Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) WWDC Wrap Up With Rene Ritchie @reneritchie

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

This is a really simple one. WWDC happened this week. Rene Ritchie has been attending it, virtually, of course. So he’s here to break down the keynote, which we all saw, but also to let us know what’s been going on in the developer sessions which have been going on all week. Rene is of course a long time prominent Apple watcher and journalist, who actually just struck out on his own with his own YouTube channel. So search YouTube for Rene Ritchie and subscribe to his channel. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com ApolloNeuro.com/ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another week on bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. This is a really simple one.

WWDC happened this week. Rene Richie has been attending it, virtually, of course. So he's here now to break down the keynote, which we all saw, but also to let us know what's been going on in all of the developer sessions, which have been ongoing all week. Renee is, of course, a longtime prominent Apple Watcher and journalists to actually just recently struck out on his own with his own YouTube channel. So search YouTube for Renee Ritchie and subscribe to his channel.

Renee Ritchie, thanks for joining us to tell us about WWDC. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm assuming that you have been attending all of the sessions as well all this week, right? I'm keeping up as much as I can. They have so many of them that post every day that I have to pick and choose like four or five now and then make notes to go back other ones later. So that's my first question. How is this work? I want to talk about the actual keynote, which was virtual. But how is this being a virtual conference working? Because I participated in a different virtual conference this weekend. I'm just curious how they're doing this. Just tell me

what the format is. So there's two or three big elements. Traditionally, WWDC, it would be in the San Jose Civic Center. And there would be various rooms you'd go to. There's the giant room where the main sessions are held and then a whole bunch of other rooms and they have five, six, seven going on at once. So instead they brought the engineers and designers in. They had them inside Apple Park. They have a table. A lot of them put little Easter eggs like little dog statues or motorcycle helmets or other things on the table to make it more visually interesting. And then they just recorded them essentially saying what they would say if it was a live presentation. And they're using high enough quality production value that you don't really miss having the audience in the stage. And it's actually

easier to hear them and to pause it when you need to and to go back. So it's, I think it turned out actually really, really well. So like you're saying you could, you could miss everything that happened today, but tonight you could go in and get all the sessions. Yeah. Yeah. What about things like audience feedback? Is there any setup for that at all? Yeah, well, I mean, they have, traditionally have labs, which is this giant, like room where people can line up and talk to the engineers to either created or maintain the code. And they're doing that through like a lottery. You sign up and you can get an appointment to talk to one of the engineers about your issues. But also Twitter seems to be sort of like the secondary channel where a lot of the engineers

and designers are and they're posting their sessions and people are sending back information and feedback and questions and things like that. And it's sort of the original intent of Twitter when it was first invented was this conference backbone and it's become that again. Well, it's the collision conference that I participated in this weekend. So they had little pull-out rooms like that where it was sort of like clubhouse style or house party style or even Zoom style where you go into a room with five or six other people and then, you know, you would just pass the virtual mic around, I guess. What about, because this was also my question with the collision conference. You know, the point for a lot of us for any conference is to just, you know, be in the hallway and run, oh, so-and-so. haven't seen you in however many years, the actual networking. Is there any, the collision conference

to their credit has a really good app and you know, you can do the, you know, it was instant messaging, trading credentials, that sort of thing. Do they have anything like that set up or? No, it's very much like a sort of a presentation medium. They do have some challenges. Like there's a swift programming challenge that people can do. But Twitter is sort of absorbing all of that. And when people post something and retweet something, people who are interested in those topics, see each other and start engaging in conversations, but it's not the same as just hanging out in a line or hanging out, you know, in the hallways. Okay, so then let's get to what everybody saw, which was the virtual keynote. I thought it felt,

it felt good. Like, you know, they say about this COVID moment that it's teaching us a lot of the things that we assumed we had to do are not necessarily necessary. And so, you know, the idea of getting, the PR angle of WWDC obviously hasn't needed a crowd and an audience for a long time to get the news out. And I actually thought that the production was good and it flowed nicer maybe. What did you do? Yeah, I thought the video team was amazing. Like they did really high-end camera work. I don't know what cameras they used.

