Upgrade - 167: The White Room of My Mind

Episode Date: November 13, 2017

Jumping off from two Bloomberg reports about Apple hardware, Myke and Jason discuss the future of the iPad Pro and what in the world Apple is thinking as it develops an augmented-reality headset. We��ve also got updates on Apple’s television venture, the future and influence of the iPhone X, and Apple Pay for iMessage.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 167 today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile squarespace and mac walden my name is mike hurley i'm joined by mr jason snell hello jason snell hello mr mike hurley how are you Jason, nobody cares about that. We're going straight into Hashtag Snell Talk this week. Oh, wow. It is November right now. November is known to some, including you, as NaNoWriMo.

Mark has a NaNoWriMo question for you, Jason. Mark wants to know, will any of the novels that Jason has written for National Novel Writing Month ever see the light of day? This is a great question. And the answer is when you write a draft of a novel, it's not done. Writing a novel is a little bit like making, like doing any other kind of, I don't like, like making furniture or, you know, woodworking or

things like that, where it's, it's a craft and you're not done when you do your first draft, you need to edit it and you need to fix stuff that doesn't, that doesn't make sense, uh, or problems that you discover as you go through. Often the novel you finish is not the same as the one you started. And so the answer is I have three novels basically in a drawer, in a folder where I've written them through. None of them I consider done. None of them are publishable in my opinion.

I have tried to rewrite one of them, but one of the consequences of going out on my own is it's very hard to clear time and say i'm going to use this to rewrite my novel when i have a whole bunch of other things that i'm trying to do to pay the bills um it has definitely changed my mindset i have been feeling that recently with some projects it's like i would love to be able to put more time into this but unfortunately i have a job to do right yeah and Yeah, and I tried to block out time, but even then it's hard to get out of the space of,

I could use this time to do this other thing that is going to bring in money. And it's unfortunate because I really should spend the time, do the rewrite and get it out there, whether it would be published by somebody or whether I would just self-publish it, which would be fine. I don't really care. But to get to that point, they all need work. And I haven't even gotten through working on the one, let alone the other two that are sitting there. This is also the reason why when people ask me, are you doing

NaNoWriMo this year? My answer is no, because I don't really want to put a fourth novel in the drawer that I have to rewrite since I have proven to be unable to rewrite the ones that I've already got in there. And if I'm going to spend energy on something like that, I would like to resolve the existing things one way or another. So they sit for now. And hopefully I will. I have been gradually going through the one rewrite process and uh i had hoped to get back to that this month inspired by nano raimo and uh you know i feel like uh i don't know if you feel like this mike but i feel like since the apple event in september i've just been going at full max capacity and then you throw in the travel because i went i

had i had a couple of trips and you know we you had the one trip to chic And then you throw in the travel because I had a couple of trips and you had the one trip to Chicago. Like you throw in the travel and all the Apple announcements and then all these Apple product releases, which have been staggered out even over a longer time because of the iPhone 10

that I have had no, like the dog is angry with me because I don't walk her as much as I should. Because I just, I have felt like I've been at max capacity for basically every day since mid-September. So it's awfully hard to break away from that. But I need to try. This is like a mini episode of Free Agents. People should listen to Free Agents if they want to hear me and David Sparks talk about grappling with our time management and our perceptions of

getting work done versus doing personal things. Because it's definitely one of the issues if you're somebody who makes their own schedule and is their own boss like we are. If you would like to submit a question to start the show like Mark did, thank you, Mark. Just send a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and yours may be chosen for a future episode. So we have more Apple TV show news. Apple have signed another show. Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon will star in a morning show drama based on a book called Top of the Morning. When we spoke a few weeks ago about some Apple TV-related stuff, there was the rumor apparently that Apple was bidding for this new Jennifer Aniston project. It was really interesting to me to read the Hollywood Reporter article and realize that they threw this out there, and this is wild to me. This will be Aniston's return to a TV series since Friends.

She's not done any TV shows since friends which is yeah wild right she's been she's been doing movies right the movies is what she's done um but it's it's yeah i was really really surprised about that because i think basically every other every other friends actor has right all of the actors and actresses and friends have done other tv shows to my memory like i'm scanning it through like of all the big like the main crew has david has david schwimmer done a tv show oh well i guess that's an hbo miniseries but sure okay that works as a tv show i'm sure i think i can i think you can pass on that but anyway so uh this Apple has won a multiple outlet bidding war with a straight-to-season, two-season order. Yeah, which is a – that's risky.

Talking to Tim Goodman last week on the podcast I do with him, he was like, yeah, that's risky because it could be a bad show. They're stuck with two years of it or paying to buy out the second year, which sometimes happens. This seems like a rare type of deal. I imagine this isn't done very often. The story, I mean, first off, these are streaming seasons, so they probably bought 25 episodes or 22 episodes, which used to be a season. It's 20.

It's 20, see? So it's 210-episode seasons. So it's not like they're buying 50 episodes. They're buying 20 episodes. And the other thing is this is happening right now in the bidding wars, in this peak TV bidding war thing. Because this show has been out there for a while and people have been talking about it and Apple has been linked to it before. But Apple was also linked to the Ryan Murphy show that Netflix signed him for. And that was a case where there was a bidding war.

And Netflix ended up bidding for a two-season order and raising the amount of money they were paying for streaming rights to his other shows, like American Horror Story. And so this seems to be par for the course now if you really want to to get one of these big name shows that everybody's bidding on one of the ways you do it is say you know yeah we'll commit to 20 instead of 10 we'll commit to two seasons and that's just more money on the table. And that is, from a creative side, I mean, it's great to go into it knowing you're making 20 episodes instead of 10, that you can have a plan.

And I don't know, it's interesting, but this is the case where Amazon and Netflix have a lot of money too. And so Apple is up against them in terms of getting, and they want to make a splash and they want names because they want people to, um, to watch their stuff.

So this is an interesting move. It won't be the last again, they got a lot of money that they're, that they're able to spend, but it's the next step. There will be more from the Hollywood reporter. This show is described as an inside look at the lives of the people who help America wake up in the morning,

exploring the unique challenges faced by the women and men who carry out this daily televised ritual of being a tv morning tv show host yeah um aniston and witherspoon will be executive producers and the series is being written by another executive producer jay carson uh who produced house of cards and carson will also serve as the showrunner for top of the foot for well it's called morning show drama is the working title at the moment i think unnamed untitled morning show drama yeah we'll see how how it is uh they'll and and when they can put it into production right i'm still kind of a believer that this is going to be a uh this apple video service thing is is a fall 2018 thing and uh and you know the theory may be it's a fall 2018 thing and everybody gets a trial you know a three

to six month trial when they sign up like they did for apple music which means that basically apple will give you all their fall shows their launch shows, so that you will watch and try it out and presumably like it enough to stick around. Oh, I had a quick, speaking of Apple TV related things, I had an Apple TV box related update. I put the beta little profile thingy on my Apple TV 4K, which requires Xcode. It's dumb because it doesn't have a USB and it doesn't have a USB-C port on the Apple TV 4K. So you have to just kind of do it over the air, which is also a little bit disturbing. But I did it. it i updated to apple tv uh tv os 11.2 um and found and i used the like dynamic auto adjust frame rate thing that they added in the beta and uh it's great it seems to work really well many apps support it although not all i i was able to use the tv app but also the netflix app

and the plex app and it was changing frame rates. So basically, if you're playing a film, and the film's at 24 frames a second, the Apple TV flips over into 24 frames mode. And the TV just displays the 24 frames instead of what used to happen, which is the Apple TV, we take the 24 frames from video and convert it into a 30 frame per second image by adding duplicate frames which your tv then depending on how it's configured might try to dynamically remove or might not and with this setting this is uh this is the setting that john syracuse is really excited about um it just switches. And my TV blinks momentarily when you start to play the video,

it blinks and then comes back. But it takes the new frame rate and then just plays it because the TV has the ability to take a 24 frame rate video and just play it at 24 frames a second, which is better because you lose a bunch of like hiccups in movement

that are artificially put in by the conversion from 24 to 30. So it's cool. I'm a little baffled why Apple has never offered this feature before, but I'm glad that it's there in the beta because I think it's, you know, for people who care, it's a really great feature. So it's good to see that it's in there. Johnny Ive was interviewed slash profiled in Warpaper magazine, the design magazine. There was an interesting quote, possibly interesting quote, that I just wanted to read and then just discuss just a little bit. So this is a quote, this is Johnny Ive speaking to Warpaper. What I think is remarkable about the iPhone X is that its

