00:00:53 ◼ ► People thought it was going to be the Triple J, but it really, in reality, what it turns out is that
00:00:58 ◼ ► we have been plotting for a very long time. You on your side of the Atlantic, me on my side of the
00:01:03 ◼ ► Atlantic. You took care of Mike. I took care of Steven. And now it's just the two of us.
00:01:16 ◼ ► I mean, people see him online, but that's just AI. I mean, you're really good with these prompts.
00:01:25 ◼ ► You know, you know, that reminds me. I read a fascinating fact earlier this week. So you know how Jeff Bezos sent his girlfriend and Katy Perry and a bunch of other people to, to quote unquote, space, like right above the, you know, the atmosphere, basically for like 10 minutes in the Blue Origin craft.
00:01:46 ◼ ► Um, uh, and, and I saw somebody joking, like, uh, when, did you see the video clip of Katy Perry coming back down to earth and kissing the earth? Have you seen, have you seen this video?
00:01:57 ◼ ► 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.
00:02:04 ◼ ► And somebody, 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, in the, in the seventies, I think, or something to like, because there's no guarantee, right?
00:02:18 ◼ ► 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?
00:02:26 ◼ ► There was no objective guarantee. Like how could you 100% of it objectively tell that Buzz Aldrin was not like a fake Buzz Aldrin that was sent down back down to earth by aliens or something.
00:02:38 ◼ ► And so I think I saw this post, I don't recall the source. So please, you know, use Google or Chagipiti or something and find it. Um, that basically they were giving astronauts these, uh, signed dollar bills as like a, uh, like a physical token.
00:02:56 ◼ ► Of existence and proof of the same person going up to space and then coming down to earth.
00:03:06 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. So maybe that we should have, we should have given Mike a signed, you know, a dollar bill or something.
00:03:15 ◼ ► A signed pound note with King Charles on it and my signature for some reason to attest, to attest that it's really Mike Hurley who's coming back to the show.
00:03:25 ◼ ► So, you know, yeah, it would have worked great. We could have given a dollar bill to Steven and, you know, we would have known that they're still the same people when they come back.
00:03:31 ◼ ► At this point, we have no idea who's coming back or if they're coming back. Uh, you know, I, I think really Federico, what's going on here is I was invited as the first guest in, in Mike's absence, just so people will, will have a nice palate cleanser when Mike's back and they can look forward, more forward to him coming back.
00:03:48 ◼ ► Uh, I will, I will make that, make that work for Mike. So yes. Yes. That's my duty here is to make people happy that finally Mike's back.
00:04:02 ◼ ► We do. We have to follow this. We have to be very serious about this show. This is a serious show.
00:04:06 ◼ ► This is a serious show, show made by professionals who sometimes share stupid jokes that some, somehow haven't gotten them canceled them yet on the internet.
00:04:17 ◼ ► So far. Um, so starting with follow-up, we have some really important follow-up by listener Ryan Jones that finally puts a cap on this whole saga that I have absolutely hated of the terminology, uh, that some people used to describe the camera bump.
00:04:37 ◼ ► Uh, some people, you know, we, we brought this up on the show before the camera Mesa, the camera Plateau.
00:04:43 ◼ ► I have expressed my preference for the simple camera bump as a, as a, as you know, as the, as the, as the English terminology of the common folk, you know, it's just a camera bump.
00:04:55 ◼ ► Uh, 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, uh, you know, as evidence I brought, uh, I've, yes, I think it would be understood by more people around the world.
00:05:14 ◼ ► And it would be understood by more people. And as evidence, I brought the great plateau plateau from the legend of Zelda, uh, as, as very topical evidence. But now we have confirmation that actually camera Plateau is the true official name. Now, Ryan Jones was quite clever here. They found the, the, you know, Apple has a technical drawing, um, document for accessory makers.
00:05:40 ◼ ► Right. Yeah. I wish I, 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, uh, and Ryan also highlighted this in yellow in the Macedon post that we're going to have in the show notes.
