00:00:08 ◼ ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 306. Today's show is brought to you by Pingdom, DoorDash, and KiwiCo.
00:00:21 ◼ ► I'm fine and dandy, my friend, and I have a #snowtalk question for you from Patrick. And Patrick wants to know, "Jason, do you follow any English
00:00:38 ◼ ► Oh, well, I'm just, I'm pointing out that just yesterday I got to watch Arsenal score in the 16th minute, immediately give up a goal in the 19th minute to Spurs,
00:00:52 ◼ ► and then give it all away in the 81st minute, and lose the North London derby to Spurs.
00:00:58 ◼ ► So it's a particularly sad moment among many sad moments in the life of Arsenal to say, "Yes, I follow Arsenal."
00:01:06 ◼ ► And I have seen them play at the Emirates. I actually have a friend who's a Chelsea supporter who lives right next door to the Emirates.
00:01:12 ◼ ► And so he got neighbor season passes and Lauren and I went when we were there a few years ago.
00:01:19 ◼ ► And I've also been to another premiership match. I went to a Fulham match against Hull at Craven Cottage. That was really great.
00:01:32 ◼ ► And I even had a meat pie at halftime at Craven Cottage, which I felt like I had to do because it felt like a quintessential English football thing to do.
00:01:43 ◼ ► And the best part, we were right behind the, at Craven Cottage, we were right behind the ads that they put on the sidelines,
00:01:50 ◼ ► which means we were right down at the bottom of the stands. And we were on match of the day.
00:01:55 ◼ ► You could, I mean, nobody could see us, but we watched match of the day when we got back.
00:01:59 ◼ ► My friend Simon and I was like, "There we are. That's me and Matt and Simon. We're right there."
00:02:04 ◼ ► Because the guy took a pass right in front of us and then scored the one, I think one goal, one of the two goals of the match.
00:02:11 ◼ ► So we're like, "We're going to be on match of the day." And we were. Anyway, so Arsenal. Unfortunately, though, Arsenal is the answer.
00:02:18 ◼ ► Of course, there are lots of issues and difficulties around sport existing right now, but it is also kind of great for people that sport exists right now.
00:02:35 ◼ ► And I want everybody to be safe, and I hope that they're taking precautions and all of that.
00:02:41 ◼ ► But it is nice to have some stuff like that to pay attention to in the midst of all of this.
00:02:47 ◼ ► It's not quite normal, but it's a little hint of the world as it was and something to... a little bit of a distraction.
00:02:54 ◼ ► And here in the US where we have an out of control virus escalation, all the major sports are attempting to restart or start.
00:03:10 ◼ ► But I have some hope that if some of them get up and running, it will be at least a little bit of a distraction for the rest of us.
00:03:28 ◼ ► There are different matches on different days, so I've been watching a bit of that, which is kind of fun.
00:03:32 ◼ ► The thing I'm really confused about the Premier League is that they're doing the matches at the respective grounds of all of the teams.
00:03:52 ◼ ► Well, the challenge is, where in England could you put everybody for the entire Premier League in a bubble?
00:04:04 ◼ ► Because Major League Baseball is actually trying to do something very much like the Premier League, which is everybody's going to play in their home stadiums.
00:04:13 ◼ ► Because it doesn't... I'm not sure the bubble thing is going to work for the NBA and the NHL, because they're both doing it, and Major League Soccer is doing it,
00:04:21 ◼ ► and they've had teams that have had to drop out, and they're in Florida too, which is...
00:04:28 ◼ ► But yeah, I think the real challenge is, how do you have a place that is large enough that you can put all of the assembled teams in one place,
00:04:41 ◼ ► Because these teams have charter airplanes and stuff, and if you go charter airplane to hotel room to stadium,
00:05:01 ◼ ► They're going to play, it looks like, the premiership to the conclusion, and that's fine.
00:05:14 ◼ ► So we watched that after a friend's recommendation, and then we're like, "We must start watching Formula One."
00:06:03 ◼ ► If you would like to send in a Snell Talk question to help us open a future episode of the show,
00:06:10 ◼ ► or you can use the question mark Snell Talk command in the Relay FM members Discord as well.
00:08:25 ◼ ► of a computer worth calling MacBook Pro can have an Apple design processor in it, right?
00:09:08 ◼ ► And for me personally, I think that it makes a lot of sense to launch with a big splash
00:09:16 ◼ ► But the one thing that I will say that I was thinking about today when reading this report was
00:09:55 ◼ ► Well, and like I said, I think not shying away from the MacBook Pro also sends a message
00:10:34 ◼ ► It could be a little bit later, right, but around that time, like still middle of the year.
00:10:42 ◼ ► This is going to be -- the next 12 months are going to be wild for Mac purchases, right?
00:11:25 ◼ ► Provided, in my opinion, that they do have something new, and that new thing could be the new iMac.
00:12:02 ◼ ► Like, well, are you going to ship an Intel iMac and then two months later ship an Apple Silicon iMac?
00:12:17 ◼ ► Like, remember that original iMac, there was a long time difference between the Intel version and the PowerPC version that came before.
00:12:29 ◼ ► Maybe what they do is they release a speed bump, essentially, version of the current iMacs.
00:12:50 ◼ ► And then in the fall, you ship what is essentially the next generation iMac, new design, ARM processor, and it's an intermediate size, right?
00:13:06 ◼ ► Well, because they're saying it's like 23 or whatever, 24, but it's the same physical size as the 21, but you obviously get the bigger screen size because of the bezel reduction.
00:13:19 ◼ ► So maybe what they're going to go for is 24 and 30 with the bezel reduction, bigger screen, you know, new design, who knows what's a part of that.
00:13:40 ◼ ► To say one last revision of the existing iMacs that, you know, you, if you need to buy another one for your school or for whatever, right?
00:13:48 ◼ ► We still are going to sell those for a while and you can keep them on the price list, right?
00:14:15 ◼ ► Like the plan is always to whenever you have a product line, have all of those products in the product line look the same and have the same features, but you start with one version of it.
00:14:23 ◼ ► And when it's new, like Apple did this with the first Retina MacBook Pro, they did it. The 16 inch with the new keyboard, they did it.
00:14:42 ◼ ► And if they did it this way that you're proposing, what it do actually quite like, I could imagine them saying, right?
00:14:54 ◼ ► We also have an Apple Silicon version of the new iMac, which is a representation of what we think the future of the Mac looks like.
00:15:04 ◼ ► Well, and as much as we get excited about the idea that Apple is going to redesign all of its Macs now because it's unhindered by Intel and it can just envision what it wants it to be.
00:15:19 ◼ ► It's still the case that Apple has a limited, and I know they're a big company and all that, but they have a limited set of hardware designers.
00:15:44 ◼ ► So this scenario suggests that what they've decided to do is, you know, in this scenario, the iMac, which boy, the iMac has been hurting for a design update for so long.
00:16:00 ◼ ► Maybe, you know, the first ARM Mac laptops we get are familiar and then there'll be new unfamiliar ones later, but the iMac goes first.
00:16:17 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. I mean the iMac, you could, you can point it at a few different points, but it's, it's early on in the last decade that the iMac really substantially changed.
00:16:34 ◼ ► It's like, cause the iMac pro got a redesigned enclosure with, uh, with a T2 and with SSD only and the new cooling system, but the iMac proper, even though it got retina and all of that, like, but the externally, and in terms of like the fact that it's got the existing cooling system and the existing spinning hard drive options has been around for not quite a decade, I think, but pretty close.
00:17:05 ◼ ► I mean, I think it's like, I think it's like 2013, 20 and, and you could argue that the look on the front of it is from 2007. Right. They slimmed it down. But in terms of the dimensions, when you're just looking at it on its face, which is most of the time, right. I use an iMac every day. Most of the time, it's just in my face. Like I've got, I have a 2007 iMac that when it's off, cause you can't see the non-retina screen, like, and if you don't look at it from the side, like it's the same.
00:17:32 ◼ ► I mean, it's the same computer. So if they were to revisit the iMac, um, it, yeah, it's, it's due, it's due more than any, even the Mac mini I think has, has been changed, you know, to be bigger and flatter more recently when they got rid of the optical drive than, than the iMac has.
00:17:51 ◼ ► But certainly it's, it's hurting for, for a real rethink. So perhaps they decided to save it for now.
00:18:00 ◼ ► All right, let's run through some upstream headlines. So I have a couple more, uh, Apple TV+ deals that have been done. Uh, Apple has signed a multi-year deal with the Maurice Sendak Foundation to create children's content. Sendak was the creator of Where the Wild Things Are, as long as well as many other properties.
00:18:18 ◼ ► So Apple's going to be working with, uh, the foundation that holds the rights to all of those properties along with a production company, uh, to produce some content for children. So they're continuing to, as I said before, you, you expand the breadth of types of content you have.
00:18:34 ◼ ► Um, and also at the moment, children's content, especially, I guess all of animated content, which should probably be in some regard is unarguably the easiest type of content to produce at the moment because it doesn't require people in the same place as much.
00:18:49 ◼ ► So you've got to keep pushing on that, right? Makes sense. You want to keep getting stuff in the pipeline.
00:18:54 ◼ ► Uh, Apple Studios has also required the right to Snowblind, which is a graphic novel adaptation and will star Jake Gyllenhaal. This movie joins Killers of the Flower Moon and Emancipation, which we've spoken about on previous episodes, as movies under the Apple Studios production banner.
00:19:13 ◼ ► So this is the production company that Apple's created. So it's not relying on always using, uh, production companies that aren't theirs. You know, like we've spoken about, they, well, this is a film that is being made with Apple's money.
00:19:29 ◼ ► Apple is a producer. They're putting this film together, which is different from Apple buying distribution for a film someone else made and paying the people who essentially, you know, paid the money to make it. This is Apple paying the money to make it.
00:19:44 ◼ ► So a little bit different than, you know, you can have an Apple film and we've seen a few. It's not quite the same as Apple Studios where they're, they're bankrolling it.
00:19:52 ◼ ► They're involved as a, as a studio in production of that and interfering or not as is the right of a studio. But yeah, it's different.
00:20:02 ◼ ► Uh, Tom Hanks has provided a follow-up message regarding his feelings about Apple. So we spoke about this last week.
00:20:09 ◼ ► Yeah, we joked about it cause we, I, we correctly, like it was an interview where he was kind of making jokes and then it was reported in, in the Guardian, I think, uh, in text and it made him seem really, uh, like slaggy off Apple, but he was really just kind of joking.
