this to be a very expensive year for me with Apple products.

01:00:45 ◼   ► And thus far, the only thing I've bought is one AirTag and an Apple TV.

01:00:49 ◼   ► So Apple, remember when I said to you a few minutes ago that you used to be really good at taking money from me?

01:00:55 ◼   ► Let's get back to that. Let's take some money from you.

01:00:57 ◼   ► You're supposed to get a new remote too, so there's 60 more bucks.

01:00:59 ◼   ► Well, I'm too cheap. The old one was good enough.

01:01:04 ◼   ► Oh, it's terrible.

01:01:06 ◼   ► I'm going to get so many emails. Anyway, I don't see any other hardware happening.

01:01:11 ◼   ► Although, honestly, my hope, and this is going to sound a little weird, my hope is that we don't get any hardware.

01:01:18 ◼   ► Because I think that if we don't get any hardware, that means we were so jam-packed with incredible software updates and improvements and so on,

01:01:26 ◼   ► that they just didn't have the time for the hardware and they'd have to do it at a different time.

01:01:29 ◼   ► Well, none of us talked about the VR glasses, so I guess we're all in agreement that this is not the year for that.

01:01:35 ◼   ► The problem with the VR stuff is they're doing so much work internally.

01:01:40 ◼   ► They release all the software, all the ARKit, all the things, all the spatial audio, like the software we get to see.

01:01:45 ◼   ► And sometimes we accidentally get to see the software that works with whatever their internal goggles are.

01:01:51 ◼   ► Remember, there's various leaks about that over the years.

01:01:53 ◼   ► But it seems like they never released the hardware, and I'm not sure why.

01:01:57 ◼   ► Because unless the plan is we're not going to release any hardware until it's like a James Bond style, like just looks like a normal pair of glasses,

01:02:04 ◼   ► like that's going to be a long wait, right?

01:02:06 ◼   ► They have, apparently, internally, things that look like VR goggles.

01:02:09 ◼   ► You know, it's a big thing that goes in your head, and yeah, it's Apple-y and it's nice and so on and so forth.

01:02:14 ◼   ► But that's what they're working on. It's like, well, are you ever going to ship a product like that or not?

01:02:18 ◼   ► Because if you were going to, it seems like WWC would be the time to do it because it requires developer support, you know,

01:02:24 ◼   ► because writing software for VR is considerably different than writing software for a Mac or your phone or whatever.

01:02:29 ◼   ► Now would be the time.

01:02:31 ◼   ► But if this isn't the year, like, do we just keep waiting?

01:02:33 ◼   ► Because all the rumors of their VR stuff have not been like, it's totally different than any VR you've ever--

01:02:38 ◼   ► It's a VR thing, like VR AR. Like, it's a big thing that goes in your head.

01:02:42 ◼   ► It's not something that looks like, you know, a simple pair of glasses with hidden screens in it.

01:02:47 ◼   ► We're not at that stage yet. So I haven't heard any rumors. You figure we would know more about it.

01:02:52 ◼   ► But the problem is, I think we kind of get bored of like, yeah, that's the thing Apple's working on internally,

01:02:57 ◼   ► kind of like the car or whatever the hell they're doing there.

01:02:59 ◼   ► But, you know, it's not like, you know, if they release this, it's like, oh, what a surprise, they shocked everybody.

01:03:05 ◼   ► We've known for years this is the thing they're working on. It's just at any point they could decide,

01:03:09 ◼   ► is this a shippable product or is it not? And thus far they've said not.

01:03:13 ◼   ► And if we just stop paying attention to it and they suddenly release it, I don't, you know,

01:03:17 ◼   ► I think we have to keep that in the back of our minds as a thing that Apple can do at any time without any huge secret effort,

01:03:23 ◼   ► because it's no longer a secret they're really-- I mean, not that they're not trying to keep it, but like,

01:03:27 ◼   ► everybody knows they're working on this. Just like everyone knows they're working on a car thing.

01:03:31 ◼   ► So that secret is out. The only question is, what exactly is it? How much does it cost?

01:03:36 ◼   ► Is it a product? Are you going to release it? And they can make that decision at any time.

01:03:41 ◼   ► I also think this is probably not the year for that, but it's kind of like the Mac Pro.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Like, any year could be Apple VR year at this point. Like, they just have to decide, like they did with the car,

01:03:53 ◼   ► whether you're going to ship it or not. Again, with the car, they decided not. Not many times over,

01:03:58 ◼   ► but presumably that will change eventually too. So assuming it's not a VR year for hardware,

01:04:03 ◼   ► which would itself take up a huge amount of the software thing, then we get to Casey's thing as like,

01:04:07 ◼   ► okay, well, if it's just MacBook Pros or maybe no hardware at all, and this is a big year for software,

01:04:13 ◼   ► what is the big software? Casey mentioned iPad OS, and my problem with the iPad OS rumor is

01:04:20 ◼   ► that this is what everyone says every year. Like, the iPad hardware gets a lot better. They're like,

01:04:25 ◼   ► boy, I can't wait until this OS takes advantage of this. But most people do not have any concrete ideas

01:04:31 ◼   ► of what that would be, except for the people who say, I just want Mac OS on my iPad, which is not really

01:04:36 ◼   ► something that Apple seems like they're in favor of. We all just want something about iPad OS to be

01:04:44 ◼   ► worthy of the hardware that it's on, to let users be more productive, to give them more flexibility.

01:04:52 ◼   ► I did say more like a Mac, but I don't mean more like a Mac in terms of the interface. I mean more like a Mac

01:04:56 ◼   ► in terms of the way that someone who is familiar with the platform can do lots of different things with it.

01:05:03 ◼   ► On iPad OS, lots of limitations in the US make it trickier to do things that the hardware is capable of,

01:05:10 ◼   ► but the software kind of gets in your way, right? And so aside from the iPad OS gurus who themselves have,

01:05:17 ◼   ► you know, like Vitici or whatever, have very specific ideas of exactly what kind of changes they want to iPad OS,

01:05:22 ◼   ► I think most people, including me, understand that iPad hardware is as powerful as a Mac, like duh,

01:05:30 ◼   ► I guess I just got the same chip at this point, but that iPad OS is not as quote unquote powerful as Mac OS

01:05:37 ◼   ► in terms of letting you take advantage of that hardware in all the ways you can on the Mac.

01:05:43 ◼   ► I mentioned this on a past episode. It's not as if iPad OS stops you from using all of that hardware within a single application,

01:05:51 ◼   ► with the caveat that people have discovered that apparently you can't use more than 5 gigs of RAM within each app,

01:05:55 ◼   ► but that just seems like a software limit that will probably lift in the new version of iPad OS.

01:06:00 ◼   ► But you can certainly do like a render or just eat up all your CPU and GPU time on your iPad,

01:06:04 ◼   ► and you'll be using the full power of the system on a chip to do that thing, plus or minus, I suppose, thermal throttling or whatever.

01:06:11 ◼   ► But that's not what people are talking about. What people are talking about is on the Mac I can have 17 different things open

01:06:16 ◼   ► and seamlessly move between them, and the flexibility of downloading apps that aren't from the App Store,

01:06:21 ◼   ► and I can use AppleScript and I can use command line stuff. There's so much more flexibility for literally the same hardware

01:06:26 ◼   ► if you take a MacBook Air with no fan and an iPad with no fan.

01:06:30 ◼   ► And so I personally, when I think about iPad OS getting way better to finally take advantage of the hardware,

01:06:36 ◼   ► I don't know what that would look like. I don't have a vision in my mind because it's lack of imagination,

01:06:43 ◼   ► it's lack of me using iPad OS in this way. Mostly I use my iPad for very simple things.

01:06:48 ◼   ► So I don't know, like, say iPad OS 15 fulfills everyone's dreams, what the heck does that look like?

01:06:56 ◼   ► What are people expecting? We keep just talking about it in vague terms, but I can't picture sort of how that would change

01:07:02 ◼   ► other than something really radical like, guess what, iPad OS has Windows now. Not the Microsoft product, but like, literal movable windows.

01:07:10 ◼   ► No more splitting your screen, no more of this, no more of that. And you can use command line scripting,

01:07:15 ◼   ► like, you know, the fantasy of essentially an iPad OS that gains a bunch of features that only the Mac had previously

01:07:21 ◼   ► without becoming Mac OS, but I don't see that happening. So to me, I think it's going to be another year where people

01:07:27 ◼   ► are happy about the things they get in iPad OS. Oh, we can use widgets on the home screen now and all the features

01:07:32 ◼   ► that were only on the phone are now on the iPad, plus there's some cool new iPad stuff. But in the end, it's like,

01:07:37 ◼   ► a month after WWDC, people are still saying iPad OS needs to go further.

01:07:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not expecting a lot on the iPad front. It does seem, I mentioned this before, but it does seem like Apple has kind of taken their foot off the gas

01:07:52 ◼   ► in the iPad arena recently, like software-wise, as they've been so focused on like, you know, Apple Silicon on the Mac and everything else.

01:08:00 ◼   ► But I don't know, because I'm not an iPad power user, I honestly, I think I'm going to stop talking about it right here so I don't anger all the iPad power users.

01:08:08 ◼   ► But yeah, it doesn't seem like their pace of development on iPad OS is aggressive enough to expect really big things to happen this year.

01:08:19 ◼   ► You know, I hear what you're saying and I don't disagree, but I could swear that, wasn't it last year we didn't really get much on the iPad,

01:08:27 ◼   ► but the year before we got a whole ton. My memory is so bad these days, I can't remember what's what.

01:08:31 ◼   ► We've all lost a year.

01:08:33 ◼   ► Well, there's that too. But I feel like it was WWDC 19 where we got something on iPad or several somethings on iPad.

01:08:41 ◼   ► We got a whole bunch of new iPad stuff and actually cursor support was not a WWDC thing, but that's happened since then.

