Pragmatic 108: Not Turning It Into A Flower Pot

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I'm your host, John Chidjy, and today I'm joined by my good friend, Clay Daly. How you going, Clay? Hey, how's it going? It's going good. It's going very good. And the reason it's going exceptionally good, actually, I would even say, is because it's WWDC week and we've just had a keynote. Yeah, that's our mecca, isn't it, for nerds? Yeah, kind of. Well, for Apple nerds anyway. I'm not entirely sure how many Android fanboys are interested in this, but hey. Good point. Well, actually, no, they're probably pointing and saying, "Hey, look at all that stuff. had that on Android for 10 years. - That's another good point. - It's probably more the way they'd see it. But anyhow, before we get too stuck in a WWDC talk, I just want to give you a quick camera update. Super quick. As you know, I've got my Nikon Z6 II and this particular camera, I do love this camera and I've been gradually phasing out, i.e. selling off my old F mount lenses and going to native of Z mounts because they have better performance on the mirrorless body, which is to be expected. And it's not just that also, I've learning more about lenses and so on and so forth. The Z mount is significantly larger than the F mount, which means more light gathering, which means you can have larger glass and get basically superior optical performance out of a Z mount than you'll ever get out of an F mount lens. So yeah. So anyway, the only two lenses I have left that are F-mount, I've got my Tamron, it's a, oh gosh, 11 to 16 millimeter F 2.8 ultra wide, which is manual focus only now 'cause I don't have a body motor anymore. 'Cause I've sold it. - Oh, okay. - Yep. - You got rid of it? - Yeah, I sold my D500, I sold my D500. So it's now manual focus only, but that's fine. I don't mind. It was only for astrophotography and wide landscapes. - Oh yeah, so it's perfect for that. - That's fine, manual focus is probably better anyway for that. And then the other one is my novelty lens, 200-500 constant 5.6 aperture. And I'm using the standard FTZ revision one mount for adapter for that. Not the revision two one, this is the revision one, one's got the little knobby bit underneath. So, but that's okay, it's fine. And that's it. So now I've got my 24-200 Z mount, F 4.5 to F 6.3, which is my do everything lens. And it's not bad, but I missed the bokeh of a wider aperture and the low light performance. And so I was tossing up whether or not I spend $4,000 on a 70 to 200 mil F 2.8. - Oh, wow. - Yeah, I'm not doing that. Or I replaced my much beloved 85 millimeter F 1.8 portrait lens. So I did that instead, 'cause that was a hell of a lot cheaper. - So you have 85? - Yes, I do. I got it yesterday, literally showed up yesterday. So I went around the house last night, annoyed everybody by taking their photo in really low light and the vibration reduction with the in-body system plus the 85 mil F-mount combination. I literally took a photo of my son almost in pitch darkness with a one second shutter and there was no shake, no camera shake. - Wow. - Handheld. - That's amazing. - Unbelievable. I had to manually focus of course, because there was not enough light to focus. - No light. - No, no. - No candle. - No candle. As actually really kind of eerie, but nevermind. But yeah, so, and the cats- - Magic. - Yeah, it really does look really nice. So as with any new lens, my favorite lens is my newest lens. So we'll see how long that lasts. - As it should be. - Yeah, I know. I have also ordered a 40 millimeter F2, which is kind of like a very plastic, fantastic pancake kind of lens. - Oh, okay. - I wanted a compact lens that would do a standard near 35 millimeter. And it has had great reviews, except for the fact that it's all made of plastic, effectively. Well, I mean, except the glass, the glass is made of glass, but you know. - Right, right. So, and this is a 40, you said F2? - Yeah, it's an F2, yeah. So it's pretty- - Okay, nice. I wish Sony made Splendor, that sounds good. - Yeah, now look, when Nikon released that one, it was all just, you know, like here's a, here's, it's not 35 millimeter because we've got a beautiful 35 millimeter with practically no vignetting and it's just a gorgeous F1.8 lens. you really want that. But for all you cheapskates out there that want a tiny little pancake lens, it's not 35, it's 40 millimeters. So, you know, I mean, I don't know what- - Five better. - Well, I actually, I've looked at photos and the comparison between them. And like this lens, for example, is like 400 bucks, Australian. - That's amazing, actually. - It's super cheap. And because it's very, very small, like it's kind of very much like a pancakes sort of style. It's not a true pancake lens, but it's pretty close to it. it means that suddenly a mirrorless becomes, I think saying pocketable would be an exaggeration, but yeah. - Close enough then I suppose. - But yes, close enough. - Yeah, I'm looking at this here. So it is really well reviewed lens, it's amazing. - Yeah, it's a fantastic lens for 400 bucks. And honestly, so my goal is to get a much smaller little camera case and have that as like a little sling bag kind of thing. And then I can take that with me. And I'm also, I've got my, I'm eyeing off, there's a secondhand SB 300 or SB 400 or whatever on Marketplace. I might grab that and have like a super compact setup that's really high quality that I can just take with me anywhere. - Yeah. - So yeah, 'cause I mean, it's a shame, 'cause we were talking a few years ago about the Nikon 1 series and I've still been eyeing off Nikon 1 V3s, but I just can't bring myself to buy one secondhand. - I know, give it a cheap. - Yeah, 'cause it's like, they don't make any of the bits for it anymore. - That's also true. And then some of the really high-end lenses are still high-end prices somewhat. It's amazing, I keep looking. - Yeah, I know. And it's just such a shame that they stopped making them. 'Cause you said to me at the time, yeah, you were really disappointed they stopped making them. And I looked into it and I'm like, you know what? I absolutely agree. I didn't even realize these things were a thing. 'Cause when I got my DSLR, I never even looked at like compact cameras like that. And it is such a shame, but anyway. - Yeah, I mean, Nikon was, they were ahead of their time with what they were doing with the Z, with the V1 system. And I wish they had just kept going. They could have done both, you know? - Yeah. - Could have had both going at the same time. - Yeah, they should do both. I secretly hope that they'll release a similar product to that in future. Like once they're done fleshing out the rest of the Z mount lens ecosystem. 'Cause they've still got some more they need to do. I think they're releasing an 800 mil ultra tele prime. And there's a couple others coming. I mind you, they're gonna cost you the price of a small car, but that's okay. 'Cause I mean, a lens is far more important than a car, isn't it? - It's very. - Okay, I'm losing a lot of people. Okay, all right. So that was just a little bit of an update. I thought you might find it interesting. I'll post some more photos and I'm going on a bit of a road trip this weekend. - Okay, cool. - So I'm gonna go up and have a look at a gorge. It's like, well, that sounds exciting, but you know, hey, I kind of like hiking around gorges 'cause they're cool. Anyway. - Yeah, are you gonna toot? - Oh, probably, yeah. But I mean, I'm just gonna take a whole bunch of photos and add them to, I'm doing some scenery shots for a relative. So advertising promo in a sense, but I'm also gonna post some of my own website of course, 'cause why not? Anyway. - Yeah. - Right, so ends the photography update. Right, we need to get back to WWDC. And when I say get back to it, I mean, start talking about it. All right, so just going through the keynote then from start to finish with key points and some of the stuff that I wanted to do, quickly touch on and so on and so forth. So I just wanna start by saying, Apple are very, very self-obsessed about their campus. I kind of feel like it's now becoming a feature in every one of their videos. And don't get me wrong. I mean, it's one of those Frisbees with a hole in it. I know people call it the mothership, but I mean, honestly, it's kind of, yeah. It's a very impressive big building, but honestly, God. And I don't know, maybe I'm just, they're proud of it, good for them. - Yeah. - But really, do I need to keep seeing it every damn video? - I know, I think they overemphasize it sometimes. I'd agree with you. - Yeah, in any case, I may need to pay their groundskeeper more because when Tim Cook was walking around, if you look out the window behind him into the middle of Apple Park, you see all the pathways, there's some trees, but there's clumps of, you know, like different grasses around the place. And I'm like, guys, what's the groundskeeper doing? You know, like mow that lawn already, come on. - Are they going for the natural look of that sort of, I mean, is that like partially desert area? - Well, I mean, well, if they're gonna do that, where are the tumbleweeds? Yeah, I mean, like, come on, get on that. - Yeah, that's a good point. Go full or go home. - Yeah, exactly, go full tumbleweed or go home. - Exactly. - Okay. All right, so the next criticism, I have to say I am really tired of the cinematic transitions. It's just, I realized I've got a whole production company with Apple TV plus that's creating, well some of it's good content, some of it's rubbish, but I mean, they've got this massive bank of experience now they can draw on. I mean, good for them, great. But it's like, sometimes it's just a touch much. I just like, you know, but then I'm an engineer. I look at that and I say, well, give me the deets. I don't give a crap about your transition between areas 'cause clearly the floor does not do that. doesn't sink into the ground like a James Bond movie. Super villains layers don't do that, okay? And Apple campuses don't either. Anyway. - Yeah. Super villains versus Apple campus. - Yeah, seriously. Some of those transitions look just like what you'd expect in a Bond film. You know, like, I mean, come on. Anyway, whatever, I'm old. - The only thing that's missing is the gator pit. - Yeah, totally, 100%. - Or fricking sharks with fricking laser beams, you know? - Oh yeah. - Yeah, exactly. - Laser beams. - Yeah. Every shark deserves a warm meal. Anyhow, okay. Austin Powers, the gift that never stops giving. - Never. - All right. So let's talk a bit about iOS, some of the good stuff coming in iOS 16. On the iOS lock screen, so right up until now, if we wanna get access