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from relay fm this is upgrade episode 515 the wwdc draft for 2024 this episode is brought to
you by squarespace tailscale and express vpn it is june 3rd 2024 my name is mike hurley and i am joined by
my collaborator and competitor jason snell 515 baby good to be here any 515 facts for us or is
that i it's a sequel error i think i don't know it sounds like it would be an interstate well 501 fun five area code is just iowa that's boring sorry iowa uh interstate 515
is like a spur in nevada no i don't it feels really resonant but it's not 515 just it means
you know what the most important thing about 515 is tell me it's the wwdc 2024 draft i have a
snort talk question for you and it comes from me to you, Jason.
What are your current excitement
levels for WWDC this year?
Low.
Sorry.
But you know what though?
I figured it was either going to be low or high and that was why
I wanted to ask you. I wanted to kind of vibe
check you right now.
Low? Mostly because there's not going to be any hardware. Last year they launched that was what i wanted to ask you like i wanted to kind of vibe check you right now low mostly
because like there's not going to be any hardware last year they launched a whole new platform and
introduced a whole new piece of hardware um this year it feels like they've been given the directive
to integrate the ai stuff everywhere and that's interesting but it also means that my expectations
for everything else are pretty low it feels like you know, and maybe we'll be surprised.
I hope we're surprised because I'm feeling like
they're going to be very minimal additions to everything.
Yes.
Especially if you're not the iPhone.
And except in the realm of AI, right?
And AI features.
And those probably be nice to
have although i'm on the rector saying people will probably be disappointed because they're
probably going to compact a whole bunch of wishes into this dream of apple's big ai reveal and it's
going to be much more pragmatic and and not as uh exciting as all that and so like some of the stuff
that i really love is like interesting new mac features, and maybe there's a couple new pieces of hardware.
And it sounds to me like it's going to be much more straightforward than that.
And the AI stuff is stuff they want to do.
But it's almost like they're telling us to eat our vegetables a little bit.
Where it's like, okay, we got to do this AI stuff, everybody.
Ready? Ready?
And they do.
It's not like they don't have to.
All right, let they do it's not like they don't have to all right let's do it and uh so yeah i'm i'm i'm i'm thinking the fiber content of this year's wwdc may be higher than usual and
that's it's you know necessary roughage it's fine but it's not the most exciting to me so where i
am with this right now like i have been on a little bit of a journey where at first i didn't think
hub would have much to show then i thought they would have much to show and now i think maybe they
they won't again or at least the the state of ai has moved so fast in the last even six weeks
that i feel like even with all the stuff they're going to show, it might feel a little bit underwhelming.
Like the amount of time that they're going to spend on the features and that these features
won't, they will pale in comparison to Microsoft, for example.
That's kind of the fear that I have right now, that like it's not going to be that.
They're going to spend all this time talking about all this incredible new stuff, but it might not actually feel that incredible.
However, I'm kind of also at the same time, like where I am today, I'm allowing for myself to remain hopeful that they're going to have some stuff that is cool.
Yeah.
Oh, and I hope there is.
But also when I get that eat your vegetables feeling, part of it is that Apple does need to do table stakes, does need to catch up in a bunch of areas.
Right.
And that's less exciting, but it's necessary.
Like I was listening to ATP over the weekend and one of the things Marco said struck me, which is he was like, I hope that they do things to excite us and show that Apple is pushing things forward and not just playing catch up.
And then John said something like, but those are table stakes.
They have to do it and that was my thought which is on one level i understand not being
excited by apple doing this stuff that's already been announced by other other players microsoft
and google in particular on the other hand they gotta do it right like if they don't do it it's
a disaster but i feel like they have to do both like they have to show the table
stakes and then how are they pushing the state of the art forward where's a little apple magic
a little apple magic here and there where they're like aha everybody else does it like this but we
decided to do it like this which when that is done right everybody else goes oh yeah we should do it
like that too right that's the kind of apple magic stuff so i hope i hope we see some of that and i and i i do
remain hopeful that they will be able to do both of these things like that they will be able to
uh show off the basics and also show me some stuff that's going to get me excited
that's if siri transforms finally from being something that's just really not very good to
something that's a lot better or at least has the potential to be a lot better if we trust them and
believe that it will be whenever it ships.
Yeah.
That would be a big step right there,
because that's a thing we've been wanting for a long time.
Yep, most definitely.
Most definitely.
There's also kind of like,
where I am right now is not too dissimilar
to kind of how I was feeling before the Vision Pro shipped,
which is
no matter what the feeling is no matter what the features are it's going to be really interesting
to talk about that's kind of where i am with 100% wwc ai or whatever they announced at wwdc
there will be a lot for us to pick apart whether it's good bad or whether we like it or not that's
kind of where i'm feeling with it so that that excites me always anyway so and argue about right like i mean arguing
about it um because i do think that there are a lot of people who feel like a lot of the ai stuff
is hype and a lot of it is but what percentage is hype and so they're going to be people who
might say oh apple didn't do this thing and the counter is going to be yeah but that thing is bad
actually right and and that's going to be a but that thing is bad actually right and and that's
going to be a real push and pull too it's it's a little bit of a a rorschach test about um how you
feel about ai and you know i i've said it before i think ai has has enormous potential and also is
overhyped i think both of those things are true yes um so where apple comes down will be interesting
yep most definitely uh if you would like to send in a snow talk for a future episode you can always go to upgradefeedback.com thanks me for sending that
one in yeah thanks for our document which it also if you have access to our document you can just
put one in there but that that group is very small wow that's real dangerous you just said that i can
always delete them now you know i can always delete them, Jason. I'm a little worried now. You know, I can always delete them.
Yeah, but true.
But who has access to our document?
This new document?
Not many people, actually.
I think Federico, you, and Zach,
who produces the interactive scorecards, which you can always get over at Upgrade.cards.
Thank you, Zach, for producing those for us.
And that leads me so beautifully into the rules for the draft.
They're slightly different this time.
So we're going to talk about it.
I'm going to go through them.
They may need a bit more explanation as we go through it.
But these are the rules for the WWDC draft this year.
There will be 12 rounds, 24 overall picks as we pick each.
We each get a pick by round.
The picks this time are chosen
from a predetermined list of choices as they
always are, which we have agreed could be
verifiable on screen and not
ridiculously obvious.
However, here is the change. Each host
just the two of us
must draft at least one
pick from each of the following
five categories.
iOS, iPadOS, macOS, VisionOS, and AI. Each host
must call out the mandatory picks specifically when they are made, right? So if we're saying,
oh, this is going to be my iOS pick, or this is going to be my iPadOS pick. So we have those five
categories. We each have to make one pick in each of these categories. Every other pick for the 12 rounds can be from anything.
It could be we could pick more iOS stuff, more AI stuff,
but we have to make at least one pick in each of the specific categories that I mentioned.
Is that explained?
Yeah, the goal here is to spread the picks around at least a little bit.
So they're not, for example, all AI picks.
And it provides a little bit of a challenge and there's a little bit of they're not for example all ai picks and uh it provides a little bit of a challenge
and there's a little bit of game going on there game um i explained to mike that it's a little
like fantasy sports where you've got a roster and you've got particular slots that you have to fill
and the example i gave is that you know you you it's the last round and then you pick a kicker
it's that kind of thing where uh there's, we're not trying to complexify this.
We're actually trying to do this so that the podcast is better.
And we talk about each of these five subjects at some point,
rather than piling on one category.
The winner of the previous draft gets to pick first, which is me.
And as always, for Knighton to count in scoring,
it must either be clearly announced on stage or on a slide during the
presentation steven hackett will adjudicate in the case that we need it but we will always try
to work it out ourselves no partial points are awarded and the points awarded on the episode
are final and finalized during the scoring segment lest we remember wwdc 2022 sorry about that in the
case of a tie there is a tiebreaker question the loser gets the pick of
the tiebreaker question and then the draft winner gets the over under on that the winner becomes
draft champion and displays the champion pennant the loser becomes draft challenger and displays
the challenger pennant you can always buy your own draft tee over at upgradeyourwardrobe.com
so you can be ready for all drafts like I am
today. I'm wearing my draft t-shirt today.
