00:00:00 ◼ ► I still have emotional scars from the worst recording fiasco in 426 episodes of the talk show.
00:00:06 ◼ ► I mean, I think it's impressive that it's only, as far as I know, it's only happened the one time.
00:00:10 ◼ ► It also, remember, I think I told you it happened in the one-off weird episode I tried where I just talked to myself.
00:00:30 ◼ ► I don't know if anyone would actually have noticed if they, like, I don't know, I think the episode itself was fine.
00:00:34 ◼ ► It was just a bit of a strange way to spend a few hours having a conversation that you had previously, again, but still trying to make it not be unusual.
00:01:23 ◼ ► So, if you get it, if you need to, you need to pump it up while you're going, you can, you can just go for it.
00:01:42 ◼ ► And then I've done one more since then, but I think it was probably a couple years ago.
00:01:53 ◼ ► But the preceding episode of the show is not out as we record, where I talked to Chance Miller from 9to5Mac about the WWDC announcement sort of from the user's level.
00:02:07 ◼ ► And I feel like the other side of the coin is the developer side, and you were the first person to pop into my head because you, I know, do your homework.
00:02:16 ◼ ► And I think you've probably watched as many sessions so far as anybody who I could get, and I've watched way too few, even as a non-developer.
00:02:29 ◼ ► And I did, you have a developer-oriented podcast with our mutual friend Marco Arment under the radar.
00:02:43 ◼ ► And you guys didn't really, but what was your overall takeaway from WWDC from a developer's perspective?
00:02:57 ◼ ► And I've been in person for all of them that there has been an in-person event since then.
00:03:01 ◼ ► And I think you get a sense of, over that period of time, to have a sense of, like, when is it a good one, an interesting one, when there's some really, like, meaty things that you're going to get working on over the summer.
00:03:13 ◼ ► I think there's enough things happening that I think most dramatically, certainly the new design, but in a variety of ways that it feels like a year where Apple is trying to tidy up a loss of loose ends.
00:03:26 ◼ ► And kind of have a sort of cohesive strategy going forward and to get developers pointing in the same direction, which allows Apple to then do a bunch of things with more confidence going forward than they would be otherwise.
00:03:42 ◼ ► And I think the show itself, in terms of the way it's structured, is very stable at this point.
00:03:46 ◼ ► You know, since they went online sort of as the main version of this thing, that's worked really well.
00:04:03 ◼ ► And I think you've made reference to this in a few posts where it just feels like they're not overpromising.
00:04:07 ◼ ► They're not trying to go do something that they're not confident or sure that they can actually deliver.
00:04:12 ◼ ► And especially that they can deliver in three months in September when it actually goes out into the wide world.
00:04:25 ◼ ► Like, I very much appreciate that if I spend time on something that they announced in June, that come September it's going to be worthwhile that I spent that time.
00:04:35 ◼ ► Like, last year there was a whole big push on App Intents and things that were going to be coming for the Apple Intelligence thing.
00:04:41 ◼ ► And thankfully I never really went down that road too much, just mostly because of other commitments or priorities.
00:04:47 ◼ ► But it turned out if you'd spent a lot of time working on that stuff, you would have sort of not really been able to see the payoff of that yet.
00:04:53 ◼ ► And so this year it feels good as a developer to go into something that feels very confident, that feels very like, yep, this is all things that they've shipped many times before.
00:05:02 ◼ ► Like, I've gone through the, you know, I was there for the iOS 7 redesign, went through a similar summer, and it feels similar in a good way.
00:05:09 ◼ ► There's, you know, the platforms are so much more complicated than they were back in those days.
00:05:21 ◼ ► Like, I enjoy this kind of work that coming back and looking through all of my apps with a new design language and a new sort of a fresh perspective and finding interesting ways to adapt.
00:05:31 ◼ ► And, like, the iPad going, turning into a Mac is, like, is interesting and exciting in ways that are, like, that's interesting work to me.
00:05:42 ◼ ► A couple of thoughts I had coming out of WWDC were that it felt like this was the year for me where having WWDC at Apple Park this way kind of felt normal now.
00:06:34 ◼ ► And I remember the one time, you know, seeing you at the, I think we were with Marco a year or two ago.
00:06:46 ◼ ► As familiar as it is, in some ways, Apple is in a, they've never been here position where they've got a bunch of established platforms now, right?
00:07:08 ◼ ► But even in the middle of the last decade, like 10 years ago, iOS still felt pretty new.
00:07:16 ◼ ► And the Mac was really the only established, I don't want to say legacy, because legacy implies that it's on the way out, but that it's, it's just an established platform.
00:07:27 ◼ ► And now they've got a bunch, uh, iOS, you know, it's up to 26, which isn't really right, but it's, you know, it's going to be 20 years in 2027.
00:07:48 ◼ ► And, and I think it is a very Tim Cookian aspect of the company, like the way that Apple has gotten very good at annual updates to everything.
00:08:05 ◼ ► And even the hardware now, like with, especially, I think, thanks to taking control of the Silicon story with Apple Silicon for the Mac and now a bunch of iPads, where even the hardware is getting updated on a very predictable annual schedule.
00:08:31 ◼ ► I would be flabbergasted if I got to, like, visit him in his office and I saw, like, his iMac screen and he had, like, files strewn all over his desktop, right?
00:08:43 ◼ ► Yeah, he does not seem like a bunch of icons and files all over his desktop sort of person.
00:08:49 ◼ ► And I think having the company on that schedule or that rigor, it suits him in a way that they weren't.
00:08:58 ◼ ► I wrote about this recently, but, and I got some pushback from people on Mastodon at my description of the Mac's update schedule in the middle 2000s as being erratic because there was, you know, after, like, 10.4, there were, you know, like, two-year gaps, 18-month gaps between major versions of Mac OS.
00:09:25 ◼ ► And in some ways, I think that those longer gaps, you know, those are the versions of Mac OS X that people remember the most fondly.
00:09:35 ◼ ► Like, you could get people on a podcast and have them rave for two hours about Snow Leopard 10.6 and how great it was because everything, it just felt settled in.
00:09:45 ◼ ► And so the knock against this annual schedule, though, is that nothing ever really settles in, right?
00:09:57 ◼ ► I don't think they should switch to a two-year, I don't think it's even being contemplated that they would switch to a two-year cycle.
00:10:03 ◼ ► But in some ways, it feels like never get versions of an OS that just sort of, like, yeah, this is really, really bug, you know, as few bugs as possible.
00:10:16 ◼ ► It's like by the time that happens, it's time for next year's OS releases, and there's all sorts of new stuff.
00:10:22 ◼ ► Yeah, though I think, like, the core OS parts of iOS devices generally these days are very much more stable than they used to be.
00:10:31 ◼ ► I mean, there were years where I would install, like, the first dev beta on a device, but once I learned, once I made the mistake once of installing it on my actual phone and never did that again.
00:10:43 ◼ ► But, like, in the old days, you would install that beta, and it would be just broken, like, horribly broken in ways that it would just constantly be rebooting, and it would get super hot, and the battery life would, like, you would plug it in, and the battery wouldn't charge fast enough to be able to keep it.
00:10:57 ◼ ► Like, it would do all kinds of terrible things, and I feel like that side of things doesn't happen these days.
00:11:02 ◼ ► I mean, the current beta, if you installed it on your primary phone, you're very brave and foolish, but it is the kind of thing that most of the badness is going to be weird, like, you know, graphical glitches and things like that.
00:11:14 ◼ ► It isn't that it suddenly destroyed your contact book or weird things that you used to have.
00:11:20 ◼ ► And so I think there is a stability to it that is nice, and I feel like I'm reassuring on the developer side.
00:11:27 ◼ ► And I think the annual cycle feels about right in terms of the amount of time for the new features to have enough time to be settled in, to be developed, to be rolled out to people.
00:11:44 ◼ ► I think of how, like, when Chrome kind of was, I think, one of the first major apps to go to sort of continuous version updates, where rather than it being this thing where there are these big numbered versions that come out, it was just like your Chrome would just keep changing, and you had no control over that.
00:12:01 ◼ ► And that would be too much, and I feel like this is enough time for them to make big, meaningful things and get the developer community on board with that.
00:12:09 ◼ ► It works well to have three months for us to preview it and work on it before it comes out.
00:12:17 ◼ ► And I like, in some ways, too, that I think, and made even more strong this year with going to harmonizing the numbers to 26, that it kind of has a sense that all the platforms are going to be going forward in lockstep now.
00:12:28 ◼ ► And that, I think, had been the case for a long time, but it was an implied thing, whereas now it's very much, these versions are going to happen once a year, and this is what we can expect.
00:12:37 ◼ ► And that is reassuring, as a developer, to not feel like these platforms are going to somehow get out of step, or you have these weird things where things are coming to one and not the other, or the releases are being very, you know, sort of desperate.
00:12:49 ◼ ► It's very much, these are, all these platforms are from a very similar, they're in the same family, working at the same way, and they're going to be updated at the same cadence, which is nice in that regard.
00:13:01 ◼ ► Yeah, it's, they don't, they don't have a name for it, and I think the closest, and I don't think there should be, but there is, like, effectively an Apple OS 26, right?
00:13:14 ◼ ► It's the combination of using multiple of these devices in coordination with each other.
00:13:19 ◼ ► And they've obviously been heading in this direction for years, and I do think it's, it's not that he doesn't get credit for it, but we just don't talk about it, because it's, from the outside, you just don't think about this software engineering organization and project planning inside a company.
00:13:41 ◼ ► That's not our business, we're not engineers at Apple, but it's obvious if you just think about it, that it's a remarkable undertaking that these platforms are all moving in lockstep.
00:13:54 ◼ ► And it wasn't that many years ago where, I mean, even just a handful of years ago, and you know this from the, being a, literally a widget developer, widget, widget Smith is all about widgets, that it almost seemed to me at first, when they renamed the iPad version of iOS to iPad OS, you know, it used to just be called iOS.
00:14:18 ◼ ► And it was, iOS had certain features on iPad and certain features on iPhone, split screen and stuff like that was only on iPad, but it was still considered the same OS.
00:14:34 ◼ ► But it seemed to me like when widgets first came out, they were only on iPhone and like, like lock screen widgets and not on iPad.
00:14:42 ◼ ► And it seemed like, well, at least half the reason that they gave iPad OS its own name is so they wouldn't have to deliver all the features at the same year.
00:15:00 ◼ ► And it's their plan not to have it happen anymore, that major features that could be multi-platform start multi-platform now.
00:15:09 ◼ ► And it's, I just think it's easier to complain about it when they don't do it than it is to give them credit for it when they pull it off.
00:15:20 ◼ ► And I think there is certainly, there's a, you know, there are clearly the iPhone or, and that's an iOS is clearly the king of the stack.
00:15:27 ◼ ► But I think it is absolutely something that I think there is a movement towards harmonizing the platforms as much as you can.
00:15:35 ◼ ► And obviously there are some, like in terms of widgets is a great example where like, we're just keep popping up in new places.
00:15:41 ◼ ► You know, this year there, they came to Division OS and to CarPlay and there's live activities are now on Mac OS.
00:15:57 ◼ ► And I think it's absolutely, the impression you get is that Apple's intention is to try and harmonize
00:16:01 ◼ ► and create the sense that this is one harmonious family of devices that have a common, in this case,
00:16:08 ◼ ► now we've got even gone to a common design language, a common functional capability set
00:16:13 ◼ ► that even now you'd have to think about which one's compatible with which, because they all have the same number.
