00:00:08 ◼ ► For Reel AFM, this is Upgrade Episode 266. Today's show is brought to you by the fine people over at Bombas, Squarespace, and Direct Mail.
00:00:36 ◼ ► Apple provided you with a gift. We're actually going to eschew regular format and do follow-up first before we do #SnellTalk.
00:00:45 ◼ ► Because I've realized the gift Apple gave you, we heard from many Upgradients that Apple sent an email to iPhone upgrade program subscribers last week,
00:01:00 ◼ ► Yeah, you know, they did a Spinal Tap reference a couple years ago in a slide that was a "goes to 11" and I don't even remember what it was about.
00:01:06 ◼ ► And people told me about it and my concern now, honestly, is that nobody even realizes it's a Spinal Tap reference.
00:01:18 ◼ ► Yeah, "goes to 11" is like it goes way beyond what you'd expect because it goes to 11 instead of 10.
00:01:27 ◼ ► Yeah, no, it's good. How could you not, with the iPhone 11, make a joke about how it goes to 11?
00:01:34 ◼ ► So I'm glad to hear that somebody in Apple's email marketing is making a Spinal Tap reference.
00:02:00 ◼ ► Oh, man, you're right. It could. One day. You're right. Okay. All right. Spinal Tap forever, then.
00:02:05 ◼ ► And I feel like Federighi would do it, but we also felt like that was why it was 11, but he didn't.
00:02:11 ◼ ► Considering that we are preparing ourselves for another Mac OS release, I'm going to go to a question from Such, who asked,
00:02:23 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I have to say Yosemite. It's the obvious choice, but it's also the right choice.
00:02:40 ◼ ► And then you can make a side trip to the town I grew up in, which don't bother. It's not that interesting.
00:02:48 ◼ ► No. It's about the same. It's about the same because you have to go east. You have to drive east to get there.
00:02:55 ◼ ► But it is spectacular, and I was just there, in fact, a few weeks ago, and I love it. It's wonderful.
00:03:04 ◼ ► I will also put a shout-out to the Point Reyes National Seashore, which I love, and I was just there about a month ago, and that is my favorite beach.
00:03:17 ◼ ► Shout-out to the seashore. That's a tongue-twister if you say it too fast. Shout-out to the seashore.
00:03:24 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly right. Historically, I will say shout-out to Columbia State Historic Park, which is basically where I grew up, and it's an old gold rush town that is intact.
00:03:36 ◼ ► You can go visit it and take a stagecoach ride if you really want to. That was my childhood at the State Historic Park.
00:03:57 ◼ ► Yes. No. Thank you so much, Asajj, for that question. I've been sitting on that one for a while, waiting for the next macOS release, so...
00:04:05 ◼ ► See, look, there's like a whole content strategy when it comes to Snell Talk. I don't just pick these things at random.
00:04:11 ◼ ► I have questions that are years old at this point that I'm just waiting for the right time to use them.
00:04:18 ◼ ► So if you ever sent in a question and thought, "Oh, I didn't pick mine," that doesn't mean it's not going to get picked.
00:04:22 ◼ ► So you don't print out the Snell Talk questions on a piece of paper and put it in a big plastic globe that has air blowing through it and then reach in and pick one out?
00:04:33 ◼ ► You don't do that? The fix is in? You've just got a whole system of Snell Talk collected questions?
00:04:50 ◼ ► There's somebody out there now who's very angry that you're unfairly... I think it's the right move.
00:04:56 ◼ ► I know. I think it's actually fairly doing it because I'm picking based on what could be the most interesting thing to ask on this episode.
00:05:03 ◼ ► Or I just... I mean, some of them are just like, "Oh, I like that question. I'll ask it." But that's not necessarily how it works.
00:05:10 ◼ ► Thank you so much if you ever want to send... Just as I said, #SnellTalkQuestion to send out a tweet and yours may be included in a future episode. Who knows when?
00:05:26 ◼ ► Okay, so we're going to talk about Deep Fusion. This was the camera feature that's going to be coming to iOS later on this year.
00:05:36 ◼ ► It has been dubbed by many "sweater mode" because it was the... if you remember during the iPhone presentation, the iPhone 11 presentation,
00:05:44 ◼ ► Phil Schiller showed off a weird photo of a man in a sweater and was talking about how much better the photo looks.
00:05:56 ◼ ► And we now have explanations, but much better explanations, which obviously have come from Apple via... we got a great article from Matthew Pansarino.
00:06:11 ◼ ► He did a great YouTube video about this too, kind of just like in more clear terms explaining what this mode of photography will actually be able to do for you as an iPhone 11 owner.
00:06:32 ◼ ► So basically, Deep Fusion kicks in if it's not a night photo and it's not a smart HDR photo.
00:06:40 ◼ ► That is when it will kick in. So it's when lighting is mostly okay and what you get at the end of it is a much sharper image.
00:06:55 ◼ ► Because if it's... I think this is what happened with me because I tried this a bunch and I couldn't see any difference.
00:07:03 ◼ ► And I think what's happening is it's saying, "I'm going to use smart HDR for this image because I want to be able to get the brighter and darker parts."
00:07:16 ◼ ► Right. This is a marketing feature and I get why they're like, "Oh no, no, no. You're just taking a picture."
00:07:22 ◼ ► Right? Like smart HDR. It's sort of like, "You're just taking a picture. Don't worry about it."
00:07:25 ◼ ► On the other hand, I'm a little surprised that because it's a feature that matters enough that they're marketing it as Deep Fusion,
00:07:39 ◼ ► But something to indicate that this is going on because at least all of us are kind of scratching our heads about, "Is it working?"
00:07:46 ◼ ► But you can tell when it is. I've shot a couple of them that I think are very clearly Deep Fusion because of the detail that I'm getting that I wouldn't otherwise be getting.
00:07:57 ◼ ► And I've seen some videos and stuff that you can see when it happens if you're very quick.
00:08:03 ◼ ► If you take a picture and go straight to the camera roll, the picture changes. Like the processing is complete.
00:08:09 ◼ ► Yeah, because it's still processing. Also, we'll put a link in the show notes, your friend Henry Casey owns sweaters and Tom's guide had him bring in his sweaters.
00:08:19 ◼ ► There's a story that is actually a really good example of this, but they picked up from Apple's sweater photo and there are pictures of Henry wearing three different sweaters.
00:08:32 ◼ ► There's a little slider so you can compare the non-Deep Fusion sweater to the Deep Fusion sweater. It's actually pretty good.
00:08:46 ◼ ► There is a weird thing with this which is frustrating to me. It's the new feature, the overcropping feature, right?
00:08:51 ◼ ► So like the automatic capture outside of the frame. We've been talking about this a lot.
00:08:57 ◼ ► The idea that like take a picture with the regular wide lens and the ultra-wide lens capture some data and then using AI it can bring people into the photo that you cropped out.
00:09:08 ◼ ► Deep Fusion doesn't work with this and if you have that feature turned on, Deep Fusion will never work.
00:09:14 ◼ ► Which is probably why this feature is turned off by default, but it's very frustrating, I think.
00:09:21 ◼ ► And it's super weird that they've got two new features for the camera and they 100% conflict with each other to the point that you can't use them both.
00:09:30 ◼ ► I'm a little surprised that there isn't a way with all of the intelligent stuff that they're doing.
00:09:34 ◼ ► I'm a little surprised that there isn't a way for them to detect which feature is better in a given moment.
00:09:41 ◼ ► And if it detects, because the way that the outside of the frame is apparently working is it's not capturing that.
00:09:48 ◼ ► Okay. We don't really know. It may be capturing the wide and the narrow, you know, the wide and ultra-wide, let's say, every time.
00:09:56 ◼ ► But what it's doing, whether it captures it or not, is it's seeing if there's something off the edge of the frame.
00:10:04 ◼ ► So I guess it's capturing it and then looking. It's using machine learning to say, "Is there something around the edge of the frame that is cut off that might be worth saving?"
00:10:20 ◼ ► You can't just go out there with this feature turned on and take a picture and then go to the crop tool and then uncrop it.
00:10:33 ◼ ► What they want to do, and video works the same, much the same way, is they're using their machine learning to say,
00:10:39 ◼ ► "Oh, there's a person right on the edge of the frame or right outside the frame or an animal or something like that.
00:10:49 ◼ ► And so we're going to keep it and we're going to make a smart crop or make it available to smart crop."
00:10:55 ◼ ► What surprises me is that they, I'm sure there's a very specific technical reason that they don't have the ability to say,
00:11:04 ◼ ► "What do I want to do?" Oh, they press the button. "What do I want to do?" and determine whether, based on what they see,
00:11:11 ◼ ► they want to go ahead with Deep Fusion or they want to go ahead with the crop outside the frame.
00:11:17 ◼ ► But they apparently can't do that. So it's too bad because that would be the best thing here is like,
00:11:22 ◼ ► "Hey, camera, figure it out. Like, figure it out. Do I do Smart HDR? Do I do Night Mode? Do I do Deep Fusion? Do I do crop outside the frame?"
00:11:35 ◼ ► I think that whatever they're doing, it wouldn't surprise me if, because this feature exists and it's turned off,
00:11:46 ◼ ► It would not surprise me if that's actually the story behind the scenes. It's like, they really thought they could auto detect it.
00:11:54 ◼ ► It could be. It could also be just the complexity of it that led Deep Fusion to be in a later beta will be something that they could fix later.
00:12:18 ◼ ► If you are interested in learning very minute details about capture outside of the frame, Federico went into a lot of depth on this on Connected last week.
00:12:28 ◼ ► And you can hear me just becoming more and more confused and then we get to the resolution of it. It's a very confusing topic.
00:12:38 ◼ ► It's wacky. Like, the video capture, what it will actually do is if somebody walks off the edge, it will be like,
00:12:46 ◼ ► Oh, there's a person walking off the edge of the frame. I'm gonna hold on to that person like and that's machine learning.
