Episode 976: WWDC26 news, Apple TV rumors, and more

Introduction

0:00unscripted unfiltered unafraid welcome to the macro podcast my name is Michael Simon and I am joined by my colleague Jason Cross good morning and our producer I wrote down uh I must I didn't change this from last week Roman I wrote down Rugen Latula if you listen to last week's show that's a that's a that'll make sense yeah yes so ahoy there but yeah hi Roman this is episode

Catch-up episode

0:32remote number 976 and today is today's kind of a catch-up episode like we don't have anything new to talk about per se but this week we did get um the announcement the official announcement of WWDC which will be June 8th as we assumed the first Monday the first like full Monday week of June so we'll kind of give an overview of that and we'll catch up on uh Jason's studio display reviews that we've been talking about for like three weeks now that we just keep throwing in the back burner

1:04so we'll get his thoughts on that and we will um talk about some uh Apple TV rumors and we'll close with segments worst thing that happened this week and uh oh common corner of course the one that we always do that I always forget okay speaking of comments you can contact us through blue sky Facebook threads search for Macworld look for the blue mouse logo send us an email to um podcast at macworld.com send us a personal email comment under a video comment under a post just you know find a

1:37way to get us a comment and we will talk about them in a future show okay Roman I'm gonna shuffle

Apple history

1:44things around let's do Apple history first well for a couple reasons one I could tease next week's show because um April 1st is Apple's 50th anniversary and we're gonna have a special guest um some of you probably know who he is Jason Snell he worked at Macworld for a long time he worked in the Apple kind of universe I don't know if he quite does he does he because he go all the way back to the to the 80s Roman like was he at Macworld or wherever in in their in the early 80s no no he's he can tell

2:20you this but his career started in the early 90s okay so none of us are old enough to be to have been working quite that yeah yeah so we'll talk to him about you know all that stuff his experience with macro events his experience with Apple products watching through the years you know he has a a whole bunch of history there and the other reason why I want to do this is because this will lead into the this week in Apple history will lead into our first kind of main topic discussion which is

Apple TV history

2:52rumors of possibly uh an Apple TV coming soon so let's hit it Roman okay so in Apple history uh this week the original Apple TV started shipping on March 21st 2007 so what I messed this up before I'm gonna mess it again that's like what 19 years ago there you get that right there I go so I'm well rested somebody in uh YouTube comments said I needed to get some rest I got some rest so I was able to do that

3:27math uh but yeah 19 years ago the original Apple TV came out now it was introduced the previous January

Original Apple TV

3:36at Macworld Expo but it was just introduced um and there was introduced if like even before that yeah I forgot to look this up but if I recall September of the fun they kind of like Steve Jobs kind of teased it as like the thing that completes he completes they called it they called it ITV yeah yeah yes and uh there was a big um like a legal battle because there was an ITV out there I think

4:08Logitech had a device or something it was every buddy wanted to make a set top box device at this point to get into your living room and so there was an ITV out there um because of a trademark dispute with I think ultimately it was like the British broadcasting network ITV there was that was they they want to sell it globally so that was that was the ultimately what made them switch the name before

Apple TV naming

4:36it was released and it's funny because like had it come out as ITV like I don't know how it affects like the development but at least the naming of stuff like that was the first like Apple product like Apple something right if I recall not I something yeah right everything was I something for a while it's Apple watch and you know like they they kind of took that and and ran with it yeah I'm trying to think if that was we did get we did get iPad and obviously iPhone I so iPhone came out during that same keynote Apple TV was the first like announcement and then everyone forgot about it

5:11because you know iPhone came out uh you know 10 minutes later or whatever it was that that was a macro San Francisco 2007 so I guess they were still doing the eye thing but I wonder if like like a little switch flipped in someone's brain and said like you know maybe we can do Apple like

Apple branding

5:27the little logo it's cool it's branding it kind of ties everything back I know the eye thing is Apple's but other a lot of other companies were doing it you know accessory makers and you know people were kind of glomming onto that and Apple is unique and like you no one can do that right yeah I don't I don't remember that that was the actually first Apple blank product but I guess it does it might be it might be they were really going on the i thing iMac was huge everything was an

5:58internet product right that was like these days internet is such table stakes that they don't call things the internet something but that was then that was like this is an internet phone yeah well you know does Apple one count Apple two was that the original you mean that oh the original I was thinking of the services oh like Apple two like Apple two Apple two GS right I guess so well I mean they since they got away from that what did they I guess Apple was Apple three or Apple two GS the last

6:29one I think Apple two GS was the last one of that line and then everything else is just Macintosh and I don't think they called them Apple Macintosh I think they were just Macintosh right they don't even say the Macintosh they just call it Macintosh right so yeah they got away from it it was the first product I guess we could say to bring it back but yeah maybe it was it could have been the actual actual first

Alternate Apple product names

6:54Apple something um can you imagine if that wasn't if they had not just decided to do everything like iMac like if it was Apple phone Apple pad Apple it sounds weird to us because we have it would make sense if they did it but yeah yeah we have decades of this stuff but now so it sounds weird to us but it it actually makes more sense I remember when like Roman I think we were talking about you you were at that keynote but when Steve Jobs said and we're calling an iPhone and the crowd just erupted

