592: I Think He Won the Game

32:04Indeed, that is, well, we'll see what happens but selfishly i hope not unselfishly yeah let's go all right so you had cast about john i think it was you john maybe it was marco but i'm presuming it was john it was all of us it was all of us there you go uh to how do we disable sports well it wasn't me because i actually kind of like this but anyway how did disable do you like the sports that you didn't you didn't chime in do you do you like them you're like oh i didn't know that my favorite college football team something happened to them do you does that happen i i like it on the occasion it's a team that i care about Now, it will, if memory serves, I don't, other than F1, I'm not really paying attention to sports at the moment.

32:40So anyways, if it's a team that I don't care about, or especially a sport I don't care about, then I find it frustrating and annoying, like I think you guys do. But if it's at least a sport that I care about, like, let's say it's a close game between two teams that I don't really care that much about, then I don't mind that so much at all. But so like if it's two college football teams, for example, that are having a close game, yeah, maybe I'll be interested in that. But if it's two, I don't know, baseball teams that are having a close game, could not care less. See, here's why this thing has irritated me so much.

33:12You know, people wrote in to say, oh, just unfollow all the sports teams. You must have launched Apple Sports and followed sports teams. And so I went in there and nope, sure didn't. Then some other people said, oh, you have to go unfollow your local teams in the Apple News app under their sports section. So I went there and nope, I didn't have anything there either. This is literally just an opted in feature that they added to tvOS for, I think, everyone. Because nothing about any of my Apple activity would suggest that I ever want to watch or ever have watched sports using an Apple device. So I guess this is just opted in for everyone.

33:49and what drives me nuts is like Apple is or at least used to be so careful about respecting the user experience when doing something really immersive like watching a drama on TV like I've been sitting there watching these like you know really serious TV shows often by the way not even using the Apple's TV app often in other apps like the Max app and then this sports pop-up pops up in the corner like I never would have enabled that I never did enable that I've never watched sports on an Apple device. I don't follow any sports teams on any device, let alone an Apple device, because I don't follow any sports.

34:24They are just intruding upon the sanctity of a full screen TV episode, a drama that I'm watching on my TV with their premium experienced, allegedly premium experienced Apple TV platform and box. That is so against their ethos. That is so gross. Apple used to never do stuff like that. And there are so many paper cuts like this creeping into their products in the effort of ever increasing services engagement and revenue. It is really irritating me. And it just seems like the standards of the company around things like this are just going down and down and down over time. And it makes me sad. Yeah, you can see why they would want to throw this in people's face because no one's ever going to find it to turn it on manually.

35:09but the normal way to do that which is still irritating but is way better than what they did is on first startup after the os update or on the first time you go back to the home screen after the os update pop up a one-time thing you hope it's one time pop up a one-time thing says hey by the way it looks like you've just upgraded tv os one two three uh there's a new feature that will show you sport scores uh when something exciting happens do you want to enable that yes no right but they didn't do that they just literally apparently turns it on and you know as marco mentioned the the other those places that mentioned to look you should look there because i did add favorite teams to the sports app i'm like that must be it so i deleted them uh and i looked in apple news and i didn't have anything there but the actual location of this feature thanks to jason snell is in tv os go to settings apps tv and then find the item that says exciting games in the notification section and turn that off that is the thing that they turned on for you no one would ever find that on their own to turn it on manually which is why you'd have to prompt them on first boot after the new os or whatever but they just turned it on from everybody as marco mentioned like of all the things to intrude on a full screen watching television experience that they need to come up with like sort of company-wide guidelines that like look unless someone has manually opted into it you cannot ever pop up anything on the screen unless it's like their house is on fire like the home kit can pop up things if there's a smoke alarm going off i'll allow that or like a security camera but other than that sports scores are not the same as your house on fire uh yeah i mean i i can totally understand why this would be very frustrating and i do not like how buried it is let me just repeat what you said settings apps tv exciting games that's not where i would look to find this at all but what are you gonna do all right we got a phenomenal flex from matthew willoughby who is extremely excited about finally being able to get a rest day and they sent us a picture of an apple watch ultra where it says you're you've received this award this is your longest move streak you've received this award for your longest move streak which lasted 3 338 days this was sent on such a day that i guess john you computed that 3 338 days before when this was sent was April 23rd of 2015.

37:27Does that have any significance? That was the day the original Apple Watch first launched. On the previous episode, I said, hey, this move streak thing where you're allowed to have rest days, I bet there's someone out there who got a Series Zero watch and has had a move streak going since that day and somehow didn't lose their streak every time they upgraded watches and is just thankful that finally they can get a rest day. This person truly does exist. It's Matthew Willoughby. Yep. He's wearing an Apple Watch Ultra. So he has upgraded from the Series Zero through a series of Apple Watches to the Ultra.

37:59His move streak has lasted the longest that any Apple Watch move streak could possibly last for someone who bought this watch at retail, because that was literally day one of the release of the Apple Watch. It's impressive. It's very impressive. He says, and I quote, all caps, I can finally have a rest day. Yes, Matthew, you can. You've earned it. I'm not sure that's what he said. I think what he said is, I can finally have a rest day. it's something more along those lines apple should fly someone to his house like like you like the the gamification of fitness i think he won the game yeah well done all right apple id has been renamed to apple account as was foretold as the prophecy foretold uh so apple in one of their newsroom posts says with the releases of ios 18 ipad os 18 macOS Sequoia and watchOS 11 Apple ID is renamed to Apple account for a consistent sign-in experience across Apple services and devices and relies on a user's existing credentials they did it so they did this and now make a marker listener here how many years will it take us to not say Apple ID on this program infinite years it's going to be a while alright let's start doing some OS based follow up and let's start because John wrote pretty much all these show notes.

39:19Where do you think we're going to start? We're going to start with macOS. So tell me about macOS 15 Sequoia with the Apple Pencil and iPad in sidecar mode. So what's the ask here? What are we talking about? Technically, we started with tvOS because we wanted to get your glory slash sadness in. But anyway, yes, macOS is the next one up. So we were talking before, like we were talking about math notes. Like, do you think you could use math notes with handwriting in Sequoia if you use an iPad in sidecar mode? Like, they should do that. that would be really cool uh and apparently that already works uh you know not in sequoia but just if you take your ipad and use it in sidecar mode as a second monitor which i did with my ipad and have an apple pencil you can go into for example the notes app and scribble yourself a little sketch on your ipad even though you're using the mac os version of notes because then you're just using your ipad as a secondary screen but it's basically a touch screen on your mac it even does the hover effect with the cursor and everything that already works now i didn't try it with math notes on sequoia um mostly because math notes on sequoia in the very first developer beta is super duper buggy but i'm hoping this will mean that if you really want to hand write math notes on your mac and you have an ipad you can do it that is very cool that that's super neat uh chris chelberg writes with regard to iphone mirroring in sequoia uh is iphone mirroring a way to rearrange your iOS home screen more easily?

40:41I don't know. Possibly, right? Yes, I hadn't thought of it. But like, I would much rather use a mouse pointer than my finger because A, it doesn't obstruct everything and B, I have pixel perfect precision as I try to drag. It will still be that weird game of bumping around icons and stuff. But this actually is a big upgrade in my ability to rearrange my home screen without pulling my hair out. We'll see how it goes. And also the thing with being able to leave space, I hope it doesn't make the icons as squirmy. And as you know, collapsible as they were before. So I am actually looking forward to trying this.

41:15John, I'm not trying to be funny. Remind me why people like, what is this network locations thing? Like I've heard of this and I remember talking about it having left and everyone was upset, but I don't think I've ever used it. So can you give me like a two second tour of what network locations is, please? Yeah, I don't use it either, but I believe the idea is that when you are in different locations, you might have different network setups. When I'm at work, I use works DNS servers. I have a VPN, Wi-Fi is ahead of Ethernet in my network order, like all sorts of stuff like that. And you don't want to have to manually switch all this networking stuff, network locations.

