630: Time to Spiral

So I mentioned last week that I had to go to the bank to get cash for the restaurant because I never had to deal with cash before. Turns out I did, in fact, do that wrong. Did you get Monopoly money? I would like to state for the record that Marco put into our internal show notes, pre-show, Marco went to the bank wrong. How did you go to the bank wrong? What do you think I might have forgotten exists?

You did not pass code and did not collect $100? Withdrawal slips or something equivalent? Coins. Oh. I got no change. so i had to go back today a second time like oh i also need coins to fill the drawers did you get pennies i thought about it but like you know to get what to get pennies what that means like a roll of pennies is 50 cents So what that means is I spent $2. I got four rolls of pennies. We'll see if I ever actually use them. So we'll see.

but uh you know maybe they'll be illegal or banned by the time i actually you know open for full service who knows we'll find out but yes i did indeed get pennies because it turns out because coins are generally worth so little Getting anything but quarters costs basically nothing. And even the quarters aren't that expensive, especially once you get down to like, you know, dimes, nickels, pennies. These are very...

I spent less than $100 to fill all the chains that we are probably going to need for a long time. Can you clarify the semantics of that statement? Don't the coins cost the amount indicated by their denomination? Yes, but it turns out since coins are worth so little relative to rectangles of paper and cotton and stuff, it turns out you can have a lot of change.

for like $70. So you can get like four quarters by just paying a dollar, right? Yeah, it's amazing how that works. I think we're following your math here. What did you end up carrying the cash and coinage in?

Did you just put it in like a Peak Design backpack? Maybe not a Peak Design backpack. That's a little canceled right now. But did you put it in some sort of backpack or did you take a duffel or what? Here's the funny thing. So when I went to get cash, I had brought my, yes, Peak Design everyday backpack. You know what?

I'm not going to let one murderer ruin my backpack. It's a great backpack, okay? They're all good dogs, Brad. It wasn't really a backpack-centric murder either, so I feel like the backpack is fine. No, and like... What kind of shoes was the guy wearing? Are those ruined too? No, it doesn't matter. He was wearing Hanes underwear. Now you can't wear Hanes underwear anymore. He was wearing a cotton t-shirt. You can't wear cotton.

Anyway, so I'm not going to let that ruin my backpack. It's a great backpack. So I went in there with a giant backpack to get what was not a giant amount of cash, as it turns out, volume one. Today, I went in there to get change, and I had nothing. I'm like, I'm just getting change. Coins are heavy, it turns out. It's like they're made of metal. I was wearing a light jacket. I just put it in my jacket pockets and I'm lumbering out the door. I'm doing every part of this wrong.

oh my gosh you're jingling like a school janitor with a too big keychain yeah like i had i had my kid with me and as we're walking out he's like it looks like we're robbing the bank I'm like, don't joke about that. You're the world's worst bank robber who only asks for change. You can rob the bank for 70 bucks worth of coins. You can't escape quickly because you're too weighed down. That's gracious.

All right, so you've had some learnings, as the business people say. You've learned some lessons, and hopefully you won't need to get cash, at least for a little while, I presume. I have no idea. We'll find out. Take a penny, leave a penny.

All right, let's do some follow-up. We have a lot of follow-up to get through. In fact, I asked John to cut some of the follow-up, and he was very gracious about it. So we'll see. Maybe if we can plow through it, we'll make John's night by getting through all of it, but we'll see what happens.

And I'm going to start by ruining John's night by doing Vision Pro Corner. We have a few quick pieces of information to talk about. First of all, there's a new adventure episode. Adventure is one of the series, like, kind of sort of TV series. that Apple has put together for Vision Pro. There's a new adventure episode called Deep Water Solo. This is about a... rock climber, mountain climber fellow who is climbing up the side of a cliff

in somewhere in Spain. I forgot already. But it is very well done. It's, again, like eight to ten minutes, something in that neck of the woods. And I really enjoyed it. I like these ones that have a bit more of a story to them.

the rodeo one from a few weeks back I don't remember if that was an adventure episode or something else but that one I feel like they tried to put a story on it but it didn't really land this one they did a pretty good job of the story and one of the things I really liked about it So, I mean, that's not really much of a spoiler. This guy's trying to scale a cliff. And one of the fun things about the Vision Pro is what with it being 3D, They're doing an animation or an overlay on...

It might have been a rendering, maybe it was a photo of the rock cliff and showing where he's going to scale the rock cliff. And you can see that these renderings, like it's very obvious they're in 3D space, right? Like there's a path, a line going up the rock cliff that's jiggy-jaggy and a dashed line where he needs to jump somewhere. And you can see that that's floating above the rock face. Is that a big deal? No, absolutely not. But is it neat? Yeah, it's kind of neat.

So you can check that out if you're interested. Marco, I know you're going to be pausing the show in order to put on your Vision Pro that you probably haven't touched in three months in order to try it. Well... I might touch it for the next item. Well, maybe not the next item, but the one after. So Spatial Gallery is our next item. That is the VisionOS exclusive app that is only in the beta for now. It was not in the first beta, it is in the second and I think we're on the third beta now.

I wanted to very briefly talk about it. It was billed as Apple giving us more spatial content. Now, I know I do this every time, but it's important to understand the difference. Immersive is what we were just talking about, where you look around and the perspective of the camera is changing. You're kind of controlling the camera, if you will, because you're looking around a 180-degree scene, right?

spatial is when you have a rectangle with depth. And it's honest-to-goodness depth, as far as you can tell, but it's just a rectangle with depth. If you look around, you're looking away from that rectangle with depth. Anyway, the Spatial Gallery app, my two-second review. It really is just a gallery. There's almost no Chrome to the app whatsoever. It's just a series of videos and images, all of which have at least some amount of spatial content.

Some of the individual, so there's these panes that you swoop through the air, right? They're individual panes for each of the different gallery items, pictures, videos, whatever. But some of these panes are actually kind of like Instagram stories where they'll show one photo for a little bit and then another photo for a little bit and then it'll automatically advance to the next photo for a little bit. So as an example of that, They had some behind the scenes stills from Severance.

which, by the way, I am now caught up on and is real good. No spoilers, no spoilers. No spoilers, no spoilers. It's real good, though. So they had some behind-the-scenes stills from Severance They were neat, like nothing dramatic, but it was still neat to see. There's no playback controls that I could tell, like even when you're watching a short video, it's just, that's it. That's the whole thing.

It's also kind of funny because the audio changes if you're looking at it full screen versus in like a pane. You can blow these up to be more full screen and the audio sounds different. This is similar to being on like a FaceTime call when you're in an environment rather than just...

you know, looking at floating heads I loved that there were some basically advertisements like one of the first things in the list is a video for Red Bull and at the top there's a little pill that says you know open the Red Bull app or download and open the Red Bull app or whatever the case may be.

and i just think it's kind of funny it's like it's like price is right all over again like you know the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing convincing us that price is right wasn't an hour-long commercial well it's a similar thing right where this is it's it is cool new interesting content and yet Still also advertisements, in part.

There was a really good one on Porsche where they had, I forget the model, but like a particular early, early, early race car. And they showed a couple of videos of that, which was really neat. All of this, was dated the 3rd of March, if I'm not mistaken, and the impression that Apple gave was that they would be doing regular content updates. just like they gave in February of 2024 when we got our Vision Pros. It is now the 12th of March and there's nothing new.

I mean, I respect that they're trying, in theory, but come on! You got a new app for it. Let's do it. Let's move. More stuff. More stuff. That being said, and now I have Marco's attention. They have just announced either earlier today or yesterday. I forget as we record, but it doesn't matter.

There's going to be a roughly 30-minute Metallica immersive special. Reading from, I believe their press release, This project marks a new foray into immersive technology using ultra-high resolution 180-degree video and spatial audio to give fans unprecedented access.

From vantage points as close up as the snake pit to wide-angle views, it brings a live show to a whole new level, and to achieve this, Apple built a custom stage plot featuring 14 immersive video cameras using a mix of stabilized cameras, cable suspended cameras, and a remote controlled camera dolly system that moved around the stage.

Hello, Sign Me Up. It continues. Filmed during our final M72 stop. Oh, I'm sorry. This is from Metallica's website, isn't it? Filmed during our final M72 stop of 2024 Mexico City. It features full performances of Whiplash 1. And hello, Hokies. Enter Sandman. All captured exclusively in Apple immersive video. Holy pants. I want this in my life. I want it now. And as it turns out, it will be here this coming Friday as we record this. I am excited. Can we pirate it?

deep cut i know um yeah i i this is great i think like you know we'll see what exactly i have some reservations i mean first of all like you know okay i'm not a huge metallica fan but like fine i actually want to see this because what i've been saying for months is concerts and events and theater and stuff like that in vision pro would be great

my so on one hand i'm very happy to say this i am a little concerned about like what choices did they make for production like how much jumping between cameras are we going to get how much movement of the camera are we going to get What I think I want?

is basically a fixed camera. From the perspective of being a little bit above a really good seat in the audience, near the front of the stage, a little bit higher than the audience so no one's head's in your way but like basically i want the experience of being there and

I think what they will probably end up doing, for the most part, is overproducing everything, because that's Apple's style. Apple's very overproduced. And I don't know how much Creative Control Metallica had versus Apple's usual production team. Who knows? We don't know the details. i think this is a good step It is, I laughed when I read that it was just three songs. Yeah. I'm like, another content snack, another demo, another trial. Like, come on. Like, Do the hook! It's like, what?

You set all that up for three songs. Yeah, I could not agree more. Content stack is such a great turn of phrase for it.

It's so incredibly true. After three songs, the audience actually wanted to see the show. It's like, get these cameras out of here. It could be, but I just want to reiterate what Marco said, though. Some of my favorite stuff that I've seen in the Vision Pro... is the concert for one, like the Alicia Keys thing, and I think it was Raya Reva, forgive me, I forget the artist's name, but

There was, to Marco's point earlier, there was a little bit of hopping around with different camera angles and whatnot. However, What I really like about being immersive, where you can pitch the camera for all intents and purposes, is that if they're focusing on the drummer, but the bassist is just barely outside where you're looking right now, you know what you can do?

you can turn your head. And as you turn your head, you can now look at the bassist. You know what I mean? And so this is, as someone who is a concert film aficionado, one of the things that drives me bananas about concert films is that A lot of times, either somebody's soloing or maybe some and you want to focus on them or maybe you know the guitarist is soloing but actually quietly in the background that bassist is killing it and i'd rather look at the bassist for a minute you know what i mean

And this is where like the old DVD technology with like different camera angles. Do you remember that? Way back in the day. Did anybody ever actually use that besides the adult film industry? Yeah, Phil Collins had... I think it was Phil Collins. I want to say it was Phil Collins. People used it by accident probably by hitting a button on the remote. They didn't know what it did. Exactly. That's so true.

But anyways, but DVDs way back in the day, kids, ask your parents. DVDs way back in the day, a handful of them allowed for you to actually change the camera angle, and it was really neat. And so you kind of sort of get that same sort of thing here. And again, like Marco said a few moments ago, A live performance, be that music or stage or what have you. That is just

screaming, may we please see this immersive video. And I don't know if I would go so far as to say I agree with Marco on just give me a stationary camera and never move it. I think it's neat to be able to move or see different perspectives from time to time. But I wholeheartedly agree with Marco's implied point, or maybe you said it explicitly, that

I don't want to cut every three seconds. And some of the early Apple stuff, that's what it was, was a cut, cut, cut, cut. And by the time you get your bearings as to where your body feels like it is in 3D space, then suddenly you're on something else. You have to reorient yourself in a way that... is kind of true in 2D, but much more dramatic in 3D.

All of that to say, I'm super duper excited. One of the first things I plan on doing Friday morning. As someone who enjoys, I'm not a humongous Metallica fan, but I like Metallica a fair bit. And as a graduate of Virginia Tech, I need to love Enter Sandman. And if you're not familiar, don't worry about it.

Suffice to say, I'm real excited to try this on Friday, and I'm excited that, Marco, you might actually dust off your Vision Pro and try it too. I also, like, I watch a lot of concert broadcasts, usually Fish, occasionally Goose, occasionally somebody else, but usually those two. By the way, Goose is on fire on this tour. They've had some staffing changes in their percussion section over the last year.

And I think they have ended up in a very good spot where the new drummer just is working his butt. He never stops moving. You look at this guy in the video and you're like, How is he doing that for three hours? It's amazing. This is Taylor Swift level of athleticism required for this drummer to be doing what he's doing for as long as he's doing it. It's really impressive. So Goose, oh my god, they're on fire right now. Anyway, so when I watch a concert broadcast or concert video,

They do switch around. They'll usually be live switching. Somebody will be directing the live broadcast, just like a sports broadcast would be. There's a director saying, all right, take camera three, take camera two. I don't think they ever go back and really edit.

you know what switches they made uh for like the published video so you know they're just kind of guessing hey right now the bass player's doing something fun we'll switch to him for a few you know a few seconds here and there and now we'll back go back to the guitar okay let's take a wide shot to show the lights whatever

So what you see is a bunch of like really close-ups of the musicians that even if you were there in a front row seat, you wouldn't have that good of a view. And especially, you'll see things like, right behind the drummer.

or you'll see a shot down to see into the keyboard player, where normally the keyboard player's keyboards are usually blocking the view from the audience of really seeing what the keyboardist is doing. That kind of concert filming technique with multiple cameras and switching between...

is actually very different and in some ways better than a view in person when you're actually there in a great seat for the concert. It's a really interesting thing, and it's almost a different thing than being there in person. when you are there in person, you are getting the experience that the band is actually creating.

and that their artistic team around them is creating like the lighting the staging and if there's any you know background decoration or movement or you know screens or animations like you're getting that like in the sphere you're getting that whole thing that's a whole different thing When you have a multicam, live-directed, switched-between kind of format that's being broadcast, that is a good thing in certain ways, but it is a different thing than attending the concert. And when you are...

Just looking at your fixed view from the audience you are getting the entire experience that they were trying to create at that time. You're getting the cool light show. You're getting like a little bit, you know, trippiness if you're in a jam band situation. Like you're getting... If you're watching some kind of over-the-top rock band and there's fire in the background, you're seeing that as its full-scale spectacle that it was meant to be seen at.

I think if I'm watching something in an immersive video like this, I would rather have the audience experience because that's something that The multi-cam situation where you're seeing a quick close-up of the guitar, then quick close-up of the keyboard, then quick close-up of the drums, that I think is optimizing for what

TV screens and computer screens are good at. Small, high-resolution screens that are not super immersive, that are not taking up your whole field of view, but they can display really... really great content at a smaller size so you can zoom in you can see oh look at that like the way the light's reflecting off those strings that's pretty cool or whatever oh wow i didn't realize his fingers were moving that fast or you know whatever it is in the vision pro

the immersive format what it can offer is the full experience of being there and that's something that other screens can't do. and the Vision Pro can. Like, if you wanted to simulate what it's like to actually be in the sphere watching those cool animations at the ridiculous scale that they're at, you can largely do that with the vision pro you can't even come close like i i watched the videos later of some of the fish shows i saw at the sphere

And the videos were great, but it was nothing like being there. Not even close, because they're trying to show what was an immersive performance in a rectangle in front of me. And it's just not possible. It doesn't communicate it well. I hope that Apple will take advantage of what the Vision Pro can uniquely do here, which is show an immersive experience.

