Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ and Dave
Rob Wyatt and PJ McNerney and Dave Lewanda discuss the latest and greatest news in the tech world and to figure out where things have been, where they are, and hopefully where they are going.
Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ and Dave
WWDC 2025 Predictions
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It's that time of the year again...WWDC!
Last year's conference was dominated by Apple Intelligence...which never really materialized...what's this year's conference going to bring us?
Rob, PJ, and our new co-host, Dave Lewanda (bio episode coming soon) get together to discuss what will be this year's focus.
Will we finally get an answer around Apple Intelligence?
Are there new features and/or hardware around the bend?
Could this "Developer Conference" actually be something that "Developers" want?
All of this and more in the latest episode of Tricky Bits!
Welcome back to Tricky Bits with Rob and PJ and Dave. So it's that time of the year again, folks, and no, I'm not talking about the end of the year holidays. I'm talking about WW DC, and let's recap what has happened over the last two years. Two years ago, what was the new hotness? Everyone was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. Last year everyone was talking about a different a thing, artificial intelligence, or as they like to rebrand it, apple Intelligence. And now we're teeing up WW DC once again. So we have recorded an entire episode about where Apple Intelligence is at, and it's nowhere. What is WW DC going to bring us this time? And Dave, this time we're gonna turn it over to you. We think you may have researched this a little bit more than we have, so. are your thoughts? What does WW DC bring us in 2025?
Dave Lewanda:Yeah, no pressure for a go with this, but, uh, yeah, no, I think there's, it's an interesting time, especially coming on the heels of Google io and Google really going loud and proud with their AI stuff. I think Apple is going to put a, a squelch on it for a year and really let, let it soak, not draw any attention to it, and try and focus attention on other things and everyone's gonna be asking the big question. Why are you not talking about ai? And they're gonna have to do some jazz hands and, uh, you know, uh, distraction, you know, you know, close up magic to get people not to talk about ai. Um, and obviously it's a bigger miss than something like the air power pot pad that they tried to launch a couple years ago. Um, even bigger probably than the Vision Pro, uh, that didn't necessarily hit the mark that presumably they were looking for spent all the time spent in paying really smart people like Rob to build a piece of hardware. Uh, I think this one's gonna be an easier one to bury and then leak it back out slowly over the next year and maybe make another
Rob:See, I don't agree. I think they've made the bed and they have to go lay in it. And they're still doing things like after Google io, there was reports that Apple may sign up, Google Gemini to be part of the Apple intelligence backend platform thing. And is that gonna be announced? I don't think they're going to back down on this AI thing. They sold phones. We had a podcast on this whole thing. They sold phones based on this product and they prevented that product from working on older phones. And people went out and sucked it up and bought these phones and it's not here. And now there's be a new phone out. What's the marketing play gonna be for that?
Dave Lewanda:Yeah, no, I think, I mean, everything I've read has been, you know, they're trying to again, you know, run some interference across that, you know, I wouldn't be surprised they let you, you know, decide whether you want to use chat GPT or Gemini or Claude. They'll touch button the edges, but apparently the big push is gonna be unifying the oss, of iOS 19, it's gonna be iOS 26, but also MAC OS 26 and
Rob:But do we need a conference for that? That's just a, that's just, let's change it. It's like that's a typical Apple thing. There'll be a day long video presentation because they've revolutionized the way that people account for versions. Even though Samsung's been doing it for years. it's gonna be groundbreaking and it's gonna be, yeah, we're gonna name the product after the year. I think I need a raise for that. This is the sort of thing you put in like. Comedy Movers.
Dave Lewanda:They're gonna steal the car dealer, you know, the, the car manufacturer and go with, you know, next year apparently it's gonna be 26, not even 25. Um, but the other thing is they're supposed to be unifying, it's the biggest refresh since iOS seven, which is when they ditched the skew morphic approach for the flat. and now everything is going to be more, the model of Vision os and all the, you know, semi-transparent translucent glass. Trying to bring that look and feel. So even to, you know, maybe TV os and watch os get long, do updates to the appearance.
Rob:this sound like a Windows eight to you? It does. To me, it sounds like go, oh, everywhere. This is the new thing and everything has to have the same ui, so we're gonna do it everywhere. It, it literally sounds like Windows eight. I.
Dave Lewanda:almost like, you know, they need to run some interference and buy some time to get through to 20, 26 or 20, you know, when piece is a little
Rob:Th that is actually a genius plan. Make something super shitty so people get pissed off about it and they'll forget about Apple intelligence. If you make something good, they'll be like, oh, it's really good. But what about Apple intelligence? We expect it to be good. If Apple can misstep and make something super shit, it'll buy that year. You talked about.
Dave Lewanda:up some oxygen, you know, and distract, you know, run some interference or some jazz hands, you know, don't man the man behind the curtain kind of thing. and you know, it feels, it's funny you guys pointed out how, you know, just like Microsoft missed mobile, apple missing ai, this could be like, you know, it wasn't, you know, part of that was around Windows eight was around that same timeframe as like Windows attempting to stay relevant as mobile was blowing up. That feels like, again, keeping that. Story alive or that analogy moving forward? History repeats itself, I wouldn't be surprised if they try and, you know, bury the lead, you know, and keep the AI stuff tighter to the vest and, you know, by placing it with something less technically. Interesting.
