Upgrade - 213: The California Environment

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

This week Jason and Myke discuss where the iPad Pro might go next, including whether it's primarily a horizontal or vertical device, and if adding a USB-C port makes sense. Then pull up a chair, because it's time for Jason to tell you the story of his summer-long battle with the IKEA supply chain: Frösönquest 2018.

from relay fm this is episode 213 of upgrade my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell today's show is brought to you by pingdom casper and hello hi jason 213 los angeles area code excellent hello we're we're basking in the sun in la now if all we're gonna do is area codes 2-1-3, Los Angeles area code. Excellent. Hello. We're basking in the sun in L.A. now. If all we're going to do is area codes for Jason's number fact. No, 2-1-2 is also 212 degrees Fahrenheit. It's boiling. That's not just New York.

Okay. Somebody's going to run in here and tell me that there's actually some incredible significance to the number 213 that I don't know. But I don't know it. You can't know all the numbers jason did you know that every number has a wikipedia page this would be great for your uh podcast you do with steven hackett ungenius where you look at wikipedia pages i want to read to you the wikipedia page for the number 213 213 is the number following 212 Jason Snell Nobody cares about this Nobody cares about this So We are going to go straight in

To our lovely segment Known as Snell Talk Jason Our Snell Talk question this week comes from Mark And Mark wants to know Do you still read magazines? This is an easy one uh no i don't i don't i read uh i read some newspapers through their apps and i read things on the internet that are on web pages but i don't have any print magazine subscriptions or digital magazine subscriptions and i don't read anything

that is in that that format so nope i i got entertainment weekly for a long time and then i switched over to a digital sub of that and i stopped reading that and the you can tell when you're done with a magazine when your subscription lapses and you don't notice that's a that's a telling sign so no i don't read magazines anymore. Like everybody else. Would you say that you have primarily transitioned to related webpages for that content?

It's not like you're fed up with the content. You just get it in other ways now. Oh, sure. And I was never a heavy magazine. People will be shocked to know as somebody who worked in a magazine. I was never a heavy magazine reader. I never really believed in the future of magazines i mean it was not i i read i used to read sports illustrated and then i canceled that at one

point um and then i still had entertainment weekly but i was never i never had like a stack of magazines that i read or anything like that that was never the case so and you know then you're on the internet and there's stuff on the internet and so you read that stuff instead. Like everybody else, I feel like our audience, we were probably ahead of the curve there where we realized that we could read that stuff in other forms instead.

If you would like to send in a question to open up the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnowTalk. It can be about literally anything you would like to hear Jason's opinion on, as we have covered many, many topics and areas on Snell Talk. Thank you to Mark for today's

submission. Jason, I believe that there is some Snell Watch follow-up. Well, so guess what? It is the endless tale, the age-old tale of pre-ordering something and being put in the waiting list and we talked about this that the apple has two separate

chains basically like logistics chains supply chains whatever you want to call it piles of products there's a pile of product that you order on their website. And there's the pile of product that goes to stores because they want people to be able to pick up an Apple watch or an iPhone in a store when it comes out, right? What they don't want is to have every watch and every phone they make be put in a waiting list for everybody who ordered them on the first night. Because what happens then is that somebody hears the iphone is out and they go into the store and for like weeks there are no iphones in the stores because they're all spoken for for online orders they don't want that that's not good may not be fair but it's it's it's i know why they do it so i ordered i woke up the

morning after the pre-orders and i put in an order for my wife's uh level four level four what is that oh wow level four uh paladin uh dnd character yep i don't know it's monday morning i a uh avowise series four and uh it said great we are happy to take your money you'll get it sometime in October, probably late October. And I thought, all right, well, whatever. I didn't want to stay up till midnight, and this is what it's gotten me. And they're like freely available in Apple stores. So Friday, I just went on to the old Apple.com, and it said, yeah, sure. This is in stock at your local Apple store

at Corte Madera, uh, placed an order for the afternoon, finished my work for the morning. And then, uh, went up there and walked in and showed them the little barcode. The guy came from the back with the box and I walked out and that was it. And I canceled my other order. So, um, it's just weird. This is part of the thing that all of us need to know, which is if you're unhappy with your Apple pre-order and it looks like you have really fallen into the backlog where your order is not being prepared and it's a few weeks out, you should absolutely start either going to your local Apple store if it's not too much trouble or looking at your local Apple store, if you have one, on the website and see if they've got availability because they do. They almost certainly do. You may have to be diligent. You may have to check carefully.

just because you're waiting for your online order, you know, that online order is there because they are siphoning large numbers of these devices to put them in their retail stores because they want people to be able to walk into a real retail store and buy an iPhone or an Apple Watch. In any event, we got it. So instead of waiting another two plus weeks

for my wife's new Apple Watch, because she has Series Zero, I went in there Watch because she has Series Zero. I went in there and now she has the level four Paladin Apple Watch Fighter with magic. Is she happy with her decision? Yeah, I think so. She was really frustrated because the battery was getting pretty poor

on the old one because it was a Series Zero. And, or would it be a level zero level zero orc um so the uh new one like it's like it's lighter she had the stainless before this is the aluminum so it's lighter it it feels thinner it's got the bigger screen and it's got uh it's got battery it's responsive the u i mean, the Series Zero UI is pretty pokey. This one's very responsive. It's got Siri support. It's just, it's night and day from the Series Zero. And I'm hearing from a lot of people

who really just sort of stuck it out with Series Zero. They were willing to buy an Apple Watch, but they didn't really want to keep buying them every couple of years who have found, maybe this is going to be the pattern for Apple Watch going forward. Maybe it's like a three-ish year buying cycle for those. Who knows? But I did hear from a lot of people.

I think the combination of the new bigger screen and the fact that watchOS 5 won't run on the Series 0 pushed a lot of people off the Series 0 to the Series 4. So macOS Mojave is now out to the public. It's out to the world. And I had a couple of dark mode tips and tricks to share with the world. A few of them

came directly from Six Colors. One came from an Upgradian. Upgradian Andrew wrote in to recommend a Safari extension, which is called Dark Mode for Safari, that tries to force dark mode on websites. Andrew said it can be a bit ugly in places, but is a potential option

if it's something that you want to do. There's screenshots for the app. It's available in the Mac App Store. It shows Wikipedia, for example, which is a really good one to show off, because that is just the most piercing white that a web page can be.

And the screenshot show, it's like they basically try and make it all dark on the back and obviously invert the text so the text is white. So again, it's not necessarily going to make everything look pretty, but it is going to do a decent job of trying to calm down some of the kind of harshest offenders, I guess. So your mileage will vary on this one, but you know, for a $2 extension for Safari, I mean, it might provide you with some benefit. And then I saw a post uh i think this was dan's post on six colors about uh there is an app

which is called night owl which will allow you to automate switching from light mode to dark mode which is 100 something that apple should have included in mac os but but didn't um for reasons unknown but you can there is a little menu bar app that can allow you to do that. And then another one that you pointed out, which was HazeOver, which is a very clever little utility. So for applications that are white in nature,

right? Like, so like Finder or, you know, maybe you've got like a lot of white space or maybe, I don't know, like a webpage, right? So you use your own webpage in the screenshot, which I kind of like a lot of white space or maybe, I don't know, like a web page, right? So you use your own web page in the screenshot, which I kind of like a lot. HazeOver will make those applications kind of dim out when they're in the background so they don't try and drag your attention away from the screen.

