00:00:08 ◼ ► For Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 294. Today's show is brought to you by Linode, DoorDash, and ExpressVPN.
00:00:32 ◼ ► It's like you can mark it on the wall, you know, that the week has done and you can put your little line.
00:00:40 ◼ ► In fact, I believe that was week five, so we got to finally, after making four scratches downward on our wall, we now make one across.
00:00:47 ◼ ► Excellent. We have a #snowtalk question from David, and David wants to know, Jason, you're a sports fan.
00:01:14 ◼ ► Like, if Apple came out and said, "Oh, no, we're just gonna skip this year out," we would be in trouble.
00:01:20 ◼ ► I don't think we would be, though, because people would still be using their technology every day to do their jobs.
00:01:30 ◼ ► I mean, we don't have problems in regards to podcast distribution, but yes, I get your point.
00:01:34 ◼ ► Indeed. So sports writers that I've seen have been pretty... they're trying to be really creative, and that's great.
00:01:41 ◼ ► And coming up with... you're talking about history and interviewing people and doing profiles of people who are like,
00:01:51 ◼ ► But it's really hard, because that is a whole industry that is shut down, and if you cover that industry, that's really rough.
00:02:03 ◼ ► I put a World Series game, a Giants World Series game from 2012 on in the background, and just kinda...
00:02:08 ◼ ► It was nice to have the rhythm of baseball and baseball announcers and stuff happening.
00:02:13 ◼ ► But that's all that I've done, mostly because I've just had other stuff to do, and I might yet do that again,
00:02:23 ◼ ► just to get that feeling, because this is... you know, baseball is my favorite sport, and a couple weeks ago,
00:02:29 ◼ ► we should have started again after the whole winter of offseason, and instead there's no baseball,
00:02:34 ◼ ► and there's no sign that there'll be baseball anytime soon, and it's really depressing, honestly.
00:02:46 ◼ ► I have some old radio broadcasts from the early part of the previous decade, when the Giants were in the playoffs,
00:02:54 ◼ ► and the World Series, and all that, and I've been thinking about playing those, because then they can just be in the background,
00:02:59 ◼ ► and the TV... I'm not sure a replay of an old sports game or match or whatever holds my attention enough
00:03:09 ◼ ► for it to be on TV, if that makes any sense. If it's playing out in real time and I know what happened,
00:03:20 ◼ ► So putting it on in the background, if I'm in a scenario where I could have it on in the background,
00:03:23 ◼ ► but not super paying attention to it, I might do that. And radio, similarly, is actually pretty good
00:03:30 ◼ ► at just having it on in the background and getting the sort of pleasant vibes of the sport going on,
00:03:35 ◼ ► even though it's not without focus. Because I'm not going to spend three hours focusing on a baseball game
00:03:46 ◼ ► Like, there might be a couple of games, you know, like really important games to you, that you might want to watch that way.
00:03:52 ◼ ► So that's... I did one of those, and actually there was another game that I watched some of.
00:03:57 ◼ ► I watched sort of the last two or three innings of, and it was a World Series game that was very dramatic,
00:04:02 ◼ ► and teams were on their last strike to win the World Series, and then saved it, and then it came back,
00:04:07 ◼ ► and it went back and forth. It was in 2011. And during that game, I was game six of the 2011 World Series,
00:04:16 ◼ ► I was doing a podcast. And so I'm just doing a podcast with the TV on in the background, silent.
00:04:22 ◼ ► And every time one of these incredible swings in fate happened, I couldn't react, right?
00:04:28 ◼ ► So I'm sort of silently going, while we're having a talk about, like, I don't know, a science fiction novel or something like that for the incomparable.
00:04:42 ◼ ► And so I did actually watch the last three innings or whatever of that, just to see all the drama that happened,
00:04:49 ◼ ► and actually hear the announcers talk about it, because I had missed that. So that's two.
00:04:52 ◼ ► But in general, I like the idea of reliving past sort of sport things, but it doesn't really work for me,
00:05:01 ◼ ► because I don't want to focus on it. I can't focus on it, because there's not enough there for me to apply my focus to.
00:05:09 ◼ ► So I'm trying to consider ways of using it as just background sound, to make it feel a little more normal.
00:05:16 ◼ ► This was the first year that me and Adina were going to get into F1 seriously after watching the excellent Netflix documentary, Drive to Survive.
00:05:24 ◼ ► Obviously F1 got cancelled. But something that's happening in F1 is a lot of the racers, like the actual Formula One drivers,
00:05:32 ◼ ► are racing in the Formula One video game and streaming it. And so that's happening in a lot of different sports,
00:05:40 ◼ ► where the actual people that play the sports are playing the video games of the sports,
00:05:45 ◼ ► which is also kind of funny, because some of them are good, but some of them are not, right?
00:05:50 ◼ ► And so you get this, like, one of, you know, some of the best Formula One race drivers cannot play the game,
00:06:00 ◼ ► Yeah, that's good. They're doing that with, um, Major League Baseball is having baseball players play the MLB The Show video game,
00:06:08 ◼ ► and similar thing. I'm not watching that, but I'm seeing some highlights of that that I think are kind of fun.
