291: Evil Finder Icon

Hey, Brad, I got something else at the Nintendo event last week. How fun. Did you get like the little side grips that make it easier to hold? Oh, man, I wish. Like a screen protector or?

Look, if anybody has side grip recommendations that they like, I know the D brand one is coming in July and there's a couple of those people are pretty stoked for. But I got the Rona. Oh. rona 64 is that like a new platformer it's the nine it's the bad one night the 19 you don't want that one oh that could okay yeah no it was a bad time i am sorry to hear that that's it look

I can think of worse ways to have gotten like the last time I got it, I got a truck stop on five, I think. So this is probably better. It feels like a classier stream. I don't know. That's a very relative judgment, but sure.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that has played this game. I've only had it once. Well, I'm on number two now. There's probably a reason that you and I do a podcast together. We think somewhat alike that you immediately start going into the process of elimination of trying to figure out exactly. where and how you got it and from whom by triangulating everywhere you went with everyone you know who was there and got it or didn't.

Well, and the nice thing about my lifestyle choices is that they're relatively straightforward enough that it's easy for me to triangulate on the number of strange people I see on a weekly basis. Yes. Um, so yeah, anyway, I went to the Nintendo event. We talked about it last week and on Friday afternoon, evening, I started kind of feeling allergy.

My voice is starting to get a little hinky already, I'm noticing. So apologies in advance. So again, it was Wednesday night you went, right? Wednesday night we went, yeah. Friday you started feeling bad? Yeah, it's right on the edge. Okay. That sounds about, I think it was about two days for me that one time.

Current strains are from like five to two to five days is what the internet said. Oh, you mean they're still tracking strains? I had to go to the Canadian site. Uh-huh. Yeah. Great. Anyway, it's been really mild. I've not been super sick, but I've been isolating in the bedroom. So as not to get my wife and daughter sick, which is the right thing to do still. And I've eaten. I've lost my sense of taste for the first time. Or smell, I guess, technically. Taste is still there.

Taste is smell. Taste is somewhat downstream of smell. Right. It's it's really it's really weird not being able to smell the smells when you eat stuff. Yeah. Because like, let's see.

Fancy seltzer water with flavor in it all tastes exactly the same. But you really can isolate like a fudgesicle, for example. There's a mouthfeel to it, like a creamy unctuousness to the... whatever the petrochemical goo that they make those things out of is yes that your brain still is like okay there's a little bit of chalky texture interesting there's some smoothness and your brain is like yo that's chocolate i i know that

Your brain is interpolating some flavor from some texture. Exactly. And and like Diet Coke. I recognize Diet Coke. But Dr. Pepper. Nope. That tastes like nothing. Yeah. It filters out the prunes entirely. Wild. Yeah.

Hang on. Yeah. Are you saying there's prune flavor in Dr. Pepper? Did you not know this? What? Yeah. What are the key flavors in Dr. Pepper and its evil companion, Mr. Pibb? Prune. No kidding. Yeah. I started to make a joke about it. Now I'm feeling sick too, but I actually confess that I don't mind a prune now and again. Dude, I love a prune. Also, I just Googled it.

The conventional wisdom is that Dr. Pepper is a prune juice based soda. It goes back to at least the 30s. But the manufacturer has always denied this. Look what Big Pepper doesn't want you to know. Yeah, well, at least Dr. Pepper doesn't have prune-like effects on one's constitution, let's say. Look, man, when you reach a certain point, you welcome. You're like, how many prunes can I pack in in a day?

Remember when I said I like prunes? Yeah. I think the first time I ever really encountered prunes was not that many years. I mean, it's been a while. Probably as a baby, but then after that. Well, I mean, okay, the first time as an adult that I remember encountering them, I was just like, oh, this is like a cool dried fruit. Sort of like a giant raisin or something. Yeah.

And ate a whole lot of them at one time. Oh, no. It's just like, oh, this is a good fruit. This is a good dried fruit. I'm just going to eat a bunch of these. Oh, no. My girlfriend still mocks me for it to this day. I'm not going to say anymore. Did you have to reply? the toilet or did it survive let's just start thanks dr pepper

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Bot. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Instead of talking about awful gastrointestinal distress or COVID nightmare or whatever. Yeah. I can't stop thinking about how we might be inside of a black hole. What? Did you see this? No, I just have been watching the bad news this week. Okay. How about some cosmological news or some astrophysical theorizing to take your mind off of terrestrial concerns? Is this the story that started as...

There might have been something before the Big Bang was the headline. It's well, it's this is this is incredibly like theoretical. I don't mean like grounded theory backed by evidence like theoretical model. I think I think this is more like theorizing. OK. But it's kind of along those lines. Apparently this came from, none of this is to be taken super seriously. This came from like University of Portsmouth in the UK.

That's not a real place. Like some some some number of astrophysicists have suggested this. There is a paper associated with this, but which I have not read because I'm probably not capable. But apparently it came from James Webb. observations of distant galaxies you mean the just wonderful space telescope yes yes the just wonderful yes that one apparently way more galaxies are spinning in the same direction than they would expect to see in a truly random distribution

Wait, is it the same distribution as left-handed people to right-handed people? I don't know. And chirally right to chirally left molecules? What if it all is... Wow. I'm going to cut to the chase. They are suggesting that perhaps our entire universe exists inside of a black hole in a parent universe. Wow. Which would mean that all of the physics, like everything about physical reality that we know is actually...

Unique to the innards of this black hole, you know, that like I would assume that means that different physical conditions might exist in the parent universe in which we exist. Like we might have a different Planck's constant someplace else. That's always my thought that like maybe big G and little g are different. Wow. And this could be, who knows? This is not like, this is not, I don't think being taken as a seriously proposed, like.

This is the kind of thing astrophysics is physicists think about when they've taken to it. Well, yes. Or, you know, when they're just looking at observational data and coming up with explanations or whatever, but like they're, you know, they're. I think they might be trying to suggest that like, oh, this helps explain cosmic inflation and like.

Hmm. Anyway, the dark matter really is dark matter, right? I don't know. It's just the idea that the idea that our entire universe might be inside like one body in another universe is really breaking my head, even if it's not real.

Does that mean that we could theoretically communicate with people outside of this universe if we had the power of love? I don't know. Wouldn't that black hole continue to consume matter? But love transcends black holes. I learned that from Interstellar. Yeah, of course. That's just fact.

Yes, of course. Brad, it's well, hold on. First off, I have a I have a two things, two points of order. One is that I happen to be near the San Francisco, one of the public library branches, and I did not have a. My library card predated the time when like they had all the Libby and stuff support. So it lapsed. It said like they lapsed them at some point over when you haven't used it for like 10 years to check out a book or something. And I, I wasn't able to use my old library card for Libby.

the the online book thing so i was at this playground with my daughter and i she was playing on the playground i was like i'm gonna go into the library and i got a fresh new library card and i'm gonna go and tell you

The librarian there, I told the librarian what I was doing. She was like, yeah, anybody in California can get a San Francisco library card. You just have to be here. And I was like, oh, it's like, yeah, almost all the big cities in California are like that. I have a whole collection of them. Oh, my God. I should have gotten an L.A. library card.

This is my pro tip is when you go to a big city in your state, sign up for a library card because the collection of the San Francisco Public Library for e-books is so much bigger than the San Mateo County one, despite having basically the same number of people living in them.

Mm hmm. It's it's it's highly recommended. Interesting. Yeah. Is that something that applies to other states to your knowledge or is that just a California thing? I have not gone that far, but I'm going to say it's just, you know. Get more library cards. Oh, yeah.

It'll have a big ream of them. Have a whole thing. Just a whole chain full. Yeah. So the other thing is I've been playing a bunch of tears at the kingdom on the switch to for obvious reasons. Mm hmm. Well, multiple obvious reasons. I mean, you're you're sequestered and you have a brand new piece of hardware that runs it much better. I've seen some footage of both of Zelda's running on that switch. And boy, does that look good.

Like the game is actually playable now. Yeah. Yeah. I remember being so frustrated by the movement the first time I tried to play it on the switch one that I just stopped playing it after about 25 hours because I kept missing jumps that I should have been able to hit because the frame rate.

