The Vergecast - A deep dive into macOS Catalina, iPadOS, and the 2019 iPad

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller go deep on Apple's updated operating systems: macOS Catalina and iPadOS.  Also, Sony confirms their next console will be the PS5 in 2020.  Stories this week: Apple’s macOS Catalina update is coming todayCatalina ReviewPhotoshop and Lightroom users should wait before updating to macOS CatalinaNetflix confirms it won’t port its iPad app to macOSYou need a MacBook with a butterfly keyboard or a modern Mac desktop to use macOS Catalina’s SidecarWhy I’m turning off auto-updatesApple starts selling Microsoft’s Xbox controller after adding support in iOS, macOS, and tvOSiPadOS review: it’s complicated, finallyLinksys' mesh routers can now detect motion using Wi-FiApple’s Siri can now play music through SpotifyiOS 13 has gotten better, but there’s still a long way to go Apple iPad (2019) review: no competitionSony confirms next console is called PlayStation 5 and coming holiday 2020The next console war is going to be way more fun than the last oneSamsung made the smartwatch Google couldn’t Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we go deep on Apple's new operating systems. We talk about Mac OS, Catalina. We talk about iPadOS. Talk a little bit about TVOS and the PS5. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all?

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports. And mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast, the ever-growing Vox Media Empire. It's a friendly empire, though.

You can say whatever you want in our empire. I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Paul Miller's here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. A photo of me has just been uncovered on Flickr from 2011, and I'm very unhappy. Describe the photo.

It is me staring into the gaping maw of a Nokia N9 and being amazed at its camera. I like it. We were going to talk about Catalina here in a minute. So Catalina is out, and I ran the system report to find what 32-bit apps I have in my laptop. And I just roll my laptops every year, I don't do clean installs, which is bad, admittedly. So I have a bunch of old software. And so one of the apps that came up was the Elgado Turbo 264 apps. Which is like a USB stick that you...

Paul, you remember these things? We had a many gadget. This is like how we ran CS for years. Oh, yeah. Life changing gadget. You would like go out and shoot with your DSLR and then you have this like huge video file and like laptops in 2009

were not able to process them in time without destroying their battery. I got most of my videos from a Saniozakdi. Yeah. Anyway, so there's this USB stick that like you'd play in the side of your laptop and then ran this incredibly insane DRM'd application. And it would like do a great job

like spinning out 720 people. But I fell down a hole, Deeder, of like, old coverage from back then. Oh, no. And I firmly believe in the right to be forgotten, is what I'm saying. Like, I should be able to send Google a letter that's like, all photos of me before I figured out my hair situation should go away. I'm with you. I understand. Well, let's talk about Catalina.

That's the news. It is part of the news. Well, so there's a lot of, I will just, I'll say it out of the way. The joke I made at the top about the empire, you can say anything. There's a lot of news in this world at this moment. policy news, tech policy news, about the Chinese government, how various large American corporations are restricting what they say or what their employees can say. I think most notably the NBA at the top of the week got into a lot of trouble because the GM of the rocket said something and then

they turn it back and blah, blah, blah. We're now at the point where Marco Rubio has called for, like, TikTok to be investigated because it's owned by a Chinese company and perhaps its content moderation policies are unduly influenced by Chinese politics. There's obviously protests in Hong Kong. There are lots and lots of dramatic events unfolding in gaming and e-sports around the stuff. We're covering it all on the site. Just before we started taping the show today, we were talking about the fact that it hasn't cohered into a narrative yet. Like, there's a lot of stuff happening and it feels like a moment of reckoning. I suspect that in another few days that will actually like come to a coherent narrative.

But right now what's happening is, it turns out big companies in order to not irritate the Chinese government, restrict what they say or do in different ways. And that seems bad. That's like where it's at. It seems like there's a lot of, I think the tweet today was streamlined cowardice.

That's what Ben Thompson are talking about on Twitter. As the companies get bigger and bigger and bigger and they're monot- Disney owns like 40% of Hollywood, right? So in China is a huge market for Disney. Like, is it great that Disney, in order to protect the box office returns of the next MCU movie in China, are telling ESPN anchors to not talk about the politics of the NBA situation? Like, that's a lot of lines being drawn through things. Can I ask you guys a real quick, like, moral question for my own life that I was thinking about? Okay, so, so Blizzard, Blizzard's one of these streamlined, whatever it is.

Streamlined cowardice, yeah. Cowardous, sure. companies and they banned a Heartstone player for like a display he made supporting Hong Kong, took all his prize winnings. This was completely within their right because they have a crazy contract with their players. So I did the feel good thing, uninstalled Battlenet for my computer. You know, my wow subscription was over. Like I just like, you know, I'll extract Blizzard from my life and they can think about what

they've done. But then I realized that I'd spend like the the weekend on TikTok, which is way more China, you know, and is obviously way more sensitive to China speechwise. Like, you know, you know, blizzard's never stopped me from like support. I don't, I have never done this. But if I was supporting Hong Kong in Overwatch chat or in Twitch chat during an Overwatch stream, you know, that kind of thing. That wouldn't be a big deal. But I don't know. It was just interesting. Like I was want to like what you guys think about that morally like should would stop using TikTok be a good protest or is it meaningless because it wouldn't it doesn't have as much impact as this moment does with blizzard that is the question right uh the the analogy i made earlier today was everybody

understands that california has the strongest emission standards in the country so car makers who want to sell cars in america just like build them to california standards it's just the easiest choice you can make. In a global information economy, China has a huge market with the most stringent speech controls. It is not, to me, surprising that companies are just choosing that set of standards instead of the ones that we would maybe want to have here. I don't know that, like, a bunch of dudes in their 30s quitting TikTok is going to hurt TikTok. Like, that's the three of us, right? So I think the real question here is, in this moment of reckoning, this is not a question I think of individual concerns, of individual actions.

We talk about us all the time. You can vote with your dollars, vote with your vote. It seems very clear that in this case, there is a policy decision that needs to get made that makes these companies respect the values of this country versus the values of another country. And that is really hard. But there's no way that...

I don't think you can tell every teenager in America to quit using TikTok because the content moderation policy favors the Chinese mainland government versus the people in Hong Kong. I would love that to be the case. Like, that would be great. I just seems unlikely. But like I said, I don't want to spend too much time in this.

Like, this story is rapid fire right now. It's like at every minute, literally before we came on, we're taping on Wednesday this week. Right before we come in the air, the Quartz app was banned from the app store in China because they're covering Hong Kong, presumably. Like, minute by minute. There's nothing we could say that wouldn't be like completely obsolete by the time you're listening to this. Yeah. But like, we're paying attention. We're just trying to, like, suss out what to do.

We're paying a lot of attention, and I think what I'm looking for, and I'm eager to hear from folks, this is a, it's not just a tech story, right? It's an international relations story. It's a globalized business story. We obviously care about those things. We talk about them all the time, but it's going to cohere into something faster than, I think, is reasonable for us to speculate on the show. But I wanted to mention at the top, it's definitely happening.

It is arguably some of the biggest news of the week and might be huge news just ongoing as we, as we, for example, Apple, we talk about Apple a lot, I think. I don't know. Every now again, the Apple comes up. Apple has a huge business in China. They make all their stuff there. It's one of their biggest markets. Apple turned over the control of its iCloud servers in China to a company that has its set of affiliations of the Chinese government.

It's all companies in China do. That is a lot of exposure to a thing that suddenly our government on both sides of the aisle is saying is a problem. You were talking about Blizzard. Both parties have condemned Blizzard for their actions. Both parties have condemned the NBA. Both parties have condemned the NBA. So it's going to come for these companies. It is interesting to think that Google, which was under a lot of criticism for building

Dragonfly, potentially to reenter the Chinese market, they don't have any exposure, right? They're like not there. Facebook. Very little, yeah. Facebook just walked away, couldn't do it. So it's interesting to think the companies that we traditionally associate with being in trouble, Google and Facebook, are just, opted out of this mess in Apple, which usually, you know, rides high and on doing the right thing is very much enmeshed in it.

