591: That’s Why I Like Computers

26:44But that's not really this feature. It's tinting, it's developer support for custom icons for dark mode and it's so you can give your home screens a theme. And it will pick the theme based on your background. If your background is yellowish, it will make all your icons yellowish and so on. And apparently there's an Android feature that is very, very similar to this so it makes sense that they pull this out because it's a kind of like a switching feature. People on Android are used to being able to do this. Now they can do it on iOS too. Yeah, and I think they did this in a very Apple way. of like, you know, there's this whole industry out there of these apps that let people customize their home screens.

27:16And they do it through, as we mentioned, you know, all these ridiculous hacks to get that, to be able to do per icon customization and, you know, to arbitrary icons. You know, you can have all these apps that will help you install a really aesthetic theme for your home screen. And you can have this, and it'll show you hundreds of things. You can buy packs of them and everything. And they work through all these, you know, terrible means. What Apple did here is not remove the need for all those apps and not remove their market at all. What they did here was give you like the 20 % solution. It's like, here, if you want to customize your home screen, okay, we'll give you this very limited, like guardrailed, safe way to do it.

27:53And we'll give you these, you know, these 10 options that you can pick or whatever. Although actually the free form color picker was nice. But like, you know, we're going to give you these very limited controls. You can do a small subset of customization. It's still very gated, very limited, very safe, but we will let you do this. And so that's going to be great. A lot of people are going to do that. And at the same time, it's not going to at all affect the market for the apps that go way further than that. Yep. Yeah, I mean, we'll see what happens with it. But I'm excited because it seems like there's a need for this or want for this, if nothing else.

28:25And now Apple's satisfying it. You're going to make your whole home screen yellow? No. No, I'm not. But it would match your car if I did. Control center. So you're going to be able to swipe vertically between different pages. and what I thought was most interesting is that, and this was the beginning of, I feel like we heard a lot about the Intense API and several places that it becomes important. And I think Marco, you had said over the last few weeks or months that you saw this, you know, the tea leaves pointing this way and it sure seems like you were dead right. So anyways, third parties can donate controls to Control Center, which is really, really fun.

28:58So the canonical example that they used was like, hey, if you have a Ford and you can unlock your Ford remotely, well, if the Ford app supports it, you can have a control center icon that is unlock my car. And then they additionally said that lock screen controls are now going to be swipable, which I think is very interesting and exciting. And although I don't remember if it was mentioned here, while I'm thinking of it, another thing that they mentioned at some point today was that third-party camera apps, there will be an API to have a third-party camera app work while the phone is locked. Correct.

29:33And that is tremendous news for my dear friend Ben McCarthy and a lot of other people who have third-party camera apps because that is a real stumbling point. Because the fastest way to use a – when you're trying to take a photo, you want to do it immediately, right? And you don't want to unlock your phone and blah, blah, blah. So that's really exciting as well. Yeah, this now gives people the full capability to have third-party camera apps that replace the camera button on the lock screen and work while the camera is still locked. That's all very new. And that's, yeah, for third-party camera apps, that's huge.

30:03And presumably also the swipe gesture on the lock screen. If you don't want to hold down on the camera icon, you can just swipe sideways. That will also be configurable. Do we know? It would be really weird if you held down on the icon and got one camera app and swiped and got a different one. That's true, yeah. But we'll see. We will see what happens. And control center integration, too. And the way this works, this is all built on widgets. We've been seeing the building blocks here for a while. The modern widget system powers so many things all across the system. So as far as we can tell, I haven't dove too far into it yet, but as far as we can tell, all of this Control Center stuff is all just basically widgets in a new place.

30:38It does inherit the same seeming limitations of widgets. Hopefully, we'll have some follow-up next week with details of this. But it does seem like if you have, say, an app running a thing in Control Center with one of these new blocks in Control Center, the app is not constantly running in the background. so it might be hard to do things like make a rich now playing widget for my for audio apps for instance um it's very similar to other widgets seemingly in that it supports things like a buttons and toggles that kind of wake the app up when they are hit and then go back and then make the app go back to sleep so it's it's going to be a little bit limited but i'm really glad they're they're doing this and what what's interesting though is like that kind of to some degree might replace widgets on like because you can currently pull down like the widget screen or you can swipe over to the widget page like there's there are certain places like you can kind of now have widgets in like three different directions of swiping on the phone it's i think it might be might get a little confusing as to like where you're going to put certain things or like end up on the wrong page i don't know but it i'm glad to have this you know even if it's maybe getting a little bit busy yeah yeah uh they talked about privacy for a while um they said that one of the things you might want to do is put face or touch ID or a passcode in front of apps.

31:53So you can only open, you know, the photos app, for example, if you, you know, authenticate. They also said you can hide an app entirely. I missed how you would access it. Maybe you're searching for it. I'm not sure. It shows up in the app library. Okay. And there's like a special hidden apps block on the bottom of the app library. And it didn't show it in a locked state. But we assume it you just let you face ID probably to unlock that that block and then you can access the app. That's like deleted photos in the photos. Yeah, and hidden photos, the hidden album. It makes all this thing work like the hidden album, it looks like.

32:23It's kind of weird how, well, I guess there's two things, right? So one is protecting an app, and you can do that individually to apps, and you're like, great, the feature's done. And the other is hiding the fact that that app is on your phone at all. Because the apps that you tap and they face ID, you can still see the icon to the app. And you're right, they didn't show it in the presentation, but I assume the hidden app library folder doesn't even show you which apps are in it when it's in the lock state. I would hope not. Right. And so that's why there's both of these features. It's not just like, oh, if you don't want to individually lock apps, you can just drag them into this folder and they're all locked.

32:52No, it's to hide the fact that the app is on your phone at all. Yep. They also said, and this is a long time coming, but I'm very happy for it, you can restrict what contacts are being exposed to apps. So there was a big brouhaha a few years ago where we realized, I don't remember what app, it doesn't matter, but there was some app that wanted to slurp up all your contacts. Was it Path? I wanted to say that, but I think it was AfterPath. But you very well could be right. It doesn't really matter. One way or another, it slurped up all your contacts, which could have been for reasonable reasons, but ultimately what it ended up doing was spamming all your contacts, saying, oh, you should join Path, whatever it was.

33:27And that was really gross. And ever since then, I at least, and I think many others, have been really reluctant to let an app slurp up all your contacts, which I think is good to be reluctant about it. Now, apparently, there's going to be some sort of API where you can say, I guess, again, in the vein of photos, What context would you like to expose to such and such an app, which is great. I'm here for it. Yeah, because before, there used to be no API at all to context access. It was just a public open API. And I think that's when a lot of these apps were really abusing it. And so it's great to see this because there are so many apps where in order to do some critical functionality, it requests access to your entire address book.

34:04Sometimes it actually requires it in ways that I think are not actually necessary and that app reviews take a look at. like whatsapp for instance um small app no one's really heard of it um but there's it's like it's nice to see apple putting a little more attention on contact privacy yeah it's kind of i see that in some apps and sometimes i can see like you want to be able like say it's an app where you're going to have to type people's email addresses or contact information you want to auto complete it right i understand what like i want this app to build up a database of all the contacts so i can auto complete but you don't want the app to actually have all your contact info i wonder if there's some privacy preserving way that they could like vend and a contact autocomplete typing i don't know it's a complicated problem they they easily could for like like the system text inputs but i think the reality is yeah in the in the app landscape we live in no app would ever use that they would just request access to your entire time and keep keep nagging you about it every time you launch the app you sure you don't want to give me access to all your contacts you sure yeah and they would gate some critical functionality behind it an app review wouldn't have a problem with it they should but they won't right uh yeah yeah all right so we talk about messages um tap backs could be any emoji finally finally i'm very excited about this truly i am i'm a little worried what i don't think they did a great job of showing what the user interface is going to look like so i'm a little nervous it's going to be super clunky i'm going on faith that it won't be but assuming it's not clunky i am here for it very excited yeah that's a good point because the one good thing about the limited set is you don't have to go through like a giant picker you know their emoji picker has gotten better but it's still sometimes cumbersome yeah i mean really And one thing I also loved, obviously, yeah, finally the emoji.

35:39Everyone's been wanting that for how many years now? And every other chat app does it, and it's great. And Slack, WhatsApp, there's so many other apps people are using that just have free-form emoji responsive things. It has become a language that people expect to have that. So that's good. I also love that they did both italic, underline, strikethrough. And then they have send later, which is interesting. They use the example of if you want to send somebody a happy birthday message in the morning. You know, you can schedule it at night and it'll go that morning. You can just have AI send it for them.

36:09You don't need to send it yourself. You're getting ahead, man. You're getting ahead. Well, then you can have their AI read all their birthday messages and just summarize it for you. And say thank you for you, yeah. Easy peasy. All right, let's stay positive. So there's also text formatting. I'm sorry, you said text formatting. It's the text effects. There's magnification, animation, a blow away. We couldn't have a keynote without blow away reference some way, somehow. Again, this sounds cool and interesting. I'm a little worried and skeptical about the interface in order to do it because like text selection on iOS, not fun, which I don't know how it could be fun without a full physical keyboard.

36:42So I'm not like faulting them for that, but I don't know. This seems like it might be more effort than it's worth. Something that I thought was very, very interesting, particularly sitting directly in front of underscore actually was messages via satellite. So to back up a half step, you can send emergency messages via satellite. Like you can, there's a wizard you would walk through that says, why are you hurt? Are you stranded whatever you know are you safe etc etc and it would basically write a message not in an a in an ai way just like you know so casey is hurt on the side of the road and he's at such and such latin long go help more of a mad libs way yes that's a good way of putting it that's a very good way of putting it um well now you can do full honest to goodness messages like you type your message and send it via satellite which i think is great yeah it's full it's almost like it's core messages or core features of iMessage via satellite.

37:33Yeah, that's true, because it was like tap backs as well, wasn't it? Yeah, so it said, so now, you know, since the iPhone 14, you've been able to do those emergency messages, but it was like emergency only. Now, when you are connected only via satellite, you can do, you can text seemingly anybody. They have SMS support, and then for iMessage, they said key iMessage features, whatever that means, but they said it includes sending and receiving messages, emoji, and tap backs. So like that's, you know, so probably not like photos and stuff, obviously but but that's that's pretty cool like it's basically like free unlimited satellite texting with any iphone they didn't mention any money but i do i mean well all they said was works with iphone 14 or later i mean i take your point i think they're just kicking that can down the road until they figure out what they're going to do about charging for this but it's got it's got to be free well maybe they would do emergency for free that's a good and then this new feature maybe will be part of some plus they didn't say anything about in the keynote which is weird I know.

38:26What are you going to do? Males, getting on-device categorization. So this is where you filter. And Gmail's had this for how many years, John? Yeah, but I do not use it in Gmail. But some people like it. I mean, in the times I used it. Actually, Hay, when Hay was new and exciting, like a lot of people were really interested in that. It had its own little cute categorization. Right, exactly. The key feature of this categorization thing is, what are the categories? And it's not like the user can pick them. It's basically the person who makes the app has to decide what are the categories of email that people get that they think would be useful to junket put into bins.

38:54and then they have whatever machine learning thing puts them into these bins. So here are the bins that Apple chose. I mean, there's no reason that has to be fixed. Like Apple has, I think, chosen to make it fixed, but you could do things like make a tagging system and then have the system automatically file into those tags. I don't know if they're going to ever do that. I don't mean just the word. I mean like the analysis of the message to say what kind of message in it. So Apple's things are what? Primary transactions, updates, and promotions? Is that all? Yeah, something like that. Promotions was a great euphemism for that.

39:21Well, I mean, everyone has some promotions. it's stuff that's not spam or whatever but like transactions make some sense people want to have receipts primary is like the catch-all for the important messages and then updates is newsletters and social media i don't know i i always find it like i find it more work for me to think about what bucket this thing would be and even though in gmail like gmail's buckets it can be in five all the buckets at the same time because they're not folders like it's tag system right but i i think this a lot of people feel like they don't have any tools to manage their email even when they do because the tools are complicated or require setup that nerds will do but people won't they just go to their inbox and they just flail and they leave right and this at least like this will at first it's going to annoy people because like where's my email it's in these categories i don't care about it but as long as it can be disabled that's fine and for the people who do find this useful they're like oh now something else is organizing my email for me and they will learn where to look for certain things like this gmail does it a lot of other email clients do obviously people find it useful this is an apple catch-up feature i think it's important for them to have this i just hope they allow i'm thinking people in my life that if they install this operating system and they say where did all my email go i don't know what primary is that's a bad sign but we'll see how it goes i'm also curious they had that the digest view per sender and it seems like it was like they had like custom header images for companies yeah that i don't know how that like are they defining some new standard of like if you know it's extracting it from the emails.

40:50I don't know. Yeah, that seemed a little gross to me, but I don't know. It's pretty harmless. I wonder if all this stuff will work on Apple's emails. Are they going to put all their own stuff into primary when they tell us about the latest sale on MacBook Pros or the WWDC developer emails? We'll see what happens. But I do think the DigestView, like the example they used was here's all the emails about like an upcoming set of flights, for example. I'm here for that. So I was very happy for Underscore when we saw messages via satellite. And then I got very sad for Underscore because then just a moment later they decided to announce new topographic maps.

