The iPad Still Doesn't Have a Default Weather and Calculator App

One of the first questions asked on the podcast was about the iPad still not having a default weather and calculator app. The host explained that there are some things that have not been done yet because they want to do something really distinctly great in that space. They acknowledged that creating a calculator app is easy, but creating one that feels like "wow, this is the greatest iPad calculator app" is a different story. The team has just not gotten around to doing it yet, and they are hoping to get it right when they can.

The host went on to say that what would make a great weather app for iPad? They suggested that Apple should focus on creating an amazing weather app before releasing one for the iPad. However, they also mentioned that there are thousands of options available on the App Store, and many users may not even notice or care about the lack of a default weather app.

Another question asked by the host was whether there is a small group of people out there who have an iPad but don't have an iPhone and want to use an Apple Watch. The host acknowledged that this might be a tiny niche market, but they wondered if it would ever be worth pursuing as a distinct experience for iPad users. They explained that Apple Watch can be a great device for many people, especially those with LTE connectivity, and that it could provide a degree of connectiveness on the go. However, they also noted that this is not an area that Apple has pursued yet, and they wouldn't rule it out entirely.

The host also mentioned their own experience with using both iPad and Apple Watch, and how these devices complement each other well. They suggested that for many people, having both devices could be a great way to balance the need for connectivity on the go with the desire to have a more powerful device for tasks like video editing or browsing.

ExpressVPN Sponsorship

The host also took a moment to thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring the podcast. They explained that ExpressVPN is a valuable tool for anyone who wants to access content from other countries, such as Netflix titles that are only available in certain regions. By using ExpressVPN, users can change their location and unlock these titles, making it easier to watch their favorite shows and movies.

The host also mentioned that ExpressVPN is the VPN they trust the most due to its commitment to not tracking any online activity. They noted that ExpressVPN has even taken steps to engineer every single one of its VPN servers to run only in RAM, which means that even if there was a bit of data tracked (which there isn't), it would be gone with a reboot. As a result, they are giving away three extra months of ExpressVPN for free to anyone who wants to take advantage of the content and appreciate their partnership with the channel.