functionality is so determined by software. And because of the fluid nature of software, this product is going to change and evolve. In 12 months' time, this object will be able to do things that it can't now. I think that is extraordinary. I think we'll look back on it and see it as a very significant point in terms of the products we have been developing. So, I want to unpack this just a touch. I love you reading the words of Johnny Ive,

because as an American, having a British accent read it is better say aluminium Mike aluminium Mike I wanted to just slow it down just a touch so I could try and get a bit of Johnny in it were you in the white room momentarily in my mind the white room of my mind

there you go title fishing I obviously my mind. There you go. Title phishing. Title phishing. Obviously, okay, obviously, all iPhones get new software every single year, right? This is just a given. But there are just a couple of things in this quote that are interesting to me. I think we'll look

back on it and see it as a very significant point in terms of the products we've been developing. Talking about how it's going to be very different. So I've just been thinking about this combined with my usage of the iphone 10 um also listening to a great discussion on under the radar last week um episode 105 where underscore marco were talking about new considerations due to like more prevalent larger screen sizes and oled screens and how that may make them rethink the way that their apps work, like where things are placed and the use of dark colors, right? Like to black because you get the

true black of OLED and stuff like that. It's making me wonder if iOS 12 will see some significant changes to the functionality and feel of iOS from a UI perspective. You know, iOS 7 was a long time ago now. It's five years, right? So this could be time for a bit of a change. And I think that the iPhone X could be enough of a reason for it. So I've been playing around with the smart invert colors accessibility option, which I recommend anybody who has the iphone 10 should

do because then when you open all of your apps that have white backgrounds oh my word they look unbelievable right it just looks so good to me anyway like the all black like the all you're seeing is just the pixels that are illuminated it's beautiful so yeah i i think that this could be this there could be some stuff here, and I think that they wouldn't have changed it necessarily too much before. I mean, there are definitely clearly some changes to iOS 11 made for the iPhone, right? Like the big title bars and stuff like that.

I think a lot of that was changed for the X, and some of the changes they made to the iPad operating system with the swiping gestures I think were because of the 10. But I think that we could be looking at some bigger UI changes in iOS 12 because I expect there is a possibility that we – there is always a possibility we may have more phones that operate like this one in september of next year if not just the fact that that the oled notch screen will get its second iteration most likely right so there will be even if they don't introduce any new like models that they don't introduce a plus model or whatever that phone will there'll be more of them and if apple sees it as the future maybe it's the time to to do some ui redesign so i just thought that this Johnny quote, coupled with things that I've been hearing developers talk about, seems to me like this could be the recipe for some new changes come June time.

Yeah, I'm legitimately surprised that the iPhone X, which is the first OLED iOS device um doesn't come with a dark mode yeah i am legitimately surprised by that the apple watch which is oled was built from the ground up to prioritize black over white and there is you know there is screen savings and power savings reasons to do it. Plus, you can really embrace the darkness, embrace the black that it's smart invert colors is that the old invert colors literally inverted everything. And smart invert colors lets you say, this is an image, so it shouldn't get inverted, basically. And so if apps are updated

to support smart invert colors, the UI elements all get reversed. So black turns white, white turns black, and the colors get inverted. But the images stay the same. So like in Twitterific, which supports smart invert colors, I can invert and suddenly the white theme is black background. But the images that are in line all look normal. that are in line all look normal whereas overcast which doesn't support smart invert colors um the white theme looks black which is nice but all the podcast art is reversed which is less nice so smart invert colors is an interesting attempt by apple to create something that's kind of like a

dark theme but is really more like a hack with a hack inside it to make it look less bad and it's an accessibility feature as well right like it's not it's not a real like dark theme but why not a dark theme because because because you know i use and this is not just about an iphone thing this is an ipad thing too it's like i use my ipad at night sometimes when the light's off and i'm i'm sitting there reading and i'll be in safari reader or something and i'll have it set to black background so that it doesn't need to be that bright. And then I'll open like mail or something and it's just

blast of white. And I don't understand why they have not embraced this idea. I feel like this on the Mac too. And at least they have the dark theme in the title bar

but it doesn't like change the window chrome to be darker and and it's like just why not why not do that and ios seems like the perfect place to do it and and the iphone 10 seemed like the perfect time and they still haven't done it so i hope it happens but i i have to say i've got some skepticism about whether they will do it, because if they were going to do it, why haven't they done it already? And I do think, yeah, on your larger point, iPhone X is so clearly, I mean, in some ways, it's the culmination of some changes they've been making in the background for a couple of years.

But it's also so clearly the way forward for iOS, the way they view iOS going forward, which is no physical home button, lots of different gestures from the edges and all of that, that that is what all iOS devices are ultimately gonna be like. And bigger screens than we've ever had before in all sizes, right, that the screens are all gonna get bigger. And it is funny to me to hear my developer friends

talk about, oh, we must consider big screen sizes. Like, yeah, thanks must consider big screen sizes. Like, yeah, thanks for three years ago, right? Like I've been using a bigger screen, but now finally people are understanding bigger screens can cause their own issues and keeping all the UI at the top can be a bit of a struggle at times and et cetera, et cetera. But I'm happy to see people starting to understand this

and maybe embrace the bigger screens because now it's more available, right? Bigger screens are more available to people. So there you go. I was sitting on the train today, Jason, and I saw somebody using a Plus, and it looked huge to me. It was hilarious.

It was so funny to me that already the Plus phone looks mammoth to me. Although I will say, all Plus users that I've ever spoken to agree with this uh the the plus size phones always look bigger when somebody else is holding them i don't know why that's sure it's an optical illusion it's something it's that's the that's the why people didn't think that mike was right um i've heard some plus users talk about how uh i've heard some skepticism from some quarters among Plus users about the iPhone

10. We definitely got some feedback from somebody who said, Mike should really try the iPhone 8 Plus, which was weird because like... It doesn't make a difference. No, the iPhone 7 Plus was close enough that you know what the iPhone 8 Plus is going to be like. And I've also seen some speculation that maybe next year, and this is not a rumor, this is pure speculation, but that next year that Apple might very well do an iPhone X Plus.

Well, just as we went on the air today, Jason, Ming-Chi Kuo reported that next year there may be a trio of iPhones, including a 5.8-inch, a 6.55 inch oled and for some reason a 6.1 inch lcd with a notch in it um so ming chi kuo wasting no time uh there will be three phones with face id assumedly so they have notches in them so basically it's a it's an iPhone 10 2018 edition, which we should talk about sometime because I think maybe we've reached the point where Apple's going to just call the iPhone 10 as the iPhone 10 and with a year like they do with the iPad Pro. And then their differentiator is that they're going to have the iPhone 9, and then they'll have the new iPhone 10, and then the iPhone 10 Plus.

But anyway, that's another discussion to have about naming. And that'll be great in that period in February where nothing is happening and we need to talk about names because we do that. But Nchi Kuo's report is iPhone 10, iPhone 10 Plus. um but the inchi quo's report is iphone 10 iphone 10 plus and basically like iphone 9 where it's still the lcd screen but they put face id in it yeah and take the home button off so it's a plus with face id effectively right in a slightly updated design in theory but so they can still hit another price point i guess would be that would be the i guess do they have something

that can sit in between it all but but yes so uh you're right that would be a plus that would be like the iphone 9 plus yeah so there you go it's already started it is already happening well you know that's i saw my first 2018 iphone rumor like the week after the iphone event right that it's like it's nice that they keep that level of decorum to wait until after halloween to put up the christmas decorations so so but um but i do i do think that uh the iphone 10 because i'm i'm trying to think i'm going to talk about naming now just for a moment because i'm interested you can give me a reality check if this is totally crazy. But iPhone X, I can't think of a good name that follows it. I mean, iPhone XS, XS, pronounce the S, don't pronounce the X, call it a 10. I don't think they're going to go iPhone 11

or XI either way. I don't think they're going to do that. I keep coming back to that this is their iPad Pro moment with the iPhone, where they're going to do to iPhone X what they did with OS X, which is just keep it for a while and just say iPhone X is iPhone X. I don't think it's a good idea because people have been too locked in to the sequential numbering over the last 10 years. Oh, I know. If you keep calling it iPhone X, people will think it's old. I think rather than – I mean I still stand by the idea of them giving them a new product name and just pulling the numbers away.