But it hasn't, I don't think it's developed enough for us to like talk about it for more than the nine minutes we have currently talked about. Sorry. All right. Let's talk about Catalina. So I do want to, but I just wanted to mention it. But I think the big story in tech, the tech story of the week, to me anyway, is that Apple's big set of software updates continues to roll out.

It's weird to think that it's not automatically the biggest story in tech that like one of the world's two major desktop operating system has got updated this week. Everyone got it. And it's pretty buggy. And it seems to have fallen under the radar. But this is like an inflection point in like macOS history. Yep. Things are breaking in a big way. Like for example, Adobe is just not ready.

By the way, this is all Adobe. I don't mean to blame Apple for this at all. But like, what do you do in Adobe? but Apple made the call and it's a fair call we're done with 32-bit apps we're 64-bit only and like 32-bit apps

all over the place are breaking and a bunch of Photoshop and Lightroom stuff is 32-bit and it's broken. Yeah. The reason I wrote this article this week that like you don't need to update right away

Adobe not being ready and being broken on the new version of the operating system is a tail as old as time. Yeah. Up until about four or five years ago when the Mac was pretty stable and not that much changed

and the iPhone would like just get everybody to update. Nobody, not a single person with the computer, thought that they could upgrade their operating system and just have things be cool. Yeah, it was like, you just knew that if you upgraded your OS, something would break and like you would

either just accept that or you would go looking around to see if the stuff you care about is broken or not. And we had this beautiful golden age of the teens. The teens were very good to us. And we had good, stable operating system updates. And now we're just

reverting to the norm, I think. Or you can be very mad at Apple and they screwed this up and they should do a better job. It's like, I don't know. You should be mad at Apple for the bugs. Yeah, so let's break it into like two pieces. Okay. So, let's break it into like two pieces. Okay.

Specifically with Catalina, because iOS 13 also shipped very buggy, but I think it's gotten better. of Catalina to talk about. We should take them in turn. First, there is the jump to 64 bit. A bunch of stuff broke. A bunch of dependencies aren't there anymore. There's like a really silly, I mean, I think it's not fun, but it's like, it's hilarious in its way.

Just like the cruft of operating systems over time and people's workflows over time is always entertaining to me. So like a bunch of DJs and DJ software relies on iTunes creating an XML file of its library just all the time. So, like, DJs are, they still use iTunes to organize music because it is good at that. And it's available. It's like everywhere. And iTunes in the background just created an XML file, which is something that software

that makes databases does all the time. Apple updates to Catalina. They kill iTunes. They roll out music. Music no longer automatically creates the XML file. They upgraded to like SQLite or something or what? They move to a proprietary format called dot ITL. of convenient.

What, are you kidding? They used an open format? No, no, no. There's a proprietary format called dot ITL that they now use. Come on, Apple. So all these DJ apps no longer can just, like, read this database of organization. So DJs who are, like, using iTunes to organize their stuff, and then they could use multiple apps to access that library and that organization.

All those apps are broken. Now, depending on who you ask, you can do your iTunes management and then, like, hit a button to generate an XML file, but it's a manual process and it might not work. So this is just broken. It's just a workflow that's broken. Should all of the DJ apps in the world been ready for Catalina and updated to dot ITL, which is like what Apple wants you to do or like whatever proprietary iTunes Library API? Maybe.

I think more file extensions should be like resonant with meaning. Like dot ITL clearly stands for it lost, right? I think all file extensions should mean something like that. But so that's like that's one, this Photoshop thing is another, like there's just a bunch of stuff that broke. Right. Well, and to Deeter's point, it is we really, our phones are training, are like training us aggressively. Dude, you have to update all the time. Update means security, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Do it. Go. Go. But the classic, especially in the music industry, like the music industry is famous for having probably kept dying alive a lot longer than anybody else for compatibility reasons. And I think graphics professionals, like Dieter said, this is a tale as old as time with Adobe. So graphics professionals are going to be used to this aspect of don't update your operating system. So it just seems like, but we've been learning with our mobile devices to update.

And we just have to remember that for now, and it's not, it doesn't look like it's going to be forever. But for now, a desktop computer is a computer that you manage. and the operating system provides tools to help you do that. And a mobile operating system is managed by the provider. Yeah. So I think that the 32-bit thing kind of snuck up on everybody. It's the sort of thing where, like, five years ago, like, it's all anybody would talk about. It's like, check all your apps, 32 to 64.

The 32's going away, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that just everybody in the industry got so good at just keeping up to date that I think that a bunch of people didn't occur to them. but like, oh, wait, some of these frameworks are like a decade old and, like, might break now. Yeah. So my only stuff, honestly, on my Mac was the Adobe stuff. Everything else, like, me, it's fine.

And I've been upgrading this Mac for, you know, I don't know, eight years, something like that, a long time. I have a bunch of ancient Microsoft stuff from, like, an ancient office install. Like, it's stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Microsoft and Adobe are big companies. They're probably going to pull them long.

There are some, like, beloved ancient utilities that are going away. The, not the dashboard. Drag thing. Yeah, drag thing is going away. No, the dashboard where I have all the widgets. I still use widgets. That's just you, man.

Although I use them on the today's screen, on the Today View, so. But Scott, right? Like, there's just a bunch of stuff. And what I'm saying is this is a, it's a lot of change at once. And I don't think Apple, anyone, us, the Mac ecosystem was like really prepared to communicate the scale of change. Like, you go from Sierra to High Sierra or L. to Mojave. Everything is basically the same, right?

And Paul, to your point, you update your phone. Well, the app store is in the background, just like quietly bringing everything along, right? Instagram's a couple weeks late with dark mode for iOS 13, but eventually it's going to be there. And they announce it it just shows up on everybody's phone. And you've never thought about it because everything's auto-updated in the background.

The Mac App Store is not, I would say, a success story on par with the iOS App Store. And so it's just like not happening for people. So stuff is just broken and there's no like inherent built in sense that it will get fixed over time. So that to me is like a that's a big change. That's a very interesting thing. Like the Mac App Store could be something more like how software is distributed on, you know, on Linux where it's sort of this repository of up-to-date software, you know, instead of like Apple's wedge to control and profit more often. of app development, you know.

If the Mac App Store was a little kinder to developers and a little looser in rules, it could be much more popular and it could, therefore, help an update like this go a lot smoother. And yet it is not. And like, we've been talking about this for a long time. In fact, it seems like they're going the other way, right? Like, now they're acquiring code to be notarized on Catalina. That's not a Mac App Store thing.

That's just a full-on Catalina thing. It will explain it. So your app needs to be notarized, which is you need to sign up for a developer account, and then Apple needs to be like, yep, you exist as a human. We gave you, you are like a real thing, not scammy, therefore your app can run. The hope and the assumption and the way it seems to be going, I haven't heard a whole lot of complaining about this since the news first became popularized a few months ago, is, yeah, if you have a developer account, your app gets notarized, that's fine.

Like the only people that should really be hurt by that are people that are legit making malware that Apple, like, Apple wants to be able to have this notification thing to, like, deny bad actors, not, like, pick and choose and curate is the hope and the assumption. Nevertheless, short of, like, going through and turning off a bunch of stuff and hitting a bunch of security flags and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Apple, Apple now is, like, anointing every single app that appears on your phone. It's, you know, it's a laptop. Their laptop. Excuse me. The big one. They're already anointing the stuff on your phone.

They're like, it's like a notary non-public. Yeah. So I've seen some developers already say like, you know, it's too much work to support Mac users. Like, we're done. We're out. And that sounds like really lazy. But like if you think like a lot of software these days is built with, maybe I've heard of CICD, continuous integration, continuous delivery. So every time you update the software, all the tests are run.