41:50I don't know if it's actually location aware, but it does let you have a pop up menu that says, I'm on this network now. I'm on my home network. I'm on my work network. I'm on my traveling network where I use a VPN or whatever. Like, I believe that's what the feature is for. The reason it's a story is because it disappeared when they when they redid the settings app and when system preferences became system settings, network locations disappeared the functionality was still in the os but the gui for it was gone and the story is now thanks to raycat let us know network locations are back in the gui in sequoia so if you missed them they are there they're still kind of buried in the network pane but it's better than trying to do it from the command line we do have some sad news though from rob bad news syracusa it looks like the password field is still right aligned in the passwords app at least on ios and it's the same on mac os i launched i installed sequoia i was using the beta it launched the password app yeah it's it's just so weird like if you stick the insertion point at like the i can't even say the beginning of the word yeah it is the beginning it's the first letter of the word and you type a character the character appears to the left of your insertion point that's very weird which makes sense if you think about it but like when you're typing it's like this is not how typing should be like again i think this is possible on the web using modern web technology but no one would ever do this like why just it's it's literally a form there are labels and there are text fields username colon field password colon field it doesn't have to be this hard apple just use regular text fields you're breaking my brain i should file a bug on it now i guess like you know you gotta get those bugs in early hell i mean i don't know why i didn't file it for the year and a half since this or two years whatever it's been since i gotta file it now like you made a whole new app it's all new can we fix the text fields please our friend mb bischoff writes with regard to sequoia window tiling window tiling in sequoia can be disabled or set to happen only when option is held down also it can optionally leave margins between windows that's pretty cool i didn't know any of that yeah i'm shocked if there are any settings related to this i was afraid i would just have to like find some hidden plist key to turn it off but uh if you can find it in system settings is a little bit hidden there are three whole options to to do it and i was playing with the tiling i don't know if i know all the options but it seems not it seems kind of limited like i didn't it didn't seem like a lot of flexibility for the tiling where i can do eighths and thirds and grids and stuff like that it's more like just left half of the screen right half of the screen top bottom limited top bottom stuff because when you do the top you go you end up going to the spaces thing but anyway margins between windows i am i am a big fan of but i know some people don't like it so hey make it a toggle if you don't like margins no margins if you do like them there they are it doesn't let you adjust the margins which they should uh and my dream of having full windows server access to make a real window manager continues to be a dream but for now all those people who like uh windows style windows tiling they will get thrown a bone in sequoia we have a miracle a miracle has happened in sequoia steve trout and smith noticed that there's an update to the chess app yes in mac os there's been a chess app what forever i think or in in i believe it was there next as well but don't quote me that is a next step it's it's a very old app right so apparently the renderer has been updated and according to us to steve trotten smith it's the first time since mac os 10.3 panther which is 21 years ago my goodness wow we'll link to a a poster by a cable saster that shows the old renderer and the new one the new one i'm assuming is using a reality kit and it looks nice and the old one looks super dated And remember, the old one was new in macOS 10 10.3, 21 years ago.

45:34So not only will the chess app not die, it seems like it's getting more updated than a lot of other apps in macOS these days. Indeed. With regard to iCloud keychain and browser integration in Sequoia, Jonathan Fries noticed that a clean install of macOS Sequoia has what appears to be pre-installed extensions for passwords. and uh john you've put in a bunch of json in our show documents so can you talk about this please yeah i he just sent like the um the path to like uh you know a json file and it was like slash library slash google slash chrome slash native message host slash com dot apple dot password manager dot json like okay but does that say that they're the extension is pre-installed or is that just information about where they might get it and i looked at it and it's if you look at the json it's got a name and a description and it's got a path and the path is to the cryptex thing i think we talked about on the past shows the system has these cryptexes which are like sub images that they're allowed to be overlaid on top of the cryptographically secure os image so that the combination of them is also cryptographically secure and they're the cryptexes are so that apple can update those separately from the whole os so they don't have to do a full os update when one little thing changes and it looks like it's called password manager browser extension helper is that the full extension it looks like it i mean it's a dot app it's you know dot app contents mac os well i think that apple is literally bundling the iCloud you know like jonathan says the iCloud keychain extensions for chrome and for firefox um i guess i should i mean i had limited time with the developer beta it seems pretty solid but like a lot of the new features are buggy or entirely missing like the ai stuff so i'll have to think to look into this but that would be a bold move pre-shipping like you know really just saying hey uh you know third parties have to make you install their browser extensions to use it for their password manager but we can just ship them we'll just everyone who gets this and honestly i think well in one respect i think it's a good idea because you get explaining to anybody that like you know uh you can use iCloud Keychain it does two-factor it does this it does that a they don't know what iCloud keychain is and they say oh um but i use chrome no problem just install the iCloud keychain chrome extension i would never trust someone to just some you know someone who's not a tech nerd to be able to find the correct non-scammy real live apple iCloud keychain i don't even know what it's called i i have to check a hundred times before i install it to make sure this is actually from apple or is this just going to steal all my passwords pre-installing in the OS is the right way to go.

48:14It must be nice to be the platform owner. Indeed, you can just make these things so much easier. There is incredibly great news for a lot of developers, particularly macOS developers. For the longest time, if you wanted to have a virtual machine on your computer, maybe of an old version of macOS or something like that, you couldn't sign into iCloud. So that means on this VM, you couldn't do anything that relates to iCloud, because it wouldn't let you sign in. And that's still true of all the existing or the already released versions of macOS. But Sequoia virtual machines will allow logging into iCloud, which is super duper exciting for those that have that need.

48:56That's not me personally, but that is really great. No joke. So reading from Ars Technica, as long as your host operating system is macOS 15 or newer and your guest operating system is macOS 15 or newer, VMs will now be able to sign into and use iCloud and other Apple ID-related services just as they would when running directly on the hardware. That's very cool. I think they mean Apple account-related services. Ah, that's true. They already did it. It begins. It begins. And then there's a doc on Apple's developer site, using iCloud with macOS virtual machines. And reading from that doc, when you create a VM in macOS 15 from a macOS 15 software image, and blah, blah, blah, Virtualization configures an identity for the VM that it derives from the security information in the host's secure enclave.

49:38Just as individual physical devices have distinct identities based on their secure enclaves, this identity is distinct from other VMs. Yeah, so this is a thing that pretty much only Apple could do because they are the ones who are the keeper of all the software that interacts with the secure enclave. The reason it didn't work before is because the VMs didn't have access to that and you need that to sign into iCloud. And you may be thinking, who cares if you can sign into iCloud? so many things and so many apps require an iCloud login not just like in-app purchase or stuff like that but anything that uses cloud kit or any of apple's cloud services it was very difficult to do what uh you know ios users take for granted of being able to have like a simulator or a vm where you can test your software especially for mac os when you if you want to support like two versions back you had to keep around old macs running old versions and that's a little bit more cumbersome than keeping around old phones because the macs are just bigger and you're going to have a keyboard mouse attach them and everything right we're like can't it would be great if we could just do this all in virtualization oh but we can't because even though you can and have been able to virtualize mac os for years the inability to sign into iCloud put a big damper on that now it's not great that this requires you have to be running sequoia to run the vm and the only os you can run in the vm is sequoia or later so it doesn't help people now but two years from now you'll be able to run the two-year-old version of mac os in a vm so i mean it could quibble with how they did it or whatever but obviously it kind of requires support in both the os and the vm thing so i can see why it requires 15 on both and in a few years this will fix itself i'm just glad this finally came they heard the cries of their developers next stop mac os simulators and xcode dare to dream that would be cool and i mean i think there's no reason not to right i mean well the reason is it takes work but hypothetically there's no reason we couldn't that apple couldn't do it all right Let's move on to Apple Intelligence.

51:25Rick Noller writes with regard to Apple Intelligence and third-party mail apps. Could you add your Gmail account to the Apple Mail app and then hide it? That might allow Apple Intelligence to access that info, but you wouldn't have to use it or see it in mail.app. Yeah, I do this on my Mac. I think I mentioned this before. I have a weird arrangement. Apple Mail on my Mac, which is an app that I do not use. I occasionally launch it and I have my Gmail account configured with this ancient Google thing that has been in there forever where you can pop from your Gmail account. It's very strange and they still support it.

52:00I keep waiting for it to break. But the old pop protocol where you just say, what's new since the last time I checked and it downloads the messages individually. Right. That exists for Gmail. And I use it to basically make a network backup of my Gmail. Right. An incremental network backup. So I launch Apple Mail every once in a while. It downloads all the messages into a pop local mailbox. And I just stick them into a folder called Gmail Archive. It's the tertiary backup of my Gmail. And what that means is Apple Intelligence on my Mac, but on my future Mac, will be able to have access to my mail to use that to give it the context that it needs to do smart things.

52:38But on my phone, I don't do that. And so the suggestion from Rick is something I'm going to try. I configured my Gmail account, not with pop, but just, you know, the default way you can configure it on your phone. I haven't figured out how to hide the account. I just ignore it. And I'm into my other inbox. I'm not in like the all inboxes view or whatever. And I hope what that means is that my phone will also see my mail. Now, unfortunately, I don't ever want to use Apple mail. And I'll set my, you know, my default email client is set to the Gmail app. But I hope this means that Apple intelligence, again, not on my current phone, because it's only a 14 pro, will be able to be smart about my email even though i don't use apple mail all right xcode ai code completions in the documentation for xcode 16 it reads xcode 16 includes predictive code completion powered by a machine learning model specifically trained for swift and apple sdks see objective c predictive code completion requires a mac with apple silicon and 16 gigs of unified memory running mac os 15 so not a double whammy so a uh xcode 16 if you want the cool code completion you have to also be running mac os 15 which is not always been the case sometimes when there's usually when there's new versions of xcode you can run them on the current stable os uh and they work and have all the features but not this year and the second thing is hey you want code completion hope you didn't buy a base model macbook or macbook pro with 8 gigs of ram because the the cool smart code completion requires 16 gigs of memory uh in other words it requires a copilot plus pc all right yeah that's tough but i mean here we are uh with regard to more with regards to the hardware and requirements david steer writes i'm curious as to why apple intelligence works on m1 chips but you need an a18 pro to use it on iphone if i recall correctly the m1 is roughly equivalent to the a15 bionic which means anything after iPhone 13, including iPhone SE third generation, could possibly have the necessary power, but crucially, not the required amount of RAM.

