00:00:24 ◼ ► We've been spending a lot of time together over this past weekend. We'll talk about that in a minute.
00:00:41 ◼ ► So none of the announcements, like what is the thing that you're most looking forward to
00:01:38 ◼ ► And we swamp the live stream, which reminds me, we got to get the live server moved over to a better box
00:02:21 ◼ ► And yeah, I would agree with you actually. That is definitely one of my key key highlights.
00:02:32 ◼ ► just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk and it will be maybe included in a future episode.
00:02:37 ◼ ► We have a, I think this will probably be the last warning for dongletown surf club merch.
00:02:48 ◼ ► Summer of fun is fast on its way. So you got to go down to the beach and join the dongletown surf club.
00:03:01 ◼ ► You can wrap up all of your dongles in a towel and like tie them on a stick and go walk out.
00:03:27 ◼ ► I was very excited over the weekend because I got to make my debut appearance on the incomparable.
00:03:34 ◼ ► You did just fine. Although I did while editing it back notice what you pointed out after we recorded,
00:03:39 ◼ ► which is that at the beginning of the show, you sort of thought it was Myke at the movies.
00:03:54 ◼ ► And I think like you asked me a question and then we just have a conversation and then I had to remember,
00:04:02 ◼ ► But then what happened to me later on in the episode is I had that thing that everybody mentions,
00:04:07 ◼ ► where I didn't talk for like 15 minutes because I was just listening to the incomparable.
00:04:18 ◼ ► So I so if you are keen to know mine and Jason's opinions about Avengers Endgame, there is episode 458 of the incomparable.
00:04:38 ◼ ► I have got to live out all of the little goals and dreams that I have for myself at this point.
00:04:47 ◼ ► So thank you for having me on the show because I've been listening to the incomparable for so many years.
00:04:59 ◼ ► I had some of this on and two, it was recorded at a time that I did not recorded at 7 p.m. Pacific time.
00:05:12 ◼ ► Rad is the title. Those of you who have seen Endgame know the no spoilers, but a rat from San Francisco saves the universe.
00:05:22 ◼ ► It was really fun over the week to see the clips that people were pulling from the episode from overcast new clips feature.
00:05:38 ◼ ► And I think we passed the test, which I knew we would pass, which is that are people going to clip the important thoughts that we have?
00:05:55 ◼ ► And I feel like we learned a lot. And those moments come completely unplanned to which is part of the joy of them as you just kind of do a podcast.
00:06:01 ◼ ► And then afterward, people are making clips and you're like, oh, yeah, we did that, didn't we?
00:06:06 ◼ ► All right. It was funny, though, because I think we both expected that people would be clipping the Batman comment.
00:06:21 ◼ ► I did enjoy listening back to it. So again, thank you to everybody who is sharing clips of the show.
00:06:28 ◼ ► And also thank you to everybody that included us on that, because I think it's really nice to see.
00:06:50 ◼ ► I think I think I was like, let us know. Let me know if you have more to announce about Photoshop.
00:06:56 ◼ ► That must have been it. Well, on May the 9th, Adobe have a little conference, I think, in New York,
00:07:06 ◼ ► So we're going to find out more then this week, just a couple of days about what's happening in Photoshop for the iPad.
00:07:15 ◼ ► Yeah, sure. And Brendan wrote in, along with many others, but Brendan was first to recommend a website that rewind dot website.
00:07:23 ◼ ► They have a feature called Cast Rewinder as an option for Jeff, who asked in the Ask Upgrade last week about a way to create,
00:07:30 ◼ ► basically to take a podcast that you want to listen to from the beginning and be able to listen to it from the start.
00:07:35 ◼ ► Well, this website, you can feed it an RSS feed and it will generate a new RSS feed for you that will basically publish an episode for you on a time frame.
00:07:53 ◼ ► The Adventure Zone. Oh, the Adventure Zone. And they would pop up for you on an interval.
00:07:57 ◼ ► So this is a really cool feature, a really cool thing, but would still be brilliant to have in all the great podcast apps.
00:08:08 ◼ ► And I would like to just provide one last piece of follow up from number one upgrade in Casey, who, we had the summer of fun.
00:08:39 ◼ ► I realize we've, by the way, just to forward promote our summer of fun, because Myke and I are both putting lots of items on.
00:08:46 ◼ ► You put items on the calendar and you start to think, oh boy, like this is going to, if you're in our business, it's like, this is going to require some scheduling because I'm going to be out here and you're going to be out here and we're going to do this thing and all that.
00:08:58 ◼ ► And so we started planning this year of like a month ago, a summer fund document with our ideas for the kind of off format episodes we want to do during the summer of fun.
00:09:09 ◼ ► And when it, when that starts, there's nothing in it, right? Like when it starts, it's like one dumb idea for a draft of something. And then that's about it.
00:09:17 ◼ ► I feel like in the last week, week and a half, um, we have gone now I have, I'm at the point where I have more summer of fun ideas than there are weeks in the summer of fun.
00:09:28 ◼ ► Which is perfect. That's what we want because that means we get to pick the best of the best for our wild and wacky episodes.
00:09:40 ◼ ► All right. Let's move into a couple of upstream pieces of news. There are a lot of, uh, this is some news in streaming media. There were a lot of up fronts last week, which is when the TV networks start showing off what they have to advertisers.
00:09:51 ◼ ► So there was a bunch of news, a bunch of shows being displayed, but there are a couple of things that were interesting to me because we've touched on some of these themes in the past.
00:10:01 ◼ ► So we may remember that the Obama family was creating a production company for Netflix programming.
00:10:08 ◼ ► The production company is called Higher Ground and they debuted their slate of programming for Netflix.
00:10:13 ◼ ► It is a selection of scripted and unscripted projects. There are seven in total that have been announced, which will be released over several years.
00:10:21 ◼ ► The two that were highlighted specifically were one was called The Fifth Risk, which is by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis is responsible for the books Moneyball and The Big Short.
00:10:35 ◼ ► Yeah. It's a book about kind of horrific things involving government, things you don't understand that government agencies do and how they do things to protect the United States and humanity from terrible things and that, uh, and how dysfunction in those agencies can, uh, can put people at risk.
00:10:58 ◼ ► And, uh, it, it was, uh, I think initially a long form magazine article and then adapted into something larger.
00:11:05 ◼ ► And it is when you, when you, if you've read that article or that book, you realize why the Obamas might have wanted this to be, uh, uh, something on, on their slate, because it is, it is kind of fits in with their, their thoughts about like responsible government and is, you know, pretty much a direct, like the Lewis book anyway,
00:11:25 ◼ ► a direct shot at the way the current administration has handled government agencies. So it's not, it's, it's, it's political, although they are definitely spinning it as being kind of like more, it's about the people, everyday heroes who are in the government trying to take care of us.
00:11:49 ◼ ► Well, it's right. It's yeah, except it's not like explicitly political, but I mean, if you sign Obama, I mean, you're not signing the Obamas if you're Netflix in order to get like an action movie, right?
00:12:06 ◼ ► Yeah. But, but trying to kind of like have it be like, well, we're rising above it though, higher ground and talking about like important issues that everybody should care about is sort of the, the pitch there.
00:12:16 ◼ ► I am going to say I really robbed my eyes when I saw the name of the production company.
00:12:25 ◼ ► So I like, I mean, I love Moneyball and the Big Short, so, you know, I mean, I know that they're great movies because they have great actors and great directors and that sort of stuff, but like obviously the source material is super interesting as well.
00:12:39 ◼ ► They also focused on a World War II period drama called Bloom. It will be focusing on the barriers faced by women and people of color around this time.
00:12:47 ◼ ► But it's super interesting thing is it's being written by Callie Gurie who won an Oscar for Thelma and Louise.
00:12:58 ◼ ► And they have a bunch of like this, some children's stuff and some scripted, unscripted stuff.
00:13:03 ◼ ► So there's a lot of projects from the higher ground production company and Hulu is getting some Marvel TV shows. Adaptations of Ghost Rider and Hellstrom will be live action shows launching in 2020.
00:13:16 ◼ ► Hulu has, there's been an announced slate of animated shows, Marvel shows for them in the past.
00:13:23 ◼ ► But it seems like this is where all the Netflix style live action violent stuff is going to go to Hulu now instead of Disney Plus.
00:13:35 ◼ ► So the Disney Plus stuff is being produced by Marvel Studios, which is the movie studio.
00:13:39 ◼ ► And it's the first time that really the movie studio with the movie studio actors is doing TV.