They used really good quality lenses. They had a lot of really good movement. They moved us around Apple Park, so for many people who've never been inside Apple Park and didn't know just geogri-spacially where everything was, like what parts were in the Steve Jobs theater, both behind the stage. That undisclosed location, that lab is under the Apple Pond or whatever. Go ahead, sorry. Yeah, no, I mean, it's probably in one of the lab buildings, but like the whole, and

Kevin Lynch, the watchOS software lead was at the fitness center, which is, you know, outside the main building towards one of the corners. and they had a really good ability to move us all around, and they managed to socially separate the presenters by putting them in interesting spaces, especially towards the end with the Mac Silicon demo. They had Johnny Serugi, who's the head of Silicon, and then in the room next to them,

they could shift over to Craig Federigi, and then shift over to Andreas, who was doing more of the developer tools demos, and it kept us in a flow, but also kept them separate. So, you know, I'm a normie non-developer person, And I feel like for us, for a while, we were very spoiled where there was a lot of, you know, big, you know, hardware announcements, things like that. And these last couple of WWDCs, again, for the normies like me, have been boring in the sense that, oh, yeah, this is a developer conference. Like, there was, I'm not saying there was no news that was made, but there was no news that blew my hair back.

So we'll get to the developer stuff in a second, but just like with your critical eye, what do you think about the conference? Yeah, I think that was a really conscious decision. I think normally when they have WWDC, especially in the years they don't have March events, just because they get everyone there together. And it's much easier to meet with international press, like people from Asia, from Europe, from North America, all at the same time. It's incredibly efficient resources. like 2017, they had so much hardware the new iPad pros, new MacBook pros, new IMAX, the IMac pro, the HomePod, and they could do demos for all of that. They could seed review units for all of that.

It was just so big. But because no one was going there, I think they decided to keep the focus on software. And maybe in July, because it's rumors are that a lot of these products are ready and have been ready for a long time. But it's out of the way we might see new Macs and new headphones and new other products just drop in press releases for the next month or two. Well, and, you know, Anil Dash disagreed with me. He said it was the best WWDC keynote since the iPad.

Well, he's super geeky. He's going to say that. He's a dev too, right? Yeah. Okay, so let's get to the things that did excite me from, that were announced at the keynote, starting with the widgetization of the home screen. When I do my reports on these, you know, I got to write them up and record them immediately afterwards. So I didn't get to like dive deep into what's actually possible. So just

real quick, because you just sum up on a really basic level like what we can suddenly do from on our home screens. So basically Apple took the complications from Apple Watch. They're using one of their new frameworks called Swift UI, and that is deployable across all of Apple's platforms. So they took those complications, which are really information dense and really glanceable. They're easy to understand and mentally parse. And they made those the new widgets. And you can put those anywhere arbitrarily on your iPhone home screen. You can put them any intermingle them with your icons. So you have these widgets like photos and calendars. And you can have stacks of widgets that automatically rotate or smart widgets that try to pick the best widget for you and different

size widgets and multiple. So you can sort of put the information where you want them. And that's a big change for Apple because in the Steve Jobs era, the home screen was never meant to be a destination. It was a portal. You didn't stay there. You just went there to get to an app and then you stayed inside the app and then you switched in between them. But now Apple's recognizing that maybe you just want to take your phone out for a second, swipe up, see something, close it, and put it away. So they're putting those on the iPhone. They're also going in the sidebar on the Mac and in the sidebar on the iPad. It does come at a cost. These new widgets don't do interactions yet. You can tap on them and go to the app, go to different places in the app, but you can't like do buttons or

enter text or have like a calculator in them like you could, the old widgets. But I have a feeling we'll get there eventually. They're just resettling on a new normal. Right. Everyone was making jokes. Now we've got the Windows Live tiles, but we're not quite there yet. But I'm curious, do you have a take on why they waited this long to add complications to the home screens like this?