7:26yeah because it was such a big deal which is but what was funny because it had been rumored that it was going to be called iPhone yeah of course so it was you know to those of us in the jaded journalism community it was you know we were like yeah but that so the i thing was it was iMac and i iPod right and you know i don't know yeah i don't i don't know but people people i think if he said it ran os 10 and everyone cheered and then he said we're calling the iPhone and everyone cheered yeah that was a that was the still the greatest like sometimes i just watched that keynote just to

7:58watch it like it was he was so good that day that was like his um uh what is it uh i don't know jimmy hendrix or bob dylan or like one of their iconic concerts like that was just he was just brilliant that day uh so the apple tv at that time it was uh 7.7 inches square yeah which seems gigantic now it does uh and uh it had a 40 gigabyte hard drive is that correct yes 40 gigabyte hard

8:29drive uh yeah and it ran itunes people remember it had a weird it was it had like a pentium m processor and ran a whole different os than the it was an os was that front row was that the software it ran oh i remember that shipped on the um iMac right i think i think it included that that's not what they called the whole operating system but it was based on mac os and stuff it wasn't sort of

9:01like the current apple tv software is its foundation is the iphone ipad right branch of stuff right this was like more like the mac branch of stuff it's like taking a mac and cutting everything out of it and making it just run to itunes and a few other things the interface wasn't great the remote wasn't great right right you could basically watch movies and listen to music and that was it but it was similar it was definitely similar to the front row like interface where as jason said

9:34very different than the iphone and the mac and everything it was its own thing it had a ton of ports on the back for connecting to televisions because back then there were like 17 different standards before hdmi took over everything there was um video out and our uh the component video and hdmi yeah there were component video cables yeah and like uh and of course ethernet because not a lot of people had decent wi-fi in their homes and it's all kinds of it was it's kind of a wonky

10:08product but second gen is where it switched to apple silicon they had an a4 they changed the entire operating system they changed the layout and the interface and it's not what it is today but it was definitely a completely different branch and kind of a different product and all that first gen apple tv was interesting but not good yeah the second gen came out in 2010 which was um a bit of a landmark year ipad came out with the a4 processor the iphone 4 came out that was oh yeah you know like really the

10:43one that really blew everything up this came out um i did i i can't remember if i owned the original apple tv i don't think i did i don't think i don't think a lot of that a lot of people didn't i don't think you were the weird thing also about that when the original apple tv came out during that time was even though there were video standards being established there was still kind of a mishmash of video formats out there so when the announcement came there was apple didn't actually

11:17say it's gonna for it in a support this format they didn't say they didn't announce that at that time uh so there was a question as to whether with what it was support remember when real networks was was a thing oh yeah so um and you know a lot of windows media video was out and uh yeah divx do you remember divx video oh yeah so now everything's at what mpeg4 and there's yeah there's a couple of major standards that you can kind of rely on everything being formatted in unless you unless

11:54you're like doing some really niche stuff or production stuff you know everything for consumers is one of a handful of very small flash video flash oh yeah so the real media stuff wow that was that was for a while that was everywhere yeah they did such a good job of like convincing every major media organization to we're we're way off track here but um apple killed flash basically because the iphone didn't support it and steve jobs wrote a letter and said basically screw you we're not doing

12:27it it sucks and if you like it go buy something else so you know um anyway apple tv a couple of them came out the second gen as jason said could change the the shape and the and the the whole idea of it then we got the hd model the 4k model and the one we have today is the third gen yes the third gen apple tv 4k when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work use indeed sponsor jobs it gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the

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New Apple TV

13:51which came out in october of 2022 and we've been waiting for a new one for a little while now we're uh we're expected to get one this this year probably first half of this year it's and it's probably going to be what amounts to a chip and ship update you're not going to suddenly sudden uh major new features for it are probably going to come like in the os 27 updates later anything that would require you know more ram or whatever all that yes it it seems to be like all of these delays the

14:27home pod apple tv this this new home flat screen thingy it's all related to siri allegedly that's what people keep reporting mainly mark german keeps reporting that these siri delays that have now reaching year three maybe you're close to it yeah i know what they're pushing all of these updates because they they're all going to have apple intelligence support or at least siri support and it's very dependent on the app intense and the contextual awareness and the and the whole new

14:58thing the whole new siri architecture yeah so uh the apple tv wouldn't be because it exists and has its all of its software and services so they could update the they could give us a fourth gen apple tv it's got a new chip in it and then it just gets all these new capabilities this fall or whatever you know they could do that but there's also no reason i mean there's not a whole lot of i have i think i have the second gen

15:29yeah i have the second gen and it's fine like it's no one is using apple tv saying man i need a new one of these things yeah there's not there wasn't a huge gap between the second and the third gen it was a year apart the chip was a big gap it went from like the a12 to the a15 and that and the remote got a little better but the main thing the third gen did is it slashed the price a lot it was like it was like better but also they made it considerably cheaper which was a huge shock um and so yeah it and

16:02it's still kind of the best set top box out there there's no question about it it's the best it's the best buy a country mile yeah it's also twice as expensive because they practically give away amazon fire sticks and stuff like that but it's you know it is the best right i i have a so on my porch i have a little projector that i have a fire stick plugged into and my my living room tell my dining room television is a samsung smart tv so i i use them i use them all and man when i sit in my

16:34living room and i turn on my apple tv it's so nice it's it's it's by far by far the best the everything snappy everything loads quickly the picture is better it's organized nice everything is better so yeah we might be getting a new one soon or we might be getting a new one in a couple months after new siri drops um so jason i'm gonna push yours to the to the end let's because this is a nice segue into wwdc yeah okay so we're never gonna talk about studios it's gonna wait do you

