537: Worse Than All of Our Toilets

35:32It kind of came late, but it got there. There were a few changes to the way focus modes could do stuff. I forget, did we have focus modes in iOS 15? Or was it still called Do Not Disturb then? No, it's been around for more than one year. I thought so, yeah. But the focus mode became an API that apps could integrate with, as did, I believe, share with you. I think that also came in iOS 16. and then messages got a huge upgrade with being able to edit being able to mark as unread so there were it was a pretty big update and i would say overall oh pass keys i forgot about pass keys like there's so much like there's like there were there there have been so much in ios 16 um certain things i think didn't come out so well um one of the major changes was the they added this automatic dictation.

36:26Before, while you're dictating with the little Siri microphone thing into a text field, you would have to say things like period and new line. And they added a thing that tried to make that automatic. Frankly, I changed it back. Fortunately, they made that a setting and I changed it back because I found it too unreliable. And I still now just say period and new line. But I'm glad they at least were working on that. Otherwise, I think that's the biggest stuff. I mean, the home app got redesigned and everything, but for the most part, those were the major themes, I think, for the user and developer side.

37:03And I would say overall, iOS 16 was a pretty good year. It was a pretty solid release. I don't think I really had a lot of major problems with it. There haven't really been major unstable features. And this is honestly, you know we've you know listeners you know that when apple has software quality problems we will be brutal and we will call them out on it constantly until they fix them i think apple's software quality is in a pretty good place these days i i really think that so here i was going to say about okay okay about ios 16 i think it's a great example for people who are new to the platform or new to the earth um you may think like we say every year you know every year the iphone's pretty good and you know usually ios is pretty good like one of the things you didn't mention at all is like is ios crashing are there stability issues or their data loss issues like we don't even talk about this stuff related to ios was the upgrade terrible did it brick people's phones like you just don't hear about those things and i feel like that goes this is a great example of the platform that is the most important to apple that makes them the most money also gets the most resources makes perfect sense but it wasn't always that way those of us who have been in the application for long ago remember when ios was not 60 of apple's profits or revenue i forget which one it is but it used to be that ios was a tiny little sliver because the iphone was brand new and there were ios releases that were terrible that did crash that were just like everything was broken and it made everything worse and it was a giant mess there was a long time ago so we're talking about like you know iphone os version 5 or you know back when it was called firmer 13 13 was a bad release yeah they're they have been worse but in general because ios gets so much attention and so much resources which is warranted i think because of the importance the importance it is to the company apple has this is evidence of like what happens if you put lots of people on something what happens if some of your best people are on something what happens if you put tons of money into it what happens is that every year new iphones come out and we go you know what these are pretty good this is a good phone we have quibbles and you know it's like these tiny differences that we debate but in general the phones you know don't catch fire don't fail the wi-fi things don't go bad the screens don't burn in they don't delaminate occasionally they bend but again that was a long time ago like the iphones tend to be good and ios the recent releases of ios for the most part they've been pretty good when i look back at ios 16 the things you listed even if i don't care about all any of those things there's not really any negatives like ios 16 erased all my photos ios 16 crashed all the time hey, iOS 16 burns my battery down.

39:39iOS 16 made something that used to work not work, right? You hear about those things for, you know, let's say macOS, but not so much for iOS. So I think iOS and the iPhone continue to be great examples of what Apple can do when, you know, when they put the maximum amount of effort into it, when they think it's important to the company, when it is important to the company, and they resource it as such. Even for a platform like iOS that's like old and creaky and it's not going to be super cool like the VR platform or whatever. Like it's their bread and butter, but it's really important to have that bread and butter because it keeps everything else going.

40:13So I'm glad that iOS 16 was good. I agree. I don't have any complaints about it. I enjoy the new features they added. The new features they added more or less work, you know, like all the stuff that you're talking about. Like, you know, the AI, not AI, sorry, the ML punctuation thing where it figures out to put the point. That's a hard problem, but it doesn't crash. It doesn't cause the screen to get all scrambled. If you don't like it, you can turn it off. And in general, the features they added, like editing and marking is unread and unsending and all that stuff or whatever, that stuff just works.

40:43It works like they said it did in the keynote. It makes the phone better. And we just go like we just take it for granted. Like, yeah, another good iOS release. Good job. So I hope Apple continues in that path. And I kind of wish some of the other OSs could get that treatment. Obviously, the other OSs don't sell like iOS does. And I get it. But we can all dream. Yeah, you know, I agree with both of you guys. The one complaint I have about iOS 16, which is maybe a desire for an improvement, I guess is a better way of phrasing it, is a lot of the stuff they added, I feel like either the configuration is clunky or non-obvious or there's not enough configuration.

41:21So like setting up your custom home screens, that's very, very clunky. And I don't love it. And plus, for the longest time, they forced you to change both wallpapers at the same time. I'm not sure if that's true anymore. No, no, they fixed that. Okay. That's another example. Even when they make a fumble, like that new feature comes out that they've never had before, and they kind of flub the UI, they fixed it in a mid-cycle release. We didn't even have to wait to iOS 17. That's true. But even still, I wish there was a little bit easier to configure and perhaps more configuration. another thing that drives me absolutely batty is i have my phone set up to randomly rotate through pictures of aaron and the kids and every time i lock the phone it will find a new picture to show you on the screen always on screen which i have left on it'll find a new picture to show and figuring out where or what picture that is is like a 75 tap process that underscore documented way back when i don't even remember how to do it but it's a nightmare and i wish so badly if there was a way that you could even if it's like a triple triple tap or something but some way to say please show this to me in photos i would love for that oh that actually on that point but the photos thing i think this is a great example of what money and resources can't buy which is like you know no matter how many people you put on how much money you put into it when something is a 1.0 like the very first version of this lock screen customization thing it's not going to have all the features everybody want even if they thought of that even if they thought But someone said, hey, you know, people see these photos on their home screen.

42:53They're probably going to want to be able to find them in their photos collection. There's probably not time to do that for a 1.0, given the size of the team that's assigned for this brand new feature. So this is a lesson for people, all the people who have never written software for a living. No matter how much you care, no matter how much money you have, 1.0 is not going to do all the things that you wish it did. And it seems like you could fix that by adding people or money. But there are many books about this that you can read if you care to understand why that's not the case. Indeed. Yeah, I completely agree.

43:20One thing on that, too, is all of these lock screen customization features. The other day, I was in a restaurant, and the people at the next table over, one of them had shown the other person their iPhone, and the other person was like, oh, my God, how do you get that up there? And they had no idea that lock screen widgets existed. And I feel like a lot of these features, a lot of the iOS power features that have come along in the last few years, they're really hidden from people. Like, you know, I've said before how nobody knows about how you can customize the complications on watch faces. Similarly, no one knows about lock screen widgets.

43:59When I look around in public and I see how other people have their phones set up, I almost never see anybody with any lock screen widgets. Because I think that whole system is still very hidden if you don't know to look for it. and so that i think that's one area that you know i i recognize apple's resistance towards you know adding adding like setting screens and the settings app and stuff like that when not necessary and they want everything oh you just you just long press here and then this whole new world opens up and and i think they i i hope that future os's maybe that we're about to see in a week maybe improve that a little bit yeah yeah that's it's a hard problem because i the you don't want to be like oh you have to go through this manual tutorial and like you know then you launch an ios app and they want to there's like a 17 tap thing where some overlay is showing you every new feature they added and everything and it makes it quote unquote discoverable but at a certain point you just tune out you're like okay next next next i just want to get to the point where i'm using the app apple tends not to belabor the onboarding process of the phone there's already enough crap you have to go through they're not going to be like oh and by the way did you know that i was 16 we added the ability to have widgets on your live screen at that point people are like oh i just want to use my phone right and it's a hard problem because you don't want to shove it in their face uh you know and you don't want to force them to go through a big tutorial it's the nature of an os when it gets as old when the version number hits 16 there's probably a lot of features in there that are going to be more sort of power user expert features or features that i get discovered by word of mouth or popularized by seeing somebody else that has them and in some ways that's kind of inevitable like it's you should every single feature on your phone can't be easily discoverable because that would be a nightmare right there's always going to be things that are obscure and that's why apple has things like in in the you know apple retail stores where you like come and we'll show you how to use your phone or your mac or whatever and we scoff like oh people oh people have to go there and they have to learn how to use their phone like people who don't listen to tech podcasts are not going to discover this on their own but maybe they will realize hey there's like a free class i can go to at the apple store where they'll tell me how to use my phone and i bet they will cover stuff like this in that you know 30 minute class or whatever and people will feel like they get great value of it and they'll they'll love apple so i I think those classes are a great idea.

46:06And those classes are way better than forcing everybody to go through like a tutorial level in video game parlance to learn how to use the new features of their phone. Because most people do not care, especially at the moment they're setting up their phone. But maybe later they will care. And when they choose to go to a class to learn about their phone, they'll be happy about it. If Apple chooses to try to show them all the new features they added, they will not be happy. Yeah. But there is kind of like a middle ground there. Like, you know, the lock screen customization and widget thing, I just looked around the settings app.

46:34I don't see anything about it anywhere in there. As far as I can tell, the entire section of the phone of lock screen customization does not exist in the settings app. You have to get to it from the lock screen through the long press or whatever. And I feel like that's, you know, look, they'll add things to the settings app whenever they want to. Have you set up a new phone recently with a new Apple ID? It is spammed like crazy with all sorts of service upsells and other garbage. So services, it goes the other direction where they're not shy about saying, did you know we have a new service? Yeah, like they already have a section called home screen.

47:08They could have one there called lock screen or they could have this section renamed home and lock screen and have it be two subscreens. Like they have obvious places for it. Yeah, I'm not saying this particular problem is intractable. But, you know, like another example is like when you swipe left or whatever, when you swipe to reveal the widgets that are to the left of your first home. Wait, do you swipe left on the home screen you don't want? Or which direction is that? I don't even, actually, I don't even know. We talked about this last time. I'm like, what do people mean when you scroll down?

47:37What I mean is that imagine in the imaginary physical world of your phone, to the left of your first home screen is a screen with a bunch of widgets that you can put on it, right? How many people know that screen's even there? Oh, that's different. That's a whole different section of widgets. It's not the lock screen. It's the other place. It's a place where widgets were before, you know, you could put them on your lock screen, right? And it uses different widgets because lock screen widgets are a special type. The apps have to bend and it can only be black and white. I know. I know. Well, what I'm saying is that screen, how many people don't know that screen is there?

48:07Because it's not like you open your phone for the first time and there's a little blinky arrow saying, hey, did you know there's something over there? I mean, I think they might have had some kind of discoverability thing the very first time that feature was added to iOS, which was years and years ago. But right now, I think people might accidentally do and go, oh, my God, what is this? What is this screen I've never seen before? Which like whatever outputs, is it the default? that maybe they have like the photos widget the weather widget is the default or whatever that is quote unquote not discoverable but if you see enough people using a phone and you see them doing it and you see if you see someone do it you can say can i swipe in that direction and find a bunch of widgets and lo and behold you can at the bottom of that screen is like a plus or an edit button or whatever so a little bit more discoverable than lock screen stuff um but like i said there's always going to be examples of that that's sort of what do you call it progressive disclosure or whatever they call it where it looks simple to the person who wants it to be simple but there is more complexity if you know where to find it and then we're just trying to find the way to smooth that ramp between those two worlds to go back a half step to what john was saying about version one you know so i'm trying to i don't think i'm going to succeed but i'm trying very hard to get call sheet out the door before wwdc which means i probably should have submitted it last week and i haven't yet but that's neither here nor there anyway i have uh 18 open tickets issues whatever in github of which i plan to only fix two of them before i send it to the app store or to review.