Or like, why now maybe? Yeah, I think a few things. I think one, they were adamant about that philosophy that the home screen wasn't a destination. Also, if you look at Android vendors, for years, they've reported that most people don't change the default widgets and don't even use widgets. It's one of those things that's really for nerds. I forget the exact number, but HTC said like 80% of people don't ever bother with widgets. And I think a lot of people will get the iPhone and they'll not even know they're there. You know, they won't even bother enabling them because they're not enabled by default.

But it's one of those things where Apple used to be, again, especially with Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall, They used to be very mainstream focused. And increasingly over these years, they're taking care of little things that really annoyed power and geeky users. And now with Swift UI, they can take all the work they did in the watch and just put it everywhere. I think they have a really solid foundation to sort of scratch all those itches now. Yeah, but that was actually going to be my next question. I mean, if you add up this, like the widgetization of the home screen, you add it to, you know, We'll get to like the clips that can disappear on you.

Things like gestures even. Like the days where you could be completely new to the iPhone and pick it up and intuitively figure out how to use it, those are basically over, right? So no, you might disagree with that. So what do you think about this notion that maybe it's gaining too much complexity all this stuff? So I think there's two factors there.

I think one is that the market has matured, along with these products. We've had iPhone and Android on the market now for 10 years, and customers are just more sophisticated because they've become, you know, new customers are basically touch-native now. It's just how they interact. And people who have been using traditional computers, they've sort of figured out how to do it. So you can be a little more bold. But I think also both Google and Apple have been good at doing complexity and depth. And what I mean by that is the simplest and most common functionality is on the top. And, you know, like my sister really only uses her phone to make phone calls to listen to music and to send messages.

And she doesn't know about, she might, she doesn't use control center, notification center. She'll never see the widgets. And that's fine for her. But people who do know about them can go a little bit deeper, put in a little bit more effort and get a lot more functionality out of it. And I think ultimately that's the best balance. You know, it's maybe not perfect for everybody, but at least it's a little bit of something for everybody.

Well, let's tell me about the app clips because, again, this is one of those things that felt like, well, that seems useful to me, but I imagine if you're a developer might be way, way cooler. Yeah, so you do have to create it as basically a new target inside Xcode. So it's not one of those things that, you know, famously they always say, you get this for free. This you have to make basically a new little sub app that's 10 megabytes in size or smaller. So it's really fast. Like they don't want you to ever have to watch a little, a little thing rotating on your

screen when you try to use them. And the goal is, like you, this will be mostly valuable when we can all travel again. But you land in a new city, you go to rent a car, you go to park, you go to rent a bike, one of those things. And you have no way of knowing what app you're going to need for that. And instead of standing there trying to find out what it's actually, like the acronym used in that city's parking system or bike rental place, there'll just be a QR code or an NFC for you to tap.

It'll find the app for you. It'll download just the specific functionality you need for that transaction. It'll use login with Apple so you don't have to create an account. It'll use Apple pay so you don't have to give them a credit card. fishing for a credit card. And the idea is just you get in, you get out, you get done what you want to have done. And that's sort of been the beautiful dream for maybe call them applets or Google called them app fragments or things like that for years now. I'm looking at my grab bag list of things that I wanted to pick up to learn a little bit more about. I keep hearing about this,

people talking about that thing where is it iOS only maybe where it'll recognize certain noises, you can set it to like if it hears a fire alarm or a baby crying or a doorbell or something, you'll get notified it. Tell me a little bit more about that because that was just like an aside and I was like, well, that would be super cool. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. I'm not going to say they're buried in accessibility, but the accessibility team has this way of finding out what people need, surfacing this technology and eventually just it goes mainstream. And there's two really cool things they're doing. The first one I'll just squeeze in up front is you can now double tap or triple tap the back of the iPhone to launch things like control center or a notification center,

even series shortcuts or a screenshot. So it just makes it much easier to do functionality for people who don't want to dive all the way into a specific app to do it. And also exactly what you mentioned, it'll now hear for different kinds of alarms. It'll hear if there's water running, if a baby's crying, if someone is yelling. And for people who are low hearing, it'll send them an alert to tell them that this is happening. It does exist on the watch, but right now, I think it's mainly being used for hand washing. It'll detect the sound of soap and water so it can tell that you're washing your hands

and then give you a 20 second timer. But it's all part of this machine learning to understand what's happening in the environment around us. Yeah, the handwashing thing was super cool to me too, I thought. This just came across tech meme like an hour ago that Apple's bringing face ID and touch ID logins to the web in Safari 14. Did that just happen?