54:35Do you think it's possible that Apple's notoriously stingy RAM provision could be coming back to bite them in the era of AI? It's true that lack of backwards compatibility could help them manage server capacity or drive customers to upgrade their devices, but they'll need to balance that with the difficult messaging that their new flagship features are not available to the vast majority of their user base. Yep, 100%. It's the RAM. I mean, Gruber asked that on the talk show, and they were typically cagey about it but they did confirm it's lots of factors including the ram it's 100 the ram like that's why the 15 pro can do it and the other ones don't yes the 15 pro does have a better neural engine than the 14 pro but not that much better uh but what the 15 pro has is more ram and it seems to me that getting any of this stuff to work on a phone with the limited amount of ram that's on a phone because i believe what the 15 pro has what eight gigs i believe that's right so we just got done saying that on the mac to get a somewhat pedestrian feature ai feature like code a completion of like where write some code for you or whatever you need 16 gigs of ram and they're trying to get this to work on a phone with eight they cannot get it to work on a phone with six apparently um like ram is the thing here if you bought a base model macbook air after hearing people rave that you can do everything on this you can buy an eight gig macbook air you can do xcode you can do all your development well you don't get the ai features that you want from the new version of xcode because you need 16 and we discussed on a past show how the rumor was that all of the phones for this year in september are going to have eight gigs of ram this is why right and even eight gigs is probably pushing it because that's the same amount as the 15 pro why didn't they go to nine or 10 or 11 or 12 or 16 whatever uh ai eats ram it needs a lot of it ram takes battery ram takes space ram produces heat like apple is stingy because they're cheap but also stingy because especially in a portable device ram has a cost to it well now they're rolling out tons of ai features and i don't think it apple wants the only phone that can run this stuff to be the very tippy top flagship because even the iphone 15 can't run it only the 15 pro can run it that is not ideal it's nice on the mac that it can run all you know all the ii features can run all the way back down to the m1 so kudos to that those teams but like the macs you know macs have more stuff they have more battery they have more memory they have more cpu and even though the xcode code completion requires 16 gigs apple intelligence broadly speaking as far as i know does not require 16 gigs so a lot of the apple intelligence features will work with 8 gigs just not the xcode thing it seems but yeah this is this is definitely chickens coming home to roost apple being stingy with ram seems like it's fine every time someone probably made an internal argument we should put more ram they say it's fine i'll show you like we even got some inside information ages ago they said we did tests with it was just about ssds and it turns out one ssd chip isn't actually that bad it's not noticeably worse than having the two ssd ssd chips so we didn't do it they reversed that decision because of you know presumably public outcry or did they just want to hear people whine about it anymore but all the previous cases where they said actually eight gigs of ram is fine they need to keep up with the pace of the industry even if it doesn't seem like it's strictly necessary they can lag behind a little bit but you can't just ignore it forever and saying there will never be another thing that we need to do that requires more ram than we have now here's ai saying guess what we found a use for all that ram that always happens there's always something over the horizon that requires more resources usually it's just games honestly they're always games will always eat everything you give them right but sometimes there's applications that everybody uses, although at this point everybody games to some degree or another.

58:05Something is going to want those resources. Computers are never fast enough and never have enough RAM. You have to keep up with the industry. You can't say, we finally plateaued. Computers will never need more than 8 gigs of RAM. It's AI now. Who knows what it'll be in 20 years. Apple, please give us RAM. I think this also should inform your purchasing decisions of Macs over time. I mean, if you buy a Mac today and you want it to still have cutting edge features for as long as possible, this is a pretty big reason to not just leave it at the 8 gig default. Even 16, like, you know, because LLMs as we know them are giant RAM hogs and because we don't really know what the future will hold with features, there might be some really killer feature that comes out in two or three years that requires 16 gigs of RAM or more on the Mac to actually be usable.

58:58and even if Apple doesn't do it, someone else might. So this should inform your purchases even today. Like, you know, sometimes you can kind of peer into the future and be like, well, I think we're on the cusp of something that's about to need a lot of resource X. In this case, we are there right now for RAM. We are in the early days of something that needs a lot of RAM and so maybe for your next Mac purchase, get a little more than you otherwise would have. Apple's AI training data at machinelearning.apple.com and we'll put the full URL in the show notes, of course. It reads, we train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web crawler, AppleBot.

59:41Web publishers have the option to opt out of the use of their web content for Apple intelligence training with a data usage control. We never use our users' private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models. and we apply filters to remove personally identical information like social security and credit card numbers that are publicly available on the internet. We also filter profanity and other low quality content to prevent its inclusion in the training corpus. In addition to filtering, we perform data extraction, deduplication, and the application of a model-based classifier to identify high quality documents.

1:00:12Yeah, so this is kind of the same answer that they gave on stage. We saw them twice talk about this. I think once in the iJustine interview and then again on the talk show. uh and as i said before and i'll say again their answer to how do you train your ai models is not great it could be worse i like the idea they're saying we are not using your private or personal data we're not training anything that you do and they do use licensed data and so on and so forth but they also always have this item they say we use publicly available data uh you know oh you can opt out well it's kind of hard for us to opt out when this is the first we're hearing of the fact that you're training ais on our data so you already got it you already did it you already trained now i think apple bot has existed as is a pre-existing thing and we could have been blocking things with robots that text or whatever but if you care about this if you didn't know that apple was training its ai you wouldn't have maybe been blocking apple bot because you're like oh apple's not doing anything like that i don't have to worry about it now setting aside the legality and ethics of training on this type of data Yeah.

1:01:11I, I'm still kind of surprised that Apple didn't use one of its greatest resources, money to pull an Adobe and say, we do not train on publicly available information. We train only on information that we licensed, cut deals with the people who have the information, make a licensing deal with the New York Times. If you have to do with Wikipedia, with Encyclopedia Britannica, with what like just having sort of consensual data sharing relationships. But apparently that is insufficient to train something as complicated as what they're attempting to do. So they've been training on publicly available information.

1:01:45they're crawling the web looking for stuff and throwing it through this engine and the uh you know how that's going to shake out in the u.s anyway has yet to be determined because those cases are winding their way through the court system i don't think this is apple's really pinning itself into a corner here because there are other companies that are much worse off if it turns out that that uh training on publicly available information requires some kind of uh legal arrangement or whatever apple will just make those legal arrangements like they're not doomed or anything like that it just kind of surprises me that they didn't take the an even more conservative approach than they have and so it forces apple executives to be on stage and they have to say we use this we use that and we also use publicly available information if you press them and say what is publicly available information i mean they will say web pages web pages that are on the web your web pages do you have a blog is it on the web does it have stuff in it we probably trained our ai on it unless it contains profanity or credit card numbers or whatever right that is not an easy thing for a company like Apple to talk about or say.

1:02:44And in this case, they can't say, oh, but, you know, open AI, we push all the problems off onto them because this is Apple training its models, its foundation models, and presumably its future ChatGPT competitor on publicly available information. All right. So what if you don't want your website to be included in Apple's AI models? Well, there's a knowledge base document that we will link in the show notes that describes how you can modify your robots.txt in order to tell it to kindly bugger off. Yeah, just go back in time and do that like two years ago. Yeah, exactly. But we'll put a link in the show notes if you're interested.

1:03:18All right, Tim Cook did an interview on the Washington Post and the Washington Post asked a lot of questions. John, you've extracted a few. Do you want me to play the role of Tim and you'll play the role of the Washington Post? You can't do both of them? I can. I thought we would play it. You can do a funny voice. Can you do a Tim Cook's accent? I can't do it. Good morning. Yeah, exactly. All right. The Washington Post asks, did you take any special delight in calling it Apple intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence? To which Tim replied, it seems sort of a logical conclusion after looking at so many names.