01:08:47 ◼   ► I feel like Apple seems to have been, and I can't cite my source, it's all just gut feeling at the moment, I apologize.

01:08:55 ◼   ► But Apple seems to have been in a two year TikTok sort of thing. So like, you know, in 2019 we got a lot, 2020 we didn't get squat.

01:09:03 ◼   ► In 2021 we getting a lot. I feel like we may be. I don't disagree with your pessimism, Marco, but I personally am optimistic that I think this might be the year that we probably will not get everything we want.

01:09:20 ◼   ► And all of us, including me, will probably grumble about how we didn't get this or didn't get that.

01:09:23 ◼   ► But I think we will be getting a lot on the iPad. More than just, "Oh, here's your stupid widgets, leave us alone."

01:09:30 ◼   ► I think we're going to get something more significant. I don't know if that's going to be a revamp of multitasking.

01:09:34 ◼   ► I don't know if it's going to be windowing. I don't know if it's going to be a terminal or something more robust with shortcuts.

01:09:41 ◼   ► I don't even know what. Like John was saying a moment ago, "What does this even look like?"

01:09:44 ◼   ► I don't know, but this is why I don't work at Apple, because I'm not smart enough.

01:09:48 ◼   ► So I'm very curious to see what happens with iPad, and I will put my hat in the ring, and I will put my vote in the box that says it's going to be a big year for iPad.

01:09:57 ◼   ► Well, and ultimately, what iPadOS seems to really need is follow-through.

01:10:04 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:10:06 ◼   ► This is something that Apple's been really bad at.

01:10:08 ◼   ► You know, they have this kind of, you mentioned the TikTok cycle, and I think it might actually be having the fate of Intel's TikTok cycle of, "TikTok, tok, tok, tok, tok, tok, tok."

01:10:20 ◼   ► You know, we're going to keep adding more toks.

01:10:23 ◼   ► But they try out ideas. We're going to really put some effort into iPadOS, and we're going to really make it more powerful, and address power user needs, and really make things easier/better/more capable.

01:10:37 ◼   ► And they do like 75% of it, and then they leave it alone for two years, and then they go a different direction, and do 75% of that, and then leave that alone for two more years, and then go a different direction, and do 75% of that, and then leave that alone for two more years.

01:10:52 ◼   ► It seems like they're never really reaching, like they're never following through with the plan they seem to have at any given moment, and really seeing it through to be really good, and to mature the other apps on the system, to use all the new stuff, and to really make sure all the new stuff is rock solid, and reliable, and works.

01:11:11 ◼   ► That's what we're missing there. In addition to just fundamental basics of multitasking that they still struggle with. There are still so many aspects of iPad multitasking that are incredibly unintuitive to those of us who are not experts with it, or incredibly clunky, and hindersome, if that's a word, to people who are experts with it.

01:11:32 ◼   ► I still don't even think they've nailed some of the basics of multitasking yet, but whatever direction they want to go, whether it's multitasking UI stuff, or whether it's down to other more boring things like file provider APIs, drag and drop mechanics, stuff like that, a lot of that stuff they just haven't followed through to make it good and reliable yet, even years later.

01:11:53 ◼   ► So I hope that whatever direction they want to take with the iPad, I hope they figure it out pretty soon, because it seems like they haven't quite figured it out yet. And then once they do figure out, I hope they actually follow through and instead of doing a you know, a two thirds job of it, go all the way finish it like make it work well make it work reliably.

01:12:13 ◼   ► If the Mac worked as inconsistently and oddly as the iPad does, the Mac would not be as popular among people like us as it is. The reason why we have so much affinity for Apple's platforms, as you know, old time Mac users. Well, not we aren't as old time as john, but you know,

01:12:34 ◼   ► I can't believe I can't believe john didn't jump all over us for that 2004 Yeah, you guys have been around the block.

01:12:40 ◼   ► But like the reason why we have so much affinity for this is because there's so many little details that have had that they got right early on, and that have been right the whole time and that are mostly reliable and and you know, aren't constantly shifting and, and like the things they set forth to do on the Mac mostly work most of the time.

01:13:00 ◼   ► And I feel like an iPad was I can't say that it not only do things keep changing, but so many of the basics just like fail in weird ways or are broken and random point updates. And some of them just never get fixed or never work all the way or I don't know, it just, it seems like it's in a constant state of like, all right, we did something two thirds of the way.

01:13:19 ◼   ► And now the team is gonna not touch it for two years. And then we're gonna just do something different two more years from now.

01:13:24 ◼   ► I feel like the bright spot in that as was already mentioned, it didn't come into WDC update is the keyboard trackpad and cursor support, right? If they had saved that for WDC, it would be a quite a wow announcement. But I think that direction of the iPad platform that it will become a platform that has pervasive and yet a very iPad specific support for cursors and trackpads and keyboards.

01:13:45 ◼   ► And we'll keep iterating on that try to make a better and better keyboard, right? I think they've done well with that there. We've had a couple of years of trying to do keyboards on the, you know, the iPad and then adding cursors sport and then putting in the trackpads.

01:13:58 ◼   ► And I think they are fairly committed to that direction. The problem is, those are sort of input methods that and I think those are spread pretty well throughout Apple's apps and the interface in an admirable way. It's what you're getting at Marco is like that the fundamental interface paradigm of the iPad has problems, right?

01:14:17 ◼   ► That it is not it's not sort of a modular composable understandable system that gives you flexibility, you know, I'm not saying it has to be like the Mac, but we've talked about this before the interface of, you know, the WIMP interface, you know, Windows. What is it? I always forget what the eyes for Windows input menu pointer Intel probably know it's not

01:14:37 ◼   ► someone look up WIMP in the chat room will get it window icon menu pointer icon. Yeah, so it's so old that icons were a novel concept icons. Wow, little pictures. What are they? Whoa. Anyway, overlapping windows in a menu bar and even like basics is like the doc, you know, dialogue boxes like the way the keyboard and the mouse interact with Windows like it's a very flexible interface, right?

01:14:59 ◼   ► You can do a lot of things on a Mac just with that simple paradigm. And once you learn how that paradigm works and generally have standard windows and you learn how the menu bar works and you learn how the doc works. There's a lot of flexibility there flexibility for people to make their own workflows flexibility for app developers to do their own thing and flexibility for the users to combine them all to do their thing and same thing with multitasking command tab using the doctor switch apps clicking on a window to bring an app forward the variations that you can do there.

01:15:25 ◼   ► It's an extremely flexible interface, which is why it has survived so long doesn't mean the iPad needs to do that. But the iPad has its own sort of version of that in the iPads version of that is not as obvious not as generic not as flexible and not just like you said Marco for the experts who know how to use it has tons of frustrations like limitations.

01:15:45 ◼   ► I think part of that is the inability to sort of expand the system in iOS like to do to do even something as simple as my dinky Mac apps which would be impossible in iPad OS because you can't do things like observe when you know apps come to the front and take actions but it's just not possible for historic reasons on iPad OS right.

01:16:04 ◼   ► So it's up to Apple to you know, sort of rethink like what are we doing an iPad OS because you don't want to give up and I think iPad experts don't want them to give up and say well just forget it's just going to be like Mac OS on a tablet.

01:16:15 ◼   ► I know some people do want that but the people who love the iPad love it for a lot of reasons that are make it different from the Mac that it's not as complicated. There's fewer things to worry about that it is simple.

01:16:26 ◼   ► It's just that I feel like Apple has not found that happy medium and that's part of what I was getting out of like, oh, well iPad OS to be more powerful, but also don't make it like a Mac but also make it better than it is now but also don't make it weird and complicated.

01:16:39 ◼   ► It's a tall order like I don't I don't fault Apple for having not figured this out because a nobody has figured it out in the entire industry as far as I'm concerned and be Apple keeps trying and I think cursor and keyboard support is a great move in that direction,

01:16:52 ◼   ► but there's still the fundamental question of how do you have to change the interface paradigm iPad OS in some way if you ever want it to be anything approaching as flexible generic and understandable as the Mac again doesn't have to be the same as the Mac but needs to have those qualities about it so that someone who learns iPad OS is not constantly frustrated by the limitations and can also use it to do complicated things.

01:17:17 ◼   ► We'll see. So, John, do you think this is the year of iPad OS then?

01:17:22 ◼   ► I mean, I agree with you Casey that I think this will be there will be more on iPad OS this year than there was in last, but I not even sure there'll be anything as significant as cursor and trackpad support was because I think that was very significant and done very well and had hardware to go with it.

01:17:36 ◼   ► It just didn't happen to neatly coincide with the WWDC announcement.

01:17:40 ◼   ► That's fair.

01:17:41 ◼   ► What are we getting for iOS?

01:17:44 ◼   ► I'm hoping we get an expansion to the widget system, which is funny. I'm actually I'm actually making overcast widgets like right now not right the second, but like I was doing it earlier today.

01:17:56 ◼   ► Trying to figure out like we know what they should even be because I feel like the widget system is a like in iOS 14 was a really good first step really good 1.0 of that system, but I want better than 1.0 now.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Like it's a year later approved to be pretty popular pretty capable amongst users. So I hope they took it further.

01:18:15 ◼   ► What I'm mostly hoping to see is a first of all a better flow for placing them on your home screen that doesn't make you inadvertently blow up your entire icon arrangement while moving them around that might be too much to ask.

01:18:29 ◼   ► But what I want to see is a smaller size because right now the smallest size is basically two by two icons.

01:18:38 ◼   ► I'd like to see one that's maybe like one by two like, you know, two wide one tall so you could fit more widgets on on certain screens without having them take up so much space.

01:18:49 ◼   ► I agree with that.

01:18:50 ◼   ► And for at least the larger sizes, I would like to see ideally some improved interactivity capabilities, you know, right now the way widgets work and I was 14 is that the smallest size.