00:12:52 ◼ ► That's like there's a person or a cat or whatever. There's an object and I think it's important.
00:12:58 ◼ ► And that's how it's doing it. And it's doing it so that you don't lose that moment because that person is outside of the frame.
00:13:05 ◼ ► What it's not doing is just capturing two videos and saying which one do you want to use?
00:13:09 ◼ ► So there's a lot of wacky. It's pretty wacky and we as commentators about this stuff are trying to understand it and explain it to people who want to know how it works.
00:13:20 ◼ ► Where Apple is really thinking of the vast majority of iPhone users who don't want to know how it works and don't care how it works and are not going to change the settings.
00:13:32 ◼ ► It's literally built. It's better this way. I think is the argument is that most people will never go consult the second video and recrop their video.
00:13:41 ◼ ► But if the machine learning algorithm can see that your kid was just outside of frame and put him back inside the frame automatically, then you you know, you win.
00:13:54 ◼ ► That's the best scenario for most people. But for us, we're trying to figure out like, how does this work? What is doing?
00:14:03 ◼ ► And it is kind of fascinating to see how many different things are going on inside the camera app.
00:14:12 ◼ ► Oh, by the way, I want to mention pet hair and I mean, I think hair in general. It's not just sweaters.
00:14:18 ◼ ► There's lots of detail. But one of the things that I've seen like I have a black cat and I don't know whether it's all deep fusion or whether it's also some smart HDR.
00:14:27 ◼ ► But what I've noticed is I have been able to take way better pictures of my cat than I used to because black cats are very hard.
00:14:35 ◼ ► They're, you know, they're reflective and dark and like they're just really hard to take pictures of.
00:14:49 ◼ ► It I've been impressed with the pictures I've been able to take that I haven't been able to capture him before.
00:14:57 ◼ ► It will probably be out probably in a couple of weeks for everybody to try. I haven't put the 13.2 beta on my phone.
00:15:08 ◼ ► I actually didn't even put 13 on my phone this year. I just waited because things were so difficult.
00:15:20 ◼ ► I noticed on Twitter, Jason, that you said that you got a bunch of NFC stickers and I'm assuming that they're for shortcuts.
00:15:28 ◼ ► And I'm wondering if you can just give us an idea as to what you're using them for. Sure.
00:15:38 ◼ ► He handed me an NFC sticker at W.W.D.C. anticipating that this would that this would happen.
00:15:45 ◼ ► But it was enabled the use of an NFC sticker to trigger a shortcut was enabled in iOS 13.1, which just came out.
00:15:55 ◼ ► And I thought I wanted to play around with this. And so I bought on one of his recommendations that he posted on his blog.
00:16:02 ◼ ► And we'll put a link in the show notes to what I bought a roll of like 10 NFC stickers from Amazon.
00:16:07 ◼ ► They're just white stickers you can order. You know, you could order 50 custom printed relay FM and if see stickers, if you want to.
00:16:20 ◼ ► And basically, think of it like Apple Pay. If you if you wave your phone over it, it detects that it's there.
00:16:28 ◼ ► And the way it works with shortcuts is you open a shortcuts automation tab and you add a new item.
00:16:39 ◼ ► And then you tap on that and it says, OK, you know, scan the sticker and you have to tap and then scan it.
00:16:53 ◼ ► So you do that and then you build your shortcut. And then any time you have and I think your phone has to be has to be on.
00:17:13 ◼ ► So that's pretty cool. So I thought I want to experiment with this and I only have the one sticker and I want to try it out where I can actually just buy some stickers and stick them places and see if I use this.
00:17:22 ◼ ► So I stuck a sticker on the post by my mailbox at the front of my house with the idea that if I'm coming home in the evening and it's late.
00:17:33 ◼ ► And I can't see the you know, the walkway to the front door. Clearly, I can actually scan that sticker as I go by.
00:17:41 ◼ ► I tagged that sticker and it will turn off or turn on the light at the front door and unlock my front door.
00:17:49 ◼ ► So I'm trying that one. And then I have in our back bedroom gets really damp in the winter.
00:18:01 ◼ ► But there are times when I'm back there and I think I really need to turn on the dehumidifier and I have to, you know, open up the home app and go find the smart switch and turn it on.
00:18:12 ◼ ► I guess I could use Siri for that, too. But what I'm going to experiment with is now I have a sticker on the dehumidifier.
00:18:18 ◼ ► And if I tap that with my phone, what it will do is turn on the dehumidifier and actually turn on the ceiling fan to circulate the air in the room.
00:18:26 ◼ ► And that's just a single shortcut. And I'm probably going to stick one in the kitchen somewhere that will take whatever I'm playing on my phone and send it to my home pods, because that's a scenario I have sometimes where I'm listening to a podcast.
00:18:38 ◼ ► And then I want to transfer it to the home pods. And it's usually when I'm in the kitchen doing something and I want to get it on the big speakers.
00:18:46 ◼ ► And so I can stick that sticker somewhere and just do that. And then I don't even have to go to overcast or whatever.
00:18:56 ◼ ► Yes, the tapping it on the home pods to transfer it over, right, which is, I think, a very similar kind of thing. But I don't think is there yet.
00:19:04 ◼ ► So that's a way to do it. And I've heard from people that that's a pretty popular one is these kind of AirPlay directive on a sticker so that if you were in a context, you know, you walk into a room and you want to put it, you know, put the audio on the speakers that are in that room,
00:19:20 ◼ ► you can actually just tag the NFC sticker. And Android's had NFC stickers for a long time that the OS has been able to access and do stuff with like connect to Wi Fi and all of that.
00:19:30 ◼ ► But really, for iPhone, it has taken until user automation has access to it, which is with 13.1. So it's been fun. Is it practical? I don't know.
00:19:44 ◼ ► My job is to live with it and find out if it's practical and come up with some ideas of how it might be practical and then disseminate that to all of you.
00:19:53 ◼ ► And then you can make your judgment about whether you know, it's a dumb idea or whether it's a good idea or whether you already bought stickers because it was so exciting.
00:20:09 ◼ ► Right now, all it does is turn on low power mode, but I'm thinking about what else I can add to that as like a you're traveling now thing.
00:20:18 ◼ ► Like I might want to turn on the like the hue scene that I have that cycles the lights. Right.
00:20:29 ◼ ► And it can be literally any shortcut. That's the thing that's really amazing is that you can have it be something incredibly complex that is going to a web service.
00:20:40 ◼ ► And, you know, like all of these things that it can do. It's just a matter of what's practical like as again, that's something you could do.
00:20:47 ◼ ► But what's the scenario there? But yeah, setting a scene, anything like that totally makes sense.
00:20:52 ◼ ► So I'm I think it's a fun idea and we'll see where it goes and I've been spending some time with that.
00:21:00 ◼ ► And also with the shortcuts that are in the home app automation, which are limited in what they can do.
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00:23:14 ◼ ► I am also excited to talk about Microsoft because Microsoft did some stuff last week that's really interesting and I think very clever.
00:23:24 ◼ ► And I will now point out at this point that the last time Microsoft did something that I thought was really interesting and really clever, it failed miserably.
00:23:32 ◼ ► So I'm not sure it's going to succeed, but all the Metro stuff they did where they were doing a touch interface that had touch apps and all that.
00:23:43 ◼ ► I think we were excited about the Surface Studio. Was it called the Studio? We were excited about that too.
00:23:53 ◼ ► Anyway, this stuff is fascinating and I think it's interesting on its own and I think it's interesting in the context of what Apple is thinking of doing in the future too.
00:24:02 ◼ ► They had a huge event. They had a bunch of updates. We'll talk about a few of the things that are releasing this year in a little bit.
00:24:10 ◼ ► So I was recording a show. I just finished recording the show and I went onto Twitter and I saw that they were having an event and people were like, "Oh, this is a really great event."
00:24:17 ◼ ► So I was like, "Alright, I'll tune in." I tuned in five minutes before they showed off the Neo.
00:24:26 ◼ ► So what we're talking about mainly today is two devices that are coming next year, holiday 2020, that Microsoft have created that are dual screen devices.
00:24:39 ◼ ► So the first is the Surface Neo, which is the first one that they showed off. It has two nine inch screens that have a hinge down the middle.
00:24:47 ◼ ► It's a 360 degree hinge, which means it can basically go from a book, right, so the screens are on the inside.
00:24:54 ◼ ► You can fold it all the way back around again so you have screens on both sides, right? So you can fold it out and on itself. It's all the way around.
00:25:02 ◼ ► It runs a new variant of Windows called Windows X, which is very confusing to me when I see it, but it's called Windows X. It's actually an X.
00:25:13 ◼ ► It's like Windows 10, but with an X. I honestly feel like they're just trolling at this point, but I love it.
00:25:18 ◼ ► These devices need developer support to work. The 360 degree hinge has pen and keyboard support.
00:25:28 ◼ ► Now they have some really cool videos. I'll include those in the show notes, including some hands-on stuff that The Verge did, but the product videos are really nice.
00:25:35 ◼ ► There's this one moment in the product video, which my mind exploded, where it's floating in the air and it opens up, and then they have this sound like "bzzzzzz" as the keyboard flips around and magnetically attaches to the bottom screen.
00:26:02 ◼ ► It'd be even better. So if you put the keyboard on the... so you're folding it like a laptop, right? So you have one screen on the bottom, one screen in front of you.
00:26:10 ◼ ► You put the keyboard on the bottom screen, you have a touch bar above it. If you move the keyboard up, you get a trackpad below it. Very clever.
00:26:18 ◼ ► Just really smart. It looks like it's been... the things that they're showing seem really well thought through about the way that people might use these devices.