1:03:48At least for me, I can tell you it wasn't a riff off of artificial intelligence. Wow. I'm struggling. It wasn't. Yeah, right. It was sort of calling it what it is. I'm sure a lot will be said about it, but it's probably not as it appears. Yeah. As far as Tim's concerned, it's just like, oh, it's an Apple feature that's intelligent and has nothing to do with AI. Oh, yeah, sure, too. Okay. I mean, at least for him. He's saying his perspective. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Washington Post asked, what's your confidence that Apple intelligence will not hallucinate? To which Tim replied, it's not 100%, but I think we've done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we're using it in.

1:04:26So I'm confident that it will be very high quality. But I'd say in all honesty, that's short of 100%. I would never claim it's 100%. So this is interesting because, you know, as people have noted, like when you opt into OpenAI, you know, you have to explicitly say you're sending your data to them. And when it comes back, there's a little disclaimer underneath it. Like there isn't all these things that says, you know, check important information or this information might not be correct or so on and so forth. But this question was not about OpenAI. It was not about the OpenAI integration. It wasn't about that screen that has the disclaimer at the bottom.

1:04:56It was about Apple intelligence. and because Apple does have models, the chances of Apple's own stuff, not open AI, the stuff that stays on device or goes to Apple super duper private servers. What about that? What does that have a chance of hallucinating? As I continue to futilely point out, hallucinating is a terrible term because there is no distinction between a quote hallucination and a quote correct answer. The AI model is functioning the same way in both cases. It's not like, oh, it made a mistake or it got like we know from the outside, we can judge whether we think this is a good or bad thing.

1:05:27But the internal machinery is operating as expected in both cases. Everything from an LLM is either not a hallucination or a hallucination. There's no special like, oh, it did a bad, it did a good. Like, it's just a big stew of words and probabilities. And it's a machine that is deterministic, that is fed various inputs and various parameters that tweak it and you get output from it. And every time it does that, it is exactly as correct or exactly as incorrect as every other instance. But anyway, what it is saying is, can that machine produce stuff that is not useful because it doesn't fulfill the purpose?

1:06:05If you're asking a question, did it give you an answer that is correct? Did it actually give you something helpful? Did it understand what you were asking for and give it to you? Like, we can judge what it does. And this is Tim Cook saying, some of the things that we ship as Apple Intelligence might not do the right thing. Now, for Genmoji, what do you care? you ask for you know uh you know a turtle skiing down the alps then the turtle doesn't look like a turtle who cares right no harm no foul summarization i guess it could get wrong if you ask it to summarize something and its summary is uh not accurate in a way that is significant like if it's a big article about like you know how much detergent you're supposed to use in the dishwasher and the article has a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about all the things that you shouldn't do and then at the end tells you what you should do and the summary decides that uh the summer the best summary of this article is one of the bad things that the article is somehow concluding that you should do one of the things that is actually saying you shouldn't do i would call that in tim's parlance here hallucination because you asked it to summarize the article and it didn't it didn't summarize the article the way a human would because it it didn't understand the point of the thing and if you rely on that summary you'll put the wrong amount of detergent in your dishwasher or whatever right uh and this is another awkward position for tim cook to be put in this is a good question from the washington post to have to say you're rolling out a bunch of these features are they going to essentially malfunction and not do what they're supposed to do in a way that's not like oh we'll file a radar and we'll fix it like because you know apple ship software that doesn't does what it's supposed to do all the time but those are bugs and they can fix them there's nothing you can do when this happens you could send this to apple and say hey it summarized this thing wrong and they'll try to make it better next year but it's not as simple is like this caused a crash or you know this thing was misaligned or a cosmetic error or whatever this is a different realm where apple is shipping products that might not function correctly and that there's nothing apple can do about it except for like try harder next year with their next model that is trained on more data they slept from the web so then the washington post asked what makes you think open ai and sam altman specifically are trustworthy partners who share Apple's values.

1:08:14Very well phrased and a very good question, to which Tim replied, they've done some things on privacy that I like. They're not tracking IP addresses and some of the things like that that we're very keen on not happening. I think they're a pioneer in the area and today they have the best model. And I think our customers want something with world knowledge some of the time. So we considered everything and everyone. And obviously we're not stuck on one person forever for something. We're integrating with other people as well, but they're first and i think today it's because they're best it's another uncomfortable situation people keep asking apple about open ai it's uncomfortable that feature exists it's uncomfortable that open ai is what it is tim is trying to put a lot of a spin on it say they're doing some things with privacy like you know why they're doing that probably because apple forced them to like this i don't think they were doing that on their own i think if you use a chat gpt through the web there they are tracking ip addresses and other stuff like that but whatever deal they did with apple you know it just there's there's baggage that comes with sam open and open ai uh and apple i guess they feel like you know this is this is on tim because you know he's the person to give a go no go on this type of thing saying this is what everyone's talking about we need to have it we don't have any of this we can't don't have anything that matches us internally and in fact we think it's a little bit dangerous but either way we have no choice we have to partner and you know the google deal didn't go through and they're still keeping the door open say it's not just open ai we'll partner with whoever but yeah they have to partner with this company and put a disclaimer on their little thing it's the opt-in and there's a disclaimer that says it might be wrong but they feel like they need to have it because they think that's what people want i think they're right that that's what people want i think the whole story would have been that they still don't have an ai chatbot but i think the utility of ai chatbots is still maybe not it's kind of like when something is good enough to like work in a disney context i know apple and disney aren't the same thing but like when is it good enough to work in an apple context where we have more expectations about uh i don't know the cultural expectations of an apple product are different than you know like a pc type thing or an android phone it's it's more um more cautious about uh you know like there's you know the app store is not the same as the open web let's put it that way right yeah apple runs the app store in a more uh cautious way than the open web runs which is bad and good in some ways.

1:10:35But here they are. They're like, we have to provide this option and we have to awkwardly answer every press question about it by saying, people want it. They're the best one. We're not stuck with them. Next question, please. The aforementioned Steve Trouton-Smith asks with regard to Siri unsupported devices. And so Steve writes, I still have so many questions about Apple intelligence. Does Siri just not get better on anything below an iPhone 15 Pro? No improvement to the cloud-based Siri on older devices, home pods apple tvs it's a good point i don't know the answer to that the apple i don't think anyone asked apple that and they should have obviously the older devices can't run apple intelligence on them certainly a home pod can't talk about ram limits right um which by the way like for a device that is all about siri and that is so reliant on siri and is so bad with siri that's the device that needs it the most it's such a shame that this is not going to get it it makes me wonder is like is a new home pod coming with eight gigs of ram actually i shouldn't say that i don't actually know how much ram a home pod has do you know how much ram a home pod has i have no 128 kilobytes i don't know wow maybe it does have eight gigs but anyway here's the thing though for all the devices like every iphone except for the 15 pro it's not like apple can't make siri better for them because they could like the whole the whole magic of their strategy for apple intelligence is that they run it on device if they can and if they can't they run it on basically a logical extension of your device that's the whole private cloud computing thing it is like a bigger iphone processor that is not in the room with you and so that's the the the cloud the transparency of like we'll run a device or run there but the software doesn't care where it runs because it's basically running on apple silicon with you know of a different size right runs a big apple silicon in our data centers runs on smaller apple silicon on your phone it could be that on devices like the home pod or every phone except for the 15 pro it could just send everything to private cloud computing which obviously would be slower and there'd be and so on and so forth but at this point tons of siri stuff most of the siri stuff goes across the network anyway that could make siri smarter on devices that can't run apple intelligence locally i would vastly prefer that i would let my home pod now is currently sending things over the network and taking a long time to do bad things how about updating it and having to do everything through private cloud computing to the llms i hope that's what they do but i find it not encouraging that Apple never offered that as a thing that they're doing.

1:13:14Everyone was so excited and jazzed about Apple intelligence. No one really said, you know, what about my HomePods? Maybe they just assume we all think, we all understand that's what's going on. But they didn't say it. They didn't say, we'll dynamically choose if we do it locally or remotely. And of course, on devices that can't do it locally, we'll do it all remotely. They didn't say that at all. So we will all find out when we start installing the betas that actually have Apple intelligence features in them on our unsupported devices. Apple Silicon in Apple's private cloud computing servers. There's a blog post about this, which I did not have a chance to read, but I presume, John, you at least glanced at it.