Right. People mocked me when that game came out and I suggested maybe I'll play it someday on a better switch. Well, who's laughing now? Do you have a better switch yet? I don't. Oh, yes, I know I am. Now I'm playing the stock tracking game, actually. Ooh, I am not sure I've really ever done this in modern history, actually, because like until recently we got sent most hardware like this that we needed to cover. Yeah. And when we didn't, I just.

kind of had a soft personal rule of I'll just buy it when I can just buy it you know like I've always just kind of chosen to not play the stock tracking game I've always just told myself like just just chill out and wait until it's just there and you can buy it on a lark and not have to like

snipe a thing you know did you tell nintendo did you express interest in purchasing a switch when the time was right i did i have not heard anything well the good news is that on january june 10th at 7 20 p.m two days ago I got an email that said, good news. Nintendo Switch 2 plus Mario Kart World Bundle is waiting for you. Thanks for waiting. It's your turn. Okay. Well, maybe we'll talk later. I don't know. It seems like they're just getting out there, though.

It's like Tom's or some site that I found that has a stock tracker that's updating every time somebody gets them back in stock. And like Best Buy has already had another round of restocks since launch day, like five days later. Costco and Best Buy both seem to have had a bunch. It seems like they will just be coming in stock.

somewhat yeah yeah routinely oh um but what we're here to talk about this week we were going to talk about google io and then wwc and then we looked at the stuff that was at google io and we're like that looks horrible and boring and it's a bunch of AI garbage. They put up Google, put up a blog post that's entitled a hundred things we announced at Google IO.

92 of them were AI. And seriously, like 80% or more of those 100 things were AI related. It's just like, I pass, I think. Look, Brad, do you need an API that's going to help you get your token spend under control? Of course I do. Yeah. I've been asking for this. It's just what the kids crave. So anyway, this is what they announced at WWDC. What's coming to iOS and macOS? It's kind of a...

Like, I was a little surprised at the tech press coverage of this because it was generally kind of negative. And I watched. So I watched this. I didn't read any of the press until after I watched the keynote. I watched the keynote this morning and. I came out of it kind of optimistic and like excited about most of the stuff that they showed.

Interesting. Okay. I'll say this was happening as I was wrapping up Summer Game Fest slash travel. I think this was the start of Monday, right? It was Monday. Yeah. Okay. Monday was the last day of the thing. And then Tuesday I was coming home and like all I saw on my feed was about liquid glass. That's like all that was penetrating.

I mean, so the context for this is that the day, a couple of days before maybe, they announced, they released a white paper, like a research paper that they'd done. Oh, I missed that. The new LLM, like the thinking models that have rolled out from all the major AI providers, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and the like.

Sorry, who is they here? Apple. Apple did this. So usually if Apple sends out something prior to like a big keynote or a big event or something like that, they're signaling something, right? There's like there's there's a lot of like there's a lot of like reading the tea leaves with Apple PR. It's like it's like Queen Elizabeth and the brooches, right? Like she wears this. They do shit to snub people or to pre pre warn that.

things are going to be good or bad or wild or boring. This is a passive aggressive white paper is what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, look, they could have released it two days after and nobody would have noticed it. Okay. But the, the, the white paper, basically the, just the white paper is.

that they um they built they built a series of tests so they looked at the way people are testing the existing thinking models and thinking models are the ones that do like long chain of thought processing and they the idea is that they can solve complicated problems they can do reasoning rather than just pattern matching

And people test them with mathematical problems and stuff like that. But their point was when they do the testing with mathematical models, they find that there's interference. There actually is pattern matching happening in those.

in those systems. And they devised a series of tests based on simple logic puzzles that could scale. Things like the thing with the three poles and the rings and you have to move the rings from one to the other, only moving one at a time. And you can't go higher than a certain point.

But you can you can have like an infinite number of poles and an almost infinite number of rings and still have a solvable puzzle where you're sorting the rings by color onto the different poles or whatever. Or the other one is like the is like the wolf and the dog and the sheep have to cross the.

have to cross the river on a boat and it can only hold two at a time and you have to get you have not have the wolf and the sheep next to each other at the same time or else the wolf will eat the sheep uh and and though so They set up a series of those problems for it, and they found the TLDR is that it was pretty good at mid complexity problems. It was terrible, worse than LLMs at low complexity problems.

and completely melted down at high-complexity problems and gave up and stopped trying to solve the problem, stopped applying resources at inferring the problem using the methods that had worked at the mid-tier. And theoretically, you should scale. Anyway, it's kind of damning. Like the press going around was, yo, this is Apple saying this AI shit is is whack. And they're going to completely pull out.

from from apple intelligence and and all that in this wwc keynote yeah because if less people forget that was the big announcement at this time last year at wwdc right Like that was when they debuted the term Apple Intelligence and rolled out the like smart LLM driven Siri and all that stuff and then famously delayed it indefinitely a few months later.

Yeah, like it has a lot of that stuff hasn't shipped today. Now they're saying it's going to be the end of this year for some of the features they announced last year, which is like never happened. Like usually they ship stuff by September, October, maybe maybe Q1 at the latest. Like very on Apple like to miss the mark that hard. Right. Yeah. So.

OK, so the TLDR is that that's what they're coming into this and they launch it with maybe the worst like WWDC is where they go the hardest on dad jokes for Apple that they ever go. yeah it's where fred craig frederangi announced that one version of mac os was gonna be called weed Like he did. Yeah, it was a joke. It was terrible. I think it was El Cap. I can't remember. But he did a whole thing about how there's a little town out in eastern California, northeastern California.

That blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's why we're saluting. We salute you. Mac OS 10 weed. Terrible. This one, they had him driving an F1 car on the roof of the Apple on the Apple circle. Yeah. And then coming in to round and round by rat. Yeah. And also his hair was really high inside the helmet, which was pretty funny. That was pretty good. Which I'm sure that song was very popular when he was young, but I'm not sure what message that sends now. I mean, look, it's a very Tony Stark.

kind of okay for sure like sure they're definitely channeling like early robert downey jr mcu business there i think just at a time the part that the mcu has never been more popular huh look the kids the kid let me tell you let me tell you how the kids feel about iron heart Actually, the kids kind of like Ironheart in my house, at least because there are enough girl superheroes, it turns out. But anyway. The point is. They came out, they were like, hey, we got a lot of big news.

Uh, they didn't come out and say immediately they didn't lead with, Hey, we, we fucked up Apple intelligence last year. They just kind of said, Hey, we have more stuff coming. And then they were like, Hey, the big thing is we completely redesigned this for the first time since iOS seven. Yeah, which was, don't tell me, probably 2014 or 2015. 2014, okay. That's sooner than I thought, but it's still been quite a while. We've been living with flat design ever since, right?

Yeah, the last one was when they took out all the skeuomorphic elements from the initial iPhone rollout, right? It was the first major iOS redesign. And it was when they like got rid of the note, the, the, you know, the yellow memo pad note lines on the notepad and the wood on the back of the calendar and all that stuff. Yes. Yeah. Um, so, so it's been a long time and, and like.

They've changed some design elements here and there, but there's a lot of stuff that's been really, really stagnant in that time. Like the kind of push and hold thing that pops up when you try to copy and paste something has been essentially unchanged for like.

12 years ish now. Not to bury the lead. The new one's called visual liquid glass rather. And it's a bunch of transparent glass elements. I'm not sure how I feel about the amount of transparency. I mean, like the very first thing I thought when I saw it was like, boy, they have shipped a lot of fast graphics hardware since the last time they did one of these, like literally everything they make.

can do transparency without breaking a sweat at this point and they are really going to flex on that everything's free all the things that were expensive when we did this with vista in like what 2005 six six yeah it came out yeah yeah all that stuff's free now god this really is just arrow glass isn't it i didn't want to see yeah i mean look i was i was i i went and looked up a bunch of vista screenshots i was like oh right we did all this um i don't know i don't know about this well so

The thing that surprised me looking at the stills is that they don't look a whole lot different than what we have right now. I guess not. I might. I'll just say right now, my biggest concern is just legibility. Like, yeah.

I'm afraid that they may have gone too far in the transparent direction. I mean, obviously it is a lot of it is like semi-translucent. It's very blurred out. Frosted glass. Frosted, but still like just looking at even some of the videos I've seen, like the amount of color bleeding through behind.

button and text elements that you really want to be clear and like extremely legible at a glance is kind of concerning to me. There were places in the demos that they showed like the Safari. They showed Safari, which has the tab bar at the bottom. And it's like a transparent piece of glass now that floats on top of the web page where the text in the tab bar was unlegible, illegible, illegible, illegible, illegible because of the transparency and the thin font.

