Upgrade - 228: The Proof is In the Dust Tray

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

This week we officially open 2019 iPhone Rumors season, as the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple may be adding more cameras to the back of this year's high-end iPhone. Will this restore bragging rights to the members of the Max Club? Also, it was a smart-devices Christmas at the Snell house, as Jason took delivery of a smart lock and a Roomba.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 228 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile express vpn and lunar display my name is mike hurley and i am joined by my atlantic brother mr jason snell i don't know what that means hello from the pacific ocean mike hurley and i am joined by my atlantic brother mr jason snell i don't know what that means hello from the pacific ocean mike hurley well to get to you i go over the atlantic so it's true you know that's just how i think of you as my all right my atlantic my over atlantic brother anyway our hashtag snell talk question comes from edwin this week. And Edwin asks, Jason, do you use Hot Corners in macOS? And if so, what do you assign them to? If not, what other random macOS features do you use?

For example, stuff like Dashboard. You know, John Syracuse uses Dashboard. I can't believe that he still uses it. It's wild to me. I don't. I know, but every time we mention Dashboard, somebody appears, at least one person. It's usually more people. I don't. I know, but every time we mention Dashboard, somebody appears, at least one person. It's usually more people.

You don't need to do this this time, by the way. We know. I know. People use Dashboard. I am very confident that you have good reasons for it and have good uses for it, but it still baffles me that they couldn't be anything to replace it. What baffles me is not that people use it.

It's that Apple allows them to continue using it. It's very nice of Apple to do that because it was like a very classic Apple move would be like, yeah, it's gone. Forget it. But instead they're like, whatever. Who's it hurting? It just is there.

It's fine. It's HTML basically. So that's supported by WebKit and who cares? I don't know what random macOS features I use. I can mention a few. I don't use Hot Corners. I used to use hot corners um when i worked in an office i think for a while at least i used hot corners to auto lock my screen right um

but after a while i actually set up a uh in a little apple script that i could launch with launch bar that um locked my screen so when I would go away from my screen, I would just type command space lock return and walk away. And that was easier for me than the Hot Corners. So I don't use Hot Corners. I don't use Dashboard. Sorry, Dashboard fans. Random macOS features.

I use, so I use sort of random. I use services a lot with Automator and AppleScript. I use services, which are kind of random, although Apple just changed their name to Quick Actions and gave them logos and put them on the touch bar. So in Mojave, they got a little brush up, which means they're slightly less random than they were before.

I use those all the time. We were talking before we started recording about how there are all these things that are like, oh, you can do this terminal command that is really convenient to process a file for a podcast. And I think to myself, well, I don't want to do that. I don't want to launch the terminal every time I when I select a file and choose services sub menu, you know, right click on it, choose the services sub menu, and then it kind of goes off. So I use that. And then the other thing that seems kind of random that I use is I have my dock on the right, which, you know, Apple wants everybody to have the dock on the bottom, but they do let you put the dock on the right. I used to pin the dock to the top as well so it was top right but uh you can't do that anymore so it's it's on the right side so that's kind of random i'm on the left side i'm dock on the left side that's it's

the driving side we you know in the uk you dock on the left in the us you dock on the right it makes sense i do use a hot corner the top right hot corner when i drag my mouse up to the top right hand corner it turns on a screensaver on my iMac it's the only way a screensaver is turned on on my iMac is by so you know i have my cursor movement cranked up so high uh and i i one of the things that i've always done ever since i used a physical trackball as my pointing device is have kind of like very large gestures to move my mouse around my screen and one of the side effects of that is that you're you fling your cursor into the corner a lot and so

i did a lot of accidental triggers and i don't like that do you have it turned up high sensitivity or low sensitivity to move your to move your cursor then which one do you mean i think it's high sensitivity so you only move your finger a little bit and it's flying all over the screen. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you're like, you know,

probably I assume keeping your finger mostly in the same place in like the middle of the tripod or whatever. In the middle of the trackpad, right. But if I want to, if on this 27 inch screen, especially if I want to get somewhere, you know, I'll fling,

I do this, I do a grand gesture. I always figured that this was one reason that I didn't have RSI issues with my pointing device was like when i use the track ball especially because i had a pleasant you know you kind of roll the ball and it keeps rolling well they are like ergonomics it's all very big gesture instead of like little detailed fine movements i always feel like i'm uh i'm i'm doing a lot of when i'm doing big movement i'm not going move move move move move, move, move, move, move. I'm going, and it just kind of flings it over there. And I do a lot of that.