Right, so it's not quite the same in the sense that, right, if it's in the foreground, it's going to be blinding and white. But it does at least mean that if it's not in the foreground, it can fade away a little bit more. And people even not using dark mode might like it. It's an interesting idea. I'm not using it, but I kind of like the idea that if you don't want to have like everything running in full screen mode, but you want everything in the background to be a little less distracting, especially if you're in dark mode though and it's light a very light window you can use haze over and it lets you uh set sort of per app or per window um how how dim those things get in the back versus your um foreground window yeah so these are just a source of actual utilities to help i guess make the mojave

experience nicer for people i have not yet um upgraded to Mojave. I will at some point, but I just never rush with my production machine. I don't want to introduce problems that I'm not currently having. And you always run that risk, I think, with production machines. But it seems that everybody that I know that's running Mojave,

and you were talking about last week, seems to be having a pretty good experience so far. So it is available for you. Don't be afraid, Mike's running Mojave and you were talking about last week seems to be having a pretty good experience so far. So it is available for you. Don't be afraid, Mike. I'm going to be. I'm just being cautious. All right, okay. You know, I am in no rush.

I'm in no particular rush. Jason, I have one piece of upstream news for you this week. Disney has sold its 39% stake in Sky to Comcast. Disney made $15 billion out of this deal, which means that Comcast has now kind of been wholly successful in their takeover of the European broadcaster Sky. So while this means that Disney has lost the potential of a distribution arm into Europe, a very, very powerful one,

they have gained a ton of cash that they can probably put into investing in their upcoming streaming platforms. Obviously, Disney made this, they got this stake when they bought Fox, right? So that's how they got that 39% stake. And they were being a little bit coy about it at the time, right? Kind of making it sound like it was something that they really wanted to keep but was probably always very likely that it would end up being something that they sold uh especially with comcast not getting fox so they

moved to sky as their second bet and peter kafka uh has said that he believes that this this cell that like this at disney being willing to let go of this probably means that they will end up picking up all of Hulu. Yeah, this feels to me, and I don't know if this is true or not, but it feels to me, when they were vying, when Universal or

Comcast and Disney were vying for the Fox stuff, somebody floated this theory that this would all get resolved where they would make essentially a gentleman's agreement. Yep. We spoke about that before. To carve up the spoils of this.

These two companies, yep. And so it would not surprise me at all if the deal was, you're going to let us buy Fox. We're going to let you buy Sky and we're going to sell you our stake in Sky. You're going to sell us your stake in Hulu. And then the deal is done and we'll walk away and not be in business with each other. We'll take these businesses, you take those businesses. And then now we're just competitors and we're not co-owning joint ventures with one another basically and uh it looks like that may

exactly happen yeah i was reading in the wall street journal article uh about this there was a potential benefit for disney that if they kept sky they could have basically rescinded on all of the distribution deals for disney content right so then they could have put them on their streaming services right so they could have changed all those deals if they would have kept sky which is kind of like a that was like one of the only reasons that people thought oh they might want to keep it at least for that for a while right they're like let's just undo all of these like we would like all the marvel movies back please thank you very much um but it makes way more sense for them to try and tie up something

like hulu for what their their future plans are and plus the cash i mean disney has been spending a lot of money recently uh a little bit more cash coming back is definitely not going to hurt probably not that disney's hurting for money specifically but no it's more about i think more about control right yeah sure they get their money back and they're losing that stake. But they are ending up with, you know, they get all of Fox, Comcast gets all of Sky, they get all of Hulu. Hulu is very useful for them because although they've announced these other services, there is this question of what Disney does with the content that's more adult in nature, like the stuff they bought from Fox and the FX networks. And Hulu has always been the most logical place for that kind of stuff to go as Hulu's or as Disney's streaming service that's more adult targeted than their other ones.

And so perhaps that's what will end up happening. Just a super like pie in the sky type question do you think that they would keep the name the same do you think it would still be called hulu do you think that it has brand recognition in the u.s it does i mean it is not an international brand by any means but and that would be one of their challenges would be to roll it out internationally but i think it has some name recognition and it's got content and i don't know why they wouldn't do that unless they think that there's some other brand that they they already own that would work with it i don't think there is in fact i i think you could argue that given what i've witnessed is that the fox brand is so politically charged now because of Fox News in the US that walking away from that,

walking away from a brand that is going to turn off half the audience is probably a good idea. So I think they'll probably downplay the Fox brand and the Hulu brand has existed. It is a streaming service. Even if it changes into a very different kind of streaming service with very different kind of content, I would imagine over time what's going to happen is that all of the non-Disney content on there will go away, right? That everybody else will be like, well, we're out of here. We're not going to use this as our sort of like streaming equivalent for broadcast TV to show you stuff after the fact um everybody wants their own everybody wants to own their own so hulu will just end up being a vehicle for disney and then

i think that makes sense it's because it's existing they've got an existing catalog why not you know even putting the political issue aside the 20th century fox branding is of no real use to disney right because it's it's not necessarily it's not in really any way a stronger brand than disney's own brand that they would use in movies and tv the only limitation is again that there may be things this is like what we were talking about apple and its streaming service there is this issue of there are there like in the 80s disney created touchstone pictures and the whole idea there was that they wanted to wrap more adult content in a brand name that was not disney right like so having a having a useful brand or brands around that you can put content in so you you

aren't releasing an r-rated movie with a disney banner in front of it like that's going to be the value of having box 20th century 20 20th or 21st depending because there's different pieces of them uh with different century names but like fox would be a way that you could wrap more adult fare out of disney and that may be what they end up doing or they just completely create something new right like there is nothing stopping them creating another new brand right which is neither it's true but they've got you know they've got existing brands that they can use. And so, rather than rebranding, that's obviously a question that they've had. If they haven't already decided, they will decide at some point. But I think that's such a historic brand as a film studio that keeping it around in some form is probably what they'll do for, again, for film releases. They'll probably define it a certain way. I think that's their challenge is what is a Disney product? What is a Fox product? Or what goes on a Disney service? What goes on a Hulu? Those rules, what are the

rules? Because you don't want it to be random you want all of these things to to mean something because otherwise they're totally if they have no definition they're totally meaningless like i always think about how um every now and then you'll hear some promo somewhere for a new like album from a music artist and they'll say the label it's on and you're like that is meaningless in almost every case it's meaningless it's on. And you're like, that is meaningless. In almost every case, it's meaningless. It's just a corporation put this out and it doesn't mean anything to consumers. There are cases though, where those brands are clearly defined. And then you're like, oh, it's one of those. And you want that for your products, right? You want Hulu to mean something. One of the

challenges right now is that it is kind of just an empty bag that TV shows get stuffed in and they need to doing original content like Handmaid's Tale and some of the other stuff. I've been watching a lot of Hulu actually in the last few weeks. That helps define it. And that's important. Like the way that John Landgraf, who's the executive in charge of the FX networksx networks the cable networks um fx and fxx uh which is a real that's their comedy network they split it in sort of two um they've done a really good job of defining what that kind of content is so i think there's a great value in that and that's what brands are good for brands are good to be labels that let a consumer go oh i i get it and um that's one of those we talk about apple and all their

marketing decisions and and structural decisions about uh iphone names and things like that especially this is another one of those cases where you know this is really important decision making that gets done and that's why they presumably pay those disney executives a lot of money. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you in part by Hello! We move from Hulu to Hello! Hello make insanely comfortable buckwheat pillows. You may have never tried a buckwheat pillow. If you haven't, buckwheat pillows are very, very different to regular fluffy pillows.