00:20:27 ◼ ► Um, and we said at the time, he's obviously disappointed that this didn't get a theatrical release and he's making some jokes, but obviously there's some pain there too. And yes, Tom Hanks had, world's nicest human being Tom Hanks had to walk it all back last week later and he did.
00:20:44 ◼ ► So there's a new statement that says Hanks is quote thrilled that Apple TV plus is making it possible to everybody to see it, that it is quote a magnificent gift. We feel as though we were rescued at sea by a convoy of a big Apple logo with a bite taken out of it.
00:21:00 ◼ ► Yeah, but he, he couldn't, he couldn't resist the also showing like what he actually feels about this, which is like, and we mentioned it before, right? Like he's clearly upset because he made this movie to be shown in cinemas and it can't be.
00:21:14 ◼ ► And it's not just, he's an actor, right? For people don't maybe don't know this. He was a producer and wrote the screenplay for this movie. This was a very personal, important project for him.
00:21:26 ◼ ► And it was always planned to be a theatrical release. It was going to come out on father's day. And then it got pulled off the schedule and had no home, essentially no place to show it. And Sony sold it to Apple.
00:21:38 ◼ ► And I, and so you've really got to look at it through the lens of the disappointment that you, you spent years on a movie and now it's, it's going to just debut on a streaming service.
00:21:51 ◼ ► It's totally disappointing at the same time, Apple did rescue it, right? Cause it's getting seen and, and, and also they, they spent money on it. So like Sony and all the participants in the, in the movie will get their money.
00:22:07 ◼ ► But, um, but he's also disappointed and I get, I get it like, and, and he's, he's right. Like Apple did save them, but it's also disappointed. Both can be true, but you know, people are always like, Oh, Tom Hanks, he was mean to Apple. And so he had to come out and say, no, it's good.
00:22:23 ◼ ► They saved us. It's a shame. I mean, he's obviously super sad that they had to save him, but they did. And they did. Um, I watched Greyhound last night. I did. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Um, it is a very specific kind of film.
00:22:38 ◼ ► It is, um, first off there's one scene with a woman in it, it's Elizabeth Shue and she is a flashback where we see Tom Hanks's character before he leaves to go to the war. Um, which is interesting.
00:22:56 ◼ ► And I'm not sure, like, I mean, it adds some dimension to his character, but like, it's funny because the rest of literally the rest of the movie is men on a, on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. That's, that's what it is. It's a war movie.
00:23:08 ◼ ► It is men on a Navy ship. That's on the one ship. You see the other ships in the distance, but it's the one ship. And, uh, what I loved about it is it's non it's essentially nonstop action.
00:23:21 ◼ ► It is the harrowing journey. They are, they are protecting a convoy that's going with, with people and materials from, um, or material, I guess, from, uh, America to the UK.
00:23:35 ◼ ► During world war II. And there's a period of about three days where they're out in the middle Atlantic, where they are. Um, they don't have air support and that's when the U boats come and the U boats sunk.
00:23:47 ◼ ► You know, people may not know this hundreds of ships and, and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people died in the mid Atlantic as a part of this, because the Nazis wanted to prevent the soldiers and material from getting to the UK.
00:24:02 ◼ ► Because that was, and so that was a calculation they made. And so, uh, Greyhound is about one of the ships that is there, a U S Navy ship that is part of a multinational, uh, collection of ships that are trying to protect these defenseless ships from the U boats.
00:24:18 ◼ ► And it's during that period where they have no air support and it is so it's intense. And then also, I think I find it technically fascinating because it's about how, how do you captain a ship in the middle of a battle with a sub and Tom Hanks is the captain.
00:24:37 ◼ ► So he's running around and shouting out commands and they're going to the sonar and the radar guy is shouting things back that are getting relayed and he has to get on the, on the radio to the other ships. And they're looking for the subs.
00:24:49 ◼ ► And, you know, it's, it's a lot of, a lot of terminology, a lot of technical stuff. I would say, um, if you're, if you're somebody like me who is kind of fascinated by the technology side of this, uh, old school, like how, how does that work?
00:25:04 ◼ ► Like, it's not like a guy with a joystick and a button driving a ship, right? Like he literally has to shout commands for dozens of men and they're all men dozens of men to like steer or shoot or do the radar or whatever.
00:25:20 ◼ ► Like he has to do all of that himself. So I think, I think it's fascinating. Um, it's not like it is very specifically that like it's, it's not anything more than that.
00:25:32 ◼ ► It's, it's not going to go down as like the greatest film and Tom Hanks is Canon, but I thought it was a very entertaining and intense way to spend, you know, 90 minutes. So, so yeah.
00:25:44 ◼ ► Check my list. If that sounds interesting to you. Yeah. We're doing a Leonardo DiCaprio marathon right now. We just keep picking. We did, uh, we did, um, bunch of Tarantino movies.
00:25:58 ◼ ► Yeah. And a bunch of DiCaprio movies. I don't know what we're going to catch me if you can. Have you done that one yet? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. That's a good one. Yeah. I love it. Like the cap is my favorite actor. Like I love so many of these movies. Anyway.
00:26:10 ◼ ► Uh, moving on CBS all access will be showing you a for champions league and Europa league football matches in America. Um, part of an existing deal and Turner let it go because of coronavirus.
00:26:24 ◼ ► Yeah. There was, so CBS was already in, in, in going to be doing it in the future. And then Turner was going to broadcast these in the U S and then they dropped out and CBS basically said we will pay more to extend and pick up the rest of this.
00:26:38 ◼ ► Interesting. Mostly because it's yet another live sports on streaming for a long time, maybe even a decade, but certainly for the last five years, we've heard that live sports is a bulwark against cord cutting that how you keep people on cable is live sports.
00:26:56 ◼ ► Um, which has truth in it. I think it's the only reason that I'm on still on cable is, is live sports. Um, but the counter to that is the streaming services want live sports too. And the question is when does it cross over where it's worth it more for streaming services to rip the live sports away from cable than it is for cable to keep the live sports.
00:27:18 ◼ ► And, uh, it's probably going to be a battle that we watch for the next decade, but this is an interesting example of that where CBS all access, by the way, is already the exclusive home of the national women's soccer league.
00:27:29 ◼ ► They are doing a tournament in Utah, um, that replaced their season. They put everybody in a bubble in Utah and they're playing there. That's all on CBS all access. So, um, you know, all sorts of streaming services experimenting with this.
00:27:42 ◼ ► And of course we've talked about it before. Apple is going to do this too. So, uh, keep an eye on that.
00:27:47 ◼ ► And we spoke last week about Quibi, right? We were thinking of the quibby 90 day trials up. So what's going to happen now, uh, according to an analyst firm, sensor tower, Quibi apparently lost 92% of its subscribers after the free trial period ended.
00:28:02 ◼ ► They estimated that just 72,000 people who signed up in the first three days stuck around after the trial period. So they're just seem to measuring this on the first three days, which again, like this was reported a lot, a lot, a lot.
00:28:13 ◼ ► We're like, Hey, Quibi has no subscribers. Like it's based on a sample period. Uh, Katzenberg said that this was quote incorrect by an order of magnitude.
00:28:22 ◼ ► They said that 5.6 million people downloaded the app and they are seeing a quote excellent conversion to paid subscribers, but they wouldn't say how many that was.
00:28:31 ◼ ► So my feeling is I reckon if you extrapolate that 72,000 figure, you're probably pretty close to what they actually do have because what Katzenberg's like, Oh, 72,000 is wrong.
00:28:44 ◼ ► But since it's how I didn't say that was the total they had. So I reckon you've got somewhere in the middle there because when things go really well, they will tell you the number.
00:28:56 ◼ ► Like they had no problem telling you 5.6 million people downloaded the application, but they wouldn't say how many people were paying.
00:29:03 ◼ ► So that's not as impressive a number you would assume. So I can't wait to find these numbers out.
00:29:09 ◼ ► I assume at some point we'll find out how many people are paying for Quibi and then I would like to ask every single one of these people why.
00:29:16 ◼ ► So we'll see about that one. This is one of the more interesting things I think to keep an eye on over time because I don't know what is going to happen to that company, but I can't imagine it being super good for them. Right?
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00:31:41 ◼ ► Right. Okay. I was wondering that when I was putting our notes together this morning because I realized I'd only seen iOS and iPadOS. I hadn't seen the Mac anywhere. I didn't even think about the watch because the watch typically doesn't get it at all.
00:31:56 ◼ ► Which is interesting. So, you know, in our audience there were tons of people already running the developer beta. I'm sure that this is going to increase that amount significantly.
00:32:07 ◼ ► I have also put the developer beta on my iPhone now. I would have been flirting with this. I was really intrigued. I wanted to do it and I did it.
00:32:18 ◼ ► So I now have the, I'm now running iOS 14 on my iPhone and my 11 inch iPad is running iPadOS 14.
00:32:27 ◼ ► So I thought we could maybe talk through it a little bit because I have some thoughts now about the app library and widgets that I didn't before because I hadn't used them in the way that they're on the iPhone.
00:32:38 ◼ ► Because, well, app library is not on the iPad and the widgets are a very different beast on the iPad, right?
00:32:48 ◼ ► You, I remember when, I'd asked you this question before, I think that you are running it on an iPhone but not your day-to-day iPhone. Is that right?
00:32:57 ◼ ► Yeah. I am not yet at the point where I want to subject my day-to-day devices to the betas.
00:33:02 ◼ ► So I've got it running on an iPhone and I've got the iPad beta running on an iPad but not my main devices.
00:33:09 ◼ ► I might, a little spoiler hint thing, which is I am probably going to install it on my iPhone soon because it seems pretty great, honestly, on the test phone.
00:33:24 ◼ ► And as you pointed out time and again, I'm not really, none of us are really in a position where we desperately are relying on our iPhones.
00:33:39 ◼ ► Like I have no idea if like battery life's being impacted because it's just like these aren't things that I'm having issues with at the moment because I'm at home all the time.
00:33:47 ◼ ► When I'm recording shows, my iPhone is on a charger, right? So like it's being topped up all the time anyway.
00:33:58 ◼ ► So I think this is a pretty cool feature. So this is the idea of you don't have to have all of your app icons on and home screen anymore.
00:34:13 ◼ ► Like the categories, typically it seems like they're sorting it by things like entertainment, productivity and stuff like that.
00:34:32 ◼ ► Every now and then I'll get a couple of apps and suggestions that are on my home screen.
00:34:37 ◼ ► And I feel like they don't need to suggest those to me because I've already gone past it to get here.
