Ubiquiti Travel Router Field Test

I'm happy to report that we have not yet been classified by the U. S. government as dangerously capable Therefore, you're still able to listen to our show. Do you think that Apple has classified us as dangerously capable? and that's why we aren't getting invites to things? No, that's not it. think I think the world of audio only podcasts was never super high on Apple's list, but it sure is invisible now. Like I think they just don't care. I mean, we should probably talk about the idea of should we really be doing video I don't think any of us are super into that idea, but you know, if we want to continue to have that kind of visibility to the rest of the world That might be a good idea, but it would so complicate the Production of the show and the editing of the show I don't think I don't think it's it's Enough motivation for us, but I don't know. how do you guys feel about that? I don't want to pivot the video So I think there's a couple of things here. It's a little rude of me to say this, but I think all three of us have faces for radio. And so there's that. Secondly, I know for me and for John, our physcical spaces are not really conducive to doing video. likeike I have done it. It can be done Every time I am asked to guest on a podcast, which doesn't happen that frequently, to be clear, I'm not trying to Cumble brereak here but on the occasions that it does happen I often ask up frront Are you doing video for this? And annoyingly, the answer is typically yes and If the answer is yes, I have to go through this whole like internal dance of do I really want to clean up the rest of the office? Do I really want to just, do I don't want to do this at all? Like it's just not for me. It's not what I enjoy Yeah The flip side of that is, I think it's clear that that's where attention is, certainly for Apple, although honestly, I don't really care if Apple pays that much attention to us. It would be lovely to be able to go to WBBC, but it's really not that big a deal. They're not going to pay do you think we suen suddenly start doing video, they're going to pay attention to us? No, they're not. Well, no, no, that's fair. but they seem to ignore everything that is not video these days or print for that matter. Yeah. I mean and to be clear, like we were never like super reliably getting press access, but it has really turned to zero in recent years, like the last couple of years where I think it was always zero. I think the only time it happened was an aberration otherwise constant zero. which again, I'm fine with. Honestly like it does help to a degree that we don't have to worry about losing our press access because we don't have any. Yeah. And so we are able to be really honest and really direct. That's more difficult. because I know when I have had times in my career where I've had press access with Apple I have worried about losing it I don't think that ever made me do anything major majorly different from how I would have otherwise done it. But I'm sure it had to have like a minor impact or some kind of like subconscious biasing that like maybe I would soften things or not go near certain things because I was afraid of of losing that access. whereas when you have nothing to lose, it does give a certain degree of freedom. but I don't know, I canm go back to the video thing for a second. Maybe a good guiding principle on this for us to keep in mind is like I don't think any of our audience has asked us for that But that's a very good point. I think the reason why YouTubers have pivoted into a lot of podcasts is because they're easier. You don't need to write and edit nearly as much as you do for other like formats that succeed on YouTube. If you can just have a casual conversation and do minimal editing and minimal writing, that is much easier. So there's a reason why YouTubers like it And there's a reason why Some podcasters enjoy it because they think they can get YouTube audience with their podcast. And that's of course very tempting. podcast wouldn't like more listeners or more of an audience. And so I think that's why people are doing it. but If we are happy doing what we are doing and our audience is happy doing with us doing it this way And we're all happy with the numbers and how everything is going. I don't think we should feel compelled to have to push into an area that none of us seem like we actually want to do. J just for the idea of possibly basically trying to become YouTubers in a way that it seems like none of us really really have that in us Nobody wants to see us It's a young attractive persononss game. It's not for us. We have, as is tradition, a whole pile of follow up. However, I think we might make it through follow up. Typically the week after WBC, John it basically explains to us that we are going to do a full follow upp episode. But Joh, to your credit I think we're going to make it past follow up. So let's see what we can do. Let's see how we'll see how it lands. a bold statement? Yeah bold st' That's how many shows, especially member specials have you started Casey by saying, I think this is going to be a short one Every time E time. We don't have much to say about this. This is up there with, oh, I'm not gonna to buy that. Anyway. Have you seen the R two reviews recently? They're looking good. Anway. Waiting for the R three X and Carplay. Tell me about it. we need I'm trying to get through follow up and I'm derailing myself. We need to have I'm really rooting for Tesla. hear me out Hear me out. I'm want be out. That's a hot. I'm really rooting for Tesla Ellipsis to start shipping carplay because I believe in my bones that the second Tesla ships carplay, Rivian's going to be like, Ohh yeah toes, we're right there too. Absolutely. But they they want to control every pixel of their amazing experience.. Don't even get me started. think you' I think once once if Tesla ships carplay, which have there been any I know there was rumor about that a few months back, but is there anything anything more recently about that notot since like a month or two back where they said it's totally going to be talked about at WWBC and then it totally wasn't. Yeah. Well, maybe maybe it'll be a fall thing. maybe it's a never thing. I don't know. But yeah, I think you're right. think if Tesla ever shhips carplay that will put a lot of pressure on Rivian to finally cave, but that's probably going to take years. I do think that the Rivian R two probably going to do what the Model three and Model Y did for Tesla, which is like, It's going to make them all of their money even though we're all going to think it's fairly boring. It's also going to be a really good overall car. And I'm personally very interested in the R three, but that seems further out We'll see. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't I've been away all this past week as everyone knows, and I haven't looked too much into the R two, but the little bits that I've seen is that it is incredible and that the places where they, you know, had to skimp in order to make it cheaper That's reasonable. in the places where you really don't want them to, you know cut corners and cheap and be super cheap, they didn't. So it's supposedly real good. But anyway, speaking of Rivians, let's talk, It's Road trip. Jason Paul sent us a link to the Utah Road tririp deemo typo, which is excellent. and the frustration on the dude typing at the iPad is just palpable. You can see it right on his face. It's amazing That's what you got to watch the video for. just watch you gott to watch the gu's reaction after he does the typo. It's great. It's becausecause he knows exactly what he did. and you could just see in his face. He's like, o crap. Y. Like I can't believe this auto correct just got me right now. But anyway, it's delightful. But Florian also wrote in to say at the time of that ill fated demo, I was working for the company that made that software. Francois Lagunis, the guy who made the typo, was the CTO and is still a dear friend. He swears to this day that it was the amount of makeup they made him wear on his hands since they were prominently featured in the over the shoulder device closeups that caused him to factat finger the title. From his recollection They made the team shoot the do overver as soon as the live event ended so that they had the footage as soon as possible to edit into the published quote unquote, recorded video of the event In any case, it worked out okay in the end, the company ended up getting acquired by GoPro not long after, and that software still is the architecture powering the video editing featured in their quick app, QUIK Yeah It's like a, you know, it doesn't surprise me they did the recording right after, basically they've still got the same clothes on. It's the same room, it's the same sound or you know,'re we're going to fix this up immediately. You don't go anywhere, guys You still got one more thing to do. so that's fun and hand to makeup. You don't think about hand to makeup, but hey, if they're going shoot your hands in a close up gota put on hand makeup. All right, there has been a little bit of rumbling. I've heard this kind of not literally whispered, of course, but I've heard this kind of being talked about here and there. And so we can't credit this to anyone, but an anonymous person said, word on the street is that IOS or I guess all of the OS is All the OS is twenty six point six, ye. Thank you. All the OS is twenty six point six actually create the newotlight spotlight index It just creates it, It doesn't use it. So if people update their devices when twenty six point six is released, the index will already be there when they update IOS twenty seven Or whatever, twenty seven, sorry Yeah, I wonder if something is going to keep the index up to date. L that this is sketchy on official info or whatever, but keep an eye out for twenty six point six and see if I guess you'll have to do it the micray, like see if your disk space suddenly goes down by a lot. But as people were saying it's going to take like, you know, it's been taking like a day or two to build to rebuild the index after installing like the, you know, for example, IOS twenty seven beta But if they do this and they roll it out in the twenty six point six update, by the time everyone updates at twenty seven it won't have to rebuild the index. Maybe it will just incrementally, like maybe it create the index and let it sit there. And then when you install twenty seven oS, it will just incrementally update whatever has happened since it rebuilt the whole index. Clever idea, Watch for that Can I tell you guys how much I have to resist putting it on my phone? Yeah Because like I'm traveling next week or this week. and so I'm like' I'm resisting. I should not do doing it in the car on the way to the airport. Yeah, right. I should not have be a one on my phone when I'm about to travel. Oh my God, I like Honestly, I'm more tempted on my Mac Because now that I've had it on my like my travel laptop, which I am bringing with me, but now that I have it on my laptop, every time I go back to my desktop laptop I'm just like, oh my God, everything is so much lower contrast. The toolbars suck, everything is blurry. The icons are dim. everything like once you are using Golden Gate for even a small amount of time When you go back and see Tahoe, you're just like, oh my God, what were they thinking Everything is so much better on Golden Gate. and And it's not like, look, it's not perfect. There's still a lot about this design that I think they need to keep iterating. and I'm sure they will Taho looks like such an aberration you when you see Golden Gate and get used to it even for like five minutes And you say that because of functionality because of the way it looks or yes. Honestly I haven't had time to do much functionality with it yet. It's really just the way it looks. the basics of just like how like windows and toolbars and icons look and the menus without all the weird menu icons They did like a one point one for liquid glass It's it's a good one point one. Like it's still, it's still most of the same style Teaks they have made combined to make a pretty big overall improvement. And every time I'm back on Tahoe or IOS twenty six and I see, you know, a bunch of blurry text fading under a backgroundless bar God Please please let me install these betas on my devices very, very soon. One more week I gotta make it one more week. so maybe I'll get to beta two, but after once beta two iss out, I'm in. That's it, I'm jumping in. John, when do you plan on properly running? You typically don't run the betas at all, Is that right? Oh no, it depends. When twenty six was coming up, I was running all the twenty six betas because I had to get my apps st to work in twenty six. Once twenty six came out, I kept running the betas for a while and I said, whyy am I doing this? And so I switched to like the mainstream twenty six and I've just been going back and forth you know on that. And so yeah, whatever I have like twenty six point five point one or whatever the latest twenty six is And on that same machine for reasons that I tuted about and think I mentioned maybe on the last show, I don't remember I ended up having to partition the main drive so I could install twenty seven beta Because if you install twenty seven beta on an external drive, Apple intntelligence doesn't work because as we've discussed in past episodes, Apple Intelligence refuses to work if you boot from an external drive for reasons, I think supposedly security reasons, but I don't know the details but anyway, that's just the way it is So yeah, I've got twenty seven beta and twenty six five one, both on the same machine that I just flop back and forth right So let's talk about the password app or the passasswords app, excuse me. Hartley Charlton writes at MacC Rumors, the passasswords app can now automatically update weak and compromised passwords. We talked about this some last episode. Apple describes the system as agentic, with Apple Intelligence and Safari securely navigating through websites, signing in and upgrading accounts to strong passwords without the user needing to intervene beyond an initial tap The feature displays as a live activity when active Yeah The last episode I was like, there's no way they could be doing this unless the websites support all of the, you know, well known URLs for password changes. And by the way, ATP and NFM now supports that as well. I mentioned in the last show and I was like, Ohh yeah we should do that because we have optional passwords now. anyyway Um But surely that's how they have to do it. And like, well, how can we have a button that says fix these ten bad passwords? Do does it expect all ten of those websites to support this standard? so it knows where the URLs are? And the answer apparently is nope It's just going to wing it. It's just going to say, ye, well, this is the website. I'm going I'm going to run a little saafari, headless safari in the background and I'm going to let this little LM powered agent try to find its way through the password change form and change your password for you. So Yeah, as I said in the headline for this item that referenceced to Casey's from our Nuggets of wisdom, ATP Dev members spepecial, Passwords app does the hard thing says, Nope, we're just gonna we're just gonna try it. We're just gonna do it. So Good luck. faster with that. Good luck All right, so let me do a little inside baseball to introduce our next follow up segment. I think we've said many times that John is far away the person, even when he had a jobby job, far away the person that puts the most effort into our internal show notes that we run the show off of And you can tell that, it's sometimes abundantly obvious that this is the case because I'm going to talk now, starting now about MacOS twenty seven and you look at the time