From Relay, this is Connected, episode 548. Today's show is brought to you by our two sponsors, Ecamm and ZocDoc. I'm your annual chairman, Federico Vittici, and it's my pleasure to be joined by... Somebody else this week. Please welcome to the show Mr. John Boris. Hello, John. Hello, hello. It's good to be here, Federico. I haven't decided yet. Is this a takeover? Is this a Mac Stories takeover? Is it that? That's one possibility in my mind. We could call this show Connected Stories.
or connected stories well because you know app connected doesn't doesn't really doesn't exactly roll off the tongue you know Yeah. Connected Unwind. I don't know. We'll think about it. We'll think about it. People thought it was going to be the Triple J, but it really, in reality, what it turns out is that... We have been plotting for a very long time. You on your side of the Atlantic, me on my side of the Atlantic. You took care of Mike.
I took care of Stephen. And now it's just the two of us. What do you mean I took care? You disappeared him. He's no longer on the show. He hasn't been here for weeks. I mean, people see him online, but that's just AI. I mean, you're really good with these prompts. You've got a fake mic.
over there you know you know that reminds me i i read a fascinating fact So you know how Jeff Bezos sent his girlfriend and Katy Perry and a bunch of other people to quote unquote space, like right above the, you know, the atmosphere basically for like 10 minutes in the blue origin. And I saw somebody joking like, did you see the video clip of Katy Perry coming back down to earth and kissing the earth? Have you seen this video?
No, I haven't. Anyway, there were some comments like making fun of this video and some people were like, ah. we should have left her up in space and somebody else was like, how do we know it's really Katy Perry who came back? And so actually I read this fact about like how in the 70s, I think, or something. Because there's no guarantee, right?
back when the space program was a thing, there was no guarantee that the person you were sending up to space and the person who came back were actually the same person, right? There was no objective guarantee. How could you 100% objectively tell that Buzz Aldrin was not like a fake Buzz Aldrin that was sent back down to Earth by aliens or something? And so I think I saw this post. I don't recall the story. So please, you know, use Google or ChatGPT or something and find it.
that basically they were giving astronauts... these signed dollar bills as like a physical token of existence and proof of the same person going up to space and then coming down to Earth. Oh, that's weird. They were really that concerned about that kind of thing? That's weird. Yeah, so maybe we should have given Mike a signed dollar bill or something.
A pound note. Give him a proper British pound note. A signed pound note with King Charles on it and my signature for some reason to attest that it's really Mike Hurley who's coming back to the show. Yeah, it would have worked great. We could have given a dollar bill to Stephen and we would have known that they're still the same people when they come back. At this point, we have no idea who's coming back or if they're coming back.
You know, I think really, Federico, what's going on here is I was invited as the first guest in Mike's absence, just so people will have a nice palate cleanser when Mike's back. They can look forward, more forward to him coming back. I will make that work for Mike. So that's my duty here is to make people happy that finally Mike's back. Thank you. No more John. Now, we have a proper structure.
of the show to follow we do we have to follow this we have to be very serious about this show this is a serious show this is a serious show show made by professionals who sometimes share stupid jokes that somehow haven't gotten them cancelled Yeah, we're serious people over here. So starting with follow-up, we have some really important follow-up by listener Ryan Jones.
I see this. That finally puts a cap on this whole saga that I have absolutely hated of the terminology that some people use to describe the camera bump. Some people, you know, we brought this up on the show before, the camera mesa, the camera plateau. I have expressed my preference for the simple camera bump as a, you know, as the... as the English terminology of the common folk. You know, it's just a camera bump. But if I had to choose between two fancier terms...
and specifically between Camera Plateau and Camera Mesa, I would have gone with Camera Plateau, if anything, because I think the term plateau is more common. You know, as evidence, I brought... Yes, I think it would be understood by more people around the world. It would be understood by more people. And as evidence, I brought the great plateau from The Legend of Zelda as very topical evidence. But now we have confirmation.
that actually Camera Plateau is the true official name. Now, Rian Jones was quite clever here. They found the, you know, Apple has a technical drawing document. for accessory makers. Oh, right. I wish I had thought of this before. They have, it's called the Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Devices. And on page 300...
of this PDF, there is the schematics of the back of the iPhone. And it clearly shows, and Ryan also highlighted this in yellow in the Mastodon post that we're going to have in the show notes. the schematics say camera plateau So that is actually the official name. If you are an accessory maker, if you are, you know, one of these companies making cases for the iPhone, you know that looking at this PDF, you need to account for the camera plateau. I'm still hoping for...
The next revision of the iPhone calling it something like the elevated camera housing. Something that rolls off the tongue like that would be better, I think. Camera housing, yeah. The elevated camera housing. It's more descriptive of what it really is. After all, it's not a geographical thing. It's just a bit of metal around the edge of a phone. Yeah, true, true.
So that's the first item in follow-up. We also have some iMessage-related follow-up by D. Griffin Jones. Now, this is fascinating. It's fascinating. This is related to the conversation that I was having about like building a perfect memory for myself and wishing that I could... You know, amongst all the things that I'm trying to index in Obsidian and Obsidian Copilot, I mentioned half-endedly that I also wanted to index my iMessage history.
And let me read you this follow-up comment. Federico mentioned that there's no way to get an accessible record of iMessages. Actually, there is. A command line utility called iMessageExporter makes it really easy to get a plain text export of all your messages. You could possibly create a script to run this daily on the McStadion Mac Mini. I've read an article that covers the basics. There's also a link in the show notes to the GitHub repo where you can find this command line utility.