Rob:That will play out exactly how you said it will. They just won't say nothing. They'll just carry on as if we never mentioned it and kind of what Windows did or Microsoft did with the mobile space. It's like they kind of pro that for a bit and then just kind of went, Hmm, don't talk about that. I think Apple with ai, if they don't talk about it, then I will 100%. Agree with you that that's what they're doing. They, they're just trying to buy time and they don't really know what they're doing themselves. And I don't think they do know what they're doing. I don't think they've ever known what they're doing. They landed on a cash cow and having been in there, I can say this for a fact, they landed on a cash cow and they have to just keep milking it. They haven't had any good product really for years. Apple Intelligence is not gonna help them to make a better product. it's always gonna be a feature on a product. I think Johnny, ive went to OpenAI to make an AI product. I don't think Apple are capable of doing that.
Dave Lewanda:It is probably not. I mean, Steve Jobs unfortunate demise at a too young of an age, you know, whether he would've been able to, you know, pull another rabbit out of his hat, we'll never know. this concept, uh, from history of, you know, the theory of the retarding lead, you know, the sun never sat on the British Empire until it did. It feels like the sun never sat on Apple until it does. Where, you know, are they gonna be able to, run another playbook where they can't bring Steve Jobs back, though, you know, where, you know, apple of the late eighties, to the late, went through a 10 year fallow period where, you know, Microsoft propped them up right then. The next team came back in under Steve's, guidance and, know, they decided to make the switch from Power PC to Intel, and they had a really nice run from whatever it was, two th you know, os 10 OSX,
Rob:been a while. I mean, it's, it's been 25 years that they've been solid. I mean, the iPod. It is really what cemented their position. Yeah. It revolutionized how we changed, how we listened to music and the ads they had with the white headphones and that killed off Sony. Basically. They were like, you'd com and then the Windows version of iTunes was a massive deal, and then ultimately, obviously it all got killed by the phone, blah, blah, blah. We've done over that. But can they keep doing this is the big question and I don't think they can, I think they're out of ideas of where to put new products. They've got one everywhere. I guess there's the some new things. There's the, there's the new car play, which I think we talked about before and said it was a also on that missing list that we had there. It seems to exist. Maybe they'll announce some more things about that. My big question is, are they gonna talk about the store and the new roles from the store? Obviously things have reappeared Fortnight's Bag, biggest app on the uh, app store right now,
PJ:will,
Rob:I.
PJ:be presented as if it was their decision and it was a win.
Dave Lewanda:yeah. Or, or they just won't even talk about it. And, you know, I mean, they're doing it because they've been basically, you know, considered per, you know, committed perjury and, uh. We're forced to do it. Um, I think it's gonna be, it's interesting, you know, I think we've even seen, you know, there's been a transition over the last few years where instead of crushing everything out in the.zero release of the OSS in September, that they've even already started phasing out. Like there've been some more significant, you know, I remember it was, uh, group FaceTime was supposed to, you know, didn't come out to like whatever, dot two or there, even on the dev side, there was some changes to Swift UI that came out in the dot four release that were pretty substantial that you would've, you know, midyear or much bigger shakeup than that. So I part of this move to like rebranding the OS by the year that, know, maybe they even start, you know, start using the month somehow in there as well. And
Rob:Maybe they could put it after a dot. So they could do 26 dot four for April. I am a genius.
PJ:You have that guy a re.
Rob:Exactly. Uh, Paul, if you're listening, you can't have that idea.
Dave Lewanda:It's been trademarked patented.
Rob:Yeah.
Dave Lewanda:Uh, tricky bits exclusive. Um, no, I think, I mean, there there's been some softening, there's been
Rob:I.
Dave Lewanda:I think there's, I mean, who knows what's going on. I mean, supply chain, you know, the, the whole political tariffs. You know, I've heard things that like, know, China's blocking the people that Apple want to take outta China to go to India to make new devices. So they probably have bigger fish to fry of just continuing to produce hardware. I don't know even know how they could produce new hardware if they're having trouble building existing, you know, the next gen of whatever the existing product lines are. So, that further cements leaning into the services and the software products that don't require manufacturing or import export limitations. There was some mention I read today around, uh, you know, again, more playing on the edges, like the gestures that you can do with your AirPods, you know, where you can shake it off, you know, shake your head no to tell it to stop or, there was talk about camera controls perhaps. so I think they've made some little inroads again, as you guys mentioned, where these, it's not trying to be that super agent or agentic ai that can be your Jarvis or, uh, you know, complete control. But it's these little things like I've noticed when I am, you know, getting in the car, it suggests, do you want directions to home? know, those are the types of things, you know, it's recognizing the pattern that, oh, you know, we go down to see my in-laws every weekend and that, you know, it's Sunday night, you're probably driving home from where, you know, this place 45 minutes away. So can they continue? But that doesn't make for a good story that they can sell probably until maybe they can build it back up. And that's why I think, you know, given this year they'll, you know, jazz hands and distract away from it. And then next year they'll roll out all these little improvements up into a, a better story. Once they have a better story. But you can't, you know, what they tried last year was lead with the big news and then fill in the details. Um, I think now they'll probably try and get, grab the, you know, gather the details before they relaunch the bigger story.