So, you know, like the next ones maybe just called iPhone. Or like they call it iPhone Pro or whatever. Well – I don't know. I think, so I think they could do it for a little while. I think you could collapse the, like, if you think about the iPhone 6, 6S, 7, 8. You could take three or four years and just say, this is iPhone X. And it's better, the all-new iPhone X.

But the other way to do it would be something that they did with OS X. And it's something that they're doing with the chips now which is to call it iPhone 10 something, but not a number or a letter. And so if you imagine if this was, and it's not called this, but imagine if this was iPhone 10 Bionic and that last year's

phone was iPhone Fusion or whatever. They could do something like that too. I mean, and then eventually they just drop the 10 name and every year they come up with a new marketing name, which is not a number, but it's got, you know, like Pixel, right? Like Google Pixel. I know that they've given those numbers, but like the name, I actually think that might be a nicer way to do this going into the future is give them a cool name. Stop doing numbers. Let's give

these products some interesting names that sums up some of the features in them. I like that idea, Jason. And I don't want them to pick like big trees in California. I want it to be something a little bit more abstract, which is applicable to everyone. So like Bionic, because it's just a cool word, right? Like give it some name like that. But yeah, I'm on board with that um so there we go we've solved that problem thanks all

right well everybody check check back in uh in february for naming corner somebody write this down yeah something like that or or frank will come up with some segment art for naming corner and we'll just have to do it every week that's how it works right that is exactly how it works today's show is brought to you by mac weldon they make the most comfortable underwear socks shirts undershirts hoodies sweatpants so much more you're ever gonna wear jason i am later on this week getting on a plane what do you think oh you're gonna be wearing mac weldon sweat I most definitely am, because they are the most comfortable pair of trousers that I own. Those sweatpants are fantastic. I

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for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. Apple Pay for iMessage appeared in the most recent version of the 11.2 beta for iOS so I want to give you some rundowns here Jason some of the things occurring here

so as it stands right now Apple Pay for iMessage is US only, this was expected when it was originally announced but found by a friend of the show, Guillaume Arambo, who is at underscore inside on Twitter, who you should be following because he finds

so much awesome stuff dug deep into iOS. Additional countries can be added with OS updates like Apple Pay. Sorry, without OS updates. That's the key part. Like Apple Pay. So Apple Pay could be turned on in certain countries and on devices without their requiring an iOS update. So that's a good thing, right? So it means that countries

can be turned on for Apple Pay for iMessage as they get ready to do that and want to roll it out further. You will find inside of your wallet app on ios your current apple pay cash balance along with recent transactions and it has a little card which looks really nice and i'll put a link to a tweet from matt panzerino over at tech crunch it has like an iridescent effect so when you move your phone around there's like a glittery color color-changing, hologram-y effect on the card, which is in the Apple Wallet app. So they're being a bit cute with it. Debit card payments are free, and credit card payments incur a fee. So when you're sending money to somebody, if you have a credit card attached to your Apple Pay Cash card,

so where it's going to debit the money to send to somebody, where it will take the money from. If you use a credit card, there's a fee. If you use a debit card, it's free. There are a couple of ways. Actually, there are a lot of ways that you can send somebody Apple Pay Cash. So you can open the iMessage app

and send it inside of Messages. You can ask Siri to send someone money or request money from someone. There is an Apple Pay button on people's contact cards. When you send someone an iMessage that has an amount in it, like for example if I send Jason a message that says

you owe me $10, Jason will see that message with the $10 underlined, which he can tap, and it will open the Apple Pay app, iMessage app open, and pre-fill the amount for him. And also the QuickType keyboard will also prompt you of an Apple Pay logo when somebody asks you for money. Basically, Apple really want you to be using this a lot.

So there are some limits, probably for money laundering purposes. Single transactions and transfers to your bank are limited to $3,000 in total. So I couldn't send Jason $3,001, and if he had $3,001 in his Apple Pay cash balance, he wouldn't be able to withdraw all of it. You cannot send less than $1 a time, so $1 is the minimum. You can only send or receive a maximum of $10,000 in a seven-day period, and you can only withdraw a maximum of $20,000 per week to your bank account. I'll just say thank you to, I think it was Ryan, over at Mac Stories for providing me with a lot of that information in his great article. I'm curious about the international stuff though, right?

Like, I imagine that they will have to do some ui that explains the the currency conversion yep this might be one of the reasons that they haven't done it for outside of the u.s yet because it becomes infinitely more complicated when jason's paying me money right because do you get it in dollars do you does it go in your wallet does it get converted then into pounds uh can you keep it in dollars and pay american people in dollars or does it then get converted back there's a lot of complexity there uh that i wonder about yeah or do we just use us dollars for everything apple's just apple's always in us dollars and then uh that doesn't make sense right because if you're in a foreign currency you want to pay your friends in the foreign currency uh yeah so that i can see why it's us only because the idea for

this is that it's in your apple pay right so in your actual apple pay says this is the problem that these have got the same name in like when you're using apple pay in stores or public transport you can have your apple pay cash card set as the default card so whenever you have any money on that it can take from it right so this is like uh that's like paypal balance or something right which is you you want to use your your mad money your your money that's just sitting in your wallet in cash essentially instead of using your credit card so you know the idea of where this is very simple right in that like you are filling up the card right by making transactions so it just debits an account right the same as paypal it's very similar to paypal in this way but it's hooked right into all of ios I want this because it seems...

Of course you do. Well, I like the... Honestly, I would want it because of the hooks into iOS and into iMessage. Because it just seems like a very seamless thing, right? It seems like just an easy way to pay people money. And a problem that I have is most of the services that provide this stuff like venmo i can't get access to right so my hope is that this will go international and that there will be a way to make very simple international payments with this like for example if like you know when when me and federico travel

together we're sending paypal transactions constantly back and forth because like one of For example, when me and Federico travel together, we're sending PayPal transactions constantly back and forth because one of us has booked the hotel, one of us has booked the flights, so it's all PayPal stuff. And it's like, ah, but I have a PayPal business account and a PayPal personal account. Honestly, I would just like to keep all my business stuff in PayPal and then all my personal stuff in the iMessage payments.

It's just an easy way to deal with it. Plus, as well, when we're talking about the numbers, we're texting them to each other, right? We're sending iMessages back and forth. So wouldn't it be nice to just hit a button? If Apple does this well, though, right? I mean, and that's the question of they're going to do it. I could also see them rolling it out and saying it's, you know,

only to pay people who are using your local currency right now, and we'll do international later. But if they do it right, they're going to do those conversions i can see lots of scenarios like you and federico are in the u.s together and trying to split bills so you know you you're getting a bill in u.s dollars um it would be really nice if you could say i want to pay federico 20 u.s dollars and have it say that'll be this many pounds out of your account and that'll be this many of whatever currency he wants to use euro fine or if he wants to use his his laundered uh i don't even know what uh swedish kroner he could do that

oh i'd give but i said too much um but but the idea that you could take you could take uh yeah so you got pounds and euros and dollars all in the same transaction and if they do it well and i don't know if it's possible because this sounds like a really complicated setup but if they do it well that should all just happen right you should say i want to pay federico 20 us dollars and it'll and it'll be able to say well that's this many pounds that you have in your account. So I'll take that out. And then I'll pay it to Federico, which will turn it into euro. And now he gets euro.

