00:00:19 ◼ ► I am one of your regular hosts, Jason Snell, and of course, Mike Hurley remains on leave.
00:00:26 ◼ ► And so, the next up in the parade of guest stars on Upgrade is Relay, co-founder, and co-host of Connected, and Mac Power Users, and probably other things, too.
00:00:45 ◼ ► It's good to have you back. I am calling in all my favors for this leave, so thank you for joining.
00:01:03 ◼ ► There are a lot of John's out there, but that's over now. It's over now. It's non-John's. It's four non-John's. Something like that.
00:01:16 ◼ ► Because they're interrelated, and they're kind of follow-up, but they're kind of Snell Talk.
00:01:20 ◼ ► So, the first one is from Listener Casey, who says, sorry, Listener Casey, who says, I've always been super cagey about the exact town I live in.
00:01:37 ◼ ► And rather than just say, I live in the nearest city, Richmond, Jason regularly and willfully brings up Mill Valley on his shows.
00:01:52 ◼ ► Well, okay. So, first off, it's not really accurate for me to say I live in San Francisco.
00:01:58 ◼ ► The truth is, I feel like I'm not really worried about OPSEC, about operational security, because I bought my house in 1999, and therefore all public records of my address are on the internet.
00:02:16 ◼ ► I mean, please don't be creepy, please don't come to my house, but, like, I can't, it's just like how I will always get spam email to certain email addresses, because those email addresses have been out there since the 90s.
00:02:30 ◼ ► Like, I could hide it, but, and Mill Valley's a big town, and the Bay Area, you know, I just decided to be precise, especially for that.
00:02:39 ◼ ► I think Casey is smart, actually. He lives in a metro area that's got smaller cities as well as Richmond. I think he doesn't need to be any more specific than Richmond, but I, you know, I don't know.
00:02:53 ◼ ► For whatever reason, I just decided saying San Francisco is inaccurate, because I don't live in San Francisco, and saying Bay Area is accurate, but super broad, and sometimes the context comes up where I talk about my town, and I don't have a problem with it, and it's too late.
00:03:15 ◼ ► Yeah, we had a FaceTime conversation with my daughter. She calls us sometimes, and then just, we talk to her while she drives home from work, and I brought up, while she was doing that, I brought up Find My, and we watched her dot drive home.
00:03:32 ◼ ► She says, oh, I'm home, but she's still miles away. She just wants to get off the phone with you. That's a real...
00:03:46 ◼ ► Yeah, we can tell people, but I'm not going to do that, because I think he's right to just say Richmond. That's good enough.
00:03:51 ◼ ► You know, he wants me to come do his, like, fiber and ethernet through his house with him.
00:04:38 ◼ ► I guess the only pictures of Casey's house that are public are that one bedroom where he records.
00:04:48 ◼ ► Go back to the YouTube version of when he was on Upgrade and just drink in Casey's guest
00:05:21 ◼ ► He is a completely genuine person who is pretty much exactly the Casey you hear on podcasts.
00:05:30 ◼ ► And he writes, Jason, I was shocked when you mentioned Mill Valley and didn't include the
00:05:42 ◼ ► MASH was a TV show popular in the 70s and the 80s about a bunch of doctors at a surgical
00:05:51 ◼ ► hospital in Korea, but it was sort of a commentary more on Vietnam, but it was set in Korea.
00:05:58 ◼ ► If you plot out the events of the MASH TV series, it couldn't have happened because the series
00:06:10 ◼ ► But BJ was a character added a few years in, played by Mike Farrell, and he always would
00:06:17 ◼ ► write letters home to his wife, Peg, in Mill Valley, California, which, and he would rhapsodize
00:06:26 ◼ ► And honestly, that's most of what I knew about Mill Valley when I moved here was, oh yeah,
00:06:33 ◼ ► And somebody suggested at one point that just like they've got that statue of like Captain
00:06:43 ◼ ► And at one point there was literally a public comment period for what they should put in the
00:07:31 ◼ ► Mountain biking was entirely invented on the slopes of Mount Tam behind my house and my town.
00:07:55 ◼ ► But if you talk about Memphis contributions to the world beyond Elvis, it's like the blues,
00:08:00 ◼ ► And it's a downer, but it's been turned into something better, which is the MLK assassination,
00:08:11 ◼ ► And right next to Central Barbecue, which is really a contribution to society, too, frankly.
00:08:21 ◼ ► I don't know if we've talked about this, and we won't go into any details, but I'm anticipating
00:09:01 ◼ ► Stephen, do you have any words of wisdom or observations to impart to your professional
00:09:30 ◼ ► I said this on that analog episode, but it's definitely my, like, go-to advice, really for
00:09:35 ◼ ► anybody who's a new parent, is, like, it's so easy to lose sort of the contact you have
00:09:43 ◼ ► And I think if your spouse is a mom, like, it's a very hard season, or can be a very hard
00:09:58 ◼ ► And it's easy to, for everything in the household to revolve around the baby, and that's not wrong,
00:10:34 ◼ ► But if you are in a relationship and you're the parents and you've got the kids, the thing
00:10:51 ◼ ► And it does change the dynamic, but the fact is that, you know, I think it's also an opportunity
00:10:55 ◼ ► for bonding and a growth of the relationship because now you're not just connected to each
00:11:00 ◼ ► other, but you're connected to this other person and you're responsible for their life and growth
00:11:08 ◼ ► And that's another point for you to connect as people and, like, become actually closer
00:11:14 ◼ ► together because you are now, you know, the team with this screaming child that has entered
00:12:11 ◼ ► It was really, I was tossing it off, but the moment I said his name, I thought, oh, I've
00:12:18 ◼ ► And he did, Dr. Drang, the internet's favorite pseudonymous snowman slash mechanical engineer,
00:12:32 ◼ ► And nothing makes Dr. Drang more angry than, well, not angry, vexed than referring to somebody
00:12:49 ◼ ► He is the guy, for people who don't know, literally, he has a blog post where he was walking
00:12:59 ◼ ► Let me see what happened with this light post, because that's kind of what his job was.
00:13:03 ◼ ► He's retired now, so he has more time to listen to our dumb podcasts and correct us about
00:13:09 ◼ ► So, he wrote a piece called Simple Phone Bending, where he explained sort of a simplification
00:13:24 ◼ ► So, if the beam is lengthened by 10%, which is about how much longer an iPhone Pro Max is
00:13:32 ◼ ► And if we make the reasonable assumption that the side rails of a max-sized phone will have
00:13:42 ◼ ► He says it's not impossible that they actually looked at the size, because remember, the iPhone
00:13:49 ◼ ► They may have looked at that gradient from Pro size to Pro Max size and looked at the stress
00:13:55 ◼ ► on the side rails and said, that's too far, that's out of our zone of comfort, so we'll
00:14:01 ◼ ► Keeping in mind also that when they back it off, they're backing off the size of the battery,
00:14:05 ◼ ► they're backing off the size of the screen, all of those other decisions that have to go
00:14:09 ◼ ► But Mark Ehrman's report was, they looked at a Pro Max size and said, nope, it's too bendy.