that it takes for this chapter, these chapters. There's lots of images first of all. Second of all, I still I still bristle when you characterize me having doing far and away most of the effort, blah, blah, blah Just sayad, do it all. just say I know occasionally you'll put an item. I know occasionally Marco puts in an item, but honestly, just sad, do it all. Yeah you that Yeah. We both going a totally different direction. I saw you being like, no, you know, not Casey does this. Marco does that, meaning like broadly for the whole show, but shot cheesy pey. Anyway, so take a look at the timestamp, everyone. We'll see how long the macro is section. I mean to give an example, show me the text that you typed in the show notes for this week's episode Excuse me, sir. Ecuse meir. I know you're on vacation. I know you're on vacation. Not only that, but I am the chief transcriber in chief forDC. Mostly because Google Docs cannot handle both of us doing it at once. one hundred percent. And I just I just backed off and I said, Casey, Casey wants to do this? He's going to be tabpping it said T to be fair to Casey, he did do the notes transcribing for the keynote, but he didn't need to do it because I would have done it. but I'm still saying for the first approximation It's all j Oh Yes, that does mean that MacOS comes for, but usually Apple does that too, because they like save IOS for last when they used to go OS byOS because like IOS is an important one and they save the good stuff to the end, you know It's he you anyways Take a look at your podcast player, hopefully overcast and see how long the macOS section takes I still contend it's mostly just lots of images that take a lot of vertical space, but we'll see. All I know is so I am the chief note taker in chief of the external show notes. and I've got like ten or twelve bullets from MacOS twenty seven and I've got one each for iOS iPadOS, TVS and watch OS. So we'll see. And that's a good example, by the way. Casey does all of the external facing showot notes, even though occasionally go in there and add a line or two, Casey doesn't even notice because when he' done it, he never looks at them again. Also I would never say that I have anything to do with the external show nototes. It's all Casey, one hundred percent. That's why all the badokes that are there That's Casey. Also very true. Rude, but very true. sometimes attribute jokes to me and I feel like saying that's not me. that's Casey. All right. I'm going to stop derailialing us or something. MacOS twenty seven. I'll re us don't. exactly. Adam DMasy writes, John said, quote, Golden Gate does sound like a code name rather than a public name Well, he might have been remembering that Golden Gate was actually the codename for Big Sir It was also apparently the codename for eWorld one point one, and you even brought receipts to this little endeavor. Yeah, do you guys know what EWorld is? Yeah, wasasn't that the like faux AL? It an online service? Yeah, I'm pretty sure, I don't know this for a fact, but having used EWorld when it was new. I'm pretty sure the company that made the MAC app for AL, which you probably aren't familiar with anymore, there was Mac app for AL And I think that company that made that app essentially white labeled it to Apple and said here you can have the app and then Apple just You obviously changed all the strings and stuff and then changed all of the graphics eworlds. whole idea was there was this like a I don't know how to describe the art style but sort of an impressionistic kind of cartoony art style of a little village with buildings and stuff back when everyone thought the internet was going to be a giant gif of a town with little people in it Anyway, that was EWorld. and yeah, EWorld one point one. Golden Gate. I did not know that. The bigig Sir one I probably knew and then forgot. so Yeah, there's only so many California names that get reused E have you ever used Microsoft Bob No. I't think I've only seen magazine pictures of it. I used it I was traveling to New York when I was a kid once and a friend who wasn't Casey. I actually have multiple friends who I would meet in New York. But a friend had it on his computer and I used it for like a couple of days on this trip It was wild. L so this was the thing where, you know, again, this is like probably early to mid nineties back when there was still a lot of experimentation in like What should computer UIs be? And what should be like the metaphor that structures all your applications and documents and everything together. And Microsoft Bob was an experiment that Microsoft did somewhere in the mid nineties that was like What if we just arrange things like in a house and you could go to different rooms in the house, like very much a like you know, like the early generation of nerds had probably you know, done a little bit of acid one weekend and came up with this idea in somebody's hot tub and it's like, okay, well, that's a cool idea. It didn't work really well at all But I believe that's where Clippy came from. I think Clippy was like an offshoot of Bob or Clippy escaped Bob. Yeah. I mean, but there was like look, this was back in the day that there there was still at least some experimentation of like before we had all settled on basically the desktop with applications and files like There were other ideas. You know, it wasn't that long after that that the POM pilot happened. And the POM pilot also had a totally different structure of like how should your data and applications be structured, which actually was far closer to what we have on IOS today than like you know PC's were Um, but ld was Erold was a little bit after that, I believe. but it was that was back in the day when like Nobody was quite sure what the internet would end up being for consumers yet. And there were things like AOL and compompUerve and everybody wanted their own online service and that's I guess where Eorld came in Yeah, it was one hundred percent like the AOL Mac client except that they had that graphic where click on the house and then it would just it was really really skinny, but it wasn't like bobware. it was like a, you know There was very very few graphics of things f putit on a floppy disk, but yeah you can find screenshots of it online. had a pretty cool art sty didid not last long, thankfully Need did Bob I feel I want to also say that this diversion into Microsoft Bob should not be counted towards my time But I will take full credit for the derailment. Reclaiming my time. Oh gracious.l. You can now use touch ID for administrator access in MacOS twenty seven, John, what does that mean I always wondered about this. I'm like, well, there must be some reason for it. But if you had like a Mac with touch ID and you needed to like do something, Oh, I wanted to drag a file out of the slash library folder and it' like it was in the finder and be like, well, you can't do that because it's not owned by you, but If you enter your password because you have an admin account, if you enter your password, well will, you know, do it for you with administrative privileges or whatever And it would always make you enter your password. Lots of other stuff, it would be like, oh, you know, auto fill, do touch ID or whatever. It would ask you for touch ID. Every time you needed to elevate your privileges, eventually do the equivalent of pseudo or pseudo or whate however you pronounce that word It would always throw up a dialog box. you had to type in your password. and I was like, ye, I don't know it's just weird for whatever reason twenty seven You can touch ID to do stuff as admin. I don't know why they changed their mind. I'm glad they did. All right, you can skip the Si waitlist. Thankks to front of the show, Steve Traouton Smith. You can do a defaults write, which we will put in the show notes and that will let you, I guess just start using the new series. Is that right? Yeah, it doesn't show you the waitlist thing. I was gonna to say that like it's fine for us to put this out there because just our super nerdy listeners which are in the grand scheme of things, few in number We'll know about this, but it has since leaked out into the media. so now everybody knows this. so hurry up and do it before Apple somehow disables this. I did it and got immediately into Sory. Yep And it's only for the Mac though, to be clear. It only works on MacOS Golden Gaage. I mean, are you going to write suono deffaults write command on your phone? That's the yeah, I I would love to skip it on my test phone for IOS twenty seven, but there seems to be no way to skip that yet exxcept I guess be Joanna Etern And speaking of Steve Trton Smith, he also pointed out that there is a change in Apple's documentation. The key UI design requires compatibility. Well, let me just read what it says in the documentation. The system ignores this key when you build for IOS twenty seven or later iPad OS twenty well, basically all the twenty seven or later OSs. So this is the thing that said, don't use liquid glass for my apple please and Apple saying tough nugs. You're going to have to use it if you compile against any of the OS' twenty seven. I think they might have said that last year too, like, oh, we have this key. you can put it in your app and you don't have to upgrade to li a glass. We'll just run you using the basically the old metrics, all the old controls and the old everything. That time is over D for twenty seven No choice. Yeah. I think we were adequately warned and that kind of key usually only does last a year or two. So That makes sense. It's time to get on board. That being said, like All of the problems of liquid glass from from twenty six, like we like if you were kicking the can down the road and you didn't want to deal with them with your app You still have to deal with them because even if Golden Gate fixes some of your biggest , you know, nitpicks or issues, which Honestly, in that kind of context of like app developers maintaining things, It's not really going to help that much. It's just nicer, you know in certain ways, but All the things about like, you know, having different metrics for controls than IOS eighteen and different behaviors and things you still have to deal with that as long as you support IOS eighteen or IOS twenty six. And for most apps, that's going to be a little bit. Like you're probably still dealing with supporting all these things for at least another year So Like for me with oververcast, I'm thin This is probably a good time like this like once I launch my twenty seven version this fall, I can probably drop support for IOS eighteen then That's even that's pretty aggressive, given where the numbers actually are for most apps these days. So I understand why people still want this key to work because then they can keep shipping one UI for their app instead of now kind of two and a half is what they' have to do. But It it's going to be a bumpy time. likeike The support for twenty six and Tahoe is going to be kind of a thorn in app developers sides for probably at least another two years Yeah. I hope you spent the last year working on that isue and not saying, oh they gave me a key. I don't have to worry about it because if you did that, you're just scrambling now. Yep All right, during onboarding and I think this is coming from one John Syracusea, during onboarding for Golden Gate, the liquid glass slider where you decide how transparent you want it to be, well, that's part of the onboarding process, which is pretty interesting. Yeah that is. what that means is, you know, I always assuming everyone will just leave it on the default, But now I wonder, I mean, maybe most people will probably still leave it on the default because people just hit continue, continue, continue. I don't care C continue later, continue. they just want to get through it Yeah, it's part of it's part of like the onboarding after you install or update to the OS. So everyone's going to at least see that slider And I'm sure Apple will be monitoring where those numbers. I say I'm sure, but honestly, I don't know what kind of metrics Apple gathers about this stuff. Apple tends not to gather much info, but we do know that they have some numbers. So it's not really talked about it. like What kind of anonymous usage info is actually gathered from like MacOS and IiOS Um Yeah, I hope Apple is looking at where this slider goes. I bet people will either not touch it or put it all way to the right. I put it all way to the right And then some people put all way to left because They're young and they think it's cool I like I still this this slider still baffles me like it still just feels like We didn't feel like deciding. So we're going to give you this zero to one floating point setting that changes one thing about liquid glass that honestly isn't even that much first of all, it isn't that impactful of a change. And second of all, the range between zero and one of like how they look is not that different. Most importantly, going all the way to the right does not make it opaque. There's reduced transparency for that if you want it, but just to be clear, the slider makes it less transparent. and all the way to the left is not fully clear either. So like whatever you want, this is kind of a like weird milk toast middle of the road kind of like, well we can give you a little bit of control. But it feels like a very precise control and it just isn't. And by the way, they give you like a picture of Apple Park with some crap floating on top of it You know, li glass style Um, be aware that that picture scrolls. So you can scroll the picture just to see how does it look with a withith an image scrolling underneath the controls. Oh, interesting Before we move on from that, as Marco pointed out, the underlying setting, which is called NS Gass tint amount, does go from zero to one If you set it to a value higher than one, it is ignored Unfortunately, this is the first thing I did. I'm like, oh, the slider grows from zero to one, fifteen. What does fifteen look like? fifteen looks like one We are sponsored this week by Lisa. Lisa is tunnel visioned on making great mattresses and furniture that supports those mattresses. And I really dig that. Lisa mattresses, they have all sorts of different options, including a pet bed, which isn't exactly a mattress, but it's close enough. And I think that's adorable. You should see the little image on their website. You should go check it out. We'll tell you the URL at the end So you can see this adorable little puppy sitting on on one of their pet beds, but they do mattresses for all sorts of different sizes and shapes of people, including children, including their plus mattress, which has a little bit extra support and cushioning right where it counts. And that's really cool in my book. 