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Upgrade

327: The Future Doesn't Apply

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 327. Today's show is brought to you by ExpressVPN,

00:00:16   SaneBox, and MailRoute. My name is Myke Hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hello, Jason Snell!

00:00:23   Hello, Myke Hurley. We're back. We made it. We made it through. This is a normal episode of Upgrade.

00:00:29   I'm promising, even though we have just started it, it feels like a normal episode of Upgrade after

00:00:34   so much going on in the last few weeks. Drafts, events, post-events,

00:00:38   embargoes, interviews. Reviews. Now it's just, you know, it's your upgrade. It's just an upgrade.

00:00:44   It's good. Although we do have an operating system to talk about today. I guess we do. Did that come

00:00:49   out? Kind of. Is it, have we reached Mac OS 12 yet? Maybe. We have a #SnellTalkQuestion from Dylan,

00:00:55   who was inspired by last week's #SnellTalkQuestion and asks, "Jason, what is your favorite

00:01:01   pro?" So last time we had, "What is your favorite mini?" What is your favorite pro?

00:01:05   Oh, this is a hard one. So some could be iPhone pro, iPad pro, AirPods pro, Final Cut pro. Yep.

00:01:14   Mac Pro, iMac Pro, Logic Pro X, which is this, I guess pro. They took the Xs away. They stole our

00:01:20   Xs. Cause it's not Mac OS 10 anymore. I guess that's what those meant. Get the X out. You

00:01:27   gotta X them out. I'm going to say the iPad pro cause I've used the iPad pro as my mobile

00:01:37   computing device since it was released in 2018 to this day. Still use it. So two, you know, or no,

00:01:45   2016, right? For the original one. So gosh, it's been a long time now. Five years of me and the

00:01:52   iPad pro being BFFs. So it's gotta be the iPad pro. That's the answer. Five years of Apple pencil,

00:01:57   Myke. Five years of Apple pencil. Yeah. It happened not too long after we started the

00:02:04   show. It was like the next year. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Yeah. That's my choice. What's your choice?

00:02:08   iPad pro is up there. AirPods pro are up there as well.

00:02:12   Oh, they're great. They're great. But my, my relationship with AirPods pro is more limited and

00:02:16   not as long running as the iPad pro. The reason I knew about the five year thing is from Apple's

00:02:23   photo widget because it reminded me of the first time that me and Federico met in person when he

00:02:28   came to London to pick up a review unit of the original iPad pro. Oh, so it was around now. And

00:02:35   then I looked at the day and I was like, wow, five years. You pick him up at Heathrow or something.

00:02:40   Uh, no, uh, not that time. No, I met him outside Apple's offices. I pick him up,

00:02:48   uh, have picked him up at Heathrow. Um, I think I took him to Heathrow that day. Oh, that's right.

00:02:53   That's right. I took him back. Uh, and I was waiting for all of the five years of iPad pro

00:02:58   articles, but nobody wrote them. I think everyone was too busy. Yeah. There was too much else going

00:03:03   on. Right. Well now it's time. It's time for the, that'll be my next project is 20 articles about

00:03:09   one. Five iPads for five years. All right. Thank you to Dylan for that snow talk question. If you

00:03:16   would like to send in a question to help us start the show, just send a tweet with the hashtag snow

00:03:20   tall question. I'll use the command, a question, Mark snow talk in the relay FM members discord.

00:03:26   You can get access to the discord by the way, if you sign up for upgrade plus go to get upgrade

00:03:30   plus.com. You get a ton of wonderful benefits, including ad free longer episodes of upgrade every

00:03:38   single week. So we do, we provide those to a subscribers about grade plus go to get upgrade

00:03:44   plus.com to find out more and sign up. Jason, it is nearly that time again, the upgrade is

00:03:51   coming. Our annual award show the seventh annual upgrade is, is going to be happening

00:04:00   towards the end of December exact. Episode date to be determined, but I'm expecting it will probably

00:04:07   be December 28th. I reckon it's probably when we're going to do the upgrade. So, but vote,

00:04:12   that means voting is now open. So we will call on you, the upgrade Ian's to help us as you have done

00:04:20   many years in the past to go to upgrade ease dot vote. That is where you can go. And I'll have a

00:04:28   link in the show notes in case you're not sure how to spell that. So you can just go and click it.

00:04:34   What we want you to do is go in and fill out all of the categories that you want.

00:04:40   You can write in your responses or choose from the dropdowns that may exist on these pages

00:04:46   to help us decide best apps, games, products, stories, loads of wonderful stuff that we will

00:04:54   be looking at for the seventh annual upgrade ease. Jason, there is one category that I was thinking

00:05:00   of, cause I've been starting to think about my upgrade ease and my nominations. I should know in

00:05:04   case you're not too familiar with the upgrade ease. We ask for the votes of our audience,

00:05:10   the upgrade Ian's, and we use that along with our own picks to decide the winners. So me and Jason

00:05:16   bring our own nominations to the categories. We take into account what the listeners like

00:05:21   and what they think. And then we use that to discuss and decide who or what wins the vote

00:05:27   for that year. And you can find a history of all of the past upgrade ease winners at upgrade ease

00:05:33   dot com. We have a wonderful hall of fame there for you to go and peruse through. So you can see

00:05:40   who or what has won each category or each year, which is a really cool thing that means.

00:05:45   Yeah. Built by upgrading and Zach who also does the draft report card or draft a scorecard. So

00:05:54   very, very good. It's again, I'm taken back to the fact that we did this the first time and you tried

00:06:00   to make it the first annual and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's only annual after you do

00:06:05   more than one. Well, look at us now. It's seven annual. But as, as I was saying, there was one

00:06:09   category that I think is going to be particularly difficult this year, which is the best movie

00:06:15   category because there's a lot of movies. Um, I think it's going to be a little trickier than

00:06:23   normal because I actually couldn't think of any new movies I've seen this year.

00:06:27   Get in your votes for Wonder Woman 84 now, which we're going to, we're going to talk about in a

00:06:30   minute. But, uh, like the Oscars, the upgrade is allows movies to not be released in theaters and

00:06:35   only on streaming this year, just for this year. My problem isn't that movies have been coming out,

00:06:41   so I haven't been seeing them. Okay. Well that is a problem. Yeah. And let's move so we can

00:06:47   actually pivot that straight into talking about upstream. Uh, but yeah, just before we, we leave

00:06:53   this, if you go to upgrade these dot vote, you can go ahead and cast your votes. Um, we will give you

00:06:59   ample notice as to when we're closing the nominations. You've got a good few weeks to go

00:07:04   and get your voting in. So let's talk about a couple of upstream headlines upstream is where

00:07:09   we take a look at news in streaming media and the technology companies that surround it. So talking

00:07:14   about movies coming out and movies I can't see. Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984 is coming to HBO

00:07:22   max on December 25th. Huge news in terms of movie industry strategy. And we talked about it here

00:07:31   a few weeks ago, the idea that you're taking a movie that was, you spent hundreds of millions

00:07:38   of dollars on and are going to put it on HBO max is, I mean, it's never, it's never going to

00:07:48   directly earn back the money you put into it. Right. They're taking a huge loss on this. What

00:07:53   they get is promotion for HBO max, which it seems like HBO max kind of needs, hasn't really seems to

00:08:01   have gone the way that they want it. I think so. I don't know. I mean, it, it, I, I see a lot of

00:08:06   negativity about it. HBO max. I use HBO max a lot, but then again, I paid for HBO before and I get

00:08:11   HBO max with my cable subscription. So because I pay for HBO. So for me, it's like, well, yeah,

00:08:17   I just keep getting it and there's more stuff on it and I'm actually pretty happy about it, but,

00:08:21   but sure. They're in a tough battle. And the more, um, reasons you have to sign up for HBO max,

00:08:26   especially, I think for them right now, they've got a lot of people who get HBO on cable and

00:08:31   haven't signed up for HBO max. And they really want those people to kind of come over and become

00:08:36   HBO max customers. Like I know that it's been a thing that like, uh, it wasn't available on, uh,

00:08:42   was it the Amazon fire stuff and it's just become available. That's like, if you had, if your TV

00:08:48   solution was using a fire TV stick, you just couldn't watch HBO now until now,

00:08:52   uh, HBO max until now, HBO now until max. Um, the yeah, it's, and it's not on Roku yet. Um, but,

00:09:00   but I think that's, that is an issue, but I'm talking about like, I've also read that

00:09:04   they've got all these people who are eligible for HBO max because they get HBO on their cable

00:09:09   company and their cable company has a deal with them to, uh, turn that into an HBO max subscription.

00:09:16   And that's what I'm on who haven't done it, like who haven't signed up and said, yes, convert my

00:09:22   collect, connect my cable to my HBO max and get me HBO max. And they want those people, right. They

00:09:27   want those people to be, you know, discovering the wonders of HBO max. And, um, and so maybe this

00:09:35   will be a motivator for that too, but they, they, yeah, they need attention and this is a good way

00:09:40   for them to get it. Uh, how do you quantify that in terms of money? Because HBO max is obviously

00:09:45   a very important thing for Warner brothers, um, Warner mania to have, um, and they want to grow

00:09:52   it, but it's not money in the bank today. Like movie theater ticket receipts would be. Um, I,

00:09:59   my understanding is also that like, they're going to have to pay, probably there had to be a

00:10:03   negotiation here where they're basically paying a fee. That's going to go to the people who have

00:10:08   a part of the, of the, um, the profit of the movie or the gross of the movie, because, um,

00:10:15   it's not going to make that like the assumptions that people made, if you're a producer and you've

00:10:19   got a little piece of the, of the net of the movie, you aren't going to get it now. Like

00:10:24   you negotiated that thinking it would be in a theater. So it's, it's, it's a mess. And the fact

00:10:29   that they've done it difficult to work out the attribution of people that signed up for HBO max

00:10:35   to see this movie, you know, like, so they're just like, we'll just write you a check, I guess.

00:10:39   Yeah. I think that that there's some of that going on. So it, in the end, it's a move where they don't

00:10:46   want to let it sit for another year and hope, cause, cause keep in mind, it's not just that in

00:10:52   a lot of places, especially in the U S movie theaters basically are shut down or if they are

00:10:57   open, nobody's going to them, but there's this anticipation that that's going to be the case

00:11:01   for a long time. And there are a bunch of movies that are stacked up now that are made and sitting.

00:11:07   And so they've decided to pull the trigger on this. Everybody's, you know, black widow is delayed by

00:11:13   Marvel. They ha they aren't putting it on Disney plus they're, they're like, no, no, no, we're

00:11:16   going to wait. And we're going to put in the theater, wonder woman, which is, I would say a

00:11:21   much bigger movie than black widow, given the track record of the previous wonder woman movie.

00:11:27   The it's a big move and there's a little bit of desperation, but there's a little bit of a,

00:11:31   wanting to prop up HBO max and also get the movie out there. It will show in the rest of the world,

00:11:37   which there are places. And like, you know, if you're in a place, if you're in Australia or in

00:11:43   Taiwan or something, movie theaters are open and it'll be fine. You can go see the movie

00:11:48   in the UK where you're locked down. I guess you won't get to see it.

