695: The Crystal Pepsi of Aqua

32:05John Siracusa:better thumbs up for the bar yeah so quickly within mac os and some of these are also applicable on ipad sidebars now expand all the way to the leading edge of the window if you think about it they were there was a little they were inset just a little bit i don't know they were floating above right for no reason sidebars were floating above the content because because everything floats above of the content you take content and you just drop crap on top of it this is my favorite feature of the entire keynote i didn't i could not believe they did this i hated it so much when they did it but i'm like well they're not going to change that because it's the cornerstone of liquid glass terrible idea i hated it since day one they actually undid it thank god then they had to go to the next slide and say but don't worry sidebars are still translucent and then your stuff can put still edge because the margins just ate up space for no reason they made the window like incoherent for like visual hierarchy wise because like the toolbar buttons floating over the content okay their buttons they float over why is the sidebar floating why is it floating inside it was just it was so bad so thank god for that i'm my favorite feature by far yeah and and it's

33:03Marco Arment:funny like they they keep um you know one of the thing that's in also in this area too is like they fixed the corner radius of the windows now mac os window corner radius like in in um tahoe there was like the default system radius and that's like you know new window or new api apps would have that but then like no no no we've said this on the shows many times people still get confused about you know what gave you the really really big corner radius in tahoe having a toolbar and yes being compatible with the new sdk having a toolbar and no one ever guesses that because it doesn't make any sense why should the existence of a toolbar in the window determine all four corners of the but it did that's how it worked the big corner radius was any window that had a toolbar and was compiled with the new sdk right and link you know it was liquid glass adopting out that had toolbar apps that had hide show toolbar hiding the toolbar would change all four corners of the corner radius on the window when you hit the toolbar they would go back to be smaller and then and so that's two that was tahoe you know liquid glass with a toolbar roundest liquid glass without a toolbar less round and then there was not liquid glass the the setting that says don't adopt a new appearance or whatever which was the old default mac os 15 thing so you at least three corner radiuses on Tahoe.

34:18And there was a couple more corner radiuses because of like custom windows and stuff. So yes, that's another thing I didn't expect them to do. Not because it's difficult to do. It's very easy to do. I just didn't think they would do it, but they did. And their, you know, applause, I'm sure they got applause in the room feature is just make the corner radius the same in every window in macOS. And also, by the way, make that value be smaller than the stupid Tahoe toolbar one. I still think it's maybe a little bit over rounded because, you know, if you're seeing an image, you're missing those little pixels that around the corner, but thank goodness.

34:44Consistency has returned. Sidebars go to the edge. Every window has the same corner radius. That corner radius is smaller.

34:50Marco Arment:Yeah. And it seems I'm just eyeballing it. I have it on my laptop here. It looks like it now matches the corner radius of a Mac laptop screen. So if that's true, because if not, it's very close. But if that's true, that makes some sense. You know what the corner radius does not match? The radius of the toolbar buttons. you're right concentricity is dead baby it does not it does not that's why they did it oh wow because that's what when you had a toolbar and like they had the rounded corners to concentricity it was the whole idea of like it you know if you draw you can make a central point and then draw the radius and that will be the edge of the toolbar button and then you keep going out farther and that is the radius that is the edge of the window and i think it's fine mostly but like this is one of the cornerstones of their making everything sort of capsule shaped with like semi-circular corners.

35:40And to make that look nice, it's like, well, we need to have that radius, you know, as you go farther from the button, the radius of, you know, it needs to match. Concentricity is what they called it, right? And if you have, you know, rectilinear toolbar buttons, you don't have that problem, but they don't. So they kept the liquid glass semi-circular end cap toolbar buttons, but they also made every window have the same corner radius on the Mac and that corner radius be smaller, which means that it no longer matches the toolbar radiuses. And so I'm sure Alan Dye hates it. And when I look at it, I see it's slightly less harmonious, but I don't care because practically speaking, I want to see more of my content.

36:14I don't want 17 different corner radiuses on my Windows on my Mac. Yeah.

36:17Marco Arment:I mean, I think, you know, part of any design is you have like the theory, the principles and the theories that you're trying to achieve. But then at some point, reality has a conflict with those. Or there's some trade off you have to make where you have to sacrifice some of the purity of your your goals and principles for just pragmatic reasons or there's some conflict somewhere that arises or you have to think that this goal i was trying to achieve was not a good goal well right because the goal of concentricity is it looks nice and it is visual geometrically pleasing but what is the purpose of windows what is the purpose of a user interface the purpose of windows and a user interface is to present content and controls so people can use software the purpose is not to look amazing in screenshots and for you to be able to draw little circles on stuff and say look how the corner radius it has it has a job design is how it works and so if you say like oh i have to compromise my design well remind me again why you were so dead set on these semi-circular end caps on toolbar buttons they waste space and they don't look good unless you overly round the corners and so we say oh you have to you have to back off from your purity of design your design was not to an end that was benefiting the user it was benefiting you because it made you feel good in screenshots but that doesn't benefit the user so thank god they've backed that out and now they have this awkward design where they kept the toolbar buttons because it's hard to change them that radically you're not going to make everything square edge at this point but they fixed the windows so now they have this hodgepodge where it no longer looks good we're still wasting a little bit of space in toolbar buttons but at least they've gone in a pragmatic direction it seems every change they've made it seems to me that whoever used to be there who was not letting them make this obvious change is now gone or has changed their mind yeah i mean maybe this is a steven lemay thing maybe it was getting rid of alan die thing maybe it's somebody else but whoever Yeah, whatever.

38:02Maybe it's because one half like now is winning the argument with the like the court of public opinion swaying the inside people. OK, we agree. We were wrong to try that. Let's let's back it off a little bit. But we still have to wait three or four more years for them to do a new design that is actually both internally harmonious and actually designed well and useful for its purpose.

38:21Marco Arment:Yeah. I mean, what we have here is, you know, on the Mac, what we have is something that is that has been edited. Again, it's like a one point one. It has been tweaked. the tweaks they have made are largely good but the found the foundations of it are still weird and not really fitting in the platform as well as they could but that being said i did one of the things i noticed like in my first few minutes of poking around on golden gate on my laptop one of the first things i noticed was this new button style like where they where it's like a little bit like glossier a little more polished there's like there's a border around some of the buttons it actually looks a little bit like they're reinventing aqua like it's it's a newer you know plainer version of aqua this is it's the crystal pepsi version of aqua but it is it is getting closer to aqua it's and like the buttons that they have now the the tweak to that is not subtle you won't like the if you out there haven't seen golden gate yet the minute you start using it, you're going to notice, wow, the buttons are really, like, the toolbar buttons on all the windows really stand out now in a way they didn't before.

39:34Marco Arment:And it almost, like, it looks a little out of place. It looks kind of like, all right, the toolbar buttons before, we wanted to show off our glassiness so well that we made them too glassy and then nobody could really see anything. Now, the problem was nobody could see them well enough. So we took our glass and just turned it up. Like, we made it louder in the interface, like, visually louder. And so what we have now is now the toolbar buttons are like a little bit too, like they stand out a little bit too much now. Yeah, they have a little bit of the specular highlights and stuff. Although Aqua is a great example.

40:09Think of Aqua was so internally consistent. It also, by the way, had buttons that had semicircular end caps, but it was all simulated, static, glossy. It looks like a translucent cylinder of blue, you know, clear blue plastic or something, a clear blue glass. Nothing behind them ever showed through those buttons. they were 100 opaque and the corners of the windows in aqua tack sharp exact squares on the bottom corner radiuses because the toolbar had corner radiuses because no content was in the title the title bar rather the title bar had corner radiuses because no content was in the title bar title bars were opaque except for when the window was in the background in which case they showed through the desktop not the content behind them and the bottom corners were squares so you could see so the content area had sharp corners so you could see every pixel of the content in like the preview app or whatever in mac os 10.0 uh but the buttons had circular end caps on them how do they make that design work they they did that from day one and they said this is what it's going to look like and our buttons are going to look like pieces of glass and our windows are going to have pinstripes and sharp like it was such a more coherent sensible design than the hodgepodge we have now and i think what you're noticing marco is like how do we band-aid these buttons we still want them to look glassy but they have to be more opaque and people can't see the edges of them so let's put a dark outline around them it's almost like they're taking accessibility options and making the like making them the default because bordered buttons is an accessibility option and but what you get by default in golden gate is like slightly bordered buttons because they were hard to see and they can't you know they can't fix the design entirely because the design of like aqua you know had like the buttons stood out so much from the background these buttons didn't and they had to make them stand out a little bit while still being glassy anyway um we'll probably have more to say about this once we start loading the os as marco has used it a little bit i haven't even loaded it yet because i'm still working on a release on one of my apps and i need to keep this between a tahoe my other dev machine but uh but yeah the final thing we'll try to do quickly um icons are off by default in menus incredible incredible i'm surprised surprised they walk that back we've talked about on past shows i don't think icons and menus are actually a terrible idea but their implementation of it was terrible and so they've just said never mind it's a setting it is off by default which doesn't mean there's no icons in menus but i guess the setting is hey if in mac os 15 if there was an icon on the menu there will still be in this mode when you turn them on all the other icons appear but i feel like this is them um basically admitting admitting defeat and saying developers don't want to add these to the degree they existed in 26 we're going to leave it off by default and eventually i assume that switch will go away and those icons will just be gone are they is it a user setting or

42:47Marco Arment:is it just a developer api thing where you can say as a developer this item needs a label and or an icon i thought i thought it was a user setting but i can't find it i thought it was

42:57John Siracusa:an api set or an api thing not a setting but an api it is at least also an api thing um the only

43:02Marco Arment:other thing i'll mention is um the so in this so sidebars now on the mac they they got their accent color back for the icon.

43:10John Siracusa:I was going to bring this up too.

43:11Marco Arment:Which is, first of all, great. You notice it immediately. And yes, it helps a lot because as it turns out, using multiple factors to distinguish things that matter in a user interface, you know, don't just use shapes, use colors also. Imagine if you could have different color icons. Imagine that. We don't have the technology yet. Sorry. Right. The more you can, you know, communicate with people with different visual cues, the easier it is to use these things typically. But the one thing they did, so they obviously also had to solve the problem of it being difficult to determine what the current selection is.

43:42Marco Arment:So what they've done, because in Alan Dye's design world, contrast is the enemy. And so what has indicated the selection so far has been in the extremely light-colored sidebar, the currently selected item has an extremely light-colored box around it. So what they've done in Golden Gate, it still is a very light-colored sidebar with a very light-colored box around the selected item. But now the font of the selected item's text is bold. Now, this, I see what they're going for. They're going for make it easier to distinguish. The problem is when text is bold, it gets wider. And so now you have the selected item changing its size as the selection changes.

44:37Marco Arment:This is not the approach. Just have a higher contrast selection state. For God's sakes, we've solved this so many times in interfaces. They can't solve everything. Someone's out there saying, but we could do the thing that we know works, but let's think of something else. And they won that argument. But here's overall, though, with these design tweaks, what I want to see. I mentioned earlier that iOS 7 changed a lot during its beta period and Liquid Glass did not. I'm hoping this year with this new kind of, you know, listening to feedback and fixing problems kind of approach and with a lot less Alan Dye in the organization.

45:15Marco Arment:I'm hoping that this will all be like a little bit tweakable during the course of this summer and fall. Hopefully, they take feedback. They see that this is a pretty good 1.1, you know, rough draft. I think it can be tweaked to be even better. I think they will hear that from a lot of people. And hopefully, this is, again, a rough draft, not their new design team saying, all right, this time we got it 100 % right and we're not going to change any of this stuff. one other quick thing they did is they they gave us a glass effects in the icons which is useful i think because you know that's one place you want might want the cool effects uh they give the icon composer gives you more previews of how it's going to look in 26 and 27 which is useful because they changed how it looks um and then the final thing is i don't know what the story on this on ios is i haven't installed the betas but on mac os as far as i can tell from people's screenshot and reporting on it um in tahoe the uh well on the phone when you look at like your home screen in iOS 26 and you like tilt your phone around it changes where like the the light highlight like the specular highlight around the edges of the icon is like it changes that as you tilt the phone to try to show it's like glinting off the icons in mac os i don't think even on laptops use it but on desktop mac the desktop map is not not being tilted ideally while you're using it unless you're on a boat i guess and so they had to pick a light direction for the icons in tahoe and they picked essentially 45 degrees coming from the upper left going down to the lower right and so the icons would have a glean on their upper left corner and a little glean on their lower right corner in 27 uh they have changed it so there is so it's from top to bottom the light hits the top of the icon and puts a little glint on it and it also puts a little glint on the bottom edge which i think it looks a little bit less awkward and a little bit nicer but just so what fyi the light

46:57John Siracusa:has moved good to know all right so then they talked about how they they are optimizing the parts of the system that make a big difference in the performance of our products. And this includes things that they can just tweak timing on, like animations, but also they genuinely made things faster. They said 30 % launch improvements on iOS and iPadOS for launching apps because they're preloading data and they didn't say much more than that. They also talked about one of the things that drives me freaking crazy, which is when you take a picture and it doesn't get sucked into the photo library vortex for like 30 seconds, 60 seconds.

47:34John Siracusa:So, you know, you take a picture, you immediately want to send it to, you know, I'll say I immediately want to send it to Aaron or something like that. And I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for God freaking knows what, but waiting for whatever happens that needs to happen to happen. And they specifically called that out and said it should be 70 % faster. They said a bunch of other things. And yes, from the camera app, we know you can tap on it in the camera app. The reason I do that is for the reason Casey said is if you don't tap on it when you see it in the camera app, you're going to have to go to the photos app to find it.

48:01and that's where you're going to be waiting. Yep.

48:03John Siracusa:They said a whole bunch of other things were faster. We're not going to enumerate them all. They also said that network transitions are going to be better, so it's more seamless to go from cellular to Wi-Fi or vice versa. Also, another change that is so obvious once they made it, but it never occurred to me, instead of getting a global, or maybe not global, but a conversation global indicator of sending data in an iMessage, You know, we're at the top under the contact's name or whatever. You'll see the little blue bar. Now you'll get a little blue bar per message. Imagine that my mind is blown.