Whatever Metallica snack they've made here, it sounds like it's probably going to be closer to the multicam kind of style. We'll see how it goes. I do think there's a place for that, but I hope that's not all they ever do. I hope what they really offer also is the audience perspective. Just give me a fixed perspective. There's so much potential there.

Because people go to live events because they're going to get that perspective when they go. And there's so many people who would love to enjoy live events who can't go or the events already happened in the past or whatever. There's a huge market there. And so again, I will again urge Apple, this is good. This is a start. There is so much more here to be taken advantage of, and I hope they do.

we are sponsored this episode by terminal this is the wonderful e-ink display that i was talking about back in december that i bought myself before they were a sponsor now they're sponsoring our show so this is what terminal is this is basically small e-ink display with a nice white case you can or black case that you can just

on your desk or on your wall or in your kitchen or whatever and it just displays ambient information now because it's e-ink it's not a glowing screen so it looks great anywhere it's very you know kind of you know non-intrusive visually and it can display whatever you want. They have an entire gallery of what they call recipes for displaying stuff from different services.

So, of course, you can have the basics, clocks, weather, calendars. I have a countdown to the day the restaurant's opening, plus weather, and plus quotes from the office online. All of those were already in their recipe gallery. There's thousands of things people have made for this. So you probably don't even have to make your own. But if you want to make your own, you can. There's a whole open easy API for this.

and it's super easy to use. I personally haven't, but I know Casey was looking at that, and there's so much going on here. They have an unbrickable pledge, which means if they ever go out of business, They open source all their code. You don't even have to use their infrastructure if you don't want to. They have a really great setup there. And I love that it looks nice enough to pass the historical commission.

restrictions in most households, I would say, at least according to data from the ATP hosts here. i love the terminal it's a great looking product it works well you can hack it a bunch or if you don't want to or you don't have time you can just use what they have built in and it's fantastic so check it out today it's 129 bucks And with this promo code, use code ATPFM for $15 off. Terminal. It's T-R-M-N-L. So basically terminal with no vowels in it. Delete all the vowels.

So the domain name is useterminal.com and use code ATPFM for 15 bucks off. Thank you so much to Terminal for just being awesome and for sponsoring our show. Alright, let's talk iPad Air. Apparently the 2X base was a false alarm. Tell me about this, John.

You know, that was something I mentioned, the MacRumors had said that the iPad Air 13-inch is missing the 2X base feature that the previous version had, but apparently that story has been pulled. I don't know why they didn't just update it and put a retraction on it on MacRumors or something, but...

Seems like it was just a false alarm, so in case anyone was worried that the 13-inch error is a regression in this way, it seems like no. Additionally, we had some feedback with regard to the appeal of the iPad error, because the three of us were kind of scratching our heads saying... Why? John Spurlock wrote in and said, one reason I'm glad the iPad Air exists and just ordered one is the larger screen size.

I use mine mostly for music like sheet music and the 13-inch makes a huge difference as does the $550 savings versus a similar iPad Pro. Because there is no 13-inch regular iPad. That's the point there. If you want a 13-inch, it's great that the Air exists, because otherwise you'd have to buy a Pro, and they're really expensive at any size. And the 13-inch one, even more so.

Ryan Manley writes, I was a big iPad Pro guy. I've had three big ones and one small one. I went to the M2 iPad Air last year mostly because I wanted the blue one. I'm literal proof that colors drive buying decisions. And yes, Face ID is the biggest thing I miss. Are you listening, lack of color czar at Apple? Can we please, please have colors, please?

pretty please yeah especially man like now that we're seeing all the ipad or the the macbook air reviews of sky blue which is just bluish silver like oh man what a missed opportunity oh like an actual sky blue one that would be amazing i currently drive a sky blue car like that would be great that would look awesome and it seems like they just didn't do it i don't know why i wish

Please, Apple. Sometime soon. Maybe the M5 generation. Give me cellular, nanotexture, and a color that's actually a color. That would be amazing. And again, and I think this is an important feedback from Ryan here. People often make buying decisions based solely or significantly on visual appeal. Colors, styles, We know. We know people. Sometimes we have been people who have bought a new Apple thing.

mostly because you know we wanted it and why do we want it sometimes we wanted it because it was a cool color or a new color like you know something cool like Anything. Just give us anything. I'm not saying every color has to be bold. I'm saying make any color bold. Give us one.

Seriously. You know, we bought Aaron's car like nine months ago or something like that, and we were trying to find a car that we wanted, and i will give you one guess and we worked with several different dealers during the time and i'll give you one guess what each dealer's first question was you know at well after you know what are you looking for in terms of like what model

What color do you want? Which shade of silver do you want? Pretty much. But that is almost always the first question. Then a friend of mine was looking for an F-150 Lightning, actually, and he ended up just getting one. It's a really nice truck, although I'm not a truck person. But anyways.

uh you know as i was kind of living vicariously through him and because i i enjoy buying cars with other people's money and you know oftentimes the the question was what color do you want and i i feel like it's not an apples to apples comparison between a car and a computer well unless you're John buying a $15,000 computer but nevertheless it's still important to your point Marco that it makes a big difference and you know my M3 Mac

macbook pro that i'm talking to you through right now i i feel like it was time for me to upgrade and update anyway last year two years ago whatever it was but I definitely instabought when I saw that there was that deep, deep black, which granted is not a bold, vibrant color, but it just had such nostalgia for that black book that I wanted so badly back in 2008 or thereabout. that I had to have it. And granted, I'm kind of taking the wind out of my own sails, but when I'm talking about black,

But the same thing would be true. If there was like a vibrant blue, I'd probably rock one. And certainly if not in the Mac, which maybe I'd be a little more conservative with the computer.

You bet your bottom that I would 100% rock a very bold blue iPhone. And a couple of years ago, there's 13 or thereabouts we had a reasonably decent blue iphone pro and i recently gave that to declan as a you know phone without service to use as like a noise maker at night and whatnot and man everything every time i look at that thing Man, I miss that blue. I miss that blue so much. And in defense of the current black color on the MacBook Pros, The reason why people went nuts for that

is because it was new. And it was extreme. It was more extreme than... Before that, we had silver and space gray forever. Silver is you know aluminum great. That's the color I usually get space gray was just It was just like, do you want light gray or medium gray? The new, whatever they're calling this gray, is a much darker gray. It's not black, but it's much closer to black.

And so it was, for the first time, it was like, oh, finally, like, a more bold choice exists besides these two kind of just lukewarm, do you want this kind of lukewarm thing or that kind of lukewarm thing? The MacBook Air is now available in one bold color, which is the super dark navy blue, almost black.

And then three just total bland milk toast tim cook roommates chat kind of colors like just the most boring bland like we are afraid to express anything whatsoever with our color schemes like just and there's three of them like i understand as as i think we'll get to Many people want to and choose to buy the boring colors. That's why the iMac is offered in silver, even though it's also offered in all those other colors.

but they offer it in other colors too for people who want color in their life. Why would a company... Whose logo was a rainbow for so long. Why would they want to offer color in their products? Because it's nice, and people buy them, and people love it, and it makes people happy, and it adds some emotional appeal to what is otherwise your work computer or whatever. It gives people some fun in these tools that are just machines otherwise.

Apple has not shied away from colors across their product lines forever. They're actually really good at colors. When they choose to do real colors, they do a great job. And doing colored aluminum... They've been doing it since the iPod Mini. Like, it's been a long time. They know how to make good colored aluminum in all sorts of different colors.

saturated colors, pastels. They do a really good job when they do it. So they have the resources. They have the ability. They have the talent to pick good colors. Use it! Give us something! Some option! Because we keep hearing from people who could buy the more expensive Pro version of an iPhone or a Mac

And they don't. They get the smaller, more consumer branded one or whatever because it's available in more colors than gray, gray, and gray. Use that enthusiasm and you can actually upsell people. You can even like Apple and they actually have done this in the past. They could even have, like,

you know, the cheapest configuration only available in silver, gray, gray, and gray. And then they can have, like, the next step up. I think the iMac used to be this way. I'm not sure if the current generation is, but the M1 generation was like this. then the step up like the mid the mid tier specs that one's available in three more colors or whatever like they can do stuff like that there's so many ways to do this that would work out better for everybody so just

Come on, color! Bring color back to the world! Trust me, we need it right now. The world can use some. Please, for the love of God, bring color back. Matt Riptoe writes with regard to your question, Marco, about portrait-only iPad apps. Would you actually, would you mind just recapping what the query was from you last week? Yeah, so basically I said last week one of the things I'd gone through with the restaurant was I had an iPad set up to play music and

and run the app for the mixer to control volume and stuff. And the mixer's app would only run in portrait.

on ios it's it's not an iphone only app it was an ipad native build but it would only run in portrait and the problem was i'm like i i couldn't find any way for ipad os on any sized ipad even on a big one to run two portrait only apps side by side with the ipad physically in landscape mode i figured by this point the screens are so big now maybe they can do that and turns out i could not find a way well

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

But I don't think I will do it because this is an iPad that, again, this is being used by all the bartenders, all the staff who are working back there. They're not all going to be iPad experts. I think the stage manager environment What if it gets swapped? Or what if it gets disabled? Or what if a different app gets pulled up and then that scene is messed up? can I trust people who are not iPad power users to be able to use stage manager and like put it back?

I don't know. I don't know if I want to take that risk. i wonder if you could automate this with shortcuts i i genuinely don't know let's make it even more complicated Well, didn't you already buy the iPad Mini, though? Like, isn't this kind of the ship is going to sail there? Yes. So you'd have to, like, return the iPad Mini or find another use for it and buy a bigger one. But, like, this is, you know, this is the problem with iPadOS. We've talked about it many times.

you really want to build something complicated out of a set of understandable building blocks. Like if I asked you on your Mac, can you put two windows side by side? You'd say, yeah, because you learned a lot ago how to move windows around on your Mac and how to resize them. And using those basic tools of like window controls and resizing and moving and dragging, despite the fact that.

uh mac apps continue to try to make the title bar disappear or make it difficult like try grabbing the top of your chrome window but anyway um Because the fundamental building blocks of manipulating Windows on the Mac are simple to understand and learn and are incredibly flexible, almost anybody can take two windows by the side by side maybe they don't know about the cool shortcuts with like where you can tile them and blah blah but they don't need to know those shortcuts

They know what windows are. They can see them. They can move them. Chances are good they'll be able to recover. But the instructions for doing it in Stage Manager highlight how that is not the case on the iPad. First of all, Marco couldn't discover it, which, I mean, granted, he didn't even think of Stage Manager, which is itself its own problem of this weird mode. But second, even if you had said, let me try Stage Manager, would you have tried this? Fabian wrote in with an example video.

He says, here's an example with Monument Valley 3, which is an iPad-native portrait-only app, and Nintendo Music, an iPhone app running in iPad compatibility mode. After activating stage manager, launch app A, locate app B via the doc app library or spotlight, hold down the shift key, and tap on app B. If you don't have a keyboard, hold down the icon of app B and drag it onto the quote stage.

No one's going to figure this out. It's way too complicated. And for what? To what end? What does this complexity give you the ability to do? It gives you the ability to do a very finite, limited subset of what you can do by simply moving windows around. like it's just it's madness so i don't want to rehash everything about ipad or us being a problem but it's a problem All right, going back to colors for a minute, Yossi Kanner writes,

Tech pundits love to complain that Apple doesn't make devices with real colors, yet it seems people actually buy the plain black or silver option. I had an iPhone 12 mini and a 13 pro in blue colors that came in and hated them. Since then I've gone back to the more neutral colors and much happier. Now granted there isn't much color in Apple's current lineup but choosing to get a colorful iPhone or iPad is a much bigger decision than say getting a colorful case.

I think Apple's making the right choice here. Yossi, I appreciate your feedback, but you are wrong. I want a colorful phone. So this is not an either-or situation. No, you're right. In every case, everyone advocating for color says of course they should continue to make a neutral color or maybe multiple neutral colors because that is probably he's right that's what most people will buy right but that's like Again, not every product will be your best-selling product.

Not every color will be your best-selling color, right? You put the color in for excitement, right? Cars are the best example. You guys were talking about a bunch of things, but cars are the second most expensive things most people will ever buy next to their house if they ever own a house, right?

And cars are purchased massively based on their appearance, which doesn't make sense. You're like, oh, with something so as expensive as a computer, do I care how it looks? Are you kidding? The two most expensive things people buy, cars and homes, are purchased... so much based on their appearance it's ridiculous it's almost as if the more expensive things get the more we buy based on how it looks not less right so

There's no argument to be made that you shouldn't, you know, make these fancy colors because people will just pick the neutral ones. Fine. It gets them in the showroom, right? Like, they're not even going to buy that car, but they want to come and see it because it's shiny and red, or the car they're going to get is silver, but they want to look at the cool red one, right?

Or you want to go into the neighborhood with the fancy houses, even though you're not going to buy one of those, but you want to buy one next to it so you can look at the fancy house. Yeah, most people are going to buy the neutral colors. They should always offer the neutral colors. Look at the iMac. It comes in a huge range of really nice colors, and there's just one neutral color, and that one neutral color is enough because that neutral color...

is fine. And if you want an iMac that is neutral and won't clash with your decor, there's one for you to buy. This is not a problem that needs to be solved. It's not like they shouldn't offer colors because most people will not buy them. Yeah, that's why they should offer them. Most people won't buy them, offer them anyway, to get people in the door and to get people excited. Well, and also, we hear this argument a lot

whenever we are basically advocating for something that is not going to be Apple's largest seller of its category or whatever. And we always hear people trying to excuse Apple's logistics be like, well, look, they don't want to keep that many SKUs. Or like, well, no, not a lot of people buy that one. You know, there's a lot of degrees of precision or ratios here that matter. Like, okay, not a lot of people. What does that mean?

like do more people buy a theoretical you know orange macbook air than would buy the mac pro Probably. but they still have the Mac Pro.

I was going to say, while you were talking about, like, oh, bring us color in your life, I'm thinking, well, you know, the next product due to be updated, is everyone ready for, you know, a lime green gigantic cheese grater? I mean, but seriously, like, If you use that logic of, well, they shouldn't make things that most people won't buy or that most people don't need, quote, need, well, then they should only make the silver MacBook Air and no other Mac. Like, by that logic...

Why do any of these other models exist? Most people use the silver MacBook Air. Okay, then just make that. Of course, the logic makes no sense. You have more options for lots of reasons. enough people buy them to make them worth making. It doesn't take that many people to buy something at Apple scale.

for it to be worth making in a certain configuration. And even if it isn't worth making on its own, you still have to make it. The same reason they make all those other computers and stuff, because you need to have a diversified product line that people feel confident in. So even if they're going to buy the silver MacBook Air, they feel more comfortable buying that knowing that there's an entire line of Mac laptops that covers all their needs.

As opposed to like, oh, I was going to buy a laptop, but that company only makes one. And I'm worried about getting entrenched in the Apple ecosystem considering they only make one laptop. And what if my needs ever don't fit within that one laptop? Doesn't make you confident.

