Upgrade - 411: 180% Different for Me

Episode Date: June 12, 2022

It's the aftermath of a WWDC like no other, so in this very special episode Myke and Jason kick off the Summer of Fun with an episode recorded live in the California sun. The breeze is blowing, the questions about the M2 processor and Stage Manager are flowing, and we're trying to get our heads around what last week's announcements mean for the future of Apple's platforms.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 411 today's show is brought to you by uni pizza ovens electric capital one and mode my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snow hi jason hi mike hi i'm waving you already know it because you've heard the music we're starting the summer of fun early jason why are we starting the summer of fun early well because it's the it's basically summer and i'm enjoying the sun and you're enjoying the sun in sunny california because we are recording this one in person in the human flesh and you're like well wait a second i thought mike was sick how could they do that and it's like well i have a long table in my backyard and my backyard is outside i'd like to keep my backyard outside and here we are we are in my backyard with a complete podcast set up uh that is working

surprisingly well yeah and i'm i'm staying masked i've decided except for when i'm drinking fluids because look if i take jason snell down the world's coming up but you're you're you're you sound so muffled that way we're far away away, and the breeze is blowing. Hey, look, I just want it on record that I tried. Because I'm still positive. I'm still testing positive every day. Well, as listeners can hear, we are outside. We are not next to each other. We are at a remove from one another.

I can even scoot back a little bit. And the wind is blowing, as you can hear. back a little bit um and the wind is blowing as you can hear not a sound effect now we last year i think on the summer of fun or maybe it was two years ago during uh stay inside time we did a fake episode where we were outside upgrade for the summer of fun where we put in a lot of sound effects that suggested that we were outside. We could just slide back. You hear that? That was the sound of a picnic chair. Slide on back.

But this is real. This is all real. We don't actually know what's going to happen. My neighbors were having like an inflatable pool. They were having a pool party with a bunch of kids in it yesterday when we were out here having dinner. And they were screaming. That could happen.

A crow could attack us. That could happen. It could rain. It might. I mean, looking at at the sky i'm not expecting rain perfectly blue and it's breezy it was raining on the golden gate bridge on my way over though so you know that's just but i feel like that always happens it's a thick fog that is always literally always raining many years ago during wwc in san francisco me and steven decided we would take a lovely walk together across the bridge. One of the worst decisions we ever made because it's just cold and horrible. I probably told this story before, but I commuted across the bridge in a bus every day for, I don't know, 15 years.

And I will tell you, I would start to look out the window and I'd be like, bad day for you guys. Or, oh, you were very lucky. Like I could gauge like what kind of day it was for the tourists coming over the bridge. Because some days you couldn't see a thing. And it was windy and cold and miserable. And other days it was crystal clear and beautiful. And those people all went back to their towns and in their countries and reported back, oh, Golden Gate Bridge, very bad. Or, oh, Golden Gate Bridge is very beautiful. Or, oh, Golden Gate Bridge is very beautiful.

And it's just the luck of the draw. I have a hashtag snow talk question for you. It comes from Arjan, and Arjan wants to know, when you make a typing mistake, do you repeatedly press backspace until you correct it? Or do you command space to delete the whole word and type correctly? I didn't even remember that you could do the shortcut to go back a word.

And that is my answer. Also, what I really want to say here is always forward, Mike. Always forward. Never backward? Never backward. You never correct an error? Never. Do you never make errors?

Just keep going. No, you do, but you just correct around them and say, you know, that word I said before was not it. Anyway. Wait. So what you're saying, i've never seen this in your writing so you make an error and then just say no forget that don't worry about that what i meant to say was this i think if you consult the history of my writing you'll find out that that's exactly my incredible yeah i just always forward push the cursor forward ever forward, I like hitting keys, so I just hit back, back, back. Back, back, back is a pretty good one. That's a classic maneuver.

I don't trust a lot of those jump forward, jump back, especially since sometimes they change between apps or it'll be on command or option or whatever. And so I don't, not for deleted. Also, I was looking, so I had to change some keyboard shortcuts. And I had to, on my Mac, I discovered that there's a keyboard shortcut that's enabled by default. I think that is shift delete to delete the other direction. I think that's it.

Let me see. Shift delete. Yeah, it does delete rather than backspace. It eats the letters in front of you, right? Yeah, that's what the delete key would do otherwise. And then backspace just goes, backspace will go left, delete key will go right if you're in a left to right language.

Well, I find that really disturbing and I turn that off. By the way, the reason that I'm mentioning this is that I mistakenly installed the macOS beta on my main system that I use every day. Hang on a second. We need to get into that. We'll see.

So I had to... Just pause there a second. All right. That is the end of Snortalk. Okay, thank you. All right. We need to... Chapter marker.

That's where it goes. And I'm going to write down... We have a topic later on in the show called beta impressions. All goes. And I'm going to write down in the, we have a topic later on in the show called beta impressions. All right. And I'm pointing, Jason mistakenly

installs Ventura. I will just say to close out the Snow Talk question, I do sometimes do shift option like to, and then highlight stuff

and delete it. But anyway, I mostly will hit the backspace key. If you would like to send in a question for us to open an episode of the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag snow talk or use question marks no talking to relay fm members discord uh do you want to give a

mic update yes yes how you doing mike's still sick um i still have coronavirus uh i would say that my symptoms are going it's i'm on a roller coaster at the moment where and i've heard this from other people it could be perfectly fine for a while and then i just all of a sudden feel terrible my most recent symptom which is one i've had for the most couple days has been really nauseous i don't know where that's coming from but that's like a thing that i got going on uh we're going home tomorrow um i've been consulting with guidelines from the cdc and the nhs about like can i travel the thing is i can travel like no one's stopping me you don't have to test anymore but basically what i've been reading is after five days you're um you are way

less contagious so as long as so the c CDC recommends, as long as you mask, you're fine. So, I've been contagious now for seven, eight days. So I've been testing positive for eight days, I should say. So,

we've, I've also, because of that, our airline won't change it, because technically and legally, I can travel. So we'll be masked up the entire trip, and going home tomorrow i will tell you i cannot wait to go home i have had enough of this trip i can't wait to go it's

a cursed trip yeah it really is you gotta you gotta get home so saying it's a cursed trip we have a connection that i'm not feeling too confident on but we'll work it out yeah yeah no it's it's a uh it's a tough one as much as i I enjoy your visits to California, the circumstances of this, it could have been amazing and instead it's terrible. It had the makings of Perfect Trip and went in the exact opposite direction. We were talking before we started recording today

about, like as you mentioned to me, that last Monday was a blur. Oh, yeah. And I wanted, I don't think we told this story on the show but i thought it would be funny to tell it now so we recorded last monday you were at apple park and i was in my hotel room in san jose but we were over video webex yeah because it was apple was running it right so everything's in webex not zoom that we normally use time and you could have had the video off

but you had the video on i could see you could see me so i thought you can see me but it ended up being very helpful because what jason would see is every little while i would kind of recoil into myself as i needed a minute it reminded me of when i was a kid sometimes they would need to calm the class down and they'd say okay everybody heads down on your desk right it was like you put your fold your arms and put your head down on your desk and just think think quiet thoughts for a little while and give the teacher a break the teacher needs a little break right now kids and that's what you did and so i took that as a cue to keep talking talking just vamp for me for a minute because i i'm recharging uh i've also been using my blood oxygen sensor a lot so as the you know apple watch yeah you know i've i've many times

i've been like this feature is pointless why did they include it um i've been using it i still say the way that apple positioned it initially was kind of silly you know it's like oh did you go up mountains a bunch um but i've been using it uh a lot for uh checking my my blood oxygen because why not people say you should do that so I've been doing it. I can do a little test for you right now. I was 94% an hour ago. That's not good is what I've heard. I'll do another test later.

The FDA does not approve of you using this in a medical way. It's more for entertainment purposes. Entertainment purposes only. I'm so entertained with my blood oxygen. If it's low enough you'll be very entertained by it yeah this is providing drama 96 right now so we're all good it's all the all the extra oxygen that's out here in the outside world it is nice to be outside i've not spent a lot of time outside i'll tell you that um wwdc is over it's true oh that sounds so good the bird

song i don't know if anybody's enjoying this as much as i am but like i'll tell you right now like listeners if you think to yourself oh man i wish they were inside as a palmer you spent a lot of time inside just take it from me it's good to be outside uh what was your overall thoughts on wwdc um i i mean i we talked about this sometime some a little bit last week. And I wrote a Macworld column about it last week, actually, which was basically, this is the way to do it. And I think that that's been the consensus.

I don't know if Apple's going to do it this way again. This was a change for them. This was trying something different to see if they could synthesize an in-person event with online stuff. And I think they did a really good job. Like, the fact that they did all those sessions on the web, like they've done the last few years, and those sessions were good.

I watched a bunch of them this week. I think that was all good. I've heard good things about the labs. They had a Slack where you could go in and talk to people who are people who work at Apple in key areas and ask them your questions. And they and their colleagues would chime in with answers, and that was all the stuff that you could do

and not be in Cupertino at all. So I think on that front, they have done a really good job. And remember a few years ago when this first happened. Oh, there's a siren now. Uh-oh. I swear this is not a plot development in this fake outside that we're doing.

It's just the regular thing. So that's so great. Okay. I think that we all wondered whether they were really going to be able to embrace doing an online WWDC a few years ago. It's getting so much more aggressive. And it was. Right. I mean, because COVID happened.

And there was an emergency, I mean, because COVID happened, and there was an emergency, and they rushed to build an online WWDC, and it turns out they did a pretty good job, and they were able to iterate a couple of times on it, and they've done a great job. So I think that part of it is settled, because WWDC is experienced by 99.999 whatever percent of the Apple's developers not in person so the part the really was the other part and that was mostly Monday although it did you know there was stuff happening on Sunday and on Tuesday like overlap with some things and some events and all that and in the end it's it's not that different but it's a little different from what i was kind of predicting a few weeks ago which is do it as a media event well they did but and it may end up there it may end up in the steve jobs theater with media and developers right it depends on how big

they because i mean i don't think they've said the amount of people but the images that i've seen and even the images apple posted it looked like there was over a thousand people. And can the Steve Jobs Theater hold that many? I think it could do 2,000. 2,000? Well, then they could do it there then. Yeah. I think it's just they occupied way much more physical space, right, than they would have in a theater. And that's because of COVID.

