Refining User Interface Design

Stephven Hacket, you talked me through I don't even know how to describe it. I just want to dive right into it You talked me through something crazy sort of. I don't know. Do you have the impression that you was like I didn't even do anything a little bit. Yeah. so you texted me dealing with this Apple account issue that like you can't set up a little bit. A lot of people, I think are in the boat that you and I found ourselves in We had an Apple ID from back in the day. they were using for like mine was like from iTunes purchases, like buying music, emo music in two thousand four to put on my iPod. But that's not the Apple account I use for my iCloud stuff Right various reasons And that just opens a whole world of hur It's so complicated. that it is even hard to state problem as opposed to describbe but I think is the solution. But it's basically But for the people with the dual accounts that which you said well, where your iCloud ID AKA, your primary Apple account And I actually in this case, it's actually ever so slightly more difficult to talk about with the new lingo of Apple accounts as opposed to Apple ID's So if I say Apple ID, you know what I mean because it's a little bit easier to think of them as IDs. But anyway I've got an Mac. com Apple ID. This is my iCloud life This is where I get mail there. All my iCloud storage is there It is part of a family with my wife and my son My media and purchases account is secondary. like and that's an at daring fireball address for reasons I don't even remember, but I know that it started when I started buying music on iTunes. We were also innocent back then, right? And the system was so simple, right? It's like buy music. it in was it fairplay was there DRM? and put it on the iPod. Yeah. that's all it had to do in the beginning. Yeah. I didn't give much thought to. I have no recollection of why I decided to use my main daring fireball. nT address as that address And I guess I think some point it doesn't even matter at this point, but I think I already had my Mac d. com address But I didn't really use Mac. com for anything. I just like wanted the domain or the username and it felt like a good thing to have but I didn't want to use it for much. and so I didn't think to use it for the iTunes purchases. And at the time It just was like, you just need an email address for iTunes purchases. That's it. It didn wasn't really about having an account and there was no idea that Now fast forward, twenty five years to now And I literally have I know this sounds ridiculous, but I've got likeike thousands of dollars of movies purchased fififty movies times, let's say fifteen dollars each seven hundred and fifty bucks. Yeah. And I've bought hundreds of movies becausecause as I often say, money runs through my hands like water. But instead of renting a movie, I usually buy it. from iTunes or they don't even call it iTunes anymore Be if I think if I possibly maybe want to watch it twice, then it's already roughly the same as two rentals. and rental thing. How many times have you like rented a movie? I know Dan Benjamin and I used to talk about it back in day when we had little kids When it was a twenty four hour period I think now the rental period is like forty eight or something. I twenty four But But yeah, when your kids are small, it's like, oh, they want to watch it again L like how many times can we watch this Pixar movie or twenty four hours? Right O or d We your parents and you fall asleep and you don't finish it, But then by the time it's the next twenty four hours later and the kids are put to bed and you can start it again, it's like up too late because maybe you started at nine o'clock on Monday and then Tuesday. you want to watch the second half of the movie and it's nine hundred one when you hit play and it's like sorry, it's expired Right. And I guess the twenty four hours thing isn't a problem anymore, but I end up buying a lot of movies. and I don't regret it, but Now I've got thousands of dollars worth of movies tied to that There is We should preface it for people are like, well, isn't there a thing that Apple announced like a year ago where you can merge the two accounts And I guess I should step back a little further where for years for anybody out there who does not have to deal with it. I hopefully we can make this interesting to listen to But if you've just got one Apple ID that you use for everything for iCloud and for purchases You are in good shape Yeah on And if you don't Forever, ever since these this ev Multiple systems have evolved over the years A has always more or less supported it And the support has become better in recent years, putting aside the merging accounts thing It's you when you're setting up a new device, And it says, what's your Apple account and you put in your Mac. com. And then there's a button now that says like, do you have a separate It's small print because most people don't have it. they don't want to draw attention to it. but there is a way to say I have a separate account for media and purchases And then you can enter a different account for that And then your new device is set up right out of the box and Media and purchases go to your secondary account. which is for media and purchases and your iCloud and everything else goes to your primary account And it used to be like ten to fifteen years ago, you would have to set it up with a primary account first and then go into the settings app and poke around until you found the media and purchases thing and sign out. And there were always for a multiple number of years, some weird things that would make the wrong assumption I think my game center my I'm not even a big game center user, so I don't really care even that much I think for a number of years want my game center ID to be that secondary account, the one that's at daring fireball. net because that's were most of the people who I would play Games withith would know me from But it would default to just guessing was my Mac. com address. Yeah. Yeah. It's like that team, no one on that team had the problem we had of multiple applicants right Just use the system one. Yeahah, I do wonder at what point this became clear to Apple that they needed a solution. And so like you said, a few years ago They rolled out a thing where you can optionally like migrate purchases. fromrom one account to another And The fine print And that support document is just unbelievable. I mean, I'm sure I've signed contracts with less text, right? L You have to jump through all these hoops and the counts have to be in exactly the correct state And then you can hit the migrate purchase button And I remember when that rolled out. great, I can solve my problem and Best I could tell I fit all the criteria and I hit the button and just Nothing right is kind of just fails, not a lot of feedback. And it's frustrating. You're right. Apple has downplayed the sort of dual account thing. It's still there. It still works, but you do run into edge cases And I think that's just going to continue to sort of degrade overver time, right I know that I have talked about this on previous episodes of the show. I have no recollection with whom Could have been you, even I don't know Probably like Somebody who's similarly long on the platform, Snell or Glenn Fleichman or somebody. I don't know. But I know I've talked about it and I actually almost can state this as a fact, not just as a guess Part of the saving grace that this has always worked to some degree of ease. And in recent years, it really has been much easier where if you know what you're doing when you're setting up a new device, everything just works. and it's been cou of years and of course, I the nature of my work with a bunch of review units every year. iPads, multiple phones, Mac books I set up more devices than almost anybody except people who also work at Apple and there aren't those edge cases like, oh, Game Center goes to the wrong one sometimes or something like that. It just works for the most part now, keepeping the duual two different accounts. O for iCloud, one for purchases The saving grace behind that has been It is an it's a downstream effect of the fact that employees by and large tend to stay at the company for a very long time. It's it is not a company where whatever you do, but including engineers They don't really job hop through Apple as much as other companies. And there's an awful lot of people And a lot of times when people do, even people who leave Apple often come back. after five or six years. They'll go to another company and then they come back. partart of that's just how the career game works. You come back and all of a sudden and Apple has stuff built. you get like your old ID number back, you don't get a new number I think you get your old email address back in most cases, it's like you never left or in some ways like you never left Because of that, there are a lot of Apple people in the same situation as us because they were on the platform when iTunes came out, made similar decisions. and so there are a more than you would think. It's certainly a higher percentage than in the general population of just users There are Apple employees in the same boat. Therefore, there are a number of people probably to a very high level within the company who have to deal with this. So either engineers who are willing to work on it, be like managers up to executives who need it and who are like, Hey, why the hell doesn't this work? I'm not, you know, sure So that's been the saving grace What I worry about at this point is more and more is how many of those people are starting to retire out of the company because they're in their sixties, not their forties or fifties That could be a problem. But for the most part, it all has worked better over the years, not worse. It has gotten more officially supported And the stuff from device to device has worked better And it just kind of works. Once you have it set up, it is a little more complicated, but then it just works. And the way it worked with family sharing with iCloud was seamless where I'm the one who buys most of the stuff and like the Apple TV is set up to my media and purchasing account. So when my wife or son buys a movie. It goes through my account and they' you know that's ours is too And I can join my Mac. com identity is in the family, but because me the person In this way, the family is like the person not the account. and me, the person has both the Mac dot c identity and Daring Fireball Media and Purchases identity and it all just works. Those things go to the family. Whar this broke is with Apple onene. Yeah Yeah. This is where I hit the wall too, right, which Apple O on the surface is great. Sometimes I go into the UI where it's like, oh, I actually want to pay for these separately and I always make a decision of like It's cheaper for like the combo that I want and like Wh cares about the random stuff that I'm not using? But it does seem like one of those features that doesn't quite gel. identity system and you get into storage and it gets strange quick. Yeah. So I just She had your I was going to do this anyway, but after I got off the phone with you and then I did some more work, which we will talk about and I got it working where we haven't even gotten to what it is And you were like, you screamed at me write it down Yeah Yeah And I was like, even better, how about I have you on the show? And you're like, okay, but write it down I have some notes here, but in my notes, this isn't even a problem, but I just did some math which I haven't looked at recently. Sple one and I have the premier whatever plan for family It includes Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple News Plus, Apple Fitness, and two terabytes of iCloud shared storage. And Apple Music costs seventeen. And Apple does all of this monthly. I don't think you can get a yearly subscription to any of this stuff. No whichich is kind of interesting, but that's sort of a side discussion why they don't want to charge annually. but