Upgrade - 355: The WWDC Keynote Draft 2021

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

It’s time for our sixth annual competition regarding what will happen at Apple's WWDC keynote! Is this the year iPadOS gets all the love? Will there be Mac hardware? Can Myke and Jason figure out the future of HomeKit and watchOS? It's time to let our imaginations run wild--we'll leave the harshness of reality for next week.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 355 today is the WWDC Draft for 2021, and today's show is brought to you by Hello, Pingdom, and Forward Networks. I am one of your participants, Mike Hurley, and I am joined by my adversary and also my combatant in the draft, Jason Snell. Hi, Jason.

Damn you, Mike. You won last time, but I'll get you this time something like that i don't know yeah i have a hashtag snow talk question for you jason and it comes from me and i would like to know what your plan is for watching the wbc keynote next monday i think i'm gonna do what i did last time and i'm gonna sit on my couch with my nice tv and take notes and have it on the big TV. I've done it the first few times Apple did the streamed events. I did it at my desk.

And I think there's something to be said. I'll be at my desk the rest of the day, right? Something to be said for sort of having it still feel sort of theatrical, even though I can't be there. So I think I'm going to watch it on TV. What about you? Yeah, so far with an iPad. I'm actually going to watch it from the studio for the first time. So I'm bringing an old TV

and my old Apple TV here, which I actually bought a new remote for because now I love the new remote so much I couldn't face the old remote, so I don't have a new remote coming. So I'm going to bring those both to the studio so then I'll also be ready to record with you

as soon as we can after the keynote which is the plan by the way so next week's episode we will be starting live as soon as we can after the keynote ends so if you want to continue listening about hearing us talk about what's announced

at WWDC you can tune in straight after just keep your eye on our Twitter account and we'll post as soon as we go live. But we are, of course, today doing the draft. If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question, I didn't do this. I just put it into the document, which, listener, you can't do. But if you send out a tweet with the hashtag Snow Talk

or use question mark Snow Talk in the RelayFM members' Discord, then you may be able to help us open an episode of the show. So let's talk about the rules for the draft today. This is the largest WWDC draft that we've ever done at my request. I tried to talk you down, and I talked you down a little, but not as far as I would have chosen. So it's packed. We're going to have to move fast. So as we said before, the way that we do the draft here is Jason and I put together a list

of things that we're able to draw from. So we come up with our picks. We put in anything we can think of, any rumors that have come around and a bunch of things that we just pull out of our brains. We put them into a master document that we pick from. We had a lot of stuff in the document, like a lot, a lot of stuff. So there are going to be 14 rounds in this draft of 28 overall picks it will be split into three categories six total picks for ios and

ipad os four picks for mac os this will also include any mac hardware and then four picks for everything else yep the winner of the previous draft gets first pick which finally is me i was thinking i don't know how this works this is weird do i not get to go first you don't believe it or not it's actually not written into the rules it's just been one of those things that stuck around for a long time sportsmanship sports. Sportsmanship. For an item to count, it must either be clearly announced on stage or on a slide during the presentation itself. That's right. In case of a scoring

stalemate between Jason and Mike, Stephen Hackett will adjudicate. We pretty much always score ourselves, but when we can't, we always have Stephen's help. There are no partial points awarded. It's just a full point or a zero point. I've amended this in the in the bill of upgrade rules because uh it previously said no half points awarded and i

thought well we could award a third a point or a quarter of a point and that's not no that's not it's good to have nicely clarified rules it is good to have nicely clear although we haven't had to deal with this in a long time because of sportsmanship again sportsmanship it's a watch word here the upgrade draft no points awarded for any pre-announced or ridiculously obvious items so if something is pre-announced just before the keynote and it's not in the keynote it doesn't count no and if it's in the mac os or the os state of the union afterward or in a press release or on the website it's not in the keynote doesn't matter it has to be in the video either said or visual the points awarded on the episode

are final and in the case of a tie there is a tiebreaker question i get to pick the time limit that we're going to be doing and then jason will pick the over or under and we'll get to that in a bit so it when it looks at previous draft results so far i am winning for the year because i picked up the April victory. This is ending a two-year losing streak. So I have a document where I keep track of it. And I hadn't remembered this, but I have not won a draft since 2018.

Yeah. Up until the April one. So there we go. In the past, though, I have actually had the most success at WWDC. I have won the first three drafts consecutively, and you have won the past two after that. So odds are in my favor for WWDC typically,

but not recently. I like your chances. Yeah. As always, there will be a link in the show notes of the episode to a scorecard, which is maintained by the wonderful Zach Knox. You can go and see it. It's an interactive scorecard, so you can play along with us

as everything goes through over the course of the event next week. And they also have a new home now as well, where you can also see previous scorecards. It is upgrade.cards. I had no idea there was a dot cards uh domain but there is so now we know pick that up tiebreaker question so we've been uh we've been settling on these over under for the event durations recently which i actually think is a pretty good uh tiebreaker because we've done stuff in the past like

mac os name color of tim cook's shoes sure somebody had a good one that i i actually enjoyed which was guess that we each guessed the name of the location that will be chosen for mac os and then whoever's geographically closest to it wins which i think is hilarious but this is the foolproof one i don't like the complexity of it or yeah so this one somebody sets the uh somebody sets the number and the other one chooses over or under and that's how that's how the gamblers do it and you know the gamblers wouldn't lie would they assuming the apple will name it and name it with a geographic location right i know i know and

that's the risk there too is that they don't name it. They just say, well, you know, it's just Mac OS 12 and let's move on. And then what do we do if we tie? So this is better. This is always going to work for us. As a slight aside, because we don't have this in our pick, so I do just want to ask you now about Mac OS and its naming and numbering. Yes. Do you have any particular thought on what they might do this time around?

I definitely think it's going to be macOS 12. I suspect they'll just keep on with the tradition of giving it a code name because that's fun. Although I wouldn't be surprised at some point if they stopped because iOS doesn't have a nickname. No, none of the other releases do. Just the Mac.

And if they are going to go to the incremental numbering, they may as well just switch over to that. Yeah, so it could happen. I guess, though, that Apple didn't really talk about it being macOS 11, did they? No, they called it Big Sur, but that wouldn't stop them from saying macOS 12. I think it is something they could absolutely do, but my guess is that they won't um stop naming mac os only because it's a fun thing to get people to talk about you know what mac os is and it's a tradition but you know apple

breaks traditions all the time when it suits him so so they could but um my guess would be not and you would expect that they would go if they are going to increment the number they're going to go to 12 they aren't going to skip to 15 or whatever. No, I think it's going to be 12. Yeah, I think you're right there because why would they have changed the number to 11? If they're then going to jump, that would have been the time to do it, right?

To make that change. If they were doing that, then we would have already seen Mac OS 12 and 13 earlier this year, right? They'd be like, no, what do you mean? We're just incrementing the number and then they would hit 15, they didn't do that so yeah i think it'll just be 12 so the tiebreaker question i had to think about this so i get to set the number how many minutes the event will run for and whether we'll go over or under that now all of the previous events that we've been doing since wwdc they they haven all of the previous events that we've been doing since WWDC,

they haven't crossed the hour mark or they've been right around the hour mark. Right. I feel like that's not enough time for WWDC. I can imagine that if they're going to go long somewhere, they're going to go long here. I mean, that's how it's typically always been.

It's going to be very interesting just in general for this having been one year of virtual events. And I think it's going to be very interesting just in general for this having been one year of virtual events. And I think it's going to be, I'm intrigued to compare and contrast like just the visual style of this WWDC to the last one, because definitely the events videos that they've done, they just keep turning up the pressure on how good they're going to look, you know? So I'm very intrigued about that. And also just the presentations, like the sessions and stuff. Now they've had an entire year to prepare

rather than a couple of months or weeks to prepare. I'm intrigued to see how all of the visual style of that's going to be this year as well. But nevertheless, I have picked 85 minutes as the runtime. So just under an hour and a half is where I'm going. Over or under 85 minutes, Jason Snow? Well, I'm considering how long the keynote was last year. And the answer is

it was 108 minutes and 51 seconds. And so I'm going to go over. I think it's going to be more like 100 minutes. Maybe not 120, but I think it's going to be over 85. So I'll take the over there. I'm going to say that I did do a slight miscalculation here, and so this may end up going in your favor, Jason.