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It's really, really cool If you are interested in this, go to lisa. com for twenty five percent off select mattresses plus get an extra fifty dollars off if you use the promoc code ATP, which is exclusive for our listeners. That's L E E SA. com promo code ATP for twenty five percent off select mattresses And an extra fifty bucks off. Su our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. A againain, lisa d. com promo code ATP. Thank you to Lisa for sponsoring the show All right this this might get me in a lot of trouble But there was a lot of consternation with regard to the corner radius of MacOS Windows And John, would you like to just briefly recap why perhaps you or if not you, others were upset about this in MacOS twenty six, please? Yeah, they made the corner radius very large, which means the corners were very, very rounded, which means there are a larger number of pixels that you don't get to see in the corners of a window. And this is especially important in Tahoe because the way the UI works is that if like if you're looking at a picture, like an image or something The image goes edge to edge. So you're losing all four corners of that image if that image is in a window because all four corners are curved as opposed to like go back John, it respects your content. Yeah. Go back like several versions when there was an opaque title bar, the title bar had rounded corners. but when you viewed an image in a window The image started where the title bar ended, like under the title bars is where the image started. And those were sharp corners because the title bar ended. and then there was just a right angle and you could see all the pixels in the image. And then when you went to the bottom of the window for many, many, many years in macOS ten slash macOS, the bottom corners of the window were sharp as well. So if you put an image in a window, you could see all the pixels in the image And Apple has slowly eaten away at that and twenty six was like, we're taking the whole corers. like there could be something there could be a big thing in there. could be there could be like a little signature that you wouldn't see in the corner of like a picture if it's a painting. They were just chopping it off. And some people didn't like how it looked Some people did like how it looked, but the bottom line is the job of the window is to show the content and it annoys me when they decide You don't need to see the corners And they decided that because of concentricity, which is they had all these little, you know the controls had semicircular end caps on them, and they could make the corners match the radius of the semicircular end caps such that if you put a central point where the center of the corner is and you traced out an arc, the arc on the window edge would exactly match the arc on the controls, That's concentricity where you'd see concentric circles drawn from a central point. And then a macroros twenty seven, as we discussed less episode decrease the corner radius of the windows so you can see more of your stuff and there was much rejoicing and many people who are there live have said since we recorded last week that there was cheering from the live audience for the fact that they fixed the window radius. So it's not just me, but as I pointed out last episode So they, you know, I endorse this change They made a smaller corner radius in all the windows no longer matches the corner radius on the floating controls. And so now it is the exact opposite of concentricity. You have two very different corner radii radiuses And yeah, it's hard. anyway, all this is say is difficult for me to explain graphically. so I'm glad that Sammy Sido posted some images to explain this And we'll put this link in the show notes When you look at this image, you'll understand what I'm talking about. twenty six, you're like, Oh, everything looks nice and everything matches in twenty seven. Doesn't match anymore. To be clear, I totally endorseed the change in twenty seven But it is fighting against the other parts that they didn't change in liiquid glass, which are the little capsule shape buttons Yeah, And I think this is one of those cases where I can see why they went for the Tahoe design Because from a like visual isolated context does look better. The problem is it doesn't work better in practice with computer UIs And that is, I think where Where Apple has gone a little bit too far in you know, when when their designers get a little bit too pure and theoretical about things. This is kind of their failure mode. And this has happened numerous times over their history with numerous designers in charge too. And you know, fortunately, they tend to eventually correct those things. And in this case, it took a year, but they corrected it. So I'm glad to see that. Like there is no question in my mind When you're looking at a screenshot, the MacOF twenty six version does look better , but Unfortunately, design has to interact with the real world. And sometimes that requires compromises on the pure ideal aesthetics and you have to actually run into. what people actually need in reality Again, you have to ask what is the job of a window? And the design they have now is awkward and bad because also the little floaty buttons and toolbars were also designed poorly with, you know, if they design from the start, you would say, okay, the job of the window is to show the content and let's let everything fall from that. And what they've done is taken a design that totally didn't do that job and fixed one part of it without fixing the other So of course they don't match. It's still better than it was. Again, I still endorse the change, but it just highlights, Hey, we fixed one thing, looks like maybe this entire idea was bad because now we fix that one thing and we see some other stuff that also looks bad with it and needs to be fixed. M, it's going to be a while before they unwind all of this stuff, but baby steps one thing at a time I got to tell you, based only on these screenshots, I agree with the slug of this post, which is y'all better shut up. sereriously, is this what you really want to see window corners? And based on this screenshot alone It looks frreaking terrible in MacOS twenty seven. it looks awful. Yeah because because you because it's a mismatch was they they fix the corners and didn't fix the other parts that are next to the corners. You know how you could fix the other parts that are next to the corners? You can make those radii also match the, you know, like there's a way to do it, but they didn't do it. Right. Like like in this case, like the like, it's a little bit easier on the search box compared to the toolbar, but like, but ye like the search box The reason why this is a mismatch is that they made the search box and the toolbar hills instead of roundrecks. So you know, basically like what we used to call ovals in kindergarten. it's like they are This is a text field that is perfect oval around the left and right side. an oval. Don't do that gat trw people on you. Well, okay, But it's close. capapsule shape. It has semicircular end caps on a rectangle. Right. And the problem is as the like as the height of that increases, that means the radius has to increase too So it does significantly constrain your design in a way that like, well, now you have to have very, very large corner radii on the window to match all these pill shapes or capsule shapes of the controls. In previous versions of MacOS, Those weren't exact pill shapes. They were round wcks so that you could so yes, they had rounded corners, but The entire left and right side didn't have to be a continuous curve. So that gives you way more flexibility. And search fields were pill shapes at one point But the way they made that work is they just put bigger margins around them. The corners of the window were practically square and the search field was pill shaped back in the day. They just moved it farther from the edges, so it didn't look weird. I mean, just again, it's about holistic design. Design is like everything together. Does it work well? Does it look good? Does it look harmonious? And just twenty six was like, well We think it looks good and it's visually harmonious, but nothing works. And so they're just trying to fix it without changing everything and you get twenty seven I think what has tentatively sold me on twenty seven being the improvement is what Marco said a couple of minutes ago that yeah This looks worse in in this microcosm or in this this like, you know, zoomed in view, but It actually affords you a much better view of the content behind all this. So maybe they really are respecting our content, who to thk it nine to five Mac has noted that the Mickey Mouse hands are back in MacOS twenty seven Golden Gate, and they also indicated or said the world is healing Do you know about the Mickey Mouse hands was this news to you? No, we had talked about that, I think at some point semi recently. I guess when twenty six came out. I still hate the hand icons in twenty six and twenty seven. They didn't change the shape of the hand icons much. I think maybe it looks like the pointing finger is tilted a little bit Yeah, what we're talking about is a Mickey Mouse, the character wears white gloves with like three little creases on the back of the hand And for I don't know how long for ages and eight, maybe since Classic Mac was, I think so. The various hand cursors, the pointing hand that you click on links with in a web browser, the big hand that when you hold on Spacebar in Photoshop, you can move the canvas around. and the grabby hand where it's like grabbing something. All of those hands look like a white glove because they were white black outline with a white cursor Three little Mickey Mouse. creases on the back of the glove and in twenty six I took off the creases because I don't know They didn't want it to be whimsical anymore. in twenty seven, they brought them back. whichich to me seems petty, but I endorse it That's incredible. All right. In MacOS twenty seven, there are a bunch of new icons and I don't know, they're different. I don't know what else to say, but the findinder one,, I don't know what they're doing here The basic Apple guuy says, honey, the Finder icon sucks again. And I disagree. I know what he's getting at and we'll get more from the basic Apple guy in a little bit But if you go to the link we'll have in the notes, you can see the Tahoe and Goldingit Finder icons. and the main send of the Goldingit Finder icon is they made the blue too light again. I don't know who's obsessed with making a light blue findinder, but just back off man. likeike it's got to be like a deeper blue. it's the it's supped to be. But they also changed the shape of the profile face, like the finder icon, which used to be the MacOS icon is like a face that is you know with two eyes and a smiley face that looks like a face head on, but it is blue on the left and white on the right. and the right hand part of it also looks like a face in profile So it's kind of like a two face thing. some people call it two face. Anyway In Tahoe, the profile face had a completely vertical line under the nose of the face and now it is more curved The original version of this was more curb, so I think the Golden Gate shape is actually an improvement The color is just too light, so maybe I should follow a feedback on that. Just darken up the color. You're on the right path, J darken up the color and maybe extend the white part to the edges of the squirrel and then maybe just give us back the oldicon. Yeah I think at that point, you're at the old icon, which honestly is better. Yeah. Well, not really because there's been so many variations of this. If you look at the original like classic macOS one from MacOS seven point six or whenever it first appeared It wasn't the Finder all kind, it was the booting up MacOS seven point six like splash screen face It had a vertical line that extended past the bounds of the thing. It has looked very different over the years. So anyway, I think Golden Gate design is better than Tes. I just missed the color I we just need Stehven Hacket to get upset about this and then it'll get changed. That's how it works last year, right? Something like that All right, and then we have a bunch of other ones by Basic Apple Guy and they are side by side in their post. And I don't know, do you want to go through these? Do you just have broad comments about this? Yeah, we'll go I mean, again, follow the link to Basic Apple Guy's post about this because he posted a ton of images to show Tahoe versus Golden Gate. And I just want to make the point that we talked about this back when Taho came out with So when you know, in WWC twenty twenty five with the advent of Tahoe and icon composer And just to recap, they introduced a new format for icons, which is. icon files. It's amazing. no one had ever used that extension before, but Apple got it. icon. And it's basically a bunch of resources in a little package and instructions for compositing them And the resources can be bitmaps or vector images And what this means is if you go into an application package on Tahoe And you dig around and there, you're like, whereere's the icon You probably won't find a bitmapped image of the icon unless it has one of those for legacy reasons or for fallback reasons. what you find are these icon assets shuffved into an asset catalog that have the ingredients of the icon and they are composited in real time by MacOS to make the icon. And part of the reason they do that is because Tahoe introduced this idea of on MacOS anyway, and I guess on IOS as well of icon themes where you can have lightight mode, dark mode, the clear icons. All that is doing is changing the formula for how those pieces in the. icon files are composited to make the final icon. Ideally in Apple's world, you just have a bunch of vector shapes and a bunch of instructions for compositing them, and then we can make that icon look good in light mode, in dark mode, in clear mode And in, you know, whatever U Another thing that you can do by moving the icon format to this recipe and ingredients composited together is that you can change essentially all the icons in every single one of your OSs without having to redraw your icons. So that's what we're looking at here. As far as I can tell, pretty much all these icons in basic Apple Guy posts are the same icons as in the same contents of the. icon files that were assembled into the assets. car file or whatever Like the resources are the same. They didn't redraw the icons All they're doing is changing the recipe for how they're composited and you would think How big a difference could that possibly make Obviously the find arch kind has changed we just on saying that the shapes are different. but. theseese icons we're looking at in our notes and most of the ones in this blog post that will link And I think they're basically the same icon But changing the compositing makes the world a difference. Marco mentioned it before when he said that When you upgraded twenty seven, then look back at twenty six, everything looked blurry These are way zoomed in our show notes. so I'd encourage you to like move back from your screen or like shrink them down or whatever But the smaller these icons get, the you know, the more they are icon size and not blown up to this giant size, the more you can see how blurry Taho's compositing was. Like everything is in this weird haze and all the edges are blurred and take that same resource and render it in the new way. And there's two things about the new way of rendering. One, crisper edges And two, They added a new refraction feature to the recipe where each individual layer can say should this layer refract what's behind it? and by refracting, they just mean like make it seem as if the edges of the thing are made of rounded glass so that when you see the things through it, it kind of bends the light a little bit. Anyway I think for the most part, the Golden Gate versions of every single one of these icons is an improvement because things that were blurry and indistinct and low contrast and Tahe become sharp and higher contrast And the few cases where they add a refraction, like the freeform icon, I think look great, especially large sizes. small sizes is kind of lost. but What do you think? Do you think this is an upgrade or a downgrade? Oh my God, I think this looks like an eye test. When you look at the Tahoe icons And and then you look at the Golden Kanicun One or two Yeah, exactly. It's like the Tahoe icons look like I don't have my reading glasses on and I need to put them like and then you put the and then you look over go to get youre like, ah, Chrisistmas. Like maybe look Allan D seemed like he's about in his forties. Maybe he just needs reading glasses and he doesn't know that yet. It looks like when you when you see Taho, it looks like eye strain. This is part of what I like this is