These are my favorite
things. Now we've been doing this for so long, we have a lot
of statistics. There have been eight
WWDC drafts in Upgrade history.
Jason has won three WWDC
drafts. Mike has won five WWDC
drafts. Wait, you
mean Snell Talk listener Mike?
Snell Talk listener Mike mike he's really good actually
so far you should have him sign something why not so far this year there has been one draft
the ipad draft which i won uh i as jason mentioned a moment ago i am on quite a streak i don't think
this is the longest streak ever you hold that um but i'm i'm going for it yeah good for you
would you like to pick the tiebreaker question?
All right, the tiebreaker is event runtime,
and I'm going to set the over-under at 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Okay.
Now, I saw in our picks document, I think,
you put the previous run times.
Of the last three WWDCscs they were 146 in 2021 148 in 2022 and 206
in 2023 you picked one hour 50 really well and i think for my same thinking which is
i mean it's unlikely that they would match last year right They introduced an entire platform and hardware. So over two hours, you figure
it's got to be less than that. And if previous years have always got to
the high 145 to 150 mark,
oh boy. I'm going to say under an hour and 50.
I'm going to say under. And I feel
like the the ai stuff as we said earlier is most likely to just
be replacing most of what they would normally do rather than being additive to the typical os
improvements so i was surprised because it looks like generally they're they shoot for 145 but i
think generally what they're really shooting for is two and not 145 but they're happy
to come under 206 in 2023 remember the whole vision pro there and yet it was really only 15
minutes 20 minutes longer than the previous one so clearly they're shooting for something between
145 and two i didn't feel comfortable choosing two as the over under because i think vision pro
really pushed that thing along i wasn't comfortable comfortable choosing 145 because I think that would have made it a lot easier
to choose the over. So this was your question. Is it going to be a little longer than normal
because of AI or is it going to kind of be in the ballpark? So I think that's a good pick by you. I
was kind of hoping to tempt you to the over because I also think it's probably going to be about 145,
think it's probably going to be about 145 148 but um we'll see we sure will all right so i think that that will bring us to the first rounds of the draft for this year so i will be going first
and i will immediately be picking my ai mandatory pick to begin oh okay all right this is the
gamesmanship right like i've been thinking a lot
about this like yep yep yeah i've been pretty pretty stressed out about how to call these picks
right so i'm going first ai pick mandatory and my number one pick is siri becomes more conversational
okay what do we mean by that i mean i had it high on my list too so it's a good pick but what what do we mean by that
you know i i do actually think they will call it this specifically like i think conversational
but i think what we're gonna see is apple demonstrating that siri like the personality
is different it's changed like that it responds more it asks you more questions there's going to
be something here about like this might be a bit of a know it when we see it kind of kind of thing
but i think it will become quite clear that the siri in ios 18 will be more advanced than the
siri in ios 17 that in in the conversations you have with it it will be right listener david shabb is asking
like because we have conversational in quotes actually is that does that need to be used and
i don't think the exact word needs to be used but i think that we would both agree what we mean by
this is that it is more conversational in the sense of you're having a conversation with siri
it is it it feels more like you're having a conversation with a person oh my god i have
roofers on my roof today mike so there may be
occasional noises i apologize sorry that time but here here is where it is um i think we mean
conversational we'll know when we see it it's like having a conversation with siri and if it if it if
it's still like feeding it commands in a command line you don't get the pick and if it's more like
hey mike yeah i can help you with that what do you want to know like it'd be like okay it's
conversational now uh we'll we'll, we'll,
we're gentle.
This is a gentleman's agreement kind of thing.
And Steven's there if we disagree.
Yeah. I,
I do feel like this is,
this is one that feels pretty locked to me.
Like Siri,
no matter,
no matter what happens,
Siri is the interface,
right?
Like that,
that's kind of how I feel.
And yeah,
if they rename it or something too,
we,
we know what this means.
We,
we get it. But I just feel like if they were going to do anything and not have some kind of enhancements to it that that is going to be one of these things that they're going to
they're going to seem behind if they're not making some kind of personality change.
Yeah, personality that seems chatty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For sure.
All right, you're up.
All right, well,
this is funny
because I'm also going to do
some gamesmanship here.
And so for that reason
and that reason only,
I'm choosing a MacPic.
This is my MacPic.
Oh, no.
And its system settings
is redesigned in macOS.
What do I mean by this?
As
Mark Gurman has reported, the idea that they're going
to make some changes in system settings,
whether it's reorganization
or favorites or other things, the organization,
I'm not saying it's necessarily going to look dramatically
different, but that they're going to make some
organizational changes in Mac OS
settings so that it's better. Now,
this may also be in ios and ipad
os but i'm specifically saying you know mac os they're going to do some something to write the
disaster i'm not using that word lightly that is the organization and structure and function of
system settings and it's my mac pic so the uh the gamesmanship here is that of all of the categories
that we have predetermined,
we have the fewest macOS picks, I think for reasons that are obvious.
Yeah, and I don't like any of them.
No, they're all bad.
But this one was the one that I had labeled.
I wasn't going to pick it for any time soon,
but this one seemed like maybe of all of the things we have,
the thing that is the most likely to occur, if anything.
See, the beauty of it is once the good
quarterbacks are taken you're left with the bad quarterbacks you just leave it till the end so
you could just make your last pick the mac pick if you want currently in my i have a i have a short
list of picks here which is 25 picks long it is my final pick so we'll get to that later on makes
sense makes sense but anyway i i went on a little rant on this on six colors podcast last week
because i i just was thinking about the system settings again.
Don't make me think about them and how,
how frustrating it is that they have no,
they're organized,
except there is no order.
Um,
and things are in various weird places and you can't find anything.
So all you can really do is search and how it could be so much better,
either better ordered,
or if you're going to admit that there is no order show,
recent make,
be able to pin favorites is anything would
be better than what's currently there so i hope it happens all right my next pick i'm actually
going to make another ai pick okay uh ai summaries of notifications and content i guess in ios is
where this is but i don't think that makes a difference.
Anyway, this is what I'm saying.
It's in our AI category, so this is just a freebie.
Ah, yes, of course.
So if I'm thinking about what are the things
that Apple's local models can do,
this seems like the easiest,
that you would be able to either visually or audibly, I actually
think they will do both, get summaries of all the notifications that you have.
Or, you know, you're reading it, you've got an email on your screen, and you could ask
the assistant, what is this about?
These kinds of things, which I think could be really helpful, right?
Like you're in a group chat, which is super noisy, be like, what's the group chat talking about today? You know, and that you could read stuff on screen. That
was my real hope is that it's actually gonna read stuff on screen. So it wouldn't even
necessarily need developer buy-in, right? Like, so you could go to a Discord channel
and be like, what's happening here? And I hope that Apple would be able to do that,
right? I feel like they could do that and I would like it if they would. But I think
the iOS, sorry,
the AI kind of summaries of things
could be really nice, and I think
this could be something that Apple could implement
in a way that, and I
think a lot of these features are going to be important, that they have
stuff that they can do without
there
being a need for developers to
have to opt in, because i think that sometimes can can
haunt them a little bit what's your second round pick all right mike the uh the gamesmanship
continues with my next pick i choose an ipad pick uh because again okay because again i don't think
there are very many ipad things to pick so i'm gonna pick yeah it's a second round pick people the calculator app is coming to ipad os that's my pick
i came to win mike i came to play hard and try to win one finally calculator app on ipad os
apologies to friend of the show james thompson he'll be fine there's been a calculator app on
the iphone for a long time and he still sells his calculator on it's fine it's interesting i mean i'm finding this interesting the way you're
you're doing this because i had some of these picks and i was wondering like what is best is
it best to claim the categories or is it best to claim the things that are most likely to happen
what we believe might be most likely to happen anyway so i guess we'll find out right my feeling was that there were
some categories so limited that i was unhappy with any of my choices and then there were categories
where there was lots of stuff to pick from that i felt okay about and i felt like if there was
literally only one mac item and for me it was actually only two ipad items yeah i would just
try to grab them up front because i felt like it's, again, it's that if there are only three good quarterbacks, you want to grab them.
