00:00:08 ◼ ► From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 529 for September 16th 2024, a monumental day that we'll get to shortly.
00:00:23 ◼ ► My name is Mike Hurley and I have the absolute joy and pleasure of being joined by my friend, Jason Snow. Hi, Jason.
00:00:52 ◼ ► So I have a Snortalk question to start in possibly the only way that could be acceptable, which comes from TF who wants to know,
00:01:05 ◼ ► Currently, as we record, 59 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy and foggy, we had a change in the weather,
00:01:14 ◼ ► TF over the weekend and our usual best weather of the year, September, October pattern has been disrupted.
00:01:50 ◼ ► But having it be a little cooler and there being some wind was good because we were not as miserably hot.
00:02:00 ◼ ► And so like the flags were whipping and we had almost no wind where we were sitting, which is really nice.
00:02:44 ◼ ► That rain time, one time when we were at baseball, me, you and Steven is the worst rain I have ever seen.
00:03:00 ◼ ► When I was a kid, we took a trip to Washington, DC and we were in the Smithsonian, I want to say.
00:03:11 ◼ ► There was a question about whether we should go back to where we were staying because there was a tornado warning.
00:03:16 ◼ ► And I also remember that one of the glass panels in the windows of the cafeteria at the Smithsonian was broken and water was just pouring in.
00:04:00 ◼ ► For the rest of the week, this is now the Memphis local weather segment, just letting everybody know.
00:04:09 ◼ ► So it's going to warm up and all that moisture that's down in the ground is going to come out and make everything nice and humid.
00:04:31 ◼ ► If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question for us to open a future episode of the show, please go to upgradefeedback.com.
00:04:41 ◼ ► I am in Memphis right now because this Friday, September 20th at 12 p.m. Eastern time to 12 a.m. Eastern time at youtube.com/atrelayfm
00:05:01 ◼ ► We're doing it on YouTube this year, which is going to be great because you can rewind the video if you want to.
00:05:06 ◼ ► Like I love that about YouTube live streaming compared to Twitch and then it will be on our YouTube channel forever.
00:05:12 ◼ ► So there's a link in the show notes which you can go to to actually you can like put a reminder on YouTube, but you can also just watch it straight there.
00:05:22 ◼ ► Jason's going to be here, Casey of this is going to be here, Kathy Campbell's going to be here.
00:05:26 ◼ ► We're going to have an incredible time raising money for the kids of St. Jude bigger and better than ever.
00:05:35 ◼ ► So that is why we're going to be broadcasting the sixth annual podcastathon for the kids of St. Jude for the Relay for St. Jude campaign.
00:05:47 ◼ ► We got to see this happening over the last few years and last year in October, St. Jude welcomed the first patients and families to its newest housing facility, the Domino's Village.
00:05:58 ◼ ► It's one of four housing facilities that are available to St. Jude patients because St. Jude has treated patients from across the United States and around the world, which makes housing for patients and their families a critical need.
00:06:11 ◼ ► So St. Jude provides free housing to any patient who needs treatment requiring an overnight stay and whose family must travel 35 miles or more to the campus.
00:06:24 ◼ ► The Domino's Village is six stories tall with more than 307,000 square feet and it features 140 fully furnished apartments.
00:06:32 ◼ ► Patients and their families that are staying in the Domino's Village can spend quality time together in places like the Arts and Cross room, the community kitchen and outdoor activity space that has a large LED movie screen for movie nights.
00:06:44 ◼ ► There's also places like a toddler room, a beach themed play space designed just for the little ones with a walk in lighthouse and colourful mural with sea creatures, sailboats and beach umbrellas.
00:06:54 ◼ ► Plus they have a medical clinic with three exam rooms where patients can get medicine or preclinical work before a procedure to the hospital.
00:07:02 ◼ ► This is another thing in the big stack of things for what makes St. Jude special to me.
00:07:07 ◼ ► Because they understand that families need to feel like families and kids need to feel like kids even though they're going through this horrible traumatic thing of having cancer treatment or treatment for other life-threatening diseases.
00:07:21 ◼ ► They make sure to put the money that they are given in the donations to good use like this. That yes it goes to treatment for cancer, yes it goes to research for more treatments but it also goes to making the lives of these kids affected by one of the worst things that could happen to a human to make their lives that little bit better while they're receiving their treatment.
00:07:42 ◼ ► The Relay community has shown so much generosity over the last 5 years and 6 podcastathons and we would love support again this year to support the life saving mission of St. Jude.
00:07:55 ◼ ► Please go to stjude.org/relay where you can make a donation today and there are some incredible awesome rewards that you can redeem if you do.
00:08:03 ◼ ► Plus you can also find out about employee matching and how to set up a fundraising campaign of your own where there are even more fantastic incentives available.
00:08:11 ◼ ► Don't forget the podcastathon will be on Friday September 20th from 12pm eastern on the Relay YouTube channel.
00:08:18 ◼ ► When we rally for a common cause we become more than a community, we become beacons of hope for all.
00:08:23 ◼ ► That's why we're asking you all to join Relay and St. Jude this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
00:08:29 ◼ ► Together we can help cure childhood cancer so go to stjude.org/relay to donate or create your campaign today.
00:08:37 ◼ ► While me and Stephen may be competing for the title of co-founder champion this month, we're all united when it comes to what matters most.
00:09:15 ◼ ► Beacons are hope. Beacons are shining light through the darkness. It's a good metaphor I think.
00:09:36 ◼ ► One of the things I look forward to the most in doing Upgrade when we started was that I had never done a podcast that I was on every week so that we could have a continuity where there was follow up.
00:10:04 ◼ ► So that was one of the things I was most excited by about doing Upgrade was the existence of follow up and the ability to have an ongoing story and back and forth with listeners.
00:10:15 ◼ ► So I'll swallow a little bit of this now but later on we've got some questions from listeners about the show and its history and Six Colors and you know these 10 years we've shared together.
00:10:27 ◼ ► This is something that changed because in the beginning of Upgrade you were so excited for follow up we did way too much of it.
00:10:38 ◼ ► There was much too much follow up and I think we kind of scaled that back over time because we were spending a significant portion of the show just talking about the previous episodes.
00:10:50 ◼ ► It works for some. I did have a moment where I, you know, okay let's just be real here.
00:10:57 ◼ ► There are moments where I feel like I'm almost at the end of an episode of ATP and they're still doing Ask ATP.
00:11:22 ◼ ► In the draft episode you mentioned how annoying it is that the A-series chips don't line up with the phonename but it's even worse internally at Apple.
00:11:43 ◼ ► In my organization we primarily develop for the G variant which is M-series chips and inherit that design for other chips.
00:11:50 ◼ ► So when figuring out which chip is in each product we have to consider H15, H16, A17 and iPhone 15.
00:12:15 ◼ ► I recommend that people inside Apple begin constructing if they haven't already a bingo game.
00:12:27 ◼ ► Where you have various letters and numbers on a bingo sheet and see if you can connect them all to various products because that's what this sounds like.
00:12:49 ◼ ► I find it weird that Apple hasn't synced this stuff up externally because there's confusion in communication to customers I think when you're getting 18 on your 16.
00:13:08 ◼ ► Johnny Serugy confirmed in an interview with YouTuber Giga1 that the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro have 8GB of RAM.
00:13:17 ◼ ► He spoke about it very specifically, very openly and talking about why they needed to move to 8GB, what it enables for Apple intelligence and then all of the other benefits that may come from having this amount of RAM in an iPhone.
00:13:37 ◼ ► This doesn't -- I think what's interesting in thinking about our draft versus, for example, the Ricky's on connected and other games like that is that we have very specifically limited ourselves to the event video.
00:13:54 ◼ ► For example, both of us missed on the announcement of the OS release date, which is today.
00:14:02 ◼ ► And I think that's part of the strategy is like what does Apple deem worthy of mentioning in the video?
00:14:07 ◼ ► And honestly, my opinion is that there are details that Apple used to care about, not just -- I know people are like, oh, well, you know, Apple doesn't -- omitted a bunch of stuff from this video.
00:14:21 ◼ ► I think that Apple is recalibrating as well for the fact that they're doing this video and you know what, that watch the film, watch the event, all that stuff like stays on their website for a long time.