00:14:34 ◼ ► I love him, yeah, you just chatted with him, he's a good pal, and we do, we love him as
00:14:58 ◼ ► Yeah, I do, I do want to highlight something you said about, you know, if you back off the
00:15:06 ◼ ► And when we're talking about a slim phone, obviously the first thought is, well, what is it going
00:15:13 ◼ ► And Gurman, I think some others have reported that Apple has some combination of technologies
00:15:18 ◼ ► that are going to mean the battery life in this phone will be comparable to the others,
00:15:23 ◼ ► But it really just goes to show like how complicated it must be to design iPhones year after year
00:15:32 ◼ ► And then they really, over the however many years it's been, 18 years of the iPhone, really
00:15:54 ◼ ► And they're working on all these complicated problems that, quite frankly, seem impossible
00:16:01 ◼ ► Yeah, I, we'll talk about this maybe a little bit later, because there's a lot of discussion
00:16:09 ◼ ► of sort of where Apple is, is succeeding and failing, let's put it that way, right now.
00:16:15 ◼ ► I, I always say, so like we were talking about this AI stuff, and there's more of that, that
00:16:21 ◼ ► And what I always want to say and try to say is, I'm not inside at Apple, it is, it is a
00:16:31 ◼ ► And having managed organizations that are a fraction of the size of Apple, or even a part
00:16:58 ◼ ► And the people who work there, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that what they do is
00:17:10 ◼ ► And just doing, looking at Dr. Drang's math about the iPhone plus or iPhone air is a part
00:17:18 ◼ ► of that is, is look, they are balancing battery and battery systems engineering and their own
00:17:25 ◼ ► chip designs, which is an enormous undertaking and all the other parts that go in there and,
00:17:33 ◼ ► Like it's, it is always an enormous undertaking and they have to ship enormous numbers of
00:17:39 ◼ ► And that's the other thing I always say when there's like a, somebody gets a, a bad iPhone
00:17:47 ◼ ► It's like, there's no way there aren't bad iPhones because they make so many of them that
00:17:59 ◼ ► But like it is worth, again, the, we're going to criticize what is worth criticizing about
00:18:05 ◼ ► Apple, but that doesn't mean we don't appreciate and shouldn't appreciate kind of the amazing,
00:18:10 ◼ ► uh, run that they do and the incredible difficulty level of all the stuff that they do.
00:18:16 ◼ ► Because there hasn't been a, I mean, the, the biggest phone disaster in the last 15 years
00:18:26 ◼ ► all of its little gates here and there to be pretty solid at all this stuff while pushing
00:18:40 ◼ ► Um, Mark Gurman reported that Siri has been taken away from John Gianandria and given to Mike
00:18:47 ◼ ► Rockwell, who is moving into Craig Federighi's software group, Mike Rockwell, who is in charge
00:18:52 ◼ ► of Vision Pro is keeping Vision OS, the report says, but will leave Vision hardware behind to
00:19:05 ◼ ► And I don't know if you remember this report, but I remember this report that originally the
00:19:10 ◼ ► Vision Pro was going to be more Siri focused and that Rockwell got so frustrated with, uh,
00:19:17 ◼ ► the, the lack of ability to make Siri good enough for Vision Pro and that he tried to basically
00:19:28 ◼ ► And that's one of the reasons Vision Pro is not, uh, as Siri focused is that they wanted it
00:19:36 ◼ ► So yeah, I think I, I, I, I do wonder part of me thinks about the dog that caught the car.
00:19:47 ◼ ► You've been complaining about it all this time, but, um, it is a visible change that I think
00:20:04 ◼ ► My vibe from this too, is that John Gianandrea seems to be much more professorly and researchy
00:20:10 ◼ ► and not maybe product shippy and Rockwell seems to be a product ship guy and you need that to
00:20:20 ◼ ► I think the biggest thing for me in all of this is that Siri is now under Craig Federighi.
00:20:33 ◼ ► for better or for worse, who's in charge of basically all Apple software, Siri was outside
00:20:57 ◼ ► And maybe he's the person or, you know, we'll bring in the people to, to get it where it needs
00:21:06 ◼ ► And I hope a couple of things, one, I hope that he's actually given the time to turn it
00:21:12 ◼ ► I hope that there are not expectations with an Apple that, Hey, this is going to be fixed
00:21:16 ◼ ► by iOS 20, you know, in a year and a half or whatever, this is going to take some time.
00:21:28 ◼ ► But two, I hope that through the reporting through Craig Federighi, that Siri can be a bit more
00:21:40 ◼ ► And I mean that in two ways, I think, first of all, from the beginning, Siri has always
00:21:54 ◼ ► And part of this promise of a Siri that is more integrated with your data through app intent
00:22:21 ◼ ► Now, again, just like the iPhone thing we're talking about a second ago, there are examples,
00:22:25 ◼ ► A recent one is messages in the cloud, the feature that syncs your iMessage stuff and your history
00:22:39 ◼ ► And hopefully that is going to be instilled in the Siri team, because clearly someone in
00:22:52 ◼ ► I mean, if German is to be believed, they were debating shipping the thing that they just
00:23:03 ◼ ► And I think a combination of Rockwell and Federighi, like that's going to be insulation from that
00:23:10 ◼ ► And when they ship this, I hope and trust that it will be better than it would have been otherwise.
00:23:20 ◼ ► They had a it's not good enough moment, clearly, where somebody was like, let's ship it.
00:23:30 ◼ ► I mean, you could you could argue that that argument has not won the day in some previous
00:23:41 ◼ ► And this one, you know, is even more sensitive if it's using user data, if it's using your
00:23:49 ◼ ► I wanted to mention Joe Rosenstiel wrote a piece last week on Six Colors about Siri and
00:23:54 ◼ ► Spotlight that I thought was I mean, he's asking for a very specific thing in some ways because
00:24:13 ◼ ► And he basically said typing into a search engine, you get you get a bunch of results ranked and
00:24:26 ◼ ► Like if you're trying to ask how to do something in mail and you don't say how it tries to do
00:24:34 ◼ ► But one of the things that I thought was very perceptive about that piece is that part of
00:24:46 ◼ ► And and you want a lot of your personal data is being indexed and searched by Spotlight.
00:24:57 ◼ ► Spotlight feels very old in the sense that it's not really making any assumptions about
00:25:04 ◼ ► You really need to think about like old school search engine, get the exact words right.
