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366: The Node Legacy

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:12   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 366. Today's show is brought to you by Instabug,

00:00:20   Calm and Memerful. You may have forgotten, but it's still the Summer of Fun! And I'm one of your hosts,

00:00:27   Myke Hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason Snow. Hi, Myke Hurley. Did you know

00:00:31   that on a leap year, you can now listen to every single episode, an episode of Upgrade every day?

00:00:38   Every day. Do you know, I thought last week I was surprised you didn't mention anything about the

00:00:42   fact that it was 365. I was thinking about child abuse media instead, so I missed it.

00:00:49   Less fun! So I mentioned it today with the leap year wrinkle there, 366. This will be,

00:00:56   if there was a February 29, then you would listen to this on December 31st, and you would have

00:01:02   completed your daily Upgrade pilgrimage. And if it's not a leap year, then this would be the

00:01:09   January 1st of the next year. Happy you've been listening to an Upgrade episode a day for a year.

00:01:15   Yeah, exactly. I have a #SnowTalk question that comes from Ryan, and this one feels like one of

00:01:21   those questions that's going to start a war. Ryan asks, "When writing in Markdown, do you use

00:01:27   asterisks or underscores for italic and bold characters?" All right, so Markdown fans,

00:01:34   people who don't know about Markdown. Let me, so Markdown, the idea is you just write it with

00:01:39   plain text, and the styles are implied, and I use Markdown for all my writing. I thought about this.

00:01:45   This is one of those things where, like, they say, "How do you tie your shoes?" and you have

00:01:48   to actually do it in order to be like, "Oh, that's how I do it," because you've internalized it.

00:01:54   The answer is I use underscores around italics. So the rule, by the way, in Markdown is if you use

00:02:03   one of underscores or asterisks, it's italic, and if you use two of underscores or asterisks,

00:02:11   it's bold. So what I do, and I've done this for years, my italics is one underscore around the

00:02:21   italicized phrase, and my bold is two asterisks around the bolded phrase. So that's my answer,

00:02:31   is I differentiate them, not just by their number, but by which one I use. And to me,

00:02:36   two asterisks around something absolutely represents bold, and one underscore around

00:02:42   something absolutely represents italics. - So wait, it's one underscore on each side

00:02:49   to make something italicized, and two asterisks around each side to make it bold?

00:02:55   - Yes. - Again, this is one of those things where I know I have a system, I don't know what it is,

00:03:02   and also as well, because some apps interpret it differently anyway, which is just a whole other

00:03:06   annoying thing. I do think that it's a strange decision. To me, I think it would make more sense

00:03:11   to have one asterisk makes it bold, one underscore makes it underlined. I feel like that would be my

00:03:17   perfect-- - I mean, only John Gruber knows for sure, but I think that's the question. I think

00:03:22   what he's doing is, when he built Markdown, is he was recognizing that some people do asterisks,

00:03:28   and some people do underscores, and so he decided to sort of punt on that, and instead just say it's

00:03:33   one for italic and two for bold. But the way I do it is, I don't italicize things with asterisks,

00:03:41   right? It doesn't feel right to me to do it that way, so I do it the other way. And Markdown is

00:03:49   a thing that came out of plain text message board and use net group posting standards, right? When

00:03:59   all you had was plain text, people would use markup like asterisks to emphasize things. So

00:04:07   that's where it comes from, and in fact, I'm using it very much like I used it on message boards in

00:04:15   plain text before. It just feels comfortable to me, but that's how I do it. So I do differentiate,

00:04:20   because I don't like the idea of having it just be the number of them. I'm also differentiating by

00:04:25   using asterisks and underscores. This is like, apologies to people who don't care about Markdown,

00:04:30   this is like asking somebody what their favorite font is. Well, but only if there was two choices

00:04:36   of fonts. Right, Arial and Helvetica, right? They only two. It's my understanding. And if you use

00:04:43   all of those things at the same time, it's Comic Sans. Thank you so much for sending in this

00:04:48   question, Ryan. If you would like to be like Ryan, just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk or

00:04:52   use question marks SnowTalk in the relay FM members discord. I have some Apple TV+ content

00:04:58   follow up for you. Well, one thing, Merry Christmas to you, Jason. Oh, yes. Merry Christmas to all.

00:05:04   Merry Christmas. It's Ted Lasso-mas. Yeah. Interesting that they threw a Christmas episode

00:05:10   of Ted Lasso in August. It's weird. I don't know why they did this. My assumption is there's just

00:05:16   something about like time has been messed up and production was maybe stalled and maybe this was

00:05:20   supposed to be at this point in the timeline. I don't know. So what I know is that they ordered

00:05:25   10 episodes. This is the first I had heard of this. They ordered 10 episodes and then Apple came

00:05:29   back to them and said, how about 12? Here's some more money. Make more Ted Lasso. Also, they were

00:05:34   under the assumption that they were going to premiere three episodes. Yeah. Like they did

00:05:37   last time. And so they built sort of a three episode arc that they planned out and they were

00:05:42   released in one week installment. So very clearly Apple, they assumed that they would be on for

00:05:49   seven weeks again with 10 episodes and Apple came to them and said, you're going to be on for 12

00:05:56   weeks. Here's some more money. Make more episodes. We're going to extend Ted Lasso and the time that

00:06:00   it's airing so that we can get the most out of it. And this, and they added two standalone episodes

00:06:06   that weren't connected to their story arc. This is one and there's another one later on. I don't

00:06:12   know about the timing. I don't know if they just decided they didn't care and they would release

00:06:15   a Christmas episode. I didn't know if they built the Christmas episode to sort of be loosely

00:06:20   connected so that it could get pulled out and run at Christmas time, or if they didn't care,

00:06:26   or if they thought that there was going to be some other schedule where they were going to be

00:06:30   premiering in December. I honestly don't know, but instead in August, we got the Christmas episode

00:06:35   of Ted Lasso, which does not push forward any of the plot lines from the season. I'll say I loved

00:06:42   this episode in the way that I have continued to love season two of Ted Lasso. I think some people

00:06:46   are falling off now, which is a shame to me. I personally don't really understand why you would

00:06:52   not like this when we'd like the first season, but nevertheless, people have different tastes.

00:06:57   But I will say that this episode- I do have an idea.

00:07:00   Okay. I don't think that this episode hit as well as it would have for me if it was in December. I

00:07:05   really enjoyed it. I would have preferred to watch it at Christmas though.

00:07:08   Yeah, you can now. I mean, that's the beauty of streaming. But yeah, I actually was thinking,

00:07:13   why not make this even more standalone and just have it be a little surprise that there's a

00:07:19   Christmas special of Ted Lasso? Like the British television type of thing that they're going for

00:07:23   anyway. Because that's what it is, right? They're doing a Christmas- I watched enough Doctor Who

00:07:27   Christmas specials that I understand what a Christmas special is supposed to be. And so

00:07:31   people who are like, "Oh, it's so sentimental." And it's like, "Yeah, it's a Christmas special.

00:07:35   That's what they are." So here, I think the reason that some people are reacting badly to season two

00:07:41   of Ted Lasso in part is because they're trying to tell a story over the course of the season.

00:07:47   And probably most of the people who watch Ted Lasso did not watch it week by week. They've discovered

00:07:53   it since it was on. I think the challenge with anything like Ted Lasso is that they need to

00:07:58   create new conflict and then kind of go through it. And the beginning of season one is sort of

00:08:03   like set up for that. So we'll see. I mean, season two may end up being a disappointment.

00:08:08   I think it's unclear, but I think judging it based on the first part of it when they're trying to

00:08:14   tell a complete season of a story is not ideal. But I get it. I think also there's a lot of

00:08:22   scrutiny put to it. I had that moment myself in the first episode where I was watching it,

00:08:27   and I had put so much onto Ted Lasso because I was so enthralled with the first season.

00:08:33   And I'd watched all those episodes multiple times. And now there's a new episode. And it's like,

00:08:40   the pressure has really risen on it. I'm not going to have the same experience watching something for

00:08:46   the first time as something that I've sort of poured over the last year. And it's a sitcom.

00:08:53   That's the other part of it that I think people like, I've seen people are like, "Oh, all these

00:08:57   jokey kind of things." It's a sitcom. It's not a holy work of art. It is a sitcom and it's got

00:09:05   heart, but it's also kind of a joke factory with lots of dumb jokes. And that's part of it. And I

00:09:11   do wonder if maybe it got canonized a little bit too much in some people's minds. And I was able

00:09:17   to kind of accept that and that I needed to view it as what it is and not as a thing that maybe I

00:09:24   built it up to be a little bit in the intervening time where I was going over it a second and third

00:09:30   time and studying it and all of that. People don't like it and think it's bad. That's fine.

00:09:34   I think that that's a legitimate read if you want to have that. I'm not willing to put it that way.

00:09:38   I actually think that they're going somewhere and I think that the way they handle their

00:09:43   characters is really interesting. I could use with a few fewer Ted Lasso-isms. I think they're maybe

00:09:50   overdoing it on that a little bit. That was never the appeal to me was corny Ted Lasso sayings,

00:09:55   but I guess it was for some people. So I don't know. I'm enjoying it. I thought the Christmas

00:09:59   episode was a lot of fun. I also have friends who thought it was terrible. So, you know,

00:10:03   I don't know. I thought it was fun. I think it's going to be a Christmas classic. More to the point

00:10:08   is people are going to watch that episode at Christmas time. We will. Forever. Yeah. I loved

00:10:13   it. Like also is there anything Hannah Waddington cannot do? Oh my word. Yeah. Clearly they've

00:10:19   decided they're going to have her sing once a season. Yeah, but of course. Of course.

00:10:24   Yeah. Incredible. I want to give another full hearty recommendation for Shamika Doon. It's done

00:10:32   now. There was six episodes. Um, so I, I really recommend it. It was satisfying to me the whole

00:10:39   way through. So I've seen the first four and despite me not liking the title, I think it's

00:10:45   great. I think it's great. I think it's especially great if you know mid 20th century musicals

00:10:51   because a lot of the references are to those things. Knowing the format and knowing some of

00:10:58   the jokes and references that they're making can help as somebody who was brought up on,

00:11:02   especially The King and I. And I have some literacy of some of these other musicals. It is

00:11:09   not only is it very clever in that way, but because it's modern humans from our time being thrown into

00:11:17   the universe of the 50s musical, there are a lot of amazing commentaries about the divergence

00:11:25   between the present day and the mores of the period and the conventions of the period.

