00:00:00 ◼ ► Stephen Hackett, you talked me through, I don't even know how to describe it. I just want to dive right into it. You talked me through something crazy, sort of, and I don't know. Do you have the impression that you, it was like, I didn't even do anything.
00:00:14 ◼ ► A little bit. Yeah. So you texted me dealing with this Apple account issue that like, you can't set it up a little bit. A lot of people I think are in the boat that you and I found ourselves in. We had an Apple ID from back in the day they were using for, mine was like from iTunes.
00:00:30 ◼ ► Purchases, like buying music, emo music in 2004 to put on my iPod. But that's not the Apple account I use for my iCloud stuff for various reasons. And that just opens a whole world of hurt.
00:00:46 ◼ ► It's so complicated that it is even hard to state the problem as opposed to describe what I think is the solution. But it's basically for the people with the dual accounts that which you said, well, where your iCloud ID, aka your primary Apple account.
00:01:06 ◼ ► And I actually, in this case, it's actually ever so slightly more difficult to talk about with the new lingo of Apple accounts, as opposed to Apple IDs.
00:01:16 ◼ ► So if I say Apple ID, you know what I mean, because it's a little bit easier to talk, think of them as IDs. But anyway, I've got a Mac.com Apple ID. This is my iCloud life.
00:01:28 ◼ ► This is where I get mail there. All my iCloud storage is there. It is part of a family with my wife and my son.
00:01:35 ◼ ► But my media and purchases account is secondary. And that's an at daring fireball address for reasons I don't even remember.
00:01:51 ◼ ► We were all so innocent back then, right? And the system was so simple, right? It's like, buy music, wrap it in, was it Fairplay was their DRM?
00:02:02 ◼ ► Yeah. And I didn't give much thought to, I have no recollection of why I decided to use my main daringfireball.net address as that address.
00:02:15 ◼ ► And I guess, I think, at some point, it doesn't even matter at this point, but I think I already had my Mac.com address, but I didn't really use Mac.com for anything.
00:02:26 ◼ ► I just, like, wanted the domain or the username, and it felt like a good thing to have, but I didn't want to use it for much, and so I didn't think to use it for the iTunes purchases.
00:02:40 ◼ ► And at the time, it just was like, you just need an email address for iTunes purchases. That's it.
00:02:50 ◼ ► Now, fast forward 25 years to now, and I literally have, I know this sounds ridiculous, but I've got, like, thousands of dollars of movies purchased.
00:03:04 ◼ ► What, 50 movies times, let's say, $15 each, 750 bucks. Yeah. And I've bought hundreds of movies, because, as I often say, money runs through my hands like water.
00:03:14 ◼ ► But instead of renting a movie, I usually buy it from iTunes, or they don't even call it iTunes anymore.
00:03:21 ◼ ► Because if I think, if I possibly maybe want to watch it twice, then it's already roughly the same as two rentals, and the rental thing...
00:03:32 ◼ ► I know Dan Benjamin and I used to talk about it back in the day when we had little kids, when it was a 24-hour period.
00:03:56 ◼ ► But then by the time it's the next 24 hours later, and the kids are put to bed, and you can start it again, it's, like, oh, too late.
00:04:03 ◼ ► Because maybe you started it at 9 o'clock on Monday, and then on Tuesday, you want to watch the second half of the movie, and it's 9.01 when you hit play, and it's like, sorry, it's expired.
00:04:16 ◼ ► And I guess the 24 hours thing isn't a problem anymore, but I ended up buying a lot of movies.
00:04:22 ◼ ► And I don't regret it, but now I've got thousands of dollars worth of movies tied to that account.
00:04:28 ◼ ► There is, we should preface it for people who are like, well, isn't there a thing that Apple announced, like, a year ago where you can merge the two accounts?
00:04:37 ◼ ► And I guess I should step back a little further, where for years, for anybody out there who does not have to deal with it, hopefully we can make this interesting to listen to.
00:04:48 ◼ ► But if you've just got one Apple ID that you use for everything, for iCloud and for purchases, you are in good shape.
00:04:57 ◼ ► And if you don't, forever, ever since these multiple systems have evolved over the years, Apple has always more or less supported it.
00:05:15 ◼ ► Putting aside the merging accounts thing, it's when you're setting up a new device, and it says, what's your Apple account?
00:05:22 ◼ ► And you put in your Mac.com and then there's a button now that says, like, do you have a separate, it's small print because most people don't have it.
00:05:36 ◼ ► And then you can enter a different account for that, and then your new device is set up right out of the box, and your media and purchases go to your secondary account, which is for media and purchases, and your iCloud and everything else goes to your primary account.
00:05:53 ◼ ► And it used to be like 10 to 15 years ago, you would have to set it up with a primary account first and then go into the settings app and poke around until you found the media and purchases thing and sign out.
00:06:07 ◼ ► And there were always, for a multiple number of years, some weird things that would make the wrong assumption.
00:06:14 ◼ ► I think my game center, my, I'm not even a big game center user, so I don't really care even that much.
00:06:20 ◼ ► But I think for a number of years, I want my game center ID to be that secondary account, the one that's at daringfireball.net, because that's where most of the people who I would play games with would know me from.
00:06:40 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like that team, no one on that team had the problem we had of multiple Apple accounts, right?
00:06:48 ◼ ► But yeah, I do wonder at what point this became clear to Apple that they needed a solution.
00:06:53 ◼ ► And so, like you said, a few years ago, they rolled out a thing where you can optionally migrate purchases from one account to another.
00:07:10 ◼ ► You have to jump through all these hoops and the accounts have to be in exactly the correct state, and then you can hit the migrate purchase button.
00:07:23 ◼ ► And best I could tell, I fit all the criteria and I hit the button and just nothing, right?
00:08:01 ◼ ► But I know I've talked about it, and I actually almost can state this as a fact, not just as a guess, that part of the saving grace that this has always worked to some degree of ease.
00:08:14 ◼ ► And in recent years, it really has been much easier, where if you know what you're doing when you're setting up a new device, everything just works.
00:08:24 ◼ ► And, of course, the nature of my work with a bunch of review units every year, iPads, multiple phones, MacBooks, I set up more devices than almost anybody except people who also work at Apple.
00:08:37 ◼ ► And there aren't those edge cases like, oh, Game Center goes to the wrong one sometimes or something like that.
00:08:48 ◼ ► And the saving grace behind that has been that it's a downstream effect of the fact that Apple employees, by and large, tend to stay at the company for a very long time.
00:09:04 ◼ ► That it is not a company where whatever you do, but including engineers, that they don't really job hop through Apple as much as other companies.
00:09:18 ◼ ► And a lot of times when people do, even people who leave Apple often come back after five or six years.
00:09:43 ◼ ► Because of that, there are a lot of Apple people in the same situation as us because they were on the platform when iTunes came out, made similar decisions.
00:10:03 ◼ ► And therefore, there are a number of people probably to a very high level within the company who have to deal with this.
00:10:10 ◼ ► So either engineers who are willing to work on it or be like managers up to executives who need it and who are like, hey, why the hell doesn't this work?
00:10:22 ◼ ► What I worry about at this point is more and more is how many of those people are starting to retire out of the company because they're in their 60s, not their 40s or 50s.
00:10:42 ◼ ► It has gotten more officially supported, and the stuff from device to device has worked better.
00:10:55 ◼ ► And the way it worked with family sharing with iCloud was seamless, where I'm the one who buys most of the stuff.
00:11:13 ◼ ► And I can join my Mac.com identity is in the family, but because me, the person, in this way, the family is like the person, not the account.
00:11:25 ◼ ► And me, the person has both the Mac.com identity and the at Daring Fireball media and purchases identity.
00:11:50 ◼ ► Sometimes I go into the UI where it's like, oh, I actually want to pay for these separately.
00:12:03 ◼ ► But it does seem like one of those features that doesn't quite gel with the two identity system, and you get into storage, and it gets strange quick.
00:12:12 ◼ ► So, I just, and I, I was going to do this anyway, but after I got off the phone with you, and then I did some more work, which we will talk about, and I got it working.
00:12:38 ◼ ► I have some notes here, but in my notes, this isn't even the problem, but I just did some math, which I haven't looked at recently.
00:12:51 ◼ ► It includes Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple News Plus, Apple Fitness, and two terabytes of iCloud shared storage.
00:13:07 ◼ ► Which is kind of interesting, but that's sort of a side discussion, why they don't want to charge annually.
00:13:17 ◼ ► Some of this stuff I hadn't really thought about, but remember when Apple TV was like five bucks?
00:13:35 ◼ ► I mean, Netflix is in a class by itself in all ways, but 13 bucks a month, that's like mid-range for those things.
00:13:43 ◼ ► But with the benefit, I should say, it's still because it's ad-free, and there is just one tier, and you get the best quality.
00:13:51 ◼ ► So it still is, it is a good value compared to the others, because it's a much higher, visibly higher video signal.