00:06:13 ◼ ► And in the newspapers, I should also say, the newspapers and like local sports websites around here,
00:06:18 ◼ ► there are a few different sim seasons going on, where like the San Francisco Chronicle is using a baseball game,
00:06:27 ◼ ► and who is simulating, they're simulating the entire season as it was originally scheduled.
00:06:34 ◼ ► And so they will every day have a little report about what happened yesterday, and what the current standings, in quotes, are.
00:06:41 ◼ ► Which I think is another fun, it's a fun idea, and they've even had a couple of things where they've had the local broadcasters broadcast kind of,
00:06:50 ◼ ► they're calling the video game as if it was a real game, which is kind of fun, but again, it's not that fun.
00:06:59 ◼ ► Like, I get it, and it's a nice idea, and if you want to hear those voices and all that, but it's not the same.
00:07:06 ◼ ► There's something fun to tide you over if you're looking for it, but I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily then be like,
00:07:18 ◼ ► By the way, if you're missing racing at all, then there are hours of Gels Marble Runs on YouTube for you to watch.
00:07:30 ◼ ► They're the best, it is the best, because it is everything that is true and not true about sports.
00:07:37 ◼ ► Because you watch, it's great, the announcers are great, they just had a new thing where they have a partnership with an auto race circuit, which is Formula E, I think.
00:07:49 ◼ ► And what I'll say is, you'll find yourself telling stories and narratives about the grittiness of the competitors,
00:07:56 ◼ ► and getting really excited when one competitor does well, and really excited when another competitor fails.
00:08:02 ◼ ► And the other part of your brain is saying, "But they're just marbles. They're not real, they're not people."
00:08:12 ◼ ► Marbula One, yes. They used to have the MarbleLympics, but they had to change the name because the Olympic Games didn't appreciate it.
00:08:21 ◼ ► It's just, people, if you haven't seen Jill's marble runs, just go watch it if you miss sports especially, because it's truly amazing.
00:08:33 ◼ ► That's part of the fun of it, is that you get really into it, and the announcer will say things like, "Oh, really smart move there by so-and-so," and you're like, "It's a marble."
00:08:55 ◼ ► If you would like to send in a question to start the show, just tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk.
00:09:03 ◼ ► On last week's show, you mentioned that rumors were making you feel some sort of sense of normality, because the rumor mill continues to move on, and it is moving on further.
00:09:14 ◼ ► So I wanted to give some additional details and kind of corroborations that came out after Mark Gorman and Debbie Wu's iPhone 12 article from last week.
00:09:23 ◼ ► So there is a YouTuber, EverythingApplePro, who has shown off a leaked schematic of the upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max.
00:09:31 ◼ ► This is expected to have been generated sometime in January and was kind of leaked out of Foxconn and given to a case manufacturer.
00:09:39 ◼ ► So it corroborates a lot of the rumors that we spoke about last week, so we've got the flat sides of the iPhone 12 Pro Max, but the actual device will be thinner down from like it's like a 7.4 millimeters from 8.1 millimeters, but the screen is bigger.
00:09:55 ◼ ► So there will be significantly reduced bezels on the next phones, like a 40% reduction based on these schematics, which is really interesting.
00:10:09 ◼ ► Like it's a thing that's happening by other manufacturers, but this wasn't really something that I considered.
00:10:14 ◼ ► So I'm intrigued to see what that's going to end up looking like and how that's going to be usable if this is the case.
00:10:23 ◼ ► So instead of it being that like multi-tiered thing right now where you've got the square and then the lenses that stick out on the top, that's just going to be flat.
00:10:33 ◼ ► And then also something that's intriguing is that the SIM card tray is apparently moving to the other side and there's some kind of connector or some description that appears to be on the other side of the device.
00:10:44 ◼ ► Some people are saying it's a smart connector, some people are saying that it isn't, but it's just intriguing to see this device.
00:10:51 ◼ ► I think the thing that's the most, I'm most excited about here is like the physical changes.
00:10:56 ◼ ► So this one, which is the Pro Max, getting bigger and thinner and the bezels, like I'm really intrigued to see what that ends up looking like.
00:11:13 ◼ ► And there have been people have done 3D mock-ups of it was like, okay, so take the iPad Pro design and make it a phone.
00:11:24 ◼ ► So I like to see that it's moving ahead here and global economics aside, which they kind of can't be put aside, right?
00:11:32 ◼ ► Like nobody really knows how this is going to go, but this is the kind of thing in the before time that we would have looked at and said, this will also drive a big spike in iPhone sales because it's a substantially new looking iPhone.
00:11:47 ◼ ► And a lot of people wait to buy a new iPhone until there's a new looking iPhone that just new specs don't matter to a lot of people.
00:12:08 ◼ ► But normally you would look at this and say, this is the kind of iPhone release that drives a sales spike from the iPhone line.
00:12:19 ◼ ► And it's interesting because I wouldn't have even as I said, I didn't consider a lot of these changes that it will make the iPhone look even more modern because it will have that really thin bezel design, which is appearing all over the smartphone market right now.
00:12:33 ◼ ► So that is an intriguing thing, at least to think that maybe Apple is continuing to push the design language, right?