00:06:04 ◼ ► 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, one of these companies making cases for the iPhone, you know, that looking at this PDF, you need to account for the camera Plateau.
00:06:21 ◼ ► 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.
00:06:32 ◼ ► The elevated camera housing. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, more descriptive of what it really is. It's not, you know, after all, it's not a geographical, uh, you know, thing. It's, it's, it's just a, a bit of metal around the edge of a phone.
00:06:46 ◼ ► Yeah. True. True. True. So that's, that's the first item in follow-up. We also have some iMessage related follow-up by D. Griffin Jones. Now this is,
00:06:55 ◼ ► Oh yeah. This is, uh, this is, uh, this is fascinating. It's fascinating. So, uh, this is related to the conversation that I was having about like building a perfect memory for myself and wishing that I could, uh, you know, amongst all the things that I'm trying to index in Obsidian, uh, and Obsidian co-pilot, I mentioned half-endly that I also wanted to index my iMessage history.
00:07:14 ◼ ► And let me read you this, this follow-up comment. Uh, Federico mentioned that there's no way to get an accessible record of iMessages. Actually, there is.
00:07:22 ◼ ► A command line utility called iMessage exporter 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 MacStadion Mac Mini. I've read an article that covers the basics.
00:07:35 ◼ ► Um, there's also a link in the show notes to the, to the GitHub repo where you can find this command line utility. This is fascinating. Uh, I wish I, I had gone looking for this before. You know, John, I recently cleaned up my iMessage history. Um.
00:07:59 ◼ ► Yeah. That's why I did it because I felt like it was bogging down sync. Uh, and I recently cleaned it up so that I only kept the, 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 exporter thing.
00:08:15 ◼ ► Now, obviously, um, the challenge here is if you use iMessage a lot, like this sort of plain text export becomes viable only for these large language models that support like a giant context window.
00:08:28 ◼ ► Um, so I think, you know, if you want to try this, um, you know, you're just going to get, you're just going to get a plain text, plain text export of your messages locally.
00:08:37 ◼ ► 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, uh, GPT 4.1, uh, model, which supports 1 million input tokens.
00:08:56 ◼ ► API, API only right now. So you gotta, you gotta know what you're doing, but this is interesting nonetheless.
00:09:01 ◼ ► And it kind of reminds me, do you remember John, a few years ago on the Mac, um, the folks at FlexiBits were making that utility called Chatology. Do you remember?
00:09:11 ◼ ► Oh yeah. I totally forgot about that app. I, I, yeah, I've got another, 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.
00:09:23 ◼ ► 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. So that's, 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.
00:09:41 ◼ ► 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, it's really good for, you can also, I think you can sideload with it.
00:09:49 ◼ ► If you have an IPA file, backup photos to get files out of the files app, bunch of different things.
00:09:56 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Well, so this is interesting. I'll think about it. You know, that project that I mentioned, um, is 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.
00:10:10 ◼ ► So I finally, finally, finally finalized it this week. And, uh, so yeah, I'm slowly building up this, this huge archive in, in Obsidian and, you know, I have now reached the point where every single request that I'm making is 40,000 tokens, actually 42,000 tokens.
00:10:29 ◼ ► So yeah, it's, uh, is it slowing down your Obsidian yet? Oh no, no, no, that doesn't matter. Like these are just text files. And normally like Obsidian, I know Obsidian just using increment, it uses incremental sync, you know? So it's not like it's syncing all the files all the time.
00:10:43 ◼ ► But it has a big index. It has a big index. It has a big index. So it's only, it's only slow in terms of the generation of, of the responses from the LLM.
00:10:52 ◼ ► But I'll, I'll tell you this and maybe we'll get more into this once we talk about this side. Like this is actually the final, uh, 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?
00:11:14 ◼ ► Yeah. But it's much faster and also supports the giant, um, context window. So, uh, I've been able, I've had a really good experience with Obsidian copilot and 4.1 mini, uh, in terms of querying my entire Obsidian vault. So we'll see, 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.
