803: Checking in on the Betas
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Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by your friend and I, Mr. Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. Hello, David. How are you? Good. I have been looking forward to this show. We're going to be talking about our experience with the betas. That always gives me an excuse to install things and test things. So this will be a fun show.

We've got a busy outline today, but for more power users, we're going to be talking more about naming and numbering of the operating systems. That's the ad for Extended Version Show. So we've got a full outline of Apple beta-related stuff here today.

We do. You know, they just keep spinning off platforms. I realized last night that tvOS just isn't in here. It's like, tvOS got some stuff. Maybe we'll circle back to that in a feedback episode. But yeah, a lot of stuff. So...

We had spoken a few weeks ago about what our strategy was going to be going into WBDC. And, you know, so we all we have experienced each, I think, all of the betas. I will say I have not experienced Vision OS 26. My Vision Pro will download it. It will say preparing.

it will restart and then it restarts back to vision OS 2.5. And I tried a couple of different things. I think I'm probably going to have to like erase it and like reset it up. Uh, so, uh, looking forward to hear, hearing how vision OS has been for you. But, uh, but yeah, I'd say we just, uh, I said, we just dive into the liquid glass. Yeah. You know, the, um,

On the vision though, like you don't use it often, right? No, I don't. That's what I keep hearing from my friends who got these things, don't use them off. They're like, well, every time I put it on, I got to do an update. And like, you guys got to use them more because I don't, that's not a problem for me. I've got it on all the time. So I was all, you know, I think that's part of the issue. If you do like lots of updates at once. So be careful with that. But we do have all section about it. I did test it. I've been playing with it. We're going to cover that as well. But like you said, let's, let's get started.

The big, you know, UI update this year is this liquid glass item. And now you and I have both spent some time with it. Yeah, it's really interesting. We're going to talk about it sort of in the context of the various platforms. But right at the top, like I've just been thinking a lot about it. And it is interesting that it doesn't really change a lot of like where things are. And there are some exceptions to that, particularly on the iPhone that we'll get to later on.

But things basically are where they've been. It's just things are dressed up a little bit. So you've got buttons with this glass material where the content flows behind them and they like refract the light and the content kind of within the edges of it. But it's not a it's not a redesign of the sense of, oh, gosh, these things have been here for 10 years and now they're somewhere else. Again, there's some of that.

more generally, it is a refresh, I think, of a lot of ideas that were already in place across these platforms. Yeah. You know, I often think about these updates, like, did they work on the engine or the paint this year? You know, did they work on the details or did they work on the engine? And we've had some years where they put a lot of work in the engine and the paint didn't look any different. This year is all about paint, in my opinion. Yeah.

And that kind of goes to the point that they made these UI changes, but the switches are still in the same places. The settings are still in the same places, but the button looks different, you know? And I think that's the way to do something like this. Like, yeah, I don't think you should change the UI and move things, uh,

on the same year. Like I'm sure there's a manpower problem as well, but I think if you're going to work on the paint, don't work too much on the engine because as users, we need to figure out the new paint job before we can, you know, have things start moving around on us. I think that's, I think that's exactly right. I mean, they've got a big user base now, right? Yeah. It's huge. And you can't just go in and like change a bunch of stuff all at once. So you're really going to

cause frustration and confusion in that user base. And so I totally agree with you. But that's not to say it's a featureless year either. Like, don't hear us say, oh, gosh, it's just a coat of paint. Like, particularly, I think, in Tahoe, where we're going to start, there's actually quite a bit in Tahoe for people like us who want a bit more out of their Macs. And I'm excited about it.

Yeah. And like, I think if I could put a theme to it, it's like, this isn't to stretch the analogy, but,

They didn't change the engine. They changed the paint, but they also added fog lights. It's like they added some cool features too. I guess I have to stop with this analogy. But it feels to me like the stuff we got added was added on. It wasn't like underlying the foundations of the system, which they spent a lot of time doing over the last decade so they could have these options. Another reflection that I have now spending a few weeks with this stuff

is that this is kind of ambitious. I mean, switching up the paint on all your platforms when they have so many, it's easy to critique some of this stuff. And I have critiques, and I know a lot of us do. But this is not a small project. It's not like the old days when they just shipped the Mac.

We've got iPhones, iPads, Macs, Vision OS, Watch OS, TV OS. I mean, they've got a lot of platforms to cover, and they did this across the board in one year. Yeah, it's really broad. And I think we said this on our post-WBDC episode, but this is not something Apple started on a year ago. This has clearly been in the works for a long time.

And it's not that they rushed it as a distraction for the AI stuff. I think those sorts of takes are pretty short-sighted. This is something that they have been thinking on and working on. And it shows. Yes, there are things to change and update with it. I'm sure that they will. And people are filing feedback. And that's all good. But the system which they have built...

does scale pretty well across all of these platforms. And that's not an easy thing to do at all. And it's one reason the platforms all look kind of different from each other, right? Because that is a hard thing. And when they designed this, you got to think, you know, all the way from the Apple Watch up to, you know, someone's big television or the big, you know, display in the Vision Pro. Like it has to work from top to bottom. And that's an interesting set of challenges, I'm sure. Yeah.

So just speaking generically about this liquid glass update overall, what are the good things you're liking now after a few weeks? I like the level of fun that it brings. I like that when you are scrolling your photos, the buttons pick up the edges of the color and refract the light better.

Some people have said that that's distracting. I think you can kind of get used to it pretty quickly. And I really, really like the customization on the home screen. The clear look is not for me personally, but I think a lot of people are really going to love it on the iPhone and iPad and even the Mac. The Mac picks these things up as well.

But the tinting in particular is much better than an iOS 18. In iOS 18, you could only tint in dark mode. It was kind of gloomy and muddy looking. And they've re-architected that. They've added light mode tinting to it. And I think people are going to have a lot of fun, particularly on their iPhone in the next year, really customizing and dialing in just what they want. Yeah, I think you should not understate the delight factor.