48:38John Siracusa:You're going to get one per message. I'm being snarky, but like genuinely, this will be very useful because so often I'll be in like a grocery. I feel like this only happens in grocery stores and I actually don't go into grocery stores often, but for whatever reason, on the rare occasions I do, I will try to send Aaron a picture of something and be like, Hey, is this specifically what you meant? And I'm just waiting. And then I will try to describe with text what I'm looking at because the picture isn't going through. And then that's held up behind the photo. And so it seems like that is all going to get way, way, way better, which I'm super excited for.

49:09And speaking of scheduling things, you skipped over this before because we don't have any deals. But they didn't mention the CPU scheduler and they talked about what devices it's going to run on. And they did not provide any information to really let you know what is different about the scheduler. But they think it's better. So stay tuned for that in future episodes.

49:24Marco Arment:i mean who had cpu scheduler on their bingo card for the keynote yeah like that's you know state of the union maybe yeah so this is the platform improvement section they did design which is like hey look who last sucks we're trying to fix some part of it and then they do the part that honestly this should be and this kind of is but should really be in every single keynote or at least every single wwc which is things that exist we made them better and most of the time in the good wwcs they do this but this section was just about oh there's stuff that exists could it be faster yeah we think it can we let people spend the year trying to make a bunch of stuff faster and better the network transitions is not a speed thing even though it's listed here it's like it's an aspect of your device and it could be better so we made it better and we'll tell you about it and they should do that every single year and i think they do do it every single year very often it doesn't make it into the keynote but i'm glad it got its own section here and this is they kept going there's more of this stuff like the next one was search which is like we know our search kind of sucks sometimes and we know users don't understand why uh and we're going to say some vague stuff that's saying we rebuilt the foundation of search i don't we don't know what that means yet but all we know is hey search has been kind of crappy like when the spotlight index doesn't update or when the spotlight indexer goes crazy and kills your mac or when you try to search for something on your phone and it doesn't find it or when it gets corrupted you have to restore your phone we don't know the details of what the problem is but i think everyone has experienced bad search on apple devices so them coming in the keynote and saying we've rebuilt the foundation of search and we've re-architected the search index cautiously thumbs up because the old one was bad so i hope the new one is good i i hope so i mean so i i will you know so part one of of this is uh yes i believe what they what they have said in their coded way was we rebuilt like the whole like mds worker stat like the whole like spotlight uh database uh index thing like that has been historically pretty fragile and you've had to do a lot of really weird things in fact just recently craig hockenberry blogged about how yeah if your spotlight index gets corrupt on an ios device you basically can't rebuild it you have to like restore the phone or something like it's it's a terrible uh situation to be in and there's like no recovery process and that's why you can easily google for like how do i rebuild the spotlight index from the command line of my mac that's easy to find you know why that's easy to find because it's a thing that mac users occasionally have to do and have since the advent of spotlight and that's not a reliable system and that's another example of a system it's like well you you rolled this out and i'm sure you've changed it over the years but like it's certainly not getting better and it certainly seems like it's getting worse um let's just hope this isn't another um was it mdns responder whatever what was the thing where they rewrote a major component of mac os and then it worked discovery d yeah it works so much worse than the old one they had to roll it back let's hope that's not the case here but on keynote day where i'm willing to believe that the new one is going to be better and i'm looking forward to it because this is a part of all this is a part of all their platforms that needed to be improved so thumbs up i will say though the the other part of this though is so what they said was that that you know when you first run the any new 27 os um it basically will re-index everything on your computer and that is so far from what I can tell on my laptop that is not only true but also about an hour after I installed it I ran out of disk space so and now and so I deleted a couple of you know I emptied the trash deleted a couple of quick files you know that I had time for right before the show and I have a finder window open and I'm just I have the status bar showing on the bottom.

52:49He's watching the space go down

52:50Marco Arment:I'm just watching it like tick down like 10 megabytes every few seconds or you know 100 megabytes every few seconds like it's like 52.57 gigs and 52.53 gigs. Like it's just 52.5. Like it's just going down as I'm talking, just watching it fill my disk again. So I don't know. I haven't had time to check, but presumably that is the re-indexing process, like slowly building up an index somewhere on disk. Or it could be a bug and it's just filling your disk with garbage. But the good news is the SSDs are really cheap right now. Yeah, right. Yeah. And it's a good thing they're all upgradable on Apple laptops too.

53:22Marco Arment:Right, exactly.

53:23John Siracusa:Oh, good point. All right, I'm going to try to pick up the pace and it's not going to work, but I'm going to try. this is, I think the second feature of John's keynote, the more I think about this, actually, this really was your keynote. I'm excited about it. Yep. So you, you got your liquid glass refinements, which we all knew you would, but now you've got another new feature, full res photos in shared albums. A miracle. I didn't even know they could, could they do that? Do they have the technology to provide full resolution photos? You would think not considering shared photo albums were just so long ago that the reduced res like made sense from like a, a bandwidth and, and like storage space perspective.

53:56that was a long time ago thank goodness full res photos and also windows and android people can join in so you can actually use shared albums to share an album without any of the caveats the caveats used to be well of course you can't see this unless you have a phone although there was a web view which was crappy and those people didn't feel like they were really participating because they have to go to some crappy web page and i don't even know if that's still supported and the other caveat was but of course you can't actually share photos because what if someone wants that photo you're like oh can you give me that photo i'll send you the full res version because the shared album ones were reduced res.

54:25And I mean, I know most people don't care because little kids take screenshots of photos and that's how they share photos. But like, honestly, it's just, it's embarrassing. Full res photos and shared albums. Thank goodness. Happy about that.

54:37John Siracusa:Yep, very much so. It's just everything's coming up Milhouse. I wanted to quickly mention that they mentioned cycle tracking now has support for perimenopause menopause, which is good that they remember that. Everything coming up me. I'm an old person married to another old person. That's right. There's custom EQ on AirPods. Something for me, actually, panoramas on Vision Pro, you can now take a source that is a panorama and it can be treated as like a spatial scene where they synthesize depth to it, which, okay, fine, whatever. But they said you can also use these spatial scenes as environments.

55:13John Siracusa:So if you don't speak Vision Pro, if you recall, you can put yourself on the moon, on Saturn, next to a lake. I forget where the lake is. It doesn't matter. there's several other places.

55:24Marco Arment:There's 3D desktop wallpaper.

55:26John Siracusa:Yeah, it's like a 3D desktop wallpaper. That's a very good summary. Thank you. Well, now you can use your own images as that 3D desktop wallpaper, which is super cool because I've seen some incredible panoramas. I've taken some great panoramas. Heck, I haven't done it yet this trip, but some of my favorite panoramas are from here at Cape Charles. So, you know, I could use one of those as my background. I could transport myself back to the beach, which is super cool. I've seen some great ones of like Disney World, for example, if that's your thing, because it is for me. So I think that's really neat.

55:54It's a shame. It's a shame, though, by the way, that the spatial scenes that you're taking are not 3D in the same way as the actual environments. Because the actual environments, you can crane your head over and look on the side of a rock that you couldn't see the side of before. But that's not going to work with the photos you take. But still, for the purposes of desktop wallpaper, if you want an image that is familiar to you and not one of the ones that Apple makes or that Disney makes or what do the other companies make. Because it is actually a lot of work to make one of these fully 3D environment things.

56:21John Siracusa:Yep. Super cool. uh then john you were kind enough to pull a bunch of things from the word wall there's a lot here is there anything you want to call out specifically yeah let me just go through them real quick um this is another thing it's my keynotes i'm always looking for photos one of my big complaints has been you know i spend a lot of time in photos on my mac uh and the mac photos app has had its feature count reduced for many years like they just they took away a whole bunch of features when they synced it with ios and they just never really reconciled that throw the fork away they didn't take away all the features but they took away a lot of the features and when they took them away i'm like okay well i guess the feature set that's left in mac photos i guess that will be the common feature set across all their platforms eventually but no they just never brought stuff from the mac to the other platforms and the things that i use star ratings and keywords are two examples those exist and you could do them on the mac kind of like they exist in like itunes slash music um but they barely are exposed in the iowa search but anyway keywords i put keywords on my photos i have been for for years and years those keywords are nowhere to be found on the iphone you can't set them on the iphone star rating same thing so they added them they this is in their word wall so i don't know the details of this and when i say word wall we mean we really mean a wall of words this was in this section of the presentation where like platform improvements they said also all this other stuff and i screenshotted it and just copied and pasted the text you know with the uh the ocr thing and preview yep and so this is what i got from it star ratings and photos add keywords to photos and videos expire your shared albums which is a useful feature because sometimes you like you're done with the vacation you don't want to be up there anymore uh additional participant permissions and share albums which i guess you can say you can edit photos and you can add photos or whatever you can react with emoji and shared albums uh i don't know what this one is but i'm intrigued option to prioritize syncing to iCloud photos is that where i could say sync this picture now uh faster to start uploading a ti cloud photos that sounds good uh facetime is going to have dual camera use so you can show your face and the thing that you're looking at at the same time which will help will help when i'm trying to debug stuff with my parents uh notes has some new stuff you can draw in notes in the in mac os now imagine if you could like touch your screen and draw anyway imagine section links in notes copy and paste as markdown in notes ipad os gets iphone app resizing we'll talk more about that in a little bit interesting uh optional an optional persistent menu bar on ipad so you can have the menu bar show all the time undo and redo home screen edits and ipad os that's nice um i don't know if these are mac os or ipad os because again it's a word wall and i can't tell but they say more consistent window positioning persistent across external displays those are music to anyone's ears i don't know what platform they're even talking about is it ipad is it mac but yes yes remember my windows are on my displays more high resolution high refresh rate display modes for external displays again is that ipad or mac either way thumbs up more distinct active windows we've slowly rediscovering the technology of being able to tell which window is active by distinguishing it visually we used to know how to do it but all those people left and now we don't know updated menu bar icons what the hell does that mean remove is that i think removing most of them yeah we updated them by removing them not in the menus menu bar icons like like look in your menu bar right now the sound icon and like you know like that's not what they mean not not in menus menu bar icons that's got to be what they mean right well the siri icon is different yeah it's that weird half wave thing yeah option click to secondary sort this is just in the word wall okay but that's just like if people are familiar with the old set of table views you could like click one of the headers to sort and you could click to sort ascending and descending but then you could option click one of the other headers to do a secondary sort so you could sort ascending by album title and the option click the next thing by like year or something anyway i i don't know what that applies to but i'm excited by it i don't even know what os these are updated app icons what apps did you change every app icon but i'm excited by that because i didn't like a lot of the tahoe icons so updated app icons uh independent alarm volume that's kind of like having independent alert volume but it's cool to be able to control that separately again what os i have no idea oh

1:00:30Marco Arment:Oh my God, I just validated one that's on here. Smoother scrolling in calendar. Nice. It's true. Oh my God, it actually scrolls like a normal app now. iPhone mirroring has app resizing, another interesting thing that we'll talk about in a little bit. DRM video support in iPhone mirroring, which is nice. The word wall is huge. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. There's even more stuff there. Those are just the ones that excited me the most. We are sponsored by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place.

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1:02:57John Siracusa:All right, then we get to trust and safety. This is helmed by Sambal Desai, who is VP of Health. They really hammered home a lot that safety features, whatever they're about to be, and we'll talk about it, were based on experts in research. They kept saying over and over again that this isn't, or they were hinting and saying in a roundabout way, basically, this isn't Apple just up and deciding what the best practices are for all these different things. they were going to the American Association or Society, whatever it is for pediatrics. They were going to all these other different organizations that at least at one point were reputable, who knows now.

1:03:32John Siracusa:But they talked a lot about children and devices, a lot, a lot. And they talked about how you should have a child account for any of your children that you are, you know, acting as a parent of. Do you know what that is? Is that an existing thing? Am I just behind the times? I don't know what they were saying. I think it's an Apple ID where the birth date is known and known to be that of a child. I think it's as simple as that. Yeah, I think it's Apple ID, but they also said you can convert existing accounts to child accounts. So it goes with what Casey was saying. It's like, maybe you have an Apple ID for your kid, but it doesn't have a birth date associated with it.

1:04:07So you can quote unquote convert it to a child account by putting a truthful birth date into the Apple ID and then it becomes a child account. Anyway, all this, this section, trust and safety, as Casey was saying, basically is about i'm not gonna say child restrictions but about Restrictions on the usage of Apple products. What would they call this when they first started really emphasizing this? It was like digital health? Digital well-being or something. This is very similar. It does have more of a child focus, but they have essentially overhauled every one of their features that lets you limit how much you or someone else can use Apple's products.

1:04:46Like monitoring how much they're using them, limiting how much they're using them. Again, some people use this on themselves. Parents use it on the kids. and as casey so they keep referencing these expert organizations but they also emphasize i forget the exact quote but they were like parents are in the best position to decide what's right for their kids even that seemingly uh who could possibly disagree with that statement unfortunately it's a complicated world and there are you know kids who have parents who do not let them be who they actually are and so giving them more electronic control over their lives is worse for those kids than when they had more like a you could secretly see things on their computer that was in the room without their parents being supervising them or whatever there is no perfect solution to this but i think apple has had tools digital well-being tools and parental control tools for years and my complaint about them has always been that they don't really work screen time has never worked consistently for me it has always showed statistics that don't make any sense based on what i know to be true it the screen time statistics would never match from device to the device to the same person so what even is the point this device says you use this long this device says you use that long like which one is right we have three devices and three different answers for everything and also the restrictions were so incredibly easy for kids to get around that it was just terrible so this entire section of the talk is we have overhauled everything having to do with digital well-being and parental controls and we've added a ton new features and like a lot of things we've talked about in the past i'm saying you needed to fix this you needed to overhaul it fingers crossed that it actually works this time and if it doesn't work fingers crossed that you fix it until it does work because they essentially left screen time to rot and it became mostly a joke among kids so i know there are lots of downsides to this i know that a lot of kids don't want their parents to have even more control over their electronic lives but on the flip side a lot of well-meaning parents do want to have some kind of control and knowledge they want to be able to give their kid a device at whatever age their friends get it while still having it be locked down or whatever.

1:06:41And the features they showed allow good conscientious parents to better serve themselves and their kids. They also allow bad parents to be worse parents, unfortunately, and that is the double-edged sword of technology.