01:19:03 ◼   ► The only interactivity is you tap it and launches the app and the bigger sizes you can define tap zones within the widget and then it still just opens the app.

01:19:12 ◼   ► But then it tells you like which tap zone was hit and then your app can respond accordingly like an image map.

01:19:17 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Wow, good reference.

01:19:20 ◼   ► Yeah, so I would like to see maybe maybe more interactivity there.

01:19:24 ◼   ► But otherwise, you know, outside of the widget system for the rest of iOS, I'm generally pretty happy with what Apple tends to do with iOS updates, which is we usually get a couple of new capabilities, usually nothing really major.

01:19:40 ◼   ► But you know, a couple of things we couldn't do before maybe new app types that become possible to make new like hooks in the system that we can now hook into as third party apps that previously were only accessible to Apple's apps, you know, stuff like that.

01:19:53 ◼   ► So, you know, new types of apps that might be able to exist and otherwise just general improvements to the API's in lots of mostly boring ways, some big, some small, you know, I want to see Swift UI move forward.

01:20:08 ◼   ► I'd love to see advances in UI kit still because Swift UI still can't replace UI kit in many ways.

01:20:15 ◼   ► You know, stuff like that. I want to see stuff like collection view and table view improvements, you know, all that stuff.

01:20:21 ◼   ► And otherwise for iOS, for feature wise, I just kind of, you know, sit back and see what Apple gives us and usually I'm pretty happy with it.

01:20:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree with you there. I don't feel like there's anything that I want to come out of iOS super badly.

01:20:38 ◼   ► I agree with the ones that you cited, like, you know, slightly more interactive, it would just would be good.

01:20:43 ◼   ► I very much agree with you saying there should be a smaller size widget.

01:20:46 ◼   ► I completely agree with that.

01:20:48 ◼   ► But I feel like the things I'm most looking forward to from an iOS perspective is actually the developer side.

01:20:56 ◼   ► And we don't necessarily need to go into it now or belabor it if we do, but, you know, async await is seemingly about to land.

01:21:03 ◼   ► Swift UI improvements, I think, would be extremely welcome on this new thing that maybe I'll ship sometime before I die.

01:21:10 ◼   ► I'm 100% Swift UI as I sit here now.

01:21:13 ◼   ► And I tell you, writing new stuff in Swift UI is extremely, extremely fun and extremely fast.

01:21:21 ◼   ► For me anyway.

01:21:22 ◼   ► You know, I'm not good at it yet, but I can cobble together something that looks reasonably good way faster than I could with UIKit.

01:21:31 ◼   ► And I feel like I love Swift UI for that and how quick it is to iterate, you know, and so much about it I really enjoy.

01:21:41 ◼   ► But the second you want to do anything that even smells like it's custom, well, good frickin' luck.

01:21:46 ◼   ► It's just, you're not going to have a good day.

01:21:48 ◼   ► This is where your day takes a turn, right here.

01:21:51 ◼   ► Oh, that one little teeny tiny thing you want to do with an animation?

01:21:54 ◼   ► Well, you just cost yourself three days and, you know, 50 working hours or something like that.

01:22:00 ◼   ► And that's where it's frustrating.

01:22:01 ◼   ► And so I really hope to get, you know, improvements in Swift UI.

01:22:05 ◼   ► I would love to see UIKit bindings for Combine, which is never going to happen.

01:22:10 ◼   ► I'm really, really scared.

01:22:11 ◼   ► I wrote a blog post about this a little while ago.

01:22:13 ◼   ► I'm really scared that Combine is basically going to fade into the ether because I could see how politically that would be a logical conclusion,

01:22:22 ◼   ► especially for the people who are really trying to ram Swift UI through.

01:22:26 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:22:28 ◼   ► Isn't Swift UI built on Combine?

01:22:30 ◼   ► Oh, kind of.

01:22:34 ◼   ► There are combined components within Swift UI.

01:22:36 ◼   ► I would not personally say that Swift UI is in its entirety built upon it.

01:22:41 ◼   ► But things like observed object and whatnot, that definitely is Combine.

01:22:47 ◼   ► But I feel like you could, if you wanted to, you could jettison Combine while keeping Swift UI.

01:22:52 ◼   ► And I really hope that's not the case.

01:22:56 ◼   ► I'd love to see an expansion of Combine rather than it being kind of just fading into the ether,

01:23:02 ◼   ► which is what I'm really fearful might be happening.

01:23:04 ◼   ► I had to look up what sync meant today.

01:23:07 ◼   ► Combine, because I have no background in this functional reactive programming world that this is all based on,

01:23:15 ◼   ► or your prescription Swift, I have absolutely no idea what any of the terms mean.

01:23:20 ◼   ► And ostensibly they are English words, but they don't make any sense to people who have not been exposed to them before.

01:23:31 ◼   ► And so I'm like, all right, I have this object that I've made to be compatible with Swift UI, and it has all these @published properties, whatever.

01:23:39 ◼   ► And I wanted to see, okay, I have this other class that I want to react to changes in those properties.

01:23:45 ◼   ► Maybe I can use those wrappers. How do I do that?

01:23:48 ◼   ► Okay, so I learned from, I believe, a Swift by Sandel post that I found Googling,

01:23:55 ◼   ► I learned that I have to do publisher name .sync.

01:24:00 ◼   ► And that means respond to changes. Okay, that makes total sense.

01:24:04 ◼   ► And then it said, okay, well, I need to store the object that it returns,

01:24:11 ◼   ► and the object that it returns is of type AnyCancelable.

01:24:16 ◼   ► Okay.

01:24:18 ◼   ► So then I had to look up what AnyCancelable means.

01:24:22 ◼   ► A type-erasing cancelable object that executes a provided closure when canceled.

01:24:26 ◼   ► You've got to learn about what type erasure is.

01:24:29 ◼   ► The amount of crap that you have to understand to understand what this means.

01:24:34 ◼   ► You know, I love you so much, but this is when you stop Googling and--

01:24:40 ◼   ► I almost said a bad word.

01:24:41 ◼   ► This is when you stop Googling and call me for the love of all that is good and holy.

01:24:46 ◼   ► There is nothing I would love more--well, there's nothing that you would hate more,

01:24:50 ◼   ► but there's nothing that I would love more than to try to tell you how to do these basic things in combined.

01:24:57 ◼   ► Because everything you're saying is 100% accurate. You are correct.

01:24:59 ◼   ► It sounds like you at least slightly know what you're talking about.

01:25:02 ◼   ► There are other things that you might want to know about, which we can talk about another time,

01:25:07 ◼   ► if you're so interested and so inclined.

01:25:09 ◼   ► But seriously, I should be saying this to you privately after the show,

01:25:12 ◼   ► but I'm saying it publicly so hopefully other people will shame you into compliance.

01:25:16 ◼   ► Just call me. Just send me a text at Slack DM, whatever.

01:25:20 ◼   ► We can walk through this and save yourself so much time.

01:25:23 ◼   ► Some people like to learn on their own.

01:25:25 ◼   ► I think Marco understands that combined or RxSwift or whatever are specific implementations of a thing.

01:25:34 ◼   ► Marco just needs to understand the concepts behind the thing,

01:25:37 ◼   ► kind of like you understand the concepts of objects and methods or whatever concept you want to talk about.

01:25:42 ◼   ► Concepts of functional property.

01:25:43 ◼   ► Once you learn them, then you can say, "Okay, well, in this framework, this is what we call this thing

01:25:48 ◼   ► and this is what we call that thing and this is what we call this other thing."

01:25:51 ◼   ► I think he's just trying to get over the conceptual hurdle.

01:25:53 ◼   ► Not everyone learns best by having someone explain to them.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Maybe Marco learns best by doing it on his own or whatever.

01:26:00 ◼   ► But yeah, I think we've talked about this in the past,

01:26:03 ◼   ► how combined fits in with Swift UI and how committed Apple is to this particular concept of,

01:26:08 ◼   ► I don't know, what do you call this?

01:26:10 ◼   ► Marco called it functional reactive.

01:26:12 ◼   ► Is there a generic term for this?

01:26:14 ◼   ► No, I think that's about as generic as you get.

01:26:16 ◼   ► That's why it's called RxSwift.

01:26:18 ◼   ► It's for functional reactive.

01:26:22 ◼   ► Anyway, why is it called combined?

01:26:24 ◼   ► Because I understand.

01:26:26 ◼   ► Because they were trying to do a Half-Life reference and missed the pronunciation a little bit.

01:26:30 ◼   ► Right. That's Combi. I get that one. I finally got a reference.

01:26:33 ◼   ► Yay, video games.

01:26:35 ◼   ► But I think the fact that we have wandered into DevTools here is kind of a comment on iOS

01:26:41 ◼   ► in that it has reached a level of maturity unlike iPad OS but like Mac OS

01:26:46 ◼   ► where the super obvious things that iOS was missing have mostly been knocked down

01:26:52 ◼   ► starting with copy and paste all the way up to keyboards and better notification systems.

01:26:58 ◼   ► I think there is room in iOS for end user features every year to make the notification stuff a little bit better.

01:27:04 ◼   ► Adding flexibility, refining things.

01:27:07 ◼   ► There's even room for, you know, there are some paradigms that could be rethought on iOS

01:27:13 ◼   ► like the settings app that have just never been rethought and just, you know, we allow developers.

01:27:18 ◼   ► Like, well, developers can put settings in their apps if they want but some settings can be in the settings app

01:27:22 ◼   ► and we'll just leave that that way forever.

01:27:24 ◼   ► That could be rationalized at some point if Apple really cared.

01:27:27 ◼   ► But in general, I feel like most of the improvements to iOS probably have to do with OS support for services.

01:27:36 ◼   ► Like, for example, you can imagine a new feature having to do with maps.

