00:00:08 ◼ ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade episode 303. Today's show is brought to you by the fine folk over at Linode, DoorDash, ExpressVPN and fully.
00:00:22 ◼ ► Hello Myke Hurley, I'm joining you live from California where an event just took place, but I'm just in my house.
00:00:27 ◼ ► You're just at home, because it's WWDC time. We are recording this episode basically immediately after the WWDC 2020 presentation ended.
00:00:44 ◼ ► There's more information pouring out as we record today, but this is our immediate reactions and we can talk more in future episodes about that.
00:00:52 ◼ ► If you're new around here, before every keynote we do a draft where me and Jason instead of doing typical predictions, we take a look at what our predictions will be and then we draft them and pick our favorites and compete to win.
00:01:12 ◼ ► Now Jason, I will say I peg you as the winner on this one, which is of just great upset to me.
00:01:19 ◼ ► I put you at 5 points to my 4 points. Would you like me to go through how I scored this?
00:01:26 ◼ ► Sure, I have it 5 to 3, so it will be interesting to see what you gave yourself credit for that I didn't give you credit for.
00:01:32 ◼ ► I think I know what it is, but we'll get to that. I'll put a link in the show notes to the draft scorecard in case you also want to see exactly what all of our picks were.
00:01:42 ◼ ► But Jason, I have you as correctly picking that the Arm transition would be announced, which it was, that Mac Catalyst would get some improvements, which it did.
00:01:52 ◼ ► We see the inside of the Apple Park ring, we saw it many times, that there would be new Memoji options and improvements to Siri.
00:02:04 ◼ ► Those were my 5. I really thought I was going to get no gameplay demos, and then an Apple person spent about a minute showing off a Tomb Raider game just to show that code translation in Rosetta running on Apple Silicon would be fine.
00:02:23 ◼ ► And that, you know, I don't want to argue it. There was gameplay. He was literally playing a game, so go figure. I lost that one out.
00:02:54 ◼ ► The screen that I saw just had the widgets in the widget area to the left of page 1 like it currently does, and I think the new widgets will be there, but is that a layout change?
00:03:04 ◼ ► I didn't mark this down until a point where I believe that Craig said that you will be able to get these features on iOS.
00:03:36 ◼ ► Now, maybe the home screen layout, I mean, I assume, actually, the question is did they show it?
00:03:41 ◼ ► But I assume that that last page, the whatever they're calling it, the library, app library, it's got to be on the iPad, too, right?
00:03:49 ◼ ► I kept looking for images of either of those things on their iPad demo, and I didn't see them.
00:03:59 ◼ ► All right. Anyway, it still doesn't change the overall score anyway, so maybe I can just have the point so it's not too much of a gap.
00:04:08 ◼ ► Changing default apps on iPadOS and iOS. I didn't think I was going to get this one, but it showed up on one of the Word Bubble slides,
00:04:16 ◼ ► which actually, now that I know this, now that we know this is the case, it makes the most sense.
00:04:21 ◼ ► This is not something that Apple really want to do that you'll be able to change. I think it's email and web browsing.
00:04:29 ◼ ► But that is something that you will be able to do. New Apple watch faces and enhancements to messages on iOS.
00:04:41 ◼ ► Yep, I agree. I agree. So one that's slightly in dispute because there's some concern about that iPadOS one, but the fact is it doesn't matter.
00:04:51 ◼ ► Also, I really love that in the members Discord everybody's posting facts from Apple web pages, which is beside the point because it's not about what's on the web pages.
00:04:59 ◼ ► It's great if you have the information, but it's not about, as we said many times, it's not about what is true, it's about what we saw in the presentation.
00:05:06 ◼ ► There is some question, I believe, that it was spoken about in the presentation, but nevertheless it didn't change the overall win.
00:05:14 ◼ ► This is your second WWDC win in a row, Jason Snow. Congratulations to you. I'm obviously heartbroken.
00:05:20 ◼ ► Thank you. You won the tiebreaker. I thought that was going to be auspicious when you won the tiebreaker immediately, which was, will Tim Cook be on a stage?
00:05:26 ◼ ► And in fact, he was the only person who was on a stage, but he was on a stage in the Steve Jobs Theater.
00:05:32 ◼ ► So I thought it was going to go your way there, but you know, a score of five to four, we had one, I believe, that was like 10 to nine or 10 to 10 with a tiebreaker, something like that, where we've gotten more.
00:05:45 ◼ ► I feel like this is a combination of some things that took us by surprise, but also us being a little bit more bold and risky with some of our choices.
00:05:57 ◼ ► Because of something that we both had some hardware-related picks, and there was no hardware today.
00:06:06 ◼ ► And it was Mac-related for both of us. You predicted new iMac, and I predicted new Apple Display, and neither of those things happened.
00:06:14 ◼ ► We're going to obviously talk about the ARM or Apple Silicon transition, but at the very end of the presentation, Tim referenced the fact that there were more Intel Macs coming.
00:06:25 ◼ ► We can assume that that iMac is coming. I would not be surprised to see it announced in the next couple of weeks, personally.
00:06:33 ◼ ► Whether that will come along with an Apple Display, I don't know, but it seems like that iMac is imminent, but not now.
00:06:45 ◼ ► Yeah, I would be not at all surprised if there was new Mac hardware soon, but not today. Not during the countdown.
00:06:54 ◼ ► One of my picks that I was surprised, I think I was the most surprised that we didn't hear anything about, was a focus on mental health features for the Apple Watch.
00:07:03 ◼ ► I still think that might be coming to watchOS 7, but with new Apple Watch hardware that maybe there's a sensor that they add, which can provide a little bit more functionality there.
00:07:16 ◼ ► There were several moments where, especially during the Watch presentation, where the Watch presentation was very much like, "Here are just a few of the features we're adding."
00:07:24 ◼ ► They just said it, that this is a tiny sliver of what's actually being in the new version of watchOS. So I thought that was interesting.
00:07:33 ◼ ► Yeah, there are these pages on Apple's website where you can look at all of the new features.
00:07:38 ◼ ► I had a cursory look before we started recording today just to see that they were there, and there are lots and lots and lots of things, which is great.
00:07:45 ◼ ► I know as we all are going to enjoy immensely over the next few days diving through those, especially with having additional time than we usually would during the WWDC week.
00:07:56 ◼ ► Jason, is there any of your picks that you got wrong that you were really surprised about?
00:08:05 ◼ ► I'm kicking myself more for the ones that I had on our list than I didn't pick. I had a Johnny Srugi appearance, right? The chip guy at Apple.
00:08:19 ◼ ► He made his appearance, and I could have picked that, and I thought about it, and then I didn't do it.
00:08:25 ◼ ► The ARM Transition Hardware Not Offered, that was my last pick, and I thought that was a wacky pick that probably wouldn't go, but it would look great if it did, and it did not go. It did not happen.
00:08:35 ◼ ► There was a Mac Mini, as you prophesied a Mac Mini that is the developer transition kit.
00:08:42 ◼ ► I'm just going to say on this one, I am pretty pleased about that, because I would just say I listen to a lot of tech podcasts. I've not heard anybody mention Mac Mini before I mentioned it.
00:08:52 ◼ ► So I'm just going to go ahead and say I called that one. I mentioned it here a few weeks ago. I'm going to take that, that I called the Mac Mini as being the transition hardware.
00:09:02 ◼ ► I'm pretty pleased about that one, actually. It makes the most sense, and we'll talk about maybe a little bit more why in a little bit.
00:09:13 ◼ ► Irene, I reckon we probably only have one more keynote this year, so the best I can do is a tie. Hopefully I can at least get a tie. That would be nice so I don't lose another year.
00:09:25 ◼ ► I just want to, before we move on with the show, I want to thank everybody who signed up for Upgrade Plus, which is our new membership option here on Upgrade.
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00:09:46 ◼ ► But just go to getupgradeplus.com, and you will be able to sign up for $5 a month, and you will get this episode and all future episodes with no ads and more content.
00:09:55 ◼ ► In our Upgrade Plus post show today, we're going to talk about what it was like for us to experience WWDC at home, what our plan for the rest of the week is, and how that's going to differ to years past where we've been in person in San Jose or San Francisco.
00:10:11 ◼ ► I want to talk about if we're going to install betas or not, and we may also talk a little bit more about how this keynote was presented if we don't get to it in the episode. So they're kind of the things that we're going to talk about in our Upgrade Plus post show, which is available to all Upgrade members.