00:25:10 ◼ ► Like and on top of that, it's the disunity of it where you've got two places that you can
00:25:30 ◼ ► product line are not integrated properly because they're, I think, in different groups and different
00:25:37 ◼ ► And the biggest example of that that I can remember where I got a little a little peering
00:25:41 ◼ ► into this fact that like different parts of Apple do different things is when Workflow got
00:25:54 ◼ ► bought Workflow because that would seem like the logical place to integrate system wide is
00:26:00 ◼ ► And it turned out, no, the what I was told was that the operating system team didn't want
00:26:08 ◼ ► And I thought, that seems, I mean, I get why it fits with Siri in a lot of ways, because
00:26:21 ◼ ► operating system, not being interested in something, and then other parts of Apple that are also
00:26:32 ◼ ► I think it's good that they bought it, but I didn't like the fact that apparently part of
00:26:48 ◼ ► I have one more piece of follow-up, which is from anonymous who wrote in and, and he said,
00:26:56 ◼ ► hi, Jason, regarding last week's episode with John and Apple potentially using an M series
00:27:10 ◼ ► And I wanted to share, it's incredibly disruptive to do any variant of a chip, not only for the
00:27:15 ◼ ► additional design time, but all verification and testing down the line with the tight timelines
00:27:25 ◼ ► So basically the idea here, and I think we've seen this with Apple, like Apple can only do
00:27:30 ◼ ► so much and every new chip variant, look, they're so good at reusing their chips in different
00:27:35 ◼ ► devices and plotting out that, that piece of, of information that I gave, uh, I've been
00:27:41 ◼ ► talking about for a few weeks now where I was talking to somebody involved in Apple's chip
00:27:51 ◼ ► That's all part of the secret sauce of this is, is that they're aligned and the chips are
00:28:00 ◼ ► Which is if they, if they want a high-end chip and they also are building future servers for
00:28:06 ◼ ► their private cloud compute, whether it's the high-end chip or it's just functions on a, a
00:28:20 ◼ ► They're just like, do we need to build a new chip for our servers or can we, whatever we need
00:28:30 ◼ ► Because they don't, they don't want to build five or six chips because they're not Intel.
00:28:34 ◼ ► They, they want, everyone has a huge cost and they are trying to target their specific, uh,
00:29:08 ◼ ► It's all this work and it's the fabrication of those chips and you end up with bending and
00:29:26 ◼ ► And when they've, as they've gone through, you know, as the iMac and the MacBook air, the
00:29:36 ◼ ► It's like, we've built this around Apple Silicon and you can see that as a, it's just like a
00:29:41 ◼ ► way to say it has Apple Silicon aside, but no, like we designed these at the same time and
00:29:46 ◼ ► Not only we didn't design the MacBook air just for the M two, but also the M three, the M four,
00:30:01 ◼ ► And then it's like, well, you've designed this stuff to fit in a Mac studio or in a laptop.
00:30:05 ◼ ► And it means you leave a, potentially leave a lot on the table when it comes to a full desktop
00:30:12 ◼ ► And so, yeah, it's the Mac pro is such an interesting story when it comes to Apple Silicon, because
00:30:31 ◼ ► I think where the cooling in the Mac studio is specifically designed to handle those max
00:30:36 ◼ ► And they know that, and that's, for me, that's the question about the future of the Mac pro
00:30:39 ◼ ► is, are they looking at the cooling envelope of the Mac pro and saying there is something
00:30:45 ◼ ► And that's, that's the great unanswered question about why the Mac pro didn't get the M three
00:30:54 ◼ ► The saddest thing is if June comes and they just say, yeah, okay, the M three ultras in
00:31:00 ◼ ► the Mac pro now, because that means like they didn't even care enough to put it in the same
00:31:05 ◼ ► The good news would be if they're holding it back, because there's going to be a different
00:31:17 ◼ ► And that's the reason why the Mac pro hardware actually starts to make sense is that they
00:31:31 ◼ ► I don't know what the story is there, but it's, um, it's not great right now, but that would
00:31:35 ◼ ► be, again, it's either going to be the other shoe drops and it's just sad or the other shoe
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00:34:49 ◼ ► Um, it is, uh, Mark Gurman, of course, the sheriff of, uh, of the rumor roundup reporting in his
00:35:11 ◼ ► It's not a decided, but his angle here is that they're actually thinking about it now, not for
00:35:17 ◼ ► FaceTime or anything like that, but for visual intelligence, the idea that they are, which is
00:35:22 ◼ ► not, it's kind of an underwhelming feature right now, but I think what Gurman says is they're
00:35:26 ◼ ► high on it and, and eventually being able to, uh, put their own models in there and analyze
00:35:41 ◼ ► And it would like, look at whatever you were looking at and on the front for the series where
00:35:49 ◼ ► But, um, this, I don't know what I feel about cameras on the Apple watch, but this makes more
00:35:56 ◼ ► It's what I worry about is that it's the people who've been trying to build this camera who
00:36:05 ◼ ► Because I think FaceTime shooting, you know, up your nose while you're trying to talk to
00:36:14 ◼ ► And he said, this is similar to what they're thinking about with cameras and AirPods is just
00:36:33 ◼ ► And maybe that's just me, but even like Google lens, other things like, I just don't tend
00:36:44 ◼ ► Translation is a thing that I do, but I very rarely otherwise dealing with this sort of stuff.
00:36:55 ◼ ► Like, I love the idea of your device knows where you are and knows things about you and
00:37:17 ◼ ► Like my phone's got three cameras on the back and one of the front, like it's covered in cameras,
00:37:23 ◼ ► Like we've all gotten used to that and we have been used to that for a long time, right?
00:37:28 ◼ ► Phones, even before smartphones had cameras, but suddenly when you're talking about AirPods
00:37:33 ◼ ► and watches, things that you may wear on your person in times that you would not have your
00:37:43 ◼ ► Like if you're at the gym and you have your watch on in the locker room, like your phone's
00:37:49 ◼ ► in your bag, like suddenly like you have a camera in a space that a camera is not expected.
00:37:54 ◼ ► And I don't think this would be like full glass hole kind of levels of pushback, but I think
00:38:03 ◼ ► there would be some and with some people and, and, and take off the table, like security things,
00:38:10 ◼ ► you know, you can get an iPhone without a camera and app like Apple or other companies make those
00:38:16 ◼ ► for people who work in like secure locations or people may have to leave their phone in
00:38:21 ◼ ► a locker at work and not take the phone in to work because of their, whatever they're working
00:38:25 ◼ ► Well, suddenly you're talking about a watch and AirPods that now have those requirements.
00:38:32 ◼ ► I just don't know if, if visual intelligence or, or honestly, even FaceTime or just having
00:38:42 ◼ ► I think this is one of the fascinating areas where we, we have to look again, I think we're
00:38:46 ◼ ► going to talk about this later, but where Apple's doing well and where Apple's doing poorly.
00:38:53 ◼ ► And I think we're going to see this more where Apple becomes culturally across the company aligned
00:38:59 ◼ ► in that AI is the future and that, you know, all these features are, are super important.
00:39:23 ◼ ► And Apple's hardware people are executing so much better than their software people right
00:39:29 ◼ ► I think that's one of the weird things about the current state of Apple is that the hardware
00:39:36 ◼ ► And so you end up in these situations where like, I love the idea that they, they're like,
00:39:43 ◼ ► yeah, we can put a camera in a watch and we'll make it kind of more scanny and a little less
00:39:48 ◼ ► And so you'll be able to kind of like find a piece of paper and go boop and it'll scan a
00:39:52 ◼ ► document and tell you what it is and act on it or put it in your photo library or whatever.
00:39:57 ◼ ► When I, I walk the dog with just an Apple watch and if I see something weird, uh, that's
00:40:10 ◼ ► Meanwhile, the, the, the, the software team has shipped an Apple or visual intelligence is
00:40:19 ◼ ► And that's, that's the concern is that Apple puts all this amazing hardware in these products.