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about what the next iPad Pros are going to be about and also some data mining by the wizards at 9to5Mac and Steve Trout and Smith. So our good friends, good friends of the show, Guillermo Rambo and Steve Trout and Smith have been doing their great, great valuable work digging around in iOS 12.1 because there's beta out for that and have been for like a week or two. So I want to look at a couple of different things as a way to try and unpack a little bit about what we may be expecting probably later on this month as to what the new iPad Pros are going to look like. So it's a few things here.

iOS 12.1 offers the support for Memoji syncing over iCloud. Now, why would you want that, Jason? Why would you want a syncing face emoji? Your Memoji over iCloud? Probably because you will have it on another device and people tend not to, think really own two iphones so you need a separate product that has the true depth camera aha you may say be saying to yourself out there uh probably to an ipad right so you can sync your memoji between your ipad and your iphone which is a good feature it's a feature i would definitely want um i did note actually i was pretty proud and i please i should, I didn't note this last week, that my iCloud restore included my Memoji. It wasn't necessarily something I thought

would be excluded, but was happy to see when it was included, right, that in my iCloud backup was my Memoji, so pleased about that. But yes, so that, I think we can, again, if you had any doubts about there being a true depth Face ID camera system in the iPad Pro, this is a pretty good indication that there will be one. Yeah. Because Face ID in the iPhone X does not seem to offer any advancement in using Face ID in other angles. It was not added in 12. It was not added in the new phones. And Steve Trout and Smith have found evidence of landscape orientation support for Face ID in iOS 12.1. support for face ID in iOS 12.1. He says that it is his understanding that landscape face ID would require a realignment of the front facing center sensors.

So you won't see it on existing hardware. So it seems that this is only really becoming a little more complicated. So what it seems like that there will be landscape face ID on the iPad. Now, does that mean one camera does it mean two cameras like it doesn't seem that like this is something they can just add in software this is like a physical change to hardware so the doors are back wide open again because we were very very confident that it would be one camera, software's going to fix it because that seemed like the logical thing, right? Yeah, I wouldn't say I was very confident.

Like there is this question about, because you think about the bezels and it being kind of bezel-less and you think about like, would there be two notches on an iPad Pro? That seems kind of weird, right? But at the same time, if the bezels are almost gone and you're holding an iPad in one orientation and that's where the camera is, your hands over it, which means that like literally in one orientation, you can't use the front facing camera, um, which is not really the case now. And, um, or at least it's not as bad as it would be here. So I think, I think there's a case to be made that if you're going to consider the iPad a two orientation device, that you're going to need two, two sensors, two cameras, and then have them alter, you know, which one you use is altered based on the orientation of the device i feel like so i feel like either they're going to have uh i mean yes either they're going to have a magic new face id that's got a different kind of set of sensors and can work in

either orientation or you've got a uh two sets of sensors or you have apple picking a primary orientation for the ipad and saying that other orientations are not as important, which is interesting, right? Because I think that some people use the iPad mostly vertically and others use it mostly horizontally. Although I would argue that horizontal is the one that has always made the most sense, especially since Apple started including a keyboard with it and considering it more of a pro, you know, on the iPad Pro, a pro product. I feel like history is pushing the iPad Pro toward horizontal orientation. But if you look, you know, every iOS device up to now is primary vertical. The Apple shows up when you start up and it's upright vertical. The logo on the back is vertical orientation. So what does this mean?

Does this mean that this new iPad Pro is going to be a horizontal orientation, unabashedly, unashamedly horizontal as the primary orientation? Or are they going to stick a bunch of cameras all over it? What do you think? So here's my question, and I don't know the answer to this

no actually i'm looking on apple's website now so i do have the answer i think the way i've been thinking about this right is two cameras but it's not a camera right like you won't have two cameras on an ip iPad if they had two sets of sensors. You'd have one camera and two sets of sensors. Because Face ID requires an infrared camera, a FLADA illuminator, and a dot projector. So they don't need two camera systems. Because basically, the way that I'm thinking about this right now, looking at what we've seen so far looking at what Steve has uncovered

is that there will be two sets of sensors on the iPad so it will only work in two fixed orientations where you won't be able to use it upside down to get face ID but you'll be able to use it in one portrait and one landscape that's how it seems like it's going to be to me so I would expect that we will see

one full camera system in the way that it's always been, sort of as a front-facing camera on the iPad, and then a second Face ID set of sensors. So the infrared, the flood illuminator, and the dot projector. Because it feels like two cameras is wasteful, right? Like you don't need two complete camera units. And the other thing is they've got to stop this thing from costing a lot more money and two whole sets of that system feels like it'd be pretty expensive unless there's a brand new version of this system that that as steve trout and smith said

you know the existing hardware won't do this but there could be a new sensor block that is more advanced and that will work in multiple orientations. That's also possible is that it's just a way fancier, you know, reengineered version of it. But you're right. They may also scatter the sensors around or duplicate some of the sensors. Keep one camera but have extra sensors in order to do that. I think it would be a mistake on Apple's part for them to lock the iPad into one orientation. As much as I use my iPad almost entirely horizontally, I know people who don't,

and I think it would be really weird and a failure. Honestly, it would be a usability failure if Apple had said, you're holding it wrong in one orientation if you're trying to unlock your device, especially since it's the only way other than putting in a password to unlock your device. That's not cool. Yeah, I mean, I feel confident that at least landscape, right, will be the primary way that they're going to support it

because there's code to suggest that landscape now exists where it doesn't for the iPhone. But i'm kind of feeling that there will be like two you can have like with the apple logo if it's the way it is right now pointing up or if you take that and turn it left like the upside down might not work anymore right so if you have like the lightning port on the bottom sorry the lightning port on the top that wouldn't scan it all right you know you know what i mean like there's going to be like there'll be one portrait on one landscape could be because these these uh these uh this doesn't work upside down and there's nothing to suggest upside down support and i think honestly i would be fine with that because i only use my ipad like i'm just me personally i use it in two orientations like i use the home button on the bottom and the home button on the right that's just how i do it

that's how i've always done it and that works for me so that i wouldn't notice too much of a problem there i don't think and i very very rarely pick up my ipad in a way that is like not the way i expect if you know what i mean like i'm very rare like oh my ipad's upside down like that doesn't happen to me this i'm sure this happens to other people but i think with the ipad pro it's typically got something attached to it right like i think a lot of people use it that way this it's in some configuration that it would be hard to get it upside down because like there's the keyboard there or the case is there or whatever so i think that like i had kind of resigned myself to thinking that software would fix this and that it would you know one one sensor all orientations but i'm

now less inclined to to think that which makes the whole thing a little bit more interesting to me again because it's like well okay how are you going to solve this problem how do you set it up how do you intend it to be used and how do you tell the story about it but wait wait there's more there is um there are a few things going on right now which seem to suggest that there may be more than just a lightning port on the next ipad pro so when talking about landscape face id in a in thread, Steve Trout and Smith also noted that iOS 12.1 seemed to be checking on whether an external display was connected to the iPad. And in the iOS simulator, in the beta version of the simulator simulator it also now supports virtualized 4k displays now you cannot do this with the current lightning to hdmi adapter 4k is too much for it so what is going on here

yeah and there's some speculation that what you have to do right now uh the the device itself doesn't need to do all the work because that lightning HDMI adapter is able to do it's because it's got a chip in it, right? It's doing some of the work, but that if you're doing a direct USB-C connection, then the device has to do the work to drive it. So there are a couple things here that suggest, and again, what we're not saying is, oh, this new iPad Pro, Apple's going to sell a touchscreen 4K thing that you can dock it to, and that would be cool. But I think more likely, this is just the idea that if Apple adds USB-C to the iPad Pro, there's a bunch of stuff that they have to add to the software so that the device can directly drive the external devices that are plugged in and external displays to do via you

know mirroring presumably is one of those things and this kind of marries up with a ming chi kuo report from before the last apple event where kuo speculated that or at least mentioned that the new ipad pro could feature usbc and at, it was like, do they mean on the device or did it mean a USB-C adapter in the box? And it was really confusing. It's not clear to try and work out what Quo had heard or what Quo was reporting. So I guess this kind of asks a second question, right?

