Music Music From Relay, this is Connected, episode 543. Today's show is brought to you by Ecamm, NetSuite and Google Gemini. I'm your annual chairman, Federico Vittici, and it's my pleasure to be joined this week as well by the one and only Stephen Hackett. Hello, Steven. Hello, Federico. We just did, I think, an interesting pre-show about me making a big life decision this year. Yeah.
Connected Pro members should go check that out and send me feedback about it because as you'll hear, I think it's an exciting time for me. I'm sure I will get my fair share of critics, but I always do. But I think it's more exciting than concerning. So go check that out.
We have some follow-up, Stephen. Some really important follow-up. We have some really important follow-up. I do have one little housekeeping thing I'm going to slip in here. There's currently work happening in my backyard and I'm doing my best to mute and Jim will do his best to clean it up. So if you hear background noise on my side, I apologize. It may not be to a normal standard of quality, but it cannot be helped. Okay, follow up. Connor wrote in.
When this came in, I immediately texted you a copy of this. So Connor wrote, on November 17th, 2023, that seems like a long time ago. It is. I sent feedback to the show about buying a Bridge keyboard from Best Buy. This was around the time that Bridge was... I think going out of business and then they got bought by like a new company with some of the old owners. I have some link in the show notes. You can follow Bridges history. It was very complicated.
Back to Connor. I'm here to report that 16 months later, the keyboard has imploded. The whole thing fell apart spectacularly in a 24-hour period. This led me to the realization that all iPad keyboards have significant compromises these days. So I bought an aftermarket smart keyboard folio. Fingers crossed it holds up. I'll check back in in a year.
The keyboard has imploded. What does that mean? What does that mean? Like, it literally imploded on its... Like, I am so fascinated by... And sorry about whatever happened to Connor. This, like... From a podcast and entertainment perspective, it sounds incredible. But at the same time, I'm sorry, Connor, that this happened. Maybe let us know how it failed. Yeah.
In putting these links together for the show notes, I also realized that Bridge is, you know, there's some entities, companies, people, brands, whatever, who put Ys in their name. For no reason? Like, for example, what? I mean, nothing specific comes to mind. I just have a feeling that people have done it. It's kind of silly. It feels like an early 2000s kind of vibe. It does. Yeah.
Like having a website without the last E in the name or having I in front of your username. Maybe you should actually consider rebranding Relay. so that you don't use the Y, you use the letter I, so it becomes Real AI. Real AI. Real AI. So it's actually about AI. It's a podcast network about AI. That will end well.
For you, I'm sure. I was telling somebody the other day, they were asking, you know, just a person in my life, right? Not a tech person. They will never hear this. They're like, hey, what's the deal with AI? I was like, oh. Oh, boy. Let's sit down. And I made the comment is I know I can tell what things are bubbly, like what's a bubble in tech, because that's what we get show pitches for.
And so for a long time, Mike and I got pitches for like crypto stuff and NFTs. And now all we get is like, hey, have this AI person on your podcast or start an AI podcast. And what I told them was. these things are bubbles to a degree, but there's always something that sticks around to the next cycle, right? Like.
There's some crypto and NFT and like blockchain stuff that is still with us. And there will be some AI stuff with us in 10 years. The trick is knowing what's what. And I don't know how we're talking about this now. But anyways, Relay AI. Coming? Probably never, but maybe. You never know. Christian wrote in. This is incredible.
I'm a resident of the Channel Islands where Sark is one of the four main islands. Sark or Cirque. I'm suddenly unprepared to say the name. This was on the flag in the Jeremy's we played recently. Yeah. Yeah. Fun fact. Actually, it's two half islands. So there's a big island and a little island. And it's one of the car-free islands in the English Channel. So there's no cars there. Interesting. Which is cool. Yeah. Big Cirque and Little Cirque.
That's cool. I wonder if Christian... We don't know whether Christian lives on Big Sork or Little Sork and what the differences are between... Supposedly, I would imagine one is big and the other is small. Yeah, interesting. Okay. Yeah, Christian did not send in their address, if that's what you're asking. Right, right. We don't want to dox Christian. No. For sure. Yeah. But thank you for the feedback. I love hearing from listeners from places we talk about or places I would...
We did a whole thing a few years ago that you remember. We did. Yeah, we had people just send in where they listened from, and it was a lot of fun. Maybe we should bring that back sometime. Maybe. Without doxing people, yes. Well, I mean, you know, the address, there's not an address field on the feedback page. If it's voluntary, is that doxing? No, probably not. It's just sharing. Yeah. Last week you asked to hear from people who are using.
high-end Mac hardware and like AI training and like, who's the 512 gigabytes of unified memory for? And Matthew wrote in, Matthew says, I have an M2 Ultra Mac Studio with 192 gigabytes of unified memory. I use it for research purposes at the university level, and I study exergy economics. and perform societal exergy analysis using matrices. Yes. I had to look up a lot of those words. Okay. Exergy. Exergy. I got a lot of exergy myself. Okay. Exergy is defined.
I asked the internet. It's the maximum amount of work that can be produced by a stream or system as it is brought into equilibrium with a reference environment. It can be thought of as a measure of usefulness or the quality of energy. Okay. I still don't know what it means, but that's how the internet answered. It sounds fancy. Yeah.
Look, I want to be in equilibrium with a reference environment. I want to be in equilibrium with my environment as well. When I think about that, I think about it's like floating atop a pool, right? You're just like... Right. You're just going with the flow. Back to Matthew. This workflow is massively parallel. So I assign each country we're looking at to a processor core. Oh, okay. Even so, building a database of all countries, and there's a link in the show notes to this.
It takes 24 hours for the Mac Studio to crunch the data. I wish I had funding for an M3 Ultra, but we will probably wait for an M5. That is wild. Isn't that cool? You got that Italian core, that United States core just coming along for the exergy. I love it. I also have my own example.
of real-life application of the Mac Studio. I recently spoke to a friend who's been hired as a video editor for one of the biggest Italian TV channels and one of the biggest... unrevised talent shows here in Italy. And they were telling me that in the editing room that they have in the office, they have a whole lineup of about 10 M2 Max Max studios.
