The Vergecast - WWDC 2019, a new Mac Pro, and updates to the iPad

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

This week Apple held their annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).  The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discuss everything announced — from the Mac Pro to iOS to iPadOS. Also, Google gave some updates on their new Stadia game service right before the show so the crew dives into that as well as the Palm Pre 10th anniversary. Stories discussed this week: -The Palm Pre launched 10 years ago today, here’s what it meant to me -Apple’s $5,000 Pro Display monitor doesn’t come with a stand in the box -Apple announces all-new redesigned Mac Pro, starting at $5,999 -Does the iPad make sense as a computer now? -Apple knows that iPad mouse support has broad appeal -iPadOS should make the iPad a better tablet, but not a laptop -Sidecar lets you use your iPad as a second display for your Mac -Apple reveals iPadOS for iPad with new home screen widgets and multitasking improvements -Apple Maps is getting its own version of Google Maps’ Street View -House lawmakers launch antitrust investigation into Big Tech -Apple announces new sign-in tool to compete with Facebook and Google -Apple will permanently remove Dashboard in macOS Catalina -Apple CarPlay getting design refresh and better Siri support in iOS 13 -Apple TV and iOS will soon support Xbox One and PS4 controllers -Apple’s HomePod speaker will be able to recognize who’s speaking to it with iOS 13 -Apple enables HomeKit support for home security cameras and routers -Apple wants to save your hearing and track your menstrual cycle with new Apple Watch update - Google’s Stadia game service is officially coming November: Everything you need to know  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Skylar 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. This week on the Vergecast, all WWDC, all the time. We're going to get into everything from the Mac Pro to iOS to the iPad. It's coming up. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge podcast Empire, an empire that consists of two shows. But it's small but mighty.

Rapidly growing. We're trying. Every day we try. I'm your friend, Nelai. I'm here. Deeter Bone is here. I'm here and I'm old. I just realized that there was a song called Empire by the, by the

leave Queens Reich that is now in my head, and that's just the saddest thing ever. I think a thing that Vergecast listeners maybe don't know is that Dieter listens to a lot of metal. It's like a real thing. I mean, I don't know if I call that metal, but it's not what you expect, but it's also exactly what you expect. Paul Miller is here. Hello. How's it going man? It's going pretty good. I do not listen to metal. I got a, that's my confession for the day. Okay. I mean, it's a, I mean, you should start. It's healthy. I've been listening to a lot of old nine-inch nails, like broken era nine-inch nails. Just because I think it's important for someone in the world.

Remember that 9-inch Nails used to be like a super aggressive band and not just like the banjo riff from Old Town Road. Like that's the modern experience of 9-inch Nails. It's like this one sample in Old Town Road. Anyway, listen to Broken. It's a good album. Anyway, so we're going to do something a little different this week. Normally we have two episodes a week.

This week, I think we're going to have 2.5. Just follow me on this. there's WWDC, which happened. Dieter and I have been getting, I would say, hundreds of tweets waiting for our WWDC podcast because Apple announced so, so much stuff at Dubdub. And we were there, we got to meet with a lot of people, we got to play with a lot of stuff. So that's this episode of the Vergecast. At the same time, there's another gigantic story happening with YouTube, in censorship, and all that stuff.

I was trying to put together the show last night and I realized I had no idea how to talk about both of those things at the same time because they're radically divergent. They're both really important. So we're going to do the Dubdub episode and then we're going to put out Vergecast B with Casey and Addy and we're going to go through the YouTube stuff. So if you're interested in both things, I know people want to hear us talk about both things, this is going to be the Dubdub episode a little bit later today. We're going to do an episode about YouTube platforms, all that stuff with Casey Natty because

quite frankly Casey writes a newsletter about it every day. we should probably let him talk to you. So I just want everyone to know what's going on. It's just too much for one episode. So we're going to try something this week and break them up. I know that's a lot of verge casts in one week, but quite honestly, there's enough to support it. If you think it's too much of urgecast, let me know. And maybe we'll do, we'll just do all the news in like 10 second bites next week.

But this is what we're trying this week. Just trying to be as transparent as possible. Okay. So here's the news. Here's the big thing I want to talk about. Today, the day that we're recording is the 10-year-old. anniversary of the Palm Prix. And that's the only thing that's worth talking about.

There's no other, nothing else in the world that matters. Dieter wrote a great piece for us on the pre and the community. This is basically how I came to know of Deeter, is that he ran precentral.com. Paul, I have an extraordinarily vivid memory of you, like running into the trailer at CES with an SD card full of photos of the pre on the day it was announced. I published the first hands-on photos of the Palm Prix. Yeah, I mean, but like sprinting. There was no connectivity in Vegas when this thing was launched years ago.

Right. I sprinted an SD card throughout, through the convention center to get to our trailer to publish the photo. And he burst into the trailer holding an SD card aloft. It was like, it's an unbelievably vivid number. But this is the day 10 years ago that it came out. People would go to sprint stores and buy it. So I just want to talk about it for two minutes before you get in the Apple stuff because it's kind of a momentous thing. Maybe people aren't as familiar at the pre anymore.

You've forgotten it. The pre and WebOS, everything is, like, everything is sprung from it. The cast of characters in the world of tech are all deeply related that project, especially in the Android side. Dieter, you want to kind of go through it? All of the history of WebOS? Well, yes, I would. Yes, Nile. May I?

We're going to do three Vergecast. this week. I bought a pre, and in my tainted memory, I believe it was a perfect device only ruined by Sprint. Is that true? No, absolutely not true. Sprint did not make it better. I will tell you that. But it was a compromise device that they had to get the thing out the door. And so there was a conflict within Palm of, are we just going to do this thing and see or screw it? Can we do it with web technology, and then like, well, the web technology, we can get that done faster. And so it became WebOS. But there was a conflict there and that, like, eventually led to, like, a series of compromises that kind of stuck with the company. And then they were always

the underdog. Anyway, the point is, the thing that made that WebOS, especially that initial launch at CES so amazing, was it was one of, I mean, I don't know, fewer than five times in the past decade and a half, maybe even, where there was a tech keynote where somebody got on stage and said, this is a brand new way to use a thing, in this case a phone, that you've never thought of before, that you've never seen before, and that is completely consistent and coherent and not just like a sort of an idea. We had it with the iPhone. I think you could say we had it with the Palm Prix.

Maybe we had that moment with Windows phone. Maybe. Yeah, we did. Yeah. Okay. At first Windows phone launch event, they were like, everything is squares. And we are like, yes. This will definitely work.

Yeah. But like everything that you use on your phone right now, not everything, but many things that you use on your phone right now that you take for granted were done first on the pre. So like proper notifications that don't annoy you that just pop in with a little thing that you can swipe away. Having your apps arranged in little cards that you can move, you know, navigate through. They haven't quite matched that exactly, but whatever. Swiping up to go to your card view, you know. having a universal search that goes across apps and settings and the web.

You know, just blah-da-da-da-da-da. Slide-out keyboards. Slide-out keyboards. The most popular form factor right now. Yeah. But the article that Neely was referencing is like the other thing that mattered was there was this really great community of just like nice people. And I do take a little bit of credit for it because I was the person running the forums. and I, you know, moderated them.

And, but I can't take full credit because there are a bunch of other people that really were, like, thinking clearly about what makes a good online community. In particular, like, WebOS internals did a really good job of, like, if you're going to have a jailbreaking scene, this is how you do it so that it's ethical and they're not stealing stuff and it actually, like, works right. And that was great and it works super well. So there's a bunch of that stuff that I actually miss more than I miss, you know, waiting for a web page to load on a Palm Prix. Yeah. I mean, I think as we, again, we're going to have a whole other episode about platforms and moderation in this moment. And a thing that Dieter knows really well because he started many of your favorite, I don't know what's a platform-based websites and communities. It's true.

I mean, Deeter was the editor-in-chief of Android Central. Dieter was the editor-in-cheaf pre-central. He started these sites. Creating a community that's healthy and respectful and productive and useful to the world requires a fair amount of curation and norm setting and moderation and it's just weird that we used to do that so much and we seem to have forgotten how to do it or forgotten that it's important and we've definitely forgotten that like how we can't get into this but it's not that we forgot how to do it's that we nobody knows how to do it when there's more than a million people on a single community it's true yeah

which maybe maybe that's why webOS never succeeded all right solved it yeah uh anyhow that's that part. I just want to point out the pre, because all of us have really deep memories of that moment in smartphone history. And it's really important to me that we trace those connections back because so much was in that platform and it's gone everywhere else. But speaking of platforms and dominant platforms of that, it was WWDC. Yeah. Dieter and I were there. Nick Statt was there with us. Varon, our video producer was there. I managed to say a lot of specs about the Mac Pro in a three-minute video. I was just like, it was nerve-wracking because there was

a bunch of like Apple people and video pros around me and I was like, Radion Vega 2 Pro Dual. And I'm like, no, that's not it. How many times does it take you to get the type of RAM correct? A thousand times. Also saying 8 PCI can't do it.