PJ:Let me ask you guys this one, o obviously, you know, there's a question of what we think WW CDC is gonna have. What would you guys want to have it to have to make it worthwhile? Like what would it be like, Hey, I'm really excited if Apple would solve this particular problem. Like, what would be exciting for you guys?
Dave Lewanda:Where WW DC has lost some of its shine for me is that it's not really as much of a developer's conference anymore. day really feels more like a product marketing. You know, dog and pony show and yeah, they've got the labs or the, the videos that you can learn stuff from, but somehow getting back in touch. And, you know, I've heard a lot of, you know, even some of the bigger name developers or other people in the Apple ecosystem, I mean, John Gruber tore him a new one regarding, you know, they're not even gonna have a allow an Apple person to speak to Gruber during his, you know, live podcast that he does at WWC for the first time in 10 years. Marco Armand and a couple of these other big Apple platform developers are kinda like done with Apple. Xcode has become a bear, you know, to use,, whether it's, you know, the macros in Swift, know, having to be compiled and, you know, running up your build times. They just released a pre-compiled version of the Ma Swift syntax that is required for macros. But it, everyone I've read is, it's been tough to integrate Swift UI previews fails every other time for me. And maybe it's part of the, to your point, Rob, around the store of like getting back, recognizing the third party developers that built the App store or the App store was built on the backs of all those developers and the profits from the app store. At least getting back in touch to the developers and really deciding are they going to be you know, work with developers even up to Epic Games
Rob:No,
Dave Lewanda:going, or is they just, otherwise they might as well just close the system and make everything web apps like, you know, the
Rob:I think they'd like that. It's Apple have never liked developers. They've always been a thorn in the side because we've always said like Apple liked to be the smartest people in the room. And when you bring in developers or experts in their field, they're not the smartest people in the room. This happens a lot in games and graphics and things like that, and it's Apple have never given a shit about their developers at all. It's like, this is what you're going to get and you'll like it. And if they cared about developers, they would've never have made swift. Why'd you force on language on it just for you? It's like, yeah, it's open source, but no one's really going to use it.'cause it has no benefit that if I'm gonna learn a new language today, I'm gonna learn rust not swift, but generally I'm just gonna stick in the c plus plus world because that's what apps are tend to be, at least platform apps tend to be written in. And if you're not gonna do platform apps, you may as well do web apps, in which case you have the whole ecosystem of web apps for development. So I don't think Apple Care about'em from my point of view in the graphics world, if they'd make a native version of vol, it'd be excellent. make it C. So we don't have to use objective C to call any graphics API. Which again, if they cared about developers, if they cared about games as they say they do, they just bought a tiny game studio, then you'd have an interface that. They want not telling them what they want. It's like they already have platforms they can publish on. They don't need the Apple platform. If they really wanted them, they'd accommodate them rather than telling them what they're gonna do. But Apple, I don't think are capable of accommodating anybody. It's, this is we all the smartest people in the room. And that will trip'em up in the end.
PJ:These are actually really interesting answers.'cause I think this is a great double down on the DC in ww. DC stands for Developer conference it's fascinating because I, I agree with Dave's, notion that, you know, the keynote has become basically a, a product dog and pony show
Rob:but before you go any further, that's true for GDC too. These days it seems like all development conferences have become whizzbang, flashy things and don't, don't have any actual content. GDC still has some content, but it's getting down that same path. WW DC, the Microsoft one and the Google one and the Facebook one, and they were all just flashy marketing events of, look, we have developers. This the days of just a back room of developers sitting in a room and hashing it out are pretty much gone. And that may be because of YouTube and the way we consume media today. It's, and all the information you want you can find online. They don't really need to sit you there. And secondly, if you go into a meeting with these people, you can get their info and they don't want your content in them directly. They want you to go through proper channels, blah, blah, blah. There's many reasons why the developer conference has kind of faded and it's become this whizzbang thing, but I think ww DC is the worst offender. Maybe Google IO is actually worse, but it, it's close.
PJ:bad up there. Yeah. So, so let me then pivot the question. Do you guys feel, and maybe the answer's an easy yes. That these conferences now occupy the space as conferences, really for the shareholders and the news media and the product people that want to see the new whizzbang features, rather than being about how do we empower developers to operate better on our platforms.
Rob:Yes, it is exactly that. I think, and you can see this because it's always from their point of view, if like Apple will tell you this is how the new API will be used. But if you go to like a real developer conference, like I know the PlayStation's GTC or uh, the internal one for first party. Studios, they'll get developers up there saying, this is what we did. We told it wouldn't work. We did it this way. These are the issues we had. This is how we worked around it. The end result is this and things like, this is how we got Nan night and visibility buffers and all these new technology. Was someone just going, what if I did this? And it's like, oh crap, it works really well. You don't get that opportunity on Apple platforms. I will still, I'll go on a stage and say Microsoft's developer support to this day is a thousand times better than Apple's and'cause they don't really care about their developers. Where Microsoft document all the APIs, they are very good at like the MSDN old days and then MSDN online now it's, it's orders of magnitude better. Apple is just literally, they'll document the function calls and it's like, I can read that from the damn header file.
