696: It Seems Petty, But I Endorse It
15 Jun 2026Lots of details from macOS Golden Gate, Apple’s AI Tech Talk, road trips, and failed Bobs.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- It’s Road Trip (via Jason Paul)
- Indexing for the new Spotlight
- Passwords app does the hard thing
- macOS 27
- “Golden Gate” was the codename for macOS Big Sur… and eWorld 1.1
- You can use TouchID for Administrator access
- There’s a way to skip the Siri waitlist (via Steve Troughton-Smith)
sudo defaults write "/Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/GenerativeModels.plist" "EnhancedSiriWaitlist" -dict-add Enabled -bool NO
- ST-S points out the change in Apple’s documentation
- The Liquid Glass slider is part of Golden Gate onboarding
- Corner radius ∆s, illustrated
- Mickey hands are back
- They can’t leave well enough alone, Finder icon edition
- General Golden Gate icon changes
- Touch Macs are coming
- You can resize the iPhone Mirroring window
- HIG updates for menu icons
- iOS 27
- iPadOS 27
- tvOS (Apparently it’s still an OS in the lineup —Ed.)
- watchOS
- Apple’s AI Tech Talk
- Images
- Quotes
- Dan Moren vanity searches
- An aside on Apple filtering out some frequencies during utterances of “Siri”
- Stephen Robles’ SiriAI review (timestamp link to 5m47s)
- 3Blue1Brown transformers video
- Apple’s announcement for third-gen models
- Instruction-Following Pruning for LLMs
- LLM in a Flash: Efficient LLM Inference with Limited Memory
- Ars Technica’s write-up
- Post-show: Casey’s trip results
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The WWDC 2026 Platforms State of the Union
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Chapters
- Safely incapable
- Derailments
- It’s Road Trip 🖼️
- 26.6 builds new Spotlight index?
- Resisting beta 1… 😬
- Agentic password upgrades
- Our collaborative show notes
- eWorld and Bob
- macOS: Touch ID for admin access
- Skip the Siri waitlist on macOS
- Liquid Glass opt-out is gone in 27
- Liquid Glass slider 🖼️
- Sponsor: Leesa (code ATP)
- Mac window-corner radii 🖼️
- Mickey Mouse hands 🖼️
- New Finder icon 🖼️
- Sharper app icons 🖼️
- Preparing for touch-Macs
- HIG on menu icons 🖼️
- Siri pull-down animation
- iPad menu-bar tweaks
- tvOS hardware cutoff
- watchOS hardware cutoff
- Sponsor: Quince
- Apple’s AI Tech Talk 🖼️
- Filters to defeat wake-words 🖼️
- Apple’s AI Tech Talk, cont’d. 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Where’s our SOTU coverage?!
- Trip-tech results
Safely incapable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to report that we have not yet been classified by the US government
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as dangerously capable. Therefore, you’re still able to listen to our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you think that Apple has classified us as dangerously capable and that’s why we aren’t getting invites? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the world of audio only podcasts was never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super high on Apple’s list, but it sure is invisible now. Like I think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t care. I mean we should probably talk about the idea of should we really be doing video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think any of us are super into that idea but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we want to continue to have that kind of visibility to the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world that might be a good idea but it would so complicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the production of the show and the editing of the show that I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I don’t think it’s So it’s enough motivation for us, but I don’t know. How do you guys feel about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to pivot to video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think there’s a couple of things here. Um, I, it’s a little rude of me to say this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think all three of us have faces for radio and so there’s that. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secondly, I know for, for me and for John, our physical spaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not really conducive to doing video. Like I have done it. It can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. Every time I’m, I’m asked a guest on a podcast, which doesn’t happen that frequently, to be clear. I’m not trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like humble brag here, but on the occasions that it does happen, I often ask upfront,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you doing video for this? And annoyingly, the answer is typically yes. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the answer is yes, I have to go through this whole like internal dance of, do I really want to clean up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rest of the office? Do I really want to just, do I don’t want to do this at all? Like, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for me. It’s not what I enjoy. But the flip side of that is, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s clear that that’s where attention is, certainly for Apple, though honestly, I don’t really care if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple pays that much attention to us. It would be lovely to be able to go to WBDC, but it’s really not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that big a deal. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna pay. Do you think if we suddenly start doing video, they’re gonna pay attention to us? No, they’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fair, but they seem to ignore everything that is not video these days, or print for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and to be clear, we were never super reliably getting press access, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has really turned to zero in recent years, like the last couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John where- I think it was always zero. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the only time it happened was an aberration, otherwise constant zero, which again, I’m fine with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, like it does help to a degree that we don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about losing our press access because we don’t have any. Yeah. And so we are able to be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honest and really direct. That’s more difficult. Like, I know when I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times in my career where I’ve had press access with Apple, I have worried about losing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that ever made me do anything major, majorly different from how I would have otherwise done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but I’m sure it had to have like a minor impact or some kind of like subconscious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biasing that like maybe I would soften things or not go near certain things because I was afraid of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing that access. Whereas when you have nothing to lose, it does give a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain degree of freedom. But I don’t know, and going back to the video thing for a second, Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good guiding principle on this for us to keep in mind is like, I don’t think any of our audience has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked us for that. But that’s a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that the reason why YouTubers have pivoted into a lot of podcasts is because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier. You don’t need to write and edit nearly as much as you do for other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco formats that succeed on YouTube. If you can just have a casual conversation and do minimal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editing and minimal writing, that is much easier. So there’s a reason why YouTubers like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s a reason why some podcasters enjoy it because they think they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get YouTube audience with their podcast. And that’s, of course, very tempting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What podcast wouldn’t like more listeners or more of an audience? And so I think that’s why people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing it. But if we are happy doing what we are doing, and our audience is happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing- with us doing it this way, and we’re all happy with the numbers and how everything is going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we should feel compelled to have to push into an area that none of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us seem like we actually want to do just just for the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Possibly basically trying to become youtubers in a way that it seems like none of us really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have that in us
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to see us It’s a young attractive person’s game. It’s not for us.
Derailments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have, as is tradition, a whole pile of follow-up. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we might make it through follow-up. Typically, the week after WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John basically explains to us that we are going to do a full follow-up episode. But John, to your credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re going to make it past follow-up. So, let’s see what we can do. Let’s see how it lands. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey statement. Yeah, bold. That’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many shows, especially member specials, have you started, Casey, by saying, I think this is going to be a short one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time, every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We don’t have much to say about this. This is up there with, oh, I’m not going to buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you seen the RT reviews recently? They’re looking good. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Waiting for the R3X and CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about it. We need, see where I’m trying to get through follow-up and I’m derailing myself. We need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have, I’m really rooting for Tesla. Hear me out, hear me out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I’m really rooting for Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ellipsis to start shipping CarPlay. because I believe in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bones that the second Tesla ships CarPlay, Rivian’s gonna be like, oh yeah, totes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re right there too, absolutely. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wanna control every pixel of their amazing experience. Don’t even get me started.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey But anyways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think once, if Tesla ships CarPlay, have there been any, I know there was rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that a few months back, but is there anything more recently about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not since like a month or two back where they said it’s totally gonna be talked about at WWDC and then it totally wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, maybe it’ll be a fall thing, maybe it’s a never thing, I don’t know, But yeah, I think you’re right. I think if Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever ships CarPlay, that will put a lot of pressure on Rivian to finally cave. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably gonna take years. I do think the Rivian R2 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna do what the Model 3 and Model Y did for Tesla, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna make them all of their money, even though we’re all gonna think it’s fairly boring. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also gonna be a really good overall car. And I’m personally very interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the R3, but that seems further out. We’ll see. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I haven’t I’ve been away all this past week, as everyone knows, and I haven’t looked too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much into the R2. But the little bits that I’ve seen is that it is incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that the places where they you know, had to skimp in order to make it cheaper. That’s reasonable. And the places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you really don’t want them to, you know, cut corners and cheap and be super cheap. They didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So uh… it’s it’s supposedly real good but anyway
It’s Road Trip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Rivians, let’s talk its road trip. Jason Paul sent us a link to the Utah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey road trip demo typo, which is excellent. And the frustration on the dude typing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the iPad is just palpable. You can see it right on his face. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what you gotta watch the video for. Just watch, you gotta watch the guy’s reaction after he does the typo. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the best, cause he knows exactly what he did. And he, you could just see in his face, he’s like, oh crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Like, I can’t believe this autocorrect just got me right now. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s delightful. But Florian also wrote in to say, at the time of that ill-fated demo, I was working for the company that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made that software. Francois Lagunas, the guy who made the typo, was the CTO and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still a dear friend. He swears to this day that it was the amount of makeup they made him wear on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his hands, since they were prominently featured in the over-the-shoulder device close-ups that caused him to fat-finger the title.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco From his recollection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they made the team shoot the do-over as soon as the live event ended so that they had the footage as soon as possible to edit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the published, quote unquote, recorded video of the event. In any case, it worked out okay in the end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The company ended up getting acquired by GoPro not long after, and that software still is the architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powering the video editing featured in their quick app, Q-U-I-K.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. Yeah, it’s like, you know, it doesn’t surprise me they did the recording right after, basically they’ve still
⏹️ ▶️ John got the same clothes on, it’s the same room, it’s the same sound, right? You know, we’re just gonna fix this up immediately. Don’t go anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John guys. You still got one more thing to do, so that’s fine. And hand to make up. You don’t think about hand to make up, But hey, if they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John shoot your hands in a close up, Got to put on that hand makeup.
26.6 builds new Spotlight index?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there has been a little bit of rumbling. I’ve heard this kind of not literally whispered, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve heard this kind of being talked about here and there. And so we can’t credit this to anyone. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an anonymous person said, word on the street is that iOS or I guess all the OS is
⏹️ ▶️ John is 26.6. Thank you to all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OS is 26.6 actually create the new spotlight spotlight index.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just creates it, it doesn’t use it. So if people update their devices when 26.6 is released, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey index will already be there when they update to iOS 27 or whatever 27 sorry. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that is something is going to keep the index up to date like that was I get this is sketchy
⏹️ ▶️ John on official info or whatever but keep an eye out for 26.6 and see if I guess you’ll have to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John the Marco way like see if your disk space suddenly goes down a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as people were saying it’s gonna take like you know, it’s been taking like like a day or two to rebuild the index after
⏹️ ▶️ John installing like, for example, iOS 27 beta. But if they do this and they roll it out
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 26.6 update, by the time everyone updates to 27, it won’t have to rebuild the index. Maybe it will just incrementally,
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe it’ll just create the index and let it sit there. And then when you install 27 OS, it will just
⏹️ ▶️ John incrementally update whatever has happened since it rebuilt the whole index, but clever idea.
Resisting beta 1… 😬
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I tell you guys how much I have to resist putting it on my phone? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like I’m traveling next week and so or this week and so I’m like I’m gonna I’m resisting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John should not do
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the car on the way to the airport.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right I should not have beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on my phone But I’m about to travel but oh my god I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I’m more tempted on my Mac because now that I’ve had it on my my like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my travel laptop Which I am bearing with me, but now that I have it on my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time I go back to my my desktop laptop I’m just like oh my god. Everything is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much lower contrast the toolbars suck. Everything is blurry the icons are dim like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything like once you are using Golden gate for even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small amount of time when you go back and see Tahoe you just like oh my god
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What were they thinking it? It, everything is so much better on Golden Gate. And it’s not like, look, it’s not perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s still a lot about this design that I think they need to keep iterating and I’m, and I’m sure they will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Tahoe looks like such an aberration when you, when you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Golden Gate and get used to it, even for like five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And do you say that because of functionality, because of the way it looks or yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I haven’t had time to do much functionality with it yet. It’s really just the way it looks like the basics of just like how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how windows and toolbars and icons look and the menus without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the weird menu icons like they did like a 1.1 for liquid glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s it’s a good 1.1 like it’s still it’s still most of the same style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the the tweaks they have made combined to make a pretty big overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement and every time I’m back on Tahoe or iOS 26 and I see you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of blurry text fading under a backgroundless bar. I’m just like, Oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please, please let me install these betas on my devices very, very soon. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. I got to make it one more week. So maybe I’ll get to beta two, but I’m after once beta two is out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in that set. I’m jumping in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, when do you plan on properly running? You typically don’t run the betas at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? Oh no, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John it depends when I, when 26 was coming up, I was running all the 26 betas because I had to, to get my apps to
⏹️ ▶️ John work in 26. Once 26 came out, I kept running the betas for a while and I said, why am I doing this? And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John switched to like the mainstream 26 and I’ve just been going back and forth on, you know, on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and so yeah, whatever I have like 26.5.1 or whatever the latest 26 is. And on that same
⏹️ ▶️ John machine, for reasons that I tooted about it and think I mentioned maybe on the last show, I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I ended up having to partition the main drive so I could install 27 beta because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you install 27 beta on an external drive, intelligence doesn’t work because as we’ve discussed in past episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence refuses to work if you boot from an external drive for reasons I think
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly security reasons, but I don’t know the details, but anyway, that’s just the way it is. So yeah, I’ve got a 26 27 beta and 26 five
⏹️ ▶️ John one both on the same machine. and I just flop back and forth between them.