But they could do it in the theater if they felt comfortable. But they also cannot do it. Obviously, they would prefer to do it in the theater, though, comfortable but they also cannot do it I think so I think so if I had to guess my guess would be that next year they'll do in the theater if they can they'll do it in the theater and they'll actually have presentations on stage

for the media event even if a bunch of it is pre-taped because a bunch of it was already pre-taped but it'll be more of a live event than a viewing party, which is essentially what it was. But even if they do the viewing party thing again, like I love the idea that you get the chance at the trip of the lifetime.

If you're a developer and you get to go to the mothership, you get to see Apple park, you get to see the ring, you get to see the whole thing. There's the developer center. Like there's all of these things. And no, that's,

that's for 0.0001% of Apple developers. But it's a great moment for them. And it also has great value for Apple to show excited developers, right? I feel like if they do go back to the Steve Jobs Theater and have some aspect of it live, one of the things that they're going to do is have all the developers in the front. And they're going to be hyped up. And they're going to be applauding and shouting and being very excited and that's good for the performance of the media event and let's let's not kid ourselves i was noticing and watching some of it back state of the unions for developers the the key the keynote is not like the developers were not referred to as you in that presentation, right?

At least they did. Our developers, not you. Because it's not, the keynote's not directed at developers. It's for developers as users and all other users, right? Because they did do something in this keynote that, like, on reflection I really enjoyed. They kept talking about there being APIs for everything. And whether in previous years they just haven't had as many APIs but like you know like focus mode for example there wasn't a focus API last time but there is this time and they called it out and I liked it for that

um I do think uh as well as your article I'll put in the show notes also put a great article that David Smith wrote as well um just about his whole experience is kind of crossing the divide as both he attended as media but did everything else as a developer right and david spoke so highly of it i mean honestly if they do anything that different to last week in the future i'd be really surprised it just doesn't seem like they need to go back to WWDC's in-person first because there's so much more they could still do. Like Apple could facilitate meetups and or the community will be doing it themselves again.

Right. Because now, right, now this happened this year. Next year, if Apple did the same thing, it would still attract more people like it used to. Right, because people know what it is. Yeah. Because if you were somebody who would go to WWDC like I would before, right?

Just be in that environment. You would have seen this year that people were just getting together a lot. Like, oh, I want to be in that. Now, the question is where it will happen. Right, because around Apple Park, there isn't a lot of stuff. There aren't a lot of hotels. There aren't a lot of restaurants.

So that all still could occur in San Jose, right? As it has in previous years, because plus San Jose is 15 minutes to Apple Park, right? So honestly, I expect that to start occurring over time. I think now I would be disappointed if Apple brought WWDC back to the full-on 5,000-person convention because there kind of isn't a... I don't know why you would do it.

Why would you get so many people there to do one day? Because I don't think they're going to do a five-day thing, right? They shouldn't. Because the online classes are enough classes are online is so much better and it and it enables so many more people to do this i think this is the way to go but it will still allow for people who want to be in the environment yeah can still come to the environment because there will be ancillary events popping up just as there always was like i would love to next year put on live

shows again in the hammer theater right right i would love it if we could do that and the way that this year went except for one notable exception would seem to suggest that that could be a possibility for us right to do that again right and you end up with sort of ancillary events although i do wonder with apple facilitating things like they did if that might suggest apple wanting to have more of it be kind of under their which is good auspices and that totally fine i mean the talk show being in the developer center is they always had that page right where they blessed certain events sure so like they can just keep doing that and also they can put on more themselves they have the developer center they have all that space around apple park

like there's stuff that they can do i think this is the template for the future of wbdc 100 i don't think it is returning to 2019 it doesn't make sense to have this big conference but you're also right just in a the way the world works and the way people are you will end up with um knowing what it is now you will end up with somebody saying i'm going to do a a sidebar conference in san jose that week why not whatever and and that'll happen there were developers that were going anyway right like i saw a bunch of developers online who were before they even knew that apple was inviting people. So I'm going to be in San Jose that week.

Or I'm going to go because there were a number of developers I saw that had already planned to go and got rejected for tickets. And they got tickets, you know, because Apple did like multiple rounds of sending those passes out. So people want it. And this is a way to do it where I think it still continues to make it pretty democratic feeling. And sets the expectation, right? Which is you're not here for a week, which is actually you still have to pay for your flights, but you don't have to stay for five, six, seven days. You're here for a concentrated period. And maybe with the developer center, you know, it's not just we'll watch the keynote together it's you'll watch the keynote together and you're gonna you're gonna meet some people who work at apple and there's gonna be some

stuff in the developer center for you and it's gonna be a great two days two and a half days and then you go home they could make a couple of tracks too so like you know you said like okay we're gonna put on screenings of these 10 sessions of the whole sort which we think of like and so you can go on like apple's golden path of wwdc right where like they're going to have they're going to be showing these sessions in developer center you can if you're in town you can come along and we'll guide you through three days but it's not a different experience than anybody else right imagine imagine actually having some in-person sessions where you could talk to the people in the videos about like and ask them follow-up questions there's stuff they could do

but most of it's going to need to happen online and that's fine but they can create an experience that is special for the developers who are lucky enough to have it and who will presumably cycle through and not be the same group every year which is why i said it's a an experience of a lifetime it's like this is that was the year I went in person. And then they're useful as part of the show as well. And so that's a good combination because it is a show, they're putting it on, having the developers there shows the public

that Apple cares about its developers, which is important because there's a lot of stuff going on that is controversial about Apple and how it treats its developers. So having that as a profession of Apple how it treats its developers so having that as a profession of apple's love for its developers is good for apple and it's also good for the event itself to be you know like i said it's it's a much more receptive studio audience the the mac world expo crowds and the wwdc keynote crowds were always the best in terms of stagecraft

because they were because the media is we're kind of not supposed to clap and stuff i hate that thought by the way like because i guess i'm media now right so close nearly got there yeah i guess technically you can still say you're not until the next time i would be excited i'll be clapping and shouting like i don't know why there is an expectation the media must be jaded like Like it doesn't make sense. I think the idea is that you're objective and you're not there to root. You're there to cover it. I,

this is where I threw my arms up with the touchdown thing when they did the windowing on the iPad. I did do that, but that's about it. I come from a different age where like I'm independent. Yeah. Right. Like I didn't,

I don't work for IDG or whatever. Like I'm just a guy who has a bunch of podcasts, not because he wants to be a journalist, but it's because he's an enthusiast. It's a cultural thing, but it's always going to be there, right? Which is why for the media events, pure media events, the crowd is seated with VIPs who are like friends of Apple, who Apple has invited, and Apple employees,

and they do the cheering, right? And my feeling is that that actually got a little over-aggressive in the last few years. Well, the beauty of this is you've got an excited audience that's going to cheer, who are the developers. So you bring them in, and it's that much better. And if there are crowd

shots that show people, and you're like, ah, there's my buddy who went, that's also all to the benefit of this. So, yeah, let's do this again yeah except for the one this very specific thing that we shouldn't do exactly the same no but similar but very no no similar not for me no very similar for everyone else exact 180 percent different percent 180 degree 180 percent different for me okay all right this episode is brought to you by mode and their new keyboard, the Sonnet.

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to get them quicker if you want i've owned a mode 80 for over a year they also sent me an early unit of the sonnet to check out which i cannot wait to get home to genuinely i'm sorry i just don't like typing on my laptop keyboard anymore i want my keyboard these two keyboards the 80 and the sonnet they have different layouts so you can choose which works best for you either functionally or aesthetically but you're going to find with all of mode's keyboards is an incredible attention to detail the highest level of quality and all-round excellent experience mode pick premium materials and machine them with incredibly high precision and care look we sit in front of our keyboards at our desks all day. Why shouldn't it be completely tailored to suit your preferences? Keyboards are a tool that we use to get our best work done,

so why should we have to settle for anything less? Quite frankly, why would you want your keyboards to sound like this when it could sound like this? Mode keyboards are wonderful to build, have incredibly detailed and easy to follow instructions and truly make typing an event to look forward to it's one of those things that makes your day that bit more enjoyable you can find out more today by going to mode designs.com slash upgrade fm that's mode designs.com slash upgrade fm mode it's time to rethink keyboards thanks to mode for the support of this show and relay fm so observations since last week um what kind of stuff have you been thinking about what kind of stuff has been bouncing around in your brain what sessions have you watched that kind of stuff yeah i watched a

bunch of sessions um not as many so so here's the way that I look at sessions is so many sessions are Apple evangelizing developers on what they need to do to follow Apple's guidelines. And the truth is that is not what I'm looking for. It's not for me, right? It goes without saying. It's not for me right that goes without saying it's not for me what i'm looking for is are there things i can glean about new things that apple is doing that uh by watching the developer session they explain how it works and what it does and i go oh that's how that works and then they're like okay let's do this in swift and i think goodbye time for me to leave next session so i i watched a bunch, especially on Tuesday, I watched a bunch of desktop class iPad related sessions, which I thought was really interesting. And I wrote up on Six Colors.

internally you need to not have you know restore those features that are on the mac but not on the ipad because you didn't want to put them on the iphone back in the day and and consider that more but it is interestingly also uh an os update in ipad os 16 with the idea of giving more tools so like there are three different browsers that you can choose for your window basically the top of the window that do different things whether you're a whether you're a browser or a or a uh like a a file-based app or there's a third one too a navigation-based hierarchical navigation-based app they have these three different kind of toolbar styles or something and then um that have like the name of the like the document one the documents kind of to the left like it is on mac os now um there's a file menu essentially on under the file name that you can you click on the file name and and it's a it's a new drop down menu that lets

you do things that are file related like they didn't call it i don't know if they call it the file menu but mac users will be familiar with it as the file menu yes because it's literally icon your article you've got an image and it's like it's got a little chevron whatever you call it carrot yeah next to the file name duplicate rename move export like it's a bunch of actions you can perform on the file right and so and there are some basic ones there like renaming in line, but also you can put your own commands there for your app. So it's basically a file menu. And then there are toolbars. That moves it to the left.

So then there's this toolbar area in the center. And what developers can do, this is the kind of stuff you glean from the sessions, what the developer can do is say, like on the Mac, here's my default toolbar. And here's some other things you can add to the toolbar. And these things are grouped together. And this thing can't be taken off the toolbar and these things are optional and and then anything that doesn't fit in the toolbar basically overflows into the little you know more menu off in the corner um but it's apple defining saying like this is how you do all of the toolbar stuff on on ipad and it's not quite a menu bar, right? Because they didn't introduce a menu bar with iOS 16.