And if all the tests pass, that means the software is good. And then they ship a binary right then. And they just update the official binary of the software right then. And there aren't any Mac servers to run the notarization unless you're crazy. I don't know. Just typical Apple things. Yeah. But it's a huge inflection point in MacOS.

And it was not built as such. Deider, your review gets at it. Your review begins and ends with weight. Right. But only until reviewers got it was the scale of the inflection point, I think, clear. Right. Well, and actually, I didn't do a good enough job. Like, I said wait at the beginning and the end, but I feel like I wasn't clear enough about it.

Like, because I didn't upgrade my Mac, I, like, took a review unit and it was, like, a relatively clean install. And, you know, I didn't install literally everything that I use. I knew it was a problem, but I didn't realize the scope of the problem of all of the, like, security access dialogues that now pop up. because, like, Apple wants to make sure apps have permission to get into, like, say, your documents folder. You know, they want to move the Mac to a place where not every single app can have access to your whole damn hard drive, right? It seems like a reasonable thing for them to want to do. In order to make that happen, they need to, like, lock it down, and then the apps need to ask permission, and then you need to grant them permission. It's all like there's nothing irrational about that chain of desires and events.

until you get to the end of that chain, which is when you update your Mac and then all of a sudden your entire screen is filled with permission prompts that you need to accept. It is very vista. It's a real throwback. Apple actually made a, I'm a Mac commercial with Justin Long and John Hodgman

and some other famous actor who was the security guard standing behind John Hodgman. And every time John Hodgman talked, he said, like accept or deny. Like Apple used to like make fun of Microsoft for this thing that is happening on Catalina.

But like I get, like times have changed. Like there are more bad actors and the Mac is like Apple is a more popular company and there's more targeting of their platforms. Like, yep, you got to, this is my inflection point. Yeah.

I don't think this will be the permanent state of Catalina, but it is absolutely the state of Catalina now. And my instinct, I've done this. I skipped Sierra. I basically skipped L-CAP. Like, it's sort of like accidentally updated one day. Like I hit the wrong button.

I was like, oh, shit. I think I skipped Leopard back. You can just skip MacOS versions. Like your world won't end the way that like if you skip an iOS version, like all of a sudden things just stopped like working along the way. Yeah. You just skip a MacOS version. I think I should skip Catalina.

Like it doesn't, there's nothing here that's compelling. I don't even have a laptop that can run sidecar because you need a butterfly keyboard laptop, which is the worst trade in history. Like you can have a broken keyboard, but a cool second iPad display. No, your MacOS upgrade strategy is going to be the Samsung model where you're just going to get it when you have to buy a new computer. Yeah, that's right.

I feel great about that. I will say, all of this complaining aside, I'm really liking Catalina. I've been using it in, like, the developer preview for ages. And once I clicked yes on enough prompts, Now I only get a new, I only get a new prompt like every other day. And I'm always, let me tell you, I am always grateful for that prompt. Because a lot of times it's like new information.

It's like, oh, I didn't know you. Do you say no a lot? I say on my phone, I'm saying no left and right. Oh, dude, dude, I got Mario Kart on my Android phone and it pops open. You must have Google Play to play this. And then you say, no thanks. And you play it anyways. They're lying.

You don't must. No, but I say no a couple things on the Mac, but mostly it's knowledge of what your software is doing. Because your software does a lot of invisible things, and hard drive access is an interesting one that's good to have insight into. I would hope eventually that we could find a low noise way to do this with network access. So the sort of situation with Zoom or Zoom just installed a random application that was, you know, spying. I don't know what it was doing, but it was being a bad person. I was like, I remember this story. It was bad, right?

Yes, it was bad. It could definitely, it could phone home and it was running perpetually on your, on your computer. And most importantly, it was a web server holding a port open on your computer, which is, in a sense, a access point for messages from the outside, which is what you don't want sometimes. So knowing that, having better insight to that would be nice in the future. I don't know if they'll ever get there. Yeah. Like I said, inflection point. I don't think it's bad.

Like in the brief moments I've gotten to use Catalina, it seems fine. And features like sidecar seem cool and like it seems right that they broke up iTunes into 45 separate apps in the finder sidebar or whatever they did. Like, there's nothing about it that's bad. I just think that there's no reason to experience the transition. And this is a transition point. If you have a Mac that's working. Like in the, Dami, who wrote the. wait for Photoshop users post yesterday.

We were like listing the things that are broken. I have no idea what the Photoshop Extendscript toolkit is. I don't. There's like a print shop in Kansas City that like the entire business runs in the Photoshop Extendscript toolkit. Like they should definitely wait. Like there's no reason for them to risk their business. I beseech you printers of Kansas City.

Wait. Yeah. And so it's just that there's no reason to experience the transition. I think you can wait a year. And I think the better reason, this is the other thing, the better reason to wait a year is because the real promise of Catalina is catalyst apps, is getting all the iPad apps. And that appears to be a garbage fire. I have every single feeling in the world about this. I know.

That's why Deeree will be talking for the next 10 minutes. I'm going to go get some coffee. I begged Apple to make its own good catalyst apps ahead of WWW. I said, Apple, do this right. Show everybody the way to make these apps good. At the time, they were not called Catalyst apps. They were called, whatever they were called. Marzapan.

Marsa Pan apps. WWC arrived, and Apple did not do that. In fact, they left their own Catalyst apps as the same hot garbage that they were in Mojave. So that was bad. And then it turned out that alongside Catalyst, they also announced this thing called Swift U.I, which is apparently an incredibly elegant way to build a UI for Mac developers that are already using Swift. And to some people, especially like Mac Partisans, it looked like Swift UI as a future, and Catalyst is just this weird placeholder and you should ignore Catalyst, especially because

they're bad. And then in the months since WWDC, we have learned that making a good Catalyst app, making a good Mac-style app but using iPad-style code is very difficult. And it's not well documented. And everything you want there to do on it isn't actually there or easy to do. And so the result is we have a bunch of pretty fine catalyst apps. There's like, you know, I don't know, 20 or 30. And some of them are cool.

Like carrot looks dope. Plany seems cool. Like 9 to 5 Mac has a list of like all the ones that are out there. But like Twitter hasn't arrived. That was on stage. Asphalt 9 hasn't arrived. That was on stage. Netflix just quit.

They were like, no, Netflix, not doing this. Not doing it. But those are the ones you want. Like on Tuesday, the interview episode this coming Tuesday is Kvon Bakeport, the head of product on Twitter, KCEN I talked to him. And I asked him, like, how's your Catalyst app? And he was like, it's great because we don't have to, like, work very hard. And it's just like not there.

Yeah. Because I think they actually have to, like, work fairly hard to get it right. But the promise is that all these, like, great iPad apps will just, like, show up on your Mac. And the developers won't have to work very hard, but then everyone gets the benefit. this is always the dream, right, of like multi-operating system support or multi-platform support. It seems like that dream has crashed directly into reality. Yeah. Mark German at Bloomberg had a really good story where he talked about like some of the developer worries and complaints about Catalyst.

And there's like two big ones and they both relate to the difference between user expectation and like developer reality. So one is users expect to not have to pay for the same damn map again, right? They bought it once on the iPad and then it shows up on their iPhone. Why isn't it also showing up on the Mac? It seems a reasonable thing to expect. Developers, on the other hand, are like, yeah, actually, no, it takes a lot of work to make that Mac app work, so I should get paid for that. And similarly with, you know, people that are only paying a little bit of attention. And if you are a regular human being, you should only be paying a little bit of attention.

The message, their takeaway is, oh, developers can, like, check a box and, like, fix two things. then an iPad app turns into a Mac app. And it's not like that at all. If you do that, it's going to be terrible. And so, like, people could potentially be mad at iPad developers who are promising a Catalyst app because they're taking too long. And it's because they think it's easier than it actually is. Okay.

