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Upgrade

390: 🦓🦅🦜🐧

 

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00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade episode 390.

00:00:13   Today's show is brought to you by Memberful, New Relic, and Doppler.

00:00:17   My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined by Jason Snell.

00:00:20   Hi, Jason Snell.

00:00:21   >> Doing great, Myke Hurley.

00:00:22   How are you?

00:00:23   >> Very well, my friend.

00:00:24   Very well indeed.

00:00:25   I have a hashtag SnellTalk question for you, as I always do.

00:00:28   and this one comes from Nathan,

00:00:30   and Nathan wants to know,

00:00:31   Jason, what do you use for your profile picture on macOS?

00:00:36   - Oh, Nathan, I have auto login set up.

00:00:41   So is this the thing that comes up

00:00:45   when you have to put in your password?

00:00:46   Is that what this is?

00:00:47   - Yeah, you see a little icon, right?

00:00:49   Or if you go to, what is it, system,

00:00:51   it's in system preferences,

00:00:54   and then users. - Oh, I have a,

00:00:55   - And yeah, so it's, I have,

00:00:57   it's actually the same picture that I have on Twitter.

00:00:59   It is, at least on my iMac,

00:01:01   it is an illustration of me,

00:01:04   a profile that was done for all the speakers

00:01:08   at the OOL conference one year.

00:01:10   And I liked it and I put it as my Twitter pic

00:01:14   and it still is.

00:01:15   And it's also my picture for login purposes on my iMac.

00:01:20   That's it.

00:01:21   - I have a question.

00:01:22   - Uh-huh.

00:01:23   - See, this is one of those things.

00:01:24   But I say like sometimes people ask us lots,

00:01:27   we get lots of great AskUp great questions

00:01:28   and Snail Talk questions.

00:01:30   But sometimes these questions are like,

00:01:32   why doesn't Apple X, like I think we could never answer.

00:01:36   So a lot of the times, most of our answers would be,

00:01:40   I don't know, so like I don't put them in the show,

00:01:43   but they are legitimately good questions,

00:01:45   but we just have no answer for them.

00:01:47   But here's one of them where it's like,

00:01:48   in System Preferences, there is a picture for me, right?

00:01:53   which is my Apple ID picture.

00:01:55   But that's not the same picture as my user picture.

00:01:59   And when you try to select your user picture,

00:02:02   you're not given that one as a suggestion.

00:02:04   You have to add it again.

00:02:06   And it's just kind of like,

00:02:07   why do we have multiple photos,

00:02:10   but none of them talk to each other?

00:02:12   - Yeah, and it really wants me to use a Memoji.

00:02:15   - Big time, big time.

00:02:17   Like it's an entire category

00:02:19   of the user image selection part.

00:02:22   And I hate, I hate Memojis.

00:02:25   - I'm not into it, no.

00:02:27   - I don't like the art style.

00:02:28   Lex, who did the Ricky's website,

00:02:35   added Memojis for me and John Voorhees

00:02:38   and James Thompson for reasons.

00:02:40   And I think it's legitimately the best Memoji of me,

00:02:44   he did a better job than I have done.

00:02:46   - It's the same for everybody.

00:02:48   Lex did a better job for everyone.

00:02:50   - Your internal idea of what you look like

00:02:53   versus the idea of someone else about who you are,

00:02:56   that's like a way better picture.

00:02:58   That does a way better job.

00:03:00   But I don't want a Memoji as my Apple ID icon.

00:03:03   You're right about the login thing.

00:03:05   What I find funny is that my login user image

00:03:09   for my laptop is something totally different

00:03:12   because they don't have it together

00:03:14   to get those things all to be connected.

00:03:17   - Well, the thing that Memoji,

00:03:20   always remained a frustration for me and I just can't understand why they haven't found a way to do it, which is like

00:03:25   Why can't it just be like emoji like my emoji just can be my face

00:03:30   Which is what we always thought they were adding in the first place, right?

00:03:33   So like right I could send you what is actually an emoji

00:03:36   But it's actually me like all of this stuff is would be doable if they wanted to do it

00:03:40   But they just didn't do it and they didn't want to do it. Right, right. I just checked on my laptop

00:03:44   I have a photo of me which I know what happened there. It's actually a photo of me from

00:03:48   that John Gruber took.

00:03:50   And the reason that it's my photo there

00:03:52   is that I had to go to the user

00:03:55   'cause I got tired of looking at like a baseball.

00:03:59   And I chose edit and then it's like,

00:04:03   okay, now you gotta pick a file

00:04:05   and I searched for Jason as an image.

00:04:08   And I tried to find one that was a picture of me

00:04:11   and I put it in there and then I've left it.

00:04:13   And it's just, it's dumb.

00:04:14   But on my iMac, it's the Twitter,

00:04:18   illustration of me. The images that they have, the default images, are really weird, right?

00:04:23   So we've got like a bunch of flowers, like there's a rose, a dandelion, sunflower, another

00:04:30   sunflower, then there's like a gingerbread cookie, the yin yang, a lipstick kiss, fortune

00:04:36   cookie, some equations on a chalkboard, a number one, like a medal, then a lightning

00:04:43   I think that's like fruit of some kind and then a globe and a snowflake some like like sand

00:04:50   I guess like sand ripples is in a Zen

00:04:53   Garden a leaf a sand dollar. Is that what that's called? I try accidentally just selected as my own. Oh, no

00:05:00   Eggs blue eggs, right

00:05:05   Robbins eggs some bowling pins a dartboard tennis ball a football soccer ball and

00:05:10   And then a baseball, basketball, a basketball with a weird looking texture.

00:05:15   Yes.

00:05:16   Then American football, an eight ball from pool table, hockey, but like the hockey puck

00:05:24   and the stick, which is out of context with the rest of them because it's just the circular

00:05:30   parts.

00:05:31   Well, so is the American football because the whole idea here is it's cute because it's

00:05:33   a round icon and then they get the American football and they're like, "Mmm, yeah, it's

00:05:37   on grass."

00:05:38   Okay.

00:05:39   violin, a golf ball, violin, an LP, like a record, piano keys, a guitar, drums, an owl,

00:05:50   a zebra, an eagle, a parrot, and a penguin. That's like, one, that selection is madness.

00:05:58   It's bananas. Like it's just madness. It's never changed, like for as long as I've been

00:06:03   using the Mac, that's the selection and I don't know why they hang on to it.

00:06:08   So I have a server, right?

00:06:09   I have my Mac mini server.

00:06:11   Whenever I, it generally comes up when I'm upgrading

00:06:14   or I'm in a dialogue or something,

00:06:15   but occasionally I am prompted to have to change that, right?

00:06:19   Like I did an upgrade or I did a restore

00:06:21   or something like that.

00:06:22   And I always change it to random things.

00:06:26   And so I'm looking through here

00:06:27   and it's like a history of my server.

00:06:29   It's like, oh, water on a leaf.

00:06:31   Yes, I was water on a leaf on the server for a while.

00:06:36   - Gingerbread man, oh, gingerbread man.

00:06:39   Good times, good times.

00:06:41   I don't, yeah, it's super strange.

00:06:44   I guess they decided people like balls.

00:06:47   So they would like do a lot of balls and people like music.

00:06:49   So they would do a bunch of musical things.

00:06:50   - And birds. - And birds and a zebra.

00:06:52   (both laughing)

00:06:54   - Why is it just, it was everything?

00:06:56   - You know, the usual birds, owl, eagle, parrot,

00:06:59   penguin, zebra bird, sure.

00:07:02   - Someone just got very confused.

00:07:05   If you would like to send in a Snail Talk question

00:07:08   for us to open an episode of Upgrade,

00:07:11   just send out to it with the hashtag Snail Talk

00:07:13   or use question mark Snail Talk

00:07:14   in the Relay FM members Discord.

00:07:16   Some follow up items for you.

00:07:18   Jason joined me on stream last Friday

00:07:22   and we modified his Keychron keyboard

00:07:25   that we'd built together previously.

00:07:27   There is a stream archive of this available on YouTube.

00:07:32   I will put a link to that in the show notes

00:07:34   If you want to watch it, it's there.

00:07:36   If you want to see --

00:07:37   We basically stuffed Jason's keyboard

00:07:39   full of packing materials,

00:07:40   and it sounded a lot better.

00:07:42   -Yeah, the screams of teddy bears.

00:07:44   But it sounds -- They're very quiet.

00:07:47   And that's going to be coming to me, right?

00:07:49   -Yeah, it's being packaged up,

00:07:51   and it will be sent out to you probably this week.

00:07:54   -And we'll probably do, hopefully,

00:07:56   another stream where I receive it.

00:07:58   And we put it together. That'll be fun.

00:08:01   Dan Morin of Six Colors put together a podcast note workflow like yours that we spoke about

00:08:08   last week, but built in shortcuts.

00:08:11   Oh, okay.

00:08:12   So first off, it's a great idea, and I'm kicking myself not to think about it, and I think

00:08:16   this is really an instructive point, which is I—so I've been spending a lot of time

00:08:21   writing scripts in Python, and then this came up and I had to get, like, the creation date

00:08:27   of a file in the Finder and all of that, and I thought, "Okay, well, I'll just go to Apple

00:08:30   And that was my problem because I need to start thinking

00:08:34   about doing it in shortcuts, not in Apple script.

00:08:38   'Cause it's actually much more accessible

00:08:41   and you don't have to know all the stupid finder scripting

00:08:43   that you have to know for Apple scripts.

00:08:44   And it's a very, actually quite easy to do

00:08:47   the same thing in shortcuts.

00:08:50   And so Dan did a great job of doing it.

00:08:53   And then, and there's a link to it on six colors,

00:08:56   but also what was funny is when he posted it,

00:08:59   He and I had gone back and forth about the best way

00:09:01   to format the time, because in the end,

00:09:04   what you get out is you're trying to find the difference

00:09:07   between the current time and the time you start a recording,

00:09:10   which is the creation date of the file.

00:09:12   And you can do math on dates in shortcuts,

00:09:15   and you get a result that's basically the number of seconds

00:09:19   between the two, which is great,

00:09:20   but number of seconds is not a great thing

00:09:22   to put in your show notes.

00:09:23   You want hour, minute, second in your notes you're taking

00:09:27   about your podcast.

00:09:29   So Dan and I went back and forth and like,

00:09:30   what's the most efficient way in shortcuts to do it?

00:09:32   Because in a scripting language,

00:09:34   there's a, you can do a one liner in Python

00:09:37   or in just shell scripting, you can do a one liner

00:09:40   and format the number of seconds as hour, minute, second.

00:09:43   And shortcuts, you can't.

00:09:45   It, so he did one method where he went to Python

00:09:49   and I was like, I think I can do it in shortcuts,

00:09:50   but I had to add like 10 steps

00:09:53   where it did all the division and all of that.

00:09:55   And then he figured out a way to do it using,

00:09:57   there's a calculate action,

00:10:01   do calculation basically in shortcuts

00:10:03   that you can do some stuff that Dan got it down much closer

00:10:08   'cause you can do things like floor,

00:10:09   which is basically give me the result of this division

00:10:13   without the remainder.

00:10:15   And then, you know, there's also the command

00:10:17   that lets you do just the remainder.

00:10:19   And so he was able to do math

00:10:20   and get it down to fewer steps,

00:10:22   which as an aside, by the way,

00:10:24   boy, shortcuts needs to be better documented by Apple

00:10:27   because they have that calculation action

00:10:29   and it is incredibly powerful,

00:10:32   but you need to know how to use it.

00:10:33   And there's a get info box in shortcuts

00:10:37   that for each item and you click it and it says,

00:10:40   "You can use this to do a calculation."

00:10:43   It's like, guys, it's not good enough.

00:10:45   You gotta actually document these things.