01:27:41 ◼   ► But that's like a combination of, like, okay, there's a part of that that's in iOS

01:27:44 ◼   ► and part of that is on Apple's server side with their map service, right,

01:27:47 ◼   ► and then combined they make this new feature that, I don't know, works with AirTags

01:27:52 ◼   ► or some sort of feature that spans the entire stack.

01:27:56 ◼   ► And that is demoed as a feature of the new iOS but really it's a feature that is the OS, the services,

01:28:03 ◼   ► you know, maybe the hardware all combined into one thing.

01:28:07 ◼   ► Like new stuff with the U1, how the phone might interact with VR glasses, like all sorts of other stuff.

01:28:12 ◼   ► That's potentially out there.

01:28:14 ◼   ► But beyond that, what we're mostly looking for is how can I make iOS apps with less fuss?

01:28:21 ◼   ► And that gets into, okay, SwiftUI is new but it needs to improve.

01:28:24 ◼   ► How will that get improved? How does it combine and fit into that?

01:28:26 ◼   ► What about enhancements to UIKit?

01:28:28 ◼   ► What about, you know, better integration between UIKit and SwiftUI?

01:28:33 ◼   ► And there should be fewer things that I have to go to UIKit to do if SwiftUI is maturing.

01:28:38 ◼   ► And then on top of all that is Swift, which, because it's open,

01:28:43 ◼   ► like if you're wondering what's new in Swift, just go to like, you know, what is it, Hacking with Swift?

01:28:48 ◼   ► Paul Hudson's website? Anyway.

01:28:50 ◼   ► Swift is out in the open. No guesses about what's coming in Swift.

01:28:53 ◼   ► If you want to know, you can know right now. Like it's not a secret.

01:28:56 ◼   ► It's open source. You can see the new version of Swift.

01:28:58 ◼   ► You can see lots of blog posts explaining what's in it.

01:29:00 ◼   ► There's tons of new stuff that's really cool.

01:29:02 ◼   ► And Apple will announce it on stage for the people who don't follow the Swift community.

01:29:06 ◼   ► But it's the kind of, you know, the bright spot/oddball.

01:29:09 ◼   ► And, you know, because even though WebKit is open source,

01:29:12 ◼   ► Apple tends to like hold a lot of those changes back.

01:29:14 ◼   ► And a lot of it has to do with Safari, which itself is built on WebKit.

01:29:18 ◼   ► So when they say, oh, the new iOS has a new browser that supports X, Y, and Z,

01:29:22 ◼   ► they can keep that a secret. But the new stuff that's coming in Swift, for the most part, isn't a secret.

01:29:27 ◼   ► Even, I suppose, like when SwiftUI came out, we didn't know about SwiftUI initially,

01:29:31 ◼   ► but I think it was possible to know about FunctionBuilders before.

01:29:34 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like kind of like snuck out right beforehand.

01:29:38 ◼   ► Right, but like seeing FunctionBuilders doesn't tell you, oh, and by the way, SwiftUI is coming.

01:29:42 ◼   ► Like that's the kind of secret they can keep.

01:29:44 ◼   ► But if you're wondering what's new in Swift, there's a bunch of stuff that's new.

01:29:46 ◼   ► Apple should rightfully sort of promote it.

01:29:49 ◼   ► And, you know, like Casey mentioned, Async/Await.

01:29:53 ◼   ► I think Actors is coming this year as well.

01:29:55 ◼   ► And just general like quality of life things,

01:29:57 ◼   ► like the thing I mentioned a couple shows back about removing an error

01:30:00 ◼   ► or about not being able to do a thing because some class has self-reference.

01:30:05 ◼   ► There's lots of sort of quality of life improvements to Swift itself

01:30:08 ◼   ► that they will probably tout at WWDC that are material.

01:30:13 ◼   ► And in the context of iOS, it's like, okay, I'm not looking as an iOS developer

01:30:18 ◼   ► for some major deficit that iOS has.

01:30:20 ◼   ► What I just want is help me make iOS apps, help me make new, better iOS apps,

01:30:25 ◼   ► help me add features to my iOS app, help me to make iOS apps more quickly with fewer bugs.

01:30:30 ◼   ► And I think that's a perfectly valid thing to WWDC.

01:30:33 ◼   ► And, you know, we're not going to get something on the level of SwiftUI this year probably,

01:30:37 ◼   ► but I think we just hope to sort of see iterations on everything involved in making an iOS app.

01:30:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I hope so.

01:30:45 ◼   ► And one of the things that I think I'm a little worried about is, you know,

01:30:50 ◼   ► show me how it makes this better.

01:30:52 ◼   ► So as an example, I've done a little bit of work with actors, or not even work,

01:30:57 ◼   ► like dabbling with actors, and that was in the context of Scala,

01:31:01 ◼   ► which I only barely knew at the time.

01:31:03 ◼   ► And I kind of sort of understand the purpose they serve,

01:31:07 ◼   ► but I don't want someone to get on stage and say, "Hey, here's actors.

01:31:11 ◼   ► Aren't these cool?"

01:31:12 ◼   ► Well, no, no, no. Show me.

01:31:14 ◼   ► Show me why these are cool and where this will help me and where this will make things better.

01:31:18 ◼   ► And I don't know if that's what we're going to get.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Async/await, I think it's easier to understand why it's cool and why it would be useful,

01:31:26 ◼   ► but again, show me an example of where this makes things better,

01:31:29 ◼   ► and don't rely on Paul Hudson or John Sundell to do it.

01:31:32 ◼   ► Apple, you do that. That's what you're there for. You do that.

01:31:35 ◼   ► The thing about actors is they might not have something.

01:31:38 ◼   ► Like SwiftUI, they had a thing, right?

01:31:40 ◼   ► And yeah, there's a bunch of underlying technology that made that possible,

01:31:43 ◼   ► but they didn't tout the technology.

01:31:45 ◼   ► They said, "Here's SwiftUI."

01:31:46 ◼   ► They didn't explain technology at all. It just looked like magic, right?

01:31:48 ◼   ► If you didn't know about function builders, you're like, "That doesn't even look like valid syntax," right?

01:31:51 ◼   ► So I think they mostly lean in that direction.

01:31:53 ◼   ► Async/await is an exception just because answer to "What should I do for concurrency besides Grand Central Dispatch?"

01:32:00 ◼   ► has been, like, that's been an open question for a while,

01:32:03 ◼   ► and Async/await is the thing that is an answer,

01:32:06 ◼   ► and I think a lot of people in the audience would be familiar with it from other languages if they have any experience.

01:32:10 ◼   ► So I think that is a thing that they can say, "Hey, we have Async/await.

01:32:14 ◼   ► Here's a slide on what it gets you. Come to the session if you want to know more,"

01:32:19 ◼   ► even if they don't have any particular new API related to that.

01:32:23 ◼   ► And Actors, if there's no new framework, like, to your point, to demo it, to show me why it's in there,

01:32:29 ◼   ► it might just be a word on a slide, and you'd have to go to the follow-up session of, like, what's new in Swift

01:32:34 ◼   ► to hear about Actors, because without -- like, if you don't understand what Actors are,

01:32:41 ◼   ► you shouldn't just, like, dive in and start using them everywhere in your code.

01:32:43 ◼   ► And if you do understand what they are, you probably have a very specific use case.

01:32:47 ◼   ► You know, unlike lots of other features, like SwiftUI is like, this is a whole new way to write applications.

01:32:52 ◼   ► Actors is not a whole new way to write applications.

01:32:54 ◼   ► Please do not change everything in your application to an Actor. You will be sad.

01:32:58 ◼   ► Similarly, don't start using Async/await everywhere in your application,

01:33:02 ◼   ► because you'll quickly learn how Async sort of infects your code like a virus

01:33:06 ◼   ► and travels upwards in the call stack until everything is Async and you don't know what's going on.

01:33:10 ◼   ► So there's a lot of new technologies. Like, there's a reason these are the technologies that Apple waited a long time to roll out.

01:33:16 ◼   ► Like, on day one, you didn't have all this stuff, because it's important to get to the fundamentals right.

01:33:20 ◼   ► And then you can maybe do a SwiftUI, and then and then maybe you can do Async.

01:33:25 ◼   ► And I think that's the appropriate prioritization of, like, what's the most important, so on and so forth.

01:33:29 ◼   ► So, like, as time goes on, these more specialized -- I don't know, more potentially dangerous features,

01:33:38 ◼   ► they're there because there's very important use cases where you absolutely need them and there's no better tool for it.

01:33:43 ◼   ► But they're not sort of like, I'm going to build my entire application where every single function is going to be asynchronous.

01:33:49 ◼   ► Please don't do that. Like, you know, if you want to do that, go use Node or something. Like, please don't.

01:33:54 ◼   ► Like, it's not, you know, you can still basically build your applications the same way, but if there is --

01:34:00 ◼   ► and I hope that's what they do with Actors. If they have any session on Actors at all, the whole session should be about,

01:34:05 ◼   ► in what context would I ever want to use an Actor? And then show you a concrete one and say,

01:34:10 ◼   ► here's how it was before we used an Actor, and it was a pain in the butt, and I had to do all the synchronization,

01:34:14 ◼   ► I had to be careful, and oops, I forgot to do this on the right thread, and now I have a crasher.

01:34:18 ◼   ► But if I use Actor as this one thing, this one object in my code is an Actor, and that makes a big difference, right?

01:34:24 ◼   ► But Actors is so early. Like, I just saw the proposal for global Actors going by, and I feel like you can't even have a complete Actor story

01:34:31 ◼   ► until you can talk about how you can use it to protect global data as well, and it seems like that proposal is not going to be accepted in time for WWDC,

01:34:39 ◼   ► so maybe Actors won't be heavily featured, but surely Async/Await will at least have a session.