And right, that's the dream. So I'll say the PayPal app on iOS does this kind of stuff. And they have a very, very simple UI in their iOS app. The web, not so much. But on the iOS app, it's like just big numbers. You just tap on the little flag and you change the currency. then you can tap on this one change that currency just say the amount when you go through it gives you a breakdown you want to send this to this it's going to cost you this job done right now that's and and a lot of that stuff probably could be done

quite nicely inside of an iMessage app i i would think so this is great and i'm not surprised that apple is doing all of this, honestly, because as I said before, as I said when this was rumored, when it came up, this is like what big companies are doing now. Big companies want to be mini banks because why not,

as well as get people to spend money with you, just get them to literally give you their money to just look after. Yeah. And then all that money that's sitting in your wallet is money that's sitting in apple's bank account to uh to gain interest or do whatever until it comes back out and stuff like that you know and then when then they've got all the reserve they give you the money when you need it it's not like apple haven't got enough cash that they you know they need to spot uh for themselves they're fine they've got that

money and then also the other part of it is just system lock-in right you then may be more likely to spend that inside of an apple pay thing somewhere whether it's giving money to apple or just using it inside of their system because the money's already there and it's easier than getting it out again yeah i'm not surprised that all of this is happening um it looks like apple's ui and all the systems are good and I hope that they one do a good international rollout and two that they find a way to make it work for international transfers I'm up for that I want to take a step back here and say

that I think this is an interesting trend that sort of has happened the last year or two but is really ramped up this year which is is iOS number whatever now a marketing concept and i say that because among the features apple has announced as being part of ios 11 or coming in a future update right are i message in the cloud apple pay uh friend to friend. And I might even throw like faster

inductive charging in there. That wasn't an iOS 11 announcement. It was announced when the 8 and the 10 were announced, but it was sort of like a future development. And I think it's really interesting as a trend. We've touched on this before, but I want to point it out now in the context of Apple Pay for iMessage, which is Apple seems to now be okay with the idea that when they say something is coming in iOS 11, they don't mean that it will necessarily be in 11.0. Like it will be part of iOS 11 at some point. And I think I'm okay with that.

I'd be okay with ios announcements being kind of a roadmap where a lot of this stuff will hit on day one but some of it is going to roll out over time because even though we all want it now right that of course um because that lets them pluck some things out that are more complicated and not happening and not ship them when they're not ready and keep working on them and then rolling them out when they need to. And I got to be honest, it used to be that if you didn't make the iOS drop in September, that didn't show up for a year. And I kind of like the idea that Apple can be a little more confident in announcing features in June because they know that even if they don't all

make it in September, they just need to make it by December or January or February. I like that, but it's different, right? But I feel like that's the game they're playing now is iOS 11 is a collection of features across multiple software releases. And that's just how it is, right? We'll get iMessages in the cloud, iMessage in the cloud at some point, and we'll get the inductive charging update at some point. And we're going to get Apple Pay for iMessage if you're on the public beta now, but that'll roll out in the next few weeks. And it's just this kind of rolling iOS 11. It's not the single release anymore. I think that's good, probably, but it's definitely the way they seem to be approaching it. So we have two Mark Gurman rumor articles to discuss this week. We'll start with the smaller of the two i think uh which is okay apple ar headset

so i want to read read some of the key points all right just break it down for me summarize some of this stuff for you so this will be the break a breakthrough product to succeed the iphone i'm sure i've heard that i'm sure i've heard that somewhere before yeah that is not the strongest that is not the strongest thing in this article right like nope you're gonna get to the details and i i think the i was asked i was on twit yesterday and i was asked about this and and i think all these details are true but the product to succeed the iphone part not that part no at least not in the short term because i find it so kind of ridiculous everybody wants everybody is looking for the next iphone everybody's looking for an iphone killer i think that i think the smartphone is going to survive for a long time

yes yes i mean like the this was what this was the app my joke is the apple watch right this is yeah right i mean the apple watch is gonna is not going to be bigger than the iPhone. And talk like this makes it seem like if it's not bigger than the iPhone, it's a failure. And it's not. Nothing is going to be bigger than the iPhone for a very, very long time. So that's a silly talk. But let's get into the details. Could ship a product as soon as 2020.

Apple's device will have its own display. As soon as. as soon as 2020 um apple's device will have it's usually will have its own display as soon as as soon as is great you're going to get through this jason mike i could go into outer space as soon as tomorrow apple will have its own display and run on a new chip and operating system uh the company began putting together a team to work on ar related projects a couple of years ago. This team's first product was ARKit. And their next step, what they're working on now, is creating a headset

with a built-in display capable of streaming 3D video without draining the battery. Apple is creating their own chips again for this that they have been doing recently with a lot of their new products. The new operating system, internally dubbed ROS, for Reality Operating System.

That is not a good name. AROS is better than ROS. It's the Pirate Operating System. ROS. ROS is based on iOS, as you could assume. Again, as like tvOS and watchOS have been. Yeah.

The company plans to release a new version of ar kit as soon as 2018 this will include things such as shush persistent tracking uh persistence tracking is when you can put an object in a virtual space uh look away and the object is still there right so you could put something down you could turn away do something else turn around and it stayed exactly where it is um the persistence tracking i think there's very basic versions of that right now it's not as good as it could be like it loses its place i assume there'll be many other things that come with ar kit but of course what this whole thing is framed around is like an apple google glass right this is what yeah we're assuming

or an apple hololens yes the other way to look at it. Yes. Because HoloLens actually had AR features. Google Glass didn't. Google Glass was just a screen projected in front of your face for text and stuff. It's too old, right? It was too long ago. I mean, Google Glass, if it existed now, it would be AR.

But then it was just a HUD, right? It was just a heads-up display was what it was exactly that's that's right um you know there's there's a lot of things to say that you don't want to say when you get something like this because episode 300 of upgrade we can look back and laugh at ourselves for some of the things we say here but this is something that i'm i'm really struggling to get my head around is apple making an ar headset um to i assume my assumption is they are not making an ar headset to be used just at home like i think the hololens is like my assumption would be if they made something

it would be to be like become part of your life it would be like a more like a wearable really than than anything else and it would i guess be akin to something like a google glass i i struggle i struggle with this um partly because Google Glass kind of ruined it, right, for everyone. And it just – there is an inelegance to a product like this that I'm kind of not sure about. Well, so the product doesn't exist, right? Well, so the product doesn't exist, right? So anything we think about it is what we bring to it ourselves. Yep.

But as soon as 2020. Here's the thing. I feel like this is clearly a direction Apple wants to go in. Tim Cook talks about AR all the time. I think Apple, sometimes I think the modern strategies of all the tech companies is, at least a lot of it can be explained by fear of being left out of the next big wave of technology and being obsolete. And nobody wants that. Everybody, these modern tech companies know that they can be obsoleted in a minute. out of the next big wave of technology and being obsolete and nobody wants that everybody these

modern tech companies know that they can be obsoleted in a minute right that this is the that they could be blackberry to use one of many examples that they could be just if you poo-poo something that's new technology it could be the thing that destroys you. And so I think Google and Apple and others, Amazon, Microsoft, are somewhat obsessed with investing in things that could potentially be a threat to their thing that they do, or could potentially be a threat to the thing that their competitor does really well. And so for Apple, you look at AR and VR is kind of a subset of AR. And you say, well, if anything is going to replace a smartphone, it's probably wearables and something that is a heads up kind of display where you don't need to hold a phone,

hold glass in front of your face, right? That, that, that is a threat. And they, uh, and AR is interesting and VR is interesting and they've got the powerful processors and sensors and all those things. And so they make AR kit and they put it in, in, in the modern phones and they start to work on, well, what would happen if we took our OS knowledge and our sensors and our, our, our APIs and all the hardware we build and we built a headset. And I think the answer is probably like, well, this isn't going to be a product that's any good for a few years yet that, that anybody's going to want. And I think that is why you say could shoot ship a product as soon as 2020.

It's like, that's somebody saying, you know, we're working on stuff that's somebody saying you know we're working on stuff that's on the roadmap but but what we've got now is kind of clunky but maybe there's something there um and then the question is what's it for in 2020 and the answer there are a lot of answers right it could be that it that it is mostly for home use originally and it is a game playing thing because i would imagine that if it can do AR, you could probably like flip down a, uh, flip down, uh, uh, uh, uh, thing, a covering over the eyes and basically turn it into VR. If you wanted to do that, um, like, you know, I, I think that they, right. So this product makes sense to me in that I think they need to work on it and that they

will probably come to a point where they think, yes is a product here but it's so far off now that it is more about like hedging about the future and making sure you don't because apple has advantages here in in the in that they've been working on a car kit in that they're building their own silicon um in that they've got uh in terms of apps and games some developers who are going to already are getting up to speed on ar stuff with the iphone and are going to be exploitable in the in the good in the good way of like look at all of our developers are already here for this new platform and then imagine how great james thompson's calculator slash game will be on a set of goggles. We may never hear from James again. He may just be in the goggles from then on. So like, I like it from that level. I think the question is,

how do you picture this as a product at the end? And yeah, that's a real question. I don't know if the tech even in 2020 is going to let us like wear them out of the house. But in an office setting, in a home setting, uh, it's a little more plausible. That's certainly what Microsoft is targeting. Um, but you know,

I don't know. I think the best way to look at this is that it is a, uh, maybe a short-term product product, but it is a long-term hedge against the disappearance of the iPhone glass, because that's a huge threat to Apple's livelihood in, in the 2020s. Yeah.