Dave Lewanda:Yeah, well that's, that's one of the funny things is some of the documentation, like maybe that would be better if they just canceled the developer's conference and put all the money and resources into the documentation.'cause often you'll find stuff that's not in the documentation, that's in a video, like a ww DC video that gets published, you know, some Edge Corner case for something I found, you know, uh, how you control the center stage camera on an iPad was not at all documented in the, traditional developer documentation, but the guy who did the presentation mentioned it and, and had it on one slide in a developer video. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's, I. There's a way, you know, if you wanna have a dog and pony show for the product team, just do it and call it that launch the iPad in, June, if you're gonna do the phone and the watch in, uh, September and the computer, you know, the Mac in November. yeah, it really has felt like, it just doesn't, it doesn't line up with filling the needs of the developers necessarily, but maybe that's it.'cause Apple, I mean, that's, to your point, Rob, I mean, Microsoft has always been about selling their software and they'd be, would've never made it anywhere without the third party developers. Whereas Apple just wanted to sell you hardware and now it's hardware and their services. If, you know, you sign up for Apple Fitness and Apple TV and Apple News and Apple iCloud Plus or whatever and never use a third party app, they'd be, they'd be fine with it. Right.
Rob:going back to your question pj, what would I like to see? I'd like to see Apple open up their platform of like, these are all the internal APIs that we use. You can use'em to, that ain't gonna happen. And I think if that did happen, you'd see how insecure the Apple platforms were. Uh, which is kind of why they keep doing these wall gardens, even as the. And Microsoft does that to some extent, but they are pretty good at documenting or at least acknowledging that these are there. They say, they don't say you can't run them, they just say you probably shouldn't. and again, good things have come from developers doing that of like, oh, you said don't call it, but we have to,'cause we have to do A, B, C, whatever our product requirement is. The requirements of your product is more important than Apple saying you can or can't do this. But on. OSX. Sometimes you just can't do it. It's like you absolutely can't, especially if your app's gonna go in the app store.'cause then they will vet that you're not calling any of these internal things and you have to now go via alternate distribution paths, which for Mac you can still do, but iPhone you cannot do. So that's what I'd like to say. Open up and just be more honest as to how these things are implemented. And you're not the smallest people in the room. Developers can help you. They will help you. They'll tell you better ways of using these APIs, better ways of structuring them. But you have to be willing to listen. And I'd also like to see side loading on the iPhone. Get rid of the$99 developer fee, which if you could side load, you have to get rid of that fee because why? Why would anybody pay? So there's all lots of things that fit together, which just everything that sucks about being a developer on the Apple platform, I think we just talked about.
PJ:To round back to the same question you, Dave, what are the things, what are the tech. Technical things. I mean, you talked about documentation, but what are the technical things you would love to have coming out of Apple that they would announce at W-D-W-D-C that you'd be like, yes, that is awesome. That is worth it.
Dave Lewanda:I think just modernizing their APIs., The mixture of, callbacks and, the reactive approach was hot for a couple years and then, you know, now you know, async weight, you know, mean swift. I liked Swift. I got into Swift. I, I thought I had a lot of Syntactical cleanup, you know, more concise, you know, and easier to read, easier to teach. And I think that's kinda where they were going. But it up through Swift five, like Swift 5.9. It of a couple years ago, and then they started to move towards Swift six, which is the big move to the concurrency stuff. It all started to fall apart and it's become a, a mess. And then the fact that like a lot of the Apple APIs, especially the Apple frameworks, are just a mix. They, they haven't bothered, you know, the, uh, keeping them at all in sync. You know, each one is slightly different, different generations of callbacks or key value observation or having a publisher interface and not having any level of consistency there. So even if you wanna structure your app, you end up having to wrap it, your, each one, each one of their SDKs, whether it's core Bluetooth, whether it's AV foundation in a way that works, to build your own. Consistency on top of that, which makes, you know, the mobile app of any, any level of complexity that much more complicated.'cause all those things are sort of, can move underneath the hood for you. As we, as I dealt with in, you know, jobs. There's gotta be an answer somewhere here around, in the blog post I wrote up around having a single platform for these mobile devices, you know, I don't think it's React native. I, I'm not sure it's flutter. There's been a big push for, there's a Swift on Android group and maybe they'll talk if they talk about that at wwc. Um, apparently they just did a big. post, I haven't had a chance to read it yet on how they use Swift to rewrite the swift, on the server side for the monitoring for the Apple Passwords app. the Mac, you know, the Apple iCloud passwords app that they pulled out of the OS and made a standalone app, probably because of competitive, concerns, with third party vendors like One Password or LastPass., So I think there's opportunities when, when Swift is used, well, it feels like it can be useful and, you know, can be very expressive. I've, I've enjoyed that, but it also can get very messy and, know, just be a, a dog on a lot of these things because especially you know, the concurrency problem, they try to solve a lot of the really challenging stuff, but messed up the easy part. They pushed everybody into the deep end of the pool, but before everybody was ready to, and now they're that, and Swift 6.1, 6.2 is tried, but I haven't, and I haven't been as close to the code in the last few months myself, but everything I've been following online suggests that it's, you know, they've, it gets messier before it's gonna get
Rob:Isn't that a symptom of being the smartest person in the room?