00:11:30   And, uh, you know, in episode four, there's a whole musical number. That's basically the sound

00:11:35   of music. Um, uh, but about biology, I'll put it that way. That's amazing. Cecily strong does a

00:11:45   great job. I have to tell you episode five. It's so good. There is like a scene that for me makes

00:11:52   the entire show worth watching. So like, I cannot wait for you to see the next episode. Uh, this

00:11:58   rich, Schmigadoon for me feels like another, uh, example of this like new HBO that I think of.

00:12:06   Yeah. Because this show is like, why, who, why did they make this? I really love it. And also

00:12:16   it was very clearly an expensive television show to make and because of like, and they are doing

00:12:23   things in a way to me that feel like just for the art of it that I really appreciate. So like it is

00:12:30   a musical and the majority of the singing is recorded live in the show. So it's, you know,

00:12:39   typically the way that especially with television shows is you get a clean recording in a studio and

00:12:44   you clean it up and then you mime it. But they do that in case they need to patch anything in.

00:12:49   But the majority of the singing in the show is done by the characters in the scenes in that

00:12:55   moment. And I think that that is a really great thing and I think adds to the overall show itself,

00:13:01   but that is not, it is going to be an expensive thing to do to get right. So I really appreciate

00:13:08   the show. I really love it. It's a little one of those, like, I don't know. I feel like for me,

00:13:14   "Shmegga Doon" just hasn't hit yet. And I think that if when it does, it's gonna,

00:13:20   people are like really gonna be talking about this. I think it's fantastic.

00:13:24   Yeah. I thought it was really, what I've seen of it so far, it's very good. It got over my

00:13:28   preconceptions of it as a kind of hacky title, but it, I think it actually, that title hits the

00:13:35   tone, which is, it is a level of the main characters are at a level of removed from it.

00:13:40   It's almost like disbelief that this could actually be a thing because they kind of,

00:13:44   they kind of know they're in a, in a TV show or really they're in a musical.

00:13:48   Musical shmusical, right? It's kind of like, yeah.

00:13:50   It's very, very meta. And there is a moment in episode four that I really liked

00:13:54   where music starts and one of the main characters basically is like, nope, nope. And they leave.

00:14:02   That's pretty good. I like it. I like that too. I refuse your musical number. I'm not going to do it.

00:14:06   I recommend it. I have some bad follow up for you too is bad news matter. The, the, uh,

00:14:13   interoperable smart home standard has been delayed to 2022. Uh, this is, I think the second delay of

00:14:19   the project now at this point, um, apparently the standards group have yet to complete their SDK

00:14:25   and certification process, which I don't know. It feels like all of it. It feels like you haven't

00:14:30   completed anything yet, which is, you know, um, but apparently first half of 2022, you know,

00:14:36   I was, I was reading article about this on the verge by Graham Gothenburg. And I kind of agree

00:14:41   that was something that he said, which is, this is surely a difficult thing to do with all of these

00:14:50   huge tech companies trying to come together. So yeah. And like on one level, it would be nice for

00:14:58   them to get there, but the point is that they're going there and that this is going to happen and

00:15:02   they're building a thing for the future so that we have a standard for smart home stuff. And that's

00:15:08   the most important thing. So what I'm saying is Myke, it doesn't really matter. Oh, that took a

00:15:14   second to yeah. Okay. Thanks for that. Does it matter? Does it not matter? It will matter

00:15:23   eventually, but not now. What's the matter, Myke? So I have a rumor roundup for you. Okay. I'm ready.

00:15:30   My body is ready. Let's do this in his power on newsletter. Mark Gurman reported that Apple

00:15:35   is planning to once again, have multiple events this fall. Once again, I would like to thank

00:15:39   Mark Gurman for mailing out his newsletter at the end of the week so that we get to tackle it on

00:15:43   Monday morning. Very good. Thank you. Friend of a friend of the podcast, Mark Gurman. Thank you very

00:15:47   much. It makes him an actually even more friend of the show. Yes. Benefactor of the podcast.

00:15:53   September for the iPhone 13, a new iPad mini, which we haven't spoken about yet, but we will

00:15:59   eventually. New AirPods. This is like the standard AirPod and Apple watch for September. And then the

00:16:08   MacBook pro refresh in a separate event in October or November. If it makes sense, right? Like,

00:16:14   we have an ask a couple of questions later on about this, so I won't spoil it, but

00:16:18   makes sense that they would probably have a very similar, Hey, we're going to do these things

00:16:23   online. Potentially. We will just roll them all out one time, just like they did last year and

00:16:29   make our lives exciting and incredibly busy for a multiple month period. And well, this is,

00:16:35   this is very much the model they've been using for a while now, right? Which is that they, they,

00:16:39   if they've gotten max to introduce, they don't introduce them in September. They introduced them

00:16:44   in October or November. And if they had an iPad pro, which they don't, cause they just released

00:16:49   one, they would do that at that same time. They don't, that doesn't need to be in the iPhone event,

00:16:53   but they very much want to have the Apple watch and the iPhone in that September event. That's

00:16:58   their big, you know, big launch event for those products. And then they will occasionally sweep

00:17:03   something new in there. Having the iPad mini in there, I think is interesting. Um, it seems

00:17:09   unnecessary. They could probably do it later, but it is more of a, you know, it's not really a pro

00:17:14   product. So having it be then and having new AirPods then sure. That sounds fine, but this is

00:17:19   this is how they've been handling it for a while. Pre pandemic is, is like this. So it sounds,

00:17:24   it's almost refreshingly back to business as usual for Apple product rollouts.

00:17:30   At least time was right. That is going to be September, which yeah. And then yes, for,

00:17:35   for those of us who cover this and talk about it, it's rolling thunder from the beginning of

00:17:39   September through the holiday, basically. Uh, and digit times can similarly reported that the MacBook

00:17:48   Pro, the new ones, the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros, they've entered mass production now. Um,

00:17:54   which would again seem to indicate that we're looking at kind of like October, November for

00:17:59   shipping. And while we're talking about laptops, Bingchi Kuo reported that the next MacBook Air is

00:18:05   still set for mid 2022. It will feature a similar industrial design to the upcoming MacBook Pro

00:18:11   and will be available in a range of colors. I think what that tells me about the laptops though,

00:18:17   is like that the MacBook Pro is going to look like the iMac and then the MacBook Air is going to look

00:18:22   like the MacBook Pro, which also looks like the iMac, you know, like in it's like physical shapes

00:18:27   and lines and all that kind of stuff, right. Which all looks like the iPad pro. So, so we're just

00:18:33   going to look very similar. Uh, and then there'll be some different colors and stuff, I guess,

00:18:37   but that's cool. Cause I love the way does iMac looks. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. That

00:18:41   sounds, it's all happening later than we thought. And that may just be because of production issues.

00:18:47   Legacy nodes. Yep. Sure. Right. They're just out there doing their noting. They're just noting.

00:18:54   The legacy of the nodes is that we have to wait for some new products. And that sounds like part

00:19:02   of their legacy from now on. Lord of the rings or something like, or like Harry Potter and the

00:19:07   legacy of the nodes and the legacy of the nodes. Sure. Sure. The node. It could, no,

00:19:14   it's like the born identity. It's the node legacy.

00:19:16   This episode of upgrade is brought to you by instabug building mobile apps presents challenges,

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00:20:36   That's T-R-Y try.instabug.com/upgradefm. Our thanks to instabug for their support of this show

00:20:44   and Relay FM. More on Apple and CSAM. This was never going to be a one week conversation

00:20:50   because there was just too much in the air after last week's episode. And there's still a lot going

00:20:56   on about this, but we're going to focus on just a couple of things today because...

00:21:00   - Apple continue releases clarifying documents and statements.

00:21:04   - Yeah. And there's all kinds of reports about this, right? Obviously, as you would expect,

00:21:10   there are people inside of Apple that are upset about it. There are lines being drawn from things

00:21:16   like people leaving Apple to this, whether it's true or not. There's a lot going on.

00:21:20   But there's two things with one specifically that I figured probably required the most

00:21:26   analysis today. The first being Joanna Stern's interview of Craig Federighi.

00:21:30   There's been a few interviews. This was the highest profile one and for me the best.

00:21:36   Yeah. You know what? Very good point. Yeah. This is very...

00:21:41   - I was talking to Dan Morin about this on the Six Colors Podcast and he said,

00:21:44   "Who will Tim Cook have to talk to next week?" And I'm like, "Maybe."

00:21:49   - I could imagine one of those morning show like ABC News or CNBC or whatever.

00:21:55   - Yeah. Yeah. But Craig, I understand why they ruled out Craig here because what they really

00:22:00   wanted to do was get into the technical detail of how it works with Joanna. And Craig's their

00:22:06   point person for that. He's their technical explanation guy.

00:22:09   - He's really likable. - He is.

00:22:11   - Right. So personally, I want to see Craig talk about this to Tim, right? Like, for those reasons.

00:22:18   One, I like the guy. And two, he knows. And also, as Craig does, gives a little bit more

00:22:26   information than Apple have given otherwise. Like, for example, Craig stated that the threshold for

00:22:31   alerting Apple, like the threshold of images or hashes found, is around 30 currently, which is

00:22:37   not a thing that has been published or written anywhere. But Craig just said it during the

00:22:42   interview. I've got some quotes that I will read and we can talk about them. It starts off,

00:22:48   with, "We wish this had come out a little bit more clearly. It was widely misunderstood.

00:22:54   Introducing these two features at the same time was a recipe for confusion."

00:22:58   I'm happy they said it because we all knew it. So I'm happy you said it because, really,

00:23:03   ultimately, this whole thing was a PR failure. That's what this ultimately was because Apple

00:23:10   were trying to show something good that they were doing, but instead undermined the entire thing.