00:34:46 ◼ ► Because that was my whole thing of like when you do this, where does that app that I just downloaded go?
00:35:01 ◼ ► But they operate slightly differently to folders because if you have one that has more than four apps in it,
00:35:08 ◼ ► which is probably most people's categories, it gives you three large icons and then four smaller icons.
00:35:14 ◼ ► And if you tap on one of the larger icons in the little grid, it opens that app immediately.
00:35:24 ◼ ► But then if you tap on the little grid of smaller icons, it then opens the whole category for you to choose the app that you want.
00:35:30 ◼ ► And they're then in alphabetical order, which is good and the animations are pretty nice.
00:35:35 ◼ ► Then there's also the alphabetical list which you can get by pulling down or tapping in the search field.
00:35:59 ◼ ► So I just find myself... If I was searching the app library, if the app that I don't see is in front of me,
00:36:07 ◼ ► or I'm just doing what I've always done, which is just search for applications from the home screen.
00:36:13 ◼ ► So I'm kind of doing a mix of both right now. I'm deciding to kind of trust that the app library is going to show me what I want.
00:36:20 ◼ ► And most of the time, the app that I'm looking for is one of the three large apps in a category.
00:36:26 ◼ ► So I've always found the Siri Suggestions stuff for app recommendations to be pretty good for me.
00:36:37 ◼ ► So the phone is learning what you're using, when you're using it, and is surfacing that stuff to you.
00:36:48 ◼ ► I wanted to get to one home screen and hide the rest of them and just use the app library.
00:37:02 ◼ ► It's more that I feel like I have questions about how people are really going to use it.
00:37:09 ◼ ► And I think it comes back to what other options do I have for finding apps on my device?
00:37:17 ◼ ► Because the truth is, I can find things very easily with the search interface, because that's how I've used it all the time.
00:37:26 ◼ ► And that's from any page of the home screen you swipe down, and you get a keyboard and search box,
00:37:36 ◼ ► Whereas with app library, you swipe to the right, or right to left, a few times till you get to the last page,
00:38:04 ◼ ► They're not just an app library, and they've always been there. They've been there for years now.
00:38:13 ◼ ► I think that sometimes people are like, "Where is that app?" And you get a little scrolling list,
00:38:19 ◼ ► and you can find it. Maybe you don't know the name of it, and you're like, "What is it? Oh, that's the one."
00:38:27 ◼ ► There's a test flight group if you're beta testing apps. There's some nice things there,
00:38:33 ◼ ► and the fact that the ones that are the larger icons, you can just tap, and it launches them.
00:38:38 ◼ ► But I'm not sure how much I'm really going to use app library, even though I kind of like it,
00:38:44 ◼ ► because of where it is and how many different interactions you have to do to get to it,
00:38:59 ◼ ► You can do more Siri-like commands in it if you want to, and it'll give you Siri-esque responses.
00:39:05 ◼ ► There's a bunch of other stuff in there. So what it feels to me is basically that Apple built a new feature
00:39:11 ◼ ► because it was easier to build a new feature than rethink everything, right, because it always is.
00:39:17 ◼ ► But it feels like they need to rethink everything, because I'm not sure that the app library plus the search screen,
00:39:32 ◼ ► And I think it's a problem that a bunch of the best parts of what you can do in app library, I can already do.
00:39:49 ◼ ► I'm really skeptical if I'm ever going to use it, because I'm not -- you know what I'm not doing?
00:40:04 ◼ ► Look at these categories in the library. Oh, here's sports apps, and here's entertainment apps. How exciting.
00:40:15 ◼ ► For me, the biggest benefit of having this is no longer needing to manage my home screens.
00:40:24 ◼ ► Sure, sure, and this is a softer landing than just saying you can hide your home screens and then use search, right?
00:40:31 ◼ ► Because they must feel like not everybody's going to use search, and so you can put it out in front of them.
00:40:54 ◼ ► But I do appreciate that they're trying to make it a soft landing if you hide a bunch of pages of your app list and then can't find an app, right?
00:41:28 ◼ ► They're nice, but the widgets that exist for two out of the three that I use, I will replace as soon as the applications that I actually use for those purposes has a widget.
00:41:40 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's the challenge with the betas, right? Is that unless you happen to... You know, later in the summer, you might happen to know the developer or talk to the developer and get on their beta.
00:41:49 ◼ ► If they are able to build a beta that they can distribute in TestFlight, which they often can't for the new OS.
00:41:54 ◼ ► I believe that right now, it is possible for you to distribute TestFlight with the widget kit stuff in it.
00:42:03 ◼ ► So this is the challenge is that you still have to be on a TestFlight in order to do that.
00:42:07 ◼ ► So this is the thing, it's like we aren't going to really see with so many things with iOS betas, you can't really see its full impact until the developers have written to it and released their apps.
00:42:17 ◼ ► And that is oftentimes, you know, basically in September or October when they get those apps out there.
00:42:30 ◼ ► I actually made a widget stack with my local weather and also my mom lives in Arizona and so I put her weather in there so I can flip over and be like, oh, it's 75 degrees.
00:42:48 ◼ ► I have one widget stack on my home screen of like the medium sized ones and I have notes, weather and calendar there.
00:42:58 ◼ ► And I have them doing the auto rotation thing like it should be trying to guess which one of those I want to see at any time.
00:43:09 ◼ ► I like that most of the time it's my calendar that I'm seeing. I actually really enjoy having that information glanceable on my home screen because that's the type of information, especially the calendar one.
00:43:20 ◼ ► I just like to have a rough idea, like in my mind of what's going on and getting those visual reminders when I'm doing something else.
00:43:27 ◼ ► I actually find to be quite useful. But as I say, right, like that, as we said, the impact of widgets in general, I won't feel properly until I'm able to actually use like a Carrot Weather widget, Fantastic Cowl widget.
00:43:43 ◼ ► Am I going to get widgets for Slack? Am I going to get widgets for Dew? Am I going to you know, like what it what are they going to look like?
00:43:50 ◼ ► What are they going to mean? Then I'll understand if like the current situation where I have I have a four by four grid of apps on my home screen.
00:43:59 ◼ ► Am I going to keep that? Will it get less? I don't know. Right. Like this is I want to see how this changes over time.
00:44:06 ◼ ► But I will say that so far I actually do really like having these widgets with this information available to me at all times.
00:44:15 ◼ ► And tapping it opens the app super fast. You're a lot of the times you know, you can go to a place, right?
00:44:21 ◼ ► So I can tap and be in my upgrade Apple Note from the widget faster than if I open the app and then navigate it to the note.
00:44:31 ◼ ► I think the truth is that we're going to end up overdoing it and then scaling back. Right.
00:44:37 ◼ ► I think that's the way it's going to go is that we're going to go every widget, every time we're going to do widgets everywhere.
00:44:54 ◼ ► So it's you know, and then I can just swipe through over time and work out which ones I actually like more.
00:44:59 ◼ ► Like when I put like a few days ago, I had the Apple Music widget in that stack as well.
00:45:09 ◼ ► So that's what I like about the stacks. But you're right. When I add you know, I'm going to want to use the widget of every app that I use frequently.
00:45:27 ◼ ► which I think is what I heard Craig Federighi call it on some podcast interview somewhere.
00:45:43 ◼ ► like one on top of each other, which is great because I can swipe for different reasons. It's fine on my iPad. On my iPhone,
00:45:48 ◼ ► that takes up the whole screen. So that's too much. So I've just stacked them all on top of each other.
00:45:53 ◼ ► I don't see how I go there. I honestly I don't think they're going to do it. But I would really love to see Apple tighten the size of that shortcut widget up quite a bit.
00:46:02 ◼ ► Like comparing it the old widget to the new one, like the tappable areas have doubled in size. And I don't think that that's needed.
00:46:09 ◼ ► Like that you could quite easily put 10 to 16 widgets in the space that they have eight.
00:46:16 ◼ ► But I don't think they're going to do that now. I would like to see them do it, but I don't think that kind of stuff's going to change.
00:46:22 ◼ ► But I would say overall, I also do really like the widgets in your article that you wrote on six colors.
00:46:39 ◼ ► Just a nice little notification. I found it quite tricky to actually hit the call answer button.
00:46:44 ◼ ► But to be honest, I don't care. Right. Like I don't really. It's very rare that I will get a phone call and answer it immediately.
00:46:53 ◼ ► Because it's either a call I don't want or it's a call that I can't answer at that point. So I like not having the whole screen taken over.
00:47:00 ◼ ► It does. Your whole screen is still taken over if you're doing nothing with your phone.
00:47:05 ◼ ► So if you get a call and the phone is locked, you get the old UI still. Which makes sense. Right.
00:47:25 ◼ ► And this goes to a lot of interesting. A lot of design decisions about the phone are based on the fact that it's got a small screen.
00:47:33 ◼ ► And then also it's a phone. And you've seen it. Like, although I got a, you know, it's true for the iPad to like a call comes in and it takes over your whole UI of your device.
00:47:44 ◼ ► And you're like, why did that just like, it makes no sense. Right. But at least in, in, on the iPad, you've been able to switch out and look at an app in FaceTime and do picture in picture, which was something that was also not available to the iPhone that is now available.
00:47:58 ◼ ► So I like this. This is kind of clean up of some assumptions that were made going back to 2007 about like a phone should be the most important thing you're going to do on your phone is receive a phone call.
00:48:10 ◼ ► It's like, but if you frame it as what I'd like is a special kind of notification where anyone in the world can input your number and completely interrupt whatever you're doing on your phone.
00:48:21 ◼ ► No, that's ridiculous. Who would allow that? So it's good that it doesn't, you know, you get a little slider and you can tap the button to, to accept or to block it, but it doesn't get in your way.
00:48:32 ◼ ► It's a, it's much better. Have you spent time, I mean, I saw it in your article, you spent a bit of time with the maps app and I'm intrigued to see what you think about that.
00:48:42 ◼ ► I mean, I haven't, I'm not an Apple maps user, so. Yeah. Well, and they don't, the data for a lot of this stuff is not in, in a lot of places yet, but I live in the Bay area.
00:48:52 ◼ ► So it's available here. Um, the bike directions, I'm excited about that because that like that you can get directions and it'll show you the bike paths and it will re route you the way you want to go.
00:49:03 ◼ ► You can avoid Hills. You can, it shows you the incline and how much climbing you have to do if you're trying to get a flat ride versus something that's really super uphill.
00:49:13 ◼ ► Um, so I was impressed by that feature. There's also a feature that I haven't had a chance to try because I don't leave my town basically at this point, but I've definitely experienced in both San Francisco and New York city.
