630: Time to Spiral

29:28The world could use some. Please, for the love of God, bring color back. Matt Ripito writes with regard to your question, Marco, about portrait-only iPad apps. Would you mind just recapping what the query was from you last week? Yeah. So basically, I had said last week one of the things I had gone through with the restaurant was I had an iPad set up to play music and run the app for the mixer to control volume and stuff. and the Mixers app would only run in portrait on iOS. It's not an iPhone only app. It was an iPad native build, but it would only run in portrait. And the problem was, I'm like, I couldn't find any way for iPad OS on any sized iPad, even on a big one, to run two portrait only apps side by side with the iPad physically in landscape mode.

30:13I figured by this point, the screens are so big now, maybe they can do that. And it turns out I could not find a way. Well, Matt Ripto and many other people have actually written in to point out that it turns out you can actually run two portrait-only iPad apps in landscape side-by-side using Stage Manager, which is something I didn't even think of. I figured Stage Manager would have the same restrictions, but it turns out it doesn't. So this is both helpful in the sense that, great, I can actually do this, I think. I haven't actually tried it, but I can do it. Apparently, a lot of people are going to say this.

30:47but I don't think I will do it because this is an iPad that's that again this is being used by all the bartenders all the staff who are working back there they're not all going to be iPad experts I think the stage manager environment and the little like what if it gets swapped or what if it gets disabled or what if you know a different app gets pulled up and then that scene is messed stuff like can i trust people who are not ipad power users to be able to use stage manager and like put it back i don't know i i don't know if i want to take that risk i wonder if you could automate this with shortcuts i i genuinely don't know but let's make it even more complicated well didn't you already buy the ipad mini though like isn't this kind of the ship is kind of sailed here yes so you'd have to like return the ipad mini or find another use for it to buy a bigger one but like yeah this is you know this is the problem with ipad os we've talked about it many times um you really want to build something complicated out of a a set of uh understandable building blocks like if i asked you on your mac can you put two windows side by side you'd say yeah because you learned long ago how to move windows around on your mac and how to resize them and using those basic tools of like window controls and resizing and moving and dragging despite the fact that uh mac apps continue to try to make the title bar disappear or make it difficult like try grabbing the top of your chrome window but anyway um because the fundamental building blocks of of manipulating windows on the mac are simple to understand and learn and are incredibly flexible almost anybody can take two windows and put the side by side maybe they don't know about the cool shortcuts with like where you can tile them and blah blah but they don't need to know those shortcuts they know what windows are they can see them they can move them chances are good to be able to recover but the instructions for doing it in stage manager highlight how that is not the case on the ipad first of all marco couldn't discover it which i mean granted he didn't even think of stage manager which is itself its own problem of this weird mode yeah but second even if you had said let me try stage manager would you have tried this this uh fabian wrote in with an example video he says here's an example with monument valley 3 which is an ipad native portrait only app and nintendo music an iphone app running in ipad compatibility mode after activating stage manager launch app a locate app b via the doc app library or spotlight hold down the shift key and tap on app b if you don't have a keyboard hold down the icon of app b and drag it onto the quote stage.

33:07Like, no one's going to figure this out. It's way too complicated. And for what? To what end? What does this complexity give you the ability to do? It gives you the ability to do a very finite, limited subset of what you can do by simply moving windows around. Like, it's just, it's madness. So, we don't want to rehash everything about iPad or us being a problem, but it's a problem. Alright, going back to colors for a minute, Yossi Kanner writes, tech pundits love to complain that Apple doesn't make devices with real colors, yet it seems people actually buy the plain black or silver option. I had an iPhone 12 mini and a 13 pro in blue colors.

33:40They came in and hated them. Since then, I've gone back to the more neutral colors and much happier. Now, granted, there isn't much color in Apple's current lineup, but choosing to get a colorful iPhone or iPad is a much bigger decision than say getting a colorful case. I think Apple's making the right choice here. Yossi, I appreciate you, your feedback, but you are wrong. I want a colorful phone. Well, no. So this is, this is a, it's not a, uh, this is not a either or situation. No, you're right. You're right. in every case everyone out of canada for color says of course they should continue to make a neutral color or maybe multiple neutral colors because that is probably he's right that's what most people will buy right but that's like again not not every product will be your best-selling product not every color will be your best-selling color right you put the color in for excitement right a lot of cars are the best example and you guys were talking about a bunch of things but like cars are like the second most expensive things most people will ever buy next to their house if they ever own a house, right?

34:30And cars are purchased massively based on their appearance, which doesn't make sense. You're like, oh, is something so as expensive as a computer? Do I care how it looks? Are you kidding? The two most expensive things people buy, cars and homes, are purchased so much based on their appearance. It's ridiculous. It's almost as if the more expensive things get, the more we buy based on how it looks, not less, right? So there's no argument to be made that you shouldn't, you know, make these fancy colors because people will just pick the neutral ones. fine it gets them in the showroom right like they're not even going to buy that car but they want to come and see it because it's shiny and red or the car they're going to get is silver but they want to look at the cool red one right or you want to go into the neighborhood with the fancy houses even though you're not going to buy one of those but you want to buy one next to it so you can look at the fancy house yeah most people are going to buy the neutral colors they should always offer the neutral colors look at the imac it comes in a huge range of really nice colors and there's just one neutral color and that one neutral color is enough because that neutral color is fine and if you want an iMac that is neutral and won't clash with your decor there's one for you to buy like it's this is not this is not a problem that needs to be solved it's not like they shouldn't offer colors because most people will not buy them yeah that's why they should offer them most people won't buy them offer them anyway to get people in the door and to get people excited well and also like i we hear this argument a lot whenever whenever we are basically advocating for something that is not going to be apple's largest seller of its category whatever and we We always hear people trying to excuse Apple's logistics.

35:55Like, well, look, they don't want to keep that many SKUs. Or like, well, no, not a lot of people buy that one. You know, there's a lot of degrees of precision or ratios here that matter. Like, okay, not a lot of people. What does that mean? Like, do more people buy a theoretical, you know, orange MacBook Air than would buy the Mac Pro? Probably. But they still have the Mac Pro. i was gonna say while you were talking about like oh bring us color in your life i'm thinking well you know the next product due to be updated is ever ready for uh you know a lime green gigantic cheese grater i mean but but seriously like if you look at if you use that logic of like well they shouldn't they shouldn't make things that most people won't buy or that most people don't need you know quote need well then they should only make the silver macbook air and no other Macs.

36:45Like by that logic, why do any of these other models exist? Most people use the silver MacBook Air. Okay, then just make that by these like that. Of course, the logic makes no sense. You you have more options for lots of reasons. And enough people buy them to make them worth making. Like it doesn't take that many people to buy something at Apple scale for it to be worth making in a certain configuration. And even if isn't worth making on its own, you still have to make it the same reason they make all those other computers and stuff because you need to have a diversified product line that people feel confident in.

37:17So even if they're going to buy the silver MacBook Air, they feel more comfortable buying that knowing that there's an entire line of Mac laptops that covers all their needs, as opposed to like, I was going to buy a laptop, but that company only makes one. And I'm worried about getting entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, considering they only make one laptop. And what if my needs ever don't fit within that one laptop doesn't make you confident, like, you have to diversify your product lines. We've talked about how diversified should they be, you know, with respect to the iPhone, how many iPhones is enough iPhones to cover the market and the same thing with Macs or whatever.

37:46But the answer is never just make the one or two that are the most popular. That's even if every single one except for the one or two most popular loses money, you should still do it because overall you will make more money by having a full featured product line that gives people confidence. Speaking of the MacBook Air, the M4 MacBook Air has a new mute button icon. The F10 key, instead of being the outline of a speaker, it's now the outline of a speaker with a slash through it. And I may sound like I'm snarking, but actually i do think this is an improvement this this is better definitely improvement i very frequently find myself like having to double take to make a second glance because i have the same keycaps on my keyboard i think all the apple ones do to make a second glance to see like the f11 has got the little the little sound wave coming out distinguishing from you know so anyway hopefully this is a trend that will ripple across all their keyboards but uh yeah good improvement yep it gets my stamp of approval all right with regard to the quote-unquote hydra chip in ATP 562.

38:43Do you have a dragon? Apparently we discussed and linked to, I do remember actually this interview, a Johnny Surugi interview from July 2023 in which he was asked in so many words, what are the next challenges and processors that Apple should tackle to get to the real next generation of processors? His answer after disclaiming about future products and blah, blah, blah, was basically one of the things that is going to be important is packaging. So this relates to the Hydra HIDRA chip uh because some people think that it should be pronounced hydra and then people like to remind you that the mythical beast uh the hydra from mythology is a multi-headed creature i think if you caught off one of the heads to grow back or whatever oh doesn't this sound like packaging is interesting multi-headed beast uh m4 extreme chip it's not going to be an m4 ultra for the mac pro could use one of tsmc's various new technologies for doing what amd calls chiplets or whatever various like multiple multiple uh independently manufactured chips combining into a larger thing for a super mega chip for the mac pro that all sounds well and good and i'm certainly rooting for the uh m4 extreme type thing to come in the mac pro but i don't actually know if hidra is a alternate spelling of the mythical hydra because that hydra is with an hy every place that i've seen it and also there is at least one thing called hidra which is an island in norway or something uh so code names are weird this this code name could be about uh the island in norway it could be about the multi-headed beast it could be an intentionally misspelled version of the multi-headed beast or it could be something else entirely uh but i just want to throw that out there because so many people said you dummy hydra it's a multi-headed beast m4 extreme confirmed i hope you're right but i don't know if the code name has anything to do with that yep all right uh mark german writes with regard to the m4 ultra and hydra uh apple's ultra processors have always been developed by fusing two max chips together to double the performance across the system that requires a so-called ultra fusion interconnect system the m3 max has that feature while the m4 max does not let's pause a second here this is the second thing that i've read one translated for french that is flat out stated that the m4 max does not have an interposer on it what are they basing this on does german have a d lidded m4 max that he's looking at does someone have die shots of the m4 max that shows it's not there i don't know it's frustrating me that this has just been and now it's just like asserted as truth and second the m4 max has it last time i saw any die shots of the m3 of the m3 max or the m3 max any die shots m3 max it was in the context of a story of someone saying hey look no interposer on the m3 max and again i said did they just crop the picture and it's there or is it not there no answer please i wish i could fix this myself i can't i don't have these chips i don't have the equipment i can't do it somebody out there like and i google search for it so much but just try google searching for m3 space max die shot like but just it's impossible like i can't it's all just so much garbage in the search results i can't find it anywhere so please i would love for someone to actually determine if any of this is true.

41:53German, you can't just say the M4 Max doesn't have an interposer. Did Apple confirm that? Then tell me that Apple confirmed it to you. And again, I will reiterate, even if the M4 Max doesn't have an interposer, maybe the M3 Max didn't either. But when they manufactured the ones they're going to do for the Ultra, they put it on there. Because it's a different chip. Because it's got Thunderbolt 5 and all sorts of other stuff. Anyway. This just annoys me. So, sorry. Continue. German continues, Though I previously speculated that Apple might have used the M3 Ultra to differentiate from a future M4 Ultra Mac Pro, that now seems less likely given the lack of UltraFusion development.

42:27An M3 Ultra refresh for the Mac Pro or a future M5 Ultra, if that generation gets this interconnect capability, is more plausible. The main benefits of the Mac Pro are PCIe expandability and extra ports, hardly enough to be a true differentiator for 99.99 % of people. Apple knows this and its marketing team was dismayed when a higher-end extreme chip with double the performance of the Ultra processors was nixed years ago. That would have given the premium price more of a justification. I put this part in here because I like the idea of the marketing team at Apple having so much influence over the company and sway over the products that it's a disappointment that there was no good chip in the Mac Pro could actually influence product design.

43:08And that may sound ridiculous if you're from a company where you're like, well, we make the product and the marketing team sells it. But my vague impression with the little knowledge I have about inside of Apple is that actually the marketing team or the product marketing team is surprisingly powerful within the company. So I really hope this is true. I really hope the marketing team was dismayed. I was dismayed. A lot of people were dismayed. I hope the marketing team is like, how are we going to sell this? It's a Mac mini in a giant case. And, you know, everyone just shrugs. So, again, fingers crossed.