And their policy is that they all have to use Final Cut, obviously. So they added this really, really popular... TV show with like millions of watchers on any given week using just Mac Studios and Final Cut. And I thought that was pretty cool. And then they're obviously like, they have different production pipelines for what's going on the online video distribution channels versus what's actually being televised over the air, you know, because this is...
Channel 5 is an over-the-air... channel on television, so they have different encoding and production pipelines for what goes on the web versus what actually goes on TV, but they're all just using Mac Studios, M2 Max, and Final Cut. And I thought that was pretty cool. That is really cool. I love hearing stories about people using Macs in these ways. Over the weekend, a friend of mine sent me a picture. I'm not sure where they were. It was some sort of like...
recyclers electronic kind of cell right like it was a table full of old macbook airs like pre-retina macbook airs i actually applied i was like macbook air rendering farm you know like let's go yeah probably a bad idea hey Federico it's the final call for merch it's the final countdown as they say
You did exactly what I was hoping you would do. I was hoping you would. Thank you. You would call. Merch in the sale ends on Friday, March 14th. Go to connectedmerch.co.uk. The link is in the show notes. You can't miss it. It's also the chapter art right now. Lots of ways to get to this. We got six shirts available for pre-order. Organic Mega Pickles.
Tiny Heads, Tiny Heads Special Edition. Take a test flight. Gumdrops and technology should be colorful. Go check them out. We're trying to feed a baby here. Exactly. And also like, sure, the world may be ending, but wouldn't you want to watch that as it happens while wearing an organic Mega Pickles t-shirt? Right? At least do it in style, you know? That's a good point.
I hadn't really thought about it that way. Yeah, don't do it with the t-shirt with the Mac bro on it. Do it with the Mega Pickle on it. The Mega Pickle. I can tell you exclusively here. that Mega Pickles is the highest selling shirt so far. Ooh. Okay. This is a big reveal of the show. Followed by Technology Should Be Colorful.
Interesting, interesting. Don't give it away because we need to have a final proper reveal. I mean, obviously Tiny Heads is the best selling I've forgotten. Tiny Heads selling. Right, right. Despite Michael. It's the middle of the past. Now, if you combine the, I didn't do this. If you combine the two tiny head shirts, because there's tiny heads and tiny head special edition, it's the top seller. Okay.
Ooh, okay. I like it. I like it. So go do it. Go check it out. Seriously, everyone who's ordered one, thank you. Thank you. If you're in the Relay members Discord, which you can... joined by becoming a member of connected pro i've been dropping free codes for t-shirts because with cotton bureau as you sell more you earn these free codes and you know i probably should send them to family and friends or like to you but instead i'm just giving them away to members so that's a good call
Yeah, it's fun. It's like dropping. Have you ever like gone to a pond and like you drop bread or something and then all the fish like come up and eat it? No, but one time when I was little, my grandpa took me to this really big square in Rome and he was like, hey, do you want to feed the pigeons? And he gave me a bag of rice. And it's like, just throw it on the ground and the pigeons will come to you. And that has to be one of the most traumatizing events in my life where I drop this...
like rice beans on the ground and I was basically assaulted by pigeons. And I was like six or seven and I remember just being traumatized by it. It looked like a Alfred Hitchcock movie, honestly. Like I was basically assaulted by all these birds. who just wanted to eat the rice. So I do think that dropping breadcrumbs in a pond is probably the safer bet. Or a code for a free t-shirt and Discord. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I could just see, you know, little young Federico there. And I was real tiny. I was short. I was real little. And all these pigeons flying toward me, trying to eat the rice off my hands. It was scary. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'm glad you're okay. This episode of Connected is made possible by Ecamm Live, the leading video production and live streaming studio built for the Mac.
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That's one month free of Ecamm Live at Ecamm, E-C-A-M-M, Ecamm.com slash connected with the code connected at checkout. Go there now and check it out. Our thanks to Ecamm for the support of the show. Stephen, I have some important news to share with you and our listeners. I have finally found a really good use case. for my $3,500 face computer, which will be the Vision Pro. It took me a year to get to this point, but I finally found a way for the Vision Pro to be sticky.
in my quote-unquote workflow, in a way that I've been using it almost, no, almost every night. That gives it away. Every night for the past week. So, the Vision Pro... has become my night computer. Not in the sense that like, you know, the old joke of like day phone and night phone. It's not about that. It's about something else. So over the past few months, my girlfriend Sylvia, she's become very sensitive to light sources at night.
I don't know what happened. I think, you know, maybe these things come and go during the year. You know, maybe, you know, there's the time of year when you're working a lot and you're particularly stressed. And so you're... more of a light sleeper than normal but over the past few months yes she's been very busy and she's been very stressed you know for a lot of responsibilities at work but the thing is she's become very sensitive to light
So I had, you know, we had to rethink all of all of our like home automations for like the the the colorful light bulbs that we have like. Instead of turning off, you know, at some point in the night, they turn off before we go to sleep or like even things like turning off the LED for my television or the LED for like my monitor in the office.
was blinking by itself at night, like turning off all of these lights. And obviously... I was the one remaining problem in this scenario, in that Sylvia goes to bed before I do, because I like to carve out like an hour, an hour and a half for myself to do my reading or to do my gaming, to do those sorts of things. Watch some YouTube videos. Watch Severance, which Sylvia doesn't do. I just want to have those 90 minutes for myself before I also go to sleep.
And obviously, I was waking her up constantly by using either my iPhone or my iPad Pro in bed. And so that's when I realized, wait, I could still use all the apps that I want to use. without emitting any light whatsoever by using the Vision Pro. And so that's exactly what I've been doing for the past week. I've been using the Vision Pro as my night computer, mostly to do reading and watching TV.