49:26So I have 16 things for me to work on the moment I get this thing published. So John is exactly right. Now, granted, it is just me, but still, that is how this works. And then one final thought on iOS 16, another thing where I've come to really like the features, but I feel like while we simultaneously have gotten a lot more configuration than I expected, I want more configuration, and that's with focus modes. And I think on Analog, at some point I'll talk with Mike about what I've been doing with focus modes recently because I've ended up in a situation, or well, that seems like it happened to me.

50:00I have chosen a situation wherein - Like the white cars. Just like white cars, which do happen to you. I've chosen a situation wherein I'm basically in a particular focus mode 24-7. Well, anytime I'm not sleeping, I'm in this one focus mode. And it actually has been working pretty well for me. And like I said, I'll unpack that on analog probably later this month or whatever. But I've really even have come to really like focus modes quite a bit. But there's things, and of course off the top of my head, I can't think of what specifically they are, but there are definitely some things that I wish I could be either more explicit about or tweak just a little bit.

50:31Oh, a great example. I would love to have a specific home screen for a focus mode and everyone is reaching for their email client saying, oh, contrary, you can do that. Well, not exactly. What I want to be able to do is say, take these five or six apps and put them on my travel home screen when I'm in the travel focus mode. But that's not how it works. what you need to do is dedicate a page always and forever that is the only one that happens to be surfaced during the travel focus mode. Does that make sense? So you can't like have a bespoke thing that only shows up during your travel focus and then it goes away.

51:06You have to have it there always and you're just choosing to kind of sort of highlight it or not. It's a silly example, but it drives me bananas. And so stuff like that, I wish we had a little more control, but But as much as I'm harping on a few of these things, it's because I love them so darn much. And iOS 16 really is really, really good. I mean, heck, they could have done making iMessages unread, and that would have sold the release for me right there. I'm in. That's all I need. So it is really, really quite good, and I've been really pleased with it. All right, let's move on to iPadOS 16.

51:41um this obviously many of the same features apply to ipad os although not any of the lock screen stuff you know we'll see if that happens this year who knows um but i think the major headliners for ipad os that were unique to it or at least mostly unique to it um were stage manager and maybe free form and and kind of the new paradigm like they had this whole thing called desktop class apps um and and what this kind of meant in practice was things like customizable toolbars and stuff that made it gave ipad apps a lot more of the abilities that mac apps have have always had and kind of made like system native ui for a lot of that stuff but that's kind of a longer term play for the ipad like i think a lot of this stuff with the ipad they they changed some things like you know some better external display support they had like display scaling modes and stuff like that a lot of that stuff seems to be giving the ipad you know slowly over time giving it more and more abilities that are like a Mac in some way, or that can be closer to a Mac in some way.

52:41And I think they largely succeeded, although it remains to be seen how much the market will use that. But at least, look, at least now Apple's using it with their new Pro apps and stuff. So that all helps. Although Apple is not using all the features you just mentioned, the Pro apps. That's true. Steve Stratton-Smith has been commenting that both Logic and Final Cut do not use the resizable window thing that works with stage manager and i don't think they even support split view i mean again they're 1.0s see previous discussion about 1.0s doesn't mean they're never going to but um yeah apple i mean stage manager does feel like it definitely fizzled like it was an idea they had but how multitasking might be better i continue to think it works better on the mac than it does on the ipad ipad people don't seem to be big fans of it support from third-party applications for it has not been wonderful including from apple itself so let's set that aside but the other the other desktop class application stuff of like more controls better widgets a way for you to have a kind of sort of menu bar type thing without rolling your own like that's all good and positive but i mean i feel like we're going to get to eventually the summary of what we say about ipad west every year which is uh the hardware continues to be let down by the software because the hardware is so incredibly capable and by that i don't just mean power because the phone is incredibly powerful too but it's got a tiny screen and it doesn't support a stylus and you can't connect it to external displays and like it's the the full picture of the power of the ipad the fact that it uses mac socs the fact that you can get one with a really big screen and you can put a keyboard on it and you can connect to an external monitor and you can use a pencil with it the os does not do that those capabilities justice that's always our complaint and they moved one tiny little inch closer to it with 16 by adding some of the desktop class application stuff and then one tiny little inch backwards by attempting to fix multitasking again I'm a stage manager and having kind of land with a thud.

54:26So, you know, not, not, I'm not, even though iPadOS also, you know, didn't cause crashes and the features they added existed and we're fine. The fundamental complaint about iPadOS that we have a complaint that we don't have about iOS continues to exist. And that we just feel like the, the, you know, the hardware is let down by the OS. Whereas on the phone, we feel like the hardware is well supported by the OS. The OS lets the phone do things that we think phone apps should, be able to do for the most part not true on ipad os yeah i think because you know ipad os the the i would say specifically like the area of the software that makes it so frustrating for a lot of power users is specifically multitasking like you know and when you look at the way the phone the phone doesn't have things like split view so you don't really like we're able to enjoy the the iphone as you know there's always one app on screen there is never more than one app so one app on screen we got picture in picture on the iphone another example of a thing that said you know what we always know we've had the power to do it but actually phone screens are big enough we should support picture in picture and they did and that is a limited for multitasking that i take advantage of on my little tiny phone screen but it's not like you know on ipad again ipad os you have the an external monitor yeah exactly like it you know you have exceptions on the on the phone like the dynamic island stuff and you know control center widgets but you know for the most part the phone is each app takes up the full screen and that you know ios is really good at that that's what it was made for ipad os still feels like it's fighting you at every turn and and i i appreciate that you know some of the changes they've made in the last couple releases like like when they they changed um some of the like split view controls to put it into that little ellipsis dot thing on the top of the windows and like so yeah that was very good yeah some of those things helped a lot but i still whenever i'm using an ipad multi-tasking and window management still are very clunky to me and ios 16 or sorry ipad os 16 attempted to change that in a big way with stage manager and i and i think it just it i don't think it made anything better i i think it was a big sidestep in certain ways i think it was a step back in certain ways i i tried i tried using it myself for maybe a few weeks on my ipad usage and granted i'm not an i'm not an ipad power user and that's part of the reason why this stuff drives me nuts.

56:46But I found it infuriating. Like everything, I only kept using it for that brief time so I could say I give it a fair shot and I hated every minute of it and it was fighting me at every turn. So I think that was a clear misstep. I honestly think they would have been better off not shipping Stage Manager on the iPad. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm looking at the page of the link in the show notes for features for iPadOS 16. and other than stage manager there's not really that much here that i consider to be unique to the ipad and i think what there is has already been covered they added a weather app that that was a long time coming uh i mean i i obviously i bought uh one of the new m2 uh ipads and i do like my ipad i i would not say i'm a power user though i really really like having an ipad pro for both casual use and couch use, but also on the go if necessary.

57:41It's very rare that I would try to accomplish anything that vaguely looks like work on an iPad. In fact, it's almost never, but in certain cases it can be done. But no, I love my iPad. I love the hardware. I love that I was able to keep using the smart keyboard or whatever it is, the super fancy floaty keyboard from the 2018 iPad that I could still use it on my brand new iPad. but yeah software wise it's just like stage manager never clicked for me maybe it's a perfectly good feature and it's just my brain doesn't operate that way but what i've heard is that it's not very good and when i tried it like i said my brain just did not click with it and it's funny because looking at this page the the primary feature here is icloud shared photo library which has been very good for me personally i know we covered over the past couple of months a lot of places where there were gotchas and oopses but in my experience it's been great I've been really happy with it and I'd like to jump very briefly back to iOS uh yeah with iOS the dynamic island granted it doesn't happen often that I've found an app that I use that supports the dynamic island that I use the features in the dynamic island but man when it is there when you have an app that supports it when they when it's when it's working properly it is pretty freaking great and I do love it uh but with iPadOS I mean shrug which kind of sucks right because these are such powerful pieces of hardware but like there's nothing i don't have anything bad to say about ipad os but whereas i can i can come up with a ton of great things to say about ios with ipad os it's kind of like well they didn't they didn't ruin it i guess yeah showing uh the iphone getting a little bit more attention i was getting more attention it reminds me of the the you know so the the ipad pro didn't get revised so the the the because the like apple pencil thing is in the place of where the little face id sensor would be and so on so the rumor is like hey well the one way they might fix that when they eventually do fix it is they could move the face id sensor down into the display and put a notch on it and people are like notch on the ipad why would they want that that would be so dumb but here's the thing as i said when the notch came out in ios um it's not this is apple making lemonade out of lemons right apple doesn't want to have to have this gigantic sensor array there it's just they can't get it to be invisible under the screen quite yet or whatever so it is what it is and they're trying to make the best of it and they did great and people love it oh i love the dynamic island i love it and it works like you just said or whatever but uh you know as i said when uh when the new phone came out what people love is a new place for always visible system level ui to be on the screen they don't love a giant black hole in the middle of their phone right you but you can get that pretend it's all screen there's no notch anymore you can get all those features of the dynamic island in probably a more aesthetically pleasing form but just dedicating part of the screen to have always visible system level ui like the mac does all the time ipads can do the same thing we mentioned the three little dots which was like the first after years concession of ipad os like okay i guess we'll have some visual ui that is like system level thing like you know every single freaking window in mac os has a three stoplights on it or whatever just there's so much room on big ipad screens dedicate a portion of the ipad screen to something some kind of system-wide always visible ui like a dynamic island and i know you can't well we don't have a notch or whatever i feel like if they put a notch on the ipad to deal with the pencil situation that will finally give ipad os like the excuse slash kick in the butt to add you know always visible system level ui to their interface like they're they're going they're bending over backwards to continue this model of like we don't have window chrome we don't have windows we don't have window controls i'm like yeah we know you don't that's what makes it so annoying to do anything and they're grudgingly adding little grab handles and three little dots with a menu they're grudgingly adding a control to have like a menu bar and i feel like if you give the notch on the next ipad i think it will be kind of a shame because i don't like the screen real estate being taken but i do believe people will see it as a net win because finally ipad os will be forced to essentially copy the dynamic island and then you'll have the ability to have some kind of visible ui for apps that aren't the front most It frustrates me so much.

1:01:43Anyway, iPadOS, do better. That's a pretty good summary, actually. Yeah. What I want from iPadOS for me, and I know that my needs and preferences are obviously not going to be representative of everybody, but every time I use an iPad, it mostly makes me want either a Mac or a phone. And I wish over time for that to be diminished and for me to really love what the iPad is. And maybe that's just not me. Maybe it's just wrong for me. But I've never quite gotten there with an iPad, or I've only gotten there for brief moments. And I would love for that to change. Anyway, how about watchOS 9? This is actually...

1:02:23I don't think there's that much to say about watchOS 9, because there's not that much to say about most versions of watchOS. Because most versions of watchOS have not that many visible changes to either the user stuff or developer APIs. And I think watchOS 9 was very similar. um they did actually so the i recently was setting up um i was trying to customize the the metrics that were displayed for certain workout types in the watch and this used to be in the watch app on the phone which is really frustrating is it's like if you were already out on a run for instance and you're like oh crap i i wanted to see the average pace not the current pace or whatever like there was no way for you to change that if you were already gone now with this new version they moved it they moved all that customization into the workout app on the watch and they moved they changed a whole bunch of stuff and that actually took me forever to find if in case anyone out there in case you want to find that you got to hit the ellipsis button on the start workout blobs and it's buried way deep in there you'll you'll see if you start if you start hunting around in there but anyway the workout app got a whole bunch of like you know new stuff like that a few new capabilities here and there but for the most part it.

