00:00:08 ◼ ► Hello and welcome to Connected episode 454. It's made possible this week by our sponsors Squarespace, ZuckDoc, and NetSuite.
00:00:21 ◼ ► Hello, I'm reporting live from the Moscone Center here in San Francisco. When are you guys getting here for WWDC?
00:00:32 ◼ ► No, no, no, no. I'm ready for next year. They're bringing it back. There's a word on the streets around San Francisco. It's Moscone. They're bringing it back.
00:00:41 ◼ ► Oh, and I'm joined by Federico Petitjian. I had to do that. I was so excited by being at Moscone. Hi Federico, I apologize for not...
00:01:21 ◼ ► I have some important follow-up. I did it again. I was overexcited during the quizzes last time and I put the scores into my spreadsheet incorrectly.
00:01:30 ◼ ► I am reading from Kate who sent in to say the total score on the quizzes episode should have been Federico with 1,770 points and Stephen with 1,690 points.
00:01:42 ◼ ► I put all of the points onto Stephen instead. This has been corrected. Federico, you're back in the lead. Congratulations.
00:01:52 ◼ ► But now you're back to winning. See, you thought you'd lost it and now you have the jubilation of winning again. Congratulations on winning again.
00:01:58 ◼ ► Kate, thank you so much for caring about justice and fighting the constant collusion on this show.
00:02:33 ◼ ► Stephen is just mad that we didn't make this joke ourselves, so he's now making it himself.
00:02:39 ◼ ► I'm making the joke, but I'm also passing along some anonymous feedback from someone. All I can say is they know about how Apple Park was built.
00:02:49 ◼ ► And they said that Apple does indeed pipe in, quote, this is a quote from the person, "Nature smells around Apple Park."
00:03:02 ◼ ► Why do you have this feedback? Is it in response to upgrade? Because if it is, why is it going to?
00:03:11 ◼ ► I said that somebody asked me what's Apple Park like, and I said that it smells good, that it smells like nature.
00:03:18 ◼ ► And someone pulled me aside, or they sent me an email, or they faxed it to me. I can't really say how.
00:03:31 ◼ ► The pipe in nature smells. What, they just hide a bunch of air fresheners all around Apple Park?
00:03:45 ◼ ► It's kind of concerning that they have a piping system hidden from you where they can just...
00:04:08 ◼ ► I think it's like flowers and stuff, you know, kind of like a sweet, oaky smell. I don't know.
00:04:23 ◼ ► If you haven't been to Apple Park, it is beautiful. There's trees and tall grass and blooming flowers and fruit trees everywhere. I think they just enhance it.
00:04:46 ◼ ► So are Apple grinding up a bunch of flowers underneath Apple Park, just wafting the smells out? Is that how they do it?
00:04:54 ◼ ► They're just like, above ground, it's all about nature and underground. They're just like mulching trees after trees and just throwing the smell out.
00:05:07 ◼ ► Chance says in the Discord, "It's literally like how casinos pipe in tons of oxygen to give you more energy, allegedly."
00:05:20 ◼ ► Isn't this apparently like planes on airplanes, they can control the oxygen to make you sleepy? Isn't that a thing too?
00:05:27 ◼ ► I think all of this is a lie, by the way. Like, 100% of what we said in this segment is a lie.
00:05:37 ◼ ► Suddenly everybody knows that all these organizations, they pipe some substance into the air and like, it's a well-known secret, but Mike and I are just finding out about it.
00:05:48 ◼ ► Do y'all know that a lot of high-end cars now have fragrance systems? If you get like, a luxury BMW and other brands, they have little pods that you put in the glove box, and they pipe nice smells into the cabin.
00:06:02 ◼ ► That's stupid. There's just another way that these car companies are trying to get more money out of you.
00:06:09 ◼ ► All right. Well, if you know about the nature smells of Apple Park, let us know anonymously through one of the many systems we have, whether it's Stephen or me or the Mike Hurley tip line, obviously.
00:06:24 ◼ ► It's clear that Stephen wrote an article after visiting Apple Park because he was talking so effusely about WWDC, so you must have been high on the old nature smells.
00:06:35 ◼ ► And you said, I like just the title of your post, the vibe is good. And I would agree, the vibe at WWDC, it's a good vibe.
00:06:43 ◼ ► I think that this kind of new format of WWDC, right, the Apple Park, mostly two-day thing, bring a bunch of developers in, bring a bunch of media in, and then also make everything available online.
00:07:01 ◼ ► I think that over the next five years, it's going to continue to grow, like the community event will start to grow more, right, like it used to be.
00:07:08 ◼ ► Because WWDC was whatever it was, and then there was a bunch of stuff that was around it.
00:07:13 ◼ ► My expectation is now we're at the starting point of the next whatever WWDC is going to be.
00:07:19 ◼ ► But I think that the core, like doing it the way Apple's doing it, rather than the convention thing, I think they've done a very good job.
00:07:29 ◼ ► I agree. And honestly, like, if they are keeping this format, and I guess at this point they are keeping this format, I wouldn't mind if they slowly but surely started expanding the sort of the venue, you know, developers at Apple Park into more like a festival kind of situation.
00:07:49 ◼ ► Because you got the space, right? You got, and it does feel like a festival. Like I think, Mike, you said this.
00:07:56 ◼ ► I think they walked into the keynote area on Monday, that it looked like a festival. And I think they should lean into that.
00:08:03 ◼ ► They have, for example, that space they built for the Vision Pro demos, that field that they have in front, like I could see, for example, just, you know, a few stands here and there for maybe some beverages, maybe some different food stands and just developers hanging out on the grass.
00:08:26 ◼ ► Kind of all that. And I think they should have a party. Like they should have a party because they should have a party.
00:08:32 ◼ ► But like these are all like tweaks to this new format. And I think just in general, it's good. Like more than anything, right? Like we said it multiple times a year now, just having everything, just everything available online.