00:26:33 ◼ ► I think I want to just introduce both of them and then we can talk about them both. Is that fair? Because there's a lot of overlap, I think, between the two.
00:26:42 ◼ ► So everyone's minds are blown by this, right? Like, people are going crazy, right? As you would imagine. Like, Microsoft, they've shown us something and it seems really exciting.
00:26:51 ◼ ► Panos Panay, by the way, their Chief Product Officer, he is a showman. He's very, very good at displaying products, right?
00:27:03 ◼ ► Like, probably one of, if not the best out there right now. Like, I've only seen a few of his stuff, but like this, the way he demoed all of these products and spoke about them, very good.
00:27:12 ◼ ► I like their staging. Everyone's low down. He's walking up and down the aisles. Like, Microsoft, they've been putting some thought into this, right? Like, we've all been sleeping on them a bit, but they've been moving forward.
00:27:23 ◼ ► So everyone's minds are blown by the Neo's introduction. It seems like Panos Panay is wrapping up, like he's going off stage, like puts one finger up in the air and he's like, "Ah, but I'm not done."
00:27:33 ◼ ► And then they roll a video and it looks like another demo video of the Surface Neo. You have an individual and they're walking along and they have the Neo and they close it up and then something starts ringing and then they pick a smaller one out of the bag.
00:27:54 ◼ ► There you go. It is unfolded. It is an 8.3 inch tablet, right? If you unfold the two, which is interesting. It is a smaller dual screen device. It runs Android.
00:28:07 ◼ ► And Microsoft don't want you to call this a phone. They want to kind of move away from that, but it is something to replace your smartphone. So, holiday 2020.
00:28:19 ◼ ► Yes, let's be clear here. This is a product that isn't going to come out until the end of next year. These two products, if they do come out, it will be the end of next year.
00:28:30 ◼ ► Now, again, it's like a lot can change in a year, but they are going the right way about this when they talk about why they're doing it because they want to get these into developers hands in like within a few months time.
00:28:40 ◼ ► Because both of these devices are going to require developer support, especially the Neo, which is the Windows X version.
00:28:52 ◼ ► Because that one could just straight up fail, right? If developers don't get on board, while the other one is an Android phone.
00:28:59 ◼ ► Sure, right. And in the Android space already, there is already a lot of these types of devices. Developers are getting on board of it. Microsoft and Google are working together, but Google had already started to push towards this anyway.
00:29:15 ◼ ► So there is more of a story there, but it seems a little unclear to me at least. What is needed for an app to run on Windows X? Do you have to start from the beginning? Will things run at all?
00:29:31 ◼ ► Microsoft is not saying a ton about Windows X right now, other than it's going to need buy-in from the developer community.
00:29:45 ◼ ► But the fact that a lot can change in a year, but I think they're doing this in the right way. They know that they're showing their hand way earlier than they should.
00:29:54 ◼ ► Especially because in a lot of the coverage, they're saying a lot of the details of this device might change. They haven't even decided if it's going to have a camera on the Duo. They've not made a decision yet.
00:30:05 ◼ ► This is a fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple, right? Because Apple could literally have something in their lab that they're planning on releasing at a special event in October of 2020.
00:30:20 ◼ ► And they wouldn't need to do the developer, like, "Let's come on, bring you around." Apple doesn't need to do that.
00:30:28 ◼ ► In fact, I would say, this is one of my thoughts about this, is when you look at something like the Surface Neo, which is something that we've kind of talked about in the context of the iPad or in context of the MacBook, we've talked about the idea that Apple's ideal laptop is probably two screens where you could type on one or use it for other things, and then another one that's sort of like the alternative screen.
00:30:49 ◼ ► And that is a product that we both laugh about because it's like, "Finally, no keyboard travel at all. Hooray, we win."
00:30:57 ◼ ► And yet, I think also kind of is a possible future direction for them. And you look at the Surface Neo, and that's basically what that is.
00:31:06 ◼ ► But if you think about iOS and multi-window and all of that that they put in iOS 13, like, you could do this basically today, I think, on iOS if you had a product like this, because iOS apps now can support running in multiple spaces, essentially, and across two screens.
00:31:26 ◼ ► would presumably be one of the things that it would be capable of doing. So that's kind of fascinating, the idea that this could potentially be a direction that Apple could go with the iPad, or with a product that is also an iOS product but is not quite an iPad.
00:31:42 ◼ ► I think what I would say about both of these is, I know how much you love foldable phones and how fascinated you are by them. I think what's interesting here is that these aren't that, quite. These are dual screen devices, folding dual screen devices, which is not the same.
00:32:01 ◼ ► There's no continuity between the screens. Well, there is. You can have apps. No, because you pop the screens open and it's two screens. There's a gutter between them, there's bezels between them. You've got two screens. You can use them both, and they can both work together.
00:32:18 ◼ ► But what you don't get that the folding phones are trying to give you is the illusion, or even not illusion, the reality that it is a single screen. This is not what Microsoft is even attempting to do here. I think maybe that's a smart move because the folding screen tech is not ready yet.
00:32:36 ◼ ► I see what you mean. When you say continuity, you mean physical. I think of it as more using these screens together. I'm more interested in devices that change in their form factor than I am in purely foldable phones as we've seen them now.
00:32:58 ◼ ► These devices excite me as much, if not more, than the Galaxy Fold does. What I really love about the way that they're building this device is what they keep referring to as postures.
00:33:12 ◼ ► You can see it in a bunch of the coverage. There are so many ways you could use this device. You can hold it like an open book. You can flip one screen around on the back and just use one screen.
00:33:23 ◼ ► You can set it down and use it like a laptop with one screen on the bottom and one screen above. Or one that I absolutely love in some of their videos. You can stand it up horizontally, slightly bent in so it's maintaining itself, like you're standing a book up on a table.
00:33:37 ◼ ► And then use the keyboard in front of you. And you have two large screens that you can use. Personally, I understand there's a bezel, but I would accept the bezel. The bezel would not bother me because I'm able to use these two screens. It is very adaptable.
00:33:53 ◼ ► I agree. I just want to make it clear that this is the difference between these and what the Samsungs of the world are trying to do, which is like, and then you open it up and it's a tablet. Oh, it's like Microsoft is basically saying, yeah, that stuff isn't ready. And we want to have a solid hinge on these things.
00:34:08 ◼ ► And we think that there's a lot of value in having two touchscreen displays in terms of all the different things you can do with them. And I think, again, I want to think that they're right.
00:34:18 ◼ ► I am fascinated by this. We have talked about this in the context of the iPad, you know, slash a laptop from Apple. And yeah, I mean, there are studies that go back decades, like three or four decades about how people are more productive with multiple displays, especially in the era of small displays on computers.
00:34:40 ◼ ► And I look at this and I think, okay, you've got a lot of different things you can do with the Neo, especially if we think about the bigger one that's basically two iPads in a sandwich hinged.
00:34:51 ◼ ► You can, that's a two screen iPad. You lay flat on a table or sit it up right, like you said. But if you put it in a laptop configuration, you've got, you know, a horizontal and vertical surface.
00:35:05 ◼ ► You can put, you can snap that keyboard on it. And now you've got a physical keyboard and like a touch bar and you pop it off. You could also just use it as a software keyboard.
00:35:13 ◼ ► There's like so many different things that you could potentially do with that postures as they say. And, you know, I think that's very interesting.
00:35:23 ◼ ► The open question is what are the use cases and will there be ones that are so compelling that it's worth, you know, the expense of having a two touch screen kind of device.
00:35:38 ◼ ► But as an iPad user, I look at this and I think, wow, it would really be nice if I could have that, that laptop like typing plane instead of having, I mean, I already have that with the bridge keyboard, right?
00:35:51 ◼ ► But this would be a physical keyboard and a touch bar and I could take it off and now I've got two screens and I can have the bottom screen doing something on the top screen doing something else.
00:36:01 ◼ ► Like there's, it is, there's a lot of potential here. And then for the small one, I think similarly, there's a real question to ask, which is, is a two screen device that you open, like a clamshell device that you open,
00:36:15 ◼ ► a more natural and appropriate feeling device than a foldable phone like we've seen from the companies that are, that have announced these foldable phones.
00:36:29 ◼ ► Is this actually just as productive or more productive to have this kind of like I've got stuff on the left and stuff on the right kind of approach and then I can flip it sideways and it's like a little tiny laptop.
00:36:41 ◼ ► And, you know, I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems very practical and very realistic in a way that the folding phones still seem like wacky ideas that are not for most people.
00:36:52 ◼ ► Like Microsoft seems to have done a lot more thinking about what is practical to build. And I think that's their credit.
00:36:59 ◼ ► I'm sure Microsoft would love for this device to just be one piece of glass, right? That still can fold the way it folds, right? Like that's the ideal, right? That there isn't a hinge, like there is a hinge, but there's no gap between them, right?
00:37:12 ◼ ► Like imagine such a beautiful idea of technology, but we're not there yet. We may never be, we're not sure.
00:37:17 ◼ ► And I would say that the problem with that continuum is that there's one scenario for that, which is it's either open or it's closed because yeah, you could make a laptop with a continual screen, but isn't that a little bit weird?
00:37:30 ◼ ► Like, and is it really necessary that you've kind of like the curvy part that curves up to the top part of the, I think there's an argument to be made that having two discrete screens in a lot of cases is fine.
00:37:47 ◼ ► I feel like that Microsoft had decided that they will make this device as it is now, like as great as it is now, to push their software forward until there can be more advanced, even more advanced form factors in the future, right?
00:38:04 ◼ ► That's kind of my thinking on this. Samsung have had a lot of trouble. Huawei are having a lot of trouble. Microsoft have decided to make something that many people will call compromise because it doesn't look like those devices, but I believe will actually be a more successful device for now, right?
00:38:28 ◼ ► So I want to read a quote from Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, right? Remember that as I say these words.