1:06:55Marco Arment:Yeah, I think there's also, we can't forget the environment that they are doing this in right now in the world, in the political and regulatory environment. There is a huge number of age verification requirements and regulations going into effect all over the world all over the u.s they are well-meaning although in many ways pretty problematic i was gonna say they are not well meaning well it's almost universally not well-meaning i think i think the people who support them who like hear about it and say that's a good idea i think they have they have well-meaning behind that the public that supports them has usually has good intentions but the people who proposing the bills do absolutely do not and the reason they're getting voted for is because it's you know the surveillance state that's what that's what people want so the people who propose these bills and the people the politicians who support them have terrible motivations the citizens who hear about it and say that sounds like a good idea they're well-meaning yeah that's a good way to put it because like you know when when you hear something like we need to protect children from inappropriate materials like okay that's that seems fine but then once you get into how and what does that mean by gathering information about every human on the planet does that sound good yeah yeah it's like oh what if what if we um take take a picture of every kid's face and store it in a database and we want to know who you are and how old you are and your social security number we're going to store that somewhere and it will never be hacked don't worry yeah don't yeah we're going to store it we're going to have uh let's maybe that's a global identification system i maybe just just for verification yeah don't worry it won't be won't be in an s3 bucket we just need to know everything about you and these these private companies are going to store it and don't worry they'll take care of that data no problem they won't sell it to anybody it will never get hacked you'll never lose it it's just a terrible idea and so yeah and what private companies and what are they getting out of it and it's just i mean the whole thing is it sucks you ass and then then of course you go into like okay well in many in many uh places you know content is considered dangerous or illegal that i think maybe you and i might not think is dangerous or illegal um think about places where certain sexualities or gender identities are considered illegal still uh you know that's that's a very big thing still in the world you know there's it's a huge battleground in so many places or even just in our country where some gay kids gonna want to learn about themselves so they can't go to any of those pages because anything having to do with anything that's not heterosexuality is deemed equivalent to porn which is ridiculous but that's how that's how these laws are structured or gender affirming care like if you think you're trans and you want to like maybe read a little bit more about that or you know, consider some of those ideas.

1:09:35You're too young to know about that, even though you're living it.

1:09:37Marco Arment:Yeah, it's like, you know, we've had throughout our history a lot of, like, you know, banned content in various ways, banned books, you know, banned political ideas and banned ideologies and concepts. And, you know, we as a society are not good at making good decisions around that and controlling that, you know, uniformly. And so in the political environment that we're operating, and getting back to the topic, um apple has a target on his back because so does every other major tech gateway company um that all of these regulators and legislators around around the world keep saying well you created this entire controlled walled garden so that means when we want to dictate what people can do we just have to go to you it isn't like you know if you're trying to like block something on the open web, it's much harder.

1:10:30Marco Arment:There's a lot more parties involved. It's kind of a game of whack-a-mole. You can't really ever fully get everything. But if you're a tech gatekeeper on a lockdown platform, you can do whatever the government forces you to do. So Apple has created this problem and put themselves in this position, but they also recognize they are in this position. And so now, as all of these laws are either threatened to be put in place or actually are enacted around around the world apple i think recognized we need to get ahead of this and because you see what happens if apple in their gatekeeper position if there's a regulatory you know upswell of some feelings around the world and apple doesn't get ahead of it you end up with something like the dma in the european union where it's like okay well the regulators have decided that your your version of lockdown and app store control and fees and everything is anti-competitive.

1:11:24Marco Arment:Apple has decided not to even do anything at all about that whatsoever unless they are absolutely forced to. And so what happens, governments regulate them, and sometimes they go pretty far in that regulation in ways that might be either impractical, certainly undesirable for Apple for other reasons, other than financial reasons, could hurt the product in various ways. Well, that same thing could happen with all these age requirement laws everywhere and verification and everything. So in this case, this is Apple, I think, trying to get ahead of that instead of what they did with the absolute rules, which was nothing.

1:11:55Marco Arment:Now they're trying to get ahead of it a little bit so that way they can go talk to the different politicians and legislators that are trying to enforce probably more draconian, more ridiculous measures and say, look, we have done all the research. We've worked with these different groups and the American Association of Pediatrics and all these different things. We've worked with all these people and created this fully safe, proven system that addresses these needs and therefore you don't have to regulate us any further like that's that's kind of the move here so i think that that's why we're seeing this now um now as a parent who uses screen time uh for my kid uh all of these improvements to screen time are certainly welcome because it is a really simplistic and limited system and it's and easy to get around yeah screen time it's been one of those Apple features like I was talking about last week where they kind of like did like an 80 % job and then just never touched it again like for years and years and years.

1:12:55Marco Arment:So this is nice to see. I see why they're doing it now. I think it's a good idea to do it now. And I trust Apple to do this kind of thing well if it has to be done at all. Now, as John was saying a few minutes ago, there is the question of like, well, are there any downsides to this being done at all? But the world is deciding on its own that they're going to force these kind of restrictions on tech platforms. They're going to force this no matter what. So in that context, I trust Apple to do it better than anyone else and in a way that considers things that don't follow the simplistic storyline better than anybody else, including things like what if parents are trying to keep down their gay kid?

1:13:40Marco Arment:Like that's there's all those or, you know, what about like domestic abuse situations? There's all sorts of situations that like when when platforms talk about or develop or think about, you know, permissions based systems like this or access control systems. There's a lot of those kind of messy realities that they don't consider. And then that becomes a bad scene for a lot of people. apple historically has been much better than everyone else at handling that kind of you know breadth of concepts considering all of these different cases and doing the best they can with them assuming it works again that's always the caveat although i will say i don't think in this case this is going to save apple like uh unlike the dma stuff um the dma is trying to make them do a thing that would be beneficial to everybody uh now the laws are trying to make apple do a thing that is not beneficial to anybody except for again the surveillance state and people who want to own this data and to give an example of that uh and all these laws that are being passed that apple doesn't like they're gonna say well it's well and good that you did all that apple but you know you just ask people to enter their ages like you ask parents to enter their kids ages you ask people to voluntarily enter their ages what's stopping them from just lying about their age because that's whenever you hear age verification stuff well shouldn't we you know like kids shouldn't be able to see things they shouldn't see so if you know but like oh what did they lie about their age that's where we get into the whole gathering your identity because they can't just say, hey, please enter your age here.

1:15:03Like, no, no, no. You have to prove that you're 18 years old or 19 years old or 20 years old. You can't just say it because what's the point in adding a dial-off box that says type your age here? Okay. 57. Boom. And like anybody can type a number. They need to get your identity. They need to know who you are. You need to prove who you are. So what do we gather for that? A government ID, a picture of you, your birth certificate, your social security number. You know, like go through a verification agency that will gather all your biometric data and vouch for you that like that's where this becomes a problem apple is doing none of that when you create a child account an adult just enters i have a kid this is their birthday that's them you can type anything you want there i have fake children apple ids right now for kids that don't exist for the purposes of testing nothing is like that was apple's whole big point here we consulted with experts and we're putting it in the hands of the parents and the government's saying no no no the laws we want to pass say you can't do any of that because then anyone can enter anything they want and apple's like we trust parents we trust our users that's the way we want to do and these laws are like you can't trust parents you can't trust users you certainly can't trust kids you know you can trust palantir right exactly that's and so that's the that's the binder in so i feel for apple here i agree that they're trying to do what they're trying to do is in general a good idea it does have some scary downsides but the much scarier thing are the laws that are being and i'm just talking about u.s laws laws in other countries where people can be executed for being gay is like that's a whole other ball box even just in the u.s depending on what state you're in things are already pretty grim so it's i think it is interesting that one fully one-third topic wise of the keynote was on the topic of trust and safety and it was essentially all about digital well-being and parental controls and again it all looks good and it's a vast improvement what it came before i hope did a good job implementing it, but I fear that it's not going to be enough.

1:16:57John Siracusa:Yeah. I mean, everything you guys said is exactly right. Um, it, it was interesting watching this for me, uh, because as Declan's is Declan's fifth grade graduation kind of present and in some ways, in many ways, as a self-serving thing, um, we got him an Apple watch SE. This is his first like real honest to goodness device. Um, is it an SE three? Yes. And I know that's a new watchOS. Yeah, exactly. But anyways, he was using an iPhone that does not have service. It's effectively an iPod Touch at this point. As a noise maker in his room, just to do white noise in the background while he sleeps.

1:17:35John Siracusa:And so we had done a little bit of screen time on that, like screen time related settings on that to make sure he's not, you know, futzing with that during times he shouldn't be. But now he has a device that, you know, is places other than his bedroom. And so we had to take a much closer look at screen time. And I can tell you, it's not very clear or easy to set up. It's unclear how they really expect things to happen. Like none of it is very well done. And they went through in the keynote, you know, what, who, when, and how with regard to kid-related things. So what content can kids see? One of the big things they announced is ask to browse for websites.

1:18:12John Siracusa:So in the same way that you have, you know, may I download this app, please? You can have, may I go to this website? And apparently this is turned on by default for kids under 13 years old. They have who you can talk to. And this is something that we were running into with Declan because we don't personally, for us, We don't currently want him to have unfettered access to any contact under the sun. We would like to be able to vet the people that he's putting in his watch to send text messages with. And as he gets older, we'll probably stop doing that. But for today, we would like that. And so that's kind of very kludgy in screen time settings right now.

1:18:46John Siracusa:And now there's also a ask for permission to connect, which is really great because that'll make those sorts of things much, much easier. They also kind of flipped on its head or maybe not flipped on its head, but took a different approach to screen time scheduling. So, you know, we can say you can't use your device after, you know, 7 or 7.30 at night or what have you. Well, now, well, that is still true. But now you can also say, well, you know, any app in the realm of games, you can have 30 minutes a day, an hour a day, two hours a day, et cetera. So they're doing time allowances. This is when kids can have access.

1:19:21John Siracusa:They do time allowances rather than a specific schedule. And I think some of this was already available, but it was an app by app basis. and now you can do it in like a group basis. And I think that that's very clever as well. And then how parents can guide kids. They said the words, we've completely redesigned screen time. You can pause device use entirely. You can also allow unlimited use. So there's a very easy button right at the top, or a trio of buttons, pause, allow unlimited and change schedule because another thing you can do is get more robust scheduling. So school days are these rules, weekends are these rules.

1:19:54John Siracusa:They also talked about how there's a bunch of APIs available for developers as well to leverage with this. They did also mention that there's a setup assistant, which is basically a Windows wizard, which I chortled about because it's very clunky, but also the way you set it up right now is even clunkier. So I'm actually kind of excited about that. And there's also going to be a new child safety website, which they mentioned as well. So that's pretty cool.

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1:22:25John Siracusa:And then we get to, I think, the final of the triumvirate, if I'm not mistaken, which is Apple Intelligence and Siri. And one of the things that was said verbatim, I believe, is some seem to be pursuing AI for the sake of AI. And I think that is extremely well said. As I said, I believe in the top of the show, I am very enthusiastic at this point, before we get to the State of the Union, where Apple seems to be taking what I consider to be a much more Apple-y and much more effective approach to AI, which is what are the ends we're trying to do? And are those ends able to be met by some of these new technologies?

1:23:04John Siracusa:So they have a bold new architecture for Apple Intelligence and Siri centered around you and the Apple products you use every day. Again, so far so good. Then they started talking about Apple Foundation models. Craig said, again, either verbatim or close to, this year we embarked on a deep collaboration with Google, leveraging the technologies behind their Gemini family of models. Together, we created the next generation of Apple Foundation models for our integrated Apple Intelligence experiences and adapted these new models to run on device and on servers using private cloud compute. so if you're wondering if google was going to get a mention of gemini not all did they get a mention they got a very generous for for on the apple scale things mentioned together we created it's a collaboration between apple and google they named google they named gemini they attributed this product to a collaboration a deep collaboration with google i don't think that was contractually obligated it sounded like they wanted to say this some people were uh cynically saying well now when it goes wrong i can just blame google for the when it you know siri tells you to put glue on pizza or whatever but uh you know i could have gone either way on this a lot of uh thought went before this keynote was like well they even mentioned google or all they just say it's apple intelligence again there was that quote-unquote joint press release many months ago there was only released by google i mean obviously it had apple's blessing because it talked about apple in it but that made me think like oh they're not going to mention google at all but like how could they avoid it and they didn't it is a deep collaboration with google we'll see how long this deep collaboration lasts again.

1:24:28They previously had a pretty deep collaboration in 2024 with OpenAI, and that one doesn't seem to be going as well. But anyway, for now, Google helped us fix our crap. Yep. Good. We hope. Good, we hope.

1:24:40John Siracusa:Yep. So there's going to be new, more powerful on-device model or models. Higher accuracy dictation. Heck yes. Better natural language understanding. Heck yes. A new system orchestrator. Personal context understanding. they said that behind the scenes Apple Intelligence used a spotlight and all of us went but the good one, the new one, not the old one right, right

1:25:03Marco Arment:this time it works, we swear yeah, we'll see, we shall see about this speaking of the new Siri, by the way, there is a waiting list in the beta, so if you install the beta it says, oh, you want to use the new Siri, join the waiting list I mean, obviously it's the first beta and they're still rolling things out, but just FYI if you're rushing to install the beta so you can try the new Siri you're going to be on the waiting list probably

1:25:21John Siracusa:but at least you'll be close to the top, I guess oh and actually can we pause right now we do this every year i'm gonna do it again i should have done this at the top of the show but i'm gonna do it now pull over order your t-shirts pull over atp.fm store no no don't buy those they aren't the good ones no i'm kidding i'm kidding um for the love of god do not put betas on any device you care about marco i believe you said you were doing it on an alternate uh device if i'm not mistaken i have it on my laptop and i

1:25:48Marco Arment:actually just ordered a refurbished iphone air uh because i want to run the new models uh like the high-end models i want to test my like you know all my transcription stuff with them and the only iphone that i own that can run the big new models is my personal iphone 17 pro and because it can only run on the 17 pro and the air oh i didn't realize that okay yeah and we should just list the other devices while we're talking about this the new more powerful on device models runs on iphone air siphon 17 pro ipad with m4 and later so that's not a lot of ipad just the latest air and the pro right yeah and the mac with m3 and later and you need at

1:26:29John Siracusa:least 12 gigs of ram i barely made it in on my m3 max so if you have an 8 gig mac uh that's not going to save you m3 and later yeah so i mean i'm assuming if you have one a machine that is older than that you'll just get the older existing on device models well it's based on what they were

1:26:43Marco Arment:saying it sounds like there's actually two new model classes it sounds like they made the foundation models better for all devices that could run them before which you know it's like iphone 15 pro and you know so it's all all devices that can run apple intelligence models locally before i think those are all those are getting new models but then also there's a there's like an even larger more sophisticated set of local models that these higher end or newer devices are getting. Yeah. And if you know the Gemini product lines, you can probably guess which Gemini models are like replaced Apple's old foundation models and which Gemini models are their new, more powerful ones.