And if they're gone, then it doesn't matter.
You can just let them go.
So apologies to people who don't play fantasy American football, which I did for many years.
I got better and I don't do it anymore.
I draft Apple things now instead.
What was wrong with me?
I guess the interesting thing now is if you think there's only two iPadOS picks,
do you just make the next one?
You know, like in the next round?
Is that how you play me?
Just to block you?
Yeah.
That's an interesting idea.
Probably not, but you have to weigh that with...
I can't trust you, can I?
I can't trust you.
You can't trust me.
You can't trust me.
Well, that's the thing.
Yeah, if there's only one up there,
you could view it as,
well, Jason's got his iPad pick.
He doesn't need to pick the other one.
Or, yeah, right,
I could pick it and leave you with the dregs.
You don't know how I feel
about the probability
of those items, right?
If I felt there were
two high probability items
about the iPad,
I could go with them early or not.
But you don't know whether I feel that way or not that's
the strategy here a little extra without adding a lot of complication there's a little extra
strategy spice yeah it's true i've been doing this for almost 10 years mike this is our ninth
ninth wwc draft i mean you got a you know a relationship that long you've got to keep it you've got to keep it keep it spicy yeah spice and so that means more rules apparently is the way we keep that's
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Okay, draft round three.
I'm going to pick my iOS
pick now.
Which is free placement of
apps and widgets in iOS.
Good pick, good pick.
Oh boy is it time
to allow me to put apps
wherever I want on my home screen.
I heard somebody say this on a show recently.
I think it may have been John Voorhees on App Stories.
And he was like,
do you think they'll get rid of jiggle mode?
And that was an interesting thought to me.
I don't know if they would get rid of the jiggling.
I do feel like I don't need that anymore.
But I don't know if maybe all customers do.
You know what I mean?
Like on my Mac, for example,
every time I drag a file,
they don't all start dancing.
You know, like I can just, I can handle it.
I can move stuff around.
It's fine.
We'll see.
I think they won't get rid of that,
but it would be interesting to see what they do.
I'm just, I'm really keen about this, what this this system's going to look like and i'm also intrigued to know
if i'm going to use it like am i not my my home screens are all full am i going to have non-full
home screens i don't know about that but i do like the idea of a bit more freedom i've been
struck by especially on the ipad jason of of how much space there is between the icons still.
Now I'm using a bigger iPad.
It's still ridiculous.
What is going on over there?
I have a row of four app icons
and a bunch of widgets on my iPad home screen.
I could put eight app icons there and it'd be fine.
If you look at the dock,
I have so many in the dock in that same amount of space.
I know, it's ridiculous.
And I'm assuming
we're not going to get any changes to the ipad home screen because they'll do one of those things
where they put it on the iphone and then they would make ipad users wait a year for it that'd
be sad oh that'd be real sad but you're probably right you're probably right yep yep what is your
third round pick uh my third pick is new environments in vision os okay going with a vision os pick uh
coming you know those coming soon environments they don't count so i adding some at least um
and mentioning that they're adding more environments to vision os as part of the vision os 2 update
so you're saying because i had in this pick that it would include the coming soon options you're
going to exclude the coming soon options?
No, I'm saying that those count.
If they update the coming soon to be there,
that still counts.
The soon has come.
Yeah, they're new too.
If you can't use them now and you can use them
in this announcement, then they're new.
I would say that they don't exist, right?
Exactly.
It's time.
Well, next day is time.
I think this is something they
should be doing past time uh this is this is like um watches right like the the watch faces this is
like a thing apple should be adding these at least once a year new environments why not absolutely
and apparently they've got two that are coming soon so coming soon. Maybe now is soon.
My fourth round pick.
I'm going back to AI again.
All right.
Siri can perform more actions inside of apps.
These are essentially shortcut actions is the way we'll think about them,
but that you'll be in an app and you'll be able to say
you'll be able to ask your assistant to do
something for you inside of that application
and that it will just go ahead and perform it
for the nerds among us
I guess this will just be built on the same technology
that shortcuts actions
are built on like app intents and that kind of stuff
to be able to surface things
so like for let's think of an example here that you could be,
what app would have good actions?
Oh, you could be in Timery, say,
and you could just press the little button on the side of your phone
and just say, start my upgrade timer,
and it would just go ahead and do that
because Siri should be able to understand what the app is able to perform.
The app has been able to tell the system,
these are the things you can have,
and just have the assistant do this kind of stuff.
This, to me, feels like, I think,
will be especially nice on the Mac, I think,
is where I can imagine myself using it a lot more.
But the idea of being able to talk to the computer
and have the computer do things,
it goes back to the, what was the name of that?
The knowledge navigator.
It goes back to the knowledge navigator idea that we spoke
about a few weeks ago. That you were
essentially asking the computer to
perform actions and the computer should be able
to understand and perform those actions.
Exactly. No, this
is the dream, right? Is that
one of the drudgeries that we have not
been freed from by computers is operating computers.
And if you could tell your computer to do a thing instead of having to click 80 times in order to get it to do that thing.
I mean, to me, this is the dream of user automation, which is instead of having to build shortcuts or write scripts, you tell the computer what you want to do and it does it even
better you could tell it what to do and say the next time i ask you just do this thing um but yeah
i think i think i hope we see this i hope this is the i mean when they bought um workflow and made
it shortcuts they put it in the siri group for a right? And I think this might be part of the reason. Automation, Siri should be part of automation.
I hope so.
Okay, Mike. My pick is
AI!
I'm going with my AI pick.
Xcode gets AI features!
Okay.
Copilot, basically.
Yeah.
Any more thoughts on that?
I'm just wondering, what do you think this is?
Like, this is just code completion what do you think this is? Like,
this is just code completion.
Like it,
you know,
do you have a sense for what the,
the,
like the copilot stuff does in the Microsoft apps?
Yeah.
I mean,
it is,
I've seen this in a bunch of different apps,
the Coke code completion suggestion,
asking for help,
asking for a routine,
a subroutine to be dropped in basically that Apple has trained a model on
Swift, at least if trained a model on Swift,
at least, if not Objective-C, on Swift,
and that it will aid you using AI to aid coding in some way.
Beyond that, I am not a coder,
but I would imagine that they're going to look to
what Microsoft has done with Copilot as their inspiration.
Yeah.
I mean, the code Copilot,
before they changed the brand to everything being Copilot,
you know the one I mean, the that's that they use in their in their development tools I remember we we spoke
about this for the first time maybe last year or the year before like this felt like the thing that
would come first first but it but yeah right I mean we got the transformer model right that's
what we got um as kind of like the first uh post gpt machine learning feature we did
not get xcode stuff i think i remember there being a report once that apple was concerned
about accidentally leaking its own code and that's maybe why this took them a little bit longer
like they didn't want their internal stuff to be getting out through xcode ai stuff so
we'll see all right my next pick so this is pick number five ai created emoji
oh wow i'm putting scare quotes around the word emoji because they're not going to be emoji.
It will be stickers, but they'll look like emoji
and Apple will call them probably emoji or emoji stickers.
This is something that there has been a bit of smoke around, right?
Like this is a Mark Gurman report.
This kind of feature, you guessed it before i think google had a thing called emoji kitchen i think is the name this just feels like such an
apple thing to do to me i think we spoke about it on the show last week that you know the system's
going to be suggesting these handcrafted sticker emoji for you to share with your friends and make your chats
more lively.