00:12:40 ◼ ► Like if the notch gets smaller and if the bezels get smaller, the screens get bigger, the phones get thinner, like this is going to be this could be a very big year for the iPhone.
00:12:56 ◼ ► It sounds like in terms of progression of the iPhone that the iPhone 12 that we're going to just so iPhone SE came out, right?
00:13:34 ◼ ► And that sounds like, you know, and then yes, there's also the 10R11 kind of style that continues to exist and it sounds like will continue to exist.
00:14:06 ◼ ► Like I think over the life of the iPhone 10 design, it feels like it might go through more iterations that way.
00:14:14 ◼ ► Like they're moving, I think from my perspective, they're moving to a different physical design and an adaptive physical design quicker than I thought they would have when the iPhone 10 was first introduced.
00:14:27 ◼ ► There was also a report from German and Wu at Bloomberg about Apple's high-end headphones, the upcoming headphones, the head pods.
00:14:38 ◼ ► So a quote from the article, the ear pads and headband padding attached to the frame with the use of magnets so they can be replaced by the user.
00:14:48 ◼ ► Prototypes of the headphones have a retro look of oval shaped ear cups that swivel and a headband connected by thin metal arms.
00:14:59 ◼ ► This is not the design language I was expecting, but now I've heard it, it makes more sense.
00:15:06 ◼ ► I was assuming that it would be plastic, that these headphones would be plastic to match the kind of AirPods style.
00:15:15 ◼ ► But then when I now I think about that, I was like, oh no, they will look like Beats and Apple probably doesn't want to do that.
00:15:23 ◼ ► So this is going to be a very different looking thing with more metal in them than I would have expected, at least exposed.
00:15:31 ◼ ► There is expected, there is predicted to be two models of these headphones, one with premium fabrics and one with lighter breathable materials for sports.
00:15:41 ◼ ► But you may be able to kind of Apple Watch style by these interchangeable parts and just swap them out for what you're doing.
00:15:48 ◼ ► So this is becoming a more interesting and I think advanced product than I was expecting it to be based on this report.
00:15:57 ◼ ► Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm kind of proceeding under the assumption now that we're watching Apple taking a multi-stage process to, with the success of AirPods, to basically say, you know, it's time to make a line of headphones branded as Apple and then Beats can go away.
00:16:19 ◼ ► Ultimately, I do. I think it'll take time. But I think step one is can the Apple brand handle its own headphone line?
00:16:31 ◼ ► Because the AirPods, as we've talked about before, the AirPods has been so successful. It's one of their most successful products. Why would you not put your foot to the gas there and say like more, do as many as we can?
00:16:43 ◼ ► But I think if they can do that, it does call into question why the Beats line exists because they could just integrate the same kind of product line.
00:16:52 ◼ ► You know, maybe, maybe not. But in the long run, Apple has not shown that they're really great at maintaining a, you know, a parallel brand that's not an Apple brand but is owned and operated by Apple, especially if Apple also makes products in that category.
00:17:06 ◼ ► I just don't see how that can withstand in the long run. But again, it doesn't have to be this year. It could be a few years down the line as they, you know, the right way to do it would probably be to just grow the Apple headphones line to the point where the Beats line doesn't make sense anymore.
00:17:23 ◼ ► Instead of having people sort of be sad that it's gone, they won't care because all the Apple products are there.
00:17:30 ◼ ► Yeah, I think they will probably keep Beats around until that point, right, but they're not going to keep that brand around if it's being absolutely, you know, eaten alive by the AirPods and AirPods products, right, like that line of products or like, you know, all the other things that moves around it.
00:17:48 ◼ ► So like the headphones and potentially sport versions of all of those devices, because, you know, as you say, if Apple's onto a winner, they'll just keep pushing it and see how many types of headphones they can make with this technology because the brand is so strong that it's almost iPod like, right, with how strong the AirPods brand is.
00:18:08 ◼ ► They'll just keep pushing it. I mean, I'm intrigued to see what they will actually call these over ears. Like, I don't know how they would include an AirPods name into them, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did, right?
00:18:22 ◼ ► Yeah. No, I think it's most likely just because the brand name is so strong that they'll be, you know, Apple, you know, AirPods Complete or AirPods X or AirPods Plus. Yeah, I mean, that's what it'll be. And people will be like, "Well, wait, I thought AirPods meant little things you stick in your ears." And Apple will say, "Not anymore."
00:18:42 ◼ ► It means whatever we want it to. Yeah, because that's the truth of it, right, is people will be like, "Well, actually, we define AirPods as being..." and Apple will be like, "Mm, no. Mm." And then everybody else will be like, "All right, I guess that's not what it means anymore."
00:18:56 ◼ ► It's their word. It's their product. If they redefine it, people will just go along with it. Like, I mean, it's not... they couldn't... they're not going to make over-ear headphones and call them, like, "Mac Pro," right?
00:19:07 ◼ ► That... okay, that would be silly. But to say these are... these are also headphones, but they're different and they're also AirPods because that's the product line we have, people will go along with it. It's not a big deal.