00:14:02 ◼ ► You don't have to, there's no nickel and diming over, oh, do you want SD or HD or high-quality streaming?
00:14:20 ◼ ► Even though they're all weird numbers like 13 and 17 and 7, you add them all up, and it's a nice even 60 bucks a month.
00:15:03 ◼ ► But even if you take off 17 bucks a month from Arcade and Fitness, you're still at $53 a month, which is still higher than Apple One at $38 a month.
00:15:20 ◼ ► So just Apple Music and TV is $30, and 10 for the 2 terabytes of storage gets you to $40.
00:15:42 ◼ ► It's some of that stuff I never touch, but it's not hurting anything, and I'm saving some money, so be it.
00:15:48 ◼ ► It's a very good deal if you were already going to be in for just, like, for me, and I can verify that the music thing, for me personally, the TV is essential.
00:16:28 ◼ ► I was a longtime subscriber to the Washington Post and unsubscribed in a fit of peak back during the election.
00:16:45 ◼ ► But every once in a while, but they're paywalled, and every once in a while, there's an article I want to read, and I can just go from Safari to Apple News, and it opens right up without a paywall.
00:17:13 ◼ ► On the surface of it, right, it's like, oh, we've got two terabytes, in your case, across three people.
00:17:20 ◼ ► But it's like, it goes by so fast, especially once you have kids with iPhones, and it's game over.
00:18:20 ◼ ► They're fresh food but already prepared, not a meal kit with a bunch of ingredients that you
00:18:26 ◼ ► have to put together, which is a great idea that those are great services that have sponsored
00:18:30 ◼ ► this show in the past and that I have enjoyed very much for making, like, dinners or something
00:18:43 ◼ ► They ship to you like the meal kits with, like, dry ice in the package to keep everything
00:18:51 ◼ ► You just put it in the microwave, heat it up in a couple of minutes, and it is ready to
00:18:56 ◼ ► It's almost impossible to think of a way that you could get a really good meal, hot meal,
00:19:00 ◼ ► easier than just taking it out of the factory meal out of the fridge, putting it in a microwave
00:19:13 ◼ ► Every week, they have a different menu to choose from, and they have a whole bunch of categories
00:19:19 ◼ ► Like, you can concentrate on stuff if you've got, like, goals in mind, like weight loss or
00:19:31 ◼ ► They've got even something called a Muscle Pro Collection for strength and workout recovery.
00:19:43 ◼ ► And I have found, after selecting a lot of meals from Factor through their sponsorships of the
00:19:55 ◼ ► They're very good at describing the meals, and everything kind of comes out the way you think
00:19:59 ◼ ► They have bans on their list of over 175 ingredients, stuff that they will not allow in any of their
00:20:16 ◼ ► It's fresh, never frozen, over 100 rotating weekly meals, all sorts of flavors, all sorts
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00:21:25 ◼ ► September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. All right. Where did I leave the cliffhanger?
00:21:32 ◼ ► Apple one, right? All right. More storage. So December, we get up to 1.9 something terabytes
00:21:40 ◼ ► out of two. And I had looked at this problem before and thought the answer was, well, I'm the
00:21:47 ◼ ► family nerd, right? I take care of this. Maybe I don't do much as a family contributor, but I can
00:21:54 ◼ ► keep all of our technology working. No surprise about a lot of people who listen to the show are
00:22:01 ◼ ► in the same role in their family, right? The Wi-Fi doesn't work. Talk to daddy, right? I mean,
00:22:07 ◼ ► it's me. That's my job. And I don't really want anybody else screwing with the Wi-Fi. So I'm happy
00:22:11 ◼ ► to do it, right? Jump right on it if somebody sees a problem, right? We're out of collective iCloud
00:22:17 ◼ ► storage. That's my problem. But I just figured I would go in and click around in settings or system
00:22:24 ◼ ► settings on my Mac and buy some additional iCloud storage. And then that would be piled on top of
00:22:31 ◼ ► our two terabytes from Apple one. Because the key thing to know is that there is no tier in Apple one
00:22:39 ◼ ► above Apple one premier for $38 with all of the media features and app features and two terabytes
00:22:49 ◼ ► of iCloud storage. There is no Apple one ultra with all of the media stuff and six terabytes of storage
00:22:57 ◼ ► that Apple one as a thing tops out. There is a page. Let me look it up here. I have it here.
00:23:07 ◼ ► There is a page on Apple's website. What happens to your iCloud storage when you sign up for Apple one?
00:23:16 ◼ ► And when you sign up for Apple one, if you have less storage than the Apple one account tier you're
00:23:25 ◼ ► signing up for, it just, it just gets canceled at the end of the month. So if you're only paying for
00:23:30 ◼ ► 200 gigabytes, but then you upgrade, you get a two terabyte family plan. They just cancel the 20 gigabyte
00:23:36 ◼ ► plan. And there's an explanation for this. And for that, there's no explanation for what do you do if
00:23:41 ◼ ► you have a separate media account. Right. But there is a part that says, if you belong to a family
00:23:48 ◼ ► sharing group, if a family member subscribes to an Apple one family or premier plan, you can choose to
00:23:55 ◼ ► keep your current iCloud plus plan or use the shared iCloud storage in Apple one. Now what that bullet point
00:24:04 ◼ ► means is let's say my wife wanted to keep her own iCloud storage and she wanted to pay $10 a month
00:24:14 ◼ ► and have her own two terabytes that isn't shared with me and our son. She can do that. And she can
00:24:21 ◼ ► just say, I don't want to use the family storage. I want the other family privileges like a shared calendar
00:24:26 ◼ ► and the access to my apps and the media that I purchased and stuff like that. But she would have
00:24:32 ◼ ► her own iCloud plan for $10 a month. And any other member could do that, but then that's not shared.
00:24:40 ◼ ► So she buys a $10 iCloud. It doesn't get pooled with the family thing that I'm in charge of and that my
00:24:48 ◼ ► account has purchased the Apple one. It's her $10 a month and her two terabytes. And then me and my son
00:24:56 ◼ ► would share the other two, the two terabyte shared account. If there's the second bullet point, if
00:25:02 ◼ ► your family needs additional iCloud storage, shared storage is implied there, the family member who
00:25:09 ◼ ► purchased Apple one can buy more iCloud storage with both Apple one and an iCloud plan, your family can
00:25:17 ◼ ► share up to 14 terabytes of total iCloud storage. That's because Apple one comes with two terabytes
00:25:25 ◼ ► and the most, the biggest iCloud standalone plan you can currently buy is a 12 terabyte month plan for
00:25:33 ◼ ► $60 a month. So two plus 12 is 14, but the person or at night it, what did they say here?
00:25:41 ◼ ► The family member who purchased it can buy more. Well, that works if you have a regular single iCloud
00:25:53 ◼ ► ID, but it's not the family member, which to me, it says person who has to do this. It has to be the
00:26:02 ◼ ► actual account. The actual ID, the actual separate login, right? The separate login has to purchase both.
00:26:11 ◼ ► The problem with that is that all of the other ways that you and I have talked about it leading up to
00:26:17 ◼ ► this point on the show, it works because those two worlds of purchases are sort of different. You buy
00:26:25 ◼ ► iCloud with your iCloud ID and you buy apps and media and subscriptions to media, things like Apple
00:26:34 ◼ ► fitness through your media and purchase account. Apple one crosses the two streams because it is a
00:26:41 ◼ ► single bundle with both media stuff and iCloud storage. And what happened in December is when I
00:26:52 ◼ ► tried to do this, I just started poking around and thinking, well, this must be easy. I probably read
00:26:59 ◼ ► that same thing where it says the family member who purchased Apple one just needs to purchase more
00:27:04 ◼ ► iCloud. And I thought, well, this is great. I don't even need to pay for the six terabyte plan that costs
00:27:11 ◼ ► $30 a month. I just need to pay an extra $10 a month to get two more terabytes, right? To double us to
00:27:18 ◼ ► four. And I did it. I purchased two terabytes of iCloud. And then it said our total is now two
00:27:28 ◼ ► terabytes. And I spent an entire day doing nothing but looking into this and trying to figure out, well,
00:27:37 ◼ ► why won't it add this? It says it's supposed to add it to the shared family pool. And all it was,
00:27:43 ◼ ► was two terabytes. And the explanation is when I purchased two terabytes of iCloud, it's my
00:27:52 ◼ ► Jay Gruber at mac.com account purchasing two terabytes of iCloud, not my at Gruber or Gruber
00:28:01 ◼ ► at daringfireball.net address, which is my media account. But it's my media account that purchased
00:28:10 ◼ ► Apple One. And it magically works that iCloud can be assigned to another address. There is a path
00:28:20 ◼ ► that you can go through. Yeah, you can purchase iCloud storage and then apply it to another Apple
00:28:27 ◼ ► account. It's linked at the bottom of the what happens if you have two accounts. Yes, you go to
00:28:32 ◼ ► settings iCloud subscriptions, Apple One, and scroll down and click manage iCloud Plus. And what I see
00:28:40 ◼ ► when I go to manage iCloud Plus is who do you want to give the the Apple One bundled two terabytes of
00:28:47 ◼ ► storage to? And it lists my son, my wife, and two of me, one for each email address. And when it was
00:28:55 ◼ ► assigned to my mac.com address, then it was it could be shared with the whole family. But that that it
00:29:03 ◼ ► only applies to it still is purchased by that. And there's no way for that account to just buy more
00:29:08 ◼ ► iCloud storage. When I buy iCloud storage, it's purchased by the other account. And then my account
00:29:14 ◼ ► has access effectively, I think, to two different ways of having two terabytes of storage. The one I bought
00:29:21 ◼ ► for $10 a month on its own, and the one that comes with Apple One, but there is no way to combine the
00:29:26 ◼ ► two into two. So your family is still sort of partitioned off into that other storage bucket.