00:23:17   So I'm happy they admitted it. Yeah, the conflation of those two things was a huge

00:23:22   part in the misconception. So I'm glad they admitted it. And again, Craig drops that number

00:23:29   of how many things cross the threshold. And then they later put out a white paper that goes into

00:23:34   detail about it, which is what I was saying earlier, that they keep explaining themselves.

00:23:39   Which is just, as we said last week, when you have to frequently ask,

00:23:43   answer the frequently asked questions. When they're actually frequently asked.

00:23:48   Something went wrong and they continually are frequently answering them. And so there's an

00:23:53   admission here that they know that they blew the rule out here. And that's separate from what the

00:23:58   details are of the system. It could be a good system or a bad system, but I think we could

00:24:04   probably agree that the level of confusion that this generated and bad PR this generated suggests

00:24:11   that they made a mistake in how they rolled this stuff out. And I think clearly the iMessage stuff

00:24:17   should have not been rolled out at the same time as the CSAM detection. And then they threw in the

00:24:22   Siri stuff too. Also Siri, you can talk to Siri about this stuff now. Like really? Really?

00:24:27   We'd all forgotten about that. And again, for right now, we are mostly just talking about the

00:24:32   CSAM stuff because the iMessage detection thing, whilst not perfect, I think, is still just like

00:24:39   less open to this kind of wide criticism about fundamentals of everybody's privacy.

00:24:44   And I stated last week, like, do children have privacy, etc, etc. But we're not talking about

00:24:50   that today because this is the thing which is still causing the most issue. So one of the

00:24:54   things that Craig really doubles down on and keeps coming back to is this idea that Apple is saying

00:25:00   that they are trying to find photos in iCloud without looking in iCloud. This only makes it

00:25:08   worse for me. This makes it worse for me. And I know that like, you know, people,

00:25:12   we were talking about it and saying like, the iPhone is like, you know, they're using the iPhone

00:25:19   to look, but they're saying, oh, it's only on upload as if again, you make that choice somehow,

00:25:24   which you don't. Like, you know, they're saying we look on your phone for something in the cloud,

00:25:32   but it's only for the cloud and only an upload point. But it's still happening on the phone.

00:25:37   Like, I don't think this line and I know why they're like hammering on this line now.

00:25:42   I don't think it helps really make things any clearer.

00:25:46   Cote- So I found this interview and this part of this interview incredibly clarifying for me,

00:25:53   not maybe the way that they wanted, but in understanding Apple's approach,

00:25:58   which is I feel like Apple, okay, a few things. One is Apple takes pride in being more concerned

00:26:07   about privacy than most of Silicon Valley. And most companies, period.

00:26:12   Cote- And I think Apple has also got a lot of pride in their tech prowess. So

00:26:23   it seems to me that at some point, and there are a lot of theories still flying out there that

00:26:29   they're going to encrypt iCloud photos at some point and they have to do this as a prelude to

00:26:34   that. I'm not sure that that's actually true. There's no evidence to suggest that they're

00:26:37   actually going to do that, but people are trying to understand why they did this this way. And

00:26:42   that's an answer that answers that question. David Tompa- Well, just if I can just say something

00:26:47   on that exact point and then we can not have to talk about it again. If that was the case,

00:26:51   then they should be talking about that right now. But they're not.

00:26:54   Cote- Right. So here, I would like to argue an alternative explanation. They may yet

00:27:00   encrypt iCloud photos. I don't know, but I'm going to give you an alternative explanation, which is

00:27:05   Apple looked at how all of their colleagues, competitors, whatever you want to call it in

00:27:12   Silicon Valley who have cloud storage handle CSAM media, which is that they just build an algorithm

00:27:18   that scans it all in the cloud. And then if they find ones, they forward those to NCMEC

00:27:25   or whatever at some point and the authorities. And that's what happens. Right. And I think Apple

00:27:32   said, we can do better than this. We're Apple. We're the privacy company. We can use our

00:27:38   incredibly bright minds to build a more pure, more privacy protecting algorithm and system and

00:27:49   whole cryptographic approach that will, when we put it out, will show that we're not like the

00:27:55   other guys and we care more. And so they built this and I, I got to say, I think that's true,

00:28:03   regardless of whether it's the thing that pushed it over the edge or not. I think that's clearly

00:28:07   what they did. You can see it in the way Craig Federighi describes this is they decided to solve

00:28:12   the problem of scanning your photos in the cloud on their servers by building this thing. And I

00:28:20   think it's worth at least pausing for a moment and saying, is that a problem? I get that Apple thinks

00:28:26   it's a problem or at least a place where Apple can kind of put it over on the other competitors

00:28:32   by doing them one better and showing off how they're doing it better. Apple's argument is once

00:28:36   you're scanning photos in the cloud, you can just scan for anything. And we didn't want to build

00:28:41   that tool that way. And I can appreciate that. That does have some legitimate privacy benefits,

00:28:46   but I do wonder if it really was more motivated by the fact that, well, we're Apple, we can build

00:28:52   something better than this. And I think that, again, all that is true, but I think it leads

00:28:56   them to a point where they've caused their own problem here. And the reason that I say that is

00:29:01   one of the things that Craig says in this interview that I think is very instructive

00:29:05   about how Apple feels about this feature and felt about it when they built it is he has to

00:29:10   explain to Joanna, who's a very smart person, but still you get a moment, you get the sense

00:29:15   from the whole interview where you can see that she basically has to pause Craig and then explain

00:29:18   what he just said to the audience because he kind of zips through it. What they're doing is in their

00:29:27   mind okay because it's a part of the software flow that is the pipeline, I believe he calls it,

00:29:36   for iCloud uploads. So from Apple's perspective, there isn't a spy on your phone that's looking

00:29:43   at all your photos. There's a scanner in your iCloud upload pipeline. So from Apple's perspective,

00:29:54   it's still fundamentally an iCloud feature because it only is touching images that are headed for

00:30:03   iCloud. And if you get to that level of detail, it actually makes a lot of sense and you understand

00:30:09   why they feel that way. I think the problem and where this is sort of like their hubris at

00:30:14   building this brilliant privacy-protecting feature is that the way it gets boiled down in public

00:30:21   perception is Apple, the iPhone is scanning all your photos, which is not what's happening,

00:30:26   but it is an on-device thing and once you cross the on-device threshold, I think it makes everybody

00:30:31   really nervous. But like I get it from his perspective, which is literally the argument is,

00:30:37   but it's in the pipeline. It's in the pipeline. It's not on your phone. And I think if you extend

00:30:42   that out, if somebody came to us and wanted to do an all images on your phone scanning thing,

00:30:47   we can't do that because we didn't build that feature. We built this feature that's sequestered

00:30:52   in the cloud upload pipeline. Again, like technically valid, but I also think maybe they

00:30:59   missed or ignored the how that would get simplified into something that would upset people.

00:31:08   This is too much of a nerd on a forum argument for me, right? It is scanning all my photos.

00:31:18   It's just doing them at a different point because I use iCloud photo. Like I use iCloud photos.

00:31:27   Like I'm supposed to because if I want to back up my photos automatically, it's the only way I can

00:31:34   do that with my iPhone because Apple does not provide a tool to allow anybody else to do it

00:31:41   in the background. Whenever photos are just taken, I have to open applications on a system to have

00:31:46   them upload. So I'm supposed to do that. It's like this is too much of a technicality for me.

00:31:51   We're not scanning all your photos. We're just scanning all your photos that upload to iCloud,

00:31:58   which I also cannot choose. So if I take a photo and have iCloud photos enabled,

00:32:03   it does scan all my photos. It's just scanning them when they upload, which is also on a timeline

00:32:09   that Apple defines. I don't ever say scan now. All I can do is stop it from scanning, right? Or I can

00:32:17   like what put it in my phone in low power mode, which is like, I don't like it. It frustrates me.

00:32:22   I don't like these very particular arguments. I don't like what I consider to be a straw man

00:32:29   argument of like, we'll just turn off iCloud photo backup. So that's not a solution to this problem,

00:32:35   if people consider it a problem because like what now? Now what? I can't back up my photos anymore.

00:32:42   And also it's a thing I pay for. So if I, so what you're saying is practically it essentially,

00:32:48   it's an all photos scanner because it's wedged in the place where you back up your photos,

00:32:53   which is automatic and outside of my control. Right? So like, I also just don't like the,

00:33:01   you know, I think a lot of people that are defending Apple's stance on this are saying like,

00:33:05   oh, we just turn off iCloud. Like, as I said last week, I actually don't even like that as a thing

00:33:13   because it's allowing people that want to hide this stuff from Apple and from authorities,

00:33:20   giving them an easy way to do that. Right. And I'm sure you'd still catch, you still can. And

00:33:24   I've seen lots of reports. I've seen the reports that, you know, you will catch people anyway.

00:33:29   Right. But you can do it. Uh, it actually also makes it feel for me that Apple cares more

00:33:35   about the, them having to store the images and actually find them. Right. There's that argument

00:33:41   to which I don't like, which is they only don't want them on iCloud. Right. So, but, so if you

00:33:47   turn off iCloud, they're not even going to look anymore. It's like, well, what is this for then?

00:33:52   Like, is it just because you don't want to store the images as opposed to like actually trying to

00:33:57   like save the children? Well, I, I, again, I think that their idea here is that they want,

00:34:03   they do bear responsibility for what gets loaded onto their cloud. And also they want to balance.

00:34:08   And this has been the story we talked about last week too. They want to balance the, we're going

00:34:14   to look at everything on our, on our customers phones with, we're going to ignore everything on

00:34:21   our customers, phones and our cloud service and allow this sort of stuff to happen. And they're

00:34:25   trying to strike a balance here, which honestly I think is part of the, part of the problem with

00:34:30   how it's perceived is, um, they're trying to hit a very particular balance and that gives you, um,

00:34:39   you know, a lot of people an opportunity to attack them from, from either side about this.

00:34:44   Yeah. And that gets you, you know, people can probably say I'm a little bit all over the place.