I don't know. It's the way that I've been using pointing devices for a very long time. But anyway, my method of pointing is not very conducive to hot corners because I fling my cursor into the hot corners all the time and it's a bad idea so uh so i i i have avoided that feature but it's cool that you use that that makes sense i mean it's a great feature if people don't know about it like there's a at least small collection of things that you can set off yep um by putting your by parking your cursor in the corner of the screen what a weird idea but it's actually kind of brilliant you can lock your lock your screen or go to the screen saver i don't even know what all the options are but there there are a few. You can do mission control and dashboard,

our friend dashboard, launchpad. Dashboard! You can put the display to sleep, which seems like an awkward one to have to deal with. But that's kind of like locking the screen. So very cool. Thank you to Edwin for that suggestion. If you would like to send in a tweet to open the show,

just send in a question with a hashtag SnellTalk. So just send in a tweet to us, hashtag SnellTalk, and it may be picked for a future episode. Just a piece of follow-up. So we spoke a lot about TVs last week, and up to that point it was unknown how many more manufacturers would join LG and Samsung with adding AirPlay and HomeKit to their television sets, Sony. And the fun thing about Sony adding it to theirs is Sony's TVs run on Android, which

is just a fun thought, right? That these Android TVs will have AirPlay 2 in them. I like that. It's a fun thing to me. Android code. Oh, breaking news, breaking news. I actually have a hot corner configured on my Mac that I didn't even remember.

But it doesn't do anything. That's the point of it. So I have my upper left hot corner disables the screensaver. if i am like doing something where i don't want the screensaver to come on like uh you know just like keep the ui visible i need to see it i'm going to go away but i don't want the screensaver to kick in and the computer to lock apparently at some point i set that up so in the i can move my cursor to the upper left corner and then the screensaver doesn't engage which is you can see why I didn't even think about

that because it's not kicking anything off. You wouldn't know this. It's preventing the screensaver from running. Okay. Anyway, so there's the Edwin, I gotcha, there at the end. So yeah, televisions, there's going to be a lot of them with AirPlay 2, a lot of them with HomeKit. I think, well, we definitely are still waiting for the other shoe to drop with this to kind of understand what this is all going to be a lot of them with AirPlay 2, a lot of them with HomeKit. I think we're... Well, we definitely are still waiting for the other shoe to drop with this

to kind of understand what this is all going to look like. You know, like, is Samsung going to be the only manufacturer with direct ties into the apps? Like, why is that, if that's the case? Yeah, I'm intrigued to see how this is all going to shake out over the coming months. I still think, you know, I mean, we spoke about this in the past. We're moving into upstream now, ever so slightly, one foot in the upstream segment.

Bucket. But spring, I think we're going to see something in the spring from Apple about the TV service. Yeah, that feels right to me. I mean, who knows? It could really be any time. You know, every day is apple tv service day it potentially in 2019 but it does yeah i think i feel like sooner rather than later i think they maybe want to get out in front of the disney service which is supposed to come and

the warner media service both of which are supposed to come i think toward the last half of the year and so why would they not want to get out in front of it so let's talk about upstream this was uh we were originally going to talk about this topic last week, but we moved it for obvious reasons, but it still warrants discussion. Netflix have removed in-app subscriptions on iOS, so you can no longer sign up for a Netflix plan in the Netflix iOS app.

When you open it for the first time, you're just given the option to log in. And I really liked, John Gruber wrote an article about this during Fireballball where he kind of like took a look at the page and all that was there was just a login and a help button and when you press the help button it calls netflix support and then he was kind of just like playing the role i love the idea of john gruber doing some acting as he speaks to the netflix support person and is like i don't know how to sign up for netflix and then they like what am i supposed to do here and then they explain to him go to the

website so that's kind of the situation um it is estimated uh based on estimations and charts and all that kind of stuff this could cost apple about 256 million dollars a year with the lot with the cut with the loss of their cut of net's revenue coming from iOS. It is worth remembering that Netflix at least had a lot of customers that were being charged 15%, not 30%, because the App Store cuts this in half a year after subscription, right? So if you subscribe to a year, no matter who you are, if you have an in-app subscription, no matter what developer you are, after one year, Apple cuts their cut down to 15% for those customers, right? And then that continues from there. However, it has been long rumored that Netflix never paid that 30% and that they

were always paying 15%. So what do you think about this? What do you think about the fact that Netflix has done it? Why do you think they've done it now? And what do you think about Apple's kind of position and stance with this type of thing specifically? You know, I don't know. I'm torn. We've talked about this before. I get the idea that Apple doesn't want the App Store to become filled with kind of sleazy stuff where they're taking you off to their own web service and asking for your credit card yeah like it's people trying to punch holes in the system right like every app will just be free and it's like some kind of shell right and then like you actually have to subscribe right via our payment processing or whatever so that's part of it on on top of that

the apple payment system is convenient right like there's no denying that yes you put in your credit card with your apple id you are you know there's standard ui it always goes through apple they have a refund system you know apple's a legitimate vendor so i mean i suppose you know they could they could leak your credit card but it's less likely than random company could leak your credit card i mean i my feeling on that is it hasn't happened yet and i'm assuming people are trying to break into apple's credit card database many many times a day so i feel like at this point they are one of the probably the safest places to have your credit card information. And just, you know, it's consistent UI.

You're using Face ID. If you've got a system that has Face ID or Touch ID, if you can't, you know, it's got all of this stuff going for it. So from a user perspective, having every payment go through Apple, I get why it's easier that way. And then this comes back to the thing that you and I have definitely talked about more than once, usually about Amazon, but Netflix is a good example too, which is at the same time, there are a lot of businesses that are reluctant to give away a big percentage to Apple or can't because of margins. And I think about like Kindle books and things like that, where like the whole margin would be gone. And then some, if you gave Apple their cut, where there's gotta be a carve out.