I'm just, this is just something that I'm really struggling with because I just can't, I, I don't know. I really struggled to see this as a product, which is mass market. I really do. Oh,

I agree with you. I think it's, and that's why I think it's not the next iphone no um i i well let me put it this way and and we yeah we can laugh in this and upgrade 400 uh or 500 which is um i guess that only pushes it out two years every time we say that but if you asked me if by the end of the 20s, which is weird to say that, but by the end of the 20s, if people are largely foregoing a slab of glass in their hand as they walk around in the world for wearables, that includes potentially something that they can see, you know, it's basically a-up display of some kind. I would say, yeah, that sounds reasonable. Like, it sounds reasonable. The question is how we get from here to there, because I don't think voice interface and talking is going to be enough on its own. I'm not sure whether having just, you know, headphones in and a cellular watch on your wrist is going to be enough to satisfy people to leave their slab of glass at home.

But I'm also not sure everybody wants to walk around wearing glasses unless they are literally as light as the pair of glasses I'm wearing right now. But I could see it, right? I think the challenge is how we get from here to there. And the problem with that is that it's very hard if you're a company, you know, any company to not have a product between here and there, right? The only way you get from here to there is by releasing a product and having it, you know, be not great, but exciting, and people get it, and then you make it better, and then you make it better, right? And the challenge for Apple is, unlike some of their competitors, Apple is really reluctant to release a product that they don't think that they can sell a bunch of. And that's a challenge, right? Is how do you make this thing good enough that people want it? Even if it's impractical and expensive and not a lot of people want it, but like the Apple Watch, it's enough to get the

category rolling and then you iterate and more people start to buy it and then it kind of becomes its own thing. That's what they need to do here. And for me, that's like, that's the question for whoever's building this thing at Apple. And it's probably the question for all the managers of those people in terms of when do they think that this is a real thing, or do they potentially go, oh, no, no, no, we're not, push it back. This is not going to happen. Because that's the real question is, will anybody buy an Apple thing that they strap on their face that does, you know, VR and AR apps that they can use at home? Will people buy that product? What are the details of that product in 2020 that would make somebody buy it? And it's, you know, we don't have a lot we've had some vr you know vr only uh game

things like oculus and the psvr but it's super limited so i don't know i it's something you've got to do but you're kind of going into the woods here right as apple and saying i hope we find the right product in you know two or three years i hope so i you see what i mean though they they gotta do this but i'm not sure i agree they do i mean because i mean i i i was the one who for before ar kit right was was saying like apple us being silly for not pursuing v and AR, I was getting concerned that they were not going in this route. I personally think that something more like the HoloLens is more interesting and something that should be progressed as something than Google Glass. My concern is Apple will go down the Google Glass route,

which I think is the wrong route. And that really, I believe that these AR products could be more interesting as a way to augment computers, not smartphones. And I hope that that's the route that they're going down. I really struggle by 2020 to imagine there to be a product compelling enough that is like the Apple Watch but for our faces. That's what I'm concerned about, because if Apple screw this up the first time,

they're not going to get another shot at it for a while right and then they may then miss it because i think that this is a product which is fraught with social problems and it's just very tricky it's just like a very tricky thing because you know if apple make a headset they're going to have to put a camera on it and it's like that is there's like a million problems in there and yeah this so i i just think i i don't i don't know if the world's ready for it jason it's the it's the it's the problem yeah um so and will it be ready in in three or four years or not i can't see how yeah right like what's gonna change right like we all our smartphones are going to continue to be our smartphones they're still going to have cameras on them, right?

They're the cameras we're used to. I don't know. This is just something that, like, between now and then, I'm really interested to see where technology goes because I really just don't imagine it within the next couple of years to be a product that people could walk around

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and when you sign up, please say that you heard about them from Upgrade. We thank TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. So the second report from Mark Gurman is about the 2018 iPad. Yay!

So we were talking about this last week on Ask Upgrade. Somebody asked if we think that there will be a 2018 iPad with Face ID and how that's going to work, like where are the cameras going to go, what's the orientation going to be, that kind of stuff. And we were wondering, like, maybe 2018's too soon for Face ID on the iPad. Well, Mark Gurman says that it's not. So here is the key information from this second Mark Gurman report. So the next iPad, the 2018 iPad, will have a screen size similar to the current 10.5-inch iPad Pro, but but with again, smaller bezels at the top and bottom and no home button. It will have face ID support. It will not have an OLED screen because

they're super expensive. And currently only Samsung can make them to Apple standards and all of their screens are going into phones. And maybe next year, as we spoke about at the top of the show, there'll be even more phones, right? So they're going to need even more screens and they're already struggling to get the amount that they need. This new iPad will have a faster processor and a custom Apple GPU again. There will be a new version of the Apple Pencil

with an implied release date more than a year after the recent iPad Pro update. So kind of maybe fall of 2018 where we got the most recent iPad Pro WWDC time, which was because it was super late, right? So we're kind of looking at, again, about like a kind of 15 to 18 month cycle

on the iPad Pros, which seems to be becoming the norm, right? Like you're looking at a year and a half now, which is kind of cool. So I want to ask you, Jason, do you think that this report makes more or less sense than the last one like does this one stack up to you yeah i mean i i think this makes sense uh the idea that apple would want to bring face id everywhere totally

makes sense to me i think that i think that we know that that this is also not a wait and see like apple went all in on face id a while ago they've even said so and so how would they not have said okay we got this stack we've got these sensors we've got this stuff bring it everywhere like and that the next generation ipad has probably always had face id as part of the plan and probably max too right next generation max yeah one would hope i mean there they have to build it into mac os right Face ID as part of the plan. And probably Macs too, right? Next generation Macs. Yeah, one would hope. I mean, there they have to build it into macOS, right? Whereas it's already in iOS.

But yeah, you would think that at some point they definitely got the word like, put this in. This is our, we're not doing Touch ID. Also, here's my question for you. Could the Touch ID work be like the start of it, right? Because for a lot of what i guess i could understand from ios was that like they obviously had to do work to support face id but it was it was piggybacking on the biometric stuff and all the secure enclave stuff yeah i mean the work that

they've done on mac os already to support touch id on macbook Pro with Touch Bar means that they basically got that. They still have to do all of the whatever, you know, whatever is happening in terms of the intelligence of Face ID, right? That has to get built in, although that's probably fairly portable. I was going to say, like, again, from what I understand about how that works on the MacBook Pro, a lot of the processing is happening on a specific chip, right?

Which I'm assuming is very much like the chips that run on iOS. So maybe then again, right? Like a lot of that code is usable because it's not actually happening in macOS itself, maybe? Right, it's happening in some ARM processor that's also running the secure enclave and all of that. It's possible. It's possible. It's just a little more work than iOS.

It's in there, right? The iPad getting it is a little more straightforward than the Mac. Yes, than the Mac. For sure. But the OLED stuff totally makes sense to me that they wouldn't do an OLED iPad screen only because Apple is shown to be super conservative

with OLED. It's not that there aren't OLED tablet tablet panels out there because i think there are but like apple apple is not going to jump in until they get an oled panel that one matches you know meets their standards which are high i think apple is very happy with the ip iPad screen as it currently exists because it is the wide color gamut screen. It's got the high refresh rate for ProMotion. And also there's price issues, right? Because an OLED panel for tablets is going to be super expensive. And that's going to either cut into their margins or raise the price of the iPad Pro.