Apple music, seventeen Apple TV is up to thirteen. Some of this stuff I hadn't really thought about, but remember when Apple TV was like five bucks? Yeah, Apple TV in particular has had several price increases. or some of the others, I don't think I've seen quite the jump That's up to like normal. That's no longer like a discounted streaming service. I mean, Netflix is in a class by itself in all w, but thirirteen bucks a month.'s that's like mid range. for those things. But with the benefit, I should say it's still because it's ad free and there is just one tier. you don't and you get the best quality. So it still is it is a good value compared to the others because it's a much higher visibly high video signal. It's just the compression artifacts are no not as good. The sound is great You don't have to there's no nickel and diming over o, do you want SD or HD or high quality streaming? You just pay thirteen bucks a month and there's no ads. anyway. Apple Arcade, seven bucks a month, Apple News plus, thirteen bucks a month, Apple Fitness, ten bucks a month So those things alone cost sixty bucks a month Even though they're all weird numbers like thirteen and seventeen and seven You add them all up and it's a nice even sixty bucks a month. And I'm cutting off the dot ninety dines ple or the two terabytes of iCloud storage on its own is ten bucks a month Right, so that's to buy them all individually would be seventy bucks a month familyily sh. Aouple one includes all of those things and it's thirty eight bucks a month That is Almost half price, right? That is a pretty good deal. And even if you say, well, I don't use Apple Arcade or Fitness, like those are of those items, those would be the first two I would probably drop Although I think my son would immediately notice the arcade. But even if you take off seventeen bucks a month from arcade and fitness, you're still at ty three dollars a month, which is still higher than Apple one at thirty eight dollars a month. You'd have to drop a couple of them to make it even and even then it's even Right. So just Apple Music and TV. is thirty and ten for the two terabytes of storage gets you to forty And that's two bucks more than Apple one at thirty eight. So you could think of Apple One as giving you arcade news plus and fitness for free. Pretty good deal That's exactly how I think about it too. It's Some of that stuff I never touch, but Yeah It's not hurting anything and I'm saving some money. So So be it It's a very good deal if you were already going to be in for just like for me and I can verify that the music thing For me personally, the TV is essential. I'm always watching Apple TV programming relay this story. I've learned that dropping Apple music is instantly noticeable by my family members. Apple newews plus, I actually do. I easily get thirteen dollars a month of value out of that For the Wall Street Journal alone. Wre. comes with it Right. Wall Street Journal alone is easily worth thirteen bucks. But also now the Washington Post, I unsubscribed. I was a long timee subscriber to the Washington Post and unsubscribed in a of peak back during the election. And I was like, you know what? It's not just about the Bezos editorial. We're not going to endorse Kamala Harris. It was like, you know what? This newspaper is going to shit anyway every once in a while But they're paywalled and every once in a while there's an article I want to read and I can just go from Safari to Apple News and it opens right up without a paywall. There's a couple. There's a bunch that I usually get thirteen bucks a month So it's a good value The Problem is with the family is that we ran out of storage in December Mmm. Well on the surface of it Right It's like, oh we got two terabytes in your case across three people. In my case, it's five But it's like it goes by so fast, especially once you have kids with iPhones and it's game over My son recently passed me in between December and now he's passed my IiCloud footprint I'm at like I'm still a hair under one terabyte personally and he's past one terabyte and then my wife is I don't know, two hundred gigabytes or something like that. Let me just hold that right there. That seems like as good a spot as any. for cliphanger. around the sponsor. read And I'm going to thank our good friends at Hunger strikes, you're tired, you're exhausted. there's something healthy. here we go in your fridge and pantry that you should be making, but you just don't have it in you Right? Yeah. It's like u I don't have time. I'm too tired already. Factor solves this problem because factor is a service. You sign up, you get some meals sent to you. They're fresh food already prepared, not a meal kit with a bunch of ingredients that you have to put together, which is a great idea There' are great services that have sponsored the show in the past and that I have enjoyed very much for making like dinners or something like that. But factor isn't like that. It is all packaged together, a single serving for one person, Fresh They ship to you like the meal kits with like dry ice in the package to keep everything cold and refrigerated But you got a whole meal sent to you, you just put it in a microwave, heat it up in a couple of minutes and it is ready to eat. It's almost impossible to think of a way that you could get a really good meal, hot meal easier than just taking it out of factory meal out of the fridge, putting in a microwave and eating it. It is really great really nutritious, they focus on high quality ingredients and they have so many options. Every week they have a different menu to choose from and they have a whole bunch of categories of food It's overall stuff. like you can concentrate on stuff if you've got like goals in mind, like weight loss or just overall nutrition or increasing your protein and specifically you can Tck out meals that are optimized for that They've got even something called a Muscle Pro collection for strength and workout recovery All sorts of stuff like that if you have specific ingredients, or you can just browse for ones that look tasty. And I have found after selecting a lot of meals from Factor through their sponsorships of the show whatever sounds like is going to be like, it is like that. They're very good at describing the meals and everything kind of comes out the way you think it's going to be. 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Always am happy to have their stuff in the fridge and it always goes quick So where do you go to find out more? headad to factormeals d. com slash talk show fifty off and the fifty is five zero Gess what? that Get you percent off your first Purchase Talk show fifty off You get fifty percent off and free daily greens per box with a new subscription only while supplies last until september twenty seventh, twenty twenty six. See website for more details. headad to factactormeals. com slash talk show fifty off and use that code talk show fifty off to get fifty percent off Free daily greens per box with new subscription only while supplies last until september twenty seventh twenty twenty six website for more details All right, where did I leave the cliffhanger? Apple one, right? All right, more storage. So December, we get up to one point nine something terabytes out of two and I had looked at this problem before and thought the answer was, well, I'm the family nerd, right? I take care of this is don't maybe I don't do much as a family contributor, but I can all of our technology working. No surprise. Ill bet a lot of people who listen to the show are in the same role in their family. right? The Wi Fi doesn't work Talk to Daddy, right? I mean, it's me, that's my job And I don't really want anybody else screwing with the Wiifi. So I'm happy to do it, right? I jump right on it if somebody sees a problem. right? We're out of collective iCloud storage That's my problem. But I just figured I would go in and click around in settings or system settings on my Mac buy some additional iCloud storage And then that would be piled on top of our two terabytes from Apple onene becausecause the key thing to know is that There is no tier in Apple onene above Apple One preremiere for thirty eight dollars with all of the media features and app features and two terabytes of iCloud storage There is no Apple O ultra with all of the media stuff and six terabytes of storage. that Apple one as a thing tops out There is a page per have it here. There is a page onn Ales website What happens to your iCloud storage when you sign up for Apple onene? And when you sign up for Apple onene if you have less storage Th the Apple one account tier you're signing up for, it just it just gets canceled at the end of the month. So if you're only paying for two hundred gigabytes, but then you upgrade, you get a two terabyte family plan They just cancel the twenty gigabyte plan And there's an explanation for this and for that. There's no explanation for what do you do if you have a separate Media account There is a part that says if you belong to a family sharing group If a family member subscribes to an Apple One family or Premier plan, You can choose to keep your current Cloud pllus plan or use the shared iCloud storage in Apple onene Now what that bullet point means is let's say My wife wanted to keep her own iCloud storage and she wanted to pay ten dollars a month. and have her own two terabytes. that isn't shared with me and our son She can do that And she can just say, I don't want to use the family storage. I want the other family privileges like a shared calendar and the access to my apps and the media that I purchase and stuff like that. But she would have her own iCloud plan for ten dollars a month And any other member could do that, But then that's not share So she buys a ten dollar iCloud It doesn't get pooled with the family thing that I'm in charge of and that my account has purchased the Apple O It's her ten dollars a month and her two terabytes And then me and my son would share the other two two terabyte shared account If there's the second bullet point. If your family needs additional iCloud storage. shhared storage is implied there. The family member Purchased Apple One can buy more iCloud storage bothoth Apple one and an iCloud plan, your family can share up to fourteen terabytes of total iCloud storage. That's because Apple one comes with two terabytes and the most the biggest iCloud standalone plan you can currently buy is a twelve terabyte. plan for sixty dollars a month Mhm So two plus twelve is fourteen. person or at noight what did they say here? The family member purchaseed it can buy more Well That works if you have a regular single iCloud ID But it's not the family member, which to me it says person who has to do this It has to be the actual The actual ID, the actual separate loggin Right, these separate login has to purchase both The problem with that is that all of the other ways that you and I have talked about it leading up to this point on the show. It works because those two worlds of purchases are sort of different You buy iCloud with your iCloud ID and you buy and media and subscriptions to media, things like Apple Fitness through your media and purchase account Bple one crosses the two streams because it is a single bundle Both Media stuff And iCloud storage And what happened in December is when I tried to do this I just started poking around and thinking, well, this must be easy. I probably read that same thing where it says the family member who purchased Apple one just needs to purchase more iCloud. And I thought, well, this is great. I don't even need to pay for the six terabyte plan that costs thirty dollars a month. I just need to pay an extra ten dollars a month to get two more terabytes. R to double us to four Mhm And I did it, I purchased two terabytes of iCloud. And then it said our total is now two terabytes And I spent an entire day doing nothing but looking into this and trying to figure out, well, why won't it add this? It says it's supposed to add it to the shared