00:14:38 ◼ ► And now they are more and more leaning into the film as being even higher kind of level.
00:14:52 ◼ ► And I think we're going to see more of this actually where these details are going to end up leaking out later.
00:14:58 ◼ ► That they're just going to say, look, obviously there needs to be more -- a higher memory environment and more memory bandwidth.
00:15:07 ◼ ► And then sure, there'll be an executive interview the same day, the next day, there'll be a press release where they'll actually release stuff that is beyond, like way beyond what's in the video.
00:15:17 ◼ ► Because I think they're -- my observation anyway is that I feel like the videos are getting less specific intentionally because they're on a path toward being more of a commercial than they've ever been.
00:15:32 ◼ ► And I think that wasn't the case when they were on stage where it was sort of -- I think mentally they were still like the press is here.
00:15:44 ◼ ► And I think now they flipped all the way over to we may invite the press or not, but this video is for the world and we don't need to get to that level of detail.
00:15:54 ◼ ► The obvious example is at the end of the video they don't say, "Hey, if you're watching this in the Steve Jobs theater, go back at the end and there'll be products out the back."
00:16:05 ◼ ► So I think this is in line with that where Johnny Ceruggi is happy to say that they have 8 gigs of RAM, but it's not going to be in the video.
00:16:13 ◼ ► Well, because this is like similarly now they have the opportunity to get that information out in different ways.
00:16:18 ◼ ► So Apple want the world to know that the phones have 8 gigabytes of RAM in them, but didn't deem that worthy of taking time in the big event commercial.
00:16:29 ◼ ► But they know they can get that information out to people so they'll just give it out through interviews like this.
00:16:35 ◼ ► Right. I mean, there's the stuff you dump in a press release, there's the stuff you put on the website, and there's the stuff that you hold as a tidbit that you know will get reported.
00:16:50 ◼ ► It's just a different strategy maybe and maybe a more sophisticated one than the old one was.
00:17:01 ◼ ► To comply with EE regulation, the batteries on the iPhone 16 line have apparently been specifically designed to be easier to replace.
00:17:15 ◼ ► But I did see today something that I guess is funny. I think unrelated really, but it's just a funny contrast to this.
00:17:30 ◼ ► I don't think that the ease of the battery replacement is what dictates the cost of the battery replacement.
00:17:40 ◼ ► Right. That may be true. Interesting. Yeah. Tear downs are going to tell us a whole lot, right?
00:17:48 ◼ ► Because there's this initial thought that because the GPUs were one different between the Pro phone and the non-Pro phone that that meant it was a binned chip.
00:17:55 ◼ ► But there are suggestions that based on how you read the specific text of what was said in the event, that they may be describing in the Pro chips the cores from the M4.
00:18:11 ◼ ► And there's a question if maybe the non-Pro chip is a different chip generation even though it's on the new process.
00:18:31 ◼ ► And that's the thing that somebody's going to grind down that silicon and try to see what's in there.
00:18:43 ◼ ► And Apple could eliminate all doubt by just disclosing all of this in interviews and things.
00:18:50 ◼ ► Some of this stuff they're like, "Look, if you want to do it, you can speculate. We're not going to talk about it."
00:18:58 ◼ ► The iPhone 16 Pro features a new Qualcomm modem that should see an increase of 5G download speeds of around 25% over the 15.
00:19:14 ◼ ► Like, Qualcomm just purposely making it harder for Apple to make their own modems by making them better and better and better.
00:19:25 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, good news, iPhone people. The Qualcomm modems are even better. Your 5G is even faster."
00:19:33 ◼ ► All it does is raise the bar for Apple about what Apple has to do if they're going to make their own modems and go away from Qualcomm.
00:19:39 ◼ ► I think the truth is that Apple doesn't have to go away from Qualcomm. It just wants to.
00:19:48 ◼ ► Like, it's possible that the rumor that they're going to do this in the iPhone SE and maybe in some iPads, you're trying it out.
00:19:59 ◼ ► Either you're confident that the iPhone 17 is going to have better 5G even though Qualcomm's raising the bar.
00:20:14 ◼ ► Or you could always say, "Hmm, okay. We're going to wait another year or something like that."
00:20:21 ◼ ► But in the meantime, Qualcomm, since this is one of their key things that they do, is 5G modems. Good for them.
00:20:41 ◼ ► I'm really intrigued to see what that translates to. But great, right? Like, if you could just make it faster just by putting a new modem in it, like, fantastic.
00:20:55 ◼ ► But I guess as well, you've kind of got to have the speed available to you in your plans or whatever.
00:21:08 ◼ ► So we can assume that they'll probably be ready to go as soon as iOS 18 drops, provided Apple is expecting that and it's in there.
00:21:34 ◼ ► Yeah. And Apple, I don't know whether this means Apple's like, "FDI, do what we say." Or whether it's more like, "Can you hold off? We don't have a final thing. Now, okay, now we're ready.
00:21:44 ◼ ► Now we're ready to seek approval." But they knew, like Apple last week was so confident about, "These will be approved." Right?
00:21:51 ◼ ► But the timing is interesting that they've gotten it to go just as they're launching it.
00:21:57 ◼ ► And the question is, will this require a software update or is there some sort of like secret switch that can get flipped when you're in a region that's got an authorization, which would be a cool way of doing it?
00:22:09 ◼ ► This reminds me of, do you remember like way back in the day when Apple had to work with, was it the FCC?
00:22:18 ◼ ► And they ended up creating a new process for submitting things secretly, which wasn't a thing that they had.
00:22:26 ◼ ► Right. Because that was the story when the original iPhone came out, is that one of the reasons they announced it way before they shipped it is that they had to go through a public FCC process to get the radios verified.
00:22:35 ◼ ► And so the iPhone was going to be leaked by the FCC if they did that. And so the story is that they did it early and then sought FCC approval.
00:22:48 ◼ ► And yeah, not great, not ideal, but you're working with a public agency, but at the same time, the public agency knows that industry does not necessarily want all of their stuff to be disclosed by the public.
00:23:05 ◼ ► So I'm sure that there's something going on here, whether some of our listeners who are in government could probably tell this, whether this is a wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of situation, or if there's literally a process where the company says we're seeking approval, but we don't have, we're not ready to ship the product yet.
00:23:22 ◼ ► So can we hold off and you can release your final evaluation when we're ready to ship? Is that official or is that more like an understanding between these groups? I don't know.
00:23:34 ◼ ► Cool though. I hope that isn't too long until I get some of these features in the UK, but I'm not necessarily holding out hope for it, especially with the, I think it was sleep apnea that they, I think one of the two, it was the hearing aids where they didn't even mention the UK, but hopefully it will get done here too.
00:23:54 ◼ ► An Apple has shared an image of Wired that was created in image playgrounds. Apple is calling this the first public image that has been seen outside of Apple's original demos.
00:24:11 ◼ ► I would say like, it's the best one of these images I've seen from them, but I still, I still like, but why though, you know, like congratulations, I guess, but why?
00:24:27 ◼ ► It's also very funny that Wired put this big thing across the image that says AI generated image, which is in line with their policies. So it's just funny to see that image, this image going around the web with just that text over the top of it.
00:24:45 ◼ ► So I mean, my thoughts immediately were, I guess Apple's still trying to, you know, still trying to make this happen where I thought like maybe they would back off on this and instead they're kind of like pushing forward on it and saying, see, it's fun.
00:25:03 ◼ ► And, but they're still trying to make it happen, which I guess means technically they're still trying to make Craig Federighi's AI generated dog fetch happen.
00:25:27 ◼ ► It's again, my, my feelings about this are complicated because I don't, you know, I don't really like the look, but I also appreciate the fact that there are scenarios in which
00:25:47 ◼ ► It's literally like, it's fun versus like, if you put it and it's in a text message, right?
00:25:55 ◼ ► Like you put in a keynote presentation when you might otherwise have needed a, an image library subscription that is for a company that is paying photographers or whatever.
00:26:10 ◼ ► But which is why I kind of like the AI emoji better because it feels much more emojis are constrained and in terms of their language, but also in terms of what is an emoji.
00:26:24 ◼ ► And so you're kind of creating images that look like emoji design, Apple's own art emoji design that kind of, I feel better about that.
00:26:34 ◼ ► But you know, this is what Apple, I don't even know if this is what Apple thinks people want.