41:28In Maps you can access them offline. There's turn-by-turn voice guidance. I think they specifically were talking about for hikes. Yep, they were. This was literally the only new features for maps this year were targeted at Underscore. It was just targeting Pedometer++. Because Underscore is the nicest human that's ever lived, he was so positive and so upbeat about it but i my heart breaks for and there are other other hiking apps we just happen to know someone who makes one of them and this and to be clear this is this is exactly you would expect apple to add this feature it is a logical feature to add to maps they should add it third parties have been filling this gap now apple is stepping up and i think underscore is right that apple's going to do what they do but third parties are able to do more sophisticated complicated things with different decisions so it's not like when apple enters one of these areas it makes it impossible like apple made a podcast app and overcast still exists right so it actually just the first yeah it is a is it a it is dynamic that as a developer for any platform you should become accustomed to and don't be afraid that it's going to destroy your app because you know if your app was successful at all there's room to make something different than what apple does and apple almost never do what a third party would want to do with a given app well in all fairness though you know when apple really does damage by a sherlocking it's usually because they do something in a way that someone else can't match like in using some kind of system integration or apis that we aren't allowed to use or business terms that we aren't allowed to use 30 you know shenanigans like that's that's what usually really kills something else or they massively subsidize it because obviously apple can make apps that are subsidized by their bazillions of dollars from their other businesses and they can put you out of business but they tend not to do that like they have surprisingly small teams on many of their apps but the real thing that keeps it back is because apple is never going to add really complicated sophisticated features they're just allergic to it right yeah and so if you know whatever obscure feature that you think hikers want apple's probably never going to get around to that they're just going to give like the thing that works for 90 of hikers and that 10 would still be using your app so you just have to make sure your app i mean it probably already does does something opinionated specific that is too nitty gritty for Apple to ever add because they have to make something that works for most people and you can make something that works for like the hiking enthusiasts.

43:37By the way, most of the follow, apparently the standard exists for email corporate logo headers. It's called BIMI or B-I-M-I and apparently it's not very good, but that is a public standard. So please don't email us. Thank you. Wow. Today I learned. It must be used so broadly. Somehow we missed it. wallet gets tapped to apple pay cash so what the theory is you know let's say you want to pay somebody for something but you don't necessarily want to give out your phone number or your email address what have you then you can just tap your phones uh like you can to exchange stuff via airdrop uh so that's pretty cool that's super cool it's like not just do you not have to share it with them even with people who i don't care about sharing it like i'll totally give you my you have to do the thing it was like what's your i message what's your i mean that's why venmo and stuff have the little qr codes for you to yeah that's just the hassle of having to type something in or whatever and so this has the double whammy you don't type anything in and presumably it's privacy preserving where you literally don't need to give it to them yeah yep uh you can use apple pay online um i guess it's apple pay cash online is that what i missed that part of the there was some kind of like enhancements to what you can do with apple pay checkout online and it was it was various financial little tricks that we don't really care about.

44:51This is another example of them flying by, but they made mention of something about in the wallet app. So if you have a concert ticket, there would be an event guide for that particular venue, which in theory sounds really great. They talked about journal app. Honestly, I don't really care. We should probably move on. They added search, which it somehow magically did not have, amazingly. Now it has it. You can log your state of mind also, which I'm kind of surprised it wasn't there at first, but But it's good to see them doing something to the Journal app. This is a brand new app that launched in a very minimal state.

45:23I didn't see yet, though, were there any changes to Journal APIs? Was there any way for, for instance, other third-party apps to vend activities to suggest for Journal to use? They didn't mention it in the keynote, but that doesn't mean it's not there. We'll find out. Indeed. Then there's game mode in iPhone. So that's basically cranking everything else back so that the game process is the priority. photos gets its biggest redesign ever it's got a two-pane design which i i didn't think aesthetically looked great but i can understand how they landed there because it seems like functionally it'll be an improvement um there's filters so one of the examples they they enumerated was filtering out screenshots which is pretty cool uh granted i was sitting with a bunch of journalists so they were very excited about that if you don't have a lot of screenshots in your phone that we're intentionally taking people who write about software for a living do yeah it's built on the amazing intelligence in the photos app is what was what was stated at the time there's collections time people favorite memories trips etc you can reorder collections you can pin collections this is so i have i have many albums and i want to put stuff in like the same three albums all the time and they're alphabetical currently yeah scroll scroll scroll oh i went past that letter go back up this is great yep yeah i think this is actually gonna like i obviously this is like a high risk thing to redesign the photos app i will have to see like what it actually is like in use but it i'm pretty optimistic the current photos app really has a hard time scaling to very large collections which we all slowly accumulate um this seems like they've done a lot to try to make them more manageable well they did mention that they in this the part of the state of union that we saw that they had redone some of the photos app and swift ui but not they made a point of saying but not the collection view because they were showing showing how it could integrate with UIKit.

47:09And I think that's because SwiftUI can't handle the collection viewing photos when you have a lot of photos. Yeah, that would not be something I would use SwiftUI for. Right. They also said there's a carousel that has a new set of photos each day, which is exciting. And then on the bento box at the end, they mentioned RCS. And we all laughed because we thought that that was all we were going to get with regard to RCS. But then they actually briefly said verbally that RCS is coming. And also something that I think is exciting, especially for those with not as great vision is larger icons on the home screen.

47:40I think that was very briefly mentioned verbally. Did they show that? Because I would love to make some icons bigger and some icons smaller. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's my thing with game controllers. Not every button is equally important. The primary action button on a controller is more important than the tertiary button, right? So I would love to make apps bigger. Did you have other thoughts on game controllers you want to share? All right, audio and home. I don't know too much that we need to say about this. I did like the AirPods Pro, maybe only the AirPods Pro. One way or another, you can nod or shake your head to interact with Siri.

48:12So an example they gave is Marco was calling, do you want to answer? And you can shake your head laterally left and right. Siri will interpret that as no, I do not want to answer, which is cool. Voice isolation, which we got an email about this actually. And I don't know. Do you remember? I feel like voice isolation was a thing in the past. They've talked about it on the phone and various other things. I don't know why. Maybe they did it better. It seems like there's a new ML-based... Because there's lots of new techniques out in the industry for ML-based voice isolation. I got you. I remember NVIDIA did this amazing demo showing it off two years ago.

48:44And other products have added it here and there. So you're right. They have had various techniques for various noise canceling and microphone isolation techniques over time. I think those have mostly just been very simple hardware tricks. And this seems like it's more ML-based. So this should work a lot better and be more advanced. It's going to be pretty cool if it works. I hope it's not AirPods Pro only. They just showed the AirPods Pro. The voice isolation is they said AirPods Pro. They specifically said the nodding your head might be for both, but sorry, John, you're going to have to get on the Pro train eventually.

49:13Yep. TVOS. This was fun for you, huh? This time, remember the big talk we gave about how third-party apps are still liable when Apple does something? Insert that here. Oh, God. So I believe there was a feature at its TVOS called Insight. Now, I believe it was like something else I've seen. Oh, yeah, Amazon x-ray yes that's right and what else there was some other app oh yeah your app that's right before casey decided to make call sheet we've been saying for years that x-ray is a great feature that amazon has and people always have a question when they're watching a show what is that person from and x-ray provides that feature x-rays interface to be clear is terrible like every amazon interface casey's app call sheet in case you don't know is the thing where you can look up what people have been in movies and tv shows and so on and so forth and it's a very nice app the thing i would say to encourage you here is those on-screen things for doing that i think they should be there and they're great but apple's history of making an interface on the tv itself that lets you do anything sensible is not good i would much rather look when someone my wife says what is that person from if i threw an interface on the screen while we were watching the show she doesn't want me to even pause it she wants me to look it up on my phone in which case i'll use call sheet and again i'm not poo-pooing this feature i think it should exist i think it's great hopefully it'll have a better interface than x-ray but there is still definitely a place for a thing for app that you use on your phone to look up who that person is without pausing the show and without putting anything on the screen.

50:33Yeah. And also, you know, the new feature will only, inside is gone, it will only work on Apple TV app. Like, it won't work in third-party apps. Yeah, which I didn't catch at first. Yeah, I thought it was just in the Apple TV player, but in hindsight, it does make some sense. Right, they wouldn't have the data. Right, right, right. They just do screen, like do the Shazam version, video Shazam. Oh, they're definitely not doing that. I know, but like that would be the technology. Your TV's doing that to show you ads, but Apple's not doing it. That technology does exist, but Apple is not used. This is just for Apple TV plus television shows or movies.

51:04Plus, if I use that instead of Call Sheet, I'd be spoiled constantly on character reveals and ages and stuff like that. That's true. Apparently, I owe you a drink at dinner later. You'll be fine. But no, it was funny, though, because for a hot second... I think I owe you some drinks, honestly. Well, for a hot second, I was devastated because I thought it was for everything. And I think part of the reason I thought that, which in retrospect was silly, But I knew that there was so much AI and ML and what have you. And I'm envisioning this world where they're figuring out what's on screen. I mean, they could.

51:34Hypothetically, they could. But the more I think about it, the more I think that that's challenging, at least today. Maybe in the future it won't be. But today, I think that's really challenging. I don't think it's challenging. I think it's expensive. And it's privacy invasive in a way that Apple doesn't like to do. So anyway, there was a five-minute window before people started reporting in and sending me texts that like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's okay. It's just Apple TV+. And then I was not quite so miserable. But for a second. It's all part of the developer experience. Well, that's the thing is underscore, again, underscore sitting right behind me.

52:00And he's like, nope, this is part of the process. So anyways. But yes, it was funny in retrospect, not funny at the time. Enhanced dialogue. One of my favorite features about my beloved Sonos setup is that the soundbars, or at least my soundbar, can do their own dialogue enhancing mode, which is not flawless, but it works reasonably well. and I am old enough now that I feel like generally speaking I can hear but particularly at night time when the kids are asleep and Declan's room is right above our family room where we watch TV I don't want to have to crank the volume in order to just understand what the heck people are saying Do you have reduced loud sounds on?

52:35I understand the question, I don't recall You should try that I'll have to give that a shot You're talking about the reduced loud sound? Just a compressor I leave that on all the time I should give that a shot but one way or another there's now enhanced dialogue for I think any playback on Apple TV which I'm really excited for because presumably an Apple TV box is going to have more processing power than my Arc soundbar. So these enhanced dial-up features exist everywhere. They're on every TV, they're on every receiver, they're on every set-top box. It's good that Apple has one, but I have to tell you the quality of these varies widely.

53:05So hopefully Apple does a good job of it because it's easy to just like, oh, I'm just applying an EQ curve and human voices are around here and that is awful and that's been around for ages and there's, you know, increasing amounts of ML or whatever. So I hope Apple has done a good job of this because it actually is pretty hard to do because if you if you listen to a bad one it's it's grating on your ears like you can like the voices are just too loud and too clear and everything else feels in the distance so doing this well is actually kind of tricky and i'm looking forward to seeing apple's implementation i mean it could literally be the exact same algorithms as the voice isolation for airpods pro just like tuned down you know like with less reduction of the background but you do have to be careful because you don't want it to sound like like the people are like right in front of your face and the whole rest of the show is back there.

53:47You can over enhance it. I mean, one thing that Apple is historically very good at is doing features like this with subtlety. Like a lot of times they get criticized for not doing a more extreme version or having more controls over how they're doing things like this, but I would trust them to do this well enough that it would be if anything, you would say it doesn't go far enough. It's probably going to be a pretty subtle effect. The demo, obviously, we were hearing it over concert speakers, so who knows how it sounds in person, but the demo of it seemed like it was actually fairly subtle. Auto subtitle appearance when muting or skipping back.

54:19I thought that they already did this for like, what did she say or whatever. When you ask the Siri remote what did they say, and it will go backwards three seconds, turn subtitles on, play through, and then turn the subtitles back off, which is one of the best features of Apple TV. And now this is even more of that of saying, look, if you just skipped back, you don't even have to... Because it is kind of annoying to pick up the remote and mumble into it, what did they say or whatever. this, if you skip back, it just assumes it's because you didn't hear something. So that removes a step, and that's great.

54:47And the auto subtitling appearance when muting is a no-brainer that is great. Yeah, I love that. Support for, I think it was 21 by 9 projectors, whatever the standard aspect ratio is, which is kind of interesting and cool. I don't know anyone that uses an Apple TV with a projector, but I know it happens, so that's neat. And then different screen savers are going to be available, slideshows, portraits, moments from Apple TV plus shows and then they did a big song and dance about Snoopy and how that's gonna be a screen saver so that's cool

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57:36Watch OS. Yes. They talked a lot about activity or activeness. I know that's not really a word, but anyways. That's it. Yeah. Activation. Activation. That's what it was. But they talked about training load, which was interesting. To be honest, I was slightly tuned out at this point because I was still figuring out if my job was going away. After you were sending your emails. Right. Exactly. No, but they talked about training load and, you know, oh, if you've trained really, really hard that, you know, maybe you need to back it off a little bit so you don't get exhausted, et cetera, et cetera. You can customize the summary tab in fitness, which I'm excited about.