Handcrafted by the hands
of artificial intelligence.
Nobody's going to use them
because it's going to be
really weird.
I mean,
or maybe this is how
you get your chef's kiss emoji
to everybody once,
you know.
It's going to be
one of those,
what were they?
Were they Slofies?
It's going to be
one of those,
hey kids,
let's make this a thing
and everybody's going
to be like,
meh. I mean, or just stickers in in general right i i think they keep trying to make
stickers happen um i i just i really don't know i mean i can imagine this maybe being fun for a few
days but i don't unless this is really going to be very impressive and that or they are going to do
what they actually should do which is find a way to make them emoji but they're not only going to work on ios devices anyway and it's going to be a
bit of a mess but i do think they're going to go to this well and and this is a fun thing that they
can do that people will think will be fun and it will also show really well in ads yeah oh i agree
and they'll make an ad for it and they'll be like isn't it fun and everybody else will be like
it's it's this would be apple dipping its toe into the generative area in a way that's not gonna ups no it's not
gonna upset people because there aren't like emoji artists that exist out there in the world
they're gonna have designed emoji pieces that the ai can use to construct a new emoji right
it'll be constructed from existing emoji lexicon uh right i think
that's what's going to happen i think so so generative in the most limited sense which i
think there's going to be a lot of that if i had to make a prediction i think there's going to be
a lot of that where it's like oh you know usually the ai announcement is like we have a vast expanse
of the world and it'll create things and some of it'll be bad and some of it'll be interesting and
some of it might even be what you call good um. And then Apple will be like, we have a very limited directory of things from which we are choosing, and it allows us to keep control because the AI can do what it wants, but only within our area.
And I think that that sounds very Apple.
That's an Apple way to do AI is we trained it on a very limited collection of emoji glyphs and that's all it can use so how
bad could it be and it might still be bad but we'll see what's your fourth round pick all right
my pick i'm gonna go to ios which i haven't picked before and i'm gonna say users can change app icon
colors okay um we talked about this last week and i think that i'm gonna stand by that speculation
the idea that i don't think apple's gonna just say although if they did it would count like if you want to
make facebook green you can just do it i think it's going to be a developer story where they're
like aha we're going to have themes or or we're going to let you choose just like they do with
sf symbols choose a layer that will be the where the theme color will be reflected like a highlight
or something like that and that if a developer like just absolutely hates the idea,
they just won't participate.
Right.
Like,
I don't think Apple is going to go full on.
Like,
yeah,
you just change it and nobody,
Matt,
nobody cares just about your brand,
do whatever.
I don't think they're going to do that,
but I do think there's going to be some sort of theming involving the
coloring of app icons. And that's why I think this pick is broad enough to encompass that idea that like if you
want to say i want orange you'll get orange probably from some if not all or in some way
that may or may not be satisfying but app icon colors i do think it's going to happen
someone wrote in uh to upgrade feedback and, I'll get their name in a moment,
and mentioned the idea that tvOS,
and I thought VisionOS app icons,
are created in layers, right?
So you give Apple a file which is layered.
Yeah, it's how you get the spatial kind of effect.
This could be the basis for changing some element.
Maybe you would be able to specify which element could be colored and which wouldn't right which is which is how sf symbols
basically work is that there's a portion of the of the symbol that is designated as being kind of
like attached to a color um so you don't just recolor the whole symbol. You can recolor a portion of the symbol. It's abstracting the design of what's colorable and what's not,
and I could totally see them doing something like that.
I can't find the name of that person in the feedback system,
but if that was you, thank you very much.
That was a good piece of feedback.
But yeah, I think that that could be a way to do it, right?
And then developers could provide something.
But still, this one for me was low down in my picks
because I remain skeptical of it.
So bottom line is, this is my, you know,
it was my highest rated iOS pick left, Mike.
And so for strategy reasons,
not wanting to go even lower on my list,
even though I know that I wouldn't probably have rated
this very high either in the overall percent chance of chance of happening.
But I think it's higher percent chance of happening than literally everything
else that I see on the iOS list.
So I picked it.
Okay.
Ooh.
Now I'm wondering if I,
if I should start jumping ahead to some of my mandatory picks
or if I'm just going to keep with the things that I think are most likely.
So I am actually going to take this time to at least get one more mandatory pick off the board,
which is a VisionOS pick.
And my sixth round pick is that we'll be able to rearrange apps in VisionOS.
Because my word, if they don't do that, the platform's over.
If I can't move my apps around, what are we doing here, you know?
The thing that could come back to bite me with this is they might not show this in the keynote.
I had this second on my
vision os list but i didn't have it rated very high and my thought is this which is one will
they show it and two will they really do that or will there be some other like concept for apps and
i i don't or will they say you know there's that many apps it's not that big a deal we'll just
leave them in alphabetical order for a little while longer they should totally do it but will
they do it what's my confidence in
them being able to do that and show
it? And I'm not clear how much is going to be in Vision
OS. This would seem to be table stakes, right?
And yet, here we are. So
maybe. Maybe.
I think it's not
a bad choice from you. I think this is a choice you need to make.
Yeah, this is
the two Vision OS picks
that I had highest. I do actually have some more in my short
list but it was yours and mine yeah yeah well i hope it happens i mean really it needs to happen
it's really annoying also i think that the vision os apps list is too small on top of that like it
takes a little tiny field of view like you could have more apps there too. Yeah, especially because of the amount of effort it takes
to get to the fourth page.
It's a big action that you're taking each time,
so it would be nicer to have some kind of...
Maybe that's what they'll do, right?
They'll have a new way to do it, and it'll be more rearrangeable.
I kind of think about how you look at the Apple Watch. The Apple apple watch had its idea of doing it and then it created a brand new
idea of doing it and they have both of them but right so maybe we'll get a list is what i'm saying
you know yeah or like an immersive view where your entire space is filled with apps and you
have to swivel around to do it don't do that apple don't do it you can put one over there you have to
walk over to press the icon like you're not just leave only leaving the window no you just have to swivel in your chair you have to be like boom it's over
there right like it's a 360 app world that you're inside you are the app icon oh boy that sounds
terrible app icon is you what is your sixth round pick jason well i wrote the book on it literally
and so i'm going to choose AI-powered tools for
editing photos, which I think is a pretty good bet. Apple, I mean, everybody else is doing it.
Apple has really resisted doing retouching tools in photos in general. There's not even
a basic retouch tool in photos for iOS, even though there has been on the Mac for a while now.
The one on the Mac isn't very good.
I've been using Photomator for years to do this.
Photomator does a great job.
It's got AI enhance.
Also, I'll say there's probably some machine learning stuff
that's already in Photos that they'll label, right?
They're like, oh, it's an enhance.
That's really just an improved enhance
of what they already did, but they can call it ML.
But anyway, so I just think there will be ways in the photos app it's one of the most straightforward
ways to shout out ai they've been using ai tools and photos for years they may say that they may
like photos has had ai tools in it for 10 years because it kind of has um but i do think that
they have to do that thing where you can eat it'll either be smart retouching of like skin or
it'll be remove a person in the background but it's or it'll be like an ai adjustment where it's
like they call it out and say oh we can we can you know use ai to adjust your photo to make it look
good or fill a a particular kind of mood or like there'll be stuff like that in there i i really
think so that's why i'm going to pick it that was actually going'll be stuff like that in there. I really think. So that's why
I'm going to pick it.
That was actually
going to be my pick.
That was the one
that this is awkward for me.
Like I bumped
my Vision OS pick
above this one.
I think this is a good one.
Mike, this was going
to be my pick last time
and then I got too scared
about iOS.
So I picked the iOS pick
and didn't see strategy.
It's happening.
It's happening.
