Upgrade - 568: A Persona of a Bearded Man

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

from relay this is upgrade episode 568 today's show is brought to you by Squarespace delete me and factor my name is Mike Hurley I'm joined by Jason Snow hi Jason Snow hi Mike Hurley my name is Jason Snow and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi Jason Snell. Hi Mike Hurley. My name is Jason Snell and I'm joined by Mike Hurley. I have a Snell Talk question for you. It comes from Mike and Mike wants to know. Jason? Mike with an I? Different. This one isn't me. Usually when I say it's from Mike it's me but this one is not me. Okay. Alright. Just to work with her. Alright.

Mike wants to know how much did you enjoy using the AirPods Max for the recording of last week's episode? I like how this is phrased. How did I like it? How much did you enjoy using the AirPods Max for the recording of last week's episode? I like how this is phrased. How did I like it? How did you like it? Mike, I did not like it. I know. Because listeners may know, Jason doesn't like wearing over ear headphones.

I hate it. Any kind? I hate it so much. Yeah. Somebody, was it Lauren or Jamie, asked me like, what's the deal with those headphones? Are those your headphones? And I was like, no. I said, I've only ever worn AirPods Max at Apple Park.

I literally, because they supply them if you're doing a podcast there. And again, very generous of them, not saying anything about their generosity, just saying, I don't like over ear headphones It doesn't matter who makes them even the greatest ones of all time. I'm never gonna like them. It makes my ears sweaty I find them weird and uncomfortable. I've just I've never liked using them I find the whole experience unpleasant. So no is how I like them. I like them zero.

Yeah. I was just mentioning to you before we started the show, because my travel is getting in place for September this year for the podcast of them, where we'll be hanging out and hopefully talking about new iPhones. And doing a better live in person episode than we did last year where we didn't wear headphones and were off access and sounded like a disaster, like amateurs. Just ruined one of the most important episodes of the year, but we try not to think about that. We're not going to do that. We're not going to do that again, because we're going to wear headphones this time. But this is the thing for me, my travel headphones are an original pair of AirPods Max. And this is the, I think the first trip that I'll be taking,

maybe the first trip since Apple updated the AirPods Max. And especially since they got them to the point where it was actually somewhat on par with the previous version. Like there is a cable that you can use now, which there wasn't for many months when they introduced the USB-C version. Right. Yes. And I think I'm like super over the AirPods Max, but the question is, do I move to the new Sony's or not? This is like the question I have for myself. Oh yes, because I saw those just came out.

Because that's what I was waiting for. Because the last ones, the last Sony's, they didn't get the kind of like overwhelming, these are really good reviews that the Sony headphones usually get. But I watched a MKBHD video, this is the WH-1000XM6 and he's like, oh yeah, they did it again. And like they do a lot of what I want, like fold and all that kind of stuff and you compare multiple devices but I just don't think it's

I just, this is the thing, I'm never gonna get exactly what I want because what I like about the AirPods Max is they do the automatic switching, which I love with Apple products and AirPods. It works really great for me and it's not going to do that. You can have multiple devices, but it's not going to do the switching. Yeah, but then I also don't get a lot of what I want from the AirPods experience from the AirPods Max because it uses an old chip. So you don't get like transparent, the adaptive mode. You don't get the voice modes and stuff like that. So I just don't know. I don't know what to do.

They're old. I actually realized, I do have a little bit of a story here, which is that I did buy some generation of those Sony headphones at one point. The story was I had just kind of a weird inner ear thing that we thought that I had, which I think I do have. And it means that sometimes when I travel, I get to my destination and I feel kind of sick for like a day afterward. And one of the things that my audiologist and

my doctor suggested was don't use my plug your ear in ear headphones because they exacerbate the pressure in your ears and instead use cans, you use the big over ear headphones. And so I bought a pair, we were about to go to Hawaii, I bought a pair of the Sony noise canceling headphones. They sounded great. There are quirks because because it's Sony, and it does things that I'm like,

hmm, you know, I spent enough time with Apple products, and I'm like, this is janky, like, oh, you could update the firmware with this, it's just like, it was weird. But they were really nice, and I ended up giving them to my son, because he wanted them, and he likes them, and he used them until they died,

and, you know, brutalized them in a way only a teenager can do to the point where they died a violent death. But the reason I didn't use them anymore is because then Apple came out with AirPods Pro. And one of the features of AirPods Pro in addition to doing noise canceling, which was really nice on an airplane, is they have, they made a point of saying that they have airflow control in the headphones and the air passes through and it doesn't block your ears. The air moves through and the pressure would move through. And I've used those on airplanes since and have not had any effect. I don't wear the in-ears.

I wear the AirPods instead. But anyway, so I did buy them. I appreciate that people like them. I wouldn't recommend people buy an AirPods Max right now, either, so you think about that. We'll look at each other in September and we'll see what we're wearing. I've got a few months,

because it's also like I like the the AirPods Pro work fantastic like the noise cancellation on a plane is just superbly good. It's so good, but I just find most comfortable when flying to be wearing other ears. I just find that to be more comfortable. This is one of those ergonomics things that as we have more and more products that are designed for us to wear. Ergonomics matter and everybody's ergonomics are a little bit different. Everybody's gonna have different preferences.

This is why I say, I have no problem with the AirPods Max other than the fact that I don't want that category. I just don't like that product category at all. But it works for you. And for me, I would choose AirPods Pro over AirPods Max every time. And we have friends who would choose regular AirPods over either. So I mean, it is what it is.

But yeah, looking forward to seeing you in September, though. So that's good. Listening, you may have thought to yourself, why is the music different for this episode of Upgrade? That is because it is the summer of fun. Summer of fun! I thought we would just take a moment for any new listeners who wonder why we're shouting and what the Summer of Fun is. Well, this

started honestly too many years ago for me to remember now, where basically during this period of time in between kind of like kind of more like late June up until September for the iPhone, things get a bit quiet news wise. And there was just some years we were really struggling what to talk about. And we decided we're just going to start doing some weird stuff and throwing in some fun episodes and some creative projects throughout the year. This became the summer of fun. So the summer of fun starts when the week after WWDC, it runs up to the

draft for the iPhone event. That will be the summer of fun. We're in it now. And we're in it now. And it's meant to be fun. It is. I refer to this period sometimes as the, the, the cruise toward the iPhone event because we have the peak of WWDC and then there's, it's very busy afterward, but it's not busy in a, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, every week. Instead, it's more like everybody is, you know, the betas will come and we'll have conversations about things that are in them,

and we'll have rumors about the iPhone. But it's like, it's a different pace, and you almost have to pace yourself. And Summer of Fun actually is a way for us to kind of pace ourselves, do creative things to talk about during that time when we're all kind of just anticipating the new iPhones and whatever else comes in the fall

and reflecting on the stuff that got dropped at WWDC, but that we've got a few months to reflect on that. So it's a, and we'll throw in some ideas. And I will say in our show document, I collected a bunch of great ideas that had been sent in by people kind of as ask upgrades that while Mike was gone, I just sort of, I created a new section called good ideas in our documents.

So we'll probably pull some of those good ideas and we'll do a tier list and we'll do a weird just draft for fun and stuff like that. That's what we do. We have had multiple people right now to say, will you do a new tier list for the icons? No, they've all been redesigned. That is- Maybe.

That's high up on my list, but we would wanna have to leave that until later in the summer if we're gonna do it, I think. Yeah, I had a great idea for an audio-themed segment where I will play sounds for you. And I'm not actually gonna go further than that in saying what it is, but I had a... And the more that I think about it,

the more I like this idea, so that might happen this summer, we'll see. Part of the summer of fun is it gives us permission to try and get a little creative with things we do in the show, knowing that we've kind of got, the summer gives us a little more space to do that. So I hope people enjoy it.

We certainly enjoy it, but I think it provides a little variety in a period where otherwise it could be kind of samey, right? Cause it's not like we don't have stuff to talk about. It's just that we don't have any, we have the same stuff to talk about for like 10 weeks. And, and so you try to space it out and intersperse it with other stuff. Now I want to talk about something that's summer related, but not fun, but there's no way I could kind of let us talk about the summer of fun because

without mentioning this, because the Summer of Fun encapsulates surf vibes. And to me, surf vibes come from Brian Wilson. And we lost Brian Wilson in the past week. Brian Wilson was the creative driving force behind the Beach Boys. I think one of the greatest songwriters of all time. He passed away this week and it means a lot to me. I've loved the Beach Boys music since I was a kid and I've had the pleasure of seeing Brian Wilson in concert three times. Incredibly emotional experience. His music just hits me to my heart. And Peter wrote in to ask, in the wake of Brian Wilson's passing, Mike, what Beach Boys related tracks are on your mind?

Mine include In My Room and surfs up in my room is just Brian Wilson had this duality where he can create the happiest music but also the saddest music it's a fascinating and he's lived a fascinating he lived a very difficult and interesting life for me though one of the songs that just never leaves is God Only Knows it's just I, one of the songs that just never leaves is God Only Knows. It's just, I think one of the greatest songs ever written. It was the first dance that me and Idina had at our wedding. Jason, you got to see that dance in person.

We did that. Cause that song is so beautiful and I love it so much. But just the majority of the Pet Sounds album has been in my head because it has more of a somber tone than the majority of the Beach Boys catalog and so yeah I just wanted to mark that here because he means so much to me and I feel like it's it is summer the Beach Boys to me are summer and so rest in peace Barry Wilson. Let's move on with some follow-up. We got a bunch today. An anonymous person wrote in Jason to let us know about something you might be excited about.