And that's, I, and I get like, I, when we talk about this, we get a lot of feedback from people who are like, well, if Apple does that, they have to do it for everyone. It's like, you know, do they, they, they, they really don't. So like, I would, I would say that, you know, what I would like to see is Apple for, again, to make it as easy as possible for users to let companies like Amazon and Netflix put their, you know, put their, their regular signup form in their app, even if it's just a web link, because it's sort of a special case. At the very least, it would be nice if they could

actually say you need to sign up for this on the web and kick it out to a Safari page. My frustration is that Apple, I think motivated by the fact and this is the part that isn't motivated by the fact that it's better for users. This is motivated by the fact that it's better for Apple, they don't want to even let you admit that there's another way to sign up. So like the Kindle app can't point you at the place to go. The Comixology app can't open a web view or kick you out to Safari in order to buy stuff. They have to pretend that it doesn't exist and then you just have to kind of know. And that's stupid.

That's bad for the users because it's Apple saying, well, if you're not going to use our system and let us skim 15% off the top, then you just have to pretend that your website doesn't exist. And I don't see how that is a good user experience. So I get Apple's point, which is they want to use their leverage of using their easy-to- use payment system to get a cut from your business. But I also understand that there's some businesses for whom that is, they just can't. It's not going to work if they do it that way. And unfortunately, Apple is in this kind of absolutist mode right now. I mean, the only way it could be worse, I guess, is that if they said, if you don't use our system, you can't be on our platform. But that's not going to happen because Apple's not going to kick Netflix off, and they're not going to kick Amazon off. So we end up in this weird interim state. And I don't

like it. I get that Apple is going to miss $250 million a year of their cut from Netflix. I also get that if I'm Netflix, why am I doing that? And having been in this, working for a media company, it's not just that, but I'm giving away my customer data. I no longer have direct access to these customers. They're Apple customers, and I get some money back, but they're Apple customers. And even if I wasn't reselling people's data and all that, it's like, I don't know who they are anymore. They're just a generic Apple customer. I can't email them. There's a limit payment system, but I would really like Apple to loosen the restrictions on this stuff so that it's a better experience for the users. You shouldn't have to launch Netflix

and have it be like, I can't help you here. Figure out what to do. It's like if you imagine a conversation between you and the app, right? Like, hi, log into your account. I don't have an account. Well, all right then. Bye. That all said, I don't have an account well yeah all right then bye you know that all that all said

um i don't really uh like the the advantage of doing it apple's way before was that um you could sign up for netflix within apple's world and manage it through your many you know subscriptions in the app store and i can see some user advantage there although it always struck me as being ridiculous like why would i you know because but i know that apple's taking a cut for nothing other than using the in-app purchases so i've never subscribed to a service like this through apple okay most most people aren't like that like i mean i i used to buy my comics on comiXology when they were available in-app purchase i still bought them on the web because I thought, why am I giving Apple a cut of this transaction?

But so, you know, but it is easier for people. So it's, you know, I would say don't. The other thing that happens sometimes is some people have experimented with the idea that it costs more inside the in-app purchase than it does on the outside. They're basically like, you're paying Apple for the convenience of it, which I don't love either. So I just don't love this whole thing. But I can totally see Netflix saying,

this doesn't make sense for us to channel our people through your system. Because what's the point in that? As you'll remember, the idea of charging more is also prohibited. Do you remember the issues between Apple and Spotify? Spotify was trying to charge more, right? They were trying to make it cheaper if you subscribed outside of the app store and then there were no Spotify updates for a long time.

Do you remember that? We spoke about that a long time ago. Yeah. Where Apple kind of blocked them. It was quite something I was thinking of, like why now, right? Like Netflix and Apple seem to have had a really good partnership thus far, right?

Like when a lot of their competitors had done this a partnership thus far, right? Like, when a lot of their competitors had done this a long time ago, Netflix still kept it around. You know, they do a pretty good job of adapting to new platforms and, you know, being on the Apple TV and all that kind of stuff. And I was wondering, Jason, do you think that maybe the business relationship has changed now that Apple is about to start competing with them? relationship has changed now that apple is about to start competing with them it's possible it's possible i mean who knows i i if i'm netflix i guess they're no longer just a platform they're also a competitor yes um but i don't know i mean who can tell what the what the uh corporate culture is inside of netflix especially my feelings like

if they were questioning it like if they're on the fence about whether they wanted to keep doing this that would definitely be a part of like all right they're now our competition right like yeah it makes it just a little bit harder to keep cutting them a check why are we why are we giving our competition um well they're not even cutting them a check it's like why are we allowing our competition to to to filter our our money take a cut and then pass it on to us like if you start looking at okay so they brought a billion dollars together right for their tv it's like well we paid for a quarter of that yeah right i think it gets i think it becomes a little bit i know i would feel that way right like if i was in charge of netflix i would kind of at that point be like well they don't do anything for us right like they're not generating new customers well that that's that's what i was going to say is think of it this way

which is apple's in-app purchase and subscription program is a convenience that makes it easier for users and easier for um app makers and service makers, especially on smaller ones, right? It's the ones, it's the little independent developers, especially. But it is a convenience to make it a better experience for users and a streamlined experience for the vendors. and a streamlined experience for the vendors. And then there is this other group where it doesn't add convenience.