Here's my conspiracy theory. Okay. I think I've put this together. Yeah. That's why Apple's apps are bad. It's to set the expectation that these apps will be bad. Oh my God. So that you use this like Catalyst app and you're like, huh, some apps on my Mac, me, person who's only paying the appropriate amount of attention to the Mac developer ecosystem in this 2019, some Mac apps are bad iPad apps.

And this is something I expect. And honestly, enjoy because I enjoy being jolted into a different interface paradigm that requires a touchscreen on this computer that doesn't have a touch screen. But it keeps me alive. You know, there's like a little jolt of excitement every now and again. And so I expect some apps to be back. My version of. Dieter's face right now. No, my face right now is because at WWDC, a bunch of people in podcasts and whatever asked Craig

Federigi, why is the home app still look like this? And his answer was, oh, that's a design decision. It's not a limitation of the catalyst platform. We just want it that way. And it's like, what? The subtext of that is we want it to be bad. Yes, you solved it for me. Thank you.

Yeah. We're just lowering. Because when you think of Apple, you think of lower expectations of the user experience. My thinking is that what is flooding our computers right now are electron apps, which are, you know, fancified, glorified web browsers. Love them. And, you know, performance aside, the UI ends up often. being a little webby and weird. So we're already sort of learning that,

that, well, it's not everything's going to look like a Mac application. So in some sense, like the bar is lower for a Catalyst app because it just has to be better than an electron app. Right. But an electron app with a webby UI generally built for a mouse and a keyboard. An iPad app generally built for YouTube. interact through touch. Yeah.

And like, this is the problem. Like, if anything gets Apple to put a touch screen on a Mac, it's the success of Catalyst. Right? Because Catalyst apps, like,

there isn't, I think Gruber was pointing out, like the PCalc, which is a very famous app, the developer wrote a whole long blog post, and there's no like menu selection interface built into it. Like, if you just want to select an item out of a list,

there's no native control for that in Catalyst. You just get the Iowa. a spinny wheel, which makes no sense with the mouse. Like, that is, Grubber's like, that's ridiculous. This is the first GUI framework for this kind of computer in history that does not just have that as a primitive. That's, Apple's like, either they solve that problem, they put the work in the catalyst, or hear me out, you just put a touchscreen on the Mac and you're like, just touch the

wheel. Like, just do the thing, and it's going to work fine. And now you actually do have iPad apps in your Mac. Yep. I would be totally into that. This would break all of their religion. They could release an arm Mac, put a touchscreen on it, and say, hey, iPad apps, go to town. No problem.

Apple, if you're listening to this, this is not a get out of jail free card. No, you can't do that. Go ahead. You can put a touchscreen. I don't care, but you also need to solve problems. How damning is it, I'm coming back to this Netflix thing. How damning is it that Netflix won't do this? Like, them taking their iPad app, they've done all this work, does like offline, your cue is there,

always logged in. You don't have to worry about relogging in. You don't have to deal with, you know, my web browser good enough or fast enough. It's like, it's just a native app. They're, them refusing to take that and put it on the Mac or like, no, our website's good enough. Woof. Yeah. I mean, who knows? Like, as with all things with these companies now, is like, is this a sincere technical limitation that they didn't want to overcome because the market's not big enough? Or is this just politics because, I don't know, they want some additional API hook and Apple's like, we'll give that to you if you put Netflix in the TV app on Apple TV Plus and do a sign up thing where we take 30% of your money.

And Netflix's like, no, in response, we withhold our Catalyst app. All of those things are possible. And maybe we'll never know. But this is supposed to make it easy. And I think what we've learned just in the week or so that we've had Catalina is actually hard. And that, it is an open question whether a catalyst is. is meant to be a real project, meant to be a real thing, a real avenue for developers, or it's just sort of the thing that allows Apple to stem the tide of electron

while they move everybody to SWIFU-I. I don't know. Does it work on sidecar? So I don't have a computer that can use sidecar. Oh. Does it work with, does catalyst? You can't? No, you can't touch.

Just because you put an app on there, you can't touch the screen. Like, come on. Come on. You can use a pencil on stuff, but. Can you use a pencil on the interface elements? That would be amazing. I have to check. I mostly drew with it. Photoshop, by the way, not yet supported for sidecar.

So, like, if you turn on pressure sensitivity in Photoshop, like the brush is, like, way slow. And it's just that. It's just like some combination of Apple pushes forward with no regard for the past, which is Apple's way. That's fine. The developers are in a state of consternation. They haven't caught up to where Apple wants to be. I think that with Catalina, in particular,

enormous set of open questions about whether developers want to catch up up to where Apple wants to be. Paul, I know what do you like about Catalina besides the asking of permission? Well, I just like, I feel like it's a cleaning up. I mean, you know, as hard as it is to have the deprecation of 32 bit,

that represents to me a slimming and a trimming down of the operating system. And to me, it just feel, and they also like, they cleaned out the root folder and I like these permissions, things. I feel like there's a lot. The operating system to me, and it's just a subjective feeling, but it feels slimmer,

more streamlined, and a little more polished in that sense. Less polished in the apps that replaced iTunes, in my opinion. I think they're very good. They're better than iTunes, but that's a low-ass bar. Right? Like, they're 1.0 products for sure. The TV apps, complete lack of awareness of other television ecosystems and television apps is wild because the TV app on the iPad and on Apple TV, like, I'm used to like,

there's a show and it shows me and I click in it and then like hear all the services I can watch it on and it doesn't do that on the Mac. You know, and Apple Music is similarly got like the history is like weirdly slow to update. There's just like some 1.0 kind of stuff in all of these apps. Well, Apple Music, you know, they're using the dynamic new ITL file format. Yeah. I will be, you know, for people who. are taking this as me somehow recommending this operating system, I do not use any of these apps

that you're talking about. I don't use Home Centerland and I don't use Apple TV and I don't, you know, I use, I use VS code, I use the brave browser and I use like a weird text editor that's not even a real app. Yeah. Look, here's a final word on Catalina. I'm going to try to sum it up. If you have never used a computer before and you buy a Mac, you're going to love Catalina. You're going to love it. It's going to be the best thing that ever happened to you. It's clean. It's simple.

It communicates well. If you have never had sugar before and someone hands you a can of Coke, you're going to love it. You're going to love it for the right of your life. It's going to be the best. You're like, the future of computing unfolds in so many directions. How will apps work in the future? It's got a new shell. Yeah.

If you have ever used a Macintosh. before if you're upgrading, it's not going to be quite as fun. It's going to be, yeah, it's going to be a little rocky. And I just, my recommendation is you can just wait. You just wait a month. You can wait a year. You can skip the whole thing. Yeah.

I'm going to see, I'm going to see if anything, I'll let you know if anything compels you an upgrade. Right now I have felt no such pull, except that I like always have the latest thing. But that's just me. That's like, I buy phones on the podcast every year. So like, what am I doing? All right, we're taking a break. We'll come back.

We got to talk about iPadOS and TVOS. WatchOS? There's a lot of OS. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this.

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So speaking of Adobe. Yeah. Where is this transition going? I'm going to tell us. It was supposed to be a pregnant pause. What's going to happen next? Walls exist, and they're sometimes made out of it. Every now and again, Adobe updates its software.

When that happened? When you subscribe to software, you don't own the software. Yeah, every now and again, Adobe updates a software even renting from them. The feature that I was most excited about with iPadOS, showed it on stage, I swear to God, Cred Federidi looked in my eyes when he announced it, was you're going to import photos directly in the lightroom. It's not there yet. No, it's not.

Absolutely isn't there yet. There is an amazing workaround that people on, like, forums and Reddit have found, which is you can import 10 photos at a time in the files app and then share them using the Lightroom Share button, which is still an incredible hack. But at least you've gotten to you, I can see an SD card. Yeah. Adobe.