They said, the enterprise release notes on Mac OS 26 say that privacy and security settings can now be migrated to migration system. Fantastic. Let's hope that that means that if you migrate, you don't have to approve 15,000 different dialog boxes. That is what it would appear, Right. And as we spoke before, is the obvious thing that should happen. Right. Like there's no reason that getting a new computer means you've forgotten. Once I say it's okay, you should never ask me again. Yes. Patrick wrote in and says,

as I've been watching all the interviews in WWDC, I've noticed one particular person has been missing from the media coverage this year. Is it odd that at one of Apple's biggest events of the year, the CEO is absent? Why do you think this is? I don't think it's odd at all because Tim, this is about software and product and it's not about Tim. Tim is a big picture strategy guy. If he's, if he's anything, I mean, he's steering the company. And so, you know, I think he made his appearance, his token appearance, but like in terms of a Q&A, he doesn't do a lot of those. They tend to be out of band.

They're at weird times with interesting outlets, and they are more, often they're more kind of like soft, or they're more business focused. Like I don't think it's, it's a notable at all. This is the, like this, this is, they, they always will card out your VPs for things like this event. I've heard this in a few places, like on a couple of podcasts that I listen to. I think these are people trying to find a story where there isn't one like Tim. No, this, if this was the iPhone, and he was not on Good Morning America,

then you've got a problem, right? Because that's when we see him. Tim is always around in September. In a pre-taped thing where he wanders around, but yeah, it's an OS thing, it's developers. It's just not a big, Tim makes his appearances. He hasn't vanished, but this is, yeah, there are other people to do this kind of coverage right now.

Also, last year, I think it was at WWDC last year, they had him doing some stuff and it just didn't go well. No, it's not necessary. He did that interviewer and KBHD and it just, it didn't land. It's the trying too hard part of last year. Last year tried too hard and now Tim, to talk about Apple Intelligence, is part of the trying too hard part of last year, last year tried too hard and now Tim to talk about Apple intelligence is part of the trying too hard. It's part of the, they were desperate to be seen as strategic about AI and this year was a retrenchment and Tim not being front and center makes perfect sense for that, honestly. Yeah. Uh, Joelynn writes in and says in the WWDC draft pick episode, Jason asked if math notes was called maths notes in the UK.

I said, no, I was wrong. It is called maths notes in the British English version of all of Apple's platforms. Uh, I missed this and I looked at it's like, oh my God, yes it is. It just completely, I just don't see it, right? Like, that is such an ugly thing to say, math notes. So, but yes, it is, it is correctly, what's the word that you use localized? Is correctly localized.

It's localized, yes, because it's short for mathematics note-. Or something. Yep, that's what it is. From now on, I defy you to not look at the notes app and think, ah, notematics, my old friend. I saved a notomatic today. And Apple is on the defensive about Apple intelligence. And seemingly, I think quite specifically about John Gruber's article, Joanna Stone got the interview this year.

Joanna gets interviews frequently, but... She does. Joanna got the sit down with Federighi and Jaws, which I think was positioned as a, this is the canonical place in which we will give our responses. The one thing that I wanted to pick out on this was, Jaws says, there's this narrative out there that this was demo where only I like the out there. There's a narrative out there. What could it be?

Nobody knows. Essentially, in case you missed it, Apple is saying that they had two architectures last year for how the more personal Siri and the personal context stuff would work. They said it was working on one of them at the time of the demo. They then subsequently realized that this path was not the right one and it was switched to the other one and it's going to take time Understandably John Gruber wrote a piece about this and As he points out the features in question that were never actually demoed at all like they you know Jaws and Craig talk about like they're being oh

The things that we were showing at the time that we were demoing at the time. It's like they weren't ever demoed. Like the features were spoken about as if they were happening on the presenter's phone, but we never saw them happen. Like it kept cutting away, showing animations and stuff like that. And I want to read a quote from John's piece. But at this point, based on Federighi and Josriak's public statements

and some other things I've heard from little birdies this week, I'm willing to stipulate that there was, let's call it, working code for the personalized Siri feature a year ago. At least one reason why the feature as presented in last year's keynote was edited like it was, is that the latency was so bad that whatever state it was in, it couldn't be shown in a single take. So I think we can kind of put it to bed now where as of a lot of these things are kind of two truths, right? Like Apple is true in saying it was working, but John is kind of right in that it was not showable because they never showed it to anyone, which is still going back to the original point he made in the first place. Exactly. This is a distinction kind of without a difference that allows Apple to kind of like

push back on something by redefining what the statement was, because what Gruber says is, nobody he knew at Apple had ever seen this feature running before they announced it. I'll just flag that and say, that's unusual. Yeah. Right. That's unusual. So nobody saw it. And what Apple is saying is, well, no, we had it running. And it's like, okay, did you have it running? What state was it in? Was it running before the demo? Or was it running later? I mean, that's one of the scenarios here is that they, they, they got it running. I have a hard time believing they would show it without believing that they could ship it.

And that's something that Federighi said in the interview that I think absolutely rings true, right? Obviously just passes a logical test that he's like, we wouldn't have put it in the video if we didn't think we could ship it. And so we did have it. What happened is they had something that was like running in a small group on somebody's computer somewhere, and they're like, yeah, we can get this over the top. But it was like not as far along as generally a feature that gets put in the keynote would be.

And even the idea that maybe the things in the video were generated by actual code, like there are so many edits, it's this idea that even if they were generated by actual code, they were generated in. What they don't wanna say is, we weren't lying, we just stretched it way more than we usually do because we were desperate. So they leave that part out. So like, are they telling the truth here? I think they probably are, but what they've done is redefine the argument to something

that they can explain away by saying it's a narrative that this was demo-ware only, where the truth is it wasn't demo where only a small group saw it but it was totally broken. And then we could never get it working which they don't wanna say. So they just kind of leave it at this. Joanna Stern was with, joined Neelay Patel

as the guests for the talk show this year. Yep, I got shouted out from the stage. You did. It was hilarious. Hilarious. Plus they mentioned Dongle Town, Neelay mentioned my name and mentioned Dongle Town. I love it.

There is a problem with Dongle Town. I think there was a simultaneous creation problem between us and the Virg. Oh yeah. We didn't create it, but we were a popularizer of it. And he was doing the Chinatown thing, right? Forget it.

It's Dongle Town, he said, which the Chinatown. I don't care. Cause I am a citizen of Dongle Town. So I was happy to, happy to see it. I just wanted to say, like, in case people haven't heard the episode, cause maybe it's like, Oh, you know, I listened for the interview. This was the best episode of the talk show from WWE seen years in my opinion. It's actually, I'm like, Oh, this is what I would prefer to hear. Like, yes, I just want to hear them talk about it.

I think that from my tastes, I prefer the executives in an environment like Joanne, I've got, where it's like, let's just make this the tightest it can be because you're not going to give us a lot of the information that we want anyway. So we may as well make this 10 minutes rather than 90 minutes. I don't know.

We got some feedback, by the way, where somebody said, oh, you say that the, you say that the Gruber does his interviews the way he does because he needs to try and ask questions that they're gonna answer and all of that. But Joanna just went for it. I'm like, okay, well, I think that's a good point, except what I'll say is John Gruber rented out a theater, filled it with people,

and is trying to put on a show. Whereas Joanna is doing an interview, by the way, on a moment's notice, cause she got told the day before and her video people were going to the airport and she's like, no, no, we must stay. They've given this thing. So it was really out of the drop of a hat

and she had very little time to prepare. But like it's a TV interview essentially. I know it's Wall Street Journal, but I mean, she used to work at what, ABC? Like it is a TV interview where it's gonna be edited. In fact, they dropped the Siri part first because they didn't have time to edit the whole thing. So they just put that out immediately.

And in that scenario, like the whole point is to do the give and take and ask those questions directly in a way that I would say you are less likely to do when you've sold out a theater and you're trying to put on a show. It's a different, it's a totally different experience. And I think that you would feel, if you're in Joanna's shoes,

you would absolutely feel more free asking those questions in that way. So yeah, plus she's the Wall Street Journal. Honestly, the Wall Street Journal, as much as we love John Gruber, the Wall Street Journal has a weight that Daring Fireball can't. Because the Wall Street Journal is conformist. Joanna can more easily ask that. I feel like maybe some people wouldn't understand the thinking behind that.

But she has the shielding of, and like the confidence of this entire massive organization behind her rather than being just one person. Plus it's not live. It's not live. There's no audience. And, and I mean the audience factor too, like I think one of the reasons they skipped the talk show was to punish Gruber. I think one of the reasons they skipped the talk show is the last thing they wanted was an audience of developers to be free to boo the statements

of Apple executives during a bad year. So yeah, but it's a very different scenario. I don't know how these things go, but my expectation is when Joanna sat down, she knew she could ask that question and they were going to give her an answer. And that is not a thing that would have happened on the talk show because it's more of a conversation. It's a podcast. Like it's a longer drawn out thing. They have a very specific thing they're going to say and that's all they're going to say. And they can say, we're not going to talk about that anymore. And that's fine because it can then be edited out of the video because it's fine. Right. And that's the venue they chose, which is a kind of control. I mean, they didn't control Joanna,

but they controlled the venue. They did that in that little perch that they have above the Steve Jobs Theater that's got the view of the ring and all of that. Like they had this whole setup. They also controlled it in the sense that they didn't tell her that she could do it until the day before there was no suggestion.

That is an aspect of control is keeping people kind of out of out of balance But they did you know, it was it was great in the sense that we don't usually hear executives talk in detail about any of this It's actually great for a lot of the same ways The talk show is great is if you can get or any Apple interview on a podcast is great If you can get something out of it that allows you to glean something about the way they're thinking and Joanna did that and I'm very glad that she did. She's so good at her job. That's the thing I actually took away from the talk show is, boy, Joanna and Neelay are both, they're both so good.