You have to diversify your product lines. We've talked about how diversified should they be with respect to the iPhone, how many iPhones is enough iPhones to cover the market, and the same thing with Macs or whatever. But the answer is never.

just make the one or two that are the most popular. Even if every single one except for the one or two most popular loses money, you should still do it because overall you'll make more money by having a full featured product line that gives people confidence. speaking of the macbook air the m4 macbook air has a new mute button icon uh the f10 key instead of being the outline of a speaker

it's now the outline of a speaker with a slash through it. And I may sound like I'm snarking, but actually I do think this is an improvement. This is better. Yeah, definitely an improvement. I very frequently find myself having to double take a second glance because I have the same keycaps on my keyboard. I think all the Apple ones do.

to make a second glance to see like the f11 has got the little the little sound wave coming out distinguishing you know so anyway hopefully this is a trend that will ripple across all of their keyboards but uh yeah good improvement Yep, it gets my stamp of approval. Alright, with regard to the quote-unquote Hydra chip and ATP 562, do you have a dragon? Apparently we discussed and linked to, I do remember actually this interview, a Johnny Cerugi interview from July 2023.

in which he was asked in so many words, what are the next challenges and processors that Apple should tackle to get to the real next generation of processors? His answer, after disclaiming about future products and blah, blah, blah, was basically one of the things that is going to be important is packaging. So this relates to the Hydra HIDRA chip.

Because some people think that it should be pronounced Hydra. And then people like to remind you that the mythical beast, the Hydra from mythology, is a multi-headed creature that I think if you cut off one of the heads to grow back or whatever.

Oh, doesn't this sound like packaging is interesting. Multi-headed beast. M4 Extreme chip is not going to be an M4 Ultra for the Mac Pro. Could use one of TSMC's various new technologies for... doing what AMD calls chiplets or whatever, various like multiple independently manufactured chips combining into a larger thing for a super mega chip for the Mac Pro. That all sounds well and good, and I'm certainly rooting for the, uh, M4 Extreme type thing to come in the Mac Pro.

But I don't actually know if H-I-D-R-A is an alternate spelling of the mythical Hydra, because that Hydra is with an H-Y every place that I've seen it. And also... there is at least one thing called H-I-D-R-A which is an island in Norway or something so codenames are weird this this codename could be about the island in norway it could be about the multi-headed beast it could be an intentionally misspelled version of the multi-headed beast or it could be something else entirely

uh but i just want to throw that out there because so many people said you dummy hydra it's a multi-headed beast m4 extreme confirmed i hope you're right but i don't know if the codename has anything to do with Yep. Alright, Mark Gurman writes with regard to the M4 Ultra and Hydra, Apple's Ultra processors have always been developed by fusing two Max chips together to double the performance across the system.

That requires a so-called UltraFusion interconnect system. The M3 Max has that feature, while the M4 Max does not. Let's pause a second here. This is the second thing that I've read, one translated for French, that is flat-out stated. that the M4 Max does not have an intraposer on it. What are they basing this on? Does Gurman have a de-lidded M4 Max that he's looking at? Does someone have die shots of the M4 Max that shows it's not there?

I don't know. It's frustrating me that this has just been, and now it's just like asserted as truth. And second, the M4 Max has it? Last time I saw any die shots of the M3 Max, sorry, the M3 Max, any die shots of the M3 Max, it was in the context of a story of someone saying, hey, look, no Interposer on the M3 Max.

And again, I said, did they just crop the picture and it's there or is it not there? No answer. Please. I wish I could fix this myself. I can't. I don't have these chips. I don't have the equipment. I can't do it. Somebody out there. And I Google search for it so much, but just try Google searching for M3 space MAX. Die shot like but just it's impossible. I can't it's all just So much garbage in the search results. I can't find it anywhere. So please.

I would love for someone to actually determine if any of this is true. Garmin, you can't just say the M4 Max doesn't have an intraposer. Did Apple confirm that? Then tell me that Apple confirmed it to you. And again, I will reiterate, even if the M4 Max doesn't have an intraposer, maybe the M3 Max didn't either. but when they manufactured the ones they're gonna do for the ultra they put it on there because it's a different chip because it's got thunderbolt 5 and all sorts of other stuff anyway

This just annoys me. So, sorry. Continue. Garmin continues, though I previously speculated that Apple might have used the M3 Ultra to differentiate from a future M4 Ultra Mac Pro, That now seems less likely given the lack of UltraFusion development. An M3 Ultra refresh for the Mac Pro or a future M5 Ultra, if that generation gets this interconnect capability, is more plausible.

The main benefits of the Mac Pro are PCIe expandability and extra ports, hardly enough to be a true differentiator for 99.99% of people. Apple knows this and its marketing team was dismayed when a higher end extreme chip with double the performance of the ultra processors was nixed years ago. That would have given the premium price more of a justification. I like the idea of the marketing team at Apple.

having so much influence over the company and sway over the products that it's a disappointment that there was no good chip in the Mac Pro could actually influence product design. And that may sound ridiculous if you're from a company where you're like, well, we make the product and the marketing team sells it.

But my vague impression with the little knowledge I have about inside of Apple is that actually the marketing team or the product marketing team is surprisingly powerful within the company. So I really hope this is true. I really hope the marketing team was dismayed. I was dismayed. A lot of people were dismayed. I hope the marketing team's like, how are we going to sell this? It's a Mac Mini in a giant case. And everyone just shrugs. So again, fingers crossed.

M4 Extreme, that made everybody say 20. What did you call it last week, Marco? A breakout box for the studio? It's not even a breakout box. It's in the same box. Yeah, it's a PCI Express enclosure for the Mac studio. I mean, a PCI Express hotel. Certainly, if the plan is indeed for the Mac Pro to get some kind of extreme chip that the studio doesn't get or can't fit or whatever, That would kind of explain, because when you look at the Mac Pro now, It does kind of look like a seat filler.

it's like this this is a role that apple wants to ostensibly wants to keep serving And here is a computer that sort of serves it. That exists and is not Intel. Right. Which is an important feature. It sort of serves this role. But like it does kind of like the current Mac Pro. does not differentiate itself enough from Mac Studio, except for a very, very, very small market of people who

happen to use PCI slots, but not GPUs in those PCI slots. That is a market, but it's not a very big market. And so if they also... are able to have a bigger extreme chip that could then presumably also not only have better performance and maybe better GPU grunt, but also presumably could address more RAM and have higher resource ceilings, more Thunderbolt bandwidth, and all the other things that you get from having more of these chips.

that would help differentiate it because then people like John who just need a bunch of processor or GPU grunt who won't fill the PCI slots.

um you know that becomes served and now there's only one john and even he wouldn't buy this because it'll probably be 25 000 but there's like scientific computing there's AI research and training and stuff like that where like if anything where you're working with huge amounts of memory huge data sets big throughput like There are industries and uses for what would be a theoretical extreme quad chip and the resources that would presumably go along with it. These are not massive markets.

But they're profitable and certainly... Apple itself would probably use them. So there's lots of reasons for them to make a computer like that. And again, it does seem like the current Mac Pro is basically a benchwarmer waiting for a better one to come out that is more differentiated above the studio.

if that is the case granted this is wishful thinking you know this is wish wishful rumor casting like we or wish casting as people people call it like we want this to be true so it kind of makes us believe the rumors more but i do hope

that the mac pro isn't just what we see today i hope that they do actually make the extreme version at some point and maybe not every cpu generation you know we'll see about that um i will say though When it comes to that performance, when we get into the next item about the M3 Ultra benchmark,

I'm a little concerned. Actually, before we go into that, I just want to say that it's not just wishcasting. It is the thing that often gets us into trouble when it comes to the Mac Pro because it is like, yes, people want this and it's, you know, desirability or whatever. But the real downfall is like, well, how would what Apple is doing make any sense if not for X?

And that leads you to things like this kind of hope, because, for example, why in the world would they not revise the Mac Pro with the M3 Ultra at the same time as the studio? It only makes sense. The only reason they wouldn't do that is because...

You know, based on what they said, there might not be an Ultra in every generation. There's not going to be an M4 Ultra. They're not revising the Mac Pro at the same time as the studio. Therefore, it only makes sense that the Mac Pro is not getting the M3 Ultra. and it's not getting the M4 Ultra because Apple has hinted that doesn't exist.

m4 extreme wwc confirmed right and yet when we do that and try to try to make sense of what apple has said and what they have done very often we find ourselves foiled by like oh here we are wwc 25 and guess what they just announced the new mac pro with the m3 ultra

And then we'll all just smack ourselves in the forehead and say, but that doesn't make any sense. And Apple will be like, The things they've been doing with the Mac Pro have not made a lot of sense recently, and so we have to be careful not to fall into that trap of

because that's just that's you know i'll be there in my belief cert if they put a mac pro with m3 ultra months after the studio got the m3 ultra like what in the world is the point what are they even doing but anyway yes m3 ultra benchmarks next time Right, so this is from Geekbench 6. I'm happy to read off all these numbers and whatnot. I can characterize it for you.

Right, so here's the deal. So I've looked these things up. Now, some caveats to start. This is super early. I don't know if people even have the M3 Ultra Studio now. I think the embargo's lifted, but I think a few people have them. But anyway. The thing about Geekbench, it's just a benchmark. Anyone can submit scores to it. Very early in the life of any model of computer, there are few reported scores. At the time I gathered these numbers, there was only a handful.

of purported M3 Ultra scores being reported. You get the app and it reports your scores over the network to their server, right?

um when they show the scores for computers they've been out for a while they're showing an average which i would argue is also maybe not the best because people could like super cool and overclock them and throw off the average and do all sorts of weird stuff but anyway uh That's why in some cases we have multiple scores here for like, here's the best score I could find for this, and here's the average score of the few ones they have attached.

there so and then the final caveat is of course how how exactly representative is geekbench of anything that you care about and we'll link it in the show notes to an artist technical article they try to do a few more different benchmarks try to be more representative, but here's the upshot. In GPU, which honestly is the main thing I was looking at the M3 Ultra for, because

The number of CPU cores isn't that different. The cores themselves are M2 versus M3. It's not that big of a deal. But in GPU, maybe they've done something big here. And based on the Metal scores, and Metal is the API you care about if you're in the Apple world, it is 10% faster than the M2 Ultra.

than the M2 Ultra's Max Studio's best score, and it's 20% faster than the M2 Ultra's average score. So, you know, the M2 Ultra's Max Studio's been out for ages, so the average is probably accurate, but I wanted to give it the best chance here. The M2 Ultra's best score is within 10% of the M3 Ultra. The M2 Ultra Max Studio was released in June 2023.

so here we are in 2025 and apple's releasing a computer that is 10 to 20 faster in gpu that's not a big boost in that many years right it's not encouraging especially since you can get more metal score at the very least by just putting in more GPU Maybe it was a cooling issue. Maybe it's literally a die size issue because they really are running up against the radical limit even when doing the two maxes stuck together type of thing.

But it seems like only a month or two ago when we were talking on the show about all these people have these grand fantasies of Apple putting out a GPU that's going to rival a 4090 and stuff, and instead they put out a GPU that is a low double-digit percentage faster than the one they put out in 2023.

extremely disappointing. Still, people will say, and they're right in that regard, well, it's actually extremely expensive to try to get something with this much GPU power with fast access to 512 gigs of RAM, right? And that is true. But... It's just further narrowing the use case and making, you know, as if I wasn't attracted to the M3 Ultra anyway, but certainly if you're buying this thinking, well, I just want to get the best GPU Apple sells, this is it.

but it's not the best by much. Extremely disappointing. And then the single core score, of course, is not great. 10% faster than the M2 Ultra. Again, the 2023 computer. 20% slower than the M4 Max. that's not a small number single core is i mean we know that like we know the m4 is amazing in single core we know this uses m3 cores it is what it is uh and then in multi-core 24 faster than the m2 ultra 24% since 2023 and multi-core yeah nine percent faster in multi-core than the m4 max

9% faster than the max of the current generation. That's supposed to be half the chance. It's not half the chance because it's two M3 maxes for the M3 Ultra. it's not it's not great in multi-car like if he's like well if you want the fastest multi-car you gotta get the m3 ultra yeah by nine percent now One, I will say one more time.

Geekbench is not reality. Geekbench is a benchmark. Benchmarks are not particularly representative. If you look at the Ars Technic article, you will find some real-world things that can do much better than that. You'll find some real-world things that can do much worse. So as always, If you care about how long it takes to do a thing, export a final cut project, do text-to-speech, run an AI model, do those things, measure those things, and say, how much faster is it and how much am I getting?

M3 Ultra. does not look like a particularly compelling upgrade from the M2 Ultra, and the M4 Max Max Studio looks really attractive, unless you really need that extra 10-20% GPU, and that extra 9% of multicore. And if you don't get that, you get 20% faster single core. So, yeah. M4 forever. Yeah, it seems like the Ultra here, again, what I was saying earlier, the Ultra is really about

the other higher RAM limits, more Thunderbolt bandwidth. If those kinds of things are what's holding your work back, then maybe this is for you. Otherwise, like, look, you know, if there's a way for me to spend money to get more performance, I will often be prone to that. I would not in a million years choose the Ultra for my need.

because the Max is actually doing a better job. It would be better for my needs by a mile, and it would cost half as much on the processor. But again, it's hard to say there's nobody who this is for, but...

This is not probably for people for whom... cpu performance is critical like this is probably mostly for people who need more ram or maybe who need that extra gpu but again the gpu does not compare that well Because, you know, also what we're seeing, and this is kind of what worries me about the rumors about the Mac Pro getting an extreme, you know, quote, extreme chip with, you know, double the Ultra or whatever.

these chips don't seem to be scaling that well past the max core counts. We've seen this from all the generations so far that have gotten the Ultra chip. Or was there an M1 Ultra? Yeah, there was. I was going to say that when you were talking about the other thing. Even though you said quad and we keep talking about it in that context.

I continue to think and hope, I thought this was what the M3 Ultra was going to be, but I continue to think that they're better off making a chip that is bigger and badder than the Max and putting two of those together, rather than trying to put four of anything together.

Because they've never been able to do it. And you're right. If their overhead's killing them on the two-chip ones, and it was killing them on some of the earlier two-chip ones, there's a reason they didn't do the four, right? So I'm just hoping they make two really big chips. and stick them together rather than trying to take four of any of the existing chips.

Yeah, because as we're seeing, we saw this with all the Ultra so far, the Ultra being two maxes stuck together does not give you twice the performance. On the GPU it sometimes can come close. On the CPU it's way off. um and because again like there's there's different bottlenecks there's different trade-offs there's different

Things don't scale perfectly because they're complicated, and that's not how things work. And they screwed up the GPU, so the GPU gets close. I forget which generation. One of the generations, they actually screwed up the GPU part real bad, and it was way worse than it needed to be. I think that was the M1 where they messed it up and they fixed it in the M2. Yeah, there's all these different bandwidths and caches and things that just make it more complicated than just doubling everything.

what you're getting is you get twice the cost, at least, on the manufacturing side. Certainly the retail price reflects definitely twice the cost. But you're not getting twice the performance, and in many cases you're getting a lot less than twice the performance. So it does seem like, again, you will know if you need this.