00:10:47   It would be a real help to people who use shortcuts

00:10:50   if you would actually document how all the actions work.

00:10:54   So anyway, we post the story.

00:10:56   great thing happened, which is we had three different

00:10:59   readers come up with three completely different ways

00:11:02   to get it to be even shorter.

00:11:04   - Oh, good.

00:11:05   - In ways that show you how, I mean, it's this thing

00:11:09   about how computer programmers think,

00:11:10   like they don't think like the rest of us,

00:11:12   but in a kind of a brilliant, hilarious way.

00:11:15   My favorite one that got it down,

00:11:18   there were two that actually got it down

00:11:20   to like two steps fewer than Dan's.

00:11:23   But the one that made me really laugh is,

00:11:25   There's a way in shortcuts to say, to take a date,

00:11:28   like that modified date and say,

00:11:32   give me the date and time at the beginning of this day.

00:11:38   So it basically takes,

00:11:39   you can take like December 3rd at 1.22 PM

00:11:42   and it will come back with December 3rd at midnight, right?

00:11:47   It just the beginning of the day.

00:11:49   And then you add the seconds to it.

00:11:51   And now you've got December 3rd at 2.18 AM.

00:11:56   But if you use shortcuts to format that as a time,

00:12:02   you get 2.18 and number of seconds,

00:12:07   which is the timestamp you want.

00:12:09   And it's referring to an actual time during the day.

00:12:12   But if you format it as the time of your thing,

00:12:16   it doesn't matter, right?

00:12:17   It doesn't matter that it's a date

00:12:19   because all you really wanna do is get the time out of it.

00:12:21   So ingenious and also at the same time dumb

00:12:25   because there ought to be a better way to format times

00:12:27   in shortcuts than it.

00:12:29   But it was a fun little thing.

00:12:31   And not only did it teach me that there are like 10 different

00:12:34   ways to do something in shortcuts.

00:12:36   And the reason we went with something inside shortcuts

00:12:38   instead of going out to a shell script

00:12:40   or something like that is mostly because,

00:12:42   I mean, theoretically it means it works on the iPad.

00:12:44   I also just liked the idea that it's portable in that way.

00:12:47   I set you a different macro last week

00:12:50   And it didn't work for a while

00:12:51   'cause it was like using scripting stuff

00:12:53   that's not installed in macOS

00:12:55   and other stuff is deprecated.

00:12:56   And it's like, if you can stay inside shortcuts,

00:12:59   it will just work, but you've got to do some extra work.

00:13:02   And major tip of the hat to Dan,

00:13:04   which is I really need to start thinking about,

00:13:05   can I do this in shortcuts before I ever go

00:13:09   to some other thing for a Mac utility?

00:13:12   Because shortcuts means it's probably,

00:13:15   if you can figure it out, it could be simpler.

00:13:18   and it means that you can hand that out to anybody

00:13:21   and they can just run it in a way that

00:13:23   Apple script is a little more complicated.

00:13:25   So that was a fun little incident that happened,

00:13:28   especially the one-upsmanship of everybody

00:13:30   trying to find a different way to solve the problem.

00:13:32   - Well, I guess luckily for you,

00:13:33   the person who thought to write it for Shortcuts

00:13:36   also publishes on your website.

00:13:38   - Yes.

00:13:39   - You know?

00:13:40   - It's perfect.

00:13:41   - Pretty helpful. - Synergy.

00:13:41   We just, yeah, we were talking about it

00:13:43   and Dan was like, "Should I post this?"

00:13:45   And I said, "Dan, any work you do

00:13:47   that's in any way related to computers

00:13:49   or things we've written about on Six Colors,

00:13:51   you should plumb those for posts.

00:13:53   That's how I live my life.

00:13:56   It's like, oh, I did a thing.

00:13:58   Let's write about it.

00:14:00   - You also, the Jason Snell special,

00:14:04   which is taking a topic we spoke about

00:14:07   and then thinking about it some more

00:14:08   and then writing an article about it.

00:14:10   And you did that for the iMac versus external

00:14:13   display decision, and you wrote a really nice article

00:14:15   about that on Six Colors.

00:14:16   So if you're interested in that discussion

00:14:19   from Ask Upgrade last week

00:14:20   and you want more of Jason's thoughts on it,

00:14:22   then there's a great article for you to go read.

00:14:24   - Yeah, I thought that was a really great topic

00:14:27   and it emerged from an Ask Upgrade question

00:14:30   and I didn't wanna just leave it as that.

00:14:32   I thought that would probably work as a post.

00:14:34   So I went and found the post.

00:14:36   - I think it's gonna be something we will come back to.

00:14:39   - Oh boy.

00:14:40   - A lot over the next six to nine months, I think, so.

00:14:43   - And if you listened to our discussion last time,

00:14:45   you'll see that my feelings have evolved a little bit

00:14:48   in the story and that's just the difference

00:14:50   between talking about it off the cuff

00:14:52   and thinking about it when writing an article.

00:14:55   And you're right, I think my feeling will involve more

00:14:57   because the end of that story is basically like,

00:14:58   look, I can tell you what I would do today.

00:15:01   But if you told me that I'm gonna,

00:15:03   you come from the future and say,

00:15:05   I actually did the other thing,

00:15:06   I'd be like, okay, I can see that.

00:15:07   Like, I'm not super baked into this.

00:15:09   But one thing that I think I really,

00:15:11   when I went through the thought process

00:15:13   that came back to me is that same idea,

00:15:14   which is if you wanna live the one Mac life,

00:15:18   because the truth is having two Macs

00:15:20   and getting them out of sync,

00:15:21   like we talked about, it kinda stinks.

00:15:23   If you can do it with one Mac,

00:15:25   those MacBook Pros are amazing.

00:15:27   If you don't need more power than a MacBook Pro,

00:15:29   and Apple comes out with an external display,

00:15:32   like, that's pretty good, right?

00:15:35   To not have a laptop and a desktop

00:15:37   and have to go back and forth between them,

00:15:39   it's pretty good.

00:15:40   Assuming that display is good,

00:15:43   you're going to put more money in up front,

00:15:45   but you're only going to need the one computer

00:15:48   instead of if you have a desktop and a laptop.

00:15:50   And I just, I'm reminded every time I travel

00:15:53   with my MacBook Air now that of what it was like

00:15:56   before I lived the kind of one computer life

00:15:59   when I had a MacBook Air as my primary back in the IDG days.

00:16:03   And now with the iMac Pro, which is you open it up

00:16:06   and you're like, oh yeah, this version of software is old

00:16:09   and I've got to reauthorize this

00:16:11   and I've got to run this update.

00:16:12   and this file isn't here, is it on Dropbox

00:16:16   or is it on my hard drive at home?

00:16:17   And it's a lot easier when you just have a computer

00:16:21   and it's with you all the time.

00:16:22   So that was my big lesson there is it makes me think

00:16:27   that it's possible depending on timing

00:16:29   that what I might choose to do is get a MacBook Pro

00:16:31   and an external display.

00:16:33   I probably won't, but again, if you came back

00:16:35   and told me that's what I decided,

00:16:37   I would not think it was ridiculous.

00:16:39   Be like, there are lots of options out there.

00:16:41   And thank you to listener Kieran who wrote in about this.

00:16:44   I ran out and got Kieran's tweet

00:16:47   and put it in the article, which was fun.

00:16:50   - The morning show has been renewed

00:16:52   for its third season, Apple TV+.

00:16:56   - I'll get around to watching season two sometime.

00:16:58   - It's really good.

00:16:59   Season two is really good.

00:17:00   It's better than season one.

00:17:02   They've got some changeover in showrunner.

00:17:04   Charlotte Stout is going to be the showrunner.

00:17:08   This is part of a multi-year overall deal that Stout has done with Apple.

00:17:13   So now, uh, Kerry Aaron, who was the showrunner previously, is going to be a

00:17:17   consultant for season three whilst developing new projects for their Apple deal as well.

00:17:22   So they're making some change.

00:17:24   Instead of grinding on a third season, that's probably good to keep it fresh.

00:17:27   Keep it fresh.

00:17:27   Yep.

00:17:28   And so, but, but also still involved, right?

00:17:30   So hopefully it will continue to keep its tone.

00:17:32   Um, so yeah, I'm really excited because I, I think that in season two.

00:17:38   the show really worked out what it is.

00:17:41   And so now I'm very excited with the hope

00:17:46   that they're going into season three understanding that,

00:17:49   that like the biggest benefit that this show

00:17:53   can actually have is if it actually mirrors the real world

00:17:58   and the timeframe that it's in.

00:18:00   Like in season one, it kind of accidentally did it.

00:18:03   And then in season two, they really lent into it.

00:18:07   And so I hope for season three,

00:18:09   they create the show with that in mind

00:18:11   and don't feel the need to completely rewrite the show again.

00:18:14   - Charles Statz's credits are Fosse/Verdon,

00:18:18   House of Cards, Homeland.

00:18:20   She's worked as a producer on all of those

00:18:22   and as a writer.

00:18:23   - Especially for this show,

00:18:24   that's a pretty great track record for this show.

00:18:28   That's like the pocket of what The Morning Show

00:18:31   is all about, I think.

00:18:32   So I'm pretty pumped for it.

00:18:34   And I'm really pleased that they've done it.

00:18:37   Apple is requiring that retail and corporate employees must submit proof of receiving their

00:18:42   COVID vaccine and booster or face frequent testing.

00:18:48   Apple have still not chosen to follow along with some tech companies in requiring vaccination

00:18:54   for their employees.

00:18:56   But they are now just, because I think previously they had, if you don't get vaccinated, you've

00:19:01   got to get tested a bunch.

00:19:03   they're saying if you don't get boosted you got to get tested a bunch. I remain really

00:19:11   surprised that they are not requiring vaccination at least at a corporate level. So this just

00:19:19   you know I keep seeing headlines about this and I'm like oh there it is oh no wait that's

00:19:24   not it so that this is just another of those situations where they're doing something but

00:19:29   but I don't think they're doing enough.

00:19:32   - Yeah, well, there are so many different ways

00:19:35   that the ongoing pandemic could go

00:19:37   that it'll be interesting to watch that.

00:19:39   I threw an item in here just to mention

00:19:43   because I want to just get everybody's head

00:19:45   thinking about this.

00:19:47   There was a New York Times article yesterday

00:19:49   about how there are some more COVID lockdowns happening

00:19:53   in China and it's all speculative

00:19:58   and it's sort of very much a we'll see what this does,

00:20:00   but the idea there is that that may lead to another ripple

00:20:05   of supply chain issues down the road, right?

00:20:08   'Cause sometimes these things are immediate

00:20:10   and sometimes they-

00:20:11   - It doesn't surprise me at all.

00:20:13   - Yeah.

00:20:14   - Like, because really we didn't hit supply chain stuff

00:20:17   until now and that's coming from the 2020.

00:20:21   - Yeah.

00:20:22   - Beginning of this, you know?

00:20:23   - So I just say, keep an eye on the supply chain.

00:20:27   may be ongoing issues with supply chain stuff. And I'm interested in seeing Apple's results

00:20:34   are late next week. I'm interested to see if they make any statements about sort of

00:20:41   the state of the supply chain either during their statements or during their Q&A.

00:20:44   - I have to, right? I mean, because-

00:20:46   - Right, yeah. And maybe they'll give, they'll say, "No, we're looking good." Or they may

00:20:49   say, "Well, we're concerned about this thing over here and not that thing." And that's

00:20:52   actually the kind of thing that you can get out of an Apple results call that is informative,

00:20:57   right? It's like, tell me what an AR advisor says what, Tim? Tim would be like, "I don't

00:21:03   know what you're talking about." But if you say, "Tim, supply chain, what's going on?"

