Marques Brownlee in Conversation With Craig Federighi ⇥ youtube.com

As part of his post-WWDC press tour, Craig Federighi appeared on Marques Brownlee’s Waveform podcast and in a more truncated form in a short video interview. They discuss the redesign of MacOS appearing in Big Sur, the keynote video production, and why it will only be possible to change the default browser and email clients but not, say, maps or music.

One thing that Federighi and Brownlee discussed is how Siri still doesn’t allow interaction behind it, even though it now appears as a floating orb that does not visually dominate the screen. According to Federighi, this is a deliberate limitation — it was tried both with and without interaction, but the latter suffered from a lack of clarity about how to dismiss Siri after use. However, MacOS has a floating Siri panel and it, somehow, avoids this confusion. “Just copy MacOS” is not a great answer or solution, but I think the current design is somewhat misleading.