00:34:47   I'm very conflicted about this. Right. I think it's both good and bad. And I hold those, uh,

00:34:52   two things equally for me. Like I just have lots of issues with the, honestly, more of the way it

00:34:59   is being described than what they are doing. Right. Because like this other thing, this thing

00:35:05   that they're now kind of pivoting to, right. Which we've been talking about of like where the scanning

00:35:09   is occurring, it's still on my phone. Like it's not being scanned in the air, right? Like it's not

00:35:15   like it's scanned in the, like on the way to the cloud. It's still occurring on my device. And so

00:35:21   I still have to have an intrinsic, um, belief that the system is okay. Like I still have to believe

00:35:29   that the hashing is correct. And we're going to get to that in a minute because I was reading

00:35:33   another document that they published and it still doesn't make any sense to me. So like, you know,

00:35:38   Craig says, uh, well, Joanna says something which I like, like what's on my device is mine. It's

00:35:42   private. And you've taught us to believe that you've had ads that believe Craig says that it's

00:35:47   a misunderstanding as it's only being applied to, as you said, the pipeline, right. But I wanted

00:35:52   to get it because I liked it. She said it because it was a good challenge. Cause, and I still don't

00:35:55   think that it's, it's, I mean, accurately met by Apple, no matter where they say it's happening.

00:35:59   They have those billboards and that they had it like the, was it at the, uh, at CES or whatever,

00:36:05   whatever happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone, like, you know, Vegas. And, um, you know,

00:36:11   their argument would be that still true because what's happening here is that

00:36:17   literally these images are being scanned on their way out the door. And so I guess they would argue

00:36:26   that they're not, it's not happening on your iPhone anymore. Once they're in the pipeline,

00:36:30   like what happens on the airplane that's flying from Vegas to somewhere else doesn't stay in Vegas.

00:36:36   But it is happening on device though, isn't it?

00:36:38   It is happening on device. Yes. This is, this is what, this is my point about how Apple I see,

00:36:44   and we can have a whole conversation that's happening in the discord as we record, uh,

00:36:49   about whether saying it misunderstanding what Apple is doing is Apple's problem or not,

00:36:57   or fault or not. And I would say that it is their problem. Uh, and the way that they built this

00:37:03   feature, I think they built it. Um, again, some of these Apple statements about this seem kind of

00:37:11   self-congratulatory like look at this brilliant thing. We, we devised here without thinking about

00:37:16   the fact that other people might view the border between their phone and the outside world

00:37:20   differently. Clearly Craig Federighi believes that once it's in the upload pipeline, it's not

00:37:28   really on your device anymore. It's the stuff that's exiting your device. And you have said,

00:37:36   right, you know, right now, but it's still on your device. Like it's, it's still literally on your

00:37:42   device. And I think that again, we can debate whether this is the right way to build this,

00:37:46   what we can debate all of that, but I think it's instructive to see that this is how Apple has

00:37:51   defined this and how Apple built this feature. And I think it comes all the way back to Apple

00:37:56   deciding, cause let's be honest here. If Apple just started scanning for CSAM on iCloud, uh,

00:38:02   just like every other online provider does and didn't say anything about it, or made it a

00:38:07   footnote somewhere that there would not be a hubbub like this about it because it would be

00:38:12   just like everybody else. And Apple decided to re you know, build a better mouse trap,

00:38:18   but in doing it and decided to build it in a privacy enhancing way. I completely agree with

00:38:26   that. They absolutely made a huge effort to have this thing do right by its customers. And yet you

00:38:35   can see a little bit of a disconnect between Apple saying, well, it's in the pipeline, don't worry

00:38:40   about it. And other people saying, yeah, but it's still on my device. Like you, you guys don't think

00:38:46   of this as belonging to me because it's headed out the door into iCloud, but you, you know, so they

00:38:52   may have, they may have miscalibrated in their enthusiasm for this technology, I guess is what

00:38:57   I'm saying. And now they're feeling the blowback for that. I said this many times and I'll continue

00:39:00   to say it. If you talk so strongly about things like privacy, you create a huge magnifying glass

00:39:11   for yourself. You open yourself up to scrutiny. If you want to try and sell your products based

00:39:17   on this, then whenever you do anything, this is what you get. Like, so you get to sell products

00:39:22   like that, but you will also get more heavily scrutinized. That's just the way it goes. I'm

00:39:26   sorry. Like, but this is, this is like, you make this for yourself. Right? So one of the things

00:39:34   that, uh, Craig Federighi says is that there will be multiple levels of auditability, right? Which

00:39:39   is not a thing we've heard about before. Then Apple published another document. They continue

00:39:45   to publish these documents. This one is called security threat model review of Apple's child

00:39:50   safety features. So a couple of things from this one, uh, is that Apple will publish a root hash

00:39:57   of the encrypted database in a knowledge base article, which can be matched against what's on

00:40:02   your device. So you will be able to on your device, like bring up the hashes that are stored

00:40:09   on devices doing the matching and compare it to, or at somebody can you wouldn't, but somebody can

00:40:15   right. Compare it to what Apple says they are searching for. So you can, you know, research as

00:40:21   anybody can look at these two. I'm just going to say, I bet this wasn't in the original plan,

00:40:27   right? You'd be able to say this, this has got to have been a change, right?

00:40:30   Or it would have appeared later or, you know, whatever, but yeah, you're right. I think

00:40:34   this seems like a thing that they have done. I think so. I mean, I like the idea again,

00:40:38   what you're trying to do is provide, it's almost like a canary in the coal mine, right? It's the,

00:40:43   it's the public post of what the hashes are. So if they were forced to change the hash,

00:40:48   somewhere for some reason and not say anything about it, you would be able to compare and

00:40:53   somebody would be able to write it up and say, oh, they changed the hash. But, so yes, sure. I

00:40:58   don't think part of the original plan. That's right. And this is a thing that's going to be

00:41:02   tricky. Look, we may get follow up for this and I'll welcome it. I read this document, this part

00:41:06   of the document five times, right? I read it five times today to try and get my head around this.

00:41:11   So they stated, Apple stated that they will work with two organizations in separate sovereign

00:41:16   jurisdictions to match the hashes together. So they get two databases and they match them

00:41:21   together. If an image does not appear in both hash lists, they won't scan for it, right? So that's

00:41:27   another way of what they're saying here is if some government tries to sneak something in,

00:41:31   if it doesn't appear somewhere else, they're not going to search for it. I don't want to get into

00:41:36   the weeds on that, but earlier they say, basically in the paragraph before, they say in this

00:41:41   report that Nicmec is the only US source. So the system is supposed to work with two, but in the

00:41:48   US they're only going to use one. So if they're talking about adding future databases, right?

00:41:56   Let's imagine here that what they're saying is this is a future database is that if they get

00:42:01   something say from the United Kingdom, it has to somehow, I don't know how, match Nicmecs, right?

00:42:06   Right. I think, I think this is a bigger deal or not as big a deal as you're thinking.

00:42:10   Nicmec, my understanding is like, there is a whole international community of groups that are

00:42:16   fighting this stuff and that I think Apple has decided and experts can write in and tell us if

00:42:22   they want to, but like, I think Apple has decided that this is a canonical list and that this

00:42:28   organization has generated a canonical list. It's been part of the larger international discussion

00:42:34   about CSAM and that they're going to use this as the canonical list and then they can start doing

00:42:40   comparisons. And basically what they're saying is if the global international anti-CSAM community

00:42:49   doesn't agree that an image is CSAM content, then it doesn't go in the hash. That's sort of what

00:42:58   they're saying is that this is their database and we think it's pretty canonical and that if

00:43:04   some other organization wants you to use their list, what they're really going to take is the

00:43:09   ones that are agreed to. So I think that, I think that's what they're getting at here in, in, in a

00:43:14   simplified way is essentially if one country adds a bunch of things surreptitiously and the other

00:43:20   organizations don't add those, they're not going to count them because that means there isn't a

00:43:24   consensus that those images need to be flagged. I think that's what they're going for.

00:43:28   Yeah. I understand that.

00:43:34   It still just is this thing of like, I'm not American, right? And there's just like American

00:43:42   companies blindly trusting American organizations. Every other country has to match the American

00:43:46   organization. I get it. I mean, Apple is an American company, so I get that this is where

00:43:52   they would start. But like I said, my, my impression is that this is a, uh, an international,

00:43:59   uh, process and that the database is worked on with different groups around the world. And if

00:44:07   that's not true and there's a great disagreement about what CSAM content is between the US and the

00:44:11   UK, I guess somebody let us know, but I don't think that's the case. I think that, I think that all

00:44:17   sorts of global governments are united in trying to identify this material and stop it and share

00:44:23   information. And I think what Apple is really trying to do here is not some sort of US-centric,

00:44:29   uh, thing where, where it could be subverted by NCMEC. In fact, I guess you could argue that if

00:44:33   NCMEC were to add images that weren't in another nation's database at that point, they'd be like,

00:44:38   hmm, maybe not. Uh, but I don't think that practically that's the case. So anyway, that's it.

00:44:44   Well, but like right now they're only using NCMEC. There's no secondary source, but if they bring

00:44:50   other countries in, then they will do that. Which I guess is like, I suppose is maybe like a thinly

00:44:57   veiled argument to the China issue that was being raised, right? I guess that's kind of what they're

00:45:03   saying here more of like, if we have a country that, you know, people don't trust, it will be

00:45:09   run against this one, which we have decided to trust. And, and, and NCMEC actually is also

00:45:15   connected to the international center for missing and exploited children. They're sister organizations.

00:45:20   So, you know, what you're basically saying is you may view NCMEC as an American enterprise,

00:45:25   but it sounds to me like the NCMEC database is an internationally agreed upon database.

00:45:29   It was just really confusing to me when I was reading it. Right.