part of why I am so anti blurry text ever appearing in a UI, because when you are of middle age and you need reading glasses When you see blurry text your eyes like you instinctively think I have to squint or you know, look through the bottom of my glasses or whatever it is, like whatever your accommodation is for seeing things more sharply. you you kind of incinively think I'm the problem and you and you do whatever that accommodation is instinctively And then it doesn't get fixed That's what eye strain is. And so when you look at blurry text in a UI reminds you of eye strain and then also can cause eye strain, which is part of the many it's one of the many reasons why that's a bad idea in a UI design And so to kind of do that across the whole system in a broad diffuse way to have everything be a little bit soft and blurry all the time is not a good design. So I am again very thankful when I see these icons like, ah crisp And you know what, when I have to like tweak my overcast icon to work well on twenty six and twenty seven That's going to be a little bit of a pain in the butt. In this case, I don't care, worth it I am so happy to see The return of sharpness contontrast. And that's the overall message here S someome of these designs probably need a bit more tweaking to look as good as they can, but overall, it is way sharper and higher contrast. You don't have to do anything to overcast icons. That's the point Like the new version of icon Composer ' show you if you just take open up your icon file that you've been using in Tahoe It will show you in the app. Here's how this icon looked in Taho And here's how it's going to look Uh in in Golden Gate No changes to the icon. Again, this is just changing how the software composites your stuff. Now you can change I think the one thing they eded in twenty seven is you can flip a little bit for each layer that says refraction yes no And you could change the amount of refraction angle and all sorts of other crap like that. But I think that is the only new feature. But like I said, Apple didn't update for the most part, didn't update these icons. The exact same icon will look different in twenty six than it does in twenty seven, which is It's wild, but it's like a fallout of them deciding that their icons are going to be ingredients and recipes instead of baked in bitmaps. Now, there's nothing stopping you from making your icon an icon composer and just putting in one layer that's one hundred percent opaque bitmap. You can still do that. There's no one stopping you from making a bitmap icon. Lots of Apple icons incorporate bitmaps in them It seems like if you look at all the Apples' icons They prefer you just use a bunch of vector shapes And that gives Apple the freedom to essentially change the look of every single icon without asking developers or their own developers to change anything about their icons, they just change the rendering. Now it's somewhat limited. They're not going to change them in radical ways, but This is the thing to keep an eye on. Its It's a bold new regime for icons going from like Photore realistic bitmaps in ten point zero to you know, a bunch of ingredients and recipes and already from twenty six to twenty seven, twenty six they rolled out twenty seven, they're changing the look. So I wonder if next year, we're gonna to have thing an icon composer that says, Hey, the same icon with no changes. Here's how it looks in twenty seven, six, Here's how it looks in twenty seven. Here's how it looks in twenty eight And don't remember remember you also have to check what is light mode, dark M mode, clear mode Is that all of them orr is there the one where I'm forget. Yeah, light's light dark and like kind of yeah, uncolored clear. Yeah. So Fascinating. I think some of the icons are downgrades. I think the little robot guy looks a little bit worse, but he's a pale shadow of his former self anyway. Well, that's the thing. like, Like when I saw my overcast icon for the first time on twenty seven, I was like, oh, that's a little it's a little bit too sharp in certain ways because I had designed it to try to fight against all that softness in twenty six. So like there are certain, you know colors or layer effects or things that like I might dial back slightly for the twenty seven version so that it looks more normal it's kind of like when you see you are when you have like stage makeup on and then you go into the regular world and you look ridiculous, you know in different context, you might actually make different decisions depending on how it is being rendered and where. So I think you can make tweaks to the recipe on a per OS basis, but I'm not entirely sure Yeah, I have to see mretty sure you can't include multiple icons for different OSs. I did that thing that I talked about in the past episode where I bent over backwards to use my old bitmam icons on pre twenty six, and I'm going to still keep doing that if I can. I'm not I know icon compomposer lets you tweak the icons for different modes. likeike,, do you want to make a tweak that's in dark mode only? Like in dark mode, you want to turn off this layer effect, but in light mode, you want to turn on. But I don't know if it lets you do that on a POS basis. I know it previews your icons. s here's how it looks in twenty six and twenty seven. But I think there might be one other one or two other things they added besides refraction. I think they might have let you do like inside outside glint effects on stuff or anyway. Brave newew worldorld of icons All right, there's been a lot of chatter and understandably so about how Apple is basically quarterbacking to get Touch Max ready to rock. Curtis Hard writes in MacOS twenty seven, NS ScrollView has a new refresh controller which takes in NS refresh controller, which allows Native pul to refresh, tried in Safari on a webpage Yeah think that's gonna to feel so weird to do in a Mac but you know, touch Macs, you got to do it If Steve Chaon Smith appears yet again, Appkit isn't just getting touch gesture support, but NS tooolbar now has IowS style fluid morphing animations when used with a touchs screen too Long presses trigger a right click, momentum, pinch and scroll work great. veryery clearly, telegraphing upcoming touchscreen Macs. Anywhere you see a liquid glass stretch or highlight effect on IOS now functions in the same way on MacOS when used with touch Here's Calculator on MacOS showing off some of the fluid interactions, and we'll put a link in the show notes. It has this tweet or or whatever they're called and a couple follow have gifts that indicate what Steve is talking about. Yeah, all the willly effect wherere like on your phone when you like dont most people don't do this, they just press buttons. but if you were to press your finger on the button on a phone and move your finger around, you can see the button kind of stretches and follows your finger, all that stuff is in. MacOS controls if it when used with touch. and they added a whole bunch of new APIs, a whole bunch of new things you can set on it to say do was recent this isn't in the notes because it just came out today, but I was recently showing that there's keys that you can set to make all the menus look essentially like iPad menus And you know, and that if you pull down the menu and keep your finger down on the screen and move it around, you'll pull the menu a little bit I don't think those effects really add anything, but they're part of liquid glass, that's the liquid part of it I mean, they don't take away too much because I feel like they don't bother you if you don't intentionally trigger them, but I think it's just basically a waste of time. But anyway, all that's coming to the max So do you plan to touch your screens? Oh no, definitely not. Well, John, that's not even a question. For me, I don't plan to, but there are definitelyccasions, especially if I'm like flip flopping between iPad and Mac, which doesn't happen often to be fair, but does happen. And there's definitely occasions that I've like started to reach up to like swipe at something just briefly I don't feel like and here I here this is Casey one hundred one. I don't feel like there's anything that this solves in my life. Like it would be nice, I guess to occasionally be able to do this, but I sitting here now, I don't yearn for a touchscreen Mac That said, I don't remember what report it was and I'm sure we talked about it on the show, but when they talked about how when you use touch, there'll be like contextual menus or something like that that pop up like path style like around your finger. I'm sure this was a german. controls that are more suited to fingers than to mouse binders. Right, exactly. It could be interesting, it could be really cool. So we'll see what happens. Yeah I mean, it s's the type of thing that once you start doing it, you can't go back. Like that's why everyone wants it. And judging by my children's laptop screens, they're constantly touching them even though they're not touch screens. So I guarantee both of my kids will be touching the screen. like the same amount they do now, which is to say all the time. You can't I hope they put that aleophobic cating on the screen becauseuse that will just help me keep their screens be less gross, but I won't do it because I don't tend to use laptops. And if I did use laptop I wouldn't do it because I't want to get into that habit because it makes the screen uglier But you know, I have an iPad I touch it all the time so. Yeah. oncece you go touch you can't back I wonder like, you know, because as I've as I have with my most recent like laptop laptop I have the nanotexture screen and I've told I've said on the show many times how much I absolutely love nanotexture and I don't plan to buy any future laptops without it as long as if they are offered with it And I wonder like, you know, one of the downsides of nanotexture is that it is harder to clean. And you know, it does just like the The other type of screen, I guess the glossy type of screen, it does get those like keyboard imprint lines in the middle of the screen that are yes slowly become impossible to clean I don't know how to clean those. like get once you get like to a certain point of those imprint marks, they seem to be permanent And that's always been the case even before Nanotexture I wonder like, you know when Apple says Nanotexture, that refers to a few different processes that they've had over time. Like the original ProtisplayXDR was the first one and that did one version of it. And then the cururrent like Mac laptops that offer it different version of it, and then the iPad Pro that has it is yet a different version of Nanotexture. I wonder if maybe they would move to the iPad Pro version of it for the Touch laptop and whether that would be easier to clean. No, let us make a fourth version. Let just to keep refining it. Yeah yeah, I imagine it'll be more like the iPad one, but maybe a newer revision All right, Apple has updated the human interface guidelines, so the Hig for menus. It says in the Hig, use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose Icons allow people to find menu items more quickly and help clarify what selecting an item does. Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app File system locations, connected devices, visual concepts like rotating or flipping an image, and user generated content like folders and documents. display an icon if you can't find one that clearly represents m item. and they gave a very curious example of this seven days of the week where they've chosen Odd choices for icons for each day of the week with a little gray X below it indicating don't do this And then they have a different version that's just the text for the seven days a week and they have the little green check markark. Yes, do that Yeah. I love that I love that the the don't do this is just Taho. Y. the idea is you have to have come with an icon for every item. So good luck. Yeah. L this thing we literally told you a year ago, this is the right way to do it. and now we're saying this exact same thing is the wrong way to do it And just this is the clarifying from last episode. We were like, well, is there a way to turn off the icons? Is it some kind of user setting? Is it a developer choice I'm pretty sure it is only developer control. I didn't see anything in the UI for it. But regardless, the important point is regardless of how this is implemented in terms of who gets to decide which icons appear where Apple's advice to developers has now reverted essentially to its pre twenty six advice, which is Don't put an icon on every menu item. That's not what we want you to do. So the put an icon in and again, the twenty six intervace guidelines also did not say to put an icon in everything. We read them on the show to clarify They were like, you know, put them on most stuff, I guess, and repeat them in this weird way. It was like the guidelines were incoherent last time. The guidelines didn't say you must put an icon on every menu item. But in practice, what Apple did was basically put an icon on almost every menu item. and it was ridiculous and the advice was vague and didn't make it clear, when am I supposed to use icons or not? shouldould I copy What Apple's apps do Like the twenty six guidelines didn't give developers enough information to know what they should do The earlier guidelines for all the other years of the MacOS give clear advice. and now the advice is once again clear. and not only is it clear, it is the pre twenty six advice, which is don't put icons everywhere. They do say in a subsequent part of this to as they say, apply uniform visual treatment across menu items in the same group for visual consistency imbalance, provide icons for all menu items in a group or none of them And it's showing like if there's a group of menu items, like's like a divider, and then there's menu items for doing stuff with windows, like move and resize or full screen or whatever If they have icons to let you know like when this is the tile thing that tiles to the right half of the screen, this is the thing that tiles to the left or whatever. they should all have icons and not just like one or two of them because these are all Commands where icons are useful. So again, the advice is clear defefault, your default should be No icons. But if you think an icon As they say will help clarify what selecting an item does then do use an icon, but all icons that do that simar all menu items that do that similar thing should also have icons. So backack to sanity Wasn't there a convention in the past? Maybe I maybe I just misinterpreted this. Wasn't there a convention in the past that Menu items in MacOS would have an icon only if they matched a toolbar item in that app and it would be the same icon as the toolbar item. I think the Hig might have said that at one point, but I don't think that was strongly suggested for a while. Maybe Maybe it was in the pre twenty six ones, but yeah, the thing with toolbar icons is they have changed so much over the years that I think they probably just deleted that advice in menus If it was ever there, just because it adds confusion was like, well you know, in the current design system, it's impossible to do that because the pictures on the toolbars would never fit in tool bar icons. Like if you think about the tool bar I images in like MacOS ten point zero, those wouldn't fit in menus. specially in the pre wrrittad days, this was just literally impossible. All right, that is the end of the MacOS section. You can look at your timestamp now and compare it to where we were. So very, very long ago. Don't forget to subtact. Don't forget forget to subtact the Micsoft Bob time Yeah. Oh yeah, that's very important. Also, much of what we were saying was way beyond MacOS. Like the icons are universal. Who side are you on? I'm just saying we're talking about