Agentic password upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let’s talk about the password app, uh, or the passwords app. Excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Uh, Hartley Charlton writes at Mac rumors, the passwords app can now automatically update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weak and compromised passwords. We talked about this some last episode, Apple describes the system as agentic with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple intelligence and Safari securely navigating through websites, signing in and upgrading accounts to strong passwords
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without the user needing to intervene beyond an initial tap. The feature displays as a live activity when active.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the last episode. I was like, there’s no way they could be doing this unless the websites support all of the, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, well-known URLs for password changes. And by the way, ATP.fm now supports that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mentioned it in the last show and I was like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we should do that because we have optional passwords now. Anyway, but surely that’s how they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And like, well, how can they have a button that says fix these 10 bad passwords? Does it, what does it expect
⏹️ ▶️ John all 10 of those websites to support this standard? So it knows where the URLs are. And the answer apparently is, nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just gonna wing it. It’s just gonna say, yep, well, this is the website. I’m gonna run a little Safari, headless
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari in the background and I’m gonna let this little LM powered agent try
⏹️ ▶️ John to find its way to the password change form and change your password for you. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in the headline for this item that reference to Casey’s from our Nuggets
⏹️ ▶️ John of Wisdom ATP dev member special, passwords app does the hard thing. Says, nope, we’re just gonna try
⏹️ ▶️ John it. We’re just gonna do it. So good luck passwords app.
Our collaborative show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let me do a little inside baseball to introduce our next follow-up segment. I think we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said many times that John is far and away the person, even when he had a jobby job, far and away
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the person that puts the most effort into our internal show notes that we run the show off of. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can tell that it’s sometimes abundantly obvious that this is the case, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to talk now, starting now, about macOS 27. And you look at the time that it takes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this chapter, these chapters.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s just lots of images, first
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of all. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still bristle when you characterize me having doing far and away most of the effort, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just say I do it all. Just say it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know occasionally you’ll put in an item. I know occasionally Marco puts
⏹️ ▶️ John in an item, but honestly, just say I do it all. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a totally different direction. I saw you being like, no, you know, not Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco does this, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that, meaning like broadly for the whole show, but but John, cheesy, PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so take a look at the timestamp, everyone. We’ll see how long the Mac OS section
⏹️ ▶️ John To give an example, show me the text that you typed in the show notes for this week’s episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me, sir. I know you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on vacation. I know you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on vacation. Not only that, but I am the chief transcriber in chief
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because Google Docs cannot handle both of us doing it at once. 100%. And I just backed off and I said, Casey wants to do this, he’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be tabbing it. So to be fair to Casey, he did do the notes transcribing for the keynote, but
⏹️ ▶️ John he didn’t need to do it because I would have done it. But I’m still saying it’s a first approximation. It’s just.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all John. Oh my word. And yes, that does mean that macOS comes first, but usually Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does that too, because they like save iOS for last when they used to go OS by OS, because like iOS is an important one and they save
⏹️ ▶️ John the good stuff till the end, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I hear you. Well, anyway, take a look at your podcast player, hopefully Overcast, and see how long the
⏹️ ▶️ John takes. I still contend it’s mostly just lots of images take up a lot of vertical space, but we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I know is so I am the the the chief note taker in chief of the uh of the external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes and I’ve got like 10 or 12 bullets for macOS 27 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got one each for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see and that’s a good example by the way Casey does all of the external facing show notes Even though I occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John go in there and add a line or two Casey doesn’t even notice because when he’s done with it never looks at them again.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But I would never say that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have anything to do with the external show notes. It’s all Casey 100%. That’s why all the bad jokes that are there. That’s Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s also very true. Rude, but very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes attribute jokes to me and I feel like saying that’s not me. That’s Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I’m going to stop derailing us or something.
eWorld and Bob
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS 27. I’ll review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t worry. Yeah, exactly. Adam DeMasi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, John said, quote, GoldenGate does sound like a codename rather than a public name. Well, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might have been remembering that GoldenGate was actually the codename for Big Sur. It was also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently the codename for eWorld 1.1, and you even brought receipts to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this little endeavor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do. You guys know what eWorld is? Yeah, wasn’t that the like faux AOL? It’s like an
⏹️ ▶️ John online service? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know this for a fact, but as having used the world when
⏹️ ▶️ John it was new, I’m pretty sure the company that made the Mac app for AOL,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you probably aren’t familiar with. But anyway, there’s a Mac app for AOL. And I think that company that made that app essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John white labeled it to Apple and said, here, you can have the app. And then Apple just obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John changed all the strings and stuff and then changed all of the graphics. The world’s whole idea was there was this like
⏹️ ▶️ John a I don’t know how to describe the art style, but sort of an impressionistic kind of cartoony
⏹️ ▶️ John art style of a little village with buildings and stuff. Back when everyone thought the Internet was going to be a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John gif of a town with little people in it. Anyway, that was the world. And yeah, you were at one point one Golden
⏹️ ▶️ John Gate. I did not know that the big Sur one I probably knew and then forgot. So, yeah, there’s only so many California
⏹️ ▶️ John names and they get reused. You have you ever used Microsoft, Bob?
⏹️ ▶️ John think I’ve only seen magazine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures of it. I used it. I was I was traveling to New York I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a kid once and a friend who wasn’t Casey. I actually have multiple friends who I would meet in New York.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a friend had it on his computer and I used it for like a couple of days on this trip. It was wild.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so this was the thing where, you know, again, this was like probably early to mid 90s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when there was still a lot of experimentation in like, what should computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UIs be? And what should be like the metaphor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that structures all your applications and documents and everything together. And Microsoft Bob was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an experiment that Microsoft did somewhere in the mid 90s that was like, what if we just arranged things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in a house and you could go to different rooms in the house? Like very much a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, like the early generation of nerds had probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, done a little bit of acid one weekend and came up with this idea in somebody’s hot tub. And it’s like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a cool idea. It didn’t work really well at all, But I believe that’s where Clippy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came from. I think Clippy was like an offshoot of Bob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Clippy escaped Bob.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there was like, look, this was back in the day that there, there was still at least some experimentation. Like before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had all settled on basically the desktop with applications and files, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, there were other ideas. You know, it wasn’t that long after that, that the PalmPilot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. And the PalmPilot also had a totally different structure of like, how should your data and applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be structured, which actually was far closer to what we have on iOS today than PCs were.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, eWorld was a little bit after that, I believe. But that was back in the day when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody was quite sure what the internet would end up being for consumers yet. And there were things like AOL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and CompuServe, and everybody wanted their own online service, and that’s, I guess, where eWorld came
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was just 100% like the AOL Mac client, except that they had that graphic
⏹️ ▶️ John where I click on the house and then it would just, I mean, it was really skin deep. It wasn’t like Bob where there was like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there was very few graphics, things fit on a floppy disk, but yeah, you can find screenshots of it online.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had a pretty cool art style, but it did not last long, thankfully.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel, I want to also say that this diversion into Microsoft Bob should not be counted towards my time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I will take full credit for the derailment. Reclaiming my time. Oh,
macOS: Touch ID for admin access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can now use Touch ID for administrator access in Mac OS 27. John, what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always wondered about this. I’m like, well, there must be some reason for it. But if you had like a Mac with Touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and you needed to like do something, Oh, I want to drag a file out of the slash library folder. And it’s like, it was in the finder
⏹️ ▶️ John and be like, well, you can’t do that cause it’s not owned by you, but, uh, if you enter your password, cause you have an admin account, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John enter your password, we’ll, we’ll, you know, do it for you with administrative privileges or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would always make you enter your password. Lots of other stuff. It would be like, oh, you know, auto-fill, do
⏹️ ▶️ John touch ID or whatever. It would ask you for touch ID. But every time you needed to elevate
⏹️ ▶️ John your privileges, eventually do the equivalent of sudo or pseudo or whatever you pronounce that word.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would always throw up a dialog box you had to type in your password. And it was like, I don’t know, it’s just weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John For whatever reason, 27, you can touch ID to do stuff as admin. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John why they changed their mind. I’m glad they did.
Skip the Siri waitlist on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. You can skip the Siri waitlist. Uh, thanks to front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the show, Steve Troutman Smith. You can do a defaults, right? Which we will put in the show notes and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will let you, I guess, just start using the new Siri. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It doesn’t show you the waitlist thing. I was, I was going to say that like, it’s fine for us to put this out there because just our
⏹️ ▶️ John super nerdy listeners, which are in the grand scheme of things, few in number, we’ll know about this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it has since leaked out into the media. So now everybody knows this. So hurry up and do it before Apple somehow how it disables
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I did it and got immediately into Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, and it’s only for the Mac though, to be clear. It only works on Mac OS Golden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Gate. I mean, where are you going to
⏹️ ▶️ John write a sudo defaults write command on your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, yeah, I was, I would love to skip it on my test phone for iOS 27, but there seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be no way to skip that yet, except I guess be Joanna Stern. Uh
Liquid Glass opt-out is gone in 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of Steve Trout and Smith, he also pointed out that there is a change in Apple’s documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The key UI design requires compatibility. Well, let me just read what it says in the documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The system ignores this key when you build for iOS 27 or later, iPadOS 27, well, basically all the 27 or later OSes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is the thing that said, don’t use liquid glass for my app, please. And Apple’s saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tough nugs. You’re going to have to use it if you compile against any of the OSes 27. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they might have said that last year, too. like, oh, we have this this key. You can put it in your app and you don’t have to upgrade to
⏹️ ▶️ John liquid glass. We’ll just run you using the basically the old metrics, all the old controls and the old everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That time is over. Update for 27. No choice. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we I think we were adequately warned. And that kind of key usually only does last a year or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two. So that makes sense. It’s time to get on board. That being said, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the problems of liquid glass from from 26, like we like if you were kicking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the can down the road and you didn’t wanna deal with them with your app, you still have to deal with them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because even if GoldenGate fixes some of your biggest nitpicks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or issues, which honestly, in that kind of context of app developers maintaining things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not really gonna help that much. It’s just nicer in certain ways, but all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the things about having different metrics for controls than iOS 18 and different behaviors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things, You still have to deal with that as long as you support iOS 18 or iOS 26.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for most apps, that’s going to be a little bit. Like you’re probably still dealing with supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these things for at least another year. So like, like for me with Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking this is probably a good time. Like this, like once I launched my 27 version this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall, I can probably drop support for iOS 18 then. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that’s pretty aggressive given where the numbers actually are for most apps these days. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand why people still want this key to work. Because then they can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping one UI for their app instead of now kind of two and a half is what they’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. But it’s going to be a bumpy time. Like, the support for 26 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tahoe is gonna be kind of a thorn in app developers’ sides for probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least another two years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I hope you spent the last year working on that issue and not saying, oh, they gave me a key, I don’t have to worry about it. Because if you did
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you’re scrambling now. Yep.
Liquid Glass slider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. During onboarding, and I think this is coming from one John Syracuse, so during onboarding for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GoldenGate, the liquid glass slider, where you decide how transparent you want it to be. Well, that’s part of the ongoing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the onboarding process, which is pretty interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that is what that means is, uh, you know, I was just assuming, oh, everyone will just leave it on a default, but
⏹️ ▶️ John now I wonder, I mean, maybe most people probably still leave it on the fault, but people just hit continue, continue, continue. I don’t care. Continue
⏹️ ▶️ John later, continue. They just want to get through it. But yeah, it’s part of, it’s part of like the, the onboarding
⏹️ ▶️ John after you install or update to the OS. So everyone’s going to at least see that slider. And I’m sure Apple will
⏹️ ▶️ John be monitoring where those numbers, I say I’m sure, but honestly, I don’t know what kind of metrics Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John gathers about this stuff. Apple tends not to gather much info, but we do know that they have some numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not really talked about it. Like what kind of anonymous usage info is actually gathered
⏹️ ▶️ John from like Mac iOS and iOS. Yeah, I hope Apple is looking at where the slider
⏹️ ▶️ John goes. I bet people will either not touch it or put it all the way to the right. I put it all the way to the right. And then some people put all their
⏹️ ▶️ John time left because they’re young and they think it’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I still, this, this slider still baffles me. Like it still just feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we didn’t feel like deciding. So we’re going to give you this zero to one floating point setting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that changes one thing about liquid glass. That honestly isn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much. First of all, it isn’t that impactful of a change. And second of all, the range between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero and one of like how they look is not that different.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most importantly, going all the way to the right does not make it opaque. There’s reduced transparency for that if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but just to be clear, the slider makes it less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparent. And all the way to the left is not fully clear either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, whatever you want, this is kind of a like weird milk toast, middle of the road kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, well, we can give you a little bit of control, but it feels like a very precise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control, and it just isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, they give you like a picture of Apple Park with some crap floating on top of it, you know, little glass
⏹️ ▶️ John style. Be aware that that picture scrolls. So you can scroll the picture just to
⏹️ ▶️ John see, how does it look with an image scrolling underneath the controls? Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before you move on from that, as Marco pointed out, the underlying setting, which is called NS Glass Tint
⏹️ ▶️ John Amount, does go from zero to one. If you set it to a value higher than one, It is ignored.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Unfortunately, it was the
⏹️ ▶️ John first thing I did. I’m like, oh, the slider goes from zero to one, 15. What does 15 look like? 15 looks like one.