Joanna brings a sense of professionalism that is so strong. Like she has such a weight behind her words. She's very, she's, she's a very impressive like media personality. Yeah. And she has fun and she's got a great personality and she tells stories from her life and that are, that are often hilarious. I, I sometimes I wonder what her wife thinks of getting brought up. I think she doesn't know. I guess it's just part of the, or she doesn't know. But like, yeah, she's just, yeah, Joanne is great. And Eli is also really just super smart. And we can make fun of his, you know,

sometimes he like had the headphone jack and stuff like that, but like, he is really sharp. I got to talk to him the night before at a dinner for a little bit. And we were talking about the Apple and China book, which is on our list of things to talk about this summer, I think. Yeah, I want to read that book. Yeah, you should read it. And we should do a little book club because I just finished it. And it's a really good book, actually. I highly recommend it to everybody. It's, it's, it's, it's the guy's a good writer.

And it's, and it's a, there are, I've read a lot of bad Apple books and this is not one of them. But anyway, I got a chance to chat with Neelay about that. Yeah, I mean, he views, he views things from a certain perspective. And I think that one of the challenges of a lot of people working in general tech today is that they end up focusing a little too much on like AI related issues and not other things because AI is such a big topic right now. I think even Neelay is a little bit guilty of that, although he brings a skepticism to it that I really appreciate. So anyway, that was part of the joy of the talk show for me. And I was there in the first row, not watching the F1 movie because I was supporting independent tech media and my friend John. good guests and really smart people and having a bunch of smart people turn over what Apple was trying to do this past week. I thought that was really smart.

Good show. Just to wrap this whole thing up, Apple keeps saying that these Apple intelligence features that we didn't get will be coming quote in the coming year, but apparently the coming year does not mean 2025. It means 2026, like coming as in the year that is yet to come, which is a super weird way to say that when if pressed, apparently they will tell you they mean 2026. They mean next year.

So they should just say 2026 rather than the coming year. I look, I know why they're doing it, but I wish they would stop doing it. Here's, here's the way that I viewed that, which is what Craig Federighi said was essentially the same thing they said in their, in their announcement about delaying the features right down to the fact that it didn't meet their high quality bar. Um, which is a weird, anyway, I have issues with the whole statement and in the coming year, it's a very particular way of, of phrasing all of it that felt a little, you know, obfuscating. But here's the thing, Apple, Jaws, you can change those words, you could approve some new things to say

at WWDC about it, to provide a little more color, if you will, to the idea of like what you're planning. You don't, color, if you will, to the idea of like what you're planning. You don't, there's no law on the books that the statement that you released surreptitiously, you know, on a Friday in the spring needs to be the words you cling to for the next year, right? You could be more clear and it would be okay. I don't know why they didn't do that and why they're acting like, uh, we're just going to keep parroting our statement. Like there was no, there's no reason. It's not like they're like, well, you know, we didn't get it cleared with the bosses. Like the bosses are right there. Like be, be, be clearer, like be clear about this.

If you have to clarify it with everybody, you didn't clarify it. It suggests to me there is still a little bit of nervousness, like this feeling of being behind that they want to like say, hey, no, it's come in. Like, oh, it's come in. Like, I don't know, it's weird. Anyway, Mark Gurman reports that internally Apple is targeting iOS 26.4 for these features, which we would expect to be in the spring. Right.

Now, so something, just a tangent on this before we move on. And I know, I'm pretty sure we mentioned it last week. I got to be honest, Mike, what we talked about last week is just a blur to me. It was, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was Keynote and then that, and then I had briefings and then I had another podcast. We did a Six Colors podcast, which is on YouTube and posted on Six Colors for anybody who wants to see it. Usually that's a members only thing, but I posted the video. Anybody can watch it if you want to see me and Dan sit in chairs and talk. We, we did. We nailed it to the second on the little countdown timer. briefings and like it was, it was banana. So I don't, I don't remember everything about what we said in there.

Uh, but I will say again, I was surprised that even though they didn't really talk about it, it was very clear that everything Apple showed is in existence, is in the betas and will ship this fall. Yeah. And, and they didn't, I don't think they made a big deal about it, but that is as close as an apology as you're ever going to get. Yeah. Which is everybody beat them up for the fact that they showed a bunch of stuff

they couldn't ship or couldn't ship until very late in the game. And they've been doing that for a few years where they've showed stuff that they couldn't ship, but this year it was the worst and they were running ads about features that weren't ready and that turns out didn't even ship and haven't shipped. And so this year's rollout was about stuff that's real, stuff that's in betas and stuff that it's going to ship in the fall. That says a lot, I think about, about what happened. There was some Montgomery reporting on this a while ago

about the idea of like they were going to try and basically make sure now that they would just show what they had and so they cut it off at a certain point. I think you can trace what happened with these WWC features back multiple years to when it started to be like things started to slip, you slip, there'd be features that would slip, and then it kind of became, what we're showing will be available within the release cycle, and then once you kind of start expanding out further and further from that, you get to the point of like, hey, we hope we're gonna ship this, and then they don't.

And so now, they've tightened it back up again. And I think that's okay. And you know what? I think people will be forgiving if something doesn't end up shipping in the fall, but ships like in the late fall or early winter, right? Like in a November or December update where they're like, okay, you know,

quality bar, et cetera, et cetera. But the idea that you are by default announcing features that you won't even be able to ship until spring, I think they have realized we can't do that because if it slips further, we are dead. And, and so we just need to not promise. And the fact is Apple has a lot of big platforms. If they've got some fun features that they want to roll out next spring or next winter, they can announce them. It's fine.

Like they don't, they can hold them until next June, or they can just roll those features in. They're working on them in the background and then roll them in. As they do OS releases. I've definitely sat on calls where they've had a beta release coming and they've wanted to talk about the features that are going to be in the beta release. Like, it can be done. So I think that's where they're that's where they're going. Now is just like if they've got some features that they think that they can get in in this cycle, but not yet, they're not going to talk about it. And I'm okay with that. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace, the all in one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings of a professional website, grow your brand and get paid all in one place.

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Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all of Relay. So we'll talk about the betas in a little bit, but kind of like a week out from WWDC, I wanted to get a vibe check from you now. Like, you know, we were right after the keynote, you know, you're in the kind of like, your head's swimming with everything you've seen and it was a big WWDC.

So how are you feeling now about what was announced last week? Again, forgive me because I said some of this, I'm sure last week, right? But it was just in the aftermath, right? It's so hard. I'm impressed that I walked away from a WWDC keynote excited about the Mac and the iPad

because then it feels like that never happens. That feels like a real kind of meat and potatoes. I wrote a piece on this about, called Apple Intelligence Shifts Gears. But one of my feelings about it is, it's not a piece so much about Apple Intelligence, as it is about Apple's priorities this year, where I felt like Apple, it's not a piece so much about Apple intelligence, as it is about Apple's priorities this year, where I felt like

Apple, it's like Apple said, Oh, let's go back to what we're good at. Last year, it's like they lost their minds. And they're like, we gotta, we gotta impress the market and, and the valley and show that we're on this AI thing. And it said a lot, I think, about their insecurity about it, because they they missed LLMs and have been struggling to catch up and this year it felt much more like oh yeah what is Apple best at we make products that people like and they use them and they integrate them in their lives and they use them to do stuff and so some of the ML announcements AI announcements are a little bit more like classic like we're applying this technology to do a thing they're like we're gonna let developers use this.

We're gonna let users use it in shortcuts. We did all of these Mac productivity boosters inside Spotlight, including, you know, Clipboard Manager, which they've never ever ever had in the whole 41 year history of the Mac baked in. And then on the iPad, rolling out their entirely redone windowing model. To get excited about Mac OS and iPad OS at a WWDC keynote to me is, it just is really

interesting because it shows that Apple is tending to its platforms instead of freaking out. The AI story is there and I think, I don't want to minimize that they have challenges there, but like the steps they took are encouraging the fact that there's that they put chat GPT in the image playground, right? Which is just like, yes, because your model isn't very good. The fact that they are letting third party developers use the on device model and shortcuts to use the on device model and private cloud compute and chat GPT. There are so many examples like that where they are, they feel a little less defensive and a little more understanding of the fact that tending the platform doesn't mean that it all has to be invented by Apple. And my top example is actually the most esoteric for a general audience, but just to throw it out probably again, because I probably mentioned it last time, I think the Xcode announcement is enormous because

they didn't shift Swift, Swift Assist last year, we saw it. And then John Voorhees and I ended up in the same room, this happened Tuesday. So I know I didn't talk about this. We ended up in the same room with the same two guys who gave us the Swift Assist demo that last, you know, in the spring earlier this year, people were like, did anybody see that after that we were talking about the other stuff that hadn't shipped that nobody had seen? We got a demo in that room of Swift Assist, didn't ship. This year in that room, we got a demo of Xcode. And what they didn't do is say, well, we've got Swift Assist now running with our LLM. What they said is, we've got Swift Assist running now with our LLM. What they said is, we've got Swift Assist running now with ChatGPT by default. And if you go to the settings, you can literally put in any LLM you want,

local, remote, put in the URL and the API key or do the setting to use a local binary. And it just works and it works with Xcode passing all the information about the project. And on top of that, they specifically worked with Chad GPT with OpenAI to have it used by default, a model that is smart about Xcode and about Swift. So like, I think that is a great example of Apple this year being a little more relaxed, a little more understanding of its limitations,

a little more open to the idea that people are picking up all sorts of AI tools so fast that Apple baking something in is just a bad idea. And that is the reality of it. So like getting a real dose of, of what's really happening on the ground, you know, and, and seeing that Apple gets that. I think that's a really good sign. So, so, you know, I, I feel like they're in a much better place.

It just puts last year into stark relief about how desperate they were to just, you know, telegraph that they got it. And this year it feels much more like an apple that I understand. It makes me wish that the hype cycle was just knocked on by three months, so they wouldn't have been forced to do what they did at WWDC last year. And we got the full year to now. And like, this was their set of features that then I'll be so much happier. I understand why they did what they did last year. I think in the details in hindsight, all of us, including them, would say they didn't do it right.

They made a bunch of mistakes. Like the AI hype was so great and the pressure on Apple is so enormous that I understand that they needed to say, look, yes, yes, we get it. And clearly, if Apple was, I mean, one Apple was behaving complacently before. I get that.