It's just a real under current of the update story. But iPadOS is here. Yep. Do you reviewed it? What do you think? I think that there are bugs. I mean, sorry. The IRS 13 story continues.

Yeah. My floating keyboard, I love the floating keyboard. I will defend it to my dying breath. I think it's the best. It just goes where it wants, just all the time. It's like, nope, I think I should be over on the side of the screen now. No, you know, it's like a game. It's like, where's Waldo?

I think that the Safari browser is actually pretty good. I definitely like, I'm the kind of person that will push a browser to the edge of what it's capable of and then find where it breaks and then complain about that spot. But overall, I think that you're going to have better time on the way. the web with the new safari than you did on the old safari. And I think that the multitasking model is super complicated. We can get into that if you want, although we talked about it a bunch of last couple of weeks. And I think that the model for manipulating text is a dumpster fire. I think the line I used was Apple, Apple tried to move on for the loop and like do something really great and intuitive. So like they aim for the stars and they hit the ditch. Yeah. It's real bad. Well, explain what it is.

I'm thinking about how to explain it, and I don't know how, but I'm very curious to see if you can. The very short version is they want you to not have to think about it, and so they let you just, you know, drag and touch and, like, the cursor will figure out what you're trying to pull off. Are you trying to select a word? Are you trying to highlight a thing? Are you just trying to move the cursor? You know, they'll just, you'll figure it out. And if, like, you're annoyed because you can't see what's going on with the cursor. If you move your finger real fast, the cursor gets a little bigger so you can, like, see.

where it goes. They didn't think through that, like, fingers are still big and, what's the word, opaque? You can't see through them. So it makes it real hard to place. That's the problem the loop was designed to fix. And then on top of all of that, I think that they just, they whiffed on the cursor stuff. On top of all of that, they completely whiffed on these three-finger gestures. I just, they're terrible.

The three-finger tap is great. So, like, learn the three-finger tap. That's how you can bring up your undo, redo menu, your all that stuff. you're cut, copy, paste. But if you think that you can, like, do the lift-up thing and, like, do the plop-down thing with regular consistency at the speed that you normally would when you're working with text on any other computer that has a mousing system, you are sadly mistaken. Yeah.

So it just, it's just, it all works, but it just, it definitely slows you down if you're working specifically with text. So let me ask you this. Philosoph, I want to talk about iPad OS as an iPad OS as an, in a lot of you. OS, but philosophically, Apple is closest to a gesture-powered navigation system for general computing with the iPad and iOS than anybody else. That's right. That is completely true.

Is that a good idea? Sure. Why not? Well, because they're really close. They're farther along than anybody, and it seems like a bad idea. Like, should they keep going? Or is asking people to remember, like, how many fingers do a thing, just like a fundamentally broken idea. Well, I mean, I've been getting into this for a long time. I don't think it's fundamentally

a broken idea. I think that we give ourselves not enough credit for how we learn desktop operating systems. And I think that people will pick up this stuff. I think that it's not as discoverable and intuitive in the sense of like riding a bike is intuitive as it could be or should be. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't keep going. One of the things I talk about a lot in this review, is like, I'd never know what's going to happen when I tap on an icon, which seems real bad, right? Will the window be in a sidebar? Will it be in a split screen? Are there multiple screens?

Which window is it going to open? I don't know. That all seems terrible. But the truth is that it's not, I don't know because I don't know what the operating system is doing. It's not, I don't know because the operating system is screwed up. Like the OS has an internal logic to what happens with its windows. It's just too complicated to understand. understand unless you are like seeing the matrix, right?

Yeah. And so don't try and see the matrix. And you'll be like, you'll like eventually just come to terms with like, oh yeah, it's a little bit wacky. It's fine. And like maybe in like four years, I will have this like inherent intuitive sense of how the thing works and I'll see the matrix without having to think about it. It'll be like, I don't dribbling a basketball.

First time you dribble a basketball, you just bleh. And then over time you get better at it. I mean, I'm still blah, but you know what I mean, right? Maybe it'll get there. Some people have learned to dribble a basketball is what I think you're getting at. But there's always going to be stuff at the edges of a UI that are hard to get right the first time. And I think that text is like specifically a thing that is difficult when your primary input mechanism is a finger. It's just like because unless you want your text to be, each character to be bigger than the tip of a finger, like something has to be new or something has to give.

You have to figure out a solution for that problem. And Apple's tried a couple different solutions. And I think in this one in particular, they were too ambitious or they just didn't reach the level of their ambition. We're 11 years into touchscreen primary devices like this. You wouldn't think we'd still be bad at this. Did they give themselves permission to use more fingers? Is that the problem here? And they just did a bad job there?

Or, because like, you would think that if you were just trying to improve what we already know from phone screens and just make it a little more iPad-y, whatever that would mean, that you could make a improvement, not that, not that you would go this far in the wrong direction. No, I think that that's exactly what they're trying to do. I'm just saying like they whiffed it. Like, there's a difference between is this a good idea or a bad idea and did you execute your idea well? I just think they didn't, like, execute the idea. So theoretically, if it was just intuitive and when you swipe something, it's selected, but sometimes the swipe was actually a moved cursor because what you meant to do was move the cursor. If somehow it could read your intent well enough, it would be a good way to interact. Yeah.

And that, by the way, that is not completely out of the realm of possibility. It just isn't. There's a rumor or a story right now that Google Stadia is going to, is aiming for negative latency because they're going to predict what you're going to, what you're going to do. on your controller before you do it, and therefore you'll not have any feeling of latency. And that isn't a crazy idea either. It's hard for buttons. But on an analog joystick, there's only so many directions that your finger can possibly go. And after that, it's just a probability problem and a confidence problem.

How confident are they that the next thing you do is going to be this, given the physical capabilities of the thing you're using? And like, if Apple is good enough at machine learning and AI, they could theoretically make this cursor accurate and do what you expect to do 95% of the time. And like, if they can get that percent that did it get it wrong, small enough, it will feel like magic and only occasionally annoying. Right now, I think their hit rate is closer to like 50%. That's saddening that's like a guarantee that I'll be even worse in video games. Like, it will confidently predict that I will press the wrong button and just push it for me. Yes, what if normally, I do miss all my headshots,

but this was going to be the one time. Yeah. Well, so I guess let me zoom out of that a little bit again. Okay. With desktop computers, it's, I mean, this is now a 30-year metaphor that has just been refined and refined and refined. It also had the ability of existing somewhat in a vacuum for most of its existence, the Windows mouse metaphor, right? Like, that was the thing. It was the only thing. So it existed mostly in a vacuum.

So every time, like, more capabilities were layered on to it. they were wholly new. There was no other better thing or other more effective thing that was constantly being compared to. Right. And it got to develop in parallel with sort of astonishing leaps

in overall computing power. Right. Like do you remember, like, early 2000s max, there would be like slash dot flame wars about how many processor cycles Apple was wasting on like visual effects? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm fairly sure those conversations have gone away, right? But Apple did use those process cycles to make the UI more predictable. It would show you where Windows are going. There's all these animations. It taught users what to expect. And then over time it wound some of those animations back. The iPad, and particularly iPad OS and all this new stuff, has none of those benefits. Right.

It's wholly new. It has not been refined over time. They actually keep rebooting it in different ways. It does sit next to a very powerful, very flexible, very well understood. mouse windows metaphor. And, like, the thing is already so powerful that the main complaint is it doesn't only do all the things that you think it should do. Right.