00:13:45 ◼ ► The Hulu shows are being done by Marvel TV, which is not the movie studio and it's run by a different group of people.
00:13:54 ◼ ► And it will be, you know, like the Ghost Rider show, the guy who's going to star in that was Ghost Rider on Agents of SHIELD, right? On ABC.
00:14:04 ◼ ► So this is the split that I find interesting is that they're kind of saving their super high gloss movie actors stuff for Disney Plus.
00:14:14 ◼ ► But there are other Marvel properties that they can produce that can go somewhere else.
00:14:26 ◼ ► That's a Marvel show and Cloak and Dagger is on Freeform, which is a cable channel owned by Disney.
00:14:36 ◼ ► But I think we've seen a demarcation here where the like super prestige, you know, these people from the movies direct spinoffs from things that are in theaters is going to go to Disney Plus.
00:14:53 ◼ ► That's my guess. And maybe other more adult adaptations like Legion is a good example, which is wrapping up on FX.
00:15:08 ◼ ► But it is, you know, because it was X-Men related, it was on a Fox channel and all that.
00:15:21 ◼ ► But it is a fascinating division where the TV people are doing kind of like the stuff over here and the movie people are doing the stuff over here for Disney Plus.
00:15:29 ◼ ► I can imagine logistically it making sense, right? Like if it's all the movie actors, let's just keep them in the system that they're already attuned to rather than moving all this stuff over there.
00:15:38 ◼ ► And there's corporate politics involved here too because like Kevin Feige who runs Marvel Studios used to work for Ike Perlmutter, who's the head of Marvel.
00:15:47 ◼ ► And by many accounts an awful human being. And finally, and he didn't want to do that anymore.
00:15:55 ◼ ► And they're like, you know, you've made billions of dollars for Disney. We're going to move you under the head of motion pictures for Disney instead and out of Marvel.
00:16:02 ◼ ► But what that means now is that there are basically two different chains of responsibility inside Disney for Marvel filmed content.
00:16:23 ◼ ► I don't entirely understand why Ike Perlmutter, who is the guy who, you know, he's claimed to famous basically that he bought Marvel and took it out of bankruptcy.
00:16:32 ◼ ► And when they sold it to Disney, I kind of expected him to walk away and he won't go away. Like he's still there.
00:16:40 ◼ ► And so now I kind of feel like the conditions of the sale must have included that Ike gets to run Marvel for as long as he wants.
00:16:53 ◼ ► But now I'm starting to feel like he's just, he's not going to let go of Marvel until he's unable to do the job anymore.
00:17:02 ◼ ► Which is just, I find that so bizarre and that people really chafe under him and he's notoriously cheap.
00:17:07 ◼ ► I hear from people, you know, who are, who've worked for Marvel that like, despite all that money from Disney and all of that,
00:17:13 ◼ ► like Disney doesn't run Marvel as a, it doesn't spend money on it to have it be like this generator of intellectual property.
00:17:23 ◼ ► Which I find, I mean, I get it from a business sense of like, well, we're not going to fund this thing and have it lose lots of money because it's a business.
00:17:32 ◼ ► But on the other hand, it's sort of like, yeah, but it's generated tens of billions of dollars for you in terms of the intellectual property it's generated.
00:17:38 ◼ ► Maybe you could just use it for that and it can lose a little money in the comics business, but you're going to make it all back in the movie side.
00:17:48 ◼ ► So yeah, it is, so the idea that there are these two completely different groups making filmed entertainment under the Marvel banner
00:18:20 ◼ ► So now that they've got all the X-Men and stuff like that, presumably, I don't think there's a draft, right?
00:18:25 ◼ ► I don't think there's a draft where Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter or Jeff Loeb, who runs Marvel TV, sit down and it's like, okay, well, I got a Wolverine.
00:18:38 ◼ ► I imagine that they go through all the mutants and are like, okay, we're taking all these mutants and you can have the rest, Marvel TV.
00:18:53 ◼ ► There's nothing quite like getting home after a long day and collapsing onto the sofa to relax.
00:18:58 ◼ ► And it is even better when you have a Borrow sofa, which is the luxury couch for real life.
00:19:02 ◼ ► Borrow was created by a couple of students who thought that there must be a better way to buy furniture rather than dealing with limited showrooms, long delivery waits and awkward deliveries themselves.
00:19:13 ◼ ► That is why Borrow lets you easily customise a high quality sofa online, which could be shipped for free in one week.
00:19:20 ◼ ► Borrow were recently named one of the world's most innovative companies by Fast Company because they let you build a sofa that suits you.
00:19:27 ◼ ► You can choose from five fabrics, three leg finishes, two armrest styles and any length.
00:19:39 ◼ ► It has a built in USB charger so you can charge your devices right from your sofa, which is a sentence I never thought that I would say, but I love that I get to say it.
00:19:48 ◼ ► It's made of high quality materials like sustainably sourced hardwood instead of flimsy particle board.
00:19:52 ◼ ► And they offer a curated selection of hand woven pillows to help jumpstart your interior style.
00:19:57 ◼ ► The great thing about Borrow's sofas is that they're like modular, so you kind of build them up in components.
00:20:18 ◼ ► And with Borrow, you don't have to have these kinds of worries, which is really incredible.
00:20:27 ◼ ► You can get $75 off a new sofa and free one week shipping by going to Borrow.com/upgrade.
00:20:43 ◼ ► Myke, my mind is still spinning about the idea that there could be a draft between Marvel Studios and Marvel TV.
00:20:56 ◼ ► Well, only if you do it where somebody gets to be Kevin Feige and just basically gets all 12 picks first, and then everybody else picks the rest.
00:21:06 ◼ ► That's true. That would be less entertaining than sectioning up mutants one by one to see where they go next.
00:21:20 ◼ ► Let me give some brief overview to some of the highlights and then we can dig into some more of the interesting details.
00:21:54 ◼ ► It's not other. They rebranded it. It's a much more exciting brand now. It's not other.
00:21:59 ◼ ► Nobody is excited about other getting bigger, but wearables, they're very excited about.
00:22:03 ◼ ► iPad is up 22% year on year and doing great, especially when you consider this is just iPad Pro.
00:22:13 ◼ ► It came in very late. Yeah, and that's the biggest single growth year over year boost in six years.
00:22:21 ◼ ► Mac is down 5%. We'll get to why in a bit because that gives some interesting details on that.
00:22:26 ◼ ► Q3 guidance is between $52 to $54 billion, which is just about where they were last year.
00:22:34 ◼ ► So it is possible that Apple could beat the current trend and go up year on year slightly in Q3.
00:22:42 ◼ ► So that would be good for them, right? To not have three quarters in a row where they're down revenue.
00:22:49 ◼ ► And Wall Street hates surprises. So that's the thing about guidance, why we talk about guidance,
00:22:53 ◼ ► and why even though revenue is down, profit was down, iPhone sales were down, the stock didn't fall apart.
00:23:02 ◼ ► The answer is three months ago, they gave guidance and said, we think we're going to fall into this category in terms of our revenue next quarter.
00:23:10 ◼ ► And so they told everybody that. So that's priced into the stock that was priced into the stock and they landed it, right?
00:23:16 ◼ ► They landed at the high side of their guidance. So Wall Street doesn't like being taken by surprise.
00:23:21 ◼ ► They like not being taken by surprise. And so when Apple announced these results, even though they're not very good by Apple standards,
00:23:30 ◼ ► Wall Street was like, great, you did it. You did what you said. You're back in control of your own story here.
00:23:36 ◼ ► And then their new guidance is even better. And then some of the things we'll get to, they were very positive about.
00:23:42 ◼ ► So it is kind of funny, though, to see a story where Apple had a quarter where the iPhone went down 17% year over year and the stock went up.
00:23:50 ◼ ► But like this is why when Apple had to do that adjustment, it was such a big story because they got it wrong.
00:24:01 ◼ ► Not good. They will not be happy. Because this is you know, we talk about this every single quarter, right?
00:24:05 ◼ ► Like this is what it is. It's about hitting the numbers you were supposed to hit. And then that's where that's what that's the game that is being played.
00:24:17 ◼ ► So iPad growth, it's hit an all time high in active iPad usage. This is just great news for me.
00:24:24 ◼ ► I mean, we'll get into later on, like a little bit about how iPad and other stuff compares to the overall business.
00:24:34 ◼ ► this is the type of stuff as an iPad user that you want to see that like the product itself is doing better because it must reinforce the ability for advocates inside of Apple who are working on and care about the iPad
00:24:46 ◼ ► to be able to get the development resource that they need to improve it if the product itself is getting better.
