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 Touch ID 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’ Siri AI 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 U.S. government
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as dangerously capable. Therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 to things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not it. I think the world of audio-only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts was never super high on Apple's list, but it sure is invisible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Like, I think they just don't care. I mean, we should probably talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of should we really be doing video. I don't think any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us are super into that idea, but you know, if we want to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have that kind of visibility to the rest of the world, that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a good idea. But it would so complicate the production
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the show and the editing of the show that I don't think, I don't think it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough. 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, Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know for, for me and for John, our physical spaces are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really conducive to doing video. Like, I have done it. It can be done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every time I'm, I am asked to guest on a podcast, which doesn't happen that frequently, to be clear, I'm not trying to like humble brag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, but on the occasions that it does happen, I often ask up front, are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing video for this? And annoyingly, the answer is typically yes. And if the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is yes, I have to go through this whole like internal dance of, do I really want to clean up the rest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the office? Do I really want to just, do I don't want to do this at all? Like, it's just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. It's not what I enjoy. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the flip side of that is I think it's clear that that's where attention is, certainly for Apple, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, I don't really care if Apple pays that much attention to us. It would be lovely to be able to go to WBDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it's really not that big a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're not going to pay Do you think we suddenly start doing video, they're going to pay attention to us? No, they're not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's fair. But my, but they seem to ignore everything that is not video these days or print for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and to be clear, like we we were never like super reliably getting press access, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it It has really turned to zero in recent years, like the last couple of years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John where… I think it was always zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John I 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. I know when I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had times in my career where I've had press access with Apple, I have worried about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing it. I don't think that ever made me do anything major, majorly different from how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have otherwise done it, but I'm sure it had to have like a minor impact or some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like subconscious biasing that like I maybe I would soften things or not go near certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things because I was afraid of losing that access. Whereas when you have nothing to lose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does give a certain degree of freedom. But I don't know. And going back to the video thing for a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a good guiding principle on this for us to keep in mind is like, I don't think any of our audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has asked us for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that's a very good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason why YouTubers have pivoted into a lot of podcasts is because they're easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don't need to write and edit nearly as much as you do for other formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that succeed on YouTube. If you can just have a casual conversation and do minimal editing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimal writing, that is much easier. So there's a reason why YouTubers like it. And there's a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why some podcasters enjoy it because they think they can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube audience with their podcast. And that's, of course, very tempting. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast wouldn't like more listeners or more of an audience? And so I think that's why people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it. But if we are happy doing what we are doing and our audience is happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us seem like we actually want to do just for the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly basically trying to become YouTubers in a way that it seems like none of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have that in us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody wants to see us. It's a young, attractive person's game. It's not for
Derailments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have, as is tradition, a whole pile of follow-up. However, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we might make it through follow-up. Typically, the week after WWDC, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically explains to us that we are going to do a full follow-up episode. But, John, to your credit, I think we're going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it past follow-up. So, let's see what we can do. We'll see how it lands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, bold statement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many shows, especially member specials, have you started, Casey, by saying, I think this is going to be a short
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every time. Every time. 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 R2 reviews recently? They're looking good. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting for the R3X and CarPlay. Tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. We need. I'm trying to get through follow-up and I'm derailing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need to have, I'm really rooting for Tesla. Hear me out. Hear me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco out. Hear me out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm really rooting for Tesla ellipsis to start shipping CarPlay because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe in my bones that the second Tesla ships CarPlay, Rivian's going to be like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, Totes, we're right there too. Absolutely. But they want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control every pixel of their amazing experience. Don't even get me started.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think once if Tesla ships CarPlay, which have there been any, I know there was rumor about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 going to be talked about at WWDC and then it totally wasn't.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, it maybe it'll, maybe it'll be a fall thing. Maybe it's a never thing. I don't know. But yeah, i I think you're right. I think if Tesla ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ships CarPlay, that will put a lot of pressure on Rivian to to finally cave. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's that's probably gonna take years. I do think the that the Rivian R2 is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to do what the Model 3 and Model Y did for Tesla, which is like it's going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them all of their money, even though we're all going to think it's fairly boring. It's also going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a really good overall car. And I'm personally very interested in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R3, but that seems further out. We'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don't know. I haven't I've been away all this past week, as everyone knows, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven't looked too much into the R2, but the little bits that I've seen is that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is incredible. And that the places where they had to skimp in order to make it cheaper, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable. in the places where you really don't want them to you know, cut corners and cheap and be, be super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheap, they didn't. 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 Road
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trip demo typo, which is excellent. And the frustration on the dude typing at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad is just palpable. You can see it right on
⏹️ ▶️ John That's what you got to watch the video for. Just watch, you got to watch the guy's reaction after he does the typo. It's great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's the best because he knows exactly what he did. And you could just see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in his face,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he's like, oh, crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Like, I can't believe this autocorrect just got me right now. But anyway, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful. But Florian also wrote in to say, at the time of that ill-fated demo, I was working for the company that made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that software. Francois Lagunis, the guy who made the typo, was the CTO and is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dear friend. He swears to this day that it was the amount of makeup they made him wear on his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hands, since they were prominently featured in the over-the-shoulder device close-ups that caused him to fat-finger the title.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Casey 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. Hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. Yeah. It's like a, you know, it doesn't surprise me they did the um, 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 going to fix this up immediately. You Don't go anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John guys. You still got one more thing to do. So that's fun. And hand to make up. You don't think about hand to make up, but hey, if they're going to shoot
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course, but I've heard this kind of being talked about here and there. And so we can't credit this to anyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But an anonymous person said, Word on the street is that iOS, or I guess all the OSs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All the OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. All the OSes, 26.6 actually create the new spotlight index.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just creates it. It doesn't use it. So if people update their devices when 26.6 is released,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the index will already be there when they update to iOS 27 or whatever 27. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wonder if that if something is going to keep the index up to date. Like that was, again, this is sketchy
⏹️ ▶️ John unofficial 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 uh, disk space suddenly goes down by a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as people were saying, it's going to take like, you know, it's been taking like a day or two to build, to rebuild the index after
⏹️ ▶️ John installing like the, you know, for example, iOS 27 beta. But if they do this and they roll it
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the 26.6 update, by the time everyone updates it, 27 won't have to rebuild the index. Maybe it will just
⏹️ ▶️ John incrementally, like, maybe it'll just create the index and let it sit there. And then when you install 27
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, it will just incrementally update whatever has happened since it rebuilt the whole index. But
⏹️ ▶️ John clever idea. Watch for that.
Resisting beta 1… 😬
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I tell you guys how much I have to resist putting it on my phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, like, because I'm traveling next week and so, or this week, and so I'm like, I'm going to, I'm resisting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, I should
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the car on the way to the airport.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. I should not have beta one on my phone when I'm about to travel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, oh my God, I like, honestly, I'm more tempted on my Mac because now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I've had it on my my, like my travel laptop, which I am bringing with me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I have it on my laptop, every time I go back to my desktop laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm just like, oh my God, everything is so much lower contrast. The toolbars suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is blurry. The icons are dim. Like everything, like, once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are using Golden Gate for even a small amount of time, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back and see Tahoe, you're just like, oh my God, what were they thinking?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is so much better on Golden Gate. And it's not like, look, it's not perfect. There's still a lot about this design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think they need to keep iterating. And I'm and I'm sure they will. But Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like such an aberration when you when you see Golden Gate and get used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how how like windows and toolbars and icons look and the menus without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the all the weird menu icons. Like They did like a 1.1 for Liquid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glass, but it's it's a good 1.1. Like it's still, It's still most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same style. But the the tweaks they have made combined to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a pretty big overall improvement. And every time I'm back on Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or iOS 26 and I see you know, a bunch of blurry text fading under a backgroundless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar, I'm just like, oh, God, please, please let let me install these betas on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my devices very, very soon. One more week. I got to make it one more week. So maybe I'll get to beta two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But once beta 2 is out, I'm in. That's it. 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? Well, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it depends. 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. uh Once 26 came out, I kept running the betas for a while and I said, why am I doing this? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I switched to like the mainstream 26 uh and I've just been going back and forth on, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John on that. um And so, yeah, whatever. I have like 26.5.1 or whatever the latest 26 is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on that same machine, for reasons that I tooted about 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, Apple 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think supposedly security reasons, but I don't know the details. But anyway, that's just the way it is. So yeah, I've got
⏹️ ▶️ John 27 beta and 26.5.1, both on the same machine that I just flopped back and forth between them.