So not just about the Face ID stuff, about USB-C. Does it seem likely to you that apple would put usbc on the ipad pro or is it seeming more likely based upon these little tidbits that are coming out at the moment i mean you and i talk about the ipad a lot here we both are enthusiastic users of the ipad you know i know you talk about it with federico and connected like um so i i'm of two minds about all this stuff because there's the stuff that i think of as an enthusiastic ipad user ipad pro user and you know in that way i want to push apple right i and i think you do and i think federico does and lots of people who use the ipad pro want to push

apple and say part of the beauty of creating the ipad as a product separate from the iPad is that you can push it into other places, into more computery places. It can be your device that you are pushing iOS into places where traditionally only computers have gone. But now this thing can go there. And I think I said on a show show it might have even been like a year ago but i know i said on this on on this podcast before like the ipad pro is a computer at some point shouldn't it have a usb port like instead of a lightning port that that maybe and will it happen this year i don't know but like if you think about where Apple's going with the iPad Pro, of course, it should be primarily horizontal orientation, because of the keyboard support, of course, it should have a USB-C port on it. Because it is a pro device, and it's attaching

to all of these things, using these all these various lightning adapters, like, is there a reason why the iPad needs to have lightning just because the iPhone does? It's not like iPhone Junior anymore. It's its own thing. And it needs to be able to diverge from the iPhone in places where it makes sense because of what it is kind of becoming as a pro product.

So do I think Apple would add USB-C to the iPad Pro? Yes. I don't have any idea whether this is the time to do it, but I think it makes a lot of sense if they were to choose to do it. I am going to be frustrated if they add a USB port to this thing and it still has such limited support for external devices as iOS currently does. And this is the thing that I've railed about again and again, which is, you know, you can't, you can't read off of files off of an attached SD card or a USB hard drive and copy them onto your iPad. You can't do it. It's not possible. It'll, it'll see pictures and movies, but that's

it. It let everything else. It just doesn't understand what it's seeing. And that is not very computer-like because sometimes when you have a computer, somebody hands you a thumb drive with a presentation on it and you need to get that off. And right now the iPad is incapable of seeing that presentation on the thumb drive that somebody hands you in a hotel lobby or on an airplane or wherever, someplace where you can't just say, can you put this in the cloud instead and share that file with me so I can download it? So yeah, I hope they do it, but I hope that includes more than just sort of external monitor support, but a bunch of other better peripheral support in iOS

12.1. Why would you want external monitor support for an iPad? Well, I mean, you do presentations. There's presentations and stuff where people are pushing out to an external display. You know, I would love, I think all of us, we've talked about like that theoretical, like what is it, Surface Studio kind of thing. Like what would a big iOS device be like? And, you know, I think about this and I think, wouldn't it be amazing if Apple made a 4K

touchscreen display that you could buy and attach an iPad to? And then it would be a giant iPad. But at the same time, I think at that point, why don't you just make it a giant iPad? Like, why require an iPad to attach to it? Why not just put the whole brains inside that screen and not worry about it? So I think it's just, I think it's just external display support at higher resolutions. So that if you're attaching to a projector or, uh, you know, an external display or something to do a presentation or anything like that, um, I think that would be, that's, that's most likely

what it is. I would love it for it to be more than that, but that's my guess is it's just that. I would love it for it to be more than that, but that's my guess. It's just that. I mean, what I want is display support and a trackpad and go to town. That's what I want. I mean, and I know that this is one of those things that a lot of people can't understand,

and it does sound peculiar. Like, well, what's wrong if you just sit in front of a Mac? But I like iOS as my environment. It's comfortable for me. I understand it way more than i understand the mac i feel like an ipad power user i do not feel like a mac power user and so i would love to be able to have a more uh ergonomically focused environment where i could have an ipad running that i could also pick up and take out on the go of me it's almost like

the nintendo switch but for my computer because the nintendo switch is out on the go with me. It's almost like the Nintendo Switch, but for my computer, because the Nintendo Switch is my on-the-go device, and I plug it into a dock, and it's on my TV. And something else, again, not anything I actually think will happen this fall, but something that could happen in the next couple of years is the idea that iOS may become more capable of supporting external pointing devices.

And so the problem with external devices right now on iOS is that they're essentially just mirrors or their outputs for like a presentation. If you could use a keyboard and a trackpad or something with an iPad, you could then use an external display. You know. You could attach it and have it be a second display or have it be your primary display. We talk about if you're building apps that run on iOS and on the Mac, that means they support a menu bar and keyboard shortcuts and pointing devices. At that point, iOS could also support those in certain contexts, not in all contexts by any means. But could we envision a scenario where an app that's built to run on iOS or the Mac, when you plug in an iPad or an iPhone for that matter, but let's say you plug in an

iPad Pro to an external device and in the context of the giant external screen, it says, well, if you want to use it on here, I'll give you a menu bar and I'll give you a cursor and I will, you know, support your keyboard shortcuts because now I'm on a giant non-touch display. And so we need a different input mechanism. They could totally go that way if they wanted to. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, but that is a direction that they could go in. I mean, it feels like everything here, you know, whilst a lot of it being theoretical just in this discussion, you know, you couple that with stuff like the marzipan apps and you know you're moving towards a thing right there's like a there's like a thing there's a road you can take um and

that continues to be something of great interest to me seeing how this little stuff starts to play out and maybe we'll start to see some more kind of seeds being sown uh with the next ipads like if they do get usbc i'm not too confident about that personally but i would like it um i don't i'm not convinced it will happen but if they do go that route like that would be very exciting to me because it shows continued further uh focus on improving the iPad platform. You know, like that's like in a year when you don't get any software, if you see it make another big change to the hardware,

like not just from design, but from like really thinking about what it can do, that is really exciting to me. Yeah, and in the long run, I do think Apple's goal is that Apple's devices are part of a unified Apple platform in terms of apps. And the idea there is if you have an iPad and you attach it to some other stuff, it lets you do your Apple apps stuff, right? And if you have a Mac, it lets you do your Apple app stuff too. So

they want that experience to be similar, even if the device, the base device is very different. to be similar, even if the device, the base device is very different. And it is an interesting question too, if they do a big hardware revision of the iPad Pro this year, and iOS 13 adds a whole bunch of new iPad features, I would imagine that these devices will support all of those new features. So this is an interesting case too, where there might be a few things that they put into 12.1 just to enable so that the device can ship and make sense. But these devices may also be in line for a major update, like an improvement that is really intending to use the features that are introduced. Like if they introduce USB-C, maybe there's a base functionality that exists in 12.1 when they ship but presumably the ipad

features in ios 13 would be conceived of as you know being for these devices basically if that makes sense all right today's show is also brought to you in part by our friends over at pingdom pingdom are amazing because they help keep your sites and the sites that you love online they will monitor your website so you don't have to giving you real-time feedback so you know exactly what's going on at all times because look the internet it's an amazing place but stuff breaks all the time just of the websites that Pingdom are monitoring, they detect one in 400,000 outages every single day. It doesn't matter how big a company is.