1:03:35I think that was about it for obvious user-facing features that you would actually see that were part of watch os 9 not just you know obviously with the launch of the apple watch ultra there were certain abilities that the ultra got um that that you know the rest of us or that other watches might not have gotten or some of them came to both um but for the most part watch os 9 was a pretty quiet release and again this is this is like every other release of watch os um the the developer apis were also pretty quiet you know there there were some you know whenever something happens to swift ui that usually is spread to all the all the platforms that swift ui runs on sometimes except for mac but you know for the most part like whenever ios gets swift ui thing usually watch os gets it too so that helps at least but for the most part the you know watch os 9 was was a pretty subtle release um as well as just alongside of almost every other watch os release um they the watch face situation is still really you know underwhelming and limited uh i still wish for third-party watch faces or at least very very large complications that we can have more control over or something like that i think there's so much more that watch faces could be and watch os 9 did basically nothing to to really improve that yeah i mean i really like my apple watch.

1:05:02Um, but that being said, I agree with you that there wasn't that much here. Uh, I've, I did dedicate myself to being a little bit more religious about sleeping with my watch, but that quickly fell by the wayside because I would put the watch on the charger in the evening when I shower, because, uh, that's the correct thing to do. Don't at me. Uh, and then I would, you know, never put it back on and, or, and, or maybe I would put it on to charge while I was brushing my teeth or whatever. And then I would forget to put it back on or it wouldn't charge by the time I passed out. And so I tried to be very good about it for like a couple of weeks and then it fell off, fell by the wayside.

1:05:37I didn't even realize, you know, you're talking about the complication thing. Like I didn't even realize that you could futz around with the views on the workouts. I'm sure I knew this at some point, but it wasn't until you said something a moment ago that I was like, oh yeah, can I do that? Oh, wait, where is it? Oh, you got to go in, you got to hit the ellipsis, then you got to hit the pencil. Like it is so not discoverable, which, I mean, it is the watch. I can give them a buy on that, but no part of this was obvious to me. But I was just fiddling with it while you were talking. There is some cool stuff in here.

1:06:08But yeah, I mean, I love my Apple Watch. I don't know that I yearn for that much more from it other than perhaps a little bit more customization with regard to complications and what complications fit where and so on and so forth. I would love third-party watch faces, but I mean, that's going to happen the same time we get an Apple TV set, right? At this rate, it's never going to freaking happen. But no, all in all, I like my watch. I like the hardware. I like watchOS. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well. And yeah, I mean, there's not much to say. John, I know you have a lot of thoughts about watchOS, so hit me with it.

1:06:42I just want to chime in to say that I continue to believe third-party watch faces will happen eventually. I hope so. I'm not so convinced, but I hope so. Yeah, me too. One can hope. All right. The big one, macOS Ventura. I know John has nothing to say about this, right? Yep, that's correct. Well, the big feature that we skipped over, even though it was on two out of the three OSes we've discussed already, is the iCloud Shared Photo Library, right? And that was another, this is a thing that Apple does. And when it's a service, it makes sense. They roll out a feature across all their platforms. Because honestly, a feature like this wouldn't make sense if it wasn't rolled out across all platforms.

1:07:18Because all the platforms support Apple's iCloud Photo Library. They all have a photos application from Apple on them. Of course, there's going to be some backend change. it should be on all of them and it is and i think the feature has been a rousing success at least as far as my library is concerned it you know it was able to handle my library it didn't destroy all my photos a duplicate feature a little bit scary as we had many weeks of follow-up on that but in general i've been able to uh you know mitigate any problems there by backing up 30 000 photos not ideal but you know it could be worse and it's a version 1.0 like for example when now when i see it find duplicates that aren't really duplicates i would like to tell it no photos those aren't duplicates but there is no option to do that because it's a 1.0 so maybe in the next version they'll say oh now if it suggests a duplicate and you believe it's not a duplicate you can click another button that says don't tell me about this one again because it's not actually a duplicate right that's the type of feature you get in a 1.1 and a 2 or whatever you know however we're versioning this thing so i think that was a great new feature on the mac uh the mac is also an excellent example of the opposite of ios what happens on a platform that doesn't sell a lot that doesn't have a lot of people on that doesn't have the very best people and the most money and the most resources you get mac os which even though it's incredibly mature simply does not have the the polish stability reliability just general fundamental goodness that ios or even ipad os hell even watch os have to give just a random example that everyone's been talking about for years but only because it's so glaring uh when those little notifications appear in the upper right setting aside that we think the ui is bad and they have buttons that only appear on hover uh we're like three years into that redesign and when you drag your your uh pointer over there uh with your mouse and you try to click one of the buttons the buttons disappear out from under your your pointer that's not a 1.0 problem that's not something that was in the initial you know 0.0 release of this thing this thing has been out for years and no one can be bothered to fix it it's embarrassing to every time i go and do that now everyone knows a trick like oh put your put your cursor into the menu bar first and sneak up on it from behind and you'll be able to like you have to flank the button or something it's that this is like years into this that type of thing would not stand on ios ios has they care more about it they will make sure it's more polished if some of that slips out in a 1.0 they'll fix it you know within a couple weeks or a month it's not like it's going to stay there for years parts of mac os are like that all over the place setting aside the system settings redesign which i think is terrible at least that is a 1.0 and in theory they could fix it or whatever but like there's just so much stuff that is unreliable has bad ui or both uh and it's not like we're begging for tons and tons of new features to be added again i do like it when we have feature parity we got the catalyst version of messages so we have the messages features parity finally uh but like it just needs to it needs to be good in the way that any boring ios release is good and they have not yet achieved that what do we want out of mac os just make you know stability speed and fix the ui that's bad yes on top of that we can add new features but like let's achieve that first and they don't they're not getting it like setting aside my weird bug with the windowing thing or whatever like that's just who knows what that will end up being that's that's not a big deal i'm talking more about the things like the notifications or the fact that system settings is so terrible and it's 1.0 right maybe you let that one stew a little bit longer like or just any feature that's been in the os forever basic stuff how networking work dns resolution like just features that have been there for literal decades right that just either get flakier over time or don't get enough attention paid to them or or just plain don't get any better that the world moves on and that still like the one that drives me nuts i've talked about this before i have multiple macs within this same room here and when i want to copy a file from my mac to the one that i can practically reach with my arm how long does it take for me to mount that mac as a shared thing in the finder open it up drag it in there why can't i reliably make an alias to that and reopen it how many different ways are there with aliases and sim links and internet addresses with smb colon slash slash which one of those should i use which one will work reliably which one will stop working inexplicably and why does it take so long to do that airdrop is faster but that's newer technology but why does plain old file sharing through the officially supported smb file sharing why is that so slow why is it so bad why does it have so many bugs why do things not work why can i not reliably make like an alias to a network drive and have it mount on launch because periodically that alias gets stale or goes bad or dies or something like basic functionality file sharing and mounting other macs on your desktop as a volume should be so fast and so reliable and so brain dead simple and it's not and that's you know that's what i want out of macOS all that said that's just my general macOS rant because comparing to ios ventura in the pantheon of recent macOS releases isn't pretty okay they didn't break many new things right they didn't nothing terrible was in it the stuff they did added mostly kind to sort of work so things that i'm complaining about are mostly already there system settings is crap we know that we it did need to be redesigned and fixed this is not the greatest redesign i do feel like mac os is going through this weird phase where where i don't know i was gonna say where apple can't decide what the ui is supposed to look like it seems like they have decided it's just i disagree with their decision like the way controls look in the swift ui mac appearance like the way buttons lurk the way like pop-up menus look and everything i think it's bad i think it's not good i think they don't work well i think they don't look good i think everything about them is bad worse than the app kit controls that they replaced but that's the direction apple is going is going and that stuff can change over time so we'll see if the course correct on that right but now we're in this weird place where if you look at what the ui looks like in system settings if that's the future of mac ui as opposed to the app kit controls that i use in my app i think all apps on mac os are going to start looking worse and working worse hopefully they will fix that but right now we have half and half some of apple's old apps have app kit style or even carbon style controls in them i mean i know carbon isn't running anymore in 64 bit but anyway they have controls that look like the mac os from years past and then other ones use swift ui and have swift ui-ish mac controls that look and work differently usually worse and they're all coexisting and uh you know we'll see if they get that straightened out but i i really do wish mac os could they could find a way to give mac os the right kind of attention it's never going to get the attention that ios gets it doesn't sell as much doesn't deserve as much attention i get that but like the resources they do have i wish they would put them on the more boring stuff uh of just you know fixing notifications making system settings way better and making like basic things like file sharing that haven't been touched in decades just like hey look at that with a modern lens and say if we did this now would it suck this bad and i really hope the answer is no yeah i think where i want to get with mac os you know i i mentioned that with with ipad os i want to get to a place where i'm not constantly wanting to use a different platform when i'm using my ipad what i want to get to with mac os is i want to get to a point where when i hear that Apple has redesigned or rewritten something in macOS, I want it to not feel like dread.

1:14:20Well-founded dread, not just like pessimistic dread, but like, you know, proven by past experiences and continuing evidence that when they redo it, it's not going to be better. And we would like it to be better. One important difference is that when you look at all the other OSs that we're talking about today, watchOS, iOS, iPadOS, even, hey, throw in tvOS, one of the critical differences here is that those are all based on ios and to some degree ui kit mac os is older and is different and the apis are very different the behaviors in the system the capabilities of the system very very different it shows it shows when when you see apple's attention to the os's and to their features and to their designs that even though many i'd say most of the software quality issues that plagued them a little while back, I would say most of those issues are behind them.

1:15:14Again, like I was saying earlier, I think their software quality is in a really good place overall these days. And that really is to their credit. The number of platforms they have, that's not easy. I really do give them credit. Their software quality is substantially better now than it was five, 10 years ago. And it's definitely in a pretty good overall place in absolute terms. However, obviously there's gonna be things that are not so good in every set of software. And macOS, and especially in terms of design choices, seems really, it needs a lot of work in those areas. Again, quality-wise, you know, I'm not having to reboot stuff, stuff's not crashing.

1:15:52That stuff is mostly good. Things mostly work. But reaching for a button and having it disappear as your cursor goes toward is just one level removed from crashing and losing data, right? Because this is like fundamental basic functions. When a button appears on the screen, and I should be able to click it with my mouse pointer. And that's just not the case for years on end. And, you know, surely everyone at Apple knows about this, but the fix doesn't get prioritized. And, you know, when you look at trying to write, for instance, like as I'm doing this overcast rewrite, I've so far kept everything Mac and iOS neutral.

1:16:26So I have this huge amount of code that's like, you know, instead of using UI color or NS color for color computations, I have things like platform color and trying to use SwiftUI color whenever possible, although I can't use everything with it because it doesn't offer all the variables and stuff. It can't tell you RGB values and whatever. Anyway, so I have all this like cross-platform glue code in there. And every time I launch the Mac build of my test app, it looks ridiculous. Because SwiftUI, the idea is you can share a lot of components between the platforms. You can even maybe share like certain layouts and stuff.