00:11:42 ◼ ► 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, uh, I can, I can tell already that 4.1 is in my future. I, you know, this, this, uh, idea of kind of collecting all the data from your life.
00:12:01 ◼ ► I have done this at various times, including just years and years ago, uh, 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, which, 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.
00:12:30 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. Uh, 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?
00:12:43 ◼ ► 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's originally Apple was doing things like determining which were the most popular emoji or how, you know, what words people were typing into the keyboard on their iPhone to suggest things in quick type. And they were using differential privacy to get those statistics without, uh, compromising their customers, uh, privacy and, and the way it works.
00:13:13 ◼ ► And this is going to be a vast, uh, 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, uh, they're not collecting data on the one person in the world has, who has this bizarre, uh, word that they type or emoji that they have.
00:13:43 ◼ ► 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.
00:14:06 ◼ ► Now what they're doing is they're doing it with Genmoji. And so they're looking to see if, um, you know, there are a lot of people like me who are typing Federico Vatici with a mule looking over his shoulder.
00:14:18 ◼ ► That's probably, that's probably, that's probably one that would identify me, I would have to say, but, 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.
00:14:32 ◼ ► And so, uh, uh, Apple's been using differential privacy as a way to collect information about popular requests for Genmoji so that they can fine tune the, uh, the prompts for those particular requests.
00:14:48 ◼ ► Uh, and so far all they've done is Genmoji, but this article that they published on the machine learning, uh, website says that they're going to be adding it to all the other image tools like image playground and, and all the other aspects of that, that, that are out there as well as writing tools.
00:15:06 ◼ ► And I think with the, the image stuff that 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 for, and I should back up and mention that this is all opt-in.
00:15:23 ◼ ► You have to have, um, agreed to, you know, device analytics for any of this stuff to be used on your device, but, but for things like email, they don't want to upload someone's actual email.
00:15:36 ◼ ► So what they're doing is creating synthetic data, synthetic emails or synthetic paragraphs of, 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.
00:15:55 ◼ ► And when they find good matches that is reported back so that they're fine, they're determining the popularity of certain types of text and messages by creating them wholesale with synthetic data and then comparing them against actual data on people's phones without that data ever leaving people's phones.
00:16:17 ◼ ► So that's, that's, that's something that they're not doing yet, but they've got planned for the future.
00:16:29 ◼ ► Um, uh, we'll see if it actually, you know, uh, it feels to me like it's part of a, of a, of a new Federighi, you know, driven, um, approach to Apple intelligence, but I may be wrong.
00:16:42 ◼ ► Oh, by the way, when you were talking, I, so this morning I actually put together a little project to query my entire archive of iOS reviews using GPT 4.1.
00:16:52 ◼ ► 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, uh, Google Gemini.
00:17:12 ◼ ► I posted on Blue Sky this morning, uh, a sample of being able to work with this kind of massive archive.
00:17:18 ◼ ► Um, it says iOS 10 2016 was the first time you covered differential privacy in your annual review.
00:17:25 ◼ ► You gave a technical summary link to external resources, summarize Apple claims and usage.
00:17:47 ◼ ► It's a way to collect user data at scale without personally identifying any individual.
00:17:52 ◼ ► Differential privacy used in conjunction with machine learning can help software spot patterns
00:17:57 ◼ ► and trends while also ensuring privacy with a system that goes beyond anonymization of users.
00:18:07 ◼ ► I think this, when I read about this, uh, yesterday or the day before I was struck by one
00:18:13 ◼ ► thing and I, and this is me getting on my, my AI hobby horse about how LLMs got trained.