Agentic password upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So let's talk about the password app or the passwords app, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Hartley Charlton writes at MacRumors, 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 last episode. I was like, there's no way they could be doing this unless the websites support all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And like, well, how can they have a button that says fix these 10 bad passwords? Does it expect all
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 going to wing it. It's just going to say, oh, well, this is the website. I'm going to run a little Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John headless Safari in the background. And I'm going to let this little LM powered agent
⏹️ ▶️ John try 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, a reference to Casey's from our Nuggets
⏹️ ▶️ John of Wisdom ATP dev member special, passwords app does the hard thing. says, nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John we're just going to try it. We're just going to 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 you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tell that it's sometimes abundantly obvious that this is the case because I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to talk now, starting now about macOS 27. And you look at the time that it takes for this chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or these chapters.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's just lots of images, first
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of all. And second of all, I still
⏹️ ▶️ John bristle when you characterize me having doing far and away most of the effort, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just say I do it all.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco occasionally you'll put in an item. I know occasionally Marco puts in an
⏹️ ▶️ John item, but honestly, just say I do it all. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a totally different direction. I saw you being like, no, you know, Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John does this, and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does that, meaning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broadly for the whole show, but John, cheesy peasy. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so take a look at the timestamp, everyone. We'll see how long the macOS section.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John lasts. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John to give an example, show me the text that you typed in the show notes for this week's episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excuse me, sir. Excuse me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sir. I know you're
⏹️ ▶️ John on vacation. I know you're on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey vacation. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only that, but I am the chief transcriber in
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly because Google Docs cannot handle both of us doing it at once.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just backed off. I said, Casey's, Casey wants to do this. He's going to be tapping it. I said, to be fair to Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John he did do the notes transcribing for the keynote, but he didn't need to because I would have done it. But I'm still saying it's the first approximation.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just all John.
⏹️ ▶️ John that does mean that macOS comes for, but usually Apple does that too because they like save iOS for last when they used to go OS by
⏹️ ▶️ John OS because like iOS is an important one and they save the good stuff till the end, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, anyway, take a look at your podcast player, hopefully overcast, and see how long the macOS section takes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still contend it's mostly just lots of images that 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 see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that's a good example, by the way. Casey does all of the external facing show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I occasionally go in there and add a line or two. Casey doesn't even notice because when he's done with it, he never looks at them again.
⏹️ ▶️ John never say that I have anything to do with the external show notes. It's all Casey, 100%. That's why all the bad jokes that are
⏹️ ▶️ John there, that's Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rude, but very true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John People sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John attribute jokes to me, and I feel like saying that's not me. That's that's Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I'm going to stop derailing us or something.
eWorld and Bob
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I'll resume us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't worry. Yeah, exactly. Adam DeMassey writes, John said, quote, Golden Gate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does sound like a code name rather than a public name. Well, he might have been remembering that Golden Gate was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the code name for Big Sur. It was also, apparently, the code name for eWorld
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 1.1, and you even brought receipts to this little endeavor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I Do you guys know what eWorld is?
⏹️ ▶️ John faux AOL? It's like an online service. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I don't know this for a fact, but
⏹️ ▶️ John having used eWorld when it was new, I'm pretty sure the company that made the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app for AOL, which you probably aren't familiar with, but anyway, there's a Mac app for AOL. And I think that company
⏹️ ▶️ John that made that app essentially white labeled it to Apple and said, here, you can have the app. And then Apple just
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously changed all the strings and stuff and then changed all of the graphics. eWorld's whole idea was there was
⏹️ ▶️ John this like a I don't know how to describe the art style but sort of a an impressionistic kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John cartoony art style of a little village with buildings and stuff back when everyone thought the internet was going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John giant gif of a town with little people in it anyway that was eWorld and yeah eWorld
⏹️ ▶️ John 1.1 Golden Gate I did not know that the Big Sur one I probably knew and then forgot so yeah there's
⏹️ ▶️ John only so many California names and they get reused either of you ever used Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I've only seen magazine pictures of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it I used it on I was I was traveling to New York when I was a kid once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and a friend who wasn't Casey I actually have multiple friends who I would meet in New York
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I 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 and what should be like the the metaphor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that structures all your applications and documents and everything together and Microsoft Bob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was an experiment that Microsoft did somewhere in the mid 90s that was like what if we just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrange things like in a house and you could go to different rooms in the house like very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much a like you know like the the 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that's a cool idea it didn't work really well at all um but i believe that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where clippy came from i think clippy was like an offshoot of bob or clippy escaped bob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but i mean but there was like look this was back in the day that there there was still at least some experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like before we had all settled on basically the desktop with applications and files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there there were other ideas you know it wasn't that long after that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the palm pilot happened and the palm pilot also had a totally different structure of like how should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your data and applications be structured which actually was far closer to what we have on ios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today than than like you know pcs were um but yeah e-world was eWorld was a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that I believe but it was that was back in the day when like nobody was quite sure what the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would end up being for consumers yet and there were things like AOL and CompuServe, and everybody wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own online service and that's I guess where eWorld came in yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just 100% like the AOL Mac client except that they had that graphic where click
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 you know
⏹️ ▶️ John there was very little very few graphics things fit on a floppy disk but yeah you can find screenshots of it online it had a pretty cool
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ John my time but I will take
macOS: Touch ID for admin access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can now use Touch ID for administrator access in Mac OS 27. John, what does that
⏹️ ▶️ 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 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 because it's not owned by you. But if you enter your password, because you have an admin account, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you 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, autofill,
⏹️ ▶️ John do 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 sudo or whatever you pronounce that word,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would always throw up a dialog box. You had to type in your password. And I 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. Thanks to friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the show, Steve Troughton Smith. You can do a defaults write, 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 wait list thing. I was, I was going to say that, like, it's fine for us to put this out there because just our super
⏹️ ▶️ John nerdy listeners, which are in the grand scheme of things, few in number, we'll know about this, but it has
⏹️ ▶️ John since leaked out into the media. So now everybody knows this. So hurry up and do it before Apple somehow 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 Gate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, where are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John sudo defaults write command on your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's the, yeah, I was, I would love to skip it on my test phone for iOS 27, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be no way to skip that yet, except, I guess, be Joanna Stern.
Liquid Glass opt-out is gone in 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of Steve Troughton-Smith, he also pointed out that there is a change in Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentation. The key UI design requires compatibility. Well, let me just read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it says in the documentation. The system ignores this key when you build for iOS 27 or later, iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 27, Well, basically, all the 27 or later OSs. So, this is the thing that said, Don't use liquid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glass for my app, please. And Apple's saying, Tough nugs. you're going to have to use it if you compile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against any of the OSs 27.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might have said that last year, too. Like, oh, we have 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 basically the old metrics, all the old controls, and the old everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That time is over. Update for 27. No choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we think we were adequately warned, and that kind of key usually only does last a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or 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 want to deal with them with your app, you still have to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Because even if Golden Gate fixes some of your biggest uh, you know, nitpicks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or issues, which honestly, in that kind of context of like app developers maintaining things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's not really going to help that much. Um, It's just nicer in certain ways. But all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things about like, you know, 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 26. And for most apps, that's going to be a little bit. like You're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably still dealing with supporting all these things for at least another year. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, like for me with Overcast, I'm thinking this is probably a good time. Like, this, like, once I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched my 27 version this fall, I can probably drop support for iOS 18 then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that's even that's pretty aggressive given where the numbers actually are for most apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days. So, I understand why people still want this key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work because then they can keep shipping one UI for their app instead of now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of two and a half is what they'll have to do. But it's going to be a bumpy time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the support for 26 and Tahoe is going to be kind of a thorn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in app developers' sides for probably 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
⏹️ ▶️ John you did that, you're scrambling now. Yep.
Liquid Glass slider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, during onboarding, and I think this is coming from one John Syracuse, during onboarding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Golden Gate, the liquid glass slider where you decide how transparent you want it to be. Well, that's part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the onboarding process, which is pretty interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is. What that means is, you know, I always assume, oh, everyone will just leave it on the default. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now I wonder, I mean, maybe most people probably still leave it on the default because 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
⏹️ ▶️ John will 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 like what kind of anonymous usage info is actually gathered from
⏹️ ▶️ John like Mac OS and iOS. Um, Yeah, I hope Apple is looking at where this 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 the
⏹️ ▶️ John way to the left because they're young and they think it's cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still, this slider still baffles me. 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that changes one thing about liquid glass that honestly isn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even that much. First of all, it isn't that impactful of a change. And second of all, the range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between zero and one of like how they look is not that different.