1:13:49You know, I need some AI to summarize this for me. Well, so this was a question on the talk show live, which we talked about before. You can pull link to the YouTube video so you can check it out. Or the Vision Pro video, if you have one. Get it out of its little marshmallow. It's a pretty big marshmallow. Yeah. Gruber asked them, what what is the apple silicon that is running on apple's private cloud compute servers like what is it and predictably they did not answer that question right it's apple silicon yeah there was no way they were going to answer that yeah we talked about the like maybe three or four shows ago we we talked about the rumor that said that apple is going to run data centers with m2 ultras in them or whatever and we thought that doesn't make any sense and again the private cloud computing thing explains that we talked about it in the wwdc episode it now does make sense and using m2 ultras also makes sense because it's a chip they already designed uh the speculation has been that there hasn't been enough time for apple to make any kind of custom server chip they like they they sort of decided to do this too late because the lead times on silicon are so long and depending on how many how successful this effort is and how many servers they need it takes a certain number of products to justify making a custom chip and m2 ultra despite being very power efficient and having lots of compute and so on and so forth is not the ideal chip for doing private cloud computing ai stuff it doesn't need the h265 decoder and encoder on there it probably doesn't need thunderbolt since it doesn't have persistent storage right like it's not this is not a a purpose-built server chip lots of other companies do have purpose-built server chips companies that run huge amounts of servers like google and facebook and amazon right apple as far as we are aware on the outside even though they do run servers they don't have their own dedicated server silicon i feel like if they did they would have bragged about it so the rumor about them using m2 ultras makes sense there's a bunch of things on that chip that aren't being used and are just being wasted i think you know maybe two or three years ago they started the project to make a dedicated server chip and that'll come out in two or three more years after that but But that is something to watch for because, you know, I can tie everything to the Mac Pro.

1:16:05It's a situation where they have to make a weird custom chip that has a limited application whose needs are different than all the needs of their other chips because server is different in the same way that the Mac Pro is different. Can they bring themselves to do that? Or will it just be, will their server farms just be the dumping ground for the unsold, cheap to produce inventory of the two years ago, pretty good Mac Studio chip? all right apple and open ai aren't paying each other yet says bloomberg uh this is reported on bloomberg and then covered on the verge uh but german says apple isn't paying open ai as part of the partnership instead apple believes pushing open ai's brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments chat gpt will be offered for free on apple's products but open ai and apple could still make money by converting free users to paid accounts today if a user subscribes to open ai on an apple device via the chat gpt app the process uses apple's payment platform which traditionally gives the iphone maker a cut then uh back to the verge recapping the report also says this deal isn't exclusive to open ai and that apple is in talks with anthropic and google to offer their respective chatbots as an alternative option with an agreement for google's gemini expected to be in place later this year yeah griber also asked that on stage hey which way is the money flowing in the situation they obviously didn't answer this makes some sense apple is in the power position here apple essentially owns billions of customers who have shown a willingness to spend money open ai wants access to those customers if apple's offer to them is we will literally build you into the operating system you couldn't ask for a better customer acquisition tool than this it's your job to convert those people by having a good enough product that people want to pay for it or whatever It makes sense that there's no money changing hands either way, because on the other hand, OpenAI can say, well, you don't have anything like what we have, and we're the market leader.

1:17:57And in the end, those two things cancel each other out, according to this rumor, and nobody pays anybody. And OpenAI helps to do lots of conversions, and Apple, as always, hopes to take a lot of 30 % to 15%. Indeed. All right. And then The Sane writes on the impact of Apple Intelligence. Do you think that the arrival of Apple intelligence is pulling dev time away from the workflow features and shortcuts, or might these be rolled together in a future release? I'm sorry for chuckling. It's just, I don't view those as at all related, like the sorts of people who work on one. I mean, I guess in some cases could be the same people that work on the other, but from what little I know, and from what I know as a developer, I don't think that people that are really good at doing the sorts of things that workflow does are going to be necessarily very good at doing the sorts of things that Apple Intelligence does.

1:18:46I put this question in here because a sort of company-wide fire drill effort like Apple Intelligence pulls resources from everything, even if it's not the same people, because so many people in so many groups across the entire company have shifted their focus because an edict has come down from on high that 2024 WWDC is going to be the coming out of Apple intelligence, this really does, you know, it is a company wide tax, and it was the right thing to do, they should have done this, arguably, they should have done it earlier. But it does take away from things, even even the problem is like, even if you're not a person who was taken off task by doing this, people you work with were taken off tasks, people have probably moved around, right?

1:19:31Priorities change, maybe your thing that you actually did have time to work on and finish doesn't even make it into the OS, because it's all hand undexited about the feature that somebody else wrote because that's the important one to roll out so um you know every and every release priorities shift around and the thing you might want to be developed might not get the resources that it deserves but apple intelligence is definitely one of those times every few years where there is a big movement within the company that has the potential to impact every aspect of the software stack that is released to WWDC.

1:20:05All right, let's talk iOS 18. There are some indentations on the bezel in iOS 18 when you engage Siri, I guess. So this is really, really difficult to verbally describe. I'm going to read a little bit from The Verge, but there is a GIF link that you can and should click because no matter how I describe it, it's not going to make a lot of sense. So here we go. When you press the side buttons while running the iOS 18 beta. There's a clever new animation that makes it look like you're pushing the bezel into your screen a little bit. At first glance there's not much purpose here other than to add a little whimsy.

1:20:38But it might also be a practical visual indicator if Apple eventually releases phones with solid state side buttons that don't move when you press them. And again, there's a link in the show notes to a GIF so you can see it in action. Alright, so I kind of get having a visual indication that you successfully pressed a button is a good idea. People should do that on the web, they should do it in their iOS apps. I am shocked. when this does not happen. I think during WWC, I was complaining to somebody, it might have been one of you, that the WWC, like the developer app, where you can bookmark sessions that you might want to look at later, when you tap the little bookmark icon, it does not highlight in any way to show that you've tapped it.

1:21:16You and I were talking about this. And you can tap it over and over and over again. And it's not clear whether you're toggling in on and off or whether you're just saying on, on, on, or if none of those things are happening. It's not a good UI. that said usually the feedback that you successfully press the button is that you feel it go in and out and even for like the buttons that don't move like the ios like the iphone 7 home button that's what the vibration feedback is to let you know you have successfully pressed the button now there's this visual bit of feedback where what it looks like is you've you're super strong and you have dented the side of your phone in momentarily you've dented the screen and this little black region from the side of your screen right next to the button invades the pixels of the screen and just goes like like you're shoving a little black rectangle into the screen region and then letting it go back out again i'm not sure i find it aesthetically pleasing but i do like the idea of visual feedback but it also makes me worry that the like non-moving buttons that have been rumored for ages maybe aren't that great and they need to add this that's more clear that you press the button i don't know it is it looks a little bit weird to me.

1:22:21I think it looks really cool, honestly. Yeah, I agree. I actually thought it looked pretty neat. I mean, obviously, I haven't used it in my own hand, but it looked pretty slick to me. All right. Caleb Denman writes that in iOS 18, you can now change the width of the beam of the flashlight. It works on the 15 Pro, 14 Pro, and maybe any iPhone with a dynamic island. And I read this and I understood the words, but I was like, I'm sorry, what? How? What? And so a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, has helpfully recorded a short little video, which we will put in the show notes, that demonstrates this.

1:22:53And I don't know that this is incredibly useful, except on the rare occasions when you're trying to find something in the dark room and your partner or whatever is asleep and you don't want to blind them with a flashlight going full blast, this seems like it could be pretty useful. The interface to this is weird. It's like you have an X and Y axis for swiping. like the the y-axis is brightness and the x-axis is beam width and since it's a circle it's really more like beam diameter i'm not actually sure how they're doing it is there like a a matrix of of leds in there or something or i don't know apparently it's on it's on my phone so i'll try it out when i get the beta and then finally for ios uh steve trotten smith as we've mentioned many times writes there are new apis to provide a locked camera capture extension which must be launched via button on the lock screen control center or the action button it cannot be launched by swiping sideways and lock screen there is a video about this uh from wwdc this year i spent some time with my good friend ben mccarthy and let me tell you they were very excited about this uh for their app obscura so you should definitely uh i know ben is definitely going to be playing with this soon yeah that was my question on the wwc episode uh does swiping i know you can put the button for third-party things but does it also work with swiping because i thought it would be weird that the button launches one camera app and the swiping launches another that could also be a feature if you want to have two camera apps and remember that the swipey one is this is the default one and the button one is the third-party one but it does seem kind of strange like they're giving access to the lock screen they have an extension to do this they could just as easily have a setting somewhere that says hey do you want swipe to also activate the camera that you put in the little control center button thing or whatever, but not in the first beta anyway.

1:24:37I didn't watch the video, so maybe they just explicitly say, no, in iOS 18, it's not going to be that way. Let's move on to Marco's favorite platform, Vision OS and Vision OS 2.0. Vision OS 2.0 features that were not mentioned in the keynote, and there's a Vision OS 2.0 preview that Apple has. You can customize your home view, finally, and Apple writes, you can now personalize your home view. Simply pinch and hold to jiggle and arrange apps and bring them to your home view, including those from your compatible apps folder. Very nice. Finally. You can see your keyboard in any environment. When you're immersed in an environment, Vision OS 2 recognizes and reveals your Magic Keyboard or MacBook Keyboard so you can keep typing away.