Eight PCIE4 slots is like a very, your brain doesn't want to think that way. So there's a new Mac Pro. That was the big announcement. I feel somewhat bad for Apple that their $1,000 monitor stands, like overtook all the rest of the news from WDBC. Yeah. Yeah. That's self-inflicted wound. That's just a truly self-inflicted wound. What are you doing? So we're going to break this up into two chunks, basically by platform, but not really. So there's a lot of macOS news with Catalyst, the MacPro,

the new display. We've got to talk about that. There's a ton of iPad news. Deeter just put out video, but iPad OS, it's new gestures. I highly recommend it because it really does appear like, Fredere, you just read our review and just addressed it. There's not a lot of iOS stuff, right? Yeah, less than you'd think. So we'll do that later. And then there's like just a grab bag of silly things.

You know my favorite news from WWDC is? Absolutely my favorite piece of news. It's that the HomeKit now supports video cameras. because Apple cares about privacy, the way they're going to do motion detection and like people detection on HomeKit cameras

is instead of sending it to the cloud, they're going to render that video on Homepods. So the HomePod is now going to do like local video AI stuff. It's just the silliest. I love it the most. But there's like a whole grab bag

of miscellaneous like that that we'll get to at the end. But let's start with the Mac because it's a big deal. Do you think we should start the Mac Pro or Cal catalyst first. Let's start with the Mac Pro.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I'm excited about the Mac Pro. You should be. And then we'll wrap it up. We'll start at a high and end end in the low of Catalyst. We're the medium of Catalyst. So the new Mac Pro, we've been waiting for it forever, two years.

The trash can. The trash can pro from 2013 was idling. People thought they were going to get out of that business entirely. Apple, you know, had their, they talk about it as like the moment they admitted they were going to make a new computer, which is. really funny. Like, you know, they brought in Matt Penzerino and John Gruber and some other folks and said, we've designed herself in a thermal corner, we're going to do a new pro machine, we're going to do a new pro display. That was two years ago. And they finally announced

it. And it is ridiculous and wonderful. It seems like it is going to be ludicrously expensive. But just to go through it, if you haven't seen it, you haven't heard about it real quick. It is a tower. It's built in a stainless steel frame. All the components mount to that frame, the outside sort of external cheese grater thing is just a slide over cover. Yep. Although it does have a couple of Thunderbolt three ports on it, on the top of it. On the top, but that's mounted. Like the, the, it's like a, that part's hollow.

That's the top. Yeah. So it's got two Thunderbolt, three ports in the back. It has eight PCIE four slots. Nailed it. Three single height, four double height, and then one is like half size. and that comes with a pre-populated I-O daughter card that has USBAs, it has Thunderbolts,

and it has a headphone jack. Apple's story about that daughter card is we put out of the daughter card because maybe you don't want it at all, you can just pull it out, you can do something else with it, maybe there's going to be new I.O. in the future, you can replace it. Yep. It's just, that's how they're doing it.

One of my favorite I.O. features is there's an internal USB port, this is true, an internal USBA port inside, because Apple knows that pro users often have crazy pro applications that require hardware dongles for DRM. And so you can just install that dongle right inside, right inside the machine. That's where we are with dongles now. Internal support. There's a SATA connection in there if you want to plug into traditional hard driver SSD, right? Yeah.

And during one of our briefings, they kept saying j-bods. And I forgot that that is a great term. It stands for just a bunch of disks. but they kept saying that's really the bay for J-Bods which is great you can put like array array in there I guess it's crazy spec

it has a 28 core 26 core 28 core 28 core zion 28 core 28 core zion that processor itself is brand new seems like it's very expensive one thing to be aware of what the processor is they opted to they're only offering it right now in a configuration with one

you know slot for the processor they're not going to have like you know dual processor slots that may be someday in the future, but given the specs of this chip and the thermal envelope that they've created, by the way, they've overdone the power and the thermals here so that you can run this thing flat out and it won't hit its threshold for temperature because the fans are supposed to be really quiet. They say it'll be quiet as quiet under your desk as the IMAQ pro on top of your desk. So it's probably a little bit louder than an IMAG pro.

Yeah. But the point is that there's these three fans that, like, blow those. stuff through and then they've got a couple other things. So the thermals of this should allow you to just run that 28-core Zeon processor flat out for as long as you want in theory. And that processor, I don't think Apple is going to officially support this, but that processor is socketed. So if you want to get crazy in the future, you can replace it. That's something that you cannot do with any other part of any other Mac, as far as I can tell. A bunch of dim slots.

And then Apple has this new connector module system called the MPX-K. connector. So those double-height PCIE slots, they're going to sell special cards inside of these MPX modules. So you get the regular PCIE connector, and then Apple's riff on that connector, another one that has power and basically another Thunderbolt bus on it, so that you get the system connection between the GPU and the CPU on the PCIE, and then you get the Thunderbolt bus and power, so you don't have to run a power cable to your video card. And you don't have to run one of those weird Thunderbolt jumper cables. So any video card that goes into one of these slots, you can address it from any Thunderbolt

port on the system. So you could plug it to display into the top of the computer, which I think is very funny. But that is, I would not say it's proprietary, but it's not open. They said they weren't going to publish the spec for this special connector. You have to go talk to Apple. But they didn't sound like they're going to be weird about it. Well, and there's also, if you have dual cards in this thing, they also, like, have a faster channel between each other. No, that's what Paul was talking about last week, the Fabric Link.

The Fabric Link, isn't that on the same card? Yeah, that's on one card. Okay. Infinity Fabric. That's an AMD technology that links them up. I do know that the power headroom that this is offering to cards is a pretty notable. Like, obviously, Apple is mostly using stock off the shelf. parts. But the fact that they've designed their own module, there is a lot more power delivery

to this module than you typically get with PCIE, like almost like almost a order of magnitude. So I think that is actually, I think, one of the biggest deals as far as like the potential headroom of this computer. Yeah. I was listening to the accidental tech podcast. Highly recommend that podcast. They were talking about the power supply in this thing. I forget what it's rated at like 15K K-1-500. 1500. And apparently in the U.S., the most that you are allowed to have drawing from a standard outlet, like, continuously is like 14.

Or, yeah. So it's like 16 or something. So they're like right at the limit of what's like actually legally allowed to just be continuously drawing power out of an outlet. Sounds about right. So then in these MPX slots, you can put radion. I'm going to get it right. This is from the video. Radion Vega 2 Pro graphics cards.

Or pro-vega. Provega. Killing me. So many words. Or the dual version of those graphics cards have two GPUs on a single card. So you can get up to four GPUs. And then all that cooling and power can just support all of that running flat out. Here's what you cannot do with this machine.

I mean, you can, but it just won't work. You cannot install an Nvidia GPU. You can put it in there and then it will do nothing. You can put it there to have feelings at it. Well, I mean, it's like when I said you can't do it, it's not like the police are going to come. It's like the TikTok meme or they actually charge their phone off of things. It's not like it like fires like lightning at you when you try.

Like you can do it. It just won't do anything. And we asked, Deeter, I would say, everyone in San Jose, why Apple won't support like people on the street, Chipotle employees. The crossing guard. Yeah. And so the answer that we got from Apple, most commonly to synthesize all the answers we heard was basically instead of OpenGL,

Apple has metal to support a graphics card on MacOS now or an iOS. The amount of integration work that needs to be done is a lot different than just putting a driver on Windows and Apple doesn't want to do it. Like there was nothing beyond it. Like they just kept saying it's like, you know, it's a lot of work and we're supporting AMD. And we'd like, but why do you be told them? And it's a lot of work to integrate these cars.

We take it really seriously and we're supporting AMD. It's like, but they're right, you could call them. Maybe they could do it. They've got, like, it's a lot of work. And what is absolutely nuts about this, Sean Hollister confirmed this. You can run the new Mac Pro in boot camp, so you can boot it into Windows, and then your Nvidia graphics cards will work. That's what I was going to ask.

So there's nothing, there's no physical limitation. This is a standard plug. Yeah, it's PCI4. eight PCIE4 slots. Yes, that's what it is. So if you boot it in the Windows, which you can do, you can, it will happily support an Nvidia card

because Windows will happily support an Nvidia card. But you cannot, you cannot in MacOS because Apple, you know, it's a lot of work to integrate these cards and we're just supporting AMD at this time. Yeah. I mean, literally, like everyone in San Jose was briefed with this answer. Now, I would say Apple kind of believes the reason people want to run in video cards is video games and Bitcoin. Like, that's kind of their brush off.