00:26:40 ◼ ► I think this is what Apple is afraid people want and that will be used against them by their competitors.
00:26:49 ◼ ► And so, you know, I watch football over the weekend and Google's got lots of pixel ads.
00:26:54 ◼ ► I don't know. Now you're in America. You may see more of these and maybe, maybe notice them and find them interesting.
00:26:59 ◼ ► But like they are pushing circle around something to search it on AI, which is clearly Apple's thing with the camera control is, is going to be an answer to that.
00:27:10 ◼ ► And like this is the, this is why I think Apple really is going so deep down in this embrace of AI.
00:27:22 ◼ ► I think Apple is afraid that people will want it and that it will be used against them by their competitors.
00:27:28 ◼ ► And so I think there's a scenario. I don't know what you think about this, but I think there's a scenario where a year or two on, we realized that 90%, I mean, not a hundred percent, but like 90%, 80% of these AI features are a dog.
00:27:42 ◼ ► No offense to Craig Federighi's dog and nobody wants them and they're pointless and why.
00:27:47 ◼ ► And then there are a few that are really good and then they're like, Oh, this is what people want, but we're not at that state.
00:27:51 ◼ ► Now we're at the stage now where it's like, what can we do with AI? Let's shovel it out there.
00:27:56 ◼ ► And if you're Apple, you're like, Ooh, I really don't want to do that, but we're going to get killed.
00:28:05 ◼ ► And we'll see, we'll see if offering, because offering it to make images of a dog at a birthday party or your mom as a superhero to the public is one thing, but like, is this just Memoji?
00:28:32 ◼ ► And I'm going to, I'm going to counter something that I think is probably in the heads of some listeners right now, which is, yeah, but so many people are already using AI generated images, using AI chatbots and stuff.
00:28:40 ◼ ► It's like, I don't believe that the people who are tinkering around with AI chatbots are representative of the entire human population.
00:28:50 ◼ ► It doesn't mean that the general human population won't also like generating images like that.
00:29:04 ◼ ► I just don't think that represents the vast majority of the much more low tech, you know, smartphone using populace.
00:29:24 ◼ ► Apples, when I mentioned Memoji and Slofies, those were both, hey, fun with your phone, yay kind of features, and they went nowhere.
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00:31:55 ◼ ► So today, let's do the B-Tails! It's the B-Tails because it's new OS day around here, so it's less, as we're recording right now I think they're still in beta because they're not available, but they will be available by the time this episode comes out.
00:32:15 ◼ ► And it's okay because the point ones are also still in beta and will remain in beta until they release next month, right?
00:32:21 ◼ ► Yes, very good point. There's always more betas. And this is probably a historical day because today iOS 18, iPad OS 18, WatchOS 11, macOS Sequoia and VisionOS 2 are released.
00:32:33 ◼ ► This is probably the most released from Apple ever, like the most operating systems in a day because we now have VisionOS in the fray.
00:32:44 ◼ ► What reviews have you written this year? I have a macOS review, an iPad OS adjunct to Dan Morin's iOS review.
00:32:56 ◼ ► I have a piece that's going up later about my feelings about the new changes to the Photos app, and then Dan's got his iOS 18 piece.
00:33:04 ◼ ► I want to write something about the watch, I haven't gotten there yet, and it may be in conjunction with the actual new watch as well. And I need to write more about VisionOS, although I already wrote about when that VisionOS 2 developer beta came out.
00:33:18 ◼ ► And it's great, I don't know, there's nobody who is using a Vision Pro who should not be on VisionOS 2, bottom line. Just do it.
00:33:26 ◼ ► It's absolutely the right version of it. What was it like to write the macOS review this year? I know that I've been talking to John Voorhees about his, and it seems like a bit of a struggle, to be honest.
00:33:40 ◼ ► So one of the challenges is Apple Intelligence is hanging over everything. It's true of all of these reviews. It's just hanging out there. The main event is not here.
00:33:56 ◼ ► This release is like a bunch of the side stuff, but there's this thing that Apple has leaned on as the most impressive thing that they're doing, and it's not there. Which is weird.
00:34:11 ◼ ► So that's a weird feeling. And I would say also, yes, in the beta process, a lot of features were just sort of being added as they went and being changed as they went. I felt like there was a lot of stuff that was way more movable this summer than it has been in the past.
00:34:29 ◼ ► And that can be a challenge as well. For the last few years, the way I've written my review is I write a public beta story when the public beta comes out. So that gives me a few weeks after they announce to spend time with it and then write a story about the public beta.
00:34:45 ◼ ► But the public beta, I'm not being judgmental about it. It's a public beta. It's early days. They've got the summer to fix things. That's why it's a beta. And so I will make observations about, "Huh, this thing is missing. This thing doesn't work right. I don't know about this thing yet."
00:35:00 ◼ ► And then in the fall, I come back to the close to final and I recheck everything and see what progress they've made. And I don't know if there's been an OS version that made more progress over the summer than Sequoia, where a bunch of stuff changed.
00:35:16 ◼ ► And a bunch of stuff that I complained about in July is just fixed. So I deleted a lot of stuff from parts of it, which is good news, right? But it also shows you that they were shipping things in June that were...
00:35:31 ◼ ► I mean, maybe they did some changes based on feedback, but I think a lot of it was also they were making changes because they were putting things in that were not feature complete in order to get them in the beta. And then they added them on as they went.
00:35:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I haven't really spent any time with Sequoia. I never really play around with the Mac betas anyway. But you were sharing some stuff with me and I thought that you had a really good way of talking about there being this cloud that's hanging over everything, which is the actual version of iOS 18.
00:36:17 ◼ ► All of the point ones is what I was trying to say. All of the point ones for the major platforms include the big thing.
00:36:29 ◼ ► Which is, every year this happens. This has been happening for a long time. That 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 have features in them and we know they're coming. But it is much rarer for what feels like the entire point of having the new operating system to not be in the initial shipping version.
00:36:51 ◼ ► And you can kind of feel how you'd like about Apple intelligence, but if you are looking at the company and thinking about the company in the way that we do, it is clear that this is actually what they care about.
00:37:08 ◼ ► But they don't have anything to show for it today. This is also that function of the iPhone controlling everything. It doesn't make sense to ship iOS 18 right now.
00:37:22 ◼ ► They should ship iOS 18 in October. They ship iOS 18 and it includes a bayette for Apple intelligence. But what are you going to do about the iPhone?
00:37:32 ◼ ► So you kind of have to ship it now. It's just one of these funny things about how the iPhone dictates everything.
00:37:41 ◼ ► And that's why 0.0 of all of this stuff is coming out today because the iPhone comes out on Friday. And they can't ship it with 17 on it. So here we are.
00:37:52 ◼ ► Yeah. So here we are. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I could ask are the intelligence features far behind enough that you had to delay them to October?
00:38:04 ◼ ► I think what we're seeing here is Apple hedging. I think in June when Apple announced this, they were not convinced there wouldn't be big problems that prevented them from shipping it immediately.
00:38:18 ◼ ► And so they said, look, it's not going to be in the first version and we'll get to it when we get to it soon thereafter.
00:38:25 ◼ ► Now they've obviously reached the point where they feel like, yeah, October, we can ship it in October.
00:38:30 ◼ ► If they had known that they were this close, would they have pushed it a little and gotten it into 0.0?
00:38:39 ◼ ► Maybe. I don't know. I still think that, I mean, there, there are some worry about how it's going to work, but there's also some worry about just the strain it's going to put on, you know, their servers that they're building their little private compute cloud thing and all of that.
00:38:53 ◼ ► But, um, it is a little curious that they're literally saying like, Oh yeah, in a couple of weeks, it'll be out. Just like, well, why didn't you push that?
00:39:00 ◼ ► I know you're running full speed here, but like the developer betas haven't changed that much. So could you have just shipped 18.1 as 18.0 and been fine?
00:39:10 ◼ ► Probably, but I think they didn't know that when their initial plan, but so we're left, we're left looking at everything else.
00:39:17 ◼ ► And it is fine. Like there are always a spread of features. Like there's always like the eight, the eight tier features that are there that are the big ones that are like, Oh, this is a big change.
00:39:29 ◼ ► And then there are a bunch of B tier features that are pretty nice. And then there's like, the C tier is just like all of this little tiny detail stuff.