1:27:19I'm sure Apple has tweaked them in whatever ways they want. Yeah.

1:27:23John Siracusa:Regardless, they also said that there is going to be broad world knowledge, including going to the web. You can do app actions, which I don't remember them ever having referred to it that way before, but maybe I'm wrong. Also on-screen awareness. And at this point, they shot out Mike Rockwell, the fixer who is allegedly going to fix new Siri and fix Siri to make new Siri. And let me tell you, if you are to believe the keynote, and we are recording this hours after the keynote, we're recording it on keynote Monday. We've barely had time to do, John and I haven't had time to put any betas anywhere.

1:27:54John Siracusa:Marco has barely had any time to put betas anywhere. Oh, and that's why I don't think I ever closed the loop on that. Don't put the beta on any device. I think I briefly said that, but don't do it. That you care about it. Not the first beta anyway. Yeah, definitely not the first beta. Maybe wait for the public beta. Exactly right. But anyway, at this point, we are in full, it's all going to be great, man. That's where we are right now. So take this all with copious amounts of salt. And so this thing they had here was, as Marco said, it's a dual shot. It's a split screen. On the left is Mike Rockwell holding his phone, and you can see him from the waist up.

1:28:25And on the right is a hand holding an iPhone. And it's very clear from the second they start doing this demo, that's his hand. what you see on the left the shot on the right is a close-up of the hand that you see on the left you know that because when his finger twitches on the left the finger twitches on the right like these are live synced in time real-time shots now first of all setting aside what we're gonna talk about in a second which is the convincing everybody this is not fake look at the angle he's i should put a freeze frame of this but if not go to the thing look at the angle he's holding his phone he's looking at his phone screen he's holding it so that it is facing him and i'm like where is the camera that is shooting yeah yeah yeah like i you can see just out of frame i'm sure maybe they cg'd part of it out but just out of frame there is a huge camera and lighting rig pointed over his shoulder at the phone to get what i think is an amazing shot of a real iphone where you can read the screen where it doesn't look like the phone is not pointed at the camera i just the staging of this and i probably they probably had him practice hold your hand exactly here at exactly because it doesn't you could have him hold it like oh he's clearly holding his phone so it's pointing to the camera he doesn't even look like he's using it no he looks like he's using his phone and yet they're still managing to get a shot so a plus for whoever set up this shot just on the like the logistics and the quality of the appearance now mike rockwell is a human being and i guess they didn't want to do too many takes of this and he speaks with his hands so occasionally you'll see his other hand fly up into the frame on the right side which is another really human moment of just like they probably told him not to do that but he gets excited and his hand moves and it appears in a frame it is very human and very straightforward again kind of like when steve jobs would have like the overhead projector camera pointing down at his phone that would be attached with a tether so it could show him the big screen and he'd you know it kind of reminds me of that but kudos for him to doing that and then finally as we discussed at length already they needed to do this to show you this is not fake this is a real phone we never cut away it's a continue it's a oneer it's a you know i mean they do have cuts but like when he's interacting with the phone this is it this is software it is running out of phone he's talking to it we are all to assume that this is not like a canned demo where it's just like a movie playing and he's pretending he's using it and we are convinced of that by the fact that sometimes you have to wait an uncomfortable period of time for the new series to do anything and we just see the little spinner and we go uh-huh uh i guess is it good is it gonna do something and he just stands and again this is a two shot that never cut away he's there and he just has to sit there silently waiting for the phone to do and then the screen comes up and then he says his prepared statement oh now it has told me blah blah blah blah blah so this was simultaneously both the most uncomfortable section of the keynote and also i feel like potentially the most triumphant i think i posted on mastodon this is mike rockwell either taking his victory lap you brought me in to fix siri i done fixed it or or it's him going out there and saying now it's my neck on the line if this crap doesn't work you're gonna blame me because i'm you know it's like if you're gonna fix siri you got to go out there and show it working and you know how you have to show it working a continuous shot of the phone in your hand and you use it and that's the only convincer it's like we can't ship this unless unless this works and and it's it's not shouldn't be such a high bar because it's like well of course you can't ship something unless it works right but But in this post-WWC 2024 world, there's such skepticism about Apple ever getting this to work.

1:31:49They need to do everything they possibly can to say, we swear. We swear it will work this time. And I'm still not. I'm actually still not convinced because I haven't used it myself. But they did everything they could. So kudos to Michael Rockwell. Extra kudos to the people who set up this shot. Yeah.

1:32:04John Siracusa:And actually, a friend of mine, Rob Ryan, tweeted at Craig Hockenberry, another friend of ours, that, and this is with regard to later in the keynote, but I presume it's applicable here too. Rob said, Justin's demos were all one large take. Imagine how many times he flubbed and had to reshoot the demo. So I would assume that's true as well for Rockwell. Again, I don't know this, but that is intense and I am impressed. And like we've, all three of us at some point during this episode have said, I think that's exactly what they needed to do to instill some amount of confidence that this is not vaporware.

1:32:35Yeah, and they show the new look of Siri, which German's like mock-ups, artist mock-ups were actually pretty accurate uh one of the things i noted every time they showed the thing especially on mike rockwell's particular phone that he's demoing on when the big like dynamic island expands into this large liquid glassy blob where siri does stuff with like an animation um and it's very clear like i don't think the slider affects that like it's very it's very translucent it's very transparent it looks glassy and it refracts what's behind it and what's usually behind it are the top corners of some icons on the home screen if you're doing it on the home screen he's got widgets he's got like the weather widget and the calendar at the top of the screen and if you can look at the screenshot in my uh in the show notes here i don't have the image list for us to put in the document but if you just watch the video you can see it do you see the little the two little holes the little refract refracty holes that it's making in the bottom of the lozenge do you see the notes yep it can't what is that thing that we knew the name of when the 2019 mac pro came out the thing that makes people like uh makes people feel queasy when they see things with lots of holes in it oh yeah it's giving me that and it's not just this i said there was a couple other screenshots that did the same thing because it is so refracty and clear it adds these artifacts that either that look like it look like it has like these weird sort of rotted holes in it or it looks like an alien head or whatever yet another place where the idea that interface elements should be glassy and refract the things behind them it's not a great idea even when the interface element the whole point of it is just to be the spinny, ethereal, rainbow-colored blob.

1:34:02I think that's ugly, and I hope they fix that.

1:34:07John Siracusa:You know what it gives to me is Flight of the Navigator. I don't know why, but it's reminding me of the spaceship from Flight of the Navigator for whatever reason. Anyways, so yeah, so Mike Rockwell is doing his victory lap. They're now calling it Siri AI, which is Siri plus Apple Intelligence. Mike said specifically, we know there are times you expect more from Siri. well no Sherlock did you think so like all the understatement of the century in any case they talk about a whole bunch of stuff I'm going to try to blast through this real fast but they said it's a more capable assistant and they go through like an exchange where you know what where's Jeff's new place show me photos from near there that's not exactly right but you get the idea it's they also talked about how the voice is much better and more expressive additionally there's sliders like carrot weather style where you can change not only the pace of the voice so you can crank it super fast if you're like if you're a sicko like me and listen listen to podcasts at nearly 2x or you can slow it way down you can also crank up or down the express expressivity i so wanted to turn the expressibility to max i want to say how far does that go because it sounded pretty expressive the one where it's like i'm so excited to read this sentence because i think it should be read and excited but they never they never moved the expressibility they just changed the speed slider i'm like put that expressive expressivity to the max i want to hear it.

1:35:25Marco Arment:This is like new ways to prank your friends. Like go change that setting on their phone. Exactly. Put it on slowest speed, highest expressivity.

1:35:34John Siracusa:But then they said it's more conversational and they talked here about how you can swipe down from the Dynamic Island to search on iOS. And Search and Spotlight and Siri are all kind of one conflated thing now. They use the example, which is really bold. They use the example of what's the schedule for the upcoming weekend of the World Cup, which is the sort of thing that Siri of yore would absolutely just crap the bed on. Anything sports-related, it's always wrong. It's showing you Super Bowl results from 30 years ago, whatever the case may be. Things that seem so eminently obvious, you know, like, when is the football game today, asks an American.

1:36:11John Siracusa:And Siri's like, oh, you know, some British team is playing some other British team in three days or whatever. It's just preposterous. And then they have a whole conversation about how I want to plan a watch party for Brazil-Morocco, and they go back and forth. And this looks pretty good. Like if we're to take on at face value that this is how this works, I'm not sure I would use Siri to help me plan a party. But the fact that it is capable of doing that here is, I guess, actually to argue with myself, this is one of those occasions where it's like we don't really need AI for this. Like I'm not looking to plan a party with AI, but I am happy to know that it's possible.

1:36:46Well, setting aside whether you want to do it or not, these demos, I mean, these demos are just demonstrating, look, it doesn't suck so bad anymore. I can understand what we're saying. But they always ended at least one step short of something that I think humans would actually want to do. They would be like, find the photos from last weekend, send only the photos with these people in them to this group chat and blah, blah, blah. And that's just essentially demonstrating Siri's LLM power now. It understands what I'm saying. It no longer embarrassingly gets wrong everything about what I'm trying to say.

1:37:15it demonstrates the demo shows it understands me it knows what i'm asking and then it tries to do it but the place where it falls down and the reason to your point casey why people probably won't use siri to do these types of things setting aside that they don't trust it because they think it sucks um is that they get to the point where it's like okay um show me the photos from this weekend send the ones of my kids everyone wants to pick the specific photos they don't they're not gonna say but they show like two photos in the thumbnails and they're like i think it said like 37 photos and it's like great send no you're gonna want to see maybe you don't want to send 30 you're gonna want to pick the five that you want like human interaction has to happen or the thing of like i'm putting together this plan does this look okay and you're like show me the part where you say actually i want to edit that launch me into a text editor with this thing show me this as a file like the the final mile the last mile of like human interaction is either required or or desired in many steps in this process if you're just talking it back and forth with the agent and you're like i'm fine with whatever you do then your friends are going to complain stop using that stupid ai thing to put stuff into our chat because it's just a bunch of slop right say what you have to say or show us the pictures you think are good uh you know and i and i get like i said on a past thing of like somebody who doesn't know how to use a phone saying oh i just started typing to my friend about the trip to japan and it prompted me to send the photos like that person does need that kind of help but as a demo as a general purpose thing you need to be able to drill down i know this is a version 1.0 we're just glad if it works at all right but every one of these demos i saw the part where it's like well now is the now is the part where the human's going to want to make a decision it's like saying book me a vacation like nobody wants to do that as a real thing you do it as a demo to show how cool your thing is but no one wants to do that because you're like i want to pick my flight times i want to pick my airline i want to pick my seats i want to pick my hotel i want like you want to have input because it's your life you know and the difference between this and like a human assistant is presumably if you have a human assistant who is a skilled you're fabulously wealthy and that you pay them a lot of money to know your actual tastes and probably you still have complaints about it but yeah so these demos as a demonstration that siri no longer sucks were convincing but they were not convincing to me as a demonstration to the thing that humans are going to do with their phone yeah i mean this is true like almost

1:39:24Marco Arment:every modern ai demo like with every new ai model that comes out every ai based product you know every company that integrates AI into their stuff, they always come up with these, like, you know, kind of contrived, weird demos that no one really does or would do in that way. But also... Or if they did, their friends would yell at them about it. Right. But also, Apple's own keynotes have always been filled with these kinds of demos. You know, just it's been less sophisticated, but it's been... They've always included some contrived situation, often being performed by Craig Federighi, that nobody would ever actually do.

1:39:58Marco Arment:And also, if you tried to do it, it wouldn't work as well. And this is the thing, when I'm saying Apple has a credibility problem with a lot of these areas, this goes back in lots of ways. Even before AI, Siri has always been a big one. But even just stuff like the stuff they demo at WVC oftentimes does not pan out the way that they seem to hope or think it will. Things like iWork documents being collaboratively edited, where it's like, well, no one actually ever does that because it sucks and everyone just uses Google Docs. A lot of this new AI stuff is like, okay, well, will people actually do this with Apple's intelligence or Siri, whatever version of that we're talking about?

1:40:43Marco Arment:Or will they just bounce out to ChatGPT or Claude or something else and do it there because they're better? This is two different questions. Number one, will Apple's version of this thing work and work reliably? And then number two, will it be competitive? And then will it stay competitive over the course of the following year if they just kind of half-assedly update it along the way or don't update it at all along the way, which often is the case with Apple's features? So this is a great set of promises. the demos didn't really tell us what we really want to know which is does it work and how well does it work and that's the kind of thing we will only find out with time everybody who's ever used an apple platform or been near a home pod knows like siri over responds and under delivers uh we we have all had pathetic siri failures will this finally fix it i mean i like to think maybe but I almost feel like, am I being naive for even believing that it's possible for Apple to fix it?

1:41:52Marco Arment:We've been burned so many times. So they need to earn our trust. That's going to take time. They might be on the path to do that with this new version of all this stuff. I hope they are because it might not seem this way all the time, but I'm rooting for them. I want them to succeed because I like and use their products. But we've just been burned so many times in these areas, what they have shown today is an interesting concept. Will it deliver? Will it be reliable? Will we actually be using all of these features a year from now? Or will we be saying at next WBDC, oh yeah, that thing that showed up, that never happened.