00:16:17 ◼ ► There's a sense of, if you run Apple OSs with a 26 in the number, things are going to work well for you.
00:16:29 ◼ ► And I think that is absolutely good for customers as well as for developers to make that simpler than trying to tell people that,
00:16:39 ◼ ► And this, like, it just gets very confusing very quickly to try and explain which things you need for what features,
00:16:46 ◼ ► whereas that is much better in the new numbering system and the way that Apple is sort of posturing towards harmonization.
00:17:00 ◼ ► I've bought one of these before they sponsored because I was listening to ATP when they talked about Terminal, T-R-M-N-L.
00:17:18 ◼ ► It's a seven and a half inch black and white e-ink display, but it is a total throwback to, like, hacker first thinking gadgets where you connect all sorts of plugins.
00:17:42 ◼ ► They call them recipes, stuff like that, where you set up an account online and then your terminal connects every 15 minutes and draws new information from the server, like your calendar, the temperature, anything that you would think of as a sort of status message that you could do there.
00:18:26 ◼ ► They've made a promise that if the company ever goes away, they're going to open source everything about it so that your hardware will still keep working even if the company goes away.
00:18:52 ◼ ► And it's under 150 bucks if you want to get the regular colors, black, white, I think clear.
00:19:47 ◼ ► If most of you go check them out and don't at least think, ooh, maybe I should buy that.
00:20:21 ◼ ► And that code, which you could just apply at checkout if you just go to the main website, useterminal.com.
00:20:55 ◼ ► And so in my mind, it's a bit of like, I'm looking forward to potentially getting one in like October as a reward for finishing the summer work.
00:21:03 ◼ ► I think it's that kind of a fun project where, unfortunately, for the next three months, I have no time to tinker.
00:21:07 ◼ ► For you in particular, David, I think that this would be a dangerous, dangerous gadget to buy.
00:21:19 ◼ ► But let's, it's a good segue into, to me, one of the other themes that are very obvious to you, Mr. Widgetsmith.
00:21:31 ◼ ► But I think obvious to anybody who's been paying attention that the whole concept of widgets has been a major, and it is sort of, widgets are the cross-platform software of the Apple OS 26, right?
00:21:54 ◼ ► That the widgets you write to show up on an iPhone are a lot, or identical maybe, to the widgets that you write to show up on a Mac.
00:22:09 ◼ ► It's philosophically something that Apple clearly wants, because it's, instead of writing full app, where the code is just running and can do anything, it is sort of low energy, low battery consumption, totally safe, right?
00:22:29 ◼ ► Like, it seems very unlikely to me that there are any kind of software exploits that could happen through a widget.
00:22:35 ◼ ► And there's rumors that Apple might come out with some kind of HomePod with a screen type device that I would bet, if there's a developer story for, would only run widgets.
00:22:54 ◼ ► I mean, I think that's my expectation, as someone who would be very excited about such a device.
00:22:59 ◼ ► Like, it is very much, and I think this year even, we got, like, a new type of widget, with the interactive snippets widgets, which are a new thing that would be even more appropriate on some kind of a home device.
00:23:10 ◼ ► But I think it was one of these things, looking back almost five years now, that since widgets were introduced, that architecturally, they were structured such that they were so easily portable to different places.
00:23:22 ◼ ► That the same code I can run on a widget that is a complication on a watchOS device can run on an iPhone, on an iPad, on a Mac, on VisionOS now.
00:23:36 ◼ ► And I think it's worked really well, too, that Apple has made it such that you can take the widgets from, like, your iPhone, and they can become widgets that show up on other places, that they can show up on your watch.
00:24:02 ◼ ► So your car manufacturer didn't have to do a firmware update to your car for that to work.
00:24:08 ◼ ► Like, as soon as I got back, you know, plugged my testing iOS 26 phone into a car that had a CarPlay, and it's like, boom, they're my widgets on my dashboard in my car.
00:24:17 ◼ ► And I think it's clearly this way for them to have sort of this experience that is very common and expected across all their platforms that benefits from its simplicity, that widgets, they're interactive now.
00:24:30 ◼ ► But even there, like, interactive widgets are all you can basically do is have a button that, when you push, does a thing.
00:24:40 ◼ ► And I've pushed interactive widgets far beyond what they likely should do in terms of some of the work I've done for WidgetSmith.
00:24:45 ◼ ► But all of it is structured in this very simple kind of command response system that means they can have, you know, interactivity that in CarPlay, I can have a CoverFlow music widget that you tap, and it cycles through the albums you want to play.
00:25:02 ◼ ► And all that is happening with me doing, like, literally zero work on, because all it is doing is taking the work I did for iPhone and magically turning it into something on CarPlay.
00:25:12 ◼ ► And so I think widgets in that way have worked really well for Apple as a way to give developers surface area on all the platforms, but with very little sort of relative work to do, and with a lot of safety from a battery life and performance perspective.
00:25:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned CarPlay, because I think CarPlay is probably a better example even than the hypothetical HomePod with a screen, because it actually exists, right?
00:25:37 ◼ ► But it is, by definition, a platform where you can't really allow third-party apps, per se.
00:25:46 ◼ ► It has to be, you know, for safety and regulatory reasons, but the regulations are for the same common-sense safety reasons.
00:25:53 ◼ ► You can't have software that could have bugs that would affect the display and operation of a moving vehicle, right?
00:26:04 ◼ ► So something that is not sandboxed in the way that apps are sandboxed, but more colloquially sandboxed.
00:26:22 ◼ ► And I think the difference is that Apple themselves are making widgets the same way third-party developers are.
00:26:31 ◼ ► And compare and contrast with WatchOS 1.0 10 years ago, where they didn't call them widgets, but it was sort of the same, I think, the same...
00:26:47 ◼ ► I mean, correct me if you disagree, because you know more than I do, but the whole problem with the original WatchOS...
00:27:10 ◼ ► And for developers, shipped a WatchKit that was sort of like, effectively, your app on your phone would render a screen and sort of send it to the Watch.
00:27:29 ◼ ► And the thinking behind that was obvious, because that first generation, first few generations of Watch hardware were so constrained computationally, you know, and battery life-wise, right?
00:27:41 ◼ ► Like, even if you didn't do too much with the Watch, you really didn't get a full day of battery life.
00:27:53 ◼ ► And so, Apple trusted itself to write software that would be as efficient as possible to fit within those constraints.
00:28:05 ◼ ► And, you know, it makes sense that the first version wouldn't allow third-party software to run.
00:28:14 ◼ ► Anything that Apple itself isn't using and isn't the way they would want to write the software for it isn't going to have legs.
00:28:20 ◼ ► And I feel like the modern widget system has some of the same thinking behind it of efficiency.
00:28:50 ◼ ► But generally speaking, the infrastructure and the framework, like having someone who's spent so much time looking at widgets, I think the fundamentals are the same.
00:29:04 ◼ ► Because the nice thing about the way they've done it is Apple doesn't have to convince people to have their widgets show up in these new places.
00:29:18 ◼ ► But if you have widgets that are in your iPad app, they'll just show up in the new system.
00:29:32 ◼ ► But because it's this common system, they're benefiting from that portability in a way that I think works to their favor.
00:29:38 ◼ ► It's one of those things where we had WatchKit 1, we had WatchKit 2, which was a bit better.
00:29:55 ◼ ► But architecturally and structurally, it's been so reliable that they really nailed the implementation of how this works.
00:30:02 ◼ ► And it's clearly worked in the sense of the number of places this technology has then just overflowed to means that it clearly was a good idea that they're sort of all in on at this point and working well as a result.
00:30:26 ◼ ► I installed it, installed Vision OS 26 and started playing with it, got some widgets and built, put it on there just because I wanted to experience it.
00:30:34 ◼ ► I mean, the Vision OS, that's a whole discussion that's such a complicated thing as a developer
00:30:39 ◼ ► because it's such a beautiful, capable, wonderful platform that has no real use case behind it.
00:30:47 ◼ ► It's uncanny how the widgets that you hang on the wall seem so realistic, for lack of a better word.
00:30:58 ◼ ► And that they can hang forward if you put a real picture or a terminal or whatever on your wall or inset, and you can put them into the wall.
00:31:24 ◼ ► Yeah, it makes sense that, oh, and if you leave the room and come back, all your widgets in that room that you had set up are in the exact same place where you left them.
00:31:48 ◼ ► And it's like you can leave, walk around the house, go up and down the stairs, come back.
00:31:54 ◼ ► And they are, I mean, to me, it seems literally to like the centimeter in the exact same place where you hung them.
00:32:04 ◼ ► It's like so if you center one over a chair or something and you walk around, restart your device, come back, and that widget is still centered perfectly over the chair where you left it.
00:32:24 ◼ ► It's like you walk up to it and the hands of the clock and the indices to mark the hours are like three-dimensional pieces of plastic stuck on the clock face.
00:32:47 ◼ ► Clearly, I think what is most exciting on that side of things as a developer is just that it is, I think, it is probably fair to say that Vision Pro, Vision OS launch did not have the uptake that I'm sure Apple hoped it would have had.
00:33:02 ◼ ► And I think as someone who made apps for day one, that was certainly disappointing, that it seemed like this platform is just technically amazing, but, you know, hasn't found its feet.
00:33:11 ◼ ► And I was worried going into WGC this year that it would be very quiet over there, that it would just sort of, that Apple would be approaching this platform as something that was just kind of, they'll, you know, sort of, in some ways, the feeling that some people have sometimes had about the iPad, where it just sort of didn't get much in this year.
00:33:33 ◼ ► This is clearly massive amounts of time, energy, engineering effort going into making something that isn't just, isn't, it's not just like the basic implementation of what something like this would be.
00:33:44 ◼ ► This is the, you know, the plussed up version of this that is really thoughtfully designed, beautiful to look at, and has some really clever things going on behind it.
00:33:53 ◼ ► And so I appreciate their confidence in terms of doing that, that clearly it is something that they care a lot about and are still putting a lot of effort behind.
00:34:05 ◼ ► It seems like in the near term that that is unlikely, but in the long term, they're trying to lay the groundwork for something where you could imagine, you know, having widgets since, I think in some ways are even, are a better version of a Vision device.
00:34:21 ◼ ► Where if you imagine that headset getting smaller and smaller and more something that you could wear on a ambient basis, widgets are the perfect thing for that.
00:34:36 ◼ ► Like I, in the hotel room in Cupertino, when I was playing with it, like I, as you would be, most hotel rooms have the kind of ugly art on the wall.
00:34:43 ◼ ► And I replaced the art in my wall with some of my favorite pictures and like size them so that they were over the exact frames in the room.
00:34:51 ◼ ► And as you say, like I'd come back and look back over and they were still exactly where I left them.
00:34:56 ◼ ► Like exactly over the paint, you know, things aren't starting to shift and skew and start to stick out.
00:35:07 ◼ ► It's a tough platform to talk about because I suspect relatively very few of the people listening to this show have Vision Pro.
00:35:32 ◼ ► Other than I think that the reason is that there's so few, there's so few Vision OS users compared to the other platforms that the difference between a developer beta and a public beta just isn't.
00:35:47 ◼ ► It's not sufficient to spend the engineering resources to have to clean up a developer beta to public beta form, you know.
00:36:05 ◼ ► Or I mean, I think even it's just one of those situations where once it's a public beta, then Apple needs to support it through their support infrastructure.
00:36:13 ◼ ► And I think to your point, it's such a small number of people who would do it that spinning up the ability for you to take it to an Apple store and the person in the Apple store to know how to, you know, restore it back to the last version or those kinds of operations.