00:45:32   No, I think, I think your read, um, about what this is really about is important, which is what

00:45:38   they're really saying is if some country decides we're going to put all of these images that are,

00:45:45   let's say, uh, LGBTQ plus imagery, and they consider that illegal media, that the, you compare

00:45:54   that to the international database and say, nope. Yeah. And it doesn't go in. And that's what they're

00:46:00   trying to protect is some other country classifying things that aren't CSAM media,

00:46:06   M stands for media, CSAM as CSAM for their own purposes. Yes, indeed. That's right. So,

00:46:14   so, uh, USA America. So anyway, that I think that's, what's going on here, which is they're

00:46:19   reassuring is what they're doing. They're saying, no, no, no. And this is visible. You'll be able

00:46:23   to see it. Uh, it's in the OS image, which is the other thing about this. It's like, it's not a file

00:46:27   that can get like surreptitiously updated later. It's literally part of the OS image. So, which

00:46:33   they ship everywhere in the world. So again, they're, they're frequently answering a lot of

00:46:37   frequently asked questions here, but you can see, this is what I said last week. You can see that

00:46:42   they took a lot of care to build this feature the way it is, which is why it's kind of a shame that

00:46:47   they roll, roll, rolled it out in such a way, uh, that they, I mean, it was going to be controversial

00:46:54   regardless, but they, they definitely brought more controversial, uh, takes on themselves by

00:46:59   the way they did it. I hope this is the last time we need to talk about this. I hope so. It probably

00:47:04   won't be, but I hope so. At least I hope that we don't have to talk about it again next week.

00:47:08   Okay. Well, I'm sure we won't. That's my hope. All right. This episode is brought to you by our

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00:48:55   It could be the start of something exciting. Our thanks to Memberful for their support of this show

00:48:59   and Relay FM. Agile Bits have produced a beta program for their upcoming version eight of

00:49:05   1Password, and they have chosen to build it using Electron. In case you are unaware, Electron is an

00:49:12   open source framework that allows for developers to more easily create apps for multiple platforms

00:49:17   because it utilizes web technologies. This means that developers need to do less to make, in theory,

00:49:23   to make their apps compatible with various operating systems, right? Because you can build

00:49:27   it using web technologies. All platforms understand web technologies, and you need to do less to kind

00:49:32   of make it settle into the operating system itself, rather than building a dedicated Windows app,

00:49:37   a dedicated Mac app, a dedicated Linux app, and so on. However, Electron apps are heavily criticized

00:49:44   for RAM and storage usage issues. They use too much of both. And because they're web-based,

00:49:51   not feeling as native or responsive as the other apps that run on the platforms that are built with

00:49:57   the standard tools. When Agile Bits announced this last week, they were pretty quickly faced with a

00:50:03   wave of criticism from Mac customers, especially who have been previously big supporters of what

00:50:08   has been for some time a very well-made and good-feeling Mac app. Bit more context for you.

00:50:15   Over the last few years, Agile Bits has started to change as a company. So they moved from a kind

00:50:21   of "hey, buy our software" to "subscribe to a service that we provide model" and they offer

00:50:26   multiple subscription options for individuals and businesses and teams, etc. And it seems like,

00:50:33   I don't know if this has been completely confirmed yet, but it seems like that the new version of

00:50:38   1Password will only work with one of their subscriptions. That's definitely true?

00:50:45   Version 8 drops local. So if you don't pay, you can't upgrade.

00:50:52   Right. The writing on the wall was sort of the last version where they introduced their service,

00:50:57   and although Local Vaults remained a feature, it was very clearly something that was going to go

00:51:01   away. So you need to subscribe and you need to sync your stuff with their online service that

00:51:09   they've built for syncing. Agile Bits have also been more focused on cross-platform over the last

00:51:14   few years, which makes sense, you know, if you're a software company and you're just working on the

00:51:19   Mac and iOS, what is all of Android and Windows for you as well if you want to get out there

00:51:24   or build a web version too. And the last thing is they've also taken large amounts of venture

00:51:31   capital funding to expand their business and focus on enterprise as a future for the company.

00:51:36   So you wrote a great article, which was a very interesting article in its framing because it

00:51:44   was different to what a lot of people were talking about, because you actually also as well focused

00:51:49   on kind of Apple's role in all of this in an interesting way. So I want to kind of talk about

00:51:55   this a little bit with you. What does it mean for 1Password to go to Electron, do you think?

00:52:02   Like what does that mean? What does it say? Well, there's a lot going on here. We should also

00:52:10   mention the Windows version is going to be Electron. In their blog post about their engineering

00:52:15   decisions, they gave it very little time. They were like, "Well, yeah, we're going to use Electron

00:52:21   for Windows." And the idea here is, you know, they're going to use... That's a big computing

00:52:25   platform and they're like, "It's fine." For me, the big issue is that this is a company that was

00:52:31   sort of a Mac-focused company and that has expanded. And they were one of the good ones

00:52:36   in the sense of supporting the Mac and building a Mac native app. And my piece is very much about

00:52:43   their development priorities. And a lot of people wanted me to be like rageful at AgileBits for doing

00:52:50   this and for daring to do a subscription model and all those things. And that's not what I wrote.

00:52:54   What I wrote is that this is really instructive about where we are right now in computing

00:53:01   platforms, that a company that was previously very pro Mac and Mac-focused has essentially decided to

00:53:08   dump the same cross-platform app that they built for Windows and Linux on the Mac rather than

00:53:16   building something using the tools that Apple provides, whether it's the old tool of AppKit,

00:53:22   which is what we think of as sort of standard Mac app of the past anyway, or something like UIKit

00:53:30   and Catalyst, which would be sort of taking their iOS app and moving it to the Mac, or something

00:53:35   very forward-looking where Apple wants to go, which would be SwiftUI, where you could take it

00:53:41   across all of Apple's platforms. So it's sad, first off, and that was sort of a point I wanted

00:53:48   to make, it's sad to see a major developer who we think of as a Mac-friendly developer

00:53:53   basically throw their Mac app in the trash and replace it with Electron, which is essentially

00:53:59   the same thing on Windows and Linux. I think it says something about the state of desktop

00:54:06   versus mobile, that they are building native interfaces for iOS and Android, and the desktop

00:54:13   OSs are just getting Electron. I think that shows you what the priority is. Also, though,

00:54:19   Apple has a role to play here, AgileBits has a role to play here. AgileBits made a very interesting

00:54:26   engineering decision. They decided to write a brand new version of 1Password 8 for Apple platforms.

00:54:33   Now, we should also say they've been working in the background on a unified backend, basically

00:54:39   a unified code base for 1Password using the Rust language, and all of their versions are based on

00:54:48   that with a UI layer on top of it. The idea there is they're writing for a lot of platforms, and

00:54:55   they don't have the money. Maybe they do. They have chosen not to spend the money to engineer

00:55:04   a bunch of different platforms with different code bases because it causes inconsistencies and

00:55:09   because it costs a lot of money. You know, they're a company, I'm sure, that's very focused, because

00:55:14   it's their business, on security. You take that level of funding too, and I think there's an

00:55:19   implication there that you want to grow. Oh, you have to grow. Maintaining, you can grow and build

00:55:24   features a lot faster when you're not maintaining five different apps. Okay, so I get it. I get it.

00:55:29   What happened is, and I think, I think, I'm not a developer here, but just looking at this as

00:55:35   an observer of this stuff, I think they made a huge mistake, which was they decided to build

00:55:43   their next generation iOS platform app on SwiftUI. And I can't believe they made that decision.

00:55:54   Well, this is the thing, is in hindsight, they should have stuck with UIKit, built a catalyst

00:56:01   version for the Mac, and waited SwiftUI out a little bit. Couple more years, I think. But

00:56:06   instead they decided they were just going to just go into it. There are issues with going into it

00:56:11   with SwiftUI on the Mac anyway, because it's not supported on older versions of macOS. So they were

00:56:15   going to have to do the Electron app or keep their Mac app alive, which they never even considered,

00:56:20   which is one of the things that I said was sad, is they never considered it. If you read the blog

00:56:25   post, it's implicit in the blog post that they're not going to update their Mac app as it was.

00:56:30   The old one, the version 7 prior.

00:56:32   The native Mac app. And when I mentioned this on Twitter, one of their engineers,

00:56:37   one of their lead engineers said, "Yes, we're not going to maintain the extra Mac-only code base."

00:56:44   Which, again, I understand why they make that decision, but let's be clear, it was never even

00:56:50   considered. Just like Electron was always going to be the answer for Windows, it was never really

00:56:55   considered. Well, I imagine one of the reasons it was never considered and they've moved to Electron

00:57:00   is they didn't want to keep doing it. It was not a consideration because it started from the point of

00:57:04   we don't want to keep dragging the whole thing as an app. Yes, exactly. So what they wanted to do

00:57:10   was, and I think this is a case where they really did value Apple platforms and they wanted to do

00:57:15   the right thing. They wanted to build a new version using Apple's cross-platform interface

00:57:22   language, interface system, so that they could deploy one interface with some modifications

00:57:28   across all of Apple's platforms. So that they would have Electron for Windows and Linux,

00:57:32   and they would do an Android thing for Android, and then they would use SwiftUI,

00:57:35   and it would solve everything. And what they said was, "We did this for a while and we realized we

00:57:39   were going to have to repeat a lot of work to get it to work on the Mac because it's not really all

00:57:43   there on the Mac, plus it's not backward compatible, so we'd have to do Electron on the Mac anyway,

00:57:47   and we decided we were just going to do Electron on the Mac and have that be the Mac product."

00:57:51   Now, a couple of things here. One is, if we take them at their word, they made a mistake because

00:57:59   they thought that SwiftUI was further along on the Mac than it was. And I think that that does

00:58:03   say something, what they went through, because they did press ahead with SwiftUI for a while

00:58:08   on the Mac too, along with iOS, and they said, they imply anyway, that it's just not far enough,

00:58:15   and that maybe Apple has oversold it a little bit and it's more of a future technology.

00:58:19   I've heard from several developers who said that this is kind of unbelievable that they would make

00:58:25   a decision like this because Apple stuff is never as good as Apple claims it is, and that SwiftUI

00:58:33   is just not there yet for a lot of things, and that to take your whole app and put it in SwiftUI

00:58:38   right now and expect it to work and expect it to work on the Mac is not really realistic.

