Here we are, post WWDC, as we record about 24 hours-ish since the end of the big keynote. I'm joined by Justin Searls, back again for another WWDC hot takes show. What's up, Justin?

Hello, Jerod. Yeah, this is -- you know, as an Apple... Well, I guess I show my hand if I say I'm an Apple fan. But as a close follower of the -- as a journalist at justin.searls.co... This is a semi-annual -- this is one of the two poles of the calendar year. This is the software holiday, and then in September we have the hardware holiday.

That's right.

And then everything else, that gets sprinkled throughout the different quarters as a bonus. So yeah, it's a big deal. There's a lot to talk about.

Yeah, and as a software guy, I've always thought this was the best -- not this year's, but in particular WWDC was my favorite event, because it seemed to focus more on the things that I am interested in, I care about... I mean, macOS gets its own section, and you just don't get that very often. Of course, when they're releasing new Macs or iMacs, they'll do some Mac stuff... But so much of the last decade plus has been the iPhone, and then their pushes into new directions kind of stealing the show. And at WWDC, it seems like things that I like steal the show. This year the show stealer, if there is one - or the headliner - is the new design, but they actually started with sort of addressing Apple intelligence. We're going to take this in order, and you are a thorough person, so you started even with the intro here, the F1 teaser. Now, full disclosure, I did not watch this thing live. I was doing Changelog News, and so I got to watch it post facto yesterday afternoon, and some this morning, which means that I got to kind of skip around a little bit... I didn't have to sit through every last second. So when things happen, like Craig Federighi jokes, sometimes I'm here for them, and other times I'm like "I've got to get past this." So your takes on the F1 trailer -- or what's it called, teaser? ...very well warranted. I will just say, kind of funny, kind of cool... Obviously, they're pushing a movie, but...

I think that Craig and Tim and the whole kind of cadre of white middle aged dad senior vice presidents at Apple have enough self-awareness that it can be endearingly cringy.

Right. They know how cringy it is. It's not accidental.

And it's almost like -- well, I guess whenever stuff shifts domains. So for example, Apple has amazing hardware and software capabilities; that's their bread and butter. And so to them, they're very serious about it. But the fact that they also own one of the most successful now Hollywood studios on the planet in terms of production budgets, and visual effects, and the cadre of contractors that work underneath them, and stuff... That to me -- that whole F1 teaser just feels like that's just them showing off. That's them having fun at work.

Right. That's what I was thinking. I was like "This is Craig's way of driving one of these fast cars, and expensing the entire thing."

Exactly. Yeah. So good for him.

And it just shows how much money they have to float on these kind of videos. Like, they've just got so much money. I'm sure somebody, some bean counter somewhere internally was like "Well, we've already built all of these models and these assets for the film itself... We could reuse some of this." And I'm sure approximately none of it actually did get reused, and it was probably a $20 million intro... But we'll see.

Right. It looked expensive, I'll say that much. But aside from that, I think we should get to the heart of the matter, which is we were wondering, was Apple intelligence going to go completely unmentioned? Of course, they've had this egg on their face, this failure to ship last year's features, this marketing push even, advertisements, like actual shot and shipped... Commercials with features that never came to fruition, and may never... I mean, maybe eventually they will, but they had to like issue a mea culpa, so to speak... I mean, there's been a lot. And a lot of confidence lost in the ability of the company to deliver... And Siri is an embarrassment... And what would they do with Apple intelligence? It seems like they approached it, they didn't completely shy away from it. They didn't completely ignore it, but they -- obviously, it's not the point this year. It's just kind of sprinkled in across all of their things. What's your take on how they handled this, given all that we know about how precarious of a spot they're kind of in, with their image being like they're falling way behind?

Yeah. I mean, you could say they had to clear the table, except that Apple has such a history of just memory holding anything that isn't on-brand...

Right.

A lot of people, I think, sort of cynically expected that there'd be absolutely no mention of Apple intelligence whatsoever, or if there was, it would just be like "Our customers love genmoji so much", and then they'd move right along.

Yeah... \[laughs\]

And Craig Federighi, if you didn't watch the keynote, starts with this whole -- well, if you didn't watch this keynote and you're choosing to listen to this instead, with the same amount of time roughly, then that's a decision you can make...

\[00:08:08.00\] I think it's a good one. I appreciate that decision, you know?

I think it's a great decision, and I think all the sponsors appreciate me calling that out first thing. So Craig starts -- he doesn't equivocate and he doesn't back away from it, but he also doesn't roll in the mud and ask for our forgiveness either. I think that internally they're probably really, really angry about the optics, and I'm sure that there's a lot of people in Apple marketing and PR who are just walking around, darting in the hallways and trying not to end up in the bathroom as any of these guys at the same time, for fear of just sort of like the hell that they've caused them over the last year... So I think that he had to clear the table, but then to move past it by talking about basically "We're going to show a lot of great stuff today. You're going to see sprinkles of this Apple intelligence stuff, but just stay tuned for the big things." And that I think was probably -- you know, no one at Apple has the reality distortion effect the way that Steve Jobs did... But when you're talking to developers, I think the messenger you want for that is Craig Federrighi, because he's likable, he's "one of us", because he's very technical... And so it's hard to hate the guy. And when he gives the message, I think that developers are more likely to at least nod along to it. And that's what they needed to do, and then they could move on to the other stuff.

Right. Yeah, I would tend to agree. I think that they didn't shy away from it, they didn't do -- I mean, I feel like they just kind of returned to form and act like none of that really happened. They were talking about this stuff every single keynote for the last five years. They've had machine learning -- like, "We're doing it with machine learning", and they've been sprinkling in model-based features into their platforms for years... And then they just felt last year -- I think because of Siri and how stagnant it has become, they felt the pressure of like really going for the gusto... And they probably didn't have to do that, even though I was saying they should do it. Like, we've all been saying "You need to revamp Siri, and give it actual AI features." And now they just kind of returned to form, to a certain extent. They acknowledged -- it was kind of like a reference acknowledged moment, but not like "We're going to make a big deal out of this", which is probably the best possible way...

I totally agree. I think what happened, if you look back on it last year -- you know, we talk about, in recent history even, in COVID sometimes, entire like year-long periods are like "Man, that feels like a fever dream in hindsight." I think the whole post-ChatGPT just maelstrom over Silicon Valley of all the companies that have gotten flat-footed, caught off guard by it, Apple was the least prepared of any of them for that. And so Apple under Tim Cook is an extremely -- you know, other than Tim's one line of "I don't care about the bloody ROI", they are extremely responsive to the care and feeding of their large institutional investors...

\[laughs\] Right...

And the fact that it had gotten into -- they don't care that Jerod's calling for them to have an AI story, they care that like CNBC and the Wall Street Journal are calling for them to have an AI story. And so last year I think that they just needed to put some lipstick on the pig and come up with really big, audacious, customer-facing competitors to what the vibe of ChatGPT and all these things would be. But if you look at last year's keynote and you look at this year's keynote, and you watch last year's state of the union, which I accidentally did yesterday... I got 45 minutes into the state of the union video, and then I was like "Wait a second, this is last year's state of the union." And then I started this one. I was like "Okay, yeah, this is --"

I thought you did it -- okay, it was on accident.

Boy, that's depressing. But you look at the two, and it's so obvious that last year they were sort of aping at what somebody told them AI was, and it was very much just like "What can we throw together in a hurry?" And this year, especially if you look at the state of the union... \[00:12:16.12\] You know, the real story here, the thing that we're going to remember from this segment isn't like the optics. It's that Apple for the first time is letting us call through to their models on device, and not in some baby dinky way, where you've got three functions... Like, you've got a translate function, and a summary function, and you can call them. It's like, nope; you're starting a real session. And not only can you have the sort of back and forth chat dialogue in a sort of semi-stateful-seeming way, but you can take any struct in your whole app and annotate it as generable. Whereas in all these other environments we're just suffering with JSON and untyped sort of like MCP tools. This is all strictly typed, and it's all of a piece where you can just imagine a world where a year from now they plug in private cloud compute, and then you can pay a premium to get more and more access as a developer to really harness these LLMs locally. It becomes a tremendous advantage for their platforms over other platforms, because the story over the last seven years has been "Why would I use any of these iOS native APIs if the web is the better story?" Well, now every AI-based tool comes with an unbounded upper bound of cost to how the -- the more power users, the whales, the people who get the most value out of my app, they could cost me hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in Open AI API fees. Whereas if this is happening on device, it's an all you can eat thing. Like, suddenly, me as a developer, especially as a solo guy, I'm chomping at the bit. I can't wait to start using this and only this as the way that I expose AI features to my users, because it doesn't cost me anything. I can give the app away for free and I don't have to worry about waking up to some huge bill.

Yeah, very well said. I think it's ironic... One more point on Siri, and then we should move on to the design, because the design really was the most talked about aspect, and cross-cutting thing in the entire keynote. It's kind of ironic that all of the pressure around Apple to do AI, whatever that means, really culminated around Siri, because they had this chatbot already, this voice assistant sitting in the phone for a decade... And so much missed opportunity there. And it just so happens that where all of this -- you know, people like me and maybe the Wall Street Journal... I don't know, probably on the same level... Are calling for them to like revamp Siri with AI, and it just so happens to be what appears to be their most dysfunctional business unit in the entire organization, perhaps. I mean, they haven't done anything with Siri for a decade. It's been so dysfunctional. And all of a sudden, all this pressure to revamp that sucker, it was like probably other teams, if it had been in a different area of the ecosystem, could have perhaps pulled something off that impressed... But there's just no way the Siri team was going to get that done.

Okay, so in the world of VC-backed tech, we've forgotten this, but most companies, most normal businesses in the world, they get really good at whatever makes them money. That is the feedback loop. Do a thing, make some money, do the thing more harder, better, wider, whatever, make a little bit more money. And Apple is that kind of traditional, old school, "legacy" business. And so when you look at Siri and ask "Why is Siri dysfunctional?" Well, because it was a cost center. Like, they sell zero marginal extra products because of Siri's existence, except for, you could probably argue the HomePod, which they were still selling the first batch of when they discontinued it five years later. Like, the services... \[00:16:05.03\] People forget this, but iPhone OS and the first several iPod touches, and I think the first iPad, maybe, you wanted the software update in the fall, you had to pay 10 bucks because of the accounting shenanigans going on in terms of what was considered gap accounting at the time.

Oh, yeah.

And of course, Steve Jobs didn't like it, but the truth was they didn't have a way to even conceive of "How are we going to make all of our ongoing software investments worth it to us as a company?" And the answer to that was ultimately services revenue, right? That's why we get the five gigabytes of iCloud. And so yeah, sure, it's fun to complain about all of that sort of marginal services expense that we have to accrue if we want to have the family iCloud photos, but ultimately, the reason that it keeps getting better is because we keep paying more money for it. Siri has none of that. So that competitive instinct, that drive, that hunger doesn't have a reason to be there institutionally, and so then it wasn't. And so that's how stuff gets ignored or a blind eye turned to, when the guy at the top of the organization, Tim Cook, is "How can I tighten this machine even harder, to get six days of inventory instead of seven?" He's not thinking about "How do I make Siri slightly more conversational, so that people want to be friends with it?"

Right. Yeah, that's just the way businesses work. Alright, let's hit on the big topic of the new design. It's called liquid ass. Sorry, Liquid Glass.

Whoa...!

Easy joke. Too easy. Low-hanging fruit. Impressive in one way, at least for me. I'm not excited about this. I don't think it's going to be bad. I think it's gonna be fine. I think it's kind of bad right now because they are pushing the envelope on everything, and it's betas and stuff, and so people are finding the edge cases where it looks bad... But I think it'll be fine as they continue to refine it. It's an interesting idea. It's not a super-exciting idea to me... And I totally thought of Windows Vista when they first started talking about it, which is -- I mean, Windows Vista's design was kind of cool. The reason why we have a bad connotation to that - at least I do - is because the operating system was so bad... But there were some cool stuff going on in Arrow, which - there's Arrow vibes here with Liquid Glass. But what's impressive to me is how pervasive they're rolling this thing out. They've rethought everything. I mean, they really have. Each of their platforms is getting Liquid Glass, it seems like, in 2026, or in version 26, as they say. And that's just a huge undertaking with how many platforms they have. Now, I wonder how much of that code is shared and whatnot, but... I mean, think about the app icons alone. It's just a huge undertaking. Anyways, Liquid Glass - this was the big announcement. It's kind of gotten mixed reviews online... Some people are into it, some people aren't... I'm kind of just waiting and seeing. I want to try it. I think there's some cool ideas into it, but it's not like "Wow, I'm excited. I can't wait to use it." I'm also thinking it's going to be pretty good by the time they ship it. What do you think?