00:10:27 ◼ ► If you just go to getupgradeplus.com, you can sign up, and serious, sincere, massive thank you to everyone that has signed up. I'll say, blew me away how many people signed up. I'm so happy that people have been universally positive about this approach that we're taking here, and I'm so excited about it, and the more stuff that we'll be able to do for our Upgrade members in the future.
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00:12:46 ◼ ► Now, I had the feeling that we would probably talk about macOS first today because it would be the biggest set of news, but I thought that that would purely be because of the chip transition.
00:12:59 ◼ ► I was not expecting, I think along with most people, that macOS would see the level of work that it has had done to it, right?
00:13:12 ◼ ► I think that's the big surprise is that this isn't just a chip transition story with the Mac.
00:13:20 ◼ ► It is also kind of what, well, what they said was the biggest visual change since OS X, which brought the Aqua interface and all of that.
00:13:28 ◼ ► And I think that's true. Looking at it, again, only based on sort of what we've seen immediately, it sure feels like, am I wrong, Myke?
00:13:40 ◼ ► Yeah, and that may be, okay, so to say that has some baggage to it, and I think I want to talk about that baggage immediately because there are people that would say that or would have said that in the past, and it means a bad thing, that it's a bad thing.
00:13:56 ◼ ► This isn't what you want the Mac to be. But I think what you have to consider here is the fact that iPad has evolved and is continuing to evolve, and now macOS is evolving with it, and they're going to move together.
00:14:09 ◼ ► Because we'll talk about iPadOS 14 later on, but some of the visual design stuff that they've shown in macOS, they've clearly brought to iPadOS.
00:14:17 ◼ ► I actually don't think it's the other way around. Like, some of the new toolbars, some of the new sidebars.
00:14:23 ◼ ► I did notice that the toolbars get the shading around them, like the cursor support stuff on iPadOS, so obviously there is a symbiosis there.
00:14:33 ◼ ► I would say it goes both ways because one of the big statements about iPadOS was, look at all these sidebars in all of these apps. Like, Photos has a sidebar now on the iPad.
00:14:45 ◼ ► Photos has had a sidebar on the Mac for a very long time, so what it's doing is it's kind of pushing that look the other way as well, and that makes them even more synced up.
00:14:55 ◼ ► But yeah, the fact that all the apps have round-recs behind them, which is an iOS standard, a lot of increased transparency and translucency in the interface,
00:15:11 ◼ ► which again I'm sure you can turn off in the accessibility settings, but it was subtle before, and it's even greater now.
00:15:17 ◼ ► The new sort of simplified toolbar at the top of the windows, like, there's just a lot of changes that have happened here that are going to be surprising, I think, for Mac users,
00:15:29 ◼ ► because the Mac's visual interface has only kind of gradually evolved. It's not like they made Aqua and then they stopped, right?
00:15:37 ◼ ► It has kept evolving and it doesn't look anything like Aqua now, and you can go through a screenshot gallery of past Mac OS versions and you can see how it evolves from version to version,
00:15:48 ◼ ► but this seems to be the biggest individual leap that they've taken with Mac OS design since, you know, since 20 years ago when OS X first happened.
00:15:58 ◼ ► By the way, as several people pointed out, when Craig got info on his Apple Silicon Mac, which we still have to talk about, somebody pointed out, it's also, a Mac OS Big Sur is also version 11.
00:16:12 ◼ ► So no Spinal Tap references, but we finally have made it out of OS X, because it's not called OS X anymore.
00:16:19 ◼ ► They finally, they waited a little while, but they finally seem to have felt free to increment it to version 11. So here we are.
00:16:27 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think this is the right, I mean, honestly, we could have made the argument and would have made the argument that moving to ARM chips, Apple's own chips, would be warranted enough for a version 11,
00:16:40 ◼ ► but they've made some, so many changes to the UI design that it is looking different now.
00:16:47 ◼ ► I was intrigued to see Alan Dye presenting the design portion. I believe this is our first in-depth video from him.
00:17:03 ◼ ► Did you know that the Apple boot sound, the startup sound, was part of the presentation?
00:17:13 ◼ ► I did notice that. That was interesting. I mean, you could do that on existing Macs through like a terminal command, but I wonder if that Mac OS 11 Big Sur is going to turn that on by default.
00:17:27 ◼ ► It would be, and it's, you know, as well as making changes to a lot of the sounds. They've remade a lot of the sounds or adapted some of the sounds.
00:17:36 ◼ ► I think, again, unified some from iOS, you know, and I feel like there's going to be a lot of discussion about the idea of Mac design, what makes a Mac app.
00:17:48 ◼ ► This stuff has been going around for the last couple of years because of Catalyst anyway, and I think that, you know, me and you have said on this show many times that there isn't.
00:18:02 ◼ ► So much has changed that the old ways of Mac design have evolved, and I think this is a massive, massive point in saying that Apple are changing what it is to be Mac design.
00:18:16 ◼ ► So we haven't talked about it a lot. I mean, first off, a lot of people are going to argue. They're going to look at this, and they're going to say what I said, which is, oh, this is the iPadification of the Mac.
00:18:26 ◼ ► I could make a very different argument, which is Apple's Mac design has drifted in a similar way to its attention to the platform in general, seemed to drift for a few years there, where they seem to not be paying that close attention.
00:18:43 ◼ ► There hasn't been a heavy design attention on the Mac in a while, really, and I would argue that what defines a Mac app is in large part based on examples from the operating system vendor.
00:19:03 ◼ ► And what we see with Big Sur is Apple saying, we've refreshed our apps. They all look much more alike than they used to. The OS itself is different, and it looks like this.
00:19:15 ◼ ► And, you know, you can like it, and you can not like it, but it is Apple saying, here's what the Mac looks like.
00:19:22 ◼ ► And yes, it does look more like the iPad. There's no doubt about it that there is a lot of design influence here because they're essentially building some different app platforms that they're building.
00:19:32 ◼ ► They're building different app platforms that are all interconnected with one another, and now they're going to be running on the same chips, too, on top of that.
00:19:38 ◼ ► And so this is Apple saying, like, this is what a, in the 2020s, what a Mac app should look like is what these apps look like.
00:19:48 ◼ ► And while that is change, and there are going to be people who are grumpy, I will argue that it is also a positive thing that the platform owner is making an effort to define what the platform is,
00:20:00 ◼ ► because I haven't felt a lot of that on the Mac for the last few years. It's been a little bit here and a little bit there, but it's been a lot of kind of drifting since we sort of de-aquified 10 years ago and made the interface a little more gray,
00:20:13 ◼ ► and they added some translucence, and then they removed some translucence, and they did their dark mode and all that.
00:20:18 ◼ ► But, like, it's been, I would say, kind of without a lot of leadership from the platform owner.
00:20:24 ◼ ► And sometimes an abdicated platform owner can be good, because it means that the developers can do whatever the heck they want, and it doesn't matter, right?
00:20:33 ◼ ► But it feels like those days are over. Developers can still do what they want, it's just that if they do what they want, and their apps look nothing like all the Apple apps, and nothing like the operating system, the users will notice, right?
00:20:48 ◼ ► I liked the look of the control center stuff and the new, what are they called? I can never remember the name.
00:20:55 ◼ ► The apps, the little shortcuts that live on the top right, the menu bar. Menu bar apps? That's the phrase, right?
00:21:07 ◼ ► And notification center and widgets coming back, it looked very dashboard-y when it was on the Mac, which was fun.
00:21:23 ◼ ► This commitment to the Mac idea that Apple have been talking about for a while, I think seeing big changes in macOS to the point where there's a lot more opinions again, is actually a good thing.
00:21:36 ◼ ► Where it will definitely upset some people, it will make other people happy, like me, I think it looks fantastic. I actually consider that I will upgrade to Big Sur because I want that design.
00:21:47 ◼ ► I think it looked really great. Plus there are a lot of interesting features in there, we're going to get to more of them in a minute.
00:21:52 ◼ ► But I find myself being a little bit more excited about the Mac again, just because Apple seems to really be weighing in and pushing stuff.
00:22:04 ◼ ► And talking about the design stuff, you can see how Catalyst has been a bit of a bridge as well, just from a visual design perspective.
00:22:25 ◼ ► Way more than we got in its first year from an idea of showing these are all the things.
00:22:32 ◼ ► I noted a couple of things that seemed intriguing, like new menu and keyboard APIs, and new controls like revised date pickers and stuff.