All it is is an impediment. It doesn't make things easier. It just makes things weirder. And they're working at a scale where it's enormous sums of money that they're throwing in for some arguable but small user benefit. And I think that's the problem is, as with so much of the App Store, right? The App Store was built on the iTunes model. So it's got this kind of like hit singles problem that it's always had. And also, a lot of these decisions are made for kind of like smaller vendors or it's been made for like in-app purchases of stuff for games. And, you know, this is not a system built for Netflix, right?

This is not a system built for selling comic books at very low margins through comiXology. It's not built for that and it doesn't work for that. it doesn't work for that. And so I keep thinking that the ideal thing for Apple to do is to work with these vendors and say, all right, this is obviously not going to work. So let's come up with something else. The problem with something like Netflix is it obviously did sort of work because there was a lot of stuff that is still going through because these people who are on the Apple subscription plan can stay on it. You just can't sign up using that system anymore. So obviously it did work and that's money that Apple's going to lose if Netflix walks away. At the same time, Netflix walking away, there's an opportunity missed there

for Apple. Is there some other approach that Apple could take to them? And for Amazon in general, because for me, it keeps coming back to the Kindle books and comics and stuff too, which is like, it's just a bad user experience. And Apple is going to insist on it being a bad user experience, even though it's impossible for Amazon to make any, you know, they'll lose money on everything they sell if they, if they do it that way. And so what we're kind of at an impasse. And I just think that it's a bad user experience and Apple should do something to correct it. But I get the impetus there, which is it's services revenue. All this stuff is counted as services revenue. All of that Netflix money that comes in and then Apple kicks 85% of it back out. But it's all Apple services revenue.

So yeah, I see why Apple's motivated here, but it's just frustrating because it's a system built for a different business model than the one that they're enforcing on Netflix and Amazon. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Luna Display.

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So, Jason, it is now 2019 2019 which means we can talk about indeed i declare the iphone rumors season open iphone 11 time the wall street journal has published a report saying that apple plans to introduce three new again in September of this year. So as you would imagine, the cameras are a big focus for these new phones. And pretty much the only real big detail that the Wall Street Journal has in this article is the idea that there's going to be some camera changes. So let's say the iPhone 11, so what will replace the XS, no changes for the amount of lenses that it's getting. Of course, those lenses will be updated in some way, but that's going to be a dual lens on the back phone. The 11R will get two lenses, so it's going to get

an extra lens from the XR to the 11R. And apparently, we could be looking at a triple camera system for the Max. It is not stated at all in this article what that third camera could be used for. No. Just that there's three of them. And the thing is, it is until there's any more information or until, like, any more rumors or until Apple shows it off, it could be anything. Because there are, you know, the phones that are out there now that have multiple lenses they they use this for all different types of stuff some some on some phones that third lens is basically unusable by the user

but it's used to collect more data right for like portrait mode and stuff like that in some phones it is like a wide angle lens right or like there's a lot of different things that you can do with a third lens um but now the the there will be a differentiation between the phones again the wall street this article i didn't really like this article very much it's bad it's it's super bad so like they seem to focus on the literal amount of cameras being some kind of key selling point of phones they say that they are lagging behind phones that have multiple phones lenses including the galaxy a9 which i think is from their budget line and samsung because it has four cameras so like for some reason apple needs to

catch up with them and the mate 20 which has uh three and that the mate 20 is a huawei phone which is a that if you are aware that's the one that that is the phone that won mkbht's blind camera test to everybody's surprise which was really funny um but for some reason the wall street journal seems to think that the amount of lenses somehow makes the phone just better it's a really stupid this is this is a uh this is a megahertz myth kind of level thing yes where or or a megapixel race right where it's like well we have more megapixels therefore our camera is better and we know that's not true um and you you look at companies adding four cameras on the back and you say to them yourself like who are they fooling here and the answer

apparently is reporters for the wall street journal that's who they're fooling who would be uh a big enough sucker to believe that that was relevant? The part that got me is they had this whole thing about how Apple needs to catch up with the competition. And then they mentioned these completely random phones instead of the Pixel 3, which is the consensus among tech reviewers best smartphone camera. Which adding a third lens to this phone will probably not do that right like you know it might add some stuff but just adding a third lens to this phone we now we can't just all walk away and be like great it's now going to be like the pixel yeah i mean the pixel the pixel can do it with with one right like it's a good lens and then there's software. So, having three, I'm sure that Apple

is not putting a third lens on there. For funsies. For check marks on a specs list, right? But what are they doing is the question. Have you seen the renders, like the purported renders of this? It's like a camera housing on the back it's like a super bump that's got three cameras and the flash and a microphone on the back it's real awkward huh like yeah it is but but i do wonder like the if you if you put three cameras in a in a kind of a v configuration it gives you um it gives you more parallax to work with in terms of uh detecting uh depth yeah i'm sure that that's if if this is the case if it kind of looks like this at least the i would totally be on board with like the spacing being this way i don't know if it would