This is fascinating. I wish I had gone looking for this before. You know, John, I recently cleaned up my iMessage history. um really yeah i kept i feel like i have to keep mine although it's mine's huge now yeah that's why i did it because i felt like it was bogging down sync And I recently cleaned it up so that I only kept the last year of iMessages, which is still a ton of iMessages. And it's still like, I think I'm going to try this iMessage Explorer thing. Now, obviously...
The challenge here is if you use iMessage a lot, this sort of plain text export becomes viable only for these large language models that support like a giant context window. So I think, you know, if you want to try this...
you're just going to get a plain text export of your messages locally. So you're not talking to any cloud service. But if you do want to then integrate it with the cloud service, I'm guessing that you got to try Gemini 2.5 Pro with 2 million tokens input or the latest GPT 4.1 model, which supports 1 million input tokens.
Which is API only right now. API only right now. So you got to know what you're doing. But this is interesting nonetheless. And it kind of reminds me that you remember, John, a few years ago on the Mac. the folks at Flexibit. were making that utility called Chatology. Do you remember? Oh, yeah. I totally forgot about that app. Yeah, I've got another alternative for you here, Federico. You could use an app like iMazing.
which one of its big things is backing up your iMessages. And it does a similar thing where it creates a file for you. I believe it's a rich text file that includes images and all that kind of thing as well. That's another option. I haven't used that app in a while, but it...
It has always been pretty rock solid for that sort of thing. Yeah, I think Amazing can also like export your WhatsApp database or something. I think so too. It can do a bunch of different things, but I mean, this is just one of them. I mean, it's really good for... You can also, I think you can sideload with it if you have an IPA file. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Backup photos to get files out of the files app, a bunch of different things. Yeah, yeah.
Well, so this is interesting. I'll think about it. You know, that project that I mentioned. It's still ongoing. I think I should be able to finally share my voice recording workflow that I mentioned here on Connected a few episodes ago. I finally, finally finalized it this week. And so, yeah, I'm slowly building up this. huge archive in Obsidian. And I have now reached the point where every single request that I'm making is 40,000 tokens, actually 42,000 tokens.
So yeah, it's... Is it slowing down your Obsidian yet? Oh, no, no, that doesn't matter. Like, these are just text files. And normally like Obsidian, Obsidian just using increment. It uses incremental sync, you know, so it's not like it's syncing all the files all the time. But it has a big index. It has a big index. It has a big index, so it's only slow in terms of the generation of the responses.
from the LLM. But I'll tell you this, and maybe we'll get more into this once we talk about this side. This is actually the final. part of the project, but I've been surprised by GPT 4.1 Mini. specifically. So 4.1 Mini, it basically matches the performance of 4.0, which is... Oh, really? Yeah, but it's much faster and also supports the giant context window.
So I've had a really good experience with Obsidian Copilot and 4.1 Mini in terms of querying my entire Obsidian Bolt. So we'll see as soon as I get my... archive of you know all the tens of thousands of articles that i've ever published we'll see what happens then yeah Yeah, yeah, I can tell I'm going to be dragged back into chat GPT. I actually unsubscribed because I was trying to pare down some of my subscriptions.
And I was kind of preferring Gemini. But I can tell already that 401 is in my future. You know, this idea of kind of... collecting all the data from your life. I have done this at various times, including just years and years ago, where I would just use a service like IFTTT and... copy plain text versions of all my tweets from back when I was on Twitter and the daily weather and a bunch of different things like that.
You know, in the end of the day, I've got that text file somewhere and it was small, relatively small. I never really went back to it. So I kind of stopped doing it at some point. But maybe with AI, you know, I could get more out of it. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. John, we have a tiny topic. Can you tell me about what Apple is doing with this term that I feel like I haven't heard in a long time? What is Apple doing with differential privacy and why are we still talking about this?
Yeah, I went back and looked and we have articles going back to I think it's 2016 on this on Mac stories about this. It's it. Originally, Apple was doing things like determining which were the most popular emoji or what words people were typing into the keyboard on their iPhone. to suggest things in QuickType. And they were using differential privacy to get those statistics without compromising their customers.
privacy and the way it works. And this is going to be a vast... simplification of how it works but essentially apple is collecting aggregate data that allows them to pull out the most popular terms essentially without actually being able to identify a particular user or their device. So they're not collecting IP addresses. They're not collecting data on the one person in the world who has this.
bizarre word that they type or emoji that they use where it would be so rare that it would that it would identify them they're pulling out average data basically and what they really want anyway is the most popular data for some of these things to fine-tune these these these tools and so originally it was for things like
figuring out what should be the suggested emoji or what should be the suggested word using the keyboard. Now what they're doing is they're doing it with Genmoji. And so they're looking to see if... You know, there are a lot of people like me who are typing Federico Vatici with a mule looking over his shoulder. That's probably one that would identify me, I would have to say.