00:38:37 ◼ ► "The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us. What is most important for us is the app model and the experience. How people are going to write apps for Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app because it's going to be about the Microsoft Graph."
00:38:59 ◼ ► You know, if you've been watching how Satya Nadella has been managing Microsoft and the path they've been taking, it's not surprising.
00:39:13 ◼ ► It's staggering. It's mind blowing. But in terms of where they've been headed, like, it's not like first off, what else are they going to do?
00:39:32 ◼ ► They don't have a small device operating system. And for a long time now, Satya Nadella has been saying how what Microsoft's goal is, is to have Microsoft's services across all platforms, right?
00:39:45 ◼ ► They want to be on Mac and Windows and iOS and Android and they want to be in the cloud and they want everybody using OneDrive and Office 365.
00:40:06 ◼ ► It's reasonable that that Microsoft would actually release a piece of hardware that doesn't run their own operating system.
00:40:16 ◼ ► Like, like, I mean, this is walking the walk, essentially. This is them saying, yeah, we know we don't have it.
00:40:26 ◼ ► And so we're just going to work with Google and put it on Android, because in the end, what's going to make this the best product?
00:40:31 ◼ ► And, you know, it's going to be tailored to all of the stuff that Microsoft cares about.
00:40:38 ◼ ► And Microsoft is going to use its apps to help push this as a good shape for that kind of product.
00:40:44 ◼ ► But still, what a change from the era of Steve Ballmer, where Windows was the most important thing.
00:41:01 ◼ ► They're not going wild with it. Like, they're working with Google because right now, like, Google is and has for a while been actively discouraging too much customization of Android.
00:41:11 ◼ ► And like with their biggest partners like Samsung, getting them to scale back the wild stuff and make it look more consistent.
00:41:21 ◼ ► But Microsoft is going to be making changes and integrating with their services a lot more.
00:41:27 ◼ ► But I really like. So again, I want to point people to an interview that Panos Panay gave to The Verge on The Verge casting.
00:41:35 ◼ ► He's just like, look, we want people to be where they want to be on the operating systems that they use.
00:41:41 ◼ ► Like, it's wild for us to try and bring people to something else when on these types of devices they want to use the apps and services that they know.
00:41:52 ◼ ► And they're on Android. Right. Like that they know they can't try and build something again like Windows Phone because it failed horrifically.
00:42:00 ◼ ► Which is why I think actually Windows 10 could be a risk, depending on how difficult it is to make apps work.
00:42:07 ◼ ► Like, I wonder why. Do you mean Windows X? What did I say? I think you mean Windows X. I meant Windows X. You said Windows 10.
00:42:12 ◼ ► Well, Windows X iPhone just ruined me. Windows X could be a risk because of that. Right.
00:42:20 ◼ ► I wonder why they didn't just go with Android on both of these devices, but they decided not to.
00:42:25 ◼ ► I mean, they do feel that this other device is a convertible. It's a tablet. It's a laptop. It's the classic device that Windows excels on.
00:42:34 ◼ ► It gives me the heebie-jeebies a little bit because I'm thinking back to when they made those bold moves back in the day to do the Metro interface and say,
00:42:42 ◼ ► "We're going to do the first Surface and it's going to have a touch screen and it's going to have touch controls and it's going to be great."
00:42:57 ◼ ► "Also, we have this compatibility mode where you can plug in a mouse and just run Microsoft Office and then it just looks like a PC and you don't use any of the touch screen features."
00:43:03 ◼ ► And I thought, "No, no. What are you doing? What are you doing? You're undercutting yourself already."
00:43:08 ◼ ► I think it's a great tragedy that Microsoft had the ability to build something, the vision to build something like that,
00:43:16 ◼ ► and then internally, politically, did not have the confidence to step away from Windows.
00:43:22 ◼ ► What concerns me about the rumors about Windows X is that originally the idea was that it was only going to run these kind of new app paradigms
00:43:35 ◼ ► And by the time it got to ship, or not ship because that's 2020, it got to announce period,
00:43:53 ◼ ► But it also feels like we, once again, are hedging because we have this huge install base that exists
00:44:05 ◼ ► And maybe it's the right decision, but I think it made the other product back in the day fail
00:44:14 ◼ ► because you didn't have to use the new thing and developers didn't need to build for it.
00:44:18 ◼ ► So we'll see. I think Windows X is the devil's going to be in the details and it's going to be in the developer story.
00:44:25 ◼ ► We talk a lot about how developers on Apple's platforms feel about Apple and how they can often get frustrated about Apple,
00:44:30 ◼ ► but Apple is so lucky to have so many developers who are excited about building for their platform
00:44:55 ◼ ► And this is time and again, this has been like the problem with Microsoft is they've got all of this success,
00:45:16 ◼ ► So Microsoft also announced updates to its other product lines for this year and including is the Surface Pro X,
00:45:24 ◼ ► which doesn't run Windows X, but the reason I want to mention this is it features Microsoft.
00:45:35 ◼ ► Do you think it's X? I think it's X. I don't remember now, but it's the capital letter X.
00:45:58 ◼ ► They designed their own chip and they're putting it in a product that they're calling for like their most power usury customers.
00:46:23 ◼ ► Revised Surface laptops, they were taken shot after shot at Apple about the keyboards and that kind of stuff.
00:46:34 ◼ ► On the Vergecast, it was very fun to hear Panos Panay dance around these ideas saying that Intel is a wonderful partner.
00:46:41 ◼ ► They're working on really great things, but it's clear that Microsoft also want more flexibility with their own hardware.
00:46:49 ◼ ► So literally their announcement encompasses something they designed Qualcomm, Intel and AMD.
00:47:08 ◼ ► I think it's another good lesson maybe learned from what Apple has succeeded doing, which is not necessarily you need to become your own chip designer.
00:47:19 ◼ ► I'm not sure Microsoft's really going to go down that route, although, you know, who knows?
00:47:23 ◼ ► But I think it does say something that they, you know, there's value in not being entitled or indentured to one supplier and like lashed to Intel in the way that they used to be.
00:47:44 ◼ ► There's some stuff that they're saying, which is kind of wild. 13 hours of battery life and it has a fast charge built in which can get you in an hour to 80 percent battery.
00:47:57 ◼ ► So like I think that this might be like one of the first examples of like, what would it be like if Apple went to ARM?
00:48:13 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think what from a perspective of an Apple user, because I if you listen to some podcasts like ATP and all that, they say this and I think they're exactly right, which is there are people who do not care about what operating system they're using.
00:48:37 ◼ ► For me, I look at this and I say, well, this is great, but it runs Windows and I'm not interested.
00:48:42 ◼ ► Right. Like, I mean, that's the bottom line is that I think their hardware is really good.
00:48:45 ◼ ► And then I think about running Windows and, you know, not small part of me dies inside for a moment and then I move on.
00:48:54 ◼ ► What I want and I hope happened a few years ago and we will start seeing the fruits of it now is I want Apple's laptop and maybe iPad designers to look at what Microsoft's doing and have somebody there say.
00:49:10 ◼ ► Why aren't we doing better than them? Why? Why is Microsoft doing better stuff than us in hardware design?
00:49:17 ◼ ► Why is that happening? How is it that we've allowed them to creep ahead of us in all of these different areas?
00:49:24 ◼ ► And how do we fix it? Because I think the truth is that it's very easy for Apple to get complacent.
00:49:34 ◼ ► They set the standard for a long time. It is not a surprise why most successful premium laptops look like Apple's laptops.
00:49:44 ◼ ► It's because Apple did it right and everybody else is like, "Oh my God, we need to just do that. Let's just do what they do."
00:49:53 ◼ ► I have quibbles with some of their design decisions and I hate kickstands on the surface. I hate kickstands.
00:49:58 ◼ ► But I sure hope Apple is taking this as a challenge and that we're going to see the MacBook designs and maybe even iPad designs step up because of it.
00:50:09 ◼ ► All right, we're going to take a break and then talk about Mac OS Catalina. Big episode today, Jason Snow.
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00:52:03 ◼ ► Yeah, should be. I mean it's 10 as we're recording this, it's just after 10 a.m. Pacific.
00:52:20 ◼ ► Yeah, so we're going to talk about it. So people should go and read your review. It's very good. I actually really enjoyed it.
00:52:30 ◼ ► But I want to break down a few key questions that I have for you and then maybe we can talk about those in a little more detail.
00:52:39 ◼ ► For as much as you can sum up, what should people know before they upgrade to Catalina?
00:52:45 ◼ ► Wow, a lot, a lot. And that's I think what makes this release so different from a lot of the recent releases.
00:52:54 ◼ ► This isn't this is an end of an era and the beginning of a new era and it's an era that we knew was coming for years now.
00:53:10 ◼ ► Lots of stuff. So I would recommend that nobody upgrade to Catalina until they have done the investigation of whether their apps that they rely on will still work and that their peripherals that they rely on will still work.
00:53:30 ◼ ► And that's because with Catalina, Apple is removing all the 32-bit support from the operating system.
00:53:40 ◼ ► And what that means effectively is stuff compiled for 32-bit stuff compiled built using carbon, which was essentially the compatibility.
00:53:51 ◼ ► This is going back a long way, but it's the compatibility layer for the old Mac OS API's the classic Mac OS API's.
00:54:04 ◼ ► And those apps will no longer function as well as more modern apps that are not recompiled for 64-bit will not function.
00:54:15 ◼ ► And so if you've got some old app that still worked even up to Mojave, like, you know, our friend James Thompson is a great example.
00:54:24 ◼ ► His app Dragfang, which has been around for decades now, 25 years. It's so old that not only is it written for the carbon API's, but James actually had to make a bug fix last year and he had to build it in an emulator.
00:54:45 ◼ ► You're so old that you've got to make your bug fixes in an emulator of an old version of Mac OS. It's true, right? It's true.
