Tech Brew Ride Home - WWDC Debrief With John Voorhees of MacStories

Episode Date: June 8, 2019

Does what is says on the tin. John Voorhees helps us sum up WWDC, get act dev reaction from the floor of the conference, and pick up some of the stray threads we missed from Apple's biggest week of the year. Sponsors: Capterra.com/ride Molekule.com checkout code: ride for $75 off 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 weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. As I said on Friday, nothing complicated about this one.

The great John Voorhees of Mac Stories gives us a debriefing of the week that was at WWDC. I guess the Meta View and then like we'll laser down in. From my end, it felt like the most jam-packed, sort of exciting WWDC in a couple years. Just on the 30,000 foot level, do you agree with that? Oh, definitely. It was, we were covering it at Mac Stories, and it was almost impossible to keep up with Craig Federigo, especially, because he just moves so quickly. And there was so much packed in. A lot of things that I really didn't expect.

I mean, there were announcements about all kinds of new enhancements to hardware, as well as all the iOS and iPadOS. There's a million different things to talk about. But, yeah, they, you know, I think it ran about two minutes. I mean, two hours, 15 minutes. Believe me, I noticed that. It was, it was, we were, we were an hour and 15 minutes late posting the show that day. Yeah, but it felt like five hours because it just kept going and going. And I still feel like I'm absorbing what happened because we've been out here in San Jose at the conference.

And there's just people keep discovering new little things that they just didn't have time to talk about. Okay, let's do it meta from the Apple fans perspective. Are you getting a sense? And I'm saying fans as opposed to developers. Let's do fans first. Do you feel like Apple fans got enough wow things for them to come away from it happy? I think they did. I mean, it was a little bit of a mixed bag in the sense that I think a lot of Apple fans misinterpreted the Mac Pro

and the Pro Display XDR that came out, which is not meant for your average consumer or Mac fan. It's really meant for, you know, Hollywood filmmaker tool chains and that sort of thing. That's an incredibly expensive machine and an incredibly expensive display. And I think some people were a little disappointed that there wasn't something that was maybe more powerful than an iMac Pro, but less crazy than what came out. Although I think people who have these workflows that require multiple high-end computers that they can now replace with one computer are going to be really happy with it. But I think for every, you know, when you look at everything else, when you look at iOS, you look at iPad OS, a lot of pain points that people have. have had, especially if you're interested in working on the iPad, have been eliminated. And that, that, I think, made a lot of people happy. You know what? We're going to come back to several

of those points individually here. But so then what about the developers? What's the sense from WWDC? Are the developers coming away happy? I think so for the most part. I mean, there was a lot of angst and concern, especially by Mac developers going into this, that somehow, you know, all the iOS people were going to flow in and the Mac was not going to be the platform it used to be for development. But that's really not turned out to be the case. Apple's doing a couple of things that I think really point towards and clarifies their vision for development in the future, which is, first of all, there's Catalyst, and Catalyst is what used to be called Project Marzipan. And that's the ability to take iPad apps and publish them on the Mac without a ton of work.

and, you know, that is going to do, I think, two things. One, it's going to revitalize the Mac app ecosystem, which has been kind of stagnant over the last several years because it'll bring in some of the best of the iPad apps that are out there. But I think it's also, in the end, going to also help the iPad because developers looking to publish on both platforms will hopefully make deeper iPad apps with an eye towards then taking that deeper Pro iPad app

and bringing it over to the Mac. So I think if you're an iOS developer, you're happy because you can now target the Mac more easily. If you're a Mac developer, you might start looking at the iPad. And on top of that, Apple's not getting rid of App Kit, which is the framework that has historically been used to make Mac apps. That's still sticking around. There's just a new way to do this now coming at it from the iOS angle.