00:18:19 ◼ ► Uh, and I wondered whether as in an alternate, alternate universe, whether instead of scraping
00:18:26 ◼ ► the entire web, whether AI companies could have generated synthetic data and then compared
00:18:44 ◼ ► I mean, this is just me saying, you know, there are other ways that I think there are better
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00:20:51 ◼ ► So we have a bit of a bombshell from Mark Gurman with a new, with a new report from the latest
00:21:08 ◼ ► Yeah, and we have some knowledge about what Apple has been working on with the Vision Pro
00:21:15 ◼ ► And I do want to start with the Vision Pro because I think it's a, I think we're obviously in
00:21:20 ◼ ► a very, very interesting situation with the Vision Pro, which is like this incredible piece
00:22:01 ◼ ► As we know, the Vision Pro starts at $3,500 and they want to somehow improve the comfort
00:22:12 ◼ ► Huge parentheses here, by the way, John, if you recall a few weeks ago, and then I swear
00:22:20 ◼ ► I'm going to get back to, to, to, to, to the rumors, but just, this is how my brain works.
00:22:25 ◼ ► Do you recall a few weeks ago, I asked you, hey, is this weird Vision Pro head strap made
00:22:34 ◼ ► Yeah, ResMed, ResMed, which makes, makes like head straps for people with CPAP machines
00:23:05 ◼ ► Last night, I'm unwinding at the end of the workday and I'm just mindlessly scrolling through
00:23:14 ◼ ► And I see a post from the Vision Pro subreddit saying the ResMed head strap is back in stock
00:23:43 ◼ ► Well, Mike is probably busy right now and doesn't have time to purchase a weird accessory
00:24:07 ◼ ► I just placed an order, even though I don't live in the UK, using a forwarding service.
00:24:19 ◼ ► And long story short, the medical head strap is being delivered to somewhere in Southampton
00:24:46 ◼ ► And the important trick here is that I was able to buy myself with my name and my credit
00:25:16 ◼ ► And then from there, I'll have to pay the shipping and a fee on top of it to get my hands or rather
00:26:08 ◼ ► Eventually, at some point in my life, I really want to have like a bunker, you know, like
00:26:22 ◼ ► Like, the idea of an atomic apocalypse and me being able to shelter inside that thing with
00:26:35 ◼ ► I think that the novelty would wear off pretty fast with the atomic bomb going off over your
00:26:42 ◼ ► I know you and you and the Silicon Valley CEOs ought to get together and maybe you could
00:27:25 ◼ ► So, I was reading this discussion on social media a few weeks ago that, like, a bunch of people
00:27:31 ◼ ► say, oh, if they get rid of the outer-facing eyesight display, they can make the Vision Pro
00:27:37 ◼ ► But actually, if you take a look at the bill of materials of the Vision Pro, that is not
00:27:57 ◼ ► Either change the displays, or Apple eats more of the margin from the Vision Pro, which
00:28:29 ◼ ► Mark is saying that they're working on a Vision Pro specifically designed for macOS integration.
00:28:38 ◼ ► It'll focus on ultra-low latency display streaming with potential for enterprise applications, like surgery, imaging, flight simulators, that sort of stuff.
00:28:50 ◼ ► 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.
00:29:03 ◼ ► Like, 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.
00:29:14 ◼ ► And we built a product that, physically speaking, looks like a weird, ultra-low latency, Mac virtual display.
00:29:27 ◼ ► On the one hand, you know, I went to CES in January and saw a lot of these glasses that are essentially that, you know, by Vitcher and Rayneo and a bunch of other ones.
00:29:41 ◼ ► And Rayneo, 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, $1,000, $1,500.
00:29:56 ◼ ► And I get that those glasses that sell for $200 or $300 are not anywhere close to the Apple Vision Pro's quality.
00:30:19 ◼ ► And, like, honestly, like, if you compare the quality of the virtual displays on those glasses with the quality of the virtual displays, especially the ultra-wide ones on the Vision Pro, like, those glasses suck.
00:30:34 ◼ ► So, I'm saying that, like, would I spend $1,000 for a, how could we call it, a Vision display?
00:30:52 ◼ ► You know, because you could keep the speakers, just keep the speakers, keep the displays, Thunderbolt connection, $19.99.
