Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Fatici. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm doing really, really well. We just talked for like 15 plus minutes about Obsidian and plugins and daily notes and Markdown in the pre-show for App Stories Plus members. I think it's a good one.
It is a good one. It is a really good one. I'm excited about Obsidian. You'll be, I mean, you are obviously from that conversation far ahead of me on Obsidian right now, but it's been on my mind too. I've been thinking about my holiday projects and Obsidian is part of that. I do it kind of every year because, you know, it's easy, especially with the way our years go, where we are probably busiest in the, in the fall as we lead up to the holidays and
For those systems, you see where the holes are. You see where things start breaking down and how they can be optimized. So it's a good time to start reevaluating that stuff. And if you're interested in listening to that, you can become an AppStories Plus subscriber by going to appstories.plus. Or you could be a Club Premier member. Just go to plus.club to learn about Club Mac Stories Premier, which has a lot of benefits, including the AppStories Plus pre-show segment.
And the fact that those episodes get released early in high bitrate audio and with no ads. Yeah. Today we wanted to do a sort of, we're approaching the end of the year. We're going to take a couple, we're going to take as always a couple of weeks off to recharge and think about our holiday projects.
John and Brandon are going to be attending CES in Las Vegas. John is going to Las Vegas. I don't know why everybody thinks it's so weird that I'm going to Las Vegas. I am on the record saying that you will be the surprise in Las Vegas. I think there's a dark side to you that we haven't explored yet.
All right. You may be right. You know, Brendan, your true self will be revealed in Las Vegas. I learned listening to Into the Aether that Brendan has never been to Las Vegas. So I will have to show you. I have. I've been there a couple of times. See, you're a regular. Not a regular. It's been many, many years since I've been there. But but yeah, we're going to see. Yes, it'll be a lot of fun. We're going to be doing some stuff for NBC, but we'll also be checking out gadgets and things that are relevant to Mac stories generally, too. So we will be reporting back on all that stuff.
But in any case, today we are going to sort of take a look at the past year and pick apart a few topics for our year in review episodes. Some of the bigger themes and some of the trends that we have seen, you know, in doing app stories and writing for Mac stories. And let's just get into it because, I mean, the first one is pretty obvious. And this is where I'm going to have you take the stage, John, so to speak, regulation.
Regulation has been the topic this year between the DMA and the Department of Justice against Apple in the US. It has been the conversation for the past few months. Yeah, it really has. And at this time of year, I start thinking about these themes because we do our MacStory Selects Awards. And one of the things...
that when we're thinking about the apps that deserve awards, it's partly what is the what's kind of like been the vibe of the year and what have been the the big overarching themes. And there's no doubt that regulation is a big part of that. That's why Delta was our app of the year, because
If it hadn't been for things like the DMA, we probably wouldn't have Delta worldwide on the App Store today. That was a direct result of regulatory pressure. And I know people have a wide range of views on...
whether the EU is doing the right thing, whether the Department of Justice in the US is doing the right thing. Impressing companies like Apple and Google and Amazon and Meta, all these companies are under intense scrutiny worldwide by not just the EU and the US, but other countries as well. And I think that it's long since overdue in my view in that
I think that with unfettered power of these tech companies had gotten it to a place where
things weren't being done in the name of the consumer anymore. There were opportunities that were being missed, whether there were monopolies where there was not enough competition to really drive innovation, or whether it's like pricing and things like that. These tech companies have grown up, this is a mature industry, and it's an industry like any other big industry where capitalism breaks down sometimes. And as a result,
the EU, the US and other governments are stepping in and regulating. Now, good and bad can come from regulation. I think
Something like Delta, to me, is a bright point because it shows that pressure can cause change. Apple is still kind of maybe dragging its feet a little bit with the emulators because I saw recently, you know, PP SSPP had trouble getting its gold version approved in the App Store. There are some other emulators I've read about that have been stuck in limbo or have given up, which is a real shame. But I think...
regulation really when it comes down to it has made a difference and whether it's in your view a good change or a bad change there's no denying I think that it has had a big impact on the app store this year. Yeah we have seen cases of
Apple may be using their notarization system almost like a weapon more than a technical implementation of the system, right? The notarization in the European Union should be used to make sure that apps that you want to install from third-party marketplaces are certified, that there's a
sort of a kill switch enabled in case something goes awry with one of those apps. But we have seen the cases of Apple refusing to notarize an app that it shouldn't be able to refuse because it's operating outside of the App Store guidelines. And so whether it's a BitTorrent client or an emulator, if it's not anything dangerous or anything malicious that contains malicious code, notarization shouldn't be used, shouldn't be held as a weapon against those developers.