⏹️ ▶️ John importantly, going all the way to the right does not make it opaque. There's reduced transparency for that if you want it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just to be clear, the slider makes it less transparent. And all the way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the left is not fully clear either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whatever you want, this is kind of a like weird milquetoast middle of the road kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, we can give you a little bit of control, but it feels like a very precise
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, they give you like a picture of Apple Park with some crap floating on top of it, you know, liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John glass style. Be aware that that picture scrolls. So you can scroll the picture just
⏹️ ▶️ John to see how does it look with a, with an image scrolling underneath the controls. Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, Before you move on from that, uh, as, as Marco pointed out, um, 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 Unfortunately, was the first thing I did. I'm like, oh, the slider goes from zero to one. Fifteen. What does fifteen look like? Fifteen
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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?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they made the corner radius very large, which means the corners were very, very rounded, which means
⏹️ ▶️ John there are a larger number of pixels that you don't get to see in the corners of a window. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John especially important in Tahoe because the way the UI works is that if
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you're looking at a picture, like an image or something, the image goes edge to edge. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you're losing 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.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it respects your content. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go back like several versions when there was a title, an opaque title bar. The title bar had rounded corners.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you viewed an image in a window, the image started where the title
⏹️ ▶️ John bar ended, like under the title bar is where the image started. And those were sharp corners because the title bar ended
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there was just a right angle and you could see all the pixels in the image. And then when you went to the bottom of the window
⏹️ ▶️ John for many, many, many years in macOS 10 slash macOS, the bottom corners of the window were sharp as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you put an image in a window, you could see all the pixels in the image. And Apple has slowly eaten away
⏹️ ▶️ John at that. And 26 was like, we're taking the whole corners. Like there could be some, there could be a big thing in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John There could be a, there could be like a little 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.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, And some people didn't like how it looked. Uh, Some people did like how it looked, but the bottom line is the job
⏹️ ▶️ John of the window is to show the content. And it annoys me when they decide you don't need to see the
⏹️ ▶️ John corners. Uh, And they decided that because of concentricity, which is they had all these little, you know, the controls
⏹️ ▶️ John had semicircular end caps on them, and they could make the corners match the radius of the semicircular
⏹️ ▶️ John end cap such that if you put a central point where the center of the corner is and you traced out an arc, the arc
⏹️ ▶️ John on the window edge would exactly match the arc on the controls. That's concentricity,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you'd see concentric circles drawn from a central point. And then Mac OS 27, as we discussed last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, decreased the corner radius of the windows so you can see more of your stuff. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ John much rejoicing. And many people who were there live have said since we recorded last week that there was cheering
⏹️ ▶️ John from the live audience for the fact that they fixed the window radius. So it's not just me. But as I pointed out last
⏹️ ▶️ John episode, uh, they, you know, I'm, I'm, I endorsed this change. Uh, They made
⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller corner radius on all the windows, but it no longer matches the corner
⏹️ ▶️ John radius on the floating controls. And so now it is the exact opposite of concentricity.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have two very different corner radii radiuses. Uh, And yeah, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John hard. Anyway, all this is difficult for me to explain graphically. So I'm glad that Sammy Cito
⏹️ ▶️ John posted some images to explain this. And we'll put this link in the show notes. When you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at this image, you'll understand what I'm talking about. 26, you're like, oh, everything looks nice and everything matches. And 27
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn't match anymore. To be clear, I totally endorse the change in 27, but it is fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John against the other parts that they didn't change in Liquid Glass, which are the 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, you know, when their designers get a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too pure and theoretical about things. This is kind of their failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode. And this has happened numerous times over their history with numerous designers in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge too. And, you know, fortunately, they tend to eventually correct those things. And in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it took a year, but they corrected it. So I'm glad to see that. Like, there is no question in my mind. Like, yeah, when you're looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a screenshot, the Mac OS 26 version does look better. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, design has to interact with the real world. And sometimes that requires compromises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the pure ideal aesthetics. And you have to actually run to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people actually
⏹️ ▶️ John need in reality. Again, you have to ask, what is the job of a window? And this the design they
⏹️ ▶️ John have now is awkward and bad because also the little floaty buttons and toolbars were also
⏹️ ▶️ John designed poorly. With, you know, if they who designed from the start, you would say, okay, the job of the window
⏹️ ▶️ John is to show the content and let's let everything fall from that. And what they've done is taken a design that totally didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John do that job and fixed one part of it without fixing the other. So of course they don't match. It's still better than it was. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still endorse the change, but it just highlights, hey, we fixed one thing, but it looks like maybe this entire idea
⏹️ ▶️ John was bad because now we fixed that one thing and we see some other stuff that also looks bad with it and needs to be fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's going to be a while before they unwind all this stuff, but baby steps,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 this screenshot alone, it looks freaking terrible in Mac OS 27.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looks awful. Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a mismatch. They fixed the corners and didn't fix the other parts that are next to the corners. You know how you can fix
⏹️ ▶️ John the other parts that are next to the corners? You can make those radii also match the, you know, like there's a way to do it, but they didn't
⏹️ ▶️ 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 yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 rects. 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 left and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right side. oval
⏹️ ▶️ John Don't get the geometry people on you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, okay, Whatever. but it's close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It's a capsule
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco semicircular
⏹️ ▶️ John end caps on a rectangle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And the problem is as the like, as the height of that increases,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that means the radius has to increase too. So it does significantly constrain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your design in a way that like, well, now you have to have very, very large corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radii on the window to match all these pill shapes or capsule shapes of the controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In previous versions of macOS, those weren't exact pill shapes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They were round rects. So that you could, so yes, they had rounded corners, but the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left and right side didn't have to be a continuous curve. So that gives you way more flexibility.
⏹️ ▶️ John And search fields were pill shapes at one point. But the way they made that work is they just put bigger margins around
⏹️ ▶️ John them. The corners of the window were practically square and the search field was pill shaped back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John They 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 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 has tentatively sold me on 27 being the improvement is what Marco said a couple minutes ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, yeah, this looks worse in this microcosm or in 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'd have thunk it?
Mickey Mouse hands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Nine to five Mac has noted that the Mickey Mouse hands are back in macOS 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Golden Gate, and they also indicated or said the world is healing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know about the Mickey Mouse hands? Was this news to you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, we had talked about that, I think, at some point semi recently, I guess when 26 came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still hate the hand icons in 26 and 27. They didn't change the shape of the hand icons much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think maybe the, it looks like the, the pointing finger is tilted a little bit. but, uh, But yeah, what we're talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John is Mickey Mouse, the character, wears white gloves with like three little creases on
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of the hand. And for, I don't know how long, for ages and maybe since classic macOS, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John like grabbing something. All those hands look like a white glove because they were white, black outlined
⏹️ ▶️ John with a white cursor, with three little Mickey Mouse creases on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John of the glove. And in 26, they took off the creases because I don't know, that they didn't want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be whimsical anymore. And 27, they brought them back, which to me seems petty, but I endorse it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's incredible. All right.
New Finder icon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In macOS 27, there are a bunch of new icons.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don't know, they're different. I don't know what else to say. But the Finder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, I don't know what they're doing here. The basic Apple guy says, honey, the Finder icon
⏹️ ▶️ John And I disagree. I know what he's getting at. And we'll get more from the Basic Apple guy in a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you go to the link we'll have in the notes, you can see the Tahoe and Golden Gate Finder icons. And the main
⏹️ ▶️ John sin of the Golden Gate Finder icon is they made the blue too light again. I don't know who's obsessed with making a light blue finder,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just back off, man. Like it's 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 the Finder icon, which used to be the macOS icon, is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a face that is, you know, the two eyes and a smiley face that looks like a face head-on,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a blue on the left and white on the right. And the right-hand part of it also looks like a face
⏹️ ▶️ John in profile. So it's kind of like a two-face thing. Some people call it two-face. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tahoe, the profile face had a completely vertical line
⏹️ ▶️ John under the nose of the face, and now it is more curved. The original version of this was more curved.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think the Golden Gate shape is actually an improvement. The color is just too light. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I should follow feedback on that. Just darken up the color. You're on the right path. Just darken up the color and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John extend the white part to the edges of the squircle, and then maybe just give us back the old
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at that point you're at the old icon, which honestly is better. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John not really, because there's been so many variations of this. 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 Golden Gate's design is better than Tahoe's.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just missed the color.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We just need Steven Hackett to get upset about this and then it'll get changed. That's how it worked
⏹️ ▶️ John last year, right? Something like that.
Sharper app icons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then we have a bunch of other ones by Basic Apple Guy, 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 we'll go. I mean, again, follow the link to Basic Apple Guy's post about this because he posted a ton of images to
⏹️ ▶️ John show Tahoe versus Golden Gate. And I just want to make the point that we talked about this back when Tahoe came out with when,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in WWC 2025 with the advent of Tahoe and Icon Composer. And just to recap,
⏹️ ▶️ John they introduced a new format for icons, which is .icon files. It's amazing. No one had ever used that extension before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple got it, .icon. And it's basically a bunch of resources
⏹️ ▶️ John in a little package and instructions for compositing them. And the resources can
⏹️ ▶️ John be bitmaps or vector images. And what this means is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you go into an application package on Tahoe and you dig around in there, you're like, where's the icon?