But, you know, maybe you're looking for a pig in a bonnet or you're looking for a dog playing the piano. And maybe a lot of other people are doing that. Apple's been using differential privacy as a way to collect information about popular requests for Genmoji so that they can fine-tune the prompt. And so far, all they've done is Genmoji, but this article that they published on the machine learning website.
says that they're going to be adding it to all the other image tools like Image Playground and all the other aspects of that that are out there, as well as writing tools. I think with the image stuff, the process sounds like it's very similar to what they were doing historically with... emoji pickers and that sort of thing. With writing, it's a little different because they don't want to upload. And I should back up and mention that this is all opt-in. You have to have agreed to
device analytics for any of this stuff to be used on your device. But for things like email, they don't want to upload someone's actual email to their servers and analyze that. So what they're doing is creating synthetic data, synthetic emails or synthetic paragraphs of documents, and then downloading those to people who have opted into their phones or their iPads.
comparing it against their actual on-device data. And when they find good matches, that is reported back so that they're determining the popularity of certain types of tech. by creating them wholesale with synthetic data and then comparing them again. actual data on people's phones without that data ever leaving people's phones. So that's something that they're not doing yet, but they've got planned for the future. It's no specific release of an OS, but soon.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's an interesting approach. We'll see if it actually... It feels to me like it's part of a new Federighi... you know, driven approach to Apple intelligence, but I may be wrong. Oh, by the way, when you were talking, so this morning I actually put together a little project. to query my entire archive of iOS reviews using GPT 4.1.
This is something that I was already capable of doing with Gemini 2.5 Pro, but now I wanted to test GPT 4.1 because I do slightly prefer the way that GPT talks compared to Google Gemini. And so I asked... When did I first cover differential privacy? And, I mean, obviously it worked. I posted on Blue Sky this morning a sample of being able to work with this kind of massive archive. It says, iOS 10 2016 was the first time you covered differential privacy in your annual review.
You gave a technical summary, link to external resources, summarize Apple claims and usage. By the way, John, it's actually... spot on, like he quoted my paragraph from the review. And I double checked. It's literally the same paragraph on Mac Stories. And here's what I wrote. So this is nine years ago. Here's my attempt to offer a layman's interpretation of differential privacy. It's a way to collect user data at scale without personally identifying any individual.
Differential privacy used in conjunction with machine learning can help software spot patterns and trends while also ensuring privacy with a system that goes beyond anonymization of users. That was pretty good, I think. Yeah, I think that is pretty good. When I read about this yesterday or the day before, I was struck by one thing. And this is me getting on my AI hobby horse about how LLMs got trained. And I wondered whether...
As in an alternate universe, whether instead of scraping the entire web, whether AI companies could have generated synthetic data and then compared them against the web instead of actually using the web's data. I think probably not. The problem is generating the synthetic data in the first place.
Yeah, they have to have something to start with. But they could have used license data to start with. I mean, this is just me saying, you know, there are other ways that I think, there are better ways I think these companies could have gone about what they've done. Yeah, I don't disagree. You know, I don't disagree. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Ecamm Live, the leading video production and live streaming studio built for the Mac.
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from the latest issue of the Power On newsletter. It is that time of the year, you know? I mean, we're getting ramped up for WWDC, so, you know, Mark's going to start dropping the knowledge on us. Yeah, and we have some knowledge about what Apple has been working on with the Vision Pro. and iPadOS 19.
And I do want to start with the Vision Pro because I think we're obviously in a very interesting situation with the Vision Pro, which is like this incredible piece of hardware, incredible operating system. I think Apple has really... has really nailed it with Vision OS, but nobody's buying the thing because it's too expensive. So what is Apple doing here? And here's the report from Mark. According to government, Apple is developing two new Vision Pro headsets.
The first of the two is going to try and address the main problems of the original Vision Pro. Apple wants to reduce the weight of the Vision Pro. For context, the current one is like one and a half pounds or something. They want to lower the price point. As we know, the Vision Pro starts at $3,500. And they want to somehow improve the comfort of the Vision Pro without having to necessarily rely on third-party straps.
Huge parentheses here, by the way, John. If you recall, a few weeks ago, and then I'm going to get back to the rumors, but just this is how my brain works. Do you recall a few weeks ago I asked you, hey, is this weird Vision Pro headstrap? made by this medical company. available for you. Yeah, ResMed. ResMed, which makes...
It makes like head straps for people with CPAP machines who can have problems with breathing. I asked you, is it available for you? Because obviously I cannot purchase Vision Pro or Vision Pro accessories in Italy because the Vision Pro hasn't launched in Italy yet. I'm amazed that it's still not in a place like Italy. Yeah, I know. I really am. I know. I know. But you told me, no, it's not available for me. And I checked on Reddit and apparently the ResMed strap has been sold out for a month.
Hold on. Last night, I'm unwinding at the end of the workday, and I'm just mindlessly scrolling through Reddit. And I see a post, as I do. And I see a post. from the Vision Pro subreddit saying the ResMed headstrap is back in stock in the UK. And so I'm going to guide you through my mental process. I see the post. I open the post. I see there's an Apple Store UK link. I'm like, oh, I see. It is actually back in stock. So this is what my brain does.
Step one. Oh, I should text Mike and ask Mike to buy this for me and ship it to me. that's the first thing i thought of step two well mike is probably busy right now and doesn't have time to purchase a weird accessory for me and ship some medical equipment from the UK to Italy. Step three, I go back to the Reddit thread and I start reading the comments.
And I see this comment from somebody mentioning, oh, yeah, this is great. I've been waiting for this one for months. I just placed an order, even though I don't live in the UK, using a forwarding service. Oh, interesting. So I signed up for this forwarding service. The medical head strap is being delivered to somewhere in Southampton tomorrow. And from there, that warehouse is going to forward it to me in Italy. How do these services work? I've never used them. I mean, is it like a...