Dave Lewanda:Well part of it, the, the guy Chris, uh, Latner, I think was his name, I'm might be mispronouncing that, who, was the, one of the original founders of Swift Left Apple. And I think that's sort of when, you know, he's the one who put together the original concurrency pitch. similar now, to, Steve Dobbs, when who take over for the vision lose sight of the, the reasons and the, the motivation, you know, they're trying and they're probably not, you know, I don't, again, don't wanna bes smart to anybody, a lot of smart people who are doing it, but, you know, maybe they're overthinking it. I don't, I don't know. It's a, it's clearly a hard problem to solve,
Rob:It is, but they never do it in like a layered approach. Like you could just be like, if you took the C approach, even let's just take threads in the operating system as we know'em today, they haven't changed in 50 years what they are. That's a thread. If you want to do asynchronous at some point you create one of these and, and then on top of that, you build various. Asynchronous models and who handles creating and destroying the thread, who handles synchronizing them, who handles, when they run and when they don't run. Things like that, that can all be in the higher level frameworks. And even Swift, it's in its high levelness, it's still doing this at the operating system level. So I think the whole vision of like, any of these layers you can interject at based on what you want for your app. Apple never do that. I, I'd love to see them become more of a, a straight up. Like this is the platform, these are the levels and layers that we have. And comes back to what I said about Volcan Avenue C interface. it'll never happen, but it'd be nice to do that. And I still think a lot of the old fashioned platforms like WIN 32 or X 11 or things like that are still have that thing. You can use these big fancy frameworks on top. But generally it's built on this and it's that this bit that's missing on the Apple platforms. And I've always thought that having to throw in a new language and a new model and a new concurrency model and all that on top of everything else is just, I think it's hard. I think Apple's a very hard platform to develop on. Xcode you mentioned is horrible. It can't even give me errors in a file in order it has to order them. For me, it's like, why can't you compile like every fucking other platform compiles of just compile a file, tell me what's wrong with it.
Dave Lewanda:best one. If, and not that you needed any re convincing that swifty y is bad, but right now it'll just say it can't compile in a reasonable amount of time and you end up having to do a binary search by like commenting out the whole block and then uncommon half of it, see if it compiles, and if it tells you what the real error is. Nope. Comment that back out uncommon, like that feels like a just complete miss. As far as the tooling on the tooling side,
Rob:Yeah. And annoying things like that window with the errors in, it'll scroll up. there's so many inated areas like show if you know this one caused it, pull it at the bottom so I, or put it wherever the focus of the window's gonna be. it's like, don't make me scroll all the way back up and do it, at least to the CI mean, it happens to see too, but at least it's like file by file. Like, I know these are all good and this one isn't. And it's just ridiculous that they do things so different to everybody else where there's no need to
Dave Lewanda:I mean, I think going back to your question, like what would I want if, if I could have one wish, you know, the genie came outta the bottle and I had one wish for the Apple Developer Conference. Fix X code, just make X code
Rob:make Xcode Visual Studio.'cause that's the, that's the one thing that Microsoft's always made. Well, I was, I've never been a huge, huge fan of it. Mostly because it has a terrible debugger, but compared to the debugger in X code. Visual studio might as well be some like kale embedded debugger. It's, it's great.
Dave Lewanda:I'll, tell you still my favorite ID of all time. Uh, and even with all the work that's gone into like the AI enabled stuff not that I've spent a ton of time with, that is still net beams that sun put out for Java swing development in 2006. It was amazing. It would, you know, could refactor code every, every which way you could almost to the point, like similar to what you see some of the LLM stuff doing now. It's like, I need a function. It would fill in, it would automatically fill in blocks and, you know, help you, you know, complete the code in a way and point out where the bugs, the errors were. I mean, you'd never have a compiler. It almost had, it felt like a spell checker, like as you were typing it would, you know, get your syntax and tell you the wrong thing. And
Rob:See, for me it's not about the idea, it's about the debugger. It's like if you went in low level code or very technical code, I just wanna step through the function and see what it's doing. And I think the debugger is the key. And for me, SN Debugger for the PlayStation was brilliant. And then Sony killed that'cause they integrated everything into Visual Studio and it's getting good again now. But it's took them well 15 years since the 20 years since they killed the SND bugger. Uh, I think the KLD bugger, the armed debugger is really good. Sega Ozone Debugger also an embedded debugger. Really good. Uh, mostly'cause a lot of these are scriptable debuggers. So you can write scripts to do things that don't have function native functionality within the debugger. Technically excode can do it'cause you can do python in A-L-L-D-B, but uh, it's so obfuscated that it's an exercise in frustration just to get to it. Excos always been the worst of all the ideas for sure. but it's interesting'cause all the things we're talking about should be things that are at a developer conference. Enough. Nothing that we just talked about for the last hour will even be relevant at ww DC'cause of the, the whizzbang and the flashes that they need to put out there, as PJ said to, to keep the shareholders happy more than anything. And we are doing something, we are making progress.