⏹️ ▶️ John You probably won't find a bitmapped image of the icon unless it has one of those for legacy reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John or for fallback reasons. What you find are these icon assets shoved into an asset catalog that have the
⏹️ ▶️ John ingredients of the icon and they are composited in real time by macOS to make the icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the reason they do that is because Tahoe introduced this idea of on macOS anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I guess on iOS as well, of icon themes where you can have light mode, dark mode, the
⏹️ ▶️ John clear icons. All that is doing is changing the formula for how
⏹️ ▶️ John those pieces in the dot .icon files are composited to make the final icon. So
⏹️ ▶️ John ideally in Apple's world, you just have a bunch of vector shapes and a bunch of instructions for compositing
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And then we can make that icon look good in light mode, in dark mode, in clear mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in, you know, whatever. Another thing that you can do by moving
⏹️ ▶️ John the icon format to this recipe and ingredients composited together is that you can change
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially all the icons in every single one of your OSs without having to redraw your icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that's what we're looking at here. As far as I can tell, pretty much all these icons in basic Apple Guys post
⏹️ ▶️ John are the same icons as in the same contents of the .icon files that were assembled
⏹️ ▶️ John into the assets.car file and whatever. The resources are the same. They didn't redraw the icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John All they're doing is changing the recipe for how they're composited. And you would think, how
⏹️ ▶️ John big a difference could that possibly make? Obviously, the Finder icon has changed. We just got done saying that the shapes are different. But these
⏹️ ▶️ John icons we're looking at in our notes and most of the ones in this blog post that we'll link, I think they're basically the same icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John But changing the compositing makes the world a difference. Marco mentioned it before when he said that when he upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ John to 27, then when he looked back at 26 everything looked blurry. These are way zoomed in in our show notes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I'd encourage you to like move back from your screen or like shrink them down or whatever. But the smaller these
⏹️ ▶️ John icons get, you know, the more they are icon sized and not blown up to this giant size, the more you can see how blurry
⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe's compositing was. Like everything is in this weird haze and all the edges are blurred
⏹️ ▶️ John and take that same resource and render it in the new way. And there's two things about the new way of rendering them. One, crisper
⏹️ ▶️ John edges. And two, they added a new refraction feature
⏹️ ▶️ John to the recipe where each individual layer can say, should this layer refract what's
⏹️ ▶️ John behind it? And by refracting, they just mean like make it seem as if the edges of the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John are made of rounded glass so that when you see the things through it, it kind of bends the light a little bit. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think for the most part, uh, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John become sharp and higher contrast. And the, the few cases where they added refraction,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the freeform icon, I think look great, especially at large sizes. Small sizes kind of lost. But what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think? Do you think this is an upgrade or a downgrade? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. I think this looks like an eye test. When you look at the Tahoe icons and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you look at the Golden Gate icons. One or two? Yeah, exactly. The Tahoe icons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like I don't have my reading glasses on and I need to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you look over at Golden Gate, you're like, ah, crispness. Like, maybe, look, Alan Dye seems like he's about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in his 40s. Maybe he just needs reading glasses and he doesn't know that yet. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you see Tahoe, it looks like eye strain. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of why I am so anti-blurry text ever appearing in a UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because when you are of middle age and you need reading glasses, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see blurry text, your eyes, like you instinctively think, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when you look at blurry text in a UI, it reminds you of eye
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strain and then also can cause eye strain, which is part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many, it's one of the many reasons why that's a bad idea in a UI design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to to kind of do that across the whole system in a broad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diffuse way, to have everything be a little bit soft and blurry all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time is not a good design. So I am, again, very thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I see these icons, like, ah, crispness. And you know what? When I have to like tweak my overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon to work well on 26 and 27, that's going to be a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pain in the butt. In this case, I don't care. Worth it. I am so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the return of sharpness and contrast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's the overall message here. Some of these designs probably need a bit more tweaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look as good as they can. But overall, it is way sharper and higher
⏹️ ▶️ John You don't have to do anything to your overcast icons. 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 for
⏹️ ▶️ John each layer that says refraction, yes, no. And you can change the amount of refraction and angle all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of other crap like that. But I think that is the only new feature. But like I said, Apple didn't update, for the most
⏹️ ▶️ John part, didn't update these icons. The exact same icon will look different in 26 than it does in 27,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, you know, it's wild, but it's like a fallout of them deciding that their icons are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be ingredients and recipes instead of baked in
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, there's nothing stopping you from making your icon an icon composer and just putting in one layer that's 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John opaque bitmap. Like you can still do that. There's no one stopping you from making a bitmap icon. Lots of Apple icons incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John bitmaps in them. But it seems like if you look at all of Apple's icons, they prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John you just use a bunch of vector shapes. And that gives Apple the freedom to essentially change the look
⏹️ ▶️ John of every single icon without asking developers or their own developers to
⏹️ ▶️ John change anything about their icons. They just change the rendering. Now, it's somewhat limited. They're not going to change them in radical ways,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the thing to keep an eye on. It's a bold new regime for icons going
⏹️ ▶️ John from like photorealistic bitmaps in 10.0 to you know a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John ingredients and recipes. And already from 26 to 27, 26, they rolled out. 27,
⏹️ ▶️ John they're changing the look. So I wonder if next year we're going to have a thing, an icon composer that says, hey, the same icon
⏹️ ▶️ John with no changes. Here's how it looks in 26 Here how it looks in 27. Here's how it looks in 28. And don't
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. Remember, you also have to check what is light mode, dark mode, clear mode. Is that all of them? Or is there one more I'm forgetting?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's light, dark, and like kind of, yeah, uncolored. Clear.
⏹️ ▶️ 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 he's 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, 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 know colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or layer effects or things that like I might dial back slightly for the 27 version so that it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more normal. It's kind of like when you see like when you are when you have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stage makeup on and then you go into the regular world and you look ridiculous. In different contexts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might actually make different decisions depending on how it is being rendered and where.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can make tweaks to the recipe on a per OS basis, but I'm not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John sure. I'm pretty sure you can't include multiple icons for different
⏹️ ▶️ John OSs. I did that thing that I talked
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about in the
⏹️ ▶️ John past episode where I bent over backwards to use my old bitmap icons on pre-26, and I'm going to still keep doing that if
⏹️ ▶️ John I can. I know Icon Composer lets you tweak the icons for
⏹️ ▶️ John different modes. Like, oh, do you want to make a tweak that's in dark mode only? Like in dark mode, you want to turn off this layer effect, but in light mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to turn it on. But I don't know if it lets you do that on a per OS basis. I know it previews your icon and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's how it looks in 26 and 27. And I think there might be one or two other things they added besides refraction.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might have let you do like inside-outside glint effects on stuff. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John brave new world of icons.
Preparing for touch-Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. There's been a lot of chatter, and understandably so, about how Apple is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarterbacking to get TouchMax ready to rock. Curtis Hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, 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, that's going to feel so weird to do on a Mac, but you know, TouchMax, you got to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Charlton Smith appears yet again. AppKit isn't just getting touch gesture support, but NS Toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macs. 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 wooly effect where you're like on your phone when you like, most people don't do this because they just press buttons, but if
⏹️ ▶️ 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, do you, 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 essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in that if you pull down the menu and keep your finger down on the screen and move it around, you'll pull
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu a little bit. I don't think those effects really add anything, but they're part of liquid glass. That's the liquid
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it. I mean, they don't take away too much because I feel like they don't bother you if you don't intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John trigger them, but I think it's just basically a waste of time. But anyway, all that's coming to the Mac. So do you plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to touch your screens? Oh, no, definitely not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad and Mac, which doesn't happen often, to be fair, but does happen. And there's definitely occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I've like started to reach up um, to like swipe at something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just briefly. I don't feel like, and here I, here, this is Casey 101.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't feel like there's anything that this solves in my life. Like it would be nice, I guess, to occasionally be able to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I sitting here now, I don't yearn for a touchscreen Mac. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 when you use touch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there'll be like contextual menus or something like that that pop up like path style, like around your finger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sure this was a German
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one. Yeah, controls
⏹️ ▶️ John that are more suited to fingers than to mouse blenders.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. That could be interesting and could be really cool. So we'll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it's the 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. You can't,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope they put that oleophobic coating on the screen because that will just help me keep their screens be less gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John But 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
⏹️ ▶️ John into that habit because it makes the screen uglier for me. But, you know, I have an iPad. I touch it all the time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John once Once you go touch, you can't go back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder, like, you know, because as I have with my most recent laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop, I have the nanotexture screen. And I've said on the show many times how much I absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love nanotexture and I don't plan to buy any future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops without it as long as they are offered with it. And I wonder, like, you know, one of the downsides of nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it is harder to clean. And, you know, it does, just like the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type of screen, I guess the glossy type of screen, it does get those keyboard imprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines in the middle of the screen that are slowly become impossible to clean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't know how to clean those. Once you get to a certain point of those imprint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marks, they seem to be permanent. And that's always been the case even before Nanotexture. I wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Apple says nanotexture, that refers to a few different processes they've had over time. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco original Pro Display XDR was the first one, and that did one version of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the current Mac laptops that offer it are a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different version of it. And then the iPad Pro that has it is yet a different version of Nanotexture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if maybe they would move to the iPad Pro version of it for the Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop and whether that would be easier to clean.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they'll just make a fourth version. They'll just keep refining it. 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey common actions and key features of your app: file system locations, connected devices, visual concepts like rotating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or flipping an image, and user-generated content like folders and documents. Don't display an icon if you can't find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that clearly represents menu item. And they give a very curious example of the seven days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the week where they've chosen odd choices for icons for each day of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the week with a little gray X below it indicating don't do this. And then they have a different version that's just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the text for the seven days a week. And they have the little green check mark, yes, do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love that I love that the the don't do this is just Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to have come with an icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for every item. So good luck. Yeah. Like this thing we literally told you a year ago, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right way to do it. And now we're saying this exact same thing is the wrong way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And just this is the clarifying from last episode. We were like, well, is there a way to turn off the
⏹️ ▶️ John icons? Is it some kind of user setting? Is it a developer choice? Um, 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 in 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 in 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 26th guidelines didn't give developers
⏹️ ▶️ John enough information to know what they should do. The earlier guidelines for all the other years of
⏹️ ▶️ John the macOS did give clear advice. And now the advice is once again clear. And not only is it
⏹️ ▶️ John clear, it is the pre-26 advice, which is don't put icons everywhere. They do say in a subsequent part
⏹️ ▶️ John of this uh to, as they say, apply a uniform visual treatment across menu items in the same group.