00:31:02 ◼ ► Like, I would probably, like, people spend, you know, people spend, what is it, the studio display, $1,500 or something?
00:31:13 ◼ ► 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 doesn't, but it's not a computer at that point.
00:31:28 ◼ ► At that point, you can make it lighter because it doesn't need to run an operating system.
00:31:40 ◼ ► Because, like, this is also, like, the kind of rumor that is resurfacing every once in a while, it seems.
00:31:46 ◼ ► First, it used to be that Apple was working on glasses that you were supposed to plug into a Mac.
00:32:06 ◼ ► I mean, you think about it, not only would you be able to take out the guts that runs the Vision Pro, the, you know, the M-Series chips, 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.
00:32:26 ◼ ► 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.
00:33:14 ◼ ► I think a studio display type of price range would probably make this a doable product, maybe.
00:33:54 ◼ ► Like the long-term vision, the top priority of Tim Cook and like apparently the product that he's spending most of the time like researching and talking about within Apple is making proper AR glasses.
00:34:07 ◼ ► 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?
00:34:19 ◼ ► 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?
00:34:29 ◼ ► They require a lot of different advances in display manufacturing, in systems on a chip, in lightweight batteries that don't catch on fire.
00:34:41 ◼ ► You know, the Orion glasses had like an external component for the gesture recognition.
00:34:56 ◼ ► And not just the glasses, but Apple apparently is also facing, you know, the pressure when it comes from Meta's lower cost headsets.
00:35:04 ◼ ► You know, the Quest headsets that in some cases are matching some of the functionalities of the Vision Pro at a much lower price.
00:35:12 ◼ ► In the meantime, while these glasses that Apple wants to make doesn't, you know, they will not be a product this year or even next year, Apple is continuing to explore AI-enabled accessories.
00:35:31 ◼ ► 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.
00:35:40 ◼ ► Those are just glasses with cameras and speakers, which I continue to believe are absolutely the sort of product that Apple should make.
00:35:47 ◼ ► I really hope that, like, imagine, 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.
00:36:15 ◼ ► 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.
00:36:41 ◼ ► 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.
00:36:54 ◼ ► 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?
00:37:01 ◼ ► Or what, you know, what kind of cameras can they really realistically put in an AirPod that's going to be useful to you?
00:37:11 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I'm interested to see, but I feel like the glasses give them a better platform for those kind of technologies than either headphones or a watch.
00:37:23 ◼ ► And, I mean, even, I'm also skeptical of, like, the camera in the AirPods because, like, unless you have no hair.
00:37:37 ◼ ► Hair, jewelry, like, you're going to have a camera that is looking at either your hair, your beard, or your jewelry.
00:37:47 ◼ ► Like, some people have them, like, sticking out horizontally from their head practically.
00:37:55 ◼ ► Yeah, they're, like, guns coming out of the, like, you're a mech walking down the street.
00:38:01 ◼ ► I have actually seen a person, like, a couple of days ago wearing the AirPods like that.
00:38:06 ◼ ► And every time I see people wearing them like that, I'm like, hmm, that is a fascinating choice.
00:38:17 ◼ ► I think people just twist them in there and leave them whatever direction they're pointing once they get them into a comfortable spot.
00:38:31 ◼ ► I am probably more excited that I should be about a Vision Pro that is not a Vision Pro.
00:38:38 ◼ ► I think it's going to be quite telling what Apple is going to do with Vision OS 3 at WWDC.
00:38:46 ◼ ► Like, I get the feeling that, like, okay, like, let's face it, nobody's buying this thing, right?
00:39:08 ◼ ► But, after the billions of dollars that you have invested into manufacturing, human resources, right?
00:39:30 ◼ ► Like, if anything, the sunk cost of the Vision Pro is going to be the greatest driver of innovation for the Vision Pro.
00:39:44 ◼ ► I think that, you know, even if the Vision Pro, as we have it today, never amounts to a good selling product,
00:39:52 ◼ ► 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.