And obviously not playing games. Although I do hope that changes at some point later this year if Apple allows HDMI connections via the developer strap. We'll talk about that if it happens in Vision OS 3. But I mostly use it to watch TV. watch YouTube, listen to some music occasionally, and catch up on my reading cue, just using the Vision Pro. And that gave me not just, I mean, obviously a newfound appreciation for, you know, finally I can put this really expensive computer to good use. Yeah.
But also I have some up-to-date notes about using the Vision Pro regularly. Okay. I do have one hardware question. Sure. At some point, weren't you a person who took off the light shield? I did. I did. But because of this new scenario in my life, I put on the light seal again. That's what I thought. Okay.
Yeah, yeah. Just to make sure that no light is bleeding whatsoever. In fact, I got to look into whether I can actually turn off completely eyesight, you know, the outer facing display. I don't know if there's a way to just say just... never light up the outer facing display I gotta look into it I'm not sure if there's a maybe usually these things are like accessibility settings maybe there's an accessibility setting in somewhere to do that
But yes, I have the light seal again. Just get some tape. Just tape over the outside. Did you see that trypophobia-inducing cover for the Vision Pro? Yeah. D brand, I think, made. It honestly looks horrific. But yeah, it doesn't completely block the display anyway, because you need the sensors. Anyway.
So I'm running the Vision OS 2.4 beta. I have three comments. The first one is that the performance of the Vision Pro... in really low light and by low light i mean absence of light because i'm using it in the complete darkness of my bedroom while my partner is sleeping next to me the performance in low light continues to be really really abysmal really bad like
Obviously, the pass-through is non-existent at that point, but I always get the alert that I'm using the Vision Pro in low light, and I wish there was a way for me to say, yes, I know that I'm using this in the dark. Like, I don't need you to... tell me every single time but the you know the effect of you looking around a dark room is really jarring because you get this like
You don't get this pure pitch black. You get the pass-through version of pitch black, which is like black but fuzzy. It's like in the old days when the TV channel went off the air and it was like dark static. Yes, it's basically the equivalent of dark static. Obviously, using an environment mitigates that.
But still, I wish there was a way for... I wish there was a darkroom mode or something to just say, yes, I know that I'm using the Vision Pro in a darkroom. And the good news, though, is that gestures still work perfectly. So the Vision Pro is obviously, I think it's using a combination of like LiDAR and something else to still see your hands and your fingers as you perform the pinching and the clicking gestures. So those work perfectly. But I wish there was a way.
to have a better darkroom environment. But speaking of environments, like the proper vision-wise environments, my absolute favorite is the new Bora Bora environment. Like, it's... It's so peaceful and quiet. It looks fantastic. But I continue to be very much confused by the volume and audio settings for environments in Vision OS. It seems that by default, the environment always plays sounds unless you go into settings and turn down the volume for all environments. But...
Just like any other Apple platform, this applies to the iPad, this applies to the iPhone, I wish there were more fine grained audio controls. Like, I wish there wasn't more, and I don't know exactly how, because I'm not an Apple designer, but I wish there was an easier way for me to say, just turn down the volume in this environment if I'm using it at night, or maybe...
turn it back up if I'm using it during the day, or maybe have separate... I think one of the things that Android, for example, does so well is having multiple volume sliders for different things. That sort of interaction does not exist on Vision OS. And I figured because it doesn't exist on iPadOS or iOS either. So that's, you know, better and more fine-tuned audio controls would be nice to have. Yeah, Android, just for people who aren't familiar, I just looked it up.
They have volume levels for media. Yep. Call. It's like the volume of the other person on a phone call. Ringtone, notification, and alarms. All separate sliders. Yeah, and when you use the slider on Android, there's like an ellipsis button that you can press. And when you press that...
button right underneath the volume slider, it brings up this menu with all the separate sliders that you can use. I think it's really well done. It's one of the best aspects of Android. And I think it's totally something that Apple should copy on all platforms. The final comment that I will share is that to, and this is again something that we spoke about in the pro show, but to overcome the lack of native apps on Vision OS, which is the same problem as iPadOS.
I'm also using a bunch of web apps on the Vision Pro, and it's fine, really. It's actually better. This is one of the points that I will share in my article. It's actually better than on the iPad, because at the very least, you can open... an unlimited number of windows around you for those web apps. This is, you know, part of the superior multitasking that you have on Vision OS compared to Stage Manager on iPadOS. I've been using this app literally called Web Apps from the Vision OS App Store.
And web apps basically gives you a launcher, a customizable launcher for different websites. And each of those websites, you can choose to open in a separate window.
So I can have my Todoist, I can have my ChatGPT or Cloud Window, I can have my Google Calendar all open as standalone web views on the Vision Pro. And I can, you know, if maybe like one of the things that I... also do like is preparing for the next day before i go to sleep so i like to have my calendar my task manager you know some some ai tool on the side and i can open an unlimited number of these windows and even though they are web apps
They work just fine. And even without a keyboard, I've mostly been using eye tracking and hand gestures, and they work okay. And the final thing... as an additional comment that I will share with you, Stephen. This will probably be a post on Mac Stories at some point. I was wondering last night, in fact... Hey, is it possible on the Vision Pro with the M2 chip to run AI models locally? And boy, was that fun. So I found...
these two apps from the VisionOS App Store. One is called Full Moon. It's made by a company called Mainframe. They do a bunch of AI services, I think. And they have this very simple client to run on-device private AI models. And they have those lightweight AI models, like the small version of Llama by Meta.
a small version of DeepSeek, you know, these small AI models that you can download and they take up like one, two, two or three gigabytes. And those models, they work. You know, they're kind of slow. I could hear the fan of the Vision Pro going off as I was chatting with those models locally. But the Full Moon app was working and got the job done. Then I found something else. I think it's called On-Device AI. Not the best name, but they have a Vision OS version that, funnily enough...
