iOS 27 design changes, AirPods with cameras, Apple education store changes

I got a text from one of my friends earlier this week, Angela, and she just texted and she said, why doesn't the iPad have a calculator app? And I'm like, okay, huh, it does. And I said, okay, I said, have you updated your iPad recently to new software? And she said, no, I heard that you should never update your software unless you get a new device. And I was like, that is horrible advice. Whoever told you that is very, very wrong. Wherever you learned that is very wrong. I thought you were going to say she has an iPad that's too old to get the iOS. that you need for the cat guy rap it is an ipad air i believe capable of running not only ipad os 18 but ipad os 26 and it that is the type of comment that gets under my skin so much it like makes me want to bang my head into the wall because presumably she's running ipad os 17 i guess refusing to update denying all of the update prompts because of whatever myth that she's heard that you're not supposed to install an update unless you get a new device that comes with that version of the software and it's like no no no no no that's not what you should do i told her it's like you're missing out on the calculator app which you apparently want and you're missing out on all of the various security fixes and improvements that have come with two years of ipad os updates compared to what you are running it's like apple is never going to escape that thinking that each ipad os or ios update slows down your device like they're just not going to be able to move past that yeah it doesn't matter how much they say otherwise no one that conspiracy theory will never disappear yeah conspiracy theory that's the word i was looking for yeah like the idea that apple intentionally slows down other devices and the idea that like they on purpose make your battery bad like those two things are like they're just tied together partly because of the you know the battery scandal back in the day but also just in general it's such an easy thing for people to update and then you know not every single time but sometimes your device does get slower after you update because naturally or inevitably the point zero update is less performant and less optimized than what they run before and then they hit some bugs and they're like well look here's planned obsolescence in action it's like so that kind of and it's such an easy thing for people to throw around because you just say it and like you can't really prove or disprove it one way or the other so you just you know people put it out into the ether they like ingest it and then it just becomes the fact right it's like oh you know apple slows down your devices it's just a thing that will never can never be dispelled right it's just a permanent thing even though apple has done so much to support older devices as much as they possibly can in many many regards not every regard and sometimes there's features that i think we criticize them for where it's like oh why was this limited to that like yeah remember when they did the stage manager stuff right and it was like it's just like the year it was like m1 only or something right and then they uh you know they got a big blowback about that over the summer and and they ended up rolling it out to like the A12Z or whatever the previous chip was for the earlier iPad. And then when they did the multitasking revamp with iPadOS 26, they then put it on all sorts of platforms and hardware, including all the AES, you know, the iPad Mini and the base iPads too. So, you know, there are some situations where they're a bit stingy in terms of feature support, but I've never seen anything concrete where it's like Apple intentionally pushed an update out that made your device slower. Nope. Your device might have got slower because the battery degraded naturally or like the operating system update wasn't super optimized and super performant and maybe there's some glitches and bugs in it but it's never i've never seen any evidence that was like sitting there inside cuba team like right here we go ipad os 27 let's make sure that devices older than about two years ago are worse so then it will somehow make people so frustrated they'll update when the logic is if a company was incentivized to do that then the users would buy other things right Like you would get, if Apple was slowing down your iPhone, after a few rounds of that happening, you wouldn't be buying another iPhone, right? Like that just, it's just not, it's just not how that logic goes, but it's just such an easy thing for people to throw out into the air and you can't really disprove it in a sentence. So therefore it sustains. And she said that her iPhone is on iOS 26, but only because it updated overnight against her will. So she didn't want to update there either, but the auto update for whatever reason stuck through on her iPhone, but not her iPad. Just like that. this just frustrates me so much yeah i know a fair amount of people who like refuse updates on the basis that they just don't like change and they're like i just like it how it is and i don't want it to change which i don't agree with either but at least that's more that's more grounded in reality than the idea that like you update and your phone's gonna get slow on purpose you also by the way if you're a modern apple ecosystem user you're kind of forced to update and like if you buy new airpods right they like airpods pro 3 require ipad s 26 um for instance and if you want the best support against all your platforms like if you have a if you have an iphone that's running ios 26 and ipad that's running ios 18 your devices are going to work better together if they're both on the same version yeah right um and so yeah it's kind of sad that the there's so many people out there who like have this conspiracy or just like misunderstanding of the update system but it's just something it doesn't matter how much education apple tries to do they're never gonna they're never gonna make it come through it's the same as the um oh your phone's listened to you right like Oh my God. That gambit, which is ridiculous too, but you can't get anybody to disbelieve that if that's what they're telling you. Because it's just impossible. Ahead of WWDC next month, Apple rolled out an update this week to the Apple developer app across all of its platforms. And I think the coolest part about this is just the new app icon. Mayo, you put it in our show notes, but it is a very just cute and fun icon. It's like they've replaced just the plain old sticks or whatever you want to call it, making the App Store logo. The breadsticks? Yeah. Yeah, with a pencil and a brush and a ruler. It just looks really cool. Okay, so this icon is awesome, right? Yes. I don't normally put bullet points in the show notes. We're just like, this is a cool icon. But this update is a cool icon. And I don't know why it took them like nine months since I was 26 for them to do the liquid glass update for the developer app. But here it is. And the icon is awesome. And it's kind of a throwback to that. So obviously, the Apple developer icon is inspired by the App Store icon, right? and you remember the app store icon before the app store icon became breadsticks it was like a drawing of the letter a using tools like a pencil and a brush and a ruler so it's almost a throwback to the old design of the app store icon and i thought that old app store icon was so cool and when they put in 10 changes to breadsticks i was very upset and so the developer icon now is like using the the basis of the old app store icon but also just doing it in a really nice rendering with like you know it's like a glassy pencil and a glassy paintbrush and a nice translucent ruler and it just looks awesome so you know some of the liquid glass icon redesigns i've been opposed to many of them i quite like this one is like right