And I don't think they want to raise the price of the iPad Pro right now. I think they want to sell more iPad Pros at the current prices. So I buy that part of the story too, that this is not going to be an OLED iPad. It's going to be a Face ID iPad. And what the Face ID gets you is you can take the button off the screen and you can shrink the top and bottom areas. And you don't have the space constraints of a phone so you can still leave room for the sensor bar i don't think there's going to be a notch i think they can

leave room for the sensor bar but have all the bezels come in a little bit more so that you can make a smaller ipad that's got the same size screen or alternately a same sized ipad that's got a bigger screen what do you think of that one though actually because i was wondering right now you know saying the report from germis is as a screen size similar to the 10.5 inch ipad pro like i can see that that's the case or but i can also see that like that could have been misconstrued whether like oh it's going to be the same size and you think it means screen but like it's actually physical size do you think that they're more likely to bring it in or push the screen out to the edges of the current one um i i'd say i'm 50 50 on it um if i had to choose i would say that it feels more likely that they would keep this they would maintain the screen

size and make the physical size smaller but you know if you keep the physical size the same that means you've got more room for components and battery but it means it's bigger and heavier so what is apple going to solve for there and in the in the 12.9 assuming they do this on the 12.9 it's the same question which is i would take a smaller 12.9 uh right because i like the bigger screen but i'd be happy if it was smaller and lighter 10.5 seems like a very nice size. People like it. So that's a question is, could you make it smaller or could you just stretch out the screen? On the 10.5, quite frankly, I think they could do either one and it would be a good product. It would be a better product, either a little more screen. I think the advantage

of having it be the same screen size is it's not another iOS screen screen size right they just say no no no it's the same yeah it's the same size as the 10.5 it's fine it's fine you know that kind of thing do you think they'll do anything to the 12.9 or do you think it's going to be like another two to three years for that one right so like they they rev the 10.5 and then maybe in a year and a half rev to 12.9 again it's a good question i don't know i i want them to be in lockstep right i i'm gonna fear for the 12 9 if it isn't uh again at the same time as the 10 5 right because we had the 12 9 then the 9 7 came out with new features nothing happened to the 12 9 then they both got updated together in june right so i want them updated together again from now on.

Yeah, I know. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like that the 12.9, like it's not like it's dead, but I can imagine them skipping, right? So like the 10.5 gets a revision

and then a year later it gets another one and then the 12.9 gets a revision. I doubt it sells a lot, right? I mean, as much as gets a revision. I doubt it sells a lot, right? I mean, as much as I love it, I doubt it sells a lot. In fact, I was going to say with the 10.5, if they made that a little bit bigger screen, they would pick off even more users potentially from the bigger iPad.

But I do think that there's an advantage to having giving people choice in terms of screen size. Because if you're somebody who wants extra screen space, a 10.5-inch screen is not great. I mean, on a laptop, people prefer a 13 over an 11. And yet on the iPad, definitely people seem to prefer the 11 or 10 and a half to the 13 essentially uh but at the same time the 12.9 is more expensive and has presumably really nice margins so they want to keep it around uh yeah realistically the 10.5 is the priority and then the question is do they keep updating to 12.9 in lockstep i hope they do so if the home button goes away then what happens to our gestures so i can't imagine that apple would change ios on the ipads gestures to match the iphone right so like that the swipe up would take you home because i really

think that the swipe up for the dock is way more powerful there. The dock stuff makes more sense. And honestly, I think that they would just keep what's already there. There is already a gesture on the iPad to go home and it's a four-finger pinch. And you can also use four fingers to swipe left and right and you can go between apps like you can on the iPhone.

I would hope and think that they'll probably go down that route rather than once again changing all of the UI gestures for iOS on the iPad because you'd end up with like what would you do for the dock like do a thing to swipe up and then you know

I've got here's my theory I'm just going to put it out there which is swipe up to go home swipe up and hold or swipe up and go high to bring up the dock and the multitasking switcher and control center which is what it currently does if you if you think about swiping up from within an app and you doing the big swipe you get to a place where the dock is there the multitasking switcher is there and control center is there they're all there i

wouldn't like that so you just so you just get rid of the little dock swipe and the dock swipe becomes a home instead because all the multitasking stuff will be so much slower right like doing because you'd swipe up and then you'd want to bring a new app in and then you'd have to tap again and then bring it all seems like it's just adding even more steps to a what can be sometimes clunky ui anyway i find myself the the swipe up a little to get the dock it is not a gesture that i have embraced on ios 11 oh wow i use it all the time i i i rarely use it but i can can see how for multitasking and kicking off apps, that is where I use it. And so that would be more complicated. I think the four finger pinch thing is too esoteric for people.

I think Apple wants something a little more specific than that. They may move some gestures around around but i feel like they will find a simple gesture to have you go home uh what about like a swipe in from i was gonna say from the side but like that i was gonna say also another solution and this is like lifting something else from the mac which they have done some of which is what if home is home the home screen is already an app in the app switcher right when you command tab one of your options is the home screen in the app switcher right so it's in the dock so what so what if it was in the dock so if you want to go home you flip up and tap on

home and it shows us up as an app maybe in multitasking too as an app what if you move to there just isn't home anymore on the probably not but they could de-emphasize it right because you're flipping around between apps so maybe just putting it on the dock is is answer, is that they keep the UI the same and they just put a home, the home screen just lives on, in the little side area on the dock at all times. Just like the Finder is always in the dock on the Mac.

Yeah, that would work. Or like, you know, Launchpad comes back, Launchpad finds its way, and then that's it, right? Like you hit it and then all your apps open up rather than you going home. That's all it is, right? Like you hit it and then all your apps open up rather than you going home. That's all it is, right? Just rearrange the apps and it could just be some weird little app launcher,

which is in the dock. Because that's all home is, right? Unless they do something more there. I mean, but yeah, that could totally work. Gomer referenced a new version of the Apple Pencil. I just want to run through very quickly again. What do you think of that? Yeah, I want to just say what I want to see.

Well, okay. What I think it will be is just the lag has improved, right? The latency has improved. That's what, honestly, I think it will be. It will probably just be that. But if I was going to ask for what I would like, just a couple of things. Buttons.

I would like there to be a button which could have some functions programmed to it. This could be great for drawing apps, right? Because you could assign shortcuts to it or whatever, but there are many different applications that could do interesting things with buttons. You could have, it could be programmable inside of applications, which I would really like.

So like, say for example, an app like your wonderful Ferrite, that you could have effectively what would be like a shortcut key attached to it so like if you press the button and tap it cuts the audio right right at that point or something like that you know like you could i'm i'm thinking of like what my wacom tablet does. So I have select. So when I hold the button and drag, it's like I'm pressing the select key. And, you know, it's the shift I should say, not select, shift.

It's like I'm holding the shift key and then dragging. That's what happens when I use the button on my Wacom. So I'd like to see some programmable buttons there or an eraser on the top. I would also honestly like to see new material options. I've said support. I would love an aluminum Apple Pencil

because that would be wonderful and it would still be super light and it would look really nice and you could get them in all the four colors or three colors, however many colors there's going to be in the next iPads. I would quite like that too. So yeah, that's what I think the Apple Pencil could have

I would also like to see new smart keyboards with backlighting on them please thank you very much that would be great let me throw out there for the Apple Pencil inductive charging and not as long no

I wish they were a little I wish it was a little bit shorter i feel like it's it's okay awkward making it out of aluminium could make it shorter because it's all about balance right so like how it feels in the hand so like having it longer is like it's this balance thing it's the pen thing but having it smaller and made of aluminium the weight and the balance would be nice the pens i use are not as long as the Apple Pencil. And a newly sharpened pencil is not as long as the Apple Pencil, I think. It's just a little bit too long.

So I'd like it to be a little bit shorter. But it's just a little ergonomic thing. It just seems like there's too much there. And yeah, maybe there's a balance and a weighting thing that is a part of this too. And then inductive charging, I think, is one where i think the charging issues with it are dumb right with the the thing and you can do it and it's fine but it's not its best feature that it's got a little nubbin under the cap that you have to use to charge and then you have to find you have to use an adapter or stick it into the bottom of your ipad and have it stick out what would it inductively charge against though well i mean they would they would allow it to inductively charge

against air power but how but like then if the battery dies what do you do if you're out at a coffee shop i think it would still need a a lightning plug i would also be fine if it had a um my feeling is if it had a female lightning so that you could just plug it into any of your mini lightning plugs. I get that there's the emergency of you're at a coffee shop and you can just siphon off some of your iPad's battery power, but it still seems like a very weird odd product out. I will fight in war over this statement.

That whilst it looks silly, it was the best, smartest way to deal with this product was to have the male lightning plug on there. Because when you need to charge it, you just want to be able to stick it into the iPad and charge it. And anything which is not, I am charging it via the device i'm using is a step backwards if i have to have a cable because like my ipad i don't need to take charges with it when i'm leaving for the day because it's gotten all day battery life right the apple pencil doesn't and and it it drains quicker especially if you keep it nearer i hope that they can do something around that as well because if you keep them nearer. I hope that they can do something around that as well, because if you keep them near each other, they're connected to each other and the battery drains.

So if any kind of case or anything that keeps it attached, the battery drains. I don't want to then have to take a full connector with me somewhere because I might have to charge my Apple Pencil because it has a female connector. Like whilst it is dumb and it's fun to make jokes about it because it looks ridiculous, right? To stick the Apple Pencil in the bottom, it makes so much sense during usage.

It's like having an inkwell, right? You would stick the pen into the inkwell to refill it and then use it, right? It just kind of makes sense to me that you have this thing, you stick it in there, you wait 30 seconds, and you're good for 15 minutes like whilst it is not necessarily like this is definitely a function of a form decision that they made and if they decide to go in another route with it in my opinion if it doesn't charge from the device they've made they've made a bad decision okay take it from someone that uses it. Yep. I'll take that. It is frustrating in all other contexts, I would say. But you're right.

If you're just out somewhere with your iPad and your pencil's running out of battery, it would be terrible to be like, oh, no, I need to get an adapter out and plug it in that I brought just in case the pencil ran out when you can just sort of stick it in the ipad and it charges i get that they it's just again all the other scenarios it's weird and i i really it makes me uncomfortable to plug that thing into the bottom of my ipad and have this big pencil big long pencil thing sticking out the bottom like i'm afraid i'm gonna snap it off every single time it terrifies me but you use it more than i do so i get and i get why it's there push and wrench that thing in and out like there is no problem it's not breaking you're all good all right i wouldn't worry about it but also so you don't ever need to leave it in for that long you kind of just i will plug it in

i'll open up a couple of apps kind of get all my ducks in a row and then i'm good to go because it only takes like 30 seconds or whatever it's it's totally fine it's totally fine all right anything else on this this ipad i mean i know i want it and also yeah i want increased sales means we get more ipads yeah that's what i was gonna say is is yes please an ipad update in 2018. I know we had one in 2017. I'm greedy. I want another iPad update. I want the iPad to get the whizzy new iPhone features. They don't have to get them the same month, but maybe the next iPad has the whizzy features

that came to the iPhone. And the iPad is, you know, the iPad's doing, the iPhone is solid. The iPad did the True Tone and then it moved back to the iPhone. Well, I want it the other way. I would love face ID on my iPad. Um, and all the latest, you know, latest processor tech upgrades and all of that stuff and getting rid of the home button, I think is fine because, uh, I, I am over the physical home buttons now.

Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, it's like when i use touch id on my ipad i'm like oh yeah look at you i mean i have it has been kind of weird to keep using the physical home button for this amount of time anyway right because we've had the the yeah i don't i don't use the home button very much other than unlocking it via touch id because i have gestures to move around which is why i believe which is why i believe that it's not necessary on the ipad yeah i and i would like to see uh some i would i would really like to i'm gonna say that i will say it i would love an oled screen on an ipad, really would. It would be so nice. And I hope for 2019,

maybe we can get one. We'll have to wait and see. All right. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace. Use the offer code upgrade at checkout and you'll get 10% of your first purchase. Make your next move with Squarespace with the ability to grab a unique domain name, access to award winning templates and 24 seven customer support. They will let you easily create the website that you have for your next idea and you're going to feel great when you're doing it. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that will let you put just about anything you want online.

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and use the offer code upgrade when you get to checkout, when you go and sign up for a free trial with no credit card required. Just go to squarespace.com and use the offer code upgrade when you get to checkout, when you go and sign up for a plan to get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for this show. That is the offer code upgrade for 10% off your first purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. It is time for hashtag ask upgrade dave wants to know i've noticed a trend this week which dave is making fun of but it's

i've noticed it given that twitter now allows 280 characters in their tweets do you think that the upgradians will be more loquacious? Loquacious, yes. Loquacious in their hashtag AskUpgradeQuestions. And what impact do you think this will have on the segment? Will it be better or worse? Now, this word, loquacious, means tending to talk a great deal or talkative. I like, it was making fun, I'm sure, with the word choice, right? But I did notice when

i was looking through the ask upgrade questions that boy were they longer well hey 380 character tweets people are using them so i'm gonna say uh that whilst the questions in some cases are longer quite a lot of the time people would send multiple tweets this is fine i mean if it helps our listeners get their questions out to us in in a more detailed way to try and help with some stuff great because a lot of the time as well i was noticing people just like wrenching to fit the 140 and like really also sometimes you you paste in a tweet and it's not the whole question and then you're like oh god what was the rest of the question you have to go back and find the next tweet there i think there are a lot of good debates that people are having about whether 280

instead of 140 hurts twitter or helps twitter um about like regular conversation and people the the kind of uh challenge of fitting a thought in 140 and And I think those, I have some opinions on them, but I think it's a good, great, debatable subject. I will say, as somebody who does podcasts where I'm posting a new episode and I'm trying to mention everybody who's on the panel

and I can't fit it in 140, I'm very happy to have 280 so I can mention everybody in the same tweet and keep it in one tweet and say, here's our new episode with these five people

and here's the link. And as somebody who does podcasts with this hashtag where people are asking questions, and I do that with TV Talk Machine too, where people tweet at TVTM with their questions, and it's a super easy way to get podcast feedback and questions, I'm very happy with 280

because I want them to be able to fit their question in and not give up or send an email that then we forget to read on the air. Because like people send emails to upgrade every now and then. And I feel really bad because I usually forget that we've got them by the time the show happens. And so I'm happy. I think this is a great change for some of these uses that we have for it. So I'm glad to have longer clearer hashtag ask upgrade tweets i think that's great ryan wants to know how do you clean the inside

of your airpods case jason please tell me you have good options for this i'm assuming like compressed air would do it but like there is there's just like there is some lint in my airpods case which feels like it's now just a part of the airpods case like it's impossible to get out i don't have a good answer here my uh in-ear headphones came with a little tiny tool that's like a little kind of scraper thing that's super small that I will use sometimes. I was, this is not, okay, I'll just say it. I have a SIM removal tool that I use to like pop out the SIM card on my old iPhone and put it in the iPhone 10 and all of that. And it was out and it's basically like a little tiny pin. And so I actually kind of used it to scrape off the

lint and the junk around the corner of the AirPods case. You did it, Jason. I'm now using a SIM removal tool right now. There you go. See, you did have an answer for me. I did it. That's fantastic.

It's not like a push pin where it's going to kind of scrape because it's too point a pin it's not like a push pin where it's gonna kind of scrape and not because it's too pointy it's it's kind of a blunt uh pin and and that worked pretty well to scrape the stuff uh out so yeah there you go there's my if you've got a sim removal tool that might be your answer that is an upgrade top tip uh chris has a question for me chris wants to know is there a reason to get AppleCare Plus for the iPhone X and not just have it on something like home contents insurance with accidental damage cover? Now, I'm assuming Chris asked me this question

because Chris is also in the UK and is, like me, unaware of what home contents insurance is like or if it even exists in the US. Who knows? But here is my question about this, right? And I've also had people say to me like, oh, what about European Union warranty laws and all that sort of stuff? I'm sure that there are ways in which you can argue a case or you can put it on home contents

insurance with accidental damage cover and you might be able to get stuff fixed. I had a laptop fixed that way once where I spilled an entire half pint of soda into a laptop keyboard. And with the accidental damage cover, they replaced it. That's what we call the Pepsi syndrome. That's what we always used to call that when I was a kid. It's like the China syndrome, except instead of a nuclear meltdown,

it's Pepsi on your computer keyboard. Which feels very similar at that moment in time. I actually, I dumped that. i did that to that computer during the month in which we were launching relay like building up to it it was the month prior in the u.s uh generally this is called renter's insurance okay yeah see this is something that people that own homes also get i don't know if that's a because renter's insurance sounds like something you do when you're renting but like there's like a here it's for for homeowners it's generally just it's your homeowner's insurance and you can have it cover and it covers your house and the contents and then it's it depends on your policy but there's for just a

policy for just the contents i think generally you know the the difference there is then you're then you're a renter you're a renter because a homeowner's insurance you also have to be insured against somebody tripping on the on the shrub outside your house and breaking their neck and stuff like that but um but and i'm with you which is uh what's your insurance like what's the deductible what's oh you know there's a whole list of things like you sure maybe your insurance is awesome and it totally covers it but i'm not sure how confident people are about their insurance coverage covering something like they may say they cover it but like will they actually agree to fix it how long is it going

to take them who is going to perform the repair, right? Like all of these questions. Like, for example, I got my laptop replaced, but it took like four weeks, three or four weeks. Now, the Apple Store, in theory, is not going to take that long, especially for an iPhone. Now, I know like the iPhone stuff is done relatively fast when you actually can get an appointment.