00:24:53 ◼ ► Right. So the growth is good. It's been it's been mostly growth. I think it's six out of the last eight quarters.
00:24:58 ◼ ► It's had year over year growth. They talk a lot about iPad usage being an all time high.
00:25:02 ◼ ► It's the strongest quarter in six years. And as we said earlier, iPad Pro is the bulk of this.
00:25:11 ◼ ► We did release a new iPad Air and a new iPad Mini late in the quarter, but it was late in the quarter.
00:25:18 ◼ ► And most of what you're seeing here is the iPad Pro. And I think that's great because not only is there room for those other iPads to continue to lift the boat here,
00:25:33 ◼ ► And the wearables home accessory group is clearly driven by AirPods, which is a product that is going for a renaissance.
00:25:48 ◼ ► You know, I always parse what Tim Cook says about Apple Watch sales because they don't reveal Apple Watch sales.
00:26:15 ◼ ► Or just late in the process. Again, it's one of those things where, yeah, they're in there, but they weren't in there for all three months of the quarter.
00:26:23 ◼ ► And of course, they're very excited about services growth. And we're talking a lot about future offerings.
00:26:40 ◼ ► Like in that quarter in Q2, there were no new services offerings that Apple was selling.
00:26:47 ◼ ► The beauty of services is it doesn't have peak quarters. It's not seasonal because you just sign up for a service and you keep paying every month or every quarter or whatever.
00:26:57 ◼ ► And then it's additive because you keep adding new people paying for new services and it keeps going up.
00:27:04 ◼ ► So services has grown for like every quarter, basically, in the last five years or something like that.
00:27:11 ◼ ► Let me ask you a question. Within a reasonable period of time, maybe five years or so, do you think that Apple could be making most of their revenue from services?
00:27:35 ◼ ► But services is at 20 percent. I don't know. I think the first 10, going from 10 to 20 might be the easiest for services.
00:27:56 ◼ ► But there is a real good question to say, like in five years, what percentage of Apple's revenue portfolio is services?
00:28:02 ◼ ► And is it more like 30 or 40 percent? Because I can imagine there being some quarters where it's the most.
00:28:09 ◼ ► Because if you say right, like it doesn't go down, it's not seasonal. Right? Like once people are in, they're just in and you just keep adding more people.
00:28:19 ◼ ► I could imagine at least a quarter, like if there was a bad iPhone quarter or whatever, it's just like a quiet quarter.
00:28:24 ◼ ► It's like, oh, it took over. Like it doesn't seem like an impossible thing to me, especially when like, you know, Apple haven't been focusing for too long on services in a way that they'd be able to make meaningful change.
00:28:46 ◼ ► So like if you can just keep capturing those people, getting to give you more and more money, it seems you can see why they're doing it, basically, is what I'm getting at, because this is this money on the table for them.
00:29:03 ◼ ► So Tim says, we think that most users are going to get multiple over the top products, talking about TV subscription services, and we're going to do our best to convince them that Apple TV Plus products should be one of them.
00:29:15 ◼ ► Yeah, this is Tim setting, this is Tim. Hello, this is Tim. This is Tim setting, I think, setting expectations for Apple TV Plus, saying, look, we want to be in the mix.
00:29:29 ◼ ► He's not saying, well, we think that people are going to pick our offering because it's the best and this is what they're going to use to watch TV.
00:29:35 ◼ ► They're like, look, people are going to subscribe to a bunch and we want to be one of them.
00:29:39 ◼ ► I'm so happy that they're talking about it this way, because otherwise they are going to get ruined. Right?
00:29:43 ◼ ► Like if they want to roll in here and be like, we have the best one, everyone should just get ours. Like that's not going to work for them.
00:29:50 ◼ ► Well, it's impossible because that's not the case. And so, so seeing reality, it's a good sign. It's a good sign.
00:29:55 ◼ ► And the thing that definitely got around, there was like a misquote that got around on Twitter a little bit, which was like, people are going to buy multiple ones and we want this to be one of them.
00:30:05 ◼ ► And people are like, aha, there's proof that Apple is going to sell this because there's this debate of like, will it be free? Will it be in a bundle with something or all that?
00:30:14 ◼ ► But that was a paraphrase and it was not accurate. He doesn't say buy, he says going to get, and he thinks people, he wants people to get Apple TV Plus.
00:30:24 ◼ ► So if you have that pet theory that they're not going to charge for this, which I just don't see, I think they'll charge for it.
00:30:30 ◼ ► But I think that they'll make it worth your while to have a bundle with other things. But you can keep saying that because Tim didn't say we think they'll buy ours.
00:30:43 ◼ ► Well, we can do upgrade conspiracy theory time. Get is the wording that Apple uses for free apps in the App Store.
00:30:56 ◼ ► Let's talk about the iPhone. I want to give a quote. This is from your, you wrote a really good piece on Six Colors about this.
00:31:04 ◼ ► Apple is now turning around iPhone sales by being more active when it comes to selling those iPhones to customers. What does this mean?
00:31:12 ◼ ► Yeah, the iPhone, and I try, it's, you got to word it the right way so that I struggle with this a little bit.
00:31:19 ◼ ► The iPhone has sold itself. And I don't mean to say like, Apple has done nothing for, because Apple has made the iPhone and they've made this thing that everybody has wanted and it's sold a lot.
00:31:30 ◼ ► And it's not as if people aren't trying to sell the iPhone, but like the impression I get is that Apple's approach in retail, for example, has definitely been, hello, we do have the iPhone.
00:31:49 ◼ ► Right. And my impression now in, in, in talking to people who work or know people who work in Apple retail is last fall as iPhone sales were falling off the, you know, off the charts.
00:32:05 ◼ ► Apple said, Oh, okay. I guess we need to push this. I guess we actually need to push the iPhone like all the way down. And this wasn't just like, be more aggressive about closing the sale.
00:32:17 ◼ ► If you're standing at a table with a customer who's looking at an iPhone, it's also things like if you're leading like a photo walk for one of these today at Apple sessions, um, take out, give everybody an iPhone 10 R to take their pictures and then come back in and say, yeah, did you really like the 10 R?
00:32:32 ◼ ► You know, you could upgrade, you could do a, like, like really wrapping, converting customers in the store into new purchases of iPhones at strategically in a way that believe it or not, they didn't really do much of before because they didn't need to.
00:32:48 ◼ ► And I think that, that what has happened is that Apple has built this immense business on the iPhone without pushing a lot of the buttons that you usually push to sell products. And now they're pushing those buttons because it's time and it has, it seems to have had an effect.
00:33:05 ◼ ► So it is, uh, you know, Tim Cook went into it in the call, like they are, uh, they are doing trade in stuff. They're doing installment stuff, different programs work better in different markets. They talked a lot about how installments were working well in China.
00:33:19 ◼ ► Um, but, uh, trade-ins is a way to make this work as well. Um, thinking about, uh, you know, what motivates buyers in these different markets in order to get in the end, to get a new iPhone sale. And yeah, I'm not saying that there was none of that going on before, but of course, of course there is, but it seems to me like there was a top down review at Apple of how do we goose iPhone sales.
00:33:45 ◼ ► And according to Tim Cook and, and Luca Maestri, the CFO on that call, you know, they seem to believe that this has worked and continues to work and there, and they, they talked a lot about, which I thought was good about learning.
00:33:59 ◼ ► About how we tried this out and we're like, we've, we've learned a lot about how in these markets, people like this and in these markets, people like this, and we're trying things. You get the sense that Apple's like motivated now to figure out the best ways to sell the iPhone to customers, not worldwide, even, but like in each market.
00:34:14 ◼ ► And they're going to try a bunch of different stuff and learn from it. And that's just a level of active selling of iPhone products.
00:34:21 ◼ ► This is what companies that have products to sell do. Like this is how they sell a product. Apple has just had the luxury over like a 10 year span to not have to worry about this because it was just an incredibly desirable product and the iPhone remains to be desirable, but the market in which the iPhone is sold has changed around it.
00:34:43 ◼ ► Right. Like we've spoken about this, right? Like the, the increasing price of smartphones is, is one thing as well as the, uh, removal and a lot of territories of subsidies and the slower pace of innovation too.
00:34:57 ◼ ► Like, you know, in the early days of smartphones to a two year old, three year old smartphone was horrendously out of date and that's not really the case anymore.
00:35:05 ◼ ► And so you've got to give people reasons to upgrade. And there was a time when they did. And also Apple's competitors are making more and more interesting products. Like they have competition.