And then there's one other developer story that came out of this that I think is kind of meta, a big deal for everybody, and that Swift UI, because this is a whole new way to build UIs for apps from everything from the watch all the way up to the Mac. And what it does, it's a little bit, I mean, I like to think of it as someone who's not really a programmer as like CSS. It's kind of human readable. You have a lot of parameters and drop downs that you can pick from to describe what the UI of your app should look like. Instead of going through pages and pages of detailed code, you pick these

parameters, and it's much more human readable and shorter and should allow things like designers to actually get in and do some of the code themselves even alongside traditional programmers. So again, I'm not a programmer either, but so my sense of it was that Swift UI not only is it just going to make life easier for actual developers, but it might actually draw. draw in like you're saying more novice developers, like maybe bring people into development that wouldn't have done it until it got this simple. Exactly. And in the past, you know, we've had tools like interface builder, which is kind of a drag-and-drop

interface for building UIs. And designers especially would use that alongside programmers to build apps. But I think this might even be better for, you know, collaboration on a team when you've got both designers and programmers working together. All right. let's come back to the Mac Pro. So I feel like in the sense that the knock on the previous Mac Pro was that it's sort of, you were shut out of a lot of things.

Like basically, this bad boy, you can basically slot in a Cessna airplane engine if you want, right? Yes. So like basically they went entirely in the other direction. It's like, all right, you just want ports and stuff, fine. Knock yourself out, right? Right. And I think this is a lot more than anybody really expected. I mean, no one really knew what Apple meant when they said it was going to be a modular computer.

And, you know, you look at the design. I think it's actually kind of an ugly machine myself. But it does harken back to the old cheese grater that was, you know, the nickname for the Mac Pro before we got the trash can, which was problematic really from the start because it had problems with the GPUs overheating. So it was really, really constrained in terms of what hard work could go in there because it was so tiny and such a unique design that it didn't really work out. Now, this is just a big, you know, it's a big rectangle, and you've got a latch on the top, you twist it,

you pull the whole thing off, and you can put, there are eight PCI slots in there, there's all kinds of custom new Apple designed card slots and modules to make things very fast, and it's designed for, I think, you know, people doing 3D model rendering, people who are doing high-end video, because it can handle up to three streams of 8,000,

8K video simultaneously, simultaneously, which is amazing. I mean, they were doing demos after the keynote of people editing 8K video in real time and doing color correction and all sorts of other doing all sorts of other plugins to try, you know, to edit the video live, which is just something that wasn't, isn't done on,

you know, a single box in most circumstances. You mentioned this a little bit earlier, but from what I can tell, some of the complaints are that it priced so high that it is only targeting the highest high-end pros, not the aspirational pros, so that, like, yeah, if it was maybe $4,000, like, people would still, you know, feel like it was in the realm of attainability. What do you think that that says about how Apple is thinking about the Mac lineup generally? I think that they realized that, you know, originally what was going to happen supposedly, the word was, that was that the Mac Pro was going away and that the IMac Pro was kind of the new Pro machine.

And there were a lot of, you know, there are howls from the community about that. I think what this machine is designed to do is to be kind of the supercar of Apple. It's got cutting-edge technology in it that hopefully will trickle down over the years to other machines. It's definitely not meant for everyone. You know, the people that they had doing demos were people from Pixar and things like that, where they were saying they were going to take four workstations and reduce them down to the single machine. Those are people with, you know, Hollywood budgets to make big films. It's not, as you said, like a prosumer or aspirational photographer, videographer, whatever.

They're going to be really, I suppose some of the big YouTubers will pick these up pretty quickly. and people doing really high-resolution video, but it's really meant for an entirely different market than someone like myself or most people doing, you know, your average taking home movies or photos or whatever. Real quick, a word about the pro display or maybe even the $1,000 stand. I don't know if you got a chance to get eyes on with that thing, but just real quick, what are your thoughts there? Well, I haven't actually seen it myself yet. I was just, my jaw dropped when I saw the stand was $1,000. I mean, you know, there was an audible gasp, as we all saw in the video, yeah. There was. I mean, you know, you can either buy a $1,000 stand, or maybe you can just have a small

child hold up your display for you. I mean, you know, even the visa mount adapter is $200, and you can buy a good visa arm for less than $200. So it's very, very expensive. It has characteristics that I guess from my understanding are the things that pros need in terms of, you know, the color and the matte finish with this nano etching that they've done with the glass, that feature alone, just getting the matte finishes $1,000. And it's, you know, so you can get a 32-inch display for $7,000, which is amazing to me. But, you know, I suppose there must be somebody out there who needs it. I certainly am not going to spend that kind of money.