Conversation Continues

The host concluded by encouraging listeners to check out the full conversation on the Waveform Podcast, where they delve deeper into these topics and many more. They also invited readers to share their thoughts in the comments section below and continue the conversation.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is up guys mkbhd here so in case you somehow missed it apple's wwdc was this week and the stuff they announced there has been making tech headlines pretty much every day since so typically when apple gets up on stage they share something that they've been you know working on behind the scenes for a long time and they're finally able to share it with the world they get on stage and they share it and then there's the sort of reaction from the internet everyone's blogging tweeting making their videos about it and then apple's usually just like zipped nothing they never really reply that's typically where the conversation ends but not this year 2020 in many ways is a little different so after the keynote this year after their online-only presentation i got to have a conversation with the man you may recognize from tons of facetime in the keynote singer vp at apple craig federighi we had a decently long chat on the waveform podcast with a whole range of topics from the behind the scenes of how they made that two-hour keynote movie basically to uh all the software and the new stuff that they've announced and you know it's not all roses and flowers some of the stuff they announced was pretty controversial too so luckily enough i was recording video on my end craig had some iphones set up recording his end in apple park so if you want more of the summary of the really long list of things that they've announced that are new you can go back and watch my last two videos that go into that stuff in lots of detail but this this is the more rare conversation part all right so point number one default apps so you may remember one of the new announcements in ios 14 was the ability to newly change your default mail or browser apps and the reaction to that was at first largely very positive including for me uh that's like a from a very traditionally stubborn company from like apple not something you would expect but then after like a day or two of digestion the questions start coming up well what about maps why not other things too here's what he had to say i did hear that you were looking forward to using alternatives yeah yeah i mean there you go i love everybody i love that extra layer i think my my natural question to that is okay it's only mail and browser is there a reason you didn't have full-on you know chaos or or even just maps because i think maps would have been nice to also be able to set as a default you know honestly uh a great point i mean i think for us we looked at what were the top things that we'd been hearing people say they they wanted to configure and there's definitely uh those two that rose to the top uh so um i'll certainly take take the input about about maps as well it was uh this was this was just where we started i think your point on on chaos is an important one i mean obviously with with ios we're very careful about trying to keep we we know how uh platforms can sort of descend into chaos and uh particularly when um apps that you know might honestly not even be browsers uh you know how to decide they're gonna be a browser and then you know try to hook into being your browser because maybe they could redirect you to a different uh tracked ad experience when you click on something or bounce you into you know who knows what and so we are very careful about um making sure that that experience that we don't have people getting uh misled or have their device gets configured into a place where uh boy they just don't even like uh like using their their uh their phone anymore because it's gotten so wonked up so uh we we proceed cautiously on these things for sure does that mean there will be uh i assume well i maybe i shouldn't assume that not every app can add that flag to potentially be a default browser but only certain approved ones yeah you're exactly right so so we uh will have criteria for the you have to be a general purpose browser and they'll be i mean the ones you would think of as using as your browser will of course all all qualify um but we don't want um a random game to just claim like yeah i'm a browser you know i'm willing to throw up a webkit view now and then in in the middle of my game experience i'm going to be your browser because we think that could could readily be abused so we want real general purpose mail apps and real general purpose uh browsers to be able to present themselves to the user with this functionality and and keep out all the rest of the confusion gotcha so the browser point i think is actually a really good one something to sort of think about a little bit if any app can just become your browser when any link comes up and then that app has different policies on tracking and privacy then it sort of goes against your own policies on tracking and privacy now we see this on android all the time and it's actually more of a it feels like a convenience and more customization feature but in relay for reddit for example if i click a link to read a story it doesn't have to open chrome there's a browser built into the app here so it just opens that and that's convenient but craig's response here is basically that sometimes apple has to take a stance against some of that convenience in favor of maintaining their own pretty strict privacy policy makes sense then next up was siri so siri got a bunch of improvements in ios 14 as well answers a bunch of new questions now and it also is in this compact new ui with a much smaller animation i pointed out in my videos and a lot of people also reacted that you couldn't really interact with things behind siri despite that smaller animation siri also gets a new compact ui both on the phone yeah and on the ipad but something we've noticed since using it is it is a compact ui but you can't interact with things underneath or behind it um is that intentional is that a limitation what's what's that story no no and in fact you know we tried it both ways we we had uh internally we had prototypes running where uh you would scroll behind uh the siri answers as you brought them up and initially we thought that was gonna be uh really great and so we implemented it that way and then what we found was that for most of the interactions we were having with siri that that then created this kind of extra heaviness to it because if you just said wanted