just a couple hours ago? That was, a lot of stuff is, I want to say it's buried in the sessions. It's just there's so many sessions. I think it's taking people time to go through them all and sort of find out everything else because they can never fit everything into the keynote, even at almost two hours long. There's just a lot of stuff that doesn't make it in. And another one that I think I also caught this today, boot camp is apparently dead. Yeah, so Apple is building Hypervisor into the Apple, into the Apple Silicon for the Mac.

And they're also building, they're trying to make it as performant as possible. And my guess is there's a lot of back and forth going on with Microsoft right now, and neither of them are going to say anything until they have a very firm deal in place. But instead of having to boot into a separate version of Windows, and Microsoft doesn't even license Windows for Arm commercially yet, it would run theoretically in something like Parallels or VMware on the Mac Silicon. So would that replace parallels, or that just, it works better with Parallels? that way. It would be parallels. Basically, Apple's giving parallels in VMware the ability to run as

fast as possible on the Apple Silicon. That's great. All right, let's wrap up with what was the big news, but everyone knew it was coming, you know, Apple leaving X-86 behind. Real quick, high-level thoughts from you on that? I think it has, I mean, I'm always cautious about these things, but it looks like Apple's doing it exactly how they did the power PC to Intel transition, using the same names for technology like universal binaries and Rosetta and the virtualization path. It's going to let you run iPhone and iPad apps, which is going to be a huge boost to just the number of apps, especially games, you can run on the Mac. And it looks like they have a smart plan for a family of Apple Silicon ranging from ultra-mobile to pro-mobile to desktop to pro-desop.

And I think in the long run, it'll let them move faster. Intel has been notoriously slow in trinking their process down to 10 nanometers while Apple had did that a couple years ago already with Taiwan Semiconductor. And because their teams work so closely together, they'll be able to deliver features faster and specific features that they want to deliver. So I think for consumers, it's going to be a huge win. For developers, there's going to be some intermittent pain when they lose things like Windows support for now, or they worry about things like how, even though Apple has gone out of their way this year to say they're not locking down the Mac, you can still download any app you want, you can go in and change the security mode from full-on iOS-like security to classic Mac-level

lack of security. I think there's still going to be some tension about what's happening with their traditional classic hobbyist Mac computers. Well, I'm curious, how much of a focus has this been in the sessions this week? Because it is a major move, if you're a Mac developer. Is it been something that has been talked about all the time, or is it an aside? Or how has it been a big? dealt with. There's specific sessions. So there's a specific session on how the Mac Silicon is working just from an architecture point of view, like how it's being set up. And there are also sessions on how to make, developers have to allow their apps to work, their iPhone and iPad apps to work on the Mac. There's a session on that. There's a session on how to make them work really, really well.

If you want to make them native, you want to take your existing Mac app and make it native versus using Rosetta. And also sessions on how to make Catalyst apps, which is putting in a little extra work to make the iPad app feel much more like a Mac experience. So as long as you go to that section, you'll find a bunch of stuff on it. Actually, the converse would be like what, and I don't, again, since we're not live with other people, what do you feel like the developer reaction to this has been? Is it excitement or dread or even indifference? Or what do you think? I think it's the spectrum. I think there are some people who have been through this before with Apple when they did the power PC to Intel transition and kind of feel like it's not Apple's first

rodeo and, you know, they're going to be fine. You know, it's being well managed. And there are other people who think that they've been through this before and they've had pain with 32-bit apps and they've had pain with other things be like maybe it's OpenGL or it's OpenCL or, you know, Apple taking away technologies that they depended on and they feel like it's going to be at least a couple years of pain or that, again, their classical computer experience is being taken away from them. So I think, you know, one set might be too optimistic and might get hurt a bit along the way, and a set might be a little bit pessimistic and we'll find that they're actually happier than they thought they would be. But we're going to have to watch how Apple manages the process, which is why