01:34:44 ◼   ► All right, so back to things that people actually care about. What about macOS? Oh, I'm sorry, before I get to macOS,

01:34:51 ◼   ► there's one thing I did want to say, and I forget which one of you just mentioned it, but services and things like that,

01:34:55 ◼   ► I would love, and it's not going to happen, but I would love to see improvements to things like Photos.

01:35:02 ◼   ► I'm still not on iCloud Photo Library, you can shame me about that next episode, that's maybe two episodes from now,

01:35:07 ◼   ► but I would love to see the thing that we're all hoping for, like the idea and concept of a family in the context of Photos,

01:35:17 ◼   ► that would be amazing, and I would probably switch to iCloud Photo Library that day.

01:35:21 ◼   ► But I feel like there's a lot of cases, and that's the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

01:35:26 ◼   ► Well, actually, Fitness Plus. Fitness Plus is another example. Again, this is somewhat a self-created problem,

01:35:32 ◼   ► because I'm not on a family plan or anything like that with Erin, but there are times that she would like to do a Fitness Plus workout,

01:35:37 ◼   ► and that's only associated with my Apple ID, not hers, and so she can't without me doing it with her,

01:35:43 ◼   ► which we do do from time to time, and it is lovely, but there are times that I want to do one thing,

01:35:47 ◼   ► she wants to do another, and it's just tough nuggies for us. And again, to some degree, that's a self-created problem.

01:35:52 ◼   ► But just stuff like that, like being able to share a workout, or even if we both have rights to use Apple Fitness Plus,

01:36:00 ◼   ► only one person's stuff can be shown on screen at a time, and just little improvements to their services.

01:36:06 ◼   ► As much as I kind of bemoan that they're so bent on services these days, if you're going to go down that path,

01:36:13 ◼   ► and let's go and let's do it right, and I feel like some improvements in that regard would be really, really welcome.

01:36:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and Fitness Plus is a young service, so you would expect this is the year.

01:36:22 ◼   ► If you're going to, I mean, here's the question about things like Fitness Plus.

01:36:25 ◼   ► Yeah, Casey, this would be the year that you'd get enhancements? If Fitness Plus is doing okay.

01:36:31 ◼   ► It's not doing okay. Maybe this is not the year to expect version two of Fitness Plus.

01:36:37 ◼   ► Like, SwiftUI, I think, you know, SwiftUI I think is doing pretty well, and there's going to be enhancements,

01:36:41 ◼   ► but for anything like a service like that, the question is, how much does Apple care about this?

01:36:46 ◼   ► How successful is it? Is it going gangbusters, and it's like, yeah, we'll get that version two out there?

01:36:50 ◼   ► Or is it kind of like, well, maybe let's just wait and see on this one?

01:36:54 ◼   ► One other thing I would like to see, this is a little tiny thing, but Apple bought Dark Sky,

01:36:59 ◼   ► and they're shutting down the API, like, I think it's this fall. It's sometime fairly soon, like in the next year.

01:37:07 ◼   ► And Dark Sky was the best weather API for so many apps, so many good apps, like good weather apps,

01:37:14 ◼   ► so many of them used it. And it was, you know, speculated like why Apple bought it and it shut down the API.

01:37:22 ◼   ► I think the most direct reason they bought it is because they started using those, like, you know,

01:37:27 ◼   ► immediate rain forecasts in their own weather app. But they're also shutting down the API, and it's like,

01:37:33 ◼   ► okay, well, that's kind of crappy because there's other weather APIs, but they're not as good for, you know,

01:37:40 ◼   ► a lot of people out there. And so one thing I would hope to see is maybe a system-wide weather API available,

01:37:48 ◼   ► you know, weather kit available to apps. That being said, I'm not expecting this. I don't think they're actually going to do that.

01:37:53 ◼   ► I think they're just going to shut it down because they don't want to, you know, it's something they own,

01:37:56 ◼   ► they don't want to deal with it anymore. But I bet that's not why they bought it.

01:38:00 ◼   ► But just like a little, like, ray of hope, I hope that they're actually going to have, like, weather kit that you just have weather data

01:38:06 ◼   ► without having to get the user's location and send your own API request to some other third-party service and pay for it.

01:38:13 ◼   ► Like, ideally, that would be part of the system. But, yeah, honestly, I'm not holding my breath on that one.

01:38:19 ◼   ► Well, I mean, that is a service play. Like, if you think about what they do with CloudKit where, like, you know,

01:38:24 ◼   ► it's a play to say, it's very specific because it's weather apps, but, like, things like CloudKit are like,

01:38:28 ◼   ► okay, so you want to make an app in iOS and you have some data you want to store and you want it to be cloud synced.

01:38:33 ◼   ► And if we ask every single individual developer to figure that out on their own, it's really actually a harder problem.

01:38:38 ◼   ► So instead we'll give you CloudKit, which is, like, one way that you can do that.

01:38:41 ◼   ► If you don't want to be like Marco and write your own servers, you don't have that skill set,

01:38:44 ◼   ► maybe you're a lone developer or a small team and you don't have server-side expertise, use CloudKit.

01:38:48 ◼   ► And we'll do a bunch of stuff for you. And the model is you can get a bunch of stuff and a small amount of data,

01:38:53 ◼   ► essentially for free, which is actually a pretty good deal. You don't have to run the servers, assuming the API works,

01:38:57 ◼   ► and everything is reliable, Apple will run it for you. But they do charge money beyond a certain point.

01:39:03 ◼   ► And a weather API would be similar, where that's a potential money maker for Apple, right?

01:39:08 ◼   ► You know, they bought a company that already had an API, and I understand that by getting rid of the existing one.

01:39:15 ◼   ► But you could say, oh, here's weatherKit, and it's a way for someone to more easily make a weather app

01:39:21 ◼   ► to give sort of more innovation in the weather app space without having to worry about the weather stuff.

01:39:26 ◼   ► And then on top of that, we'll charge you money for it. If your weather app becomes successful,

01:39:30 ◼   ► we'll start taking a cut of your profits because, hey, we run the servers.

01:39:33 ◼   ► That's how all the other weather things work anyway. That's why all the iOS weather apps are subscription-based,

01:39:37 ◼   ► because they have to pay somebody for the weather info. I think that makes perfect sense.

01:39:42 ◼   ► Please don't give Apple ideas for new ways to extract money out of developers.

01:39:47 ◼   ► Well, but here's the thing. It's just for weather apps, so it's a limited space, right?

01:39:52 ◼   ► And I'm not sure how much money weather apps make in the grand scheme of things, so maybe it's just two small potatoes for them.

01:39:57 ◼   ► But with or without Apple, every single weather app that gets weather info is paying somebody for that weather info.

01:40:03 ◼   ► I don't think there are many sources of free weather info that are good these days.

01:40:08 ◼   ► So it's not a change to that market at all. But I see what you're hoping for.

01:40:12 ◼   ► My more realistic expectation is, oh, they bought Dark Sky.

01:40:16 ◼   ► Now would be the year that you show off enhancements to weather functionality in iOS built on Dark Sky.

01:40:21 ◼   ► Like Apple's first-party stuff, you know what I mean?

01:40:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's the most likely end. But I agree with Marco that it would be fun if there was,

01:40:29 ◼   ► I guess you can't have Cloud Kit for weather stuff, hey, but you could do Weather Kit or something like that,

01:40:35 ◼   ► where developers could tap into that for either free or low cost. And I think it would be funny.

01:40:41 ◼   ► I don't really have any desire to run or write a weather app today, especially since I love Carrot Weather so darn much.

01:40:47 ◼   ► But if there was an API right there on the device, I would at least consider it. Maybe Marco would too.

01:40:52 ◼   ► We would have competing weather apps, you and I, Marco.

01:40:54 ◼   ► I'll tell you one thing. When Weatherline shuts down in, I think, about another year or whenever that is,

01:40:59 ◼   ► I'm going to have the urge to write a weather app. I'll tell you that. I don't know. I shouldn't do it.

01:41:03 ◼   ► I hope someone else does. But I'm definitely going to be motivated.

01:41:08 ◼   ► Well, you can get very, very similar functionality from what I know. And I don't know Weatherline particularly well.

01:41:14 ◼   ► But I think you can get pretty similar functionality on the newest version of Carrot Weather.

01:41:17 ◼   ► But I don't know Weatherline very well. Maybe I'm underselling it.

01:41:22 ◼   ► Nevertheless, anything else for iPad, iOS, anything like that, or shall we talk Mac?

01:41:28 ◼   ► Before we jump into the Mac, very quick diversion here into Watchland.

01:41:32 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, that's a thing too, isn't it?

01:41:34 ◼   ► Yeah, WatchOS. I want custom watch faces, and I think now's the time.

01:41:39 ◼   ► Yeah, right. Oh, it is the time, but yeah, right.

01:41:41 ◼   ► You've been so against this for so long. Every time I bring it up, you're like, "It's never going to happen."

01:41:45 ◼   ► I'm glad you finally come around, because custom watch faces absolutely have to happen.

01:41:50 ◼   ► I don't know if this is the year, so I'm not as optimistic as you, but it has to happen.

01:41:54 ◼   ► Talk about iOS and the obvious features that everyone wants. It has to happen. It just has to.

01:42:00 ◼   ► Eventually they will get around to it. I really hope this is the year.

01:42:03 ◼   ► But if this is not the year, it's going to happen in the next five years.

01:42:08 ◼   ► And if it doesn't, everyone on WatchOS should be fired.

01:42:10 ◼   ► Well, I think, well, is there anybody on WatchOS?

01:42:13 ◼   ► I think the reason why this feels like the right year for it is because the way they built widgets on iOS

01:42:22 ◼   ► shows a pretty clear path on how they could do it in a way that would be compatible with their power and control needs.

01:42:32 ◼   ► The way widgets work on iOS is your process of your app is not always running and is not checked very often to refresh that widget's contents.