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required. You can just see if the service is right for you. Then when you sign up, use the code upgrade at checkout to get a huge 30% of your first invoice. Thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. Now Jason, I believe that you have a story you would like to tell. I do. I do. We could talk about the iPad more. I like that. But I do want

to tell a story. It's got a couple of links to the stuff we talk about here. Also, I just really wanted to talk about this because I went through this kind of whole thing. It happened a little bit of it trickled out onto my Twitter feed. but i want to i just want to tell the story which is uh we're going to call it uh frozen quest uh for reasons that that will be apparent in a moment um so this spring we redid our backyard we um we poured new concrete we had a like totally uneven like pavers and stuff and you could trip over them and they were awful and we just uh we we put concrete back there in the backyard it's larger area it's really nice and we wanted some new furniture outdoor furniture out there so we can enjoy the california environment and uh we put new, there's new grass back there now, which we never

really had grass that was anything but sort of randomly kind of there. And there was no, there are no sprinklers. There was nothing like that. Then we're going to redo the front yard and take out all the grass and stuff out there at some point. Anyway, so we redid this. We want a nicer backyard. After being in the house almost 20 years, we got one. And so for the outdoor furniture, we looked at a bunch of places and we looked at some outdoor furniture. It was extremely expensive. It was nice, but it was extremely expensive. And in the end, we went to Ikea and we looked at the stuff that they had. And there was some stuff there. I think it's called Solaron that was perfectly nice and much more within our budget. that was perfectly nice and much more within our budget. And so we bought some Ikea furniture and they have cushions for their furniture. So we got some cushions for that. So you could sit

and it's nice and cushy and they've got covers for the cushions so that they're not just, you know, the loose fill there. You can pick a color. And so we picked a color and all that. And we got the back cushions and we couldn't find the cushion covers for the back and which are called frozen. I will say, um, that's where it comes in here. And the guy at the store says to me, look, here's what you do by the cushions here. They got the covers online, just order the covers online. Um, so a word of advice as you'll hear in this story is never leave ikea intending to buy parts of what you just bought online but i will also say when i was trying to outfit my office here did a lot of ikea shopping completely agree with that sentiment

do not just if you can't get it in the store. Avoid IKEA's online ordering system as much as you possibly can because it is fraught with disaster. Yeah, so I've had some good luck with IKEA orders online. I have ordered bins for my little pieces of furniture that I've got here.

The Kallax, those came. They were fine. The shipping price was fairly reasonable for that. I actually ordered a piece of this furniture. We wanted a corner so we could put them in kind of a corner. I ordered that online as well and we got that. But in that same order were those covers and they just weren't in there. There was no communication that they weren't in there. They just weren't in there. So I call Ikea and guess what? You know, I'm on hold for half an hour. And then I get to somebody

who looks up my order and says, it's very strange. I explained the whole thing. And they're like, all right, well, this is really strange. I need to transfer you to somebody who could help me to, you know, somebody else who could help, help me um that was another 25 30 minutes on hold it's as if i was just reliving my last half hour the next person comes on they have no idea who i am or any of my background i've told the whole story again like did i just i don't even know what happened anyway they're like all right you say you didn't get it that's great we'll just put in a new order and we'll make sure you get those and they'll be there in a week. A month passes. I keep checking over this month, the shipping number on the invoice. So among the stories I

wanted to tell here is how Ikea's website is terrible. Amazon has set the bar so high for everybody else and everybody else has kind of like tried to come up to Amazon's level here. Ikea, first off, you get an order and there's an email and it says, click here to track your package. I click on that link. It goes to a customer service page. That's like information about looking up product manuals and things like that. There's no information about tracking a package on it at all.

And I think, what is happening? Why is the track package link not? So I copy the URL of the track package link, and it actually is a package tracking URL. It says track package in it. But then there's a whole bunch of stuff on the end that's like other little data points that they're passing out of the email to their server, presumably for tracking and logging reasons. So I delete all of those. So it's just the pure package tracking URL. And that works. That gets me to a package tracking page, which I think to myself, this is really bad. If your email you send to people who you're shipping a package to,

literally the package tracking link in it doesn't work either by design or by an accident where they're accidentally redirecting you because why they're redirecting a tracking a package tracking link to this totally other page it's completely baffling so i put in my number and uh it's it basically what i get back is oh yes you made that order last week or two weeks ago and it hasn't shipped yet. There's no other status. It's just like the order was made and it hasn't been shipped. So after a month, I phone again, spend 45 minutes on hold, finally talk to somebody. I say, well, I get this new order because they failed to send my last order. They're like, no, we're very sorry.

I don't really know what happened there. I'm cancel this order and I'm gonna make a new new order Just so you know this exact thing that you had I had this with an entire sofa like that what you're going through right now Like this happened to me when I needed I was like trying to get a sofa that they had in stock Delivered for like seven weeks. So like I am with you on this one and there's no communication I mean we joke about amazon, hey, would you like to see where the truck is on a map? Would you like a picture of the box outside your door? We've got that for you. IKEA is like, we don't know what your thing is.

We don't know if we have it. We don't know if we shipped it. We don't know if you didn't get it. We literally know nothing about this. So it is quite a contrast. Anyway, they're like, all right, we'll cancel it. The new, new order. A month passes again.

Same story as before. It's in the system. When I get to that page, it's in the system that there is an order. And there's an estimated, the thing that kills me, there's an estimated delivery date. But it never shows a shipped. And the delivery date passes. And it is, again, just so we're all on the same page here. We are talking literally about fabric covers for cushions.

That's it. It's not like a big thing here. Like it's a small. No, very small item. Very small item. So after a month, I decide I'm not going to sit on the phone for an hour at this time. So I find their email contact form and I just say, let's try this one. And I get within a day, I get a response from somebody who's like,

I don't know what's going on here, but I've canceled that. And I've given you, here's your new order number. I've reordered it. Okay. A few weeks pass and I call again. I'm like, this is, it's the end of the summer now. We've missed the whole summer. The furniture has been sitting out there with bottom cushions and a whole bunch of assorted pillows that we found around because we don't have the top.

We have the top cushions, but there are these thin little white things that need a cover on them. After this time, this time I push a different set of buttons in the phone tree and I immediately get somebody on the phone, which is amazing. I think I set a problem with my order instead of like miscellaneous help. This person is very nice. And I spend about 25 minutes with her kind of putting me on hold and checking and coming back and putting me on hold and checking and coming back. And then she says, I need to get a manager because I don't know what I'm seeing here. And I wait for another 15, 20 minutes and a manager comes on. And the manager is also very nice and very smart and says, okay.

First off, he says, I also tried to get these and couldn't. That's a bad sign. He says, I'm really sorry. Here's the story. We never had them in stock online. All of our stock went to the stores. Now I'm doing a callback now to the Apple Watch because this is another case where a company has two different supply chains.