to check the weather or look up a piece of information and then you were ready to move on your scroll gesture wasn't going to move on the siri result was going to stick around there so you always had this additional step of dismissing the result and we found that to be extra heavy and so uh you know we'll continue to listen to what people have to say through the beta period because like i say i mean we've we actually have it working both ways um but but our feeling was that we wanted to achieve a a great lightness not just visually but in terms of you could dip into siri get an answer and and move on uh quickly without any kind of overhead in the subsequent interaction so there's there's definitely a real balance there yeah i i felt that the experience was a little different on the phone versus the tablet you know on the phone it felt like it made sense i'm not necessarily reading or scrolling or doing things behind siri very often but the tablet with the bigger screen to me felt like an opportunity to give me a little more of like the the multitasking feel that i talk about on ipad yeah where you do feel like you have a little more control over leaving siri there while you do other things and coming back to it so that might be something to look into yeah did you have a thought about what you how you would have expected if you were to let's say start you know you got your answer and then you started scrolling and doing other things on your ipad yeah at what point you would expect siri to kind of get itself out of the way or whether you would have preferred to you know have it hang out for you know minutes and then you go over there and manually put it away yeah so i think because that animation came in from the bottom and then the answer came in from the top i almost felt like it would be different behavior on the phone but i almost felt like just being able to swipe it out of the top where it came from to disperse it uh sort of like a notification even though it isn't one or bringing that siri animation from the bottom corner and just swiping it down out of where it appeared um so that's again there's probably a thousand ways to to also consider doing it but i think that just because i'm such an ipad multitasking advocate i think that would be something i'd be interested in all right so there you go makes sense to me the one extra step of dismissing siri is one extra step they feel like they wanted to avoid but also again i think it's important to mention that these are the videos i was making were about developer betas and these are early software that can continue to be changed down the road he mentions they could change it so if you do see that behavior change maybe they've thought about it more alright so then the big one mac os big sur new visuals new rounded corners new icons i had to talk about it seeing all those visual changes it got a very mixed reaction online and i'll share some of mine after but yeah there's a there's a sort of an overarching theme of these rounded corners and a new transparency and a different sort of look to it can you talk about that theme of mac os big sur yeah well i think the the first thing just to address the the 11.0 i mean we do feel that between the the new design and the the beginning of a new chapter with the introduction of apple silicon i mean i think this is this is just the beginning i mean this is a this is a real renewal of the platform in in many ways and so we're really excited to to mark this with uh the next chapter the turning into the next chapter with with uh with 11. um as far as the the design goes you know i think it's a huge part of our visual scenery of our lives at this point and so what seems right is partly what we're used to seeing on that screen every day and when it changes immediately there's all kinds of little pattern recognizers in our brain that go like hold on something's different something i feel like after you use the ui for and i've been living on it for months it feels natural it feels um fresh and yet clearly distinctly mac and i love it and i think that it's natural the first time you you see it and of course the internet reacts on like they see a single screen shot and then let's start a tweet storm and then let's pile on um they don't they don't necessarily live on it right and so um i will love to hear the feedback of people as they've if they've really made it their system like they have the previous mac uis for you know for weeks and and come back and say how do you feel about it now um i think the design team did amazing work and i i find you know things like rounding you know some of those choices may seem arbitrary but in fact it's extremely consistent throughout that whole experience and i think it's really organic you know straight edges like this are like the process of human manufacturing processes you know uh if you look out in nature if you look at our own faces there's a lot of curves uh right and natural curves and so i think there's something really beautiful and organic about the the look of the ui uh and uh i think the the use of the use of materials is really great um the clarity of some of the unified toolbars i think is is just clean and fresh and really deferential the content and then of course i mean it's a big step to change the icons of the mac that's certainly a signature change but what we found when we live on it is we're all moving back and forth between our iphone our ipad our mac and having that consistency and familiarity just takes a level of of sort of mental mapping energy out of the whole thing and it's just it's relaxing it's comfortable it's it's clear uh and so you know we approach that decision with a lot of a lot of debate um but in the end we we tried it and it just it just felt right and i think as people use it they're going to come to the same conclusion yeah those new icons are not from ipad or iphone right they're new they're totally new icon set as far as like finder and and spotify and final cut like all these new apps on the mac we did not create a spotify app we would not make we would not make that step i mean it might be fun to try but i don't think we're allowed to do that right um we we did you're right so there's some mac uh some icons like like finder exactly where uh there's no analog and so we got to imagine with the new shape and aesthetic how how should should the mac look and i think i i love what we came up with there um then there are other icons uh like say safari or messages where uh we took the ios icon and the typical you know chiclet shape um but applied a little bit of the traditional mac craft to