00:29:31 ◼ ► So when your son takes one too many photos, and you tip over, the problem remains, right? And I can
00:29:39 ◼ ► still because iCloud family sharing works, even without Apple One, I can share the other two terabytes.
00:29:46 ◼ ► So we don't lose storage. And when I was using the iCloud storage I purchased, it didn't kick my wife
00:29:53 ◼ ► and son out and send them back to five gigabytes of free storage. They still had two terabytes, but it
00:29:59 ◼ ► didn't solve our problem that we were out of space. And I realized, I think, I guess, I don't know if they
00:30:06 ◼ ► charged me or not. Again, money runs through my fingers like water. I didn't bother to look to see if
00:30:13 ◼ ► this $10 that I'd spent and eventually canceled within 24 hours if I ever got charged for it. But
00:30:20 ◼ ► I thought, why even bother doing this with, you know, I'm not going to pay for more. We don't need
00:30:27 ◼ ► more. That would be a waste of money. I thought maybe the solution is I would just pay for the
00:30:31 ◼ ► $30 a month for the six terabytes and share that. And maybe that would have worked. I don't know,
00:30:38 ◼ ► but I didn't want to waste the money on it, right? There's a part of me that doesn't want to spend the
00:30:42 ◼ ► money on it. And so I solved the problem in December, the very old fashioned way where I
00:30:48 ◼ ► found, I don't know, a couple of hundred gigabytes of my stuff that I could delete. I deleted some old
00:30:55 ◼ ► device backups. I didn't delete anything I care about. I didn't start doing the thing where like,
00:31:01 ◼ ► I don't want to spend any more money. So I'm going to start throwing out photos. No, I didn't,
00:31:07 ◼ ► but I cleaned up enough stuff that it dropped our usage down to like 1.8 terabytes. But there was a
00:31:14 ◼ ► point, this is the point I alluded to earlier where I thought, well, maybe I need to purchase this
00:31:21 ◼ ► from, Oh, I know what I should do is purchase Apple one from my iCloud account instead of from the media
00:31:30 ◼ ► account. So I canceled the Apple one that we already had from my media account. And then using my primary
00:31:37 ◼ ► account, I signed up for Apple one. And I thought, well, that'll solve it because either way we get all
00:31:44 ◼ ► the media and all the iCloud, and then I can buy the two more terabytes of iCloud and then we'll have
00:31:50 ◼ ► four, right? That sounds like a maybe, right? I don't think that seems unreasonable. Do you think,
00:31:54 ◼ ► Stephen? No, it sounds like that should work. I think most people would assume that it would.
00:31:59 ◼ ► Yes. And the reason it didn't work was because I still needed to have a media and purchases account
00:32:08 ◼ ► because my media, that account purchased, as I said, thousands of dollars worth of movies,
00:32:14 ◼ ► all of our subscriptions, all the apps, every app I've ever paid for, whether it's a subscription app
00:32:20 ◼ ► or a one-time app through the Mac app store has gone through that account. So I still need the media
00:32:25 ◼ ► and purchases. And when I purchased Apple one through that iCloud account, it only shares the
00:32:33 ◼ ► purchases from your media and purchase account if you have one. So the media and purchases from Apple
00:32:39 ◼ ► one no longer were shared with the family and they immediately lost access to Apple music. And of course,
00:32:46 ◼ ► both of them were going to the gym, one in Boston in college and one here in Philadelphia,
00:32:51 ◼ ► where I won't say who's, which one's which, but the one here in Philadelphia could give me an earful
00:32:58 ◼ ► immediately upon returning home from the gym where she didn't have any music at all with no warning.
00:33:05 ◼ ► And I was like, oh shit. So I can't do that. Yep. Hmm. So I canceled that Apple one subscription and
00:33:14 ◼ ► resubscribed to Apple one from the other one and deleted 200 gigabytes or so of stuff that was easily
00:33:23 ◼ ► deletable and thought I will solve this in the new year. That's future John's problem. Well, future John
00:33:31 ◼ ► came about this week was when I noticed I'd been looking and it was like 1.9 of 2.0 terabytes,
00:33:38 ◼ ► 1.9 of two. And I'm like still going. And this was the week where it got to 2.0 of 2.0 terabytes.
00:33:44 ◼ ► And the little graph underneath wasn't all the way. And I don't know, there might be some panel
00:33:49 ◼ ► somewhere where you could see the exact, how much space there is, but it was, I didn't want to get to
00:33:56 ◼ ► that point. And so I started looking into it and long story short. And this is where I called you
00:34:03 ◼ ► yesterday. The only way I could figure out how to solve this. And this is why I called you is the way
00:34:10 ◼ ► you solved it. I think basically, and the way you solved it, I will hand this off to you is.
00:34:16 ◼ ► Yeah. Adding the media account as a family member in the iCloud family, which does have some trade-offs.
00:34:25 ◼ ► Like what if you don't have another slot? What if you have too many people in your family? You got to
00:34:39 ◼ ► that's not fantastic. You have the issue, you and I spoke about this is if they are both semi-public,
00:34:45 ◼ ► how do you name them differently? So what I did, my, my media account, no one knew what that was.
00:34:51 ◼ ► And so I renamed him Legacy Steven and he's in grayscale. He's just in my family, like a ghost
00:34:58 ◼ ► of past purchases. The key here though, is to add it to the iCloud family and then turn on shared
00:35:05 ◼ ► purchases. That way. Okay. Legacy Steven bought this app five years ago. I use it. And because
00:35:15 ◼ ► it's shared within the family, I can use it signed in just as my regular iCloud account, but not
00:35:21 ◼ ► everything works with shared purchases. It's actually up to the discretion of developers. If they want to
00:35:28 ◼ ► say my app or my subscription, you can share within your family. And there's business models on both
00:35:34 ◼ ► sides. I think it makes sense depending on what you're doing with your app. So I did end up having
00:35:38 ◼ ► to repurchase a handful of things, but the thing that killed me about this is I don't, I mean, I didn't
00:35:46 ◼ ► mind like a year ago. I don't think I came across that in writing anywhere from Apple. It was kind of a,
00:35:52 ◼ ► I did all the things you did, jumped through all those hoops. I was like, you know what? I had a slot in
00:35:57 ◼ ► my family, in my iCloud family. I was like, you know what? We're just going to adopt him and he
00:36:06 ◼ ► I searched the web and, you know, I think I'm pretty good at searching the web. I could not find
00:36:11 ◼ ► anybody else who has encountered this. There was like a Reddit post from somebody in a way that Reddit
00:36:17 ◼ ► often does show up very, is often like the only place where somebody's ever talked about this.
00:36:38 ◼ ► I could not figure out how to open the hatchback. I couldn't figure it out. And I'm like, I'm a grown
00:36:42 ◼ ► man. And I look in the dashboard and of course it's a rental with no manual. I don't know. Usually
00:36:47 ◼ ► they have the manual. I was like, I cannot figure this out. There's nothing on the fob. And I
00:36:53 ◼ ► went in the house and searched on Reddit. And then there was one Reddit thread from somebody who was
00:36:58 ◼ ► like, how the hell do you open the hatch on a Kia Sorento 2022 or whatever? And somebody was like,
00:37:05 ◼ ► yeah, it's really weird. It's over here. And it's like, oh, holy shit. I would have never gotten that.
00:37:11 ◼ ► And there was like one post on Reddit that alluded to this, but your post on 512 pixels was the only one
00:37:19 ◼ ► I saw from somebody else that solved it this way. Yeah. Cause I even thought if I hadn't read your
00:37:27 ◼ ► post, I, and I honestly don't know if I would have thought to try this because I kind of, and again,
00:37:34 ◼ ► it's the way that I can be sort of too stubborn for my own good where I would have thought, well,
00:37:41 ◼ ► that's not going to work. They're not going to let me add myself as a family member because I'm already,
00:37:48 ◼ ► it's going to say, oh, you can't add Gruber at daring fireball.net as a family member because
00:37:59 ◼ ► Or I was afraid too. Oh, it has the same birthday. Right. Cause I did think for a second,
00:38:03 ◼ ► I thought family knows about twins. Right. But it did work for me. And again, sharing those purchases.