00:11:51   Also one of them are major chains. It's just, they're closed. They're just closed. So

00:11:56   this is what's so frustrating to me, this US centric, uh, way of doing things like,

00:12:04   so we'll all agree that coronavirus means you can't go see the movie. Right. So why did I offer

00:12:09   no option for me in the UK? Why can't I pay $25 on iTunes? Right. It's just like, oh, you know,

00:12:17   you just have to work it out on your own. Well, so this, this takes us to another thing

00:12:22   that's happening here, which is in December for a month, December 25th to January 25th,

00:12:28   Wonder Woman 1984 will be on HBO max. Then it disappears. So what they're using this as is a

00:12:36   simultaneous with the theatrical window in parts of the world where they have a theatrical something

00:12:41   to happen. It'll be on HBO max and then it goes away from HBO max. So presumably on January 26th

00:12:51   or 25th, it goes in, it slides into the premium video on demand window, which means that that's

00:12:58   the moment where if you don't have HBO max or you don't want HBO max, or you can't get HBO max,

00:13:03   it will become a for rental and for sale, or maybe what they do the stagger thing,

00:13:10   what they do the staggered where it'll be, it'll be for sale for two weeks and then it'll be for sale

00:13:14   and for rent after that, it's going to go into that window. So it's only unlike most movies that

00:13:20   come to a streaming service and then they're just on that streaming service forever. And that's it.

00:13:23   They want their money from Blu-rays and from online sales and from online rentals. They do

00:13:31   want that as much of that as they can still get. So that will still happen with this movie. It'll

00:13:36   just happen after the HBO max window. So really interesting. It's like the HBO max window exists

00:13:43   in America. Yes. There is no window here. Well, I don't know what's going to happen in the rest

00:13:48   of the world. I think in the rest of the world, if you're in a place where the movie theaters aren't

00:13:52   open, you can't see it. And then in a month, it'll, you'll be able to rent it on iTunes.

00:13:57   Basically wild to me, these kind of strategies just really, you know, obviously I am sensitive

00:14:04   to it, but they, they become frustrating. Like Warner's whole thing with HBO max has been really

00:14:09   annoying to me anyway, because they're making content and they're locking up stuff and they have

00:14:15   absolutely no known plan for international distribution or anything. Yep. You own it HBO,

00:14:23   right? Disney made it work. Make it work. Well, their challenge is that they have some stuff that

00:14:28   they don't own because they sold it internationally. Right. It's the same problem as CBS. They're

00:14:32   into some of the same deals as every service has this, but like Disney planned it, right?

00:14:39   They actually had a plan and they waited until they could get the rights back. And then they

00:14:44   all like, one of them had no plan. They just rushed it. This is the thing. Disney had a plan.

00:14:49   Warner didn't have a plan. And, and they, they did rush it because they knew with Disney coming

00:14:56   out into the market that they couldn't wait and launch their, if, if Warner media had said,

00:15:00   well, we're going to launch HBO max, but not until 2022, everybody'd be like, wow, you're,

00:15:06   you're dead in the water. You're doomed. They knew they had to get something out there. And that's

00:15:11   why it's imperfect, especially internationally. But I would, I would argue it's really no

00:15:14   different than CBS all access, which is about to turn into whatever paramount plus is, is some of

00:15:20   these companies are doing that now. Also some of these companies are doing that now and have to

00:15:27   struggle with their international deals and their international rollouts are going to be slow and

00:15:31   it's going to be super awkward, but they're at least kind of learning and starting in the U S

00:15:35   territory that they're most familiar with. Disney's situation is, is different in that

00:15:41   Disney plus isn't large. It isn't like an evolution of existing cable or broadcast

00:15:49   properties. And so their rights in conferences are less and they had longer to plan it.

00:15:57   So I would argue, I mean, this is the thing. Disney is a better rollout, like,

00:16:02   right? Disney's a better rollout. Apple is a better rollout because they're not encumbered

00:16:06   at all, even though they're also not encumbered by familiar intellectual property, but they're not

00:16:10   encumbered by a lot of deals from previous iterations of their company that didn't care

00:16:16   about streaming and didn't care about international streaming. So I would say Warner is in the same

00:16:21   boat as something like CBS, Paramount, Viacom, and NBC as well. Like these big American companies

00:16:30   that have so many complicated deals that it's going to be very hard for them to try and compete

00:16:34   internationally, compete worldwide. Whereas Disney and Apple and Netflix and increasingly Amazon,

00:16:42   they are playing a different game because they can be everywhere in the world. So it's fascinating.

00:16:48   It's fascinating to watch this. There's like a sliding scale of frustration though, right?

00:16:52   For me, because CBS, they know they have no plan. So they've made their content available on

00:16:59   Netflix, right? Like you can, I can watch the Star Wars show at the Star Trek. Oh dear. I can watch

00:17:05   the Star Trek shows like Discovery here on Netflix, right? Yes. Because they know they

00:17:10   don't have a plan, but yes, Peacock and HBO Max, it's like, yeah. Yeah. But here's, but here's the

00:17:17   thing. They taking a feature film like this, they know that they could sell it to somebody in the UK,

00:17:24   but they're going to, they're going to then forego all of the money that they might get from rental

00:17:30   and purchase on DVD later, or I mean on, on like, or, or Blu-ray, but like any of that post that

00:17:37   video on demand cycle. So if you're, if you're foregoing that and theatrical, the amount of money

00:17:43   that you would need to be compensated by a local, by a streaming service that works in market in

00:17:48   order to balance it out, because you're not going to get HBO Max subscribers out of it,

00:17:55   it's probably more than anyone would be willing to pay. So I understand why you're sad about it,

00:17:58   but it's like, there's no option there. They should just sell it on December 25th outside

00:18:03   of America. Well, the problem is lots of parts of outside of America have movie theaters open.

00:18:08   It's just your country that doesn't. So that's part of the problem. Well, yeah. Anyway, moving on,

00:18:14   Apple have aired a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, the animated show on PBS yesterday, and they're going

00:18:22   to be doing the same for Charlie Brown Christmas on December 13th. You may remember, uh, Apple

00:18:28   acquired the rights to these properties as well as doing a deal for more original Peanuts content.

00:18:36   Apple kind of knew that they were taking a tradition and put in like owning it. So they

00:18:43   made the announcement that they would offer these shows for free. You could even in the Apple TV app,

00:18:49   if you had an Apple TV, or you could watch them online or on any smart TV, anywhere Apple was,

00:18:54   they had a window of time where you could go and watch Thanksgiving and Christmas, uh, for free.

00:19:02   Nevertheless, Apple received some criticism for this and have ended up doing a deal to show and

00:19:08   have now we're seeing it, uh, Thanksgiving specials and the Christmas specials on PBS

00:19:14   with no commercials. And they've got, there's never any commercials on PBS. Okay. Well,

00:19:20   I don't know. I'm just doing what the article tells me. Uh, and they also put a note at the

00:19:24   front and said like, Hey, we are, uh, giving we're Apple and we're giving this to you.

00:19:30   Yeah. They used to be on commercial TV. They were on CBS originally and then on ABC,

00:19:35   but PBS didn't have commercials. So it's not like Apple's like yeah. Apple's gift here is that if

00:19:39   somebody wants to watch this and they only have free over the air TV, it has gotten an airing on

00:19:44   free over the air TV and the Christmas episode on December 23rd, the Charlie Brown Christmas,

00:19:49   the classic, the Thanksgiving one, by the way, is for those outside the U S who don't

00:19:53   understand Thanksgiving suffice to say the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is awful. It's a terrible,

00:19:59   it's bad. It's bad. It's real bad. My kids used to watch that all the time. We had,

00:20:04   we had all the Charlie Brown specials and they used to watch them on long car trips.

00:20:07   When we were going down to Southern California to visit grandma and grandpa for Thanksgiving.

00:20:10   And they would sit there with their iPods, their iPods and watch videos on them. That's

00:20:16   how long ago this was when my kids were little and they watched that Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

00:20:19   and they would demand it at various times all through the year. They'd say, Oh, let's watch

00:20:23   the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It's bad. It's really bad. Charlie Brown Christmas.

00:20:28   That one is really good. It's brilliant. It's a classic. So, uh, if you're just doing over the

00:20:34   air TV, December 13th, you can get it. If you're not an Apple TV plus person, December 11th through

00:20:39   the 13th, it will be just free streaming on Apple TV. Plus you don't have to be a member.

00:20:44   Um, the Thanksgiving one don't watch it, but it will be streaming for you later this week.

00:20:49   Don't watch it. It's bad. It's kind of funny, right? Because like Apple clearly

00:20:53   wanted this because it's like a good hook to get people to sign up. And then they ended up

00:20:57   just putting it on TV anyway. It's like, Oh man, they tried so hard, you know,

00:21:03   it's very funny to me. They did. They did.

00:21:08   All right. This episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at sane box. One of the

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00:24:01   So Jason, last week, Apple introduced the App Store small business program.

00:24:09   As a very quick refresher for anybody that's not familiar with this by now,

00:24:14   basically any developer that earns under a million dollars a year can qualify for a reduced 15%

00:24:19   commission on sales in the App Store. So Apple are slicing their cut in half from 30 to 15%.

00:24:25   There are still some more details to come but in a nutshell, you get that 15% if you earn under a

00:24:32   million dollars a year. If you cross a million in a year, the 30% will kick in for anything on top of

00:24:39   that one million dollars of revenue for you so that Apple will take their cut at a larger rate.

00:24:44   If you do cross a million dollars in a year where you're a part of the program,

00:24:48   the next year you will go to 30% and you can reapply to the program if you fall below a million

00:24:55   dollars again and then you're back in the program the following year. I wanted to just get your

00:25:00   thoughts on this. How does this deal strike you? Especially now it's been a few days so we've seen

00:25:04   a lot of people talking about it and stuff like that. It's interesting that it's not just a cut

00:25:11   but it's a special program, right? It's a little like saying HBO Max really wants you to sign up

00:25:22   for it even though you get it. You just have to sign up for it. Well, this is the other version

00:25:27   of that which is you get a big cut but you have to apply for it. You know, a reduction in this.

00:25:33   This is a 20% what? 20% ish? A little more than that increase in revenue from the perspective of

00:25:40   the small developer. We've all been saying that Apple should do something like this,

00:25:45   especially in the face of all of its criticism. It's very clearly a move

00:25:49   that is happening because Apple is feeling the pressure. It's also a...

00:25:56   So it's about PR. It's about changing people's perception of Apple and the funny thing is

00:26:04   for those who have been criticizing Apple, and that is things like Epic Games and David

00:26:10   Henemeyer-Hanson from Basecamp, they were all really infuriated by this. And like DHH went on

00:26:18   this Twitter rant that is like hilariously out of control and the Epic Games guy...

00:26:25   -Tim Sweeney.

00:26:26   -Tim Sweeney, similarly. And I'm not surprised they reacted that way because they're essentially

00:26:34   in a political and PR battle with Apple where they want governments essentially to step in

00:26:40   and change Apple's behavior. And so any move Apple makes that makes it harder for them to do that,

00:26:49   they are going to attack. What's frustrating to them about this move is that Apple is

00:26:55   legitimately improving the lives of all of its small app developers, giving them a 20% raise.

00:27:04   These are the heartwarming indie developer stories and small business stories that we've heard about

00:27:11   before and we will definitely hear about more now that Apple has done this. It also puts people like

00:27:18   Epic Games in opposition to those people. It reframes this conversation from being "Apple's

00:27:26   taking too much money from developers" to "Apple's taking too much money from big/rich developers."