uh to it and i think that's been where there's some of the controversy right now where people are saying hold on i know what that iphone icon looks like and this one seems just a little different something's tripping here and going like this isn't quite right um and you know that's that's natural and understandable but we we did want to pay homage to that history of great uh craft and detailing that's been part of uh the mac the history of mac icons and so we kind of brought those those two together and hopefully in the end uh successfully i think this is all a very eloquent way of saying you'll get used to it and i think that's that's kind of he's got a good point you probably will eventually get used to it after a while but the other thing is design is subjective and sometimes there are designs that even if you do get used to them you still don't like them like for me an example is on my phone i use waze for navigation i don't use apple maps or google maps that much anymore that's because i like the feature set but every time i open waze i hate looking at it it's just it's ugly it doesn't look good it's not clean or elegant or flat or minimal or modern or anything every time i open it i hate it but i don't switch because it still has the feature set i like and i feel like apple knows that and they also know people aren't going to switch off from mac os because they didn't really like the new icons people complain about iphones all the time and then what do they go out and buy the next iphone so he's got a point we'll get used to it but also craig or anyone else at apple who may stumble upon this video i talked about the other icons and how i might not like them and that's preference but this battery icon in system preferences i you gotta fix this one i'm sorry there's just there's no way this should make it out of the beta please change this battery icon all right i got i got a couple fan questions as well i asked i put it out on youtube we had some some questions and we're going to have craig on the podcast um first one the ipad still does not have a default weather and calculator app and they want to know why you know there's some things that we we have not done because we to do it we would want to do something really distinctly great in that space and uh i think it's obviously easy to create a calculator app uh but creating one that feels like wow this is this is this is the greatest ipad calculator app that it felt like i think we we we want to do it when we can do it really really well and and we we honestly have just uh uh haven't gotten around to doing it great so uh that day that day may come but uh and you know whether it be easy enough to scale up our additional our existing weather uh app but we feel like what would a great weather app for ipad be like let's let's do that before we do it and otherwise they're great options on the app store i mean there are thousands of options on the app store in fact so very true i think this one it resonates to me because one of my favorite apps you guys just acquired dark sky so it's no longer on android so i'm like this this ios weather app better turn into this amazing thing so um i think i think it may be time for an ipad weather app that's just me i'm just saying all right well and it could be could be time for you to go iphone exclusive i think that would be another another another good move that's a big point of leverage you make a great point another question is uh there's a there's a very small group of people out there apparently that have an ipad and want to use an apple watch but don't have an iphone um is this a workflow you guys think about or are there groups of people who maybe that's too small of a group of people to cater to but will there ever be an ipad apple watch experience we don't i mean i i get it i think i think there's an interesting place where apple watch can for many people take that kind of the device that i need to have with with having lte it can be that device that gives you the degree of connectiveness connectedness on the go and then you've got your your ipad when you want to um get deeper and it's a sensible it's a sensible uh point it is not one that we uh have pursued yet um i mean i wouldn't rule it out but so i i get it i uh i love using my ipad and i love using my apple watch so i could i could understand that so there you have it some interesting stuff some some new information and some clarifications on stuff that's already been announced good conversation material and again it's a much longer fuller more detailed conversation over on the waveform podcast so in case you want more quarantined content or if you haven't listened to my podcast yet feel free to hit the link below the like button to check it out um we've got other guests on previous episodes too but you can subscribe and listen to it anywhere podcasts are but let me know what you think in the comments section below and we can continue the conversation 2020 style thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one shout out to expressvpn for sponsoring this video so if you're like me and you feel like you've watched nearly everything online the number one thing you need is expressvpn see streaming services like netflix have different shows and movies available in different countries which means there are titles out there that you didn't even know that you don't have access to but expressvpn lets you change your location which essentially unlocks all these different shows and titles that netflix and other streaming services have so i've been using expressvpn to watch star trek discovery which is only available for netflix in the uk but it's pretty easy you just fire up the expressvpn app change the location to the uk and then refresh netflix or whatever service you're using and that's it it's fast it works on a computer or on my phone or even on the tv so you can watch these new things on the big screen look you've heard me talk about vpns before and why they're so important for online security and privacy but expressvpn is the one i trust because they explicitly do not track any of your online activity and they've even gone above and beyond to engineer every single one of their vpn servers to run only in ram which means even if there was a bit of data tracked which there isn't it would be gone with a reboot so thanks to them being such a good partner with the channel i'm giving away three extra months of expressvpn for free so if you want to take advantage of this content boosting vpn feel free to head over to expressvpn.com mkbhd so that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"