Is there a fee on top of the shipping that they charge? Yeah. So you get an address in your name at this forwarding services warehouse. And the important trick here is that I was able to buy myself with my name and my credit card from the UK store because the UK store does accept. European credit card. I don't think it would work with a US credit card on the UK store.
Oh, I see. So I was able to put in my quote unquote fake address for the forwarding service, use my credit card. It's been delivered tomorrow. And then from there, I'll have to pay the shipping and a fee on top of it. to get my hands, or rather, my head inside this thing. Federico. You are a man of many fake addresses. You really are. Well. You really are. You've got your places in California. You've got my address. You've got. A random warehouse in Southampton. What other place?
locations do I not know about that are your fake addresses? If I told you, that would sort of take away the secrecy, you know? I know, I've already given away three of your big ones. Yeah, I have plenty, don't worry about it. No, I'm kidding. I really don't. They're called safe houses is what they are. Oh man, I've always been fascinated by the concept of a safe house or rather, eventually at some point in my life, I really want to have like a bunker.
You know, like a place. A bunker, really? Yeah, man. Like I see these videos sometimes. YouTube recommends those videos to me of like people who build like a bunker in their backyard or something. Like the idea of an atomic apocalypse and me being able to shelter inside that thing with like a bunch of canned beans or something, you know, it's fascinating. Yeah, I think that the novelty would wear off pretty fast.
with the atomic bomb going off over your head. Okay, you know for sure, though. I know. You and the Silicon Valley CEOs ought to get together and maybe you could go live on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean or something. You know that that's one of the things that some of them are doing. No, no, no. I prefer the comfort of... You know, just give me a cozy bunker, you know? A cozy bunker. All right, sure. Yeah. But anyway...
We were talking about German saying that, you know, Apple is... We were. Yeah, for this Vision Pro. So the first model is basically like a revision of the Vision Pro. Make it lighter, make it cheaper, make it more comfortable. Okay, pretty regular stuff. Now... It makes sense, but I don't know how much, how much can they get it down? If it was a, what do you think? One pound, $2,000? I mean, that's still going to be too expensive. So I was reading this, I was reading this, this, this.
discussion on social media a few weeks ago that like a bunch of people say, oh, if they get rid of the outer facing eyesight display, they can make the Vision Pro much cheaper. But actually, if you take a look at the bill of materials. of the Vision Pro. That is not the most expensive component of the Vision Pro. It's probably the screens, right? It's the screens. It's the Sony... What is it? Micro OLED displays? I think so. Inside. Those are the...
A way to really make it cheaper, there's two ways. Either change the displays or Apple eats more of the margin from the Vision Pro, which right now I don't think they want to do for a whole bunch of different reasons. So we'll see. But anyway, so this is the first model. You know, put a pin in that. Makes sense. Now get this. they all they're also working according to mark on a second vision pro now this one is a bit of a weird beast in that
It's not clear from the report, but my read on what Mark is saying is this. Mark is saying that they're working on a Vision Pro specifically designed for macOS integration. It'll plug directly into a Mac. It'll focus on ultra-low latency display streaming. With potential for enterprise applications like surgery, imaging, flight simulators, that sort of stuff. My read, Mark is not saying this, but my read is that... This is a Vision Pro.
without many of the guts of a Vision Pro in the sense that it's like a fancy display. It seems to me like the rumor is, what if we took... What a lot of people are saying is the best feature of Vision OS and the Vision Pro, which is Mac virtual display. And we built a product that physically speaking looks like a Vision Pro, but actually it's just wired ultra low latency. Mac virtual display. I don't know. I'm torn on this one, Federico. On the one hand...
You know, I went to CES in January and saw a lot of these. These glasses that are essentially that, you know, by Vitcher and Rayneo. and a bunch of other ones and ray neo their air 3s just came out for like 270 which i expect that whatever we're talking about here from apple is going to be more like you know i don't know a thousand dollars fifteen hundred dollars you know like a high end
display that you would have on your desk. And I get that those glasses that sell for $200 or $300 are not anywhere close to the Apple Vision Pro's quality. for a lot of people they might be good enough and they're probably you know like a fifth of the price or so yeah i mean i'm just gonna say it I have tried to use those glasses with computers. And honestly, if you compare the quality of the virtual displays on those glasses...
with the quality of virtual displays, especially the ultra-wide ones on the Vision Pro, like, those glasses suck. Like, they're terrible, like, compared to the Vision Pro. Yeah, I know. So, I'm saying that, like, would I spend... A Vision display. You know, it's not a Vision Pro. It's a Vision display that is just literally a wired display with good speakers, you know, because you could keep the speakers. Just keep the speakers, keep the displays, a Thunderbolt connection.
$19.99, would I spend those? Yes. Like, I would do it. Like, I would probably, like, people spend, you know, people spend, what is it, the studio display, $1,500 or something? on a vision display, probably even more. Like, because you're getting, like, you're getting, you know, basically like an infinite display because it's, you know, because it's virtual and it's in front of your eyes and it's a really good quality display.
