801: WWDC 2025: A Return to Form
01:42:16 Share

Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by your friend of mine, Mr. Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. Hey, David. How are you? I am doing well. It's WWDC week and I was able to stay home this year, which is kind of fun. Where'd you watch the keynote? Just sitting at my desk. Yeah? Yeah. Me too. We had the Mac Sparky Labs in the Discord. That was kind of fun. Everybody was commenting on stuff. So it was kind of fun having folks there.

But it's a big week, WWDC week. We're releasing this episode early. If you're getting this in your feed earlier than you expect, your usual Mac Power Users episode is because we're recording the day after the event and we want to get it out ASAP so you get the latest news from us. One of those weird episodes we do that's kind of news-related.

Yeah, yeah, we don't get to do that very often here. But you know, it's WC is a big deal, right? It's where we learned about Apple's software plans for at least the next year. And this was a big one. And it's gonna, it's gonna impact you no matter what part of the Apple ecosystem you're in. So it's a it's a big week.

Yeah. And it was an interesting year. I mean, going in, I had a lot of questions because, you know, everybody's talking about artificial intelligence and Apple is, you know, by all rumors was not going to say much about it because they kind of need a reset year. And it was just going to, I was really curious to see what they would do. You want to talk maybe just overall going in what your impressions were?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so much of my thinking was in line with that episode we had with Jason Snell a couple of weeks ago. There's a lot of stuff in the water when it comes to Apple right now. You've got everything from developer concerns with the App Store and steering provisions. Some of that is, of course, caught up in multiple legal cases.

You have, like you said, the Apple intelligence thing is a big deal. We're going to talk about that a bit more specifically and more power users at the end of the show. But there's a lot of questions and Apple addressed some of them. Some of them they didn't address at all. But I think they did show what they're good at. Like Apple is a platform. They're an operating system company.

And they push the ball forward in a bunch of ways across a lot of operating systems. And they kind of is just so interesting, like comparing WBC to something like Google IO a couple of weeks ago or even Microsoft Build, where it was just about like products and features as if the AI thing wasn't happening all around them. And I thought that was was really noticeable.

Yeah, you know, it's funny because last night after, you know, all the dust settled, I watched last year's WWC keynote again. And it was such a different one for them because, you know, put it in context last year, everybody's talking about AI, Wall Street's getting wound up about AI and Apple's lack of a story. And they're like, you want a story on AI? We got a story, you know, and they spent the whole time talking about Apple intelligence.

And, you know, the disappointment is a bunch of the best features they talked about. Not only do they didn't ship in hindsight, it sounds like they'd never even really had a working version of them when they announced them, which is very unusual for Apple. Yeah. And this year felt like kind of a return to form where they're like, you know what? We're not going there again. We're just going to go back to what we're good at. And the stuff they did was quite impressive because,

But they also kind of punted on AI for another year. So it's just a, it's a strange year because I feel like they did deliver the goods, but also there's this huge thing going on outside the door that everybody's working on and talking about. And we're pretending like it doesn't exist. Yeah. Super interesting. I, in hindsight, I,

should have known by the time the keynote started, Apple was not going to address developer concerns about the 30% from the app store or some of the other rules that are kind of in the crossfire. Sometimes Apple does that stuff before WBDC to try to like smooth things over. I watched the State of the Union, which is sort of a technical keynote, nothing in there about the business model or anything else. So all that stuff is unaddressed. And that was

Probably always going to be the case because so much of it is tied up in legal things around the world, but still a little disappointed that they didn't address that. It's one thing to say you love developers and they do amazing things, but it's something else to show them. But, you know, some of that's as old as time. Yeah. But, you know, I agree with you. I feel like not only is it kind of shabby, it's also...

against their own long-term interests. It's short-sighted, but I agree with you. We didn't get those answers yesterday either, but what we did get was announcement that they're refreshing the user interface across all the platforms at once. You're the Apple historian. I don't think they've ever done anything like this. No, they didn't. The closest they got was iOS seven where the iPhone and iPad were updated and

But the Mac didn't follow that until the next year with Yosemite, I think. Yeah. Because Mavericks was the same year Iowa 7 was, and Mavericks had the previous look. So it is the first time that they have done this kind of all at once. Definitely very sweeping, right? Like changes all the way across the board. Yeah.

Uh, and I'll just say off the top of the bat, like we're gonna have a bunch of links in the show notes. I'm sure people have seen it, but definitely go look at the, the meat liquid glass video. Cause it really goes into detail about how it works and what it can do. It is kind of hard to talk about because like it's, it's very, in some ways it's very different than some things we've seen from Apple, but there's also a little bit of a nod to Aqua and it, right. That was the old user interface. Yeah.

Yeah. Buttons look so good. You want to lick them. The famous Steve Jobs quote. There's some of that here, but it's it's it's I think most noticeable that it's on all of the platforms all at once. I think one of the things about it is it does bring back memories, right? Prior operating systems where they tried to do stuff like this.

Like Windows Vista was about this. I remember when we used to hack UI. Did you ever do that where you get that software where you could reprogram the window looks? Oh, yeah. And there was a bunch of like settings like this. So the first reaction is an old guy is like, oh, wow, this kind of reminds me of the really bad stuff I did back in the day.

But when you start like spending more time with it, there's a lot of just nice touches and things that only Apple could do. I mean, they do control the hardware and the software. That's one of the reasons why I've always been a fan of Apple products. And a design like this is really only possible when you do that. I mean, they have a limited number of devices they're deploying to, so they can really dial in what the, the user interface is going to look like. And again,

maybe Apple's the only company that could have done something like this. Yeah. It was interesting in that, you know, meeting liquid glass video, Alan Dye mentions like, Hey, when I was seven, we were at this level of processing power. Now we are all the way here at the A18 and we can do so many more things. And I mean, that was an issue in the early days of Aqua, like back in 2000, 2001, 2002, where,

The Mac hardware really struggled with some of the transparency and things that Apple was putting into the UI. That does not seem to be the case today. Like, I've got it now on three devices and like, yeah, it's slow in places, but it's also developer beta one. I fully expect that it will be nice and buttery smooth by the time they're done with it. But it is interesting to me, you know, the talk going into this was like, oh, it's going to be like Vision OS 5.

And it's not really like Vision OS. There are definitely parts of it that feel like how the Vision Pro feels in terms of these things feel like physical objects in a way, like when you drag your finger over text to select it like in an Apple Note, it feels like you have this little bubble of water or glass under your finger that's like,

moving and sort of shimmering over the text. And that's not really like vision OS, but the physicality of it is right. One of the most interesting things to me in vision OS is that the windows cast shadows on your environment because they want them to feel like they're rooted in your space. And some of that physicality is definitely present now across, you know, iOS, iPad, OS, Mac OS, and more. And,

And that's very compelling, I think. I think it's very interesting that they can do that in a way that doesn't talk down to the user. I've thought a lot about this. I haven't gotten to write about Liquid Glass in particular, because really I just need some more time to solidify my thoughts. But my thoughts so far...

are that skeuomorphism, right? It's like the original Mac. It was the desktop. You had folders. You had files. Your calculator looked like a calculator. That was because people didn't know what a computer user interface, a GUI, a graphical user interface, should look like or do, right? And so it made sense to root it in real-world things.

And of course, there was backlash to that iOS 7 in 2013. That is the backlash to it, right? It's OK. We don't need the calendar on my iPad to look like a calendar that an executive would have on her desk, right? It can look like software. And what they're doing with liquid glass is different from both of those things. It has personality and fun and a liveliness to it.

but not in service of explaining what the user interface is. It's something slightly different, but,

And, you know, we can get into how it looks and I definitely have complaints about how it looks, particularly on the Mac. But I think that what they're trying to do is, hey, this is a digital thing. We're not trying to trick you into thinking your address book is an actual Rolodex, but you can interact with it as if it were real. And it has like light reflections and refractions like a real piece of glass would. That's really interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, and flatness is dead, and everything is dimensional. Like even looking at the icons, you can see dimension to them, and the windows have dimension to them. And one of the things that comes out, again, like you, I've only been in it a day, but they're really aiming at trying to give you a...

the ability to see all your stuff easily. Like the Safari view on iPhone is excellent. When you start scrolling, the entire user interface like gets out of the way. When you go in to take a picture with the photos app, again, it's a viewfinder more than it's a user interface anymore. And they're just like throughout the whole system, they're looking for ways to like

not only this glass interface, but have it animate out of the way when you're doing your work. What I find particularly interesting about that is that just four years ago in iOS 15, Apple tried some of this stuff.

And the backlash to it, including for me, was huge because it didn't work. It didn't work because everything was flat. And so you had just these floating controls at the bottom of the Safari window. And on the Mac, your content bled up into the tab bar. Those things are back now in iOS and Mac OS 26.