But that is perfectly fine i'm at 85 i was kind of you mean to be 115 minutes what did you um kind of nevertheless we're 85 that's that's where we're gonna go all right with that thank you uh i did your first time picking me over under what am I supposed to do, you know? Well, you live and learn Maybe I'll end up being right though, you know? You could be I won't be No, you won't

To be honest It's the likelihood of us getting to the tiebreaker With the amount of rounds we have Seems unlikely to me So before we get started With our first round, which is iOS and iPadOS, let me take our very first break of this week's episode and thank our first sponsor, which is Forward Networks. Forward Networks reduces business risk by

revolutionizing the way that large networks are managed. How? Well, their advanced software delivers a digital twin of your network, which is a completely accurate mathematical model made in software. This model can serve as a single source of truth for that network. So users can verify that it's configured correctly in compliance with any necessary policies and behaving exactly as intended. Forward Enterprise can accurately also predict the impact of a proposed change on your network across every possible traffic path. So network operators can roll out these changes of confidence, all while the network itself stays secure and reliable. It is an invaluable tool for your company. Fortune 500 companies and large public sector organizations are turning to mathematical

models of networks. Forward networks have customers such as PayPal, Verizon, and Goldman Sachs, along with several large government agencies as well. It was founded in 2013 by four Stanford PhD graduates who felt empathy for network operators and know that security is top of mind for IT professionals and business leaders, so they sought to apply principles of modern software development to the network. Request a demo today at forwardnetworks.com slash upgrade. That's forwardnetworks.com slash upgrade. Go there right now and check it out one last time. Forwardnetworks.com slash upgrade. Our thanks to Forward Networks for their support of this show and RelayFM.

So let's get started with the picks themselves. Okay. We're going to round one on iOS and iPadOS. And again, I'm all discombobulated jason i'm thinking right now jason gonna pick first but no it's me when i do my prep i i think like okay these are the two most obvious ones so which one am i gonna pick and then is mike gonna pick that the other one or otherwise i should pick the one that i think mike won't pick and then i realized oh mike picks first this isn't how it goes okay how intriguing home screen widgets on ipad is gonna be my first pick yep literally the first one on my list too

yeah i mean so that's a winner's advantage i think of maybe of everything in our list this one feels like the most sure thing like for me me anyway, that was kind of how I approach this this time. Widgets have had a great success over the last year. People love them. And it was always very clear that we should see them on iPad. It seemed like the perfect device for it. So I can only assume

that if we are going to be getting iPad OS as a focus this year, or at least getting some new features, we might talk about what some of those could be, it seems like widgets coming to the iPad would be a pretty sensible and worthwhile addition. Yeah, I mean, it was missing last year, that was the, well, I mean, you can put them in the column i guess what you're really saying here is that the the the little widget place where widgets live and yeah on the actual home screen if they're going to mingle they're going to mingle with the app i can put them kind of kind of wherever you want uh and it'd be super interesting i would love it you know i could imagine people doing

loads of cool things with their old ipads you know know, like you set up an old iPad that you've got and it's like a little like a status board and it lives off to the side of your desk, you know, like your old iPad or whatever. Could be super cool, especially if they add more functionality for widgets this year. Maybe we're going to talk about that in a bit. I hope that they do. I think Apple would be really silly to not double down on widgets, considering it was, in recent years, one of the things that they've actually added into the system that has taken off in the way that they would want to. I think the last few years for Apple, they've been trying to launch things and they haven't panned out. Even last year, watch face sharing, nobody's doing that.

even last year, watch face sharing. That just, nobody's doing that. Right. The thing about the widgets too is just like, it's all embedded in this disappointment that the iPad didn't get the attention that the iPhone home screen got last year. And I think the message, even though Apple didn't say it, but like it was very clear that next year for the iPad,

like we're just not, we couldn't do them both. Essentially that was the report I saw, right? We talked about it. So the iPad got to wait a year. Well, here we are. So it's time. What's your first pick? I'm going to go with what my second item on my list was, since you took my first one. That's fun, which is overhaul of notifications. This is something that Mark Gurman has reported. is something that Mark Gurman has reported. And it's needed, it's necessary, a revisiting in iOS and iPadOS of how notifications are sent, new features and tools to customize them. The idea, I think one of the concepts out there is that you could have different scenarios. So like certain times of day, certain locations where your notification preferences change so that you don't see this notification when you're in the house, but you'd see it when you're out and you don't get it at night.

But these other ones you do get, even if you're sleeping and like having the ability to really control that. You know, Android has notification settings that every time I've looked at an Android phone, I'm baffled by them because they're like, that's the argument, right? Is, oh, you get so much control. And I look at it and think, oh, this is too much. This is too much. And I think that's what Apple's going to struggle with with notifications is, I think offering people control

is really great for notifications and it's a must, but it really fights against a lot of Apple's instincts in terms of keeping it simple. So I'm interested to see how they do it. But I think they need to do it because notifications are a mess. They're a mess across all their platforms. Notifications on Mac, don't get me started about that. Oh my God. I'm hoping that they'll have a more unified idea of how notifications work and put it on

all their platforms. But this pick is overhauling notifications in iOS and iPadOS. I always feel like whenever apple have done this kind of stuff they never go as far as i want them to um but i hope that they do something and that that idea of profiles even that mark gorman was talking about that we just mentioned that would be nice but i really want there to just be way more control over and also for apple to enforce it you know like what i want jason is like each application has different types of notifications they're allowed to send and you can choose what you want so like you can turn off marketing messages from an application in ios settings you know that's the kind of stuff that i want to be able to do but i can't imagine them

going to that level yeah but i can't see the scenario where they say okay what we're going to do now is we're going to classify you have to as a developer classify your notifications i wish to put them in these buckets and uh and we're going to look right the app review is going to look and you better not uh mess this up but the idea there that then the user just says i want to see these kinds of notifications instead of, let me go into this app and deliver quietly, or, oh no, do I want to turn that off? It's too much. That's the question, right? Is what's their approach here? But I appreciate Mark Gurman's report. I like the idea that they're going to take another crack at it

because they need to. For my second pick, I'm going back to the widget. Well, more size options for widgets. I think that this will be something that comes along naturally with the iPad that maybe you might have larger widgets, but I would also like smaller widgets as well for the iPhone, you know, like a widget that takes maybe two app icons in size rather than the four. You know, like I have a couple of widgets that don't need to, that I want on my home screen, but they don't need to be as big as they are. Looking at you shortcuts, right?

Like the single shortcut widget as like a two by two block, it's way too large. And I think that they could, you know, honestly, I think you could do them in one,

like, you know, like one icon sized, right? Wouldn't that be interesting that a widget that's an icon? Yeah. And the benefit that you have there is it's updating information. So like,

finally, your third party calendar app could show you the date as the icon yeah isn't that at that point isn't that just a custom i mean you could have more than one i guess per app but it's like a custom automatically updating icon yeah it's the automatic updating part which is exciting to me as opposed to the custom part because custom icons you know you can do that but widgets live on the home screen and they can have data surface to them like imagine your weather app showing you the current weather status in the application icon because it's a widget now instead so i don't know i think they will do again i'm i'm going big on this

because i'm sure that they will too i feel i feel pretty confident now honestly it would be a huge surprise to me to not see a lot of attention paid to widgets again and expanding them because even last year it seemed natural that this was the start of a new strategy right and we discussed how the it's one of those cases where people were actually enthusiastic about upgrading in order to get all the new things so they could get their home screen and be customized and all of those things. Like the logical thing would have been that Apple looked at that and said, oh, we should prioritize those features. And widgets is a great example of that. Like, did they do the widgets last year and say, OK, we're done now?

This is it. This is all it ever needs to be. I would think not. I would think that that was 1.0 and we'll see 2.0, but who knows. Okay, give me your second pick. I'm going to go with more options to change default apps.

So currently, Apple offers some options to change some app types away from the default so that you can have a different web browser and a different email app. And I think Siri has some custom defaults for things like music, but I'm going to keep this broad and just say Apple will add to that class. I have some thoughts about what it might be. Calendar is a good one. Let's hear it for, is there a calculator service?

We should get that in there. James Thompson can just like slide in and be like, no, no, PCalc is your calculator now. But whatever it is, I just feel like not only is the pressure still on Apple to sort of show that they're open to third parties and not just trying to take everything for themselves. But they introduced this concept. So I'm going to throw in that they'll expand it and add some new things. And remember, it's a developer conference. So they're talking to the developers of the third party apps who would benefit from being able to be set as a default. So that's why I think that you'll see some expansion of this policy. It is difficult to think of exactly like the ones that they might do. Calendar makes sense.

Calendar. Even reminders, like a to-do application stuff. Right. And I know, and it's complicated. And this is a weird area where like auto opening of app based on its type instead of what app it is. But there are places where that happens. And I think you could do calendar is a good one. Actually, one of the things that struck me is like Apple's data detector stuff will find dates. And I use Fantastical, right?