00:40:24 ◼ ► And if they're not supported properly by the software, then it's just a waste of everybody's
00:40:28 ◼ ► So that's, that's my concern about it now is that if I think about visual intelligence now,
00:40:51 ◼ ► I think that this is a direction within Apple, which is put sensors everywhere and put cameras
00:40:57 ◼ ► And the reason you do it is because they're foreseeing a future, which I think is not unreasonable
00:41:10 ◼ ► If they ever build those, you know, like Meta Ray-Ban style glasses that have a camera in
00:41:15 ◼ ► You're, you're, you're using AI on the, on the phone to process all of that image stuff.
00:41:26 ◼ ► It's more precise on a map because, uh, beyond the, just the GPS, especially if you're in
00:41:33 ◼ ► It can recognize the buildings and know where you are great, but you could be aligned in that
00:41:41 ◼ ► But like, if you ship the hardware and it turns out the software is just not there, what are
00:41:50 ◼ ► The other thing I wanted to mention, by the way, since this is the rumor roundup segment
00:42:23 ◼ ► My sources are reporting that it's possible that Mark Gurman will be on Mac Break Weekly
00:42:44 ◼ ► He's, uh, he's, uh, he's the, as Gruber wrote the other week, he is the foremost, uh, Apple
00:42:54 ◼ ► The information breaks some stuff from time to time behind their paywall wall street journal
00:43:01 ◼ ► Occasionally we get leaks out of the, um, supply chain from the people out there, but, um, most
00:43:49 ◼ ► Uh, the EU told Apple to open up access to notifications and a smartwatch interoperability.
00:44:21 ◼ ► And the thought was, well, the Apple watch is going to come out and it'll be super integrated.
00:44:24 ◼ ► And it was, but the fact is to this day, they're trying to bring back the Pebble and they still
00:44:34 ◼ ► And that's what this, I feel like that's one of the things this EU, um, ruling is about.
00:44:44 ◼ ► Uh, the first is that non-Apple smartwatch devices should have, uh, the ability to receive
00:44:57 ◼ ► So this is something that really wasn't around in the first sort of Pebble era, but you know,
00:45:02 ◼ ► you get a notification and you can do a tap back or you can do a quick reply with your voice
00:45:17 ◼ ► So like, um, if you have a Garmin smartwatch, you know, if you're a big runner, some of those
00:45:23 ◼ ► companies have done things to like, they do like a fast reply, but then has to go through their app
00:45:32 ◼ ► And this mandate says, no, no, no, you gotta, you gotta open that access up to notifications.
00:45:49 ◼ ► So we're all familiar with, you get a new Apple watch or a new set of AirPods, you open
00:45:55 ◼ ► And you take a picture of like the weird, a QR code in space, or do you just hit the button
00:46:06 ◼ ► And if you've, like, I did this recently, we had to replace, this is a very upgrade topic.
00:46:09 ◼ ► We had to replace our shower speaker because whatever waterproof JBL we had for like 10 years
00:46:24 ◼ ► But I like hit the button and like, I sort of waited for the card because I've just paired
00:46:49 ◼ ► Developers should be able to integrate alternative solutions to AirDrop and AirPlay on the iPhone.
00:46:58 ◼ ► So, uh, quoting iPhone users, uh, will be able to choose from different and innovative services to share files with other users and cast media content from their iPhones to TVs.
00:47:15 ◼ ► So the fact is there is no reason today that the Apple watch should be better than any other smartwatch on the iPhone because Apple has built features for the Apple watch and doesn't allow anybody else to use them.
00:47:35 ◼ ► I, I feel like fundamentally that is anti-competitive and we could talk about what happens in the early days when Apple is building the platform.
00:47:47 ◼ ► I think that there's an argument to be made that for them to innovate, they need to build it for their product and then they can start rolling it out.
00:47:55 ◼ ► And there could be a window of, of, uh, uh, availability for it where it's like, well, you can, you can build this stuff for your own stuff, but within five years, it needs to be APIs that are open to people.
00:48:05 ◼ ► Like, and again, that would be a huge advantage for the Apple watch, for example, over other products.
00:48:10 ◼ ► But, you know, 10 years in 10 plus years into the Apple watch, the fact that nobody else can do what the Apple watch does because Apple won't let them is not great.
00:48:23 ◼ ► Apple said today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules.
00:48:35 ◼ ► We will continue to work with the European commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users.
00:48:46 ◼ ► So, um, again, I, I, I'm sympathetic, but I also think that this is the classic Apple move, which I'm sympathetic to their argument, but they overstep, they overreach because they're using a reasonable argument to make, expand it out into an unreasonable argument.
00:49:04 ◼ ► Which is if we, if we build stuff for our smartwatch, why should we ever give it to anybody else?
00:49:14 ◼ ► So, uh, it's the EU saying, no, you need to be able to let other people compete with you, which doesn't seem, you know, it doesn't seem unreasonable.
00:49:29 ◼ ► I, I, I don't think everything Apple does should be an open API the moment that it ships.
00:49:35 ◼ ► I don't think that, but I do think that ultimately they need to not like withhold all smartwatch features from their platform for 10 years, except for the Apple watch.
00:49:48 ◼ ► This is not a fully formed thought, so forgive me, but having something like Bluetooth fast pairing with the card and stuff, like, is that really a big advantage of AirPods?
00:50:00 ◼ ► Like you see it one time you set it up or if you restore them, I have to set it up again.
00:50:05 ◼ ► Uh, what makes AirPods good is the sound quality, the connection, the noise cancellation.
00:50:10 ◼ ► It seems like Apple's trying to pick a fight over a feature that's not even that important or that big in that specific case.
00:50:23 ◼ ► Doesn't it make the iPhone better and more valuable to an end user if they can bring other smartwatches to it?
00:50:39 ◼ ► Apple has shifted at some point from what makes a single product better for a user to what makes the ecosystem better for a user.
00:50:51 ◼ ► I think you could throw the whole App Store issue in here too, which is, it's like Apple has decided that the ecosystem is entirely controlled by Apple and Apple's products.
00:51:10 ◼ ► And there isn't that broader thought, which is, well, but to make the ecosystem good, we need to have a lot of players in it.
00:51:31 ◼ ► As frustrating as it is, I think for us observers, I understand why Apple has this opinion.
00:51:35 ◼ ► Because even if we say Apple is going to, like the Apple Watch is not, if they completely open up, or AirPods, every feature of connectivity on the iPhone to those products, it's not going to change.
00:51:58 ◼ ► I think in these conversations, a lot of people will be like, well, think about the iPod and iTunes, right?
00:52:04 ◼ ► Like, Apple made iTunes, it made the iPod, they were made to work together, and at times there were ways to break that marriage apart.
00:52:17 ◼ ► One, that was a long time ago, and Apple was dealing with things like music rights and other complicated things that don't really come into play of, like, can my Garmin get iMessage notifications, right?
00:52:32 ◼ ► But the truth is also, we live in a different time where there are lots of companies making lots of products, lots of good products.
00:52:41 ◼ ► And Apple has built walls in a way where, like you said it perfectly, that they don't have to compete, and they hide behind privacy or user security.
00:52:56 ◼ ► And they are hurting, potentially, one part of their business in order to try to boost another one, which was your point that I thought was really good, your point that you're still thinking about, which is that the iPhone is less good because people who want to make various wearable things, like Fitbits and Pebbles and other smartwatches, can't make them as good for the iPhone.