Like, the available AMD cards are very fast for most of their use cases. They're as fast as the available Nvidia cards. If you want to do compute, you know, you can, like, write your weird metal compute application, and it'll be fine. Like, what is it really that you're after? And then it was like, yeah, it's the Bitcoin. Right? Like, it's like they think the use cases are actually corner cases. I don't think that's true at all. Yeah, it's, it's really hard to tell. Is Apple making some idyllic future that we will soon ride in? I mean, that's the thing. Apple does metal. Apple is not making a future for everybody. Apple is making a future for people who use Macs and iPhones. Yeah. And so, you know, Vulcan is not like the perfect spec or anything, but that is a spec that benefits everybody when it's supported. You know, it's online.

It's on Windows. It's on Android. That's an industry standard that people have rallied around. Apple is building its own alternate universe and investing heavily in that alternate universe is only good as long as that alternate universe. You can do everything there. If you can't do everything there, for instance, maybe your machine learning algorithms were designed against Nvidia hardware or they use Vulcan. compute type stuff, well, you're out of look now. I mean, I think the answer is then you can just go by a PC, which has been quite fairly the answer for like three years. Like Apple's like reentering this market. It's not like that market wasn't well served.

So I think that's kind of their answer. What I think is funny about the sort of compute stuff you're talking about is the future of those applications are FPGAs, right? I mean, that's where like particular lot of mining is going. And Apple is actually putting out an FPGA for the Macs. It's called the Afterburner card. And it accelerates rendering of pro res files natively, so you don't have to transcode them. Any app that supports their render API will just get it for free.

So I think they showed us Premiere doing it. They showed us DaVinci Resolve doing it. So that's neat, right? A custom FPGA chip just to do that. It kind of reminds me of the Mac I had in high school, the Centra 660 AV, one of the shortest-lived Macs of all times. It had an AT&T DSP chip in it. Oh my God. And you could plug it RCA jack into it and watch video and like a 240 window. I had a power Mac with RCA as well. Oh yeah. No, there was a real moment when Apple's like RCA jacks are the future of this platform. Well, I mean, right now FBGA,

like we've talked about this on the podcast before, but this is a where a lot of the performance game, like this is how the new fancy cameras that we all love so much are working. Yeah. It's dedicated custom hardware acceleration. Yeah, I mean, people are really excited about this card. We have no idea how much it costs. We have no idea how much these video cards cost. We actually have no idea how much any of this really costs. All we have is the sort of base spec, which is $6,000.

Which, by the way, that is not a deal at $6,000. So Apple's claim is that it's a deal against a similar configured HP, which is $8,000. I believe Apple is incorrect. Sure. We'll see. We'll see. The benchmarks will come out, and people will put $6,000. PCs next to $6,000 Mac Pros.

Because most of the enthusiasts who want to check this out are probably not going to dump $35,000 to get like a spec-out Mac Pro just to have a bake-off, you know. So here is what they said to us several times, which is this is what we announced just because we have to have some starting place. But their belief is that this is not for enthusiasts, this is for pros. It will go into big pro workflows at Hollywood Studios and production companies. what have you, and almost every one of these machines will be configured to order. Yeah.

In fact, Neely, I asked multiple people some variation of, are you going to have this in Apple stores? And the answer was never, yes or no, it was we think that this thing is going to be 90% BTO, or I don't know what, you know, some percent. This is going to be almost completely billed to order. So it's like, ah, huh. Yeah. So, yeah.

I don't think they're anticipating that, like, a bunch of people are going to go buy this thing. And that's fine, but to me, it does mean that there is, like, there's a possibility that there's a dip in, like, if you look at the, like, the ramp up from, like, amateur to pro. Like, you've got the IMac, and then, like, you could, like, geek out a Mac Mini, and then you could get an IMac and then you can get an IMac Pro. But, like, is there a gulf between, like, IMac Pro and Mac Pro that, you know, 10, 15 years ago with art, with the old towers? Like, you would just, like, you'd buy a tower for, like, you know, a reasonable price. and then you just start throwing cards in it as you, you know, earn more money in your life. Like, there's sono speakers or something.

Yes. And then all of a sudden you, like, had a killer machine. Like, the idea that, like, a regular person would want to go buy a tower and then, like, upgrade it over time, Apple is basically saying with this thing, that's never coming back, those people should just buy IMAX. But I think that is true. I agree. I agree. I think those people are buying laptops. I don't even think they're buying IMAX.

Yeah. Well, I don't think they should, anybody who really needs horsepower, unless they can afford a Mac Pro, or less they absolutely have to use Logic or Final Cut, is getting ripped off if they even buy an IMac. Yeah, I mean, because you can buy a PC tower. But I think Apple's point is like that market is saturated, it's well served, everything is bill to order. Like, they are aiming for the very, very tippy top of the market with a super fancy computer that has an enormous amount of headroom. And then I think the reason I'm laughing about this $1,000 monitor stand, like, the most is for the people who are going to buy it, it doesn't even, Disney's going to buy that thing. Yeah. You think Bob Iger's, like, sweating a thousand dollar monitor stand?

Like, he's good. Disney owns Pixar. I mean, I can't name another company because Disney owns them all. But just imagine that there was another one. AT&T, Marvel. AT&T. Yeah. You know, they're post-production artists.

AT&T's post-production. What world do we live in? There's one more group of people that the Mac Pro is for. And that's for people that just have way too many gigantic, solid blocks of cheese that they don't know what to do with.

They need to reduce them in size. Okay, thank you. Dieter, thank you for bringing this up. This is the real elephant in the room. All right? Everybody called the G5 Mac Pro back of the day

the cheese grater. The cheese grater Mac, right? And it's funny shorthand. And you squint your eyes. You can kind of see it, right? There's holes lined up in the front, and there's handles on both ends, kind of like a cheese grater. And I feel like the design team at Apple took this as a challenge.

They're like, they called the last one a cheese grater, and it wasn't even very much like a cheese grater only slightly. We will show them how to produce a computer that looks exactly like, a cheese grater. And I think they knocked it out of the park. They did a great job. It looks like one of those fancy cheese graters with wire handles. Oh yeah. It's great. I mean, it looks cool. It looks smaller than it is, which is a, like, a feat. Yeah, I will say that speaking of feet, the feet on the bottom look really dumb. They look really dumb. It just looks dumb. They look like bad off. You know, like if you, if you buy like a bad TV stand from Best Buy and it's the modern one, it's definitely those feet.

However, you can buy casters. Yeah, the wheels, I was not at WWDC. I was watching at home, and when I'm watching a live stream of a tech conference, sometimes I applaud. Wheels was one of my applause moments. That's pretty good. So Paul, what do you think? I come to you with PC nerdery. Do you think they got it right?

I'm so conflicted about this. It's everything I love and some of what I hate about Apple. I love that they have pushed the envelope. In every sense of the word, they have created a computer that seems to have a higher ceiling for power than almost any desktop computer I've ever seen. It might be the most powerful computer you can just like buy straight up. But it doesn't solve the problem that I feel like, it doesn't solve the part of the market that I feel like Apple is underserving. I mean, it is serving a part of the market that they also were underserving, which was these really high-end production pros and stuff.

But it doesn't solve the problem of the fact that if I'm an up-and-coming, an up-and-comer and I want to use Unity or Unreal or DaVinci Resolve, and I want a decently powerful computer, but I'm not already rich. This doesn't do anything for me. Yeah. And I think they would point you at the IMac or the IMac pro for that stuff. And then I would laugh at them. Fair.

It's not unfair. So I'm very confused right now because, I don't know, we're 20, 30 minutes into the Verge cast. And I expected that we were going to be spending the entire first half of this thing listening to Neli discuss methods of local dimming on displays. Oh, is it that time? With regard to the pro display XDR. And before you pop off, I just want to say, XDR is the stupidest name. It is not a great name. It's not high definition.

It's extreme. definition. It's like, no, it's, it's the most. Okay. Apple, uh, has a very, I would say, reality adjacent definitions of, of HDR. Like, it's so close and you're like, huh. Like, definitely we were in a briefing and they told us the IMac Pro had an HDR display. And I was like, it doesn't.

Uh, they will happily claim that the iPhone 10S has an HDR display and it's like, does it? Mm. Because it doesn't. You know, like, it does. If you define it. to have it. You know, like, if you define a minute differently, I can run a four-minute mile. But like, but do other people define it that way?