And I'm sure it'll get better. I'm sure they'll like subtly tweak it over the next iOS 26.1 will probably look better than 26 because. We'll talk about the versioning later. Like I'm sure they'll tweak it a little bit here and there, but I still am not sure this was the right call and I...

What are the odds that they're going to let you have any control whatsoever over opacity and stuff like that? Like zero, right? I bet they will because of accessibility reasons. Yeah, because they need to make it accessible for high contrast users. Yeah.

That is always an option, but it never feels like the ideal option because it's usually just a global toggle. You know, it's either like it's either have all of our effects as animated and is in your face as we think they should be or turn literally everything off and make it like completely inert. Like they never just let you.

toggle or slider individual effects really yeah i unfortunately i don't have a burner iphone that i can just like that's old enough to to to you know run beta os is on but is not something i'd use on the day-to-day anymore Um, but, but I thought, so basically my takeaway on this whole thing, well, there's two things. I really liked the segment, the way they showed this, cause they.

clearly we're showing things that people who worked on the product were excited about and that they felt were like substantive upgrades for users in a way that we haven't seen in these press conferences in a long time um and that we don't see from other companies like like other companies are just talking about new things that they're shoving down our throats that nobody really wants yeah and this is i mean this is okay you could argue that

a complete UI redesign is something that nobody really wants and they're just shoving down our throats. But at least it's not shitty AI, a slop in the end. This is good old human innovation.

I think like this to me looks like a thing that came out of the light and dark mode changes that happened over the last few years. Yeah. And I think isn't light and dark kind of one of the first things they show in the video. They lead with that. And. If you've experimented with that stuff at all, it's really hard to make the kind of color shifted icons that they rolled out last year look good. Partly because.

The app isn't really able to do like it does. It's not aware of the it doesn't understand how the icons work, right? Like the the tools can do it for the Apple icons because I think they're just building a bazillion different versions of all the icons. But I think that they needed to do some core underlying technological changes to the way icons work in order for this to happen. And they get into it a little bit later. And there's another session later on that I watched bits and pieces of.

But it looks like they actually like in the icon forge thing or whatever it is they call the icon creator toolkit. Now it's actually you're actually establishing layers like a background layer, mid layers. forward layers so that the os both has transparency and depth information that's relevant the cool thing is i don't know if you watch the actual keynote but it looked like for the design lab they had physical mock-ups of that stuff made that stuff

This is maybe a weird term, but that stuff looked delicious. There's something about it. First of all, it looked kind of fake. It almost looked like CG. These little... I think you... Well, they look like screens with like acrylic blocks you put on top of. Yeah, you theorize they're made out of acrylic, but they just look like these little oval glass shapes that you can slide around almost like the slider on a Ouija board or something just to like.

refract whatever's underneath them in a way that looks like very tasty. Yeah. So so it looked like I guess my point is, I think the screens look the same as the current OS.

for all but people who are real nerds i think when you actually see it moving and you see the animations and stuff being really fluid actually running at 120 frames a second and like picking up and it i think it i think it's one of those things that you're going to look at after like three months of using the new OS and you're going to go back to a device that's running the old OS and it's going to feel like going back in time.

Yeah, I think I could probably see that. I mean, the fluidity of the animating elements is probably the best part of it, which I assume is where the liquid part of liquid glass came in. They wanted something that felt like it was sort of flowing across the screen. Yeah. Because a lot of the, a lot of these menus like, like move and stretch and reform themselves like very, very animated way. They, they pour. Yeah. Yeah.

Like the context menu that pops up when you when you like long press a word in a text document or something. Now they showed a couple of times and it doesn't just appear. It doesn't just snap into place like it does on Windows when you right click. It kind of just it kind of like pours up out of where your finger is.

And then you can move up to the to the to the selection on a touch device. I think that makes a certain amount of sense, like unlike the transparency, the like runaway refraction, refractive elements everywhere, like the stretching and growing menus feel like there's a lot of usability. potential there. It seems...

I don't know. It seems good. It's exciting to see something new and different for the first time in a long time there. I'll give it a shot. Also, we don't have a choice if you're going to keep using Apple products because this is across the entire line. This is a company-wide effort on every device that they ship. Yep.

I mean, that's look, that's the Apple way, right now. No, I do. I would give anything to get a chance to go into that design lab and and see the physical ephemera that they made for this stuff. I mean, it looks incredible. Do you think.

They made those just as a showpiece for this video or were they actually using those in the lab for like visibility testing or something? I would. I would. I can't imagine they would go through that for making those just for this video. Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah.

It also looks like they changed the curve on window edges for the first time in a really long time. Like that's famously a Steve Jobs thing from like the dawn of the Mac. Like the angle of the curve had to be exactly specific degrees. There's no right angles in nature, man. And it was that the curve, it looks like the curve matches the curve on the bottom of modern phones. Yeah, that would make sense. Yeah.

So, um, so that, I thought that was interesting. I still hate rounded corners, but that's ship seems to have long sailed at this point. I mean, you get a, get a galaxy note. Um, I, I think, um, I would guess that that's one of the if they if they have actually changed that curve, I haven't looked at the design docs yet to see. But if they actually change that, I would assume that killing a thing that's a holdover of Steve.

Was a fairly significant undertaking at the at the at the current Apple. I mean, just getting people on board with the change. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's been gone a while now.

It's 13 or 14 years, right? Yes. For almost 14. Yeah. It's almost 14 years. All the speaking of speaking of longstanding Apple elements that have changed here and speaking of icon design. Yeah. I have to agree with Gruber that the new Finder icon sucks. It doesn't look right.

They change the sides. It's like it's like now we're on that it's we're on that Star Trek planet where the people have the white faces on the right side and the left. And now that we're on the evil planet, the evil side of the planet. That's exactly what I mean. Yes, they inverted the colors on the finder icon and it just does not look right anymore. Like the facial, the profile.

the face just looks an evil yes i just want to kill him i want to kill the finder there's an evil finder icon i think i think that they're going to kill the finder and they're going to replace it with files soon oh god no wait what yeah

like on on mac os on everything well there's no finder on anything but mac os the finder is a mac os sure yeah files is the finder on if i can be pedantic finder is the entire graphical shell in mac os so i guess what you're really talking about is like a finder file like

Like on Windows, it's called File Explorer, right? Yeah. Like what we're talking about is the window that lets you browse files, right? Like that is also a Finder window, although Finder technically is bigger than just that. Okay, fair. But anyway. Yeah, I had that down on the list of things to be angry about later on. Oh, I'm sorry. I missed that. I couldn't I couldn't contain myself. No, I mean, look.

As often happens after WWDC, I went over to the Daring Fireball and checked out to see what John Gruber has to say, because he's usually fairly insightful. And that was the one that jumped out at me, too. I I'm, I'm look at the, at least this time we have the hardware to do the kind of blending and stuff that's needed to make this look good and seamless and performant without killing battery life and all that. So absolutely.

They ran down component upgrades. There's not a ton of stuff to get into here because a lot of it's kind of tedious. I think that like this is the first time ever that they've stripped down the camera in a way that I'm. happy about like right now if you open up the ios camera it has a million options on the bottom like video cinematic photo portrait spatial pano and somehow whenever i open it it always ends up on the pano side

Like every, just about every year when we inevitably talk something about WWDC every year, camera, the grand camera portion, I just don't use camera on my phone very often. So I just feel kind of. Not left out, but I just don't identify with much of the camera talk because I just don't. Finally, now, finally, one of the things they've changed here, the inadvertently ending up on the pano setting. I don't know how it happens.

Every time it's all the way at the end of the options. I guess it's just if you are brushing your screen as you go to the camera, it's just inevitably going to end up there. I don't I don't I really don't understand. I've taken like one panoramic photo in the last 12 years.

And it's always the one that it opens to. So there's two options now, photo and video. And then if you want more detail in there, if you want to go to a portrait or something, you can. But yeah. And then I think you can also deep link with the deep link button if you so desire. So. That's a good change as far as I can tell. The Safari stuff we talked about already.

FaceTime controls have moved to the bottom now instead of the top, which is a good change. I think more controls at the bottom is good, especially as phones get bigger. The CarPlay stuff that they showed was kind of interesting.