Apple OSS twenty seven and Microsoft Bob That was the MacOS action. the icons were yes, but' we have the same problem as Apple. Maybe we should have just talked about improvements, trust and safety Well done. Well done. All right, with regard to IOS twenty seven, Mario Gusman writes the new pull down animation for Siri AI in IOS twenty seven is pretty nice. It's basically the old Pulse to refresh animation from IOS six, Nice, fun fluid The animation will also start from where you drag your fingers, so it won't always be animating in from the center. And at a glance, this looks pretty great. Yeah check out the movie and the tooth that we'll link in the show notes. It's basically you pull down from the top and it's like you're pulling a black blob from the top, like it bends down the top of the screen and once the black blob gets far enough away from the top of the screen, the screen like saps close behind it and that blob becomes the floating Siri thing. I'm still not a big fan of the Glossy black, transparent refracting look for series stuff but it is at least consistent and it is mostly legible and these little fun bits where you get to pull out a little blob of ink. are also fun All right, that was the end of the iOS twenty seven section. Let's move on to iPadOS twenty seven. and Steve Trum Smith writes, the iPad's menuar is now left aligned and can be set to display permanently. When hidden, it will still show the app name so you know which app is currently frontmost. Yeah, whoever was insisting We can't just put a menu bar on the iPad. Like, isn't that surrendering? It's like, what if we center it Th then it's like we're doing something different. And then twenty seven said, just left align it. like the menu bar is left aligned, just do it. And make an option to have it permanently visible. And when it's not visible, make sure you show the app name. It's like there's just slowly like, you know we tried for a decade or whatever to come up with a UI that's better than the Mac UI. We couldn't do it, notot to say it's not possible, but all I can say is we didn't do it So let's just do the things we know we That is the end of the iPad OS twenty seven section. Let's talk about TBOS twenty seven, which in John's defeense there was almost no mention of in the keynote. We should talk about hardware support, which is to say TBOS twenty seven drops support for the Apple TV HD from twenty fifteen and the Apple TV four K first generation from twenty seventeen, as I have lamented many times recently and having come fresh off of a vacation where I brought I believe it's the HD from twenty fifteen. whatever I think this is the first one that allowed for apps on Wow. This is an old Apple TV and it shows.. Yeah, it's not great. And I would love, as I've said, so many times, I would love to trickle down and upgrade my travel slash tailgit Apple TV to something nicer And apparently, this is as nice as it will ever be because it will not get the TVOS twenty seven. And I'm not really sad about that since it's already hurting so bad, but give me a new Apple TV Ale. please, please. I want it, please. I'm kind of surprised that the Apple TV four K got dropped, but then I saw a year came out. I was like, okay. ye. It seems so recent. Apple T four K That's the new one No, first generation was twenty seven Yeah. Yep. Turns out Apple TV's don't come out that often. Yeah. Wh knew Watch US twenty seven, We're done with TVOS, which again in John's defeense, that makes sense. Watch US twenty seven. Let's also talk about their hardware support. Hartley Charlton, M Rumors says Apple confirmed that the only App W watchatch models compatible with WatchOS twenty seven are Series nine, Sies ten, S series eleven, ultra two, Ultra three, and SE three Initially they had incorrectly said that the series nine was not supported, but that was an oops. It is supported. So again, nine, ten eleven, not the Ultra one, but yes for Ultra two and three and yes for the SE three. When they said the nine wasn't supported, I'm like, reallyally? Jeszus is harsh, I'm glad the nine came back in. but still this is I mean, Marco would know better than I. Is this the most harsh hardware cut offff ever for a watch OWS release? Yeah. And I think that's It's a casualty of the very slow update pace they chose for the Apple Watch SOCs. You know, as we talked about in whenever new Apple Watches come out, they have gone like two or three versions in a row having the same processor on Apple Watches. So this is This is what happens. It is like all of a sudden, when you have when you want to cut off processor that was used for three generations in a row, you end up slicing off a whole lot of models. So that's that's why this is happening. We are sponsored this week by Quinince. Now you've potentially heard one of our former Quint spots or maybe on a different podcast, and you might think to yourself, well, Quintince just does clothing, right Oh no, my friend. Oh no, not at all Not only does quinints do clothing for people who buy men's clothing, for people who buy women's clothing, but they do child clothing. in fact Decklin got some like stretchy pants, some like kind of sweat pants that he really, really enjoys. 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Quinince dot com slashtP. than you to Quinince. for sponsoring the show P's AI Tech Tks So When we were there two years ago, I believe it was, What they did was they had the keynotes. and then most of us, I don't remember if we were told to, if it was optional or what the deal was, but most of us were shuffled into the Steve Jobs Theater. And that's when we saw Igustine, who was she talking to? I can't remember Talking to John G Andrea and maybe Mike Rockwell. And I forget it was some Apple executives. Yeah. And she I mean, I really like Iustine, but she was clearly giving nothing but softball questions to Apple I don't know if they did anything last year or not, it doesn't really matter. but this year what they did was selected media was invited to an on the record technical deep dive into the bold new architecture enabling Apple intelligence capabilities. That's Apple' description, I'm assuming they quot is from the Verge. But when they have quotation marks around I'm assing it's Apple So it was Craig Federigi, Amar Supermana, Spermana. I think I got that close to right. Who's the vice president of AI, Mike Rockwell, who's the Si lead in Sebastian Merino Miss the software VP. There's some images from teech radar, which willll put in the show notes of Steve talking in front of various like diagrams and whatnot. That's Craig, Steve. Oh Godd, Sorry. Yes. Thankk you for the correction Good grief. Yeah, this was given in the like what was it? The developer center. It's a tiny I've never even been in this room, although I maybe I've walked by it, but a tiny little room. like it's not the Steve Jobs Theater is big. Oh, this wasn't in the theater. My bad. That's where I thought it.. This was was in the developer center, that tiny room that has like four rows. It's where the talk show live was like during like the COVID lockdown year, do you remember? My bad, I didn't realize. Yeah, but it but it's so small. It's like four or five rows deep. it's just one tiny little room And I don't understand why they didn't do this as a WWBC session or publicly broadcast this or whatever, because it was clearly on the record. press was there. and you know people were taking pictures. I don't know if anyone just recorded the whole thing on their phone, but I kind of wish they did because everybody was forced to say Here iss what my AI transcription note taking app wrote. Here's what the fastest typist at our company wrote. L We're going to read a little bit from Chance Miller from nine to five Macro. I'm assuming had really good fingers and typed all this stuff up, but even that had typos. or maybe it was anyway Tons of info. in this AI tech talk that I guess is not really I mean Is it relevant to developers? There's so many WWC sessions. you could argue like Do developers need to know this, or is this just like Apple talking about a cool thing that they did? Sometimes it's a little bit of each youre like, well, it does help if developers know what's under the covers, it'll give them an idea to how to correctly assess a feature and know if it's right for them, but it's just cool. And so they did this to explain their AI architecture Fascinating, but I've had to piece it de because I wasn't there. I had to piece it together from everybodyer's reports. And some of they only invited a tiny select set of press because the room is tiny. You can't fit that many people. I don't know why they didn't do as the S she's updated or maybe they thought Most people aren't interested in this nerdy crap Craig Federi iss interested in Nnardy Craft, clearly start. But like what the press that they invited, some of them are into it and some of them are like, they just talked about AI. and like they latched onto a few of like the intercompany drama things, but I would have loved to learn even more. So I learned as much as I could by looking at what other people reported and now we'll piece it together here All right, so we have those images, like we said, and I'm going to read a bunch from Chance Miller, as John said So accord to Feder Ge. And these are as best as we know, either verbatimum or ne verbatimum cor. Y This ist people attempting to transcribe. So if there are errors, it's errors in transcription Of course, we don't have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on IiOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers And then when it comes to the knowledge base, we, of course don't use Google seearch or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that's clear. The amount of Google Assistant we use is none. So here, Craig, and I encourage people to look at these pictures and check R out. This is the best images I could find because I think they were in the front row. And there are slides behind them, which I just released the slides, man. Anyway, this shows an architecture diagram of like Like the phone on the left with like a stack of roundreck sewing like the system experience and the AI assistant and then down from that are the apps and then down from that is the system orchestrator. and like it's showing like the block diagram and then there's a line going to the right showing the cloud part of it, and we're going to talk about both parts of them. But this first part where Craig's talking, he's like, L look you know, I know we did a deal with Google, but he's trying to explain, and I'm not sure how good a job he's doing, but I think what he's trying to explain is When we say we're using Google Gamina U That doesn't mean that like you know when you go to Gemonatic Google. com and you type in that box That's not what we're using. That is an entire like piece of software that under the cover uses Gemini models and stuff We're not using Google Assistant. We're not using the Gemini chatbot And he goes further to say We're not using the infrastructure or that they use to run the bac endnd for those services either. That is entirely a Google thing. As he says, the amount of Google assistant we use is none. What he's trying to say is we wrote our own thing that uses models behind the scene that shares zero code with Google. And when we talk to models behind the scenes Those models are not any of the models that Google uses to power any of its customer facing products. So this is Apple really trying to draw the line. so you don't think like, oh, it's a shiny black blob where I get to talk to Google Gemini just like I do at Geminite at Google. com. That's not it at all Continuing from Craig. The system orrchestrator is key to the privacy architecture of our entire system. It's what coordinates requests against things like the app toolbox that provides access to actions within your apps the spotlight semantic index to access personal content to help fulfill your request, and even things like on screen context to understand what you might be looking at at the moment you're making a request This in turn is built on a set of powerful on device models. These handle everything from understanding speech to synthesizing the voice that speaks back to you, to understanding visually the environment in the on screen context, understanding text that might be on the screen, as well as a whole set of other models For some requests, models are capable of processing your Si requests entirely locally on the device. but sometimes the system orchestrator realizes that it's a more sophisticated question, and then it wants to draw on greater intelligence. It does that by contacting our models running in private Cloud compomute The Private Coud Ccute hosts our third generation of Apple Foundation models from our AFM Cloud and AFM Cloud Pro models to our AFM fusion model and image model. These are the models that are the product of our collaboration with Google. These are models designed specifically for our Apple intelligence experiences Finally, when you make a request involving current events or other elements of world knowledge, those responses are grounded by accessing Apple's world knowledge service. This is something that we've built over many years and provides a great source of information to satisfy your request. So that is kind of describing the layer kick to saying we have a whole bunch of models that are running on your device and we wrote software the system orrchestrator that's above them that when you give a query through Siri, which is an app that rewrote, and it goes to systemstem orrchestrator, which is an app that rewrote And it decides where is it going to send your request? And we have a bunch of different models that around on device that do all these things that we listed and even more. And it decides, you know that's what happens when you' like, I'm using Google Gemini to do something or I'm using like codex coding agent and you're just typing. It's not like it takes what you type, sends it to an OLM, gets a response. There's a whole piece of software under there that is deciding There's the system prompt and all other stuff, but like It's composing. proptps to send to different agents getting the responses back, using those to figure out where and when it's going to send the next response. likes that's the product. L we've talked a lot about like LM's being commoditized? Is this is this thing where anyone can have an LM and it's fine LMs may be commoditized products that we're all using are not Commodities It's kind of like saying like the underlying search engine technology may be commoditized, but like the things that make the app or the things that, you know, index the web and all that stuff are not commodities because that's what makes a product good. And here's Apple describing the app that it made on all our phones and everything. that does all the stuff that eventually, yes, sends requests to either an on device model or a cloud model in private cloud comppute But that is the very, very last link in a long chain. and you know, requests are going back and forth all internally with all this stuff many times over before you get a response. And that's, you know, that's what's Apple saying, That's what we wrote. so again, you should not expect this to look, behave or be anything like Google Gemini because it just doesn't share anything with it except for the fact that the various underlying models that it is orchestrating among were created in collaboration with Google in a fuzzy degree that we'll get to in a little bit And then even going so far as to say like When we have to find something, like the world knowledge thing, which is Apple's fun phrase It doesn't go Google search either. Like, guess I know they did a collaboration with Google, but it' not going to Google seearch, Apple made. And I think this might