This is a fun
this is a fun game play for WWDC. happening it's happening and this this is a fun this is a fun
gameplay for wwc but yeah i think that this is as far as ai stuff goes any an easy one for them to
do something in i don't imagine them going as hard as google has i would be surprised if they had like a add stuff to this image.
Yeah.
I think it's going to be more like,
I mean like literally I know that these are the demos,
but like literally I had a photo when we went to Hawaii a few years ago that I
used that,
that was my,
my wife and daughter on a beach and there was some guy walking in the
background and I was like,
goodbye,
take that guy out. And photo mater did. Yeah. I just really circled him and then photo mater replaced him and he was some guy walking in the background and i was like goodbye take that guy out and photomator did yeah i just really circled him and then photomator replaced him
and he was gone that is great it makes your i know it's technically you're manipulating
whatever like it made a unusable photo usable and um that's the stuff they need to do but i agree
there's probably not going to be like circle select the sky and tell it to be nighttime or like i don't think it's going to do stuff or
put a unicorn somewhere right like no i don't think it's going to do any of that stuff do you
think they would do something like the the best take feature where you could change people's heads
i think it's possible that they will do something like that where you take a burst and then it
it tries to merge them together into the best into out of the merge, out of pieces of the merge.
Because I feel like they take so many photos anyway, right?
Like they're taking like tons and tons and tons.
So every time you take a photo, they take like nine photos.
Would not surprise.
I mean, they already do that, right?
But would they add a little layer where they offer you?
Again, my guess is they wouldn't just do it. they where they offer you my again my guess is
they wouldn't just do it they would like offer you an upgraded version that's using as somebody
who sat in photoshop i've got a poster in my living room of my kids on the one of the lions
at trafalgar square and it is literally made up of three different stills that i took because
none of them was quite right and i put them together like
huh i'd really like it if my photos app could do that and be like oh yeah here's your kids where
they're both smiling and and like i had to i had to bodge that together myself so it would be really
great if that feature was there even if it was just an option where apple was like you know
none of these looked great but I put them together for you.
That would be fine.
The one for me is blinking.
Yeah.
That's what I would want to be able to fix.
Blinking, smiling, whatever it is.
And some of that can be detected actually when you're taking the photo.
But yeah, to be able to analyze, take a burst,
even if you generally just throw it away,
and analyze the faces and try to make sure that the faces are all looking at the camera
or smiling or whatever, or not not blinking that would be great you know i don't think you
need to do a burst like look at live photos well i photos is lower resolution than the actual photo
but they do it's gotten better over time though yeah it's better resolution but it's not the
resolution of the full photo and i think that's what apple would want to do but you could definitely take multiples as a burst or as a secret burst that you then process right which
is what they do anyway they're already taking multiples so imagine them taking multiples they
could even use and they might even brag about it like use the accelerometer on the camera to realize
that you're holding the camera still and and analyzing the photo so you know that this is
basically the same photo in the very in a very short window and just keep
capturing as long as you're holding the camera up so that you can do those merges.
There's lots of smart stuff they could do to solve a problem, right?
Because when we talk about AI, so much AI hype is about a solution in search of a problem.
This is a real problem.
And I know that Google and others have done work in this area,
a lot of work in this area and Apple hasn't,
but like it doesn't change the fact that it is a problem that needs,
that would help people to have a solution,
a usable photo for your Christmas card,
because both your kids have their eyes open in the picture,
even though when you press the lens or the shutter,
one of them
had their eyes closed but a second later they opened it and the system recognized that and you
were still holding steady like that is a huge solution that yeah right now you can use somebody
else's platform for it or you can do what i do which is have to bring it into photoshop and align
the images and then try to blend them and it's I mean, it took me like an hour to get that photo ready for the poster that's on our wall in our living room. So yeah,
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Alright, so our next
pick. We're into round
number seven now.
Oh
boy. I'm going to rip off the
band-aid.
Apple announces partnership
with OpenAI for AI
features.
Wow. It's been AI features. Wow.
It's been heavily reported.
Yes.
To the point where since we last recorded,
I think the information reported that the deal is done.
Yep.
The shape of this, I don't know, really.
And I think we're going to have to wait and see.
How much would they even mention it?
We don't know.
I think they will
for all of the reasons
that it makes sense
to talk about AI at all,
right? Whether you like
them or hate them, OpenAI have
the market at the moment, like it's
theirs. They are kind of
synonymous with the AI
moment. People know who they are. They are kind of synonymous with the AI moment. People know who they are.
They are
obviously the leader
in some metrics.
They are the company
that I think kind of kicked off
where we are and are ahead
in a bunch of areas.
If Apple's going to partner with someone,
I think they're going to partner with them.
I hope that they have more than one partnership, but I'm picking OpenAI as a partnership that they will have.
I think it will happen.
I think you'll get this point.
But I think they're going to play up OpenAI in the sense that they want to be recognized as using
one of the leaders in this field for some features and yet i think they're going to downplay open ai
if that makes any sense i think they need to cite it and they want to cite it but i don't think
they're happy about it um and i think it's going to be one of those things where it's like a logo on a slide or maybe even just a mention and no logo.
I don't, personally, I don't expect
that we're going to see like a return to the stage
from Mr. Pop Collars.
I don't think it's going to happen.
I think it's going to be like, oh yeah,
and if you want, you can do this thing with OpenAI
or we partner with OpenAI,
so if you want to do this thing, you can do this thing with open ai or we partner with open ai so if you want
to do this thing you can do that or siri if if you want further information siri can talk to open ai
to gpt they may even also just say chat gpt and not even mention open ai right they might do that
like if you really want that you can use other chat bots such as chat gpt right and which leaves
open the door that they'll make
deals with google for example for gemini right i think they're gonna so this is the thing is i
think they need to do it because they want to be seen as having this play but so i think you're
you're going to get the point but i i would predict the downplaying of it like that they're
going to toss it off as like because not only do some people
have strong feelings about open ai negatively but also it does make apple seem like they had to go
outside for help so i think they're going to downplay it but mention it i would say that
that's most likely especially considering the recent controversies you know that maybe it's
a thing where hey look we're doing this but's not. I am leaning towards them not having Sam Altman come out now,
like where there was a point where I think that was a definite.
I now don't think that will happen.
But I can imagine them saying that, hey, and when you want to do this,
it goes out to our partner, OpenAI, or one of our partners, including OpenAI.
And now that it's not a stage show, there's no come out on stage anymore, right?
You would have to make a much more integrated thing with a partner to have them in your video which you could also take out later
um i think that maybe maybe sam altman comes on stage maybe if it's a live show at the steve jobs
theater but it's not and so i think that it won't happen that way i mean i'm not saying
i guarantee it like anything could happen but I wouldn't put money on it for sure
all right with my pick number seven um I'm gonna go with AI enhancements to iWork apps
oh I feel like this is a quick win for Apple to say you know we'll let you uh start a business
document and pages or pages will prompt you and and put some things in there
or they'll suggest a next paragraph for you or some of this basic text generative ai or something
in keynote like you could be say like you know build me you know build me some bullet points
about this or build me a slide deck about this i just i feel like there's something an ai related
thing that they can roll into an app honestly i think it's easier for them to roll AI stuff into apps than the OS anyway.
And so being able to do that, my guess would be it's going to be some tech stuff in pages
because that's the easiest thing for them to do.
So I don't feel super confident about this, but like it among what's out there, I think
that this is one of the more, we're at the point now where my confidence level has dropped,
and I'm just trying a bunch of stuff that I think is possible,
but not necessarily at the highest rate of likelihood.
I didn't really think about this one, to be honest.
I see what you're saying, especially in pages,
but I wonder if they will have any enhancements that are specific to these apps
that wouldn't just work in any app you know well i mean i guess that's a question i i if
i mean my argument would be that if they say you can generate auto generate a paragraph in
pages or notes that it still counts because it's in pages.