And this is something that at some point I would like to check out. I think that this app can connect locally on your Wi-Fi network to the Mac version. to sort of offload some computing to the Mac version, which is an interesting idea that I want to check out. But this app also lets you download on-device models on the Vision Pro, but even bigger models. And when I saw...
that I could download the 10 gigabyte version of DeepSeek with 14 billion parameters. I was like, oh boy, I wonder what happens here if I download this huge model on the Vision Pro with the M2. What's going to happen? And here's my advice for whoever wants to try this. Don't do it. So my Vision Pro got really hot. So I downloaded the 10 gigabyte DeepSeek model. The Vision Pro got really hot. The fans, they started really going. And as soon as I loaded the model,
Everything crashed. Oh, no. Bora Bora turned into a pitch black environment. Well, that solves your past. Sure. That was actually a better, like, that was a proper pitch black. PNG probably just being used as a placeholder because the Vision Pro ran out of RAM, supposedly. The environment crashed. All of my other windows, except the on-device AI window, all of the other windows, they sort of froze, crashed. And then got stuck in this like zoomed state. Like literally their UIs.
Got stuck on screen. I couldn't move them. I couldn't close them. But all the UI elements were zoomed in. So they were like comically huge for whatever reason. It's like when you hit command plus in a web browser. you make the text really huge, that's what happened. I had to force quit all my apps. That didn't do it. I had to power cycle my Vision Pro. So if you try and run an AI model locally on the Vision Pro...
Maybe try with the small ones. Don't do the 10 gigabyte, you know, anything over 7 billion parameters. Don't do it unless you want to have a really bad vision OS crash. That's incredible. I have never heard of a Vision Pro crashing out like that. Yeah, it was kind of spectacular in its own way. This episode of Connected is brought to you by NetSuite.
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be brought into equilibrium with a reference environment. Okay, okay. So you want to channel all my exergy here? I do. Okay. Yes. Do you remember... ios 6 to ios 7 do you remember that year oh yes i do what a time uh what a time we could be getting ready to relive that so Mark Gurman and Bloomberg and others have talked about a potentially, I'm quoting, one of the most dramatic software overhauls, unquote, in Apple's history.
Gurman goes on to say, quote, this will go well beyond a new design language and aesthetic tweaks, unquote. This would include the Mac and iOS and iPadOS. And it seems like the new design will be loosely based on Vision OS with Apple's goal to make the design of its operating systems, quote, more consistent. Apple wants to simplify the way users navigate and control. their devices what is your gut reaction to this is this something that is needed huh so my first reaction was that
I've been sort of banging this drum for the past few years. I really didn't think that we would see another major redesign after the whole mess that iOS 7 was. And it took Apple many, many years of refinement and sort of building back up the iOS design architecture to land in a more nuanced and stable place. And for that reason, for the past few years...
I've had that line in my annual iOS reviews where I thought, under Tim Cook's app, Apple will probably never see another major dramatic redesign again. And so I was very surprised. to see this report by Gurman. But then, you know, the more I thought about it and the more I saw myself potentially going down to...
different paths with that thought. A cynical one and maybe a realistic one. And the cynical point of view is kind of where I want to start this conversation with you. Because the cynical point of view would say, well... If you are behind on AI and the narrative surrounding Apple these days in any major tech press outlet is Apple is behind on AI, Google is eating their lunch with Gemini and all these other AI providers.
are showing a different path for the future of technology, what's a good way to sort of change the conversation, almost Don Draper style? Yeah, I was going to say, Don Draper. Yeah, that would be totally, totally blindside. the press, and be like, well, I know that you're all thinking about AI, but what about a complete makeover of all of our platforms? So that's one way to look at it, you know? Well, I think people are...
I think MG Sigler had a really good post about this on his new blog, Spyglass, this morning. People are inherently and intrinsically almost... always attracted to new that is also there's also another madman reference you know what a show that was when don draper explains explains the concept of new this you know new creates an itch in people and and it's hard to let go
of being curious about what's new and so a new design it sort of catches people's attention and maybe distracts them from all the problems that apple is having with ai and apple intelligence so That's one way to look at it. And I kind of wanted to ask you if you also think there's something to this idea. I think that it's... Let me rephrase that. I don't think Apple says...
Hey, y'all. They get a big meeting. Tim Cook sits down. Hey, y'all. We're behind Apple intelligence. Let's distract everybody with a new design. Yeah. Now... If that's an unintentional consequence, is Apple sad about that? Probably not. Probably not. You know, I don't think Apple is a company that would redesign its OSs to...
Out of spite, almost. Yeah, well, out of spite, but it's also kind of out of fear, right? Or out of desire to distract from their... ongoing woes with with apple intelligence and you know the the whole siri news cycle we kind of missed but like uh personalized siri not coming anytime soon it seems like and so i don't know I don't think it's a distraction move, but I generally have been in agreement with you. There's like Apple is not going to really do a ground up rebuild, especially of iOS.
because iowa 7 was so jarring and for years right people like you and i both heard this in our everyday lives like oh is my phone going to change if i upgrade it again right people had to relearn things with iowa 7 it was very jarring but if you look at iowa 7 and you look at ios 18 we're in 18 right i was 18 yeah they are clearly different Apple has evolved it over time. And yes, the basic structure of iOS 7 is still more or less there, but it looks...