Because it is kind of delightful having this new interface on all your devices. And I have it on everything except my production machine. So I'm kind of living in it. And I'm really enjoying it. And like showing it to my non-tech family members, they like the look of it. You know, I'm not going to let them put it on their devices. But it's just kind of fun. And it's a nice refresh. And I think that is not something you should dismiss. I think that

If Apple's going to stay current, they need to update and bring a new look every once in a while. So I think that is an important piece. I also think that the cohesion matters, that things look similar across the same family of devices from the same company. We've never really had that. Like Vision OS compared to iPhone OS or iOS compared to Mac OS up until this beta, they were very different platforms in terms of the way they looked.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That said, um, there's lots of work to be done and, you know, I think it's, uh, particularly on the Mac, but, uh, across the web platforms, I think there are some dials to be, to be run as we record this. We're still on beta one. We're recording a little early cause I'm going to be on vacation. And, um,

My guess is beta two will be out by the time the show releases. And I think we'll probably already see progress in terms of them dialing back some of the areas where it's just too hard to read. Yeah. Yeah. There's some spots where the, the, the translucency is a, is a bit, a bit much, but I think too, I mean, Apple takes accessibility really seriously. And even in beta one, like you said, that we're running now,

There are quite a few ways to dial it back via reducing transparency or tweaking the colors. And that's there on day one because Apple designed this with accessibility in mind. That doesn't mean they've gotten it right in beta one. It's not, don't hear what I'm not saying. What I am saying is Apple cares about it and they will get it to a place where it works for everybody, either individually,

in its default state or by making the accessibility settings really work for a wide range of people so yes there are issues now and you know one of them kind of most famously is control center you can just see right through it like that is that will change i am sure in a in a future build but apple cares about accessibility they didn't design this and think oh gosh now we got to go around and band-aid it like no they've these things go hand in hand at apple like

they deeply care about their products being usable by as many people as possible and, and meeting those people where they are. And so this is not Apple writing off that community at all. Yeah, exactly. And, and honestly, I think they'll find a good balance when it releases, there'll be folks that are cranky about it, but I think overall people are going to really like it. And, and,

And this is a starting point. Even whenever they release in September, you know it's going to evolve over the years a bit. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, iOS 7 to today, it's radically different. Like, I rewatched the iOS 7 keynote the other day. iOS 7, even in the beta, saw a lot of changes. But it's really evolved, and they will do the same thing with this.

Absolutely. And so I'm generally pretty happy about it. A couple of weird things. Let's talk about it on the Mac in specific. The app icon thing is weird. Like some of the, some of the third party app application icons get put like Steven wrote in the outline there in prison. Yeah. App icons in prison. That kind of works. Honestly, it's got this box around it. It's like, you know,

Old days of Monopoly, go to jail. Do not collect $200. They are forcing icons into the squircle, you know, the square with the rounded corners. And so like on my beta laptop, which is next to me, Notion, which I'm looking at right now, talking to you, David, on my Sequoia machine, my production machine, it's not in a squircle. It's like its own little cube icon with the letter N on the front. It looks kind of like a kid's toy block, letter block.

And on Tahoe, it's that same icon shrunken down in a gray squircle. The ATP boys have said it's in jail. That's where I got that from. That's not great. I wish developers were still able to have custom icon shapes on the Mac. Because that's been a fun part of the Mac for a long time. But developers will...

uh adapt to that but yeah right now at least it's it's pretty rough and like chrome which is you know widely used is uh is also in jail which is interesting because in sequoia it's the chrome circle you know that icon with the colors in it on a white background but on tahoe the white background is gone and it's in the gray squircle gel it's like i don't know quite what happened there but people will get it sorted out it's early days for that still

Yeah, and this is the thing where they're just trying to bring everybody into the same system. But on the Mac, one piece of this evolution is we are getting less whimsy on the Mac. Like the other one that people have been talking about is the Mickey Mouse hand. You know, the grab hand looks like a Mickey Mouse hand. A bunch of people wrote me about that, and I'm like, I never really thought of that as a Mickey Mouse hand, but I guess I can see where you'd say that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they got rid of the lines, so it's like just a blob of a hand. Yeah, it's a boring hand now. But that seems to be like every year they take a little bit more of the historical whimsy out of the Mac. I'd even argue that the flip with the Finder feels like kind of a loss of tradition as well. The one you didn't mention on the show because we hadn't discovered it was Otto the Automator. Yeah, they took his legs away and his arms. Yeah, yeah.

Poor guy. I actually, I think I'm not telling stories here. Sal Segoyan and I were talking about that. And he said, you know, that original Automator icon was at the behest of Steve Jobs. Steve was the one, when they first demoed the feature, Steve named it Automator because that wasn't the name of it. And he told the head of graphics for the Macs, I want an icon with a robot. That was how that happened. So, you know, they kept the robot, but

We just got his head now. Yeah, no, it's bad. My headline, because it was after I'd written the Finder thing, was, oh, no, they did it to Automator 2. Yeah. Poor, poor Automator. Sal didn't seem that upset. He's the guy who did it, so I guess I shouldn't get too wound up about it. But yeah, it feels like the whimsy is leaving the Mac to a certain extent. And maybe that's because they're a trillion-dollar company and they want uniformity among their platforms. Yeah.

Maybe all the old guys that put the whimsy in have retired and nobody cares anymore. But I have to admit that makes me a little sad to see things like that go away. Yeah, me too. But there are like on the Mac in particular, there are weaknesses like the buttons and finder are glass. And so they float above the surface of like the finder window in a way that doesn't really make sense.

But one place I adore it is, you know, for a million years on the Mac, if you've done volume or brightness adjustments, you get that floating heads up display. That's like it used to be, I think, center of the screen. Now it's kind of, you know, lower third centered and you get the little progress bar fill up and it obscures content.

Now I have a link to a thing I put on Mastodon about it. Now it's just this little liquid glass bubble that comes in where the notifications come in and the top, right? So, and it's the whole thing's liquid glass. So in my screenshot, you can see it refracts the light based on the wallpaper and it obscures the hard drive icon behind it, which is just like this really cool look. And I think it actually really works in that sort of environment. So it, it,

Why there are rough edges, particularly on the Mac, liquid glass as a material, right, that takes this light and bends it and changes it, it does leave some really cool effects in places.

And what I suspect we will see is over the summer and into, you know, this release cycle, the third party developers will kind of figure out where it works and where it doesn't. And we'll, we'll get to like a shared understanding of like these sorts of controls really work well, these sorts of controls don't. And I think that'll be primarily based on what Apple has built, but

But I think the community will figure it out and it'll all adapt and change over time. But there are, even on the Mac where I think it's the weakest, there are glimpses of something that's really fun and interesting. Like that's just a more interesting, fun design than the old heads up display that was gray in the middle of the screen. Well, if you want me to blow your mind, when you've got that volume open and you click on it, you can take two fingers and swipe right and left on your trackpad. Oh, that's cool.

And it changes the volume up and down. You don't have to hit the buttons anymore. That's awesome. I know if you connect AirPods, they bloop in and out of the control center. The animation and stuff is fun too. But I do want to get to some of the features in Tahoe, if we're ready to dive into that. And I think the most interesting thing in terms of...

you know, what we want and the Mac power users audience is spotlight spotlight. I had this, I had this, it was literally a shower thought this morning. I was just kind of thinking about the outline, what we're going to talk about. And spotlight has turned into like a, almost like a command line for your whole Mac in a way that really I'm an Alfred user. So maybe I think launch bar may be a little more like this, but you can just basically start typing, uh,

and write an email to somebody in spotlight. It just sends off and you, you like, you don't see mail. It's not like mail comes to the foreground and it fills in somehow. Like it just does it. And it's, it's, it's very impressive. Even in beta one.