00:27:36   And it reframes the story as a couple of rich guys fighting over a quarter they found on the street,

00:27:44   right? Which is sort of like, "Who cares? It's a couple of rich guys. I don't care." And again,

00:27:49   I'm not saying—I'm just talking about perception here, right? I'm talking about perception here.

00:27:53   It makes it harder for Epic because Apple is going to be able to cart out all sorts of

00:27:58   small developers who are so helped by this and it makes Epic seem even more like, you know,

00:28:05   "We make a lot of money but not quite enough. Apple should give us more money because why not?

00:28:13   Because we want it." So I understand why they reacted the way they did because this is a really

00:28:19   good PR move by Apple. Now, is it a PR move? Yes, it is. It also is really good and helps a lot of

00:28:25   people. There are lots of issues. I thought it was really funny. A lot of people have been picking

00:28:29   into the details of this and saying it doesn't really make sense in a few places. Apple's

00:28:34   statement on this specifically said that details would be revealed in December. So I feel like

00:28:39   maybe some of the details everybody's asking for are details that are just not announced yet.

00:28:45   I wouldn't have been surprised too if they took a view here of like, "Let's see how this is received

00:28:53   and then we can tweak it a little bit if we need to." Well, yeah, don't be specific about it and

00:28:59   see what people criticize about it and then address those criticisms when you officially

00:29:03   launch it. Because the big criticism is that the way it works is very bad if you're somebody who

00:29:10   is... If you're a small business, and it wouldn't be like an indie developer probably, but like a

00:29:17   small development shop and you've got apps and you're about to go over a million, it's really

00:29:22   bad. If you go over a million but your business just hovers around a million, if you go over a

00:29:28   million, the next year you are at 30%. And if you go under a million, then you can go back,

00:29:36   but you've lost a year. You've lost that 20% raise basically for a year. And so a bunch of the

00:29:42   criticism of this is Apple should probably phase this in and say the first million you make is

00:29:48   taxed at 15% and then thereafter it's 30%. But Apple seems to not want to do that because

00:29:57   they've cast this as a program that you have to apply for. And also I think that means they

00:30:02   really want to take every dollar they can from the big developers even if it's their first million,

00:30:07   which fair enough, fair enough. But I wonder if there's some other way to tweak this so that

00:30:12   for developers... I mean, it could be as simple as saying it's... When you're in the program,

00:30:20   the program takes your first million at 15 and then the next half a million, let's say, at 30.

00:30:29   But as long as you stay under half a million and a half, you're eligible for the program the next

00:30:35   year or something. There are ways to make this a little bit less punitive because you may end up in

00:30:40   a situation where a company gets to December and is almost at a million and they almost want to

00:30:47   sabotage their revenue. They almost want to remove their apps from the store for the rest of the year

00:30:53   so they don't go over. And is that conducive to the spirit of what Apple's trying to do here,

00:30:58   that somebody who makes a million and one dollars is going to end up losing a large chunk of their

00:31:04   revenue for one year, whereas somebody who makes $999,999 doesn't? I know these are edge cases,

00:31:13   but this is the stuff that's come up. And I would imagine that Apple is looking at that and saying,

00:31:17   "How do we soften the blow so we don't have people in this really weird in-between case?"

00:31:21   Because honestly, not only is that kind of unfair, it's also potentially bad PR, right? Like,

00:31:27   the last thing you want is a sad story about how a successful app-developing company had to lay off

00:31:33   people because they fell over the million-dollar mark and therefore are going to see their revenue

00:31:40   go down. That's a bad... You don't want that. You don't want that kind of story. You just want it to

00:31:45   be that the rich guys in the store keep paying you 30%. So I think it's a brilliant move that's

00:31:52   going to be great for all the people we know who are small developers. I think it's a brilliant

00:31:57   move for Apple in the sense that it makes the arguments of their opponents tougher. I don't

00:32:06   know if it necessarily is going to actually get Apple, allow Apple to escape from the various

00:32:14   regulatory scrutiny, scrutinies that they have invited from you and from the US and elsewhere,

00:32:20   but it makes it less likely. And I think that it's not just a matter of

00:32:27   can governments step in. It's also a matter of what is a government's priority in terms

00:32:35   of regulating big tech. And has Apple defused the situation just enough that it's dropped

00:32:41   even lower on the list below Google and Facebook and social media, Twitter.

00:32:47   Has Apple done enough there? I don't know if they have.

00:32:50   >> Well, it's a shrewd move, right? Because it really severely undermines the arguments of people

00:32:59   like Sweeney and Hannah Maya Hanson. Because what are they arguing? That the rich should continue to

00:33:06   get richer? Because that's the argument now. >> Yes, yes. They're forced to make that argument.

00:33:11   And you can cast it differently. You can cast it as, but it's still unfair. But they can no longer

00:33:15   say, oh, but what about the little guy? We're the champions of the little guy. Apple's like,

00:33:19   we took care of the little guy. You're standing on your own now.

00:33:21   >> And I think I've made my point very clear many times in that my main issue with this has always

00:33:27   been Apple telling, not main, but one of my main issues is Apple telling big businesses how to run

00:33:33   their businesses. That's always been a big problem for me because it feels to me like there are two

00:33:40   big issues here. One is the one that Apple is now trying to fix. And then there is the other one

00:33:44   where you've got the Sweeney's and Hannah Maya Hanson's of the world. They have large companies.

00:33:47   And why should Apple as another large company be able to dictate rules to them? That's one thing.

00:33:52   But that's the rules thing. The money thing. Now the money thing affects people that don't have

00:33:57   so much money. And so it gets a lot trickier now, especially because what this is affecting is that

00:34:04   middle band because there is a top tier, which we know about that can get special deals. Like if

00:34:09   you're a big enough company. But it does definitely diffuse their argument a bit. Like they can still

00:34:16   make lots of very valid arguments about Apple's control and all that kind of stuff. But if you

00:34:21   look at the stuff that Apple started to put into place over the last few months, you can see them

00:34:26   starting to really like make some holes in areas that they think is important. So like one is this,

00:34:33   one is this, um, there was some leaked code, which suggests that like, um, start up on iOS 14,

00:34:41   uh, with a new phone, you will be recommended third party apps to try out. They've done that

00:34:46   thing now where you can change some default applications. Like these are little release

00:34:51   valves that Apple is choosing to let go, which starts to deflate the arguments of these larger

00:34:58   individuals. It's what we've been saying for a while now, while this story has been going on,

00:35:02   which is the great threat to Apple is that they, the threat is not, Oh no, um, we, we don't want

00:35:13   to change anything, right? Cause something has to change. The threat is can Apple change itself

00:35:18   enough in small ways to avoid an outside entity changing them? Because what you really don't want

00:35:26   is an outside entity telling you what to do. Laws being passed regulations from, from regulators

00:35:33   being applied to you, court cases being lost that lead an external force to dictate how you run your

00:35:40   business. Nobody wants that. Apple especially does not want that to happen. And I always was baffled

00:35:45   about why Apple seemed to be not doing anything because that's an enormous threat to them. So here

00:35:51   we are. And the answer is they were working on it. And their, their plan is to make very small

00:35:56   changes at the margins that they think will give them enough of a PR win to make it much harder to

00:36:03   argue that Apple needs to be regulated, which is interesting because I think that they are being

00:36:09   very conservative in what they do about this. They're not going to give away the store. It would

00:36:12   have been way easier actually for them to say first million is 15 and then your second million

00:36:17   and up is 30. And instead they're like, well, we're going to do this program. And once you go

00:36:21   past it, then you're not in it anymore. And like that, that's a conservative way of doing it that

00:36:26   they didn't necessarily have to do, but it shows that they, they wanted to, they still want the

00:36:31   money from everybody else, right at 30%. So it's it, but it is a, uh, an interesting strategy. I

00:36:40   think it does take the wind out of the sales of their, of, um, a lot of their critics and will it

00:36:45   be enough? Probably not, but there's probably more they can do around the edges, but it definitely

00:36:50   like, I understand, like, was it, I think it was Tim Sweeney that likened their struggle to the

00:36:57   civil rights movement and, uh, suffice it to say, he got a lot of blowback for that one. It's like,

00:37:02   what are you doing, man? That was a bad quote. It's an own goal, uh, PR move. And this is the

00:37:08   thing is though, like I said, I understand why they're upset. It's because Apple made a really

00:37:13   good chess move here and their position is weaker now. It doesn't mean that they can't win. Doesn't

00:37:18   mean that they don't have more to do, but I can see them getting furious on the internet. And,

00:37:25   uh, I get it because they're, they're angry with Apple because Apple has made their job of, of

00:37:32   fighting Apple harder by doing this. So anyway, it is, I just want to like, it's a funny story.

00:37:37   The, the, to sum it up, it is a PR move by Apple. Apple wants to avoid regulation. Apple wants to

00:37:45   clamp down on criticism of, uh, Apple taking too much money away from developers. In doing so,

00:37:52   Apple has given a windfall to small developers, to the smallest, but I would say probably the largest

00:38:00   number of Apple developers while not having to actually give away a whole lot of money because

00:38:04   these aren't the big fish. These are the small fish, the people we know, but it's the small fry

00:38:09   here. And so it's quite a move because it gives them a PR win. It makes them, uh, be able to tell

00:38:16   all these heartwarming stories about small developers. They don't give away a lot of their

00:38:19   money in doing so. Um, and we'll see, we'll see how it plays. So I think it's fascinating from

00:38:26   that perspective. Um, if you're somebody who fundamentally believes that there's nothing Apple

00:38:30   provides that's worth 30% cut, then I don't think this changes your opinion about it. But, um, I've

00:38:36   heard from a lot of the small developers who are pretty happy with this because, and they do say,

00:38:41   like, even a 15%, it's like, well, there is a lot that Apple does do for a small developer that

00:38:46   they're grateful for. And that's the other part of this is that, um, a big developer probably has no

00:38:51   problem, uh, hiring lawyers and accountants to do, to get them, you know, taxes in every, uh, country

00:38:58   and, and certified in every country and all those things. And the little developers can't do that

00:39:02   either. And they rely on Apple for that. And Apple is providing a very nice service for that now 15%

00:39:08   that they're taking. But, um, as I think it was John Syracuse on ATP last week pointed out,

00:39:13   what this doesn't change is Apple's absolute power, right? Which is what Apple wants. Apple wants to

00:39:19   be a benevolent, uh, ruler of the app store and grant more money to its smallest developers.

00:39:29   But make no mistake, Apple has not ceded any control over its world here by design.

00:39:39   >> So the M1 Macs have been around, uh, with the public for a week, with people like Jason

00:39:49   for a couple of weeks. And there was just a few things. I had some impressions that I wanted to

00:39:53   go through, but I wanted to just mention a couple of, uh, interesting things that have been, that

00:39:58   have come my way in the last week or so. And there was a really interesting, uh, very in-depth

00:40:03   interview on Ars Technica. Um, and it was with Jaws, Federighi and Srouji talking about the, uh,

00:40:10   M1 Mac and the transition to Apple Silicon for the Mac. Um, and there were a couple of things that I

00:40:16   really liked that I wanted to point out. One of them was from, uh, joining Srouji talking about

00:40:20   the M1 saying it's not like some iPhone chip that is on steroids. It's a whole different custom chip,

00:40:26   but we do use the foundations of many of these great IPs. And I think that really,

00:40:30   that I think that answers from what I, what I think many of us have been asking,

00:40:37   which is basically that the M1, yes, you can say that the architecture seems very similar

00:40:45   to what they've been doing with their iPhones and iPads, but just in the sense of like,

00:40:51   that's how Apple knows how to make chips now. Yeah. I view this as being something that can

00:40:57   be over-interpreted. Like how, how do we think this went? Okay. So they've got the

00:41:03   A12X, which then becomes the A12Z. I mean, literally it's from seven GPU cores to eight.