The difference is now liquid glass helps set those controls off from the content of the web. It's, you really kind of have to think about this user interface as having layers and the, the base layer is your content and the thing above it is the controls. And as the content moves beneath the controls or behind the controls, then the liquid glass effect with the refraction and the tinting and everything takes place dynamically. So,

iOS 15 couldn't do that. And I think that's why that design failed then. But what but how it kind of works now, I think there's definitely room for improvement in places. But when you look at screenshots of this, you're like, wait, we tried this. It didn't go well. Why are they doing it again? Well, I think now they have the tools in the liquid glass APIs to make it work in a way that it never could without them.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you, my initial impression is I like it. I think it's a nice modernization. So some of it feels a little over the top to me, but maybe it's just because I'm not used to it yet. Like when you pull down control center, the borders of the buttons, which are now transparent, are so distinctive that I'm just not sure whether I like it or not, but I need time.

Yeah, I like a lot of it. I think it's best on the iPhone and the iPad. There's a lot to it on the Mac that feels pretty disjointed. Like if you have a finder window open, the controls at the top, so like to change your view or the actions or the share button, they are...

floaty liquid glass, but I'm not sure they need to be because there's not content behind them. I think there's some like defining that Apple needs to do of, of where it shows up and where it doesn't. A lot of the toolbars in Mac OS, quite frankly, look pretty bad in my opinion at this point, but like iOS seven, I do have faith that they will hear feedback and make adjustments. You mentioned control center, uh,

It my problem with control centers that they don't dim or blur the background like you can basically see right through it. Same thing with notifications on the lock screen that that will improve, I think, over the summer. And I do want to say here there have been a lot of complaints from people who haven't used it. Like, well, what about accessibility? And like, I'm not going to speak for that community, like people like Shelley Brisbane and others are reporting on this.

or will be reporting on this, but Apple does give you tools to tone this down through reduced transparency, reduced motion, and some other tools and settings that do help with the accessibility angle. And look, we're, we, we all are or will use accessibility settings at some point in our lives. And so, um,

I'm willing for beta one to give Apple the benefit of the doubt that they take accessibility extremely seriously and that they will address, you know, the, the, the, the most kind of blatant issues with it. Again, this is developer beta one. It will change. It will evolve, send feedback. If you're a user that, that is in that, in that situation and you, you have access to the betas, but it's definitely not fully baked at this point. I don't think.

Some of the things I like about it, and this is getting a lot of grief in the press, is this new clear icon mode. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people don't like it, but in a time where phones are so distracting, I kind of like the idea of removing all color from the phone in an attractive way. And so I've been running that for the last day.

And I think it's fine. I know people are complaining, well, it's hard to figure out what's what. I turn the app names off anyway. I make the icons big. I know what's what. I don't really need to look at it that close. But I think this is kind of fun. And it obviously needs tuning. But there's some interesting takes here. And I'm glad that they're taking some risks. Yeah, the clear icon thing. And they've gone back and re-architected tinting. Thank goodness, because I think that was kind of rough last year.

It's all in the name of customization, right? And I can tell you as someone who works on WidgetSmith, which is at the heart of it, a way to customize your devices, people have all sorts of different tastes. And some of the screenshots I see from our users, I would not run my phone that way, but people do and love it. And so there will be people who love the clear icons because it lets you focus on your wallpaper.

And I think that's, I think it's good for, for Apple to have those options and just, I may not personally like the clear, maybe it doesn't work for somebody else visually, but,

that's fine. Like it is just an option. And, and one that I think is, is interesting. And the clear icons, I think are a good example of how Apple has made this cross platform. So that is available on the iPhone and iPad home screen, but it's also available on Mac OS. And so in Tahoe, in the appearance settings, you can set icons to clear and it makes the dock, uh,

uh basically pick up this this clear design and a couple of other areas in finder and across mac os so it's the same concept but it is tuned if you will or adapted for the individual platform and that is something going into this that we had heard but honestly i was a little nervous about like what does that really mean especially for the mac and

I think there are, there are designers and people at Apple who don't understand the Mac and that concerns me in the long run. And while there is definitely weirdness, I think they did a good job with like the Mac still looks and feels like the Mac and that's distinct from the other platforms. So, uh, do you think you're going to learn to, to love this Steven? Let's just get to emotions here. I think so. Uh,

But as a primarily a Mac user, I want to see them tone it down on the Mac. Yeah. It's really, I think, kind of overwrought in places on Mac OS. So hopefully that will settle down. Yeah. The menu bar thing got me like they took the background out of the menu bar. So depending on your wallpaper, it's like, are you going to be able to see your menu bar icons? Like basic stuff like that. I mean, I need that stuff to work.

And again, I'm sure they'll put dials in where you can put stuff back or there'll be terminal command or something. But I'm just going to kind of go with it through the betas and see what happens. I do like, though, a new look. I was ready for a new coat of paint, you know, and it's a nice distraction on the air that Apple missed on AI, you know. You know, I've heard that and I actually don't really agree with that. I think, well, yeah.

Let me say that another way. I think that short sells the work Apple's done here. Like they weren't suddenly bad at AI last year and thought, oh crap, we need to go redesign our OSs. Like clearly this has been in the works for,

A long time. So it is good for them from a press perspective that this is like no one. Very few people talked about Apple intelligence yesterday. It was mostly about the design, the talk I saw online. And it definitely has been my focus so far in learning more about this stuff has been the design angle of it.

So it's good as a distraction, I guess, from that point of view. But I don't view that as like Apple's strategy going into WWDC. Like, oh, this isn't ready, but we're going to push it out to... I know that's not what you're saying, but that is what some people think and say. And I think that's just short-sighted. Yeah, you're right on that. And just to add on to that, like...

I was talking to my family about it, and my daughter's like, oh, no, is it like iOS 7? Because that year, nobody's phones worked. Even in September after they released it, that was a rushed job. They had a management change at Apple, and Johnny Ive took over software, and hell or high water, he was going to get that flat iOS out, and they did, and it was a mess. Whereas this thing has been in the works for years, clearly. Yeah.

I mean, you don't just overnight update the user interface in all your platforms. And I think this was probably, you know, like we talked about this last year and I think the year before. As soon as we saw the, you know, the Vision OS operating system, we're like, oh, this has got to be the next thing. And it was, but it's also not as derivative as Vision OS as it could have been. I feel like this is kind of its own thing too.

Yeah, yeah. I think they did a good job with like, what do we like about this, but how do we make it work in interfaces that you touch or use a cursor with, as opposed to something you're navigating, like you do Vision OS. I think clearly people at Apple have been working on this for a long time. And that's even very evident in the developer story for this. And so developers...

Who recompile their apps against iOS 26. You can turn liquid glass on or off in Xcode. If you turn it off, your interface will be just the way it was. And if you turn it on, then you get it. And then you have to, you know, you'll have to tweak stuff. There will be work to do for developers to really fine tune this.

But they're giving developers that time. And then next year to compile in the new Xcode with all the other new features, it will be required. But that's a year down the road. And developers have a lot of control over their own elements and how Liquid Glass affects them. And so I think like iOS 7 and maybe even some things on the Mac over the years, at first we may see a pretty...

interesting set of of apps come out that sort of interpret this in different ways but i think pretty quickly everyone will sort of come to like the understanding of like this is basically how this should look and work and every apple app at least on ios is updated now with it and so we have lots of examples from apple and how they think this should look and work and

Some of them, you know, I think look and work better than others. You know, you mentioned Iowa seven, no one knew how to use their phone. I am a fan of what they've done in the new phone app where they've kind of compressed it to a smaller number of views. So your voicemails and favorites and stuff are kind of all together. And then you have the dialer and your contact separately, but yeah,

Just know that you're going to get phone calls from your mom. Like, what happened to my contact list? Where is it? That one in particular, I think, may trip some people up. I have heard that you can actually turn some of that off in the phone app. I was reaching over to grab the phone with the beta on it. You know, it's not a huge change, but some things are rearranged a little bit in a way that some people may not.

Take a second to get used to. I mean, I can tell you, I launched the phone app and on first launch, it said, Hey, do you want the classic view or the new view? I forget exactly what the words were, but they, they actually let you choose on first launch.

Do you want to leave it as it always has been or see something new? Okay. So you actually got to say, yeah, hopefully that's in the shipping version too. Yeah. I don't see that in settings, but again, this is dev beta one. So, you know, like, can I, can I change my mind after the initial thing? Like, hopefully yes. You know, and one other thing I just want to say about liquid gloss is the liquid part.

I really love the way the buttons animate, the sliders kind of grow and shrink under your finger. It really does feel very responsive to your finger in a way that iOS has never felt before.

And, um, I, I really like that. I like that way. It kind of transforms and trans figures as it moves around and it shrinks and grows. And, and even the way the, you know, the, the search bars kind of shrink down, everything is very liquid. And, uh, I'm sure this is something they never did in the past because they probably didn't have the processing power, but now they do. Um,

And it feels very dynamic and kind of whimsical. And I think that's my favorite feature of this. Yeah, it is really, I mean, I think the best example of what this can do is like scrubbing over texts and notes with your finger. Like it keeps up with you. You come to a stop and the little bubble of glass kind of like rebounds a little bit like a droplet of water would, right? Like it's,

It really is kind of combining the elements of water and glass in an interesting way, which is pretty fun. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace. The best place to build a website for your business or your project is designed to help you stand out in a sea of websites and to succeed online.

So whether you're just starting out or you're scaling a project or a business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim a domain name, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place.