to widgets and so on on our lock screen, we have to like wake up the lock screen and then swipe across from left to right. And then you get all your widgets up. And I always found that annoying because obviously, you know, on the Apple watch, you just like, you know, if tap the watch face, we can always on display, you just, you know, turn your wrist and you can see the critical readouts of some of the customizations. So bringing that to iOS to an iPhone is long overdue. And I'm really glad that they've done that 'cause I've taken a whole bunch of those ideas from the whole Apple Watch face customization thing. And they're applying that to the iPhone, which is fantastic. - Yeah. I'm actually surprised it took this long. I mean, with the fact that we've done it now already with the Apple Watch. - Yeah. I kind of get the feeling that they could have done it a lot sooner and it just de-prioritized. They're like, yeah, as features go, it's not that critically important that they do it now. So they just kept pushing it off and pushing it off. That's how it feels to me, like something they could have done a long time ago as well. I totally agree. They could have. And it was just a political decision not to, I think. But I mean, there is talk about always on displays, technology getting into the next generation of iPhones and so on and so forth. But I mean, well, that may well be true, but honestly putting those sorts of widgets on the lock screen would not require that display. So I don't really buy that as being the real reason doing it now. I just think that as being well, you know, that's, it's almost unrelated in some ways. But anyway, so yeah, I'm actually really happy having said that I'm actually really happy with that. I think that's really, really good. Yep. Same here. Yeah. What did what do you think about the focus improvements like the whole home versus work thing? Thoughts on that one? I, I think, you know, okay, so for someone who's in management, who does use one phone, I don't have multiple phones. I like I don't. So I use Google, what do you call it? Google Voice for my work stuff. And everything else is my, my, so I don't have my work email actually in my mail app. I have, I use the Microsoft products for work and having, having different focuses for, for, you know, between and work at home, I'm really actually pleased with that. I don't know how easy it'll be for it to set it up though. The problem is a lot of times if something takes too long to set up, I don't waste my time doing it. What do you think? - I think it's definitely steps in the right direction, but I think that it is also a problem in terms of like integration. I need to know more about whether or not that will actually work with the broader ecosystem. Like so many of these focus features and the definition of this is work, this is not work, lines get blurry. If you're using everything in mail and you've got separate mail inboxes and there's a feature to say, well, this inbox is work and this inbox is home. And hence I can now divide my email notifications coming in between those flags. That is something that's under Apple's control. But if you have Microsoft Outlook or Gmail or whatever else system you've got for your email and it doesn't support those tags and that integration, then how will focus mode know which is which? Because, yeah. - That's a good point. - 'Cause I mean, like some people will prefer the Outlook client and the Outlook client can have multiple mailboxes. And some people actually have their mailboxes in Outlook, not in mail. A lot of people hate Apple mail, seriously. And I get why, 'cause it's not always intuitive. And for me, the big killer in mail is that search is terrible. - It is horrible. - But I suppose, yeah. So look, I guess I'm initially skeptical about the focus stuff. And it's simply because of my use case. And I don't think it's that uncommon where you have a separate application. So unless separate applications can handle that support and that'll take time probably, and some may, some mightn't, I need to see this in use to know if it's actually gonna work. Like so many things in the Apple ecosystem, if everything's in the Apple ecosystem, then it works. But if you're not, then it doesn't. And that's my concern with that. But we'll see. We'll see how that goes. - Are you doing focus, any sort of focus stuff now? - I do have a focus mode for do not disturb when I'm driving. I've got a focus mode after hours at night, but I don't try to split home and work. It just didn't, like I've tried, and I guess this is part of my other skepticism. Up until now, I've tried different hacky ways of doing what Apple now says you should be able to do. And it's never really worked. So I don't know if this is actually gonna work or not. I found that when I was managing a team not that long ago and I guess pre COVID probably more so when you're juggling so many balls I think that would really help. So like in your use case right now where you find yourself in your career I think that could be really beneficial. But I mean, I don't know, goodness knows what I'll be doing in another six months time, who can say but maybe I'll become more useful then but I don't know, we'll see. It's yeah, steps in the right direction potentially. But anyway, that's really not much else to say about that for me anyway. So I think the biggest deal is one of the silliest and simplest things. And that's the updates to messages. Yeah. Way overdue. I cannot believe that. And I thought, oh, can't you edit messages already? And I'm like, holy crap. No, you can't. And for some reason, I don't know. I had it in my head that, oh, yeah, yeah, you can you can edit messages. well, no, you can't. And now you can, or rather in iOS 16, you can. Oh, wow, finally. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It seems like such a simple thing that they could have done and should have done ages ago. I don't know why they didn't. But right. Thank God for that. Yeah, I mean, other apps have other, you know, messaging app messenger apps have been able to do this for a while. And it's really, I mean, Apple's, you know, messages is a messages app. I think in a lot of ways, they treat it like it's just a regular SMS messenger when in fact it's more than that if you're using it between iOS devices. - Yeah, I mean, the thing is that, I don't know. I mean, I guess on Facebook Messenger, for example, not that Facebook is necessarily a meter stick for anything particularly, I guess it's more like there are plenty of other apps out there where you can edit messages and you can recall messages. There's even functionality in Microsoft Exchange or Office 365 to recall messages and emails. So, now you can do that in messages as well in iOS 16, which is fantastic. So it's like, right, we can edit, we can recall messages. Fantastic, that's the way it should be. You'll never be able to stop people from taking a screenshot, but it's better than not having it, that's for damn sure. So hallelujah, and thank you Apple for that. What took you so long, but irrespective, We're really glad you've done it. So thank you. Two thumbs up. I'd do three thumbs up if I had a third arm, but I don't. - Yeah, they've made it to 2015, I don't know, 16? - I can't remember. - 14? - It's been a while. All right. Who uses SharePlay? Do you use SharePlay? - Yeah, Vic and I actually use it together sometimes. - Seriously? Wow, okay. - When he's around, yeah. When he's not, you know, when he's not busy working, yeah. We, we, we, we, you know, sometimes he plays a tacky country music at me, but yeah. (laughing) - Disco country. Well, here's the thing. I've never used it. And I tried to, like when I was, trying to think about how long ago this was, but I was away for a weekend and I tried to convince my wife to use it and it didn't work first go, so we gave up. That's like, that was it. Yeah, there was, And I can't even remember how long ago that was. It was over a year and a bit, but in any case, it's just like, well, what's the, what's the, hmm. I had no use for it, but there are people that do use it and like it. And you can now like share plan messages, like, okay, great, that's good. I'm happy for those that use it. For me, it's not something I've really used. - I think it being in messages rather than having to be part of a FaceTime call, it's actually pretty cool. I mean, you know, there's some people, Vic and I are mostly in messages. - Yeah. - We barely ever are FaceTiming each other, or FaceTime arguing each other. So this seems like more our speed rather than FaceTime. For it to be in FaceTime first rather than messages is kind of weird I think. I would have thought that either you do them both together or you do messages first. - Yeah, totally. I guess the other thing is, I don't read too down. Maybe the two are interrelated. The fact that I had a bad experience may have been related to the fact that the implementation was less reliable when it was linked so heavily with FaceTime. Now that it's more open through the rest of the system and messages that maybe that's going to make it a lot easier to use and maybe that changes things. So I should give it another crack, but haven't been doing a heck of a lot of travel on my own for a while, you know, re COVID and such. So maybe that'll change in, in the next year or so we'll see what happens. Yeah. All right. Dictation. I kind of was excited about this actually, 'cause I always found dictation to be quite a sort of a kludgy solution, or kludgy solution, depending upon how you wanna pronounce that word. But, you know, it hadn't been, it was like it was an either or thing. So either you're dictating or you're typing text into the keyboard. - Yeah. Having both is better. - Yeah, well, 'cause I was thinking about this, like when I was using drag and dictate years ago, And I was really getting into that. It was all very much, you know, like you press and down, press and hold down the key, the hot key to start dictation and would then dictate what you're saying. As soon as you take the key, the hand off the key, it fills in the screen and you type away wherever the mouse cursor is. And that's more analogous to now what they're doing in iOS, which to me is the way it should have been from the beginning. But I realized retrospectively, one of the reasons I didn't like using dictation on the iPhone was because you couldn't do this, which is, you know, so when you're dictating, yeah, so what they're changing in iOS 16, sorry for those that haven't seen the keynote, is it now leaves the keyboard up when you're dictating. And that allows you to go in there and actually do edits and splice in real world editing with the