Yeah, yeah, it would,
but I'm wondering
if they would do that.
That's the thing.
If it's just text generation,
it's like you can just do
wherever you write your things.
I like this pick.
I think it's okay.
My eighth round pick
is that some AI features
will be labeled
as coming next year.
Ooh.
All right.
I think it's a little bit risky. I think it's, it could very well happen
only because coming next year is a tough one, right? Like they would rather not, they would
rather say late later this year and then announce at the end of the year, Oh, that'll actually be
coming in the spring. But will they just come up right up and say uh coming next year maybe they will maybe that
that's what it's going to take so i think it's a really good uh a good gamble to take here here's
what i imagine for this is like there's some feature like and we want to show you a preview
of something we have coming next year could be that's what i think and this is just leaning into
do i believe that they were caught out?
And the answer is yes.
And so I expect that there will be at least something
that they will want to show
because they're impressed by it.
They think it's cool,
but they just straight up know it's not coming this time.
Or it's something that will only run on certain hardware
that they want to make sure is well seated
before they release it you know
maybe it is something just run on the next iphone so there's no point shipping it in when ios ships
so they'll just say it'll come next year yeah i i think it absolutely could i i what made me
hesitate to pick this and i had it on my longer list of possibilities what made me hesitate is
them not saying no no no it's happening. They might not want to admit it, right?
Yeah, they might not want to admit it.
Yeah.
Okay, I'm going to choose AI-powered transcription in notes slash voice memos.
This is rumored.
It's a fairly straightforward thing to expand transcription to other places
so that if you leave yourself a voice memo it comes back as text um or maybe even
syncs to notes or something right like maybe there's actually once you can make voice memos
into text maybe you could just do that there or you could just leave a voice memo in notes but
this is the idea of making audio system-wide audio that contains spoken word into the words
so that you can search them and see them so i think that
this is a pretty likely scenario my ninth round pick i'm picking my ipad pick because i'm getting
scared okay which i hate this pick but it's the only thing that i could kind of imagine and it
leads back for what you were saying earlier of like sometimes
the iPhone gets a thing and then the next year
the iPad gets a thing. Last year
the iPhone got standby
mode.
And I think especially with the new
OLED iPads it would be kind
of cool for my iPad to have
something on the screen
even when I'm not using it. And my hope
would be that it wouldn't necessarily be
just when the iPad is charging
that they might come up
with something else for the iPad.
But some kind of standby mode
for iPadOS
is something I could maybe see happening.
I would love it.
I would love it.
I would love it.
I don't think it's going to happen,
but I would love it.
Wouldn't it be great
to be able to take an iPad
and especially an OLED iPad and have it also be your status board when you're not using
it wouldn't that be nice because i feel like what you could do here is you just put it on the oled
ones and say it's a standby mode but essentially it's always on display yeah right so that's what
i would love i think it'd be so cool i agree i love it i don't
yeah i i have not a lot i don't think it's gonna happen even but i'm trying to you know we have
you gotta you gotta do it this is the rules right you gotta make an ipad pick here
all right um with my ninth pick i am going to choose uh some iphone ai features are limited to the most recent pro phones
yeah so this is this is now they're gonna have to mention it but this is a little bit like remember
when they did the the stage manager stuff and they said it's only in the most recent i you know
ipad pro or whatever or ipad air like there was like one model that could do stage manager, no, it was multitasking.
It was multitasking.
And they were like, no, no, we got to gate this.
And everybody had to buy that iPad
in order to try out that feature that summer.
Everyone went, that was in the San Francisco year.
That year, that Apple store sold so many iPads,
including one to me.
I went and bought, I think it was the iPad Air 2
or something.
I went and bought one because previously it was the iPad Air 2 or something. I went and bought one
because previously it was like,
it almost seemed like an unchanged,
unneeded device.
Then it turned out,
oh, actually,
you have to have it for this stuff.
Right.
And so that's my theory is that
I think for some of this AI,
we're going to have a lot of like requirements,
like system requirements
that are going to come up.
And, you know,
like Apple Silicon only for Mac and who knows what it'll be for iPad. But I think for iPhone, requirements like system requirements uh that are going to come up uh and you know like apple
silicon only for mac and and who knows what it'll be for ipad but i think for iphone my feeling is
it's going to be iphone 15 pro and later yeah mark gorman and i think it was in power on last
week was talking about this a little bit and i think his thinking was it would be the 15 Pro phones would get some features
and then all 16 phones.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think going forward, they're going to have to put it on everything.
But for 15, it might be limited to just the Pro,
which again gives the summer for people to test these features
with a 15 Pro, which is important.
Otherwise, why announce a feature that doesn't run on current hardware?
It doesn't make sense.
But in that scenario, I would
be, I think, a little bit disappointed
that it wouldn't run on
the regular 15.
That, I think, would be
a little bit where I'm like,
what are you doing over there? Really, what are you
doing? What is going on
here? Were you really that
far behind?
If you're going to say these features only run on pro devices fine you know what i mean they'll run on pro devices but
how did we get to a scenario where you released a phone and then nine months later released features
that couldn't run on it like how did you get yourself into this situation you know that that
would be the question i would have to ask like i think that would be it would be weird to me.
All right, my 10th round pick,
I'm picking my macOS pick.
Oh, yay, hey, here it goes, macOS, can't wait.
And this one purely comes from a,
please fix this, Apple.
It's been so many years,
and I don't know why we're still in this mess.
Redesigned notification center in macOS.
Just show me more than three notifications, you that's all i really want just go back to what it used to be like when i would click the the date
and it would show me all my notifications in a list why do you just show me three when i can now
put widgets wherever i want who's putting widgets there anymore anywhere they all go on their
desktop okay just show me my notifications all right it is just showing more notifications enough to get you this pic because that's not a redesign to just list more well i
think i mean i think it's a new notification center right like it looks different
yeah i don't know okay tell me i mean i mean we can change it this again uh just gentlemen's
agreement uh yeah we can do that or you could change it to be like update to notification center but let's leave it we know what it means
right i'll i'll give you that if it's just like let's say it's been this way for so many years
if it's no longer this way that's a redesign okay you know all right i'll give it to you i'll give
it to you thank you they will need to call out notification center and mac os and say that it's
been improved essentially that's the key right is like we need to see in the video because it's a keynote notification center has
changed it's a keynote draft they may have like a detail page somewhere that shows notification
center but if they don't say or show on a slide oh we redesigned notification center which honestly
my feeling is this year if they do literally anything on mac os it will be in a slide because
they won't have that much yeah i could imagine that one of
those bento slides and it's like notifications and exactly what was your pick uh that we could
or settings system settings redesign you know blah blah blah if that at all all right
i am gonna make uh surprisingly an ios pick even though I was afraid
of iOS. Well, my first pick was
or no, I made an iOS pick in round
three, right? So I'm going to go back there
because I am now in my lower rounds
as we both are. And sometimes you just
got to pick things that are maybe a little more
risky. And so I'm going to pick
another Mark Gurman rumor that I
am thinking of David Smith as I
do this too, is
topographic maps added to
maps in iOS. So they're already
on the watch
but for hiking and things like
that on
when you just got your iPhone with you, add a topo
map. So it's a rumor. I
like the idea. They've already got the data set
so let's do it.
Why not, right?
This is on Apple Watch uh watch os the latest watch os you can do
that you can see a topo map yeah yeah all right i mean okay i can i can be on board with this one
this wasn't one that i had in my short list i think i missed that mark i'm going to pick that
actually but i still don't think that i would have gone with this one. Yeah, there's a rumor about a couple new Maps features,
and I found this one felt a little more likely than the other one,
but I really was just grasping at straws at that point.
Because this, to me, feels like one of those things,
like what you were mentioning.
Would this make it into the keynote?
I don't know.
Bento Box animation or an aside that says,
oh yeah, and maps on iOS
is getting a lot of our great maps features from,
you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Whatever, indeed.