A friend of mine here in Memphis is a small business owner, and she just rebranded her company. Had somebody do a logo and some colors. It looked really good, but then it was time to build a new website. And of course, I recommended Squarespace. She was able to build it out in just a few days, and it looks really good. You can read about her offerings, schedule an appointment time, send her an email. It's really great. And she's not really a designer, but she's

But the Blueprint AI feature in Squarespace makes that easy. You just feed it some branding stuff. You can tell it about your business and basic information. And then it combines that with professionally designed and award winning website templates. And then, of course, you can tweak it from there. But no experience is required to get started.

And you can get discovered quickly with integrated SEO tools. I am by no means an SEO expert, but with Squarespace, that's not that big of a deal because every website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions and an auto-generated site map. Plus, you can track all of your visitors with the built-in analytics that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand. I love building on Squarespace, and so will you. Head to squarespace.com slash MPU for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code MPU to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain name. That's squarespace.com slash MPU and the offer code MPU to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of Mac Power users and all of Relay.

Okay, let's get to the Mac. Mac OS Tahoe. First, I will say, as the California representative, Lake Tahoe is one of the most beautiful places on the planet Earth. If you ever get to California, put it on your list. Another place that makes no sense to anybody outside of California. You know, Gurman leaked the name, which is wild. Yeah.

And he was like, lots of Al people have second homes there. I was like, oh, okay. Sure. Yeah. This is the first time I think we get the name early, if memory serves. But yeah, I did my honeymoon in Lake Tahoe. It's beautiful up there. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So I have warm feelings towards Tahoe and Sequoia. They've hit some good ones the last few years. Mm-hmm.

And also, wait, let's just talk about that. Why does this one have a name? Everything else is named the year, right? Yeah, well, it's actually Mac OS Tahoe 26. So the name and number aren't in the order I expect because it was like 10.6 Snow Leopard. So I don't like the order of the name and the version number. But I am glad they're keeping the name. I mean, that's gone back long before California places. They used cat names.

That feels like a little nod to history, even though they broke another really important nod to history, which we'll talk about in a second that I'm very mad about. But yeah, yeah, Tahoe, it keeps the name, but the version number does jump all the way to 26, which is also something that Mark Gurman reported early that Apple is naming the OSs for the upcoming year, which I think makes a ton of sense. I really hope they align the iPhone model numbers too, because

You can jump numbers. It's totally fine. And I think not only does it help you remember when it came out, but it was so hard as someone who talks about this stuff for a living to remember like, oh, that feature came out in Mac OS 15, but that was iOS 16 and watch OS 8 or whatever it was because they were so scattershot. And locking them all together means like, oh,

in 10 years from now, we will remember that iOS 26, like the 26 releases were when we got liquid glass. I think that makes a lot of sense. Totally agree. Totally agree. Um, that we're getting, uh, let's do the compatibility check. We, we talk about this every year, uh, new Mac OS, how many old Macs got dropped off the back of the truck?

Yeah, so a few did. The iMac Pro and the 2018 Mac Mini, a couple of MacBook Pros, the 2018 MacBook Pro, the 2019 iMac, and the Intel MacBook Air from 2020 were all dropped. Most importantly, though, Apple announced during the State of the Union that this is the last version of macOS that will support Intel Macs.

And so there are still several Intel Macs supported by Tahoe, but they will not get another major OS release. And then the year after that, they're going to drop Rosetta support. So they have laid this out in advance and,

which I think is a lesson learned from power PC to Intel when they kind of surprised people like, Oh, snow leopards, uh, Intel only good luck G5 owners. Uh, they're giving people advanced notice, which, which is the way to do this sort of thing. So if you're out there sitting at an Intel Mac, you're good for another year, but it's probably time to start thinking about upgrading. And, uh,

The good news for you is you get to go to Apple Silicon and your Mac is going to be a lot faster when you buy a new one, no matter which one. Most definitely. It doesn't feel like... It doesn't feel too soon either, honestly. I mean, that's... They stretch it out for quite a while. Yeah. No, I think it's...

Totally fine the way they're doing this. So during the keynote, they're putting in all the new icons because they redid a bunch of icons. And you and I did not watch the keynote together this year. And I saw the Finder had been flipped. They had a little change to the Finder icon, but they flipped the whites on the left, the blues on the right.

And, um, and I thought to my, the first thing I thought when I saw that was, Oh, that's different. And then the second thing I thought was Steven's going to hate that. I do hate it. I know you well enough and, uh, sure enough, you hate it. I, I do. So since the beginning of time, basically the darker color on the finder logo, which has been blue and gray for a long time, those hues have changed used to be kind of more purple and blue, uh,

The darker side has always been on the left and different people have different interpretations of why that is. Like, is it a happy person looking at their Macintosh? I don't know, but it's been the same forever. And if you look at this blog post in the show notes, it's, it's survived that through like system 7.5.3, which was the first version that the finder logo was in the boot up screen. And,

Some people think that was Mac OS 8. It wasn't. It was 753. But it survived through the OS X transition. It survived the Big Sur redesign. And they've changed it where now it's a white icon with the face on the right being blue. And you may think, look, why are you upset about this? It's 30 years of Mac history tossed out.

For no reason. And it was like a branding thing. Like the finder logo is the max brand. And the thing that's even more infuriating to me is like, I ran the old logo through the icon composer app, which like adds liquid glass to your app icons. And you know what? It looks totally fine. It looks good. Clear. It looks good. Tinted.

I don't know. There's feedback filed with this. If you work at Apple, the feedback number is also in the show notes. Like, please, please talk to somebody. This has got to change. I feel like it's one of those things for change for the sake of change. Like, you know, the design team's like, well, you know, since we're changing everything, let's switch the finder face, you know? And it's like, yeah, that's not a good enough reason to do that.

Yeah. I'm with you, but I'm not as passionate as you are about it. I yelled at my screen. I was like, what? I believe it. I believe it. What is happening? I will say it is on track to be the most popular thing I've written this year. It has blown up. Is it? Yeah. Yeah. I looked at the WordPress earlier. It's like, oh, hello, viewers. Yeah.

It's funny how that works, right? It really is. You brought your passion to the store. But maybe that helps too, the fact that you're getting that much traffic on it. Did you put in a link into your post about where to file feedback? I mean, let's turn it into action. I got the feedback number in there. And in the feedback, there's a link to the blog post. It's like, yeah. So I did send it to a friend of mine at Apple who has nothing to do with design. They were like, I can't help you with this. That's fair. Yeah, I know.

Someone in the design department is like, ah, these old nerds are getting all bent out of shape over this color switch. Let's just make it easy and switch it back. Switch it back. You have my undying love, Alan Dye. Just hit Command Z and sketch.

There are some, a couple of, or I guess really one kind of other liquid glass feature in Tahoe that I actually find really interesting. Maybe it's not a liquid glass feature, but it's a design feature is you can add colors and emoji or symbols to a folder. Labels have been around on Mac OS 10 since Panther. They were on the classic Mac OS before that.

but they were really limited due to like some historic shenanigans in the Mac file system. And, uh,

Now you have much more customization. So you could have your work folder on your desktop be blue with like a little, you know, business emoji on it and your personal folder in your documents be green and have a beach tree on it or something like lots more customization when it comes to folders and finder. And I think that's great. Like, I think it's fun. I think it looks really good. And I think people are going to have fun kind of mixing and matching those things.

Yeah, totally. And it brings back kind of that customization bug that we used to have in the old days. And I would like to see people get more custom with their Macs. And I'm definitely going to be putting some of these in. This also, by the way, goes over to the iPad. You know, we're going to talk about iPad in a minute, but the custom folders work there as well. So, nice.

It is cool. There's a lot of stuff this year continuing to bring the Mac and the iPhone in particular closer together. So we have the iPhone remote app that we got, iPhone mirroring last year. And with that came notifications from the phone coming to the Mac, a feature that I really like. Now live activities on your phone will show up in the menu bar, which is so cool. Like I love that live activities are showing up in more places.

Yeah. Shortcuts got an update. Now you can, they, they brought, that's one of the few kind of bright spots of Apple intelligence and artificial intelligence is shortcuts integration. It doesn't go as far in before a dub dub. There was some rumors that like Apple's going to like you vibe code shortcuts in essence, or you say, you know, make a shortcut that turns on my lights when I leave home.

doesn't do that but they have given you hooks straight into the um straight into the apple engines the llms and chat gpt as well so it's an interesting take i've been playing with a lot already do you want me to go down that rabbit hole now you want to wait till later i've got stuff on this but it can wait yeah let's circle back to that because i think it's a pretty interesting conversation

Yeah, but they did not bring Gemini in, but they've now got Apple native actions controlling shortcuts, which is nice. And there's a lot to talk about with shortcuts, but I think we're going to save that for later. We've got Rosemary coming in, so we're going to bring the automators to Mac Power users in a month or so and talk about more of what you can do with shortcuts. Spotlight was an area that really got a lot of attention this year.

It is much more in line with something like Alfred or LaunchBar or maybe even Raycast in terms of capability. It's not extensible like those programs are. We talked about Alfred recently talking about all the third-party workflows and stuff, but it definitely covers the basics. So you can browse content within Spotlight like you can in these other apps.