keyboard at the same time as you're, or just intersplaced with dictation. And it sounds like a simple thing, but I think it's gonna make a big difference. So that's really good. - Yeah, I think so. I think I'll use it more often because of the ability to have me correcting. And the punctuation, isn't that? - Oh yeah, that's true. I forgot about the punctuation, you're right. So they're actually gonna have dictation try and predict punctuation. - We'll see how that works. - Yeah, it always felt bizarre saying full stop, comma, apostrophe, question mark. And yeah. - I tried doing that with Max and trust me, It doesn't work at all that well. - Yeah. You don't have an accent, Clay. Anyway. No, you don't. And nor do I. Yeah, that's right. Anyhow. But yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how it performs with non-US accents. But even within the US though, I mean, there's such a wide variety of accents, even within the United States, it's kind of, even that's a challenge, let alone, you know, what Aussies or Dutchies sound like. - Right. - Right. - Right. - Yeah. Would you describe yourself as having a Dutch accent or is that not really how you? - I would say I'm a mixture between a Dutch and a Jamaican accent. It's so it's even worse. - Dutch making. - It's like, yes. (laughing) - Dear me. All right, fair enough. Well, I'm just got an Australian accent. I don't know what else to say, but nevermind. All right, moving on. Live text. Now live text, when you are, you can copy code from a video freeze frame. And of course, okay. There is zero chance they ever would have cited that as an example if this was not a WWDC keynote. So, they know their audience. That's great. Glad to hear it. Because I mean, how many average people on the street are like, oh, great. I can do code snippets now from a freeze frame on a video, said nobody that was not a programmer. Nobody. But still, that is very, very cool. I don't honestly know how, if I would ever use it. But I mean, as a programmer, it's kind of cool. Oh, as a programmer. Yeah. That's kind of cool. But I mean, really? Yeah. Okay. Still cool, though. So, yeah, definitely on the coolness scale. All right. Wallet stuff. So, my first comment on wallet stuff is that so much of it is focused on the US, which is as usual. Apple's an American company. You know, America's 4% roughly of the world's population. So it's like, well, I guess that's a decent sized market because that's still a lot of people. But having said that, I find it very hard to get excited about it. You know, sub note to this, like the whole Apple Pay later thing and some of the auto tracking integration. I guess from my perspective, we still don't have Apple Pay cash in Australia. - Oh, you don't? - No, we still don't have it. - Oh. - No. So, you know, there's so many features in Apple Pay that we do not have. Like I can add, there's a whole bunch of banks in Australia, something like 12 or 14 banks, whatever, the big ones generally, that will allow you to do Apple Pay integration. And that's fantastic. That's been working for a very long time. And we already had PayWave everywhere here. So PayWave, PayPass, whatever you wanna call it, Tap2Pay, doesn't matter, same thing, same tech. different names, different companies, same tech. But the point is that, and for those systems that's worked fine for ages, but the rest of it has been a complete non-starter. So all of that stuff with, you know, being able to message money via iMessage, can't still can't do that. And, you know, because the banks in Australia say, well, we've got this other system called OSCO, O-S-K-O, which is backed by another standard called pay ID. So you can do interbank transfers from within your banking app, but it's not- - Free? - Yeah, free, instantaneous and free up to set dollar limits, of course. So it's like, well, we don't need your crap Apple. So no, we're not helping you. So I suspect that there's a bunch of, you know, banks, potential collusion, God knows, between the banks in Australia that are keeping Apple out, I suspect. But either way you slice it, the whole Apple pay later thing, it has to be based on things like the Apple credit card. Again, we don't have those here either. So it doesn't look like that's changing anytime soon. So I imagine Apple pay later, which is the whole buy now pay later with X number of installments at zero interest, like that whole thing, I suspect that will also not be available in Australia either for the same reasons. So, 'cause it should all, they're all just financial credit services in one form or another. So without that banking partner backing it like Goldman Sachs, you've got nothing. - Yeah, and this Apple Pay Later, I presume it's only through their own card, right? - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. - Okay. - So I mean, the whole Apple Pay Later thing is, I mean, just for the listeners, the whole idea of the whole Apple Pay Later is, let's say you got something that's worth $1,000. You can, if you use your Apple card or Apple pay and you do the whole pay it later option, then within the wallet, it gives you that option. And you can say, well, I'll pay this back at 250 bucks every two weeks or whatever, until it's fully paid. So I'm not paying nothing today. And I pay the rest in, you know, in a six to eight week period or whatever the terms are. - I thought it was six, six weeks. - Might've been six weeks, sorry. Yeah. what is it four payments over six weeks or? So I think it's six payments I believe over the... is it four weeks? I guess you're right, it's four payments over six weeks. My question is, so if something is paid over six weeks, are you not hitting past the window of... I mean, how do they work out the no interest? Because you're past the month now. I don't know. It's a good question. of the details I had a bit of a look before I couldn't see any of the details out there but whether or not you like or don't like pay later systems I mean I kind of have this is one pay later system that I actually have a card for but I very rarely use it anymore because if you miss that payment it's like well you get really burned like financially Like it's worse than a credit card in terms of how much they bleed you for. Because they basically throw all of the interest that was accrued up to the point, unless it's different than what we have here. But here, if you miss that one payment, all of the interest that was accrued up to that point basically gets dropped on you. Yeah, it's... Yeah, the... It's some of the... Okay, every system is slightly different. Some of them do an interest component, some of them have got a flat rate, essentially, you know, unpayment, lack of payment fee. So, it varies, it depends. But either way, it's nasty and it's not something that's... Yeah, I... - It's better to stay away from these systems. - I find the whole buy now, pay later systems to be very grubby. You know, it's a very grubby kind of market. So, there's lots of operators out there that are dodgy or they just feel dodgy. You know, like the whole payday loan kind of a market. You know what I mean? - That's, yeah, that whole, yeah. Yeah, that's a no good. Stay away from that for sure. - Yeah, I mean, it just makes me feel like, it feels grubby. I don't know how else to describe it. It just, it feels like a grubby business. And I mean, I don't know, maybe it's a, maybe it's a me too thing, but I mean, if Apple's looking around saying, oh, well, hey, we've got Apple card, we got, you know, so we got credit, we've got, why don't we just do the current fad of, you know, buying our pay later thing, because that's currently popular. I don't know. The next thing that we'll be doing is offering, you know payday lines, oh, good God. But yeah, and then the circle will be fully complete and it'll be like, oh, good God. But anyway, you know what? Hey, it's fine. Either way, it probably doesn't impact me anyhow because it's not gonna be coming to Australia for a while probably if ever. So, you know, shrug. It just feels weird to me. Like, I don't know, I'm still getting my head around the fact that Apple offers financial services like this. - Yeah, it makes no sense, honestly, but yeah. - No, I can, when you're turning over that much capital then I kind of see why you would want to have more control. But no matter how I look at it, Visa, MasterCard whether it's Apple or not, big banks or not, it's all funneled through a company of one kind or another. And it's all just, yeah, everyone's taking the skimming a little bit off the top. - Right. - Just make, it just annoys me all of it, but nevermind. - You know, from the Apple card, the Goldman Sachs card, you know, that actually is my card of choice now. Everything is paid by this card. And I just pay it up, you know, like I just pay, you know, if I bought something for a thousand dollars, I'll just use the card, pay it off right away. Then I get the point or whatever the percentage back. But credit cards are the devil. I mean, come on. - Totally. I guess my point is simply, I can understand why Apple got into the whole credit card thing, but this stuff makes less and less sense to me. So that's all. Because in Australia, for example, you go to an Apple store, you can go and get these cards, like it's an interest-free card. And if you spend more than like $1,000, you get just automatically 12 month interest free, you spend more than 1500, you get like two years interest free or something like that anyway. - Yeah, Barclay used to do that for Apple here. And then when Goldman Sachs came in the picture, they stopped. - Yeah, so I imagine if it ever comes to Australia, the same thing will happen here. And for the moment, it's done by a company called Latitude Finance. And so Latitude Finance take care of like that component. So you don't apply for credit via Apple, you apply via Latitude and then they'll give you a card. And then that card, they've got partnerships, not just with Apple, but with all these other companies. And it's a form of interest-free. It's not exactly the same thing as buy now, pay later. It's similar. Buy now, pay later is different insofar as you have X number of fixed payments at this fixed regularity. Whereas interest-free is you have a minimum payment, you meet your minimum payment, and you don't get slugged any interest for, like let's say it's 24 months based on the transaction. But if you don't pay it off by that 24 months period, - Man, we are gonna take your left kidney, your right kidney, your liver, your house, your cars. - You could have bought two laptops. - And it's like, is it really worth it? Anyhow. - Yeah, not really. - Oh God, I spent more time talking about finance than I