Dave Lewanda:not the the old crusty guys like us, they're trying to get, you know, new people, you know, a more diverse developer crew that a lot of the stuff is, you know, geared towards the student developer or the, you know, making it as easy as possible, lowering the, the on-ramp. A lot of, you know, the swift Uey stuff was clearly to move in that
Rob:Well, if you go in that direction, do what you said and do a web app and get it for all platforms at the same time.
Dave Lewanda:Again, they're trying to lower the barrier to entry to get people, you know, so that, you know, those kids in 20 years are doing a podcast about how bad Apple is in 2045. But, who knows what they're really thinking? It's clearly a hard problem. And, you know, again, I'm not here to, you know, drag him on anything, but he certainly could do better. It feels like, it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do better.
Rob:Oh, I'll drag over the cold. not a problem. Doing that, having worked there, I. Internally, it's as messy as you think it is of like I can tell you exactly how those frameworks come become to be so disjoint and all of that. And they do have an API standards committee inside. So you have every API you have to submit to it. And they do supposedly to do like style of API auditing and they also do security auditing and things like this function could be a problem, but they don't, they're not by good because loads of crap gets past them. They have standards like intes have to be intes. Like if it's, even if it's an unsigned value, it still has to be an integer because in 64 B, you're not gonna have a number that's bigger than you can store in 64 B, but, but things like that, it's like you're being the smartest person in the room when you enforce things like that. And I've said this exactly as I'm gonna say it again on this podcast before is. Unsigned INT is a safer data type because if you pass in a negative number, it shows up as a massive positive and the check you have to say, if X is less greater than 10, we'll catch all negative numbers and only zero to 10 will get past it. If you are suddenly forced to have that value being integer, because some API standards board said, so you now have to remember to go back and explicitly check for all the negative values and be like, if X is less than zero, then it's also an error. And lots of times and lots of buffer overruns and lots of security problems have come about because you can index negative in this function because no one checked the negative value. It's just things like that of, and even in the on go into a whole different subject on the Vision Pro, there was swift inside system code and there was a, a system wide, architecture decision. Now you can't allocate memory. Which basically means system code has to be C, which is what it should be, not even c plus plus in the grand scheme of things, it should be C, the OS is straight C. The system code should be straight C as well because you can control when it allocates memory, objective C and Swift will even objective C will do this and Swift does it more, but objective C does it. When it reallocate its dispatch tables'cause it's like, oh I need to reallocate the cash bang memory allocation. we didn't prevent memory allocation by saying you can't call Malo. We blocked the call. So to make it even worse is Malo would sometimes work'cause you go, I need a K and it's got a K in system in a user space, so well give it to you and it's all good. But then every now and then Malik's like, well I need another page from the operating system. So it'll go and hit the SIS call, then it will crash and it crashes miles and miles away from the thing that actually caused the initial problem. And that's a good thing really you do want, thats call to be blocked. But if you're gonna do that, you've gotta structure your code above it in a way that's expecting, thats call to be blocked and know what things are doing. People would just show up and, oh, I'll just write this in objective C And I've said this before too, we, that API that would pass a dictionary in because people couldn't agree on what the fucking parameters for the function code should be. So we'll pass a dictionary in'cause then you can just query it and see if your parameter's there. And if it is, you can do this. And if it isn't, you can read a different parameter and all that of like, how bad do you want this to be? And it's system level code that just gets a billion times worse when you get up to the high level code. They do not have the right people in the right places is really what it comes down to. And we've had a podcast on this too. It's. People get hired and they get moved around. And even on my team, there was a guy who was brilliant at math and all this and he was doing embedded code and I was doing I level code and we could have all just took his position to the left and would've all been in a much better position to, to do things. But not because the head count and how the teams work and all of this and who needs good staff and who doesn't it, it was just a typical middle manager corporate mess.
PJ:Welcome to Big Tech Folks.
Rob:It's a mess, but they, they have this API board to try and fix it, and they enforce things like ins have to be ins and not uin, and it's like you're not actually fixing anything. You really have to go back to what we said about GDC and open up the layers, clean it all up from the ground up, and not build all this on a basic house of cards. It needs to be solid foundation. Then you can go to the high level languages on top of that, but the foundation has to be solid. But most people have that layering system Windows as if Linux, as if Apple have it at the OS level, like Kernel is clean and fairly good. Above that, it's fucking free for all.