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Mac window-corner radii
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this might get me in a lot of trouble. But there was a lot of consternation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the corner radius of macOS Windows. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, would you like to just briefly recap why perhaps you or if not you, others
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were upset about this in macOS 26, please? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they made the corner radius very large, means the corners were very, very rounded, which means there
⏹️ ▶️ John are a larger number of pixels that you don’t get to see in the corners of a window. And this is especially
⏹️ ▶️ John important in Tahoe because the way the UI works is that if like, if you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at a picture, like an image or something, the image goes edge to edge. So you’re losing
⏹️ ▶️ John all four corners of that image if that image is in a window because all four corners
⏹️ ▶️ John are curved. As opposed to like, go back- But John, it respects your content. Yeah, go back like several
⏹️ ▶️ John versions when there was an opaque tile bar, the title bar had rounded corners, but when you viewed
⏹️ ▶️ John an image in a window, the image started where the title bar ended, like
⏹️ ▶️ John under the title bar is where the image started. And those were sharp corners because the title bar ended, and then it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a right angle, and you could see all the pixels in the image. And then when you went to the bottom of the window for many, many, many
⏹️ ▶️ John years in Mac OS X slash Mac OS, the bottom corners of the window were sharp as well. So if you put an
⏹️ ▶️ John image in a window, you could see all the pixels in the image. And Apple has slowly eaten away at that, and 26
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, we’re taking the whole corners. Like there could be something, there could be a big thing in there. There could be a, that could be like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John signature that you wouldn’t even see in the corner of like a picture if it’s a painting. They were just chopping it all off. And
⏹️ ▶️ John some people didn’t like how it looked. Some people did like how it looked, but the bottom line is the job of the window is to
⏹️ ▶️ John show the content. And it annoys me when they decide you don’t need to see the corners.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they decided that because of concentricity, which is they had all these little, you know, the controls had semicircular
⏹️ ▶️ John end caps on them and they could make the corners match the radius of the semicircular end caps such that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you put a central point where the center of the corner is and you traced out an arc, the arc on the window edge
⏹️ ▶️ John would exactly match the arc on the controls. That’s concentricity where you’d see concentric
⏹️ ▶️ John circles drawn from a central point. And then in Macros 27, as we discussed last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, decrease the corner radius of the window. So you can see more of your stuff and there was much rejoicing and many people
⏹️ ▶️ John who were there live have said, uh, since we recorded last week that it was cheering from the live
⏹️ ▶️ John audience for the fact that they fixed the window radius. So it’s not just me, but as I pointed out last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, they, you know, I’m, I’m, I endorse this change. Uh, they made a smaller corner radius on all
⏹️ ▶️ John the windows, but it no longer matches the corner radius on the floating
⏹️ ▶️ John controls. And so now it is the exact opposite of concentricity. You have two very different corner
⏹️ ▶️ John radii radiuses. Uh, and yeah, it’s, it’s hard. Anyway, all this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult for me to explain graphically. So I’m glad that Sammy Sito posted some
⏹️ ▶️ John images to explain this and we’ll put this link in the show notes You when you look at this image, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what I’m talking about 26 You’re like, oh everything looks nice and everything matches in 27 doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John match anymore to be clear I totally endorse the change in 27, but it is fighting against
⏹️ ▶️ John the other parts They didn’t change in liquid glass, which is a little capsule shaped buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah And I think this is one of those cases where the, I can see why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went for the Tahoe design because from a like visual isolated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco context, it does look better. The problem is it doesn’t work better in practice with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer UIs. And that is, I think, where Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gone a little bit too far in, when their designers get a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too pure and theoretical about things. this is kind of their failure mode. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has happened numerous times over their history, with numerous designers in charge too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, fortunately, they tend to eventually correct those things. And in this case, it took a year, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corrected it. So I’m glad to see that. Like there is no question in my mind, like, yeah, when you’re looking at a screenshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac OS 26 version does look better. But unfortunately, design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to interact with the real world. And sometimes that requires compromises on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pure ideal aesthetics, and you have to actually run to what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually need in reality.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, again, you have to ask, what is the job of a window? And the design they have now is awkward and bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John because also, the little floaty buttons and toolbars were also designed poorly. If
⏹️ ▶️ John they had designed from the start, you would say, OK, the job of the window is to show the content, and let’s let everything fall from that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what they’ve done is taken a design that totally didn’t do that job and fixed one part of it without fixing the
⏹️ ▶️ John other. So of course they don’t match. It’s still better than it was. Again, I still endorse the change, but it just highlights, Hey, we
⏹️ ▶️ John fixed one thing, but it looks like maybe this entire idea was bad because now we fixed that one thing and we see
⏹️ ▶️ John some other stuff that also looks bad with it and needs to be fixed. And man, it’s going to be a while
⏹️ ▶️ John before they rewind, uh, unwind all this stuff. But a baby steps one thing at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to tell you, based only on these screenshots, I agree with the slug of this post, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is y’all better shut up. Seriously. Is this what you really want to see window corners. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I based on the screenshot alone, it looks fricking terrible. And in Mac OS 27, it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because because you because it’s a mismatch was they fix the corners and didn’t fix the other parts that are next to the
⏹️ ▶️ John corners. You know how you can fix the other parts that are next to the corners? You can make those radii also match the you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a way to do it, but they didn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Like like in this case, like the like, it’s a little bit easier on the search box compared to the toolbar. But like, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it the search box. The reason why this is a mismatch is that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made the search box and the toolbar pills instead of round wrecks. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, basically like what we used to call ovals in kindergarten. It’s like they are… This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a text field that is a perfect oval around the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John left and right side. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not an oval. Don’t do the geometry people on you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But it’s close. It’s a capsule shape. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end caps on a rectangle. Right, and the problem is as the like as the height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that increases that means that the radius has to increase too. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does significantly constrain your design in a way that like well now you have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very very large corner radii on the window to match all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pill shapes or capsule shapes of the controls. In previous versions of Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those weren’t exact pill shapes they were round rects so that you could so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes they had rounded corners but the entire left and right side didn’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a continuous curve so that gives you way more flexibility and search
⏹️ ▶️ John fields were pill shapes at one point but the way they made that work is they just put bigger margins around them
⏹️ ▶️ John the corners of the window were practically square and the search field was pill shaped back in the day they
⏹️ ▶️ John just moved it farther from the edges so it didn’t look weird I mean just again it’s about holistic
⏹️ ▶️ John design design is like everything together. Does it work well? Does it look good? Does it look harmonious?
⏹️ ▶️ John And just 26 was like, well, we think it looks good. And the it’s visually harmonious,
⏹️ ▶️ John but nothing works. And so they’re just trying to fix it without changing everything. And you get 27.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what what has tentatively sold me on 27 being the improvement is what Marco said a couple of minutes ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that yeah, this looks worse in in this microcosm or in this this like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zoomed in view, but it actually affords you a much better view of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the content behind all this. So maybe they really are respecting our content. who to thunk it.
Mickey Mouse hands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Nine to five Mac has noted that the Mickey Mouse hands are back in Mac OS 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Golden Gate, and they also indicated or said the world is healing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you know about the Mickey Mouse hands? Was this news to you? No, we had talked about that, I think, at some point, semi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently, I guess, when 26 came out. I
⏹️ ▶️ John still hate the hand icons in 26 and 27. It didn’t change the shape of the hand icons much. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think maybe it looks like the the pointing finger is tilted a little bit. But, uh, yeah, what we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John is Mickey Mouse, the character. wears white gloves with like three little creases on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the hand and for I don’t know how long for ages and maybe since classic macros I think so
⏹️ ▶️ John the various hand cursors the pointing hand that you click on links with in a web browser the big
⏹️ ▶️ John hand that when you hold down spacebar in Photoshop you can move the canvas around and the grabby hand where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John grabbing something all those hands look like a white glove because they were white black outline with
⏹️ ▶️ John a white cursor with three little Mickey Mouse creases on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the love and in 26 they took off the creases because I don’t know that they didn’t want it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be whimsical anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John and 27 they brought them back which to me seems petty but I endorse it. That’s incredible.
New Finder icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In Mac OS 27, there are a bunch of new icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know they’re they’re different. I don’t know what else to say. But the the finder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one Mmm, I don’t know what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing here Oh the basic Apple guy says honey the finder icon sucks again, and I disagree I know
⏹️ ▶️ John it he’s getting at and we’ll get more from the basic Apple guy in a little bit but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the link we’ll have in the notes you can see the the Tahoe and Golding it finder icons and the the main sin of the Goldini
⏹️ ▶️ John Finder icon is they made the blue too light again. I don’t know who’s obsessed with making a light blue Finder, but just back off,
⏹️ ▶️ John man. Like it’s gotta be like a deeper blue. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But they also changed the shape
⏹️ ▶️ John of the profile face. Like the Finder icon, which used to be the macOS icon, is like a
⏹️ ▶️ John face that is, you know, the two eyes and a smiley face that looks like a face head on, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John is blue on the left and white on the right. And the right-hand part of it also looks like a face in profile.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of like a two-face thing. Some people call it two-face. Anyway, in
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe, the profile face had a completely vertical line under the
⏹️ ▶️ John nose of the face, and now it is more curved. The original version of this was more curved. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the golden gate shape is actually an improvement. The color is just too light. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I should follow feedback on that. Just darken up the color. You’re on the right path. Just darken up the color, and then maybe extend
⏹️ ▶️ John the white part to the edges of the squircle, and then maybe just gives back the old icon?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. Yeah, I think at that point you’re at the old icon, which honestly is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John not really, because there’s been so many variations. If you look at the original, like classic Mac OS one from Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 7.6 or whenever it first appeared, it wasn’t the Finder icon, it was the booting up Mac OS 7.6,
⏹️ ▶️ John like splash screen face. It had a vertical line that extended past the bounds
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing. It has looked very different over the years. So anyway, I think GoldenGate’s design is better than TAS, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We just need Stephen Hackett to get upset about this and then it’ll get changed. That’s how it worked last year, right?