00:08:46 ◼ ► I think it's just better for everyone, like even the people that are there, like you can just do whatever you want to do in the time that you want to do it. Like I just think it works. It works well.
00:09:20 ◼ ► Sure, sure. But like in Cupertino, like, I don't know. It was a very weird experience for me.
00:09:28 ◼ ► This sort of suburbium place where all the streets are, they sort of look like each other and they're all like these intersections. And the way people make U-turns is weird.
00:09:43 ◼ ► They have weird street signs that tell you either you turn left or you make a U-turn. And it's very strange. There are no stores. Everything is a strip mall.
00:09:54 ◼ ► And it's very strange to look at. Nothing besides Apple Park and two hotels are taller than two stories.
00:10:06 ◼ ► Like, every single thing is like a two-story building. It's very flat. Everything is very flat.
00:10:13 ◼ ► With a lot of intersections and U-turn signs and strip malls and essentially one hotspot for five restaurants.
00:10:29 ◼ ► Like, there was a place. It was like 10 minutes and an Uber away. It's called Santana Row.
00:10:34 ◼ ► It's like this little development. I think that might be more what you're looking for, vibe-wise. It was pretty nice around there.
00:10:39 ◼ ► But I just much preferred this to San Jose. I'm sick of San Jose. That place... Sorry if you live in San Jose.
00:10:47 ◼ ► Downtown San Jose is terrible. It's even worse now because there was nothing open before and now what's open is now closed.
00:11:12 ◼ ► There were more places to eat in that little strip mall than all of San Jose, even when it was busy.
00:11:23 ◼ ► Correct. Downtown San Jose is the Boulevard of Broken Dreams that Green Day was singing about. I'll tell you that.
00:18:55 ◼ ► And so I'm glad with how that worked out, because it's kind of a mirror of how Apple works.
00:19:34 ◼ ► You can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything,
00:19:56 ◼ ► And once you have that data, you can improve your website and build a marketing strategy
00:20:04 ◼ ► And if you set up Squarespace email campaigns, you can encourage site visitors to sign up as email subscribers.
00:23:47 ◼ ► And the theory here is that, of course, Reddit is sort of kind of preparing for an IPO,
00:25:03 ◼ ► He said on the Vergecast today, it's like, I think he said 2 million monthly active subscribers.
00:25:35 ◼ ► And it all got kind of ugly in that Christian later wrote on the subreddit how the call went.
00:25:45 ◼ ► Reddit was not budging from their position of, no, this is going to be the price of the API.
00:25:55 ◼ ► A few rumors started going around that Christian, the maker of Apollo, was blackmailing Reddit.
00:26:15 ◼ ► But as we were at WWDC, he announced that he's going to discontinue Apollo on June 30th at the end of the month,
00:26:30 ◼ ► And he published excerpts of all sort of the receipts that he has, transcripts and snippets of the phone calls that he recorded with Reddit.
00:26:57 ◼ ► Initially, a bunch of subreddits announced this protest, sort of this planned blackout of subreddits.
00:27:07 ◼ ► Now, the context here is that a subreddit is totally governed by the moderators of a subreddit.
00:27:19 ◼ ► but they can also take a subreddit, which is a subcommunity on Reddit, like, for example, the Apple subreddit.
00:27:32 ◼ ► They can take a subreddit private, which means it's no longer accessible to the outside world.
00:27:43 ◼ ► And initially it was like a handful of subreddits sort of agreed to do this protest in support of Apollo,
00:27:51 ◼ ► but also third-party developers and third-party apps in general, and against the approach taken by the current Reddit management.
00:28:23 ◼ ► To the point where with all these subreddits going private, I guess the Reddit infrastructure was not prepared to have all that private content.
00:28:43 ◼ ► And we now get to today, where we know that Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, sent a memo yesterday to Reddit employees saying that,
00:28:56 ◼ ► "Oh, this is another protest. It'll pass, just like every other protest we've seen in years before."
00:29:20 ◼ ► Redoc. Yeah, we're at 6, just 6,100 subreddits currently, Doc. It was like over 8,000 yesterday.
00:29:47 ◼ ► Like, this is one of those things where Reddit is like perfect for something like this, which is honestly like why this whole thing has happened.
00:29:58 ◼ ► I don't think this kind of community action could occur anywhere else. This is so perfect for Reddit.
00:30:23 ◼ ► And it's like this, we as a community, all of our subreddit communities can organize and do a thing.
00:30:30 ◼ ► Which is why now it's like extending past the two days because it's like grown and morphed.
00:30:39 ◼ ► So now it's like the original idea was just two days and now it's like, "Oh, well, a bunch of them are going to stay dark for longer."
00:30:49 ◼ ► I kind of see what the guy is saying, it will pass, but the problem is what's left afterwards.
00:31:01 ◼ ► I understand why Reddit are in this situation where they need to charge because VC investments dried up, the company makes no money,
00:31:13 ◼ ► They're very upset about the fact that a lot of the large language models are trained using their data and they want to charge people for that.
00:31:26 ◼ ► If you're a large language model and you want to train against that data, it costs you this much.
00:31:41 ◼ ► It could be way less and you're still making money, more money than you were making before because you couldn't serve ads effectively to these people.
00:31:48 ◼ ► And I feel like you're not going to get everyone, but someone who's paying, paying for a third-party app probably has a little bit extra that they would pay.
00:31:58 ◼ ► You could pay directly to Reddit or whatever, or if you want to use a third-party app when you try and log in, it's like, hey, you want to use this app?
00:32:17 ◼ ► Yeah. None of this seems complicated, so I don't really understand why it's gotten to this point.
00:32:25 ◼ ► It's very strange. It's also very silly and sort of so counterintuitive, I think, to upset the very people who feel the strongest about Reddit.
00:32:40 ◼ ► Folks who use Apollo, and it turns out it's a couple of million people, are arguably power users of Reddit.