really wanted to. Okay, order tracking. Great, are we thrilled? - Is that gonna work for anything outside of Spotify? - Sorry, you mean Shopify? - Oh, Shopify, what if it's called, no, Shopify. - Who knows? Honestly, the great thing about Shopify is that a lot of it is transparent. You don't see like, like when I go to a website to buy something and they use Shopify, there's like a, sometimes you really look, there'll be like an indication, like a little logo at the bottom saying powered by Shopify. But generally my brain just tunes that out. So I have no idea if it's a Shopify system or if it's homegrown or if it's like some other because Shopify is not the only one. But for me, Yeah, I think, but they mentioned Shopify, but they didn't during the presentation. - Yeah. - Yeah. - You're right, they did. - I'll just probably just send it to them. - It'll be interesting to see how well that works because a lot of the stuff with auto tracking is in Australia, there's like Australia Post will do like StarTrack and you've got toll and you've got, oh goodness, who else? So FedEx have got stuff here, UPS do a little bit. They're not as big here as in the States, but every one of them will have their own notification system. So whether or not integrated order tracking is something that this is actually gonna help or with or not, I don't know, we'll see. All right, let's talk about something more useful, like maps, I mean, I say useful, you know, multi-stop routing, finally. - Overdue, way overdue. - Finally, oh my God. - Yeah, I mean, I stood up and applauded for this. - Yeah, I know. The funny thing is that in my Model 3, they only added multi-stop navigation in the Model 3 like three, four months ago. - Really? - Yeah, really. - What is the backend for your maps in your car? - Okay, so Tesla pay for a, they take a Google Maps backup and then they kind of like, like periodically and then they apply their own (beep) to it. So it's kind of, it's like a, - It's a pseudo Google maps. It's hosted by Tesla, but it's derived from Google maps. - From Google, gotcha. - But I suppose my point is more that how you navigate that hasn't got, like, if you've got multi-stop navigation, it probably doesn't matter really about the backend data. It's more about how you manage navigation from point to point as by points. And yeah, for the longest time, people would ask Elon Musk for this and he'd just sort of like say, - Yeah, well, it's on the list, it's on the list, it's on the list. And you say the same kind of thing for years. And then finally said, right, finally, we're giving you way points, stop it already. And it's like, it's not, it's like when you're taking, if you're going, I would say more than half of the trips that I take, whether it's in my car, public transport or someone else, whatever, if I'm navigating from place to place, there is half of them have more than one stop. So multi-stop routing is to me is table stakes. And it's annoying that we haven't done do that in Apple Maps until now. - Great, now it is. - Yay, finally. - Yes. - Anyway, all right. I like the recent, being able to recall recent routes. That's really handy. Something I use all the time in Google Maps and on my Tesla, which is great. So now we can do that in Apple Maps as well. It will be in iOS 16, so yay. - It's annoying when it wasn't there, but yeah. - Yeah, it is. It really is annoying when it's not there. 'Cause it's like, you wanna go back and you have to go and rebuild it from scratch. And it's like, okay, well, where was I going? Okay, and you type this in the search box. Okay, now how did I get that location? And it's no, you don't search by Plaza, you search by some other thing. I figured it out yesterday. If it was in recent, just go, oh yeah, that one, tap done. - Exactly. - Very handy. The whole city stuff, I think it's useful maybe if you're living in those cities or maybe if you're visiting those cities, but honestly, I'm not really turned on by that. You know, like they've added Sydney and I'll be visiting Sydney for a few days. Well, another wave of massive wave of COVID and all lockdowns or God knows what happens in November, notwithstanding, but hopefully in December we'll be doing that trip to Sydney. So that might be handy, but I mean, honestly, it looks cool, like all the 3D effects and all of the extra details on buildings and bridges and different things. But I don't know, is that what people really want? I guess it's appeasing the masses 'cause if you go for the largest cities. - Is it though? - Well, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm trying to figure out what they're thinking is. I mean, if you've got, like Sydney's got, well, I don't know, four million, five million people in it, let's say. So if you do that update for Sydney, then you've accounted for, I'm now pleasing all of the iPhone, iOS, Maps users and given this really great feature. So when I think of maps and Apple, I'll think, oh, this is fantastic. 'Cause I never leave Sydney. I've now catered for what? I don't know, the biggest single portion of the Australian population. If you take in Melbourne as well and Brisbane as well, then you've probably taken in two thirds of the Australian population. Everywhere else though, it's like, what's the big deal? Like, who cares? - Right. - I don't know. I don't know, I'm struggling to understand the appeal. - Me too. It's not something that I'm really, I mean, Miami I think is listed as one, not really crazy for it. It's not something that I was clamoring for here. - I was gonna say, I mean, yeah, it's Miami. It's already awesome, right? Moving on. All right, sports stuff. - Yeah. - Who cares? Does anyone care? - Yeah. - I mean, people that love their sports would care. Good for them. - I suppose. - I was so bored at the sports part that I did, my only notes were who cares? Question mark. So I took no notes. Any thoughts on that at all? 'Cause I've got none. - I don't remember much of this part of stuff to tell you the honest truth. (laughing) - We are on the same page, Clay. Okay. Man, all right, let's keep moving then. Okay, family stuff, family integration. So now we can actually create like shared photo libraries for a family group. And I mean, I am absolutely thrilled that they have finally done this. And I still feel like I hate iCloud photos so much. It has scarred me for life that I just cannot be bothered to try it. I think that Apple decided to venture into these areas a little bit too late. I mean, we've all set up our systems in a way where we've had to work around these things. Yeah. So yeah, they have finally, you know, a couple of years ago acknowledged and have given you family things for things like, you know, Apple Music and, and all of these other subscription items that they have, you know, what do you call it? Not Aputure, that's not around anymore. But, you know, the video editing and all these sort of things. But I mean, I don't know, like, if you're reworking your system, yeah, first thing you should be thinking about is how do you get a system like iTunes, for instance, or photo library to be shareable in a family? Yeah. It certainly is a problem that's been well and truly solved by a lot on lots of other platforms. It's, I mean, and And don't get me wrong, just because I'm not going to use it personally doesn't mean that it's not amazing. I think that it is long overdue. Lots of people are going to get lots of really good enjoyment out of that. And it sounds like the syncing of the metadata and so on, it sounds like it's something that's going to be... It's like if one person puts a lot of effort into all the tagging and all the metadata and the enhancements of each of the folks making them more searchable and so on, everyone gets benefit from it. or not family groups should have equal ability to do that editing or not. I don't know. Yeah, it's like the debatable. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it should be the same kind of grading like parental privilege. So, parental say, well, the parents will say, well, hi, I'm, I have full edit. Everyone else can view, I can grant individual users the ability to edit certain things like these albums. And so, I just like sharing on, on different platforms like Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever you might be using, you can say, well, you get a share link to view this, you get a share link to edit this or make comments on this, but you don't have like edit privileges, let's say for some reason. So that kind of flexibility wasn't clear to me if that's gonna be available or not, but I hope that they do have that kind of granularity. And if they don't-- - I doubt that that will be the case. Like something like this would, In my view, if I were to set it up, I would say, you know, the one holder of the library gives the ability for others to edit. But let's say if that is not the thing, right? Let's say everyone is read-only, except for the main holder or let's say the main two holders. People who are in that structure, like let's say the kids, should be able to, in my view, should be able to download the image onto their own device and be able to do something completely different with it there. as long as the actual main image does not get deleted or wiped from the database. - Yeah, yeah, totally. In terms of that sort of granular controls, my only other thought is that if it's not available in the initial release, it will be available in iOS 17 probably, and that's fine. But anyway, look, so I just think that's fantastic. Some of the other things in the family stuff I thought was really good is they really made it a lot easier to onboard kids onto devices. Like in the past, it was like, you've got to create an account. You've got to flag it as the, they're your child and link it. And you're the parent. And the whole quick start thing looks super simple. My only frustration is all my kids are now older. So they were almost at the point where they can manage their own stuff. Like I've got an 18, 17, 14 and 11 year old. So everyone except my 11 year old is pretty much self-sufficient technologically at this point. So it's like, it's I've kind of my fit, my kids have, we've sort of almost missed this boat. But I think if you're a parent with young kids and you're trying to onboard them onto new devices, the whole quick start thing looks really handy. That's fantastic. And the easy configuration looks fantastic. So honestly, I think those are all really great steps. Acknowledgement that families have been, I don't know. I wouldn't say maybe- - Nothing? - Well, I wouldn't say second-class citizens, but certainly I think there's an, to an extent it feels very much like they haven't