43:38M4 Extreme WWDC 2025. What did you call it last week, Marco? A breakout box for the studio? It's not even a breakout box. It's in the same box. Yeah, it's a PCI Express enclosure for the Mac Studio. I mean, it's PCI Express Hotel. Yeah, and certainly, you know, if the plan is indeed for the Mac Pro to get some kind of extreme chip that the studio doesn't get or can't fit or whatever, that would kind of explain, because like when you look at the Mac Pro now, it does kind of look like a seat filler it's like this this is a role that apple wants to ostensibly wants to keep serving um and here's a computer that sort of serves it that exists and is not intel right like it's an important it sort of serves this role but like it does kind of like the current mac pro does not differentiate itself enough from mac studio except for a very very very small market of people who happen to use pci slots but not gpus in those pci slots like so like that's that is a market but it's not a very big market and so if they also are able to you know have a bigger extreme chip that could then presumably also not only have better performance and maybe you know better gpu grunt but also presumably could address more ram and have you know higher higher resource ceilings more thunderbolt bandwidth and you know all the other things that you get from having more of these of these chips that would help differentiate it because then people like john who just need a bunch of processor or gpu grunt who won't fill the pci slots um you know that becomes served and now there's only one john and even he wouldn't buy this because it'll probably be 25 000 but there's like scientific computing there's ai research and training and stuff like that where like if anything where you're working with huge amounts of memory huge data sets, big throughput.

45:31Like there are industries and uses for what would be a theoretical like extreme quad chip and the resources that would presumably go along with it. It's not, again, not, these are not massive markets, but they're profitable. And certainly Apple itself would probably use them. So, you know, there's lots of reasons for them to make a computer like that. And again, it does seem like the current Mac Pro is basically a bench warmer waiting for a better one to come out that is more differentiated above the studio. If that is the case, granted, this is wishful thinking. You know, this is wishful rumor casting, like we, or wish casting, I guess people call it.

46:09Like, we want this to be true, so it kind of makes us believe the rumors more. But I do hope that the Mac Pro isn't just what we see today. I hope that they do actually make the extreme version at some point. And maybe not every CPU generation, you know. We'll see about that. I will say, though, when it comes to that performance when we get into the next item about the m3 ultra benchmarks i'm a little concerned no actually now before before we go on to that i just want to say that it's not just wish casting it is the thing that often gets us into trouble when it comes to the mac pro because it is like yes people want this and it's you know desirability or whatever and but the real downfall is like well how would what apple is doing make any sense if not for x and that leads you to things like this kind of hope because for example why in the world would they not revise the mac pro with the m3 ultra at the same time as the studio it only makes sense the only reason they wouldn't do that is because you know based on what they said there might not be an ultra in every generation there's not going to be an m4 ultra they're not revising the mac pro at the same time as the studio therefore it only makes sense that the mac pro is not getting the m3 ultra and it's not getting the m4 ultra because apple has hinted that doesn't exist m4 extreme wwc confirmed right and yet when we do that and try to try to make sense of what apple has said and what they have done very often we find ourselves foiled by like oh here we are wwc 25 and guess what they just announced the new mac pro with the m3 ultra and then we all just smack ourselves in the forehead and say but that doesn't make any sense and apple will be like we know like the things they've been doing with the mac pro have not made a lot of sense recently and so we have to be careful not to fall into that trap um of because that's just that's you know i'll be there in my belief cert if they put a mac pro with m3 ultra months after the studio got the m3 ultra like what in the world is the point what are they even doing but anyway yes m3 ultra benchmarks next item right so this is from geekbench six um i mean i'm happy to read off all these numbers and whatnot uh what's the best way i can i can characterize it for you right so here's the deal so i i look these things up now some caveats to start um this is super early the i don't know if people even have the m3 ultra studio now i think the embargo's lifted but i think a few people have them but anyway um the thing about geekbench it's just a benchmark um anyone can submit scores to it very early in the life of any model of computer there are few reported scores at the time i gathered these numbers there was only a handful of purported m3 ultra scores being reported you know you get the app and you just it reports your scores over the network to their server right um when they show the scores for computers they've been out for a while they're showing an average which i would argue is also maybe not the best because people could like super cool and overclock them and throw off the average and do all sorts of weird stuff but anyway uh that's why in some cases we have multiple scores here for like here's the best or you know here's the best score i could find for this and here is the average score of the few ones they have attached there so and then the final caveat is of course how how exactly representative is geekbench of anything that you care about and we'll link it in the show notes to an artist technical article they try to do a few more different benchmarks try to try to be more representative but here's the upshot in gpu which honestly is the main thing i was looking at the m3 ultra for because the number of cpu cores isn't that different the cores themselves are m2 versus m3 it's not that big of a deal but in gpu maybe they've done something big here and based on the metal scores and metal is the api you care about if you're in the apple world uh it is 10 faster than the m2 ultra uh than the m2 uh ultra's max studio's best score and it's 20 faster than the m2 ultra's average score so i'm you know i'm too ultra's max studio's mount for ages so the average is probably accurate but i wanted to give it the the best uh chance here like the m2 ultra's best score is within 10 % of the M3 Ultra.

50:07The M2 Ultra Mac Studio was released in June 2023. So here we are in 2025, and Apple's releasing a computer that is 10 to 20 % faster in GPU. That's not a big boost in that many years, right? It's not encouraging, especially since you can get more metal score at the very least by just putting in more gpu maybe it was a cooling issue maybe it's literally a die size issue because they really are running up against the reticle limit even when doing the the the two maxes stuck together type of thing but it seems like only a month or two ago when we were talking on the show about all these people have these grand fantasies of apple putting out a gpu that's going to rival a 4090 and stuff and instead they put out a gpu that is a low double digit percentage faster than the one they put out in 2023.

51:02Extremely disappointing. Still, people will say, and they're right in that regard, well, it's actually extremely expensive to try to get something with this much GPU power with fast access to 512 gigs of RAM, right? And that is true. But it's just further narrowing the use case and making, you know, as if I wasn't attracted to the M3 Ultra anyway, but certainly, if you're buying this thinking, well, I just want to get the best gpu apple sells this is it but it's not the best by much extremely disappointing and then uh the the single core score of course is not great 10 faster than the m2 ultra again the 2023 computer 20 slower than the m4 max that's not a small number single core is i mean we know that like we know the m4 is amazing in single core we know this uses m3 cores it is what it is uh and then multi-core 24 faster than the m2 ultra 24 since 2023 in multi-core man nine percent faster in multi-core than the m4 max nine percent faster than the like the max of the current generation right that's supposed to be half half the chip it's not half the chip because it's three uh two m3 maxes for the m3 ultra like it's not it's not great in multi-core like if he's like well if you want the fastest multi-core you got to get the m3 ultra yeah by nine percent now one i will say one more time geekbench is not reality geekbench is a benchmark benchmarks are not particularly representative if you look at the rs technical article you will find some real world things that it can do much better than that you'll find some real world things that can do much worse so as always if you care about how long it takes to do a thing export a final cut project you know do text to speech run an ai model do those things measure those things and say how much faster is it and how much am I getting but uh m3 ultra does not look like a particularly compelling upgrade from the m2 ultra and the m4 max max studio looks really attractive unless you really need that extra 10 to 20 gpu and an extra 9 of multi-core uh and if you don't need that you get 20 faster single core so yeah m4 forever yeah it seems like the the ultra here again what I was saying earlier like the ultra is really about the other like higher ram limits more thunderbolt bandwidth like if if those kinds of things are what's holding your work back then maybe this is for you otherwise like look you know if there's a way for me to spend money to get more performance i will often be prone to that i would i would not in a million years choose the ultra for my needs because the max is actually doing a better job uh you know for it would be better for my needs by a mile and it would cost half as much on the processor but again it's not to say there's nobody who this is for but this is not probably for people for whom CPU performance is critical like this is probably mostly for people who need more RAM or maybe who need that extra GPU but again the GPU does not compare that well because also what we're seeing and this is kind of what worries me about the rumors about the Mac Pro getting an extreme, quote, extreme chip with double the Ultra or whatever, these chips don't seem to be scaling that well past the max core counts.

54:23We see this from all the generations so far that have gotten the Ultra chip. Or was there an M1 Ultra? Yeah, there was. And I was going to say that when you were talking about the other thing, even though you said quad and we keep talking about it in that context, I continue to think and hope, I thought this was what the M3 Ultra was going to be. But anyway, I continue to think that they're better off making a chip that is bigger and better than the Max and putting two of those together rather than trying to put four of anything together because they've never been able to do it. And you're right.

54:53Like just if their overheads killing them on the two chip ones and it was killing them on some of the earlier two chip ones, don't try to go. There's a reason they didn't do the four. Right. So I'm just hoping they make two really big chips and stick them together rather than trying to take four of any of the existing chips and stick them together yeah because like as we're seeing we saw this with all the ultra so far the ultra being two maxes stuck together does not give you twice the performance um on the gpu it sometimes can can come close on the cpu it's way off um and because again like there's there's different bottlenecks there's different trade-offs there's different you know things don't scale perfectly uh because they're complicated and that's you know that's not how things work and they screwed up the gpu so the gpu gets close I forget which generation.

55:36One of the generations, they actually screwed up the GPU part real bad, and it was way worse than it needed to be. I think that was the M1 where they messed it up and they fixed it in the M2. Yeah, there's all these different bandwidths and caches and things that just make it more complicated than just doubling everything. So what you're getting is you get twice the cost, at least, on the manufacturing side. Certainly, the retail price reflects definitely twice the cost. But you're not getting twice the performance. And in many cases, you're getting a lot less than twice the performance. so in it does seem like again you you will know if you need this and odds are if you don't know that you need this you don't need this like if if you don't if you're not hitting the ram limits on your maxed out max chip uh computer you probably don't need this if you're not like absolutely maxing out the gpu total speed all the time you probably don't need this like this is this This is for certain people, not for us.

56:35And if you just want a really fast general purpose computer, an M4 Max-based computer is most likely going to give you a better and possibly even faster overall performance. Whether that's the MacBook Pro or the Mac Studio, you can have it in both. And it seems to be the same chip in both, and that's great. So you want a laptop that's the fastest computer for you? Great. You want a desktop version? You have that option too. You want one with slots? Too bad. But right now, the M4 Max is the place to be. And the M3 Ultra is for almost no one. We are sponsored this episode by BetterHelp. With over 30 ,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally.

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59:03So a few years ago now, on March 10th of 2022, there was an exchange that was had on this very program on episode 473, Fan Boats and Coattails. And I believe Marco is going to play that exchange right now. eventually the imac screen is going to be larger than 24 inches and when it does 27 inch imac will come back that's all i'm saying i'm not i'm not saying like that tomorrow there's going to be a 27 inch imac despite this hole in the lineup or whatever it's just the 24 like it went up from 21 the low on imac used to be 21 so they made 24 which is a nice in-between size and keep it but eventually two or three years from now they're going to be like 24 really everyone else is so much bigger and they'll they'll work their way back up to 27 uh and 5k you really just infinite time scaled us on this it's not totally i'm gonna say within like within three years there'll be a 27 inch time you really just finite time scaled us on this all right that's the bet three years from now we'll bet it my one dollar my one dollar bet yeah all right so it's been three years yeah um i for all the people who sent this in uh by mastodon on other means don't you all know i had this on my calendar like i put it i think i put it on the calendar on that show i always put these on my calendar because i would never remember them otherwise yeah i should have gone with five years uh i should have stuck uh to my instincts but uh double or nothing double yeah i was gonna ask so well so here's the thing here's the other thing that i didn't think about when uh we're making that so first of all i still say that they're going to make a larger imac for the reason i was trying to articulate in that clip which is like look even if they never um add a larger imac to the line the one and only imac that exists assuming the imac continues to exist at all as a product which is not guaranteed but considering to exist at all that one and only iMac will itself get bigger just as it got bigger from 21 inch to 24 but my three-year timeline was not asking for that my three-year timeline is saying they're going to add a bigger iMac here's what i didn't anticipate the iMac is close enough to being a monitor that you got to add the gigantic apple monitor timescale modifier to all your calculations which means apple producing a new screen that only happens once every 15 years or whatever so yeah that i blew it uh it's three years have gone by there's no bigger iMac and i honestly i would not double or nothing for an additional two years because that's how i mean uh since then what has happened with the Mac Studio display not anything what has happened with the XDR nothing what has happened with the iMac very little so uh i still think there will be one but i don't think it will be in two years uh and so just i mean i hope we don't have to wait until the 24 inch just to become you know inconvenient and inexpensive and they kind of like a 25 or a 26 inch just like kind of like bumped up from so i hope we don't have to wait that long uh but related to that ever since apple came out with the 24 inch and then said to everybody who would listen we're totally not making 27 inch so buy this 24 no sense waiting for 27 we're not going to make it we're not doing it by the 24 right which is true they didn't make a 27 you should have bought the 24 right but ever since then shortly after that there have been persistent rumors about a larger iMac which has been frustrating to me in this bet uh so German in August 2024 says a larger iMac remains something Apple is exploring as well but it's unclear if that will be an m4 product or something that comes the following year or later yeah february 2025 from german again apple will also probably eventually get around offering a larger iMac i just want to reread that beautiful piece of german prose again apple will also no sorry i screwed it up i'm i'm adding my own thing to it let me try again apple also will probably eventually get around to offering a larger screen iMac at least he hyphenated its larger screen although that's debatable golly that's it like like the the rumors of larger imacs have never gone away and not just like vague wishful thinking but like from people like german usually have sources and yet one has not shipped so marco gets one dollar yep which i can apply towards the price of the imac that i bought a month ago for the restaurant what color was that one green there you go see there you go uh i would just like to point out that the pro display xdr which, from what I gather from U2, still a very good monitor, release date as per Wikipedia, 10th of December 2019, which was almost 2 ,000 days ago.