family pool. and all it was was two terabytes And The explanation is when I purchase two terabytes of iCloud. It's my J Gruber at Mac. com account purchasing two terabytes of iloud not my Grou or Grouber at deringfireball d. net address, which is my media account Mhm But it's my media account. purchased Apple One And it magically works that iCloud can be assigned to another address. There is a path that you can go through Yeah, you can Purchase iCloud storage and then apply it another Apple account. It's linked at the bottom of the what happens if you have two accounts? Yes. You go to Settings iCloud subscriptions Apple one and scroll down and click manage Cloud plus And what I see when I go to manage Cloud plus is who do you want to give the Apple one bundled two terabytes of storage too. and it lists my son, my wife, and two of me, one for each email address And when it was assigned to my mac. com address, then it could be shared with the whole family that that it only applies to it still is purchased by that. and there's no way for that account to just buy more iCloud storage When I buy iCloud storage, it's purchased by the other account. And then my account has access effectively, I think, to two different ways of having two terabytes of storage The one I bought for ten dollars a month on its own and the one that comes with Apple one. but there is no way to combine the two into two So your family is still sort of partitioned off into that other storage bucket So when your sing takes one too many photos and you tip over, problem remains. Right. And I can still because iCloud familyily sharing works even without Apple O, I can share the other two terabytes. So we don't lose storage. And when I was using the iCloud storage I purchased, it didn't my wife and son out and send them back to five gigabytes of free storage. they still had two terabytes, but it didn't solve our problem that we were out of space And I realized I think I guess, I don't know if they charged me or not J again, I water or money runs through my fingers like water. I didn't bother to look to see if this ten dollars that I'd spent and eventually canceled within twenty four hours. if I ever got charged for it. But I thought, why even bother doing this with, you know, I'm not going to pay for more, we don't need more. That would be a waste of money. I thought maybe the solution is I would just pay for the thirty dollars a month the six terabytes and share that. and maybe that would have worked. I don't know, but I didn't want to waste the money on it, right? There's a part of me that doesn't want to spend the money on it. And so I solved the problem in December, very old fashioned way where I found, I don't know. of hundred gigabytes of my stuff that I could delete. I deleted some old device backups I didn't delete anything I care about. I didn't start doing the thing where like I don't want to spend any more money so I'm gonna start throwing out photos. No, But I cleaned up enough stuff that it dropped our usage down to like one point eight terabytes. But there was a point, this is the point I alluded to earlier. where I thought, well maybe I need to Purchase this Fr Oh, I know what I should do is purchase Apple one from. My iCloud account instead of from the media account So I canceled the Apple one that we already had from my media account And then using my primary account, I signed up for Apple And I thought, well, that'll solve it because either way, We get all the media and all the iCloud and then I can buy the two more terabytes of iCloud and then we'll have four That sounds like a maybe, right? I don't think that seems unreasonable. Do you think, Stehven No, it sounds like should work. I think most people would assume that it would Yes, and the reason it didn't work was because I still needed to have a media and purchases account Because my media that account purchased, as I said, thousands of dollars worth of movies, all of our subscriptions, all the apps, every app I've ever paid for, whether it's a subscription app or a one time app through the Mac app store has gone through that account. So I still need the media and purchases and When I purchased Apple One, through that iCloud account It only shares the purchases from your media and purchase account if you have one. So the media and purchases from Apple one no longer was shared with the family And they immediately lost access to Apple Music. And of course, both of them were going to the gym, one in Boston in college and one here in Philadelphia where I won't say who's which one's which, but The one here in Philadelphia could give me an ear full immediately upon returning home from the gym where she didn't have any music at all We have no warning. And I was like, o, shit can't do that H So I canceled that Apple one subscription and resubscribed to Apple one from the other one and deleted two hundred gigabytes or so of stuff that was easily deletable and thought I will solve this in the new year. That's Future John's problem. Well, Future John came about this week was when I noticed I'd been looking and it was like one point nine of two point zero terabytes, one point nine of two point and I'm like still going. and this was the week where it got to two point zero of two point zero terabytes. And the little graph underneath wasn't all the way and I don't know, there might be some panel somewhere where you could see the exact how much space there is I didn't want to And so I started looking into it. And Long story short and this is where I called you yesterday. The only way I could figure out how to solve this and this is why I called you is the way you solved it I think, basically. And the way you solved it, I will hand this off to you is Yeah addding the media account as a family member in the iCloud family with does have some trade offs. Like what if you don't have another slot? What if you have too many people in your family? You gott to tell your youngest kid, sorry, you're on your own. That's Do you kick the youngest or the oldest out? like the old Mbe the oldest. Yeah I guess it depends on how old they are, you know. So that's that's not Fantastic. You have the issue you and I spoke about this is if they are both semi public How do you name them differently? So what I did, my media account, no one knew what that was. And so I renamed him Legacy Stehven And he's in Gyscale. He's just in my family like a ghost of past purchases. The key here though, is to add it to the Cloud family and then turn on shared purchases That way Okay Legacy Stehven bought this app five years ago I use it and because it's shared within the family I can use it signed in just as my regular iCloud account. but Not everything works with share purchases is actually up to the discretion of developers If they want to say my app or my subscription you can share within your family. And there's business models on both sides. I think it makes sense depending on what you're doing with your app So I did end up having to repurchase a handful of things But The thing that killed me about this is I don't, I mean, I didn't mind like a year ago I don't think it I came across that in writing anywhere from Apple. It was kind of I did all the things you did, jumped through all those soups L' like, you know what? I had a slot in my family In I Clou family? I was like, you know what? We're just going to adopt him and He will live forever as a third adult in our IClub family I searched the web and you know, I think I'm pretty good at searching the web. I could not find anybody else who has encountered this. There was like a Reddit post from somebody in a way that Reddit often does show up very is often like the only place where somebody's ever talked about this I rented, I remember couple years agoos Sometime in the last three years, I rented Kia SUV for a road trip to take the kid to college or something And honest to God, I could not figure out how to open the hatchback. I couldn't figure it out. And I'm like, I'm a grown man and I look at a dashboard and of course it's a rental with no manual. I don't know Usually they have the manual I was like, I cannot figure this out. There's nothing on the fob. And I went in the house and searched on Reddit and then there was one Reddit thread from somebody who was like How the hell do you open the hatch on IkeA Sorrento two thousand twenty two or whatever. And somebody is like, yeah, it's really weird. It's over here. And it's like, Oh Holy shit, I would have never gotten that and There was like one post on Reddit that alluded to this, but Your post on five hundred and twelve pixels was the only one I saw from somebody else that Solved it this way. Yeah. because I even thought If I hadn't read your post, and I honestly don't know if I would have thought to try this. because I kind of And again, it's a way that I can be sort of too stubborn for my own good where I would have thought, well, that's not going to work. They're not going to let me add myself as a family member because I'm already it's going to say, oh, you can't add Grouber at Daringfireball. net as family member because you're already using that account as your media and purchases account. Or I was afraid too. Oh, it has the same birthday, right? Be I did think for a second I thought family knows about twins, right? But it did work for me and Again sharing those purchases. a cou cruel parents who name their twins both John Yeah. that's rough Do you put a one and two on birth order? You know, it's Very confusing The share purchases work and the beauty of it now is that I can add storage to my family And I'm signed in on all my devices with just one account. I now no longer have to jump through the hoop of the separate media account because if I go reach for something that old account bought, right? like an app or a movie I bought or something becausecause it's shared in the family It just works. And I'll give Apple credit here for sure The family sharing purchases is compleompletely transparent. I mean, it's really, really good And it is something that is opt in. So if in your family for whatever reason, whether it's you as one person or one other member of your family or your whole family is just sort of independently minded and you want your own purchases, but you want a shared calendar and shared storage space or something You can do that, right? You can say I don't want to share my purchases with the family But if you do want to share that, it just works. And Apple definitely encourages developers. I mean, it's up to developers whether to go along. I know you and I were talking about it. It seems like weather apps in particular often don't because they have a bunch of And I think it's reasonable that weather apps have a surprising number of ongoing data processing costs that really does escalate with the number of people using it or the number of devices effectively using it. and they can't charge you per device for yourself. So if you've got three iPhones because you review them or something, there's no way to ch charge you separately for it. But That's not unreasonable. There's other developers with other reasons good or bad who enable family sharing, but it seems like most do. I can't remember the last time I've run into it Yeah. I think weather apps is really the only category that that comes to mind for me. And I car at weather. I believe what Brian does is there's a standard subscription. And then there's a family subscription above that to help offset those ongoing costs because weather data is expensive And if you're Brian and you want fifteen different weather services and carrot weather I can't imagine what that must look like And you know what? I think that's fair But yeah, for the most part, it just works and that means if I've purchased something and I'm going to go download it app on my kid's iPad later on or they want to put it on their phone and I've already paid for it or we already have a subscription to it, then that automatically automatically gets applied to them And It's just seamless. There's