Well, the trick to Spotlight, once you get it installed, is hitting the right arrow key when you invoke Spotlight. And then it does this beautiful animation where you see the liquid animation where things pull apart just like drops of water. And it adds four icons, apps, files, actions, and clipboard history.

And so it gives you a way to already like drill in on spotlight in ways you never could before. And I just, I'm just continually impressed with this. I made a video for the lab members on it because there's so much to do here, but you want to just take each one of those items and go through them. I mean, let's start with the apps. I mean, you hit the app button and it's like an app searching tool, right?

You can type in, it groups them, it groups them by type, you know, so you can find any app using your mouse and keyboard, or you can just type in a search bar, but it's a really great little app launcher. Yeah, it really is. And I like that they're leaning into, I think that's how a lot of people use spotlight, like even in the beginning, like back in the tiger days or whatever. But what is neat about it is that it is like,

I did not expect it to be like a modal thing within spotlight, which lets you get to things actually faster. Like if you hit command space, right arrow, and then you're, you've, what you've done very quickly is limit the scope of the search. And so you can get to what you want more quickly. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think for a lot of people, that second icon, the files icon, is going to be hugely beneficial. Because, you know, in the shipping version of Spotlight, if you type in the name of an app, generally it finds it and you can launch it. But, like, doing a file search is much more difficult. I even find, you know, because I've been going back and forth between Tahoe and Sequoia. I'm sorry, yeah, Sequoia.

And like getting it to do a file search on the existing spotlight is difficult. I find it almost easier just to open finder and do a search in finder. And this has really opened up options. And just let me say, generally search is not only did they add this, this filtering mechanism searches way better. Like to me, one of the, you know, the litmus tests of this has always been find an Apple note. Like I've got a bunch of Apple notes and I just want to jump to a specific Apple note.

Now on the existing version of spotlight, that almost never works. Just type in the name of an Apple note and you can get to it through spotlight and open it directly on this new version in Tahoe. It works every time. You know, if I get close with the name of the note, I can open directly and that's without doing any filtering. I mean, this is really impressive. I think that the notes thing in particular is so interesting because as an Alfred user, right? Like I have a plugin to interact with notes and I,

I mean, Spotlight doesn't have that. It's not extensible in the way Alfred is. But Notes is like one of the most common things I use Alfred for because I just live in Apple Notes. Like right now, we're doing this like huge project at home with the family. It's like I just have this long Apple Note that's basically like stream of consciousness as I have like phone calls and planning with people. And I'm in and out of it all day with Alfred. And with Spotlight, I can get right to it. And that's pretty sweet. Yeah.

Yeah. In fact, that plugin to me is going away as this hits my production machine, because I will now search for that in spotlight.

um the third icon is the most interesting one that's the actions one and this is all about app intense apple's been talking about app intense at these conferences for a couple years now um we all knew that this was going to be a big deal with apple intelligence but it's also a big deal with with spotlight and when we saw the presentation before when we did the first show right after the presentation

I thought this was just limited to what Apple had put in, like reminders and notes and Apple's applications. But when you open the, this actions button, it already finds all the app intents from all apps that you've installed that have app intents. And because I love shortcuts and I've got a bunch of shortcuts, friendly apps, I've got a long list of available options here now that I can trigger in what you call a command line spotlight, because you,

They're just sitting there waiting for me. And the mechanism is real simple. You get, you've got a little button you press and say, I want this to be the shortcut to call this one. Like I like countdown timers and I've had a million of countdown timer apps over the years because going into the clock app and hitting the timer is very clunky and

Now I've just added the word timer to the app intent countdown timer. And on my Tahoe machine, I don't need those apps. My Mac does it for me, just real simple. And I've had a really good time going in and setting some of these up. The app intent thing is the most, I think, forward-looking thing in Spotlight. A lot of the stuff, again, Alfred, Raycast, Launchpad, they're doing similar things now.

But Abitents, like basically, I mean, it's what's the fancy Siri that is now coming sometime next year. That's what this is all built around, right? It's developers giving the system little bits of functionality that the user can string together in different ways. And I actually think doing it visually, like with the tools in Spotlight, with the tools in Shortcuts,

is actually going to be beneficial in the long run when in the future we can do them with our voice. And I think Apple fell backwards into that because, I mean, they, they showed off the Siri thing last year and very famously, uh, you know, didn't ship. You can go read that big piece by Gruber that we've referenced. Um,

But the opportunity that it has presented is, oh, we can actually use these intents now in a way that I think more people will understand what they can do. And so when it comes...

to Siri at some point in the future, we're going to kind of already understand how it thinks and works. And I, I understand why Apple didn't highlight that aspect of it, but I think it's actually low key, like really important. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is critical to not only shortcuts, but Apple intelligence as well. And honestly, when you're out there buying apps, you should be buying apps from developers that are jumping in on App Intents because you get immediate benefits from it. And over time, that's going to be even more valuable. A couple of limitations on this. I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to trigger one of these outside of Spotlight.

Is there a way to use my magic trigger I add in Spotlight and then keyboard shortcut to run that?

No, there isn't. I even wrote somebody Apple. So, but you know, that's what shortcuts is for. You can write a shortcut to do it. Any one of these things has an app intent. It's already in shortcuts. So you're not losing the benefit, but it would have been cool if we could have had like a keyboard shortcut to trigger it without even calling spotlight. But yeah. Hey, you know, take what you can get. Right. And, and I, I do wonder if that's, um,

An early beta thing. Like I just don't know the answer to this. Like will applications like keyboard maestro or better touch tool be able to tap into this world? I surely hope so. As someone who has a lot of.

of automation on his Mac built through Keyboard Maestro. I'm going to talk about this at some point, or maybe I did on the feedback episode, but I've been consolidating a lot of my stuff that was across multiple apps into Keyboard Maestro. And that would be awesome if I could have a thing that could automatically call an app intent and interact with it. I hope that's coming because I think it would be really even more powerful than what Apple has built.

I can already think of a way to do it, actually, because you can make a trigger in Keyboard Maestro, a URL call. So you could write a shortcut. You could write a shortcut to do a URL call. So there's got to be somebody's going to make an app that has an app intent that lets you embed a URL call. And then, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Keyboard Maestro does it. But yeah, there's going to be a way to do that. I can already think of two or three ways I would probably do it.

pull it off so we just need a couple extra bits and actions and since the third party intense can be called i think it's only a question of time before you can do a lot of that stuff yeah all right um the quote we've been getting people asking us does this replace alfred or raycast i want to ask that question but before we do i want to finish the um

the four buttons and the fourth one is the, um, is the clipboard history. And this is the least impressive one to me. I, you know, I, I feel like it's like, it's like they, um, they are creeping in the direction that I'd like them to go. Like ideally we would have clipboard history, uh,

That is universal across all devices, just like this new user interface is universal across all devices. If I copy something on my phone, it shows up my clipboard history on my Mac, you know, and there are third party apps that do this, but I think Apple would be in the position to make it the best version of this, but that's not what this is. It just works on your device. And shockingly after eight hours, it goes away. I, cause I use keep clipboard history all the time and I use it for days and

You know, I woke up in the morning after I had installed the beta and it was empty. I'm like, what happened? Little digging. They clear it out after eight hours. So every day you start with a fresh clipboard history. That is, that's a bit weird. Alfred, I know you can set your history 24 hours, seven days, one month or three months.