But it's not a computer at that point. At that point, you can make it lighter because it doesn't need to run an operating system. It just needs to mirror a display, essentially. I don't know. I think it's an interesting idea. And I wish they keep exploring it. Because this is also the kind of rumor that is resurfacing every once in a while, it seems. First, it used to be that Apple was working on glasses.
that you were supposed to plug into a Mac. Now it's a Vision Pro, quote unquote, that you need to plug into a Mac. So I don't know. Yeah, look, I think if they got it... To be lighter and or comfortable, I would consider it. I mean, you think about it, not only would you be able to take out the guts that runs the Vision Pro, the M-Series chip. But you wouldn't have to, you know, I mean, you could probably take out
You wouldn't have to have a battery pack connected to you since you'll be connected to a Mac. I suppose that's a good thing, even though, I don't know. It's hard for me to see this as, it's a little bit like the first one we talked about that Mark. had in his newsletter, but without the chipset in it. Maybe. I don't know. I don't find it very exciting. So I'm not surprised that this was not something that they shipped.
right away but they they have they have figured out how to do the mac in a great way in the vision pro there's no doubt about it i do not like the ultra wide i think it's too wide i feel like i have to swivel my neck around too much. It's a good exercise. With that one and a half pounds on my head. Yeah, you want to strengthen those neck muscles, you know?
I know. I know. I've used it. It's good. I, you know, if they could do this at a reasonable price, something approaching, I think a studio display type of price range would probably be make this a doable product. But anyway, we're still in the report. Mark is saying that the long-term vision, get it? The long-term vision. Yes. And apparently Tim Cook is like obsessed with this. He's hell bent is what it says in the newsletter.
is there anything that's a good american expression yeah is there anything in life john that you've ever been like hell-bent on doing I don't know. Certainly not AR glasses. Well, that is apparently what Tim Cook wants to do. That's what gets Tim up in the morning. You know, yeah. And I mean, I get it. Like the long-term vision, the top priority of Tim Cook and like...
Apparently, the product that is spending most of the time researching and talking about within Apple is making proper AR glasses. Now, obviously, there's a whole conversation here to be had about, like, first of all... As we've seen when Meta showed off their prototype of like, what's it called? The Orion glasses. Right. It's very expensive right now to make glasses. that look like regular glasses and that don't compromise on display quality, comfort, looks.
and performance, right? They require a lot of different advances in display manufacturing, in systems on a chip, in lightweight batteries. that don't catch on fire um you know the orion glasses had like uh like an external component for the gesture uh recognition like it's very complex to make these glasses but Meta is going ahead. They're making these glasses. They're gonna be a product. And not just the glasses, but Apple apparently is also facing the pressure when it comes from Meta.
lower cost headsets, you know, the Quest headsets that in some cases are matching some of the functionalities of the Vision Pro at a much lower price. In the meantime, while these glasses that Apple wants to make... They will not be a product this year or even next year. Apple is continuing to explore AI-enabled accessories. They're researching Apple Watches with the camera. They're researching AirPods with the camera. And they're still researching the equivalent of Meta.
the equivalent of like the meta Ray-Bans, essentially, which are like, those are not AR glasses. Those are just glasses with cameras and speakers, which I continue to believe are absolutely the sort of product that Apple should make. I really hope that, like, imagine, John, how beautiful, how beautiful it would be if in 2026, next year, we could get Apple. I'm just going to call it Ray-Ban glasses, but like non-AR Apple glasses and a foldable iPhone. I would be the happiest boy in the world.
You know what they're going to be called, Federico? They're going to be called eyeglasses, but the lowercase letter I instead of E-Y-E. Eyeglasses. No, no, I feel like we were finally able, like for many years I had to endure. I had to endure people first calling the iPod Touch the iTouch. And then it was people calling the Apple Watch the iWatch. And there's still people who call the Apple iWatch. If they do the eyeglasses, I'm just going to quit. I'm going to quit.
I'm going to quit. Oh, no. Well, let's let's make sure Apple knows so you don't quit. Yeah. I think the glasses make the most sense of all those things to me because the way the glasses are built. is just fits with things like cameras and speakers. Whereas I really don't understand what Apple is thinking. Like, where are they going to put a camera on the watch that is useful? That's not like.
you know, pointed out to the side of your body or what, you know, what kind of cameras can they really... realistically put in an air pod that's going to that's going to be useful to you i don't know well i mean i'm interested to see but i feel like the glasses give give them a better platform for those kinds of technologies than either headphones or a watch. Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. And I mean, even I'm also skeptical of like the, um, the camera in the AirPod. Unless you have no hair.
That too, right. Hair, jewelry, all kinds of things. You're going to have a camera that is looking at either your hair, your beard, or your jewelry. Have you seen the way people wear AirPods? People wear them in all kinds of weird ways. Some people have them like... sticking out horizontally from your head practically. Yeah, some people wear them like the AirPods are shooting at you, like little lasers. Yeah, they're like guns coming out of the... Like you're a mech walking down the street.
I have actually seen a person like a couple of days ago wearing the AirPods like that. And every time I see people wearing them like that, I'm like, that is a fascinating choice. Maybe... Maybe it's comfort driven. That would be my bet. I think people just twist them in there and leave them whatever direction they're pointing once they get them into a comfortable spot. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so... I continue to sort of put a cap on the vision rumors.
I am probably more excited that I should be about a Vision Pro that is not a Vision Pro, it's actually just a display. I think it's going to be quite telling what Apple is going to do with Vision OS 3 at WWD. Like, I get the feeling that like... Okay, like, let's face it, nobody's buying this thing, right? Do we think... Give me an over-under, John. Do we think that Apple is selling a thousand Vision Pros a week? Less or more?