1:17:01And then you see the way it renders. something that looks and works totally fine when it's in iPad or iPhone mode or even in Catalyst mode on the Mac you run it in Mac native AppKit mode and it's a train wreck or things are just randomly broken there's more bugs SwiftUI on the Mac is in a pretty rough place still and it makes it very difficult to use both and it's not AppKit mode to be clear that's the thing that's so frustrating about the Mac AppKit's controls Carbon went away and everything about it was all folded into AppKit there was a time where mac the set of controls on macs buttons radio buttons check boxes pop everything scrolling views all those controls those all existed had tons of features looked really good and were 100 consistent and that period is over because now here comes the swift ui version which they're different and sometimes i feel like they're different because they you know they're different with reason they like someone has decided they think this is better but they're just plain different if if you know running a swift ui uh app in mac mode used all app kit controls it would probably still be weird to get it to work right you know you'd have to pay some attention to it but at least it would be consistent but it's not like that swift ui's mac controls are kind of like modified ipad os controls kind of sort of but occasionally an actual app kit control will peek its head out and it doesn't make for apps that that look consistent that work consistently and again i think the apkin controls universally were better they looked better worked better were easier to use had more features were more obvious more intuitive they were just better and maybe you know again swift ui is young maybe they'll fix it or whatever but i feel like the people who are designing the mac look and feel for swift ui don't understand what makes good mac controls it's kind of like ios 7 all over again or it's like they have they have this aesthetic idea only at least ios 7 look kind of cool the mac ones don't they don't even look good and they don't have a lot of features and they don't work well.

1:18:56And I think they're fundamentally barking up the wrong tree when they think a pop-up menu should be some text with a V and an upside down V next to it. Yeah, and I think that's like overall what I want, you know, the Swift UI-ification of system settings and the rewrite of system settings on Ventura, obviously you already mentioned how it's garbage and it is. And system settings over the last year has not gotten any better. It still feels like a really rough beta. It doesn't even feel like a 1.0. it feels like a 0.8 or something like it feels like a rough beta and there should be still a lot more iteration on both the design and the the bugginess of it but it kind of reflects the the general state of when apple touches mac os especially in the ui area the results always seem really half-assed like it doesn't seem like this is a nice you know unified design between ipad os and ios and the mac no it feels like ipad os and ios have their cool nice design and the Mac is a half-assed clone of it or a half-assed re-implementation of it.

1:19:56That's how it feels. We can quibble about design choices and we do and we will. But I want the Mac to stop feeling like every time they touch it, they do a really half-assed job of whatever they were trying to do. And that is, I don't think Apple is, Apple has not shown that they have that level of rigor and care about the Mac anymore software-wise. Now, hardware-wise, it's been amazing recently with all the Apple Silicon stuff. But software-wise, macOS is mostly coasting on what was established a very long time ago. And the stuff they have changed, the stuff they have made new in recent years about macOS, especially design-wise, has been pretty shaky at best and really feels very half-assed at worst.

1:20:39They're chipping away at that other stuff, like the old stuff. That old stuff, granted, it was old, but A, it was internally consistent, and B, it was really good. like i don't the same way we say we don't think there's a lot of people inside apple who know how to make a good mac app i'm not sure how many people are inside apple who have who have ideas that i agree with about how to make a good mac user interface like the again the basics controls buttons windows that whole nine yards because every time they touch an area they take an app kit looking thing from decades ago that looked old and creaky but nevertheless had internally consistent and very good controls and they replace it with something like system settings like notifications got replaced with a worse an increasingly worse version of what was previously there system settings got replaced with the granted the old one was all old and creaky and you know needed to be expanded but all those controls all those beautiful buttons and all those you know those beautiful hand laid out things got replaced with just this boilerplate thing that looks worse than a web page and it's like if that's your vision for the whole os i don't want you to find any more old creaky parts of the os and replace them with that because you're making them worse they look worse they feel worse they are fundamentally worse and they're buggy by the way with all the bugs it's like it's so frustrating yeah they work worse yeah so it's kind of like i you know i think about that with my own little applications the parts i i enjoy doing the little app get things right the programming model is old and janky but like the result is a window like a settings window that looks to me like a settings window in a mac application i look at it and i say that's a mac settings and other apps are like that you know safari or other like good apple apps like they have mac looking uis but some of them don't some of them have weird you would think oh is this a catalyst app and like no that's 100 native swift ui mac os only app you just think it's a catalyst app because you look at those controls and think those don't look like mac controls but they that's supposedly the future of mac controls i don't know i'm very frustrated with like i get done saying that ventura didn't really fundamentally break everything but everything they do touch in each new release is not an improvement on the old it is just a replacement of the old with like a creaky 1.0 of the new and i don't like the new in the defense of mac os though well i mean obviously you two both love it as well but on a positive note for all of apple's platforms as they exist today and who knows what will exist in a week but for all of apple's platforms as they exist today for me and i suspect for you two mac os is the one where i am most at home.

1:23:02It is the one where I feel most comfortable. It is the one where it gets in the way the least. Now, I'm not saying that's true for everyone. In fact, I would argue for a lot of people, especially not olds like us, it's probably either iPadOS or iOS. But for me, as an official old, I love sitting at my Mac. It's not that we're old. It's that we're programmers. We're computer nerds. We're people who know and understand Unix stuff. That's not true of the general public. That's why we feel the most comfortable there. It's also why other people feel the most comfortable on their phones and ipads right and so i don't think it's like an age thing of like because it's you know older like we want something that's older or whatever like ios is pretty darn old at this point too it's just that mac is the system mac os is the system where you have the most freedom it has a command line it has it doesn't constrain us on what we can do you can have multiple windows or the basic windowing system you can move around you can have always visible controls you can put icons in your menu bar like all sorts of things that maybe the modern apple wouldn't do but they're here for quote-unquote legacy reasons mac os is the platform that you use to develop for all of other app apples other platforms even you know i know you can you know develop on the ios apps on the ipad now or whatever but i don't think many people would choose to do that willingly just because you have so much more flexibility in a development environment and development tools and all that stuff if you develop on a mac so i i think that's why we like it the best and it does mean that it is narrow interest it does mean that we are on the fringe because we're you know tech nerds who are into the things that the mac can do better but it's not because we're old or there's something old-fashioned about the Mac.

1:24:34It is just simply the most powerful and flexible platform Apple has. That's fair. I was mostly making fun of myself and trying to be silly, but you are completely correct, as always. And so I agree with you, but I don't know. I feel so much more at home and so much more free on a Mac than I do on anything else. And there is something amazing about having an iPad, especially if you don't have it in the keyboard case, which I love, or the smart, fancy, magic, whatever keyboard. I know we went through what means what like a couple months ago, and I always forget. But when you have an iPad and that thin little sliver of a device with this beautiful screen and optionally a pencil, and you can be in the middle of anywhere because it has a cellular modem, not to get Mark when I started, but you can be anywhere and do things on the internet.

1:25:21And if you want to add a keyboard, you can, but you don't have to. Like, it is amazing. And I love the iPad for that. And I love that I have the whole of human knowledge in my freaking pocket with my iPhone. And I can be fast on the iPad. I can be fast on the iPhone. But never do I feel as unconstrained. Is that a word? You know what I mean? I never feel more free than I do on the Mac. And I feel that way even on the 13-inch MacBook Pro screen in and of itself, which honestly is way too small for any serious use. But you know what? It still works. I feel extremely that way when I have my two 5k screens.

1:25:59Um, you know, I'm sure this is the same for you guys and your ridiculously expensive monitors. Um, it's just, I feel so free and I feel like I can get things done so much faster. And that's what I love so much about the Mac. And just to very quickly pick out one thing on this, honestly, mostly unimpressive marketing page continuity camera if you just bought an apple monitor that maybe has a piss poor camera on it continuity camera is pretty nice feature especially when you hoard old iphones so uh i have i don't use the like hub features of the studio display for anything except a light a usbc to lightning cable that's plugged into my last year's iphone that sits on top of my of my studio display 24 7 and every once in a while, it'll take me like flipping to a different camera and then flipping back to the continuity camera to get it to work.

1:26:52But once I do that, it looks great. It works flawlessly. It is amazing. And I know that for you guys, you don't have any camera to worry about onboard the screen. And I know you've had to add your own. But I really love if you're one of those seven idiots that keeps their old phones like I do. This is an incredibly useful feature that I use several times a month as I'm having chats with friends that are overseas and so on. And I really have enjoyed continuity camera quite a lot. We are brought to you this week by Green Chef, a CCOF certified meal kit company. Green Chef makes eating well easy with plans to fit every lifestyle.

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1:29:34So is there anything else going on this week or should we just end here? let me do a little speed run of the uh the last minute rumor slash preview things just because it's mostly obvious stuff and we can get to it quickly um headset we've been talking about it forever uh people keep talking more and more about it a couple things on that one as pointed out i think on the talk show recently or maybe it was on dithering i forget one of the early tells of like whether apple is going to actually release something that has been heavily rumored is as the date approaches, if you don't see any reports of a denial saying, actually, everyone thought this thing was going to come out at WWDC, but rumor has it that actually it's not now.