put the time and effort and energy into it that they should have. Right. And and now we're at that point where they've kind of fixed that and moved that to where it should have been years ago. So two thumbs up, Apple. That's great to see. Personally, though, it's just, you know, my kids grew up, Apple. They grew up. Yeah. I missed the boat. Yeah. Anyway, that's OK. Yes. In here. All right. Moving on. Safety check. I was absolutely thrilled to see safety check in there. And it's just from my not from my personal experience, but I am aware of I have a friend through work who's gone through a situation that was quite unpleasant, where this sort of feature would have made a massive difference. So I'm I'm so grateful that Apple are doing this. I think that they tackled that absolutely spot on. I thought it was well presented, well conceived. And honestly, I think that's just fantastic. - Yeah, I'm very happy that Apple is acknowledging there are some difficult things to face sometimes and they can be there for that process. I'm very happy. - Yeah, I think that I don't have too much else to say on that because it's the sort of feature that you're not going to use until you really need to use it. And some people may never need to use it. Let's hope you don't. But having it there and knowing it's there, that's the value. And clearly they've acknowledged the fact that, yes, you know what, this is a problem. And you can, in fact, and I realize I'm going on about this for the listeners that aren't aware of it. It allows you to effectively, like if you're in a relationship and you've shared passwords and accesses to different things, it allows you to go through and do a complete audit of all of your Apple-related stuff and basically say, "Right, well, I'm now just going to do a bulk logout of everything and reset passwords for all of these things and ensure that I have complete control of my accounts." Because sometimes we share passwords with our partners, if things go wrong, then that could be used maliciously. So this is the ability to go through and basically do a a complete safety check and say, well, you know what? All of these instances are logged out. All these passwords are now reset. I'm basically cleaning house and bringing all of that control back to myself again, which I, yeah. That's the, in essence of how the, of the feature. So I think that's fantastic. - Mm-hmm, I agree. - All right, HomeKit. I can't remember. I know Vic's really into HomeKit, but are you doing much with HomeKit, if anything? - Yeah, I'm using it. And just Matter, I think they had discussed it a while ago. - I was trying to remember when they did it, they talked about it previously, 'cause they did. I can't remember if it was leaked or if they actually spoke about it. - Yeah, I just can't remember when it was. - Yeah, I was aware of it, but anyway, so what do you use on HomeKit? - I have a bunch of cameras. I have actually a bunch of non-HomeKit enabled devices that are put on HomeKit via plugs that are HomeKit enabled. So yeah, I mean, everything sort of lives in HomeKit. When I leave the house, you know, I just have a one push button and all my cameras are on so I could run through the home front when I'm gone. - So any of the, the thing with Home and Matter is that it's almost like a, yeah, hey, we're doing this. But I mean, there wasn't anything else about the HomeKit stuff that I really took away from the keynote. I guess my take on it is, well, if this works more broadly, like a matter becomes the standard that everyone else adopts and it all works together nicely, hey, I'm all for it. But as I'm-- Well, that's always the question. Because you can create a standard, but you can't make people follow it. They have to be a certain amount of self-interest in them following it and motivation. So if that motivation isn't there, that self-interest isn't there, then they're going to be, well, I don't know if I'm going to follow this standard. In any case, we'll see. And as I'm fond of saying, I'm excited for the future potential, but it's right now just potential. So we'll see. Crossing fingers and toes that that goes somewhere. 'Cause at the moment I really don't use HomeKit stuff because there's really nothing. So most HomeKit stuff is double or triple the price of non-HomeKit home automation stuff. And that's what stops me buying it. It's like, I'm not paying extra money for something just because it complies with HomeKit. I don't, it's like, it's just not worth it. So until it, anyway, it's fine. - That's why I have some of the items that I have bought is on HomeKit, but not officially on HomeKit. But you know, it's the switches are, I mean, and the plugs are, and those are not overly expensive. The main reason for doing it the way I have done it is because let's say if HomeKit is down, then at least, and it has happened where HomeKit went down, at least I have other players in my ecosystem that are still up and vice versa. They might be down and HomeKit might be up. So, I think it's potentially slightly dangerous if you need a backup system to have everything be in HomeKit, personally. - Yeah, I don't know. I kind of go, I could go either way on that. I feel like, I guess thinking about the whole diversity of the ecosystem, if it's an open standard and everything's all interoperable, then that's can only be a good thing. My concern is that where all these things fall down is like licensing fees and accreditation. So they say, oh yeah, you want to comply with this, then you've got to pay this fee to get assessed and we'll go through a bunch of tests and yada, yada, yada. And then the companies that make these products then have to recover those costs. And then the other factor as well, it works with Apple HomeKit and Apple, people that buy Apple products must have more disposable income for some reason. People think that sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not. So we're gonna charge an Apple tax on top of that. And it's like that all conspires and combines to create a higher prices for those products. But if it's a standard where the accreditation is easier, cheaper, more straightforward, people comply with it and you don't have to use HomeKit, you can use any other system by any other manufacturer to do all of your automation coordination, for the want of a better way of saying it, then you're appealing to the broad market and the broad market may or may not have Apple kind of money and therefore you're not gonna pay an extra tax for it. So I don't know, time will tell. As with these things, it's down to the manufacturers to support them and having a standard is no guarantee it will be followed. and that is the longer term play. So crossing fingers and toes and cautiously optimistic for the future potential, I guess. Yeah. - Yeah. And I mean, the other update for home, it actually, the update that will be coming or is in beta is the rooms not being set up the way they are now, because now they're set up in a, it's sort of like an amateur person made this app, right? you know, where you have to sort of swipe in between rooms rather than having a pane that has all of the rooms that you could just tap into. So I'm actually looking forward to that. - Yeah, fair enough. All right, let's move on. CarPlay. So they had a big section about the, it's like a preview. It's not actually being released as part of, at least the impression I got it wasn't part of iOS 16. Right. But it's like, yeah. So they made no commitments as to the when they're simply saying, you know, it's time we updated CarPlay. No kidding. And here's what we're going to do with it. And they show all these really beautiful, like new gauges, like integration with a binnacle screen, you know, for your instrument cluster. And because I mean, more and more cars are going to fully digital instrument clusters or vinnicles, whatever you want to call them. And some of the readouts they've got, oh, well, you know, here's your HVAC stuff. So you can turn your air con, your heating, your ventilation controls, do all of that from your phone and by car play. And then you can have your speed readouts and yada, yada, yada of how fast you're going. And I'm thinking the only way that's going to work is if there's some kind of ODB bus integration within the vehicle, because that's the only way to get that information in real time. And there's pros and cons to that, because you got to be careful with ODB, because you can actually write data down to it as well. So I don't know. I also wonder how automakers feel about this. Because not everyone's going to have CarPlay. And then you've also got Android Auto on in the wings as well for people that don't have iPhones. So from an automotive manufacturers perspective, like opening that up is potentially dangerous and what's the upside apart from the on sale to customers like, oh, whatever they're going to call it, CarPlay 2 or something. They'll call it something to differentiate I imagine because they'd have to. Otherwise, how does Toyota say, oh, ours is CarPlay compatible? And then the user comes in and says, but I don't have the really flashy things Apple showed me and it's like, yeah, oh, this is CarPlay one, not CarPlay two or whatever they do. And because Toyota still would have to make or, or Nissan or Hyundai or whoever they are, they're still gonna have to provide some kind of interface of their own. And then, then they have to provide the capability for Apple and then the capability for Android auto and future probably to then come in and have their overlay. And if you're Tesla, of of course, well, Elon Musk will just give Apple the middle finger and say, "Nah, you don't get to play on ours, bye." And it's fair. Meanwhile, on the wings, I'm just like, "Damn it." 