01:42:42 ◼   ► You, as the app, you basically vend to the system upon request on a certain timeline a SwiftUI view.

01:42:50 ◼   ► And then the system chooses how to render that. It basically stores that view and just renders it.

01:42:56 ◼   ► You give it a timeline, very similar to how watch complications work.

01:42:59 ◼   ► You give it a timeline and say, all right, at this time show this version of this view.

01:43:03 ◼   ► And then in two hours, either ask me for another one or show this version of this view, whatever.

01:43:08 ◼   ► You give it the timeline of how it shows stuff.

01:43:10 ◼   ► And the point is, your process has never woken up to do that.

01:43:13 ◼   ► And it's all built on SwiftUI.

01:43:15 ◼   ► The way they can make custom watch faces is you give them a SwiftUI view that includes variables in the view

01:43:25 ◼   ► that are bound to things like the rotation of an hour hand, the rotation of a minute hand, the exact hour, minute, and second.

01:43:32 ◼   ► You could have a SwiftUI view that is bound to those values.

01:43:36 ◼   ► And then the system could update that view over time for you, whatever it is.

01:43:42 ◼   ► Once a second if it's showing on screen, maybe once a minute if it's on the sleep version of the face.

01:43:47 ◼   ► And your process doesn't have to be running at all for that.

01:43:50 ◼   ► The system could do all of that right within Clock Kit and only wake you up on the kind of schedule they would wake up a complication for data updates.

01:43:59 ◼   ► And that would be an incredibly power efficient way to build watch faces that would let WatchOS maintain almost complete control over what's going on.

01:44:10 ◼   ► But you as the app would still have a ton of creative freedom to do whatever you want with that.

01:44:18 ◼   ► You could even have things like placeholders that you could place in your watch faces for standard complication types and sizes.

01:44:24 ◼   ► So there's lots of different things they could do with this.

01:44:26 ◼   ► I really hope they do it because what we saw with widgets and combined with SwiftUI's native capabilities,

01:44:34 ◼   ► that shows a really good path on how to do this in a way that is compatible with their technical priorities and goals.

01:44:42 ◼   ► So they have all the tools to do it now. It is totally in Apple's hands to do this. There are no more excuses.

01:44:49 ◼   ► It's 100% ready. They don't have to wait for massive jumps in battery power or anything like that.

01:44:56 ◼   ► They're ready to do this now if they want to. So I hope they do.

01:45:00 ◼   ► That was the rumor when the widgets stuff came out. There was even a clock rotation function call or something like,

01:45:06 ◼   ► "Oh, this was originally designed as a watch face API." But it's just a perfect fit.

01:45:11 ◼   ► And then the other good thing about it that you didn't mention, but that Apple loves, you know what else you can do?

01:45:16 ◼   ► You can make a watch face store and Rolex can make a watch face and charge a huge amount of money so everyone can say they have the Rolex.

01:45:22 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, I know they do this with everything. I'll just make an iMessage store. I'll just make a tvOS app store."

01:45:27 ◼   ► Like some app stores work better than others and maybe watch face app store wouldn't be that big a deal.

01:45:32 ◼   ► But I think because there are established brands in watch, I think Rolex would be dumb not to make a Rolex, a set of Rolex watch faces in the Apple watch face store.

01:45:44 ◼   ► Rolex would never do it.

01:45:46 ◼   ► I don't know. But like whoever. There are brands that would want to sell it.

01:45:50 ◼   ► I think it would be more successful than the iMessage store, but maybe less successful than tvOS.

01:45:57 ◼   ► Either way, they should just do it. Apple knows how to make app stores. Apple loves having another platform for you to develop.

01:46:02 ◼   ► It's just another part of developing for the watch.

01:46:04 ◼   ► I have a feeling that watch apps, we saw from the part of the court leak documents, that the watch store is not a ghost town, but it's nothing compared to the iOS store, the one that counts.

01:46:17 ◼   ► And it's kind of depressingly not great.

01:46:20 ◼   ► Just because how many people want apps on their watch. Mostly you just want to use the built in apps and use it as a fitness device and have some cool complications and maybe get a cool weather app.

01:46:28 ◼   ► It's not that big a deal. But I feel like watch faces are similar.

01:46:32 ◼   ► There is a market for there to be a watch face store, so Apple should totally do it.

01:46:36 ◼   ► Even if it's not super popular, it's not a big deal.

01:46:40 ◼   ► Maybe this is the year. I'm feeling slightly more optimistic based on your enthusiasm.

01:46:45 ◼   ► There's no way the really high end brands like Rolex, Patek, Longa, they're not going to do it.

01:46:54 ◼   ► I don't know. They see dollar signs.

01:46:56 ◼   ► First of all, you probably see it from places like Hermes, but I think you also see it from the big fashion brands.

01:47:01 ◼   ► It has some collaborations with Fossil and stuff like that.

01:47:03 ◼   ► How about Swatch?

01:47:04 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe. They're a big brand.

01:47:07 ◼   ► They also have Swatch group owns a whole bunch of different sub brands.

01:47:11 ◼   ► Regardless of the big brand influence, that would be a new marketplace for developers and designers to make cool stuff.

01:47:20 ◼   ► I think it would really breathe some life into the Apple Watch software scene, which needs life breathed into it.

01:47:28 ◼   ► It could have been like MP3 player skins.

01:47:31 ◼   ► Say you make the overcast watch face that integrates with the overcast widget in a way that you can't see the borders between them.

01:47:37 ◼   ► If you could actually make them butt up against each other and make it like a complication blends into the watch face because you get to control both of them, that's a little bit un-Apple like.

01:47:45 ◼   ► But it reminds me of MP3 player skins where you have control over the whole palette.

01:47:49 ◼   ► You can really make something that is an integrated whole that is as ugly as you want it to be.

01:47:54 ◼   ► As branded the Frito-Lay watch face. That'll be the big popular one. It's a giant Dorito rotating.

01:48:01 ◼   ► First of all, that would be amazing and I bet people would use it.

01:48:04 ◼   ► Even beyond the big brand stuff, I think this would be a wonderful thing for app makers and app designers to play with.

01:48:12 ◼   ► Because the Apple Watch face game needs that level of individualism added to it.

01:48:19 ◼   ► Now that so many people use the Apple Watch, you need more individuality than whatever Apple's half-assed attempt at making three new watch faces a year can add to it.

01:48:34 ◼   ► You need more than that. You need a richer set of influences and perspectives and ideas than just whatever five people in Cupertino can come up with.

01:48:45 ◼   ► I definitely agree. I'd like to go on record that I do not want there to be custom watch faces because then Underscore will do nothing for the rest of his life but make custom watch faces.

01:48:58 ◼   ► And I like his apps.

01:48:59 ◼   ► That's all he does now anyway. What are you talking about? There's no change. He makes some watch faces now and he just can't ship them.

01:49:04 ◼   ► I know. I like his apps too.

01:49:06 ◼   ► He's probably got 75 watch faces ready to ship right now.

01:49:09 ◼   ► That's funny. Alright, Mac OS, Jon, what do you want?

01:49:15 ◼   ► I feel like this year for Mac OS, the obvious thing is that we have all this ARM Mac hardware.

01:49:23 ◼   ► And yeah, we have a Mac OS that runs on them already.

01:49:25 ◼   ► But kind of the same way that the new iMacs are an example of hardware made with Apple Silicon in mind in a way that the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air were not.

01:49:39 ◼   ► Because they were just kind of like, "Oh, it's the old one with the guts ripped out."

01:49:41 ◼   ► You can do a similar thing for Mac OS.

01:49:43 ◼   ► What kind of things can you do in Mac OS knowing that our Mac exists?

01:49:50 ◼   ► And that OS is this one that's going to be announced at WWDC because Big Sur was...

01:49:58 ◼   ► They knew Big Sur was going to be released before ARM Macs were out.

01:50:02 ◼   ► But this OS, they know this is the one that's going to be released when ARM Macs exist.

01:50:06 ◼   ► So for example, if they're going to be cellular Macs at some point, now would be the time to have the OS, the underpinnings of that in the OS.

01:50:15 ◼   ► So if there's any framework changes you're going to do, if there's any sort of thing that you want to tell developers at with a hint, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, here's a way that you can...

01:50:23 ◼   ► Because there's a lot of APIs that exist for that already, but they can enhance them.

01:50:26 ◼   ► And people are like, "Huh, why are they enhancing that API? It doesn't make sense."

01:50:29 ◼   ► Cellular is just one thing I'm thinking of.

01:50:31 ◼   ► But even just APIs that take advantage of the upcoming 128 core integrated GPU and whatever features that might have.

01:50:39 ◼   ► Like, this is the Mac OS that can really sort of leverage Apple Silicon Macs.

01:50:45 ◼   ► It's complicated by the fact that if there's no hardware associated with it, you kind of have to read between the lines.

01:50:50 ◼   ► But I just feel like this is the OS that could be optimized for ARM Macs in terms of all the features they can possibly support.

01:50:59 ◼   ► And if there are any kind of frameworks or things that needed to be sort of recompiled or made better for the ARM Macs in a way that might have disrupted compatibility,

01:51:08 ◼   ► this is the OS to do it in.

01:51:10 ◼   ► And then besides that, I feel like it's just the usual complaints about reliability, performance,

01:51:16 ◼   ► like all sorts of stuff that came out in Big Sur that is not fully big.

01:51:19 ◼   ► Like, there's lots of complaints lately about the update system.

01:51:22 ◼   ► I just read Jason Snell's big thing about enterprise Mac users complaining that every time there's a security update, I have to get a 3GB download.

01:51:29 ◼   ► Like, the mobile update system that ARM Macs inherited from iOS, essentially, is not up to snuff for the Mac.

01:51:39 ◼   ► We shouldn't have 3GB downloads for a small security patch, right?