00:58:43   So what they didn't do, again, is just decide to keep their iOS app and update that and use

00:58:51   Catalyst on the Mac. And I think maybe that was a... I would be interested to hear why they chose

00:58:58   that decision, because it seems like they really were shooting for the future, and it wasn't a

00:59:04   realistic decision for the present. Can I give a conspiracy? Like I just completely found it

00:59:10   on nothing, but I stab in the dark I take on this. There were people within the development

00:59:16   organization that love their Apple products because that's kind of the company that they

00:59:22   came from. They were told, "You cannot have a standalone Mac app anymore. We will not support

00:59:28   it. It's financially not going to work for us." So they jumped to SwiftUI because then in theory,

00:59:34   they could develop for the iOS platform, and hopefully they'll be able to make a good Mac app

00:59:39   out of it. Except they could have used Catalyst. Catalyst, although it has issues, would allow them

00:59:46   to build on top of their iPad and iPhone app with a Mac version, and they chose not to do that and

00:59:54   instead kind of bought into the hype. Well, that may have just been the wrong choice. They might.

00:59:58   Well, that's the thing is I think they made a mistake there. They do say, though, and again,

01:00:04   I want to just call this out because we should be clear, they're soft-peddling it because it's PR,

01:00:08   but let's be clear here. What they discovered was that it would take more work to make the Mac

01:00:13   version work, so they gave up. And again, like fair enough, I get the idea. The idea here is that

01:00:22   you've got to reduce the number of platforms you're supporting. That was the idea, and they

01:00:28   were going to have to do Electron on Mac. And so I can hear the conversation, which is, why are we

01:00:32   spending, like, we don't, we are not going to spend these extra cycles making the SwiftUI version work

01:00:36   on the Mac when we're already having to deploy an Electron version for old versions of macOS. So just

01:00:42   do the Electron version and not worry about it. I suspect keeping in mind that maybe down the road

01:00:47   when SwiftUI is a little bit better, that they might bring the Mac version for SwiftUI back

01:00:55   down the road, but not yet. So these are decisions that they made. The net result is they're taking

01:01:00   the native Mac app, tossing it in the trash, replacing it with Electron. A lot of people

01:01:04   are up in arms because Electron uses lots of RAM and stuff like that. It's not very efficient.

01:01:10   There are a lot of Electron apps out there now, you know, Slack, Discord, Skype, there are lots

01:01:15   of them. I think, though, that the really important thing about this is it is what Apple's

01:01:26   developer tool strategy is. And I actually think, despite what happened here, that this paints a

01:01:34   really clear picture of what Apple's trying to do, with the Mac especially, right? So Apple has

01:01:39   leverage because Apple has mobile. Apple has the iPhone. People want to develop apps for the iPhone.

01:01:44   And they do develop apps for the iPhone. Then Apple's got the Mac. Desktop is not a priority.

01:01:52   Look at this. This is a company that has enterprise aspirations and they're fine

01:01:56   sticking their Windows version in an Electron wrapper. Like, they're fine with it. It doesn't

01:02:01   matter. It's good enough. It works. It's consistent. It's fine. And Apple wants the Mac to have,

01:02:07   you know, be able to take advantage of the fact that there is all this great iPhone and iPad

01:02:13   software. And that's why they built Catalyst. And that's why the ultimate goal for Apple is SwiftUI.

01:02:17   Because in a world where a lot of companies are not going to build custom versions of apps for

01:02:23   Windows and Mac and Android and iOS and the web, they're going to make tough decisions. The Mac

01:02:30   is never going to come out on top, right? Because first off, it's desktop and not mobile.

01:02:35   And secondly, it's the Mac and not Windows. So it's never going to win there. So Apple's playing

01:02:39   a different game. The game Apple is playing is, oh, what you do is you go from iPad and iPhone to

01:02:46   Mac. You go from your iOS app to the Mac. And we built Catalyst to have you do that. And we're

01:02:51   building SwiftUI so that you can do that. And that's Apple's whole game here, which when you

01:02:58   look at what 1Password went through, it actually makes a lot of sense, right? This is Apple's gambit

01:03:05   to get Mac software to be relevant is essentially it's part of the iPhone/iPad universe.

01:03:13   So what they want is people to develop for, you know, we can only develop two apps. What are we

01:03:19   going to do? It's going to be Android and Apple platforms and the web, let's say. Throw that in

01:03:24   as a third platform. Like that's what they want is they want people to start developing for Apple

01:03:27   platforms, which means, well, as long as you're doing your iPhone app, you should get that on the

01:03:32   Mac too. And we've got the tools that let you do it. And so you're just building another instance.

01:03:35   It's a little bit extra work, but it's not a lot. And you pick up what we're now defining as a

01:03:40   native Mac app, which by the way, there are, what's a native Mac app. Is it AppKit? Is it

01:03:45   Catalyst? Is it UIKit? I think Apple's saying yes and yes, and yeah, pretty soon because, but that's

01:03:53   what Apple's trying to do is Apple wants to make it so a developer like Agilebits looks at Apple's

01:03:58   platforms and doesn't throw something in an electron wrapper on the Mac, but instead,

01:04:02   because they had to build that iPhone app, also deploys that on the iPad and the Mac.

01:04:06   And the problem right now is that Agilebits jumped a little bit too soon to the next generation tools

01:04:13   when they probably, if they had, I mean, in the end, it may work out for them because in the end,

01:04:18   a year or two down the road, they may actually have a native, you know, Swift UI Mac app and

01:04:24   iPhone and iPad app, and they're all working together and it's great, but it's a little too

01:04:28   early for that. And if they wanted to be like solid out the door this fall, they probably would

01:04:33   have been better off updating their iOS app and choosing Catalyst. Now, it may also be that there's

01:04:39   some legacy stuff in the code of the iOS app that they look at and they say, why are we going to put

01:04:43   money into updating this thing when we should be looking at it? We're going to need to rebuild it,

01:04:49   and then Apple is going to be going to Swift UI. So maybe we just need to go there now. Like,

01:04:54   that may be going on in the background too. Anyway, it's a difficult situation for everybody,

01:04:59   and I think that there's blame to go around, but it's also just about reality, which is if you're

01:05:04   a developer who is not super focused on the Mac as a platform and you need to make some decisions,

01:05:11   you're going to say, well, I can build one thing and deploy it everywhere. And so they do, and you

01:05:16   get a cross-platform app using Electron. And is it an efficient app? No. Does it have a lot of

01:05:22   overhead? Yes. Did you have to spend extra money to make it work on other platforms? No. And you

01:05:29   know what? It's always been the case that the Mac has been a platform that is, a lot of the apps on

01:05:38   it are not the best effort of the developers because it's an afterthought. However, the

01:05:45   challenge is like, you don't have much of a platform if everything is an afterthought. And when

01:05:52   you have a developer who used to treat the Mac as a priority and now has treated it as an afterthought,

01:05:58   and it's part of a trend, as a Mac user, it troubles me. As an Apple observer, I think it's

01:06:07   interesting because it's a case where Swift UI is supposed to be Apple's answer here. And at least

01:06:12   in this case, for whatever one password's reasons are, it failed because they tried to use it as

01:06:20   their Apple platforms approach. And in the end, they pulled the plug on the Mac version. And that's

01:06:27   not great. What is a Mac app? You know, what is a good Mac app today? We said this before. Behind

01:06:33   door number one, behind door number two, behind door number three. But what if I reveal that a

01:06:38   Mac app, I mean, and we can throw in the other, what's not behind a door, like Electron,

01:06:43   but there's also UIKit and AppKit and Swift UI, right? So like, and I think the answer is,

01:06:52   because a lot of people on Twitter, I've seen people saying like, there's no such thing as a

01:06:56   native Mac app anymore. It's all a mess. And it's like, I would say what is a native Mac app is in

01:07:02   transition and Apple is trying to take it from point A to point B or C maybe, but they're not

01:07:09   there and we're not there. So we're in this weird transition. I think ultimately Apple thinks a

01:07:14   native Mac app is not a thing. And it's mostly a native Apple platforms app written with Swift UI.

01:07:21   - Yeah, that's their plan. We're just still, I think, a couple of years away from it. I mean,

01:07:27   one part has sort of proven it. - Right. And there'll always be stuff that was written for

01:07:30   AppKit that's still gonna run for years and will be fine, right? These apps that are only written

01:07:35   on the Mac, like BB Edit, right? They're only written on the Mac. They're only gonna be on the

01:07:38   Mac. It's fine. But like what Apple wants to do is lead everybody down the path and Catalyst is

01:07:44   actually great for today. And I think Catalyst gets a lot of, it's not perfect, but like,

01:07:51   if you were to do it today, if you wanted to make a Mac app today and you had an iOS app,

01:07:56   you should use Catalyst, right? You shouldn't throw it away and use Swift UI. You should use

01:07:59   Catalyst. But Swift UI is where it's going. And they said, as Agilbit said, they're trying to

01:08:03   skate where the puck is going to be. And I get it. Like that's what Apple wants everybody. That's

01:08:08   Apple's dream is that instead of ignoring the Mac or only shipping like an Electron app or some

01:08:14   other kind of lowest common denominator app, what you're gonna do is you're going to spiff up your

01:08:19   Swift UI app that you're also writing for iPhone. And you'll put it on the iPad and the Mac too.

01:08:25   That's the whole plan. Me personally, I haven't run and nor will I run a beta version of 1Password.

01:08:31   Like that's an application that I would never run a beta of because that I don't want anything

01:08:36   going wrong in there. So I haven't used it. Right. I've seen a lot of people using it. I've seen a

01:08:40   lot of people complaining about it, et cetera, et cetera. It's a beta. Yeah, it may get better.

01:08:47   I have run it just really to take a screenshot of it from my article on my 24 inch iMac running

01:08:54   Monterey. And it's a beta. It doesn't really work right. It's got a lot of work to do.

01:09:01   And if I had a prediction, I really do think that in the end, and they haven't said this, but I

01:09:08   would be surprised if AgileBits doesn't at some point here commit to bringing the Swift UI version

01:09:16   from iOS to Mac at some point in the future when they can. Their blog post stops just short of

01:09:23   saying that. But I feel like that would probably reduce the amount of anger here.

01:09:32   I wouldn't make that bet myself, even if I wanted to do it. I wouldn't say it because

01:09:36   you've got to assume you'll be able to. Well, that's true.

01:09:40   It's like, how long could it possibly be? Could it be six months? Could it be 10 years?

01:09:44   Okay. So the other thing that I wonder in the background, a lot of conspiracy theories that

01:09:48   we don't know the details of is, I wonder if in part, this is also a prod to Apple.