58:06You can also have different goals for different days. You can account for injuries. And gentlemen, you can pause for rest days. This is great. You know there's someone out there who got a Series Zero watch, and they've been on a streak, and they've been getting the badges, and they haven't missed a single day, and now finally that person can have one day of rest. I don't think a Series Zero watch would have enough battery life to give you your standout. They've been going from watch to watch and somehow haven't lost all their streaks. Because we've been saying this for years, is like they gamify this by giving you cool little badges for going on streaks, but it's unhealthy to, like, for example, keep doing the same activity through injuries or never to take a day off.

58:45And we've always been like Apple. Like, you're not promoting a healthy lifestyle. The people who are most addicted to this gamified thing are going to end up injuring themselves and making their lives worse. Let people have a day off. Pause for a day. The streak still counts. This is just a life lesson that Apple has now learned and now is passing on to us. it's okay to take a day off and if you're injured don't do the same activity you normally do and now the watch understands that and allow you to maintain your streak and i think it is completely legitimate yeah and also like there's there's this like falling off the wagon effect where like if you have had a long streak and then you you have to break it you're forced to break it for some reason a lot of times it's really hard to ever go back because you're like well it's over now yeah and like you never go back yeah exactly like you know i'm off the wagon now forget i guess i'll go back to you know being a slob like it and it's so it can be very demotivating so actually like enabling rest days not only is is you know healthier mentally for the people who are trying to keep streets going but i think it will result in people keeping more streaks overall and and like and not falling off that that wagon as much because it is not as you know you're not like losing oh there it is i'm gone forever like i lost all this that i've worked for might as well throw it away but it makes the apple watch stickier or not you know for self-motivated thing where you're not going to switch to a different watch if you still have your streaks going.

1:00:01Indeed. They talked a little bit about a Vitals app, which I'm genuinely excited about to see kind of like an overall status of what your health is across several different metrics, which is cool. Because fitness obviously is specifically about exercise and things of that nature in fitness. And Vitals is more of a holistic view of everything about you. I mean, I like what they're doing here. So the idea is like daily health metrics, overall health status. if something changes in a few different ways, like if your vitals in different ways change, they'll alert you like, hey, your heart rate's been up this week and also other stuff has changed.

1:00:37That's nice, but why... I have to wonder, why can't this just be the health app? I feel like the health app, honestly, is a mess. There's so much in there and I don't think the health app does a good job of information architecture. Are you being on the watch? Because this is the watchOS section. You mean in general, the health app? I mean in general. I think this should be just a function of the health app. Maybe it is. Maybe there's just a vitals tab in the health app now. No, well, maybe. I mean, I thought it was a whole separate app. I thought it was a whole separate app. I'm pretty sure it is.

1:01:09And I will concur. I don't want to belabor it. Chat room is saying it's in the health app on iOS, and on watchOS it's separate. So maybe it's just a separate screen. Yeah, that's what I assumed. Either way, the health app, from an information architecture perspective, the health app is a disaster. it's just terrible like apple's modern like apple modern design language that they use there of just like a bunch like a grid of square around wrecked squares with like some text in the corner and that's it and there's just a huge grid like i feel like that is that does not scale to a lot of information that's fine if you have a simple app like reminders where you have like those little blocks it's the same pattern reminders that's okay there but the health app has a thousand different things in it and i i don't feel like it's it's organized well so maybe they'll do a better job of this uh they talked about cycle tracking and gestational age which i thought was very cool and a lot of more support about pregnancy specific metrics so um as an example you know i think they i think they use blood pressure as an example but there was something that they cited that it goes up quite a bit during pregnancy and that's normally okay but you want to keep an eye on it etc etc so i thought that was very cool yeah that's another example of like third-party app opportunity type thing and even more so here because like the health data is essentially a shared database that other apps can access and do things with um and there are tons of pregnancy tracking apps on the app store right now and it's like oh apple is now going to give you one for free so why would anyone use a third-party one i hope the third-party ones can integrate with the new pregnancy specific information that is presumably in the health database to enhance themselves and of course those apps are going to be way more sophisticated way more varied way more tailored to people's individual goals or whatever so i think this will actually be a boost to that market, not a detriment to it.

1:02:51Well, honestly, maybe it might have to be a detriment because a lot of times, remember it came out a few years ago that the privacy of those apps is horrendous. All the leading pregnancy tracking apps that somebody could find a couple years ago, they were all sending that data to Facebook. Oh, that's true. That is true. I feel like this should help. The competitive landscape should change so that now there is a privacy-preserving option, so maybe apps have to do that less. Anytime Apple can add this kind of even though their version is going to be more basic, more just core functionality, they're going to get the 20 % solution.

1:03:25But that is usually a good thing if the alternative is a market full of privacy invading awful apps. I just want to sell your name to diaper manufacturers. It makes perfect sense. That's how they do it. Connections was another section where they talked about several different things. They will automatically add new widgets to the SmartStack watch face, which is kind of sort of the Nuvo Siri watch face. There's Translate on the Apple Watch that uses, quote, machine learning models to do the translation. Live activities in the smart stack. I don't use live activities enough, but if there's anything that's going to get me on this watch face, it's live activities in the smart stack.

1:04:02I am here for that. Very excited about it. In fact, I'm jumping ahead a bit, but there seem to be a lot of different things where they're acknowledging and embracing the fact that the iPhone is kind of the core computing device of your life. Even for the three of us, where I think we're all primarily Mac people, and John will argue with me as soon as I stop talking, but generally speaking, I think for a lot of people, the iPhone is the most important hub of your digital life. And I think a lot of things are now, or Apple is embracing that for a lot of features. And this is one of them, live activities on the SmartStack.

1:04:38So, you know, we're getting Lyfts and Ubers and whatnot while we're here in San Jose and Cupertino. And so having that appear on your watch, whatever the live activity is on your watch, that's exciting. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. And that is a theme throughout. I think that's a good, you know, what we have with our iPhones is it's always the primary, it's always where things come first. it's always the device no matter what is going on if you're traveling or something you're always going to at least have your phone it makes a lot of sense to keep the iPhone as the center of everything and to bring those features to the other platforms when you can but still having the because like that's no matter what Apple tries to do the iPhone is always going to be the primary computer device so as much as they can embrace that and make the iPhone help the other platforms as much as they can do that and we'll see the iPhone helping the other platforms by making appearance on them yes can i just say my favorite my favorite addition to watch os the double tap api so tell me more i'm not trying to be funny tell me more about why that's so exciting for you because i don't have double tap so i don't know what i'm missing out on you couldn't remember you couldn't do it before only apple had access to it right but do you feel do you use the feature in apple stuff at all ever or no no because it's very slow and unreliable cool so like i try to use it to like dismiss notifications or whatever like i have found it to be way too slow and you know i have the series 9 like i have i have the right hardware for it and it's just really unreliable it's and when it does work it's still very it's much slower than doing it yourself because you have to like give it a second to recognize it and then it it like taps you to tell you hey i recognize this and like it shows like a little overlay thing double tap you know so but the reason i wanted is that my customers want to use it and i've gotten so many emails from people since it launched saying hey double tap doesn't work in your app what the heck man like because they don't know that until this the only thing third-party apps could do with it was use it to dismiss notifications or perform the primary action on a notification that's all it could do so absolutely and and of course what they expect from over tap is play pause like that when you when of course that would be what it does right so it makes sense and and it just seemed like i was being neglectful by not having this in my app when really i couldn't have it in my app so now that's going to be good for you know for the very basic thing and you know whatever they add in the future in this area if they add more gestures or more things like that hopefully they would they will now add these switch by modifiers for them as well yep uh photos watch face gets better customization and will automatically find photos i don't know what specifically that means i mean i understand those words machine learning that's what they said they still did this so this now we're like you know a half hour and they still didn't say ai once uh all right ipad os 18 yes or are we taking another pause?

1:07:21We don't need more pauses. Okay, sorry. Paused out. We are paused out. Okay, iPadOS 18. I would like to make an opening statement about this. Everyone was waiting for Apple to say, don't worry, you guys, we've solved multitasking. Like I said, there was no rumors about that. No, there were no rumors. But like just this morning. No expectations. I think it was just this morning. And I apologize. I am not even going to be doing show notes for this episode. So the show notes are barren. But there was a Verge link that I'm not going to look up, but you can look it up yourselves. There's a Verge link where they talked about basically, I feel like it was literally this morning, like, hey, we've got this incredible hardware.

1:07:58Where's the software? And so all of us, I agree, John, that nobody was necessarily expecting it, but we were all hoping for it and it didn't land. And what did land, though, was actually for me to this point, the most impressive stuff I saw in the entire keynote. I was excited about other things for sure, but the iPad OS demo blew my mind more than anything else I think I saw during the keynote. So what did we talk about? Well, first, it has the home screen customization from iOS 80, which honestly, that's new. It's not a given that it's going to get new features. Usually when something cool comes to Springboard in iOS, the home screen, the widgets, usually that either doesn't come to the iPad at all that year, and maybe comes like the following year, or it comes to the iPad in a much more limited way.

1:08:45In this case, all of that home screen customization and stuff that is in iOS 18 is also all on iPad iOS 18. So that was actually a pleasant surprise. Yep, couldn't agree more. So there's that. The same story with Control Center and a lot of the photo stuff. They talked a lot about a floating tab bar, which I believe they either said or implied has an associated API where - Yes, it does. This is like on the Apple TV Plus app where there's a tab bar at the top. and that was i was like okay fine whatever and then they said oh and there's some i don't know if it's like a hamburger button or whatever but there's some button you can press and then that tab bar will slide down into the i was going to say the left wherever your text into a sidebar leading it'll slide down into dot leading into dot leading right uh into a sidebar and that i thought was uh extremely cool um and then and so they talked about their they made a big stink a happy stink about how there's improved and refined animations uh they they talked a little bit about share play and at this point i started to pass out but then they started talking about screen sharing and i woke back up and they said there are a couple very interesting features you can tap and draw on the screen to instruct the remote users so they showed like putting a gigantic like fu like it's right here it's right here circle the button big hot pink marker like It's right here.

1:10:02Click this. Yeah. So anyway, like a big arrow or circle or what have you. And they also said that you can ask, the remote person can ask for remote control. So if you have like grandma or grandpa or what have you, and they don't understand what's going on, but they live, you know, 500 miles away, you get on a share play call. I'm not clear how you do the screen sharing. It doesn't really matter. But one way or another, you can say to grandma, I would like the control, please. And you can actually perform the operation that grandma or grandpa is trying to perform, which I was very excited about.

1:10:32Oh, man. For remote tech support? I'm so excited to use this. Yeah. Back when I had needs like that with my grandparents, this would have been a godsend. I'm very happy for everybody who has to use this feature. This is going to be a big quality of life improvement. Yep. The Sherlocking continues. Poor James Thompson. I love James so much. Calculator is arriving on iPad. I genuinely double down on what you guys were saying earlier about how this doesn't necessarily hurt James but it's not a fun feeling and it's not, I don't know if it would help him necessarily, I mean it does draw attention to other calculator apps I think PCALC is going to be fine because PCALC has, with the sole exception of the iPad, has always run on platforms that had built-in calculators, well I guess the Apple TV but like there were always Apple calculator apps on these platforms and p calc still had quite a market i will say also when they announced calculator for ipad at the as of yet that got the biggest applause in the event like bigger i would have expected emoji responses in my message to be a bigger applause but no calculator for ipad by far the biggest applause in that keynote to up to this point this is interesting with casey being excited about the ipad stuff we're about to see in a second it's kind of just because of the order because as we'll see this this thing that was presented as a feature of calculator is not a feature of calculator it is like an os-wide service that appears in other os's and other places like it's everywhere sort of well i think it's just calculator and notes right but it's clear that it's not a feature of the calculator app if notes is using it right so what's interesting framework yeah so so what's so what we're going to talk about now is math notes like this is so calculator you know it's it's calculator for the ipad but then it has this other mode called math notes that it's totally unrelated it might as well been a separate app like that's the thing like it and so there's with all these apps now that are or all these features now that are kind of buried in apple apps in weird places so for instance like that one secret button on calculator there's like the document scanning that's just built into the files app or preview on the mac like and it has there's a whole document scanner you can use with with phone cameras and stuff and it's it's tucked into weird places like you don't even know it's there notes is the king of this there are so many amazing features in apple notes that you wouldn't really expect to be in a notes app and it doesn't really have that much to do with notes necessarily and and so this is one of them so this math notes feature this is what they what they demoed with i agree case i think this is one of the most impressive demos of the day math notes it's kind of like a combination of calculator and solver with handwriting yeah in the most amazing it's like a handwritten solver yeah yeah that's good the most amazing recognition and like ways to play with numbers so this the way it works is you use the apple pencil and you can just you can like doodle up a note or whatever and any you know if you write like seven plus four equals it will recognize that as a mathematical expression and stick the answer there well but but there wait there's and there's so much more there's more not only does it stick the answer there the naive way of building this is it puts like, you know, a monospaced font.

1:13:45Right. You know, what did you say? Seven times four is 28 or what have you. It doesn't matter. It puts a 28 there in like a monospaced font, right? Oh, no, baby. It's going to try to mimic your own flipping handwriting. Yep. How amazing is that? I don't understand how this is possible. I don't know if this was part of the same thing, but I think it also improves your handwriting as well. So when you're scribbling the numbers, it's trying to, oh, you made the circle on that nine is a little bit squished. It opens it back up for you. So it's more legible to yourself later. And then it writes the answer.