00:49:23 ◼ ► This issue where the buildings are so tall when you're in the city core that they can't see enough of the GPS satellites and they get confused about the other.
00:49:33 ◼ ► Other kind of wifi data and other things that are used for location. And you end up with, I mean, have you had this where you, you look down at your little dot and it just is drifting around.
00:49:41 ◼ ► Just like, like it, it has no idea where you are. So it's like you're tethered to a balloon and are floating around a city. It makes it so frustrating.
00:49:50 ◼ ► Um, and they have this bananas feature where you hold your camera up to the buildings on the other side of the street and it uses machine learning to match them to their database of where they've driven around.
00:50:05 ◼ ► And says, oh, that's where you are, which you can also see is an AR feature. I wonder what they might want to use that for. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but, but that's super, super clever because I have had that moment where I've been in midtown Manhattan and I've been like, where do I go?
00:50:22 ◼ ► I don't even know where I am. Oh, I've had it where in large cities like that, it tells you to go in the wrong direction because it's got confused with the GPS.
00:50:33 ◼ ► Yes, exactly right. And then you go, you walk a block that way and you're like, no, wait a second. This is the wrong number. I'm going uptown when I should be going downtown or whatever it is.
00:50:43 ◼ ► It, need a little moment. Emotionally process that. So, uh, so that's, that's clever and yes, it is very obviously one of those we're building AR glasses features, but it's, it's nice in the meantime to put it in the world's most popular smartphone.
00:51:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess whatever. And then they, I have a, an electric car and they've got this whole EV charging thing in it, which is very exciting until you realize that it's only for supported vehicles.
00:51:10 ◼ ► And, um, presumably that includes like either current model phone or cars, or maybe it's, if you've got the app installed and your car makers app supports it or something, cause Apple maps wants to know like the make and model and it wants to know the range.
00:51:28 ◼ ► And I think it wants to know like what your battery status is. And so it's one of those things where it's like, Oh, great. Now, now I can plot out when I need to charge my car. And then Apple sort of says, no, not your car.
00:51:40 ◼ ► Like, uh, and my car has terrible range, so it doesn't really matter, but I think it's one of those interesting things where, um, I don't know if there's a specification that they're, that they're meeting or something, or if it's all about like connecting to the car makers app.
00:51:54 ◼ ► But like, if you have to rely on your car maker to update their app to support this, like, like, uh, it's, it's just a funny moment where I think, Oh, Apple's doing a feature.
00:52:04 ◼ ► Oh, it relies on compatibility with somebody else. And I'm just less excited about it then, because then you're, then you're relying on someone who is an Apple. Apple can be really excited about this feature, but you know, it, are the car makers excited about it?
00:52:18 ◼ ► I hope they are. Cause it's a good idea to be able to say, I need to go on a road trip with my EV and for it to be able to mark out where you need to stop to charge. There are third party apps that do this. They are not very good.
00:52:30 ◼ ► So I'm confused why Apple needs support from car manufacturers for that. That doesn't seem like something that has to happen.
00:52:37 ◼ ► So some of it doesn't have to happen and it frustrates me, like you should be able to say, here's my car and here are the maybe even like here are the, one of the things that needs to know is what your charging types are because there are different chargers that have different charging types.
00:52:50 ◼ ► But there's like a nice visual way to do that. Like here are a bunch of charges, which ones can you use? Right.
00:52:55 ◼ ► Apple seems to have punted on that and just said, well, we need to connect to your car or your car app or whatever. And then we'll know instead of just letting you the other apps that I have used that aren't as good. We'll just say, what's your make and model. And then do you have this plug? And do you have this plug? And if there are, if it varies within a model, if that's an option and then it, it does that, I guess the other thing that it's doing here, it wants, I think what Apple really wants is Apple wants maps to know how much charge you have.
00:53:22 ◼ ► So that if you're driving somewhere, it's monitoring your range and it knows to tell you, you know, and could adjust where you need to stop based on how much battery charge you already have in the car.
00:53:35 ◼ ► Which made me immediately think, shouldn't it do that for gas cars too? Shouldn't it, shouldn't it be able to talk to gas cars and see how much gas you've got left in a tank on your road trip and automatically build in stops at gas stations too?
00:53:48 ◼ ► It probably should, but maybe Apple is more focused on the electric future than the gas present.
00:53:54 ◼ ► I get that. But there are so many variables based on like the age of the car, the wear on the battery that like, I don't, unless CarPlay is being like hooked into the car's computer for that information.
00:54:09 ◼ ► And that's why they need it. You know, like the car can talk to the system or to maps or whatever and say, well, cause this isn't even, this isn't even just a CarPlay thing though.
00:54:19 ◼ ► No, it's not related to CarPlay. Well, it's on my list of things that I need to bring up with Apple and ask them, can you explain this feature more to me?
00:54:27 ◼ ► Because, you know, is it, is it, well, car models being released in the fall of 2020 will support it, or is it any car model can support it if they have, you know, if there's a way to talk to it via their app or something in between, or maybe if they support this standard for car data communication that we now support?
00:54:48 ◼ ► I don't know. Um, but I had a lot of questions and it's one of those features that I immediately sat forward and I was like, yay. And then I saw the footnotes and I, I thought, oh, okay.
00:54:59 ◼ ► Last thing I wanted to mention was just again, to talk about how much I'm enjoying the new shortcuts stuff. Cause my, my favorite thing about shortcuts in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 is how much stuff you can do without opening the app anymore.
00:55:16 ◼ ► So like I have shortcuts that I run from the widget, um, or I can run from search and this is especially good on the iPad where it used to like on iOS 13 and before it had to open the application for me to give it the information.
00:55:32 ◼ ► But now it can do all of that stuff via what is effectively looks like notifications. Right. And I just type in, or I can choose from like a date picker or whatever, and it never has to open the application or I don't have to leave where I currently am in the system.
00:55:48 ◼ ► That is fantastic. I love that. Like I'm, I'm, I, you know, we've mentioned it before and I just want to say again, they've made massive changes to shortcuts that got absolutely zero time outside of just the sessions. Uh, and there's some really fun stuff in here.
00:56:06 ◼ ► See, I'm looking forward to using shortcuts. More of the challenge with using shortcuts during a beta is that, um, stuff just breaks like stuff just stops run really slowly and some between beta one and beta two, like different stuff got fixed and different stuff broke.
00:56:22 ◼ ► And like this is going to happen, but, but when it's a shortcut and it's a stack of, you know, 40 actions, um, if one of them breaks your whole shortcut breaks and that is beta life. That's what it's like, but that's limited my ability to try that stuff out.
00:56:38 ◼ ► But I agree. One of the ultimate goals, one of the things that we've always had on our wishlist for shortcuts is get out of my face, right? Like there's so often where it's like, Oh, well you can run this shortcut. Here's what's going to happen.
00:56:49 ◼ ► It's going to open the shortcuts app separately. It's going to open that shortcut. It's going to scroll through every item and make you watch like every line of code and then it'll get to the end and it'll do its thing.
00:57:01 ◼ ► It's like, well, I'm glad it did its thing. Why did it get in my face like that? So the more of this that they take away and put in, uh, in little notifications or things that just happen, um, running them from widgets, right?
00:57:14 ◼ ► You can run specific shortcuts from widgets, um, which, you know, again, gets the shortcuts app out of your way. Cause I don't need, like when I run an Apple script, I don't see the script editor because why would I want to see that?
00:57:28 ◼ ► But, uh, shortcuts hasn't gotten there yet for, for reasons that have to do with it previously not being a, an Apple app and all of that. But like, I'm glad they're pushing more of that stuff underneath the surface cause I don't want to see it.
00:57:40 ◼ ► Yeah, but I think the, the, the bay is great right now. Like, um, I'm definitely enjoying my time with it. It's fun to have it to play around with.
00:57:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I think so. And, and all the usual warnings apply cause it's a beta, but, um, you know, now that it's a public beta, you could try it if you want. And my experience with it's been positive for the most part.
00:58:02 ◼ ► But again, it's one of those things where, well, I put it on my main iPad that I use every day. It's like, you know, I, I run shortcuts that don't run on iPadOS 14 right now.
00:58:15 ◼ ► And so I would just have to forgo them for the summer and I'd rather not, but on my iPhone, I can probably get away with it.
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01:00:12 ◼ ► So this is a perfect example of a summer fun topic where we are taking a topic that we would normally talk about, but also adding in something fun. Fun.
01:00:23 ◼ ► At the end of it. So we're going to talk a little bit about a really interesting and wonderfully written article that Jon Gruber posted on Daring Fireball of, uh, tail end of last week.
01:00:40 ◼ ► In essence, this is an article that is framed around whether Apple could or should enforce different kinds of rules on apps in the app store.
01:00:52 ◼ ► So Google made the headlines over the last week for finally adding split screen support to Gmail, which is a five year old feature.
01:01:02 ◼ ► Now, when I saw this headline, I was like, oh, people are calling multi windows split screen again. No, Gmail, the Gmail app did not support split screen multitasking on the iPad.
01:01:13 ◼ ► Five years ago, this feature was introduced and Jon was saying this is an incredibly popular app, should have supported this feature long before now.
01:01:22 ◼ ► And goes on to reference recent app store issues. So like with the email app, Hey, for example, where it seems like Apple was putting their focus on their kind of rule enforcing for apps for basically trying to get money out of them.
01:01:38 ◼ ► Really, which is for in many instances, worsens the user experience because it makes signing up for applications and their paid parts more complicated.
01:01:49 ◼ ► Right. Because we've all seen this, like you download the Netflix app and all you can do is sign in and there's nothing else. Right.
01:01:55 ◼ ► And is that a better or worse user experience? But that's the stuff that Apple's been focusing on.
01:01:59 ◼ ► And Jon posits the idea of should Apple actually be using their heavy hand to push developers to support more standard OS features?
01:02:11 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's about priorities. I feel like this is a very much a kind of modest proposal kind of thing where he's not necessarily proposing that Apple use its heavy hand for this as much as saying that it says something about Apple's priorities,
01:02:24 ◼ ► that it's willing to lean on developers and get cut up in the press over, um, caging money out of developers basically, but seems to not put nearly as much effort into making sure that the quality of the platforms apps is high.
01:02:49 ◼ ► And there are lots of different ways to do that. I think, in fact, I think I saw, or maybe it was on, on dithering groupers podcast with Ben Thompson that they mentioned this, but there may actually have been an Apple deadline saying if your iPad app doesn't support this, we won't, we won't approve any more updates.