And odds are, if you don't know that you need this, you don't need this. If you're not hitting the RAM limits on your maxed out max chip uh computer you probably don't need this if you're not like absolutely maxing out the gpu total speed all the time you probably don't need this like this is this is for certain people

Not for us. And if you just want a really fast, general-purpose computer, An M4 Max-based computer is most likely going to give you a better and possibly even faster overall performance. whether that's the macbook pro or the mac studio you can have it in both and it seems to be the same chip in both and that's great so you want a laptop that's the fastest computer for you great you want a desktop version you have that option too uh you want one with slots too bad but

But right now, the M4 Max is the place to be. And the M3 Ultra is for almost no one. We are sponsored this episode by BetterHelp. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. And it's super convenient. You can just join a session with a click of a button, which helps you fit therapy into your busy life. And if your therapist is not working out, you can switch therapists easily at any time.

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So a few years ago now, on March 10th of 2022, there was an exchange that was had on this very program on episode 473. Sandboats and Coattails, and I believe Marco is going to play that exchange right now. Eventually, the iMac screen is going to be larger than 24 inches, and when it does, the 27-inch iMac will come back. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying that tomorrow there's going to be a 27-inch iMac, despite this hole in the lineup or whatever.

it's just the 24 like it went up from 21 the low on iMac used to be 21 so they made 24 which is a nice in-between size and keep it but eventually two or three years from now they're gonna be like 24 really everyone else is so much bigger and they'll they'll work their way back up to 27. and 5K. You really just infinite timescaled us on this? I'm going to say within three years there'll be a 27K.

You really just finite timescaled us on this? Alright, that's the bet. Three years from now, I'll bet it's my one dollar bet. All right, so it's been three years. Yeah, for all the people who sent this in by Mastodon on other means, Don't you all know I have this on my calendar? I think I put it on the calendar on that show. I always put this on my calendar because I would never remember them otherwise. Yeah, I should have gone with five years. I should have stuck to my instincts.

Double or nothing? Double or nothing? Yeah, I was going to ask. So here's the thing. Here's the other thing that I didn't think about when we were making that. So first of all, I still say, that they're going to make a larger iMac for the reason I was trying to articulate in that clip, which is like, look, even if they never add a larger iMac to the line,

The one and only iMac that exists, assuming the iMac continues to exist at all as a product, which is not guaranteed, but continuing to exist at all, that one and only iMac will itself get bigger just as it got bigger from 21 inch to 24. But my three-year timeline was not asking for that. My three-year timeline was saying they're going to add a bigger IMF. Here's what I didn't anticipate.

is close enough to being a monitor that you've got to add the gigantic Apple monitor timescale modifier to all of the calculations, which means Apple producing a new screen? That only happens once every 15 years or whatever, so... Yeah, I blew it. It's three years have gone by. There's no bigger iMac. And honestly, I would not double or nothing for an additional two years. Because that's how... I mean, since then, what has happened with the Mac Studio display? Not anything.

what has happened with the xdr nothing what has happened with the imac very little So I still think there will be one, but I don't think it will be in two years. And so just, I mean, I hope we don't have to wait until the 24 inch just to become, you know. Inconvenient and inexpensive and they hold like a 25 or a 26 inch just like kind of like bumped up from so I hope we don't have to wait that long

But related to that, ever since Apple came out with the 24-inch and then said to everybody who would listen, we're totally not making 27-inch, so buy this 24. No sense waiting for 27. We're not going to make it. We're not doing it. Buy the 24. right which is true they didn't make a 27 you should have bought the 24 right but ever since then shortly after that there have been persistent rumors about a larger imac which has been frustrating to me in this bet uh so german in august 2024

Says, a larger iMac remains something Apple is exploring as well, but it's unclear if that will be an M4 product or something that comes the following year or later. Yeah, February 2025. From German again. Apple will also probably eventually get around offering a larger iMac. I just want to reread that beautiful piece of German prose again. Apple will also... No, sorry, I screwed it up. I'm adding my own thing to it. Let me try again.

Apple also will probably eventually get around to offering a larger screen iMac. At least the hyphenated larger screen. Although, that's debatable. Golly, that's bad. Like, the rumors of larger IMAX have never gone away. And not just, like, vague, wishful thinking, but, like, from people like Gurman who usually have sources. And yet, one has not shipped, so Marco gets $1.

Yep. Which I can apply towards the price of the iMac that I bought a month ago for the restaurant. What color was that one? Green. See? There you go. I would just like to point out that the Pro Display XDR, which, well, from what I gather from U2, still a very good monitor, Release date, as per Wikipedia, 10th of December 2019, which was almost 2,000 days ago. And if you made a dollar a day since then, you could buy less than half of one.

You can buy two stands. John, I think our long national nightmare may be over with regard to threads and your timeline setting. Can you tell me more about this? More digging back from the archives. As discussed on ATP 616, I have no grippers, which was actually a reference to this very thing.

The Verge reported on November 25, 2024, that, quote, threads will now let users decide what feed they want to be their default when opening the app. And I was complaining on that show that they announced this as if it's like a feature. Here we go. You asked for it and you got it.

and I didn't get it. It's like, oh, we're rolling this out to people. You'll probably get it eventually, and I've been patiently waiting and launching the ThreadZap and looking for my little grippers, which are the little three lines that let you know that you can drag reorder. the order of the feeds and you just put the one you want the following feed on the top and it becomes your default feed.

so that every single time you launch the threads app it doesn't revert you back to the feed you don't want to see you can change the default they announced that in november 2024 as if it's just a thing but it wasn't a thing it was a thing in an article it was a thing that some people have but it was not a thing that i so exactly 100 days later on march 5th 2025 I got the feature. The grippers. I've been checking. The grippers were there. I'm like, yay, I can rotate it up.

I don't use threads as much as the other services, so it's not that big of a deal. But I was just annoyed that they announced this feature as if it was a thing they did, and it just totally wasn't. And that was going to be the story, except for that was on March 5th. Today is March 12th, and I just looked at my Threads app and the grippers are gone.

Oh no. Other people are texting me and sending me images and saying, hey, look, I got it too. It's rolling out for everybody. It did roll out to me for seven days and now it's gone. that's so cruel that's so stupid like look are you going to honor my preferences or not

Are you going to always put me on the thing I don't want to see because you think that's better for engagement or whatever the hell? Or are you just going to let me put it the way I want? And they just can't decide how much study does this feature need.

Either let me pick what my default feed is or don't. But don't pretend like you're letting people pick and then just like randomly haphazardly roll it out. Like, are they just making sure it's not going to destroy their business to allow people to have a preference setting? Finally, for follow-up this week, we got some feedback with regard to mostly me popping off about feedback in the Apple world. This is formerly known as Radar. We got...

Fairly long piece of feedback from an anonymous person, but I'd like to read it because I think there's a lot of good stuff here. This person writes, I was an Apple engineer for almost two decades and a third-party Apple developer for more than a decade. I heard Casey's rant against Apple's feedback assistant, and I can sympathize. As a third-party developer, I also got the impression that my bug reports were ignored. Let me tell you what it's like to be an Apple engineer.

So, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then come third-party bugs. During beta season, I may be assigned hundreds of bugs each week. Obviously, I can't possibly fix that many, so I triage. Well-written bug reports with clear instructions to reproduce the problem are first.

If you've attached a small Xcode project that demonstrates the bug, even better. Unfortunately, there are lots of bugs without a clear problem, description, or instructions on how to reproduce it. Even worse, are bugs so poorly written I can't even understand what's wrong? Unfortunately, these bugs will probably be ignored.

all right so so far i think this makes sense i mean that's not what i want to hear but there's only but so much time in a day and in a week and you do the things that you think are the easiest to accomplish fair enough all right so back to the anonymous person If I have a question for the developer, I'm prohibited from just contacting them. I have to send the question to Apple Developer Support. They contact the developer and eventually send me the reply.

But I have occasionally contacted developers directly for people I know. Multiple reports of the same bug are grouped together. The clearest is tagged as the original bug. The rest are listed as duplicate. Okay, this is fine. Duplicates are like votes. Oh, God. Duplicates are like votes. This is an important bug. A bug with hundreds of duplicates is important since lots of people are hitting it.

I'm supposed to fix high priority bugs first. Crashes and data loss are the highest priority, then features that don't work, eventually working your way down to annoying malfunctions and UI glitches. The problem is many annoying but non-serious bugs don't get fixed this way. So experienced engineers also work on the most annoying non-serious bugs.

We also use Apple products and we want them to work well. Bugs reported during the official beta period have the highest chance of being fixed since I'm supposed to be fixing third-party bug reports. The rest of the year, I'm assigned to work on new features in next year's release, not old bugs in last year's release. I mean, this stands to reason, given Apple's behavior, but off.

One thing that drives me crazy is Apple ignoring old bugs. New features get lots of attention and their bugs are fixed. New bugs that appear in old features' regressions are also fixed. but bugs that have existed for years are ignored. If a bug somehow slips through QA and ships, the system ignores it. There's no incentive for engineers or teams to go back and fix old bugs.

Stupendous. None of this is surprising. And some of it I genuinely do get, especially working at the vast volume that Apple works at. Woof! Having basically zero incentive to go back and fix things that are broken, that's not a great look. It stands to reason, given behavior, but it's not a great look.

when people do stuff like this it's like they're explaining like you don't understand this is the situation it's like all you're doing is explaining from a different side the exact same problem we're both saying it's bad but you're trying to like it's trying to say like on the outside we think it's terrible on the inside it's like well here's all the reasons like yeah those are the reasons it's terrible

Those are not justifications for it being terrible. And nor are they unmovable, intractable things that can never change and therefore it must be terrible. And the reason we know that it doesn't have to be terrible is because other companies do similar things at, yes, similar volumes, and they do it better. There are companies that get more customer support feedback than Apple does, you know, in industries where that is more common, right? There are companies that also have technical platforms.

It is possible to do this better, as evidenced by this big explanation of all of the dysfunction that's going on inside the company. If you fix some of that dysfunction, then it won't be as terrible. That's what we're saying. And I'm not saying that this anonymous feedback is trying to justify it or whatever. Because sometimes people do get indignant and say, you don't understand.

It has to be that way because reasons X, Y, and Z. I don't think that's what this person is saying. I think they actually are just giving a different perspective. Like, here's how terrible it looks on the inside of the company as well. But yeah. The only thing that needs to change about making this better is someone inside Apple in a position of power needs to decide that is something they want to improve.

and actually put resources towards it. And thus far, that has not happened to a large enough degree to really make a big impact. All right. I think we only have time for one topic today because this is likely to be a doozy. And this is a report from Bloomberg from the 10th as we're sitting here now. It is the 12th.

This is a report from Bloomberg. Like I said, I believe this was Garmin. And they write, Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company's history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a new generation of users. The revamp will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple's various software platforms more consistent.

That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons. As part of the push, the company is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro software. The changes are coming as part of iOS 19 and iPadOS 19, codenamed Lucky.

and Mac OS 16, which is codenamed, excuse me, which is dubbed Cheer. They go well beyond a new design language and aesthetic tweaks. The software will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac, upgrade is doing a lot of work there, to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020.

For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013. A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple's different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Still, Apple is stopping short of merging its operating systems a step other tech giants have taken. The company believes it can make better Macs and iPads by keeping their operating systems

So there's a little bit of editorializing in there. And I know on a recent episode, we talked about the potential for an iOS 19 overhaul to look like Vision OS. But at the time we were discussing that, it was purely in the context of... Does iOS need an overhaul? Is it going to look like Vision Pro? Is it going to look like the... imitation app or whatever this news story This week is something so much more than that, because making a change to the visual look of iOS...

19 would be significant especially if it's like you know looking like the vision pro or glass or crew or whatever but this this and the story is not just government other people have had this story as well i don't know if they're just parroting him or have their own sources but this is like an overhaul of the look and feel of all of Apple's major platforms, the iOS, the Mac, and the iPad.

uh to and again i don't know how much of this is gourmet editorializing with the goal of making them more consistent with each other or having more of a family resemblance Let's do a little, you know, Germanology here and say, what do we think about this sentence?

What is it? The update includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons. And with the fundamental change, the look of operating systems to make the software platforms more consistent, right? Icons, menus, apps, windows. How? how in the world could you make the look of icons menus apps and windows consistent across the phone the ipad and the mac let's talk about icons icons on the mac And on the iPad. And on the phone.

are already i mean am i wrong they're already consistent they're squircle We talked about the squircle. They're squares with rounded corners. No, no, no, not on Vision Pro. On Vision OS, they're all circles. Right, I didn't say Vision Pro. I just listed the ones German listed. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Fair enough. And icons also includes

like the design of the symbols within the icons, which they've already made consistent. SF symbols. Right. They do a really good, there's a huge library of consistently styled icons that they expand all the time when Apple designs their own icons that are not in SF symbols. they also match that style so already icons are pretty consistent you know what you're talking about is the app launch icons but like

Even those, you're right, are already mostly the same across most platforms. Yeah, are they saying that the male icon on the Mac has to be literally Pixel or Pickles as the male icon on the phone and the iPad? I mean, maybe it already is pretty close, but like... so there's that windows the phone doesn't even really have windows it's got sheets and cards and whatever but it really doesn't have windows the ipad Kinda sorta has Windows, but not really.

so i'm you know i'm not quite sure what they're aiming at there uh menus again the mac has a menu bar the other operating systems do not but they both have kind of pop-up menu things and those things do look a little bit different I can't tell. This story is so insistent that the goal of this is to sort of unify and make them more consistent with each other. I can't tell if that is a real thing or not.

right it's not like sources i think i cut out most of the people said or whatever i can see them in any kind of redesign any kind of like cross os redesign I can see someone looking at it and saying, oh, it looks like one of the goals of this redesign was to make the platforms look more similar to each other. But I feel like if you do any redesign, of course there's going to be...

The redesign will span multiple operating systems. The same ideas will appear in all of them. I don't think that means they're trying to make them look more like each other. I just think it means if you do all three at once, of course there's going to be a family resemblance. So, anyway, I can't tell how big the consistency angle is, and that is one of the things that I'm going to be looking at if this story turns out to be true.

Was the consistency angle just someone looking at it and saying, oh, they all look similar because they were all redesigned at the same time? Or is Apple going to get up on stage and say, we really felt...

It was very confusing that pop-up menus on your phone look different than pull-down menus on the Mac menu bar, and users were really tripping up on that, and it was really impairing the usability and functionality of our software. So now... a pop-up menu on your phone looks exactly the same as a pull-down menu on your mac and we feel like that that makes our platforms better or

we just wanted there to be a family resemblance so the icons already looked almost exactly the same but now they literally are exactly the same and you can tint icons on your phone you can tint icons on your mac I don't know what to make of that. And then as for the circular icons, which Casey just brought up, let's just throw that out there as like a part of the doomsday scenario that we'll surely spiral into briefly. Icons on Vision Power Circle. Not squircles. Literal circles.

How can you decide with an iOS 19 release that now iOS icons on your phone are also sort of... Apple can do that because they have noticed and they can redraw all their icons so they fit in a circle. But you can't just take a third party icons and put them in a circle shape. You'll cut off half of people's icons because they don't expect that to happen.

So I don't see any way where you can have a transition to circular icons on the phone without just massive upheaval and some kind of transition period where some of them are squircles and some of them are circles. Again. To what end? People were real confused. The icons on Vision Pro are circles, but they're squircles on their phone. They had no idea what to do. No, everyone's fine. They know what an icon is. There's nothing. This reminds me of that person talking to Zini.

The thing that I put in my Mac was 10 reviews a few times from the original, like, Apple Human Interface Guidelines. There was a section of that book that emphasized an important idea in interface design using the example of extension icons for classic Mac OS. Extensions were things that could modify the system because you had no memory protections. You could do whatever you wanted anyway.