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00:20:42 ◼ ► So you had a post go up a couple of days ago about Mac battery health. Can you explain what this is all about?
00:20:54 ◼ ► Yeah, it was kind of weird. So yeah, there was a minor... Let's back it up. Apple put a new feature in Mac OS, but they put it in the developer beta, the second developer beta of 10.15.5.
00:21:08 ◼ ► But I'll tell you, Apple has gotten a lot more savvy about accepting the fact that when they do a secret feature in a developer release, everybody will know about it immediately.
00:21:20 ◼ ► Like, the final release is not the time if you want to break the news. So they broke the news alongside the developer preview release of 10.15.5.
00:21:34 ◼ ► Also, the other piece of this puzzle is, if you recall back a few years, Apple got in a lot of trouble by making changes to the way batteries work on the iPhone and not telling anybody.
00:21:46 ◼ ► And then people noticed things were different and they started asking questions and it became like a little mini scandal.
00:21:55 ◼ ► Exactly. So I think Apple learned the lesson there that you should be pretty transparent about making changes that involve batteries.
00:22:10 ◼ ► It seemed pretty obvious that that was something they should pay attention to for the future just because of how much...
00:22:16 ◼ ► It really played into the idea of Apple making your devices worse. That is like this conspiracy theory that people have that they believe is that planned obsolescence thing.
00:22:35 ◼ ► Anyway, so what Apple did was Apple released this developer release and alongside it they briefed some people, including me, about what was in it.
00:22:49 ◼ ► So essentially what they've done is they've changed the default charging behavior on MacBooks that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.
00:23:04 ◼ ► So you don't have to have a Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro. It could be the MacBook Escape that didn't have one.
00:23:12 ◼ ► So you've got to have Thunderbolt 3 ports and all of those now have a totally different charging algorithm, basically.
00:23:21 ◼ ► And they're looking at the temperature of the battery and they're looking at your history of when you charge it and how deep you deplete it when you're using it.
00:23:30 ◼ ► And the way I read this is they were unhappy with the way Mac OS handled laptops sitting in a semi-permanent plugged-in state, right?
00:23:45 ◼ ► Which a lot of laptops do. They're sitting on your desk and they're always plugged in and occasionally you'll disconnect it.
00:23:53 ◼ ► And when you do, you disconnect it and you use it somewhere and you drain it 5% or 15% and then you plug it back in.
00:24:00 ◼ ► And batteries, although we like to think of computers as these wonderful binary devices, batteries are messy chemistry.
00:24:13 ◼ ► So what Apple has done is in those kinds of scenarios when it analyzes the battery use,
00:24:22 ◼ ► it's changing the battery charging system to not charge that battery as aggressively to full.
00:24:37 ◼ ► It very clearly says that if you want the battery to last a long time, charge it routinely to 80% and not 100%.
00:24:43 ◼ ► Also, if you have a MacBook Pro that you charge up and then you take and use and deplete its battery and then bring it back and charge it up again,
00:24:52 ◼ ► the battery health management system is going to look at that and say, "That's fine. Keep doing what you're doing."
00:24:58 ◼ ► But in these certain circumstances, it's going to try to optimize the long-term life of a battery in a Mac laptop
00:25:23 ◼ ► And that's because it would be terrible for the battery if it charged it to 100% and then just kind of left it there and kept pushing it up to 100%.
00:25:31 ◼ ► So there's a range at the top of the battery scale where Apple will let the battery deplete a little bit
00:25:42 ◼ ► But the challenge is that from the user's perspective, it's like, "But wait a second. I want 100%.
00:25:54 ◼ ► And ideally, you've got some intelligence in the software that says, "What you want is for it to be fully charged in the morning,
00:26:00 ◼ ► and we'll charge it then, but we're not going to keep it fully charged all night because that's really bad for the battery."
00:26:07 ◼ ► So that all said, on the Mac, the Mac has a lot of preferences, so you can turn it off.
00:26:14 ◼ ► And so if you are uncomfortable with this idea or if you're at a moment where you're like,
00:26:19 ◼ ► "Yeah, but I really need it to be at 100% tomorrow because I'm going on a long trip somewhere."
00:26:41 ◼ ► And what Apple says is the whole idea here is just to make the battery last a lot longer.
00:26:46 ◼ ► And the conspiracy theorists will say, "Oh, well, this is just Apple saving itself money
00:26:50 ◼ ► because it's not going to have to replace those batteries at the cost of the user's battery life on their computer."
00:26:57 ◼ ► I don't think that's really accurate because when you talk about long-term battery life,
00:27:06 ◼ ► So I think what Apple's really doing is saying, "We don't want to get a reputation of our laptops' batteries dying
00:27:22 ◼ ► So I don't think this is a big conspiracy where Apple's saving itself warranty replacements on batteries
00:27:28 ◼ ► because if your battery needs a replacement in your MacBook's warranty, something is wrong with your battery.
00:27:34 ◼ ► That shouldn't happen. But I do think that this is--I mean, Apple's not acting entirely altruistically here
00:27:43 ◼ ► because it's a big corporation, but I think it's more about the product should have a longer life than it does.