17:10remember that snl skit like the what's up with that skit that um yeah yeah yeah roman's on his head and they always had uh god i can't remember the guitar player yeah keen thompson was the the host but he always had uh god i can't remember a celebrity guest that he would start to talk well he had he had the same one it was the guy from fleetwood mac oh right right lindsey buckingham lindsey buckingham they always had lindsey buckingham there and he didn't speak and he smiled and he was always going to interview him and they ran out of time every time and they said we'll get you next week lindsey

17:43and he's just like yeah okay that's what's happening yeah well if you're if you're clamoring to hear studio display thoughts hopefully we'll get to it at the end of this segment but

WWDC preview

17:56on monday apple dropped the um the preview for wwdc basically just like it's happening there's not a ton in the announcement it is somewhat notable that they called out ai like they don't usually do that they've never done it in a previous wwdc kind of teaser and they don't talk about ai a ton unless it's like apple intelligence but they did say that there will be ai enhancement so that kind of got me thinking and jason you've you've you've kind of mentioned

18:27this a couple times right will the new siri be pushed to ios 27 i yeah i'm kind of thinking so what what we were expecting is there's a new siri that was supposed to come with 26.4 um and it was yeah it's a it's a new better model based on the foundation of google's gemini and it was going to give us the the features that were promised way back when the the on-screen aware

18:58the the on-screen awareness the personal context and and uh this was supposed to arrive in ios 18 in right before uh and then it was it was then they said oh sometime in the next year and the long-running inside info was 26.4 this spring 26.4 betas came out it wasn't in it and then they said oh uh german's posting like you know all my sources inside say they're having problems with some of

19:28these things and it's some of them are going to be some of these features are going to be next month and then some of them they're having trouble with they might eat even later they might be pushed to the fall i'm starting to think 26.5 isn't going to bring any new siri like the new the new foundation uh even with even with less features than originally said i'm i'm kind of thinking apple might be having enough problems that they're looking at it going let's forget this we only ever said this year which

20:00is kind of bs um let's just launch what we were planning for ios 27 which was which was always meant to be an even bigger siri with a bigger uh foundation like a new foundation type thing yeah yeah it would have it would have a back and forth chat interface on mac and iphone stuff like that but it would also uh be built on a foundation with far more parameters and use more cloud processing and all that other good stuff uh and have be conversational you could talk back and forth to it like this new

20:34siri update we were supposed to get with 26.4 wasn't going to be conversational you weren't going to be able to like put it in voice mode and talk back and forth to it like you do gemini and and stuff like that uh it was still going to be a prompt and answer siri that had all these other features um but the the new one is going to be conversational and also so my guess and this is totally a guess is 26.5 is going to have absolutely no new siri at all and they've just decided to scrap this sort of

21:06halfway step and just go with the big the big big siri for ios 27 and mac was 27 and all the all the 27 updates and we're going to see that this at wwec in june they're going to show it off i mean that could be um as we're as we're recording this uh uh the 26.4 updates arrived which was supposed to have siri so they all just landed which means we'll be getting the 26.5 beta within the next year or two

21:39so hopefully if you're listening to this that we might have the answer to that because if it's not 26.5 i don't think it'll be i i think it's either this update or nothing because you figure a month and a half and then we're really close to wwdc they never do anything really big in like the 0.6 and 0.7 updates those are usually security things as they already are moving on to the next big yearly update so this that's kind of their last chance it's really late it may not even be in the first beta because

22:15a lot of times right for the first couple beta releases they add a lot of features and then the last two or three beta releases are just fixing the bugs before it comes out so we'll see we may we may have an answer to this soon but my my guess is no new siri at all until wwdc and and the fall and and i bet the first betas they always at wwdc the first betas of all the operating systems are released so that develop to developers um not the public beta so that developers can start working

22:48with the new frameworks and and getting their apps compatible and all that stuff and they are often missing some of the features and my guess is new siri is not going to be in those first june 8th releases of the 27 updates either um i mean can so let's say that happens let's say we don't get siri again is like can apple like is apple going to be like can apple recover from this all right so let me let

23:23me rephrase that so we we're obviously watching this very closely do do do normal apple users have any idea that there's a new siri and it's and it's it's late because when you when you do your phone you get the the new siri animation do people know and or do they care that this has all been delayed no uh no i don't think they do i uh the iphone 17 sold more than anything else out there like any iphone before and it has no new ai any a thing right a lot of the ai that people use are third-party

23:58apps and services anyway right so i think for the most part and this is kind of apple's problem is that people have just decided that siri sucks and they're not going to use it and they don't know there's a whole new ground up like siri 2.0 brand new siri that that hopefully doesn't suck on the way like i don't think people don't know the the million iphone users don't know just just a small group of people who like focus on this stuff like like us so uh i don't know what it means for apple long term

24:35that they keep kind of missing target even though they don't publicly announce specific dates except for that first one they missed really bad um yeah the moment where we saw ads and stuff and yeah we saw ads and they it was always said to be coming in an update and then that update came and they said whoops we're not we don't it's not good so yeah i i long term i don't know what it means because they obviously obviously ai really matters to the investor class to all of apple's

25:07shareholders to everything the last when they updated the macbook pros and everything you should have seen that press release that press release that that go to apple newsroom and read the latest macbook pro press release for the for the new models it is ai ai ai every section is about using ai in some function of production or or developing for ai or ai it's it's it's everywhere and they've stopped just calling it machine learning and stuff like that all the time they're which they had before like