look like that design wise with like this kind of uh round rack just stuck to the back of the phone but who knows like that might be what it's like. And, you know, it might not be as deep as this render seems to suggest, but anyway, however it ends up looking. You know, there may also be like smart HDR things where with the multiple cameras, they have tricks that they, you know, my guess is that their camera group

and their photography group pushed for this camera configuration, if it's real, in saying like, we can do, this is what it gets us right it's not let's add a third camera it's this is what it gets a few extra millimeters of separation between these lenses can give us this amount of difference right is it is it wide angle is it better smart hdr because you can have different lenses bracketing different things uh is it better low light performance because one of the cameras

is going to be better in low light i don't know what it is but my guess is that uh apple is you know apple doesn't do stuff like this uh backward like that they they would be motivated by the features that they could get out of it um i think it's interesting that these rumors are about the back the back cameras right because the front cameras, the other thought, like the idea of having a wide angle selfie mode and doing more interesting things with the front. I'm interested in, I mean, we've said this before. We'll say it again. The true frontier of smartphone feature wars is the camera because it's the most important feature. Like everything else is table stakes at

this point like does it get on the internet yeah it does does it run apps mm-hmm it does uh i but like can i take better pictures with it because this is the thing that i carry around with me and take all of my pictures like that that's that really matters and um you know apple knows it apple apple always focuses on their on their camera and the functionality of the camera. So it's really interesting to see them potentially go down this path where they've got this whole camera thing on the back with all of these different sensors, because it suggests that they think that they've got some very clever things they can do with it that are not described in the Wall Street Journal article, which is too busy just counting lenses.

What do you think about the idea of going back to differentiating iPhone features based on hardware size? Well, you know, as a person who likes the small phones and not the large phones, I don't like it because it means that I'm going to be left out of the new stuff on the bigger phone, if that's the case, where the Max Club members will do it. But on the other hand, you're charging a lot of money for that phone it's also very large having more stuff in it i i think is okay i i think that's not unreasonable to do that because you're paying more for what you get in fact that's the argument

right now with the the 10s max right is that you're paying more for size and that's really it because there are no more features it's just size you have to really like a big screen a lot like i do right but you have to really really really like just having a big screen yeah because that's all it is like the battery is great but it's still not even that much more like it's not it's not like the difference that the plus used to be you know um the 11r is uh apparently going to still feature an lcd display uh with the plan to shift to oled in 2020 so that that's another little piece of information uh i just guess by that point it will be cheap enough for them to do it right i mean

yeah we'd move it to oled as soon as they can would be my expectation but i would think it would you know it's just like cost prohibitive um apparently apple is also investigating if it's possible to cut any features from the line to reduce overall cost with 3d touch being on the table i have no doubt that they are looking to do this stuff i mean the article even kind of states the fact that like there kind of isn't really anything that they can do to these phones. These ones, like maybe the 2020 phones might have some changes to address any potential customer kind of perception of the phones, right? Whether it's like innovation or another thing that makes this article so terrible, the way um it's at the end did you read the whole thing i mean i wouldn't be surprised if you bowed out the end of this article they back

up the idea that consumers are being kept away of price and features by getting a quote from a random customer in shanghai who left an apple store without buying a new phone and like oh yeah yeah the customer's like oh i want more And like, did you say that, though? I don't know if you actually said that. And if you did, why is this important, Wall Street Journal? Like, a quote from some customer. Like, how many customers did you speak to? Did you speak to the customers that actually left the store with a phone and found out why they wanted them?

Like, it's such a weird. This article is very weird. They clearly had one. This is a prime example of we have one piece of information yeah and then there's a narrative building that goes on how big an article can we make exactly right exactly right so we we ding we ding bluebird for this sometimes where they take mark german's information and it's you know three lines and then they build a whole narrative around it but you know the journal does it too and this is this is definitely that where they're they had they had a scoop and then they built a whole story around it let me ask you a question

about this okay sometimes controlled leaks happen right this isn't one is it no no i don't think i don't think so i i this i mean it's possible but i think it's unlikely i think i think apple generally does controlled leaks when there's like something in the water that is not right or that isn't spun right for them and that they want to counter it and i mean i suppose like fire up the rumor mill is a great way to take the heat off of them for uh what's going on now with the iphone but i don't think so i don't think that that's what's going on here i think this is a great way to take the heat off of them for uh what's going on now with the iphone but i don't think so i don't think that that's what's going on here i think this is a you know this it's about about right right like we turn into january and then all of a sudden the 2019 iphone rumor stories start appearing and and here we are with that yeah because when when i saw the headline i was like oh here we go pr machines back in action and you know and i read the article and

i was like oh no way they definitely know no no no the 3d touch thing is interesting by the way i i uh the at least in the mac rumors story i noticed somebody uh saying which is basically a summary of the wall street journal story the idea that it doesn't mean that 3d touch is necessarily going away but that the existing 3d touch hardware is expensive to implement and that they might take it out. And there's some interesting thoughts there about would they try to re-implement 3D Touch in a different way using new technology that allows them to sense pressure in a different way that's cheaper? And I don't know whether that's possible or not, or whether they would just kind of like

push the haptic touch stuff and say, we're moving on from 3D Touch and off to the haptic touch stuff, which is basically touch and off to the haptic touch stuff, which is basically touch and hold with a vibration. It's not like that's all it is. But interesting to see if they've got something else up their sleeve for that. All right, let's take a break and thank our friends over at Smile for their support of this show. And today I want to tell you all about PDFPen,