1:42:32Marco Arment:Or yeah, I used that once and then never again because it sucked. Or oh yeah, that started out pretty unreliable and now it's kind of okay. Or are we going to actually be integrating this stuff into our daily lives? Are we actually going to be using it so much that we don't even think about how unreliable or crappy it used to be? We don't know yet. We have to see what happens. Does this actually ship? How does it ship? Is it good? And that's, I feel like, what people are feeling with this keynote, the reason why it's kind of gotten a mixed reaction from a lot of the people I've seen is that we can't know that yet.

1:43:07Marco Arment:All we have right now is more promises. let's let's hope that they pan out yeah i do think the last mile problem is that maybe i think for next year's uh wwc is like even on the simple stuff of you're not doing an interactive you're not planning a whole vacation you're not planning a party or any of these silly contrived things although i will say for the past contrived things the only thing that was contrived about it was that all the person's friends were fashion models and all the pictures were amazingly taken and everything but anyway this one is the contrived thing of like no one ever wants to you know an agent to do all this stuff for them but even for the simple stuff that you might imagine yourself doing which is you know tell me when mom's flight is arriving which they did not do this time but that's just an informational thing um even on that demo my question would be say they did that demo and it said look it works and it told me when my slides are riding can i copy and paste from that window can i like where is the last mile like oh i want that information and don't say like oh just send it in a message to blah blah blah like at a certain point you as the user need to at any point You as the user need to be jumping to jump in and say, let me do my user things like that's the thing about the other ones where they're like, oh, I'm making a party invitation.

1:44:13Some human doing the demo would drag in the three prepared pictures of models for the thing, but they would pick them. They would pick them. They would decide where they go. They like the human has to have some role here other than a, you know, offhand comment yelling into yelling to your personal assistant in the next room to do a thing. It's like, do I not have a role in my life? like i need to be able to jump in at any point and these black bubbles these siri conversations you can go to this app and you can see your past conversations okay that's a start but like part of i think the utility people get out of like the you know chat gpt web interface or whatever is it's just like you can copy and paste out of that window there's little copy buttons next to things you can jump to another window and do another thing like the user is involved and all these demos were like your involvement is just giving vague directions and approving the things that i present you and it's like no i need to be more involved in that not i don't need to do it all like i need the assistant to assist me but even again something as simple as some information and it gives me the information am i just going to look at that i probably wanted that for something so at the very least i need to be able to copy and paste out of the window now maybe you can maybe you can copy paste out of the window but none of the demos showed anything other than i talk and bubbles appear and maybe i press a yes or no button and that i think is a non-starter that's that's the reason i think people like the chat gpu web interfaces because it's it's more than that that you do participate in it so i don't want to sound like i'm down on this because i'm with you marco like i want this to work and i think it can work and it's going to be way better than it was before i think but the whole industry has a ways to go on the dream of like it's like a smart personal assistant who knows all your tastes and can do everything for you that doesn't exist this demo doesn't show it nobody has it does not exist even finding a human assistance to do that is really difficult um and people like to think it does exist and they like to do demos pretending exist but it absolutely doesn't and instead what people should be doing demos of is we know the limitations of this technology here are all the places you can intervene to still have a successful endpoint to still have the successful party to still send the five pictures that you wanted to send with the help of the ai narrowing it down for you and giving you the final choice in an interface that is not a tiny black bubble floating over the whole rest of your phone screen well

1:46:25John Siracusa:what's funny is uh when they talked about serial mac os you know they said it's you know integrated into spotlight blah blah and they literally said of course this is a mac so i can drag this window anywhere and resize it to see more hey anyway um so yeah i we'll see what i'm trying to page your show notes and see if there's anything else actually i wonder before we move on from that there was one demo where speaking of demos they might have to do multiple times you know it was their single take demos and stuff the demo where they were doing i forget what they were doing they were doing some kind of siri thing on the mac it was showing cool stuff like you could multi-select files in the finder and then say i want to ask a siri question about this and basically compare these and it makes a little table like that's super useful again uh the less limited apple's platforms are the more i feel like the integration of siri can be useful because you can multi-select a bunch of files and right click them and say ask siri about them try doing that in the files app on your phone with your finger good luck um if they even allow you but one of the demos was like and see it even understands my typos which if anyone who has ever used llm based chatbots and stuff knows you can put typos in there you can misspell words you can fat finger things it it deals with it just fine because it's trained it is filled with typos and so it's fine about that it's not like it has to spell correct or something it just it doesn't matter did that person intentionally make that typo i think they put like electrical but they put like an x because x is near the c key on the keyboard or whatever did they have to practice mistyping a word in that exact way oh you let's do another take you typed it correctly like are they a touch typist and Like, it's hard for me to intentionally make a mistake on that specific word in this specific way.

1:47:57But it reminded me of the Utah road trip where the auto, the guy was doing a Utah road trip demo of some like thing that was making like a, I don't know, a slideshow or something in an old Mac keynote. And the autocorrect got him. Like they had just added autocorrect to whatever Russ was in. And it autocorrected. He typoed Utah. So it's supposed to be Utah road trip was a typo. And the system autocorrected Utah, the misspelled Utah, to its, I-T-aposture of yes. so instead of utah road trip it said it's road trip and the guy had such a smack on forehead expression and like an upset face and on the screen it says it's road trip that was a meme for a long time and and then what apple did was history racer buttoned that when they put out that video they replaced it with another take where he successfully types utah road trip and you don't get to see the i go oh i i hope someone still has that original it's i think it's probably in youtube the original it's road trip thing so this reminded me of that as a vague call back to its road trip.

1:48:50It's like, see, I can do typos and it still understands me. That's incredible.

1:48:56John Siracusa:There's a new dedicated Siri app, which we all expected. They talked about visual intelligence for a while, which mostly I didn't think was that interesting personally, but one thing that I thought was very cool was they said, and this went by super fast, so I might get the details wrong, but that you can split a bill by shooting an image of like the tab, the checker, what have you, and then I'm not clear exactly how. I think Siri parses it, and then you basically somehow tell it, okay, well, marco had this john had that i had this and then it'll figure out what the total should be and split it amongst all the people which is very cool if it actually works it's gonna be real embarrassing when you do that and the total doesn't come out to the total of the bill exactly lms are notoriously bad at doing math unless they have specific tool use which hopefully this does i do wonder like it would correctly split the bill and then you say oh actually uh make jim pay two dollars more and then it starts when you start doing deltas and then at the very end you take those numbers into a calculator and add them up just check maybe that they equaled the total.

1:49:49Otherwise, you know, it's stiffing people. But yeah, it'll be cool if it works.

1:49:54John Siracusa:You can write and edit with Siri, which, I mean, whatever. I did think it was interesting, though, that when they were talking about making a document, they said you could describe a document in natural language. And they said, Siri can generate a draft to get the ball rolling. I thought it was interesting that they were making it clear that the implication was we are not advocating necessarily having Siri write an entire document for you. but you can get the bones of it and then fill in what you want afterwards, which I thought was reasonable. I saw a lot of people online complaining about this because they're like, who would ever ask an LM to write a thing for them?

1:50:28And as I've said in past episodes, I encourage people to write things themselves, but I totally understand the situations, the context in which people desire something like this, which is a context in which they don't feel like they're expressing themselves anyway. This is not a place for me to express any of my knowledge or opinion about anything. in fact this is this is a place where i have to perform a certain i have to perform a certain role in a way that is satisfying to others that does not require any input from me and in that scenario there is only downside for me trying to write this myself because what if i failed the performance in some way so instead i will have a machine write this for me because honestly it is not an expression of myself in any way i know this sounds terribly dehumanized but what i'm essentially describing is large parts of several real jobs where you have to do this and and that's where i think these that's where i think these tools where the people who see this and say yes i would like to do that that's where the appeal lies now i still think in those scenarios these tools are still bad because the the pros that they create is fairly easily detectable by people who are exposed to a lot of it as not being from a human and it also encourages not to people not to proofread and it allows them to just say i'll just send it someone else wrote it for me i'm sure it's fine there are very few scenarios where none of your participation is required for example you don't want to have the the chatbot write a thing for you and then you never read what it wrote and then you just hit send that's going to end badly for everybody involved but and to be clear i don't endorse these features but i understand why some people see them and desire them and i could say oh you shouldn't desire them because it's bad but i understand why they desire them because lots of scenarios again people are people have to accomplish something that is not expressing themselves or their ideas or anything that they know which is sad but true and so i i mean the real solution is don't put people in those scenarios and don't require them to do that but i mean this this was one of the sadder parts of the keynote for me because i'm like oh you can write click a document and it will write some crap for you and it's just like every bone in my body says don't do that but then i understand why that feature exists so it's grim.

1:52:39John Siracusa:They talked about apps and basically this is kind of like the grab bag section. Safari, apparently they've been looking at your Safari windows, John. Again, everything's coming up Milhouse. You can organize tabs by topics and then as you browse, it will automatically add new tabs into these macro tabs. I didn't get the terminology. I don't know why you think this is for me. As I discussed the thing last episode when we talked about the rumor of this feature, I don't think I would ever use this feature i gotta manually arrange everything but i know you wouldn't but you have so many friggin tabs yeah maybe it's just for other people if it works well we'll see it depends on how they implement it if they implement it in an automated way that it just happens to people and they're it'll either it'll drive some people nuts where they'll say why does it keep rearranging my tabs and everyone has to go and learn how to turn it off uh or it will satisfy some people we'll see right uh safari lets you well will let you automatically monitor a page with a new feature called notify me as someone who as part of my container or my collection o containers i run this thing called change detection.io which there is a hosted version um but there is also a a version you can run in a container what this basically does is um it lets you uh monitor web pages that perhaps don't emit uh rss feeds or whatever the case may be it'll let you monitor for like things being available for sale that weren't before.

1:54:02John Siracusa:Their marketing website is pretty, pretty crappy, but I'll put a link in the show notes. This is an incredibly useful tool for me. I think we talked about way back when that the reason I got a Unify travel router, which by the way is what I'm talking to you through right now, is because I had this thing checking like every 60 seconds on Unify's website to see if it was available or not. Anyways, that is now a part of Safari, or if you squint anyway, it's a part of Safari with their Notify Me feature. So does Safari have to be running? You have to have a Mac that's not asleep or maybe it works in sleep?

1:54:34Like that's the question.

1:54:35John Siracusa:I would assume so. The monitoring. And you bring this up, Casey. I think I talked to you about this a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to do something similar. I ended up just vibe coding something. I was checking the menu of a local sandwich place to see if their specials included the sandwich that I like that they rarely put on special. I love this. This is big, big Casey energy right here. And I'm so proud of you. yeah i was uh yeah they have a special which is an egg salad blt which i thought should have been on their menu oh thought it should have been on their menu all the time and it's not a food that i have a lot like they put it on their menu like once every couple months but anyway i kept missing it so i'm like i'm just going to set up monitor for this and i declined your docker container and i was going to vibe code it myself but of course they had switched to some third-party menu provider that it's like a single page web app where the actual rendered page has like two tags in it and it's all javascript generated and so i had to find their back-end json thing but their back-end json thing is authenticated so i had to find a way to fake the authentication so i could get an authenticated request for the json backend and it worked and told me when the eggs out blt was available and i bought it recently and it was disappointing and so i did i disabled it oh no wait the sandwich was disappointing they've lost somehow the exile was bad i don't know if they put too much dylan or something but i was really disappointed so i took i took off my monitoring but anyway this is obviously a uh i think if more people knew about this like if it wasn't just nerds like vibe coding something or using a docker container or going to change text and IO.

1:55:52I think this could be useful for people, but I do wonder if it's going to require them to keep their Macs from going to sleep.

1:55:56John Siracusa:That is fair. And possibly the scariest thing that I saw the entire keynote in the internet was all over this passwords. The app can, can automatically fix websites that have been compromised or where you've used the same password multiple times. That is incredible and also very scary. But I think it's the right idea. I mean, i applaud them going down that road i don't think i would ever use it but that's just me i think the only way they can do that like the passwords app has supported since this introduction i think the uh all of the various dot well-known urls where there's like there's like rfcs for this where it's like if you have a website and you have a password system you should support these end points even if they just redirect and it's like slash dot w e l l hyphen k n o w n slash blah blah blah where it's like change password set password blah blah blah um and i think most sites just implement as rudex but the point is a lot of sites don't implement that at all and i think the passwords app can only help you with websites that support these well-known urls i'm not sure because i just saw a keynote so we'll find out when this thing ships but i would be terrified if passwords just tried to do it for any old website because if you've ever gone to any old website and tried to change your password as a human it's hard to figure out how to do it a lot of the times so i'd have very low because what they would present to you is hey you have five passwords that suck do you want to fix all five and you hit one button and then magic happens and updates your passwords on five websites as a human me updating five bad passwords on five websites takes me a long time and it's frustrating i don't think a machine can do it unless they all support those dot well-known urls yep uh let's see what else uh they they talked about um how calendar will have Fantasticale-style natural language input, which I am very much here for.

1:57:41John Siracusa:I think that's great. But it already had that. Which is interesting. But now on Suck is bad. Right. Yeah, that's the thing. It did, but it was very bad. They said that when you are in the phone app, and if you are calling a business, and I'm not clear how they know any of these things, but they will try to surface relevant information. So the example they gave is, hey, I'm calling, let's say, Delta to change a flight. in siri will surface your most recent flight information including like a confirmation number or whatever or it'll surface the wrong flight information if you have multiple flights and this is the most recent email this is the danger of these agents of giving you just in time data like i like that it's doing it and in a demo the most recent email it complains your flight number but what if you've scheduled a bunch of different flights and they're round trips and there's different flight numbers and you're on the phone and you're like yeah my flight is one two three four five because that's what it says in the phone app but it's totally wrong it's not that flight it may require you as a human to go to your mail app find the mail look at the information in the mail and say, is this the flight or is this my wife's ticket or is this the return flight?

1:58:41Demos. Yep. Who would ever have more than one flight information in their email thing? Setting aside whether, and we'll get to this and maybe in the next episode, whether or not Siri can see your email, because what if you don't use the mail app?

1:58:52John Siracusa:That is, that is very fair. They talked about the home app. Okay. Sure. Like they said, one of the things that they'll do, which is cool if it works, but I'm very skeptical that the crap home app and the crap Siri put together will somehow be a polished diamond, but here we go. They said that they will basically coalesce disparate notifications. So like, you know, Michaela crossed into the driveway, went to the front door, walked in the front door. The front door was open. The front door was closed. That is all coalesced into like Michaela came home, you know, or something along those lines. You get the idea.

1:59:25The Google apps do this already. They do it themselves by just sending a single notification with a summary in it, but it seemed like the feature they were, I can't tell the feature they were describing is that, Hey, we'll take arbitrary apps notifications and then summarize them and condense them into one. Or were they saying now the home app acts more like the Google app in that it will not send 25 notifications. It will coalesce them and send one notification with a summary.

1:59:46John Siracusa:That's a subtle difference, but you are right. And I'm not sure which one it is. It also said that they would basically do, they would put together clips from compatible cameras is what they said to like make one event out of multiple perspectives. And then speaking of the whole internet, the whole internet lost their minds about a raccoon. I think I was looking down and typing. So I missed what happened. What the heck is this about? Someone delivers a fruit basket to a house and is caught on camera from seven different angles and said, Robert arrived and save your fruit basket. So I guess it did facial recognition or whatever.

2:00:18And it's always a fruit basket. And then he puts the fruit basket on the table. And then what I presume is a stunt raccoon or as many people said, an AI generated raccoon, but it looked real to me, but who can tell? A raccoon in the middle of the day, probably has rabies, comes up and crawls onto the table and gets at the fruit basket. Immediately, by the way, with no delay. The raccoon was already there waiting. Again, raccoons generally shouldn't be out and active during the day. And if they are, you should stay away from them. But I wouldn't eat that fruit.

2:00:45Marco Arment:Also, I was expecting the summary of it to then be updated to say, and then a raccoon came on the table or something. But it didn't. So it kind of made the feature look bad, I think. Yeah, I think they were saying that the notification, like the same notification would update and show different content as new things happened, which I think would be something new because the Google app can't do that. The Google app just sends you a notification that says three people walk dogs in front of your house or something. Right. But yeah, maybe they just didn't fit that into the demo. The stunt raccoon is probably not a thing that will come up in your life.

2:01:17John Siracusa:Probably not. But for what it's worth, Marco, one of the things they specifically did say was that the and actually I guess that answers John's question. they said that as new notifications arrive it will update the coalesced notification with new information and to your point i guess it didn't happen in this case uh cameras finally get 4k resolution excuse me uh home kit cameras can or home kit secure video can now do 4k um what they did the thing that they everyone knew that they would natural language description to create shortcuts uh they talked about image playground and basically this is all stuff that i don't care about except that you can now use photorealistic output for the first time remember everything used to be very cartoony deliberately and now now it just looks like whatever one thinks of as ai generated imagery like they they they did a the little sample they showed you like a bunch of thumbnails And you're right that they do look more photo real than the intentionally cartoony ones used to, but they all kind of look a little AI.

2:02:13Like that was, this was another, this was the part where they put like the, the birthday person in an outfit and put candles on the cake and stuff. Right. Was that the section? I think so. No, I think you're right. anyway i just the the uh the novelty value of um ai generated imagery has not had particularly amazing staying power especially since the models are still producing imagery that people are currently able to detect as having been ai generated if and when they surpass that and people can't tell anymore i feel like the stigma will leave a little bit but right now i think there is kind of a stigma if you were to ai generate an image and send it to somebody it you're better off sending them a terrible low resolution meme from 1997 than you are ai generating a pristine photorealistic version of grandma on a skateboard on the half pipe like the little thing they said like the amusement value of that i feel like is already diminishing culturally but i think the upshot of this section is image playground the images no longer suck that's what it comes down to because image generation apple was massively behind and their new image generator is no longer embarrassingly behind you can actually generate imagery that looks like middle of the road image generation from any of the contemporary products in this apple demo we'll see how it does but again if people want to generate an image are they going to launch image playground if they know it exists if they know that it's here on their mac that's nothing like Like, is anybody going to actually use this stuff?

2:03:44No. Well, for the people who are currently generating AI-generated images because they amuse them, whatever image generator they're already using, I don't feel like this is going to displace them.

2:03:53John Siracusa:All right. So then they did the photos section. You can enhance images in ways that respect the original moment, they said, word for word. You can clean up. You can extend. So you can add space around the image. Pretty much everyone has a story about how they wanted to, including you, John. I feel like you've talked about this. I've been using other apps to do this for years. It is very useful. especially for doing wallpapers, like, cause your phone is really tall and I didn't want like my family's faces to be covered by the clock. Right. So I would always add stuff and there's tons of apps to do this.

2:04:21Again, I usually use pixel meter or sometimes I use Photoshop or whatever, but yes, this is a feature they should add to photos. I think it's a huge thumbs up. The extend feature is great for being able to add a little background where you need it.

2:04:32John Siracusa:Yeah. And then you can also reframe and you can do a spatial reframing, which I think as a technological case study or like as an engineering case study, this is so freaking cool. And I know that the people who are better photographers than me, which is almost everyone took some issue with this. And I will let you talk about that in just a second, but I think this is incredible. So what you do is you take a photo and it doesn't have to be captured with an Apple device. It can be just a regular photo from like my Olympus micro four thirds camera and it will compute and figure out the depth that was captured in that photo.

2:05:07John Siracusa:And you can basically move around, drag the photo around to reposition where the person taking the picture was within this 3D space. I bet you this is not going to work near as well as it looked on the keynote, but what they showed on the keynote was incredible. And I really also liked that as you're dragging around and repositioning things during the the interactive part of it, the areas that generated a fill would fill in are kind of like a whitish blur. And so they're not like computing it, of course, as you're moving things around, but you're getting a very clear indication of how much of this image is about to be blurred.

2:05:45John Siracusa:I think this is incredible if it even close to works. However, I do completely understand everyone's complaints about this, which I will let either one of you, I guess, John, perhaps take over why this is upsetting to people. well i it being upsetting to people is just like oh don't take your photos and like ai generate stuff on them and just like let the photos be what they are but here's my take on it which is i guess perhaps even more cynical and that is that no feature can make people care about framing photos that's my take like the idea that people can look at a photo and detect in any way that it is poorly framed i think is false i've known this from every other person who's not a photographer from my life.

2:06:27They take photos that are incredibly poorly framed and they do not care. Not only do they not care, they can't tell. They can't distinguish a well-framed photo from a not well-framed one. They don't care that their photos are badly framed. They don't care that people have a pole coming out of their head. They don't care that it's 98 % background that no one cares about. They don't care that it's shot up at an unflattering angle. Like for the exception of like people taking selfies where they're trying to make themselves look hot or whatever, for the most part when people take pictures in groups i cannot convince anybody in my life to care how photos are framed now it's great that this picture says like oh let you reframe it like you said casey like virtually change where the person might have been standing so that the you know the pole isn't coming out of the top of their head because if you took it from two feet to the left the pole would be off to the side of them but just getting people to understand that it's bad to have a pole coming out of your head in the picture is insane now you know what the main thing that can make your pictures better with respect to framing is it's called cropping and it has existed for the life of the iPhone.

2:07:24Nobody does it because they do not know that their pictures are poorly framed. You've like cropping is the number one thing you can do to your picture. You know, again, extending if you over if you actually got it too close that you can extend now. So that's a cool feature. But most of the time people make the opposite mistake. There's too much background. You're not centered. The camera is tilted, blah, blah, blah. And people don't care. So i i think extend is the best feature here cleanup is the second best reframe is a little bit silly and it's going to make people ruin their pictures a little bit but here's the thing because people don't care about how pictures are framed if you show them that they're like oh that's cool and if i think about it for two seconds they'll be like well how does it even do that but i don't see them driven to use the feature because like it's not solving a problem they have they're like well it's neat that you can do that and i get how it's kind of like amazing and future because how does it know what's behind my head they can't see it oh it's making it up with the computer that's amazing but the the question they would ask is but why would i ever want to do this i can already crop i can already extend i could see why i might want to use those if i ever wanted to touch my photos at all so yeah i i think i think reframe i know they're excited about it and it's the coolest tech but i think clean up and extend are the highlight features i think they i mean

2:08:37Marco Arment:this this raises some interesting questions that that we've been fighting as an industry for a long time now of like what is a photo is it cheating is it misleading is it fake is and i think everybody draws that line in a little bit different place apple so far i think has done a pretty good job of finding that balance with their feature set they've chosen and by the way i would say apple one of the things apple does really well here is all of their edits are non-destructive so you can always revert to original and that provides a level of surety about what the real photo is versus the edited that lots of other applications don't provide absolutely yeah but you know i think like where i come down on it which i think is is basically where apple comes down on it is like i don't think it's great to have a to have tools that can make photorealistic images of things that didn't really happen and pass them off as things that did happen um you know and and to to be able to edit your photos to create a moment that really didn't exist and was pretty far from existing i think that is you know questionable and tricky but like if you are using editing whether it's ai or older methods like you know photoshopping and tweaking colors and stuff like that like if you're using editing to create a misleading picture, that's morally questionable and that's a problem.

2:10:08Marco Arment:But if you're using editing to make the image that you were trying to capture better, but it's still depicting a moment that occurred and these tools are just helping you depict that moment better, I think that's generally fine. Now, again, everyone draws that line in different ways. To some people, adjusting the color and contrast of an image would be misleading and creating a fake scene that never really existed um to some people using tools like like the you know where it extends like this where like you're creating entire parts of a scene that not only weren't in the frame but might not actually exist in real life that way um some people think that is over the line some people think that like it's fine to delete a trash can in the background or a person who was walking in the background that is not really your subject.

2:11:00Marco Arment:Some people think that's wrong. I think I generally land where Apple lands with this. And I think they have found a good balance so far of the tools they have offered in photos editing to generally maximize the value to the person without too much fraud.

2:11:20John Siracusa:So I think that's basically it in terms of features. There's a few more things to talk about, of course. But any other features we want to discuss before I

2:11:28Marco Arment:move on i'm just i'm i'm really excited to get into all these os's and just start using them because like all those giant word cloud slides they had this time it really does seem like they had a really great goal in mind here of tackle every every small thing find a bunch of small stuff and tackle it i love that idea and then i hope also that all of these new apis that we've gotten for all the new AI stuff. I hope this enables a lot of cool little improvements in apps. I think it can. We will see. The first generation foundation models enabled a little bit of fun stuff. Not a ton. Let's see what the second generation can do.

2:12:10Marco Arment:There's still a bunch of limits because they're still on device. The better models still only run on, as I mentioned earlier, a pretty small number of pretty recent devices. That could be a question mark for a while, but I actually like that there's a whole bunch of little improvements and some pretty interesting API improvements for us to play with. But as we were talking about last week about like, you know, reward versus homework, basically, it seems like the homework side of it this year is pretty small. That's awesome. Because that gives all of us now the ability to do to our apps what it seemed like Apple was focusing on on their apps through the last year, which is make things better.

2:12:53Marco Arment:Just overall, just a building year. That's really nice. You tricked Marco into giving his final judgment again, but we're still not up to it. One more thing about the Apple intelligence things, which they gave vague answers about, and they had more stuff later, which is usage limits. There's a question a lot of people had going into this, but if you're out to discuss it in the preview thing, which is, do you have to pay money for this stuff? Because historically speaking, lots of the LLM powered stuff that we do, especially at the cutting edge, costs money. There's a free version of it, but the free version is not as good as the one you pay for, is Apple going to charge money for some of these things?

2:13:24And here's what they had to say about that. They said that not exact words that daily usage limits apply to some features. This is a direct quote from Apple from the press release. Some Apple intelligence features, including image generation, have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful server models. Increased access is available with most iCloud plus most iCloud plus subscription plans, which also include Apple intelligence support for compatible home cameras. so this is super vague and this is really kind of an inversion of the industry standard for the past several years which has been hey we have a new subscription for you to pay for or we've increased the price of your subscription but guess what the new subscription or the increased price of the subscription it comes with these ai features that you didn't ask for apple's doing the opposite you're already paying for icloud plus well guess what if you're already paying for it we increase your usage limits on a thing that you didn't have before which is the ability to use our powerful server models to do image generation the bottom line is that a lot of these features that were shown here that are not running on device cost apple money to run and it's always the question of like well shouldn't apple just eat that cost and we get it all for free and at a certain point even apple can't eat it anymore i mean what do you expect more than five gigs of free iCloud storage no so now they're going to be running inference for you for free on their on their slash google servers up to a point and we just we talked about like like the the iWork apps had those ridiculous limits where you could do like make two slide decks and your usage was up so we'll see what the limits are we'll see where the rubber meets the road but i do like the idea of them saying some of you are already paying us a subscription we you'll get more stuff because you're already paying us and i don't think there's good they didn't announce anything that said oh and by the way all your subscriptions are going up to account for the ai features that you may never use so far they haven't said that all they said is if you pay us your limits will be higher I give that a thumbs up and in general the economic reality of oh so you want to do cutting edge stuff with LLMs well it turns out that costs money because someone's got to pay it and right now we're all sort of gliding on VCs paying for a lot of it for us because these companies just get investor money and charge people to use it but the price they're charging is not yet potentially paying for what it costs to give out because they're still in that growth phase I'm not sure where Apple is on the spectrum like obviously we've gone over that they have not spent the hundreds of billion dollars of everyone else does.

2:15:39But those servers and those data centers aren't free. Someone's got to be paying for that. And somehow that cost has to be paid by margins on Apple devices, by existing iCloud Plus subscriptions. This will be a tricky balance. And, you know, hours after the keynote, I don't know where they're going to land. Their statement is very vague. But in case you were wondering, someone is going to be paying something for some things. It's not all free.

2:16:04Marco Arment:Also, there's a different side of the cost situation here, which is developers, it seems like now have access in certain APIs to the private cloud compute models. But they said there's like, if you get the first 2 million installs of your app, you don't pay up to a certain rate. And then they just didn't say what happens after that. There's been APIs like that. Like a lot of the CloudKit ones are like that too, where like, oh, up to some limit, it's all free. Yeah, weather works that way too. I mean, and there's, and and they also said somewhere around like you know for iCloud plus subscribers they get higher limits but is that for you and your app too it seems like it might have been so I think there's this is going to be a pretty weird and complicated pricing situation for developers for a little while um you know and and I I don't like I would never make an app based on the assumption that I would stay under that cap forever like I would always have that in the back of my mind like what happens when i cross that to if i cross that two million installations mark what happens to my cost model of that i've made this app based on um so well the way apple has done it with other apis though well i'm not sure about the weather api but the cloud kit ones that doesn't get charged against the user like it's their icloud account that they would have to upgrade if they want to use it more cloud kit does but weather doesn't so i there's there's a bunch of what is this more like is it more like cloud kit or something like the weather i think it's gonna be more like the weather but i they haven't really given a full and who knows you know when they're going to announce full pricing probably not for at least a you know a little while but and the weird thing about pricing about these services like the things we mentioned the weather api and cloud and stuff i don't think there's been a lot of motion in the limits and and the the cost structure whereas charging for ai inference that's not a static pricing landscape in 2026 like it has already changed and it is going to because we get better doing inference but then the models get bigger like it's not the type of thing that apple can set in stone in 2026 and just say we're never going to change this pricing structure because that is so out of touch with where we are with this technology it's changing from day to day moment to moment like who knows where this will go it could go massively up could go massively down the bubble could burst and everything could go up a huge a price so it could be a breakthrough in inference and everything gets cheaper like who could have predicted all the ram and ssd price like this is not an area where apple can say here's the pricing structure and then just never revisit it.

2:18:25I mean, they could, but it would be a terrible idea. So please, Apple, don't do that. Please, Hammer, don't hurt them.

2:18:30John Siracusa:Also, there was a couple of mentions in the keynote and then later a document on Apple's newsroom. And it says, in this document, due to the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple's proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants. Quote, we're deeply disappointed that our EU users won't have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share new software releases later this year, quote, said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.

2:19:06John Siracusa:Quote, our hope is to eventually bring Siri AI to the EU and we will continue to engage with the regulators on a path forward. However, their refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI's availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU. I don't know if there was another press release for China, but they did mention in the keynote. Also, we don't know how this is going to work in China and it won't be available there until we work something out with the Chinese government. So this is not really any news. Apple continues to fight with the EU about all things related to its platform.

2:19:41John Siracusa:Yep. I do think it was quite funny. I don't know it's hard for me to have a reasonable and unbiased opinion about this because I am I think I've been described in the past as the most American American which is not something I'm proud of these days but nevertheless I don't know I do think this is this is funny if nothing else because it's two you know unstoppable forces you know approaching each other and I don't know I don't feel like anyone's and this is like a lot of the past issues like Apple theoretically has a point which is um to allow third-party uh lms to have the same access that our llm has would be a security concern on the phone but then the use point is yeah that's the whole point of the thing whatever access you have other one other companies should give access to because it's anti-competitive if only you can do the fancy things on your phone how is anyone ever going to compete with siri on your phone like this this becomes not an avenue for competition because of your stranglehold on the market like and that's where they meet each other they butt heads which is like okay the eu wants competition and apple says yeah but a we don't want competition we're not going to say that but we don't want competition and b it's difficult for us to figure out how to give competition because we as the platform owner have such incredibly invasive access to everything and we trust ourselves because we're trustworthy but we don't trust these other companies and as a consumer you can like well i i kind of get where they're coming from because i wouldn't want you know facebook to have unfettered lm access to my phone to read all my information and do anything they want uh but on the other hand i also don't want the ios and apple platform landscape to always be limited by whatever idea apple has about something so apple says well we came up with a solution we came up with this trusted platform thing or whatever and it's just kind of like the different browser engines like we came up with a secure way for people to compete with us and that is just a way not just a way but that is also a way for apple to have a little knob that says oh if the complication gets too tight just turn this now because we control everything that we control the way third parties access the stuff that we let them access and we control how much they access and we control what they have to do and we approve their apps and we're going to force them to jump through all these hoops and you know like the third party stores will make it so onerous that no one will ever want to compete with us that's the cynical take and the other take is but on the other hand you don't want those things to have complete access to the phone so So, you know, no one is completely in the right here.

2:22:00Both parties have difficulty. I mean, the EU is trying to do the right thing, but not understanding the constraints. And Apple is trying to maintain control while also complying with the law. And they're failing to do that. The people who set the law say you are not complying with it. And Apple can disagree, but Apple doesn't make the laws. So this is kind of a bummer for the EU. And I'm not sure what the Chinese situation is there, but it's probably even more grim. and that maybe they want Chinese LLMs to have access to the phone to the same degree that Apple does. Yeah, it's not a good situation.

2:22:31It's just a repeat of all the other things we've had. And the upshot is people in the EU don't get these features. So folks in the EU will try it out for you and tell you if it sucks or not.

2:22:41John Siracusa:I think that's mostly it. As we mentioned earlier, there was no Ternus. And then at the very, very end, Tim had his personal note where he just basically said the things you would expect him to say. and then there was a music video at the very very end but we're going to talk about that in the after show anything else before we wrap on wwdc 2026 i thought that the the tim goodbye thing at

2:23:04Marco Arment:the end was the perfect encapsulation because first of all like you know apple we all know that apple is you know that they release new phones in september and that the os's are announced or the OS is ship, you know, right before that, like a week before that. We know that. But Apple won't even say it. They won't say it in the video, ships in September. No, they said ships in the fall. You know, everyone knows when it ships, but they won't say it. Everyone knows at this point, you can see, like we'll talk about it a little bit over time. There's probably a foldable iPhone coming up, but Apple won't say it.

2:23:43Marco Arment:They pretend like it's still a big secret and they uphold the secret. And that's how they are with a lot of things. In this case, I think Apple is pretending that this is not Tim Cook's last event officially in hosting. And I think the only reason they would pretend that way is because they don't like to transmit their future plans. They don't like to say, look, we all know that even though we announced John Turner is going to be CEO on September 1st, we all know that the next event is probably going to be like a week after that. so they won't say that even though again everyone knows it it's the pattern they've kept for years well i think i think you just you called out the distinction here the difference about saying when the event is is because that's unannounced they want to keep their options open why would you commit to something when you're not sure whether you're going to hit that deadline who knows what could happen between now and some number whereas the ceo transition they did commit to a date they wrote it in the press release there's an exact day and so it's two different things there i think the main reason they didn't talk about uh the transition even though it has been 100 % announced is because it would distract from the announcement.

2:24:51Like if Tim Cook had said anything, if he had done a big heartfelt, this is my last thing and I can't believe this is the last time I ever going to talk to you and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that that would be there would be stories about that. And by being Tim Cook and saying a word salad doesn't say anything significant. He's sure that there's not going to be a separate story about his statement at the end of the presentation. And so far, I haven't seen one because it's impossible to write about.

2:25:12Marco Arment:Well, yeah, but that is like by them not being willing to just come out and say, yeah, we know that you know that this is Tim's last event. We're not going to say that. Everyone knows it, including Tim and all of us, but we won't actually say it. And then what we will say is, as you said, standard Tim Cook fare. It's vaguely pleasant and fairly content free. but i word salad yeah i i respect what he was trying to do um i i you know the the iconography of him standing below the giant rainbow at apple park um while he has massively kissed up to the trump regime that has fought against queer rights at every single turn and continues to do so during Pride Month at that.

2:26:06Marco Arment:I think that that was a perfect encapsulation of the end of Tim Cook's reign.

2:26:13John Siracusa:Yep, I think you're right. All right, well, thank you for sticking with us for WWDC 2026. We still have an after show in overtime to come, but I'm excited. I'm excited. I know we've already done our closing remarks like thrice, so I will just say I'm excited. I haven't done mine once yet. All right, John, close it up for us. I did at the beginning. I basically gave the summary version, but I'll just re-wrap it up here because we're at the end. The reason I was so excited about everything that was shown here is because every single thing that they announced makes something better. And I know that's a low bar, but it reminds me of the scene that I think I've brought up on this very show in the past from the movie American History X, where the main character, who's a skinhead, white supremacist, Nazi kind of guy, um is i think he's in jail at this point and something terrible happens to him in jail and he's in a hospital bed and like this guy's talking to him as like his advisor or whatever and it's like he's hit rock bottom he's at his lowest point he's he's he's a skinhead he committed crimes he's in jail he's having a terrible experience in jail he's still unrepentantly racist and terrible uh and this is like his uh mentor or guide or whatever his uh you know black friend is trying to convince him hey don't be a nazi it sucks um and so he's on the hospital bed And the guy says to him, has anything you've done made your life better?

2:27:32Which is the exact right time to propose that question to this person, to sort of get some perspective and see clarity. And I feel like the last WWDC, part of the reason I was so upset about macOS 26 in particular, but a lot of the 26OS things is it didn't feel like they were making things better. They made a bunch of stuff worse for no good reason. and it's not so much the things they made worse like broke the world oh it's unusable blah blah it wasn't that bad it was fine like you could get around with it but like the idea that they would they would spend an entire year working on something that did not make their os's better pained me at my core so this wwdc pretty much every single thing they announced makes their products better assuming it works the way they say it does but there's nothing i saw that was like, oh no, don't do that.

2:28:29That will make your products worse. Now, they were helped by making things so much worse last year that merely improving on that, not even getting back to where they were before, but merely fixing some of the problems from last year does count as making something better, even if the state that it exists in the 26 OS still isn't as good as it was in iOS 16 or 17 or something. But it's the trend. Like, that's the thing when people complain to me, oh, you hate these OSes so much or whatever. They're not that bad. They're fine. You can use them. I've said this from day one. It's not actually that bad.

2:29:01The upsetting thing is the direction. Directionally, it is upsetting to see people intentionally using bad ideas to make things worse. And pretty much every single thing in this keynote was using good ideas to make things better by small amounts. And possibly they won't work the way they were shown or whatever, but at least everything they were shown was good. And there's a lot of it, as we noted, the word clouds, all the big list of things that they're doing. Like they didn't even have time to put it all in. There's so much stuff, all these little things, all the things that get the applause lines.

2:29:29I mean, all the things where Casey's writing in the notes, like hell yes to caching on async images, like developer stuff. They're like, yes, finally, I've always wanted that API. I've always wanted that capability. I've always wanted to add keywords on my phone to the photos app. I always wanted to be able to extend the frame and not use a third party app. Every single thing in this keynote is making something better. That's boring for people but where's my foldable phone where's my vr headset where's my you know m5 max studio right i get it i get it why people are not excited by this this fall we already shipped it you didn't like it and probably next year but like but just man i like i i love that's why i'm excited about this i love that everything i'm saying and as i go look for more stuff watch some sessions learn about this look at the documentation like that's better that's going to be improved that's going to be cool and this is a very familiar feeling for me because that's what wwc always used to be like it's like whatever came before it whatever they announced at wwc and all the sessions and the keynotes and all that stuff it was like let me tell you all the ways that things are going to be better and boy does that feel good after last year yeah that's really well put john thank you

2:30:36Marco Arment:to our sponsors this week squarespace and claude and thanks to our members who support us directly You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about some updates that are popping up about the foldable iPhone. We're going to be covering that in Overtime because we just couldn't cram it into this episode. Join now to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:31:06Marco Arment: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 Margo 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-G Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S It's accidental Accidental

2:31:56John Siracusa:They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long

2:32:06Marco Arment:So Casey, you're famous. This is amazing.

2:32:09John Siracusa:I don't know if I would go quite that far, but it was a very unusual end of the keynote. So I'm sitting there and the state of the world for me was I was in the main living area of the house that we're staying in. And I was watching the keynote on the TV because I'm me. I brought an ancient Apple TV with me and I'm watching the keynote on the TV. I'm typing out notes on my laptop. and I'm starting to send a text to Aaron as Tim is up saying, hey, the three of you, you know, the three of them were at the beach. You know, maybe I can pop down for a little bit before the State of the Union. I think it's ending now.

2:32:44You didn't see my message before you left?

2:32:47John Siracusa:Well, so right as I send that, all of a sudden, Tyler Stallman and Jason Snell both send me texts at like the exact same moment. Tyler's was two exclamation points and Jason's was call sheet in the keynote. And that's all I knew. And I don't understand because they're like a minute to two before me because they're in the audience. And I don't understand how this is possible. I assumed that I missed something. Yeah, right. At this point, it's over. I just told Aaron, I'm going to come down to the beach. I think I was like 10 seconds ahead of you, which is why I knew I was seeing it before you did.

2:33:23So I immediately typed into the window so you would see it. But at that point, I think you'd already gotten up and left.

2:33:27Marco Arment:Yeah, usually the Apple TV stream is like 10 or 15 seconds behind the online stream, which itself is probably a good minute behind the in-person stream. And I got the info from live people too. The reason I had it much faster than you is I got it from a live person.

2:33:40John Siracusa:So in any case, so I get out my phone and I am so sad because I think Tyler said it to me, but I didn't notice until it was all over. Oh yeah, so Tyler sends the two exclamation points to which I replied with an ellipsis and a question mark. And he sends a photo of the presentation. patient. But at this point, of course, it had long since moved on. And so I see something like the screen is fairly far away from him. And I see that there's some gentleman in like a couple of like round recs on the screen. And Tyler asks, are you watching? And I said, I'm seeing Tim doing his wrap up to which he said, but I didn't see this until after.

2:34:16John Siracusa:Oh, keep watching, record it and your reaction, which I so deeply wish I'd seen that because that's what I should have done. But in the heat of the moment, as my heart rate is spiking, because I don't know what's about to happened, but apparently something's going down. I take out my phone and I record the TV because I don't know what else to do. Like in retrospect, I should have recorded myself, but whatever. And I record the TV and all of a sudden they, after Tim fades out, they have like app appreciation by, uh, was it Eric, the architect, I believe. And so there's this guy standing in what, what vaguely looks like an office C kind of reception area.

2:34:49John Siracusa:And he starts wrapping all I, all I need is good reads and some better sleep. And you start seeing these app icons pop up. I keep it calm so these drafts stay in call sheet. Okay, so can you put drafts in call sheet? Well, not Greg Pierce's drafts, no. But I don't f***ing care because this was one of the coolest things I have had happen to me in a fairly long time. Because there, on the Apple keynote, admittedly after it was kind of sort of over, but on the Apple keynote is Jelly's icon for call sheet floating in space and approaching the camera a little bit. or I guess the camera was approaching it, which I didn't even know what to do with myself.