A week less. Okay. So let's say they're selling less than a thousand Vision Pros per week. But after the billions of dollars that you have invested into manufacturing... Human resources, right? Because just the making of Vision Pro, but also the software. Making the software, making the platform. You cannot just abandon the thing. All the retail costs of training all the people in the retail stores. I mean, the whole thing from the beginning to the end is a huge investment. Like if anything.
the sunk cost of the Vision Pro is going to be the greatest driver of innovation for the Vision Pro. Wow, that's kind of a dark road to innovation. But I hear what you're saying. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know... Even if the Vision Pro, as we have it today, never amounts to a good selling product. There are technologies that have been developed and software that's been built that is going to sustain future innovation of other things that come down the road.
But if you were to eyeball it, 500 per week? So I'm trying to think how many countries it's in now. It's not in more than a dozen countries or so, I don't think. It's like US, Canada, Australia, maybe UK. France. Germany? No, I don't know. Maybe a couple of places in maybe Japan. A couple of places in Asia, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we're talking a lot of countries We're talking to probably 10 to 12 countries.
I'm going to change my answer. I'm going to say it's over 1,000 because I figure that those are all large countries. I'm sure they're sustaining at least 100 a week each. So if they sell, I'm just going to give you some numbers. If they sell 1,000 a week. That's 3.5 million dollars. a week. It's nothing. Nothing for Apple. I mean, I'll take it. I'll take it. Don't get me wrong. I mean, sure. You know, if I could, I would sell a thousand Vision Pros.
Yeah. Making our side hustle, Federico. We can sell them out of the back of a truck. This episode of Connected is brought to you by ZocDoc. Have you ever woken up with a tight pain in your neck or yet another day of a persistent cold and immediately turned to the internet for advice? We've all done it. We've all gone down the rabbit hole. But look, it's time to get the help and care you really need with Zockdorf.
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So stop putting off that doctor's appointment. Go to ZocDoc.com slash connected to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's ZocDoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, ZocDoc.com slash connected. Our thanks to ZocDoc for their support of the show and all of Relay. All right, Federico, you know, this has been a big week for Mark Gurman because there's more, not just the Vision Pro.
Mark had a bit of a bombshell about iPadOS 19, while all of us have been thinking about all the Apple intelligence features that still haven't shipped and will likely be in iPadOS 19 and iOS 19. He said that there's more to iPadOS 19 than just that. He said that there's going to be a comprehensive software overhaul targeting productivity. The details here are very scant, I would say. He mentions enhanced multitasking capabilities. That's more like a Mac also.
That's more like a Mac and advanced app window management. Those are kind of the productivity thing. that he mentioned about that which is interesting i mean all of this will coincide with the rumors that there will be new ipad pros coming this fall with an m5 chip which can drive some of this, you know, more advanced software, I suppose. And of course, you know, it really does address.
the long-standing issues that a lot of people who are power users have had, yourself included, because, you know, you did your not an iPad OS review not that long ago, really, with a whole laundry list of things that... that the iPad just doesn't do particularly well. We can get into some of those. I'm not sure that in my mind that multitasking and window management. Those are aspects of productivity.
that I think that Apple needs to address, but it feels like such a drop in the bucket compared to all the things that should be addressed that I don't think that tweaking, you know, maybe going from four windows to six. or more degrees, or the windows can be resized completely freely, for instance. Those are kind of things that they could tweak. Let me give you some additional context.
So a few weeks ago here on the show, we got an anonymous feedback. Well, anonymous is not quite in the sense that it came from a person. Named in the feedback form. Mark Gurman so not Mark Gurman a few weeks ago wrote in and said It's a shame to hear that you're going back to the Mac, Federico, because this year iPadOS is getting live window resizing and positioning similar to MacOS and VisionOS. Wink emoticon. Not even an emoji, like a wink emoticon.
Now, this was weeks before the German report. And now the German report is saying we are getting, you know, Mac-like multitasking with, you know... better positioning. Mark didn't mention the live window resizing, but the live window resizing, this deserves an explanation in the sense that right now on iPadOS... When you resize a window, you're basically moving between multiple versions of the auto layout templates for that window.
It's not like on a Mac where you're grabbing a window from the corner and you're resizing it live. You can see the window doesn't blur. you know, stays visible in its entirety. It just reflows in real time. Right, right. I mean, on a Mac, you can, if you want to make your window two pixels smaller, narrower, you can. And on the iPad,
you have some fancy animations that are basically transitioning you from one size class to another. Yeah. But I worry, this is my concern and the reason why I wanted to talk about this, that Apple... I'm going to have two different routes here. I'm going to have the worrisome version.
The worrisome version is that Apple took in all the feedback and said, oh, look at all these people complaining that in Stage Manager, you're limited to four windows and you cannot move around like you want to and you cannot resize them like you want to. We're just going to give them that. complaining about the iPad Pro and iPadOS on the iPad Pro and just heard the bit.
about, oh, there should be more windows and you should have better ways to move them around and resize them. Yeah, because that's essentially what happened with Stage Manager. It was kind of a superficial solution. Yes. would an account for... All the other things that you referenced, my Not an iPad Pro review story, that actually came out in May of last year. So it's 11 months ago. So it's almost a year.
And I'm just going to run through real quick all this laundry list of complaints that... I had collected, you know, that story was basically my collection of every single thing that I thought was wrong with iPadOS after more than 10 years of iPad. Actually, last year, it was 2024, 14 years of iPad, now going into its 15th year in 2025. No like missing apps. So like no text edit, no preview, no journal, no power user stuff like Xcode or a command line like the terminal. None of that.