And so, like, I think Apple is actually just, like, they're in a very difficult position. They're not actually iterating. It just seems like they keep rebooting to see if they get it right instead of being able to commit to one thing and refining it. But do you think now is, like, this is the foundation that they're going to refine? I think that's not totally fair. I think the slideover thing is a clear iteration. They had a good idea of like there should be an app

and it should like invisibly theoretically live on the right side of your screen and you can swipe it in and swipe it away and it's good for like certain things and turning that into a stack is like really smart. Like that's great. So like their core foundation of iPadOS is one big screen, split screen and slide over. Like those are like the three modalities basically

instead of like Windows you can put anywhere you out in space. And they seem pretty committed to that. And I'm actually like I'm okay with that. Those three elements, and then every now and then if you really want to, you can have a picture and picture thing or you can expand a notification to do something, right? That's like an extra modal space that can sometimes exist. That is a foundation. I think it's pretty smart. If you're committed to not letting people just have windows, how do you play around with the different ways that things work inside that basic framework where they're going to try some stuff and it's going to fail and they're going to have to.

and they're going to have to like start over and try something else. And I guess the reason that I'm like pretty chill about this, like, you know, at the video and in the piece I make this joke about like everything is temporary, nothing matter to just be a Buddhist, you know, go away, is because I have watched Android do this for a decade. Every single version of Android, they're like, well, that idea sucked. Let's try it again. And that like iterations, a cycle of iteration and rebooting is why Android notifications are so good now. They were willing to keep poking at it every single time and trust users to like figure out what they were doing in a way that Apple just refused to with notifications. And the reason I'm so excited about iPad OS being a little bit complicated, which seems super counterintuitive, is because I see Apple realizing and having a willingness to like try some stuff, have it fail, and then change it the next time. Yeah.

That's not that's not the way Apple usually does this kind of thing. And that's like, so that's fun. So I think the question is like, are they going to commit to iPad OS diverging from iOS, which WWC, they seemed, basically there's two answers to this. Like there is the public answer, which is it's iPadOS now. It's its own thing. And then to us, they're like, it's still iOS. Like, it's all one operating system. And I think a big question is, will it diverge?

Will it actually become its own thing in a different direction? I mean, that depends on whether or not developers make, you know, feel like they can make money selling, like, like, like pro sumer apps. You know, a great way to convince developers that they can make money selling pro sumer apps is to support the creation of those apps so they could work both on the iPad and the Mac. That seems like a really good way to ensure the future success of the iPad as a computer. Apple should really think about that. You say that, Deter, and I believe you, but also, like, two weeks ago, I spent, like, $80 on audio apps for my iPad.

because it's the iPad, if people aren't aware of the audio ecosystem, there's these things called AUV3, audio units V3, the fancy new audio unit. And so you can have an app that hosts these like mini portable apps that are the audio units. And the audio units can accept sound in, send sound out, except midi in, and send MIDI out. So you can have an app that is, it is like built to combine all these different apps and that's like your effects chain or that's your that's your music it's so cool it's like a it's a whole different way to use computers and in my feeling and it's awesome and it's a great way to spend so much money so quickly oh well i mean it's only ten dollars and it will generate really great mini sequences and i need it and so you just buy it

how many apps do you buy probably like five all right i want to hear some tews man where's that SoundCloud link. All right, well, I'll work on it. I've got to buy some more audio units real quick, though. Ah, yes. The classic music production can untrue. I got to find that sound. Deeter, you also reviewed the iPad, which I think it's just an iPad.

Just an iPad? It's an iPad. Heard that one. I thought your conclusion was, this is more confusing than ever. It seems spot on. Like, why would you buy this one instead of an error instead of a used pro? But, like, I actually, I don't get it. Where did you land?

man, I am actually also confused. A air seems like a better deal because you get a newer processor. And like the screen is noticeably better, at least to me. But, you know, it's like that's 170 bucks. And like, so why maybe it's safe to like get the, the main thing with this iPad that bothers me, that troubles me is the processor is pretty old. It's the A10. And, you know, like Apple will support it for as long as they can. But I think that it's going to have a slightly shorter shelf life than,

than iPad Air would. That's interesting. I mean, Apple's usually not too aggressive in dropping support for these older iOS devices in particular. Yeah, I don't think that it's like a short shelf life. I think it's like instead of like seven years, it's five or instead of like 10 years at seven,

like that's the range or talk. We're not in Android land where the thing is completely useless after a year and a half, right? To be clear. But it is completely baffling why this device, which is like design,

for education designed for people that don't want to spend a lot of money they might want to give it to their kid one why the keyboard is still so expensive it's more than half the cost

of the iPad itself you did the interview with the CEO Logitech thank you for asking about the Logite brand name they did that for you yeah I appreciate it I spoke right into my ear holes

it was great but like they're not making keyboards that are like that much cheaper and they're just using Bluetooth whatever and then two the lack of multi-user support in iPad OS has gone from, like, ridiculous to, like, I don't even know the

word, like, punitive. Like, Apple should literally be indicted. Like, it is terrible that they do not offer this feature to everybody. It's available in the education market, but not for anybody else. If you want to give your iPad to a kid, to your child and you don't want that child to, you know, open up your work email and send your boss on email. You, uh, you eventually land on, well, I'm going to have to buy them an iPad. Like, that's, that's the end of that story every time. And TVOS, which we haven't talked about much here, uh, supports multi-user. Yeah. It's like right there. It's actually like really good, too. It's bizarre. They just like figured it right out. They're like, some people want to watch different TV shows

than you. Here's an entire robust multi-user stack. And it's like, You don't think people on iPads want to do different things? Here's an idea. A 15 finger gesture. It's a handover. It requires two people to make the swipe. That's pretty good. Here's my big question about this iPad.

And I asked you about it when I did the interview with Brack and Darrell, the CEO, watch. The smart connector is now on all the iPads except for the mini, right? Yep. That's right. It's a different smart connector on the new iPad pros. It's on the back, whereas all. all the old iPad pros and the iPad Air and this thing have it the little on the bottom. Sure.

Right. But it's still like three dots on the back of the, I think it's the same configuration of Pogo pins or whatever, right? This is purportedly an open connector. Why isn't there even just a dongle that lets you plug in a USB keyboard? Right. Like, theoretically, anybody can make something for that connector. And I asked Prack and Darrell, like, why aren't there more?

And he was like, oh, Bluetooth. Like, everyone has sort of the same answer when I asked this question. Like, why isn't there a $20 iPad keyboard that sucks that connects to this connector? It is the thing everybody with an iPad wants. Like, there's a reason there's now a hardware connector on Johnny I's magnificent streamlined design that defers to the screen. Yeah. Because everybody wants to plug a keyboard into it. Can I blow your mind even more?

Yeah. Try going and looking for, like, a standalone Bluetooth keyboard, like on Amazon, that isn't part of, like, an iPad case. Just like, you want a good knock-around Bluetooth keyboard that you can, like, throw in a... a bag, I wanted to use it with the Galaxy Fold, right? I used to have this incredible Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard. Yeah. The thing that flips open that you could like slot a tablet in is now it didn't foresee that the devices would get thin, so nothing fits in it anymore, it all falls out.

So I had to buy a new Bluetooth keyboard. And there are no good ones. There are zero good standalone Bluetooth keyboards. I'll find some for you. Okay. I mean, you have to be able to slot a... Paul's like, yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Yeah, but use it on your lap with a tablet.

Right. So you're saying the lappability of the Bluetooth keyboards are low. Yeah, there's no lappable Bluetooth keyboards. Does the tablet have to be on my lap? Yeah. Yeah, that's laughability, Paul. I mean, lapability 101. Have you even taken fundamentals of lappability in one of your many? So you want a Bluetooth keyboard, but that also has a stand for a tablet.

Yeah. So that it's laughable. And that stand could be separated or attached. You know, there's many, it could fold. It could do all sorts of things. Right. There's just, there's like, there's one company. that makes it and it's like, you know, the keyboard that like has like eight

RGB colors and blah blah. I'm just saying we live in a world of profligate dongle creation. Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. It is bizarre to me that there is not a USB to smart connector dongle. There is a better ecosystem of things for AirPods than there is for the smart connector on the iPad.