And so I think this conversation will continue into 2025. And I'm curious to see if the changes that we have seen in Europe this year with the whole system for default apps, for third-party marketplaces, for payment processors, I'm curious to see if all of that works
will stay a European exclusive or given the pressure in the United States and other parts of the world, if given that the system is now built, maybe Apple will just say, you know what, whatever, we're just going to do this everywhere to appease the regulators and maybe take some of the pressure off our backs. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see too, at least in the United States where things go, because obviously we have a new administration coming in, in
the government. And so there's going to be a lot of change, presumably with the DOJ and, you know, the regulators here in the United States. My guess is that like the lawsuit that's out there with Apple will continue. That's my read on it from what I've read so far.
But yeah, it'll be an interesting 2025. I think we'll see a lot more activity from the EU and some of those other countries. I know, I think it was Korea and Japan and some other places were also looking into implementing similar rules that we'll hear more from those countries as well. Let's talk about the Vision Pro because that was the other big topic for the year. And I think I'll sum it up this way.
We were thinking the Vision Pro was going to replace our computers. At least I was thinking it was going to become my main computer when I'm home by myself, like right now, just me and the dogs. And I thought for these instances, I'm always going to be wearing the Vision Pro. And that has not happened for a couple of reasons, I think.
The first one being, I just love the M4 iPad Pro that I have here so much. And this iPad Pro does not work well with the Vision Pro because the Vision Pro, the best integration it has is with macOS. It doesn't really integrate with iPadOS in any way besides airplane mirroring.
And the second problem, well, there's three problems. The second one is the lack of apps, the lack of third-party apps beyond the initial excitement from the usual suspects on Apple platforms, you know, the Fantastical and the Things and OmniFocus, all these developers that are always there on day one for a new Apple platform. But besides that initial wave of apps,
It's been kind of a wasteland on the Vision OS App Store. And the third reason being the work, actually working, getting work done with the Vision Pro can be cumbersome. If you don't use a Mac, the whole situation with keyboards and trackpads, it's still so much in its infancy right now that it slows me down. It's not a totally solved problem, that's for sure. There's definitely got to be work done there.
Yeah, I would add something to that. I would add that the lack of a really good story about gaming makes a big difference with the Vision Pro. And I know that Jason and Mike talked about this on Upgrade this past week.
past week. And I agree with everything they said there. The fact that there aren't hand controllers really hampers the Vision Pro as a gaming device. And as we've seen during the course of the year, although maybe the app story isn't great for the Vision Pro after that initial wave, the entertainment story has been improving. I mean, there's great immersive stuff going on. Apple is producing more content for it. I have watched some 3D movies. It's great for that.
But one big hole in that entertainment story is a video games. Video games are an enormous entertainment industry that's that eclipses Hollywood at this point and not having the full gamut of the kinds of games that you can play on
on the Vision Pro is hampered by the lack of controllers, but also the relatively, the anemic input and output system. We've got Wi-Fi 5 with a pretty weak antenna and no way to put a USB-C cable into the Vision Pro to connect it to Ethernet or anything like that. So I think that IO story is part of what's hampering it as well.
I was going to mention that like the lack of any Ethernet input or USB-C, whether
whether it's USB-C data or USB-C video via the Apple developer strap, that was a pretty big miss on Apple's part, in my opinion. And I think it is the one feature of the Vision Pro because I have the Apple developer strap, I never use it because it's like, you just use it for screenshots over a wire, it's not worth it. So I would be very surprised if Apple in Vision OS 3 does not enable video pass-through feature
or Ethernet pass-through via the developer strap. There's two more things I want to mention. For video games, I feel like Apple had a problem of hubris with the Vision Pro where they thought they were going to reinvent the wheel of gaming by just using hand tracking. And
Sometimes, I think you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just need to build a better wheel. And it's still a wheel. We have been here before in the gaming industry. At the end of the day, controllers...