00:41:11   So you can see that in the MacBook air with the M1, right? Core counts the same between those

00:41:15   two chips, the M1 and the A12X/Z. So what he's saying here is we knew these chips would be in

00:41:25   Macs and we needed to put things in them that Macs would need. And we needed to be aware of Mac

00:41:32   usage, like how code executes in Mac OS so that it was efficient and actually worked with Mac OS

00:41:40   stuff. Like, of course, of course, I don't think that changes the fact that in all likelihood,

00:41:47   the M1 really is just an evolution of the A12X. And there's nothing wrong with that.

00:41:52   No. There's nothing wrong with that. But I feel like, I feel like it's an interesting statement

00:41:56   here because what he's really saying is, no, we didn't just take a chip we made for the iPad and

00:42:01   stick it in a Mac. Of course they did. And that's what, that is what I'm trying to get at too,

00:42:05   because I mean, I think there's been quite a lot of conversation where people were just saying like,

00:42:09   oh, it's just a beefed up iPhone chip in a derogatory sense where like, I don't think

00:42:17   that's the right way to look at it. It's like Apple knows how to make chips in a certain way

00:42:23   that do what they want. But I believe, I believe that the Mac chips are going to go in their own

00:42:32   direction now. And like, this is just the starting point because if we're going to say these are

00:42:37   always iPhone chips, we're going to start to bump into some real weird stuff when we start scaling

00:42:44   these chips up to get into the Mac Pro. Like, does it mean that then my iPhone could also somehow

00:42:50   support six Thunderbolt ports? No, I think, I think it's the same as saying that the A12X

00:42:58   is just a scaled iPhone chip a little bit, right? Which is, well, they added a bunch of cores and

00:43:07   over time, I think what's really happening is Apple is taking that architecture and it's

00:43:11   spreading it apart. And this is really not any different from what you just said. It is,

00:43:14   they're spreading it apart. Of course, a high-end chip for a Mac Pro is going to be different from

00:43:20   an iPhone chip, even if the fundamental architecture is the same. The cores are the same.

00:43:26   You're going to add, as you grow that thing, you're going to add features to it. So maybe the

00:43:31   next step up, which is the M1, has, you know, they've integrated RAM on the package and it's

00:43:39   got more cores. There's maybe a future one that the RAM is off the package and, or the RAM ceiling

00:43:47   is higher. Maybe there are more Thunderbolt lanes for it to take advantage of, as opposed to just

00:43:53   sort of the two lanes that are on the M1. Maybe there are other external things, but they like,

00:43:59   they build modularly up. So you could, you know, you could look at a Mac Pro Apple Silicon chip,

00:44:06   probably, and look at it and see, it's like the lizard brain in a human being, right? Like,

00:44:13   you can see the part that is the same in the human brain and the lizard brain, but it's the

00:44:17   whole lizard brain and the human brain's got way more stuff on it. It's kind of like that,

00:44:20   I think, where it's like, you'll be able to point at a Mac Pro Apple Silicon chip and say,

00:44:25   there's the A16, whatever, but around it is all this stuff that the A16 doesn't need because it's

00:44:35   just for the iPhone. And then, and I think the story of, of the Mac product line over time and

00:44:39   Apple's product line over time entirely is probably going to be, there's the chip, the A

00:44:44   whatever chip that's in the iPhone. There's a chip that's a step up from that that's in probably the

00:44:49   iPad Pro and the low-end Macs, whether they call it that or not, but it's probably a very similar

00:44:55   chip. And then there'll be like another step up above that and maybe another step up above that.

00:45:00   And that's how they'll do it. But I think it's interesting that like, I don't think this is a

00:45:04   matter of them saying, oh, well, we, now it's time to make a Mac chip. I think what they did was they

00:45:10   took the, the A14X and that was like, there, we're on our way to making a Mac chip, but there's more

00:45:18   work to be done. And anybody who used the developer kits over the summer, they were on an A14Z,

00:45:25   there were some features that they didn't have and the performance wasn't the same, but it ran.

00:45:29   And, and in the meantime, over two years, cause I'll also point out there was, so there's the A12Z

00:45:36   and there's the M1. There's never an A13X, right? I, I'm starting to suspect that the reason there

00:45:45   was never an A13X is because they took that two years to build the M1, to evolve that A12X/Z

00:45:52   into something that wasn't an A14X, but was the M1. But still, I mean, it's the same course. Like,

00:45:58   I think that that was what they were doing all along. Anyway, it's, it's great. They're,

00:46:03   they're, they overshot, right? That was the other line that made me laugh is in that Federighi

00:46:07   article was, you know, we knew they were going to be good, but we kind of overshot it a little bit,

00:46:12   like they're, the, the, how good the performance is on them. There's also an important part,

00:46:17   which is something that we'd all piece together, I think, but it's now good to hear Apple say,

00:46:22   which is effectively that Windows on M1 is now the ball is in Microsoft's court. So the full quote

00:46:29   from Craig Federighi, we have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their own version of

00:46:33   Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications, but that's the decision

00:46:38   Microsoft has to make to bring, to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. But

00:46:44   the Macs are certainly very capable of it. So there is an addendum that I will make, which is

00:46:49   you don't want to run it. Like if, if you are thinking like I want bootcamp, you do not want

00:46:57   the ARM version of Windows because the ARM version of Windows runs x86 applications very poorly.

00:47:04   So, you know, if you need it, if you think you want it because like it will get you out of a jam,

00:47:09   then yeah, maybe, but if you want it because you want to play games, you're not going to have a fun

00:47:14   time. No, don't, if you care about Windows compatibility, do not buy a Mac with Apple

00:47:20   Silicon for the foreseeable future until they do something that really changes the story. Just

00:47:24   don't. Apple makes a lot of very capable Intel Macs. You may have one already. I would stick with

00:47:30   that. Right? I would stick with that because although I have a lot of enthusiasm and optimism

00:47:39   for Windows somehow coming to Apple Silicon at some point because I think there's, I think

00:47:44   Microsoft is motivated and Apple is motivated to make it happen. Microsoft is very motivated to

00:47:48   put, to get like Windows on ARM a thing, but it's just, their develop, the development community is

00:47:54   not, for some reason, not embracing it in the same way that they have for Apple Silicon. So like as

00:48:01   Carl's saying in the chat room, there is not, I don't believe there is a Chrome version for Windows

00:48:09   on ARM, but there is one for Apple Silicon already. Right? And Windows on ARM has been around for a

00:48:15   while. Like Microsoft have released their own Surface products with ARM chips in them. The

00:48:20   Surface X, I think is like over a year old at this point, runs the ARM version of Windows,

00:48:25   but just very badly. So it's interesting. I don't know what Apple's doing to convince them.

00:48:31   - We pit Microsoft and Apple against each other even now and I don't think that's right. It's like

00:48:37   Microsoft looks at what Apple is doing and first off, I think Microsoft looks at what Apple is

00:48:41   doing and says, "Oh, well that'll help motivate people to build ARM PCs." Right? Like, "Oh yeah,

00:48:49   maybe Intel is not going to do it for a lot of people and they're going to move toward more ARM

00:48:55   PCs." So that gives some more wind in the sales of Windows on ARM. And then secondly, it's not

00:49:02   their core audience, but like a portion of the Windows audience does want to run Windows inside

00:49:07   of virtualization or on a partition on a Mac. And Microsoft, I think is into that and is okay with

00:49:15   that. And that's just another Microsoft customer and they like that. So I think the issue is that

00:49:22   Windows on ARM is just too early days right now and they don't even sell a copy. It's only on

00:49:28   systems that are ARM systems, right? So they don't even have a box you can buy or a license you can

00:49:35   get to download an image to put on a Mac if they could run it. They're not there yet, but I feel

00:49:42   like they probably will be. And given that Parallels and VMware are going to do virtualization

00:49:48   of ARM-based operating systems on Apple Silicon and that that's already underway, the logical next

00:49:54   step is probably that at some point here, Microsoft will make a version of Windows for ARM that will

00:50:00   run on those virtual machines inside Apple Silicon. I just, I think it's going to happen. It's just

00:50:06   going to take time. And the good news is Intel Macs still exist if you care. And PCs exist. I mean,

00:50:13   you don't just get a PC laptop and do that too. - Honestly, for a lot of options, this is probably

00:50:17   the best choice, right? Because as well, with the power of Apple Silicon chips, you might not need

00:50:21   to buy as expensive a Mac anymore. So the money you save just by a Windows laptop. Is Apple

00:50:27   Silicon ready.com? Terrible name to say out loud, but it could be a useful resource for you. If you

00:50:35   have a specific application that you need to know if one, it runs in Rosetta 2, because not every

00:50:41   app does or not every app does very well. Or if you want to make sure if something is Apple Silicon

00:50:46   optimized, you can go to this website. It has a large selection of applications and you may be

00:50:51   able to check if your one is there. Again, like, you know, I have very fond memories of

00:51:01   the original transition, right? I'm probably going to keep bringing this up a lot now because it's

00:51:05   just, it means something to me. It's like my first real foray into the Mac. I remember all these

00:51:10   types of websites for the original Rosetta, right? Like, how well does it run and that kind of stuff.

00:51:16   So it's good to have these kinds of resources around, I think. - Yeah, it's great. Yeah,

00:51:22   it's not the best name. It's all those words run together too. So you can say whatever ISAP

00:51:28   Le Silicon Rede? I don't know. I mean, there's many ways you can pronounce is Apple Silicon

00:51:34   Rede, but it's good to see that. And it's funny, you know, the short version, we're going to talk

00:51:40   about, you and I have both been using these a lot because we both bought our own too. So I got out

00:51:46   of reviewer mode and I spent the last week as user mode, and then you got yours and you've been using

00:51:51   it too. Like there are, the short version is, is Apple Silicon Rede for almost everything?

00:51:58   The answer is yes. Even if it's just running in Rosetta, it runs fine. There are some very

00:52:02   peculiar, like I said last week, edge cases where something doesn't quite work right. Some of that

00:52:08   stuff is big Sur related and some of it is Silicon related, but it's all headed down the path. The

00:52:14   fact that like day and date, there was an Apple Silicon beta Photoshop available that you could

00:52:19   run side by side with a regular Photoshop if you wanted to, to like use this. And when it doesn't

00:52:24   do something right, you use the other one. It's all happening fast. So it's a good site to look at.

00:52:30   But it's going to be like, there's a music plugin that doesn't work or there's something very

00:52:36   technical and specific. You should check first before you move house to an Apple Silicon Mac.

00:52:41   But for most people it's just going to work. So I have had my MacBook Pro for six days

00:52:50   and over that period of time, uh, I have made it my main machine. So it's very easy to lift off,

00:52:59   list off the specs as 16 gigabytes of Ram on a one terabyte hard drive. That's just,

00:53:04   it's funny that they don't have to check anymore. He like, he's been like, Oh, what chip did I get?