And Alfred has the option, which I really like, to include or ignore text and images from other Apple devices. So the universal clipboard thing, which, oh boy, running betas I use endlessly. Like take a screenshot on one device. I want to paste it to my production machine, like doing it all the time.

And it seems like at this point, Spotlight is just unaware that Universal Clipboard works. It may be that I've got to be on another Tahoe machine and I only have one Tahoe computer set up right now. But I would like more control over how long it lasts. Eight hours is just... And it's not about, oh, I copied that thing...

yesterday and suddenly I need it. I don't think I've actually ever had that experience, but what it is, I think eight hours is just too short. Like I think seven days is long enough where like, I don't even think about how far back it goes. And, uh, so I would like some, some control over that or, or having it, uh, last longer.

Yeah, I feel like this is a great feature that it exists, but I hope this is just step one of a much larger clipboard history. Like now that it's here, they have a beachhead. Now, next year, can we get, you know, a compatible one on iOS and iPadOS? And can we, you know, like there's just, it seems obvious what the next steps would be. In the meantime, I'm going to continue using third-party clipboard history because this hasn't got enough juice for me. Yeah.

Um, so does it replace Alfred launch bar Raycast? I'll go first. And the answer is no. Um, that's not because I just released an Alfred field guide. I don't know. Some of you probably thinking that it's just, there are a bunch of features that I get out of Alfred that just are not here. Yep. Um, and a lot of it is the third party workflows. We've talked about how the Apple notes one is replaced here, but there's a bunch of other things I do, you know, that, um,

They're just not here. And I rely upon them, you know, link cleaner, stupid little plugin, but I use it like 10 times a day and like stuff like that. And like,

that's there and like the way it interfaces with my contacts is better there's just a bunch of stuff it does better but that doesn't mean it does everything better than spotlight and historically it did so i used to have spotlight mapped to control space and alfred to command space and like three or four years ago i realized i never invoke spotlight because alfred does everything better and

But that's not true anymore. Like calling an Apple note, running an intent. There are a couple things now that Spotlight does better. So my strategy is I'm mapping control space back to Spotlight. I've already done it in command space to Alfred. And I know what the features are and the different ones I want to use. And I'm bilingual. I can put my pinky on control or command. And I think a lot of Mac Power users are going to find the same experience. Yeah.

I think so too. I'm basically in perfect agreement with you. Like it is awesome that it's here, but I've got so much custom stuff in Alfred. There's little, little scripts, little things that I use every day that I would, I would really miss. But I think, I think this is another like classic example of Apple moving into a arena with power user apps. Like what this is going to do is going to introduce these ideas to a lot of people and,

And then they want more. And then they go looking for the Raycast, the Launch Bar, the Alfreds of the world. And I think that's only a good thing. Another feature that they added that I am finding just so delightful is the improvements to Control Center. Yes. Have you played with any of this stuff? Yeah. It's very much like what you get on the iPhone or iPad, actually. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, you can customize it. You can add third-party widgets. You can put your own in. You can use the ones. You can design it just how you want. And when you invoke the edit mode at the top left corner of your menu bar, I hold that in quotes since there's not a bar there anymore, is a little plus button. And you hit that and you can add additional control centers. So like now I have on my Tahoe machine, I have a control center for like

audio and video and like production controls i have one for lighting and home kit controls and that's a thing now you can set up two or three of these things and just have all of that stuff up in your menu bar and and call them as needed and i i don't know why this makes me so happy to have this on the mac this is a feature we've had on ipad and iphone now for a year or two

And it didn't really occur to me that I needed it on my Mac. But now that I have it, I love it. I think it's really awesome. And I think in particular, once developers like because it's been on the iPhone and iPad for a year, I think it would take a little while for the Mac sort of to catch up with what developers are doing here. But I think in the long term, this is going to be really great for the Mac. I mean,

I know for me, I use it all the time on the phone and the ways that you just mentioned, right? Like I have a general one, I have a control center. There's basically just like a home kit remote for my house. And it would be great if that all that's the same on the Mac. Cause I mean, particularly with home kit stuff, I'll be at my computer and I reach for my phone to do something. And it's just going to be awesome to have it click away on the Mac as well. Yeah. It's, it's excellent. And, um,

You know, that's the fog light kind of thing I was talking about where it's just like, oh yeah, just everything's a little better now on the Mac. A couple others of these, and it just depends on if you're a Markdown nerd or not, but the Apple Notes Markdown is not just export, it's also import. I think the original reporting was that you could export, but you can also import Markdown. And that's actually really beneficial for me because I write everything in drafts in Markdown.

And sometimes it's something that belongs in an Apple note. And I always disliked that process because you put it in and the markdown doesn't render. And I know there's some third party apps that kind of do that for you. We've talked about them, but it's, you know, it's better. It's just to have the native app import and convert the markdown to rich text for you. And great, you know, small feature, but it works.

I've noticed one thing, and this is beta one, but when you import headings, it also makes them bold. Just silly things like that. I don't think they've got the conversion entirely ironed out yet. Yeah, they'll get there. Yeah. I think it's awesome. I mean, Markdown has popped up in lots of interesting places in the last few years, and I think this is a great one. It doesn't turn notes into a Markdown editor,

quite the way that some people would want but it's a great way to get just information in and out right which is like always the the concern with things like Evernote or something it's like well Markdown's pretty universal at this point so you can get your stuff there

Yeah, but honestly, I think that's the right decision. There's millions of people using an iPhone who've never heard of Markdown. And if you turn the Apple Notes app into a Markdown app, they're going to be like, what are all these hashtags? And, you know, just, yeah, I think it should be a rich text, but it allows those of us that partake in Markdown to get data in and out easily. That's right. One other feature that I'm going to talk about this because we're talking about the Mac, but this is across all the new devices is

I mentioned on our initial reaction show how I'd done an initial test with private cloud compute and shortcuts. And I am like even further a believer of that now than I was when we first recorded that show because I've been doing even more tests. And

As much as I've been giving Apple a hard time about Apple intelligence, private cloud compute in shortcuts is a substantial artificial intelligence boon to privacy-loving Mac and Apple users that we didn't have before.

