00:00:55 ◼ ► I'm going to be trying curling for the first time very soon after the years of wanting to.
00:01:34 ◼ ► And Lauren and I would watch the Winter Olympics curling, and we were fascinated by it.
00:01:44 ◼ ► And they're watchable and interesting, and we always thought about doing it, but it was always too far away.
00:01:51 ◼ ► And then the last Winter Olympics, four years ago, we discovered they had just opened a new facility in Oakland, which was drivable for us.
00:02:09 ◼ ► So we've been almost doing it for four years now, and we expect the club is gearing up for an influx of curious people around the Winter Olympics.
00:02:17 ◼ ► So we're trying to get that all set up so that we can make them our guests and hopefully convert some of them to become curlers, because it's fun.
00:02:28 ◼ ► I realize that it's such an outlier among people I know and I talk to, but it's really not any different than playing tennis or golf or bowling or whatever.
00:02:45 ◼ ► So I will also say that yesterday, I was playing third, which meant that I was doing a lot of sweeping.
00:03:01 ◼ ► But it's kind of funny, because if I'm skipping, if I'm calling the shots, my heart rate doesn't go up very much.
00:03:06 ◼ ► But we did so much sweeping on Sunday, and I looked, and I was in zone two for a very long time, which does not usually happen.
00:03:21 ◼ ► The problem is that you sweep and sweep and sweep, and then you're expected to immediately shoot.
00:03:25 ◼ ► And I was thinking it's like biathlon, you know, the sport where they make you ski a lot, and then you have to very precisely shoot a target.
00:03:35 ◼ ► It is bizarre, but when you think about it, you realize what it is, is they're going to get your heart rate up as high as possible, and then you have to hold absolutely still.
00:03:57 ◼ ► I think it's like soldiers in cold climates would have to be skilled at moving and shooting, right?
00:04:03 ◼ ► Like, anyway, curling, you know, if you've swept a lot and then you have to do a shot, it is very hard sometimes to not just chuck that thing as fast as possible, because your heart is raising.
00:04:21 ◼ ► And everybody else out there, maybe check out the curling at the Winter Olympics or just see if you've got a curling club near you.
00:04:50 ◼ ► If you have a snow talk question that you would like to hear us begin an episode with in the future, just go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send yours in.
00:05:01 ◼ ► It is that time, which means our campaign for the wonderful kids of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is drawing to a close, but there is still time left.
00:05:11 ◼ ► We're actually going to be keeping the campaign open until, I think, next Monday, but this will probably be the last time that we ask for your donations.
00:05:27 ◼ ► If you make a donation at stjude.org slash relay, click the blue button when you make your donation for donation matching.
00:05:34 ◼ ► Because your employer may have St. Jude in their donation matching program, and it will double your donation, which is fantastic.
00:05:43 ◼ ► You don't even have to do anything except click that button and, I think, fill out just a small amount of information, and your donation can be doubled.
00:05:49 ◼ ► We do this throughout all of September to raise support and awareness for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
00:06:07 ◼ ► I will never understand how that math works, but it is the seventh time that we've done this.
00:06:11 ◼ ► And in that time, Jason Snow, I am very happy to report that as of today, as a community, we have now passed over $4.7 million raised for the kids of St. Jude.
00:06:25 ◼ ► As we are very close to the time of recording this to $640,000 raised this year, thanks to the incredible generosity of our audience.
00:06:52 ◼ ► You know, looking after the families and also sharing the information that they have, including medicine worldwide.
00:06:59 ◼ ► So, for example, in April of 2025, St. Jude announced that childhood cancer medicines have been delivered to five countries, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, Nepal, and Zambia.
00:07:08 ◼ ► This effort is part of the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines, a collaboration between St. Jude, the World Health Organization, and other global partners.
00:07:17 ◼ ► And this initiative aims to reach more than 120,000 children in 50 countries in the next seven years.
00:07:24 ◼ ► And, you know, I know we talk about this a lot through the month, but we do it for a reason.
00:07:29 ◼ ► It's important to us to raise money, to, in part, thank St. Jude for saving Josiah Hackett's life, but also for, as the years have gone on, because of all of the things that we see that they do close at hand.
00:07:47 ◼ ► And we got to see Domino's Village this time, where I just, people have heard this throughout the month.
00:07:52 ◼ ► And, and, but just to restate this, they, they have, the coverage that, for the families who have children with cancer, we talk a lot about, like, they don't get any bills.
00:08:20 ◼ ► And so Domino's Village is a great example of, we went in there, you know, one, two, and three bedroom apartments with kitchens attached to a facility with lots of external rooms and a cafeteria and an outside play area.
00:08:36 ◼ ► And that's just there for families who are, are staying at St. Jude, I think presumably in that facility for a little more extended periods of time.
00:08:44 ◼ ► That means their kids are having treatment for a week or two or three or four, or, you know, even, even longer.
00:08:52 ◼ ► And, and they get a place to live because they don't have a place to live in Memphis and that's covered, right?
00:09:01 ◼ ► So St. Jude is covering the families and they're paying the doctors and they're paying the buildings full of researchers to do studies because they're not just treating kids, but they're also doing research to create new treatments.
00:09:14 ◼ ► It really is the more time I spend there, the more I realized that it is an A to Z, uh, kind of anti-cancer organization.
00:09:30 ◼ ► So if for any reason you've been thinking to yourself, I've been, I've got to donate this year, I've got to donate this year and you haven't, this is your last call to do that.
00:09:51 ◼ ► It doesn't matter how big, how small it truly doesn't because, you know, we could have tens of thousands of people giving small gifts and that goes an awful long way.
00:10:05 ◼ ► This community is not made up of a whole bunch of moneybags who are tossing in millions of dollars.
00:10:15 ◼ ► But when you talk to the people at St. Jude, what they will tell you is, uh, Relay's community is remarkable because, and so many of these online communities, the gamers that we meet with the game streamers.
00:10:26 ◼ ► Uh, at the, at the play live event that they do in the spring that we go to where we're the outliers because we're the tech podcasters among all these video game streamers.
00:10:34 ◼ ► But like the remarkable thing is we're all about those, those folks and us about bringing communities of people together who don't have a lot of money, but we'll reach into their pocket and make even, you know, lots and lots and lots of small notations make a difference too.
00:10:48 ◼ ► It doesn't always have to be, you know, the CEO of a big company who rolls in and puts his name on a sign.
00:10:55 ◼ ► Like, you know, I see, I do see this in other communities that we're part of, like they do a fundraiser and the platform that they're streaming to will donate a bunch of money or whatever.
00:11:07 ◼ ► This is our listeners who are connected with what we care about and then make donations.
00:11:25 ◼ ► So on last week's episode, we had a question about companies that could make Mac clones.
00:11:42 ◼ ► Just to go back, we'll talk about this more in a minute, but just to go back to last week's episode, which was great.
00:11:58 ◼ ► We had been in Memphis for almost a week, including a couple of rehearsal days, a 12 hour long podcast-a-thon day, followed up by an early wake-up call the next day to go to sit in the 90 degree humidity in the sun to watch a college football game.
00:12:16 ◼ ► And predating the recording of that episode, we spent like an hour trying to figure out how we were going to shoot video and hook up all this stuff and move furniture in your room and all of that.
00:12:28 ◼ ► I'm just saying, this follow-up is really good and I appreciate everybody here for supporting us because I was definitely a bear of very little brain during that episode.
00:13:39 ◼ ► You don't want to make a thermos with a Mac inside of it because it would get real hot.