00:53:09   Like nice. It's easy now. Very easy to remember. Um, and yeah, so I have all day been using this

00:53:16   machine. I have a shoot every other machine that I have except for recording audio because the audio

00:53:22   recording problems are big. So related, it's a little bit shaky with some of the tools that I use.

00:53:27   So rather than, uh, putting that to risk, I'm just recording on my iMac pro. Um, Rosetta 2 is

00:53:36   unbelievable. It is unbelievable for him. Pretty much every instance, there is no way for me to

00:53:44   know if an app is not native. I don't know. Like it's, you know, I have to check by going to get

00:53:51   info and seeing if it tells me that's the way I know if an app is native or not. Yeah. For those

00:53:56   who don't know, if you select an application and choose command I to do get info, it actually says

00:54:01   what kind of application it is Intel, Apple, Silicon or universal. Um, and you can see it

00:54:06   right there, just like in the old days of the Intel transition 15 years ago and, and something

00:54:11   else that has come up that I realize now is exactly what I said 15 years ago is not only if

00:54:17   you buy an Apple Silicon Mac, will all of this stuff just basically work. It is the very rare

00:54:24   case where things will get faster over time because updates will come out that turn your

00:54:30   Rosetta apps into native apps and they'll just be faster then. So they'll start a little slower and

00:54:35   then they'll just keep getting faster, which is pretty unusual for computers. Right. And it's

00:54:40   pretty great. Yeah. So on that note, apps load just unbelievably quickly. Like if I open logic

00:54:52   on my iMac Pro and I have a, like many of our friends do, uh, a eight core Mac Pro from 27,

00:55:03   iMac Pro, sorry, from 2017 with 64 gigabytes of Ram. That's what I'm using right now.

00:55:10   When I open a logic on this takes a few seconds and it's always been like that. Logic has always

00:55:16   taken a beat to open, but on my Mac Pro one bounce and logic is open, which I have never seen that

00:55:24   before. I've just never seen that. I got to think that that is in part this new unified memory

00:55:28   architecture that it's just has the ability to load stuff into memory so much faster. Yeah. It's

00:55:33   just there waiting all the time. Right. Yeah. It's done some advanced machine learning. It's using a

00:55:37   camera to look at your face and it recognizes that your face looks like it's about to launch logic.

00:55:43   And so it just starts loading logic in the background. So when you click the button,

00:55:46   it's like, Oh, here it is. That's not actually what happens yet, but will probably happen in

00:55:50   the next few years. So I ran some bake-offs and, uh, logic pro exporting on the M one is slower

00:55:58   than my iMac Pro. So, you know, I, I did some like, like, right. I'm racing these machines

00:56:03   against each other and it is slower. I just, to be clear, you're, you're racing an iMac Pro

00:56:08   against a little laptop. I know I did this because, you know, there are lots of examples,

00:56:13   like all of our developer friends, you know, like it's the opposite for them that, you know,

00:56:17   like their apps are compiling and you did this too faster on the M one. No, I just think it's funny

00:56:22   that we're, we're, we're talking about an iMac Pro against a little laptop because there's a huge

00:56:27   imbalance there, but that's, this is where we are. Cause I did the same reason that I even thought I

00:56:32   could try this. Jason is I have never experienced in app performance in logic. Like I have

00:56:38   experienced on this machine. It is absolutely fluid and responsive in a way I have never

00:56:45   felt like zoom in and out panning around dragging, like everything is instant and is moving under my

00:56:55   mouse perfectly. Right. So something that I will very frequently have is I select all of a thing

00:57:02   and we'll drag it and I'll have to kind of wait for it to catch up. This is very normal for my

00:57:07   Mac Pro. And this is because I am dealing with sometimes very large files, like four, five gigabyte

00:57:13   logic projects with 1500 cuts in them. Right. Like I'm really pushing logic in a way that it does not

00:57:21   expect to be used. Right. Like Apple, Apple very frequently, uh, is optimizing for, you know, 15,000

00:57:29   uh, uh, instruments, but they're for three minutes. Right. Uh, I am doing things in a very opposite

00:57:36   way of that of like, here's a three hour audio file, but there's only three tracks, but there's

00:57:41   lots and lots and lots of cuts, lots of things to keep track of. And the performance that I have

00:57:46   experienced is just so different. It is so, so different. And honestly, the way I could describe

00:57:55   it is it feels like an iPad in that way where everything is responsive in a way that I have not

00:58:04   seen from a Mac in the past. So that is the biggest change for me. So I did a similar kind of, uh,

00:58:13   podcasting workflow test on my MacBook Air. And, uh, what I found is like you, there are certain

00:58:20   things that are faster on the iMac Pro. Um, I, I did a de-noising test of a long file using iZotope,

00:58:28   which is running in Rosetta, I will say. So when it goes to native Apple Silicon, it may be faster

00:58:33   on the, on the MacBook Air, but for now that was a faster, that's my, that's the task I bought the

00:58:38   iMac Pro for. And it is faster at that. Like it is, that is a fully multi-threaded and that the

00:58:45   Xeon processor cranks away on that and it does a great job. So that's faster, not like spectacularly

00:58:51   faster, but it is faster. But you're right. Everything else that I did felt, uh, fluid. And

00:58:58   even in iZotope, the de-noising app that I use for this, doing all of the, like opening the files,

00:59:05   saving the files, selecting all of that stuff was far more fluid and far less laggy. And, you know,

00:59:12   please wait, please wait, please wait while I load this progress bar slow, slow, slow. All that stuff

00:59:18   was way faster. So, um, it's, it's an interesting mixture, right? Of the stuff that is, um, that is

00:59:26   not as accelerated, I think because of Rosetta in a lot of cases and the stuff that is, um, is more

00:59:33   accelerated or maybe even some of it is stuff where the particular configuration of the iMac Pro

00:59:37   is built for that. And the M1 is trying its best and is doing a pretty good job, but is not,

00:59:45   is not up to the standard, believe it or not, of a Xeon processor, which of course it's not.

00:59:49   It's amazing how close it gets though. Yeah. Cause they're both eight core, but my iMac Pro

00:59:56   is eight cores, eight high-performance cores basically. Yes, they are basically,

01:00:01   but it's picking up with the memory bandwidth and the, and maybe even the SSD speed, it's picking up

01:00:06   benefits there that show in different places. So it is, I mean, yeah, it feels, the whole thing

01:00:15   just feels so, so fluid. Um, in general. Two of the most taxing things that I expect that I'm doing

01:00:20   with my machine are before and after the edit process. So one is I bring my files into Adobe

01:00:27   Audition and do the match loudness that they have in Adobe Audition, which I really love. So it

01:00:33   basically just levels my audio files to a particular loudness. That, that and forecast,

01:00:41   which is Marco Ahmet's tool for, um, taking a file and adding the chapters and also doing the final

01:00:47   compression from wave to MP3. Those two things. That kills the cores, right? That's the whole

01:00:54   goal of that app. But those both were Rosetta 2 and they, in my tests, were doing things at

01:01:00   exactly the same speed as my iMac Pro. And I cannot fathom how that is possible. That,

01:01:06   you know, I was a little bit like, ah, man, I wanted to see it beat, uh, Logic, but the things

01:01:11   that I really wanted to see how it would do is forecast an audition. Cause these are the things

01:01:15   that typically, uh, take a chunk of time. And I know that they're pushing machine to its maximum

01:01:21   and they were running as fast. And I couldn't believe that. Like ultimately

01:01:25   for me, like it feels like it doesn't matter exactly what's going on, whether this application

01:01:32   is M1 or it's Rosetta, everything works. It all works great in a way that is astounding to me.

01:01:39   Like I I'm really blown away by the overall performance of this machine. It's very,

01:01:45   very impressive. The one downside for me is that there are far fewer iOS apps available, uh, than

01:01:52   I expected there would be, especially in the categories that I'm looking for. Like there's

01:01:56   a lot of productivity tools that there aren't, uh, the iOS versions haven't been released for them,

01:02:02   which is a shame because the ones that I've been using, they work just as I expected. So

01:02:08   Widget Smith, I now have Widget Smith widgets on my Mac, which is great because I love those widgets.

01:02:14   Overcast is fantastic to have on my Mac because I use Overcast as part of my production process

01:02:20   for publishing shows. So I very frequently will take the edited audio and upload it to Overcast,

01:02:28   which you can do if you're a premium member or subscriber, you can upload files yourself.

01:02:33   And I will check that the chapters are good and that it all seems okay. I can now do this on my

01:02:39   Mac where I am. I'll usually have to take my headphones off, put my AirPods in, get my iPhone

01:02:45   and do it there. But I get to now have that as part of the production process on my Mac. And

01:02:52   that's awesome. And some games that I've tried, they work great. Like for me, it's not that

01:02:57   they're great or what they work, how I expected them to work, right? Which is a little bit worse

01:03:02   than they do on the iPad, but that's perfectly fine because it's now opened me up for tools

01:03:08   that weren't on my Mac before. And I really implore developers to give it a go, you know?

01:03:15   - Yeah. Give it a try. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I think if you're a developer who's

01:03:25   withholding your app from the Mac, look at it. Could it be better? Yes. But think about that

01:03:33   you're giving access to somebody who loves your app on iPad or iPhone. Easy access to it on the

01:03:38   Mac. You're helping them out. Your web equivalent, if you have one, it's not as good. It's almost

01:03:43   certainly not as good for a lot of reasons, even if it does all the same things, because it's in

01:03:47   a web browser window instead of in its own window. And yes, if you want to improve it, if there are

01:03:52   things that are wrong with it and it doesn't work right, well, of course, don't put it on the store.

01:03:55   But if you want to improve it, improve it. If you want to add catalyst stuff to it, great. That's

01:04:02   all great. But don't let, I would say, perfect be the enemy of good because my greatest disappointment

01:04:07   with iOS apps on Apple Silicon is that most of them aren't there more than anything else.

01:04:15   - Yep. And as well, understand that the people that are looking for this are your biggest fans

01:04:24   of your apps because they're not very visible. You really have to have decided you want that app

01:04:30   and then go and get it. They're not surfaced on the store. You have to search and then click a

01:04:36   couple of buttons to get it there. These are the people that are really looking for your application.

01:04:41   Give them the option. We'll see. But yeah, I will say, I am excited about the Mac in a way that I

01:04:52   haven't been for about five years because there's some stuff going on, Jason. And I'm like, come on,

01:04:59   then. Show me what you got. What's round two? Let's see it. Yeah, it's super cool.

01:05:04   - Things are happening. I migrated my old MacBook Air that I used to use a lot, don't use a lot

01:05:11   anymore. I think of you when I look at that MacBook Air, Myke, because it's the one where

01:05:18   we have those New York briefings with interviews and I have to record, upgrade, and all that.

01:05:23   I'm like, all right, I'm going to bring the Mac for this because this is probably too far for my

01:05:26   iPad to go. And I migrated it after many years of service, after seven years of service, to

01:05:35   the new MacBook Air. And it's been fun playing with it and it's great. And I'm happy to have a

01:05:45   modern Mac laptop in my collection of tools because every now and then I have to choose,

01:05:53   do I go out into my cold office that's not heated on the weekend and do a thing? And I think, oh,

01:06:00   I could grab the laptop and do that where it's warm. And that's kind of fun for things that I

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01:08:01   - Protecting you from bad actors. Watch out, Chuck Norris. You're not getting my stuff.