00:54:59 ◼ ► And, you know, because he makes his money from PCALC and Dragfang hasn't made money in a long time, there's no way and he would need to completely rewrite it because it was based on carbon.
00:55:11 ◼ ► He just put it to sleep. He announced that it was not going to be updated and it really hasn't been updated in years other than a couple of very minor bug fixes.
00:55:21 ◼ ► And there are going to be apps like that that you're like, but what do you mean? I'm still using it.
00:55:25 ◼ ► Like, James may know, for example, that his app is essentially untouched for years and can't survive.
00:55:50 ◼ ► It's one of those things where you should do your due diligence because once you're on Catalina, that old stuff, if it hasn't been updated, will just not work.
00:56:02 ◼ ► It's not like you can do a clever thing where you hold down control and say open it, like, no, it will break.
00:56:14 ◼ ► So there's the QuickTime Player X or X or whatever it is and all of that stuff still works.
00:56:20 ◼ ► But the old QuickTime Player 7 and everything that was behind that that was generating .movs for, like, Call Recorder used it, like, all of these things, it's dead.
00:56:33 ◼ ► So Call Recorder, which is a tool we use to record our podcast, that got updated in the last, you know, over the last year.
00:56:43 ◼ ► But this is my warning is what if you have a tool that you use and works fine, but unbeknownst to you, perhaps, that developer is not planning on updating it, can't update it, won't update it, doesn't make financial sense for them to update it.
00:56:59 ◼ ► This happens a lot. I'm especially worried about, like, weird USB scanners and document scanners and things like that where, you know, the company that made it has moved on five models since then and they're not going to go back and fix the drivers and they just stop working.
00:57:14 ◼ ► And if there's nothing you can do to, you know, in the system, maybe there's a compatibility mode that lets, you know, Image Capture use the scanner without any drivers, great.
00:57:24 ◼ ► But like check you need to check because, you know, well, so some of it is hard because you you're gonna have to ask the developers.
00:57:33 ◼ ► One thing you can do is St Clair software has a piece of software that will put in the show notes that is called go 64 that will scan your computer and show you all of the apps that are either 32 bit or are 64 bit, but have some 32 bit stuff attached to them.
00:57:53 ◼ ► But really what you need to do is is look on the websites of the developers of the stuff that you rely on or, you know, if you want to go this far install Catalina on an external drive or something and boot into it and see if you can do your job with it.
00:58:09 ◼ ► But I would be really cautious because stuff's gonna break and it's gonna break for a good reason, which is that this stuff is really old and Apple needs to move on and it's given everybody a lot of time.
00:58:20 ◼ ► And the developers have been aware of this for a long time, but as a user fact is if you still rely on it just don't update until you can find another solution.
00:58:31 ◼ ► And in fact, I would I would even go so far as to say the recommendation I would make is if you know that there's something you rely on and it's gonna die in Catalina start stay on Mojave or High Sierra or wherever you are.
00:58:44 ◼ ► And start shopping around for replacements because the replacements will run almost certainly unless it's a catalyst app will run pre Catalina and you can maybe build a new workflow up on your previous version of Mac OS to the point where you're comfortable and like, yeah, okay, this is working now and then update to Catalina and do it like that rather than update to Catalina have everything break and then slowly put your life back together.
00:59:11 ◼ ► But you do need to start looking for that replacement because eventually you will have to upgrade because this is the thing is you can hold out. I mean nobody's going to make you upgrade but at some point the security updates will stop and at some point you're probably going to want to buy a new Mac and the new Mac won't run anything but Catalina or further when there's an or or further ahead right new model and they the new Mac hard new Mac hardware released after today will not run 32 bit apps ever right like that's.
00:59:40 ◼ ► I will also say if you if you have an app that's just an app you use occasionally that you need to run you can emulate Mac OS so you can emulate High Sierra or Sierra or Mojave in a virtual machine and VMware or Parallels or one of these things that it is legal to emulate Mac OS on Mac hardware.
01:00:00 ◼ ► And so you could do that and I you know, that's the example of like if you've got Adobe Illustrator CS5 and you need to open it three times a year then you could probably suffer through a slow emulation and run it in a virtual machine on your Mac running Catalina running High Sierra inside you could you could do that.
01:00:22 ◼ ► That's a possibility to but I just I want to warn our listeners and I want to actually suggest our listeners warn their loved ones and their friends.
01:00:38 ◼ ► It's not like it doesn't have a bunch of new features and it's interesting and it's a place Apple needs to go.
01:00:48 ◼ ► But with this one the bar is higher. This is a new era. A lot of old stuff is breaking by design.
01:01:01 ◼ ► You won't get Apple arcade, but you will be able to use your stuff and that's the most important thing.
01:01:09 ◼ ► So that's my that's my warning is that this is a big one and you should proceed with caution.
01:01:20 ◼ ► You're all good. You've checked that all the devices that you need have drivers that will have been updated.
01:01:35 ◼ ► What makes it worthwhile for them? Like what are the features in Catalina that you think collect stand out there?
01:02:03 ◼ ► The fact is there are going to be apps that come out for the Mac now that will require Catalina.
01:02:08 ◼ ► There will be a bunch of them and the reason that they require Catalina is that their catalyst apps.
01:02:13 ◼ ► Mac catalyst, which is this technology that lets developers you take their iPad apps and put them on the Mac.
01:02:32 ◼ ► They have changed it from catalyst to Mac catalyst. I wonder if there was a trademark something that somebody has a trademark on catalyst and they had to change it to Mac catalyst.
01:02:39 ◼ ► But that's that's what they're calling it. Can we just one word that Mac catalyst which is work with that because it's easier to say.
01:02:47 ◼ ► So let me let me ask you before we dive into Mac catalyst. Is there anything else like you got Apple arcade?
01:02:55 ◼ ► I guess Apple TV will be part of it right when that when that launches it's it's for certain models and I think it's like 2018 and later MacBook Pros and iMacs for those models.
01:03:07 ◼ ► And you know, like t2 processor coprocessor devices you get 4K HDR video for the first time on the Mac where even though you've got 4K and 5K displays on all these systems the copyright holders don't didn't want computers to be able to play back 4K video for fear piracy, which is stupid because piracy happens anyway, but I think I think it's all getting channeled through the t2.
01:03:35 ◼ ► With DRM I think that that's I think that that is why the looking at what their restrictions are I suspect that that is the deal they made with the content holders that Apple licenses the content from for the movies and TV shows that you buy or rent on on iTunes or Apple TV.
01:03:56 ◼ ► I guess we need to start calling it now. So but it is there for those systems. So some systems will actually with 4K displays will actually be able to watch 4K video which is nice so that they broken up iTunes.
01:04:08 ◼ ► So there's the music app which is not in catalyst but is it looks very much like the catalyst apps. There's definitely this sidebar main bar style app thing that Apple is going for that.
01:04:20 ◼ ► They think is like this is what app should look like on the Mac. It's simplified some of the features that I used in the music app are in iTunes are gone in the music app which kind of bums me out and they they kind of rearranged all the like play controls are all in different places.
01:04:35 ◼ ► Now. I'm not quite sure why maybe there's consistency with iOS. They're looking for but it still does what it does and you can play it. You can still play music on your hard drive if you've got a big collection of MP3, but it is a little more Apple music forward by default, which is probably the right thing to do.
01:04:49 ◼ ► TV app is what we've expected. It is very similar to what we see on iOS and on Apple TV the right down to the watch now pain. The big difference is that watch now on iOS and Apple TV. They've got this thing where it's linked to other services.
01:05:09 ◼ ► So you can like, you know, if you watch something on Hulu it knows that you just watch that on Hulu and it'll say up next is that next episode on Hulu and there's nothing like that on the Mac so far as I can tell because there aren't those apps on the Mac and I think those apis aren't there on the Mac and so it just doesn't do that.
01:05:24 ◼ ► It's just sort of promoting the stuff that you're doing within based on what you're doing inside Apple's TV app. That's all it really knows about but and there's a podcast app.
01:05:33 ◼ ► Yay because the podcast supported Mac OS before was made in like 2005 and it was all in iTunes in iTunes and while it worked it was not.
01:05:42 ◼ ► Great and now it is literally the podcast app from the iPad. It's a catalyst app and it's it's fine. They have over the summer. They did a bunch of stuff to make it a little more Mac like it's still kind of weird.
01:05:56 ◼ ► Like I was trying to delete an episode a download and I was trying to click on it and I realized I need to like control click and select delete and then confirm the delete and then I accidentally moved my fingers right to left on the trackpad and it did a swipe to delete and deleted it immediately and I thought oh, okay.
01:06:13 ◼ ► I accidentally deleted something but it turns out that that was the fastest way to delete something was to swipe on my trackpad to delete it. It's very iOS thing to do and not sure that's a very Mac thing, but I think we're going to be getting used to a bunch of weird weird app behaviors now with catalyst and then the finder has device support now.
01:06:32 ◼ ► So that's another you know iTunes exploded and it left all of its stuff in four different places Catalina is basically what happened and the stuff in the finder is again. It's fine.
01:06:43 ◼ ► It's basically the stuff that was in iTunes, but now it's in the finder you plug in an iOS device and it shows up in the sidebar and you click on it and you get all the settings and if you sync stuff you can do it there and if you transfer files the files interfaces there.
01:06:56 ◼ ► Although strangely it doesn't show the same exact list of files that are in the on my iPad on my iPhone folder in the files app on iOS.
01:07:06 ◼ ► I don't know why it's very weird like some of them are there but some of them aren't there seems really inconsistent and I'm you know, honestly one of the my favorite features is find my because find my friends has not been a very you could get to it.
01:07:25 ◼ ► But in very limited ways on the Mac before and now the full-on find my app from iPad is on Mac as well.