Sharper app icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then we have a bunch of other ones by BasicAppleGuy and they are side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by side in their post. And I don’t know, do you want to go through these? Do you just have broad comments about
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’ll go. I mean, again, follow the link to BasicAppleGuy’s post about this because he posted a ton of images
⏹️ ▶️ John to show Tahoe versus GoldenGate. And I just want to make the point that we talked about this back when Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ John came out with, you know, in WWDC 2025 with the advent of Tahoe and Icon
⏹️ ▶️ John Composer. And just to recap, they introduced a new format for icons, which is.icon files. It’s amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John no one had ever used that extension before, but Apple got it,.icon. And it’s basically a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of resources in a little package and instructions for compositing them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the resources can be bitmaps or vector images. And what
⏹️ ▶️ John this means is if you go into an application package on Tahoe and you dig around in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, where’s the icon? you probably won’t find a bit mapped image of the icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it has one of those for legacy reasons or for fallback reasons. What you’ll find are these icon assets
⏹️ ▶️ John shoved into an asset catalog that have the ingredients of the icon and they are composited in real time by Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS to make the icon. And part of the reason they do that is because Tahoe introduced this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of, on Mac OS anyway, and I guess on iOS as well, of icon themes where you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John a light mode, dark mode, the clear icons. All that is doing is changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the formula for how those pieces in the dot icon files are composited to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the final icon. So ideally in Apple’s world, you just have a bunch of vector shapes
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of instructions for compositing them, and then we can make that icon look good in light mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John in dark mode, in clear mode, and in, you know, whatever. Another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you can do by moving the icon format to this recipe and ingredients composited together
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you can change essentially all the icons in every single one of your OSs without
⏹️ ▶️ John having to redraw your icons. So that’s what we’re looking at here. As far as I can tell, pretty much all these icons in
⏹️ ▶️ John basic Apple Guys posts are the same icons as in the same contents of the.icon
⏹️ ▶️ John files that were assembled into the assets.car file, or whatever. Like the resources are the
⏹️ ▶️ John same. They didn’t redraw the icons. All they’re doing is changing the recipe for how they’re composited.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you would think, how big a difference could that possibly make? Obviously the finder icon has changed. We just got
⏹️ ▶️ John done saying that the shapes are different, but these icons we’re looking at in our notes and most of the ones in this blog post that we’ll link,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re basically the same icon, but changing the compositing makes the world of difference. Marco mentioned it before
⏹️ ▶️ John when he said that when he upgraded 27, then when he looked back at 26, that everything looked blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ John These are way zoomed in in our show notes. So I’d encourage you to like move back from your screen or like shrink them down or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the smaller these icons get, the more they are icon size and not blown up to this giant size, the more you
⏹️ ▶️ John can see how blurry Tahoe’s compositing was. Like everything is in this weird haze
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the edges are blurred and take that same resource and render it in the new way. And there’s two things about
⏹️ ▶️ John the new way of rendering. One, crisper edges. And two, they added a new refraction
⏹️ ▶️ John feature to the recipe where each individual layer can say, should this layer refract
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s behind it? And by refracting, they just mean like, make it seem as if the edges of the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing are made of rounded glass so that when you see the things through it, it kind of bends the light a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I think for the most part, the Golden Gate versions of every single one of these icons
⏹️ ▶️ John is an improvement because things that were blurry and indistinct and low contrast in Tahoe become
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp and higher contrast. And the few cases where they added refraction, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John freeform icon, I think look great, especially at large sizes. Small sizes is kind of lost, but what do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think? Do you think this is an upgrade or a downgrade?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, I think this looks like an eye test. When you look at the Tahoe icons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you look at the Golden Gate icons. One or two? Yeah, exactly. The Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons look like, I don’t have my reading glasses on, and I need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you look over at Golden Gate, you’re like, ah, crispness. Maybe, look, Alan Dye seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like he’s about in his 40s. Maybe he just needs reading glasses, and he doesn’t know that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like, when you see Tahoe, it looks like eye strain. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is part of why I am so anti-blurry text ever appearing in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a UI. Because when you are of middle age and you need reading glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you see blurry text, your eyes, like you instinctively think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to squint or look through the bottom of my glasses or whatever it is, like whatever your accommodation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for seeing things more sharply. you kind of instinctively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think, I’m the problem, and you do whatever that accommodation is instinctively,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it doesn’t get fixed. And that’s what eye strain is. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at blurry text in a UI, it reminds you of eye strain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then also can cause eye strain, which is part of the many, it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the many reasons why that’s a bad idea in a UI design. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of do that across the whole system in a broad, diffuse way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have everything be a little bit soft and blurry all the time is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good design. So I am again, very thankful when I see these icons, like, ah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crispness. And you know what? When I have to like tweak my overcast icon to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well on 26 and 27, that’s gonna be a little bit of a pain in the butt. In this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, I don’t care, worth it. I am so happy to see the return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sharpness and contrast. And that’s the overall message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Some of these designs probably need a bit more tweaking to look as good as they can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but overall it is way sharper and higher contrast.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you don’t have to do anything to your Overcast icon. That’s the point. Like the new version of Icon Composer will show you,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just open up your icon file that you’ve been using in Tahoe, it will show you in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s how this icon looked in Tahoe. And here’s how it’s going to look in Golden
⏹️ ▶️ John Gate. No changes to the icon. Again, this is just changing how the software composites your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you can change, I think the one thing they added in 27 is you can flip the little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John for each layer that says refraction, yes, no. And you can change the amount of refraction, the angle, all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of other crap like that. But I think that is the only new feature. But like I said, Apple didn’t update, for
⏹️ ▶️ John the most part, didn’t update these icons. the exact same icon will look different in 26 than it does in 27, which is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s wild, but it’s like a fallout of them deciding that their icons
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be ingredients and recipes instead of baked in bitmaps. Now, there’s nothing stopping you
⏹️ ▶️ John from making your icon an icon composer and just putting in one layer that’s 100% opaque bitmap. You can still
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. There’s no one stopping you from making a bitmap icon. Lots of Apple icons incorporate bitmaps in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it seems like if you look at all of Apple’s icons. They prefer you just use a bunch of vector shapes
⏹️ ▶️ John and that gives Apple the freedom to essentially change the look of every single icon
⏹️ ▶️ John without asking developers or their own developers to change anything about their icons. They just change
⏹️ ▶️ John the rendering. Now it’s somewhat limited. They’re not going to change them in radical ways, but this is the thing to keep an eye
⏹️ ▶️ John on. It’s a, it’s a bold new regime for icons going from like photo realistic bitmaps
⏹️ ▶️ John in 10.0 to, uh, you know, a bunch of ingredients and recipes. already
⏹️ ▶️ John from 26 to 27, 26, they rolled out 27. They’re changing the look. So I wonder if next year
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to have a thing, an icon composer that says, Hey, the same icon with no changes. Here’s how it looks in 26. Here’s how it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John in 27. Here’s how it looks in 28. Uh, and don’t remember. I remember you also have to check what is
⏹️ ▶️ John light mode, dark mode, clear mode. Is that all of them or is there one more I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco forgetting? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light, dark and like kind of, yeah. Uncolored
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So fascinating. I think some of the icons are downgrades. I think the little robot guy looks a little bit worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John but uh, a pale shadow of his former self anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s the thing. Like I like when I saw my overcast icon for the first time on on 27, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, that’s a little it’s a little bit too sharp in certain ways because I had designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to try to fight against all that softness in 26. So like there are certain, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, colors or layer effects or things that like I might dial back slightly for the 27 version so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks more normal. You know, it’s kind of like when you see like when you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have like stage makeup on and then you go into the regular world and you look ridiculous, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different context, you might actually make different decisions depending on how it is being rendered and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can make tweaks to the recipe on a per OS basis, but I’m not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. I have to see. I’m pretty sure you can’t include multiple icons for
⏹️ ▶️ John different OS’s. I did that thing that I talked about the past episode where I bent over backwards to use my old bitmap icons
⏹️ ▶️ John on pre 26 and I’m going to still keep doing that if I can. I’m not I know I can composer
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you tweak the icons for different modes like Oh, do you want to make a tweak that’s in dark mode only like in dark mode, you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to turn off this layer effect, but light one you want to turn on, but I don’t know if it lets you do that on a per OS basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t previews your icon. It says here’s how it looks in 26 and 27. But I think there might be one other
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two other things they added besides refraction. I think they might have let you do like inside outside glint effects
⏹️ ▶️ John on stuff or anyway, brave new world of icons.
Preparing for touch-Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, there’s been a lot of chatter and understandably so about how Apple is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarterbacking to get touch max ready to rock, uh, Curtis hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rights in Mac OS 27 and a scroll view has a new refresh controller, which takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an NS refresh controller, which allows native pull to refresh. Try it in Safari on a webpage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t, I, that’s going to feel so weird to do on a Mac, but you know, touch max, you got to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Steve Charlton Smith appears yet again. AppKit isn’t just getting touch gesture support, but NSToolbar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now has iOS-style fluid morphing animations when used with a touchscreen, too. Long presses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trigger a right-click. Momentum pinch and scroll work great, very clearly telegraphing upcoming touchscreen Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anywhere you see a liquid glass stretch or highlight effect on iOS now functions in the same way on macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when used with touch. Here’s Calculator on macOS showing off some of the fluid interactions, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll put a link in the show notes. It has this tweet, or toot, or whatever they’re called, and a couple follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have GIFs that indicate what Steve is talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all the wiggly effect where you’re like on your phone when you like, most people don’t do this, they just press buttons. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you were to press your finger on the button on a phone and move your finger around, you can see the button kind of stretches
⏹️ ▶️ John and follows your finger. All that stuff is in macOS controls if it when used with touch. And they added a
⏹️ ▶️ John whole bunch of new APIs, a whole bunch of new things you can set on it to say, it was recent, this is in the
⏹️ ▶️ John notes because it just came out today, but I was recently showing that there’s keys that you can set to make all the menus look essential,
⏹️ ▶️ John like iPad menus in, you know, and that if you pull down the menu and keep your finger down on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and move it around, you’ll pull the menu a little bit. I don’t think those effects really add anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re part of liquid glass. That’s the liquid part of it. I mean, they don’t take away too much because I feel like they don’t bother
⏹️ ▶️ John you if you don’t intentionally trigger them, but I think it’s just basically a waste of time, but anyway, all that’s coming to the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to touch your screens?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not. Uh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, that’s not even a question for me. I don’t plan to, but there are definitely occasions, especially if I’m like flip flopping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between iPad and Mac, which doesn’t happen often to be fair, but it does happen and there’s definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occasions that I’ve like started to reach up, um, to like swipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at something just briefly. I don’t feel like in the here, right here, this is Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one-on-one. I don’t feel like there’s anything that this solves in my life. Like it would be nice, I guess, to occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to do this, but I, I sitting here now, I don’t yearn for a touchscreen Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That said, uh, when I don’t remember what report it was, and I’m sure we talked about it on the show, but when they talked about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you use touch, there’ll be like contextual menus or something like that, that pop up like path style,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like around your finger. I I’m sure this was a German
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John controls that
⏹️ ▶️ John are more suited to fingers than to mouse blunders.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. That could be interesting and could be really cool. So we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, it’s this type of thing that once you start doing it, you can’t go back. Like that’s why everyone wants it. And judging
⏹️ ▶️ John by my children’s laptop screens, they’re constantly touching them even though they’re not touch screens. So I guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ John both my kids will be touching their screen like the same amount they do now, which is to say all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they put that oleophobic coating on the screen because that will just help them to keep their screens be less gross. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t do it because I don’t tend to use laptops. And if I did use a laptop, I wouldn’t do it because I don’t want to get into that habit because
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes the screen uglier for me. But you know, I have an iPad and I touch it all the time. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John once you go touch, you can’t go back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder like, you know, cause I, as I’ve, as I have with my most recent like laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop, I have the nanotexture screen and I’ve told, I’ve said on the show many times how much I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely love nanotexture and I don’t plan to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any future laptops without it as long as if they are offered with it. And I wonder like, you know, one of the downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nanotexture is that it is harder to clean and you know it does just like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other type of screen I guess the glossy type of screen it does get those like keyboard imprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines in the middle of the screen that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly become impossible to clean I don’t know how to clean those I like once it gets once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get like to a certain point of those imprint marks they seem to be permanent and that’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been the case even before nanotexture I wonder like you know the eye when when Apple says nanotexture they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that refers to a few different processes they’ve had over time. Like the original Pro Display XDR was the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and that did one version of it. And then the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Mac laptops that offer it are a different version of it. And then the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has it is yet a different version of nanotexture. I wonder if maybe they would move to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Pro version of it for the Touch laptop and whether that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be easier to clean.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, let us make a fourth version. Let us keep refining it. Yeah, I imagine it’ll be more like the iPad one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe a newer revision.
HIG on menu icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple has updated the Human Interface Guidelines, or the HIG, for menus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It says in the HIG, use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Icons allow people to find menu items more quickly and help clarify what selecting an item does. Use an icon to highlight the most common
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actions and key features of your app, file system locations, connected devices, visual concepts like rotating or flipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an image, and user-generated content like folders and documents. Don’t display an icon if you can’t find one that clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey represents a menu item. And they give a very curious example of the seven days of the week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where they’ve chosen odd choices for icons for each day of the week with a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gray X below it indicating don’t do this. And then they have a different version that’s just the text for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the seven days a week. And they have the little green checkmark. Yes, do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love that. I love that the the don’t do this is just Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Yeah. The idea is you have to have come for the icon for every item. So good luck. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco told you a year ago, this is the right way to do it. And now we’re saying this exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is the wrong way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. And just this is a clarifying from last episode we were like, well, is there a way to turn off
⏹️ ▶️ John the icons? Is it some kind of user setting? Is it a developer choice? I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John sure it is only developer control. I didn’t see anything in the UI for it. But regardless, the important point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of how this is implemented in terms of who gets to decide which icons appear where, Apple’s advice
⏹️ ▶️ John to developers has now reverted essentially to its pre-26 advice, which is, don’t put an icon
⏹️ ▶️ John on every menu item. That’s not what we want you to do. So the put an icon in, and again, the 26
⏹️ ▶️ John interface guidelines also did not say to put an icon on everything. We read them on the show to clarify,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they were like, but you know, put them on most stuff I guess, and repeat them in this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John way. It was like the guidelines were incoherent last time. The guidelines didn’t say you must
⏹️ ▶️ John put an icon on every menu item. But in practice, what Apple did was basically put an icon on almost every menu item, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it was ridiculous, and the advice was vague, and didn’t make it clear when am I supposed to use icons or
⏹️ ▶️ John not? Should I copy what Apple’s apps do? Like the 26 guidelines didn’t give developers
⏹️ ▶️ John enough information to know what they should do. The earlier guidelines for all the other years
⏹️ ▶️ John of the macOS did give clear advice, and now the advice is once again clear, and not only is it clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is the pre-26 advice, which is don’t put icons everywhere. They do say in a subsequent part of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John to, as they say, apply uniform visual treatment across menu items in the same group for visual consistency
⏹️ ▶️ John and balance, provide icons for all menu items in a group or none of them. And it’s showing like if there’s a group of
⏹️ ▶️ John menu items, like it’s like a divider, and then there’s menu items for doing stuff with Windows, like move and resize
⏹️ ▶️ John or full screen or whatever. If they have icons to let you know, like when this is the tile thing, the tiles
⏹️ ▶️ John to the right half of the screen, this is the thing that tiles to the left or whatever, they should all have icons and not just like one or two of them because
⏹️ ▶️ John these are all commands where icons are useful. So again, the advice is clear. default, your default
⏹️ ▶️ John should be no icons. But if you think an icon, as they say, will help clarify
⏹️ ▶️ John what selecting an item does, then do use an icon. But all icons that do that similar all
⏹️ ▶️ John menu items that do that similar thing should also have icons. So yeah, back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sanity. Wasn’t there a convention in the past? Maybe I mean, maybe I just like misinterpreted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Wasn’t there a convention in the past that menu items and Mac OS would have an icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only if they matched a toolbar item in that app, and it would be the same icon as the toolbar item?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Hague might have said that at one point, but I don’t think that was strongly suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while. Maybe it was in the pre-26 ones, but yeah, the thing with toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ John icons is they have changed so much over the years that I think they probably just deleted that advice in menus
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was ever there just because it adds confusion. It’s like, well, you know, in the current
⏹️ ▶️ John design system, it’s impossible to do that because the pictures on the toolbars would never fit in
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar icons. Like if you think about the toolbar images in like Mac OS 10.0, those wouldn’t fit in
⏹️ ▶️ John menus, especially in the pre-retina days. This was just literally impossible. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. That is the end of the Mac OS section. You can look at your timestamp now and compare it to where we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were so very, very long ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget to subtract the Microsoft Bob time. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very important. Also, much of what we were saying was way beyond Mac OS. Like the icons are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Whose side are you on? I’m just saying, look, we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Apple OSS 27 and Microsoft Bob.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that was the Mac OS section. The icons were, yes. But that’s, we have the same problem as Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we should have just talked about improvements, trust and safety and AI. Well done.
