Upgrade - 303: The Return of Two Old Friends

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Myke and Jason break down the WWDC 2020 keynote, which featured changes to the Mac both expected and unexpected and some long-wanted updates for iOS. Did the iPad updates let us down? Are we ready for the Apple Watch to track our sleep? And who won the draft?

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 303 today's show is brought to you by the fine folk over at linode door dash express vpn and fully my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley i'm joining you joining you live from California where an event just took place, but I'm just in my house. You're just at home because it's WWDC time. We are recording this episode basically immediately

after the WWDC 2020 presentation ended. So we have basically as much information as you can have from when the keynote ended. There's more information pouring out as we record today, but this is our immediate reactions and we can talk more in future episodes about that. Now, if you're new around here, before every keynote, we do a draft where me and Jason, instead of doing typical predictions, we take a look at what our predictions will be and then we draft them and pick our favorites and compete to win. And we will now spend just a few moments talking about how we scored

this draft. Now, Jason, I will say, I peg you as the winner on this one, which is just great upset to me. I put you at five points to my four points. Would you like me to go through how I scored this? Sure, sure. I have it five to three. So it'll be interesting to see what you gave yourself credit for that I didn't give you credit for. I think I know what it is, but we'll get to that. I'll put a link in the show notes to the draft scorecard

in case you also want to see exactly what all of our picks were. But Jason, I have you as correctly picking that the arm transition would be announced, which it was, that Mac Catalyst would get some improvements, which it did. Yep. We see the inside of the Apple Park ring.

We saw it many times. That there would be new Memoji options and improvements to Siri. Yes. Did I get, was that what you had, all of those? Those were my five. I really thought I was going to get no gameplay demos. And then they, then an Apple person spent about a minute showing off a Tomb Raider game just to show that a code translation in Rosetta running on Apple

Silicon, uh, would be fine. And, uh, that, you know, I don't want to argue it. There was gameplay. He was literally playing a game. So go figure. So I lost that one out. Even though I already knew I'd lost by that point, I was still happy when it happened. All right, so I got changes to the home screen layout on iPadOS.

You can have widgets you could you could already add widgets can you actually add them because the home screen that i saw just had the widgets in the widget area to the left of page one like it currently does and i think the new widgets will be there but like is that a layout change or unless you can put widgets in yeah until a point where i believe that that tim that craig said that you will be able to get these features like uh on on ios but maybe you can't move them around. I don't know, actually. I honestly, looking at, and even looking at the website, I can't tell. So I think you might be right there.

That's my question is, did they show those widgets like doing stuff? Now, maybe the home screen layout, I mean, I assume, actually the question is, did they show it? But I assume that that last page, the whatever they're calling it, the library, app library, it's gotta be on the iPad is, did they show it? But I assume that that last page, the whatever they're calling it, the library, app library,

it's got to be on the iPad too, right? I just, I kept looking for images of either of those things on their iPad demo and I didn't see them. Stephen says yes. So you get that one. Ding. All right.

Okay, well, anyway, it still doesn't change the overall score anyway so maybe i can just have the point so it's not too much of a of a gap uh changing default apps on ipad os and ios i didn't think i was going to get this one but it showed up on a uh one of the word bubble slides which actually now that uh now that i know this now that we know this is the case it makes the most sense this is not something that apple really want to do um that you'll be able to change i think it's email and uh web browsing uh yeah but that is something that you will be able to do uh new apple watch faces and enhancements to messages on ios they were my four points that i gave myself yep i agree i agree so one one that's slightly in in dispute because

there's some concern about that that ipad os one but the fact is it doesn't matter um also i really love that in the members discord everybody's posting uh facts from apple web pages which is beside the point because it's not about what's on the web pages information but it's not about as we said many times it's not about what is true it's about what we saw in the presentation there is some uh question i believe that it was spoken about in the presentation but nevertheless we it didn't change the overall win this is uh your second wwdc win in a row jason snell congratulations to you i'm obviously thank you you won the tiebreaker i thought that was going to be auspicious when you won the tiebreaker immediately which was it will tim cook be on a stage and in fact he was the only person

who was on a stage but he was on a stage in the steve jobs theater so uh i i thought it was going to go your way there but uh you know a score of five to four we we had one i believe that was like ten to nine or ten to ten with a with a tie something like that, where we've gotten more. I feel like this is a combination of some things that took us by surprise, but also us being a little bit more bold and risky with some of our choices. But either way, thank you for acknowledging that I am the winner. Because it's something that we both had some hardware-related picks, and there was no hardware today, which was interesting. No hardware.

And it was Mac-related for both of us. You predicted new iMac, and I predicted new Apple Display, and neither of those things happened. We're going to obviously talk about the ARM or Apple Silicon transition, but at the very end of the presentation, Tim referenced the fact

that there were more Intel Macs coming. we can assume that that imac is coming i would not be surprised to see it announced within the next couple of weeks personally um whether that will come along of an apple display i don't know but uh it seems like that that imac is imminent, but not now. Yeah, I would be not at all surprised if there was new Mac hardware soon, but not today, not during the keynote. One of my picks that I was surprised, I think I was the most surprised

that we didn't hear anything about was a focus on mental health features for the Apple Watch. I still think that might be coming to watch os7 but with new apple watch hardware that maybe there's a sensor that they add which can provide a little bit more functionality there i would be surprised there were several moments where um but especially during the watch presentation where they where the watch presentation was very much like here are just a few of the features we're adding. They just said it, that this is a tiny sliver of what's actually being in the new version of watchOS.

So I thought that was interesting. Yeah, like there are these pages on Apple's website where you can look at all of the new features. I had a cursory look before we started recording today just to see that they were there. And there are lots and lots and lots of things, which is great. And I'm going to, as we all are going to enjoy uh immensely over the next few days diving through those especially with having additional time than we usually would

um during the wwdc week jason is there any of your picks that uh you got wrong that you were really surprised about uh really surprised i don't know about that i mean i i definitely uh i'm i'm kicking myself more for the ones that i had on our list that i then didn't then i didn't pick like i had a johnny sruji appearance right the chip guy at apple and he made his appearance and i could have picked that and i thought about it and then I didn't do it. The ARM transition hardware not offered, that was my last pick. And I thought that was a wacky pick that probably wouldn't go, but it would look great if it did. And it did not go. It did not happen. There was a Mac mini, as you prophesied, a Mac mini that is the developer transition kit. I'm just going to say on this one, I am pretty pleased about that because I would just say,

I listened to a lot of tech podcasts. I've not heard anybody mentioned Mac mini before I mentioned it. So I'm just going to go ahead and say, I called that one. I mentioned it here a few weeks ago. I'm going to take that, uh, that I called the Mac mini as being the transition hardware.

Nice. I'm pretty pleased about that one, actually. It makes the most sense. And we'll talk about maybe a little bit more why in a little bit. So that was the draft. You can knock that one up as a win for you. Irene, I reckon we probably only have one more keynote this year. So the best I can do is a tie.

Hopefully I can at least get a tie. That would be nice. So I don't lose another year. I just want to, before we move on with the show, I want to thank everybody who signed up for Upgrade Plus, which is our new membership option here on Upgrade. Now, just as a reminder, it is more content with no ads. You can go to getupgradeplus.com.

You can sign up for the $5 a month plan. But if you go to the website, really.fm.com. You can also sign up for our annual plan as well. But just go to getupgradeplus.com and you'll be able to sign up for $5 a month. And you will get this episode and all future episodes with no ads and more content. And in our Upgrade Plus post-show today, we're going to talk about what it was like for us to experience WWDC at home. What our plan for the rest of the week is and how that's going to differ to years past

where we've been in person in San Jose, San Francisco. I want to talk about if we're going to install betas or not. And we may also talk a little bit more about how this keynote was presented if we don't get to it in the episode. So they're kind of the things that we're going to talk about in our Upgrade Plus post show, which is available to all Up the episode. So they're kind of the things that we're going to talk about in our upgrade plus post show, which is available to all upgrade members. If you just go to get upgrade plus.com, you can sign up and serious, sincere, massive thank you to everyone that signed up.