00:53:23 ◼ ► It means that when you look at Eric Mikakovsky's Pebble Eric, Eric Pebble, if you look at his blog post about bringing back the Pebble, he says, it's going to be way better on Android.
00:53:39 ◼ ► And I roll my eyes because he's like, well, of course, all of us here use Android because it's open.
00:54:03 ◼ ► And I cannot understand people who contort to say, well, actually, the fact that the Pebble is much worse on the iPhone than on Android is a good thing because, you know, my column.
00:54:17 ◼ ► It means that it's a company town with one solution and then everything else has been intentionally degraded because they want you to buy the Apple Watch.
00:54:32 ◼ ► And so allowing there to be more, it's not even competition, variety of products available to your users in your ecosystem is a benefit to your devices.
00:54:44 ◼ ► And this is, Stephen, it goes back to the fact that I still get the feeling that Apple, as much as Apple talks about all the money that it's paid out to developers after taking its share, that the truth is Apple ascribes 100% of the iPhone's success to itself.
00:55:02 ◼ ► When, in fact, an enormous portion of the iPhone's success is due to the apps in the App Store, which were made by people who are not Apple.
00:55:10 ◼ ► But Apple even gives itself credit for apps in the App Store because the App Store is Apple's.
00:55:18 ◼ ► They do these self-serving reports where they talk about how much economic impact they have in various countries.
00:55:30 ◼ ► And, I mean, it's deeply misguided because, and I think that this is biting them in a bunch of areas now in terms of working with developers, is the iPhone, I mean, you could really argue that what made the iPhone fly was the App Store.
00:55:57 ◼ ► And yet they have this attitude that is pretty pervasive, which is it's all about us and that's the wrong attitude.
00:56:05 ◼ ► The attitude is our products are improved by the other products in our ecosystem, and, therefore, you should let other products in your ecosystem.
00:56:14 ◼ ► And they do to a certain extent, but you have these areas where they're just like, well, no, we can't have book reading be good on the iPhone or the iPad.
00:56:23 ◼ ► It can never be good other than in our app because we have decided to bar Amazon and Kobo and anybody else from selling books and comics directly from the app.
00:56:34 ◼ ► They have to do a big workaround, and we don't because we're the owner, and they're giving themselves an advantage.
00:56:39 ◼ ► But it makes, it degrades the iPhone experience, and there are so many different examples of this.
00:56:43 ◼ ► This is just another one because, again, I don't think the Pebble is going to compete with the Apple Watch at all.
00:56:47 ◼ ► But there are some, if you want to use a Pebble in the year 2025, you are not a serious Apple Watch potential customer, right?
00:57:02 ◼ ► That's okay because Apple's still going to be, the Apple Watch is still going to be the best on the platform.
00:57:07 ◼ ► And if it's not going to be the best on the platform, well, Apple should get a kick in the pants and make it better.
00:57:31 ◼ ► I like that Eric Pebble has enough money and enough sway at Google that he can get them to open source their OS and that he can fund, essentially, because he's not Kickstartering this.
00:57:48 ◼ ► He's just using his own money to make them and then he's going to sell them, like in the old days, before we had crowdfunding.
00:58:01 ◼ ► I've got the Core 2 Duo, the black and white one, underscore and I each, he talked me into it, just to see what's going on there.
00:58:09 ◼ ► And honestly, like if Apple has to change some of these things, like, I mean, I like the Apple Watch a lot, but there may be times where I choose to wear the Pebble for whatever reason.
00:58:28 ◼ ► This ruling also, I think, will have an impact on things like the meta Ray-Bans, right, where the idea here is interoperability.
00:58:36 ◼ ► That the meta Ray-Bans is an example where Apple doesn't have a product in the category, but they can only integrate to a certain degree.
00:58:49 ◼ ► And it's just, you know, again, Apple should, I would argue in that case, since it's basically using the same kind of things, that if Apple doesn't want to play in that area, that's fine.
00:59:01 ◼ ► But if iPhone users want that product, they should be able to use it and have it be decent.
00:59:35 ◼ ► You can just talk about your day or have it explain something to you or start brainstorming ideas.
00:59:42 ◼ ► I pretended I had a job interview coming up and I asked for it to help me prep for the interview.
01:00:21 ◼ ► Stephen, this is back to Mark Gurman, actually, because something Mark Gurman wrote in one of his pieces kind of set me off.
01:00:44 ◼ ► And during, I believe it was during Upgrade, I bought a Fire TV, a Google TV, and a Roku 4K streamer box.
01:00:54 ◼ ► Because Mark Gurman wrote this piece about Apple TV being a laggard and needing a hardware update because it was a laggard with a low market share.
01:01:04 ◼ ► And look, I think, as I say in my article that set this whole thing in motion, I think he's just conflating the two things.
01:01:13 ◼ ► I think it's basically a writer or editor kind of conflating these two things rather than getting into the details of the complexity of it.
01:01:19 ◼ ► But Apple shipping a new Apple TV box with upgraded specs is not going to change anything about the Apple TV because it's already fine.
01:01:32 ◼ ► I mean, maybe in, was it 2015 when they launched tvOS and the future television as apps and all that stuff.
01:01:43 ◼ ► But since then, in the 10 years since, it's like, well, do it, you know, like I upgraded when I bought my first 4K TV.
01:02:09 ◼ ► We got to talk about streamer boxes, but we also got to talk about embedded streaming because so many people, I think I haven't, I haven't looked at these numbers.
01:02:16 ◼ ► I probably should interface with connected content on their television sets through the apps on their TV.
01:02:50 ◼ ► And they're like, well, we're, you know, we need to support all of our apps on all devices.
01:03:00 ◼ ► And I do think that they may need to make a more affordable box because I think that it would be good for them to do so.
01:03:07 ◼ ► And so if, if Mark Gurman's, if I read between the lines, maybe one of the things he's saying is if they update the Apple TV hardware, maybe that will enable them to get the price point down a little bit.
01:03:17 ◼ ► But that's literally the only hardware innovation that I want to see on the Apple TV on that side.
01:03:21 ◼ ► I know there are people out there who are like playing games on the Apple TV who want more, but it's really such a niche use for the Apple TV that I'm just for the purposes of this.
01:03:33 ◼ ► Because when he says they're a laggard, he means that people aren't buying them, that it's a very low market share.
01:03:38 ◼ ► But I was really skeptical about this comment because I thought my experience is that the Apple TV is actually pretty good.
01:03:46 ◼ ► And while we're really frustrated about all the things it doesn't do, the hardware especially is not the problem.
01:03:58 ◼ ► And I have spent the last month kind of using them on and off and trying a bunch of things on them.
01:04:12 ◼ ► The software is a problem, although it made me appreciate the things that are good about the Apple TV a lot more too.
01:04:21 ◼ ► Can you debrief me about this ridiculous project that I gave for myself where I spent several hundred dollars for a single blog post?
01:05:15 ◼ ► And you really praised its live tab where they're pulling in what's on live television through YouTube TV, but also YouTube Premium and all these other places.
01:05:34 ◼ ► I mean, one of the big things, and I heard from somebody who was like, well, I don't care about live TV.