up there is one of the best just a great icon very cool there are also some cool iMessage stickers in the update too like there's a license plate that says ww a california license plate says wwdc 26 there's like an apple at 50 rainbow sticker that's cool very good update i don't know anybody who like like this developer icon if they took out the grid lines which make it look like developer right they could ship that as the app store icon like it's like a modern version of the old app store icon it's so good then in saturn news last week apple announced that it is now requiring verification for the education store in the united states so the backstory here is that the education store in the united states unlike other countries like the uk you've never had to verify that you actually qualify for one of those discounts so you've never had to verify that you're actually a student or a teacher or a staff member at a K-12 or college university. Apple did briefly in 2022 for literally like three days try to require verification in the US. That got blowback and I think there were just some problems with the technical implementation of it. So Apple scrapped it and said no, it's back to being a free-for-all. It's back to being an honor system. This time around, they're working again with Unidays who they also worked with in 2022 and who they also work with for like the Apple music discount for students and you have to verify via your education email then log in to your institution's like academic portal so you log you give unidays your at whatever whatever dot edu email then that'll redirect you to your college's full-on academic portal then you go back to unidays to verify your identity at that point you will be blessed with the ability to get a discount on the apple education store in the u.s i think it's incredible that it lasted this long as like the free for all in the United States because I know a lot of people who, I mean, why wouldn't you? If you knew you could get a discount of like $100 off, $150 off a new Mac or an iPad or whatever via the education store and didn't have to prove that you qualified, like why wouldn't you do it? Oh yeah. And unfortunately that's like the reason why they now have to require the verification. I mean, they don't write verification in like every other country, right? Or like many other countries, including the UK for a long time. But if they hadn't done verification and I was buying new Apple stuff, Why would you go to the UK education store too and buy it that way? But yeah, I don't really understand why the US store lagged behind so much. Like, I don't understand what, I don't really get what the blowback was four years ago when they introduced it for three days and got rid of it. When, like, I mean, in the UK, it's Uni Day system as well, right? So like, I'm not really sure what the issue was in the US education system that was different to international. And the fact that, like you said, for Apple Music, they did it anyway using Uni Day. So I don't really get the whole asymmetry on this one. I think one of the reasons is homeschooling. So homeschooling is more common in the United States than I think anywhere else around the world. And I think that that first attempt with Unidays in 2022 didn't have proper support for homeschooled teachers. I highly doubt it took them four years to implement that. But I think that is one of the factors because now with this verification system, if you are a homeschool teacher you can still get the discount using your driver's license or passport or whatever and then prove from your state that you are a certified homeschool teacher which still isn't a perfect system because apparently in some states in some cities or whatever you can just be a homeschool teacher without any certification which seems like a problem in and of itself for another discussion but this is at least an attempt at trying to include homeschool teachers in this system whereas before there wasn't yeah it's an 80 20 fix for apple yeah where most of the people that used to just be able to go to apple.com certification and check out will now face a wall and they won't be able to do it anymore and get the hundred dollar off macbook neo right i mean that's the other interesting thing about the timing is the macbook neo right yeah hundred dollars off 599 is a pretty significant discount on something where apple's margins are already presumably lower than usual yeah i mean they're never going to tell us but it feels like they they tried to do it in 2022 or whatever they hit the issues they were like okay we won't bother with this and then they've just had a massive hit on a product you know at the start of this year that also has a pretty generous education discount and they've probably seen the metrics and seen how many people got the education discount and they're like you know that thing we were trying to do four years ago we should probably do that again and then they spent like two months fixing it and now here it is again i mean it's the timing's just kind of too coincidental for that to not be the case i think But whatever, I don't blame them for putting the verification steps in. And the same limits still apply too. So you can get one desktop per year, one Mac mini per year, one laptop per year, two iPads per year, and two accessories per year. So you can really kit yourself out if you have a way to verify yourself. And newly introducing Apple Watch discounts as well. Yes, the Apple Watch is available on the Education Store for the first time. So the pricing, Series 11 is now starting at $359, which is down from $399 for everyone else. The Ultra 3 is $719 down from $799. Then the Apple Watch SE 3 is $229 down from $249. Those discounts are pretty much like percentage wise exactly what we expected. And for the Series 11 and the SE 3, I think you can do better saving on like Amazon or whatever. But the Ultra 3 is harder to find on sale. So if you're buying an Ultra 3 and you can get verified, getting $80 off via the education store is not a bad deal, really. i think back in the day the education deals were even better because at least they were in britain i don't know it was in the us at the time but when i got my i think when i got my 2012 macbook pro this is when i was going to university you'd get the laptop at a discount and it was like the 10% discount or whatever plus you'd get free you get apple care plus like extended so like you get like the the apple care you normally have to pay for you get that for free for three years and you got like app store credit so it was literally like it was like a party you got discount off your laptop you got a free gift card for the apps for the app store and you got uh apple care plus or whatever it was called back then um they've i think they've tied that up in the decade since but that's what i remember getting at uni and i was like wow my 1700 power laptop is a good value kind of i know years and years ago like multiple decades ago the discount used to be significantly better i remember listening to a lot of the Apple at 50 like stories about people who bought their first Mac in college in like the 90s and the 80s and stuff and they were talking about getting just gigantic discounts then compared to the 10% you get now so it's definitely gotten less lucrative in the intervening 20 years or whatever and now in the US at least you have to verify yourself but it's still nice that Apple offers this at all for sure and it's always worth like checking like even if you can get verified it's worth checking amazon and elsewhere because you can sometimes save like especially on the macbook air certain times of year you can save a lot more buying from amazon or somewhere than you can even with the education store yeah it's just like when they have the black friday deal for the apple store as well generally third-party retailers you're gonna get the best the best price happy hour this week is sponsored by quince check them out at quince.com slash happy hour all lowercase lately i've been rethinking what i wear a bit and i'm leaning on pieces that are easy and comfortable to wear but still look put together and quince is great for exactly that they have clothing featuring elevated fabrics the fits are clean and everything just works without needing to overthink your outfit every day it just makes getting dressed simpler quince has all the wardrobe staples for spring at great prices that means items like 100 european shorts and shirts from 34 Lightweight breathable and comfortable but still looks great And their 100 Pima cotton t have a softness that just has to be felt And Quince works directly with ethical factories to cut out the middlemen, so you're getting premium materials without the usual brand markup. 