And in some places, radically different. And I think better than iOS 7 did. And so I've been... on the same train you've been on. Like Apple's just going to continue to evolve things over time. You know, some years we'll get bigger things than others. Like Big Sur was a pretty big change to Mac OS. You know, the new control center.
being editable in ios 18 like that's a big deal widgets are a big deal but i didn't really think that we would have a a big shift again like this potentially could be that said I'm extremely interested in this. And I think the overall vibe of Vision OS, like the bronze and the frosted glass and the depth, I... really like the look of vision os and if there are things that can be gleaned from that but done in an appropriate way for each platform
then I think that's okay. Like the thing that I really raised my eyebrow at, and like with Gurman, it's hard to tell like what's him and what's sources, but Gurman's Apple quotes. Apple also plans to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. That... worries me a little bit because where apple has done that on the mac like they've hidden a lot of things on the mac behind clicks or behind drop downs and not all that's good and i think apple
in its current design iterations of software, wants to stash things away and you have to go find them. And I don't think that's a good trend. I hope that's not something that is going to be like a... a hallmark of this upcoming design refresh. But as long as they don't go too far and they can take things from Vision OS and try to make things feel more related, I don't think that's necessarily...
a bad thing. I don't know. Am I over-reading that line? No, I don't think you are. And that sort of brings me to what I've been thinking as the second way to consider.
this possibility which is so let's say that you're Apple and you're thinking about the future and you're thinking about what does your ecosystem look like say five years from now or seven years from now where in addition to the phone and tablet and the laptops, maybe you have glasses, maybe you have foldables, both on the phone and maybe foldable laptops or foldable tablets, and you have an app ecosystem that...
is going to continue because this is already happening but it's only going to continue becoming more and more modular. In the sense of like an app that you use can be a widget, can be, I mean, you literally know with WidgetSmith, like what even is an app anymore at this point? It's not necessarily the icon that you press on your home screen, right? So if you're thinking about that.
And you're thinking, well, let's say that we're doing a foldable phone next year. What is a window? What is an application window when you open up a foldable phone and it becomes a small tablet? Yeah. What does that mean in a world where I don't remember what podcast this was on. So my apologies, but some show I was listening to recently was talking about iPhone apps on the iPad. Like they're still just centered with background. I was like, why aren't those in?
slide over or like there are all these weird edge cases and boy foldables really complicate all that and i'm not sure that i'm not sure that that ios is Okay, here you go. As an iPad user, I'm going to ask you this. iOS apps started life as like, they take up the whole screen, right? There's no window Chrome. There's no window management.
You open an app, you hit the home button on your iPhone in 2008 or whatever. I'm not sure iOS or iPadOS has ever really broken free of that. Like, Stage Manager tries, but it's still on Rails, right? You can't...
You don't have complete free-form control like you do on the Mac. And maybe, I mean, we're pure speculation territory now, but maybe this redesign... like maybe that's part of this of like you know what on the ipad turns out we maybe do need some window chrome and it needs to be more than like that weird little half circle thing in the bottom corner and you know vision us had to deal with that because
your apps are in your, like in your space, like in your physical space. And so there needed to be depth and some window management and like. maybe the iPad benefits the most from this, which would certainly be interesting given our pro topic today where the iPad feels really stagnant. Exactly. And this is sort of where I was going.
I think another way to think about this rumor is if you're Apple and you invested a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of people over the past few years into building the Vision Pro. and the Vision Pro with Vision OS, right? And the reception of the Vision Pro has largely been great software, but this hardware is not going anywhere, not with this form factor, not with this price.
but the software is really good. That's been like a common theme over the past year. And so if you're Apple and you're looking at it, and maybe there's a part of you that thinks, well, should we throw away all of these? interesting ideas that we've had for Windows Chrome and multitasking and interactions? Or is there a scenario, is there a timeline in which we can take some of those lessons?
some of those design sensibilities, some of those interaction patterns that we have pioneered with Vision OS, do they make sense on other platforms? And I'm going to give you like a very practical example. One way, one simple way. that I could see when German said, like, this loosely word.
from Gurman's reporting is doing a lot of work in this context. But let's take it at face value. Let's say that you're loosely based on Vision OS. In a very practical term, that could mean that maybe, you know the home indicator at the bottom? of your iPhone apps, like the home indicator that you swipe to open multitasking and to go back to the home screen. On Vision OS, you also have that sort of...
indicator anchored at the bottom of a window, right? But next to that indicator, there's always a close button. So that when you look at it, there's a tiny dot next to the... to the thin line, there's a dot that appears, and that's your close button. Maybe we could see something like that on iOS or iPadOS. There's maybe space to have more UI elements next to the home indicator. That could be something to close. as an app or maybe it could be a window switcher.
Like, again, in the context of a foldable, I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if this year at WWDC, we get an API, developers get an API to support multi-window on iPhone. And everybody's like, why would you want to do multiple app windows on iPhone? That's the sort of thing that sort of telegraphs the ability to have multiple windows on a foldable phone next year, right? And this is exactly what Apple does. Do you remember when they did that years ago?
Size classes. Size classes. Like, why do you need, wait, wait, why isn't an app always the same size? Like, they're bigger phones coming. They're coming real soon. Exactly, exactly. Or like maybe when German says they want to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices. All right. What does that mean? Maybe a way that, you know, maybe.
Something like that could be a redesign of top bars. Like top bars have been with us forever, especially on the iPhone. On the Vision Pro, they look completely different. They're floating. Sometimes they're floating at the bottom. Sometimes they're floating at the top. Sometimes they are ornaments. on the side. And when you look at them...
They expand into different sections of an app that you can navigate. Maybe we could be looking at something that is not necessarily like a straight up one-to-one copy of Vision OS, but something similar to that, like a new way to navigate. sections of instagram for example or sections of i don't know uh mastodon or whatever um and of course uh there's the whole aesthetic Like the simplistic fact that you, for example, as Apple, have a chance to make your icons look completely new.
With new guidelines, maybe you can give them a round shape. Maybe you can give them a sense of depth, like on Vision OS. I do think that the Vision OS app icons are some of the best work that Apple has done in years. And I would love to have some consistency with those styles. They're not skeuomorphic, but they're not flat either. They're new, they're fresh, they look nice. And I think that's potentially another avenue. But for me, the main point here...
is this idea of consistency. And I see a lot of people sort of arguing about this, like, does Apple need to make everything consistent, right? And that I think is where...
is the trickiest part of the conversation. Because obviously, the Mac, the iPhone, the Vision Pro, the Apple Watch, they're all fundamentally different platforms, right? With wildly different... interaction systems some things have a trackpad the phone you touch the apple watch is tiny and on your wrist like they are completely different devices why and do they need to look the same
right and i would be this is my theory i would be personally shocked if apple throws away decades literally decades of design expertise and design studies that show that it's better to optimize the same interface element for different computing platforms and instead they just go you know what
A menu should look like a menu everywhere. We don't care if it's on your wrist, if it's on your physical space with the Vision Pro, or if it's on a Mac, they should always look the same. They could do that. I would be very surprised. And for example, there's going to be a link in the show notes. To show you a practical example of what I mean, on every Apple platform, there's a UI element called a sheet.