01:09:53   And I wonder if there's been a conversation now between AgileBits and Apple about Swift UI,

01:09:58   right? Where Apple, where somebody who's in charge of Swift UI comes to AgileBits and says,

01:10:02   why? They must have.

01:10:04   How did we fail you that you abandoned your Swift UI app for the Mac?

01:10:08   Similarly to the people that left the Mac App Store, right? And then Apple kind of

01:10:11   walked at them, tried to get them back in. What I'll say, for me personally, as a one password

01:10:16   user, I already use tons of apps on the Mac that aren't quote unquote good Mac apps. They are just,

01:10:24   this is a web version, right? I could just list them, right? Or a bunch of applications that

01:10:30   they're not web versions, but they don't look like Mac apps either. They're built with native stuff,

01:10:35   but they're like, quote unquote, they're built to the technology, but the UI is designed in such

01:10:41   a way that it's meant to be like our UI, you know, like it doesn't look like an Apple app.

01:10:46   All I want is what an app can give me rather than caring so much about how it's made, right?

01:10:55   So like I use Slack because I like what Slack does, even if it frustrates me sometimes,

01:11:02   the tool itself is good, you know, like, and so I'm going to, it's really the same for me

01:11:07   with one password, right? Like I'm going to keep using it because I really like what one password

01:11:13   does for me. Like I'm not going to abandon it now. So something I want to say here too is this fall,

01:11:20   Apple's new password stuff is so good in the new versions of the OSs that I think for a lot of

01:11:27   regular people who only use Apple platforms and don't need to share passwords and stuff,

01:11:31   there's no reason to keep using something like one password. I feel like Apple's password management

01:11:35   stuff is going to elevate to a point where it's going to be irrelevant to use something like one

01:11:41   password for a whole class of people. By the way, I think this is why one password is doing what

01:11:45   it's doing, right? In terms of it's pivoting to, you know, sharing an online services and enterprise

01:11:50   and things like that is because they know, I think at least one person who works there has actually

01:11:55   tweeted about this. It's like, they know where this is going. They know where the puck is going,

01:12:00   right? And they know that basic password management, which for years has been a niche for

01:12:04   them to fill is becoming an OS feature and they got to go somewhere else. So for me, I do use it

01:12:10   for other stuff and we do have some shared volts. So I will probably stick with it, but I have to

01:12:14   be honest. I am seriously considering moving most of my stuff into Apple's password managers this

01:12:21   fall and using it instead because quite frankly, Apple does a shocker, does a better job of

01:12:26   integrating its own stuff than third parties do with integrating or how third parties are allowed

01:12:32   to integrate their stuff. And so Apple's password manager has some advantages over one password.

01:12:37   I have some like issues with apples, right? Like for example, with credit cards, like it doesn't

01:12:41   save the numbers on the back of the card, right? Oh yeah. You know, that's a great issue. Also,

01:12:46   it's in a totally separate place. It's in wallet, which is also kind of annoying.

01:12:51   So stuff like that, you know, like one password is really good at what it does because that's what

01:12:57   they do, right? Like they think about all of that stuff and Apple and the passwords team,

01:13:04   who I think are kind of part of the Safari team, I think, or like it's anyway, like they're doing

01:13:09   a great job like that. The two factor auto-fill thing is one of the greatest things added to iOS

01:13:16   and Mac OS in years, like years. It is superbly good. I love it. But hey, huh?

01:13:26   Yeah. So I think there are going to be people who say the era of native apps on Mac and even Windows

01:13:34   are at an end. I don't believe that, but I believe that technology like Electron is going to do even

01:13:43   more than what like Java did back in the day, which is allow the Mac to be supported when it

01:13:48   wouldn't be before, but not by apps that are great. And this is already the case. And as a Mac user,

01:13:53   I feel like you learn to be grateful when a tool that you really want to use comes to the Mac,

01:13:59   even if it's bad, because at least it's there and you can use it while still being a little bit

01:14:03   offended by how bad it is. So like OBS is a web app and that's a streaming app, right?

01:14:13   I do have a level extra level of offense for apps that aren't interfaces to online services,

01:14:18   like Slack and Discord and Skype. They're web apps, but they're tied to an online service.

01:14:24   And I guess 1Password is now too, right? But there's something about like,

01:14:29   why is this an Electron app when it's just sitting here on my desktop that extra offends me? But the

01:14:36   point is I would rather have that than they not be present on my computer. And for people who didn't

01:14:42   live through the nineties when being a Mac user meant that there was just huge numbers of apps

01:14:48   that you couldn't run on the Mac at all, it's better that they're there, even if they're bad.

01:14:53   That said, I hope there continues to be a thriving set of apps that run better and work better because

01:15:00   they are really adopting the native, like Electron, you can just be a purist and say,

01:15:07   I don't like Electron because it uses a lot of RAM. And it's like, well, your computer has a lot

01:15:10   of RAM and maybe it doesn't matter. And your computer has a lot of disk space. So it doesn't

01:15:13   matter that it takes up a lot of disk space. I am more sympathetic to the people who say things like,

01:15:19   it doesn't do accessibility right. Or when I open the preferences window, it doesn't open a window.

01:15:24   It opens this fake pane that I can't move around and that I have to dismiss. And it doesn't follow

01:15:30   any of these keyboard shortcut conventions. Or I can't automate it in some ways because it's very

01:15:36   weird because it's really all fake and it's just loading a webpage. Those I'm more sympathetic for,

01:15:41   because those are ways where it's actually worse to use. And I think there are better Electron apps

01:15:46   and there are worse Electron apps. And in the end, if somebody could build an Electron app that felt

01:15:52   absolutely like a native app in the sense that it sort of does all the things and isn't ignoring

01:15:57   platform conventions, I would be okay with it. And I hope there's still a market for apps that

01:16:02   do that going forward. And that's why I'm at least encouraged by the fact that Apple has made

01:16:07   such an effort to get the Mac involved in the strength of the iPhone as an app platform

01:16:16   by building catalyst and now by building Swift UI as a cross-platform framework.

01:16:21   Because Apple is making a great effort to make it that real Mac apps that only run on the Mac

01:16:28   are probably not going to be very common. But if you can get a real Apple platform app that's

01:16:35   optimized for the Mac and the iPhone and that the OS knows what to do on those different platforms,

01:16:40   that's better than the alternative. As we were recording, Apple have released iCloud for Windows

01:16:46   version 12.5 and includes a new password manager app. Of course it does. Of course it does.

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01:18:51   their support of this show and Relay FM. Let's finish up with some #AskUpgrade questions.

01:18:58   Stitch asks, this is following on from our conversation earlier,

01:19:02   do you expect the fall, we'll say iPhone event to be fully virtual?

01:19:08   I'd say it's a greater than 50% chance that it will be. That said, at some point,

01:19:16   Apple's going to want to do an in-person event again. Now the iPhone event is very important,

01:19:24   but it's also a packed event. Traditionally, it's got lots of overseas media that come to it

01:19:32   that won't be able to probably get in a lot of them to the US. There's that other event that may

01:19:38   or may not happen in October or November, if it's an event, but a product launch.

01:19:42   So at some point here, I feel like we're going to have our return to in-person.

01:19:48   It could be this fall. My guess is that it probably won't be, but if Apple wanted to do it,

01:19:56   they could. What they would need to do is they do it at the Steve Jobs Theater.

01:20:01   They'd have everybody wear masks and they'd probably do it outside.

01:20:06   They have a stage outside. They could do it. Well, they could, but my guess is they probably

01:20:09   just require proof of vaccination from everybody who they invite. They could do that. They could

01:20:14   set up a thing where you have to upload your vaccine status or have your barcode scanned

01:20:18   or whatever it is, and that they verify you and then they let you come. Because it's a controlled

01:20:23   event. They can completely control who goes in that building. So at some point, they're going

01:20:28   to do that. I don't know about an outside event. I mean, that would be fun, but I think the problem

01:20:32   with the fall in the Bay Area, the reality of it is we have smoke days now, right? We have periods

01:20:38   where there's a wildfire somewhere and the wind shifts and it blows over the Bay Area and then you

01:20:42   don't want to be outside. So anyway, I think it's going to happen. It may not be till next year.

01:20:49   So do I expect the fall event to be virtually or fully virtually? Yes. But at some point,

01:20:56   they're going to surprise us and they're going to go back and they're going to have some other

01:20:59   system because, again, this is a very controlled guest list. They can put lots of requirements on

01:21:07   it and verify everything and do all of that if they want to let members of the media back into

01:21:13   their facility again. Maybe too soon, but it's going to happen at some point. So we may be a

01:21:20   little surprised whenever that happens. I thought this would be. I don't think it will be now,

01:21:27   right? Yeah, things have slid backward to a point where it seems a lot less likely now.

01:21:33   There are more indoor mask mandates and things like that in California. And so it would be a

01:21:39   harder sell. They delayed their own return to work, right? This is going to be my next point. I don't

01:21:45   think they have an event until they've had their return to work. I think that's probably true. I

01:21:50   don't think that those things can match up in my mind. How do you let people from the outside in

01:21:55   when you don't even let your people back? Exactly. It's like, we're not going to let our employees

01:21:59   come back, but we'll let you rando in. Thanks. Hey everybody. Where is everybody? Yeah, I don't know.

01:22:06   There's something about it that I don't know if it fits because it's like, how will they staff

01:22:11   the place if there's nobody there? Yeah, I do wonder what conditions will apply when they

01:22:18   open the doors, right? Are they going to not open the doors until everybody can come in or are they

01:22:22   going to do like positive tests within 72 hours or negative tests within 72 hours or a vaccine?

01:22:28   Well, positive tests are a challenge, right? Because it sounds good, but it's bad.

01:22:34   Negative tests sound bad, but it's good. It's very confusing. Myke asks, not me, what are your

01:22:40   must bring devices when you start traveling again? I actually have twisted this question and you can

01:22:45   choose which one of them you want to answer. We've also both started traveling again, so. Yeah, a little bit.

01:22:50   Right, but that was like, you know, I can now say like, what were, but my, I have a secondary question

01:22:55   based on my trip, right? Which was inspired by Myke's question. At this point, which device are we more

01:23:03   likely to take out of either the iPad Pro or a MacBook Air or Pro and why? And are there any shifts

01:23:11   that we would like to see in either product to make this an easier choice to pick just one?