I've done a bunch of testing. The model is not as good as a frontier model. If you go and look at it against Claude or, you know, open AI stuff, but it's still pretty good and it's 100% private and you can call it through a shortcut and it is replacing a lot of the stuff I was doing in those models.

Because it's good enough. Yeah. And it's private. And we're going to talk more about this. We're going to do a show on shortcuts and what's going on now. But this is a big deal. Yeah. Super cool that it's local. Super cool that developers can just use it. And, you know, if Apple had a frontier model that was on a bunch of servers somewhere, they may have to charge for it. But this is just on your device. It's already there.

And for a lot of things, the developers will want to do in apps like take this list of things and sort them or like look up

this basic information and return it in this way, I think it's going to more than meet the needs of people. And yeah, awesome that it's local. Yeah. Now, just to be clear, that's what the developers are getting. They're getting the on-device engine. Right. But the users, us people listening to the show, we get private cloud compute, which is a server-based AI. That's right. I've read that like four times. And

And it is confusing to me. So developers, local on-device for things, users in shortcuts have access to private cloud compute. Yeah, and it's good. I mean, it's not, like I said, it's not frontier model good, but it's good. And if you're doing some stuff that's good enough for, you now have a free private Apple intelligence, you know, LLM you can bang stuff against out of shortcuts. Yeah.

I don't know. I feel like that story is just not out there, but that's the biggest Apple intelligence win that I've seen so far is the ability to access it. And I've changed a bunch of my queries to point now at PCC and I just run them out of a shortcut. They're working on my devices. And like I said, we're going to talk about this more in the future, but that's across all platforms. The thing I want to say though, at this point is we got the code of paint. Steven, you agree that it,

It's really not a big engine change this year. We got some additional features. We got the fog lights and I don't know. What's another feature? Got the cool grill. I don't know. What else have you done? Nice wheels. Yeah, okay. So, Stephen, can I install it on my production? No. You have work to do. I miss the control center. I miss the spotlight.

I'm just saying. You got stuff to do, man. I go on my Mac, my Sequoia Mac. I'm like, what is this nonsense? Where is my control center with all my lights on it? All right, I won't. I thought I might get you at a weak point. No, no, no, no, no, no.

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Pretty good. I'm not, I mean, as usual, the battery dies on my phone quickly during these betas. Yeah, it does. The only, you know, I honestly haven't seen many bugs at all. Every year in messages, I have some wonkiness occasionally. And this year is no different with messages. And I don't know why it is, but those are always kind of rough in the early betas. The other one is the...

the side table mode, what they call it again, where you turn on its side on a MagSafe adapter. Standby. Standby. My clock kind of stalls out on me sometimes, and I don't know what's going on there. Overall, it's been pretty good. Yeah, I haven't had a lot of

stability issues in terms of like crashing or that sort of thing. I mean, there's always the few apps, like the bank app you really need never works. Um, I agree with you on battery life. Definitely. And there are some visual bugs. Like you can kind of get it in a state where it seems a little bit confused about what's happening, but, um,

I want to go back to what I said earlier. It was like liquid glasses. Design language has been in the works for a while. This, while it is buggy, it's less buggy than I would have, have thought it would have been. And I think liquid glass is the most fun on the iPhone. Uh, what I have, what I keep showing people, uh,

is having two or three of the tab bar controller at the bottom of an app, and you put your finger down and move your finger across them, and the liquid glass bubble overshoots your finger and bounces back, and you get a very similar thing in text selection like in Apple Notes.

And it's fun. And what's clever about a lot of it, and again, I think it's most noticeable on the phone because you're touching it all the time, is that if you're in settings and you're just flipping a toggle on and off, you actually don't see liquid glass. It's just like a, it's a shiny looking, but it's a toggle. You see the liquid glass bubble if you put your finger on it for a second and then like drag it over more than just a flick.

And even that sort of thing, it kind of expresses itself when you want it. I think if every time you flicked a switch in any app, you got a little liquid glass bubble, it might be a bit much, but they've kind of done it where it exposes just at the right time and the right experience. And that makes it, I think, I think it makes the fun of it makes, it means the fun of it will last longer is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Yeah.

On the stability thing, after I installed the beta, it occurred to me that my car runs off my phone. What if the Rivian app doesn't work? I mean, there's an NFC credit card thing I can use. But what if my car doesn't work because I put the beta on? Everything worked. So it's all been pretty good. But yeah, getting back to liquid glass.

I agree. It's delightful. You know, that's, that's what it is. And there's definitely some areas where it's a little too delightful. Like the control center is so transparent that it's hard to read. And there's a couple of things like that, but beta one, I think they'll get it sorted. Yeah. I think they will. And again, the overall structure is the same, right? The exceptions to that, that one talk about for a second are photos and the phone app.

So last year in iOS 18, Apple changed the photos app. I have actually come to really like the redesign, but they got rid of the tab bar at the bottom and it was just like a long scrolling thing. You had your library at the top and you had all your collections at the bottom.

And this went a little unremarked upon in our community, but in TikTok land and other places, people just roasted photos all year for this redesign. And this year they walked it back a little bit, not all the way back, but a little bit of the way back. And the pendulum swung back. Pendulum swung back. They went too far and they're like, oh, we're going to come back a bit.

And they learned this lesson with phone. So if you look at screenshots from the original iPhone, the phone app has been the same since then. It gets updated visually, right? It was glossy. Then it was flat in iOS seven, but where things are in the phone app has never changed. And it changes radically in iOS 26, where you've got your content, your favorites up at the top and,

They're in their own section. It combined missed calls and voicemail, which I think is a really good idea because why do I have two badges for one time I didn't pick up when David called me? But it asks you, do you want to stay with the classic design or do you want to move to the new one? And I think had it not been for the photos thing last year, Apple would have said, we're going with the new one. People will learn it.

And in a way it is more cowardly to have the switch. But if you think about users of the iPhone who use the phone app, when you radically redesign that, you are going to confuse and frustrate some of them. And so I think in the phone app in particular with the photos history this past year, it's,

Even though it's weird for Apple to make this decision of like, hey, do you want the new design or the old one? I think it's actually the right call in this case. And I like the new phone layout to a degree where like on my phone that's running iOS 18, it looks really old to me now. But I am also glad it's not the default for all of the text messages and phone calls I would get from my family members after they updated.

Yeah. And you not only do you get to choose when you first run it, there's a button in the upper right corner, you can switch it between I think they call it classic and unified. Yeah, classic and unified at any time. So if you if you've got a family member that's like, what do they do to my phone, just hit the top right button, click classic and you're back to normal.