00:32:50 ◼ ► And then there's the folks who are using other iOS clients and folks who are using Android clients.
00:32:56 ◼ ► It's a few million people, realistically, and they feel very strongly about the service.
00:33:09 ◼ ► Like, Reddit without subreddits, nobody's interested in reading the updates of Steve, the Reddit CEO.
00:33:18 ◼ ► I don't know if it's because they were very interested during his AMA, but that was a different reason.
00:33:23 ◼ ► People don't follow Reddit because of Reddit staff. People follow Reddit because they find other people with similar interests.
00:33:31 ◼ ► And it just seems to me, and I mean, look, I run a very small community, but it feels kind of counterintuitive to me to be like,
00:33:42 ◼ ► "You know what a great business plan is? To upset the very people who love us and see what happens."
00:33:48 ◼ ► Like, I mean, sure, you can try that if you like to watch the world burn, if you're into that sort of stuff.
00:33:54 ◼ ► Because you sure did just that. And this drama with the phone calls and the accusations.
00:34:05 ◼ ► And honestly, I feel like a distraction from it anyway. Like, it's not really what this is about.
00:34:19 ◼ ► And they made it so complicated on themselves. Just come up with the pricing tier for the open--
00:34:35 ◼ ► And you should really charge them. Because, I mean, Reddit, you know, it powers open AI and it powers Google search results.
00:34:49 ◼ ► But similarly, I will make the point, right? If third-party developers are able to make money, then they should also pay.
00:34:56 ◼ ► Or there should be--like, if the third-party app developers are not paying, you make users pay.
00:35:02 ◼ ► I don't think that that is unfair, right? Like, if Reddit's not making any money, but Apollo's making money, Reddit's like, "Hey! What about us?"
00:35:15 ◼ ► It wasn't even just like, they knew it was coming and they said it was going to be fair.
00:35:29 ◼ ► But I think there's a key difference where using Twitter, using Twitter's tools is fine.
00:35:37 ◼ ► Like, the Reddit app is not good. The Reddit website is just terrible. It's so bad. I don't understand.
00:35:55 ◼ ► Everything about it is terrible. So, yeah, maybe they should also rethink their approach to like,
00:36:12 ◼ ► and figured, "Hey, this guy has 2 million users and they make, I don't know, 1 billion requests per month.
00:36:36 ◼ ► It seems like a bunch of mistakes. Mistakes are fine, but then they didn't react to them.
00:36:44 ◼ ► People upset their communities all the time, but it's what you do when you found out you've upset people.
00:37:02 ◼ ► And at a point where I don't know, it doesn't seem possible at this stage to try and imagine how the situation will resolve itself.
00:37:11 ◼ ► Because I feel like Twitter is easier, where it's like people just continue using it, and that's the end of it.
00:37:16 ◼ ► It's just going to keep being used until it goes away, but you can kind of predict where it's going to go now, I feel like.
00:37:25 ◼ ► My expectation is what will happen is slowly these Reddits will start to unlock again, but then post that, I don't know what happens.
00:37:40 ◼ ► You can use old Reddit if you go to old Reddit.com, and if you just put old dot before any Reddit.com URL, it takes you to the old interface.
00:37:53 ◼ ► I think Reddit will most likely kill that, because they want people to use the new version of the site.
00:38:05 ◼ ► The product itself, if you don't use a third-party app or browser extensions or whatever, it's so bad.
00:38:13 ◼ ► Realistically, I cannot imagine myself going to the Apple subreddit via the native Reddit app or the Reddit website.
00:38:29 ◼ ► I'm surprised that the CEO was allowed to make this whole mess without any repercussions.
00:38:51 ◼ ► So I don't know if this is the case, but Mark Zuckerberg is in a situation at Facebook where he has the ultimate say.
00:39:09 ◼ ► I don't know what the situation is with Reddit, but I feel like Federico at a certain point, they're all just like, "Well, we're screwed if we don't do something."
00:39:29 ◼ ► I was listening to the Chateque Daily Update today, and Ben was suggesting that people have been positing that Google could just buy Reddit, which just feels like a great idea for everyone.
00:39:52 ◼ ► It's the only way to find actual non-content-form content from people on the internet these days.
00:40:18 ◼ ► Honestly, in our community, talking strictly about our side of things, it's very sad to see Apollo end up like this.
00:40:49 ◼ ► I don't know what it says about the idea of, you know, maybe you shouldn't build an entire business on top of an API that you don't have control over,
00:41:04 ◼ ► or that it's not federated in the sense that if it stops working, you can just go to another server that offers the same service, right?
00:41:20 ◼ ► Third party clients that got the, you know, the rug pulled from under them, another gun.
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00:43:14 ◼ ► We've both since, like many people, been thinking about it a lot and have published content talking about it.
00:43:21 ◼ ► And I guess we should talk about it a little here too. Federico, you just published your article, which is full of, as I said to you, I texted you and said like you had the ability of explaining things that I was not able to get across.
00:43:43 ◼ ► But it really does feel like, and I think people get a sense of this even if they haven't tried it, this does really feel like the beginning of a new frontier for personal computing.
00:44:04 ◼ ► And I think it's very difficult to talk about it also because, like, first of all, it was a 30-minute demo for a product that is not even out.
00:44:14 ◼ ► And it's a lot like you can tell people, yeah, you should go to the Apple Store and check it out.
00:44:19 ◼ ► And it was a very sort of guided, crafted demo for something that has no frame of reference, right?
00:45:23 ◼ ► And there were people asking me, so what did you think? Because they do like a little Q&A at the end.
00:45:36 ◼ ► And so I figured I'm a slow writer that I know about myself, especially for these things.
00:45:47 ◼ ► So I figured, you know, I'm going to take some notes for sort of these like bigger ideas that I want to talk about.
00:45:55 ◼ ► I will let the, you know, I will let other people who are much faster than me sort of do these hands-on articles and like first impressions.