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So Copilot Money is what I use to live a healthier financial life and you should too. Yep, now's the time to try it out for yourself. Sign up at www.copilot.money slash 9to5Mac and get two months free with our code 9to5Mac. That's www.copilot.money slash 9to5Mac. Promo code 9to5Mac. Thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring the show. iOS 26.5 is now available to everyone after about six weeks of beta testing. Quite a long beta period, it felt like. For an update that doesn't have much in it. So Apple's release notes specifically mention three different things. Suggested places in Apple Maps, which displays recommendations based on which trending nearby and your recent searches. And Apple doesn't say this, but of course ads are coming to Apple Maps this summer and suggested places is one of the places in the Maps app that will show ads once that launches this summer. So laying the groundwork for a spot to put ads in sooner rather than later. Then the Pride Luminance wallpaper that we talked about last week. And that's the wallpaper that Apple says dynamically refracts a spectrum of colors. And you notice too, Mayo, that this is already kind of popping off on social media a little bit. It seems to be popular because it's super customizable yeah i think there's been there's been fair few like tiktoks and stuff for people just showing off their colorful wallpaper and being like oh where'd you go and get that from where'd you download it from it's like no you just add it yourself in the wallpaper guy and you can pick your own colors and they should just have more of that like more of the apple wallpapers should just have more customization in that way where like some of them have like all the color ones do but then some of the other ones are just like well here they are um and the thing that's really nice about the pride one is like literally you just get a open ended color palette to pick your colors and you can pick any combination of 12 colors and it like has a very unique it's like if you see someone's home screen or see someone's iphone like lock screen you'll know they're using the pride limit's wallpaper because it has like a distinctive look right like the slashes of color or the same width right so you can it's distinctive but it'll be unique because they can choose the colors different to you and with 12 colors right there's a lot of combinations then the other thing and probably the most important thing in ios 26.5 is support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging. The way Apple has rolled this out has been super weird because you probably remember we talked about it as part of the iOS 26.4 beta testing process, but it didn't actually ship as part of that update. It's shipping as part of iOS 26.5 and Apple is still calling it a quote-unquote beta even though it's available to everybody now. And furthermore, it's also rolling out gradually. So even if you have a carrier that supports end-to-end RCS encryption, it might not be available to you right away. So Apple has a list on its website of all the carriers that offer this feature. And in the United States, it's the big three, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T. But again, it's rolling out gradually over the coming months. So once you update iOS 26.5 and your carrier supports it in a few months time you'll probably have access to it yeah and apple still calls it a beta but now it's like a public beta isn't it's in the public os releases it's not in like the beta channel of the software update and you'll know when you have it because at the top of a thread in the messages app you'll see it'll say text message rcs and then a lock icon and encrypted this and apple does say that once it rolls out to your device all of your existing and new conversations will automatically transition to encrypted this is kind of weird because if you have a long running thread with somebody you can't get to the top yeah how often or can you even get all the way to the top in that thread to see if it's encrypted or not i feel like that encrypted logo icon whatever you want to call it should be somewhere easier to see because otherwise people are just not going to pay attention to it they have it for iMessage as well right like if you have an iMessage chat at the very top of the iMessage chat it has the same encrypted paddock thing now but I guess it's if you're starting a conversation with someone new you're like oh yeah it's encrypted but if you've got my conversation with you I don't know how many messages are in it but there's no way I'm getting back to the top to see the only time you'd see it is if I message like glitches out you know where it switched to sms temporarily then it switches back to my message it'll put the padlock back there again but maybe they should put it in like the the conversation details like you know when you press on your little face and you scroll to the bottom and has like turn on contact key verification maybe around that area would be a good little status area for a little like this is encrypted using rcs this is encrypted using iMessage or something because there's so many variables that play here like i think it's important to know which thread is encrypted and which is not because a you're waiting on support on your end of the conversation then the person on the other end the android user like they have to be using the latest version of the google messages app and their carrier has to also support it so there's just so many things that have to be right for this to work that knowing on a thread by thread basis as easily as possible would be really nice but at least i think it's great that apple is doing this and that they've worked with the gsma to do this they've worked with google it was a joint announcement from apple and google rolling this out so it's clearly something they've tested and they know works just the rollout's been kind of funky and it's not super clear to know when you have access to it did you really expect anything less from rcs that's yeah that's a good point anything else and iOS 26.5? I don't think... Those are the three things Apple highlights in the release notes. Yeah, if you go to the vibe check of Reddit, people seem to think that 26.5 is pretty efficient and some people claim that you get more battery life and stuff. Safari is snappier. The base is boomer. Safari is snappier, yeah. But for the people that hold out, right, like if you're in the know and they're like, oh, I'm not going to 0.0, it does finally seem like they've got to a point where this incarnation of the operating system is stable enough that there aren't really any other people. I'm not updating now because of this and that. Like, obviously, you're not going to get the, you know, the lay people in the street, like what we talked about at the beginning. I don't know. Maybe I'll tell her. I'll tell her. The Reddit folks say it's time. But you know what I mean? Like the R slash iOS people, like, they're like, I've got an iPhone 14 Pro. Is it safe for me to update you or not? They finally seem satisfied by the stability and performance 26.5. I've even seen on the iPhone S, I've read it, some people claim that 26.5 gets a longer battery. Again, your mileage may vary, but people seem relatively positive on the update. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has a report that outlines the current state of Apple's work on AirPods with cameras. So this is, we've talked about it before. This is what Apple is working on. And Mark reiterates that these, so he says there will be cameras in both the right and the left earbuds, and the cameras won't be used for photo or video capture, but rather they'll serve as what he says are the quote unquote eyes for Siri, and will capture the environment around you in low resolution. And the idea is that users could ask questions about something they're looking at. So Mark's example, which is the same example he uses for a lot of this AI and visual intelligence stuff. They could be facing food ingredients and ask what they should cook for dinner. It's similar to what you get, like if you upload a picture to visual intelligence or chat GPT. Then he also says Apple has been working on something that could give the wearer a reminder based on something the camera sees. So a reminder to, I guess, like, I don't know, take out the trash or buy a certain ingredient for your food or using the cameras to provide more advanced turn-by-turn directions. So citing a specific landmark when you're walking to tell you where to turn rather than just saying turn on 67th Street or whatever. Then from a privacy perspective, he says that the cameras will include a small LED that will turn on when data from those cameras is being fed to the cloud. So they won't be on all the time, but anytime something is actually happening with what's being captured, that little light will click on. But then I think the most important part of his story is he can he says that they've kind of reached a new milestone in development and they're now in the design validation testing stage of development the next and final stage is production validation testing which is when apple actually began early mass production of the product but inside apple employees are now using what mark says are prototypes with a near final design and capabilities so it sounds like later sounds like the hardware is done but they they might be waiting on having like a compelling software story to actually sounds familiar i feel like i've heard that before yeah you know this like smart display yeah right yeah the problem is the examples that mark can come up with which is the best we have to go on right now and never like smoking gun that sounds awesome you know let's go and get an airpods with cameras in because what does an airpods with cameras in mean it means you're gonna have longer stalks with ugly little cameras poking out the bottom of them and a light that has to turn on when you're talking to it i guess so you're getting slightly worse looking airpods for something something yeah and the turn-by-turn direction one is like surely just from like gps it knows what landmarks are around it already kind of does that too and you can like on the iphone you can do the thing where you like hold it up and it'll show you which where you're turning like with like an little ar style view yeah and you can like scan the area around you so it has the most precise location data possible like yeah mark's examples aren't great and i don't know if that's because he doesn't have like he doesn't have from his sources examples of some of the specific features or if it's an indication of the types of features you can actually create based on this product and the location of the cameras and your ears and the quality of those cameras and the data that's captured. Kevin's sources are perfectly relaying the the Apple product team and they're like yeah we got nothing. I do worry that some of this visual intelligence stuff is like four or five years ago Apple's like vision is going to be big we need to make sure we've got hardware for it so they started building these you know AirPods with cameras and things it's like oh we're not going to at least it seems like originally they weren't going to do the smart glasses form factor and they were like we can do AirPods with cameras instead and then you know somewhere along the way they're like oh we should probably do glasses as well and now they're going to do both but when they were conceiving the hardware in terms of okay we need the cameras to have this much resolution and fit in this size form factor of airpods the software didn't exist so it was kind of being like designed on hopium right of like oh this we'll be able to offer these visual intelligence ai experiences but now like the hardware's done and it's like do we have visual intelligence ai experiences that are worth getting people to buy airpods new airpods for it's just very unclear to me if there's like i mean if they just roll it out as new airpods and it's like oh you get cameras as well it's not so bad and i guess it's kind of like the the heart rate sensor right where they just kind of threw it into the airpods pro 3 but it's not like the reason you buy them maybe they could do the same thing here it's like oh these have got cameras in and you can you know use them sometimes but the problem with that is unlike the heart rate sensor i feel like the look of the airpods is going to be compromised because they're going to like mark says the stalks are going to be longer and you're going to have like you know yeah forward-facing camera holes and leds that light up so there are some like straight downsides to the hardware whereas the heart rate sensor basically didn't change the the form factor of the airpods at all and you wouldn't really know so yeah i'm not like super enthused about it like you just kind of you're just kind of betting on the the ai team like even even if you ignore the weaknesses in apple intelligence right and like those fumblings look at any visual intelligence ai product on the market today i struggle to find compelling examples of things i'm like if i could have that in my airpods i'd want to buy new airpods for it you know what i mean it's like the you kind of have some things with the phone and like they you know some of those things exist some of those things are kind of theoretical but at least you can see that oh if you've got an app on your phone you might want to come out and snap a picture of it and ask a question or get this done but there's another level that you have to leap to to want to do that with wearables right and wearables in your ears i can see both sides of this one being that i all for apple experimenting and trying new hardware and new form factors for all of this stuff like for a while there was looking like they weren going to do do anything different really But now they doing these They doing the meta Ray style smart glasses which are presumably coming I think either at the end of this year or next year. Like I'm glad to see them experimenting and trying new things. The smart glasses have an advantage in that they actually take photos and videos that you can share, right? So you can make memories with them. And that's what you see with the Ray-Bans the most. You see people play like audio through them and take you know like first person pov photos and videos which are kind of cool the airpods cameras are not going to be taking photos and videos that you actually use they're just purely to send off to siri for their low resolution they might be black and white right just so it just can send off to the the assistant for analysis um so it doesn't have that going for it yeah i don't know i'm not like i don't want to dissuade them from doing it but at the same time i'm like did you make these with