So then I tap on the date because it's a hyperlink and it opens it in the calendar app. That's not what I want. That's not my my calendar app so that would be a directly applicable thing tj in the in the discord just just suggested one which is very key for maps maps yeah right that if you can auto detect an address and set google maps as your default that'll open that address in google maps and not in apple maps and yeah so I don't know what form this will take, but I'm willing to put down a chip on more than they've got already. All right, for my third pick,

I am going back to the home screen. I'm going back to the iPad again. My later picks will differ from this, but Jason's picked up some stuff I would have too. So I've moved my list around app library for the iPad. Now that was high on my list again you got me again this again as people will say this i think federico wrote this in his review too like app library kind of makes more sense on the in the first place um so yeah i would love to see this because, you know, I'm sure I think we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. My iPad is, you know, I've got a bunch of icons and a bunch of folders, which I just throw stuff into and I never know what's in there.

I think it's an even worse state than my iPhone. I would love app library on my iPad. I do hope as well Apple does some refinements to the app library. hope as well apple does some refinements to the app library um i really want them to put it in a new gesture like a swipe up from the bottom gesture like they do on android so this is my only hesitation about app library on ipad and i had it high on my list of possible picks is what if it's not app library what if it's another take on app library but it's not app library i think it will be but like when you think about the size of an ipad screen and you think take on app library, but it's not app library. I think it will be. But like when you think about the size of an iPad screen and you think about how app library is implemented on iPhone, I wonder if they'll have another approach that does the same thing but isn't maybe the same. I also wonder like you could do app library as like a widget or an expanding thing or a column on a page instead of um it being the full thing

i also wonder could you just make an applications uh icon that imagine if you will an application folder of a kind that would then you would tap and it would open it pad from which you could launch applications interesting interesting anyway uh that's my issue is only, I wonder if Apple will say, oh, well, App Library, that's more of an iPhone idea for the iPad. We've invented Appstravagance. You're like, all right, whatever.

But yeah, I do think that something like this has to come to the iPad. It makes more sense on the iPad. I have, you know, I struggle with this more on the iPad than I do on the iPhone. So I would really like to just be able to have it be there instead of having to... Because honestly, after spending

a year with App Library on my iPhone, I look at that last page of my iPad home screen and I just think, oh, this is so sad. All these folders that are just where these apps are dumped in order to keep them on the device, but not visible to me. So I would like that to go away. Give me your third pick. My third pick is, this is the big one, Mike. It's a big one. At least one Apple Pro app brought to iPad.

This is way earlier than I had this on my list. Okay. I thought about it, and I decided that I think all signs point to this. And in fact, I would say, and you can see because I picked it here, I think it's the most likely quote unquote solution to the um m1 ipad is so powerful why can't you do more stuff with it i think it's actually the easiest solution for apple is to have a long gestating probably final cut or something for ipad uh released uh i think it's actually easier for them to do that than say rethink multitasking and windowing in order to support external displays or something like that i feel like uh just saying oh we brought final cut to the ipad and it's not full final cut it's missing some features that we'll add later but you can move your you can sync your projects

back and forth and and you can finally do video editing even though you could with luma fusion but like now you can do final cut style video editing using the power of the M1, et cetera, et cetera. It could be Logic, it could be Xcode, but I think Final Cut is probably the most likely. And I just, so that's my rationale is really that I think it might be easier for them to say, hey, look, we did a pro app instead of the harder work. This is me being a little cynical about this,

but like the harder work of really overhauling iPadad os to be more properly powerful for the ipad pro and what you're saying is that then when the question is why is the ipad pro so powerful why does it have thunderbolt they point to final cut right that's that. That's a pretty interesting thought. I hadn't considered that. I mean, I had this low on my list because I just feel like we've been burned about this for years. I remember back to WWDC in San Francisco talking about Xcode for Ivan.

I know. I know. And there are several items on this list that are very much, I've been burned by this so many times, am I going to do it again? And sometimes the answer is yes. Let's just keep picking it until they do it. And sometimes it's like, no, I'm not going to pick it. And then sometimes that's when it happens. So for this time, I feel like this is the most likely scenario

of all of the scenarios about them justifying the power of the M1 iPad Pro. They may also just not. So there's that. For my fourth pick, this is maybe a frustratingly ambiguous pick, but new features for the Messages app. Okay. You know, I feel like they started to do some interesting stuff with messages last year, pinned messages, the threaded replies and all that kind of stuff. I think Apple could push a little bit further here, maybe adding some more functionality to these things that they have done before. I don't really have a lot to this. Well, I was thinking, there were rumors out there about the idea that Apple wants to do things that are more social media-like, social network-like. Yeah, I just don't know what any of that is, right?

I mean, the one that I will suggest, and this is a freebie, Apple, you can just slide it in in the next week to the beta, is I want tap backs expanded to be any emoji I want. Just anything, right? I love Slack replies and I love tap backs, but tap backs with six icons is stupid. So I want more, I want emoji reactions basically, but there's lots of fun stuff that they could probably think up in terms of, of, of making, I mean, messages is so powerful for them and they've only seemed to

recently awaken and realize that they actually need to do things and make an effort on messages did you reckon the in the discord stories stories story but oh man they could right like they could yeah you don't like don't joke about that like say its name and it will appear because we already have everybody's apple id and you've got people that are in your messages and that you've added their contact or that you get their little icon like there's already a back-end directory service so apple could totally do it that you do stories and there's a story view that's like everybody who's in your contacts if you say it stories. If you say it three times, it will appear. Oh, no. Look into the app and say it three times.

My thinking for this pick was not so much the detail, but the reason. Yeah. And I have another pick that I'm going to maybe make in a bit if you don't get it too, which is I think there's going to be a story about in all of this stuff. I think we're going to hear things about how you know the last year has changed the way we do x and communication is one of those things so adding new features to tools that people use to communicate virtually i think will be something that not only they would be wanting to do but also would have made the people in charge of producing this software and making the decisions may have realized more the areas in which they are lacking this year or where

things could be improved. So I could imagine new features for messages in that regard. Yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable. And I think I know where you're going when you say that. But we've got a couple more picks here, which is great. I am going to go next with more user-controllable design and theming on iOS and iPadOS. Now, this could potentially even be related to the notifications thing, right? They might have a bigger picture idea of sort of like modes or when I'm at home, here are my notifications and here's how my wallpaper changes. Android's latest release announcement has a lot of customization in it.

I'm really saying, I mean, obviously we know sometimes Apple and Google do the same sorts of things. It's in the conversation, it's in the water. They're not copying each other. They're literally on parallel tracks doing the same sorts of things, and then they have their individual take on it. I think it's interesting that Google did that. Google obviously saw the enthusiasm that users had with the iOS release last year

in terms of customizing their devices. Well, Apple also saw that. And so I imagine that whatever they't, I imagine that whatever they do, should they do this, it will be disappointing in the, in the way that it will not ever be what everybody wants it to be. An example I would give would be, are you saying that you, every UI element in the system can now change based on a per user base? I'd be like, no, you know, I don't think Apple's going to do that. That's more of an Android thing. But I could see Apple coming up with a set of themes, a set of statuses or a set of themes to choose from,

and then telling app developers, here are the themes the users can pick from. There are four of them or six of them. And you can choose change your ui based on what theme the user is using and so it's like night mode like dark mode and light mode except more more modes and um an example would be that you could also say like my icon changes when if somebody is choosing i don't know summer mode my icon gets all summery. And winter mode, my icon gets all wintry, right? And my UI changes. So that's the idea.

I think it will be really restrained because it's Apple. But I feel like Apple is going to want to do something to sort of get across the idea that users really do want a little more control over what their devices look like. Yeah, I don't think they're going to do as much as Google has done with material. No, I think it would be impossible, right? Because Google has literally done everything as far as I can tell. But that's why I came in with the idea

of sort of like presets. Imagine Apple saying, yes, you too can customize your device to one of four items that we have made for you, that we have chosen but i just want to say for the sake of scoring if all they do is add like a proper blessed custom app icon thing that would count i just want to say that because we don't have that in there we didn't speak about that but i think that would count like if they said hey we have this new way

for users to set their own custom icons that is user controllable design yeah i think so yeah and you we know we know what this is which is it's essentially reacting to the aesthetic af uh trend of last fall and being like oh yeah we got to get some of that in there and whatever they do we'll know it when we see it the david smith effect yes underscore the underscore effect. I was going to pick one here, but it's boring. So I'm going to change it for a different one. Maybe we'll come back to what was boring there in a minute.

I'm going to go with one that I desperately want, which is a redesign of the Home app. Oh, nice. The Home app kind of sucks. Kind of? It's really not very good. No. The information density is weird. All of the controls, you know, like it takes too long to do everything. Like, for example, I recently got internet-controlled radiator things.

So they're radiator valves that I can turn on and off. I think it's made by a company called Eve. Yeah, you could finally do what all of us with smart thermostats in the US have been doing for years, which is control your temperature of your environment with the computer. Yeah. Just because the environment, I've got them here at the studio. Lots of people have nests in the UK. I just don't have access here at the studio to a central controlled heating system.