on a display though. All right. So iOS 13, what are the highlights there for you? You know, there's a lot in this release. They've really updated a lot of apps that haven't been touched in a long time. I'm a big fan of dark mode. I like using that on my Mac, and it'll be nice to have that on iOS as well. The Shortcuts app, though, is just really kind of amazing because, you know, Shortcuts started

out its life as an app called Workflow. and that team got purchased, that app got purchased by Apple. And when it came out originally as shortcuts, it was an add-on. You had to go to the store and download it. Now it's tightly integrated with the OS, which makes a lot of new things possible. So they've completely redesigned how you create shortcuts, which lets you automate all kinds of tasks on iOS. So not only do you have a new way to do that,

But you've got all these triggers. It used to be that you couldn't do things like have a shortcut run at a certain time a day or when you arrived home. But you can do all of that now. There's all kinds of system level triggers for shortcuts when you connect to a certain Wi-Fi network, when you connect your phone to car play when you're driving somewhere. There's a lot of things like that that are really powerful. Plus, they can series shortcuts, which are, you know, the voice command actions, they can actually take inputs. and provide outputs before they were all kind of self-contained.

So it was very hard to do anything beyond, like, you know, what's the weather? Or, I mean, they're very simple things you could get, get little bits of information. But now you can put information in them and get information back out, which makes it a much better experience. What about all of the, especially in iOS, all of the focus on privacy. I think you guys did a piece like for Apple, privacy is not just a market. gimmick anymore. It's like a basic value proposition for them now. Go ahead. I was going to say it is, I think they treat it as a feature now, and it's a feature that

runs across the entire lineup, you know, whether you're talking about hardware, and it's something like the T2 chip and the secure enclave and all those other chips that they've used to protect privacy, or the apps themselves, you know, the fact that the machine learning of photographs and things like that is happening on device and not going up to the cloud. And it's something that, you know, we've been seen from Apple for a few years now, but they seem to have really doubled down on it because every segment of the presentation on Monday, even though they were really trying to cram as much in as possible, had an aspect of privacy mentioned.

So, you know, I think we'll continue to see more of that. This might be the right place to talk about the whole sign-in or log-in with Apple sort of controversy. And I don't know if it's a controversy. Like, I've been covering it from the angle of, is this some sort of a thing that it's an interesting time when all this anti-trust stuff is bubbling up for them to sort of be this aggressive about it. But I'm wondering, because you're there, from the other angle to it is from the developer point of view,

it is sort of like, you know, your average developer doesn't need the Facebook level of targeting and information. But you do like to have information about your users and feedback about how your product is being used and things like that. So are you hearing anything from developers, any sort of backlash about it from that angle? No, not from that angle. People did, I mean, eyebrows were raised when Apple announced that it was going to be mandatory. So if you use like Google or Facebook to authenticate, you also have to use Apple sign in. So that raised a few eyebrows.

But, you know, I think some developers, especially the smaller ones who I've talked to, they have used Google or Facebook because it was just easy to incorporate those APIs and use them. But a lot of them were not comfortable necessarily with what was going on on the other end with Google and Facebook. Because they didn't know for sure what information about their app was going back to Google or Facebook. And so I think some people are very, very optimistic about it because they don't really want that information. They just want to be able to get someone into their app and use their service not to allow, you know, a man in the middle to use whatever information is being, you know, omitted from the phone to Google or Facebook. So almost it's like it gives them peace of mind that they don't have to worry that some day down the road. Their app is got, people are going to be pissed because their app gave this away and gave that away and they didn't even know. Right, because you've seen all those stories that come out of, you know,