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We now move in to round number 11 i'm going to go back to ai here all right and
say ai improvements to spotlight search all right okay interesting i feel like this is one of those
ones where it's an easy call out for them
to talk about how the power of our new AI system
it's been easier than ever to find things on your devices
I feel like Spotlight is something that they have called out multiple times
with Siri intelligence improving over the years
and or there'll be new things that are going to be in spotlight that weren't
there before made made
possible by the power of
AI so that's why I think
we're going to see
improvements to spotlight
it feels like an easy
one to me even for them
to say like hey using
the power of our AI
system we know what
you're looking for and
can surface content for
you in spotlight you
know maybe spotlight is
going to become more of
a home a hub than it
has been before.
Okay. All right. I think it's definitely possible.
There are things that they could do in Spotlight.
It's a good place to pour AI stuff.
It's literally a prompt that you type things in.
And so you can put all sorts of different AI-generated things in there if you wanted to.
Earlier on, you were talking about those notes, voice memo, memo transcription thing you might be able to search that from spotlight right
like you know you search a thing and it can using the power of ai can search inside of other stuff
you have sure in the system it already does that right so that would be a logical like if it's just
translating it then it would have access to all those transcripts it's an interesting idea
and again it's one of these things where it's like access to all those transcripts. It's an interesting idea. And again,
it's one of these things
where it's like,
yeah, they're kind of doing it,
but they don't say it's AI
that does it right now.
So maybe they'll say
it's AI that does it now,
you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Just like photo editing.
All right.
I'm going to stay
on the AI train too.
And I'm going to say
that they're going to have
some sort of message composition
in mail using AI.
Generate or apply
to this message, which is jo jolly that kind of stuff yeah
the google yeah yeah here's an emoji just respond with an emoji we can do that no i mean my idea
here is google already has started to do this with uh gmail it's the idea that uh you can
analyze the message that came in and you're doing a reply and it's going to
suggest something more than like a word or a sentence it's going to say you know maybe give
you options or maybe just sort of give you a grayed out kind of like would you like this
basic reply and people will be annoyed by it and maybe it'll be turned off but like
this is it's actually a place that's gained gained traction i think
there are a lot of people who appreciate the fact that if i'm replying to a message
that it it knows what you want to say especially in some context and you can be like yep that's
exactly what i want to say uh or pick from like yes or no and it writes a yes or no for you about
like no i'm sorry i can't do that or Or great, that sounds great, let's do it.
And not have to worry about it.
I don't personally like that,
but I feel like that's a thing that you could demo
and explain why it solves a problem
and explain why Apple has taken great care in what it does.
And it's existing technology that everybody has seen.
So, you know, we're at the ends of the draft now,
but I think that's one place
that they could add some AI seasoning fairly easily.
Yeah, I was just thinking as you were talking then, right,
about like mail is an interesting thing
because there is an entire amount
of large language of your own, right,
that they could learn from to build these things.
But then it made me think about like,
if they're doing this kind of stuff on device, right,
like that they're going to use their systems this kind of stuff on device right like that they're they're
going to use their systems to kind of train on your data how hot are these phones going to get
every time you get a new one right like how much of this stuff is passed from phone to phone and
if they're going to train on your information like the the setup process where the phone the battery
life is terrible and run the phone runs hot for a bit
like i feel like that is just going to get worse and worse with with some of these things so it's
going to be interesting to see how they handle that yeah they're going to need to be much more
intelligent about sort of like when do you run those tasks and don't run them in certain
circumstances but people want those features right away but you're like yeah but i can't run the
phone when it's on on battery and i need to regulate the heat and all of those things about it but you're right
it'll happen 12th and final pick yeah i have seven things here left and i'm trying to decide
which of these i want to go for
oh boy um i'm gonna make a vision os pick okay because i don't want it to just be another ai
pick so like i'm just gonna put this out there so you can take it if you want to
the pick that i had next like in my list um was auto auto complete expanding to complete sentences right like i feel
like that is a very likely thing but i don't want to pick that i want to pick something different
and so i'm going to go with multiple mac displays in vision os oh i had that on my list that was one
of my possible picks here because i i think that that's actually a a decent chance of happening
multiple uh multiple if they've put work into VisionOS,
which I do believe they will have,
and I hope that they've prioritized it,
even with all the other things going on,
this feels like a thing to add
that people would really dig.
And we have heard that
this is running inside of Apple at least
somewhere, right?
This is a thing that they've been trying
and I would love for them
to find a way to handle this so I could have
two displays on my Mac
and two Mac displays inside
of Vision OS that I would be able to
use. I think it would be able
to increase productivity even if they did
a thing, and I don't know how I would feel about this,
we'd have to just score it. You could just have Mac
apps that are on displays
or whatever inside
of VisionOS, but I would like to
see them have multiple monitors that I
could use inside of my
Vision Pro. I like it.
That's my final pick. Wow, okay.
I'm left with the dregs now, because that might have been my pick. Wow. Okay. Um, I'm left with the dregs now
because that,
that might've been my pick.
Hmm.
Um,
hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Uh,
I just hate the idea
that what I choose here
might determine
who wins and loses,
right?
Like,
cause it's,
it's here.
Well,
every pick is that,
right?
I know it's true,
but it's just,
um,
oh,
wow.
Um, I'm going to pick out of left field,
more information on CarPlay.
Oh, wow.
See, now this would be interesting.
I like this.
I like this.
It's in our list and it it literally is more information on car.
What does that mean?
It means that at some point they're going to say something about CarPlay that isn't CarPlay exists.
That they're going to be like, we did this thing to CarPlay.
Or we've got CarPlay 2 and more people are adopting it.
Or it's going great.
You know, if it's just a restatement of existing things, it's not more information.
But if it's literally, this is one of those like CarPlay mentioned with a little bit of an asterisk is basically what this is, which is give me something about CarPlay.
Something about CarPlay.
The reason I find this one particularly interesting is it was, I don't know, two or three years ago now that they showed off next generation carplay right and what has become exceedingly obvious over this
amount of time is no car makers want to do this like except for like one like more and more car
makers and nilai patel keeps interviewing car makers and ceo car ceos on dakota and he keeps
asking them and they're all saying they don't want to do it i think mercedes fans were the most recent to say no which i think means for apple to improve car play they actually need to take it in
a different direction right the direction that they wanted to go down which is like hey we're
the operating system in the car car manufacturers don't want that and they run risk i think of
car play being dropped yeah and i think that apple needs to maybe make like you know
to save face a little bit that this is an option but that there is a new version of carplay which
looks like that but doesn't necessarily require that you give over the dials of the car yeah i
think i think i mean most of that already exists in carplay they have support for multiple displays
and different shape displays and all of that.
But yeah, maybe it's a statement about like a change in direction.
I don't know.
I just, I mean, my pick here really is that they often talk about CarPlay at WWDC because it does get updated when iOS gets updated.
And it is strategically important to them.
So do they mention it and give more information in some way?
I'm going to put down that they will because they sometimes do.
That's the draft. I feel
the most uncertain
about this draft than I have in a while
which makes me think that this rule change
was a pretty good one. I just
feel like it
made it a bit more frantic feeling
that I felt like I had to make picks
that I didn't want to make at the point that I
was making them, leaving other stuff on the a good thing it's i mean and it was gentle right
it was only five mandatory categories out of 12 picks so it was it was gentle but it still added
a little bit of that feeling i like it well we'll we'll muse about it and for next time about whether
this is it may only make sense for certain kinds of events like wDC. I think WWDC, it may only really make sense for it
because it is the only keynote
where we can feel somewhat confident
about what's going to be there, right?
Because they say in advance,
you're going to hear about this, this, this, this, and this, right?
From an operating system standpoint,
even if they don't share a lot of stuff during it.