00:21:07   I think that's the kind of thing where they actually will disclose something about how

00:21:12   they're feeling because that has to do with what analysts want to know and investors want

00:21:16   to know, which is kind of long-term issues affecting the business. And it's something

00:21:20   that really is inside baseball in another sense,

00:21:22   where it's not about an Apple product or anything like that.

00:21:24   It's just about like, how are you weathering this?

00:21:27   And I'm looking forward to what they will say

00:21:30   because it is a really complex thing

00:21:32   and it's affecting different companies differently.

00:21:34   And this article made me raise an eyebrow basically

00:21:36   and say, oh boy, here's another wrinkle.

00:21:39   Here's another thing that may add more churn

00:21:42   into the already kind of messy situation

00:21:46   with the supply chain.

00:21:47   - I mean, like this was the quarter where,

00:21:49   their pre-guidance was like,

00:21:52   "Hey, we know we're not gonna sell what we wanna sell."

00:21:55   Like, it's kind of as simple as that.

00:21:57   - Yeah.

00:21:58   - This is the holiday quarter?

00:22:03   - This is the holiday quarter.

00:22:05   - So it should be the big one.

00:22:06   Like, you know, as history has gone,

00:22:09   this should have been, in theory, the biggest quarter.

00:22:11   - They have said it will be probably

00:22:13   their biggest quarter of all time,

00:22:15   even though they're gonna not sell as many things

00:22:18   as they thought they were gonna sell

00:22:19   because of the supply chain.

00:22:20   So we'll see.

00:22:22   That's next week.

00:22:23   I think that's a week from Thursday.

00:22:25   And so obviously then we will talk about it

00:22:28   on the January 31st episode of Upgrade.

00:22:33   - Which I'm always excited about.

00:22:34   - Yeah.

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00:25:07   Rumour round up, Jason.

00:25:09   - Oh, I love a rumor roundup.

00:25:11   And again, thank you to a friend of the show, Mark Gurman,

00:25:13   for dropping all of his juiciest rumors on Sundays,

00:25:18   so that upgrade is fresh.

00:25:19   - Not just Mark today though.

00:25:21   We're gonna spread out a little bit.

00:25:22   We're gonna start with the well-known Apple rumor

00:25:26   publication, the New York Post.

00:25:28   - Ah, of course, classic.

00:25:31   - The New York Post is saying that Apple is said to be

00:25:34   in serious talks to acquire some of the broadcast rights

00:25:38   to Major League Baseball for Apple TV+.

00:25:41   I'll read a quote from 9to5Mac,

00:25:43   "Exact details of the deal were not disclosed,

00:25:46   "however the sports package believed to be on the table

00:25:50   "is weekday national games

00:25:51   "that were previously owned by ESPN."

00:25:55   - Right, so the idea here is the way baseball works,

00:25:58   and I know you and I have talked about

00:25:59   how baseball works in the past.

00:26:01   They open the gate, they roll the balls in,

00:26:02   that's how it happens.

00:26:04   - That's how it happens.

00:26:05   The ESPN has had a package where they basically show games

00:26:10   to their entire national ESPN audience that are,

00:26:15   if you're in a local market,

00:26:18   you see your local teams games,

00:26:19   but these are national games.

00:26:20   So they are showing games,

00:26:23   if you're in a different market

00:26:24   and you don't have like the MLB TV package

00:26:27   or something like that,

00:26:28   it's your opportunity to see games from other cities

00:26:32   and games that, you know, maybe your team isn't playing

00:26:35   and there's another baseball game on.

00:26:36   So it's not exactly an earth shattering kind of package,

00:26:41   but it does provide some content.

00:26:45   I would say it's about on the level

00:26:48   as the Amazon deal with the NFL,

00:26:50   where they've been, this is actually changing

00:26:53   and it's getting improved,

00:26:54   but Amazon's had a deal for a while

00:26:56   where they're basically like simulcasting the same game

00:27:00   that's on the NFL network.

00:27:03   So it's not like super exclusive, but it's interesting.

00:27:08   And I think that this makes sense in a way,

00:27:11   'cause we've been talking for a while

00:27:12   about how Apple has been investing in this idea

00:27:15   of doing live sports as one of its things.

00:27:18   I wonder if this, we talked about like,

00:27:20   what would be the next Apple subscription service.

00:27:23   I wonder if this is not Apple TV Plus,

00:27:25   but is bundled in and is also available as a separate,

00:27:29   like Apple Sports kind of subscription at some point.

00:27:32   I don't know. Let's see what their plan is.

00:27:34   But even if they just roll it into Apple TV+,

00:27:37   this is a start, right?

00:27:38   And it might actually help get their feet wet,

00:27:41   get their toes wet on doing this thing where,

00:27:44   'cause live streaming infrastructure is different.

00:27:47   You've gotta serve everybody immediately.

00:27:49   And the demand is essentially 100% at one moment.

00:27:54   Whereas anything you do on streaming, you put it on a CDN,

00:27:57   people watch it whenever,

00:27:59   and demand is smoothed out over time.

00:28:02   Live sports, it's all at once.

00:28:05   And so it's very, very different.

00:28:08   And this is, yeah, this is not an earth-shattering thing.

00:28:12   This is not like the playoffs

00:28:13   are gonna be on Apple TV+.

00:28:15   - That's not where you wanna start though, right?

00:28:16   For that exact reason, you just mentioned

00:28:18   you don't want the biggest, most popular sports

00:28:20   as your first thing 'cause you're gonna get in trouble.

00:28:22   - Right, and this lets them say,

00:28:24   and lets them promote in their app,

00:28:27   you know, the Reds are playing the Diamondbacks

00:28:30   on Tuesday night at six o'clock,

00:28:33   and you know, you can watch it for free on Apple TV Plus.

00:28:37   And that's regardless of if you have cable,

00:28:39   and it's regardless of if you have ESPN

00:28:42   or your local sports channel,

00:28:45   it's just on Apple TV Plus for you to watch.

00:28:48   And that's fascinating to me.

00:28:50   So we'll see.

00:28:51   I also wonder about, and this is similar to Amazon,

00:28:54   will they have somebody produce it for them

00:28:57   or will they have like an Apple TV+ crew?

00:29:01   I don't know how that ESPN package works

00:29:04   and whether they built their own broadcast

00:29:07   or whether they sort of reared the local.

00:29:08   I think they built their own broadcast for that.

00:29:10   So they might potentially need to be

00:29:12   like Apple TV baseball announcers and stuff,

00:29:14   which is kind of wild to think about Apple hiring--

00:29:17   - I could imagine them doing it similarly

00:29:19   to how they've done before,

00:29:20   where the first thing someone does it for them

00:29:23   and then they bring in their own team afterwards.

00:29:25   - They might hire somebody to do it.

00:29:26   I mean, the way baseball is configured,

00:29:28   you have a feed coming out of the stadium,

00:29:30   so that would be something that would be produced

00:29:32   in the stadium by the local crews.

00:29:36   But what Amazon ended up doing

00:29:38   was doing their own play-by-play and analyst on top of that.

00:29:42   And that could be produced, you know,

00:29:45   MLB actually has its own media arm.

00:29:47   They could produce it if they wanted to for Apple.

00:29:50   And that's probably all part of the deal.

00:29:52   But like, yeah, again, this is just the start.

00:29:54   and Apple is going to be playing in sports

00:29:57   at least a little bit.

00:29:58   They may decide it's not for them,

00:30:00   but right now they're in exploratory time

00:30:02   and they are gonna make some deals, I think.

00:30:04   - Yeah, this aligns with a report

00:30:06   from an investment firm called Wedbush

00:30:08   that says Apple is on an aggressive hunt

00:30:10   for live sports content.

00:30:12   So it seems like if there is a deal being done right now,

00:30:15   they are at the table trying to make that deal.

00:30:18   Mac Otakara is reporting that a new iPad Air

00:30:22   is set to be unveiled this spring.

00:30:25   It would feature an A15 bionic center stage 5G

00:30:29   and the same overall design.

00:30:32   - Yep. - Makes sense.

00:30:33   - Not surprising at all, other than to say,

00:30:35   yeah, that the iPad Air needs to get on sync

00:30:38   with like the mini.

00:30:40   And I think the thing here is just to say this, yeah.

00:30:43   And say this spring is when they're gonna do that.

00:30:45   They're gonna bring it up to speed,

00:30:46   A15 center stage, 5G, all the things that we're missing,

00:30:49   'cause the iPad Air remember was ahead of the game,

00:30:51   but now it's been a little while.

00:30:53   So this makes perfect sense.

00:30:54   - No, it's behind.

00:30:56   - No, it was ahead of the game.

00:30:57   - Yeah.

00:30:58   - When it was released, it was ahead of the game.

00:30:59   Now it's behind the game.

00:31:00   Yes, the game has left it behind.

00:31:01   The game is over on Apple TV+ now apparently.

00:31:04   - The game has left the station, I think is the--

00:31:06   - Yeah, they rolled the balls back out and closed the door.

00:31:09   - Friend of the show, Mark Gurman is reporting

00:31:11   that Apple is considering delaying the announcement

00:31:15   of its mixed reality headset by at least a few months.

00:31:19   This is from Bloomberg.

00:31:21   The headset was targeted for an unveiling at WWDC in June, followed by a release later

00:31:26   in the year. But development challenges related to overheating, cameras and software have

00:31:31   made it harder to stay on track. This delay would see a late 2022 announcement with product

00:31:37   release in 23. Prior reporting from Germen suggested that this product was originally

00:31:42   scheduled to be announced in 2021, so this would be the second major delay that this

00:31:49   product line would see.

00:31:51   - I told you the maxim that we came up with on Liftoff,

00:31:54   which is whenever anything is late in the year,

00:31:56   that means it's going to be next year.

00:31:58   And here we are with late in the year.

00:32:02   Also my initial reaction to this was,

00:32:04   oh, I know what all the developers will be doing

00:32:06   over their holiday next year, this year,

00:32:09   is they're going to have an announced VR product

00:32:14   that isn't shipping yet.

00:32:15   So they'll be putting in all of their work

00:32:18   in late in the year and early in the following year.

00:32:21   So it may be a year out before they ship this thing.

00:32:23   But I think what Gurman is saying, at least right now,

00:32:26   is that they're still going to do what you, I think,

00:32:30   have suggested is probably the most likely scenario,

00:32:32   which is they'll do an event maybe in August,

00:32:37   maybe in October, or maybe even as part of the iPhone event,

00:32:42   which I think they might do because all eyes on that event,

00:32:47   even though it would be, you know,

00:32:48   the Apple Watch was launched in an iPhone event, for example.

00:32:51   So they might do that,

00:32:51   but like they're gonna do that fall,

00:32:53   late summer or fall event.

00:32:55   But in this scenario,

00:32:58   probably not ship it until early the next year.

00:33:02   - Yeah, one of the things that Mark mentions

00:33:05   is like this was similar from what he was hearing

00:33:08   with the original Apple Watch,

00:33:10   that the product kept getting pushed.

00:33:13   - Yeah.

00:33:14   - And you know, it's kind of like,

00:33:16   this is the second time that Apple's tried to introduce

00:33:18   a new category and is struggling to get it

00:33:20   over the finish line.

00:33:22   - It's hard.

00:33:23   It's hard, right?

00:33:24   Like it's hard to put out a new product

00:33:27   and you have to balance all those things too.

00:33:28   Like, is this something that's good enough to ship?

00:33:30   Do we need to fix this?

00:33:32   Because they want that first product to be viable, right?

00:33:34   They don't want that, like say what you will

00:33:36   about the original Apple Watch.

00:33:37   - You only get one shot at the first impression.

00:33:39   - Yeah, exactly.

00:33:40   And the original Apple Watch as limited and primitive

00:33:42   as it seems now, it did work, right?