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me, and it's one of the reasons that I love this app so much. With the PDFPen Pro, you can convert websites into PDFs. You can create and edit tables of contents for your PDFs, and even edit document permissions as well. With version 2.2 of PDF Pen and PDF Pen Pro on the Mac, you have dark mode. For all of you, all of the upgradings out there that love dark mode. And of course, PDF Pen is available on iOS as well. I use it on my iPad with my Apple Pencil all the time, so I can sign with my Apple Pencil, which I love doing. Basically, if you ever deal with PDFs, trust me, you need PDFPen. You can learn more about PDFPen and PDFPen Pro

right now at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. That's smilesoftware.com slash podcast. And hey, if they say, hey, how did you hear about us? Say, from the Upgrade podcast. Thanks to PDFPen for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Yay. So, Jason

Snell, you have been up to all sorts with smart home stuff. I saw you published a review of a smart lock over at Six Colors. I did. A couple of days ago. And I wanted to talk to you about this because smart locks kind of feel similar to me

like electric cars or self-driving car technology as a thing that we can kind of feel similar to me like electric cars or self-driving car technology as a thing that we can kind of see as the future but a lot of people are a little bit hesitant of or like a little bit scared of you know like if i get a smart lock can someone hack into my house or if i get a smart lock can i be locked out forever if i lose my phone or whatever so i'd kind of like to understand some of the thinking and then talk about you know know, kind of your general uses. So why did you want to get one of these things anyway? Yeah, so I share those skepticisms about it.

I also had the skepticism of just like, why? What's the benefit? What would be the benefit here? Am I just doing a stupid nerdy thing that my whole family's going to hate me for? And quite honestly, it's like a one too many times we ended up like driving away from our house and saying uh did anyone lock the door and be like um i don't know and like i don't like turning around and checking to see if we

locked the door i don't like calling our neighbor and having them check to see if we lock the door. I don't like calling our neighbor and having them check to see if we lock the door. And that alone was reason enough, like literally this happened, it's in the story, but literally this happened on our way into San Francisco. And by the time we got back in the car at the end, I had already purchased this lock and it was coming to us from Amazon. So that was the start of it. Also, I kind of liked the idea of with the kids coming and going that they, like my son didn't, sometimes he had his key, sometimes he didn't. Sometimes my daughter had her key, sometimes she didn't. So sometimes I was like letting them in or they would have to go around and like not having to carry a key and being able to get back in the house. It was kind of nice. So there were other benefits that I kind of saw.

But the number one was I like the idea that I could check on my phone and basically see, yeah, the door is closed and locked. And just it's done. And peace of mind is there. And actually, the way our house works, and I learned after writing this story that everybody's got a different situation. In Europe, as somebody pointed out, a lot of the front doors, you open the door with the key. Like the key actually turns the latch. Whereas at least in lots of parts of the United States, you have a doorknob or a door latch that you push that is not on a lock. It may be locked. is not on a lock. It may be locked.

It may have a lock, but it's not the only way. You can just push it. If it's unlocked, you just push it and it latches. In our apartment building, the locks that are on all the doors, they have to be manually locked like what you're talking about. You can close the door, but it doesn't lock it. The first thing we did when we bought this place was put in a second lock that will lock right like right

because that we own this place so we can do what we want with it but there are other people that are renting that they have to remember to lock their doors right yeah well so this is what i was going to say is that is that this didn't used to be a problem before we got our new door as a part of our you know renovation that we did of our house like six, seven years ago, the old door had a doorknob and a deadbolt. And the doorknob had a lock in it, and then the deadbolt had a lock. And so if you had the doorknob set to be locked, and it was turnable, there's a little thing on the back of it, it was set to be locked, and you closed the door, the door was locked. It wasn't deadbolted, but the door was locked. Yeah.

If you had it turned to unlock and our side door is still like this, then you would step outside and close the door and you could just turn the handle and come back in. The new one, the latch doesn't have a lock. So the latch is the latch and the deadbolt is the only lock on the door. So the latch is the latch and the deadbolt is the only lock on the door. And what that means is every time you leave and you want to lock the door, you have to remember to put the key in the lock and lock the door. You can't just close the door and it's locked. So that led to this situation happening all the time, right? Because we would leave that doorknob set to auto lock. And so, yeah, maybe we forgot to deadbolt the door, but it's not that big a deal.