00:39:39 ◼ ► So there's still a bunch of B tier features and depending on the platform, I mean, I would argue that there may be some arguably A tier features, but really.
00:39:49 ◼ ► Apple intelligence just obscures it all. So really you've just got to say Apple intelligence is the thing that Apple's focused on. That is the number one feature on all these releases and it's not there.
00:39:58 ◼ ► So we're left with the rest and it's a little bit weird. And I feel bad for some of the features like on the Mac, iPhone mirroring features really nice.
00:40:05 ◼ ► And I think we'll make people's lives better. And I think that Apple's pitch for it was actually really smart having used it now because they talked a lot about using notification center as the method to get to phone mirroring.
00:40:19 ◼ ► And I found that that's actually true. The idea that I don't often go, Oh, I shall bring up my iPhone now and look at what is going on.
00:40:29 ◼ ► But instead I get a notification on my iPhone, but it comes up on my Mac and I click on it and it opens iPhone mirroring to that app that I don't have on my Mac.
00:40:41 ◼ ► I'm like, Oh, okay. All right. Right. Like now it's all kind of seamless on this one screen that I'm using right now. Um, and they did a good job. It's like, it's, it's smooth.
00:40:52 ◼ ► I've got some quibbles, but like in general, it works really well. They fixed a bunch of stuff in the beta. There's complaints I made about mirroring and specific, you know, about like you couldn't edit the home screen.
00:41:05 ◼ ► You couldn't add or remove apps and stuff. And they, they fixed that you still can't access control center, which I find a little bit weird and you can't force a rotation, which there are apps where they work in both formats, but sometimes it's better in one than the other.
00:41:20 ◼ ► And if it supports both sizes, it will always stay vertical. I don't love what, what if you actually physically turn the device? Will it do it for no really? No, no, that's related to the.
00:41:34 ◼ ► No, cause your device could be in standby and it's going to run the phone in vertical vertical. So it's not, no, it's just, it's a thing that they should add. They probably will at some point because there are, there are apps where that's nice to be able to force it into, into horizontal instead of vertical.
00:41:49 ◼ ► And they added their little window manager on the Mac, which I don't want to belittle it by saying, Oh, they got a little window manager, but that's like the tiling stuff.
00:42:00 ◼ ► Yeah. It's just, it's basic, but like, that's the point is there are lots of apps out there that do this stuff like Moom from my pals over at Many Tricks is one of them, but like there are lots of them and they all do more, but this is something and it's, and it's stuck.
00:42:19 ◼ ► And if people want it more, there are third party apps to solve it, but this is like a very basic, I want to put this window to the right. I want to put this window to the left and keyboard shortcuts in order to move and dock sliding things into the corners and having them resize and dock there.
00:42:35 ◼ ► Like, it's just nice. It's a, it's a well thought out basic feature that is not going to blow the third party apps, third party utilities that really need this to be like, Oh, I need, I need it to be in three. And I need it to move this thing around when I hold down this key.
00:42:52 ◼ ► And like Apple's not going to do any of that stuff. It is once again, just trying for like a simple addition for the masses. And it is that. And I don't think it needs to be a lot more complicated.
00:43:02 ◼ ► I don't love the fact that you can't change the keyboard shortcuts that it applies and that they use the globe key, which if you're using a third party keyboard, you kind of don't have.
00:43:12 ◼ ► But again, nice Mac feature. The video conferencing stuff is nice. They have been layering on all the video that you take with your device, their own like video synthesis, right?
00:43:29 ◼ ► So we, they had the effects that came in and the portrait effect and all of that. And so this time they have background replacement and there are a bunch of images of like Apple park that you can put behind you.
00:43:42 ◼ ► But you can also use your own and Apple's background replacement tech is really good. And now every single app just gets it if they're using video, because you can set that at the system level.
00:43:53 ◼ ► And they just keep kind of like ratcheting there. It's a nice little feature. Is it enough to upgrade on its own? No, but security updates are probably the reason you update on your own.
00:44:05 ◼ ► You know, and I mean, the list goes on, I'll throw out another one here. Safari. I really like high distracting items and I know it's kind of like a manual ad blocker, but like here's the thing. I don't think that websites should be prevented from making money on ads.
00:44:24 ◼ ► Right. I clearly don't believe that, but I do believe there is a point. And that's why I think it's great that Apple calls this high distracting items. There is a point where you are trying to watch, trying to read an article.
00:44:35 ◼ ► And right next to the words is a video, possibly even overlaying the words is a video that is auto playing.
00:44:42 ◼ ► And it's so, or there's an ad that's blinking and it's so hard to focus on reading an article when that is in your peripheral vision. And so Apple's basically said, we will let you make it go away.
00:44:57 ◼ ► And it disappears like Thanos has snapped. It just into little particles and it goes away. And like, I can't be against that because that's a, in my mind, that is a violation of the contract between the reader and the website.
00:45:11 ◼ ► If they are making it impossible to read your article in order to load it up with distracting ads, I think that's it's gone too far.
00:45:19 ◼ ► And it puts it in the user's hands to say, no, that ad. And what I found is a lot of times the really distracting ad actually has an ad under it because they're trying to work around ad blockers and the ad under it is not distracting because it's not animated or video.
00:45:35 ◼ ► So there are a lot of positive things about it, but I've really liked that feature because there are sites I read that with that, like literally good sites and then halfway in the middle of the article, they just start playing a video of a completely different article about a different topic.
00:45:52 ◼ ► And I know why, I know it's there so that they can run a pre-roll ad and claim that people were watching that video, but it's muted and like it's a ripoff. It's a ripoff to the advertiser. It's a ripoff. It's bad policy.
00:46:05 ◼ ► And now as a user, I can just say, I don't want to see that. And it goes away and then I can read my article in peace.
00:46:11 ◼ ► Can I give you a quick hit list of the things that I like from the various betas that I've tried?
00:46:19 ◼ ► So this is, I've been using iOS and iPadOS 18 and I've tried, I put watchOS 11 on my watch a couple of days ago as well.
00:46:39 ◼ ► And I really, I think Apple has done an incredibly good job of detecting effects to be added to words.
00:46:47 ◼ ► Like for example, a couple of days ago, I, for emphasis on a word, repeated a letter a bunch of times at the end of the word.
00:47:00 ◼ ► I was like, you should add an effect to the you because you've obviously done something weird to it.
00:47:04 ◼ ► So they're doing a good job of that, but also they're just really fun to play around with and emoji tap backs, you know, about time.
00:47:15 ◼ ► The control center, I like the third party actions. It's fiddly to set up, but you set it up once.
00:47:22 ◼ ► I like that you're able to have multiple pages for HomeKit because I can now have a different page with distinct items, one for my home and one for the studio, which I love that I can have that and that can set them up the way that I want to.
00:47:35 ◼ ► Game mode is the thing that's been added when you play games, right? And I know that this is doing stuff like it changes some of the thermal properties and gives you more power, but something that it does spatial audio for iPhone games.
00:47:50 ◼ ► Now, this makes a ton of sense to me. I actually think spatial audio makes the most sense for video games on your phone than it does for watching movies and stuff.
00:48:00 ◼ ► It just fits really well, especially if I play a lot of games that have sounds, like not music, but sounds, and I can hear those sounds while I'm listening to a podcast.
00:48:11 ◼ ► And this makes a lot of sense because the podcast is up here in my ears and the sounds from the game are happening down there on my phone.
00:48:18 ◼ ► I really like it. I think it works pretty well. The new photos design, it takes some setting up, again, like Control Center, but once you've set it up, you're left with something that works better for you.
00:48:38 ◼ ► Yeah, and like I said, I wrote a piece for my feelings about this. There was a lot of initial backlash to the photos design, and I think the initial beta was a step too far because it was literally like you could scroll up or down or sideways.
00:48:55 ◼ ► I was like, "Mm, that's a lot of different things happening in one app." And they took out the scroll sideways, and now it opens with two things, the library grid above and collections below.
00:49:08 ◼ ► And again, I heard from people who were like, "Oh, I can't believe they did this. I just want my library. I just want my grid of photos that's completely chronologically ordered with the most recent ones at the top."
00:49:25 ◼ ► Photos has two things about it. One of them is it's where your system camera roll basically is, and you need to be able to get to it to get to that last photo you took.