1:30:13That hasn't happened. Whether or not Apple strategically leaks those to tamp down expectations so people don't go to a WWDC keynote expecting them to release the Apple car and that everyone's always disappointed because they didn't release the car and afterwards every single story is about, there was no car, there was no car. that's the kind of time when it would behoove apple to strategically leak the information that there's not going to be a car this time well they haven't done that with the headset so far uh one week out there is no story that says everyone's expecting the headset but it turns out apple is not going to reveal it this is setting aside of when they're going to ship it or when it will be available or anything else like that everyone thinks the headset is coming and there hasn't been no sort of rumored denial adding more support to it apple has apparently invited a bunch of what what this article phrase is xr media outlets which is like you know arvr whatever um these are websites publications that are focused on arvr that have previously not been invited to apple keynotes so press from these websites like upload vr and uh what is this one called um road to vr.com these people have previously not gotten press invites and this time they did why why would these people get press invite now i wonder maybe it's because apple is going to reveal the headset uh steve trotten smith pointed out today that the os behind this which we've known has been you know you know rumored to be called reality os whatever the trademark is we had an item in the show so we didn't get to before it was like xros xros pro with xr being lowercase or whatever uh steve trotten smith says it's such an open secret that they didn't even bother scrubbing the most recent references they left in their open source linker and you can put a link to github where you can see an enum showing all the different platforms and there's a platform for ios tv os watch os bridge os ios mac which that's what catalyst is i believe they're the final two enums are reality os and reality simulator in undisguised in github in parts like that's the type of stuff that they would in past years try to remove from their betas try to remove from their open source but it's like it's like look wdc is next week why even bother hiding it yes the thing was internally called reality os the enums are probably going to be reality os that's what the symbols would be maybe the branding will be xros or whatever by the way can we just i hope it's reality os because that's such a better name than xros yeah like they filed a bunch of trademarks for xros or xros pro those may just be protective trademarks or whatever um real the word reality when it comes to 3d computer graphics stuff has a long history with sgi and also i think maybe with mips and n64 which are also connected to sgi so cisco had a product called iphone and trademark on it yeah no no i'm not saying that's why they can't use it i'm saying that's why it is a fitting word because it has kind of a storied history in the world of 3d or whatever but i'm not sure the word reality means anything to people of course xr doesn't mean anything to regular people is they don't know the x is a placeholder for a and vr as we just discussed with these media outlets in the end the brain doesn't matter that much how many people know what the name of the os is on their uh on their ipad or on their iphone and the fact they change names it's just this is another example of apple's platform naming they're they're stuck on this lowercase letters with capital os which i've never really liked it was fine for ios but then when they did mac osl lowercase anyway whatever the point is the the the mounting evidence that apple will reveal the headset to wwc is now just it's like as close to 100 as you can ever get without actual confirmation so that's going to happen probably we'll talk more about it next week the other thing related to the headset which is that the the people who can't keep secrets are now uh demonstrating they can't keep secrets and can't contain themselves uh by leaving subtle hints or rumors or stories about game developers uh being buddy buddy with appy so with apple so hideo kojima the maker of the metal gear series maker of death stranding very famous uh you know creator of video games that you that many people know and love uh has been seen around apple campus supposedly uh there's been rumors that they're working with apple or whatever uh sean murray the person who made no man's sky the video game uh just tweeted today like uh this morning i guess a single apple emoji that was the entire tweet yeah that's that was uh like not subtle thing that's the thing about being a famous game developer like apple can't fire them because they don't work for apple whatever deal they have with apple is too far along to be canned although steve jobs would kick somebody out of the keynote if they pissed them off enough but he's not around anymore um and what are you going to do what are you going to say oh now we're not going to work with hideo kojima because he leaked something or because he was spotted at a starbucks near apple or whatever we've talked a lot about like what are they going to try to pitch the headset for and the thing that headsets are most well known for in the world right now is games despite facebook trying to make it for doing meetings and stuff like that uh vr games have been a thing for many many years the big gaming company oculus was made as a gaming headset and you know anyway uh so we've wondered what apple's going to do there this smoke around uh the you know famous game luminaries orbiting this makes it think that apple will have some portion of the keynote where they will try desperately to convince you that in addition to all the other wonderful things that their headset does it's a great platform for gaming and here are some famous game people to let you know that their famous games are going to be on this new platform that's better than nothing and the last episode i was saying how apple needs to pay people money to bring their games to their platform uh the the thing is you have to be it's all about consistency you have to do that you have to do it consistently on an ongoing basis you can't just do the thing that apple has always done which is one big famous person or game shows their big fan their big famous product from three years ago runs really well on a mac i know everyone who cares about game has already played it maybe you even already played it in vr but now that three-year-old game that you already played in VR is available on the Apple headset and that's it right or maybe two other games and like just to compare that to what Microsoft had to do with the Xbox they had to consistently over years and years and years court game developers pay game developers money acquire game developers be really dedicated to the production of games and kind of in the way that Apple has been trying to do with Apple TV plus television shows where I feel like they have actually put their money where their mouth is and paid to have lots of television shows produced and when some of them didn't turn out that well they didn't give up and say oh well we'll try again another decade no they made more shows with more people and they found the people who knew how to make tv shows and they found stars who are good in television and writers who like that's what they would have to do with the game so anyway the rumors about these famous people orbiting around apple uh makes me think that there will be a significant game portion of the headset thing where they will show some famous games and some famous game makers running on the headset but that by no means is sufficient to make the survival gaming platform unless apple actually follows through for the first time in their entire history when it comes to games so fingers crossed in that but headset seems like it's going to be there nobody disagrees one week out if at this point if it's not there if there's no rumors in the next week and the headset isn't there i think people people are just going to be sad and mopey walking away from that screen so i think it's going to happen yeah i feel like you know if you look around the industry, we touched on this a little bit last week, everyone is talking about new AI capabilities.

1:37:39Everyone. Every large tech company is investing massively in these new AI techniques, large language model-based things, generation. There's so much in these new AI techniques and abilities that we've gotten in the last year, basically, in the industry that we're investing in super heavily in every other company. And Apple, it seems like, is not probably ready to show anything in that area yet i hope they're investing heavily in it i hope they realize how important it is i hope they fix siri but it seems like none of that is probably on the table for this this year's wbdc and this year's platforms so in the absence of that i feel like we need something else that's really nice can you imagine if they didn't have the headset this year how angry the press would be after an entire keynote where they don't mention ai once yeah right and i mean and as i said last time i'm pretty sure they're gonna find some little token things that they can call ai that they would have previously called ml or siri anything that you previously called ml just swap the letters out no one yeah exactly but like you know i feel like they they need to have something to and i know this is not why these things are there but like they need to have something to distract the press from their lack of ai you know announcements that are that's likely i mean and it's not just a distraction it's a new platform it's a big deal like it's not like this is a diversion don't look over there it's just a happy accident that they have this massive new product that's been rumored for years that unlike the car is actually going to be revealed to the public and that will really do a good job of tamping down the ai angst which will still exist by the way they will get asked about it but you know not as much yeah and i and i really i have high hopes for this platform because i mean first of all look i like apple i don't want them to lose you know like i don't want i don't want them to have a flop but also just as a technologist and as a developer this is really baffling to me why this thing would be so amazing and you know i'd like you know in my house my son has the uh the facebook quest 2 and it's it's a totally fine product it's a little getting a little long in the tooth i know So, German had a Quest 3 little preview piece the other day.

1:39:51But, you know, it is a very PC product. It's like, here's a thing that's like this plastic piece of garbage that has low resolution screens. And it's uncomfortable on me. The optics aren't great for my eyes. And how often does it get used? How often does it get used in your house compared to like the plain old Switch or the iPad? Well, it depends. Well, it kind of, I know what you're getting at, because it goes months at a time without being used. But it is currently, there's this adorable game called Gorilla Tag that my kid is super into. And it basically seems, as far as I can tell, like just like a giant playground that's mostly other kids that are his age group, just like running around yelling and jumping on stuff.

1:40:35And it's actually ingenious because, you know, one of the big problems with VR games is like, if you have to move your legs in the game, you're going to walk into walls and stuff in real life. and so in this game they simulate all the all the kids are basically simulated as gorillas with no legs so they walk they walk on their arms and so he's up there like swinging his he's getting the most buff shoulders for a kid for an 11 year old because he's he's like swinging his arms moving around it's it's so funny and it seems to be only like children who play this game like i like you can hear over the voice chat when you're in the room you hear the other kids and like there's no older kids or adults play this game like it's all children and it's so adorable and it seems like there's no like you know combat or you know anything like that it just seems like a nice you know wholesome thing anyway so right now it's getting used a lot very very heavily but you know i also see the limitations of it you know i personally can't really use it very comfortably for a very long time it is not good for my eyes i do get a little bit motion sick with it um and i'm not usually a motion sensitive person like so that's that's saying a lot and i don't find the game experience is that compelling on it yet and maybe that's because i'm not a gamer much and you know maybe i'm just missing stuff but i haven't found it that compelling and you know using using the hand controllers is clunky um and stuff like that and so when i hear about the apple headset rumors and from people who know more about this than i do you know things like the hand tracking the eye tracking the foveated rendering with higher resolution displays all this stuff that is that it's pretty heavily rumored to have sounds like it is going to be substantially better than what I have tried so far, which is this dumb thing.

1:42:12It should be like quadruple the price. Yeah, at least quadruple, if not more. But it sounds like what Apple is going to release here, or at least unveil here, is not just a small step above what we've seen, but a big step above what we've seen. And that has me excited because while the existing products have not been compelling for me, again, I don't believe Apple would ship something if they didn't really believe it was compelling. And I can't imagine a high-level Apple person using a Quest 2 and being like, yeah, this is pretty good. Let's just match this. No, that would never happen. I guarantee you the Apple attitude towards those products would be about as positive as when Steve Jobs had to demo that Motorola Rocker phone.

1:42:57It would be not glowing. I mean, there are higher-end things in the Quest. The Quest is fairly low-end. there are higher end like pc gaming uh vr headsets and apple's probably going to basically match them maybe be a little bit better the software story may be better it'll probably be more more refined more you know higher performance lower latency hopefully but it's not going to be 10 times better than any existing headset the question is like how much does the how much is apple able to elevate it the way it usually does by you know uh just making the the software better having a more compelling story about use cases and the other thing i'm really interested about it by the reveal of this is it's the most recent test of apple's hardware design uh you know with respect to the things that we have complained about in the past uh about their obsession with simplicity and removing ports and you know all that type of thing like designing it to be a beautiful object a beautiful featureless object with adhering to certain aesthetic principles rather than making it usable, rather than recognizing what do people want to use this for.

1:44:02And it comes to a head, particularly on devices that you wear. The watch did a pretty good job of this, I think, in that the watch does not have any sharp things that poke into your wrist, right? It generally fits on your body, and the watch straps fit on your body in a way that recognizes the size and shape of human wrists and what they're made out of. Like, I think it does an okay job, but i do worry a lot about this headset i i want what i'm looking at is like what does what does the hardware look like because i look at you know let's look at the uh the airpods max the big over ear headphones which i think have a lot of problems yeah those look really nice but ergonomically there's some some fairly obvious fumbles one of the biggest ones is the ear cups have metal on them which looks and feels great and premium but it's heavy and this is the type of trade-off i'm looking to see when when apple comes to a decision like that well we could make the ear cup things out of metal and they'll be gorgeous and feel really good and be very during durable and sturdy but also they'll be really heavy and that could be wearing over time what should we choose should we make them lightweight but have it be not quite as premium looking or should we just go for the thing that looks and feels the best and not worry about the weight and i think they made the wrong call on the airpods max and for a headset that type of thing is paramount that also gets back to the whole, you know, compute module battery pack thing on your belt.

1:45:27I think that would be the right decision. Rather than trying to build it into a thing that goes in your face, they recognize that after testing this thing for however many years, having lots of weight on your face doesn't feel good. So let's get that weight away. And so when I'm looking at this thing, they want people to strap on their face. What I want to see is I would, you know, again, the ideal is like, if I have to put it on my face, it better be the OXO good grips of headsets. I do not want any part of this thing to have been designed to look nice, to look symmetrical, to look like anime from the 90s.

1:45:57I don't want it. I want nothing about this to be like, I care about how I look. I want, first and foremost, the highest priority to be comfortable on people's faces, breathable, light, no places that pinch you, good visibility in the ways that you want to have visibility. Like, just everything about it doesn't make you sweaty, has an easy way to put in the prescription lens thingies they're going to support. like just it had because you know the watch you wear but it's your wrist is fairly you know far away from the the sensitive organs that do all your sensing like your nose and your mouth and your eyes and your ears right this thing is on it's not just on your head it's on your face and so this is a a perfect crucible for apple's worst predilections of like we want it to be a beautiful symmetrical solid with no features on it made of sharp aluminum and really heavy and like all that and on the other side is yeah but i had this thing on my head while we've been testing over the past three years and it sucks when it's like that so that is the number one thing i'm looking forward to is when they reveal this headset i obviously i'm not gonna be able to tell by looking at it but like when they reveal this headset does it look like something that was designed to look beautiful or does it look like something that was designed to be comfortable ideally you do both like obviously the apple ideal is oh it looks beautiful and it's also comfortable and it's breathable and you don't get sweaty and and and and you don't get motion sick because we made the latency a little like that's that's the ideal but in any design there are trade-offs and historically especially recently historically apple has made poor trade-offs when it came to those decisions they reversed a lot of them on the laptop so kudos so they're going in the right direction but the headset team like there's nothing that the laptop team did that i can say and that will transfer directly to the headset because they'll they'll you know learn like this is totally separate like totally separate development lines so totally separate everything So that is the thing that I'm most looking forward to, only because I don't believe the Mac Pro is going to be released.