Okay, here's a dumb question that maybe will help understand what this display actually does better. If I'm at AT&T and I'm mastering an episode of Game of Thrones, right? Yeah, yeah. And I can see everything that's happening because my XDR display has amazing, Contrast so I can see all the differences in the dark portions of the scene when I Email that to your Vizio television and you watch it in fake H- or plebeian H-D-R. Yeah, yeah. Will it look better because I had so much attention to detail or will it be pure black all the way across the screen?

First of all, we're starting in the email-based streaming service. That's the best idea we've ever had that shit's never going 90 email to Chromecast. Oh, my gosh. It's so powerful. Email to Chromecast. That's great. Just thinking about like a TV, a 4K HDR TV, like a Samsung HDR TV, will like happily produce 1,000 nits of brightness, maybe more. Like someone can go like 2,000 nits of brightness. That generates a lot of heat. You need to have a lot of LEDs back there, but it's big. So they're spaced out. Right. And so you can just do it. And they're also like the pixel density of that display is actually not very high.

Right. Because it's a TV, it's on the wall. So even though you've got 4K, it's like big and far away from you. To master for that on a computer monitor, to match a thousand nits of brightness, to get a retina quality. You're just packing more stuff in there. So you're generating an awful lot more heat. So Apple's big claim with this display is that you will be able to properly master HDR and you will see it in your work canvas such that when it goes to, you know,

to an HDR TV, which many of them will do a thousandths of brightness, it will match. Right. Right. So it's not like necessarily superior to a TV. I mean, it is because it's a reference display. But in terms of brightness, many TVs on the market are really, really bright in a way that monitors cannot be. Okay.

So Apple's big comparison is like a $43,000 Sony OLED reference display that will go to reference brightness for HDR but can't stay there and overheats and then dims to cool down and then flips back. And they're very proud of this demo. They're like, look, the light is amber. It's off reference. And I'm like, that's not relevant to literally anything I do. But it was like, that's the demo. So they've got this display. And the thing that is that is different about it is they've used this array of blue LEDs as the backlight. It's 576 local dimming. It's 76 local dimming. Zones, you know, Apple, I love Apple display stuff. Like, they do different things than virtually everybody else.

And I always think it's interesting. I think their displays look great. So the, each of those LEDs is like in a custom little reflector pocket that's sitting in front of a half mirror that re-reflects the light. So they're like shaping this light. And the LEDs don't shine forward. They shine out. So first they're using blue LEDs, which basically no one else does.

They're shaping that light really aggressively. What do you mean? Don't shine forward, but shine out. So if you just think, like, the wave guides are in and around the LED, instead of shooting straight at you, they're shooting out. I'm, like, spreading my hands out. They're shooting out into this, like, well, and that light has been collated and sent out. So it's more diffused from the jump.

So the light would be more diffused, and it would bleed, but since it gets shaped by this, pros will understand this phrase, a layer mask. The shooting it out means that the light is more even across the points of the LEDs. that they're shaping the light to be more even and then on top of that they find a way to have it not bloom so that one thing can be super bright and the pixel right next to it

can be fully black. And the question is what are they doing to LCD to make that happen? So this is really hard to describe. I encourage you to like just go look on YouTube for like a local dimming demo but the thing that you want is blacks to be black and whites be really bright. And doing those things

right next to each other is extremely hard. So like an OLED TV or an display in your phone. The pixel itself is the light source. So you're literally turning the light on and off. And so you can have a totally black pixel and a totally bright pixel and they don't bleed. An LCD display, it gets its light from a grid of LEDs behind the display. That's why they're called LED LCDs. And so local dimming is we're going to turn some of that grid off and some of that grid on around the portions of the screen that are light and dark. So if you ever seen an LCD TV bloom.

And this is, if you turn, if you have like a Vizio TV or any TV that does aggressive local dimming is Samsung TV and you turn local dimming all the way up, like, uh, and then you bring up a black screen and you bring up a UI element over the black screen. Yeah. Like an Apple TV, you will literally see the TV bloom because all the LEDs around the UI element turn on and all the LEDs around it are off. So you see like blues of light.

So that's the problem with LCD TVs. Apple is controlling it because they're, They're sending that light out from the grid behind the display. It's an LCD display. They've got 576 zones that can turn it on and off. And they're sending that grid out and more precisely shaping it. But they showed us this demo. This is why Dieter thinks I'm going to nerd out about this.

By the way, I'm fully nerding out about it right now. They showed us this demo. It was one of the pro display XDRs. And it was like successive layers of it were removed. So all the way on the right was like the finished image. and then without the diffuser, and then without the color correcting layer, and then all the way down to,

we can see the individual blue LED is turning on and off as an image moved across the screen. One of those layers, Deter, I don't remember this, one of those layers was not in color, right? As the image moved, there was like a monochrome image moving on the screen. That's not how a normal LED works. Yeah.

Or a normal LCD is like always in color. Yeah. So I asked this question very directly, like three times. Are you using an LCD to further mask the local dimming? Because that is one of the newer technologies on the market. We've seen it. We saw it at CES from like high sense. And they were like, we're not going to talk about that.

I was like, but are you using an LCD to mask the back? And they're like, we're doing something else that you can't just do it later. So I was like, are you doing it? And they're like, we're not talking about it. So I think they're doing, maybe they're not doing it at all. And they just don't want to talk about it at all. It's probable. but I think they're doing some crazy stuff to get that million to one contrast ratio

that literally no one else is doing because no one else can get it with an LCD. And this display looks great. It is super expensive. It's $5,000 without a stand. Yeah. By the way, the mount on the display itself is like a magnet. So if you watch the video, it clips onto that $1,000 stand with a magnet. So even mount it on a visa stand, you have to pay like $200 for a little adapter.

Yep. Again, I don't think, you know, if you run a big person, production company and you buy 50 these things, and you've got the racks all set up. Like, you're just, you don't want to buy the stand. So why would you? So that makes sense. And then if you're like, yeah, it's whatever. Like, I'm the editor of Game of Thrones. Like, I would like a thousand dollar monitor stand. They're going to be like, yeah, that's fine. You've made enough money for us. The stand is really cool. The display has two fans in it, just FYI. They're very quiet. Apparently can't hear them. Massive.

It can also great cheese. It's got the same cheese grader pattern on the back. And then there is a matte version, which is $1,000 extra because the glass itself is etched as opposed to like a filming applied. It's nano-etched, Neelai. Yeah. We were in the briefing and they were like showing us a list off and they, you know, they did bake off with all the other displays. And then they were like, tell us what else a pro would need.

And we were in there with another journalist and he was just like, I don't know. I'm sorry. But it was very impressive. I want one of these displays very, very badly. but I don't think my use of Google Docs and Slack are going to convince our CEO to give me one of them, but I'm going to do my best. Yeah.

Okay. Do you want to talk about Catalyst? And then we can shift. We take a break and talk about the iPad. All right. So the new version of Mac OS is called Catalina. I literally do not know or care what most of the new features are. I mean, it's like whatever.

But the big new one is they have made Project Marzapan. They've officially given it a name, which I almost didn't think they were going to do. they're calling it a catalyst and I was really hoping that they would you know make it good

make everything feel like that you know it belonged on the Mac and I kind of don't think they did I kind of don't think that they did enough and so we might have another year of like iPad apps on the Mac that feel

not great we'll see we'll see maybe all these iOS developers are going to do amazing work but I don't don't know that there are quite enough tools, but perhaps there are. But Apple itself only released a couple of these apps, a couple new versions of these apps. There's the podcast app and the something else. I forget the other one.

Well, they decomposed iTunes into podcasts, music, and Apple TV. Apple TV. Yeah, Apple TV might be the other one. But, yeah, that's the other big news of the Catalina is they killed off the iTunes. app, although it still exists sort of in terms of like they're a store existing. When you plug in your iPhone, sync becomes an option in the sidebar of the finder,

which makes sense. It's sort of like where your external disks show up. I still wish that they would have just brought back I-Sync, but whatever. And then, you know, the dashboard is gone now. And they changed the shell to ZSH. To ZSH. Neil, do you want to have feelings of the dashboard or shall we move on? Let's move on. Nobody cares about the dashboard.

I use it every day. It's trash. Give it up. You know the thing about the dashboard is that it was like the first time or one of the first times Apple just killed a third-party utility by building it into the system. Yeah, what was it called confabulator or something? Yeah, and they like reached out to the confabulator guy in there like, we love your thing. And he's like, I don't want to sell. And they're like, here's dashboard. And now it's gone.

Yeah. We saw some Catalyst apps. They're fine. But you can tell. You definitely can tell. The sidebar is a little bit bigger. Like there's things, like, you look and you're like, oh, I see that. I see you.