00:38:17 ◼ ► Yeah. That's rough. Um, do you put a one and two on birth order? You know, it's very confusing.
00:38:24 ◼ ► The share purchases work. And the beauty of it now is that I can add storage to my family and I'm signed
00:38:34 ◼ ► in on all my devices with just one account. I now no longer have to jump through the hoop of the separate
00:38:40 ◼ ► media account because if I go reach for something that old account bought, right? Like an app or a
00:38:46 ◼ ► movie I bought or something because it's shared in the family, it just works. And I'll give Apple credit
00:38:53 ◼ ► it here for sure. The family sharing of purchases is completely transparent. I mean, it's really,
00:39:00 ◼ ► really good. Yeah. And it is something that is opt in. So if in your family, for whatever reason,
00:39:07 ◼ ► whether it's you as one person or one other member of your family or your whole family is just sort of
00:39:12 ◼ ► independently minded and you want your own purchases, but you want a shared calendar and shared
00:39:17 ◼ ► storage space or something, you can do that, right? You can say, I don't want to share my purchases
00:39:24 ◼ ► with the family. Um, but if you do want to share that, it just works. And Apple definitely encourages
00:39:31 ◼ ► developers. I mean, it's up to developers whether to go along. I know you and I were talking about it.
00:39:36 ◼ ► It seems like weather apps in particular often don't because they have a bunch of, and I think it's
00:39:44 ◼ ► reasonable that weather apps have a surprising number of ongoing data processing costs that really does
00:39:52 ◼ ► escalate with the number of people using it or number of devices effectively using it. And they can't
00:39:58 ◼ ► charge you per device for yourself. So if you've got three iPhones because you review them or something,
00:40:05 ◼ ► there's no way to charge you separately for it. But that's not unreasonable. There's other developers
00:40:10 ◼ ► with other reasons, good or bad who don't enable family sharing, but it seems like most do. I can't
00:40:16 ◼ ► remember the last time I've run into it. Yeah. I think weather apps is really the only category that
00:40:21 ◼ ► comes to mind for me. And I like carrot weather. I believe what Brian does is there's a standard
00:40:27 ◼ ► subscription and then there's a family subscription above that to help offset those ongoing costs because
00:40:35 ◼ ► weather data is expensive. And if you're a Brian and you want 15 different weather services and carrot
00:40:40 ◼ ► weather, I can't imagine what that must look like. And you know what? I think that's fair. But yeah,
00:40:46 ◼ ► for the most part, it just works. And that means if I've purchased something and I'm going to go
00:40:52 ◼ ► download that app on my kid's iPad later on, or they want to put it on their phone and I've already paid
00:40:57 ◼ ► for it, or we already have a subscription to it, then that automatically gets applied to them.
00:41:02 ◼ ► And it's just seamless. There's not like a button somewhere like, oh, enable family sharing on this
00:41:21 ◼ ► you add the other account as an additional family member. And for me, at least, I didn't do it like
00:41:27 ◼ ► you. It's not really a legacy account for me. I just have two Johns in the family now and explained
00:41:34 ◼ ► it to the family. They don't really have to worry about it. Maybe because I only did it yesterday,
00:41:40 ◼ ► I haven't thought through all the ways that they might. But when they text me, it's not like it's
00:41:46 ◼ ► added a new option for who to send an iMessage to. It's still just me and it comes to me. And so
00:41:53 ◼ ► it doesn't really affect them. And we don't, we're not anticipating adding family members at this point.
00:42:01 ◼ ► So we only had three. You can have up to six, I think is six or five, six. I don't even know what
00:42:08 ◼ ► the limit is. I think it's six. Yeah. So we're well below the limit. It just, it bothers me because
00:42:15 ◼ ► it is an ungainly solution to the problem. But the additional part of this that I had to do that is
00:42:24 ◼ ► still, to me, not obvious unless you really think about how this works, is the extra two terabytes of
00:42:30 ◼ ► iCloud storage had to be purchased by my second account, the media and purchasing account. It has
00:42:39 ◼ ► the same one that purchased, because that's that thing where the family member who purchased Apple
00:42:44 ◼ ► one has to be the one to buy additional iCloud storage. But that's my media account, which I don't
00:42:51 ◼ ► use for iCloud. And I even showed you a screenshot. So how do you buy iCloud storage from an account that
00:42:59 ◼ ► you don't sign into iCloud on a device for? I don't even know. I actually looked, it's like when
00:43:04 ◼ ► you go to their website, maybe if I should try it in Chrome, because when you go in Safari,
00:43:08 ◼ ► and you go to purchase iCloud, it opens a link to settings or system settings, and it switches you
00:43:15 ◼ ► out of the web into system settings, where I'm signed into my main iCloud account. And I don't want,
00:43:21 ◼ ► I'm not going to sign out of iCloud and lose a terabyte of syncing to sign into a different account.
00:43:33 ◼ ► Right. I thought of that. And that is probably what I would do if I were not me with 50 spare
00:43:41 ◼ ► iPhones sitting around my desk. So what I did is take the iPhone 17e review unit, which I had wiped,
00:43:51 ◼ ► but still hadn't sent back to Apple and signed into it. But I signed into it only using my secondary
00:43:57 ◼ ► account, which logged me into iCloud for that account, maybe for the first time ever. And if not,
00:44:05 ◼ ► the first time on purpose. And purchased two terabytes a month of storage and assigned it
00:44:13 ◼ ► to the family somehow, there was something I clicked, and it was like the angels started singing,
00:44:22 ◼ ► And then all of a sudden, on all of my devices, I had four terabytes of shared storage in the family sharing.
00:44:35 ◼ ► my main account still uses that account as the media and purchases account. And then the second
00:44:43 ◼ ► instance of the account uses that ID for both iCloud and that. And I signed in on a spare iPhone
00:44:52 ◼ ► And that's where we took slightly different paths where I was like, if I'm going through all of this,
00:44:58 ◼ ► I would like just to have one login for everything. And so I purchased, I just pulled up my subscription
00:45:04 ◼ ► tab. I purchased Apple One and my family's additional two terabytes as my iCloud account. So my media,
00:45:12 ◼ ► that's why I named him Legacy Steven, like my media purchasing account is no longer active. That
00:45:18 ◼ ► account hasn't purchased anything new since I jumped through all of these hoops. But it is good that
00:45:24 ◼ ► both work because there are pros and cons to each. And certainly if family sharing wasn't as good as
00:45:32 ◼ ► it is, or maybe you ran into something that you really needed to share and it couldn't for some
00:45:37 ◼ ► reason, then yeah, it would be good to be able to use the other setup. But why I said write it down,
00:45:44 ◼ ► I unpacked most of this on Connected, and then I wrote some about it. But as soon as you do it,
00:45:49 ◼ ► it feels so complicated to explain. And it feels like there's so many edge cases. Like when you and
00:45:57 ◼ ► I were talking yesterday, I was kind of Googling in the background too. I came across this form,
00:46:01 ◼ ► someone had the same problem. And someone later in the thread was like, well, I live in a country
00:46:17 ◼ ► you'll never run into this specific problem. There might be other problems you run into
00:46:21 ◼ ► with the two account in the family member who's in charge of it system, but not this one.
00:46:27 ◼ ► It's the fact that Apple One is magically special cased on Apple's side to blend the iTunes stuff with
00:46:38 ◼ ► the iCloud stuff. And I'm calling it iTunes stuff for all the media, including the App Store. All of the
00:46:44 ◼ ► purchasing stuff is separate from the iCloud stuff. And Apple One magically merges those together into a
00:46:52 ◼ ► single purchase. This would be solved. And one way Apple could solve it would be to offer those additional
00:46:58 ◼ ► storage tiers of 6 terabytes and 12 terabytes through Apple One and just charge the same Delta for two
00:47:08 ◼ ► additional tiers of Apple One. I would have done that in a heartbeat. And I would actually be sending them
00:47:14 ◼ ► more money because it would cost... I'm only paying $10 more a month now than I was before to get two
00:47:21 ◼ ► additional terabytes. It would have cost me $20 a month to get six terabytes. But we don't need that.
00:47:30 ◼ ► Again, given the pace at which we got to two terabytes and the four or five months it took to go
00:47:36 ◼ ► from December till now, we're probably good for a while. So I don't need to spend it. But I would
00:47:58 ◼ ► The other thing I guess I should talk about is why I don't try merging my two accounts.
00:48:06 ◼ ► Yeah. So let's come back to that. Let me take another break here and thank our next sponsor.