The door is locked. And so, yeah, maybe we forgot to deadbolt the door, but it's not that big a deal. The door is locked. And I'll do a little sidebar here to say, you know, how important is it to lock your front door? I think there are people who potentially go around and check to see if a door is open and then walk in. I do think that that probably happens. No lock is super secure. They want to break into your house, they're going to break into your house, that's there's there's windows there's they can smash the door and open it it's not a perfect system but uh i like the idea that our door is

not you're better looking like you've got somebody who is like the right level of desperate you know they're gonna check doors that are on that will open before they'll break into something you know exactly it's best to have it locked yeah so so that that's my that's my thought process because i'm gonna get you know we're gonna get those notes of like well you know it's not secure because yes like i need a system and you need lasers and dogs and sharks with lasers on their heads and all those things you get such a typical five-man crew situation you've got the eyes the ears you know there it goes so uh so anyway that that was that was a big part of it um and i should mention that one of the features of this is you can set it

to auto lock so actually and you can set the amount of time but if the door is closed and not locked you set a time and i think the default is two minutes yeah and it just locks so my my kids sometimes will leave and not lock the door and i I'll be like, like my daughter has left for a sleepover and not lock the door and we'll be going to bed and I'll be in bed and I'll be like, wait a second. And I'll go out and oh no, the door's not locked. And I'll lock the door. So with this, if they, if anybody kind of comes and goes and leaves the door unlocked after two minutes, it just locks itself.

So there's that kind of peace of mind on top of it. So lots of kind of smart things. It does HomeKit. It's got a little, you know, it's actually got a little module where you plug in a smart home something. So by default, this thing is just a keypad with a deadbolt, but it's got a little smart plug area and it comes, the package I bought comes with the little thing that you plug in there on the inside. It's like a little module. And then that's the smart for the smart home stuff. And then it has a little plug that looks like a, looks like an iPhone charger brick, except all it is, it just plugs into the wall. to Wi-Fi bridge because it uses Bluetooth LE. And if you want it on your home network for remote access and HomeKit and all of that, you add this little plug.

And now it is relaying your Wi-Fi stuff to the LockFi Bluetooth LE. So this is the Yale Assure, A-S-S-U-R-E, which is a fun name, right? Like we assure you it's closed, which is where the name come from. Someone wrote that on a whiteboard somewhere. Yeah, that's what you got.

But you've got like a whole package, which includes all the little extra bits and bobs. It's got the whole smart stuff package that comes along with it. And it's all in a bundle. And it's very easy to install it. It is this keypad on the door. So it's got a bunch of other features.

Like you don't need any smart devices. You can also walk up to the door and put in a code and yes, you can generate codes and you can generate and revoke codes and you can set codes for certain times. So if you have a plumber who needs to come to the house and you're not there, this is the example they always give. You can give them a code that'll let them in, but only on the one day, only in a period of time. Or if you have a house cleaner who comes only on a certain day, you can give them a code. I always think those are funny because it's like, we trust you in our house randomly or

non-randomly, but we don't trust you in our house randomly. It's like, okay, fine. And you can deauthorize codes. You can give a house guest a code. And it's all just punching the number on the little glass touch pad on the front. There's no physical lock, no physical keyhole on this thing. It's just a pad. And yeah, so you can do that.

But the clever thing for smartphone users is there's an app, you connect it to the device and you authenticate and all of these things and you can turn on auto unlock. And the way that works is when you leave your vicinity of your house and you have to leave the area, otherwise, every time you walk past the front door, it'll unlock. It's like, oh, I see that phone on Bluetooth. I'll unlock the door. And it's like, no, no, no, I'm just in my house. Stop it. So they don't do that. That's very clever of them. They do location services and they wait until you're out of a radius you can define of your house. So when I walk the dog, I leave that radius and then it says, okay, he's gone. The next time I

see him back here, I'll unlock the door. And it, you know, I wouldn't say it works a hundred percent of the time, but I would say it works 90% of the time maybe where I come back home and either the door's already unlocked or I'm walking up and I hear the door unlock or I get to the door and I push down the handle and it hasn't unlocked and then it goes and then it unlocks. So it's pretty successful. It's not 100%. Can you get push notifications when it locks and unlocks indeed i can in fact that happens when i'm here working in my office with the door closed and the kids are coming home from school um uh or even on the weekend my wife's going out to go shopping or something like that um little notification center on my uh because

it's home kit so it's not just in app, Notification Center. It's on the Mac, too. HomeKit will see it, so I'll get a little thing that says, door was unlocked, door was locked. And I'll say to myself, oh, my daughter's home, my son's home, which is just a little bonus thing. So I've also heard, I haven't tried this out yet, but I heard from, I can't remember who that was. Was it Dave Nanian, maybe, who does SuperDuper, said that he actually finds that the HomeKit stuff is more rapid to respond than the on-device stuff. when you return home uh turn on a like a light switch or a smart switch somewhere and then have it be whenever that smart switch turns on the lock unlocks he in his experience that actually