01:03:07 ◼ ► I've seen some, so this is kind of like yes and no. Basically there was a deadline which just passed, which said that you had to support multiple screen sizes. So you had to build to the iOS 13 SDK. Apple strongly recommends is what they say that you support multitasking.
01:03:29 ◼ ► Sure. Right. Yeah, I think, but this, this comes to the core of it for me, which is, again, the larger issue here is, is groupers using this moment to point out that Apple seems really concerned about getting its money, but not concerned.
01:03:44 ◼ ► I actually think even larger than not supporting its features of its, of its platform is the scams and the span apps and the, and the scam subscriptions that are like a 99 cent trial followed by $40 a month or something that the only purpose of them is to trick you.
01:04:04 ◼ ► So you get, you get, you know, weird apps that are using other people's intellectual property. You get, you get rip offs of other of apps that steal their name or steal their icons. All of these things litter the app store.
01:04:17 ◼ ► But a company trying to make money without Apple getting a cut is what makes them say stop.
01:04:24 ◼ ► And I get that. I get that. We probably don't see like we probably see the scams and the stuff that gets through, but most of it doesn't. That may actually be true.
01:04:34 ◼ ► But I think John's point is, is strong in saying, um, maybe Apple's priorities are misplaced and that, and that there are lots of ways you can clean up your store that don't involve getting money and that benefit the user.
01:04:48 ◼ ► And you seem to be more focused on benefiting your bottom line financially than on benefiting the user and that that is antithetical to the way Apple should behave as a corporate culture.
01:04:58 ◼ ► And I think that that point in the essay is really strong. My, my, my read on it immediately in terms of like, well, what Apple should do for something like Gmail is I do think Apple should be more aggressive in telling app developers what platform features they need to support.
01:05:17 ◼ ► And I'm not saying like you literally can't be in the store anymore if you don't support split screen multitasking, but I can see Apple saying, here's a new feature.
01:05:27 ◼ ► And then two years later saying, if you're using an, if you're an iPad productivity app, um, we won't, we won't be accepting new submissions unless you support this feature.
01:05:36 ◼ ► Five years is too long. Yeah. Yeah. That's that. That was my thought is that the big, the big leverage that Apple's got is saying our app store apps will support key platform features.
01:05:48 ◼ ► You need to do it. And I know that that if you're a developer, it's like, oh, just what I want is Apple telling me what to do. It's like Apple is telling you what to do.
01:05:55 ◼ ► Apple already makes you have to work all summer when you would rather be outside fixing things and also adopting new technologies. If you're an indie developer, a lot of times for the fall for those releases, but certainly fixing bugs and making sure your app works on the new platform.
01:06:10 ◼ ► I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple to say, Hey, we're introducing big new platform feature for the iPad. It makes the iPad better.
01:06:19 ◼ ► Screen sizes is actually not a bad example, right? Where all of us with 12.9 inch iPads, we know the offenders who spent years not supporting that size.
01:06:28 ◼ ► So you get a weird upscaled, not quite right version of your app because they aren't supporting the 12.9 iPad that happened for ages and was really frustrating.
01:06:39 ◼ ► And so I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple to say, as they do with some of the iPhone stuff and they have done saying not by this fall, you need to support all of the features we're introducing at WWDC, but maybe saying by next fall or the fall after that.
01:06:55 ◼ ► We're not going to like, we, we built this exciting new productivity feature for the iPad. And if you're making a productivity app for the iPad two years from now that doesn't support it, we aren't going to let you update your app anymore.
01:07:07 ◼ ► Like bottom line, you can't be on our platform if you don't use platform features. I don't think that's unreasonable. And Gmail, like this is the, this is the perfect example.
01:07:17 ◼ ► It's like how Apple should not have allowed Gmail to be updated way before five years, right? Apple should have come down on them two years in and said, you got to support this feature. Period.
01:07:29 ◼ ► I like, uh, John says, like, don't, you know, like don't, don't, I can't scrutinize a million apps, but maybe they should start by scrutinizing apps with a million users. Right.
01:07:41 ◼ ► And I kind of liked that. It's like, that's just an easy way to draw a line and be like, there is a level. And if you're at that level, well, you need to do it.
01:07:48 ◼ ► And he lays out some stuff like video app doesn't support picture in picture. You're out of the store app doesn't support dynamic type size, but clearly should you're out poor accessibility. You're out email client doesn't support split screen. You're out.
01:07:59 ◼ ► Like, and he's being, you know, he's, he's taking it to a, a, like a real conclusion here, which everyone knows Apple isn't going to do, but it's a modest proposal thing where it's like, he's not, he's not really proposing this, but he's saying, let's look at the extreme version of this.
01:08:16 ◼ ► And let's, let's compare the priorities. Yeah, I am definitely in agreement of if you are gonna push people so hard to do something that actually makes user experience worse, like not allowing me to create a Netflix account when signing up for Netflix, because it must go through your payment processing.
01:08:36 ◼ ► If you're going to do that, then also do this other thing, really do it instead of like make the user experience better. Nobody's user experience made worse. If Google put the work in to support multi window support for split screen support for Gmail, who locks or whatever. Right.
01:08:54 ◼ ► That makes everybody's stuff better. Now, so one thing I wanted to press on this, like, I think a lot of people would say like, Oh, you know, like Google's apps don't look like iOS apps. So Apple should make them, uh, uh, Apple should make people comply to that.
01:09:10 ◼ ► I disagree with that strongly myself because Google has their own design. They have what they think is good design and they should be allowed to do that whether you like it or hate it. I think that's up for debate. Like I don't think Apple should be able to say like this button should look like our button. I don't agree with that.
01:09:30 ◼ ► I think Google, um, and I've written about this and I got her ranked by somebody at Google about it at one point. I think there is a level of arrogance that comes with a owner of a different platform coming onto your platform and saying, well, we're just going to use our platform conventions over here.
01:09:49 ◼ ► Um, that is my, all of us Mac users saw Microsoft do that and Google has changed its attitude. Google tries to be a better iOS citizen than it used to be, but at the same time, Google wants its apps to look like Google.
01:10:03 ◼ ► And I wouldn't, yes, I wouldn't advocate for Apple to say Google can't use material design, right? Yeah.
01:10:09 ◼ ► Microsoft's apps look unique and, um, also look like other Microsoft apps, but I don't want Apple to say, no, you have to change what your app looks like. There that this, this is about, for me, it's about adopting core functionality of the platform in a vaguely timely fashion, right?
01:10:30 ◼ ► This is like, this is like saying if your app can't do copy and paste, it shouldn't be in the store anymore. Like it's pretty simple. Like there are lots of extreme examples we can come up with.
01:10:41 ◼ ► Speaking of which, in the spirit of the summer of fun, what we thought we would do here is we're each going to pick a list of five or so applications that we use that are missing what we consider to be a core iOS feature.
01:10:56 ◼ ► So we'll pick an app and say what it is that this app should have that it doesn't have. That's right, everybody. It's the disappointing app draft.
01:11:07 ◼ ► Can I go first with the obvious? Yes. Google docs. Uh huh. It was on my list too. Go ahead.
01:11:14 ◼ ► I'm going to start with saying I would like Google docs to have full multi window. Actually, no, I'm going to go for trackpad for trackpad support because that at the moment is more important to me than the multi window, which I have made many arguments for, for Google docs for a while.
01:11:30 ◼ ► But the right now I want to be able to select text easily and correctly with the trackpad on my iPad where at the moment I'm doing like you double click a word with the trackpad, then you try and hover over the little blue selecty thing and just get it in the like, I, I, this is ridiculous.
01:11:47 ◼ ► I want to have full trackpad and cursor support in Google docs. Yep. I am going to go with Dropbox and proper support for the files app.
01:11:59 ◼ ► It's a joke. They have files app support. It's never worked right. It generally doesn't work unless you've recently launched the Dropbox app, which like that's beside the point.
01:12:12 ◼ ► And as a Dropbox user, it's extremely frustrating because I have files I need to get to on Dropbox. Uh, it should work like a file provider. It should just work in files. That's the system file interface.
01:12:24 ◼ ► The Mac version of Dropbox uses the finder and yet Dropbox seems to just not care. I believe a bunch of new files features were added in iOS 14 still not supported.
01:12:35 ◼ ► And in 13 we're now almost at 14 Dropbox is still not there. So frustrating. And, uh, you know, it does it. What do they want? I'm an iPad user. I'm not going to stop using my iPad because Dropbox is bad.
01:12:51 ◼ ► It makes me less likely to use Dropbox. So it frustrates me greatly. Uh, and, and I, you know, and maybe Apple, maybe Apple is partially at fault here. I don't know.
01:13:01 ◼ ► But I, I can tell you though, that there are, there are other apps that do a better job of file support than Dropbox. So I'm going to put it on the list. I don't think Dropbox is trying.
01:13:11 ◼ ► Because that was what I was going to ask you is like, have you ever used a file provider that actually works well with the files app? Like I I've used file providers that work better than Dropbox. I'll put it that way.
01:13:23 ◼ ► Because I would say like, I agree with you. I want it to work better. Uh, I feel like there maybe needs to be more work on both sides of that, but there is clearly an element of Dropbox not working right.
01:13:36 ◼ ► And we could have spoke about this tons of times in the past and the bugs have gotten better, but they still do exist in some places that even like iCloud and the files app doesn't work very well.
01:13:45 ◼ ► Yes, that's true. But, and yet I find iCloud far more reliable than Dropbox. And so if somebody at Dropbox wants to, wants to correct me and say, actually Dropbox would love to be a supporter of all of the files API's, but there is a bug or Apple hasn't done a good job.
01:14:02 ◼ ► I'd love to hear it. My feeling is Apple hasn't done a great job and there are bugs and that's being used as an excuse and that Dropbox really just doesn't want to do it. So, you know, correct me if I'm wrong.
01:14:14 ◼ ► You know, when you try to share a link or a file and you open the share sheet and you get those suggestions to send messages to people, you know, you can pop up, you're like, Hey, you've recently messaged Jason. Would you like to message us to Jason?
01:14:27 ◼ ► It would not be a surprising if you had forgotten the fact that this is actually something that third party developers can do as well. It's not just a messages feature. And the reason that you may forget this is because so very few messaging applications have actually implemented this iOS 13 API.
01:14:47 ◼ ► I was only reminded because discord supports it. So if you've recently messaged someone in discord, you can send them a link or if you recently in a group, you can send it to that group.