01:05:43 ◼ ► It's fast channels, free ad-supported television, but also all of the services are adding live channels.
01:05:51 ◼ ► And one of the reasons for that is sometimes, not to put too fine a point on it, sometimes you want to sit down and turn off your brain and just watch something.
01:05:58 ◼ ► Or you're making dinner or you're folding laundry and you just want to put something on.
01:06:02 ◼ ► And these are essentially playlists, unless it's like a news channel or a sports channel.
01:06:13 ◼ ► Most cable channels are also just playlists where they show 18 episodes of Law & Order in a row.
01:06:38 ◼ ► And a lot of people are really responding well to what we all know the TV always did well, which is sometimes you just turn on the TV, flip it to a channel, and veg out.
01:06:48 ◼ ► And think about how many places where TVs are that maybe aren't the living room where that's true.
01:07:07 ◼ ► I don't know if the guy's got a DVD player in the back and he just like swaps them in or if it's streaming somewhere.
01:07:25 ◼ ► Most people are going to look at their phones or, you know, pull a laptop out and get some work done because they're waiting on a tire to get patched or whatever.
01:07:40 ◼ ► Like Google TV and the Amazon thing and tvOS, like they're designed with the living room in mind, I think.
01:08:04 ◼ ► And now that AirPlay is on televisions and I think even some projectors now, like maybe that's going to break down a little bit.
01:08:15 ◼ ► And it seems to me like the live tab in Google TV kind of understands that where it's bringing everything together so you don't have to hop around.
01:08:25 ◼ ► And giving you just like a broad overview of what's available to you in a way that I think tvOS tries to do.
01:09:13 ◼ ► So I've got like a bunch of Jeopardy episodes on there and I watch them when I want to.
01:09:34 ◼ ► And I have a MASH channel and you can just turn it on and then you're the tire store at that point, which is great.
01:09:42 ◼ ► But one of the reasons I focused on live with Google TV, which because I have YouTube TV, like it doesn't integrate with all of them, but it does integrate with a couple of them.
01:09:56 ◼ ► But as a result, it's like, look, if you're in the Google ecosystem, Google TV is as good as Apple TV, basically, because it is tied into YouTube TV and YouTube.
01:10:05 ◼ ► And all the Google, like if you rented a movie or bought a movie on your Android phone, it's there.
01:10:28 ◼ ► And that is one of the things that, because I wanted to write about the live stuff is because Apple has completely missed the boat when it comes to live.
01:10:39 ◼ ► And if we go another tvOS announcement without them integrating live TV in some way, it's a really bad sign because it feels like tvOS is holding the product down because they are just on maintenance mode with this thing.
01:10:56 ◼ ► And the streaming world is shifting and adding, you know, letting people add their third party apps is not enough.
01:11:04 ◼ ► And one of the places they need to do work is in a live guide because you should have an API the way it should work.
01:11:36 ◼ ► Amazon is doing what Apple should do in terms of if you have an app on their platform, plus they've got their own library of hundreds of live channels that you get with Prime Video.
01:11:47 ◼ ► You can basically, either the apps are furnishing those channels to Amazon or Amazon is just doing a back-end kind of connection with their service and that is they've negotiated with them.
01:11:59 ◼ ► But whatever it is, if you have an app and you say, like, I'm adding Peacock, it adds all the Peacock channels.
01:12:06 ◼ ► And basically, if you pick a Peacock channel, it'll launch Peacock and tune to that channel.
01:12:10 ◼ ► But basically, you're getting a program guide that you can then mark favorites because you've got hundreds, like 600 channels or whatever.
01:12:16 ◼ ► You mark your favorites and you can mark your favorite from traditional TV on something like YouTube TV, a Prime Video channel, a Roku channel, a Peacock channel, a Paramount channel, and put them in your favorites and then they all just show there.
01:12:31 ◼ ► So you can have ESPN and CNN and the MASH channel or whatever, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer channel.
01:12:53 ◼ ► The home screen has ads on it and not like promos for like Apple has like Apple TV stuff that they're promoting and Google is going to promote things that are on YouTube or that you can get in their store or whatever.
01:13:30 ◼ ► If you if you arrow up by accident or whatever to the ad unit, it will take over almost the entire screen.
01:13:40 ◼ ► And it will autoplay with audio a television commercial for Mancini Sleep World in this case.
01:13:52 ◼ ► Some of them instead just have a button that will take you to commerce because Amazon is going to Amazon in the end.
01:13:57 ◼ ► Even if you spend $100 or $120 on one of these Amazon devices, they don't view it as, you know, thanks for giving us money.
01:14:06 ◼ ► They view it as a foothold in your house to sell you stuff and to merchandise and to sell commercial space.
01:14:14 ◼ ► And so if you want, if you don't mind, like it is the best in a lot of ways, but it is so aggressively just, it's like erecting a billboard in your house.
01:14:40 ◼ ► That's basically what is going on with a fire TV is that it is so aggressive with the ads that it just, look, if I'm being precious and you don't care, that's fine.
01:14:50 ◼ ► But like web banner ads on my television by default that I can't turn it off and they, they don't go away.
01:14:57 ◼ ► It is, in my opinion, a huge step above having Apple show, you know, an Apple TV show in that space.
01:15:27 ◼ ► And that's why I said, I mean, I, I, in my piece, I basically said, I'm not going to ever use this Amazon product.
01:15:45 ◼ ► But that is the equivalent of when you buy a computer, part of the screen is just a banner ad from the operating system.
01:15:54 ◼ ► Wait, you mean like in settings when, uh, you could buy Apple care plus or turn on Apple intelligence?
01:16:04 ◼ ► And although that's also not great, if, if imagine you boot up your windows PC and there's a, just a square in the corner that has, that has like web display ads in it.
01:16:35 ◼ ► I don't like the marketing stuff from, you know, Apple saying, don't you, don't you want to buy Apple TV plus?
01:16:44 ◼ ► And I accept that more than what Amazon's doing, which is literally like, if you are a mattress, local mattress company, and you want to stick your 32nd TV ad in a fire TV in a particular region, we'll do it.
01:17:05 ◼ ► And that if Mancini Sleepworld found out that it was running in the home screen of a TV interface, they'd be like, that's not what we bought.
01:17:16 ◼ ► Although, by the way, I do opt out of ads on Prime Video and it doesn't have any effect on the ad load on the fire TV.
01:17:31 ◼ ► There was a story, I think last week about they were testing an ad spot in the boot up screen.
01:17:46 ◼ ► And, you know, and Roku is also interesting because they make boxes, but they also sell TVs with it all integrated.
01:18:39 ◼ ► But most of those you can get on other boxes too, because they just want the ads, the ad revenue from it.
01:18:46 ◼ ► And their live guide is okay, although it's mostly just focused on their stuff, not other people's stuff.
01:18:58 ◼ ► And I would be, I actually wouldn't be surprised if Roku is planning a big OS update, because they sure need one.
01:19:18 ◼ ► Having made this journey, I've got a little prescription for tvOS, which is one, get on live TV.
01:19:23 ◼ ► Every app that's in the app store should be able to provide you with a live TV guide, either, you know, by an API or something else, where you can say, if you add Paramount Plus, you get these channels.