00:22:39 ◼ ► And Apple have made the new versions of Map and Messages in capitalist, which messages seemed like a good one.
00:22:46 ◼ ► That's probably what they were going to do. We're going to talk about some of the changes to messages when we talk about iOS 14.
00:22:52 ◼ ► But that made a lot of sense to help bring that up to the current standard without needing for Apple to redo everything again.
00:23:00 ◼ ► And putting an app like Messages behind Catalyst is only going to help Catalyst in the long run, because Messages is arguably one of the most used apps on Apple's platforms.
00:23:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I was surprised. Even though I mentioned improvements to Catalyst, I really was nervous about that one.
00:23:17 ◼ ► That was one that I thought I maybe wouldn't get, just because last year Apple didn't talk about it a lot.
00:23:24 ◼ ► Now, part of that was the theory was that they talked about it a lot the previous year and said it would happen.
00:23:32 ◼ ► Whereas this time, what we got was a little bit of SwiftUI mentioned here and there, but a whole bullet point, basically, about Mac Catalyst.
00:23:41 ◼ ► And then they got to bring it back and say, "Oh, by the way, these apps that we just showed you, Maps and Messages, these are Mac Catalyst apps as well."
00:23:49 ◼ ► But it's all part of this unification story, and Mac Catalyst is there with the new design language that they started to push out last year that is now much clearer this year about what they're viewing Mac apps as.
00:24:03 ◼ ► And I would go back to something that I think we've talked about a couple of times since that fateful day where they got a bunch of people in a room together and said,
00:24:14 ◼ ► "We're going to do a Mac Pro and we're recommitting to our Pro users and the Mac," and all of that, is there's definitely a "be careful what you wish for" aspect, right?
00:24:25 ◼ ► Because if you like the Mac exactly the way it is and don't want it to ever change, you kind of want Apple to keep its eye elsewhere and just not worry about it.
00:24:36 ◼ ► And in that moment when they had that meeting and all that, that was Apple saying, "Yeah, our eye was off the ball a little bit, and now we're going to focus on the Mac."
00:24:42 ◼ ► But this is what you get, is it's now part of the Apple machine driving into the future, and that means it's connected to the iPhone and the iPad, and it's going to pick up design language from those other devices, and they're going to share things back and forth.
00:24:57 ◼ ► And this is the result. And I'm excited about it too, although definitely a little trepidation there too, as somebody who's used the Mac for a very long time.
00:25:06 ◼ ► But the alternative is it's a legacy platform, it'll never change because the only people using it are people who are sort of dead-enders, they've been there forever, they're never leaving, and no one else is going to use it, and so we're just going to park it and let it stay there.
00:25:20 ◼ ► And Apple has decided that they're not going to do that with the Mac, and that they're going to make it part of their overall product line, and it's all going to interconnect.
00:25:28 ◼ ► And so, you know, starting later this year, we're going to have Apple systems running on Apple-designed chips that are going to be running macOS Big Sur, and they're going to have this new look and feel, and it's very much going to be kind of like, this is the beginning of the next decade-plus of what the Mac is like.
00:25:47 ◼ ► I was really excited about some of the stuff that's been shown on Safari. I also dug around a little bit before the beginning of the show, and it seems like a lot of these Safari features are at least coming to iPadOS as well.
00:26:01 ◼ ► The privacy stuff was really interesting, so there's a new privacy report button that will show what websites are trying to get from you, basically, like what their tracking info is. This is something you see in a lot of content blockers, and now Apple's building that in, which is really great, because now there'll be like a native name-and-shame type thing built into the system, which may ensure that a lot of websites maybe stop trying to use so many trackers, when people can constantly see just how many people are using it.
00:26:30 ◼ ► They can see just how many things are going on and how much data is being mined from every person that's on a website.
00:26:36 ◼ ► Yeah, it's more in line with their whole strategy and their whole brand of pointing out when there's tracking happening and trying to block some of it and all of that.
00:26:47 ◼ ► The Safari extensions thing also is really interesting, where extensions are very useful, but they can also be pretty serious in terms of privacy issues, and so Apple implementing a new form of browser extensions, but having built into it that you can set them to be on-per-site or off-per-site and even allow it for the day or something, or just this once.
00:27:11 ◼ ► That's interesting, right, because that's taking the extensions idea and saying, "Okay, they're useful, but extensions reading every page that you go to is not cool, so how can we build around that?"
00:27:22 ◼ ► So again, it fits in with their story pretty directly, and you can see that every product, every feature that comes up at Apple, clearly it passes through a filter of how can we view this in terms of our take on privacy and security.
00:27:37 ◼ ► I'll take a quick diversion at this point to just mention about the security stuff, because I don't think we're going to have the time to dig into all of it today.
00:27:44 ◼ ► What did you make of the idea that developers will now need to self-report what their privacy stuff is, and this is going to be shown on App Store pages? Did you think that was an interesting thing to talk about?
00:27:57 ◼ ► I'm not entirely clear on how much of that is self-reported and how much of that is based on a scan of the app, but I think it's a great feature that shows Apple caring for the users in terms of offering disclosure.
00:28:15 ◼ ► I'm sure that there will be a lot of conversation about this involving developers. I think the developers that are doing the right thing here are going to not have a problem with it, but I do think some developers are going to have some issues.
00:28:28 ◼ ► It wouldn't surprise me—surprise, surprise—it wouldn't be a surprise if there was a controversy involving the App Store, where I would assume that whatever is self-reported, you have to agree that this is part of your App Store submission,
00:28:42 ◼ ► that you're reporting this truthfully, and that if it's found out not to be true, then you are going to get in big trouble, and that will be bad. So there will probably be some controversy about that.
00:28:51 ◼ ► And I do wonder what they're scanning for as well, and saying, "This app seems to do this, this app seems to do that." We'll have to see.
00:28:58 ◼ ► But I think from a user perspective, getting more transparency on what tracking procedures and policies a particular company is using is good as a user of software. It'll be interesting to see just from the Apple developer relations perspective how it works.
00:29:15 ◼ ► With iPadOS 13, I switched to Safari back on the Mac again, because Safari was so good on iPad that it pushed me everywhere. But one of the things that I have really missed is Chrome's ability to natively translate a webpage.
00:29:30 ◼ ► I think it's one of the best features of Chrome. You go to a webpage which is not in your native language, it automatically translates for you. And this is coming to Safari, and I am very, very excited about that, because that's a feature that I've really, really wanted.
00:29:44 ◼ ► So that one is a big, big win for me. I cannot wait to use that feature. Again, another reason, genuinely another big reason that I will want to update to Big Sur.
00:29:54 ◼ ► And again, just for people that don't know, I typically stay at least one version of macOS behind, because I don't want to mess anything up with my audio equipment, which happens on new versions of macOS very frequently.
00:30:07 ◼ ► You know, like, Jason will every single year will have a new problem with his USB interfaces and macOS. But this is going to make this is like a big reason, honestly, why I want to do this.
00:30:18 ◼ ► Like, I, for another podcast that I do, the pen addict, I very frequently am looking at pages in Japanese, because of Japanese pen releases. And like, I can't, you know, like on Chrome, it would just translate them all immediately.
00:30:30 ◼ ► But in Safari, it's like, oh, now I have to go and open Chrome again. So I'm really excited for Apple adding this feature, because that's one that I'm going to use a lot and will be really, really happy with.
00:30:40 ◼ ► There's going to be Control Center on the Mac. It's all intertwined with the menu bar, right? And I think I'm interested in that as well, that you can like drag things out of Control Center into the menu bar.
00:30:48 ◼ ► And like, that's fascinating. And, and Notification Center as well that they've revamped that. So instead of having the two panes of Notification Center, they've got a Notification Center and Widgets Share Space.
00:31:01 ◼ ► And the widgets can be widget design similar to that on the on iPad and iPhone and Notification Center. Now it kind of groups notifications and stuff.
00:31:10 ◼ ► And that's great, because one of the annoying things about the Mac version of Notification Center is that it's this today view and notification view, and it's, you have to toggle between them.
00:31:19 ◼ ► And they've cleaned that up in a way that's kind of being stolen directly from the iPad. But I welcome that, because I do use that from time to time, and it's not good over there.
00:31:36 ◼ ► All right, we need to talk about the chip transition. Got to do it. But before we do, let's thank our second sponsor. That's how you get them, Jason.