You've seen sheets before. Sometimes they slide up from the bottom. Sometimes they come up in the middle of the screen. Sometimes they are full screen. It's technically speaking the same UI element, but as per Apple's... human interface guidelines, they look completely different based on the Apple computer that you're using. And I think when Gurman says loosely, I think loosely potentially means that Apple is gonna...
Reuse, recycle, but always adapt some of the UI conventions and styles and sense of aesthetic that they pioneered with Vision OS, but they're always going to adapt and optimize that. for whatever computer you're going to use. Yeah, I think Apple knows that making the Mac and the Apple Watch and the Vision Pro all look and work the same.
are like two different things, right? You can recycle some of the visuals, but as you said perfectly, the interactions are totally different. And I think the best example of this currently, and stay with me here. is vision os and tv os the tv os launcher and like that interface like there's some vision os stuff in there right that the icons kind of shimmer and there's some depth to them yeah
But one, you're using your eyeballs and your fingers, and the other, you're using a remote. And very clearly, those OSs are related, but you use them in very different ways. I think Apple is definitely smart enough to know that copying and pasting one OS over another is not the way to do this. But, you know, there are some things that I think could be a bit more... tidy across the line and i think most interestingly the ipad has the most to gain
And honestly, I think the Mac has the most to lose, like simplifying window management on the Mac. Like we've had red, yellow and green controls in the upper left hand corner since the Mac OS 10 betas 25 years ago. But you hover over that green button and that thing is overloaded. You have move and resize, fill and arrange, full screen, and move to your other displays. All under a hover state?
okay, red, yellow, green still makes a lot of sense, but all that other stuff, like, is there a better way to do that? And so I'm a little... A little apprehensive because, again, the last couple of years since really Big Sur moving forward, Apple has kind of not done a great job with some of that on the Mac. But.
Apple's perfect user is one who moves fluidly between their devices throughout a day and making that easier is in the company's best interest. And probably ultimately, once you get over the hump. is better for users. And so I am excited about this a little nervous, but mostly excited. And I think that it could be, it could be fun to see what, what Apple would do with this.
if vision os is the seed but i will tell you more than one of our friends who develop apps i've texted me be like oh boy you know because it means a lot of work for app developers summer busy summer busy summer Some final questions that I want to share. Just sort of leave out there before we move on. It'll be interesting to see whether or not this redesign... will totally and completely embrace SwiftUI or still remain anchored to UIKit for several aspects.
It'll be interesting to see if Apple also embraces the style of design that we saw with photos last year. And not just like the actual structure of photos, but like this idea of customizable app interfaces, right? Is photos like quite telling from that perspective? And lastly, more of a... More of a wildcard theory than a question. Yes. But can you imagine if this report actually means that Apple is going to unify everything under like an Apple OS?
brand. Instead of like, you know, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, like just say AppleOS. And it's, you know, it's consistent. I'll give you that. It's consistent, but... still optimized for everything i know that there's a whole bunch of reasons why apple doesn't want to do it yeah but i think it's going to be fascinating to think about as an option i think mike floated out an upgrade like eight years ago yeah yeah
I mean, Apple has a lot of operating systems, but really they have basically two. They have macOS and they have all the others that are basically the same underneath, but have different frameworks, different UIs. different capabilities. I don't think they would toss all of the brand equity they have in things like macOS and iOS in particular.
But what I could see and what I would prefer is that they use this as an opportunity to keep the OS's named what they are, but tidy up the branding that links them.
It's like, why are we on macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 and Vision OS 2? And some people are like, just put a name after it. Or put a number after it. Put a year after it. I actually would kind of like for them to... use names like if it's mac os sequoia then like let it be ios sequoia or you know just something so it's easier to understand and to keep up with
I get Apple like starting at one and moving forward. We saw it two weeks ago with the C1, right? The first cellular chip is C1. That's fine. I think with hardware, it's a little bit different and maybe more important in hardware, but... while you're in there, Apple, do something about the names because it's getting out of hand. I love that idea. And I'm going to give you one final what if scenario that I think you're going to particularly like you, Steven. Okay.
If you are doing this and you're keeping the names separate, but you're giving them consistent branding. So we've had cats before, right? Yeah. On the Mac. Yeah. And then we've had California places. But now we're looking into the future. We're looking into futuristic technologies. And we're looking ahead. We're looking to expand our horizons. Oh, I see where you're going. And what better way to look up and above than space? Can you imagine iOS Andromeda and macOS Andromeda?
I don't know, tvOS Orion and VisionOS Orion. iPadOS Uranus, you know. I mean, it's right there. Yes, yes. Or they could just say, you know, iOS Pluto. That's not a planet. It used to be an operating system, but now it's not. I don't know. I just think, you know. You know, Cats, California, space. I love it. Yeah. I love it. I suspect that we will hear much more about this between now and WWDC, which really, Federico...
Not that far away. It's what, two and a half months? Only two and a half months? Is that right? April, yeah, two and a half months. Oh, two months, three, two and a half to three. Okay. Yeah. It's next week. It's tomorrow. I do think we'll get dates in the next two weeks.
We're entering that phase. It's looking, not to take a political turn, but it's looking increasingly... uh how can i say this uh challenging to to consider a trip to the united states if you're not american yeah these days you know i get it I'm just going to say it. People are going to hate me for it. Do WWDC in London. Do it in Europe. It's right there. The area around Battersea is beautiful. Just do it there.