01:08:06   - Not you. So that isn't all that's going on with the Mac, though, right? It's not just

01:08:11   M1 Macs. We also have macOS Big Sur.

01:08:17   - Oh, did that come out?

01:08:18   - It sure did. macOS 10, no more. We now have macOS 11, and the first, well, I guess the only

01:08:26   macOS 11 probably will be Big Sur, and then we'll go to macOS 12, something else next year, which is

01:08:32   the expectation based on where the beta cycle's going.

01:08:35   - Yeah, there's an 11.1 beta, so that suggests that we're going to an

01:08:38   iOS-style approach where it'll just march every year now.

01:08:41   - And I didn't really have much experience with Big Sur until very recently. Like,

01:08:46   I tinkered around one of the early betas, but now I'm using it on my M1 MacBook Pro.

01:08:53   So I'm living with it now, and I know that you have spent, obviously, a lot more time

01:08:59   with Big Sur than I have. I'm very early on in my experiences, really. I'm kind of like,

01:09:04   along with everybody else, has just installed it, which is not the way that I do with iOS betas,

01:09:09   right? Like an iPad OS, I install those myself. But with the Mac, I'm a bit more hesitant

01:09:14   because I do so much heavy lifting work that could potentially be upended by a beta version of a Mac

01:09:22   operating system. But nevertheless, we have Mac OS 11 now, and I think the biggest,

01:09:28   the clearest, most in-your-face, and somewhat controversial thing about Big Sur is the design.

01:09:35   So there are lots of cues taken from iOS, right? And there are certainly some rough edges.

01:09:41   Where are you, kind of, how are you feeling now about the design of Big Sur? How has it settled

01:09:50   for you? What do you like? What do you not like? You know, I mostly like it. I know that there are

01:09:58   things that are not great, right? Like, it's not perfect. This is what happens with OS revisions

01:10:07   on the Mac, which is they do a big design change, and they go a little too far, and then they spend

01:10:11   the next couple of years cleaning it up. And that happens, but I like that they're pushing it

01:10:15   forward. I like that they're taking more space. Whether or not Apple does touch screen Macs in

01:10:21   the future, I think that it's also clear that Apple has decided that the decisions they made

01:10:26   about how tight everything was in terms of layout were from an era where screens were much smaller,

01:10:32   and the average Mac screen is much larger now, just because, you know, the laptops used to be

01:10:38   smaller. The average Mac is still a laptop, but the average Mac now is a 13-inch laptop, maybe a

01:10:43   13-point something, right? And the average Mac screen in general is probably, like, I don't know,

01:10:49   14 or 15 inches, because, again, mostly laptops, but also a bunch of giant iMacs. Screens get

01:10:57   bigger, you get a little more room, and they decided to take them, and so there's more padding

01:11:01   everywhere. And could that be touch-friendly? I suppose, but it's also just, design-wise, I think

01:11:08   they're saying, "Let's take the space. We don't need to cram everything in." And some people were

01:11:12   complaining about that and don't like that, and running this on an 11-inch MacBook Air is going

01:11:16   to be painful, but I kind of like what they've done. The contrast seems nice to have the kind

01:11:25   of light windows, or very dark windows if you're in dark mode, and, you know, I think it looks

01:11:31   pretty good, but there are things about it that are messy and that need to be cleaned up, and

01:11:35   that's going to happen. But after having spent the whole summer with it, I'm kind of used to it now,

01:11:40   and I like it. Yeah, I really like it too, in general. So there are some parts of it that are...

01:11:46   there are some parts that I feel seem wrong, and there are some parts that I can tell I don't like

01:11:54   because they're different, but doesn't necessarily mean they should change. So, like, alert boxes

01:11:59   seem very different, right? Like, they look very different, you know, they are now these kind of

01:12:05   things that appear in the middle of the screen, and they are more, I guess, more square than

01:12:11   rectangular, I guess, in most instances, but the point is that they are now like a vertical thing,

01:12:16   not a horizontal thing, and all the text is centered. It's like, you know, look like an

01:12:22   alert box to me, which is why I think I find it so weird as opposed to not liking the design. It's

01:12:28   just I'm very used to these things being a certain way, and now they're not that way. And I reckon I

01:12:35   will get used to it, but there definitely are some points of it which are very opinionated,

01:12:41   and when you make very opinionated choices, you will upset people. Yeah. But I'm with you that

01:12:49   overall, I am a big fan of the design of Big Sur because it's just, you know, it's fun. And also,

01:13:00   as well, like for me, it is more familiar to me for iOS, and so therefore I think everything on

01:13:10   Big Sur looks more modern, and when I go back to Catalina, it's like, "Ooh, you look old."

01:13:18   Have you had that experience? When you go back to a Catalina Mac, how do you feel about that now?

01:13:22   Well, it's, you know, it's all very nostalgic. But yeah, I agree. I think you got to move forward.

01:13:31   I think you got to move forward. You got to try to modernize the look and feel, and people will

01:13:37   complain because it's a change, and also because you didn't get it right the first time. It's a

01:13:41   little bit off, and then you spend the next couple of years as a designer fixing it, and I think that

01:13:46   will be what happens here. Even over the summer, I think that the design got a little more consistent.

01:13:51   And yeah, so I think it's okay. The way I put it in my review is that I feel like Catalina was the

01:14:01   bad cop and that this is the good cop, and like they made Catalina break all the software and

01:14:07   all of those things, and then this one gets to move on and say, "Ah, but we got new things and

01:14:13   Apple Silicon, and it's a big, brave new future." And it's kind of a funny way to end up doing your

01:14:23   OS rollout, but I do really think that Apple, at least to a certain degree, just decided that they

01:14:28   didn't want the rollout of Apple Silicon to be tied up with Big Sur, to be tied up with

01:14:32   incompatibility so that the narrative became, "Apple Silicon broke my app," and so they just

01:14:36   did it all last year. Yeah, yeah, iPhone 7 lost the headphone jack, so the iPhone 10 could be amazing.

01:14:43   And people wouldn't get upset about it. Very similar type of thing. Yeah, like Catalina took

01:14:48   a bullet for Big Sur, right? Like everything was horrible, but it's so everybody's first run of

01:14:54   Big Sur wasn't that alert box nightmare. Unless you're doing Migration Assistant

01:15:02   from something older to Big Sur, you still get it. How do you feel about the app icons? We spent

01:15:09   a lot of time looking at these over the summer. How are you feeling about them now? Does it kind

01:15:15   of feel right? No, I mean, like we said, a lot of them are still just literally an image inside a

01:15:25   round erect, which is dumb, and they need to rethink them, but that's where we are. And all

01:15:30   the apps that I use have not updated their icons yet, so the dock is this kind of like combination

01:15:36   of various weird shapes of icons, and I know Apple wants everything to be a round erect,

01:15:40   and it'll all get there, but you know, it's fine. It's weirder on Catalina as apps are starting to

01:15:46   update their icons than it is on Big Sur, because I have more Catalina icons in my dock, but now have

01:15:52   these like clearly Big Sur-ified icons, and that looks very strange. So a couple of new additions

01:16:00   are Control Center, Notification Center. How useful do you find these additions, or like these

01:16:07   changes, I should say, to the way, especially for Notification Center is more of a change than an

01:16:12   addition, but how are you feeling about these on Big Sur? So Control Center got a lot better over

01:16:16   the summer. There's more work to do there. I like it as a direction because it sort of unifies somebody

01:16:21   who runs like Bartender in order to slim down how many items I see in my menu bar. I like the idea

01:16:28   that Apple is basically going to build Control Center to be this place that a whole bunch of

01:16:33   drop-down controls can go. They need to add more of their controls to it. When the summer started,

01:16:40   it was sort of not a modular system, but actually now you can go to the System Preferences app and

01:16:45   you can add items or remove some items from the Control Center, and they just need to kind of like

01:16:50   keep going down that path because I like that. I think also the next logical step is to let

01:16:56   third parties have access to Control Center to drop their items in there. That might take a year or two,

01:17:02   but just as a way to kind of like simplify the menu bar, something that doesn't need to display in the

01:17:08   menu bar but needs to be sort of quickly accessible, living in Control Center is a nice way to approach

01:17:15   it. And you can add things, you can drag things out of Control Center into the menu bar, and

01:17:21   you know, it's gotten a lot better over the course of the beta version of it. So I don't mind it.

01:17:29   I think it's also additive. It's not saying, "No, you can never put your Wi-Fi status in your menu

01:17:36   bar if you care about that." Of course you can. You can do that if you want. You can promote

01:17:41   anything you can think of more or less into the menu bar, or you can take it out and put it in

01:17:47   Control Center. I like that. I think that's a good way to approach it. Notification Center's a bit of

01:17:52   a mess for me. Just notifications in general. They took the buttons away and now you have to

01:17:59   hover and click to get to the actions to accept. It's all a bit... Yeah, I play a game where I move

01:18:05   my mouse over and I try to click the X and then the X goes away, and then I have to move it back

01:18:10   and wait and the X comes back and I have to move it but not too far and then click the X to make

01:18:13   the notification go away. It's not good. Honestly, I've never really used the Notification Center

01:18:20   sidebar. It's sort of out of sight and out of mind. Now I go there and I'm like, "Oh boy,

01:18:24   I got a lot of notifications to clear now." You only get to see three, which is really strange

01:18:31   to me. You have to click to see more. I don't really like what they did to the notification

01:18:35   stuff. I think that they've made that... There kind of isn't really any improvement there at all,

01:18:41   and I think they've made everything a little bit worse in my opinion. That has been the one

01:18:46   clear thing to me where I can see, "No, you made this harder and all of the ways in which

01:18:53   notifications are handled seem a little bit wonkier in Big Sur. That's something that I'm not

01:18:59   that hot on." What other things jump out to you? Really is the design. The design, the sounds. We

01:19:05   spent time talking about this stuff in the past. They're the big, big things. Are there any other

01:19:10   parts of Big Sur that you're finding particularly interesting? Well, Messages... It's easy to take

01:19:17   Messages for granted, but Messages on the Mac was bad and old and didn't have a lot of the features

01:19:23   that were on iOS. And because they took it and put it in Catalyst, it's good. It's not great.

01:19:30   It's not great. I could criticize some of the behavior. There's some quirky behavior in there.

01:19:37   Is it because it's Catalyst? Maybe. But if you compare it to the previous version of Messages,

01:19:45   it's so much better on so many different dimensions because of the features. And also

01:19:51   because, quite frankly, it works better. I have so many problems with old Messages in terms of

01:19:58   typing in one tab and suddenly I'm in a different tab typing to a different person. That happened

01:20:03   to me all the time. It's so frustrating. Either you send the message and they're like, "Whoops,

01:20:07   wrong window!" But I started in that window. It just decided to move me to a different window.

01:20:12   All that stuff seems to be gone now because they threw that app out. That's iChat AV. It's gone.