00:35:16 ◼ ► And when talking about the innovation, there is competition there now in a, in a way that there wasn't for a while, I think. So they are, they are having to actually sell their product.
00:35:26 ◼ ► And so it's just a different situation. They seem to be very happy with the trade and stuff, as you said, right? Like they were talking a lot about that and clearly that's something we're going to see more of.
00:35:38 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, no, and it's tremendous luxury for them to have those buttons to push, right? I would imagine in lots of markets, you know, all the buttons are pushed immediately, right?
00:35:49 ◼ ► Like you, you, you, you do everything you can to sell the product and then they, somebody comes to you and says, we need to sell more. And you're like, I don't even know what to do now.
00:35:57 ◼ ► We're doing everything. And that hasn't been the case for Apple. Um, they, they did say something, and this is like a larger picture iPhone thing too, but I think it's related to their efforts in this side, which is, um, what the story that Tim Cook was telling is that iPhone, everything is broken up quarterly, uh, on these financial reports.
00:36:18 ◼ ► And they wanted to kind of drill down a little bit and express, give some more color, as they always say about the sales trajectory. And what they said is that November and December were actually the worst for iPhone in terms of like their projections.
00:36:34 ◼ ► And that March was the best. And even like the last couple of weeks of March was really promising. So what they're saying is, I know it looks like we had a bad quarter followed by a bad quarter.
00:36:50 ◼ ► But what we really had is a, you know, two really bad months and then have been recovering and we continue to recover. And, and that's why they said some analysts that was really smart. I forget, maybe it was Shannon Cross, um, said, um, usually your year over year, uh, court, you know, or usually your quarter when you go from the second to the third financial quarter.
00:37:13 ◼ ► Um, you go down by, uh, I don't know what the number is like 12% or something like that. And you're only saying you're going to go down by 6% or 8%. Basically, usually the next quarter, the spring quarter is, uh, worse than the second quarter by a lot, just in the seasonality.
00:37:30 ◼ ► Like holiday is big next one's lower next one is lower than that. And then it kind of goes back up and then it, then it spikes again. And, and what she said, this analyst said was, but this time it looks, it looks nicer.
00:37:44 ◼ ► It looks like you're not going to take as much of our revenue drop in the next sequential quarter. And they said, that's because we see the iPhone turning around.
00:37:54 ◼ ► We think, we think, you know, the worst of it is past and now we're in a positive trajectory again, and you can't see it in the quarterly data, but we see it in the, you know, week by week, month by month data.
00:38:06 ◼ ► And that's interesting because again, they can say that, but then they, but then they go to jail. So they, they, they, and, and, and that's why their guidance is what it is. That's why their guidance is a little bit better than you might expect.
00:38:18 ◼ ► So they, they feel like they've, um, and by turned around, I don't necessarily mean that suddenly iPhone sales are going to shoot up, but I think it may mean that their expectations are out of the woods.
00:38:27 ◼ ► They're getting back over to sort of flat year over year instead of down 20% or 15% year over year.
00:38:32 ◼ ► I hope they're right. I mean, like, you know, I know these people are super smart, but like the confidence is rocked when they messed it up so bad for right for Q1. Um, was it Q1 that they messed it up for? I think it was. Yeah. It's the holiday quarter, but that's their first financial quarter.
00:38:48 ◼ ► And it's just like, I hear something like that and they're like, Oh no, no, we've had a good month. So we're going to be good again. It's like, I really hope you're right. Like, let's not get this wrong again.
00:38:57 ◼ ► Um, I wanted to ask you one question about the retail stuff, right? The trade-ins and the subsidies and the pushing in today, Apple. Do you think this might be why Angela Ahrendts left?
00:39:11 ◼ ► I don't know. It seems like that somebody may have gone to retail and said, we're going to do a bunch of stuff now. And it isn't what you wanted to do. And it may have been a situation where she was like, that's not what I want to do anymore.
00:39:24 ◼ ► Yeah. I want to rethink the retail experience and you want me to start being a more aggressive seller of widgets, right? She comes up with today at Apple, which is this education program and they're like, perfect. That's how we're going to sell to 10R.
00:39:37 ◼ ► Yeah. Just, just as it's rolling out, they shift the, the purpose of those, um, those stores from, Oh, kind of touchy feely holistic Apple just needs to be present and then everything will be taken care of. And all of a sudden it's like, no, we need to push all the sales buttons.
00:39:56 ◼ ► And like this feels having worked in retail for some time, this feels very clear to me now as to what happened. Like they were on a route to create an experience that was not supposed to be a store. She was actually transitioning Apple stores away from even being called stores. Right.
00:40:15 ◼ ► And now they're like, well, yeah, but now we just want you to really push the products and that, that clashes with the position that aren't started to build. So I wouldn't be surprised if then it was just kind of like, I don't want to do that. And they're like, okay, then we need to get somebody who will.
00:40:32 ◼ ► And then maybe they parted ways amicably because of that. Like it just came to a point where everybody decided.
00:40:38 ◼ ► Yeah. What you need out of these stores is not what I was hired to do. So, so I don't want to do it anymore. This, this, this, I don't know when I, when I hear them talk about it in these ways, it seems to make a little bit more sense to me as to what happened and why it happened so quickly.
00:40:52 ◼ ► Certainly there was a big change in what Apple was doing on retail. And I can tell you from the people I've talked to inside retail that, uh, last fall was a big change. Like they, they really changed how they approached everything.
00:41:06 ◼ ► And last thing I want to talk about is a quote from Luca Maestri about the Mac. Uh, Maestri says, "Mac revenue was $5.5 billion compared to $5.8 billion a year ago, with the decline driven primarily by processor constraints on certain particular models."
00:41:25 ◼ ► So I, I popped in after I transcribed this, I popped in because I was in the midst of writing my articles to the, uh, I went to the relay Slack in the general channel and I, and I pasted in that quote and I said, "It's just me or did they just throw Intel into the bus?"
00:41:42 ◼ ► And, and people haven't made as big a deal out of it as I think maybe they should have. I'm a little bit surprised. I...
00:41:50 ◼ ► Yeah. So I mentioned in my Mac world story and John posted about it on Daring Fireball, but, um, I looked at that and said, um, this is, they didn't call them by name, but like by basically saying the Mac went down because of Intel.
00:42:06 ◼ ► They are, and it's not the only one we heard from somebody, um, somebody on Twitter who I think was talking to us or a group of people we know and said that they work in a doing IT in a company that has Dell computers and that Dell shipments were slowed down because of Intel availability.
00:42:21 ◼ ► So Intel is kind of like not doing a good job in certain processor shipments across the board, but like from Apple's perspective, it's like, we could have sold more Macs and you didn't let us.
00:42:31 ◼ ► And for them to call it out on the call and basically blame someone else, blame a supplier for a failing of one of their product categories where they felt they would have been up, but they were down.
00:42:40 ◼ ► That is a sign that Apple has had enough with Intel and that this is, we're just waiting for the body to hit the floor, right? Like this relationship is over.
00:42:55 ◼ ► Especially because it's been recorded, like it's well reported that Qualcomm looks to make between 4.5 to $4.7 billion of revenue in the coming quarter because of the settlement of Apple.
00:43:07 ◼ ► Like, not all of that is necessarily due to Intel's failings because there was the overarching patent question and Apple was going to have to pay patent fees to Qualcomm, whether or not they used Qualcomm's processors.
00:43:24 ◼ ► But the fact is it was all precipitated on the fact that they did not have a viable competitor to Qualcomm because Intel couldn't deliver.
00:43:32 ◼ ► And the arm, we know our Mac project has been reportedly worked on for a very long time, but I look at this where, where this is Apple saying without saying it, they are saying to the world, the Mac is being held back by Intel.
00:43:47 ◼ ► That is what they're saying here. The Mac would be growing, but Intel can't get us chips fast enough. And what's the next step?
00:44:01 ◼ ► Undoubtedly, like undoubtedly it is not saber rattling for the new CEO of Intel. This is Apple saying, you know what's holding the Mac back? Intel.
00:44:15 ◼ ► I think that timelines are too complicated. I think it may indicate that the timeline is, uh, is happening sooner than some might expect.
00:44:23 ◼ ► Because you would think that they were still two to three years away. They might not want to say stuff like this.
00:44:29 ◼ ► Look, they're still reliant on Intel for processors for Macs, like in the, in the intervening time.
00:44:33 ◼ ► But like if they are already, especially if some of the leaks have been maybe from the Intel side, who knows?
00:44:38 ◼ ► Because Apple does need to start to, uh, make deals with Intel in terms of like, here's how many chips we're going to buy.
00:44:44 ◼ ► And when and where and what kind. And at some point the writing is going to be on the wall, right?
00:44:49 ◼ ► Where Apple is going to say, we don't anticipate buying chips from you at this volume in a year and a half or whatever.
00:44:54 ◼ ► Um, but yeah, it feels to me like this is, this is going to happen sooner than we think.
00:44:58 ◼ ► But I don't think it's something where they can say, oh, let's put our foot on the gas now because we've really got to get out of Intel even faster.
00:45:05 ◼ ► I don't think that's, uh, possible. I think they've got their plans, um, and they're planning on executing them.
00:45:12 ◼ ► I think it's more likely that they're ready. They know how soon they're going to start making a transition.
00:45:17 ◼ ► And so they're more comfortable throwing Intel into the bus for Mac sales and saying it's their fault, not ours.
00:45:27 ◼ ► Right. I mean, for, for a boring, um, set of charts and graphs and a boring hour long phone call where it's like a 40 minute monologue,
00:45:37 ◼ ► followed by 20 minutes of strange questions from financial analysts there. This is why I do it, Myke.
00:45:56 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think there's always stuff. The reason I put the effort into doing the transcript is there is always something to be gleaned from that transcript.
00:46:06 ◼ ► No, no. Like literally you can hear when somebody at, so they read the way it works is they read a prepared statement at the beginning.
00:46:15 ◼ ► And by the way, it's interesting when they have a bad quarter and they don't have things to talk about, they open the call for questions very late.
00:46:21 ◼ ► They did it a lot earlier this time. Last quarter, it was like 10 minutes of questions. Like three questions.
00:46:28 ◼ ► We don't want your questions. Ask a question. And if you ask a question, we don't like you're never being invited back on the call.
00:46:33 ◼ ► So make sure that they're okay. Questions this time. Uh, they, they asked a few more questions, but every time they ask a question, you can hear in the background and it's a much higher quality.
00:46:41 ◼ ► It used to be like a speakerphone, but now it's like a high quality, uh, microphone set up. It's like a more of a PA a podcasting setup.
00:46:48 ◼ ► Um, I wonder if they use the same. Anyway, there's a, I wonder what microphones they use anyway.
00:46:53 ◼ ► Um, they, the, you can hear the papers, Myke, you can hear, you can hear when somebody's asking a question, you can hear the sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh, as they move the papers around of like, what's my prepared answer for that?
00:47:07 ◼ ► And sometimes they don't have it or they have it partially. And what you get from Tim Cook in those scenarios is like, well, you know, as we said, this fact that I already said, that doesn't quite answer your question.
00:47:16 ◼ ► And, you know, in general we think, and you can see that they, he's not, he's not making up an answer there. He is parsing what he's, what they've agreed that he's willing to say.
00:47:27 ◼ ► So, so yes, this was, and this was in the scripted part, like throwing Intel under the bus was in the script. So there, there we are.
00:47:35 ◼ ► There we are. We are at the point where Apple is more or less openly hostile to the provider of processors on Macs.
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00:49:30 ◼ ► So we spent the last couple of weeks talking about Guilherme Rambos reports of what we're going to see at WWDC over on 9to5Mac.
00:49:48 ◼ ► And yes, we did a huge report this morning, Monday the 6th, as we are recording this episode.
00:50:00 ◼ ► So Mark did what Mark has done for many years and I was wondering, did Guilherme get it all?
00:50:07 ◼ ► So iOS 13. So what we're going to do, I'm just going to run through some of this stuff.
00:50:32 ◼ ► Yeah, this is, it goes back to Apple's point that they have made a few times now, which is that iPhone, especially sales, are, the sales cycle is widening.
00:50:50 ◼ ► And they're, so they're trying to make sure that they can have iOS still run well on old systems.
00:50:57 ◼ ► I'll say this benefits Apple too, because if Apple's trying to get people to upgrade through trade-in, what happens to the traded-in phones?
00:51:04 ◼ ► Well, the answer is they get refurbished and they get resold either to customers or to businesses.
00:51:25 ◼ ► It means if you hold onto your phone for three years, you can update it to the latest iOS and it's going to work well.
00:51:31 ◼ ► There seems to be some visual changes to iOS kind of a fundamental level with what is being referred to as new animations for multitasking and opening and closing apps.
00:51:46 ◼ ► And there's no more detail in that. And it feels like maybe it's something to do with whatever's happening with iPad, I think.
00:51:53 ◼ ► It's like, there's going to be some wild stuff. So the animations need to change somehow.
00:52:01 ◼ ► Right. Which also makes me wonder if that's tied to iPad. Sometimes with these reports, you get the details, but you don't get the interconnectedness of it.
00:52:07 ◼ ► It's the, I always talk about the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which is like you start reporting individual features.
00:52:18 ◼ ► So like do changes to widgets and notification center imply something else for where widgets might appear?
00:52:23 ◼ ► Do they will widgets appear in other places on the iPad interface, but they look different in notification center on the iPhone.
00:52:29 ◼ ► We don't know. We, you know, all we, all we have are, I think if Mark Gurman knew more, he would say, and so, you know, he's, he gets some bits of information that he has to phrase in a certain way because that's all he knows.
00:52:42 ◼ ► There'll be a dark mode between you already, but you'll be able to switch on with control center. There'll be a toggle in control center, which is perfect.
00:52:50 ◼ ► That's what you want from that. Um, something that was referred to as being in testing. There's not many of the, the, these features that referred to as this, which means that Mark is probably not that sure on it, but a swipe keyboard coming to iOS.
00:53:03 ◼ ► I use swipe keyboard of G board all the time and I love it. And I would love to see Apple implement their own version of that.
00:53:09 ◼ ► Yeah. Um, there will be a new health app in iOS 13 and there's also going to be some stuff in Apple watch that we'll talk about how these ties in.
00:53:16 ◼ ► Um, hearing health is going to be one of the new things added as well as an overall redesign and more comprehensive measure tracking, which I know is something Apple were really, really behind on when the health app came out and they've added some stuff over time.
00:53:31 ◼ ► But this is going to be a much, much more comprehensive system it would seem. Um, and again, there's some stuff with the Apple watch that ties into that.
00:53:39 ◼ ► A new reminders app. Uh, Mark describes the app as being divided into four sections. Um, today. So what task you have today, all of your tasks, your scheduled tasks and your flagged tasks.
00:53:54 ◼ ► Seems interesting. I mean, a new reminders app is a long overdue thing and it would be, you know, I've spoken about this. I would love to see Apple do to remind us what they did to notes, right?
00:54:06 ◼ ► Where they actually make it a compare like a competitive, simple version of what it should be. And reminders has kind of not been that for awhile.
00:54:16 ◼ ► It's not going to pick up all the features that its competitors do, but it could do potentially a better job than it's done. I, I laughed at this because I use reminders as a really stupid list map.
00:54:27 ◼ ► And I look at this and I'm like, Oh man, you're going to make this, are you going to make a good and complicated and stuff? Because I don't actually want to use it in that way.
00:54:36 ◼ ► I just want it to be a place where I can put story ideas. I only put my story ideas there and it's just a dumb list. That's all it is. It could be a text file, but I put it in reminders. I don't know why.
00:54:46 ◼ ► Maybe. Anyway, I think it's good, but I did have that moment of, of thinking, Oh, I, I rely on the stupidity of reminders. Well, maybe that'll have to change, but that's okay.
00:54:56 ◼ ► I think it's good that Apple, Apple should provide base, a base feature set for apps. Right. And sometimes it feels like they do a very simple feature set and then time moves on and the base, the bar has been raised.
00:55:09 ◼ ► And they don't go back and raise the bar in their apps. And you mentioned notes is the perfect example where the bar was raised and notes, uh, went to that level, right?
00:55:19 ◼ ► They, they did enough that notes is not putting other notes apps, I think out of business, but it is a more functional app because the truth is 95% of the people will use the built-in apps and it makes the iPhone or an iPad experience better.
00:55:31 ◼ ► If those apps are better. New screen time features to allow parents to restrict the times of day that apps can be used. Seems like a natural extension.
00:55:40 ◼ ► And actually something that, that, um, I struck me that I could have used a lot, which is limiting who can be contacted at certain times of day. I think that's a kind of interesting thing of like, you know, you, we're going to lock down how your iPhone gets used after a certain point.
00:55:56 ◼ ► But if you need to call us, you know, your parents, you can do that. That, that sort of thing is apparently going to be in there.
00:56:02 ◼ ► Some changes to iMessage or messages to make it, you know, Apple kind of referred to on and off of like messages as like a social network and some apps like WhatsApp allow you to set profile information, like an image for yourself and stuff like that.
00:56:17 ◼ ► Apparently this is coming to messages along with what is referred to Jason as a dedicated menu to send sticker versions of an emoji. Jason, I think they're finally making bitmoji.
00:56:28 ◼ ► Yeah. Good. Good. I wanted this right. I want my animoji in environments like how I use bitmoji every day. I don't also want to be making a face every time.
00:56:42 ◼ ► Exactly. So once they know what your animoji looks like, they can put your animoji in different sticker situations. Right.
00:56:50 ◼ ► The dedicated menu thing again, it's like, it sounds like that's just an iMessage app. Surely like I, I don't know what that would mean, but I would be super excited to get that.
00:57:00 ◼ ► Yeah. I have some questions about iMessage applications and if you know, are we still doing that?
00:57:07 ◼ ► And if we are, I mean, they, they keep adjusting the interface. I wonder if they're going to adjust the interface to the point where it doesn't rec, it doesn't look anything alike.
00:57:22 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. That's uh, that's a big one, right? I, I, my home pod is much less, I've said this on this podcast before, my home pod is much less useful because, um, like we still do all of our, um, grocery list stuff on our Amazon echo.
00:57:36 ◼ ► Yeah. And the primary reason is that although I can tie the grocery list stuff to the home pod, if my phone leaves the house, that functionality ceases to function because it has to be tied to my phone.
00:57:48 ◼ ► And what you really want is multi-user support so that, uh, you can either link multiple phones to the home pod or you can just link multiple Apple IDs to the home pod. So let's hope that there's a lot of good stuff there.
00:58:07 ◼ ► This, you know, I could only imagine the excitement for Federico Vitucci when he read that, like that is just like, yes, it should 100% be there. Um, and again, that's like, that is a strong indication of better understanding of the way the files are used on iOS.
00:58:24 ◼ ► Right. Right. Right. What do you mean getting a modal dialogue anytime you tap on a file in Safari and iOS is not the right way to do it?
00:58:32 ◼ ► I want to read a quote directly from Mark's report. The iPad is getting some unique features, including an updated interface for multitasking tweaks to the home app and the ability to cycle through different versions of the same app.
00:58:44 ◼ ► So we have yet another way that multiple instances is being described right now. It's the ability to cycle through different versions of the same app.
00:58:54 ◼ ► Yeah. I assume that that's what that means, right? Is that you can have different, the same app, like doing different things either in multitasking or in full screen in different places, which is just like another way to describe it, which doesn't really help.
00:59:09 ◼ ► Right. Like this is, and I looked at it and it's like, okay, I don't like version five, let's go back to version 4.5. Nope. I don't think that's going to be it either.
00:59:18 ◼ ► Uh, yeah. And tweaks to the home screen, which we've talked about before. Uh, what are those? What are those like that has been out there for a long time now for a year, uh, plus where that was going to be in iOS 12 and it didn't happen.
00:59:34 ◼ ► Uh, Mark, I'm and also confirm some nine to five reports, basically using the iPad as the second screen. It sounds actually just like that with the way that Mark's described it, which is surprising to me.
00:59:44 ◼ ► That wasn't what I was expecting. Um, there being updates to mail and find my friends to be updated and merged with find my iPhone. So that's all in there as well.
00:59:53 ◼ ► Um, so we moved to the next version of Mac OS. So obviously Mars Pan running iPad apps on the Mac.
01:00:00 ◼ ► Um, Mark did talk about the fact that developers will need to also submit their apps to the Mac app store, which is interesting, but sure.
01:00:11 ◼ ► Right. They're not universal yet. So like, sure. Right. It's not the same store. Yeah. So you have to do a separate process. Yeah.
01:00:17 ◼ ► Um, you know, again, confirming of reports that Apple will be bringing more of their own applications like podcasts to Mac and then one which is curious.
01:00:27 ◼ ► I can have a quote. There will also be a new Apple music app, which is being developed as a standard Mac program.
01:00:42 ◼ ► Okay. So the best I can, I can, uh, get from this and from other things that we've heard is that apparently Apple has been working on a transition of iTunes on the Mac to Apple music for a while.
01:01:00 ◼ ► Uh, and apparently that's where they're going, at least in the short term is ripping a bunch of non music stuff out of iTunes and calling it Apple music, but having it be the music app that is that we've been using all this time and not the iOS version.
01:01:15 ◼ ► I, I find this kind of bizarre. I guess it's good news for Mac users in the short term because it means that you, that we would be able to theoretically keep all of our precious, uh, advanced iTunes features that the music app on iOS doesn't offer.
01:01:30 ◼ ► But it is weird from the sense that like, okay, Apple, you gave us a new app using your classic development frameworks when you're in the process of moving all of these apps from iOS and you've got this app on iOS.
01:01:45 ◼ ► So I look at this and I think this can't be for the long run. Like maybe, maybe they're not going to bother turning music into music on iOS and the music on Mac via marzipan this time because they don't need to.
01:01:57 ◼ ► They've already got this other project where they're going to simplify iTunes and make it the new music app. Um, but that can't, you know, be for the long run, right? Like surely eventually that is going to, uh, it going to transition.
01:02:12 ◼ ► But then again, you can look at this and say, this is Apple saying not every app is going to be marzipan that there will still be apps that are running, uh, the old app kit, uh, approach to apps.
01:02:23 ◼ ► And that's fine. And so maybe if you, if you want to view it this way, that Apple's not, not saying, you know, look out five years and everything runs in marzipan that maybe they're saying, no, no, you know, some things on the Mac will, will use the old methods.
01:02:39 ◼ ► Now I look at this app and I think, why this app though? Like why, why I final cut, I get it right. Like I get, I get it. But this app really?
01:02:47 ◼ ► Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. Right. Cause it's like, you can get it where it's like, Oh, okay. So they've broken up iTunes and then like podcasts and books, they become a marzipan apps. Cause that's where that fits. And you'd be like, okay, but music is more complicated.
01:02:59 ◼ ► So we had to make it as a standard Mac app, but like, why is it more complicated though? Right. Like that's what I'm interested. As you said, like, but why though?
01:03:07 ◼ ► I think, I think, um, you know, if, if they built a brand new app from scratch as, uh, as app kit, that would be wild. Right. But that's not my understanding. And I'm, you know, I'm not gonna, I have heard through the grapevine, right? Like not directly, but that my understanding is that this is not that my understanding is that this is iTunes with pieces ripped out of it, but who knows?
01:03:32 ◼ ► Like that that's all secondhand thirdhand, who knows what these are all rumors at this point, but based on Mark Gurman's report, like, what is this? And maybe that's, maybe that's it. Maybe that it was already a simplification plan underway, or they said like, you know, I think you were getting at, um, we can bring over these, these purpose build apps from via marzipan.
01:03:54 ◼ ► So you don't need to do that in iTunes anymore. So tear that stuff out and we, you know, because if you've got a TV app and you've got a podcast app and you got, you don't need those parts of iTunes anymore. So rip them all out, simplify iTunes, make it music again.
01:04:06 ◼ ► And even though it's still really iTunes, um, we'll, and we'll rename it because Apple renames has been renaming all its Mac apps to parallel iOS for years now. Um, yeah, so we'll see. Also any bets I'll say as a side light, any bets to when system preferences is going to get changed to say,
01:04:25 ◼ ► Me too. Cause they've been trying to standardize all this language, but anyway, that, that sounds, it sounds to me like the biggest, uh, the most likely scenario is there were a lot of simple, uh, unitasker apps on iOS that they could bring over to marzipan.
01:04:37 ◼ ► And then they looked at iTunes and they're like, yeah, we, we can't do that. Let's just use the Mac app and take that stuff out. And that'll be okay for now, but I have a hard time believing that's a longterm solution.
01:04:50 ◼ ► Screen time stickers in messages coming to Mac iOS and also adding to the confusion as Mark calls it the ser integration with the Siri shortcuts app again, hasn't helped.
01:05:04 ◼ ► I don't know what that means. That doesn't help. Nope, nope. Don't know what that means.
01:05:09 ◼ ► So the, the root of this and the mystery is we don't know whether adding Siri shortcuts to the Mac is a thing or whether they're also adding the shortcuts app to the Mac with marzipan and what that means in terms of automation. It's unclear and it continues to be unclear. Maybe the Siri team is better at keeping secrets than other parts of Apple. I don't know.