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00:33:17 ◼ ► Jason, we've kept people waiting for long enough. Let's talk about the chip transition.
00:33:21 ◼ ► Now, I think we need to get our name, like our kind of ongoing naming correct here, because we've been calling it the ARM transition.
00:33:28 ◼ ► Apple did not call it that. They are calling it their chip transition to their own, to their Apple Silicon.
00:33:35 ◼ ► So I guess from now on, we'll just start calling it that, right? Like, because that makes the most sense.
00:33:46 ◼ ► Because nobody knows what ARM Holdings is and Apple Silicon is what they're calling it, which is fine.
00:33:51 ◼ ► I'm not convinced, by the way, that Apple Silicon is a phrase that is long for this world.
00:33:56 ◼ ► It feels to me like they are going to make an announcement of what they're going to call this stuff when they ship the first computers to use it.
00:34:04 ◼ ► And maybe they'll call it Apple Silicon forever, but I don't know, it didn't feel like there was branding there.
00:34:10 ◼ ► It really felt like that was what they decided to refer to it because they needed to call it something.
00:34:14 ◼ ► And, you know, in the end, perhaps there will be a new series of chips that'll be the, you know, some letter followed by some number series.
00:34:24 ◼ ► We'll see. Maybe they'll stick with this, but I wouldn't put a lot of money down on Apple Silicon.
00:34:31 ◼ ► No, this was, honestly, I think they wanted to just not call it ARM because they don't call the iPad chips and the iPhone chips ARM chips.
00:34:53 ◼ ► And they, right, they may never brand it. It may just be that they'll come out with the, you know, M20 or whatever and say...
00:35:00 ◼ ► The M20, whatever name, right? Like, they'll brand it. I'm almost convinced they will be branded the same way that they brand every other chip they make, right?
00:35:21 ◼ ► Because, honestly, I don't think that they really care about branding it too much on those devices.
00:35:29 ◼ ► It's like, you know, they have batteries, they have chips, their chips have code names.
00:35:43 ◼ ► And in a year or a couple of years time, once they've made this transition, which they said is going to be a two-year transition,
00:36:17 ◼ ► And they kept talking over and over again about how these chips will take the Mac to a whole new level.
00:36:23 ◼ ► They're going to make much better products, really kind of throwing Intel under the bus.
00:36:27 ◼ ► But also saying that there are still Intel Macs coming later on this year and that they're going to continue supporting them.
00:36:33 ◼ ► But clearly, Apple are putting on the line what we've all been thinking and saying for a while,
00:36:49 ◼ ► that we've not had on the Mac for a while in the big jumps that they're going to be able to take.
00:36:54 ◼ ► And Johnny Ceruggi shared not only the history of Apple Silicon Design, talking about how they got there,
00:37:00 ◼ ► but also talking a lot about what they're looking to do and what they're looking to aim for with these new chips.
00:37:06 ◼ ► And that's a big part, I think, of the story here and one of the reasons why Apple wants to make it
00:37:16 ◼ ► In fact, Apple has been taking a lot of other aspects of the computer and putting them in their own custom chips in the meantime.
00:37:30 ◼ ► and they're in the Secure Enclave and they're controlling the camera, and they are the touch bar,
00:37:36 ◼ ► and they are the disk controller, and they keep on adding that stuff, and that was part of his message,
00:37:48 ◼ ► and then in their little slide there, it's all these other things that are kind of like custom hardware things
00:37:54 ◼ ► that Apple can build as part of this. And that message is, it isn't just about us being fast enough,
00:38:01 ◼ ► because essentially what they said was what we've all been thinking, which is essentially when they did the A12X with the iPad Pro,
00:38:09 ◼ ► they were there in terms of fast enough. It's about going beyond that, so one of their messages is pushing the Mac further.
00:38:17 ◼ ► Definitely the implication there is, we don't have to be like every other PC if we're not chained to Intel.
00:38:24 ◼ ► We can innovate on the Mac like we've been able to innovate on the iPad and the iPhone.
00:38:35 ◼ ► Well, whatever Apple says it is, maybe? They have the ability to spread out what they define as the features of a computer,
00:38:47 ◼ ► because they're controlling the whole thing, as opposed to having to take this set of definitions from Intel,
00:38:55 ◼ ► because they're using Intel stuff. And so that'll be fascinating to see. I understand why they talked about that a bit,
00:39:06 ◼ ► And in fact, viewed through a certain lens, this switch has been going on for a while now,
00:39:11 ◼ ► because the T1 and the T2 are Apple Silicon that has been embedded in a whole bunch of Macs for a few years now.
00:39:19 ◼ ► And they aren't taking over the central part, but they've been taking over other parts of the computer,
00:39:33 ◼ ► I think they want to send the message that Apple's not new to this. This isn't going to be a surprise.
00:39:38 ◼ ► They've been tested. These are devices that we've all used that are using the Apple design processors.
00:39:45 ◼ ► And then they do the big reveal, which is, "Oh, all the Macs you've seen us demo are all running on Apple design processors,
00:39:58 ◼ ► And then they reassure people about the third-party story by saying, "Microsoft and Adobe, they've already got it up and running."
00:40:04 ◼ ► Because that's one of the things, when I've seen people try to sow some fear about this transition,
00:40:13 ◼ ► And people are like, "Well, those guys, you have to have Rosetta," which they do, they have Rosetta too,
00:40:21 ◼ ► And so Apple, of course, in this very first presentation says, "Look, here's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, here's Lightroom and Photoshop,
00:40:28 ◼ ► and they're all running on this thing too. And this isn't even emulation. They're building on our chips now."
00:40:41 ◼ ► Because we've been talking about what would be involved in an ARM transition for a long time.
00:40:45 ◼ ► And in that presentation, I watched as they just went, "Check, check, check," all the way down.
00:40:50 ◼ ► They hit every point, including what people are like, are they going to really do, put the effort in to doing emulation for Intel stuff?
00:40:58 ◼ ► And it's like, they did, they carted Rosetta out of the scrap heap, brought the name back, calling it Rosetta 2.
00:41:05 ◼ ► They're going to do a code translation when you download the app, which is really interesting.
00:41:10 ◼ ► They're not going to even wait because they want to do that work in the background so that when you launch it, it just runs.
00:41:19 ◼ ► So they've checked all these off so they could say it's seamless for users. So that's great news.
00:41:25 ◼ ► One of the things that I really thought was super interesting is that they said about how all of the apps,
00:41:31 ◼ ► including their Pro apps, and showed off the Pro apps, that they were running natively on that platform.
00:41:37 ◼ ► As you say, it wasn't just that they were doing all of the demos on this, which was an A12Z from 2018.
00:41:55 ◼ ► But it's still essentially a chip from 2018 that they're using to demo this, and essentially that chip in the Mac Mini that the developer can.
00:42:04 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a good way of saying it. It's a current chip, but it is a current chip which is not that unchanged from a couple of years ago.
00:42:15 ◼ ► And we saw one report that said that this is the chip essentially that they've been using for the last few years for all of their testing.
00:42:21 ◼ ► And so, you know, they're saving the real thing for the first computers to ship, first Macs to ship with the Apple Silicon.
00:42:31 ◼ ► And that, I think, you mentioned the two-year transition window, which is interesting because there was some conversation about, like, well, maybe they'll keep...
00:42:41 ◼ ► There's the argument that maybe they'll keep certain systems around for a very long time running Intel.
00:42:45 ◼ ► Like, they'll keep Pro Max will run Intel, Consumer Max will run the Apple chips, and that'll go for a while.
00:42:54 ◼ ► By the end of two years, that Mac Pro, it's going to be running Apple Silicon if it isn't already.
00:43:00 ◼ ► The other way is through the lens of the Apple transition, or the Intel transition, where it was, like, six months and everything flipped over, right?
00:43:32 ◼ ► So that's also very interesting, that this is happening sooner maybe than people expected.
00:43:39 ◼ ► And, you know, I would argue most people probably thought the transition would take a little bit longer,
00:43:44 ◼ ► even though, if you look at the Intel transition, it happened really fast, and they're giving themselves more time than that.
00:43:52 ◼ ► But honestly, two years, I mean, I'm assuming, if they're talking about the entire line, they also mean the Mac Pro.
00:43:59 ◼ ► Two years is faster than I would have thought they would have had an ARM chip for the, or an Apple-designed chip for the Mac Pro, honestly.