01:20:17   It's gone. And instead we have Messages. So I think that's a winner. And Safari... But everybody

01:20:27   gets Safari. If you're on Mojave or Catalina, you get this version of Safari. But they did a bunch

01:20:31   of stuff to Safari and added some new features in. And translation is in there. I'm not sure whether

01:20:37   it's enabled by the new version of Safari or not, but I've been really loving the new 1Password

01:20:41   plugin that just pops up in the form field. So you can very quickly unlock with Touch ID if you're on

01:20:49   a Touch ID system and you don't even have to bring up the 1Password popup. It just sort of does it in

01:20:55   line. I'm not sure whether that's enabled by the new Safari or not, but for me it ends up sort of

01:20:59   coming as a whole. Those things make my Safari browsing experience a lot better.

01:21:04   Yeah, I like the new Safari stuff too. I like that YouTube can be watched in 4K now in Safari.

01:21:12   This is part of Big Sur. I have a nice monitor, right? Let me look at it in high quality.

01:21:19   I know. How do you feel about macOS in general now? Are you positive for its future?

01:21:27   Maybe better to say, does Big Sur itself make you feel any different about the Mac and macOS?

01:21:32   They've been heading in this direction. This is all part of the same thing, which is Apple has gone

01:21:39   from viewing macOS as a legacy platform, which doesn't necessarily mean they're going to kill it,

01:21:45   but it means that it is never going to be more than it is because the people who use it are using

01:21:50   it because it provides continuity to the past. And so I believe that there was an era at Apple

01:21:56   where they felt like, "We're just going to not touch the Mac. We're going to use Intel processors.

01:22:00   We're going to just kind of keep it going." The most we do to the Mac is build our ties to the

01:22:05   other parts of our operating systems and other products that we use, but otherwise we're just

01:22:09   going to kind of let it float and be what it's always been. It's going to feel a little old,

01:22:14   but to the people who are using it, that's fine because it's familiar.

01:22:18   We had those debates about what's going on with the Mac and does Apple care? Is Apple just going

01:22:24   to keep it on life support and consider it the legacy platform or are they going to try to make it

01:22:27   modern? And it is definitely a "be careful what you ask for" moment, right? Because if the Mac's

01:22:37   not a legacy platform, but instead is a super important part of Apple's whole strategy and has

01:22:43   the ability to run iOS apps as well as Mac apps and is going to use Apple's processors and is going

01:22:49   to be a big part of Apple's story going forward, it also can't be treated like a legacy platform

01:22:57   and left untouched and feeling like it was designed 15 years ago. And so I understand

01:23:03   if you're a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user, as I am, that you look at some of these changes and you say,

01:23:08   "Oh, just leave it the way it was." First off, keep running that Mac, running Mojave, you'll be

01:23:16   okay for a while. But this is Apple caring about the Mac and you may not like it. I mean, this is,

01:23:23   again, if you've been on the Mac a long time, you'll know the most annoying time, times in Mac

01:23:32   history are when Apple was really trying to iterate and innovate and do new stuff and let's

01:23:37   try this out and let's try that out. And what if this is translucent and what if this was shiny and

01:23:42   what if this had a 3D effect on it? And you roll your eyes at a bunch of that stuff. But that was

01:23:46   also when Apple was investing thought into it and it did move the platform forward. And a lot of the

01:23:52   bad ideas just kind of fell out after a while. That's where we are now is Apple's actually trying

01:23:58   stuff on macOS and they're not all going to be great. Some of them are going to be annoying and

01:24:02   some of them are going to be annoying for good reasons. And some of them are going to be annoying

01:24:05   because we're used to the way it always was. And we'll have to figure out whether the new way is

01:24:11   better or worse or just different. But I'm excited about what Big Sur represents because Big Sur

01:24:19   represents a new era of Apple caring about the Mac and having the Mac be a huge part of its technical

01:24:26   strategy instead of the Mac being kind of floated away on a slab of ice. Live as long as you can,

01:24:37   but away from the rest of us. And that was sort of where it was, I feel like, a few years ago.

01:24:43   It may be weird and different and scary and annoying, but the Mac is relevant and important

01:24:52   to Apple's whole strategy now. And that's great for the Mac, I think, in the end.

01:24:57   MATT: Yeah, that's a beautiful way of putting it. And it is that kind of thing of, you can't ask for

01:25:07   the Mac to move forward and also for it to stay the same. It's going to move, and it's moving.

01:25:15   JASON: Yeah, that's it. And the fact is, people maybe forget a little bit about how

01:25:21   annoying it was in those eras where the Mac was really changing and moving. And it was

01:25:24   annoying and people were annoyed by it. But if you've got to choose between—and I do believe

01:25:31   this is not a false choice, I think this is a real choice. You can't say, "Oh, well, the Mac is going

01:25:35   to be central to Apple and it's going to be a part of their core and they're going to invest a lot of

01:25:39   time in it, but it's not going to change." That's not how it works. So I would rather it change and

01:25:45   adapt and continue to be a part of Apple's big structure. I actually, you know, you and I have

01:25:52   talked about iOS laptops for a while. We talked about, like, what if there was an iOS laptop.

01:25:58   The whole premise behind the talk about an iOS laptop or an iOS desktop was, "Well, it can't be

01:26:07   the Mac. If we wanted to run iOS apps and have touch and have Apple's processors and all of those

01:26:12   things, it can't be the Mac. So we're going to have to have Apple, you know, have the Mac over there

01:26:18   and then build these things over here." That's not going to happen.

01:26:21   - It felt like they wouldn't do anything, right? - Yeah, right.

01:26:25   - It's like, "Well, this is the only way we're going to get this stuff because Apple aren't

01:26:27   doing it." - Right. And now, I think that's just not the way it is now. Now, the traditional

01:26:34   computer shapes are Macs, but they're also part of Apple's overall strategy. And I think in the long

01:26:39   run, you're going to have two choices, right? I mean, as of today, you have two choices. You have

01:26:46   an iPad Pro or Air in a keyboard case made by Apple with cursor support that you can use that's

01:26:53   completely on iPad OS. Or you get a MacBook Air also running on an Apple design processor and runs

01:27:00   some iOS software as well as Mac software. And if that story changes over time, then you're really

01:27:06   sort of just making some interesting decisions about the hardware. I think that that's where

01:27:10   Apple wants the Mac to be, is part of its whole product line and that there's a really nice

01:27:15   continuum from iPhone all the way up to Mac Pro. And if they hadn't done this, that's not what it

01:27:21   would be. If they hadn't done this, they would be, "The Mac is available. It remains a product

01:27:25   in our lineup." And then over here, we start at the iPhone and go up to a desktop iPad thing.

01:27:31   But they made the choice not to do that, I think. - This episode is also brought to you by Express

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01:29:35   and relay FM. It is time Jason Snow for some #askupgrade questions and this week we're going

01:29:43   to start off with a question from Kevin. Kevin says do you think that any of the just introduced

01:29:48   M1 Macs will be refreshed during their two-year rollout plan? So Apple is saying that in two years

01:29:56   they will have transitioned the entire product line over. Do you think that we might see any

01:30:00   changes to the just released products during that period of time? I do. Seems possible right? I

01:30:07   reckon I within the next 12 months there'll be an update to these some of these products at least.

01:30:12   In fact I'm gonna guess and we don't know we this the beauty of it we don't know.

01:30:17   I'm gonna guess that a year from now these Macs will all be updated for the M2.

01:30:26   Right? The only one that I would pause on is the Mac Mini.

01:30:33   Maybe. We'll see what they do with the Mac Mini right? It's possible that they're gonna do a

01:30:38   they're gonna do a high-end Mac Mini configuration. Yeah. But they could even do that potentially and

01:30:43   say now you can choose your Mac Mini there's the M1 and the M1X and all of that but I don't know

01:30:48   we're gonna see I keep feeling like since these are Apple's processors that they will just put all

01:30:53   of these products on a annual or 18-month cycle and just but in the next two years I would say

01:30:58   for sure that in the next two years probably within the next 18 months if not the next 12 months

01:31:03   they're all going to get whatever the next generation chip is just like the iPhone does.

01:31:07   So you know it might be more like the iPad where it's every 18 months that's fine but I think the

01:31:13   days where Apple is intransigent easy to say when the days when Apple is intransigent with their

01:31:21   Mac updates because it's like well you know we're not ready Intel's not ready whatever I feel like

01:31:26   they're gonna have extra motivation with these new chips like they're not gonna want to keep selling

01:31:30   the old chips when they got the new chips since they made them. So definitely within the next two

01:31:35   years. I think things are gonna be a little more loosey-goosey than they were before in a good way right like

01:31:40   we might update it in a year it might be in six months might be in 18 months but we'll do it when

01:31:44   we're good rather than you know and it's our decision rather than we have to do it now because

01:31:49   we waited for so long like I don't know if we're gonna get yearly product updates I would say as

01:31:56   you said like probably will end up closer to six 18 months like a year and a half. Here's my

01:32:03   counter-argument would be if the MacBook Air is your more most popular computer you could argue

01:32:08   that you should just put it on an annual cycle and every fall you announce the iPhone and then

01:32:12   in the next month you announce the MacBook Air with the you know M iPhone chip minus 13 processor.

01:32:22   I don't know we'll see reasons that you do yearly product updates than just we have the new chip

01:32:29   right and I'm not sure that the MacBook Air user is desperate and hungry for the next generation

01:32:35   processor at this point. I think you're more likely if you're Apple to want to upgrade iPads

01:32:43   more frequently because they get additional features hardware features to them and even

01:32:48   the Macs might not get I don't know even the iPad Pro is on an 18-month cycle right so even like

01:32:55   that so I agree with you I'm going to put a wrinkle in there too which is but what if these models are

01:33:01   all the transitional models definitely the next and the next wave has hardware changes yes then

01:33:08   you're even more likely to see it I would say sooner because Apple's going to want to sweep

01:33:12   away maybe next fall sweep away the MacBook Air with their new fangled MacBook Air although the

01:33:18   MacBook Air may actually be a bad example because they did redesign it for retina and I feel like

01:33:22   maybe that is the retina the MacBook Air now but we'll see we'll see but I think it's also possible

01:33:28   that we're going to get a faster pace here in the first two years yeah and then it'll slow down a

01:33:32   little bit because they will introduce some new hardware designs and then they'll iterate for a

01:33:37   while yeah this first two-year period there's there's a the future doesn't apply right in that

01:33:43   sense like in the future I imagine it will be probably 18 months to two years for for significant

01:33:48   Mac updates but within the first two years I mean we could have a new 14-inch MacBook Air in six

01:33:56   months that replaces the 13-inch that I just bought and I'm fully expecting that to happen

01:34:02   right like something like that to happen because these first two years no MacBook Air MacBook Pro

01:34:07   that's what I meant to say the MacBook Pro not the MacBook Air but like a 14-inch MacBook Pro

01:34:11   I imagine would come along as soon as they update the 16-inch I don't think it's going to sweep away

01:34:18   your 13-inch because I think they're going to have a 13 or 14 or 16 but we'll see it's exciting though

01:34:24   it will probably be a new yeah well so what I'm saying Kevin is you know don't wait yeah just go

01:34:31   just go buy buy an M1 Mac now I don't think he's actually asking that but I do think that we'll see

01:34:35   another refresh in the next two years I think that setting the over under at two years makes

01:34:39   this an easy yes if it was a year or 18 months it would be a little bit trickier but at two years

01:34:44   I think absolutely Brian asks do you think MagSafe could ever come to the iPad? This is the only way

01:34:53   I could imagine wireless charging coming to the iPad is MagSafe yeah I mean there's already an

01:35:00   array of magnets on the back of the iPad so building an iPad where the magnets use MagSafe

01:35:05   and also are there for mounting on cases and stuff isn't unreasonable and there with the MagSafe Puck

01:35:12   you have unlike a charging pad right you can attach that thing and then lean it against

01:35:16   like I lean my iPad against my nightstand when it's charging upside down so that the charging

01:35:22   plug is at the top right it would not be a big difference to stick the magnet on the back and

01:35:27   then lean it there and you can sort of lay it in any configuration and it would charge it's a big

01:35:31   battery though right like I think there's that's the challenge is do you really want to slowly

01:35:36   charge it with that versus a really fast charge with a USB-C connector that is the problem and so

01:35:46   you know as I could imagine maybe it coming with there could be more power through MagSafe in the

01:35:53   future as the technology improves but I don't know if we're going to see it yet but this is the only

01:35:58   so this is the only way I imagine non-USB-C charging on an iPad I wouldn't put money on it I

01:36:05   think I think it's it's not a solution for the iPad it doesn't need to exist I think the iPad is

01:36:11   fine I also think let's just say they'd be better off doing MagSafe on the iPad and the Mac that's

01:36:19   more like old MagSafe. Correct yes yes. Derek asks I'm currently using a 2018 iPad Pro for Magic

01:36:27   Keyboard someone who mainly uses the iPad as a laptop replacement is the M1 MacBook Air now a

01:36:34   better choice? Well I've been thinking about this question which I looked ahead in our show notes

01:36:40   as I do as a professional podcasters I've been thinking about the whole episode. Oh really?