You can launch iPhone apps from it. So if you have an app that's just on your iPhone, then it will launch it in the iPhone mirroring environment. You get parameters and spotlight searches, which some of that has been there, but now it's a bit more robust. But the big two things are in terms of like automation and sort of nerdy stuff is...

you have quick keys. So like in Alfred, where I hit Command Space and I type RM, and it shows me a plugin that I have for dealing with reminders within Alfred. I can do similar things

In spotlight example, they gave was a R so command space, a R to add a reminder and it's intelligent. So it also gives you like some quick ways to get to a due date and lists and tags and those sorts of things. But it's also smart. This is the, this is the part that really kind of blew me away was spotlight is context aware. So in the keynote, the example was I'm in pages. I have this photo. I want to knock out the background of the photo and,

And instead of using the pages user interface, they use spotlight to perform a task on the image in the pages document. That's through app intents mostly, but wild that spotlight now is much more aware of what you're doing and the tools available to you.

Yeah, having released the Alfred Field Guide, of course, my inbox is blowing up with people saying, well, do I need Alfred any longer? And I think you do. I mean, it's the plug-in architecture that makes things like Alfred and Raycast so good. Like, you just add features to whatever you need. And none of those features in that Field Guide are touched by these new features. But at the same time, Apple, because it's the first party, it's the developer of the operating system,

gives you some things that you couldn't do with Alfred or Raycast. So my suggestion to people is as this releases, figure out the pieces of it you want to use and map spotlight and to a separate key. Like for me, Alfred is command space. I'm going to make spotlight control space and,

and uh i've already set it up on my beta machine and i'm already testing it and there's some really nice new stuff in here but they're really come they're uh complementary feature sets they're not overlapping as much as you would think so yeah and i love this i mean i hope every year apple like makes spotlight better i mean it would be great if they made it so good that you didn't need a third party app but i don't think it they'll ever go that far but the um

But it's really cool that they're adding a lot of good stuff to it and didn't see that coming. No, including a clipboard history manager. What? Yeah. Yeah. What? Just wild stuff. I think this will follow the same path that so many other things do where you

This may hurt Alfred and others around the edges a little bit, but mostly what it's going to do is introduce average users to features like this, and then they may be more likely to go find a power tool that does even more. So this, I think, while it is definitely Sherlocking these apps to a degree, I think they will continue to find ways to stand apart and be better and more robust. And that's a pattern we've seen play out over and over. Yeah.

What is your general vibe towards, you know, Tahoe now? So you've got it running on your laptop. Yeah. Like, how are you feeling? I know the finder icon has got you upset. But just, I mean, it is quite a difference, like this new Liquid Plus user interface. Yeah, I just want them to tone it down in places. I think it's a bit... I think it makes sense for controls and stuff on...

Mac OS where content is behind them, but in things like toolbars and sidebars, it feels like it's a little cranked up a little too high, like dial that back a little bit. And I think that they, they will find a middle ground there, but, but feature wise, I,

I think it's a great feature release. Like I think the stuff with files and folders, I think the stuff shortcuts and spotlight and some gaming stuff like I think all that's I think it's a very solid feature release. I don't love the UI right now, but I think I will adjust to it over time and I do anticipate they will make changes as well.

Yeah. I think of all platforms, it feels a little too much on Mac. Like I think I'm okay. I think the balance is pretty good on the other platforms on the Mac. It feels a little too aggressive, but that's just me. Uh, we didn't mention journal app is now on the Mac, but, um,

That's about all there is to say. It's not, you know, during the, the discord group on the Mac, on the Mac Sparky labs, somebody said, Oh, you know, day one's dead now. I'm like, Oh no, it's not. No, it's not. Journal is a, it's a basic features and it's even more basic with the implementation of Mac. Yep. Yep. Just like, just like spotlight now for another things. Journal, I think is even a bigger example of that because it is not what day one is.

But it is everywhere now. And if you want to use it, you don't need day one. Then, hey, you can type on something other than your iPhone, which is good. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Devon Think. Go to devontechnologies.com slash MPU to get organized and unleash your creativity. Devon Think 3 offers an all-in-one solution for organizing, storing, and retrieving documents across multiple formats.

It's ideal for researchers, academics, and professionals who need to manage complex document collections and citations.

but it really goes a level deeper. If you're looking for a good way to keep related documents together, I'm not sure there's anything better on the Mac. Devon Think leverages advanced AI-powered search that goes beyond simple keyword matching, finding relevant documents with precision. It seamlessly syncs your document databases across multiple Macs and iOS devices, ensuring access to your information anywhere. And Devon Think To Go lets you take your documents with you wherever you go.

I've been using Devon thing for years. And one of the things I love is the way the developers are constantly bringing new technologies and iterations to the application. They have industry grade encryption and secure storage to protect your most sensitive documents information. You can easily import documents from various sources, including web pages and emails. You can either put the documents in the Devon thing database, or you can just use the Devon thing tools and reference documents outside. They've got you covered.

Whether you index or import, you still get all that Dev & Think goodness. Plus, their automatic document classification and intelligent tagging system learns from your organizational patterns. The Dev & Think smarts make management of PDFs for me trivial. What's more, you can convert scanned documents and images into searchable, editable text with very high accuracy. It's also perfect for writers and content creators with the native support for multiple document formats, including Markdown.

Highlight, comment, annotate documents directly within the application, enhancing collaboration and personal note-taking. And all of those documents get links. So if you want to hyperlink to any document in your Dev & Think database, it's one click. That is not something you can do with the Finder. Dev & Think utilizes AI to suggest document connections and provide contextual recommendations, making your workload lighter.

You can easily export documents in multiple formats and share with team members or across platforms. They even have a server edition so you can provide databases to larger teams via web browsers, allowing you to capture web content instantly and save it directly to your Dev & Think database. Small team, large team, they've got you covered. Dev & Think has so many features, you'll just have to try it out for yourself and see how

And they're already working on Devon Think 4, which to me is a real practical use of artificial intelligence. Check it all out. Go to devontechnologies.com slash MPU. Once again, devontechnologies.com slash MPU to try Devon Think today. And our thanks to Devon Think for their support of the Mac Power users and all of Relay.

All right, so let's switch gears and talk about iOS and iPadOS 26. I've got some links in the show notes, stuff for you to go check out. It supports the iPhone SE2 and iPhone 11 and higher for iOS.

So they cut off, you know, I think like the XS and XR, pretty small list of phones got dropped this time. Apple, I think, continues to do a good job with compatibility with iOS in particular. You know, people carry their phones for a long time. And even when they don't, they go to somebody who will continue to use them. And so that's good to see that Apple continues to be committed to that.

Liquid glass, while everywhere definitely stands out on the iPhone, right? It's kind of the context in which they introduced it. It is not iOS spread out to the other platforms, but I think it's where people will interact with it sort of the most natively because you're touching your iPhone all the time. And some really interesting stuff. We mentioned the clear icons on the home screen, but there's also some new stuff on the lock screen. So the controls are liquid glass, right?

And the time on the lock screen now, it can be more variable in size depending on your photo. So Apple's doing a lot of stuff across the OSs with spatial scenes. And we saw this on Vision OS recently.

In Vision OS 2, where you have a two-dimensional photo and they figure out with machine learning the separation of the foreground and background and they add a 3D effect within the image. And in Vision OS, it's actually really compelling in places. Like I've pulled up some photos and put them in that mode. It's like, gosh, this feels alive in a way. And sort of the emotional aspect is honestly really powerful in Vision OS in a bunch of different ways.

But that now comes with the iPhone as well. And so I can have a two-dimensional photo of me and Sparks at a live show, and I can tell it, you know, spatialize this, and it will add depth to it. The time will slide between the foreground and background, and it really makes it feel...

more dynamic because as you just like ios 7 actually uh this is a feature they ditched like in ios 8 or 9 but there was parallax so as you move the phone around in your hand you kind of peek behind or kind of peek around the edges of things and that makes the comeback here as well yeah and it looks nice i mean i've i've been playing with it and uh got my dog popping out of the screen on me right now it's great uh i people like this i mean

Again, it's just like going to that personal experience with your device. They have really, you can tell when you go to select a wallpaper, how heavily it leans into pictures of your family and your pets of the suggestions. They know what people want on their devices and they're looking for ways to make it more attractive. The other thing they did as part of this is they automatically resize the time.

If you use the glass kind of font of time and it, it adjusts itself height wise behind your image, just right. And again, I think this is all nice little quality of life improvements. It's not going to change the world, but if it makes your user smile when they turn the phone to see their wife there with the time behind her, I kind of like that, you know, so good.

I still think the whole wallpaper experience, the user interface part of it, and like, it's very confusing. Like, okay, so I've got the lock screen wallpaper, but then I've got the behind the apps wallpaper and like, you know, and then I've got, especially if you're using different focus modes, it's, it is, I mean, I make my living talking about this stuff and I always have to kind of refresh myself how it works every time I go in to change it.

I do think that is something that could use some work. Didn't get any work this year, but the actual lock screen mechanics are nice. Mm-hmm.