1:14:14And then like Solver, which is a great app that we should link in the show notes that Casey's not making, that will like, it's a live thing. It's like a spreadsheet where the answer is based on the things that are before it. One of the really cool things I think I saw in the keynote was hard to tell because it was far away. They were like, oh, you can change the numbers. And like, oh, changing numbers. Is it going to make me get an eraser tool and then carefully scribble out the nine? You can. The presenter did that. That was one of the choices. But I think there's like a gesture to sort of just swipe over the nine and it knows where the nine is.

1:14:46You know what I mean? And the whole nine disappears and you type a new number in its place. And there's a little slide. If you hover over it, it shows a little slider above it and you can just slide the value up and down. Yeah. And it does more complicated math, so more ways for kids to cheat on their homework. Not that they need it anymore because there's a million web-based tools that will do all this for you already. Yeah. I mean, like I personally am not a handwriting person. That's why I like computers. But tons of people are. like it you know i like solver i like typing actual numbers i don't want to see my handwriting i don't want to hand write math equations but sometimes especially if you don't know like math ml or how to like make the big if you're in like an actual math class we have big giant expressions with fractions and and exponents and lots of parentheses and square roots over whole big things like you know doing algebra this this looks like a great teaching tool and this you know it's essentially you know i don't know if it's a public framework but it's a private framework that's used by two of apple's apps and it's so amazing they should just spread it everywhere like like pencil kit i hope they eventually will make this a third party thing that you can just pop up because it's just what what a great app what a matt and for the ipad like it's their one app platform that has a pencil yeah this is like what can you do with the pencil they're really cranking up the features that and we'll see more later that appear with the pencil in pencil kit or with pencil related things in the os yeah because this this feeds right into smart script also this was math notes and smart scripts seem to be the same system you know just so between I mean, calculator has math notes.

1:16:06Notes also has math notes, but notes takes it further with the idea of smart scripts. This is basically the engine that recreates your handwriting as a font, basically, dynamically. And so as you handwrite notes, it figures out what your handwriting looks like. As John mentions, if you kind of squish a letter or flub a letter, it will correct it to make it more readable as you go. Because what it's doing is converting your handwriting into reflowable text. so yeah after you've handwritten a whole page of notes with the apple pencil in in apple notes you can like delete words by scratching them out and then just collapses them you can copy and paste you can paste other text in and it will paste it in in your handwriting it's just nuts i said to the dancer next to me i said oh i'll also sign checks for you yeah like wait it's pacing oh this is can people can like do kids still need doctor's notes or like notes from your parents to get out of school oh this would be great No, kids have other ways of hacking that.

1:17:03They always do. But this is definitely a cool feature. And it also has kind of like shades of Newton. You know what I mean? Like being able to use handwriting as text and interchangeably. It's amazing looking tech. I hope it works as well as the demos. It demoed phenomenally. If you watch nothing else from this keynote, if you ask me, watch this like five to ten minute demonstration. It was, I think Jenny Chen did it. It was phenomenal. It was so cool. it doesn't evaluate an expression until you draw an equal sign which I thought was clever she had a column of numbers she was putting together like a budget or something and there was a column of numbers and she said oh I really wish I had a sum of this and so she just underlined the bottom number and then magically a sum appears it was unbelievable she put a graph in one of them she was doing some physics problems yeah it has a built in grapher because of course might as well it was really unbelievable I wish I was not like John and I hand wrote things.

1:18:00Yeah, right. I just never do. I mean, again, if you don't know the correct note, if you ever tried to enter a complicated algebraic expression like in Wolfram Alpha or in something or whatever, and you don't know how to do that, or you're trying to use the tools, oh, I need a big parentheses, and you're using a toolbar, or if you don't know the ASCII syntax for it or whatever, it's just like, just let me draw it. Just let me draw the expression, and this is really making this stuff more accessible. And again, there are web-based tools that do this, and there are teaching tools that do all these things as well.

1:18:29And there's Wolfram Alpha exists, but this is on your iPad. This comes with your iPad. I think this also shows some of the kind of hilarious limits of the rumor game. Because it was rumored that there would be math ML support in Notes, which is like, okay. It undersells it, yeah. Yes, it's like, that is sort of what this is, but it's totally missing what this really is. Yeah, it's Newton plus Solver. Exactly. So we get to Mac OS 15. Sequoia is the answer, which is good because everyone definitely knows how to correctly pronounce and spell Sequoia. But here we are. Mac OS 15 gets all the note stuff we just talked about.

1:19:06Well, I guess except the pencil-related things. Not necessarily because people can use tablets. Oh, that's true. Drawing tablets with a Mac. I wonder if a Wacom would work. I didn't even think about that. I doubt it. Then this is what I was alluding to earlier. They had a big section on continuity. And I think for me, if you're going to watch one thing, watch Math Notes. If you're going to watch two things, watch this iPhone mirroring stuff. So what they said was, hey, what about occasions when your phone is out of reach, but you want to do something with your phone? Well, what they demoed was you can mirror your phone's screen onto your Mac.

1:19:43And then not only that, but you can interact with your phone using your keyboard and mouse, which was very freaking cool. And then apparently you can pinch to zoom. I mean, they mentioned that. I was wondering, as soon as they did that, I'm like, oh, that looks like a simulator. Are they going to make users hold down option to get the little two balls or whatever? I'm like, there's no way that they're going to ask users to do that. but then I realized everyone has a trackpad so you can just oh that's true yeah this is a your virtual phone on your mac screen it's I mean you feel like oh how lazy are why don't you just go get your phone but honestly it's it's a backdoor to let you run iphone apps on your mac essentially because previously only ipad apps could be run on your mac and their little windows now your whole freaking phone is there on your mac this I think this is a great feature it makes such a perfect integration of like because they make the phone platform and the mac like excellent I give this two thumbs up yeah I mean I don't even know how often I'll use it but it just seems like something that should be possible yeah and think and think of so many so also notifications from the phone will show up on the mac the audio from the phone comes through the mac you can have standby support where like the phone can be on a chart on a charging stand in standby showing some widgets next to your desk and you can be using it on the mac like you can drag and drop files to the phone from the mac like that i think this is gonna be one of those things that we start to use all the time and not even realize and wonder how we lived before it existed even just something something simple like like what if what if you break your screen on your phone and you need to like you know get info on it or something extend the life of phones with broken screens yeah or just like laptop around with me to use my phone yeah or you know get get info off of it before you get a replacement maybe maybe apple will start selling a headless iphone shuffle i can't even i can't even with that it's a stick of trident gum but you need you need another device to use no buttons no but i just want to reiterate what marco just said because you went so fast, but I think it's important.

1:21:30A notification comes through on your Mac. It looks like it is peer with all your Mac notifications. You can click on it on the Mac and it will start up the phone mirroring. So you'll see your phone and then you can interact with that notification because your phone has now started whatever, you know, app that notification came from, which is incredible. And like you said a moment ago, you could have standby. I don't personally use standby just because I don't really have like a dock that makes it easy, but I love the idea of it. But if you are a standby person, you can have your phone sitting next to your computer.

1:22:04And similar to how CarPlay eventually started working where it was not literally what you were doing on your phone, it became like a second screen. Well, standby can remain up while you're interacting with your phone on the computer. So your phone is doing two things concurrently. Very, very, very cool stuff. And it's also, just not that it needs to be reinforced, but reinforcing the Mac's dominance as the platform where you can do everything. You can run iPad apps. You can run Mac apps. You can use your entire phone. It integrates with all these things. You can develop apps for all those platforms.

1:22:38The only thing you can't do is the Vision OS stuff, and that still kind of seems like it's off in the corner. And the Pencil, too. I do wonder about the Pencil. Obviously, you can use an iPad, a sidecar. I don't think there's any Pencil support in that mode, but technically speaking it seems like it would be plausible to allow you to use your apple pencil on your ipad screen when using a sidecar and you're we'll see how i mean they should just make touch max with pencil support i mean they'll get to it eventually but not this and cellular and oled well you know get in line the oled we're gonna get don't worry about that's coming uh what else do they have uh video conferencing stuff window tiling don't you blew right past oh i'm sorry you're right that's true uh this is a bunch of apps that manage windows don't worry john you're totally safe from being sherlocked well my app doesn't do any of this stuff like again they still don't expose enough apis for you to do something good i know window tiling window time is one of the few things you can do because you don't need interactive support for it it's like oh i just enter a keyboard command and the active window but goes into the third or a quarter or whatever but like real-time interactive window dragging like when you're dragging a shape in like adobe illustrator or affinity designer or something there's no apis for that and apple doesn't do it itself and so but but yeah this does hurt a lot of apps that do the same thing this is just catch up with windows they've had this forever people just expect to be able to yank a window to the side of the screen and have it tile.

1:23:46And now it does. And it will hurt a bunch of third-party apps, but third-party apps do way more than this. So again, there's room for them to exist. Though this is another moment where there was a lot of applause when we were sitting there. And it's so funny too, because you guys have talked about, or maybe just Marco, I guess, has talked about in the past. They don't have the pregnant pause, you know, when they're waiting for people to stop clapping because it's a recorded video. They just keep going. They just keep plowing forward. But there was a lot of applause for that. So like I said, there's some video conferencing stuff.

1:24:11I mean, they have Zoom style fake backgrounds. I thought they already had that, but yeah, it's a catch-and-feature. Yeah, system-wide background replacement for any video input. And presumably they'll do a less janky job of it. I mean, their demo looked pristine, but we'll see. It's a competition to see who has the best machine learning. Everyone's demos always look pristine. Let's see what happens when you're in dim lighting and stuff like that. Right, right. So real-time follow-up, I just adjusted where I was sitting, and I definitely kicked over my capped water bottle. So maybe John was right about this, because I had it at the edge of my chair, and I adjusted where I was sitting.

1:24:41See? Levels. Levels are important. Levels, levels. I've had opinions about where 1Password has been going for the last year or two. You? And I will say that there is now a passwords app on all of the platforms, including Windows on the iCloud for Windows app. And I will be exploring that later this year. And I'm going to start. As will I. That's all I'm going to say about that for now. Yes, I'm looking for it. It is not as full-featured as OnePassword by any means. In particular, it seems, I haven't explored yet whether there's any kind of group functionality like family sharing and things like that.

1:25:18So I had somebody talk to me. There is, there is. We have that already? So I had somebody reach out on Mastodon because I think I'd cast out a question about this. And I know that there is something, but I don't know. You talked about it on the show. Now you're both like this. I'm currently using it. Yes, you can make arbitrary groups where you share things in your iCloud keychain. i have two groups i have family passwords and parent passwords and once you put a thing into that group it is shared with the people who you say and are just completely arbitrary it works great i mean for passwords the verification goes the whole nine yards and yeah this app i mean people have been asking for this because passwords like the keychain access app is obscure and weird that is not for regular people to use exactly i don't think it's for me and they shouldn't really ask it it's not for any but then there was the password you know uh settings thing on ios and the password preference pane slash whatever they're called in settings right but it's just kind of buried and people are making shortcuts to launch it but now there'll be a dedicated app so it's better it's more exposed it just makes it feel more comfortable like yes when i need to get my passwords now keychain access does more than just passwords keychain access has secure notes keychain access has all your stupid developer certificates in it that stuff isn't exposed in passwords like that is in the keychain so to speak and that is important stuff and so keychain access has to still exist but regular people should not touch that because you can really hose yourself by like, oh, I don't know what these certificates are.

1:26:36Let me delete all these. Like even if you're not a developer, don't do that. Like that your root SSL certificates are represented in there. There's your login key chain and the system key chain and things that people don't have to understand. Plus making, what do you call it? Certificate signing requests for making SSL certificates if you're not using Let's Encrypt, which you should be. Like key chain access will soldier on. But since the last version of Mac OS, when you launch key chain access, it says, hey, are you sure you want to launch key chain access? Yeah, it's like passwords are over here.

1:27:02Yeah, do you want me to just open the passwords preference but and now i hope it will say actually there's a whole other app called passwords you should go to that one and it's a swift ui app and it looks nice and i hope it doesn't have right align text fields for the passwords but we'll see how that goes yeah i think this is you know there are going to be some things you know like secure notes you mentioned are not there but like you know where secure notes are in notes like you can make a locked note and have all the but those aren't in keychain i do wonder how they're going to square this because i do have secure like the secure notes and notes are in the notes database and encrypted the secure notes in keychain access i believe are in the keychain with all of the in iCloud keychain with all the secure synced stuff i may be wrong about that but i think there's two different worlds and i wonder how they're going to reconcile that because that is that is a feature that people like one password like they just want to like here's an arbitrary list of secure stuff that i want to be locked up or whatever um and you can do that in keychain but you it's a terrible interface for it then using it in notes is much nicer so i hope that's what people are doing i wonder if maybe they're just trying to keep the you know the iCloud keychain data size small and lightweight.

1:28:03With one password, you can have just arbitrary files that you stick in there. And the way it does it is honestly kind of rough. So I've scanned my driver's license and have the picture of it in there, for instance. If you put one image or one PDF into Keychain, it's going to be way larger probably than everything else in there. And that's just for one of them. So if they keep the size of everything small, maybe that helps them keep it fast and reliable. All right. They talked about Safari for a bit. they said the quote, private browsing that's actually private, which I thought was funny. They didn't go deeper into that, but we all know who they're...