00:27:49 ◼ ► They're not making their money--any money that they're making charging you for an out-of-warranty battery replacement
00:28:08 ◼ ► As I expect that this thing is becoming more of a concern or like a thing that Apple feels the requirement to address
00:28:17 ◼ ► because of Thunderbolt, because if you plug in a lot of devices now, it will charge your laptop, right?
00:28:27 ◼ ► And that's the thing. Like if you have your monitor powered and then your Thunderbolt cable comes from the monitor to your laptop,
00:28:33 ◼ ► it's also going to charge the laptop, and that may not have been the case before with just a monitor cable, right?
00:28:39 ◼ ► I don't think people generally are driving an external monitor from their laptop without plugging in their laptop.
00:28:44 ◼ ► I think that they were always plugging in their laptop. But I do think this has always been an issue, and I think Apple--
00:28:50 ◼ ► seriously, I think what happened is normally this would just be a different algorithm that they'd put in Mac OS.
00:29:00 ◼ ► They'd be like, "Hey, the guys over at the battery department have figured out this better way of doing this,
00:29:07 ◼ ► And after what happened a couple years ago with the whole kerfuffle about the iPhone battery, they can't do that anymore.
00:29:17 ◼ ► They don't feel like they can be safe because the conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork, right?
00:29:22 ◼ ► They have to announce it, so they announced it. But on one level, it's really not that big a deal.
00:29:34 ◼ ► I mean, maybe not all the time, but it's done that a lot over the course of the life of Mac OS X.
00:29:44 ◼ ► which is if you leave your laptop plugged in all the time, and you expect that the moment--
00:29:50 ◼ ► the rare, possibly, but the moment that you unplug it and walk away, it will be charged 100%
00:29:57 ◼ ► so that you can get all of that life out of it because you really need it. It won't, necessarily.
00:30:14 ◼ ► but that probably a third party will, which is more like what I have on my electric car,
00:30:38 ◼ ► because it could be much more problematic for you if you can't have the battery at full,
00:30:55 ◼ ► Like in the menu bar or something, to just hit a button to select the battery percentage
00:41:51 ◼ ► and that's not great, but like I feel like those scenarios are all going to be in play.
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00:45:21 ◼ ► We're going to take the old design and we're going to stick some upgraded hardware in it,
00:45:59 ◼ ► which there almost is now, we've seen it twice, this is the perfect time to buy this phone
00:46:10 ◼ ► And this is one of those cases where I've seen a bunch of videos from people who cover all the phone market
00:46:18 ◼ ► and they look at this phone and say, "It's kind of hard to believe because this is such a great deal."
00:46:22 ◼ ► There are other Android phones that are like premium but for a good price kind of phones.
00:46:28 ◼ ► But then there's this thing, which is, you know, good camera, does single-camera portrait mode.
00:46:45 ◼ ► It's not the cutting edge phone at the top of Apple's product line that a lot of our listeners are going to buy.
00:47:05 ◼ ► So he was on the SE before and he is a carpenter and so his phone was just full of sawdust.
00:47:17 ◼ ► And he told me, "Oh, I got it for £17 a month from Apple for two years, interest-free credit."
00:47:57 ◼ ► He is a big iPad Pro user, my dad, which was a big surprise to me when he bought one of those out of the blue.
00:48:05 ◼ ► My dad's not very technologically savvy which is why anytime he makes any of these decisions on his own, it's always a surprise to me.
00:48:23 ◼ ► They have options on price for the iPhone and you can get them direct from Apple on these discount deals.
00:48:30 ◼ ► You could go to buy any new Apple device now and the first question is are you trading one in?
00:48:50 ◼ ► I'm sure we're going to have a great time talking about the next earnings which are in a couple of weeks.
00:49:06 ◼ ► I saw somebody say on Twitter for $750 you can get one of these and an Apple Watch Series 3 and a pair of AirPods.
00:49:26 ◼ ► You can see there's the SE and there's the XR which is still for sale and then there's the 11 and they kind of escalate.
00:49:41 ◼ ► That's Apple knowing who its different audiences are and making phones available for all of them.
00:49:50 ◼ ► So you can just kind of go through the price line up to a point and then there's a big leap.
00:50:08 ◼ ► "Well, we got this one." Which keep in mind a few years ago would have been the top of the line iPhone.
00:50:15 ◼ ► It has the top of the line iPhone processor because it's the only processor that they're putting in all of those phones.
00:50:28 ◼ ► I know that there are people that were in the SE lifestyle that are not getting what they wanted which was a small phone.
00:50:52 ◼ ► I think what it just shows is that their data makes them believe that they should just keep making phones bigger.
00:51:12 ◼ ► I think I saw some developers as well saying that they were so happy to see this going away.
00:51:25 ◼ ► If you're developing an app in 2020 for the 2020 phones and still needing to support the iPhone SE screen size.
00:51:38 ◼ ► Yeah the whole operating system has moved on and the third party development has moved on.
00:51:50 ◼ ► It's very difficult for developers to fit things on that screen and also have good UI in all of the larger screens.
00:51:57 ◼ ► And it's a diminishing size of the market so there's only so much effort they're going to put into how it looks on those screens.