How is it on a phone with an always-on display? The phone I have the beta on does not have always-on. Have you experienced that? It's black with the time. It doesn't show you the image. Okay. Well, I think that's an option, or at least it was in iOS 18. You know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe I've turned that off a long time ago. Okay. Yeah, I think it's really cool. I think it definitely really shines with a certain type of photo.

And I mean, even the default iOS 26 wallpaper, like it changes slightly based on how tall you want the time to be. So there's a lot of interactivity in play, but I totally agree. The, the mechanism to edit the lock screen is really confusing and I still get it wrong. Like I go to edit a widget and then accidentally like cancel out of it. Cause I, you know, just that I think needs a little bit of a rethink, but maybe next time around, let's talk about the camera app. Okay. Um,

I mentioned it earlier, but when you open the camera app, it is all view screen now. I mean, before, I think the user interface was getting pretty complicated. And for a lot of folks, like which one of these cameras is a video camera and which ones is just another variation of a still camera? Well, now there's just two buttons, you know, video or camera. And then from there, you have additional selections if you want.

I was asking about this. My family dinner table is like my lab for non-nerds. And I was asking, like, how often do you guys use anything other than the basic camera? And the answer was almost never. Except like when the kids want to take, like they want to pose their friend with like a portrait image. But I feel like

Apple has probably got pretty good data on this, but I think for most people, you open it and you take a picture. So they're just going to make it the best possible experience for that. Yeah, I think so too. And I was listening to another tech podcast that one of the hosts really dislikes a lot of the current design stuff. Like, well, they're just hiding the controls from people. But I think in reality, they're doing what you said. Like they're matching the expectations that most people have.

don't change any of that stuff. And they just want to open it and take a picture and look, it's all still there. Right? In fact, some of it in some areas, there's more controls than there used to be. You just got to tap or swipe to get them. And people will learn that gesture one time and then they'll, they'll know it. But if you just want to like hop in and take a picture real quick, it's actually a little bit smoother of experience. And yeah,

The camera UI is really where you can see liquid glass shine. If you have the controls up from the bottom where they're in that little page, a little popover, that popover is made of liquid glass, the text on it. And so the the photo, as you move the viewfinder around, does the liquid glass thing under the control. It's a great way to show somebody like, how does this look? That's the biggest piece of liquid glass that I've found in the OS so far.

Yeah. And I think the complaint that it hides controls is completely legitimate. Like if you'd like to go in and play with them often, it's going to be more, it's going to take a step longer now. But, um, you know, that's when you make a platform for millions of people, a lot of times you're going to go down to the lowest common denominator and, um,

They did this, but I, you know, I think I like it. I think just, I like the fact that when I take a picture, it's just the view screen and I can really focus on taking and framing a good picture. Yeah. Um, a lot to see. And honestly, power users often don't use the photos app anyway, because there's so many great third party photos apps that go further. Right. They're using, uh, you know, obscura or, or, or highlight or something else. Lots of good options out there. Um,

The camera app, though, is a good example of what's happening across a lot of system apps on iOS and iPadOS where the controls are sort of dialed back. You know, they're under a button or they're kind of off from a swipe. An example of this I really like is the FaceTime app where the controls just sort of stack on the side and then fade out when not needed. I think that's really nice. And we talked about the phone app earlier. Basically, any app with a toolbar, so the...

bar across the bottom of the screen with the buttons so in phone it was you know the dialer and then you had contacts recents voicemail whatever they were those will pick up the new look they expand when you need them they sort of shrink away when you don't and you know all kind of very fluidly and so camera is a good example of what's kind of going on across the os

Yeah. My favorite I mentioned earlier is Safari. I really like the new Safari design. I don't know if that's a controversial take, but it really takes all of the user interface out of the way when you're scrolling through a website. I mean, it's got the, it got the address bar to just a little lozenge at the very bottom of the screen and,

And then with, you know, movement and taps, you can get to additional functions. But when I'm, especially on the phone, when I'm on the web, I just want to see the web. Yeah, no, I totally get it. And also throughout the phone, search bars are at the bottom almost everywhere now. And that makes total sense to me because when you're trying to find something, the top of the screen is a long way away from your thumb. Yeah.

Even more so when you have a device that's foldable and even bigger. Hmm. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Can we talk about CarPlay for a second? Dude, I'm so excited about CarPlay. So excited. After I put the beta on this phone, I ran to my truck and jumped in. And Mary's like, what are you doing? I was just in the driveway in my truck for a while playing with it. So it's got the new liquid glass icons and look. Because CarPlay runs from your phone, so you don't have to like

update your car's firmware or something. It just comes off your phone. There's a new compact design for incoming calls. Something that I've actually found pretty frustrating in car plays that when you have a call come in, it takes over the whole screen. Now it just comes up from the bottom, just like a message does. And you can just hit receive or, or decline or use your steering wheel controls for that messages.

picks up a lot of stuff from iOS. You have your pinned messages and you have tap backs. The biggest thing, though, I think is live activities and widgets. And so like Tahoe that picks up live activities from your phone in the menu bar, CarPlay can pick up live activities, which I think is great for expanding what CarPlay can do without having full blown apps on it. So like Carrot Weather, for instance, has a CarPlay app now. But

And I love Brian and his app, but to make that he had basically had a fake being a navigation app, which doesn't really make any sense. It's like a navigation app with weather on top of it. Other weather apps have done this too. Well, really what I want to know is like, is it getting ready to rain? And now if I have that set up as a live activity on my phone, I can select to have that live activity show up in car play, which is really cool.

And the widgets in CarPlay is fascinating. And so it is effectively the standby system from the iPhone. So if you have an iPhone on a MagSafe dock, you turn it horizontally, you get that view where you can flip through certain widgets. They've basically built that into CarPlay. It is...

uh, controlled on the phone and you have, you have, so you have a widget screen. And so CarPlay now has two main screens. You have sort of the primary screen that shows you your navigation and your media playback and any map shortcuts or other suggestions. Like when I, when I get within half a mile of my house, I think it's half a mile, um,

I get the garage door because I have that in HomeKit and I can open it in CarPlay. So you have that screen. That's sort of the primary screen in CarPlay now. And then you scroll and you have basically just a grid of app icons and you can have multiple pages of those. The widgets get put in between those. So you have the primary screen, the widget screen, and then the sort of the app grid.

And you have two stacks, one on the right, one left. You can control what's there in the CarPlay settings on the phone. And I mean, I guess, spoiler alert, it works with third party widgets. So like I when I was in my truck last night, took a picture and sent it to Dave of like, hey, look, here's WidgetSmith and CarPlay. Right. There's work to do, but.

It works. It's not just first party widgets. Best I can tell it is basically the standby system. And again, what that does is that adds capability to CarPlay without needing full blown apps on CarPlay. And so for instance, I could very easily see myself having an up next widget that CarPlay has a calendar that

But it's not very compact and kind of is not really what I'm after. But I like Apple's calendar, built-in calendar widget. And so having that, having, you know, something from WidgetSmith, having something from these other apps, I think it's going to be really compelling. And everyone just gets it because, again, CarPlay comes off the phone. It's not, you're not waiting around for, you know, Honda or Toyota to get around to adding it, which is great. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's all a win. And the idea of displaying live activities to me is like such an obvious answer. And sometimes Apple does that and you're like, oh, of course, that's the way it should have always been done. And it always kind of feels good when you have that moment because it never occurred to me. But now that I see it, it's like, yes, that's the way. Yeah.

Yeah. Big year for CarPlay. And then, of course, they made the CarPlay Ultra announcement, and it's not in many cars yet. The car they had... It's in one car, I think. It's a very fancy car. Yeah. She was driving around Apple Park in it. I was like, that's kind of weird. But anyway...

But I do think a year or two from now, the CarPlay Ultra, where it takes over the center console to – not the center console, but the wheel console behind your wheel. I think that's going to be more common. I mean, it just makes so much sense. Car companies don't know how to design user interface. Apple does. So, let them. Yeah.

The iPhone app got a lot of updates this year. Yeah, we talked about some of the design ones earlier, but there are a couple of great phone-related features that honestly have been on Android for a while. I'm glad Apple's catching up with them. You have, the big one for me, I think is unknown calls are screened automatically. So right now, how it works in iOS 18, if you're in a country that supports this, because this is not

universally available, at least the way it is now, is I have an unknown number. I can send it to voicemail and on the lock screen of my phone, I get a real time readout translation of the voicemail. So if I say, oh gosh, it's my doctor's office. I can pick up. I interrupt them leaving a voicemail. And my experience with that every time has been the person's very confused as to like what you're answering all of a sudden, even though that's how old landline voicemail machines worked, but you know, no one remembers those. Yeah.

Um, but now you can have proactive call screening where you don't even have to interact with it. It picks up, they start talking you, and then you can decide to jump in or not. So it's, it's kind of building on the live voicemail feature, uh, which is, that's great as someone who gets a lot of calls that don't answer. But what's really cool is the hold music detection where you call your bank or doctor's office or your whatever, and you're on hold.