The one that I thought was cool was the CarPlay Ultra thing, which is the new... I don't know if you've heard about this, but this is... I've heard the name. Is this something that your car or your... dash unit has to explicitly support oh yeah of course of course so uh carplay ultra does two things it gives the phone control over your like instrument cluster video screen yes this is the thing they announced

in conjunction with Aston Martin, right? Yeah, with a $200,000 car. I guess that should tell you where this feature is targeted, considering it's debuting in an Aston Martin. Yeah, it'll trickle down over time. Yeah, but eventually. But... but it also gives the, so right now iOS doesn't have control over things like air conditioning and seat positioning and mirror placement and all that stuff. So this moves those controls into CarPlay. Oh, okay.

At the same time, the EU is saying, hey, man, you need more buttons on your car units, not let more screens. Screens are bad and dangerous, it turns out. Yes. Like we all said 10 years ago. Yes. I personally feel like the screen and touchscreen based stuff should be. non-car operation only well like music fine even maps fine because you don't need a map to drive a car but like anything that is touching climate control or seat orientation or like

physical manipulation of anything in the car seems like a bad idea. Well, so the good thing about moving this into CarPlay, the bad thing is, of course, it's like there are going to be touchscreen interfaces for all this. The good thing is when you move it into play, you can interact with it with Siri, which is much better than. Every in-car voice recognition thing I've ever used. So like if I could say, hey, Siri, set the driver's side AC to 62 degrees.

that's going to be better for me in the, in the car. That's the only good thing about this as far as I can tell. Well, and being able to see, I guess what song is playing on the instrument cluster and starting to look over at the, at the entertainment screen. But again, your car has to support it. It's only in like three cars right now. I think they said there are. Oh, also, they added widgets to CarPlay, which seems like a terrible idea. Yeah.

uh it seems like they're the same kind of widgets as are coming to the watch and they're based on the kind of uh i can't remember what they called it uh there's a there's a name for it the thing that pops up when um

God, what is it? The SmartStack. So it's basically based on the SmartStack stuff, which is context-aware now. Like the thing on the watch when you hit the... Oh, no, it's not the home button. It's when you swipe up from the bottom. Yeah, swipe up from the bottom and it gives you like... But also that...

that has the option on the watch of coming up when you're doing specific things. Like if I have a podcast playing the podcast, like the smart stack comes up with the podcast widget at the top, uh, the car stuff is going to supposedly work the same, which is, which seems nice. Um,

The rest of the phone stuff, they're adding spam there. They for the second or third year running, they're talking about addressing spam in the phone and messages apps. I was very excited. So I didn't see the phone stuff. I did see the screening in the messages, though. How does the phone stuff work? It had a potential spam notification on the top, which I believe it already has. I was going to say, how is that different? Because you already get potential spam on current calls.

so the now you can send it to screening where it's where they start talking and then you have the choice to jump in if you want which they kind of had before but it was just you listening to the voicemail you couldn't jump back in i think i see This doesn't seem like a good fix for the spam problem from where I sit. And this is firmly in the, hey, the carriers have a problem that Apple needs to address because it's impacting Apple users. The hold assist thing seemed goofy.

This is like when you're on the call to some call center someplace, you can just put it on hold and it'll notify you when they pick up, which they're just going to hang up on you. And again, I was going to say, unless you're like very quick on the draw with that notification, you're probably just going to lose your spot.

It does it by detecting hold music, which, you know, anyway, but still, unless you have the phone right in front of you with the screen facing you, like there seems like way too much potential to just miss it. I think I have an air pod and it'll beep and I'll just type the air pod. But anyway, fair.

Actually, can I ask real quick? Yeah. Have you tested the Bluetooth audio on the Switch 2 since you're talking about AirPods? I have not. I've not yet. Would you be so kind when you feel like it? Yeah, I will. Because I forgot that they had added Bluetooth audio to the Switch 1 at some point. It was bad. But yeah, I heard it was so bad that even when I remembered that it had it, I didn't care. But with this newer hardware, I'm really curious if...

If AirPods are usable with a Switch 2 without noticeable latency, then I'm finally going to buy some AirPods because that was like my one holdout on my wired noise-canceling travel headphones was to use them with a Switch. Yeah, I'll give it a try. Okay. Yeah, I'm really curious. Anyway, I use the AirPods with my PC, my Windows laptop all the time. They're good. Sure.

The messages stuff, they're adding a bunch of like, like what I think of is like WhatsApp features, like shared backgrounds and stuff like that to group chats. You can put your own photos in there, which means that I have some group chats that I'm just going to have to leave because I know they're going to put fucking go see or something terrible back there. Lovely. You can add polls. That's neat. Yeah, that's cool.

I'm not in any group chats on iMessage or messages or whatever you want to call it. It's all like Discord and other services for me. Yeah, most of my stuff's in Signal and WhatsApp these days. Yeah.

the spam here too so now it's now when you get unknown messages they're just putting them all in one bucket so you can go through them this is a huge fix this is excellent like being able to basically there will be a drop down where you can you'll have like an unknown sender's bucket that you can yeah it's just it's just a filter it's all it is

filter but that's huge just to be able to shunt all the ones you don't know to another folder and it seems like they're using apple intelligence to pull the specifics like specific things you do want like table ready notifications and hey, your pizza's ready, and here's a verification code for logging into whatever. Yeah. That is a truly exciting addition.

I think the first time they mentioned chat GPT was like 40 minutes into this thing when they talked about image playground, which like Jesus Christ, if you're going to talk about AI image generation and your keynote. make sure that the images that generate just aren't complete shit. Like if you're going to steal a bunch of like the, the week after what Disney and NBC fire file, a giant lawsuit against mid journey for a copyright infringement.

Maybe make your images good when you're going to show stolen images, I guess. Or maybe not. I don't know. If somebody sent me a picture of a raccoon that was drawn by ChatGPT like this thing sent, I would just... block their fucking number and never talk to them again. Um, the live translation stuff was good. It seems like they're behind Google on all of that. Um, but it's nice that it's built into the iOS stack and is available to other apps, I guess now.

Is it a big deal for that to run entirely on the device or is everybody doing that at this point or is that actually unique to Apple? I think it depends on the devices. Google definitely will fall back to the cloud if they don't have appropriate hardware on the device. I don't know what I don't know enough about it to say authoritatively on the other stuff. OK, because that definitely seems like the kind of thing you would prefer to not leave your phone if you could help it. I mean.

If for no other reason that it's going to be faster than kicking it to the, you're going to get a 450 millisecond round round trip on the, on the, on the translations. Right. So, yeah. Yeah, that's text, text and speech. Although, again, it sounds like that's maybe not actually a radically new feature on phones generally just for Apple. It's it's it's speech to text, text to speech, text to text and speech to text to speech.

Yes. Which was like, it seemed cool. The latency on the speech generation stuff seemed slow enough that you'd never actually use it in most circumstances. Or like only when you really had to on a phone call or something. Yeah. I also thought it was weird that they only used European languages for this.

because they were talking about French and German, like the places that I would see it being useful are like Southeast Asian languages and Spanish and some other places that I wonder are not, that maybe aren't in the supported list right now.

Oh, well, does that make you think that maybe these languages are easier to translate and that's why they're demoing them? I don't know if they're easier to translate, but I think the models are probably, there's probably more material to pull from for the models. Sure.

Um, and maybe there's political reasons they don't want to tell you a bunch of stuff with Chinese and with Cantonese and Mandarin right now. Um, let's see the adding pins for your favorite artist and Apple music seems men playlist is a real.

Like, I can't believe this feature hasn't been there already. Maps is doing a thing that they've now in different companies in different places have promised three or four times. that i have yet to see actually work in practice but let's let's try it again uh basically they have pins for homeschool and work it learns your preferred routes so most people drive the same route

Most days, the only time you differ is when there's traffic or something in the way. And it'll give you alternatives when they make sense and notifications when there's larger than usual delays. What maps do you use by default? I use Waze. Wait, really?

100% of the time. It was not my, well, you mean just for driving? Just for driving. We have different use cases because I don't drive. This is more for walking around a city or, you know, like when I was in Los Angeles just now. But like, is that what you use even if you're just like out on the street when you're traveling or something?