00:44:18 ◼ ► I mean, you can probably find a two-year period where they do, but they are committing to updating every single Mac,
00:44:24 ◼ ► updating or eliminating, I suppose, every single Mac in a two-year period that begins later this year when they ship the first one.
00:44:32 ◼ ► And that's not unreasonable. I think it would be a lot harder for them to do it in six months.
00:44:40 ◼ ► One new version of Xcode, obviously, the version shipping, I guess, today, will feature the tools that you need,
00:44:47 ◼ ► and they did that thing that they did, as they always say, you can just recompile and get it up and running in a matter of days,
00:44:54 ◼ ► which, again, there's a lot of asterisks to this, which we will see play out over the next few days.
00:45:14 ◼ ► Like, we saw this with Catalyst, that even Catalyst apps that spent a lot of time having work done to them still had a lot of rough edges.
00:45:22 ◼ ► So, Catalyst is different, obviously, because it's, like, the stuff that is in front of you,
00:45:28 ◼ ► rather than the stuff that's way deep down into the system, so there's clear differences there.
00:45:43 ◼ ► so you'll be able to ship binaries. I guess this will be in the Mac App Store and outside the Mac App Store.
00:45:50 ◼ ► Probably this is mostly focused for outside, because the Mac App Store delivers just what you need, doesn't it?
00:45:56 ◼ ► So, the Universal binaries, meaning that if you download an application, it will have what you need for Intel and for Apple's design chips,
00:46:08 ◼ ► and also Rosetta 2, which will be emulation of Intel. They said that it's going to be faster, more powerful, more compatible than the original Rosetta was.
00:46:18 ◼ ► It will do the translation on the install of the application, rather than when you open the app, which is a really clever way of doing it.
00:46:25 ◼ ► I don't know enough to know why they didn't do that the first time, but that sure seems like the logical way of doing things.
00:46:31 ◼ ► And Apple say that this could even handle complex Pro apps, and they demoed Maya, the 3D modeling application.
00:46:41 ◼ ► So, again, with any type of emulation, it's not going to be exactly the same, but you have a margin of error that you can get things to.
00:46:50 ◼ ► But when you have companies like Microsoft and Adobe committing publicly, they will have their stuff ready.
00:46:57 ◼ ► I mean, when is the question, but they'll have it ready for shipping. That's pretty good.
00:47:12 ◼ ► So Microsoft and Adobe are probably much more willing or feel much more pressured to make these changes quickly than they did with transition to Intel, would be my expectation.
00:47:24 ◼ ► I agree. Some of the speculation I saw there about this transition was from people who don't seem to understand Apple and where the Mac is,
00:47:36 ◼ ► and Apple's relationship with third-party developers, large ones like Adobe and Microsoft.
00:47:43 ◼ ► Because I saw a lot of people who were sort of saying, you know, "Good luck, Apple doing a chip transition," and all that.
00:47:49 ◼ ► And it's like, no, this is going to be, I think this is shaping up to be an easier chip transition than Intel.
00:47:55 ◼ ► In part, by the way, because I think they've been laying the groundwork for this for a few years,
00:48:00 ◼ ► whereas the Intel transition, they were hedging against PowerPC by keeping the Intel project around,
00:48:12 ◼ ► And this feels like something that they've been working on executing for multiple years, right?
00:48:16 ◼ ► Like for maybe three or four years, they've been thinking that this is where they're going to go,
00:48:36 ◼ ► There was a slide that they did during that WWDC where Steve Jobs said, like, "So here's how it works.
00:48:58 ◼ ► and that gives Apple more control and more of the ability to say, like, now we make the move.
00:49:03 ◼ ► It's going to be not -- there will always be issues, but it's going to be way easier because it's planned,
00:49:43 ◼ ► This is a very peculiar -- because this is a thing that they've done just because they can,
00:50:02 ◼ ► And so I kind of missed this part because I was like, did I -- what is -- what are they saying exactly?
00:50:55 ◼ ► I mean, yes, you can do it, and now you can say you have way more apps in the Mac app store than you did before.
00:51:12 ◼ ► So these are all momentous things, and this is something I just said, and I'm going to say it again.
00:51:46 ◼ ► "Sure, we're going to translate Intel apps, and we're going to let you build new apps on our chips,
00:51:51 ◼ ► and we're going to let you move your iOS apps into the Mac app store, and they'll just run."
00:52:36 ◼ ► Not mentioned now, and that's fine, but, like, the fact that they are thinking about virtualization at all,
00:52:50 ◼ ► that they're well aware of one of the most virtualized things on their platform, right?
00:53:18 ◼ ► The fact that Apple mentioned virtualization, even though they didn't mention Windows virtualization,
00:53:29 ◼ ► That doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to make it available, but at least no, I guess?
00:53:37 ◼ ► I think it means that there's groundwork being laid here so that it could happen later.
00:53:55 ◼ ► So the implication here is it will be better than the stuff that's in the current version of Mac OS to do this stuff."
00:54:08 ◼ ► This is a program that developers have to apply for, and it's basically to give them help,
00:54:44 ◼ ► And get one of these ARM Mac Minis to show to Twitter how fast Mac OS runs or doesn't on ARM.
00:54:51 ◼ ► That's what they're doing. This is the right way of doing it, to try and weed out some of that.
00:55:03 ◼ ► I'm probably sure that there are lots and lots of things that you have to sign where you probably can't do this stuff.
00:55:09 ◼ ► But someone like Steve has both a reason for this software, for this hardware, but also shares.
00:55:21 ◼ ► So I expect that to get the kit--James Thompson sent us in the chat room that there was no price mentioned in the application when he applied.
00:55:33 ◼ ► I'm sure there's a lot of paperwork that needs to be signed to try and weed out the people that genuinely will be able to take use of it and maybe those that wouldn't.
00:55:59 ◼ ► I hope it is reusable in whatever the Mac Mini update is, that they can use some of this work to do that.
00:56:31 ◼ ► So I can't wait to try the new version of macOS for the design stuff because that, you know, chip transitions are dramatic and exciting.
00:56:46 ◼ ► But in the end, you know, I don't think of that Mac I used that ran a PowerPC chip and that Mac I used that ran an Intel chip and think, "Oh, boy, all the colors were different when I ran on PowerPC," because, you know, in the end, it was a Mac.
00:57:00 ◼ ► So in terms of direct impact on, like, how we do our jobs and use our computers every day, some of the visual changes may be much more important.
00:57:11 ◼ ► So I'm looking forward to trying those out and seeing kind of what the heck they're doing to remake the Mac and how it feels.
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00:59:07 ◼ ► The first kind of thing that Craig spoke about was a selection of things that are encapsulated into the experience of iOS 14, especially on the iPhone.
00:59:21 ◼ ► There was the home screen, there was widgets, and there was picture-in-picture video on the iPhone.
00:59:34 ◼ ► The home screen really, basically, finally, we have a way of having more organization and cleanup options for app icons.
00:59:47 ◼ ► So at the end of your home screen pages, you do an extra swipe and there is some folders that are automatically organized into categories and they surface the apps to the top level that you use the most.
00:59:58 ◼ ► There's a search field which you tap on, but when you tap on the search field, it also organizes all of your apps into an alphabetical list.
01:00:22 ◼ ► I mean, I think we've been waiting for the idea of just having a list of just show me what my apps are.
01:00:28 ◼ ► I think using their Siri tech to do the search suggestions, which you've been able to get in the search screen before, they've essentially taken the search screen and pushed it out onto this last screen with a bunch of different app collections on top of it.
01:00:40 ◼ ► And then you've got the ability to basically delete all the extra pages from your screen.
01:00:46 ◼ ► You can have as many pages as you want, but I think they made the point very well that after the first couple, your muscle memory kind of falls away and then you're just hunting through folders and all of that.
01:00:55 ◼ ► So this is a welcome feature to be able to organize, use that spatial memory to get your home screen page one, maybe page two, the way you like it.
01:01:11 ◼ ► And then you will need, you know, who knows how many pages you will need for your muscle memory because you won't just have apps on those pages either.
01:01:27 ◼ ► I will also expect I will have a page or two of widgets because widgets now are very basically Apple have finally done what everyone wanted them to do, which is to implement a version of widgets that's very similar to Android.
01:01:43 ◼ ► You can have multiple size options for them that developers can submit with different UI depending on the size.