have been in the notes so we never got to it in the past year. But Apple's W Knledge serervice I don't if we ever talked about on the show, but like the rumor was they're making a service that knows things about the world. And so when you ask a question about the world, it doesn't go Google search. It goes to Apple's Word knowledge service. And Dan Morren' had some things to say about that. Righto, so Dan tuted. I asked SiriAI what it knew about me. well, about quote, Dan Morren quote. And it did it pretty well until I clicked on my hyperlinked name and got a Wikipedia entry for an entirely different Dan M Fascinatingly, since Siri AI seems to largely be relying on Apple's web index, it doesn't appear to have the ability to access the web directly. Case in point, after my mistaken Wikipedia identification, someone did go out and create a Wikipedia page for me But Siri AI can't see it yet if it prov even if you provide it with URL. So Dan asks, what about this and pace in the URL? And the response is that URL currently leads to a quote, Wikipedia, does not an article with this exact name, quote page. If you're seeing a live page at that link, it may have been created very recently and hasn't been indexed by my search engines yet, or it might be a draft in the Wikipedia sandbox. If you're able to open it What does the first sentence say? Why don't you tell me what it says? So this is the blessing the blessing in the curse of Apple creating its old world knowledge thing Part of what makes Google valuable Is their ability to crawl the web and keep their index up to date. Andpple Google has made tremendous advances in that back in the old days, you know, makeake a change to a page un you have to wait for it to appear in the Google index. These days Google indexes aggressively and amazingly and in proportion to how much change in traffic things get And you can bet Google is index Wikipedia like crazy How good is Apple going to be at keeping their worldor knownledge index up to date? Now, granted, this is asking a lot Wikipedia page was probably created that day and then Dan Marren's asking it. But just to show the way you know, the Si AI works Even if given the URL It still won't just go out and get that URL. It says, well, that leads to a page that says there's no article with this name. Yeah, I bet it does in the Apple World Knowledge indndex that was created somet timee in the past. But right now it doesn't. Hey, Siri AI, why don't you go to that web page right now and read what it says on it and it's like I can't do that, but if you open it up, what does it say No So I just I'm not sure how they're going to resolve this because That's staying in, baby Oh my God. This is terrible. No. This is almtogether terrible What is this playing? I guess I said the SIRI, this is a good opportunity marker for you to address the thing that people kept toasting to you this week on Mastadon Yes. so there this is going around that if you If you open up the audio for the WC keynote, in an audio editor and show a frequency spectrogram. And I verify, this is actually true. Whenever they say the word Siri they strip out. these tight narrow frequency bands at three K, four K, five K and six K hz. It It's a tight enough strip that You don't really hear a difference. like as a human listening to the presentation, it doesn't sound weird to you. It doesn't sound muffled or muted They're only doing these little tiny slices of the frequency spectrum And the idea behind this is theoretically to be just enough of a reduction in the signal in key areas defeats the recognition of everyone's devices listening to that keynote like in the background so that everyone's phones don't activate when they hear somebody you in the video say Siri Becauseuse they say that a lot in the schina. Yes. And this was actually there was a similar trick done back when Amazon did a Super Bowl commercial for the Alexa Service. I believe it was in twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen, something like that. They did something similar with the audio of that commercial, where they when they said their hail word to their assistant They also stripped out some frequencies to to fix the same problem so that way everyone's Amazon echoes wouldn't wake up in response to that. And even and Amazon even blogged about it about like the science behind why they were doing this and how it how it like, you know subtly defeated their recognition to serve this role So everyone said Since Apple's doing this, that must be why. And then everyone else started saying, well, wait a minute, my phone and my wife's phone and all these other phones in the room kept activating during the keynote. And I tried The reason why I paid attention to this is that even even back when Amazon did their version of this back you a few years ago I thought, wouldouldn't it be a great overcast feature if I just detect like if you are playing out loud on a speaker or in a car, If I try to detect when a podcast contains the word Siri or Alexa and apply that filter myself in oververcast as it's playing so that podcasts don't trigger all your devices accidentally. Wouldn't that be a cool feature? So I tried recreating this effect, even just like first in an audio editor. So I would record myself saying Siri or Alexa or whatever and giving a command And I would play it over speakers and I'd see my devices activated. And then I would say, all right, what filters in Adobe Audition or whatever do you need to apply to replicate this effect so it defeats that recognition Back when Amazon did their Super Bowl commercial. I could not do it No matter what I tried I could not get the recording of my voice to not trigger The speakers What did I do when all this came out this week about Siri? I try the exact same thing. And I went in and I was able to compare because now I had the real audio from Apple. So so I opened that real audio up and I saw exactly how they stripped out those frequencies and exactly which ones were stripped out with what kind of response pattern And I figured out exactly how to replicate like as close as possible to that process. And I applied it to a test file. and I still couldn't replicate the effect. It would still wake up all my devices whenever I would play my voice coming over the speakers. Now what it what some people have theorized is that maybe By recognizing my voice, maybe I'm giving it such a strong signal because it's me saying it that my device would woulds activate, but maybe like somebody else wouldn't be able to activate my devices as easily And that's certainly possible, but Also with everybody saying that all of their devices were being woken up by the keynote anyway. it seems like this is not necessarily a very strong filter that basically the recognition of the term Siri by all of the modern Apple devices out there seems like it actually might be sophisticated enough and sensitive enough maybe this trick of muting these few frequencies doesn't even defeat it necessarily, or doesn't defeat it enough if the voice is close enough to you. Or maybe if you haven't done like the personal voice training with the series setup process, maybe yours is more sensitive or less sensitive I don't know, but there's a of variles and it's not It doesn't seem super clear cut that this process works one hundred percent of the time Yeah, they should add some other way to mix it in there like some frequency that you could add or something. But I mean, the main problem is as we've discussed every time we mentioned audio U That waveform that you're looking at your computer screen doesn't magically transfer into your brain. It has to go through a whole bunch of other stuff. And guess what? the frequency response of speakers is not perfect So yeah, you could put out the slice out these narrow slices By the time that makes it through your audio chain, to your speakers, to the physical world, through the air, to your ears how much of that slicing out survives. Like you have to really the finer you slice it, the more chance there is that the just the quality of the amplification and the speaker cone wiggling around end up mushing some other frequencies into the range where you could notch them out and now there's like there and it's really complicated. I mean, to be clear, like this particular slice out would be very difficult to do in any kind of analog way. If you try to do it like with a parametric EQ, you won't be able to. You need like an FFT filter with That's what I'm saying but it's so narrow that like you think, okay, well now that I've cut that out, there'll be nothing in that frequency band when the sound hits my ear. And it's like, well is the signal chain from that audio file to your ears so perfect that Its tiny narrow slice of frequency is going to have no energy in it whatsoever because Your speakers are that perfect. you know, especially if you're playing over a phone speaker or something, I'm not sure it's going to work. So it doesn't surprise what I'm saying is it doesn't surprise me it is unreliable All right, so coming back around, let's talk about what Amar had said during the same presentation. Again, they are the vice president of AI. We're super excited about our third generation of Apple Foundation models or AFM in partnership with Google. We've built a family of models spanning on device to the cloud FMcore, core addvanced Cloud and Cloud Image are custom builds for Apple Silicon trained using proprietary data and refined using techniques. This was a potential transcription thing. I don't know what I think the word they had for the transcription was different. I looked at other sources and another source had techniques. but anyway, refined using something. from Geminite from Tier Mels And also, our friend Stephen Robz was there and did a video about all this, about a bunch of stuff, including this meeting. We'll put a timestamp link in, but what Stephven said was that He thinks Refined is another way of saying that they distilled the Gemini models to train Apple Foundation model And what that means is basically you have some finished model that someone's already trained And you you know, you don't want to have to go through all the effort of training your thing the same way. So instead You ask questions of that other finished model and use the answers to train your model. That's distilling Lots of companies or you know everybody does it, apparently. It's just an open secret. You know, if your competitor comes out with a better model than you, you ask that model questions and use the answers to train your model. So your model is as good as theirs It's not clear to me Well they talk about all these models. First, they give them all Apple names. It's know AFM, Apple Foundation model. Core core advanced, core advanced Coud. The names sound like old Intel processes, honestly. But But Apple gives them names. And so they're created in partnership with Google trained using proprietary data. So it's not like a finished model from Google because they're training it and' the proprietary data Apple's proprietary data Google's proprietary data and then refined using techniques from Gemini frontier models arere you distilling bigger like It's hard to tell what they're doing physically speaking Are they starting? They're all called Apple Foundation mods So they were called that before the Google deal. Apple had foundation models. This is AFM three, but they dropped the three for most of the stuff, right? So there was AFM one and two that Apple made all on its own and now they're doing three. do they taking the models from AFM two and just using those models and then distilling against Google Gemini models to train them? or are they taking Gemini models and training them with Apple It's not clear But all I'm saying is that they were not exactly clear in like What is the origin of these models whereere they made it Apple and refined with data from Google, whereere they made it Google and refined with data from Apple Like clear as mud, but they're basically saying this Both cooks have some participation in this meal. we're just not sure what they do Alrighty, then some more details. Oh this little bit here, I know the names are just like AM Core or cloud, blah, blah AFM Cloud Pro, Apple says, this is Aar talking again, is our most capable model with quality similar to Gemini frrontier models Again Does that mean it is a Gemini frontier model? Like because when they say frontier model, they're saying the best Google models that they have. This is AFM Cloud Pro. It runs only on servers. It's presumably a big model It has an Apple given name, AFM Cloud Pro and they say this one is the same quality as the best models Google has Is it just those models? Is it those models changed in some way becausecause we have those stories about how Apple is given access to these Gemini models and is allowed to tweak them and modify them. Or is it an Apple model that is distilled against Gemini models Not entirely clear, but Apple's trying to characterize When we say all this AM stuff Here's how you should think about it. And AFM Cloud Pro is basically there like They're, you know, Chat GPD five point five, there whatever. like it's's their biggest thing. All right, then some more details with regard to this same tech talk from above. John, can you go through some definitions for us to set the foundation though, please? Yeah, I had to look this up because they just start talking about them in the talk And we're going to start reading from an Apple press release, which makes more sense in light of this talk or give some background for it. So the first term is dense model. And the definition of that that I found is that Every parameter in the network is activated for every input. For example, if a model has seventy billion parameters, all seventy billion Is that correct from that? I might have miscopieded it. All seventy billion process each token, That is correct U So yeah, you've got the models are measured in a number of parameters. And if it is a dense model, anytime you give it any request All seventy billion parameters participate in every single token that it produces tokens are sequences of words. Again, I should find those links to the YouTube videos that explain how LLMs work, but it is a good idea to know how they work And that's a dense model Which may be how you think all models work, but that's not that was just like the sort of the most naive version of Then you have sparse models or mixture of experts or MOE The model is divided into many expert subnetworks. A small router network decides which experts are relevant for each token and only those experts are activated So that's where, you know, for each token that's going through All seventy billion parameters Don't participate in the processing of that token On the ones that another network decides are relevant, so you don't have to activate all of them at once. So that's Stense model versus sparse model. and you'll hear those terms in this big Apple press release about their third generation foundation models. All right, so with that in mind Apple's announcements of its third generation foundation models happened over at machine leararning d. apppple. com with we'll put the link in the show notes And with regard to the on device model FMCR is a three billion parameter dense model. So that's the one where if you ask it anything, it's using all three billion parameters AFM Core Advanced is a twenty billion parameter sparse model and our most powerful on device model. It's natively multim modal, enabling helpful features like expressive voices and higher accuracy dictation Built on cutting edge Apple research, this model activates just one to four billion parameters at a time, depending on the request. AM three core advanced is unlocked and optimized for our most capable Apple Silicon systems. So this is the model that you only get