a compelling vision or did you make these because it was like the hype train of ai and they kind of didn't want to be left behind either and now we're at the point where the hardware's done it's like well where's the features to go along with it like and i and i think at the top levels they don't want to ship something like that without some sort of compelling reason because they're going to have a repeat of what happened with apple intelligence on the phone and siri right which they're only finally about to recover from we think maybe in a month's time right exactly i don't i think they're going to be super picky about launching anything new in that domain i mean like we've seen with the smart display right like supposedly the smart display was like manufactured has been sitting in warehouse somewhere for months and they don't want to ship it incomplete without a good story for it so it's just been sitting there waiting and now these airpods with cameras they're not being mass manufactured but they're like the step before that and i think they could easily sit there in that stage for another year you know like It just depends how long it will take them to find or get or get working visual intelligence features that are compelling enough. I also have questions just about the general form factor of this product, like cameras in your ears. What if you're a person with longer hair and your hair is draped over your ears? What if you are wearing like a hoodie and you have your hood up for some reason? It's cold outside or you're wearing a hat or a toboggan or something because it's cold outside. there seems to be a lot of situations where this product just won't be able to capture any data yeah let alone do anything from a feature perspective with that data you know like the form factors to me sounds like it has too many compromises especially if to to release it they're gonna have to have like a higher price model you know like if it's like airpods pro 3 with cameras and it's like another 50 extra it's gonna be really hard so i think only 50 extra like a hundred dollars extra yeah if it's something where they the price of the components is enough they can just like all airpods pro 3s now have cameras in them i don't want that though like that's the thing right from yeah from the from the pricing like oh the marketing side of pricing it's like okay that would at least be amenable because then people can get it and just have it as like an added bonus but then you've got the people who don't want to wear cameras on their ears people that don't like the stalks that are slightly longer and they're gonna have conspicuous led lights they have to light up if you do ask it a question um so it almost feels like they're going to have to have two tracks right where you're going to have to still be able to buy airpods pro with cameras and without because i just think there's going to be too much of a contingent of people like even if vision intelligence was the best thing in the entire world there'd still be a pretty big contingent people that i don't want to wear cameras on my ears so yeah you know sell me a different model i also again i'm glad apple is experimenting with this but i feel like the priorities should have been flipped the glasses the meta style glasses should be coming first because that is the better form factor hands down even if you don't care about any of the visual intelligence stuff there is value in having something on your face that you can take that cool first person pov photo and video from that is a better product inherently than whatever this will be so i i wish that the priorities were flipped and that those were coming first and not airpods with cameras yeah i mean maybe they're sitting on something really awesome in terms of why we need cameras that are facing outwards to the world beyond what the iPhone can already do, right? And if they do have something, AirPods are not a terrible place to put it because I think they're a better form factor than the watches in terms of having to hold your watch up at a weird angle to snap a picture. At least your AirPods are roughly on your ears, which is roughly eyeline, excluding cases where you're wearing a hat or you've got super long hair or something. But if you have short hair like me, the AirPods are facing forward roughly where my eyes are. So in that scenario, I can see where they went down this road, but it just really, it's like the hardware team could do the best job in the world and it doesn't matter. Like, it all depends on the AI experience. And so far we haven't heard, like the thing on their phone where you can take a picture of a poster and it can put it in your thing. Like that's the closest they've come to me being like, wow, that's actually useful. And that's not, that doesn't reach the bar that would put it in headphones, you know? I can't think of anything that would make me want this product or want cameras in my ears, period. but we say things like this a lot then apple does show us something like okay that's cool i want those so we have to wait and see like apple's announcement will undoubtedly be more compelling than mark german's reporting but i'm not as convinced as usual you can just kind of see the cracks of like a the management team being like the different people in charge four years ago being like we need ai ai ai his hardware you know make some airpods with cameras in and it's like yeah but what what does it do and the question mark is still very looming on that one finally happy hour is brought to you by framer your website is most customers first entry point into your brand but if your business is still struggling to write simple changes like when marketing has new copy ready you need to use framer framer is the website builder that helps businesses build better websites faster it has a robust content cms with everything you need for SEO and analytics built in. 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So he says that Apple is preparing a quote unquote slight redesign for macOS 27 meant to not overhaul or really change the liquid glass interface introduced with 26 last year, but rather clean up some of the the quirks and the rough edges that are particularly affecting the macOS implementation of the design. So what he says is that the changes to macOS are meant to make liquid glass look the way Apple's design team intended from the start. He says last year's operating systems don't necessarily suffer from design problems, but rather a not completely baked implementation from Apple's software engineering team. Which is pointing the finger, not at design, but saying it's Craig Federighi's team's fault for failing. I wonder which source go about this article. Was it one of the engineering team or was it one of the design team? because yeah someone's putting their finger down the hole for sure on this one i mean if you want to zoom out if the design wasn't finished in terms of implementation then they shouldn't have shipped the design like yeah that's the number one point because with this liquid glass redesign apple has painstakingly ensured compatibility with all old software in so far as that there's like a info flag any app developer can set and even if you're using the latest sdk your app will look like the previous year's design it would look like sequoia same on ios right there's a compatibility file you can make it look like ios 18 and so their old design system and chrome and all the ui is still in the operating system right now and so it wasn't like a system it wasn't like a situation where you know they got to may and they're like well this isn't done yet but we're screwed right we have to ship it it's like no you literally could have just turned it off system wide and just carried on for another year and kept on refining it on the mac and they chose not to right they chose to go for it and bring it out so