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00:43:07 ◼ ► Mark had a bit of a bombshell about iPadOS 19, while all of us have been thinking about all
00:43:15 ◼ ► the Apple intelligence features that still haven't shipped and will likely be in iPadOS 19 and
00:43:28 ◼ ► He said that there's going to be a comprehensive software overhaul targeting productivity.
00:43:52 ◼ ► Those are kind of the productivity things that he mentioned about that, which is interesting.
00:43:58 ◼ ► I mean, all of this will coincide with the rumors that there will be new iPad Pros coming
00:44:04 ◼ ► this fall with an M5 chip, which can drive some of this, you know, more advanced software,
00:44:11 ◼ ► And of course, you know, it really does address the longstanding issues that a lot of people
00:44:19 ◼ ► who are power users have had, yourself included, because, you know, you did your not an iPad
00:44:25 ◼ ► OS review not that long ago, really, with a whole laundry list of things that the iPad just
00:44:37 ◼ ► I'm not sure that in my mind that multitasking and window management, those are aspects of
00:44:49 ◼ ► But it feels like such a drop in the bucket compared to all the things that should be addressed
00:44:54 ◼ ► that I don't think that tweaking, you know, maybe going from four windows to six or more degrees
00:45:17 ◼ ► Well, anonymous is not quite in the sense that it came from a person named in the feedback
00:45:30 ◼ ► So not Mark Gurman, a few weeks ago, wrote in and said, it's a shame to hear that you're
00:45:35 ◼ ► going back to the Mac, Federico, because this year, iPad OS is getting live window resizing
00:45:40 ◼ ► and positioning similar to Mac OS and Vision OS, wink emoticon, not even an emoji, like a wink
00:45:51 ◼ ► And now the Gurman report is saying we are getting, you know, Mac-like multitasking with,
00:45:59 ◼ ► Mark didn't mention the live window resizing, but the live window resizing, this deserves
00:46:05 ◼ ► an explanation in the sense that right now on iPad OS, when you resize a window, you're basically
00:46:15 ◼ ► It's not like on a Mac where you're grabbing a window from the corner and you're resizing
00:46:28 ◼ ► I mean, on a Mac, you can, if you want to make your window two pixels smaller, narrower, you
00:46:33 ◼ ► And on the iPad, you have some fancy animations that are basically transitioning you from one
00:46:40 ◼ ► But I worry, this is my concern and the reason why I wanted to talk about this, that Apple,
00:46:57 ◼ ► The worrisome version is that Apple took in all the feedback and said, oh, look at all these
00:47:01 ◼ ► people complaining that in stage manager, you're limited to four windows and you cannot move
00:47:12 ◼ ► So I worry that they took in the feedback in, you know, complaining about the iPad Pro and
00:47:20 ◼ ► iPadOS on the iPad Pro and just heard the bit about, oh, there should be more windows and
00:47:36 ◼ ► And that wouldn't account for all the other things that you referenced my not an iPad Pro
00:47:51 ◼ ► And I'm just going to run through real quick all like this, this laundry list of complaints
00:47:56 ◼ ► that I had collected, you know, that that story was basically my collection of every single
00:48:01 ◼ ► thing that I, that I thought was wrong with the, with iPadOS after more than 10 years of iPad.
00:48:09 ◼ ► Actually, well, for, for, uh, last year it was 2024, 14 years of iPad now going into its
00:48:21 ◼ ► So like no text edit, no preview, no journal, uh, no power user stuff like Xcode or, or a
00:48:30 ◼ ► And those apps often had like limitations and still do like compared to their Mac OS versions.
00:48:38 ◼ ► Apple likes to say that iPadOS features desktop class experiences, but they really don't.