And clearly there's an issue with the fact of what I'm gonna say, but I'll say it anyway, which is classic Apple maneuvering, they wouldn't have talked about AI almost at all last year because it wasn't ready. And they were still trying to figure it out, but they felt they had to talk about it anyway. And so we got Apple Intelligence branding

and they tried to market their way through it in a way with all those ads. And, you know, we all saw how it went for them. So but I understand why they did it. I mean, they felt under enormous pressure. But then I look at this year and I think, oh, not only does it seem like more a more familiar Apple. But if you look at some very particular places, I think it shows that they've spent the last year plus learning a lot more about where AI is being used, thinking a lot more about how they want to use it in their products, and getting over, I think, expediently because of all the famous kind of issues that are going on behind the scenes inside of Apple. But getting over there, we need to invent everything thing when like it's just not maybe someday their model will be cutting edge, especially the on device model. I think I think that's where they should put their greatest effort because I think that they have the biggest wins there

But like I don't know it just to me it felt familiar Yeah, yeah, it was this is this WWDC my my vibes are basically the same as they were last week, which is It's either a good sign or a bad sign like this year It's a good sign like last year sign. Like this year it's a good sign. Like last year, my vibes were similar and it was a bad sign because I was upset. But this year, like I was super happy with what was announced and then the things that I've tried, I'm like, I agree. Like, which is not always the case where like you, they

show something like stage manager, right? When they showed stage manager, like they did it and then you used it and it's like, Oh no, they didn't do it. Right. And it, and it wasn't very good. Like it was just two, three years ago. Um, but I feel like, I feel great about this and there's things that I feel even better about the before. Uh, I watched the two and these are, I thoroughly recommend that people watch the developer video meat liquid glass. Yeah. Uh, even if you're not a developer, it's not a developer session. It's the design session. So they're just talking like about design, which you might not like,

right? Some people don't like hearing people talk about design, but I do. Um, and I found this to be fascinating and I thought really informative. And I think like there's been, you know, I think the prevailing thing that people are talking about is like Apple aren't even thinking about accessibility with this when they are. Like if you watch the videos, they spend a significant portion of the time talking about the ways in which they are thinking about accessibility. You may disagree on whether you think it's accessible. I mean, I've read from two strong disability, like accessibility advocates who think that Apple are doing a decent job with liquor glass, but you know, everybody will have their own take on this.

But I think that this video does a very good job of showing their thinking and it also shows like best lots of lots more best case scenario kind of design because what is in the current versions of the operating systems is absolutely not the best case version of this design like it's there's things that they've got to fix and I think when you watch that video if you watch that video you I think you'll get a better sense of what I'm talking about. Of what they're actually trying to do, because a developer beta is not a final. And I've heard some people are like, no, we can complain about what's in beta one, because the criticism, you know, it's like, okay, but it,

they're not done. I mean, it's very clear from the videos that a lot of this is not entirely implemented yet, because it's developer beta one. But I agree, Shelley Brisbane was pointing out that when iOS 7 came out, there weren't a lot of accessibility features that we have now, which I think is really interesting. I think this design was absolutely, you can see it in the videos, made with accessibility settings in mind. Now, we can talk about whether they belong in

accessibility or display options or whatever, but like regardless what they're saying is they're building a primary design, but they're building all of the ways that you can adjust it based on your own preference. And that preference might be, I can't see it, and that preference might be, I don't like it. But that's okay. Giving people options to change how the design behaves, to please them. I mean, I know people who have all sorts of accessibility interface features turned on because they don't like how it looks and they like it better the way that with those things turned on.

And it's like, that's fine too. I think that the big question for me is, if you, if everybody has to reach for the accessibility settings to make this design work, they failed. Yeah. But, but, Apple has such a huge user base that they can't please everybody. So what they want to do is please a large number of people who will like the interface and find it usable, and also be there for the people who think it's too much and let them turn on those features. And you want to hit a sweet spot. And there is a real gradient, there's a real spectrum

between 100% of iPhone users turn on accessibility features and 5% of iPhone users turn on accessibility features, and 5% of iPhone users turn on accessibility features in order to mitigate the design. And if 100% turn on the usability features, that design was a failure, right? Because the default should work for most people. If, and that would be that they pushed it too far and everybody hates it, and what are you even doing? And if it's 5%, let's say, maybe that number is 10, or maybe it's, you

know, whatever that number is, a small number, you'd say, Well, you know what, people are people, and everybody's got a different opinion. And that's okay. That's totally okay. In between those two numbers. That's the question is like, I think that's how you measure how successful the interface is. Because if the interface is so bad that a very large number of people have to turn it off or you know turn it into something different then you blew it. But some people but but designing it so that people can choose is good. Like you just want to hit the default to have it be a crowd pleaser and not like a super aggressive everybody hates it kind of thing. And so I think that's part of their challenge in doing this, but they're certainly thinking about it because those videos were all made before anybody saw this. And it shows that they were thinking about it. Also that video, the videos that are the,

kind of backstage videos, WWDC, the sessions as it were, that video is much more, I mean, it's very scripted, but it's much more, hey, we're designers who built this and this is how we think it should be used. Whereas the stuff that's in the keynote that I think turned a lot of people off, that's marketing storytelling for the design videos. And I don't think there is helpful.

I made this parallel on, I think, Six Colors podcast, and I'll make it here, which is, I made this, uh, parallel on, I think six colors podcast, and I'll make it here, which is I read uni watch, which is a blog about like sports uniform stuff. And every time a new uniform design comes out, there's this just impenetrable storytelling that goes with it where it's like, we chose the white of the San Francisco fog, the orange of the Golden Gate bridge and the gold representing the gold miners in the gold rush of 1949 or of 1849 and you're like Okay, what I really want to see is the designer saying all right here We need to make a new uniform for the Giants and here were our options and here's how we did it

Like I find the storytelling stuff just sickening It's just PR and it's dumb and I hate it. And and the keynote description of liquid glass reminded me of that. And that's bad, right? That's in a bad way where it's and so somebody was like, but the but the storytelling or but the PR they said this thing. And I'm like, you just gotta forget it. You got to let it go in one ear and out the other because that is nonsense. It's just PR about liquid glass. Watch that liquid glass session, you'll get a better sense of what they're actually trying to do. I mean, again, judge it how you like, but as a veteran media person, I'll just say the way they rolled that design out in the keynote, that's just marketing. Just don't even listen to it because there's no point. If you want to understand how this design works and what they intended the storytelling is not going to the people moving around their pieces of liquid glass or of glass on top of like forget it just forget about it but that session is a much more realistic thing about what they're trying to communicate to developers about how they design

their apps in this new system it makes a lot more sense not to say that it can't be criticized it absolutely can but you get a lot more sense. Not to say that it can't be criticized, it absolutely can, but you get a much better sense of what they're trying to do than you do from the kind of highfalutin marketing speak happening in the keynote. Yeah, that was much more high level and it's very high level. And a lot of people do struggle

with hearing that kind of stuff. I like it. I just like hearing people talk about the decisions that they made, even if those decisions are like, they feel detached from a sense of reality, right? Like in that, what you're saying is like, we chose gold to represent. It's like why, like there were decisions that had to be made. Um, people made those decisions and then maybe they gave them a reason why they're making that decision and then maybe it came after. But I like that kind of stuff. Like in the same way that I like hearing actors talk about acting. I just always find that kind of stuff interesting. I like to hear people's craft, but it is inherently stuck up, maybe is the phrase I'm looking

for. Right? Like I can't think of a better phrase, but it is, you're very much like highfalutin, as you would say, where like you're talking about, these are the reasons I make my decisions. It's like, it can be a bit heavy for people. I loved when they had all the physical, because I loved the physical representations of things that they had in the nest. I thought it was adorable, I loved it.

I get what they're going for there, but again, it's showbiz, right? That's what they're doing there. It's marketing. You gotta, you can like it. I'm just saying don't think that that is their serious explanation of the design. Cause that's not what it is.

It's storytelling. It's in fact, I would argue that's the stuff you craft after you've done it in order to explain it to people, which is not the same as saying, here's why we did it and how to use it. It's a different purpose, which is why I really liked that session video, because it was much clearer about what they're trying to achieve.

And it was therefore to the people that need it. That was a session for developers, the people making the apps. If you wanna understand how it's supposed to look in your apps, watch the session where they show you, right? Rather than just the keynote, which love it or like it or hate it or love it or not, like whatever, the keynote is as much marketing as it is telling developers about the stuff that's coming. It is absolutely marketing. That's why they do the State of the Union is that it's like now that everybody else is gone

I can talk to developers now The keynote is the part of the developer conference where they're talking to the people that are going to use the software on their phones Right. I feel like we should know this by now That is where they are telling customers This is what we have made right where then the rest of the content is for the people making the software Like that's how WBC goes. Anyway, I wanted to touch on some of the little bits and bobs that we've been digging up over the intervening time since the last episode.

Now it's just a few things that I found interesting. We're going to talk about the recording podcast on iPad thing in a little bit, but the audio input controls are on the iPhone now as well. So you could always like plug a microphone into your iPhone and record on it, but you were never sure which microphone was being picked up by the app that you were using. But the audio input selector will be on the iPhone. Yes, iPhone and iPad get that where you basically there's a default, but you can also set it per app.

Yeah. And it happens in the system. The apps don't have to write an input control, which I don't think they even could. In my mind, this makes it potentially better than on the Mac because there's a system level per app audio control that's you know app developers on the Mac have to build their own audio picker in and On the iPad it just is an iPhone. It's just being done for you. And that means yeah the the a Lot of talk about iPad but like iPhone as a little portable audio thingy

That's very capable is it's a real thing Do Do you know, can the iPhone do the recording that the iPad can do? Yes. It can, so you do all of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could do, I did, Dan and I did a six hours podcast where I phoned him, he was like in Seattle at a convention and I just used the phone audio and I realized,

oh yeah, situations like that, you can say, bring a USB mic and plug it into your iPhone and start recording, do a podcast and then stop recording and send the file. And it's a complete local recording just off of an iPhone, pretty cool. Apple podcasts got a few new features. One of them is an amplify voices option in the podcast app.