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00:51:08 ◼ ► We were talking about iCloud plus additional storage versus Apple one. Why you want to keep the media?
00:51:14 ◼ ► Oh, why I don't merge? Why I don't why I don't merge. Yeah, there we go. Oh, God, I didn't know why that was flush from my memory. So that's another way that would solve the problem. If I went through the account merger and merge the two. But the problem is.
00:51:32 ◼ ► I attempted the migration. And again, if you look at that support page, the list of conditions is very long you have to be in. And it just failed for me, even though best I could tell the conditions were all correct. Now it was earlier on, you know, this feature has been out now an additional year or whatever it's been. And so maybe it's more robust now, but it just didn't work for me.
00:51:57 ◼ ► And that sort of set that plus I had the two terabyte problem. It's like, okay, we have to do something with this now. And that's how I ended up bringing my media purchasing into the family.
00:52:08 ◼ ► For me, there were a couple of killers in there. First was right off the bat. There was a if it ain't broke, don't fix it angle where and even though that was announced, I guess, shortly after I went through the whole rigmarole.
00:52:22 ◼ ► No, that was last year. So no, that I ran out of storage space months later. But my whole dual account system, while more complex, I'm not confused by it until now with this Apple one storage limitation thing.
00:52:38 ◼ ► I didn't find it confusing. I'm totally used to it. And it just works and has just worked for years. So why take any risk at all?
00:52:48 ◼ ► And I followed along as other people in this situation tried it. And it seemed like most people had success. It seemed like serious problems were few and far between.
00:53:01 ◼ ► It seemed like if it didn't work, there was a way to revert. You could just say, ah, just this doesn't work for me for X, Y, or Z. Go back, go back. And you can go back.
00:53:09 ◼ ► And you can only do that like once a year, because I guess it's kind of expensive on Apple side to do the work. They don't want people trying it every day. I don't know.
00:53:19 ◼ ► Maybe it's some sort of weird piracy loophole. Like, yeah, yeah, stuff to you. You can watch my movies. I don't know.
00:53:25 ◼ ► Yeah. And then you can use my law. Yeah, I don't know. Something like that. I was like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Mine's not broke. So I'm not going to fix it. But I'd like to see what other people say. And it seems like it worked. But then this is what led me to you is you had to post on 512 pixels last year, where you listed, like after Apple, maybe Apple didn't even know all of these issues.
00:53:47 ◼ ► At first, I don't know. But they listed all of the fine print, like don't try this if and one of them is if the secondary media purchase account is also used for test flight installations. And that's a problem for me, because it's just would not have occurred to me 25 years ago when the iTunes store came out. But if I had made, I didn't even need to make a whole email account, just an alias like iTunes purchases at daring fireball.net.
00:54:16 ◼ ► If I had made that email alias, and then use that to sign in for iTunes, and then use that to sign in for the app store and that to sign in to buy movies. And here I am 25 years later, still using an email address that I had only created to buy shit from Apple.
00:54:37 ◼ ► So I would be a perfect candidate for this account merger thing. And I would think, ah, good riddance to that email address that I never used for anything else. And now it's all on my Mac.com. That's nice and neat.
00:54:49 ◼ ► But I can't because I used Gruber at daringfireball.net, my main email address for like my life. And of course, that's the address that I use from all of my test flight accounts. And as I was on the phone with you, I think yesterday I counted, I think I have 50 test flight apps.
00:55:08 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've got a lot too. It's a cost, I guess, in our profession. But like going back through this list, like something as simple as does the media account have an Apple music library associated with it? If it does, you can't do it.
00:55:21 ◼ ► Or if the non, no, I think it's if the non, if both have a music account, right? Of course, my media and purchase one has a music account because it purchased the music. But if your iTunes one has a music library too, then you can't merge the two.
00:55:40 ◼ ► That's the problem. I don't think I have that. But who knows, right? Who knows if I set up a review unit phone years ago and only signed into my iCloud account to avoid the hassle of doing a second account login for a phone I was only going to use for a week. And I played a song. I don't know what counts.
00:55:57 ◼ ► You know, what would be in there is that U2 album they gave away like 10 years ago comes back to haunt us all the time.
00:56:04 ◼ ► Right, right. I've got one album in there and then I go to delete it and it's son of a bitch comes back.
00:56:10 ◼ ► Right. I don't even know if that would trigger me, but it seems like something that could happen. I don't know. And I've already spent days on this problem. How many more do I want to spend? I don't know. But the test flight one is sort of a deal breaker. Again, it's like I could drop out of every single test flight that I'm currently testing, write them all down.
00:56:34 ◼ ► And then if they're public, resign in using a different address or do the account merger, merge it all to my Mac.com address and then free up my main Gruber at daring fireball.net and then use it again to get back into test flight.
00:56:58 ◼ ► And it's like, I could do that. It's a small ask, but it's a small ask of 50 developers, which is a lot of work.
00:57:08 ◼ ► You know, the thing with the original Macintosh, it was like it every second it boots up faster. You save hundreds of years of human life or whatever. That's how it is asking developers to do stuff in App Store Connect.
00:57:19 ◼ ► Like, going in and adding a test flight, it's way more clicks than you think it would be.
00:57:23 ◼ ► And you're not going to hear back from everybody, right? Like, it's an unpleasant step. And some of these other things you mentioned, it's like, is there something inherent about test flight that is unaware of this other thing that's going on with my accounts?
00:57:35 ◼ ► Or was it built in a way? Because it was, test flight was external and then Apple bought them. Is there something like deep in the foundations that, okay, like we can't reasonably fix this. And so it's just going to be some fine print on this page for the handful of people who want to migrate with test flights.
00:57:51 ◼ ► Yeah. So, bottom line, just add the other account as a fourth family member. Buy everything through that account, including the iCloud storage. And I guess, I mean, I can't see why it wouldn't work to create a spare user account on a Mac, sign in with that address, without having a spare device to wipe and sign in on.
00:58:16 ◼ ► Yeah, I should even try that and just sign in and see if it works. But I'm sure it does.
00:58:20 ◼ ► But it was funny because that account shows how, you know, each account, you can see how much storage they're using towards the family. And like I said, I'm just under a terabyte. My son is just over a terabyte. My wife is at 220 gigabytes. And my media account is at 276 kilobytes.
00:58:46 ◼ ► Fits on a floppy disk. It doesn't just fit on a floppy disk. It fits on an old original 400K floppy disk.
00:59:02 ◼ ► It fits on a floppy disk. So probably, I don't know, maybe it doesn't have a music library. Maybe it is on my other, I don't know. But add it if you have another family member to spare and that's it.
00:59:18 ◼ ► Or drop out of Apple One and just pay more money a month to buy the ones you need. I mean, that just seems like, I mean, I know Apple is hurting for money, but I don't feel like I need to suggest users or listeners of the show spend more money monthly on a poor Tim Apple's services division.
00:59:43 ◼ ► Right. But what a fiasco. I honestly, I don't know. I think we covered it all. I don't want to cover the rest. I do. I will. I swear to God, write something about this to help people who are Googling for it and tell them this.
00:59:57 ◼ ► And I guess I'll leave, last but not least, I'll just say, if anybody out there, whether you work at Apple or whether you're just a listener and you've solved this on your own and you know of a better solution to the problem, please write to me and tell me what it is, right?
01:00:12 ◼ ► If there's something better and more graceful, it's the ungracefulness of adding myself secondarily to the family account that really bothers me. It's like the way that I'm still bothered, lo these many years later, by file name extensions on the book, right?
01:00:30 ◼ ► Like we, right. We, we had a better system. We had a better system and then we went to this and now we're stuck with it. And now it's, I'm stuck with a phantom John Gruber in my family forever.
01:00:53 ◼ ► Right. So like if we'd had a fourth, then what, then what do I do? Right. It's messy. And anytime.
01:01:00 ◼ ► You run into these things, especially with Apple accounts or like if you're an app store connect or podcast connect or some of these other sort of internally systems, you really feel the age of them.
01:01:18 ◼ ► Sure. It's not. I hope it's not, but there's definitely, there's definitely cruft in here that they either can't or won't get rid of.
01:01:29 ◼ ► And I understand like you have more than a billion Apple accounts. I would be so afraid to be on that team that has to do anything with this. And maybe that's why the Apple one thing is kind of semi outside of the path of iCloud plus and test flights kind of semi on the outside of iCloud family sharing.
01:01:49 ◼ ► Like if you, if you, if they were going to build it today, surely it would be better and cleaner and easier to understand.
01:01:56 ◼ ► But it feels to me at least like they have these limitations due to their, due to the history of the system that they just basically have to live with at this point.
01:02:07 ◼ ► Yeah. And I remember for years and years, whenever this would come up and I had the inkling, like it would occur to me like, God damn it.
01:02:15 ◼ ► Why can't Apple just fix this and let you just say, take these two Apple IDs and mush them together.