They could have, but they didn't. But they're putting things that you might find in a menu bar in other places. That was after iOS 15. That was the X-Way. We were all talking about that constantly, right? Menu bar on iPad. Menu bar mode. They could have easily in this mode, in fact, put things in the menu bar.

Because it was the introduction of that globe key thing. Right. Which shows you commands. Where they basically replicated the menu bar, like what you'd see on Catalyst. They're really dipping their toe in the water there, right? Where you've got the globe key and command key thing, which will bring up your menus for the app, but it's not a menu bar. And now you've got these other things in that toolbar that are menu-like, but not a menu bar. And they're attached to the individual windows.

It will come as no surprise to you, Mike, that it turns out if you do this on your iPad app, it makes it a better Mac app, too, through Catalyst. That was one of the selling points they made is all of these choices sort of like the toolbar becomes a Mac toolbar item when you're on the Mac. Oh, okay. So if you're trying to improve your iPad app to make it more Mac-like and you're using Catalyst, you actually are also making your Catalyst app

more Mac-like in the process. And it's part of their strategy of like, take something from iOS and make it an iPad thing and then bring it to the Mac and you can pick up all these other kinds of features. So they're making an effort with a bunch of the desktop class stuff around it to just sort of restore interface things

that just weren't there on the iPad. And yeah, I think it's part and parcel with the stage manager stuff that they're doing. But interesting that they chose to give it a name and call it out in a different way. And for a developer conference, right? They're trying to extol the virtues of doing this. They know that most of their iOS apps

are not particularly iPad adapted and are not using features like this. And they're really really this is one of those cases where they are really trying to evangelize developers to like you come on make a toolbar to join us my concern of a lot of this kind of ipad stuff is in the past a lot of the productivity apps so they had these features right like i think about like uh windows you know multiple app windows or whatever yeah apple's apps do them a lot of third party smaller apps do it but the big guns don't do it right right or like it takes them a year 18 months to add this kind of stuff you know like i still want

to have multiple windows in google docs i don't think that's ever going to happen i think the challenge yeah i think the challenge is with Google Docs or with Microsoft Office, you've got something that is sort of, they built their own thing to do it. But all of the kind of smaller apps that have built their own toolbar system or whatever, I think you'll see some improvement there where they'll be like, oh, now I'll just use Apple's thing instead. But you're right. The big ones, are they going to embrace this or are they

just going to ignore it like they've ignored everything else? But then the other thing is, all I really want is Apple to make pure, true, real-time collaboration in one of their document apps, right? So we could move our Google Docs to Pages or whatever. That was one of the things that I added to our little

show document here, is that Apple spent a lot of time talking about collaboration features. And in the conversation over this past week about it, I've seen some people be really enthusiastic about it that feel like Google and Microsoft are playing in this space and that where is Apple and does Apple even care? And people who use Microsoft Teams

or whatever else are like, oh, it's great that Apple's doing this. I admit to being a little more skeptical about this because Apple loves to say, oh, look, we have come up with our solution that will let everybody collaborate in real time, but it only ever works on Apple's platforms, right? And sometimes there's a web version of it, but really it's for people who are fully committed to Apple platforms

and so many businesses aren't. We're going to use Pages now. That's just what we're going to use as opposed to Word or Google Docs. There are not a lot of organizations that I think are willing to do that. So I look at those collaboration things and I think maybe we would use them under certain circumstances. I mean, I would love to. Maybe we would use them under certain circumstances. I mean, I would love to, but every time I've tried it, and I've tried it so many times, it's like the collaboration that currently exists in Notes, where it's like, all of our

changes are going to get synced, but when? When? Yeah, exactly. And so, the fact that they are trying to do things more real-time with messages and FaceTime and stuff like that i think it's all admirable but i'm still left with wondering if they're actually people are actually going to use um these collaboration tools not because they're not good because maybe they are but because i just any any any organization that would standardize on Apple collaboration tools is an organization that is 100% Apple.

And, you know, Apple, unless Apple is going to be like Microsoft or Google, and I don't think they ever are, and say, we are also going to make all of our collaboration tools available on all the other platforms, right? That's not why it exists so it makes it a hard sell even if it even if it is good and you know i share your skepticism of like you know could we just could our show documents go in uh some other collaborative tool that apple does i mean we'll try it out but it would work for people who were starting something new but considering we already have google docs for me it has to meet google docs's core functionality right before i and like the fact oh runs on apple platforms only not a problem for me in my business right but you know like if i now decided i wanted to reorganize our show document and moved everything around, you're on your laptop, you see it exactly as I'm doing it.

That has become now something that I rely on. And so for me to consider wanting to move to something else, it has to do that. But I do like the look of their other collaboration stuff, right? Shared tab groups is fun. Yeah, is that going to happen? Are we going to start having like a little shared tab groups for all our podcasts?

Could do, why not? We'll upgrade tab group where instead of sending you links, I just open tabs. I mean, I'm a huge tab group user. I have seven tab groups that I use. Wow. So I'm currently in my recording tab group, which has all the things in my recording. And what I like about that is, so say, for example,

I'm on my iPad in the morning. I can have my recording tab group open, have all my tabs open. I can be editing the document. When I then sit down on my my iPad in the morning. I can have my recording tab group open, have all my tabs open. I can be editing the document. When I then sit down on my iMac in the evening to record a view, it's just where I left off. And I love it as a persistent thing. And then I can go to my, like, I then have just a general RelayFM tab group, which has all of the tabs I need for publishing.

So I switch over to there and do all the stuff I need. I'm a big fan of this feature. I'm happy they're adding more to it. And I like the idea of shared tab groups. I have a vacation tab group where I keep ideas for vacations. Adina should be shared on that. Yeah, I have thought

about that as a perfect example. For family things, I can really see it because this is, just as we all knew 10 years ago, but Apple didn't know, that perhaps partners want to share their photo libraries with each other. We also have things like going on vacations or shopping for appliances or whatever it is, right, that you are collaborating on. And having a shared space to do that would be kind of nice. So that's a – and honestly, to take it back to collaboration features in general, that's where Apple has some power. Because there are small businesses, yes, but there are family groups that are all Apple. And if Apple – and you're like, oh, well, business collaboration doesn't make sense for families well

some collaboration does maybe it's not the same kind of business document collaboration as you're thinking of but some of those things actually do make sense for families or for very very small work groups but I just on a larger scale I keep coming back to the fact

that even if Apple made literally the best collaborative things we might adopt it. But would it be a game-changing kind of thing? I just have a hard time because of what Apple is trying to do and who their tools are for. I have a hard time seeing it. So when I see them demo it and they're like, oh, boy, everybody's got to get on board here on the collaboration train because we're doing business collaboration. Like, look at all these happy business people who are doing this.

It's like, okay, but who is that? Who actually, what company actually is that that's doing that level of collaboration? And it's Apple's ideal company because they're all on Apple products. But the reality, it doesn't really fit that. Continuity Camera, you wrote about that. Yeah.

So Continuity Camera camera we saw the demo right there was more detail um in uh there were there were some wwdc sessions about it um and first off we were talking about camo and sherlocking of camo um which is a great app that does this i i believe we've already seen that apple is not willing to go to the level that camo is in terms of fiddly settings so there are going to be reasons to use camo in fact i wonder if the apis for this thing will make camo be able to transition into being a more fiddly fiddly settings for continuity camera kind of utility in the future but like because camo you can crop your picture manually and remember our complaints about the uh about the center stage camera on the studio display and how apple doesn't let you uh mike change the refresh rate manually

for your your power in the uk and how um i can't say can i get it a little bit uh a little bit tighter so you don't see the edges of my green screen? And Apple just seems to not want anyone to ever do anything at that level of detail with their camera. Camo will let you do that. Is there an API, though? There is, but I don't know if it's for this. I bet it's just to access. Just to get the feed from it.

Maybe so. Maybe so. This is my frustration, though. I'm going to say webcam settings is still a thing that they need to offer yeah even though that might be a third-party opportunity because uh like like i i look at this thing and i think well yeah but camo will be the one that lets me crop it so that my green screen doesn't show sure and this doesn't do that so there are some limitations there. In terms of the actual implementation, first off, it's this idea of a system camera, which we have not had before, which is like what is the default camera that is in use right now? And Apple has sort of assumed essentially that you only have one camera most of the time and it's an edge case and nobody cares. Now there is this system camera.

So you've got cameras that are attached is this system camera so you've got cameras that are attached to your computer and then you've got the system camera and so let me give you an example of this so i have a new iphone or new it doesn't matter i have an iphone running um ios 16 and i've got a mac that's running ventura and i bring and they're both logged into the same apple id and i was listening to mac power users by the way david sparks also a hater of ventura so you're not on your own okay good yeah it's not a great place i'm just saying like just in case i don't know if you've got any ventura haters in your comments no i haven't although i did i didn't even think about like ace ventura

pet detective and stuff like that but it's like whatever um okay so you bring this i saw a great joke the idea you know it could do the lookup mac os ventura pet detection i wished i could remember where i saw this joke but i thought it was hilarious okay all right so it's hard to share okay um so continuity camera you bring your phone close to your mac and and at that moment when they're both logged into the same apple id basically your phone is now among the available cameras for your Mac. So you could switch to it and use it in zoom or whatever. And this is actually good because one of the uses of continuity camera is not as a webcam for your face.

It's as like a camera for you to show something you're demonstrating, right? Like when, when the Mac studio came out, Dan and I did a live stream, and I had an iPhone with Camo attached to my Mac so that I could like show the Mac Studio and the studio display using a handheld camera.

So you can do that, and it's like a camera on your Mac. However, continuity camera has this other thing where if it's perpendicular to the table and not moving not shaking it's basically using sensors to detect am i mounted am i am i mounted somewhere and if it is then it becomes the system camera and takes over for your webcam. That's so complicated. Why can't I just tell it? Well, this is the idea is you can tell it.

Okay. But what they want to do is they want to make it magical, right? So they want to make it so that if you get one of these Belkin accessories or whatever and you drop your phone into it right behind your Max display and you let go, it just magically goes bloop. Now we're on the magic camera. My phone in a dock. No,

because it would be, I think it's actually sensing that it's on its side and steady. Okay. But if you had a sideways dock, maybe it would do this. I it's weird. We'll see how it works in practice. I think what they

want to do is they want to use the sensors in the iphone to basically detect that it's in webcam mode yeah okay and when it's in webcam mode it just flips over so that you don't have to go into zoom and change your camera it just changes your camera automatically when you enter that mode okay um so that's a little weird but but it doesn't, and whether you'll have to use that feature or not, I don't know. But it is separate from the idea that when it's close, you can use it as a camera. It is a camera input, and you could select it and then take a picture or something.