They're definitely iPhone apps. Like, the podcast app is 100% the iPhone podcast app. Yeah. Just with some Windows stuff. Some of that's going to suck. Some of it's going to be just fine. And I'm, like, not super, like, snooty about it. But then again, I use Electron on Mac and I'm fine with that.

So I am by definition not snooty. Yeah, it is nice. They have that low bar. Like, if you can beat, like, cute and. GTK or I don't know if GTK actually goes on Mac, but if you can compete with like a knockoff or a non-native UI library or framework, then you win, right? Yeah, pretty much. The one thing that they kept on saying, though, they said this twice in the keynote is how

excited their developers were to not have to have a MacOS development team. They could just have the iOS development team handle it, which is like, woof, man, you're just telling people not to hire developers. I see you. That's rough. Well, they weren't doing it anyway. Yeah, exactly. So that's that.

That's all I really have to say about it. We should talk about iPad, though. There's a lot more that's going on with iPad. Well, we've gone for almost 40 minutes. Let's take a break and come back and do the iPad. Okay. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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Yeah. It's, this is your, I mean, you gave me 20 minutes to talk about display LEDs. So I feel like we should talk about the future of computing maybe for like five. So the, man, I don't even know if I can list off all of the stuff that they did to the iPad. Number one, it's no longer running iOS. It's running iPad OS. What does it mean that it's iPad OS instead of iOS? It means, I don't know.

I don't know what it means. As near as I can tell, it means that now Apple has to commit to having real iPad OS updates every year, which is actually great. They have changed up the way that multitasking works a little bit. Now you can have that slideover app. You can have multiple versions of them, and they can fan out. You can't rearrange them like it can with WebOS. But you can swipe through them really quickly like you can on an iPhone 10, which basically means that that little slideover window becomes like an iPhone 10 that's like hanging out on the right side of your tablet. which is pretty cool.

They also have done a bunch of stuff with drag and drop for multiple windows. So apps can have multiple windows now and not just Safari, so that's great. Anything that you can drag, you can basically turn into a window, which is kind of wild. And then they also have like app expose. So if you long press an app on the dock, you'll see all the instances of that app, all the spaces you put it in. Or if the app is open, you can like tap on that same app on the dock and it'll jump into that thing where you can look at all the windows on it. And I want to clarify, multiple windows sort of means multiple instances of the same app.

So they could be different views of the same app, or they could be multiple of the same view in the same app, right? Well, it depends what the app allows you to do, right? Like, Safari, you can just open up the same page in two columns. But mail, you, like, I doubt that you'd be able to get, like, your inbox in two different separate windows. But you could definitely get your inbox and, you know, one of the, you know, one of the, you emails you're writing, and then a third email that you're, like, referencing in three different

windows, if you wanted to. I guess I'm a crazy person. This has been a longstanding thing with the iPad for me, like, as a writer, one of my fundamental things I do when I write, I have the text in front of me, and then I have reference text. It might be notes. It might be an earlier draft. And not being able to use the same app in that side-by-side way has been very frustrating. So I feel like they solved that for me, hopefully. Yeah, they didn't solve it for me because I still have to use the garbage Google Docs app on the iPad and that doesn't multi-window. But they're going to force all iPad apps to support at least like the resizeable window thing next year. It's going to become mandatory, which is like just great news.

I don't know that all this new multi-tacking stuff, like it's like some real finger gymnastics, right? And I don't know. Like, are people going to use all that stuff? I think people are going to take to that new, the new, like, iPhone on the side of your iPad thing really, really quickly. Whether or not, like, it conceptually makes sense to start, like, dragging sheets off and, like, take an icon and drag it over here and, like, how many instances in my app window do I have? Like, all of that, managing that kind of workspace, I think gets, we'll get really hard really quickly. It is actually way more complicated, like, way more complicated than the simple, like, window model on your Mac, on a desktop. So I read your piece today, which is very good, and I watch your video.

Oh, I haven't even gotten to the finger, like the new, like finger gestures. That stuff was crazy town. Okay, well, the drag and drop piece, I want to talk about the finger stuff, but the dragon drop piece, I think where Apple is going with the iPad is that if you just try to do something, it happens. Right. Right? Like if you're just like, what if I just like pick this up and slide it over here and like use five fingers and a thumb from my, like, and they're like, yep, that'll work. And I don't think any of it is meant to be a workflow. Right.

That's kind of like, that's my read of it now. It's like it all just kind of does stuff. Yeah. Right? Like, it all just sort of happens. And like there's an internal consistency. So if you just like keep monkeying around, more things will happen. Right.

I don't know that it, that they're expecting anyone to do it on purpose, I guess. Yeah. But that gets into the pinches because there's like 50 pinches now. Yeah. So they added, like one of the, like, one of the. One of the problems with iOS is you had to shake to undo, and everybody hated that, so they needed a new gesture for that. So they've added new language to the iPad OS, not necessarily to the iPhone, where three fingers does stuff now. So if you three finger pinch that copies, do it twice at paste.

If you three finger plop that paste, so it cuts and then paste, then you can go left and right, and that'll be undo and redo. My whole hang up with this, and I made a whole video about it, is like, I don't understand conceptually how someone graduates from, like, one finger to two fingers to three fingers. like they don't seem conceptually related to each other. They're internally consistent. So one finger moves stuff, two finger select stuff, three fingers edit stuff. So that all makes sense. But I don't know how like somebody learns all of that stuff. Well, two finger pinch zooms.

Two finger pinch zooms, right? But sometimes it selects. It can select on lists. If you don't pinch, you just hold them down. Also, if you tap three fingers, different things can happen to. And on your computer, two finger scrolls. Right. That's true.

Two finger scrolls, one finger scrolls on, on the iPad. But two fingers selects. Well, no, if you have an iPad here in the future, you don't have, what's the computer? Yeah.

Well, now you can plug in a mouse. And you can plug in a mouse. Problem salt. Also, you can barely grab the scroll bar on the side now. You can grab the scroll bar.

If you move the cursor around and you like move your finger really fast, the cursor like gets really, really big so you can just like move paragraphs at a time, which is kind of cool. One of the new gestures is,

I don't even know if you call it a gesture. is selecting text. So I'm sure everybody who's ever used a mobile device, basically since the pre came out, has had a problem where when you're editing text, you have a cursor, and when you use your finger to move around

in that editable text environment, all sorts of bad things happen, and it's never fun on any platform. Yeah. Well, so this is to Neely's point, they got rid of the magnifying glass, and they're just like, just move your finger around and we'll get it, we'll figure it out.

Are you trying to select or move the cursory? there's like a difference in how exactly you pull each of those things off, but Apple's basically like, we're going to figure that out for you with the iPad. Like I don't, I actually don't know if I can precisely explain how you move the cursor versus how you like start with a selection with the cursor. The on-screen demo, the first time Apple ever demonstrated this new interaction method of an intuitive selection, the guy who works for Apple couldn't do it. And like I don't want to judge beta software too strongly, but this is literally the demo. is designed to demonstrate that they have improved on text selection, and he can't get the motion right. So all of this, like, interface stuff, I think that for a lot of people,

it's not going to matter because they're just going to use it, like, they use their iPads. But it matters for, like, can you use it as a computer? But it doesn't matter. Can you use a computer as some other things that they did? For example, they watched Neely's review of the iPad Pro, and then they specifically just went thing by thing that he complained about in that video, and then they announced a fix for that precise exact thing on stage during the keynote. I mean, by name, like literally by name.

Do you feel powerful, Neelot? Do you feel vindicated? I feel like I said extremely obvious things to them about their decade-old tablet, and they're like, yeah, yeah, that's the one. I mean, like, they made it sound. Look, they did some stuff around like plugging in USB drives that is indeed novel, right? Yeah. So USB drives them out in user space are protected.

They don't want you to like, I don't know, install malware off of USB. Great. So that's different. Did that require a multi-year project for their operating system that is based in like a 40-year-old operating system? I don't know. Right? Like, I doubt it. Yeah.

It required somebody telling them it would be nice if like this totally normal natural thing worked. And they're like, oh, people use our device. is not at Apple Park. Yeah. So it's USB drives. You can mount local storage in the Files App. A huge variety of file systems, hard drives, USB drives, SD cards and readers.

Filesap also works with SMB if you are living in that world. And they're like, we think that's going to be great for people without AirDrop. And just like the way they said it was very much like, can you imagine? The dirty people. Yeah, it was a lot. They wrote an API so that apps can address particularly the camera stuff directly so you can import directly in the Lightroom, which honestly is just so late coming, but I'm so happy it's finally here. And then they added a desktop class browser. Those are the things.