But like any September event,
we don't know if it's going to be any more than the iphone one of the motivations for doing it this way also in addition
to just sort of like spicing it up a little like we said is um mike originally did this draft as uh
as more hard and fast categories and i felt like the problem is that almost everything's going to
be an ai announcement and that everything else is on the sidelines and there's no hardware and
there's no like and i thought well that's really boring if we have three ai picks and then a whole bunch of things that we don't think are really
going to happen and so we led it led to sort of this more flexible format and i like it i kind
of like it i don't know depending on rumors we might do something like this for other events
right where if we feel like there's really only kind of two things or whatever but for wwdc
especially this year,
it seemed like the right way to go.
Yeah,
definitely.
This is a conversation,
a really good conversation we had during,
uh,
upgrade plus.
Yeah.
Oh yes.
You got to,
everybody got to hear all the details and upgrade plus last week,
by the way,
in,
uh,
upgrade plus this week,
there is,
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The California Bear Trophy will be decided in Upgrade Plus.
Go to getupgradeplus.com to sign up if you haven't already and thank you for your support.
I will just say, like I'll say it here too uh if you've ever supported us or if you currently do uh this
is basically around the time that we launched the the upgrade plus in 2020 so i just want to thank
everyone for their support uh whether you have ever been a member or if you are one right now
we genuinely really appreciate it before we wrap up this week uh we said we would talk about
and i want to talk about a little bit more about what if uh-huh uh the vision os experience um
you've written a review about it uh because we were a little bit constrained about what we could
talk about uh last time um and i just wanted to follow up and just say like i just had such a
good time with this like i i as a huge marvel fan this was
incredible for me i got goosebumps on three separate occasions going through the what if
experience like even just at the beginning when you're inside the marvel studios logo
it's like oh yeah they have a moment where you're actually flying as the marvel is flying out you're
in you're inside it it's uh very fun you're in it very funny um yeah this is just it was really great and i think that
this is kind of for me the perfect kind of encapsulation of what vision pro is capable of
from a all the senses that it has you know like the fact that you know where the portals that
one comes from and the space and
the fact that they're always looking at you i thought was really interesting um if you're
sitting up or like standing up sitting down like the characters are always looking at you like it's
just like a lot of really interesting technology that's going on here and just like the hand
tracking for the spell casting it's very good the. The spatial audio, incredible. There's this one part where
you're having to shoot from your
hand,
some kind of spell to destroy
these aliens or whatever.
The spatial audio will indicate to you
where they're shooting at you from, so you can turn
around. You've got a shield.
It's very
active in the moments that it is active,
but by and large, it is a passive experience. As you said in your review, it's not it's very active in the moments that it is active but by and large is a passive experience
right as you said in your review it it's not a game there's game-like elements within a story
so i was thinking about it and and uh had come to this conclusion then i saw david smith post
on massad on about it too which is like feels like an amusement park ride that that is how i
would say it is it's like in one of those interactive amusement park rides a little bit
where like you're on rails and you know whether you shoot at the spider-man villains or at buzz
light your targets or whatever like as you're going through doesn't really matter the story
continues to go you know you at the most the story won't progress until you do the thing but it's not
like you can get shot and die and then the thing doesn't happen like Like that's not what it is. So it's very on rails. Um, and I came out at the end thinking,
yeah,
it's basically like an hour long amusement park ride,
which is pretty cool.
Cause most of those amusement park rides are very short.
Uh,
but that's what it was kind of like,
and it was a fun experience.
It's not a game,
nor is it a video.
It is this inter mediate step.
And,
uh,
yeah,
I had a lot of fun with it,
I think.
And it's built obviously
to show off the Vision Pro's features.
So it's leaning into all the things
the Vision Pro can do,
including augmented reality and environments,
some really beautiful environment design that they do
and hand tracking.
So yeah.
And the performances are really good too.
Like just in general,
like the visuals, the audio, the acting, right?
There's just like good
performances all around like this is the kind of thing too where i could imagine like all right so
you've built this could there be another one right like i hope there will be right that like you
build this technology and you could have periodic releases of new episodes of this what if story
um i liked it the the choreography was really good um which is an interesting challenge
because there's like fighting that's occurring between superheroes and you're like playing a
part in it well they have to do it in such a way that the fight can continue to occur even if you're
taking a while to do a thing so like just from a direction standpoint it's really good um before
we wrap up on this i want to talk about the end part. So
if you don't want to be spoiled
for the end of the What If experience,
then you can skip to the next chapter.
Now.
Alright. The moment
where the Watcher shows you the two
sets of stones, and you
get to snap
all my... I was
just so excited about that like that genius one legitimate choose your
own adventure moment and the whole thing there because i talked to them about it there's a couple
mentions of it in the in my story um i talked to the the interaction designer and and he admitted
like yeah we can't do branching where we've got like 80 different scenes and a user only plays three of them because each of them is incredibly expensive so they have
them all but at the very end you get to make a choice between a and b and we won't go into the
details of the spoiling and then you need to make a thanos style uh snap of your fingers in order
for it to happen and it is a beautifully realized moment that
really gives you uh yeah it kind of gives you chills right because you get to do the snap
it did for me yeah because when i was like just snap your finger like oh my god it's like that is
so good and also again like i had no idea the vision pro could detect that right like that
was impressive on its own right that like a snap, it can know what that looks like
or sounds like or whatever.
That was impressive.
And then, yeah, we won't spot,
but then there are two endings
and the Easter eggs in those endings are fantastic.
They're so good.
And so, yeah,
I really had such a great time with this.
I love it.
Like, I really love it.
Yeah, it was good.
It's a fun thing great demo uh
shows off what the potential of vision pro is and uh yeah i really enjoyed it all right so next week
obviously will be wwdc you're gonna be uh in you're gonna be at apple park right uh yeah i'm
gonna be at apple park next monday and and we will record a podcast next Monday.
I don't know where.
It may be back at my hotel.
It may be in a car.
It may be at somebody's house.
It may be at Apple Park.
I don't know.
I honestly don't know,
but we will do it somewhere.
Yeah, I'm going to be in London.
I'm not going to WWDC this year.
I have some family commitments.
This unfortunately fell at the exact wrong week in June for me,
so I can't make it.
But yes,
we will endeavor
as we always do
to record an episode
as soon as we possibly can.
And if there's anything
that prevents that,
we'll make sure
to put it on Mastodon
and in the members discord
and stuff.
But we will do everything
as is humanly possible
to record
and get our episode
out as close
to the WWDC ending as possible.
Even if I am recording
it standing outside of the store
down at Apple Park in the press area.
Now you see how I draw the line on that one.
I think I would wait.
For me personally,
I would wait till Tuesday
if we're going to get that.
No more car cast.
I don't know.
With a microphone,
if it was just background noise,
I think we could probably do it
and it would suppress it mostly.
Anyway,
I hope it won't come to that.
I hope it will be
a little more controlled than that.
Genuinely,
since we're having this conversation,
if that was what it was,
I would wait until Tuesday.
What about if it was
in a secluded place
outside the Steve Jobs Theater
where there was nobody but me,
but I was outside
and there might have been birds?
I would prefer to wait.
Okay.
Well, we'll see.
Well, we're
going to make all efforts to record on monday in a controlled environment yeah we'll do everything
we can and sound of air i just think an important episode deserves good sounding audio yeah i agree
too bad about this one too bad about the roofers yep too bad about it but i i would i would say
the post-wwc episode is more important than the draft if such a thing could i agree i agree it's true if you would like to send us in
your questions your follow-up your feedback for the show you can always do so at upgradefeedback.com
you can check out jason's work at sixcolors.com and hear his podcast at the incomparable.com
and here on relay fm where you can also hear me too and you can check out myepropel.com and here on RelayFM, where you can also hear me too, and you can check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can find us on social media. Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L.
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of this week's episode.
But most of all, thank you for listening.
Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snow.
Goodbye, Mike Hurley. Thank you.