So that's like the voice boost in Overcast, I assume, which I think is great. Trying to level out the audio in podcasts, which can sometimes be not great. Launchpad, so this is the thing on Mac OS where you could get a grid of big icons, like a springboard, like your home screen. Yeah, like the iPhone home screen.

Is now gone. It's actually applications, which is kind of like the app library, which is in Spotlight. Yeah. That's how it's been replaced. So basically, there is a list of all of your apps in Spotlight. So if you do, I think it's Command-Shift and then Command-1, you get Applications view, which is all your apps on your system.

But the launchpad thing that they made that was meant to be sort of easier and for people who liked an iPhone style app launching kind of thing, I can't imagine that very many people use this feature. I feel like that was part of the back to the Mac initiative, right? Where it's like we're bringing a bunch of features

back to the Mac that we learned from iOS. From the iPhone. So yeah, but I'm happy they've actually thought that through again, because I figure that's probably one of the least used features of macOS. But it was something that was important because the applications or just being in a folder is weird. Like when you think about it, if you think about it, that is really strange. So having them have a more elevated place in the operating system makes sense.

It makes so much sense to put them here. Mac OS 26 Tahoe is the last version of Mac OS that will run on Intel machines. There will be three more years of security updates though for Tahoe and for the other devices that have been knocked off they're gonna still be on a three-year security update. Do you have any kind of reflection on Intel going away? Do you have any feelings about it?

I think it's great that they have supported it for as long as they have and it feels like a longer goodbye than they did previously. I think somebody did the math, and it is actually a little bit longer of a goodbye. It's fine. I mean, it needs to happen. This is the way of things. And it's been a while now since they

started shipping Apple Silicon. And again, it's not like those Intel systems are going to be sent a kill order and stop working. They're just not going to get updates. They will still get security updates for three years after that. That takes it through the lifetime of those devices. So I think it's fine. I think Apple didn't need to be this generous with their compatibility here.

I also am actually as a Apple Silicon Mac user, looking forward to what will be accomplished by them not having to support Intel anymore. And I'm pleased that they're telegraphing it. They're being very clear. Oh, sure. Communication a year in advance and four years in advance of the security updates ending,

it's very responsible. It's the right thing to do. I'm glad they did it. iOS 26 offers a new Adaptive power mode that will detect how you use your phone and make more performance updates throughout the day to extend your battery life This is part of a big overhaul of the battery screen. It looks different You've got information about your current charge level when you lost charged and it has daily usage information So you can be like hey, you're using your,

it seems like you're burning more battery than usual. This all feels like set up for, there's a phone with a smaller battery coming. Yeah, that's the speculation. That's not unreasonable. People wrote in to say that this is my draft pick and it may be, but the way they pitch it and the way we envisioned it,

it's not, like it's not clear enough. I was doing, I thought they were gonna kind of shout, oh, we're using AI and they didn't do any of that, even though that is probably what's happening here. It's absolutely some form of machine learning, but this is like this weird thing where there's still stuff that Apple could easily claim as Apple intelligence, but isn't doing that.

Exactly. We'll step back from that. But it's good in general, because learning how you use your phone and adjusting how the battery settings are set, it sounds good to me. And yeah, if there is a thin phone with a small battery, this becomes a necessary feature for that, obviously. The swipe to go back gesture that you have. So you can kind of like swipe from the left edge of your iPhone and it will take you back to the previous page that you were on. This, you know, like in any app or whatever. This is now gonna work from anywhere on screen,

not just the edge. I think this is fantastic. I've not used this yet, I'll say, but in my experience of trying out, of having an Android phone over the last few months, I like that you can do the swipe gesture from both sides of the phone and it will take you back. I like this more because it's more logical that you would just swipe in one direction to go back and one direction to go forward. It can be a bit weird on Android sometimes, but I like that you can do this. This is great for one-handed use of any phone of any size. So basically

if there's not swipeable, if there's not a swipeable thing on the screen, you know, like you're not like swiping through a carousel, it's not going to take you back. But if you're swiping on a piece of UI that is like static, it will take you back. I think this is fantastic. Yeah. No, I'm doing it right now. And it's nice because even on an interface element that you can tap if you swipe on it, it just goes back. It just takes you back. Love it. I saw an example of a developer using the on-device intelligence models that I wanted to share. Charlie Chapman, who makes Dark Noise, which was featured in the keynote, which was amazing. Which means his official upgrade name is Charlie Dark Noise.

Charlie Dark Noise. Thank you, sorry. Charlie Dark Noise says, I was able to hack in a magic mix feature into Dark Noise in about an hour that creates a mix from a prompt that you can edit and then save really quickly. And this is fantastic. So one of the things that Dark Noise does,

it's like it's a background sound white noise app. There's like a bunch of them, a bunch, bunch of sounds. You can actually combine them. So you could take rain noise and a plane and you could put them together. But with this, uh, like Charlie, one of the things he types in is like rain forest cafe is the prime force cafe. Yeah. And it's got like rain and like people noise frogs, frogs and cricket. And like like I just think that's in Yeah, this looks incredible. This looks incredible one of the one of the sessions that I watched because I'm still going through them

I still have a bunch of bookmarked is about how you use these models in apps and one of the things that it appears you can do and that that Charlie Dark Noise did is You can say sort of like here are the things that appears you can do and that that Charlie Dark Noise did is you can say sort of like, here are the things that I've got. So obviously, his feature is like, here are all of the sounds that I can do. And then and then basically, you can tell the model. So what you're doing is picking from these and and building because it's like, how does it know that there are frogs in the app?

And it's like, well, because dark noise has said, here, you know, here's all the stuff, all the sounds that I can make now using that. And this prompt craft, uh, uh, craft a bunch of sounds and then pass them back to me in a way that I can then take them and make a playlist. It's, it's, it's really cool. And you see the kind of like the, of like the smart of it is that like he didn't make a specific description. Like it's not that he said give me rain and animals and he put in an abstract concept, the rainforest cafe and it produced something. Now did it just make a rainforest sound? You know, I don't know, right?

But like it took a prompt, it took his answers and it gave a response. It's like, that feels like really good technology that developers can have access to. And it just runs on the devices. Like, I'm so excited to see more examples of this. Like, this is so early and people have got to try and get their heads around it. But like, seeing again, like how quickly Charlie Dark Noise was able to get this in place is also like, you know, like a quick version of it. It's very exciting. I think it's very exciting. Yeah, I agree. Also, there was some new parental control features added to iOS, which Apple did like a whole separate press release on. So there's a few things I want to touch on here. So one, there is now a new API. One of the things they're doing

is tidying up ages for children inside of a family group. So you can go in and like actually state the ages and that UI is better. Apparently it was awkward before and you can go in and set the age of your children and it will then change their experience a little bit. One of the reasons they're doing this is because they've introduced something called the declared range API that a developer could integrate with. And what that will mean is that the system will say, this person is kind of about this age. They don't get the exact age. I don't get the birth date, but they get the like, here's the rough age. They don't get the exact age. I don't get the birthday, but they get the like, here's

the rough age. Now what Apple doesn't say, and I'm not sure about is if this is maybe some of their response to some of the legislation that people are trying to put in place around social media. Like I think this could kind of be one of their answers of like, Hey, well, here's an API. Cause I think, I think app makers want the app stores to do it and app stores want the app makers to do it. Right app stores want the app makers to do it, right? If I'm remembering that correctly from like a... Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that's how it's going.

So this is, I guess this is for many reasons, but they can be like, hey, look, we have an API now, we did all this work, but anyway. And I think Apple wants parents to do it. Yeah. And then doesn't want that information to be disclosed to app makers or their services so that they can protect privacy. And there are now laws coming out

that this is them trying to say, look, this is what we built. We would really like to use this for everything. Yeah, I mean, without knowing it, I think this is a pretty decent way of handling this. So then you don't have to have someone going in and setting about knowing. I think this is a pretty decent way of handling this. Like, so then, you know, you don't have to have someone going in and setting an age and like 12 different applications. Anyway, the app store is getting more variance in age ratings. So apps can be available for

13 plus 16 plus 18 plus. This was not a thing that happened exist. It was before a quote from the press release community safety'm sorry, communication safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime, video calls, and to blur out nudity in shared albums and photos. They had some features like this in iMessage and stuff before. This is now gonna expand into more places.

And they've previously, the experience for people under the age of 13 on the iPhone came with a set of restrictions about web content and stuff like that. There is now a new set of restrictions for 13 to 17, specifically, which is like, from what I can understand is a different set of web content restrictions by default, which, you know, you can go in and change, but they set defaults. But they also have a new feature where children would need to request

that their parents approve new contacts to be added. And so you could use them in messages and stuff like that. So if you wanna send a message to someone that they've not sent a message to before, it will ping the parent and be like, will you approve this? And then the child can say, this is what this is for.

And they're all, Apple's also launching permission kit for developers to be able to integrate and do the same. That like, if you wanted to follow someone on Instagram, for example, it could pop up to the parent and tell them if they wanted to integrate that. So I just thought this was interesting. Obviously I now pay more attention to parental control than I've ever done before. Where like before it was an abstract concept, but for now is part

of my future I guess is thinking about parental controls for devices. So yeah, I just thought this is an interesting suite of stuff that they were doing. And I do believe it is important for Apple to provide tools to make it easier for parents and children to have better experiences with their devices and to kind of make it easier for those decisions to be made and less like granular and you know, less like, you know, you can maybe feel more comfortable with a device is with a child and it's going to be set up the way they want. I think this is good stuff and it is responsible from Apple to provide these features. So pretty cool This episode is brought to you by

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and use the promo code upgrade20 at checkout. That is J-O-I-N-D-E-L-E-T-E-M-E.com slash upgrade 20 and use the promo code upgrade 20 at checkout. That is J O I N D E L E T E M E dot com slash upgrade 20 and the code upgrade 20 at checkout. That is the only way to get that 20% off. One last time, join delete me.com slash upgrade 20 and the code upgrade 20. Our thanks to delete me for the support of this show and all of relay. What betas are you running? Oh wait, hang on a second. Welcome to the details. I was going to say, are we finally at the details? Finally back at the details again.