25:39like like ai is not a new concept that apple just discovered a year ago like they've been doing it they just didn't brand it they branded it apple intelligence which was you know a stroke of marketing genius i suppose and then it kind of fell on its face and what's what's really interesting about the whole apple intelligence kind of saga is that there are companies like google and samsung and amazon and facebook like they're doing they're investing heavily in ai and haven't really gotten that

26:10far with it like apple is doing it slow and steady thing uh google's what i not in terms of like selling uh that's what i mean pixel pixel devices but but google is like the big dog in ai of course yeah like uh like it's definitely a like a a thing that's developing but as far as like just to point at something and say apple missed the boat like they really have it the boat might be a little bit a little bit off the shoreline but they can still get there pretty quickly well the heart

26:44i think the the issue is that it's difficult and complex to get to a reliable place there's a lot of companies that are willing to ship things that are just totally unreliable wrong flaky um it's a there's a lot of ways in which it's a privacy nightmare for a lot of these companies um and apple so apple has a standard they have to meet that's pretty high higher than i think a lot of these other companies are willing to meet they're just willing to race ahead and release and it's hard to catch up there's a it's it's really hard to make this stuff there's a you can count on

27:21less than one hand the number of companies that make good foundation models and good like yeah the the seven trillion other ii companies that spring up all use those three companies like major foundation models and apis and stuff and they just modify it and you know buy tokens so yeah i think there's just kind of two things going on it's like apple's got a high standard to meet but also it's really really hard yeah and they're so they already kind of capitulated and said all right we're gonna we're gonna use

27:55google's yep um gemini as the foundation for this thing and they still haven't been able to deliver anything yes a shippable product yeah because they're trying because it's not just gemini's with slap siri on it right like it's it's using gemini technology but all the stuff they want to do with it all the on-screen contextual awareness and the personal like context for your stuff and all these things those aren't just like built into gemini or anything they have to use gemini and still build

28:27that stuff on top of it within it put all their god rails on it yeah so it's it's gonna be it's a big complicated thing i know they're working really really hard on it but i don't know how long they can go not not delivering it before like investors start to get upset i mean i guess as long as they keep selling products they don't they don't care but yeah as long as they're selling you know what a hundred billion dollars products a year i think they'll be fine yeah but um to your earlier point i the the real worry for apple is that they haven't quite a number of products that are reliant

29:05on this shipping before they can ship the product so their product pipeline is kind of being starting to be held up now and that's what investors care about they're like hey man if you keep selling products and they're like well we can't keep selling products uh if half our products require this new theory yeah right i mean that's the thing but on the other hand they sold more products than ever in the in the holiday quarter they just released their cheapest mac ever and it's still out of stock in the sense that you can't go in the store and buy one right now if you want a certain color

29:37so yeah i don't think any of this is really affecting their ability to sell products yeah not the existing products this is this is all required for all the new areas they want to grow into and um so yeah i don't know how much time i don't know how much runway they have uh i mean they certainly have all the money in the world that's not the issue the issue is just like when when does the when did all their investors and everybody start to get real nervous when does it start impacting sales to consumers i yeah anybody anybody's guess but it's starting to look bad

30:08um so wwc i i assume apple intelligence is a major plays a major role in it regardless of whether or not we get the new siri or part of the new siri next month there's still a lot to come and i yeah it's the the next new siri is still always a part of that the big chatbot one the big model and the big and that is supposed to tie in to and work with a whole bunch of apple apps all the

30:39all the apps that come pre-installed on your things and stuff right so there's a lot of ai features within apps and all that well with with all the delays we've seen from this like thus far do you think we'll get that kind of next next generation in ios 27 or are they going to push that out another year and make sure that this whole bit is so no i think i think they're going to skip this whole bit is what i'm saying it's that they're going to say this is a half step we're investing too much time

31:09and effort in a in the new model but it's smaller and lesser and it doesn't do let's just stop working so hard to make this work and just put all our effort in the thing that we were going to ship this fall which is going to have all those features and more and be bigger and better and and you think that's going to that will arrive in june or will be previewed in june i think that's going to be a key focus of what they talk about at wwtc uh the rumor so far for all the new operating

31:42systems is i mean there's always some new features but it's going to be people are saying this is like snow leopard release it's it's uh going through all the old code with a fine tooth comb and removing cruft and fixing long old outstanding bugs and making everything run smoother and more efficiently which it could use yeah every you know every few years we need that uh it's not a bad idea so outside of the ai stuff which is big there's not expected to be much in the way of major new

32:16features except for that um i think we're going to maybe see some other things like maybe a health app revamp that's been a little bit delayed and overdue and i think that ties into this ai stuff um yep but but yeah there's it's not expected to be a oh the the like last year's release full of a bunch of different so many features and so many different apps we're still going to have liquid glass they're just going to tweak it some you know all that stuff

32:46i mean i think as as both an apple diehard user and a casual fan i think that's a good thing because like apple comes out with 50 new features nobody uses all of them very few people use a large part of them and i'm going to say like a handful don't even pay any attention to them they just don't even know they're theirs right they restart my phone and make sure it works like you know i'll go back to my parents my mom the first thing she did was call me it's like

33:16after i was 26 and she's like how come my phone looks different and i had to explain like it's the same right it's just different they don't most people who use apple products just want their phone to work really well last really long and and that's it they're very frustrated that they're getting that it's nagging them about a software update when it just nagged me four months ago right and then and then they install it uh and when the screens pop up that tell them what the new things are