00:36:32 ◼ ► I think it's just the reality of a small platform that hasn't found sort of growth at this point.
00:36:38 ◼ ► And so it doesn't make sense for it to get quite as robust of treatment as the other platforms would as a result.
00:36:44 ◼ ► It almost seems like a certainty that when the time comes that they have a AR glasses product, whether they still call that a vision something or not, it's obviously going to be related to this platform.
00:37:01 ◼ ► And the first one is almost certainly going to be battery life constrained and computationally constrained, you know, that the lighter and smaller the glasses, the less of a computer there's going to be in there.
00:37:20 ◼ ► And so the whole, hey, widgets are lightweight and don't get to sort of execute their own arbitrary code.
00:37:28 ◼ ► They're just more constrained in the same way that they're suitable on a device like Apple Watch and suitable for use in a constrained environment like CarPlay.
00:37:47 ◼ ► And I think that is the part that is so helpful for them in the way that as soon as you allow any form of arbitrary code to be run somewhere, suddenly you have a whole host of problems that you just don't have when it's this predictable kind of snapshot architecture.
00:38:01 ◼ ► The thing that I would like to emphasize as a point of comparison to like the precision of the stability of the widgets you place in Vision OS 26 around you is compare and contrast with the measure app on the phone where you can put something on a table and measure it or measure that from one wall to another.
00:38:28 ◼ ► Like if it says it's 6 inches, it might be 6.2 inches if you actually take off, use a real ruler or something.
00:38:38 ◼ ► And the line you draw to measure a box or whatever it is that you're trying to get the measurements for, it sort of wavers around a little bit when you're using the phone for this.
00:38:48 ◼ ► But it's like somehow with Vision Pro with its extra sensors, extra cameras and whatever else it's doing, it is not like that at all.
00:38:56 ◼ ► It is uncannily like a real picture frame on a wall or and also the thing with the panoramas.
00:39:04 ◼ ► I mean, with the pictures you hung in your hotel room, did you use panoramas where they really do look like a window to whatever the panorama is?
00:39:21 ◼ ► It looks like an open window that you could reach your hand through or your head through.
00:39:36 ◼ ► Once Vision OS 26 comes out, I would seriously recommend people go to, you know, even if you've already taken the, oh, I'm just curious.
00:39:50 ◼ ► When Vision OS 26 comes out, even if you've already done it, you should go back to the Apple store and spend half an hour taking a tour again.
00:40:03 ◼ ► And I think those are that and spatial photos are the two things that I think are just, for me, the most compelling aspects of using a Vision Pro.
00:40:12 ◼ ► Like I, whenever I go to, whenever I travel now, I make a point of recording like high resolution panoramas.
00:40:20 ◼ ► Like I stitch together with lots of photos rather than even just using the built-in one because it is the most lovely way to be able to revisit a place that you love and to go to it and like physically feel like you're there again.
00:40:37 ◼ ► And, you know, like I'm talking to you right in my office, I have a giant panorama of a place that I love behind me and it is beautiful to have like panoramas just work in that way because they're so expansive because they can take advantage of being kind of unconstrained physically.
00:40:55 ◼ ► But being able to take a photo and make it look like it has a bit of dimensionality gives it such life.
00:41:02 ◼ ► There's just a delight that comes from that, that is, I don't worry too much about recording spatial photos like using the fancy mode, like the AI version of just kind of spatializing a scene is good enough.
00:41:14 ◼ ► And that just gives it such a sense of delight is, I think, the best word, which is like, ooh, that's cool.
00:41:20 ◼ ► And it can take you back to that moment just enough to enhance the memory beyond just a flat photograph.
00:41:27 ◼ ► All right, it's probably more than enough time on Vision Pro, but it really is super impressive.
00:41:33 ◼ ► And I totally agree with your takeaway that any fears that Apple inside that there's any kind of deflating, but this is that this isn't worth our time.
00:41:49 ◼ ► It is a really impressive year over year update, and they obviously are all in on the future of that platform.
00:42:16 ◼ ► Liquid Glass is the name of the texture and the look, and it is a very good name for it.
00:42:30 ◼ ► It is also a philosophical change on how you lay out your user interfaces, that even if it wasn't Glass-looking, it would be a change.
00:42:50 ◼ ► And I think that's exactly – I think Apple – I don't know why they didn't give it a name beyond just like the new design or the new design language that they talk about, the new design system, I think they'll mention.
00:43:03 ◼ ► That effect is like the reward you get if you structure your app in the way that the new design system wants you to.
00:43:13 ◼ ► That it is the design flourish on top that is sort of benefited from the new design system.
00:43:19 ◼ ► And I think the new design system sort of fundamentally seems to be about trying to view your UI in terms of content and control and separating those into two distinct layers and making sure that you have that sense of hierarchy, that there are things that are content and there are things that are navigation or operations.
00:43:40 ◼ ► And if you separate those out so that the content is below and the controls are above, Liquid Glass is what sort of makes them look cooled in that way that is creating this difference that you didn't have before if your contents were more embedded inside of your content, which I think is very much the way that they're going.
00:44:00 ◼ ► And it feels very much like this design is coming from a place of Apple wanting to, I think, prepare for the future and also try and sort of clean up a period of time where developers have gone in all kinds of different directions with the way that apps work and are laid out from a hierarchy perspective.
00:44:29 ◼ ► I think it helps Apple in terms of their ability to sort of ship new platforms or do new things.
00:44:35 ◼ ► If we get a folding phone down the road or something, it's much easier for them to do if apps don't have – if every app has its own form of hierarchy and its own form of navigation, that is much more difficult of a thing to pull off than if they've harmonized and created consistency between all the different things.
00:44:56 ◼ ► I think the carrot part is if you do it and we have this cool new visual effect and all this fun new interactivity and dynamism that will be delightful and make your users be like happy, like there's just something fun about the new design language.
00:45:11 ◼ ► And I think the stick is I – having done this for as long as I have, listening to developer videos or reading through it, there's very much in this undercurrent I'm getting of no seriously.
00:45:23 ◼ ► This is the time that you need to stop doing things in your own way and being super custom and doing all these things.
00:45:30 ◼ ► And I think they're saying without saying things are – like if you do this now, that will be good for you now and very good for you down the road.
00:45:40 ◼ ► And I think a lot of the work they're doing seems to be heading in that direction, that there's things coming down the road that they want apps to be much more flexible, much more dynamic.
00:45:48 ◼ ► Once you separate content and control, if you change the shape or size of a device or a screen, that's much easier to do because the content and the controls can morph more fluidly between those things.
00:46:02 ◼ ► And so I get the feeling that that's what they're trying to do with this and that this new design system is very much a – it isn't just a – it's been however long since iOS 7, it's time for a new one.
00:46:14 ◼ ► This feels like they're trying to get their house in order to both tidy things up from the past as well as be ready for whatever's to come.
00:46:32 ◼ ► And from that perspective, I actually think I didn't, especially in the early years, that it was too flat.
00:46:39 ◼ ► And there was layering – they even harked back to it in the keynote where they talked about iOS 7 briefly introducing liquid glass.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And part of – it was sort of maddening the way that iOS 6, maybe like iOS 4, 5, and 6, had layers, but they didn't make conceptual sense.
00:47:07 ◼ ► It was like, wait, you'd pull down Control Center, and somehow it looked like it was under.
00:47:19 ◼ ► And I honest to God think the answer was Steve Jobs thought it looked cool, that that's the texture we're going to use.
00:47:25 ◼ ► And the, hey, Steve, you know, it doesn't really make sense that that would be under your home screen.
00:47:35 ◼ ► And iOS 7 introduced this layering that had logic to it, but then they presented it visually with no shadows, no visual indication of depth.
00:47:49 ◼ ► And they obviously added indications of depth over the decade that we had that as the visual language.
00:48:05 ◼ ► That when something gets disrupted, what it disrupts is generally at the peak of as good as it's ever going to be.
00:48:18 ◼ ► But about how with the introduction of passenger jets, like in the early 60s, at the time, the propeller passenger airplanes were the best they ever were.
00:48:39 ◼ ► It really is a very good looking, cohesive visual language that if you stick to Apple's apps and third party apps that are meant for the platform, like yours or like Overcast or ivory from tap bots.
00:49:01 ◼ ► You know, Ivory is maybe the best example or Icon Factory's apps, you know, that there's ways to be branded and distinctive.
00:49:18 ◼ ► There's room for that sort of branding and not looking generic while sticking to the principles.
00:49:37 ◼ ► But it clearly was designed phone first because the phone is the king of the platforms.
00:49:53 ◼ ► And now when I go back to my regular phone, which is still running iOS 18, everything does kind of look old.
00:49:59 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think as a developer, it's been a weird experience having to jump back and forth between, you know, my – like, whenever I look at my current designs, I look at them and they're like, these are trash.
00:50:32 ◼ ► Like, the way that buttons react to your touch is not just cool looking, which it is absolutely 100% cool looking, but it is a very clear way of getting a sense of have you touched it?
00:50:43 ◼ ► Are you – like, there's a sense of a lot of things that were problematic about earlier versions of iOS's design are very much addressed in this.
00:50:54 ◼ ► Like, the biggest challenge I have in some ways is that I need to support older versions of iOS and so I'm going to have to continue to have both going at the same time.
00:51:06 ◼ ► And it's nice as a developer that the more I embrace the system behaviors and controls, the better my life becomes.
00:51:14 ◼ ► Like, my app becomes prettier by doing less, which as a developer is always lovely to have as the case.
00:51:24 ◼ ► Like, so come the fall when you have, like, a major new update to – I'm sure you're planning on an update to WidgetSmith.
00:51:32 ◼ ► How hard is it going to be for you to maintain versions that look idiomatically correct on iOS 18 or 17 or however many versions you still support going back?
00:51:44 ◼ ► How much work is that in the code base to ship one app that looks new and liquid glassy on iOS 26 while still looking the way users expect who are hanging on to the older OSs?
00:51:59 ◼ ► Yeah, I think, weirdly, it is probably almost as much work to support both concurrently than it is to adopt the new thing.
00:52:07 ◼ ► Like, the new thing has actually been really easy to adopt in my early work on it because so much of it is I can just lean on iOS 26 to do the right thing.
00:52:16 ◼ ► But the challenge, I think, is going to – and this is one of those just architectural decisions I'll have to make fairly soon – is am I trying – how much am I trying to have a shared code base between the two with lots of kind of, like –
00:52:28 ◼ ► if it's 26, do this, if it's not, do that, versus trying to sort of – and just saying this is a meaningful major change.
00:52:36 ◼ ► I'm just going to kind of split the code and they will share the underlying logic will all be the same.
00:52:44 ◼ ► But whenever there's places that I need to do new things, I'm just going to have a version that's iOS 28 and before and a 26 and after.
00:52:53 ◼ ► And that's worked actually relatively well for me on – watchOS went through this a little bit where there's been a bunch of things where I – watchOS –
00:53:01 ◼ ► like, watchOS had its big redesign in watchOS 10, I think it was, watchOS 9, wherever we had this big new redesign.
00:53:07 ◼ ► And I essentially, in that case, I just split my code base in two and said, if you're running the new version, you get new controls.
00:53:17 ◼ ► And the nice thing with Swift – the way SwiftUI works, which is what all these are built with, is it rewards making things into small little sort of atomic pieces that you build from.
00:53:29 ◼ ► And so just sort of having a high-level thing that's picking different Legos out of the box when you're doing iOS 26 versus iOS 28 is very natural.