Siri pull-down animation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to iOS 27, Mario Guzman writes, the new pull-down animation for Siri AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iOS 27 is pretty nice. It’s basically the old pulse refresh animation from iOS 6. Nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun, fluid. The animation will also start from where you drag your fingers, so it won’t always be animating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in from the center. And at a glance, this looks pretty great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, check out the movie and the tooth that we’ll link in the show notes. It’s basically you pull down from the top and it’s like you’re pulling
⏹️ ▶️ John a black blob from the top, but like it bends down the top of the screen. And once the black blob
⏹️ ▶️ John gets far enough from the top of the screen, the screen like snaps closed behind it and that blob becomes the
⏹️ ▶️ John floating Siri thing. I’m still not a big fan of the glossy black transparent refracting
⏹️ ▶️ John look for Siri stuff, but it is at least consistent and it is mostly legible and
⏹️ ▶️ John these little fun bits where you get to pull out a little blob of ink are also fun.
iPad menu-bar tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, that was the end of the iOS 27 section. Let’s move on to iPadOS 27. And Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trout and Smith writes, the iPad’s menu bar is now left aligned and can be set to display permanently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When hidden, it will still show the app name so you know which app is currently front most.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, whoever was insisting, we can’t just put a menu bar on the iPad. Like, isn’t that surrendering? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, what if we center it? Then it’s like we’re doing something different. And then 27 said, just put, just left align it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John just the menu bar is left aligned, just do it. and make an option to have it permanently visible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s not visible, make sure you show the app name. It’s like, there’s just slowly like, we tried
⏹️ ▶️ John for a decade or whatever to come up with a UI that’s better than the Mac UI. We couldn’t do it. Not to say it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible, but all I can say is we didn’t do it. So let’s just do the things we know work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the end of the iPadOS 27 section. Let’s talk about.
tvOS hardware cutoff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TVOS 27, which in John’s defense, there was almost no mention of in the keynote. We should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about hardware support, which is to say TVOS 27 drops support for the Apple TV HD from 2015 and the Apple TV 4K first generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 2017. As I have lamented many times recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and having come fresh off of a vacation where I brought, I believe it’s the HD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from 2015, whatever the, I think this is the first one that allowed for apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it. This is an old Apple TV and it shows. Yeah, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. And I would love, as I’ve said so many times, I would love to trickle down and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade my travel slash tailgate Apple TV to something nicer. And apparently this is as nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it will ever be because it will not get the tvOS 27. And I’m not really sad about that since it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurting so bad, but give me a new Apple TV, Apple, please, please. I want it, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of surprised that the Apple TV 4K got dropped, but then I saw what year it came out. I was like, okay. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John so recent. Apple TV 4K, that’s the new one. No, first generation was 2017. Yeah. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turns out Apple TVs don’t come out that often.
watchOS hardware cutoff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WatchOS 27, we’re done with tvOS, which again, in John’s defense, that makes sense. WatchOS 27,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s also talk about their hardware support. Hartley Charlton, MacRumors says, Apple confirmed that the only Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch models compatible with WatchOS 27 are Series 9, Series 10, Series 11, Ultra 2, Ultra 3, and SE3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Initially, they had incorrectly said that the Series 9 was not supported, but that was an oops, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is supported. So again, 9, 10, 11, not the Ultra 1, but yes for Ultra 2 and 3, and yes for the SE3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When they said the nine wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John supported, I’m like, really? Jesus is harsh. And I’m glad the nine came back in, but still this is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Marco would know better than I, is this the most harsh hardware cutoff ever for a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think that’s, it’s a casualty of the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow update pace they chose for the Apple watch. So C’s, you know, as we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in when, when, whenever new Apple watches come out, they have gone like two or three versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a row having the same processor on on Apple watches. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is what happens. It’s like all of a sudden when you have when you want to cut off a processor that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was used for three generations in a row, you end up slicing off a whole lot of models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So That’s why this is happening.
Sponsor: Quince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Quince. Now you’ve potentially heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of our former Quince spots or maybe on a different podcast and you might think to yourself, well, Quince just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does clothing. Right? Oh no, my friend. Oh no, not at all. Not only does Quince do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clothing for people who buy men’s clothing, for people who buy women’s clothing, but they do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey child clothing. In fact, Declan got some like stretchy pants, some,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some like kind of sweat pants that he really, really enjoys. that he really, really enjoys. And Mikaela got this absolutely adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long-sleeve dress with like hearts and different colors all over it. And Pockets, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know anything, and even I know that that’s really exciting. They do stuff for the home, for travel. They do bags and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accessories, jewelry, beauty and wellness, all sorts of different things. And what’s great about Quince is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of their clothes are really well-made. I had gotten a set of linen pants at the end of last summer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been so excited to bring them to the beach this summer so I can use them in their like native habitat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I forgot them at home. I’m genuinely upset by this. I literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came home from the beach today and I completely forgot to bring them. I’m very sad, but I’ve got plenty of summer left, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one more beach trip. So there’s plenty of opportunity to put on these excellent linen pants that I got from Quince. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you are interested in any of the stuff that they offer, including, but not limited to clothing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the great things that Quince does is that they work directly with ethical factories. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way you cut out the the middle people and you’re paying for quality not brand markup. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have things beyond clothes, they have upholstered sofas, they have ceramic cookware, premium bedding, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can almost do your entire house with just Quince stuff and that’s pretty awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my book. So elevate your summer wardrobe, go to quince.com.at for free shipping on your order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 365 day returns. It’s now available in Canada as well. That’s q-u-i-n-c-e.com.at
Apple’s AI Tech Talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when we were there two years ago, I believe it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, what they did was they had the keynotes and then most of us, I don’t remember if we were told to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if it was optional or what the deal was, but most of us were shuffled into the Steve jobs theater. And that’s when we saw,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I just deemed who were the, who was she talking to? I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to, uh, John G Andrea and maybe Mike Rockwell. And I forget it was that some Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I really like iJustine, but she was clearly giving nothing but softball questions to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if they did anything last year or not. It doesn’t really matter. But this year what they did was selected media was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey invited to an on the record technical deep dive into the bold new architecture enabling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple intelligence capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Apple’s description. I’m assuming that quote is from the Verge. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey has quotation
⏹️ ▶️ John marks around it. So I’m assuming it’s Apple talking when they say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was Craig Federighi, Amar Subramanya, I think I got that close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to right, who’s the vice president of AI, Mike Rockwell, who’s the Siri lead, and Sebastian Marino-Mess,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the software VP. There are some images from TechRadar, which we’ll put in the show notes of Steve talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in front of various like diagrams and whatnot. That’s Craig, not Steve. Oh God, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. Thank you for the correction. Good grief.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was given in the, what is it, the developer center. It’s a tiny, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never even been in this room, although maybe I’ve walked by it, but a tiny little room. Like it’s not, the Steve Jobs Theater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this wasn’t in the theater, my bad. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John where I thought it was. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, this was in the developer center, that tiny room that has like four rows. It’s where the talk show live
⏹️ ▶️ John was like during like the COVID lockdown year, do you remember? My bad, I didn’t realize. Yeah, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so small. It’s like four or five rows deep. It’s just a one tiny little room. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why they didn’t do this as a WWDC session or publicly broadcast this or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was clearly on the record. Press was there and people were taking pictures. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if anyone just recorded the whole thing on their phone, but I kind of wish they did because everybody was forced to say, here’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John my AI transcription note-taking app wrote. Here’s what the fastest typist at our company wrote. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna read a little bit from Chance Miller from 9to5Macro, I’m assuming had really good fingers and typed all this stuff up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John even that had typos or maybe it was, anyway, tons of info in this
⏹️ ▶️ John AI tech talk that I guess is not really, I mean, is it relevant to developers?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s so many WWC sessions you could argue like, Do developers need to know this or is this just
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple talking about a cool thing that they did? Sometimes it’s a little bit of each. You’re like, well, it does help if developers
⏹️ ▶️ John know what’s under the covers. It’ll give them an idea to how to correctly assess a feature and know if it’s right for them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just cool. And so they did this to explain their AI architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fascinating, but I’ve had to piece it, because I wasn’t there. I had to piece it together from everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John reports. And some of them, they only invited a tiny select set of press because the
⏹️ ▶️ John room is tiny. You can’t fit that many people. I don’t know why they didn’t do it since she was upstate, or maybe they thought most people
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t interested in this nerdy crap. Craig Federi is interested in this nerdy crap, clearly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the press that they invited, some of them were into it and some of them were like, oh, they just talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John AI and like, they latched onto a few of like the intercompany drama things. But I would have loved
⏹️ ▶️ John to learn even more. So I learned as much as I could by looking at what other people reported and now we’ll piece it together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have those images, like we said, and I’m gonna read a bunch from Chance Miller,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as John said. So according to Federighi, and these are, as best as we know, either verbatim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or near verbatim quotes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is people attempting to transcribe. So if there are errors, it’s just errors in transcription.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google search or anything like that as the foundation of our system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I hope that’s clear. The amount of Google Assistant we use is none.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here, Craig, and I encourage people to look at these pictures in TechRed. This is the best images I could find because I think they were in the front
⏹️ ▶️ John row and there are slides behind them, which I just released the slides, man. But anyway, this shows an architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John diagram of like the phone on the left with like a stack of round recs showing like
⏹️ ▶️ John the system experience and the AI assistant and then down from that are the apps and then down from that is the
⏹️ ▶️ John system orchestrator. And like, it’s showing like the block diagram and then there’s a line going to the right showing the cloud part of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna talk about both parts of them. But this first part where Craig’s talking, he’s like, look, you know, I know
⏹️ ▶️ John we did deal with Google, but he’s trying to explain, and I’m not sure how good a job he’s doing, but I think what he’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to explain is when we say we’re using Google Gemini, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that like, you know, when you go to gemini.google.com and you type in that box, that’s not what we’re using. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is an entire like piece of software that under the cover uses Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ John models and stuff, but we’re not using Google Assistant. We’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ John the Gemini chat bot. And he goes further to say, we’re not using the infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John that they use to run the backend for those services either. That is entirely a Google thing. As
⏹️ ▶️ John he says, the amount of Google Assistant we use is none. What he’s trying to say is, we wrote our own
⏹️ ▶️ John like thing that uses models behind the scene that shares zero code with Google
⏹️ ▶️ John And when we talk to models behind the scenes, those models are not any of the models that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google uses to power any of its customer facing products. So this is Apple really trying to draw the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t think like, oh, it’s a shiny black blob where I get to talk to Google Gemini just like I do at gemini.google.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from Craig, the system orchestrator is key to the privacy architecture of our entire system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s what coordinates requests against things like the app toolbox that provides access to actions within your apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Spotlight Semantic Index to access personal content to help fulfill your request, and even things like on-screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey context to understand what you might be looking at at the moment you’re making a request. This in turn is built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a set of powerful on-device models. These handle everything from understanding speech to synthesizing the voice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that speaks back to you, to understanding visually the environment and the on-screen context, understanding text that might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be on the screen, as well as a whole set of other models. For some requests, models are capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of processing your Siri requests entirely locally on the device. But sometimes the system orchestrator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realizes that it’s a more sophisticated question, and then it wants to draw on greater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intelligence. It does that by contacting our models running in Private Cloud Compute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Private Cloud Compute hosts our third generation of Apple Foundation models, from our AFM Cloud and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AFM Cloud Pro models to our AFM Fusion model and Image model. These are the models that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the product of our collaboration with Google. These are models designed specifically for our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple intelligence experiences. Finally, when you make a request involving current events or other elements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of world knowledge, those responses are grounded by accessing Apple’s world knowledge service. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that we’ve built over many years and provides a great source of information to satisfy your request.