00:52:05 ◼ ► When Apple put up the pre-orders for the iPhone SE or the page itself when they announced that the product was live.
00:53:11 ◼ ► Because even in the details that we're getting I still feel like I can't understand exactly how this thing will feel until I use it myself.
00:53:49 ◼ ► The package of the 12.9 inch Magic Keyboard and 12.9 inch iPad Pro are heavier than a MacBook.
00:54:02 ◼ ► It's the same thing with the Brydge keyboards that we've been talking about for years now.
00:54:11 ◼ ► Is it's not a crime to turn an iPad into a laptop and have it weigh what a laptop would weigh.
00:54:22 ◼ ► And you know, let's not also leave out that there's also a lighter keyboard cover that Apple makes that's not as heavy as a laptop.
00:54:40 ◼ ► But it's not because what really bugs me is there's this Mac chauvinism that they believe that the only reason you would use an iPad is because it's lighter than a laptop.
00:55:08 ◼ ► Like I don't mind that my iPad and Brydge keyboard put together weigh as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
00:55:18 ◼ ► And also there's just the physics of having to keep it all from flopping over backward.
00:55:26 ◼ ► And the clincher is, of course, you take one hand and you pop the iPad off and you walk away.
00:57:03 ◼ ► We have been talking on this show for a while about knowing that this had to be a heavy product.
00:57:14 ◼ ► And we know this from having used, as you say, products similar to this one for quite a while.
00:57:21 ◼ ► And it is exactly that idea that it needs to be heavy because I want it to be a laptop.
00:58:26 ◼ ► And it basically seems like you have the range of from about 90 to 130 degrees in angle.
00:58:34 ◼ ► Most people are saying that practically it goes back as far as the old Smart Keyboard Folio did.
00:59:14 ◼ ► It's also about the height, and the height makes the angle a little bit more acceptable.
00:59:22 ◼ ► because I know that people have been frustrated by the lack of adjustability of the Smart Keyboard Folio,
00:59:27 ◼ ► the fact that it only has two angles, one of which is not acceptable for anything except watching a movie,
00:59:56 ◼ ► said that if you're the kind of person who opens your laptop and pushes the angle of the screen way back,
01:00:26 ◼ ► But in Sara Dietschy's review, she says, well, you have more adjustability on the Surface,
01:00:40 ◼ ► Like if you're just using it on desk and desk-like environments, then the Surface is more flexible.
01:00:48 ◼ ► If you're just using, and we talked about it here, Myke and I get it, Upgradients get it.
01:01:11 ◼ ► But Sara's video made me feel very happy because she handles this device the way I would handle it.
01:01:23 ◼ ► And it's just like walking around holding just the keyboard portion, and the whole thing stays together.
01:01:40 ◼ ► So I kind of like that because that's how I want to carry my iPad around when it's in this form factor.
01:01:47 ◼ ► I do feel though, after watching these reviews and reading what lots of people are saying about this product who have used it,
01:01:59 ◼ ► For sure. Because at its core, the challenge with reviewing something like this is you're not reviewing...
01:02:36 ◼ ► So what you really need to do is kind of look at it and say, like I just said about if you're using it at a desk, don't use this.
01:02:51 ◼ ► It's for a particular use case. And what that means is, it's just like when we would talk about the bridge.
01:03:04 ◼ ► But not everybody does, right? And there are a lot of people who probably looked at this product and thought,
01:03:20 ◼ ► But it's not for a lot of cases. A lot of use cases, the smart keyboard folio is better.
01:03:27 ◼ ► Or an external keyboard in a stand is better. Or a bridge keyboard maybe even. I don't know.
01:03:55 ◼ ► Which we're all wondering, obviously it's going to be heavy to allow that, but is it even possible?
01:04:14 ◼ ► And there's two parts to that. One, I'm really pleased that's the case because I would have been really upset if it was only clicky in the bottom.
01:04:33 ◼ ► I just think it's interesting that Apple is making a trackpad in 2020 that clicks physically.
01:04:44 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I'm happy that the entire thing clicks because then I'm probably not going to notice any difference to my usual trackpads.
01:05:01 ◼ ► So it says, "Magic Keyboard Micro Review. If this is the accessory you've been waiting for, it's perfect.
01:05:06 ◼ ► If you're somebody trying to force an iPad into your life when you don't need or want it to be more than a Netflix player, it's not going to do a lot to solve your problems."
01:05:18 ◼ ► "Baffled by people complaining about the 12.9-inch Magic Keyboard plus iPad weighing as much as a 13-inch laptop, making it equivalent to a laptop is kind of the point."
01:05:33 ◼ ► If the Smart Keyboard Folio made it weigh as much as a laptop, I would maybe raise an eyebrow.
01:05:43 ◼ ► This is the first, first-party, complete, "Your iPad is now a laptop" product that Apple has done.
01:05:57 ◼ ► That's Apple saying, you know, not everybody wants the big heavy keyboard with a backlighting.
01:06:02 ◼ ► And the Magic Keyboard with the moving keys and the trackpad and all that. It's like, not everybody needs this.
01:06:15 ◼ ► And you could expect us to be talking about this thing a lot more, I think, over the next coming weeks.