01:19:44 ◼ ► As somebody who's got YouTube TV, having those channels be integrated into the interface so it knows that right now I can flip to Discovery Channel or whatever and see a thing.
01:19:56 ◼ ► And the misguided or at least misfire of an interface decision where the TV app is sort of the main interface of Apple TV, but the home screen is sort of the main interface of Apple TV.
01:20:26 ◼ ► And boy, after using those other devices, I think Apple just needs to rip the Band-Aid off and make the home screen disappear.
01:20:37 ◼ ► And put the TV app should be the interface and there should be an app tab or whatever and an app launcher in that main.
01:21:09 ◼ ► Because I'm sure the people who focus on TVOS day in, day out know that they're behind in these areas.
01:21:25 ◼ ► Like, they keep adding those features that will eventually let them kill the home screen.
01:21:43 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I think it's compelling that when they brought the TV app to the Mac and iPhone, iPad and stuff, right?
01:22:04 ◼ ► As frustrating as it is, and as behind as some of its competitors it is in a few areas,
01:22:26 ◼ ► It does most of what I need to do, but I do wish about the live TV and about the unified interface.
01:22:52 ◼ ► It's not, the thing I miss the most is the swiping on the remote, honestly, on the Google TV.
01:23:25 ◼ ► And so if I'm reacting again to that Mark Herman story about they need, you know, they're going
01:23:32 ◼ ► It's like, the thing that makes Apple TV not a laggard is a software update, not the hardware.
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01:26:21 ◼ ► Anonymous wrote in and said, Jason, what do you do about date metadata for the photos you scan in?
01:26:34 ◼ ► We scanned in a bunch of slides from Lauren's family and I just sent them to a slide scanning
01:26:48 ◼ ► You can actually select a big batch and, uh, and do a data just up in the menu and, and select
01:27:03 ◼ ► And, and so then what you end up doing, if you're like me, what you end up doing is playing
01:27:30 ◼ ► And they sent the national guard and I'll get this number and it'll be like, it'll be like,
01:27:48 ◼ ► And then back basically dating that from her birth and saying, well, we'll say this is 1974.
01:28:02 ◼ ► Oh, everybody had a, it's a, it's like a cookout and there's a happy birthday, Lauren fourth birthday.
01:28:14 ◼ ► And, uh, and after all of that, a little work, uh, some, some shoe leather included to figure it all out.
01:28:41 ◼ ► Maybe I'll try to look that up and put it in the show notes, but I highly recommend this because nobody's looking at your slides.
01:28:46 ◼ ► And you know what, what people might look at if you put it in a digital library and you send it to your family and friends.
01:28:52 ◼ ► And if you show them off to your family members and like whole portions of my mother-in-law's life returned to life by scanning all those, all those slides that were just in a box in her garage.
01:29:09 ◼ ► I have not sent anything off to be scanned, but we've, you know, at times taken like, okay, we're gonna take the shoe box and scan them.
01:29:18 ◼ ► Uh, first of all, you can, like you said, you can select multiple images and change their date all at once, but not from the inspector window.
01:29:36 ◼ ► And like, if you accidentally tab out of it, it thinks that your photo, instead of being, you know, 2025, it's the year 25.
01:29:58 ◼ ► And so all I can say is that I use them and it was very successful and, and even they have a, the, the option, which I really liked to like, okay, would you like us to send your slides back?
01:30:12 ◼ ► Cause I've got the digital versions and I do, I do not want part of this is I do not want boxes and boxes of slides back.
01:30:18 ◼ ► But also if you have, so I actually regret this cause my, my parents put a bunch of photos from my childhood in a book.
01:30:25 ◼ ► Um, and you used to get from the photo lab, you would get the negatives and the prints and the negatives seem to have disappeared, which is a bummer.
01:30:33 ◼ ► Because if you, if, if somebody saved those packages, even if they pulled the good prints out and put them in photo albums or whatever, if they saved those little paper packages that had the film negatives in them, you can take all those negatives and send them off to a scanning service.
01:30:49 ◼ ► And you will get, and what will happen is they took 30 pictures or 20 pictures and one of them went in a photo album and one of them went in a frame on the wall.
01:31:00 ◼ ► And the rest of them you've never seen or haven't seen since they came back from the, the, the supermarket.
01:31:11 ◼ ► And, and people didn't take as many photos back then because the film was finite, but, but the idea that you would take 30 photos carefully.
01:31:23 ◼ ► And this happened to us with some of these slides too, where we're like, oh my God, here's this famous photo.
01:31:30 ◼ ► We're like, there's the one that went on the calendar and there's the one that went on the wall.
01:31:34 ◼ ► And then you look back, uh, Lauren's been doing this cause we, she's got a photo shuffle on her iPhone of our kids on a lot on the lock screen.
01:31:43 ◼ ► And it's fascinating because you get these photos that are the setting of a very familiar photo that we've marked as one of the best photos of our kids.
01:31:57 ◼ ► Um, and certainly imagine then a photo from 40 or 50 years ago that nobody has seen in 40 or 50 years.
01:32:04 ◼ ► That is similar to photos maybe you've seen, but maybe not, maybe completely different.
01:32:10 ◼ ► And, and so, yes, I highly recommend if you've got slides, if you've got old film, um, to get that, you don't have to do it yourself because getting a slide scanner.
01:32:32 ◼ ► They've got a system where they're, you know, making sure that the dust gets off of it.
01:32:36 ◼ ► It's, I, I, whether you scan cafe or something else, I highly recommend the, uh, you know, getting that stuff into digital form for your sake and everybody else in your family's sake, those old family photos.
01:32:54 ◼ ► And so what do you think is more important or what would be your preference for Apple to focus first on bringing down the price of the vision pro or keeping the price as is, but making the device smaller and weight less to be more comfortable.
01:33:12 ◼ ► Like, I think a way that you bring the price down is to use materials that could be lighter, get rid of the goofy screen on the front, which are definitely make it cheaper and lighter and simpler.
01:33:34 ◼ ► It needs to get the, if you're building the next generation vision pro, I'm less concerned.
01:33:50 ◼ ► Like, you don't, it's not going to, the next vision pro isn't going to cost $800, right?
01:34:03 ◼ ► The only way vision pro is going to work is it, it's a product line that is leading somewhere and will eventually get there.
01:34:15 ◼ ► As cheap, as cheaper as you can make it, knowing that it's not going to be cheap, but as cheaper as you can make it.
01:34:20 ◼ ► And if you can make it lighter along the way, changing the materials or whatever, please do that too.
01:34:25 ◼ ► Because those are going to be, those are your two biggest impediments to people buying and using this thing are, they're not comfortable with it.
01:34:33 ◼ ► I wasn't going to say they can't afford it because I think the people who are buying this thing can afford it.
01:34:41 ◼ ► And, and, um, and if, if there is a groundbreaking killer app, whether it's concerts or sports or whatever, that, that we settle on here where it's like, oh my God, now you can subscribe to this service and it's got all these Broadway shows in immersive, or it's got all the sports and immersive.
01:34:59 ◼ ► If the ticket price is whatever that service costs, plus 3,500 or plus 2,000, 2,000 is going to sell more.
01:35:09 ◼ ► It's, it's not going to be a mass market product, but 2,000 is going to sell a lot more than 3,500.