Pretty much every single video app shows you your camera view before you start, right? So if for some reason your iphone camera turns on you could just switch it to your whatever camera um before you real time follow up matt cassinelli uh hi hi matt listening in the chat room uh says he tried it on his sideways dock and it does work that is so that means it also doesn't work because it wants to be it what it's sensing is that the phone is on its side and steady and then it's like oh i'm i've been mounted now i'm going to use this as the primary okay so it's pretty wild um but it's

an interesting thing so the other thing obviously is the uh the desktop uh desk view right yeah which is using the wide soup ultra wide it's only the ultra-wide camera. And it sees so much that it's mounted on your computer, but it sees the desk in front of you. And so they've done this thing where they're de-skewing it and they're rotating it and they're making it available. So the details here are fascinating. One is it's an app. And the reason it's an app is because they think the use case for this is in a video conference as the equivalent of a screen share.

So they made it an app so that you can share it, share the window of the desk view as a screen share. So if you're on Zoom, it'll be your face will still be there. But also now you're sharing your screen, except it's actually you're on zoom it'll be your face will still be there but also now you're sharing your screen except it's actually you're sharing your desk are you following me so to get the desk view there is an app inventor called what desk view desk view and when you open that the continuity camera is running it shows the desk view so then in zoom you could be like share my screen yes and choose and choose desk view and then it will share your what i will say whilst that sounds super weird it at least what i like about it is they could easily just say

we have an api for desk view we want everyone to adopt it or like hey check out desk you in facetime it works in fact at least this way it shows that they have thought to themselves right like what is the way that we can build this feature that every single video conferencing tool can use exactly and video conferencing tools don't like two cameras right so you could switch and i i'm unclear if desk view is also available as a camera there is an api so if it's not uh you know because there's an api i imagine they're talking to zoom and and webex and all those companies about supporting this and being like oh now we've got a button to show your desk view uh but if you don't have something like that you can just share

the window and you'll see it i don't know if it's a camera so you could switch to it but um yeah it's them saying this is used more like document sharing like a screen share than it is like a camera because would you normally without any context but you know you and i might want to switch to the desk view and so i think that's a i don't know the answer to that question the other thing that is a little tidbit that I wanted to mention that didn't come out in the keynote, I believe, is that Center Stage uses the ultra-wide. Desk View uses the ultra-wide. If you're in Center Stage and Desk View at the same time,

yes, it is taking the same image and simultaneously cropping and altering two parts of it to generate your center stage and the desk view which is wild but what is even wilder is if you're not using center stage then it's using center stage in continuity camera yes so like so you can use yes continuity camera includes center stage and it's using the iphone's ultra wide camera to do that and it's using the ultra wide camera no the iphone currently doesn't do that exactly the iphone doesn't do center stage but it does in continuity camera mode okay so so if you're not using center stage though it uses the wide camera

and so in that scenario if you're using desk center stage, though, it uses the wide camera. And so in that scenario, if you're using desk view and continuity camera, it's using different iPhone cameras. It's using one iPhone camera to do the document view, and it's using a different iPhone camera to do your portrait view. Because the quality is higher. I think everybody had just assumed that that was all it did. What you're saying is you can say turn on center stage mode yes and then and then it's doing if you can imagine it like two different machine learning algorithms are eating different portions

of the of the of the camera i don't know if this is true if this is another myth or not but like it's one of those things you hear that like certain fighter pilots are trained to use both with their eyes independently so they can look at different consoles i don't know if you've ever heard this i've heard this i don't know if that's true but that's how i imagine it like the iphone is using one lens and it's looking in two different directions that's it it's giving itself uh kind of like a lazy eye it's wild it's pretty it's pretty wild and then there's a portrait mode which they talked about there which is you know again essentially they're just adding features that they already have built somewhere and they're putting them in. The lighting one is fun because that's like the first really, I think, good use case of the portrait lighting.

Portrait lighting, yeah, is if you're in a badly lit video chat and now you don't need a ring light, I guess, because you can use portrait lighting which essentially is using um object detection to or depending on the camera i suppose it's actually using a depth map and then it's pulling you out and lightening you and it's darkening the area behind you it's just something so funny about faking a ring light why don't you just light like lighten the whole image it's just something funny about that to me of like, oh, is your image too dark? We will pretend you have a light on you. The argument is that if you're backlit, you can't lighten the whole image. What you really want to do is lighten the dark part of the image and darken the light part of the image to get them to be a little bit closer.

But yeah, this is all another example. I mean, look, I don't want to say this to belittle continuity camera because i actually think this is a brilliant feature and the number one thing about it is that unlike camo apple is has the home field advantage and so apple gets to come up with that feature that it just detects that you want it and it turns it on whereas camo you've got to like launch the app and then turn it around and, and you know, the screen has to stay on and all this stuff. And Apple doesn't have to behave that way. Apple can just say, now it's a camera, it's magic. And, and that's all great. However, beyond that, which is a great detail, when you look at the details of the

features of continuity camera, it is another example of Apple recycling all of its features into various products which they have to do they have how many os's now they have to do it but this is a this is a perfect example where it's like oh we got lots of image effects what effects do you need and they're like okay i'll take center stage and uh and portrait mode and uh the one of the portrait lighting and can you get me something that shows me what's on my desk? Okay. Yeah.

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Finnish or Danish. I don't remember. And I don't want to offend Christian by saying the wrong one. So I'm not going to commit to anything. All right. So you mentioned earlier on that you quote mistakenly installed Ventura. Yep. What does that mean?

What does that mean exactly? I did it again. Whoopsie. So, okay. Here's a, here's a, maybe the experts out there can tell me what i did wrong here but

what i'd like to do is install the beta on a new volume on my computer right so i can keep my existing monterey installation and then also have ventura and i can reboot into vent Because although that's not ideal, because you really want to live with it, I also record podcasts and audio hijack, which I use to do everything, including this. Rogamiba has had enough with your beta testing. They disabled. So UUNI is Finnish for oven. If you're an Upgrade Plus subscriber, you don't know why I just said that. But there you go. right thank you it's a correction from the ad okay an ad you didn't hear but pizza is tasty

this episode is also brought to you by pizza which is tasty sorry i what what was i even saying oh so rogamiba yeah rogamiba um has had it with your complaints about their apps not running in the betas. They just disable them. If you try to launch their apps in a beta, they're like, this app doesn't work in the beta. They just have built that in and I rely on them. So I can't do that. So the problem is the way Apple distributes the beta is via a development profile, a developer profile that you download. That's basically a, it changes where developer profile that you download. That's a, basically a,

a, it changes where the software update server looks. Yeah. And it looks at different software update server. And there's one for public beta. There's also one for developer beta. And when you press, so I did that and I restarted cause I thought,

well, I'm going to do this and then I'm going to go in and I'm going to download it or whatever. And then I got distracted. There was a lot going on. And I came back and there was a thing that was like, do you want me to go ahead with this or whatever? And I'm like, sure. And then I went, no.

Oh, because that machine. I see. And it doesn't update. Yes. To the existing system. Yep. So my complaint to Apple. This is why I always at a certain point get rid of that.

Like I get rid of from my ipad or whatever so my complaint to apple and again correct me if there's another way to do this but i i want to i want to download it and install it on a different target that's what i want to do and i don't think i don't think you can i think the way i ended up doing this last year was making a new target, installing the current OS at a blank form on that target, booting into that OS, putting the profile on there, and then updating it to the beta. But that's dumb. I just did two OS installs when I could have done one.

So that would be my complaint, is it ought to be easier to get an install target that is not just an upgrade to the existing one anyway it was too late i i did it and i thought that i was going to be able to swerve away and i did not swerve away at which point my system has been updated to the beta my audio recording stuff no longer works what am i gonna do and the answer was that in the end it doesn't really matter i got lots of i got lots of backups i got a carbon copy cloner backup i got a time machine backup in the end what i did was i tried to migrate and i had some issues where i used migration assistant

to migrate my files from my backup okay to a new monterey install and everything went there except that um neither dropbox nor icloud drive was functional so like icloud drive it just sat at setting up icloud drive i it overnight, still sat there. And Dropbox also just basically stopped working. That sounds horrible. I hate this. Well, I hate it too. It was horrible. So what I decided to do is I installed, I made a new

volume and installed a new version of Monterey on it. Wiped the Monterey version I'd been playing with. And on this one, I think I only – oh, no, no. I didn't install a new version of Monterey. I deleted my user. I deleted my user and I made a new user.

So I was starting fresh with an asterisk, which is I was starting fresh. All my apps were installed. So that was good. But all my user folder stuff was not. That was not installed. installed oh the wind is picking up yeah we might get blown away it's nice uh it is it's a pleasant day um it's 70 degrees right here i can tell you it's in my menu bar oh because we've got the weather station like right right right over there wow so um i can see a hummingbird yeah yeah there's like a humming

my neighbor has a hummingbird theater i can see it it's beautiful i can see it it's humming around yeah no cats have appeared we should always record like this just outside it's a commute somewhere in california yeah i know it's nice we'll bank them we'll come out and record like 20 episodes of upgrade every episode is basically a draft at that point of something so um so anyway yeah so i i i cloud drive wasn't working and um i sync a bunch of stuff so many apps sync stuff with i cloud drive like i couldn't not use it my bb edit preferences are in there like everything's in there oh god so what i did was so i did the i did the thing where i uh i made a new user that's an admin then i logged into the admin then i deleted my jsnell user then i made a new

jsnell user um uh and deleted the admin account and now i'm back except i have nothing in my user folder and so it was and i decided like this is what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna start fresh and clean keeping in mind that my old user folder is on the computer. It's sitting there. So I can copy anything I need from the user folder if I need it. But I'm going to go, I'm going to start fresh. So, you know, over the course of that day, I kept launching apps and having to look up their serial number

or all of that. I didn't love that part. You had all of the pain parts of getting a new computer without actually getting one yeah exactly right exactly but i cloud drive worked and dropbox worked so that that was good um so yeah i i a combination of starting things up fresh and putting the serial numbers all the app store stuff just worked because app store and then sometimes i'd launch an app and i'd be like oh this app looks really weird or it doesn't have my stuff and then i would quit out of the app

and i would open my user folder and the old user folder and well not ventura for my backup from right before ventura got installed and i would pull over like the preferences files and like I uh the stream deck had nothing and I looked online like where is the stream deck file kept and it said oh it's here and I copied those over and it still had nothing on the stream deck I'm like do I have to remake the entire stream deck and then I found a post somewhere that said it's actually in this other folder it's not in the Elgato folder it's in the com.elgato.streamdeck folder. And I copied that over and then it worked. So it was an adventure game of like, where are the, like I opened the logic

and logic looked weird and I'm like, no. And I had to go copy all the logic files over and re-authenticate. And so now I'm back basically up and running fresh, but it took a little while to get there. So you're not going to be running Ventura anymore then? Well, I have Ventura on there, the old one. So you can boot into that?