not like a button somewhere like, oh, enable family sharing on this one thing It's just a blanket sort of allow statement across the accounts And that is very nice, but where it hits the So you turn that on, you add the other account as an additional family member, And for me, at least, I didn't do it like you. It's not really a legacy account for me I just have two Johns in the family now and explained it to the family. They don't really have to worry about it. I maybe because I only did it yesterday. I haven't thought through all the ways that they might. but When they text me, it's still it's not like it's added a new option for who to send an Ie message to. It's still justxt me and it comes to me And so it doesn't really affect them and we don't, we're not anticipating adding family members at this point So We only had three. You can have up to six, I think, is six or five, six. I don't even know what the limit is. I get six. Yeah. so we're we're well below the limit. It just, it bothers me because it is an ungainly solution to the problem Mhm But The additional part of this that I had to do that is still to me not obvious unless you really think about how this works, is the extra two terabytes of iCloud storage purchased by my second account the media and purchasing account It has the same one that purchased because that's that thing where the family member who purchased Apple one has to be the one to buy additional iCloud storage But that's my media account, which I don't use for iCloud And I even showed you a screenshot. So How do you buy iCloud storage from an account that you don't sign into iCloud on a device for I don't even know. I actually look. It's like when you go to their website, maybe if I should try and Chrome because when you go in Safari and you go to purchase iCloud opens a link to settings or system settings and it switches you out of the web into system settings where I'm signed into my main iCloud account and I don't want I'm not going to sign out of Cloud and lose terabyte of snking to sign into a different account So well I'm just separate separate user on the Mac maybe. right. I thought of that. That and that is probably what I would do. If I were not me with fifty spare iPhones sitting around my desk Yeah So what I did is take the iPhone seventeen E review unit which I had wiped and but still hadn't sent back to Apple. and signed into it, but I signed into it only using my secondary account. which logged me into iCloud for that account. maybe for the first time ever and if not the first time on purpose and purchased Two terabytes a month of storage and assigned it to the family somehow, there was something I clicked And It was like the angels started singing Ls and And all of a sudden on all of my devices I had four terabytes of shared storage in the family share But after adding that account is a fourth family member, two John's now in the family My main account still uses that account as the media and purchases account And then the second instance of the account uses that ID for both iCloud and that. And I signed in on a spare iPhone and bought two terabytes of storage And now it works That's where we took slightly different paths where I was like if I'm going through all of this, I would like just to have one login for everything And so I purched I just pulled up my subscription tab I purchased Apple one and my family's additional two terabytes as my iCloud account. So my media That's why I named Legacy Stehven. Like my media purchasing account is no longer active. That account hasn't purchased anything new since I jumped through all of these hoops But it is good that both work because they're pros and cons each and Certainly if family sharing wasn't as good as it is, or maybe you ran into something that you really needed to share and it couldn't for some reason then yeah, it would be good to to be able to use the other setup. But why I said write it down. I unpacked most of this on cononnected and then I wrote some about it, but As soon as you do it It feels so complicated to explain And it feels like there's so many edge cases like When you and I were talking yesterday, I was kind of googling in the background too I came across this form and someone had the same problem and someone later in the thread was like, well, I live in a country without Apple one. And so that changes a lot of these dynamics. Right. It's like Geez, I mean it's like another complication on top of this If you don't have Apple one or you live somewhere where you can't have Apple one, you'll never run into this specific problem. There might be other problems you run into with the two account in the family member who's in charge of it system, but not this one. It's the fact that Apple one is magically special casted on Apple's side to blend the iTunes stuff with the iCloud stuff, and I'm calling it iTunes stuff for all the media including the app store All of the purchasing stuff is separate from the iCloud stuff And Apple One magically merges those together into a single purchase This would be solved and one way Apple could solve it would be to offer those additional storage tiers of six terabytes and twelve terabytes. through Apple one and just charge the same delta two additional tiers of Apple onene I would have done that in a heartbeat and I would actually be sending them more money becausecause it would cost I'm only paying ten dollars more a month now than I was before to get two additional terabytes. It would have cost me twenty dollars a month to get S terabytes. But we don't need that. Iain, given the pace at which we got to two terabytes and F or five months it took to go from December till now We're probably good for a while. So I don't need to spend it, but I would have done it because it was easy and obvious and it would have worked. I it would have saved you two days of work that you didn't plan on. Right. And this entire episode of the talk show wouldn't even be happening. You might still be here. You were here exactly a year ago. Yeah. We wouldd be talking about different things I don't know The other thing I guess I should talk about is why I don't try merging my two accounts that migration path Yeah, so let's come back to that. Let me take another break here and thank our next sponsor. It is our good friends at Nion. 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Learn more about Notions's deeveloper platforms today at notion. com slash talk show. Now those are all lowercase letters, notion dot com slash talk show. to try Notion's deeveloper platform today And when you use our link, you're supporting the talk show. Thank you very much to Notion, Notion d. com slash talk show What did I say was going to come back to you? We were talking about iCloud plus additional storage. For example one Why you want to keep the media Oh, whyy don' merge? Why don't Why dont merge. Yeah. There we go Oh Godd, I didn't know why that was flushed from me So That's another way that would solve the problem if I went through the account merger and merged the two The problem is And that's you Why didn't you do that I attempted the migration. and again, if you look at that support page, the list of conditions is very long you have to be in and it just failed for me even though best I could tell the conditions were all Correct. Now it was earlier on, you know, this feature hass been out now in additional year, whatever it's been. And so maybe it's more robust now, but it just didn't work for me in that sort of set Plus I had the two terabyte problem s, o Okaykay, we have to do something this now And that's how I ended up bringing my media purchasing into the family For me, there were a couple of killers in there. First was right off the bat, there was a if it ain't broke, don't fix it. angle where And even though it was announced, I guess shortly after I went through the whole Rrigmar role No, that was last year. So no that I ran out of storage space months later. but My whole dual account system, while more complex, I'm not confused by it until now with this Apple one storage limitation thing I didn't find it confusing. totally used to it and it just works and has just worked for years. So why take any risk at all? And I followed along as other people in this situation tried it and it seemed like most people had success. It seemed like serious problems were few and far between It seemed like it didn't work. There was a way to revert. You could just say, ah just this doesn't work for me for X, Y or Z, go back, go back and you can go back And you can only do that like once a year because I guess it's kind of expensive on Appleide to do the work. They don't want people tryrying it every day. Yeah Maybe it's some sort of weird piracy loophole, like Yeah stuff to you, you can watch my movies. I don't know. Yeah. And then you can use my log. Yeah, I don't know. somethingomething like that I was like, if it ain't broke, don'tix it. Mines not broke. so I'm not going to fix it. But I'd like to see what other people say and it seems like it worked. But then this is what led me to you is you had a post on five hundred twelve pixels last year. where you listed Like after Apple mayaybe Apple didn't know all of these issues. at first. I don't know, but they listed all of the fine print, like don't try this if. And one of them is if the secondary media purchase account is also used for test flight installations And that's a problem for me because it's just would not have occurred to me twenty five years ago when the iTunes store came out. But if I had made I didn't even need to make a whole email account, just an alias like iTunes purchases at daringfireball d.ot com If I had made that email alias and then use that to sign in for iTunes and then use that to sign in for the app store and that to sign in to buy movies. And here I am twenty five years later still using an email address that I had only created buuy shit from Apple I would be a perfect candidate for this account merger thing. And I would think, Ah, good ridds to that email address that I'd never used for anything else. And now it's all on my mac d. comot That's nice and neat can't because I used Gruber at daringfireballd. net my main email address for My life And Of course, that's the address that I use from all of my test flight accounts. And as I was on the phone with you, I think yesterday, I counted I think I have fifty test flight apps. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a lot too. It's a cost, I guess in our profession. But like going back through this list, like something as simple as does the Media account have an Apple music library associated with it? If it does, you can't do it. It's like there Or if the non no. I think it's if the non If both have a music account, right Of course my medium purchase one has a music account because it purchased the music. But if your iTunes one has a music library too, then you can't merge the two. That's right That's the problem I don't think I have that, but who knows? right? Who knows if I set up a review unit phone years ago and only signed into my iCloud account to avoid the hassle of doing a second account login for a phone I was only going to use for a week. played a song? I don't know what works You know what would be in there is that YouTube album they gave away like ten years ago comes back to haaunt us all the time. Right. Right. I've got one album in there and then I go to delete it and it's Son of a bitch comes back That's right I don't even know if that would trigger me, but it seems like something that could happen. I don't know. And I've already spent days on this problem. How many more do I want to spend? I don't know. But the test flight one is sort of a deal breaker Again, it's like I could out of every single test flight that I'm currently testing Write them all down And then if they're public resign in using a different address or do the account merger merge it all to my Mac. com address. And then free up. my main grouper at daringfireball. net and then use it again to get back into test flight? Yeah. But I would have to email every single developer and ask to be invited back. It's like I could do that. It's a small ask But it's a small ask of fifty developers, which is it's a lot of work. Yeah You know the thing with the original Macintosh, it was like Every second it boots up faster, you save hundreds of years of human life or whatever. That's how it is asking developers to do stuff in App store connect. L going in and adding a test flight, it's way more clicks than you think it would be And you're not going to hear back from everybody, right? Like It's an unpleasant step in some of these everything things you mentioned. It's like, is there something inherent about test flight that is unaware of this other thing that's going on with my accounts. or was it built in a way? because it was Testlite was external and Apple bought them Is there something like deep in the foundations that o, okay, like we can't reasonably fix this And so it's just going to be some fine print on this page for the handful of people who want to migrate with test flights So bottom line Just add the other account as a fourth family member buuy all everything. through that account, including the iCloud storage. And I guess I mean, I can't see why it wouldn't work to create a spare user account on a Mac, sign in without address, without having a spared device to wipe and sign in on I think that would be totally fine Yeah, I should even try that and just sign in and see if it works, but I'm sure it does. But it was funny because that account shows how, you know each account, you can see how much storage they're using towards the family. And like I said, I'm just under a terabyte. My son is just over a terabyte. My wife is a two hundred. twenty gigabytes And my media account is at two hundred and seventy six Chilobites. You have one text file in there somewhere Yeah fits on a floppy disk. It doesn't just It doesn't just fit on a floppy disk, it fits on an old original four hundred K floppy disk. you still got room for a system folder, man. Let it Oh boy. fits on a floppy disk, so it's So probably, I don't know. mayaybe it doesn't have a music library. Maybe it is on my other I don't But add it If you have another family member to spare and that's it Yeah Drop out of Apple One and just pay more money a month to buy the ones you need. I mean, that just seems like, mean I know Apple is hurting for money, but it's true. I don't feel like I need to suggest users Our listeners of the show spend more money monthly on aor Tim Apple services division. He wants toready bang. I mean, who can blame me, right? He's got to Right What a fiasco. I honestly, I don't know. I think we covered it all. I don't want to cover the rest. I do I will I swear to God write something about this to help people who are Googling for it and tell them this. And I guess I'll leave last but not least, I'll just say if anybody out there, whether you work at Apple or whether you're just a listener and you've solved this on your own and you know of a better solution to the problem Please write to me and tell me what it is, right? If there' something better and more graceful. It's the ungracefulness of adding myself secondarily to the family account that really bothers me It's like a Like the way that I'm still bothered low these many years later by file name extensions on the, right? L we Right? We we had a better system. We had a better system. did and then We went to this and now we're stuck with it. And now I'm stuck with a phantom John Grrouuber in my family Yeah. Again, at least you had room for it, right? So the limit is six. Yes. My wife and I have three children I had one spot left. Yes. so you use the last spot, right? Right. So like if we had had a fourth, then then what do I do? right? It's messy and anytime you run into these things, especially with Apple accounts or like If you're an A store connector or podcast connect or some of these other sort of internally systems You really feel Age of them And I'm sure all this stuff right L the joke is, well, it's web objects, right R sure it's I hope it's There's Den O Noi. There's definitely cft in here that They either can't or won't get rid of. And I understand like You have More than a billion Apple accounts. I would be so afraid to be on that team that has to do anything with this And maybe that's why the Aa one thing is kind of semi outside of the path of iCloud plus and test flights kind of semi on the outside of iCloud family sharing. like If you if they were going to build it today Surely it would be better and cleaner and easier to understand. It feels to me at least like they have these limitations due to their due to the history of the system they just basically have to live with at this point And I remember for years and years whenever this would come up And I had the inkling Like it would occur to me like, Goddamnit, why can't Apple just fix this and let you just say, take these two Apple IDs and mush them together let me which one becomes canonical one think that and then I think, I'll bet this is a really hard problem. And then I'd hear from people at Apple from time to time, neverever with details, but just like, I can't tell you more than this, but yes, it is a very hard problem. And I believe that because like you said, these things grew organically over time with lots of users and from Origins that you just never They never could have been expected to think would grow this way. Ohes The probably the least Well, not the least, but it's among the least of the various problems we still live with and always will for the fact that the app store started as the iTunes music store Yes and evolved into it. and that At this point it's never almost certainly never going to come. If it didn't come with the Apple Creator Studio, it's never going to come. The idea of like upgrade pricing for apps, right? Like BB Edit sixteen just shipped last week. And if you're already a paid BB Edit user, you can upgrade from whatever version you currently own to BB Edit sixteen point zero for I think forty bucks instead of the retail price of whatever it is, one hundred bucks, ninety bucks, whatever That's the way software world worked forever. That's the way some software, like BBeda and others still work. It's never been in the apppp store. And part of it is maybe Apple just doesn't care about that, but I think part of it was just that it never made any sense. There's no such thing as an upgrade to an album or a single or a move right So it just wasn't in the infrastructure for the store. And when they were like, all right, let's build an app store and it was like, hey, we can just build on top of this. We already people already have Almost everybody who bought an iPhone in the first year already had an iTunes account because they had an iPod and an iTunes music collection and stuff. So they already have an ID. They can already start buying apps. They don't even have to enter not just enter it once and save the credit card. They've already got it. Yeah. whichich for the right call at the time. rightight? to suggest otherwise at the time than bananas But It does have these knock on effects all these years later. I mean, I remember on upgrade, Jason and Mike spoke a lot about the Creator Studio thing and like You go into the app store and there's numbers and there's numbers, you know, it's got some version number behind it and they're different. I think just yesterday, Mac Rumor' linked to it. there was a support document showing the icons of like the new one and the old one explaining which is whichitch. L No one thinks this is a good idea, but they're handcuffed by decisions made twenty years ago. I forget who I was talking about this on a recent show. I think I was talking about it in a recent show that part of the reason that you can have them installed side by side is that they're not On the Mac at least, they don't use the same like bundle ID? Bundle ID. The comm dot appleot numbers. one of them is com dot Apple numbers IOS or iCloud ores, I forget. it's But the IOS ones were never the same as the Mac ones until Apple Creator Studio And again, Apple Crreatater Studio is to that bundle of apps what Apple won is to the other thing where it's like two worlds collided where the fact that numbers didn't have the same bundle ID on the Mac that it did on iOS never mattered. They could just say, well, we're apps from the same developer. so the two versions of the apps can see the same iCloud dririve folder full of documents and it all just works. users don't need to certainly don't need to worry about bundle ID's And then when they wanted to sell a bundle with all of these apps that would work on all the platforms, they were like, oh We're the bad guys here who passast us. We were the bad guys Right So that's why on the Mac, you can I think on my main Mac, I still have the old versions because I'm a hoarder and I can keep them. and I'm like, well, let me wait and see if there's anything I like about the old version better. But you can just have old numbers and new numbers side by side. but in your applications folder, they both just say numbers And so it looks like something impossible has happened because if you make two files in the same folder and try to give them the exact same name When you try to give the second one that name, it's going to say pick another name That name's already in use and you have to make it different by one character somewhere Numbers, it's like the display name is not the real file name in the file system. Sure. So yes, then they end up And I guess it's good that they kept the old icons the same so that you can identify them by the icon once you learned it I don't hate them as much as other people, but they're a little they'. I don't like the old ones either. So sure. The thing I think you mentioned it or I'm sure we both linked to or talked about it. The thing was going around of like The I workork icons get better going backward in time. like the benjamin button kind of thing and and that's so true of the network icons. It is one of the best tweets of all time. I guess I'll put it in the show notes, but yes, You look at the icons I think he used pages as the example. I think so It's true for all of them But if you just look at the icons for pages, it really does seem like an icon designer getting going from I don't know what I'm doing to. I'm exquisite and can make one of the best icons anybody's ever seen But only when you go in reverse. Yeah, only backwards God, I hope that trend changes. All right, let me take another break here and thank Guess who Good friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one platform for your web presence and You can go to squarespace. com slash talk show. I'll just spoil the end right now. squarespace d. com slash talk show. you save ten percent off any purchase for up to a year And you can give that code to your friends when their friends come to you and say, Hey, I need a website because you're the biggest nerd that I know. Send them to squarespace. Asure them that they can sign up for a free trial start going and they get full access to everything Squarespace does. The whole shebang and It is designed normal people. like in the way that a word processor is designed so that someone who doesn't even really know the what a font is that they can change margins and actually print. That used to be like a thing people couldn't do with computers is actually like create a document with multiple fonts and get it to print out And worord processors made that easy. Squarespace is like that for websites except that you can make like not like basic baby websites, but like full fledged totally professional looking websites with all the features that you might want or expect all sorts of stuff like e commerce, like being able to sell things like sell goods or sell your time if you're a consultant or a trainer or something like that and send out invoices and have invoices for the things you're selling or the time you're