01:05:34 ◼ ► And the Apple watch Apple watch is going to get an app store. You say, but the Apple watch already has an app store. It's on my phone. Yeah. Now it's going to be on the watch.
01:05:45 ◼ ► Yeah. On one level, it makes sense. Right? Because what you want is you want to be able, I have had those moments where I'm like, Oh man, I don't have this app. I didn't, I didn't sink it over or whatever. And I'm, I'm, and I'm on my Apple watch. I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to have to go to the phone and all that.
01:05:59 ◼ ► So on that level, like making the Apple watch more independent makes sense to me, but then I try to imagine like what is an app store on the watch list?
01:06:06 ◼ ► It's going to be, it's going to be very difficult, but like you, you, over time, you have to increase the independence of the device and putting an app store on it for as peculiar as that may end up being is something that eventually you do need to do.
01:06:22 ◼ ► I mean, remember when the iPhone wasn't standalone, like it was not that long ago when the iPhone had to tie into a computer and they made great efforts to make that not the case anymore. The iPad too.
01:06:34 ◼ ► And I think the Apple watch, although it's still, you know, fundamentally very tied to iPhones, making it more independent, especially now that you have a cellular model that does not have to be anywhere where the iPhone is.
01:06:45 ◼ ► So if I'm out and about with only my watch and I want to do something on an app that I didn't sync to my Apple watch, being able to say, Hey, watch, download this app and have it, bring it up in the app store and have me install it.
01:07:00 ◼ ► Uh, that's, that's great. Also, there's some weirdness in the fact that the Apple watch app store is kind of just a weird subset of the app, the iPhone app store, and maybe there's a better way to streamline that where it's, you know, it's kind of treated as its own thing.
01:07:21 ◼ ► So there's going to be some new, uh, health apps for the Apple watch. One is called dose inside of Apple, whether that will be the actual name or not, which is a pill reminder application, which I would greatly benefit from because I always forget to take my pills and another one called cycles, which is to track menstrual cycles on the Apple watch.
01:07:38 ◼ ► So these are a couple of additional apps that will be added that tie back into the health focus stuff we were talking about earlier. Uh, James Thompson's in the chat room, probably because, uh, they're going to make a calculator app for the Apple watch apparently, uh, which is, uh,
01:07:52 ◼ ► and people said that he was unreasonable to put a calculator on the Apple watch. People called him, uh, one of these wacky developers who, which he is because he does put everything on every platform. There is a calculator for Apple TV too.
01:08:06 ◼ ► It makes so much sense. There are calculator watches, right? Like that's, that's a thing that exists. Right. Yeah, I had one. Absolutely.
01:08:15 ◼ ► So it is about time that they do it. Uh, but I bet it won't have bananas and 3d about screens. Probably not. Probably not. Unless that's, unless those are the things that you need to have a calculator on the Apple watch.
01:08:29 ◼ ► Like that's part of what you actually need, but we'll find out, um, voice memos that should already be there and a books app. I read that. I was like, wait, what is like, Oh, for audio books.
01:08:43 ◼ ► Audio books, like syncing, syncing books, uh, makes sense. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense because it's a audio focusing and people will want like in the same way you'd listen to podcasts.
01:08:53 ◼ ► You know, I know that Marco talks about how like one fraction of 1% of people use the Apple watch app with a playback for overcast, but I use it all the time. I w every time I walk the dog, I just don't take my cellular Apple watch.
01:09:10 ◼ ► I am, I just, I, it surprises me because I, I leave my iPhone behind. I go walk the dog. I've got my AirPods in, I listen to podcasts on my Apple watch. Um, and it's great. So I'm surprised that more people don't do that. But you know, the Apple watch is a, it is a product with very specific appeal in some ways.
01:09:29 ◼ ► And it's also a super early, I think even now in the life cycle of a product like this, it's, it's still a very primitive device in a lot of ways as advanced and amazing as it is to have a computer on our, on our wrists. It's still, you know, super early days for the Apple watch.
01:09:45 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, yeah, and again, to take us back to the iPhone, like the early iPhone had lots of places where it was just kind of non-functional and you're like, Oh, a device like this should be able to do this. And the answer was, well, yeah, but not yet. We're not there yet. And the Apple watch is still there for a lot of things.
01:10:00 ◼ ► There's still a lot of big chunks that every year they can kind of like tear off of like, Oh yeah, finally the Apple watch does this. And I feel like we're, we're, we're still there and we're going to be in there for, uh, for years yet.
01:10:11 ◼ ► And several new watch faces. So these are listed gradient, the face that makes a gradient collar, uh, extra large shows jumbo numbers. California has a dial name, which has a classic watch face style, which mixes Roman numerals and Arabic numerals.
01:10:28 ◼ ► So regular numbers and Roman numbers, right? Like as you would see them, uh, a redesigned solar analog watch face, it looks like a sundial and an infograph sub dial watch face that includes larger complication views, like a stock market chart or the weather.
01:10:47 ◼ ► Yeah. This, so the problem I have with this is that, okay, new watch faces. That's great. But the thing that last year was very clear to a lot of us who watch this stuff is Apple has not spent enough time on its old watch faces and making them better.
01:11:01 ◼ ► And so they have like all sorts of faces that don't have functionality that the new, like they're my go-to face. I can't put on my current Apple watch. Not well, I can, but I can't do anything new with it because they didn't update it.
01:11:14 ◼ ► It's just, it's dumb. So, uh, new watch faces is great, but I'm still going to be disappointed if they haven't really shown that they're going back and they're updating the existing watch faces to make them better.
01:11:27 ◼ ► Um, I don't need third party watch faces. That would be fine and all. But what I really want to see is that if there aren't going to be third party watch faces, Apple needs to be better committed to keeping their, maintaining the existing watch faces. So we'll see.
01:11:40 ◼ ► Yep, we will see. Uh, and also last part that I wanted to just call out, cause it's like thrown away in there, but it's important to many people listening to the show for this year, Apple has been considering debuting a revamped Mac Pro desktop computer.
01:11:54 ◼ ► It's also readying a new external monitor, code named J290 with high dynamic range support. So colors look much better.
01:12:09 ◼ ► So there's a lot of stuff in here. I mean, yeah, if we get big, big old WWDC, especially when you think like marzipan is one bullet point on this, but that is going to be a huge, huge part of the presentation, right?
01:12:24 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, the fact is that one of the truths of WWDC keynotes is sometimes they'll spend five minutes on a feature that nobody ever talks about again. And sometimes there'll be one little item on a slide that's got 100 items on it that has the will change the face of how millions of people use their devices.
01:12:39 ◼ ► And in the moment, sometimes you can tell, and sometimes you can't tell, like sometimes it's just sort of like, wow, look at this new feature. And then we never talk about it again. So, uh, that's one of the great things about WWDC and I'm looking forward to it.
01:12:53 ◼ ► All right. So we should do some hashtag ask upgrade questions before we wrap up today. But before we do, let me thank Eero for their support of this show. With Eero, you can build a wifi system that is perfectly tailored to your home.
01:13:05 ◼ ► We live in a world today where we're all streaming TV shows with dragons in them every single day. It feels like...
01:13:15 ◼ ► Don't watch Game of Thrones. So when you've got all that stuff going on in your home, you want high quality streams and you still want to be able to go on Instagram and somebody's downloading something in another room.
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01:13:53 ◼ ► You can expand to your entire house in every corner. Eero also has Eero Plus now as well. So as well as their incredible hardware, they have software solutions that go along with it. This is designed to provide simple, reliable security to help defend the devices in your home from malware, phishing and unsuitable content.
01:14:10 ◼ ► Eero Plus can automatically tag sites that contain violent, legal or adult content. So you have great parental controls at your fingertips. You can have ad blocking functionality to help improve load times for websites that are full of privacy, invading ad tracking. And it's also possible to have Eero Plus check the sites that you visit against a database of millions of unknown threats to prevent you from visiting anything malicious. Eero Plus even includes descriptions to 1Password, Malwarebytes and Encrypt.me as well. Jason, I believe you live in an Eero home.
01:14:39 ◼ ► I do. And that's how my, all my devices, I was realizing that, um, I even have devices in places where I haven't considered that I have devices because I have a sprinkler controller. I have a smart sprinkler controller. And now that we have entered the dry season here in California, I had to reconnect it and it's on HomeKit and it's got its own app.
01:14:55 ◼ ► And I had that moment where I thought, right, I need to make sure that my Wi-Fi reaches that area because it's like back, it's outside behind our bedroom. And, uh, but Eero's got it covered because we have three different Eero devices in three different places. And as a result, we've blanketed the entire, our entire lot with Wi-Fi.