⏹️ ▶️ John For visual consistency and balance, provide icons for all menu items in a group or none of them. And it's showing like
⏹️ ▶️ John if there's a group of menu items, like a divider, and then there's menu items for doing stuff with Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John like move and resize or full screen or whatever. If they have icons to let you know, like when this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the tile thing that tiles 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
⏹️ ▶️ John just like one or two of them because these are all commands where icons are useful. So again, the advice is clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Default, your default should be no icons. But if you think an icon, as they say,
⏹️ ▶️ John will help clarify what selecting an item does, then do use an icon. But all icons
⏹️ ▶️ John that do that similar, all menu items that do that similar thing should also have icons. So yeah, back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wasn't there a convention in the past? Maybe I may, maybe I just like misinterpreted this. Wasn't there a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convention in the past that menu items in macOS would have an icon only if they matched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a toolbar item in that app and it would be the same icon as the toolbar item?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the HIG 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 and like macOS 10.0, those wouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ John fit in menus, especially in the pre-retina days. This was just literally impossible. But yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. That is the end of the macOS 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. Don't forget to subtract the Microsoft Bob time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. That's very important. Also, much of what we were saying was way beyond macOS. Like the icons
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I'm just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John look, we're talking
⏹️ ▶️ John 27 and Microsoft Bob. Well, that was the macOS section. The icons were, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have the same problem as Apple. Maybe we should have just talked about improvements, trust and safety in AI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well done. 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. Like it bends down the top of the screen. And once the black blob
⏹️ ▶️ John gets far enough away 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 Trout-Smith
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: the iPad's menu bar is now left aligned and can be set to display permanently. When hidden,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will still show the app name so you know which app is currently frontmost.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, whoever was insisting, we can't just put a menu bar on the iPad. Like, isn't that surrendering? It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, what if we center it? Then it's like we're doing something different. And then 27 said, just left align it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, just the menu bar is left aligned. Just do it. And make an option
⏹️ ▶️ John to have it permanently visible. And when it's not visible, make sure you show the app name. It's like, there's just slowly like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we, you know, we tried for a decade or whatever to come up with a UI that's better than the Mac UI. We
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn't do it. Not to say it's not possible, but all I can say is we didn't do it. So let's just do the things we
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the Apple TV 4K first generation from 2017. As I have lamented many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times recently, and having come fresh off of a vacation where I brought, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's the HD from 2015, whatever the, I think this is the first one that allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. This is an old Apple TV and it shows. Yeah, it's not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would love, as I've said so many times, I would love to trickle down and upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my travel slash tailgate Apple TV to something nicer. And apparently this is as nice as it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever be because it will not get the TVOS 27. And I'm not really sad about that since it's already hurting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ John seems so recent. Apple TV 4K, that's the new one. No, first generation was 2017.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out Apple TVs don't come out that often.
watchOS hardware cutoff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch OS 27. We're done with TVOS, which again, in John's defense, that makes sense. Watch OS 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 Watch OS 27 are Series 9, Series 10, Series 11, Ultra 2, Ultra 3,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and SE 3. Initially, they had incorrectly said that the Series 9 was not supported,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that was an oops, it is supported. So again, 9, 10, 11, not the Ultra 1, but yes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Ultra 2 and 3, and yes for the SE3. When they said the 9 wasn't
⏹️ ▶️ John supported, I'm like, really? Jeez, this is harsh, but I'm glad the 9 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 WatchOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think that's, it's a casualty of the very slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update pace they chose for the Apple Watch SOCs. You know, as we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever new Apple Watches come out, they have gone like two or three versions in a row having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same processor on Apple Watches. So this is what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like All of a sudden, when you want to cut off a processor that was used for three generations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a row, you end up slicing off a whole lot of models. So that's why this
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
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey do 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some some like kind of sweatpants that he really, really enjoys. And Michaela got this absolutely adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long sleeve dress with like hearts and different colors all over it and pockets, which I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know anything. And even I know that that's really exciting. They do stuff for the home, for travel. They do bags and accessories,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jewelry, beauty and wellness, all sorts of different things. And what's great about Quince is that all of their
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
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Apple’s AI Tech Talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple's AI Tech Talk. So, when we were there two years ago, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was, what they did was they had the keynotes, and then most of us, I don't remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we were told to, or if it was optional, or what the deal was, but most of us were shuffled into the Steve Jobs Theater.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that's when we saw IJustine. Who was she talking to? I can't remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John Talking to John GiAndrea and maybe Mike Rockwell, and I forget. It was some Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And she, 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 has quotation marks around it. So I'm assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John it's Apple talking when they say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was Craig Federigh, Amar Subramania. Subramania, 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry. Yes. Thank you for the correction. Good grief.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was given in the like 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, Steve Jobs Theater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this wasn't in the theater. My bad. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John where I thought it was. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was in, it 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 but it's, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it's so small. It's like four or five rows deep. It's just a one tiny little room. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't, I don't understand why they didn't do this as a WWDC session or publicly broadcast this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, because it was clearly on the record. Press was there. And, you know, people were taking
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures. I don't know if anyone just recorded the whole thing on their phone, but I kind of wish they did because everybody was forced to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's what my AI transcription note-taking app wrote. Here's what the fastest typist at our company wrote. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we're going to read a little bit from Chance Miller from 9 to 5 Mac, I'm assuming, had really good fingers and typed all this stuff up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but even that had typos, or maybe it was anyway, tons of info in
⏹️ ▶️ John this AI tech talk that I guess is not really, I mean, is it relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John to developers? There's so many WWC sessions you could argue, like, do developers need to know this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or is this just like Apple talking about a cool thing that they did? Sometimes it's a little bit of each. You're like, well, it does
⏹️ ▶️ John help if developers know what's under the covers. It'll give them an idea to how to correctly assess a feature and know if it's
⏹️ ▶️ John right for them, but 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 the, 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 this in the Chief Jobs Theater. Maybe they thought most people aren't
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in this nerdy crap. Craig Federici is interested in this nerdy crap, clearly, because he's nerdy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the press that they invited, some of them were into it and some of them were like, ah, 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 going to read a bunch from Chance Miller,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as John said. So according to Federigi, 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 of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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. These are 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 rec showing like
⏹️ ▶️ John the system experience and the AI assistant. And then down from that are the apps. And then down from that is
⏹️ ▶️ John the 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.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we're going to 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 a 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 the
⏹️ ▶️ John Gemini chatbot. And he goes further to say, we're not using the infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ John or that they use to run the backend for those services either. That is entirely a Google thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John As he says, the amount of Google Assistant we use is none. What he's trying to say is we wrote our
⏹️ ▶️ John own like thing that uses models behind the scene, that shares zero code
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google. And when we talk to models behind the scenes, those models are not any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the models that Google uses to power any of its customer facing products. So this is Apple really
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to draw the line. So you don't think like, oh, it's a shiny black blob where I get to talk to Google Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ John just like I do at Gemini.google.com. 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 on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and AFM Cloud Pro models to our AFM Fusion model and image model. These are the models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are the product of our collaboration with Google. These are models designed specifically for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our Apple intelligence experiences. Finally, when you make a request involving current events or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other elements of world knowledge, those responses are grounded by accessing Apple's world knowledge service.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is something that we've built over many years and provides a great source of information to satisfy your request.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is kind of describing the layer cake to saying we have a whole bunch of models that are running on
⏹️ ▶️ John your device. And we wrote software, the system orchestrator that's above them, that when you give a query through Siri, which is an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that we wrote, and it goes to system orchestrator, which is an app that we wrote, and it decides where is it going to send your request. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we 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, I'm using, you know, Google Gemini to do something, or I'm using like
⏹️ ▶️ John a codex coding agent, like, and you're just typing. It's not like it takes what you type, sends it to an
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM, gets a response. There's a whole piece of software under there that is deciding, you know, there's the system prompt
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other stuff, but like it's composing prompts to send to different agents, getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the responses back, using those to figure out where and when it's going to send the next response. Like that's, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John the product. Like we've talked a lot about like LLMs being commoditized. Is this a, This is a thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone can have an LLM and it's fine? LLMs may be commoditized, but the products that
⏹️ ▶️ John we're all using are not commodities. It's kind of like saying like the underlying search
⏹️ ▶️ John engine technology may be commoditized, but like the things that make the app or the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, index the web and all that stuff are not commodities because that's what makes a product good. And here's
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple describing the app that it made on all our phones and everything that does
⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff that eventually, yes, sends requests to either an on-device model or a cloud model and private cloud compute.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that is the very, very last link in a long chain. And, you know, requests
⏹️ ▶️ John are going back and forth all internally with all this stuff many times over before you get a response.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's, you know, that's what Apple's saying, that's what we wrote. And so again, you should not expect this to look,
⏹️ ▶️ John behave, or be anything like Google Gemini because it just doesn't share anything with it except for the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that the various underlying models that it is orchestrating among were created
⏹️ ▶️ John in collaboration with Google in a fuzzy degree that we'll get to in a little bit. And then even going so far as to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, when we have to find something, like the world knowledge thing, which is Apple's fun phrase,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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. Apple made, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this might have been in the notes and we never got to it in the past year, but Apple's world knowledge service.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if we ever talked about it on the show, but like the rumor was they're making a service that knows things about
⏹️ ▶️ John the world. And so when you ask a question about the world, it doesn't go to Google search. It goes to Apple's World
⏹️ ▶️ John Knowledge Service. And Dan Morton's had some things to say about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Oh, so Dan tooted. I asked Siri AI what it knew about me. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about quote Dan Morton 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 AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to largely be relying on Apple's web index, it doesn't appear to have the ability to access the web directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Case in point, after my mistaken Wikipedia identification, someone did go out and create a Wikipedia page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, but Siri AI can't see it yet, even if you provide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with URLs. So Dan asks, what about this? And pastes in the URL. And the response is that URL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently leads to a, quote, Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name, quote, page. If you're seeing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live page at that link, it may have been created very recently and hasn't been indexed by my search engines yet, or it might be a draft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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 and the curse of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John creating its own 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 Google has made tremendous advances in that. Back in the old days, you know, they're 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
⏹️ ▶️ John can 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 Morrin's asking it. But just to show the
⏹️ ▶️ John way you know, the Siri AI works, even if given the URL,
⏹️ ▶️ John it still won't just go out and get that URL. It says, well, that leads to a page that says there's no
⏹️ ▶️ John article with this name. Yeah, I bet it does in the Apple World Knowledge Index that was created sometime
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past. But right now it doesn't. Hey, Siri AI, why don't you go to that web page
⏹️ ▶️ John right now and read what it says on it? And it's like, I can't do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you open it up, what does it say? I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure how they're going to resolve this. because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey staying in, baby. Switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann Fox
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann News Podcasts. Switch to CNN.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my God. This is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is altogether terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John playing? I guess I said the SIRI. This is a good thing.