01:36:45   Because this this is really the question right this is really the question I've gotten this from

01:36:50   a bunch of people which is like well now that the Apple Silicon Macs are out you don't need to use

01:36:53   an iPad anymore right which again is not what Derek's saying but it's a fundamental

01:36:57   misunderstanding of why people use the iPad but I think it's worth talking about here because this

01:37:01   is really the issue Apple now makes this amazing touch tablet that you can stick in a keyboard case

01:37:07   with a trackpad on it or do whatever you want with it and it is running iPad OS and now there's the

01:37:13   M1 MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro and they are light and they're running Apple Silicon and they're

01:37:18   really fast so is the Air a better choice than the iPad and the answer is no they're the same

01:37:26   or at least they're they're different enough that you just need to choose what you prefer

01:37:32   and this is the thing the iPad you use the iPad because you like the software on it

01:37:39   because you like the uh the ergonomics of it because whether it's holding it in your hands

01:37:46   or being able to pull it out of the case and walk away or using it in the case having cellular

01:37:51   networking like there are a whole bunch of things ergonomically about it and kind of side features

01:37:56   about it that are great and the software is great and works for you if the Mac is a better fit and

01:38:03   having something that's always a laptop and runs oh you know a few iOS apps but mostly Mac apps

01:38:09   then the Mac is a better fit for you right now I just don't see I don't see any crossover here

01:38:15   like if you could literally run if if the Mac had a screen you could fold back or take off and was

01:38:22   touch and also had the ability to run every iOS app it would be a much more interesting debate

01:38:30   about exactly what you want from it but right now I think it's really clear and hasn't changed do you

01:38:36   want to use an iPad or do you want to use a Mac and I think a Mac looks better now than it has

01:38:42   for a while but like I wrote a piece last week about the Mac my Mac world column last week I

01:38:50   wrote I wrote it on my iPad because I wanted that was the right choice for that in terms of the

01:38:57   ergonomics in terms of the apps I was using it was the right choice for that moment so I think that

01:39:02   there to me this is not a question that has a clear answer now it's we're still back in do you

01:39:11   prefer using the iPad or not the iPad is not a a again I'm not saying Derek is saying this but I do

01:39:16   hear this a lot it's like well surely eventually Apple will do enough to the Mac that you won't

01:39:20   have to resort to the iPad and as people like Federico have talked about Federico Viticci for

01:39:24   a long time iPad users aren't or at least a lot of them aren't resorting to the iPad aren't aren't

01:39:31   coming down to the iPad or having to use the iPad because it's the only thing which offers

01:39:36   they like using the iPad and the iPad Pro with the the magic keyboard is even better and offers

01:39:43   even more options now it's not a Mac Mac users who rely on Mac software are not going to want to use

01:39:48   an iPad and iPad users who rely on iPad software are probably not going to want to use a MacBook

01:39:54   Air because they're different they're just very different so that's my answer is you should get

01:39:59   the one that you that you like and if you've been using the iPad because you really like the

01:40:07   ergonomics of it but you've been struggling with the software and have to go back to your Mac a lot

01:40:11   and really would rather have a Mac yeah you should get a MacBook Air with an M1 because you're going

01:40:16   to be happier but you're also going to lose your tablet and it's just going to be a laptop and have

01:40:21   to stay permanently as a laptop that's just how it is there is a world in which these devices would

01:40:26   have been closer but that hasn't happened you know like if just every iOS app ran and there was just

01:40:34   nothing developers could do about it the stores were the same it would be closer but it it isn't

01:40:40   it isn't that close um but as you say they're like I think even if even if you put the same operating

01:40:52   system on these two different things it's still not one or the other right it's like

01:40:58   an iMac is different to a MacBook Pro they both run the same operating system they both can do

01:41:06   the same things but they're different because one is a laptop and if you put Mac OS on the iPad Pro

01:41:14   it'll be different because the iPad Pro can be used without a keyboard on it all it's thinner

01:41:19   it's lighter uh has face ID it has Apple pencil right like if you kept those hardware features

01:41:27   different they're like they're still different products with different ergonomics and different

01:41:31   use cases different battery life different ports they're different um just because one is closer

01:41:39   than the other it doesn't necessarily mean that all the choice is removed

01:41:43   and finally Kevin asks given the speed of even the M1 MacBook Air do you think that the iMac Pro goes

01:41:53   away and the top of the line iMac M whatever takes its place is Kevin double dipping or do we have two

01:42:01   Kevins Kevin is asking two questions Kevin has the same Kevin it's the same Kevin oh man Kevin

01:42:07   jackpot you started and ended ask upgrade congratulations uh Kevin has a lot of M1

01:42:13   questions is the answer I we talked about this when I reviewed the iMacs last time

01:42:18   which is it's feeling to me very much like Apple is happy to build high-end iMacs yep and therefore

01:42:26   you don't really necessarily need an iMac Pro anymore also don't forget the iMac Pro was the

01:42:32   replacement for the Mac Pro and then they changed direction and brought back the Mac Pro so the iMac

01:42:37   Pro is kind of not Apple strategy I okay so is there ever going to be another iMac Pro I'm not

01:42:48   sure no there isn't thank you Myke people love it when we whisper I think it's one and done here

01:42:55   we wondered if it would be I think here's the thing I think it's the same question as is there

01:42:59   a higher-end Mac Mini in space gray I don't know the answer like I really don't there's room for

01:43:06   one but will they bother to make one will they make a more feel or will they just replace this

01:43:11   two port two USB-C port Mac Mini that we have now next time it'll have four and it'll just be the

01:43:17   Mac Mini then I think there's a possibility for marketing and I know this is what we talked about

01:43:23   when we talked about the iMac when it came out you could market the high-end iMac as an iMac Pro and

01:43:28   give it a different treatment and put space gray on it or whatever if you wanted to or you could

01:43:33   just make it a high-end iMac high-end iMac is simpler if they see that there's some some

01:43:38   advantage to calling one of the models iMac Pro I think they could I probably wouldn't bet on it I

01:43:46   probably would guess that they're just going to make the iMac and the iMac is going to be so

01:43:51   awesome that they'll just be like it's it's awesome enough as it is and then if you need

01:43:57   expandability that's what that's what Pro is for that that's my gut feeling but I think there's a

01:44:02   possibility that they will take the big high-end souped up iMac and call it iMac Pro and maybe make

01:44:09   it look a little bit different but that's extra work that may not be necessary because the iMac

01:44:13   is capable of doing that heavy lifting and they do have a Mac Pro up above it

01:44:19   I just you know I think it was obvious to me to us we've spoken about it for a while of like

01:44:24   the iMac Pro is like a

01:44:28   it's like a vestige of a bygone era in the sense of like it was supposed to be a thing

01:44:37   and then they had to change course like the iMac Pro was supposed to be Apple's top of the line

01:44:45   machine yes that was its whole reason for being right and by the time it came out it had already

01:44:51   been undercut right it already changed their mind and then they've made the regular iMac more

01:44:57   powerful in some ways and let's be clear the next iMac knowing what we know now about the M1 the

01:45:03   next iMac will blow away the iMac Pro in terms of absolutely certainly yeah the low-end iMac

01:45:10   right the the 21-inch iMac or whatever will wipe the floor with the iMac Pro

01:45:16   the only thing is if they decide that there's a marketing value in calling a system pro

01:45:22   that's essentially just a high-end system yeah I doubt they will do it because that's

01:45:28   added complexity they don't need and takes away the focus from their other Pro Mac yeah which is

01:45:34   the actual Mac Pro there are two questions here I think which is one will Apple ever call a machine

01:45:40   iMac Pro again or two will Apple make a machine that's clearly the like the evolution of the iMac

01:45:47   Pro I think question two is no way question one maybe like you know like the iMac Pro has very

01:45:55   different internals to make it as powerful as it is I don't think that's going to happen and that's

01:45:59   not that doesn't need to happen anymore they may call an iMac an iMac Pro but the idea of what the

01:46:07   iMac Pro is there's a reason they released this machine in 2017 and then didn't change it oh I

01:46:14   will say unless they completely redesign the iMac which maybe they will and I think they should they

01:46:22   better if they don't I will put money down that the cooling system in it will look like the iMac

01:46:30   Pro right although they the m1 will they need to cool it but it'll be like m1z or something like

01:46:36   that I feel like I feel like this is exactly it right it's so much that cooling system might be

01:46:40   overkill you might not need cooling for the whole thing right now I'm take it back I'm not putting

01:46:44   my money down I'm not putting my money's come back none the money's money's off the table I never

01:46:48   took my finger off the money and so I'm going to take the money back all of these iMacs have these

01:46:53   huge cooling systems because of the Intel processors that are in them so either they're

01:46:57   going to be empty shells or they really are going to redesign these and I think that's why they're

01:47:01   really going to redesign the iMac it's like not only has it been a design that's been out there

01:47:04   forever but like so much of it doesn't need to be there if you only need a small cooling system

01:47:10   because you've got cool Apple chips imagine how thin slice cheese with that iMac

01:47:18   thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of upgrade I would like to once again

01:47:23   thank our fine sponsors of this week's episode ExpressVPN mail route and same box and a huge

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01:47:33   week go to get upgrade plus.com thank you for your support if you do that you can find Jason online

01:47:38   at sixcolors.com and the incomparable.com and Jason hosts many podcasts here at relay FM if

01:47:45   you have yet to check out 20 Macs for 2020 the podcast version here at relay FM please do that

01:47:50   it is sublime I love it uh Jason is also at JSNL I'm at iMyke I-M-Y-K-E I uh host many shows here

01:47:59   at relay FM and I also live stream at mike.live where currently I have been building and playing

01:48:04   around lots of mechanical keyboard stuff it's actually if that's your thing go check it out

01:48:09   uh we'll be back next time until then say goodbye Jason Snow thanks for all the questions Kevin

01:48:17   thank you.

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