I just don't get it. And again, it is purportedly an open connector. They've told us several times it's open connector, but I don't think it is. I think that is as lockdown as anything. It makes it seem to me that maybe it's a subset of USB. Because, yeah, there's such a good point. It would be so nice to have a smart connector to USB. I agree, Nealai.

You're right. I'm just all conspiracy theories today. It's a real wild ride of a show. So, Deeter, your iPad review, I thought the subhead was great, no competition, because it doesn't have any. It was like, we talk about competition all the time. But we should generally talk about iOS 13 and something the other thing is very interesting. We also talk about, like, antitrust and, like, the pressure from governments

to open up. Apple opening up Siri to other music services because basically, like, they're starting to feel the pressure, and they're opening up their services to be in a more equal competitive playing field. So now you can say, hey, Siri. In the stingiest way. Well, right, but it can run on the watch. You can say, hey, Siri, play it on Spotify, and it'll do it, which never did before. Yeah. I think you still want to be able to set default apps. I suspect just the here. hint of like the antitrust pressure in Europe, all of the people talking about it all time, including us and all the other folks, I think it's going to push them towards default apps.

And I think the iPad becoming more computery and complicated is like it will be the first one to go, is my guess. Oh, I would love that. There's actually, there's now two layers of the default app question. There's default apps on the voice assistant, and then there's default apps on the operating system. So both Google and Amazon lets you set default apps. on the voice assistant.

But not any. I actually think that's like a mistake for both. Yeah, okay. Right. Like stuff that they have a partner with, right? Yeah. So like on Google Assistant, you cannot set, I don't know, Apple Music to be the default music player.

It's like Spotify and Google Play or whatever it's called now. Yeah. Google songs. Like whatever. Whatever it is. Yeah. By the way, the pro tip on the Spotify thing, instead of saying on Spotify, you can use Spotify like a verb, like Google.

Really? So you could, you can like just lift your. wrist, you know, to your face or say, hey, Siri, and just be like, Spotify music. Spotify, and it will do it. That's great. Spotify Ramones, and it'll just, like, play Ramones on Spotify. Spotify Ramones is a great thing to be yelling all the time at your wrist as you walk around. Okay.

The one thing I do want to talk with iOS 13, we talked about Catalina, some bugs, some broken stuff. When we reviewed the phones, we noted that iOS 13 was very buggy. Yep. We actually said, everybody, wait, like, don't rush out and pre-order. It's a real theme of Apple stuff. Like, don't rush into it. Let them settle down. They seem to be in a rush.

They've now put out 15 updates to iOS 13. And they want to 13.1.2 right now, right? Yeah. So the big one to wait for was iOS 13.1. And then 13.1.1 hit, like, a day later, and 13.1.2 hit, like, the day after that. It was just a rapid pace. I said, I think, on the show, around off and we read time, hey, we're going to, like, if if iOS 13, is like, like, if iOS 13, is, like,

get better. We're going to reconsider, at least the score. It's a buggy thing. Yeah. So I just want to give everybody update. I'm on dot one, dot two. There are still some around the edges, but it is far better. Like, I don't think I need to reconsider the score. I wanted to check with you, dear. Have you hit me show stoppers if you're reviewing iPad or us and all this stuff? I haven't hit any showstoppers lately. Like, it's, it has settled down. There's still some fit and finish stuff that's like,

what are you doing? Like, how and why? I mentioned. I mentioned the keyboard jumping around. I've had some real hassles with the share sheet. It's like freezing. And in messages specifically, I think Apple messages is actually like pretty bad, which is super ironic because I like committed to using I message. So my family would talk to you.

This is what happens with a monopolist. They got you and now the prices are going up. And the price is waiting for the share sheet. I had to reset all network settings on my phone. Oh, no, all settings. I had to reset all settings on my phone so I could send MMS messages, by the way. That's insane. Because Apple lets Verizon lock down the MMS settings.

So there was literally one string of 20 characters I needed to change in settings. And in order to change that, I had to burn every single setting on my iPhone. It was the best. That doesn't seem great. No, but that's iOS generally. That's iOS generally. Yeah. I would say that it's like they need to clean up a bunch of stuff around the edges, but it's

not like don't upgrade time anymore. Like you, you should go ahead and install it if you've got an iPhone. I mean, the one I'm waiting for it. I mean, they put out the beta that has deep fusion in it.

People are testing it. I'm sort of waiting for it to hit. Yeah. Then if that works, the camera goes the way I think it's going to go based on what I've seen already on foot and online, it's like every,

like if you bought an iPhone 11 and you haven't upgraded, like now's the moment. But I haven't had any showstoppers. So people were asking, and I think it's fair to say I'm not going to go and change the scores on the phones.

because they're fine. They're as buggy as phones are now. Like they've reached the normal level of frustrating bugs in like a first-gen phone. They're not at the chaos weight level. All right, we'll take a break. We'll come back. You know, do what we don't really do. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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Every week. The consistency that keeps this nation together. And it's working so well. Yeah, maybe we should actually be consistent. It's called, you know what? Maybe radio was a mistake. I like it. I don't know if you guys are, I've heard of this, the lynxys aware.

Okay, imagine. Oh, God. Imagine a Wi-Fi router, right? Or actually a constellation of Wi-Fi routers in a mesh configuration. And you think, oh, great, now I can have Internet. And actually, no, also, they can tell when you're walking around in your house because they use magic to do motion detection. somehow with some sort of Doppler.

I really don't understand. I don't think Lynx's is really describing the technology very well. But the Wi-Fi signals, they reach some sort of point of equilibrium and the timing of the signals reaching each base station or each satellite or whatever. And then when someone moves in your house, that disturbs that equilibrium. And now the Wi-Fi mesh has determined. motion. Yes.

So the positive way to think of this is, well, good, now I don't need a camera in my house, right? To know when there's motion in my house. I just ask my Wi-Fi routers. They tell me, the scary thing about this is that, oh, this is just radio technology and probably all Wi-Fi routers could be turned into some sort of motion detection to spy on us, and we're all going to die. This is like movie stuff.

This is like, there's a scene in Mission Impossible where like Benji is like, here's what I can do. I can hack into the mesh Wi-Fi router system and triangulate his position. Yes. That's dope. Oh, wait, I'm super into this. Just thinking about it that way. Made this way better.

I feel like this was a science project we covered ages ago. There was like, there was definitely a thing where like it was specifically it was like seeing through walls. Like you could use Wi-Fi to see through walls. And everyone was like, what? I remember this. Even at the end of the day, they are radio waves. They propagate and you can measure their reflectivity, right?

Like, you can, like, do stuff with them. Yeah. In Lysis. 2015, MIT researchers used Wi-Fi to want to see through walls to recognize people through walls. They could actually identify people. They could detect walking speed. Yeah. And now Lingsis has given itself the capability, which is very cool, I think.

For $3 a month. You pay Lingsis for the privilege. to be tracked through your home. All right, this segment's over. I can't. I can't. Like, everyone's just trying to find reasons to charge a monthly fee, and this is what links has came up.

We're a service company now. Our service? Knowing that you're in your house. How fast are you walking? This burglar is very fast. $3 a month. All right. Last big thing we got to talk about.

Well, two things. There's some hints of Sony. P.S.5. They're doing drips and drops. So the previous drip months ago, like, it's going to have an SSD so fast you won't believe it. Yeah. Which is great. This one, though, big one, new controller.

Well, two, Holiday 2020. So coming out next to your PS5. And the controller will have haptics that are unimaginable. And adaptive triggers. Well, doesn't that count as a haptic? Yes. But if you think about the trigger for just a set. Second, when you think, we've been talking to user interfaces this whole time.