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 this is actually true. 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 the 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 keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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. And this was 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 2018 or 2019, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did something similar with the audio of that commercial, where when they said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their hail word to their assistant, they also stripped out some frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fix the same problem so that way everyone's Amazon echoes wouldn't wake up in response to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And 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 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 did their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of this back a few years ago, I thought, wouldn't it be a great overcast feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I just detect, like if you are playing out loud on a speaker or in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, if I try to detect when a podcast contains the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word Siri or Alexa and apply that filter myself in overcast as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself saying Siri or Alexa or whatever and giving a command. And then I would play it over speakers and then I'd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see my devices activated. And then I would say, all right, what filters in Adobe Audition or whatever do I need to apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replicate this effect so it defeats that recognition? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back when Amazon did their Super Bowl commercial, I could not do it. No matter what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried, I could not get the recording of my voice to not trigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speakers. So what did I do when all this came out this week about Siri? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried the exact same thing. And I went in and I was able to compare because now I had the real audio from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I opened that real audio up and I saw exactly how they stripped out those frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and exactly which ones were stripped out with what kind of response pattern. And I figured out exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to replicate like as close as possible to that process. And I applied it to a test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file and I still couldn't replicate the effect. It would still wake up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all my devices whenever I would play my voice coming over the speakers. Now, what some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have theorized is that maybe by recognizing my voice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I'm giving it such a strong signal because it's me saying it that my device would start to, but maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody else wouldn't be able to activate my devices as easily. And that's certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. But also with everybody saying that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their devices were being woken up by the keynote anyway, it seems like this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily a very strong filter. That basically the recognition of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco term Siri by all the modern Apple devices out there seems like it actually might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sophisticated enough and sensitive enough that maybe this trick of muting these few frequencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn't even defeat it necessarily or doesn't defeat it enough if the voice is close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to you. Or maybe if you haven't done like the personal voice training with the Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup process, maybe yours is more sensitive or less sensitive. I don't know. But there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of variables and it's not, it doesn't seem super clear-cut that this process works 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they should add some other way to mix it in there, like some frequency that you could add or something. But I mean, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there's stuff there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 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 band
⏹️ ▶️ John when the sound hits my ear. And it's like, well, is the signal chain from that audio file to your ears so
⏹️ ▶️ John perfect that its tiny narrow slice of frequency is going to have no energy
⏹️ ▶️ John in it whatsoever? Because your speakers are that perfect. I, you know, especially if you're playing over
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 is unreliable.
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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models spanning on device to the cloud. AFM Core, Core Advanced Cloud, and Cloud Image or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey custom builds for Apple Silicon, trained using proprietary data and refined using techniques. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a 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
⏹️ ▶️ John techniques. But anyway, refined using something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, And also our friend Stephen Robles was there and did a video about all this, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of stuff, including this meeting. uh, Uh, We'll put a timestamp link in. But uh, what Steven said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that he thinks refined is another way of saying that they distilled the Gemini models to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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, everybody does it. Apparently, it's just an open secret. You know, if your competitor comes out with
⏹️ ▶️ John a better model than you, you ask that model questions and use the answers to train your model. So your model
⏹️ ▶️ John is as good as theirs. It's not clear to me when they talk about all these models. First, they give them all
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple names. It's, you know, AFM, Apple Foundation model, Core, Core Advanced, Core Advanced Cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John The names sound like old Intel processors, honestly, but they, But Apple gives them names.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that 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 using
⏹️ ▶️ John techniques from Gemini Frontier models? Are you distilling bigger? Like, it's hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell what they're doing physically speaking. Like, are they starting, they're all called Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Foundation model. So they were called that before the Google deal. google Apple had foundation models. This is AFM3,
⏹️ ▶️ John 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, and now they're
⏹️ ▶️ John doing three. Do they taking the models from AFM two and just using those models and then distilling against
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Gemini models to train them? Or are they taking Gemini models and training them with Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not clear. But all I'm saying is that they were not exactly clear in like
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the origin of these models? Were they made at Apple and refined with data from Google? Were they made at Google
⏹️ ▶️ John and refined with data from Apple? Like clear as mud. But they're basically saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John both cooks have some participation into this meal. We're just not sure what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty. Then some more details. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John This little bit here, I know the names are just like AFM Core or Cloud, blah, blah, blah. AFM Cloud Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says, this is Amar talking again, is our most capable model with quality
⏹️ ▶️ John similar to Gemini Frontier models. Again, does that mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Gemini Frontier model?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that like Because when they say Frontier model, they're saying like the best Google models that they have. This is AFM
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloud Pro. It runs only on servers. It's presumably a big model. It has an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John given name, AFM Cloud Pro. And they say this one is the same quality as the best models
⏹️ ▶️ John Google has. Is it? Just those models? Is it those models changed in some
⏹️ ▶️ John way? Because we have those stories about how Apple is given access to these Gemini models and is allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ John tweak them and modify them. Or is it an Apple model that is distilled against Gemini models?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not entirely clear, but Apple's trying to characterize when we say all this AFM stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's how you should think about it. And AFM Cloud Pro is basically their like their,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, ChatGPT 5.5, their 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 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 have miscopy-pasted. All 70 billion process
⏹️ ▶️ John each token. That is correct. So yeah, you've got the models are measured in
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John words. Again, I should find those links to the YouTube videos that explain how LLMs work, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a good idea to know how they work. And that's a dense model, which may be how you think all models work, but that's
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, that was just like the sort of the most naive version of it. Then you have sparse models or
⏹️ ▶️ John mixture of experts or MOE. The model is divided into many expert
⏹️ ▶️ John sub networks. A small router network decides which experts are relevant for each token,
⏹️ ▶️ John and only those experts are activated. So that's where, you know, for each token that's going through,
⏹️ ▶️ John all 70 billion parameters don't participate in the processing of that token. Only the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that another network decides are relevant. So you don't have to activate all of them at once. So that's dense model
⏹️ ▶️ John versus sparse model. And you'll hear those terms in this big Apple press release about their third generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So with that in mind, Apple's announcement of its third generation foundation models happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at machine learning.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. Uh, AFM Core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Advanced is a 20 billion parameter sparse model and our most powerful on device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model. It's natively multimodal, enabling helpful features like expressive voices and higher accuracy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dictation. Built on cutting edge Apple Research, this model activates just one to four billion parameters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a time, depending on the request. AFM3 Core Advanced is unlocked and optimized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for our most 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 their 3 billion parameter dense
⏹️ ▶️ John model, which is like all the parameters all the time. It runs on lower devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John And AFM Core Advance is 20 billion, but it's sparse. So that's a big jump. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of understand why only Apple's top-end devices can handle it. Even though all 20 billion 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 the difference
⏹️ ▶️ John they were talking about on those slides about how you can't get the expressive voice and stuff. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John all AFM Core Advanced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Oh. 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance. AFM Cloud Image is for image generation and editing, go figure. And AFM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cloud Pro 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 don't
⏹️ ▶️ John come out and say this, but every part of their architecture, and I imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John most uh things like this, is trying as hard as it can to use the smallest
⏹️ ▶️ John possible model it can get away with. This is as opposed to, for example, me, whenever I use any
⏹️ ▶️ John of these products, I'm using like you know codex from the command line or something, and
⏹️ ▶️ John like a slash models thing where you can pick which model you want. Whatever the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I always pick biggest, highest effort, most thinking, because I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the smartest one. It's like, well, it would be much faster if you use a smaller one. It's a waste of time
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the big one on these little dinky tests. I'm like, I just want the smartest all the time, which means I run out of tokens a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is fine. That's my own stupid choice. That is not what Apple wants billions of iPhone users
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. So what they're going to do is you make a request. and It's going to be like, if we can get away with doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John with AFM Core, our 3 billion parameter dense model, we're going to. Even though if we gave