00:33:46   And that's a judgment call of like,

00:33:48   can we ship this?

00:33:50   Is this good enough to ship? - And it demoed well.

00:33:51   Right, it demoed well.

00:33:52   And that's an important part of the whole thing.

00:33:56   When we all saw it for the first time,

00:33:58   it was like, well, this looks cool,

00:33:59   and they gotta do that again.

00:34:00   I mean, my personal read on this is similar

00:34:02   to what I've been saying, as you mentioned, for months now.

00:34:06   Maybe it isn't exactly where it would wanna be,

00:34:08   and they can't announce it the way that they would want to,

00:34:11   which I think is in-person event.

00:34:13   They don't know when they're gonna be able to do that.

00:34:15   let's just take more time on it.

00:34:17   - Could be too.

00:34:18   Like, I mean, once you're on the treadmill,

00:34:21   for lack of a better metaphor,

00:34:24   and the product's out there and you're releasing updates,

00:34:28   like you can't, you're on it.

00:34:30   That product's live.

00:34:31   Now you're iterating.

00:34:33   This is the one time in a product's life

00:34:35   where you can just say, we got time.

00:34:39   - Yeah.

00:34:41   - Just wait, wait for it.

00:34:43   We don't have to rush this

00:34:45   Because once we ship, once we announce really,

00:34:48   like the clock starts ticking.

00:34:50   So if we need to take our time

00:34:53   so that we don't stumble out of the gate,

00:34:54   now is the time to do that.

00:34:57   So that's, I think it's fine.

00:34:59   I'm not really surprised.

00:35:01   Everything has slipped, right?

00:35:03   Like we've seen all sorts of things slip,

00:35:05   often for availability reasons.

00:35:07   You've got a brand new product.

00:35:08   It's obviously shooting to be a very high end product

00:35:11   with lots of technology packed into it.

00:35:15   If this was a lesser product, it would be easier to ship,

00:35:17   but they are setting the bar pretty high for themselves.

00:35:20   So I'm not surprised, but I still, at this point,

00:35:23   I feel like based on what Mark is reporting,

00:35:26   that this is probably an announced fall product.

00:35:31   And they may even say that it'll be shipping

00:35:33   by the end of the year, but it definitely feels

00:35:34   like it's not gonna be shipping for the holidays

00:35:37   and in quantity until next year.

00:35:40   - So on the hardware, the components, the price,

00:35:45   Gorman says that he expects the headset

00:35:48   to be priced above $2,000

00:35:50   due to the high-end components being used.

00:35:53   We'd heard previously 3,000.

00:35:56   I reckon it's probably gonna be between two and three.

00:35:58   I just don't know how they could do higher.

00:36:01   I mean, 'cause even $2,000 is astronomical, right?

00:36:04   - Well, think about that this is,

00:36:06   what he says is M1 Pro level performance

00:36:10   because they need the GPUs.

00:36:12   And it's got the two, what, 8K panels?

00:36:17   How is that product not $2,500, $3,000?

00:36:22   - No, I understand, but this is one of those things

00:36:25   where it's as expensive as you decide to make.

00:36:27   They've made the decision, it didn't naturally grow this way

00:36:30   and I know why you would go to this level,

00:36:34   but like, I don't, for me with the price thing,

00:36:39   I'm kind of putting it to the back of my mind

00:36:41   until I try and get a sense of what their strategy is.

00:36:44   Because if their strategy is we make a $2,500 headset,

00:36:49   we're Apple, hello, this is what we do,

00:36:52   it's not a great strategy ultimately, right?

00:36:54   And we can believe that the strategy is, as we've expected

00:36:57   and as it's been rumored and pontificated on many times,

00:37:00   that like, this is the first one,

00:37:03   so they can get some enthusiasts in the mix

00:37:07   and get some developers in the mix

00:37:09   and try and work it out and bring the price down.

00:37:12   - And honestly, at this point, ship it after the holidays

00:37:14   when they might even have another version available

00:37:17   for the next holiday season, right?

00:37:19   So it's like, just don't, this is not for everybody.

00:37:23   I think though, this goes back to me saying

00:37:24   that they set the bar for themselves very high.

00:37:27   This is, I think, what Apple is doing here,

00:37:29   which is we're not gonna ship an Oculus Quest 2.

00:37:32   we're not gonna do it.

00:37:34   We have standards, right?

00:37:35   Is probably what they're saying.

00:37:37   And like, if we can't do it with this level

00:37:41   of GPU performance and this quality of display in the thing,

00:37:46   it's not even worth being a product.

00:37:48   And that will set the price much higher.

00:37:51   They could have made a cheaper product,

00:37:53   but it does allow them to go on stage.

00:37:55   Presumably we'll see what their competitors do

00:37:57   in the next year, but it allows them to go on stage

00:37:59   plausibly say, "This is the single best VR experience anybody has ever made." And I think

00:38:05   that's what they're shooting for. I think they want to come out and say, "You've seen

00:38:08   the rest, now see the best. This is the best VR thing ever. It's got M1 Pro power. It's

00:38:14   got dual 8K display. It is the closest thing to reality that you can possibly find. And

00:38:23   it's going to blow everything else out of the market." And whether that's true or not

00:38:26   remains to be seen, but I think that's what they're going for.

00:38:28   Whether that's true or not by the time they announce it is to, you know...

00:38:32   Well, that's what I mean about their competitors, right?

00:38:34   Like, we know that Meta is working on a Quest follow-up that is probably going to be the

00:38:39   Quest Pro, but I think it's Project Cambria.

00:38:42   That's the name of it at the moment, yeah.

00:38:44   But it might not even be Quest.

00:38:46   Honestly, I would expect it will have a different name, because Oculus had different product

00:38:52   names depending on where it sat in the market before, and now...

00:38:55   - Right, and this is a high-end thing,

00:38:57   so they may want to retire Quest.

00:38:58   We'll see, but that's coming, right?

00:39:00   And that may be, that's the risk of it slipping here,

00:39:03   is that Apple, I think, is staking out the high ground

00:39:06   and saying we have the best experience.

00:39:07   But by the time they ship this thing,

00:39:09   that may be a harder argument to make.

00:39:10   We'll see.

00:39:11   - And I would expect from a strategy decision,

00:39:13   'cause I think they were already doing it anyway,

00:39:16   Meta will be willing to take a loss on the hardware

00:39:19   in a way that Apple, I don't think, would.

00:39:21   And that's where then the price and specs

00:39:24   could all start getting jumbled up because of the time that it takes them to get the

00:39:27   product out there.

00:39:28   Because this is, you know, I think more important to Meta's overall strategy.

00:39:35   They changed the name of the company, right?

00:39:39   Because of this.

00:39:40   So if they can get it in under a certain price point and take a loss on it, but they're banking

00:39:45   on all of the games that they own to sell well, you know, like it's, this is basically

00:39:50   taking the Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo model, right? When all these

00:39:55   consoles are released, they lose money at the beginning, but they make it up later

00:39:59   and they also make it up on the games that they make, right? So maybe Facebook

00:40:04   Meta could take that route where Apple could also, but won't.

00:40:12   My guess is that the Project Cambria quest follow-on will be, like, keep in mind

00:40:19   the Oculus Quest is what, 300 bucks? So I think that they're probably shooting for like a thousand

00:40:25   dollar headset that is much better than the Quest. And you think about it, the Quest is priced like

00:40:32   a console, but a thousand dollar headset is not priced like a console. It's a totally different

00:40:37   thing. I think that's what they're shooting for. And that's going to give Apple an interesting

00:40:42   position to be way more expensive and presumably have way better technology in it. Again, the

00:40:48   The argument is going to be that Meta has got a better platform with an existing app

00:40:54   store for VR and Apple is going to have to build that, although they've got their huge

00:40:58   existing iOS app store.

00:41:00   It's just an interesting way to go.

00:41:01   I think in the long run, those companies are going to get more in sync with their products.

00:41:06   But from this perspective, before those products exist, I think it's fascinating to see what

00:41:16   their different approaches are.

00:41:17   And one of them may prove to be more successful than the other in the short term, and it might

00:41:20   be different in the long term.

00:41:22   But I agree in the sense that what META is going to do will probably be a very different

00:41:28   approach than what Apple is doing.

00:41:30   And it may be successful because when you think about the Quest being $300, a $2,000

00:41:37   Apple headset is like, "What?

00:41:38   Like what are you doing?"

00:41:41   And yet if you think about the specs, I think they could justify it.

00:41:46   I think the question is, does anybody care enough

00:41:48   about having the best VR experience ever or not?

00:41:52   And that comes down to execution for Apple, right?

00:41:54   And what is Meta's execution?

00:41:56   And is it so good that the difference

00:42:00   between what they're doing and Apple is doing

00:42:02   is kind of not that much, and yet the price is so much more.

00:42:06   And that's a threat to Apple.

00:42:09   - And it's also worth remembering

00:42:10   that PlayStation will be in the mix.

00:42:12   But then anyway, and the PSVR2's

00:42:15   Um, uh, hardware is amazing.

00:42:19   I don't remember if we've talked about on this show, but like the specs that they've

00:42:22   given.

00:42:23   4K HDR, 110 degree field of view with foveated rendering.

00:42:28   This is where...

00:42:29   Is it wireless now?

00:42:30   Uh, it would be one USB-C cable to the PlayStation 5.

00:42:35   Well that's better than the ridiculous set of boxes and cables that the...

00:42:41   Because I have a PSVR and I like it, but honestly I haven't played it since I got the Quest.

00:42:44   - Because it's clunky, super clunky.

00:42:46   - It's so clunky.

00:42:48   - Yeah, and also, I mean,

00:42:49   I mean, the Apple's is probably not gonna be wireless.

00:42:53   Right?

00:42:54   I don't think-- - Oh, Apple's will be wireless.

00:42:55   Yeah. - You think it will be?

00:42:56   All right, maybe.

00:42:57   - It's entirely self-contained.

00:42:58   - Okay, cool.

00:42:59   Well, anyway, the foveated rendering,

00:43:02   which is where it's using eye tracking

00:43:05   to just render what's in front of you.

00:43:07   We've spoken about this,

00:43:08   it's like this is something Apple probably do.

00:43:10   OLED display, 90 to 120 Hertz, inside out tracking,

00:43:15   so it no longer needs a camera.

00:43:16   And they have new really cool looking controllers

00:43:21   like kind of similar to Oculus-like controllers.

00:43:26   - Exactly, instead of my old PSVR,

00:43:29   'cause I didn't use the little magic wand Sony things.

00:43:32   And so I ended up playing all my PSVR stuff

00:43:35   with just the PS3 controller or PS4 controller, I guess.

00:43:40   which was fine. It was fine.

00:43:42   But I will say this about Sony.

00:43:46   Their software is better because they're a platform.

00:43:52   They're a gaming platform.

00:43:54   - They're gonna have the best,

00:43:55   they're probably gonna, mm.

00:43:56   - They're gonna have the best games.

00:43:57   - They may have the best games.

00:43:58   It's gonna be between them and Meta really,

00:44:00   depending on what Sony's able to put out there.

00:44:03   - Can I just, my experience with the PSVR,

00:44:07   my favorite thing about it was the Astro Bot Rescue game.

00:44:10   I love that game so much.

00:44:11   - They'll make a huge version of that now.

00:44:13   - So that game though is so successful.

00:44:15   I have to say, and I don't know if there are any rumors,

00:44:17   I assume there aren't any rumors about this

00:44:19   and I assume they're gonna be eight years behind,

00:44:20   but what the Astro Bot Rescue game,

00:44:22   when I think about it, I'm like,

00:44:23   can you imagine Nintendo VR?

00:44:26   Can you imagine?

00:44:29   - If they, yeah, it would be great.