It's going to be summer details, isn't it? I am on, let's see, I have my old Mac studio studio is running Mac OS, my review unit iPhone 16e is running iOS, my Vision Pro is running Vision OS, and my primary M4 iPad Pro that I use every day. I charged up the older iPad as a fallback, but I put it on there. So that was the big gamble, right? It's like, am I just committing to this thing being broken all summer and I'm gonna either have to use a different iPad or just use it broken.

But it's not on, so it's not on my primary iPhone. It's not on my primary Mac. Vision Pro exists to be on the cutting edge, so it's there. And so the thing I've spent the most time with is iPad OS actually Yeah, same. I've only put The betas in two places one is vision Pro for the same reason The vision Pro is such a cutting-edge device. You may as well just put the betas on it and just see what's going on

It's also not a critical device for me that if things don't work where I expect that's fine Point and I put it on I have I expect, that's fine. That's the whole point. And I put it on. I have two iPads, pros. I have the 11 inch is my kind of home machine. And then I have a 13 inch here at the studio, which I use for Quotex brand design work. I put the beta on that one because I was most interested in trying out the new windowing system.

And it made sense to have the bigger screen to really get the full use of that and totally I would say that the 13 inch iPad Pro has actually been the computer I have used the most since WWDC because I find it so exciting I guess we could start with that maybe then if we're above loving it most I think that this windowing system is just superb. I think it is absolutely superb. And it was made even better for me by Federico. I was mentioning it's unconnected. You can actually still use Stage Manager and get all of the benefits of all the windowing. Stage Manager is divorced from the windowing system now. The windowing system is just what it is. And the way they put it to me was it's just like the Mac.

Stage Manager is an optional way to collect Windows. That's it. And I love it because while you can have lots of Windows on screen, because the screen is small, it's like smaller than my studio display or whatever, I find it not comfortable to have like 12 overlapping Windows, right, of all the apps open that I might wanna see. But now when I use stage manager,

I have like five different stages. This is the same as how I use it on my Mac. Five different stages. We have apps that I use together, together all the time. They're always open and I can move between them and I can still fully resize them, overlap them. It genuinely is like, oh, this is for me the absolutely perfect way to use an iPad.

Like they crushed it. I love it. And it's fun. And I'm reminded of all of the reasons that iPadOS was my preferred platform for a long time, because I do find it to be just a more enjoyable computer to use, like it is more fun to use for me than a Mac is. And yeah, I've just been having a fantastic time.

I bought a smart keyboard. Yeah, of course you did. Not thrilled about really, like I think the smart keyboard kind of ruins what's good about the new iPads. Like it makes it so heavy and so bulky, but it really makes this system sing. Like having a keyboard and trackpad just built into the experience, like it really has made it feel fantastic. And then you just take it off and then it's then in light again.

Yeah, but then you've got to have a second cover like lying around somewhere that you've got to turn. Welcome to my world. Yeah, I don't like it. I don't like it, but I love the keyboard experience. to my world. Yeah I don't like it. I don't like it but I love the keyboard experience. I would love it if Apple built like a combo somehow like of a Smart Folio and a keyboard and trackpad kind of thing where you could just like like kind of like surface like you know like you detach it. I don't want to kickstand though like I like that's the problem so I don't know. But yeah what if in your experiences with the with iPad OS so far? I really like I've been very slowly kind of putting my thoughts out there.

So I wrote a piece about about the iPad. And it just feels to me like Apple has gotten over a lot of its hangups. I think we talked about this last week, the idea that the iPad was in this weird interim state of like, well, it needs to be more Mac like, but it can't be more like the Mac. It needs to be its own thing. And then they're just over it. And they're like, yeah, you know, the Mac is pretty good.

We could just use those windowing concepts over here. And I really like it. I think it's not for everyone. I also go back into single window mode when I'm doing a lot of stuff because I don't need those windows Then and that's fine But then it's actually very easy to just get back and and my brain kind of clicks with it and when I'm using it either in the case or attached to the studio display, which I also did and

It's it's eerie because it really is just like using a Mac now when you're using it in the studio attached to a studio display It's it's weird because it's just Windows on the screen. Like there's really can you close the iPad? You can't. They didn't they didn't get lid closed in there. So it's got to stay open. There's like your little buddy on the side. Not your workout buddy. No. Second screen buddy, yeah. So impressed by that, have you also used it a lot? And I would say I've found it surprisingly stable. Every now and then something weird happens and I'm like, it's a beta, whatever. I've restarted it a couple of times when weird things happened.

But for the most part, it's been perfectly useful. I had to think where I just, I wasn't getting email for a whole day and then just start again. It's like, okay Yeah, thanks. Yeah I don't know where I looked and I was like is there no is the email like this is the old email What what is happening and you know, eventually it just kind of came back. So that's bug. There's bugs It's developer beta 1 for pizza, but in general pretty usable even so I like that. You can resize those windows to be any size. They don't stop at various break points.

They're just like Mac windows. They can be any size. I mean, this is what is most Vision OS like of all of the designs. Yeah, grab the corner and make it whatever size you want. It worked in Vision OS and they're doing it here too. Like, and it looks just like it and acts just like it. And it's interesting to me in a way that like,

I don't understand how this is working based on what I thought I knew about the way that iOS and iPadOS apps are made. But like I didn't know that they could do this, that you could have an app be kind of any physical size that it wants to be? Well, they're supposed to be able to adjust like this because there are so many variations now that they're supposed to be more flexible and then if you carry them over to catalyst they have to be more flexible still. I'm holding on to the old size classes mentality which was how it was for a

long time. That's sort of what the old windowing system did too. But it's not necessary now. And they threw it away and built something different. My understanding is they took a little team, and they took a few years, and they completely rebuilt the entire windowing approach for the iPad. And that's why it's new and runs on every iPad. And it's just, this is what it is now.

And it's very good. That's the thing is I don't look at it and think, well, it's just this is what it is now. And it's very good. Like that's the thing is I don't look at it and think, well, it's kind of janky and broken. It's like, no, it's really good already in developer beta one. There are a lot of things about it that are really strong. I did. OK. One thing that I've heard from people that I totally get is that some people really liked split view. Yeah. And it's interesting that Apple built split view sort of, if you take two windows and tile them,

they look like split view. And there's a little split in the center and you can resize them to any size you want. And I thought, this is a case where I wonder if there should be an affordance for people who want that. Where there's like a shortcut of some sort. Yeah. I mean, the way that it works right now is you just have to drag it to each side and it will, and it will put on one half of the other half. Like I, I don't think

it's too difficult. Like now there isn't slide over, there's nothing like slide over anymore. Nothing like slide over. Well, I mean, a window over another window is what that is. But yeah. And I would expect slide over was probably the least used. I just wonder if they'll get feedback. Like is there a way to take a user who's in single window mode

and give them a shortcut of some sort. I don't mean necessarily a shortcut literally, but something gestural that allows them to say, I actually want this window, that's my whole window over there on half, and then I wanna pick another app that could, because I know that some people really do like that feature. Harry McCracken was talking about it.

I was on Twitter yesterday, and he really likes that feature and feels like this is a step backward because he thought that that was a nice kind of like simple way of doing it. And I don't know how much of that is, it's what people are used to. And I think it's interesting.

I think genuinely this is a much more logical way of initiating SplitView than the existing system. I agree. Also, did you notice all of the tiling shortcuts? Because that's the other thing about this that has not been talked about as much is like all of those tiling shortcuts that Apple added to Mac OS last year.

So you can do like globe, globe shift arrow left and it just takes a window and pops it in half on the left half of the screen or globe F for a full screen or not. All of those keyboard shortcuts work on the iPad. So it's actually and and shortcuts has access to tell Windows to do that. And they're all under the green button and the spotlight to the traffic lights And they're all under the green button and the spotlight too. The traffic lights, they're all in there too. Just like they are on the Mac.

Yeah. Yeah, so all that window management and tiling and stuff is there too. Yeah, so I think it's really good. Dan Moran and I recorded last Friday's Six Colors podcast on entirely on iPad. And how did it go? I'm desperate to know. We're great. There's nothing nothing to it. We did. I mean, the issues were a lot of times we do live streams like we're doing now. You can't do that on an iPad because you need another app for that. And we were doing that in discord, which is our live stream. And so we used a different workflow where we both went in Discord and talked to each other on the stage in Discord and then recorded locally.

But the files were all fine. They were all good. They're like lossless 48 kilohertz in an MP4 but there, there were lossless audio, I believe. Um, and so that part totally worked. And then I actually thought about editing it together on my iPad, but I didn't, I edited it on a Mac cause I want to move on to the next thing. But we did it and it worked great. So like that's a, that's a real, uh, possibility for people who are doing podcasts and video stuff. Like we, I just, I'm looking forward to the day where I can say, if you've got your, like if Dan is going away for a long weekend and we still want to record the podcast on a Friday, but he's going to be in, I don't know, Delaware, I can say, you know, you just bring your microphone and your iPhone.