If I was walking around the city, I'd probably be Google Maps or maybe Apple if I'm if I don't want to have my phone out a lot. OK, that was my real. I guess my real question there was, is it a time to just use Apple Maps now since that's built into the phone? I've just never let go of Google.

for that well so the reason i use apple maps is if i'm someplace i don't want to have my phone out and look like a tourist not that that really is a thing that makes you look like a tourist anymore but like if i'm going someplace and i want to be able to just glance at my wrist to see where i'm supposed to turn next the watch app from apple maps is really good and the google maps one was

kind of underwhelming the last time i used it okay interesting i've never tried either one on my watch actually but also it's been like what it's been a decade since apple maps had its disastrous launch like i'm sure it's fine at this point i look man You say that, but I've still I've like occasionally because my my use case for maps when I'm going someplace is, hey, Siri, you know, do this. Take me to this place with ways.

And it opens it up in ways. And sometimes it opens it up in Apple Maps and it's wild where it tries to send you. Interesting. I asked it to take me to. to a target a few months ago and it navigated to one that was near Tacoma that I was at six months ago. And like, like, yeah, okay. I did go to that target six months ago in Tacoma. That is correct. But it's also 1200 miles away now and I'm not going to go there today.

So. All right. Well, maybe Apple Maps is not ready for prime time after a decade. I don't use it enough to say one way or the other. The wallet section just made me realize that all they want to do is have you spend money with this device. So the capitalism continues to work and also embed your entire identity in it. Yeah. I like the ID and the Apple wallet thing. Okay. Car keys in the wallet I'm here for.

I will put my if my car lets me put my car key in the Apple wallet, I will absolutely do that. Interesting. Just because I'm very unlikely to lose both my phone and my keys at the same time. I guess it's not like you could use the.

phone to unlock the car unless you could get into the phone in the first place anyway right so if you lose the phone it's probably not a huge deal in terms of somebody also stealing your car i mean look if i lose my phone they might as well steal my car they have everything man um The ID in the wallet is a thing that is both compelling and terrifying. Like you shouldn't ever use that as your only form of ID. No.

Because like if you get pulled over by the police, you should never give them an unlocked phone to prove you are who you are. Right. It's a terrible idea. Everybody should know that you click the phone power button five times and that turns off the biometric security stuff on most modern phones. I like on the other hand, I've lost my wallet when I was traveling. I've had my wallet stolen when I was traveling and had a real problem getting back on a plane to come home. Yeah.

And it would be really nice to have something that works to get me through TSA that's just part of my phone. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's not the worst use case for that. I think California has been trialing the driver's license in the wallet for some months now, if I'm not mistaken. i think you have to have a more current id when i looked last time i don't think my id is new enough to work don't have your real id

No, I do not. I have a passport instead. That also works. But yeah, I've been staring at that feature and wondering if I should put my driver's license in the Apple wallet. And I'm still not 100% sure. Yeah, but I guess don't give it to a cop at a traffic stop. That's the that's the TLDR there.

It seemed like there was some other type of ID, like a non-passport ID that you can also put in the wallet now that's not a driver's license. Did you see that? Well, you can put your library card in there. No, no. I mean, it was like some other travel ID. I'm not sure what that was that they were showing in the video.

So they showed passports and passport cards, which are not good for travel, but you can store the information there. Okay. Maybe that's what that was like. Validation purposes or something. I don't know. Okay. They did boarding pass. They've done a revamp on how boarding passes work now, which is actually really exciting. Like I just flew for the first time in a while this week. So it's nice to see that.

Well, so the boarding pass changes that are coming in the next version of iOS, you get terminal maps that are attached to them in the wallet. It does live updates, which they haven't done currently. That's huge, especially when you fly through a connection you're not used to. Yeah. And you're just like you have.

30 minutes to trying to find some food before you get to your next gate. Well, and you can share your flight status with somebody, which then gives them a widget that pops up on their thing so they can on their car dashboard so they can see how far away you are and all that stuff. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Kind of nice.

Yeah. The gaming stuff seemed like somebody discovered over there how Xbox Live worked for the Xbox 360. And we're like, hey, let's do this again. Yeah. They had Game Center over 10 years ago. 12 years ago i don't remember when game center was a thing but yeah it was um

Like iPhone four or five, probably. Yeah. Like they, and they kind of deprecated it, although you can still sort of open it within certain games. Oh no, it's fully back. I got a friend request the other day. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah.

um but there's no game center app anymore you have to just get it inside one of the participating apps i think i don't know it's weird yeah that's what i meant yeah um they talked about visual intelligence a fair amount which is like has been around kind of for a little bit where you can take a picture and um like it'll it'll ai recognize what's in the picture and then give you

like menus for a restaurant or identify a pair of shoes or something were the examples I think they used. The thing that's interesting to me is that they're rolling out the thing where you take a screenshot and that post take a screenshot with your phone or iPad app pops up now.

and in addition to all the markup or copy and paste and crop stuff that was at the top now there's ai options at the bottom that will analyze what's in the picture and tell you more about it so like i think one of the examples they gave was taking a picture of a concert poster and then adding a an event to it

from that for your to your actual calendar which seems like like it's amazing to me that take a screenshot has become a core feature for ios when it was so hard to do on phones for a long time in the early phone days I mean, just these people sharing stuff on social media constantly by taking screenshots of their phone at this point, you could take it, take that picture of that text and you go viral. That's how it works. That's right. Um,

I I'm really curious. I need to go back and watch more about how the app. It seems like they have a whole app toolkit for making those app icons that gives you like a 3D blow up of the thing and how thick the glass is supposed to be and all this stuff. Yes, Gruber, in his post complaining about the new Finder icon, had thrown it into that thing, into the new version of that thing, and kind of remade it as the old version, as if just as a proof of concept, say, hey, look.

The old Finder icon design can still look good in liquid glass. But I guess the point being, I guess that tool is relatively accessible. Yeah, it's in the beta for the new version of Mac OS, I believe. Um, I I'm really curious what, like how fast people replace these icons because the thing that I don't think people realize, like if you switch your phone to dark mode and switch your icons to dark mode.

Most of your third-party app icons still look like crap a year into this OS release. And if people don't engage with the new, I mean, they'll make it part of the requirements for passing cert at some point.

But if people don't engage with the new apps, then there's no reason to go through all this effort. They talked about a bazillion other things and then talked about iPad OS.

where they're adding a whole new multitasking system that actually seems like a real multitasking system with like tiles and window placement and being able to put things on top of other things and not just limiting you arbitrarily to the way you know somebody at cupertino decided you should do multitasking um there's a menu bar they're adding expose for swipe ups on the trackpad or the i assume the screen too but they didn't show that

They're close, minimize and maximize buttons when you're in windowed mode. And it works on every iPad that runs the new OS, not just the pro and air models, which is new. It's also worth mentioning that they cut off most of the. most of the like the new the cutoff for ios ipad os 26 support on the new on the old hardware is all the stuff that wouldn't run multitasking like it's the old a16s and stuff like that right

My iPad couldn't run iOS or iPadOS 18, so it doesn't affect me at all. Oh, you're one of the A Max processors? I can't remember what A is in there. This is a new iPad year for me. Unless... Unless there's another tariff catastrophe by the end of the year. My iPad is eight years old. I can't sit in a sunny, I can't sit in my living room when it's sunny in there in the afternoon and like sit there and it's too dim.

no no no no no like meaning meaning the screen has to adjust brightness way up because it's so bright in the room like the auto brightness jacks the i can't i can't sit in there for more than like a couple hours before the battery is all like oof down to 15 like almost basically hitting low battery mode like the battery is extremely shot in that thing and it's not getting ios updates anymore so it's time it is time for a new ipad you've had it for a long time i think eight years

Yeah, it was it was a couple of years old when we started doing this podcast. Yes, yes. Like it makes me like I for how much use I get out of the thing, it makes me feel OK about spending the money on a pro when I do buy one because it's such an infrequent purchase and it lasts so long and I use it so damn much.

Yeah, that's kind of how I feel about mine. I use mine. It's my primary reading device pretty much. Yeah. And I use it to draw, too. Right. Like I use I use I use the iPad definitely more than my MacBook, like. Probably more than my PC for recreational purposes outside of work.

Uh, they're bringing a preview from Mac OS to iPad. Oh, PDFs and stuff. That's cool. That's a good, that's a good thing. Native PDF reader seems good. Yeah. We talked about the new files app. Yeah, it seems pretty good. I did. I'm trying to find it in this video. I didn't actually see that. They did. Basically, it's syncing the folder customizations you can do in the macOS Finder. Okay. There's a couple new views.

I looked at it and was like, oh, this has parity with Finder now almost. It's getting close. The overlapping windows of this also sure does just kind of look like a desktop metaphor. Like the lines are blurring more than ever before. Yeah. I wonder what the battery life is going to be like when you run multiple apps at the same time, because it's not great on my second, my M2 iPad Pro.

Interesting. Okay. I don't really have much of a use case for that. My iPad is pretty much like a single app full screen kind of thing for me. So I for a long time, I would do show notes for the podcast where I had like a couple of browser tabs open on one side and then the note stock open in the other side. Sure. Background tasks for video for like.

time-consuming stuff like video exports and stuff like that in shaper and davinci resolve and a couple of their video editing apps that they showed are coming uh they pop up like live activities in the in where the notch would be on your ipad They're adding background tasks. So like stuff like video exports and audio exports that take a while. Like they talked a lot about making it better for audio and video, including studio quality audio with AirPods, which.

I mean, just think, Brad, we could both be recording this from our AirPods on our iPads right now. Let's just like go to the park and do this podcast. Yeah. I'm skeptical of that stuff as always. Yeah. I mean. Look, the AirPods Pro 2 is one of those things that has continually amazed me for the entirety of the time I've owned them. So maybe the local capture thing lets you capture just your side of a video conference app, though.

Which is, I think, really interesting because that means you can have three people capturing their audio and video and then send it to an editor and splice it all together into a podcast. Yeah, because obviously you're going to get a high quality recording. I'm sure it's capturing the local feed and not like some compressed version.

yeah that's the whole the the whole that's the whole point is it's grabbing it at the system level um the background tasks lets you export video and it shows up like a live activity which is i thought pretty cool And then finally, the thing that they buried at the end is the thing I've been waiting for for like two years, which is journal is coming to the iPad. Finally, what is the journal?

Journal is an iPhone app that's like that prompts you at the end of every day. It's like, hey, you want a journal? You want to do a journal? You should do a journal. Hey, man, you know, it's going to make it's good for your mental health to do a journal. You should talk about how you're feeling today. Is that actually an established thing?

Look, man, I'm sure somebody established that somewhere. I don't know what the real science is. I have, I have been recent years. I've been thinking to myself, I would give anything if I had kept a journal. Yeah. Throughout my life. I just absolutely do not have the discipline to do it. So there was no world. There was never a world where I was going to do that. But I wish that I had more records of my life up to now.

So I did it for like 10 years from probably middle school until I went to college, basically. Maybe a little bit before that. Maybe like fifth, fourth or fifth grade. Anyway, it doesn't matter. You ever read it? Oh, it's horrible. It's absolutely the last thing on earth that you ever want to read. Yeah.

That's fair. You know what? You know what it was that really did it for me? It was going through some old photos that I found on my NASA at one point and finding like pictures of some concerts I went to that I have no memory of going to. Oh, like that. You can probably find out exactly what that concert is.

I know what it is once I look at the pictures. What I mean is I don't remember going to it. It was a Frank Black and the Catholics show and I just have no recollection that I had ever seen Frank Black in his pre-return to the Pixies era. You know what I mean? It's like, you should remember ideally all of the shows you've been to in your life. And I super don't. Huh? I don't, my memory doesn't work that way. I remember all the shows I've been to. I bet. Anyway.

So that's it for iOS, for iPadOS, I guess. Feels like they're getting closer to blurring, like you said earlier, like it feels like the distinction between a laptop and specifically a MacBook and the iPad is getting weirder and weirder and thinner and thinner. It seems like it's like, do you want to be able to pop the screen off or not at this point? Right. Because they did most of the demos with the trackpad on one of the magic keyboards with an iPad for this for the iPad segment.

Right. But I assume they will never actually unify those product lines just because they make money. Probably. I mean, look at me. I have both. I'm sure plenty of people have both. Well, and it was a really weird split because a lot of the art and a lot of the positioning in this segment for the iPad stuff was as a creative device. Because I know...

Like anecdotally, a lot of the people I know that used to use Cintiqs and Wacom tablets and stuff like that have switched to iPad and pencil just because of convenience and because they can take it with them when they go places easily and stuff like that. And it's way more multi-use. Yeah. And and it's like it's like, yeah, they get they get a cool device that they can use to watch movies on the airplane and draw when they get where they're going. I like it was weird that.

separation between showing like really nicely produced, really good quality art that human beings had made. And then some shitty AI generated post postage stamp size picture of a raccoon. with a cityscape behind it in the generated generated ai segments earlier in the in the show so anyway um like it i wonder if they're feeling that tension internally and it's that's where it's like leaking out maybe

Um, it's also worth noting that the iPad OS is pretty much the last thing that they hit. Like they talked about TV, they talked about watch, they talked about vision OS for the goggles all before even vision pro got more time than the iPad.

What is that about? Like, I don't know what I do. I'm not sure what the strategy is with like, I mean, by all accounts, yeah, by all accounts, vision pro is, I mean, is this harsh to say that it seems like basically a failed product at this point? I think, I think that they are.

doing an extended public beta test and figure like one of the things that they talked about i wrote in the notes we've sold literally dozens of these things um but one of the notes don't send angry letters i don't care just um One of the notes literally showed them placing widgets, like the same kind of widgets that are in CarPlay and all the other places now.

and placing them in the environment and locking them in their place so they're static and they looked like they were embedded in walls and stuff like that, which is a thing that everybody I know who has one of these has done in their house.

And then when you reboot the device, they all go away and you have to do it again. They're all annoyed by that. So like they're taking things that are people do that people are doing and making it behave the way that you would expect it to. Which is a kind of Apple way to. to like approach this thing i don't know the other big feature for it was that personas don't look like corpses anymore so that's a those are the the kind of

You can't take a picture of your face when you're in a FaceTime call when you're wearing the goggles because the goggles are in the way. Right. So they do a bad face scan of you and then make you look like a kind of freshly exhumed corpse. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed bad still, but like maybe in another five years, the headsets won't cost as much as a car and we'll weigh five pounds. Yeah. And won't be won't won't give you permanent neck problems when you use them.

It's a cool device. If I had $3,500 to blow, I'd probably bought one. It's neat. It's not something I'm going to use day to day. What if they made one that wasn't $3,500? Yeah. If it costs what a MacBook Pro cost and it did the same stuff that a MacBook Pro does. Hmm. That's an interesting question. Sure. Speaking of MacBook Pros, though.

Yeah. I mean, I still like the form of the laptop. I still like a thing with a screen and a keyboard and a pointing device. As I've been locked in my bedroom for the last week with limited access to computers. The laptop is the one that I use when I need to do real things. Right. Yes. Call me old fashioned. But yes, the actual computer is the thing I always reach for when I need to do anything serious. So they kicked off the Mac OS Tahoe, which is the one thing that's breaking the.

I buried the lead here, I guess they're ditching the incremental version numbers that are basically the year minus seven because that's when iOS started. Yeah. Yeah. We alluded to this earlier, but yeah. yeah it's just the last two digits the year now everything is just the the version number well of next year to be clear not of this year this is not

This is not macOS 25 that's launching this year. It's macOS 26. Well, but it's for the majority of the year that ends in 26. Or it's for the year in which that OS's support will end or its primacy will end. Wait, so you wrote in here that they're changing the versioning to an annual model like Ubuntu. Yeah. They're actually doing it like Madden.

Sure. It's Madden numbers. Yeah, I guess so. Well, it's kind of the same thing. Didn't they do that? Like Madden had two 25s or something because they had Madden 25 and then they changed the annual model and then they had a Madden 25. Maybe it was the other way. What's the distinction?

Well, like one was the 25th edition of John Madden, the football game. Oh, I see what you're saying. And one is the one that was released in 2025. They did that a long time ago, though, didn't they? Yeah, I thought so. Anyway. the the they did a bunch of dad jokes with the mac os section because they always do and they're always terrible at that intro of like how they came up with the name tahoe was like i could not skip past it fast enough extremely cringe uh but you know what's not funny brad

yes what this is the last version of mac os that will support intel hardware yeah that's crazy because what is it 2020 is the last round of intel max that came out the last intel max came out in 2020 that's actually pretty good i went and looked it up It's basically six years of support. Yeah, that's pretty good by Apple standards on these transitions. Is it really?

Yeah, the the the power PC to Intel transition, they cut them off after like two years or something. Yeah. Also, almost criminal. Right. But also just like forget architectural transitions. They also just routinely.

in support for old macbooks or all their devices not you know i just talked about that with my ipad like they they routinely just in support for old devices regarding you know even on the same architecture so i don't know i don't know if six years is the average there or not i think watch let's see the watch this year is goes back to watch oh watch apple watch six and the se second generation okay which are both 2021 products i think so 20.

20 products. I have a series eight watch that was in 20 that came out in 2022. So then, yeah. So 2020 then. Yeah. So that's the same, same time. I mean, I, I would feel better if it was longer, but look, Apple's going to Apple. Yeah, sure. I think about this a lot. There have been a lot of arguments about graphics cards with ray tracing support lately. People talk a lot about how long hardware should last these days. I don't know, by the standards of 20 years ago, we've got it extremely good.

these days that things last more than two or three years but also but also but also when you say hey this laptop you bought five or six years ago no longer gets updates like that doesn't feel good either yeah it's it's um I don't know. Ask me how I feel when my wife's M1 MacBook Air.

loses support and i've spent another two grand well actually no i mean the one the one advantage that the macbooks have that ipads and phones and stuff don't is that's a prime candidate for just putting linux on there that's true That's true. There are some very good Linux distros. Like I've said it before, I think when I put Fedora on my very old MacBook Air for my girlfriend, like it's shockingly usable. Yeah, I actually hit.

My MacBook Air that I have Chrome OS Flex on is going to end of life next year, I think. So, you know, it happens. So laptops can be resurrected in ways that I really wish there was something you could do with old iPhones and iPads. Yeah, you chuck them in the landfill. It's just where they don't belong. People were harvesting screens out of old iPads to use as mister displays for a while. I did that. Did you? Yeah. That might be something to think about.

I did never actually put it in the mister because I ended up getting a different case for them. Anyway, we don't have to get into it, but I have the screen still. The macOS stuff, like they're adding widgets. On the desktop is the difference, right?

Yeah, you could could like sort of slide them over above the desktop before, if I'm not mistaken. They came out of a tray, I think. Right. Kind of. Yeah. But now they just sort of sit on the desktop, it looks like. Yeah. And you get all the personalization theme color stuff from last year's iOS. But in the new. hey, we're going to make this look good version. The big things I thought were continuity and spotlight changes. Yeah, is continuity fully new? I couldn't tell if they were saying.

Been around for 100 years. This is they're adding to it, I guess. They're expanding it, making it good again. The the problem with so continuity came out. Oh, man, like 10 or 12 years ago with. Hey, you can copy on your phone and then paste it into your Mac and it's going to work magically across the network, which to be fair, is still pretty cool. It's still good. Yeah.

the big stuff actually actually sorry if i could jump in like i kind of wish they made that stuff a little more transparent or explicit like sometimes yeah certain features like that sometimes they make they try to make a little too seamless or invisible

where like i don't actually remember that i can do that or there's no like maybe maybe just like a little pop-up saying like hey we've received your clipboard from your iphone now you can go ahead and paste it would be nice well yeah and but like

They do it sometimes. Like when you get a call on your phone and it rings on your laptop, it says, hey, this is a call coming from your iPhone, right? That for sure. It's really stuff like the clipboard, like little usability tricks that you kind of forget are there sometimes.

Yeah, I thought I thought the stuff I thought that they're adding an actual phone app to the Mac now is nice. That's I didn't know that that wasn't there. And that felt like an omission. Live activities from the notch, like the notch stuff. pops up on the Mac now too? Or the Dynamic Island, you mean?

Yeah, the dynamic island. Sorry. The notch is inert and the notch is dead, as we know. Yeah, it's just a hole in the middle of your phone that you don't notice anymore. There is no life in the notch. Love the notch. They're adding shortcuts to Mac OS? Maybe the shortcuts have been there? I don't have a Mac OS device. No, they absolutely have been. I made a shortcut in Mac OS last week to enable and disable blocky over my network. Oh, nice. For my devices.

Do you SSH into it to do that? No. No, that's just a block. It just has an API. Oh, that's nice. You can hit. In fact, people get into it as we talk about this. I was trying to figure out if you could make a shortcut that triggers on view and not on like touch. Where, you know, shortcut widgets live in the, what do you call that thing? When you swipe to the right on the iOS home screen and it brings over the whatever that kind of tray thing is. Is that the smart stack?

Is that a smart stack or is that where the widgets live? Yeah, that's the widgets area. I was trying to figure out if I could make a shortcut that would effectively run itself and update on sliding out that widget tray. That seems impossible. I don't think it's possible because I always forget if I have enabled or disabled the ad blocker or not. You don't set it to time? I should do that. I don't do that because I...

I don't like the pressure of having to like get it done in 10 minutes or whatever. Oh, I love that. I should, I should really just update the shortcuts to, to auto re enable at some point. Look, I'm going to tell you, I had to, I had to log into zoom yesterday and the capture was getting blocked by the ad blocker.

I was like, I'm going to hit 60 seconds on this. I bet I can get logged in in 60 seconds. I feel like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Okay, if you're gamifying things like that, I might be able to get back on board. I've also added, when I said a blocky, I added an allow list that I did not have before.

Okay. That's supposed to fix a bunch of the commonly broken stuff like YouTube history and things that are supposedly get broken by disabling tracking. That's good. So that probably is going to help alleviate some of the stuff. Anyway. That sounds like some nice changes to shortcuts here that I wrote down. They are allowing you to now run shortcuts against specific actions. Not shortcut actions, but actions you take in the operating system.

OS triggers, right? Like time and stuff like that. And so also, yeah, some passive triggers like time. So you can set shortcuts that just run time of day. So this is basically just a visual cron job at this point, I guess. The way they handle that has always been weird because you've been able to do that on iOS for a long time, but it's unclear. It's unclear which things run on like for home automation stuff.

It's unclear which stuff runs on the home kit box and which stuff runs on the phone and like who triggers it and all that. I hope it's more transparent here on the Mac. I think the cooler thing for me and the thing I can actually see coming up with some pretty useful shortcuts with is that you can.

have it automatically run shortcuts against specific actions. Like the examples they gave were dropping files. Like anytime a new file appears in a specific folder, you can have it run a shortcut or connecting to a specific display. Yeah. Like that's huge. Like if you if you travel with your MacBook but also dock with it in an office and you can have it run some visually scripted shortcut chain of things.

as soon as you plug it into your monitor or work like that seems rad or change between work and uh like your work and home focus when you plug into the work monitor and stuff like that yeah like it seems like a lot of potential for cool stuff with that the the adding new folders to files to a folder would be awesome for when you're like like when when i share a file when i share a finished file with you i always send you a message would be nice just right yeah um

I'm going to change my my block disabling shortcut to play the Mission Impossible theme when I do a 60 second one. OK, great. Yeah. Yeah. Good use of time. AI shortcuts. I'm not so sure. Don't care. Yeah. Not going to use that spotlight. though changes spotlight seems like a weird cli for your mac now so all of these have been going that way like i use power toys run quite a bit on windows these days and it also has a whole little like um command interface where you can like

You hit equal sign to do calculations. You do conversions like I'd have to pull up the help to see all the things I can do. do left caret to open window switch between open windows like there's all sorts of stuff it's weird yeah like so there's spotlight on mac os like power toys run is an add-on for windows uh i think when i used gnome recently when i was messing with linux there's some equivalent pop-up

command interface there too like it just seems like a thing that's on computers now yeah and so the way it works is um you have like they built like little two-letter combos that do specific things like you can send a message by typing sm And it it basically builds a form in the spotlight pop up that lets you say what the message is, who it goes to and what the subject is. And then it sends it as an email or as a text, depending on which of the prompts you hit to start.

Doesn't seem like AI. It seems like this is just like a different way to interface with your apps. That's human driven. And it seems like some real power user business, which I thought was cool. Yes, it's awesome. Actually, I just pulled up Power Toys Run again to see what all I can do. So you can do mathematical equations, search files and folders, search programs, navigate the Windows registry.