00:44:30   - 'Cause Astro Bot is very Nintendo like.

00:44:32   - Yeah.

00:44:33   - And I love it so much, but you know, it's Nintendo.

00:44:37   So there'll be, you know,

00:44:38   - The Nintendo headset will be here in 2030, right?

00:44:41   - It will come out in 2030 and it will be 1080p, right?

00:44:43   Like, you know, 'cause it's just what they do,

00:44:45   but the games will be the best games if they do it.

00:44:48   I mean, Nintendo are fine, right?

00:44:51   You know, Nintendo, totally good.

00:44:53   They're just gonna keep riding that Switch train.

00:44:56   They're good, you know,

00:44:57   that Nintendo works at a very different speed,

00:44:59   but yes, from a game quality perspective, it'd be amazing.

00:45:04   I want to talk about alternative app store payment stuff.

00:45:09   Oh yeah, we have a little update.

00:45:11   Honestly, this was a story

00:45:14   that I feel like I could have blinked and missed it.

00:45:19   But it is a story that,

00:45:22   without all of the hubbub of the last six months,

00:45:25   is monumental,

00:45:27   but it kind of was just like,

00:45:29   I think we're so jaded about this discussion now,

00:45:33   that it kind of just went by.

00:45:35   So Apple has finally confirmed they will comply

00:45:39   with the South Korean law for allowing alternate payment

00:45:43   methods in the App Store.

00:45:46   Now, they're going to basically do exactly what Google did.

00:45:49   Apple just waited.

00:45:50   They saw what Google did.

00:45:51   They're going to copy it.

00:45:52   They're going to allow for developers

00:45:54   to submit a specific build of their applications

00:45:57   for South Korea that will give users

00:46:00   choice of how they would like to pay in app. But Apple will still be expecting to take

00:46:07   a commission. They are calling it a reduced service charge.

00:46:13   All of this at the moment has basically just come from a set of quotes given to the Korea

00:46:22   Herald. That's basically as much as happened. It's like, "Oh, okay. Super interesting. I

00:46:28   to see where this goes. Then, a couple of days later, Apple announced that this will

00:46:34   also apply to dating apps in the Netherlands due to another legal case there. So we have

00:46:41   more details now for this one. I'm not sure why they gave the details now, maybe it's

00:46:47   like the date at which it has to be implemented was sooner, but Apple's going to be creating

00:46:52   a special entitlement that developers of dating applications will apply for. This is similar

00:46:58   to like CarPlay, so if you want to be a CarPlay app, you want your app to work in CarPlay,

00:47:03   you have to like apply to Apple and they confirm that you are the right kind of app for a CarPlay

00:47:09   app. If you're approved for this special entitlement for dating apps, they will be able to, developers

00:47:17   will be able to integrate this functionality into another Netherlands specific app release.

00:47:22   So we're going to have something called store kit external purchase entitlement, which I

00:47:28   think that makes sense, right?

00:47:29   This is the ability for you to have the external linking like the Korea thing.

00:47:33   There's also going to be something called store kit external link entitlement.

00:47:39   I think it's fair to expect that the link entitlement is what's going to also be used

00:47:43   to appease the Japanese Fair Trade Commission ruling, which is the first one of all of these.

00:47:48   Undoubtedly.

00:47:49   Yeah.

00:47:50   least, when talking about the dating apps in the Netherlands, Apple will still be requiring

00:47:56   some kind of commission no matter which you choose. Now, this is intriguing, right? Because

00:48:03   I don't remember anything from the Japanese Fair Trading Commission thing where Apple

00:48:08   was saying, "Hey, we're still going to make you pay us." That was never spoken about.

00:48:12   We all just kind of assumed you'll just be sent out if you're a reader app and you can

00:48:16   just go do the thing. But Apple will still want some kind of commission, but also are

00:48:21   going to say like, they're not going to help customers with any kind of refunds, etc, etc,

00:48:25   etc. What we don't know yet is how much, how it may differ between these two entitlements,

00:48:32   if at all. What are they doing?

00:48:35   I think we have now seen our, the Apple strategy. I texted you when these things were going

00:48:41   on and I said this, I feel like we discussed this scenario exactly and that there's actually

00:48:46   nothing surprising here. Apple has, remember they said, "Well, we need time," when the

00:48:51   US ruling was being appealed. They're like, "We need time, we need time." Clearly, they

00:48:55   are now building these two entitlements for StoreKit that they will allow certain apps

00:49:03   to do the external link or allow certain apps to do the external purchase. And you can now

00:49:09   see Apple strategy, which is they are going to build very specific rules about when you

00:49:14   use this. So they're going to limit this to where they have to make it available. They're

00:49:19   going to, and I know we talked about this a few months ago, they are going to make it

00:49:23   as painful as possible to implement, which is, I was laughing when I saw that the Netherlands

00:49:30   dating app will have to be a separate binary with a separate App Store ID. You're not going

00:49:37   to be able to do this per region, you're going to have to say here is the Netherlands version

00:49:45   of our app that lets you use this external search.

00:49:48   Technically, Match.com could end up with four versions of their app because they will do

00:49:54   it in the Netherlands, they will do it in South Korea because why not, and then Japan,

00:50:00   right?

00:50:01   Yeah, possibly, possibly. Depends on what their rules are, but it sounds like it's possible.

00:50:05   That'll be the way it is.

00:50:06   You know, you can see where I'm going for with that.

00:50:09   - Yeah, so they're not gonna make it easy for you.

00:50:11   And this is where it comes,

00:50:14   the dramatic vision of like Epic and people like that

00:50:19   about freedom from Apple's tyranny is hitting reality,

00:50:24   which is where they're winning cases

00:50:27   and where the regulators are putting pressure on Apple.

00:50:31   It's all about options for other payment methods

00:50:36   or options for links.

00:50:39   And so Apple is going to abide, they have a plan.

00:50:43   They are gonna abide by the letter of the law,

00:50:45   but they're not gonna repent, right?

00:50:48   They're going to do as little as possible

00:50:50   and make it as difficult as possible

00:50:52   because Apple wants control and Apple wants money.

00:50:56   And so you can see it here that if you believed

00:51:01   that by going to an external credit card provider,

00:51:04   you were gonna be free of Apple's tax on you.

00:51:09   Apple has made it clear that that's not the case.

00:51:11   Google has made this clear to Play Store developers

00:51:14   that it's not the case, that as platform owners,

00:51:18   they feel they have the right to charge users

00:51:22   of their platform for access to their platform.

00:51:25   And so the way they're spinning the percentage

00:51:30   that they take is now, now, although I could argue

00:51:35   that you saw this from the beginning with the App Store

00:51:37   because Steve Jobs talked a lot about how like,

00:51:39   we build you the APIs and we're running the App Store

00:51:43   and we handle the bandwidth and we take care

00:51:45   of all that stuff and in exchange,

00:51:47   and we're gonna grant you for free apps,

00:51:49   we're just gonna give it to you, that's great,

00:51:51   but if you pay, we wanna take our percentage.

00:51:53   And so now what they're both saying is,

00:51:56   look, if you wanna avoid that, that's okay,

00:51:59   avoid the credit card charges,

00:52:01   but you're not gonna avoid being on our platform

00:52:04   and paying us a fee for being present

00:52:06   and making money on our platform.

00:52:08   That's, you know, if you wanna separate those two,

00:52:10   that's fine, but we're still going to charge you.

00:52:13   So presumably these entitlements will include a requirement

00:52:17   that they announce to Apple in some way

00:52:20   what the size of the transaction is.

00:52:22   Apple will probably bill them

00:52:24   for Apple's percentage of them.

00:52:26   And so anybody who thought that they were gonna escape

00:52:31   paying Apple money by using an external credit card provider

00:52:34   is going to discover that they won't.

00:52:35   They're still gonna have to pay Apple.

00:52:36   In fact, depending on how it goes

00:52:39   and how bold Apple wants to be,

00:52:40   it may be the same or worse to use an external provider.

00:52:45   My guess is that in order to keep these regulators at bay

00:52:47   a little bit, it will be a little bit better.

00:52:50   And what the argument Apple will make to developers is,

00:52:53   okay, you can do it this way.

00:52:55   It will be worse for your users

00:52:56   and you're really not gonna make much more money,

00:52:58   you decide, and figuring that most people will be like,

00:53:01   "It's not worth it for me."

00:53:02   And where does this all end up?

00:53:05   It ends up with this, which is,

00:53:07   unless a government or a regulatory body of some kind

00:53:12   is willing to say that the owners of software platforms

00:53:17   cannot legally charge for access to the platform

00:53:26   in some way, Apple and Google will continue to take their cut.

00:53:31   And that, the challenge there is that,

00:53:33   and I think that's coming, that conversation is coming,

00:53:36   but that's a tougher argument to make, right?

00:53:40   'Cause you're basically saying every platform that exists

00:53:44   has to be wide open and that the constructors

00:53:47   of the platform have to give everything away for free.

00:53:50   And the risk there is depending on how that stuff

00:53:53   is written and how that rule is organized,

00:53:57   you may end up in a situation where what ends up happening

00:54:01   is to become an Apple developer,

00:54:02   you're gonna have to pay a lot more money, right?

00:54:06   Like to have a class of app that is allowed to charge money,

00:54:09   you have to pay Apple a large amount of money.

00:54:13   And again, the risk there is that you're gonna end up

00:54:15   in a situation where you basically say,

00:54:17   platform owners can't charge for access

00:54:19   to their platforms at all.

00:54:20   That's a big step because that's basically saying,

00:54:23   your compensation for making a platform for developers

00:54:27   is nothing, you can't do it.

00:54:30   And that would be a huge change across all platforms.

00:54:34   I'm not saying that it might not happen

00:54:36   or that it might not be an interesting wrinkle,

00:54:38   but what Apple and Google are doing here is saying,

00:54:41   basically you're gonna have to go that far

00:54:44   if you want our money.

00:54:45   - Can you believe like,

00:54:46   can you imagine thinking this is the right way

00:54:50   to go about this?

00:54:51   Like you sat down with all of the options

00:54:55   and you come to the decision

00:54:57   that this is the way you want to go.

00:55:00   I cannot fathom this.

00:55:02   - It's the same thing that we've talked about before,

00:55:05   which is I can understand the mindset

00:55:07   from Apple's perspective

00:55:09   because Apple's very much shown we want our money.

00:55:11   Like we want our money, it's part of Apple's culture.

00:55:13   Apple didn't become the most profitable,

00:55:16   valuable company in the world by not taking its money.

00:55:19   but also part of it is the Steve Jobs instituted

00:55:22   kind of cultural thing, which is everybody owes us

00:55:26   for how great we are.

00:55:27   And anybody who's touching our platforms owes us.

00:55:30   And so we want our money because our great,

00:55:32   your great product is actually because of our greatness.

00:55:35   And like that is just a thing that has been instituted

00:55:38   and the success of the app store reinforced it.

00:55:40   And it still is there.

00:55:42   So I can understand them thinking that.

00:55:44   The part that you and I talked about before

00:55:46   that kind of blows me away is what I just said

00:55:49   about what they're doing is challenging governments

00:55:54   and regulators to make it impossible for platform owners

00:56:00   to monetize their platforms in any way, right?

00:56:01   Like that's, they're like, okay, we'll do this,

00:56:05   but we're still gonna take our cut

00:56:06   and we're gonna keep taking our cut

00:56:08   until you make it illegal for us to take a cut

00:56:10   on our platforms, which is a really,

00:56:12   like they're raising the bet there.

00:56:15   And I look at it and I think, yeah,

00:56:17   but what if they take the bet?

00:56:20   It could be catastrophic to your business

00:56:23   if you're barred further,

00:56:24   where you might get them off your case

00:56:27   if you eased up a little bit

00:56:28   and you'd still make a lot of money.