01:23:15   So I, I'm not going to answer your question the way you want because, and you already know this

01:23:25   about me, my iPad Pro is coming with me 100% of the time. I do, the reason that I have written and talked

01:23:33   so much about traveling with just an iPad is because I started out thinking, can I leave my MacBook

01:23:40   behind? Because I'm, the iPad is always going to come with me. I am never traveling without an iPad

01:23:46   ever, ever, ever. I use it. It's the one that I would, I would feel lost if I didn't have it with me.

01:23:53   I just, I love it. And I use it all the time. And it is my primary computing device when I'm not

01:23:58   sitting at my desk. That said, when I was traveling a lot before the pandemic, I had, the laptop I had

01:24:08   was an, it was my laptop from, from Macworld. So it was a 2014 MacBook Air. I have an M1 MacBook Air

01:24:16   now. So really powerful, great battery life. And you know, it's small. So my story is that I'm more

01:24:27   likely to also bring the MacBook Air than I used to be when I was traveling before. And that's

01:24:32   mostly because it's just easier to do some stuff on the MacBook Air. Honestly, right now, what I

01:24:40   have, the line I've drawn is, am I expected to record a podcast? Cause I went to Denver last

01:24:46   weekend, weekend before last now, with just an iPad and people sent me files and I posted, I edited

01:24:53   two podcasts from the hotel room in Denver on my iPad. Not a problem.

01:25:00   Using fair, right.

01:25:01   Using fair, right. And I used, I used a separate app to do some denoising on, on the, the one

01:25:07   podcast that I posted from there. That was where people sent me the files. I got them in my Dropbox

01:25:12   moving to fair, right. It's all fine. Recording is a lot harder because there's no, you know,

01:25:16   audio hijack makes things so much easier and you get back backup files and it's just, you know,

01:25:22   I have to bring like other hardware with me if I travel with the iPad. So I have to bring extra

01:25:28   boxes anyway. So for me, that's what the line is. It's like, if I'm really expecting to do a

01:25:34   podcast while I'm traveling somewhere, I'll just bring the laptop. So I didn't bring it to Hawaii.

01:25:39   I didn't bring it to Denver. But when I visited my mom in Phoenix and had several podcasts to

01:25:45   record from there, I brought the MacBook Air. So for me, that's, that's basically the dividing

01:25:50   line now. But the iPad it's a hundred percent of the time. See, I've already struggled too, right?

01:25:55   So I'm like, I, if I'm, I always want to have both of them. If I'm going to be working or if there's

01:26:02   like a possibility of work, I need a laptop. I need a Mac. It's how I know how to record and edit.

01:26:09   I'm not going to learn a whole new system for a trip, right. Or like on the trip. Uh, I want

01:26:16   reliability because if I'm traveling, if I'm on vacation or I'm traveling, seeing family,

01:26:21   what I don't want to do is like spend hours and hours trying to fix an issue that's come up

01:26:26   because I've tried to record with an iPad or whatever. So like, I think like, what would the

01:26:33   Mac have to do for me to not want to take my iPad? And I don't know. So this is a question I had. I

01:26:40   don't really have an answer for myself. I know I don't want to be taking both of them because it's

01:26:45   a lot of weight and a lot of bulk and you know, you just take in all this stuff, but I don't

01:26:50   really know what exactly I would want to happen to one or the other to make like what, honestly,

01:26:56   what I want is an iPad that can boot into Mac OS. That's what I want. Right. It would be awfully

01:27:03   convenient if I could reboot my M1 iPad running with the smart keyboard into Mac OS for podcast

01:27:09   purposes and then reboot it back into the iPad. That would be nice. I've just worked it out.

01:27:13   That's what I want. I'm never going to get it, but that's what I want. And the reason is because like,

01:27:17   I know I could in theory just take the Mac, but like if I'm going to watch like a movie on a

01:27:22   plane, I don't want to get a Mac for that. Right. Like I got the keyboard and it's like big and

01:27:26   there's a whole thing. Right. And so I don't want to do it. And plus it's like, it's, it's

01:27:31   way harder to preload the video. Like, Oh yeah. For me anyway. Nobody wants to let you save video

01:27:37   on my daughter. When we went to Hawaii, she borrowed one of my iPads to preload movies on,

01:27:43   to watch on the plane because she just has her MacBook air and you know, they don't want to let

01:27:47   you download stuff on videos on a Mac. They only want to, cause it's less secure or something,

01:27:53   even though it's probably not actually less secure. So yes, I agree. For me, I draw the

01:27:59   line at recording a podcast cause I can edit podcasts and prefer it. And in fact, I prefer

01:28:04   writing articles on my iPad too, honestly. If I was going, I could like generate my financial charts

01:28:11   and stuff on an iPad. I have built the automation to do that. And I did that at your bachelor party.

01:28:16   Actually I had to do that there. That was the one time that I've used those scripts actually.

01:28:22   But at this point, again, I would just bring the Mac book air cause like, I'm not trying to

01:28:27   pull a stunt here. Right. I'm trying to just get work done. And the iPad is my preferred

01:28:33   tool for most of what I do, um, when I'm out and about. But that M1 air changes the equation a

01:28:40   little cause it's so good that it's just kind of, and also I've been broken down by the fact that

01:28:46   Apple's never going to provide apparently proper audio access support in iPadOS. And so I just

01:28:52   sort of given up and it's like, if I need to record something, I'll bring the Mac book air

01:28:55   and it's good. And that's good enough. And last question comes from Brants. It seems that every

01:29:02   year brings a new report about how the latest iPhone will have limited availability at launch.

01:29:08   Do you think that this production, that this prediction will actually come true as Apple

01:29:12   and many other manufacturers are still dealing with global chip component shortages? I think

01:29:18   one key difference here, right. Is this report came from Tim, which is not who usually reports this.

01:29:26   I think Apple will do what it does to disguise availability issues. I think it does that by

01:29:33   staggering release time. Sometimes it also has you pre-order, but it ships it later, allows it to

01:29:40   allows them to open the pre-order period where you'll get it on release day. And then it's all

01:29:47   just a function of how few they have, how quickly that slips into the past. And then they often get

01:29:53   up to speed and those dates move back forward again. And you think you're not getting it for

01:29:57   two months and you get it in a month, but like Apple will disguise it. Apple's not going to be

01:30:01   like, Oh, you can't get it. Instead, Apple's just going to open it for pre-orders and, you know,

01:30:07   will it be a month out after five minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes? That's going to be the

01:30:14   thing. But I think Apple tries very hard to disguise it so that you don't think about it

01:30:19   that way. This is also a way that I think Apple's approach is superior to like the games console

01:30:24   people, for example. And forgive me for going there again, but it just drives me crazy. Like

01:30:28   with Apple, you give them your credit card and stuff and you say, I want an iPhone. And they say,

01:30:32   great, it's going to come in a month. It's going to come in six weeks, whatever the wait is,

01:30:36   you will get it then. And we'll let you know if you'll get it earlier. Or just like, it will come,

01:30:42   right? Like you give me the money and it will come. Right. Whereas some of these, especially

01:30:46   like the game consoles, it's like, sorry, we're out, come back later and get your bots ready and

01:30:51   try to order it. And it's like, Apple just doesn't play that game. Apple wants to take your money.

01:30:54   They want to take as much of your money as possible and they'll get you a phone when they

01:30:58   can. Also, I'm just going to say it again, because we say it here, people need to listen. Also,

01:31:04   they ship a bunch to the Apple stores and you can, if you've got an Apple store near you,

01:31:10   you can almost certainly get one faster if your thing is really ordered, you know, a month back

01:31:19   ordered or something. You got to like try to do that order that gets you one that's in your store

01:31:24   supply because the stores get supply. They don't just put them all toward the back order. So that's

01:31:28   something to look for. But anyway, I think, will it be slower? Maybe. But when Tim Cook says they're

01:31:36   not going to have as many available, some of that is also about when they, right? The announcement

01:31:43   happens right before the end of their fiscal quarter. So some of it may be, well, yeah,

01:31:46   they're really going to ship mostly in October. And they might ship a lot of them in October and

01:31:53   not in late September. And that actually is a function of that too. So I don't know. I mean,

01:31:59   we'll see. There could be an amazing iPhone shortage and everybody's like, oh, it's immediately

01:32:03   three months back ordered. This is ridiculous. But my guess is that Apple plays it's when do I

01:32:09   announce it? When do I announce pre-orders are available and what is the actual release date

01:32:13   after that? They set those dates and they can change those dates and they try to play it so

01:32:18   that it plays out the way they want. And so they push those dates back if they need.

01:32:22   Because that's what they did last time, right? Like if they felt like it was going to be

01:32:26   immediately like nobody's going to get until late October, well, they won't announce it until October.

01:32:31   I agree with you. There'll be some available in September, but most in October. But that means

01:32:36   they think that that's fine. If it was going to be, as you say, like a three month wait,

01:32:40   well, they would just wait. Like they've already done. They could just wait. It's fine.

01:32:45   If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just send out a tweet with

01:32:50   the hashtag #AskUpgrade or you can send one in with question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members

01:32:56   Discord, which you get access to if you sign up for upgrade plus go to getupgradeplus.com and you

01:33:02   can sign up $5 a month, $50 a year. You can add free episodes with extra content. Every episode

01:33:08   of upgrade plus is longer than upgrade and you get bonus content that is only heard by the

01:33:14   upgradeians who subscribe to upgrade plus go to getupgradeplus.com. Thank you to everybody who

01:33:20   does. Also thanks to Calm, Memberful and Instabug for the support of this show. Before we go,

01:33:26   let me tell you about another show here on Relay FM, Make Do. You don't have to monetize your

01:33:31   hobbies, but hey, if you want to, Make Do is ready to be your cheerleader. Listen as you hobby at

01:33:38   relay.fm/maketo or search for Make Do wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to find Jason

01:33:46   online, you can go to sixcolors.com or you can go to @jsnewl on twitter. I am @imike. We'll be back

01:33:57   next week. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snow. Goodbye Myke Early.

01:34:01   [Music]