01:14:58 ◼ ► Discord is the only third party messaging app that I use that supports this. And I would like to see Slack do it because I think it is a super useful feature that you are talking to someone and you're like, Oh, let me go grab that link and you go to share it so you can copy it.
01:15:17 ◼ ► It's way nicer if you can just tap the button and it automatically goes there. Slack have an extension, but it's ropey at best. It works, but not very well, not all the time. And there is a better way to do this. And they, I would love to see this, see Slack implement this messages suggestions thing in the share sheet.
01:15:38 ◼ ► Yep. That's again, an iOS feature. Wouldn't it be nice to support it for a year now I have, I have Slack on my list too, but I'm not going to get there just yet. I'm going to bring up, um, apps that I read articles in.
01:15:51 ◼ ► So newspaper apps and other things. So the New York times, San Francisco Chronicle, not the Washington post cause they do this, uh, the athletic actually. And there's a footnote there because, uh, I'm talking about dark mode.
01:16:04 ◼ ► Dark mode also has been around a while. And if you're reading, uh, at night with the lights out to have the blinding white background with black text on it is no good.
01:16:16 ◼ ► And, uh, many of my newspaper apps don't support it. The athletic, my, my sports subscription content service that I enjoy, they added dark mode support in their articles. But then when you go back out to the menu of stories, no dark mode.
01:16:34 ◼ ► So you're like reading an article and you're like, ah, this is good. And then you press the back button and you go, oh, it burns. Why, why would you do that?
01:16:42 ◼ ► So dark mode support in places that where I read things just for Pete's sake, it's not that hard. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just told developers of implementing a feature is not that hard guys.
01:16:55 ◼ ► You can do this. Yeah, you can, you can do this. It's, it's been a year and you knew it was coming for another year.
01:17:04 ◼ ► Facebook have just started rolling out. Isn't that wild Facebook? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I get it. Maybe you have other priorities. I mean, quite honestly, the New York times, just as a side note, um, their iPad app has had a bug where when you tap one of the, it has three tabs, it is a three tab interface.
01:17:25 ◼ ► It's got the front page, this new version of its app that they released six months ago. There's a front page version of it. There's a personalized thing, which I find completely useless, but you can personalize stories.
01:17:36 ◼ ► And then there's sections of the newspaper, which used to be at the top level in at like a, or like in a hamburger menu. And now it's in a tab. So it's bad. They made a bad decision there.
01:17:47 ◼ ► But the best part is the first time you tap on it, it's blank. And then you tap out and then you tap back in. And now the menu appears. It's been like that for six months. I filed a bug with them and they're like, yep, we're working on it.
01:18:03 ◼ ► I guess put it, put it with dark mode. I don't know what a mess. And I know being a developer of newspaper apps is a thankless task, but I'll just point people to the Washington post, which is doing it right when it comes to dark mode, please be like the Washington post and give me dark mode everywhere.
01:18:19 ◼ ► Cause if we're reading at night, like it is the one reason to use dark mode and then these apps don't support it. It's infuriating.
01:18:30 ◼ ► I wanted to just cheat a little bit and just to point something out, just to show that nobody's perfect. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I was thinking very hard about, about can we, can we ding Apple for not supporting Apple features? The mail app doesn't have a share sheet.
01:18:46 ◼ ► And that's wild to me. Like there's no way to share an email message, which is like pretty easy to do. Like just create a PDF. Like it's not hard, but like there's just like a really weird omission to me, you know, like to, to not be able to share, to have like a share sheet on an email.
01:19:06 ◼ ► You can forward and you can print, but you can't share it. Like I would love to see them do something, you know, there's anything you can do here. You could share it as text, you could share it as a PDF.
01:19:23 ◼ ► I was 13 created the way for you to be able to choose, you know, you can top that tap that thing at the top and you can choose how do I want to share this, this file. Like it's, you know, every other third party application has a way to share emails to other applications
01:19:37 ◼ ► that I have used. Um, whoever it creates a link to it, which is a thing that exists, you can create links to, to mail messages. So, you know, it will be great if they did it, they don't. And I just wanted to mention that.
01:19:50 ◼ ► All right. I'm going to, uh, say something about one of my favorite apps, which is Twitter ethic from the icon factory, which I like a lot, but, um, they don't properly support contextual menus.
01:20:07 ◼ ► There's a very nice contextual menu system in iOS and Twitter ethic. You don't use it. So let me describe to you what happens if you tap and hold. And by the way, currently, um, you can't, you can't like two finger click on a track pad. That doesn't work.
01:20:24 ◼ ► But if you tap and hold on a tweet, you get a contextual menu, an iOS contextual menu. It'll let me airdrop the tweet. It will let me share the tweet. It will let me open the tweet in a different app. It'll let me run shortcuts. All of those things are there.
01:20:41 ◼ ► But on the tweet itself, in addition to the reply and retweet and all and favorite commands, there's a, an ellipsis icon. There's a more icon. Do you think that that brings up the same contextual menu?
01:20:59 ◼ ► Because it does not. It brings up a different menu of items that you also might want to do like muting people or sharing. There's literally a share tab within that tab, a muffle, manage and lists, uh, show discussion.
01:21:19 ◼ ► And they're not, they're not connected. Tapping share brings up the other thing. I love the app. Icon factory is great. I don't understand how there hasn't been a context menu unification here because I really like those features.
01:21:38 ◼ ► Um, having them all in one place is very useful. Having to get to having to tap and hold and remember tap and hold means you have to wait for the time out for that context menu to show in order to run a shortcut based on a tweet.
01:21:52 ◼ ► I don't understand why this is happening. Anyway, more, more apps should be more consistent with context menus. And I, I understand that, uh, things change over time, but, um, at some point having two contextual menus in different places is not, it's gotta stop. Yeah.
01:22:11 ◼ ► Uh, I would like a multi window support on in the Twitter app, the official Twitter app. Um, so then I could get my timeline on one side and I could have, uh, like my mentions or whatever on the other side.
01:22:28 ◼ ► And then that would also allow me to hide the trending trends as well. Cause I, I really don't like seeing those in the window on the side. So yeah, I would like that. That would be nice. I would like multi window support is really not very highly supported in a lot of places.
01:22:47 ◼ ► Um, I could list that all day, but the applications that I actually want, Twitter is one of them. Um, and I would like to see it there. I'll just say it's not even a full pick at this point. Google sheets and Google docs. I want those to have multi window as well.
01:23:01 ◼ ► Um, yeah, you know, multi window, I think maybe doesn't have as many practical use cases as we thought it would when we were first thinking about it. Um, there aren't really a lot of applications that I would use in multi window. They're the three that I would like to the most. And they're also three that don't support.
01:23:19 ◼ ► Yeah, I have on them, on my Mac, I frequently have a Google sheet open twice to different tabs, which is actually amazing, right? That's the thing that you can't even do. I don't think on apps. Right. But, but you can do it in web browser, right? Where I've got, I've got one document with different tabs and I've opened a different tab in a different window.
01:23:42 ◼ ► I would love to do that on my iPad. It's actually a Google advantage. Um, I'm going to just I pick, I'm picking a whole bunch of video apps here, but including my, um, from my cable provider Xfinity, uh, which blocks Airplay support.
01:23:59 ◼ ► And I am of the opinion that if there's, um, if you're a video app and I can watch video on my screen, I really should be able to watch it on my Apple TV. Yeah. If you don't have an Apple TV app, okay. I hate it that they don't support Airplay. And I'm sure there's some sort of, well, our license technically says, or there's a strategy of like, well, we don't want to be on that box.
01:24:19 ◼ ► But like, if you're going to offer an iPad for a video app and like it's, and you're going out to an Apple TV, like presumably there should be, this should be a secure connection, right? There should be some level of trust in what Apple is doing.
01:24:31 ◼ ► Like I should be able to put that on a screen and I'm not, you know, turning off mirroring is a similar thing, by the way, a lot of these apps also turn off mirroring. I'm not sure I believe that it's actually legally required.
01:24:43 ◼ ► I think maybe it's more strategic, but like, you know, if you play video, like it should just go to Airplay. You shouldn't, I don't like the idea that you could, you can even opt to disable Airplay.
01:25:01 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there, there's so many, I almost put that on the list is picture in picture in general.
01:25:08 ◼ ► It needs to be more widely supported, but YouTube is the real offender. I was going to ding Safari for this too. I feel like Safari should be more aggressive in, cause like I have a bookmarklet that forces things into picture in picture, but like I think Safari should just be more aggressive in offering picture in picture.
01:25:28 ◼ ► It will. Well, it will in full screen, right? Then you can put it in picture in picture.
01:25:38 ◼ ► Let's see, where do I want to go here? I'm going to go to rather than mention another, an app we've already beaten up, I'm going to mention Microsoft office and I'm sure it's coming. Microsoft office just supported multi window support. So they were very slow.
01:25:51 ◼ ► Yeah. Apple in their press releases for the trackpad stuff referenced mouse point of support.
01:26:05 ◼ ► Yeah. So they, they just did window multi window. They're now going to do mouse point of support, but they haven't yet. So I'm going to put on the list after you've edited text on the iPad with a trackpad.
01:26:18 ◼ ► And when you go to a text editor that doesn't support it, it makes me want to cry. It's so bad.
01:26:26 ◼ ► And, and also I think about like the cross hairs and stuff in Excel, like there's so many things that will be much better in Microsoft office with proper support for pointer, but it's not there yet.
01:26:38 ◼ ► So that was, we had lists of five. That was what we wanted to talk about. Usually in our drafts, we do reference things, uh, that we didn't pick.
01:26:46 ◼ ► So I will very quickly reference three more that I didn't pick, but they're not the official list. This is kind of a draft, but I guess, you know, whatever we draft everything these days.
01:27:00 ◼ ► Not to go too far here, but I wonder if there is a way for Apple to basically say, if you're going to be on our platforms, you have to be on the iPad.
01:27:09 ◼ ► Because I, I feel, I feel pretty strongly about this. Like there were some apps that are iPhone only and I don't understand it. I don't understand it. It's frustrating.
01:27:19 ◼ ► And I think, I mean, the iPad's doing okay now, but like if ever Apple was going to use its platform leverage to say, no, you need to be on, I guess, I guess Instagram's leverage there is, do you want us to not be on the iPhone?
01:27:32 ◼ ► But Apple would say, do you want to not be on the iPhone Instagram? Do you really want to do that? Or can you, oh, poor Instagram had to make an iPad app. Come on.
01:27:41 ◼ ► They have like a pretty good web app that I use on my iPad. So just make an iPad version. You've already built the layout, right? And like over time I've added all the features. Like you can do stories in the web app. You can do messages in the web app. Make an iPad app.