if it really was a case of the software engineering team hadn't finished it then whoever made the call to ship in the first place they they made the wrong call i don't really think that's the case it's just like you've seen the feedback you've seen the criticism you've got another year to kind of tweak and refine things and i think whether you whether you're a liquid glass fanatic or you're a skeptic everyone can kind of agree it's executed and cared for way more on the phone than it is on the Mac, right? It just is. And in the run-up to the release last year, clearly most priority in engineering resources and design resources are going towards the phone because the phone's the most important platform. It's the biggest. It's the one everyone cares about. The Mac is small in comparison. We love the Mac and obviously they sell millions of them, so they should care about it. But if you can see where Apple's constrained resources get attention, they clearly go to the phone first. And so now we're another year on. there's just more time for whether designs were incomplete unfinished didn't translate as well as they thought they were going to reactions to customer feedback this is the time to do it right it's another year on they're not they haven't sat in an ivory tower with their fingers in their ears they hear what people say and they they make their choices about what they want to incorporate into the next year round i don't think the whole os is going to look completely different they're certainly not going to do like a revert to the previous design right but there's clearly some areas where you know give it another year you can redesign some things in your mock-ups you can get the engineering team to test some things out you can see how it looks in practice you can see how it works across the you know the ecosystem of mac apps and be like okay this didn't quite go as we thought it would this doesn't quite work here look guys we've had a thousand complaints about this sidebar being too transparent let's make it more more blurred more opaque right you can exactly and that's the exact kind of thing you'd expect them to do with another year of time and tinkering so that's kind of what i think mark's getting out here i don't know if it will be enough to like quote the people i'm never updating to tahoe because of the design right i don't think it's gonna be that dramatic but maybe there's some like standout areas of things that will now get they've had enough time to do the touching up that they didn't get time to do for the first year i don't think liquid glass and macOS tahoe is even one tenth as bad as some of the sensationalism we've seen from some Mac users. I do think there are places that it can be cleaned up and it sounds like that's the goal in Mac OS 27, but I don't think it's going to be enough to quell some of the people who are really upset about it. And I don't think it should be. I think Apple has introduced something that is so really good and great on the phone and the iPad and just, it falls down, I guess in some spots on the Mac and you can tell again where they cut corners or where they just ran out of time or where they made a design for the phone and they kind of just like, yeah, hammed it onto the Mac as well, right? Rather than being like, we've made this design for the phone. Now let's make a dedicated design for the Mac too. It's like, no, that's not how it works. They've made a design for the phone that translates pretty well to the iPad and then it 50% gets the way there on the Mac. But that's what we're doing. If you've got another year time of resources, you can maybe do some Mac specific designs for some things that didn't have that time before. I mean, one of the things that makes me laugh every update or every beta cycle at the moment is people check whether the corner radius has been quote unquote fixed on the Mac. Because, you know, like with Tahoe, all these different windows have all different corner radiuses. But the people in the beta forums talking about it are like, oh, it's still the same. It's like, yeah, that's as designed. Like intentionally, these windows have different corner radiuses. Apple talked about this in the design presentations last year. They like the concept of concentricity. And so they were like, depending on where your menu, your window controls are for like close and minimize, you should make your corner radius match that. So on Windows where they, if you have sidebars, the placement of those controls is different to other types of Windows. And so that's why the corner radiuses go different. It's not like, oh, we just messed up or we didn't have time to finish the corner radius on these screens. We intentionally make the corner radius different on different things. Now, just because it's as designed doesn't mean it's good, right? I would argue the concentricity design concept works well on the phone, right? because you have a nice single pane of glass with rounded corners and the apps generally fill the screen. And so the concentricity of the toolbar items in that works well. On the Mac, when you're on a more multi-window environment, it makes less sense. And so maybe in the, you know, they see the response of 26 and they spend the next nine months working on the next version, the design team go, you know what, we were wrong about that. We shouldn't put concentricity as the number one priority across the entire system. Let's go here, here and here and we'll take it away. And it does mean the corner radius won't match, but it'll be better for the platformer overall. And here's the places where we can break the rules, right? Like we had these design ideas and ideals, but when the rubber hits the road, there's some spots where it just doesn't make sense. And so I don't know specifically whether the corner radius is going to change in 27, but it's the kind of thing that they have time to look at and review and maybe change in a year-over-year cycle. Is there anything specifically in Tahoe that really bothers you that you hope they address? I don't like the sidebar design. And like, give me a specific app, like Finder, Mail. I prefer the old way where the sidebar was attached and it wasn't like quasi floating above. Floating, yeah. But it's not like really floating above. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it just kind of looks like it's floating above, but it's still kind of treated like it's attached. And I'm just saying, because it's floating above, it has to be inset on all four corners, right? The sidebars. That pushes those window controls down, which makes the corner radius more extreme. if they made the sidebars edge to edge again they'd have less padding on the top on the left which then means the the buttons would be close to the corner which that means the corner radius could be reduced so these things kind of go hand in hand right you know make the sidebars straight and maybe just make them a bit more contrast in color because it feels a bit too white on white for my liking um and then i be more happy with it the corner radius specifically i don really care about like but i get why other people care about it but yeah for me sidebars it's the things i don't like and the toolbar icons i think we spoke about this during the beta cycle right the way the toolbar items look when you like scroll down in finder for instance or in safari the liquid glass treatment of those buttons just doesn't look as good as it does on the phone they just look more like ugly gray buttons rather than what I feel like you get on the phone, which is more like fluid and responsive and blurry and dynamic and more fractions. You don't really get that on the Mac. And so that's probably the two areas where I'd be looking for refinement. The sidebar thing is like a design choice, right? It's like they chose to make it floating, but I think it looked better when it was