00:13:45 ◼ ► We have Chris recommended a company called Joseph Joseph, which I don't know if you know
00:14:06 ◼ ► I would just say there's a point of order in the Discord from Zoe saying Mac clone doesn't
00:14:14 ◼ ► I would say, Zoe, that everybody here is suggesting what they would like, not what they think would
00:14:27 ◼ ► It makes me think that what I should have said last week is obviously Marc Jacobs, because
00:14:34 ◼ ► then we could have had like a Mac by Mac from Marc Jacobs, courtesy of Marc Jacobs by Mac concerted
00:15:23 ◼ ► I think you may have a Fellow product that you might not know that you have, Jason, which
00:15:55 ◼ ► I mean, they could stick a whole Mac Pro inside one of those little canisters if they wanted
00:16:38 ◼ ► Specifically, Jason, you will like this because they do multiple limited edition colors a year.
00:16:45 ◼ ► I think we're all in agreement that a company that is going to have lots of colors would be a winner.
00:16:53 ◼ ► And actually, that was one of the things that Stefan said because Framework just did a bunch of colors on their laptops.
00:17:10 ◼ ► What is your final verdict on Final Cut Camera and Final Cut for iPad for making last week's episode?
00:17:18 ◼ ► It was like left as a cliffhanger for the listener about we didn't know what was going to happen.
00:17:23 ◼ ► I'm going to write about this, too, I think, because I have not seen a lot of real-world experience with this.
00:17:32 ◼ ► Because remember, in, I would say, spring of 24, Apple did the, because it was the thing where I went to New York,
00:17:40 ◼ ► and they did a demo in New York at their thing about the new iPad and Final Cut Camera.
00:17:45 ◼ ► And so the idea was you set up an iPad and a bunch of cameras, and you can use the iPad to, like, view what the cameras are seeing live and adjust their settings and all of that,
00:17:53 ◼ ► which I was looking forward to doing while we recorded until we realized that we couldn't connect a third camera.
00:17:59 ◼ ► And so I had to use the iPad as a camera, which means that I couldn't control it while we were going.
00:18:11 ◼ ► And, like, it just, you know, you could say, like, maybe because it was my phone and Jason's camera, but I had three phones or whatever.
00:18:29 ◼ ► But so what we got out of it, for people who don't know, the other thing that was funny is I described this to people and they didn't know this thing existed.
00:18:36 ◼ ► It's a thing that Apple announced that's pretty cool and that nobody seems to have remembered, which is Final Cut Camera is not just a camera app on your iPhone.
00:18:44 ◼ ► If you use it with Final Cut Pro on the iPad, there is a mode in which Final Cut Camera sends a, streams a signal to the iPad.
00:19:03 ◼ ► And the iPad will be able to remotely control the settings on the cameras and set what they, what, how they're all set up and then record.
00:19:12 ◼ ► And it streams it all live to the iPad and then at the end when you're done, it's, it streams the full quality version.
00:19:20 ◼ ► It's like a proxy version, but it will record super high, you know, 4K, I think HDR and transfer that afterward.
00:19:27 ◼ ► And honestly, by the time we finished Upgrade Plus, because I stopped when we were done with Upgrade, by the time we finished Upgrade Plus, all of the high-res video files had transferred.
00:19:42 ◼ ► At the airport, I went to my favorite place in the Memphis airport, which is, there's a little brew pub by gate six.
00:19:57 ◼ ► I'm sitting there waiting for my flight and I get out the iPad and my AirPods and I start editing.
00:20:05 ◼ ► And Mike, by the time I went to board my flight, the beer was gone and the podcast was about 80% done.
00:20:18 ◼ ► So you had two processed audio files of you and me that we sent on to Jim, our audio editor.
00:20:27 ◼ ► So in the Final Cut project, you get a multicam clip, which basically is like up to, in this case, up to four.
00:20:34 ◼ ► It was three different cameras, two iPhones and the iPad itself, which was the two-shot.
00:20:54 ◼ ► But the key central part of this is I can see the multicam clip and there, and you can bring up like a little multicam switcher.
00:21:00 ◼ ► And then there's like the two audio files because it was both of us on separate audio files.
00:21:10 ◼ ► And that meant I didn't have to watch the whole show in order to direct what camera we were going to use.
00:21:30 ◼ ► I want to recommend if you, even if you don't want to watch the episode, I recommend going to, and I'll say if you're, uh, if you're an upgrade plus subscriber, then you wouldn't have seen this.
00:22:00 ◼ ► And at that point I just, I just opened it over the table and stared at you and you, and so that moment, which was very funny, that's an example because I, I had just lived it.
00:22:19 ◼ ► And then, so I did that in a few places, but mostly I was able to just use our audio tracks and, and get the, and get the back and forth ready to go.
00:22:35 ◼ ► Um, I was worried about the speed of the transfer and the fact that I had to get to the airport.
00:22:47 ◼ ► My mistake is because we were so flustered because we, we ended up having to use the iPad.
00:22:52 ◼ ► I didn't set the iPad to record at SDR, which meant I had an HDR project with SDR video in it.
00:23:04 ◼ ► And I did not have the time or inclination to figure out how to adjust the brightness on clips in final cut on an iPad.
00:23:19 ◼ ► I think the alternative was literally just setting up a phone on a tripod and doing a two shot of it.
00:23:30 ◼ ► If I need to capture video in a live setting, this is how I will do it because it really was quite good.
00:23:41 ◼ ► So assuming that we could successfully pair the phones, it was a, it worked out really well.
00:24:00 ◼ ► You can also, you can subscribe to final cut pro for iPad for $5 a month and then just cancel it after a month.
00:24:17 ◼ ► Cause I wasn't able to compose it with me sitting in the chair and I was able to zoom in a little bit and figure out how to do that again, figure out how to do that on an iPad.
00:24:28 ◼ ► Um, and yeah, so it was a, it was a cool experiment that also generated a unique video clip or video, uh, episode of upgrade for those who partake of such a thing, but it was fun to do just as an experiment as well.
00:24:44 ◼ ► Uh, we had an anonymous, uh, person right in to say, I worked for one of the big three us telecom carriers and have heard that over the first 72 hours of pre-orders, the air made up less than 5% of sales.
00:24:58 ◼ ► Uh, this also matches a statistic that MKBHD shared and in his video about the 17 pro from dbrand and like dbrand their case sales, 5% of that makeup was the air.
00:25:11 ◼ ► Uh, he didn't do a very good job of talking about this statistic in his video, I think to kind of, he extrapolated it out further than I, I think makes sense.
00:25:23 ◼ ► This is one of the reasons I wanted to tell this together, uh, on Macworld about kind of like how the shape of iPhone sales and I want to really quote from, from your, uh, piece.
00:25:33 ◼ ► The problem with reports about early iPhone sales is, isn't that they're untrue, but that they're out of context.
00:25:40 ◼ ► The type of people who rush into Apple stores in mid-September to buy new iPhones are not the same people who are buying iPhones the rest of the year.
00:25:48 ◼ ► I, I, I think it's, you know, it's that thing where on one level you get a sample and if it's a representative sample, that's all you need.
00:25:57 ◼ ► And people are always skeptical about that, but having seen how like online polls work in representative communities, I will, I will say it's not always the case.
00:26:06 ◼ ► But generally if I open an online poll somewhere, you know, or I'm a participant in one and I can see it, you, you, you do that for a day and then you can leave it open for another week.
00:26:17 ◼ ► And unless there's, unless somebody like brings in their community to skew the results or something.
00:26:22 ◼ ► The point is, once you reach a sample size that is representative, the numbers aren't going to change.
00:26:27 ◼ ► Uh, 500 people who are a representative sample come and vote on something and then you get 5,000.
00:26:49 ◼ ► And, and, and I will also say the air is in a slot that is the worst selling of the four because it's always been the worst selling of the four.
00:26:56 ◼ ► And one of the things we don't know here is, is this worse or better than the plus or the mini?
00:27:01 ◼ ► But what I will say is I strongly suspect that the 17 and the air will sell better from December on than they are right now.
00:27:16 ◼ ► And that's because the people who buy iPhones in September and October are people who really want the new iPhone.
00:27:29 ◼ ► And so I think this is worth watching because we don't know that, that, um, it may be a flop.
00:27:36 ◼ ► It was, like I said, it was already in the slot of two phones that if you want, you can call flops that were not good enough for Apple to maintain.
00:27:43 ◼ ► But I feel like the air is going to get a little bit of wind in its sails from people seeing it and also from random, this effect, the random people on the street who need a new iPhone and they roll in, in March to an Apple store and they go, whoa, what's this?
00:28:00 ◼ ► And they're upgrading from an older phone and they just, and, and because of their priorities, they, they, it's not as much of a compromise and they really like how, how thin and light it is.
00:28:10 ◼ ► And that, that is a, that is a, if this is a phone that is all about the vibes and not about the specs, then the people in our community who are all about the specs, of course, are not going to like it, but that there is a, probably a broader community.
00:28:24 ◼ ► The point of my pie chart that I did is 40% of iPhone sale or iPhone revenue happens in Q3 and Q4 of Apple's fiscal year.
00:28:38 ◼ ► And that's something that's always important to keep in mind is that first quarter, 36%, it's true.
00:28:56 ◼ ► In fact, you could say 64% of iPhones sold are roughly two thirds are not now in this high season for iPhones.
00:29:10 ◼ ► I think because of the newness of it and because of the holidays, I think that those are the things that drive it, but the rest of the year, they're still selling iPhones.
00:29:29 ◼ ► This may also be one of the reasons that Apple's okay with doing a spring release of some of the iPhones that we've talked about over the last few years is the 16e came out in the spring.
00:30:02 ◼ ► That is also a product and we'll see how it does, but maybe its existence is more like nobody should buy a product because it's strategic for Apple.
00:30:17 ◼ ► So more, more later on all of this, but I just, I wanted to, I did go through the numbers in a way that I had never done it before just to see like what percentage of iPhone sales really do happen in that peak period.
00:30:28 ◼ ► And you could say, yes, there's a week or two that's actually in Q3, um, uh, the right at the very beginning.
00:30:34 ◼ ► And it's like, it's never a whole lot, but there is some there, but you know, even if you say that 20% of the sales are in Q4 where there is nothing happening.
00:30:51 ◼ ► So where everybody in theory can, and most people do know there's a new iPhone every year,
00:31:04 ◼ ► So anyway, that's the, uh, that, that was my, I wanted to check and see because I knew that that was the case, but I wanted to put numbers on it of, of how, even when the iPhone is seasonal and everybody in our community feels like they're buying a new iPhone.
00:31:18 ◼ ► There are an awful lot of people who buy new iPhones in March and May and July, even though it's almost September in July, they're still just buying a, they just need a new iPhone.
00:31:34 ◼ ► I think it's something for us in the tech forward bubble to keep in mind that there are some people who just don't care like we care.
00:31:47 ◼ ► My, my kind of gut feeling on the air is that it, it will outsell the plus and the mini purely because people are talking about this phone.
00:32:06 ◼ ► I don't remember the last time anyone really put that much attention in talking about the iPhone plus model.
00:32:15 ◼ ► I don't know how much of this is, is now kind of received wisdom and narrative versus reality, but the story goes, this is the, there's a good rest is history thing, Mike.
00:32:27 ◼ ► It's the, you know, stories tell us that it's the, that's the cue when the historians are like, oh, this is probably made up.
00:32:35 ◼ ► Um, the, the narrative goes that there are certain markets and those stats were from an American carrier, right?
00:32:41 ◼ ► The, the stories go that in certain markets, new looking phones sell better because there's a greater element of desire to be seen with, or to have, I don't want to judge why, but like to have.
00:32:59 ◼ ► And so if you have a really amazing iPhone, but it looks exactly the same as last year's, there's less motivation to update.
00:33:04 ◼ ► And if that's true in certain markets, presumably the air is going to sell better in those markets.
00:33:50 ◼ ► And with eCAM, you can screen share, use multiple cameras, and even direct the show in real time with their live camera switcher.
00:33:56 ◼ ► It's great for simplifying your workflow, too, because you can do everything with the eCAM app.
00:34:01 ◼ ► You get started quickly and have everything on hand to create whatever you need with video.
00:34:09 ◼ ► When you do your live streams for every quarterly earnings results, you're using eCAM, right?
00:34:18 ◼ ► I get Dan Morin in either on Zoom, which it integrates with, or on eCAM's own video call platform, which they have connected to live.
00:34:30 ◼ ► And then I got the charts in a window, and I've laid out the whole canvas there, and it's a really friendly experience.
00:34:41 ◼ ► And I actually have multiple YouTube channels connected to it, and I have multiple layouts.
00:34:49 ◼ ► Profiles in eCAM Live, something like that, where I've got sort of like pre-laid out for the D&D with all the branding, all the graphics, and for six colors with all the graphics.
00:35:06 ◼ ► I've used a bunch of these options, and I like eCAM Live because it feels so familiar to me.
00:35:12 ◼ ► It's a great Mac app, and it feels like it, and I feel like there's no compromise in terms of performance.
00:35:27 ◼ ► You can drop in video clips, bring in interview guests, use a green screen, and so much more.
00:35:33 ◼ ► eCAM's members are marketing professionals, podcasters like us, musicians, church leaders, bloggers like Jason, and content creators of all kinds.
00:35:41 ◼ ► If you're on the pro-level plan, you can enjoy eCAM for Zoom, where you automatically send eCAM Live's audio and video output into a Zoom meeting, Zoom webinar, or a Zoom event.
00:35:50 ◼ ► And you can add up to eight Zoom participants as camera sources in your broadcast or recording.
00:35:55 ◼ ► You can automatically create individual recordings for those, too, and add Zoom chat messages to your broadcast or recording as text overlays.
00:36:10 ◼ ► That's a whole month free of eCAM Live at eCAM.com slash UpgradeFM with the code UpgradeFM.
00:36:20 ◼ ► So when we spoke last week, Jason, your iPhone review units had not yet arrived of you.
00:36:27 ◼ ► They were on your way to your home, and we were in a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, which is not where your phones were.
00:36:55 ◼ ► But what I have done is, when it came last Monday, I transferred the Air from my old phone.
00:37:19 ◼ ► Look, if I have to prioritize, based on my interest and the interests of the world, a phone that is new and interesting in a lot of ways, especially considering that I have to make—this is the case of anybody who isn't an embargo reviewer, right?
00:37:48 ◼ ► And I don't know what my angle is, but it's like, well, I'm going to start with the most interesting phone, which is this Air.
00:37:56 ◼ ► And I had a week, and I've started to—the parts of my brain—somebody was asking me last week about it, and I was like, I don't know.
00:38:05 ◼ ► I think, you know, yesterday I was thinking, I think I actually could write something about the Air now because I spent a week with it.
00:38:12 ◼ ► And then I can move on because, you know, I'm looking forward to moving on to my, you know, magical orange thing that I've got here in my hand right now, which I haven't even turned on.
00:38:29 ◼ ► Because, yeah, it is—for specialists like us, even, it's the most interesting because it's the most novel.
00:38:45 ◼ ► But that was the decision point when I got them was, well, of course it's going to be the Air.
00:38:54 ◼ ► Yeah, and it's novel in ways that I don't necessarily think that we would have assumed.
00:39:02 ◼ ► Like, it is a very capable phone in a way that maybe it didn't need to be to still do what it's doing, right, which is to be thin and light.
00:39:19 ◼ ► There are things this phone has which are, if they didn't have them, we would have excused it because it was so thin and light, I feel like.
00:39:29 ◼ ► I think the ProMotion—I mean, this is the year that ProMotion and Always On came to the 17 as well.
00:39:38 ◼ ► And I don't know whether this is connected or not, but one of the thoughts that I've had is that if you're trying to induce Air purchases from Pro users, which I don't know if they are or not.
00:39:56 ◼ ► I mean, I would imagine Apple makes more profit on a Pro or a Pro Max than on an Air because presumably the margins on this are worse for now.
00:40:05 ◼ ► It would have to be. It's brand new, right? The amount of R&D that went into the things is going to mess it up.
00:40:11 ◼ ► Exactly. I mean, it's hard to measure because they're also, I think, very clearly headed in the direction for the whole line.
00:40:16 ◼ ► And this investment in this design is investing in lots of technologies that are going in other places.
00:40:21 ◼ ► But I think if you didn't have the Always On display in ProMotion, it would be almost impossible to make a case for anybody who is a Pro user to consider the Air instead.
00:40:34 ◼ ► I think they did—this is—I don't know if this is the reason, but this was the perfect year to do that, bringing down at the screen and having everybody get the selfie camera.
00:40:46 ◼ ► All the things that make the 17 so much better than the 16 also make the Air a more viable product than it would have otherwise.
00:40:54 ◼ ► I think—or to put it another way, for $1,000, this thing better have a lot of good features, right?
00:41:08 ◼ ► Like, if it was that, if it was literally compromised like the 16, it's just a much harder sell.
00:41:22 ◼ ► That part doesn't matter so much because even the standard chip is so solid that it doesn't really matter, I think.
00:41:34 ◼ ► I think that that will drive some people away from it, but at least they got the screen right.
00:41:44 ◼ ► I mean, the things that people have hung up on, but I kind of want to get your feeling on the—just the overall feel of the device, the thinness, the lightness, the screen size.
00:41:52 ◼ ► Like, what has been your experience making this your primary phone for the last seven days?
00:42:02 ◼ ► Because I transferred all of my Overcast podcasts that were loaded to my Apple Watch, the downloaded ones were gone.
00:42:29 ◼ ► And I think it's a combination of it being thin and light and also maybe a little wider, so it actually kind of fills my pocket width-wise a little bit, so it's not rattling around as much.
00:42:46 ◼ ► Holding it in my hand, you know, just between my fingers, holding it in my hand, it just feels so good.
00:42:53 ◼ ► That thinness, it has a science fiction almost quality to it, the idea that I'm just holding a bare screen.
00:42:58 ◼ ► And yeah, there's a bump at the top, but I don't hold it at the bump, except if I want to get some extra leverage, in which case I put my finger up at the top,
00:43:10 ◼ ► However, speaking of extra leverage, I will say, this is a wider phone than the Pro, right?
00:43:19 ◼ ► And while the screen is really nice, as somebody who's been using a Pro for the last couple of years, up from the Mini,
00:43:33 ◼ ► I think there's some muscle memory going on there, but it also reminds me of when I've used some other larger phones,
00:43:38 ◼ ► where I feel like I'm doing a lot of, like, shimmying with my fingers and propping with my back index finger.
00:43:46 ◼ ► And I don't think about how often I try to use my phone one-handed, but this week I've been thinking about it a lot,
00:43:58 ◼ ► because I've struggled to use it one-handed, because of the way everything, the grip is different, and it's wider,
00:44:05 ◼ ► and I struggle to get to the top, and I'm trying to shimmy the phone up in my hands so I can tap with my thumb.
00:44:10 ◼ ► And then my thumb doesn't quite reach, because it's, you know, over, too far away, because the phone is wider.
00:44:19 ◼ ► That's the aspect of the ergonomics that I didn't really realize, is it's a wider phone, and I can feel it.
00:44:24 ◼ ► Yeah, I, in using the Air, I am reminded of the reason that I switched from the Max to the Pro, right?
00:44:35 ◼ ► And I'm very aware of the fact that the Pro Max, it is a two-handed device, like, that's kind of the way you have to use it.
00:44:43 ◼ ► And I knew that the life I was heading towards was a one-handed device with holding a baby, which is why I went down to the Pro.
00:44:51 ◼ ► And I am reminded of this when using this phone, but the difference of being, like, remembering what it was like to use the Max is that
00:44:59 ◼ ► I am aware of the fact that the screen is larger, but I don't notice it as often, because it's easier to hold than a Pro Max is.
00:45:11 ◼ ► Because of the thinness and lightness, like, it's easier to kind of maneuver my hand around.
00:45:20 ◼ ► Like, I ended up, I mean, this is how I use my phones anyway, but on my Air, I have a pop socket on the back now, like I always do.
00:45:29 ◼ ► And the combination of the pop socket and the kind of the iconic plateau is enough to kind of make it easy-ish to hold.
00:46:07 ◼ ► But, obviously, it changes the usability of the device, because basically nobody can use it completely one-handed.
00:46:16 ◼ ► And just from a physics perspective, increasing the screen size, every little bit you increase the screen size increases the battery a lot.
00:46:49 ◼ ► Other than the weird kind of ergonomic issues that I've faced and tried to get over, and I'm sure I would get over it.
00:46:58 ◼ ► I'm sure I would internalize all these little finger moves that I remember from previous phones, but haven't had to deal with with the latest pros.
00:47:09 ◼ ► Because I got over it when we went to larger phones from smaller phones, and you just kind of get over it.
00:47:29 ◼ ► Like, I already was at the case where if I was going to go somewhere and I was really worried about running out of battery in the middle of the trip, I would bring a battery.
00:47:44 ◼ ► I'm somebody who works at home and does not spend lots and lots of time outside of my house where the battery life would be an issue.
00:47:51 ◼ ► I'm saying, for me, I'm the kind of iPhone user who doesn't care so much about extended battery life, as long as I'm near a charger or I can bring a battery with me.
00:48:12 ◼ ► And I was sitting there and I was getting texts from Casey and Steven about college football.
00:48:22 ◼ ► And then I realized what I should do is send them a tandem video from the ballpark with me in the corner and a video of the ballpark.
00:49:13 ◼ ► And, again, I say, for some people, it's good enough to be worth having this futuristic experience.
00:49:20 ◼ ► But I keep coming back, Mike, to the original MacBook Air, where it felt simultaneously like the future and also like you were, it was too early.
00:49:33 ◼ ► It was just, there were so many, I mean, the word that I used over and over again in those reviews in the early days of the MacBook Air was compromise.
00:50:00 ◼ ► And yet it's also so amazing to have this light thing in your pocket or especially between, you know, your fingers.
00:50:25 ◼ ► You and I have been talking for ages now about how it's very clearly also a stake in the ground so that they can have technology to build toward that enables a folding iPhone down the road.
00:50:38 ◼ ► Like one of the ways you get there is by putting your engineers through the question of like, how do we make a single iPhone plane that is this thin?
00:50:49 ◼ ► And have it not bend and have it have good heat, good enough heat characteristics, let's say, and battery and camera.
00:51:05 ◼ ► I think this is definitely the direction they're going with something like a folding phone.
00:51:25 ◼ ► And what I'm not saying is Apple is going to inflict a low featured product on everybody next year.
00:51:31 ◼ ► But what I'm saying is, like the iPhone X, Apple is test driving new functionality here that it will apply to solving, just like how the MacBook Air influenced the MacBook Pro.
00:51:42 ◼ ► The MacBook Pro is still not thicker than the MacBook, or still thicker than the MacBook Air.
00:51:58 ◼ ► And the idea here, where you're trying to build a battery and display plane that is so thin, and that you are starting to load more technology up into the bump, which is the iPhone equivalent of the wedge on the MacBook Air.
00:52:18 ◼ ► I don't think, because I always hear from people who are like, I just want a thick, heavy phone.
00:52:23 ◼ ► And it's like, okay, there's some truth to that, but I would say you got the dimensions wrong.
00:52:30 ◼ ► The thing that we've really learned is that you can never make a phone with a big enough screen.
00:52:46 ◼ ► And if you're doing that, like, again, the MacBook Pro is not the MacBook Air, but having a way to manage battery and thinness is important to lots and lots of people.
00:52:58 ◼ ► And, you know, Apple could ship a MacBook Pro today that's an inch thick and has battery life for a week.
00:53:08 ◼ ► And by seeking the technologies in the air, they are trying to find that balance or the pieces that will allow them to recalculate their balance.
00:53:19 ◼ ► Because they know that a lot of people want more battery life and they're not giving it to them.
00:53:24 ◼ ► But if they can give it to them and make it a little thinner and make it a little lighter, over time, that is a great advantage for them.
00:53:45 ◼ ► But honestly, for me, it's primarily about that width thing and not about the rest of it.
00:53:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I think, like, people, when they're asking for a thick phone, what they want is the features that it provides.
00:54:02 ◼ ► But I think what we're both saying here is the hope is Apple can maintain the feature set, but use this, all this, their learning technology-wise to make all the phones thinner.
00:54:54 ◼ ► It has something, like, the iPhone X was fundamentally different because it had a full screen, right?
00:55:01 ◼ ► This is fundamentally different because it is unbelievably thin for what is in it, right?
00:55:08 ◼ ► Where, like, realistically, you're losing out on one or two cameras, depending on how you would judge it,
00:55:47 ◼ ► And they just, maybe I'm talking too much about this, but, like, I see so many reactions to people
00:55:59 ◼ ► But it is a little bit like somebody with a 12-inch powerbook saying, Apple's going to take away my 12-inch powerbook.
00:56:07 ◼ ► And it's like, well, they are, but they're going to replace it with a powerbook that's like a quarter of the thickness and has a 13-inch high resolution.
00:56:19 ◼ ► And this is how, like, you know, those people complain, like, the iPhone's really boring.
00:56:35 ◼ ► Because then you're no longer on, oh, my God, we discovered a new category, and now we can invent things for it, and it's going to be great.
00:56:43 ◼ ► But the truth is that once all that is gone, you are back to being at the pace of innovation, at the pace of tech innovation.
00:56:51 ◼ ► Not at the pace of pulling things off of, you know, oh, we'll use this tech from over here, and yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great.
00:56:59 ◼ ► And it becomes, oh, we've already stuffed a lot of cameras in there, but how do we go from 24 to 48 megapixels, and what does that sensor look like, and do we need a tetraprism?
00:57:08 ◼ ► And so it's fair to say that, like, the iPhone X was the last time Apple really kind of broke open the iPhone and started rethinking it to the point where they sold the old model as well, right?
00:57:24 ◼ ► And then over time, all that stuff got interspersed to the point where now today's iPhone 17 has all of the contents of the iPhone X, right?
00:57:36 ◼ ► And it is the iPhone, and it's not identical to the iPhone X, but it has become the iPhone.
00:57:43 ◼ ► The Air is like that, where it's like we are seeing Apple figure out problems that will allow it to apply those answers to other products, and the products will change and improve over time.
00:57:55 ◼ ► And that's what makes it, like you said, interesting in a way, different in a way, that is impressive and that we haven't seen in, you know, seven or eight years.
00:58:07 ◼ ► And, you know, not that there isn't progress, but mostly it's sort of slow, iterative progress.
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00:59:28 ◼ ► We do a lot of these ads where it's like, oh, I received a podcast box, and now we'll speak about the podcast box.
00:59:53 ◼ ► But I will tell you, we had a skip week a couple weeks ago, and we have a skip week this week because we're traveling next weekend.
01:00:15 ◼ ► We don't get seven meals a week from HelloFresh, but it is so nice because I'm working in the garage all day.
01:00:24 ◼ ► Then she gets home, and I come out of the garage, and we're like, and it's dinner, and you've got to make dinner, right?
01:00:52 ◼ ► And then you can make that yourself and enhance your repertoire, and that's really nice.
01:01:05 ◼ ► I'd say no, but when we skip it, we feel it because it is such a great way to ensure that we're making meals every day, which we're going to do anyway.
01:01:18 ◼ ► We make the meals, but it's such a relief to not be like, oh, no, I can't make that because I don't have that ingredient.
01:01:28 ◼ ► If there's meat or pasta or whatever, it's in the box, and you put it in the fridge as well, and then you get it all out, and then you get the pleasure, I would say, of producing that meal more or less from scratch.
01:01:45 ◼ ► It's like there's a pepper, and there's an onion, and, you know, there's a sauce packet.
01:01:55 ◼ ► I can put that on my shopping list and go to the store, which is also cool, but it means that we don't, you know, there are three meals a week that we don't have to meal plan, other than the meal planning of going to their website and choosing from their vast array of choices for every given week, which is more of a pleasure than a chore.
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01:02:36 ◼ ► So I have been using the, I guess I should explain, I have an Air and a Pro, I think I kind of spoke about this last week, but the Air is kind of becoming my work device.
01:02:48 ◼ ► You know, I've been using an Android phone for the last six months or so as a work device, and now I'm moving some of that over to my Air.
01:02:55 ◼ ► Plus, it is already being incredibly helpful for the stuff that I'm doing with CrossFord, which is having a device that I have set up in my family, but as a new user.
01:03:07 ◼ ► So it doesn't have any of my stuff in it, because this was becoming a problem for me of like, you open the photo picker and here's pictures of my baby that I don't want in a video that will be seen by millions of people, right?
01:03:19 ◼ ► So I now have like a completely like silo device, but then also putting it in my family plan means that I benefit from things that I've purchased already.
01:03:39 ◼ ► And I will say, I understand why some people will say, after a few days, this orange is too much for me.
01:03:54 ◼ ► Where me and you have been talking for years now on this show, spearheading with the color czar idea that Apple just need to put colors on the Pro phones.
01:04:07 ◼ ► I would say they maybe went a little too far, like further than they needed to go with this orange and like by and also removing a kind of neutral, like black or gray.
01:04:25 ◼ ► I love looking at my phone and seeing like a band of orange going all the way around it.
01:04:33 ◼ ► And I don't think there has ever been a back of an iPhone that looks better than this one.
01:05:01 ◼ ► I know that there's some people who don't want any color at all and they really want it to be gray or, or, or black.
01:05:06 ◼ ► And I think it's a little curious that they didn't offer it in gray or black, but only in that dark blue, um, which I think is very pretty.
01:05:12 ◼ ► And in any other year I would have been very happy to get, but like the point is you should offer a silver, silvery white phone.
01:05:19 ◼ ► You should probably offer a black or dark gray phone, but like let people have some color choice in their life.
01:05:33 ◼ ► It's like, nobody is making you buy an orange phone by your boring colored phone by the silver phone, which I think also looks fantastic.
01:05:41 ◼ ► This is like when I said that the IMAX came in six colors and also silver, which is not a color and people are offended.
01:06:03 ◼ ► I, I think there are lots of people who would look at this orange and be like, Whoa, that is too much.
01:06:17 ◼ ► I would be, I would not be surprised if it, if it becomes kind of like a reference point, like a little bit iconic.
01:06:36 ◼ ► I think it'd be incredibly weird to not, I mean, cause this is the benefit of them moving back to aluminum.
01:06:41 ◼ ► They have more, it is easier for them to produce a range of color in their product, in the profiles again.
01:06:55 ◼ ► And you can look at the iMacs too, but look at the iPods and see all the bright colors that they've got there.
01:07:25 ◼ ► Now, the brilliant thing about how this is built is even if you put a case on it, you get the big plateau just sticking out there with its big expanse of anodized orange aluminum.
01:07:43 ◼ ► And around the front of the phone, you see the orange bracketing it, and it just looks so good.
01:07:57 ◼ ► But I'm enthusiastic most about the concept of offering a bright color in an iPhone Pro.
01:08:06 ◼ ► I've also been really taken by the industrial feel of this phone in the days that I've been using it, where it is thick and heavy,
01:08:24 ◼ ► It's like one of those wide pencils that workers use when they're cutting wood or carpenters or slicing up drywall or something.
01:08:37 ◼ ► Like, I know we're talking about high technology here, but yet there is a little bit of that vibe, right?
01:08:58 ◼ ► But I, you know, even though it has got that kind of, like, heft to it, the way that it looks and feels in my hand, like, the way the edges feel, the density, the way that the plateau feels, like, it actually works together.
01:09:43 ◼ ► And this actually will bring me to a question from Ben, who asked if we could speak to the scratch or durability concerns of the 17 Pro phones that have been found in Apple stores.
01:09:56 ◼ ► Apple has responded to this saying that there is some weird thing going on in their Apple stores, that they're leaving marks on the phones.
01:10:42 ◼ ► I have no doubt that there is something to the fact that certain parts of the anodization probably are more, you know, liable to get scratched than other parts of the anodization are up around the corner, the curve of the plateau.
01:10:58 ◼ ► But, Mike, it's hard for me to find a story that I have more contempt for than a whole bunch of people trying to find a gate, trying to make a scratch gate a thing.
01:11:12 ◼ ► I will share here my little pet theory that I shared on Connected, which is this is only taking off because everybody was really excited about bending the air, and that didn't happen.
01:11:27 ◼ ► So now the people that really want to talk about – because every year there has to be a gate, right?
01:11:31 ◼ ► Because there is like a whole industry of people, and it's getting worse with social media, especially threads.
01:11:45 ◼ ► And so like people want to find these things, and it's like because the air doesn't bend, well, I guess we'll find the next thing, and it turns out that it's possible to scratch an iPhone.
01:11:58 ◼ ► You can see the dynamic, the economic dynamic on YouTube thumbnails because that's where I see it.
01:12:18 ◼ ► But this time of year, every thumbnail is some person – I almost said a bad word – some person holding an iPhone with a big arrow, making a face like they are smelling a dead fish.
01:12:38 ◼ ► And then the title of it will be, iPhone Review Impressions Power at a Price or something like that.
01:13:05 ◼ ► And you have to – the spotlight, that same thing that I talk about with the Apple events being – the iPhone events being so important.
01:13:15 ◼ ► And if you're somebody who makes your money creating engagement in one way or another or makes your brand or however it is, now is the time you do it.
01:13:32 ◼ ► But instead, it's scratches, mild scratches at a certain level of hardness on a certain part of an anodized aluminum.
01:13:53 ◼ ► And I think that I've gotten to the point where I just can't evaluate the cameras on these phones anymore in a way which is helpful.
01:14:07 ◼ ► And I think that the problems – or like what I perceive as problems with Apple's cameras, it actually takes a really long time for me to realize a change.
01:14:27 ◼ ► So like the base – like I was – you know, we went out yesterday and I was taking a bunch of pictures walking around the park.
01:14:41 ◼ ► I don't really feel like I can say this is – I cannot discern the differences year over year.
01:14:51 ◼ ► Like I can tell you that I prefer the 4X over the 5X lens just because I didn't like how far the jump to 5 was.
01:15:09 ◼ ► But the big thing about the cameras is just a selfie camera, having the options on the selfie camera, they didn't exist before at all.
01:15:41 ◼ ► People who are angry about – don't call it an optical quality zoom because it's not optical.
01:15:54 ◼ ► But like when you've got 48 megapixels of resolution, even the digital crop looks pretty good.
01:16:16 ◼ ► But I agree with you in general for the last few years, I used to spend a lot of time doing photo testing.
01:16:35 ◼ ► And I rely on people like Tyler Stallman or Sebastian DeVit to talk about who both posted reviews.
01:16:45 ◼ ► People like that who really know photography to talk about how they've reacted to the camera.
01:16:53 ◼ ► Now, they're also content creators who are going to, you know, to, you know, go to Iceland to shoot.
01:17:02 ◼ ► But like I rely on those people who know what they're talking about to show me the differences that they're perceiving in it.
01:17:12 ◼ ► But it is also telling that it's at such a high level now that we can all kind of just say, OK, iPhone cameras are good.
01:17:24 ◼ ► But otherwise, and the fact that the new 48 megapixel zoom camera gives you reach because you can go 4X or even digital crop to 8X.
01:17:34 ◼ ► Like there has to be, for me, things that are functionally different or didn't exist before for me to really be able to be like, OK, this is this is a nice thing to have.
01:17:45 ◼ ► But like, like photographic styles for me was one of those because I got to tune my image to look the way that I want it to look.
01:18:21 ◼ ► Why they did it is the way an image gets processed is based on choices made by the people who build the image pipeline.
01:18:29 ◼ ► And Apple got tired of getting dinged because people would look at a different choice made on a different phone and say, I like that better than Apple's choice.
01:18:42 ◼ ► And it was, it's a little like Steve Jobs saying, you can have a bumper case if you want it.
01:18:50 ◼ ► And, but the truth of it is, yeah, if you spend time once going through photographic styles and picking your default photographic style and having it please you.
01:19:07 ◼ ► And there's nothing wrong with making a photo look like it pleases you and having it happen up front so you don't have to edit it later to please you.
01:19:31 ◼ ► Like, I literally did the thing where you hold the camera up and you take a selfie and then you tilt it a little so that Lauren's in the shot.
01:19:44 ◼ ► Like, that's, that's, and that, I think in some ways, I know I said this last week too.
01:19:50 ◼ ► This is Apple reinventing something that didn't need to be reinvented and that people didn't know.
01:20:01 ◼ ► Like, that is, that is a perfect Apple kind of thing to say, hey, the way we've all been trained to take selfies is dumb.
01:20:11 ◼ ► So, on last week's episode, we both shared a not great first impression with the AirPods Pro 3.
01:20:28 ◼ ► I also heard from people who said that they hated the AirPods Pro 2 and they liked the AirPods Pro 3.
01:20:50 ◼ ► The noise cancellation on a plane is, so I said last time, if it was good enough, I wouldn't need my AirPods Max anymore.
01:20:59 ◼ ► I won't be bringing them on future trips because the AirPods Pro 3, they are absolutely doing the job for me in that environment.
01:21:11 ◼ ► There are times when I got an airplane and I don't actually, I'm not ready to listen to a podcast or music.
01:21:21 ◼ ► People are boarding the plane and the air is blowing out of the vents and all those things and I'll turn it off.
01:21:50 ◼ ► Which is, the difference is, on the AirPods Pro 3, if I'm playing music or a podcast, I don't hear anything from the plane.
01:22:03 ◼ ► And I know that's a weird way to say it, but like, that's the level of difference for me.
01:22:09 ◼ ► Is, before, I could still hear that stuff was going on outside, but it was so much quieter that I could focus on the music.
01:22:37 ◼ ► And the way we reacted to it last week, I think one of the things that's happening is, because those ear tips are stiffer, there is more of a feeling of insertion when you put them in your ears.
01:22:50 ◼ ► And there's more of a feeling of positive pressure on your ear canals than there was with the AirPods Pro 2.
01:22:58 ◼ ► That said, after a week of using them, I don't know whether I've squished the ear tips a little bit or whether the ear tips have expanded my ear canals a little bit, but they already feel more comfortable.
01:23:07 ◼ ► But certainly, the act of putting them in your ears feels much more like an act than they did before.
01:23:38 ◼ ► That made it feel much more like the AirPods Pro 2 did, like closer to that than it did before.
01:23:45 ◼ ► And I think like a lot of people, like the people who spent time reviewing it, I've realized, you know, I'm used to it or it's gotten easier or whatever, but it feels more normal.
01:23:58 ◼ ► And the quality of the product is outshining the discomfort that I will stand by the fact that like this is one of the first Apple products in a really long time that had such a negative first impression for me.
01:24:16 ◼ ► So I would say that if you, if you feel you're not sure about it when you get them, keep it going because it gets easier.
01:24:51 ◼ ► Apple wanted the seal to be better and they wanted the, that, um, the tips to be more resilient and they wanted to do better noise canceling.
01:24:59 ◼ ► And so they pushed it in a way that makes it not feel quite as natural out of the gate.
01:25:15 ◼ ► I think there's always people who can't wear the old ones who can wear the new ones and it's great for them.
01:25:19 ◼ ► I also think if you're one of these people who's like, I just don't like the feeling of something in my ears.
01:25:24 ◼ ► I think this is going to be worse because, because it's more of a feeling of something in my ears.
01:25:42 ◼ ► And I mean, that's why they make, the argument could be, that's why they make AirPods 4 with active noise canceling.
01:26:03 ◼ ► And yeah, I got, I got used to it, but I, that initial reaction that we both had was very interesting.
01:26:21 ◼ ► I went too small and then there was more noise leakage and I went back up a size and I, I may adjust the size of my right ear.
01:26:31 ◼ ► Um, but I'm also getting used to it over time and the quality difference is kind of amazing.
01:26:39 ◼ ► When I did the test, I went both down to extra small and did the fit test and it's like, you're right here.
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01:27:45 ◼ ► I find Claude to be excellent at understanding huge amounts of text and doing interesting things with it.
01:27:54 ◼ ► I'll get a transcript of a podcast and I can give it to Claude to help me extract quotes from these transcripts, to help suggest episode titles, to help me with writing descriptions for those episodes, which is something that I always really struggle to do on my own.
01:28:07 ◼ ► And also to help me get answers on links that could be included in our show notes that somehow I've missed.
01:28:12 ◼ ► It is super helpful doing these tasks that can take me a ton of time or that I find a struggle.
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01:28:37 ◼ ► That includes access to all of the features mentioned right now, and that is all lowercase letters in that URL, which is claude.ai slash upgradepod.
01:28:58 ◼ ► This project is codenamed Veritas and is being used in anticipation of the new version of Siri coming next year.
01:29:16 ◼ ► Developers are using this tool to test how the new Siri models are performing for finding information about the data on device.
01:29:28 ◼ ► This app will probably never be released in the way that Apple are using it internally because we should actually be seeing the results of this baked into a new experience with our devices using Siri, which is due to a wide quote as early as March.
01:29:49 ◼ ► This is a quote from Mark's article, Veritas resembles most popular chatbots letting users manage multiple conversations across different topics.
01:29:57 ◼ ► It can save and reference past chats, follow up on earlier queries, and support extended back and forth exchanges.
01:30:08 ◼ ► Like, I don't want to be doing things primarily by voice, and I don't want to start fresh requests every single time.
01:30:17 ◼ ► Like, and Mark Gurman put on his pundit hat and said Apple should release this to the public.
01:30:21 ◼ ► And I think I look at this and think, well, what they should do is they should make type to Siri more functional, right?
01:30:30 ◼ ► Type to Siri should have ability to reference multiple chats just like you can in other chatbot apps.
01:30:35 ◼ ► It should just be part of Siri is the type to Siri should become a little more prominent and type to Siri is your chatbot.
01:30:41 ◼ ► And if they want to process type to Siri in some different ways so that it gets results that they want, I'm okay with that.
01:30:49 ◼ ► I don't think it needs to necessarily be, no, when you're in this mode, it's just the bare model.
01:30:56 ◼ ► But I think the ability to have that kind of library of different text queries and a context inside them, right?
01:31:04 ◼ ► That's one of the most important things about this is when you deal with one of these chatbots, they are able to reference your entire, that entire conversation.
01:31:15 ◼ ► But like that conversation and understand the context of it and be able to follow up or go back to it later, which I do all the time with like programming projects where I'm like, oh, it doesn't quite do it right.
01:31:31 ◼ ► But in general, I'm not opposed to this because I think it should text interaction is perfectly valid.
01:31:37 ◼ ► One of the things that's not clear from Mark's report is what is powering this experience?
01:31:53 ◼ ► Like these are the questions that were still unanswered based on the previous reporting.
01:32:14 ◼ ► From code found in the 26.1 beta, 9to5Mac is reporting that Apple is laying the groundwork for other AI companies to provide models to create imagery in image playgrounds.
01:32:26 ◼ ► So they're like, they're putting in some, some stuff that I think wouldn't need to exist if it was just chat GPT and them.
01:32:36 ◼ ► Like, I don't, I'm not sure who these companies are that are like, oh, we'd like to have our model available in Apple's tool.
01:32:46 ◼ ► But I would say, I feel like what Apple's going for here is a system wide image generation API.
01:32:57 ◼ ► So I think that's what they're doing here is they're saying we've built kind of a nice UI on top of image generators.
01:33:05 ◼ ► And maybe the long run is your image generator can also be, you know, in that, in that same API, you know, so that people want to use your image generator from anywhere in the system using our UI.
01:33:20 ◼ ► But that's the advantage Apple has is to say, like, anywhere in the system, if you're like, make an image, you can do it and it can use stable diffusion or, you know, whatever you want.
01:33:39 ◼ ► Philip Esposito at Macworld has found evidence in 26.1 that Apple is building some new frameworks to allow third party smartwatches to work better with iPhones.
01:33:53 ◼ ► Notification forwarding is referenced for notification support and something called accessory extension, which would allow for better pairing.
01:34:09 ◼ ► I mean, this is clearly a thing to appease the regulators all around the world that want it.
01:34:27 ◼ ► We've talked about this at length, but I'll just say it's been more than 10 years since the Apple Watch came out.
01:34:32 ◼ ► You can, you know, iOS should probably do a decent job of allowing other watches to pair with the operating system because not everybody wants to buy an Apple Watch.
01:34:41 ◼ ► And you're making your, I mean, my argument is essentially that you're making your product lesser.
01:34:51 ◼ ► And you're almost building a system like back in the day when the Mac was incompatible with everything because everybody used PCs.
01:35:00 ◼ ► It's a little like that where, like, there's whole classes of products and Apple's response is, well, no, just buy an Apple Watch.
01:35:13 ◼ ► And I get Apple's argument here, but, like, Apple provides all of the, all of those features for the Apple Watch.
01:35:24 ◼ ► I couldn't, I didn't want to talk about it today, so I don't think we're not, I don't want to.
01:35:31 ◼ ► But, like, I've just put a link in the show notes that Apple wrote a big thing again about the DMA and why it's so terrible for everybody.
01:35:37 ◼ ► But, to me, it just felt like not really worth rehashing, but I just wanted to mark that it was a thing that happened.
01:35:42 ◼ ► We're going to keep the good vibes rolling for now, and if we want to get into it, we will get into it next time.
01:35:52 ◼ ► It's like, you know, by offering different app stores, you're somehow a limiting choice.
01:36:01 ◼ ► Mark Gurman is also reporting that Apple is gearing up for production of M5 MacBook Pros.
01:36:08 ◼ ► I don't know if I read something wrong or conflated to different reports, but there is expected to be a M5 MacBook Pro that comes out towards the end of this year or early 2026.
01:36:23 ◼ ► This is not the OLED touchscreen model, which is also still expected to come in 2026, but not the next revision of the MacBook Pro.
01:36:31 ◼ ► This is what we think the sequencing will be, is late this year or early next year, there will be an M5 MacBook Pro.
01:36:54 ◼ ► If they do the M5 MacBook Pros early next year, it'll be like it happened the last time, where there will be two MacBook Pro releases in a single year, because they're kind of like filling out the old line, and then they're kicking into the new line, and that's how they'll do it.
01:37:08 ◼ ► So, your OLED touchscreen is going to come late next year, but in the meantime, there will be one last generational revision to what we think of as the current feature set of the MacBook Pro with the M5.