Things that you put in your hands. Since the 70s. 50 years plus. We have 50 years of history that teaches us people want to click buttons and move sticks and press on D-pads. Right. You can make them better. You can explore haptics, you know, customizable shoulders and trigger buttons. Like you can try all of these things, but at the end of the day, you need a controller, which is why I am very excited to see two people
desperate companies. So Apple with the Vision Pro and Sony with the PSVR 2 sort of teaming up together and maybe enabling this integration with PSVR 2 controllers on the Vision Pro. The third thing that I will say is I think the one thing that stood out to me in 2024 with the Vision Pro is if you have the money,
which is a pretty big ask for a Vision Pro. But if you have the money, and if you are a Mac user, the Vision Pro is becoming the ultimate expensive accessory for a Mac. Yeah, absolutely. The stuff that they have done with Mac virtual display and now in Vision OS 2.2 with the widescreen and ultra widescreen display is excellent. I am very jealous of all that. But I use an iPad, so...
There's nothing I can do there. Yeah, I think the story with Sony is super intriguing to me because I think it's more than just...
Apple needs another kind of controller that it can hook into the OS like it's done with, you know, Mac OS and iPad OS for the existing DualSense and Xbox controllers. Because I think for this to be a partnership that really benefits both Sony and Apple, what we're, what I'd like to see is for this to all kind of work with, uh,
with Sony Remote Play to kind of integrate the Vision Pro with the PS5, for instance, to be able to make it kind of like the super version of the PSVR that takes it to another level. I think there's a lot that could be done there that goes beyond just making a controller that's compatible with Vision OS. I'm going to lay out a plan, a hypothetical plan for you. So this is another one of my predictions. Just picture this, okay? Yeah. 2025 Vision Pro.
Step one, enable USB-C video and Ethernet input via the Apple Developer Strap. Rename it in a way that it's no longer called Apple Developer Strap. Just call it something else because it gives off this idea that it's just for developers. So enable USB-C video and Ethernet input in the Vision Pro. Step two, work with Sony.
for these PSVR2 controllers. Step three, work with Valve, which are also releasing new VR controllers. They have been highly rumored. It's very likely that we're going to see a slew of announcements from Valve at CES, from the brand new SteamVR headset, SteamVR controllers, maybe a Steam controller, and maybe even Steam consoles. So work with Valve.
And step four, embrace some kind of open API for all kinds of VR controllers to work with the Vision Pro. Or maybe, you know, Apple could do it a la carte, sort of being like, OK, now we're adding support for the PSVR 2. Now we're adding support for the new Steam controller. Now we're adding support.
for the MetaQuest controllers. Like you can do it this way or maybe you can launch some kind of framework that all kinds of companies can integrate with for the Vision Pro. And obviously the step five,
Make it cheaper. Like at $3,500, it's still, I mean, it's no surprise that according to Bloomberg, Apple has sold possibly less than half a million units of the Vision Pro. So it's very expensive. And it also needs to spread out to more of the world too. I think if, you know, especially if sales are, if these things are stacking up on shelves somewhere, make it available in more countries too. AI. AI.
We should talk about AI. This is, you know, when we were talking about the regulation section, I was thinking about AI because one of the things that I'm going to use Notebook LM for in 2025 is I'm going to dump all these e-regulations, DOJ lawsuits. Ooh.
Everything that's all these like 100 page plus PDFs into Notebook LM and be able to query that because those things take a lot of time and effort to read and outline and highlight and having to... Make a podcast out of the DOD case. Boy, that'd be a thrilling podcast. It's a great idea. Yeah, but...
But yeah, AI is everywhere and I think it's going to continue to be everywhere. And I think the hype is going to tend to be overblown still, which I think the challenge for us is to get past the hype and find the things that are actually useful for people. That's what Mac Stories has always done. And I think we're in a pretty good position to continue doing that. But, you know, I look at a lot of the integrations and apps and different services that are coming out and, you
It's very, very hit and miss right now. But I think with there being more agents coming up in the next year, as well as people thinking about new UIs that go beyond a chatbot, we're going to start seeing a lot more interesting applications than we have so far this year.