Well, the thing people forget about Vista is that the arrow scheme, the theme with the frosted glass and the transparency and translucency - the reason that people look back on that with disdain as like the butt of the joke is that that operating system, you know, snout to tail, wrote all kinds of checks that it couldn't cache.

Oh, yeah. That's what I said, the OS sucked. It was not a good OS.

Your hardware didn't have a GPU in it necessarily, right? So I remember, I installed Vista excitedly on my Dell Inspirion, whatever the hell, and it ran like absolute trash. So everyone was going back to XP, because it was faster.

Yeah, totally.

\[00:19:45.18\] A big part of the story, and in my opinion, if you look at -- if you look at Liquid Glass, the reason it's boring... For somebody who likes boring stuff, the reason it's boring is like a big part of the story is, and they said it themselves in the keynote, "We have the Apple Silicon, we have the hardware that allows us to get away with this." And what was left unsaid, I think, is that this is, in a sense, the purest manifestation of a lot of what the same stuff they were talking about with the iOS 7. iOS 7 was also, if you go back to that announcement --

Oh, I do remember that.

...it was about the layering, right? It's like, we want to have this idea that you -- yes, the design is flat because the control center swipes up on top of that. There's multiple dimensions that you're dealing with. There's the Z index, the entire UI scheme. And that's still there, except now you have a story, and some graphical pizzazz to kind of turn that from a concept that you could kind of move around with some smoke and mirrors to kind of make it look like a frosted glass control center... And now it's like "No, we're actually introducing this brand new element made out of unobtainium, that moves and has an emotional valence, and kind of feels like a Pixar character or some s\*\*t." And that's to me, as somebody who's really excited about consistency, and about having that sort of conceptual throughline all the way through to implementation - it looks phenomenal. So for anyone who's looking at this thinking "This is really boring" or "I don't really get it", if you switched from the traditional home button iPhone to the iPhone 10 era iPhone, where you've got the face ID, and the swipey bar at the bottom - for years, that was running as effectively a separate fork of iOS's user interface. Like, the animations throughout the system are wildly different, depending on which of the two of those systems that you're using, even if you have like the iPhone SE third generation with the home button. So what I really look forward to with this is that I think it's going to feel a lot like the final culmination of the promise that we had with iOS 7 and with the iPhone 10, in terms of just how things feel and look and touch. The Liquid Glass thing I think is going to be the delivery of that promise. And then to your point about consistency, right now -- again, I think only about myself, because I'm a selfish asshole... As a solo developer who wants to deliver an application to four of the five or six Apple platforms, there is no hope of that working if it's not all Swift UI, and if the controls aren't the same in all of these environments... And as recently as yesterday, the story of using Swift UI on macOS was like -- you're going to get the Settings app, basically. You're going to get all of these controls that look totally out of place in the Mac. And we knew that wasn't sustainable, and so I don't think there's ever been a better day to start working on an Apple app if you plan on taking it multi platform, because now -- like, look at the new iPad. Windowing isn't a mode, windowing is just how it works. We'll get to that. But it looks like -- some of these screenshots side by side, it looks a lot like macOS, right?

It does.

And you can sort of see how that whole UI scales up and down the stack so much more gracefully. So... Sure, stuff's not readable. There's cases where the glass really kind of obscures the content beneath it, and Twitter/X, and -- well, X more than the other ones, because X is full of those kinds of people... They're making fun of this and calling out every single screenshot that looks ugly. But to be honest, if I'm a designer, my job is to absolutely swing for the fences with beta one and see how much I can get away with in terms of the purity of the vision. And yeah, I'm going to go zero frosting on the glass, and then back it off over the course of the subsequent betas, to dial it into "Okay, so what are people actually able to accept?"

\[00:23:54.11\] Yeah. And they clearly have done that, which is why I said I think it'll end up being fine. There are some -- you know, on the subreddit programminghorror they're having a field day, because there's some screens where it's like... Especially control center, with the translucent glass, especially if you have like a bright background as your wallpaper, like a reddish background, and then you bring the control center down... I mean, it looks like a hot mess at the moment. And because, like you said, no frosting, no -- they just haven't really dialed in all the different settings to increase the contrast and make it more legible. The borders could use some \[unintelligible 00:24:32.28\] It's hard to tell where the thing stops and starts... I think the animations will probably be made a little more subtle over time... But iOS seven was the same way. It was like "Whoa, they're really going for it. They've kind of like gone too far", and then like you see them progressively hone in on what is kind of the top notch settings, the perfect settings.

iOS seven, we were like "What's the button? What can I click here? What's just yellow text that's header, and what's yellow text that's --" Like new note, you know?

Yeah, exactly. New note was just like a straight up text. There was no -- like, give us an underline at least, like we get in the web. Show us that we can click on it. And they figured that all out.

And of course, we saw all this coming. If you looked at that recent Invites app, if you looked at the Sports Scores app, if you have the visionOS, the whole UI motif looks exactly like this, and it fits right in. I felt bad for the guy, a fella named Justin, who was showing off the tvOS segment... Because he was like "And check out this new Liquid Glass user interface in tvOS", and I'm squinting and I'm like "tvOS already looks like this, man."

I know. I couldn't tell what the difference was, really. It was like giant posters, and then like \[unintelligible 00:25:47.25\]

It's a hard sell. Yeah, glassy, big -- it already is that, but okay.

I think as a direction though, it's not really -- like, for me personally, it's not really a direction that I'm interested in UI going. I'm kind of ready for -- I think I've said this to you, and I've said it to others... I'm kind of ready for a move back to skeuomorphism, and like go back to like comfortable, real plush things... Just for -- you know, as fashion swings back and forth, let's go back in the other direction. I'm excited by the Airbnb direction, with their new style. They're like really going for like bright, and colorful, and real-ish, but not like -- you don't have to have the leather kind of design, but just like icons that look very rich and real... And this is kind of more like slick, and translucent, and glassy, and cold, I would say, to a certain extent... And so it's not the direction that I like to see them go, but you know, I'm here for it. We'll see how it goes.

I wonder too whether or not the advances in silicon, the fact that GPUs are so powerful now that you can get away with an operating system layer like this, and we're not talking about how it's going to slow all of our apps down, which was the story whenever --

Yeah, which is true. We're not --

...with OS10 originally, or --

We're not afraid of that, are we? I'm not afraid of it.

No. And so when you look at this, whether it was Airbnb's new kind of -- they're taking physicality in a totally different direction.

Yeah.

This Liquid Glass thing felt inevitable to me, because it is Apple's brand made manifest. Their buildings are just curved glass. Their ideal iPhone is very obviously a glass puck. And my dream of it, and ever since I had this thought, I haven't been able to shake it... That the iPhone 20th anniversary, or whenever they're able to do the all glass iPhone, is going to be not just using this Liquid Glass, but like basically a translucent device, just like visionOS. Like, you're going to look through it and you're going to see the thing behind you, and instead of having an AR mode, you'll just hold up your magic rectangle to the universe and it'll annotate the world around you. I think that's what they're going for. So Apple as a company, constitutionally, that's like who they are, really. It's what they encode into their buildings, and everything about how they talk... They're just that austere, minimalist company that want to decorate our universe with stuff. I don't think they can go in another direction, but somebody like Airbnb has the same lack of constraints. They can go in their own. So we'll see. \[00:28:22.10\] Honestly, my favorite thing about Liquid Glass is that I don't think that Google and other platforms are going to chase it. We might actually start to see a little bit more daylight between this and the other platforms, in terms of them each establishing their own brand identity. So if anything now, the pressure should be on Google, Samsung, Microsoft to come up with their own design instead of just copying whatever Apple's doing.

Hard to believe this is the same company that shipped that game center design with the green felt poker table thing going on... I mean, that's just wild, because you're right... And this is not a surprising direction. Of course, like you said, we've seen it coming. VisionOS is clearly the inspiration for this move across all the platforms, and you've been living that life as a visionOS beta tester for a while now... So let's get into the specific platforms. iOS took the majority of it, and that's because it's their biggest, most important platform they have, of course. Gosh, I don't know if we can cover all this, Justin. I don't think we can. We might have to hit the high notes...

There's a lot of stuff here.

Yeah, there's just too much, and I definitely want to get into the macOS stuff and the developer stuff... I know you want to talk visionOS, I will listen to you talk about it... And tvOS is important to both of us, I guess, because we are tvOS users.

Oh yeah, sure. We're tvOS people.

So I want to hit each platform, I just know we can't spend all day on iOS. So take me vertically through it, and talk about the stuff that you think is interesting, and I'll just interject as we go.

Well, you know, anyone who listens to the Changelog and has heard me on any of your shows before knows how hard it is to clip anything I say into one of your 60-second reels, so feel free to raise a hand...

\[laughs\] Well, you do a three-hour solo pod, so...

It's true. Yes. If you want my full, unabridged takes, you can check out Breaking Change, a podcast production where it's just me and you, and all afternoon.

There you go. You could probably do this exact same podcast with your same outline, without me there.

I'll take the same notes and I'll just be like, boom.

It'll be longer, but more cohesive.

So iOS, we started talking -- let's see... I think the lock screen is interesting, because the biggest change that jumped out at me with the lock screen was the usage of... Spatial scenes, I think is the term that they termed it. So that if you've got a photo and you've got that depth effect now, they're going to use machine learning to kind of spatialize the photo, the same way that you've been able to, on a onesie-twosie basis in visionOS in the Photos app, you can go and take any photo and spatialize it, as if you took it in that spatial photo mode, with an iPhone... And it's a very cool effect. It's very believable. And the thing that you can do on an iPhone, that -- well, you can do it on an iPhone if you're Apple, but you can't do it if you're a web developer, because they took away the gyro APIs, if you recall... Like, we used to be able to rotate the phone and then get that \[unintelligible 00:31:16.06\]

Yeah. They took that away?

They took it away because the nasty Meta and the Google and the ad tracker people were using it to identify who was who, and they just couldn't figure out a way to keep that API working... As a result though, now the entirety of Liquid Glass appears to be this way, but they specifically called it out during the lock screen demo, of you're rotating your phone and you're actually seeing behind the depth effect of whatever it is you're looking at; you know, like the picture your spouse. It was weird how Craig's talking about like all these pictures of our loved ones on our lock screens, and the two examples are a dog and a kangaroo... I'm like, "Do you just live in the office, dude?" \[laughs\]

\[00:32:06.02\] Ah... People love their dogs, man.

Maybe he's a private person. The other -- do you have anything to say about the lock screen? I think it was pretty one and done.

No, I think we can go on. It's good.

I guess in the home screen you can make all your icons clear. Are you going to make your icons clear?

Yeah... And they had themable -- they had themes last year, and now it's like transparent as a theme... Of course, you can also change to like orange-tinted everything, and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, custom tint.

Right. And of course, clear, which I would never do, but I'm sure some people are going to do it and enjoy it. Are you going to go translucent across the board?

I don't know. There's been a recent trend to kind of go back to that sort of Gameboy pocket with the sort of translucent hardware design, where you can sort of see the battery underneath it and stuff... I'll try it for a day. Honestly, I don't use my home screen at all anymore. I'm just always launching via spotlight pretty much anything that I need.

Yeah. I have -- how many home screens do you have? Like, if you swiped. Do you have a lot, or do you have one?

I have five.

Okay, that's a lot.

And all of them were accidentally created by accidentally dragging something out of the app library other than the first one. And the first one is just my photos widget, because I want to see the daily photos. Otherwise I would never look at my photos. And I find that delightful. And like map, and I don't know, my ring alarm. Like, the stuff that I absolutely need to be able to hit in a touch. Anyone waiting for them to kind of rethink how to make the home screen useful, this isn't the year for you, unfortunately.