Those were extensions, and in the later versions of classic macOS, you would see the icons of the extensions that loaded during the startup process. You'd see them march across to the bottom of your screen from left to right. And the extension icon that Apple defined when they rolled out System 7 with extensions and stuff was a puzzle piece.

So, you know, just picture like a rectangle, but it's like a puzzle piece, kind of a squashed puzzle piece because you don't have that much room for the little, I don't know what you call them, the little things that stick out in little notches, but it was a puzzle piece. But the thing is, there was like four different puzzle piece icons that were possible with different arrangements of the little bulges and holes. No one was ever confused by it.

because a puzzle piece is a puzzle piece is a puzzle piece if i throw four puzzle pieces in front of you you're like well one of those is a puzzle piece but i have no idea what the other ones are like The other thing that they showed was the home icon for HyperCard. You go to the home button to go back to the home of your HyperCard stack for old people. There were seven different versions of that. They all look like little houses. Little square houses with a little triangular roof.

Again, anyone said, oh, click on the home icon, click on the little picture of the house. No one said, well, I see one picture of the house, but that other one looks different. Is that also a house? You can trust people to recognize

a bunch of different puzzle pieces, a bunch of different house icons. And yes, you can trust people to recognize this is an icon on your phone, and this is an icon in Vision Pro, and this is an icon on your iPad, and this is an icon on your Mac, even if they're not all squircles. It'll be fine. So I really hope that part of it is just family resemblance and not...

you know, everybody, I mean, we're already at everybody's squircle. Maybe they should make Vision Pro squircle. Again, this rumor doesn't mention Vision Pro at all. So I don't know what the hell, or at least not the part that I snipped out of it, but. Setting that aside... How do you feel about this OS-spanning rumor as compared to how you felt about the iOS 19 rumor? I mean, this is a much larger... So what we heard of iOS 19 earlier, and we did that after the overtime about it, It sounded like

There was that mock-up of the camera app. Was it Jon Prosser who did the mock-up? That's right. and

It sounded like, okay, well, maybe this is something that they're doing for certain apps. The point I made was that Apple has always had multiple design languages depending on the app type and there were different styles your app could be whether it was like a content viewing app or like a single view app versus a document app versus productivity app and they've always kind of had they've been juggling multiple styles

And so my thought at that time was maybe this is just a new style that they're going to, you know, add and make easy in the APIs and everything and maybe adopt for some of their app. This is a pretty bold claim that it's much bigger than that. That this is more about the default look of the UI widgets and the styles and everything. And that's a bigger thing. Now,

It sounds like echoes of iOS 7, but I think we're in a very different world now than we were back then. First of all, This is a mock- larger and more established and more entrenched world of apps now and all the stuff that runs in Apple's ecosystems is much bigger now and much more entrenched. And it's much bigger companies now having a lot of influence and a lot of usage in their apps. for Apple to do something like iOS 7 today.

I don't even think they're in a position to really do it very strongly for lots of reasons. Number one, I don't think they have the support from developers to, on a large scale, adopt a new design language. Because the small developers like us, They have done a pretty good job of straining that relationship, first of all. Number one is, we are largely, we've been strained, let's say. And they keep doing that, and that's going to keep being a thing.

with their policy decisions and behavior and everything like that. So there's already like that relationship with small developers is strained. That relationship with big company developers is not only differently and maybe more strained, but big company developers have largely not... stuck with Apple's stock look for anything. Big companies develop their own styles and their own looks for their apps, and they use them across platforms.

They want their style of their app to look the same on Android and iOS and maybe on PCs or the web or whatever the other platforms might be, but especially Android and iOS. So they are already saying like, you know what? That's nice, Apple. You have your default widget looks and whatever else. We're not going to use them or we're going to override them to look like us. So the big companies, when you think about like How would this actually play out? The big companies are going to be...

Hostile or neglectful. They're going to actively fight against it or they're going to just like never update to the new styles or whatever. So all the apps that you use on your phone from big companies like They're out. They're not going to do any of this stuff. They're going to keep doing their own stuff. Small developers like us This kind of thing is usually a pretty huge workload on us. It's a huge

requests and a huge burden to put on third-party developers when the system theme significantly changes. Because huge UI chunks of our app will not work right, will not look right. They'll have visual glitches or it won't work in the new format. And so for us to adopt it, It's a huge amount of work. oftentimes needing a pretty significant redesign of the app to adopt it. And on that front, by the way, I've seen a lot of people reacting to this story by saying,

Well, SwiftUI to the rescue because SwiftUI is declarative and you can be less precise about exactly how things look. Therefore, it'll be much easier for people who have fully adopted a SwiftUI to accommodate the new look. There is a tiny, very, very small amount of truth to that. But mostly. uh what i think marco's getting out from someone who has experience with doing this is it's not like your apple won't work

when they change the default look of everything, no matter what API you use. Unless you're really unlocking custom controls and stuff like that. But if you're along the straight and narrow, it's like, your app will work.

But when they change the default look, you have to go through every single screen, every single button, every single widget. Because anybody who actually pays attention to their app, like any developer who doesn't budget their time the same way a big company would, has tweaked everything within an inch of its life.

just even if it's just micro adjusting padding or using a particular thing because of the way it happens to look in the default widget set and it looks nicer that way when they change all the default widgets you've got to go through every single thing that appears in your app and make sure it still looks okay and good because it will like the choices you made to use

this style of picker versus that style of toggle and you're using overlay here and z stack there and background here and why did you make those choices because they make they make the best appearance and behavior with the widget set that you developed it with

and if they change all the default widgets you are going to have to go back and revisit all that stuff even if you use swift ui from top to bottom so that's that's the burden we're talking about here not that like all of a sudden my app crashes or it doesn't load or you can't hit a button anymore

it just starts to look like this was clearly developed with a different widget set because it was what this does to the developer community is it just drops a huge bomb this will be all we can do this year with our apps that's what because like what happens is When Apple does a new theme, usually what happens is if you... don't build with a new SDK. So if your app that's not updated yet in the store,

will continue running on the old theme. So people will launch your app, and if you haven't built it with a new SDK, which you can't do usually until the week before release for public, and maybe for Testify you can do it a little bit earlier, but anything built with the old SDK will still look old.

Did that happen with iOS 7, by the way? I don't remember. I think so, yeah. But then what will then happen is all of your users when they update their phones, which might be day one with the beta, or at least it'll be certainly in the fall when the OS releases. Your app will look very, very old to them.

and they will complain. First of all, they'll accuse you of being abandoned, and you'll start getting one-star reviews. And as I learned last summer, one-star reviews in small numbers, okay, that's life. In big numbers, that can destroy your business. That can be a pretty substantial your business on fire problem. So what developers have to do when the system theme changes like this?

see also when dark mode was added that was a smaller version but of a similar thing we have to address that with our app we have to adopt it because the reviews will kill us if we don't and they'll kill us starting on day one at large scale and even before that we'll start getting killed in the summer during the betas but we will get killed if we aren't there with the new redesign

So it's imperative. This is not like some optional thing we can adopt at our leisure or if we like it or not. We have to do it. And what that means, that's such a huge thing. It's so big because it touches potentially every screen, every control. That means that we really can't do any other features this fall. That's why it's such a huge burden. It's an incredibly expensive lever for Apple to pull. Keep in mind also...

It is similarly expensive for Apple, for all of their apps, all of their software, all of their UI. So if this is true, This is a huge deal for the software community both inside Apple and for all of us outside of Apple. And it has to really be worth it. like because it's so again it's it puts such a burden it's so expensive and that will mean that All of the other features that we might want to add this fall are not going to happen. That's how I can't possibly express enough.

how much of a burden this plays on the community you see this because if you recall with the previous big reason with ios 7 It took a long time before a lot of the apps on your phone, or before most of the apps on your phone were translated over. And in fact, apps that are not made by enthusiasts and that don't care how many one-star reviews they have,

often never get updated. Like, you know, the app for my mixer at the restaurant, that doesn't even work in landscape mode. That's never going to get updated for it. Never. Like, there's not a chance. How many apps on your phone are there that are just part of some hardware that you bought or for your dentist's booking software or whatever? None of that stuff's ever going to get updated.

you enter this era of just like transitional crappy user experiences that are kind of blended old world new world or they can force the new theme on all the old apps that aren't updated, which will break them all. So there's no... I don't know if it'll break them all, but visually they might look...

unexpected, let's say. I don't think it'll literally break most things. A new look will just cause things to look extremely awkward. Maybe some text will be truncated, especially if they try to keep the metrics the same. I want to recall back to something that you said, Marco, on I think a show or two ago, which I think people might be remembering and thinking that it conflicts with what you're saying, but it actually doesn't.

You had mentioned how iOS 7 was a gift to you when you were developing Overcast because it was so much simpler and required less like pixel perfect, you know, photorealistic artistic skills and more just to be able to work with like text and white space and solid colors and stuff. That was a gift to you because you were in the midst of developing an application that was not out yet. Yes. It's a different situation when you already have an app.

and they pull the rug out from under you and change the look of every single thing. So you built your app based on the widget set from iOS whatever you were doing when you developed it, and now here comes iOS 19 and everything looks different.

That's going to be true of this redesign as well. It will actually be an advantage for people who are just starting their app at the right moment because they will be the first to be able to adopt this look and feel because they don't they're not converting a legacy app they're like they're there from day one they hop right on board their app is designed with this look in mind from the start It is optimized and tweaked and made to look correct with the iOS 19 widget set, right?

And everybody who has an older app has to go and convert theirs and decide, oh, what do I do with this screen? I pick this because... in the old look this looked best but the new one it doesn't look good at all do i have to use do i have to add another screen can i use a different widget here can i use a sheet instead of this thing like

Like, that's true of any of these changes. And what you said before, Marko, is so true. And what I keep saying with, to what end? Like, if you're going to make a big change like this, why? What is the benefit on the other side of this pain, right? What is it that is about your systems that demands this kind of overhaul?

and this is where we kind of get a little bit into the spiraling, but before we get to that, which I will soon, I first want to say the tiny optimistic part of this story for me personally. and that is that I have been unhappy with the direction that the macOS UI has been going in for many years now. We've talked about system settings many times. I'm currently making an app using a bunch of the new SwiftUI and macOS widgets.

and buttons and controls and forms and labels and text fields and all the things, right? And I don't think they're an improvement over what AppKit looked like a decade ago. I think they're worse. I think they're uglier. I think they don't work as well. so on the mac the answer should be the question to what end Could be, in best case scenario, hey, all those things you don't like about how the Mac is looking and working? Now is an opportunity to fix that.

to say we're going in the wrong direction we shouldn't have text fields with no borders with right align text in the passwords right like the the toggle switches and settings and labels 20 yards away from there are the things that they're labeling that's not good Let's come up with a better look for that. Let's just make some more contrast and more visual hierarchy and not just have everything to be dark gray everywhere.

On the Mac, there is, I think, a need, a problem that needs to be solved. That the current notion of modern Mac OS UI is ugly and works worse than it used to. That's my optimistic take. you know i i don't think ios and ipad os are dying for a you know ui overall and obviously it's so much more important than the phone because it's such a more popular platform but the mac kind of has felt at sea for a while now with

Any new eye they were allowed basically being met by the Mac's biggest fans with either a shrug or a frown. Whereas in the early days of, especially the early days of Mac OS X, Aqua had everybody jazzed, even though it had tons of detractors as well, but it was certainly exciting. And over the years, they have refined the Mac interface. And there were good years and bad years. Sometimes the dock was really shiny. Sometimes it wasn't.

Sometimes they added stitched leather to the calendar app. But there's been ups and downs, but always I feel like we're driving on a winding road towards improvement, except for in the last, let's say, five to ten years where... a bunch of even just forgetting the widgets a bunch of things that happened like do you remember I don't even remember which OS update this was we already established that we can't remember the names of the OS's but I think long time Mac users will

have this feeling that it used to be easier to tell which window was active, which window was in front. Like, they made an OS change where, like,

The front window was not as much more prominent than the windows behind it. Like, they used to, you know, in the old days, they'd have, like, the windows would be the background windows would be lighter and the front window would be darker sometimes the foreground window would have more detail than the background windows the foreground window has always had a bigger shadow and still does but they made some changes in recent years

that really just kind of flattens out the UI a little bit and makes Foreground and background windows look much more like each other. They have taken away borders on things, things like text fields. There are things in the macOS UI that you can't tell are controls in sort of an iOS 7 style. There are UI problems to be solved on the Mac. And in theory, this could be a way to fix them. Now it's time to spiral.

How much confidence do we have that literally anything they do to any of these operating systems will be an improvement? Yeah, that, so... The bigger concern for me is what they have demonstrated on the Mac for the last decade or whatever. Or pick any platform, really. No, but especially... The Mac, I think, is the most in danger with this because what they have shown with the Mac is that they currently do not have

enough resources devoted to the Mac, or possibly enough talent left in the company. Enough expertise. They don't know what to do. Yeah, like, what we've seen is that whenever they change the Mac UI recently... it's usually worse. Yes. And when you see something like the new settings app, you're like, okay, this was a dramatic redesign that happened recently.

and it's awful like there's so many things about that are that are unintuitive ugly broken like it's just like outright just awful and especially since it did achieve some of its design goals which is to make an interface that scales better with more settings like

I think they have achieved that, but every other aspect of the redesign is bad. Like, congratulations, you made a scalable system for adding more settings that is more scalable than hand-tweaking every single screen, but literally everything else about it is worse than it was before. Right. So when you think of a redesign happening, it's not the people who made the Mac what we love. It's the people who made the settings app. It's those people redesigning.

the entire os like that's what we are going for here yeah so now think about i'm picturing in my mind's eye a new consistent, forget about it whether it looks like Vision OS with like glassy things on iOS, but like a new consistent thing and all I picture in my mind looking at my Mac screen is title bars that have even fewer features and less contrast title bars that are bigger

menu bars and title bars that are just bigger and featureless expanses of white and light gray. Like, you know what a pop-up menu looks like on the phone? Whatever that thing is where it shows like a rounded rectangle with the lines through it. My pull-down menus from the menu bar look like that. Huge amounts of white space around each thing.

the check boxes and radio buttons are gone everything is a toggle switch like for consistency because people are confused they're not confused like that's what i see like Because if you take iOS or iPadOS and make the Mac look like that, it is not an improvement. It is worse. And that's what I fear. I fear so badly. Well, and in fact, Apple's own marketing department and statements have been made. Craig Federighi, like,

Outright stating things like we're not going to merge these OSs. And in fact, there's a rumor. Garmin still says exactly that. But if you make the designs too, quote, consistent, you are adopting design patterns for a platform that are not right for it. And that's the same reasons that we all know these platforms are not really meant to be merged, allegedly, or shouldn't be merged.

They're doing all this allegedly, and again, this is all through the German filter, so some of the details or justifications or reasons might be wrong, but... the information about them having a big redesign of this is probably right. That's based on German's track record. Yeah, and OS-spanning redesign, not just within one island. Yeah.

But what we've seen from Apple over the years, with a lot of the stuff they've done to the Mac especially, that they use that term consistency. It is a goal of theirs to make the Mac more like iOS. Not only does that not make sense, Because the design, like, they're such different systems with such different hardware and input and output methods and, you know, just information density and control designs and everything. They're so different, it makes no sense to have them be the same.