00:48:47 ◼ ► something is lacking compared to the desktop version, or as I recently explored, even the
00:48:56 ◼ ► Um, you know, shortcuts is more limited on iPadOS compared to Mac OS, even like customization,
00:49:04 ◼ ► like even when the same feature exists, like toolbar customization, that is a feature that technically
00:49:11 ◼ ► also exists on the iPad, but it's so much more limited compared to toolbar customization on
00:49:24 ◼ ► Even Federico, I would say even the pro level apps that Apple has made things like logic pro and final cut pro,
00:49:42 ◼ ► So the inability to, to play multiple audio streams at the same time, or record your local audio when you're also doing like a zoom call,
00:49:50 ◼ ► for example, the many, many, many problems of the files app compared to finder on Mac OS.
00:50:09 ◼ ► Um, so on the iPad, you're stuck with a, with a semi functioning file manager that doesn't even support customization and doesn't support power user features.
00:50:26 ◼ ► Doesn't allow you to create like presets or like your favorite groups of windows, which is something that like you can even do.
00:50:42 ◼ ► Stage manager manager is a unique one where it's actually, it's, it's a problem on the Mac too.
00:50:56 ◼ ► And of course on iPad OS, you cannot install any third party launchers because that's just not the kind of app that you can, that you can install on an iPad.
00:51:07 ◼ ► Which also leads me into, there's all kinds of other utilities that you cannot install on an iPad.
00:51:14 ◼ ► Things like system wide utilities, uh, you know, utilities for custom keyboard shortcuts, apps that want to run long running tasks in the background, like clipboard manager, clipboard managers, for example, you know, that sort of thing.
00:51:29 ◼ ► You're just, you're just, you can't because of platform limitations and, and, and, you know, there's other stuff like, um, you get an iPad pro with a magic keyword.
00:51:43 ◼ ► If you want to, if you want to hook it up to an external display, there's still, you know, you, you don't really have the availability of any third party backup services.
00:52:02 ◼ ► If you're spending 3000 euros on an iPad pro and you're spending 3000 euros on a MacBook pro, you're getting a wildly different experience and you're spending the same money.
00:52:12 ◼ ► You're, you're buying a computer in both cases that has a laptop configuration that has a pro in its name,
00:52:24 ◼ ► 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,
00:52:39 ◼ ► because if, if you've been keeping a finger on the pulse of the iPad community for the past couple of years,
00:52:45 ◼ ► I mean, Chris Lolly, you know, another longtime iPad user just put out a video last week, you know,
00:52:50 ◼ ► talking about his, his evolving relationship with the iPad, you know, reading between the lines and not even between the lines.
00:52:58 ◼ ► It's basically saying I'm going to get more, most of my work done on a Mac mini and I'm going to do,
00:53:07 ◼ ► 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.
00:53:14 ◼ ► You know, we've heard stories from other longtime iPad users who have now moved back to a Mac.
00:53:23 ◼ ► So I, 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.
00:53:42 ◼ ► I mean, I, I think that the biggest problem, if you were to like boil down a lot of these things into one set of issues is it's system level access to the OS.
00:53:55 ◼ ► 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.
00:54:17 ◼ ► They can read your screen if you give it the permission to do so and allows you to do stuff there.
00:54:23 ◼ ► It's all, it's all those deep hooks into the OS itself that are absent on iPadOS that is at the root of a lot of, a lot of this.
00:54:31 ◼ ► And, you know, one of the ones that's even if you're, even if you're not into using kind of these more advanced utilities on the Mac, something as simple as a clipboard manager.
00:54:40 ◼ ► I mean, that to me, again, I don't want, I don't want Apple to go an inch deep on this stuff, but simply adding a clipboard manager, I think would go an awful long way towards,
00:54:53 ◼ ► making the iPad a more powerful tool because that's something that I think more people use than, than anything else.
00:55:03 ◼ ► I mean, I think I kind of feel like I don't want to be fooled again by 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.
00:55:17 ◼ ► 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.
00:55:24 ◼ ► 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, you know, be able to listen to some music while I'm doing that.
00:55:35 ◼ ► But it's, 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.
00:55:53 ◼ ► And I really hope that we're going to get, we're going to get more rumors between now and WWDC, you know.