01:37:33 ◼ ► That they won't ship two MacBook Pros with the same chip, but who knows how they're chipped?
01:38:23 ◼ ► I mean, I think my guess is some of this will come next month, and the rest of it will come
01:38:33 ◼ ► And Ryan Gordon and Leanna Baker at Bloomberg are reporting that Intel has approached Apple
01:38:40 ◼ ► This is apparently very early discussion, but the companies are talking about how they could
01:38:45 ◼ ► And this follows a pattern of Intel making some partnerships right now to essentially protect
01:38:54 ◼ ► For Apple, so there's an episode of Dithering that I spoke about this, and it gave me a bit
01:38:59 ◼ ► more insight into it, like Ben was talking about this, and saying that essentially, Apple should
01:39:05 ◼ ► or could consider doing this as a future insurance policy for something occurring with TSMC.
01:39:14 ◼ ► You build up Intel's fab capability, and we're not talking about Apple using Intel processors.
01:39:23 ◼ ► We're talking about the other part of Intel's business that people are very concerned about,
01:39:33 ◼ ► And it comes back to TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor, their headquarters, everything is
01:39:50 ◼ ► And TSMC has some factories in the U.S., again, because the U.S. is providing incentives
01:39:57 ◼ ► The idea here would be you also keep Intel afloat because there's a counterweight to TSMC,
01:40:05 ◼ ► So if something happens to Taiwan, and therefore something happens to TSMC, Intel is there
01:40:29 ◼ ► It's also, again, this pattern in the United States where there's a lot of, like, because
01:40:37 ◼ ► I mean, there is, from an American perspective, what is going on here is, oh, no, we used to have
01:40:51 ◼ ► They are now on hard times, and it's bad for America if they're no longer viable, because
01:41:07 ◼ ► I would add the only bit of analysis, I guess, that I would add to this is just because we
01:41:16 ◼ ► can't think of anything that Intel could provide Apple, I'm sure there's something Intel could
01:41:20 ◼ ► It might not be an A-series chip or an M-series chip, but I bet there's stuff they could fab
01:41:27 ◼ ► I bet there's stuff that Apple uses that is not as crucial, and I know it burns Intel to
01:41:32 ◼ ► be like, well, we'll throw you a bone or something, but I'm sure there's a bone that could be thrown
01:41:37 ◼ ► to Intel if they want to actually fab some chips for Apple that are up to speed, but it's not
01:41:43 ◼ ► going to be a chip in an iPhone or probably a Mac or an iPad, but I'm sure there could be
01:41:47 ◼ ► something, but really this is about trying to maintain American chip production capacity
01:41:54 ◼ ► in the long run, because there is a fundamental danger of having so much of it be in Taiwan.
01:42:02 ◼ ► like, I don't know, I agree with this idea, by the way, like, I think that it is a good
01:42:29 ◼ ► Like, I think that there is like, it makes, to me, it makes a lot of sense that you would
01:42:35 ◼ ► make sure that this company was around for the long haul, whether that makes you happy or
01:42:45 ◼ ► And if Intel gets enough momentum, it could become a relevant option for Apple, maybe not
01:42:56 ◼ ► now, but maybe in a few years, even if Taiwan is not invaded by China and TSMC is still able
01:43:14 ◼ ► that's like, I know it's essentially saying Intel is too big to fail, but there's a real
01:43:19 ◼ ► strong argument that Intel is too big to fail, that it would be too catastrophic if Intel failed.
01:43:26 ◼ ► I did have a thought, I had a stray thought, which is like, I know Apple had to buy Intel's
01:43:32 ◼ ► modem business and took it, you know, to years and years to ship their own modem and all that.
01:43:37 ◼ ► But I have, I had that thought of like, would Apple ever entertain the idea of just saying,
01:43:45 ◼ ► And I think the answer is no, for the same reason that they don't manufacture themselves.
01:43:49 ◼ ► They have Foxconn do it and other companies do it, is there's a level below which Apple
01:44:09 ◼ ► They also want to, you know, TSMC, they want TSMC to invest in American factories as well.
01:44:17 ◼ ► I think that, yeah, this is all about strategic, nobody run out and say Apple's going to build
01:44:30 ◼ ► Let's face it, after a night with some drinks, we don't all bounce back the way that we'd
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01:46:40 ◼ ► Scott writes in and says, with the iPhone Air having all the compute in the camera bump,
01:46:46 ◼ ► and iPhone chips being compatible to computer chips, do you think there's a world in which
01:47:18 ◼ ► What you're talking about there essentially is a TV streaming stick, like the Amazon stick.
01:47:27 ◼ ► I laugh at this because we just spent 15 years hoping the Mac Mini would get smaller, and then
01:47:41 ◼ ► I think the answer is the Mac Mini is as small a device as Apple is interested in making.
01:48:00 ◼ ► It would still probably cost too much, but they could do it, and you just hang it off the
01:48:23 ◼ ► I just saw how there's a new Raspberry Pi keyboard thing where it's like a whole computer inside
01:48:28 ◼ ► It's probably impractical, but I do have that thought of like, oh, you know, what if there's
01:48:52 ◼ ► But that's the one that strikes me as that would be pretty awesome, is if you had a keyboard
01:49:01 ◼ ► Logan writes in and said, while blood oxygen sensing is now back on the Apple Watch with
01:49:09 ◼ ► the results being displayed on the iPhone, why isn't the same data available in the vital
01:49:16 ◼ ► I understand it not being able to be displayed on the watch, but if it's already displayed
01:49:20 ◼ ► on the iPhone in the blood oxygen section, why can't it be displayed in the vital section?
01:49:25 ◼ ► Now, I'll say, this is an example of a classic kind of question that we get, which we obviously
01:49:37 ◼ ► Now, you can tell me if this is the case, because I know for me, on the Apple Watch vitals, both
01:50:07 ◼ ► But what about the, but now that you have the blood oxygen sensing back on the phone, why
01:50:18 ◼ ► My guess is because this strategy of syncing oxygen back to the phone happened relatively
01:50:26 ◼ ► And the vitals app and the vitals tab and the health app were probably built to reflect the
01:50:38 ◼ ► I know what you put, that is like too much work to engineer a solution that they're hoping
01:51:16 ◼ ► And we'll, yeah, because, you know, Mossimo and the patents expiring and do you want to
01:51:21 ◼ ► put in work that's going to just get thrown away and how important is the vitals on the
01:51:36 ◼ ► So it's, this whole thing is so dumb, but that's probably why I think, I feel like we figured
01:51:43 ◼ ► Reed writes in and says, has Mike ever had issues getting service on his U.S. purchased
01:51:48 ◼ ► eSIM only iPhones in the U.K., especially now that the eSIM only iPhone Pro have a larger
01:52:08 ◼ ► So I have, I have been on the eSIM train longer than most people would in my country because
01:52:14 ◼ ► I've been buying iPhones in America for years, like from when they were first eSIM phones,
01:52:21 ◼ ► The first year or two, it was, I couldn't do the transfer while I was in America, but now
01:52:47 ◼ ► And they have just functionality in their app for moving your eSIM from device to device.
01:52:52 ◼ ► Like it's not complicated and has worked for me flawlessly in the ways in which I would
01:53:33 ◼ ► Like I remember looking this up years ago because different phones are sold in different territories.
01:53:48 ◼ ► I recommend that when you go to a different country, you buy a phone there as a souvenir
01:54:17 ◼ ► I was scared too because I review a bunch of phones and I used to just pop the Sims back
01:54:59 ◼ ► So I am convinced that he's playing Silksong because the whole world is playing Silksong.
01:55:08 ◼ ► The other thing for me of Silksong, I'm not really playing games at the moment to try because
01:55:22 ◼ ► It's actually really fun because I've now just started listening to the Restless History
01:55:34 ◼ ► If you would like to send in a question for us to answer in a future episode of the show,