to run on, whatever it is. M three or better, iPhone seventeen Pro or better iPad M four That's the FM core FM three core advanceced. I took out the threes So just compare AFM core is there three billion parameter dense model, which is like All the parameters all the time, it runs on lower devices And AFM core advance is twenty billion, but it's sparse. So that's a big jump and you can kind of understand why only the Apple's top end devices can handle it. Even though all twenty billion aren't activated once, it's one to four billion depending on the request, but it's much more sophisticated model. So Thats That's the difference they were talking about on those slides about how how you can't get the expressive voice and stuff. That's all AFM core advanced Rto And then server based models running on private Cloud compute. There's AFM Cloud, AFM Cloud image andFM Cloud Pro. AFM Cloud is optimized for speed efficiency and performance AFM Cloud Image is for image generation editing and editing, Go figure and AFM Cloud Pro powers our most demanding use cases like eentic tool use and complex reasoning Yeah so Apple If you look at their talk and all their description of this, like come out and say this, but Every part of their architecture and I imagine most things like this is trying as hard as it can to use the smallest possible model it can geta away This is as opposed to, for example, me Whenever I use any of these products, I'm using like, you codex from the command line or something and it has like a slash models thing where you can pick which model you want Whatever the biggest is, Always pick biggest, highest effort, most thinking because I'm like I want the smartest one. I'm not it's like, well, it would be much faster if you use the small one. It's a waste of time to use the big one on these little dinky tests. I'm like I just want the smartest all the time, which means I run out of tokens a lot, which is fine, that's my own stupid choice. That is not what Apple wants billions of iPhone users to do. So what they're going to do is you make a request and it's going to be like, if we can get away with doing this with AFM core or our three billion parameter dense model, we're gonna Even though, if we gave it to AFM Cloud Pro, it would do a way better job We're not going to do that because Computing is a scarce resource. It costs money It takes time And even though it probably would give a better result, although that is somewhat debatable because somebody they say, well, if you give to one of these big thinking models, not only does it take longer but it actually gives worse result because it overths it and blah blah blah. But setting that aside My my experience has been bigger, more powerful models Do better No matter what you ask them, I'm sure there are counter examamples, but my experience with codeestuff is they do better But that's not what Apple Software wants to do. So it's going to figure out What is the wimpiest model that I can send this to If none of the on device ones will do it, then I have to send it to the cloud. But even when I send it to the clloud So we really want to send it to the one, the AFM Cloud Pe, the one we pro, the one we said that is comparable to Google stuff That is like the line of last resort But when I'm sitting there talking to like, you know you know, chat GPT or whatever in a web browser I'm at least Picking the popu menus that say, Yeahah, go to chat GPT super hard thinking maximum, whatever, all the time No matter what I'm asking it And Apple does not give you that choice. They only have one model, AFM Cloud Pro that is on that level. and I bet it gets very few requests by design The only other thing is like if you do anything with images, they just have one image model. So everything that I is going to AM clloud image But everything else, they have so many choices before they get down to the quote unquote, good model underneath it all And I think that may come up when we get to Um, Another Denmore an example, maybe we skipped over it or maybe I removed from the notes, but Sometimes Yeahah, maybe to get clipped out of the notes here. Sometimes when you ask Si AI in the in the current betas a question and it gives answer. Actually that's from my experience, not Dan Morre.' sorry. Casey, my goodness. Even you confuse you and Dan Moore. No. I don't know where it went in the notes though. anyyway, sometometimes when you ask a question you get answer as I did with Siri AI and MacOS Youd like oh, that's pretty good answ And then when you ask the same question later to, for example, demonstrate it to a family member gives you a totally different worse answer. And when I see that, I'm like Did you go to AFM Cloud Pro the first time But then the second time I ran it, you did like a local on device model and gave me a crap answer because that first answer was so much better So Yeah, Apple doesn't seem to give you control over that routing. I don't think there's a pop up menu in Siri where you can pick the model that you want. And sometimes that difference shows through Maybe if you don't if you're not like experimenting like I am and asking the same question multiple times with the exact same wording, you won't notice that But results may vary Traditional large language models, whether dense or sparsely activated, require all weights to reside in active memory or DRAM To break this barrier, AFM Core Advanced introduces a novel, sparsely activated architecture built on instruction following pruning or IFP, a technique developed by Apple researchers. in fact There's instruction following pruning of large language models, four large language models from june twenty twenty five. That's also at machine leararning. apppple dot comot Yeah. I forget if we ever talked about that paper that Apple' had a bunch of papers on this topic, but here is the fruits of that labor. Apparently AFM Core addvanced does, in fact this thing. And this is this paper ys from June from basically a year ago All right, then there's also LLM in a flash, efficient large language model inference with limited memory. Again on machine learning. apppple. comot Philiponi Stefano wrote an article about it, which will also link from Philiponi. The LLM in a Fash paper addresses challenges and solutions for running LLMs on devices with limited DRAM capacity It presents an approach for efficiently executing LLMs that exceed available DRAM capacity by storing model parameters in flash memory and loading them into DRAM on demand. Yeah I think we did also mention that paper ages ago. Apple explicitly calls out the instruction following pruning for large language model sparse thing. so they're definitely doing that because that was Reading from direct wrote from their VP of AI or whatever This is his name Amar The yeah, yeah. Yes. And there's other people about about flash memory about like, oh, you don't have enough RAM but you want to use a bigger model you can store part of it in a flash and like swap it in or whatever. That makes me wonder if one of the reasons Apple Intelligence is disabled on external drives Be Apple just doesn't want to deal with haaving to guess at the performance characteristics of external drives, if they're doing if they are in fact doing this technique, this LM and a flash thing where some of the model is in RAM and some of it is on flh. Apple knows the char the speed characteristics of all of its internal SSDs. And so maybe it's one it's an external drive. they're like How about we just disable entirely? because I'm sure plenty of the drives are fast enough But if they're not it has a terrible experience or like pererformance hols off a cliff. I'm just speculating I have no idea this is true. If someone knows for sure, please write in and tell me why? Why can't I boot for an external drive? and use Apple intelligence, but you can't, and maybe this iss one of the reasons. Or could be that this LMmental flashhing thing isn't even used in any of the twenty seven OSs. I don't know that either, but I just thought I'd throw that out there All right, with that in mind, Coming back to Apple's Foundation mododels announcement, instead of forcing the entire model into DRAM, the full model is stored in flash memory or NAND. Because NAND to DRAM bandwidth is too slow to swap weights token by token as standard, MOE or mixture of experts models require, FM three Core addvance makes routing decisions per prompt. A lightweight dense block selects a fixed set of experts during initial processing periodically re selecting them during generation. To minimize data movement, the model relies on a high percentage of always active shared experts, alongside input dependent, routed experts, swapped into DRAM only when needed This design also introduces crucial inference time elasticity Rather than using a single model for all tasks or managing an ensemble of smaller models, FMCore addvanced uses a predetermined number of active parameters tailored to each specific use case. This allows weights to be loaded incrementally across requests of varying difficulty, scaling the model size for beyond traditional DRAM limits while minimizing latency. So this is them saying This specific model, AFM three core addvance does use the things from the flash paper it sounds like But of course, Apple Intelligence hasn't been able to run when Bota from an external drive since its introduction in twenty twenty four. So this and also the AFM core addvance only runs on the highest end hardware. So that can't be the root reason why they do this, but I wonder if it contributes to it Anyway, all of that is to say, if you think Apple just like bought models from Google, stuck them on servers and then sent requests to them. That's not how this works at all. Like I feel like thats the biggest point of this tech talk is all those things on the diagram and Craig Vadery pointing out like They Google's participation, they were an important part of this and we'll get to you some even more important parts of them in a second Apple is the one writing the software that's on top of it. and Apple, in fact has made many advances. all those AI people that Apple hired that eventually left to go to other AI companies They actually did interesting novel work. I'm not sure if this stuff is like The equivalent things are happening at all the cutting edge AI companies, but I do want to give Apple credit for like they're not just like We failed. We can't do anything. Let's just use a third party product and slap a seriri face on it. Not at all. Like these papers and the fact that they're using them and the description of how they use them and how it gets them to be able to run models that otherwise wouldn't run on device. and essentially how it makes it possible for Apple to ship twenty seven OSs to literally billions of Apple devices and not destroy And all their servers, like they can't do the thing that everyone else is doing, which is like every request goes to a server. Don't run anything on device They're trying so hard to run everything on devices that they possibly can. Using lots of interesting techniques to make models that shouldn't fit on your phone actually fit on your phone and shuffling between them and like all it's fascinating. and it shows that they are not I mean, they're behind, like because they're not the cutting edge like their competitors are, but they're using what they're good at Basically reading client side software to innovate in that area on top of the underlying technologies that makes the models themselves and trains them and stuff like that Then coming back to AMar, to bring this model to production, we work with both Google and NVIidia to extend our private cloud compute infrastructure to NvIDia GPUs in Google's Cloud while maintaining Apple's unmatched Privacy guarantees Enter Cunningham over ours technical rights to do this while still making the samev privacy promises, Apple's new iteration of private Cloud C compute is using Nvidia conffidential computing, Intel's trust domain extensions, and Google's Titan seecurity chip to provide layers of protection similar to what Apple provides for its own servers To provide additional protection, Apple keeps a cryptographically verifiable append only ledger of all Google Cloud hardware that is part of the PCC fleet And Apple's devices will only trust hardware, excuse me software on these servers that is signed by Apple The Google Cloud servers don't yet support all the same protections as Apple's own private clloud compute servers, but Apple says it will gradually be ramping towards the complete set of protections throughout the summer preview period So what is a u What graphically verifiable append only ledger sound like to you? Yeah, it's not blockchain. It sounds like it. Isn't that exactly what a blockchain is? R I' say a blockchain. yeah I mean, all this stuff has been point out when we talked about private account compomute, like Apple is doing everything that it possibly can to mathematically show and prove and guarantee that you are talking to servers that behave in the way that Apple says. And that way is H can't see it because it' all end at encrypted. So Apple can't see it And obviously, the server that receives a request has to, of course, decrypt it because how could you know, it has to know what you said to do the work But the other guarantee that Apple gives is the software that runs on those servers will never save any of that. It doesn't even log stuff. it doesn't like no data that comes into that server that is decrypted in memory and then processed and cheucked back out is saved in any way. And so that's private Cou computing. There was twenty twenty four where they talked about that. they gave a big paper on it and everything. And that's part of the promise is We our software behaves in this way We can't see your data. We don't save your data. We can never see it. If anyone asks us to get it, we don't have it. We never kept it. It is transiently there and disappears and that entire time it's encrypted and kept in this hardware and then we don't save anything about it thrown away Apple has its own servers with those you know, M three Ultra, M two Ultras, whatever they were that we saw being made in that factory, runs Apple Silicon, runs their models. they've had that for I guess since twenty twenty four That's private cloud comput. They just continued to call everythingvery on their servers private cloud computute. So you're wondering about this several episodes ago, what would they do? They're just calling private cloud compute And what they mean by that is Th M two Ultra Apple Silicon servers that Apple made And also, Nvia GPU is running in Google's Cou Because as we saw, Google has a similar architecture to PCC. Uh and those those things that Casey listed there, if you go to the Andrew Cunningham article ArSechn that will be in the show notes. Those are links. So if you want to learn what is NvIidia' confidential computing What is Intels trust domain extensions? What is Google's Titaned security chip? Those are the pieces of the puzzle that are building up towards making Google able to run servers that Apple calls private cloud computing, even though They share essentially nothing with Apple's private cloud computing other than the promises that they fulfill. And as this article says, They're not quite up to the standards of Apple's Private Cloud compute, but the idea is they will be before the twenty seven oS ship. If they're not, how will we know? like again, Apple gives these images to security researchers so they can mathematically prove that When you run a request, it's really running against this image and security researchers have at it, prove to yourself that we're not saving any data There's no secret NSA side channel. that sends every request in plain text to some server or logs it like you have the binary image. this is it prove to yourself because the