1:28:37Well, yeah, and then the next line was, if you've missed anything we've added to Safari over the last few years, it's time to check it out. They were clearly targeting Chrome, because look, the reality is Safari has a Chrome problem. Chrome is way more popular than Safari, and Google is being extremely aggressive at getting the most people possible to switch to it. Google is so... The second you sign into any Google service, you get that email saying, complete your Google setup. And it hammers home, you've got to install Chrome, you've got to install Chrome on all your devices. The fact is, Safari has a severe problem with losing people to Chrome a lot over the years.

1:29:12So this was clearly targeted at that. And I think it's good to see Apple being a bit aggressive there because they have to be. Yep, couldn't agree more. So they highlighted, quote, machine learning quotes, which includes directions to things that it detects on the page, summaries of pages, quick links to learn more about, like, people, movie, music, TV shows. This was not a call sheet thing in my eyes. That's just, you know, hey, there's... It's just, basically, this is all kind of Safari saying, the web is junked up with crap. And we know when you land on a web page, maybe you just don't know what the deal is with this TV show, and you can't see it through the barrage of ads and other garbage.

1:29:50And so there's reader mode that's existed for years. It will summarize it. And if there's media stuff, it will try to extract that stuff and probably give you a button that you can see it on Apple TV+. It's an opportunity for them to integrate with streaming services, but it's also just a lot of Safari tools seem like the web is an annoying place to be sometimes. And we will try to use our application to scrape out the stuff that you actually want and present it to you in a nice way. And I appreciate that. Yep. Reader includes now a table of contents and a summary, which I thought was very cool.

1:30:22It's in like a little sidebar area, which was neat. Then they talked about viewer, which was specifically for video playback. It's unclear, like John wrote in the notes, does this work on YouTube? We don't know. So it's unclear what the situation is, but it has a mode where the video will take up the entire window area, which I really liked because I don't necessarily want to go full screen with the video, but I want it to make the video take up the entire window area. And it uses the native player too. Like if you watch some webpage that has video and it's some weird video player and there's a bunch of blinking ads in the corner and there's some things, like this will yank it out into the native player somehow.

1:31:00That's why I asked if it works on YouTube because how would that work? There's a bunch of utilities that do that, YouTube now where they'll essentially modify the markup on the page to let you use the native player, turn it into an HTML5 player. So that'd be the first thing I try on that. But that's, you know, it's good to have that feature available. These features are great because if you don't want to use them, they don't mess with your web browsing, but it's always worth a try. And I've been using reader more and more often just because so many web pages are so junked up, it's impossible to actually read them.

1:31:26It's bad. John, there was some talk about gaming. so anyway uh yeah so the you know the game porting toolkit there they are not budging on this the idea that this is a tool for you to port your games as opposed to what other people like you know uh valve has done with the uh steam deck and everything of saying no no apple will take care of this you just run your game and we will make it work on the mac they're saying no this is a tool for you developer for you to make your game to run on the mac because we want it to be essentially a native mac game we don't want this to be a way to run windows games on mac although it is and they mentioned they mentioned crossover and that whatever that whiskey thing is like there's a bunch of other tools that use the game party toolkit to essentially provide an app that's like hey go here and you can play windows games on your mac and you totally can right but apple is not on board with that and when they said this was like why don't you do what they're doing apple but like no apple says we want you to port your games and we found two more developers who are games that you played three years ago wow i mean the most interesting thing is like they mentioned frostbunk which i don't know much about but they mentioned control which is was one of the first sort of triple a games to um really emphasize ray tracing they're like hey you just got an nvd card with ray tracing support and you might not know what the hell that's good for we'll get control because it has a mode where you can turn on ray tracing and it looks kind of cool and again that was years ago uh now it's available on the mac as you know max and ipads uh have ray tracing hardware in their gpus and so that's a good get for them but this is you know this is back in time so if you if you've been waiting to play control which is a pretty cool game uh you can try it out now on your mac and then ubisoft out there talking about prince of persia and the new assassin's creed game so apple is schmoozing the developers enough to get them on board but and some of these games are not three-year-old games like the assassin creed it's the upcoming one so they their support there so they seem to be making some headway with the big developers right it's it's kind of one of those things where you apple has to get to the point where when a cool game is coming out a mac user doesn't have to think about whether it'll be available on their platform all they have to ask is is this a platform exclusive because that's what people think oh there's a game coming out and what they want to know is this a platform exclusive is it only on playstation is it only on xbox right is it only on pc and if they say no it's just it's a cross-platform game which most triple a games are because they want to make money from everybody when they say that mac users know they're still excluded.

1:33:44No, it's not platform exclusive. It's everywhere, except for the Mac, obviously. That's the hurdle they have to get over. And so it takes, you know, I bring up a new developer every year to say, we have this game, we have that game. They have to get it to the point where gamers, when they hear a game is not platform exclusive, can assume that it's on the Mac and we are so far from that. But baby steps. Every year there's one more developer, one more game. It's just at this rate, it'll be like 2076 before that happens. Do we know, John, if your ancient piece of garbage slow mac pro is going to be able to work with anything it seems like no i mean they were pretty they were pretty clear like i mean they didn't say anything about os supported platforms but i would assume this is a bad assumption previous years you would assume that if this was the if this version of mac os did not support intel they would have said it in the keynote but in in recent years it seems like they leave unfortunate news out of the keynote and maybe save it for state the union or something but they didn't say anything so i'm assuming sequoia still runs on intel minus all the features we're going to talk about in a little bit um but just you know uh reader sent in a listener sorry sent in uh a link to our predictions from past episodes we mentioned that on the last episode like what were our predictions i was kind of surprised to hear myself saying that my prediction was wwc 2024 but then i heard the reasoning that would be the exact pretty much the exact same time span for when apple dropped power pc support which is three years and seven months after the first intel mac so my if if they follow the same logic they should have dropped intel support today i don't think they did so therefore they're going even longer with this transition so good for them casey's prediction was 2026 and marco just waffled usually that's my cup of tea sounds about right yeah all right all right now we have a little over an hour in we have our first mention of artificial intelligence yeah uh this was again, I think I'm going to request and give myself an opening statement.

1:35:37I felt like what we all wanted, or certainly what I wanted, and I think we talked about this last week, was we wanted the adults in the room. And that's not really to slag on Microsoft necessarily or Google, but we wanted somebody with a little bit of, I can't think of ways to say this that aren't going to sound mean, but here we are and I'm very tired. So we wanted people that weren't, that were going to have taste and have, not class, but just apply artificial intelligence and large language models and things like that in ways that actually help regular humans. Not for me to figure out an FFMPEG incantation, but to do like normal stuff.

1:36:17And Craig comes out and, or maybe it was Tim, I think it was Craig though. It was Tim first. Okay. And says, you know, several things I'm going to read. These may not be verbatim quotes, but I think they're worth noting. you know we they called it apple intelligence i don't recall exactly when their reveal was but they said you know we want to ensure that the outcome of using ai features reflects the principles at the core of our promise we want them to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most they need to be intuitive and easy to easy to use deeply integrated into product experiences and they should understand you and be grounded in your personal context what is your routine?

1:36:53Who are your relationships with? What kind of communications do you participate in? And so on. And obviously, privacy is a very big deal. And so they say, oh, I think this is when the reveal was. It goes beyond artificial intelligence. It's personal intelligence. It's now Apple intelligence. So what you were saying about being adults and it could be phrased as being less hasty, being more conservative, but really what it is is

1:37:17Apple's implementation of everything, as they said, it reflects a value system. Apple has a value system that informs their products. Every company does. But the thing is, the value system of many companies is unattractive to customers. So they don't talk about it. Like their value system may be, we need as much of your information as possible because we can sell ads better to it. And they don't want to say that to you because it doesn't make you want to buy their products. But that is their value system and it is embodied in their product, right? And so Apple's value system, and again, it's not because Apple is a magnanimous or whatever.

1:37:48apple's business model does not involve selling advertisement and collecting information about you to sell to advertisers that's why they do this it's not because apple is good and you can say well maybe you know because apple does have ad type businesses or whatever and we've talked about apple's conflicts with their services business versus other ones or whatever but apple's value system is such that telling it to customers is advantageous for their business yeah and do they live up to their value system all the time no we call them on right but they do have a value system and the amount of sort of technology they put into trying to implement artificial intelligence stuff within the bounds of their value system, you see that it's not like BS.

1:38:28They're not blowing smoke up your butt. They did a lot of work that they didn't have to do to make these features exist and fit within their value system. And the problem is this thing that's sweeping the industry, this whole AI trend with LMs or whatever, a lot about it is counter to their value system of privacy and useful approach and making it easy for everybody. And so Apple had to figure out how we have to get in on this train because it's the trend or whatever. And Apple doesn't always follow trends, but Apple sees the value, using the value too much. They see how good these features could be.

1:38:59So they said, we can't ignore this. We have to do something here. But how do we take this thing that by its very nature consumes information indiscriminately, gives bogus answers to things, potentially harmful, offensive things that we don't want. how do we figure out how to provide the benefit to people while still keeping it within our values and i was honestly very impressed with the lengths that they have gone to to try to do what everyone else is doing and their in their catch-up in a way that like i bet other companies are looking at this like they did what for what reason why would they do all that work to preserve privacy that doesn't make any sense you know to go fast and break things um and so i was i came away really impressed with what they've done i mean obviously the features that we're going to talk about it's like okay yeah you can every one of these features you can say someone else had this already but i feel much more comfortable using these features in the way that apple has implemented them and it remains to be seen and we'll talk about for the next year how do they actually work because you could if you're all wonderful and privacy preserving and and deeply integrated into the operating system but it doesn't work well we'll complain about it but it sure demoed well yeah yeah i thought they handled it with a deft hand i thought it was well done because you know because to keep in mind, the environment into which they are announcing these AI-based features, some of which are server-based, and this is an awfully hostile environment in the culture right now, in the media, in the press, even just among the public.

1:40:27There's a lot of hate around AI stuff these days. It's a very, very hot area. And Apple historically has been hit or miss in terms of how they've been able to read the room in those ways. That's true. And I was a little concerned for them going into this, honestly. But I think they did a really good job with it. As John said, I think their approach to doing this in the Apple way with all the privacy focus and everything, I think it probably will result in not being as good or as capable as some of the other systems here and there. But overall, I think what they've shown, again, we'll see how it works, but I think what they've shown has a pretty good chance of working well enough that we will decide as Apple users this is worth the trade-off.

1:41:09I think they might have an actual advantage this time because, well, we'll talk to it when we get to it, I guess, but a lot of the capabilities they're providing require information that is not readily accessible to anything except for the OS platform because they have access to everything. And normally, you wouldn't want to use a platform that's like, we're going to take all your information and chuck it over the fence to OpenAI, right? And that'll give us these amazing features. but because apple has implemented all of their ai features in such a privacy preserving way they feel free to pull literally anything everything all your relationships all your contacts all your photos all your everything because they know they're not sending all that information to the server to be harvested for advertising purposes they're custom selecting just the two things you need uh your wife's name is this here's a picture of her here's the information we have about her here's the question the person asks and then it processes your request and discard that information, you would not want that information to being sent to arbitrary third-party AI vendors.

1:42:10You would never, like, say you're using this cool AI tool and say, great, I need access to all your photos and all your contacts and everything you've written in your messages and all your email. And it's like, you would never give that. It's like, well, we need that to do cool AI stuff. It's like, but do you need it all now? And they'd be like, yes, sell ads, right? So I think Apple's ability to pick and choose just the slices they want should make it possible for them to add not creepier features but features that as they suddenly take your personal context into account without you feeling like you're giving them everything never mind that apple already has access to everything because if you use apple photos they have all your photos you but like the whole idea of like well apple doesn't have access to your photos and then encrypted and apple doesn't have access to your messages and then encrypted except for iCloud backups unless you enable advanced data protection anyway it's the world is complicated but i i think in in this case they may actually be at an advantage here because they no longer have barriers to combining information about you to give good answers.

1:43:04They feel free to just yank it all because they have this very privacy-preserving way that they're doing it. Yeah. And I love that, you know, kind of as expected, they are doing as much as they can locally on device. And that's great for privacy concerns in lots of ways because then you can have even more access to things. But also it's great for latency and performance. Like, you know, some of the biggest problems that I've always had with Siri is that it's just so incredibly inconsistent in ways that feel kind of like server failures or server timeouts or things like that and so by putting so much on device and and of course by also having probably a pretty strong financial incentive to put more and more on device over time and to minimize server requests that is both good for privacy and and you know you're right like you know when they do have to send them to servers or to another model it there are they're sending a minimal set of information and that's good but in i got the impression that most requests are intended to be handled fully on device and that's going to be just amazing for consistency and performance also yeah the one thing they don't have with this and we talked about with learning the lms learning and everything is they're not pitching and they don't certainly don't have the idea of your own personal assistant that that learns about you over time right that's not this this is like one-offs or you have an agent it can do it can answer questions it can take commands or whatever but it immediately forgets everything the servers forget everything the client forgets everything i know they have the semantic model and they talked about this it's like we have a semantic model we didn't want to say we have the equivalent of microsoft's recall database on your phone but don't think about that comparison right because they do have this local only semantic model of all this stuff that is the stew that processed all your email and all your photos and all your other things so you can ask scary questions find me the picture of this person with this thing or whatever and i can pull it out because it's already done that processing but there's no agent that learns about you?