And those apps often had limitations. and still do, like compared to their macOS versions. Apple likes to say that iPadOS features desktop class experiences, but they really don't. And there are so many instances in which the iPad version of something... is lacking compared to the desktop version. Or, as I recently explored, even the web version of the same app. Yeah. You know, shortcuts is more limited.
on iPadOS compared to MacOS, even like customization, like even when the same feature exists, like... Toolbar customization. That is a feature that technically also exists on the iPad, but it's so much more limited compared to toolbar customization on macOS. So there's this inconsistency throughout. every single app on the system.
Even Federico, I would say even the pro level apps that Apple has made, things like Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, they still lack significant features that you can use on the Mac. Things like plugins for Final Cut Pro. I mentioned the audio restrictions. So the inability to play multiple audio streams at the same time or record your local audio when you're also doing like a Zoom call, for example.
the many, many, many problems of the files app compared to Finder on macOS. And I mean, it's not like Finder is perfect. But it works. It's pretty fast. It's reliable. Sure, it could use some tweaks. But guess what? On Mac OS, you can install. the tweaks for the Finder. So on the iPad, you're stuck with a semi-functioning file manager that doesn't even support customization and doesn't support power user features.
multitasking problems I mean we mentioned this like stage manager still limited to four windows doesn't allow you to create like presets or like your favorite groups of windows which is something that like You can even do you can even do a save. split pair on Android these days. Like you can literally save a preset.
of two windows together yeah stage manager manager is a unique one where it's actually it's it's a problem on the mac too it's probably even a bigger problem on the mac i've i've kind of given up on it to be honest yeah I touched upon the slow performance and inconsistency of Spotlight. And of course, on iPadOS, you cannot install any third-party launchers because that's just not the kind of app that you can install on an iPad.
which also leads me into there's all kinds of other utilities that you cannot install on an iPad. Things like system-wide utilities, utilities for custom keyboard shortcuts. apps that want to run long-running tasks in the background, like clipboard managers, for example, you know, that sort of thing. You just, you can't because of platform limitations. You get an iPad Pro with the magic keyword. You cannot use clamshell mode if you want to hook it up to an external display.
You don't really have the availability of any third-party backup services, once again, because you cannot install them on iPadOS. So there's a long list of problems. All things being equal and price being equal, if you're spending 3,000 euros on an iPad Pro and you're spending 3,000 euros on a MacBook Pro, you're getting a wildly different experience.
and you're spending the same money, you're buying a computer, in both cases, that has a laptop configuration, that has a Pro in its name, but the experiences are extremely different. And I think now the more optimistic way to look at this rumor would be...
Sure. Amongst other things, Apple is also improving the windowing. But I hope they were able to take in the feedback and not just my feedback. Because if you've been keeping a finger on the pulse of the iPad community... I mean, Chris Lawley, you know, another longtime Apple user, just put out a video last week. you know, talking about his evolving relationship with the iPad, you know, reading between the lines. So not even between the lines. I mean, just watch the video.
It's basically saying I'm going to get most of my work done on a Mac Mini, and I'm going to do the single task more focused to work on the iPad, but my primary computer is going to be a Mac. because there's so much more that I can do, so many more apps that I can try on a Mac. We've heard stories from other longtime iPad users who have now moved back to a Mac. And I mean, I'm also in the same boat right now.
The more optimistic view, I think, would be that Apple has been able to take in all this feedback from all these different people with all these different backgrounds and realize, well, maybe... We should do more. And, you know, with iPadOS. I don't know. What do you think, John? Yeah, no, I think that that's right. I mean, I think that the biggest problem, if you were to like boil down a lot of these things into one set of...
issues is its system level access to the OS. You know, things that allow on the Mac. Tools like Better Touch Tool or Default Folder X or Substage or, you know, Forklift, all these apps that can. do things like replace the finder or access how audio and video is being routed and handled on your Mac. They can read your screen if you give it the permission to do so and allows you to do stuff there.
It's all those deep hooks into the OS itself that are absent on iPadOS that is at the root of a lot of this. And, you know, one of the ones that's even if you're not into using kind of these more advanced. utilities on the Mac, something as simple as a clipboard manager. I mean, that to me, again, I don't want Apple to go an inch deep on this stuff.
Simply adding a clipboard manager, I think would go an awful long way towards making the iPad a more powerful tool because that's something that I think. more people use than than anything else so i yeah i agree with you i mean i think I kind of feel like I don't want to be fooled again by the the promise of changes to the ipad but i've kind of ended up similar to where chris is on you know he did his video which is great and we'll we can put a link in the show notes to that but
I still love my iPad and I still use my iPad to get work done. I love being able to walk outside my house and carry my iPad with me and nothing else and go down to a coffee shop and do email or do a little writing and be able to listen to some music while I'm doing that. But if I'm editing a podcast or dealing with video or, I don't know, doing something that requires a bunch of different apps,
I'm going to be sitting at my desk at home because that's where my Mac is and that's where it's easier to get those things done. So I guess we'll see. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I really hope that we're going to get more rumors between now and WWDC. Oh, I think we will. Yeah. And speaking of... Rumors. The final thing I wanted to talk about on the show today is...
This idea that Stephen and I, we've been talking about for quite some time. So this idea that with the upcoming iOS 19 redesign, what if Apple took a page from VisionOS and built an iOS... a new ios design that you know was translucent and transparent and could show you the deals the details of your surround
Now, this is obviously based on the assumption that we've also heard from the rumors that Apple is working on this brand new design language that will incorporate some elements from Vision OS. Now, I wanted to bring to your attention... A couple of experiments, one from two years ago by Jordan Singer and another by Gavin Nelson. from a few days ago. Both are concepts. They're SwiftUI, I believe, concepts. of what if iOS but reflective.