No, no.

And the squircles are the same shape as they always were, despite what the rumors were saying.

Yeah. My use is very similar. I think I only have two though, but I have like photos widget, because yeah, when it pulls up things out of your past, that's a delightful moment in your day. And then like weather, just for a glanceable thing, and then calendar... And then everything else, I just swipe down and start typing, basically, to just launch, because I'm sure there's just thousands of things down in there and I can just summon them by swiping down. Gone are the days where you swipe sideways, sideways, sideways, looking for that one particular icon.

You know, the next thing up here is camera. And we talk about swiping... They redesigned the camera app. The camera app looks nice. There's just two tabs now for video and photo, which is nice, because currently it's like, do I -- you're basically forcing your users to remember just cinematic \[unintelligible 00:34:28.14\] panoramic video... Nope, that's a photo thing.

Right.

He said "All your controls are just a tap away." But the thing is then he shows a swiping gesture of some mystery navigation that you have to swipe left to right to like change the type of thing you're looking at... And then another swipe up for the controls themselves, like your F stop and whatnot... And so what they've done is they've made it look really pretty, but I think that they've really just hidden a lot of the complexity...

They hide all the buttons, yeah.

Because most people don't need it. The camera team's first and foremost job is to make it so that you can't take a bad photo. You just point it at a thing, \[unintelligible 00:35:08.02\] their job is to figure it out.

A hundred percent.

And I liked how you put it in your newsletter, where it's like the skill needed to take a great photo is asymptotically approaching zero... I think that's true.

Exactly.

And that wasn't true when this previous iteration of the camera app was being developed. So I'm kind of curious your take on the camera...

I think simplify it as much as you can. You know, the nerds are going to nerd out, and they'll -- they'll tap, and swipe, and... So many people are now camera aficionados, as it's become the way that you share and the way that you do everything, influence, so to speak... That if you can just simplify the UI and just make it dead simple for those of us who are just trying to take a picture... And then like you said, do all of the fancy software stuff in order to make sure that my picture looks good... I don't want to care about F stop, or shutter speed, or is the flash on auto or not? I just want it to know what to do in order to optimize this picture. And for those of us who are like "Yeah, that picture was suboptimal. I'm going to go ahead and like do the thing", yeah, they'll swipe and they'll figure it out. So I think it's a good move, and I think it's funny that you say it's a tap away when it's not a tab away... But you know, words are hard.

\[00:36:21.14\] Well, we talk about sherlocking in these keynotes all the time. It's like "Oh, this app just got sherlocked by Apple's new feature." Well, when Apple hides stuff or takes away complexity for the sake of, like you said, streamline, make it simple for the masses - you know, I think this was a great day for Halide. Like, if you want that extra control, you can still get it, and there's an app for that. And that I think is actually probably appropriate and probably a good thing overall, just based on what you're saying.

Yeah, I agree with that. Make room for the apps to do their special things for the power users. Cover the 80% case the best you can, and just don't worry so much about the 20% case, because you have an ecosystem for that... And there's developers who can make good livings by providing that software. And then eventually, Apple decides they're going to take it away, and do it themselves, and then they get mad. But that's the \[unintelligible 00:37:11.16\] of life.

Yeah, there's a curve here, right? You're the company Halide that starts doing stuff that Apple can't do yet in their Camera app, so you're at the leading edge. Then Apple figures out how to do it and they do it, and then they realize that's too much, and then they pull it back, and now you're the only app where people can do it. I think you get sherlocked when you come up with a great idea first, and then Apple recognizes it's a great idea... What Apple I think more recently is aware of much more, especially on the iPhone and iPad, is they're doing this for the masses. You work in Apple design, your mom and your grandma are going to call you when they get mad at you. And in fact, the next thing that they talked about was the photos app. And we didn't get an apology with Apple intelligence...

Which we deserved one... \[laughs\]

The closest we got to an apology in the entire keynote is this line from Craig: "Many of you missed using tabs in the Photos app." \[laughter\] Really, Craig... What happened to my tabs? Where did those -- oh, right. Last year you announced that you were taking my tabs away.

It sounded like they just mysteriously disappeared, and they've brought them back...

The passive voice comes back again.

Exactly. Yeah, somehow those tabs disappeared...

So there's now two tabs. There's library and Collection. Honestly, I'll be happy with this new photos app if I take a photo and then I launch the photos app and then my photo is in the photos app. That would be wonderful. Because right now I have to wait 15 seconds for cloud things to happen...

Syncing.

Yes. Or image signal processing to finish, or deep fusion to occur... I'm not sure.

\[laughs\]

To get all the threads in the sweater perfectly coiffed. But that's a recognition, I think, that people were upset about the photos app. Otherwise there's not a lot new there other than this new spatial photos thing. And based on my experience with visionOS, it is really cool, but if you have to tap "I want to spatialize each and every single individual photo" and then wait for five seconds for the computer to do its thing, no one's going to really do that. It would need to be a sort of modal interface where you just -- I'm in spatial mode now, and I want to see artificial 3D video game looking versions of all my family who've long since passed. Probably, like a lot of these apps, it's a light year for new features, but a lot of little kind of paper cuts have been touched up throughout.

Right. Well, I think that will be much appreciated with how dramatically they changed photos last year... I mean, it actually prompted -- I don't know what you call it, people who don't upgrade. Holder backers, I don't know... It prompted people like "Yeah, I'm not going to upgrade. I'm going to wait." Which - that's not what Apple wants. They want everybody running the latest... They do not want to have a subculture of people running a previous version of iOS, and somehow dodging updates as long as they can, just because they hate the photos app so much.

\[00:40:10.00\] And the photos thing in particular became like a TikTok trend, didn't it? Like, people --

Well, I think it even made like late night TV. I can't remember if it was like Colbert or the British fellow whose name is alluding me right now... Last Week Tonight, John Oliver... Somebody did like a whole segment on it. Like, how mad they were about it just sucking. And it's like, that's when it starts to like permeate everybody, is when it's on late night TV... So maybe that's why I got the shout-out from Craig. **Break**: \[00:40:38.08\]

I'll skip ahead a little bit just to say that the phone app got a huge redesign for the first time since -- you know, the last time the phone app was designed at all was back when the iPhone couldn't make phone calls because it was on AT&T's edge network, and it was useless for that purpose as well... But the phone app really hasn't changed at all since 2007-2008, other than to handle like the larger screen real estate. This new phone app, this unified call history list in just one nice little tidy homepage is opt-in. Apple is not forcing change on people in that way anymore.

That's nice.

And honestly, I think that there's probably a world where a lot of the people who got really angry about the photos app would have been totally fine with it if it had been an opt-in thing. They might have even discovered it and then suddenly thought that it was kind of cool, and different. But as soon as you move somebody's cheese and tell them "Nope, this is just how it is now", then you invite the backlash.

\[00:44:21.05\] As a total aside to the phone app - well, it's related, but it's not in the feature list... There's a new generation, and my kids are one of them now... My 15-year-old son just got a phone number for a while. He's had the phone, but it's just been Wi-Fi only. He's got a phone number. They have no idea what it was like to make a phone call on the plain old telephone system. Like POTS, landlines. They've only ever used these things. I just am thinking this because I had the first phone call with him and I'm like "He has no idea how to even use a phone." But aside from that, they don't know how crystal clear and like latency-free the phone system was. Like, when you just like called somebody and the cord was going into the wall, compared to the way these things work now. Like, it was like you're in the room with them, it was so good. At least in the nineties when I was using them. I'm sure it started off bad... And we've kind of just lost that. I mean, it's never coming back, I don't think. There's just too many environmental factors for them to care about that. I don't know what your thoughts are on that... Why it is that the quality of the sound and the latency of the voice on the other end - we're talking about the phone app - is just so bad, and continues to be bad, ever since it was AT&T and you couldn't even get the connection through for a while there... But it's just not good. I know they've released features over the years saying it's going to sound better now... And I haven't had a phone call on my iPhone that sounded quick and vibrant and like full fidelity, ever. And I just think it's gone.

Well, I think because whenever the carrier is involved in the transmission, it means that there is somewhere -- there is your 1990s cordless phone, the RCA phone that you got for $20 at Radio Shack is involved somewhere, in some switch...

Yeah, exactly.

Some nerd listening to this is excited, because that switch is running Erlang... \[laughter\] But that is the reality, right? Like, even if you're using your WiFi calling or whatever, it's like, your end isn't the problem. Your end isn't the reason this sounds like trash. It sounds like trash because it's not end to end. And so that's why, whenever possible, I just use FaceTime audio, and then I'm always amazed at how good it sounds by comparison.

Yeah, it does sound a lot better. It's just like a thing where -- I guess FaceTime audio feels like a step, or like a... I'm sure there's a toggle where it's just like "Always use this if I'm calling an iPhone", but it just seems like it's not being used most of the time in my life... And so I'm never having good quality. Like, I'm just mad when someone's talking to me on the phone, regardless of what they're saying. Like, content aside, I'm still angry, cause it's so hard to hear them, and like have a high-fidelity conversation... Anyways, just ranting now. Let's move on.

Well, for what it's worth, it may be that that step is starting to be obfuscated a little bit, because they also announced a new home screen for the FaceTime app. And the thing about the phone screen unified timeline that they showed is that the phone app also shows your FaceTime calls now, just like the FaceTime app on like your Mac or whatever would also show your normal phone calls, because there hadn't been a phone app... Although there's a phone app now on the Mac and the iPad...

Right.

So the fact that these are separate apps, for basically -- you know, FaceTime is the app that you use if you want it to not sound like a bucket of assholes. And the phone app is what you use if you want it to have to engage with the world outside of our carefully tended garden of an ecosystem. And it really does feel like this should be -- you're basically creating two entirely different user interfaces that people have to learn, when the only difference is the protocol underneath, and people shouldn't have to care about what protocol they're using. They don't understand it, they don't -- like, your son doesn't have any clue.

\[00:48:12.02\] Right. Yeah, it'd be like if they had like an SMS app and then like a Messages app, and you'd have to pick the one that you wanted. When they unified them, they made the green bubble, blue bubble, whatever, and maybe that's enough to let you know "Hey, this is a FaceTime call." "This is a regular call." But we shouldn't have to think about these things. It should just sound better and be better when it can be... And hopefully that happens eventually.

Well, any good feelings that we had about the opt in nature of this new phone app... I'll opt into it because I'm just a sicko and I opt into all the things. Like, you had to hold me back from putting developer beta one on my phone --

I was going to ask if you're running it yet.

I have a rule that I try to keep with myself - I don't install betas while I'm overseas... Because I need my devices to keep working. So not yet, but the minute that I get back to America, I'm just turning over all of my everything. All my iClouds are going to be completely corrupted as hell to all of the bugs of the -- and that's the thing I don't understand, is when you install these betas, your iCloud... If you're logged into your iCloud account and you're running this beta software and it is super-buggy, all you're just doing is inviting a whole bunch of cockroaches to infest all of the key-value stores across all these applications.

Right. And you're doing that. You're going to do it.

Well, why stop now?

When you get back. Yeah, exactly.

But that to say, I don't think that the changes that we saw on Safari are opt-in. I think that this is a pretty significant change to how Safari looks and feels and behaves. And I don't know, once people start using it, if it's going to invite the same kind of backlash that like the compact tabs interface did a few years ago, or... What were your thoughts as you looked at the new liquidy glassy Safari?

Just like a trepidation, mostly... I mean, it's like my favorite app, Safari, and it's my most used app, probably, on my phone... Maybe next to messages. I think Safari and messages are probably my two -- if I was going to check my screen time settings... Well, maybe YouTube. I don't know. I don't have to go through the whole list of things I use, but... It's just one of my favorite apps, and... You know, I don't know. I'm going to withhold judgment, but I have a little bit of trepidation. I feel like they're moving my cheese. But maybe I like the new cheese better. I'm open to change. I'm not resistant, I'm just a little trepidatious. What do you think?

The thing that they always say about these changes to Safari, whenever they try to make the controls hidden or the controls smaller, is that you have more room for your content. And I think as nerds, we react to that by saying "No, you're saying is we have less room for our buttons and our controls and our functions and our utilities."