1:25:16Cool. Does it only recognize those keyboards or does it recognize the party keyboards? Sure sounds like it. I feel like they should have a keyboard recognizer and say, is that a keyboard? It's either probably rectangular, you can probably find the edges, but okay. Guest user improvements. All I've read about this so far is what I'm about to read to you, but oh my word, I'm here for it. So it says, VisionOS 2.0 now lets you save your most recent guests' eye and hand data so they can easily skip their next setup, which is pretty cool. How many recent guests? Just one for now. Just one. Steve Trouton-Smith writes, the enterprise APIs for VisionOS 2, which there was a session about enterprise APIs in VisionOS 2 at WWDC.

1:25:56well anyway so it's enterprise enterprise apis include things like access to the main camera pass-through capture and barcode or qr scanning but only for in-house or business-to-business apps you can't ship this stuff to the app store very weird it's interesting that they're making concessions for what appears to be their their one uh enthusiastic customer base for the vision pro right now which is enterprises that don't balk at the price and have apparently come up with useful applications for a high quality VR XR headset thing. They're giving them much more access. You know, if you need to get access to this hardware, more direct access to this hardware to make this Vision Pro be useful for use on your factory line or whatever you're having people do with this stuff, you can have it.

1:26:42It's just you can't distribute those things to the app store. That's just your own private little world. They've always had sort of the enterprise certificates and enterprises can have their own little private per enterprise app store with their own distribution certificate. And that is one case where Apple has been a lot looser because it's not like the whole world. It's just a very, very narrow use case. So it's interesting that they are immediately, essentially giving up on a lot of the restrictions for the Vision Pro for customers that really, really want it. Finally, The Verge writes, more new features coming in Vision OS 2.0 that either weren't mentioned or flew right by.

1:27:17Placing app windows, You can place them further away than you could before. That's, I guess, for people with much better vision than I have. Volumetric windows, which are ones that let you view an app's content from all sides. They will tilt to face you, so you can use them while lying down. Ahem, Marco. Though developers can opt out of this if they want. You'll also be able to resize them, which is cool. You can also offload virtual environments. Their icons will still be there, but if you're sick of Mount Hood, it doesn't have to take up space anymore. I am offended by this, The Verge, because that's my favorite one.

1:27:47And by space, they mean SSD space, right? I guess. How big could those be? I don't know. Challenge accepted. And then while watching full screen videos in a virtual environment, you'll be able to lie down and recenter them above you. Good stuff. That's especially useful for you, Marco. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Because that was one thing I had to keep sitting up for the talk show live. Because regular Windows, you can just hold down the home button and it'll just center whatever you're looking at as the center of the view. But the fully immersive things seem to not have any up and down rotational ability.

1:28:17So I just keep sitting up taller than I probably should have been that moment to watch the talk show. Then with regard to Swift, Swift has been moved out of Apple's GitHub account, and it is now in its own account, Swiftlang, S-W-I-F-T-L-A-N-G, Swiftlang. Yeah, Ben Cohen actually mentioned this on our interview. So Apple writes on a blog post. But we didn't dive into it. Yeah, Swift is migrating to a dedicated GitHub org at github.com slash SwiftLang. This migration reflects the growth and maturity of the Swift community and highlights Swift's versatility beyond Apple's own ecosystems. The migration to the SwiftLang organization will be phased over the coming weeks and months.

1:28:54Initially, the SwiftLang organization will include foundational elements of the Swift project, such as compiler and core tools, standard libraries and core APIs, samples, the Swift.org website, and official clients, drivers, and other packages. since the dawn of Swift it has been presented the whole world domination joke I made in the interview as a language that is good for a wide range of things and Apple didn't want it to just be oh this is the language you need to use to write for Apple's devices they wanted it to be a general purpose programming language that everybody can use now their number one priority has been making it work for Apple's devices so it's a 10 year old language and a lot of the effort in those 10 years has been spent to make it good for programming Apple's platforms, which makes sense.

1:29:38But during that time, there's been server-side Swift. There's been Swift on Linux. There's been attempts to evangelize Swift outside the Apple ecosystem. And all of those efforts have run into sort of stumbling blocks of saying, well, but our foundation isn't the same that Apple ships with its platform, so we have to have our own alternate version of it, or the server-side stuff is a little bit weird, and it's clear that Apple's heart isn't into it and the Linux version has a bunch of gaps in interoperability that don't exist on Apple's platforms. And if you keep chasing these things down at the very root, it's like Swift, it's an open source project, but it's at github.com slash Apple.

1:30:21That's where it is. This is an Apple project. And yes, you allow people to use it on Linux and we could fork it because it's open source or whatever, but people just didn't have faith that like Apple was serious about the idea of this being a language that is as general purpose as C. C has a standards body and, you know, has committees adding features to it and C++ or whatever. But no one company owns C, right? And again, even though Swift is open source, say, well, nobody owns it. It's open source. If Apple ever goes evil, just fork it or whatever. But no one has the staff or the desire or the ability to keep developing Swift outside of Apple.

1:30:59And so moving the language out of Apple's area into what I assume will be a different legal entity, a different governing system, or at least a different GitHub organization. Granted, it's still, you know, the Swift core team is still staffed by Apple employees and stuff like that. So it's not as if Apple is giving Swift away to someone else who's going to parent it from now on. It will still be Apple driving this with their money and their employees. But this is an important, both symbolic and practical step to show Apple's dedication 10 years in to finally saying, no, we're actually serious about Swift, you know, as they said in one of the slides, replacing C++, not replacing C++ on Apple's platforms, replacing C++, period, everywhere, someday, maybe.

1:31:44All right. And then we got through almost everything we wanted to in the interview with Holly and Ben. But one of the major things, perhaps the only major thing that we didn't have a chance to talk to them about, but we really wanted to, was Swift testing. So we were talking, I guess, a couple episodes ago about how we really would love to see XC test kind of go the way of the dodo. and Swift Testing is the new hotness baby and it looks pretty good at least at glance. Yep, it's an open source thing. It's been out for a while. It was out before WWC. I could not remember for the life of me which one of the several testing frameworks it was.

1:32:21I should have just guessed the most obvious name which is Swift-Testing. Glad to see that happening. It does use macros and macros are still a little bit slow in Xcode but maybe next year they'll fix that. All right, HomeKit. You can now pick your preferred HomeKit hub reading from The Verge. Apple Home users can rejoice over an update discovered in the first iOS 18 beta. The option to choose a, quote, preferred home hub, quote, this fixes the problem of your smart home deciding to run over Wi-Fi through HomePod when there's a perfectly good Apple TV using Ethernet sitting right there. Hallelujah.

1:32:54How long has this taken? Yep. Like HomeKit has always been like, you don't have to worry about it. We'll intelligently pick the right thing. But very often in your home, you know, if you're a tech nerd, which one of your devices has the best network connection and the best hardware and if it's apple stuff most of the time that's the apple tv if you have a recent apple tv it has the highest chance of being plugged into ethernet uh because it has an ethernet port if you bought the expensive one uh and if you keep buying a new one every year the processor does occasionally get better so no i don't want my original home pod to be my home on wi-fi right the the apple tv is always plugged in right my apple tv is always going to sleep or whatever but i don't just yes please i'm going to i'm going to designate my apple tv as my home github and i hope this uh improves matters yep all right let's talk carplay uh another one of marco's favorite things uh there are new carplay features uh these are uh detailed on a mac rumors post which we will link in the show notes uh there are contact photos and messages i don't think it ever occurred to me that that's not a thing until I read this and I was like, holy crap, that's not a thing, is it?

1:34:02So here we are. So that's very exciting. You'll get silent mode improvements. You can now choose to have silent mode on your iPhone, turn, immediately turn and automatically turn on or off when the device is connected to CarPlay. So that's cool. Speaking of that, I, again, I haven't driven my wife's car, so I'm not that familiar with this, but like, yeah, I always have my phone on silent. I mean, the little silent switches in the silent mode. And sometimes I forget that that means that like most apps will not make noise like the i i watch youtube on it and youtube ignores the silent switch and just plays audio but sometimes i'll play something i'm like why isn't this making any sound and it's because it's honoring the silent thing so if you have the silent switch turned on as a lot of people do with their iphones and you connect to carplay does your phone refuse to make sound through the car speakers it doesn't do like you know bloop when you send a text message for example it just sends it so that's the best i can think of and so this what this would do is say you can leave that switch to silent but if you set the setting what it would do is when you connect the car play it would be as if you had switched the switch to not silent and you hear the bloops i think that's correct it is hard for me to parse this but i believe that to be correct and like another example is i think generally speaking and this could be my own settings like my own focus modes and whatever so i might be accidentally lying to you but like another example is i don't think there's an incoming text message tone right if you're in silent.