00:46:03 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm pretty happy that, you know, I waited a week because it kind of gave me an opportunity to think it through on my way back to Italy.
00:46:33 ◼ ► It seems like both of y'all just keep thinking about it, right? I've heard you both mention that in a bunch of places.
00:46:40 ◼ ► I don't know about you, Mike, but personally it just feels like you tried this very sweet thing and they take it back from you after 30 minutes.
00:46:58 ◼ ► I really wanted to just do the whole thing again because also I know there was stuff I was missing.
00:47:21 ◼ ► I think I heard someone say, I think it might have been Matt Thompson, that they brought up the keyboard and it just didn't work.
00:47:32 ◼ ► So there was more that I wanted to be able to do, but they're like, obviously just like bringing it.
00:47:38 ◼ ► And I wanted to do the whole thing over again so I could actually pay more attention in certain areas.
00:47:54 ◼ ► And now I'm seeing things like right now I'm talking to you and my vision of my laptop is obscured by my microphone stand.
00:48:04 ◼ ► And I would quite like to be wearing a Vision Pro so I could have a large screen rather than my 13 inch screen because everything's overlapping.
00:48:12 ◼ ► And also it wouldn't matter that the microphone stands in the way, although I might bump it a few times.
00:48:16 ◼ ► But I guess I'd be using it in spatial so I would see it anyway, right? Because you'd have to pass through.
00:48:22 ◼ ► And so I could move things around. I could put it up there a little bit in front of me on the wall so I could look up rather than trying to look down.
00:48:28 ◼ ► I keep bumping into these situations where I feel like it would be nicer if I could do this.
00:48:35 ◼ ► And then the more I found out from developers about the way that these apps can kind of work is very exciting to me.
00:48:43 ◼ ► Because when you're doing the demo, the apps are all kind of just in this one line in front of you.
00:48:50 ◼ ► But you can actually put them wherever you want. You could just take an app and put it on the desk and just leave it there.
00:48:57 ◼ ► But I didn't really have that experience as such. There was a window that I moved around but I personally didn't move it in a strange way.
00:49:09 ◼ ► But the only one I did that to was the FaceTime one because my FaceTime experience was so bad I didn't want to look at the face anymore.
00:49:16 ◼ ► So I just took that and put it behind me. But the idea that I could take a clock widget and put it on my desk and I could take a photo widget and put it on the wall.
00:49:29 ◼ ► That kind of idea is so tantalizing to me. And now I just keep seeing it everywhere. How I could use this device.
00:49:40 ◼ ► It's so complicated to explain. You do sound a lot like you're talking about a dream that you had. Which is always a thing with AR and VR I think.
00:49:51 ◼ ► Because you are trying to describe something that you could see that nobody else could see. So it definitely has that dream-like feeling to it.
00:49:59 ◼ ► Yeah and I think Federico did a good job of explaining the way that things made him feel. Especially the 3D photos and videos which I found to be an unsettling but not necessarily in a bad way kind of experience.
00:50:14 ◼ ► But it was just like seeing something you were. And I think the weird part was seeing somebody else's memories.
00:50:20 ◼ ► If they were my images I think I would probably have cried my eyes out just looking at them. But you're like "I'm a dad of this child. This is this child's birthday." It's very strange. It's a very peculiar feeling.
00:50:32 ◼ ► I keep thinking about the photos. I keep thinking about the video. The Apple immersive video two minute montage that we saw. But also as I try to explain in my story I feel like we should not ignore the potential for...
00:50:56 ◼ ► And thankfully the three of us were not doing that. But I see a lot of folks doing it. Saying "Oh it's just an entertainment device."
00:51:04 ◼ ► And I'm gonna offer a prediction here. I was talking about this with John. OTJ. And it's why I sort of structured my story the way I did.
00:51:14 ◼ ► I think come next year that whole thing that we've been sort of talking about for a decade. You cannot use an iPad for real work. I think that argument will find new life. Will be repurposed as "Oh you cannot do productive work on a vision pro."
00:51:36 ◼ ► And the only place that I'm seeing this pop up is people saying to me "Oh but there's an app store so it can't replace the Mac." And it's like "Ahh." I know what you're saying. That you can't just install whatever software you want. But you need to forget about that.
00:51:52 ◼ ► In that scenario you're forgetting the iPhone exists. The iPhone is a bigger deal than the Mac. More people use the iPhone every day to do their work than Macs. That's just numbers.
00:52:08 ◼ ► And I know that I can't install some homebrew thing on my vision pro. But I don't think you need that. If the Mac app store was fully stocked we'd just use the Mac app store.
00:52:24 ◼ ► It's just because people don't want to put the software on there because they like the flexibility of not needing to. But we're entering into this new world. The iPhone is great. It has all the apps you're going to need and all the experiences you're going to need. Or you can just use a web browser. I think vision pro is just going to be the same scenario. Forget that. Just forget it. It's a different thing.
00:52:47 ◼ ► And also, I mean, come on. Let's face it. Programmers with opinions are not exactly, you know, they're not exactly the pulse of the average population on earth.
00:53:01 ◼ ► Like, oh, I'm a programmer and I cannot install this weird command line tool on an iPad. Therefore, it's like, dude, you need your programmer and like, you know, nine out of ten people don't need to do that on a computer.
00:53:22 ◼ ► Like, whether they're students or lawyers or doctors or whatever. So like, I feel like that conversation, however, like all those people have been waiting for a new platform to sort of attach this theory onto. And I feel like with stage manager.
00:53:43 ◼ ► Did I say stage manager? I didn't mean to say stage manager. I like the Freudian slip there. With vision pro, they're just gonna go for it because it's such a perfect opportunity. But see, it's so early to say this, but I think that the iPad quote unquote didn't work.