1:47:46But, you know, setting aside the Mac Pro, which seems like it's not going to happen. Speaking of rumors of things that aren't going to happen, you know, that we did get the rumor that's not going to happen and that hasn't shifted. So I want to see what this headset says about how Apple is thinking about designing things that literally go on people's faces. because that will give us a good idea of you know how much the company has learned over the years all right and and for me personally like i if marco gets motion sick with it i will get massively i get motion sick so easily so this is probably not going to be a product for me it doesn't mean i'm not interested in it i'm interested in it and i think apple should make it and do it and i look forward to the day when when it gets to the level where i can use it without getting sick but i have no illusions that that day is going to be you know next monday and that's fine like i'm i'm not in the market for it i just that's why i'm looking at from a more academic perspective what does this product say about how apple designs things i would expect apple to be pretty good at things like avoiding motion sickness you know when you when you look at the software stacks of of how to ensure like really high performance for what is effectively a giant game environment all the time even like even if you're not playing a game in it it's basically a game and game engine running you know, for a lot of this stuff to work.

1:49:03And Apple is actually pretty good at the level of, like, top-to-bottom hardware-software integration to be able to do things like super low latency input or output, you know. Yeah, I mean, but I'm sure they're going to do it really well, but I'm not sure technology is there yet to get this to the level where someone like me can wear it without getting motorcycling. I mean, there's not a single headset that exists today that people say, and don't worry, no one will ever get motion sick. It's just a question of who and by how much. And unfortunately, I'm at the far end of that spectrum. So I think Apple will do a good job because they do tightly control the hardware.

1:49:41But I just I'm not at this point, I don't think it's technologically possible to make a consumer headset that does not cause people like me to get motion sick. And that's not Apple's fault. And I'm not saying they should wait until it is. It's just it's just a fact of life. Well, I mean, but it's also Apple's style to wait until they can do something that makes effectively no one motion sick and then release a product and only do things that would not make people motion sick. I can totally see them doing that. And we're looking at, obviously, much higher component costs than this. We're looking at a much higher power envelope and much higher end chips powering it.

1:50:18So maybe it's possible. Maybe they have achieved that. I can't imagine Apple would release something that a large portion of the population would get motion sick from. no no it'll be it'll be small but i think it could push up against double digits because i feel like that's the true of the existing high-end headsets it also depends on the software obviously this is another thing you know if you've used one of these headsets that like the actual software that's running on them like the game for instance makes has a huge influence over whether you're getting motion sick so it's not just the hardware and that is another area where i hope apple would do a good job in that like you know whatever their os is or however apps work um because that you know it's apple's filled with regular people who are employees and some percentage of the apple employees who worked on this headset are just as susceptible motion sickness as i am so they know they know how it breaks down even if it's like oh they don't let the public use it they don't know there's enough people working on this that the apple kind of knows like which things are causing the most motion sickness like there's the setting screens and xros is that causing motion sickness what can we do to fix it like they've had years to work on this so i think they're going to do the best they can i just again i'm i'm not willing to believe the technology has got to the point where um i'm going to be in the fold eventually it will right but maybe not this year but that's fine that you know i just i just hope they do a good job that's why i hope they do a good job with the fundamentals of the physical reality of it because i think there'll be many years before the physical reality becomes actual little glasses and so if they get the fundamentals of the headset right kind of like they got the fundamental ergonomics of the laptop right with the powerbook keyboard pushed up pointing device down in the middle in the center uh it took them a few tries with their quote unquote portable computers, but that fundamental design was good and better than everything it became before it and has lasted and has stood the test of time.

1:51:57Touch bar not but standing. You know, I'm very interested to see, John, what you specifically feel about the headset in no small part because of the three of us. You're the only one with eyeglasses and I have to imagine there will be a story around that, but it's the story that you have eyeglasses. What are you talking about? No, he has super special contacts. I know, but you've also got glasses. way for when you take your contacts out yes but i never take my contacts out except when i sleep because otherwise i'm friggin blind don't you have reading glasses now marco yes i do and that sucks i hate every moment of it we're all enough to have glasses yeah no and i by the way i also do have contacts by the way reading glasses don't seem to be addressed by any vr heads that i've ever seen i mean maybe you know i don't follow the news as closely as you maybe i'm missing like the ones that have custom things but the thing is everything in well things inside vr headsets are physically close to your eyes bottom line like even even if you're doing the outside camera view type of thing so i think if for someone like marco whose eyes have difficulty focusing on things that are close by there may need to be some lens help out there for maybe i don't know what marco's prescription is but like it's not much it's like 0.75 magnification yeah Yeah, you'll probably be fine.

1:53:10In fact, it'll maybe help you let the pixels blur together. But that's another thing that every headset manufacturer knows, that people don't have perfect vision, so you must accommodate for some kind of diopter adjustment or prescription lenses. Prescription lenses is going farther than just diopter adjustment because you can have things like astigmatism that are not easy to do by just moving lenses back and forth. And anyway, I do hope Apple does a good job with that. I don't know what part of visual problems this is, but I had this problem with both the Quest 2 and with the DJI headset that I briefly owned for that DJI FPV drone that I briefly owned, that I can never get things set right so that the center of my field of view and the edges of my field of view are all in focus in one of those headsets.

1:53:55The outer edges of my field of view were always blurry. And I don't know, again, I have pretty good eyes overall, and yet I still have problems like this because of this one minor flaw that I have. People have so many different eye conditions and lens shapes and different abilities and different needs for different corrections. This is going to be a tough problem to solve. And frankly, I hope that – and I have pretty good faith that Apple has probably put a lot of effort into making this as accessible to different people's eye needs as they possibly can compared to the rest of the industry because that's the kind of thing they would care about.

1:54:31but I also don't know what are the physical limits of what they can even correct easily maybe they just can't correct for certain types of conditions yet maybe they never can and that's why I'm a little worried about this product's overall accessibility even if you get past issues of price which is its own version of accessibility but even if you get past that are there going to be certain eye conditions or other types of ability differences that make it impossible to use this product and would people with those conditions or abilities have just this entire world of technology that they can't access like i hopefully apple will do the best job they can for that and apple i think of all the tech all the major tech companies i think they do the best work in accessibility by far um so hopefully they would accommodate as best as they possibly can all different abilities and needs but this kind of product is so specialized because it It goes right on your face and is right on your eyes.

1:55:31And it has to measure your hand tracking, allegedly. And what if you have motor difficulties? There's all sorts of potential accessibility limitations and challenges with this product that, again, I have a lot of faith in Apple to address those to whatever degree they can. But they might not be able to for certain things. I think Microsoft is the leader in accessibility when it comes to gaming. They have tons of custom controllers, more accessible custom controllers. they've gone way above and beyond what any other gaming company has done for you know to provide more accessible interface to video games so you can play full-fledged triple a same video games as everybody else but with with uh controllers that if you look at them they may not make sense to you until you see somebody using them uh apple doesn't have a controller at all they're just there's third-party controllers for ios and apple tv and everything controlling games on apple platforms sucks equally for everybody yeah well no i mean you can use you can use your playstation controller but apple has basically seeded that market to third parties but microsoft has put considerable effort into it this is another place where we can look at what apple does and compare it to well i keep comparing them to microsoft because microsoft actually did break into the gaming market and showed what it takes to do that and by the way it's been so hard for them that they're currently considering maybe bailing out i'm not sure they're going to do that but anyway what does apple do in the area of accessibility so they have people come up and say okay we're going to show our the cool video games that you know we support on the headset or whatever do they take any time to say oh and by the way uh since ar vr games demand more of you physically to be able to play them here is the our accessibility story for that because it is it is more demanding you mentioned adam waving his arms around or whatever like it there it's physically more demand demanding to play most vr games because you're not just sitting on the couch motionless with your thumbs on a thumbstick and even that has accessibility issues because you know there's lots of controls lots of buttons they're not easy to hit depending on you know what kind of mobility you have and how about control you have your digits that's why they have those you know all sorts of accessible controls that microsoft i'll try to find a link to show notes to show people what those are like but they're really cool but yeah vr also has that same story and i'm not you know again it's a 1.0 you don't expect apple out the door to have this it took microsoft years and years and years to get seriously into accessibility for console games so i'm not going to fault apple if they don't have a big story there but it is it's what's what we talk about with these headsets all the time how many people are you removing from your market by requiring them to put something on your face by requiring them to be able to wave their hands around to by requiring them to be able to stand up and turn their head or focus their eyes or all the other things that this this headset will demand for you to do anything with it um how narrow are you you know how narrow is your market going to be when all is said and done and again for a 1.0 it might end up being pretty narrow.

1:58:16All I know is, sitting here today... And we've talked about this a lot. I have no damn idea what the point of this is, but the closer we get to this Phantom headset thing, leaving aside the fact that I cannot fathom looking in the mirror and saying, yes, this is worth$3 ,000, much less saying to Aaron, hey, I think I want to spend$3 ,000 for something that may or may not ever be anything. All that aside. Guarantee you buy one. Oh, I'm sure I will. It's for the business, Aaron. What do you want from me? It's for the business. See, at least I don't tell myself I'm not going to. But that's true. I am going to get that.

1:58:53There are two rumors related to this, by the way, related to Casey buying it and the price and whatever. The rumors are, one, that someone did a bill of materials check on it because now so many rumors have leaked that they know this is the vendor of the screens, this is the vendor of the, you know, all that. They did a bill of materials thing and they said the cost of the thing is around$1 ,600. And the other rumor is that Apple would be selling this at cost and not making its customary 30%, 40 % margins. so what do you think like 2 000 maybe yeah if those are both true maybe the thing comes out as a 1600 device like that they're not there that it'd be even like a loss leader they might even lose a little bit i don't know if i believe that but you know it's a thing that's happened you know occasionally in the game console world it always happens except for if you're nintendo uh the other console makers when their consoles first come out they sell them at a small loss and eventually they start selling at a profit nintendo has been more like apple and said you know what we always want to make a profit but the nintendo does that by cheaping out on the hardware apple does it by raising the price so we'll see so i feel like the uh the case is saying oh how am i going to spend three thousand dollars on this there is a possibility however dim it might be that it won't be three thousand dollars so we'll see yeah and i agree with you and and i also agree with marco that i'm sure i'll end up getting one because i can't resist but um but all that said, I have crossed the Rubicon threshold from what, really, into really?

2:00:18Really? What's this going to be about? I'm excited to see what this is going to be. And so I'm really stoked for, as we sit here and recording this a week from today, I am really, really stoked to see what is this? What does it look like? What is the point? What is their spin? Are they just going to throw a bunch of random different styles of pasta against the wall and see what sticks? like they did with the watch? Are they going to have an extraordinarily mature and specific story about it? I am really excited to see what this is. I'm really excited to try one whenever that may be. Maybe that's when I receive mine.

2:00:54Maybe that's when I get an appointment at the Apple store, like we did with the watches. I'm super excited to hear, for those that are able to try them at WWDC, because presumably, whether or not the broader press does, you got to imagine like these these xr you know press people will you know probably some general video game uh press establishments will you know apple i was just about to say you know how much apple loves youtubers these days podcasts don't exist but the youtubers they're where the cool the cool kids are um so yes i'm curious to see what they have to say i'm just i'm excited to hear it and it it almost it's almost a bummer that this is the event for it because i i am also excited for new iPad OS.