Um, overall again, the bolt-ons this year, in addition to the improvements of the phone improvements to the photos, a couple of things that stood out to me is the new messages features that they added are really useful. Um, you and I have already done some polls between each other. I think the background is really nice for me. I said this in the prior show, but sometimes I need reading glasses and sometimes I, I use my phone without them and often gets me in trouble because

Um, being able to set backgrounds uniquely to different people is going to be one way I'm going to avoid that. So I'll see, Oh, this is Steven. I have trees in the background with Steven, you know, kind of thing. So it's kind of cool. I think those are nice improvements. A silly one that I just discovered the other day is I can change the duration of the snooze, you know, like, you know, the alarm clock. Yeah. It's been nine minutes forever. I never understood why was it nine minutes instead of 10 or five. Right.

Well, now you can change it to whatever you want. Yeah. And that's actually a part of a broader change called Alarm Kit. And so developers will be able to actually put up alarms that look like the standard alarm, but from their app. And that's going to be, I think, really interesting for apps like Do, right? The kind of task manager checklist app, but its thing is like,

it reminds you until you want to die before you do something. Right. And for, so for things like that, or we have some friends who are working on an app where like timers and repetitive timers is really important for one of their features. Like this is going to be really cool for a whole class of application. But yes, changing the snooze time. I would love to, if anyone knows why it was nine minutes, like I like to think that Apple hire some sort of like,

sleep scientists and they like tested the perfect number of minutes maybe some dude just picked a number out of the air 15 years ago and that's what we have but but it's changeable it's awesome

Yeah. Nice. Are you a snooze guy though? Do you like use the snooze? I mean, I shouldn't be, but yes, sometimes, sometimes I am. I try, I usually don't actually have it enabled, but on certain occasions I will turn it on, but I try to, I try to feel like the stakes are higher. It's like, no, you got to get out of bed. Cause it's not going to give you a snooze. You can turn that off. Right. So yeah,

That's my ultimatum to myself on the morning. Ideally, you get enough sleep that you just wake up. Ideally. Okay, iPad OS. This is one I've been really looking forward to talking about on the show. We were giddy about the announced changes after it, but now that I've spent time with it, it's...

This is a big deal. I feel like of all the platforms this year, the iPad is the one that transformed with these changes. I think so too. I think the iPad is the thing that,

Other than liquid glass. That's like, what was in WWDC in 2025? Oh, right. That's the year of the iPad. Like finally multitasking got good. Um, I definitely want to point people. Our friend Federico Vatici did a great interview. You probably read it by now, but if you haven't go read it, a great interview with Craig Federighi, who is Apple's senior vice president of software and,

And it was all about the iPad. And what I really came to appreciate in reading that interview is one, Federico is a great interviewer, much better, much better than me. But two, more importantly, Apple has struggled with the iPad because it has this like fundamental design problem in that its strength is that it's one app at a time and you kind of can't break it.

That's why a lot of people like an iPad is why they hand them to their kids or hand them to their grandparents, right? Or people who just aren't comfortable with a full desktop environment. They want something simpler and safer. And that's why the iPad is good and why the iPad is chosen and by so many people and sold in such great numbers.

But also, there is a part of the audience for the iPad that want to use it as their primary or only computer. And how do you cater to both sets of people at the same time in the same product? Like, I don't... That's a hard problem. And...

Now, in iPadOS 26, you get to choose. It works in one app at a time. They even got rid of split view and slide over, which we can talk about in a second. But then they also give you this full-blown window management mode where you can drag apps around and it works very much like the Mac. And you can layer Stage Manager on top of that, which I want to hear from you because you've spent a lot more time with Stage Manager. But I think they finally found a way to...

work with both of those types of users at once. I suspect this is it for the iPad here or now. Like, I think this is, this is the design that we've all been wanting. Yeah. So refinements from here, but I feel like, yeah, this was what we needed. I mean, it's, it's really a trifecta. It's the window management plus the files improvement plus background tasks is those three things when you put them together and,

It solves a lot of problems. I mean, we've had a parade of former iPad power users on the show and we've been rubbing their nose. And in fact, they're going back to the Mac. And I feel like a bunch of them are probably now going back to the iPad because their biggest complaints are being solved. But the, but on the window management front, so my, when we did our first recording around the show, I asked, well, why do we need stage manager? I mean, you've got window mode and you've got, you've got simple mode, right? So you've got single window mode, you've got movable windows, right?

What else do you need? And what I didn't realize, because I thought that stage manager was like the in-between land between those two, but actually stage manager is the most advanced method because you get the windowing mode in stage manager. It's additive. So if you just want one screen,

And you've got window management, you can do that. But if you want multiple spaces and kind of the stage manager experience along with movable windows, you can do that too. You know, Mike Hurley's who turned me on to that fact, I didn't realize it because I was making fun of it. And he's like, well, wait, you missed something. You can actually move windows in the spaces. So if you really want to go power user mode and have different spaces for different things, you can move,

And putting the traffic light buttons on the top left corner, it's immediately understandable. I mean, one of my complaints about the iPad is they change it every few years. And every time I think I know the interface on how to manage a window, it changes. And it's just really hard for me for whatever reason to remember. Whereas the stuff on the top three buttons on the top left corner of a window, I've known now since 1984. And yeah,

That is ingrained, and I think they're taking advantage of that. So this is just a big win, and I've had no problem managing Windows. I've been doing it both on an 11 and a 13-inch, and suddenly the 13-inch is kind of fun because you've got extra Windows and you've got space to use them.

And I think this is just a big win in terms of window management. Very happy with that. Yeah, me too. I do think it is better with a keyboard and mouse than just using your finger. And so I think if you want to make a run at...

the ipad being that for you at the very least try like an external magic trackpad because it really does make a difference i think i bet they sell a lot of those expensive keyboard cases once it ships yep i bet you know a lot of people are going like okay now i need it just kind of the other two pieces of that trifecta the files app is just better it's not a finder replacement it's

but it is a lot better and a lot more manageable. I mean, file management was one of the things that chased me off the iPad. And just to be clear, it's not the finder, but it is giving me most of the stuff I need to work with the iPad in a manageable way that I didn't have before. For me, that's a, that's preview pre, you know, PDF viewing and editing. It's just something we all do all the time. Um,

And there were lots of great third-party applications to do that over the years. But now having Preview as we have come to know and love on the Mac, on the iPhone and iPad, it's like, man, this is a huge one. Yeah, agreed.

And then the last piece of it is background tasks. And now you can download a big file in the background and leave Safari. You can render a video out of Final Cut and leave Final Cut. I mean, just the stuff that was always tripping me up where I'd get stuck in app jail. I couldn't leave until it was done doing the thing. That's no longer a problem. Again, this doesn't go as deep as it does on the Mac. It's not unlimited.

But the usual problems are solved. Yeah, it was just so goofy that if you were doing a big export out of something and you went to another app, it just stopped. Like, so dumb. And it clearly was not an issue of the silicon, but I'm glad they got it resolved. Yeah.