Although it seems like for Ikea, they basically have their supply chain to stores and then some stuff goes online, but it's not, they're not connected. And what it means is if you place an order online and they literally have it in the store near your house, there's no connection. Like they're not going to alert you. And I spent the whole summer with an existing order that I'd already paid for and it had never been delivered that had never been communicated as being backordered, right? That's, I think that's one of the key problems here is at no point did they say, we don't have these and we don't know when we're going to get them.

Because then I could have said, we'll refund my money and I'll go try to get them in the store. But they never actually said that. But it's similar to the Apple situation where they're in the stores, but they're not in the online supply chain. So the guy was very nice. He's like, you know, the trick here is to go look for them in the stores. The problem is it's the end of the summer now and it's a a seasonal item so it won't be available until next spring good luck no i'll give you a ten dollar gift card as a sorry and i'll refund your money well that's great okay thus ends summer's over now whole summer no cushions whatever uh and i okay, at least I've gotten this resolved. They're never going to come.

They're going to refund my $18 or whatever. And I've got a $10 gift card. Great. I should, you know, I should not have expected them to come, but it was always a mystery and nobody would give me a straight answer. I'm going to take this into my own hands. And then thus begins phase two of Frozen Quest. This is the real quest.

This is when the quest begins. this is where the quest actually starts because at this point i didn't know i thought that when you order something on the internet it just shows up at your door because that's how it doesn't show literally everybody else everybody else right and if it doesn't show up your door they're like oh guess what we don't have it that didn't happen here so instead frozen quest begins um ikea's website so ikea as much as i've said negatively about ikea's online store one of the interesting features of their website is um is tracking of stock in stores so you go to the site and you see a product yep and if you've got we actually have two stores in the bay area you actually can say this store and it'll say

there are three of these in the store or there are no it's not in stock in this store so i looked and the guy actually i had talked to said according to my information here the emeryville store has four of these so if you want you could go over there and get them and and i think he said something like if they're there yes yeah it's a little foreshadowing uh so i'm like you know what i'm gonna do it so one morning i i drove timed to get to the store at 10 a.m when they open parked right by went all the way uh uh straight to the exit because i'm not gonna weave my way through the whole store all this stuff is off in the at the end where there's like the warehouse part of ikea so i go in the exit through the through the checkout line backward go straight to where it says that there are four of them on the shelf

and i find a box containing three of them and a paper cup uh half full of cold coffee that somebody has just abandoned in the box okay okay uh so i take those three and i buy them i'm halfway to my goal i've got three covers i thought well three is better than none and i've got all the cushions in my in my car and i think should i just bring in the other three and return them i'm like no i'm i'm gonna i'll wait it out till spring or and i get this brilliant idea as i'm standing in the store or i'll go home and i'll see where else they're in stock and i'm gonna do it i never do this but i'm gonna use the power of social media yeah to put out the bat you can use your brand you can engage you can engage your brand right and and you know what so i get one of these every little while you get one right that you can

do and everyone's going to forgive you for if you do this all this time people will be annoyed by this all right so i go back and i spend a half an hour clicking on ikea's website to literally every single location in north america to see if this thing isn't how many do you need at this point three three three more i need, three frozen cushion covers in gray. Yes. Okay. There are only two, well,

there are three stores that have them. One claims to have one. That's not any good to me. I'm not going to even, but, but the Renton store outside of Seattle has eight. Whoa. And the Atlanta,

and the Atlanta store has four. And I think, I think this might work. So I post a note on Twitter and I say, hey, anybody out there who is near the Ikeas in Renton, Washington or Atlanta, I need an item. Can you help me out here?

I immediately get a note back from my friend, Monty Ashley, who I do podcasts with on The Incomparable, who says, oh yeah, I'm going to be over at Wizards of the Coast today. He used to work there. They make Magic the Gathering and D&D and stuff like that. And they're right next to the IKEA. So I'll go in and check. And I'm like, great, fantastic.

Like literally an hour later, I get a text from Monty showing me the empty box where they aren't. All eight of them are not. They're not there. Whoever said that there were eight... So that is like they have a stock management problem, right? So now we've discovered is that they're very helpful in-store supply chain management system.

Also doesn't really work. Garbage. But in the meantime, no, no, no. Don't give up hope everybody I have two twitter followers who are both near the Atlanta store and both of them say that they're going to go

one guy says he's going to go tomorrow and the other guy says he goes past there on his commute he could go today and I say to the guy tomorrow I say sounds great and then the guy says I can go today and I'm like well that's great because I'll just tell the other guy if you, sounds great. And then the guy says, I can go today. And I'm like, well, that's great. Cause I'll just tell the other guy if you don't get them.

And then he can go tomorrow. If you don't get by there, or I can just tell him not to. It's like, we'll work it out. Well, the guy who was going to go by tomorrow, he couldn't wait.

So he went there. They met each other. They met, they met each other. No. One guy walks in, looks at the box where the frozons are supposed to be and there's another guy there and he says are you looking for the frozons for jason

and the guy says yes and the other guy says oh there aren't any oh god they're gonna fight it out for to provide you oh... Oh, my word. It doesn't matter. There were supposed to be four. There are zero. There are zero. Now, I've been very specific on Twitter. I haven't even gone into the details of exactly what model number it is that I need.

I just asked for Seattle and Atlanta. But it's Twitter. And so there are people on there. You know Twitter, right? Where you very specifically target something at one little narrow specific group or concept. And everybody else who follows you ignores that and expands it to include themselves. That's pretty much how Twitter works. So I start getting, there's a guy in Beijing, who's like, they might have them in Beijing. And then I got somebody else who in like Germany,

who's like, they don't have them in Germany. i'm like i figured they didn't thank you but i figured that was probably not um and i think okay this was really exciting i sent people to ikea's around north america we all failed it's very sad i'll wait until the spring hopefully they'll still make this thing in the spring and i can get them then. And then I get a message in the incomparable member Slack for the paying members of the incomparable. We have a Slack community from a guy in Bergen, Norway, Lister Michael, who says, is this the model you're looking for? I don't know how he figured that one out, but he figured it out. He said, they have them at my local Ikea. how does they know the coming because everyone's got them at their local i know well oh right so i'm like well if you are near there and it's not too much trouble

and you want to go look this is the model number these are what they are you know that would be great and i'm thinking to myself really i'm I'm going to get cushion covers from Norway? Well, the next day I get a picture from Listener Michael and they had them and he bought them and he put them in a box

and sent them from Norway and a week later, on Friday, I got a box from Norway Post, opened it up. There are indeed three Frozon gray covers, cushion covers. I put them on the cushions that had been sitting shrink-wrapped in my garage for three-plus months. Put them out on the furniture. Hooray.

The backyard is complete frozen quest is a success thanks to listener michael who i compensated for his for his trouble um and it's gonna rain tomorrow so that was happy summer everybody um and i have an epilogue here too which is so i got this finally all complete this epic quest on friday saturday, Lauren and I go to the Cal football game. And they have a pregame tailgate area where you can hang out before the game. You can buy a beer. We walk in there

and there's this huge area where you can sit and just hang out and chat with people. It's entirely our Solaron furniture, all of which are in neutral gray and all of which have their cushions with covers i have a question for you jason dozens of them jason now i want your honesty here it's very important if you hadn't got those covers would you have stolen i what i'll say probably not because i'm a fundamentally honest person but i will say that as i stood there looking at those things i thought to myself what would i need to do if i did need to steal three of those who do i need to talk to to make

this right what charity do i need to give some money to well i was thinking like could i casually take the covers off of them without people noticing and stuff them like under my shirt and then run out before anyone noticed and and flee to a place where they couldn't you know into the into the stadium where they couldn't find me god but fortunately uh listener michael prevented me from stealing from tailgate town at the california memorial stadium but there are like dozens of them there i couldn't lauren saw it and she was like you got to check that out like oh no anyway that's my story that's my story listener michael save the day don't buy anything online from ikea don't

believe everything you see uh anything you see on ikea's website i like ikea stuff but if i can't buy it in the store i'm not ever ever ever gonna buy it again and i'm looking forward to next summer when we will have a fully functional backyard for the first time well jason i for one i'm really pleased that you did not let it go i've been holding on to that pun for this entire thing i know that there are people that have already tweeted this joke to you because they didn't have the self-restraint that i did the cushion covers didn't bother me anyway oh so proud of you today's show is brought to you by casper casper the company focused on sleep and they're dedicated to making you exceptionally comfortable one night at a time you spend a third of your life sleeping when you're not sitting on the cushions you know your sleep bag if you spend

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every day and i miss it when i'm sleeping somewhere else you can get fifty dollars towards select mattresses by going to casper.com slash upgrade and using upgrade at checkout terms and conditions apply that is casper.com slash upgrade and the offer code upgrade to get $50 towards select mattress purchases. Our thanks to Casper for their continued support of this show and RelayFM We have some hashtag

ask upgrade questions to round out today's episode Adam wants to know, Jason should Adam buy a TV Apple TV I should say right now they would love to future proof as well as upgrading buy a TV, Apple TV, I should say, right now? They would love to future-proof as well as upgrading their next TV in the next year or two. Is now a good time or a bad time for him to buy an Apple TV? I think now is a great time because I think, would you agree with me?

It seems unlikely that Apple is going to upgrade the Apple TV 4K anytime soon. I can't understand what they would put in it if they did. Yeah, right. And we know that they don't update these tvs very often these apple tvs and they just did it last year and i don't know what tech they would put in it that doesn't currently already sort of exist out there for tvs and audio and stuff like that and they did a they did a software update to get the dolby atmos stuff in there so if you'd love to future proof as adam would love to update to get the Dolby Atmos stuff in there. So if you'd love to future-proof, as Adam would love to future-proof,

get the Apple TV 4K, even if you don't have a 4K TV. And I think that when you upgrade your TV in the next year or two, the Apple TV 4K will work great with that TV too. Peter wants to know, do you use Apple Pay and iMessage? And if so, why do you use it? What do you like about it? And do you think that it'll ever get outside of the US? Apple Pay Cash is great. I use it whenever I can. Unfortunately, a lot of the times that I need to pay somebody, like to listener Michael for

Frozen Quest, he's out of the US, so I can't do Apple Pay Cash. So when I am sending money to people just here in the US, I do use it. And it's great. It's a lot of fun. I like it a lot. For Mike's bachelor party, when we were divvying up who was paying for what, everybody who is American just Apple Pay Cashed everybody else what they needed to. So I think it's great. I get the challenges. I hope they get it out of the US soon. Because it's a debit system and you've got to have, I think they've got a credit card partner. There's a lot of complexity to how it's built, but Apple rarely does something and then just leaves it parked in the US. It does happen, but they know that they want to be overseas with it so i think it'll

happen this rollout has definitely been slower than apple pay and apple pay feels like a more complicated system than apple pay cash was yeah but apple pay like contactless payments and things already existed where they were going and this this is a more of a challenge because they have to they have to have these financial partners and Right, but they have to make up deals of individual banks. With banks. It's true. It's true. I'm surprised.

A deal with Visa or MasterCard would not be as hard because those companies would really want that business. So I find it peculiar. I feel that potentially it's that Apple Pay Cash is also a difficult thing, but not as high priority as Apple Pay itself was. It's possible. Also, I think banks have tried to build their own versions of this, right? And so it's a harder sell for Apple because banks want everybody to use the Send Cash feature that's inside their own banking app instead of using the one that's controlled by Apple. their own banking app instead of using the one that's controlled by Apple. But the Apple one is super...

Basically, what you want is you want terms that make the banks go, oh, yes, we want to support this because this will ultimately create a certain amount of money that passes through our bank that benefits us. But it is strange. And I think you're right. It is a combination of it being a whole bunch of deals need to be made. And maybe it's not as high priority. But I like it. I think you're right. It is a combination of it being a whole bunch of deals need to be made, and maybe it's not as high a priority. But I like it. I think it's a great feature. As Rick in the chat room points out,

the complication may come through if you enable this in multiple countries, how and if those countries communicate. So, like, can you send money to me? And if that is something that they want to enable, which when they do this they probably should there's then a whole big thing about foreign exchange now it's all possible to do because paypal manages it like lots of companies manage this but like that is the complexity because you shouldn't launch this if it's then locked to the country because it's too confusing

right like that just becomes a pain point so maybe that is the thing that they're a little bit held up on is is making it work across uh across country lines marcus said jason if the 10 and 10s weren't available and all that was available it was a 10r or a 10s max right that was what apple went with they just pushed the oled screen up into a large screen and the only smaller phone available was a 10r do you think which one do you think you'd go with which one so remind me do you know the um the dimensions is one of them smaller physically not really uh i actually think i'm gonna check this off the top of my head that they're about the same size so i think it seems pretty obvious to me which one most people will go with but like i'm checking this right now um we're looking at well okay so that the uh the 10s

max is 6.2 inches in high and the 10r is 5.94 and the tennis max is three inches 3.405 inches wide and the 10r is 2.98 so the 10r is slightly smaller than the tennis max um i would probably i don't know the 10r sits pretty comfortably in between the XS and the XS Max. So I, again, this is the world where the X and the XS don't exist because that's my preference. I like the XS Max. I think it's really, because the X is already a little bit larger, that decreases the space between the two models, which means that it feels like less of a jump to get up there. But the fact is when I hold it in my hand and I'm trying to reach around on the screen it's like it's it's just too big for me so on that level i would want the 10r because it's a little bit smaller okay um and the screen looks great

i would be really sad to give up the 2x lens because i do use that a lot when i'm taking pictures but i think if i had to choose i would probably choose the 10r just because i think the 10s max is just too large for my hands and the 10r will be a little bit smaller i'm really excited for the 10r reviews to start coming out in the next couple of weeks i just i'm just really keen to see how people stack it up against the 10s like after an extended use period yeah and how people react to the screen because the screen looked great when i saw it yeah yeah at the steve rups theater so but like what happens in regular circumstances when you're looking at both of

them side by side you know like how is that going to be i'm really keen to see how people start to start to judge that but the 10r is a quarter of an inch less wide. And for me, that's a big deal. That's that. So it's, it's that much, it's still larger, you know, larger by three tenths of an inch than the, than the 10. But if I was forced to pick, I think that would drive it more than anything else is, um, I would want to try it in my hand for a while. Cause you know, there may be just a threshold that is crossed and that ultimately the XR and the XS Max are both just, they're over the threshold and so it doesn't matter.

And if that's the case, I might go for the XS Max just because it is, I'm stuck with a big screen. I might as well have the big awesome phone. But my hope would be that the XR would be somehow more comfortable to use because it's a little bit smaller. It's thicker though. It's only like over a millimeter. My issues are about just where my fingers can reach on the screen more than anything else when I'm holding it in my hand.