Those are the things. Yep. They added a browser that they are calling desktop class. I think the verdict is out whether or not how good they did. So, Deter, you played with it. You opened Google Docs. He did the whole thing? What do you think?

It, the verdict is out. It is unclear. One of two things, one of three things happened. One, they took, like, proper mobile safari

and, like, did some real ports and, like, put it on the iPad, and it just works better that now, along with, two,

they have figured out how to do a better job of making touch work on a bunch of different websites that don't expect to have touch. Or three, they have gone through

the most popular websites that people complain about the most and made sure that they work. Amongst all of that, the thing they clearly did is they changed the browser's user agent to desktop Safari. So it is desktop Safari. That's what a website sees. And then when you go there, it will try and send you the desktop version instead of just, you know, assuming you're on like a big ass iPhone. And then Safari on the iPad will be like, well, this actually kind of sucks.

I'm going to reflow this website a little bit to make it better. and then I'm going to put like this layer in between that it optimizes it for touch. So they are like re-rendering a website and they're optimizing it for touch and they're quote unquote lying, I don't know, about what kind of browser they are. All that adds up to me, like they didn't take Safari from the Mac and put it on the iPad. It's still basically mobile safari, but it's more capable now and they're doing much more work to get websites that aren't optimized for mobile Safari. in the way that in a perfect world they would be. And they're basically like, you know what? Our mobile safari actually could work with your thing if you weren't idiots who didn't know

how to code a web page. So we're just going to like do that for you. So here are my questions. There are so many of them. Okay. One, just like philosophically in the world of responsive websites, which is basically the world, the tablet breakpoint is like gone. Right?

Like you're not doing that. Like you're still making a breakpoint for different sizes, but you're not like turning it into some mobile version at the tablet breakpoint? In some cases, some websites do, but I'm with you. You're not doing the like, here's the mobile experience of some subset of functionality, here's the sort of middle one, and then here's the desktop one with all the buttons, right? Like, that middle zone is going away. This makes sense on like the 13-inch iPad Pro, because it's a laptop size display, right?

It kind of makes sense of the 11th. Are they going to do this on the iPad Mini? because that just like to me is like the funniest idea. So that's like one question. Like, you know, that the whole world has kind of built itself around. Like there's an iPad class, an iPad breakpoint class. We're going to build websites that do iPad stuff. But now they're just saying it's Sop Safari.

That's going to be super interesting. How are they going to rewrite? Right. Yeah. Second big question, this one I kind of like, I think is even more philosophical. It's like, what is a desktop class browser? Because we, what we have always meant is, is a bunch of these web apps don't work here.

And you get kicked to using an iPad app and the iPad apps are often inferior. The example is Google Docs. Google Docs for iPad is just an inferior product as an app. And they were very clear that Google Docs on the web now works in this browser. They're very clear that a bunch of web CMSs work in this browser. I think that is, in particular directed at product reviewers.

We're like, I can't use this as my laptop. because my, like, Rinky-Dink CMS, I won't name names, but, like, we know these folks, doesn't work in it. So, like, I have to go to laptop to file. That is not true of Vox Media, by the way. Yeah. Chorus. We can use Chorus from an iPad right now.

It works fine. You can use Chorus from an iPhone. If you're, by the way, a major media company, you're in the market for a new CMS. Chorus is not available for licensing. I have this problem when I would try to send the newsletter for Circuit Breaker, and I could do everything pretty much okay. But then there's a slider that you can slide to delay the sending. And I couldn't grab the slider with the iPad. So I'd have to have a go.

If I was only iPad that day, a coworker would have to fit to slide a slider for me. But to answer a couple of your questions, most breakpoints are just based on size. So that's already pretty much a solved problem. The big problem with interactivity in web apps is that there are. There's a concept of a click and a concept of a touch. And you have to program for both. Unless you do a simple click, like most interactivity doesn't quite, it doesn't actually interpret one to one.

So it is more work for the web developers. There is no automatic fix to turn every click interface into a touch interface. But I think that might be the work that Apple is doing. Yeah, Apple's trying to do some of that on the fly. And I don't know if they're doing it like through like magic or like they've picked three or four, like, common, like, web interactions and are, like, just translating them. Or, like, a web monkey script. Yeah, like a grease monkey script.

Exactly. Or if they've got a whole bunch of, like, websites that they're like, okay, we're going to, we know this one is broken. We're going to fix this one. And it may be that if it's doing the second one, it may be that that's fine. Like, honestly, like, there'll be some stuff at the edges doesn't work. But if Apple, like, just has to go through and, like, when a website is broken, like, manually, like, recode Safari to fix it.

That sucks. That's not what you want a web browser to do. But if that's what you're going to be a browser to do. if that's how they want to run their, you know, their engineering time, than more power to them, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, when you add it all up, it's like they said it's iPadOS. It's just a marketing term.

And then they did all this stuff. And that the real question for me is, like the big, big question, is it going to diverge from iOS? Right. Right. And is the phone going to be one thing? And is there going to be an iPad team? And it's going to gain more capability that eats into laptop capability.

in a way that the phone doesn't need that work to get done? Or is all, a lot of that stuff is bleeding back to the phone already. Right? You can actually, like, plug a mouse into the phone. Do USB sticks? Yep, all that stuff is going to bleed right back in iOS. Yeah, there are some,

I think some of the three-finger gestures might not bleed back to the phone, but otherwise, yeah, it's all there. And the windowing. So basically the windowing and a couple of the gestures, that's the big difference. Yeah. Also, sidecar,

very excited about sidecar. Oh, can I tell you the coolest thing about sidecar? Yes. They Sherlock's not one but two very popular iPad apps with it. They did that. I never thought I would say this. They did something really cool with the touchbar. So like it's just a fact.

They did it. I'm out here. I'm standing touchbar. So you plug your iPad into the, into your Mac. It shows up. It's a little whack-on tablet. The stylus works, the whole thing. On the left side is like a bunch of modifier keys.

So if you're writing with a stylist, you want to hold down command and get a different. function out of the pencil, you can do that. And then on the bottom, they redisplay the touchbar. Yep. So you can like, you know, you're like in whatever Adobe app and you see the touchbar at the bottom with all its like little quick commands. It's just right there.

And it's like they forced everyone to make touchbar stuff, even though no one wanted it. And I'm just like, was the grand plan that they were going to make it cool on an iPad because it's like the one place where you see it. You're like, that's really neat. Like, they just got for free this, like, row of shortcuts in every app that displays on Sidecar because it's just the touchbar again. It's just cool. We saw it.

It was, I mean, it's all beta. A little bit buggy when we saw it. But I'm actually super excited about Sidecar. And it works over Wi-Fi, which I do not believe will be as responsive as a cable, but they claim that it is as responsive as a cable. Yeah. You cannot start it from an iPad. You have to go to your Mac and say send to the thing.

It's not like VNC. You have to like go do it. Right, right, right. But I think it's super smart. Okay. Do we want to go through a bunch of miscellany? iOS, iPhone is literally miscellany. It got dark mode.

They fixed the video editor so you can record stuff. They made a dope editing interface for photos. It's really good. Yeah. They changed the way that Siri works so that it's no longer taking little snippets of human voices and like putting them together like jigsaw puzzles to make Siri talk. They're actually just straight up doing computational voice from the jump.

That's kind of, oh, and then Apple Maps, the good Apple Maps that only exist in the Bay Area are going to be in all the U.S., I think, by the end of the year, and they copied Street View. They made a big deal out of announcing Street View, which Google announced in 2008. Yeah. It did feel a little tone deaf at the moment. Yeah. The audio sharing thing, I forget what it's called. Okay, before the pre, there was a TV commercial that probably sent me on the path that

where I am today of being a huge nerd is there's a palm commercial where there's this misconnection on a train. And so he or she, I forget who instigates the IR beaming of contact information between palm devices. And that's so cool. And then I remember when Bluetooth came out, I was like, oh, Bluetooth is going to make this misconnection situation even better. And now here comes Apple with what was already such, such.

a status symbol for teens, the AirPods. And now, if two people have AirPods and iPhones, they can tap their iPhones together somehow and listen to the same music. Yep. It's a revolution in cute, aspirational products. It is. I mean, you know, a few years ago,

you would just take one headphone out of your ear and just give it to someone. And now you can do that same thing with four Bluetooth radios and three computers. Yeah, like $3,000 worth of hardware. It's neat. Who doesn't love it? We should talk about single sign-on.

It's a lot. Okay. Yeah. I bet I can do it quickly. Good luck. This is a big deal. It has not been implemented, so I cannot tell you what kind of big deal it is. But Apple keeps coming at Google and Facebook for tracking. So you might remember they've blocked like third-party cookies in Safari by default.

They do all kinds of ad tracking blocking by default. other ways. Now they're coming after login with Google and log in with Facebook single sign on buttons, which are very popular, very useful, but track you. Like, that's the trade, right? Like, Facebook gets app analytic data

about how many of its users log into apps and what they use and they can correlate all kinds of stuff. Google, it's the same data. So Apple's saying, okay, we're doing login with Apple, sign in with Apple. So Apple says we're doing sign in with Apple. We're not going to do any of that track. We promise. We cross-arrow.

heart and hope to die. There's no way to know. Maybe Tim Cook is tracking everything you're doing, but he promises he isn't. But given Apple's entire history in public stances, you can assume they're not. So we're not going to track you. And if you want,

if the service requires an email address as part of the sign-in, we will automatically generate randomized email addresses per service for you that correlate back to your account, and you can turn them on and off it will. Yeah. Right.

So you sign in to Uber, you give them a fake email address a year from now, it turns out Uber's doing some shady tracking. You don't have to reset your whole ICloud account. You just turn off your Uber account in Apple. Right. And it makes it completely impossible for you to, you know, share passwords and across accounts.

And it makes it much harder for somebody to do the kind of hack that happened to Matt Honan a decade ago. The really famous hack where they got, they knew what his email address was. And so they went from like Amazon to ICloud. They got his email address from one, and then they were able to go to the other, right? Yeah. So if you have a random email address for every single service that you use, nobody will be able to, like, get from, it'll be harder to get from that to your identity. Yeah.

So that's a big deal, right? And Apple's position is developers really want it. The developers are wary of Facebook and Google, so they want to throw it. So they've come to them. So that's good, meeting some market demand. The power move is that the iOS development. agreement has been updated to say, if you have Google or Facebook login buttons in your app, you must provide sign in with Apple.

You have to have it. Your Apple will be rejected if you have sign in with Facebook and you don't have sign in with Apple. There's a Reuters story saying Apple also wants their button to be the first button. That's a little bit in dispute. But there's a Reuter story claiming that. So that's like a big platform owner move, right? How does that work with like Tinder, for instance?

doesn't have a whole bunch of buttons. It has the Facebook button because they kind of want you to have a pretty expensive account so that you can't be a scammer. Well, Barry Diller's going to have to sit down in his new Mac Pro code up a sign-in with Apple button. I mean, like, that's the answer.

The sign-in with Apple, like, from a technical level, it's like not exactly OAuth, but it's like OAuth-esque is what we were told. And it will work. There's no reason you couldn't just put it on Android or put it on the web via any web browser. it'll work in, you know, such as a safari thing. So it's not like Apple Pay, for example.

So from a technical perspective, it's not like there's lock-in other than, like, you know in your heart that your account is like with Apple. And even if you don't own a single Apple device, you could still use it. But like in your heart, like you know that like Apple is the one that's sort of the mediator for all of your accounts. And I think this is like another big philosophical shit for the company, right? I think a lot of people for a long time, their online presence with their online identity was like their Gmail account or their hotmail account or their Yahoo account or their Facebook account. Your identity lives in like a web service of this kind and your ICloud account philosophically existentially tied to your phone.

Apple is like disassociating that a little bit and saying anybody can have an ICloud account where you will protect your privacy and you can sign in with ICloud everywhere. Yeah. Are people going to believe that? Like, it's really hard to know exactly how this will play out, but I will say like this idea of like it's super important for individual security and privacy to decompose your email address from your phone number from your other online identities. Like those really need to become separate things because it's a huge attack vector for every human who has those things correlated. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a good idea. People, I mean, like there are wild. cheers in the audience when they announce this thing. There is this company called Okta.

Oh, God. That offers single sign-in for corporations so that you can have one sort of singular place that your employees need to sign into all the services that you offer, like expensifying, concur, and Slack and, you know, file bug, you know, whatever, whatever you need to sign into. So that is technically a third-party sign-in. Do all of these companies have to make a sign-in with Apple button now? If they offer like corporate single sign-in services? I think we know that enterprise apps get passes.

Yeah, okay. Right? I mean, like the pilot app that Delta deploys an iPad mini, like they're not going to be like you have to sign of Apple pilots. I mean, like they changed it and that's very aggressive. I would say they changed it in the context of on the day of WWDC, another lawsuit from developers was filed against Apple for antitrust stuff in the store, The FTC basically leaked, announced, like, they told some reporters, like, we're going to start looking at Apple.

The House Judiciary Committee announced antitrust investigations as a big tech. You actually look at Apple's stock price. All that stuff hit, and their stock price cratered while the keynote was going on. Wow. It's coming. If you had to rank who's in the most being investigated right now of the big tech companies. Facebook. Facebook.

then Google. Then Apple? Then Amazon. Whoa. Yeah. I mean, that's the list. That's Elizabeth Warren's list, right? Facebook Google Amazon.

But as far as actively, what is actually happening? Well, so we know that, like, the DOJ and the FTC have divvied up Google, Facebook, Amazon. That's like a thing that's occurring. And then we know that Apple is like on everybody's list. We know there's these lawsuits pending. So that, you know, Apple's position is like, look, be on the platform, like just buy something else. It's not a bad position for them to be in. But when they say, hey, if you use a rival service and you want to put your app on our phone,

you have to use our service, that's really touchy. It's like right on the line. Yeah. Like, what if you want to be Tinder and you want to have a tight Facebook integration and you don't want to offer login with Google and you've like made that business choice to put Tinder on the iPhone. Now you have to make the business choice to log in with Apple. Yeah. That's like a pure expression of iPhone dominance. Yeah, it's textbook. We are dominant in this domain, and we are going to use that dominance to become stronger in another domain where we are not currently. And their argument is, and that's great because we're not going to steal your data like these other jerks.

Right. So, like, you have to, like, really buy it. I think a lot of people do buy it. That's why they were cheering. But it, the backdrop of WWC was, like, antitrust rumbles. And then Apple's big announcement that got all these cheers was like, by the way, if you want to use her platform, you have user service. All right, let's very quickly go through the rest.

We're going way over. I'm just going to read some stuff. Apple is building a major defense against spam calls in iOS 13. That's great. Kind of overdue. CarPlay is getting a redesign. Oh, my God. The new car played redesign is great.

It's tunes and turns on the same screen. And I'm very happy. Apple TV and iOS will soon support Xbox 1 and PS4 controllers. Massive cheers for this in the room. Yeah. it is very smart. HomeKit multi-user support. Like, this is just a list of things that are overdue. The home pod will get multi-user support.

That's cool. The iPad won't, though. The iPad won't, bizarrely. It's it. HomeKit's getting support for home security cameras. Oh, they announced that they're going to work with Ero and Linksys to firewall HomeKit away from, like, the internet. So your home kit devices are, like, are, like, firewalled.

So they, you can't basically, it's not, you reduce the attachment. backfactor. Yeah. They definitely made it sound like you would need a new router for this. I can tell you that Eero just needs a software update. But it's just something I know. So that's coming. It's neat, I guess.

The video camera thing is a long time coming, so people are excited about that. Apple Watch got a bunch of updates. There's cycle tracking. Also sort of long overdue. 50% of the world is women, as you may know. Yeah, one thing about that cycle tracking, they, were really thoughtful about the display of it. They were really conservative about what days they were going to predict for your period.

And they were also just really, I don't know, thoughtful, I guess is the word I'll use again. When it comes to fertility tracking, you have to turn it on in the initial setup workflow of it. And you can turn it off at any time. So if that's the sort of thing you just don't want to see, you won't have to see it. Yeah. Which is like a super important thing to have done. Yeah, I mean, I think they obviously spent the most time there with watchOS. I think people are going to really like it.

Yeah. WatchOS, new watch faces, great, new monochrome stuff, great. Streaming audio API, which is notable because Spotify is suing Apple for antitrust issues in Europe. And one of their big concerns is that they were never allowed to make a watch app. This is a question. Could Spotify make an app now? And they're like, you'd have to ask them, but, you know, using these puzzle pieces, it is, true that you could assemble a puzzle.

So that's a big one. Oh, and it has a decibel meter, which I think is super fun. It's like the dirtiest thing you can do. It'll tell you when your environment's too loud. TVOS gets a new home screen, also long overdue, and multi-user support. That new home screen has like full screen, like moving previews, which is like the big thing that all, you know, smart TVs are doing. If that bleepin, bleepin, bleepin, bleepin, bleepin, has sound, I am,

lighting my Apple TV on fire. It's going to have sound. God damn. Duh. Multi-user support long time coming. TvOS is getting a home, like a control center. One thing I think is really interesting on TBS in the Apple TV in particular now is now that Apple's putting its app everywhere, they have to do something to make the box worth it.