01:01:50 ◼ ► You know, like for example, you may have a calendar widget, maybe the smallest widget shows a date and your next event, a larger widget will show multiple events, your next upcoming five, for example.
01:02:04 ◼ ► You can move them around on the home screen and they'll have automatically updating information.
01:02:14 ◼ ► We saw it before with widgets, but like just how much information can be added to those widgets and how quickly it can update.
01:02:25 ◼ ► They also had a smart stacks feature so you could just put this one widget on your phone and it will show you the widget that the iPhone thinks you want to see at that time, which is cool.
01:02:39 ◼ ► Which is like, it's the Siri suggestions thing for the widget, which is this is the widget you want right now.
01:02:50 ◼ ► Although it looks like you can basically just sort of scroll through your widgets in that space if you want to.
01:02:55 ◼ ► And I'm really excited about like the idea of having just one screen, which has my task manager and my calendar on it, on the widget, like its own home screen.
01:03:04 ◼ ► Because that's the kind of stuff that I've wanted for a very long time and I'm really keen to see, I want to dig into it, like how does this work on the iPad as well?
01:03:22 ◼ ► Where you just have this one screen and it's got all of the information that you want, right?
01:03:45 ◼ ► I was very surprised to see that Siri got the time that it got, that there is some visual changes to Siri as well as some behind the scenes stuff.
01:03:56 ◼ ► Personally, I didn't see as much behind the scenes stuff as I would have wanted to see.
01:04:11 ◼ ► There was a video floating around recently that you may have seen of an iPhone versus a Pixel with dictation.
01:04:18 ◼ ► And the reason the Pixel was so much faster was because the Pixel 4 added Google Assistant dictation like natively to the device.
01:04:26 ◼ ► This isn't something that's the same on all Android phones, but they shrunk it down and they put it onto the device so that it was on-device dictation.
01:04:33 ◼ ► And when you have on-device dictation, it can speed things up so much because you don't have to go out to the web to turn the light on or off anymore, right?
01:04:51 ◼ ► You know, it's a keynote. It's very vague. We may get more signs this week about it and then in the months to come.
01:04:58 ◼ ► But I like them talking about how they're making an effort to improve Siri and improving Siri on-device and throwing in translation.
01:05:06 ◼ ► One of, you know, a thing that I keep coming up with is I want to see translation applied to messages.
01:05:12 ◼ ► And that's not something they mentioned, but I feel like now it is very little work needs to be done to get that ball across the goal of
01:05:20 ◼ ► we have a translate app, we have on-device translation, and we've got messages to be able to, you know, translate something in line.
01:05:29 ◼ ► If you receive a message from somebody in a different language to be able to sort of like kick that off to the translate app and get the answer.
01:05:36 ◼ ► And I also appreciate it in their translate demo, the idea that they're going to be able to recognize the language that's being spoken.
01:05:42 ◼ ► And so you can have sort of two windows translating either direction and you tap the button and say something in one language and it displays it in the other.
01:05:50 ◼ ► And it'll work for both directions because it knows which language is being spoken for the 11 languages that they're supporting, we should say.
01:06:04 ◼ ► But the thing is, though, like this is something that Google does to them all the time.
01:06:13 ◼ ► Like the reason I know all of this is two nights ago, me and Adina were playing around with the translation feature in Google Translate, which is just this.
01:06:22 ◼ ► And she was talking in Romanian and I was talking in English. Like we were just kind of fooling around with it.
01:06:26 ◼ ► And it's this exact feature. You press the microphone button once, it listens to me, it listens to her, translates things backwards and forwards.
01:06:33 ◼ ► I'm really happy that Apple's doing it, but they have a long way to go because they had something like nine or ten languages.
01:06:42 ◼ ► And I hope that this is something that they move quickly and that they keep iterating on and keep adding more because that's what makes this thing useful.
01:06:51 ◼ ► If you go to use this application and it doesn't have the language you want, you may never come back to it.
01:07:03 ◼ ► But you've got to move quickly on stuff like this because otherwise it doesn't get adopted and that moves against what Apple's kind of plan is with this type of stuff.
01:07:12 ◼ ► I liked all the compact design. They've redesigned it so that Siri doesn't take over the whole home screen anymore.
01:07:18 ◼ ► It's even more so on iPad OS where it kind of lives in the bottom right hand corner and gives you pieces of information, which I which I really liked.
01:07:28 ◼ ► So that was messages. Sorry, that was Siri. I want to talk about messages. I'm jumping ahead already.
01:07:34 ◼ ► There's a bunch of stuff in here that I loved. The ability to pin a message to the top of the list. Fantastic.
01:07:44 ◼ ► But when I want to send her a message, I always expect her to be able to scroll down and search for it. Right. Yeah, exactly.
01:07:50 ◼ ► But she isn't always at the top. But that's my mind always would say, well, she should be at the top.
01:07:55 ◼ ► She's the most important person to message. So like I want that to be the case. And I have a couple of group threads like similarly, right.
01:08:05 ◼ ► I don't want a two factor authentication or a message from some my doctor or whatever to be above all that stuff.
01:08:16 ◼ ► They are there. And then all of the group stuff is amazing. So inline replies that are collapsible. Fantastic.
01:08:31 ◼ ► I mean, look, Slack has threading, but Slack's threading UI is terrible. But this looked much nicer.
01:08:38 ◼ ► Mentions of notification options. So if you're in a group thread, I have a lot of noisy group threads on Do Not Disturb.
01:08:48 ◼ ► So you can type somebody's name in. They'll mention you. This is exactly the type of stuff that I wanted.
01:08:53 ◼ ► And also you can have more kind of imagery around so you can like give an image to a group.
01:09:00 ◼ ► But it still shows all of the like individual profile images of everybody around it so you can make things feel a bit more fun.
01:09:07 ◼ ► And also along with all of this, more Memoji options, which included in the message section, which has hair and options, more accessory options, more age options.
01:09:17 ◼ ► And they also included face coverings, which seemed like an obvious but a good one to have. By the way, everybody, wear a face mask.
01:09:25 ◼ ► Just wear face masks. That's a great thing to do. Please do that. Wear a mask. Show your compassion for other people.
01:09:32 ◼ ► Yes, it's a really easy thing to do. But these message things are rolling out on all of the platforms, which is fantastic.
01:09:40 ◼ ► And I'm super, super happy about that. Just Apple continuing to make messages a much, much better overall conversation platform is a great thing.
01:09:56 ◼ ► Well, we should talk about at least we should mention CarPlay updates so they're not, you know, standing still on CarPlay.
01:10:03 ◼ ► They're adding some new app categories to CarPlay, which makes sense. Parking apps. So, you know, you need to get parking nearby.
01:10:10 ◼ ► There are apps like ParkWiz that will let you do that. EV charging, which is really nice. They're a bunch.
01:10:15 ◼ ► Having an electric vehicle myself, having an EV app that tells you where the nearby charging stations are and all that. That's very nice.
01:10:22 ◼ ► Those are now allowed on CarPlay with this new version and quick food ordering as well.
01:10:28 ◼ ► So you can do that from your car and then pick it up if you're on the road and you need to stop somewhere and pick up some Starbucks or whatever else.
01:10:34 ◼ ► Like being able to do that directly from the CarPlay interface is convenient. So it's nice to see that.
01:10:54 ◼ ► It is for later, but it is something that I wrote up when I wrote about Ultra Wideband technology that one of the things that it can really be used for is for digital car keys, basically.
01:11:04 ◼ ► Because it prevents sort of spoofing and hijacking, you know, your key signal from the restaurant where you are and then repeating it to your car, making it think that your car is closer than it is.
01:11:15 ◼ ► And that the U1 chip, the way it works, all using time tracking via the speed of light. And so therefore you can't spoof it like that.
01:11:22 ◼ ► So there's this, you know, there's this NFC version of this that is coming out with the BMW car that's coming out this fall is the first one to support it.
01:11:32 ◼ ► But there also they mentioned working with this consortium to work on this broader standard and that the U1 chip will work with it and all of that.
01:11:39 ◼ ► So the point here is basically like if you buy a car, maybe not this fall unless it's this BMW, but like in the next few years, you will probably end up buying a car at some point that you can unlock with your phone.
01:11:52 ◼ ► And it's got it. You got to start somewhere. This is the thing that it will actually have a huge impact on people's lives, but it's not going to be for like five years for a lot of people, if not longer.
01:12:02 ◼ ► But it will eventually our car, our phone will be our car key and that'll be how it works. But so there, Apple is starting that today.