Absolutely. Yeah, I think obviously it's beginning now, this entire talk about agents. So this new name for what is basically a bot that does things for you, but it does those things based on a large language model. That's the difference from before. This
This race to build the agent for your life, for your office work, for your personal productivity, for your personal knowledge management, for your browsing, like all of this is going to continue. I'm not sure if we are going to see Apple. I mean, Apple is...
We always need to keep in mind that Apple is two years behind. Now, can they somehow short circuit that distance between them and the rest of the industry and maybe get to a much better place in a year instead of two years? That's still left to be discovered. But I think Apple is going to bet heavily on their App Intents framework and probably
We're going to see that in the spring, but I think we're going to see potentially, it wouldn't surprise me to see at WWDC 2025, the next step for App Intense where Apple says, well, we also have agents now, but we are doing them in a native way. Basically, I'm thinking about the future of automations. Yeah.
If you think about it right now, we have our primitive agents on Apple platforms. On the iPhone and iPad, it's not on the Mac. We have personal automations. So things that do things for you in the background without your input.
I wonder if maybe Apple could say, well, we're going to take that system. We're going to take what we are doing with Apple Intelligence and App Intense, and we're going to find a way to automate the process so that you can build your agent with natural language. And that's going to do things for you in the background. But it's done in a native and privacy conscious way. That would be interesting, I think. Yeah, it really would be. And I think what makes me optimistic about it is that control over the OS.
Because right now, the kind of agents we're seeing are from like Rabbit and some of these other companies where what they're doing is they're essentially, they're automating UI. They're clicking around on the web for you. Exactly. Like there has to be something more than watching a large language model click buttons in a Google Chrome window. Like there has to be something more than that.
Yeah, exactly. Because that, I mean, that works to a degree, but we've seen for years that automation based on UI doesn't work super well. I mean, just look at how most web pages are built. The UI that you see may not be the UI that I see based on like how the ads are loading and how the JavaScript works.
You know, we're not talking about super simple HTML static pages most of the time on the web. And having an agent that actually clicks around in the web is hard. What you need is APIs and things like app intents that allow you to hook into those functionalities directly without having to worry about what the UI looks like. The thing that we have seen in 2024 that we are continuing to see is
This explosion of models, AI models, whether they are...
proprietary models like ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini or open source models. You know, obviously Meta with their Lama model. But there are some other interesting open source models coming. There's one open source video model made by Tencent, I want to say, the Chinese gaming company. They made a text-to-video open source model. So there's been a literal explosion in these open source models. But all of these models...
that we have seen in 2024, they're all based on the web. They all have web APIs. And that has allowed this proliferation of AI apps on the App Store. All of these AI apps on the App Store are largely based on the OpenAI API or now the LAMA open source model or the Cloud, the Anthropic API. They're all based on the web. So we have seen this year
There's thousands of apps on the App Store. Some of them, they're making millions of dollars in revenue that are just wrappers around the OpenAI API. I think that's fascinating. And I'm not sure. I mean, OpenAI must still be happy because even if those people are not using ChaiGPT, they're still coming from developers who are paying for API access. Right.
Is Apple going to follow a similar route in the future? I don't know what to think. I don't either. Like, look at Google.
you look at Google, you look at OpenAI, they put out all this, like all these companies, they also usually put out different flavors of their models, right? They have the small model that has, you know, maybe just a few billion parameters and then they have like the more expensive, the more, the much bigger models. Is Apple going to say next year, oh, we're going to have Siri LLM and it's going to,
there's going to be a Siri LLM Mini and a Siri LLM and a Siri LLM Pro? Like, are they going to follow the rest of the industry in offering multiple flavors of their model?
Hard to say. Yeah, it's very hard to say. I think the other things can be interesting in 2025 to watch is that, and it goes a little bit to what you were just saying, is that the business models for these apps, there's going to be a shakeout because on the one hand, some apps allow you to plug in your own API keys if you're already a subscriber, say, to ChatGPT or to Claude. Yes.