And so that would be what I would be most concerned by. Nantless asks, I'm having apps that I don't actually have installed on my iPad show up in my screen time report. Is there any reason why or how this is happening? Yes. What you are probably seeing is the report for all of your devices. So when you're in screen time, there is a button on the top right or a word that says devices, which is a button. If you tap that, you can choose specific devices attached to your iCloud account or all devices.

So if you tap around on that, you should be able to narrow it down. I wanted to mention this because that is a feature. I do have a weird bug right now where my XS Max is just showing us the word iPhone, which is very weird. And my iPhone X, which is no longer attached to my iCloud account, is still in that list. I think that there's some weird stuff going on in there, but it is still a feature that I like. I like to book around in there. I like the reports. I still want to see more

refinement come to screen time, but I'm really pleased with that feature. I think it's pretty cool. Nick asks, is there any idea, Jason, why some complications aren't available on the new Infograph watch face? Is this a thing that you're finding yeah so the problem with what apple has done with the new infograph face and i'm going

to write about this i'm working on my apple watch review right now um is they decided to do different complications in the different faces so even though there's little circles in the old faces and the new faces the new faces circle complication is different than the old one. And they're not compatible. You can't just take an old smaller complication and put it in the circle in the new one, which means that every app that has a complication for the old watch faces and hasn't been updated for the new watch faces, their complications are invisible on the new watch faces. been updated for the new watch faces, their complications are invisible on the new watch faces. So like Overcast, when we were first taking these new watches out for a spin, you couldn't put an Overcast complication on the new faces. Marco Arment had to update Overcast

to add a new complication. I think this is a bad decision on Apple's part. One of my complaints, I think ATP did a very nice job following up on our criticism of complications and watch faces on our show last week. I meant to put this in follow-up, but forgot. Listening to Marco talk about the watch faces, I found it absolutely fascinating because he is a watch person, right?

Has a lot of experience with a lot of different watch faces, different sizes, different shapes, different features. I loved that segment of ATP. Just hearing him talk, go through all of that. It was really, really good. And I enjoy that he said he had listened to us talk about it and then he was sort of building on what we were talking about. It's a good conversation. I like it a lot. And he's right that one of my frustrations, I feel like this is one of those things where the Apple watch has gotten good enough now that we need to start getting down to some of the details.

And some of the details are these faces, like Apple keeps adding faces, but not going back to their other faces. They modified the old faces on the series four and like the straight lines curve now, which I agree with Marco is really weird, um, that they did that. with Marco is really weird that they did that. But like the fact that they didn't make it so that the old complications, if they didn't have a new one to override it, were compatible or something like that. Like they just didn't do that. Like you got to update for the new one. And the fact that they didn't update the old ones to use the new style either, which they could have done for some of them. They could have said, well, the circle on these faces, we're going to make space for them because we're going to use

the snazzy new circular complications on these older faces. They're like, nah, that's too much work. Apparently we're not going to do that. We're just going to use the old style complications. So I'm in a situation where in a lot of ways, like Marco, like I want numbers on my watch hands, on my watch face. I like the, I like a watch face with hands, like I want numbers on my watch hands on my watch face. I like the, I like a watch face with hands, but I want numbers on them. I don't want to do that extra mental calculation of where would the numbers be? What time is it? Like that's a little bit more mental load that I prefer not to have. I like having an analog watch face, but I want the numbers on it too. I like how it looks. And that means that the utility face

is still a face that I really want to use, but it's also really boring on the Series 4 when I know that I've got these super awesome infograph faces, but they didn't offer a variation of the infograph face that has the numbers on it. I know why the numbers aren't there on the main one, because you'd lose some of that space on the interior where they put these complications. But could there be an alternate design? Could there be a modification to the old utility face to add some of the new complication styles in there? And it's just one of those areas where, is it this hard to develop watch faces that Apple has sort of, they make them and kind of abandon them? Or were they just prioritizing other things? Because I understand, up until the release of WatchOS 5, there were lots of other things for

them to prioritize. But at this point, I feel like they got to get their Watch Face house in order. And that's one of my big frustrations with the Series 4 Watch, is the inconsistency of faces and complications and the lack of, um, of alternatives or, um, you know, adaptable faces, faces that have sort of some different variations.

Like you, if you like a face and it doesn't do exactly what you want too bad, you move on to the next one. And I'm not asking for like super nerdy, uh, face modification formats or anything like that. I'm just I think they need more variations on their themes than they've really been able to offer up to now. So anyway, to Nick's point, one of the things they did there was literally like if an app hasn't been updated to support the new complications on the new faces they're just not there it's really annoying all right so our next question uh comes from gustavo gustavo is a happy user of the 2018 9.7 inch ipad but they are suspicious that this will be the last ipad apple releases at this price point jason what do you think apple strategy will be for that iPad, the regular iPad going

forward? Do you think that it's something they're going to keep doing? I think that iPad is the bedrock of the iPad line. And I think that is their strategy. I think we've seen it. I think there will be a seventh gen iPad at some point, 9.7 inches low price. I think that's, I don't think that's an aberration i think that's the final destination of the ipad line yeah i think that it's going to continue right like it feels like an entryway like it just feels like something that's going to stick around um i don't think that the ipad pro means that the ipad can't exist and i think for there to be an ipad pro that the iPad can't exist.

And I think for there to be an iPad Pro, there always has to be an iPad. Like, I think that something will stick around in that price point for the foreseeable future. I don't know how often it will be updated, but there will be something. That I don't know. Maybe it's every other year or something like that. But I don't get gustavo's

suspicion i think this is exactly where apple wanted to go with the ipad they want a mass appeal ipad and in fact they will keep rolling pro style features down to it eventually as they did with pencil support like that is their education model that is their under the tree model the ipad pro gets the freedom to be as high end as it needs to be because there's a low-end base model ipad and our last question today comes from steven steven is very happy jason how ios 12 has optimized performance on these older devices but feeling a little bit shy about putting Mojave on his 2015 iMac. Is there a rule of thumb or resources to help determine when your Mac is too old to upgrade?

I don't know. I feel like Apple's done a pretty decent job with the last couple of versions in terms of not making it be a sort of slowdown disaster. I don't have a rule of thumb about it. I think a 2015 iMac is probably going to be fine with Mojave i i especially if you're already running the previous edition and you're going from high sierra to Mojave um i don't i i don't have a resource beyond that i think uh i think Apple's gotten better at that these updates have not been ones that totally slow down your your mac so you should only ever upgrade when you need to for a reason

though right right i mean i give you a hard time mike about updating to mojave but like really you should have a reason to do it and for a while apple will continue to release security updates on older versions anyway and unless there's a feature you want or there's a compatibility reason to switch you can also just stay behind and that's okay so that's my rule of thumb is do you want the new features or not and beyond that you know i i think mojave on a 2015 imac is probably not an issue all right thank you so much to everybody that has submitted their Ask Upgrade questions.

You can always send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade to have your question answered at the end of the show. And don't forget, if you have something fun you'd like us to start the episode off with, send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk. You can find links and information about this episode at relay.fm and those show notes should be in your podcast player of choice

as well. Thanks to Holo and Pingdom and Casper for their support of this show and of course thank you for listening. As always you can find Jason online at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com Jason hosts a wide variety of shows here at Relay.fm

as do I. And you can find information about those at relay.fm. Jason is on Twitter. He is at jsnell. You can find me on Instagram. I am at imyke. And until next time, we'll be back. Don't worry about gradients. We'll be back with you next week. Say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody. we'll be back with you next week say goodbye Jason Snell goodbye everybody