I can boot into Ventura. Okay. But I'm not going to live there because, again, I can't do any podcasts or anything there. You're not going to live there. No, you don't want to live there. I've got to say, I'm not sure I agree with the audio hijack thing of like we're just not gonna let you use our apps like i understand the frustration as a developer trying to support someone during that period but unless they know it's 100 definitely broken yeah i think that that's that's surely only going to cause more

issues for them from a support perspective than less i get i get that they've been burned by it but that's my question is do you know that it doesn't work because if it does work and you're disabling it out of some sort of beta spite that's not great but like you know if you think it might work say for 50 of people right so you're only going to hear from 50 of your users that install that but now it's 100 So you're only going to hear from 50% of your users that install that. But now it's 100%. Now you're going to hear from 100% of people. People that are just going to be mad at you. I'd be surprised.

And this was obviously preemptive, right? The moment that I installed it, it's not like there had been an update. It was waiting for the new version so that it could disable itself. Yeah, it could have been a new version of macOS that changed nothing. It's just a version number they don't know. they've got weird extensions and stuff it's possible that they actually have to explicitly sure sign or code or something the extension in order for it to work

with a specific os version and that they can't do it it's possible but it doesn't feel like that to me it feels like they got burned so many times that they just turned it off i feel like if it was that she say then they would have this at every point release wouldn't they yeah that's probably true so probably too if if they if they check it out with the betas and it actually does work okay they should they should not turn it off they should or they should do an update that turns it back on yeah but yeah aside from your ventura disaster man have you been running any other bears i have uh i spent while all this was going on on my mac i did spend a lot of time so as you know i currently possess

two studio displays because i don't have to send my studio display back until the end of the summer and i am going to take that extended it's not even extended a long loan period and i'm using it because it's been valuable i got to update the firmware in one and not the other and all of that. So I set up a little iPad station with an iPad Air, M1 iPad Air, because, again, I didn't want to go into the beta world on my iPad Pro either. But I have an M1 iPad Air, so I installed the beta on that and attached it to a studio display and attached it to a keyboard and a magic trackpad

and set it up as a little alternate computer next to my computer. The M1 iPad Air is a fantastic iPad. You liking it? I love it because I mean for me it has everything the iPad Pro does. Except 11 inch.

And touch ID versus face ID yeah I mean that's the only downside that I found because compared to my iPad mini the screen is so much better oh my god the iPad mini I know they say it's it's not even it's not the same the quality of that screen is nowhere near as good the ipad air screen looks absolutely fantastic i've been really enjoying it really enjoying it that's the only beta i've used myself is ipad os yeah obviously i haven't had an external display or anything but i brought my 2018 11 inch with me with the magic keyboard and now so i'm using the magic keyboard with this ipad air and i've got to say a big fan of stage manager yeah i keep going to keep trying to call it center stage in my brain i really like it

i really like it i i don't i don't know what to think of it i think it's rough and i think that there's a lot of work they have to do and i think it's rough. If I give them the benefit of the doubt that they have the whole summer to kind of like shape it up, I think it's got a lot of potential. I'm happier that it exists. Even in its current state, I'm kind of happier that it exists than that it didn't exist, right? Like I want this to exist. Well, here it is. The fact that you can use an iPad on a, with window, a windowing mode on your iPad, but also that you can do the external display thing, which is like just mind blowing to sit down.

And it looks like it looks, I sent you a picture. I sent you and Steven a picture of what looks like a Mac, right? It looks, it's a, it's a studio display with some windows open and a backdrop picture. And it's an iPad.

And there's a dock. And there's a dock. And there's a dock at the bottom, right? Which is your tell with me, because the dock wouldn't be at the bottom. It would be on the right side. I wouldn't be on the bottom either. I'm not a monster. But there it is, because you have no choice on the iPad.

You're going to get it the way they want. It is, you know, part of it is getting used to it, because it's a different system. Part of it is getting used to it because it's, it's a different system. Part of it is the weirdness of the different size classes in the app. So resizing is, is kind of an adventure, right? It's like, imagine, imagine you have a, like a friendly dog and then you resize the window and it's an angry dog.

It's a little like that, right? Where you're like, Oh, it's a different app now. And some of the apps don't bless their hearts. Some of the apps don't have any idea what they're doing like slack uh and again they they it wasn't written with this mode in mind they didn't even know it existed but it's still hilarious like slack in in stage manager uh just won't show the sidebar unless it's in full screen it's like no no i don't know what size this is but it's not full screen so, so no sidebar for you. And that's just like, I mean, they'll fix it. And every app is struggling with the keyboard.

Oh, yeah. I mean, because, again, they don't know. These are all, I think it's amazing that they work at all. I can't believe. With stock apps. But that's because Apple has been using these kind of window management APIs for multitasking. And so these poor little apps, they don't know that they're in stage manager. They just think they're in a for multitasking. And so these poor little apps,

they don't know that they're in Stage Manager. They just think they're in a weird multitasking mode. Like the original multitasking where the only apps you could try out is Apple's apps. But every app works to some degree. To some degree. If you can do a split screen,

it will work with Stage Manager. And there are weird parts of it where on the iPadad version of this it wants the apps to be in certain sizes and in certain positions and apple's going to put them there for you and it does this thing where it's like you want two apps that overlap each other you can kind of see one out the back so you can tap on it and bring it to the front right but like it's done a thing for me which i've really enjoyed which is like three or four app multitasking yeah and that's just not a thing you could do before.

I know. Like, and I've been doing multitasking without a keyboard in portrait mode, and you can have two apps in horizontal on top of each other. Oh, isn't that nice? And it's really nice. It's like a different way of doing things where it's like there are certain apps where like that is actually just a nicer experience. I think one of the big things that is not, I mean, again, developer beta 1,

like there's so much more ground to cover here before they are done. But one of the things that struck me is that these apps all run, which is great, but most apps don't understand the concept of multiple windows. Even Safari doesn't even work out what's going on. You should be able to drag a tab out of Safari, right,

and make a new window next to it so you can have two different, because that's actually a common use case is comparing two documents in Safari. Like, I was doing this today to prepare for this show. I had a stage that had Google Docs, Notes, and a Safari window, right? Yeah. So I tapped a link in Notes, and it would go to another stage and open a brand new Safari window. What are you doing?

There's some bugs. I was logging into Slack, and Slack needed to open Safari to log me in. And all of a sudden, the whole thing just got sucked over onto the iPad screen from the external display. And that's, you know, it's a combination of there's bugs in the betas because they're betas, and not all the apps know about this yet that it's all going to get worked out but i'm encouraged by it right like it's not going to be for everyone that's the beauty of the fact that it's a little button that you choose in control center and if

you're not in it it just is a normal ipad right it's gonna be good i think like again i haven't give me some time to like think about it philosophically and some of the choices they've made may be a little weird and maybe they'll tweak them as they go but i'm encouraged by it because it is i think in the grand tradition like with the cursor support the pointer support of apple taking a thing that we know that is so familiar from 1984 and trying to do their modern take on it and some of the things that they're doing are going to frustrate some users but like not being able to lose a window behind another window is actually really important for usability because it's really easy to lose a window. Having a shelf with window sets on it is interesting.

I'm not sure it's right, but I get what they're doing there, even though I'm not sure the implementation is exactly right. Ironically, when they introduced the little thing at the top of every window, the multitasking little widget nubbin thing in iPadOS 15, a lot of the complaints were that it was a wasted space and it was too big and it got in the way. And I know when I'm editing in Ferrite, I tap it by mistake all the time and I'm super frustrated by it. Well, guess what? It needs to be bigger it needs to be a bigger target because it's now super important because you need to do things like dismiss a window and send it out off over into the shelf i don't want to ever have to hit the

three dots i want that thing there permanently it annoys me with the controls on yes like the little three things on the mac it annoys me that i have to hit the three dots and then hit the thing to make it go full screen. I just want it there all the time now. Because you want to be able to send that window away. Go away or let me open this in full screen for a second. Yeah, so there's some functionality and some interaction stuff there that I have some questions about.

I also am not entirely convinced that having the dock and the shelf is not a really weird mixed metaphor. I get why they're not the same. And so I get why they're visible. And sometimes what I found in my brief use of it is sometimes that's the best way to bail out of something. And you're like, how do I do this?

And the answer is, I'm just going to click in the dock and drag out the Safari icon and make a new Safari window, which you can do, which is actually kind of a great thing. But yet now I've got these things over here and these things over here. And there's a lot. And they're at a jaunty angle. I don't like the jaunty angle. a jaunty angle i don't like the joint i wish i one thing i should do on the ipad if i click the home the desktop it takes me to the home screen that's what i wanted to do it doesn't do that i wish you'd do that yeah um i like that you can kind of make the dock disappear if you want to you just got to make the app big enough that's kind of good something that people might

not have realized that if you want to make the dock or the shelf or whatever they call it i've just been calling it the shelf disappear literally all you do is move your window over it and or or make your window tall enough and the dock just goes away because you're you say i want to use that space which is good because the most frustrating center stage experience is you have one window manager or sorry stage manager uh you're doing it to me one window and it's sort of like a window inside an ipad window with all the all the like things around and it's like well that's a waste of space you should take it to full screen mode if you're gonna leave it like that yeah and that's why it would be nice to have a button to just say make this full screen right here um because some apps

are better in full screen um so it's a work in progress it's a beta but i think it's got a lot of potential and i think that that i'm actually having used it for the past five six days on ipad i can't wait to use it on my mac i'm a spaces user i have like two spaces i like yeah and i would like to have more and i tried this for a while i set up like four spaces so none of my windows overlapped but then it was too much zooming backwards and forwards all the time and i got swipe it swipe swipe but with stage manager it's all kind of feels like it's there like it's what i found with with the ipad it all just feels like it's there and the animation of bringing the apps forward is way nicer i find it way nicer than the way it was on ipad where it's like things are spinning

around all the time right right this i think this is a nicer way of doing things and i could imagine collecting up all of my apps into these little stages i'm pretty into it as a feature i think this is a this you know this is the best foundation that they are building from, I think. I think this is better than the split-screen foundation from iOS 9. I think this is a place where there could be a lot more expandability. If you may allow me, actually, we could go into a very quick rumor roundup. Yeah, I was going to say one of the things that this implies is the future of the iPad. Just to maybe close on Stage Manager a moment before we leap over the fence into the future of, of the iPad. I just, before, just to, to maybe close on,

on stage manager a moment before we, before we leap over the fence into the corral is this. I think that if I had to boil down my concerns about stage manager as of beta one right now, the two that I have that are the biggest are actually, I'm not sure that that shelf is quite right. Yeah. And what you said, which is I think controls for moving windows around need to not be hidden

behind a very hard to tap on little widget that then exposes more controls. that then exposes more controls. I think that there needs to be a much easier way to very quickly rearrange or send off individual windows. And it's just not there yet. I think that needs to be more explicit. Rumor roundup. Yeah. Ross Young, display analyst,

is reporting that a 4.1-inch iPad Pro is currently in development for release in early 2023, featuring a mini-LED ProMotion display. It's been corroborated by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who also says next year. Mark also talks about 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro updates on the horizon for this year as well. Makes sense. Go bigger. Keep going bigger now.