1:03:35Woof. And if you made a dollar a day since then, you could buy less than half of one. You could buy two stands. John, I think our long national nightmare may be over with regard to threads and your timeline setting. Can you tell me more about this? more digging back from the archives as discussed on ATP 616, I have no grippers, which was actually a reference to this very thing. the verge reported on november 25th 2024 that quote threads will now let users decide what feed they want to be their default when opening the app and i was complaining on that show that they announced this as if it's like a feature they're like here you go you asked for it and you got it and i didn't get it it's like oh we're rolling this out to people you'll probably get it eventually and i've been patiently waiting and launching the threads app and looking for my little grippers which are the little three lines that let you know that you can drag reorder the order of the feeds and you just put the one you want, the following feed on the top and it becomes your default feed so that every single time you launch the Threads app, it doesn't revert you back to the feed you don't want to see.

1:04:35You can change the default. They announced that in November 2024 as if it's just a thing, but it wasn't a thing. It was a thing in an article. It was a thing that some people have, but it was not a thing that I had. So exactly 100 days later on March 5th, 2025, I got the feature. The grippers were there. I've been checking. The grippers were there. I'm like, yay, I can rotate it up. I don't use threads as much as the other services, so it's not that big of a deal. But I was just annoyed that like they announced this feature as if it was a thing they did and it just totally wasn't. Okay. And that was going to be the story, except for that was on March 5th.

1:05:10Today is March 12th. And I just looked at my threads app and the grippers are gone. Oh no. Other people are texting me and sending me images and saying, Hey, look, I got it too. It's rolling out for everybody. It did roll out to me for seven days and now it's gone. That's so cruel. That is so stupid. Like, look, are you going to honor my preferences or not? Are you going to always put me on the thing I don't want to see because you think that's better for engagement or whatever the hell? Are you just going to let me put it the way I want? And they just can't decide how much study does this feature need?

1:05:41Either let me pick what my default feed is or don't. But don't pretend like you're letting people pick and then just like randomly haphazardly roll it out. Like, are they just making sure it's not going to destroy their business to allow people to have a preference setting? So annoying. Finally, for follow-up this week, we got some feedback with regard to mostly me popping off about feedback in the Apple world. This is formerly known as Radar. We got a fairly long piece of feedback from an anonymous person, but I'd like to read it because I think there's a lot of good stuff here. This person writes, I was an Apple engineer for almost two decades and a third-party Apple developer for more than a decade.

1:06:17I heard Casey's rant against Apple's feedback assistant, and I can sympathize. As a third-party developer, I also got the impression that my bug reports were ignored. Let me tell you what it's like to be an Apple engineer. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then come third-party bugs. During beta season, I may be assigned hundreds of bugs each week. Obviously, I can't possibly fix that many, so I triage. Well-written bug reports with clear instructions to reproduce the problem are first. If you've attached a small Xcode project that demonstrates the bug, even better. Unfortunately, there are lots of bugs without a clear problem description or instructions on how to reproduce it.

1:06:48Even worse, are bugs so poorly written I can't even understand what's wrong. Unfortunately, these bugs will probably be ignored. All right, so so far, I think this makes sense. I mean, it's not what I want to hear, but there's only so much time in a day and in a week, and you do the things that you think are the easiest to accomplish. Fair enough. All right, so back to the anonymous person. If I have a question for the developer, I'm prohibited from just contacting them. I have to send the question to Apple Developer Support. They contact the developer and eventually send me the reply. but i have occasionally contacted developers directly for people i know multiple reports of the same bug are grouped together the clearest is tagged as the original bug the rest are listed as duplicates okay this is fine duplicates are like votes oh god duplicates are like votes that this is an important bug a bug with hundreds of duplicates is important since lots of people are hitting it i'm supposed to fix high priority bugs first crashes and data loss are the highest priority than features that don't work eventually working your way down to annoying malfunctions and UI glitches.

1:07:46The problem is many annoying but non-serious bugs don't get fixed this way. So experienced engineers also work on the most annoying non-serious bugs. We also use Apple products and we want them to work well. Bugs reported during the official beta period have the highest chance of being fixed since I'm supposed to be fixing third-party bug reports. The rest of the year, I'm assigned to work on new features in next year's release, not old bugs in last year's release. I mean, this stands to reason given Apple's behavior, but oof. One thing that drives me crazy is Apple ignoring old bugs. New features get lots of attention and their bugs are fixed.

1:08:17New bugs that appear in old features, regressions, are also fixed. But bugs that have existed for years are ignored. If a bug somehow slips through QA and ships, the system ignores it. There's no incentive for engineers or teams to go back and fix old bugs. Stupendous. None of this is surprising. And some of it I genuinely do get, especially working at the vast volume that Apple works at. But having basically zero incentive to go back and fix things that are broken, that's not a great look. It stands to reason given behavior, but it's not a great look. When people do stuff like this, it's like they're explaining like, you don't understand.

1:08:55This is the situation. It's like, all you're doing is explaining from a different side, the exact same problem. We're both saying it's bad, but you're trying to say like on the outside we think it's terrible on the inside it's like well here's all the reasons like yeah those are the reasons it's terrible those are not justifications for it being terrible and nor are they unmovable intractable things that can never change and therefore it must be terrible and the reason we know that it doesn't have to be terrible is because other companies do similar things at yes similar volumes and they do it better there are companies that get more customer support feedback than Apple does, you know, for industries where that is more common, right?

1:09:34There are companies that also have technical platforms. Just, it is possible to do this better, as evidenced by this big explanation of all of the dysfunction that's going on inside the company. If you fix some of that dysfunction, then it won't be as terrible. That's what we're saying. So I think, and I'm not saying that this anonymous feedback is trying to justify it, or whatever, just like, because sometimes two people do get indignant and say, you don't understand there it has to be that way because reasons x y and z i don't think that's what the person is saying i think they actually are just giving a different perspective like here's how terrible looks on the inside of the company as well uh but yeah like this the only thing that needs to change about making this better is someone inside apple in a position of power needs to decide that is something they want to improve and actually put resources towards it and thus far that has not happened to a large enough degree to really make a big impact all right uh i think we only have time for one topic today because this is likely to be a doozy and this is a report from bloomberg from the 10th as we're sitting here now it is the 12th uh this is a report from bloomberg like i said i believe this was german and they write apple inc is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company's history aiming to transform the interface of the iphone ipad and mac for a new generation of users the revamp will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make apple's various software platforms more consistent That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons.

1:10:59As part of the push, the company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro software. The changes are coming as part of iOS 19 and iPadOS 19, codenamed Luck, and macOS 16, which is dubbed Cheer. They go well beyond new design language and aesthetic tweaks. The software will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac. Upgrade is doing a lot of work there. To the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020. For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013. A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple's different operating systems look similar and more consistent.

1:11:36Still, Apple is stopping short of merging its operating systems, a step other tech giants have taken. The company believes it can make better Macs and iPads by keeping their operating systems separate. So there's a little bit of editorializing in there. And I know on a recent episode, we talked about the potential for an iOS 19 overhaul to look like Vision OS. But at the time we were discussing that, it was purely in the context of does iOS need an overhaul? Is it going to look like Vision Pro? Is it going to look like the imitation app or whatever? This news story this week is something so much more than that, because making a change to the visual look of iOS 19 would be significant, especially if it's like, you know, looking like the Vision Pro or Glass or Crew or whatever.

1:12:17but this this and this story is not just government other people have had this story as well i don't know if they're just parroting him or have their own sources but this is like a overhaul of the look and feel of all of apple's major platforms the ios the mac and the ipad uh to and again i don't know how much of this is government editorializing with the goal of making them more consistent with each other or having more of a family resemblance let's do a little you know germanology here and say what do we think about this sentence uh the uh what is it the update includes updating the style of icons menus apps windows and system buttons and with the fundamental change the look of operating systems to make the software platforms more consistent right icons menus apps windows how how in the world could you make the look of icons menus apps and windows consistent across the phone the ipad and the mac let's talk about icons icons on the mac and on the ipad and on the phone are already i mean am i wrong they're already consistent They're squircles.

1:13:36We talked about the squircle. They're squares with rounded corners. No, no, no, not on Vision Pro. On Vision OS, they're all circles. Right. I didn't say Vision Pro. I just listed the ones German listed. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Fair enough. And icons also includes the design of the symbols within the icons, which they've already made consistent. SF symbols. Right. They do a really good, there's a huge library of consistently styled icons that they expand all the time. when apple designs their own icons that are not nsf symbols they also match that style so already icons are pretty consistent you know what you're talking about is the app launch icons but like even those you're right are already mostly the same across most platforms yeah i mean are they saying that like the the male icon on the mac has to be literally pixel or pickles the same as the male icon on the phone and the ipad i i mean maybe it already is pretty close but like so there's that windows the phone doesn't even really have windows it's got sheets and cards and whatever but it really doesn't have windows the ipad kind of sort of has windows but not really so and you know i'm not quite sure what they're aiming at there uh menus again the mac has a menu bar the other operating systems do not but they both have kind of pop-up menu things and those things do look a little bit different i can't tell this story is so insistent that the goal of this is to sort of unify and make them more consistent with each other.

1:15:02I can't tell if that is a real thing or not. Right? It's not like sources. I think I cut out most of the people said or whatever. I can see them in any kind of redesign, any kind of like cross OS redesign. I can see someone looking at it and saying, oh, it looks like one of the goals of this redesign was to make the platforms look more similar to each other. But I feel like if you do any redesign, of course there's going to be, a like the redesign will span multiple operating systems it will the same ideas will be appear in all of them i don't think that means they're trying to make them look more like each other i just think it means when if you do all three at once of course there's going to be a family resemblance like so anyway i'm i can't tell what how big the consistency angle is and that is one of the things that i'm going to be looking at if this story turns out to be true was the consistency angle just someone looking at it and saying oh they all look similar because they were all redesigned at the same time?

1:15:59Or is Apple going to get up on stage and say, we really felt it was very confusing that pop-up menus on your phone look different than pull-down menus on the Mac menu bar and users were really tripping up on that. And it was really impairing the usability and functionality of our software. So now a pop-up menu on your phone looks exactly the same as a pull-down menu on your Mac. And we feel like that, that makes our platforms better. Or we just want there to be a family resemblance. So the icons already looked almost exactly the same, but now they literally are exactly the same and you can tint icons on your phone you can tint icons on your mac i i don't know what to make of that and then as for the circular icons which case you just brought up let's just let's just throw that out there as like a part of the doomsday scenario that will surely spiral into briefly icons on vision power circles not squircles literal circles how you know how can you decide with an ios 19 release that now ios icons in your phone are also circles apple can do that because they have noticed and they can redraw their icons so they fit in a circle but you can't just take a third party icons and and put us put them in a circle shape you'll cut off half of people's icons because they don't expect that to happen so i I don't see any way where you can have a transition to circular icons on the phone without just massive upheaval and some kind of transition period where some of them are squircles and some of them are circles.