'Cause honestly, that's one thing that I don't like about my Tesla is that there's no CarPlay integration and it sucks. - Is there Android? - No, no Android. - None of it is there. - Nothing. - Oh, okay. - Honestly, the whole, I used to be a car guy, not really an entertainment or whatever you call it, a system guy. But I, yeah, there you go. I don't get CarPlay, honestly. It's, I mean, it's nice if you can get my, if I can play my iPhone via my speaker system and that's all I care about. - Well, see for me, Clay, why I love CarPlay is because I've driven crappy old cars for quite a while. We talked about this before, more on Bubble Sort than on Pragmatic. But I mean, I feel like, I have a Honda Jazz, which over in the States, I think it's sold as a Honda Fit. Yeah. Yeah. And it comes with very, very basic stereo. So I ripped that out years ago and put in an entry-level Sony dual-DIN stereo. And for the only reason that it had touchscreen and supported CarPlay. And the car play via cable. So suddenly I had satellite navigation. I had integrated audio for my shows. I had Siri functionality in my car, all of it built in. And it cost me something like six or $700 to do that. Now, if you go and buy a car, if you, sorry, wind the clock back to 2013, when I bought the Jazz, the only way you could get that was paying like an extra six or $7,000 for a luxury package. Yeah, that was what Sat Nav used to cost way back when. And of course you then have to pay several thousand dollars every few years for a maps update because the... - Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know what that is. - So for me, the value of CarPlay is the fact that I can listen to anything I want that I can stream. Like I can listen to internet radio over CarPlay. I can bring up whatever songs I've got on my Apple music library. I can listen to whatever podcast and whatever podcast app I want. And I can get a navigator that is always up to date maps all just by plugging my phone in. So to me, CarPlay has been the leveler and it kind of demolished the luxury high end, you must pay this extra premium to like Volvo or whoever the hell or Honda or whatever. - Right. - In order to get that sort of function. that's a premium feature. I'm like, no, it's not a premium feature. It should be table stakes for every vehicle, in my opinion. So that to me, that's what CarPlay is. CarPlay basically killed the top end of that luxury market for add-ons to car makers. And I think that that is like, hallelujah, thank you. So, but you know, having said that, you know your mileage may vary. Some people don't really use it that much and that's okay. My wife still doesn't use it very much in her car. - Yeah, she has it built in or you have to also do the same? - She just doesn't use it. - Okay. - Okay, well that's your choice. So there you go. But look, anyway, I think it'll be great to see. I'm interested to see how many manufacturers adopt it, but yeah, not an iOS 16, but looks cool. We'll wait and see just, you know, how much they can do with it, 'cause there are limits. Some things will have to still be buttons, physical buttons, because that's just the nature of it. I've gone on about that many times before. So the previous episode of "Pragmatic" when I was talking to Russell Ivanovich about Teslas and what needs to be a physical button and what isn't. So if you haven't listened to that episode, go back and listen to that. And I'll go on about there, my rant on that quite a bit. Anyway, let's move on. WatchOS 9. So who's got a Series 3 or lower? Because if you have, tough, it's gone. It's fallen off the update cliff and it ain't coming back. So, yeah, my son still has a Series 3 and he's running watchOS 7. He hasn't even upgraded to watchOS 8 yet. So he's like, I don't care. It's a watch, it works. Hey, that's the way. Anyway, so watchOS 9, four new watch faces and they all suck. Great. - Yeah, I don't use any of those. - I'll never use any of them. They're just terrible. And I don't even care anymore. Like I used to get excited about new watch faces, but now there are so many to choose from and they're all so customizable. I just don't, do not care anymore. I've given up caring. And I've also given up waiting for a watch face app store as well. It's never going to happen. They're just not going to do it. - No, I don't think so. I think you're right. I think the fact that they keep putting these sort of, you know, not so great faces out. - Yeah, I don't think. - I'll tell you one thing and it's really good though. I think it's really good is the banner notifications. Because one of the things that really (beep) me to tears is when a notification comes in on my watch around about the time when I wanna check the time and then the notification comes in and it comes and covers the screen and I can't see what the time is. - Anything. - It's like, did you stop to consider that maybe I was not raising my wrist to check the notification, but to check the time because it's a watch. - A watch, yes. - Anyway. - Yeah, no, I look forward to that. - Yep, workout stuff looks nice. Not really for me. I'm not a workouts kind of guy. I do, I'm an accidental work outer. I like, I get the notification. It looks like you're having an outdoor walk or whatever. And I'm like, well, yeah, well spotted. That was 10 minutes ago, but thanks. And yes, I was outside briefly. So you may as well record that as exercise towards my exercise ring. And that's pretty much all I use it for. But I mean, what did you think about that? Are you more into the exercise features? - Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Anytime they do any added workout stuff, I welcome it. Some of the automatic stuff sometimes doesn't quite work for me, but I don't turn them off. I just basically say dismiss. - Yeah. The other one that's interesting the whole sleep stages thing, like all the sleep stuff, you know, I'll reserve judgment to see how well that actually works. Yeah. We'll see. - Same here. - AFib history. That is actually really interesting because I think that's a critical, that's a critical piece that's been missing with AFib. But again, they said that it's still waiting for approvals, but either way, it's not available in Australia yet. So like shrug, whatever, I'll wait and see when it gets here eventually. - But I'm looking forward to that. - Yeah. So that's a good one. But yeah, for me, it'll probably be a while off. I'd rather like the update to health because I don't think, I think this was presented at the same time as watchOS 9, but it was actually more related to the health app. I say related to the health app, it's actually a separate app, I think, isn't it? It's the, with all the drug interactions. - Yeah, I believe so. - Yeah. - Yeah. - So I think that's really good. So my question is, where are they pulling the drug in directions from? Is it like, I wonder who they paid, if they paid a license fee or something like that. 'Cause that is not really in for, I mean, I guess Google could give you some sort of indications of interactions, but. - Dr. Google has been known to diagnose cancers in people that it's just a freckle and you're like, - Yeah, okay. But yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I would hope that whoever it is, is an accredited source of information for drugs and drug interactions. But yeah, I think that it's great. And I think that it's the sort of thing that, you know, is long, well, we'll say long overdue. I think that there are other apps already that do this and I don't use any of those apps. But the funny thing is I probably should. So. - Well, you know, the funny thing about it is that There are a lot of people taking a lot of medications that cause interactions amongst each other, correct? But the thing is that we in the healthcare field just sort of ignore most of those things because they are stated as interactions by the manufacturers when they did their studies, right? And so this actually potentially could cause people to be more panicky about the stuff they are taking. - That's true. - You know, so we'll see how this, you know, we'll see how this plays out. Maybe, you know, people will go to the prescriber and say, "Hey, listen, you gave me two things "that are causing, you know, a slowing of my heart rate "and a massive slowing of my heart rate "and my father has had some sort of heart rate issues." And so, maybe this is a good thing for people to actually take their health more seriously, but we'll see, we'll see how that goes. - So I suppose at this point, I feel like it's better that we would have it than not have it. And I think my reaction to this is much similar to when they introduced ECG. So like people coming in to doctors saying, "My Apple Watch is telling me I'm dying." And the watch is saying I'm dying or something. And the doctor's like, yeah. And there was a whole bunch of this fear that that was gonna happen. And most of that was not founded. But I don't actually think that, I do think it probably did, like there were cases where that did happen for sure. But I don't think it was anywhere near as bad as people originally thought it would be. But either way, some people, you know, honestly, Clay, some people don't even think about drug interactions. They're just like, yeah, I'll have these sleeping tablets and I'll have these antidepressants and I'll have a couple of swigs of vodka, I should be good. And it's like, yeah, you know, maybe not do that. Please don't do that. And then Heath Ledger's like, man, everyone's very sad. So anyway, I think that's a positive thing. I think it's a very, very good thing. - I agree. - Overall. - Overall for society's sake, yes. - All right, ready to talk about the Mac? Hell yeah. I was not expecting, I just wanna say, I was not expecting that there would be a product announcement. I thought that if I'm gonna do something, it'd be like, here's a sneak peek of, like the whole can't innovate my ass kind of thing from the Mac Pro back in 2013 or whatever it was. But anyway, but no, they didn't do that. They full on released to, well, I say released in air quotes they'll be available next month. So they, I guess, technically it is it. I guess that technically is actually a preview in a sense. But anyway, so the M1 chip is no longer the king. It is now the M2. And I honestly am surprised because by the math I was doing in my head, I'm like, that means that the M2 has beaten the Mac Pro to market. So they started their Apple Silicon transition and their top shelf, top level, highest performing, most expensive computer that they make, the Mac Pro never got to Apple Silicon before they released the second generation of their Apple Silicon chip. Now I'm not sure what that should tell you. I mean, I guess hardly anyone buys Mac Pros. Maybe that's not a big deal. I don't know. But it certainly tells me that the Mac Pro, when it does get released, will come with an M2 in it. I think that's an absolute guarantee. I agree. Yeah, I agree. I think I think in I mean, you could go to the you know, you could do a quad max, you know, whatever they call the M one max, or is that the ultra? Yeah, the ultra. Is that the highest one? Right? Yeah. Or, or you could, you could go and do some M two ultras and not have to do quad maybe and that might be the Mac Pro. So yeah, I think it's it. I had a feeling the M2 was going to drop soonish, but I actually thought it was going to be in a Mac Mini instead of, you know, the Air and the Pro. Well I think, I've said this previously, is that the MacBook Air is the, generally has has been the leader in terms of new tech. So when the new tech comes out, they tend to push