attached. But the toolbar thing is maybe like, maybe that's an example where they dedicated the engineering resources to the phone. And then when they did it on the Mac, it just didn't come out as well. And with another year round, you can refine it and make it look a bit better. So that's probably where the two specific areas i would highlight but but it's hard to like pick out one or two specific things it's like the overall yeah the overall feel of the platform and the overall feel of the platform the mac is definitely third place for me compared to ipad and iphone i'm not in the camp where this is terrible i'm not using it right i use it every day and i get along with it but it's definitely for me the third place version of liquid glass yeah i mean and that's i think how it should be like you said kind of based on the size of the platforms where resources get directed. But for me being third, I don't think there's a huge gap as big of a gap as some people think between first and second and third place. Like it is still really good in most places. So I don't think it's like if you rate iPhone and a and iPadOS and a, I don't think MacOS in third place is like a D minus. I think it's like a B maybe a B plus even like, I think it's fine. I can't, I struggle to come up with an example of something i would want changed i think the only thing that bothers me a little bit and this isn't even necessarily liquid glass like it's kind of liquid glass but i think mac os control center is still a mess for a lot of reasons i just don't think it's functionally useful in the slightest and in mac os 26 all they did was kind of make it harder to read like that's where i noticed the translucency problems it kind of reminds me of like beta one of ims 26 yes where everyone was like control center you can't read it and then they fixed it but the mac didn't really changed and it's yeah like the the the glass treatment on control center on mac is just weird like it doesn't look like other elements i don't know it's odd the other thing so i mentioned sidebars and the other thing is tab bars you know like in safari at the tab at the top like for individual sites or you mean like the navigation bar kind of like the like the the so if you've got three window if you've got three tabs open you like switch between it by tapping right yeah and you can have like multiple finder windows open with tabs as well i just don't like how it looks it looks it reminds me of sidebars right where they've changed it to like floating and floating yeah and it's like well we've got to have matching count corner radius everywhere so rather than having like things that look like tabs we have like three floating buttons that have rounded corners on both sides it's like guys you don't need literally every element to have rounded corners i love rounded corners the old version of macOS had a lot of rounded corners it didn't have rounded corners literally everywhere so you could just pull that back a little bit and make them look more like actual tabs do you use the separate or compact tab bar in safari separate Yeah. Okay. Me too. Yeah. Then finally this week, Bloomberg has a really in-depth kind of monster report about some of the changes coming to iOS 27 from a design perspective. And the big thing here is about the camera app. So Bloomberg says the camera app will become fully customizable as part of iOS 27. So you'll be able to pick your own set of controls in a system Apple is calling widgets that run along the top of the interface. The app will continue to launch with the same default set as today. So that's things like resolution and flash and live photos. But then you'll be able to switch over to a quote unquote advanced array of options or choose your own items to put in that top menu bar. There'll be a new add widgets tray that slides up from the bottom. And then you kind of, I presume you'll be able to drag things around, give yourself easier access to things like depth of field and exposure controls. And this comes a year after Apple completely redesigned the camera app as part of ios 26 and i think did a really good job of it but this kind of gives you a way to bring back some of those controls for easier access that are now hidden in the tray at the bottom i don't know it brings back the right answer because most of those controls were hidden away as well in the yeah well it gives i think it's like adding functionally right it's like yeah if you have some of these controls that you use a lot you'll be able to like permanently pin them to the top of the viewfinder yes yeah but yeah i don't think it's like fixing a problem of the 26 camera because the ios 18 camera did the same thing it just hit them slightly differently but the same basically the apart from the visibility of like panorama and those camera modes the other features of the camera app are basically unchanged right yeah in terms of how visible they are up front so this would be in my opinion being like a oh we're giving you more power for advanced users of the camera app if you always change the exposure you can now drag an exposure widget to be right here in the viewfinder and you know what if you want it to be up at the top you can put it up at the top or if you want it at the bottom you can put it at the bottom so i think is just bringing like a layer of customizability to the camera app and we've seen them do this on other apps too right like where the you know safari for instance the safari action menu thing that when like the little page menu for a long time it was like here's the set of controls you've got and that's it with 26 it's like now you can change the actions you can edit the actions you reorder the actions you can put them what you can put your favorite actions to be right up here and you can make the other ones hide away um and they've done that with some other apps too so i feel like that's a trend they've been going down and now they're bringing it to the camera app it's like okay we have our base presets but if you're an advanced camera user and you want these things always visible or now you can drag them and put them right here maybe there's some different like modes in terms of the visuals and it'll be a bit like widgety so you can have a bigger one or a smaller one or if you really want a dedicated exposure control it doesn't just have to be a little button you can actually have like a slider directly on the screen right but for our you know regular person they just never customize anything it will look like the camera app it does today and be nonsense input streamlined i guess my thinking was ios 26 kind of took the camera app and put the made it more bare bones kind of if that makes sense and didn't give you many options to make it more complex if you wanted to so what ios 27 is doing is using the foundation of what was introduced in ios 26 and taking it if you want it to the next level because people have for years said that apple should make like a separate pro version of the camera app and it sounds like they're not going to do that they're just going to make the stock camera app let you make it as pro as you want it which is probably the better choice i think yeah you have to be careful right with design in general because the answer to everything is not just make every single app customizable and be like we don't know how to design an iq i just let the user do it but in the case of the camera i think it's probably is it'd be a better outcome than what we have today to let users have more choice in what's actually visible at any one time and the other thing that really gets my nose of the camera app is like the the matrix of preserve settings oh yeah i hate that system yeah like preserve the last use this prefers the last use that it's like it's so hard to even read and like understand what it means like if you turn on like if i turn on the live photo preserve