1:17:26Again, to what end people were real confused that the icons on vision pro are circles, but they're squircles on their phone. They had no idea what to do. No, everyone's fine. They know what I got. There's nothing. this reminds me of that uh bruce tagnazini uh thing that i put in my mac os tender use a few times from the original like apple human interface guidelines there was a a section of that book that emphasized an important idea in interface design using the example of extension icons for classic mac os extensions were things that could like modify the system because you had no memory protections you could do whatever the hell you wanted anyway um those were extensions and uh in and the later versions of classic mac os you would see the icons of the extensions that loaded during the startup process.

1:18:08You'd see them march across the bottom of your screen from left to right and the extension icon that Apple defined when they rolled out System 7 with extensions and stuff was a puzzle piece. So it was, you know, just picture like a rectangle, but it's like a puzzle piece, kind of a squashed puzzle piece because you don't have that much room for the little, I don't know what you call them, the little things that stick out in little notches, but it was a puzzle piece. But the thing is, there was like four different puzzle piece icons that were possible with different arrangements of the little bulges and holes.

1:18:35no one was ever confused by that because a puzzle piece is a puzzle piece is a puzzle piece if i throw four puzzle pieces in front of you're like well one of those is a puzzle piece but i have no idea what the other ones are like it's they showed the other thing that they showed was the home icon for hyper card you go to the home button to go back to the home of your hyper card stack for old people there was seven different versions of that they all look like little houses little little square houses with a little triangular roof again anyone said oh click on the home icon, click on the little picture of the house.

1:19:05No one said, well, I see one picture of a house, but that other one looks different. Is that also a house? You can trust people to recognize a bunch of different puzzle pieces, a bunch of different house icons. And yes, you can trust people to recognize this is an icon on your phone, and this is an icon in Vision Pro, and this is an icon on your iPad, and this is an icon on your Mac, even if they're not all squircles, it'll be fine so i really hope that part of it is just family resemblance and not you know everybody i mean we're already at everybody squirkle maybe they should make vision pro squirkle again this rumor doesn't mention vision pro at all so i don't know what the hell or at least know the part that i snipped out of it but you know setting that aside how do you feel about this os spanning rumor as compared to how you felt about the ios 19 rumor i mean this is a much large like so what we heard with ios 19 earlier and we did that after show or the at the overtime about it it sounded like you know there was that that mock-up of the camera app that uh somebody was john prosser who did the mock-up somebody is right um and it sounded like okay well maybe this is something that they're doing like for certain apps like you know the point i made was that apple has already has always had multiple design languages depending on the app type and there were different styles your app could be, whether it was like a content viewing app or like a single view app versus a document app versus productivity app.

1:20:30And they've always kind of had, they've been juggling multiple styles. And so my thought at that time was maybe this is just a new style that they're going to, you know, add and make easy in the APIs and everything and maybe adopt for some of their apps. This is a pretty bold claim that it's much bigger than that, that this is more about the default look of the UI widgets and the styles and everything. And that's a bigger thing. Now, it sounds like echoes of iOS 7, but I think we're in a very different world now than we were back then. First of all, this is a much larger and more established and more entrenched world of apps now and all the stuff that runs in Apple's ecosystems.

1:21:16It's much bigger now and much more entrenched. And it's much bigger companies now having a lot of influence and a lot of usage in their apps. So for Apple to do something like iOS 7 today, I don't even think they're in a position to really do it very strongly for lots of reasons. Like number one, I don't think they have the support from developers to, on a large scale, adopt a new design language. Because the small developers like us, they have done a pretty good job of straining that relationship, first of all. Number one is we are largely – we've been strained, let's say. And they keep doing that, and that's going to keep being a thing with their policy decisions and behavior and everything like that.

1:22:08So there's already – that relationship with small developers is strained. That relationship with big company developers is not only differently and maybe more strained, but big company developers have largely not stuck with Apple's stock look for anything. Big companies develop their own styles and their own looks for their apps, and they use them across platforms. They want their style of their app to look the same on Android and iOS and maybe on PCs or the web or whatever the other platforms might be. but especially Android and iOS. So they are already saying like, you know what, that's nice, Apple.

1:22:47You have your default widget, looks, and whatever else. We're not going to use them or we're going to override them to look like us. So the big companies, when you think about like, how would this actually play out? The big companies are going to be hostile or neglectful. They're going to actively fight against it or they're going to just like never update to the new styles or whatever. so all the apps that you use on your phone for big companies, they're out they're not going to do any of this stuff they're going to keep doing their own stuff small developers like us this kind of thing is usually a pretty huge workload on us it's a huge request and a huge burden to put on third party developers when the system theme significantly changes because huge amounts of huge UI chunks of our app will not work right, will not look right.

1:23:44They'll have visual glitches or it won't work in the new format. And so for us to adopt it, it's a huge amount of work, oftentimes needing a pretty significant redesign of the app to adopt it. And on that front, by the way, I've seen a lot of people reacting to this story by saying, well, SwiftUI to the rescue because SwiftUI is declarative and you can be less precise about exactly how things look. therefore it'll be much easier for people who have fully adopted a swift ui to accommodate the new look there is a tiny very very small amount of truth to that but mostly uh what i think marco's getting at from someone who has experience with doing this is it's not like your app won't work when they change the default look of everything no matter what api you use like unless you're really unlocking you're doing custom controls and stuff like that but if you're along the straight and narrow it's like your app will work but when they change the default look you have to go through every single screen every single button every single widget because anybody who actually pays attention to their app like in any developer who doesn't uh budget their time the same way a big company would has tweaked everything within an inch of its life just even if it's just micro adjusting padding or using a particular thing because of the way it happens to look in the default widget set and it looks nicer that way when they change all the default widgets you've got to go through every single thing that appears in your app and make sure it still looks okay and good because it will like the choices you made to use this style of picker versus that style of toggle and you're using overlay here and z stack there and background here and why did you make those choices because they make they they make the best appearance and behavior with the widget set that you developed it with and if they change all the default widgets you are going to have to go back and revisit all that stuff even if you use swift ui from top to bottom so that's that's the burden we're talking about here not that like all of a sudden my app crashes or it doesn't load or you can't hit a button anymore it just starts to look like this was clearly developed with a different widget set because it was what this does to the developer community is it it just drops a huge bomb this will be all we can do this year with our apps that's what Because what happens is when Apple does a new theme, usually what happens is if you don't build with a new SDK, so your app that's not updated yet in the store will continue running on the old theme.

1:26:07So people will launch your app, and if you haven't built with a new SDK, which you can't do usually until the week before release for public and maybe for TestFlight you can do a little bit earlier, but anything built with the old SDK will still look old. Did that happen with iOS 7, by the way? I don't remember. I think so, yeah. but then what what will then happen is all of your users when they update their phones which might be day one with the beta or at least it'll be like you know certainly in the fall when the os releases your app will look very very old to them and they will complain they will first of all they'll accuse you of being abandoned uh and they you'll start getting one star reviews and as As I learned last summer, one-star reviews in small numbers, okay, that's life.

1:26:55In big numbers, that can destroy your business. That can be a pretty substantial your business is on fire problem. So what developers have to do when the system theme changes like this? See also when dark mode was added. That was a smaller version but of a similar thing. We have to address that with our app. We have to adopt it because the reviews will kill us if we don't. and they'll kill us starting on day one at large scale and even before that we'll start getting killed in the summer during the betas but we will get killed if we aren't there with the new redesign so it's it's imperative it's not this is not like some optional thing we can adopt at our leisure when we or if we like it or not we have to do it and what that means that's such a huge thing that's all i'm just saying it's so big because it touches like potentially every screen every control.

1:27:43That means that we really can't do any other features this fall. Like that's why it's such a huge burden. It's an incredibly expensive lever for Apple to pull. Keep in mind also, it is similarly expensive for Apple, for all of their apps, all of their software, all of their UI. So if this is true, this is a huge deal for the software community, both inside Apple and for all of us outside of Apple. And it has to really be worth it. Like, because it's so, again, it puts such a burden. It's so expensive. And that will mean that all of the other features that we might want to add this fall are not going to happen.

1:28:27Like, that's how, like, that's how, I can't possibly express enough how much of a burden this places on the community. You see this because if you recall with the previous big redesign with iOS 7, it took a long time before a lot of the apps on your phone or before most of the apps on your phone were translated over and in fact apps that are not made by enthusiasts and that don't care how many one-star reviews they have often never get updated like you know the app for my mixer at the restaurant that doesn't even work in landscape mode that's never gonna get updated for it never like there's not a chance um you know how many apps on your phone are there from you know like that are just part of some hardware that you bought or that, you know, for like your dentist's booking software or whatever.

1:29:09Like none of that stuff's ever going to get updated. So you enter this era of just like transitional crappy user experiences that are kind of blended old world, new world, or they can force the new theme on all the old apps that aren't updated, which will break them all. So there's no... I don't know if it'll break them all, but visually they might look unexpected, let's say. Because like, again, I don't think it will literally break most things. a new look will just cause things to look extremely awkward maybe some text will be truncated where you didn't think especially if they try to keep the metrics the same but i want to uh recall back to something that you said marco and i think a show or two ago which i think people might be remembering and thinking it conflicts with what you're saying but it actually doesn't uh you had mentioned how ios 7 was a gift to you when you were developing overcast because it was so much simpler and required less like pixel perfect you know photorealistic artistic skills and more just to be able to work with like text and white space and and solid colors and stuff that was a gift to you because you were in the the midst of developing an application that was not out yet yes it's a different situation when you already have an app and they change they pull the rug out from under you and change the look of every single thing so you built your app based on the widget set from you know ios whatever you were doing when you developed it and now here comes ios 19 and everything looks different that's going to be true of this redesign as well uh it will actually be an advantage for people who are just starting their app at the right moment because they will be the first to be able to adopt this look and feel because they don't they're not converting a legacy app they're like they're there from day one they hop right on board their app is designed with this look in mind from the start it is optimized and tweaked and made to look correct with the ios 19 which it said right and everybody who has an older app has to go and convert theirs and decide oh what do i do with this screen i picked this because in the old look, this looked best, but the new one, it doesn't look good at all.

1:30:59Do I have to add another screen? Can I use a different widget here? Can I use a sheet instead of this thing? So that's true of any of these changes. And what you said before, Marco, is so true. And what I keep saying with to what end? Like, if you're going to make a big change like this, why? What is the benefit on the other side of this pain, right? You know, what is it that is about your systems that needs to be that demands this kind of overhaul um and this is where we kind of get a little bit into the the spiraling but like before we get to that which i will soon um i first want to say the tiny optimistic part of this story for me personally uh and that is that i have been uh unhappy with the direction that the mac os ui has been going in for many years now we've talked about system settings many times i'm currently making an app using a bunch of the new swift ui and mac os widgets uh and buttons and controls and forms and labels and text fields and all the things right and i don't think they're improvement and improvement over what app could look like a decade ago i think they're worse i think they're uglier i don't think they don't work as well so on the mac the answer should be the question to what end could be in best case scenario Hey, all those things you don't like about how the Mac is looking and working.

1:32:22Now is an opportunity to fix that, to say we're going in the wrong direction. We shouldn't have text fields with no borders with right aligned text in the passwords. Right. Like the toggle switches and settings and labels 20 yards away from there, the things that they're labeling. That's not good. Let's come up with a better look for that. Let's just make some more contrast and more visual hierarchy and not just have everything be dark gray everywhere. On the Mac, there is, I think, a need, a problem that needs to be solved. That the current notion of modern Mac OS UI is ugly and works worse than it used to.