TechCrunch has done a bunch of these stories where they'll sniff the network traffic and see, oh, well, Facebook's getting this information about this app and this information about that app. And those developers don't always know that they're leaking that information. It's because they're using some sort of ad tech or they're using Google or Facebook. And if they use the Apple sign on, presumably that that won't be an issue. Okay, iPadOS. or actually just iPad generally in the sense that to what degree have we addressed the complaints

that even if you commit to an iPad Pro, you're still kind of playing with one hand tied behind your back. What do you think the moves that Apple has made there have done to address those complaints? I have not had a chance to try the beta yet myself, but from what I've seen, it looks like an awful lot has been addressed because I think probably the biggest thing is the fact that now you can display multiple instances of the same app, whether that's side by side, you know, editing one document and pasting things into another one, whether that's multiple versions of Safari next to different apps. So maybe you're doing research in Safari and taking notes and

notes in one setup, one space, and then have Safari next to another app and another one. That creates a lot a flexibility that just wasn't there before. And it's very easy to switch between those pairs of apps. The other big bit of progress that we've made with this this week, I think, is the Files app. Because for me, at least, when I would work on iOS in the past, at times I'd be in the Files app, and I'd say to myself, you know, it's just easier to go get in front of my Mac and do this because the Finder's just a lot more powerful. Now, though, you know, there's now, you know, there's now You can have a column view in files. There's metadata.

There's a whole bunch of other things that just make working with files on the iPad, I think, better than it was before. Wrapping up, TVOS got overlooked. In fact, I actually legitimately, at the top of my mind, have no idea. Was there anything in TVOS that was new and notable at all? The thing that's most interesting in me is that there is now, there's game controller, port. So you can use an Xbox or a PS4 controller. Oh, right. Right, right, right. I think that that's going to be pretty big. I, you know, I haven't seen anybody really tested out yet to see what the

latency is and things like that. But people have been saying for years that Apple should make its own controller with the Apple TV if they're ever going to be really truly into games that you play on your television. And this is their solution. I'm sure when Apple Arcade was announced, they talked to game developers who said, you know what, if we're going to do this, we're going to need some kind of controller support. And this is the answer. Instead of doing their own thing, they're just going to have it work with Sony and Microsoft's controllers, which I think is, you know, it's potentially a good solution. Those are good controllers, and Apple's not in the controller building business. So why not, you know, use someone else's, although it is kind of

an unusual move for Apple to do that sort of thing. Were you surprised that they didn't use this opportunity to, like, give us more on Apple Arcade, or does it make more sense to do that with the iPhone launch? I think it'll make more sense with the iPhone launch, because I assume that that's when that's going to roll out. We have the event in March, and that previewed it. And this is more of a, you know, this is a developer crowd, first and foremost at WWDC.

And while there were obviously game developers in the crowd, this is, you know, the story behind Apple Arcade is more of a services story and a customer-facing story. So I think we'll see more of that in the fall. And finally, I think you wrote about CarPlay, which again, I overlooked and probably didn't even talk about Day of, but what's new in CarPlay? Yeah, it got like two seconds of screen time and three sentences on the website, but looking at it carefully, you can now display two apps simultaneously. So if you're navigating with maps, you can see the map, and you can also see your music playing, and there'll be like serious suggestions. So you're driving up to your house and there's a serious suggestion to open your garage door, for example, you'll be able to use that.

Apps are no longer, you know, they don't have to fill the whole screen. They can exist side by side, which is really nice. Plus, third parties are going to get Siri voice support. So apps like Waze or Pandora or Spotify will be able to use Siri to control music or navigation. Whereas before an app like Ways, for instance, had a special button inside. the app and carplay that you had to first tap before you could activate voice control, which was, you know, it was not as good an experience as Apple's built in one. And a lot of people assume that was a competitive thing, but maybe it was more of a technological

thing because now that's spreading to third parties as well. Before I let you go, you guys have a new podcast, right? We do. It's called Dialogue, and it's a seasonal podcast where we interview people more about creativity, culture and society, things like that, with a tech angle involved. And our first season is about writers and writing. And we've just had two episodes out, an introductory one with me and Federico Viti. And then we've interviewed John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who we have a two-part interview with him.

It's about two hours in total. The first episode is out, and the next one's coming next Tuesday. Well, look that up. Anything else you want to plug? I would like to plug actually Federico Vatici did and interview. you with Craig Federigi of Apple that just came out today on App Stories, which is our other podcast that you can find over at appstories.net. Thank you, John.

Thank you very much, Brian.