00:54:02 ◼ ► Right. In the sense of like, this is the next thing in computing. I think we can feel pretty confident that that's not the case. Like it didn't replace anything. Not that I really think the vision pro will replace anything specifically, but like there was an idea for the iPad or what it could be.
00:54:19 ◼ ► And it didn't catch on and replace for enough people, their laptops, I think, because realistically the iPad and a MacBook are too similar. Right. So like there isn't, I don't think a enough of a compelling use case for a iPad, the keyboard, the people where they can just use a Mac and a keyboard.
00:54:40 ◼ ► The vision pro there isn't anything that exists like this. Like it is compelling on its own because it's doing something hugely different than a laptop and an iPad or a Mac. Right. Like they are, it is projecting this environment.
00:54:57 ◼ ► You can have this mixed kind of view. It's doing things that don't exist, which I think gives it a better chance of being successful than the iPad had at being successful. I'm not saying you have to agree with me, but do you follow where I'm going with that?
00:55:11 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I think the fact that it stands on its own and has no similar product definitely helps in terms of like, oh, this thing can, you know, it's not a replacement, which I think has long been the problem of the iPad. Right.
00:55:31 ◼ ► And likely the reason why the iPad pro even exists and we don't need to get into all of that. But I do feel like there's, I think you're right. I think that that will definitely help the product.
00:55:43 ◼ ► Well, see, I mean, I do feel like it'll be perfect for entertainment, for communication or, you know, I have my concerns about gaming. I didn't talk about gaming at all in my story just because it just, you know, it was not part of the demo. Apple didn't either.
00:56:02 ◼ ► Apple didn't either. They literally just showed like a person with a dual sense controller playing.
00:56:13 ◼ ► So we'll see. What I know is that it's gonna like, on one hand, I am happy that this is not coming out until next year because it just gives me an opportunity to, you know, think about iOS and iPadOS 17 this summer and in the fall.
00:56:34 ◼ ► And it's great for us as content creators too, right? We have like six months to talk about the same before it comes out. Then it comes out. We talk about it for years. Thanks, Apple. You know what I mean? We could just O-Pine for the next six months based on these half an hour that we have.
00:56:46 ◼ ► But I also want it. So it's gonna be very challenging to wait at the very least six months or more, most likely seven, eight, nine months if this thing comes out in March. So yeah.
00:57:07 ◼ ► I'm not sure how I want to ask this. I didn't experience it like y'all did, but I get the sense from everyone talking about this who did it.
00:57:16 ◼ ► This is a much more feelings based product than we've seen from Apple, maybe ever. Like I have feelings about the Macintosh, right? But most people don't, right? Most of the people see these as tools that overlap in weird ways sometimes.
00:57:30 ◼ ► And that's where you get some of the discussion you just talked about. But something about this makes it feel so much more personal and intimate. And I do worry a little bit about that when it comes to like first impressions.
00:57:46 ◼ ► I'm sure we've all had people talk to us, you know, even in the audience, right? People just know this is coming. People feel like creeped out by it or they're really excited about it or they don't want something on their face like it feels like this is a little bit of a different bracketing for the conversation than we've had before.
00:58:03 ◼ ► And I want to kind of keep tabs on that as we move closer to launch than after launch because I'm not sure an Apple product has had to deal with this in this kind of way before or at least to this extent. Does that make sense?
00:58:18 ◼ ► Oh, it makes perfect sense because it's so different and it does come from these multiple angles, right? I didn't feel comfortable about Apple entering this because I was worried about like shutting off to the world. But I feel like their entire product is focused on trying to stay connected with the outside world.
00:58:39 ◼ ► And so I feel a bit more comfortable with it. But then like I'm still reserving judgment for like, I didn't see notifications as such. Like they only really showed one. And I'm like keen to see what is that like, you know, because I don't like the idea of just like notifications being beamed into my eyeballs.
00:59:00 ◼ ► So that's one set of feelings. But the other side of the feelings is like what you were driving at the beginning of like we are we feel very me and Federico feel very strongly about this having experienced it.
00:59:12 ◼ ► But I think for me, most of my emotional feelings are coming from the entertainment aspect because it's more immersive. But using it like a computer is just a very impressive thing.
00:59:23 ◼ ► I'm not like in love with the user interface, you know what I mean? But like I was just stunned at how impressive it was. It was very funny to me to I had a nostalgia that I didn't realize until I read Federico's article that it does look like the PlayStation Vita interface, which is very funny.
00:59:41 ◼ ► But yeah, I think that it draws a sense of emotion out of you as the user because it's surprising. It's different. It's incredibly impressive. But then there are these emotional things, which are photos, videos, movies, that everyone will have that experience the same way that they do today from looking on their other devices, I think.
01:00:00 ◼ ► I feel like this happens because it's the maybe a good way to describe it is it's the most intimate product they've built. I mean, because it literally goes on your face and in front of your eyes.
01:00:15 ◼ ► It's a feelings-based product, which is a really good description, Stephen, because it tricks your brain into seeing a different or slightly altered reality.
01:00:31 ◼ ► And, you know, unless you're a robot, you know, that will create feelings in people, you know? So, yeah, the feelings-based product. I really like that. I really like that. Yeah, we'll see. I really want one.
01:00:50 ◼ ► Before we wrap this segment up, I wanted to push people towards three pieces of content. One, Stephen has Apple Vision info that we all hope that you would have, which is talking about the history of Apple Vision, where that name comes from.
01:01:05 ◼ ► It was very funny to me, Stephen. I was doing some like calculate because it's about a bunch of monitors. I was doing some calculations and the Apple Vision 850 AV, the Apple Vision ColorSync 850 AV was $1,999 in 1997. That makes it as expensive as the Apple Vision Pro in today's money.
01:01:27 ◼ ► And that thing weighed like 87 pounds. So you really got your money's worth. Imagine putting that on your face. You would have been in trouble. In case people haven't listened, I want to recommend my episode of Cortex that I did.