1:33:02That's my optimistic take is like, you know, I don't think iOS and iPad OS are dying for, you know, a UI overhaul. and obviously it's so much more important than the phone because it's such a more popular platform but the mac kind of has felt at sea for a while now with any new eye they were allowed basically being met by the mac's biggest fans with either a shrug or a frown whereas in the early days of especially the early days of mac os 10 aqua had everybody jazzed even though it had tons of detractors as well but it was certainly exciting and over the years they have refined the mac interface and there were good years and bad years sometimes the dock was really shiny sometimes it wasn't sometimes the the they added uh stitch leather to the calendar app you know but like there's been ups and downs but always i feel like we're sort of you know driving uh and on a winding road towards improvement except for in the last let's say five to ten years where a bunch of even just forgetting the widgets a bunch of things that happened like do you remember i don't even remember which os update this was we've already established that we can't remember the names of the osses but i think long time mac users will have this feeling that it used to be easier to tell which window was active which window was in front like they made an os change where like the front window was not as much more prominent than the the windows behind it like they used to you know in the old days light have like the windows would be the background windows would be lighter the front window would be darker sometimes the foreground window would have more detail than the background windows the foreground window has always had a bigger shadow and still does but they made some changes in recent years that really just kind of flattens out the ui a little bit and makes foreground and background windows look much more like each other they have taken away borders on things things like text fields to think there are things in the mac os ui that you can't tell our controls in sort of an ios 7 style there are problems ui problems to be solved on the mac and in theory this could be a way to fix them now now it's time to spiral how much confidence do we have that literally anything they do to any of these operating systems will be an improvement.

1:35:09Yeah, so the bigger concern for me is what they have demonstrated on the Mac for the last decade or whatever. Or pick any platform, really. No, but especially, see, the Mac, I think, is the most in danger with this. I'm in danger. What they have shown with the Mac is that they currently do not have enough resources devoted to the Mac or possibly enough talent left in the company. Enough expertise. They don't know what to do. Yeah, like what we've seen is that whenever they change the Mac UI recently, it's usually worse. Yes. And when you see something like the new settings app, you're like, okay, this was a dramatic redesign that happened recently, and it's awful.

1:35:55Like there's so many things about it that are unintuitive, ugly, broken, like just like outright just awful. And especially since it did achieve some of its design goals, which is to make an interface that scales better with more settings. Like, I think they have achieved that. But every other aspect of the redesign is bad. Like, congratulations, you made a scalable system for adding more settings that is more scalable than hand tweaking every single screen. But literally everything else about it is worse than it was before. Right. So when you think of a redesign happening, it's not, you know, the people who made the Mac what we love.

1:36:29It's the people who made the settings app. It's those people redesigning the entire OS. Like that's what we are going for here. So now think about I'm picturing in my mind's eye a new consistent. Forget about it, whether it looks like vision OS with like glassy things on iOS, but like a new consistent thing. And all I picture in my mind looking at my Mac screen is title bars that have even fewer features and less contrast title bars that are bigger menu bars and title bars that are just bigger and featureless expanses of white and light gray. like you know what a pop-up menu looks like on the phone whatever that that thing is where it shows like a rounded rectangle with the lines through it my pull-down menus from the menu bar look like that huge amounts of white space around each thing like the check boxes and radio buttons are gone everything is a toggle switch like for consistency because people are confused they're not confused like that's what i see like if you take the i take ios or ipad os and make the mac look like that it is not an improvement it is worse and that's what i fear i fear so badly well and in fact apple's own apple's own marketing department and statements have been craig federighi like outright stating things like we're not going to merge these os's and in fact there's rumor german still says exactly that but if you if you make the designs too quote consistent you are adopting design patterns for for a platform that are not right for it And that's the same reasons that we all know these platforms are not really meant to be merged allegedly or shouldn't be merged.

1:38:03But they're doing all this allegedly. And again, this is all through the German filter. So some of the details or justifications or reasons might be wrong. But the information about them having a big redesign of this is probably right. That's based on German's track record. And OS-spanning redesign, not just within one island. Yeah. But what we've seen from Apple over the years with a lot of the stuff they've done to the Mac especially, that they use that term consistency. It is a goal of theirs to make the Mac more like iOS. But not only does that not make sense because the design – like they're such different systems with such different hardware and input and output methods and just information density and control designs and everything.

1:38:53They're so different. It makes no sense to have them be the same. But also I don't – I think they are being very condescending to users to suggest that we need things to be more similar. Otherwise, we just don't understand our computers. like they're selling Macs in record numbers. People aren't confused. Like people who buy the Mac know the Mac. Not every single person in the world understands the Mac, but not every single person in the world understands any computing platform, including iPads and iPhones. Like computers, when people are motivated to have to use them for work or people like them, they figure them out.

1:39:30That's what we've done over the decades of computers existing. Like people figure them out. Not everything is perfect. Not everything needs to stay the same way it is forever. but people are able to learn two different interfaces on two different devices and it's fine to have the mac look and work differently than the iphone that's why it's a different platform if you wanted everything to just look like iphones we all just use iphones and nobody would even need the mac so i don't want people hearing this and thinking you're saying oh people can just figure out the mac it doesn't matter that it's harder no as we said before on the ipad talking about ipad uh and stage management stuff the mac paradigm for doing what it needs to do is better and easier than for example the ipad paradigm or the iphone paradigm it is better and easier to manipulate multiple things multiple windows on the mac than it is on the phone or the ipad obviously it's easier on the than on the phone because the screen is tiny but even on the ipad where you have a 13 inch ipad and a 13 inch macbook pro dealing with windows and ipad os uses an interface appearance and vocabulary and set of actions that is Byzantine and hard to understand.

1:40:38So having to learn something new on the Mac pays dividends because that new thing you're learning is better than what you knew on the phone for dealing with multiple windows and a keyboard and trackpad and, you know, all the Mac stuff. Like it's not the case that the Mac is difficult and worse but you should just suck it up it's the case that the mac is better than the other choices because it lets you do more powerful things with a simple easy to understand consistent interface that by the way has been around for decades and is basically a lot of the skills that you know from windows microsoft windows transfer over for various reasons they're very similar to each other like we have not come up with a better way to do many things with a powerful personal computer than windows menus pointer blah blah blah arguably touchscreen max would help with this a lot but apple's being stubborn there but setting that aside and setting aside any redesign that may you know one of the rumors is they'll redesign mac os to be more friendly to touch by all means go for it but that is a separate issue entirely from things like i just mentioned the toggle switches.

1:41:44Was macOS crying out for iOS style slidey sideways toggle switches? I've seen more people confused by the iOS toggle switch control than I've ever seen people confused by a checkbox. Is it because people are old and checkboxes existed on paper forms, whereas most people didn't interact with little toggle switches unless they were dealing with like audio equipment or something? People don't always know which is the on and which is the off, which is why they have the little one that says ON where you can see the letters on when it's on. Like is blue on or Or is gray off or is gray like nothing in macOS was saying, you know what the problem with macOS is?

1:42:19People can't figure out checkboxes. They have no idea what a checkbox means. They can't tell when it's on. They can't tell when it's off. We need consistency. People on the iOS settings app use those little toggle switches. How about we put them on the Mac? And so here I am making a Mac app in 2025. And the settings screen in my app is filled with iOS style toggles because that's the way Apple wants you to do things. And they heard you in that direction with SwiftUI and macOS. and it's not the end of the world and again there are some advantages to it for scalability but it is not a thing that mac os needed it was not crying out for users were not baffled by checkboxes and radio buttons because they've been seeing them their whole life right and they're understandable and tractable ditto for buttons and for you know windows and title bars and pull down menus these are flexible components that could be improved upon and you can come up with maybe enhancements are ways to make them better or better window management systems and so on and so forth but the solution is not uh we should get rid of all that and just use stage manager everywhere because stage manager is not burning up the world and these toggle switches are not appreciably making anything better at best they're neutral like oh i i recognize these from my phone therefore i know how to use them but like it's not it's not making the mac better and more powerful It is just sort of like visual consistency for the sake of visual consistency.

1:43:38Yeah, and I don't think that's a thing that people need as much as Apple designers seem to think they do. These are very different platforms. They behave very differently in lots of ways. And I'm not saying that the Mac has no room for improvement for things that are confusing to a lot of people. That's not what I'm saying at all. There's lots of room for improvement for that. But I don't think people need a different skin on the UI. That's not what's confusing them. What's confusing them is things like, where do files go? How do I get to things? What the hell is a disk image? There's all sorts of other things.

1:44:11How do I find things in settings? Yeah, right. And why does half the settings app not work? Literally, it doesn't work. So again, this is what we're talking about. We're going to have those people redesign the whole thing. We're not having, like Bruce talking to Zini here, we're having those people redesign it. Not only do I not trust them to do a good job. Like I literally, again, because the settings app is literally broken. Like many features of it do not work. They do. It does not work. So do we want those people redesigning the whole OS? Even if we liked their visual concepts, which I don't think we will, but even if we like their visual concepts, they have not been trustworthy to execute correctly, to make something that works.

1:44:57So that's a huge worry for me. And I think when you look at how people have reacted to this rumor, it has gone over like a lead balloon. Yeah, people are not excited about it. Not at all. And I think that shows where Apple's reputation is in this department. I mentioned earlier the developer issues of if they're going to drop a bomb on the developer community and put a massive burden on every iOS app developer in the world, you know they i think they might be you know kind of overrating their their position here and and maybe maybe overestimating how much how much political capital they have in this environment but then on the technical on the on the technical side too like do they even have the talent on mac os to implement a new design or or on ios because for all of ios 7's faults it was a very clear vision of what they wanted and they overshot it by a little bit which arguably is what you want to do you want to you don't want to undershoot it you want to overshoot it so the fonts are a little bit too thin maybe the thing is a little bit too simple maybe the buttons have too few borders and you just back it off six notches and you have an os that you can use for a decade right that like i think the ios 7 trend and by the way it's cheaper to make apps with it i think the ios 7 transition despite all the fuss about it was largely successful and i do agree that occasionally you know every decade or two it's good to refresh everything and come up with a new look right we're just all scared now because we're like okay but what new look like what are you going to do specifically because just saying we're going to do a big redesign like if and to be clear and to be optimistic if if they make something that looks cool and attractive and new we will be excited about it customers will be excited about it even though people will grumble that they change the stuff looks or whatever but like that is a source of excitement it is there is upside to this like a setting aside like to what end what what benefit are people getting or whatever merely changing the way things look in a few minor behaviors if you do it well it's important to do that every once in a while and can get people jazzed and excited it can be a differentiator it could be like what the apple wants the story to be when the new iphone comes out with ios 19 is like and it's got an all new interface that looks really cool.

1:47:13That's what they want the story to be. And that is a plausible story. It absolutely can happen. Even if functionally, they don't actually improve anything on the phone, but it just looks a little cooler. And most people think it looks cooler. Thumbs up. Same thing with the Mac. Oh, the Mac has been kind of the same for a long time. Like I just said, there's things about the current interface that bother me. Guess what? They have an all new look and redesigned for the Mac. And actually, a lot of those problem areas have improved and the whole OS looks new and different. and we're excited about it and i remember the times when mac os 10 versions would come out and we would be excited about how it looked that started to you know again that started to veer off a little bit around the stitch leather thing but in general for many of the early years of mac os 10 each new os would come out and we were excited to see how it looked and he had opinions i like it i don't like it but in general it's like oh this is the mac looks all it was part of things that drove upgrades back when apple sold the os for 130 kids if you remember back in those days they used to sell the upgrades to mac os uh it would make you buy it because you want you want the cool new look uh and even if you didn't think you liked the cool new look and when you first saw it it would grow on you and eventually the old look would look old and you'd feel like you needed the new look and like that i think that's a healthy phenomenon but there was a there was a lot of getting lost in the wilderness there and then ios 7 happened and then the os started to diverge i do agree there's less sort of design unity between mac os ios and ipad os than there has been mostly between the mac and the other things but i fear i fear what they will do and that's what i'm hearing from everybody who's sort of in the know regular people don't even know this is happening they won't know until they see the first ad for the phone or they go to the store and see the first phone with it right which is the way it should be right but people who are tech enthusiasts i have not heard a single person say i'm so jazzed about that i haven't even heard a single person say what i just said which is there are parts of the current mac os that i don't like and i hope this fixes them.

1:49:04Everybody is saying, oh my God, I'm so afraid of what they're going to do. I'm so afraid that they're just going to make everything worse. And Apple should really reflect on that. And I mean, hopefully they use it to motivate them. No one believes in us. Everyone thinks we don't know how to make things better. Everyone is out there just crossing their fingers that we won't break the crap that they like now. Like there's a lot of people are feeling that way. Just fix the existing bugs and don't break the things that I like, right? That is a very pessimistic position for customers to be in. And Apple, I don't know if they do surveys of like their most enthusiastic customers, Apple should not have a, it should not like to see that in the server responses, the sentiment that their most enthusiastic customers are saying, please just don't make anything worse.