00:49:33 ◼ ► I get it, but the whole point of having a photo library is to look at the photos in the library, I think. And that includes on your devices, not just like back home on a Mac or something.
00:49:45 ◼ ► It includes on your devices, especially for like... And I think, again, our more computer-focused community is maybe over indexing on, "I don't want to see collections. I just want to see a utilitarian grid."
00:50:02 ◼ ► And I just don't agree. I think the problem with Apple's... First off, there's this perception that it's just Apple's stupid machine learning stuff trying to recommend a memory for me.
00:50:14 ◼ ► And that is on Apple, because that's how Apple pushed this stuff primarily was with these memories that could be very weird, weird labels, weird collections and all of that.
00:50:24 ◼ ► But first off, collections is way more than that. And I think that a lot of them, if you want them to be utilitarian, you can actually make really great utilitarian collections.
00:50:34 ◼ ► I would argue that recent days and travel alone, and then people and pets, where you can now make groups. So you can say, "I want all the pictures. I want to see all the pictures of these four people together," and make a person group as well.
00:50:48 ◼ ► Those are utilitarian. You could scroll back through a grid forever in order to find something. You should probably use search, which by the way is also incredibly better now than it used to be.
00:51:01 ◼ ► You can just search for plain text, essentially, like, "Find me all the photos of Jamie on a beach in Hawaii," and you just type it and it comes out. And it's exactly right, which is amazing.
00:51:13 ◼ ► But the recent days, when you get to that open screen, yeah, you can scroll back. It's like, "A few days ago, I did this thing." Well, yeah. Or you could look at recent days and go back three days and go, "There it is," and tap and see all the photos from that day.
00:51:28 ◼ ► It is utilitarian. If you want to go beyond that, they're also generating memories and featured photos and stuff like that. And you can customize it. Like you said, you can pin things. You can move the order around to make it be what you want.
00:51:43 ◼ ► But Apple is trying to serve two purposes here because Apple feels, and I think they're right, that hiding all of the curation behind a tab and having everybody's main interface be a featureless grid is a mistake.
00:52:00 ◼ ► And they're right. It is a mistake because it's bad user interface. Featureless grid is not the right way to do it. There are use cases where featureless grid is the right thing. It's utilitarian. "I need to go and find that thing I just did. There it is. Got it."
00:52:17 ◼ ► But if that's all photos is, there's something wrong because there's so much else going on. And I firmly believe that a huge percentage of regular users never tap on the tabs and are not aware of what Apple is doing behind the scenes to organize their photos.
00:52:32 ◼ ► And why do we have hundreds of thousands of photos in our photos library if it is not to look at them? And Apple trying to find ways to get you to look at them again and surface them is part of the reason the app exists.
00:52:44 ◼ ► So I'm a big fan. I think this is the right thing to do. And I think if people are grousing about, "Oh, I only want to see a grid," like, how are you using your photos library? And maybe consider looking at the utilitarian features and collections because their recent days alone is very helpful in just coalescing your photos down into the most recent days.
00:53:03 ◼ ► Or travel that coalesces your trips based on your GPS and time data so that you can just say, "Where is that trip I took?" And instead of scrolling back a year to find that trip you took, you look at trips and you go back four and you're like, "Oh, that trip," and you tap on it. It's just the right thing to do. So I think they nailed it.
00:53:20 ◼ ► I also like that the grid of photos at the top, you can choose how it's displayed, whether you want it to be displayed in date order or added order, like when added to the library. I love that you can do that because I would often find myself trying to find an image.
00:53:37 ◼ ► But it's like, is it in recents or is it in my library? But you can just choose. And by default, my choice is to, I want to see things as when they were added to my library because that makes more logical sense to my mind.
00:53:51 ◼ ► And to be clear, Photos has been using machine learning for a decade. And none of the features I've mentioned are Apple Intelligence. I think the only Apple Intelligence features in Photos are cleanup, which removes things from the background, which works really well.
00:54:04 ◼ ► Not perfect, but none of these things are, but it works really well. And there's a freeform text to make it generate a memory movie and stuff for you. That's an AI feature.
00:54:19 ◼ ► Yeah, with all the things flying in and the lasers and stuff. Yeah, there's a lot going on there.
00:54:23 ◼ ► And it shows you the words it's searching to collate what you're looking for. It's very, very good. Very good UI.
00:54:34 ◼ ► It's good. I have dealt with performance issues when importing. I have a big one password library. It's like 2000 passwords and it bugs down.
00:54:47 ◼ ► It bugs down. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I've been using it a long time, right? So it really, it really bugs down and I think it's a problem.
00:54:56 ◼ ► And then deleting them is also really slow. It gets slow. I think they've got some work to do there.
00:55:02 ◼ ► And then I think passwords as an app is so good that what it does, especially if you're coming from one password,
00:55:10 ◼ ► is reveal all the ways that I think Apple still fails at dealing with this because I've been using it for the last few weeks full time.
00:55:18 ◼ ► And what I found is then I come to a website that wants to use my credit card and it doesn't autofill from Apple for some reason, from the wallet.
00:55:27 ◼ ► Because that's not in passwords, it's in the wallet. But if I'm not going to use one password, then I'm using Apple's wallet stuff.
00:55:32 ◼ ► And I come to websites where it won't autofill or it won't autofill the date and it won't or it won't autofill the little CVV code.
00:55:45 ◼ ► And one password does a very good job of brute forcing those kinds of scenarios, I think.
00:55:51 ◼ ► And if it fails, use a keyboard shortcut to call up your credit card and grab and copy and paste the dates and codes out of it.
00:55:59 ◼ ► And Apple is not good enough there. Apple Wallet feels very much like they've sort of moved on from autofilling in the browser because they want you to use Apple Pay.
00:56:09 ◼ ► But the fact is, the reality, I'm not always using Apple Pay on websites. That's just how it is. And they don't do as good a job of that.
00:56:17 ◼ ► And there's other similar data. I was asked to put in my driver's license. I was like, "Oh, boy."
00:56:23 ◼ ► And you can keep that in a locked note or something, but there's other personal information that it doesn't do as good a job about.
00:56:29 ◼ ► I also have some import errors that happen to me where I would try to log into a website using passwords and it would say the password is wrong.
00:56:36 ◼ ► And I would look in passwords and it was the wrong password. It was like an old password.
00:56:45 ◼ ► So I had to do a bunch of cleanup there too. So I guess what I'm saying is it's good. Apple's progress is good.
00:56:55 ◼ ► But there are still things that in terms of autofill that it needs to do a better job of.
00:57:00 ◼ ► Because right now, if I was not also having, my one password app is still on my system.
00:57:08 ◼ ► I guess what I'm saying is I tried to use passwords all the time and Apple's adjunct things that are like what's in one password.
00:57:16 ◼ ► And I end up having to go back to one password more than I expected. And that's not great.
00:57:23 ◼ ► So it's a good step, but I feel like there's more to do there and the app needs to get a little bit better.
00:57:48 ◼ ► So it still has some quirks where you want to use variables and it thinks you're doing something different.
00:57:57 ◼ ► And every now and then I write something and it gets the little squiggle under it and I tap to see what does MathNotes think this is.
00:58:04 ◼ ► And it thinks it's some complex math equation. And I'm like, oh no, that's just a letter. Why are you doing this?
00:58:12 ◼ ► And this also featured that makes sense to real people, regular non-computer nerd people.
00:58:22 ◼ ► Lauren's response was something like, oh yeah, trying to do math when you have to type it in with a keyboard is impossible because it's really bad.
00:58:31 ◼ ► This is one of those things that our keyboards weren't really made for and that we all learned how to do the math with our hands and you're writing the equations and all of that.
00:58:43 ◼ ► So yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff in there. It's just that we're also just waiting for the main event to happen and that's Apple Intelligence.
00:58:53 ◼ ► I have a couple of little bits. So you're talking about great ways to surface your photos.
00:59:13 ◼ ► You can pick like, you can also pick just like, not images, but like show me photos of this person.
00:59:26 ◼ ► And what happens is they are analyzed and they are cropped on the phone based on a machine learning analysis of what the key images are that you want to see because obviously a photo is not the same shape as an Apple Watch.