Do it. Everybody's going to be safe. WBD Battersea. It's right there. That was bad even for your standards. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Google Gemini. Gemini Live is a feature where you can just talk to it, and it's really wild to have a full-on conversation with this thing. I was messing around and asked it to give me some ideas for hosting an event. And when it starts giving results, you can just stop it and say, okay, well, what about something low key for a smaller group?
And then adjust to that and you can keep going until you get an idea that you want. And I think it's really useful for brainstorming things. It's good when you don't know where to start or if you hit a wall, you can just open Gemini and it helps you get the ball rolling.
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Our thanks to Google Gemini for their support of the show and all of Relay. I've had this thought rattling around in my head the last couple weeks. Yes, buy it. No, no, I'm not buying a Mac studio. Did Apple accidentally make the world's best AI desktop? I think, yes, I think they. accidentally realized I'm half joking, but also not really, that they're making the best AI computers. Yeah.
I don't think that was the goal when they started, you know, sketching out Apple Silicon for the Mac probably eight years ago now because we're five years into it. So eight, 10, 10 years ago. But they kind of fell into it, I think. Now, I think they've embraced it since then, right? Like, they're not continuing to be surprised by it. But this has come to light, especially with the Max Studio and the M3 Ultra.
Y'all have been writing about this on Mac Stories, so what's the deal here? The deal is that Benchmarks came out for the new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra, and it...
It looks like a beast of a machine. I especially want to point people to this review slash benchmarks by Max Weinbach at Creative Strategies. They have done... an excellent job comparing the performance of the new m3 ultra mac studio running on device local large language models so the models downloaded and running locally on the computer, between the Mac Studio...
and a PC setup using the latest Intel desktop high-end CPUs and the NVIDIA RTX 5090. So currently the best GPU in the world for consumers. That is very expensive. It's a very expensive GPU and a very expensive setup all around. And the most surprising aspect to me is that in a vanilla setup, meaning you're just downloading the model.
And you're running the model with a non-optimized, not to get too much into the weeds, there's plenty of ways for like programmers and developers to optimize a large language model for an NVIDIA GPU. But if you just, you know, set it up and you run it vanilla out of the box. The M3 Ultra absolutely obliterates. The 5090. And to the point where, so in this story, just I wanted to look up the specs again. They're using the 256 gigabyte version.
of the Mac Studio with the Ultra. So they're actually not even using. the top-of-the-line version. But with these specs, they have the 32-core CPU, the 80-core GPU, they have that unified memory, 192... gigabytes of those 256 can be allocated to VRAM they have a 4 terabyte SSD and if you just look at the numbers you know if you scroll down in the story that is going to be linked in the show notes and if you scroll to the LLM performance You're going to see that, for example,
This person is running one of the QAN models. So QAN is the large language model created by Alibaba. That's going to be, according to the reports, one of the partners for Apple intelligence in China. They're running the $32 billion. a 4-bit version of QAN, the RTX 5090...
can output almost 16 tokens per second. I know that tokens are not necessarily words, but for the sake of simplicity and clarity on this episode, think of like 16... instances of the word hello like the word hello tends to be a single token so imagine that every yes hello imagine that in hello
Imagine that every second that large language model on a 5090 can spit out 16 hellos. Hello. Hello, hello, hello, like really fast. It's very eager to say hello. But the ultra... in the mac studio can spit out 33 per second of them and that's basically like twice the performance that you're getting in a computer that is a chunky mac mini essentially So yeah, I do think that, and the story goes on to sort of explain how a lot of the work here is being done by the open source framework.
that apple created for developers which is called mlx it's an open source framework that allows developers to fine-tune
large language models specifically for Apple Silicon and specifically for the unified memory architecture of Apple Silicon. And so when you combine those gains and those optimizations with models... and you just want to run them out of the box, you get significant better performance on a Mac Studio compared to a 5090, which basically leads into this bigger topic of, is Apple making?
the best AI computers for consumers and just thinkerers right now? Potentially, yes. Potentially, yes. There are a couple of things here that are interesting to me in reading through this. I read through the Apple open source MLX stuff and I couldn't help but think about things like OpenCL, which back in like 2013 with the trash can Mac Pro, Apple was like, OpenCL, this is how we're going to compute.
on gpus and it just didn't really take off i mean it did in some circles but not hugely think about metal for graphics right apple's graphics frameworks that by all intents and purposes seem to be very good and very performant Apple's basically having to twist the arms of video game companies to port their games to use metal, right? But here, there are a couple distinct differences. One...
Because all of these researchers and all this work happens in the open, Apple's been forced to publish these things in a way that they probably didn't do with OpenCL and probably haven't done with Metal. And even if there is a hill to climb to adopt Apple's frameworks, the hardware is so compelling that people will do it. Right. With metal. Yeah. Like you can really like make your.
your game sing on an iPhone. But there, the market factor is there's a bunch of iPhones and people with iPhones spend money on apps. But here, if you can make your model really sing on Mac hardware.
using Apple's open source frameworks, you could be saving significantly in terms of budget when you're putting these things together. And, you know, the 5090 is... an interesting card because it can do ai stuff but it's also marketed to consumers for gaming but when you get into like nvidia's ai specific hardware that like these ai companies are buying and putting in
like big racks and data centers. Yeah. It's a different ball game in terms of price. And you can't just get some of that stuff. You've got to have contracts and you got to have minimum buys and there's waiting times and you can just order. a pretty nice Mac studio on your phone and get it on your doorstep in, you know, 10 days. That's amazing. And I think, yeah, I mean, for context, an NVIDIA H100.
which is the NVIDIA Tensor-based GPU that is using data centers, that is usually, it goes for about $30,000. So that gives you some context. That's a lot of Mac studios. Yeah. Yeah, I just think it's so interesting. And they talked about this on Upgrade this week as well. Jason had John Gruber on and they were talking about this. And I think there's kind of two levels to the conversation. There's like the framework model.
sort of level that we've been at. But then there's the conversation of, well, if Apple wants to continue to entice these companies, is Apple intelligence a... a stumbling block for that like should apple take all of this and turn the mac into not only the bait the best AI computer for researchers and developers, but the best AI computer for consumers. That I think is a very different conversation and one that I'm not sure. I'm just not sure where that lands.