2:01:37I'm excited for new iOS. I'm excited for whatever ridiculous part of California we're getting on our Macs next. But I almost don't care about those because I'm so hyper-focused on what this headset is and what does it mean for me. Yeah, like I care a lot about those, but I think they are so overshadowed in like the hype and the attention and the anticipation because we are going to get a new platform in all likelihood. And that is a very exciting thing. Yeah, I'm still excited for the boring stuff. But one thing related to that, in case this doesn't end up being released, I just want to mention it now because it was one of the most fun rumors I saw.

2:02:15And I just assumed I'd be able to talk about it when it gets released. But maybe it's totally false. But anyway, it was an iOS 17 rumor. And the rumor was that on the multitasking switcher on iOS, they'll have a button that basically removes everything from that screen. uh and now the question is does is does it do the equivalent of force quitting every single one of those applications or does it just remove all the pictures i really i really hope this feature exists because then we'll discover which of those two things it does and it will just it's it's a great experiment for all the people who reflexively force quit applications which again people shouldn't be doing um to see like how apple satisfies that user need because we discussed in the past, reflexively force quitting every application is bad for you and bad for your phone.

2:03:03But the desire to not have a bunch of images cluttering up that screen is perfectly reasonable desire. Those are two separate things, but people just don't want the pictures there. So the only way they have to get rid of the pictures is by swiping them upwards, which, by the way, does something else, force quitting them. And then there are other people who want to force quit it. Anyway, as we said in the past, force quitting apps is fine. Reflexively force quitting every single application every time you're done using your phone, not fine. Those are two different things so if they add this feature i can't wait to see what it actually does i have a hard time imagining that it will literally force quit every application i think it will just get rid of the pictures and i think people that's all people really want but then then what about when an application is hosed and you do have to force quit it that will cause you you probably still have to swipe up and so there will be some people who say i don't use the button because the button doesn't actually force quit the applications i still swipe everything upwards see i don't i I think they would actually make it, like, you know, terminate all the applications.

2:04:02But, you know, over time, when they first introduced that, you know, that mechanism, if your app was, quote, forced quit and not running in the switcher, or not available in the switcher, whatever it was, you couldn't do things like background refresh. You couldn't do things like background downloads. Like, you lost a lot of those abilities. and then over time they have actually given you more abilities to have your app woken up for background activity when it is forced quit in in subsequent updates so i wonder if you may be in the middle of doing a background activity when you get forced quit and that's not going to be good for you no it's not going to be good but maybe it maybe it would like you know call your termination block and give you a few seconds to close it up rather than instantly closing you up you know who knows but you know if they would do something like that it wouldn't surprise me if there were also some tweaks to what your app was able to do when it has been forced quit to make it less of an extreme negative for the experience of using each app.

2:05:00But I think it still would actually terminate the current executable of the apps. We'll see. We'll see. But I think if these rumors are true, I think that they need to go a step further, which is like for the visual clutter thing, requiring someone to go back to that screen and hit the one button to get rid of all the little pictures. why not just let people like say hey every time i lock my phone get rid of all the little pictures or put a maximum number on the little pictures right and i keep saying little pictures because for people who don't know very often those little pictures of screens of apps are apps that have not been running for days but like ios keeps little pictures of what the screen looked like the last time it was running and so as you scroll to the left and more and more of those things like those things haven't been running in ages they're not currently running they haven't been running it's just a little picture so i think people just don't want the visual clutter on that screen and requiring them to manually clean up that screen every time a single button is better than having them swipe up but it's not as good as saying hey just let me know should i have a maximum of three items there every time the screen locks you want me to remove all those little pictures i think that would make people happier because at this point there's so many people who have trained themselves to clean up all the little pictures they just need to do it ios can help them out there ios can can get rid of those pictures for them automatically uh but but anyway we'll see we'll see if the rumor is not true then whatever this has all just been a pointless discussion but the rumor is true i I find this the most exciting and fascinating feature of iOS 17 that I've heard rumored.

2:06:19Oh my God, you have pretty low standards. I mean, it's a headset year, like whatever. No, but I mean, but I'm actually hoping for other platform improvements as well. And I don't need to be blown away with tons of user features. I just want to see, you know, I mean, first of all, the idea that was rumored about watchOS being potentially, you know, pretty well revamped in a lot of ways. That's very exciting to me because as I mentioned earlier, most years it seems like watch os is barely touched and i know that isn't always the case but in terms of what features actually show up to users and developers it's pretty minimal every year with watch os so the idea of there being a substantial update or change to how watch os works or looks or behaves is pretty promising to me because as much as i i've you know really gotten into the apple watch in the last couple years um in terms of you know i've been wearing it most days and not wearing my fancy watches as much, I think it still could be so much better than it is.

2:07:16And there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that they just haven't picked. So I hope that this is a big harvest. To stretch that metaphor way too far. But in general, what I want as a developer is just give me the next iterative set of improvements for SwiftUI and Swift itself. Swift itself is actually doing pretty well. That happens kind of separately from the WWDC cadence in a lot of ways. But give me just, you know, next version of SwiftUI and next version of Xcode. Like there's been a lot of weird little Xcode bugs this year. I have weird source kit crashing in the background. Sometimes I have to reboot my entire Mac to get things to work correctly or to update in the simulator, which is really scary.

2:07:58Whenever I work on a package like Blackbird or like my Overcast new sync engine, when you have a package open in Xcode and you try to then open a project that uses that package weird stuff happens and it basically doesn't work there's all sorts of weird little behaviors like that um errors that that stick around forever on xcode even after you've cleared the air oh gosh yes there are so many so like annoying yeah so many little bugs like that and little limitations like that that make day-to-day stuff in the current version of xcode less reliable uh that or weirdly limited in some way that's the kind of stuff I want to see fixed.

2:08:35You know, just improvements of developers' day-to-day lives. Fix the tool bugs. Make, you know, make things perform a little bit better if you can, but really, like, fix the bugs first. And, you know, iterative updates to SwiftUI. That's what I'm really hoping for. I would love to see some SwiftUI improvements. I've actually been pretty happy with SwiftUI for the most part. There's definitely some things that are very frustrating and very janky. And there's a lot of places where I wish I had more control than I'm allowed. um you know especially like uh with regard to the search field which is what i'm running into a lot with call sheet um you know i need to i ended up needing to go thanks to the help of gi rambo i needed to end up going down to ui kit like plucking the the appropriate ui kit uh control out of the view hierarchy which is gross and i hate it but i needed to do that in order to accomplish what i needed to do uh but for the most part i haven't had to do too much of that with swift ui the new navigation stuff that you had brought up like an hour and a half ago, it took me kicking and screaming, or I was kicking and screaming, going to embrace it.

2:09:38But once I did, it actually makes everything way, way easier and way, way nicer. It seemed completely overblown. See also all of SwiftUI. It's always that way. No, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, that's true. No, you're exactly right. But once I embraced like creating, you know, a enum that represents all of my different screens and then, you know, having basically an array of that enum that or enumeration or whatever that that manages what is the current navigation stack once i finally committed to that it made so many things so much easier and i'm really digging on that there's definitely times where it's annoying but for the most part it works really well but yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff both low-hanging and not that i would love to see get better you know marco and i have both been whining you know we've been commiserating with each other slash whining publicly about how bad the error messaging still is in SwiftUI.

2:10:30And that is a hard problem to solve. It really, really is. Because we're bending Swift in half, breaking it and trying to put it back together again. I totally, genuinely sympathize with what the Swift and SwiftUI developers are working against and up against. But as someone who is using their work product, getting these completely unintelligible error messages often being highlighted on 50 lines away from where the actual error is. All too often, and I forget the way it's phrased, but all too often, SwiftUI will just throw its hands up and be like, sorry, dude, I got nothing. Yeah, it'll be like, this is wrong, but I can't tell you why.

2:11:12Yeah, help me, help me, please. Give me 50 lines to narrow down on. Nope, no, I don't think I'd like to do that. Just figure it out. Just keep hitting Command-Z until you get something that builds. And then slowly, what is it, Command-Shift-Z back until something breaks. You know, stuff like that. Marco, the thing you mentioned, which I've been running into more and more often, the Xcode errors that you've fixed yet are still shown in the sidebar for the, basically until you reboot your computer or at least restart Xcode. It's driving me batty! But hopefully that'll get better. But all in all, like I have been really enjoying doing the SwiftUI work in CallSheet.

2:11:48And God knows, like whether or not you think CallSheet is ugly, I can assure you that it would be way uglier. It would just be straight up ugly in UIKit. And a lot of that is because I'm not as good a UIKit programmer, but I think SwiftUI makes making pretty interfaces much easier for someone like me who is not a designer by any stretch of the imagination. And yeah, I echo what you're saying, Marco, to have improvements in Xcode, improvements in SwiftUI, improvements in just what we're able to do as developers in any general way. like all of that is welcome and i'm really excited to see to see what lands and i hope that even though i know you know the the headset will overshadow all these things a lot of times some of the boring stuff is some of the best stuff like store kit 2 is not perfect but it's really nice and a hell of a lot nicer than store kit 1 was you know silly stuff like that really matters and i hope we see some of it yeah that's like what i'm ultimately looking forward to is all those little tiny iterative changes like for instance there are still so much in the platform apis where we can't use async code yet and it would be like any every time you know every new os version since async has been released they've added a few more places you can use async code i assume we will hopefully be in for the same thing this year that we'll have more places we can use async code more places that are that are made more swift native more places that are more easily compatible with swift ui like all these these major platform and language shifts and framework shifts they've made over the last decade more and more places in the code where we can use them where we can write the most modern kind of code possible swift async swift ui all those like all the hooks that we get into various system callbacks and frameworks and different ui components like the more they can modernize the better that makes developers lives easier i have faith that they will do that again this year because they do that every single year and it's wonderful and that's that's the kind of stuff that actually makes a bigger difference honestly to most developers lives than a new platform like that's that's why you know it's not going to get mentioned it's not going to get news coverage it's not going to make anybody super excited except when we're going through like the api diffs or we see a session in the middle of the week like oh my god that one little tiny change that one api call that makes my life easier that's wonderful like that's that's what i most look forward to in wbdc is the big stuff yeah you know that that can be game changing for some people not usually for everyone it's the small stuff that makes everyone's lives a little bit better once you can actually use that you know that os version that's the kind of stuff that i really look forward to because that helps everyone even if you have an app type that doesn't benefit from any of the other big changes or a new platform that's announced you can still benefit from like this one improvement to this file or network API or whatever it is.

2:14:40Yep, couldn't agree more. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Trade Coffee, and Judo. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

2:15:06It was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O. A-R-M Anti-Marco-Armen S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long Casey, I have to ask In the document under After Show It says Casey has destroyed Aaron's car and computer in the span of one weekend. Now, I can guess, you know, maybe there was a water spill on the computer, but how did you spill enough water to destroy her car?

2:16:16Yeah, no, that is a little bit of, not hyperbole, but a little, well, I guess it is hyperbole. It's a little bit exaggerated. No. I know, right? It's funny. It's shocking, I tell you. Aaron was slated to go on her first girls' trip since just before the pandemic. like weeks before the pandemic. She was slated to go to a place a couple hours away from home. And then she was going to spend the weekend there and have some time not being mom, which she freaking is deserved. She is owed that so badly. We had a whole bunch of stuff that was going on the morning, Friday morning that she was intending to leave.