00:59:56 ◼ ► What that means is it will make the time bigger or smaller based on the content and the spaces around the content in the photos.
01:00:03 ◼ ► Again, not perfect, but pretty good. For example, there's a photo that's got me and Lauren and there's some space to the side and it wraps the, it puts the time on the left wrapped.
01:00:14 ◼ ► So it's the first two digits are at the top and the bottom two digits are at the bottom because it knows that's the space it's squeezed into.
01:00:20 ◼ ► But for another photo, we might be at the bottom and it puts it above and it uses the depth effect to actually have our heads be a little bit in front of the time.
01:00:28 ◼ ► And then another photo might say, "I can't do that here." And it tries to put it in the least obtrusive place in front of us.
01:00:34 ◼ ► But there's a lot of stuff going on for that photo, the new photo's face on the Apple Watch.
01:00:44 ◼ ► It has a few things. It's kind of like the lock screen, right? You can choose pictures of nature, I think pictures of pets, pictures of buildings like architecture and cities, I think they call it, and pictures of people.
01:00:58 ◼ ► So I set mine up to be like nature, cities and pictures of my wife. And then every day it gives you a new set of images.
01:01:06 ◼ ► And then they scroll through throughout the day and you can also just tap on the watch face and it will cycle through them. And it's doing that thing like the lock screen, like as Jason said, sometimes it's a picture of my wife and the time part of it is behind her head.
01:01:20 ◼ ► And you can also have two complications on it too, which I think is fantastic. So I have the date and I have the weather.
01:01:29 ◼ ► And I think now I'm like 90% sure this is going to be my watch face now because it brings me happiness when I look at my watch.
01:01:38 ◼ ► Like it's joyful to me because I get to see these photos of things that I care about. I think this is incredible.
01:01:44 ◼ ► They've done a fantastic job with this. It's like they took the lock screen photo shuffle, shrunk it down and put it on the watch and I think they did a really good job of it.
01:01:54 ◼ ► I like more widgets. There are much more widgets than the Apple Watch. I like the suggestions. I like that you can kind of say like don't suggest this to me or do suggest this to me. I think that's pretty good.
01:02:06 ◼ ► One of the new widgets that I like a lot is the workout one where you can just start your three most recent workout types just from a widget. I think that's really good.
01:02:17 ◼ ► I like the vitals thing. It's just like a cool app to have. And then just because I don't want it to feel left out, we mentioned VisionOS 2 a little bit.
01:02:25 ◼ ► The new gestures for going to the home screen, bringing up control center and stuff, it's so much more natural than the way they were doing it before.
01:02:33 ◼ ► And then the new environments and stuff like that. VisionOS 2 is a good leap forward. And as Jason mentioned earlier, which I agree with, if you have a vision pro, you should be on VisionOS 2 because it just makes everything a little bit better.
01:02:46 ◼ ► But yeah, this is part one of iOS 18. We'll be doing this all over again, I guess in like a month and then maybe again like two months later as we add in all these Apple intelligence features.
01:02:59 ◼ ► Since this is a real retrospective episode as well because it's our anniversary, I'm going to say I had a late idea when I was trying to figure out what the opening photo for my macOS review was going to be that I really like.
01:03:18 ◼ ► And I've mentioned it in passing here before. So I'll just mention it here. It's an Easter egg, but I love it, which is it's macOS Sequoia, which is named after the national park as we discovered when we were measuring for the California Bear Trophy.
01:03:32 ◼ ► But it's also the tree. The park is named for the tree. Sequoia is the redwood and there's a bunch of different kinds of redwoods. There's giant sequoias and there's the California coastal redwoods.
01:03:40 ◼ ► There is a redwood tree in my backyard, a Sequoia in my backyard. And I have spent the last 20 years writing and editing OS reviews in the summertime under that tree.
01:03:54 ◼ ► That's my favorite place to be to work on stuff in the summertime. I sit out there in a camp chair and I work under the tree. And it's a Sequoia.
01:04:02 ◼ ► So my art for the macOS review this time is literally a Mac running the new, awesome, classic Mac screensaver under the tree. Because it's a Sequoia and it's macOS Sequoia.
01:04:16 ◼ ► And I don't, you know, it made me happy to be like, yeah, I got it. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to show the tree. So there it is.
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01:06:35 ◼ ► So we mentioned this earlier in the beginning of the show but it is a very special anniversary here. This has been an anniversary year and this is an anniversary year not just for this show but for Six Colors.
01:06:50 ◼ ► So 10 years ago you left IDG and started Six Colors. We started Upgrade. It's a big day. Congratulations, Jason.
01:07:00 ◼ ► Literally Upgrade and Six Colors launched at the same moment because it was when the embargo dropped on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus reviews.
01:07:09 ◼ ► I mentioned this in a little bit in my post on Six Colors today about the 10th anniversary but I got the review units from Apple which I didn't always get and then had to tell my PR person I wouldn't actually be at Macworld when the embargo dropped.
01:07:29 ◼ ► It was like, "Well, what are we going to do?" I could have just run away with the phones but I also felt like that Apple was giving me those phones because I'm me but also because I had an outlet at Macworld.
01:07:41 ◼ ► I could have pressed it but I didn't want to so I made a deal with the powers that be at Macworld that I would give them a review for free if they had a prominent link to my reviewers notebook at Six Colors and a prominent link in my bio at the bottom to Six Colors.
01:07:58 ◼ ► It was really like literally this is going to be viewed by a lot of people who read Macworld and I want them to know that I started a new site.
01:08:05 ◼ ► That's what we did. I wrote the review for them which disappeared from the internet and is now in Six Colors as of last week for reasons.
01:08:15 ◼ ► I feel like I own it because I wrote it for free and they were no longer holding up their part of the deal which is they were no longer posting it and linking to my site.
01:08:24 ◼ ► So it's like, "All right, well, I'm going to take that one back." They offered to find it and repost it. I'm like, "Just don't worry about it. I'll post it."
01:08:31 ◼ ► So I had that going to them. I wrote a substantial sort of like reporters notebook essentially talking about my experience reviewing those phones.
01:08:40 ◼ ► Those were milestone phones too, right? Those are the first much larger iPhone 6 Plus. The 6 Plus, it was even larger still and they drove a huge upsurge in iPhone sales.
01:08:55 ◼ ► That phone was a great success that turned into a future disaster that they were clearing up for many years because those phones were so successful.
01:09:03 ◼ ► It really messed up their earnings for a long time to come because they were this huge, huge bump in sales.
01:09:10 ◼ ► That's like, "What's wrong with you? Why can't you do that more?" That was really a one-time thing.
01:09:16 ◼ ► It is funny that obviously I'm aware of 10 years and I've been thinking about it a lot and thinking back to when we started the show and how long ago that feels.
01:09:24 ◼ ► But the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus feel way older than this show in my mind. They feel so long ago.
01:09:33 ◼ ► I can't believe that when we were planning this show, it was like the iPhone 5S is the phone we were using.
01:09:43 ◼ ► It is very strange. All that stuff had to drop at the embargo time, which was an afternoon embargo.
01:10:14 ◼ ► Oh, you were going to Italy. Okay. So you had a vacation. So what are we going to do with this?
01:10:26 ◼ ► It was Thursday or whatever. It was very quick after the aftermath of me leaving IDG and all of that.
01:10:33 ◼ ► Almost immediately, we had to record and talk about the iPhone because that was going to be our first episode.
01:10:41 ◼ ► And you were going to be gone on vacation. So we pre-recorded episode one. I posted it.
01:10:54 ◼ ► It was also incredibly new for both of us, especially me. I'd never been in that experience before.
01:10:59 ◼ ► And we tried our best to make it sound like it was happening in the moment it was happening.
01:11:11 ◼ ► No, you're recording something in advance, but acting as if it was done at the release time.
01:11:17 ◼ ► That's a thing. It was our first episode. So it became this thing of, "Well, in the last week, I left my job of 20 years,
01:11:32 ◼ ► "Started a new website, reviewed these phones, and we are starting this podcast, which we need to explain to people."
01:11:50 ◼ ► "I really, really, really wanted to take some time off. I was burned out and I wanted to take some time off."