it onto the air first. They tend to, not always, but they generally they do. If you look at the design of the wedge shape for the laptops and the MacBook Airs, that's where it started, Unibody started there. Yeah, so just to be clear on what they actually announced, they announced the M2, and then they announced that the MacBook Airs would now come with the M2 chip as would the entry level 13 inch MacBook Pro. So just briefly on the M2 chip itself, a couple of stats, the memory bandwidth is now like 100 gigabits per second, which is like 50% more than the M1, which is significant for, what is essentially the M1 to M2 gap in terms of time is one year and seven months, or 19 months, or call it a year and a half if it's easy for your brain. But in a year and a half to get a 50% increase, Everyone's like, oh, the M2 is just going to be like a refinement and it's not going to be massive change. I think that counts as a massive change. A little change would be like 10, 15%. - It is. - 50% more? No, that's significant. And that memory bandwidth is a bottleneck and they're really working on that bottleneck. So that's impressive. It can now handle up to 24 gig of RAM. That's nice. The CPU caching for each CPU core has been increased as well. And that I imagine will be the primary driver because it's using the same, I think it's still on five nanometer. So it's using the same manufacturing process. So your performance improvements are on basically debottlenecking. So they've got an 18% performance increase over the M1, most likely because of local caching and bandwidth improvements. They've obviously done some stuff as well to improve that, to reduce the bottlenecking for the graphics performance, 'cause they reckon at the same amount of power, it's got 25% better graphics performance. and it can do 35% more, but you will consume more power. So to me, it just screams we're widening up the bandwidth between different parts of the CPU is the primary thing that they're doing here, which is fantastic. That's great. So yeah. - My question is, there's 24 gigabyte RAM ceiling, or I mean, is that artificial? Did we just randomly decide that, well, we don't want to go to 32 because we don't want to mess with the pro line? I'm not sure. I listened to a little bit of this discussion on ATP and I mean, I guess my initial reaction is, well, you've got the traditional reason, which is the address space, but it sounds very much like this is not an address space problem. So I don't actually know what the thinking is there. It could just be, maybe it is a differentiator. Okay, it is definitely a differentiator, but between the classes of M1s and M2s now and future, whether it's the Pro, the Max or the Ultra, which I suspect I'll continue with that naming methodology in future. So it's most likely that, but don't forget the more RAM you put down, RAM's quite power hungry and it takes up a lot of space on the die. So it could be a space-saving measure. It could be a, well, maybe it's just like the improvement of going to 32 gig is simply not worth it. Like from a performance perspective. So you don't get enough from it. It's like, what are you going to be doing? Spinning up more virtual machines? I don't know. I just, I don't know. I find RAM limits to be, 'cause once your solid state drive read-write access time is so fast, the benefits of RAM are, you know, less and less important. If you're running VMs that need to have a self-contained environment, then fine. But if you don't, what's the issue? Things will always be faster if you're loading up hundreds of photos in Photoshop or Lightroom or what have you. And the more RAM you got, the merrier. Sure. But I mean. That's the only other thing I can think of, really. I don't know, it's an interesting question, but yeah, I don't have too many other thoughts on it. So far as the MacBook Air goes, though, they finally gave it a redesign. It's no longer a wedge shaped. So great. It's now a straight cut chip. It's no longer a potato wedge. Which I don't really care. I found I always found the wedge design to be a bit weird. It's not like I liked it or disliked it. I just thought it was a bit odd. I don't think it was particularly smart. I think it was just one of those designs that they did was advantageous. And they said, well, we don't have to have a constant thickness. We can actually go thinner at one end because all the craps at the back end. and that helps with the balance, but like physical balance in the center of gravity when you've got on your lap or what have you. But, you know. - You know, the wedge shape, I always thought of jobs whenever, you know, taking it out of that envelope. And now it's, you know, we have one more wedge shape in the lineup in this 13 inch and that's it. Well, no, actually this 13 inch have a wedge. - But the wedge shape MacBook Air will still be on sale. - Yeah, it will be. It's true, it will be. It's very Apple-like of them to keep that M1 around. - But I mean, geez, don't buy it. Pay the extra and get the M2. But anyway, I'm glad it's got MagSafe again. And... - Oh, I am ecstatic. - And then of course leaves you two USB-C ports for whatever you need. Thank you very much. It has a notch, the display notch. Oh, goody, said nobody. Great. - You know, I'll welcome the notch with them having gone to 13.6. Honestly, I wish they would have just said, "Hey, let's shove this thing to 14." But yeah, I welcome the notch. - Look, I don't welcome the notch. I don't hate the notch. I'm just become beaten by the notch. It's like, you're gonna take this notch, John, whether or not you like this notch or not. And I've been beaten up with my phone for so long now. just like my brain visually tunes it out. But I kind of, you know, and you can say, well, that's right or wrong or so and so forth. But it's like it I understand it's just a limitation that this is how they're working around it. And it sucks. Let's just agree that it sucks. And we're just going to live with it, because at some point in the future, all that stuff will become far more compact and they will get rid of the notch again. Until that happens, you're going to like the notch, John. You're just going to have to. I just think that with the M2 introduction, they could have figured out how to get a little drop, you know, whatever Sony calls their little... I think it's Sony that has the camera in the middle of the screen, or is it Samsung? One of those two. They could have figured out how to do it here. I mean, it's going to happen at some point. Why not? Why not there? I don't know. I mean, maybe what they were doing instead was focusing on trying to finish the damn a Mac Pro on Apple Silicon. 'Cause they're like, you know what? We really should do this. I don't know. Anyway, maybe someday. 1080P FaceTime camera, another about time. But then I've already got my own Logitech, you know, C920, 1080P webcam that I use at home. And I guess I know this is a laptop, so it's not the same thing, but anyway, it was one of those about time things. And I guarantee you, I will be buying one. I have made the decision. I've been waiting for the updated MacBook Air because my use case at this point with work and everything, I'm gonna sell my Intel MacBook Pro, which is now four years old, and I am gonna buy one of these. So I'll let you know how that goes. - Yeah. - Yes, incoming months. - Look forward to hearing an episode on this. - All right, 13 inch MacBook Pro, as I mentioned before, the only comment I have now with M2, still with a touch bar. - Yeah, why? - Why? Why Apple? Why do you hate me and everyone? In fact, - Touch bars, oh my God. All right, so my prediction is looking forward. As I said before, Mac Pro, whether it's 2022 or 2023, I've given up, like who knows when the hell they're gonna release it. It's supposed to be this year, we'll see. But by 2023, all Macs will have been updated to M2s. I think there's no question. Yeah, and so by the end of 2022, if Apple has its shit together, they will have everything will be Apple Silicon, everything will be M2 available with an M2 in it. Which is gonna be interesting if that's the case because that'll mean the Mac studio which is really not that old, will get a bump. We'll see. I kind of think that they're going to. And I think that that will change their story moving forward but we'll see. But I know we are pressed for time. So I wanna keep moving and talk about Mac OS. So Mac OS is being called Ventura. And I'm like, every time I see that, - I keep the guys Ventura, exactly, right? Oh, right. Anyway, nevermind. Doesn't matter. Yes, so love that movie still. Anyway, Jim Carrey is hilarious. But you know, the sad face is finally my beautiful trashcan Mac Pro is no longer officially supported. Sad face, sad panda. - You'll find a way to shove it under. - Yeah, I know. The OpenCore legacy patching team is already working on Ventura compatibility based on the first beaters. So it'll take time, but you know, they'll get there and I'll still be able to run it, I imagine. But as I said, my longer term goal will be to get a Mac studio and replace my Mac Pro with it. I'll probably keep the trash can around. I'm not turning into a flower pot. Thank you, Vic. But you know, anyhow. But yeah, I'll keep it around for running VMs and different things. It's still a beautiful, very powerful machine. Plus I can run anything on it as opposed to Apple Silicon where I can't. I mean like virtual machines and different operating systems. That's a geek thing. Most people wouldn't care. That's right. Stage manager with the window management thing looks cool. I'll believe how useful it is when I see it. So yeah, spotlight improvements are very meh. I kind of like, well, that's great. Kind of answering a question I didn't ask. And I've been so stung by search in mail. Like they're saying, oh, it's going to be massively better. - Sure it will, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. - We'll see. - I'm not gonna hold my breath. The big one for me though is pass keys. - Yeah. - Now. - Yeah. I mean, is this the future? - I think it is the future, but there's a big but. I want it to be too, because the whole idea of a pass key is that you generate it on the device and it's unique to that device in your account. And then it synchronizes that with your other devices on that account via the iCloud synchronizing in the backend. So there's no more password anymore. You simply go to a website and says, do you authenticate whatever else by metrics to get into your device and then you can access the website. So it's like, there's no passwords anymore. So if the site you go to has very poor cybersecurity practices and it gets hacked, there's no passwords to