01:07:48 ◼ ► Do you feel like there has been any Advancements here like what what has been your kind of feeling is it as as rosy as we hoped it would be a situation at least.
01:08:07 ◼ ► Yes, because that's going to that's going to be interesting and what the quality is of them.
01:08:11 ◼ ► I suspect that a lot of the first catalyst apps were going to see are going to be that there's going to be a collection of them that are are ones where Apple aided the developers to have showcase apps and those are the ones that Apple is going to point to and say look at this app that that was look how great it is and it's going to be behind the scenes that they've got like a lot of help from Apple, but there are also a lot of independent developers who have been spending the summer building catalyst apps and those are going to come out and and we're going to get a sense of what's going on.
01:08:40 ◼ ► We're going to get a sense of what the strengths and weaknesses are of this talking to developers over the summer.
01:08:53 ◼ ► There are lots of things that catalyst can't do there are lots of things that catalyst can only catalyst apps can only do by basically bridging back to app kit, which is what Mac apps use and it's allowed you can do it.
01:09:06 ◼ ► But if you actually go back and say I need to do a thing over here using the Mac stuff that isn't going to help an iOS developer who's coming to the Mac for the first time because they don't know those tricks and they don't know that stuff and that's part of the appeal of catalyst is that you can bring your iPad app over and it'll work but there are workarounds.
01:09:27 ◼ ► I think the sense I get though is the developers are the developers. I've talked to are disappointed in how inconsistent and frustrating catalyst is and and that developers.
01:09:42 ◼ ► Talk to who have both a Mac and an iOS app don't feel like they could reduce their workload by just developing one app right now because their Mac app would regress because their Mac app wouldn't be able to do what it does now because of the limitations of catalyst.
01:10:00 ◼ ► They would turn it into a catalyst app and it would lose features and I think the developers I talked to are not wanting to do that to their Mac users, right?
01:10:10 ◼ ► So, you know, I think it's a work in progress and I think the developers will learn more about it.
01:10:15 ◼ ► My big open question is what is Apple think of it because we know you and I talked about it Apple spent a lot of time on stage talking about Swift UI and not a lot of time on stage talking about Mac catalyst and when developers got catalyst.
01:10:28 ◼ ► It's got all these kind of missing pieces and things about it that are not that are frustrating a lot of limitations. You can't choose to have it be in the same app store ID as your iOS apps so that your customers who bought an iOS just get it on the Mac.
01:10:47 ◼ ► A lot of little stuff like that. It doesn't do full screen. It doesn't let you hide the cursor. I was talking to Steve Trout and Smith about this over the weekend. Like even for games, it's not really good because you can't do a lot of things or media playback because you can't do the things that you really want to with media playback.
01:11:03 ◼ ► So my big overarching question is how committed is Apple to making this better because it does feel like this is kind of the future of a bunch of Mac apps and the livelihood of the Mac and the Mac app store kind of depend on these apps existing and being good.
01:11:20 ◼ ► But it's clear from what developers are saying saying that it's not good enough needs to be better. And my question is how is Apple going to make it better and how fast are they going to make it better? Are they going to be making it better throughout the year?
01:11:35 ◼ ► Are we going to have to wait a year for it to be better and will it be better in a year because you know the catalyst apps that Apple released on Mojave. They're not a lot better this year.
01:11:45 ◼ ► You know, you still have that date spinner in the home app like there are improvements, but they're really not that much better.
01:11:54 ◼ ► So so yeah, I think the jury is out on Catalina. I think that's the simplest way to put it is it's a working or on catalyst. It's a work in progress and Apple needs to do more ball is in their court on that one.
01:12:08 ◼ ► But in the meantime, we will get some interesting apps that are coming from iOS that will finally run on the Mac and that's a good thing. It's just that they may be a little bit weird and it may take longer and they may not be as good because catalyst is not quite as far along as we would like.
01:12:25 ◼ ► I think really if you say right like the proof will be in the pudding on this one over the next few weeks what actually happens right like does anything happen right like we don't we don't know yet right like what is it going to what is it going to end up being what apps are we going to end up seeing and what I think we're just going to have to wait and see right like we have no idea we have no way of knowing right now.
01:12:50 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean if you look at Steve Trout and Smith's Twitter feed he asked people to share their catalyst apps that they were working on and there are some that are pretty ambitious, you know, their multi window kind of complex more productivity focused and I look forward to trying those out and seeing how those feel and I'm impressed.
01:13:10 ◼ ► I mean never underestimate Apple developers to figure out ways clever ways to get their software to do what they want and it seems like I have not heard a lot of stories where Apple has come back to them and said you know, you shouldn't you're cheating.
01:13:29 ◼ ► And so I think Apple is letting a lot of stuff go because like they're being clever and they're making the best of this and Apple benefits from having good catalyst apps. So I'm really looking forward to it. I honestly think the question mark is how good are the apps how good are the apps going to be and when are they going to come out and are we're going to get a shower of apps on launch day, but then there are other apps that are not going to come out and what happens to those developers why you know, there's not a ferrite and there's not an overcast on day one.
01:13:58 ◼ ► Because this summer has been so fraught with bugs for developers that a lot of developers are focused on getting their apps working on iOS 13 and that's number one priority and the number two priority might be to update their iPad apps to be ready for Catalina and then number and catalyst and then number three is catalyst.
01:14:18 ◼ ► So after the flurry of apps the first week or two what happens after that and is that is there nothing and when the apps continue to trickle our onto the store are they good or are they not and none of that is something I know right now nobody does right now.
01:14:36 ◼ ► No, I mean, I don't know maybe Federico has everybody sending him catalyst apps as possible, but I think we don't I think the apps are going to tell the story is there any other feature that you feel is worth spending some time discussing today.
01:14:54 ◼ ► I know we've got stuff like screen time sidecar those kinds of things. Yeah, I want to I want to talk about sidecar. But before I do that, I want to mention we talked about this a while ago this summer about security and how Apple is cranked up the security even more in Catalina and that's still true.
01:15:16 ◼ ► So another warning I will give people is you will get more dialogue boxes in your face about your apps asking permission for stuff.
01:15:26 ◼ ► You will get a flood of notification center approval requests when you launch Catalina for the first time when you launch a bunch of older apps.
01:15:34 ◼ ► You're going to get can I look at the desktop can I look at the documents folder can I it a lot of permission requests are going to happen.
01:15:40 ◼ ► It's annoying. I'm not sure Apple has struck the right balance between annoying the user and making the user so frustrated that they ignore what the security dialogue say we'll see it frustrated me during the beta.
01:15:54 ◼ ► We'll see how it does in the final and they're mandated notarization, which is this process where an app developer has to upload their app basically to Apple for an automated process to give it a stamp of approval and then kick it back to them before that they can they can release it.
01:16:14 ◼ ► And it's not like an app store process where they're being looked at by a person but it is a quick scan and then a little bit of a an approval from Apple and if your app if an app you're trying to run doesn't have that it basically will bring up a box that says it can't be opened because Apple can't check it for malicious software.
01:16:37 ◼ ► This software needs to be updated contact the developer for more information. Yeah, you really remember you were very upset about that. Yeah, it's it's a it's a little bit too scary like using malicious in that box when it's really just something that Apple hasn't looked at it's out of Apple's control.
01:16:54 ◼ ► I don't love it. The good news is this is gatekeeper which has been around for a while it it scans not just on first launch now, but it will scan multiple times.
01:17:07 ◼ ► So if an app gets altered later and its signature changes it can stop it and say wait a second. This thing seems something wrong with this app.
01:17:17 ◼ ► But because it's gatekeeper you can also do exactly what you did before which is if you control click on the app and choose open instead of it having the options. Okay and show in finder.
01:17:28 ◼ ► It also has the option open and once you open that app it just opens after that just like before so, you know, somebody stood on stage at WWDC in June and said we will not prevent you from launching software that you want to launch and that seems to be true.
01:17:45 ◼ ► What Apple's really doing is getting in your way more and saying, you know, you really shouldn't launch this and I think by default that's a good thing because defaults should probably be locked down and the good news is that the bypass switches are still there for users who want to do that.
01:18:03 ◼ ► We talk about sidecar. I'm going to be honest. I don't get it. I don't get it. It doesn't I have tried to use sidecar. It's well implemented. You can put an external display.
01:18:18 ◼ ► You can mean the I think the best part of sidecar is that literally you can from about 10 different places in the system take an iPad that's near Mac and say I want to use this as an external monitor and it just does it.
01:18:29 ◼ ► It's like an AirPlay display basically and suddenly boom. You've got a nice retina display external monitor attached to your Mac. You can drag files over to it Windows over to it.
01:18:40 ◼ ► It's got a second desktop like great. But all of these uses that Apple has for it that are like, well, you can use it to Mark this up and you can use it with this Mac app and you can draw something on it.
01:18:53 ◼ ► Almost every time I tried to do something inside car. I thought to myself. Why don't I just do this in iOS like and this is how I felt by a lot of these kind of like screen on an iPad solutions for the Mac where I felt like why like, oh, I could put my Twitter client over there or I could literally just run my Twitter app on my iPad right.
01:19:16 ◼ ► So for me, I really feel like the iPad is best as an iPad and not as an external display and if there is a specific scenario where there's a Mac app and you have to use the Mac app. There's no iPad app and you want to use especially with pencil input you want to draw or illustrate
01:19:31 ◼ ► and you can use this to do that with your iPad and it and get access to the pencil and which is something that you can't do on the on the Mac great. It's a very specific Niche and for more broad purposes.
01:19:46 ◼ ► I just think I mean it's fine, but I had I really struggled to find ways where it was better than just using my iPad as an iPad where it's then it's purely completely native and running on my iPad also by the way, you're not you don't have to be within 10 meters of the Mac
01:20:03 ◼ ► because that's a limitation of this. It's not like screens or Luna display where you can go anywhere and you can initiate control from the iPad. You have to be within 10 meters because it's a handoff. It's an you know, one of those kind of features and you have to initiate it from your Mac.