1:35:27So you'll see the little banner at the bottom of the CarPlay screen, but there won't be the standard ding or whatever you happen to have your text message set to if you have yourself in silent mode. Moving on, color filters can help individuals with colorblindness to differentiate colors in the CarPlay interface. Voice control allows you to control CarPlay entirely with Siri voice commands through a connected iPhone. Sound recognition is expanding to CarPlay to provide notifications for driving-related sounds, such as car horns and sirens. And then there was a whole session about next-gen CarPlay.

1:35:56Now, I haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but a lot of people that had that we saw at WWDC were kind of punchy about it, and I'm not 100 % clear as to why, but I think, John, you have some notes for me to read, so here we go. Next-generation CarPlay will be highly customizable, allowing automakers to tailor the design of the system to uniquely match their vehicles. So far, so good. Apple revealed a variety of different design options and layouts that will be available to automakers. Automakers will be able to show custom notifications on next-generation carplay apple's website continues to say that the first vehicles with next generation carplay will arrive in 2024 but it has yet to provide a more specific time frame and it did not provide any time related updates in its wwdc sessions daniel pritchard writes it's 20 minutes of an apple designer in a white room telling you esteemed automaker ui designer how apple will generously let you quote customize your gauges and infotainment example you can use any font as long as it's Apple's one SF family, which has variable weights and metrics.

1:36:53So that's fine, right? I don't know. Apple still has not figured out what would make car makers happy. They only know what would make Apple happy. Like, you can choose any variation of a single font should be a non-starter. We're going to car companies and saying you can customize it. Now, I know Apple doesn't want people to make their interfaces ugly, but have they seen a car? Car makers demand to be allowed to make their interfaces ugly or use whatever font is like corny looking to apple but fits with like the jeep brand or whatever not the gm is doing carplay but you know it's uh i don't know i don't know how this is gonna work out for i mean i still keep waiting for those next generation carplay cars to arrive surely there'd be like there's always somebody like the singular of the car world right signature c who's like we are not the market leader we can differentiate ourselves by doing what apple wants when no one else would do it but yeah i'm gonna watch the session i'm gonna see how how bad it really is but yeah but people people were watching it they were i don't know if they're people in the audio industry or whatever but they the vibe seemed to be that apple still wasn't quite getting what the car industry wants from them i i don't see how they could it just it seems so far from apple and what they could tolerate uh and the control and relationships they'd like to have compared to what the automakers want to do like you know i i can't see almost any automaker wanting to sign up for this like i think apple is very you know type a with their designs and the automakers tend to be very type a with their designs and tend to be pretty incompatible designs um and more more of just i can't imagine anybody willing to be willing to give up that level of control so i i would expect this to have no significant effect on the adoption of this next-gen CarPlay.

1:38:41I knew this as I was saying it, but just to save myself. Jeep, Chrysler, whatever, that's Stellantis, not GM. Sorry. I meant to correct you, and then I got sidetracked. So, thank you. All right. Anything else for follow-up? I think we did a great job. I'm proud of us. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. And thank you to our members who support us directly. We do an ATP overtime segment exclusive to members every week. This is a bonus topic that we do after all the rest of the show, exclusively for members. This week's overtime is Apple's Blue Ocean Revisited. This is relevant to a topic we talked about with John's blog post called Apple's Blue Ocean a few months back.

1:39:23We're going to revisit that with some updates. So you can hear that by joining at atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

1:39:36Now 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 list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m and t-marco-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-s-siracusa it's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long So when I used to travel for work, you know, for WWDC, among many other things, the most recent time that I had been in WWDC was in 2019.

1:40:47And at that point, Michaela was like a year, year and a half old. It was a burden for me to be gone, right? Like Aaron can handle it, but it's a burden. Now, five years later with Michaela just having graduated kindergarten, it's supposed to be considerably easier. And it's supposed to be almost not really. I'm not even sure that anyone would have even noticed I was gone. But it's, uh, Michaela was doing a camp, doing just a little like half day camp every day this week. And so Monday, uh, we are upstairs at Apple Park, you know, getting our breakfast, which I don't recall if we talked about this the other day, but it was actually very tasty.

1:41:25And, you know, I'm getting to see all of my friends. It's the first time I'd seen John in five years. You don't recall if we talked about this? It was the last show. Oh, that's right. We don't. That's right. It was a whole segment. Yeah, sorry. This is a new, a new low in your inability to remember what we talked about on the show. Yeah, this is pretty good. We talked about food. We talked about WVC food. I forgot about the breakfast part. Yes, you're right. Okay, anyway. Go on. All right. So the point is, I'm sitting there with John and other John and Marco and Underscore and a bunch of other people, and it felt so good to see all of these people I hadn't seen in so long.

1:41:57And so I get a phone call from Erin, which is not that it's not allowed or anything like that. It's just she knew that I was going to have a very busy day, and I was going to be doing a lot of different things. And so for her to call me was very alarming and unusual. She says, hey, I just picked up Michaela from camp. My car just died. You don't want to hear that. Okay. And remind us what car this is and how old it is. This is a 2017 Volvo XC90, which has somewhere around 40, 45 ,000 miles on it. That you purchased new. That we purchased new and have maintained as per Volvo specifications every moment since.

1:42:37So she says, yeah, you know, I heard something that something was like stuck in the wheel or something like there's a thunk, thunk sound. So I pulled over, looked around the car, didn't see anything. Let it, you know, turned it off, let it sit for a couple minutes, turn it back on. And I started to go and then the car just straight up died. And she sent a video of her cranking it. I showed John and Marco and a handful of other people. And it was definitely the motor was trying to turn over. Like the internals of the motor were moving without question, but it was not actually like properly turning over and operating under its own power.

1:43:13The cylinders weren't firing. I want to claim partial credit for my attempted diagnosis based on a phone video with bad audio of saying it sounded like it was something having to do with the belts because the starter was turning, like the starter was rotating, and it was causing some parts of the engine to rotate, but there was no explosions happening in the cylinders as far as we could hear. But it was turning and turning, and she said there was screeching noises, and I'm like, well, belts. That is what John theorized. And certainly the electrics were all working just fine. It was something mechanical.

1:43:48And then I called Volvo from California and said, hi, I'm sitting there standing in California right now. My wife is going to be coming in with her car in the back of a tow truck. Can you take care of her, please do something? You know, I call Volvo, I think on Tuesday and they're like, hey, you know, we just haven't had a time to get to it, which I get. I mean, we dropped this on them unexpectedly. And, um, and then I call, I hadn't heard from anything from them Wednesday. And I'm starting to get concerned because the going theory from Volvo, which I did not understand, but what Volvo said to Aaron and she related to me was that it was a starter related problem.

1:44:21As John had already said, we could hear the car trying to turn over to a degree in the video. So it didn't seem to me to be a starter, but I mean, I'm no professional mechanic. So I'm like, okay, whatever you say, but I'm, I'm seeing it's now Wednesday late afternoon, Eastern time. And I haven't heard from Volvo about what the heck is going on. and we're supposed to be taking that car out of town this coming weekend and so I'm thinking to myself if there's a part that they need we are bumping up against not being able to get the part and get it repaired before we need to go keep that thought here if there's a part that they need there may be a part that you need there might be just one part so I call Volvo and again they're very very kind and he says alright so here's what happened a pebble seems to have landed itself inside one of the tensioners for the serpentine belt.

1:45:13So the tensioners are like the pulleys, effectively. And a pebble got in there, which caused the serpentine belt to eventually sever. Actually, we were just at Volvo yesterday, and they handed me the serpentine belt to look at, and it just severed right in half. And I don't know how, but it did. And these things are thick. These are really designed not to do that, But nevertheless, so the serpentine belt severed, which in and of itself is a problem, but it is a fixable problem. But he said, and then, and I'm like, oh, it caused a hole in the housing of the timing belt and then shredded the timing belt.

1:45:53God. At this point, I know we're f***ed because if you're not familiar with what a timing belt does, and John, correct me when you're ready, but a timing belt is what keeps the internal bits of the motor working the way they're supposed to. So if you think about it, like if you put up a fist, right, and you're moving your fist up and down, that's like a piston in a car engine, right? Well, above your fist are valves, which are other pieces of metal. And the timing belt makes sure that never the two shall meet. So if the piston is all the way up, then the valve is also up. If the piston is down, then the valve can lower into the cylinder so it can let in gas or in air or let out exhaust, etc.