executable binaries, you know it's just machine code. You can see what it does. You can decompile it, and you security researchers should be able to prove, S, we're not saving it anymore. And then also we should be able to prove is that thing that we gave you, that's the thing that's running on the server. And All the stories I've said about this is that in the end you have to there is a root of trust in believing that Apple is not lying to you That's true of every piece of software in the world. Lots of times people send and ask ADB questions like they say Apple says My messag is entered encrypted. But do we have to just take their word for it? The answer is yes. you know they write the software. They could lie and say it's end encrypted and just be lying through their teeth. security researchers would discover that they were lying in most cases. In the end, there is some root of trust, you know, if you keep digging down and like what is that paper that we've linked to a few times U musing on trust or whatever, something like that about talking about if you had a compiler that was corrupted in some way that you couldn't trust anything because the compiler builds all your other programs. Oh I wish I could remember that one. Yeah, I know what you' thking about finder for the notes, maybe U So yeah, but you do have to trust some when they say we some software that do this. And and also you have to trust that it doesn't have bugs, which sometimes it does, it's supposed to do this, but it doesn't actually do this.'s a bug in it somewhere Um But yeah, that's it seems like, I mean, the question is Those Apple silicon surfers with the M two ultras in them How long will Apple keep doing that? Have they already given up on that effort and said, well, it's a cool thing. We tried it, but that was under the old regime and now what we're going to do is what everybody else does, which is we're going to run NVIDA GP's, whichich is interesting because Apple hates NVIia's guts and hasn't done anything with NvIA for ages, but apparently they'll use their GPU's and servers. And it's also interesting because Google, which is running these servers. Google has their own like TPUs. there's tensor processing units that are really good at running Google's models. Th Google makes its own silicon, these TPUs, which talked about a long time ago on the show. that are different than NVidD GPU's Why isn't Apple using those Well If Apple uses Nvidia GPUs, they're not tied to Google So if and when the deal ends with Google or they don't like Google hosting their stuff, they could go to anybody and say, hey, do you have a data center filled with NVidia GPU's that we can run our stuff on They probably do. Only Google has DPU's I think. I don't think there's any sort of third party for that. Now I'm not sure how much stake to put in that because if I was sending these things to Google, I would just run on their TPU's and if we have to go elsewhere, then just like port it or whatever but maybe that's more difficult But anyway It seems like Apple might be giving up on the idea that they're going to run Apple Siliconon servers. in their own data centers and build their own hardware and whatever that factory was and Arizona and Texas. and instead ofre just going to do what every else does and just Hey some hosting provider like AWS or Google Cloud to rent racks full of anyIia GPUs. And at this point Google did a deal with XAI, GroC, whatever. like they built out data centers that they aren't using because no one wants to use GroC because it sucks never hits Een Musk. And so XAI is renting whole data centers to Google So it could be that when you talk to Sary AI, it ends up going to an XAI data center that is being rented by Google where it's running NVia GPU's. Gacious. What a world that we live in. But yeah, this seems like a A change in Apples stance and again, notably the first time that I'm aware of since when NvidDia had a bum GPU in like an Book or something that like the relationship between Apple and NVIidia soured. and I belie if it was a MacBook pro Was it? Yeah. And like that was so long ago, like you would say it was so long ago, sureurely none of those people are still there, but Phil Shehll is still there U But yeah, they're still sore about that, but this is one degree separated, I guess. Like the deal is that Google will run servers for them because Google's running good at running servers. And I'm not sure if Apple dictated that and by the way, the servers you run for us, they should use NA GPUs and not your tensor things, not your TPU's But that's the shape of it Apple and NVidia together again, sort of. Sitting in a tree COMPT ING Sitting in one of Ela Muk's dat centers. You're gonna spell out inference, I don't know. Yeah. So again, this is not you know, getting back to video podast. It's not a visual medium and we don't have good images. The technad our images are blurry because it's like taking from a phone in an audience or whatever. But please do look at the block diagrams Um And I think they did at one point, they like highlighted things in a particular like color. I think it was all shades of blue so it was tough to see on the screen, notot a great choice. But basically they said Um All the things in blue are Apple And all the things in this different shade of blue are Google. Everything was Apple. The only things that were Google were like, you know, tinted shaded stuff and the cloud thing. So they weren't forthcoming with exactly like is it Google model that we change as an Apple model that we just still Goog like they didn't go into that level of detail But their big emphasis here was Most of the stuff you see in SRAI is software Apple wrote. and They didn't say this, but like it's clear that You kind of need the part that Google provided or otherwise none of this works But Apple was really emphasizing, we did a lot of work for this. And I mean, I guess it's like also when it falls on its face and doesn't work right or you're aren' happy with how it goes. Don't blame Google because that wasn't up to them. That was up to us All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode Quince and Lisa, and thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at ATP dotfm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP oververtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in oververtime, we're going to be talking about by popularly request, the WBDC State of the Union session. There was a whole bunch of stuff covered there. We're going go over that in oververtime because it just couldn't fit in the show You can join listen HDFM slash join. Thanks everybody, and we'll talk to you next week Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin 'cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him becausecause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes atp dot m And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at CAS. E Y L ISS so that's Casey Lis M A R C O A R M Anti Marco Armen S I R AC USS Syacuse' accidental acc mean to accal accal The T podcast so long byy the way, if you're not aTV member, you're like, are you gonna to state the union overtime, non members hate when we put stuff in overtime because they don't get to hear overtime. And like I get it, you know, but like here's the thing I'm pretty sure in multiple past years possibly also including last year We didn't cover state of the Union at all, because what happens after WWC is there's tons of follow up and tons of news and things happen and State of the Union just gets pushed off and pushed off, and then we look up and it's a month later and it's like, I guess we'll just delete State of the Union from the notes because Like it's it's old news now. like we can't really like go back to it. It's just it's already done and gone That's what overtimes That's why stay the Union So don nott be sorry about it. I mean we're sorry, like, you know, and it is developer type stuff. and it's like, how can state of the Union be an overtime? That should be part of a regular episode when we didn't cover it at all P people didn't notice, but now it's in overtime somebody will complain. So anyway, I will say that the solution to this is to become a member C't confir All right, I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes talking about trip results. So I just went to Cape Charles for the last week. This is our happy place on the eastern shore of Virginia. and I brought a truly asinine amount of equipment and computing related things in no small part because I had to record this very show but also because on me. And I wanted to talk about the Unified travel router, which we talked about at some point in the past, but to refresh your memory, the standard operating procedure for travel routers is a GLINT, which I don't know how to verbally describe how big a GLINet router is, but they're small but not tiny by any stretch. And a few months ago, UnFi came out or Ubiquity came out with the Unifi Travel router, which is exceedingly small. Let's imagine like five or six credit cards stacked on top of each other. That's probably not exactly right, but that's kind of what I'm talking about And what a travel router does is It If you have a single internet connection, which presumably you do But you would like to broadcast that to your entire families constellation of devices, then what you can do is you can use a travel router, be that a GLI net or the Unifi travel router to log into or connect to whatever the internet source is. So in a best case scenario, you plug hernet right into this little baby travel router, but more realistically, you are in a hotel or something like that and you have the travel router log into the hotel WiFi and go through that whole pain, you know, painful dance But Z The travel router broadcasts its own WiFi that your phone and iPad and Mac and your spouse's phone and Mac and iPad and your children's iPads and switches and so on and so forth, they all connect to the UTR, the UnFi Travel Router. That is figuring out how to get you to the internet Now the pro move in my personal opinion, which you can do either by hand or the Unifi travel router does automatically, is to set your WiFi that this portable router is broadcasting to be the exact same SSID and password as your home Wiifi. So this way everything just jumps on the nearby wiFi thinking effectively that it's at home. This iss particularly critical if you're Dork like me and bring one or maybe two, Sono speakers with you when you are on a long trip like this becausecause then the sono speakers say, Ah, yes, I'm at home. And even though some of my friends are not here, I'm at home, so I will work just the way I always do, which is great. This kind of reminds me of I don't know there's lots of animated shows that have done this, but like some some animated character or a person who has to be in water, like maybe it's a mermaid or something or like they dry out that wherever they go, they bring like a a fish bowl or a bowl of water or whatever with them. and it just occurs to me that Casey, wherever you go, you have to bring speakers with you because you wither and die without constant music playing. Correct. That is pretty much correct I really want to argue with you, but You're the guy in Pana with a sprinkler thing and he's pping the water as he walks around because he's got pp in the water. There go. I've never seen it. mayaybe we'll do it for remmemberers sion. I was just about to say. Anyhow, so yeah, so this is one of those things that it is exceedingly nerdy. Most people, even perhaps most nerds, want nothing to do with it And that's perfectly fair No argument One of the things that I was interested to do because this was the first time I had taken the UTR to travel to something larger than a hotel room And the UTR is very small and doesn't use a lot of power, and it seems like It's really meant for the space of like a car or a hotel room, but not the space of an entire house. And when we stay at Cape Charles, we stay in a standalone house. I would guess it's like fifteen hundred square feet, so not small, but by no means voluminous either. And I don't know what that would be in metric. I'm sorry, I have no idea. But anyways, it's three bedrooms, it's got like What is it two and a half bathrooms, which is Basically perfect for our family And I was really worried and I brought a GLINet with me as well because I assumed that the UTR just wouldn't have the oomph. broadcast wiifi throughout the entire house. Now, this was The GLI net was set up for success because it so happens that the cable modem and the router for the house were fairly centrally located, which was excellent But I have to say The YouTuor worked great I was very impressed I in fact, didn't want to say anything to Marco about this h John for that matter but When I was talking on ETP I was connecting via ethernet. I think I did talk about this last week via a really janky like fifty foot ethernet cable running through the kitchen of the house over to where the UTR was which actually had a ubiquity Flex mini, I think it is hanging off of it so I could connect more than one thing via ethernet because again, I'm a dork Anyways, but I had it so the laptop was connected ethernet to a little tiny five port switch, which was connected to the UTR, which was in turn connected as a client to the house's router. Oh my God. But by the way, the UTR supports teleport, which is kind of sort of like tailscale, but just for unify stuff. And so what teleport is it's a Wireguard based VPN that's mostly zero config or very little config So I was going ethernet to switch to UTR to router via VPN to Richmond. to talk to you too And I gota say it worked for What? I'm stunned. I't God. like no latency. It's astonishing that this worked at all. Much less did so with effectively no latency So I don't have too much more to say other than that. Teleport on the UTR has been a little wonky for me. It used to almost never work again, teleport being the VPN thing. It used to almost never work. Now it mostly works Occasionally, it'll just kind of forget to be connected to teleport, which isn't the end of the earth, but I prefer all of our traffic to be encrypted through whatever the house's router is and emerge or ingress onto the internet from our house, like our literal home in Richmond But all in all, it actually worked really well. And what's interesting about the fact that the UTR can be on on teleport is that If I wanted to, I could actually bring one of the UnFi security cameras and connect it to the UTR. I guess it would have to be a WiFi camera, or I would have to use like a POE injector or whatever. But I could connect it to the UTR and as long as it's on teleport, it will record the camera in the travel situation to my setup at home Why would you do this? I have no idea except to make sure that Penny isn't clbing on the furniture. But other than that, I have no answer. But the fact that you can is really freaking cool. So they are not a sponsor, they should be a sponsor. They arere not a sponsor, but you should really consider the Unify Travel router if you're traveling. And I find that even if I didn't use it at the house I would consider bringing this anyway because it is so darn small. And when you're in the car, if you set it up, you hook it to your phone to tether off your phone or if you do like me and borrow a hotspot from the library or what have you, it is a really excellent way to get the kids online quick and easily in the car and you just what I have is, you know a little anchor like battery pack connected to the UTR, which is in turn connected to the hotspot and it works great. So this is Proably something you should not want in your life because you are really in a bad state if this is something that excites you as much as excites me. But I gotta tell you, I freaking love this thing. It's great.