I'll say blew me away how many people signed up. I'm so happy that people have been universally positive about this, this approach that we're taking here. And I'm so excited about it and the more stuff that we'll be able to do for our upgrade members in the future. Yep. This episode is brought to you by Fully. Fully's workplace furniture is designed for health, flow, and balance. During these difficult and uncertain times, Fully is helping people and businesses across the US, Canada, and Europe make the transition to working from home with modern, environmentally friendly, and ethically manufactured office furniture. I have multiple Fully desks in my life, and they're amazing. The quality of them is so good. I have got the Jarvis standing desk from

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feeling that we would probably talk about macOS first today because it would be the biggest set of news, but I thought that that would purely be because of the chip transition. I was not expecting, I think along with most people, that macOS would see the level of work that it has had done to it, right? Right. I think that's the big surprise, is that this isn't just a chip transition story with the Mac. It is also kind of, well, what they said was the biggest visual change since OS X, which brought the Aqua interface and all of that. And I think that's true looking at it again, only based on sort of what we've seen immediately. It sure feels like, am I wrong, Mike? It feels like this is the iPadification of Mac OS a bit. Yeah. And that may be may be okay so to say that has some baggage to it and i think i want to

talk about that baggage immediately because there are people that would say that or would have said that in the past and it means a bad thing that it's a bad thing this isn't what you want the mac to be but i think what you have to consider here is the fact that iPad has evolved and is continuing to evolve. And now Mac OS is evolving with it. And they're going to move together because we'll talk about iPad OS 14 later on. But some of the visual design stuff that they've shown in Mac OS, they have clearly brought to iPad OS. I actually don't think it's the other way around. Like some of the new toolbars, some of the new new sidebars i did notice that like the toolbars get the uh they get like a shading around them like the cursor support stuff on ipad os so

obviously there is a symbiosis there i would say it goes both ways because one of the big statements about ipad os was look at all these uh sidebars in all of these apps like photos has a sidebar now and i on the ipad it's like well photos has had a sidebar on the mac for a very long time so what it's doing is it's kind of pushing that look the other way as well and that makes them even more synced up but yeah the fact that um all the apps have round recs behind them which is a an iOS standard. A lot of increased transparency and translucency in the interface, which again, I'm sure you can turn off in the accessibility settings, but it was subtle before and it's even greater now. The new sort of simplified toolbar at the top of the windows,

like there's just a lot of changes that have happened here that are going to be surprising, I think, for Mac users because the Mac's visual interface has only kind of gradually evolved. It's not like they made Aqua and then they stopped, right? Like it has kept evolving and it doesn't look anything like Aqua now. And you can go through a screenshot gallery of past Mac OS versions and you can see how it evolves from version to version. But this seems to be the biggest individual leap that they somebody pointed out Mac OS Big Sur is also version 11. So no Spinal Tap references, but we finally have made it out of OS X.

Because it's not called OS X anymore. They waited a little while, but they finally seem to have felt free to increment it to version 11. So here we are. Yeah, and I think this is the right... I mean, honestly, we could have made the argument and would have made the argument that moving to ARM chips, Apple's own chips, would be warranted enough for a version 11. But they've made so many changes to ui design that it is looking different now i was intrigued to see alan die presenting the design portion i believe this is our first

in-depth video from him um obviously alan died taking over some of the role that Johnny Ives served before. Did you know that the Apple boot sound, the startup sound was part of the presentation? I don't know if they're bringing that back, but it seemed like it. I did notice that. That was interesting. I mean, you can do that on existing Macs through like a terminal command,

but I wonder if that Mac OS 11 Big Sur is going to turn that on by default. It's an interesting idea. And as well as making changes to a lot of the sounds, they've remade a lot of the sounds or adapted some of the sounds. I think, again, unified some from iOS. And I feel like there's going to be a lot of discussion

about the idea of Mac design, what makes a Mac app. This stuff has been going around for the last couple of years because of Catalyst anyway. And I think that, you know, me and you have said on this show many times that there isn't that thing that actually doesn't exist anymore. The idea of what a Mac app design is. So, so much has changed that the old ways of Mac design have evolved. And I think this is a massive, massive point in saying that Apple are changing what it is to be Mac design.

So we haven't talked about it a lot. I mean, first off, a lot of people are going to argue, they're going to look at this and they're going to say what I said, which is, oh, this is the iPadification of the Mac. They're turning the Mac into an iPad. It's outrageous. I could make a very different argument, which is Apple's Mac design has drifted in a similar way to its attention to the platform in general seemed to drift for a few years there, where they seem to not

be paying that close attention. There hasn't been a heavy design attention on the Mac in a while, really. And I would argue that what defines a Mac app is in large part based on examples from the operating system vendor. And on the Mac, it's kind of been all over the place and it's kind of been drifting. And what we see with Big Sur is Apple saying, we've refreshed our apps. They all look much more alike than they used to. The OS itself is different and it looks like this. And, you know, you can like it and you can not like it, but it is Apple saying, here's what the Mac looks like. And yes, it does look more like the iPad.

There's no doubt about it that there is a lot of design influence here because they're essentially building some different app platforms that are all interconnected with one another. And now they're going to be running on the same chips too, on top of that. And so this is Apple saying, in the 2020s, what a Mac app should look like is what these apps look like. And while that is change, and there are going to be people who are grumpy, I will argue that it is also a positive thing that the platform owner is making an effort to define what the platform is. Because I haven't felt a lot of that on the Mac for the last few years. It's been a little bit here and a little bit there, but it's been a lot of kind of drifting since we sort of de-aquified 10 years ago and made the interface a little more gray and they added some

translucence and then they remove some translucence and they did their dark mode and all of that. But like it's been, I would say kind of without a lot of leadership from the platform owner. And sometimes an abdicated platform owner can be good because it means that the developers can do whatever the heck they want. And it doesn't matter. But it feels like those days are over. Developers can still do what they want.

It's just that if they do what they want and their apps look nothing like all the Apple apps and nothing like the operating system, the users will notice. That app will stand out now and not necessarily in a good way. I liked the look of the control center stuff and the new, what are they called? I can never remember the name. The apps, the little shortcuts that live on the top right of the menu bar.

Menu bar apps? That's the phrase, right? Sure. Yeah, menu items, menu bar apps. Menu items, yeah. They've changed some of the design there, which I like the look of. And notification center and widgets coming back.

It looked very dashboardy when it was on the Mac, which was fun. But that sort of stuff from a design perspective is really good to see as well. I think that this really is showing that we have a new... This commitment to the mac idea that apple been talking about for a while i think seeing big changes in mac os to the point where there's

like a lot more opinions again is actually a good thing where it will definitely upset some people it will make other people happy like me i think it looks fantastic like i i actually consider i will upgrade to pixar because i want that design i think it looks fantastic like i actually consider that i will upgrade to pixar because i want that design i think it looked really great plus there are a lot of interesting features in there we're going to get to more of them in a minute but i find myself being a little bit more excited about the mac again just because apple seems to really be weighing in and pushing stuff and i think that that's very exciting It's always exciting when they do that. And talking about the design stuff, you know, like you can see how Catalyst has been a bit of a bridge as well, right? From just from a visual design perspective, like Catalyst apps

look closer to Mac OS 11 than they did Mac OS 10 in places. And we saw the announcement of lots and lots of updates for Mac Cat mac catalyst here way more than we got in its first year right from an idea of showing these are all like a big slide these are all the things i noted a couple of things that seemed intriguing like new menu and keyboard apis and new controls like revised date pickers and stuff and apple have made the new versions of map and messages in capitalist which which messages seemed like a, like a good one, right?

That's probably what they were going to do. We're going to talk about some of the changes to messages when we talk about iOS 14, but that made a lot of sense to help bring that up to the current standard without needing for Apple, I guess, to, to redo everything again.

And, and putting an app like messages behind catalyst is only going to help Catalyst in the long run because Messages is arguably one of the most used apps on Apple's platforms. Yeah, I was surprised. Even though I mentioned improvements to Catalyst, I really was nervous about that one. That was one that I thought I maybe wouldn't get

just because last year Apple didn't talk about it a lot. Now, part of that was the theory was that they talked about it a lot the previous year and said it would happen. And so it did. And then they didn't talk about it much. And they talked about SwiftUI. Whereas this time, what we got was a little bit of SwiftUI mentioned here and there, but a whole bullet point basically about Mac Catalyst. And then they got to bring it back and say, oh, by the way, these apps that we just showed you, Maps and Messages, these are Mac Catalyst apps as well. But it's all part of this unification story. And Mac Catalyst is there with the new design language that they started to push out last year that is now much clearer this year about what

they're viewing Mac apps as. And I would go back to something that I think we've talked about a couple of times since that fateful day where they got a bunch of people in a room together and said, you know, we're going to do a Mac Pro and we're recommitting to our Pro users and the Mac and all of that, is there's definitely a be careful what you wish for aspect, right? Because if you like the Mac exactly the way it is and don't want it to ever change, you kind of want Apple to keep its eye elsewhere and just not worry about it. And in that moment, when they had that meeting and all that, that was Apple saying, yeah, our eye was off the ball a little bit. And now we're

going to focus on the Mac. But this is what you get is it's now, you know, part of the Apple machine driving into the future. And that means it's connected to the iPhone and the iPad, and it's going to pick up design language from those other devices. And they're going to share things back and forth. And like, this is the result. And I I'm excited about it too.