I love people yelling as much as possible now, because the earlier you yell, the better the chance that risk for you to affect change. Well, what is, what do you think of that argument or that fear that was it, who was it? I did, I read a piece this week, you know, talking about, um, maybe the ideal of the Mac, this pristine, beautiful OS is getting muddied up, getting complicated. What's your take on that? Is the fact that this change is clearly designed to make it so that if you're developing for Apple World, you don't have to develop multiple times, it's just one thing, but that the Mac itself, the experience of the Mac, would be the one more likely to suffer from that.

I think, you know, a lot is, it's often the sum of all fears, and there's these two things that are true about humans, one that we hate boredom, but also that we fear change. And we're always sort of caught in between those two extremes. When you look at Steve Jobs, he came out with that original Mac and he sealed that up, much to, uh, uh, was his consternation. And that his vision has always been computing appliances that were continuously, relentlessly being made more and more accessible to the mainstream. Like forget punch cards, forget command lines, forget the, forget the, even the mouse. I want to make this a computer that everybody can use. And there's a tension with people who do come from traditional comp side backgrounds who like the fact, like Bloomberg terminals. You know, they like the fact that they were inherently complex machines. And I think this is sort of Apple getting a little bit back to their roots, things that they managed to accomplish with the iPad and they feel like they're frustrated they can't do with the Mac. But I also think that they deeply understand that they're hobbyists on the Mac. And a lot of the people working at Apple we're developers working outside of Apple first.

They're the same kind of geeks. So I think they have the same arguments that we have externally, and they sort of try to find the best path forward they can. Let's end with like two sort of rapid fire ones. What has been the thing that was announced this week that was the most surprising to you? I think just the most surprising was how much we didn't know. Like even though there was a ton of rumors and some of the features,

like the new IMessage features had leaked, there was so much stuff that they were adding, even little things, like, that weren't leaked at all. So for me, it was just everything became more consistent. Everything became more powerful. The whole story was much more legible, I think, than it had ever been before. That was the big takeaway for me is that it really feels like a lot of, even some of the pain we've been going through, especially on the Mac, with new file systems and new languages and they're rewriting all the demons, all those sorts of things. you now sort of see the direction they were going,

where before we were just stuck in the dark word why the ride was so bumpy. Well, then, were there any omissions that surprised you? Yeah, every year there are things that I just really want them to do that it doesn't seem like multiple user accounts on the iPad. I mean, I have a long list every year of things that Apple Watch independence, I mean, the iPhone became independent from the Mac with iOS 5, and here we are in watch OS 7, you still have to own.

an iPhone. You can't even do it with just an iPad. You still have to own an iPhone to get an Apple Live. So there's there are huge items on my list that they just don't seem to get to. And I hope, I always hope next year will be the year. René, you, you are a one-man band, maybe probably not a one-person band, but you recently launched yourself as your own pirate ship, as it were. You want to tell us about that real quick? Yeah. So I've been working for a decade with Mobile Nations. They were bought by Future a couple of years ago, and I stayed there for about a year. And Future is just a media monolith, and I kind of itched to be back on my own. So I went independent back in April. Turned out the worst timing ever. It was about two weeks before the pandemic hit us. But

I'd already set my course, so now I'm just trying, I'm trying to go as far forward as I can with it, mostly centered on YouTube for the moment. So if I wanted to find you on YouTube, search Renee Richie, what's your brand? Yes, sir. YouTube.com slash Renee Ritchie. I'm either incredibly boring or incredibly consistent, depending on how you look at it. I will have told people that at the beginning of the show, and if I can figure out how to do this, if you watch this on YouTube, a little card will be right there at the bottom now that'll link to your YouTube channel. Oh, great.

Renee, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.