You don't even need your iPad and plug it in and wherever you are and then do a local recording and send it to me and then you're done. And you've got a podcast at full quality essentially. That's exciting. So it removes a bunch of barriers, not all, but a bunch of barriers to, certainly to the stuff that I do where I'm traveling and I need to have

extra stuff that I don't want to bring that I could do a very slimmed down version of this. Like a USB-C mic only right interfaces don't seem to work? Interfaces do work but they only work when they're sending a stereo signal down and it gets mixed down to mono so you could do it with you can plug six microphones in onto a Zoom recorder. You're gonna get one track. And do it, but you're gonna get one track out of it. Which if, I mean, recording multi-track in a room together,

there's kind of not a lot you can do with it anyway. But yes, it will not be, it works, but, and that's, I filed a feedback about that. It's like, if you do a multi-channel interface right now, it doesn't do anything. It's like if you do a multi-channel interface right now, it doesn't do anything. It's like I don't even know what that is. So I feel like they need to do some work there.

They don't have to record mix down all six tracks in a multi-track interface or something, but they probably need better UI. Then the one thing that we really noticed, Dan plugged in his Audio Technica ATR2100X to his iPad running Beta 1, and it was horribly overmodulated. And that microphone, it's hard to adjust gain and volume.

It has limited gain controls, and we realized that the system has no gain controls. And it's interesting because there's also a preview, this blobby kind of sound preview that doesn't do anything. So I think there's some stuff that's just not hooked up. But I filed a feedback that said the system, if you're going to let me pick a microphone, you should also probably let me adjust the volume in software.

But for the podcast, we used a microphone. Each of us used an MV7 from Shure that has on-device gain control. And with that mic, it wasn't a problem at all. Yeah, I'm thinking about picking one of those up, the MV7. A new world. A new world, yeah, that you can do stuff like that. So it's exciting. I mean, big thumbs up to iPadOS right now, is basically what I have to say. I'm really happy with it. I'm using it full time with my iPad, and I have no real complaints.

I wanted to touch on VisionOS a little bit because there's some interesting stuff going on there too. So one of the things that I wanted to try out is to see what the new personas look like, and to see if it fixed the beard issue that I have. So long-time listeners will remember that I can sit up in a persona in Vision OS, but I believe because of my beard, the sensors do not pick up my mouth moving. And so my chin kind of moves, but my mouth doesn't open unless I open my mouth, uh, unusually large. Uh, so I wanted to try it out for two things. One, the new personas are stupendous,

like kind of cannot believe how good they are. Like I already thought the spatial personas looked very convincing. Now it just literally looks like it just actually looks like me on a bad video call, like a compressed video call. Right. One of the, one of the things as, as good as the old spatial personas were, if they, if you like turned your head a little bit, it looked kind of like a face on a box, it was, you could, you could see that there wasn't a lot of depth there.

box. You could see that there wasn't a lot of depth there. And now the sides of your face and stuff are accurate and the skin tone is more accurate and they say the eyebrows and eyelashes are more accurate. It just looks way better. Already they made great strides. They also told me the spatial personas are all the default now. Like they're so good that they're like, they're the default. There's no reason to have it in another way. In a box, no.

But so yeah, I wanted to do it and I have a blog now called the Enthusiast. Yeah, we'll talk about it later. Yeah, we'll talk about it. And I put together there some images before and after and some videos that I uploaded. So yeah, as good as it looks, the mouse still doesn't move. So yeah, it doesn't. They got to figure out a way. Somebody suggested, why don't you, why don't you shave and capture

persona and then grow your beard back? It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you misunderstand. It's the reverse of that. It's, it's the, Mike captures his beard once and for all, then shaves off and then he lives entirely in a persona of a bearded man. There's got to be a way. I can't believe that this is the case. I just can't believe that this is the case. Whether it's a training thing where they're like open your mouth really wide, whether they do something like kind of fake it in some way, just pick up. I mean, there is your chin jiggles, right? But it never opens all the way. So like they're picking up signal. It feels like there's just something that they need to do to detect that it's a beard and more kind of like expansively

react to that signal in some way. So I hope that maybe they'll fix that eventually. I will say having done in spatial persona calls with you, you know, you get over it, but it's still not ideal. It's still like a weird side-by-side. I love spatial persona calls, but I know I have a vastly better experience than anybody that I'm talking with. Like when I posted this- Right, cause you don't have

to see yourself. I often have calls of underscore this way, and when he saw the post, he was like, oh man. Like I was really hoping this was gonna fix it, but it didn't fix it. So yeah, but I can't believe how good it looks. And then just in general, with Vision OS, the widgets are really nice.

They look really good. They pin to the walls. You can pin apps to surfaces now too. Yeah, geographic persistence is really a feature that needed to exist. And I wanted to give a clarification, because I've heard people say like, oh, finally, when you open it up,

your windows are in the same place. Two things have happened. They already did that, but just not for reboot. So like this was a Vision OS 2.0 feature that every time you, as long as you didn't completely discharge the battery, every time you put on your Vision Pro, your apps were in the right places. They've done this a long time ago. But they wouldn't persist across a reboot. And now you can, and now you can, there's a new feature where you can lock a window or a widget to a surface.

So you can also say, I want it on this wall, and it will put it on the wall. And then yes, if you go, so that's one of the things that I had in my demo, is they took me in another room, and I stepped into the room. And as I stepped into the room, all of these windows appeared on the walls, and widgets and stuff. They all appeared on the walls. And that was because it knew that it had been in there before. And so it loaded all the things that were in there. So that was really, that was really clever. And they had they had some windows pinned to the walls, too. And I asked them, like, what's the deal with, with opening multiple apps in different places? like how does it get mixed up and all that and they said it's not really a big deal like if because the window like if you're far away from there the windows aren't actually open right they aren't actually open over there it opens them when you get there and restores the

state and so if you're in so far you can't be like I left it's that classic I left my Safari in another room you don't have to do that still running you know yeah yeah you just open Safari and then and then Safari's in front of you too and it's okay, they kind of smoothed all that out. But if we're headed for a world down the road, and that's what Vision OS is all about, where future products need to have this kind of persistence, I think they do, if you leave an object,

if you set up a TV from that sandwich app about television, if you set that up in a room somewhere, every time you come back to that room, it should be there, right? Like that just makes sense. And this goes for widgets and anything. So yeah, they did a really good job. I did get also in that demo,

an example of what happens when two people with a Vision Pro are in the same room together, where they're basically doing share play. They're using stuff that they already have. But one of the things that I think they're sharing, I think these are all connected, right? It's not three things, are you getting it yet? Is geographic persistence also means

it has knowledge of that particular room geography. So you can share that room geography with another, they didn't say this, but like, this has to be what's happening, is you've got the room geography in common, but for that to be the case, the device needs to know what the room geography is. So you need to have that geographical persistence.

And then on top of that, you use SharePlay. So like I had an object shared with me by an Apple marketing person, and it was like a statue of an astronaut. But like, you know, he scaled it up and turned it around, and I walked around it and I looked at it, and I could, and like we were collaborating on this little 3D model.

But the point, again, if you're looking at the future, if a lot of people have Apple vision powered devices, even if it's like 10, 15 years and they're air glasses or whatever, there will come a point when everybody not seeing the same hallucinations is gonna be a problem. You need the ability to work on or see

things with other people and so they had to build it eventually and this is when they built it. The other feature that I wanted to try was look to scroll. I just can't get it to work. I don't know if it's okay. Like there was one moment where I could see that it was in, like it could, it knew I was looking and nothing happened. So, okay. Mark Gurman said in his column on Sunday that he thought he used it and he thought it was great. And I'm like, I have, I have not succeeded at using look to scroll. Okay. I know it's in there. There's a setting it's on, but I can't do it.

I was going mad today. I'm like, I'm looking, I'm looking. Nothing was scrolling. No. We'll come back to that in the future. The beard, your beard blocked. Maybe, you know what? Beard to scroll. Maybe. There we go.

I just stroke my beard and then the webpage goes down. That's amazing. This episode is brought to you by Factor. Summer is finally here and it's fun. As listeners know, this show, more sun, more fun, more light, more time to do all of the things that make summer so special but here's what you won't be doing spending hours cooking inside because that's where Factor comes in. Factor's chef crafted dietitian approved meals

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fuss is my mom. Yes. So we, she doesn't, uh, she, she's, I think we are concerned that she's losing weight because she has struggled to make meals for herself. She lives alone. She making meals for one person is not the best thing in the world to do. So we got her factor meals. So she gets factor meals every week and, um, and we're learning like what she prefers and what she doesn't prefer. But I think, uh, we're all very happy that she's got some easy to prepare, tastes good, are healthy and nutritious. That's great. And I will say again that when we get them here,

Lauren steals them and takes them to work. And she is, I would say that if they didn't taste good, she wouldn't do that. She would say, you eat your podcast meals, podcast boy. But instead she takes them to work with her because they are remarkably good. She wouldn't do that. She would say you eat your you eat your podcast meals podcast boy. But instead she takes them to work with her because they are remarkably good. After heating them up for just a couple of minutes, they I don't know what the magic is that they've got. But they actually taste good and not like I won't mention other things other than to say that I they they vastly surpassed my expectations for a little thing that you would heat up for a couple minutes it is actually good so good that I I buy it for my mom would be very good for new parents too factor ah yes good gift to someone you can get started today at factor

meals.com slash upgrade 50 off and use the code upgrade 50 off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code upgrade50off at factormeals.com slash upgrade50off to get 50% off plus free shipping. That's F-A-C-T-O-R-M-E-A-L-S.com slash upgrade50off. A thanks to Factor for their support of this show and Relay. Let's finish out with some Ask Upgrade questions today. John wrote in and said, I watched Upgrade on YouTube for the first time today. I'm normally a listener. My Snow Talk question, this is an Ask Upgrade question, but nevertheless,

is what trainers slash sneakers was Jason wearing? They want to know your fit check, Jason. Yes, we had our initial version and we posted a later version with a better angle. But the initial version, it's like I'm far away and sitting in a chair full body. That was that was the view I had of you just far on Jason all the way over there. There is this one point. I don't know if it's in the video.