2:16:55So I am in the passenger seat of her Volvo. I forget why we took her car, but we did. It was a little bit brisk that morning. And so I had a couple of ATP sweatshirts, actually, on my lap. And then I had my iPad on top of that, which I brought with me, as I often do, just in case I needed to do something on the computer. Well, I was putting the stack of two sweatshirts and iPad onto her dashboard just very briefly as we were running in to drop Michaela off. I wouldn't leave the iPad there, generally speaking, but it's at a church. It's not the sort of place where I'm really worried about something walking.

2:17:30so I attempted to put the stack of sweatshirts and iPad onto our dash. Now, I've just put something in Slack. You're going to want to zoom a little bit. Oh, no. That's Aaron's windshield. You don't know your own strength. You may be a Hulk. There is a giant star-shaped crack right in the middle of this windshield. Not like a little chip you get when a rock hits your windshield. Not like that at all. No. It radiates out the whole length of the windshield. It's a big crack. And there's like a fairly large impact crater, if you will. You know what you did? You know those tools they give you, like if your car goes underwater and you can't roll down the window and you have to get out and it's just a tiny pointy piece of metal that you whack into your window to free yourself?

2:18:15You did that with your iPad, didn't you? With the corner of my iPad. That is exactly right. Well, this is good for people to know. If your car goes into a lake and you can't roll down the window and you can't open the door because like the pressures, you know, the water pressure is keeping it closed. Just take the corner of that iPad or I guess the iPhone if you take it out of your case and just whack that against the window and then swim to freedom. So Aaron is climbing out of the car. She's getting Michaela out of her car seat. I go to put this on the windshield. Hand to God, gentlemen. I hit the windshield.

2:18:42That is not up for grabs, obviously. But it was I won't even try to do Foley work. but it was the littlest glance off the windshield. It's not like I'm slamming the iPad into the windshield as much as we're joking about me being the Hulk. I wasn't slamming the iPad. It did hit the windshield, but it was the tiniest little glance off the inside. Did the iPad leave your hand? No, the iPad was in my hand, and it was in the Magic Keyboard that I can never remember the name of, the Smart Keyboard, Magic Keyboard, whatever it is. Was it upright? No, it was horizontal. I think I just happened to glance off the corner of the iPad just right.

2:19:15so so aaron's getting out of the car i put the i attempt to put the ipad and sweatshirt stack in her dash and i hear tink and i see that did grow a little bit since that picture before that picture was taken but it was mostly like that immediately and so i do tink oh and she looks at me and she's like what and then she goes oh no this amazes me because if you've driven a car like you know you You can like rocks can fly up from the wheels of a truck in front of you at 60 miles an hour on the highway and they'll just leave a little chip. But this is just you just destroyed it. I don't know how. And I agree with you.

2:19:52It's exactly accurate. Is the iPad OK? Yeah, the iPad's fine. She's she's supposed to drive her own friggin car two hours to go visit some, you know, visit or have a weekend with her friends. And some jackass over here decides to accidentally shatter her windshield. Aaron, to her credit, was extremely good about it. She said to me, how did that happen? I heard the little ting. How could that have possibly been the result of that little ting? She was very, very good about it. Much, much better than I would have been. What happened is somebody got Casey talking about the bug reporting process at Apple.

2:20:25Right? I was just thinking about it. And that's what happened. That or documentation. It was one of the two. But I absolutely destroyed her car. And I feel terrible about it to this day. I know I'm joking about it, but I really feel terrible about it. And again, I can't say enough good things about my wife. who has been an angel about this whole thing. I would have been such a turd if this had happened to me. And this is why she is, for a zillion reasons, the better person of the two of us. But she has been extremely good about it. And she's made fun of me for it. Oh, naturally. But she hasn't been a turd about it.

2:20:57She has full right to make fun of you forever about this. Oh, absolutely. Exactly, exactly right. Now, it also says in this bullet point that you destroyed her computer in the same weekend. So that is definitely hyperbole. So Aaron uses her actual computer, which, if you recall, is my old MacBook adorable. My old MacBook One. You know, the one port, one USB-C only, and a headphone jack MacBook, which I still love. I seem to recall that she previously had a MacBook Air that had some issues. Oh, yeah, that had been in the drink like six times. That were also, I believe, your fault. Those unquestionably were my fault.

2:21:31There is nothing up for grabs there. But we're sitting on the couch, and during the pandemic, Erin had started doing like the online grocery stuff through Kroger where, you know, she goes on Kroger's website, she picks out what she wants. They, they shop on her behalf, if you will. And then she, you know, drives up and they plunk all the groceries in the car. So she's sitting there doing the Kroger order on her MacBook adorable that was already in need of like a reload. I don't even remember what version of, of Mac OS is on it, but it's years old at this point. And I've been meaning to, you know, pull a windows, if you will, and refresh everything and start a new, but I hadn't gotten to it.

2:22:05and she was using it. I'm sitting on the couch next to her watching her do this. I don't remember why I was watching her. I think she was asking about which version of something I thought we should get. But all of a sudden it freezes and she's like, oh, that's weird. I was like, oh, that's a little weird but I mean it is a MacBook adorable. It was a piece of garbage when it was new. I love that piece of garbage but it was a piece of garbage and then it turns off. Hmm. Okay. Not good. So then she starts it up again and I see the Apple logo and then I see a padlock. It's not getting better. Not getting better.

2:22:37I think what it is, is FileVault asking for a password, I think. But I tried every permutation of any of the passwords that she and I would ever normally use, and none of them worked. Is that like a firmware password? Do they still support those? I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. So I see this padlock, I'm like, okay, something's not right. So then I think, well, I haven't looked back at this since that evening, but I was like, all right, well, let me see if I can do like an internet recovery and just like do some diagnostics or something like that. And it's able to start up. It's able to go into the internet recovery thing.

2:23:16I'm able to download all that it needs for internet recovery, and then it fails every time. And I forget the error message off the top of my head, but it fails every time. I think that either the SSD has died or the logic board has had some sort of catastrophic failure, and the thing is toast. So I actually, honestly, I didn't destroy it. That was just, it made for a fun message for you two to see in the show notes, but I don't think I destroyed it. And so that thing, I have not been able to resuscitate it. If you have an idea for me, I am all years. I have thought about bringing it. Oh, yeah.

2:23:47Yeah. Get her a MacBook Air. Well, it's funny you say that because one of the tabs I have open on my computer, and I am not a John Syracuse, so I only have a handful open right now, but one of them is a certified refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air Apple M2 chip with 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU midnight for$1 ,530, which is, I think, what I'm going to do. This particular one has 16 gigs RAM and a half terabyte SSD. She probably needs neither of those things. But what I haven't mentioned to either of you, particularly Marco, earmuffs Marco, is that the only functional computer that I have in the house, I guess other than the Mac Mini, which I hadn't thought about until just now, but the only computer I have in the house right now is this one, is mine, is my MacBook Pro.

2:24:27And if you're prone to occasionally putting computers underwater, like I am, seems a little inadvisable for me not to have some other computer capable of podcasting somewhere in the house. And so I told her, you know, whether or not she really needs a computer, because again, the only thing she ever really did on this computer was Kroger. And she could do that on like the iPad or my computer or what have you. But it seems prudent for us to have a backup computer for me. Yes. Just in case I have a computer issue. You are a computer professional. It is okay to have some kind of backup in the house.

2:25:00Exactly. So my current plan, and I haven't acted on this yet, and I do want to try a little bit longer to see if I can resuscitate this thing. But my current plan is to probably just buy our MacBook Air, which is long overdue anyway, and just call it a day. If you're looking at refurbs, look at M1 and MacBook Air instead of M2, because she doesn't need the M2 and you can ask her which form because she had a wedge-shaped computer before and the M1's going to be cheaper and it's just as good for what she's going to be doing with it. That is true. It's not going to be that much cheaper though. I haven't looked and I will look.

2:25:36I think Marco's right. I don't think it'll be that much cheaper. She definitely deserves something better even though I don't think she needs it. I think you're right, John. But more than anything else, I want this thing to last a long time. And so I agree with you that it's probably not that different between the M1 and the M2. But my thought process is, you know, I'll get refurb because she doesn't need or want something brand new. But nevertheless, I would like to get as good as I can reasonably get right now without breaking the bank. I kind of like the M1. I've said this before. I think the M1 is a MacBook Air is a better machine than the M2, just like in terms of balance.

2:26:11Obviously, the M2 is a little bit faster. And if you like the platform factor, it's fine. but the m1 the m2 is like a little bit heatier and throttle throttlier than the m1 was they both don't have fans and it's fine and it's not a big deal but i just i feel like the m1 hit the sweet spot a little bit better than the m2 does so when i think about buying like a cheap laptop or something i still think m1 macbook air even though the m2 is and i got my son an m2 because you know same thing future proofing or whatever but also that sweet magsafe port that means that you have one more port oh that's true too because you because other now now you have three three ports like when you're when you have power connected you now have two usbc thunderbolt ports that are free i mean she was using the the macbook one so i don't think ports that's a big need for her but still it's still like you know for for in case this computer gets repurposed in your household down the road exactly it is a little bit more versatile to have the m2 one exactly right um somebody who is this uh gardner vh posted in the chat a link which we will put in the show notes here's all the things that your computer can show on startup.

2:27:13And it is, I don't think I can link to the heading, but the heading is lock icon. And if your Mac is using a firmware password, the lock icon appears when you try to start up from another disk or volume, such as an external drive or macOS recovery. Enter the firmware password to continue. If I put in a firmware password, I have zero recollection of it. Again, I tried any permutation I can remember to get through this of both my passwords and Aaron's. And none of them worked. And also note that I just read to you, when you try to start up from another disk or volume, I wasn't trying to do that.

2:27:43I was trying to start up from the internal SSD. Something has gone wonky, and it's probably not good. You can't get to the hardware diagnostics thing? You know, I haven't tried it. The computer's behind me. I can try it right now if you really want me to. I forget exactly how you start that on an Intel Mac, but I'm happy to try it. It's like a hold down command D during boot or something. I don't know. You can look it up. It's in one of those documents. but yeah I think it's just toast I think either the SSD or the logic board is toast yeah it does say in this document that like you can bring it into an Apple store with proof of purchase and they can reset it for you but that's only that's only if the firmware password that you never even set is somehow a problem right rather than being the symptom of a different deeper problem so yeah I'm guessing this is probably the end of this computer and good riddance and you know get her an M2 map okay you just destroyed her car it's the least you could do right exactly right and I Again, she doesn't really care.

2:28:36And I mean that in a good way. Not that she's like, it's not something that's important to her. Yeah, but everyone likes nice things, especially after you destroy their car. Exactly. And by the way, globe with warning symbol, if memory serves, this is what it looked like. This is on the same page, right above lock icon, actually. Globe with warning symbol is what I saw when I tried to do internet recovery and it failed on two or three consecutive. Well, no, I shouldn't say consecutive. I went back and forth, but two or three tries on that same night. I didn't like bother plugging it into Ethernet, which is a nightmare because it only has one port, but I could have done that.

2:29:08I haven't bothered, but I really truly think that this thing is just fried. And I thought about bringing it to Apple just for the purposes of diagnosis, but even if they're like, oh yeah, this is the problem, like what am I really going to do? What actionable information is that really? You can give it to them and they'll recycle it for you. I guess. That's about all it's good for. Exactly. I mean, it's better than throwing it out. Or you could, you know, look, there's also reduce and reuse. It's too late for reduce. You can reuse it. Maybe a doorstop. Maybe you can put it You can put it in the door pocket in one of your cars For emergency egress when you Land in the water Right.