00:53:45 ◼ ► You know, if you were starting today and with an iOS 26 app that was new, it would be much easier.
00:53:50 ◼ ► I think the other version that is in some ways potentially possible that I haven't quite fully thought through is a lot of adopting iOS 26 is about removing customers' customization.
00:54:00 ◼ ► A lot of the things – and Apple very specifically, like, and sometimes in their videos, they're like, if you've been customizing your toolbars, now is the time to stop doing that.
00:54:11 ◼ ► And I think one of the other paths I'm considering is to essentially go down the iOS 26-ified version of it and then see how that version would look on iOS 28.
00:54:23 ◼ ► It would lose a lot of the design flourishes and things that I had built out for iOS 18, which made sense there.
00:54:38 ◼ ► But I think that aspect of it is definitely, you know, just as much of an effort as it is to adopt the new design is to adopt the new design in concurrency with continuing support for old versions.
00:54:56 ◼ ► And Apple is coming from the perspective where most of their apps, their first-party apps that come with the system, don't have to do that.
00:55:07 ◼ ► Like the version of Mail that runs on iOS 26 is not the same app that runs on iOS 18, right?
00:55:30 ◼ ► Because the sports app, you know, everybody thought when the rumors of what we now know as Liquid Glass were popping up earlier in the year.
00:55:38 ◼ ► And the idea that Vision OS is the sort of inspiration for a lot of it, which they said, you know, they even, Alan Dye said in his introduction, they made that explicit that a lot of the work they did for Vision OS inspired what they're bringing to all the other platforms.
00:55:58 ◼ ► But also because it goes through the App Store, we won't see the Liquid Glassified version of sports, I guess.
00:56:05 ◼ ► I mean, I think Apple, even for their own apps, sticks to the same rules as other developers where you can't ship iOS 26 SDK apps until iOS 26 is out.
00:56:16 ◼ ► So I'm curious how much more glassy the sports app gets, you know, and I guess the Invites app, which I used once for something just to see sort of a weird app.
00:56:39 ◼ ► He's mentioned it on ATP and then again with you on Under the Radar that and it's, you know, it's usually the case.
00:56:45 ◼ ► I think with iOS 7, we saw a really big delay from the bigger the company, you know, like Google's apps also, they were notoriously late.
00:56:54 ◼ ► Google's iOS apps were very late adopting new screen sizes, like back in the era when the iPhone first started having, hey, don't assume the screen is this number of pixels by this number of pixels or even these two sets of pixel dimensions.
00:57:16 ◼ ► We're like, yeah, I guess the rumors of a new iPhone size coming in this September must be true because there were these awkward presentations where they were saying you have to be prepared for screen sizes that don't exist.
00:57:36 ◼ ► It's like if you if you do if you adopt it this way, should this the size of a view change, then you're you know, you're at your output adapt to that at the time.
00:57:52 ◼ ► But obviously, in retrospect, they were just saying something that they couldn't say for the few, you know, for the fall.
00:57:57 ◼ ► But then when the fall came and there were these new iPhone sizes, a lot of apps from surprisingly big companies were effectively letterboxed for a long while.
00:58:09 ◼ ► And so I'm curious and bigger companies tend to have cross platform either code bases, you know, using React or Flutter or whatever technologies are out there to sort of share as much code or as many screens or just the design.
00:58:27 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure every every major app is its own unique story at the internal project level.
00:58:34 ◼ ► And even if it's not a shared code base so much, but just a branding motivation to keep your iPhone app and your website and web app and your Android app looking as similar as possible, I definitely think liquid glass is going to make that harder because I feel like if you stick to that language that doesn't look glassy, it's going to look old on iPhone.
00:59:06 ◼ ► And I don't think there's an easy way to adopt a unified language across iPhone and Android come fall.
00:59:15 ◼ ► So I think that you're going to see a thing where Apple's apps and indie apps stand out as looking cooler than the big apps from like Meta and Google and Amazon and you name the other companies.
00:59:32 ◼ ► Like, honestly, I very much as a indie developer who is able and desirous of being ready on day one that I expect, you know, my apps are going to adopt the new design, adopt liquid glass, do all the things, have the new icons and the way that they look, do all the things so that I can be there on day one.
00:59:49 ◼ ► And that is hopefully both beneficial from a, you know, just I think Apple likes developers who do that, that they more likely be featured in the app store, things like that, if you're actually doing the new things.
01:00:00 ◼ ► And I think there will be an interesting aspect of it creates an opportunity to feel fresh and to have a competitive advantage to some degree against these companies that for whatever reason don't adopt things or at least don't adopt them quickly because they'll feel old.
01:00:17 ◼ ► And like, I know this from experience of using iOS 26 for the last couple weeks is once you get used to iOS 26, switching to an app that doesn't have it feels old, it feels like flat in a way that I think I'm thinking of Google's apps, which had their, you know, they use the material design language that Google had built.
01:00:37 ◼ ► It has built for Android in their iOS apps for years, but iOS with self was not so different from that, that it would stand out that I think material could be a way that you would express the iOS 18 design language, whereas iOS 26, it's going to feel really weird and it's not going to feel at home in quite the same way.
01:00:58 ◼ ► And I think it's going to be interesting from a, like the cross platform side of it, because while you can sort of, and I've seen people who would sort of vaguely re-implement liquid glassy kinds of things in Flutter or any of these kind of cross platform systems that the challenge is it's the, the re part of the magic of it is that it isn't just a basic version of this thing.
01:01:20 ◼ ► It is like when you look at, in detail at liquid glass and you sit there and you, if you slide your, the classic one, if you just open up the lock screen and just slide up slowly and you see what's happening on the edges of the glass.
01:01:34 ◼ ► And as things are moving through it, like it is not just a simple shader, I don't think just being slapped on top at the end, which is what these Android sort of cross platform things will be.
01:01:44 ◼ ► And I think it'll feel different and potentially even weirder in the sense of there may be this uncanny valley problem where it is better to either adopt it fully or not adopt it rather than half adopting it and having things not look right.
01:01:58 ◼ ► Like if you get used to the fact that when you tap a button, it has a physicality and a kind of, you know, a morphingness to it and that fluidity, if that fluidity is wrong, if the feeling of it isn't there, it may feel worse than if it just didn't try to do it at all.
01:02:12 ◼ ► And so, but yeah, I'm definitely hoping that this fall, like it's a way to stand out as a developer that being in the new thing and doing that, there's a benefit to me both, you know, in the short term and then hopefully in the long term that it just prepares my apps for the future and it would be in a positive and beneficial way.
01:02:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm here listening to you, I swear, but you see me on video, I'm distracted looking at my iOS 26 phone, just playing because you got me playing with the lock screen again.
01:02:41 ◼ ► And I'm sure you've done it, but it, the way that you can get like really tall, thin numbers for the time.
01:02:52 ◼ ► And when you slide up as the top notification gets to the numbers, it squishes the time perfectly as you, and I'm just sitting here, it's like the best little fidget toy I've had on my phone in forever.
01:03:19 ◼ ► And I, I actually think it is important strategically for Apple, like the whole point of Apple computers has always been that they are for some people, the best computers and in a way that it's never, you know, they say it, but they really do mean it.
01:03:44 ◼ ► And part of that, and it's sort of counterintuitive or it's, it's a, it helped them, but B, it was a danger in the longterm that, that one of the most important things that kept Apple going in the late nineties.
01:04:02 ◼ ► I mean, obviously everybody remembers that the next reunification and Steve jobs coming back and taking over the company and bringing in new leadership with him and discovering Johnny Ive and his team who had already been there.
01:04:16 ◼ ► And Hey, they've, they've, they've, there actually are great hardware designers in this company, but the previous leadership was making them ship boring, brown, tan computers.
01:04:26 ◼ ► And there's that, but the other thing that really helped save the Macintosh in the late nineties was the, the web and that prior to the web, it, there was this massive moment.
01:04:41 ◼ ► I mean, I've never heard of Windows three before, but you know, especially with Windows 95, there was the de facto platform for a comp, any company, whether it was like in-house software inside a big company that the it department was making for employees to use.
01:04:54 ◼ ► Or just any kind of commercial software, like when Napster came out, it was a Windows app, it was Windows and the Mac was left behind or came second, right?
01:05:05 ◼ ► And the Mac eventually got third party Napster clients that were backwards engineered to the platform, but for stuff like work in-house work apps that were designed Windows only the Mac, you just couldn't have a Mac in the company or you could, but then you'd have to have like a PC at the same desk.
01:05:26 ◼ ► And the web became the new universal platform where the easiest thing for any company to do would be to make websites or web apps.
01:05:50 ◼ ► And the way that most of the companies that came into being like Amazon in the late 90s or Google, companies that are now amongst the big five, weren't by making apps for the Mac or for Windows, like had happened in the PC industry before the web, but they just made websites.
01:06:08 ◼ ► And the Mac could participate in that just as a peer to Windows, a website, a website, but the downside of that web mindset is that it loses the distinctiveness of the platform.
01:06:22 ◼ ► And, you know, we all complain about Electron apps or we who listen to shows like mine and yours complain about Electron apps.
01:06:31 ◼ ► But the reason Electron apps are so popular and so used and so not popular like beloved, but popular in terms of how many of them are out there and how many people are using them is that they're the same everywhere.
01:06:46 ◼ ► You package up your Electron app and it runs exactly the same on Windows as on a Mac, as on a Chromebook.
01:06:52 ◼ ► And from a certain perspective, that's it's the the long held dream of right once run anywhere.
01:07:00 ◼ ► But for Apple strategically, if everything goes, if that's the way the whole industry goes over the coming decades, it's a serious problem for Apple, because then there's what's the what's the reason to buy an Apple computer instead of, you know, whether it's a phone or the iPad or a Mac, then whatever, because you're just running the same apps everywhere.
01:07:36 ◼ ► As much as I have critiques about specific parts of it, I think overall it's a win in that regard.
01:07:48 ◼ ► I think ultimately, I think Apple would say that their goal is to make the best experience for their users who use their platforms, that if you have an iPhone, you're going to have the best experience versus any other smartphone that you could possibly get.
01:08:02 ◼ ► And absolutely, I think one of the ways that they can do that, like that best experience is not going to be coming from using a variety of apps that have very different sort of inconsistent UI paradigms and things that you're aren't familiar between different platforms that on this app, you do it this way on this app, you do it that way.
01:08:22 ◼ ► So I think Apple absolutely, from a user experience perspective, has a desire and a reason to want and push for consistency that very much is what, you know, like one of the three sort of the three main like the new design is about hierarchy, harmony and consistency is like the things that they're saying.
01:08:39 ◼ ► And I think that consistency is both between apps, as well as across platforms, but they're very much it is a goal that Apple is trying to do and their benefit, the users benefit from it in that perspective.
01:08:51 ◼ ► And I think strategically, the sort of more cynical version of it is the more that there's a difference between an iPhone app and an Android app, the easier it is for Apple to justify that you should get an iPhone rather than an Android, that they can create that differentiation.
01:09:09 ◼ ► And I mean, there were early days where it was like, oh, the iPhone's problem is that, you know, it's too expensive and everyone will just get cheap phones.
01:09:15 ◼ ► And I don't think that is obviously that it's clearly not proven out that people are willing to pay for a premium experience because this device is so important to their life, that they're happy to pay a lot of money because they'll hold that device in their hand for literal hours of every day.
01:09:39 ◼ ► And this is, you know, a tricky thing that there's only so much that Apple can do to enforce that the platform, the developers on its platform adopt its new things.