Yeah. All I can do is turn the radiators on enough. For me to turn them on, I have to long press on a tile and then press a button. Why do I need to do that? Why can't I just press a button on the home, like the one screen and turn it on? So many little things are weird about the home app. And there's so much interesting information that is there.

And the automation stuff is fantastic. That part is great. It's designed really well. It's got a lot of smart stuff. I love how it recommends things. That part of it's great. But the main kind of like here is your home and here's its controls, it's so bad. Like it's really just not – it is designed to look nice, not to be functional, and it doesn't even really look

that nice. You know, you can very, I see a lot of people very easily get into a case where they're having to scroll. You should never need to scroll in the Home app. Things should be resizing way more before you need to get to scrolling. So yeah, I would, there needs to be some rethinking for the Home app app especially as it seems that there is a potential for home technology to get better over the next couple coming years with the matter initiative this is one that i want to see them put some some time and effort into now so they're ready for that and they don't look like falls later on because i in theory with the matter initiative i wouldn't have to use the home app

i could use another app right but ideally you'd use the home app and it would be good exactly but right now it's not good oh this is a funny this is just an aside but i was thinking about how janky home kit and the home app is uh the other night at two in the morning or three in the morning this is not going to end well right i'm i'm asleep so positively i'm asleep and there's a beep from above me in my bedroom my ceiling fan and something has told it to turn on i do have an automation for the ceiling fan however it's an automation that is timed and it runs in the afternoon and it's basically if it's warm in the bedroom in the afternoon it

turns on the ceiling fan it's a nice little simple automation that doesn't work as reliably as it should. But I have tried all sorts of other automations, including some stuff in the Home Plus app, where I'm trying to do thresholds, where it's like literally if the temperature in the bedroom, because why can't you do this? If the temperature in the bedroom crosses a threshold, turn on the fan, right? If it's warmer than 74 degrees, turn on the fan. And that never worked. I tried that. It never really worked. The Home app doesn't support it anyway. And now I'm a little concerned and it's not an AM PM problem because the automation is 3

PM and it ran the next day at 3 PM. Something happened. Either there is a stray command to turn it on that finally came through. Did my Apple TV reboot or something? Or what I fear is my attempts to do a not entirely supported Home Plus automation has left some command somewhere in the HomeKit server that thinks it knows what it's doing, but it's actually, and it's not visible anywhere. It's like a zombie thing, but it only happened the one, well, no, it happened twice because I turned it off and I went back to sleep and I woke up in the morning

and it was back on. Oh, you're done now. You got to remove it. I got to move. Like, I got to take the fan down, just burn it all down. So my point is the the home app it needs help completely unrelated other complaint you know in the studio i'm like you know i say hey assistant turn off the lights and it says your accessories not responding and then i pick up my

phone and i turn them off in the home app and they go off why does that happen i don't understand why that app that shouldn't be happening right but that's a different issue i'm gonna go with a boring one good and it's vague okay but i i feel like it's the kind of thing apple will do at wwdc new it's this is like your messages pick new features for facetime this was the one that i was Oh, this is your boring one that you didn't do. No, this is my boring one. When I was talking about that, I said I might pick, I have another one to pick for the same reason. You would expect this would be an application

that had some focus on it. Right. Now, there have been new features for FaceTime on the iPad Pro because we now have Center Stage. But I'm thinking more broadly, like in the year that we've had where everybody has been doing video conferencing and all of that,

and everybody's been using Zoom and things like that. If I was on the FaceTime team, I would say, hey, why don't people use FaceTime? Like I have a every other week family Zoom and everybody's on an Apple device. And I don't know why we're using Zoom other than people are comfortable with it. And I think if I were on the FaceTime team,

I'd be saying, hey, wait a second. How can we up our game here? What do Cisco, WebEx and Zoom and all these other services have that we don't? How can we up our game here i don't know the answer to that question no uh animated backgrounds uh i don't know what it is people pay more money than we're paid to come that's right i'm just saying something like no no i'm gonna be picture that i'm an apple picture i'm craig all right let's say i'm craig i'm gonna

have my meeting with the the product leads for fac. And I'm going to be like, you got to give me something. Yeah. What, what, like what in particular? Something like look at zoom, look at WebEx, look at all of these competitors out there. They do all sorts of stuff that FaceTime doesn't try to do. Uh, you know, but I'm going to put this on you. I'm not going to come up with your list for you, but give me something. Give me some substantive advancement in something about FaceTime. I'll give you something boring, Jason. Sure. Join a FaceTime by a link. I was about to say that.

How about the ability to create a FaceTime room and email it to people? That's almost like a social feature that uses FaceTime. Super boring, but it's one of the reasons zoom has been yeah so because it's so easy you just send them around to people facetime on the web what about that jason yeah it's time on the web how about recording a meeting yeah in facetime that would be a thing and yes yes seriously backgrounds people love the backgrounds and zoom just how good your machine learning is. You should be able to pick me out, right?

Use the, I don't know, all the cameras I've got on my iPhones and stuff. Let's do something fun. Let's do it. We're into our last picks here. Yeah. Of this massive six pick. There's something, there's a thing quite specific.

There's a whole area of stuff that we've not picked and i think it's probably for good reason and it's all the ipad stuff yeah mike calculator on ipad it's right there uh weather app on ipad you could put that in there too if you wanted i'm trying to work out what i want to do here because this is difficult like if you're gonna put your money down on this one. This is one of those situations where I actually would prefer you to be going first, right? Because I would expect that maybe you're thinking similarly to me, is whichever one I go with, you can pick the other one.

What we're talking about here is, like, if or what Apple will change in regards to the way that the ipad works yeah i've got one uh teed up here if you don't so i am going to be the downer okay oh man you i saw you put this in oh man well this i think this is I thought it was a brilliant move when you put this in our document. And sure, bet the under. Go for it. Here's the pick. The core of iPadOS remains mostly unchanged.

No multitasking changes, no external display support. This is actually kind of the flip side of my One Pro app pick. And that's all. That's what you get one pro app and you'll be happy about it that's all i don't want this to be the case right i want there to be everything i want loads of new features i just don't i just don't know if I can confidently say they're gonna do it. I want them to do it, but I don't know that they will. Right. This is one of those picks where

I'm almost, would be happy to be wrong. Oh, sure. But if I'm right, I at least get something, where otherwise I would be sad. otherwise I would get a point. I'm sad about the entire future of the iPad as a platform, but I did get a point. So, yeah, I mean, look. Too many times we've asked for too much for whatever reason. for whatever reason.

And as you mentioned earlier, there's a lot of things that they can do for the iPad while still leaving multitasking and external display support as is. External display support, that could come in six months time with a new monitor, right? Like they did with the trackpad. There's no reason to necessarily do that now.

And you could still do things like expanding multiple app windows and all that kind of stuff without changing the multitasking system. So you could be ready for something like that. But what my pick here is saying is the way that we do split view and all that and slide over, that's going to stay the way that you do multitasking. And there's not going to be any external display support. But there are lots of things.

You could do a massive overhaul to the files app. You could allow people to put files in their desktop. You could, I mean, and we'll have to judge it, right? Like for example, if they finally introduce app pairs, that could be a thing that you could do, but it wouldn't be changing multitasking. It's still, you know, if it's still, you still open them the same, you now just get basically a shortcut and you open them at the same time. We'll see, but. Well, I think we'll know it,

like we said before, we'll know it when we see it. Yeah. Okay. My last pick in this category, I actually had at the very top of my list and I was going to drop it here at the very end. I thought it would have been a great section ender, was support for separate apps running on an external display. And the reason I was going to pick it in that one in particular was I was imagining a scenario where I've been advocating for a rethinking of basically windowing on iPadOS and have Apple be like, nah, but you can stick an app in a floating box that's the shape of an iPad on an external display. Yep. And it'd be like, oh, that's great, but also kind of disappointing.

But since you picked that, I'm not going to go the other way because I feel like then I'm just sort of doubling down on one scenario. And so instead, I'm going to go boring again. I'm Craig Federighi. Mike, come into my office. Hey, you're in charge of Mail.app, right? Oh, is this what you're going with? Okay. All right.

Do something resembling anything. Look, there's the hey thing from the guys who hate us. There's all these other apps out there that have tried to do interesting things with email and Mail.app hasn't changed since Steve Jobs used it. Change it. Add some more filtering. Add snoozing. Add ML-based prioritization on device.

Make Mail.app better than it's been for a decade where it's been completely just sort of laying in the weeds and i will say if they did this then that would also be laying the groundwork for it to come to mac os at some point maybe not this year but that ultimately they would merge those code bases because mail.app on mac os is like from next step it is ancient um and so yeah anyway i'm gonna pick that i i i i feel like when we do these wwdc stories we don't ever spend enough time on apple's core apps getting improvements yeah and they always do it's not always the same apps but they always get improvements and so this year i really like that we put in some apps where like this app gets better, especially apps that really need to get better. And mail, like I think Apple maybe fundamentally believes that email isn't a thing, which is weird because they use email too.