01:02:28 ◼ ► And then I'd hear from people at Apple from time to time, never with details, but just like, I can't tell you more than this, but yes, it is a very hard problem.
01:02:37 ◼ ► And I believe that because like you said, these things grew organically over time with lots of users and from origins that you just never, they never could have been expected to think would grow this way.
01:02:56 ◼ ► And it's probably the least, well, not the least, but it's among the least of the various problems we still live with and always will for the fact that the app store started as the iTunes music store.
01:03:13 ◼ ► And evolved into it. And that at this point, it's never, almost certainly never going to come.
01:03:18 ◼ ► If it didn't come with the Apple creator studio, it's never going to come the idea of like upgrade pricing for apps, right?
01:03:30 ◼ ► And if you're already a paid BB edit user, you can upgrade from whatever version you currently own to BB edit 16.0 for I think 40 bucks instead of the retail price of whatever it is, a hundred bucks, 90 bucks, whatever.
01:04:12 ◼ ► We already people already have almost everybody who bought an iPhone in the first year already had an iTunes account because they had an iPod and iTunes music collection and stuff.
01:04:42 ◼ ► I mean, I remember on Upgrade, Jason and Mike spoke a lot about the Creator Studio thing.
01:04:46 ◼ ► And like you go into the app store and there's numbers and then there's numbers, you know, it's got some version number behind it and they're different.
01:04:52 ◼ ► I think just yesterday, MacRumors linked to it, there was a support document showing the icons of like the new one and the old one explaining which is which.
01:05:01 ◼ ► Like, no one thinks this is a good idea, but they're handcuffed by decisions made 20 years ago.
01:05:07 ◼ ► I forget who I was talking about this on a recent show, but I think I was talking about it on a recent show.
01:05:13 ◼ ► That part of the reason that you can have them installed side by side is that they're not, on the Mac at least, they don't use the same.
01:05:40 ◼ ► And again, Apple Creator Studio is to that bundle of apps what Apple One is to the other thing where it's like two worlds collided.
01:05:50 ◼ ► Where the fact that Numbers didn't have the same bundle ID on the Mac that it did on iOS never mattered.
01:06:02 ◼ ► So the two versions of the apps can see the same iCloud Drive folder full of documents and it all just works.
01:06:15 ◼ ► And then when they wanted to sell a bundle with all of these apps that would work on all the platforms, they were like, oh.
01:06:27 ◼ ► So that's why on the Mac, you can, I think on my main Mac, I still have the old versions because I'm a hoarder and I can keep them.
01:06:34 ◼ ► And I'm like, well, let me wait and see if there's anything I like about the old version better.
01:06:45 ◼ ► And so it looks like something impossible has happened because if you make two files in the same folder and try to give them the exact same name, when you try to give the second one that name, it's going to say, pick another name.
01:07:07 ◼ ► So, yes, then they end up – and I guess it's good that they kept the old icons the same so that you can identify them by icon once you learn it.
01:07:25 ◼ ► The thing – I think you mentioned it or I'm sure we both linked to it or talked about it.
01:07:29 ◼ ► The thing that was going around of like the iWork icons get better going backward in time, like the Benjamin Button kind of thing.
01:07:51 ◼ ► But if you just look at the icons for pages, it really does seem like an icon designer getting – going from I don't know what I'm doing to I'm exquisite and can make one of the best icons anybody's ever seen.
01:08:32 ◼ ► And you can give that code to your friends when their friends come to you and say, hey, I need a website because you're the biggest nerd that I know.
01:08:39 ◼ ► Send them to Squarespace and assure them that they can sign up for a free trial and start going.
01:08:56 ◼ ► Like in the way that a word processor is designed so that someone who doesn't even really know what a font is, that they can change margins and actually print.
01:09:07 ◼ ► That used to be like a thing people couldn't do with computers is actually like create a document with multiple fonts and get it to print out.
01:09:16 ◼ ► Squarespace is like that for websites, except that you can make like not like basic baby websites, but like full-fledged, totally professional-looking websites with all the features that you might want or expect.
01:09:30 ◼ ► All sorts of stuff like e-commerce, like being able to sell things like sell goods or sell your time if you're a consultant or a trainer or something like that.
01:09:41 ◼ ► And send out invoices and have invoices for the things you're selling or the time you're selling or the services you're selling.
01:09:49 ◼ ► And then have your customers, your clients, your users pay the invoices on your website through Squarespace's own payment system.
01:10:11 ◼ ► It is that integrated of a system where you can build really complex systems like this just by looking and visually learning.
01:10:19 ◼ ► And if you want to, using the AI to ask questions like, how do I add invoices to my website and it'll help you out, go to squarespace.com slash talk show to find out more.
01:10:33 ◼ ► And then when your 30-day free trial's up, just go back to that same URL, squarespace.com slash talk show, or just remember the code talk show, T-A-L-K-S-H-O-W, at checkout, and you'll save 10%.
01:10:46 ◼ ► Well, after all of this breaking news related to 25-year-old payment systems, we can talk breaking.
01:11:07 ◼ ► You know, sometimes Apple have some, usually developer-related news or App Store-related news, and maybe that's still yet to come, but May is basically over.
01:11:22 ◼ ► And even Gurman, right, I don't think he's done his annual, this is everything in, you know, iOS.
01:11:38 ◼ ► Yeah, and he often gets, usually in recent years, I forget, I don't know what his track record is, but a lot of times he obviously gets somebody who sees the keynote at the day before, like over the weekend, before when they're going through the final cut.
01:11:55 ◼ ► Obviously, the number of people, obviously, the number of people within the company who get to see the keynote expands in the days before the keynote.
01:12:08 ◼ ► So I certainly wouldn't want to rule out that he has a big spoiler post the weekend before WWDC.
01:12:22 ◼ ► I think his biggest scoop was already played out, which was like last fall when Gurman, to his credit, exclusively started saying, hey, Apple and Google are talking about white label, effectively white label Gemini models in Apple's data centers being the AI models to power the actual next generation of Siri and Apple intelligence.
01:12:48 ◼ ► And lo and behold, Apple and Google, rather quietly, especially from Apple's perspective, announced that, I think, at the beginning of the year.
01:13:10 ◼ ► Apple still feels like they are living in the shadow of 24, where they announced a bunch of stuff that wasn't real and hasn't shipped.
01:13:30 ◼ ► Because really, I don't think they're going to do a lot in iOS 27 with Apple intelligence, Siri, Gemini, whatever combination of those things that we're not seeing on Android now.
01:14:00 ◼ ► And so, I think it's going to be a little more subdued than 24, but also a lot more grounded.
01:14:12 ◼ ► Yeah, and it does make last year's, from an AI perspective, last year's WWDC, it was just kind of weird, right?
01:14:20 ◼ ► Because two years ago was the one where they announced a lot of stuff that they wound up not shipping.
01:14:27 ◼ ► And then when they announced, hey, that stuff we announced, we're going to have to push that back a year, which ended up being more than a year.
01:15:06 ◼ ► And while I was thinking about it, out came, there's something rotten in the state of Cupertino.
01:15:35 ◼ ► I would mean that, but if I said that to you, and I mean it, I actually do mean it, I would think sometime soon.
01:15:50 ◼ ► But what they meant by the in the coming year is the coming year after 2025, which was in 2026.
01:16:05 ◼ ► So, and I do think, I think it was so hard for them to pull the trigger on and rip the tape off that announcement.
01:16:18 ◼ ► I think there was clearly a growing chorus within the company who were like, we're not going to ship this.
01:16:49 ◼ ► And so, they didn't know when they made the announcement just how long into 2026 it would be.
01:17:02 ◼ ► And everything they announced at WWDC in June will be stuff that comes out in the various version 27 releases in the fall.
01:17:24 ◼ ► Because last year's WWDC came after they made that announcement, but before they had anything new to announce.
01:17:35 ◼ ► And I think they did it on purpose to make sure that they weren't pretending those words didn't exist.
01:17:51 ◼ ► I'm sure it's a bitter pill to swallow for Apple to have to go to Google and be like, we need to use your models.
01:18:17 ◼ ► But it is just so fascinating that they are turning to an outside company because, honestly, they failed to do it.
01:18:43 ◼ ► I also can't help but suspect that the two years ago pre-announcement was sort of hastened by a sense of urgency.
01:19:01 ◼ ► I'm sure there are a bunch of employees in the company who are saying, this is like the next big thing.
01:19:07 ◼ ► And they kind of fell prey to the need to get out over their skis on what – and, again, there's some controversy and hard feelings that my writing on this was alluding to the fact that they lied in their announcement.
01:19:28 ◼ ► I don't mean that they knew that they were announcing things they wouldn't ship, which is insane, right?
01:19:33 ◼ ► That is not something that somebody would do at a company where the same people were going to be there nine months later.
01:19:40 ◼ ► But I also think they certainly knew that it was a maybe that they were going to ship, that this was uncertain, that there was some uncertainty that they were going to ship it on time.