01:11:59 ◼ ► And the exact opposite happened, which is the moment I left IDG, I was working on launching my site and writing those reviews
01:12:12 ◼ ► And that's just because the iPhone event is too big to ignore. If you're launching yourself into a new world of starting a podcast,
01:12:31 ◼ ► They're like, "I'm going to take some time and then do my next thing." I'm like, "Okay, must be nice. Must be nice."
01:12:50 ◼ ► So Upgrade One ended up being this really interesting combination of it being a six-color site announcement,
01:13:06 ◼ ► And I've got a selection of questions from our listeners who wanted to get some of the thinking about us and reflection.
01:13:14 ◼ ► First comes from Aaron. "Looking back, how have your interests in the tech products and companies that you cover changed,
01:13:24 ◼ ► Honestly, I think we did a lot of hedging at the beginning because we weren't quite sure.
01:13:41 ◼ ► It was still sort of the size of Steve Jobs' Apple, and now it's the size of Tim Cook's Apple.
01:13:52 ◼ ► And I think we were unsure where we would go, and so the initial description of the show was very broad.
01:13:59 ◼ ► I think at the time I was thinking I would be interested in Amazon Echoes and what Google was doing,
01:14:14 ◼ ► But I was thinking, "Okay, honestly, you can't predict the future. Let's not limit ourselves."
01:14:22 ◼ ► I think that was the idea, which was, "Let's not limit ourselves. This could be, we'll see where it goes."
01:14:28 ◼ ► And over the course of time, I think what happened is I could look at this as a failure, but I don't think it was.
01:14:34 ◼ ► I think it was dealing with the cards we were dealt, which is Apple exploded and got so big in so many different areas
01:14:45 ◼ ► that a lot of that other stuff that I was in many cases still interested in got pushed to the periphery
01:14:54 ◼ ► because the concept of covering what Apple was doing in 2014 and in 2024 or even 2018, I feel like is totally different.
01:15:07 ◼ ► That Apple just went in so many different directions that it became, Upgrade became more of an Apple-focused podcast
01:15:15 ◼ ► than I expected it to be when we started. I thought we would need to spread a little further and wider.
01:15:21 ◼ ► I think the truth is we could have, but there was so much that I think we didn't need to.
01:15:30 ◼ ► The path Apple was on was so interesting that we needed to follow it, if that makes sense.
01:15:45 ◼ ► But I think that's the thing of over these last 10 years, if you cover Apple, if there you're a beat,
01:15:54 ◼ ► there's more than ever stuff to talk about. There's more stuff than there's ever been to talk about.
01:15:59 ◼ ► I think that we both keep a healthy interest in all technology and we bring it to the show,
01:16:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and Apple has imprinted itself. I mean, Apple casts such a shadow over the tech world.
01:16:34 ◼ ► It is the biggest or one of the biggest companies in the world and people really care about it.
01:16:50 ◼ ► So yeah, I think that has led us in that direction. Our interests are broader than that.
01:17:39 ◼ ► Jonathan asks, "You've both spoken about being so happy that the other person wanted to do a show with each other."
01:17:47 ◼ ► But I'd like to know, what was it that made the potential of doing a show together so exciting for you both?
01:18:13 ◼ ► And there's a question a little bit later on where I might talk about that a little bit more.
01:18:30 ◼ ► But there were certain people who sat at the top of the Apple-focused tech community that we're a part of.
01:18:42 ◼ ► But you've got the content creators that we call now, but writers as we called them then,
01:19:24 ◼ ► But to have gotten the opportunity then to be in a position where I would be your equal.
01:19:38 ◼ ► I always loved when I got to hear you talk about technology and was always sad about the fact that I didn't get to hear you talk about it enough.
01:19:55 ◼ ► This was the famed conversation in the history of Upgrade when me and you sat down for an hour in Ireland at the All Conference and spoke about all of this stuff.
01:20:07 ◼ ► I remember thinking how incredible it would be to hear a tech podcast like the ones that we do with you on it.
01:20:39 ◼ ► That is an absolute honour for me to be able to have gotten the opportunity to do this show with you.
01:21:42 ◼ ► To have the full-court press, very charming, very flattering from the people at IDG to stay.
01:21:59 ◼ ► But in the end, it worked out, I guess, in the sense that, seriously, eight months later,
01:22:13 ◼ ► Well, I got severance out of it because I told them I wasn't really interested in going through these shenanigans again.
01:22:19 ◼ ► But I say this because I had spent a great deal of time thinking about what I wanted to do.
01:22:26 ◼ ► And when I saw you at OOL and we had that conversation, I had already been thinking about that a lot.
01:22:49 ◼ ► but I had been listening to this model of tech podcasts where there were people talking.
01:22:55 ◼ ► It was like somebody who's a writer, reporter, whatever, talking to somebody else about it,
01:23:28 ◼ ► And again, I'd been listening to the prompt, and I was listening to Connected, and that was my identifier.
01:23:33 ◼ ► And I think the reason that I approached you -- and not Steven, who I could have approached --
01:23:44 ◼ ► and in part because I felt like we were different enough in a way that Steven was a little more aligned with me, actually,
01:24:05 ◼ ► So instead, I don't know, and I think when we had that conversation, we made a good connection.
01:24:11 ◼ ► Anyway, so definitely part of it was just me thinking, "I like that you guys were starting Relay."
01:24:26 ◼ ► So you and Steven ended up being one of the very first people to hear that I was leaving
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01:26:26 ◼ ► Go to backblaze.com/upgrade so they'll know that you came to them from the show and they'll continue to support this show which we'd appreciate.
01:27:02 ◼ ► Jerry says, "Are there any episodes that you have produced that could get me started with how to make a podcast of my own?"
01:27:18 ◼ ► Because we were celebrating our 200th episode by answering some questions from listeners.
01:27:28 ◼ ► I have no doubt that that stuff is very relevant today except for every time we say Skype, replace it with Zoom.
01:28:08 ◼ ► And it's great that Dan is there because we also have all these other things that we're doing.
01:28:17 ◼ ► I don't know if he was always part of my plan or not, but I think my plan was really to give all of my friends who no longer had a place to post things on the internet, to give them a place to do this.
01:28:42 ◼ ► But Dan wanted to make a go of it kind of like on his own and he was willing to do his tech stuff at Six Colors.
01:29:00 ◼ ► My old job was thinking big picture and having a team of people and trying to cover everything.
01:29:07 ◼ ► We had a lot of really amazing writers and editors and Macworld and the Macworld website especially.
01:29:26 ◼ ► Other than the fact that we did a membership and added a community, and that has changed the feel of it a little bit.
01:29:48 ◼ ► Anyway, that's changed. But I would say that the Six Colors side of it is not that different in the sense that it's just a place for me to post my things that I write.
01:30:17 ◼ ► But what has actually happened is as we got bigger, Stephen and I brought in people to do more jobs.
01:30:47 ◼ ► There was a lot of excitement and there was always new things happening, which was fun.
01:31:51 ◼ ► But we don't want to make the show worse for the people that have been listening to it for ten years.
01:32:37 ◼ ► And I know I've talked about this before and I did a whole episode of Focused about this as a guest star.
01:33:11 ◼ ► One of the things that's allowed me to do is realize that there are things that I was doing.
01:33:35 ◼ ► And I work in a business where there is a certain percentage of what I do where me doing it is the secret sauce.
01:33:49 ◼ ► I have ideas for things that we're going to do on this show or on the podcast-a-thon or on the incomparable.
01:34:07 ◼ ► But there was this huge chunk of things that I only was doing because I'd been doing them.
01:34:29 ◼ ► And that gave me more time back to have more energy and more time to do the things that I actually need to do that are things that are for me.
01:34:44 ◼ ► If you're just one person, and I'm sure that somebody like Marcus Brownlee experiences this on an even greater scale.
01:34:53 ◼ ► But it's the same idea, which is 100% of his time should be focused on the things that only he can do.
01:35:30 ◼ ► And let other people be your teammates who can do those other things and work with you.
01:35:55 ◼ ► You grow over time and one of the things that allows you to do is work with other people to do those other tasks.
01:36:06 ◼ ► Christian asks, "I've only been listening to this show for about four years, which means I've missed out on over half of upgrade."
01:36:45 ◼ ► At some point, that was after the first couple of years, because we were realizing how hard it was to come up with things to talk about in the summer.