It will listen for the hold music and then it will tell you, we'll send you a notification when you can pick up when the person is there. I really want to see this in person. I've not gotten to use this in person, but,

What I'm a little, why I say that is, I'm sure people have experienced this. I hate it. One of my doctor's offices does this and it makes me furious. They have the whole music, the whole music stops. And then a person says, thank you for waiting. We value your call. Like is Apple system smart enough to know that that's not a real person. And that, yeah. Cause I then think, oh gosh. And I'm like picking up my phone. I'm unmuting it. Right. Getting ready. And it's like, oh, it's just stupid recording. Yeah.

So we'll see. The music comes back. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's the worst. It's such a tease. So we'll see how this works, but potentially to very, very nice quality of life issues and resolved in the phone app. One of the things to follow up on your earlier point in the new phone app on the beta, if there's a little button in the upper right corner, if you tap on that, you have the ability to switch between the classic and the new unified view. So you can toggle between them in the app.

Good. Yeah. Yep. Thanks. It's, it's a nice update. And, and then messages as well. Got some updates, backgrounds. I, I am, this is the problem when you get a little older and you, your reading vision goes away.

Sometimes you're taking a shot in the dark when you try to answer a text message if you don't have your reading glasses on. And occasionally I answer the wrong message. So I'm like, oh, this will help me. I'm going to put backgrounds for different people. Like you and I will have a big Mac Power Users logo or something. I don't know. But I'm going to have very clear backgrounds and different threads. So always know exactly who I'm talking to. You can do that now.

Yeah, very similar to how a lot of other messages apps have these features. Instagram, WhatsApp, basically almost anything has this sort of theming capability. So really nice to see messages at it. Really nice to have typing indicators in group messages. Yeah.

It's great. You know, messages is really important part of the iOS ecosystem, at least here in the US, other parts of the world, maybe, maybe not so much. But here it's a big deal. And something as simple as adding the polls, right, which I remember when they added the iMessage app store.

One of the examples I think in the keynote was like this third party app that did polls. And like the problem is you have to have the app and like even know that iMessage apps exist. Well, now you can just make a poll natively in messages. So it's like, hey, we're going to have dinner. What day works for you? Right. Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. People can just vote. You see the results of the vote.

it's going to be awesome as someone who very often ends up on like straw poll or like other websites that do this for like, you know, recording a podcast with the group of people or, you know, something like that, just doing it in messages is going to be great. And so I'm, I'm very excited about polls. Yeah. Nice quality of life updates across the board. I mean, the big thing this year was the glass OS, but on each of the platforms, they got a nice, you know, few updated features and,

And then there's the iPad, the iPad this year, something happened at Apple. I don't know what it was, but they took all the angst of all the iPad power users and poured it into the iPad this year. I have a tone question for you. Okay. It really jumped out at me. There were several instances where it really seemed like Federici was being, or at least it came across this way on stream. Maybe it would have been different in person, but,

Came across as like sort of sarcastic. Like, oh, I wrote one of them down. You've all been waiting for a new windowing system on iPad. Of course, they've done this every four years or every three or four years for a long time. Yeah. Oh, look at a pointer. That's a triangle. Where did we get that? And like, I can't tell what that was supposed to do or or did it just read poorly on stream and would have been funny in person? I don't quite know.

But the iPad in many ways is much more Mac-like now, and that's fascinating. It is not a Mac. It does not run Mac applications. You're still running iOS, iPadOS programs, but you now have a lot of the control that we have on the Mac now built in.

Yeah, I mean, just to finish up your note on Craig, I didn't like it either. Like, at one point he said, ah, this is obvious, you know? And it's like, and that stuff that we've been saying for 10 years is obvious. And they finally got around to doing it. And I feel like they're almost like rubbing your nose in it a little bit. Yeah, I agree with you. I didn't care for that. I know that they want to make them fun and funny, but...

And maybe I'm too sensitive, but it's like, come on, guys. You've been selling it as a laptop replacement forever, and you didn't have so many of these features. Let's get into some of the features. Okay. I think the big thing...

just freely resizable windows. So it's not on rails the way that stage manager was. You don't have that weird tab view. Now stage manager is still there. They did get rid of slide over and split view, but by default you just get a little resize drag and

and the bottom right-hand corner, and you can make your apps whatever size and shape you want. They remember it. So like if you quit or hide messages and come back to it, it'll pop up back where it was. And then you have some management control over that. So there's swiping up to reveal the home screen, swipe twice for clearing the mall. You have expose. You have a menu bar. You even have the stoplight controls. You have red, yellow, and green to close windows

hide or maximize a window. Like it is very much the Mac OS windowing system sort of slightly remixed. Yeah. And slide over and split view are gone. We got a couple of questions on that. And if you like slide over, that's gone. But, but now you have much more power over how you resize and shape your windows. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's kind of what I was expecting with some sort of window resizing this year. What I wasn't expecting was the rest of the stuff they did. The Files app got a huge update and background processes got an update. So let's talk about that a little bit. In the Files app, it's more Finder-like. It's still not a Finder. I mean, they didn't rename it. What would you have done, Stephen, if they renamed it Finder and they had the reverse icon on the iPad too?

I feel like that would have really sent you over. I'd be in the hospital probably. Yeah, we wouldn't be able to record today. I'd have to be at your bedside holding your hand. It's okay, buddy. We're going to get through this. He's got to pull through. Yeah, open in. Open in. Now you can tap on a file and have it open in a specific app. Gee, Craig, seems obvious. What a world. What a world. Something that has been in macOS...

Basically forever. Yeah. Yeah, that's fantastic that that's there. And I think one thing a lot of people are going to do is open things in Preview, which is available now, which is not in the files app. It is a standalone application. I could have seen a world where they basically put Preview in as like a feature in files. Like if you encounter a PDF, it kind of opens into this view. But no, it is a full-blown application. It's on the iPhone as well. This was rumored...

seven or eight years ago and never came to pass. And here it is. And like, there are some really good PDF apps on the iPhone and iPad, but it's sort of bonkers that Apple didn't have preview, which is a very good PDF application on the Mac. Like it finally made it to iOS and iPad OS. And that's a great addition. And that's no small statement that it's on the iPhone too, because it's quite useful just on the iPhone as well. Mm-hmm.

And then we've had a parade of former iPad power users on the show in the last year who came in and said, well, I'm switching to the Mac. And inevitably, one of the reasons they say it is because these are often people who are making videos and they're

The background process problem on the iPad was terrible. You would set up a render of a video and you'd switch apps and it would just quit. And they fixed that this year. Audio and video, you can set, I guess start with the audio, so that's the podcaster problem. Now you can set specific audio inputs on individual applications, which, of course, I mean, it's got a M-series chip in it,

But they never let you do that until now. Yay. That's good. Yeah, it's really nice. They've kind of unlocked that capability. It was pretty silly how it worked before. I understand it from like a battery life perspective. But if I hit export on a video or I want my audio recorded where I want to, it's like these machines can handle that sort of thing. Finally unlocking that capability is going to be great for a lot of different types of creative work.

Yeah. A voice out isolation now can be run on an individual app. I was using it in the voice memos app just last night on my iPhone. Uh, you can record with studio quality audio with AirPods. I haven't tested that yet. I feel like Apple's term studio quality is not my term for studio quality, but, uh, we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of funny. Uh, Apple throws his words around, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's fantastic. And, uh,

It's going to really let some people just travel with an iPad. You know, some people I think will make an iPad their full-blown, like, creative computer. Chris Lawley and Federico Vatici come to mind as people who have tried it a lot and have gone back and forth between the Mac and the iPad. I think if your work is kind of like their work, the iPad has suddenly become much more

compelling to you um as a as a computer honestly it's just like as a computer not just as a tablet that you're kind of forcing things upon yeah um one of the labs members yesterday suggested now that you and i need to record a full episode of mac power users just on ipads i said i'm game steven will refuse uh yeah that's about right maybe one day

But I mean, I do want to play with it because like, it would be great to have this capability, but I was thinking like, well, what if I travel, I need to record or like, it's kind of like my writing workflow. Like when I'm recording or when I'm doing show preparation, I have a lot of stuff going on on my computer and I,

The iPad still falls down in some of those areas for me. And like, I just, I'm going to take a Mac anyways, because it's just my preferred platform. Yeah. But if it's, if you're kind of half and half or you only have certain amount of space and like, well, you can take a USB-C microphone, which in and of themselves have come a long way over the years, plug it into your iPad, put some headphones in and you're kind of off to the races. And that's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah. My prediction is, look, they've made a lot of progress and they also solved that background task problem I was talking about earlier. So you can actually do a final cut expert and do other stuff. And that's great. I think they've removed a lot of the sharp edges, but not all of them. And I'll be curious through this beta period to find out what the remaining ones are.

But I think almost the more important statement you made on our iPad show was, hey, maybe it's supposed to be like this. Maybe it's not supposed to be a power user device. And I got a bunch of email from listeners after that show talking about an aged mother or a learning disabled son and just people who have people in their family that if you made the iPad a power user device, suddenly it would not be usable to them.