Dave Lewanda:I wonder if there's a space for, you know, if that's where AI could be useful is, you know, turning what people are asking for into what they, the way they should do it and you know. Things, from running amuck it's more regimented and it, you know, could learn over time more. So, you know, like self-driving. Could you have self programming where you say, I want to get from, you know, instead of I wanna go from point A to point B, I wanna get this piece of functionality and then have the AI really enforce more of the stricter rules, more rigidly than, you know, humans are.'cause humans will always fight over, you know, the bike shedding of, you know, un versus in or four, you know, four spaces versus a tab versus two spaces
Rob:Two spaces is the answer. There's no argument. It's two spaces.
PJ:All right. That'll be a topic for another podcast. So for ww DC we would love it to be about the DC won't be. It sounds like DC will not stand for de developer conference. It'll stand for damage control for, for AI at, at best, and maybe a few passing features here or there. Gentlemen, Are there any major features we expect to see out of this next conference, even from a product shareholder marketing standpoint, or is it gonna be of smoke and mirrors around minor stuff like we've seen in the past?
Rob:I don't know. I, uh, I'd like to see some new hardware, but I don't think even the rumor mill doesn't really have much new hardware. A lot of it's been announced just along the way, various releases here and there. Maybe they're stepping away from the, the all in one hardware announcement. Maybe there's a new Mac studio, an M four based one, maybe the M four ultra, whatever the JUUL one is. I think that's the ultra, maybe, I don't know. But I think if there's any hardware, it'll be fairly small things for a refresh.
Dave Lewanda:M five chip, you know, because the M four has been out for, you know, announced that the M five is coming later this year. AirPod Pros, maybe I could see, you know, the, now that the AirPod pros are like, you know, medical equipment and that they're hearing aid replacements, they haven't really touched that. I would love to see the home pod with a screen, but, you know, that, or even just better Home pod support, that that's been an area that they've let languish, you know, I was hoping it'd be kind of like the Apple tv, you know, the original Poppy project as Jobs called it. And then they turned it into something a bit more real over time that like the home pod feels like it's ready for, coming to the table as a real, as a real player, again, putting a screen on. I, I have a perfect use case in my fa in my, you know, kitchen. You know, if I had a screen that I could put like a family calendar on you, talk to the, you know, with, especially with Google stepping away from their hardware. More of the home kit space. Some more support for just smart home. But I dunno, that feels like it's fizzled
Rob:I think. I think that's the solar hardware you're gonna see. You're gonna see the smaller things. There's no new phone. There's no new I. There might be a new iPad. I don't think so. Maybe a new web of one of them. I think they've
Dave Lewanda:I think, you know,
Rob:done them all though.
Dave Lewanda:studio display, maybe the next generation studio
Rob:A big iMac. I would like if they'd make a 30 inch iMac, I would buy one.
Dave Lewanda:that all that's gonna be limited by, you know, with the political and tariffs and import export challenges. I, I think maybe that's where hardware just is DDOA this year.
Rob:Maybe.
PJ:make a prediction and I, I suspect this is something they will use the, tariffs as a cover story for, I think they will deprecate the Mac Pro. I think it has existed basically far beyond its useful lifetime they can use the cover story of the political stuff as effectively a way to get rid of it.
Rob:I think we had a whole podcast on this exact thing as to hard take on the Mac Pro and I would, I think they announced they, we said this before I. They released it because they said they would, it's an abomination of what they actually released. You can't put new memory in it. You, you can put PCI cards in it, but you can't put a GPU in it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I could see them just being like, yeah, it's, they did it. They said they do it and that's why they did it. And now it's time to let it maybe die quietly.
PJ:Well,
Rob:And
PJ:can use, they can use all the political
Rob:I think so yeah, it's time to let it die. It's like, let it die quietly. And it's.
PJ:a new Max studio like you guys are saying at the same time. To say this is occupying this high-end space now.
Dave Lewanda:Yeah, only'cause I've heard, you know, with what and seen the stuff like maybe meta's done with glasses. Could they have another vision Pro or vision not pro their sleeve somewhere?
Rob:They would, they'd be more leaky things about it if it happens. So they were looking at that sort of thing when I was there and there is a second vision probe being made, blah, blah, blah. but I don't think we're in a market space that wants that product. and I think meta may be getting this more right than Apple is when you have a new interface and you alerted this earlier with the keyboard mouse going to the touchscreen and go into the ai uh, products. If you have glasses that are on your head and they're gonna be there for a long time, you've got to ease people into it. You can't just be like, oh look, here's a full experience. And I think if we had glass style, like meta style glasses today that were full AR experiences, people wouldn't use it. But. If you take a small step and be, okay, I'll just put your notifications in your face so you can look at them while you're driving. I'll pull a camera in it so you can take, video. Basically things that meta did, that's the stepping stone that people need to get used to having this thing on their head all day. You can't put this thing on your head and have this intense experience and expect to wear these for 12 hours.
Dave Lewanda:That's where I, think maybe again, the AirPods have a space there to be that start being that bridge. You could, you know, put a little camera in the, in the stem somewhere, or even infrared, you know, some level of sensor, you know, if they're doing, getting you to do motions, like shake your head no. Or, you know, those type of things. You know, more, more smarts in the
Rob:yep. Yeah.