1:49:48Please just don't break the thing that I like, you know, please just fix the bugs that have been there for five years. I don't want any new features. Do a snow leopard release, blah, like the the uh occurrence of that sentiment has only been increasing in recent years among the enthusiast community and the non-enthusiast community the regular people who buy most of their products they are going to be upset by any kind of change but also if you do a change that they think looks cool they will be motivated to get the new phone in cool colors with the new interface and so on and so forth now that didn't work out for them with ios 18 and photos which was in the grand scheme of things a very small change that didn't change the look and feel of the widgets everywhere just changed one commonly used app in a way that i don't think was terrible but certainly wasn't a clear win over the existing app multiply ios 18 photos by every single app and every single uh iphone ipad and mac and 2025 is looking like a pretty scary year yeah because And keep in mind, too, like iOS 7 did not go over well with regular people.

1:50:53People hated it. Like when your parents' phones would update, you'd get those calls. What happened? Why does everything look like this now? Yeah. Can I go back? Nope. But also, you know, when you look at iOS 7, you can say like, oh, well, they haven't done a redesign in how many years ago that way. It's been a long time. But they've done a ton of incremental changes. If you look at, like, go, if, listeners, go do right now, go do a Google Image search for something like iOS 7 UI and take a look around at screenshots of actually what iOS 7 looked like. It looks ancient by comparison to what we have today.

1:51:32It's not that we've kept the same design all this time. Apple has iterated over time and we've iterated over time. And so it's not like we are in desperate need for a huge reset. we have been changing and evolving designs over the last decade or whatever it's been we are nothing like ios 7 today i wouldn't say nothing it's we're clearly a derivative of ios 7 but yes the details the small details have changed literally everywhere but i think if you looked at this and said is this more like from the ios 7 lineage or from the ios 1 through 6 lineage i know there wasn't an ios 1 i would say we're clearly derived from ios 7 I mean, yes, but like it's like in only very broad strokes.

1:52:14If you look and because every stroke is broader than every stroke in iOS 7. But like if you look at like what iOS 7 actually looked like and shipped like it's you know, we have gone so far since then. So there is not this big need for this. And again, like the expense, the burden that it puts on the entire ecosystem, including users, because I cannot if listeners, if you didn't have like parents. in your life or older people in your life during the ios 7 transition consider yourself like you missed it why does my phone's home screen look like a clown now right or like i don't i can't everything is lost i can't find anything just please how do i go back people hated it like regular people hated it yeah and people are always going to hate that it's not the reason not to do it and i do think people eventually got on board with it and got used to it pretty quickly because i think the ios 7 design was fundamentally a good idea if even if they overshot it a little bit but that's going to happen and like it's i think it's fine for that to happen but you don't want to burn you don't want to do that if there's not if you're not going to make some people excited about it and if there's not going to be uh benefits on the other side of it so the benefits of ios 17 or you know lower application development costs a fresh new look that makes you stand out in the market a differentiator between last year's phone and this year's phone like there's there were upsides to it that made the pain worth it.

1:53:36I think there's a couple of things that we need to explore. First of all, while I agree with everything that you guys are saying broadly, I think I can't help but wonder hearing John particularly espouse like, oh, the Mac is so much simpler and better than iPadOS to do things like window management. And on the surface, I think that's true. But I think we're all three of us showing our age because I would say for people who grow up on touchscreen devices first, the indirection that comes from a mouse, from a keyboard in some cases, but certainly by not touching the thing that they're interacting with, that has a burden that the three of us don't have to deal with because we were brought up on that indirection.

1:54:21But for things like my kids, like they're using Chromebooks now and they seem fine with that, but they're not really doing window management on their Chromebooks. Like everything's full screen. Right. And I think that they would find, and they're smart kids, but I think they would find the window management that I consider second nature to be burdensome and frustrating and old timey. me. And even though I personally agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying, John, I don't know that that's a fair representation of everyone. And I don't know that we should assume that we are completely right about that.

1:54:55Well, I mean, like I said, it's in the context of doing what you do on a Mac. If you need to see multiple things at the same time, it is easier to accomplish that on the Mac. If you don't need to see multiple things at the same time, it is easier to accomplish that on an iPad. So I think it's really just a question of like, eventually your kids, if they get older and get a job, they're going to have to do more than have a single thing full screen all the time. Like just inevitably, your work will become more complicated than that. So when you're faced with that challenge, how do you want to tackle it?

1:55:24How do you want to accomplish that goal? And the answer is not stage manager. The answer is some kind of normal windowing system. And as for the touchscreen thing, like we're all for touchscreen Macs. Like again, if they have to change a Mac OS to make it accommodate touchscreens, fine. but then actually ship some touch max right like this it is frustrating that apple has been stubbornly refusing to do touch max for reasons that don't make sense anymore uh and if they if the redesign accompanies that the that's all the better but like like here's the thing when faced with a complex task a simple set of tools is the best way to tackle it allowing you to use those tools to solve your problem rather than taking a complex task and making a complex system that fits that complex task like a key fits a lock but in only one particular way does it fit That's that's not a good way to solve that so if I said you have to develop an app in Xcode well there's a big learning curve there now i said now you have to do it on an ipad versus doing it on a mac it doesn't matter if you were born yesterday or born 50 years ago you will be more frustrated by trying to deal with all the different things that you have to deal with to develop an app in xcode or any kind of id like interface you'll be very frustrated trying to do that on an ipad versus trying to do it on the mac once you learn all the things you have to do i don't know that that's true i really don't and i and i mean that genuinely because i again i came from the same lineage that you did, even though I'm not sure you agree on that, but I came from the same lineage that you did.

1:56:53And so I, 1 trillion percent, would be, I would nope out of it instantly because it's impossible. But I'm not so sure that someone cut from a different cloth would feel the same way. But I mean, there's no way to answer this. I mean, it's a question of the complexity of the problem. How many things do you need to be doing and seeing at the same time? As that number decreases, you can get simpler interfaces. And by the way, I think the Mac does a pretty good job of accomplishing that if i watch how my son uses his mac to do things he just full screens everything three-firmers swipes between them like it's not as as straightforward as an ipad perhaps but it is a way of using a mac that is foreign to me but mac os does accommodate it and allows him to work more like he's used to but there does come a point where he needs to see more than one window at the same time and as soon as you need to do that you need to come up with some kind of solution.

1:57:43And like, I've, I've literally never met anybody who finds the way iPad handles multiple windows to be simpler, more understandable, and more flexible than the way Mac does. It's not saying the Mac is easier because people can get fresher by the Mac too. Oh, I lose track of windows. I can't tell when they're visible, so on and so forth. But if you're, if your thing you're trying to do is complicated, the iPad is so limiting. You can do certain things. I can do two, I can do two with the slide over four, five mil strange manager kind of, but it gets real hard, real fast. Like the curve, you hit a wall, right?

1:58:16So again, it depends on the context for simple things. You know, iPadOS makes simple things easy, but it makes many hard things literally impossible. And I get you in, in, I'm not, again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder if any one of the three of us would have a very different opinion about this. If we were growing up now, rather than 500 years ago. The other point I wanted to make is to be angel's advocate rather than devil's advocate, I guess. I don't know. The most casey thing you've ever said. So I put the Vision Pro on a few hours ago in order to re-watch the aforementioned free, not free solo, whatever I called it, the adventure episode.

1:58:56And I briefly used the Vision Pro to do not entertainment things. I answered an email, which I think I answered with four words because it's the world's worst keyboard. But I did a handful of quote-unquote productivity things. It was very little, but it was some. And every time I put the Vision Pro on, I've said this many times, every time I put the Vision Pro on, I feel like I'm strapping the future to my face. And that's both in the obvious ways. Like, oh, there's windows floating in freaking space. and the fact that when I look around, those windows are pretty solidly staying perfectly stationary.

1:59:34You know, they're not hovering and bouncing around like my drone does when I put it in the air. Like, they are solid. And I still am stupefied that that is something that we can accomplish in 2024, really, because this was a year ago now. But the other thing that makes it feel like the future is just the whole vibe of the interface. I don't think I have the vocabulary to do much better than that, but the way that transparency is used and depth is used, and granted, those things are used because the Vision Pro lends itself to transparency and depth especially, but the whole just vibe of the OS, leaving aside the fact that I've got the future on my face, the vibe of the OS just feels kind of futuristic.

2:00:19And then I look at things like the invites app and granted the invites app was kind of not great, but visually it's a lot of transparency and depth in a much smaller degree, but depth nevertheless. And it does, as we've talked about before, does give a kind of vision OS-y vibe. And I feel like bringing that whole vibe to the OS broadly, and I'm not disagreeing, especially Marco, with what you were saying earlier. It's a big lift for individual developers like us. It's asking a lot at a time where we're all feeling pretty disgruntled about Apple. Again, it's all of those things you said I completely agree with.

2:00:55But if you take it just at the surface, I think having that vibe, the, was it Jon Prosser, I think you said, mock-up of Photos app. Like, visually, I think that looked pretty cool, and it looked kind of like the future. And I would not at all be surprised if Apple tries to get, if not literally that same approach, that whole vibe onto iPadOS, onto MacOS, onto iOS. And perhaps that's why it wasn't mentioned in German's report is because we're already there in VisionOS. And we're bringing that same, and I know I've said the word 17 times, I'll say it again, we're bringing that same vibe to these other platforms.

2:01:37And honestly, taking off my developer hat and putting on my consumer hat, that actually sounds kind of good to me, to be completely honest with you. I think I might be here for that. Now, as soon as I take my user hat off and put the developer hat on, I want to crawl into a hole and die. Like, I'm already too tired to deal with any of that. But from a user's perspective, I think that might be pretty cool. There's some parallels with the early days of Mac OS X here. like one of the things that uh was said frequently about aqua probably by me but i don't remember um was that aqua looks like the interface that people would make up for sci-fi movies back in the day like they make like a fake computer interface of some future computer and a sci-fi thing and they'd make it it would look nothing like you know at the time like you know windows or classic mac os and it would behave nothing like it and have these gratuitous visual effects that people would look at and say that's not what computers look like this is all you know fantasy sci-fi stuff or whatever uh and apple essentially said we're going to make a movie computer interface like the genie effect was totally like a special effect movie thing everything being transparent and shiny candy colored round 3d looking photorealistic buttons and photorealistic icons like that's not what computers are like that's some ridiculous movie person's idea but they literally made it they made they made a movie computer right and what you're saying about vision os is basically the same thing oh it looks like the future because you've seen a lot of things in popular media of sci-fi stuff that looks kind of like big translucent panes i remember a minority report had such an effect on this that in pop culture even non-tech enthusiasts were saying it's like a minority report interface where tom cruise is swiping away clear panes of glass you know floating in front of him like an ar interface or whatever things in popular media influence what we think quote unquote looks like the future so vision os looks like the future because it looks like things that we've seen in sci-fi movies and as we've all said transparency and vision os makes tons of sense because it's overlaying the interface on top of the world around you in a way that other things do not things with screens that are not strapped your eyeballs don't do that um and arguably early versions of mac os 10 and later versions of windows thoroughly explored exactly how translucent you can make things before it becomes visually confusing and we've learned lessons there and we may suddenly unlearn those but you're totally right that if they can successfully make essentially the movie interface just like aqua did it will be exciting enough and cool enough that it will be a net benefit despite all the people who are going to flip out about how things look terrible despite all the reviews that i wrote saying how this thing shouldn't be translucent and this is hard to see and the information density has gone down and yada yada yada like they refined they tweaked they backed off they figured it out but that burst of excitement is something you can't replace and despite the fact as marco said that you know ios is not crying out for a massive redesign every n number of years you should do this just to sort of clear the decks and freshen things up even though it's painful it's why you don't do it every year it's why you don't do it every five years but when was ios 7 i can't do math in my head but like i think every 10 or 15 years is a reasonable time scale to think about a rig redesign the reason i'm spiraling about this is because i don't have faith that the redesign will be an improvement oh it kills me to say that but i just don't and honestly i've still not met a single not met not seen a single response from somebody granted in my little circles of people who are similar ages and have similar experiences with Apple who are like, I'm excited about this.