Well, it was 10 years ago, right? When they first started shipping it, but not anymore. And I think they waited too long to do this, but you know, the best time to plant a tree. So, so we've got a usable iPad. And honestly, one of the things I'm struggling with right now is like, I had figured out what iPad was to me and I, and we had a good relationship, you know, I wasn't pushing it too much, but now I realize, well, now I can push it some more. And, and,

Are there times now when it can be a laptop replacement for different kinds of work? And I'm just in the beginning of exploring that. But there definitely will be things that I can do now that I couldn't do before. I haven't tested the audio. The other thing we didn't mention is we can record multiple audio streams. So in theory, you and I could go on vacation or whatever and bring an iPad and use that to record a show. Mm-hmm.

Obviously, there needs to be a bunch of testing before that happens, but I'm sure that we'll get there. And we won't feel totally weirded out by just bringing an iPad on the road. Stephen laughs. I do know that it struggles with... Well, there's no gain control, so you can't set how loud the microphone is recording, which is pretty basic. Like, come on, Apple. And it's struggling with if you have a multi-track...

unit, like the MixPre 3 or even my older USB Pre 2, it doesn't always know quite what to do with something with multiple inputs. I think it's best served by, like, I have a USB-C microphone and I just want to plug it straight in. I do think it'll get there. I really hope...

I know a lot of people have filed feedback about this. I really hope that they do add gain control. But yeah, just the ability to, again, going back to that background process, right? Like why can't I record audio in the background as I'm doing something else? It seems so clearly capable of doing it. And now they've built it out. And I think it's awesome. And I think it's fun that like they specifically called out podcasters during the announcement. Like, yeah, they listen and hear what we say.

And, you know, we've had some negative feedback from some listeners saying you guys are too hard on iPad users. There's some of us out here that are doing great things with it. And I didn't mean to, if that's the way it sounded. But I think there'll be even more iPad power users now, people that are doing even better things. Because these are the basics of the tools that folks needed to get some real work done.

And it's going to open a whole new avenue for our show, frankly, when we can talk to guests about what they're doing with it. I think we're going to have some real interesting stories to share. Me too. I'm really excited. I have not played – one question we got several times and I haven't played with it yet is what is the windowing like on an iPad mini? My iPad mini is now in the hands of my 10-year-old. So I was not going to force him to use the beta all summer to answer that.

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Our thanks to Dev and Think for their support of the show and all of Relay. All right. Every year you make fun of me for putting it on my watch right away, but now you work with David and you have to put it on your watch right away too. So let's talk about watchOS 26. It's actually nerdier than that. Underscore, you know, WidgetSmith, Pedometer++, Pedometer++ in particular. Yeah, it does a lot of stuff on the Apple Watch, but...

I am now a two watch person in the summer, which is just really embarrassing to go places. I'm sorry, David, if you're listening, but it's just so weird. I at some point will once I'm on the beta on my main phone and my like, then I'll probably do the personal watch. But so, yeah. So with my work phone, I have an Apple Watch running watch. It was twenty six.

And, you know, visually I feel like it and TVOS are kind of tied in terms of like, yeah, like you can see the liquid glass in places, but the UI is so small. A watchOS isn't very layered. Like you're not dragging windows atop each other. Right. So it's, I feel like the, the visuals are a bit subdued compared to in other places, but what's there in terms of the design is really nice. Um,

I think the big thing here is the Apple Watch being more contextual. So having the smart stack, which is that stack of widgets, if you roll the digital crown up, developers will be able to provide information to the system. And so they can be basically surfaced in the smart stack in a more intelligent way.

I think I said this last time. It's the promise of the Siri watch face, you know, all those years ago, but none of that's really here yet. Yeah. And same thing with custom controls. So we mentioned on the Mac where you can manage control center, you can do that on the Apple watch now. And it does, it actually does this really clever thing where it can pull controls from your iPhone and

And then it will, best I can tell because none of it's hooked up quite right yet, it will do that action locally if possible, but then on the phone if it has to. But again, these apps have to be updated to take advantage of this. So I feel like, at least on the software side, watchOS 26 is kind of one of the harder things to sort of evaluate at this point.

But the promises that I think is really compelling. Yeah. If you're tempted to put the beta on your watch, my advice is don't, there's not enough payoff for the, for the fact that your battery is going to die every day. It's going to be real bad. The thing that I really liked though, and it's the Apple watch series nine or later. So it's the series nine, the series 10 or the Apple watch ultra two is wrist flick. Yeah.

So if you have an incoming call or you have a timer going off or you have notification, you can like rotate your wrist away from you real quickly and whatever's going on stops. And, you know, we talked about it last time, but I'm already already really liking it. Yeah, I don't have that because I still have the ultra one.

And boy, I feel like I'm due for an update anyway, but I love that idea. As I said, right after dub dub is like, I do do the nose press sometimes to dismiss things. Sure. I would like to stop doing the nose press and this would, would give me that power, but just to follow up on a point you had made earlier, I love smart stack. I think it's,

Probably the most underused feature on the Apple watch for a lot of people. And it could be one of the best. And if these third-party integrations really get smarter this year, I think it will be a huge improvement, but we're not seeing any of that yet at this time. So hopefully soon, hopefully soon. So vision OS I have had trouble. Like I said earlier, I've had trouble getting this installed and,

My Vision Pro just refuses to do it. I got to contend with that. But everything I've seen shows that Vision OS has really taken a leap forward this time. It's the youngest of the platforms. It hilariously went from version 2 to version 26, which is just never not funny to me. But how has your experience been with it? I can't wait to hear about it. Well, I mean, the whole process of owning the Vision Pro...

I've been running bays on it since day one. And it was like, Oh, are you afraid to run a beta? I'm like, no, because every beta on vision OS is a marked improvement over the last release version. Definitely. Cause it's a young platform and they're fixing things like fixing engine parts in that case, you know, so things do work better every time. And the vision OS, I, so I, I'm in it probably about, you know, four or five hours a week between watching movies and writing and

And it's great. It's just, you know, I haven't had any stability problems. You had a note in the outline that I agree with. You know, even though every liquid glass is based on Vision OS, Vision OS feels like the least liquid glass of all of them now. You know, and it may be a processor thing too. They're limited in two and maybe they're dialing it back.

Or they've just kind of already solved the problem in Vision. They don't want to mess with it too much, but that's fine. It still feels part of the same family to me. Yeah. One thing I was really interested in going into this because it was rumored, hey, the new design language is based on Vision OS, was some of the controls in Vision OS where, for instance, you have the little grab handle in the bottom right corner.

hand corner to make an app bigger or smaller well that is in the ipad the ipad took that not the i can move i can rearrange from any corner like you can on the mac uh you have uh some ornamentation and some controls on vision os apps that are outside of the window frame that is nowhere that's still just in vision os so it is not a copy in vision and and paste everywhere else but i think

what those rumors were getting at and what Apple has done is they took some of the ideas of we're going to use light and transparency and a sense of place to put your controls above and around your content in a way that kind of makes sense spatially. And, and,

You can see that. Like if you think about it that way, it works. Visually, they are still actually Vision West feels like a little like step out of turn a little bit compared to the others. But I think they took kind of what they learned more than what they designed, if that makes sense. Yeah. The feature people are talking about the most is the persona updates. And it's remarkably better than it was in the prior version.