And I'm really appreciating the point you had made in that show. And I note that when I installed the beta, it again prompted me, like, do you want power mode or simple mode? And I'll be very curious. I want to see how that all plays out. But I think they definitely, as great as this is, they definitely need to respect that there are some people using this device that don't want or are unable to use those extra features. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

And we got journal app on the iPad as well. There it is. Yeah. It's everywhere now, which is great. iPad in general. This was a huge year. A couple of years ago, we would have all been, you know, wetting ourselves if they did an iPad announcement like this at WWDC. Yeah.

I kind of feel like a lot of us have just kind of moved on with it and just given up and over to the Mac at this point, um, a little late. Uh, but, uh, I'm glad that they got there. Um, do you think like some of these people that have been coming into the show talking about switching, uh, from being a, you know, iPad to, to a Mac workflow, do you think this is going to pull any of them back to the iPad?

Absolutely. I absolutely think it will. I mean, talking with some of those guests just over iMessage the last couple of days, a lot of them feel like their limitations that they were running up against have been lifted. Now, we got to see how it is in practice. But I do think there are people who have...

Whether it be the stagnation of the iPad and iPad OS, whether it's Apple Silicon Mac book errors being incredible machines, like the combination of those things that have sort of moved past the iPad. I think there are a lot of people who will look at it with a new sense of curiosity. And I think that's great. Like the iPad software should live up to the hardware. And it seems like we're finally getting there.

If you love Mac power users and want to hear more from David and I each week, consider more power users, the longer ad free version of the show that we do each and every week. It's just seven bucks a month or $70 a year. And that money goes supporting David and I's work here on NPU directly. So what do you get for that? Well, you get a longer episode each week. David and I have an extra topic that we do at the end of the show just for members. And if you want to learn more about the show,

and the show is uninterrupted by advertising, which is pretty cool. Plus, you get a bunch of perks from Relay, the podcast network that we're a part of and that I co-founded.

You get a newsletter, some members-only podcasts, access to a Discord just for members, a lot of great perks, including some really cool wallpapers. But the key thing is you're supporting Dave and I's work here on the show. So there's a link in the show notes. I would love for you to check it out. More power users is a good time, and I think you will enjoy it.

Okay, a couple things because I am who I am. I also installed it on my watch in my Vision Pro. So just a couple quick things. The watch doesn't feel that different in terms of features, but it's all about liquid glass. I think the biggest improvements I've seen are in SmartStack. It looks really nice. Yeah, I don't think the faces are any good. I don't know what's going on with Apple devices.

We didn't get the watch face store. The faces that they add are kind of, I don't know. It's just not my thing. And they did add a tool watch category. And I like to think of the watch as a tool and nothing in there is quite useful. Here's an idea, Steven. If you make a watch and you want to make watch faces with analog hands, why not make the analog hands a contrasting color to the rest of the watch?

I don't know, man. I just don't get it. Like they have a new chronograph face, but the watch hands are the exact same colors. The background is a very thin line around it, you know? So it's like, I just want to look at my watch and quickly see what time it is. But with a busy back screen and very, you know, transparent hands, it's almost impossible anyway. Yeah. So, so, but, but it's running. Okay. I haven't really had many problems with it. And, um,

I think they're working on Watch Every Year. I think the biggest thing, the coolest thing is dismissal with a flick of your wrist. Yes. Where you can just flick your wrist and dismiss a thing without having to reach up and touch it.

So I don't have to use my nose anymore to touch it when I'm cooking, which is going to be awesome because while I have perfected the nose touch, I'm not particularly proud of that. We've all done it. You know, we've, we've, we've all been there. The thing that I do want to circle back to the smart stack thing for a second is

One thing they've done is they've given developers the ability to apply relevance to their smart stack widgets. And the idea is, and this is not a new idea. Apple's done this in other places a lot, but it's kind of coming to this corner of watchOS in a new way. It was like, hey, you use this widget at this time on a pretty regular basis, right?

let's surface it for you. Now, the way that the system and the developer communicate that are pretty rudimentary, but the idea, like the

the dream of the Apple watch, I think in particular is that it's like completely context to where I remember the old Siri watch face a hundred years ago, the idea there was we're going to surface. Things are important to you. So if it's getting ready to rain, that's what you see. Or if your kid's ballet lesson is in 30 minutes, that's what you're going to see. And that, it didn't really work that well, but it was a long time ago, but it's kind of returned to that a little bit of making the watch more aware of

of what you're doing and when you're doing it. And I'm hopeful that that gets good. I don't know if Watch S26 gives developers quite enough to really make that shine, but that's what I want from my Apple Watch. I want it to be a companion that knows what's going on all the time.

And if you're not using the smart stack at home with your Apple watch, look into it because I think it's like the ultimate upgrade to your watch and it allows you to use whatever face you want because no longer do you have to like cram, you know, 10, you know, complications on your face to get information. The stuff you want is right beneath the smart stack. If you set it up right.

I think it's a great feature, but this is just why I'm so frustrated about them not giving, I guess, the kinds of faces that I want. I guess that's what I should say. I mean, they have a lot of faces. If you want a picture of your dog and the time or whatever, they've got everything you can think of. But I like basic functional analog watch faces, and they just can't help themselves. They always have to make it overly complicated and

The basic utility watch from version zero is still probably my favorite, but it's like, come on guys. And now that you have the smart stack, I don't need, I just, I don't get it, man. Makes me crazy. Yeah. That's my, that's my reverse finder honestly is watch faces. It's like, why can't, why can't, in fact, they used to have one when they released the cellular watch, they had one called, I think it was called utility or utility.

I forget what it was called, but it was kind of like a rugged adventure face. Explorer, I think. Explorer. I used it all the time. And then one day it just went away. It's one of the few they've removed, actually. Yes. It's like, what? It's like I said something bad on the show and Tim Cook said, oh, he uses Explorer face. Let's take care of that. Tim, don't do that to me. I still love Apple. Come on, man. Yeah.

Yeah, I just, I don't get it. I don't get it. That's my thing. This is watch faces. Switching over to Vision OS. Vision OS is getting the biggest steps each year in terms of quality of life, I think, because it's so new. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit. Like now you can have it remember where you put an app.

So if you stick an app against the wall, next time you put your vision OS, it's, it's back against the wall. That's what I wanted. You know, it's like, yeah, of course, you know, and, uh, and, and the other thing, did you notice, uh, who announced the vision OS improvements? Oh, it was Mike, Mike Rockwell. Yeah. Mike Rockwell. Mike, why are you making videos about vision OS? Yeah.

You have the job. You're going to save the company with Siri. No, this was shot before he got in charge of Apple Intelligence, I think. Strap your flamethrower on, Mike. Get back to Siri. I'm sure this was filmed in May. I don't want to see you making these videos. I think it's fine. Yeah, okay. I know. I still – come on, man. The Vision OS, the persistence thing is really interesting because it applies to widgets as well. Yeah.

And they're bringing actually, they bring widget kit over to vision OS. And so like iPad apps running on vision OS can donate widgets to the system. They have a widgets app in vision OS, but it's basically the widget picker from the home screen on the iPhone and iPad. Yeah. But I'll tell you what's exciting. Cause I actually, a friend of mine just sent me a clip of it in action and

is the uh the new spatial personas are much more lifelike so if you're on a facetime call and it's like the 3d representation of yourself it looks much much better yeah i i haven't set it up yet i haven't had time but um everything i've seen says that it looks better um

Then there's two accessories that they announced, and I'm interested in both of them. The first one is the obvious, the PlayStation Sense controllers. So you've got actual VR controllers, and I'm hoping that opens up gaming. Although because they're an additional accessory, you have to wonder how many developers are going to support it, yada, yada.

But I hope that that works out. But they announced even more impressive to me is a thing called the Logitech Muse, which is just a little stylus. But the quick video demo, the guy was writing in space on it. And one of my dream uses for a Vision Pro is to have like a

10 foot long glass board in my studio that's virtual that I can just put on the glasses and go and look at and think about, you know, when I'm putting ideas together and drawing it. And the way I currently do it is with an iPad, which isn't ideal. This looks really interesting. I don't know how granule it is. And I'm going to buy one of these as soon as they come out. But Logitech is making some kind of pen you can write in virtual space with Vision Pro. And I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Or your face on it, as it were. Something. I don't know. Oh, man. So you played some with the shortcuts. Yeah. So shortcuts can now tap into Apple's models, as can...

As can individual applications. So like if you have an application that would be useful to summarize text, you can just as a developer prompt Apple Foundation model, which runs on the phone to do it all locally and privately, which is fantastic. Shortcuts can go a little bit further and actually use private cloud compute. So tell us about your experiment.

Yeah. Okay. So private cloud compute was announced last year. And I thought it's one of the things I think Apple got right about Apple intelligence. It's the idea of we're going to put our own server farm together. We're going to run our models on it and we're going to protect your privacy. So when you send a request to us, it's going to be anonymized and we're not going to know who you are. So you can ask our, our LLM anything you want, and it's going to send you back an answer and we won't be able to trace it back to you.

So that is fantastic because none of these big frontier models do that. But for the whole year, none of us have really seen if it's any good. I mean, like they had a thing where you could run a report to see how often you had sent requests to private cloud compute. And the answer is almost never because in the first year, Apple never got far enough with Apple intelligence to need it.