01:15:15 ◼ ► So I can sit in the backyard now that it's dry season, it's also warmer. I can sit back there. My Wi-Fi is fast. My camera that is in the driveway, it gets a solid Wi-Fi signal. And of course the, uh, the side yard with the, uh, with the sprinkler controller is, uh, is solid, which means that I can just use that app to set up, uh, when I'm watering the grass and it's all taken care of.
01:15:36 ◼ ► And I didn't even have to worry about it because the, you know, every, everywhere that I have this house has Wi-Fi now because of Eero.
01:15:49 ◼ ► Never think about Wi-Fi again. Get $100 off the Eero base unit in two beacons package and a year of Eero Plus by going to Eero.com/ahoy and check out using the promo code Ahoy. That's E-E-R-O.com/ahoy and the code Ahoy to get $100 off the Eero base unit in two beacons package and one year of Eero Plus.
01:16:11 ◼ ► So thanks to Eero for their support of this show and Relay FM and Jason Snell. Give me some good lasers.
01:16:16 ◼ ► Our first #AskUpgrade question this week comes from Lonny. How do you clean your AirPods?
01:16:32 ◼ ► I have a little cleaning loop that I got with my fancy headphones and it's like a little very tiny like a little loop of metal and you can use it kind of as a scraper.
01:16:59 ◼ ► Yeah. It's a little pokey thing. Yeah. It's hard. It's hard. But I do try to do that every now and then when I see that they're kind of dirty.
01:17:07 ◼ ► I do that all the time with my in-ear headphones that I use for podcasting for obvious reasons.
01:17:15 ◼ ► AirPods are the grossest Apple product I've ever made. They just get gross. There's nothing you can do about it.
01:17:20 ◼ ► And we didn't even mention that story that I think is probably fake about the guy who swallowed an AirPod.
01:17:29 ◼ ► Never. I just want to say that's one of the greatest headlines John Gruber has ever written because basically he said this is why you can never use used AirPods.
01:17:42 ◼ ► Steve asks if you could pick one company for Apple to purchase to beef up its content for Apple TV Plus, who would it be and why?
01:17:50 ◼ ► I want to give this a slight twist, Jason, because I know we spoke about the fact that there's not a lot.
01:17:55 ◼ ► In this instance, I will allow for you to be able to pick anything that might be bundled into some other company, right?
01:18:03 ◼ ► Like you just imagine Apple could go in to any company and pick out any piece they wanted. Who would it be?
01:18:11 ◼ ► Well, I'm just going to say Apple will buy the combined CBS Buy a Com company, which is, you know, they're not they're separate, but they're they have the same owners.
01:18:23 ◼ ► I think that's I think that's one of the largest swaths of content that currently is out there not run by an enormous company where Apple could just pay cash for them.
01:18:33 ◼ ► And they get a lot of content. They get a huge catalog. Now, they're going to own a TV network at that point, which I imagine they will sell off to someone.
01:18:42 ◼ ► Like Disney. This is something I was thinking about for option, but Disney just sold off all the Fox Sports stuff.
01:18:48 ◼ ► Well, that was mandated by the government, but they also let Rupert Murdoch and his family keep the Fox Broadcast Network.
01:18:57 ◼ ► And I would imagine the other way to do it either if Apple bought CBS Buy a Com, either they would leave the network behind and that would be sold somewhere else, or they would take it and then immediately sell it off.
01:19:09 ◼ ► Sort of depends on what the negotiation was, but I feel like that gives them a lot of content and that is and studios and that's what they want. They would pick up all of the Comedy Central and Adult Swim and they I mean, they would get a bunch of content.
01:19:21 ◼ ► They get Star Trek. They get they get CSI or whatever. They get all those shows. They get lots of lots of content that they could put up and I feel like that it's between that and Sony Pictures Entertainment are like the two biggest providers of content that are just sitting out there.
01:19:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I think Sony's an interesting one too though, right? Like that that would be kind of cool, but they have less now, which is the problem, right?
01:19:50 ◼ ► Yeah, but they still I mean, they still have a whole studio, you know, they've got they've got TV and movie studio and a lot of content and that would be that's another, you know, additive purchase that would be you know would be okay.
01:20:04 ◼ ► Of course at that point Apple would own if Apple bought Sony they would own the like the Spider-Man movies and things like that which like okay Apple's going to release Spider-Man movies now, but maybe maybe Sony would be trickier I reckon for them to try and pick up because like what is Sony Pictures even separated from Sony?
01:20:24 ◼ ► No, Sony would have to sell it. Yeah, Sony would have to want to sell it, you know, which I in a way that with Viacom National Amusements. I don't know what the deal is with some of the Redstone family and all that but I think that's one of those things where I imagine that Apple would come with a bag of cash and they'd be like, okay, good done sold.
01:20:52 ◼ ► I don't know. I'm not using it. Maybe that's a thing that lets you add items like in a queue or something like that. I tend to just go in Marvel Unlimited and flip around and find new things that I want to read and that's how I use it or I search for a character or series or something that strikes my fancy.
01:21:11 ◼ ► I don't have my comic reading organized that well to be honest and I kind of haven't been reading a lot of comics the last few weeks. So I've kind of let it slide. So I don't know.
01:21:23 ◼ ► I have been enjoying the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot that Boom Studios is doing where they're basically retelling Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the modern day, which is fun because it's a remix basically of Buffy for the present which is it's just kind of fun to see somebody who obviously knows the source material and loves it and then is trying to adapt it for what life is like in the 21st century instead of in the you know, the late 90s, which was when Buffy was was set.
01:21:50 ◼ ► And let's see. We just did an incomparable episode a few weeks ago about Paper Girls, which is a really good comic that has a little apple some apple references in it that are kind of wacky and fun and it the pitch is that it's an 80s.
01:22:06 ◼ ► It's almost like an 80s movie. It's almost like The Goonies or something like that where it's a bunch of girls who have paper routes and it's the 80s and then and it's like the night after Halloween and then some very very weird things happen.
01:22:19 ◼ ► And I will say that if you expect it to be an 80s nostalgia trip comic it very rapidly becomes something else and that's all I'll say but that's there. There are like five trade paperback versions of that.
01:22:33 ◼ ► And finally today question from Nate. How often do you charge your iPad the more I find myself using mine as a laptop and going to instead of my iPhone where I can find the battery drains way faster than I would expect it to.
01:22:46 ◼ ► I unplug my iPad in the morning when I get up from bed or when I don't when I when I start reading in bed in the morning before I go and get my tea and all of that and I don't plug it back in until the end of the day.
01:23:03 ◼ ► I would say with my iPad Pro it's like every day and a half right that I'm put plugging it out.
01:23:10 ◼ ► You know I don't plug my iPad in on a schedule the way I do my iPhone. I just wait until it gets low and then I plug it in.
01:23:18 ◼ ► I do it. I do a daily schedule but I will say and this is probably to Nate's point if I'm using the iPad all the time through the day which I'm not.
01:23:26 ◼ ► Yeah it might get I might notice that it gets low and I might plug it in at that point but I don't I don't generally use it all the time all day because I have my iMac that I'm sitting in front of for a big chunk of the day like I am right now.
01:23:39 ◼ ► Yeah but I would say the iPad Pro it gets what it should what it says it gets that 10 hour battery life like it gets that for me.
01:23:46 ◼ ► So I feel like the iPad kind of always has and they don't seem to want to change that and I'm fine with it because that's more than enough.
01:23:54 ◼ ► All right don't forget upgrade your wardrobe dot com. This could be your last chance to get your hands on some dongle town surf club merchandise so you can be the coolest person at the beach this year.
01:24:07 ◼ ► I'm saying if it's cool but we like it. I think it is sounds great. I'm really really happy with what we've been able to do with this stuff so you can go get yourself some t shirts or some tank tops tote bags or towels.
01:24:20 ◼ ► Tees tanks totes and towels over upgrade your wardrobe dot com. You can find our show notes this week at relay.fm/upgrades/244 or in your podcast app of choice.
01:24:30 ◼ ► You can find Jason at six colors dot com and he's at JSNEL on Twitter JSNEL I am at I Myke I M Y K E Thank you again to our sponsors the fine folk at Eero Freshbooks and borrow.
01:24:41 ◼ ► But most of all thank you for listening if you'd like to send in a question for us to answer at the end of the show hashtag ask upgrade is the way to do that.
01:24:48 ◼ ► If you want to help open the show hashtag Snell talk is the way to do that. We'll be back next week where we're probably going to talk about keyboards.