Right.

And so I think that's one reason why there tends to be resistance. But the truth is, if I'm looking at a webpage, I don't want to see the buttons. I know that there's a thing that I can tap to go and do another thing. As long as I know how to do that, I'd rather just see another paragraph, or sentence worth of text. And as you're scrolling, the new Safari does the thing that a lot of websites do where they will minimize or hide or elide some of the menu bar on the website and stuff, to kind of make the content pop out... And because now all of Apple's devices -- when iOS 7 came out, the screen was a rectangle. And with iPhone 10, now the edges of your device are round recs. And even -- I'm looking at my MacBook Pro right now, and all four edges of the operating system are round recs. They used the term concentricity I think multiple times to describe that we're going to have round recs within round recs now... \[00:52:20.12\] And Safari is the same way, where now if you use CSS, if you're a web developer and you're familiar with those safe inset zone variables to make sure that your content doesn't get too close to any of the edges... If you're not using those, I suspect that the footers and the headers are going to look real goofy with just how much more space to roam there is... Because you're going to have controls that are kind of floating over stuff now. So it'd be really interesting to see how those variables function, because it's just so much more space than it used to be. That's probably the only thing that's gonna throw people off, but we'll have to see.

And then again, if they get the Liquid Glass dialed in correctly, so that is not so -- and it's kind of, I think muddy would be what I would say... It's unclear to me, depending on what's behind those, specifically the address bar and the Back button and the dot, dot, dot, those three buttons that are kind of in the lower third now, what's going on behind there... Like, it just kind of obfuscates things, and it's not always clear where it stops and starts, and so it's just a little bit -- like, it needs to be polished still... But again, that's why I am withholding judgment, and I do want more space for the websites... So I'm not against it, in principle. We'll just see if I'm against it in practice. And then if I am, what choice do I have? It's just -- it's the way it goes. \[unintelligible 00:53:46.22\]

You're going to move to Europe, and then you're gonna --

And then I'll have browser choice. True browser choice in Europe, yes. \[laughter\]

I don't need to just get away from this UI, I need a whole new rendering engine just to kind of clear up the taste in my mouth from this crap...

\[laughs\] Yeah, exactly.

They're going to back away -- they're going to frost it to the extent needed.

I know, I know, I know. That's why I have a little bit of trepidation... You know, what if they don't frost it to my extent needed...? \[laughs\]

Safari is still going to Safari, and everyone's going to use it a bunch... And if it's bad enough, they'll fix it. I think the kind of sleeper hit of the -- I suppose it was the iOS section still that they're doing this... It was CarPlay. Like, there's a lot of CarPlay stuff in this.

There was a lot, and I'm a big CarPlay user.

Are you a CarPlay guy?

Absolutely. Now, does this -- I'm a CarPlay guy, but I'm not really sure how it works, because I haven't paid close attention... Does it run off the phone, meaning like it ships with the new iOS? Or does my car have to have something to do with it? How does it actually work?

I've got one question for you. Do you drive an Aston Martin?

Uh, no, I don't.

In that case then, then it absolutely runs on your phone. \[laughter\]

Alright.

If you drive a brand new Aston Martin, there is some Apple code somewhere... That's the CarPlay Ultra. Some stuff has to run --

Right. They said there's a lot more cars coming, but they didn't say -- they didn't list any brand partnerships or anything.

The only mainstream makes to my knowledge that have announced CarPlay Ultra support other than -- I think Porsche might be the other one that previously announced this... It'is Honda, Kia, Genesis. The Korean trio. Those makes are all supposedly coming to CarPlay Ultra, but if we -- first of all, just to close the loop on CarPlay Ultra... They just showed this off like two weeks ago. They had the Top Gear guy do the demo of the CarPlay Ultra in the Aston Martin... And they did all that with a UI that they knew they were going to throw away two weeks later.

Yeah.

Like, I'm not sure that UI is actually shipping to a single car.

Tough timing.

That's commitment to the bit right there, is that they knew that they had to get that out the door and they're like "Alright, well, this is going to be totally rewritten."

\[00:56:03.02\] Well, it took them two years to get a car, didn't it? I mean, they first announced it a couple of years ago.

Yeah. And it was supposed to be the end of '23, and then the end of '24, and here we are, halfway through '25, and they nailed it. So look forward to that Apple Intelligence series sometime in mid '28.

There you go... \[laughs\] Well, for the regular CarPlay users like myself, I just update my phone, and my car updates, it sounds like... And that's amazing, because I can't really trust the GM to do anything time-sensitive with regard to software updates, unless they want to send me into a dealer, which is one of their favorite plans... Like, "You need a firmware update. Go into the dealer." I'm like "I am not going into my dealer", unless this CarPlay feature is very compelling, in which case I'm mad about it.

So you can have a car mechanic who doesn't really understand how software works, or what USB is...

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so to answer your question, for anyone who's confused about CarPlay in their lives, your phone runs it, and then when you plug in or when you're wirelessly connected, it's literally like a sidecar display. It's like a second screen. And so it's all just projection. So yeah, for anyone playing the home version of this game, CarPlay has gotten a complete redesign. It looks all glassy... It's the first time it's ever really gotten a new design. There's a 3d looking all full screen map view for navigation that they showed off, that looks pretty cool.

That did look cool.

It also picks up your live activities... So live activity is going everywhere; it's something we knew was happening, because it was on the watch last year. When you're in the smart stack, you'd see your live activities. It's going to show us up in the menu bar now in the macOS, and it shows up in CarPlay. So you can see this very, very tiny, little progress bar of how your friend's flight is progressing while you're driving. And they literally showed that off and said "It helps you stay focused on the road", which...

I did laugh at that. I was like "As I'm staring at this tiny little icon?" Like, "What does that say...?"

Oh, man... No one at Apple has the reality distortion effect capability, but they're all striving for it... Like, they keep going back to the well, like "Well, as long as I say it's helping you stay focused on the road..."

You know what really helped me stay focused on the road? And I think this is like saying the quiet part out loud for all of us regular people who like to watch sports, and you just can't wait until you get home to actually watch the game... Is if they would just put airplay in the CarPlay, and just let me send whatever sporting event is currently on my phone, up to the giant screen in my dash, and just accept the reality that we want to watch sports in the car, while it's moving, and my kids are trying to watch it... It's actually safer if it was right there on a big screen in the dash, than it is floating around on my phone as it's passed around person to person, throughout the car. So that's a feature that I'm sure regulators will never allow... But actually, I think it's going to make a lot of us more safe if we could just throw that on the big screen, versus trying to watch it on our phones while we're driving... Because we know that's what people are doing.

Here in Japan, it is a, I don't know, very poorly kept secret that it is extremely easy to jailbreak your car display to show live TV broadcast over -- antenna broadcast, basically. So when you're driving around or whatever, or in somebody else's car, it is very common for them to be using that massive screen to play broadcast television as they're driving around... And it is extremely unsettling. \[laughter\] I don't know if you really want this wish to come true, Jerod, once you factor in other people's driving.

The more unsettling thing is somebody on their ten and their two, and they're holding their phone up there, and they're just glancing back and forth between the phone and the road, because the screen is so small. That's what people in the states are doing. So...

Well, Jerod and I both live in red states, so I want to be clear...

That's true. I'm in the Midwest, so you know, your mileage may vary, and your accidents may vary... Of course --

We've got to keep this rolling, Jerod... I need to ask you a question.

Okay.

How do you feel about background images in your text threads?

\[01:00:21.06\] \[laughs\] I've never been asked that before. Trepidation, I think is the word of the day... I just -- I couldn't possibly care less about that. How do you feel about -- like, ambivalent.

Are you in any WhatsApp groups, or do you use any other messaging apps that have tacky ass background images that make it difficult to read people's text?

I have WhatsApp, but I don't use it very often...

I try to avoid it.

I haven't seen this in the wild, if that's what you're asking. But apparently, you have some PTSD.

Yes. So when people talk about Apple's Messages app being behind, the two things that they tend to call out are "Oh, you can't do custom background images on threads", which to me is good... Because every time I've been in Line, or in WhatsApp, or any sort of third party messenger, it just looks so tacky. And the images themselves are ugly. It reminds me of using ICQ, way back in the '90s, and you'd have sort of -- the era of WinAmp skins. It was cute that we could do it then, but it makes it less readable now. I don't really know what app I'm in. I just feel uncomfortable. And then now if you're in a group thread, anybody at any time can troll anybody by changing the background image. Apple added that. So Apple relented and they added it, and I really --

Yeah, they're just playing catch-up.

...of all the things that I hope that there's a setting for in this OS, I really hope I can just turn that off.

Well, just get new friends, you know?

I might.

\[laughs\] That's my solution...

I have left group threads over less... So there's that one. The other one is typing indicators in group threads... Which honestly, to me, I don't love the typing indicator generally. But when I'm typing to a group, it's actually like -- I feel a sense of calm that I know that they can't know that I'm typing into the group. I can think about the reply, and then "Yeah, I'll respond to that later." But now giving people a reason just to stare even more at these group threads, or see the Apple equivalent of several people are typing... I'm not sure that's a net win, but that is something that people point to and say "Hey, the Messages app is behind." I don't know...

Right... Yeah, I feel like that feature, if you extrapolate law of large numbers and go across all of the users... Think about how much wasted human time there is just watching those dots, waiting for it to come through, you know? When you just don't have to.

Yeah, I think Slack eventually added a way that you could just turn off your own ability to see the people are typing indicator... Because I'm a total dummy and I'll just stare at the chat. If somebody's typing, I'm just like "Alright, I guess I'll just stop working. I guess I'm just \[unintelligible 01:03:02.22\]

Right. "Hold on, they're gonna say something. I'm just gonna stare at it like a dog, waiting for a bone."

Yup.

The other group chat change is that you finally have group cash. So if you've got one person who goes and buys a bunch of drugs for the group, everyone else can chip in and pay their portion of the cocaine bill, using the Apple cash... Which is still -- because they don't do the IRS reporting like Venmo and stuff, if you're going to deal drugs and you're fortunate enough to be in America, and you can't use real cash, Apple cash seems to be the best way to go, and now you can do that in groups. So... Check.

Check.

Oh, I see... So you're totally okay with driving while watching NFL games, and crashing into other people, but when it comes to figuring out how to split the bill on your fentanyl...

\[laughs\] Yeah, I'm just a generous person. I just always pick up the tab, you know?

Oh, there you go. See? \[unintelligible 01:03:58.20\]

So... Not a problem that I have.

\[01:04:04.11\] \[laughs\] The other feature that they added is -- and I don't know if this shows up as just a iMessage apps... Remember the iMessage apps store that you can build apps for iMessage?

Yeah, I remember that.

I don't know if Apple does, but there's still that plus button, where you can do stuff. And they've basically -- because Doodle dropped the ball and became this extremely confused company that charges you for everything... I think there might have been another app called StrawPoll, but they finally built polls, group polls into iMessage. So if the question is "When can we all hang out?", you can finally get that answered.

Right. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, catch-up game, right?

Catch-up game...

Maybe 80% solution. It makes sense. Polls are common. Roll it in. Sherlock Doodle...

Yes, sherlock Doodle, to the extent that Doodle still exists...

They don't \[unintelligible 01:04:56.20\] I mean, come on, they dropped the ball.

Doodle earned it. They absolutely did. The big one in terms of -- and they didn't use the term Apple Intelligence here, but this is exactly the kind of machine learning feature that you'd been talking about, is that they have the spam detection.

Right. And that's great. I mean, I'm here for it. Too much of my stuff is spam. I block and report everything...

Same. And it does no good, ever.

It does no good. I know it's doing no good, and yet I'm just going to do it anyways, because I'm mad at them. Like, "I'm I'm reporting you."

Sometimes -- I insist that this is it being inconsistent and me not just failing to remember the order that you're supposed to do this in... But when I get an SMS that I don't want, I very often will want to type "Stop" at it to make it go away, and also report it as junk... But if your report as junk right away, it goes away, and if type "stop", sometimes the "Report junk" button goes away... So I genuinely don't know which one I'm supposed to do. But that won't be a problem anymore, right?

I'm too skeptical of the slime ball on the other side who will actually take my stop message and do anything with it... All they'll do is confirm that yes, I am a live human, and they're definitely going to text me the next time.

I think the carrier intercepts the stop.

You think so?

I think that's one of the last vestigial thing... Somebody write in. I would love to know the correct answer of this.

Yeah, I would love to know the truth about that. If that's true, I'll start to do it, but I actually don't do it. I just delete and report as junk, every time.

Jerod, how about you text me after the show, and I'll respond stop, and then you let me know if you saw the stop... But I won't know that, because I won't be getting your text anymore.

Doesn't it have to be like a specific kind of thing? Because it couldn't you just -- like, I tell you too many funny jokes, and you just tell me stop, and then they can't just intercept that and block... There has to be more to it.

Can't they? I don't know.

I mean, they could. But should they? \[laughter\] They're like "This guy just blocked you for too many funny jokes. That's just not right."

Well, anyway, all that to say, they're adding spam detection to iMessage, and they're basically... You know, it's exactly like you've seen probably in any social network where you've got your Other Messages bucket of just all of the junk, all the crap. And so that gets all ferreted away over there, and Apple's promise to you is that any sort of time-sensitive thing that you actually want is going to be presented still in the main view... Which strains credulity when you look at the priority notifications and the stuff that kind of gets through there. Their example was "Your table is ready at yada-yada restaurant", but the problem is now every spam messenger is going to start with "Your table is ready at the whatever. Hey, have you thought about signing up for a new healthcare plan?"

Right.

I don't know if their models are smart enough.

Right. That's the problem... Apple's world, their demos and their everything is always this pristine version of life, that doesn't actually exist... And I wonder if their models just reflect that, and so they won't be able to handle the real world. Who knows...? But holy cow, we're still on iOS, man. We're getting deep into it.

Yeah, we've got to move along here. Genmoji - still exists. You can remix things. That's great.

Moving on?

Image playgrounds - they realized it's bad, so now it's ChatGPT.

Yeah, exactly. They're like "They're good at it..."

Just with postage stamp-sized images. They use the phrase "elegant" to describe an oil painting that it made, which was a choice of somebody --

\[01:08:24.05\] \[laughs\] That's classic...

You think about how much these scripts get reviewed... Sometimes you -- anyway. Translation, live translation everywhere... So I'm here in Japan, I speak Japanese, I spent 20 years of my life now traveling here, trying to learn this freakin' language... That was all a waste of time, Jerod.

I think so. Procrastinators win again... \[laughs\] Of which I am one. Yeah, I mean, who needs to learn languages? Just live translate that sucker and communicate with the whole world.

You send an iMessage now, and what that looks like is they'll see the actual text you wrote, as well as -- it's basically annotated with their preferred language, which I think is a good way to do it. You wouldn't want it just to kind of instantly convert, just in case the translation misses some nuance, or something... It's also built into FaceTime, with subtitling, which I think is very nice and tasteful.

Yeah.

But then they showed the -- they built a call API to do audio translation for audio calls, like phone... Did you watch this demo?

Yeah... YouTube is doing that as well now. They had the transcript feature, where they would translate your transcript, and that becomes the subtitles in the translated language... But now they've added dubbing, which is pretty new - it's in beta - where actually they're going to dub your voice, and you can opt in, opt out etc. And that's what this is. It's basically dubbing your voice into a new voice, I guess, or it's a clone of your voice, but it's in a different language...

So the call API, as far as I could tell, is more like line translation, where you say your line on the phone, and you are heard, and then a Siri-sounding stilted crappy voice that's nowhere near as good as ChatGPT's advanced Scarlett Johansson voice...

Right... She's too expensive.

Yeah, right? Oh, they didn't pay her anyway. Don't worry about it.

\[laughs\] Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

But then that voice will speak in the other language, and then the other person will speak, and then it'll translate again. So now what had been two exchanges of audio becomes four...

Gotcha.

And then on top of it, slower. So these are going to be very stilted, painful conversations, when you're just on the phone... And then the demo was so awkward and suboptimal, in my opinion. Then they followed it up and said "Oh, and now it's an API that you can use with any of your other calling apps." So I'll be curious to see what the uptake on that is.

Yeah, I mean, the panacea or I guess the end goal here would be live dubbing as we talk, so it comes out my mouth in English, it goes in your ear immediately in Japan -- in Japan. In Japanese.

The Hitchhiker's Guide, Babelfish... You know, it just sort of translates in and out for you.

Yeah, exactly. Isn't that the end game? I mean, you don't want to wait on the translator if you don't have to.

The best part is I would never actually have to hear your real voice, and you wouldn't have to hear mine.

That's spectacular. Right.

It would just be two robots talking to each other...

I could just have Scarlett Johansson talking to me...

...as God intended. \[laughter\] That does sound better, I'll put that out there.

Well, I'm not going to lie... Alright, moving on... That sounds cool. I mean, they're getting there.

Music -- speaking of translation, lyrics now... As part of my Japanese study, I started listening to J-pop a lot...

Oh, wow.

I'm not proud of it.

I was gonna say, you did that freely?

Now I don't have to go and check lyric definitions outside the app, because it translates inside... It even has pronunciation guides... I think the popularity of K-pop and stuff and people wanting to be able to sing along to songs that they can't even read the characters for - totally legit. I think it's a great feature. \[01:12:01.22\] The other thing that they announced that's new is AutoMix. So this is like a DJ. Like, you start a song, and then you start AutoMix. And I feel like -- how many WWDCs and how many software keynotes have they announced this exact feature?

Yeah... This doesn't exist yet...?

Remember the smart shuffle, and then the genius playlists, and then the stations...? They even had the playlist where you could have AI generate what the next thing in the playlist should be even just a year ago, I think... I'm curious how AutoMix is different.

Huh.

Or better.

New name, probably. New name, same feature.

Yeah. Same underlying mediocre ability to detect what the next song should be.

And then Skip, so that you get to one that you actually like... You know, skip three times and they'll find one for you. And unlike Spotify, it will have nothing in the backend actually learning from what you skip. You will just keep skipping \[unintelligible 01:12:56.06\]

Oh, no. It'll give it right back to you soon.

Maps app... You know, the only real new thing is that maps is Foursquare now. So it remembers the places that you visited, and you can search the places that you visited... Which is actually kind of nice. I mean, so much of the time I'll leave a restaurant review just so that I can find it again later, because that I did navigation directions to it isn't enough.

There's so much low-hanging fruit to make maps just way easier and way more useful... Like that. For instance, when were just in Seattle - I enter the hotel's address in and I get directions to it, so that it's in there... And then I go to search, and I have to go find the -- later on in the trip. You go back to your hotel three or four times, whether you're on an Uber, or a Lime, or whatever... And it's like, just keep my most recent places in there... Like, there's even a Recent -- like, there's a section for it. But the fact that I'm staying at a hotel all week, it can't seem to get that figured out. I have to pin it, or whatever I've got to do; mark it as a favorite, to come back to it. But it's not really a favorite. I'm gonna go to this hotel again.

Marking it as a favorite is kind of just -- it's just a suggestion. It just increases the odds by 20% that the search is going to actually show the thing.

I know. It's like, why can't you just do these little low-hanging fruits better? So hopefully that's what you're talking about here. I don't know...

That's what I'm talking about. We'll see how it gets implemented. Again, this is opt-in, because of course, a lot of people are having extramarital affairs, and they saw this, and they started freaking out, so then Apple had to follow up immediately and be like "Whoa, it's opt-in. You can delete any single thing from your history, and this is all on device... Your secret's safe with us."

Yeah, I don't really like when Apple enables degeneracy. You know, like the -- what's the app where it's like hide it from everybody? It's like, basically, there's your porn app, hidden from the world, and they're just gonna help you do your secret things in secret... It's like, let's just let people get caught with that stuff, if they're gonna be idiots about it... I don't know. I'm not down with this kind of stuff. It's like "Hey, you're having an affair? We've got your back."

When Craig was on stage, announcing the hidden app feature, I was disappointed that he didn't sprinkle in any sort of euphemistic dad jokes into that. They played it straight...

\[laughs\] I can't even remember - what did they say the use case is for that? Because I can only think of one... Like, most people can only think of one use case for the hidden apps. Like, when would you have like a non-shameful, so to speak, hidden app use case?

\[01:15:36.15\] To be honest, the one case that I've always wanted Apple to do, because only they could do it with their platforms, is a plausible deniability mode... Like, I would love to be able to put my -- like, type in a PIN code, for example, that would put it into a very boring ass looking home screen with nothing in it, and with none of my data there, that I could then if I was ever under duress and had to hand it over to a security person...

Right. Or crossing the border, or... Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, "The phone is unlocked. Here, you're playing with it." And because it's on an encrypted disk, there's no way for them to be able to attest like "Oh, that's not really their--" That is the mode you'd want.

Yeah. But that has a useful use case for all humans. Like, some privacy against oppression. But not like drop \[unintelligible 01:16:16.13\]

Would any country on the planet allow Apple to continue selling iPhones, if it could do that?

\[laughs\] But they're totally down with the hide your porn app folder... Okay.

Hide your porn apps. Hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your porn apps. So anyway, that's the maps app. I don't know, man... We'll see how that plays out.

Hopefully.

The wallet app - they bragged about how car key adoption is getting picked up, and then they bragged about how the exact same nine US states that have driver's licenses still have driver's licenses... And that seems to have totally stalled. The big announcement for the wallet app from the ID perspective though, is that digital ID for US passport holders is coming. And that's now -- it's not a state by state thing. It's that'll work at TSA checkpoints, supposedly, which is kind of all most people wanted out of the... They were clear to say that it was not a replacement for your physical passport. I don't know if that means like you still have to have it in your bag, or something... But it'd be really -- especially with the realID fiasco in US airports... I have to imagine TSA checkpoints would be expedited if us one dozen nerds who figure out how to find and enable this feature start using this.

Yeah.

I'm excited. The additional -- talk about sherlocking. I don't know if you use Flighty, but Flighty is an app that's a popular iOS app that you can share the little progress bar of your flights... You can do a lot of really cool stuff with flighty. They basically sherlocked it in the form of now your boarding pass will both have indoor maps of the airport at the gate where you're landing, so you can navigate there, as well as a shareable interface that becomes like a live activity for any friends and family to watch the progress of your flight... Which I think is neat. It seems pretty cool.

Yeah. I will use that, and I think other people will use that, too. What else we've got? Games?

There's a games app, and it's just Game Center, and I don't think anyone cares. So we can probably move on.

Yeah. They just -- Game Center's games. Okay, cool.

We've got places to be. This isn't a three hour podcast, Justin.

That's right. Although it's looking like one, so we've got to move.

Yeah, we've got to hustle. Visual intelligence... So that's the button, the camera control if you're in a -- I just realized yesterday that I'm in Japan mode, and so I don't have visual intelligence here... So when I hit the camera control button, it just opens my camera, which is weird, but actually kind of welcome, because of how useless visual intelligence is. If you press and hold the camera control, it opens visual intelligence, so you can take a picture of a poster and add that poster's event to your calendar... Which has happened zero times outside of a demo.

Yeah. I can't imagine you use that in real life for this.

In the keynote there, they're rebranding it.

They're like "If you're at a store and you see a plate that you like, you can take a picture of the plate, and then visual intelligence will show you how you can buy that plate online", or something.

Yeah. A decade of Google lens being not used by anyone for anything wasn't enough to dissuade Apple from taking a stab at this feature. But visual intelligence has been effectively rebranded this time around. Now it's getting added to the screenshot UI. So you take a screenshot... First of all, it looks a lot nicer now.

I was gonna say, that's a better place for it, I think.

Totally. You might be familiar with - at the top of a screenshot, if the site or app supports it, you can choose between rasterized screenshot and full page, where it's like a scrollable thing, and it'll kind of come out as a PDF. That's basically now getting an additional functionality where you can do a visual intelligence search based on whatever's in the screenshot. \[01:20:08.12\] And it's much more likely you're going to take a screenshot of something and then want to turn that into a calendar event. And so that's kind of what they're going for. And it makes sense in that sense too, because you want your computer to do something for you based on how something visually appears; taking a screenshot is the most natural action that people know how to do.

People do it all the time, too. They know how to take screenshots, they do it all the time, and so this as an extension of that I think will make it get way more use.

I've been taking a ton of screenshots and then just using the Share button to send that to ChatGPT to ask about it. So I think that having it built in at the OS level makes a lot of sense. Alright, let's be done with iOS...

Wooh! Holy cow, man.

...and get through some other platforms. People are saying this was a boring keynote, but if you sweat the small stuff, I think there's a lot of stuff in here.

There was certainly a lot discussed. I mean, they went 90 minutes, and we're sitting at almost 80 minutes here, just talking about their first 30 minutes... So watchOS - I'm not a user. I'm not interested in watchOS. I lost my watch two years ago. I've never felt better, I didn't buy a new one... And I feel freedom from closing rings, and having notifications go to my wrist... I couldn't be happier to not have a watch, not have an Apple watch, I want to never have an Apple watch again... Although I did watch the watch segment and a few things that made me think "Oh, I should get an Apple watch." But that's how they do it, you know? The workout stuff is cool, except for -- I don't know if this is jumping the gun, but... The buddy, the workout buddy - is that the watchOS segment? Was that the workout buddy?

I was wondering, is it -- yeah, yeah. It's workout -- I was like "Is he excited about workout buddy? Is he going to be the person--"

Let's talk about workout buddy, and then let's skip the rest of watchOS, because there's just too much to talk about. I think workout buddy is so creepy. Like, the voice is bad, and...

The cringiest. Oh, my God...

It's so bad. I mean, I understand conceptually why it might be cool, and I think the Nike app has something similar... Like, there are workout things that have -- but they might be real human voices. This is like straight up Siri voice, or their new version of Siri voice... And it couldn't be less -- this is a voice in your head...

"I am motivating you right now."

Yes. "You did a great workout!"

"I believe in you."

Exactly. \[laughs\]

Who are you? What is this? Yeah...

There's a workout app that my sister and I use sometimes, that -- it's a real person, but she does the stock like 30 minute, whatever, and she walks you through stuff. At the end, she always says "Good job! You crushed that workout!" And I always say "You don't know that." Like, maybe we just phoned it in. And it's just funny, because there's a disconnect in the reality of it, and it's like, this thing is so not real that I couldn't possibly motivate a single human to think that, like, "You did a great workout today" is going to feel good. It's not going to feel good.

Yeah. "Thanks, workout buddy..."

Exactly. \[laughs\]

"I wanted to give up halfway through, but man, thanks to you..." Watching that bit of the keynote -- so we've talked about this, but I built an app last year for my wife called Build With Becky. It's a subscription program for strength training. It's got lots of videos of Becky in all sorts of doing all the movements, and each program has got a little video explaining it... And she has always gone out of her way to not make value statements, or make assumptions about what's going on on the other side of the screen with somebody... And I have a newfound respect for her professional restraint, after watching Workout Buddy.

That's a great way to approach it, because even this gal - I don't even know who she is. And she does a good job with her app, but when she says "Great job, you absolutely crushed that workout", which she says at the end of every single session - I'm just like, I roll, every time. And if you could just skip that part, you're going to get credibility, with me at least... And Workout Buddy's the opposite. Like, it's just your little motivational speaker in your ear, and it's not even -- like, the voice doesn't even convince you. They could have got better voice actors, or something. I don't know, the whole thing seems like cringe to me there.

\[01:24:11.10\] Well, maybe there's somebody who works at Cupertino who is actually motivated by Workout Buddy. I'd like to meet that person.

So would I. They're probably motivated by lots of stuff. You know, like, it's just very easily motivated.

Yeah. So you said you were looking forward to something about watchOS again, but then we talked about Workout Buddy.

It wasn't Workout Buddy, it was just like the advancements in the workout app, and kind of the new design of it... It's been a few years since I've used the workout app, because my watch broke, and I never got a new one. And so I just quit using the workout app, I quit using the health app... I live life like a normal person.

You're way more mindful now, now that you don't have the mindfulness app to worry about...

Exactly. I don't have to stand up when it tells me to, I don't have to breathe when it tells me to... I'm not a minion to this thing --

The fascists...

And so I'm just happy. But when I do see kind of like the advancements in the workout app... It just looks like -- you know, they know that that's what people are using the watch for, and so they've made it really good. And so that makes me think "Oh, that might be good." Because you know, you still have that feeling of "Oh, tracking myself would be cool again." But it was just a momentary weakness, and I remembered "No. That's a life of hell." Just live your life and go ahead and just exercise when you want to.

That's right, man. I will say, in terms of what got me excited about it is the Liquid Glass design I think is the biggest improvement to watchOS over all the other OS'es. And it might be because the background of watchOS is black, and so the glass is like legible...

\[laughs\] There's no overlay...

But as it exists, the newer watchOS designs where all of the controls are on the corners, as opposed to all these scrollable UIs - those buttons are really tiny, they can sometimes be hard to spot... And now you can clock those Liquid Glass buttons way more clearly, because they're glossy, and there's a little bit of momentum around the pushing of them... So I'm actually kind of excited, because as you're scrolling through the watch, there's just more physicality there, and there's way more -- it's the only OS that is now higher contrast, thanks to the existence of Liquid Glass, compared to all the others. And so that's worth something. And Messages gets backgrounds on watchOS too, which is terrible... Oh, but watchOS has the Notes app now, finally. So you can take notes.

Do you just talk to it, or how do you take a note?

They didn't get to that part, but they're there.

Okay. Alright. Well, we'll see.

And I'm excited about it, because I go for my run with my watch every day, and I don't take a phone with me... And so I'm just adding reminders constantly using Siri... Which fortunately, at least that usually works. But being able to append to a note, or something... Hey, I'll take it.

Fair enough.

tvOS, it is --

They mostly just talked about new stuff coming out. They're like "Content. Content, content."

I think that they actually organized the show a lot better this year, because instead of starting with a totally out of place Apple TV teaser of trailers and stuff, they just moved it to the tvOS section, because the tvOS is really about the content... They talked about two of our most popular apps. One is the TV app that you have to use for basically every function of the device, and the other one is music, which I don't think anyone actually uses on purpose on their Apple TV...

I've never used it on the TV, I don't think.

Well, now you can do karaoke, and your phone can be a microphone.

And you can sing into your phone.

You can sing into your phone.

Yeah.

I'm not on board with that until it's ready to score me, and teach me pitch. Me being louder isn't the thing anyone in my family needs.

I just want it to live-dub me with Whitney Houston's voice. Then I'll be on board.

Yeah. I want you pretending to be Whitney Houston to be my workout buddy, Jerod.

Now, that would motivate.

I'd be motivated to do something. macOS...

Yes, finally. Thank you.

So we start this section, and Craig is driving again...

\[01:28:07.11\] Yeah.

...in the little scooter... And I noticed, maybe for the first time, that just like Jaws, and previously Phil, always claims the iPhone Pro announcement segment, that Craig always reserves the macOS piece for himself. And I kind of like that. He clearly loves the platform the way that you do.

He does.

So I think I'll hand it off to you, and you can share your opinions.

I mean, I'm just really excited that Spotlight's gone steroids now. I mean, I feel like for me as a lifetime Spotlight user... Now, I did start off like every Mac nerd on Quicksilver, and I've tried Alfred... Yeah, Quicksilver was what got me into it.

Yeah. Quicksilver.

But I'm also a minimalist. And so as soon as Apple offers an 80% solution, I just kind of turn into an 80% user, versus continuing to power use... And I find that my life is simpler that way.

Yeah, we're not going to install Halide. We're going to use the new camera app, and we're just going to be done \[unintelligible 01:29:08.01\]

Absolutely. I'm just gonna be one of the masses, you know? That being said, of course, I get feature envy of the Alfreds and now the Raycasts, and all the other things, and I have to defend myself against Adam and Nick, and apparently yourself, who's also a Raycast user... And just say like all the way Spotlight is good enough for me, but not as good as those other things... And they just really revamped Spotlight, and added so much functionality to it that I might even install the beta just to get in on this thing. And I'm not a beta installer myself... So that's the biggest thing for me. There's tons of little things, of course, as we go, but that's probably the one thing that truly got me excited. It was like "Oh, yeah. Spotlight. Biggest update ever. Let's roll."

Yeah. The Spotlight demo... I didn't catch the name of the person who was delivering it, but he wrapped his demo by saying "And that's how it boosts my productivity." He actually talked in the first person, which... I'm sure he's taken back to the wood shed afterwards, because that's not --

Yeah, that's not according to the guidelines.

That's not their corporate speak... But I think it was coming from a place -- they probably let it slide because it was genuine and authentic. Like, it was clear that -- because he starts the demo saying "Spotlight's gotten its biggest update ever", and immediately, my eyes glazed over, because that's the 30th time they've said that about Spotlight. And then I installed the beta, or I installed the release, and then Spotlight still can't find Safari... Like, it spins the wheel and whatnot, and can't open apps effectively, and can't find any of my files... And so that's I think the biggest reason that Quicksilver and all these other things became popular, was Safari was just so slow, and its index was so poor. Now, Safari - you use Safari every day. Like, it can launch apps, quickly. It can find files. But what they've added this time is it can basically execute any single app intent. So any app that you have installed, that has intents, which is the same UI mechanism that feeds into shortcuts, that feeds into what will later be called Apple Intelligence again... Like, if you want to create a -- it basically can create a Mad Libs multi input interface. So if creating an email is a function call, and it's got an addressee, and a subject, and a body, you can type in the quick keys for mail, whatever - I don't know, I'm making it up; empty space, and then it'll fill it the Mad Libs, and then you can actually just tab through, and fill in all of those different pieces of the function... That UI looked slicker to me than anything that you can do in Raycast even.

Yeah, it does look really cool. Now, would I actually use it? Probably not, but hey, it's got clipboard history, so let's rock and roll.

There you go. Clipboard history, man. That's the other thing. That's the white whale.

I'm a simple man, Justin. I'm a simple man.

\[01:32:07.17\] I'll be interested to see how clipboard history interacts with security. Like whether or not the passwords app, when you copy something there... They're probably being pretty smart about aligning that. And the other thing that's really nice is this is the first time I can remember that Spotlight's really meaningfully customizable. So those quick keys, like the two-letter acronyms to go and launch one of those app intents, or to launch a particular app - that's kind of why I use Raycast. I had been using it for the AI stuff until AI just became everywhere, and ChatGPT had their own macOS app... But look, the quick keys in Raycast are like I hit G, and then I hit Tab, and now I'm googling while I'm coggy-ing the web really, really quickly wherever I am. So yeah, this really seems to catch up Spotlight with most of the reason most people would be installing some third party command space bar dingus.

Yeah. And the Raycast CEO, whose name is escaping me right now - we've had him on the show prior - took to X and probably LinkedIn as well (I didn't check other places) to write today, I think, a big... I don't know, is a diatribe a bad thing? It's not a bad thing. It was a response, to a certain extent... But you know, he didn't save the 280 characters. He went full -- is it a post? I don't know. It's a long thing for a social media platform, kind of responding to them being sherlocked. Like, he's basically like "I think we just got sherlocked, but here's where we're going to go from there." Because they really did catch up in a lot of ways to the Raycast's value proposition. So I think that will just push Raycast to do new, interesting things. That's the hope. Either that, or they're going to go away. And they don't want to go away, so I think they'll have to innovate.

I think a lot of sherlocked apps do this, where it's like "Cool. Now I get to lean even more into my niche."

Right.

Like, if you have a niche, if you've got a reason to exist, "Now I can get even more 20 percentory..." And that can be a great thing for the power users who probably are the early adopters of the app in the first place.

Yeah, exactly. So spotlight updates are cool... Shortcuts coming to macOS , that is big... Not as big for me, because I can write Bash scripts and stuff... But I think this will bring that kind of opportunity to way more people. And of course, shortcuts does have hooks into apps and stuff, that Bash can't necessarily get at. So there's some stuff \[unintelligible 01:34:28.03\]

So macOS has had the Shortcuts app, but the thing that it hasn't had is the automations tab... And that is finally there.

Oh, I see.

And it was three weeks ago that I had to go and do that dance where you figure out how to add a new Launchd agent to a computer... And I had to do it, so I could run this backup shell script. And do I know if it's running or not? I don't know. And so then I had to add that script something that would literally email me upon success or failure, to know that my backup was running... Because there's just no observability into Launchd in user space. Like, I'm trying to write to a log or something, and then shell into my computer from here... But like now that you actually have that automations tab, and kind of have it be triggered by stuff... You remember really old apps - like, was it Marco Polo, was the app where you could like have your network settings all change based on what network interface you were using and connecting to? This is like 2005, 2006. Like, you can now have a shortcut run based on which network you join. Certain apps launch certain times of day... So having shortcuts automation running on the Mac, which is probably the most likely computer you have that's on 24/7, especially if it's a desktop version... So if you've got any sort of household server-y kind of tasks now, shortcuts can be that place for you. And the other big feature is one of the actions that any of those shortcuts can take is you can ask ChatGPT, or local LLM, or private cloud compute, to do stuff for you. And I think you can actually -- it will try to massage it into a structured response based on where you plan on that thing going. So if you've got it iterating over whatever the results are, it kind of gets the clue that "Hey, I want to be asking the model for a list of items", which I think is super-duper clever.

\[01:36:19.22\] Yeah, the demo that he showed was like he highlighted some text he had in some stupid document he was making for some stupid reason... And he's like "I want a new tagline for this", and so he highlighted the text, he launched spotlight, which launched a shortcut or something that handed off to ChatGPT, I believe - unless it was an on-device model; I can't remember. But it was handed off to an LLM, that said "Generate me some taglines that are better than this one." And it came back with like three different options that he could actually then tab through. So it's like some sort of list, structured data, that he could like select one of those, and automatically either copy to clipboard, or just like replace it in his Pages app... That's fuzzy to me as well, but it seems like there's some nice seams there to make it pretty useful, versus just like blobbing out random crap and you have to deal with it.

There's a ton of apps right now that are charging 10, 20 bucks a month, that are basically wrappers around Open AI's API key, and they do like one thing. And now, anyone for free can basically create a shortcut action that is effectively a low-code/no-code AI app. And they don't have to f\*\*k around with API keys, and they have a decent enough interface that they can navigate that... So I think this is going to be something that a lot of users are going to take to. And it's a net -- really, a big win. Like, if you're a developer, you do get access to the models, but only the local LLM. Like, you don't get to talk to private cloud compute. You don't get to talk to ChatGPT. Not for free. You've got to go and get your API keys for that. So if you're just an end user using Shortcuts though, you do get to talk out to the cloud, and you'll get potentially better responses than a developer would. Now, there's going to be a story for that over the course of the next few years, but I was impressed that Apple actually went for it, and lets you call through to the models in the same way that, you know, knock on wood, the context-aware Siri eventually will be able to.

Yeah. I think it's going to be super-useful, and I think a lot of people will have access to these things who otherwise wouldn't, without some serious vibe-coding chops, you know?

Well, moving on... Do you have any other macOS takes before we move on to your favorite operating system?

I will give you -- well, first of all, continuity is amazing, and I love anytime they add continuity features, which they've done not very much of, but still some... I think the contin-- I'll just reuse their word, the continuity between devices is one of the reasons why I still appreciate these platforms working well together. And the more they can make my phone and my Mac continuous, the happier I am. I'll give you five minutes on VisionOS, and then I'm cutting you off.

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, start the timer. I'm going to go back to macOS and just say that the biggest continuity feature in macOS is actually the concentricity of the sidebars. I could just imagine John Siracusa cringing real hard when the sidebar became a floating round rect on top of a round rect.

Oh, I know.

But they did a separate video and they explained why that is, and I think it makes a certain sort of internal sense, even if visually it's going to take some getting used to. Over in VisionOS land - you know, not a lot has changed... Although I think more should have. If you're going to jump 23 major versions in one year from VisionOS 3 to 26, you should expect more than this...

Good point.

\[01:39:54.13\] But the persistency, I guess, of widgets and windows was the biggest thing, as far as I could tell. You know, personas look a lot better, there's some enterprise features that probably don't apply to anyone on this call, or anyone but the two enterprises that have adopted Vision Pros...

Right. Aston Martin.

There's a Jupyter environment, that's great... But really, the existence of widgets as things that you can place in your space - you can kind of just draw a straight line to what Apple's endgame is. It's like, why would you buy one of those crappy displays, that has a Wi-Fi connection to one gigabyte of your photos, that you put on a \[unintelligible 01:40:37.22\] mantle, when you could just have one of our glasses that you wear, and you have placed your real photos on there... And it's in high resolution, and it's always updating, and it's always in the same place. Or like you can put a clock on the wall, right? I'm a guy who's got a six-bedroom house, and I have nothing on any of the walls. I'm a real minimalist. So the idea that I could put crap up with my Vision Pro, and then have it all be there in the exact same spot, forever... Honestly, that doesn't appeal to me very much, but I could do it, in theory.

\[laughs\] I was going to say, you can't be excited about that then.

Yeah, I'm not. In fact, I'm kind of worried, because the other thing that's persistent now is all of your windows also are always in the same place... But like, I use my Vision Pro from like five different spots in my house, and I move around a lot... And all it did was remind me of that one version of macOS - it was probably 10 years ago at this point - that whenever you reboot the computer now (then and now), it by default will relaunch all of the apps that you had been using, put the windows in the same place... So basically, why does Justin restart his computer? It's because my computer is getting slow, and it's too bogged down, with too many things running. So I reboot the computer and then it's like "Great, now I'm just as slow", and all the app state is also all incorrect. So I've created one problem \[unintelligible 01:41:56.09\]

You can check that box though, right? There's a box you can check that says "Don't do that."

There's a box you can check, but it actually only does it some of the time, in certain circumstances. Basically, I got into this dance where I hit Command+Shift+W to close all the windows in every app, and then Command+Q across every single app, just to clear the deck of my whole computer, and then I reboot.

And then I shut down.

And then I get my blank slate. So now with visionOS, where you have even less control, and you don't have a keyboard in front of you, I'm worried you're going to boot up and it's going to be like "Hold on..." It's going to stiff-arm you for like 90 seconds while it boots all your crap, and gets into place. But as somebody who uses Vision Pro from an Eames chair, at that sort of reclined state, the fact that the Eames chair got highlighted in their demo was -- that made me happy.

You had a moment.

I don't even have five -- look, I don't even have five minutes of content. They didn't have a lot to show for visionOS this year.

Yeah. I appreciate that, I guess... I don't know what the future of visionOS looks like. I think it's a long-term play for them, so they'll continue to invest in it... But they sure didn't have much to show over the last 12 months of investment.

The biggest hint that there is new hardware coming, in my opinion, is that they're shipping the feature where two people, in the same room, both wearing Vision Pros, can watch a movie together. Because what's going to happen is they're going to release new hardware, and then a lot of spouses are going to receive...

Hand-me-downs?

Hand-me-downs Vision Pros. That's right. So as soon as that happens, they're going to get calls off the hook being like "Hey, how do I watch a movie with my wife?" or whatever.

\[laughs\]

And I think they're just preempting that. So I suspect that probably not by the end of this year, but maybe March next year we're going to get Vision Pro 2.

Alright, quick aside in order to round out your five minutes... What do you think of Johnny Ive joining Sam Altman to build some sort of hardware device for OpenAI, or with OpenAI, or whatever's going on there? What do you think that is? What do you think they're making? It's obviously not an answer to Vision Pro, but it's going to be a competitor to whatever Apple's putting out next etc. What are your thoughts on that?

\[01:44:08.22\] I mean, we don't have enough time to dive into the psychiatric analysis of that Sam and Johnny video that they've put out... I will say that the fact that -- the Lorraine Powell Jobs interview with Financial Times, and the admission that there have been "dark uses" to the iPhone and to a lot of the inventions that Johnny Ive had a hand in, and that they both have a sense that there are bad externalities with the phone... Which is something I've been talking about since the very first day I got my iPhone Edge. I was out to dinner with Becky, and I was ignoring her so I could watch the NewYorkTimes.com page load over the course of three and a half minutes on the Edge network... And I was like "This augurs poorly for humanity", was my sense in 2007.

Yes.

And that did come to pass, and all sorts of terrible things have happened... But the idea that the solution to that is "Let's give the keys to the kingdom to this guy who basically wants to make Skynet" is -- I suspect that even if they come out with the perfect device, and this device, all it does is increase girls' self-esteem, and help people who are addicted to sports gambling on their phones find a healthier, happier way to live... Even if all it does is solve a lot of these problems that Johnny Ive helped create, then what's going to happen is they're going to cash out, they're going to retire, they're going to move on to the next thing, and 10 years from now, this same product line is going to reach the same point of maturity where they have to squeeze more blood from the stone, and you're going to wind up in the exact same situation that Apple kind of finds itself now, painted into this corner where most of their money comes in from Google search referral money, and from Candy Crush whales, is most of the services revenue. So those perverse incentives, I think, are just sort of an inevitability of basic capitalism when you're trying to chart quarter over quarter growth... And so rather than fight it, I think being cognizant of "That's the reality we live in. Let's design devices based on what that end game looks like..." Coming in eyes wide open makes more sense to me. So to answer the question of what do I think it's going to be, I think it's basically going to be a humane AI pin with a better backend, and still no real solution to the fact that they don't platform; that they can't talk to the iOS the same way... I think it's going to come with a pitch to also --

It's going to be a silo.

Yeah. Maybe they'll put out an Android phone to go with it, or really, really top tier Android integration, sort of like the Pebble group are trying to do... But I'm skeptical. And they've said that it's not going to be a wearable, per se, it's not going to be a watch, it's not going to be glasses, it's not going to be a pin... So then people already are imagining it's going to be one of those little personal AC cooler things that kind of goes around your neck...

\[laughs\] Those are cool.

Or a pendant that maybe is like a multi-form factor, it can sit on your desk, or you can wear it like a necklace... Man, I don't know how you solve the platform problem. You've got this device in your pocket that's got a huge freakin' battery, and a great cellular connection, always connected... Any smaller thing without a screen isn't going to have those things. And maybe it'll have a sc-- I don't know. We'll just have to see.

Alright.

What do you think?

\[01:47:39.11\] I like the pendant idea. I think that they've kind of ruled out everything else. It's like, well, what is it, invisible, or something? What other things are there? Earrings? I don't know. I agree with you, they certainly have -- I mean, if the platform is voice, meaning if the interface is voice, then I think they're well positioned to make that as compelling of an interface as anybody else's. But I just don't think that that on its own is a compelling device. And so I think there has to be a screen, but I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be. I like the idea of a little necklace. Maybe you can put it down, maybe you can cast onto the wall... Like, those things are cool. I don't think there's been a cool one yet, but the idea of a tiny projector that you can push onto something... Or maybe the old Star Wars "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" kind of moment, with the 3D--

Oh, a little hologram? Yeah.

...holograms would be rad. Like, something that captures our imagination a little bit, and just is out there, and different... I don't think that's Johnny Ive style, but... I don't know. Neither one of us know. I just thought -- hear what you think.

Yeah, we'll just have to see. I think Sam Altman showed the hand a little bit and said "We could imagine you get hardware periodically as part of your GPT subscription." So if it's already a hardware subscription business, then maybe whatever connectivity it needs is also rolled into that. So they've sort of got a cellular backbone kind of built into that same subscription model, so it's not like the humane pin, where you got to go and get a T-Mobile sidecar for 25 bucks a month just for this device... But there's a lot of real fundamental problems that they have to solve, that they wouldn't have to solve if they were able just to get unfettered access the same way the Apple Watch does to the phone.

Yeah. Which they won't have, and they're going to have to work around that. Amazon kind of did that with the Kindle and their WhisperNet... So that's like a very minimal amount of data.

I almost said WhisperNet, but then I thought "There's no way I get to talk to Scarlett Johansson over the WhisperNet."

\[laughs\]

Not enough bandwidth for she and I.

It's got to be a full-throated conversation. Okay, let's do what Apple did, and say "The last six minutes for developers..."

Hold on. Wait, wait, wait --

I'm skipping.