And during the keynote, they announced, hey, we've got a shortcuts action where you can send a AI query to the onboard artificial intelligence that we built into your iPhone. So it's entirely local.

Or you can send it to chat GPT or you can send it to private cloud compute. And I'm like, what? You know, so as a user, I can now selectively choose whether I want the big, medium or small model. And and I can specifically target private cloud compute, which gives me an opportunity to test it finally.

So last night, you know, we're recording this the day after the keynote. So it's early days, but like one of the things I do with AI is I like to get reflective questions on things I write. And I even like to do it on journal entries. And I, I write a journal entry almost every night and I have kind of, um, perfected this, this, uh, AI instruction prompt over the last year, uh,

And it has it go through my journal entry, read, ask me reflective questions on things I wrote about.

Um, there's a four stoic virtues. I have it go through and ask me questions about, you know, did I demonstrate justice, temperance, wisdom, you know, and just bear with me. I know I'm a hippie guys. Okay. And then, um, one of my big things is RIT. I talk about the productivity field guide. It's like, am I becoming my best self every day? So I specifically prompt myself at the end of each day, what did I do today to improve my RIT? Okay.

Um, so I've been using this and I've used it with all three models. I've used it with chat GPT, Claude and, and the new Gemini model. And it's shocking to me, the questions that asked me, cause often it really is great reflective stuff. And so my workflow is I, I dictate my initial journal entry, um,

And so using AI's voice to text, I get a pretty good dictation. Then I tack that on to this instruction and I send it up to AI and it sends me back with questions. And then I go through and I, and I fix the typing and I answer the questions if I think they're relevant. So at the end I finish it on a keyboard. That's my workflow. You know, it takes me about 30 minutes every night. I find it very useful to me to kind of,

You know, you only get better at the things you look at, right? So I do this every day. The other thing I have it do is suggest five titles. This is where Steven got in trouble. We're going to talk about this in a minute. So it's like reading about what I wrote about. Sometimes I like it to give me some time. Sometimes I title it myself. Sometimes it gives me a good idea. So that's, that's the thing I do every day. So last night, first night, I, I wrote a shortcut that took that, that chat GPT, you know, journal prompt I've written.

And I dumped it into a shortcut action. And then I did a dictation and I took the transcription and I specifically targeted at the PCC, the private cloud compute. And I said, well, let's see what I get back, you know, because I didn't expect much to be honest with you.

The common theme I've had over the last year with Apple intelligence is that it's a great idea with poor execution. And to this day, I had not really seen Apple do anything on the artificial intelligence front that felt really competent.

Well, they surprised me because the answer was really good. It wasn't as deep as I get with some of the other more frontier models, but it was entirely private. So I didn't have to send my journal entry, you know, to Google. Right. And, and the response, I got a pretty good now. So you may know during the show, I'm sick right now. I've got a sinus infection. So I keep coughing and it's been hard for me to get through the show. And one of the things I read about in journal yesterday was, um,

You know, I'm trying to enjoy and cover all this stuff, but I'm also sick, you know. So one of the things PCC wrote me was like, how do you balance your work commitments with personal time when you're feeling under the weather? What strategies can you implement to ensure you're taking care of yourself?

Great question. You know, we did the thing in discord yesterday. I hadn't done that in a while because I've been going to Cupertino lately, but this year we didn't discord. One of the questions, how has the discord experiment changed your approach to collaborating with lab members? What opportunities for growth do you see in this platform? You know,

to the stoic reflections. How can you demonstrate justice in your interactions with lab members and colleagues, ensuring that everyone feels valued and heard? These are great questions, you know? And I will say the questions I'm getting out of the bigger models are a little deeper, but I think this is it. This is good enough for me. I mean, what I want from these questions is for me to spark me to write more. I'm not getting it to write the stuff for me. I'm just asking questions.

And I think already I'm sold on PCC for this problem, you know?

And, um, and I, I just think, wow, you know, good job, Apple, you did something in AI that doesn't make me laugh, you know? And, um, and this is, uh, I don't know, it's impressive. So they gave me the ability to specifically target PCC. I'm going to share this in the labs. I'll make a video about it, but it's really great. You can make a quick shortcut. You can throw some ideas at it and get some responses back.

Now, where we got in trouble is the title options. Yeah. So I was going through here. I was reading about what you did. There wasn't a lot of context to this. I was like, okay, got some questions from it. But then there was a section called title options, and it was five options. And in reading it, I thought, oh, no. Sparks has asked the machine for titles for the episode, which...

It's fine. Like podcasters do it, but I'm kind of allergic to it. I feel like the title is an important thing that I want to choose or we choose together. And so I sent them to you. I was like, what are you doing, man? It turns out it was title options for the, I guess the journal entry, not necessarily, not the episode. So I misread them. But some of these are pretty cheesy. I got to say like, yeah, they are. The fifth one really killed me. Health, wisdom, and courage reflections on a busy day. I was like,

If we title an NPU episode that, like we've lost the plot. Thankfully, we have not lost the plot. No. But I mean, and there are options, you know. Sometimes it gives me a good one. And honestly, the other models do a better job at the title options too. But I really have always felt a little icky sending those entries up to some of these Frontier models.

to get this reflection, but I actually find the reflection very helpful. So now using Apple's private cloud compute, I can do this and get what I want back out of it without having to, you know, put it in a creepy place. And this is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted from Apple intelligence. So on day one, I'm getting a benefit out of it and, um, no, it's great and good on Apple, you know, good on Apple. Very good.

Apple productivity apps. We, that's a common theme on the show. How we like every year talking about how Apple's getting better at them. Not a lot of that this year. No, really pretty quiet on that front. Reminders got a few things, some, some sorting and a couple of their minor features, but yeah,

Not a lot. Yeah. Pretty quiet on that front, actually. Yeah. Every year when you install the betas, they have like a splash screen telling you what they changed. There are no splash screens in notes or calendar. And there is one in reminders. So not a whole lot this year. I think the biggest thing in reminders is maybe the time zone support. Yeah.

which is great if you have something that either needs to stay locked or floating and I haven't traveled, so I haven't used it yet, but if it works the way that, that other apps do it, then that's a, that's a welcome change. Yeah. One thing that just kills me cause I'm working on a new field guide about Apple's productivity apps is the, the dearth of icons for reminders lists. Like I,

I thought, well, you know, it's been a while. Maybe we should have more than like the 40 they've got listed. Considering like SF symbols is a library of thousands of symbols. Nope. No, thank you. We're going to just leave that as is. I use emoji for mine, which is fine. But SF symbols would be great. The other question I have for you is, okay, so this is great. Every year Apple does WWDC. We get this big update.

But that's not the way the world is pacing now, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. I mean, is once a year going to work for big updates?

I mean, I would argue that they're not really on an annual cycle anymore. The last several years, they've had features that they announced that end up shipping throughout the year. Now, sometimes they pre-announce that and other times they don't, right? Some things are announced as if it's coming in the OS and then it turns out it wasn't ready and they push it down the road and it comes out in February, right? That has happened. This year, it struck me that they didn't say later in the year very much. Like everything they showed,

seemingly is going to ship when these OSs ship in the fall, but things like mail and notes and reminders AI or not, I would like to see them like, Hey, we have a new thing that's ready for reminders. We got to wait till June. Like, no, you don't, you can just do it. But they, they still bundle those applications and the OS pretty tightly and

And I think it is probably time to readdress that, but you know, whether or not that makes a big difference this year with these features, you know, I guess, I guess time will tell there. Yeah. All right. We're going to talk about AI and more power users, but overall, what's your general feeling day after? Yeah. I mean, I think they did a really compelling job talking about their operating systems, the features, I think bringing the devices even closer together and,

are fantastic. I think the new design is well thought through if maybe needing a little more time to mature. But like we said in the beginning, it is a return to form in that it's Apple talking about its platforms and its APIs and not really talking about the world of AI. And some people, and I am in this camp a little bit, kind of relieved by that. Like I'm kind of AI'd out and would just...

kind of at a level with it where I just try and like figure out how I feel about and what I think about it is complicated. Uh, but Apple didn't do anything there really. And we're gonna talk about what they did say in a second for members. But I think you said it really well. Like they kind of focused on what they're good at and didn't talk much about the things they're not good at. And it's a strategy, you know, if, if the, if they're, if the lesson they learned from the world in the past year was don't pre-announce AI features that aren't ready, uh,

then they seem to have learned that because they doesn't seem like they pre-announced any, any AI features that aren't ready. So that's good. Whether it's going to cost them in the long run or the medium term, like it, it very well might. Yeah. There is a question mark about that, but I think they did a great job too. I think the type of work they did to bring a liquid blast was not trivial and

And that the whole, you know, the whole line feels kind of modernized and updated for the future. And hopefully now they can build on top of that with their view of, of automation and artificial intelligence as it starts evolving. And they did better than I expected, honestly. Yeah.

All right. Thank you to our sponsors today, Squarespace and Dev & Think. We are the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm. If you'd like the ad-free extended version of the show, head over to relay.fm. We'd love to have you as a member. For you more power users, stick around. We're going to be talking about the Apple Intelligence updates next. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.