Also, I think they are being very condescending to users to suggest that we need things to be more similar, otherwise we just don't understand our computers. They're selling Macs in record numbers. People aren't confused. Like, people who buy the Mac know the Mac. Not every single person in the world understands the Mac, but not every single person in the world understands any computing platform, including iPads and iPhones.

computers when people are motivated to have to use them for work or people like them they figure them out that's what we've done over the over the decades of computers existing like people figure them out not everything is perfect not everything needs to stay the same way it is forever but people are able to learn Two different interfaces on two different devices.

And it's fine to have the Mac look and work differently than the iPhone. That's why it's a different platform. If you wanted everything to just look like iPhones, we'd all just use iPhones and nobody would even need the Mac.

so i don't want people hearing this and thinking you're saying oh people can just figure out the mac it doesn't matter that it's harder no as we said before on the ipad talking about ipad uh and stage management stuff the mac paradigm for doing what it needs to do better and easier than, for example, the iPad paradigm or the iPhone paradigm.

it is better and easier to manipulate multiple things, multiple windows, on the Mac than it is on the phone or the iPad. Obviously, it's easier than on the phone because the screen is tiny, but even on the iPad where you have a 13-inch iPad and a 13-inch MacBook Pro, Dealing with Windows and iPadOS uses an interface, appearance, and vocabulary and set of actions that is Byzantine and hard to understand.

Having to learn something new on the Mac pays dividends because that new thing you're learning is better than what you knew on the phone for dealing with multiple windows and a keyboard and trackpad and, you know. all the Mac stuff. It's not the case that the Mac is difficult and worse, but you should just suck it up. It's the case that the Mac is better than the other choices because it lets you do more powerful things with a

simple easy to understand consistent interface that by the way has been around for decades and is basically a lot of the skills that you know from windows microsoft windows transfer over for various reasons that are very similar to each other Like we have not come up with a better way.

do many things with a powerful personal computer than Windows, Menus, Pointer, blah, blah, blah. Arguably, touchscreen Macs would help with this a lot, but Apple's being stubborn there. But setting that aside and setting aside any redesign that may, you know, one of the rumors is they'll redesign macOS to be more friendly to touch. By all means, go for it. But that is a separate issue entirely from things like I just mentioned the tile switches.

Was macOS crying out for iOS-style slidey sideways toggle switches? I've seen more people confused by the iOS toggle switch control than I've ever seen people confused by a checkbox. Is it because people are old and checkboxes existed on paper forms, whereas most people didn't interact with little toggle switches unless they were dealing with audio equipment or something?

people don't always know which is the on and which is the off which is why they have the little one that says on where you can see the letters on when it's on like is blue on or is gray off or is gray like Nothing in macOS was saying, you know what the problem with macOS is? People can't figure out checkboxes. They have no idea what a checkbox means. They can't tell when it's on. They can't tell when it's off.

We need consistency. People on the iOS settings app use those little toggle switches. How about we put them on the Mac? And so here I am making a Mac app in 2025, and the settings screen in my app is filled with... iOS style toggles because that's the way Apple wants you to do things and they herd you in that direction with SwiftUI and Mac OS.

And it's not the end of the world, and again, there are some advantages to it for scalability, but it is not a thing that macOS needed. It was not crying out for it. Users were not baffled by checkboxes and radio buttons because they've been seeing them their whole life, right? and they're understandable and tractable. Ditto for buttons and for windows and title bars and pull-down menus.

These are... flexible components that could be improved upon and you can come up with maybe enhancements or ways to make them better or better window management systems and so on and so forth But the solution is not, we should get rid of all that and just use Stage Manager everywhere, because Stage Manager is not burning up the world, and these toggle switches are not appreciably making anything better. At best, they're neutral. Like, oh, I recognize these from my phone.

therefore I know how to use them but like It's not making the Mac better and more powerful. It is just sort of like visual consistency for the sake of visual consistency. Yeah, and I don't think that's a thing that people need as much as Apple designers seem to think they do. These are very different platforms. They behave very differently in lots of ways.

And I'm not saying that the Mac has no room for improvement for things that are confusing to a lot of people. That's not what I'm saying at all. There's lots of room for improvement for that. I don't think people need a different...

skin on the UI. That's not what's confusing them. What's confusing them is things like where do files go? How do I get to things? What the hell is a disk image? There's all sorts of other things. How do I find things in settings? Yeah, right. And why does half the settings app not work?

Literally, it doesn't work. So again, this is what we're talking about. We're going to have those people redesign the whole thing. We're not having, like Bruce talking to Zini here, we're having those people redesign it. Not only do I not trust them to... do a good job like i literally again because the settings app

is literally broken. Many features of it do not work. It does not work. So do we want those people redesigning the whole OS? Even if we liked their... visual concepts, which I don't think we will, but even if we like their visual concepts They have not been trustworthy to execute correctly, to make something that works. So that's a huge worry for me. And I think when you look at like what people have, how people have reacted to this rumor. It has gone over like a lead balloon.

Yeah, people are not excited about it. Not at all. And I think that shows, like, where, like, where Apple's reputation is in this department. Like, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the developer issues of, like, If they're going to drop a bomb on the developer community and put a massive burden on every iOS app developer in the world, I think they might be...

kind of overrating their position here and maybe overestimating how much political capital they have in this environment. But then on the technical side too, Do they even have the talent on macOS? To implement a new design? Or on iOS, because for all of iOS 7's faults, it was a very clear vision of what they wanted, and they overshot it by a little bit, which arguably is what you want to do. You don't want to undershoot it, you want to overshoot it, so the fonts are a little bit too thin.

maybe the thing is a little bit too simple maybe the buttons have too few borders and you just back it off six notches and you have an os that you can use for a decade right but like i think the ios 7 and by the way it's cheaper to make apps with it i think the ios 7 transition despite all the fuss about it was

largely successful. And I do agree that occasionally, every decade or two, it's good to refresh everything and come up with a new look, right? We're just all scared now because we're like, okay, but what new look? like what are you going to do specifically because just saying we're going to do a big redesign like if and to be clear and to be optimistic if if they make something that looks cool and attractive and new

we will be excited about it customers will be excited about it even though people will grumble that they changed the way stuff looks or whatever but like that is a source of excitement it is there is upside to this like a setting aside like to what end what benefit are people getting or whatever Merely changing the way things look in a few minor behaviors. If you do it well, it's important to do that every once in a while and can get people jazzed and excited.

It can be a differentiator. It could be like what Apple wants a story to be when the new iPhone comes out with iOS 19 is like, and it's got an all new interface that looks really cool. That's what they want the story to be. And that is a plausible story. It absolutely can happen.

even if functionally they don't actually improve anything on the phone but it just looks a little cooler and most people think it looks cooler thumbs up same thing with the mac oh the mac has been kind of the same for a long time

like i just said there's things about the current interface that bother me guess what they have an all new look and redesign for the mac and actually a lot of those problem areas have improved and the whole os looks new and different and we're excited about it and i remember The times when Mac OS X versions would come out. And we would be excited about how it looked.

that started to you know again that started to veer off a little bit around the stitch leather thing but in general for many of the early years of mac os 10 each new os would come out and we were excited to see how it looked And he had opinions I like and I don't like. But in general, it was part of things that drove upgrades back when Apple sold the OS for $130. Kids, if you remember back in those days, they used to sell the upgrades to macOS.

uh it would make you buy it because you want you want the cool new look uh and even if you didn't think you liked the cool new look and when you first saw it it would grow on you and eventually the old look would look old and you'd feel like you needed the new look and like that i think that's a healthy phenomenon but

There was a lot of getting lost in the wilderness there, and then iOS 7 happened, and then the OS has started to diverge. I do agree there's less sort of... design unity between macOS, iOS, and iPadOS than there has been, mostly between the Mac and the other things, but I fear...

I fear what they will do. And that's what I'm hearing from everybody who's sort of in the know. Regular people don't even know this is happening. They won't know until they see the first ad for the phone or they go to the store and see the first phone with it, right? Which is the way it should be, right? But people who are tech enthusiasts, I have not heard of

single person say, I'm so jazzed about that. I haven't even heard a single person say what I just said, which is there are parts of the current Mac OS that I don't like and I hope this fixes them. Everybody is saying, oh my god, I'm so afraid of what they're going to do. I'm so afraid that they're just going to make everything worse. Apple should really reflect on that. And hopefully they use it to motivate them. No one believes in us. Everyone thinks we don't know how to make things better.

everyone is out there just crossing their fingers that we won't break the crap that they like now like a lot of people are feeling that way just fix the existing bugs and don't break the things that i like right that is a very pessimistic position for customers to be in and apple i don't know if they do surveys of like their most enthusiastic customers apple should not have uh

It should not like to see that in the server responses. The sentiment that their most enthusiastic customers are saying, please just don't make anything worse. Please just don't break the thing that I like. you know please just fix the bugs that have been there for five years i don't want any new features do a snow leopard release blah blah like the the uh

occurrence of that sentiment has only been increasing in recent years among the enthusiast community. And the non-enthusiast community, the regular people who buy most of their products, They are going to be upset by any kind of change.

but also if you do a change that they think looks cool they will be motivated to get the new phone in cool colors with the new interface and so on and so forth now that didn't work out for them with ios 18 and photos which was a in the grand scheme of things a very small change it didn't change the look and feel like all the widgets everywhere just changed one commonly used app in a way that i don't think was terrible but certainly wasn't a clear win over the existing app

Multiply iOS 18 photos by every single app and every single iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And 2025 is looking like a pretty scary year. yeah because and keep in mind too like the like ios 7 did not go over well with regular people. People hated it. Like, when... When your parents' phones would update, you'd get those calls. What happened? Why does everything look like this now? Can I go back? Nope. But also, when you look at iOS 7,

You can say like, oh, well, they haven't done a redesign. And how many years ago that went? It's been a long time. But they've done a ton of incremental changes. If you look at, like, go, if, listeners, go to, right now, go to a Google Image search for something like iOS 7 UI. And take a look around at screenshots of actually what iOS 7 looked like. It looks ancient by comparison to what we have today.

It's not that we've kept the same design all this time. Apple has iterated over time and we've iterated over time. And so it's not like we are in desperate need for a huge reset. We have been changing and evolving designs over the last decade or whatever it's been. We are nothing like iOS 7 today.

I wouldn't say nothing. We're clearly a derivative of iOS 7, but yes, the details, the small details have changed literally everywhere. But I think if you looked at this and said, is this more like from the iOS 7 lineage or from the iOS 1 through 6 lineage? I know there wasn't an iOS 1. I would say were clearly derived from iOS.

I mean, yes, but it's in only very broad strokes. If you look, because every stroke is broader than every stroke on iOS 7, but if you look at what iOS 7 actually looked like and shipped like, it's you know we have gone so far since then so there is not this big need for this and again like the expense the burden that it puts on the entire ecosystem including users because i cannot

if listeners if you didn't have like parents in your life or older people in your life during the iOS 7 transition consider yourself like you missed it why does my phone's home screen look like a clown now right or like Everything is lost. I can't find anything. Just please, how do I go back?

people hated it. Regular people hated it. And people are always going to hate that. It's not their reason not to do it. And I do think people eventually got on board with it and got used to it pretty quickly because I think the iOS 7 design was fundamentally a good idea, even if they overshot it a little bit.

uh but that's going to happen and like it's i think it's fine for that to happen but you don't want to burn you don't want to do that if there's not If you're not going to make some people excited about it, and if there's not going to be benefits on the other side of it. So the benefits of iOS 17 are lower application development costs

a fresh new look that makes you stand out in the market, a differentiator between last year's phone and this year's phone. There were upsides to it that made the pain worth it. I think there's a couple of things that we need to explore. First of all, while I agree with everything that you guys are saying broadly, I think

I can't help but wonder hearing John particularly espouse, like, oh, the Mac is so much simpler and better than iPadOS to do with things like window management. And on the surface, I think that's true, but... I think we're all three of us showing our age because I would say for people who grow up on touchscreen devices first, The indirection that comes from a mouse, from a keyboard in some cases, but certainly by not touching the thing that they're interacting with.

that has a burden that the three of us don't have to deal with because we were brought up on that interaction. But For things like my kids, they're using Chromebooks now and they seem fine with that, but they're not really doing window management on their Chromebooks. Everything's full screen, right? And I think that they would find, and they're smart kids, but I think they would find the window management that I consider second nature to be burdensome and frustrating. And,

old-timey. And even though I personally agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying, John, I don't know that that that's a fair representation of everyone. And I don't know that that we should assume that we are completely right about that.

Well, I mean, like I said, it's in the context of doing what you do on a Mac. If you need to see multiple things at the same time, it is easier to accomplish that on the Mac. If you don't need to see multiple things at the same time, it is easier to accomplish that on an iPad. So I think it's really just a question of like eventually your kids

if they get older and get a job, they're going to have to do more than have a single thing full screen all the time. Just inevitably, your work will become more complicated than that. So when you're faced with that challenge, How do you want to tackle it? How do you want to accomplish that goal? And the answer is not stage manager. The answer is

some kind of normal windowing system. And as for the touchscreen thing, we're all for touchscreen Macs. Again, if they have to change a macOS to accommodate touchscreens, fine, but then actually ship some touch Macs. It is frustrating that Apple has been stubbornly refusing to do touch Macs. for reasons that don't make sense anymore. And if the redesign accompanies that, that's all the better. But here's the thing. When faced with a complex task, Hey.

Simple set of tools is the best way to tackle it, allowing you to use those tools to solve your problem. Rather than taking a complex task and making a complex system that fits that complex task, like a key fits a lock, but in only one particular way does it fit. that's that's not a good way to solve that so if i said you have to develop an app in xcode well there's a big learning curve there now i said now you have to do it on an ipad

versus doing it on a Mac. It doesn't matter if you were born yesterday or born 50 years ago. you will be more frustrated by trying to deal with all the different things that you have to deal with to develop an app in an Xcode or any kind of IDE-like interface. You'll be very frustrated trying to do that on an iPad. versus trying to do it on the Mac once you learn all the things you have to do. I don't know that that's true. I really don't. And I mean that genuinely because...

I, again, I came from the same lineage that you did, even though I'm not sure you agree on that, but I came from the same lineage that you did. And so I, one trillion percent, would be, I would nope out of it instantly because it's impossible. I'm not so sure that someone cut from a different cloth would feel the same way. But, I mean, there's no way to answer this. It's a question of the complexity of the problem. How many things do you need to be doing and seeing at the same time?

As that number decreases, you can get simpler interfaces. And by the way, I think the Mac does a pretty good job of accomplishing that if I watch how my son uses his Mac to do things. He just full screens everything, three-firmers swipes between them. It's not as straightforward as an iPad, perhaps, but it is a way of using a Mac that is foreign to me, but macOS does accommodate it and allows him to work more like he's used to.

But there does come a point where you need to see more than one window at the same time. And as soon as you need to do that,

You need to come up with some kind of solution. And I've literally never met anybody who finds the way iPad handles multiple windows to be simpler more understandable and more flexible than the way mac does it's not saying the mac is easier because people can get frustrated by the mac too oh i lose track of windows i can't tell when they're visible so on and so forth but if you're if your thing you're trying to do is complicated

The iPad is so limiting. You can do certain things. I can do two. I can do two with the slide over. four five little strange manager kind of it it it gets real hard real fast like the curve you hit a wall right so Again, it depends on the context. For simple things, iPadOS makes simple things easy, but it makes many hard things literally impossible.