01:51:43 ◼   ► So hey, this is the OS where you can enhance that.

01:51:46 ◼   ► Similarly, the time machine enhancements that they've done, those are great.

01:51:49 ◼   ► It would be nice if there was some kind of interface to snapshots or some enhancements.

01:51:52 ◼   ► Like, there are features that already exist that Mac OS needs to take advantage of.

01:51:56 ◼   ► And then just general reliability and performance type stuff, right?

01:51:59 ◼   ► I think, like, normally you would say, "Oh, I just want Mac OS to be reliable. Everything about it is good."

01:52:05 ◼   ► But I think now we have enough sort of immature systems in Mac OS that they need to take that.

01:52:09 ◼   ► And similarly, like SwiftUI, like, it exists, it's there, it's better than, you know, it's a cool thing,

01:52:14 ◼   ► but there needs to be a version 2, and there are lots of parts of Mac OS that are like that.

01:52:18 ◼   ► So that's what I want to see, and I think that's what we will see.

01:52:21 ◼   ► I don't think there's anything, again, like iOS, anything major that Mac OS lacks that everyone is just dying to see.

01:52:28 ◼   ► It's just like, take what's there, make it more reliable, take the things that are immature,

01:52:32 ◼   ► make them more mature, and really take advantage of the hardware that both exist now

01:52:38 ◼   ► and the hardware that we're going to see in the next year.

01:52:40 ◼   ► To that end, did you see, somebody tweeted earlier, and I think Steve Troughton-Smith retweeted it,

01:52:44 ◼   ► that it looks like there's going to be branch prediction in Objective-C message send?

01:52:49 ◼   ► I looked at that, it was a thing about the hardware having support for a feature that helps with Objective-C message send.

01:52:55 ◼   ► And I totally believe that, like, there's tons of stuff that's been in every ARM chip that Apple has ever made,

01:52:59 ◼   ► for all its devices that are specifically tailored to make Apple's frameworks and languages run quickly.

01:53:07 ◼   ► I didn't understand enough of the technical details, like, how does this one particular feature of the CPU help with Objective-C message send?

01:53:15 ◼   ► But that's nothing new, and obviously Objective-C is the past, we all know that.

01:53:19 ◼   ► They should be adding features that make Swift faster at this point.

01:53:22 ◼   ► But yeah, that's part of being Apple Silicon, right?

01:53:26 ◼   ► Oh, and speaking of making things faster, like, if they want to talk about Swift compilation times,

01:53:30 ◼   ► but unfortunately, because Swift is so open, I mean, I'm sure they'll brag about it and say they improved it,

01:53:36 ◼   ► because they have improved it, but they've improved it in ways that are visible,

01:53:39 ◼   ► because LLVM is developed in the open, Clang is developed in the open,

01:53:42 ◼   ► Swift's compiler is developed in the open, like, there's not a lot of surprises there, but there'll probably be bar charts.

01:53:48 ◼   ► No, in terms of Mac OS, I most definitely just want, I know we say this every year,

01:53:57 ◼   ► but I want my snow leopard year, where they say, what was it, no new features, just improvements.

01:54:03 ◼   ► Just make everything better, please, please and thank you.

01:54:06 ◼   ► They need to, like, notification center, and the today view, and what they've done with the menu bar,

01:54:11 ◼   ► there's some things that need attention, I guess you could call that a zero new feature,

01:54:14 ◼   ► but they added a bunch of UI stuff in Big Sur that is not fully baked,

01:54:19 ◼   ► and I would like to see them take a second refinement run at a lot of those things.

01:54:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's like my only wish list item, and like, I feel like Big Sur is,

01:54:28 ◼   ► again, it's like what I was saying with iPad stuff earlier,

01:54:30 ◼   ► it's like they got 75% of the way done with the design and just stopped,

01:54:33 ◼   ► and like, I would love to see the notifications UI is ridiculously bad,

01:54:39 ◼   ► it's like, the touch targets are way out of whack, or the click targets, excuse me,

01:54:44 ◼   ► way out of whack, the whole thing where you have to hover over the notification

01:54:48 ◼   ► to see that little tiny X or the little options thing, like, it's so bad.

01:54:52 ◼   ► And there's a pop-up menu, because they can't put two buttons on it.

01:54:55 ◼   ► Before, there was room for two buttons, now, sorry, there's only room for one.

01:54:58 ◼   ► Like, you know, take a second run at all of that, and I would call that a new feature.

01:55:02 ◼   ► Hey, we've improved notifications, we've improved that little sidebar thing.

01:55:06 ◼   ► Even the menu bar, which they did a bunch of quote-unquote improvements to in Big Sur

01:55:09 ◼   ► to make it sort of more flexible so you can have control center,

01:55:11 ◼   ► which control center is cool, and you can drag things off of it and everything,

01:55:14 ◼   ► but it's needlessly inflexible in terms of the order things are in the menu bar.

01:55:18 ◼   ► I really don't expect them to address this.

01:55:19 ◼   ► This is the type of thing they never address, but in the next five years,

01:55:22 ◼   ► someone should think, hey, what if I want the little magnifying glass

01:55:26 ◼   ► for spotlight search to be the right-most item on the menu bar?

01:55:29 ◼   ► I don't like them saying that the date has to be in the upper right,

01:55:32 ◼   ► and I can't change that.

01:55:33 ◼   ► I used to be able to change it, and now I can't, and I don't understand why.

01:55:35 ◼   ► So that's more of a five-year plan, but a one-year plan is, like you were saying,

01:55:40 ◼   ► Margo, take all those features you added in Big Sur,

01:55:42 ◼   ► maybe take a second look at some of them.

01:55:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I would say as a general goal, nothing should appear on hover.

01:55:50 ◼   ► I know that's hard.

01:55:52 ◼   ► I know I just killed Alan Dye with that statement, but nothing should appear on hover.

01:55:58 ◼   ► If the UI has important functionality, it should be visible, period.

01:56:03 ◼   ► Hover is good when you're in a full-screen view of a video player.

01:56:07 ◼   ► The rest of the UI doesn't need that kind of treatment.

01:56:12 ◼   ► I was going to say, well, what if you just wiggle your mouse,

01:56:14 ◼   ► and the close box would glint slightly?

01:56:16 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:56:18 ◼   ► You could turn on high contrast notification dismissal.

01:56:22 ◼   ► It'll put a white outline around the little x.

01:56:25 ◼   ► No, seriously, almost all of the problems I have with Big Sur's UI

01:56:29 ◼   ► come down to that one thing of something that I need to use

01:56:33 ◼   ► is hidden behind a delay that appears on a hover.

01:56:37 ◼   ► So it's either the proxy icon on a folder window or a document window.

01:56:42 ◼   ► I just put it on there. Just leave it on. It's fine.

01:56:46 ◼   ► I'm hovering over one right now. It looks great as it is with it showing all the time.

01:56:50 ◼   ► Just leave it there. So that's step one.

01:56:53 ◼   ► And then step two is the notification.

01:56:55 ◼   ► You have this stupid hover over thing with the x.

01:56:57 ◼   ► That should always be visible, and the design should be designed

01:57:03 ◼   ► to accommodate the things people actually need all the time.

01:57:08 ◼   ► Like the top two or three options they want to do,

01:57:11 ◼   ► instead of burying them under a pop-up menu, put them in the dialog.

01:57:14 ◼   ► And the close button, which is a thing that people want to do, put that there.

01:57:17 ◼   ► And the totally non-obvious ability to grab the thing

01:57:20 ◼   ► and chuck it off the right edge of the screen,

01:57:22 ◼   ► nobody knows about that except for nerds.

01:57:24 ◼   ► It is a useful thing that you can do sometimes.

01:57:26 ◼   ► Yeah, they have better affordances for things you can do with notifications.

01:57:30 ◼   ► Because you can still do them. They're just all harder.

01:57:33 ◼   ► Not a day goes by when I don't misclick either the x button or the clear button

01:57:41 ◼   ► or the options to go do something.

01:57:43 ◼   ► Yeah, that thing expands into clear all. I forgot about that.

01:57:47 ◼   ► The little x sometimes gets wider and becomes a clear all button.

01:57:51 ◼   ► Yes, which is different in both dimensions and size.

01:57:55 ◼   ► There's so much about the notification design.

01:57:58 ◼   ► It just encompasses everything that is terrible about the Alan Dye era of software design.

01:58:03 ◼   ► And I really hope that they take a second pass at this.

01:58:06 ◼   ► Even, for God's sake, finish your first pass, because this is not finished.

01:58:10 ◼   ► We've been using it for a year, but this is not finished because it doesn't work.

01:58:15 ◼   ► So please, for the love of God, do something about this design and fix the most glaring problems.

01:58:20 ◼   ► And for me, that's notifications and document proxy icons.

01:58:24 ◼   ► We're going long here, but I want to throw in Home OS before we go.

01:58:27 ◼   ► That's the rumor. They have an OS that runs on their Home pods, and they have an OS that runs on their TV.

01:58:32 ◼   ► There's some leaks about Home OS or whatever.

01:58:35 ◼   ► But hey, if they're going to rename something to be...

01:58:37 ◼   ► Because I think the Home pod now does run a variant of tvOS. Am I correct in that?

01:58:42 ◼   ► I think that the big one runs something that was called Audio OS behind the scenes.

01:58:47 ◼   ► And I think the Home pod Mini runs tvOS, but I'm not positive on that.

01:58:50 ◼   ► Runs a tvOS variant, yeah.

01:58:52 ◼   ► I mean, anyway, assuming that leak is remotely true, sort of unifying their Home devices,

01:58:59 ◼   ► the TV, the little speakers, and whatever else they roll out, under a thing called Home OS, makes some sense to me.

01:59:05 ◼   ► If not, then... Because no one ever knew what the OS was called in the Home pods anyway.