33:47they're just like next next next go right stop i'm trying to open i'm trying to open my tiktok just leave me alone i'm like right it's i mean i'll be honest i don't use half the new features i'll try no yeah they don't they don't become part of my everyday stuff yeah so i think a year give us the new siri dial everything back as far as new features smooth out all the rough edges because there are some liquid glasses liquid glass is nice and i don't expect that to go anywhere and they just need they need to refine it a little bit and fix some stuff mac os needs a lot of help

34:22uh roman if you want to chime in with anything like like mac os needs like some love at this point yeah they need to do something about yeah the liquid glass and things like that yeah it runs well but i think just in terms of like ui cohesion and stuff like that mac os could could use some touching up yeah like the the spotlight isn't what was sold the searches and settings is terrible

34:52you know it's especially now with macbook neo like i think they need to take a step back and really get mac os back to what it was because it was in like let's go like el capitano one of those years like really good and then all over the years they kind of added too much kind of cruft to it and you know it it iphone is obviously more important so ios gets all the focus and i just think they need that you know it's not like it's not terrible it's still better than windows but it could use it

35:23could use some help they could start by bringing back launchpad there you go i like launchpad too no i know they're gonna they're gonna um no they're gonna make it um i think people are gonna be real mad because they're gonna be paying a lot of attention to mac os this year because they have to build mac os for touchscreens oh that's true also ios for folding stuff oh yeah we didn't even talk about that yeah yeah the uh mac os they're gonna if they're gonna make a touchscreen mac which is

35:55everybody says they're all systems go on that the way that they said they're going to do it is it's going to be the mac os you're used to except that when you go to touch something the spacing gets wider on menus the things uh if you touch something that if you click something that just happens when you click it you might touch it and then get like a radial menu around where you touched it that that shows next step options that make sense for touch and stuff so i think they are going to pay a lot of

36:27attention to mac os's interface but i think they're going to go in the opposite direction that people want they're going to make everything kind of less information dense less uh you know fewer less room for for more stuff because they're making room for everything to expand and and shift as touch targets happen for the touch so i feel like be careful what you wish for when you ask you to change mac os a lot because it might go the wrong direction you can kind of get a glimpse of that

37:01with ipad os 26 like there's kind of some of that in there yeah where if you hover things get you know things are wider the menus change so like yeah i think jason's probably right about that yeah i'd worry about it but it does you're right especially with macbook with macbook neo mac os needs some love they're gonna get i think there's a very good chance that a year from now there's twice as many mac users just because everybody wants a 600 laptop so yeah i mean tim cook said like this was our biggest

37:32our biggest mac launch for non-mac users which i don't know how they measure that so quickly after a week that is meaningless marketing fluff but you know maybe but it's still notable in the sense that it's attracting it's immediately attracting people who aren't previous mac users yeah i've been watching um college baseball with my son and like every single ad break has a mac neo commercial oh really they're targeting the audiences that we thought they would yeah so um that's gonna

38:04be the ads for that are gonna be huge come like supply will have rebounded and they're gonna run the ads that you see at back to school time around september and stuff are gonna be everywhere yeah and it makes sense like you know you can buy your son a 300 chromebook that's gonna break in a year and a half or you can get him a 500 macbook it doesn't run anything that he wants to run you know right whereas the macbook runs all that stuff i mean it runs it runs ipad apps and stuff too so like

38:35half the stuff half the apps that he has on his phone or whatever yeah it's gonna be better yeah yeah my son is a pc pc he has a pc for games and an ipad and an iphone and he's already asked me like because he has a he has a chromebook and he's already said like i'm going to high school next year could i get a neo like i didn't tell him about it well i mean he probably heard about it for me talking yeah but you know it's it's absolutely going to attract a whole new audience yep all right uh hardware are we gonna get any new hardware like we'll all right everyone we'll

39:10have a larger preview show sometime in may but like what are you expecting for hardware releases at wwdc there's i mean nothing i don't expect any of the kind of wild new stuff like uh like the um home hub tablet that's the way i'm wondering about is if you get the new siri will they also demo that no i don't think they will i think all that stuff is going to be in its own event or part of the september event or whatever like that's i i we have not gotten much in the way of new hardware

39:46at most wwdc's only when they uh had to kind of announce vision pro because they needed developers to get on board before they released it and all um that was the only real kind of thing but we still have a number of macs that need their chip and ship updates so mac studio needs its update mac mini needs its update the base ipad is due for its updates so all those things i think it's it's very possible all that stuff happens at wwdc they seem to be on track for a quote first half of the year and that

40:20kind of is the end of the first half of the year the the m5 ultra for sure i would bet because if we're going to be getting the m6 later this year it seems as though like that m5 ultra has to come out at some point relatively soon unless it doesn't but for them to miss the m4 and the m5 ultra would be would be strange to me right so yeah the mac studio with the m5 ultra seems to be solid mac pro man are they ever going to do anything with that does it still no mac pro is going to go away i

40:53check like once a week to see if it's not just like like axed from apple's website it would not surprise me if it just silently disappears from the website when the new mac studios come out but uh the m mac mini hasn't had its m5 update um which it might not get sometimes they skip the mac mini uh have they since they started doing the the three at least the four was the big change there was no m3 mini i'm not i don't remember about the two roman was there an m2 i think there was an