I hope that it is where you knock over a water bottle. Yes, I assume it is. I don't know. And I had to just really, really hold it together as I'm watching Jason with this tumbling water bottle. I adjusted the, the, uh, I moved the cord to be behind my back, but to do that, I had to move the boom arm and the boom arm was so long that it just swept the water bottle right off the table.

Fortunately, the water bottle was capped. No water was spilled. But I was just, I felt like so trapped in that chair with that arm and the whole thing. Anyway, my shoes are Brooks Addiction walking shoes. It's kind of boring. I have them in white. I have them in blue. I have them in black. Yeah, they in blue. I have them in black.

Wow. Uh, yeah, they're just my shoes. They're walking shoes. They're added stability for to make my feet happy. That's it. You found the one pair and you're like, never, never another pair. You know, that's, that's my, well, I had a podiatrist say you should wear one of these three brands and this is the one I ended up with. So yeah, I'm currently scrolling through the video to see, is there a point where the bottle is gone.

You know I think you put it back on didn't you? Yeah I did. No you have to look for the moment where the cord that's in front of my shoulder moves to behind my shoulder and in between those two points is where I knocked it over. I think I edited it out of the new angle video. Yeah. Um, and cut to it's one of the places where it cuts to you full video. I don't know. Anyway, there was a whole thing there.

We did two versions of the video. We got lots of angles, but again, you know, posting a WWDC reaction video a week later is silly. So we just did the fast version and then the slightly slower version. Yeah, I found them. It's not in there. I found a moment where there's the bottles on the table and then it cuts to me for a bit and the bottles on the floor. So yeah, that would be that would be one for me for always. Technically, I picked it up off the floor

and then put it back down on the floor. But I made it not be on the table that could easily be swept by the mic arm, yeah. Tom writes in and says, with Mac OS Tahoe being the last Intel release, do you think there will be a bump in Mac sales over the next couple of years? Are people still on Intel waiting for the wheels to fall off and not likely to upgrade until then?

I mean, I think it's a bell curve. I think probably the number of people still on Intel is, you know, reduced every day. And so will there be a bump? I don't know. I think any bump will probably be missed by the fact that it's fewer and fewer people every time. Because so many, I mean, there's so many tempting reasons to do Apple Intel, or not Apple Intel, just to do Apple Silicon over the last five years. I think maybe the pull forward, as they call it, during COVID may have actually accelerated their timeline on cutting Intel because they sold so many Macs. Well that helps. But we know Apple still talks about comparing laptops

to Intel. They know that they're still out there. I'm sure there will be an increase. I'm sure there will be people who, when they can't get the new version, will be like, I guess I need to update. Those are very slow updaters. But they have value value and they're going to get a great, you know, M5, M6 kind of Mac when they do and it's going to be awesome for them. But I don't know. I feel like that number just keeps going down.

and you move to like the M5 MacBook Air, my word. That's gonna be a good time for people. People are gonna love it. Yeah, it's gonna be wild. So anyway, I don't know how big that bump is gonna be. I think it'll be, it will lead some people to decide to update. In fact, the announcement that it's happening next year will lead some people to update in the meantime.

I can imagine it would move some enterprise buyers to start making some decisions potentially. I don't know. But I mean, you're talking about computers that are already five or six years old. So they were probably at the end of the cycle. So yeah, I'm not saying that there won't be one, but I don't think it's gonna be massive because I think we already saw a couple of massive bumps driven by the pandemic and driven by Apple Silicon in general. But I also know, I mean, yeah, there are people out there who hold a Mac for five or six or seven years,

and they will, I mean, I'm not trying to call out John Syracuse, but there I said it. I was just about to. I was gonna say, I love John Syracuse, so he's a good friend, and I care about him a lot. But it would be hilarious to me. I would find it very, very funny if they do not update the Mac Pro

before the next version of Mac OS. That would be very funny to me. Yeah and then you just have to... so they're there, I don't know if it's going to be a huge number. Yep, yeah we'll find out. Sam writes in and says, downloaded the iPad OS 26 Beta and I love it, however I'm disappointed about the lack of spotlight upgrades. Any idea on if we'll see these, like what's coming to Mac OS on Apple OS? I mean, no, that's a Mac feature. Gotta leave something for next year, hopefully. Like this is something that I do want,

especially if the shortcut stuff. I'm like, oh man, would I love that. And a clipboard, oh come on. Maybe I'm misguided here, but I feel like once Apple implements all of that stuff in Spotlight for Mac, I have a hard time imagining it won't come to iPad. Yeah.

Especially. At some point, but it won't be this year. I mean, next year. We're in this weird spot now with the iPad, where it's like, oh, they just added all these iPhone features, they'll come to the iPad next year. And now also they've just added these Mac features

that will come to the iPad next year. Is that also they've just added these Mac features so come to the iPad next year. Is that where we are now? That appears to be, yeah. Well, and keep in mind that that would include clipboard history, which I think would be amazing on iPad and iPhone as well. They should do it. They've got an interface for it now.

That Spotlight stuff feels very iOS-y, right? It does. The shortcuts and all that. I know. I think they built it on Mac as proof of concept, and then it will go back to the iPad. Including launching shortcuts with keyboard commands? Come on, man.

Are you kidding me? Because that solves the problem of global shortcuts on iPad OS. Exactly. The iPad had a lot this year, right? I could see where they're like, you know, this is what we're focusing on with iPad and then and on the Mac, they're like, we got this thing where we're going to really update Spotlight, but Spotlight is everywhere. So I have a hard time

imagining those Spotlight upgrades won't come to the other platforms. They do. It requires some, you know, different kind of engineering for that platform, but I have a hard time imagining that that isn't a future plan. And Andy says, regarding the iPad audio updates within iPadOS, the audio system is hardly more flexible than before. Apple hasn't provided a new set of rich APIs to let audio apps flourish and inject new ideas into the platform. They just fixed a popular gripe of podcasters of a system feature. Are we giving up on hoping for changes that give us an API and a future development area and just be happy when Apple throws us a bone? I mean, yeah, I am happy they threw me a bone.

I think fundamentally, here's what I'll say. I don't think Apple wants audio hijack to work on the Mac or on the iPad. I just don't think it does. I think it does not want to give that level of system control to apps running its utilities. And so what it's decided to do is build in solutions to these problems at a system level. And like if Apple is integrating recording of audio, selecting of input devices at a system level, that suggests to me that they don't want to let audio apps flourish. I will also say a lot of what they're doing, I mean, I mentioned this earlier, a lot of what they're doing is superior to what's on the Mac because on the Mac, I mean, Mac audio, like low level built in Mac audio is terrible. Like it's been terrible for years.

The fact that you need all of those utilities to do things that the system should probably just let you do. You should probably be able to route audio and record specific apps. And like, you should probably just be able to do that. And the sound system preference panel is so limited. And that's why Audio Hijack and Sound Source

and a bunch of these other apps have to exist is because Apple just doesn't do it and doesn't think it's important on the Mac. I find that baffling, but that's just how it is. The fact that they built these things for iPad and iOS too, is, I think, really interesting, because it's Apple actually having to conceptualize those features that they just never bothered with on the Mac

side, where there's just like a default and they don't care. So I don't know, I am, are we giving up on hoping for changes that give us an API in a future development area? Yes, I think they're not going to do it. I think that they have the audio routing is like a bridge too far and that what they're going to do is build some system features in instead. What I hope will change in the long run is that the iPad and iPhone, especially the iPad with multi windows and all of that, they still need to do more work in terms of if I've got multi windows and one of them's you know playing and one of them's recording or two of them are playing audio simultaneously, like I should that should work right because that's how the Mac works. And right now you

still have those instances where you're watching video and then streaming it through scrolling through your timeline and a video autoplay is and it stops the where you're watching video and then streaming it through scrolling through your timeline and a video autoplay is, and it stops the video you're watching in the other window. It's just, it's stupid. Like a question. I don't know. Like some, you know, when we're recording, I'm building show notes, right? And sometimes one of the show notes is a YouTube video that starts playing.

If I'm recording a podcast on my iPad and that happens, what happens? Like I genuinely don't know. It stops recording. Geez. I believe. See that. It's genuinely don't know. It stops recording. Geez. I believe. See that it's like that as bad. This is the thing of like, am I happy that they've thrown me a bone with this? Yes. Cause it's something I wanted. It's a pet feature that I wanted and they give me that feature, which is great. But what I, I don't, I don't, I'm not particularly

holding a candle for them to create a set of API's so people can make audio recording apps. It'd be nice, but like whatever I'm going to take what I can get. But I want the general system feature of multiple audio sources being played at one time to be possible. Like, you know, I mentioned this before, but like being able to watch a live stream of someone reacting to a video, whilst also watching the main video. So like I can watch a sporting event and watch a YouTuber talk about it at the same time.

I don't need both sets of audio to be playing at the same time, but I just need the system to understand the concept of multiple sources playing media at the same time, and then I can handle those. Because sometimes, with most apps, it will pause one and play another. It's like, well, I don't want you to do that. You are capable of doing both of these.

Yeah. So don't get me wrong. I mean, I would love it if Apple were able to enable sophisticated or willing to enable sophisticated audio routing and recording and other utilities like that on iPad. But I think these features suggest that they would rather just build some functionality in that solves some problems and then moves on. And they do have other audio issues, as Mike just detailed. There's a lack of sophistication in terms

of audio on the iPad that still needs to be addressed. If you would like to send in a question of your own or you would like to send us in some feedback or follow up, you can go to upgradefeedback.com. Thank you to our members who support us through Upgrade Plus. This week, I think I might talk about my blog a little bit and some other behind the scenes WWDC stuff. You can get longer ad free versions and bonus content every week by going to getupgradeplus.com. If you want to find this show on YouTube

where you can sometimes see Jason's shoes, you can go on YouTube and search for the Upgrade podcast. Thank you to Factor, Delete Me, and Squarespace for the support of this show. But most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, my curly.

know. Goodbye my curly.