1:44:49Because if there was, it would live only on your phone, and when your phone goes in a lake, you would lose it. I think the phone is the agent in a way. The semantic index that they kept talking about, I think what they're trying to do is use all the data and info that you already entrust to your phone, not do something like Microsoft Recall or Rewind AI, where not creating a whole new record of every single thing like a screen recording. It's not as in readable form. It doesn't have plain text versions and it doesn't have screenshots but it has hopefully that information inside it right but i think you know what they're doing seems to be you know more like a search index but it's it's it's a search index in ai terms of information that your phone already is keeping it's it doesn't seem like it's keeping new records but it's not but it's not learning anything like it's not it's not gaining knowledge over time to become more and more intimately familiar with you it is always sort of just in time what it pulls from its semantic index and it can answer your question but there's no teaching it anything because the whole point is if there was teaching it what would you be teaching would you be teaching anything that's only on your device to do sort of a learning agent that learns about you and get smarter over time that would have to live somewhere other than on your phone and then introduce a whole host of other problems so they're not even addressing that they're saying you know this will crunch through the data on your phone which is all the data in your life and you could ask the questions and give you answer but it's never going to get any more knowledgeable about you other than you just adding new photos and new messages or whatever like there's no learning well but i think that is learning like you know you can't you can't give a huge preamble to your system prompt to you know things like please speak to me only in limericks like you can't do that i mean i mean like learning learning like as in you know getting familiar with you and like just the dream of the eye of like a thing that actually we discussed it the large angles don't learn in the ways that people think they do right and apple is not changing that here i just i just think it's interesting to clarify because they do have that by doing going with this approach they do have the problem of where would this thing live whereas all the voracious server-side people are like, don't worry, it all lives in our cloud.

1:46:43You'd both suck all your information up. And if they figure out how to make that learn, don't worry, you have your own private one and it gets smarter over time. And Apple doesn't have the ability to do that with this approach. I don't think it's going to hurt them because as we discussed the last episode, there is no good way to do that with LLMs right now. But if there ever is, Apple may need to, there may become a time where some intelligence needs to live somewhere other than on your phone. And I'm sure Apple will work hard to find a privacy-preserving way to do that. All right, let's talk about how we're actually using this model.

1:47:14Yep, so they talked about several different things, and it started with capabilities. So basically, what are we doing with this? And they talked about language. So prioritizing notifications, which seems like low-hanging fruit in terms of a good way to use it. It may be a very difficult thing to implement, but in terms of a good way to use this sort of thing. Are they going to prioritize down the Apple Store notification I got this morning? No, it's the highest priority. Yeah, right. You need a Father's Day gift. It's like, thank you so much, Apple Store. I know this is a stupid tangent, but like, you know the Apple TV thing that tells you a sports score that pops over your screen?

1:47:47Yeah. How do you disable that? I thought I had disabled it. I went through all the settings. That drives me crazy. There is a way to disable it. I have never watched a sport on Apple TV, ever. No part of all the information Apple knows about me would indicate that I like sports at all. It didn't gather that about you. And yet I'm getting those sports promos on top of everything I watched in the Apple TV. I it makes me want to set it on fire. I get so mad. There is some way to disable this. I'm sure I thought I had disabled. That's why. But I can't. So someone read in tell us how to actually disable it because it's driving me.

1:48:19Chuck your app. Anyway, it will prioritize those top priority. All right. The movie you're watching. It's real important for you to know the score on a sports game. You don't care about. Yeah. Hopefully the hopefully Apple's learning index is better now than whatever is running on the Apple TV. sometimes I don't even know what sport they're talking about. They're like, Rogers and Harrison are in the, like, I don't know who these people are. Am I supposed to know people by their last name? I can't tell what sport you're talking about. All right. So then there's new writing tools that are available system-wide.

1:48:44They may mention, I forget how they phrased it, but basically anywhere you would have a text field, like an actual Apple vended text field, you can do rewrite, you can summarize. At some point, they talked about changing the tone. That might have been email specific, I don't recall, but you can change the tone of things. I think it's anywhere. I think all these, this entire feature class is called rewrite, and I think this is in any standard text field, like Craig Federighi said in the don't call it a talk show, fake talk show they held afterwards, that it works. We should probably explain what that is in a minute, but carry on.

1:49:14That basically, that it works, it works anywhere that you currently see things like spell check. So any standard system. Yeah, third-party apps, not just, you know, anywhere you see those standard controls. And I was like, I believe macOS 8 had a way to select text and summarize it. We've come a long way. That summarization was not very good. I believe it would just pick the most relevant sentences based on analysis. Just string those together, which worked about as well as you can imagine. But yeah, another catch-up feature, every app that we've used with AI enhancement has a feature to summarize it and rewrite it and fix it.

1:49:43But they're implementing it well. It's system-wide. It's available to third parties. We hope it works well. I think it does make me a little bit uneasy that like, all right, so here we are. We're having AI generate and edit our messages that are going to be sent to someone else who's going to use AI to summarize them. And it's like, what are we doing? like what this seems like sexual i mean in in some respects like you would hope that this will teach people to be better writers when they see how things are rewritten do calculators teach people how to do but map themselves better not not it's not quite the same because you just care about the answer with the calculator where i assume people will read the revised writing to see if it is acceptable to them maybe that's not that's a big assumption i know but like things like that i think you can learn by seeing you know seeing how if you have if you had a human editor revise your writing and you watch them do it you will eventually become a better i'm not saying this is a tool to become a better writer but i i think there is some learning happening there because a lot of time people just write a certain way and they don't think about it and just having somebody rewrite their stuff like even if it's a computer and then seeing oh that actually is better that way it can teach them to be a better writer in small ways but we'll see how much people actually use these features.

1:50:54And for people not reading, that's obviously the danger case. It's like, oh, I'll just hit this button, and then I'll hit send. People are going to get burned by that. They're going to learn, oh, maybe I shouldn't read what I wrote. It's one of those things. Tools to give you enough rope to hang yourself, and I think this is the case with that. I do like, though, one of the options. So first of all, rewrite's going to give you a really, really good proofread grammar check kind of thing. It's going to be more advanced than most grammar checks. Isn't there a service Grammarly, is it? Whatever uses it for this.

1:51:21So that's good to have that beyond device to to not have basically a key logger from someone else so that's good but also like i like that they have tone changes as one of the options to rewrite messages so you can make your writing more formal or whatever and i think that's not or like you know have different like sentiment analysis to have it be like maybe less negative that i think is going to be nice for people who maybe are not great at that kind of writing or even that kind of speaking i mean like like forum software has had stuff like that for years where they'll say before you hit send on this message it seems pretty aggressive you don't want to calm it down you know like people have been using it to try to make people be less obnoxious online today like and i i tried to write down the tone things but they were all like nice i was like do you want your tone to be more concise or more friendly or more conciliatory right where is the more aggressive setting i want it to be more assertive i want it to be like maybe you're negotiating for real estate over email or something like that wasn't in the options and i kind of understand that because the thing we'll just start threatening people's lives or whatever right make me a better negotiate right but this is part of them being conservative with like this let's just have all the tone settings to be make you sound nicer and none of them to be because sometimes you do want to be more assertive but ai will not it's too dangerous for ai to help you with that at this point with respect i don't think that you needed to be more assertive about the locking i was so nice about i was just mostly incredulous no it's good too like you know for people who people who are trying to like write up like a formal business email or something and maybe maybe they don't have that kind of writing skill or maybe they don't know English that well.

1:52:46I think this has a lot of really good applications, but I think we are definitely going to have the problem of people not reading what it wrote and just sending it. And people don't read emails anyway. These are all... Us exchanging so much text is such a big change from when I was a kid when people did not exchange text this much, period, in their entire lives. They didn't write letters to each other and there was no text messaging, no email, no this, not... Now people work with text so much more. I think it is making people better writers and i think you learn like when you get your first job where you have to do like job email oh job email is different than text messages like kids will learn that when they get their first job and realize they can't address their co-workers and boss the same way and like there's a culture that evolves around that and you know for better for us we all learn how to write work emails and having computers help out with that uh you know maybe we'll just smooth that curve a little bit yeah please advise right so the language stuff is in mail notes safari pages keynote and third-party apps as john had mentioned then we get to images um i i don't know why i wrote down photos emojis and gifs but uh apparently that was mentioned uh you get like a bitmoji style generated images of people it's more like a memoji isn't it doesn't look kind of like them emoji style sort of but then you've got like the backgrounds and they're interact or they're not interactive but they're like holding things which is more bitmoji i don't know i mean it's one way or the other but yeah no you can what it's saying is there's you have pictures of people in your in your contacts in your photos collection that it has identified using the people in places feature you can ask it to draw you a cartoony picture of that person which is brave yes because that's a bold move cartoony pictures of people can go wrong in many many ways and this is an apple feature not an open ai feature which we'll get to in a little bit this is an apple feature so if apple hoses this uh it's gonna there's gonna be press about it there's a lot of ways this can go wrong right but they've been very careful with certain things I mean, don't make my nose too big or whatever.

1:54:40Like, I bet there's a lot of that kind of stuff in there. First of all, they don't want to make it something unflattering because people don't want to see a flattering picture of themselves. And second, I think it's got the same problem that I always complain about Memoji is that unlike the Mies and Nintendo, Memoji all have little pumpkin heads. And my head's not a pumpkin. It's a football, right? Like, they just regularize everybody into like, you know, like the little people from play school or whatever. Like, everyone looks like a doll. And then you don't see yourself in that. you're like you have not captured my likeness that doesn't look like me right this seems like it's going to try to capture people's likenesses so that when you paste it into a chat or whatever generated in whatever way people go oh that's timmy i recognize i recognize his face it's not just because timmy has brown hair and it's just a round pumpkin head with brown hair on it so this is the first sort of like uh potential danger zone of the features they've got because all the other ones like text summarization helping you with writing changing the sentiment nicer This has the potential to go wrong.

1:55:34But anyway, it's part of their image generation framework. It can make people for you. Indeed. And you can do it as sketches, illustrations, or animations. And it's built into the system apps. Then another capability, Action. Basically what they're saying is you can say, I think to Siri was the implication. Yeah, this is such a weird structure of the thing. We've talked about it before of like, how are they going to talk about the OS without talking about AI features? And the fact is they didn't. They talked about AI features. They just didn't call them AI. How are they going to talk about Siri when they haven't introduced Siri yet?

1:56:05They just talked about it, and they just didn't mention Siri. Like, later they're going to mention Siri. Normally, they have a way to arrange it so they can talk about what they want about it. They couldn't avoid it. They had to talk about things that they hadn't, quote, unquote, talked about yet. And this is one. Yes, you're asking Siri. So the examples they gave, you know, pull up the files that Jaws shared with me last week, or show me all the photos with Declan and Michaela and Aaron and me, or show me the podcast that my wife sent last week. I was happy to hear that. And so, you know, it's— I wasn't.

1:56:30I can't do that. Well, fair. My point is just that I'm always pleased when Apple acknowledges that podcasts are a thing. But yeah, I think these make a lot of sense. I think this is the sort of thing we want to see from Siri is making it more useful. They also said a lot about personal context. And they started to flirt a little bit with like Rewind AI and what is it, Recall that Microsoft has been embroiled over. But they said that there is an awareness of what's on the screen. They didn't say that. That was my, they showed things that said, hey, when you're on the screen, that's the context.

1:57:00And so when you say something like, oh, send this to whatever or like. I'm assuming it's not OCRing the screen and scraping the info. So I'm assuming this is all like user activity APIs and Apple's apps. I don't know if that's true. Well, I don't think that's exclusively true because one of the examples they showed at some point, it might not have been at this part of the presentation, but like somebody sent their address in the text message thread, right? So like you and I are exchanging messages. You send me your mailing address. And they said to Siri, you know, add that address to his contact or something along those lines.

1:57:30But Siri has full access to messages, right? True. It's Apple's own app. Like if that was WhatsApp, what would it have done? I see your point. yeah i'm not sure that's a good point i'm not yeah i mean i and honestly i think like because of the way they're doing this i would have no problem with it screen scraping and ocr-ing it because i know that it is just getting the information it wants it sending it to a server that doesn't log it that has no ability to store things and it throws it away right that's so much better it is also probably just using the accessibility apis like it's it's probably already all there are lots of like i said there's ns user activity or not ns but there's user activity api there's the other various ways where this information is exposed to the os to the frameworks that you're using because you're not you know you're using the ui frameworks there's lots of ways they can do this and that is the advantage they have as the platform vendor and being having being context aware in this way is great because when they said about context like how are we providing context you're providing context by just using your phone whatever you're doing on your phone that is the context and then you activate the new siri which we'll see in a little bit and you don't have to do anything to provide the context it's already there and the os sort of extracts that from what you're doing and what you have done, right?