01:01:42 ◼ ► If you want to know what the demo is like, I chronologically went through the demo, recorded the very next morning. So I was very feelings raw in that episode. I'm very proud of it. And also underscore David Smith has written a great article kind of, I think, evangelizing why people should be considering about developing for Vision OS, talking about why he is considering, not considering why he is, and he makes a statement in the post, is developing for Vision OS.
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01:04:06 ◼ ► Thanks to NetSuite for the support of the show and Relay FM. So I wanted to wrap up this week by doing a round robin on some of the smaller things that have come out in the week since WBC.
01:04:19 ◼ ► Some of these things were one sentence in the keynote and then more comes out on the website. Some weren't mentioned verbally at all by Apple, but as we've all gone through the product pages for these OS previews and as some of us have been using the betas,
01:04:33 ◼ ► we have some things we want to touch on. Before we do though, I actually want to ask where y'all are with the betas. So Mike, let's start with you.
01:05:07 ◼ ► That's it so far. No real stage manager changes on the iPad mini. It didn't magically show up for me.
01:05:13 ◼ ► And I will have Sonoma on a M1 MacBook Air that I picked up for testing and for screenshots and stuff. I will get that set up when I get home. I like Mike.
01:05:24 ◼ ► I'm traveling. So not on my phone. I generally do the phone once the public beta is out and I'll do the dev builds, but kind of in conjunction with the beta program.
01:05:45 ◼ ► That's like my rule for myself. And then I will also kind of test it out here and there.
01:05:50 ◼ ► What I will say, I am tempted by the iPad Pro running this. I don't have an iPad Pro, but like I'm considering it maybe.
01:06:05 ◼ ► I'm just intrigued. Stage managers looks really nice. And so like I'm intrigued by it again.
01:06:22 ◼ ► So that's the native thing that Apple has added that I'm very excited about because you would be able to install a VPN.
01:06:35 ◼ ► And what it would allow me to do is to be able to watch content from other territories directly on my Apple TV.
01:06:42 ◼ ► Well, like I've done it in the past where I want to watch a thing, but it's in the US only. And so I've had to use my iPhone and then AirPlay it to the TV.
01:06:50 ◼ ► Now I would need to do that because I'd be able to use my VPN directly on my Apple TV. I think this is really good.
01:06:59 ◼ ► Like the only reason I think you would run a VPN on Apple TV is to do exactly what you said.
01:07:11 ◼ ► Where is it? Third party VPN support enables developers to create VPN apps for Apple TV.
01:07:16 ◼ ► This can benefit enterprise and education users wanting to access content on their private networks, allowing Apple TV to be a great office and conference room solution in even more places.
01:07:27 ◼ ► It's like, yeah, that's true, but come on, you know, like, but hey, keep it to yourself Apple. So no one gets mad at you. We appreciate what you're doing.
01:07:37 ◼ ► The feature I want to mention is internal linking in notes, which I cannot believe they've done it, but they've done it.
01:07:46 ◼ ► And as you can expect, it's a simplified sort of Apple version of the Wiki style linking that's become popular with apps like Obsidian and Notion and Kraft.
01:07:59 ◼ ► And now it's supported in Apple Notes as well in a much, much simplified fashion that, however, at the very core still lets you do exactly the thing, which is link to other notes in the Notes app.
01:08:14 ◼ ► So by default, you do this by pressing on an external keyboard on a Mac or on an iPad, Command + K, or by finding the Add Link button in the...
01:08:32 ◼ ► For the past few years, Apple, for the past few years, Apple officially, and by officially I mean Human Interface Guideline officially, referred to it as the Edit menu.
01:08:42 ◼ ► So the official name of the copy and paste menu is the Edit menu. And this Add Link button is in the Edit menu.
01:08:50 ◼ ► However, there's a little asterisk here. I was talking about this with OTJ. The iOS 17 product page refers to the Edit menu as a callout menu.
01:09:02 ◼ ► So because I'm the type of person who obsesses over these things, Apple, if you can let me know whether the proper terminology is Edit menu or callout menu, that would be appreciated.
01:09:22 ◼ ► So you will find Command + K on an iPad or a Mac or this Add Link option in the Edit menu.
01:09:29 ◼ ► And that brings up a window that lets you either paste a URL to a web page, so any HTTPS URL.
01:09:40 ◼ ► You now have a proper way to create hyperlinks, essentially, in Apple Notes, which is nice. Or you can search for an existing note and the link becomes an internal wiki-style link to another note inside the Notes app.
01:10:00 ◼ ► And once you enter that, you get a little yellow link and you tap it and you open a note. You follow a link and you go to another note inside the Notes app.
01:10:11 ◼ ► There's also, and I found out about this thanks to MacRumors, a really handy shortcut, which is two brackets, like two forward-facing brackets.
01:10:25 ◼ ► Two greater than signs, yeah. You type those and it brings up a sort of like a little shortcut that opens a popup with a list of recently modified notes.
01:10:38 ◼ ► So if you're in a hurry and you want to refer to another note that you recently modified, you can type two greater than symbols and you will get this window.
01:10:54 ◼ ► I cannot believe that Apple has done this, but also I think it's the right thing to do, to modernize Apple Notes by paying attention to where the market is going.
01:11:05 ◼ ► And sure, this version of internal linking doesn't have all the bells and whistles that you may be used to seeing in Kraft or Obsidian.
01:11:14 ◼ ► There's no back linking, right? So back linking is the ability to see in the note that you linked which other notes refer to it.
01:11:29 ◼ ► There's no sort of mind map, like network, graph, whatever it's called, of all the notes that link to each other, but that doesn't matter.
01:11:45 ◼ ► So I think this is going to be great, whether you want to create a table of contents or documentation for your team.
01:11:53 ◼ ► You know, you want to have a start page in a shared folder and the start page of something takes your team members or your family to different notes.
01:12:07 ◼ ► My first one is one of the most dad-oriented features, but exciting. It's called Check In.