1:46:31If your timing belt or in some cars chain gets messed up, the two can meet. And that means your engine is destroyed. Yeah, there's basically a delicate ballet of metal going on inside your engines with lots of parts moving and they have to move exactly in unison with each other. So no parts that are not supposed to hit each other will hit. That is what your timing system does. It is super duper important to have your engine correctly timed. If it's off by a little bit, it can run badly. If the timing belt doesn't exist, it's a catastrophe. like everything because remember there's explosions happening in your engine shoving the metal parts up and down very forcefully and if they're that's not done at the right time with all the other parts now you have metal parts being shot at each other using explosions which is the same thing that propels bullets out of guns it's not good for your engine certainly not so at this point i lean forward head hands on my forehead and aaron looks at me like a ghost and she says oh no the not very nice gentleman at volvo says the engine is a catastrophic loss we're going to need to replace it so you just need one part casey the engine just one part engine is the part that you need that is correct that sounds important yeah yes it is an important part of the car i asked well that's like 10 plus thousand dollars right and he says i haven't gotten an estimate yet but yes it is oh okay so fast forward a little bit of time and suffice to say the engine shot uh we will need to replace it i don't know exactly what the car is worth but the the estimate for the parts alone for a full engine replacement were north of fourteen $15 ,000.

1:48:25Then he said the labor is between 25 and 30 hours at$175 an hour. So that's roughly another$5 ,000. So we're looking at$20 ,000 for this thing to be repaired. And that's the best case scenario, right? I guess we could opt to get a used motor and they apparently have some place up in Erie, New York that does a really good job of putting together like full used replacement crate motors and that would be like fifteen thousand dollars all in instead of twenty thousand which is better but not that different you might as well get a new one at that point right so what the uh the car rebuilding youtube channels that i watch would do because this is what they always do is you just you they would take that engine and they would throw away the parts that are dead like many of the cylinders most of the valves the entire top end of the engine all sorts of stuff like that but they would salvage all the other parts all the other things that are bolted onto to the engine anything that wasn't broken they would salvage and they would buy the other parts or they'd buy a used engine and take the parts from the broken engine and stick them on to parts from a less broken engine and build a frankenstein's monster a conglomeration of working parts and and used parts and new parts to build a new working engine and the reason they do that is because they literally make money from their labor as opposed to having to pay hundreds of per hour as casey has to do for this because they are making entertainment from repairing engines but yeah if it was my engine i would want a brand new one uh and if i couldn't get a brand new one a used one with similar mileage probably seems fine but i think the most fascinating as someone who watches tons and tons of hours of car replaying channels the most fascinating thing about the story and i think everyone you told this to is that i've never heard of that happening right yes right sort of like your ipad and the windshield anyway yep um i saw a picture of it you sent a picture maybe you'll put it in the show notes you may be wondering how could this happen like the the the tensioner it's like a little pulley like a little you know disc that rotates on an axis right and it's got um strakes in it like fins right uh around the little wheel and the perfectly sized pebble like a pebble like a one in a million pebble got into this engine from the road because there's pebbles on the road all the time such that it wedged itself between two of the metal strakes or i can't tell if they're metal or plastic of this little wheel it would have to be a pedal pebble you know going at just the right time at just the right angle bouncing around off the road surface into this engine and wedging itself exactly between these two little fins on this wheel and getting stuck in there and then essentially serving as like a like a diamond cutter to shred you to shred your belts as it rotated as this little hard uh you nugget of rock because it was like a little little like white piece of like quartz or whatever going around again and again and again until it just totally shredded your belt as they say on seinfeld one in a million shot doc that is some bad luck that is world-class bad luck it's really it's astonishing and also depressing i mean i i think he just put it in the chat room so i think it'll be in the show just look at this just think of what has to happen for this little tiny because This is not the only engine.

1:51:40I can tell you, this is not the only engine to have pulleys like that on it. Every engine, every internal combustion engine has tons of these things all over it. Like, why don't they cover them with plastic shielding? I mean, they're not usually super accessible, but for the most part, you can see them and get at them in the engine in every internal combustion car on the road. And I've never heard of this happening. This is just, wow. Is that the pebble right there that's in the little pulley hole? Oh, yeah. Yes. It's that little tiny, that little tiny rectangle. Oh, my God. because it's sticking out just a little bit and the belts are under tension that is the belt tensioner and it is essentially rotating with the belt slowly shredding it or maybe not so slowly because you know do the rpm calculation yeah because i was wondering like how a pebble would stay in a in that but yeah it is like right between those little fins oh my god like what kind of pebble is that shape to successfully wedge itself in there like it's got to be like have like flat sides and be like wow it's just if this was a plot to like how james bond was escaping somebody chasing him like we would say that's completely implausible like nobody would ever believe this would never happen you can't disable a car with a pebble that's stupid yeah exactly you can't you can't you can't cause catastrophic catastrophic engine damage to a car with a pebble yeah i mean the engine grenaded itself because of a pebble so i told volvo and i was being deadly serious i want that pebble i want the 20 000 pebble i want to put that Motherfucker in a shadow box.

1:53:06And I want that thing to be the$20 ,000 pebble somewhere in my house. Because as depressing as it is, you have to see the kid. Like, I have to laugh at it. Because it's just absurd. It's just absolutely absurd. And so we talked to Volvo about it. And they were like, yeah, we've heard of something like this happening like once, maybe twice. In all of the years that they've serviced thousands of cars. And all Volvos basically have, I mean, it's not literally the same engine. But all Volvos from the last like 15, or no, I'm sorry. for the last seven or eight years have effectively the same engine.

1:53:34And they're like, yeah, this has happened maybe one other time, maybe. And when I called in into our insurance company, who happens to be Allstate, and I got to tell you, I'm not feeling like I'm in good hands right now, but that's neither here nor there. When I called in into Allstate, they were like, wait. What? What? I'm sorry. It sounds like a great insurance fraud scheme. Right? But I mean, I'm not the one who can't. Trust me. I do not want to defraud Allstate of a new motor. I'd rather have a functional car. But anyways, so we'll see what Allstate says. There's going to be an adjuster that's going to go look at it, and we'll see what happens.

1:54:10But I just feel absolutely so incredibly terrible for Erin. Because here it was. This was the first WDC trip, anyway. That was supposed to be fairly easy. And on day one, her car catastrophically dies. And then when I'm on my way home from the airport, when we get the news, oh, you thought it was just a starter. Oh no, it's going to be an entirely new motor. And that also brings up the question, it raises the question, is this going to be totaled? Because depending on how much the car is worth, which I think it's worth enough that they aren't going to total it, but they might just total the damn thing.

1:54:47And that's fine, I guess, but certainly not what we had on our bingo card for this week. And we're not going to find out about it for another week or two and now we have to rent a car to get to our vacation uh in a couple of days it's just a mess so with all that in mind atp.fm slash oh man i i mean i hope erin does does erin is she okay like not thinking this is her fault because this is absolutely no in no possible way her fault she's she's blaming herself some but i have been extremely figuratively loud about the fact that you could not have done this it was an act of god there's nothing you could have done you did nothing wrong you you the only thing she did wrong was that she sent me a text to ask can i call you instead of just freaking calling me immediately because that's how kind she is she i was i was a little perturbed that she didn't just immediately call me but uh but no other than that i mean it's just it was an unbelievably it was unbelievably bad luck but here we i mean literally the volvo people i kid you not the volvo people said to us you should play the lottery because your luck is incredible it's just bad in this case unfortunately but your luck is incredible in the wrong direction yeah exactly exactly oh man like i mean you couldn't you couldn't do this if you tried like it's just yep yep wow if you if you tried to search the ground for just the right pebble find the best one reach into the engine and shove it in there the pebble would just fall out because you didn't get it down to the fraction of a millimeter like you couldn't manually find a pebble that would fit like this and stick it in with your hand let alone throw it like because again this wasn't stuck in by a hand this you know was flung from the so find a pebble that's just right and throw it into the engine such that it gets stuck well enough into the little thing to shred the belt you'd be there for the rest of your life trying to do that yep it couldn't couldn't agree more but here we are i'm really sad about it like all kidding aside i'm really really sad about it because it is a great car despite this story like it's been mostly bulletproof it's been very good to us i have a couple of minor complaints about it but all in all, I really, really like that car.

1:56:49And to be honest, if it was totaled, we would probably get a lightly used XC90 tomorrow because we really do like the car. And it occurred to me as I was thinking, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? I was thinking to myself, I really am not looking at spending$60 ,000,$70 ,000 on a new XC90. But then it occurred to me, well, the reason we bought this one new was because CarPlay was new, or at least in this model. and I insisted on CarPlay and there really wasn't a used market at the time we bought. But now, now there's a robust used market and it's not absolutely bananas prices like it was a year or two back.

1:57:25So I think if we were to replace it, we would get, you know, like a 2020 or 2021 XC90 and call it a day. And they're actually reasonably affordable if you get one with like, you know, 20 ,000 miles on it or something like that. But hopefully it won't come to that. Hopefully we'll get Allstate to buy us a new motor and the absurdly many thousands of dollars of labor to put it in.