2:05:16I think they're going to do a great job because we're not excited. And I hope Apple, you know, takes that as a challenge and defies expectations and make something that we were like, oh, thank God, it's actually really cool. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Terminal and BetterHelp. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATB.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to to be looking at affordable evs and physical controls which is an interesting combination we're seeing uh there's this new volkswagen id everyone concept we're going to be talking about uh and some physical button news so that's in this week's overtime if you want to hear us talk about that you can join atv.fm join thanks everyone and we'll talk to you next week Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t-m-r-c-o-r-m-n-t-m-r-c-o-r-m-n-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-s-s-y-r-c-u-s-a-r-c-u-s-a-r-c-u-s-a.

2:06:54It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. John, do you have a speaker update for us? I do. Last episode, I talked about my old speakers were dying. they fully died eventually like just would not make any more noise which was bad um and so i was looking at new speakers i had some speakers in mind that i was going to get i asked the audience if anyone has these speakers how do they like them and people did write in can i jump in it just occurred i don't know why it just occurred to me what if you're only using these speakers for games why does fidelity really matter that much i mean so as i said last time i've had these speakers for like over 16 years.

2:07:42And when I'm buying anything new electronics-wise, it's like, oh, can I do better than the speakers I got 16 years ago? It's not that I'm against fidelity. It's just that I'm not listening to them all day long. So I'm not going to spend a huge amount of money on them. They're not that important to me, especially given my criteria, which I will reemphasize when I start talking about these new speakers. This is a lot of money to spend on speakers that you're using for video games, if you ask me. It's not just video. Like anytime I need to hear audio, if I'm watching a YouTube video, I need to hear the audio.

2:08:08So maybe that's not a high fidelity type experience but you know and i do occasionally listen to my music collection on my mac while i'm doing stuff you know it's just i'm not i'm not i don't have music playing all the time like you do but the bottom line is i wanted to upgrade i had old speakers i wanted new speakers i wanted the new speakers to be better than the old speakers not better in a thousands of dollars way but better i mean that's all the reason you ultimately need i was just curious all right so i i apologize for interrupting yeah and it's not it's not like i again i wasn't looking for like these have to be super high fidelity i just wanted them to be better right you know you buy a new thing you want to be better than the old thing especially if the old thing you have is really old so i asked for people to give me feedback on the ones i was thinking of buying and they did but also people uh suggested many alternatives to the ones that i was looking at most of the alternatives they suggested i had seen and explored and chosen the ones that i was looking at because i didn't like them but two uh suggestions stand out i want to talk about them uh one of them is the vanatu v-a-n-a-t-o-o transparent zero plus i had actually looked at the speaker i had mostly dismissed it based on looks which was a big criteria for me uh but so many people wrote in to say they either had these or had heard these and they were impressed by the fidelity uh compared to the price and size despite the fact that they are a little weird looking uh these links to all these in the show all of these are not great looking to be honest with you i don't think any of these are good looking these speakers are wedge shaped so they're angled they're angled they're they're more like a trap is a trap yeah they're more like a trapezoid than a rectangle but they have this interesting feature where if you can see on the back looks like there's like a handle back there right if you turn these over if you flip them like 180 degrees then then the surface of the speakers is um perpendicular to the table right so they it's like they're trying to have it both ways these can be tilted back or these can be just straight up and down and it makes very strange arrangement if you have them in your desk you should probably have them tilted up towards you i don't really like the handle but i just wanted to point this out that people give lots of good reports on these speakers in particular they have good fidelity a lot of people who are looking for speakers on their desks are measuring them as what they call studio monitors or things that will try to give you an exactly accurate and neutral near-field listening experience for doing audio editing so you know what it really sounds like as opposed to trying to change the audio to make it pleasing to your ears like no just show me the audio it's there because i'm the one changing the audio i'm mixing the track i'm adjusting the thing or whatever so i need to hear what it really sounds like so i want you to just be completely neutral have a frequency response that doesn't change it's just totally flat because that is accurate.

2:10:56I wasn't looking for that. And so the fact that these Vanity Transparent Zero Pluses have that and are fairly inexpensive and small wasn't that attractive to me. But I did take a second look at them, even though I had dismissed them earlier for being ugly. Wait, before, so first of all, before we lose, before we leave this, this is actually like to have the speakers natively angled diagonally upward towards you is a great feature for desktop speakers because that is the better angle. Normally you have to achieve it with some kind of, you know, stand or like a wedge kind of mount or something. But so to have them actually just natively angled up like that is a great feature.

2:11:33These may be tilted a little bit too much though, I feel like. Depending on the height of your desk and their position, they look a little slanty to me. A little, but I think it actually, that's pretty close to what you want. Like my, I have my, I have the KEF or KEF. I still don't know how to pronounce it. I always do a say KEF. Yeah, I have the, I think it's the LSX2? I think those have stands that like just stand them up and it's, it's at almost that angle. It isn't quite that angle, but it's, it's close. Um, that being said, I do love the name, you know, transparent. That's what you mean. Like when transparent in audio terms means the speakers are not quote coloring the sound.

2:12:12They're not like boosting the base or boosting the treble. Like they're, they're just giving you like the, a reasonably flat frequency frequency response. and that is you are correct uh what people in studios want when they have you know studio monitors uh it's almost never what you want for your own personal listening people usually would go for speakers that are quote more musical what usually means like a little more pleasant to listen to but you know the name transparent that means there's nothing there they add to that zero so transparent also zero still nothing there and then they say plus plus what like what that's not transparent anymore well they're better than the old transparent zero i think is actually the second version of this and by the way the other alternative that you will see and the reason some of these go in different arrangements is rather than tilting them up they you physically raise them so they're at the height of your ears and then you make them you know just 90 degrees to the the table uh that's another alternative uh you obviously that's why you often see studio monitors like up on a shelf in studios so that the speakers are at the level of the ears of the person who is working on the thing.

2:13:19The other set of speakers that was recommended that I had also looked at a little bit before, but again, hearing lots of people who have these in real life and like them a lot, were the Atom Audio D3V. They look like little computer speakers. They're very compact. They're fairly inexpensive. And again, one of the things that people say about these is they are very neutral good for being a studio monitor things these ones have going for them is they have ribbon tweeters which are uh very uh it's a different way of making the speaker mechanism that makes the highest frequencies and it uses lighter weight materials that can start and stop moving more quickly uh sometimes people don't like ribbon tweeters because they find them too shrill or too harsh but it may be they're just accurately portraying uh frequencies and transitions that they're not able to hear on other speakers that are more musical and less transparent yeah well that's on that response by the way like people who there is nothing more divisive and harder to like nail down consensus on in the audio world than treble like treble response like this because and there's lots of good reasons for this like the amount of treble and how people perceive it varies wildly across different speakers and headphones and it like it's it's so different and there's good reason why some people will say oh i want like i i like a lot of treble i want a lot of that detail otherwise things sound muffled or dull or boring because you're missing a lot of that high-end frequency response to other people a lot of that high-end frequency response that kind of you know sharp trebly sound that can sound harsh or grating it can make it fatiguing to listen for long periods.

2:15:04Too bright, they say. Yes. And there's a reason, the reason we have such massively different opinions across people for treble response is that people have massively different hearing response to treble. Not only as we age, we lose treble pickup response, but also just different people have different peaks and sensitivities to how we are sensitive to different frequencies, even when you're young. So anything people say about treble response or harshness or sharpness or fatigue when listening to speakers or headphones, you basically have to discount all of that and just kind of judge for yourself because whatever you prefer and perceive and even hear in treble is probably different from whatever that reviewer that you're reading perceives or prefers themselves.

2:15:54Although one thing you can look at from the physical instruction is, again, ribbon tweeters tend to be better at the highs and the subtle transitions between the different frequencies because they can – essentially the moving parts have less momentum and mass than a traditional tweeter. Those Canto tucks that you got, I think they had a ribbon tweeter as well. Ribbon tweeters are very common. So if you like the highest of high frequencies, you may be drawn to a speaker that has a ribbon tweeter as a way to get that. the other aspect of these speakers that is different than most of the other ones that i've been looking at is they're not ported which means they don't have a big hole in the back of the speaker to allow air to go in and out to make sort of a bassier noise from a smaller speaker instead they have a passive radiator which is like a diaphragm that the diaphragm goes in and out it's like a usually like a you know a circular region or whatever it's like a loose drum head and as the air pressure changes inside the speaker from it playing that little thing will move in and out uh it is a different it's a different sound porting can be like boomier and make sort some sorts of uh strange noises when the volume is very high uh but it also can give a very small speaker a lot more bass and there's factors about how close you put it to the wall that affect that and so on and so forth but anyway the atom audio d3v a non-ported ribbon tweeter small form factor studio monitor type of thing with the volume control on the front not the best looking Yeah, I gotta say, this definitely looks like someone who designed speakers in 95 was dragged to 2025 and said, use modern style to do the crap you're used to doing.

2:17:35Because that's what this is. It looks straight out of 95 with just a sprinkle of modern stuff on it. I don't mind it that much. I don't really like the shape. I don't like, in general, I feel like I don't like speakers that taper like footballs. so many of them are like that the whole uh there's a whole bunch of very popular studio monitors that their their look of their whole product line is kind of like oblong rounded tapered type of things this at least has a little bit of sharper edges but yeah i'm not a big fan i don't really like the the the passive radiator on the side i do kind of like that they have an integrated tilted stand looks like a foot as opposed to you having to buy one that's the way they accomplish this i think you can use it with or without the stand i don't know if it actually tilts but they got a lot of good reviews and here's the thing there for their size and performance it is it's a good ratio if you care about transparent ish studio monitors that are small and sound really good but don't cost that much these atom audio d3vs are a good deal i would actually have probably considered them if i could have tolerated to look a little bit better which leads me to the speakers that i was actually looking at and again one of the main reasons i was looking at these speakers was because i liked the way they looked and we just got done saying how silly it is what you're picking speakers based on how the speaker looks?

2:18:51That makes no sense. That makes total sense, by the way. I bought my car based a lot on how it looks. I bought my house based a lot on how it looks. Oh, that's not true. You bought your car because you don't know how to buy anything but a Honda specifically in a car. No, I skipped over the ugly Honda Accord generations if you noticed. I'm throwing a yellow flag on this one, but we don't have time to deal with it. I like the way my car looks. You don't have to like it. I like it. So, anyway, the two I was looking at were the Kanto, K-N-T-O, Canto Aura, all caps O-R-A, and the Canto Aura 4. And I said, please give feedback if you have these speakers.

2:19:22Tell me what you think of them. Tons of people wrote in. Pretty much no one had anything bad to say about these speakers other than the things that I already knew about them. And actually, just to interject again, the Canto Aura, the one that we're going to link in the show notes, if you open that page on Amazon, do you notice that there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 variations of the speaker? You know why? because it has fucking colors. Imagine that. It has colors. You can buy speakers in colors. You can do black, gray, indigo, which is, I guess, bluish to my eyes, but that's right. Moon, moss, pink, purple, red, and white.

2:20:01Imagine being able to buy colors. And you can distinguish all these colors, believe me. Yes. You will not be confused about which one is the blue one. It's blue. And by the way, they also sell it in black, which is the one i got i was not offended by the existence of those colors at all i bet most people do buy i bet most people do buy the black or white ones but it's still cool that the colors exist and they can change those colors every year if they want to mix it up a little bit anyway i like how these speakers looked i also like that they got good reviews i also like the size of them i was trying to decide between the aura and the aura 4 they're basically the same exact speaker except the aura 4 is larger because the non-tweeter driver in it is four inches instead of 2.5 inches and also there was the mostly ridiculous but still weird thing that was driving me towards the auras is that the auras in theory only had 16 uh 16 bit 48 kilohertz and the aura four support 24 bit 96 kilohertz which makes no difference because these speakers cannot resolve anything that would let you distinguish that and i don't even have music in that resolution anyway ears but still it was driving me towards it and on that front by the way someone who has the the auras not the Aorus 4s, wrote in to say, maybe they did a stealth upgrade of the guts of the Aorus, because here is the audio MIDI setup in macOS with my Aorus attached, and it lets me pick 24-bit 96 kilohertz.