01:36:53 ◼ ► And I feel like we used to have more guests on for timeless topics throughout the year, rather than what it is now, which is guests typically are covering somebody's vacation.
01:37:06 ◼ ► Right. There was an early time where I was like, "Let's get Scott McNulty on to talk about the Kindle."
01:37:18 ◼ ► What's funny is, for a show that's got segments, we called them "verticals" at the beginning.
01:37:24 ◼ ► Because I was laughing at the idea that everybody in the media business calls things that are focused on a particular topic a "vertical."
01:37:44 ◼ ► That segment of sending your questions is called "Ask Something." It came from this show.
01:37:58 ◼ ► There's stuff that you think is going to be a thing, and then it's not a thing, and you just drop it and you move on.
01:38:12 ◼ ► Again, you're like, "What's the show? Are we going to bring guests on to talk about particular topics?"
01:38:18 ◼ ► And now, the answer to that now is essentially no, unless it's a special episode or somebody is not around. We don't do that.
01:38:44 ◼ ► Because I think that you get joy and you're attached to the host of the show. You just want to hear them.
01:38:52 ◼ ► So that's what I prefer, and so I try and bring that to most of my shows, to be honest.
01:39:04 ◼ ► I'm not as into it because I'm into the hosts talking to each other, and that's what I like.
01:39:15 ◼ ► And I heard from somebody the other day who said, "I didn't realize Jason used to do Clockwise."
01:39:47 ◼ ► And let me tell you, nothing makes you not want to schedule guests like scheduling guests regularly.
01:39:58 ◼ ► but also I was at a point early on where I realized very quickly that the last thing I wanted to do was schedule guests.
01:40:04 ◼ ► And Zach has made a point in the Discord which I think will clarify a slight addendum that I have to my point.
01:40:10 ◼ ► Zach says, "I think The Vergecast has done guests on the show while bringing in some other journalists for some segments."
01:40:22 ◼ ► For me, it's like when somebody comes into the show and they don't really have a rapport with the hosts
01:40:37 ◼ ► I get a lot of emails from those people and they're PR people saying, "Oh, here's a person who can shoot."
01:40:44 ◼ ► Because I thought I was getting an email that I'd be happy with for the rest of all time.
01:40:49 ◼ ► So basically I'm skimming this email. It's one of these, "Hi, I'm such and such person. I do this and this and this."
01:40:57 ◼ ► And I'm skimming it and it says, "Johnny Ive." And I was like, "Oh my god, it's happening!"
01:41:02 ◼ ► But no, it wasn't that. Johnny Ive was a guest on another podcast and they wanted us to drop it into our feed.
01:41:07 ◼ ► There were people. But yeah, this happens all the time. I get these, "We're going to do a feed drop with this show?"
01:41:27 ◼ ► But I thought that someone was trying to bring Johnny Ive on the show, but that did not happen.
01:41:39 ◼ ► Mike's been covering Apple for 10 or so years now. How do these years compare to your first 10?
01:41:58 ◼ ► Steve Jobs comes back, brings out the iMac, opens a bunch of retail stores, brings out the iPod on the way up.
01:42:09 ◼ ► You said, "Oh, you go back in history." I got a contact about somebody doing a podcast about the day the Mac was launched, the original launch of the Mac.
01:42:27 ◼ ► Just to be clear, I didn't touch a Mac until several years later and didn't buy a Mac until the 1990s.
01:42:43 ◼ ► So my first 10 years was very much I have made a horrible mistake because I loved Apple stuff, loved the Mac,
01:43:29 ◼ ► Like Steve Jobs is around. I'm like, "Yeah, I know he's around, but he's like I'll honor him."
01:43:32 ◼ ► And then this person from the future would be like, "No, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.
01:43:36 ◼ ► Steve Jobs is going to take over and he's going to turn the Mac around and he's going to make it successful.
01:43:49 ◼ ► Because they're also going to release a music, a portable music player, a digital music player.
01:44:10 ◼ ► It'll have retail stores everywhere and people will come into the retail store to buy the little music player.
01:44:22 ◼ ► And then I won't even tell you what happens in the next decade, but it gets even wilder then.
01:44:43 ◼ ► So the unlikely thing that they had the comeback story and that it began in '97 and just sort of went from there,
01:44:51 ◼ ► where at the end of my first decade covering Apple, they were basically on the upswing and headed for,
01:44:57 ◼ ► we didn't know it at the time, but they were in iPod heaven and the retail was really growing.
01:45:02 ◼ ► And so the Mac was really going and OS X was out and that changed the game for the Mac a lot too.
01:45:14 ◼ ► You, in the last 10 years, have, we talked about it, have experienced the inflationary period of Apple,
01:45:28 ◼ ► Where Tim Cook is referred to in journalism circles sometimes as being one of America's ambassadors to China,
01:45:45 ◼ ► Like that's bananas. That fact that Apple's, most of Apple's feuds are not with its competitors,
01:45:51 ◼ ► but with countries and regional governments, like that's what, I think that's what's happened in the last 10 years.
01:46:00 ◼ ► So it's really dramatically different. And there's a decade in between there that set the stage for that.
01:46:05 ◼ ► But like this has been, I think upgrade has really been the chronicle for the last 10 years of what has happened to Tim Cook's Apple,
01:46:12 ◼ ► where everything is the stage set by the decisions that Steve Jobs made early on in his return to Apple.
01:46:20 ◼ ► And in the launch of the iPhone, but like the moment where the iPhone really kind of blew it out and caught fire and was just,
01:46:27 ◼ ► not literally caught fire, I keep saying the iPhone's exploded. People are going to take me out of context.
01:46:34 ◼ ► So it's a, like that, for me, that's the story of the last 10 years is just like Apple has gotten so much bigger
01:46:44 ◼ ► and so much more influential and powerful because of this huge growth in primarily the iPhone,
01:46:56 ◼ ► And it's just kind of like, it is just a very different company than it was 10 years ago. What do you think?
01:47:01 ◼ ► I mean, I couldn't agree more. Like, you know, it depends on where you cut my 10 years from.
01:47:12 ◼ ► Or you start it from 10 years from now and it starts with the biggest, most successful iPhone,
01:47:19 ◼ ► contextually the most successful iPhone in history, right? And it's like, you know, it is a very, very different time.
01:47:27 ◼ ► But there is interesting parallels, right? Where like you're looking at Steve Jobs and like his rise through
01:47:34 ◼ ► everything that he did and changed the company and the ways that he wanted to change it, like over that longer period of time.
01:47:40 ◼ ► And then you have the same with Tim, right? Like Tim took over the company, worked out what he was doing,
01:47:44 ◼ ► and then started changing it and modeling it the way that he wants. Very different times, but the ideas remain the same.
01:47:51 ◼ ► I wanted to very quickly, if you've listened this far, I wanted to just mention Upgrade Plus again.
01:48:08 ◼ ► But in the last five years, Upgrade Plus has become an incredibly important thing to the both of us
01:48:14 ◼ ► because of how it represents how we make a living, where membership has become the stable bedrock on which the show can be built from.
01:48:24 ◼ ► Advertising goes up and down. Sometimes we don't have as many advertisers. Sometimes our advertisers don't pay as much as other times of the year.
01:48:31 ◼ ► But our membership remains consistent and we would love for you to consider becoming a member.
01:48:38 ◼ ► You get longer ad-free versions of the show every week. You get access to the Relay Discord.
01:48:43 ◼ ► You get access to other perks for being a Relay listener, including additional bonus content.
01:48:49 ◼ ► But for the purpose of this conversation, what I'm saying right now, you support the show.
01:48:55 ◼ ► It helps the show continue. Me and Jason want to continue doing this show for as many more decades as you'll allow us.
01:49:01 ◼ ► I would really love it if you would consider becoming a member and supporting the show.
01:49:15 ◼ ► Yes, absolutely. It's been a great thing. Like I said about Six Colors, the same goes for Upgrade.
01:49:20 ◼ ► It has been great to have that as part of this journey and has allowed us to continue doing what we do.
01:49:31 ◼ ► If you would like to send us feedback, some follow-up or questions, you can always go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send those in.
01:50:13 ◼ ► You can find clips of the show on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where we are @upgraderelay.
01:50:40 ◼ ► you can catch the sixth annual Podcastathon broadcasting live from the campus of St. Jude.