1:58:35Because the OS knows all that and uses that to hopefully get a more useful answer out of the LL. So I talked about architecture. I feel like maybe we should try to breeze through this as quickly as possible. But basically, they made a whole speech about how privacy is important. And of course, they cited that on-device processing is where they're doing most of this, which leads us to Apple intelligence being Apple Silicon only, apparently A17 Pro and above. They talked about how there's different models. There's LLMs and diffusion models. They have an on-device semantic index. The software image, they made a lot of, they talked a lot about how their images, which they meant both for the iPhone and for their servers, which we're going to get to in two seconds, are independently verifiable.

1:59:22And I'm not entirely clear how or why or what. All they're saying is, you know how security researchers can find flaws in iOS because they have iOS? That's the same thing. If you run servers, there was no reason for you to give them what's there. Now, anyone listening to this who's not in the Apple way, I was like, why don't they just give them the source code? That's not yet the Apple way. But honestly, analyzing a compiled binary is much harder than analyzing the source code. But that's the way it is. So they talk about private cloud compute, which basically the short short of it is they try to do everything on device when they can, including a lot of the image generation, I think they had said at one point, that they do that on device.

1:59:59But there is an awareness that, oh, this is not going to work on device. I've got to send this to something with more compute power. And so they're using servers that are in turn using Apple Silicon that draws on the security properties of Swift, among other things, which I'm not entirely clear what that means. It does mean memory safety and stuff like that. This private cloud compute finally makes sense, a sense of the rumor we talked about in a past episode about using Apple Silicon and servers. finally makes sense right not because of the secure on client it's because this is stuff they would run on device they're just farming it out and if you're going to farm it out you have to farm it out to you don't have to but it's much easier to farm it out to the same architecture i would run it on apple silicon but it would burn your cpu or you don't have enough ram well guess what apple makes bigger apple silicon chips finally it's like why would they use the m2 ultra this is why it's it's apple silicon it is think of it as just an outboard giant processor for your phone that you call upon briefly to do a thing and get the answer back that may i feel so much better i'm like why are they doing this why are they making a server and so yeah and they'll give you they'll give you the image of the thing that's running on that server and they'll do a cryptographic thing where you know you can prove that ios won't talk to it unless it's been the one piece they didn't mention is like there's got to be a third party involved in here otherwise we're just taking apple's word for it that will only let you use the published ones but this they're bending over backwards like they're going almost as far enough to give you the source code to it and saying we're going to do outboard processing but we don't want any of your data these things can't log they have no storage system subsystem they're running like a version of apple's operating systems that takes those parts of the operating system out there's no support for uh for persistent storage there's no file system like there's like it's just so you see this a lot in you know cloud computing where they'll have servers that can't log that don't save you any information this is what they're doing because they don't want this information it's cheaper for them not to have it and they are really really going to great lengths to try to make it so that an outside observer could say yes they're honestly not saving my stuff but they do want to be able to do things faster than they can on your phone or with more ram than they can on your phone this is a very clever solution i'm much more optimistic about it now than i was before yeah and the other thing that i think worth mentioning is marco alluded to a quasi talk show that we went to and then we ignored it after that But what we had done was, during the State of the Union, actually, they had I Justine interview John Gianandrea, I think was the pronunciation.

2:02:25Well, Tim Cook didn't say, Tim Cook just called him JG. That's what everyone calls him. Yeah, John Gianandrea. But anyways, they had a conversation, and it was like half an hour long. And it was mostly softballs, and mostly it appeared to be prepared both remarks and questions. But one of the things that Justine had asked was, well, you never really talked about the environment. And this all comes back together because I forget who it was. But one of them said, look, all of our chips began life as iPhone chips where power is incredibly important. And so if we're going to do all this cloud computing, why wouldn't we try to do it on something that sips power rather than slurps power?

2:03:04And so here again, like you were saying, John, this also helps me grok and understand why they're doing all this with Apple Silicon. And they emphasize, oh, and by the way, all data centers run on 100 % renewable energy anyway. Yep, exactly right. So anyway, so experiences. Now we get to Siri. So Siri apparently serves 1.5 billion requests per day, and it was introduced 13 years ago. I think that was my first WWDC then, because that would make it 2011, wouldn't it? It doesn't matter. It was introduced in 2011, but yeah, my first was 2009. Right. I was 11. And that was your first as well, right, John?

2:03:38Sorry, I'm looking at John and pointing, which is not helpful for the listeners. We don't do this in person often. So anyways, it's more natural, relevant, and personal. It has a whole new look. It's like a glowing rim light and rainbow animation. I also like how there's a little bit of an indentation animation where the button is where you're squeezing it. That's kind of a cool look. We were talking about in the pundit world, are they going to rename Siri? Because the old one has such bad PR. It's so dumb. Everyone hates Siri. maybe they'll call it siri x or siri 10 or something like that not that they would rename it but rebranded siri ai another possibility right and then people like oh no they'll just keep this name the same it'll tell us really this time it's good right they did something that i hadn't heard anyone predict which is you know keep the name the same which a lot of people did say that they would do but they essentially totally rebranded siri the icon is different the user interface is different how it manifests in the os is different every it is you would be forgiven for thinking that Siri is gone and has been replaced with something new.

2:04:37I didn't think they would change the icon. The iconic Siri look with the wavy thing, gone. Now there's a colorful infinity symbol thing or whatever. The icon's out of the menu bar. Everything about this is rebranded, except it's still Siri. This is really trying to let people know you may have been annoyed with Siri and we didn't change the name, but this is better. But everything is better, yeah. So they made a big point about how it will understand you even if you stumble over your word. which I use Siri most when I'm in the car because I'm using it with CarPlay and I'm responding to text messages or whatever the case may be.

2:05:10I don't know what my problem is. I literally talk for a living. That is literally my vocation. And yet I am constantly stumbling over my own words. And so hopefully that will get a lot better. It maintains the conversational context. And they gave examples that you would expect. I can't recall any of them right now. But it was what you would expect. So do this and then, okay, what about or taking several steps in a row. Because context window is a natural part of LLM, so this fits well with that. There's type to Siri, so you can double tap on the bottom of the screen, and then you can type kind of, sort of like a chat bot, which I think there's a type to Siri already.

2:05:45You can type to Siri now, but they're just exposing it more broadly because a lot of the time, the barrier to using Siri is I don't want to talk out loud right now. In whatever context I'm in, I don't want to or can't, and so this gives it a more prominent option to something you could do before, but most people probably didn't know how to access. they're giving Siri a lot of product knowledge, which I was like, I'm sorry, what? So they said, you know, you can ask Siri, how do I scan a QR code? And once it processes and realizes what you're asking, it will show like a little help thing at the top of the screen saying step one, do this, step two, do that, step three, do this, which I thought was phenomenal.

2:06:20And, you know, another example they gave very quickly is how do I write a message now and schedule it to send later? And so it will tell you, it will teach you how to do that, which I thought was very cool. Although I don't, I didn't go through with that as like, do those instructions stay on the screen? How can you access the UI when they're there? But it's better than nothing. But yeah, to be clear, they didn't say this explicitly. I'm assuming it's only Apple products. Like, how do I fix my refrigerator? Like, they're not on board for that. But I will definitely use this because very often I want to Google for something and find like a text bag.

2:06:46Like, how deep does it go? Can I ask it what the resolution was on like the second iPad or something? I mean, Apple has this info. It's great that they're exposing it. maybe it's mostly useful for tech podcasters, but I'm looking forward to it. It's just a KBase index at this point. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but by all means, it's like a better search engine for information that's already on Apple's website somewhere, but you'll never find. Unfortunately, John, I don't think it will prepare the way for you, so I wouldn't try that. There's in-app actions, so add this photo to the email I drafted to Steve, or show me photos of Stacey in New York wearing her pink coat.

2:07:22Like that example in particular, I find that one of the things I miss so deeply about Google Photos, which was also not perfect, but at the time that I abandoned it a couple of years ago, was pretty darn good, was being able to search for something with natural language. And Apple has supported this for the last couple of years, but it's not great. Yeah, they had a fixed set of words and phrases that you could use. And if it wasn't on there, you're, you know, I remember, like, I have an app on my phone called Queriable. And I showed this to an Apple person at one point. And I said, I use this third party app to search photos.

2:07:57And they're like, why don't you just use the photo search? You can just type things or whatever. And I showed them an example. And it was like ripped blue t-shirt or some phrase like that. Queriable, a third party app that has to grind over and index all your things, but that uses type an LL on type thing. Like, look, it found it instantly. And you know the photos didn't have ripped blue t-shirt as any one of the keywords, so you would never find it. And finally, Apple has caught up with that and said, yes, you just type what you want to find. We'll do our best to find it. We're not confining you to keywords.

2:08:23Powered by modern technology. I'm very happy to see this. Me too. I hope it works really well because this is one of those things. And this is to bring it full circle, what I was talking about earlier, and not to say that you guys disagree at all. But this is what I want to see. Take something that is frigging painful in my life. Like I know that I took a picture of me and Marco on the Nürburgring and I know that it was sometime in 2013. And yes, I could like drill in via map, but I forget where the Nürburgring is. You're scrolling and you find the month, there's so many photos there and you go past it because it's just one picture.

2:08:54Right. Yeah. It's so frustrating. This is the moment that I want the adults in the room to fix that problem. And as far as we know so far, they're fixing it. So I'm here for it. They also said you can do something like, say, make this photo pop, and I guess it increases saturation or something on those lines. I have funny ways for you to hit a button in the UI. Okay, sure. Significant enhancements to app intents. And this was kind of hinted at or obliquely mentioned many, many, many times. But basically, the app intents system, and Marco, I'm happy for you to jump in whenever you're ready, but the app intents system is powering a lot of what Siri is doing, which is exactly, I think, what Marco, you had predicted.

2:09:32Yeah, it's what I've been hoping for. because it's a way for apps to expose different actions like play a podcast, send email or whatever to the shortcut system so far. And that's great for shortcut users, but there's not that many shortcut users. So what they're doing is expanding the system and basically adding it to the semantic index. So that way, at some point rolling out slowly over the next year or so, Siri will first be able to access those app intents and start doing actions like, give me a list of all the podcasts and Overcast that they never set up a shortcut for, that it can use the App Intense system with AI approaches and linguistic analysis to look at the descriptions and actions and kind of try to figure out what you actually meant and then actually do that in those apps.

2:10:24What they showed today is the early foundations of that. It's going to be a while before we can actually really do that. and a lot of this stuff is kind of hand wavy as like soon this will be available or later later in the year or next year but this is good this is a this is exactly what i was hoping to see this is a great first step yep couldn't agree more uh they also gave another great example siri when's my mom's flight landing and it was pulling together not only the email that has her flight number but also what is the actual arrival time for that flight and again this is smart useful useful ways to solve problems for people i have a question about that though a lot of the examples they were showing were like oh and we pulled this from email or whatever and they did show the superhuman email app at one point but like my question is i don't use the mail app does it have no access to my email because it's from google i understand it's a third-party integration problem google's not going to want to share that with you google already does a lot of these things google will read my emails knows where my flights are gives me summaries and so on and so forth but it seems like because i use gmail nothing in my email will be exposed to siri which will make it less useful for me and that is actually a problem for apple because a lot of people do use third-party mail clients and i hope apple at least comes up with a way to integrate with siri you know for third-party email apps that then google can ignore for three years like they did with like uh what was it multitasking in ios what was the feature they didn't add to ios yeah yeah for the ipad right i mean this is probably all part of the spotlight apis um i don't know to what degree i haven't i don't know if we know yet like through documentation and everything to what degree the existing spotlight apis are being used to feed the semantic index from third-party apps i don't think we know that uh but that is that is the way to do it um and so that's probably one of those other areas that we'll also see like over time we're going to probably see them start you know making these APIs slowly more integrated, more public with the semantic index and allow third-party apps to add data to it.

2:12:20Whether the apps will is a very different question. Google is not motivated to do this. Google has no spotlight supports. Google has its own search, which is very good. But it's kind of a shame that the usefulness of Siri depends highly on having access to things like your email that it just may not have access to if you don't use Apple Mail. So they said it's a new era for Siri. Then you can enhance your writing. We spoke about most of this already, but there's smart reply in mail. And what I thought was interesting was if you, if, if like I write to the boys, you know, hey, when are you going to San Jose?

2:12:56What is your flight number? When are you getting in? Et cetera, et cetera. So I have like a list of questions, right? What they had was like a wizard sort of interface where you would just say, okay, my flight number is one, two, three, four. I get in on Sunday and I'll be in at 5 p.m. or whatever. And then it would, based on my answer, their answers, I guess, it would draft an email that would say, you know, hey, I'm getting into such and such time and blah, blah, blah. And I thought that was very neat. Yeah. I mean, and people are like, oh, don't you want to write that email yourself? Especially on a phone, this is like, if you're on the go, you don't have time to tap out an email, but you just want to say, yes, I'll be there and I'll be there at eight or no, I'm not coming.

2:13:27And you don't want to have to type out that email. This is a useful feature. Like it's, you know, you called it a wizard using in the Microsoft terminology. It's turning what would be a typing exercise into a button pressing exercise. And when you're on the go, especially like on the watch, I don't know if this is exposed in the watch, but even on the phone, sometimes you don't want to sit there and grab your phone with two hands and type, type, type or whatever. I give this feature a big thumbs up. Yeah. Mail, previews and mail. So what I was going to say is previews and mail, now summaries, what does that even mean?