00:56:30   But the downside is that you're gonna lose everything

00:56:34   and the quality of your platform is gonna go down

00:56:36   and like all of this downside.

00:56:39   And I'm fascinated by what those arguments

00:56:41   must be like inside of Apple

00:56:43   and whether they have a plan of like,

00:56:44   well, if this becomes a problem, we have a solution.

00:56:47   But somebody decided to say,

00:56:48   rather than kind of backing off of this all the way

00:56:52   to a point where we think we can escape

00:56:54   and not have to do more and give up a little bit of revenue,

00:56:57   but really we escape from this whole situation.

00:57:00   Somebody inside Apple was like, nope, we'll take the bet.

00:57:03   We'll dare them to chase us,

00:57:07   chase that revenue somewhere else.

00:57:09   Because that's essentially the move they chose to make,

00:57:11   which is we're gonna risk our platform,

00:57:14   our app store by doing the minimum possible to comply, not realizing that the forces that

00:57:21   are out there are probably not going to be quieted by Apple doing the minimum.

00:57:26   I don't want to tip my hand for our next topic too much, but like, I believe that a company

00:57:32   can and should have competitive advantages, right? Like it's a part of doing business

00:57:37   and doing business well, like you work out what's best for you and you capitalize on

00:57:41   that but I just think the app store's gone way too far. I just think you know

00:57:45   like it just from a fundamental level right we can we pick apart this stuff as

00:57:51   much as we want but just from a fundamental level like I think the thing

00:57:55   that kicked all of this off is like Spotify right? Apple compete directly

00:58:01   with Spotify yeah and set the terms at which Spotify is allowed to compete

00:58:07   backwards. That is not fair. It just isn't fair. There's no fairness to this.

00:58:15   I think that this one is a better example than Epic than anyone else.

00:58:19   I think Spotify is the best example of this because they make the same product

00:58:25   in the same business and Apple can let themselves make more money because they

00:58:32   make Spotify give some of their money to them.

00:58:36   - Yeah, I mean that's, and that's one of the weaknesses

00:58:38   that clearly the lawyers have probably written down,

00:58:39   which is well, one place where we might be weak

00:58:42   is we may be barred from enforcing these rules

00:58:45   in areas where we compete.

00:58:47   And then we're gonna have to have a conversation

00:58:48   about our video streaming service and our music service

00:58:51   and our fitness service and all of those,

00:58:53   because all of those services where we have an advantage

00:58:56   by being the platform owner and having to dictate terms

00:58:58   to everybody who is not us,

00:59:01   the risk there is that at the very least,

00:59:03   we may be forced to comply for those categories.

00:59:07   And I would say, I agree with you.

00:59:09   I would say that's probably right, right?

00:59:12   Like when Apple, like the reason why,

00:59:14   why can't you buy books from Amazon on iOS

00:59:19   or comics from Amazon and ComiXology?

00:59:21   Why?

00:59:23   'Cause iBooks, that's the reason.

00:59:25   And it's the most unfair thing possible.

00:59:26   It's like Apple can do when that purchases

00:59:28   because Apple's the middleman

00:59:30   and Apple doesn't take from its cut.

00:59:32   Amazon has to give Apple a cut and it's the middleman,

00:59:35   so it loses almost all of its cut when it does that.

00:59:37   The business models don't intersect.

00:59:39   The result is that Apple has a huge user experience advantage

00:59:43   with books, formerly iBooks, with books over Kindle.

00:59:48   Also, it hasn't worked, which is kind of funny,

00:59:53   but I'm sure they make some money at it,

00:59:55   but it's also degraded the whole iOS experience

00:59:58   for people who do use Amazon's things.

01:00:00   And like, it's not fair.

01:00:04   Apple is competing in a way that the competition

01:00:08   can't do what Apple does.

01:00:10   And Apple's argument would be,

01:00:12   well, yeah, but it's our platform.

01:00:14   Like, okay, that's the risk though.

01:00:15   - You're saying about fairness, right?

01:00:16   Fairness is a good point.

01:00:18   Because fairness in these kinds of things

01:00:21   is mostly a feeling until someone makes it law, right?

01:00:24   So at the moment, it just feels unfair.

01:00:28   And I think the argument that I have to make,

01:00:30   like when thinking about like the feeling of unfairness,

01:00:33   is like, who is winning here?

01:00:37   Who is winning here?

01:00:39   Who does Apple think is winning here?

01:00:42   Like what is their intention?

01:00:44   Like, do they wanna be this company?

01:00:46   Like, doesn't it just make everything that they do worse?

01:00:50   Like they're a customer experience company.

01:00:54   and they make the customer experience worse

01:00:58   due to the choices that they continue to make.

01:01:01   And I kind of just like, I just don't get it.

01:01:05   - Well, I think it comes down to,

01:01:07   are you willing to trade some of your perception

01:01:11   as being a good player for money?

01:01:15   And I think where a lot of the friction happens

01:01:18   with a lot of us when we think about these issues

01:01:21   is that Apple seems to be willing to trade

01:01:25   more of their perception as being a good actor,

01:01:28   a good player in the game for money

01:01:32   than we think they should.

01:01:35   And we are informed, they are informed by their profits.

01:01:40   We are also informed by their profits.

01:01:42   We look at the amount of profit that Apple makes

01:01:44   and say, "You're playing awfully hard hardball here

01:01:50   for a company that is so rich.

01:01:53   The counter argument is that it's business, baby,

01:01:58   maximize profits, play hardball.

01:02:00   Where it comes into intersection is people's views

01:02:04   of your company, consumers' views of your company,

01:02:07   third-party developers' views of your company,

01:02:09   and regulators' and lawmakers' perceptions of your company.

01:02:14   And that's the part where I think they're tone deaf.

01:02:17   That's the part where I think the Apple's attitude tends to be,

01:02:24   "I don't care about those developers.

01:02:26   They're making money on our platform.

01:02:28   Again, off of our greatness, they're making money.

01:02:31   And consumers love us.

01:02:33   Customer sat, customer sat.

01:02:34   They don't care about this stuff."

01:02:36   Okay, well, I agree with that to a certain extent.

01:02:40   And then you get to the regulators and you're like,

01:02:41   "Oh, I don't know.

01:02:44   Tech in general is seen as a bad guy,

01:02:46   and you are not acting like a good guy,

01:02:50   and that there's a lot of danger there.

01:02:52   But that's their calculation in the end.

01:02:55   And what I think a lot of us find disappointing is,

01:02:59   I don't expect Apple to say,

01:03:00   "No, no, we're a charity now," right?

01:03:02   I don't.

01:03:03   But I do look at what they do and think,

01:03:05   "Wait a second.

01:03:06   Are you taking risks with your entire

01:03:14   corporate identity for a relatively small amount of the money that you make.

01:03:21   That's the part that I don't get, right?

01:03:23   Is they are coming off as a bad guy and as like super greedy,

01:03:27   and nobody's asking them to become a charity.

01:03:30   If this was 60% of their revenue, I wouldn't fight this point so much.

01:03:35   Right?

01:03:37   Because then it's like, okay, I understand why they want this money.

01:03:41   I think maybe they need to loosen it a little bit,

01:03:45   but this is what the company's based on.

01:03:47   This is not what the company's based on.

01:03:50   - I know, and that's what it always comes back to is,

01:03:52   I find it a strange thing to add this level of risk

01:03:56   and to potentially anger various other parties

01:04:00   for something that doesn't really seem core

01:04:03   to your business, but Apple clearly thinks

01:04:06   much more aggressively about this than we do,

01:04:10   and it's a little bit baffling from our perspective,

01:04:13   but that's clearly their strategy, right?

01:04:14   Their strategy is to do as little as possible

01:04:16   and dare those regulators and those government officials

01:04:21   to make it basically making money off

01:04:24   of software platforms illegal,

01:04:27   because I think they figure they're never gonna do it,

01:04:30   that that's a step too far,

01:04:32   and that they're willing to go in the name of freedom

01:04:34   to things like choice about payment systems,

01:04:37   but maybe they're not willing to say,

01:04:39   this profit-making corporation is not allowed to charge people for this thing because that's

01:04:44   a step they may think is a step too far. The risk is that it's not a step too far and that

01:04:51   they lose a much bigger chunk of their business and are under just brutal regulation in certain

01:04:57   markets and I'm not sure that that's what they want but they've done the risk assessment

01:05:01   and they think it's okay.

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01:06:31   Tim Higgins at the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about how iMessage is becoming

01:06:49   a lock-in for Apple and a sales driver for iPhones, primarily amongst teenagers, because

01:06:56   of the "green bubble effect" in iMessage, ultimately suggesting that there is peer pressure

01:07:02   to get an iPhone and stay on an iPhone because of iMessage group chats.

01:07:07   Oh boy. This is... look, look, this is a dumb story. John Gruber wrote a piece to...

01:07:14   Just a great, super good, like a classic John Gruber eviscerating takedown, which is more

01:07:22   entertaining to read than the original story.

01:07:24   There are a lot of these stories, there's a lot of lazy journalism where you basically

01:07:28   take some anecdotes and string them together and try to use it to make a point. This story

01:07:32   is really unfortunate because it is, you know, is it true that green bubbles get crap from

01:07:43   blue bubbles in group texts?

01:07:45   Probably, but not like, consistently, right? Like, it happens, sure.

01:07:51   - I would actually argue that they talk about peer pressure

01:07:54   like you're a green bubble, get out of here.

01:07:56   What I have heard is that it's way worse

01:07:58   to be a green bubble in a group text

01:08:00   because then every tap back becomes a text message.

01:08:05   - There was a viral, did you see this viral tweet

01:08:08   around the holidays where it was just like 25 layers down

01:08:13   of like such and such person like this, like this, like this

01:08:16   because if there is somebody who's using SMS

01:08:20   in an iMessage thread,

01:08:23   you lose a lot of the iMessage functionality for everyone,

01:08:27   even if they're an iMessage user,

01:08:29   because it breaks the continuity of the thread.

01:08:32   - Yeah, exactly.

01:08:33   So it's bad on all sides, right?

01:08:35   I get it, I get it.

01:08:36   And I'm actually a little surprised

01:08:38   that Google hasn't done more in Android

01:08:40   to mediate this experience, right?

01:08:43   - They have from their side.

01:08:44   - Well, the message, you want your SMS app on Android

01:08:49   to read those messages and convert them back into metadata.

01:08:53   That's what you want. - It does.

01:08:54   - You wanna, does it?

01:08:55   - Yeah, so they enabled this.

01:08:58   So if you use SMS on Android

01:09:01   and you're working with people on iPhone,

01:09:03   say you did a tap back,

01:09:05   it shows up as a little thumbs up emoji

01:09:08   for the Android users.

01:09:09   It's iPhone users that still get the poor experience there.

01:09:13   - Oh yeah, bad, right, because they all boomerang back.

01:09:15   Anyway, so is there an issue here?

01:09:18   - Sure.

01:09:18   But first off, this story is trying to make points

01:09:25   that it can't back up about like teenagers

01:09:29   who are using iMessage groups,

01:09:31   where we know teenagers are using lots of groups.

01:09:33   It's very US centric,

01:09:34   'cause this is really only true in the US.

01:09:36   If you look at other places

01:09:37   where the iPhone is successful,

01:09:39   group are linked to all these points.

01:09:40   If you look at other places

01:09:41   where the iPhone is successful,

01:09:43   and people don't use iMessage,

01:09:45   people are still using the iPhone,

01:09:47   So it's not iMessage.

01:09:48   I think at the core of this is basically like

01:09:50   this writer had heard some fun anecdotes

01:09:54   and decided to formulate a theory that like, aha.