Right. Right. Because if you want to watch an Apple show or use iTunes or whatever and it's already built in your Samsung TV, why would you ever buy this box? So I'm hoping that the box gets more powerful because they have to they have to sell it. Yeah. All right. I think that's everything.

Now last we can talk about the most important part of Dubdub, which was Swift UI. Thank you for bringing it up. Is that the feature of the week that we never forget, Paul? No. No, Swift UI is important mainstream news for regular people. Swift UI is really exciting to me. have attempted, I've never worked very hard to learn how to be an Apple developer, but it's always been very difficult, especially because Swift exists, but Apple's UI toolkit that you are

talking to using the programming language Swift has all still been, for the most part, Objective C. And so the thing that you quickly learn when you're trying to learn how to develop for for iOS and Mac is that you actually need to learn two programming languages, which is just, it's a little foreboding. Apple is finally making like a natively Swift UI kit called Swift UI. And it's also part of this like main, this like, um, trend in the industry of these declarative UI paradigm. So like Google's Flutter or Android Jetpack or Facebook's React, Swift UI really fits in with those. So whereas you do have to learn Swift to make an app with it, you pretty much already understand how to use something like this because it's a very familiar paradigm for most developers. I think it could be huge

as far as bringing in new developers to the ecosystem who were just put off like me, who were put off by all the complexity and difficulty. And if they want to make a green field brand new app, it seems like it looks like it will be a lot easier, more straightforward, and more fun to develop for. Yeah, I didn't get to go to the State of the Union developer keynote side, but just like I got the distinct vibe that Apple, as far as Apple is concerned, like, Swift and Swift UI is like, it's the future. They're not saying get with the program, but they're saying if you got with the program, I wouldn't be the worst idea. Well, it's sort of one in, one out where they're kind of deprecating the old Macs. the old way of making Mac applications while they're also bringing in a brand new

paradigm. I'm stoked. It seemed like a lot of people are very excited about this as well. I mean, more cheers, more demo cheers. I do wonder it's more like you made an app for our platform. We want you to spend all your time writing this code over here and maybe not this other kind of, you know what I mean? It's just more Apple ecosystem stuff.

But like what are you going to do? do. Yeah. You know? Paul, what's the comparison between this and like React Native? Well, the classic React Native term is is learn once, write anywhere so that you still have to write platform specific code, but you're all doing it all on that single paradigm. But React Native is JavaScript that then communicates with native widgets to get them, move around the screen and put them on, on the screen and stuff. So it's, you're not rendering a web page, but it's, it's still powered by JavaScript. So this is actual native Swift code that's calling native APIs.

So it's theoretically going to be more performant. Well, I look forward to your forthcoming iOS apps, Paul. Gone 90.biz. It's coming for us. I can bring Gone 90.biz to native iPadOS only. Requires a file browser. Yeah. Okay.

We're going to take a break. We're not going to forget Paul's segment. And we're going to spend, I would say, three minutes, talking about stadia because it literally happened today. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly

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Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Paul Miller. Yeah. Every week. All the time. Renowned for its consistency. And renowned for the idea that I always have the tab open before you start saying what I think is the best thing about this segment is that we literally do it every

week and it's still literally the sloppiest intro. Like, what are we most practiced at? It is this. It's called No More Notches. And there's a question mark. A lot of people leave off the question mark. But it's no more notches. So Apo hits the scene with a notchless phone that has a front-facing camera through

magical technology that makes the screen see-through when the camera's engaged. But like three hours later, But, Jeremy also has an under-display camera. So apparently right now, like, you're not going to have as good of quality from the front-facing camera as you would if you have a true notch.

But this does seem like this was the inevitable, this is the actual future, right? Yeah. Like a screen that disappears so that the camera can take a front-facing shot and then it goes back. Yep. Yeah.

I mean, the goal is to hide the, all the sensors, the fingerprint reader, and the camera under the screen. So here we are. It's the dream. No more notches, question mark. So I still think the future is the insane Assous phone that we saw where the camera literally like flips up. It's the rear cameras.

And it makes like Cybertron noises when it does it. So it's like, bimbrow. And then you can like rotate it to any angle because that's obviously what phones have needed. I think if Samsung and Apple have taught us any. It is that hinges are the highest of engineering arts. It's true. Yeah. Here's my conspiracy theory.

The big honk and notch on the Pixel 3xl was there because if you're going to have the camera behind the screen, you need to have a bigger sensor to bring in more light. You've got more space to work with back there. So they designed the whole thing assuming they'd get the screen technology figured out. And then at the 11th hour, like, that doesn't work. well, we're not going to redesign the whole phone. Well, I guess we have a big notch now, don't we? Way to go, guys. Sure do.

That's my conspiracy theory. That's a good conspiracy theory. I'm a fan. I think my conspiracy theory about the pixel three is it was decided to make people really want the pixel four. It's just something I'm working with. Google Stadium was literally announced today just before we came on. So I feel like we have to talk about it just for a minute, even though we just did an hour and a half in WWC. The news is that it costs $10 a month.

And it's launching in November. It's launching in November. $10 a month for the sort of like 4K tier. You can buy like the Founders Edition. They'll give you the controller. It's like $130.30. They'll give you three months free. Neat.

You still have to buy the games. You still have to buy the games. There will be a free tier in 2020. That's $1080p.60. So you don't have to pay the subscription for it. And they do intend to someday have a back catalog of free games. But at this point, Google launched a service, and it just took us three minutes to explain to you how much it's going to cost and what you're going to get, which means that they just did it wrong.

I mean, I am excited about Power Rangers battle for the grid. Yeah. So here's my question. So I have not paid for Xbox Live for a long time because I just play one video game, which is Madden, and I play it by myself at night very badly. But I just started paying for PS Plus because I have two PS4s. and I need to get a save file from one to the other. And it is literally easier to pay for a cloud service to do that than it is to, like, use a USB stick.

So I just did it. Great. So my question is, does this compete? Is this more like you're already paying X dollars a month for PS Plus and Xbox Live? Pay that same amount a month. You don't need a console and you get multiplayer and you get games. Or is it buy this inside of a console and just rent access to your video games that you buy from us forever.

Unclear. I think the answer, as always, with video games is, are there exclusives, which we know it's gilked by TequilaWorks and get packed by CoatSink? I know nothing about these games. If the exclusives are any good, that changes a calculus on that decision. Stadion does have the opportunity, the technology, like a lot of the limitations in multiplayer about how many people you can have all at once are due to the fact that the players are geographically distributed, and they're all trying to cheat and hack for your wow gold.

So Stadia has the potential to solve those and make very unique, interesting multiplayer experiences. And so they could have some pretty compelling. They're not exclusives just because Google paid somebody $10 million. They're exclusives because they only work on Stadia and then other possible cloud similar services. But until they have that, I don't see who this appeals to. It's like maybe a cash-strapped parent whose child wants video games, but you can't afford a console for them.

Yeah. But you're still paying $10 a month. Yeah. But you could do the free tier at $1080. And honestly, the question is, given the state of quote-unquote high-speed Internet in America, is it worth paying the $10 a month? Does enough people, do enough people in America have the bandwidth to justify that? If you have fiber, you seem like the sort of person that could probably. afford an Xbox one or PlayStation 4 or a real computer.

By the way, it sucks to be Hawaii or Guam because they're not launching in Hawaii or Guam for now. I will say that they're launching first in Europe because Europe has the appropriate regulatory infrastructure to make sure fiber is deployed to many people. Their speeds are faster and their prices are cheaper. But that's just me. That's just who I am. Look, this is why we got a race to 5G for some reason. That's right. So we can have stadia so that we can rent access to things that we buy. It's so confusing. Anyway, that's the news. It's E3 next week.

So like there's more video game news coming. We'll have people there. It's going to happen. But I want to talk about it because it happened today. Okay, we have gone way too long. It's been emotional. We talked about everything. I do want to remind everyone that Apple's idea about where machine learning should happen involves detecting motion and video on the home pod. It's very important to me to remind you that that's where

they're at. That's the end of the show. You can listen to Why'd You Push That button with Caitlin and Ashley. It's very good. I encourage you to listen to Decode with Keras Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media, Peter Kafka. All excellent shows available on the Vox Podcast Network. You can rate us and review us in Apple Podcast. Apple Podcasts you might know as a dominant provider of podcasts. So our producers ask me to make you rate us and review us there. I'm just saying those are just words I'm saying, I'm also saying break him up, rock and roll. Paul. Paul.