01:27:59 ◼ ► Um, every single banking app should get dark mode and push notifications for transactions. I know some of the cool apps have them, but most traditional banking apps do not have these. And I would like that. Um, and I also in the same way, I want every video app to support the TV app.
01:28:18 ◼ ► Because I want universal search. I want to be able to download videos and I want to be able to get picture in picture support. And if things are in the TV app, then that would work. But, uh, they don't. And I, I understand for the TV apps, maybe even more like one Netflix don't support the TV app. Right?
01:28:36 ◼ ► Like I get, I actually get that one because it's like, they don't gain anything, but I'm still saying I would like it, but I wouldn't necessarily put that one in my official list because that there's a lot to that one. I think it maybe isn't for the other stuff.
01:28:50 ◼ ► And for me, I mean, I had, I was going to beat up on Google apps too, because you know, they also don't have, um, proper pointer support. They also don't have proper keyboard support. They have keyboard support, but like basic things. Like if you hold down the command key to see what this keyboard shortcuts are, it's not there. Um, and it could be better.
01:29:13 ◼ ► Uh, the big one that I wanted to mention, you already mentioned Slack, so I sort of steered away from this, but I, it frustrates me greatly. Slack is actually removing things like support for shortcuts, which they used to have some of, and now they have none of.
01:29:29 ◼ ► Um, I want shortcuts support for Slack. I want to be able to have a shortcut generate a Slack message and post it. And they seem to not want to do that. And it, it, it, they're going the wrong direction there. It's really frustrating.
01:29:47 ◼ ► Yeah, it feels like, you know, I get it. Like when Slack, this is the thing, the Slack, right? When they came on the scene, they were the cool little indie. We're going to make everything better. They're an enterprise company now, which is where they should be.
01:30:03 ◼ ► But it means they now act like an enterprise company, right? The Mac app is Electron, right? Like they do different things. They care about different things. Yeah. I guess like one of my favorite things about Slack is like so much of their brand is focused around emoji.
01:30:24 ◼ ► But they're always really late implementing your emoji, you know, what you're going to do. And that is a list of things that we would love to see come to apps that if we were, you know, if Apple were going to be doing this thing, which John Gruber has proposed, this is the type of stuff that Jason and Myke would like to see fixed.
01:30:42 ◼ ► Yeah. Maybe we've just proven why they don't do this. Well, but I would say I think this is why they should, because like all of this stuff, like I don't think that we are being, for a lot of this stuff, I don't think that we're being unfair.
01:30:54 ◼ ► Some of this stuff is one year old. Yes. And my gut feeling is that if Apple were going to bring down the hammer about things that they had decided were key platform features that need to be supported in all apps, that one year is probably not enough, but two years probably is.
01:31:09 ◼ ► So it's like, okay, you need dark mode by fall of 2021, but you need to have dark mode in your app by fall of 2021. No exceptions, right? Like that seems reasonable to me.
01:31:22 ◼ ► I give a pass for at the moment for like Google and Microsoft for not supporting the trackpad because that kind of came out of nowhere. Right? Like if we knew it was coming, but it did kind of come out of nowhere. Right? Like three months earlier than people expected and it was just immediately there. Right?
01:31:40 ◼ ► But stuff like dark mode, picture in picture, uh, the files support stuff like multi window, they should be supported by now.
01:31:52 ◼ ► And again, I'm open and I'm sure this is going to happen. I'm open to any developer coming and saying, well, you got to understand the reason we don't support this is X and like, that's fine. Like if there's an extenuating circumstance that we don't know about, I get it. But beyond a certain point, it's just intransigence. Right. But beyond a certain point, it's not, well, there's a bug and Apple.
01:32:14 ◼ ► First off, if Apple were in charge, there would be that conversation of like, well, we can't support this because of X and Apple would be like, all right, well, you're good for now. Or, or maybe they'd be jerks and have to go to the press. But you know, the idea is, is that after a while, you're not doing it because of Apple.
01:32:31 ◼ ► You're using Apple as an excuse. Um, and while I'm open to somebody from Dropbox coming to me and saying, you don't understand how bad this is. Um, and I would listen to that because maybe it's true, but my, my perception is that it's also being used as an excuse.
01:32:47 ◼ ► So anyway, sorry, developers. I think most of the developers who are tuned into a program like this are not the people who would support this camp, right? Because they're excited about new Apple platform technologies. It's just some of these companies.
01:33:02 ◼ ► Like, yeah, anyway, that's, that's in the end. I do think that Apple, um, should as an iPad user, I would love Apple to have leaned on some app developers harder about supporting platform features because in some of these cases, honestly, with Safari as good as it is on the iPad.
01:33:22 ◼ ► Now, sometimes I wonder if these apps should even exist because the web pages are, are as good. Like if you're not Google docs, I struggle with that, which is like, doesn't work as well. Well, neither of them work right now. Right?
01:33:35 ◼ ► Now, like the Google docs web version worked worse in some ways than even the Google docs app. Right. But in some ways I would argue it's better than the Google docs app. So right. Like, I don't know. It's, it's frustrating.
01:33:51 ◼ ► So anyway, yeah, we drafted some things that's for those who are not used to drafts as list banking. Sometimes we just make lists and there's no winner. It's a, we're all winners. We're all losers here. Cause these are, these are the features in this case. We are all losers. So I hope that was fun for everybody.
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01:35:34 ◼ ► It's time for some #AskUPGRADE questions to finish out this week's episode. The first comes from Dylan. Dylan says, "Do you think that there is a maximum speed for computers doing everyday time?"
01:35:52 ◼ ► I don't entirely know what Dylan is getting at because is it a physical limitation? Can computers become physically infinitely faster? Is that not possible? Or is it more generally like, can computers eclipse our needs?
01:36:12 ◼ ► The way I read this question is, are current computers so fast that they're already too fast for the most of the tasks that a typical person would do? Like, you don't run into speed barriers anymore or responsiveness barriers anymore.
01:36:26 ◼ ► Yeah, I have two answers. One is, I do think that they will keep finding ways to make computers faster if you look at the history. This is a really great John Syracuse question, by the way. But if you look at the history of processors, that we are going to run into more and more challenges, making smaller and more efficient.
01:36:47 ◼ ► But every time we've thought, well, they can't get any smaller, we found a way to get them smaller. So I think that's going to still happen. But you also see the methods that are used for building computers change.
01:36:58 ◼ ► We have multi-core processors now, right? So it's not just a single, in the old days it was a processor, but now we have multiple processor cores all operating independently, which allows the computer to be faster because it's doing more work with every tick of the clock.
01:37:12 ◼ ► So that is going to continue. And they added the GPUs and how they work. You look at what Apple's been doing with things like Neural Engine, right, where they built custom hardware for certain kinds of work.
01:37:28 ◼ ► So I think that the drive to continually have faster and also more power efficient and smaller technology, that will continue. And I think we've shown our resourcefulness in continuing that.
01:37:43 ◼ ► In terms of for regular people for everyday use, I feel like computers were fast enough for regular people for everyday use years ago now, like many years ago now.
01:37:56 ◼ ► And while there are particular tasks, like editing 4K video or something, that require a lot of power, it's been a long time since there was a computer for what regular people use a computer for that couldn't do that job.
01:38:14 ◼ ► Like, I really think it's been a long time. And our operating systems get richer and more complicated and those require higher amounts of RAM and faster processors and all of that.
01:38:26 ◼ ► But not to get all philosophical for a moment, but like, I could write my articles just as easily on a PowerBook 160 running right now as I can today on my...
01:38:37 ◼ ► I don't need the power of my iMac Pro to write an article. Like, I don't. To edit a big podcast or edit a video, maybe. But not for the task.
01:38:48 ◼ ► So if all you're using, like most people are, is the web and calendar and watching YouTube videos and sending emails, computers have been overkill for that for a very long time.
01:39:02 ◼ ► I think a good example of this is like the power of my iPhone and what I can actually do with it.
01:39:11 ◼ ► Right? Like those two things are quite different and those chips are so much more powerful than I can really do in a lot of instances of a phone.
01:39:21 ◼ ► Well, the iPad we've talked about for a while, the 2018 iPad Pro that came out, it's like, have any of us really pushed that to the limits and said this iPad is not fast enough?
01:39:32 ◼ ► It's running Mac OS now, that chip. So, you know, I think we can all argue that that is a more taxing operating system and it's seeming to do a pretty good job of that at the moment from everything we've heard about the developer kit.
01:39:44 ◼ ► So we've got a bunch of questions like this next one from Xiled and we're just going to answer this one and it will be a catchall for all of these questions that we've been getting for a while.
01:39:55 ◼ ► So I have a MacBook Pro, which is a 13 inch late 2013, nearing the end of its loyal service and with a failing battery.
01:40:02 ◼ ► I was awaiting the keyboard transition to upgrade, but now I'm tempted by ARM. Do I get a 10th gel Intel MacBook Pro now or wait for Apple Silicon?
01:40:11 ◼ ► Well, this is an easier answer because it's a failing battery, right? And I actually answered Xiled when this question came in and what I said was I'd pay for the battery replacement because you're going to extend the life even if it's six months.
01:40:31 ◼ ► And then you're going to be through to the other side. And if those, if you want to wait for those like new, rumored new, new ARM laptops coming out next year, maybe you could even get to that point.
01:40:42 ◼ ► But you certainly could get to that first ARM set of MacBooks that are coming out by the end of the year.
01:40:50 ◼ ► So I'd say in this particular case, if you could hold on and the failing battery is the thing that's that's killing it, you know, can you hold on or can you replace the battery, which is in many cases not a particularly expensive or hard replacement to make?
01:41:04 ◼ ► Maybe let it ride. And I think I would say that for everybody at this point is if you absolutely, like I, I just bought my daughter a MacBook Air like two weeks ago.
01:41:17 ◼ ► So if because she had a 12 inch MacBook and it was causing her all sorts of trouble and she's going to go back to school eventually.
01:41:25 ◼ ► And I wanted to get her set up before then. I wanted to run migration assistant and all that. I didn't want to walk her through that on the phone or something, right?
01:41:33 ◼ ► Like I wanted to do all that for her so that when she goes, she can take this new computer with her.
01:41:42 ◼ ► So like, if you need it now, get it now and it's going to last you for years and that's fine.
01:41:54 ◼ ► Like if you can defer and delay your Mac purchases until you can see how this arm thing is going to work out.
01:42:10 ◼ ► But as with all computer purchases, if you need it now, just buy it now because every computer goes out of date.