01:12:09 ◼ ► Well, I thought I was going to be bored by the car key thing. Like it had been rumored, but I was watching it with Idina and we were both like, oh, when they were saying about you can share the key of other people and you can get temporary access.
01:12:23 ◼ ► You can make sure they don't drive too fast. Like that stuff was very, very cool and is so much more than just my phone unlocks my car. Right? Like that's to me, that functionality is kind of boring.
01:12:35 ◼ ► Like it's like, okay, whatever. Right? This is smart lock stuff. Like I have in my smart lock today where you can share the smart lock code and have different ones that work at different times and have different privileges.
01:12:46 ◼ ► And so applying that to the car, I think it's good, but it's going to take time. But at least we're kind of on the case now. I want to mention App Clips, which is funny. It's something similar to something Google, I think did last year.
01:13:01 ◼ ► And the idea here is that you can get access to a subset of an app functionality by tapping on an NFC sticker, by scanning a barcode, by someone sending you a message, by tapping on an item in Apple Maps.
01:13:16 ◼ ► And this is a perfect use case for if you've ever been somewhere that has parking meters that have an app and you can download an app and log in and set up your credit card.
01:13:27 ◼ ► So you can just buy 30 minutes at the parking meter. This happens to me every time I visit a city. I've got a parking meter app that I downloaded for Salt Lake City, a different one for Boulder, Colorado, a different one for Eugene, Oregon.
01:13:40 ◼ ► Like everybody's got their own parking app. So with App Clips, the idea here is you get to the parking meter and you'll either tap an NFC thing or you'll scan a barcode and it'll bring up a little thing for an app clip of that parking meter app and you open it.
01:13:54 ◼ ► Ideally, if it supports Sign In With Apple and Apple Pay, you'll be able to go boop, boop, and you have done it and you've paid for your parking.
01:14:03 ◼ ► And that's the dream of it. Or like if you're renting one of those scooters that almost killed us all in San Jose the last couple of years, same thing.
01:14:11 ◼ ► You can tap or scan, press a couple of buttons and you're going. You don't have to go to the app store and find the app and download it and log in and set up an account and all of that
01:14:21 ◼ ► to reduce the amount of friction for, you know, it's great that these things are app enabled, that you've got the ability to use your phone for this, but there can be a lot of barriers in the way.
01:14:33 ◼ ► So it's a nice idea similar to what Google has had for a while where you're getting a little subset of the app.
01:14:39 ◼ ► You have the option then later if you want to download the whole app, you can do that. But the idea is, look, I don't want to download your whole app here.
01:14:47 ◼ ► I just want to park, right? I just want to park my car and pay so that I can go wherever I need to go.
01:14:54 ◼ ► So I think it's nice to see Apple getting on board with this since, you know, this is the platform that we use.
01:15:00 ◼ ► And I'm sure many of us have been in this situation where you're out and about and suddenly you have to go through a whole app installation and log in and maybe even enter a credit card kind of experience in order to get what you need.
01:15:15 ◼ ► These can be found in Safari, Messages, Maps, NFC, and via an App Clip code, which is an Apple designed QR code.
01:15:22 ◼ ► Now, here's the thing. I've seen reference to these QR codes already as part of a leak about some AR stuff.
01:15:37 ◼ ► Because Apple's made this new QR code that they want and they're trying to encourage businesses to adopt so people can very easily get into their app experience.
01:15:44 ◼ ► If you have glasses on that can read those, that's going to be a different thing, right?
01:15:49 ◼ ► Like this is like another part of where they might want to start looking and going into the future.
01:16:01 ◼ ► And so the App Clip code stuff, that could be really interesting, could be a big thing for AR in the future.
01:16:08 ◼ ► And I'm sure that they will integrate into AR products, you know, maybe just in iOS, but they didn't really talk about that today.
01:16:16 ◼ ► These use Apple Pay, they use Sign In with Apple, it's all part of the integrated stack.
01:16:21 ◼ ► I think that this is a very cool idea. When Android had this, it was called Instant Apps.
01:16:27 ◼ ► When they showed this off years ago, I thought it looked really cool then, but I believe it didn't really take off.
01:16:33 ◼ ► You know, I don't really feel like I've heard a lot about it since. I expect that Apple will be able to get this to take off because they can brute force it.
01:16:46 ◼ ► And I mean the argument there also is that with Sign In with Apple and Apple Pay, you can end up with a very smooth experience for a customer.
01:16:59 ◼ ► And if you're running those parking meters or whatever else, those scooters, you just want them to give you money.
01:17:06 ◼ ► That's in the end, make it as easy as possible for us to park or ride a scooter or whatever.
01:17:18 ◼ ► Because the services that use this probably don't use social network signings, which is what Sign In with Apple was for before.
01:17:25 ◼ ► But now they'll be like, well if you want to use this cool functionality so people can check out really quickly.
01:17:29 ◼ ► And it's in, you know, you get the data that you would get if they were using your application. There you go.
01:17:34 ◼ ► They have set some rules on it. The apps in App Clips have to be less than 10 megabytes of data so they can be opened and run fast.
01:17:49 ◼ ► You know, like in the same way, like if you are on a very slow internet connection, it's going to be a problem.
01:17:53 ◼ ► And this is like another one of those things where I think about like if you are traveling overseas and you have a limited data cap,
01:18:00 ◼ ► like that's the kind of stuff that you'll burn through quickly without even knowing about it.
01:18:07 ◼ ► I think this is really cool because it would mean that I would have less apps on my iPhone.
01:18:12 ◼ ► Like I have so many apps that I don't actually need, except that one time that I do need them, so I have to keep them around.
01:18:19 ◼ ► Now I won't need to do that. I mean, arguably this means less to me now that I don't have to manually put everything inside of a folder,
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01:20:09 ◼ ► Let us. That was the part that I was the most excited about because I feel like there's the most that can be done.
01:20:16 ◼ ► There's the most space for innovation and adding features in iPad of all of Apple's platforms because it's so capable
01:20:24 ◼ ► and yet is kind of limited by the software. The software has got a lot of room to grow.
01:20:28 ◼ ► I'm not trying to insult the iPad. I'm trying to say there's a lot of room for some growth.
01:20:48 ◼ ► I've had a cursory look through the list of stuff that they've added. There seems to be a lot there.
01:20:53 ◼ ► I'm excited to dig into it more. But I was hoping for some bigger high-level stuff than what we got.
01:21:02 ◼ ► I knew things were going south a little bit when they pointed out all the features that they rolled in late in iOS or iPadOS 13.
01:21:14 ◼ ► I had the moment of like, "Uh-oh. They are taking credit for things that we already have."
01:21:27 ◼ ► So what we announced now isn't going to be underwhelming because we did all of those things."
01:21:31 ◼ ► And yeah, it picks up the iOS stuff, so that will have an impact in terms of widgets and app stuff.
01:21:39 ◼ ► And maybe if they would have shown iPadOS first and did all of those features first, I would have been more excited, right?
01:21:46 ◼ ► Because I would have been like, "Oh, look at all these great features," because they are awesome things that I'm excited about.
01:21:54 ◼ ► But just specific iPad stuff, I don't know. They spoke about this "design for iPad" thing where they were talking about design language tweaks that are better for the larger screen,
01:22:08 ◼ ► There's a lot of Mac features in here. So I said that it was the iPadification of the Mac.
01:22:14 ◼ ► Now let's do the flip side. This is the Macification of the iPad because a lot of sidebars are like, "Look, Photos has a sidebar."
01:22:38 ◼ ► But it is funny that it's sort of like, "Oh, yeah. Okay. So you're bringing the Mac. I see what's happening here.
01:22:49 ◼ ► Yeah. It's not bad, but it's also not exactly groundbreaking. It's more just little design tweaks.
01:23:01 ◼ ► Sort of like, if I'm holding my pencil and I want to do it because I'm doing something else and then I need to input some text,
01:23:10 ◼ ► And I'm bad with handwriting, but still, if I could just write every so often, that would be super helpful.
01:23:26 ◼ ► I don't know. I felt a year ago when they named this iPadOS that they were really kind of putting themselves on the line,
01:23:34 ◼ ► And I will admit that given that they shipped the pointer support already, that they took their best feature.
01:23:51 ◼ ► But my question for you is, do you think this announcement lived up to the fact that they have to make substantive iPad announcements every year
01:24:04 ◼ ► I bet that the design for iPad stuff and some of the things that they're adding are going to make the daily usage of using an iPad much better.