41:26m2 but but there wasn't an m3 um yeah but yeah the mac pro so i we've been we're going to run a bunch of um like 50th anniversary stuff next week and so i've been going back through the history and stuff and man the mac pro used to be like the thing like it was the last in the last one to get the intel chip and it was the fastest peak like it like it's just there now right there's no it's like a it's like an old broken down car that no one wants to get rid of it's such a sad like demise for what was once

42:00like such a cool mac yeah it's it's in a lot of ways the mac studio is the new mac pro and they couldn't call it the mac pro but it's really what it is it's it's the new mac pro it's just not my in the sense that you can change the hard drive and stuff yeah and i don't know that i i wonder how many people who have those that's true the current revisions of the mac pro have changed anything in that way right you can't even do much with the mac pro you can you can add a hard drive and you can put a like an audio card in there but that's about it right something like that yeah uh and a lot of

42:33that stuff people just use external with thunderbolt now and right right right uh they're gonna have thunderbolt 5 like the mac pro is so sad yeah no but the mac studio does and so just use that uh uh and then imac imac needs its m5 or whatever so all those things could be between now and wwdc and at wwdc but i don't think we're gonna get any of the the cool the cool new stuff i think we're gonna get like the rest of the m5 updates and and the ipad i wonder and this is a long shot

43:08rome's gonna start yelling at us because we're we're talking too long and your studio displays is already axed sorry jason yeah no i know we're never gonna hear about it um i wonder if they're going to preview the the folding software or the or the the software for the iphone fault not a chance there's no secret that it's coming out yes rather than risk and no man in apple's mind that product does not exist like they have never even hinted at acknowledging any kind of rumor

43:42for anything ever but they've done that it's not unprecedented they did that with the imac pro they did it with the home pod they did it with iphone right they previewed it months before but they and showed the product they didn't just say like oh this is a product that's that's coming we're not even going to show it to you but here's the software for it like never no so there's no way they're going to show or even hint at iphone the the software features for that are required for the fold without

44:14actually showing the hardware and they're never going to show that hard that iphone fold at wwdc not a chance no there was a time when wwdc was the launch pad for new iphones so like the four i think the or the three of the four was the last one but yeah um yeah you're probably right but it would be so cool if they just dropped a complete and total bomb on everybody yeah that said here's the here's the new iphone or here's but i don't think they want to steal any thunder from new siri they're finally going to have real new siri it's going to be a real chatbot that like it's conversational

44:48and talks back and forth and has like a text log of stuff like the current chatbot i think they really want that to be the star of the show they want to go out there and go like we've been working for years on this and we're finally ready to show you yeah yeah i think that would be that would be a good kind of focus for the show you know a bunch of a bunch of small updates fixing a lot of bugs and issues and here's the new series that we've been waiting for for two for three and the way that

45:20ai is infused into every apple product and service right like it's going to be in photo here's ai in photos and ai in tv and ai music and ai in this and ai in notes and ai in reminders and ai in right so and that'll make investors really happy and all that stuff and it's something that will have a lot of uh frameworks and apis and hooks that developers need to know about and start developing for and so yeah i think it fits yeah so that's sorry that that kicks off with wwdc

45:57kicks off june 8th uh 10 a.m there'll be a keynote um you can watch it online uh it's still it's the same thing where it's virtual but there will be people there and we'll have more to say about that between now and then but um oh real quick the the the wwdc logo it's it's gotta be the least teasy for lack of a better word oh i know like it's just letters it's a black screen yeah it's it's it's it's a white a white logo and the 26 is like glowy like so the conspiracy theorist or the

46:35not the conspiracy the optimist in me wants to say like this is a hint that they're going to bring back the uh the glowing apple logo on macbooks oh on the back on the lid oh i kind of do that's the worst that's the worst thing about the new apple those that those macbooks were they were the best those when you turned them on and the things lit up that was the coolest thing but um it's it's there's nothing like last year you they had the like the glassy rainbow it's like oh look we're

47:05gonna get that new interface and the year before i don't remember but there's always something that kind of hints at what's coming in this one nothing yeah it's just it's just white maybe as a at a later release as we get real close to it or something uh but this is yeah this is just a black background with a sort of white foggy liquid glassy looking wwdc 26 and that's it and the 26 is brighter than the rest of it or like yeah it's like gold yeah yeah yeah so all right so that's it

47:37that's wwdc well uh coming in march april may june was a little under three months see roman we could do we could we could do math on this show uh all right um so we're gonna do a segment because i want jason to yell for a little this is our our worst thing that happened this week and i'm just gonna

Worst thing that happened this week

48:00let him take over because uh he needs a little bit of a of a ramp to get going oh i'm i'm gonna i'm just gonna try and keep this fairly brief because we talked way too long about wwdc um apple's announced there was a rumor yesterday but they announced it today uh that there's ads are going to come to maps and they announced it as part of this wider product called apple business which is a lot of the stuff they've had for a while now their mobile their mobile device management and app management for businesses and stuff like that kind of all wrapped into one service they're calling

48:32apple business and part of this is uh what do they call it new discoverability or enhanced discoverability on maps which is uh um but start when this releases in april as a business you can claim your business on maps like people do on yelp and google maps yes this is my business and then starting this summer they're going to start selling ads and maps so they're going to ruin the next thing

49:03with with freaking ads uh so you search for something you search for best sushi near me and the first result is going to be an ad for somebody who paid to be on best sushi near me in san francisco or whatever right like not the best one and not the one that's most relevant or newest or any of the other things that you're actually looking for just the one that paid to be there and it would be marked an ad uh and then the marking kind of like the app store there's like a little blue yeah there's a tiny