Dave Lewanda:again, way not to cover your face, you know, I mean, a number of folks have pointed out, you know, just having something on your face as a detractor, know, losing your peripheral vision and or, you know, your ability to track mates a, uh, thing that, you know, just human evolution has shied away from. So, you know, can you do it all from your ears? And maybe it's, you know, bigger ear pods or bigger, you know, a headband that doesn't go over your face is there, you know, other places to put hardware, whether it's tying to your phone in your pocket to your watch on your wrist, to your, I don't know what other, where else you could stick, compute or, you know, bandwidth that would work. But, Maybe just not getting away, getting away from the face. And that's where I think maybe the AirPods have some space to grow and, and even especially with them till off the cans.'cause they realize the cans aren't a solution, but more focusing more on the, the earbuds.
Rob:I think we missed something else too. There's some game stuff that they're gonna announce. They have that new games Xbox style game center that they're gonna announce.
Dave Lewanda:app,
Rob:just replacement for Apple Arcade. I think it's just, I think a better way to find them, but I think it's still, they're not gonna take games seriously.
Dave Lewanda:you know, they pull it out of the app store and make it into a, like, you know, apple News for
Rob:Yeah.
Dave Lewanda:and Apple Sports.
Rob:it'll be. Yeah. And I still think, and I've always said this, they're missing a huge opportunity because the Apple TV is quite powerful. It could do some pretty decent games if they opened it up console style to actual console developers.
Dave Lewanda:and they wanted to, with that original remote, you know, that had the motion, you know, you used to have like a Wii style remote in that, the one that had, you know, just the flat
Rob:Yeah. I mean, it'll connect to a PlayStation controller too, of like, if, I dunno what that says it though, is that Apple saying, we can't make a better controller, so we'll just use yours? Or is that Apple saying, we don't give a shit, we're not gonna put effort into it. We'll, uh, we'll just use yours.
PJ:My suspicion basically is that they won't get into the game space because of the, the domino effect, Rob, that you're, you're kind of alluding to is that really do it right, you would need to put Vulcan as something native on all of these to do that. You then say, okay, well then how do I open up the OSS in such a way that everyone can see everything? In which case I think you hit the security issues. So I, I suspect that there's this cascade of stuff where it's like, if you really want to do games right on the Apple tv, on iOS, on the Mac. You end up actually opening up this gigantic can of worms that Apple simply doesn't
Rob:And it's an ecosystem that already exists here. It's if you use, if you're gonna make AAA game, you're gonna use Ws and you're gonna let it do the mixing, and you're gonna, you need basically access to controls, video and audio. Network sockets. And outside of that, everything else could be layers. But now these layers that already exist don't fit this new framework. So we're saying, I think it may be part of what you're saying,
Dave Lewanda:if not anything, it feels like they tried, they did that when they did that, you know, scary event. It was Halloween a couple years ago, and it was at like 8:00 PM Eastern, so it could be on and during the daytime in Tokyo. And they had that famous Japanese game designer
Rob:they always have a game. Every single time they release a new GPU, they always have AAA game, but they've paid them to port that and they jump through the hoops of calling the objectives and all that. So I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm just saying developers won't do it because it's the odd ball.
Dave Lewanda:Right, because well, yeah, so I mean, it feels like if apple apple's dipped their toes in all those times and never done it, they're, they're never going to tip pj. To your point, they're never going to do it.
PJ:I, I just think it takes way more than they're willing to commit. you have to start from the perspective that I care about my developers, in which case you have to ask your developers, what do you need?
Rob:Yeah, they're capable of doing that.
PJ:that step, then again, you can pay people to jump through your hoops perfectly willing to do that, but you're not gonna get the, the best, uh, the best development experience, the
Rob:Games is the extreme example of you can't do it yourself I mean, so is kind of getting there by buying all the studios, but the fact they own them doesn't mean that they have any say over them. think PlayStation by itself is useless. And we've talked about this like PlayStation will win every single console war because of its exclusive content, which come from developers. Like, so don't make that themselves. Like I says, they are gradually buying up all the developers, so technically do own them, but, uh, it's still independent developers, independent mindset of developers at least that makes these really awesome games. And Dave said it earlier of it's, these are the frameworks you get and do use it. And if, if they can give you some services and give you something that you'll use as is, then it's, it's what they'll do. And again, it's the smartest person in the room syndrome. It's, it doesn't work for game developers and there's never been a platform more extreme than PlayStation for, without the developers, this platform won't even exist. Unless you're going to, I think there's also a gray area, like what is, we talked about this too. What is the future of consoles? Maybe it is Apple tv. Maybe it is like get rid of the big consoles and just have something that could stream from PlayStation Cloud or Xbox Live, or whatever it is. So maybe it's not worth going down the path, but they already have the hardware, so it's not like they're making new hardware and having to spend a billion dollars promoting it. They could literally just change a few things and they'd immediately be a, a very competitive gaming platform.
PJ:Well, we've got some fun predictions for what Monday may bring. I don't think any of us are especially optimistic at this point in time, but what we'll do is next episode, we'll do some grading and some commentary after the fact to see exactly what we got out of this WWDC. So stay tuned, folks. This story is not over yet.