01:09:57   It actually reminds me back in the day of like the,

01:10:00   when the iPod especially was successful

01:10:02   and people were like, people only use Apple products

01:10:05   'cause they're in a cult or then people only use

01:10:09   Apple products because of the look

01:10:12   'cause it's a status symbol.

01:10:14   Like that was always the argument.

01:10:15   And so Tim Higgins at the Wall Street Journal, I think,

01:10:18   heard these anecdotes and said,

01:10:19   "Aha, this is the reason why people buy iPhones.

01:10:22   Like there has to be a reason.

01:10:23   It can't be that they're good.

01:10:24   It's that the status of being a blue bubble

01:10:28   is the thing that is at the center of this."

01:10:30   And it's very silly because it's only in the US

01:10:34   and it's not true in other places

01:10:36   where the iPhone is successful.

01:10:38   So it's a thing that happens,

01:10:40   but trying to build this narrative arc on top of this,

01:10:45   Like this would be better,

01:10:46   and maybe Wall Street Journal doesn't do kinds of stories

01:10:48   like this unless it has a business impact of some kind,

01:10:50   but like this is a quirky story

01:10:53   that's like a sociological story about like,

01:10:56   like iPhones are from Mars and Androids are from Venus.

01:11:00   It's like, why can't our text messages talk?

01:11:03   And you could do a story like that

01:11:04   that's about like the social issues

01:11:06   and about the technical issues.

01:11:07   And you could really kind of dig down

01:11:08   and make an interesting story.

01:11:10   This doesn't do that because this is trying to build

01:11:12   this other narrative about how Apple is causing bullying

01:11:17   among teenagers because the iPhone blue bubbles

01:11:21   are the reason you have to buy an iPhone,

01:11:23   even though like, I know those anecdotes exist, I get it.

01:11:26   It's just taking it for more than it's worth.

01:11:29   And then the part that actually made me angry

01:11:31   is that the SVP of Android--

01:11:34   - Hiroshi Lockheimer.

01:11:36   - Hiroshi Lockheimer jumped in.

01:11:38   - Went too hard, too fast.

01:11:40   (laughing)

01:11:41   - Way too hard. - I wanna read this tweet

01:11:43   in case people missed it. - Oh my God.

01:11:45   - I think he got a little carried away,

01:11:48   maybe wished he wouldn't have done it, but like did it.

01:11:50   And then the Android account kind of doubled down on it.

01:11:53   But I guess if your SVP is saying it,

01:11:55   what else are you gonna do?

01:11:56   Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy

01:11:59   using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products

01:12:02   is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity

01:12:05   as a core part of its marketing.

01:12:07   The standards exist today to fix this.

01:12:10   Hiroshi, man.

01:12:12   - Yeah.

01:12:13   - You know you went too hard.

01:12:14   'Cause then the next day it comes out

01:12:16   with a much better Twitter thread about like,

01:12:19   here are the ways in which this can be better.

01:12:22   And talking about there's a new standard called RCS.

01:12:25   Some people like it, some people don't,

01:12:26   but it would in theory help bridge some of this.

01:12:29   Or just saying like, hey, Apple,

01:12:31   we would like to work with you, right?

01:12:33   And like, that's a cool thing to do.

01:12:34   'Cause then you're like, we wanna fix this,

01:12:36   balls in their court, et cetera.

01:12:38   It's a better way to handle it

01:12:39   than being like, "Apple's a bully, man!"

01:12:41   Like, it's like, "Oh no, too far."

01:12:44   - That first tweet not only was way too far

01:12:46   and honestly just makes Hiroshi Lockheimer look like a jerk.

01:12:50   But it also feels, actually it makes him also kind of feel

01:12:53   like a cultist of his own where it's like he's been,

01:12:57   was he reading the, you know,

01:12:59   we're open manifesto at that point?

01:13:02   'Cause it was the typical condescension and arrogance

01:13:05   that I feel like Google executives involving Android

01:13:09   had five years ago, where it was just dripping

01:13:12   with condescension and arrogance and conspiracy theories.

01:13:16   And like, the only reason they're successful

01:13:19   is because they are bullies and we're good

01:13:22   and we aren't bullies, which by the way,

01:13:23   if you read anything about Google's advertising strategies

01:13:26   last week, Google are super bullies and kind of shady

01:13:29   or like super shady, like pretty rich

01:13:32   that these are happening kind of simultaneously.

01:13:34   Not gonna get into that, but just, you can look it up.

01:13:37   Yeah, anyway, so Hiroshi, I think it's funny

01:13:40   that he like super backed off of it

01:13:42   to what I think is a reasonable argument,

01:13:44   which is look, the carriers have this new system

01:13:48   and it's not as good as iMessage.

01:13:50   It's not for a lot of different reasons,

01:13:52   including the reason that it's locked to a phone number,

01:13:55   which means that there are some issues involving locking

01:13:58   to a phone number, I get it.

01:14:00   Google's point is it's better than SMS.

01:14:03   Could we come to some agreement because all the users,

01:14:07   This goes back to what we were talking about before.

01:14:09   It's a user experience issue for everyone,

01:14:12   not just for Android users, but also for iPhone users.

01:14:15   It's a user experience issue.

01:14:17   You could even argue if you're inside Apple

01:14:20   that making iMessage work better with Android

01:14:25   is actually good for iMessage

01:14:29   because otherwise a lot of these mixed groups are,

01:14:33   and outside the US they've already done it,

01:14:35   are going to retreat to WhatsApp or Line or WeChat

01:14:38   or whatever.

01:14:39   They're going to leave iMessage

01:14:40   because the experience is so bad

01:14:42   if they have an Android user in their group.

01:14:44   And I would argue that that is a bigger impact

01:14:47   than bullying a teenager 'cause they have a green bubble.

01:14:50   'Cause I've heard this from friends of mine

01:14:53   where it's like, "Oh God, we got into this loop

01:14:55   with the Android thing and it's such a problem."

01:14:56   It's like, it makes your iMessage bad.

01:14:59   It makes messages bad.

01:15:00   So I think there's an argument to be made

01:15:03   and Hiroshi Lockheimer eventually made it,

01:15:05   which is maybe Apple should support something like RCS,

01:15:08   even though it's not great,

01:15:10   just in order to make the experience with Android users

01:15:16   better for everybody.

01:15:19   Even though it's not great. - Well, it's like they support

01:15:19   SMS, right?

01:15:20   So like, you know. - Yeah, exactly.

01:15:22   - You've got to support something.

01:15:24   - And it's hard not to look at Apple's failure

01:15:26   to support RCS as anything but kind of a spite thing,

01:15:29   where they're like, no, lowest common denominator

01:15:32   for Android users is what you're gonna get.

01:15:34   but the UX is so bad that like keep RCS as a green bubble.

01:15:39   I don't care, right?

01:15:41   Like it's not iMessage.

01:15:42   - Don't give it all the features, you know?

01:15:44   - Get a new bubble, get a new bubble color.

01:15:46   I don't care.

01:15:47   But I think that it's a sort of a shame

01:15:50   that Apple hasn't gotten to that just because I do think

01:15:52   this is a UX experience problem for everybody.

01:15:54   But I don't think that this is all like,

01:15:56   "Oh, well this explains the iPhone.

01:15:58   "It's the green bubble bullying."

01:16:00   That explains it, like, come on.

01:16:03   - No, it's stupid. - Don't give it up.

01:16:03   Because, as you said, right, like, outside of the US, nobody even uses iMessage. Like,

01:16:09   I am an annoyance to everyone in my life because I don't want to use WhatsApp, which is what

01:16:15   everyone in the UK uses. They use WhatsApp, but, like, at least everyone I interact with,

01:16:20   like, WhatsApp is— You're getting that WhatsApp bullying? Are

01:16:22   you a victim of WhatsApp bullying, Myke? It's kind of the reverse, where—

01:16:27   So you're who Hiroshi Lockheimer is talking about.

01:16:30   - No!

01:16:32   - Because I don't use it.

01:16:33   I'm in some WhatsApp groups, but I don't like to use them.

01:16:36   And so I kind of, I have a bunch of family chats and stuff

01:16:40   where the only time they ever open iMessage

01:16:43   is because they wanna talk in the family group

01:16:45   that I'm a part of, right?

01:16:46   And as you said, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger,

01:16:52   they're all popular in certain countries around the world

01:16:56   and certain locations.

01:16:57   But then, like, four teens in the US,

01:17:01   Instagram messaging, Discord, like, these are being you.

01:17:06   They're only becoming bigger and more prevalent anyway.

01:17:09   So like, look, I'm not saying this doesn't happen, right?

01:17:12   We started this conversation like, it does happen,

01:17:14   of course it happens.

01:17:15   But to suggest that this is the only reason

01:17:17   people are buying iPhones doesn't make any sense.

01:17:20   - It's bananas.

01:17:21   - 'Cause it's like Jungkook pointed out of like,

01:17:23   In the reverse, on Android, Android messages,

01:17:27   RCS messages are blue and SMSes are green.

01:17:31   - Right.

01:17:32   - So it's the same there too, right?

01:17:34   Like it's more than just this.

01:17:37   It's one of the things, sure,

01:17:38   but it's like a whole set of things.

01:17:40   And so to go back to what I was saying earlier,

01:17:43   I don't think that Apple should have to support

01:17:46   absolutely everything or be forced to put iMessage

01:17:49   on Android or whatever, 'cause it is part of their system

01:17:53   of like, we've made this cool thing.

01:17:55   You get like a bunch of features,

01:17:56   like they should maybe adopt some newer standards

01:17:59   to make interoperability better.

01:18:01   I don't think they have to go the whole hog

01:18:02   to make it like perfect for Android.

01:18:05   - I agree.

01:18:06   - And of course they see iMesses as tie-in.

01:18:08   I don't think that's a bad thing, right?

01:18:10   It's just, you know, they could bridge the gap

01:18:12   a little bit more.

01:18:13   - And, you know, the truth is that Apple is not

01:18:17   in competition with coming, certainly not in competition

01:18:20   with Google's chat things.

01:18:22   'cause Google has proven to be hilariously--

01:18:25   - Oztentica wrote an incredible article about this.

01:18:29   I will find it for the show notes,

01:18:31   where they're like, "Google's one to talk."

01:18:34   It's a really good article.

01:18:35   - Google is hilariously incompetent at chat,

01:18:38   and so that's fine.

01:18:40   Apple's competition is WhatsApp and WeChat and all the rest.

01:18:44   That is iMessage's competition.

01:18:46   And so I would argue that Apple, like WeChat or WhatsApp,

01:18:52   controlling their platform so they can innovate,

01:18:55   which I would argue Apple's done a bad job of innovating,

01:18:58   that they need to do a better job with iMessage.

01:19:00   They tried the replies thing, it's not great.

01:19:02   Like they're trying, which is good.

01:19:05   I think Tapbacks is like the best thing

01:19:07   that they've done there in a long time.

01:19:09   It frustrates me that they're so limited in Tapbacks.

01:19:13   I kind of feel like Tapbacks should let you choose emoji

01:19:17   and use them as Tapbacks and have a little broader palette

01:19:20   to select from than just the ones that are there.

01:19:23   But the ones that are there are great.

01:19:25   I love tap backs.

01:19:26   They're a lot of fun.

01:19:27   So they've done some good innovation.

01:19:29   iMessage, like they need to control it

01:19:32   because it is their product

01:19:34   and they need to be able to do it.

01:19:35   And they don't need to open it up

01:19:36   and they don't need to bring it to Android

01:19:38   because it is their product.

01:19:39   If they don't want to, it's going to hurt them

01:19:42   in the sense that people on Android

01:19:46   are going to not wanna use that SMS

01:19:49   to talk to their friends.