selling or the services you're selling and then have your customers, your clients, your users pay the invoices on your website through Squarespace' own payment system and then you get paid all through your own website. I swear you listener to me right now, you can do this on Squarespace. You'll be able to figure it out. and the people you know can figure it out too. It is that integrated of a system where you can build Really complex systems like this by looking visually learning. and if you want to using the AI to ask questions like how do I add invoices to my website and it'll help you out. Go to squarespace d. com slash talk show to find out more, start your free trial. And then when your thirty day free trialals up, just go back to that same URL, squarespace. com slash talk showh Or just remember the code talk show T A L K S HO W A check out and you'll save ten percent My thanks to Squarespace Well, after all of this Breaking news relelated to twenty five year old payment systems We can talk breaking. I actually feel like this is a very quiet end of May for the lead up to WWDC. Yeah, it does feel that way. You know, sometimes Apple have some usually developer related news or app store related news and maybe that's still yet to come, but May is basically over and Yeah, it's just seems it seems quiet and even German right?. I don't think he's done his annual. this is everything in, you know, IS. He talked a lot about the Siri and the Gemini integration and some of those things But at this point WBC Other than that, feels like s a bit of a mysty Yeah, and he often gets usually in recent years, I forget, I don't know what his track record is, but a lot of times he obviously gets someomebody who sees the keynote at day before like over the weekend before when they're going through the final cut. Obviously the number of people within the company who get to see the keynote expands in the days before the keynote And some of those people be sources for German. So I certainly wouldn't want to rule out that he has a big spoiler post the weekend before WWDC. but As of now, two weeks before WWDC, I would say that has not happened I think his biggest scoop It was already played out, which was like Last fall when German To his credit, exclusively started saying, Hey, Apple and Google are talking about white label, effectively white label Gemini models. in Apple's data centers being the AI models to power the actual next generation of Sya and Apple intelligence And lo and behold, Apple and Google rather quietly, especially from Apple's perspective, announced that, I think at the beginning of the year It was like two sentences on a Google blog somewhere, right that? Right pay attention if you're a govern Great. And surely that will be the that stsuff will be the high level sort of the highlight of WBDC. Apple still feels like they are living in the shadow of twenty four with announced a bunch of stuff that wasn't real and hasn't. I remember. I know wrotard a little thing about it. And this year I think there's going to be a lot of This is what we're doing It's in the betas early. You can see it. you can touch it becausecause really I don't think they're going to do a lot in IOS twenty seven with Apple intntelligence, Siri, Gyini, whatever combination of those things We're not seeing on Android now And whichich is fine. I think it's a reasonable feature set. some of the things Google's doing And so I think it's going to be relatively known. And I suspect it's going to be maybe a little constrained. like the whole thing of, hey, when does my mom land at the airport? I don't think that's working anywhere on any platform right now. And so I think it's going to be little more subdued than twenty four, but also a lot more grounded and This stuff is here It's working, you can touch it. Yeah, and it does make last years's from an AI perspective, last year's WWDC was just kindind of weird, right? The last two have been weird because Two years ago was the one where they announced a lot of stuff that they wound up not shipping And then when they announced, Hey, that stuff we announced, we're going to have to push that back a year which ended up being more than a year because they announced that in March last year with the phrase in the coming year Right, which I at first and I and they gave that statement to me. I think it was like me and Reuters or me in CNBC. It was only like two outlets and I was one and I did not know that I was one of only two. Kind of had an inkling because it wasn't just emailed to me. I got a phone call too. And there's only so many phone calls they can make. But they didn't say you're one of only two places, but I ran the statement and then thought about it for a day or two. and while I was thinking about it, out came There's something rotten in the state of Cupertino But they said at first, that these features will be coming out in said coming year, in the coming year. which I thought meant after WWDC last year I think a lot of people you know's a reasonable way to interpret that in the coming year, like I would like to see you, Stephven and hopefully I'll see you in person in the coming year. I would mean when if I said that to you, and I mean it, I actually do mean it. I would think sometime soon. Maybe I don't know, are you going to WWDC? Yeah I'll be there. Well, then I'm going to see you in the coming weeks, right Right? But in the coming But what they meant by the in the coming year is the coming year after twenty twenty five, which was in twenty twenty six. right? Only there was a different word for that Next next year. Next year? Yes So I and I do think I think it was so hard for them to pull the trigger on and rip the tape off that day. announcement, right? And they kind of obviously postponed it as long as they could I think there was a grow clearly a growing chorus within the company who were like, we're not going to ship this, right? This isn't like what we were thinking we were' going to ship, We can't ship. And this isn't fixable, right? And effectively, they what they're doing is you're using all new models and the all new models are coming from Google, right which wasn't something they had even done on the radar at the time So they said in the coming year, what they meant was nextext year, they really meant effect and maybe they didn't know at the time, right? Because they had to backtrack and so they didn't know when they made the announcement just how long into twenty twenty six it would be But effectively, it's going to be the end of twenty twenty six because they're going to announce it two weeks from now at WWDC and everything they announce at WWDC in June will be stuff that comes out in the IOS twenty or the various twenty seven version twenty seven releases in the fall. And that's if it's there on day one, which Right. I would really hope this time it is at least something right But yeah, you're right. I' like to give the benefit. So it made last year's WWC really weird because last year's WWDC came after they made that announcement. before they had anything new to announce. Yeah it was sort of an AI free. I know they mentioned AI in Siri multiple times. And I think they did it on purpose to make sure that they weren't pretending those words didn't exist. But they didn't announce any major Apple intelligence feictures. It was the huge elephant in the room last year, right? It was like There's this whole thing that's happening and you're not discussing it. and Yeah, hopefully they've got it right this time. I'm sure It's a bitter pill to swallow for Apple to have to go to Google and like, we we need to use your models that ours aren't capable of doing what we need them to do. And who knows if that's a short term or a long term solution for them? I guess would be that they're still working on something and Maybe they'veugemoniz a bridge to win ps homemade models are ready. It is just so fascinating that they are turning to an outside company because honestly They failed to do it, right? And People have come and gone from Apple over such things, right? Yes. It's absolutely wild. There's something so poornant in today's age, Apple's relying on effectively a vendor to make it possible. At least under the hood, right? Apple's building the features But Gemini is the underlying technology. I also can't help but suspect That the two years ago pre announcement was sort of hastened by a sense of urgency like the whole world's going AI crazy. The stock market is going AI crazy. I'm sure there are a bunch of employees in the company who are saying, this is like the next big thing we need to be on it. We're in trouble if we're and they kind of fell prey to the need to get out over their skis on what And again, there's some controversy and hard feelings that my writing on this was alluding to the fact that they lied in their announcement. And I definitely did not say that and I didn't mean that. I don't mean that they knew that they were announcing things they wouldn't ship, which is insane Right. That is not something that somebody would do at a company where the same people were going to be there nine months later. That's malpractice at that point. Right. Id also think they certainly knew that it was a maybe that they were going to ship that this was uncertain that there was some uncertainty that they were going to ship it on time or if they weren't uncertain at all when they announced it If they were like, ye, I'm one hundred percent certain that we are going to ship this when we promised it, well, then those people were technically incompetent because they couldn't ship it Maybe the truth is that some of those people are no longer at the company, that there were people who were like, yeep, one hundred percent, we are going to do this on time. And those people should be gone because that really is a firing offense. But I can't help but think to conversely The fact that last year's WWDC came and went extremely light on AI just again, they mentioned it, they had some serious stuff to talk about, but nothing major And the world didn't collapse. And if anything, public sentiment over the Apple and AI over the last year is far less controversial than the year prior. Yeah, I think ye, the world has changed around them in this time frrame One thing that I'm sure you've seen it, this sort of theory going around like, well, say the bubble burst and if any of us have any money left, it'll be Apple And they can just go buy AI companies for parts. and Apple actually is genius for not investing in this early the way that other companies have I don't think that's the case at all. I think they were slow and they had some bad ideas and weren't equipped to do it properly. putting properly in quotes Now they're in the situation where they're going to announce and assumingly announce a bunch of AI powered features It's going to ship in the fall and public feeleelings about AI have They've changed, but they've also grown more sort of extreme at the ends R polarized. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you see it and when you write about it, I see it when I write about it or when we talk about it, like You got people who are really fired up and you people who really dislike it. And Apple is now entering into that when that conversation is superchged How do you manage that as a company and the way you talk about it even some of their previous talking points about how they We're privacy focused and so our models will built that in mind. Well, it's not your models anymore. know It's very complicated And there is and again, I can go back to the announcement, but it has something to do with we've decided the Gemini models are the best ones to power Apple's foundation models And it's like models that power the models. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to say it was genius. I don't think it was genius in that they for anybody at Apple in a decision making context completely foresaw how, hey, this would really work out for us if we don't do any of this crazy CapEx spending. Not crazy meaning it's wrong, crazy that the numbers their peer companies are spending on CapEx are just unfathomable to even non mortals, but that we can to just avoid that, just not spend the CapEx and then we'll just cut a deal with whoever's making the best models later It's like they're spending, they announceced it. It's like they're spending a billion dollars a year. They're giving Google one billion for the rights to use Gemini as a white label thing. A billion dollars is like nothing for Apple. It is not much to Google And compompared to the CapEx that Google has spent to build Gemini, it is really a fraction and almost certainly just billion dollar discount on what Google was already spending Google search the defaults to farrow you through the search acquisition deal, which Last we've known is twenty billion a year, but those are numbers from like frozen in time from like twenty twenty or twenty twenty one or something like that. Right. So there's no sign that they've gone down. so they're they might be slowing though because famously everybody is saying People are searching the web less because they're turning to AI tools for things they used to go to search So it might be slowing like the way that it's over the decades of the deal has grown from billion a year to ten billion a year to fifteen to twenty billion a year.' probably slowing and going to cap and maybe will start declining because it is usage based, right, rightight? It's Yes not every year Google says we're going to give you twenty two billion dollars and you'll make Google search the default and Safari It's we're going to pay you this per search searches that go through the Safari bar. and Surely, it's stills twenty to twenty five billion a year And now Apple's going to send one billion back. And they get the Gemini models. This does not, you know, However much of this was strategic, I don't know. And I think some of it, they just kind of not lucked into but sort of Luck favors the prepared and apples way of thinking is to be very they, you know, famously This whole operations wizardry they've built up in China and elsewhere expanding around the world They don't own those factories, right? Like the whole Tim Cook operations genius The whole Apple and China book from Patrick McGee isn't about how Apple built factories around the world. It's how Foxcon built factories around the world up to Apples specs, right? That's So Kind of taking that approach to AI might work out. sticking to their guns and not being like I feel like they got nervous with what they announced at WWDC two years ago But I don't think they've shown any kinds of nervousness in the way they've spent money or the way they've actually changed their products, right? Like I would say none of Apple's products have been ruined or defaced by AI. No. No, I mean, it's right in the setup flow. I was just setting up a new iPhone recently. You can turn it on or off As a side note, I would like those controls to be more granular, The more AI features are available on the platform If anyone wins the strategic conversation in my mind, it's Google being the platform or the model provider. Really the two OS's that matter in the world, IOS and Android locking anthropic and Oen AI and other companies out of that from their perspective is a great move Right? Yeah. I mean, I mean, really, once this all ships Basically the infrastructure between a feature on a pixel phone and a feature on an iPhone, the features may work differently because Google and Apple interpret them differently But the model under them is the same. And if you're Google, that's a huge victory, I think Yeah The way it's going to be and I don't know that we're going to hear anything about Gemini powering this stuff at WWDC. German was when he first announced that they were working on a deal, he was like, I don't even think they're going to announce it. I think they're just going to keep it secret. And they did announce it very quietly. and I can see why But I think it will remain quiet And I don't think they're going to talk about it and because it's not going to be Gemini Gemini. They're not going to sign in with your Google account. The way I could see Apple mentioning it is by only by re emphasizing that everything you do through Ps Apple branded Apple Intelligence is inherently private and that even Apple cannot see it and it none of what you send to it or type into it or talk to it is used for training. and Even when it goes to the cloud, the whole private cloud compute thing means that even Apple cryptographically cannot access that stuff, even when it leaves your device goes to that And it doesn't matter what model it is, it doesn't use it. So it's not Fsuck know training Gemini to get better. Yeah And Gemini is apparently going to would be very it would be shocking if it didn't happen in June is going to be an available partner for the hey if you and if you want to use a third party AI tool with Apple intntelligence, in the way that for a year and a half now we've been able to use Chat GPT and connect Chat GPT to Siri to answer questions that it's going to be Probably the big three. probablyrobably Cha GPT Claude and Gemini. For sure. I think so totally so And so people will be confused because they'll be like, well, why do I have to do this to get Gemini I was told Jem and I was going to be built in and it's like, yeah, that's a different a different lay. Yeah, that's where Google branding could have helped Apple like call the feature and call the model something else. but like Anthropy is right? It's just clawed whether you're using Sonnet four point, whatever or Ous or whatever the restust they're called So I do think though the win for Google to make this deal. It's not the billion dollars in cash It is The kneecapping of Chat GPT and Claude of cutting them off from serving in that role Be I do think it's a good place to be even if it's not training and you're not making money, I think that it' it just keep cuts them off and Google' the one that already has an existing business model and is actually a very a very profitable company even with all the CapEx that they've been spending Whas open AI and anthropic are losing more money than any startups in the history of the world. Yeah as of now Right So cutting off the two companies that are losing money from any kind of deal and offering Apple to do this for a billion, right? Like I don't know that those companies that are trying to stop the hemorrhaging could make an offer like this for a billion dollars, evenven if Apple's hosting the thing I don't know, but it's it I do think it's a win for Google. And I think there's also a sort of win for them. I don't think Google cares that much about Android. I've been saying this for years. Google IO just came and went and Android really isn't part of it. right? Certainly, nothing like the way IOS is the star always the star of WWDC.. They actually made their Android announcements Before Google IO in a way that it's like, okay Yeah, here's our keynote. We're going to have to cut some stuff. All right, Android. You can make your announcements before IO. like with the Google books coming out in the fall and stuff like that We don't have room for it in our crowded keynote If Apple is basing their foundation models on Gemini technology, whether it's an Apple hosted private cloud compute or as Germman has also alluded to, maybe letting Google do some of the hosting in their data centers But also in a private cloud compute style way, which Google independently announced last summer that they were working on the same thing for obvious reasons that they want to sell into enterprise and stuff and They don't need to see like the it's sort of a lay personers's misunderstanding to think that they want to see and use everything you type into the product to train it for the future. They don't need that. They've got all the training data they need. R. So having a private cloud computing thing, whether it's the official Apple branded PCC private clloud compute. or just lowercase letters, Hey, it's cloud computing for AI and it's totally private using cryptography and we can show you the math and show you how it's proable If Apple's using the same underlying technology as Google, then Apple's platform, even if they don't care that much about Android, it's not going to surpass Android. on how good the built in AI built into Apple's platforms is going to be the cap is on how good Gemini is. Yeah, that's right. And that's right. I think and I think that's why they're probably continuing to develop their own in the background where right they may have ideas for features or O things that Yeah, Jim and I could do it, but maybe it's not great. And if we took it and tweaked it ten percent, then we could really build what we want I think that's definitely an odd effect of this arrangement that You're right. there's not competition in the model space between Apple and Google. that there really wasn't ever, but now there really is because at least for now, Gemini is doing both I can't help but think and if you pay attention to the papers that Apple publishes through the Apple AI research lab, whatever they call it, where they let those employees ice research papers A lot of it or a disproportionate amount of it is often related at least from what I've seen, mayaybe I'm seeing what I want to see, but I think a disproportionate amount of Apple's published research on this is about doing things locally on devices opposed to everybody's thinking about it But the other companies are like, yeah, but the easiest way for us to do this is to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars and build out data centers and just do it all there and send the data back and forth Whereas Apple is but it makes sense because Apple is the company amongst all these big companies that has over a billion or two billion devices in use. Exactly around the world. Right. They've obviously seen this revolution play out over the last three or four years. So the chip designs for things like The A M twenty and the A twenty one and the A twenty two, which are in the works now and the M seven, the M six M seven M eight chips are all in the works now at various degrees. And those designs are the ones that are all informed by the LLM revolution And you know, it's not quite Moore's laaw but it's a, you know, it's like not the technical definition of Moore's laaw, but the effective definition of Moore's law that every year the chips get faster and cheaper and use less energy is true and the amount of AI compute that willll be able to be done locally on device, on phones, on your friing airPods, on your Mac Five years from now and especially ten years from now is blow away what's possible now. And I feel like It's just seems so obvious that that would be the future Apple' building for not the next two, three, four years where to be a player, you need to build these massive Hundreds of billions of dollar data centers rightight now. and almost certainly Bying the chips from NVIia. Apple doesn't want to do that. They don't want to do the CapEx And it's all sort of like right now. like what is a data center that's running right now chock full of today's existing NVIidDA chips, hundreds of billions of dollars What How useful is that going to be six years from now I don't know. Not very useful. It would be my. Right. So I feel like the way like o, it's like let's give up on this race and let's build for the next race, which is when this stuff becomes loowal. And it makes sense that Apple would do that. Yeah. And at that point, you probably still need data centers for the training runs But ye and that's where you can see Apple's not even trying to compete in a near term. Right because they would need to have the data centers now For that. But yeah, the day to day stuff make me a ginoji of John surfing on a refrigerator. like That being done on a device as opposed to being sent off to a data center back. Carly Apple has the pority there. If if you're anthropic, you don't have a