01:20:20 ◼ ► And so, you know, it's a nice feature to have it's nice that iPads can automatically get turned into external displays. I think there are a lot of good uses for that especially if you're on a on a laptop and you want a second display and you're working somewhere where you can just rig up your iPad and set it next to your laptop and now you've got a second display. That's great.
01:20:38 ◼ ► But even in those scenarios a lot of stuff I would want to do on the second display. I could just do on the iPad can I mirror the my like entire display to it or is it only as like a second. Nope you can mirror. It's a it's a an external display at the at the root of it.
01:20:53 ◼ ► There are a bunch of things to like send a window over but at the base of it. It's just a second display. You can do everything you could do with another external monitor including mirroring. So I it's like basically how I've been using the Luna display was to
01:21:10 ◼ ► Well, I guess the problem is for me. I can't initiate from my iPad right? Yeah, that's that's the thing. Nor can you roam further than 10 meters. But yeah. Yeah. Also, I mean, I will say I like that they've got the little strip of things down the side and sidecar where it's got like your right.
01:21:25 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. So down on the bottom the touch bar is there. So if you've never had a computer with a touch bar before sidecar will give you that and then on the side there are controls to bring up the keyboard and also like the modifier keys. So if you need to do a control click and you're using an app you can tap, you know, the control symbol and then tap with your Apple pencil and it will do a control click.
01:21:48 ◼ ► So and it's got like control option command shift and then it's got little shortcuts at the top to like it'll do its contextual but it's things like show or hide the dock show or hide the menu bar, you know, a lot of nice things.
01:22:03 ◼ ► I think the challenge for me the challenges that is it is doing this better than just doing it on the iPad and I'm sure there are scenarios where it is.
01:22:13 ◼ ► But even something like Photoshop like apparently photoshop's coming this year. They've said last year it would be for iOS like even something like that. Perhaps you'd rather just run Photoshop on your iPad rather than run Photoshop in this window on your Mac.
01:22:29 ◼ ► So it's not it's not a bad feature. I think it's pretty well implemented. I appreciate all the work that they did. I just try to think of scenarios where I think it is is useful and I'm having a hard time.
01:22:42 ◼ ► So I think it does do what we thought and that it basically kills the duet display and lunar display for what they were initially made to do.
01:22:54 ◼ ► For what they were initially made to do which is that you wanted to have sort of Apple pencil access to your Mac apps.
01:23:00 ◼ ► Or just a second display on an iPad right like you know those those kinds of things but what some people like me do which is to use it to like go into basically to have a Mac that has no monitor on it and just jump into it replacing something like a VNC application basically.
01:23:18 ◼ ► Exactly. It doesn't change. Or like screens which I also use. Both of those it doesn't it doesn't replace those. It is literally a second display apart from your Mac within 10 meters.
01:23:29 ◼ ► That's what it is. But it does do more than I initially thought it would do because I don't know if this was the way it was pitched initially or if I just misunderstood was that all you could really do was take a window of an app and move it.
01:23:43 ◼ ► But you can actually have like a whole mirrored display to it which is great. That is really great.
01:23:49 ◼ ► But it depends on what your use case is for a software product like this. I mean I would say like if you've never done that before like you've never had a you've never had duet display or lunar display.
01:24:00 ◼ ► This is a cool feature that you could maybe get some use out of to have like a another window whenever you like another desktop whenever you need it.
01:24:08 ◼ ► But I am I think in pretty much agreement with you the idea of like but if you're going to be using a Mac version of an app you should probably just use the iOS app.
01:24:18 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the thing is there was a there was a time when I I really liked the idea of iPad as external display for your Mac laptop when you're traveling somewhere but so often first up if you're bringing an iPad with you you're obviously an iPad user.
01:24:34 ◼ ► And so many of the things I wanted to put on that second display were things like slack or Twitter.
01:24:40 ◼ ► Which I could just run on the second display. It was very rare that I found like oh I can put this over there and that will improve my productivity because I'll have these two documents that I'm editing side-by-side that is a use case and that's that's great.
01:24:54 ◼ ► I just feel like the iPad is so strong and the apps on it are so good that it takes away a lot of the use cases for why I would want to use it as a second Mac display instead of just as an iPad running next to my Mac doing iPad things.
01:25:17 ◼ ► Yeah, handle with care watch what other people say make sure your peripherals like if you've got a document scanner and they're not going to support it and it doesn't work.
01:25:25 ◼ ► You should know that this really feels like for most people should sit down and like make a list like look at the use go 64 look at the apps you use then sit and look at your desk like what do you have plugged in like make sure you're not going to be able to use it.
01:25:37 ◼ ► Yeah, you should be plugged in like make sure you know if you have a big enough external hard drive the right thing to do is probably to clone used super duper or carbon copy cloner and clone your drive to an external and upgrade that drive to Catalina and see what happens.
01:25:53 ◼ ► Most time intensive and requires external hardware, but that will tell you like can this scan snap scanner still scan things. Oh, no, right or oh, I didn't even think of this app. I didn't know that this app was broken.
01:26:07 ◼ ► Let's contact the developer does that developer still exist who knows like that's the scary thing and one of the funny features.
01:26:15 ◼ ► It's a good feature that Apple has added in Catalina is this rollback feature where if you install a software update for like 24 hours, it keeps a an APFS snapshot of pre update.
01:26:27 ◼ ► So if you do an update and it breaks your stuff you can actually roll back to before the update unfortunately requires Catalina.
01:26:34 ◼ ► So, you know, you were saying earlier and I agree right the idea of like, you know, make sure you tell people like the more regular users in your life like think about this but me as I would consider myself a power user like I have no idea if my Wacom tablet is supported on Catalina.
01:26:52 ◼ ► I don't know if my Epson printer is supported on Catalina. I don't know the I would have to check all of that right and and that is something that people you were right in the caution like people need to check this stuff beforehand because my Wacom tablet did not work with Catalina because like Wacom are taking time getting their drivers ready.
01:27:13 ◼ ► My computer is basically unusable to me because that's how I use that's how I interact with my Mac. So I would need to know that before I'm dating.
01:27:24 ◼ ► Think about it. Yeah, buddy. Yeah, sure, you know, yeah, and there's there's cool stuff in here. I just I'm not saying that this is a bad update. I'm saying that Apple aren't doing this to be mean right now, you know, and they've given developers a lot of time.
01:27:36 ◼ ► They you gotta advance this the truth is you've got to advance the platform eventually the fact that James to bring up our friend James again had a piece of software that basically was just using carbon.
01:27:47 ◼ ► It's essentially classic Mac OS software and it's still ran on Mojave. That's amazing right at some point. You do have to clear out the old software and the cobwebs you need to you need to clean up your code base.
01:28:00 ◼ ► You need to stop supporting ancient stuff so that you can move ahead a lot of theories out there about how this may also be one of these things that if you're going to do a code area processor transition that you gotta you gotta find the stuff that can't make the processor transition and deprecate it.
01:28:16 ◼ ► Maybe that's going on too. But just this is how it happens with computers and Apple's 32-bit stuff had a really good long run. But at some point you do need to do that and Apple did everything right.
01:28:26 ◼ ► They warned everybody way in advance. They have spent it actually they put it in not even Mojave in High Sierra. If you had a 32-bit app starting in the spring of High Sierra not right when it came out, but in the spring with High Sierra of last year.
01:28:43 ◼ ► It would warn you and say this app is going to need to be updated because it will not be great in Mojave. I think but it will really not work in 2019 with what it is now Catalina and then Mojave the whole time when you launch something or even have it.
01:28:59 ◼ ► It's been peppering little alerts when you start up your Mac or when you launch an app saying this app is not going to work soon. So Apple's done everything it can but the fact is that if you're a user and you rely on that stuff.
01:29:14 ◼ ► It's now on you you need to not update until you're certain Apple can't do any more than what it's done and if you need to step off the update cycle for a while in order to get your tools to be what you want them to be now is the time and then this is not a warning that I really needed to give for Sierra or High Sierra or Mavericks or you know, right?
01:29:44 ◼ ► So that's about it for today's bumper episode and we'll thank direct mail for their support of this show direct mail is an easy to use email marketing app that is designed exclusively for the Mac to help you create and send great looking email newsletters.
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01:31:21 ◼ ► So we have some hashtag ask upgrade questions. We have to hear from Johan about the AirPods. So do you have wants to know two things from us first is do you ever use just one AirPod?
01:31:39 ◼ ► The only times I ever do this is when I'm on a long haul flight and the airport start to die. I'll take one out and charge it then after a little while put that back in take the other one out charge that and then I've got both background and again.
01:31:57 ◼ ► Yeah, I I'm trying to think of a scenario where I would use it and I don't think I can because one of the things about like using one airport is when you take one airport out it pauses right.
01:32:08 ◼ ► So it's not like the old days where like you would pop one of your earbuds out and maybe then forget to put it back in again and the audio will keep playing now when you take one out the audio stops playing and the way you resume it typically is by putting it back in again.
01:32:22 ◼ ► So very rarely I guess I would be it would be a scenario where somebody was going to be talking to me occasionally and I needed to hear them, but it would be so distracting that I generally in those scenarios.
01:32:31 ◼ ► I won't use the AirPods at all. Like if somebody's going to if I need to listen for something. I'm not going to be using the AirPods. So so no no and what are the double tap settings on your AirPods?
01:32:43 ◼ ► So mine is the right one is a skip and the left one is a play pause. Okay. I have both set to play pause because I don't think I would be good enough to remember the differences between the two.
01:32:54 ◼ ► So I do it wrong. I do it wrong all the time, but there are scenarios where I don't want to take an AirPod out of my ear and hold it.