Although definitely a little trepidation there too, as somebody who's used the Mac for a very long time. But this is, the alternative is it's a legacy platform. It'll never change because the only people using it are people who are sort of dead enders. They've been there forever. They're never leaving and no one else is going to use it. And so we're just going to park it and let it stay there. And Apple has decided that they're not going to do that with the Mac and that they're going to make it part of their overall product line and it's all going to interconnect. And so, you know, starting later this year, we're going to have Apple systems

running on Apple designed chips that are going to be running Mac OS Big Sur, and they're going to have this new look and feel. And it's very much going to be kind of like this is the beginning of the next decade plus of what the Mac is like. I was really excited about some of the stuff that's been shown on Safari. I also dug around a little bit before the beginning of the show. And it seems like a lot of these Safari features are at least coming to iPadOS as well. The privacy stuff was really interesting. So there's a new privacy report button that will show what websites

they're trying to get from you, basically like what their tracking info is. This is something you see in a lot of content blockers and now Apple's building that in, which is really great because now there'll be like a native name and shame type thing

built into the system, which may ensure that a lot of websites maybe stop trying to use so many trackers when people can constantly see just how many things are going on and how much data is being kind of mined from every person that's on a website. Yeah, it's more in line with their whole strategy and their whole brand of pointing out when there's tracking happening and trying to block some of it and all of that. The Safari extensions thing also is really interesting where extensions are very useful,

but they can also be pretty serious in terms of privacy issues. And so Apple implementing a new form of browser extensions, but having built into it that you can set them to be on per site or off per site and even like, allow it for the day or something or just this once. That's interesting, right? Because that's that's taking the extensions idea and saying, okay, they're useful, but extensions reading every page that you go to is not cool. So how can we build around that so that again, it fits in with their story pretty directly. And you can see that every product, every feature that comes up at Apple, clearly there, it passes through a filter of what, how can we view this in terms of our take on

privacy and security? Yeah, I'll take a quick diversion at this point to just mention about the security stuff, because I don't think we're going to have the time to dig into all of it today. What did you make of the idea that developers will now need to kind of self-report what their privacy stuff is and this is going to be shown on app store pages? Did you think that was an interesting thing to talk about? I'm not entirely clear on how much of that is self-reported and how much of that is based on a scan of the app but yeah it's it's a i think i think it's a great feature that shows you know shows apple caring for the users in terms of offering disclosure i'm sure that there will be a lot of conversation about this involving developers i think the developers that are doing the right thing here are going to not have a problem with it, but I do think some developers are going to have some

issues. It wouldn't surprise me. Surprise, surprise. It wouldn't be a surprise if there was a controversy involving the App Store where I would assume that whatever is self-reported, you have to agree that this is part of your App Store submission is that you're reporting this truthfully and that if it's found out not to be true, then you are going to get in big trouble and that will be bad. So there'll probably be some controversy about that. And I do wonder what they're scanning for as well

and saying like, this app seems to do this, this app seems to do that. We'll have to see. But I think from a user perspective, getting more transparency on what tracking procedures and policies a particular company is using is uh it's good as a user of software it'll be interesting to see just from the apple developer relations perspective how it works with ipad os 13 i switched to safari uh back on the

mac again because safari was so good good on iPad that it pushed me everywhere. But one of the things that I've really missed is Chrome's ability to natively translate a web page. I think it's one of the best features of Chrome. You go to a web page, which is not in your native language, it automatically translates for you. And this is coming to Safari. And I'm very, very excited about that. Because that's a feature that I've really, really wanted. So that one is a big, big win for me. Like I cannot wait to use that feature. Again, another reason, like genuinely, like another big reason that I will want to update

to Big Sur. And again, just like for people that don't know, I typically stay at least one version of macOS behind because I don't want to mess anything up with my audio equipment, which happens on versions of new versions of Mac OS very frequently. You know, like Jason, every single year we'll have a new problem with his USB interfaces and Mac OS story. But this is going to make this is like a

big reason, honestly, why I want to do this. Like I, I, for another podcast that I do, the pen addict, I very frequently am looking at pages in Japanese because of Japanese pen releases. And like I can't, you know, like on Chrome, it would just translate them all immediately. But in Safari, it's like, oh, now I have to go and open Chrome again. So I'm really excited for Apple adding this feature because that's one that I'm going to use a lot

and we'll be really, really happy with. There's going to be Control Center on the Mac. It's all intertwined with the menu bar, right? And I think I'm interested in that as as well that you can like drag things out of control center into the menu bar and like that's fascinating and and notification center as well that they've revamped that so instead of having the two panes of notification center they've got a notification center and widgets share space and the widgets can be widget design similar to that on iPad and iPhone. And Notification Center now kind of groups

notifications and stuff. And that's great because one of the annoying things about the Mac version of Notification Center is that it's this Today View and Notification View and you have to toggle between them. And they've cleaned that up in a way that's kind of being stolen directly from the iPad. But I welcome that because I do use that from time to time and it's not good over there.

So giving that a new take is a good feature. I'm looking forward to that. All right. We need to talk about the chip transition. Got to do it. But before we do, let's thank our second sponsor. That's how you get them, Jason. Our friends over at Linode,

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Once again, that's linode.com slash upgrade and the promo code upgrade 2020. That's upgrade 2020 for that $20 credit. Our thanks to Linode for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Jason, we've kept people waiting for long enough. Let's talk about the chip transition. Now, I think we need to get our name, like our kind of like ongoing naming correct here here because we've been calling it the arm transition apple did not call it that um they are calling it their trip chip transition to their own to their apple silicon so i guess from now on we'll just start calling it that right like because that makes the most sense i mean it is accurate to say I use the phrase Apple design processors a lot

right because nobody knows what arm holdings is and Apple silicon is what they're calling it which is fine I'm not convinced by the way that Apple silicon is a phrase that is long for this world it feels to me like they are going to make an announcement of what they're going to call this stuff when they ship the first computers to use it and maybe they'll call it apple silicon forever but i don't know it didn't feel like an uh like there was branding there it really felt like that was what they decided to refer to it because they needed to call it something and you know in the end perhaps there will be a new series of chips that'll be the you know

some letter num followed by some number series uh we'll we'll see maybe they'll stick with this but i wouldn't put a lot of money down on apple silicon like don't go buy your apple silicon t-shirt it's this was honestly i think they wanted to just not call it arm because they don't call the ipad chips and the iphone chips arm chips they just don't do that right it's not necessary um it's like they never really called the the chips in the max before x86 chips they just didn't call them that it wasn't necessary they were intel they were intel and this is apple and it's apple chips and they right it may they may never brand it it may just be that they'll come out with the you know m20 or whatever and say whatever name right

like they'll they'll brand it i'm almost convinced they will be branded the same way that they brand every other chip they make right like the chips in the the u of u1 chip you have the w1 chip we have the uh what do they call the apple watch ones they're w aren't they they're part of the w series but like they they give these names that's the branding that they use because honestly i don't think that they really care about branding it too much on those devices, because it's like, well, this is just part of the iPhone. It's like, you know, they have batteries, they have chips, the chips have code names. And I think going forward, that will be how we think about the Mac, the Mac have their chips, they're probably I reckon, M or whatever they call them. They have a name. And that's that.

And in a year year a couple of years time once they've made this transition which they said is going to be a two-year transition which was aggressive we'll talk about that in a little bit i think uh they just won't refer to the chips like like as a a selling point or as a new thing anymore it's just part of the overall package like that's just the way that macs are made they're made with chips that apple makes like it's as simple as that so they really put a lot of effort into this they put a lot of weight on this it was the final thing of wwdc this year which makes a lot of sense and they kept talking over and over again about how these chips will take the mac to a whole new level they're're going to make much better products, really kind of throwing Intel under the bus, but also saying that there are

still Intel Macs coming later on this year and that they're going to continue supporting them. But clearly Apple are putting on the line what we've all been thinking and saying for a while, that this is going to enable them to let the Mac take big steps and they're going to push into new areas, into new features, into new functionality that we've not had on the Mac for a while in the big jumps that they're going to be able to take. And Johnny Cerugy shared not only the history of Apple Silicon Design, talking about how they got there, but also talking a lot about what they're looking to do

and what they're looking to aim for with these new chips. And that's a big part, I think, of the story here. And one of the reasons why Apple wants to make it not just about a one-to-one with Intel, because there are other aspects. In fact, Apple has been building, taking a lot of other aspects of the computer and putting them in their own custom chips in the meantime right the the arm processors that are in a lot of modern macs are doing security and you know they're in the secure enclave and they're controlling the camera and they are the touch bar and they are the disk

controller and right like they keep on adding that stuff and that was part of his message was it's not just the processor, right? It's the processor and the graphics. And then in their in their little slide there, it's all these other things that are kind of like custom hardware things that Apple can build as part of this. And that that message is, it isn't just about us being fast enough because essentially what they said was what we've all been thinking, which is essentially when they did the A12X with the iPad Pro, they were there in terms of fast enough. It's about going beyond that. So one of their messages is pushing the Mac further. Definitely the implication there is we don't have to be like every other PC if we're not

chained to Intel. We can innovate on the Mac like we've been able to innovate on the iPad and the iPhone. Once we control this, we can decide what a computer is. We can decide... Hey, Jason, what's a computer? Yeah, well, whatever Apple says it is, maybe, right? They have the ability to spread out sort of like what they define as like the features of a computer because they're controlling the whole thing as opposed to sort of having to take this set of definitions from Intel because they're using Intel stuff. And so that'll be fascinating to see. I understand why they talked about that a bit because their story is larger than just a one-to-one switch from Intel to Apple. And in fact, viewed through a certain lens, this switch has been going on for a while now because the T1 and the T2 are Apple silicon that has been embedded in a whole bunch of Macs for a few years now. And they aren't taking over the central part, but they've been taking over other parts of the computer.

And now they're going to take over the central part, too. So, you know, really interesting to put it in the history of Apple doing this. I think they want to send the message that, you know, Apple's not new to this. This isn't going to be a surprise. Like they've been tested. These are devices that we've all used that are using Apple design processors. tested. These are devices that we've all used that are using the Apple design processors. And, and then they do the big reveal, which is, oh, all the Macs you've seen us demo are all running on Apple design processors, because it's already running, which is always a

nice, a nice twist. And then they reassure people about the third party story by saying, Microsoft and Adobe, they're already they've already got it up and running because that's one of the things when I've seen people try to sow some fear about this transition. What about big companies like Adobe and Microsoft? A lot of people are like, well, those guys, you have to have Rosetta, which they do. They have Rosetta too, because those guys aren't going to be there. And so Apple, of course, in this very first presentation says, look, here's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here's Lightroom and Photoshop. And they're all running on this thing too.

And this isn't even emulation. This is, you know, they're building on our chips now. So that was a really, it was very effective. Very effective to like check all the boxes. Because we've been talking about what would be involved in an ARM transition for a long time and in that presentation i watched as they just went check check they did it all all the way down they hit every point including what people are like are they going to really do put the effort into doing uh emulation for intel stuff and it's like they they did they carted rosetta out of the scrap heap brought the name back calling it rosetta 2 they're

going to do a code translation when you download the app which is really interesting like they're not going to even wait because they want to do that work in the background so that when you launch it it just runs and you know it'll be slower than native but they're gonna they're gonna do that too so like they've checked all these off so they could say it's seamless for users. So that's great news. One of the things that I really thought was super interesting is that they said about how all of the apps, including their pro apps and showed off the pro apps that they were running natively on that platform. Like, you know, as you say, like it wasn't just that they were doing all of the demos on this, which was an Az from 2018 the z is the 2020 ipad pro but it's just the a12x from 2018 with the extra gpu core so ah yes good point good point but it's still essentially

a chip from 2018 yeah that they're using to demo this and essentially that chip um in the mac mini that's the developer. Yeah, that's, it's like a, it's a current chip, but it is a current chip, which is not that unchanged from a couple of years ago. This is not their latest and greatest. No, it's not. It's not what's in the iPhone. And we saw one report that said that this is the chip essentially that they've been

using for the last few years for all of their testing. the last few years for all of their testing. And so, you know, they're saving the real thing for the first computers to ship, first Macs to ship with the Apple Silicon. And that, I think, you mentioned the two-year transition window, which is interesting because there was some conversation about like, well, maybe they'll keep, there are two ways to go here. There's the argument that maybe they'll keep certain systems around for a very long time running Intel. Like they'll keep Pro, Pro Max will run Intel, Consumer Max will run the Apple chips, and that'll go for a while. And the two-year window says, nope, that won't happen. By the end of two years, that Mac Pro, it's going to be running Apple Silicon if it isn't already. Okay, that's one way to view it. The other way is through the lens of

the Apple transition or the Intel transition, where it was like six months and everything flipped over, right? It happened super fast. And they're not committing to that. They're committing to a little bit more of a transition period. But the one that got me, that surprised me a little bit,

is they said later this year. So all the rumors were this was a 2021 hardware transition, and that's not true. It's going to happen this fall, presumably, right? So that's also very interesting that this is, this is happening sooner maybe than people expected. And, you know, I would argue most people probably thought the transition would take a little bit longer, even though if you look at the Intel transition, it happened really fast. And they're giving themselves more time than that. I wonder if they will do it quicker, though.

But honestly, two years, I mean, I'm assuming if they're talking about the entire line, they also mean the Mac Pro. Two years is faster than I would have thought they would have had an ARM chip for the, or an Apple design chip for the Mac Pro, honestly. Well, how often do they turn over some of their systems, right? Like Mac Mini and Mac Pro and like, they have to turn over every single system in a given two year period. I'm not sure they do, right? I mean, you can probably find a two year period where they do, but they are committing to updating every single Mac, updating or eliminating, I suppose, every single Mac in a two-year period where they do but they are committing to updating every single mac updating or eliminating i suppose every single mac in a two-year period that begins later this

year when they ship the first one and and that's not unreasonable i think it would be a lot harder for them to do it in six months so they announced a selection of things for developers one new version of xcode obviously the version shipping i guess today will feature the tools that you need and they did that thing that they did i guess they always say uh you can just recompile and get it up and running in a matter of days which again these are this is there's a lot of asterisks to this which we will see play out over the next few days? In theory, probably. In most instances, probably not. And even in the best case scenario, how much work is really required, right? Like we saw this with Catalyst,

that even Catalyst apps that spent a lot of time having work done to them still had a lot of rough edges. So Catalyst is different, obviously, because it's like the stuff that is in front of you rather than the stuff that's way deep down into the system. So there's clear differences there. But it's going to be a case of just waiting and seeing. They did announce the return of two old friends, Universal.

Got Universal 2. So you'll be able to ship binaries. I guess this will be in the Mac App Store and outside the Mac App Store. Probably this is mostly focused for outside because the Mac App Store delivers just what you need, doesn't it? So the

universal binaries, meaning that if you download an application, it will have what you need for Intel and for Apple's design chips, so it will have everything you need for Intel and for Apple's design chips. So it will have everything you need to run on whatever system is being installed. And also Rosetta 2, which will be emulation of Intel. They said that it's going to be faster, more powerful, more compatible than the original Rosetta was. It will do the translation on the install of the application rather than when you open the app, which is a really clever way of doing it. I don't know enough to know

why they didn't do that the first time, but that sure seems like the logical way of doing things. And Apple say that this could even handle complex pro apps and they demoed Maya, the 3D modeling application. And if that could run, like that's pretty great. So again, with any type of emulationulation it's not going to be exactly the same but you have a margin of error that you can get things to but when you have companies like microsoft and adobe committing publicly that they will have their stuff ready i mean when is the

question but they'll have it ready for shipping that's pretty good apple is in a very different position now than when it was with the intel transition yep in its kind of standing as a large corporate player so microsoft and adobe are probably much more willing or feel much more pressured to make these changes quickly than they did with transition to Intel would be my expectation. I agree. Some of the speculation I saw out there about this transition was from people who don't seem to understand Apple and where the Mac is and Apple's relationship with third-party developers, large ones like Adobe and Microsoft, because I saw a lot of people who were sort of saying, you know, good luck, Apple doing a chip transition and all of that. And it's like, no, this is going to be, I think this is shaping up to be an easier chip transition than Intel,

in part, by the way, because I think they've been laying the groundwork for this for a few years, whereas the Intel transition, they were hedging against PowerPC by keeping the Intel project around. But I think it probably happened a lot faster and with a lot less planning. And this feels like something that they've been working on executing for multiple years, right? Like for maybe three or four years, they've been thinking that this is where they're going to go, and they've been getting everything in place to do it. And so I think it is going to be a lot more seamless. Also, let's not forget the PowerPC to Intel transition for developers. So many developers were using CodeWarrior as their development environment, and Apple had to get everybody over basically to Xcode. There was a

slide that they did during that WWDC where Steve Jobs said, like, so here's how it works. If you're already on Xcode, you'll compile for Intel. If you're already on Xcode, you'll compile for Intel. If you're not on Xcode, you'll move to Xcode and then compile for Intel. And it was like, that was one of the steps. It'll take a little longer because first you must move to Xcode. Well, everybody is using Xcode now for everything. And that gives Apple more control and more of the ability to say like, now we make the move.

It's going to be not, there will always be issues, but like it's going to be way easier because it's planned because there's a unity of tools being used by most Mac developers. Again, they're going to be gotchas here and there, but I think this is going to actually be smoother

for a lot of reasons. iPhone and iPad apps will be able to run natively on the platform there i have so many questions about this one i think it is wild that they're doing it because they just look like iphone apps so i mean i guess the ipad versions might inherit some of the cursor support stuff which might make that a bit nicer right but this is a very peculiar because this is a thing that they've done just because they can but i don't know if i would have done that my connection died um during this part and i was feverishly asking you know like switching to cellular on my

ipad and trying to get it up and running again. And so I kind of missed this part because I was like, what are they saying exactly? So I don't know. I really don't know how this is going to work and what it's going to look like. But they showed a demo of Monument Valley and a guitar app. I saw that. And they were very clearly just iOS apps in Windows. And I mean, we were expecting iPhone apps coming to Cat to catalyst i guess that's not happening now and it would just be this instead but i like do you get these apps from the app store like where do they come from and i guess you do and do you see like this is just such a weird thing to to do i guess you say like as i said like it might be better for like fully optimized ipad apps will work nicer i said like it might be better for like fully optimized

ipad apps will work nicer i guess because it might just look like the cursor but still very just very a very peculiar thing to do i mean yes you can do it and now you can say you have way more apps in the mac app store than you did before but i'm i'm just not i'm not convinced yeah that's true. Although it's great for the Mac App Store. Look how lively the Mac App Store is now. We had millions of apps join the App Store when we moved to our own chips.

So these are all momentous things. And this is something I just said, and I'm going to say it again. It all is momentous, momentous change for the Mac. And yet, not super surprising in the other way, because like, it's been clear that Apple could do all of this stuff. It was always just a question of would they want to and when would they want to? And I think it has to do with them having this plan and moving all of the pieces forward

over the course of several years to get to the point where they can do stuff like this and say, sure, we're going to translate Intel apps and we're going to let you build new apps on our chips. And we're going to let you move your iOS apps into the Mac app store and they'll just run. And like all of these things have been sitting there, but it is interesting to see them pull the trigger on all these things you know and say all right here we go it's it's all happening now but that's where we are it's all happening right now also i should mention they they shouted out virtualization technology and i thought that was really interesting and they mentioned linux and docker now windows who knows but like i think But like, I think when they talk about virtualization, I think that actually gives me some hope that there may down the road be virtualization solutions for Windows on this platform as well.

Not mentioned now, and that's fine. are thinking about virtualization at all it makes me think that there will be if they're bringing in new virtualization technology that they're well aware of one of the most virtualized things on their platform right and it may be that it's not ready it may be that there are issues are they virtualizing uh a uh an emulating intel windows are they trying to virtualize uh arm version of windows and can they not do that yet is there not a version available that will work for them to do that maybe it will never happen but i would say people who are like oh forget it um the fact that apple mentioned virtualization even though they didn't mention Windows virtualization, I think suggests that they are aware of this issue. That doesn't necessarily mean

that they're going to make it available, but at least know, I guess, right? Like, I don't know. I think it means that there's groundwork being laid here so that it could happen later. But I do like the message it sends to developers, especially saying, if you need a virtualized Linux environment

or like a Docker container or something, we're actually aware that people use our computers for this stuff. And we've built in new virtualization tech. So the implication here is it will be better than the stuff that's in the current version of macOS to do this stuff. So that's cool.

So going along with this apple announced the universal app quick start program and this feed this is like a program that developers have to apply for and it's basically to give them help to give them assistance one-on-one assistance when needed i think being able to talk to app review teams and get expedited support tickets and the developer transition kit which is a Mac Mini so developers have to apply for it and their applications will be reviewed

I guess this is to stop anyone from just being able to buy one so like your boy over here can't just roll up and give Apple however much money it is I don't recall how much money they said it would be. It's $500 apparently. And get one of these ARM Mac minis to show to

Twitter how fast macOS runs or doesn't on ARM. That's what they're doing. This is the right way of doing it to try and weed out some of that. Now, of course, there are people that straddle the line, right? Like, if Steve Trout Smith gets one, provided that there are no...

I'm probably sure there are lots and lots of things that you have to sign where you probably can't do this stuff. But, you know, like someone like Steve has both a reason for this software, for this hardware, but also shares, like is a great resource for people online.

So I expect that to get the kit, James Thompson sent us in the chat room that there was no price mentioned in the application when he applied, but I guess we'll see in that. I'm sure there's a lot of paperwork that needs to be signed to try and weed out the people that genuinely will be able to take use of it and maybe those that wouldn't. But it's cool that they have a program and unfortunately it's not the iPad Pro as we hoped it might be.

It's not the iPad Pro. This is fine. This is them actually making an effort to put together this hardware. I hope it is reusable in whatever the Mac mini update is, that they can use some of this work to do that. But that's just fine.

More follow-up from the RelayFM members. Discord, it's $500. You're right, Jason. Yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to say about the Mac today? So much time spent on the Mac. I like it. I like to see it. I think it's a big change i think

we're gonna have summer to adapt um yeah so so i can't wait to try the um the the new version of mac os for the design stuff because that you know chip transitions are dramatic and exciting but in the end you know i don't think of that mac i used that ran a power pc chip and that mac i used as that ran an intel chip and think oh boy all the colors were different when i ran on power pc because you know in the end it was a mac um so in terms of direct impact on like how we do our jobs and and use our computers every day some of the visual changes may be much more important so i'm looking forward to trying those out and seeing kind of what the heck they're doing to remake the mac and how it feels and it feels like i'm using a big ipad or not this episode is brought to you by doordash you've got

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That's $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order when you download the DoorDash app in the App Store and enter the code UPGRADE. So go download it now and don't forget that code is UPGRADE for $5 off your first order with DoorDash. Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Let's talk about iOS 14 now, Jason. Okay. The first kind of thing that Craig spoke about was a selection of things that are encapsulated

into the experience of iOS 14, especially on the iPhone. So there were three headings for this. There was the home screen, there was widgets, and there was picture-in-picture video on the iPhone. The picture-in-picture video, the easiest one to knock out. Great to have that, but we know what that is, right? It's been on the iPad for a while now. That's right. The home screen, really, basically, finally, we have a way of having more organization and cleanup options for app icons.

So we have the app library. So at the end of your home screen pages, you do an extra swipe and there is some folders that are automatically organized into categories and they surface the apps to the top level that you use the most. There's a search field which you tap on, but when you tap on the search field,

it also organizes all of your apps into an alphabetical list and you also have the ability to just remove pages right which i know how i'm going to run my phone now i'm going to have my home screen and then i'm going to have the library i don't want any more pages on my iphone i'm done that's it what did you think about these new features i i mean i think we've been waiting for the idea of just having a list of just show me what my apps are yeah i think using their their siri tech to do the search suggestions which you've been able to get in the search screen before they've essentially taken the search screen and pushed it out onto this last screen with a bunch

of different app collections on top of it and then you've got the ability to basically delete all the extra pages from your uh from your screen you can have as many pages as you want but i think they made the point very well that after the first couple your muscle memory kind of falls away and then you're just hunting through folders and all of that so this is a welcome feature um to be able to uh you know organize use that spatial memory to get your home screen page one, maybe page two, the way you like it. And then everything else just goes in these collections. I think it's great. And then you will need, who knows how many pages you will need for your muscle memory because you won't just have apps on those pages

either. You'll have widgets for the first time. Yeah, so I may have not only less apps on my home screen than I did before, I will also expect I will have a page or two of widgets because widgets now are very, basically Apple have finally done what everyone wanted them to do, which is to implement a version of widgets

that's very similar to Android. You can have application widgets on the home screen. You can have multiple size options for them that developers can submit with different UI depending on the size. For example, you may have a calendar widget. Maybe the smallest widget shows a date and your next event. A larger widget will show multiple events, your next upcoming five, for example. And you can choose which widget you want to have. You can move them around on the home screen and they'll have automatically updating information. This is the area that I foresee the most problems with AppReview this year. We saw it before with

widgets, but just how much information can be added to those widgets and how quickly it can update, that's going to be really interesting to see what that ends up looking like. They also had a smart stacks feature. So you could just put this one widget on your phone and it will show you the widget that the iPhone thinks you want to see at that time, which is cool. Yeah, it's almost the Siri watch face for the iPhone, right?

Which is like, it's the Siri suggestions thing for the widget, which is this is the widget you want right now. And if it works, that's the Siri suggestions thing for the widget, which is this is the widget you want right now. And if it works, that's fantastic, right? The question is, how well does it work? Although it looks like you can basically just sort of scroll through your widgets in that space if you want to. Yeah. And I'm really excited about the idea of having just one screen, which has my task manager and my calendar on it, on the widget, like its own home screen, because that's the kind of stuff that I've wanted for a very long time and i'm really keen to see i want to dig

into it like how does this work on the ipad as well uh and seeing like how how interactive can you make a home screen now can it be almost like panx status board app right where you just have this one screen and it's got all of the information that you want, right? Like maybe this ends up being a great way to repurpose an old iPad. You just create this widget thing, right? But that would be really cool.

And I would love, I really am excited about this. This is one of the things I'm most excited about. I'm happy that it's on both devices, both iOS and iPadOS. That one I'm really excited about. I'm happy that it's on both devices, both iOS and iPadOS. That one I'm really excited about. I was very surprised to see that Siri got the time that it got, that there is some visual changes to Siri, as well as some behind the scenes stuff. Personally, I didn't see as much behind the scenes stuff as I would have wanted to see. Maybe there's more to it than that of

like reliability and stuff like that. I'm very happy to see that Maybe there's more to it than that of like reliability and stuff like that. I'm very happy to see that Apple's moving to on-device dictation. So that's going to speed up Siri a lot, like a lot. There was a video floating around recently that you may have seen of an iPhone versus a Pixel with dictation. And the reason the Pixel was so much faster was because the Pixel 4 added Google Assistant dictation

like natively to the device. This isn't something that's the same on all Android phones, but like they shrunk it down and they put it onto the device so that it was on-device dictation. And when you have on-device dictation, it can speed things up so much

because you don't have to go out to the web to turn the light on or off anymore, right? Like things will get quicker because of this and i'm really excited about that feature yeah we'll have to see what else is going on you know it's a keynote it's very vague we may get more signs this week about it and then in the months to come but i like them talking about how they're you know making an effort to improve siri and improving siri on device and throwing in translation. A thing that I keep coming up with is I want to see translation

applied to messages, and that's not something they mentioned, but I feel like now very little work needs to be done to get that ball across the goal of we have a Translate app, we have on-device translation, and we've got messages to be able to translate something in line if you receive a message from somebody in a different language to be able to sort of like kick that off to the translate app and get the answer. And I also appreciated in their translate demo the idea that they're going to be able to recognize the language that's being spoken. And you can have uh sort of two windows translating either direction and uh you tap the button and say something in one language and it

displays it in the other and it'll work for both directions because it knows which language is being spoken for the 11 languages that they're supporting we should say it was it's google translate this is the this is google translate that's exactly what it is yep and they needed they needed to be there with it. So here they are. But the thing is, though, this is something that Google does to them all the time. Google's so far ahead. It has so many more languages, right?

The reason I know all of this is two nights ago, me and Idina were playing around with the translation featuring Google Translate, which is just this. And she was talking in Romanian and I was talking in English. Like we were just kind of fooling around with it.

And it's this exact feature. You press the microphone button once, it listens to me, it listens to her, translates things backwards and forwards. I'm really happy that Apple's doing it, but they have a long way to go because they had something like nine or 10 languages. That's not enough languages, right?

It just isn't. And I hope that this is something that they move quickly and that they keep iterating on and keep adding more because that's what makes this thing useful. If you go to use this application and it doesn't have the language you want, you may never come back to it, right? You may just go and use Google Translate instead. I applaud them for doing it. I'm that they're gonna do it but you've got to move quickly on stuff like this because otherwise it doesn't get adopted and that moves against what apple's kind of plan is with this type of stuff um i liked all the compact design they've redesigned

it so siri doesn't take over the whole uh home screen anymore it's even more uh so on on ipad os where it kind of lives in the bottom right-hand corner and gives you pieces of information, which I really liked. So that was messages. Sorry, that was Siri. I want to talk about messages. I'm jumping ahead already.

There's a bunch of stuff in here that I loved. The ability to pin a message to the top of the list, fantastic. Like, me and Idina do not text every day because we're at home every day. But when I want to send her a message, I always expect her to be at the top. Don't scroll down and search for it, right? Yeah, exactly. But she isn't always at the top. But that's my mind always would say, well, she should be at the top. She's the most important person to message. So like, I want that to be the case.

And I have a couple of group threads like similarly, right? Some with some friends, one with my brothers. I want those message threads at the top i don't want a two-factor authentication or a message from some my doctor or whatever to be above all that stuff i want the message threads that i'm in the most to be right there when i want them and they are there and then all of the group stuff is amazing so inline replies that are collapsible, fantastic. Really into that. Slack threads for messages. Yeah, but with a better UI than Slack.

I mean, look, Slack has threading, but Slack's threading UI is terrible. But this looked much nicer. Mentions of notification options. So if you're in a group thread, I have a lot of noisy group threads on Do Not Disturb, but I still want to know if people mention me and now you can have that right so you can type somebody's name in they'll mention you this is exactly the type of stuff that i wanted and also you can have more kind of imagery around so you can like give an image to a group but it still shows all of the like individual profile images of everybody around

it so you can make things feel a bit more fun. And also along with all of this, more Memoji options, which they included in the message section, which has hair and options, more accessory options, more age options. And they also included face coverings, which seemed like an obvious but a good one to have. By the way, everybody, wear a face mask. Just wear face masks. That's a great thing to do. Please do that.

Wear a mask. Show your compassion for other people. Yes, it's a really easy thing to do. But these message things are rolling out on all of the platforms, which is fantastic. And I'm super, super happy about that. Just Apple continuing to make messages and much, much better overall conversation platform

is a great thing. What else caught your eye from the iOS portion of the keynote? Well, we should talk about, at least we should mention CarPlay updates. So they're not, you know, standing still on CarPlay. They're adding some new app categories to Carplay which makes sense parking apps so you know you need to get parking nearby there are apps like parkwiz that will let you do that ev charging which is really nice they're a

bunch i having an electric vehicle myself having an ev app that tells you where the nearby charging stations are and all that that's very nice those are now allowed on carplay with uh this new version and uh and quick food ordering as well so you can do that from your car and then pick it up if you're on a on the road and you need to to stop somewhere and pick up some starbucks or whatever else like being able to do that directly from the carplay interface is convenient so it's nice to see that um and then the car key stuff to throw that in there too the um the u1 chip got mentioned yay finally the u1 chip has a mention on stage but even then it was for later it's not for for now it is for later but it is something that i wrote up when i wrote about ultra wideband technology that one of the things that it can really be used for is for digital car keys, basically, because it prevents sort

of spoofing and hijacking, you know, your key signal from the restaurant where you are and then repeating it to your car, making it think that your car is closer than it is. And that the U1 chip, the way it works, all using time tracking via the speed of light. And so therefore you can't spoof it like that. So there's this, you know, there's this you know there's this nfc version of this that is uh coming out with the bmw car that's coming out this fall is the first one to support it but they're also they mentioned working with this consortium to work on this broader standard and that the u1 ship will work with it and all of that so the point here is

basically like if you buy a car maybe not this fall, unless it's this BMW, but like in the next few years, you will probably end up buying a car at some point that you can unlock with your phone. And you got to start somewhere. This is the thing that it will actually have a huge impact on people's lives, but it's not going to be for like five years for a lot of people, if not longer. But it will. Eventually, our phone will be our car key, and that'll be how it works. So Apple is starting that today. Well, I thought I was going to be bored

by the car key thing, like it had been rumored. But I was watching it with Idina, and we were both like, oh, when they were saying about you can share the key of other people, and you can give them temporary access, you can make sure they don't drive too fast like that stuff was very very cool and is so much more than just my phone unlocks my car right like that's to me that functionality is is kind of boring like it's like okay whatever

right this is smart lock stuff like i have in my smart lock today where you can share the smart lock code and have different ones that work at different times and have different privileges and so applying that to the car i think uh it's it's good but it's going to take time but at least we're you know kind of on on the case now um i want to mention app clips which is it's funny it's something similar to something google i think did last year and the idea here is that you can you can get access to a subset of an app functionality by tapping on an NFC sticker, by scanning a barcode, by someone sending you a message, by tapping on an item in Apple Maps. And this is a perfect use case for if you've ever been somewhere that has parking meters that have an app, and you can download an app and log in and set up your credit card so you can just buy 30 minutes at the parking meter.

This happens to me every time I visit a city. I've got a parking meter app that I downloaded for Salt Lake City, a different one for Boulder, Colorado, a different one for Eugene, Oregon. Everybody's got their own parking app. So with app clips, the idea here is you get to the parking meter, and you'll either tap an NFC thing, or you'll scan a barcode, and it'll bring up a little thing for an app clip of that parking meter app, and you open it. And ideally, if it supports sign in with Apple and Apple Pay, you'll be able to go boop, boop, and you have done it and you've got your, you know, you've paid for your parking and that's the dream of it. Uh, now, or, or like if you're renting one of those scooters that almost killed us all in San

Jose the last couple of years, same thing you can tap or scan, uh, press a couple of buttons and you're going, you don't have to go to the app store and find the app and, and, uh, download it and log in and set up an account and all of that to reduce the amount of friction for, you know, it's great that these things are app enabled, that you've got the ability to use your phone for this, but there can be a lot of barriers in the way. So it's a nice idea, similar to what Google has had for a while, where you're getting a little subset of the app. You have the option then later, if you want to download the whole app, you can do that.

But the idea is, look, I don't want to download your whole app here. I just want to park, right? I just want to park my car and pay so that I can go wherever I need to go. So I think it's nice to see Apple getting on board with this since, you know, this is the platform that we use. And I'm sure many of us have been in a situation where you're out and about and suddenly you have to go through a whole app installation and log in and maybe even enter a credit card kind of experience in order to get what you need. And that could be a lot easier.

These can be found in Safari, Messages, Maps, NFC, and via an app clip code, which is an Apple designed QR code. Now, here's the thing. I've seen reference to these QR codes already as part of a leak about some AR stuff. So like imagine you've got these QR codes on on all over the place, right? Because Apple's made this this new QR code that they want and they're trying to encourage businesses to adopt so people can very easily get into their app experience if you have glasses on that can read those that's going to be a different thing right like this is this is like another part of where they might want to start looking and going into the future that like your apple's vision of the future it's all part of it isn't it like all part of it and so that app clip code stuff that could be really

interesting could be a big thing for ar in the future and i'm sure that they will integrate into ar products you know maybe just in in ios but they they didn't really talk about that today um these use apple pay they use sign name of apple it's all part of the like the integrated stack i think that this is a very cool idea. When Android had this, it was called Instant Apps. When they showed this off years ago, I thought that it looked really cool then, but I believe didn't really take off.

I don't really feel like I've heard a lot about it since. I expect that Apple will be able to get this to take off because they can brute force it, like just what they do with this type of stuff and i mean the argument there also is that with sign in with apple and apple pay you can end up with a very smooth uh experience for a customer where they you know do almost nothing and they've given you money and if you're running those parking meters or

whatever else those scooters uh you just want them to give you money. That's in the end that make it as easy as possible for us to park or ride a scooter or whatever. This is going to be another way that they force sign-in with Apple in more places. Yep. Yep. Because. Absolutely. The services that use this probably don't use social network signings, which is what Signum of Apple was for before.

But now they'll be like, well, if you want to use this cool functionality so people can check out really quickly, and it's in, you know, you get the data that you would get if they were using your application, there you go. They have set some rules on it. The apps in App Clips have to be less than 10 megabytes of data so they can be opened and run fast, because you assume it's it's pulling

something from the web right to show this this uh ui you know like in the same way like if you are on a very slow internet connection it's going to be a problem and this is like another one of those things where i think about like if you are traveling overseas and you have a limited data cap like that's the kind of stuff that you'll burn through quickly without even knowing about it these aren't necessarily downsides to this platform but it's just a thing i think this is really cool because it would mean that i would have less apps on my iphone like i have so many apps that i don't actually need except that one time that i do need them so i have to keep them around now i won't need to do that i mean arguably this means less to me now that i don't have to

manually put everything inside of a folder. But nevertheless, I think this is a cool feature. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. It's fair to say that we all want to browse the internet without everybody in the world knowing what you're doing or people that you don't want to know knowing what you're doing. We know about incognito windows, but your online activity can still be traced by your

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Let's talk about iPadOS 14, shall we? Let us. That was, you know, the part that I was the most excited about because I feel like there's the most that can be done. There's the most space for innovation and adding features in iPad of all of Apple's platforms because, you know, it's so capable and yet is kind of limited by

the software. The software's got a lot of room to grow. I'm not trying to insult the iPad. I'm trying to say there's a lot of room for some growth. And so, you know, I was excited to see what they had to offer us. This is probably the part of the presentation that I was the most underwhelmed with. I was expecting there to be more here i'm very excited about the things they've shown i've had a cursory look through the list of stuff that they've added there seems to be a lot there i'm excited to dig into it more but i was hoping for some bigger high level stuff than what we got yeah it i i knew things were going south a little bit when they pointed out all the features that they rolled in in you know late in ios or ipad os 13 because i

thought i had a moment like uh-oh like they are taking credit for things that we already have which is you know if you want it to be a long list that's never a great sign right that's like no no we already did all these things right right right so what we announced now isn't going to be underwhelming because we did all those things and yeah like it picks up the ios stuff so that will have an impact in terms of um widgets and app stuff and maybe if they would have shown ipad os first and did all of those features first, I would have been more excited, right? Because I'd be like, oh, look at all these great features

because they are awesome things that I'm excited about. Like I'm more excited about iOS than I thought I was going to be. But just specific iPad stuff, I don't know. Like they spoke about this design for iPad thing where they were talking about design language tweaks that are better for the larger screen and they showed sidebars and drop down menus and that kind of stuff there's a lot of Mac features in here so I I made I said that it was the iPadification of the

Mac now let's do the flip side this is the Macification of the iPad because it's a lot of sidebars are like look photos has a sidebar already did on the Mac. Now it has one on the iPad too. Look, here's a dropdown, a pull-down menu. Where have I seen that before? Or the search bar that it's like, well, we rethought search on the iPad. Oh, to make it exactly like Spotlight on the Mac, you mean. It's great. I think it's probably the right decision.

But it is funny that it's sort of like, oh, yeah, okay. So you're bringing the Mac. I see what's happening here. You're bringing the Mac this way. You're bringing the ipad this way they're kind of meeting in the middle a little bit um yeah like it's not bad but it's also not not exactly kind of groundbreaking it's more just like little little design tweaks i i wanted handwriting recognition since they introduced the apple pencil right sort of like if i'm holding my pencil and i want to do it because I'm doing something else and then I need to input some text, I don't want to put my pencil down and then type. If I could just

write, and I'm bad with handwriting, but still, if I could just write every so often that would be super helpful. So Scribble, we have Scribble now. That's a nice feature. But once you get past that and the iOS features

that have already been added, I don't know, I felt a year ago when they named this iPadOS that they were really kind of putting themselves on the line that they had to have features

that were specifically for iPad. And I will admit that given that they shipped them the pointer support already, that they took their best feature. Yeah, they did. And moved it here. Because we would have lost our minds if they would have shown that feature off today and so you know so

i'll give them credit for that i'll give them credit for that but i'm just my question for you is do you think this announcement lived up to the fact that they have to make substantive ipad announcements every year now that they've named it ipad os or did it fall flat there are some things in here that are really big. Like I'm very keen, I bet that the design for iPad stuff and some of the things that they're adding are going to make the daily usage of using an iPad much better.

Like people are showing us stuff in the Discord right now. Like for example, choosing from a date picker will now show you a calendar rather than that spinny wheel. Stuff like that is going to make a very big difference to my usage. And there is also emoji search and an emoji popover on ipad os these are big things like these seem like small

things but they're going to make big differences and i'm personally hold i want to hold out until i've done two things one really dig through the stuff that like federico will be finding out and publishing on mac stories and also installing this beta at some point and running through it myself to see of Apple's apps how do they feel now because if these applications because of some of these design changes feel more grown up

and more advanced just because of the fact that they've been refined that's going to make a big difference I'm also really excited about the search stuff it popping over and me being able to just go straight to websites from anywhere like those things look really good if they do work as good as Mac Safari as opposed to Mac Spotlight as opposed to the current Spotlight on iPad OS.