choice but to run data centers. They were just the news. they're leasing exI first site here M us because they have to do that because they don't have any other way for this to work There I think there's something there when you Look at open AI, when to do hardware. I think they want to do hardware for a bunch of reasons One of them certainly is We could do some of this stuff locally and lessen our expense long term Yeah, it's just so fascinating that Apple set up so well for a lot of this And up until signing the paperwork with Google was set up so poorly for other parts of it But I suspect that three weeks from now, WBBC is done. will'll have a much clearer picture about where they're going And I think it's going to be really I think the way they talk about it, I think you're right. It's going to be very feature based. That's what Apple likes to talk about, right? What can your devices do for you How do they make your life and work better not Oh, we have this many parameters under the hood and it's doing this and doing that because one people don't care And two, their numbers probably don't stack up to everyone else's And I really hope and expect, I do expect that it will be much more restrained and focused and intentional where they add where and if they add additional AI to the interface. Whereas everybody who uses Microsoft stuff is complaining that there's a co pilot button everywhere. Yeah just everywhere And the Google IO keynote was like, there's Gemini here, Gemini there, Gemini here, Gemini there. It's everywhere. With the Google book, it's at your cursor. Right? It's like anywhere you are it can be there. And I think Apple will be much more constrained about that stuff. And I think if you decide to turn it off or my hope that you can turn certain features off and leave other ones on, that what the app you're using or the feature you're using doesn't feel broken or like half baked because you turn the switch off. right?. They're going to have to build Both And I think they will because they think about apps and features first, where maybe that's a little bit different in other places So I hopefully, you know, it would certainly be a red flag to say the least if it seems scatterhot and everywhere and it's AI AI, AI. Honestly, I just feel like They already have a pretty good idea of where to put stuff. I just want to see it much better. likeike the I don't like the writing tools. I just I've tried them. They're just they're too slow, too clunky. E the presentation and speed and the quality of the results. But I like the idea that you if you want to turn you can turn it off if you want. and if you have it on, you select some text in any app and A writing tools button appears and you can invoke it and do stuff with it makeake that a lot better I don't know. I can't see even if Gen Moji got good or An image playground, I don't know. That was a red flag two years ago for me. How much time they spent on image playground And it's still so bad. I mean, it's romical Appreciate that Apple to date isn't building tools to make effectively deep fakes But maybe there's ground between where we are now and D fakes. But Right. And it's like maybe you just want to stay out of that, right?' like Right? And people watch a lot of porn on their iPhones and Apple's like, you know what? we'll just mostly stay out of that. and you can do it your go to the web and do it on your own. And it's like you want to generate I'm not even talking about Corno. image generation. I'm just saying deep fake. We don't want images, right? Just rare lifelike images. We just don't want to be the ones who are making those tools Just stay out of it, right? There's no money in it anyway. Everybody who is making those tools is bleeding money. Stay out of it, but don't try to tell people, but we have a great solution for people who want to make AI images and it's to make ones that look to the worst in the industry Like if you're going to make a tool that is forment for making AI images, it should best and highest fidelity one.. It's like a cognitive dissonance. like we want to have a tool that makes images with AI, and we don't want ours to look good Be that's creepy. And it is kind of creepy. I get it But that means you don't want to make it, right? So I don't know. Hopefully they have some additional clarity on that. And I do I hope that it's not just AI, AI, AI AI. Like I you know, it's got to be there. If there's not a strong amount of it That'll be weird too, right? Yeah. There's a I'll know it when I see it whether the WWTC keynote has enough Apple intntelligence news, right? It should be a lot. It should be a major tent poll. It should probably be the main thing people are talking about in the mass media afterwards, but it shouldn't be everything. Yeah. Yeah, they still need to push the platforms forward, They still need to have their productivity apps get better they desperately need to revisit the macOS user interface, which I don't think we have time to get into, but I agree with what you've said. We have no time Let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor and is a new sponsor And I honestly had not heard of them before they got in touch to sponsor the show and start sending me some kit. It is even realalities And they make AI smart glasses Even G two. 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They have to leave time to talk about that stuff That was the other kind of weird thing in twenty four is Some stuff that felt like it would make the keynote was either in the developer state of the Union or buried somewhere in a document. It's like, okay, like you maybe misspent your time. But I suspect that they have worked on this one very hard to find that balance to say what they need to say, not over promise And and just try to gain some of that authenticity back They sort of blew two years ago. Yeah Yeah. and on the user interface front, I mean, I think keeping it very short. I do the way and some people they for his Viciferous as my criticism has been about MacoS Tahoe I am not a more or less pro liquid glass elsewhere think I do, I haven't talked about it, but I do think it's I think it's out of place on Apple Watch I don't think Apple Watch needed to be updated for it. And I think it's weird. The buttons that used to be entirely flat on Apple Watch now have a bit of three dimensionality. It's the one platform where I think being completely flat was right But even there, it's not over the top. I don't hear anybody saying, boy, they really ruined my Apple Watch with watching this Right. It's not that different And I think it's such an interesting idea overall on the touch platforms. It's and it gives them this foundation to build on. It's like, hey, they can just say they don't have to backtrack and say, hey, we really screwed up last year. They could say, hey, last year we laid the foundation for the future and now we can really make it s and kind of S it that way and then do some of the things they did that were wrong. I think that's one hundred percent the language that they'll use And yeah, I think I don't mind it on the Apple Watch so much. I think it's best on the phone ue that's the first target for it, I think, internally But yeah, I think they'll spend some time. Maybe not talking about it, but maybe showing MacOS twenty seven being a little bit different right There's a demo and maybe he does something in findinder that in twenty six just looks awful. It's like, oh Like you didn't say it But I saw it I think that's fine too. And I certainly hope that's been on the menu for this year Yeah. and like one of my favorite little touches last year was when they totally acknowledged in the keynote. Hey, a lot of people didn't like the changes we made the year before to the first page of Apple Photos. Y, Photos app because we wanted to expose a bunch of these features that we felt like people weren't getting to the special albums of friendriends and familyamily or recents and stuff and everybody was like, I just want to see my own most recent photos when I go to the front page of photos. And they were like, we heard you and here's what we've done. And they fixed it, right? I think they actually did fix it. and nobody You know, when there is and again, if they do fix, I guess I owe them If they do if Maga is twenty seven really does look good can't just say, Oh, good, they fixed it. you know, I owe it a bit of attention to say why it's better and sing it. But It's never going to be as long and as lengthy as the complaints about what was bad Right? It's just the it's the human nature, right? And so them fixing photos for billion iPhone users last year. And I didn't hate the year before change like some people did. I actually didn't mind it But when I listen to the criticism from the people who hated it, it's like, oh, I see what you don't like about it. I don't mind that But I but it's the proof is that there just haven't been complaints in the last year about the Photos app and the Photos app is one of those handful of apps that almost all iPhone users use. and you really consider important. You really can't not use it. Even if you use like Google Photos or some other cloud service. if you take a picture with the stock camera, it's going in the stock photos application. Or if you take a photo with a third party camera, right? I think there's more people who use photos than who use the camera app Probably. It's because people who use the third party camera app still use the photos to manage the library and there just haven't been complaints. So that was a total win. They do listen, you know, and I think they could do that. I would expect to come out of WWDC. I have very high hopes for liking the user interfaces across the board. I really do. And I think that Alan De's departure is a good rethink too. And it's not, oh, that's make Stehven Lay, Steve LMay a savior and hope that he's going to do revolutionary things. And if you think that the entire liquid glass direction is trash, he's going to make you happy. Well, that's not going to happen But I do think it's a time for reflection and hey. and the other thing too is that the current Ale and it's clearly the way they like it, but under Craig Federigi, they ship everything at the same year, right? And in years past, ten years ago, if they were going to do something like this, it would have shipped for iPhone only last year. Yeah. that's how it was. There was IOa seven And then Mavericks was still glossy and shiny. And then whatever California place came after Mavericks I don't even know if they did iPad the first year. I don't know they did. I remember because the beta was late. and it was still called IOS. Yeah. It wasn't iPadOS. Yeah right. Yeah, But it was beta and broken. They ship all this stuff. They did it all in the first year, But it but that doesn't change the fact They could only do so much in a year, right? They just happen they just shipped it all It's like you could still see that it was best and designed first for iPhone. one hundred percent U Anything else you want to get to before we we No, I think that's it. It's always a fun time of year and So In some ways, it feels like each WBC has a new layer of complexity to it I think I'm hopeful about it. I think they're going to get this one right Yeah, I do too. And I think the other thing Is as exciting as AI still is and the way that there's companies still haven't IPOed and there's tons of money. I think that the rules of the game and oh, the nature of the whole thing is more in focus. Right? It's not totally in focus It's still some uncertainty as to how much better it can get But I feel like the whole, hey, maybe we don't even need an operating system thinking is gone. It's a little more Oh, this is aajor new technological step change and we have to adapt to it and that's it. But we kind of get it I think that's right My thanks to our sponsors. We had Squarespace, where you can build a website where you can get meals to eat And Notion, of course, Notion where you can build on their AI platform