And I get you. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder if any one of the three of us would have a very different opinion about this if we were growing up now rather than 500 years ago. The other point I wanted to make is to be... Angel's advocate rather than devil's advocate, I guess. I don't know. That's the most crazy thing you've ever said. So... I put the Vision Pro on a few hours ago in order to re-watch the aforementioned free solo, whatever I called it, the adventure episode.

And I briefly used the Vision Pro to do not entertainment things. I answered an email, which I think I answered with four words because it's the world's worst keyboard. But I did a handful of quote-unquote productivity things. It was very little, but it was some.

And every time I put the Vision Pro on, I've said this many times, every time I put the Vision Pro on, I feel like I'm strapping the future to my face. And that's both in the obvious ways. Like, oh, there's windows floating in freaking space. And the fact that when I look around, those windows are pretty solidly staying perfectly stationary.

Hovering and bouncing around like my drone does when I put it in the air like they are solid And I still am stupefied that that is something that we can accomplish in 2024 really, because this was a year ago now. But the other thing that makes it feel like the future is just the whole vibe of the interface. I don't think I have the vocabulary to do much better than that.

But the way that transparency is used and depth is used, and granted, those things are used because the Vision Pro lends itself to transparency and depth especially. But the whole just vibe of the OS, leaving aside the fact that I've got the future on my face, the vibe of the OS just feels kind of futuristic. And then I look at things like the Invites app, and granted the Invites app was kind of not great.

But visually, it's a lot of transparency and depth in a much smaller degree, but depth nevertheless. And it does, as we've talked about before, does give a kind of Vision OS-y vibe. And I feel like bringing that whole vibe to the OS broadly...

And I'm not disagreeing, especially Marco, with what you were saying earlier. It's a big lift for individual developers like us. It's asking a lot at a time where we're all feeling pretty disgruntled about Apple. Again, it's all of those things you said I completely agree with. But if you take it just at the surface, I think having that vibe, the, was it Jon Prosser, I think you said, mock-up of Photos app.

But visually, I think that looked pretty cool, and it looked kind of like the future. And I would not at all be surprised if Apple tries to get, if not literally that same approach. that whole vibe onto iPadOS, onto macOS. onto iOS. And perhaps that's why it wasn't mentioned in German's report is because we're already there in Vision OS and we're bringing that same, and I know I've said the word 17 times, I'll say it again, we're bringing that same vibe to these other platforms.

Honestly, taking off my developer hat and putting on my consumer hat, That actually sounds kind of good to me, to be completely honest with you. I think I might be here for that. Now, as soon as I take my user hat off and put the developer hat on, I want to crawl into a hole and die. Like, I'm already too tired.

to deal with any of that. But from a user's perspective, I think that might be pretty cool. There's actually some parallels with the early days of Mac OS X here. One of the things that was said frequently about Aqua, probably by me, but I don't remember. was that Aqua looks like the interface that people would make up for sci-fi movies.

back in the day like they make like a fake computer interface of some future computer and a sci-fi thing and they'd make it it would look nothing like you know at the time like you know windows or classic mac os and it would behave nothing like it and have these gratuitous visual effects that people would look at and say That's not what computers look like. This is all, you know, fantasy, sci-fi stuff or whatever.

uh and apple essentially said we're going to make a movie computer interface like the genie effect was totally like a special effect movie thing everything being transparent and shiny candy colored round 3d looking photorealistic buttons and photorealistic icons like that's not what computers are like that's some ridiculous movie person's idea but they literally made it they made they made a movie computer

and what you're saying about vision os is basically the same thing oh it looks like the future because you've seen a lot of things in popular media of sci-fi stuff that look Kind of like big translucent panes. I remember that Minority Report had such an effect on this that in pop culture, even non-tech enthusiasts were saying, it's like a Minority Report interface where Tom Cruise is swiping away. clear panes of glass floating in front of him like an AR interface or whatever.

things in popular media influence what we think quote-unquote looks like the future so vision os looks like the future because it looks like things that we've seen in sci-fi movies and as we've all said transparency and vision wise makes tons of sense because it's overlaying the interface on top of the world around you in a way that

Other things do not. Things with screens that are not strapped to eyeballs don't do that. And arguably, early versions of Mac OS X and later versions of Windows thoroughly explored exactly how translucent you can make things before it becomes visually confusing and we've learned lessons there and we may suddenly unlearn those but you're totally right that if they can successfully make essentially the movie interface just like aqua did

It will be exciting enough and cruel enough that It will be a net benefit, despite all the people who are going to flip out about how things look terrible, despite all the reviews that I wrote saying how...

this thing shouldn't be translucent, and this is hard to see, and the information density has gone down, and yada, yada, yada. Like, they refined, they tweaked, they backed off, they figured it out, but that burst of excitement is something you can't replace. And despite the fact, as Marco said, that, you know, iOS is not crying out for a massive redesign.

Every n number of years, you should do this just to sort of clear the decks and freshen things up, even though it's painful. It's why you don't do it every year. It's why you don't do it every five years. But when was iOS 7? I can't do math in my head, but I think every... 10 or 15 years is a reasonable time scale to think about a rig redesign. The reason I'm spiraling about this is because

I don't have faith that the redesign won't be an improvement. Oh, it kills me to say that, but I just don't. Honestly, I've still not met a single, not met, not seen a single response from somebody granted in my little circles of people who are similar ages and have similar experiences with Apple who are like, I'm excited about this. I think they're going to do a great job.

because we're not excited. And I hope Apple takes that as a challenge and defies expectations and makes something that we're like, oh, thank God, it's actually really cool. Alright, thanks to our sponsors this week, Terminal and BetterHelp.

And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be looking at affordable evs and physical controls which is an interesting combination we're seeing uh there's this new volkswagen id everyone concept we're going to be talking about

and some physical button news. So that's in this week's Overtime. If you want to hear us talk about that, you can join atv.fm slash join. Thanks, everyone, and we'll talk to you next week. S E Y L I S S John, do you have a speaker update for us?

I do. Last episode, I talked about my old speakers were dying. They fully died eventually. They just would not make any more noise, which was bad. And so I was looking at new speakers. I had some speakers in mind that I was going to get. I asked the audience. If anyone has these speakers, how do they like them? And people did write in. Can I jump in? It just occurred, I don't know why it just occurred to me.

If you're only using these speakers for games, Why does fidelity really matter that much? i made it up so As I said last time, I've had these speakers for like over 16 years. And when I'm buying anything new electronics-wise, it's like, oh, can I do better? than the speakers I got 16 years ago. It's not that I'm against fidelity, it's just that I'm not listening to them all day long, so I'm not going to spend a huge amount of money on them. They're not that important to me.

especially given my criteria, which I will reemphasize when I start talking about these new speakers. This is a lot of money to spend on speakers that you're using for video games, if you ask me. It's not just video games. Anytime I need to hear audio, if I'm watching a YouTube video, I need to hear the audio.

so maybe that's not a high fidelity type experience but you know and I do occasionally listen to my music collection on my Mac while I'm doing stuff you know it's just I'm not I don't have music playing all the time like you do but the bottom line is i wanted to upgrade i had old speakers i wanted new speakers i wanted the new speakers to be better than the old speakers

Not better in a thousands of dollars way, but better. I mean, that's all the reason you ultimately need. I was just curious. All right, so I apologize for interrupting. Yeah, and it's not like, again, I wasn't looking for like, these have to be super high fidelity. I just wanted them to be better. You buy a new thing, you want it to do better than the old thing, especially if the old thing you have is really old.

So I asked for people to give me feedback on the ones I was thinking of buying and they did, but also people suggested. many alternatives to the ones that I was looking at. Most of the alternatives they suggested I had seen and explored and chosen the ones that I was looking at because I didn't like them, but two suggestions stand out. I want to talk about them.

One of them is the Vanatoo Transparent Zero Plus. I had actually looked at this speaker. I had mostly dismissed it based on looks, which was a big criteria for me. But so many people wrote in to say they either had these or had heard these, and they were impressed by the fidelity. compared to the price and size. Despite the fact that they are a little weird.

There's links to all these in the show notes. All of these are not great looking, to be honest with you. I don't think any of these are good looking. These speakers are wedge shaped. So they're angled. They're angled. They're more like a trapezoid than a rectangle. But they have this interesting feature where if you can see on the back, there's like a handle back there, right? If you turn these over, if you flip them like 180 degrees,

then the surface of the speakers is perpendicular to the table. It's like they're trying to have it both ways. These can be tilted back, or these can be just straight up and down. And it makes very strange arrangements. If you have them in your desk, you should probably have them tilted up towards you. I don't really like the handle, but I just wanted to point this out.

People give lots of good reports on these speakers, in particular they have good fidelity a lot of people who are looking for speakers on their desks are measuring them as what they call studio monitors or Things that will try to give you an exactly accurate, neutral, near-field listening experience for doing audio editing so you know what it really sounds like, as opposed to...

trying to change the audio to make it pleasing to your ears like now just show me the audio that's there because i'm the one changing the audio i'm mixing the track i'm adjusting the thing or whatever so i need to hear what it really sounds like so i want you to just be completely neutral have a frequency response that doesn't change. It's just totally flat because that is accurate.

I wasn't looking for that, and so the fact that these manager transparent zero pluses have that and are fairly inexpensive and small wasn't that attractive to me but i did take a second look at them even though i had dismissed them earlier for being ugly wait before so first of all before we lose the people we leave this This is actually like to have the speakers natively angled diagonally upward towards you.

is a great feature for desktop speakers because that is the better angle. Normally you have to achieve it with some kind of you know, stand or like a wedge kind of mount or something like, but so to have them actually just natively angled up like that is a great feature. This may be tilted a little bit too much. Depending on the height of your desk and their position, they look a little slanty.

A little, but I think that's pretty close to what you want. I have the KEF. I still don't know how to pronounce it. I always say KEF. I think it's the LSX2? I think. those have stands that just stand them up, and it's at almost that angle. It isn't quite that angle, but it's close. Um, That being said, I do love the name. transparent that's what you mean like when

Transparent in audio terms means the speakers are not, quote, coloring the sound. They're not boosting the bass or boosting the treble. They're just giving you a reasonably flat frequency response. And that is, you are correct, what people in studios want when they have studio monitors. It's almost never what you want for your own personal listening. People usually will go for speakers that are, quote, more musical. That usually means, like, a little more pleasant to listen to. But...

The name transparent, that means there's nothing there. They add to that zero. So transparent, also zero. Still nothing there. And then they say plus.

Plus what? That's not transparent anymore. Well, they're better than the old Transparent Zero. I think it's actually the second version of this. And by the way, the other alternative that you will see, and the reason some of these go in different arrangements, is rather than choking them up, you physically raise them so they're at the height of your ears, and then you make them.

You know, just 90 degrees to the table. That's another alternative. That's why you often see studio monitors up on a shelf in studios, so that the speakers are at the level of the ears of the person who is working. The other set of speakers that was recommended that I had also looked at a little bit before, but again, hearing lots of people who have these in real life and like them a lot, were the Atom Audio D3V.

They look like little computer speakers. They're very compact. They're fairly inexpensive. And again, one of the things that people say about these is,

They are very neutral, good for being a studio monitor. Things these ones have going for them is they have ribbon tweeters, which are very... It's a different way of making the... speaker mechanism that makes the highest frequencies and it uses lighter weight materials that can start and stop moving more quickly sometimes people don't like ribbon tweeters because they find them too shrill or too harsh but

Maybe they're just accurately portraying frequencies and transitions that they're not able to hear on other speakers that are more musical and less transparent. Yeah, well, on that response, by the way, like... There is nothing more divisive and harder to nail down consensus on in the audio world than treble. Like treble response. And there's lots of good reasons for this. The amount of treble and how people perceive it varies wildly across different speakers and headphones. It's so different.

and there's a good reason why some people will say oh i want like i i like a lot of trouble i want a lot of that detail otherwise things sound muffled or dull or boring because you're missing a lot of that high-end frequency response To other people, a lot of that high-end frequency response, that kind of sharp, trouble-y sound, that can sound harsh or grating. It can make it fatiguing to listen for long periods. Too bright, they say. Yes, and there's a reason...

The reason we have such massively different opinions across people for treble response is that people have massively different hearing response to treble. Not only... As we age, we lose trouble, you know, pick-up response. But also, just different people have different, like, peaks and sensitivities to how we are sensitive to different frequencies, even when you're young.

Anything people say about treble response or harshness or sharpness or fatigue when listening to speakers or headphones, you basically have to discount all of that and just kind of judge for yourself because whatever you prefer and perceive and even hear, in trouble is probably different from whatever that reviewer that you're reading perceives or prefers themselves.

Although one thing you can look at from the physical instruction is, again, ribbon tweeters tend to be better at the highs and the subtle transitions between the different frequencies because they can, essentially, the moving parts have less. momentum and mass than a traditional tweeter. Those Canto tucks that you got, I think they had a ribbon tweeter as well. Ribbon tweeters are very common. So if you like the highest of high frequencies,

you may be drawn to a speaker that has a ribbon tweeter as a way to get that. The other aspect of these speakers that is different than most of the other ones that I've been looking at is they're not ported, which means they don't have a big hole in the back of the speaker to allow air to go in and out. to make sort of a bassier noise from a smaller speaker. uh instead they have a passive radiator which is like a diaphragm

that the diaphragm goes in and out. It's usually like a circular region or whatever that's like a loose drum head, and as the air pressure changes inside the speaker from it playing, that little thing will move in and out. It is a different It's a different sound. Porting can be like boomier and make some sorts of strange noises when the volume is very high, but it also can give a very small speaker a lot more bass, and there's

Fact is about how close you put it to the wall that affect that and so on and so forth. But anyway, the Atom Audio D3V. A non-ported ribbon tweeter, small form factor. studio monitor type of thing with a volume control on the front. Not the best looking. Yeah, I gotta say, this definitely looks like someone who designed speakers in 95 was dragged to 2025 and said,

Use modern style to do the crap you're used to doing. Because that's what this is. It looks straight out of 95 with just a sprinkle of modern stuff on it i don't mind it that much i don't really like the shape i don't like like i in general i feel like i don't like speakers that

that taper like footballs. So many of them are like that. There's a whole bunch of very popular studio monitors that their look of their whole product line is kind of like oblong rounded tapered type of things this at least has a little bit of sharper edges but yeah i'm not a big fan i don't really like the uh the passive radiator on the side i do kind of like that they have an integrated tilted stand that looks like a foot

as opposed to you having to buy one that's the way they accomplish this i think you can use it with or without the stand i don't know if it actually tilts but they got a lot of good reviews and here's the thing there for their size and performance it is it's a good ratio if you care about transparent-ish studio monitors that are small and sound really good but don't cost that much. Atom Audio D3Vs are a good deal.

I would actually have probably considered them if I could have tolerated the look a little bit better. Which leads me to the speakers that I was actually looking at. and again one of the main reasons i was looking at these speakers was because i liked the way they looked and we just got done saying how silly it is what you're picking speakers based on how the speaker looks That makes no sense.