setting it doesn't mean i'm turning on live photos all the time i'm turning whatever the last mode of live photos I set to what like they could clean that up for sure and maybe that frames part of this where I don't it's also stupid that the preserved settings are in like a separate they're in the settings app but they're not in the they're not directly in the camera so maybe if you've got a customizable experience right you'd be able to like long press on the live photo thing and say remember this or you know what I mean like uh just customizability in the camera is probably desirable because right now your only option is very manual it's like every single time swipe up press this button move this swipe this press this like it feels like something where bookmarks pinned options or you know what it sounds like this is going to be which is like you can drag out or any of these different buttons and just lay them out on the viewfinder people are going to appreciate that a lot and people use the camera app in so many different ways it feels like a canvas where customizability feels warranted then Bloomberg also says that throughout iOS 27 Apple is planning noticeable design changes meant to streamline the liquid glass design language. So in addition to the camera app in Safari, Bloomberg says iOS 27 will introduce a new start page with four tabs at the top to make it easier to switch between favorites, bookmarks, a reading list, and browsing history. The weather app will add a new conditions section on the main page for more in-depth data for things like rain and wind. Then the image playground app is getting a complete redesign. So in a new describe a change option to easily edit an image after it's created then there will be a new animation that shows the keys sliding up from the bottom when you bring up the on-screen keyboard so looking at those four things to me nothing there screams streamlining liquid glass like the framing of the story is that's just a year of a year update yeah adding features to each application the one thing in that go in that blueberg story that was like lukegall specific is he says the unified tab bar yes that yeah is coming to more apps so we saw this right in what like i was 26.3 where they made like the app store and the games app the search tab became just a normal button again and they put like a dedicated search bar back at the top of the screen rather than doing the ios 26 like flagship design of the tab bar where the search is like a separate button and when you tap on it it morphs the tab bar into the search field at the bottom they reverted that on the app store and the games app and we were like a number one why and b if you're gonna do it for app store and games what's the justification to not do it in music right like why is music different uh and you know they never really gave an answer at the time but it seems like that's what they've decided that they don't like the separate search uh buttons anymore because what goman says is in apps like music and podcasts in ios 27 the search tab will be back to just a standard unified bar which is the key liquor glass streamlining of the whole framing of the story but i don't really know if i like this change that much like it's nice that the search button is kind of out of the way if you don't need it and i don't understand of all things this is what they're choosing to kind of re rethink in part of iowa as part of iowa's 27 like it doesn't it doesn't bother me enough to want it to change and i actually like having search out of the way when i don't need it and having it in the very bottom right corner floating off to the far corner the far edge of your iphone screen makes it easy to get to when you're like using your phone one hand or something one handed or something like yeah because the text field is closer to the bottom of the screen so if you need to like edit the content of the search you can like reach it with your thumb whereas if you go to the app store now you have to like reach up to open the search field and then if you want to edit it later you then can reach all the way to the top of the screen again so i mean this is what they said when they announced 2016 and look how we've made search even better now it's got a dedicated tab on the right hand side a consistent location all your apps and when you click on it the search field is right where your thumb is it's like yeah that sounds good but that's the thing they're going to take away it's like oh it makes no sense i mean the only thing i can guess is like in the real world users don't understand it and so like an average customer doesn't get that like the tab bar has been replaced by a search field and they're just missing it or they're not understanding it and so they're they're taking it away to make it more obvious because every other part of the interaction i think is better in the current way so getting rid of it would be a regression And I guess like using the music app as the example, you can do the thing in the tab bar at the bottom where you can press and then just slide your finger all the way across from like home to library. But then if you want to keep sliding and get to search, you can't because it's off by itself. So this does make you let you use the whole tab bar, all five options just by sliding across, if that makes sense. Like I know what you mean. it's hard to explain but if you go to the music app and try that you can see the awkwardness of being able just to put your finger down and slide from home to new to radio to library and your instinct would tell you why can't i go all the way to search because it's floating off by itself and if you put it back in the tab bar then you can interact with the whole navigation bar that way the other thing they could do by the way i've just thought of using the music app right now so obviously the music app has the floating now playing pill right yes if you scroll down it goes to the minimized form where you have the current tab on the left, you have the pill in the center, and then you have the search on the right-hand side. If they're not going to have search as a separate item anymore, it would mean when it's minimized, they could make the width of the pill bigger. Of the now, yeah. So right now, the fast forward button, the next track button disappears when you scroll down. If they got rid of the search icon as being a permanent thing in the corner, they could make the pill bigger and have both buttons there. That actually makes sense in the music app. So that's an argument to do it like that. Yeah. maybe not for other apps where they're like i guess podcast and music both use that same metaphor but i'd be interested to see what they're in tv right because tv doesn't have a have a have a floating accessory above the tab bar right like because obviously it doesn't have like a now playing thing down there will they unify the search in there um because then the only change is the transforming or the morphing of the tabs into the search like there's no pill accommodation to worry about there but for at least for music and podcast you i guess you can justify it that way because they're going to prioritize making the now playing field larger but either way similar to mac os 27 liquid glass is unsurprisingly here to stay and ios 27 will just refine it and maybe this is just addressing some of stephen lemay's pain points the things he didn't like so we're just ticking a few boxes as he takes over and the broader design language as both of us have said many times it's not going anywhere despite new leadership yeah i mean if stephen lemay designed the new Apple developer icon, then all go for all guns blazing. I'll bow down to you. All right. I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I'm on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? at BZMI. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.