01:12:14 ◼ ► So this is where a friend or family member can be alerted when you reach your destination.
01:12:21 ◼ ► So say that you've got a kid who is on the way to a friend's house and it's late night, you want to make sure they get there safely.
01:12:27 ◼ ► You can set this up instead of having to remind them, hey, text me when you get there or looking at Find My or something.
01:12:33 ◼ ► If you stop making progress, it checks in with you and if you don't respond, it shares information with the friend or family that you've set it up with.
01:12:48 ◼ ► When that information is shared, its location, battery level and cell service of the iPhone.
01:13:01 ◼ ► Like you could do this with Find My to a degree and Find My shows battery level on devices, but it's a bit more polished now.
01:13:11 ◼ ► And as someone who's got almost now two teenagers, something I'm looking forward to being available.
01:13:19 ◼ ► You know, not all the time, but in those moments where, like, hey, we're, you know, something unusual is going on or you're kind of out and maybe it's a bit unusual.
01:13:33 ◼ ► It enables some features that Find My would have, but without needing to make a kid do Find My view all the time, which might be complicated. Right?
01:13:40 ◼ ► Right. I mean, it does. I mean, I'm putting in the context of parenting, but like, you could do this with like us flying home from WBC because I think most people know by now you care for everyone when we travel.
01:13:56 ◼ ► I think it'll be primarily used in the context of family, but the nature of it kind of is it's uncoupled from iCloud family sharing and those other services.
01:14:10 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. So like, this is the thing that I know a lot of people do who feel otherwise unsafe in an area on their own.
01:14:17 ◼ ► Right. Like if you're going home from a night out or something, it's a way to, you know, like I know that friends like people say like drop a pin.
01:14:25 ◼ ► So you can like drop a pin in like an app like WhatsApp and you can watch the progress.
01:14:29 ◼ ► This is like just a very nice way of doing this. Adding in stuff like battery level and cell service, which answer questions for you.
01:14:37 ◼ ► Oh, this person's battery is fine, but they don't have cell service where they are. It will pick them up again in a minute, I'm sure.
01:14:55 ◼ ► All right. I'm up next. This is a quick one, but I'm really happy to see this. Couple handy new features in the podcast app.
01:15:05 ◼ ► So the now playing screen has been redesigned. It now has this sort of like music inspired full screen approach.
01:15:15 ◼ ► And I think there are some new artwork features for podcasters to like, I think you can probably optimize your show artwork for this full screen experience.
01:15:29 ◼ ► And more importantly for me, because I was literally complaining about this only a few weeks ago and we talked about it on the show.
01:15:37 ◼ ► There's a proper cue. At long last, there's a proper cueing system that is no longer weird in the podcast app.
01:15:47 ◼ ► So in the now playing screen, you will find in the bottom right corner, this new list icon.
01:15:52 ◼ ► You press it and it takes you to the cue page where if you've cued any episodes, you will find, well, a cue that you can rearrange or you can tap on an episode to play it.
01:16:06 ◼ ► Or you can long press it to get a bunch of actions. But even more nicely in the same screen, you will find a chapter menu for episodes that have chapters such as this one.
01:16:19 ◼ ► It's collapsed by default and it tells you the current title of the chapter you're listening to.
01:16:26 ◼ ► But if you press it, you get a full menu with all the chapters you can open in the episode you're listening to.
01:16:33 ◼ ► And generally speaking, the whole up next, play next thing has been, I was very confused by that.
01:16:48 ◼ ► Up next is sort of like the up next that you get on tvOS where it's a mix of episodes from shows that you recently followed and new episodes from shows that you were already following.
01:17:07 ◼ ► But then there's a proper cue also that is no longer called play next. I was very confused by that, if you recall.
01:17:18 ◼ ► Up next is like a showcase of things I may want to listen to, but everything that I want to listen to in specific order goes into my cue.
01:17:30 ◼ ► Playing next is the term, that little thing, and it includes both a cue and continue playing.
01:17:37 ◼ ► So it's still not like super clear, but the word cue, it's just like, and then there's a cue that is good to have.
01:17:43 ◼ ► The button says add to cue and it's got an icon that shows an item going to the bottom of a cue.
01:17:51 ◼ ► And then you open the now playing screen and it says cue. Like the terminology really helps.
01:17:57 ◼ ► It's weird there's so much feature work about Eddie in this app. You know, a lot of cue work.
01:18:08 ◼ ► Just real quick, last thing, they've added something I didn't know that they had because they supported something else.
01:18:31 ◼ ► I was like, but we add the artwork. And it's like, no, if you do it as a chapter, it works.
01:18:43 ◼ ► This is bananas. So this is an API to integrate camera apps on iOS 17 with motorized iPhone stands.
01:19:12 ◼ ► Right. Well, yeah, I just figure this is all part of like building out more functionality for some eventual home.
01:19:19 ◼ ► Yeah. Also that it's like standby on iOS 17, which is totally like the interface of the future home display.
01:19:26 ◼ ► Yeah. And FaceTime on Apple TV. Like it all just feels like this all to me feels like it moves towards the same result.
01:19:32 ◼ ► So this will follow a person or object moving 360 degrees around uses Apple's vision frameworks to detect these things.
01:19:43 ◼ ► And then the stand and the phone communicate and the stand moves the phone where it wants to go.
01:19:55 ◼ ► Apple points out the new docket API has many uses beyond video capture, including fitness, enterprise, education and health care.
01:20:03 ◼ ► But isn't it just video capture in those fields like this is something else to like standby.
01:20:10 ◼ ► It's like, well, why not the iPad? Well, the iPad doesn't have MagSafe, but pretty cool.
01:20:16 ◼ ► Not something I expected. And I think the first person or the first company to make a really cool motorized iPhone dock.
01:20:27 ◼ ► Maybe you could attach it like a remote control car. It's like you build your own Amazon Astro, but with your your iPhone is the brain.