That makes total sense, by the way. I bought my car based a lot on how it looks. I bought my house based a lot on how it looks. Oh, that's not true. You bought your car because you don't know how to buy anything but a Honda specifically in a car. No, I skipped over the ugly Honda Accord generations, if you noticed. i'm calling i'm throwing a yellow flag on this one but we don't have time to deal with it i like the way my car looks you don't have to like it i like it so anyway

The two I was looking at were the KANTO, K-N-T-O, KANTOORA, all caps O-R-A, and the KANTOORA4. And I said, please give feedback if you have these speakers. Tell me what you think of them. Tons of people wrote in. Pretty much no one had anything bad to say about these speakers other than the things that I already knew.

about them. And actually, just to interject again, the Kento Aura, the one that we're going to link in the show notes, if you open that page on Amazon, do you notice that there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine variations of the speaker? You know why? Because it has... in colors. Imagine that. It has colors. You can buy speakers in colors. You can do black, gray, indigo, which is, I guess, bluish to my eyes, but that's alright. Moon, moss, pink,

purple, red, and white. Imagine being able to buy colors. And you can distinguish all these colors, believe me. Yes. You will not be confused about which one is the blue one. It's blue. And by the way, they also sell it in black, which is the one I got. I was not offended by the existence of those colors at all. I bet most people do buy the black or white ones, but it's still cool that the colors exist, and they can change those colors every year if they want to mix it up a little bit. Anyway.

I like how these speakers looked. I also like that they got good reviews. I also like the size of them. I was trying to decide between the Aura and the Aura 4. They're basically the same exact speaker except for the Aura 4 is larger because the non-tweeter driver in it is 4 inches instead of 2.5 inches.

And also there was the... mostly ridiculous but still weird thing that was driving me towards the auras is that the auras in theory only had 16 uh 16-bit 48 kHz, and the Aura 4 support 24-bit 96 kHz, which makes no difference

because these speakers cannot resolve anything that would let you distinguish that, and I don't even have music in that resolution anyway, but still it was driving me towards it. And on that front, by the way, someone who has the Auras, not the Auras 4s, wrote in to say, Maybe they did a stealth upgrade of the guts of the auras, because here is the audio MIDI setup in macOS with my auras attached, and it lets me pick 24-bit 96 kHz.

i don't know if that is evidence that that speaker supports 24 bit 96 kHz or merely evidence that mac os will let you set that as the output and then when it gets to the speaker the speaker just down samples it to 1640. 1648. I don't know the answer to that question, but just setting that aside, that was one of the things driving me towards it. And finally, one of the final things that would drive me towards the 4 versus the Aura Was that the mid-range driver?

Looks nicer on the Aura 4 than the Aura. Look at the Aura next to the Aura 4. The Aura 4 has, I think it's metal, whereas the Aura has a paper one, and it just looks a little bit smoother and cleaner on the Aura 4. i know this sounds ridiculous to you again you're you're picking one speaker over the other because the speaker cone looks nicer believe me especially if people have those speakers whatever speaker manufacturers spend a lot of time designing the look

of the speaker drivers in their speaker even if they have grates open that's why a lot of them come with magnetic like you know you know grills great sir grills yeah they come with magnetic ones so if you don't want them on you can just take them off and there's no holes

And usually it sounds better without them. Yeah, these are visual items. And, I mean, Kef doesn't even include them because they're like, look at our beautiful speakers. They're so beautiful. And so concentric. Kef speakers are... Okay, Kef speakers are awesome. Like, I... As I have tried other brands here and there, including I have... Genelec desktop speaker. I had those briefly. That's another one of those stupid oblong lozenge-shaped things. Yeah, they're fun. The KEF speakers

They just sound so good. And not all of them. I actually don't like the LS50 line very much. They have a bit of a different sound profile that I don't care for. But the Q line and the...

The LSX2, I really enjoy. And they have a totally different design where they have concentric drivers where the tweeter is on the inside of the woofer so they it's just two concentric circles it looks like one driver but you know but the tweeter is like the middle part then that vibrates separately from the outer part which is the woofer like it's it's a crazy design but there's a bunch of benefits to that in terms of like,

It kind of widens the sweet spot of the sound. It avoids certain interference patterns. It ends up sounding really good. What Kef is really good at, to my ears, is that musicality. These are not flat frequency responses.

They just sound really pleasant and really, really good in a way that, like, especially in mid-range and in vocals, I haven't found anything that sounds this good in speakers. I have one pair of headphones that i like more than this that's the hi-fi man h6 that i have from forever ago um

I've never found anything else besides those headphones and KEF speakers and only a few models of KEF speakers that sound that good in the mid-range. But, fortunately i don't have to deal with like these being ugly because they're not ugly they're great looking in to my opinion and you know what they're offering colors

Multiple colors. Every KEF speaker is offered in multiple colors. Even the boring, like, wood finished ones are offered in, like, four different woods. And these are, like, you know, these have, like... carpet on the outside of them. These have like four different colors too. They have lots of different styles because when people use things and they buy them for their homes, they want them to look

like you know their personality it's a permanent fixture in your house it's going to be a thing that you see all the time yes you do want it to look nice and match you want it to look good and to have some options and by the way i think the kefs if you look at them now and you're like marco thinks he looks good they're a little bit Puffy looking if you're not used to what they look like and the cuff does make

other much, much larger tower speakers that are much more complicated and have lots more large drivers that don't look like the little concentric things. And yes, other companies also have concentric drivers, and they're great. Everyone should make center channel speakers with concentric drivers. You hear me?

uh but they don't uh but still some some other companies do have in fact i believe there are a couple i was looking at some when i was looking at other like desk computer mon uh computer speakers they have computer speakers with concentric drivers too not from calf but like from other much less expensive brands It's a good idea because it aligns the high frequencies, the low frequencies, and it's very beneficial.

Oh my god, there's a bright yellow version of the LSX2 now. This was not available when I purchased. You should look at the really big Kef Tower speakers. I think you might like them. Oh, they look nuts. So anyway, the downsides of these auras... What I had heard is obviously when these are all small speakers, they're kind of expensive.

They don't have a bass or treble adjustment on the speakers, which everyone complained about and I knew I wouldn't like because I do like to have that basic adjustability on the speaker itself. These don't have it. i knew that going in everyone who owned them was happy with them

Some people did say that they heard the Aura 4 versus the Aura and they picked the Aura because they felt the Aura 4 had a little bit too much bass. I mean, it makes sense. They're basically exactly the same speaker except for... The mid-range slash quote-unquote woofer is just so much bigger on the Aura 4, so it can't help but sound bassier, because that's the whole deal.

Some people like the Aura Force better because it was bassier and could go louder because it has a more powerful amplifier and a bigger driver and all that other stuff. In the end, like I said, I decided to get the Aura 4 because I did like the way it looked. No negative reviews from anybody, really.

i figured i could live with the lack of bass and treble controls and i like the way i like the 24-bit 96 scale hearts even though it's pointless and i like the way the the speaker cone look the metal speaker cone versus the paper one or whatever so i did indeed get the kanto aura fours These are just a flat rectangle, and of course I need them to be tilted up. If you are using computer speakers and you do not have them pointed at your ears, you are missing out on a lot.

because most computer speakers if they're designed at all are designed for near-field listening, which is your head is pretty close to the speakers. Like, you can reach them with your hands. That is not the case with, you know, stereo speakers or whatever. even home theater speakers that are filling a room with sound, these are going to be close to you. They're often very directional, which means that if you don't point in particular the tweeters at your ears,

you are losing a lot of the frequencies that they're putting out. And it's not subtle. You can just take them and twist them so they're pointed directly at the back of the room and you hear the treble disappear. And then point them back at your ear. So you need them to point at you and you can just twist them on your desk.

but you also need to point up at your ears so you have a choice of either getting some speaker stands that elevates the speaker so they are at ear level which i don't want to do because i don't like how it looks or you get something that tilts them up. Luckily, Kanto, my first interaction with Kanto as a brand was I bought their speaker stands for my own theater speakers. They make lots of speaker stands. Surprise, surprise! They make tiny little angled speaker stands for their tiny speakers.

And so if you get the Kanto Aura, you can get the Kanto S2 speaker stands, which is a bent piece of metal. that costs less than the one inside my mac pro and if you buy the aura 4 you should get the canto s4 speaker stand uh pro tip for canto on your website clearly indicate which speakers the stand works with. They try to do that, but they don't mention the auras anywhere. So I can just tell you from experimentally determining, the Canto S4 speaker stands fit the Canto Aura 4 perfectly.

The Kanto Aurifors have a little screw hole in the bottom. The stands have a little screw hole, and they come with a screw, and it fits directly in there, and they exactly fit. And so I hooked up my speakers with a big, long USB-C cable to my Mac. plugged everything in turn everything on tried it out here's what i think of these things i wish they had a base in trouble i knew i would i knew it would be a problem uh

Part of that, like Marco basically covered all this exact stuff before, I'm old, and I can't hear treble as well as I used to. I'm 50. That's just a fact of life. I also happen to like treble. The Canto Aura 4, in their default mode, sound too bassy to me. They sound bassy. They sound muddled. They sound muffled.

to a young person maybe they don't but to me they do which is fine very often if you have a computer speaker that has a bass and a treble knob just turn the knobs until it sounds the way you want it to no knobs so you can't do that so i'm left with uh software solutions which is fine there's lots of good software solutions to this in particular sound source from rogo me about a piece of software i already own

can do this for you. It can provide a system-wide equalizer that applies to all audio across the entire system with customizable equalizer curves and yada yada. If you don't want to do it system-wide, iTunes itself, which is where I listen to my music or whatever it's called now, music, also has its own equalizer inside the music app if you just want to equalize the music and not every system sound.

There are many other apps that do this that you can find. I like SoundSource because it does 5,000 other things. I've already put in like five feature requests for SoundSource. My main activity while setting these things up has been... trying to figure out what equalizer curve do I want. I've been trying to sort of manually reproduce the Harman curve because I actually do kind of like that. Was it Harman Kardon? Yeah. The stereo manufacturer came up with the curve.

that they claim is what most people, a lot of people listened to things and said, do you like this better, worse or the same? And they came up with a curve that they thought, If you apply this curve, most people think it sounds better. This is what Marco was getting at with like, it's not neutral. And it sounds exactly like what you'd expect from a design by committee to average. Everything designed with the Harman curve.

because like when they released that like everything was then judged against that and so for a long time and i think even still today people imitate it yeah yeah and every like headphone and speaker is is tuned to try to match the harman curve exactly because they know they're going to be reviewed against it and as a result

a lot of things end up sounding exactly the same. And for me, it's a little bit less treble than I would like. And so most headphones and speakers sound very boring to me as a result. And so, yeah, there's nothing wrong with using EQ. to tweak the sound the way you want it i have an eq in my system it's fine

Yeah, so I was basically trying to reproduce the Harman curve with my equalizer, because I found that that is actually kind of what I want, and I was trying to find a good link. You would think there'd be a good Wikipedia page on the Harman curve, and there are a bunch of Wikipedia pages about...

about target curves, and that Harmon itself has some pages about this, but there's no, like, here is the one definitive URL for the Harmon target curve. I was very disappointed in not being able to find that, because I wanted to find, like, the literal values, like, because I'm moving sliders. I'm like, I need to know where to move these sliders. I don't want to just match the shape.

on this logarithmic graph where they have to carefully count the little lines to figure out what value that is. I figured someone's got to have an Excel spreadsheet with the values for 10 band DQ or something, but I couldn't find it. But anyway, basically what it looks like is...

like a kind of an s-shaped curve where like it's high at the base then dips down low and then goes up high at the treble but then dips down at the very end of the treble anyway Point is, I was flying with equalizers to make they sound good, and the upshot is,

These things take very well to equalization because they have more than enough of everything. If I want tons of bass, they have it. This is even without a subwoofer attached. If they want tons of bass, and that's what I want, they can do it. And they also have pretty good treble. So it's just a question of... How much of each thing do you want? How do you want a valid? And I came up with a curve in SoundSource that I think I mostly like. I'm still tweaking it a little bit.

And they just sound way better than my 16-year-old speaker's surprise. they cost way more and they sound way better i think they look really nice too i love the stands one of the other complaints about the the canto auras in particular not the aura forest is they're so small and light and that the knob on them is so stiff and you have to press the knob in to turn them on and off that you end up moving the speaker on your desk.

that does not happen with the aura 4s especially on the stands because all of kanto stands are very heavy metal stands and the speakers are screwed to them and they have like grippy stuff on the bottom so i can press the power button and that doesn't happen uh the one downside to the power button is i have to press it twice because when you first press it it always defaults to like the 3.5 inch jack and the second presses to usb which leads me to the final thing about this which is

as i said before most of the time i spent with my old speakers during that 16 years the speakers were turned off like physically turned off with an off switch. So every time my computer went to make a sound, no sound would come out because they were sending sound to speakers that were turned off. That's the way I like it. And when I want to hear music, I turn my speakers on. Now whenever I turn my speakers on I have to press the power button twice which is a little bit annoying.

But the other thing that I discovered about this that I hadn't thought about at all is after I got them all set up, okay, let me do some stuff, turn my speakers off, start working. I think I clicked on something and it beeped. I'm like, how are they beeping? I turned the speakers off and I said, oh, that wasn't the speakers beep. That was my Mac- Sometimes I forget that my Mac has a speaker inside it, but it does. The Mac Pro does, in fact, have a speaker.

Mac, why are you making noise? You've never done that before. You know the answer. It's because these speakers are connected with a USB cable.

And when I turn these speakers off, macOS goes, well, wherever the hell that USB audio interface was, it's gone now. So anyway, falling back to the internal speaker. So to solve that problem, I did the... the analog the analog hole solution which is plug a stub headphone adapter into the headphone jack on the back of my mac and now it thinks it's connected to some analog speakers to the 3.5 millimeter jack but it's not

So now my Mac is blessedly silent. I have System Alive EQ through Sound Source. I have speakers on my desk that I find very attractive. I hope they don't collect too much dust. I'll keep you updated on this situation. They sound so much better than my old speakers.

And I actually have been, to Casey's delight, listening to way more music at my desk. Although, I absolutely can't. I was trying to develop my app this week, and at various points, I said, wait a second, I need to turn this music off. What do you think? I'm not Casey List. I can't. I got my brain. I can't.

I'm an active listener and my brain latches on to the music and stops doing the programming. And so there are only limited circumstances in which I can, I've never talked about this before. I can do CSS when I'm listening to music. I can't really code, and I definitely can't write. But I have listened to a lot of music when I've been working this week, and I'm really happy with the new speakers.

like i said these areas of improvement uh oh and size wise i'm glad i got the bigger ones but i was afraid they would be too big they're not i think these small ones are a little bit too small and i think these big ones are a little bit too big but they're not so big that they dominate the desk in a problematic way so if you're looking for a speaker and have similar requirements to my ridiculous requirements that you just heard and you like how these look

I think they sound pretty good, and I like almost everything about them, and I hope they will last another 16 years. And if you're not as picky as me, definitely look at those Atom Audio things, because they're a little bit ugly, but they are... I want to be like...

$100 less? $150 less? $100 less than the ones I got, and they supposedly sound better. So, if you don't want to be foolish like me and buy speakers based on how they look, but rather how they sound, go check out the Atom Audio D3V, and if you like the way they sound, they are a bargain.