00:56:01 ◼ ► And speaking of rumors, the final thing I wanted to talk about on the show today is this, this, this idea that, you know, Stephen and I, we've been, we've been talking about for quite some time.
00:56:14 ◼ ► So, this idea that with the upcoming iOS 19 redesign, what if Apple took a page from Vision OS 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 surroundings.
00:56:30 ◼ ► Now, this is obviously, you know, based on the, 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.
00:56:42 ◼ ► 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.
00:56:53 ◼ ► Both are concepts, they're Swift UI, I believe, concepts of what if iOS but reflective.
00:57:02 ◼ ► 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 surroundings.
00:57:15 ◼ ► In the first example by Jordan Singer from 2023, they're grabbing the colors using a mask on top of a blurred camera.
00:57:23 ◼ ► You never see the actual camera that is capturing the colors of the iPhone's surroundings.
00:57:33 ◼ ► You do see that the iOS interface is actually like a very Vision OS-like style interface on top of a camera viewfinder, essentially.
00:57:43 ◼ ► Now, I think this is very cool, but now in visualizing these concepts, I understand why this would be a privacy nightmare.
00:58:04 ◼ ► 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.
00:58:15 ◼ ► Like, Vision OS, your windows reflect the context of your surroundings because that's how you're using that computer.
00:58:27 ◼ ► 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?
00:58:36 ◼ ► The obvious solution on a device that you hold in your hands, so you don't have, you know, you have this abstraction of, well, the computer is an object that I'm holding.
00:58:45 ◼ ► My eyes are seeing both the physical reality around me and the digital reality inside the screen.
00:58:52 ◼ ► But the obvious solution is the wallpaper, the system wallpaper is what's unique about your device.
00:59:00 ◼ ► And this is so obvious and it's so in line with what Apple has been doing over the past few years.
00:59:06 ◼ ► 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.
00:59:19 ◼ ► 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 efforts that we've seen from Apple, you know, with the color customization on the home screen, on the lock screen, the fonts, the icons.
00:59:45 ◼ ► Using blurred photos, using blurred photos as your wallpaper and all that kind of thing.
00:59:50 ◼ ► So now instead of saying, well, the default iOS or iPadOS interface is white, you know, or dark gray for using dark mode.
00:59:58 ◼ ► Now the interface can be customized based on what your device, like emphasis on your device looks like.
01:00:20 ◼ ► I mean, you pick your wallpaper that you like, and then it kind of gets pulled through to your windows.
01:00:31 ◼ ► So, yeah, I think that's an interesting, it's an, it's, yeah, that's an interesting concept.
01:00:37 ◼ ► I mean, I don't think, I'm not super excited about it, but I think it's, it is in line with where things have been heading for the last two or three years.
01:00:48 ◼ ► I think too, you know, 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.
01:01:05 ◼ ► And with AI, Apple is having to bump up memory, bump up speed to be able to handle language models on, on device.
01:01:15 ◼ ► And there's some, 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.
01:01:31 ◼ ► And more of the user base has those more powerful devices in, you know, who own an iPhone.
01:01:42 ◼ ► I, you know, I just, I just wanted to officially back away from, back away from my idea of, you know, using the camera to, to tint the iOS interface, because I don't know, unless, unless, you know, Apple has, you know, come up with a crazy system to determine, you know, the colors of your surroundings.
01:02:01 ◼ ► 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, of, you know,
01:02:12 ◼ ► You know, window tinting based on, 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.
01:02:26 ◼ ► 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.
01:02:50 ◼ ► And then it uses that it just kind of, 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, to create the wallpaper too.
01:03:28 ◼ ► Now it's, now would be the time for me to, you know, do the usual like closing segment of the show.
01:03:35 ◼ ► But as we have established on the show, I am quite unable to do that in a way that doesn't drive people crazy.
01:04:14 ◼ ► People can hear John going on and on about Apple gaming and Mac gaming in the pre-show, in the pre-show for Connected Pro listeners and members, which you can get at ConnectedPro.co.