Yep. Manage Windows services. Unit conversions. Yes, unit conversions, execute command line commands like ping. This seems more... fully functional like that seems like hey here's some libraries that we had that we could do some cool stuff with yeah it's just i mean you know whatever the case though i'm glad to see everybody expanding on that like you know

10 plus years ago, Spotlight was just a way to run programs faster by typing them in. So it's nice to see a lot more functionality. Remember Alfred? Yeah. Did all this spawn out of Alfred? No, no, they wanted to buy Alfred. The Alfred people told them no, and then they just destroyed them. They got Sherlocked. Sherlocked.

I think that I think I actually, maybe I'm thinking about Sherlock. Alfred might be, might've gotten, but I don't, I don't remember. I think Alfred's still going. I think I'm looking at their blog was updated last week, actually. Alfred, Alfred app.com. I think they still make Alfred. Oh, there you go. Anyway. Um, let's see. The other thing is it's context aware. So it knows that like.

If you always share new documents you create, then it'll kind of lead you toward a suggested option for a share when you're opening a new document in your audio editor or whatever, which I thought was pretty cool.

Yeah. OK, last few things and then we can get out of here. The TV OS stuff, they're adding profiles to it. They've had profiles in a long time. Nobody uses them because they're completely invisible and like a third tier menu off of the pop up menu. Now it's you can set up the option to prompt you on like the main TV for the house.

So that like my daughter will have her YouTube profile when she logs into YouTube and I'll have my Disney profile and all that stuff. They're also building single sign on APIs so you can associate your account with a Disney plus account or whatever.

and you won't have to log in at all on the tv when you're on your device if you're already logged in on another device okay that's cool um the watch they made the smart stack more context aware um and and it They showed a couple of cool demos about like it pumping up the the the workout stuff when you show up at the gym based on your location, adjusting notification volume levels based on ambient volume, which.

So you don't have the really loud ding when you're in the really quiet room. Oh, that's cool. I just run with my watch on silent all the time. So do I. But I will tell you when I'm at home, if I could run with it on in a ding when it wouldn't. like blow out everybody's ears, I would probably leave the noise on. Sure. I get so few notifications that pop on the watch that I don't, it wouldn't be annoying. Wait, how do they not all just pop on the watch? You can set.

Well, A, I pruned down my notification so that hardly anything fires notifications. Wait, can you tell it on a per app basis not to send specific? What? Yeah, that's a core feature. It's been like that since the launch of the watch. Are you serious? Yeah.

I thought that you just had to know. OK, I looked up bad information then because I thought I tried to look up whether you control that stuff and like the Reddit posts or whatever that I found said, no, you when the watch is connected, you just have to accept all notifications being on the watch. Nope, that's insanity. Oh, my God. I agree. I thought that was insanity. You go to notifications. Yeah. So you mirror iPhone alerts from and you turn it off for anything you don't want alerts on.

Oh, okay. It's in, it's in on the phone, on the watch app in the notification setting. And if you tell it not to send them to the watch, the phone will still light the screen up. Okay. All right. This is good to know. Yeah. I also use the smart stack more than I thought I would. I use it a lot. Largely, though, because I still hate what they did to the dock, which is to say they killed the dock.

There's no dock anymore, yeah. Yeah, and I use the dock all the time, but in the absence of the dock, the smart stack is a decent way to get to the apps that you're using a lot while they're in use. Yeah, I think it's, it's fine. I like the way the, the notification, the, the widgets pop up, like the podcast app widget and the music app widget and stuff like that are the primary things I use it for or a remote control for the TV.

It's those on the exercise app basically for me. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a, here's a question. This might also be a new watch year. I'm not a hundred percent sure yet. Okay. You've had more than one watch, right? Yeah. Would it be foolish or sensible to keep my current watch if I get a new one and use this old watch as the exercise watch? Like is managing multiple watches across one person sensible?

It's not hard to manage multiple watches across one person. They make that a very easy prospect because they like selling watches to people. Sure. Okay. I might just because I doubt I would get much of anything and trade in for this thing. It's quite beat up at this point. So I've. Like my plan is probably to use my old watch as a sleep watch. Okay. Sure. Except they keep adding new features to the newer watches that you probably want on the sleep watch. Oh yeah, sure.

I don't find that having more than one watch is really necessary given how fast it charges now. Yeah, my main thing is just the watch gets sweaty when you're out exercising with it and it gets old cleaning it constantly. Oh. Like having to fully wipe the watch down at least once a day. Well, I mean, just consider not exercising as much, Brad. Okay, sure. Hey, speaking of exercising.

How would you like to have an AI generated hype person to help you exercise more effectively? This, this did not do much for me. It's reminded me of the episode of the Simpsons where rain will rain here. Wolfhausen. uh became homer's workout buddy and would just give him like enthusiastic slogans like pump up the fitness and you know whatever

Seems bad. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just not big on like dynamically generated stuff like this in general. I like to set my own playlist for music and like control my own workout stuff. And like, I, you know, I could see a lot of people probably wanting something like this, but. Hmm. Funny. Yeah. And that's pretty much it. Like that's a notes on Apple watch and custom workouts are now more accessible in the workouts app.

I would give anything if there was a watch-specific podcast experience, but that's just not going to happen at this point. What do you want? A way to just download podcasts straight to the watch without any involvement of...

Oh, like, and, and, and looking at what Marco who makes overcast has said, this is all like Apple mandated, like they strictly control how you can download files to a watch and like where they have to come from. Like you have to, you basically have to download the podcast on your. phone first and then just kind of hope that they sink over to the watch effectively yeah it's a bad system it's terrible but it is what it is um and i think that's pretty much it yeah um

Another year of Apple products like like I'm going to say it again. I said at the top, but like I would much rather have. Hey, here's some stuff that we like that we made that we think you all will like to and we'll make your phone better for you. Yeah.

then a bunch of AI nonsense jammed down our throat. Yeah. I mean, whether it's because they don't see as much value as they thought they did last year, or it's just because they can't get it all working to their standards. Like the fact that this is not rotten with new AI features is nice. So Craig Vetteringi did an interview with Joanna Stern at Wall Street Journal where they talked about that a little bit. And she kind of she didn't really she put the screws to him a little bit. She did.

I think it was it was maybe it was maybe one like one too many questions for me, though, of just like, where is this? Why isn't it working? Because I don't think that like after like the third question, it was very clear they were not going to provide a satisfying answer.

Yeah, but the gist was, I thought the answer that he gave one of the times she asked that was... that we tried this, we got the V1 up and running really fast, and we felt like it was pretty good for the limited cases that they demoed during WWDC last year. But then it didn't it didn't work. The V2 didn't they couldn't get to work in a way that they were pleased with at all. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's honest, at least which.

Yeah. Hopped to the fact that it was not like Apple at least can get away with that because the way they sort of prioritize excellence or however you want to put it, you know, like it's that plays with their customer base, right? And then when they say, hey, it wasn't up to the Apple standard that actually makes people happy.

Well, I also think it's important. I think it's a metaphor for AI in general, too, is the, hey, this looks pretty good when you do a surface level view of it. And then when you dig in and start actually looking at what it's doing and how it's working. You're like, oh, maybe it's not. Maybe it's not what we thought it was. And the fact that they pulled back rather than pushed forward is is like, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's admirable, I think. Better than the alternative.

So anyway, they made the menu bar and Mac OS completely transparent. Transparent implies there is still some hint of a menu bar. It's invisible now. I love that. I hate it. It's just floating icons. Spies it. It's an anti-notch. You should love that. But it just further serves to highlight the large chunk of screen that is missing. Can't you put on the left side still? No, the menu bar. No, that has to be at the top. Oh, the menu bar. You're thinking about the dock.

I was thinking about the dock. No, I whatever. Transparent dock. Whatever. You can edit your wallpaper if you want, or I use a little app called Top Notch that just makes the exact area of the menu bar black on the wallpaper, and then it just looks like a nice, tasteful black menu bar. God.

Gross. Because I'm going to say it again. My objection to the notch has never been functional. It's only been aesthetic. As long as I can't see it and it disappears into a black menu bar, then fine. So then you should love the island. We'll see. Okay.

I guess if people have questions, there'll be a question and answer episode in a few weeks. So please send them to techpod at content.town. As always, thanks to everybody for listening. I apologize for my voice. I know it's gotten progressively worse throughout this episode. That's not too bad. Thank you for persevering.

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