01:24:15 ◼ ► Like, for example, choosing from a date picker will now show you a calendar rather than that spinny wheel.
01:24:29 ◼ ► These are big things. Like, they seem like small things, but they're going to make big differences.
01:24:38 ◼ ► One, really dig through the stuff that Federico will be finding out and publishing on MacStories.
01:24:43 ◼ ► And also installing this beta at some point and running through it myself to see, like, of Apple's apps, how do they feel now?
01:24:51 ◼ ► Because if these applications, because of some of these design changes, feel more grown up and more advanced just because of the fact that they've been refined,
01:25:01 ◼ ► Like, I'm also really excited about the search stuff, it popping over and me being able to just go straight to websites from anywhere.
01:25:08 ◼ ► Like, those things look really good if they do work as good as Mac Spotlight as opposed to the current Spotlight on iPadOS.
01:25:22 ◼ ► So that handwriting in any field is great, but also being able to select and copy and paste and move around handwritten text is awesome.
01:25:32 ◼ ► But I was hoping for, I think, some big picture stuff here that we didn't get that I will assume is coming next time.
01:25:43 ◼ ► What I will say is if this is the small revision year in between the two big ones, this is so much better than any small revision year Apple have ever done for the iPad.
01:25:55 ◼ ► The iPad usually gets a big year, small year, big year type like the TikTok, and they have added more here than they would in another small year.
01:26:05 ◼ ► And I think that there are potentially some things here that in usage are going to make a big difference, but this wasn't the home run that I was hoping that iPadOS would be.
01:26:15 ◼ ► I do really feel like I need to actually spend time with this now to really feel how important it's going to be for me.
01:26:23 ◼ ► Yeah, I feel like you said it right there, which is by the admittedly very low bar of iPad updates on the off years, this is better than that.
01:26:35 ◼ ► And give them a little bonus points on top of that for the pointer support that they shipped early.
01:26:44 ◼ ► It's disappointing that it's not more, but we did get a lot earlier this spring and it's still better than a kind of no new features except what are on the iPhone that you get for free for the iPad.
01:26:59 ◼ ► And so I guess in that way, it's not entirely fair for me to judge this as that it left me wanting more because I was always going to want more, but I'm not overwhelmed by the number of changes on the iPad.
01:27:14 ◼ ► They showed off in this section, like the phone call UI not taking over the whole screen anymore.
01:27:27 ◼ ► That the phone is considered that important, that it's not a notification and Siri showing as notifications and that kind of stuff is also really cool.
01:27:37 ◼ ► Yeah, this wasn't a home run, as we say, but there's definitely some stuff in here that's going to take a bit more digging into.
01:27:53 ◼ ► I'll be honest, I'm not sure if I got what was new here other than rich complications could be in more places.
01:28:00 ◼ ► The big thing that's new, and I think this is great news for somebody like _DavidSmith because he's got his whole app that's just complications,
01:28:18 ◼ ► Every complication on a given watch face can be a different complication from the same app.
01:28:25 ◼ ► Which, as somebody pointed out in Slack that I'm in, is as close as we've ever come to a custom watch face
01:28:33 ◼ ► because if you view all the slots other than the time as a fair game for one app to take over, you're pretty close.
01:28:54 ◼ ► Now you'll be able to build a whole watch face just full of his complications if you want to.
01:29:03 ◼ ► I got a little bit lost in the watch face and the complications part, honestly, but that is actually really cool.
01:29:14 ◼ ► So with the watch face sharing, so you'll be able to share watch faces with each other,
01:29:25 ◼ ► Right, so imagine David's app, _WatchSmith's, having that moment where _WatchSmith says,
01:29:49 ◼ ► So it's not quite third-party custom watch faces, but it will open up the possibilities of apps designing a whole bunch of different watch faces and that's good.
01:30:12 ◼ ► It turns on do not disturb, it will show you some shortcuts on the home screen for your phone,
01:30:21 ◼ ► Your watch goes into sleep mode automatically at the times that you kind of say you want to go to bed.
01:30:27 ◼ ► This is really about also trying to help you get into a sleeping pattern as well as just tracking your sleep.
01:30:33 ◼ ► They actually didn't go into too much detail about what the watch is doing, when you're sleep tracking, what that data looks like.
01:30:43 ◼ ► And then you can set multiple different alarms types, so you can have sounds, you can have just tactic alarms.
01:30:50 ◼ ► And then when you wake up, you get a new screen on the watch which also shows your battery, which is important because you might want to charge the watch then.
01:31:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I want more detail and my frustration often with this is that Apple has their whole go to sleep kind of thing,
01:31:21 ◼ ► So we'll see how aggressive they are about you wanting to do it your way versus Apple wanting you to do it Apple's way.
01:31:29 ◼ ► But I like that they're actually doing all of the machine learning stuff to model being able to detect things about your sleep cycle by wearing the watch.
01:31:39 ◼ ► And then you wake up in the morning and you charge your watch and take a shower or whatever.
01:31:44 ◼ ► So good, long time coming. Glad it's here. Glad it isn't tied to a watch hardware update.
01:31:54 ◼ ► They're adding automatic detection of hand washing and it will do a 20 second countdown.
01:32:04 ◼ ► And I thought that was really clever, really cute. Clearly something they added in quickly.
01:32:09 ◼ ► Honestly, I would like to see them push it out before watchOS 7 because September is a little while away, but maybe it needs work.
01:32:32 ◼ ► So whether this is an app or whatever, I actually don't know right now, but I just saw it on a slide.
01:32:37 ◼ ► This is something that's wild that has been missing for a while since there was a workflow app for the watch and there was no shortcut support on the watch in the sense of being able to run things.
01:32:49 ◼ ► And there were also a bunch of new workout stuff. There's a new dance workout, core strength, functional strength and a cool down activity type along with a new activity app design to go alongside it.
01:33:09 ◼ ► And here's the truth is we've talked for more than 90 minutes and we are talking about what's in the keynote and our reactions to that.
01:33:19 ◼ ► And then there are the web pages behind that and there are all the other sessions that are going to happen all week.
01:33:24 ◼ ► So we are scratching the surface here and that's the beauty of it is now the summer stretches out before us and we'll get more information over the course of this whole week.
01:33:35 ◼ ► And that's the beauty of the I really love our post keynote one week out episode because that's after we've had some time to sort of like think about it.
01:33:58 ◼ ► That's the that's the big story out of all of this is that it's not only it's a bigger day than we thought for the Mac.
01:34:04 ◼ ► It's a bigger moment for the Mac because it's not just about a chip transition but it's also about some pretty serious UI changes.
01:34:29 ◼ ► And if I don't get everything I want going into this but end up coming out being much more excited about a platform that I wasn't necessarily that excited about.
01:34:52 ◼ ► You can go to get upgrade plus dot com to sign up for five dollars a month or you can hit the links in the show notes
01:35:09 ◼ ► But I'm I'm you know I'm finding myself really excited to dig in especially to some of this Mac stuff.
01:35:19 ◼ ► I'm definitely not going to run it on my iMac Pro if I run it anywhere maybe on an old laptop or something.
01:35:24 ◼ ► I'm just genuinely really excited to see all of that work go in to the Mac which honestly at least from a Mac OS perspective.
01:35:39 ◼ ► If anybody had Mac OS redesign on their bingo card fair play to you but I'm not of course that one at all.
01:35:53 ◼ ► But one thing that I'm super pleased about and like I take my hat off to Apple is they did they definitely continue to deliver.
01:36:01 ◼ ► Right. Like they didn't take their foot off the gas this year and be like OK things are difficult.
01:36:06 ◼ ► We're going to strip back a lot of stuff to the point where this is like we're doing all performance and improvements.
01:36:22 ◼ ► We're going to take a look at more of the stuff that we've learned in the intervening time.
01:36:26 ◼ ► If you want to find information about this episode show notes you can go to relay.fm/upgrades/303.
01:36:35 ◼ ► Go to sixcolors.com and you can read a lot of what Jason is going to be writing about there.
01:36:40 ◼ ► You can follow Jason he is @jasonel and I'm @imike and don't forget that you can get more upgrade content with no ads by signing up for upgrade plus.
01:36:52 ◼ ► Thanks to ExpressVPN, DoorDash, Linode and fully for sponsoring this week's episode and also for your support as well.