01:09:48 ◼ ► But there are certainly things in this release particularly where it feels like they're trying to give you rewards visually in this case, where like having really fun, fluid, interactive elements that you get for free.
01:10:02 ◼ ► Like anytime I can improve, you know, like thinking of if I'd say wanted to build an app like this myself last year, it's not that it isn't technically possible.
01:10:15 ◼ ► There's no magical new technology that was introduced in iOS 26 that makes this possible, but I would have needed like several tremendous designers and some tremendous graphics engineers and some shader developers, all these kinds of things, performance engineers to do this.
01:10:35 ◼ ► And I think that is the reward that Apple can offer to adopting a new, the new link, the design language as a developer, you know, to encourage its developers to make their apps more distinctive on iOS.
01:10:46 ◼ ► The tricky spot that Apple's in, especially with the iPhone to hark back to 20 years ago or 25 years ago when the Mac had, you know, 5% market share and it was Apple's only computing platform.
01:11:01 ◼ ► It wasn't just a, you know, the, what, what made it work and kept the platform going was it wasn't just a random 5% of the market, which would have, they would have gone under.
01:11:12 ◼ ► It was 5% of the market, almost entirely comprised of people who really cared and really preferred the Mac for reasons.
01:11:21 ◼ ► And the iPhone is so absurdly popular, you know, with a billion users, maybe closer to 2 billion.
01:11:31 ◼ ► I don't know where we're at, but it's, it's a crazy number of users and lots of those people don't care.
01:11:40 ◼ ► There are hundreds of millions of iPhone users who really don't care about the details of the user interface, or at least they think they don't care.
01:11:50 ◼ ► And who surely there will be a lot of people who, when their phone updates to iOS 26.1 or whatever, the 26.2, whichever releases the one that they push to the people with auto updates, who just get it overnight at some point in November, December, who are going to wake up and they're going to say, what the hell happened to my phone?
01:12:20 ◼ ► It's a different place to be like in some ways it was better when their customer base was entirely people who really cared because then they could cater to those people without having to bring along people who don't care.
01:12:49 ◼ ► Like it is one of those things that is kind of remarkable where you say, as you said, like there may be a hundred million people who don't like the new design, but that only represents like less than 10% of the population.
01:13:03 ◼ ► And so like the thoughtfulness and the intent that likely went into this new design because it touches literally every one of their platforms.
01:13:11 ◼ ► That is the like core objective is that all of their platforms, all of their users are going to interact with this new system.
01:13:23 ◼ ► That's a bit like, whoa, but the intent is, and the thoughtfulness is clearly behind it.
01:13:41 ◼ ► Do you have any, before we move on, do you have any particular favorite apps in iOS 26?
01:13:54 ◼ ► Like, I mean, I think the places that I've been going to for inspiration, I think is like, I go to, I mean, it's all the simple, the simple boring ones in some ways, but even just things like reminders, I think does a good job of adopting it.
01:14:06 ◼ ► Photos, I think actually does a fairly good job and is using it in interesting ways that, you know, like photo, it's a bit of a running joke that a lot of Apple's design, like design screenshots look good because they have edge to edge photos in them.
01:14:20 ◼ ► How, if you don't have beautiful photos underneath, it doesn't look as good, but obviously photos, I think it's the place where a lot of us have content that actually does, does look good.
01:14:29 ◼ ► And then I think the lock screen is the other place that I think really, like I was saying, exemplifies why this can be cool.
01:14:37 ◼ ► Why it's a place where there's this natural sense of hierarchy that you have an image and then you have these sort of interactive elements on top of it.
01:14:47 ◼ ► And then the whole thing can move around and that gives you a sense of why that hierarchy is useful and that it's, you know, it's useful that the, all the controls are separated from the content so that you can move the controls as one in a way that is sort of this beautiful fluid experience.
01:15:04 ◼ ► Some parts of it every now and then you'll dig around and, you know, in beta too, they haven't quite gotten to, there's some different screens in some of those apps, but overall it feels like if you, the initial experiences in those apps clearly is a good place for me, the developer to learn how to do this.
01:15:20 ◼ ► Well, the one that I keep looking at, and I know it's like low key and it's like, well, that's not an impressive app or, but I, I, and I surprised because I played the puzzles in Apple news, or at least I played the mini crossword.
01:15:41 ◼ ► I find that I don't waste time reading politics slash national news who's at war now news.
01:15:49 ◼ ► If I do it in Apple news, as opposed to going to the New York times or something, but I feel like the way Apple news has adopted it is really, really low key impressive.
01:15:59 ◼ ► And it most stands out to me when I, it, as the app that feels the oldest, when I go back to my main phone with iOS 18, it's like, Whoa,
01:16:14 ◼ ► And the version on, on iOS 26, it also feels like the content, content, content, put your content first.
01:16:23 ◼ ► And there's some blurriness at the bottom where the John Syracuse in me wants to say, well, if you're going to blur a full two thirds of an inch at the bottom, what's the difference than if it was Chrome that stretched across the bottom, you know, you can't read the article anyway.
01:16:40 ◼ ► And they're just the way that like the toolbar expands and contracts as you scroll and it's animated.
01:16:51 ◼ ► And I think the music app has a lot of those kinds of flourishes as well that I think I really enjoy where there's that, that sense of really, it's in any app that has beautiful content really shines with the new design language.
01:17:03 ◼ ► And with this new effect and all these things, like it looks really nice in the way that in the music app, you have the same thing that as you scroll, the now playing bar can kind of morph down into the tab bar and then pop back out.
01:17:18 ◼ ► And I imagine over time, the that will get sort of optimized to a place that it's mostly the awesome version.
01:17:36 ◼ ► Some of the new stuff in Squarespace, if you don't know, if you have, if you're new to the show, Squarespace is the all in one platform for building a website of any kind, any personal website, a business website, a restaurant website, a company website, any kind of website, Squarespace can handle it.
01:17:56 ◼ ► They've always had great visual design tools, WYSIWYG tools, and they're still there if you want to do it the old fashioned way with drag and drop and looking at it, where you build your website in your browser.
01:18:08 ◼ ► And what you see is what people visiting your website will see as it's really, really a WYSIWYG visual interface design system that they've always had.
01:18:26 ◼ ► But this is a way for somebody who's just wants to describe what changes they want made to the website.
01:18:33 ◼ ► You just describe it like you're talking to a chat bot and the changes happen right to your website.
01:18:42 ◼ ► Squarespace payments they continue to work on and any kind of payments do you need, whether you're selling goods or selling services or selling your time.
01:19:00 ◼ ► So if you have running, if your website involves you running some kind of business where you send invoices, you can do that through Squarespace too.
01:19:10 ◼ ► And the whole invoicing system is right there in Squarespace for you to customize for whatever your needs are.
01:19:40 ◼ ► And at the end of the 30 days, when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash talk show.
01:19:58 ◼ ► My other big question about WWDC this year is with the foundation models, the local ones that run on device.
01:20:11 ◼ ► You know, if liquid glass is the because it's visual, because it looks new and literally looks shiny.
01:20:24 ◼ ► Everything I've heard, both from people at Apple while I was out in California, on and off the record, and talking to developer friends,
01:20:37 ◼ ► I feel like Apple's done more in the last year than people were expecting for on-device AI.
01:20:50 ◼ ► that they took, that I think it is playing to their position in a way that I think feels honest, which I very much appreciate.
01:21:02 ◼ ► That Apple Foundation models are clearly not the bleeding edge, amazing, best model that exists right now.
01:21:11 ◼ ► And you could argue about which model is the best right now, but it is clearly not the Apple Foundation on-device model.
01:21:17 ◼ ► But what Apple did because of that, because they don't have the best overall model that could do anything and everything,
01:21:25 ◼ ► is they've built a very user-friendly from a developer-friendly API and method by which apps can adopt this and made that very straightforward and then provided something to developers where there's an incentive to use it because it is free.
01:21:45 ◼ ► And free is tremendously powerful in a lot of ways that anytime you have to pay any amount for anything, you're going to use it less than if it is completely free from a developer perspective.
01:21:58 ◼ ► That I can think about, is there a feature that would benefit from an Apple Foundation model kind of thing?
01:22:04 ◼ ► That's the summarization or suggestion or text extraction or some kind of basic operation that text-based AI is very good at.
01:22:13 ◼ ► I don't have this complicated sort of spreadsheet I have to pull up of, well, how much usage would pay for itself or do I need to build this into some kind of subscription or consumable tokens that users can buy or however this goes.
01:22:26 ◼ ► Like, it's just very much easier if it's free from my perspective and the API for using it and the system for using it is very well thought out and makes that very easy from my perspective.
01:22:38 ◼ ► I think the challenge that Apple will have as a result of that is it requires, because it's my own device, it'll only work on devices that support Apple intelligence, which at this point, I think before we were recording, I pulled up my stats and I've around like 20-ish percent of users on devices that support Apple intelligence.
01:22:57 ◼ ► And so it's awkward in that it could be really cool, but if 80% of my users right now won't get it, and maybe by the end of the year with the new devices that come out and the iOS 26 adoption, you know, maybe that gets to a third of users or 40% of users.
01:23:12 ◼ ► It's tricky if it's going to be a core compelling part of an app for it to rely on Apple Foundation models, because at this point, it feels like it can do cool things that are little extras, little bonuses, but it's small enough of a user base that it's going to be hard to rely on it as a core part of your app if it's a core feature or a core experience that you want on it.
01:23:35 ◼ ► And I think that's slightly I was a little disappointed that it's on device only that they didn't say last year, we announced the private cloud compute, which is allows us to be the only people who can say, you can go to the cloud for AI with private data and be completely confident that your privacy is, you know, is there.
01:23:53 ◼ ► And so if you have use cases for a AI thing that requires that have privacy concerns, which I think many things do that anytime you take the user's data in some form, and are sending it somewhere else, that's particularly, you know, going to be a problematic thing.
01:24:07 ◼ ► And I was slightly disappointed that there isn't a private cloud compute version, right at this point of the Apple Foundation models, I think that's something they could absolutely expect to add at some point.
01:24:21 ◼ ► But the thing that's frustrating is like, it's really thoughtfully built, it's really sort of capable at basic things, which is really cool.
01:24:33 ◼ ► And so it's harder for me to be as excited to adopt it, because if 80% of my users or 70% of my users can't use it, it's not a feature that you can as easily market around or sort of rely on in that way.
01:24:47 ◼ ► And 20% is, I get it, that's sort of a low, but then I think about it, and it's like, well, it only is this current year's phones plus the 15 pros from the year before.
01:25:02 ◼ ► I do think, I haven't even seen anybody dispute it, because who else would be in the game of making on-device models?
01:25:12 ◼ ► I mean, Android would come to mind, but it doesn't, you know, it seems like Google is sort of all in on server-based AI, cloud AI.
01:25:26 ◼ ► That Android has always been more of a client to Google's cloud services than a platform.
01:25:35 ◼ ► I know that's sort of dismissive, but it's sort of the reason they made Android in the first place, so that mobile phones wouldn't be controlled.
01:25:44 ◼ ► And their fear at the time was Microsoft, not Apple, but that Microsoft would lock them out, you know, and build, you know, take over.
01:25:53 ◼ ► If Microsoft dominated mobile OSs the way Windows dominates PC OSs, that maybe with mobile phones, there wouldn't be something like the web browser, where Google would be able to deliver everything at once.