01:19:51 ◼ ► Or if they weren't uncertain at all when they announced it, if they were like, yeah, I'm 100% certain that we are going to ship this when we promised it, well, then those people were technically incompetent because they couldn't ship it.
01:20:04 ◼ ► And maybe the truth is that some of those people are no longer at the company, that there were people who were like, yep, 100%, we are going to do this on time.
01:20:16 ◼ ► But I can't help but think, too, conversely, the fact that last year's WWDC came and went extremely light on AI, just – again, they mentioned it.
01:20:30 ◼ ► And the world didn't collapse, and if anything, public sentiment over the Apple and AI over the last year is far less controversial than the year prior.
01:20:46 ◼ ► One thing that I'm sure you've seen it, this sort of theory going around, like, well, say the bubble bursts, and if any of us have any money left, it'll be Apple, and they can just go buy up AI companies for parts.
01:20:59 ◼ ► And Apple actually is genius for not investing in this early the way that other companies have.
01:21:06 ◼ ► I think they were slow, and they had some bad ideas and weren't equipped to do it properly.
01:21:13 ◼ ► But now they're in the situation where they're going to announce – assumedly announce a bunch of AI-powered features.
01:21:22 ◼ ► And public feelings about AI have – they've changed, but they've also grown more sort of extreme at the ends.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Like, you've got people who are really fired up, and you've got people who really dislike it.
01:21:50 ◼ ► Even some of their previous talking points about how they were privacy-focused, and so our models were built that in mind.
01:22:01 ◼ ► And there is – and again, I can go back to the announcement, but it has something to do with – we've decided the Gemini models are the best ones to power Apple's foundation models.
01:22:15 ◼ ► I don't think it was genius in that they – for anybody at Apple in a decision-making context completely foresaw how, hey, this would really work out for us if we don't do any of this crazy CapEx spending.
01:22:27 ◼ ► Not crazy meaning it's wrong, but crazy that the numbers that their peer companies are spending on CapEx are just unfathomable to even non-mortals.
01:22:38 ◼ ► But that we can just avoid that, just not spend the CapEx, and then we'll just cut a deal with whoever's making the best models later.
01:23:00 ◼ ► It is not much to Google, and compared to the CapEx that Google has spent to build Gemini, it is really a fraction.
01:23:09 ◼ ► And it's almost certainly just a billion-dollar discount on what Google was already spending to keep Google Search the default in Safari through the search acquisition deal,
01:23:23 ◼ ► which last we've known is 20 billion a year, but those are numbers from like frozen in time from like 2020 or 2021 or something like that.
01:23:40 ◼ ► Because famously everybody is saying people are searching the web less because they're turning to AI tools for things they used to go to search.
01:23:48 ◼ ► So it might be slowing like the way that it's – over the decades of the deal has grown from a couple billion a year to 10 billion a year to 15 to 20 billion a year.
01:24:00 ◼ ► It's probably slowing and going to cap and maybe will start declining because it is usage-based, right?
01:24:06 ◼ ► It's not every year Google says we're going to give you $22 billion and you'll make Google Search the default in Safari.
01:24:13 ◼ ► It's we're going to pay you this per search for searches that go through the Safari bar.
01:24:18 ◼ ► And surely it's still $20 to $25 billion a year and now Apple is going to send $1 billion back and they get the Gemini models?
01:24:33 ◼ ► And I think some of it they just kind of – not lucked into but sort of luck favors the prepared and Apple's way of thinking is to be very tight on CapEx.
01:24:46 ◼ ► They – famously this whole operations wizardry they've built up in China and elsewhere expanding around the world, they don't own those factories, right?
01:24:58 ◼ ► Like the whole Tim Cook operations genius, the whole Apple in China book from Patrick McGee isn't about how Apple built factories around the world.
01:25:20 ◼ ► Sticking to their guns and not being – like I feel like they got nervous with what they announced at WWDC two years ago.
01:25:27 ◼ ► But I don't think they've shown any kinds of nervousness in the way they've spent money or the way they've actually changed their products, right?
01:25:55 ◼ ► Being the platform or the model provider for really the two OSs that matter in the world, iOS and Android, locking Anthropic and OpenAI and other companies out of that from their perspective is a great move, right?
01:26:16 ◼ ► I mean really, once this all ships, basically the infrastructure between a feature on a Pixel phone and a feature on an iPhone, the features may work differently because Google and Apple interpret them differently.
01:26:38 ◼ ► The way it's going to be, and I don't know that we're going to hear anything about Gemini powering this stuff at WWDC.
01:26:45 ◼ ► Gurman was, when he first announced that they were working on a deal, he was like, I don't even think they're going to announce it.
01:26:52 ◼ ► And they did announce it very quietly and I can see why, but I think it will remain quiet and I don't think they're going to talk about it because it's not going to be Gemini, Gemini.
01:27:06 ◼ ► The way I could see Apple mentioning it is only by reemphasizing that everything you do through Apple's Apple-branded Apple intelligence is inherently private and that even Apple cannot see it.
01:27:27 ◼ ► And even when it goes to the cloud, the whole private cloud compute thing means that even Apple cryptographically cannot access that stuff, even when it leaves your device, goes to that.
01:27:48 ◼ ► And Gemini is apparently going to, it would be shocking if it didn't happen in June, is going to be an available partner for the, hey, and if you want to use a third-party AI tool with Apple intelligence, in the way that for a year and a half now we've been able to use ChatGPT and connect ChatGPT to Siri to answer questions, that it's going to be probably the big three, probably ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
01:28:18 ◼ ► And so people will be confused because they'll be like, well, why do I have to do this to get Gemini?
01:28:28 ◼ ► That's where Google's branding could have helped Apple, like call the feature and call the model something else.
01:28:36 ◼ ► It's just Claude, whether you're using Sonnet 4.0, whatever, or Opus or whatever else they're called.
01:28:41 ◼ ► So I do think, though, the win for Google to make this deal, it's not the billion dollars in cash.
01:28:47 ◼ ► It is the kneecapping of ChatGPT and Claude of cutting them off from serving in that role because I do think it's a good place to be, even if it's not training and you're not making money.
01:29:02 ◼ ► And Google's the one that already has an existing business model and is actually a very profitable company, even with all the capex that they've been spending.
01:29:13 ◼ ► Whereas OpenAI and Anthropoc are losing more money than any startups in the history of the world.
01:29:22 ◼ ► So cutting off the two companies that are losing money from any kind of deal and offering Apple to do this for a billion, right?
01:29:30 ◼ ► Like, I don't know that those companies that are trying to stop the hemorrhaging could make an offer like this for a billion dollars, even if Apple's hosting the thing.
01:30:09 ◼ ► All right, Android, you can make your announcements before I.O., like with the Google books coming out in the fall and stuff like that.
01:30:17 ◼ ► But if Apple is basing their foundation models on Gemini technology, whether it's an Apple hosted private cloud compute or, as Gurman has also alluded to, maybe letting Google do some of the hosting in their data centers, but also in a private cloud compute style way, which Google independently announced last summer that they were working on the same thing for obvious reasons, that they want to sell into enterprise and stuff.
01:30:40 ◼ ► And they don't need to see like, it's sort of a layperson's misunderstanding to think that they want to see and use everything you type into the product to train it for the future.
01:30:53 ◼ ► So having a private cloud computing thing, whether it's the official Apple branded capital PCC, private cloud compute, or just lowercase letters, hey, it's cloud computing for AI and it's totally private using cryptography.
01:31:10 ◼ ► If Apple's using the same underlying technology as Google, then Apple's platform, even if they don't care that much about Android, it's not going to surpass Android.
01:31:21 ◼ ► Like the cap on how good the built-in AI built into Apple's platforms is going to be, the cap is on how good Gemini is.
01:31:30 ◼ ► And I think that's why they're probably continuing to develop their own in the background where they may have ideas for features or other things that, yeah, Gemini could do it, but maybe it's not great.
01:31:59 ◼ ► There really wasn't ever, but now there really isn't because, at least for now, Gemini is doing both.
01:32:06 ◼ ► I can't help but think, and if you pay attention to the papers that Apple publishes through the Apple AI Research Lab, whatever they call it, where they let those employees publish research papers, a lot of it or a disproportionate amount of it is often related, at least from what I've seen.
01:32:28 ◼ ► Maybe I'm seeing what I want to see, but I think a disproportionate amount of Apple's published research on this is about doing things locally on devices, as opposed to everybody's thinking about it.
01:32:40 ◼ ► But the other companies are like, yeah, but the easiest way for us to do this is to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars and build out data centers and just do it all there and send the data back and forth.
01:32:51 ◼ ► Whereas Apple is – but it makes sense because Apple is the company amongst all these big companies that has over a billion or two billion devices in use around the world.