2:13:53So when you're looking at your inbox, for example, and you'll see the first two or three lines of text from that email, oftentimes that's like a, hey, how's it going? and hey, we spoke about this. Well, now what that's going to show is a summary of the email. Two very big thumbs up for me if that's what's happening or if it works well, I guess I should say. And it also will bubble up priority messages. Same thing with notifications, priority at the top, you'll get summaries, et cetera. They specifically enumerated, oh, if the group chat is popping off, you'll get a summary of it, which is great.

2:14:26Focus has a reduced interruptions mode and they showed a screenshot of like maybe important, and I think it was like a rideshare or something like that. I forget exactly what it was. They had a section about expressing yourself and they talked about Genmoji. So what you can do is you can type a T-Rex wearing a tuxedo on a surfboard and then you'll get a T-Rex, an emoji looking thing of a T-Rex wearing a tuxedo on a surfboard. If this works, that's really cool. I like it. It's basically an emoji generator that generates new art in the style of Apple's emoji, which is great. This is a clever idea to choose to do this particular feature because the images generated are low resolution.

2:15:05That's true. That's faster to generate. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. They picked very tiny images. Very often, the AI image generators will make you a thumbnail first. And if you really like it, it'll do the longer processing for the bigger thing. But these are all fast and presumably on device and presumably trained on Apple's own emoji. That was one of the questions, by the way, that I just asked. that they said, and you may be wondering, listening to this, is they asked Apple, what did you use to train all your AI models? And their answer was not great. I was hoping they would have touted in the thing.

2:15:37And by the way, everything we train these with is information that we own. But what they said instead was, we trained it on publicly available information on the web, yada, yada. They didn't have a story kind of like Adobe or whatever of like, look, we paid for our own, all the information we trained this on. It's not on any of your user data. It's just on like stock photos that we bought or licensed. We licensed things from New York time. They didn't say that. They trained it on publicly available information. So Apple is not currently entirely, you know, immune to whatever the fallout is of the legal ramifications of training AI stuff.

2:16:13Yep. So they have an image playground, which this is where we're starting to, you know, jump the shark a little bit, but it could be cool. So what this is, is it's in line, or I believe they said in a dedicated app, and you can create playful images. There are themes, costumes, accessories, places, and more. It all happens on device, and you can use different styles, like we mentioned before, animation, sketch, or illustration. There are suggestions related to personal context. You can do this, I think, in many different places. And this is creating like a, what was the image generator thing? You just said it a second ago, the stable diffusion um it's giving like a stable diffusion style image this is 2024 clip art yeah actually they really showed it being used as clip art you need an image or something now you can just describe what it is or if you did a sketch of something they showed someone like drew like an outline of something you can just say take this and make it into a picture and they even showed hey maybe you didn't provide an illustration maybe you wrote a note or a document and you just circle the blank area next to it and it says make me an image and it will look at the text and figure based on that text here's what the image should be i presume that this was trained only on known licensed images because this is a big danger zone but if they train it only on like if there's no porn in there right it's not going to generate those type of things right it seems very constrained and it's just the interface is wacky and weird and really yes maybe it's like a glowing blob and these things floating around it i'm not sure that's the right choice for this feature but anyway uh if you need to generate ai looking stock art that everyone will know was ai generated uh you can use this feature to do it it's available to third parties it's available as a dedicated app it appears in lots of places it's blobby and weird and i think this is the most sort of out there feature they decided to add that is a questionable utility of questionable legality based on what they've told us and i think all the stuff that it generates is kind of recognizable as having been generated but you know it's better than i guess doing what other people what people did before features like this which is that you just google you just type what you wanted in google you make it an image search you grab some image you found on the web you yank it and put it in your thing and this is probably better than that they mentioned a few other things uh photo editing they have a cleanup tool magic eraser style thing uh searching using natural language which we talked about the memory movies which i actually really enjoy those they're clearly a very naive implementation but they're fun and i guess they're going to get a lot better or you could even type a description and it'll assemble the movie for you they even said including chapters i'm not sure if they literally mean chapters or if they mean like different phases like a title card or whatever and by the way the way the third party thing of like scribbling over an image or whatever that's their magic wand tool it's part of like pencil kit the little pencil thing that you see lets you pick like a highlighter a pencil a pen or whatever.

2:18:55Now you have a new tool, which is like a magician's magic wand. And that's the thing you use in any document where you're using pencil kit and that thing appears, you can just grab the magic wand and circle something that you drew and it will make an image out of it. Yep. And then Craig comes back to say that notes will record and transcribe audio. And then I believe he said you can also do this on a phone call. And part of that is that it will notify you, they didn't explain how, but notify you and the other party, I should make it clear. They will notify both parties that the recording has started and that will be part of the phone call and then it will record and transcribe it yeah and summarize it afterwards right yeah so all you know common you know voice meeting uh features and then all this is available for free on new os's then they talked about hey what if you need to do something more like something more intense that requires more general knowledge etc etc so we've partnered with chat gpt and gpt 4.0 and siri can leverage chat GPT.

2:19:51And what we've talked about, and we are not the only ones, is, well, how does Apple make it clear that if this gets gross or weird or whatever, that's not on us. That's them over there. That's the double popped collar weirdos over there. Don't blame us. And so what happens is as you're using Siri, it will say, hey, I forget exactly how it's verbalized, but basically, I can't do this chat GPT. It doesn't say I can't do this. That's the thing about this feature. We're like, how is this going to manifest? How are they going to present it? The fact is, they don't have anything like this. Now, if they did have something like this, how would they use it?

2:20:23We don't know because they don't have anything like this. But basically, you talk to Siri and I'm sure it doesn't say I can't do this. What it does is helpfully offer, hey, do you want me to send this to ChatGPT? As if people know what the hell ChatGPT is. They do. People know. And you could say yes or you can say no. And if you say yes, it will do it and it will bring it back. And they're really sort of isolating it to lay the blame. And I was kind of surprised when they said, and by the way will you this may work with other things besides chat gpt in the future they even named google gemini they said you know google gemini we were talking with them and the rumors that you read no they didn't say this but they said hey we may you know we may integrate with other third-party large language models what they didn't say is we're also internally working to make our model as good as theirs so we can use it they do have their own models they're using everything we've talked about so far is apple's own models running an apple's own servers and Apple's own device.

2:21:15And they emphasize this in the keynote. That's just, just to be clear, everything you've seen, it's us, it's all us as privacy preserving. But then they didn't say this, we don't have, we don't have this. There's a thing we don't have that we know people are interested in and we wanted to provide access to it. And the way they're doing it is sometimes when you talk to Siri, it's just that you talk to somebody else. Yep. And so they will go to chat GPT. This will do composition, image generation, no account required. It's free. there's nothing logged chat GPT subscribers can optionally connect their account to get more paid features etc etc they said you're in control of when chat chat GPT is used it's coming later this year and support for other AI models in the future and so basically that's AI for the rest of us as they said iPhone 15 Pro and iPad and Mac with M1 or later US English this summer everyone else pound sand for the time being and iPad M1 and later too sorry yes yes yes yeah i this is this is pretty great i mean i think we need to wrap up because we're going along here um this i i'm very happy with what they've announced today i i think it is it is exactly the kind of thing we would expect from apple like and kind of at the top of what we would expect from apple like it's not underwhelming it's not uh there's no like major limitations or compromises that we can see yet i think it just looks like a really solid set of updates and i like that you know where they're going with with their ai features does seem to be exactly in line with both what we would expect from apple and what we would hope from apple so overall you know we'll see over the coming months as we dive into the apis and see what the limitations are and then as we actually get to use these betas like we'll see kind of where the rough edges still are what features aren't there yet but overall like as a way for them to have set the direction i'm very happy with what this is yeah i mean we all these things are still subject to okay well we have to actually try to use them because the things they describe are great until we see what answers they give them but with with these sort of ailm things that's the big question like will it do a good job we like we like how it's set up we like as i said the architecture and their private clouds and the privacy preserving and we like how it integrates and we like everything about it but the bottom line is you're going to get a result is the result useful does it get it wrong like this has always been the problem with siri siri ostensibly can do a bunch of things, but often you ask it to do them and it can't do them.

2:23:33Will it be consistent more than serious? Will it be faster? These are all things that we'll find out when we start running the betas and see how it works out. But the architecture and the arrangement and the selection of features they've laid out all look good. It's just a question of execution now, and we hope they do that well. Yep. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Trade Coffee and Delete Me. And thank you especially to our members. You support us directly. We are so thankful for that. You can join atp.fm slash join. What are we doing for Overtime this week? I think we're going to be talking about the Apple Park WWDC experience, which I'm very excited to talk about.

2:24:11Everything except maybe the food will be in Overtime. We'll probably give everyone the food stuff in just a moment. So Overtime is our member exclusive segment. You can join and listen atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everyone, and we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into mastodon 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-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.

2:25:14It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. So, John, how was the WWDC food? So we used to talk about the WWDC box lunches. Yeah. Because they would be in, like, big convention centers. and the convention centers very often have contracts that require Apple to use their vendor for food that you serve people. So they had to use those vendors and that food was often exciting and surprising and unexpected and soggy and strange and just the source of lots of conversations. This was my first WDUC at Apple Park, even though they've done it here for a couple of years.

2:25:59It was Casey's first as well. They did not have box lunches. Apple is not required to use some weird vendor for their food. In fact, they can do whatever they want. It's their food. It's in Apple Park. And I have to say, not that this is a high bar, but this was the best WWDC food I have ever had. Not even close. It's nothing like the box lunches you see. It was better than most catered food at any kind of office conference thing you're going to see. It was interesting. It was executed pretty well. They didn't have many items that were ill-advised. like like like an ice cream sundae and they leave it out in the sun for an hour like there's some food items that are will work better in a context where you have to put out large volumes of it out for people now i will say that i was with the media people in a smaller area i don't know if the attendees got different food than we did but the media area had maybe you know 100 or 200 people versus 5 000 attendees well no it's not 5 000 anymore right no i think it's like 1500 or something I don't know.

2:26:59It seems like a lot, but anyway, there's a lot more, and so maybe the food was different down there, but yeah, they had a selection. I don't even think they called it pizza. I think they called it like focaccia with tomato sauce and cheese on top with basil, and that's what it was, and I have to say. Yeah, it was not pizza. It didn't. I mean, it looked like it was pretending to be Sicilian pizza, but what it tasted like was focaccia with tomato sauce, mozzarella, but it was for what it was, I give it a thumbs up. Wow. It didn't tastes like pizza but it tastes like a good food item that i want to eat right and that's what it's got to do and they had this little thing with like the pork belly on a cornbread thing that was really good too yeah the hell that was i'm like thumbs up on that too and because it was like a slab of thick cut bacon basically because that's what pork belly basically is and or vice versa and a little piece of cornbread like a little sliver of jalapeno that was really good they had some sort of fish like sandwich thing yeah i didn't bring the fish you know i wouldn't go for the it was really good it was actually really good for seconds i did and actually breakfast was really good too come to think of it they had little yeah i had a great overnight oats thing at breakfast no i didn't have that but i had they had little breakfast sandwiches that were like egg and bacon whatever those are really good yeah those little mini slice like i got one with like eggplant on and some other stuff some pickled peppers and eggplant just i mean it wasn't you know it's not high cuisine and you could tell some of it you know it's been out for a while and some of the pickled peppers did soak into like the kind of hot dog bunny type but i'm not saying it's amazing great food but boy so much better than those box night and day so much better so So much better.

2:28:25There was something else that I – oh, I saw you grab a little, like, cup of salad. And I'm really allergic to spinach, and so I'm always a little – like, I love salad, but I'm always a little reluctant to, you know, brave that in this sort of scenario. But I looked, and they had the ingredients there because California, I guess. But, hey, it worked out in my favor. And I had that, and it had all sorts of ingredients that I don't typically eat, but it was very, very tasty. So I enjoyed that. They're called vegetables. Oh, stop. I have salads all the time. um but yeah the chocolate chip cookie they had little packages chocolate cookie was pretty good yeah even even the touch screen coffee was actually pretty good like i oh they have one of those like you know touch screens you push what you want and it just very slowly drips it out this very fancy looking faucet and but even that was actually like okay which i was not expecting it to be yeah no i was very one complaint is that they had uh water just you know water bottles there and to try to be environmentally better they didn't have plastic water bottles they had like aluminum water bottles the caps on those aluminum water bottles are so hard to get off way too hard i have one right here it's fine just the initial thing where you have to break the little things that are connecting that's what i mean not once it's open it's fine i got you gotta do some strength training on that your wrist action i know it's just i mean i i got them open it's not but it was just it's harder it's harder than it should have been so there's one design problem with those with those bottles but yeah again the bar is low you're not expecting much but uh but pleasantly surprised you know it's as you would expect the apple park food i'm sure people who work there it's just like it's like work cafeteria food but well i think it was it said cafe max oh yeah no it's all the same that's what you get if you work there but like it is having eaten at a lot of company cafeterias in my career this is a step up from any place i have ever worked yeah have you ever been to any of the cafe max ever ever ever yes okay so because we went like in 2017 honestly i've always been very pleased with them yeah same i've gone to a few here and there like over different years and different buildings and different people giving us lunches and stuff.

2:30:17It's always been good. Yeah, I was very impressed with the food. It got two thumbs up for me. Beep. Beep. Beep.