However, so I created my persona. It looked a lot better. I don't use Vision OS as a persona. I think I talked to you on it once like a year ago, and that's the last time I did that. I just don't, I guess there's not enough people with it. When I do Zoom stuff, I usually would rather be on camera than in Vision space. To me, the Vision OS is a very solitary piece of hardware. Yeah.

And I just don't use it. But our friend Mike Hurley is still struggling. Yeah. Yeah. Mike has this great blog post. He had an issue in the early versions of VisionOS, his persona where Mike has a beard and

For whatever reason, the sensors or cameras couldn't see his face. And so he talks with his mouth mostly closed. Like, go watch the videos in his blog post. It's horrifying. And his new persona looks way better, looks way more like him. But his mouth still doesn't really move. And I also have a beard and don't have this problem. But they haven't solved it all. But man, they look so much better.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's more stable. I think one of my favorite things about the new version is persistent widgets and persistent app locations. And this survives restart. So like you put things up and it's there. And like in my studio now I have like a clock on the wall and my calendar on the wall and a bunch of stuff that I've kind of installed in the studio now in virtual space.

And I use it enough that I catch myself sometimes without vision OS on looking at the wall to see what time it is. You know, just like, you know, just like it messes with your brain. Cause it's very realistic. And like some of them like indent, like the weather one looks like a window.

And you can see the clouds outside. Yeah. It's just, it's a trip. And I like it. I'm glad they're doing stuff like that. And that's what I want. I want to put on that thing and have a whole different workspace available to me. You know, I keep talking about, I want my eight foot glass board that I can write on. And they announced that there's going to be a pin you can use with it. And I don't know how refined it's going to be. It's called the Logitech Muse, but I want one the day they come out. I want to really see what I can do with that in there.

Uh, but you know, it's, it's just better in a lot of little ways. Um, a couple notes I'd made, um, that the idea of shared videos just doesn't make sense to me. I haven't tested it. We don't have two of these in the house. If we've got a listener who does, and this tested it, uh, let us know on the forum. But I just, I think it'd be weird to tell my wife, Hey, let's watch a movie together, but let's put this thing on our face. So we can't actually like look at each other. I don't know. Weird.

Like I said, it remains a solitary device for me. I spent a bunch of time trying to get the 360 camera to support to work because I have a 360 camera and I like to like shoot video in Disneyland and stuff. I think it'd be really fun. I don't think it's there yet or I haven't figured out how to make it work yet. The new environment was at Venus, I believe. It's not there yet. Jupiter. Jupiter. Jupiter. Yeah. It's not there yet or at least it's not there in mine. That's a bummer. So.

So, yeah, I want to see that. And that, you know, it's like, I feel like spatial OS environments and Apple Watch watch faces, those are my white whales at this point. It's like, come on. You know, like we didn't mention watch OS, but there's no new faces to write home about. In fact, they got rid of a bunch of the older ones are now gone. Yeah.

And like the, the Pixar one is gone. That's going to make, I haven't told my wife yet. That's going to not make her happy. So anyway, they're removing faces. They're not giving us more. And, and then the spatial OS, why don't we have like 50 of these environments? Why can't we just get environments donated? Like the one in the star Wars, um, uh, viewing space and Disney should be something I can like sit in other times. I,

I mean, there's some obvious fixes there. Hopefully they get to that at some point, but they didn't this year. And just for anybody who's wondering, Reminders is still an iPad app in Vision OS. What are you doing, Apple? Come on. Come on. Yeah. And I don't get it. So we got a lot of fancy new paint. We got some bolt-on features, and it's been a pretty stable year.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so far so good, you know, a normal caveat of, Hey, don't do this on your, the machines you make your living on. But if you follow this stuff and you've got a, something that, you know,

If it is buggy or if the battery life stinks, you don't mind. I think it's worth checking out. And I think if you're a developer, you're working on an app, you're working on an idea, you need to be on it. Because it takes some time, I think, to kind of get your head wrapped around glass and how it should work. But, you know, I'm excited. You know, the title of the episode last week was Return to Form.

And that was us talking about Apple kind of getting back to what WWDC has been of like, we are moving the operating systems forward. And this really feels like that. And just the, you know, couple of weeks since WWDC using these betas, going through the sessions, and

I'm much happier with Apple spending their time on this than peddling features that aren't going to ship for a year or two. And I think the community is better for it. The products are better for it. And I'm having a lot of fun with it so far. Yeah. And I was hard on them about Apple Intelligence's first year and what happened.

And now having used these betas, I feel a little more positive about it, frankly, because these private cloud compute models are really useful and they're available to me now. I wrote a newsletter. I'm going to link it in the show notes. And by the way, gang, if you haven't, I'd appreciate if you subscribe to my newsletter. I feel like it's pretty good content. That's great. But, but the, the article I did was the idea of what is artificial intelligence to the technology industry. And,

I realized, I got the idea listening to Federighi do all these interviews. And it occurs to me, in Apple's mind, artificial intelligence is, it's a commodity. It's a thing that you buy. It's like if you have a hamburger parlor, you buy the meat somewhere. Well, AI is the meat that they're bringing in. And Apple says, we make really great hamburgers. And we're going to use this new meat, and it's going to make even better hamburgers.

Whereas AI, open AI, Sam Altman, you know, bringing in Johnny Ive, they think that AI is a product. You know, they're like, to torture the analogy yet again, they say, well, we're going to make an enchilada store. Next door doesn't sell hamburgers and you're going to want our enchiladas. You're not going to even want a hamburger anymore, you know? And when you really think about it, that's what this difference is over. It's like, is AI going to change the foundation of our technology use or is it going to improve it?

And I think, honestly, if I had to make a bet, I think it's a commodity. I mean, when you look at the way the price keeps going down and there's so many people making it, I think it's going to be really hard for it to become an independent product that replaces our phone. And in that case, Apple's sitting pretty well so long as they get their act together with Siri. So anyway, I wrote this up in a newsletter if you want to hear the full story. But using these betas has also made me feel better about what's going on

And hopefully they can get Siri fixed. You know, the rumor now is early 2026. And that story doesn't change for me. They've got to fix it and they've got to make it great. But I feel like they're on the right track here. It's going to be a fun year, man. It's just going to be fun to see people's reaction to this as they dig into these tools, as developers update stuff. I'm very excited about the fall. Me too.

So now it's okay for me to put the Tahoe on, right? Oh, okay. I don't know. I mean, it sounded to me like you said something like, you know, around beta three would be okay. That's not. No. The podcast is worse if it's just me. So much worse.

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