⏹️ ▶️ John it to AFM Cloud Pro, it would do a way better job. We're not going to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John because computing is a scarce resource. It costs money. It takes
⏹️ ▶️ John time. And even though it probably would give a better result, although that is somewhat debatable
⏹️ ▶️ John because some of them say, well, if you give it to one of these big thinking models, not only does it take longer, but actually gives a worse result because it overthinks it and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But setting that aside, my experience has been the bigger, more powerful models do
⏹️ ▶️ John better, no matter what you ask them. I'm sure there are counterexamples, but my experience with code stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John they do better. But that's not what Apple software wants to do. So it's going to figure out what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John wimpiest model that I can send this to. If none of the on-device ones will do it, then I have to send it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the cloud. But even when I send it to the cloud, do we really want to send it to the one, the AFM cloud, the one we
⏹️ ▶️ John pro, the one we said that is comparable to Google stuff? That is like the line of last resort.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when I'm sitting there talking to like, you know, ChatGPT or whatever in a web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm at least picking the pop-up menus that say, yeah, go to ChatGPT, super hard
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking, maximum, whatever, all the time. No matter what I'm asking it, and Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ John not give you that choice. They only have one model, AFM Cloud Pro, that is on that level. And I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets very few requests by design. The only other thing is like, if you do anything with images, they just have one
⏹️ ▶️ John image model. So everything there is going to AFM Cloud Image. But everything else, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John so many choices before they get down to the quote unquote good model underneath it all. And I think that may come
⏹️ ▶️ John up when we get to another Dan Morin example. Maybe we skipped over it or maybe I removed it
⏹️ ▶️ John from the notes. But sometimes, yeah, maybe I get to get clipped out of the notes here. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John when you ask Siri AI in the current betas a question and it gives you an
⏹️ ▶️ John answer, actually, that's from my experience, not Dan Morin. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, my goodness. Even you confuse you and Dan Morris.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I don't know where it went in the notes, though. Anyway, sometimes when you ask a question, you get an answer, uh
⏹️ ▶️ John as I did with a Siri AI and macOS. You'd be like, oh, that's a pretty good answer. uh
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you ask the same question later, to for example, demonstrate it to a family member, gives you a totally different worse
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I 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
⏹️ ▶️ John better. So yeah, Apple doesn't seem to give you control over that routing. I don't think there's a pop-up
⏹️ ▶️ John menu in Siri where you can pick the model that you want. And sometimes that difference shows through.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe if you don't, if you're not like experimenting like I am and asking the same question multiple times with the exact same wording, you won't
⏹️ ▶️ John notice 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey large language models for large language models from June 2025. That's also at machinelearning.apple.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget if we ever talked about that paper, that Apple said had a bunch of papers on this topic, but here is the
⏹️ ▶️ John fruits of that labor. Apparently, AFM Core Advanced does, in fact, this thing. And this is this paper, yeah, it's from
⏹️ ▶️ John 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. Philipponi Stefano wrote an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article about it, which we'll also link from Philipponi. The LLM in a Flash paper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey addresses challenges and solutions for running LLMs on devices with limited DRAM capacity. It presents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an approach for efficiently executing LLMs that exceed available DRAM capacity by storing model parameters in flash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memory and loading them into DRAM on demand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think we did also mention that paper ages ago. Um, Apple explicitly calls out the
⏹️ ▶️ John instruction following pruning for large language models sparse things. So they're definitely doing that because that was
⏹️ ▶️ John reading from a direct quote from their VP of AI or whatever. What is his name?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. And this other paper about flash memory, about like, oh, you don't have enough RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you want to use a bigger model. You can store part of it in a flash and like swap it in or whatever. That makes me wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons Apple intelligence is disabled on external drives is that Apple just doesn't want to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with having to guess at the performance characteristics of external drives if they're doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they are in fact doing this technique, this LM in a flash thing where some of the model is in RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and some of it is on Flash. Apple knows the speed characteristics of all of its internal SSDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so maybe it's when it's an external drive, they're like, how about we just disable it entirely? Because I'm sure plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of the drives are fast enough. But if they're not, it has a terrible experience or like performance
⏹️ ▶️ John holds off a cliff. I'm just speculating. I have no idea if this is true. If someone knows for sure, please write in and tell me why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why can't I boot from an external drive and use Apple intelligence? But you can't. And maybe this is one of the reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or it could be that this LLM in a flash thing isn't even used in any of the 27 OSs. I don't know that either, but I just thought
⏹️ ▶️ John 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, AFM three Core Advance 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crucial inference time elasticity. Rather than using a single model for all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tasks or managing an ensemble of smaller models, AFM Core Advanced uses a predetermined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number of active parameters tailored to each specific use case. This allows weights to be loaded incrementally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across requests of varying difficulty, scaling the model size for beyond traditional DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limits while minimizing latency.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is them saying that this specific model, AFM3 Core Advance, does use
⏹️ ▶️ John the things from the flash paper, it sounds like. But of course, Apple Intelligence hasn't been able to run when booted from
⏹️ ▶️ John an external drive since its introduction in 2024. So this is, and also the AFM
⏹️ ▶️ John Core Advance only runs on the highest end hardware. So that can't be the root reason why they do this, but I wonder if it
⏹️ ▶️ John contributes to it. But anyway, all that is to say, if you think Apple just like bought models
⏹️ ▶️ John from Google, stuck them on servers, and then sent requests to them, that's not how this works at all. Like that's, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it's the biggest point of this tech talk is with all those things on the diagram and Craig Fadery pointing out
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they would, Google's participation, they were an important part of this. And we'll get to some even more important parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of them in a second. But Apple is the one writing the software that's on top of it. And Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact, has made many advances. All those AI people that Apple hired that, you know, eventually left to go to other AI
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, they actually did interesting, novel work. I'm not sure if this stuff is like the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John things are happening at all the cutting edge AI companies, but I do want to give Apple credit for like, they're not just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we failed, we can't do anything. Let's just use a third party product and slap a Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John face on it. Not at all. Like these papers and the fact that they're using them and the description of how they use them
⏹️ ▶️ John and how it gets them to be able to run models that otherwise wouldn't run run on device and essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John how, how it makes it possible for Apple to ship 27 OSs to literally
⏹️ ▶️ John billions of Apple devices and not destroy any, all their servers. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John can't do the thing that everyone else is doing, which is like every request goes to a server. Don't run anything on device.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're trying so hard to run everything on device that they possibly can, using lots of interesting techniques
⏹️ ▶️ John to make models that shouldn't fit on your phone actually fit on your phone and shuffling between them. And like all
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it's fascinating. And it shows that they are not, I mean, they're behind, like, because they're not
⏹️ ▶️ John the cutting edge like their competitors are, but they're using what they're good at, basically writing client-side
⏹️ ▶️ John software to innovate in that area on top of the underlying technologies
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 and 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 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is part of the PCC fleet. And Apple's devices will only trust hardware, excuse me, software on these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers that is signed by Apple. The Google Cloud servers don't yet support all the same protections as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple's own private cloud compute servers, but Apple says it will gradually be ramping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey towards the complete set of protections throughout the summer preview period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what is a cryptographically verifiable append-only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ledger sound like to you? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not blockchain. It sounds like it. Isn't
⏹️ ▶️ John that exactly what a blockchain is, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John People 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 a request
⏹️ ▶️ John has to, of course, decrypt it because how could it you know it has to know what you said to do the work? But
⏹️ ▶️ John 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
⏹️ ▶️ John comes into that server that is decrypted in memory and then process and chuck back out is saved in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And 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 with
⏹️ ▶️ John those, you know, M3 Ultra, M2 Ultras, whatever they were that we saw being made in that factory, runs
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 you were 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
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John other than the promises that they fulfill. And as this article says, that
⏹️ ▶️ John they're not quite up to the standards of Apple's private cloud compute, but the idea is they will be
⏹️ ▶️ John before the 27 OS is ship. Um, If they're not, how will we know? Like again, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John gives these uh, images to security researchers so they can mathematically prove
⏹️ ▶️ John that uh, when you run a request, it's really running against this image and security researchers
⏹️ ▶️ John have at it prove to yourself that we're not saving any data. There's no secret NSA side channel
⏹️ ▶️ John that sends every request in plain text to some server or logs it. Like you have the binary image.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is it. Prove to yourself because the executable binary is, you know, it's just machine code. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can see what it does. You can decompile it and you security researchers should be able to prove, see, we're not saving it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then also what you should be able to prove is that thing that we gave you, that's the thing that's running on the server. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John the stories I've said about this is that in the end, you have to, there is a root of trust in believing that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is not lying to you. That's true of every piece of software in the world. Lots of times people send and ask ADP
⏹️ ▶️ John questions. Like they say, Apple says my message is end-to-end encrypted, but do we have to just take their word
⏹️ ▶️ John for it? The answer is yes. Like, you know, like they write the software. They could lie and say
⏹️ ▶️ John it's end-to-end encrypted and just be lying through their teeth. But security researchers would discover
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were lying in most cases. In the end, there is some root of trust. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you keep digging down and like, what is that paper that we've linked to a few times?