And in both cases, these are concepts showing an iOS UI that can get basically tinted based on the colors of the user's physical surround. In the first example by Jordan Singer from 2023, they're grabbing the colors using a mask on top of a blurred camera, but you never see the actual camera that is capturing the colors of the iPhone surrounding.
In the concept from a few days ago by Gavin, you actually do see the blurred camera. You do see that the iOS interface is actually like a very Vision OS-like. style interface on top of a camera viewfinder, essentially. Now, I think this is very cool, but now in visualizing this concept... I understand why this would be a privacy nightmare. And to what end? What's the purpose of doing this? I mean, I know that it...
It's kind of cool, I guess. It's kind of cool. It's kind of cool. But in watching these concepts, I realized how my idea was wrong and how I was thinking about it. too extremely because the simple solution was staring me in my face the whole time your windows reflect the context of your surroundings because that's how you're using that computer. You're putting on the Vision Pro. There's no home, like there is a home screen, but really...
The Vision Pro is grounded in your reality, is grounded in your surroundings, right? The obvious solution on a device that you hold in your hands so you don't have... you have this abstraction of, well, the computer is an object that I'm holding. My eyes are seeing both the physical reality around me and the digital reality inside the screen. But the obvious solution is...
The wallpaper, the system wallpaper is what's unique about your device. And this is so obvious and it's so in line with what Apple has been doing over the past few years. And in fact... Customizing the OS based on the wallpaper is exactly what Google has been doing on Android with the whole Material You design style. Right.
so doing this like this sort of like user-centric design where the windows can take on to some accent colors, you know, or details from your system wallpaper, they would be in line with the recent customization effort.
that we've seen from Apple, you know, with the color customization on the home screen, on the lock screen, the fonts, the icons. Using blurred photos as your wallpaper and all that kind of thing. And all that kind of stuff. So now, instead of saying, well, the default... iOS or iPadOS interface is white, you know, or dark gray if you're using dark mode, now the interface can be customized based on what your device, like emphasis on your device looks like. I think they should do it, you know?
What's the utility of it? Nothing. What's the utility of customization, John? Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. And look, they've done similar things on the Mac too. I mean, that's what translucency is all about, right? I mean, you pick your wallpaper that you like. And then it kind of gets pulled through to your windows. And a lot of people don't like that. But other people do. And I actually do like it myself. So, yeah, I think that that's an interesting.
It's an it's yeah, that's an interesting concept. I mean, I don't think I'm not super excited about it, but I think it. It is in line with where things have been heading for the last two or three years. So I could definitely see it being done. I think, too, one of the things that is driving this... is I believe, you know, one of the things I think has held Apple back with some of its animations and things in the past is the relatively low memory constraints on the iPhone, for instance.
And with AI, Apple is having to bump up memory, bump up speed to be able to handle language models on device. And there's some ancillary benefits to that. Things like doing more. GPU intensive backgrounds or animations or whatever it happens to be is going to be easier to do as these devices become more powerful and more of the user base. has those more powerful devices, you know, who own an iPhone.
Yeah, that's a good point. I don't know. We'll see. I just wanted to... officially back away from my idea of using the camera to tint the iOS interface because, I don't know, unless Apple has come up with a crazy system to determine, you know... the colors of your surroundings. But the more I think about it, the more I just think, you know, just do whatever Google has done on Android and, you know, offer. I mean, this could be an option, you know, offer a version.
of, you know, window tinting based on your system wallpaper, which is something that, by the way, Apple's own apps have been able to do for years using private APIs. So this would be just a way to do it officially, natively for all kinds of apps. Yeah. And I think it would be okay from a privacy standpoint if you made it like an intentional action where... Maybe it's tied to the action button and you could be, you know, maybe you're in a beautiful forest and you.
Hit the action button and the camera uses. is is live for like one minute while it gathers you know the greens and the browns and all the other colors surrounding you and then it uses that it just kind of is it is a way of kind of pulling color out of your environment, whether it's your home or somewhere you happen to be, to create the wallpaper too. Well, I think that about does it.
for this week's special episode, John. I think we did it. I think it does. I think we finished it. We got it done. And, you know, I'll let the other guys come back. I mean, they may not be the actual... steven and mike but well because because they don't have those dollar bills yeah we didn't give them the dollar bills so yeah but but you know i'm sure they'll be good even if they're like facsimiles of those guys i think it'll be
Now would be the time for me to do the usual closing segment of the show. But as we have established on the show, I am quite unable to do that in a way that doesn't drive people crazy. So I'm just going to keep it simple. I want to thank John for joining me on this week's episode of Connected. And I want to thank our sponsors, Ecamm and ZocDoc. John, where can people find you on the internet?
I am working at this website called MacStories.net. I am familiar. I am familiar. Yes. Yeah, it's a good place to find me. You go there, you'll find all my work. Everything flows back to MacStories at some point. Yes. Thanks again, John, for joining us. Thank you. People can hear John going on and on about Apple gaming and Mac gaming in the pre-show for Connected Pro listeners and members.
which you can get at connectedpro.co I only have so many outlets for my Mac gaming talk so you know connected is one of them Yeah. And if you are like not Mark Gurman, the kind of person who wants to send feedback, don't forget that you can do so by going to connectedfeedback.com. And until next time, John, say goodbye.