01:33:04 ◼ ► And so I want to have a play pause even though I know I can take it out of my ear and that works too. I found because I used to not have that as a gesture and I found that there are lots of scenarios where what I really want to do is tap it and keep it in my ear because my hands are messy or because I'm doing something that requires my hands and I don't want to hold the AirPod and I just want to tap it.
01:33:23 ◼ ► I don't want to hold the AirPod and I don't want to put it down somewhere. So but I do enough of I don't like this. I want to skip it that I want to skip function on there.
01:33:33 ◼ ► So I have it on my right one and that's just mostly it's a skip you go forward and so I have it on my right because I go from left to right.
01:33:47 ◼ ► Oh, we just we just introduced the bonus. Okay. Do you ever do you have a white telephone turned on?
01:34:11 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe I have it on I left it on because I do actually find it useful if it's on by default then it's on but I don't I don't know if I've ever actually triggered a hoy AirPods because I will use my AirPods when I'm say washing the dishes or whatever right so yeah having access then is really useful because then it also stops the HomePod from jumping in.
01:34:42 ◼ ► But we're both noticing vibrations and noticeably weaker on the iPhone Pro my wife depends on the sound of vibrations on the desk at work curious if this is a change or is a bug so my belief here Jason is that going from the 8 to the Pro you will have gone from the vibrate motor to the haptic motor.
01:35:02 ◼ ► That's what's going on because the haptic motor is quiet right but it's more fine control but it's quiet. Yes, so they can you can feel it differently. I actually feel like it was it's much better making the effect that you need and then and also there's a much more control over it apps can use different types of vibration, but it will be quieter.
01:35:24 ◼ ► So it's not a bug it is just I believe different hardware so I have a couple recommendations for Warner and his wife.
01:35:35 ◼ ► First is you can make custom vibrations in settings and so you could you could actually try to make one that's more noticeable just go to the pattern you can just have that thing so far and it just goes bananas you could do that.
01:35:52 ◼ ► Yes, so you could try that and the other thing I will say and I know this sounds dumb but sometimes the dumb things work which is if she's depending on the sound of vibrations on the desk at work look at what the alert sounds are on the phone and if those are too annoying, you know, you can actually and you're gonna have to look it up on the internet, but you can make custom tones.
01:36:11 ◼ ► Yep on iOS devices, maybe you should make a custom tone that is subtle and maybe even sounds like a vibrating phone and use it as her alert tone.
01:36:22 ◼ ► So that she can get a sound because obviously she's using sound so you should be able to use a sound to alert her even if it is not made by the vibrations from the the tactic engine.
01:36:34 ◼ ► So it's just another thought is that you can make a subtle sound that is not a beep boop boop kind of thing subtle sound if you still at the iPhone 8 just put a nice microphone.
01:36:45 ◼ ► Record your old iPhone vibrating. Yeah, sure. I mean, there's what I'm saying is maybe there's another solution here to get a sound that tips her off that is not based on the vibrating engine in the device.
01:36:59 ◼ ► So the iPhone 8 did have 3D touch which meant that it probably had a taptic motor. But what but my expectation is and I well, I know they've changed it over time and they've made it better.
01:37:09 ◼ ► So my expectation is in making it better. They made it quieter and that or at least the way it's done is dip the way that will vibrate the body of the phone will be different and over time.
01:37:22 ◼ ► It's gotten maybe more nuanced. So it's probably less noisy on a desk. That's what's a try custom vibration, but and that's a note for everybody. Like if you rely on vibration patterns on your phone.
01:37:34 ◼ ► Did you know you can make custom vibration patterns and tie them to people so that you can like literally if you're just listening to your phone vibrate on a desk or you've got in your pocket and you're feeling it.
01:37:44 ◼ ► You can literally tell who's calling or texting you based on the vibration pattern. You can do that. You can set custom vibrations for everybody and you can record your own vibration patterns.
01:37:59 ◼ ► I've put a link in the show notes to a 9 to 5 Mac article that explains exactly how to do this.
01:38:03 ◼ ► And there's a top tip right there. Jeff wants to know is there a special invocation to get Siri to respond and answer a question specifically via voice.
01:38:12 ◼ ► For instance, if you ask Siri in the car for the weather, Siri gives a spoken weather report via voice.
01:38:17 ◼ ► But if asked on the watch or on the phone, Siri will respond via a graphical interface like saying like, here you go and we'll show you the weather report.
01:38:26 ◼ ► Now, my understanding on this, Jason, you can correct me if you know differently, is that Siri will respond depend on state.
01:38:33 ◼ ► So if you are asking Siri a question and a screen is off, right, when you're asking the question and maybe using a high telephone, it will respond with voice because you're not looking at it.
01:38:50 ◼ ► But if you ask Siri and the screen is on or then it will give you a visual indicator because the phone or the device assumes you're looking at it.
01:39:00 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that's right. I think that the idea there is if you do an ahoy telephone and your telephone screen is off, it should respond with voices and not show you a picture.
01:39:14 ◼ ► But that's the idea is that it's supposed to be contextually aware and speak things if it thinks you can't see the screen.
01:39:21 ◼ ► Same for AirPods. So that should happen, but I don't you know, I don't use Siri enough in these contexts to know for sure.
01:39:32 ◼ ► By the way, I used CarPlay and iOS 13 extensively this weekend and we don't have time for it now, but we should talk about that sometime because I got to I got to spend a lot of time with CarPlay and I think it's pretty good, but it's got some weird things about it, too.
01:39:48 ◼ ► All right. So topic idea. Jason has CarPlay on CarPlay that's been added to my Apple Note.
01:40:12 ◼ ► Yeah, the Kindle topic and the HomePod pricing topic that have been on our document for six months.
01:40:29 ◼ ► There you go. Kevin asks, 11 days into I was 13 and the device has asked me if I want to continue to always allow Google Maps, Waze, Carrot weather and other apps to my location three times for each app.
01:40:42 ◼ ► Well, I keep getting this message every five to six days. Now, I can't talk for the frequency of what's going on here to you, Kevin.
01:40:49 ◼ ► But this is something that is in I was 13. So devices that are asking in the background for your location, there will be different situations that are going on.
01:40:58 ◼ ► I think one time it will ask you if the app is checking a bunch in the background. It'll ask you when you're on the home screen.
01:41:03 ◼ ► And I think when you open the app, it'll ask you if you want to allow it to keep asking when you're using the app for the app to have your location.
01:41:10 ◼ ► My expectation is once you've answered these questions per application, it will stop asking you.
01:41:21 ◼ ► I mean, we know what's going on, which is the idea is Apple wants you to be aware of apps that use your location.
01:41:26 ◼ ► And so what it's doing is a multistage process where it asks first, like, do you want to allow it?
01:41:31 ◼ ► And then it shows you that it's going in the background on a map of where you've been and says it knows you've been these places.
01:41:41 ◼ ► And if you're using an app that needs to be know where you are all the time so it can notify you like a weather app or my my smart lock app needs to know that because it needs to know when I leave home.
01:41:51 ◼ ► And then when I return, then you have to say, yes, I like that it educates you about like, did you know that this random app knew all of these places that you've been.
01:42:03 ◼ ► But at some point it needs to stop and I think that this is really the core of the question. I don't know the answer.
01:42:09 ◼ ► I haven't been tallying like how many times has it asked me about dark sky, but it should stop right.
01:42:18 ◼ ► It should do that once and I say yes, and then it should go away and never ask me again.
01:42:22 ◼ ► And I don't know if there's a bug there or if that's intentional for it to keep bugging you, but it should not keep nagging you about an app after you've said, yes, I really do want caret weather to know where I am because I care about the weather.
01:42:36 ◼ ► So I've included a link in the show notes to Federico's section in his iOS review about this and it is supposed to automatically kind of change and re-ask you after a period of inactivity.
01:42:49 ◼ ► But I don't know what's exactly happening with Kevin's situation here, but I will reiterate, I think this is a really good feature and I'm pleased they did it.
01:42:59 ◼ ► I think they tried to do it in iOS 12 and got a lot of pushback from developers and changed it.
01:43:06 ◼ ► But now they have actually gone ahead and added this feature thing to make less aggressive to remember it had that like blue bar that used to pop up.
01:43:12 ◼ ► But I really like the map. It shows you the map. And I like that I'm changing my settings a lot in applications.
01:43:17 ◼ ► Like I'm opening apps and it's like this app wants to know basically all the time where you are. And I'm like, but I don't need that.
01:43:29 ◼ ► And I've been perfectly fine with that. But then there's been others where I'm like, no, I do want my home security system to be able to use my location all the time because it's an important part of the feature that it knows when I'm coming home and that kind of stuff.
01:43:43 ◼ ► So I like that it's giving you the ability to fine tune. So probably worth something to keep an eye on, I guess, if it seems like it's wild.
01:43:50 ◼ ► But I would not be surprised if there was some kind of bug in iOS 13 because there's been a few of those.
01:43:58 ◼ ► If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, you can always send out a tweet with the hashtag #AskUpgrade and it could be included for a future episode.
01:44:06 ◼ ► Thank you to everybody who has done that. If you want to find Jason's work online, go to sixcolors.com.
01:44:13 ◼ ► That is where you can go right now to read Jason's wonderful review of Mac OS Catalina, which I was about to call Mojave, Jason.
01:44:29 ◼ ► But that's why there's that many words. I bet there would have been like five thousand if you should have been less scared of it.
01:44:37 ◼ ► I genuinely like I enjoyed reading the review because it was not it's not cut and dry Catalina.
01:44:49 ◼ ► Right. Like there's more of a story that you can sink your teeth into because there's some weird stuff going on.
01:44:54 ◼ ► And as we have said in this episode and you'll get from the review, you need to think about this one.