01:06:24 ◼ ► And we've been trying to find ways to make this lifestyle for ourselves, and Apple's finally made the product that will do it.
01:06:42 ◼ ► And I keep coming back to that idea that, you know, is Apple ever going to embrace the idea that the iPad can be used as a laptop with a pointing device
01:07:03 ◼ ► And honestly, I wasn't convinced that was ever going to happen in a short period of time, in a few years' time.
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01:09:14 ◼ ► Graham wants to know, "My partner is looking to buy an Apple Watch and is debating between the Series 3 and the Series 5.
01:09:26 ◼ ► That's a personal question. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but what's it worth to you? Because the Series 3 is great.
01:09:41 ◼ ► If you haven't had an Apple Watch before or your partner hasn't had an Apple Watch before,
01:10:21 ◼ ► When you're thinking about the money your partner is willing to spend or you're willing to spend for your partner about this,
01:10:43 ◼ ► I much, much prefer the design of the Series 4 and the Series 5 to the Series 3 and before.
01:11:04 ◼ ► I think really, if you look at the Series 3 and you're like "I like the way this looks"
01:11:40 ◼ ► I skipped the Apple Watch for a while, stopped wearing it, but the Series 5 gave me the reasons to come back.
01:12:02 ◼ ► So you can make your decision that way, I guess. You can try it out if it doesn't work for you
01:12:10 ◼ ► Will wants to know, "What are your favorite HomeKit accessories this many years into the system?"
01:12:47 ◼ ► So I don't really know what's going on with HomeKit, but I do hope that they are getting ready to change it in some way.
01:13:07 ◼ ► I love the Lutron Casita switches, because one of my great complaints about HomeKit stuff is you end up with smart bulbs and stuff,
01:13:22 ◼ ► and then you've got these light switches where it's sort of like, "No, don't touch the light switch.
01:13:30 ◼ ► That's the power to the smart bulb, and then the smart bulb you have to turn off separately, and you can't use the light switch to do that.
01:13:35 ◼ ► It's the worst. And the Lutron Casita switches are light switches that are smart home light switches.
01:13:47 ◼ ► My living room lights are on this, and it means that I can adjust my living room lights, turn them on and off from my iOS devices,
01:13:58 ◼ ► It will talk to them using voice assistants and using a physical remote control that comes with the Lutron switch.
01:14:09 ◼ ► Or, you guessed it, on the wall, it's a switch. It's real with real controls, and you can just turn it on and off by pushing the buttons on the wall.
01:14:20 ◼ ► Because it's controlling. The light bulbs are dumb. The switch is smart. And it's way better that way.
01:14:26 ◼ ► So that's my favorite. I also have done most of the lighting in my office now is smart lighting.
01:14:32 ◼ ► So I've got a smart switch for my floor lamp. I've got some light strip Phillips Hue light strips around the windows on my side wall.
01:14:42 ◼ ► And for when I do video, I actually have two TV lights, two LED lights, and they're up mounted on the ceiling and attached to a smart switch.
01:14:54 ◼ ► So I can just, with the Home app, I can just turn those on when I need to be well lit for video and then turn them back off, which is pretty great too.
01:15:02 ◼ ► So my garage lighting is second, and I have a lava lamp that I can turn on just for fun.
01:15:08 ◼ ► But the Lutron Casita stuff is the stuff that I really love because it feels much more appropriately integrated into my home to not have smart bulbs,
01:15:17 ◼ ► but instead to have smart switches in the walls because they function as light switches and they're smart. And that's way better.
01:15:31 ◼ ► I liked one of the things that we do like about the Hue bulbs, though, is the color changing abilities, which I guess this can't do unless you have bulbs that do it.
01:15:49 ◼ ► Well, right. I could make the living room bulbs smart, but then I would have a light switch that had to stay on all the time and you couldn't actually touch it, or you'd break everything.
01:15:58 ◼ ► And I don't like that. There are companies that make smart switches that cover up your light switch.
01:16:03 ◼ ► You rewire it to stay on all the time, and then you put this over it, and it's a smart switch.
01:16:07 ◼ ► I actually have one of those in my bedroom because we put in a smart ceiling fan that's also an overhead light.
01:16:13 ◼ ► And the problem there is sometimes you press the button and nothing happens because for whatever reason the smart home network didn't get the signal or something.
01:16:21 ◼ ► Whereas if you flip a light switch, the lights come on. So I'm not -- I get the appeal of like the color kind of stuff, but --
01:16:36 ◼ ► Because there isn't that break of a light switch. The lights that we have, the actual light fixtures in the house, we turn on by switches, but we actually use the lamps more in the rooms.
01:16:52 ◼ ► I would like to one day change our actual light switches to something like that, just so we have the additional flexibility of also having them controllable via the internet.
01:17:16 ◼ ► I have done it myself, and I've also had other people do other switches. I've done both.
01:17:21 ◼ ► I like being able to do it, but I get -- my wiring in my house is -- a lot of it is old, and so I get really frustrated, and it starts to get confusing about what switch is what, and that's when you bring in the electrician.