leak. And it's all encrypted. So they basically will get your password, your passkey, hash equivalent or whatever else. And that'll be the end of it. They won't be able to use that anywhere or for anything or decode it or anything. So, you know, just like standard encryption technology. The Fido Alliance has been working on this since 2013 and Fido, I actually looked up what that makes. I didn't know until just today. It's the Fast Identity Online, Fido. My issue is simple that, yes, it supports cross-platform access to passkeys. So if you go to a non-Apple device, you log in to iCloud on that device and you get access to the passkey via a workaround with like, they showed a QR code, which I imagine would be the way they would handle that. Okay, fine, whatever. And there's an authentication method using your phone. Look, honestly, I'm sure that'll work, but Apple ultimately will hold all of your keys. So unless there's some function that is a cross platform, as in to say, not just Apple iCloud platform host your past keys, it's going to be a non-starter for a lot of people. Now they didn't go to that level of detail. I really hope that that's available, but if it's not, it's going to be a non-starter. And I think that that's what Fido has been working towards. So hopefully that's going to be in the future. But like the guy said, at least he was honest. They're honest about it. It's going to be a journey. No, it's going to be a journey. It's gonna be a long journey. Really long journey. - It's a long journey. - Yeah. - But that's okay. I don't mind a journey. And every journey starts with a single WWDC keynote or something like that. With gaming, they got Metal 3, which is always better than Metal 2. And I again, switched off for the game demo 'cause I don't care. Any thoughts on gaming? - Yeah, I don't go to gaming. I don't go to gaming for Apple, so. - Yeah, me neither. - Very often. I mean, unless it's, you know, some simple card games in my, you know, iOS device where I'm standing in line. Not really. - Yeah, that's it. - Not really up there. - All right, the other thing I've mentioned is continuity camera. You can bring your weird ass adapter and you put the adapter on top of the screen and you stick your phone in it back to front so that your phone's got its little cameras looking at your face. And you then integrate your phone in real time with all the tracking stuff and features with your Mac OS Ventura. - I mean, look, this continuity camera thing. - Yes. - It continues, yeah. It's interesting, but to have it be the capturing device for joining conferences, I don't, heck. I mean, Apple should just spend the money and put better cameras. - No kidding, right? - On their devices. Okay, the iPhone, yes, has a great camera, but let's not, you know, it's an expensive piece of device. - Yeah, but honestly, yeah. So my thoughts were simple. And that is, you know what Apple, what would have made this unnecessary is better hardware in your other devices. That would have made it unnecessary. And you're not already charging enough for your stuff. Come on. And it's a hack. It is hacky as hell. Come on. - It is. - I don't care. - Yeah, it is. I mean, who is it? - Belkin who's making these things for them? - They said there were a couple of manufacturers. I think Belkin was one of them, but yeah. But I mean, honestly, I just, whatever. I cannot get excited over something that is essentially their own fault. So I can't, you know, great. Thanks guys. Yes, it's great. Yes, it's cool. But you did that to yourselves and inadvertently therefore all of us, but whatever. It's fine. - All right. I mean, look, we have iPhones that are not modular. You can't take your battery out, but all of a sudden you want to have your laptop and your monitors be modular. - Yeah. - Come on, stop it. - That's true, I hadn't thought of it like that. Yeah, quite right. Modularity begins at home or something like that. Anyway, all right. All right, last thing to quickly talk about. We only have a few more minutes before I've got a hard stop unfortunately. iPadOS. Honestly, the collaboration stuff looks really great. Like collaborating between different people in real time on platforms. A lot of those features look a lot like, like, have you ever used a product called Miro? M-I-R-O? No? No. Well, a lot of hybrid working tools like hybrid pandemic, hybrid ways of working kind of tools, collaboration, like the whole freeform tool that they, that Apple was pushing. It looks a lot like that, you know, like shared documents, shared whiteboard doodling spaces. You know, here's a post-it note. This person's working on this one over here. Let's jump and have a look at what they're working on. It's like, I've been using these tools now for a couple of years. So they're jumping in on all of that and they're saying, Hey, we can do that too. And I'm like, well, that's great. If everyone is in that ecosystem. So like something like Miro is cross platform. I can use it on my iPad, my Mac, windows, you know, Android. I'm pretty sure so long as all this stuff does that, then it'll be a serious competitor. If it's not, then it'll be, you know, walled garden problem again. But we'll wait and see. I didn't get from the presentation whether or not it would be cross-platform or not. But still, either way, their implementation looks fine. Whether it works successfully or not, I don't know. Miro had lots of teething problems during the pandemic, but they came through it and it does work. The one I was interested in your thoughts on though is reference mode for the display. And I kind of wonder whether how accurate that's really going to be in reference mode. Yeah. No, I had the same question. I'm not sure. I mean, we will see once it actually comes out, but it's quite interesting. I mean, the iPad is gonna be a true pro tool and that's not a bad tool, a feature to add to it. But again, how accurate will it be? That's the question. - Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah, so we'll wait and see how that turns out, I guess. So Resolutionator is a Mac app that is done by Minitrix and it allows you to compress your screens down to an area where there's like, so if you wanna have a, if you've got a physical screen that's only got 1920 by 1080 pixels, you can actually use it to rescale and squeeze more pixels on that that are actually there, which is kind of cool. And that feature is kind of now something that they're adding on the iPad, which I think is a great idea. It just, it helps when you need a little bit more screen real estate, but you're stuck on your iPad, which is, which is cool. Um, uh, anyway. Uh, and then finally they're like, Oh, look, stage manager, as well as Mac iOS. Now it's on the iPad finally. And you get full external display support, no longer just mirroring. And I'm like, thank goodness for that. Finally, one catch. Finally. Yes. My iPad pro is too old. Doesn't that, it's not that old. It's not that old. My iPad's only three years old, but oh well, no man, it's fine. - They drew a line somewhere, the M is it. - Yeah, I can understand that. It's part of the software stack on Apple Silicon. They didn't want to port across to Intel. Fine, I get it. It's just sad, sad face. You know, what can I do? I'll have to wait for this iPad to get a bit older then and find an excuse to get it upgraded. We'll see how we go with that. 'cause it's my iPad Pro is IT. And it's provided by the company. So I kind of like all of my other stuff is all by myself, but the iPad's the one device the company provides. And so I've got to wait until it's ready for an upgrade cycle before I get to play with that. But oh, well. So anyone with an M1 iPad Pro, it's Christmas. Here you go. That looks fine, like really, really good. - Yes, it does. - And that's it. I didn't have any other notes. Did you have any other thoughts on WWDC this year? - No, I wanted to buy an M2 Air. I'm not a hundred percent. I had to do some research on the screen 'cause I do want a 16 inch, but I'm not really keen on getting such a big laptop. So we'll see that my research, I have to do some research to see if I will be getting an M2 Air. I do like what it looks like. - So for me, for my use case, it definitely fits my use case now. powerful desktop at home and I can get away with a lightweight Mac for work. Most of my life in the last 15 years, I've had MacBook Pros for work. I've had one MacBook Air for a few years in the middle. And I think that now the M2 MacBook Air is kind of, it meets what I need. I could have gotten away with an M1 MacBook Air as well, to be honest. 'Cause it- - Yeah, no, I have an M1 MacBook Air and to me it's amazing. - Yeah, so I think it's been, It was a very solid WWDC, lots of really good features coming. Some of them are a little bit meh, but some of them are way overdue. Some don't affect me, but I think on balance, it's been a very good one. And honestly, I'm excited to see the Mac Pro whenever they finally do release it. And I really do hope it is later this year and everything moves quickly to the M2s because I hope that their design cadence improves. - Agree. - All right, cool. Well, if you want to talk more about this, You can reach me on the Fediverse at [email protected], on Twitter @johnchigi or the network @engineered_net. If you're enjoying Pragmatic and you'd like to support us and keep the show ad-free, you can by becoming a Premium Supporter. Premium Support is available via Patreon and through the Apple Podcasts channel subscription. Just visit engineered.network/pragmatic to learn how you can help this show to continue to be made. Thank you. A big thank you to all of our supporters. special thank you to our Silver Producers Mitch Bilger, Kevin Koch, Shane O'Neill, Lesley Law Chan, Hafthor, Jared, Bill, Joel Marr, and Katharina Will. With an extra special thank you to our Gold Producer Stephen Bridle and our other Gold Producer known only as R. Pragmatic is a podcasting 2.0 enhanced show and with the right podcast player you'll have episode locations, enhanced chapters, and real-time subtitles on selected episodes and you can also stream Satoshis and boost with a message if you like. There's details on how along with the Boostergram leaderboard on our website. If you'd like to get in touch with Clay, what's the best way? Any social platform, I'm CWDaily. If you're there and I'm there, CWDaily. Awesome. Thank you very much. Cool. Well, and a special thank you to all of our supporters and a big thank you to everyone for listening. And as always, thank you for coming back on, Clay. It's always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [Music] [MUSIC PLAYING] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]