So they're big things. I'm also excited about the pencil improvements. So that tech, the handwriting in any field is great, but also being able to select and copy and paste and move around handwritten text is awesome. I'm very happy about that stuff. But I was hoping for, I think, some big picture stuff here that we didn't get

that I will assume is coming next time. What I will say is if this is the small revision year in between the two big ones, this is so much better than any small revision year Apple have ever done for the iPad, right? The iPad usually gets like a big year, small year, big year type like the TikTok. And they have added more here than they would in another small year. And I think that there are potentially some things here that in usage are going to make a big difference. But this wasn't the home run that I was hoping that iPadOS would be. I do really feel like I need to actually spend time with this now to really feel how important it's going to be for me yeah i feel like you said it right there which is

by the admittedly very low bar of ipad updates on the off years this is better than that and give them a little bonus points on top of that for the the pointer support that they shipped early so i i agree with you i think that's about where we are is it's disappointing that it's not more, but we did get a lot earlier this spring and it's still better than a kind of no new features except what are on the iPhone that you get for free for the iPad. But at the same time, I'm always going to want more. And so I guess in that way, it's not entirely fair for me to judge this as that it left me wanting more because I was always going to want more. But I'm not overwhelmed by the number of changes on the iPad.

We'll just put it that way. Yeah, and there's definitely more I want to see here. They showed off in this section, like the phone call UI not taking over the whole screen anymore. That's also coming to the iPhone. We didn't mention that, but that's a big one. anymore that's also coming to the iphone we didn't mention that but that's a big one i'm really excited about that um because that's so silly right that the phone is considered that important that it's not a notification um and siri showing as notifications and that kind of stuff is also really cool uh yeah but this wasn't a home run as we say but there's definitely some stuff in here

that's going to take a bit more uh a bit more digging into should we talk about watch os before we finish today why not yeah so they focused a lot on complications i'll be honest i'm not sure if i got what was new here other than rich complications could be in more places the big thing that's new and i think this is great news for somebody like underscore david Smith, because he's got his whole app that's just complications, is it used to be that an app could put a complication on a watch face. Oh, okay. This is awesome then. I'm very excited about this now. Every complication on a given watch face can be a different complication from the same app which as somebody pointed out in in uh slack that i'm in is as close as we've ever come to a custom watch face because if you view all the slots other than like the time as a fair game for one app to take over

you're pretty close you're not quite there but you're close to being there so think of think of that think of david smith's app that can have like right watch smith which has a billion different complications now you'll be able to build a whole watch face just full of his complications if you want to and that so that's a big step forward that's exactly what's a feature i wanted so i i was kind, I got a little bit lost in the watch face and the complications part, honestly. But that is actually really cool. And then I guess now I understand one of the features that they said.

So with the watch face sharing, so you'll be able to share watch faces of each other. They also said that a developer can offer a watch face setup inside of their app right so imagine david's app watchsmiths having having that moment where watchsmith says here you know here's our design for this kind of thing and it's you know it's all lunar and weather and things like that and then you tap and it like just it opens and now it's a watch face that you can make that that that you don't have to remake it yourself it's just there on your watch that's great that's great so uh it's not quite third-party custom watch faces but it will open up the possibilities of apps designing a whole bunch of different watch faces and that's good sleep tracking is obviously the big one um and it's doing a few different things and it's tying in with the iPhone.

So there's like a whole wind down mode that the iPhone and the watch will go into. It turns into not disturb. It will show you some shortcuts on the home screen of your phone, like the lock screen that you can set up to like help you get into sleepy mode. Your watch goes into sleep mode automatically at the times

that you kind of say you want to go to bed. This is really about also trying to help you get into a sleeping pattern as well as just tracking your sleep. They actually didn't go into too much detail about what the watch is doing, when you're sleep tracking, what that data looks like. There wasn't a lot there other than like it tracks your sleep and then you can set multiple different alarms types so you can have sounds you can have just tactic alarms and then when you wake up you get a new screen on the watch which also shows your battery which is important because you might want to charge the watch then so there is more digging to do into this feature but it's at least here now. Yeah, I want more detail. And

my frustration often with this is that Apple has their whole go to sleep kind of thing, where they're like trying to close off your devices and have you go to sleep and all that. And like, ah, that doesn't work for me. That doesn't really work for me. So we'll see how aggressive they are about, uh, you wanting to do it, you know, your way versus Apple wanting you to do it Apple's way. But I like that they're actually doing all of the,

they've done all the machine learning stuff to model, you know, being able to detect things about your sleep cycle by wearing the watch. And then you wake up in the morning and you charge your watch and, you know, take a, take a shower or whatever. So, uh, good, uh, you know, take a shower or whatever. So good.

Long time coming. Glad it's here. Glad it isn't tied to a watch hardware update. That's also a good thing. So, yeah, it's all good. They're adding automatic detection of hand washing. And it will do a 20-second countdown. And if you didn't wash your hands for long enough, they're going to tell you.

And I thought that was really clever, really cute uh clearly something he added in quickly um honestly i would like to see them push it out before watch os 7 because september is you know it's a little way away but maybe it needs work but you know it's a cool thing they did some nice like cute design for it i think this is a clever smart and of the moment feature to add into uh watch os um also hidden on a slide jason i don't know if you saw it shortcuts on the watch all right whether this is an app or whatever i actually don't know right now but i just saw it on a slide this is something that's wild that has been missing for a while um since you know there was a workflow app for the watch and there was no shortcut support on the watch in the sense of being able to run things so i'm keen to see what

that ends up looking like uh and there were also a bunch of new workout stuff there's a new dance workout um core core strength functional strength and a cool down activity type along with a new activity app design to go alongside it did Did we run through the major platforms? I think we did it, Jason. I think we did. There's a lot. There is a lot. And here's the truth is we've talked for more than 90 minutes

and we are talking about like what's in the keynote and our reactions to that. And then there are the web pages behind that and there are all the other sessions that are going to happen all week. So we are scratching the surface here and that's the the beauty of it is now the summer stretches out before us and yeah we'll get more information over the course of this whole week and that's the beauty of the i really love our post keynote one week out episode because that's after we've had some time to sort of like think about it and

also a lot of the details have come to light that aren't necessarily they're sort of coming to light right now as we're talking so there will be more about all of this down the road but like this is a big day for the mac that's the that's the big story out of all of this is that it's not only it's a bigger day than we thought for the mac it's a bigger moment for the mac because it's not just about a chip transition but it's also about some pretty serious um ui changes and it's a it's a new era for the mac in more ways than one i'm gonna say like i didn't get everything i wanted today you know like i didn't get as much as i wanted for the ipad but i'm to say I am really excited about macOS Big Sur. And if I don't get everything I want going into this

but end up coming out being much more excited about a platform that I wasn't necessarily that excited about, just WWDC is a win for me, like big time. I'm very excited to dig into the stuff that's happening this week we're going to talk about that in Upgrade Plus in our post show for Upgrade members you can go to getupgradeplus.com

to sign up for $5 a month or you can hit the links in the show notes and you can sign up for our monthly or annual plan and you'll get additional content we're going to talk about what we're planning for the rest of the week we're going to talk about how it differed to watch this keynote at home but i'm i you know i'm finding myself really excited to dig in especially to some of this mac stuff whilst i'm not going to run the beta i'm not planning on running any betas i'm definitely

not going to run it on my imac pro if I run it anywhere, maybe on an old laptop or something. I'm just genuinely really excited to see all of that work go into the Mac, which honestly, at least from a macOS perspective, I kind of thought was locked in for a long, long time to come. I wasn't expecting all of that. I don't think anybody was. If anybody had macOS redesign on their bingo card,

fair play to you, but i would not have called that one at all um but yeah this is this is obviously a different wwc for so many reasons but one thing that i'm super pleased about and like i take my hat off to apple is they did they definitely continue to deliver right like they didn't take their foot off the gas this year and be like okay things are difficult we're going to strip back a lot of stuff to the point where this is like we're doing all performance and improvements and you know that's it performance enhancements

and improvements they've got some big stuff here we're going to continue digging into it next week it is not yet time for the summer of fun we're still all business next week we're going to take a look at more of the stuff that we've learned in the intervening time. If you want to find information about this episode and show notes, you can

go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 303. Jason's going to have tons of coverage over at Six Colors this week. Go to sixcolors.com and you can read a lot of what Jason is going to be writing about there. You can follow Jason he's at jsnow and I'm at imyke I-M-Y-K-E and don't

forget that you can get more upgrade content with no ads by signing up for Upgrade Plus at getupgradeplus.com. Thanks to ExpressVPN, DoorDash, Linode and Fully for sponsoring this week's episode and also for your support as well thank you so much for that and we'll be back

next time. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.