Yeah, this is the um in fact it's funny i was listening to atp from last week i said four 14.1 i said 4.1 pocket ipad 14.1 inches but it's scroll it's a it's a foldable i have a covid brain what do you want okay atp last week before this rumor came out they they were talking about Stage Manager and Syracuse, I think, said, hey, bring on the bigger iPads. And, you know, we were all thinking it. But, like,

then this rumor comes out and it's like, well, of course, because once you've got this system, because if you just scale the existing full screen and split screen modes, I think it shows you here with the external display support

being added, too. This is Apple sort of saying, we don't think think it makes like a full screen app makes sense in these bigger sizes it's just kind of ridiculous well now that this is here they can do that and and bring it on like i i think is it going to be for everyone does everybody want a 15 inch ipad well no but but people have 15 inch laptops and they like those and and I could see it I could see some interesting accessories here maybe there's you know something maybe it's just a giant magic keyboard but maybe there's they have some other weird stand that they do with it that lets you create your little surface studio kind of thing on your desk I don't know I mean like you say like 14 inches that seems too big for an iPad, but that's as big as my MacBook that I've got in front of me right now.

And I'm not like, oh, this thing is unwieldy. It's just a laptop size. And that's a laptop with the whole keyboard attached to it too, whereas this would just be a screen. I think, yeah, I mean, there's the argument that as an iPad being something you hold in your hands, it's kind of big. But, yeah, I think the truth is either the people who are complaining about, like, the idea of a bigger iPad, either it's a failure of imagination or it's simply it's just sort of not for them. And that's fine.

But, like, there are definitely just artists with the Apple Pencil. I know that there are people who would die for a 15-inch iPad to have that all addressable space for Apple Pencil. I know that there are people who would die for a 15-inch iPad to have that all addressable space for Apple Pencil. And then you think about, well, yes, and then you can also put it in the stage manager mode and put it in a magic keyboard, and now you've got a 15-inch laptop running iPad OS. Like, there's so much going on there.

There's just a lot of potential. It's exciting. You said 15 inches. I mean, this rumor is 14 inches. Oh, 14 inches, okay. But there is a 15-inch rumor. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is working on a MacBook Air with a 15-inch screen for release, quote, as early as next spring.

Also developing what would be its smallest laptop in years a new 12 inch laptop by the end of 2023 so what we're looking at is next year assumedly taking this current macbook air design and going both bigger and smaller with it to have three yeah macbook airs in the lineup yeah i think that this is partly the damn bursting because apple silicon has enabled new models right and it feels like they were holding off on a bunch of stuff because of apple silicon and and this macbook air design is literally now we can design this thing for apple silicon whereas the last one was just in the in the case of the old MacBook Air and not any different on the outside. What, three quarters of the Macs Apple sells are laptops?

It doesn't actually make sense for there only to be four models. I mean, and they have said our most popular Mac is the MacBook Air. Yes. And I mean, I'm sure the thinking is, which I would agree with, it would probably be only more popular if we had it in a bunch of sizes. Yeah, I think that's it. I think that why not? There are three MacBook Pros and one MacBook Air.

And three quarters of your Mac sales are laptops. Why would you not market it better and provide more models and more shapes and sizes? I know that there's now the M2 and the M1, but're they're functionally it's the old and the and the new of the same yeah but a 12 inch apple silicon macbook air so as uh because remember the new one is almost 14 inches right it's 13.6 six like it's it's getting it's getting bigger but it's basically the same right like it's basically the same like really it's it's i assume they're the same footprint but yeah it's just because they decrease the bezels but you could make a smaller laptop well but that's the question right like why do you make a notch and all of that you could make a smaller laptop that

would be narrower and lighter it doesn't have a fan just like the air and it's for people like i was talking to dan moran um last friday for our six colors podcast about this and like he's he he and i are both like former 11 inch macbook air people me too that's like right so i would love that little a little one oh my god i i i would take a i would lose a little screen space yeah to get an even thinner even lighter 12 inch macbook air sign me up for that and then that power in it as well yeah and likewise space to get an even thinner, even lighter 12-inch MacBook Air. Sign me up for that. With all that power in it as well?

Yeah. And likewise, there are some people who want to buy a MacBook Air but wish it had a bigger screen. And right now, Apple's whole story is, well, if you want a bigger screen, now you're up in the $2,000 plus in order to buy it. You have to buy a MacBook Pro. And it's like, does somebody who just wants a 15-inch screen need an M2 Pro processor? They don't. No.

They don't. Some people need it, but there are lots of people who don't need it and just want to have a bigger screen. And so why not let them have that? Again, what I keep coming back to is three-quarters of the Macs sold are laptops. And Apple has not really pushed it for a while in terms of what they have on offer. Because it's like, why does the MacBook Pro, your less popular laptop, come in two sizes? Yeah. But your most popular laptop come in two sizes. Yeah. But your most popular laptop comes in one size.

I guess technically three sizes, but let's not talk about that. The third-inch MacBook Pro, because that, I think, just exists for legacy reasons. Yeah, and marketing reasons. Yeah, and then forget about the cheaper one because they're functionally the same size. Currently, the modern

what we would call modern mac laptops there's the m2 air and the 14 and the 16 pro book pro so why not have three macbook airs and two mac pros like why not why not indeed yeah right because they will find their own their own niches it'll It allows Apple to charge more for a larger laptop. It allows more product differentiation. I love this idea of more laptops. Let's make it happen. Mark Elman is also reporting that an M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pros will be coming at the end of 2022.

No radical changes to those products, but the chips will go up to 12 performance cores. They're currently at 10, and up to 38 GPU cores from 32. So, again, this is like what we saw from the M1 to the M2. Not huge differences, but just continues. Charts go up. Yep, charts go up. And obviously, there are hints of the next iphone getting an

always on display in ios 16's code there's similar references to the way uh for handling the lock screen quote-unquote widgets which are complications but they call widgets yes in the same way so it's like backlight management stuff so there's all these references to like dimming states and stuff like that which would only exist if there was the need for always on display but if you just look at that lock screen design it's very clear that an always on display is in the future yeah it's it's pretty clear also since all complications are now going to be widgets then all widgets are no not all widgets are complications but all complications are widgets in yes uh i was talking to Underscore about this

because obviously Dave is very focused on these right now. Sure. Developers have to enable them to be available. So like if you have an Apple Watch app that has complications, they don't automatically go over, but you can automatically have them go over. But there is more space available to you.

So I've been seeing lots of developers tweak what they have on the Apple watch to allow for this larger space i was watching how um simon uh simon scriptable uh was testing this out because i love scriptable and i wrote a widget in javascript to do my home weather station and to do air quality and he's got it working now where you can use his app to generate these home screen widgets these lock screen widgets instead and i had that moment where i thought oh my god i'm going to be able to put the temperature in my weather station on my iphone lock screen now it's pretty great like for me but the point is like there's going to be all sorts of glanceable information that we're going to be able to put out there that's really fun um and yes

i think it is inevitable that we're going to get i'm a little surprised we didn't already get it but you know with oled on the iphone they'll say something about how this is a new screen that uses less power it'll be exactly what they said about the apple watch right when they went to the always on apple watch they said well this one we had to engineer the screen a little differently in order to support always on and it doesn't mean that they couldn't do it now it's just they would use so much power that it would be bad for battery life to do it and they're going to have a new story for that phone in the fall and then you're going to be able to see these things and that's going to be weird right like to have an iphone and your iphone's laying there and it's not a

featureless lab i know people who have Android phones that do this have experienced this already, but for us iPhone users, it's going to be a weird change. Yeah, we've got some Ask Upgrade questions about this later on that I wanted to touch on. Nice.