2:21:19I don't know if that is evidence that that speaker supports 24-bit 96 kilohertz, or merely evidence that macOS will let you set that as the output, and then when it gets to the speaker, the speaker just down samples it to 1640, 1648. I don't know the answer to that question, but just setting that aside, that was one of the things driving towards it. And finally, one of the final things that would drive me towards the four versus the aura was that the the mid-range driver looks nicer on the on the aura 4 than the aura look at the aura next to the aura 4 the the aura 4 has like i think it's metal whereas the aura has like a paper one and it just looks a little bit smoother and cleaner on the aura 4 i know this sounds ridiculous to you again you're picking you're picking one speaker over the other because the speaker cone looks nicer believe me especially if people have those keff speakers whatever speaker manufacturers spend a lot of time designing the look of the speaker drivers in their speaker even if they have great so that's why a lot of them come with magnetic like you know you know grills call them greats or grills yeah they come with magnetic ones so if you don't want them on you can just take them off and there's no holes and usually it sounds better without them yeah these are visual items and i mean keff doesn't even include them but they're like look at our beautiful speakers they're so beautiful and so concentric kev speakers are okay kev speakers are awesome like i as i have tried other brands here and there uh including i have um uh genelec uh desktop speaker they had those briefly that's another one of those stupid uh oblong like lozenge shaped thing yeah i mean it's yeah they're fine um the the kev speakers they just sound so good and not all of them like i actually don't like the um the ls50 line very much like they they have a bit of a different sound profile that i don't care for um but the q line and the the lsx2 i really enjoy and they you know they have a totally different design where they they have um concentric drivers where the tweeter is on the inside of the woofer so they it's just two concentric circles it looks like one driver but the tweeter is like the middle part then that vibrates separately from the outer part which is the woofer it's a crazy design but there's a bunch of benefits to that in terms of like it kind of widens the sweet spot of the sound it avoids certain interference patterns it ends up sounding really good but what Kef is really good at to my ears is that musicality, like these are not flat frequency responses they just sound really pleasant and really good in a way that like especially in mid-range and in vocals i haven't found anything that sounds this good in speakers i have one pair of headphones that i like more than this that's the hi-fi man h6 that i have from forever ago um i've never found anything else besides those headphones and kef speakers and only a few models of kef speakers uh that sound that good in the mid-range but fortunately i don't have to deal with like these being ugly because they're not ugly they're great looking in to my opinion and you know what they're offered in colors multiple colors every keff speaker is offered in multiple colors even the boring like wood finished ones are offered in like four different woods and these are like you know these have like carpet on the outside of them like these have like four different colors too like there's they they have lots of different styles because when people use things and you know they buy them for their homes they want them to look like you know their personality it's a permanent fixture in your house it's going to be a thing that you see all the time yes you do want it to look nice and match you want it to look good and to have some options and by the way i think the kefs if you look at them now and you're like marco thinks he looks good they're a little bit puffy looking if you're not used to what they look like and the keft does make other much much larger tower speakers that are much more complicated and have lots more large drivers that don't look like the little concentric things and yes other companies also have concentric drivers and they're great everyone should make center channel speakers with concentric drivers you hear me uh but they don't uh but still some some other companies do have in fact i believe there are a couple i was looking at some when i was looking at other like desk computer mon uh computer speakers they have computer speakers with concentric drivers too not from keff but like from other much less expensive brands uh it's a good idea because it aligns the you know the high frequencies low frequencies and it's it's very beneficial um oh my god there's a bright yellow version of the lsx2 now this was not available when i purchased you should look at the really big keff tower speakers i think you might like them oh they're they look nuts so anyway the thing the downsides of these auras um what i had heard is obviously when these are all small speakers they're kind of expensive uh the they don't have a bass or treble adjustment on the speakers which everyone complained about and i knew i wouldn't like because i do like to have that basic adjustability on the speaker itself these don't have it i knew that going in everyone who owned them was happy with them some people did say that they heard the aura 4 versus the aura and they picked the aura because they felt the aura 4 had a little bit too much bass i mean it makes sense they're basically exactly the same speaker except for the uh mid-range slash quote-unquote woofer is just so much bigger on the aura 4 so it can't help but sound bassier because that's the whole deal some people like the aura 4 it's better because it was bassier and could go louder because it has a more powerful amplifier and a bigger driver and all that other stuff in the end like i said i decided to get the aura 4 because i did like the way it looked no negative reviews from anybody really i figured i could live with the lack of bass and treble controls and i like the way i like the 24 bit 96 kilohertz even though it's pointless and i like the way the the speaker cone look the metal speaker cone versus the paper one or whatever so i did indeed get the kanto aura 4s these are just a flat rectangle and of course i needed them to be tilted up if you are using computer speakers and you do not have them pointed at your ears you are missing out on a lot because most computer speakers if they're designed at all are designed for near quote-unquote near field listening which is your head is pretty close to the speakers like you can reach them with your hands that is not the case with you know stereo speakers or whatever even home theater speakers that are filling your room with sound these are going to be close to you they're often very directional which means that if you don't point in particular the tweeters at your ears you are losing a lot of the frequencies that they're putting out and it's not subtle you can just take them and twist them so they're pointed directly at the back of the room and you hear the treble disappear and then point them back at your ear so you need them to point at you and you can just twist them on your desk but you also need to point up at your ears so you have a choice of either getting some speaker stands that elevates the speaker so they They are at ear level, which I don't want to do because I don't like how it looks.

2:28:07Or you get something that tilts them up. Luckily, Kanto, my first interaction with Kanto as a brand was I bought their speaker stands for my home theater speakers. They make lots of speaker stands. Surprise, surprise. They make tiny little angled speaker stands for their tiny speakers. And so if you get the Kanto Aura, you can get the Kanto S2 speaker stands, which is a bent piece of metal that costs less than the one inside my Mac Pro. and if you buy the aura 4 you should get the canto s4 speaker stand uh pro tip for canto on your website clearly indicate which speakers the stand works with they try to do that but they don't mention the auras anywhere so i can just tell you from experimentally determining the canto s4 speaker stands fit fit the canto aura 4 perfectly they the canto aura 4s have a little screw hole in the bottom the stands have a little screw hole and they come with a screw and it fits directly in there and they exactly fit uh and so i hooked up my speakers with a big long usb-c cable to my mac plugged everything in turn everything on tried it out here's what i think of these things i wish they had a bass and treble knob i knew i would i knew it would be a problem uh part of that like marco basically covered this all this exact stuff before i'm old and i can't hear treble as well as I used to.

2:29:26I'm 50, right? That's just a fact of life. I also happen to like treble. The Canto Aura 4, in their default mode, sound too bassy to me. They sound bassy. They sound muddled. They sound muffled. To a young person, maybe they don't, but to me they do, which is fine. Very often, if you have a computer speaker that has a bass and a treble knob, just turn the knobs until it sounds the way you want it to. No knobs, so you can't do that. so i am left with uh software solutions which is fine there's lots of good software solutions this in particular sound source from rogami about a piece of software i already own can do this for you it can provide a system-wide equalizer that applies to all audio across the entire system with customizable equalizer curves and yada yada yada if you don't want to do it system-wide itunes itself which is where i listen to my music or whatever the hell it's called now music also has its own equalizer inside the music app if you just want to equalize the music and not every system sound there are many other apps that do this that you can find i like sound source because it does 5 000 other things i've already put in like five feature requests for for sound source um my main activity while setting these things up has been trying to figure out what equalizer curve do i want i've been trying to sort of manually reproduce the harman curve because i actually do kind of like that uh was it harman kardon the yeah stereo manufacturer came up with a curve that they claim is what most people they just a lot of people listen to things and said do you like this better worse or the same and they came up with a curve that they thought if you apply this curve most people think it sounds better this is what marker was getting at with like it's not neutral and it sounds exactly like what you'd expect from a design by committee to average it's these everything designed with the harman curve because like when they released that like everything was then judged against that and so for a long time and i think even still today people imitate it yeah yeah and every like headphone and speaker is is tuned to try to match the harming curve exactly because they know they're going to be reviewed against it and as a result a lot of things end up sounding exactly the same and and for me it's a little bit less treble than i would like and so most headphones and speakers sound very boring to me as a result and so yeah there's nothing wrong with using eq to tweak the sound the way you want it i have an eq in my system it's fine yeah so i was basically trying to reproduce the harman curve with my equalizer because i found that that is actually kind of what i want and i tried to i was trying to find a good link you would think there'd be like a good wikipedia page in the harman curve and there are a bunch of wikipedia pages about target curves and the harman itself has some pages about this but there's no like here is the one definitive url for the harman target curve i was very disappointed in not being able to find it because i wanted to find like the literal values like because i'm moving sliders i'm like i need to know where to move these sliders i don't want to just match the shape on this you know logarithmic graph where they have to carefully count the little lines to figure out what value that is i figured someone's got to have it like a excel spreadsheet with the values for like 10 band dq or something but i couldn't find it but anyway basically what it looks like is like a kind of an s-shaped curve where like it's high at the base then dips down low and then goes up high at the treble but then dips down at the very end of the treble anyway point is i was playing with equalizers to make these sound good and the the upshot is that when i equal these these things take very well to equalization because they have more than enough of everything if i want tons of bass they have it this is even without a subwoofer attached if they want tons of bass and that's what i want they can do it and they also have pretty good treble so it's just a question of how much of each thing do you want how do you want to dial it and i came up with a curve in sound source that i think i mostly like i'm still tweaking it a little bit uh and they just sound way better than my 16 year old speakers surprise they cost way more and they sound way better i think they look really nice too i love the stands one of the other complaints about the the canto auras in particular not the aurophores is they're so small and light and that the knob on them is so stiff and you have to press the knob in to turn them on and off that you end up moving the speaker on your desk that does not happen with the aurophores especially on the stands because all of kanto stands are very heavy metal stands and the speakers are screwed to them and they have like grippy stuff on the bottom so i can press the power button and that doesn't happen uh the one downside to the power button is i have to press it twice because when you first press it it always defaults to like the 3.5 inch jack and the second presses do usb uh which leads me to the final thing about this which is as i said before most of the time i spent with my old speakers during that 16 years the speakers were turned off like physically turned off with an off switch.

2:33:57So every time my computer went to make a sound, no sound would come out because they were sending sound to speakers that were turned off. That's the way I like it. Right. And when I want to hear music, I turn my speakers on. Now, whenever I turn my speakers on, I have to press the power button twice, which is a little bit annoying. But the other thing that I discovered about this that I hadn't thought about at all is after I was, you know, I got them all set up. I were like, Hey, let me just do some stuff, turn my speakers off, start working. I think I clicked on something and it beeped I'm like how are they beeping I turn the speakers off and I said oh that wasn't the speakers beeping that was my mac beeping sometimes I forget that my mac has a speaker inside it but it does the mac pro does in fact have a speaker and I'm like mac why are you making noise you've never done that before you know the answer it's because these speakers are connected with a usb cable and when I turn these speakers off mac os goes well wherever the hell that usb audio interface was it's gone now so anyway falling back to the internal speaker yeah so to solve that problem i did the uh the analog the analog hole solution which is plug a stub headphone jack adapter into the headphone jack on the back of my mac and now it thinks it's connected to some analog speakers to the 3.5 millimeter jack but it's not so now my mac is blessedly silent i have system-wide eq through sound source i have speakers on my desk that i find very attractive i hope they don't collect too much dust i'll keep you updated on this situation they sound so much better than my old speakers and i actually have been to casey's delight listening to way more music at my desk although yes i absolutely i was trying to develop my app this week and at various points i said wait a second i need to turn this music off what do you think i'm not casey list i can't like my brain i can't i'm an active listener and my brain latches on to the music and stops doing the programming and so there are only limited circumstances in which i can i think we've talked to this before i can do css when i'm listening to music i can't really code and i definitely can't write so but i have listened to a lot of music when i've been working this week and i'm really happy with the the new speakers like i said there is an improvement uh oh and size wise i'm glad i got the bigger ones i was afraid they would be too big they're not i think the small ones are a little bit too small and i think these big ones are a little bit too big but they're not so big that they dominate the desk in a problematic way so if you're looking for a speaker and have similar requirements to my ridiculous requirements that you just heard and you like how these look i think they sound pretty good and i like almost everything about them and i hope they will last another 16 years uh and if you're not as picky as me definitely look at those adam audio things because they're a little bit ugly but they are uh what are they like a hundred dollars less 150 dollars less hundred dollars less uh than the ones i got and they supposedly sound better so if you don't want to be foolish like me and buy speakers based on how they look but rather how they sound go check out the adam audio d3v and if you like the way they sound they are a bargain Thank you.