And the fact is, as much as we'd like email to go away, it doesn't go away. So let's, I would love to see Apple actually have a take on intelligent email instead of doing what they do now which is really just kind of punting have you seen uh big mail i've seen the web page yeah it's one of those apps that's gonna that looks perfect and then you know you'll get it and you'll realize oh no it's not uh it doesn't do all these things but it's it's a it's a new app i think it launches this week, maybe. Yeah, well, perfect time for Apple to eat their lunch. I know.

Basically, Big Mail to me looks like exactly what I want Apple to do with mail. Like it's all of the stuff, right? It's like this looks like an app that Apple made visually because it's got the basic kind of UI conventions you would expect from an iPadOS or iOS app. But all of the modern features, right? Like fun ways to read newsletters and smart stuff and, you know, screening, but it's all on device and everything.

It's really, I'm intrigued to try it out. It doesn't seem like it will be the app for me because it's like one of the features that I come to rely on with email now is sharing and collaboration features, which I use with Spark. So I can't imagine that I would switch to it, but I'm really intrigued to check it out. But yes, this is kind of how I would expect it.

But I'm still being reserved in my feelings on it because like you say, these things come around and there's always problems. And it's like, oh yeah, it does all this stuff except that one thing that you really desperately need. All right, so that was iOS and iPadOS. We're only getting started. We're just warming up.

This episode is brought to you by Holo. Holo make incredibly comfortable buckwheat pillows. I absolutely adore my Holo pillow. Buckwheat pillows are very different to regular fluffy pillows. They have way more support for your head and neck because they're not collapsing under the weight of your head like a traditional pillow.

The best way for me to describe it is like it's kind of like tiny little shells effectively. And it's kind of akin to a beanbag, but not like a beanbag. But it's closer to that than a regular pillow. But it gives way more support. Plus air can flow through the pillow. But it gives way more support. Plus, air can flow through the pillow, so it stays nice and cool. It doesn't get hot, warm, humid like a regular pillow would.

You don't have to do that flipping to the cool side of the pillow anymore because it always stays cool. Plus, because it's a filling, you can just add or remove it to make the pillow the right size that you want it to be as well. So you can really make it just for you. These types of pillows have been popular for years in places around the world, and I have been sleeping on mine every single night for two years

and absolutely adore it. I'm like completely hooked, would never go back. I really love my hollow pillow. Hollow pillows are made in the USA of quality construction and materials, and their certified organic cotton case is cut and sewn for durability. The buckwheat is grown and milled in the US as well. You can try out a hollow pillow for 60 nights, and if it isn't for you, you can just send it back and get a full refund. Go to hollowpillow.com upgrade right now to get your own buckwheat pillow. That's

h-u-l-l-o-p-i-l-l-o-w.com upgrade. If you buy more than one, they have a special discount of up to $20 off depending on the size that you opt for. Hello have fast, free shipping of every order, and 1% of their profits are donated to the Nature Conservancy. So, go give it a try. If you love it, you keep it. If you don't, just send it back. Go to HelloPillow.com slash upgrade

right now, and thanks to Hello for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we're going to do our macOS and Mac hardware picks. This is all one category. The main reason why this is one category is we didn't have a ton of macOS RelayFM picks.

So we just put them all together. I am going to go with a dream pick for my first pick, Jason. Alright, dream on. Shortcuts for Mac. Yay! I want this so bad. So, so bad.

It has been, in my time over the last year of basically becoming mostly Mac focused again with working, it's been the biggest thing that I've missed. There are just things that I have to do, like so many more hoops I have to jump through

to get simple actions to be done, which is kind of funny because this is the exact thing that Mac users say about iPadOS a lot of the time. But when it comes to user automation, I have learned how to use shortcuts. That's what I have learned. And whilst there is a

lot more power available to use automation on the Mac, there is nothing as simple and intuitive, in my opinion. And I really desperately want to see Apple create not just shortcuts for Mac OS, but also let's take some of the power available to automation on the Mac and put a new face on it. And that face is shortcuts, right? So don't just make a simple version. Make a simple version that can also harness the amount of ability available to the Mac. Yeah, I wrote a piece about this a couple months ago. And it's just the more I use shortcuts and the more I then tried to move some of my shortcuts workflows into Mac OS and realizing what the limitations were. And I thought, well, this is ridiculous. Why is

it that user automation is actually easier on an iPad than it is on a Mac? That should not be the case. But Automator is really old and it never really became what it was supposed to be. And shortcuts is a lot closer to being the dream of what Automator was supposed to be. And I can see this being a multi-stage process where they bring shortcuts to the Mac and it has some limitations, but they're trying to sort of bridge out to AppleScript and Automator, but they're also trying to build a future for user automation. But yes, I would be so happy because this would mean that Apple is actually talking about user automation on macOS again, which they haven't talked about really since Saul, who y'all know, was on stage introducing Automator. And that was like, what, 15, 16 years ago? It was a long time ago now. So I hope this happens too. I think it

makes sense. I actually think it makes sense. And it's not just wishcasting. I don't know when they'll do it, but they need a unified user automation story and clearly shortcuts is the story yep i'm going to take another pick uh that is basically bringing something on ios to the mac uh that has been we've been waiting for for a long time and it hasn't happened and developers have been really hoping for it and this is a developer conference and i'm just going to do it again been disappointed in in the past, but maybe this is the year. TestFlight comes to the Mac. For people who don't know TestFlight, it is a beta testing system where basically you can sign up for a beta on your iPad or your iPhone. And then the developer sends new builds and you update to the new builds and you can beta test.

And on the Mac, those developers have nothing. And it's really, really, really bad. I have a developer who is sending me betas on macOS and it's an email with a zip file and I had to send like my device ID in order to be included in the builds. And it is, cause it's a Catalyst app and it's ridiculous.

So I don't know. Again, I'm betting on something that Apple should have done five years ago, but I'm going to say this is the year for test flight and it'll make developers happy. Yeah, so like one of my very, very favorite iOS apps is Timery, which is a time tracking application. And Joe, the developer of Timery,

like he's talking about this, has been working on and is getting ready to release very soon a mac version of the app and he has to he's been we've been testing and every time he makes an update he has to email me a link to a dropbox folder where i can download a zip file to update it and then because i use like two macs i have to remember to also download it on my laptop right and it's just an absolute nightmare considering how simple it is like so like i also use timery on my iphone on my ipad right and on my ipad i have test flight set to automatically update so like i'll get an email from jo Joe saying here's the new build for the Mac. And I was like, oh, I'll look at that later on.

And then I'll pick up my iPad. And it's like, it's automatically installed via TestFlight. It's like, the difference is so massive between these things that I desperately want to have TestFlight for the Mac as well. And I'm sure so many developers would want it.

And again, even if they start it small right like it's just catalyst to begin just start it because it this really is something that i believe apple even said was coming at one point and just never has and they really need to bring this yeah okay we're in agreement, we're in agreement. If we ran the zoo, this would happen, but we don't, so we just have to guess about what the zoo will do. All right, I'm going to go. I think this is somewhat risky, but I feel confident. Okay.

MacBrick Pro 14-inch with Apple Silicon will be announced at WWDC. Oh, hardware, wow. There are lots of conflicting rumors. I think there was a report today even that supply chain reports are saying Q3, according to DigiTimes. I mean, Q3 is July, right? I think if this is a product

that's even close to being ready, you've got to announce it at WWDC. These are the people that want that machine. Yes. So I desperately hope that we're going to see it. Mike, Q3 starts tomorrow, right? Or no, it starts in a month. It starts in a month from tomorrow. A month from tomorrow.

A month from tomorrow. That's right. Seven. So you could announce something in a week and say it ships july 10th and it's q3 yep like you and that makes perfect sense right so you announce it next week pre-orders in two weeks ships two weeks after like you know it's like you can make this work this is you know and i just think that this is a product so many people want this is the perfect audience for it. I know.

And if they have them close enough to ready, I'm sure if they're ready, they're going to release them, but if they have them close to ready, go for it, because otherwise... Are they selling a lot of Intel 13-inch MacBook Pros? Probably not. Really? I don't think so.

Because the other thing is, if we think, you know, we were talking about Mark Gurman's report last week, otherwise, you're going to have a lot of Macs starting to get backed up. I really, really hope this would be such a great part of the presentation to really show off something bold and big and powerful and new. I hope we see it next week.