2:35:29John Siracusa:You know, I'm like, my heart is racing. At this point, my phone is exploding. I am getting text messages from any Apple, any vague Apple person in my life. Like if you are even vaguely aware of Apple enough to watch the keynote, every one of them sent me a text and they were all very kind and very excited. It was so, so wonderful. And I'm, and I'm trying to process this all. Meanwhile, I'm calling Erin and she's on the beach. As far as she knows, I'm about to walk down to the beach potentially. And I said, call sheet was in the keynote and she was like, wait, what? And I don't remember what words I said to her, but I would presume that approximately none of them made any sense.

2:36:11John Siracusa:And I'm not going to put her on the spot and get her on the mic because that would be way too awkward. But suffice to say, I think I made almost no sense. And she's like, well, just stay there and handle whatever's going on there. And we were actually probably going to come up anyway, so we'll be up in a few minutes. And so I get through all my text messages and then I look at Indigo, which is, you know, my, my, the, the multi-platform app that I'm using these days. And my mentions are a dumpster fire, but for the first time in a long time, in a good way, which is a welcome change. So this was extremely cool and extremely unexpected.

2:36:45John Siracusa:And I think perhaps the funniest bit of this whole thing, leaving aside the fact that we were not given the nod for the keynote and yet here I am in the keynote, but whatever. Or we were not given the nod to attend WWDC, but here my app is in the keynote. But beyond that, Jelly zoomed in a little bit and Jelly noticed that the version of the icon they used is the one that actually has the hunt for an October on it and John McTiernan and the release date and so on. At one point, like a year, a year and a half ago, they had reached out, Apple had reached out to me And it said in so many words, do you have rights for this?

2:37:22John Siracusa:And like, or like, is this kosher? And I was like, I don't know. So I had jelly whipped together, an alternative version. They never asked me why. And I actually don't think it related to this. They never asked me why they wanted this information. But I said, well, you know, I'm not sure if it's 100 % on the up and up to be, and I forget how I phrased it, but I'm not sure it's 100 % on the up and up, but here's a different version of it. And I think off the top of my head, it's like the hunt or the search for blue October with the director listed as K, K-A-Y, C-L-I-S, C-E-L-I-S, which was 100 % jelly.

2:37:54John Siracusa:It was incredible. So it's directed by KC-L-I-S. And anyways, and so I think that might even be the default app icon now. I haven't thought about icons in a while. But they had this alternative completely fabricated version. The one that they used in the keynote video, this is Hunt for October by John McTiernan, which I think is hilarious. Love that. Um, but anyways, this was a completely surreal experience. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. And like, you know, because I'm me and the one moment I'm like, man, I really did make it. I really did it. Look at, I really, you know, Joe, we did it, which is what I said to jelly, you know, Joe, we did it.

2:38:30John Siracusa:We did it. Uh, but then 10 seconds later, I'm like, oh, they just needed the right thing to rhyme with drafts or to rhyme with whatever it was. I thought you were going to say, well, where's the call to action? can people tap on that to buy my thing? This is great and all, but is it going to turn into sales? Probably not. But it's so funny that my natural inclination is to just go from better sleep and call sheet, I guess, were vaguely rhymy. And I'm assuming that that's why they used my app, is not because they feel like it's good or anything like that, or they enjoyed the icon. It's just, oh, we needed something to rhyme with better sleep.

2:39:01Marco Arment:No, they think it's good. There are lots of apps in the App Store that honestly would have been a closer rhyme. right so no just take this for what it is it's cool it's an honor and enjoy it i mean your app has been featured right yeah yeah well i'm assuming they were pulling from the apps that they had already editorially determined that are apps they like i think that's right yeah

2:39:22John Siracusa:but it was it was wild to say the least i'm very appreciative and very thankful now the other thing i noticed later on after i like watched it for the 18th time um toward the end of this like music video thing uh what is eric the architect i think is the gentleman's name is standing in a room and is holding what appear to be like foot one foot by one foot um uh like printouts if you will of these app icons and it's kind of like throwing them in you know and whatever let me be clear i don't know that they ever printed one for call sheet i never saw like one of these physical objects. For all I know, maybe it was CGI anyway.

2:39:59John Siracusa:If this exists, I will give a testicle to have this in my house. Like, I will do whatever it takes if this thing is real. I mean, you could probably get one made. Yes, but that's not the same. It's not the real one. It's like you have to get the one from the video. The object itself is not the thing. It's its provenance. It's exactly it.

2:40:17Marco Arment:I would assume they're composited, but it would be really cool if they weren't. Yep, exactly right. No, I think they printed. I mean, obviously most of them are CG, but I think they probably had physical ones too.

2:40:27John Siracusa:Yeah, well, again, I don't... But yours was one of the ones that I only saw in CG. Exactly right. Although we should look at that big pile to see if Grok is in that pile on the floor. And we should also mention... Speaking of trust and safety, we forgot to mention that trust and safety section. They're all this big about safety for children, except when it comes to potentially banning Elon Musk's app that is used to take clothes off children. Yeah, it's something else. But also in the video, we mentioned, you know, Greg Pearson drafts, Curtis and Slopes was in it. And I feel like some of our other friends were in there at some way at some point, but it was so wild and so cool.

2:41:00John Siracusa:And we'll put a link to the music video in the show notes. It comes at the very, very end of the keynote after Tim's outro or what have you. But it's one of those pinch yourself moments. Like, did that just happen? Was that real? And it's very, very neat. And Craig Hockenberry, I'll try to dig up the toot for the show notes, but made a really interesting point. And it was meant in a really good way, which is exactly how I took it. But he said basically like, you know, one of the fun things about WWDC in years past, like several years ago now was the design awards, the Apple design awards. And, and you would be incredible because you would know, I feel like we knew the nominees.

2:41:42John Siracusa:We didn't know the winners before WWDC. And a lot of people would go to the actual award ceremony where you would learn who the winner was. and the camaraderie and the congratulations and all that, that used to be so pivotal and important. I mean, Marco, you've talked about wanting one for years. Absolutely. And that used to be so much more important than I feel like it is now because now it's basically just a freaking email, and that's all it is. And Craig was lamenting that, and I think Craig is right. But one of the points that Craig made was that this being in the keynote in any capacity is kind of what the ADA has become, or that same feeling.

2:42:17John Siracusa:You get that, we get that with our peers more from having like a flash in a keynote because really ultimately in this like two hour keynote, the word call sheet being said once and my icon appearing on the screen for like a hundred frames, like that's really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was the coolest thing that's ever happened to me. So it is kind of a big deal. But Craig is right. Like the combination, the formula you need to make that experience is you need recognition from Apple and you need your peers to witness it. Yes, well put. The old in-person one was the recognition from Apple is they gave you the award and your peers witness it because WWDC used to be in person, not just for a tiny select group of people who fit an Apple Park, but for like 5 ,000 people.

2:43:01would i know it's still a tiny fraction of the developer base although in the early years that actually wasn't the tiny fraction but anyway um being in front of like 5 000 of your peers who care enough to buy an expensive plane ticket to san francisco they would get to witness you receiving your recognition from apple the venue for that now is not apple park because half the people that it's probably less than half uh that used to go to wwdc are there and half of them are youtube influencers who don't know who developers are anyway right they're just there basically They think phones are cool.

2:43:28They have no idea. Like it's not just developer peers. Now it's mostly just like, you know, mainstream press who are interested in Apple products, not so much interested in developer stuff. Whereas if you showed up, especially at like the ADAs weren't in the keynote back in the day, or at least a lot of the time they weren't in the keynote. They were a separate thing. Who was still there at WWC? Who's going to go to the ADAs? It was developers like a mainstream YouTube influencer or equivalent from back in the day was not going to go to the ADAs at all because they didn't care. so the only way you have to get any recognition in front of your peers is you have to be in the keynote because every developer around the world is watching the keynote not just the ones who are there people out park to see the same video we do they just see it a little bit earlier right um and so this is it this is the only venue we have for you to be recognized by apple in front

2:44:12John Siracusa:of your peers yeah yeah it it felt really freaking good and i'm going to be riding this high for quite a while i'm sure and you know it felt it felt pretty crummy not to get invited to wbdc And I mean, we have, I think we already talked about this on the show. We are more commonly not invited than we are invited. So it is not unexpected to not get the invite, but I don't know, it hurts every time a little bit because I don't know, maybe I'm a child, maybe I'm just a person. I don't know, but it hurt a little bit, but this definitely turned that frown upside down and it is very cool. And I'm very, very appreciative.

2:44:45John Siracusa:I don't know who at Apple made that happen, or I don't know if it was just that I got super lucky and Eric, the architect just needed to make that weird rhyme, but one way or another, However it happened, I'm going to choose to believe that it was a subtle nod and a subtle thank you in my general direction, and that's what I'm going to go to bed with. Based on the lyrics, I don't think Eric the Architect knows what your app does, but I do think Apple presented him with a list of apps to incorporate into a rap song, and your app was among them because Apple likes your app. Yeah, I sure hope so.

2:45:14John Siracusa:But that wasn't the only video that happened today. There was posted to Excel or Twitter of all places, which really grosses me out, But Tim posted a video with a bunch of suggestions for how to open the keynote, which I kind of wanted to hate this because it's kind of silly and dumb in a bunch of ways, but I actually kind of liked it. So this is a bunch of random celebrities basically telling him how to say good morning, which was very, very funny. It is so, Marco's point he's made several times, it is such a Tim Cook thing that his catchphrase is literally good morning. because that's how he would hope in every keynote.

2:45:50And it's like looking for any sign of life or personality. It's like, well, you do say good morning every single time and you do have an accent that some people find amusing. So you say good morning and his whatever it is. It's good morning. Yeah. Good morning. I can't do it. But anyway, I think the interesting thing about this video, obviously this is like, you know, it's not a goodbye Tim video, but it is a Tim dedicated segment in what we know to be his last thing or whatever. many many celebrities appear in this video saying the word good morning many of them how long have they been producing this video a year a year and a half before he announced his retirement how do you get the time how do you even know you just got to stick a camera in their face for two seconds and say good morning there's a lot of celebrities they have busy schedules just coordinating alone we want to do a thing for apple are you interested do you have time it'll only take 30 seconds of time we might need a crew blah blah blah multiply that by 15 a-list actors this must have been in the works for a long time and so i feel like this is a lot of effort for a pretty silly segment and the only reason it exists is because this is tim cook's last keynote yeah i don't know if i think

2:47:00Marco Arment:it's more that apple has a lot of connections to the celebrity world you know first through apple music and then later through apple tv plus which is now apple tv on the apple tv i'm not saying people would refuse to do it just logistically finding room in all of their calendars it had to have taken six months what if it what if they just like gave gave an intern a really big budget to go spend on cameo here's the thing if you've ever seen real cameos the lighting is terrible like these were not that they were produced and they're in a studio but they all looked okay some of them look really good where i think they actually sent a crew but cameos look like you can't even see anything and they're blurry and it's overly compressed and they're like in their back room and it's echoey and these were all above that level i don't know i i like i said i wanted to hate it but i thought it was kind of cute all right and the other thing before we we can't say this we have to show even though or can't say this over time even though over time is about the foldable phone but just uh to acknowledge a few of the things that these weren't in the keynote and you know obviously there's tons of stuff that wasn't in the keynote including the whole state of the union that we'll get to in future episodes but just in the people scrambling to notice things in the hours after the keynote aired uh vince on mastodon was the first person who i saw that saw this vince says of course a tech note on optimizing app kit for sidecar touch interfaces definitely not for touchscreen macbooks and this is tn3212 adopting gesture recognizer for sidecar touch support and it reads in part in mac os 27 app kit continues to standardize on gesture recognizers as the primary mechanism for input handling.

2:48:33This change directly affects sidecar, which by the way is the thing where you use an iPad as your secondary screen on your Mac, affects sidecar because gesture recognizers are the only way to respond to touch input from a sidecar connected iPad running iPadOS 27. This article explains how the gesture recognizer model works and how to implement gesture recognizers correctly for sidecar touch input and how to update your existing event handling code and which APIs macOS 27 adds. do you want to know how to add touch support to app kit controls well you know for sidecar like

2:49:07Marco Arment:obviously like it's such a common use case obviously the ipad you know the ipad is a touch interface and yes you can use it as a second screen but you know you can touch the screen on the ipad and if you have like an app kit app and you're used someone's using a sidecar display you might want to check out these new apis we've added to app kit for gesture recognition for touch for sidecar though for sidecar yeah that's that's what it's for obviously so that so that is one of the least subtle things i've ever seen well done apple to because i was like how are they gonna put that out how are they gonna even talk about that oh yeah sidecar i have a friend who was a problem right right sam henry gold writes um ios 26 framework references fold state and angle degrees but i'm sure that's nothing right and apple's put a lot of a lot of effort in wbc this year is about um resizable iphone apps is that interesting why would they want to resize the simulator to make an iphone app really wide when would that come up i don't know we'll talk about that interesting and they show it in the demos i look let me take this phone app and they expand the phone app to be like twice as wide i'm like wow i mean like i know some phones are wider than others but really why would you ever make the simulator window twice as wide and they show like it changing from a one column to a two column interesting so again not particularly i mean this is such a land of leaks they used to have more of a lockdown in the days before like we're going to add you know we're going to make the iphone 6 be wider we're going to add some height to it in the iphone 5 or whatever they had an easier time keeping secrets then but yeah um this is just from people downloading the sdk and like searching for things and finding fold state and angle degrees is really something in the sdks i mean did they even lead those symbols to go out so um yeah foldable iphone coming stay tuned to overtime for more on that because as the title of the overtime segment i know it says the foldable iphone takes shape literally yeah and

2:50:52John Siracusa:And then somebody pointed out that there was also a lot of talk about origami in the State of the Union. Oh, yeah, their demo app was origami? Yeah. What was that? I mean, it's just a messaging app. It's just a name we picked. It's just a name.

2:51:03Marco Arment:For some reason, we're thinking about folding a lot. No one said fold. Who said fold? I just said origami. Beep, beep, beep.