Which we'll get to, which I think is an interesting thought on that exact, exact point. You know, in some ways, this is my favorite episode of the year because this is the episode where there has been so much to talk about that we have actually

not been able to talk about everything, plus we've got a little bit of a week to think about it, these sort of post-event episode things, so this is fun. Plus, you know, we're outside. It's very nice. I'm enjoying recording this episode very much, and if you're thinking, wow, this is a long episode, we're outside it's very nice this is i'm enjoying i'm 71 degrees very much and if

you're thinking wow this is a long episode we're like halfway through yeah thank you for our document anyway so that's right we're here till the sun goes down i'm having the greatest time so we're gonna keep on going this episode is brought to you by electric turning a small business into an empire takes work and you have to keep your ear to the ground for things that will help you take things to the next level but But that can be hard when all of your attention is pulled in different directions, because that is the reality of being a boss. The team over at Electric know how small businesses maybe like yours face these challenges. That's why they've solved this problem for you by operating as your IT department. So instead of spending your time sorting through unused application licenses,

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So we did speak about on the last episode that we would come back to the M2 and the MacBook Air a little bit. One of the things that's really like sat with me since our last episode about the M2 is this idea of Apple doubling down on the bets that they made with the m1 and so there's a couple of places where i think this makes the most sense for me one is the unified memory thing now you know we didn't really know what to expect with unified memory when it comes to the m1 right it was a new thing for us like is this really going to work out what is this going to be like and not only did it work out great they've actually ended up making it better so they have was it like faster memory bandwidth they use an lp5 memory right it's it's the memory like there are a few things that are like the pro and the max that are in the m1 generation that are now

in the base model m2 and one of them is they're using the lp5 instead of the lp4 which is faster and allows for more density yep which is what they said is why it's 24 gigs maximum is that the modules actually just can be denser and they're faster so you you're everything that's happening is going faster yep in terms of all the memory transfer because that that again it's not maybe uh it's it's more m2 like or m1 pro like in the m2 so and then also the fact that there's now a higher level you can go up to 24 gigabytes which i keep stumbling on because that sounds so weird to my ears for what ram can be but apple can just choose because they don't have sticks yes right

yeah yeah so i think i think when i talk about the density i think that that's literally it is what can we fit on this they've you know limitations of power and the and size uh with the m2 they don't want to make it like there's going to be an m2 pro and an m2 max right so they got to choose what the constraints are for the m2 but when they decided to use the faster ram that allowed them to put a little bit more on uh to reach like the max that they were willing to willing to do for the base model chip so the base model chip gets a little more capable, which I think is what we were all hoping,

is that that was definitely one of the things that everybody felt about the M1 originally was a bit, you know, 16 was not enough for some people. And honestly, eventually those people can buy a MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro or an M1 Max in it and they get more RAM and they're happy about it. But this brings it down for the base models too so it's good and i would say like having used an m1 for like a year or whatever 16 was not enough for me 24 would be i expect enough it's between you know that feels

just like a higher it is a higher level i expect it would be enough but i just think that's really interesting that they went ahead and pushed on those things the same as like the power to performance stuff like that's where they're continuing to push on because that's what's been the big thing that people love right it's like there is an incredible amount of power at very low power consumption and that is that's been the big thing for every like for what is you know like from tech reviewers to consumers of why these machines have been such a hit is that these there are these laptops that have incredible battery life and they're about as powerful as anything else in their class plugged in or not it's kind of fantastic just to be clear, though, the base model is 8.

So you have to go 8 to 16 to 24. That's not changed, though, has it? No, but just to be clear. Yeah, but a lot of people would get by on 8. I'm not that kind of user, right? I would need more. So just having the ability to go up higher would be necessary for me if I was to consider this computer.

Right. Because then I'm considering it not on pure power, but on format, like its size, its weight, thickness, that kind of stuff, right? That's the only reason I would consider owning one of these machines. I'm really intrigued to see one and hold one and kind of, you know, how much of a difference would it make going in and out of my bag every day but then i would still want that higher level of right support right of like of ram uh i have we got quite a lot of ask upgrade questions and because i wasn't

really sure what else we could talk about with the M2. I thought we could bring some of those in now. And there is a thing that you mentioned in your article about the MacBook Air, which also has a question. So your quote is, unfortunately, the M2 is still the base model chip of its generation, and Apple has not chosen to provide it with enough IO power to drive a second external display. And David wrote in similarly asking is Apple delaying

fixing a technical limitation because they aren't motivated to allow more displays on non-pro priced hardware or is the limit purely an artificial differentiator to upsell buyers well I mean it's a decision is it artificial I mean, it's a decision. Is it artificial?

I mean, every decision. It's a decision. Why not support 26 monitors? I'm being facetious, but there's always a limit, right? Why is two better than one? Why not four? I think they decided that for a base model well yeah i mean to your point it's a base model um why doesn't the base model have 80 cores and 9 000 gpus and like i mean it's a base model they they have to draw a line somewhere and say the base model has limitations

yeah um i don't think it's artificial in the sense of it's simply uh it does it just fine and we we turned it off i think what happened is they weren't motivated to make this an a uh enough of a priority in what they were building for m2 yep and so a the use case where you have a laptop that you attach two external displays to is not a use case that they felt was within the parameters of a base model chip. I have no problem saying this. I don't think they need to change this. Like, if you are a user who wants an M1 machine and wants to have three displays and like you are so far into the edge cases i would reword it and say if you need a laptop with that many external displays on it

you should buy a macbook pro this is what i was gonna get like if if you are for some reason a user who wants two external displays and their laptop display like you're a you are a pro now i understand we're now pushing into the expense like question but like what what are you doing right and like the thing that i like about this from these like the because it's in the base level chip you think oh that also goes in the mac mini but then it gets two displays which is like because it doesn't have the the internal display if i if i'm disappointed about anything and i did ask about this i asked around about this if if i'm disappointed about anything is i wish that the macbook air would drive to displays in clamshell mode right yeah sure i

agree with that when it's not hooked up to its own display its own display is off i i think it's too bad that they didn't do is it like hardwired in yeah i don't entirely understand why but i am disappointed given that the mac mini can do it i wish that that would be a scenario right which is like okay well i'm docked and my lid is closed and now i'd like like i could imagine it's just like if this if it say like the machine just can't handle it the problem is then which which monitor you turn off yeah right and you open you open the lid sure sure and i would also say um i know that there are ways you can use a display port adapter and you can get a second display on and all that i think

what i'd say is for a lot of this stuff it ends up being apple doesn't offer that because apple doesn't think that experience is any good yeah and apple is not going to say well it supports two displays but one of them has to be crappy they just say it doesn't there has to be like when you do you have i know that there will be people that are like they've heard what i've said about like you need to get a different computer to be i'm mad about it but like this is my point like you have to stop somewhere right because now if you're a macbook pro user and you want seven displays right well it doesn't support that was like well well i mean what are you gonna do like there has to be an end point well and every decision that they make to add features to m2 yeah is coming out of price or power consumption

or heat dissipation i mean like there are so many different things but it's not a free lunch right they have to they they have to scope this thing um as an entry-level chip and they know that it's going into all their entry-level products and there are there are decisions they're going to make that um that are going to cut off features but it's okay because there are other features honestly i think this is not even much of an issue anymore because what this was really an issue about was when m1 was the only apple silicon yep and so people were frustrated because it was only 16 gigs of ram and it was only one external display on a laptop, and, oh, we want more, but there is more now. It's the MacBook Pro.

You can do this, and so this is not what the MacBook Air is meant to be. So that's my, in the end, if they really felt that this was necessary, they would have built it differently, but they decided that that was too much of an edge case, and yeah the truth is get a macbook pro if you want that and and or wait for the m2 macbook pro which is absolutely coming uh matt asked is the m2 macbook air the new default laptop recommendation or does the m1 air still win simply for being cheaper

i'd like to get my hands on an M2 Air for more than, I mean, I had it more than the hands-on area. I got to spend a little time with them later in the day. So I've got more hands-on than some, but the truth is until you use it, it's really hard to say. It is more expensive and I'm not sure. I think the question is going to be,

is the style and the added functionality of the M2 worth the premium in price? So my guess is that it's not going to be as easy a buying recommendation a default buying recommendation i think you could just say to people you want a macbook air you can choose do you want a cheaper one but it looks like that or do you want the newer one but it looks like that and it costs that i might even go so far as to say and and i i reserve the right to change my mind once i review this thing um which to my knowledge nobody has them right like they're not they're they're coming out in july to my knowledge nobody has them there hasn't been any if i was given one to review i couldn't say that for all

i know this one's like 20 feet away from me no there's not but no but that's what you would say no no no i would say i'm not at liberty to say. I would deflect, but I can say I absolutely don't have one because they don't exist yet. So I want to get my hands on them. I think, though, that what I may end up saying is something like the $9.99 model is great and it will serve you really well. If you want to pay a little more you can get something

that's nicer um but that's that's the decision right do you want to spend more than the 999 999 is such a great price for that m1 air it really is a great price and um and it's a great product and it will serve most people's use cases so it really is sort of like do you want to spend a little bit more money for something nice but i don't think i will say the m2 air is the default i won't think i i don't think i'm willing as long as the m1 air is still in the product line to say that the m2 air is the default because the m1 air is so good and it's more affordable and so i think that i think that it's going to be um i think that's why they're selling it still is that a lot of people are still going to just buy it and it's going to be great and they're going to do well with it again just to i'm trying to cover all my bases here john in

the discord says the intel version of the macbook a used to support two external displays it's like again i'm sure it did but like i don't they've just made a decision and they're sticking to it and honestly i don't think it's that bad i really don't and i would say that that was a decision based on intel's choice yeah intel yeah intel made that decision so then it was there in the chip so now apple's made the decision and i understand if like you had a specific use case which annoys you but like i just think that there has to be limits to this stuff this is the one that they've chosen yeah well and the phrasing of they should have kept it in it's like well they didn't they didn't keep it in they they had to make a new chip and they made the m1 and it

was not a distinction that it was not on their list of things that they needed to to to have to bring over the m1 from from intel they just it wasn't on their list it was a a thing that was provided by intel that they didn't think was that important. And if you think it's that important, I get it. But, um, yeah,

what can I say? I think, I think running a laptop with two external displays is an edge case and there's a MacBook pro that solves it. And I understand why they made it, even though it is frustrating. And even though I think that it would be better if they could run it lid closed because it would still be driving two displays it would just be too external but that's

this is where we are and a secondary question that came from david what are the chances that consumers will reject apple's second attempt to upscale and up price the macbook air will the vast majority of consumers just keep buying the m1 macbook air in the short term yeah i think that's probably true that the m1 macbook air is going to sell really well the m2 i think will sell well too um i think this is maybe even priming the pump a little bit for what we were talking about earlier which is it doesn't matter when they have three of them does it yeah you have many choices choose which one you like better i think in the long run the m2 air will be the 999 right it will eventually they have this 9991 around is because they're preparing for that they're preparing for that they haven't just gotten rid of the macbook air right and they're just like the m1 and they're

just like the macbook air starts at 1299 now i think they are very aware of the fact that if they keep the 9991 around people will keep buying the 999 one because it costs that until next year when they can replace it one way or another right either with either with the m2 macbook air that we just saw being announced or with the 12 inch macbook air at 999 or like there could be this weird thing where the 12 inch costs more because whatever and then like this current one sits in the 999 spot but like look yeah apple were not stupid i think like everyone can see that they they know they know the reason one of the reasons the macbook air is the most popular computer is because it's the cheapest one

yes so they have decided to keep that cheap one in at that point the macbook and they've decided that it's better that they do that yeah then lose 200 of margin on the new one and also look at 2022 they probably can't make enough of these m2 ones but i bet they got a lot of the m1 macs sitting around yeah you know so you know or just it's maybe easier just keep making both of them for whatever reason right so it is possible i reckon though with the way that apple's computers are now i reckon this will sell better than the macbook did that would be if i was just making a bet apple laptops are hot again people know that they want them and you get the new one or the new one is that better than the old one which is also really good yeah it is and by the way have you seen it like you know what i mean like the macbook the 12-inch macbook just looked like a smaller macbook air it did this one looks

really cool if only they would have done it in colors if only if only but yeah so that's that's exactly it i think in the short term david is probably what he's suspecting here is probably true which is a lot of people are still going to buy the macbook air that's exactly it. I think in the short term, David is probably, what he's suspecting here is probably true, which is a lot of people are still going to buy the MacBook Air. That's fine. Apple, if Apple didn't want that to happen, they would not be doing this, but they are.