⏹️ ▶️ John that is kind of describing the layer cake to saying we have a whole bunch of models that are running on your
⏹️ ▶️ John device. And we wrote software, the system orchestrator that’s above them, that when you give a query through Siri, which is an app that
⏹️ ▶️ John we wrote, and it goes to the system orchestrator, which is an app that we wrote, and it decides where is it gonna send your request and we
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of different models that run on device that do all these things that we listed and even more. And it decides, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what happens when you’re like, I’m using, you know, Google Gemini to do something or I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John like a codex coding agent, or like, and you’re just typing. It’s not like it takes what you type, sends it
⏹️ ▶️ John to an LLM, gets a response. There’s a whole piece of software under there that is deciding, you know, there’s the system
⏹️ ▶️ John prompt and all that other stuff, but like, it’s composing prompts to send to different agents,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting the responses back, using those to figure out where and when it’s going to send the next response. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the product. Like we’ve talked a lot about like LMS being commoditized. Is this a, is this a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where anyone can have an LLM and it’s fine? LLMs may be commoditized, but the products
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re all using are not. Commodities. Uh, it’s kind of like saying like the underlying
⏹️ ▶️ John search engine technology may be commoditized, but like the things that make the app or the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, index the web and all that stuff are not commodities because that’s what makes a product good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And here’s Apple describing the app that it made on all our phones and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that does all this stuff that eventually, yes, sends requests to either an on device model or a cloud model and private cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John compute. But that is the very, very last link in a long chain. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, requests are going back and forth all internally with all this stuff many times over before
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a response. And that’s, you know, that’s what Apple’s like. That’s what we wrote. And so again, you should not expect
⏹️ ▶️ John this to look, behave or be anything like Google Gemini because it just doesn’t share anything with it except
⏹️ ▶️ John for the fact that the various underlying models that it is orchestrating among
⏹️ ▶️ John were created in collaboration with the Google in a fuzzy degree that we’ll get to in a little bit. And then even
⏹️ ▶️ John going so far as to say, like, when we have to find something like the world knowledge thing, which is Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fun phrase, it doesn’t go to Google search either. Like, yes, I know they did a collaboration with Google, but it’s not going to Google search
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple made. And I think this might’ve been in the notes and we never got to it in the past year. Uh, but Apple’s world
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge service, I don’t know if we ever talked about on the show, but like the rumor was they’re making a
⏹️ ▶️ John service that knows things about the world. And so when you ask a question about the world, it doesn’t go to
⏹️ ▶️ John Google search. It goes to Apple’s word knowledge service. And Dan Morin’s had some things to say about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Oh, so Dan tuted. I asked Siri AI what it knew about me. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about quote Dan Morin quote. And it did a pretty well until I clicked on my hyperlinked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name and got a Wikipedia entry for an entirely different Dan M. Fascinatingly, since Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI seems to largely be relying on Apple’s web index, it doesn’t appear to have the ability to access the web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly. Case in point, after my mistaken Wikipedia identification, someone did go out and create a Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page for me. But Siri AI can’t see it yet, even if you provide it with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey URLs. So Dan asks, what about this? And pastes in the URL. And the response is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that URL currently leads to a quote, Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name, quote page. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing a live page that link, it may have been created very recently and hasn’t been indexed by my search engines yet, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it might be a draft in the Wikipedia sandbox. If you’re able to open it, what does the first sentence say?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you tell me what it says? So this is the blessing, the blessing and the curse of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John creating its old word, not world knowledge. Thing. Part of what makes Google valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John is their ability to crawl the web and keep their index up to date.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple, Google has made tremendous advances in that back in the old days. You know, You’d make
⏹️ ▶️ John a change to a page and you have to wait for it to appear in the Google index. These days, Google indexes aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ John and amazingly and in proportion to how much change in traffic things get. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John bet Google is indexing Wikipedia like crazy. How good is Apple going to be at keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John their world knowledge index up to date? Now, granted, this is asking a lot. Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John page was probably created that day and then Dan Morin’s asking it. But just to show the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Siri AI works, even if given the URL, it still won’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John go out and get that URL. It says, well, that leads to a page that says there’s no article with his name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I bet it does in the Apple World Knowledge Index that was created some time in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John But right now it doesn’t. Hey, Siri AI, why don’t you go to that web page right now
⏹️ ▶️ John and read what it says on it? And it’s like, I can’t do that. if you open
⏹️ ▶️ John it up, what does it say? Oh, so I just it’s I’m not sure how they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to resolve this because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the latest top news that’s staying in baby. Switch to CNN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey This is terrible. No, this is all together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Terrible. News in Washington.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m Janine Herbst that what is this playing? I I guess I said the S-I-R-I.
Filters to defeat wake-words
⏹️ ▶️ John an opportunity, Marco, for you to address the thing that people kept posting to you this week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so this has been going around that if you open up the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the WWDC keynote in an audio editor and show a frequency spectrogram,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I verified this is actually true, whenever Whenever they say the word Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they strip out these tight, narrow frequency bands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 3k, 4k, 5k, and 6k hertz. It’s a tight enough strip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t really hear a difference. As a human listening to a presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t sound weird to you. It doesn’t sound muffled or muted because they’re only doing these little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slices of the frequency spectrum. And the idea behind this is theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be just enough of a reduction in the signal in key areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it defeats the recognition of everyone’s devices listening to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keynote like in the background so that everyone’s phones don’t activate when they hear somebody in the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say Siri. Because they said that a lot in this keynote. Yes. This is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a similar trick done back when Amazon did a Super Bowl commercial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Alexa service. I believe it was in twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did something similar with the audio of that commercial where when they when they said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their hail word to their assistant, they also stripped out some frequencies to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix the same problem so that that way everyone’s Amazon Echoes wouldn’t wake up in response to that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon even blogged about it, about the science behind why they were doing this and how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtly defeated their recognition to serve this role. So everyone said, since Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this, that must be why. And then everyone else started saying, well, wait a minute, my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my wife’s phone and all these other phones in the room kept activating during the keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I tried, the reason why I paid attention to this is that even back when Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did their version of this back a few years ago, I thought, wouldn’t it be a great overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature if I just detect, like, if you are playing out loud on a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in a car, if I try to detect when a podcast contains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the word Siri or Alexa and apply that filter myself in overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it’s playing so that podcasts don’t trigger all your devices accidentally, wouldn’t that be a cool feature?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I tried recreating this effect, even just like first in an audio editor. So I would record myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying Siri or Alexa or whatever and giving a command. And I would play it over speakers and then I’d see my device is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco activated. And then I would say, all right, what filters in Adobe Audition or whatever do I need to apply to replicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this effect so it defeats that recognition? And back when Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did their Super Bowl commercial, I could not do it. No matter what I tried, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could not get the recording of my voice to not trigger the speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what did I do when all this came out this week about Siri? I tried the exact same thing. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went in and I was able to compare because now I had the real audio from Apple. So I opened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that real audio up and I saw exactly how they stripped out those frequencies and exactly which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones were stripped out with what kind of response pattern. And I figured out exactly how to replicate like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as close as possible to that process. And I applied it to a test file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I still couldn’t replicate the effect. It would still wake up all my devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever I would play my voice coming over the speakers. Now, what some people have theorized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that maybe by recognizing my voice, maybe I’m giving it such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong signal because it’s me saying it, that my device would start to, but maybe like somebody else wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to activate my devices as easily. And that’s certainly possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also with everybody saying that all of their devices were being woken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up by the keynote anyway, it seems like this is not necessarily a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong filter. That basically the recognition of the term Siri by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the modern Apple devices out there seems like it actually might be sophisticated enough and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensitive enough that maybe this trick of muting these few frequencies doesn’t even defeat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it necessarily, or doesn’t defeat it enough if the voice is close enough to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or maybe if you haven’t done like the personal voice training with the Siri setup process,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe yours is more sensitive or less sensitive. I don’t know, but there’s a lot of variables and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, it doesn’t seem super clear cut that this process works 100% of the time. Yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John should add some other way to mix it in there, like some frequency that you could add or something. But the main problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ve discussed every time we’ve mentioned audio, that waveform that you’re looking at your computer screen
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t magically transfer into your brain. It has to go through a whole bunch of other stuff. And guess what? The frequency response of speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John is not perfect. So yeah, you could put out the slice out these narrow slices, but by
⏹️ ▶️ John the time that makes it through your audio chain, to your speakers, to the physical world, through the air, to your
⏹️ ▶️ John ears, how much of that slicing out survives? Like you have to really, the finer you slice
⏹️ ▶️ John it, the more chance there is that just the quality of the amplification and the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John cone wiggling around end up smushing some other frequencies into the range
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could notch them out and now there’s stuff there. And it’s really complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be clear, like this particular slice out would be very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do in any kind of analog way. If you try to do it like with a parametric EQ, you won’t be able to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need like an FFT filter with-
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m saying, but it’s so narrow that like you think, okay, well now that I’ve cut that out, there’ll be nothing in that frequency
⏹️ ▶️ John band when the sound hits my ear. And it’s like, well, is the signal chain from that audio file to your ears
⏹️ ▶️ John so perfect that it’s tiny narrow slice of frequency is going to have no
⏹️ ▶️ John energy in it whatsoever because your speakers are that perfect. I, you know, especially if you’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ John over a phone speaker or something, I’m not sure it’s going to work. So it doesn’t surprise me. What I’m saying is it doesn’t surprise me that it
⏹️ ▶️ John is unreliable. yet.
Apple’s AI Tech Talk, cont’d.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so coming back around, let’s talk about what Amar had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said during the same presentation. Again, they are the vice president of AI. We’re super excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about our third generation of Apple Foundation Models, or AFM, in partnership with Google. We’ve built a family of models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spanning on-device to the cloud. AFM Core, Core Advanced Cloud, and Cloud Image are custom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey builds for Apple Silicon, trained using proprietary data and refined using techniques. This was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potential transcription thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I think the word they had for the transcription was different. So I looked at other sources and another source had techniques.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, refined using something from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gemini frontier models. And also our friend Stephen Robles was there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and did a video about all this about a bunch of stuff, including this meeting. We’ll put a timestamp link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. But what Stephen said was that he thinks refined is another way of saying that they distilled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Gemini models to train Apple Foundation model models.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what that means is basically you, you have some finished model that someone’s already trained and you,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, you don’t want to have to go through all the effort of training your thing the same way. So instead you ask
⏹️ ▶️ John questions of that other finished model and use the answers to train your model. That’s distilling. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of companies are, you know, every, everybody does it. Apparently it’s, it’s an open secret. You know, if your competitor comes out with a better
⏹️ ▶️ John model than you, you ask that model questions and use the answers to train your model. So your model is as good as
⏹️ ▶️ John theirs. it’s not clear to me when they talk about all these models. First, they give them all Apple names.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s AFM, Apple Foundation Model, Core, Core Advanced, Core Advanced Cloud. The
⏹️ ▶️ John names sound like old Intel processors, honestly. But Apple gives them names.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they’re created in partnership with Google, trained using
⏹️ ▶️ John proprietary data. So it’s not like a finished model from Google because they’re training it. And is the proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John data Apple’s proprietary data, Google’s proprietary data? and then refined
⏹️ ▶️ John using techniques from Gemini frontier models? Are you distilling bigger? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard to tell what they’re doing physically speaking. Like are they starting? They’re all called
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Foundation model. So they were called that before the Google deal. Google Apple had foundation models. This is AFM
⏹️ ▶️ John three, but they dropped the three for most of the stuff. Right. So there was AFM one and two that Apple made all on its own
⏹️ ▶️ John and now doing three. Do they taking the models from AFM two and just using those models and then distilling
⏹️ ▶️ John against Google Gemini models to train them? Or are they taking Gemini models and training them with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple? It’s not clear. But all I’m saying is that they were not exactly clear
⏹️ ▶️ John in like, what is the origin of these models? Were they made at Apple and refined with data
⏹️ ▶️ John from Google? Were they made at Google and refined with data from Apple? Like clear as mud, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying this, both cooks have some participation into this meal.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just not sure what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alrighty. Then some more details. Oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John this this little bit here. I know the names are just like AFM core cloud, blah, blah, blah. AFM Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Apple says this is this is a more talking again, is our most capable model
⏹️ ▶️ John with quality similar to Gemini frontier models. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that mean it is a Gemini frontier model? Is that like because when they say frontier model, they’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like the best Google models that they have. This is AFM Cloud Pro it runs only on
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. presumably a big model. It has an Apple given name, AFM Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, and they said this one is the same quality as the best models Google has.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it just those models? Is it those models changed in some way? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John we have those stories about how Apple is given access to these Gemini models and is allowed to tweak them and modify them?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is it an Apple model that is distilled against Gemini models? Not entirely clear, but Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to characterize when we say all this AFM stuff, here’s how you should think about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And AFM cloud pro is basically they’re like they’re, you know, chat
⏹️ ▶️ John GPD 5.5 there, whatever. Like it’s their, it’s their biggest thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then some more details with regard to this same tech talk from above. John, can you go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some definitions for us to set the foundation though, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I had to look this up because they just start talking about them in the talk. And we’re going to start reading from an Apple press
⏹️ ▶️ John release, which makes more sense in light of this talk or give some background for it. So the first term is dense
⏹️ ▶️ John model. And that the definition of that that I found is that every parameter in the network
⏹️ ▶️ John is activated for every input. For example, if a model has 70 billion parameters, all 70
⏹️ ▶️ John billion, is that correct from that? I might’ve miscopy based it. All 70 billion process
⏹️ ▶️ John each token. That is correct. So yeah, you’ve got the models are measured in a
⏹️ ▶️ John number of parameters. And if it is a dense model, anytime you give it any request,
⏹️ ▶️ John all 70 billion parameters participate in every single token that it produces. Tokens are sequences of words.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I should find those links to the YouTube videos that explain how LLMs work, but it is a good idea to know
⏹️ ▶️ John how they work. And that’s a dense model, which may be how you think all models work, but that’s not, you know, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the sort of the most naive version of it. Then you have sparse models, or mixture of
⏹️ ▶️ John experts, or MOE. The model is divided into many expert subnetworks.