And I know that it's the apple store that's fixing it like who fixes these things for contents insurance companies who does that like do they have like some third party that they send them out to right like so yes in theory you can do this um i went with apple care plus because if i have a problem i want to take it to an apple store and the apple store fixes it yeah right with their warranty extensions on those repairs right and all that sort of stuff and then it doesn't put up my entire home insurance premium and plan and you know and all that sort of stuff so yeah i just i didn't want to go through all of that dean has an interesting question dean wants to know if you could swap time zones with me would you the pro is apple product pre-orders are at 3 p.m the con is keynotes are at 1 a.m

and uh dean is in perth so western australia yeah yes what would you do would you would you swap would you swap uh i certainly would not no you're in the prime time zone i mean i'm in as apple will continue to explain to you cupertino time zone so product pre-order at midnight is not a big deal it's like a party and then the keynotes are at a proper time in the uh at 10 a.m so i i'm going to stay here but what about you mike i mean I am in the one true time zone, which is GMT or GMT offset by one. But right now I'm in the ultimate prime time because it's the time.

I am in time. I'm at zero right now, which is GMT. No, I wouldn't either because our pre-order is at 8 a.m., which is not terrible, right? Like it's pretty good. And we watch the keynotes at like six o'clock at night. Like that's fine too. pre-orders at 8 a.m which is not terrible right like it's pretty good uh and i'll and we watched get the keynotes at like six o'clock at night like that that's fine too so i'm sure there are

some people in the world that would want to make that switch um maybe people in eastern time would be more inclined to do it right so you have to wake up at 3 a.m for their product no but they're used to the world revolving around them and their time zone so this is why i want to point out that the one true time zone is my time zone, Casey, not yours. It makes no sense that Eastern Time would be... Anyway, moving on. Rob wants to know,

what are your thoughts on if Apple will or should or could break out apps like Safari into releases that are not tied to the OS? What do you think about this, Jason? We were talking about this recently. iOS seems to be the same with a staggered release of products now. Should stuff like Safari still be tied into big OS updates? I'm sure Apple would like to unhitch apps

and have them go through software update like iWork does. Like, you know, there's just a pages update and you go, okay, that's fine on iOS and Mac. I think the problem with Safari is that it's not just Safari, it's WebKit, and it's underlying the entire web experience of the operating system. And that's why it's tied to the OS is that, you know, the apps, theoretically, the apps that are tied to the OS are the ones that can't be updated outside the OS update structure. So yeah, Apple could pull Safari app and make that updatable separate from like all the WebKit frameworks, I suppose, but I'm not quite sure what you get by doing that. Because how often

are they going to update the Safari app versus doing, you know, pushing an update that also updates the rest of it. So I get the frustration. If you're if you're an avid user, like for me, it's with photos, where I write about photos, I'm working on the update to my book about photos, because I'm going to do that in the next couple of weeks. And photos only gets updates when the OS updates. Why is that? It's like, well, I guess it's so tied into iCloud stuff that they just have made it a part of the OS stuff. But it's frustrating. I think, though, that's the theory.

And Safari is a great example it's actually the best example like all web rendering on ios for example is happening in safari essentially and uh it is web rendering in the mac that wherever it's needed is being supplied by the web kit under safari so i think that's the theory is they don't want to do that um the good news is on the mac you can just get the um the the safari developer preview if you want a peek at the next generation safari stuff um safari technology preview and that gets updated all the time which is cool but they want to keep the you know the updates that affect web rendering across the entire platform uh constraint so that's why

i want to just have before we finish today a quick tangent which is coming off this which is tied to machine learning um there's been this weird bug going around uh on ios which seems like some kind of weird virus spreading from machine to machine where it's been replacing the capital i with a uh a and a question mark in a box like this is like a weird unicode bug effectively was what was going on and it seems like now there haven't been i mean i i am interested to see apple publish a potential paper on this in the future. But what it seems like is that there has been some kind of bug in CoreML or in differential privacy or something like that in which somebody put this into autocorrect. And then somehow that spread to everyone.

Well, not everyone, to a lot of people. And it seems like there's this theory, which I subscribe to but hasn't been proven, of if it was sent to you, it maybe got into your autocorrect. Like if somebody sent you a message and it had those characters in it, then maybe you would start doing it, but you didn't even know it was happening. It's a very strange thing. People would see it, but you didn't know you were doing it.

It didn't happen to me. But there's been this bug which Apple has fixed via a software update so my my kind of question mark about this is how good is your machine learning system when the only way you can fix it is via a software update now if this happened to google google would just fix it on their back end right because their machine learning algorithms they control them but right but here it's running on the device but when it's running Google would just fix it on their backend, right? Because their machine learning algorithms, they control them. But here it's running on the device.

But when it's running on device, if there is a problem in something in your machine learning in this differential privacy stuff, I'm assuming that these two things are connected, you have to push an operating system update as your way to fix this, which means it's still happening and people are still seeing

it because not everybody updates their phones like i'm i i have like a i have a big question mark about this because it's like it's uh well many actually like it does this mean that maybe this isn't the best way to do this grand scale and then also also, this is a bug we've seen. Are there others? What other bugs could exist in the machine learning? Like, are all of the locations in my photos being tagged incorrectly? Like, are all of the subjects? Like, am I no longer seeing mountains and horses because they've been miscategorized somewhere but I can't see it?

Like, this is one we can see because it's happening to our keyboards. Like could there be other errant information, like other like weird stuff that's happening somewhere in these machine learning databases, but we don't necessarily see it. And can they then only be fixed via operating system updates? It's curious to me.

Like this, we're seeing one of the trade-offs. This is one of the trade-offs when you go for privacy, it would seem. Yeah, I think so. And it's one of those things where they could probably change the architecture so that they could make this something that was correctable without a software update. But, first off, there are lots of security implications there. but first off there are lots of security implications there and secondly um they won't hit this one again it'll be somewhere else right and they're all constantly changing oh well maybe we should make that something we can remote control and maybe there's something that it's

but so you're right this is live by the sword die by the sword here where where if this was a cloud database apple could just delete this from it and everything would be okay but since it's learning and then on device uh i had that same thought which was wow wouldn't this be the kind of thing that apple could like just kind of pop in and and and and take away and instead they're like nope we got to release a software update for it everybody's gonna have to reboot their phone in order to fix this problem. I don't understand enough of this stuff.

Right. But my assumption would be that this is the way you fix this, because if they could fix it remotely, then there's a backdoor, right? Which is exactly what they don't want. Like the only way to fix this is to go to my device and fix it. And if it's not done by software update,

how do you do it? Yeah, I don't know. I see. and fix it and if it's not done by software update how do you do it yeah i don't know i see it's a very it's a curious problem this is why i would like to see and hope that like on their machine learning blog they publish a paper about this like what happened how can you prevent it and is there a way to stop it going and putting in the future or like what changes are they going to make to stop this type of thing happening in the future because i think a lot of the reason that apple made this machine learning blog is they want to i think encourage other companies to take their approach which is a privacy first look at machine learning well i think we've seen one of the problems with that and like why company some companies are like no no like we'll control the data set right like and then we could

just change it if we need to so yeah very very interesting i i've i have been i've been racking my brain on this one a little bit and again like i have no doubt that there are many things that i don't understand but uh it is it's been an interesting it has been a very interesting thing to watch kind of happen to the internet yeah what a weird weird thing too i hope that there's some lesson they can learn from this about uh so that something like this doesn't happen again but again probably this won't recur and it will be some other weird thing now i'm just terrified that it's all wrong and I can't see it. It's all wrong and nobody knows. Today's episode

was brought to you by our friends Squarespace, MacWilder, and TextExpander from Smile. Thank you to them for supporting this week's show. You can find our show notes at relay.fm upgrade167 Jason is at sixcolors.com and he is at jsnall on Twitter.

I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. If you'd like to send in questions to open the show, use the hashtag SnellTalk. If you want to send in questions for us at the end of the show, hashtag AskUpgrade. Thank you so much for your continued participation in these segments. We quite literally could not do them without you.

As always, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye jason snell goodbye everybody