⏹️ ▶️ John Musing on trust or whatever, something like that, about talking about if you had a compiler that was corrupted
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way, that you couldn't trust anything because the compiler builds all your other programs. Uh, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John I could remember what that one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is. Yeah, I know what you're thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Find it for the notes, maybe. Um, So yeah, but you do have to trust them when they say we remote some software that do this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, 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. as a bug in it somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but yeah, that's, it seems like, I mean, the question is, those
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple silicon servers with the M2 Ultras in them, how long will Apple keep doing that? Have
⏹️ ▶️ John they already given up on that effort and said, well, it's a cool thing. We tried it, but that was under the old regime. And now what we're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do is what everybody else does, which is we're going to run on NVIDIA GPUs, which is interesting because Apple hates NVIDIA's
⏹️ ▶️ John guts and hasn't done anything with NVIDIA for ages. But apparently they'll use their GPUs and servers. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ John also interesting because Google, which is running these servers, Google has their own like
⏹️ ▶️ John TPUs, There's tensor processing units that are really good at running Google's models.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google makes its own silicon, these TPUs, which we talked about a long time ago on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John that are different than NVIDIA GPUs. Why isn't Apple using those? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple uses NVIDIA GPUs, they're not tied to Google. So if and when the deal ends
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google or they don't like Google hosting their stuff, they could go to anybody and say, hey, do you have a data center filled with NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs that we can run our stuff on? They probably do. Only Google has TPUs, I think. I don't think there's any
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of third-party thing for that. Now, I'm not sure how much stake to put in that because
⏹️ ▶️ John if I was sending these things to Google, I would just run on their TPUs. And if we have to go elsewhere, then just like port it or whatever, but maybe that's more
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult. But anyway, it seems like Apple might be giving up on the idea that they are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to run Apple silicon servers in their own data centers and
⏹️ ▶️ John build their own hardware and whatever that factory was in Arizona and Texas. And instead, they're just going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do what everyone else does and just pay some hosting provider like AWS or Google Cloud to
⏹️ ▶️ John rent racks full of NVIDIA GPUs. And at this point, Google did a deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John XAI, Grok, whatever, like that they built out data centers that they aren't using
⏹️ ▶️ John because no one wants to use Grok because it sucks and everyone hates Elon Musk. And so XAI
⏹️ ▶️ John is renting whole data centers to Google. So it could be that when you talk to Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, it ends up going to an XAI data center that is being rented by Google where it's running NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ John What a world that we live in. But yeah, this seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a 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 like an iBook or something, that like the relationship between
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and NVIDIA soured.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was it? Yeah. And like that was so long ago. Like you would say so long ago. Surely none of those people are still there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Phil Schiller is still there. Um, but yeah, they, they're still sore about that, but this is one degree separated, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they, the deal is that Google will run servers for them because Google's running good at running servers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not sure if Apple dictated that. And by the way, the servers you run for us, they should use NVIDIA GPUs and
⏹️ ▶️ John not your tensor things, not your TPUs. But uh, that's the shape of it. Apple and NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ John together again, sort of. Sitting in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tree. C O M P U T I N
⏹️ ▶️ John G Sitting in one of Elon Musk's data centers. You're going to spell out a inference. I don't know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so again, this is not, you know, getting back to video podcast, It's not a visual medium and we don't
⏹️ ▶️ John have good images. The tech radar images are blurry because it's like taken from a phone in an audience or whatever. But please
⏹️ ▶️ John do look at the block diagrams. Um, 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, um, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John were 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 distill? Like they didn't go into that level of
⏹️ ▶️ John detail. But their big emphasis here was most of the stuff you see in Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John AI is software Apple wrote. And they didn't say this, but like it's clear that you
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of need the part that Google provided or otherwise none of this works. But Apple was really
⏹️ ▶️ John emphasizing we did a lot of work for this. And I mean, I guess it's like also when it falls on its
⏹️ ▶️ John face and doesn't work right or you're unhappy with how it goes. Don't blame Google because that wasn't up to them. That was up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Quince and Lisa. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're going to be talking about, by popular request, the WWDC State of the Union session.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a whole bunch of stuff covered there. We're going to go over that in Overtime because it just couldn't fit in the show. You can join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and listen at at.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Auntie Marco Arment. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Syracuse. It's accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Where’s our SOTU coverage?!
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, if you're not an ATP member and you're like, oh, are you going to 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 WWC is there's tons of followup and tons of news, and
⏹️ ▶️ John things 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
⏹️ ▶️ John just delete State of the Union from the notes because like it's, it's old news now. Like we can't really go back to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It's just, it's, it's already done and gone. That's what overtime is for.
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Union is. So don't be sorry about it. I mean, we're sorry, like, you know, and it is developer-y type stuff. And it sounds like, how can State of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Union be in overtime? That should be part of a regular episode. When we didn't cover it at all, people
⏹️ ▶️ John didn't notice, but now it's an overtime. Somebody will complain. So anyway, 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. Um, And I wanted to talk about the Unify Travel Router,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we talked about at some point in the past. But to refresh your memory, the standard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operating procedure for travel routers is a GLINET, which I don't know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to verbally describe how big a GLInet router is, but they're small,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not tiny by any stretch. And a few months ago, UniFi came out, or Ubiquiti came out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a UniFi travel router, which is exceedingly small. It's imagine like five or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six 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 Wi-Fi and go through that whole painful dance. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the travel router broadcasts its own Wi-Fi that your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iPad and Mac and your spouse's phone and Mac and iPad and your children's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads and switches and so on and so forth, they all connect to the UTR, the UniFi travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router. And that is figuring out how to get you to the internet. Now, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro move, in my personal opinion, which you can do either by hand or the UniFi travel router does automatically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to set your Wi-Fi that this portable router is broadcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be the exact same SSID and password as your home Wi-Fi. So this way it, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just jumps on the nearby Wi-Fi thinking effectively that it's at home. is particularly critical if you're a dork
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like me and bring one or maybe two Sono speakers with you when you are on a long trip like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because then the Sono speakers say, ah, yes, I'm at home. And even though some of my friends are not here, I'm at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home. So I will work just the way I always do, which is great. This kind of reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me of, uh, I don't know, there's lots of animated shows that have done this, but like some
⏹️ ▶️ John animated character or person who has to be in water, like maybe it's a mermaid or something, or other, they dry out,
⏹️ ▶️ John that wherever they go, they bring like a fishbowl or a bowl of water or whatever with them. And it just occurs to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, wherever you go, you 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 I
⏹️ ▶️ John guy in Ponyo with the sprinkler thing and he's pumping the water as he walks around because he's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey got to walk in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, maybe we'll do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just about to say. Anyhow, so yeah. So this is one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that it is exceedingly nerdy. Most people, even perhaps most nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want nothing to do with it. And that's perfectly fair. No argument. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that I was interested to do, because this was the first time I had taken the UTR, to travel to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something larger than a hotel room. And the UTR is very small and doesn't use a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of power. And it seems like it's really meant for the space of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car or a hotel room, but not the space of an entire house. And when we stay at Cape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charles, we stay in a standalone house. I would guess it's like 1,500 square
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet. So not small, but by no means voluminous either. Um, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know what that would be in metric. I'm sorry. I have no idea. But anyways, it's three bedrooms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's got like, what is it, two and a half bathrooms, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically perfect for our family. And I was really worried and I brought a GLI net with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me as well because I assumed that the UTR just wouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the oomph to broadcast Wi-Fi throughout the entire house. Now, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the GLI-net was set up for success because it so happens that the cable modem and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router for the house were fairly centrally located, which was excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I have to say, the UTR worked great. I was very impressed. I, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn't want to say anything to Marco about this or John for that matter. But when I was talking on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP, I was connecting via Ethernet. I think I did talk about this last week, via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really janky, like 50-foot Ethernet cable running through the kitchen of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the house over to where the UTR was, which actually had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Ubiquiti Flex Mini, I think it is, hanging off of it. So I could connect more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thing via Ethernet because, again, I'm a dork. Anyways, but I had it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the laptop was connected Ethernet to a little tiny five-port switch, which was connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the UTR, which was in turn connected as a client
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the house's router.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But by the way, the UTR supports Teleport, which is kind of sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Tailscale, but just for Unify stuff. And so what Teleport is, is it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a WireGuard-based VPN that's mostly zero config or very little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey config. So I was going Ethernet to switch to UTR to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router via VPN to Richmond to talk to you two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got to say, it worked for me. What? I'm stunned. Oh, God. Like no latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's astonishing that this worked at all, much less did so with effectively no latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don't have too much more to say other than that. Teleport on the UTR has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little wonky for me. It used to almost never work. Again, teleport being the VPN thing. It used to almost never work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it mostly works, but occasionally it'll just kind of forget to be connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to teleport, which isn't the end of the earth, but I prefer all of our traffic to be encrypted through whatever the house's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router is and merge or ingress onto the internet from our house, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our literal home in Richmond. But all in all, it actually worked really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what's interesting about the fact that the UTR can be on teleport is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if I wanted to, I could actually bring one of the UniFi security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras and connect it to the UTR. I guess it would have to be a Wi-Fi camera or I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have to use like a POE injector or whatever, but I could connect it to the UTR. And as long as it's on teleport,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will record the camera in the travel situation to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup at home. Why would you do this? I have no idea except to make sure that Penny isn't climbing on the furniture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But other than that, I have no answer. But the fact that you can is really freaking cool. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are not a sponsor. They should be a sponsor. They are not a sponsor, but you should really consider the Unified Travel Router
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you're traveling. And I find that even if I didn't use it at the house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would consider bringing this anyway because it is so darn small. And when you're in the car, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you set it up, you know, hook it to your phone to tether off your phone, or if you do like me and borrow a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotspot from the library or what have you, it is a really excellent way to get the kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey online quickly and easily in the car. And you just have what I have is, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little anchor like battery pack connected to the UTR, which is in turn connected to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hotspot. And it works great. So this is probably something you should not want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your life because you are really in a bad state if this is something that excites you as much as it excites me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I got to tell you, I freaking love this thing. It's great.