01:59:09 ◼   ► They're not an app platform. It's not that big of a deal.

01:59:11 ◼   ► But that kind of unification can make sense.

01:59:13 ◼   ► There's no rumors about... We've had in our document here for a long time this rumor about future Home Apple devices with screens or whatever.

01:59:21 ◼   ► This doesn't seem like the event where they would roll that out.

01:59:24 ◼   ► But if they're going to say, "Hey, kind of like the iPad OS announcement, here's a branding change that tells you in theory our intentions for this platform."

01:59:33 ◼   ► And there is... I forgot what the name of this was. This is another topic we had.

01:59:36 ◼   ► Whatever that cross-industry effort to make all their Home automation stuff compatible.

01:59:41 ◼   ► It got rebranded at our new name.

01:59:43 ◼   ► It was called like Matter or something.

01:59:46 ◼   ► Anyway, that seems to be coming to a fruition of the industry getting together and saying, "It hurts us all when all our devices don't work with each other and everyone has to buy all these weird Home bridge Apple..."

01:59:55 ◼   ► You know, like, "Let's all sort of agree on some kind of standard because it'll be better for everybody who makes Home automation devices."

02:00:02 ◼   ► If and when that comes to fruition, I feel like Apple is a participant in that process and they will have a sort of second coming out for their Home devices.

02:00:13 ◼   ► "Oh, here's a new line of stuff in your Home, maybe a better big HomePod that Marco was predicting."

02:00:20 ◼   ► Or, "Maybe the HomePod Mini gets better and the Thread radios are suddenly going to start to use them and it works with all the things integrated with AirTag and Apple TV."

02:00:27 ◼   ► "And all this works under this new standard that means you can buy all these peripherals that work together."

02:00:32 ◼   ► I don't think this is the year for that.

02:00:34 ◼   ► But it might be the year where Apple preemptively re-brands its in-home efforts under the umbrella of Home OS and then talk about potential future stuff.

02:00:45 ◼   ► This is based on seeing a couple tweets go by mentioning Home OS.

02:00:49 ◼   ► If that turns out to be totally BS and not a real thing, I apologize for even talking about it.

02:00:53 ◼   ► But either way, I think I'm not predicting huge things from TV OS and HomePod.

02:01:01 ◼   ► I expect them to be mentioned and discussed in the context of their other devices and services and how they integrate.

02:01:08 ◼   ► But I don't think this is the year that Apple is going to come out with their new Home device with the screen and a new big HomePod and a re-branding of Home OS.

02:01:18 ◼   ► Because they just did the new Apple TV thing.

02:01:21 ◼   ► And unlike the iPad, when they put out the new Apple TV, we weren't all like, "Boy, I can't wait for the new TV OS to take advantage of this."

02:01:27 ◼   ► It's like, "Nah, it's already doing it."

02:01:29 ◼   ► It does the thing. We got a new remote. That was the big problem. It's still ridiculously expensive.

02:01:34 ◼   ► TV OS, despite Casey's problems with HDMI cables, already has pretty much all the features.

02:01:39 ◼   ► It supports all the HDMI standards. It does frame rate matching. It has a calibration app built in.

02:01:44 ◼   ► I feel like that is not a product that's in desperate need of some obvious feature other than a price cut.

02:01:50 ◼   ► So I don't think this is going to be a big year for TV OS/Home OS, but I think they will mention it as it integrates with their other products.

02:01:58 ◼   ► Oh, very quick aside. I think you might already know this, but I realized I had never done that calibration thing within the Apple TV.

02:02:07 ◼   ► And I went to do that when I plugged in my fancy-schmancy HDMI cable.

02:02:12 ◼   ► And it said, "Oh, you're using Dolby Vision. There's nothing to calibrate. Go away."

02:02:15 ◼   ► Yep, that's what it usually says. Oh, and speaking of this stuff people have mentioned in the chat, the Home app.

02:02:22 ◼   ► So where does the Home app fit into all this? No one likes the Home app.

02:02:25 ◼   ► Nope. So bad.

02:02:27 ◼   ► The Mac version is even more hilarious. That's part of your home strategy.

02:02:32 ◼   ► If you rename the thing Home OS and you say, "There's a new Home app."

02:02:35 ◼   ► The Home app doesn't run Home OS. It runs on your iPad or on your iPhone or on your Mac or whatever.

02:02:40 ◼   ► That's a great time to enhance that because as of version one it was reasonable, but now it's just really kind of limiting.

02:02:46 ◼   ► So I'm not sure if they'll save the new redesigned Home app for their big rolling out of Apple as part of the matter network or whatever the hell the thing is.

02:02:54 ◼   ► I hope I'm getting that name right. Did chat remind you to correct me?

02:02:56 ◼   ► No, you're right.

02:02:57 ◼   ► Yeah. So if they want to take a second cut at the Home app, this is a great time to do it. If not, they might save it for the big coming out party.

02:03:06 ◼   ► Is that it?

02:03:08 ◼   ► I mean I'm sure we're forgetting something. We've gone so long. There's tons of things Apple could announce.

02:03:13 ◼   ► I mean, hey, are they going to announce the car? I don't know.

02:03:16 ◼   ► Can you imagine? That would be so wild.

02:03:18 ◼   ► It just rolls out on stage. That would be, yeah.

02:03:21 ◼   ► Honestly, I just haven't been keeping up with the rumors. My focus is so narrow these days. I just want to see that MacBook Pro.

02:03:28 ◼   ► I care so much about Mac hardware and so much less about other things.

02:03:32 ◼   ► My priorities are now Apple's priorities. So don't take that as any prediction about what's going to be emphasized at this show.

02:03:39 ◼   ► Thanks to our sponsors this week. Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and HulloPillow.

02:03:44 ◼   ► And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm/join.

02:03:50 ◼   ► Thanks everybody and we will talk to you next week.

02:03:53 ◼   ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

02:04:00 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.

02:04:05 ◼   ► John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.

02:04:11 ◼   ► Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.

02:04:16 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

02:04:21 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

02:04:30 ◼   ► So that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.

02:04:35 ◼   ► And T-Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C.

02:04:40 ◼   ► USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. It's accidental.

02:04:45 ◼   ► They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental.

02:04:51 ◼   ► Tech broadcast so long.

02:04:55 ◼   ► For our WWDC extravaganza. Second consecutive time. I'm not doing it next to you two.

02:05:01 ◼   ► I'm very sad about that. I know John isn't, but I am.

02:05:05 ◼   ► Yeah I'm kind of not either. As much as I love doing the live shows in person.

02:05:11 ◼   ► I love a lot about that. But it's so much work and I get so stressed out about the logistics all working out okay.

02:05:19 ◼   ► Not for me.

02:05:21 ◼   ► Well you got a two year break from being stressed out. I feel like I got a two year break from being stressed out about travel.

02:05:25 ◼   ► Yeah right. So you're ready to go now John?

02:05:27 ◼   ► You know like recharge to endure the badness if and when it ever happens again.

02:05:32 ◼   ► At least there's one more year where you don't have to worry about like, so do we just sit here during the theme song?

02:05:38 ◼   ► Oh god that's so true.

02:05:40 ◼   ► What do we do during the theme song? Do we sing along?

02:05:43 ◼   ► You look at the audience and appreciate the people who are singing. That's what you do.

02:05:47 ◼   ► No you're right.

02:05:48 ◼   ► We just stare at them awkwardly.

02:05:50 ◼   ► I filmed them the first year.

02:05:52 ◼   ► So did I.

02:05:53 ◼   ► Yeah but that works the first year but then like you know what do you do the rest of the time?

02:05:57 ◼   ► Like it's too short for us to do like you know the rock band move just leave the stage and then come back.

02:06:01 ◼   ► You should do like what the newscasters do.

02:06:03 ◼   ► You know like when the lights dim like when we were kids when the news would be over the lights would dim the newscasters would always talk to each other like as the studio lights are dimming.

02:06:12 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

02:06:13 ◼   ► They always had to look like they had like a side conversation really they were probably just like you know either they hated each other and were cursing each other under their breath they were complaining about like the director or whoever I don't know.

02:06:23 ◼   ► But like whatever they're talking about it certainly wasn't let's discuss the latest news stories.

02:06:28 ◼   ► Well let me let me tell you if we are not in person next year then I am I am committing all three of us and I have not spoken to either of you two about it I'm committing all three of us to do one video episode next year.

02:06:40 ◼   ► No one wants to see that.

02:06:41 ◼   ► Come on.

02:06:42 ◼   ► Just for funsies.

02:06:44 ◼   ► Nobody needs to see video episodes.

02:06:46 ◼   ► That's not that's not why they go to the live shows.

02:06:48 ◼   ► The live shows are kind of like the version of the bootleg is that you get to hear the sort of raw uncut thing and I suppose sometimes you get to see toasters but you know.

02:06:58 ◼   ► Yeah I suppose like if we had to do one of those two things either a full blown live show in person in a venue that we have to like set up all the logistics for and everything or just record our video one day like I guess I could record the video.

02:07:11 ◼   ► I guess that's not that big of an ask.

02:07:14 ◼   ► I think I would prefer the live show.

02:07:17 ◼   ► Really I'll do the damn video at it.

02:07:19 ◼   ► I don't even know this will be the first time I've edited it ATP.

02:07:22 ◼   ► No it's just like what is the I just at least in live show I feel like there's a live audience that in theory is being entertained and it's like I went to a thing and I saw a thing because it's a thing that can only happen when we're here in person where it's a video thing that can happen at any time and no one actually wants to see us.

02:07:38 ◼   ► Maybe we did it in a hot tub.

02:07:39 ◼   ► That's a twitch joke you two won't get.

02:07:41 ◼   ► Correct.

02:07:42 ◼   ► Ask Adam about it.

02:07:43 ◼   ► OK.

02:07:46 ◼   ► (beeping)