Well, with you having picked that, I am going to pick something that's related, but also I think maybe a little broader, which is new Apple Silicon Mac chip introduced. Here's my rationale. There are two ways this could go. There could be a new MacBook Pro announced with a variant of, let's say, the M1 that has more cores, and this would count. They could also say, oh, by the end of the year, we're shipping a new Mac Pro and it's going to have a zillion cores in it. And that would count because that would be a new chip. Any pre-announcement of anything involving a new non-M1 Mac chip would cover me here.

So that's how I'm going to do it. That's how I'm going to play it. Yeah, I had this. This was also my next pick. Oh, doubling down. Well, I had to take it from you then and that way we we uh keep pace with one another here because this is like you know they could do anything right i mean yeah i just think if they and they could that right i mean there's

any number of machines that might use this but i think you're you're right i'm a little concerned by the reports it's like oh it's q3 Q3. Although we eventually got, after I divided 12 in half and got six and said, oh, well, that's halfway through the year, the beginning of June. Nope, that's not how it works. We ultimately ended up at, oh, it's just a couple of weeks after where Q3, ships Q3 could happen. And Apple has not been afraid to pre-announce some of these products and say it ships in a month, ships in three weeks. Take your pre-orders in two weeks, and then it ships two weeks after that. They totally could do that. So I think that we are both on the same page about this being something that they could do. And if they do it, it's not going to be the M1, right? You can't just keep putting M1s in things and calling them pro. There has to be another story here. So if you think about something that's based on the A14 cores, it's like an M1, but it and calling them pro. There has to be another story here. So if you think about something that's based on the A14 cores, it's like an M1, but it's got more cores. It's an M1X, no matter what they call it.

It's basically, you know what I mean when I say it's an M1X. And that would be a thing that they could ship now because I don't think they're shipping something that's based on like whatever the A15 cores are because that's a thing that we don't even see that ship until the fall. So I think it would just be the sort of six months later-ish. But get me, it's sort of like the half step of the M1.

For my third pick, I'm going to say that at least one more Apple system app will be based on Catalyst. I put this in the document and I thought it wasn't't a trap i think it's a good like i don't know what it is but they do seem to keep putting catalyst apps on the mac right what do you think it'll be i have no idea but something that they redesign so like right you know they could they could do a new design for an application and say, now it's based on Catalyst. And I think that there's something important for Apple to continue doing that and kind of putting their money where their mouth is.

And, you know, they did Messages as Catalyst, which is the other one that they did. It wasn't music, was it? It was podcasts and TV. Was the TV Catalyst as well? So yeah, I just want to keep seeing them push this if they want developers to adopt it. Personally, I want developers to adopt it

and I want Apple to do more with Catalyst. I think that the technology is good for users because it provides them with a greater choice of applications and stuff. And having used some of the iOS apps on a Mac, they do the job, but it's much better when a developer goes the extra mile to make it a Catalyst app. So it still has a lot of the same bones, but now supports a bunch more stuff which feels right for the Mac.

So, you know, stuff like full Swift and SwiftUI is, I think, is still many years away from being a true thing that people could take advantage of. So in the meantime, and maybe even past that, Catalyst should still be a technology that Apple continues to work on. And one of the greatest ways for them to continue working on it is to continue to use it for important applications in the system. Yeah, and I'm going to be specific here, and I updated our list to be at least one new or updated Apple system app based on Catalyst. The idea here is they could replace an existing app, or they could add an app that was only on iOS, or an app that's new across all platforms that's based on Catalyst. Can you imagine? Mail? But it could also literally be, hey, we made this new app, and now it's, know oh boy everybody clips is now available on mac os it could literally be anything i think the idea is it's a bundled in apple app

that they mention on stage that is uh that's sourced by catalyst so and and in terms of like how do we know we'll know like it'll be obvious whether it's catalyst or not and we should be able to judge it based on that because sometimes people are like they didn't say it was catalyst on stage it's like yeah but if they announce it and then we find out that it's Catalyst or not, and we should be able to judge it based on that. Because sometimes people are like, they didn't say it was Catalyst on stage. It's like, yeah, but if they announce it and then we find out that it's based on Catalyst before we score it, I'm willing to use research to confirm that the thing we saw on stage was what we thought it was. That's not the same as saying it didn't happen on stage. So I'm okay with that. Sportsmanship.

Last year, macOS introduced Control Center. You know, we got a version of Control Center. So I'm going to pick major improvements to Control Center. I feel like Control Center has a lot of work that still could be done. I'd love to see third-party stuff appear in Control Center and have a third-party API for Control Center. But failing that, I would like to see a lot more in Control Center. I think Control Center on the Mac is actually a pretty good idea. And that migrating a bunch of stuff that used to hang out in the menu bar into Control Center is a good idea. Again, I'm not

going to tell Apple what to do here, but I just feel like Control Center is also a 1.0 and there's work to be done to make it better and to perhaps integrate third parties a little bit. So I'm going to put a chip down on Control Center being better. It's a good start. I like that I can pull things out of the Control Center and put them in the menu bar. I think that's really cool. Why can't I go the other way, though, as well, you know? Yeah, well, this doesn't happen a lot.

But during the beta process last summer, Control Center got way better. Like Control Center, the first beta was not a beta. It was like an alpha. It was missing all these features. And I wrote a whole section in my public beta first look about how Control Center didn't do all these things. And when it came time to look at the final beta and the release candidate, I was like, oh, look at that. They've addressed so many of the issues that Control Center had early on. So I was actually impressed with the pace of their changes. oh, look at that. They've addressed so many of the issues that Control Center had early on.

So I was actually impressed with the pace of their changes. And so I'm also sort of keeping that in the back of my mind that whoever was working on Control Center did a lot of good work over last summer to move it forward. And I hope that they've been working in the background to keep moving it forward

for this year. So we'll see. Okay, this is our final pick in the mac mac os round and i'm back in this point again where i'm really stuck about where i want to go there's a couple very mike categories out there that are sitting there yeah what i'll say is we have um maybe uh i think in Upgrade Plus today, we'll talk about maybe some stuff that didn't make our lists. Sure.

We have some software picks, but I don't think this is going to be a year for a lot of software stuff for the Mac, just in general. I don't really imagine a lot of the stuff changing for the system itself. I think I'm going to go bold again. Okay. Because there has been precedent for this, and I think it would make sense to do it, but it would be very bold,

but there is precedent. New Mac Pro pre-announced. Ooh, okay. So they've done this twice. They did it with the iMac Pro, and they did it with the Mac Pro. WWDC pre-announced this high-end computer that will come at the end of the year.

You can look at it, but you can't touch it. And I personally believe that this is going to be a 2021 product. Maybe they sneak it in right at the end of the year, but I think it's going to happen. And again, just like the 14-inch MacBook Pro, this is the audience to do it because, I mean, these people buy them, but these people also care the most, right? And the Mac Pro, unlike any other computer that Apple sells, is a product that Moore's law does not apply to at all. They've proven it because they keep these things on sale. Like when they showed off the new one, the trash can Mac

Pro, a product that Apple had on the record said was flawed in multiple ways, was still available for purchase for a long time up until they released the new. Everybody loves Mac Pro, time up until they released the new everybody loves Mac Pro, the return of the cheese grater Mac Pro. So if they have one in the chamber, which it seems like they do, if that's likely to come this year, which I think there is a possibility of now would be the perfect time, especially even if they did, if they unveiled the MacBook Pro, the new one, and they're like, this is so great. It's so powerful. Look how amazing this is. We also have something that's so much more, you know, just a little teaser like they've done before. I would love, you'd love to see it, Jason. That's a big pick. And I'm a little flummoxed because it was not what I was expecting. And now I have a really hard decision to make

because I have a whole bunch of things that are kind of interesting to me, but they're all a little bit risky. But with your risky pick there, I feel a little bit emboldened to pick something. So I'm going to do, you know, that thing, Mike, where I said, sometimes you pick things over and over again, just hoping them, hoping to will them into existence. And it's like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, right? It doesn't actually ever happen. Well, you just said Apple was going to release a new Apple Silicon MacBook Pro for the developer conference

because these are the developers. They are one of the biggest audiences for Pro Macs. And I'm going to lean into that and say, you know what would pair really well with that? An external display. Okay. I think this might be a bit early category although depending on how it goes it could be in the ipad category too but i'm going to mention it here new apple external display announced not picking the size not picking the price just saying something that isn't the pro display xdr available and would pair nicely with a MacBook Pro?

And I think it would be kind of interesting because it would pair with a MacBook Pro, obviously with a Mac Pro. And if they do actually and hopefully do something to the iPad, there's a big story throughout the whole keynote for why this product would exist. And maybe they needed the iMac to come out first before they could do this. We'll see. I mean, my only pause on the external display is I would have assumed some kind of rumor to suggest it. Yep.

But who knows? Yeah. Who knows? There have been rumors about Apple working on an external display, though. But it's just been a while since we've heard them. But they could be there. And again, this is a thing where it might be hard to know because it's a different kind of aspect of the supply chain and where are they sourcing their panels. And are those panels that we've thought were for iMacs, but they're also for an external display?

We don't know. But it's possible that it's sneaked by. And again, I want to believe. And we'll see. I wanted to mention your Mac Pro choice. The reason I had that low on my list, it is a thing that I could totally see them doing. I'm going to bet that they do it next year. That it'll be like two years ago, we stood up here and said we were making a two-year transition to Apple Silicon. And what's missing?

And here's the Mac Pro. And then everybody goes wild. Maybe even in person. Imagine that. So we'll see. But I think they could do it because, again, what's going to stop them from doing that? But that's fine. I think that they're going to over-deliver on the two-year. We're going to get both of our picks here wrong. But that's fine. I think that they're going to over deliver on the two-year.

We're going to get both of our picks here wrong and that's fine. Except we'll be sad. But it'll be fine. We're used to disappointment. This episode is brought to you by Pingdom from SolarWinds.

If you have a website, what purpose does it serve? Whether it's driving people to your products, collecting sales leads for your company, or providing customer service of a contact form.

When these critical transactions fail for your customers, you could lose out on business. People could leave frustrated. You don't want that. It's going to be a bad experience for your users. There is a solution to this transaction monitoring from Pingdom. Starting at just $10 a month, transaction monitoring runs checks 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and will alert you when cart checkout forms or login pages fail before they affect your customers and your business. Pingdom will notify you the moment there is a failure over SMS, email, or via your favorite apps like Slack, Opsgenie, and PagerDuty. Depending on what's being monitored and the severity of the outage, you can customize who's alerted and how

they get that notification. This is really powerful stuff. Don't let your users discover a problem with your website. You should be the first to know. And it's so easy to get started. Just go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM for a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. Then when you're ready to buy, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get a huge 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for the support of this show and RelayFM. So we're going to label now everything else. So anything, any category, any hardware, any other operating system is in our everything else round. I'm going to pick something I think I picked last year.

It's classic. And I think that I was surprised they didn't do picked last year. That's classic. And I think that I was surprised they didn't do it last year. And so this may have not been a WWDC pick, but a September pick. So focus on mental health features for watchOS. I just think that this

is the next area of health that Apple should be going after here. They have the Breathe app, but I don't think that's enough. And with potential, like they have an upcoming feature of background sounds. We spoke about that in the accessibility section of stuff,

like I think it was last week. And I can imagine stuff like Apple adding background noises as maybe a guided meditation type application or something like that. I think that mental health features and helping people relax,

helping stress-related stuff, things like that, I think that they would be a really sweet addition to the overall health suite of watchOS. Okay, makes sense. It makes sense.

I struggled to think of what would be in watchOS. So it's nice that you got a watchOS pick in there. And I agree, this is something that they could focus on. And it sounds very much, I can imagine that being a thing

that they mentioned on stage, for sure. Yeah, watchOS is hard to make picks for, I think. I don't know if it's maybe particularly hard for me because I don't wear a watch very often and Apple watch it very often. But I think some of the things that I would want to pick for watchOS are things they're just not going to do. Maybe we'll touch on these, but it's just

stuff like at this point, I just don't believe that there are any calls that are doing it, but we'll find out. Oh, I am going to pick, so this is, I'm going to explain myself here as a part of this because I'm not sure it's exactly what was in our document, but I just want to explain what it means because there's a parentheses and it's very confusing. A home segment is my pick. A home segment. Now, my rationale here is Matter has been announced, which is formerly Chip. It's the home alliance. We also have seen Thread radios appear in various Apple products. I'm not saying Apple's going to unveil its entire home strategy here, but I feel like we may, I'm going to pick here that we're going to have them talk about smart home technology. Perhaps we will see that demo home that they used in videos last year to talk

about what Apple views as the stuff that it's doing in the home. So I'm not sure what form this takes, but I want to, I basically, I'm saying they're going to talk about and perhaps even show a home environment and Apple's take on the smart home. Now that seems really broad, but I will say it's also something that's really easy for Apple to not do or to talk about in the fall, but I'm going to throw it out here as a possibility. I had this pretty high on my list.

I would have picked it if you wouldn't have. I think the way that we can kind of say, look, if they just said like, Hey, here's our new version of the home app, that's not it. It needs to be like as part of the keynote where they are talking about various more than one

things that are related to home and even if they just say hey for developers you're now having access to uh you know the home the home kit server is in all these different devices and you have access to thread radios which means you can do it doesn't have to be a lot, but it needs to be more than just the home app improved. It needs to be something more sort of strategic, either about adding Apple products to the home or about how HomeKit works or how the thread radios enable more connectivity to other devices or they mention Matter and talk about the Matter strategy. It could be lots of different things but it's not just we updated the home app that's not a home segment that's just an app update i am going to go with it's getting hard now there's a reason that this is the everything else category yeah the one that i'm looking at maybe maybe i'll come back to it my concern is that it might be too focused for the state of the union than the wwdc presentation

yeah there's they do a much more technical presentation that happens in the afternoon pacific time that often has big announcements in it that are technical that are very focused on developers because they know that the morning is viewed by developers and it's a more technical thing but it's also viewed by the general public at a level that the afternoon session is not. So some technical announcements that we could pick might actually happen in the State of the Union, which doesn't count for us. Then I'm going to go with something that may be a little premature, but I think is something people will be watching out for, a new wireless audio streaming protocol for AirPods. All right.

You know, I think this will probably be something along the lines of like an AirPlay 3 or something like that. Yeah, but it could also just be we invented, or did you know there's this obscure footnote in the Bluetooth spec that allows this thing? Well, we're putting it in and that means you can stream Apple lossless

to all of our wireless or whatever, like something like that, where they say we're doing something new in order to enable new features in AirPods. That's's what i mean like this isn't the pick specifically but obviously what we're hinting at is they do something that enables some form of lossless support for their existing products yeah i think that makes sense it's not not a big meaty one no no but but it but it's hanging out there and there's a real, you know,

will they do that or not? I think there's been some strong suggestions that they have another shoe to drop about this, but they're holding it. And so perhaps this is when they would announce such a thing. I don't know why they wouldn't announce it in advance, but they haven't.

They could have said, we plan to release support for new Apple lossless streaming later this year. They could have just said that and they chose not to, which I think is a little weird, but maybe they will say it now. Well, I'm going to throw caution to the wind in terms of what I just said about the macOS State of the Union and say that there will be some improvements to SwiftUI that will be mentioned on stage, that SwiftUI is going to come up and have it be. What the pick is is significant improvements to SwiftUI. Really, though, what I'm looking at is they got to talk about SwiftUI getting better in some way.

They can't just say, hey, whether you're using SwiftUI, it's not SwiftUI mentioned. But in terms of significant, I mean, it's really significant enough to mention in the keynote that it improved would be enough this was the thing uh-huh you know i'll tell you what gave me pause for this uh maybe two years ago significant improvements to catalyst and apple said hey here's swift ui oh no oh no what if they're like oh, we did SwiftUI and that was great, but now we've got Swifter UX. So this is the thing where I could imagine that they could do a bunch of stuff, but it might not be kind of public facing keynote.

Because it's not new. Yeah, my hope is that there's something in there that makes them, especially since they're throwing a bone to the developers and the developer conference, it's like, you won't believe what you could do with SwiftUI now. You can build all of these Mac apps or you can build a custom watch face or you can

whatever it is. This could go very nicely with widgets. It could. Interactivity and widgets being a new thing that you can do because of these new additions in SwiftUI. SwiftUI. I just I'm putting down a marker here for Apple crowing about how SwiftUI has

gotten even better, right? Just as a thing, which they may not do because you mentioned Catalyst. They're like, wow, everybody was pumped for Catalyst. And the next year, they're like, we're not mentioning Catalyst. But I'm going to put it down and say they're going to pump up SwiftUI because I think unlike Catalyst, which is a transitional technology, SwiftUI, Apple thinks is the future. And so they're going to pump it some more. So I can think all they did that year was just say they gave the new name. Like this is a part of macOS.

It's called Mac Catalyst. That was basically all they did. It was super weird. Yeah. Podcast subscriptions get a plug is my third pick. That was next on my list too. This is going to be a big thing uh by any stretch

you know people may not be aware of this or such but this was rolled out as part of 14.6 but has been delayed it was but they were supposed to be available now and i think it's been delayed to later in june i think this is partly because the rollout of the new podcast app has been a bit of a disaster kind of user facing and publisher facing podcast app has been a bit of a disaster, kind of user-facing and publisher-facing. It's just been a nightmare across the board. It's like, you know, for example, if you're seeing that our shows, if you're an Apple podcast user,

are taking a while to update, this is a part of the new, part of the issues in the new Apple podcasts. So I think maybe Apple's kind of waiting to get its kind of ducks in a row a little bit more before pushing out the people to get it. But I could imagine them putting something into Apple Podcasts, some new feature or something that also touches on Apple Podcasts. And then they say, you know, and you can use this for our wonderful new podcast subscriptions feature, which is, you know, like I can imagine them just sliding that plug in purely because this is a new initiative that has

yet to even launch. So I could imagine that maybe just giving it another little kick before it gets out of the door. Yep. Makes sense. I think I put that in our list. It's definitely a possibility. And I had it next on my list. So I'm going to go with watchOS pick because I feel like I need to make one. I struggled here, but I'm going to say more data on always on watch faces. Like more watch face data will be displayed. And they'll say something about how look at this. We've improved the always on watch face even more, and it lets you show other stuff. I'm not sure what the stuff is, and I know that they won't go into great detail of like, well, what we've done is we've changed the timing of the screensaver and when it comes up.

I'm just going to say like, really, this is always on watch faces get better is really what I mean here. Yeah. In fact, let's just say that. Always on watch faces get better. Yeah, that's probably a better pick. Yeah, because that's what I'm going for is that what is there left to announce for WatchOS? Well, that is an idea I have, which is they did the always on watch face and then they did it a little bit brighter. But like I would like them to be like, well, now we've come so far that we can really do better stuff in terms of what gets displayed and what apps can show maybe there's a an explicit sort of way that an app can third-party app can

register and say i want to hold on to the watch face when i'm running and the and the face dims which it can't do now like there it goes to a screensaver which is really dumb so i'll throw it out there why not even if like as a developer you could provide a separate version of a UI in your application that is a dark mode UI, like an always-on UI. Sure. Like, yes, it's more work, but something would be fantastic. Yeah, because I get frustrated, and I use my Apple Watch all the time. I get frustrated by, as great as the always-on watch face is, there are a lot of times where it goes into dim mode, and the thing that I want to see on it isn't there anymore. And I know that ATP talked about this. The one that really gets me, like I use it as a stopwatch. I use it as a timer and that screensaver kicks in and it obscures the

information that's there. And it's like, why would you stop showing the stopwatch? Because I haven't touched the screen for 10 seconds. And then to get off, you can't just like tap and stop the stopwatch. You have to like, you know, bring it up and then open it up. And it's ridiculous, right? You should be able to say, oh, the stopwatch will not show you hundreds of a second anymore, but we'll still update every second or where the timer will show you an update every five seconds or three seconds or one second. And none of that is there now.

So that's what I'm talking about, about just having the always on watch display it's not even faces right it's the watch display get better final pick of the draft swinging for the fences in this one yeah well i've run out of things too so let's get wacky tv app redesign huh let's give it another go why not right we just keep trying the future of uh television is redesigned just keep giving it a go uh i don't i couldn't really tell you what you would do i think the tv app continues to suffer from information being laid out and navigated in weird ways. What I really want to see Apple do is crack some kind of system where they can bring in all the content. Like do whatever it is you need to do

to get Netflix in there, right? Basically, I want Apple to do what they have to do. This isn't what I'm picking. This is what I wish they would do. That I could actually set the TV button on my remote to open the TV app, not go to the home screen. By default, it goes, you know, when you press that TV button, it opens the TV app.

Because in theory, all of your content should be there. But it isn't. And that's what I want. I want them to work out some way to make that work. And that's more than software. That's deals as well. And I believe Google has gotten close with this. So I think Google TV, I think, is what it's

called now. I think they even show some Netflix stuff in there. I don't know how they're doing it, but that's what I want to see Apple do. That's my final pick. It's not a big one. It kind of sucks as a final pick. I apologize because I don't even really know what this would look like but

I think that they have yet to nail this, whatever this design would be for the TV app because I think it continues to be designed on a designed with different varying strategies in mind that haven't come to pass yet.

And so maybe they need to give it another go. Okay, that's reasonable. I put a lot of very strange things in here. You did. I'm tempted to pick because they're hilarious, but I am going to... The question is, how boring do I want to get? I have no good choices now.

I literally, I have no good choices. Yep. I, oh boy. Maybe we haven't been very imaginative when it comes to watchOS and tvOS this year, but I am struggling to think of realistic things that they would introduce. Like I just listened today on App Stories,

John and Federico have been doing like their wishlist episodes. And they were talking about, they had Alex who works at MacStories on the episode today because he does their watchOS reviews every year and he was talking about wild, incredible stuff, right? Like that you could swipe

him from the left to bring in an app that you choose and Apple could put like what Watchsmith does and you could have different complications appearing what uh watchmith does and you know you could have different complications appearing at different times but i just don't think they're going to do any of that yeah that that's that's the challenge is not coming up with ideas of things you'd like to see but things that you think are there's actually a likelihood because if you can invent a hundred different features for watch os well the problem is that each one of them maybe

has one percent chance of coming true because you don't know where Apple's going to go next. So you just, you try to have something broad. I am going to then go with another constant thing that everybody predicts that it is going to happen. And this is sort of tied to maybe my Swift UI pick as well, which is why not third-party Apple Watch faces at long last. The developers will be able to build watch faces. They'll have to be approved by Apple. They'll use Swift UI and they're going to open up the, let's just, I don't believe this, but they're going to open up the doors. They're going to be like, finally, we've been doing this for seven years. Finally, we're going to let you develop watch faces, but we have to approve everything and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But we're finally going to be able to do it. I'm sure there will be, it won't happen, but if it does happen, there'll be lots of footnotes and lots of asterisks. But that would be an exciting addition to WatchOS. It's finally time for us to add a huge risk vector of copyright infringement. Come and get it. Well, honestly, I think the existence of the App Store

is a huge risk vector of infringement. And if they say we have to approve everything as with all other apps, and if anybody files a claim the the watch face just gets zapped right like you that this is the business apple's in right like ultimately if apple didn't want to deal with that kind of thing they wouldn't have an app store right they they have imposed this on themselves because the benefit is worth it. And I know that they were particular, like they made a point of this with the stickers, right? Because they knew that was going to be a thing too.

I think that, and they did make, right, stickers is a great example. I would imagine that if they're going to do this, whoever's in charge of approving watch faces will be well-versed in the intellectual property of watch faces. Right. It also wouldn't put, I wouldn't put it past Apple to say we have some guidelines about which watch face types are available to you because these are the ones that have cleared. Right. Right.

And, and, and, and, you know, you don't do these, but do use these as the basis for that, but be able to customize it in some way, right? Maybe it's even like you're really kind of remixing a complicated set of Apple watch faces, but able to do it in a way that is not watch face sharing, right?

It's more technical than that. A really easy way for them to get around it, which I think would kind of suck, is just you can't make an analog watch face that would remove so much of the risk it would it would it would be a lot less exciting that way because that's sort of what we want to see but anyway it's just various like you know you can make as many watch face types as you like as long as they have a digital readout of the time right they don't have hands could be but i like i said i i'm only picking this because it's literally the last pick in the draft and I got nothing that I like better. But I'll take a flyer on Apple Watch faces.

It's got to happen someday, right? So that's the draft. If you want to score along as the keynote is unfolding next week, there is a link in the show notes to the scorecard. You can go to upgrade.cards. And thank you so much to Zach Knox for his continued work on this project.

It's very, very much appreciated. So as we mentioned earlier, we'll be going live as soon as we can after the keynote ends next week. So you can follow us on Twitter, follow Upgrade on Twitter as well. And you'll find out because we'll be tweeting out about that.

I'm really excited for another WWDC. I'm excited to just be excited about the event this year rather than last year which was a lot of like how's it gonna work like there isn't really any of that this time we know how it's gonna work uh and i'm really excited to see that and then some of the stuff that will come out afterwards jason people should say lock to six colors.com right i assume you'll be publishing a bunch of sure yeah i mean I mean, I think we'll be going to upgrade first,

but then in the ensuing days, you'll find all the written word there. Yes. If you want to find Jason online, you can also go to at Jason L, J-S-N-E-L-L,

on Twitter. I am iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. Before we go, let me tell you about another show here on RelayFM that you should check out, and that's Pictorial,

a show about art history for anyone and everyone. And you don't need an art degree to listen. It's hosted by Quinn Rose and Betty Chen. Go to relay.fm slash pictorial or search for Pictorial wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much to our sponsors

of this week's episode, Pingdom, Hello and Forward Networks. And thank you for listening. And also, if you support us, you can go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up and you will get longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade Every Time.

And we're going to talk about, we're going to dig into the bargain bin of picks and share some of the stuff that existed in our document that was just too unlikely to choose. So you can get that in Upgrade Plus at getupgradeplus.com. We'll be back next time.

Enjoy the WWDC keynote. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. I'll get you this time, Hurley. You'll see. Thank you.