01:26:09 ◼ ► I don't think, you know, I think that Apple's on-device models, and people at Apple told me, you know, that they consider that theirs are the, this is the gold standard, that no, that on-device, these on-device foundation models are not competitive with ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini pound for pound to do whatever.
01:26:29 ◼ ► Not even close, but four on-device models, they are the best, and I don't even know who's second place.
01:26:36 ◼ ► It's almost like a game that Apple has to itself, and who knows how this is going to play out three, four, or five years from now, but it could, you know, I don't think you have to, I don't think it's rose-colored glasses to imagine that that could be an important long-term strategic advantage that Apple has.
01:26:58 ◼ ► You know, that if these models keep getting better, and it could be sort of ironic that by the time 75, 80% of active iPhones are Apple intelligence capable, that the worst ones are the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 Pro, which only have 8 gigs of RAM or however much RAM it is.
01:27:18 ◼ ► And are actually more limited, and developers are stressing over, oh, I'd love to do this with the local models, but 20% of my users are still on an iPhone 16, and it kind of stinks there.
01:27:33 ◼ ► I think the thing that's interesting with AI is that it is a new thing that is hard at this point to predict and know what the ultimate use cases are going to be.
01:27:44 ◼ ► Are there things that make sense in an on-device, like, always there, immediate, like, super low-latency environment that don't make sense using the sort of server-client model?
01:28:01 ◼ ► Obviously, if I did, I'd be making an app that did it, and that would be exciting and wonderful.
01:28:04 ◼ ► But I think it is interesting that on an iPhone, what Apple is setting up is a scenario where if you want the cutting-edge latest supermodel, you can just use that.
01:28:16 ◼ ► You can just use, you know, OpenAI's API or Claude's API or whatever API you wanted to use, and there's nothing stopping you from doing that except the cost associated with it.
01:28:31 ◼ ► And I think that differentiation is interesting for the kinds of things that may become possible or that may be something that you expect or are attractive to it as a platform, that having both, maybe it will be better, maybe it won't.
01:28:49 ◼ ► But it is interesting that they're allowing you to have both in a sort of in a concrete way.
01:29:00 ◼ ► That should there be a version where next year they decide actually there's going to be a cloud version of it, and that cloud version is actually going to be OpenAI on the back end, say, rather than their own version, or you can choose between them.
01:29:13 ◼ ► The way they've built it, from a developer's perspective, that would be straightforward.
01:29:19 ◼ ► You know, they've created this nice interface to interface with text-based LLM AI systems.
01:29:25 ◼ ► And that is beneficial, I think, from a developer perspective, that I can worry, I don't have to have a different adapter between the various platforms, potentially.
01:29:36 ◼ ► And so, like, to start with, it's device only, and that's limiting in some ways and encouraging in some ways.
01:29:41 ◼ ► And the thing that I always think about is how latency is so often vital in user interface design, and how transformative making something that takes a couple of seconds, taking a tenth of a second, can be completely transformative to the user's experience of that thing.
01:30:03 ◼ ► And I think on-device has a higher likelihood of potentially having those things, that there you may, there's an inherent reduction in latency on a model running on that is, you know, directly optimized for that hardware.
01:30:20 ◼ ► It can just be there, and you can rely on its performance to be predictable, because it's just running locally.
01:30:26 ◼ ► It isn't that most of the time the request takes a second, but sometimes it takes five seconds, and sometimes it takes half a second.
01:30:37 ◼ ► And I think, like, from my perspective, it's interesting that it's there, and I expect to start playing with it, which is tricky in the sense of a lot of AI feels like it's moving so quickly.
01:30:47 ◼ ► And so, I don't necessarily, like, having just the first version of something, and then potentially waiting a year until it gets better, like, doesn't feel great.
01:30:56 ◼ ► But it's also interesting, I think, as a thing to explore, and we'll sort of see if it pays off for them.
01:31:02 ◼ ► But I think it plays to their strength, that Apple controls the hardware and the software, and so they can make the most amazing on-device model, because they made the device.
01:31:12 ◼ ► I have a particular interest in the transcription capabilities, and you, and, you know, it's a side project of yours, but you run...
01:31:29 ◼ ► But you run a little hobby site, PodSearch, where you've got unofficial transcripts of my show.
01:31:40 ◼ ► So, you know, Upgrade, Connected, and then, you know, it's shows that I listen to the most and that I've found most often.
01:31:51 ◼ ► And Apple Podcasts, our shows, I'm sure your shows are similar, where the nature of our audiences is such that Overcast is the number one show for this show.
01:32:07 ◼ ► And Apple Podcasts has offered its own transcripts, which, again, are pretty good for a while.
01:32:15 ◼ ► But now that I'm sure Marco is looking at it for Overcast, I haven't actually asked him.
01:32:32 ◼ ► And it would, like you just said, it would only apply to some, probably even for Overcast, under 50% of iPhones that are using Overcast.
01:32:43 ◼ ► That it's local, it's on device, and so therefore it needs to be an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 of some sort.
01:32:54 ◼ ► And it's one of those areas where, and I think the one that I run into all the time is YouTube's auto-generated transcripts of videos.
01:33:07 ◼ ► And it used to be, I don't know, a handful of years ago, it was, well, this is better than nothing for me trying to search like an old Apple keynote and search for the time that Steve Jobs called Aqua lickable.
01:33:27 ◼ ► And, you know, I'm sure they'll upgrade those eventually too, but you can kind of understand that at the almost unimaginable scale of how many videos get uploaded to YouTube every day, that they need a very efficient transcription service running in the back end.
01:33:52 ◼ ► But it's a game changer, I think, that transcription is kind of going to become universally available.
01:34:00 ◼ ► And I think a podcast app is, you know, because I have a podcast and I wish, you know, I want to have the best possible transcriptions for it.
01:34:11 ◼ ► But I just run into scenarios all the time where I'm like, oh, I wish I had this in text and I don't want to type it out by hand.
01:34:22 ◼ ► But John Voorhees had a post at Mac Stories where his son has written a sort of, well, it is a command line tool called Yap that runs on Mac OS 26 and does transcription locally.
01:34:34 ◼ ► And it seems, you know, seems competitive with or even better than Whisper already, which is pretty impressive.
01:34:56 ◼ ► Adoption may come just as because I think it's because it's built on all of these features that Apple has been.
01:35:05 ◼ ► You know, you think of all the live captions and stuff that they've been doing in a lot of different places.
01:35:13 ◼ ► But I think absolutely the broader point of it is interesting when you take something that previously was really difficult and expensive.
01:35:25 ◼ ► Except for, like, paying for doing, you know, paying, I've paid for transcriptions to be done of the podcasts I've done over the years.
01:35:34 ◼ ► Like, it's very, it becomes very expensive very quickly in a way that going from that to it's free and takes a minute, takes two minutes.
01:35:51 ◼ ► And you think of places where it is suddenly very useful to have, both from an accessibility perspective and just from a user experience perspective.
01:35:58 ◼ ► The number of times I will watch a video with the subtitles on because, for whatever reason, I can't listen to it is helpful.
01:36:07 ◼ ► And transcription is a way to just kind of, like, build it into the device and it makes them more capable.
01:36:14 ◼ ► And I love watching Marco sort of talk about his explorations for this because it's a thing I know from him.
01:36:25 ◼ ► And this is, I think, a great sort of segue back to the beginning with the foundation models is an example of, like, is there these things that because it's on device and free that will now become possible, that will now become interesting?
01:36:39 ◼ ► And that's never, it isn't because it is the, in this case, it seems like it actually might be some of the best transcripts you can get.
01:36:44 ◼ ► But even if, in the case of the LLM side, even if it isn't the best model, but if it's the free model that you can access wherever you are all the time, forever, like, that opens up and unlocks the possibilities that you just otherwise don't have.
01:36:57 ◼ ► And that's the, I think, that's the strong case for this going well, you know, while sort of Apple plays to its strength while we wait on the other kind of broader Apple intelligence things, the things that didn't go so well last year, that, you know, this is an area that's, like, feels like it's, there's an honesty saying of, like, hey, we, I don't, the impression, you know, Apple often, they're famous for saying, we can't wait to see what you do with this.
01:37:18 ◼ ► This feels very much like, they really can't wait to see what we do with this and see if there's, if they, by packaging this up in this way, it unlocks a new thing for their platform, because they can do it in a way that not every platform provider would be able to.
01:37:33 ◼ ► Yeah. And I just can't help but feel it's conflicting, right? Because we're in the midst of this AI mania, and it is very exciting. And progress is happening very, very fast, right? It's the big, most popular open AIs, ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini, and XAI's Grok, they're all, or DeepSeek, coming out of China, you know, in January, out of nowhere, and surprisingly being competitive.
01:38:01 ◼ ► It's all happening so fast, but at the same time, and I think, you know, I think that's what led Apple astray last year, with the way they announced Apple intelligence, that they got caught up in the, hey, we need to be part of this too, in a way that I don't think they needed to.
01:38:18 ◼ ► But on the other hand, they're clearly building with years in the future, three, four, five years in the future, like I said, when all, or almost all iPhones, or at least a majority of them, are Apple intelligence capable.
01:38:32 ◼ ► It's been a question since last year, really, with private cloud compute, is as to, well, if it is in the cloud, everybody, I think, can understand the on-device Apple intelligence requires a very recent phone with enough RAM.
01:38:50 ◼ ► It either works well on the hardware, or it doesn't, and it sucks if you bought an iPhone 15, not Pro, last year, or if you bought an iPhone 14 Pro a couple years ago, and hoped to use it for three or four years, that, you know, you missed the cutoff for a Pro phone by a year.
01:39:12 ◼ ► The question so many people have asked is, well, if private cloud compute is in the cloud, why isn't that available to all iPhones, or more iPhones?
01:39:21 ◼ ► And, yeah, you could run on device if your device is capable, but why doesn't everybody get private cloud compute?
01:39:32 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, it's, I think, it's one of those questions that I, it's easy to have the cynical answer be the obvious answer.
01:39:45 ◼ ► I think my suspicion is that the actual answer is probably more pragmatic, that they, there isn't a easy way to limit that, and if you have a billion users suddenly using it, you have a problem.
01:39:59 ◼ ► Like, and obviously, it's a problem you could solve theoretically with money and data centers and all those things, but it becomes very quickly this thing that is very unwieldy, and suddenly the amount of, even just, like, the thought of, like, the number of data centers you need, and however many gigawatts of power you need, like, just suddenly becomes this massive thing.
01:40:20 ◼ ► And I think it is tricky to imagine them turning something like that on in a way that wasn't strongly metered, that wasn't, that you get a certain amount of things.
01:40:30 ◼ ► And then suddenly it's this whole other bit of complexity where it's, do you get so many requests per day, per month?
01:40:38 ◼ ► Do you, is it tied into your iCloud subscription somehow, and it's this whole other thing to manage?
01:40:43 ◼ ► And my suspicion is that there's just the scale and complexity of that, just, Apple doesn't see it as being a worthwhile thing, that it is transformatively different in some ways to say, it's, you know, it's, on-device is free, and if you have a capable device, it'll just work.
01:41:01 ◼ ► And private cloud compute feels a little bit more like a way for them to be ambitious with features internally that they can manage and sort of meter themselves and not have something that is open sort of more broadly.
01:41:19 ◼ ► But it is just, it's a weird, it's a weird thing to be, because I do think Apple intelligence would be more compelling if that was the way it was, that it was a thing that anybody who's running iOS 26, you just get Apple intelligence features.
01:41:34 ◼ ► And it isn't something that you have these weird sort of gate jump hoops you have to jump through or have a particular device.