01:20:39 ◼ ► And I think this will also be super cool with the continuity camera thing, right. And Apple TV. Yeah. Yeah.
01:20:44 ◼ ► Yeah. It's it's like a hardware version of center stage. But I'm sure it will make center stage even better.
01:20:49 ◼ ► Right. Like if you pair these two things together. Oh my gosh. The phone is moving and the picture is moving.
01:20:55 ◼ ► It's like what if what do they get in a contention? You know, it's like you're you're on a boat.
01:20:59 ◼ ► It'd be bad news. They're just fighting against each other. You vibrate faster and faster and the phone flies off the stand.
01:21:05 ◼ ► I wanted to just mention shift clicking and stage manager. So this is an iPad OS currently.
01:21:10 ◼ ► And I'm really hoping that it comes to Sonoma, too. They're like, if you're in a stage anywhere that you click on an app icon and press shift from
01:21:18 ◼ ► from a stage, from the dock, from spotlight, it will open in the stage that you're currently in.
01:21:24 ◼ ► It has been confirmed to me that this is not in Sonoma. And I really hope that that is just like they just haven't gotten to it yet.
01:21:33 ◼ ► I will give it like a like a maybe another bear or so and I will file a feedback on it.
01:21:40 ◼ ► Now's the time. Now's the time to get your feedbacks in. Well, Mac OS takes a long time. That's true.
01:21:45 ◼ ► You know, Mac OS we got until like November. I filed one on the Sonoma version of reminders already because I just apparently even they don't use reminders.
01:21:59 ◼ ► It's been that way forever that in the inspection pane on a task on the Mac, you can't change the list the task is on.
01:22:06 ◼ ► You can do it on iOS, but not the Mac. Oh, my God. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you for filing that.
01:22:13 ◼ ► So I'll put that feedback number in the show notes. If you work on reminders out there, you know someone who does help me out.
01:22:20 ◼ ► My next one is turning off iCloud drive or really not ever turning it on. No longer disables iCloud app syncing.
01:22:28 ◼ ► So the way this works in iOS 16 and before any app that relied on iCloud to sync data between your devices, that wouldn't work if iCloud drive was off.
01:22:38 ◼ ► And you may be wondering, why would you have iCloud drive turned off? Well, the answer is on a lot of phones managed by corporations.
01:22:45 ◼ ► iCloud drive is off for other reasons. A while back, maybe like a year ago, Marco was talking about this with overcast that he had no idea people were in the state.
01:22:54 ◼ ► And he was looking to move to iCloud syncing for some things. And this was an issue he was hearing about.
01:23:13 ◼ ► So it was never really clear to me why these things were tied together because iCloud syncing of Apple's own apps was unaffected, even if iCloud drive was off or like the user didn't have an iCloud drive folder.
01:23:29 ◼ ► But now they've separated those things. And I think that's going to make life a lot easier for people who carry a phone around that they don't manage themselves.
01:23:45 ◼ ► Activity history and the whole map lets you see the last 30 days of activity for your devices and who interacted with them.
01:23:57 ◼ ► I actually like this feature and I like the snitching potential unless it snitches on me where then we'll be reverting back to an iOS feature before we'll go back to 16.
01:24:07 ◼ ► Is this feature available right now? Oh, I guess I need to be running a home hub on 17, which I'm not.
01:24:14 ◼ ► I don't have the answer for that. Like there might be some kind of thing that has to happen first. You know what I mean?
01:24:19 ◼ ► Like you've got to upgrade your home architecture again, which I still have yet to do the home architecture upgrade.
01:24:53 ◼ ► We worked out that this was clearly a test of the sniffer dog's capabilities of dissecting marijuana is my assumption.
01:25:17 ◼ ► I'm not going to talk about what the dog found or didn't find, but that dog is a snitch.
01:26:02 ◼ ► Typing on an iPhone finally doesn't make me feel like I don't know what I'm doing with my fingers anymore.
01:26:18 ◼ ► The way it actually predicts words and entire sentences that make sense as you're typing, it suggests those words.
01:26:49 ◼ ► You can still, you know, you still get the chance to revert to like, for example, let's say you type something and autocorrect kicks in and you're like, "No, I meant to type that."
01:27:01 ◼ ► You can tap on the highlighted word and you get a list of the options that you can revert back to.
01:27:15 ◼ ► And whatever they're doing, I think it's working because this is so different from the autocorrect that, as we've mentioned before on the show,
01:28:02 ◼ ► If this continues to be so high quality in the beta, this will be the feature that I will tell people why they should upgrade for in September.
01:28:19 ◼ ► I wonder if this will be enough to convince my wife to tell autocorrect because she doesn't.
01:28:53 ◼ ► Which, I mean, if you can type on an iPhone without needing autocorrect, and you could be successful in that,
01:29:33 ◼ ► One of my main issues with system settings now is I open it and I still can't work out where anything is.
01:30:02 ◼ ► And there's three switches, correct spelling automatically, capitalize words automatically, add period with double space, which is a sin on the Mac.
01:31:12 ◼ ► And yes, it works as well in Italian and also in the switching between English and Italian,
01:31:49 ◼ ► Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Korean, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Thai.
01:32:16 ◼ ► So the new autocorrect, if you speak in English, will only work if you have an iPhone 12 or later?
01:32:33 ◼ ► If you want to find the links to all the stuff we spoke about, head on over to the website.
01:32:52 ◼ ► If you know about why Apple Park smells the way it does, and you would get fired for telling us,
01:33:22 ◼ ► You can also become a member and get Connected Pro, which is the longer ad-free version of the show
01:33:34 ◼ ► Mike is the cohost of a bunch of other shows here on Relay FM and the co-founder of Cortex brand.
01:33:57 ◼ ► You can find me on Mac Power Users every Sunday here on Relay FM and I write over at 512 pixels.