Others simply charge you a fee and are paying themselves for that access. And the problem I see is that you're going to find a situation where people are going to want to use these various tools, but they'll find themselves paying for chat GPT like three and four times through different services. And because they're already like chat GPT plus is already $20 a month. So is Claude.
that's already a fairly expensive subscription compared to most services out there. And if you layer 20 plus another 20 plus maybe another 10 or 15 for some of these other apps, it gets very expensive very fast. So I think that we're going to see a shake out there. Yeah, if you're a consumer, you could just say, you know what?
I'm just going to sign up for ChatGPT Plus or Google Gemini Advanced, which, by the way, I want to play around more with Google Gemini because I really don't like the UI of Gemini. It's just the classic Google UI design that I do not appreciate. But...
I have played around with the Gemini 2 Flash. We were just speaking about different versions of models. Google just put out a version 2 of Gemini, but it only comes in the small model called Flash. And it's impressive. I think Flash is more like...
Oh, it's like their standard model. I think they have a nano model, which is like their phone model, Google does. Yeah. They just put out, basically, they just put out two Gemini 2 Flash. Right. And there's going to be eventually a Gemini 2 Advanced down the road. But basically, the Flash model is already just as powerful as Gemini 1.5 Advanced. Right. So it's wild, the progress that... And Google, like, the one thing that's been interesting to watch in 2024 and also keep an eye on 2025...
The entire AI industry is relying on NVIDIA for their AI eGPUs. They're buying these clusters and clusters of NVIDIA GPUs. Google has their own. Google has their own tensor, like their own, what are they called? The TPUs, tensor processing units. Yeah, I think that's right. Google has...
Google has its own processing hardware. And even if you're not interested in AI, just go read about Google's proprietary hardware that they're doing for AI. They're crazy. They're doing crazy things with their custom silicon there. Lastly, the thing we saw in 2024, indie developers. I mean, we talked about the Vision Pro. And I think if it weren't for indie developers, I don't think...
The Vision Pro would have even had a lineup of apps to begin with at launch. Not beyond the video streaming stuff and other entertainment things. And even then, YouTube and Netflix are... That's true, without Juno and all those other apps. I think more than ever, indie developers are playing a key role on Apple platforms, and
whether it's for the Vision Pro or, you know, taking advantage now for App Intense. Apple is going to, you know, they're making a big deal of this Apple intelligence integration that's rolling out next year and that will allow you to chain together actions from multiple apps with a natural language command using Siri. But
If it weren't for indie developers, I don't think Apple would be able to say we have thousands of apps that integrate with App Intense. Indie developers, despite how Apple often mistreated them,
They are and continue to be the core of the App Store ecosystem. In an age where the App Store is dominated by these shady AI utilities that overcharge people and that have questionable data sources.
practices and they're filled with ads and other junk, indie developers remain a bright spotlight in the Apple developer narrative. And I think that will continue to be true, especially because of App Intents. Yeah. And I think this year it was more noticeable than even most years, partly because of the Vision Pro, but also we came out of WWDC without a lot of
very specific APIs that were like new features that developers could necessarily build towards. And yet we still saw a ton of innovation and really cool apps coming out this year. I mean, I think when we did our MacStory Selects Awards, when we did our picks,
there was no shortage of apps to pick from. I mean, we had, we went through long lists of apps to talk about because even without some kind of giant new feature, like the first time widgets were on the system, for instance, there were still plenty of great apps out there doing interesting things in all sorts of aspects of app development, whether it was integrating AI or just coming up with new ways to, you know, solve old problems. And so that's,
That is really great to see. And I'm looking forward to 2025 to see what we get next, because I think the app intents for me, when they were first announced, it seemed like they were a very slow burn. There seemed to be like a lot of developers who were skeptical and maybe didn't do anything right away. But I've noticed that that has really picked up a lot more in recent months. So I think that we are going to have a lot of, a lot of your favorite apps with app intents integration. Once that stuff gets turned on. Yeah.
So that was 2024. That was 2024. Pretty soon we'll talk about what we think is happening in 2025, you know? We will, but before that, we will talk about the things we want to do over the holidays. Indeed. That's going to be the next episode of App Stories. It's going to be our annual tradition holiday projects. All right. That's great. We'll wrap it up there then. You can find me and Federico over at MacStories.net.
We are on threads and Instagram, blue sky and mastodon. Federico is at Fetici. That's V I T I C C I. And I'm at John Voorhees, J O H N V W R H W S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.