⏹️ ▶️ John A small router network decides which experts are relevant for each token, and only those experts
⏹️ ▶️ John are activated. So that’s where, you know, for each token that’s going through, all 70 billion parameters
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t participate in the processing of that token. Only the ones that another network decides are relevant,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you don’t have to activate all of them at once. So that’s dense model versus sparse model. And you’ll hear those terms
⏹️ ▶️ John in this big Apple Press release about their third generation foundation models.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so with that in mind, Apple’s announcement of its third generation foundation models happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at machinelearning.apple.com with, you know, we’ll put the link in the show notes. With regard to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on-device models, AFM Core is a 3 billion parameter dense model. So that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one where if you ask it anything, it’s using all 3 billion parameters. AFM Core Advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a 20 billion parameter sparse model and our most powerful on-device model.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s natively multimodal, enabling helpful features like expressive voices and higher accuracy dictation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Built on cutting edge Apple research, this model activates just one to four billion parameters at a time, depending on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey request. AFM3 Core Advanced is unlocked and optimized for our most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capable Apple Silicon systems.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the model that you only get to run on whatever it is, M3 or better, iPhone 17 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John or better, iPad M4, that’s AFM Core, AFM3
⏹️ ▶️ John Core Advanced, I took out the threes. So just compare AFM core. Is there 3 billion parameter
⏹️ ▶️ John dense model, which is like. All the parameters all the time. It runs on lower devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and AFM core advances 20 billion, but it’s sparse. So that’s a big jump that, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of understand why only the Apple’s top end devices can handle it. Even though all 20 billion are aren’t activated
⏹️ ▶️ John once it’s one to 4 billion, depending on the request, but it’s much more sophisticated model. So that’s, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John difference they were talking about on those slides, about how you can’t, you can’t get the expressive voice and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all AFM core advanced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto. And then server-based models running on private cloud compute. There’s AFM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud, AFM cloud image and AFM cloud pro. AFM cloud is optimized for speed, efficiency, and performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AFM cloud image is for image generation editing and editing. Go figure. And AFM cloud pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powers our most demanding use cases like agentic tool use and complex reasoning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So Apple, if you look at their talk and all the description of this, like they They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John come out and say this, but every part of their architecture, and I imagine most
⏹️ ▶️ John things like this, is trying as hard as it can to use the smallest possible model it can
⏹️ ▶️ John get away with. This is as opposed to, for example, me, whenever I use any of these products,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using like, you know, Codex from the command line or something, and it has like a slash models thing where you can pick which model
⏹️ ▶️ John you want. Whatever the biggest is, I always pick. Biggest,
⏹️ ▶️ John highest effort, most thinking, because I’m like, I want the smartest one. I’m not, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, it would be much faster if you use a smaller one. It’s a waste of time to use the big one on these little dinky tests. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want the smartest all the time, which means I run out of tokens a lot, which is fine. That’s my own stupid choice. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is not what Apple wants billions of iPhone users to do. So what they’re gonna do is
⏹️ ▶️ John you make a request and it’s gonna be like, if we can get away with doing this with AFM core, our 3 billion parameter dense model,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna. Even though if we gave it to AFM Cloud Pro, it would do a way better job.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not going to do that because computing is a scarce resource. It
⏹️ ▶️ John costs money, it takes time, and even though it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John would give a better result, although that is somewhat debatable, because sometimes they say, well, if you give it to one of these big thinking models, not only does it take longer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John actually gives a worse result because it overthinks it and blah, blah, blah. But setting that aside, my experience has been the
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger, more powerful models do better, no matter what you ask them. I’m sure there
⏹️ ▶️ John are counterexamples, but my experience with code stuff is they do better. but that’s not what Apple software
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to do. So it’s going to figure out what is the wimpiest model that I can send this to?
⏹️ ▶️ John If none of the on-device ones will do it, then I have to send it to the cloud. But even when I send it to the cloud, do we really wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John send it to the one, the AFM Cloud Pro, the one we said that is comparable to Google stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is like the line of last resort. But when I’m sitting there talking to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John chat GPT or whatever in a web browser, I’m at least picking the pop-up menus that
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Yeah, go to chat GPT, super hard thinking, maximum whatever all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John No matter what I’m asking it, and Apple does not give you that choice. They only have one model, AFM Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro that is on that level. And I bet it gets very few requests by design. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only other thing is like, if you do anything with images, they just have one image model. So everything there is going to AFM Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Image. But everything else, they have so many choices before they get down to the quote unquote, good model
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath it all. And I think that may come up when we get to another Dan Morin example,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we skipped over it, or maybe I removed it from the notes. But sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, maybe I did get clipped out of the notes here. Sometimes when you ask Siri AI
⏹️ ▶️ John in the current betas a question and it gives you an answer, actually that’s from my experience, not Dan Morin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even you confuse you and Dan Morin. Yeah, yeah, I don’t know where it went in the notes though. Anyway, sometimes you ask
⏹️ ▶️ John a question, you get an answer, as I did with Siri AI and Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be like, oh, that’s a pretty good answer. And then when you ask the same question later, for example, demonstrate it to a
⏹️ ▶️ John family member, gives you a totally different, worse answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John see that, I’m like, did you go to AFM Cloud Pro the first time? But then the second time
⏹️ ▶️ John I ran it, you did like a local on-device model and gave me a crap answer because that first answer was so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, Apple doesn’t seem to give you control over that routing. I don’t think there’s a pop-up menu
⏹️ ▶️ John in Siri where you can pick the model that you want. And sometimes that difference shows through. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not like experimenting like I am and asking the same question multiple times with the exact same wording, you won’t notice
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but results may vary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Traditional large language models, whether dense or sparsely activated, require all weights to reside in active
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory or DRAM. To break this barrier, AFM Core Advanced introduces a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey novel sparsely activated architecture built on instruction following pruning or IFP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a technique developed by Apple researchers. And in fact, there’s instruction following pruning of large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language models, four large language models from June, 2025. That’s also at machinelearning.apple.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I forget if we ever talked about that paper, that Apple’s had a bunch of papers on this topic, but here
⏹️ ▶️ John is the fruits of that labor. Apparently AFM Core Advanced does in fact this thing. And this is this paper, yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John from June, from basically a year ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then there’s also LLM in a flash, efficient large language model inference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with limited memory. Again, on machinelearning.apple.com. Filippone Stefano wrote an article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, which we’ll also link. From Filippone, the LLM in a Flash paper addresses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey challenges and solutions for running LLMs on devices with limited DRAM capacity. It presents an approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for efficiently executing LLMs that exceed available DRAM capacity by storing model parameters in Flash memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and loading them into DRAM on demand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think we did also mention that paper ages ago. Apple explicitly calls out the
⏹️ ▶️ John instruction following pruning for large language models, sparse things. So they’re definitely doing that. Cause that was
⏹️ ▶️ John reading from a direct quote from their VP of AI or whatever. What is his name?
⏹️ ▶️ John Amar? The yeah, yeah. Yes. And there’s other people about
⏹️ ▶️ John flash memory, about like, oh, you don’t have enough RAM but you’d want to use a bigger model. You can store part of it in a flash and like swap it in or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes me wonder if one of the reasons Apple intelligence is disabled on external drives
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple just doesn’t want to deal with having to guess at the performance characteristics of external
⏹️ ▶️ John drives, if they’re doing, if they are in fact doing this technique, this LM and a flash thing where some of the model
⏹️ ▶️ John is in RAM and some of it is on flash. Apple knows the character, the speed characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ John of all of its internal SSDs. And so maybe it’s one that’s on an external drive. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about we just disable it entirely? Cause I’m sure plenty of the drives are fast enough, but if they’re not, it has a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John experience or like a performance falls off a cliff. I’m just speculating. I have no idea if this is true. if
⏹️ ▶️ John someone knows for sure, please write in and tell me why, why can’t I boot from an external drive and use Apple intelligence?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But you can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe this is one of the reasons. Or it could be that this LLM and a flash thing isn’t even used in any of the 27 OSs. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know that either, but I just thought I’d throw that out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with that in mind, coming back to Apple’s Foundation Models announcement, instead of forcing the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model into DRAM, the full model is stored in flash memory or NAND. Because NAND to DRAM bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is too slow to swap weights token by token as standard, MOE or mixture of experts models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey require, AFM3Core Advanced makes routing decisions per prompt. A lightweight dense block selects a fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set of experts during initial processing, periodically reselecting them during generation. To minimize data movement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the model relies on a high percentage of always active shared experts alongside input dependent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey routed experts swapped into DRAM only when needed. This design also introduces crucial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inference time elasticity rather than using a single model for all tasks or managing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an ensemble of smaller models, AFM Core Advanced uses a predetermined number of active parameters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tailored to each specific use case. This allows weights to be loaded incrementally across requests
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of varying difficulty, scaling the model size for beyond traditional DRAM limits while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minimizing latency. So this is them saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John this specific model, AFM 3 Core Advanced does use the things from the flash paper it
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like. But of course, Apple Intelligence hasn’t been able to run when booted from an external drive since its introduction
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2024. So this is, and also the AFM core advance only runs on the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John end hardware. So that can’t be the root reason why they do this, but I wonder if it contributes to it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that is to say, if you think Apple just like bought models from Google, stuck them on servers
⏹️ ▶️ John and then sent requests to them, that’s not how this works at all. Like that’s, I feel like this is the biggest point of this tech talk is, with all
⏹️ ▶️ John those things on the diagram and Craig Federer pointing out like, you know, Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ John participation, they were an important part of this and we’ll get to some even more important parts of them in a second. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is the one writing the software that’s on top of it. And Apple, in fact, has made many advances. All those all those
⏹️ ▶️ John AI people that Apple hired that, you know, eventually left to go to other AI companies, they actually did interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John novel work. I’m not sure if this stuff is like the equivalent things are happening at all the cutting edge AI
⏹️ ▶️ John companies. But I do want to give Apple credit for like, they’re not just like we failed. We
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do anything. Let’s just use a third party product and slap a serious face on it. Not at all. Like these
⏹️ ▶️ John papers and the fact that they’re using them and the description of how they use them and how it gets them to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to run models that otherwise wouldn’t run run device and essentially how, how it makes it possible for Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John ship 27 OSS to literally billions of Apple devices and not destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John any, all their servers. Like they, they can’t do the thing that everyone else is doing, which is like every request goes to a server.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t run anything on device. They’re trying so hard to run everything on device that they possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ John using lots of interesting techniques to make models that shouldn’t fit on your phone, actually fit on your phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John shuffling between them. And like, all it’s fascinating and it shows that they are not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re behind like, cause they’re not the cutting edge, like their competitors are, but they’re using what they’re good
⏹️ ▶️ John at basically writing client side software to innovate in that area,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, on top of the underlying technologies that makes the models themselves and trains them and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then coming back to Amar, to bring this model to production, we work with both Google and NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to extend our private cloud compute infrastructure to NVIDIA GPUs in Google’s cloud while maintaining Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unmatched privacy guarantees. Andrew Cunningham over at Ars Technica writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this while still making the same privacy promises, Apple’s new iteration of private cloud compute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is using NVIDIA’s confidential computing, Intel’s trust domain extensions, and Google’s Titan security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip to provide layers of protection similar to what Apple provides for its own servers. To provide additional protection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple keeps a cryptographically verifiable append-only ledger of all Google Cloud hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is part of the PCC fleet. And Apple’s devices will only trust hardware, excuse me, software on these servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is signed by Apple. The Google Cloud servers don’t yet support all the same protections as Apple’s own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey private cloud compute servers, but Apple says it will gradually be ramping towards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the complete set of protections throughout the summer preview period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what does a cryptographically verifiable append-only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ledger sound like to you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not blockchain.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It sounds like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t that exactly what a blockchain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is? Right? I’ll say blockchain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, all this stuff, as has been pointed out when we talked about private cloud compute, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is doing everything that it possibly can to mathematically
⏹️ ▶️ John show and prove and guarantee that you are talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to servers that behave in the way that Apple says. And that way is, Apple can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John it because it’s all end to end encrypted. So Apple can’t see it. And obviously the server that receives your
⏹️ ▶️ John request has to of course decrypt it because how could it, you know, it has to know what you said to do the work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other guarantee that Apple gives is the software that runs on those servers
⏹️ ▶️ John will never save any of that. It doesn’t even log stuff. Like it doesn’t like no data that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John into that server that is decrypted in memory and then processed and chucked back out is saved in any way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s private cloud computing. There was 2024 where they talked about that. They gave a big paper on it and everything. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the promise is, we, our software behaves in this way. We can’t see your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t save your data. We can never see it. If anyone asks us to get it, we don’t have it. We never
⏹️ ▶️ John kept it. It is transiently there and disappears and that entire time it’s encrypted and kept in this hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we don’t save anything about it. It’s thrown away. Apple has its own servers
⏹️ ▶️ John with those, you know, M3 Ultra, M2 Ultras, whatever they were that we saw being made in that factory,
⏹️ ▶️ John runs Apple Silicon, runs their models. They’ve had that for, I guess, since 2024. That’s private
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud computing. They just continued to call everything on their servers private
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud compute. So we’re wondering about this several episodes ago, what would they do? They’re just calling it private cloud compute.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what they mean by that is those M2 Ultra Apple Silicon servers that Apple made and But
⏹️ ▶️ John also, Nvidia GPUs running in Google’s cloud. Because as we saw, Google has a
⏹️ ▶️ John similar architecture to PCC. And those things that Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John listed there, if you go to the Andrew Cunningham article at Ars Technica that will be in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John those are links. So if you want to learn what is Nvidia’s confidential computing, what is Intel’s trust
⏹️ ▶️ John domain extensions, what is Google’s Titan security chip, those are the pieces of the puzzle that are building
⏹️ ▶️ John up towards making Google able to run servers that Apple calls