49:34little highlighted differently it's tiny little dot and it's highlighted slightly differently and nobody will like we just talked about how nobody's paying attention right like nobody will know or care um and but this is the word so when when they launched the app store you remember how steve job so proudly talked about how there were going to be ads because ads ruin the experience like you you if you search for something and the results is something that paid to be there that is not search right that's so then they started adding ads but not in search it was ads in um like the categories

50:13the top list categories and the and the when they spotlight ads on the apps and stuff like that there were ads in there and then their ads came to search and then ads there's ads in like apple tv and then they abused the push notification for the wallet app to to hawk tickets to f1 the movie like and best best picture nominee f1 the movie jason if you're some respect if you're if your wallet app sends you a notification it better be for about something for one of your cards or tickets in the

50:46wallet and it wasn't it was go buy movie tickets which they absolutely deserve to get raked over the coals for it made like a billion dollars or something so it worked yeah i don't know how much of an impact that that popping up a wallet notification i mean it's it's especially bad that it was from the wallet app like that was the worst like no no that's my credit cards what are you doing but movie tickets can't live there if you use it they absolutely right um

51:19the um but they you know the way right way to do it would have been to like work a deal with fandango where you pay it and fandango pushes out their fandango push notifications for people who have the fandango app and buy movie tickets or whatever but no your wallet app just because it's pre-installed on all your iphones that was gross uh the i the for the last month i turn on my apple tv and the tv app has above the fold on the main tv screen an entire row of f1 stuff

51:52yeah like uh for a month before the season starts i have zero interest in sports i don't this is not algorithmic to me i don't watch sports of any kind i'm not into f1 i've shown no interest and they're they're sucking up the whole interface to go like watch f1 we paid so much money watch it watch it please it's pretty cool to anyone watch i don't care how i don't know anything about f1 either but i've watched a couple of them and they're it's it's it's pretty cool yeah and i don't and i honestly

52:23don't i have absolutely no problem with them paying the money and producing the thing and making it cool i have a problem with them selling out my user experience for more money instead of going like let's make more money by making a better product or experience they're going like no let's make more money by abusing our um the reach that we have to worsen everybody's experience so they did that with the app store and they did it with those and now they're going to do it with maps and i'm going to search for something and it's going to be just like on yelp or google maps or google search on the web

52:56where everything i search for the first many results are people who paid to be there and not people who earned a spot in the results by being what i'm looking for yelp is the worst you search for any i know you gotta scroll past all that stuff on yelp and it's like 15 items long it's so long that you forget you go you're you're on to the second page and it's still at paid placement ads so you

53:28don't you forget that these are paid ads you have to go so far down to get past the ads that you're just like oh wait these are the actual search results so yelp is or i don't think they're going to be that bad but google does it like google maps is great at showing a map and giving directions but if you try to find find a thing like if it's not the specific name of the business exactly if you're just trying to find something in a category like home improvement store or something like that it's just a mess because the first several results are ads that you can't trust and nobody's gonna scroll

54:03to get to the real thing and now apple's just like we need more services revenue and we gotta we we need we need to spend more than 25 billion on stock buybacks every quarter so let's get that services revenue up for a second do you think this is something that businesses have come to apple and said hey um we're gonna promote our stuff in google over you because you don't have this thing that they have in order to stay competitive with google maps do you think that this is something that apple

54:35needs to bring to their maps application no i don't i don't think anybody is like i don't think there's a business out there i just wanted you to say why i i don't think there's a business out there that's just like we're going to not be listed on apple maps and only be listed on google maps because we can buy an ad on google maps that points everybody to us right like if there's it's just not i don't think that's the way the listings work on these things and already apple gets all this has a partnership with yelp and they get all this data from yelp and all this other stuff so

55:08i do partner with them i think that's gonna go away i think that's what this is yeah not immediately because they get they use that for like ratings for restaurants and businesses and hours and stuff like that but there are already a number of businesses that like most businesses uh and locations and stuff on on apple maps when you tap on them you get like a pop-up that's like supplied by it's info supplied by yelp and it's got a little tag on it and it's like ratings and hours and stuff like

55:38that but there are some that don't it's all from apple and i think they're trying to grow that i think they're trying to split from yelp and make sure that things like business reviews and this is just one step right first ad ad placement then hours of business reviews and all the other stuff i think they want to own all that data uh and i think so there is part of that i i just went in just to make sure i was right there is a rating system within apple maps now for right uh restaurants or

56:11whatever businesses it's not all that robust and it's not all that promoted and i don't know how many people use it like for example i'm looking at a a place near me that has six ratings i we don't have time to go through yelp because you're almost gonna tell me but i but i'm assuming on yelp they have 10 times more ratings so they're gonna have to build that up if they if they plan to and that's and that's not all locations so i just like there's a pet code down the street for me if i tap on petco it says it has hours open you know and if i tapped on that i get more but then it has

56:44the 2.7 stars but it says yelp parentheses 110 2.7 stars like that's so they're getting things like review stars of data and stuff and that's the top level maps uh info right you don't have to drill down for that i always think it's funny when petco gets like two stars like it's a pet store what are you upset about yeah i don't know clean this cup but listen jason i and i absolutely understand what you're saying and we've become far too accustomed to ads being everywhere and yeah