01:33:12 ◼ ► So the chip designs for things like the A20 and the A21 and the A22, which are in the works now, and the M7, the M6, M7, M8 chips, are all in the works now at various degrees.
01:33:34 ◼ ► And it's not quite Moore's law, but it's like not the technical definition of Moore's law, but the effective definition of Moore's law that every year the chips get faster and cheaper and use less energy is true.
01:33:48 ◼ ► And the amount of AI compute that will be able to be able to be done locally on device, on phones, on your frigging AirPods, on your Mac, five years from now, and especially 10 years from now, is going to blow away what's possible now.
01:34:05 ◼ ► And I feel like it just seems so obvious that that would be the future Apple's building for, not the next two, three, four years, where to be a player, you need to build these massive hundreds of billions of dollar data centers right now.
01:34:24 ◼ ► And almost certainly buying the chips from NVIDIA, Apple doesn't want to do that, they don't want to do the CapEx.
01:34:32 ◼ ► And it's all sort of like right now, like what is a data center that's running right now, chock full of today's existing NVIDIA chips, hundreds of billions of dollars.
01:34:53 ◼ ► So I feel like the way, like, oh, it's like, let's give up on this race and let's build for the next race, which is when this stuff becomes local.
01:35:15 ◼ ► Well, for that, but yeah, the day-to-day stuff, make me a Genmoji of John surfing on a refrigerator.
01:35:21 ◼ ► Like that, that being done on device as opposed to being sent off to a data center and back, clearly Apple has the priority there.
01:35:32 ◼ ► They were just in the news, they're leasing XI's first site here in Memphis because they have to do that because they don't have any other way for this to work.
01:35:49 ◼ ► But one of them certainly is we could do some of this stuff locally and lessen our expense long term.
01:35:57 ◼ ► But yeah, it's just so fascinating that Apple's set up so well for a lot of this and up until signing the paperwork with Google was set up so poorly for other parts of it.
01:36:07 ◼ ► But I suspect that three weeks from now, WBC is done, we'll have a much clearer picture about where they're going.
01:36:14 ◼ ► And I think it's going to be really, I think the way they talk about it, I think you're right.
01:36:26 ◼ ► Not, oh, we have this many parameters under the hood and it's doing this and doing that.
01:36:36 ◼ ► Yeah, and I really hope and expect, I do expect, that it will be much more restrained and focused and intentional where and if they add additional AI to the interface.
01:36:54 ◼ ► Whereas everybody who uses Microsoft stuff is complaining that there's a co-pilot button everywhere.
01:37:03 ◼ ► And the Google I.O. keynote was like, there's Gemini here, Gemini there, Gemini here, Gemini there.
01:37:18 ◼ ► And I think if you decide to turn it off, or my hope that you can turn certain features off and leave other ones on, that the app you're using or the feature you're using doesn't feel broken or like half-baked because you turned the switch off.
01:37:36 ◼ ► And I think they will because they think about apps and features first, where maybe that's a little bit different in other places.
01:37:44 ◼ ► So I hopefully, you know, it would certainly be a red flag to say the least if it seems scattershot and everywhere and it's AI, AI, AI.
01:38:18 ◼ ► And if you have it on, you select some text in any app and a writing tools button appears and you can invoke it and do stuff with it.
01:38:35 ◼ ► That was a red flag two years ago for me, how much time they spent on image playground.
01:39:36 ◼ ► Like if you're going to make a tool that is meant for making AI images, it should make the
01:39:45 ◼ ► Like we want to have a tool that makes images with AI and we don't want ours to look good
01:40:10 ◼ ► There's a, I'll know it when I see it, whether the WWDC keynote has enough Apple intelligence
01:40:18 ◼ ► It should probably be the main thing people are talking about in the mass media afterwards,
01:40:43 ◼ ► And I honestly had not heard of them before they got in touch to sponsor the show and start
01:41:00 ◼ ► Even G2 are productivity smart glasses designed to keep real time support right in view with
01:41:17 ◼ ► And unlike most smart glasses, they are designed to look and feel like premium eyewear with no
01:41:29 ◼ ► The more context you give them, the more context, the more context you give them, the smarter they get adapting to how you work and what you need.
01:41:46 ◼ ► The one, though, is pretty similar to the type of glasses that I actually like and prefer.
01:41:50 ◼ ► And so I have them here and I was wearing them around the house and my wife and son didn't even notice.
01:42:17 ◼ ► They also have a clip that you can buy, an add-on even clip that turns them into sunglasses.
01:42:28 ◼ ► Now, the smart ring is optional, but you can use it to tap, press, and scroll the content you see on screen.
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01:43:36 ◼ ► There's other things to do, for sure, and we, I mean, before 24, like if you count the last several years of WBDCs leading up to that, they were doing good with that stuff, right?
01:43:54 ◼ ► Like, they still have to do all that stuff, they have to leave time to talk about that stuff.
01:43:59 ◼ ► That was the other kind of weird thing in 24, is some stuff that felt like it would make the keynote was either in the developer State of the Union or buried somewhere in a document.
01:44:09 ◼ ► It's like, okay, like you maybe misspent your time, but I suspect that they have worked on this one very hard to find that balance.
01:44:19 ◼ ► To say what they need to say, not over-promise, and just try to gain some of that authenticity back that they sort of blew two years ago.
01:44:30 ◼ ► Yeah, and on the user interface front, I mean, I think keeping it very short, I do, the way, and some people, for as vociferous as my criticism has been about macOS Tahoe,
01:44:48 ◼ ► I think, I do, I haven't talked about it, but I do think it's, I think it's out of place on Apple Watch.
01:44:53 ◼ ► I don't think Apple Watch needed to be updated for it, and I think it's weird that buttons that used to be entirely flat on Apple Watch now have a bit of three-dimensionality.
01:45:15 ◼ ► And I think it's such an interesting idea overall on the touch platforms, and it gives them this foundation to build on.
01:45:23 ◼ ► It's like, hey, they can just say, they don't have to backtrack and say, hey, we really screwed up last year.
01:45:29 ◼ ► They can say, hey, last year we laid the foundation for the future, and now we can really make it sing and kind of say it that way and then undo some of the things they did that were wrong.
01:45:54 ◼ ► But, yeah, I think they'll spend some time maybe not talking about it, but maybe showing macOS 27 being a little bit different.
01:46:04 ◼ ► Like, there's a demo, and maybe he does something in Finder that in 26 just looks awful.
01:46:16 ◼ ► Yeah, and, like, one of my favorite little touches last year was when they totally acknowledged in the keynote, hey, a lot of people didn't like the changes we made the year before to the first page of Apple Photos, the Photos app.
01:46:29 ◼ ► Because we wanted to expose a bunch of these features that we felt like people weren't getting to, the special albums of Friends and Family or Recents and stuff.
01:46:39 ◼ ► And everybody was like, I just want to see my own most recent photos when I go to the front page of Photos.
01:46:56 ◼ ► If they do, if Mac OS 27 really does look good, I can't just say, oh, good, they fixed it.
01:47:07 ◼ ► But it's never going to be as long and as lengthy as the complaints about what was bad, right?
01:47:14 ◼ ► And so them fixing photos for a billion iPhone users last year, and I didn't hate the year before change like some people did.
01:47:26 ◼ ► But when I listened to the criticism from the people who hated it, I, it's like, oh, I see what you don't like about it.
01:47:33 ◼ ► I don't mind that, but I, but it's, the proof is that there just haven't been complaints in the last year about the Photos app.
01:47:41 ◼ ► And the Photos app is one of those handful of apps that almost all iPhone users use and consider important.
01:47:51 ◼ ► Even if you use like Google Photos or some other cloud service, if you take a picture with the stock camera, it's going in the stock Photos app.
01:48:04 ◼ ► It's because people who use the third-party camera app still use Photos to manage the library, and there just haven't been complaints.
01:48:27 ◼ ► And it's not, oh, let's make Stephen LeMay, Steve LeMay a savior and hope that he's going to do revolutionary things.
01:48:34 ◼ ► And if you think that the entire liquid glass direction is trash, he's going to make you happy.
01:48:45 ◼ ► And the other thing, too, is that the current Apple, and it's clearly the way they like it, but under Craig Federighi, they ship everything at the same year, right?
01:48:58 ◼ ► And in years past, 10 years ago, if they were going to do something like this, it would have shipped for iPhone only last year.
01:49:05 ◼ ► There was iOS 7, and then Mavericks was still glossy and shiny, and then whatever California place came after Mavericks.
01:50:01 ◼ ► And I think the other thing is as exciting as AI still is, and the way that their companies still haven't IPO'd, and there's tons of money,
01:50:09 ◼ ► I think that the rules of the game and, oh, the nature of the whole thing is more in focus, right?
01:50:18 ◼ ► It's still some uncertainty as to how much better it can get, but I feel like the whole, hey, maybe we don't even need an operating system thinking is gone, right?