You can't skip all of iPad OS. iPad is finally a -- you can finally do development on iPad. It's got a pointier pointer, Jerod.

\[laughs\] There's a show title. "It's got a pointier pointer."

It does. So - look...

Alright, I'll give you three minutes on iPad OS.

Good Lord... I was the one who suggested we order things in this order, and now I'm regretting it. So look, multitasking --

Because this is your most excited moment...

I'm a modal editor guy. I use Vim. I believe in modes, you know? However, stage manager as a mode that you go in is like -- what mode do I want my iPad to be in? Do I want to be in "single tasking, usually works most of the time" mode, or do I want to be in "stage manager, multitasking, nothing works pretty much for sure all the time" mode? The only time stage manager works better than non-stage manager mode is when you're on an iPad in landscape mode, and you need to access an app that only works in portrait orientation, because then it'll let you kind of get away with like windowing it into something smaller. But otherwise, the fact that these are different modes has really just been an admission that stage manager sucks... And the new iPad multitasking seems like a ground-up rewrite where everything is windowing by default, you can drag from the little visionOS style grabby do in the corner, and start using multiple windows right out of the box, and having gestures like exposé, where you can swipe up once and you can see your desktop, and add another app to it. So you're not typing into Spotlight to try to figure out how to add some app that doesn't happen to be on your dock into your multitasking interface... And then if you swipe up a second time, everything gets shunted away. So then you can get back into single tasking mode, without having to do anything fancy. \[01:52:00.11\] This is a multitasking mode that you could actually explain to a real human in under 10 minutes, which is something that wasn't true before. It lets you actually move the windows around. It has real tiling. It has the traffic signals of the x and the minus and the plus, and they're hidden behind triple dots... I think probably because if you accidentally close something, it's really hard to unclose a thing. So there's a little bit of indirection there. But overall, I'm very excited to muck around with iPadOS. It's got better files app, yada, yada. So there, that's probably three minutes. Let's talk about developers at the end.

Okay... Well, I mean, you are going to do development on your iPad, is the story though. So there's a developer story there.

Sure. And by development we just mean not Xcode, and also nothing that has a non-device compiler. We mostly mean the VS Code web interface, or maybe a terminal app that works sometimes. But you can imagine the future. Before, I could not imagine them launching Xcode on iPad, and now I can.

Gotcha.

The other thing that they put out is the long-running background tasks. So they launched Final Cut Pro a year or two ago, and you couldn't do exports from it unless you kept Final Cut Pro in the foreground... Now it can do that and it has like a sort of permanent, a little banner notification explaining why your battery is running down so fast.

Gotcha. I didn't know that they didn't have background mode. I haven't followed iPad OS, because I haven't owned an iPad for a long time, and so I just don't -- I don't care very much. And so I know they had Final Cut for iPad, but I didn't know that you could export.

I thought you liked continuity. You're robbing yourself of so many continuity opportunities by not wearing the watch or the -- you've gotta go in and get... You don't have visionOS... You've gotta get all these platforms, Jerod. Think of how much continuity would be in your life.

Ah... You see, I have kids, and so I can only have so much continuity. You've got all the spare funds to purchase all the devices. I only have so much to go around.

My Vision Pro is my child...

There you go. There's some continuity for you.

Developers, six minutes.

Developers, developers, developers, developers...

Yeah.

Icon composer...

Hey, you've got to compose these 3D physicality Liquid Glass icons somehow.

That's right.

They did a demo of it in state of the union, and it looks legit. Pretty cool.

Does it?

Basically, you can pull in any SVG and it will automatically get the layering right. And then for each layer in that SVG, by default, because it has to work in clear mode, you'll see those just outlines, and you can set how much blur on each level of the layering that you want, to kind of give it the sort of sense of what kind of glass are we talking at each of the levels... They were pretty upfront and said "Hey, four layers is about the max. You probably don't want more than that." And then you can apply tint to each of those layers as well, so you can kind of give it your blessed color combo for each of the things. The weather apps got the yellow sun, for example. It looks completely reasonable. Icons have always been something where it feels like "Yeah, I'm an iOS developer, but for my icon, I go and hire this other person, or icon factory as a business." Like it was a totally different function. This I could totally see myself -- I can get dangerous in Figma and SVG editors and vector editors... Like, I could totally imagine myself building my own serviceably okay icon using Icon Composer... And not only knowing that it produces a single artifact instead of the striped 45 different outputs that you used to need when you were submitting an app... It can also create marketing images, like rasterizations that are appropriate for brand books and stuff, and screenshots for the app store. So I think it's pretty slick. Xcode, of course, also gets like v1 edition of GitHub Copilot, basically is what it looks like...

\[01:56:21.04\] Yeah.. Which, it worked in the demo. It's like function-level auto-complete.

Yeah. They've got the on-device predictive tab complete, but they've also finally got the sidebar now. It's not called Swift Assist, as far as we can tell, because that just never really happened... It's probably not -- I didn't see any evidence that it was agentic, but in the state of the union they did show that you can pull in your own API keys and use it in addition to ChatGPT; you can use Claude, you can use other models. They're trying to embrace as much as they can, and understanding that they're not going to be the solution to every single problem. Personally, as somebody who wants to be learning Swift, the idea that I would have to do that in an IDE that had no AI assistance whatsoever, when the one thing that it's really good at is teaching you the basics... I was a little bit concerned. So that Xcode has this as I'm about to start diving in for serious, can only be a good thing.

And of course, there's tons of stuff for developers that didn't make the keynote, and even the state of the union. So they have more videos coming out all week. I always am interested in what's going on --

Over 100 sessions.

Yeah, I'm always interested in what's going on in WebKit specifically, as a web developer... And they have sessions coming out about that. I didn't have the time to watch. Our old friend, Saron Yitbarek is at Apple now, working on the Safari team, and she actually recorded the video for the \[unintelligible 01:57:49.18\]

Oh, \[0Saron is at Apple?

Yeah. I'm like "That looks like Saron", and I clicked on the video, I'm like "Sure enough. There she is, recording the video for what's new on WebKit, and Safari", whatever, whatever. That's cool.

Man, everything I've heard from Saron lately is about her toddler. I should follow up and --

Yeah, you should follow up. \[laughs\] Set a reminder.

That's pretty incredible. The other stuff that's exciting -- I mean, a lot of these APIs that they've announced over the last couple years seem like they're really maturing. And this Liquid Design thing has clearly forced them to catch up on SwiftUI. So SwiftUI didn't have a way to do a rich text editor. Now it does. So you have rich text editing in a SwiftUI way, and it saves as an attributed string, so you can have your genmojis in there as well... Additionally, SwiftData supports attributed string now, too... And so you can just sort of see that they're -- like I said, now seems like a really, really good time to start version one of an iOS app. If you've got an existing one and you've already got a lot of duct tape and rubber bands holding together, like in bridging all of these gaps that had previously existed, you probably are in for a very busy summer, is my guess.

Yeah...

But if you're willing to start, as iOS 26 is the first version... It seems like Apple finally is pulling together a lot of this stuff.

And how many developers are going to come along for the redesign ride? That'll be the question, "Will we have the--" I don't think uncanny valley is the right word, but like the middle ground.

The double A --

...limbo mode, where you're just like, half the apps have updated and look like the new stuff, and then other ones haven't, and you're like "Uhh..."

They were clear that when you build in the new Xcode -- Xcode 26. So Xcode also gets to jump this time, 10 versions. When you do hit build, you're going to get Liquid Glass. And then when you realize that breaks everything, you get a checkbox, and you can check the "Stay on the old UI controls." But they were clear, in the same sentence, it was like "Basically, this will be removed in the next major release." So you get one year moratorium on that checkbox. So you can keep working on your app and keep shipping it, but... Yeah, this highway only goes in one direction, it looks like.

\[02:00:14.24\] Yeah. I also read that the new macOS Tahoe, which they're -- and that's still macOS 26, but also Tahoe...? Or is it just Tahoe?

It's macOS 26, and they're still naming them, for some reason.

Okay. So I'll refer to it as Tahoe.

Yeah, Tahoe is fine.

Or 26. I guess if I say 26, it's ambiguous as to which platform... But Tahoe will be the last Intel-supporting operating system. That's what I read today.

It's true.

That's pretty fast.

And it makes you wonder whether or not that means that they're going to have a Mac Pro for us that looks anything different -- the 2019 Mac Pro redesign is looking long in the tooth, I think.

Yeah. Is that still the most recent Mac Pro, is 19?

No, the design was 19. The most recent one has an M2 Ultra in it, which of course, you go and buy a Mac Studio and you get either an M4 Max or an M3 Ultra. The rumor is that they had a Hydra or an M4 Extreme kind of Mac Pro in the offing... That didn't materialize. So one hopes that if they're going to kill Intel Macs next year at WWDC, they would do it with the pizzazz of saying "Hey, look, this is an extremely expensive computer that can't play PC games, even if you really want it to."

\[laughs\] But it'll have a games app. So it'll have that going for it.

Yeah, you'll have the games app to play -- let's see, what did they show? Very few games.

Yeah. There was like four, or six.

Yeah.

As has always been the case. Alright, let's wrap. Two hours? We're just -- we're killing it, man. We went so fast through the last section...

Did I exhaust you? You look -- we started this at 5am my time. It's only 7am here. I could go all day, man.

You're still waking up, and I'm going to sleep, so... It's not bedtime here, but --

I have that effect on people.

...but it is just like dinner time, pretty much... So yeah, I'm ready to wait on those betas. I think I might install a macOS beta. Not early beta, but maybe like late summer, just to get that Spotlight action going. Other than that, I'm just going to wait till fall. I think all these OS'es come out in the fall, basically. Right? Or they should.

Yeah. Yup. And if they don't ship by 2026, we've got a problem from a version numbering perspective. Now, they'll all come in September, October, and honestly, I'm looking forward to it, but I think it's going to be a long summer of people complaining about contrast issues, and readability, and we're all going to be negotiating how frosty do we need our glass, and... That'll be exhausting.

We'll be salty about the frosty.

There you go.

There I go. Alright, if you want the unabridged version of this conversation in which I have been dubbed out, and it's just Justin talking to himself -- I'm sure he's probably going to stop this recording to start his fresh one, as his thoughts are already on topic... Check out Breaking Change. Where else should I point these fine folks? I think searls.co is where you live, right?

Yeah, Searls.co is the master domain. My blog, my website, which I have spent way too much effort for just an individual blog, is justin.searls.co.

That's right.

It's a static site. It's like a Hugo site. You'll be interested to know, Jerod, because we've talked about my posse adventures in the past, and stuff - I've added an enhancement script now, so that whenever I post anything to it, it actually goes and fetches the OG images from all the sites I linked to, and creates little web cards in a GitHub Action, and then decorates it back into the site...

Oh, wow.

Oh, man.

This is your other child.

Yes. The Vision Pro is my firstborn...

\[laughs\]

So I love talking about the blog, because if you're a programmer who on a weekend has ever built a blog or over-engineered the s\*\*t out of your blog only to then write exactly one blog post ever, I think that you could find a lot to love in the obsessive care that I've taken over a lot of the stuff in this website, that truly does not matter. So if you're interested, check it out, please...

There you go. Justin.searls.co. So what happens if you just go to searls.co? Oh, it says "Augurs of accidental applications."

Yeah. So that's Searls LLC. Me and my brother, we are -- his name's Jeremy. We're co-CJOs of a thriving software enterprise that's just the two of us.

Gotcha. Cool. Well, let's let you get back to your day there in Japan, and I will end my day here in the Midwest...

I assume people know where to find you.

They've already found me. If they're listening to this right here, right now, they've already found me.

They're in the right feed.

That's right. I appreciate you, all your time, all your takes, the hot and spicy, and otherwise. Anything you'd like to say before I let you go?

No. I mean, by the time this comes -- our friend of the show, Adam Lisagor and Sandwich Vision are helping to put on John Gruber's talk show.

Like, going in visionOS again?

Tonight my time, tomorrow your time. And they're doing the Vision OS thing with theater. And of course, by the time you're hearing this, this will have already aired, so we'll get to know who John's mystery guests are. But yeah, I don't know yet what's going to happen there, but I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be great.

Very cool. Alright, that's our show. We'll talk to you all on the next one.

See ya!