⏹️ ▶️ John private cloud computing, even though they share essentially nothing with Apple’s private cloud computing other
⏹️ ▶️ John than the promises that they fulfill. And as this article
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re not quite up to the standards of Apple’s private cloud compute, but the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is they will be before the 27 OS’s ship. If they’re not, how will we know? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John again, Apple gives these images to security researchers so they can
⏹️ ▶️ John mathematically prove that when you run a request, it’s really running against this image
⏹️ ▶️ John and security researchers have added proof to yourself that we’re not saving any data. There’s no secret
⏹️ ▶️ John NSA side channel that sends every request in plain text to some server or logs it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the binary image, this is it. Prove to yourself, because the executable binary is, you know, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John machine code. You can see what it does, you can decompile it. And you security researchers should be able to prove, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not saving it anymore. And then also what you should be able to prove is that thing that we gave you, that’s the thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John running on the server. And all the stories I’ve said about this is that in the end you have to, there is a root of
⏹️ ▶️ John trust in believing that Apple is not lying to you. That’s true of every piece of software in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of times people send and ask ADB questions. Like they say, Apple says my message is end to end encrypted,
⏹️ ▶️ John but do we have to just take their word for it? The answer is yes. Like, like they write the software,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could lie and say it’s end to end encrypted and just be lying through their teeth, but security
⏹️ ▶️ John researchers would discover that they were lying in most cases. Um, in the end there is some root of trust.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, you know, if you keep digging down and like, uh, what is that paper that we’ve linked to a few times, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, musing on trust or whatever, something like that about talking about if you had a compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John that was corrupted in some way that you couldn’t trust anything because the compiler builds all your other programs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, I wish I could remember what that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one is. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking of. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Find it for the notes maybe. Um, So yeah, but you do have to trust them when they say we want some software that do this. And also
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to trust that it doesn’t have bugs, which sometimes it does. It’s supposed to do this, but it doesn’t actually do this. There’s a bug in it somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s it seems like I mean, the question is those Apple Silicon servers with
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultras in them. How long will Apple keep doing that? Have they already given up on that effort and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it’s a cool thing. We tried it, but that was under the old regime. And now what we’re going to do is what everybody else does,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is we’re going to run an NVIDIA GPUs, which is interesting because Apple hates NVIDIA’s and hasn’t done anything with NVIDIA for
⏹️ ▶️ John ages, but apparently they’ll use their GPUs and servers. And it’s also interesting because Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is running these servers, Google has their own like TPUs, there’s tensor processing
⏹️ ▶️ John units that are really good at running Google’s models. Google makes its own silicon, these TPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about a long time ago on the show, that are different than NVIDIA GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why isn’t Apple using those? Well, if Apple uses NVIDIA GPUs, they’re not tied
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google. So if and when the deal ends with Google or they don’t like Google hosting their stuff, they could go
⏹️ ▶️ John to anybody and say, hey, do you have a data center filled with Nvidia GPUs that we can run our stuff on? They
⏹️ ▶️ John probably do. Only Google has DPUs, I think. I don’t think there’s any sort of third party thing for
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Now, I’m not sure how much stake to put in that because if I was sending these things to Google, I would just run on their TPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and if we have to go elsewhere, then just like port it or whatever, but maybe that’s more difficult. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like Apple might be giving up on the idea that they’re going to run Apple silicon servers
⏹️ ▶️ John in their own data centers and build their own hardware and whatever that factory was in
⏹️ ▶️ John Arizona and Texas. And instead of just gonna do what everyone else does and just pay some hosting provider like AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John or Google Cloud to rent racks full of NDVD GPUs. And at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John Google did a deal with XAI, Grok, whatever, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John built out data centers that they aren’t using because no one wants to use Grok because it sucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone hates Elon Musk. And so XAI is renting whole data centers
⏹️ ▶️ John to Google. So it could be that when you talk to Siri AI, it ends up going to an
⏹️ ▶️ John XAI data center that is being rented by Google where it’s running Nvidia GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John What a world that we live in. But yeah, this seems like a
⏹️ ▶️ John change in Apple’s stance. And again, notably the first time that I’m aware of since
⏹️ ▶️ John back when NVIDIA had a bum GPU in an iBook or something. The relationship between
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and NVIDIA soured. I believe it was a MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was so long ago. You would say, so long ago. Surely none of those people are still there, but Phil Schiller is still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, they’re still sore about that. But this is one degree separated, I guess. The deal
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Google will run servers for them because Google’s good at running servers. And I’m not sure if Apple dictated
⏹️ ▶️ John that, and by the way, the servers you run for us, they should use NVIDIA GPUs and not your tensor things, not your TPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s the shape of it. Apple and NVIDIA together again, sort of. Sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a tree, C-O-M-P-U-T-I-N-G.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sitting in one of Elon Musk’s data centers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You’re gonna spell out, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so again, this is not, you know, getting back to video podcasts, it’s not a visual
⏹️ ▶️ John medium and we don’t have good images. The tech radar images are blurry because it’s like taken from a phone in an audience or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but please do look at the block diagrams. And I think they did at one point, they like highlighted
⏹️ ▶️ John things in a particular color. I think it was all shades of blue. So it was tough to see on the screen, not a great choice. But
⏹️ ▶️ John basically they said, all the things in blue are Apple and all the things in this different
⏹️ ▶️ John shade of blue are Google. And like everything was Apple. The only things that were Google were
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, tinted shaded stuff in the cloud thing. So they weren’t forthcoming
⏹️ ▶️ John with exactly like, is it a Google model that we change, is it an Apple model that we just still Google? Like they didn’t go into that level of detail,
⏹️ ▶️ John but their big emphasis here was, most of the stuff you see in Siri AI is
⏹️ ▶️ John software Apple wrote. And they didn’t say this, but like, it’s clear that you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John need the part that Google provided or otherwise none of this works, but Apple was really emphasizing,
⏹️ ▶️ John we did a lot of work for this. And I mean, I guess it’s like also when it falls on its face and doesn’t work right, or
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not happy with how it goes, don’t blame Google because that wasn’t up to them, that was up to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Quince and Lisa, and thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna be talking about, by popular request, the WBDC State of the Union session.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a whole bunch of stuff covered there. We’re gonna go over that in overtime because it just couldn’t fit in the show. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join or listen at atp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check podcast so long.
Where’s our SOTU coverage?!
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, if you’re not an ATV member, you’re like, oh, you’re gonna put State of the Union in overtime? Non-members hate when we put stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in overtime because they don’t get to hear overtime. And like, I get it, you know, but like, here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure in multiple past years, possibly also including last year, we didn’t cover
⏹️ ▶️ John State of the Union at all. Because what happens after WWDC is there’s tons of follow-up and tons of news and things
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, and State of the Union just gets pushed off and pushed off. And then we look up and it’s a month later, and it’s like, I guess we’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John delete State of the Union from the notes, because like it’s old news now. like we can’t really go back to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, it’s, it’s already done and gone. That’s what overtime is for. That’s why I stay at the union.
⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t be sorry about it. I mean, we’re sorry. Like, you know, and it is developer type stuff and it’s not like, how can state of the union be an overtime?
⏹️ ▶️ John That should be part of a regular episode when we didn’t cover it at all. Uh, people didn’t notice, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an overtime. Somebody will complain. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I will say that the solution to this is to become a member
Trip-tech results
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes talking about trip results. So I just went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Cape Charles for the last week. This is our happy place on the eastern shore of Virginia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I brought a truly asinine amount of equipment and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computing related things in no small part because I had to record this very show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also because I’m me. And I wanted to talk about the Unifi travel router, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about at some point in the past, but to refresh your memory, the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating procedure for travel routers is a GL-iNet, which I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to verbally describe how big a GL-iNet router is, but they’re small, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not tiny by any stretch. And a few months ago, Unifi came out, or Ubiquiti came out with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unifi travel router, which is exceedingly small. It’s imagine like five or six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey credit cards stacked on top of each other. That’s probably not exactly right, but that’s kind of what I’m talking about. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a travel router does is, if you have a single internet connection, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably you do, but you would like to broadcast that to your entire family’s constellation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of devices, then what you can do is you can use a travel router, be that a GLI net or the Unifi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey travel router to log into or connect to whatever the internet source is. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a best case scenario, you plug ethernet right into this little baby travel router. But more realistically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are in a hotel or something like that. And you have the travel router, log into the hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wifi and go through that whole pain, you know, painful dance. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the travel router broadcasts its own wifi that your phone and iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Mac and your spouse’s phone and Mac and iPad and your children’s iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and switches and so on and so forth. They all connect to the UTR, the unified travel router.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is figuring out how to get you to the internet. Now, the pro move in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my personal opinion, which you can do either by hand or the Unifi Travel Router does automatically, is to set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your wifi that this portable router is broadcasting to be the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSID and password as your home wifi. So this way, everything just jumps on the nearby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wifi thinking effectively that it’s at home. It’s particularly critical if you’re a dork like me and bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or maybe two Sonos speakers with you when you are on a long trip like this, because then the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos speakers say, ah, yes, I’m at home. And even though some of my friends are not here, I’m at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I will work just the way I always do, which is great. This kind of reminds me of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, there’s lots of animated shows that have done this, but like some animated character or person
⏹️ ▶️ John who has to be in water, like maybe it’s a mermaid or something, or they dry out, that wherever they go, they bring
⏹️ ▶️ John like a fishbowl or a bowl of water or whatever with them. And it just occurs to me that, Casey, wherever you go, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to bring speakers with you because you wither and die without constant music playing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Correct. That is pretty much correct. I really want to argue with you, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the guy in Ponyo with the sprinkler thing and he’s pumping the water as he walks around because he’s got a water. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Uh, maybe we’ll do it for a member special. I was just about to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, anyhow. So yeah, so this is one of those things that it is exceedingly nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Most people, even perhaps most nerds want nothing to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s perfectly fair, no argument. But one of the things that I was interested to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this was the first time I had taken the UTR, to travel to something larger than a hotel room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the UTR is very small and doesn’t use a lot of power. And it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really meant for the space of like a car or a hotel room, but not the space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an entire house. And when we stay at Cape Charles, we stay in a standalone house. I would guess it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 1500 square feet. So not small, but by no means voluminous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either. Um, and I don’t know what that would be in metric. I’m sorry. I have no idea, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, it’s three bedrooms. It’s got, uh, like, what is it? Two and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bathrooms, which is basically perfect for our family. And I was really worried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I brought a GL I net with me as well, because I assumed that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UTR just wouldn’t have the oomph to broadcast Wi-Fi throughout the entire house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, the GLI net was set up for success because it so happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the cable modem and the router for the house were fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey centrally located, which was excellent. But I have to say, the UTR worked great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was very impressed. I, in fact, didn’t want to say anything to Marco about this, or John for that matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when I was talking on ATP, I was connecting via Ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I did talk about this last week, via a really janky like 50-foot Ethernet cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running through the kitchen of the house over to where the UTR was, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually had a Ubiquiti Flex Mini, I think it is, hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off of it so I could connect more than one thing via Ethernet because again, I’m a dork. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I had it so the laptop was connected Ethernet to a little tiny five port
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch, which was connected to the UTR, which was in turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected as a client to the house’s router. Oh my God. But by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the UTR supports teleport, which is kind of sort of like tail scale, but just for Unify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And so what teleport is, is it’s a, a wire guard based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VPN. That’s mostly zero config or very little config. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going ethernet to switch to UTR to router via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VPN to Richmond to talk to YouTube. And I got to say it worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m stunned. I’m telling you, like no latency. It’s astonishing that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked at all, much less did so with effectively no latency. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have too much more to say other than that. Teleport on the UTR has been a little wonky for me. It used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to almost never work. Again, teleport being the VPN thing. It used to almost never work. Now it mostly works,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but occasionally it’ll just kind of forget to be connected to teleport, which isn’t the end of the earth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I prefer all of our traffic to be encrypted through whatever the house’s router is and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey merge or ingress onto the internet from our house, like our literal home in Richmond.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all in all, it actually worked really well. And what’s interesting about the fact that the UTR can be on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on teleport is that if I wanted to, I could actually bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the unify security cameras and connect it to the UTR. It,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess it would have to be a wifi camera or I would have to use like a POE injector or whatever, but I could connect it to the UTR.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as long as it’s on teleport, it will record the camera in the travel situation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my setup at home. Why would you do this? I have no idea except to make sure that Penny isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey climbing on the furniture. But other than that, I have no answer. But the fact that you can is really freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. So they are not a sponsor. They should be a sponsor. They are not a sponsor, but you should really consider the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unified Travel Router if you’re traveling and I find that even if I didn’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it at the house, I would consider bringing this anyway because it is so darn small and when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re in the car, if you set it up, know, hook it to your phone to tether off your phone or if you go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do like me and borrow a hotspot from the library or what have you. It is a really excellent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to get the kids online quickly and easily in the car. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just have what I have is, you know, a little anchor like battery pack connected to the UTR, which is in turn connected to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the to the hotspot. And it works great. So this is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something you should not want in your life because you are really in a bad state. If this is something that excites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you as much as it excites me but I gotta tell you I freaking love this thing it’s great