This is our show. But the physical resistance of a trigger as a user interface as a thing that a programmer can dynamically change to give you information is super cool. And like this has been done before with lots of things. Computers have controlled physical objects and you use your sense of touch or motion to like gather information or, you know, give information. but expanding the realm of things that can give or take that information to something as simple as like a trigger button is like kind of cool. Like it's just like there's a programmer somewhere sitting in a room like thinking about like messing with your head by messing with the, you know, the resistance on that trigger. Like you remember the old, that old Nintendo horror game whose name is escaping me where like as you played the game, the game would start glitching. because you'd lose sanity points

because you'd see monsters. And eventually the game would glitch so hard that you would think that you thought the console had crashed. But it hadn't. The game was just messing with you. That's great. I mean, this is like,

I mean, my only reference point for video games is Metal Gear. Yeah. Okay. So, this is like some Metal Gear stuff. I'm into it. They also said they're taking out Rumble and doing advanced haptics in the controller,

which seems like just better Rumble and they just, like, I don't know what the difference is between, like, vastly improved Rumble and advanced tactics. It's tapics. They get to say it,

so that's cool. Yeah. I'm into that. I'm into, like, we're now at the point where Apple is selling the Xbox One controller

at Apple stores because you can just, like, plug it into, you can connect it to an iPad or TV and just like play Apple arcade games. They need to, like, move, the consoles need to move ahead

in a serious way. But I think Sony being like, one thing at a time for a year is how you will learn about the PS5 is very strange. And the fact of the first thing was, it will have an SSD is like my favorite.

Because what else would it have at this point? We're the last consumers of hard drives in the world. That's PS5. So I mean, yeah, it should have an SSD, but I am so stoked on it having SSD. I'm definitely at a point where, and a very fast SSD. I'm at a point where one of the reasons I choose to buy things on PC

instead of for my Xbox is that the Xbox takes five days, to load anything. You know, it's just like, everything feels so slow. And it's like, well, I don't want,

and it's not just the load times at the start of the game. It's the load times all throughout the game. And it really will be, I do think it'll be transformational. I'm very, very excited about it.

Also, 4K Blu-ray standard. That's a real thing now. That's, that's, I think, I think we're, I'm ready to maybe own some movies again

instead of just streaming them. Yeah. I mean, you can just buy, again, an Xbox and play 4K BlueRas right now, Paul. It's like $250. You just do it.

Yeah, but I already have an Xbox. I don't have a good reason to get it. Yeah. All right. And lastly, I mean, we're going to do so much next week with this. We don't need to do it. Also, the pixel is leaked, just up down and sideways. Yeah.

Next week, some Google stuff going on. So, like, my final guess is, actually, it's the same as a bunch of people's. It's a pixel 4, pixel 4 XL. I do not believe the pixel. 4 or 5G is going to get announced. It could be wrong, but I don't think they're going to do it. There'll be the new NEST Mini. The only thing we know about that is it's going to be easier to hang on your wall.

Okay. I do think that if that's all it is, that's a real dumb, missed opportunity because... Wait, Nest, the Hub Mini? Google Home Mini. Oh, the little guy. There's no more Google Homes anymore. It's just Nest. But when you say NEST and then easy to hang on the wall, I immediately think of the thermostat,

which is already quite easy to put on the wall because it is designed to be put on the wall. Anyway, the names are bad. Continue. Why are they putting gesture control radar on the phone and not on the speaker? Because the last time they added a cool feature to the thing they put in your house. They forgot to tell everybody. They got burned it up under the dad. That's what I got.

They also had to, like, remove the capacitive gesture control on the home, Google Home Mini. Anyway. So, okay, Pixel Mini, the Google Wi-Fi, sorry, Nest Wi-Fi, apparently, is a thing. People are pretty sure that's coming. Pixelbook, the Pixelbook Go seems like it's a thing. And then everyone is assuming there'll be a new version of pixel buds, but I don't think we've seen like a lot of leaks of that. Like not a ton.

Yeah. I mean, nowhere near the Pixel 4, nothing is. But I would have expected to see more. So I think we'll get it because every company on the planet makes earbuds now. If you don't, like, Verge is going to make earbuds next week because otherwise we don't count as a tech company. So obviously Google will have to. But I actually don't know. much about what they're going to do with them.

It feels like they tried to differentiate pixel buds with the translation feature, and that was fine. Yeah. Like, that's not what people actually care about. They looked a little silly. The Beats Pro exist, right? So, like, if you can't take on the AirPods head-on, which basically no one has in terms of size, you kind of, you land at, like, Beets Pro size, and that's a fairly competitive zone.

Like, suddenly makes really good ones. but you have to be better than a bunch of good stuff and like I don't think that the pixel buds were better than a bunch of already good stuff. They were not. So like that's just a tough zone. Like you're not better than the thing everybody wants, which is AirPods.

And you're not better than like the second place round, which is like the beats pro Sony zone. Like what is there to take? And I think that's just like going to. And now if you like Microsoft made ones that just look. look real silly. Right? So that's great.

Like, you're not even, you can't even play that. Like, you have to be, you have to be ahead of, like, they look like pop sockets for your head.

I believe that if Google thought it could make the best or the second best earbuds, it would do it, right? But I also would love to live in a world where it was not super important that the first party makes the best headphones in the world so that you can enjoy using your phone. Yeah, I just, I mean, it matters in iOS because Apple built it into the stack. Right?

So Apple has H1. It's built. Like, there is some special stuff going on with iOS where, like, the Bluetooth is better managed because the H1 chip. I have, so I do, I have both AirPods and beats pro. And, like, you know, when you switch the phone call to being on the headphones inside of the phone, like, literally an icon of the headphones you're using shows up. Like, it's, like, very tightly integrated. Yeah. Yeah.

Android isn't doing any of that stuff. Can I tell you guys a secret? Yeah. My earbuds? Galaxy buds. Yeah. People love the Galaxy buds. They're terrible for phone calls.

Their sound is like midland. And when you use it with an iPhone, it's even more midland because you can't even do like the little EQ stuff. Yeah. But wireless charging, USBC fits in a pocket. That's like, there it is. I can list a podcast on the train. It turns out that people will always prioritize convenience over sound quality. the Apple story.

I will say Dongle Life update real quick my USBC pack in headphones that I got with my Pixel 3 now they still work but the microphone doesn't work anymore.

So, you know. Look, this is your time. You're going to buy the pixel buds too. There you go. There you go. You're going to translate things. Like I said, we don't need to

overdo Google. We will overdo Google next week when all this stuff. We have been talking about the products that are coming. particularly the Pixel 4 for two months now. Yeah.

Since the Pixel 3 came out basically at this point. Like, yeah, we want to see how this camera actually performs. It is a very competitive moment. Great. We're going to get them. We're going to see them. We're going to live through the presentation. We'll be back.

We're going to go all in on it next week. Be ready for that. All right. That's the Vergecast. We did it. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Some things I need to mention.

We are hiring in case you want to help us make this show better. the verge.com slash podcast job. We're looking for an editorial director of podcasts. Big job. If you know anybody, if you know yourself in your heart, go to the verge.com slash podcast job. We're doing a survey to help us inform how to make everything better.

Anybody can take that. Even if you don't know yourself, go to the verge.com slash survey. Everybody take that one. You can talk to us. I met reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Paul's at Future Paul.

And I want you to listen to something. It's very important. X Verge reporter, Ariel de Hem Ross, is back in Vox Media. She was a superstar report. She's back at Vox Media, and she's hosting a new show for Recode called Reset. It's a tech news show. It's a broad definition of tech that looks at science, medicine, politics.

It's launching October 15th, and it comes out three days a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. It's a big show, big star, at the top of it. Ariel's great. Go in your podcast app right now. Search for a reset by Recode. Hit subscribe. Listen to trailer. Trailer's really fun.

There's also a little interview sheeted with Kara. which is everything that you would expect. It's just an experience that you should have. It's great. Go listen to that. It's really exciting. You can also check out Deeter's newsletter, command line, diverge.com slash newsletter.

It's really good. I mean, half of this show is me just reading the newsletter at Deeter and making him talk. It's great. All right. That's it. We'll see you next week. Google Time is here.

We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Propal code.