I don't think, look, if you're serious about AI, you're just going to ignore Apple intelligence and like download these models on your Mac or like run the chat GBT app like a lot of us do or. You're going to find ways to make it work for you. I don't think this means that Apple's like Apple intelligence efforts are suddenly going to evaporate. Now, to be clear, they haven't been great yet.
And they're behind, and they're going to fall more behind with the series stuff, it seems like. So I don't know. Do you view those as two different things? What are your thoughts there? I think... I keep coming back to this idea that if Apple is falling behind, and by falling behind, we mean they don't have a comparable...
suits of services when it comes to AI that they can offer to users and to developers. If that's the case, I think one potential avenue for them to sort of get out of this problem would be sort of this two-fold approach of, well, we're going to make the best possible hardware that consumers can buy and developers can buy, right? And anecdotally speaking...
It does seem to me like everybody who's really into AI in terms of heavy users of AI products or developers of AI software, everybody's just using a Mac these days. So that's the hardware route, to just say, we're going to make the best possible hardware. And sure, maybe NVIDIA captured the market in data centers, but we're going to capture the market at home.
We're going to make sure that the developers who may be using expensive data centers, when it comes to their desks, they all have Macs. And I would wager that... 90% of OpenAI employees and engineers, they're all using MacBook Pros or desktop Macs. That's sort of the scenario that I think Apple would be more than happy to be in.
But at the same time, and I had an article on Mac Stories about this this morning, when it comes to software, I think there's one way to mitigate this... narrative right now and this problem right now would be for Apple to say well so everybody's building AI powered apps and software features these days and we
as Apple and with Apple Intelligence, we are being completely left out of the conversation. Because all of these developers are building against APIs from Google, from OpenAI, from Anthropic, from DeepSeek. And they're not using any of our, they're using our developer tools to build and run the apps, but they're not using our APIs. And all of this user data and all of these APIs are not going to us, they're going to somebody else. Yeah.
And I think if you're Apple, and this is the article that I posted, there is an interesting thought of Apple saying, well, but what if we sort of regain control? of that developer angle and instead offered apple intelligence as sort of like a middleman as as an as an intermediary between developers and those third-party ai tools
So I had this article where I imagined, like, what would an Apple intelligence SDK as a bridge to Chagipiti or Claude or Gemini? What would it look like? And why should Apple do it? And I think it's interesting to think about... you know, Apple in this way, Apple saying, well, you know, instead of bringing your own API key for charge APT, you can just keep working with the Apple SDK. You can keep working. We're going to give you APIs that sort of normalize the usage.
of Cloud or ChatGPT that are going to be integrated. They're going to be available in UIKit. They're all going to be available in SwiftUI, in Swift, in all the languages that we support. They're going to be supported in all of our frameworks. You can build. for Apple platforms. They're going to work everywhere. You don't need to bring your own API key for a third-party provider. You can just be a member of the Apple developer program and we're going to give you, you know, some API.
calls for free on a monthly basis otherwise we're going to sell you a subscription and that subscription for additional ai integrations again we're going to act as the middleman we're going to act as an aggregator of sorts Those subscriptions are going to be more affordable than if you just go as an individual, as an indie developer, or as a small company, if you sign up for the standard business.
or enterprise plans from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and so forth. So a potential idea would be for Apple to say, we're going to... We already have the control of the hardware because everybody's just using Macs these days. But while we're building our own large language model, we may sort of regain control of the software.
aspect by saying you can build with apple intelligence you can use those third-party apis but you're gonna go through us and it's gonna be better for you because it's gonna be cheaper cheaper and you're gonna get a privacy guarantee from apple that's something i keep thinking about uh you know big picture right now exciting times well for the mac what a time for the mac for the for the mac like
what did Gruber call it on their inferable, like a happy accident? And I think it is. I think it is. And look, I don't know if Apple is actually going to say, you know what, instead of... rolling your own integration with chat GPT, use the Apple intelligence SDK. But I'll give you this much. They themselves are doing it. for Siri. They're falling back to JGPT and Google to an extent to sort of supplement the functionalities that by themselves alone they cannot offer.
If Apple does it for themselves, is there a scenario in which they can do it for others? And I think there is. Oh, I think that does it. We've come to the end, Federico. I think we did it. Lots of topics. Yeah. It's been a very busy March. You know, some years March is kind of quiet. Not this year. Not this year. Not this year. If you want to read more about the topics we spoke about or get yourself a sweet Connected shirt before they're gone.
Go to relay.fm slash connected slash 543 for the show notes. Those notes are also in your podcast player. Let's go find them. You can leave feedback at connectedfeedback.com. We love to hear from our listeners. And you can join. to get longer ad-free versions of the show that we do each and every week at getconnectedpro.co. If you want more of Federico, he's the editor-in-chief of MacStories.net. And looking forward to your column.
I'm sure we'll talk about that next week. Mike is not here. Mike is on paternity leave. So keep the Hurley family, you know, maybe just write Mike's name out and put it on your desk and in memory of him. That got weird. I didn't know where I was going when I started it. Keep thinking of Mike. Keep thinking of Mike. Keep him in your thoughts. He's out there raising a baby.
Sometimes thinking about Apple and technology, you know? Putting whys and words that don't have whys in them. Like Mike, for example. You can find me at 512pixels.net and I co-host Mac Power Users. Here on Relay comes out each and every Sunday. I'd like to thank our sponsors, Ecamm, NetSuite, and Google Gemini. And until next week, Federico, say goodbye. Arrivederci. Bye, y'all.