01:19:50   That's why I say actually opening up to RCS might help

01:19:53   iMessage be sticky for people who are using text messages with Android people in the group instead of them abandoning it for another chat system

01:20:02   So yeah, this is this is it is silly

01:20:05   I think it is a side effect of Google having been such a failure that obviously the people at Google are really angry about the

01:20:11   Whole thing and about RCS and the reason they're angry is because Google has never made it work. And so

01:20:18   they have this terrible situation on Android right now,

01:20:22   or you use a third party app.

01:20:24   That's just how it is.

01:20:25   And Apple has had some success in some markets

01:20:28   with iMessage and they hate that.

01:20:31   But like in the end for me as a user,

01:20:33   and I would think for Apple as the platform owner,

01:20:37   the issue should not be,

01:20:38   are we gonna give something to Android users?

01:20:40   'Cause don't put iMessage on Android, it's fine.

01:20:42   Maybe you should look at what's going on

01:20:45   with these green bubble, blue bubble problems

01:20:47   and the work that Android is trying to do

01:20:50   to cover some of it up and how it affects your users

01:20:53   and say, you know what, we could do better here.

01:20:57   And maybe implementing RCS support is,

01:21:01   as a gateway for talking to Android users

01:21:05   is something that would work.

01:21:06   Maybe not, maybe there's some technical reasons

01:21:08   why it would actually be a worse user experience.

01:21:09   That's fine.

01:21:10   But that's the solution, right?

01:21:13   Is how do we make a better experience here

01:21:15   for all our users, not, "Oh, Apple's so mean

01:21:18   "and not putting iMessage on Android

01:21:20   "and they're facilitating bullying."

01:21:22   It's just dumb.

01:21:22   - This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Doppler.

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01:22:09   Let's finish out today with some #AskUpgradeQuestions.

01:22:14   Einuk asks, "Have either of you played around with the new version of Swift Playgrounds?"

01:22:20   I downloaded it and I looked at it and I haven't done more than that.

01:22:25   This isn't really a thing that we do. I understand the significance of it, right? And I think,

01:22:32   you know, I kind of feel like maybe we give some of this stuff a short shrift because it is a cool

01:22:39   thing that they've added. We spoke about it at WWDC and then it hasn't come back up again on

01:22:44   on this show because what are we gonna do with it?

01:22:45   But the idea, in case you've missed,

01:22:47   is that Swift Playgrounds 4 is the first time

01:22:50   that you can create an app on iOS,

01:22:52   submit it to the app store.

01:22:53   Like that's the significance of it.

01:22:54   - And my understanding is it's a lot faster

01:22:56   and it's people who are developers who've played with it

01:22:58   are very impressed with it.

01:22:59   I don't write things in Swift.

01:23:01   My focus is on other languages that I am using

01:23:05   for scripting on my Mac primarily

01:23:08   and for shortcuts on iOS.

01:23:11   So while it's interesting to me on that level,

01:23:13   It's not, this feels, it's a little too developer-y

01:23:18   beyond that.

01:23:19   I did, already did a lot of the Swift introductions.

01:23:22   I've been meaning to go back to that.

01:23:23   There are little lessons and all of that,

01:23:25   because that's kind of fun.

01:23:26   - I've done those.

01:23:27   - And I was kind of interested to see how they,

01:23:29   how they work in the new version.

01:23:31   But like beyond that, I would just say it's beyond the scope

01:23:34   of us as people to do that.

01:23:37   But I've heard good things from developers about it.

01:23:39   - And people that are into Swift seem happy too, right?

01:23:42   And I've already seen, I'm sure you have too,

01:23:45   like the first apps that have been made, they're shipping.

01:23:48   Like you can buy them.

01:23:49   Like people have shipped apps now

01:23:52   that have been purely created.

01:23:55   I think one was called like, To-Don't or something.

01:23:58   - Right.

01:23:59   - Is the name of the app, which is like,

01:24:01   I'll see if I can try and find a link for that

01:24:03   in the show notes, but it's like a list of things not to do,

01:24:06   which is a cute little idea.

01:24:07   But one of the reasons that it had been circulating

01:24:10   in our community was because it was made and published straight from Swift Playgrounds,

01:24:18   which I think is really cool. So it is a great thing that this exists, but we don't really

01:24:25   have much more to say about that.

01:24:27   No, not at this time. Maybe we'll dream of being app developers at some point. My guess,

01:24:33   by the way, I'll just throw it out here, the reason that I would learn to use Swift is

01:24:36   as if Apple decided to create a light version of Swift

01:24:40   that it was going to use for scripting apps on its platforms,

01:24:45   because I feel like that's one of the missing pieces

01:24:48   now that they've done shortcuts is,

01:24:51   is there going to be something

01:24:52   that's a replacement for AppleScript?

01:24:54   Because you can't do everything with shortcuts.

01:24:56   There are things that you really kind of need

01:24:58   a scripting language to do, and what would that be?

01:25:03   And it probably should be JavaScript, which I don't love,

01:25:06   but it probably should be, but, you know,

01:25:08   Apple invented Swift.

01:25:09   So is there a Swift script essentially

01:25:12   waiting in the wings?

01:25:13   If something like that happens, then yeah,

01:25:15   I will learn that portion of Swift

01:25:18   because I'll be interested in doing things with that.

01:25:21   But in terms of like fundamentals of programming,

01:25:24   I've learned a lot of that stuff

01:25:26   and app development is not something

01:25:28   I'm really interested in, so here we are.

01:25:30   - So that app to dump was written by Cephalopod Studio

01:25:34   and they wrote an article called "Lessons from Developing an App on the iPad in Swift

01:25:39   Playgrounds from Start to Finish" so I put the link down in the show notes as well so

01:25:42   if you want to read from someone who's actually done it, what they thought of it and maybe

01:25:47   whether you should do it, I'll put that in the show notes for you.

01:25:50   Michael asks "If you have the option to customize your iPad home screen so that the dock is

01:25:55   on the left or right side instead of on the bottom, would you do it?"

01:25:58   Oh, that's weird.

01:26:01   No, the answer is no and I'll tell you why for me. Usually the iPad is in horizontal

01:26:08   anyway right? So like, and so I with the iPad dock I want to have the maximum amount of

01:26:18   space for the tap targets in a way that is not necessary on a Mac because the screens

01:26:26   a bigger, by and large. So that's my thinking on that's why I don't really

01:26:31   want that as such.

01:26:35   I would also say no. I am a side doc person on the Mac, but on iOS the doc

01:26:48   doesn't work like that. The doc is a flip up from the bottom kind of thing.

01:26:52   I mean, I guess it wouldn't matter

01:26:54   because I don't tend to use the dock in that way.

01:26:58   But since the home screen is oriented in the way it is,

01:27:01   the bottom is the best place for it anyway.

01:27:03   So yeah, it would be different

01:27:05   if the dock was always visible or something like that,

01:27:07   but that's not the case on the iPad.

01:27:09   So it's fine where it is.

01:27:12   If it was a different interface, you know,

01:27:15   like it is on the Mac, I might make a different choice,

01:27:17   but as it is, no.

01:27:20   - Otto wants to know,

01:27:23   what is your favorite iPhone color of all time?

01:27:27   - I'm gonna go, oh, well, I have a blue iPhone 13 mini

01:27:32   that I like a lot,

01:27:35   but I am going to go with the coral iPhone 10 R.

01:27:39   - Interesting.

01:27:40   - Which is this orange thing.

01:27:43   It's great, I love it.

01:27:45   - Before I tell mine, I'm just gonna say them

01:27:49   before people say you must have forgotten about this,

01:27:51   why would you not pick it?

01:27:53   - Actually the black, black, black iPhone 5

01:27:58   would be my honorable mention

01:28:00   because I loved the look of that one.

01:28:03   - That was it.

01:28:03   I was gonna say graphite 5S, but then that wasn't it.

01:28:06   It was the black 5S, piano black iPhone 7,

01:28:09   et cetera, et cetera.

01:28:11   We remember them all, but me and Jason,

01:28:14   like a little more excitement in our lives.

01:28:16   - More color.

01:28:17   And mine is the current gold Pro.

01:28:22   So the gold that they have had in the iPhone 13 Pro

01:28:28   and in the iPhone 12 Pro.

01:28:31   - It's good.

01:28:31   There've been some good colors out there.

01:28:33   I can't believe we didn't do an iPhone color draft.

01:28:35   Maybe later.

01:28:36   - What you're saying is we just haven't yet

01:28:38   done an iPhone color draft.

01:28:40   - My iPhone XR review unit was the coral.

01:28:45   - That coral one is amazing.

01:28:46   - Oh, it's so good.

01:28:48   - It's amazing.

01:28:49   - So beautiful.

01:28:49   And then I really do like my blue iPhone 13 mini.

01:28:52   I'm very happy with it.

01:28:53   It's a lot of fun.

01:28:56   It's not super bright,

01:28:57   but every time I see the blue on it

01:28:58   and I don't use a case, I smile like,

01:29:00   "Oh, blue phone, it's my blue phone."

01:29:03   But that coral 10R was really sweet.

01:29:06   - So we remember many of the colors.

01:29:09   We remember the special finishes.

01:29:11   I always liked the white 3GS.

01:29:14   That was fun.

01:29:16   - Sure.

01:29:17   Remember that white iPhone 4

01:29:19   that they didn't ship for seven months?

01:29:21   - 'Cause what was it?

01:29:22   The adhesive was going yellow or something?

01:29:23   - It was too yellow, yeah, yeah.

01:29:25   And that was like not up to spec for Steve Jobs.

01:29:27   - But they got it out there with the launch of Verizon.

01:29:31   - Yeah, that's a classic.

01:29:32   Somebody was talking about that.

01:29:33   It was like, when was the last time

01:29:34   that Apple did an iPhone launch without an event?

01:29:37   And I said, "I think it might be the Verizon iPhone 4."

01:29:41   - Well, they have Cs though, right?

01:29:44   - Or do they slide those into events?

01:29:45   Maybe so, I don't know.

01:29:46   Anyway, we didn't forget about your favorite iPhone color.

01:29:48   We just don't like it as much as ours.

01:29:50   - We just picked our own.

01:29:51   You know, it's about that thing like the yellow iPhone 4S

01:29:55   and the Verizon, like the amount of useless knowledge

01:29:58   that I retain about this stuff is frustrating to me

01:30:02   when there's important things in my life

01:30:03   that I can't remember.

01:30:05   But I can remember, well, which one was it?

01:30:08   When did they announce it?

01:30:09   Like I can remember that stuff,

01:30:10   but I can't remember like family birthdays.

01:30:15   Hey ho. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade.

01:30:19   If you would like to send in a question of your own, just send out a tweet with

01:30:22   the hashtag #askupgrade or use question mark #askupgrade in the Relay FM Members

01:30:26   Discord, which you can get access to if you sign up for Upgrade Plus.

01:30:29   Go to getupgradeplus.com.

01:30:31   You get longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade every single week.

01:30:36   Access to many wonderful perks at Relay FM.

01:30:39   In my personal opinion, the best is access to our Members Discord, which is

01:30:44   awesome community of like-minded folk. Of Upgradians, it's the upgrade, uh, upgrade

01:30:49   Discord. Yep, that's, if you listen to Upgrade Plus, you know why he called it that. That's right.

01:30:54   So yeah, go to getupgradeplus.com, you can sign up five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year.

01:30:59   Our thanks to Doppler, New Relic, and Memberful for their support of this week's episode. If you

01:31:06   want to find Jason online, go to sixcolors.com. Jason is @jasenel. J-S-N-E-L-L-L. I am @dimeike.

01:31:13   I-M-Y-K-E. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason and Snell.

01:31:18   - Happy bank holiday to you and all the other banks. Are you a bank now? I guess you are.

01:31:25   - I don't know. - Banker Myke.

01:31:26   [MUSIC]