01:41:39 ◼ ► And, I mean, even just as a developer, I would love it, because I have these issues where a lot of times my testing devices are older devices, because that makes sense for me to have them kicking around.
01:41:53 ◼ ► And so Apple, you know, they've sold a few iPhones that way, you know, even from my own experience.
01:41:58 ◼ ► And so it's hard not to have the cynical version of that of like, oh, they're just trying to sell it.
01:42:05 ◼ ► The scaling required to do it in any way that was at all broadly acceptable would be just massive and have created all kinds of other knock-on effects to the company.
01:42:19 ◼ ► They don't talk about the financials, but, you know, it's presumed that they're losing money, that they spend more to produce the original shows and movies than they make from people paying for Apple TV Plus.
01:42:37 ◼ ► But I think part of the reason that they're doing it, and there was a good interview with Tim Cook I linked to about the F1 movie.
01:42:57 ◼ ► And I think that from Apple's perspective, like from a Hollywood studio's perspective, it's all that, you know, losing money on this is a lot of money.
01:43:07 ◼ ► And from Apple's perspective and from Amazon's with the Amazon Prime, it's not a lot of money.
01:43:19 ◼ ► And so they can afford to run TV Plus at a loss as a hobby, and it doesn't affect their financials at all.
01:43:32 ◼ ► There was a story, Elon Musk disputed it, but I mean, I'll take Bloomberg's word, even Bloomberg's word over Elon Musk's any day that XAI is losing a billion dollars a month.
01:43:44 ◼ ► You know, and they had like a big fundraise back in December where they raised tens of billions of dollars and are already apparently looking for more like a billion dollars a month.
01:43:58 ◼ ► I mean, that's you know, and they're not a startup like open AI that hasn't even gone public yet.
01:44:05 ◼ ► And that's a whole other backstory with the, you know, used to be a nonprofit or still technically is.
01:44:11 ◼ ► And they're trying to change you, you have it's all sort of everybody's speculating on the future of the company, whereas an established company like Apple needs to maintain their actual revenue and profit that they currently have.
01:44:27 ◼ ► And I think losing a billion dollars a month on private cloud compute isn't really something that they have the appetite for.
01:44:45 ◼ ► And it's I think anything where, well, we'll just lose 10, 20 billion dollars a year on it isn't going to compute for them.
01:44:54 ◼ ► And Google has a unique advantage where they've got this leading edge server in cloud infrastructure that spans literally spans the globe.
01:45:05 ◼ ► I think most people, you know, I know Ben Thompson does, you know, considers it the gold standard of server architecture.
01:45:13 ◼ ► And so they can offer their AI and they're not it's not like all of a sudden now that they've they're offering Google Gemini, they're losing money in their quarterly finance calls.
01:45:26 ◼ ► You know, they're still profitable and their profits are growing because they've got that infrastructure.
01:45:30 ◼ ► Apple doesn't have that expertise, you know, I think the private cloud compute is a really interesting and unique design in the way that it is private and is guaranteed to be private and that they've got that they're doing their own hardware for it.
01:45:45 ◼ ► But it's obviously not something like today in June 2025 that even vaguely compares in scale to Google's server infrastructure.
01:45:55 ◼ ► So and again, I feel like as much as there's a gold rush or there's a gold rush mindset right now, there is no gold rush in profit for AI.
01:46:11 ◼ ► And I think, too, Apple, in a weird way, Apple has become one of the most profitable companies in all of history by virtue of making the marketing aspects of their devices be compelling and straightforward.
01:46:28 ◼ ► And, like, they make the amount of money Apple makes from charging $100 more per tier of storage.
01:46:50 ◼ ► And I think perhaps in some ways for this, there's an easy explanation of Apple wants AI to be a marketing aspect of a phone, not of iOS.
01:47:02 ◼ ► That it is something that you buy a phone with Apple intelligence, just like you buy it with three cameras or with a dynamic island or whatever that marketing sort of word is and attribute is.
01:47:15 ◼ ► And it is much easier from a marketing perspective to have something like that, that this is the phone that has Apple intelligence, this is the phone that doesn't.
01:47:27 ◼ ► And I think it helps in many ways Apple's sort of philosophy with a lot of these things that is, you know, you're saying, like, the amount of money you lose is sort of easier to quantify if it's only available on the thing that you just got $1,000 for.
01:47:41 ◼ ► That you can price that in to the way that this works that is much more straightforward rather than something that you have to kind of have any kind of retrospective backporting of features.
01:47:53 ◼ ► Which I think is just a pattern we haven't seen, you know, in general, it's there's been cases where there are features that come to new iPhones that theoretically could be run on past iPhones that you have whatever cinematic mode or various features that theoretically could exist.
01:48:11 ◼ ► Maybe, you know, I think Apple would argue that, oh, they're not as good or they're not up to our standards, but functionally or technically, it should be possible.
01:48:17 ◼ ► But I think Apple's just a pattern that they get into that's obviously, you can't argue with the outcome that it works well to say, this is a feature of this device, rather than a thing that is, they're not doing it just because they could.
01:48:30 ◼ ► They're doing it because they're saying this is a they're selling the whole widget, the whole the whole device.
01:48:35 ◼ ► And they're saying, we know it works well here, it works up to our standards, we're not going to, you know, go back and add it to previous things, because that was not the thing that we promised to you back then.
01:48:49 ◼ ► And so, I don't know, that's the sort of the justification that I can imagine that feels reasonable.
01:48:56 ◼ ► And I think it's the, it'll be interesting, I think, AI just generally is in a, in that boom phase, where it is unlikely that it will continue to expand and sort of be so hyped up for so long, at some point, that will start to contract.
01:49:12 ◼ ► And the question I think it'll be interesting is the, when it starts to contract, will it bubble down to models that are much simpler, that we, this concept of chasing this super model that can do all these magical things may not, if you never actually arrived there, then you may actually like the Apple Foundation models in a couple of years, kind of these will continue to improve, may just be capable enough to do 90% of what people actually want for this kind of a thing.
01:49:42 ◼ ► And so, if that's the case, then Apple's in great shape and doesn't even have to have the massive infrastructure and the massive data centers and all the things.
01:49:50 ◼ ► Instead, they have 500 million devices that can just do this natively and instantly, you know, out all over the world.
01:50:23 ◼ ► And weirdly, I think it feels a little bit, like, I think it's almost like, you're rarely going to be led astray.
01:50:30 ◼ ► If you, whenever you see Apple doing something, you ask, how does this benefit the iPhone?
01:50:34 ◼ ► And I see this, and I'm like, this completely benefits any kind of fluid iPhone interface design.
01:50:41 ◼ ► Because you can sit there in the new system, and you can just arbitrarily drag between sizes.
01:50:47 ◼ ► And so, previously, on the iPad, you tended to have these, like, chunk, you had these particular sizes that the interface would snap to.
01:50:53 ◼ ► And that it allowed developers to be lazy about how they did their UI and their layout and those kinds of things.
01:51:01 ◼ ► And I think that will benefit, ultimately, the iPhone, if it ever has more fluid, or either a fluid design in terms of, like, a foldable, or if you ever had any kind of windowing on an iPhone to allow you to kind of fluidly move things between.
01:51:15 ◼ ► And I think it's very much Apple, we were saying at the beginning, if you're doing things in Apple's sort of the blessed path, using their tools and not rolling your whole own design system on top of it, it's very little work.
01:51:27 ◼ ► They're doing a lot of the hard work there, that if you make the window super small, it kind of behaves like a small iPhone app.
01:51:39 ◼ ► I would guess, if the rumors about a foldable next year are true, I don't think they'll do Windows on iOS ever.
01:51:48 ◼ ► But I, you know, so I think it would be, you know, that would be a distinction between an iPhone in folded out sort of iPad mini-ish size, and an actual iPad mini would be the iPad mini gets the red, yellow, green stoplight windows that you can drag around.
01:52:07 ◼ ► And I don't think the iPhone would, but I know exactly what you mean, where it's like, all of a sudden, when you open the fold, it just grows your app to the new size.
01:52:19 ◼ ► And being ready for that now with your iPad app would put you in a spot to sort of just work next year, if and when a foldable actually happens.
01:52:32 ◼ ► I mean, Apple even said that at one point, I always love listening to videos and finding these, what I think are clues for the future.
01:52:38 ◼ ► And at one point, they were talking about the iPad, and they said, this is where your design learns to scale, which I'm like, yes, it is.
01:52:45 ◼ ► And it feels very, like, there's a little bit of just, like, telegraphing for the future, that, like, you play with the iPad, get your app looking good on the iPad, and that's a good thing for coming down the road.
01:53:00 ◼ ► And I'm sure, you know, again, with enough users, you're going to run into, it's the same thing, like we said about, like, I don't know, 100 million, at least 100 million iPhone users are going to hate liquid glass.
01:53:10 ◼ ► I got an email from a reader who really loves split view and slide over on iPad, and he's bummed that they're both gone.
01:53:24 ◼ ► And I feel bad, you know, because I've often, you know, you use computers long enough, eventually something you love goes away.
01:53:34 ◼ ► But I feel like, I feel like the fundamental problem with the previous attempts at windowing or split screen multitasking, whatever you want to call it on iPad, have been that it's too complicated.
01:53:55 ◼ ► It's, you know, it, it, just closing, when just closing the window is confusing, I feel like it's a sign that the design was flawed, right?
01:54:05 ◼ ► Like, that's been a solved problem with graphical user interfaces since, like, probably Xerox PARC.
01:54:12 ◼ ► Like, as weird as the Xerox PARC graphical user interface was, and complicated, you know, with three-button mouse and stuff like that, compared to the Mac, at least you could close windows, right?
01:54:25 ◼ ► And I feel like keeping those features while adding the windowing would just make it even more complicated than ever, right?
01:54:33 ◼ ► I feel like, I feel like this is just a better design period, and I'm so glad that they just accepted, yeah, let's just make it as much like Windows on the Mac as possible.
01:54:47 ◼ ► But I also feel, in addition to just feeling very natural, right out of the gate, it just feels like, yeah, this should have been like this.
01:54:59 ◼ ► I feel like so many more people who maybe are thinking, ah, I still just like using one app at a time.
01:55:08 ◼ ► I think there might be a lot of iPad users who think they like using one full-screen app at a time, only because the previous options were so complicated and fiddly and confusing.
01:55:20 ◼ ► And that may be, I suspect there will be a large number of users who expect they're still going to stick with single full-screen iPad apps who end up using the windowing thing a lot.
01:55:31 ◼ ► And I think it's like, it's a clue that your design was wrong when the old like split screen and slide over and all those systems they tried before, which ostensibly were to make the system simpler, made it much more complicated.
01:55:45 ◼ ► But it was this thing that you had to babysit and manage in a way that the windowing systems, as much as like the new one is more complicated insofar as you can do more with it.
01:56:06 ◼ ► And from there, there's some nice affordances that if you throw it into the corner, it'll go sort of half and half, and there's things you can do there.
01:56:13 ◼ ► But functionally, from a user perspective, you just have to learn to do two things, change the size and change where it is.
01:56:19 ◼ ► And once you've done that, you're there, rather than this weird like, well, if you tap the three buttons, the three dots at the top, and then you slide it here, and then in this pairing, it'll be this way.
01:56:28 ◼ ► And then if you do it this other way, then it's like, what happens when you close it, it closes both of the windows.
01:56:33 ◼ ► And all of the previous systems were so complicated that it just would drive you crazy to learn how to do them well.