01:35:25 ◼ ► I feel like that first generation Vision Pro has the strong smell of idealized design decisions and philosophies that, uh, a hard core product person would like that.
01:35:42 ◼ ► The, the, the, the stitched, uh, back strap that doesn't really hold on most heads well versus what they, what Belkin shipped later.
01:35:50 ◼ ► Like that's a, I think that's a great example of somebody, I can hear Johnny Ive saying, oh, this 3d knitted, uh, fine strap is, is, uh, and it's, it's a beautiful piece of, uh, of, of art.
01:36:03 ◼ ► It is, it is a beautiful accessory, but it's totally impractical and it probably cost a fortune to make when all you really need is an adjustable two-way strap up there.
01:36:15 ◼ ► So, um, so, well, I mean, they shipped the two-way strap and the single strap, but what Belkin shipped is a top strap to go with it.
01:36:24 ◼ ► Like, again, I feel like Johnny Ive and the design people there were like, okay, we've got a philosophy.
01:36:37 ◼ ► And I would love to see a more practical, less elegant version of the Vision Pro that's lighter and cheaper, honestly.
01:36:44 ◼ ► Yeah. And like the Siri stuff, none of that is fast, but part of me thinks like, well, with new leadership, they may have different priorities and what, what's important.
01:36:55 ◼ ► Um, also that was mostly just a joke about how rocks are heavy, but you answered the question anyways.
01:37:05 ◼ ► Um, David writes, my kid is going off to college next year after using a Chromebook all through high school.
01:37:12 ◼ ► Obvious choice of the M4 MacBook Air, but I'm stuck on whether to upgrade to 24 gigs of RAM and possibly 500 gigs of storage.
01:37:17 ◼ ► I have no reason to believe this machine will be used for intensive 3D modeling or rendering large video files or photogrammetry, et cetera.
01:37:25 ◼ ► I've set aside the money and can't afford the upgrades, but I don't want to spend money unnecessarily.
01:37:35 ◼ ► My, my actual advice is find a refurbished M3 MacBook Air with more RAM and more storage because the CPU difference is not that great.
01:37:49 ◼ ► And thinking about something that's going to be used long term, uh, the storage feels important to me.
01:37:56 ◼ ► Just like thinking about what a lot of people typically do through college, maybe even after college, right?
01:38:01 ◼ ► You're out on your own, you know, family life, maybe potentially like, it just seems to me like the 256 could be limiting long term.
01:38:11 ◼ ► So if you've got like a top line budget, I look for a refurbished M3 with more storage and more memory.
01:38:22 ◼ ► I think if you're really bent on an M4 and you're choosing between RAM and storage, I think I would choose storage, but I don't know.
01:38:40 ◼ ► And, and if I had to answer this question directly, what I would say is I wouldn't worry too much about the RAM, but the storage you should upgrade.
01:38:46 ◼ ► Like if you're going to, if you're going to pay for an upgrade and you're only going to upgrade one, you should upgrade the storage because 256 look, if they're very cloud oriented, it may not matter, but it's so easy to blast through that.
01:38:57 ◼ ► And then you're, and then you're toting around an external drive on a laptop, which is less good.
01:39:21 ◼ ► These are open box for the most part where they just, they, um, they get opened and then they get returned and Apple can't sell them as new or they got used for a little bit, but like Apple's going to stand by it.
01:39:41 ◼ ► And all you're losing is that it's not an M4, but the difference between M3 and M4 is, you know, your kid is probably not going to run it lid open with two external devices.
01:39:53 ◼ ► It's a little bit faster, but again, they're so fast now that, that that's, so that's a good piece of advice.
01:39:58 ◼ ► Um, and then if you want to stick with the M4 and not go over the refurb route, I would say choose storage over.
01:40:23 ◼ ► And then you'll see like, there are a bunch of M2s and M3s there and they generally have pretty good deals.
01:40:31 ◼ ► So it may be that if your kid's going to cause next year, it may be, I mean, before long in a few months, there'll be M4 airs on the refurb store.
01:40:44 ◼ ► Um, and I think the other thing, it's not in the, it's not in the question, but I will just say this, having talked to a lot of listeners, probably worth the Apple care on a machine that's going to college just for the damage protection.
01:40:59 ◼ ► I know people feel differently about that, but it's like thinking about college kids, thinking about, you know, Oh man, may, may be worth it.
01:41:15 ◼ ► So when we got the MacBook pro for him, we bought, we bought Apple care for, for that one.
01:41:19 ◼ ► Cause I was like, this is not going to, this, this, it's going to be, uh, that poor computer.
01:41:33 ◼ ► David says, I've been an Apple user for the majority of my adult life and I have never thrown away any of the boxes or packages.
01:41:55 ◼ ► Like if you're watching on YouTube, this is a small fraction of my collection behind me.
01:42:13 ◼ ► I'll give it to a family member or occasionally I'll sell it and I want them to have the box.
01:42:36 ◼ ► But if you're doing it just because you've never gotten rid of them, like you can, you can let them go.
01:43:00 ◼ ► If you, if you don't have that product though, and you have the box, just the box should go away.
01:43:09 ◼ ► I try other than if the box is too big, but I try to keep the boxes of the products that I have.
01:43:23 ◼ ► In part, in part, because what happens is you use it and then you hold onto it a little bit
01:43:30 ◼ ► because it's still semi-current and I write about this stuff and it's very convenient to have.
01:43:41 ◼ ► And I ran tests on it for my M4 MacBook air review and really nice to hold onto those things.
01:43:50 ◼ ► And then by the time you think I don't really need to hold onto this anymore, it's so old that
01:43:55 ◼ ► So it's, it's a, it's a, our business makes this weirder, but I know like Dan Frakes, who
01:44:00 ◼ ► I used to work with at Mac world who works at Apple now, he always like keeps his boxes around,
01:45:07 ◼ ► Albert says, are you surprised the spinning beach ball on the Mac has never meaningly changed?
01:45:36 ◼ ► Using weird apps or sometime if there's like a weird network issue, like I see it sometimes
01:45:40 ◼ ► if I take my laptop that is mostly connected and I open it up, not connected and it's not
01:45:45 ◼ ► on wifi and it's got an existing like network connection and it's like, whoa, what happened?
01:46:05 ◼ ► So next step, if you look at this Wikipedia article, then I'm sure it'll be in the show
01:46:11 ◼ ► It goes back to next step and it came over and, you know, it got aquified and now we have
01:46:34 ◼ ► And I will also say that if you go back to classic Mac OS, uh, different apps had their
01:46:48 ◼ ► They used to have like the counting hand where a hand would literally like count on its fingers
01:47:01 ◼ ► They had a spinning, spinning globe that you would see in some apps and HyperCard had a
01:47:09 ◼ ► So there, there have been many weight cursers over the years and, uh, it's a, it's never reached
01:47:18 ◼ ► In fact, isn't there, wasn't there a, uh, an app that had a dog cow that did a backflip.
01:47:31 ◼ ► maybe similar to the dog cow, a dog that did, uh, backflips as you waited for your file
01:48:10 ◼ ► Well, thank you for listening to upgrade, uh, normally, but you don't have to listen to this