And guess what? It's not a defeat for Apple to sell a 999 M1 MacBook Air because they're making a nice profit on that one too. But in the long run, something else will take that slot. It'll be fine. This episode is brought to you by Capital One.

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support of this show and RelayFM. Now it's time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions. For real this time. The first one comes from Nepali who asks, there are rumors of an always-on display coming to the next iPhone, as we spoke about earlier in the show. Do you think there could be a nightstand mode like there is with the Apple Watch?

Oh, that's interesting. Because I was thinking, if you have a bunch of white light on the phone is it not going to be bright like how bright is that always i'm going to be i don't know but it could be that it could be color because that's what the apple watch does is it's um apple watch it's actually is it green i want to say yeah and it also is off most of the time and then you you bump it and it comes on comes on so what's it maybe my thinking is i'm always on display how bright is it going to be at night right and what are they going to do for that i was imagining

they would somehow integrate it into the sleep mode right but i wouldn't want that because i don't want to necessarily set that up so maybe i'll have to but i can imagine they will integrate it somehow with the sleep thing yeah sleep focus in fact yeah and it will do the same thing of detecting with the gyroscopes if you bump the nightstand to light it up maybe and and not show you all of your information because one of the things the sleep mode is trying to do is not bother you with it's not going to light up with notifications battery right like i know it's very very small amount of battery needed for the always on display but if you're asleep you really don't need it

right you know like and i love that thing with the apple watch where like if i want to see the time i can just bump the nightstand and the apple watch works it out. I think that's so smart, you know? But this made me think, yeah, they'll probably do something like that. Right? They're probably going to do something like that. Darren asked, I noticed Apple having to choose which OS in the keynote in which to feature some kind of ecosystem-wide improvement during this year's keynote. Do you think it would make more sense to separate core operating system functions something

like stage manager to its own part of the keynote and then dig into app stuff when you need to so i was thinking about this question a bit i'll see if i can give it a little bit more color i was thinking about it so kind of what darren's getting to is we find out about stage manager and mac even though it's on mac and ipad and we don't find out about the mail improvements until say the ipad section but even though it's going to be in the iphone and the mac and then every single time they do a different os they're like oh and it also gets all of those features we spoke about earlier so it made me think could it, as we move into this future where they're doing more and more cross-platform features,

that they have a part of the keynote where they're like, we have these features coming to all of our platforms today. They are this, this, and this. And then they're like, and now we want to tell you about some Mac-specific features. And now we want to tell you about some iOS-specific features. Rather than this like, justos just mac just ipad yeah

you can see them struggling with it it's complicated and i saw i forget even where there were so many different interviews last week but somebody asked about this i think i saw it somewhere and that like that there was definitely there's been discussion about it inside apple is the impression i get but that they think this is the right way to do it. I feel like it's inevitable that they're going to have to change their structure because I don't actually think it works very well. I think that they are introducing so many premium, high-level Apple platform features every year that are like, these are our features for the year and they go everywhere. every year that are like, these are our features for the year and they go everywhere that it's,

they should probably structure it so that they announced those features and then tell you how, what the ramifications of them are across all of their platforms. And even on TVOS, it'll do this thing or whatever it is. And on the watch, you'll see it here. And like, there are a lot of these things that I actually think they make less of an

impact because they, they tell you about it in the iphone and then they say oh yeah it's also on the mac too there's that moment on the is it the ipad presentation where craig federighi basically says oh look at all these things that we already announced they're on the ipad and now let's move on and it's just it's one of those things where i i think it would be better structured with the top level stuff that's across all of apple's platforms described in those terms and then then you can break down and have a conversation about some specific new changes in each of the os's but they clearly don't want to do that but i feel like the direction they're going they're going to have to revisit this and rethink it yep jeffrey asks any idea why the a12z which ran mac os basically fine with the apple silicon dtk is left out of stage manager functionality in ipad os

is it just segmentation do i now really need to trade in my 25 month old iPad Pro? I will read a quote that Apple gave to a few outlets including Rene Ritchie Stage Manager is a fully integrated experience that provides all new windowing experience that's odd that is incredibly fast and responsive and allows users to run 8 apps simultaneously across iPad and an external display

with up to 6k resolution delivering this experience with the immediacy users expect from ipad's touch first experience requires large internal memory incredibly fast storage and a flexible external display io all of which are delivered by ipads with the m1 chip i'm going to assume this was said to him verbally and he's dictated it because that is a very weirdly written thing. The word experience is used a hundred times in there. Basically, I think this goes back

to what we were talking about earlier. Hey, look, I understand because I had to buy a new iPad for this, right? And I didn't want to buy, but I wanted to try out this feature because I felt like I kind of needed to to be able to talk about it. And I'm pleased i have because it's really helped inform me in ways that the presentation didn't i think the problem here is it could do it i guess but it's probably

not gonna be able to do it as well definitely not when you put the external display in the mix right being my expectation right and so then I guess they're just like, they don't want to do this thing where they're like, it works on this for this and these for this. What I will say is it is a multi, there are multiple years of products now,

I guess, that it's not like, what it's not like is the issue they have with the Apple Watch right now, which I think is a wild one. You can buy a Series 3 watch today, and it won't run the next update. At least with...

I mean, and I know you can't do it with the iPad Mini, but you wouldn't want to, trust me, right? But at least all of the iPads that are available now, most of them have been available for a while, you can do it with. But I understand why it frustrates people. I do. I get it. Yeah. But you've got to... Again, lines need to be drawn somewhere. and been available for a while you can do it with but i understand why it frustrates people i do i get it yeah but you gotta again lines need to be drawn somewhere i really don't think they do it

purely to just wring every dollar out of people so what i'd say is the the it runs mac os just fine in the dtk well just fine except that was never shipped in a product. And so was it just fine or was it good enough for developers to use as a first glance? Second, that was running macOS. This is running iPadOS. It's a different operating system. Third, the M1 is not the A12C. The M1 is different. The M1 was built with some very specific things in mind.

I don't know for sure, but it sure seems like apple had a confidence in the m1 being capable of delivering these features and didn't have a confidence in the a12z otherwise they could have literally drawn the line at the a12z one product would have been included there's only one product with the a12z right because the dtk doesn't count it's that ipad pro but they didn't is it because of the display external display support is it because of the memory and the ssd speed for doing virtual memory and paging did they have a moment where they said well we could bring it to the a12z but we're gonna need to do a bunch of things to like limit the number of windows or i was thinking ram and like it might have been yeah if you had the one terabyte one which had more ram in it

maybe it would work maybe but then at that point what you're gonna say if you have this one ipad of this generation it will work for you yeah so i think and i think that there's just a practicality standpoint where at some point they're like it's not worth us doing extra work to add that particular machine's compatibility given all the work we're relying on that's on the M1. My guess is that this was targeted at M1 from the beginning, that the whole feature was built on the hardware on an M1 iPad. on the hardware on an M1 iPad. And that was what they, and from that decision comes everything else, which is just because the A12Z ran the DTK for Mac OS fine doesn't necessarily mean it would run it fine.

And it also may be that they very specifically were like, look, we're not going to do this until we reach M1 because we do need these, whether it's a specific feature or whether it's just the ability to have fast enough SSD and enough RAM to build the virtual memory system with paging and have the multiple windows open and support an external display. And like you roll it all together and that's what you get. So, you know, it is the old question, which is a choice was made, obviously. But my guess is that usually when Apple makes these decisions, it's not always the case.

Usually it feels like when Apple makes these decisions, it's because they've decided that the amount of work to get something that would be a poorer experience isn't worth it. And that they want to have it be a really good experience. and so they're going to draw the line where they do it does not always happen that way right sometimes there's like a new photo feature or something where we're like well why is that not on the old iphone and the answer is because they didn't want to um but mostly i think mostly i think not because i think they target specific features for specific hardware and that that's my my guess about the ultimate answer here is this was a feature designed Mostly, I think, not because I think they target specific features for specific hardware. And that's my guess about the ultimate answer here is this was a feature designed for M1. Yeah.

And so they never even considered designing it for A12C. There's dogs. There's dogs. The dogs are upset. I know those dogs. Yeah? Yeah. They're loud.

They do this. Sometimes they do this. It's Bailey and Chico. It's a big dog, little dog action happening. We're going to take those dogs as a message to wrap up this episode of Upgrade. Dogs are telling us we got to go. Yep. The dogs are playing us out.

We're being played out by the dogs. Thank you so much for listening to this week's Summer of Fun initiation. I don't think we actually mentioned it at the beginning. So we're in the Summer of Fun now. We started a week early. Yeah. Usually Summer of Fun would start next week, but we actually mentioned it at the beginning. So we're in the Summer of Fun now. We started a week early. Usually Summer of Fun would start next week, but hey, it makes sense to start now. We're outside in the sun.

We're outside in the sun. It's fun. It's really summer. Fun, fun in the California sun. Jason's wearing a Summer of Fun t-shirt too, which I didn't mention. On brand. If you'd like to find us online,

go to sixcolors.com and at Jason L. On Twitter for Jason, I'm at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much to our sponsors of this week's episode capital one electric uni and mode oh if you would like to send in a question for us to answer in a future episode of upgrade just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade or use question mark ask upgrade in the relay fm members discord you can become a member and support this show by going to getupgradeplus.com where you get longer ad-free versions of Upgrade every single week. Thank you so much to everybody that supports the show by doing so. We appreciate you greatly.

We'll be back next week in much more regular environments. I'll be at home and you'll be at home. Probably. Like 12 feet over there, yeah. Honestly, with the way my week has gone, who knows if I'll be home. You know, I could be stuck somewhere anywhere. We'll find out next time on Upgrade. Until then, say goodbye, Jason

Snell. Woof!