01:56:40 ◼ ► Whereas this is like super, like you learn it in five minutes, and then you know everything there is to know about iPad windowing now.
01:56:47 ◼ ► I don't expect, you know, I wouldn't do it if I were writing the script for the keynote either.
01:56:54 ◼ ► But sometimes it's nice when they slip one in, the way they mentioned, hey, we heard that some of you didn't like the photos, the new photos layout last year.
01:57:07 ◼ ► I felt like Alan Dye, there was a point where he mentioned, I think it was Alan Dye who mentioned that, maybe it wasn't, but when it came to the iPad in the keynote,
01:57:19 ◼ ► But they mentioned that with the previous split screen, it was infuriatingly difficult to tell which window had input focus.
01:57:29 ◼ ► It was, I still think they could do a lot better, you know, but at least there's the red, yellow, green now.
01:57:36 ◼ ► And if you see whichever window has the red, yellow, green is the one where when you type, that's where the characters are going to go.
01:57:44 ◼ ► I think, I still think they could do more to deemphasize the ones that don't have focus, but boy, that's a change.
01:58:00 ◼ ► It was like some kind of trick keyboard where part of the game is you don't know which window is going to get the text.
01:58:15 ◼ ► My last question for you, and I don't know if you have any other topics, but I'm wondering if you've tried, and I don't even think they're calling it Swift Assist anymore, but I'm going to call it Swift Assist.
01:58:30 ◼ ► I think what's awkward this time of year is that using it properly requires like running Tahoe and doing all those kinds of things.
01:58:44 ◼ ► So I can speak more to the idea that they've gone with it, which I think is very thoughtful and clever to some degree.
01:58:51 ◼ ► But the actual, I haven't like massively used it over the summer so far in this, in that way.
01:58:56 ◼ ► But I think it's clever that, I mean, the reality is as a developer, it is remarkable how much of the code I write is something that an LLM can also write.
01:59:11 ◼ ► That there's an element of what I'm doing that is, I think someone, I heard someone saying it fairly recently.
01:59:17 ◼ ► I thought it was a good way of sort of summarizing developing where a lot of LLMs mean that like, whatever, 50% of the work that I used to do sort of goes away.
01:59:26 ◼ ► But there was a small percentage of my work, like 10% of it is now 100 times more valuable and important.
01:59:32 ◼ ► That like my ability to understand a code base and to architect and to orchestrate different tools in ways is very helpful.
01:59:40 ◼ ► And I'm so glad that Apple is tidy, putting that into Xcode now, making it so that it is a way that we can be better Apple developers.
01:59:50 ◼ ► And it's very clever the way they've done it, where it's not just one particular model.
01:59:58 ◼ ► But I think it is the kind of thing that is mostly just nice to see that Apple is starting into that space and working on it and making it sort of a, and having the humility to say that it isn't the Swift assist they showed off last year.
02:00:17 ◼ ► But the way this stuff works and the way it gets better, like, it seems like every month, there's a new best development model.
02:00:24 ◼ ► And so being able to plug into whatever that is, if it is the kind of thing that will improve my ability to work more quickly and to be a faster developer to try and honestly, what I find is a lot of it isn't necessarily that it is great for making the final version of something.
02:00:40 ◼ ► Sometimes it is that way, but very often what it is super helpful for is I have an idea for something, let me prototype that out quickly, which is something that I've made a career of being good at.
02:00:51 ◼ ► Like, I'm good at prototyping things quickly, but I'm much quicker to do that if a lot of the boilerplate and a lot of the busy work goes away there.
02:00:58 ◼ ► And that's how you end up with, you know, you can end up with a much better design or a much better implementation if you've tried three different versions of something and you've found the one that's best of that.
02:01:08 ◼ ► And so I think it's one of these tools that, you know, is this the best version of it or should you just use Claude Code from the command line?
02:01:17 ◼ ► Like, and the answer for that is going to change, but I'm just mostly excited that Xcode is playing in that game in a realistic, honest way that you can tie it into lots of different models and you have a lot of control in that.
02:01:28 ◼ ► And it's just going to sort of become an inherent part of the workflow that lots of developers are going to be exposed to and able to use.
02:01:35 ◼ ► And it's you just sort of, if you imagine that adding this to Xcode, the broad Apple development community is just going to get some percent faster and more efficient at doing their jobs.
02:01:46 ◼ ► And there's, you know, there's negative consequences and all kinds of other parts to it.
02:01:49 ◼ ► It's not all roses, but I think overall it is a positive step that they're starting to recognize that that is an important part of modern app development.
02:01:57 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think it's sort of interesting and it's, you know, of course, it was German who reported, I don't know, a couple months ago that Craig Federighi had told the team, the engineering division within Apple, that let's no longer have a rule that we stick to our models, use whatever model delivers the best product.
02:02:16 ◼ ► And it seems like that must, I don't think German said it was about Xcode at the time, but at least in terms of what was announced at WWDC this year, it's Xcode, the Xcode's the one where you could just sort of, somebody could make a new, you know, if like DeepSeek, if a new model pops out of nowhere next month, you know, and they support the chat GPT, pretty simple API, you could plug your developer key in for the new one that doesn't even exist yet.
02:02:43 ◼ ► And it should just work in Xcode, it's completely open as to which engine is serving it.
02:02:49 ◼ ► But it is kind of interesting that Xcode has that, hey, bring your own LLM, you know, or including on device ones, if you want to install like Llama or something that runs locally on your MacBook, but Apple intelligence itself still only has chat GPT as a partner, which, you know, there weren't any rumors.
02:03:09 ◼ ► It's not like, oh, the rumors all said they were going to add Google at WWDC, but I've, I sort of thought they might and that they had just that sufficiently few people knew about the deal that they would.
02:03:20 ◼ ► So I found it a little surprising, especially since they even hinted at it a year ago that Google would be one of the other partners.
02:03:36 ◼ ► And in this integration, chat GPT is like the default provider in that, that is, if you just want in Xcode, you can just say like turn on open AI and chat GPT, but the ability to plug in anything, it just feels very helpful.
02:03:51 ◼ ► Because it seems very much too, that there are some models are good at different things.
02:03:55 ◼ ► Like there's a specialization that some of them have that, and that changes all the time, but it's just, I wouldn't be at all surprised if at some point someone is making a model that is optimized for Swift development in a very specific trained, like it is very much aimed at that.
02:04:10 ◼ ► And to be able to plug that in, if such a model comes out, rather than using these more sort of general purpose ones, like that's great.
02:04:25 ◼ ► And so Apple not being precious about having to be the ones to make that better for us is lovely.
02:04:32 ◼ ► They just want us to be able to ship better things faster, however we choose to do that.
02:04:39 ◼ ► I'm sure they're, I would imagine, and especially I think a lot of the way they built it with the offline, on device, or local, internal, like you can have your own instance of a model running internally within your company network that you, if you're worried about sending confidential code to a system and back, that certainly sounds like Apple.
02:04:59 ◼ ► And something that they would not feel comfortable with their engineers sending the code from like calendar for iOS out into ChatGPT and back.
02:05:08 ◼ ► Regardless of whatever terms of service were there, they're not going to want to do that.
02:05:12 ◼ ► And so they've built it so that they could run their own local instance of one of the, you know, so you could LAMA or any of the open weight models.
02:05:21 ◼ ► And then it allows their developers to not be sort of cut off from being able to, you know, use these tools to make their code better.
02:05:37 ◼ ► I was delighted to see the new light tinting mode on home screens, which is one of these things that was last year we got the most, like the ugliest mode I've ever seen.
02:05:46 ◼ ► And as someone who spends a lot of time with home screen customization, I don't think my customers particularly were excited about that one as well.
02:05:55 ◼ ► And then I guess what it's also the last thing is my, so I work with Stephen Hackett now.
02:06:02 ◼ ► And it is, he would be remiss to say that he was not delighted that the abomination of the first Tahoe Finder icon has seems to be on its way back to a better place.
02:06:12 ◼ ► I don't think it's quite there yet, but it's, we're heading in the direction of positive change, which I'm delighted about.
02:06:24 ◼ ► But I, and you know my, from my post, I still don't, I, I didn't see it with the first icon where the light and dark sides were flipped in the opposite direction.
02:06:39 ◼ ► But now that they've swapped the colors in beta two, it really struck me that, oh, you know what, that wasn't the problem.
02:06:52 ◼ ► The beauty to me of that logo slash icon is that it's, it's like one of those optical illusions where you can stare at it and it looks like a face and then you just keep staring at it.
02:07:11 ◼ ► It's somehow both the front facing face on the left and the in profile face on the right.
02:07:24 ◼ ► And with the new one, the in Tahoe, it's clearly a front facing face, a tile with a profile face applied on top of it as like a sticker.
02:07:45 ◼ ► And of all companies, I expect Apple to sort of honor, you know, I know lots of changes and lots of things have to change for glass.
02:07:53 ◼ ► And the fact is, you know, Michael flare up whipped together a version that looks very liquid glassy.
02:08:03 ◼ ► I mean, Louie's is like, oh my God, I know it won't happen, but God, if I, I would just like Apple to just buy it from him.
02:08:15 ◼ ► Like I, it is the, because I think what I would, what I would say is the first version in beta one, where we've gotten from there to now is like a hundred times better.
02:08:24 ◼ ► That's, but these ones are the same multiplier again, like going to Louie's is just, it's just beautiful.
02:08:31 ◼ ► Like I think it's the way forward and I will take the colors being flipped if that's all we could get, but I'm not satisfied with that.
02:08:40 ◼ ► And I think it's one of those things, especially like I love in Louie's, his colors goes back to the older school finder purplish.
02:08:50 ◼ ► So it looks different than Safari and looks different than male, especially now that male is even more kind of bluish and looks kind of findery in, in Tahoe.
02:09:00 ◼ ► And so I'd love to see it, but you know, I love, and I love arguing about these kinds of things because they don't, ultimately they don't matter as much,
02:09:13 ◼ ► I mentioned this on the previous episode with chance, but I, I console myself with, okay, so I hate the new finder icon and I feel like it's disrespectful and hopefully they'll fix it.
02:09:23 ◼ ► And if they don't fix it this summer, which I don't think they're going to, but if they don't, maybe they'll fix it next year or something.
02:09:38 ◼ ► But what the reason we would all be so mad if they did is exactly why we care so much about the icon for the finder.
02:10:27 ◼ ► No, I mean, honestly, there's a part of me when I saw that the iPad's files app was getting all of the findification.
02:10:33 ◼ ► There's a part of me that's like, oh, are they going to rename it finder and put the finder icon there?
02:10:39 ◼ ► I kind of feel, I'd, well, I'd much rather see them rename the files app on iPad finder than certain.
02:10:49 ◼ ► I think I could get behind that, but I would be outraged if they renamed the finder files.
02:10:55 ◼ ► But I, yeah, but I, I probably might, when you say that, I'd probably be a little annoyed though.
02:11:01 ◼ ► The finder has all, you know, it's just, it's a weird, wonderful app and files as much better as files is on iPad.
02:11:16 ◼ ► And you could just search under the radar and your favorite podcast app and you will find it.
02:11:20 ◼ ► And your apps, of course, widget Smith, people are probably most people listening, probably have it on their phone already, but certainly you can find it in the app store.
02:11:28 ◼ ► You've got a bunch of other apps, Pedometer Plus Plus, Sleep Plus Plus, which is my favorite, as you know.
02:11:34 ◼ ► Really, I love, it's, I know it's, you know, not your biggest app or most popular, but to me, Sleep Plus makes the sleep tracking day.