01:42:20 ◼ ► And you can't live your life always waiting for the right time to upgrade because it's there will always be another upgrade.
01:42:29 ◼ ► And there's nothing you can do to change that. So defer if you can. And if you can't, don't.
01:42:34 ◼ ► Yes, I would, my answer would be mostly the same. I guess maybe so slightly differently.
01:42:41 ◼ ► Like, I think right now is a time where buying a Mac does carry with it more potential change than ever.
01:42:59 ◼ ► It's like we're going from one era to another. So there will never be a clearer, more visible and advanced dividing line than we're standing at right now.
01:43:07 ◼ ► But at the same vein, like if you were buying a Mac two years ago, you could, you know, from the idea of what it's going to be like on the inside at least, you could make some pretty decent guesses at that.
01:43:20 ◼ ► But at the moment, we're at like a fork in the road and we don't really know what it's going to be like.
01:43:26 ◼ ► We can make guesses, but the potential for how different this could be is more wild as we spoke about at the beginning of the episode.
01:43:46 ◼ ► But if you can do like what we what Jason recommended, if you're able to just repair that machine for like get it to run for a little bit longer.
01:43:55 ◼ ► Try and do that, because if you care about computers, which we're guessing you do, there could be some really cool computers in like three months, four months that you might otherwise be frustrated that you missed.
01:44:16 ◼ ► Winter charm and the relay of her members discord asked, do you think that Apple will offer multiple chip options for their arm max, like how you could choose an I five, I seven or I nine option with some of the current models?
01:44:29 ◼ ► I in a particular model, I'm going to say no, but there will be different models for different products.
01:44:37 ◼ ► They might, but my gut feeling is that the 16 inch MacBook Pro or whatever will have a chip in it, and there won't be one of these get a slightly faster chip for because that's that's kind of an effect of Intel offering different varieties.
01:44:52 ◼ ► But Apple would have to design different varieties. And while Apple is a very well versed chip maker now, you don't see that in the iPad, the iPhone. Right.
01:45:01 ◼ ► And I don't think that will be the case for the Mac either. I don't think they're going to create variants on a chip inside a model just for kicks of the upgrades that will be available, which will probably be not many options.
01:45:15 ◼ ► I don't think this will be one of them. Yeah, it just it strikes me as unlikely that Apple is going to make because remember, if there's a bill to order model that's got a higher, you know, more cores or faster processor like so now Apple has to make this high end variant.
01:45:30 ◼ ► And it's just for people who built the order like I mean, maybe there's a really good chip in the 16 inch MacBook Pro, and it's only, you know, a good chip in the 13 inch and the 13 inch can be upgraded.
01:45:45 ◼ ► But even then, I kind of don't see it. I think I think the most likely scenario is that they're going to be some variants of these processors for like the MacBook Pro or or maybe like an iMac Pro versus like an iMac or a MacBook Air.
01:45:59 ◼ ► Like there that there will be like a processor variant. Maybe like they may also be really similar across all of them.
01:46:08 ◼ ► But but if there are variants, I think they're going to be small. And I think every model itself is not going to have an option for a different processor.
01:46:20 ◼ ► I think you're going to get what you're going to get like with the iPad and the iPhone.
01:46:30 ◼ ► I have tried different things. I found that I have a I had a reminders list by the way of TV shows I should watch that I just found the other day and I was like, Oh, I haven't looked at this in six months. Right.
01:46:40 ◼ ► It's like, great. I still need to watch the Americans. Great. But I did use Just Watch for a while. But I decided or not just watch Just Watch is the is where you find what streaming service the thing is on.
01:46:52 ◼ ► And I highly recommend that I used to use TV time for a while. And TV time was okay. But the problem is it is not designed for how I watch TV.
01:47:02 ◼ ► Like I really do just want to kind of have a list. I don't want to sit there and go, Yep, I watched that episode. Yay. I don't want to do that. I kind of want to just keep tracking.
01:47:10 ◼ ► So theoretically, a note or reminder list would be the right way to do it. But those have failed me too. So I don't really have a system right now.
01:47:19 ◼ ► Other than I do add things to my list on Netflix and my favorites on Hulu and up next on Apple TV plus I do that so that they're like visible as a thing that keeps getting put in my face of you might want to watch this but that's about it right now.
01:47:35 ◼ ► There was a similarly an app called TV forecast, which John Voorhees wrote a really great review of on Mac stories. It's made by I believe Matt Comey is the developer of this.
01:47:49 ◼ ► And it's a really beautiful application. But similarly, I think it's wanting to do a type of kind of tracking that I don't want to do which is that like, I watched this episode of watches.
01:48:02 ◼ ► Yeah, like I don't want to do that either. I'm not a life logger of TV shows. I've seen right like I don't care about anything. I don't really watch a lot of weekly episodic programming right.
01:48:15 ◼ ► We are binge watchers. So I really all me and Adina have a shared Apple note that just has a bunch of content in it right like you make a really excellent point, which is I think my biggest problem with these apps is is that they are granular on per episode.
01:48:31 ◼ ► And that's not what I need to track. No, it's not what I need to track if I'm watching a show that releases weekly. I know it releases weekly. I'm aware that it's currently in season and I will watch it when it comes out not concerned about that.
01:48:42 ◼ ► And if I'm in the middle of a binge or a slow binge the place that I'm watching it knows what episode I'm at like and I'm aware that I'm watching it. Yeah, I don't forget. Yeah, I don't need I don't need to know that what I need to know is if I watched a season of something and there's another season coming, but it's not there yet.
01:49:00 ◼ ► Okay, watch this season at the season level and at the show level you should watch this show. I don't need that episode by episode part of it and and I think all of those TV trackers are like that.
01:49:11 ◼ ► That's excellent. I hadn't thought of that but I think that's exactly what my problem is is that I'm not interested in in tracking specific episodes. I need to track. Here's a show. I haven't seen or I've only watched the first four seasons of this show.
01:49:26 ◼ ► That's what I need to track. And so for us an Apple note works perfectly because it also doesn't remove the stuff. So if there's a show this season later on if we're like looking for a show like, oh, I wonder if there's a new season of this now and then we check
01:49:43 ◼ ► we're very like streaming service orientated with our viewing, you know, and so it's rare like the last show that we watched week to week was Watchmen and I cannot works except for the Apple TV plus stuff I guess so we did that as well.
01:50:01 ◼ ► But before those I genuinely couldn't think of a time where I'd last done that. And if we weren't covering the Apple TV plus content on this show, I would have waited until they were done and and binge them like I only watched the Apple TV plus content weekly because it was useful for me to watch it weekly for work. Otherwise I would have waited like the same as like we haven't watched Mandalorian yet.
01:50:23 ◼ ► It's on our list. It's come we're going to watch it soon, but I wasn't going to start watching it until it was all out on Disney Plus in the UK, which took a while, right? Right.
01:50:33 ◼ ► Eight weeks. Eight weeks. And finally today Ivan asks, I'm trying to decide between getting an iPhone 11 or 11 Pro right now. Do you have any updated thoughts on these devices having lived with them for 10 months?
01:50:46 ◼ ► For me, I like small phones and so the 11 Pro is my preference. I think the 11 is really nice. I like it. I've been it's an 11 that I've got the beta on like I like it. It's really nice. But I prefer the size of the 11 Pro which is why I have that one.
01:51:05 ◼ ► Federico and Steven were talking about this in a group thread that I'm in a couple of days ago and I completely agree with their point that like the iPhone 11 series, you know, like I have a Pro Max but like especially the Pro.
01:51:20 ◼ ► It is an incredibly good phone in every stretch of the imagination. Like, usually I would say to say like to Ivan, I got to wait we're so close to the next one.
01:51:32 ◼ ► If you for whatever reason want to get this phone now, like and you can get a good deal on it. You should do it because there's going to look the 12 is going to have a lot of really great features but it's also going to be expensive.
01:51:42 ◼ ► If you can get a good deal on an iPhone 11 or 11 Pro and it wouldn't bother you to be a year or two behind these phones are fantastic. The cameras are incredible.
01:51:51 ◼ ► Like they are very, very, very good phones. Like I have liked my 11 Pro Max more than I have liked other phones in this design style. Like it really for me excels on every level.
01:52:07 ◼ ► There isn't a part of it where I don't like it. It's really a very, very excellent phone. So if you want one and you have good reasons for wanting to get one when there's you know we're so close to the next one, even though we'll actually for once don't really know how close we are to the next one, but presumably like maybe three or four months away.
01:52:26 ◼ ► Then, then I would say to go for it. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode of the show you can send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade or use the question mark us got great sign in the relay from relay from members discord.
01:52:42 ◼ ► They will be put in to sheet for us to pick from for future episode. If you want to get access to that relay FM members discord and support this show. You can go to get upgrade plus.com where you can become a relay for member and support upgrade directly and you will get extra content and no ads and if you are an upgrade plus subscriber as always, there's more content after the theme song and I want to make a little note here, Jason, if I may, for upgrade plus members.
01:53:11 ◼ ► So I had somebody say to me that they wanted to hear more of the theme song because we have our special obviously amazing summer fun theme. I have been like not leaving a lot of the song because I've been worried that people would forget and like turn off the show if they're upgrade plus members and not listen to everything that's after.
01:53:30 ◼ ► So I'm going to say now in the show. Don't forget it's there and I'm going to give you more of the song now. So like from now, there will be more song, but don't forget there is still show after the rest of the theme song.
01:53:44 ◼ ► If you're an upgrade plus member. Okay, so I just want to mention that. So there you go. Get upgrade plus.com if you want that. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of upgrade. You can find Jason's work online at six colors.com and he's at J Snell on Twitter. Do you know what I saw today, Jason?
01:54:00 ◼ ► We're two weeks away from the next earnings call. It's going to be on July 30th. Oh man, I got to put that on my calendar. Yep. So there you go. That's the personalized charts.
01:54:10 ◼ ► So that will be our August 3rd episode. We'll talk about what I'm sure is going to be a fascinating earnings call. We're going to be a barn burner.
01:54:17 ◼ ► Because honestly could not predict it like there is going to be some stuff up some stuff down. It's going to be an interesting one. I'm sure about that. You can find me online. I'm I Myke I am Y K E. If you want to find show notes for this week's episode.
01:54:31 ◼ ► I have a bunch of links and information about stuff we've spoken about. You can find them in your podcast app of choice. I've got a relay dot.com slash upgrade slash three zero six. Thanks to Pingdom Kiwi Co and DoorDash for their support of this episode.