01:17:33 ◼ ► Yeah. Chris wants to know, "Which current or former Apple executive do you hope writes a tell-all book? Which story do you want to hear the most?"
01:17:51 ◼ ► I feel like we answered a version of this question before, but I'm going to throw out Phil Schiller because he's been there a long time.
01:17:55 ◼ ► So he can actually talk about jobs returning and about lots of different product rollouts.
01:18:00 ◼ ► If he were to ever write a tell-all book, he knows where all the bodies are buried, and for a long stretch of Apple history, and that's why I'd want to hear from Phil.
01:18:11 ◼ ► I, for some of the same reasons, want it to be Ive, because Johnny was there, again, for a lot of jobs his time, but I also want to hear about the design aspect.
01:18:29 ◼ ► Also, I'm interested in his life as somebody who grew up in the UK and all that kind of stuff.
01:18:36 ◼ ► I would love a book from him at some point, but he doesn't seem like the type of person to do it.
01:18:42 ◼ ► I would expect more that Schiller would than Ive would, even though I don't think either of them will.
01:18:51 ◼ ► But it feels more likely to me that Schiller would do something than I would, just because Ive seems so very private, but I can't imagine him sharing any stories, really.
01:19:03 ◼ ► Kaelan Gosso asks, "Do you think that the pandemic could finally push Apple to break its pace of new software versions every year?"
01:19:11 ◼ ► I'm going to say no. I think, I mean, for Mac OS, I think it's possible, but my short version is no.
01:19:24 ◼ ► I think it will instead push them to make smaller revisions and make them throughout the year and be a little less ambitious in what rolls into a particular release.
01:19:37 ◼ ► But I think they, you know, anything is possible right now, but I think that they're probably more inclined to continue rolling out versions every year,
01:19:48 ◼ ► even if they're less ambitious and the new features are broken up across the whole year instead of just all dropping in a lump in the fall.
01:19:57 ◼ ► They've already been moving in that direction, and I think following that kind of plan gives them the flexibility to adjust when something like this happens and say,
01:20:07 ◼ ► "Well, you know, we're not going to get -- this year is going to start out, the successor to Catalina is going to be later and it's going to be a little bit quieter,
01:20:18 ◼ ► And I think that's a more likely scenario than just, "Nope, we're not going to do an OS update," because if you watch, they're still doing OS updates throughout the year.
01:20:26 ◼ ► So in some ways, it's just where the milestone release happens, and I think that they find value in having a milestone release more or less every year.
01:20:35 ◼ ► It doesn't have to be a massive release, and they can trickle those features out later.
01:20:39 ◼ ► And finally, James asks, "Do you think AirTags would be a subscription product? Like, or a service?"
01:20:47 ◼ ► I don't. I just think that Apple has not gone so far around the bend that they look at a new piece of hardware and say, "This is actually a service."
01:20:56 ◼ ► And I don't think find -- my other comment would be that Find My is not a service, right?
01:21:04 ◼ ► Like, Find My on your existing hardware from Apple, you don't pay for that. You get that just with your product. You can find it.
01:21:14 ◼ ► And so I don't think -- I think Apple will view this as you buy the AirTags and then they're on Find My until they die.
01:21:24 ◼ ► Yes, I hadn't thought of anything like this until I got this question, and I was wondering if there could be different levels to it, but I'm not sure how that would work, either.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Like, or if it could be somehow attached -- I mean, it's obviously going to be attached to iCloud, but it just seems like too complicated to be like you have to be a paid iCloud member to use more than two of them or something.
01:21:48 ◼ ► Like, there is a product here because other companies do it. So like, Tile and Tracker have a -- you buy the thing and you can track it, but then they have like plus models, right, where you pay and you get more features.
01:22:00 ◼ ► But I think for this particular product, I think Apple is looking for more of like overall ecosystem lock-in than subscription lock-in.
01:22:11 ◼ ► Like, if you were thinking like, what's the business angle behind this? It's like making it more desirable to be in the Apple ecosystem in general by offering this product than it being a, we want to get more revenue per user on a recurring basis.
01:22:29 ◼ ► When this product, people will buy them over and over again, which is different to typical products. Like, as in the amount that a person could have could be like five, which is different, right, to a normal Apple product.
01:22:52 ◼ ► Well, that's true, but they do have multiple Apple products. And then every one of these that you buy, you're giving Apple more money for them. And I'm not sure there's any overhead there. And then they're not going to last forever.
01:23:04 ◼ ► And they keep you in the Apple ecosystem. So I think they -- I haven't thought about it either, and I think it totally could. But I don't think they will.
01:23:17 ◼ ► If you'd like to send in a question for a future episode, just send out a tweet with the hashtag #AskUpgrade, and it will go into a list and can be picked later on. Thank you so much to everybody that has and does. Please keep sending them in. We love to get your questions.
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01:23:53 ◼ ► We do stream this show live, too, 9 a.m. Pacific time every single Monday at relay.fm/live. If you want something to listen to while you're working at home right now, you can do that.
01:24:08 ◼ ► We also have a schedule of all of our live shows at relay.fm/schedule. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com, and he's @jsnew, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter. I am @imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade, and we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow.