00:00:13 ◼ ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 367, and today's show is brought to you by Squarespace,
00:00:20 ◼ ► Uni Pizza Ovens, and Fitbod. My name is Myke Early and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi Jason Snell!
00:00:49 ◼ ► I write in a monospace font. I always have. I like it. I don't want to write in your, you know,
00:01:07 ◼ ► And I'm about to mention that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about proportional fonts,
00:01:10 ◼ ► like Times, Times, Geneva. I use Geneva on my Koppo for ebook reading and it's quite pleasant.
00:01:20 ◼ ► But my favorite font is currently, and it changes. Like, this is, this is just something that comes in
00:01:25 ◼ ► and out of fashion. I find other fonts that I like. But right now, I would say my favorite font is JetBrains Mono,
00:01:31 ◼ ► which is a monospace font that's very nice. That I have it on all my devices. I've side-loaded it onto my iPad
00:01:44 ◼ ► JetBrains Mono. They do have JetBrains Duo. It's basically a monospace font where the widest letters are double-wide.
00:01:53 ◼ ► So like the M and the W and stuff. So it's not quite, or they're one and a half. They're not quite mono.
00:02:00 ◼ ► But it's a monospace-esque font with this extra width for readability at times. But I don't generally use that.
00:02:06 ◼ ► I just use mono because I'm comfortable with monospace. Back in the day, it was Monaco.
00:02:22 ◼ ► It's just how I've always written. And I think there's something about it goes back to doing coding on the web
00:02:29 ◼ ► and writing for a while, writing articles with the HTML in the articles, because that was how you did it for a while,
00:02:35 ◼ ► is you literally just would type your paragraph tags and write your paragraph and then close the paragraph tag
00:02:40 ◼ ► and actually write a whole article using HTML. And it just, it feels like writing to me, basically.
00:02:48 ◼ ► And honestly, proportional fonts, I mean, look, feel, proportional fonts probably feel like writing to some people, and that's fine.
00:03:01 ◼ ► And this goes back to why I want to see links in Markdown when I do hypertext links and stuff like that,
00:03:13 ◼ ► And I want to see it all, and I don't want it to be prettified for me because I'm not the receiver of it, I'm the creator of it.
00:03:26 ◼ ► It's actually related to this thing that Microsoft Office does now that drives me bananas, which is they have their cursor.
00:03:35 ◼ ► And at some point, I'm not sure it's true on the Mac, but it is true on iOS and it's true on Windows,
00:03:40 ◼ ► that as you type in Word, instead of the cursor hopping to the end of every letter as you type it, it just slowly slides to the right.
00:04:16 ◼ ► I am not interested in your fantasy cursor that is not even reflecting what you're typing.
00:04:54 ◼ ► If you'd like to send in a #snowtalk question for us to answer on a future episode of the show,
00:05:13 ◼ ► kind of mid-August to the end of September, here at Relay FM, we raise money for St. Jude's...
00:05:25 ◼ ► This is the third year that Relay FM has been joining together to raise money for this incredible place.
00:05:35 ◼ ► For almost 60 years, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has been on the front lines of research, care and treatment of childhood cancer.
00:05:43 ◼ ► Treatments invented at St. Jude's helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80% since it opened.
00:05:52 ◼ ► With one in five children not surviving, St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from cancer.
00:06:00 ◼ ► So, join Relay FM's efforts to raise the funds and awareness needed to treat and defeat childhood cancer.
00:06:10 ◼ ► This year, any donor making a single gift of $100 or more can redeem an exclusive Relay FM Sticker of Thanks pack at the end of the campaign.
00:06:19 ◼ ► It has a sticker of the Fever Fighter, which you'll see this used in some of our imagery this year.
00:06:26 ◼ ► It's a little superhero cartoon character who was designed by a St. Jude patient called Ethan.
00:06:44 ◼ ► If you follow me and Steven on Twitter or Instagram, you may have seen us putting stickers of each other's faces on things.
00:06:50 ◼ ► For every $500 raised this year, I am putting a sticker of Steven's face onto the desk that I am sitting at right now.
00:07:08 ◼ ► And just to give a little bit more information about it, this desk that I'm sitting at right now,
00:07:29 ◼ ► The Relay FM podcastathon for St. Jude will be happening again September 17th from 12 to 8pm Eastern Time at twitch.tv/relayfm.
00:07:42 ◼ ► So we have the main campaign goal, which is all the 3's. $333.33 because it's the third year.
00:07:50 ◼ ► But once we reach $197,000, over the last 3 years, the Relay FM community will have donated a million dollars to St. Jude,
00:07:59 ◼ ► which is an outstanding and incredible, humbling, overwhelming number, which we're all so thankful for.
00:08:08 ◼ ► And so, you know, look, this is a time when I know that we're all starting to look at our next technology purchases in our minds, right?
00:08:17 ◼ ► It wouldn't be a bad thing to take a little bit of money and send it to a truly incredible institution that does amazing work,
00:08:25 ◼ ► from literally saving children's lives, including the lives of the life of Stephen Het's child, Josiah,
00:08:53 ◼ ► I adore the work that we get to do for St. Jude and it would mean the world to all of us
00:09:01 ◼ ► if you could donate as much as you can, no matter how small, no matter how large, at stjude.org/relay, it will all be put to good use.
00:09:10 ◼ ► And I think we can at least announce that the plan is that I'm going to reprise my role on the Podcastathon as the official game show host of Relay FM.
00:09:19 ◼ ► Yes. We are so thankful for the work. Jason puts a lot of work in every year and he's going to be doing it again for us and we're so thankful.
00:09:26 ◼ ► So one of the longer segments of the Podcastathon will be a Jason Snell hosted game show, which I'm very excited about, as always.
00:09:39 ◼ ► You can also find out we have different milestone streams that we're going to be doing.
00:09:42 ◼ ► Me and Steven, I think yesterday it was, just did a flight simulator stream, which was terrible and great.
00:09:50 ◼ ► So let's cure childhood cancer together. One last time, stjude.org/relay. We're going to be talking about this from now until the end of September, but please donate.
00:10:00 ◼ ► We have a summer of fun segment that we want to do next week. This is going to take some pre-work, which is why we're going to talk about it this week.
00:10:23 ◼ ► If you go to that website, askupgradeoutloud.com. Yes, Jason, I registered a domain this morning.
00:10:46 ◼ ► So that part's up to you. What do you want us to talk about? What do you want to hear us talk about? That's up to you.
00:10:50 ◼ ► It can be askupgrade or it can be like, "Hey, what do you think about this thing?" We could talk a little bit more about it.
00:10:58 ◼ ► There will also be a link in the show notes if the URL doesn't work for you. It's a forwarded domain.
00:11:03 ◼ ► Everybody does this. Forwarded domains. You can't do https colon slash slash. I can't help you.
00:11:14 ◼ ► So if you have a dedicated microphone, like you use a USB microphone for something or whatever, use that.
00:11:22 ◼ ► Use the best microphone you have available to you. Otherwise, please record directly into your iPhone like it's a phone call.
00:11:34 ◼ ► If you have to do that, but it would be much better if you hold it to your face, the phone. It's a better microphone.
00:11:41 ◼ ► You must record in a quiet environment. If you record in a loud environment, we cannot use your clip.
00:11:58 ◼ ► Yep, I think this is reasonable. The truth is, this is not a contest. If a clip sounds bad, we're not going to use it.
00:12:09 ◼ ► Yeah, you can use voice memos. That's fine. But yeah, holding your iPhone up to your face is a great way to do it.
00:12:20 ◼ ► Send that to the, upload that to the link, askupgradeoutloud.com or the link in the show notes.
00:12:28 ◼ ► And we may use your question live on the air in the first ever upgrade Summer of Fun call-in show.
00:12:45 ◼ ► So like you don't go there to record it. So as Jason said, use voice memos or you know, like QuickTime on a Mac or something like that.
00:12:53 ◼ ► You can upload it in any audio format you want. We'll manage that stuff on our side. Don't worry about that.
00:13:13 ◼ ► Ooni is the world's number one pizza oven company because they make these surprisingly small ovens that are powered by your choice of wood, charcoal or gas.
00:13:21 ◼ ► That you make restaurant quality pizza. They're super easy to use and incredibly portable.
00:13:26 ◼ ► Ooni pizza ovens fit in any outdoor space and can reach temperatures of up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 degrees Celsius.
00:13:33 ◼ ► This enables you to cook restaurant quality pizza in as little as 60 seconds. And the high temperature is what you want to really set it apart from what you can make in your own home oven.
00:13:43 ◼ ► This is what really makes that difference. One of Ooni Pizza ovens most popular models is the Ooni Coda 16.
00:13:49 ◼ ► This is a gas powered oven that can cook up to 16 inch pizzas with an innovative L shaped burner at the back.
00:13:55 ◼ ► This gives you even heat distribution throughout. But their ovens start at just $299 and they have free shipping to the US, UK and EU.
00:14:04 ◼ ► As well as the Ooni Coda 16, one of the other coolest models that they do is the multi-fjord Ooni Karu.
00:14:14 ◼ ► They also make an amazing app as well to help you perfect your dough recipe and give you loads of pizza making tips.
00:14:20 ◼ ► Jason Snow, you are a pizza aficionado. Tell our audience how much you love your Ooni Pizza oven.
00:14:30 ◼ ► And I am mastering Ooni's recipe now using their dough recipe instead of the dough recipe I've used for like 20 years.
00:14:39 ◼ ► Which makes this really thin dough, which is really great for kind of that classic wood-fired pizza.
00:14:44 ◼ ► And I think I've got it right now where you get the like blackened edges, like it's in a wood-fired pizza oven.
00:14:53 ◼ ► Like it's just the temperature. When I put the pizza in last week, it was 730 degrees on the pizza stone.
00:15:03 ◼ ► So for that real, you know, made at a pizza shop on a real hot pizza oven, this is the trick.
00:15:14 ◼ ► And I'm just using literally the same propane tank in mine that I can use for my gas barbecue grill.
00:15:27 ◼ ► So you can go and check this out for yourself and you can become as cool as Jason and have an amazing Ooni pizza oven.
00:15:36 ◼ ► Listeners of the show can get 10% off their purchase of an Ooni pizza oven, which is up to $50 off an Ooni Koda 16.
00:15:49 ◼ ► When you're there, you'll also find a great range of accessories from peels to cutters to oven tables.
00:16:00 ◼ ► Ooni pizza ovens are the best way to bring restaurant quality pizza to your own backyard.
00:16:15 ◼ ► Apple is once again delaying their return to work plans for employees, especially at Apple Park.
00:16:22 ◼ ► They have previously delayed this to October, and now it's being pushed back further to January 2022 at the earliest.
00:16:31 ◼ ► An internal memo states that they're going to be sticking to a one-month notice for returning.
00:16:38 ◼ ► So they're going to say, "Hey, one month from now," like whenever it is that they're going to have people come back to the office.
00:16:44 ◼ ► And as it stands right now, the three-day minimum for being in the office applies, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.
00:16:49 ◼ ► And Apple, just as an added note, have not as of yet mandated vaccines for their employees who will be returning to the office.
00:16:59 ◼ ► I know some companies have done this. Apple has not said anything about that, it seems.
00:17:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I would be surprised if they don't do this, especially now that vaccines are being formally approved here in the U.S.
00:17:12 ◼ ► It seems like that's going to be increasing the number of mandates that go out for vaccination.
00:17:18 ◼ ► I can't believe that, by the way. I mean, I don't understand enough about how the FDA works, but like, the form--
00:17:24 ◼ ► I don't-- it's like here, the approval process just got, like, expedited, so it would just be approved.
00:17:34 ◼ ► But I don't understand enough about how the American medical system works, neither do I want to know.
00:17:43 ◼ ► So we're going to be talking about more Apple products and more of their product cycle that's done with largely people not being physically present.
00:17:50 ◼ ► I would imagine that this is going to defer some of the real back and forth between employees and managers about Apple's--
00:18:01 ◼ ► this three-day minimum being in the office sort of thing, but also it's pushing all of this off a little bit, too.
00:18:22 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, they're just kicking the can down the road at this point. For good reason, right?
00:18:32 ◼ ► and so they're going to push this off a bit and hope that things calm down by the time that they return next year.
00:18:43 ◼ ► Mark Gurman has reported in his newsletter, Power On, that an M1X Mac Mini is expected to debut in the near future.
00:18:53 ◼ ► This is really the thing that we all wondered about when they kept the Intel Mac Mini on sale,
00:19:08 ◼ ► There is the low-end Mac Mini and the high-end Mac Mini, and the high-end Mac Mini is that Intel one.
00:19:17 ◼ ► but this is clearly their first pass was they wanted to get a Mac Mini out there on the M1,
00:19:30 ◼ ► So I guess we're going to get that M1X, which, you know, more ports, more processor cores,
00:19:39 ◼ ► Updated design. There's been some rumors that it's going to get like, I feel like a plexiglass top or something.
00:20:18 ◼ ► I've been beating that drum for a long time now, right, that Intel has been making these little nooks,
00:20:25 ◼ ► And, you know, a Mac is not either of those, but you can look at the size of the innards of MacBook Air
00:20:38 ◼ ► Or you look at the Mac Mini, the M1 Mac Mini, and you look inside there and there's very little in there.
00:20:43 ◼ ► So they could definitely make something that's much smaller. Maybe they will. I don't know.
00:20:48 ◼ ► I mean, the challenge here is that they also want to leave enough room for them to put, in a high-end model,
00:21:00 ◼ ► I've been expecting that they'd change the look of the Mac Mini any day now for years, and it hasn't happened.
00:21:10 ◼ ► So I hope so, because I think that the assumptions of that last version are no longer true.
00:21:24 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, assuming that that larger, higher-end iMac is not coming, then this is going to be…
00:21:30 ◼ ► Just as we had the two laptops and the Mac Mini with the M1 launch, I feel like that's what we're going to get here,
00:21:50 ◼ ► Because it really feels like the iMac Pro is not going to be around for a while at least,
00:21:58 ◼ ► because there had been the rumor or the suggestion that Apple took people away from that project
00:22:18 ◼ ► Yeah, there's not a lot of buzz about that iMac right now, which leads me to believe that it's not imminent.
00:22:27 ◼ ► As somebody who is very seriously considering that computer, whatever it is, that frustrates me.
00:22:47 ◼ ► because at least in my own personal circumstance, I still have some software that is not optimized for Apple Silicon.
00:23:12 ◼ ► And of course, we also have the rumor/wish casting about Apple doing an external display.
00:23:18 ◼ ► And that's the other thing that's interesting, is like, if they did an external display
00:23:22 ◼ ► and they had these M1X systems that could use it, that's going to be tempting to some people, right?
00:23:27 ◼ ► Because you could get the power of the M1X and have it on your desk with an Apple display,
00:23:40 ◼ ► I mean, maybe this year, like maybe that's going to also come, as you say, with those laptops?
00:23:57 ◼ ► And then maybe iPads too, maybe like iPad mini and stuff like that. That's the second event.
00:24:03 ◼ ► So the first event is Apple Watch and iPhone and maybe some other stuff, but basically that.
00:24:15 ◼ ► That's what we're going to get is next wave of Apple Silicon with M1X powered later this fall.
00:24:41 ◼ ► which is very funny by the way, and he mentioned their Emmy nominations in like a web series category,
00:24:48 ◼ ► and one of them is carpool karaoke. And I was like, "Oh yeah, carpool karaoke on Apple Music/Apple TV Plus."
00:24:56 ◼ ► And this is one of those things that really precedes the modern Apple TV Plus strategy, but here it is.
00:25:20 ◼ ► -I think it's not unreasonable. -To be fair, the cheapness part of it probably doesn't actually really help.
00:25:25 ◼ ► I'm not trying to be mean, but it doesn't seem like an incredibly complicated production shoot.
00:25:30 ◼ ► Yeah. No, I think this is the... I mean, all entertainment products, I think, have within them this idea of
00:25:50 ◼ ► Everybody has some version of this, and they're successful with it. Reality or news or something.
00:26:25 ◼ ► Even John Stewart's show on Apple TV Plus. Again, even if it's a very expensive kind of what it is,
00:26:33 ◼ ► So it makes good financial sense, and people watch it. That's the thing about reality TV.
00:26:40 ◼ ► That's why there's so much of it, is that people watch it out of proportion to what it costs.
00:26:48 ◼ ► The final trailer for Foundation has been released, ahead of its debut on September 24th.
00:27:18 ◼ ► the books are very much this kind of broad. It's almost like an outline of the idea of the show.
00:27:58 ◼ ► And I'll not spoil it too much other than to say there is a character who appears in recorded messages,
00:28:21 ◼ ► a cloning process involved. And I'm like, "That's great, because you can use that actor over and over again
00:28:31 ◼ ► a way to do it and keep some actors in the show." Because otherwise, if you did a show that really went over time,
00:28:37 ◼ ► you'd have to change out. I mean, even For All Mankind, which is just going decade by decade,
00:28:41 ◼ ► you can't keep using the same people, because their characters are going to age out at some point.
00:28:48 ◼ ► So I'm intrigued by it. I think Foundation is a great idea for a show. I hope that they execute it.
00:28:59 ◼ ► It sounds like they're going to do a modified version of their binge and then watch weekly approach for this one,
00:29:08 ◼ ► I think that might be a good idea. My concern about this show, not really knowing anything about it yet,
00:29:23 ◼ ► Just from watching the trailers, it looks really nice, but I don't really know what's going on.
00:29:36 ◼ ► And it maybe would help if you get a couple of episodes in the can and then move forward from there.
00:29:45 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that's wise. And this is one of the things that everybody is trying to figure out,
00:29:49 ◼ ► is knowing that Ted Lasso, the producers there thought they were going to be repeating their process of a three-episode drop,
00:29:56 ◼ ► I think it's interesting creatively that maybe some of these producers are trying to structure their show in a way
00:30:02 ◼ ► where they really want everybody to watch the first two, and it's essentially a two-hour premiere.
00:30:08 ◼ ► In terms of old school broadcast television, they're like, "We want a couple hours to set the stage for our show
00:30:23 ◼ ► They have a new trailer coming out too. I have decided I'm not going to watch this trailer
00:30:38 ◼ ► Right. I think we saw a teaser, and what I remember of the teaser is basically the whole idea is
00:30:45 ◼ ► they had some very dramatic things happen at the end of season one that I think were not part of the original plan for the show,
00:30:59 ◼ ► I think that's really interesting to actually not try to hit reset and get it back to the way it was,
00:31:19 ◼ ► And Netflix is adding spatial audio support for iPhone and iPad, so they're going to be adding spatial audio to their content.
00:31:28 ◼ ► Really, that's fine, but this is more of a "I put this in as a thing for me to ask you a question" of
00:31:35 ◼ ► what do you feel about spatial audio? Not the music stuff, but just for video watching.
00:31:49 ◼ ► I think it's trying to really push the location effects, but I think that's good when you're watching a TV show.
00:32:10 ◼ ► and it's not quite the same if it's on AirPods, but it's, I think, better than just the stereo mixdown that you'd get.
00:32:20 ◼ ► However, there's one thing that I have an issue with, which is a lot of these implementations are using,
00:32:29 ◼ ► maybe all of them, are using Apple's head tracking thing, where the idea is that if you're watching on an iPad,
00:32:34 ◼ ► it sounds like all the sound is coming from your iPad. And it's very clever, but I'd say it makes it feel less immersive to me,
00:32:46 ◼ ► because now it feels like it's emphasizing the fact that I'm watching this on the screen,
00:32:57 ◼ ► So I'm not sure I like the idea of having it be so tightly focused on the iPad or whatever device, the iPhone, that is playing the audio.
00:33:07 ◼ ► But I do like spatial audio as a, you know, just to make movies sound better and more dynamic when I'm watching.
00:33:16 ◼ ► - I think I'm with you. I like the surround soundiness of it, that it does a bit of separation and makes me feel more immersed.
00:33:24 ◼ ► But I'm not so sure I need the, if I turn my head, like I don't think I need to feel like audio is coming from speakers on my iPad when it's not.
00:33:37 ◼ ► - Yeah. In fact, it's a little disconcerting, right? Because you have to have that moment of like, wait, am I making a mistake and the whole airplane is hearing what I'm playing?
00:33:45 ◼ ► - We just had this exact thing. So Adina hadn't experienced this because she hadn't used her AirPods with her iPad in a while because why would she have, right?
00:33:56 ◼ ► Like people don't do this as much and haven't done this as much. And we were on the plane and I saw her, she put headphones in, she pressed play and then jumped at her iPad.
00:34:05 ◼ ► And I knew what had happened, right? She thought that she had had the audio blaring out. I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's fine.
00:34:11 ◼ ► And I'm imagining lots of people have an experience like that now where they think the audio is coming from their iPad, which shows that the technology is, it works and it's impressive, but that part of it, I'm just not 100% sure is needed.
00:34:25 ◼ ► So yeah, but I do, I like the surround soundiness of it, but the kind of like, oh, it's, if I move my head left, it's, you know, I don't know about that part.
00:34:38 ◼ ► But I'm happy that more people are at least implementing the spatial audio stuff. I'm pleased Netflix is actually doing something, right?
00:34:47 ◼ ► Like I feel like for a while they've just ignored most of what Apple's doing. And I understand why, it's not criticism.
00:34:52 ◼ ► Netflix doesn't have to do whatever Apple wants them to do. Like it's up to them what they want to do.
00:34:57 ◼ ► But I'm pleased that they are implementing a feature that's part of the entertainment experience of iOS devices.
00:35:05 ◼ ► - I have one other Apple TV plus note, which is just that we watched Coda over the weekend, which is the movie that won the prize at Sundance and that Apple bought for many, many, many, many millions of dollars.
00:35:20 ◼ ► And Apple has been talking it up in the last conference call with analysts, Tim Cook's statement mentioned Ted Lasso and Coda.
00:35:31 ◼ ► Those are the two things. It was like Emmy Award nominee Ted Lasso and the groundbreaking film Coda.
00:35:49 ◼ ► And so it's a story about a girl whose entire family is deaf, her brother and her parents.
00:35:56 ◼ ► And she basically joins the choir and sings. And so there's this real, plus the parents are really hardworking working class people.
00:36:08 ◼ ► They've got a fishing boat. They're having financial distress and they rely on their daughter because of the, not just because they're deaf and she's hearing, but also because they need another person pitching in.
00:36:19 ◼ ► And so there's a lot of stuff working here in terms of the, a young person asserting their independence, but also feeling like their parents depend on them.
00:36:31 ◼ ► And she has the potential to really break out and make a move and go to college and things like that.
00:36:36 ◼ ► And yet the problem with it is that her parents need her and her parents also don't entirely understand her interest and how serious her interest is in music.
00:36:48 ◼ ► I liked it. I thought it was really, really well done. The three family members are all deaf performers, Marlee Matlin, who people know, but the other, other two actors as well.
00:37:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I've wanted to watch it, but I haven't yet. But I'll make sure that one goes on our list.
00:37:12 ◼ ► This episode of Upgrades brought to you by Fitbod, the fitness app that provides a personalized exercise plan, a fitness plan that actually fits you.
00:37:21 ◼ ► When it comes to fitness, Fitbod believes that everyone can be better, whether you're working out three days a week or twice a day.
00:37:28 ◼ ► Fitbod's algorithm uses data and analytics to help you build on your previous workout so that your next workout is scientifically proven to be better than your last.
00:37:36 ◼ ► Fitbod has been fine tuned by certified personal trainers to bring the very best practices of strength training directly to you.
00:37:47 ◼ ► So it's going to be perfect for your unique body experience, environment and goals, because it could be hard to know exactly how much you should be doing while you're exercising.
00:37:55 ◼ ► So Fitbod figures that out for you so you don't have to worry about under training or over training or anything in between.
00:38:01 ◼ ► Fitbod will also mix up muscle groups and exercises, sets, reps and weight over time to help keep you on top form while making sure that you're on the path that's right for you to help you take those steps towards becoming a better version of yourself.
00:38:14 ◼ ► If you're working out at home, Fitbod has some body weight only workouts, loads of them.
00:38:24 ◼ ► They have everything that you're going to need, no matter how much equipment you have access to, Fitbod have got it covered.
00:38:33 ◼ ► So when you're coming to something new, you can watch a video, there's an actual personal trainer right there and they're showing you how the exercise is performed.
00:38:41 ◼ ► I'm not very confident when it comes to stuff like this, so I really like to have something there that I can look at and watch and read and be like, "Oh, okay, now I see how it's done."
00:38:51 ◼ ► If I was to just read it, I don't know if I would be able to get it as well, so seeing those videos right inside of the app, which I can watch on the loop and make sure I'm getting right, it really, really helps me feel confident about the exercises I'm doing.
00:39:03 ◼ ► Fitbod is available on iOS and Android and you can get started right now by going to fitbod.me/upgrade and you'll also get 25% of your membership.
00:39:12 ◼ ► That's fitbod.me/upgrade to try out Fitbod for free and get 25% off your Fitbod membership.
00:39:23 ◼ ► So the iOS 15 Beta 6 came out last week and with it came the removal of big changes to a variety of features and I wanted to get your thoughts on this.
00:39:40 ◼ ► So I think we'll start off with SharePlay. SharePlay is this selection of technologies that really are allowing iOS users to have shared experiences with each other.
00:39:53 ◼ ► Screen sharing is one of them that's simple, but then also like, hey, maybe you're watching a movie and you're able to have a FaceTime call going on at the same time so you're all synced up and you can play and pause and it will all be at the same time.
00:40:07 ◼ ► Or it could be games and stuff like that. For me, one of the things that was frustrating about SharePlay is that there always has to be an active FaceTime call with it, which I put was a strange implementation detail.
00:40:20 ◼ ► But SharePlay has now gone from this cycle for iOS 15. The expectation is that it will come back later this fall. What do you think has gone on here with SharePlay?
00:40:35 ◼ ► It's not good enough. I mean, I think this is pretty simple. This is Apple looking at finally locking features in or out for the shipping version that they're going to put on new iPhones and saying it's not good enough.
00:40:49 ◼ ► You know, whether it's somebody at the top saying it's not good enough or whether it's somebody in the team saying we need more time.
00:40:55 ◼ ► And Apple, I wrote about this at Macworld last week, Apple has become, over the last few years, much more disciplined in making their calls about features in their OS betas and allowing features to slide out of the point O release.
00:41:14 ◼ ► And I think it's good. I think it's healthy. I think we can discuss what gives them the confidence to announce these features, potentially thinking they're going to be ready and then why they aren't ready.
00:41:28 ◼ ► But in the end, Apple, they're not talking about it so much, but Apple really has gone in the last three or four years to a new model, which is they announce features that are going to be in, say, iOS 15.
00:41:39 ◼ ► But they're not committing to them all being there on day one. They're just going to be part of the iOS development cycle in version 15.
00:41:53 ◼ ► Obviously, they had something that was solid enough that they felt they could put it in betas, but it turned out to be not solid enough for them to ship for whatever reason.
00:42:02 ◼ ► This has happened a bunch lately. And so I think I think that's probably what's going on here is that it's just not ready to go.
00:42:11 ◼ ► It's possible that one of the reasons it's not ready to go is not on the user side, but on the third party developer side.
00:42:20 ◼ ► I do wonder if part of this is the developers coming to them and saying, I know you want us to adopt this, but it, you know, this bug, this bug, this bug, this bug.
00:42:31 ◼ ► We don't, you know, we can't use this. And so you're going to go out the door and almost nothing's going to support this.
00:42:36 ◼ ► And that might be part of it too, right? It's not just about Apple pleasing users. It's Apple having it work for developers.
00:42:43 ◼ ► And if they have, you know, developers coming to them and saying this is broken in some ways, then that would be another reason to stop it.
00:42:49 ◼ ► But I think there's nobody who's saying, oh, God, we got to have SharePlay out there on day one or everything is ruined.
00:42:57 ◼ ► I saw somebody say, oh, well, but this is the marquee feature of iOS 15. I'm like, all right, if you say so, like there in the end, if that doesn't make it any better.
00:43:06 ◼ ► Like if the marquee feature, if it is, if it is that, which I don't know if it is, if, if it is, and it doesn't work right, well, geez, that's a really bad launch.
00:43:16 ◼ ► And they have to launch iOS 15, right? They can't not launch it because they know that they, they have built their new iPhone hardware on it.
00:43:23 ◼ ► And we, you and I argued last year about how maybe Apple needs to not couple the new phone hardware with the new OS launch and instead be willing to ship in an emergency the iPhones with 14 point something and then do the 15 update a few weeks later, or even like when the, when those phones ship.
00:43:45 ◼ ► But that doesn't seem to be what their strategy is. So instead they'll just pull features out and I'll point out that like universal control, the feature that many of us were most excited about it has never even appeared in a beta.
00:43:59 ◼ ► So that's probably not shipping with the point of release because they haven't even gotten it to the point where they will show it to the public.
00:44:07 ◼ ► I think that live text is probably the marquee feature. I know why people would say it for SharePlay because Apple spent a lot of time on it.
00:44:14 ◼ ► Sure. But I also think we forgot that like they definitely spent more time on live text. They were showing that off so much.
00:44:21 ◼ ► Honestly, I wonder too, how much of it is our filter as people who know Apple looking at something like SharePlay and saying, I know they're spending a lot of time on this, but this is really going to get used, right?
00:44:32 ◼ ► Well, I mean, it was what we were saying at the time, and I think it's, this is only made worse now. SharePlay felt like a feature that was late, you know, like it felt like it was coming too late. And I know that like COVID isn't over, like not far from, but people are living their lives differently in larger groups now than we were a year and a half ago.
00:44:54 ◼ ► This is also a bit of an esoteric feature. I was more excited about the, you know, URL invitations to FaceTime calls and things like that that are, and being able to do cross-platform FaceTime calls and things like that, which has also been kind of rough during the beta.
00:45:10 ◼ ► But like, I was more excited about those features than I was about SharePlay. SharePlay is interesting, but I was always a little skeptical that it was ever going to get a lot of adoption. And yeah, I think there are other things that were going to be new features that people were more likely to use than SharePlay, including live text.
00:45:27 ◼ ► That's a great example of that, including the Safari changes, which is a whole other story about this summer. And honestly, for a lot of us, Universal Control, right? Like I really would like to use Universal Control. I think that would be really great, but they're not ready for us yet.
00:45:43 ◼ ► And I understand, like, that says something to me that like, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I can't even give this to you yet. Like if that's true, I don't want it because that means it's not working right. And I only want it if it works.
00:45:58 ◼ ► Do you, I really feel like one of the reasons that this might have happened too is no one was using it, or at least the people that Apple wanted to be using it weren't. Or maybe they were saying, hey, we're not going to have this ready now, but maybe if you give us a bit more time or whatever.
00:46:16 ◼ ► Well, the developer question, like I mentioned earlier, like I think that's part of it probably is, is there a developer adoption of this or are developers, you know, it could be we need more time.
00:46:29 ◼ ► It could also be we need to talk to you because things don't work right and we've tried to implement your thing and they don't work right. I feel like that is a very possible scenario too.
00:46:41 ◼ ► I don't know. I think the whole, I think Apple has a problem with collaboration technologies over the, over the internet that is broader than just SharePlay.
00:46:55 ◼ ► Our friend, friend of the show, James Thompson, you know, I was talking to him about some experiments that he's been doing because this collaboration stuff really does look interesting and like real time gameplay across the internet in Game Center is a thing that basically doesn't work.
00:47:14 ◼ ► Apple, there are sometimes Apple's reach exceeds its grasp and it sometimes comes down to trying to do very clever things over the internet, whether it is in collaboration, right?
00:47:25 ◼ ► Whether it is Game Center or it's SharePlay or it's honestly those cross platform video chat things where that we tried earlier this summer where somebody is on a web browser and somebody is on an iPhone running FaceTime.
00:47:40 ◼ ► And like those were really messy and you know, doing that is hard. It's really hard and it's not a place where Apple has the most expertise.
00:47:49 ◼ ► And so, you know, that informs me about SharePlay that like, I think this is a clever idea, but it's kind of hitting right at some issues where Apple is not very good at what they do.
00:48:01 ◼ ► But obviously the big one is Safari on iPhone. So that's the big thing. That's the big thing going on here.
00:48:08 ◼ ► Yeah, that was one of the big headlines and you know, this is not one of those things where they just sort of hear all the feedback.
00:48:16 ◼ ► What they haven't done is just take all the feedback and then suddenly the old Safari appears, right? That's not what is happening with Safari.
00:48:21 ◼ ► Instead, they have been iterating. They seem to have, it's almost like the iterations in the various betas were just there to show you they were doing something.
00:48:31 ◼ ► And then they suddenly have dropped what feels like a complete answer. Like it wasn't like we saw it evolve to this point. It's sort of like they threw a bunch of Band-Aids on it.
00:48:42 ◼ ► Yeah, they were basically shipping little components of it to try and show you like, hey, we're still working on this and then dropped what is a more complete version.
00:48:55 ◼ ► No, no, but they, I do wonder if they were just building this or even had this sort of sketched out and sort of went back to it and then built this as the new whatever it is that they're doing.
00:49:10 ◼ ► I don't know. It's, I'm glad that they've gotten where they've gotten. I still don't think that the Mac and the iPad are great, but they're better than they were at the beginning of the summer.
00:49:21 ◼ ► And I think the iPhone stuff is good. They've taken the iPhone and put the toolbar back at the bottom, but kept the address bar at least initially at the bottom so you can do the swipe thing.
00:49:32 ◼ ► I really like the swipe between tabs gesture. But it is, they've also prominently made it that you can send that address bar back up to the top.
00:49:40 ◼ ► It's not only in settings, you can long press on the address bar and bring it up and like in the Safari app, which seems aggressive to me that you can in the actual app change the setting to have it go to the top rather than needing to go out to settings.
00:49:56 ◼ ► That's like, all right, like we get it. Okay. You, you know, people might not like this. Um, it's all very strange really.
00:50:05 ◼ ► This has all just been a very strange time. Like they, they had this really wild Safari design, but like you can actually just very easily just make it look like nothing visually has changed in Safari, which is, I don't know.
00:50:20 ◼ ► A lot of time has been spent on this, you know, a lot of energy has been expended from people inside and outside of Apple. I think it clearly highlights the importance of Safari to the operating system. Right.
00:50:35 ◼ ► But like, there are always complaints about whatever it is Apple's doing and they most of the time I think they're pretty steadfast with the decisions that they make and they, you know, stand by and sometimes they end up being right.
00:50:52 ◼ ► You know, like they make a change and people don't like it, but they stand by it and then ultimately we either come to accept it or in many cases like it, but it really felt like this was not going to be one of those things. Right.
00:51:05 ◼ ► Like this was not going to work out that way. Um, because it seemed like everything that they were trying to do was only just making people varying levels of mad.
00:51:17 ◼ ► This, so yeah, we've, we've used a lot of time. A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on this. I want to pull back a minute and consider what's going on inside of Apple because again, we, every now and then something like this happens and I like to do the what's going on behind the scenes thing.
00:51:40 ◼ ► So I know I've touched on this a little bit in the past, but just to put it out there again, clearly Safari 15 was polarizing inside Apple.
00:51:49 ◼ ► I can tell you there were, they knew people weren't going to like it because I think people inside Apple didn't like it. I don't have, I haven't talked to anybody inside Apple who said, Oh yes, it's terrible.
00:51:59 ◼ ► Everybody knew not at all, but I can read between the lines. I can read between the lines of even people at Apple on the week of WWDC approaching Safari 15 as an open question, which they, ah, they never do that. Right.
00:52:14 ◼ ► Apple rolls out a new feature and they are very disciplined at being like, this is great. This is great. This is great. And the rest of us are on the outside going, it's not really great. And they're like, no, no, it is great.
00:52:23 ◼ ► And then a classic Apple move is they say it's great. They say it's great. And then they change it and they say, now it's even greater. And you might have to wait three months for that or nine months for that or a year for that. But eventually they do that.
00:52:34 ◼ ► This time with Safari, it was very much like, yeah, well, we'll see what you think. It's like, what? Like you are already not committed to this thing.
00:52:47 ◼ ► And what that means is internally they weren't committed to it, which fair Apple's not a monolith. You're going to have disagreements. What I would ask is who decided that despite what seems to be very clearly a lot of skepticism inside of Apple about Safari, especially on the iPhone, one of the most important aspects of their most important product, who decided that they were just going to put it out there.
00:53:15 ◼ ► And maybe the decision was let's put it out there and see what the people think. And if it really does get a lot of pushback, we will revert, but we won't know. Maybe people will like it. That doesn't sound very Apple like at all. That sounds almost like a focus group. Right.
00:53:30 ◼ ► That doesn't seem Apple like at all. But my guess is different. My guess is that somebody said, no, we are doing this. I declare it. Whoever that person is, I don't know. And every, not everybody else, but then a lot of other people inside Apple are like, you're going to be sorry. Don't do it. Or we are right. And you are wrong.
00:53:49 ◼ ► They're like, no, no, no, I'm right. And, and that is what, from a management standpoint, if I was a senior person at Apple, that is what I would investigate. Right. Which is why is it that we had our big executives stand on stage in our video presentation for WWDC and trumpet this thing is the best thing ever.
00:54:13 ◼ ► When internally, we were very, very concerned and a lot of people were really confident that it was not the best thing ever. And we immediately had to backpedal and we had to do this all in public and doing it in public. It's not the worst thing. Right. But I know that Apple hates it.
00:54:30 ◼ ► And so that would be my question is what was there a dysfunction inside Apple that allowed this thing to get out there with the full force of well, okay, the full force of their of their rollout, not the full force of their PR. Because like I said, immediately, it felt like they were apologizing for it.
00:54:50 ◼ ► But why did that happen? And is that the kind of thing that Apple wants to have happen? That controversial things that Apple disagrees about internally will just be thrown out there and then we'll see if people beat them up about it.
00:55:05 ◼ ► Like I would investigate that because this strikes me as being dysfunctional that somebody decided to go with this fairly radical and I would say fairly obviously not right design direction and nobody stopped them.
00:55:22 ◼ ► Nobody had the power to stop them and maybe nobody above them understood and this is part of the problem quite what was happening and they were sold on it by somebody as being great.
00:55:35 ◼ ► A potential issue here, a potential reason here is like you look at Apple's culture of secrecy, maybe just not enough people knew about this as well, right? To even bring it up.
00:55:45 ◼ ► It's possible and that would be a thing to investigate but like this is not a matter of just an executive got it wrong though because what I'm saying is I think clearly an executive got it wrong.
00:55:58 ◼ ► I think the and people can have opinions and that executive liked it for a lot of reasons presumably.
00:56:03 ◼ ► What I'm saying is what you want is a structure inside your company where if there is great debate about something and great concern that something hasn't been thought through that all that gets surfaced and everybody who's involved in the decision-making process is clear on what the ramifications of going out with this thing are.
00:56:19 ◼ ► And if you're still all behind it and you can get everybody lined up about it then great, roll it out.
00:56:24 ◼ ► You know and it's not a democracy. I get all of that but what I'm saying is first off I think it was very clear when we saw it so to your point maybe people didn't see it.
00:56:33 ◼ ► Maybe it was siloed and the whole idea was like we're not going to tell anybody about this and then we're going to just drop it on them and they're going to love it and there was some delusion involved.
00:56:41 ◼ ► That is entirely possible but like again Apple University whatever is going on here like some analysis about why this happened because I'll tell you by the time they announced it at WWDC.
00:56:53 ◼ ► I think Apple itself if I could make it an entity for a moment realized it probably wasn't going to work.
00:57:04 ◼ ► It was almost like a bad movie being released where they're like well we got to sell it but it's really no good.
00:57:10 ◼ ► I would if I was a senior manager at Apple I would be very curious about why this was allowed to happen when people inside Apple were trying to wave their arms and say that it was bad or were not allowed to see it until it was too late.
00:57:27 ◼ ► Yeah well this is the thing right this is what you have to investigate is it was did everybody else lose an argument and not get the ear of the right executive.
00:57:37 ◼ ► If you like the Safari design and are sad that they changed it you know not everybody has to agree.
00:57:42 ◼ ► I think that it was predominantly disliked and that Apple knew it and the fact that Apple has gone to the great lengths to change it over the summer suggests that that more people disliked it and were concerned about it.
00:58:01 ◼ ► I don't know what people could be upset about like about like what they've ended up with.
00:58:11 ◼ ► I will have my URL bar at the bottom because that is easier for me to reach to it makes more sense to have all the controls in one place.
00:58:18 ◼ ► Pull to refresh is there if you still want to do that which I do want to do like I haven't put the better on my phone but I've been paying attention recently and have realized that like I have times where I would want to pull to refresh a web page more than I have the ability to do that.
00:58:31 ◼ ► Tab groups are still there. The new tab view is still there. They have a bunch of new gestures. The like maps like UI of cards swiping up from the bottom for like history and stuff is still there which is a really nice design in general I think.
00:58:44 ◼ ► So you know I feel like it's retained all of the stuff that's good but they have not taken it too far which was the floating bar.
00:58:53 ◼ ► No buttons you know trying to be more contextual about realizing what you want when that doesn't work that way.
00:59:00 ◼ ► You know like the fact that it was the content could go below it or like underneath the bar and all that kind of stuff which was just going to it was going to cause more problems than solutions and niceties it was going to give you.
00:59:12 ◼ ► And I want to be clear I applaud the process that happened this summer because Apple got a lot of pushback.
00:59:25 ◼ ► Yeah it's generally about bugs more than it is about I disagree with your design choices but bad UI is a bug right.
00:59:34 ◼ ► It's a bug of information organization and how it's interpreted by users. It is a kind of bug.
00:59:44 ◼ ► I think the iOS 15 launch in the fall when you know millions and hundreds of millions of iPhone users are going to get a new OS is going to be much better received than it would have been if it had been the design that was there at WWDC.
00:59:58 ◼ ► I guess the question that I would ask while I'm asking questions for people inside Apple who are not listening to this podcast probably I would also ask the question is this how you want it to be because this is one way to do it is to release features that are not entirely.
01:00:12 ◼ ► I don't want to say not well thought out I'm saying not entirely debated to their ends and resolved inside Apple and they keep it in the family.
01:00:23 ◼ ► But instead they let it out there and they gauge the response to it and they use that to fuel their internal arguments about where they go next and they fix it over the summer and then they release it in the fall and everybody yells about it in the summer.
01:00:37 ◼ ► All the nerds yell about it during the summer and all the regular people who just use the iPhone have no idea that this has gone on at all and they get their iPhone update in the fall and it's fine.
01:00:57 ◼ ► But I will say that would be very different from Apple how Apple has behaved generally because Apple doesn't like to do things in public anything including this kind of stuff in public and that's why I say it's worth people at Apple asking the question.
01:01:13 ◼ ► It's entirely possible that what happened was that the people who thought this was a bad idea didn't win the argument and thought to themselves, well, we'll see how the beta goes, right?
01:01:27 ◼ ► It feels very much like an I told you so kind of thing which is like this isn't going to work.
01:01:32 ◼ ► My gut feeling by the way about this is that one of the interesting UI flourishes that's in iOS 15 is these little floating lozenges.
01:01:40 ◼ ► They're all over the place and they are trying to replace toolbars with little hovery things because they look kind of interesting and they're lighter and all of that but they cover content.
01:01:54 ◼ ► And I think that the reason they're in Safari is because they're in other parts of iOS and they thought that they could extend it to Safari and it's just part of their design language across the OS.
01:02:05 ◼ ► I think maybe the problem is higher up which is the lozenge thing covering content didn't get maybe the level of scrutiny that it needed.
01:02:33 ◼ ► I've gotten myself in these situations where you start a thing and then you add to it and you add to it and it's like the slow boiling of the frog idea, right?
01:02:41 ◼ ► The more we have added and added and added, we're not seeing the step one to step 12 that other people will see.
01:02:50 ◼ ► And they may have just gotten to a point where everybody was convinced that they'd done the right thing or enough people were convinced that they'd done the right thing or that, oh, this is going to be fine.
01:03:02 ◼ ► And that they were surprised when the reaction was this way because they thought that they were going down the right path.
01:03:39 ◼ ► And in this case that for whatever reason that didn't happen, my, uh, I'm concerned that this is, there are lots of ways this could have happened.
01:03:48 ◼ ► The concern, I think if you're somebody internally is did this happen because somebody who's got power refused to listen.
01:04:09 ◼ ► It feels kind of like somebody in a position of power refused to listen to all of the criticism that people were leveling and just said, we'll ship it.
01:04:21 ◼ ► Not because that person was right or wrong, but because it meant everything played out in public instead of in private.
01:04:27 ◼ ► And I'm leaving the door open to the possibility that Apple executives look at what happened this summer and said, you know what?
01:04:42 ◼ ► Not necessarily bad for Apple to be like, uh, summer is when we try stuff out and you tell us what's wrong with it.
01:04:58 ◼ ► By the way, um, we had a question in, in our discord about floating lozenges and I'll just say my experience with the floating lozenges this summer has been when I'm writing in my text editor on my iPad.
01:05:15 ◼ ► There's still like a quick correct bar at the bottom of the screen that I can't make go away.
01:05:22 ◼ ► And what that suggests to me is that every app that that has to deal with the floating lozenge has to basically move its content away from that.
01:05:37 ◼ ► So it's floating over content, but really if you've got important stuff, you should make sure it's not floating over that.
01:05:46 ◼ ► But then if you're supposed to move the content out of the way, then there's no point having the floating.
01:05:54 ◼ ► And what you do is you consider your editable region of your content above it, but you show more content underneath it.
01:06:08 ◼ ► The problem is that the floating interface elements will float over things that are important.
01:06:15 ◼ ► And again, this is because the apps haven't been updated, but like I've had it happen where I'm trying to read or select text at the bottom of a document.
01:06:24 ◼ ► And I can't get to it when it's at the end of the document because it's under the lozenge.
01:06:28 ◼ ► So I have to go select all, right arrow, get to the end, click right, you know, return, return, return, return.
01:06:42 ◼ ► So anyway, I hope this segment was a little bit less beating on Safari and a little bit more kind of making us wonder what processes and procedures Apple is using to develop this stuff internally.
01:07:02 ◼ ► Before we do move on, I do want to go back to like what you were saying about this process and showing off at WWDC and having the summer.
01:07:19 ◼ ► We think this might be an interesting way to go, but Hey, look, we have the beta process.
01:07:31 ◼ ► because it's, it's exciting. We jumped to the conclusion that like, there must've been an error in the chain of command, but there is, there is a potential of this story where it's like, they weren't sure.
01:07:45 ◼ ► So they thought, well, we'll settle it with this entire process we have built. However, it doesn't seem like them, but it could be, you never know though.
01:07:57 ◼ ► Where like, I feel like in the past look at iOS seven, right? Everyone was saying, this is too much. This is too much. We've gone too far. We've gone too far.
01:08:04 ◼ ► And it came out and people hated it. Right. And like, you know, maybe they shouldn't have gone as far as they did. Nevertheless, long time ago.
01:08:10 ◼ ► My point being, if that was the thing that Apple have done or is a thing that Apple want to do, WWDC needs to be different.
01:08:19 ◼ ► It can't be what it is now, which is like WWDC is kind of like, Hey, we finished this thing, but you're going to get it in three months.
01:08:28 ◼ ► Like Google do this kind of stuff in quite a different way where they kind of just drop their beta and it has some features.
01:08:36 ◼ ► And then they add more and more and more until they release the operating system in September, October time.
01:08:43 ◼ ► And that is much more of a, we've got this stuff from like slowly building it up and it feels more like they are giving you a beta of their operating system because it is not shown to you as a finished product that is really only finished at like, like surface level. Right.
01:09:02 ◼ ► So if Apple want to move this way, I think they might have to change a little bit about what WWDC is. I don't know how they would do that. Like, I don't really think that it would be good to make a video and be like, Hey, we're working on this new Safari.
01:09:19 ◼ ► I think they could change it in tone, but again, they're going to have to change how they refer to things because Apple is so disciplined about saying here, you know, the whole, we can't wait to see what you do with it is literally we baked it. It's baked. You go now.
01:09:36 ◼ ► Matt in the Discord just said, we're so excited to hear what you change in it, which I think is so good.
01:09:42 ◼ ► Yeah, because that's, that's literally what they would have to do is they need to recalibrate their language to say things like this is a pretty radical change to Safari. And we know that it's going to make people wonder what the heck is going on here.
01:09:53 ◼ ► That's what, you know, and we look forward to your feedback about that because we want Safari to be the best. We think this is a step in the right direction, but we want your feedback. Like they could do it like that. Right.
01:10:01 ◼ ► Which is literally a beta rollout of we build a feature. We want you to beat on it and tell us what's wrong with it and we'll fix it because we think this is an important direction to go. In fact, they could have even framed it as, you know, one of the big problems that we have on the iPhone is we have big phones and our controls are at the top.
01:10:20 ◼ ► So we move them to the bottom and we also have a problem with the discoverability of tabs. We've told you how important tabs are on all of our other platforms and we've got this new feature for tab groups.
01:10:31 ◼ ► What about the iPhone? And so we've, we put those two together and this is the interface that we've got and that's where we're going. We would love your feedback, right? They can do it in that way. Like explain why you're doing it.
01:10:42 ◼ ► Say here is our first crack at it and we want your feedback and that would not be too different from what they do now, but it would be different. And I guess that's my overarching question is does Apple really want that to be the process or do they really want it to not happen like it happened this summer? And I don't know.
01:11:02 ◼ ► This episode of upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one platform so it helps you build your online presence and run your business from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics.
01:11:14 ◼ ► Squarespace have got you covered. It really is everything that you need to build, create, maintain, run a beautiful and modern website. You start with a professionally designed template. Use drag and drop tools to make it your own.
01:11:27 ◼ ► You can customize the look, the feel, the settings, even the products you have on sale with just a few clicks. Everything's optimized for all types of devices, no matter what the screen size, everything adjusts automatically to look great.
01:11:38 ◼ ► Squarespace combines cutting edge design and world-class engineering to make it easier than ever to establish your home online and make your ideas a reality.
01:11:47 ◼ ► Whether you want to showcase your work with one of their incredible portfolios, announce an upcoming event, publish your next blog post, take that big idea you have and give it a home online, or even just like, hey, promote your business a little bit more.
01:12:00 ◼ ► No matter what it is that you want to do, Squarespace has the tools that you need. There's nothing to patch or upgrade. You get free unlimited hosting, top of the line security and dependable resources to help you succeed.
01:12:11 ◼ ► They have an award-winning 24/7 customer support team and you can easily grab a unique domain name or take advantage of SEO and email marketing tools to help you get your idea out there to the world.
01:12:22 ◼ ► When I want to put something online, Squarespace is where I go to first and it's been that way for over 10 years now. It's so easy to use. I never really want to get lost in the website building process and try and understand how to install this and make sure I have this security patch and all that kind of stuff.
01:12:37 ◼ ► It's just not for me. I just want to go somewhere, pick a beautiful template and get to work and that's what Squarespace provides.
01:12:44 ◼ ► Go to squarespace.com/upgrade and you can sign up for a free trial today with no credit card required. Then when you're ready to launch, use the offer code UPGRADE and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
01:12:55 ◼ ► Squarespace.com/upgrade and when you decide to sign up, use the offer code UPGRADE and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. I thank Squarespace for the continued support of UPGRADE and all of Relay FM.
01:13:08 ◼ ► Let's do some #askupgrade questions to finish out today's episode. These were sent to us via text as they normally are. Until next week.
01:13:18 ◼ ► Tyler asks, "Do you think that center stage would come to the iPhone?" Center stage is a feature that's a part of the iPad Pro right now where it uses an ultra wide camera to follow you around and also make sure that people are in frame.
01:13:33 ◼ ► Do you think this is a technology that will come to the iPhone or maybe other products at Apple links?
01:13:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I think probably it will eventually. I think the challenge with the iPhone is that iPhones tend to be handheld and center stage is trying to really solve a problem where you are not pivoting and moving your device around to catch people.
01:13:51 ◼ ► That said, I can see scenarios where you're holding your iPhone and talking to somebody and somebody is next to you and it's already got the ultra wide camera on there so it can say, "Oh, there's two people in the shot. I'm going to make it the two people versus the one."
01:14:08 ◼ ► I feel like it's less needed on the iPhone but I think center stage is kind of going to come everywhere eventually because Apple likes the idea that they built this thing that detects where you are and makes sure you're framed properly and cropped properly.
01:14:28 ◼ ► Selfie cameras should all be ultra wide anyway because that makes sense especially if you're taking group selfies. Google is the only company to get this right. I know Apple has the zoom out thing but it's not much of a difference. It's a little bit of a difference.
01:14:41 ◼ ► One of the Google Pixel phones, I don't remember which one it was now, had a really good ultra wide camera and it would do detection so if people were in the frame it would pop out for them. Very cool.
01:14:52 ◼ ► I would love to see Apple put on the iPhone an ultra wide to the level and quality that they have on the iPad. It's really good and really wide.
01:15:01 ◼ ► I love center stage so me and Adina have a call with James and Saskia. They previously mentioned James Thompson. We talk every Friday. We've been doing this since the beginning of the pandemic. It's very nice.
01:15:12 ◼ ► We both have the nice iPad Pros. Adina has one and James has one. We have our call every Friday with the center stage stuff. Not only does it work really well, sometimes it still produces really funny moments.
01:15:25 ◼ ► Somebody moves a little bit and it's like zoom in. I like it. It's good. It's funny. But it's also so much better than it was before. Plus I would just say the microphones, cameras and those are just so much better.
01:15:39 ◼ ► I haven't yet been able to have a good experience of the other enhancements to FaceTime. I'm looking forward to seeing what they're like in 15. Like the audio improvements. Have you had much experience with those on an iPad? You know like the noise isolation and all that kind of stuff.
01:15:57 ◼ ► Nope. It's been FaceTime been very unreliable in places. But I like center stage a lot as well and we use it and I can't wait till everybody's got it because it'll be a lot better then.
01:16:10 ◼ ► Jonathan asks, I love the Apple watch, but it seems to have hit a bit of a plateau in terms of being able to introduce significant upgrades every year. Do you think Apple would ever switch away from its yearly upgrade cycle?
01:16:23 ◼ ► Oh wow. This question hit me in a way I wasn't expecting. Like when Jonathan said it I was like, okay so last year I know I was a little bit like I didn't really get it right. Like the new Apple watch.
01:16:38 ◼ ► And I do wonder if this is a product that maybe would more quickly hit its maturity just because of physical space constraints. And it did make me think like, do we need an Apple watch every year?
01:16:56 ◼ ► Well I think Apple likes doing it every year and Apple's got space in its product cycle to do it every year. I agree with you. I think they could do it every year and a half and it would be fine.
01:17:09 ◼ ► So here's a possibility. Maybe remember that rumor of like other Apple watches? Maybe they release an Apple watch every year but it might not be an update to the previous year's model.
01:17:23 ◼ ► I don't know. I don't know. I think they like incrementing the series and that it drives sales over time and that they're on this cycle. Like they could change it if they wanted to but I think they find enough.
01:17:38 ◼ ► It doesn't have to be a huge thing. It literally can be it's the new model year. If you look at something like cars you end up with these generations of cars where they do a new model year every year but the major changes only happen every few years, right?
01:17:51 ◼ ► I think if Apple doesn't feel like it's saving anything by going to 18 months or two years, it gets the advantage of making a new Apple watch announcement every year. That's marketing.
01:18:01 ◼ ► That's making people with older ones think maybe they do want to get the new one because it's got a feature in it that might interest them and it makes the people who are potentially new Apple watch buyers feel a little more confident that they've got the latest and greatest.
01:18:16 ◼ ► So I think it's kind of a marketing decision as much as it is a technology decision. And so ever like I mean maybe it wouldn't be shocking if Apple did Apple watch every 18 months or something.
01:18:30 ◼ ► But if it works for them like significant upgrades every year, like it doesn't have to be a significant upgrade every year. It could literally be a little bit faster processor and maybe a new sensor or a new feature and some different materials because again, you know, think of the car model year. Not every year needs to be huge to allow them to increment the number.
01:18:52 ◼ ► Materials and color actually. That could be the thing that they end up pushing on most. And again, before people close your Twitter compose box. The point of this is not the we're not talking about this they have to do this because everyone upgrades year over year. Most people do not.
01:19:08 ◼ ► But if you're if you only have small upgrades and you do them every year, it still might not be as much of an impact right like you still got if you're going to do it. You have to change something but it could be as much as here's the new processor and this new range of colors as the thing that they could just keep doing every year and then, you know, maybe you'll meet people every couple of years with this big new sensor that they've been working on.
01:19:33 ◼ ► I'll also say no there isn't an annual upgrade cycle for most people but there is a waiting period for people who bought an Apple Watch and think should I get the new Apple Watch and I think some people probably think I'll wait two generations. I wait two years or I'll wait three years.
01:19:51 ◼ ► If you lengthen the update cycle, you potentially are lengthening their update cycle, right? Oh, well, I already have a five so I'm going to wait till the seven means the same, you know, it means right now two years.
01:20:05 ◼ ► But if it means three years or four years, right? Like that's not as good for Apple. I think that there is some psychology there.
01:20:26 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like the Apple Watch and they're selling as many as they are. They're selling those right? They're selling them all the time. So it's not as if like what do they save by going to 18 months?
01:20:39 ◼ ► What do they save? And the answer is I guess they save a little bit of time in a design cycle, but I'm not sure that's enough of a savings for them to my point about them selling them all is like if you if you make a new one, people will buy it.
01:20:56 ◼ ► If you wait people are still buying so on that level you're not maybe affecting sales, but at the same time if you make a new one, it's not like you're you're stopping all the sales of the old watch. You're just taking them and putting them in the new watch.
01:21:09 ◼ ► So you're not really interrupting the cycle to drop in a minor update. It doesn't have a real cost there and it has a benefit in terms of it being new marketing and a new name and some other new stuff going on.
01:21:21 ◼ ► So it really comes down to is revving the Apple Watch every year such a burden on the back end that they will be amazingly happy to go to an 18 month cycle and that's far. I see no evidence of that.
01:21:35 ◼ ► Marina asks, I'm returning to teach in a physical classroom soon, but I want to keep the practice of projecting my slides from my iPad and marking them up. Can you recommend a stand that will keep it stable enough to write on while also raising it high enough off the podium to be comfortable to use while I'm standing?
01:21:54 ◼ ► I think that maybe the best product for this here would be the hover bar duo from 12 South because you can clamp it because I feel like any stand if you've got it at its highest height, none of them is completely stable.
01:22:13 ◼ ► You put enough force on it, the iPad will fall over and all that or it has to be much, much heavier and no one makes a product like that because the sand would have to be really friggin heavy, right? Like to completely counterbalance that weight.
01:22:27 ◼ ► But the hover bar duo from 12 South has two attachments. It comes with a weight and it also comes with a clamp. So you could clamp it onto the desk.
01:22:34 ◼ ► If you're using it with an Apple pencil, you're not going to stop the wobbling like it's still going to wobble a little bit, but it's not going to topple over. And I think the wobbling shouldn't be so bad that it would be an issue for you.
01:22:48 ◼ ► You can also put your hand behind it when you're writing if you need to. But yeah, that's the best that I could come up with. It is going to wobble though.
01:22:56 ◼ ► Like that's the challenge is high enough off the podium to be comfortable while standing. You know, ideally, you know, might want to look at getting a, I don't know about the physical classroom layout, but like the other thing would be to get like a lectern or something that actually like raises up that you can lay the iPad on.
01:23:14 ◼ ► And like it's like you're providing, giving a speech and you've got your notes, except it's your iPad. But I do like the hover bar duo. It's just the way the iPad, it's going to shimmy a little bit on a stand. That's just how it is. It's a heavy thing.
01:23:29 ◼ ► But if this one does work for you, it is also really usable in a bunch of situations, which is another reason I'd recommend it. It's my favorite of these products and I've tried a lot of them.
01:23:41 ◼ ► And finally, today Stitch asks, what Apple related thing would you most want a tell all book or documentary on? What do you think? I want Johnny Eisle to biography. That's what I want more than anything else.
01:23:55 ◼ ► I think he would have just the most interesting stories and his career now is maybe one of the most interesting to me because of what it has spanned, you know, like, and how involved he has been in basically every product for Apple's entire boom period, you know, and is also, you know, like,
01:24:17 ◼ ► a big part of why they are who they are now. I would, I also just feel like I bet he would just be a very interesting person to learn stuff from in a book form like this.
01:24:33 ◼ ► I don't think he will ever do this because he seemed to be so held back and reserved, but to be honest, so seemed Steve Jobs and he had a book, you know, it was, you know, I know it was a biography and I know it maybe wasn't great, but it did have stuff in it.
01:24:51 ◼ ► I really hope that Johnny Ive does this one day because he just has so much that he could share so many stories and I understand, look, obviously I understand and appreciate the secrecy of Apple is one of the things that makes them so interesting to me as a company.
01:25:10 ◼ ► But there is also a lot of interesting history there and I think it would be such a shame if a lot of these stories are never told because of this. So I hope that some people write some stuff one day.
01:25:22 ◼ ► My hope, and again, I'm not, this is about me, right? What Apple-related thing do you want? I want the definitive history of Apple from 1997 to 2007. That's what I want. I want them, I want somebody, a journalist, to interview. It's going to have to be multi volumes.
01:25:42 ◼ ► The first volume can be 97 to 2001 and cover the run up to the iPod from the near-death experience, but that's what I want. I want to talk to the people who were there with Steve Jobs talking about the decisions that Apple made to with the iMac and with the iPod and to bring back the company and then ultimately to lead to the iPhone.
01:26:00 ◼ ► And I know there are versions of this, but I want the one that probably still can't be done because people are still at Apple, but I want the one with Phil Schiller in it and John Rubinstein and Greg Joswiak and Jonathan Ive.
01:26:14 ◼ ► I want the history of that era, which is so important to this enormous company, with everybody willing to tell the secrets, because this is what this premise is, tell all about what actually went on in that 10-year transformational period.
01:26:32 ◼ ► And I know some of that is in other things, but what I really want is the people involved. Because when I was doing my research for 20 Macs for 2020, I heard a couple of stories that I had never heard before about the original iMac.
01:26:44 ◼ ► And Apple executives going to the chipmaker, going to Motorola and getting a PowerPC price for that processor that was the only way they were able to do the iMac at an affordable price and how they kind of took Motorola.
01:27:09 ◼ ► They kind of confused them into giving them a good deal. And it's a hilarious story that I don't think I'm at liberty to tell beyond that, but people could open up about this stuff and there's some great stories there that I would love to see.
01:27:23 ◼ ► And yeah, it can cover sort of like how King could send his book about the beginnings of Safari. I mean, there's little bits that we've seen, but I think the big picture of taking Apple from a company that was about to die to the company that basically was on its way to being the biggest company in the world by value is a story that I would like to hear by the people who were on the inside.
01:27:48 ◼ ► And we would all love it if you were the person that did it. I'm not a book writer and I'm not going to interview all those people, but somebody has good relationships with all those people and they ought to write that book.
01:27:57 ◼ ► If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show next week, do it differently. Go to AskUpgradeOutLoud.com and upload an audio clip of yourself asking us a question. Maybe you want us to talk about something. Maybe you just want our opinion about something.
01:28:13 ◼ ► It could be Snell Talk, it could be like You Kick a Topic, whatever. Whatever you want. This is your opportunity to be a part of an episode of Upgrade. You want to hear yourself on one of your favorite shows? Well, go to AskUpgradeOutLoud.com and upload some audio.
01:28:31 ◼ ► I wasn't going to say this is people's favorite show, but I'm obviously expecting that everyone that listens to this show, Upgrade is one of their favorite shows. AskUpgradeOutLoud.com. If you want to hear the rules again, just go back to the chapter where I told you what the rules are for getting on the show.
01:28:49 ◼ ► And that will be next week's episode. We're going to be bringing back the Summer of Fun because we've had a few pretty heavy weeks here, so I'm looking forward to that.
01:28:58 ◼ ► If you want to find us online, go to SixColors.com for Jason's work. He is @JasonL on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. Jason hosts many shows over at The Incomparable focused on pop culture, movies, TV shows, and more.
01:29:18 ◼ ► Yeah, that's not, I mean, I'm on it occasionally. I'll be on it this coming weekend, but it's sort of different hosts and different people. It's a whole thing in comparable.
01:29:28 ◼ ► You are a part of, because I know that Jason, no, you're Jason. James Thompson, who we've mentioned 17 times on this episode, just hosted one episode, which is very fun, so you can go check that out.
01:29:37 ◼ ► The show is called Football is Life, because football is life. Jason also hosts many shows here at Relay FM, as do I. You can go to relay.fm/shows, pick out a new show for yourself.
01:29:48 ◼ ► I am @imikeyke, and don't forget to donate to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital at stduo.org/relay. Thank you so much to all of you that do.