57:21you can say we'll just scroll past it well sure but like you have to train your mind to do that when apps in maps right now you don't have to do that you i type in like i'm going on um vacation in a couple weeks to chicago and i've been using maps to kind of like look at restaurants and plan of course you know in a month or whatever this thing launches i'm gonna have to scroll down and not click on the ad and you know the ad might be the best one who knows but yeah but you have no way of knowing that's for it to be the trust is gone right that's it's that's part of what's so frustrating

57:54about it is that apple as the biggest richest consumer tech company in the world is kind of the last person who needs to degrade user experience to make more money they need to yeah they're the they're in the best position to say no our user experience is worth more to us than this incremental ad revenue or something we're going to make money by having people buy like buy products or use our services or something because they are better experienced and it's just so disappointing to see that like

58:28if you wave enough potential revenue in front of their face like they go like well we'll just call it an enhanced discoverability or some nonsense but no when you search for something and something that paid to be there is in the results that's just bad it's bad apple does it it's bad when google does it it's bad when yelp does it it's bad when it's not a mapping thing it's bad on amazon shouldn't yeah yeah when i search for something the results should be what i search for not i've never once

58:58searched for who paid you the most to say you're the best sushi restaurant like that's that's not what i want uh all right roman let's let's get to some happy stuff yeah okay give me some positive comments thank you enough renting yes you're muted roman you're muted see we're we're ready we're ready to levity uh we're ready to levity uh so comment corner we got a couple emails from a couple of international listeners

59:32uh this message we got a lengthy email from roddy b who makes up who makes his home in uh germany he is a long-time listener and had some thoughts about how we shook up the podcast um he i think that was where his words shook up uh it took some it took some time for roddy to adjust but he said i have no clue how you do what you do but please keep doing it keep shaking things up and continue

1:00:03to be unafraid roddy also said he thinks a clamshell iphone will be popular and hopes apple will someday come up with a macbook ipad hybrid product he said i want my cake and i want to be able to eat it yeah uh i mean i know that the neo is like not that at all but i wonder if the neo is kind of an indication that they're not going to really go in that direction yeah i was going to say that i don't really think they try it i don't think they want to mash the mac and the ipad together uh at all um but

1:00:40i do i 100 agree with them on the the flip style folding iphone there's apparently designs in the works that may see the light of day in a year or two that's one of the things apple's working on for the future it's not gonna be the first folding iphone but it's gonna be a folding iphone i think that would be a huge hit i think people love that that flip form factor yeah samsung makes one motorola makes one um yeah they're they're fun they're a little retro a little modern and you know they're yeah very pocketable like you know it's once they're folded they're like so compact yeah so

1:01:14yeah i think that'd be a huge hit and as for what we do uh roman doesn't talk a lot in here because he's the producer but he does a lot of work before the podcast and after we record mike and i are mostly winging it and reading the script you have notes you have a script uh to read but but roman does a ton of the work there so he he's there's most of the oh but yeah but you see the difference is um the the work i do i find like easy and soothing the talking you guys do i find very

1:01:47stressful not not you guys talking but me having the talk see i can't even do it now that's what i mean so no that's so i would rather be producing than talking like you guys so i'm happy i'm stressed when i'm not talking i'm always looking for a place to insert myself that's not running over we we have we have conversations about how we interrupt each other and i know people have complained about that we absolutely try not to do that it is really hard it is it's a thing that both

1:02:20mike and i it's sort of our speaking styles and uh and also to not stop talking about something and move on like so it's it's having the two of us on a podcast is a really bad idea we try real hard you guys we do try uh and our last comment comes from mark l in the uk he says i'm a regular listener i like the new format more casual and chatty but keeping the well-informed coverage of all things apple so thank you very much mark thanks for listening the good thing is baseball season's

1:02:53coming up so we'll we'll have some baseball discussions oh my gosh oh here we go wait well when does it start it won't be tomorrow wednesday all right oh see you'll get that next week because because jason snell when you swap out jason's and have jason snell on uh he's a huge baseball fan don't talk you're off about baseball that's a huge baseball fan oh yeah um yeah so i'd like to encourage our international listeners to uh send us emails and post messages so we like getting

1:03:24the messages from our internet we like getting the messages from everyone but i especially like hearing them from the international listeners because they they do have a different perspective so you know apple's different in different you know apple's very dominant in the u.s you know while they have presence in other countries it's not like you know it's not like it's here in the u.s i like here yeah and there's a lot of features and services and they always that always like launch here first it takes so long for them to get to other markets and everything so yeah our perspective on

1:03:56it's different yeah and apple's presence and other international markets is growing so i'd like to hear what's what other people are thinking in international markets so uh that does it for comment corner all right and that does it for this episode of the macro podcast episode number 976 thank you jason thank you thank you roman thank you sir and thanks to you the audience for tuning in you can subscribe to the macro podcast in the podcast app on spotify youtube at the macro podcast channel or through any

1:04:28other podcast app if you have any comments or questions contact us through blue sky facebook threads search for macro look for the blue mouse logo send us an email at podcast at macro.com send us a personal email um comment under a video comment under a post um just get us a message um particularly international because roman would like to hear from you and you can join us in the next episode where jason snell will be our guest and it will be um apple's 50th anniversary um i drew myself off off off target on that one there was no reason for me i i was i was and i so yeah

1:05:06so next week um i thought maybe you were thinking about the studio displays that's why for other jason at in yeah so yeah next week will be our apple 50th um special episode see you then until next time

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