worked faster that you that like home kit was even more robust at detecting your return home and uh and doing it so i haven't i haven't tried that yet right so i see it's all in there too you set up like a geofence thing in home kit to be like when i get home turn on this light and then the thing is watching for when that light turns on unlock the door right exactly okay and i think what's happening there is it's not waiting for the bluetooth le uh sense that my phone is now close to the lock yeah it's just using the iPhone location settings, which I want to try it out. I'm not sure I want to do it that way

because this seems reliable enough, but that's an interesting little twist. So it's been kind of fun. And I think it is vastly increased peace of mind. And there is something kind of cool and futuristic about walking up to your front door and having it unlock before you open it because it knows your home and in fact the push notification comes in it basically says welcome home door is unlocked it's kind of yeah i so i i'm happy to

have gotten it there are a couple of things, that someone could just shout really loudly and potentially unlock the door i tried to do this uh on our echo and because my wife was walking home and i had not set up her phone yet to use it and so i just said hey lady unlock the front door and what the lady said was i'm sorry this is a feature that you have to um enable and i think um i think it said with code, with a security code or something like that. And basically there's this extra layer before you can get that to work. And the reason is, if you think about it, it really makes a lot of sense, which is if you have smart assistants in places that are close to the front door, especially like if you leave a window open, but even if the window is closed, if they can hear outside and somebody stands at your window and shouts hey lady unlock the front door that's bad that's a security problem right so it doesn't do that

by default you can turn that on um and i haven't because i at that point most of the time uh it's just going to auto unlock and i can also just really quickly open up home kit in notification center and or in control center and unlock the door that way and i've always wondered like what do you do if everything fails like the technology fails you and i like that this one is like there's a battery right you need to get a battery which is yeah so so if your phones fail you can use the keypad if the batteries because it's a it's like a double a batteries are in it which last a long time they say but what if the double a battery dies and you need to get in oh no um well you can it'll like a double a batteries are in it which last a long time they say but what if the double a battery dies and you need to get in oh no um well you can it'll take a nine volt battery there's

a little space on the bottom that's completely hidden but if you plug a nine volt battery in there it just turns on and then you can put in the code and get in the house it's like a failsafe it's a little bit silly but like if you've got a place where you hide a key or something like that you can just hide the battery there and plug the battery in and put in the code. And then you get in the house. But that's even better than hiding a key, though, right? Right, because you still need to know the code. Yeah.

Exactly right. And then they do highly recommend that you have an alternate way in. And we do have other doors into the house from other places that are much less convenient to go and to get to and to get to where the key is and to all of those things like there are ways but they're super inconvenient for good reason um but uh but yeah so this is that they they quite rightly realized that somebody was going to say well what if the battery dies while i'm on vacation and then i can't get into my house and they said well we have the nine volt battery bypass. So keep that in your car or in your high to key spot or somewhere

and just use that if the battery dies. It's in case of emergencies. It's a little bit silly. I imagine that it warns you well before the batteries die so you can quickly replace the double A's. And I should say, it looks nice. I got it in a finish that matches the finish of the other hardware on my door.

The inside is a little bit larger than the deadbolt was because it's got more hardware in it. So there's kind of like some space above it. It's got the, the kind of other computery hardware of the deadbolt, but it, you know, I think it looks nice and it's, and it was super easy to install. I know it probably won't be for everybody. Every door is different. And you may not be somebody, you may be somebody who always leaves your house by your garage or is in Europe and does not have this concept of a latch that opens without a key. But for me, I was actually, I think, the perfect person for this because I have a non-locking latch, which is very frustrating, and a deadbolt. So all I had to do was swap out my

deadbolt for this. And in about half an hour, I had some frustration at one point where it wasn't quite working right. And I actually just rebooted it. Yes, I rebooted my lock and then it worked fine. So yeah. So maybe I was the perfect person for it. But as a skeptic of smart locks for a very long time i yeah i i like i get it i get why they exist now you also had another addition to the smart home family over the holiday season didn't you yeah we had a massive dirt event mike you got a roomba yeah i got a Roomba. Yeah, I got a Roomba. I have been monitoring the prices on Roombas for like a year thinking I'm not going to get this until there's a major price discount. And finally in November, uh,

there was a, uh, the lowest price ever seen on these Roomba models. And I took the plunge. I got the, I didn't get the expensive ones that map your home or anything like that, like the one you have.

I got the 690, which is a perfectly nice middle of the road robot that now lives in my house. And I've been using it. And it's been cleaning the floors in my house. And in the end, the truth, the proof is in the dust tray, right? The proof is in the dust tray right the proof is in the dust tray yeah that all it added the first time you run it you're like okay is this a stupid thing or is it actually picking things up and it ran for an hour and then i opened the tray and i thought oh my god it was full of dust and lint and hair and i was like aha the robot is doing its job and it continues to do

its job uh so that was that was a relief because you know is this a silly toy that is not particularly useful or is it actually gonna work on our combination of some rugs and hardwood floors and a few carpets and uh the answer is yes it actually does its job so you know these things are they don't eliminate all vacuuming in your home but it does the majority of it like you still need to go and do some little bits here and there but it reduces the amount that you need to manually do which is really great like i think it's really we love ours uh i will ask i I wanted to know, do you, did you, do you find the Roomba incredibly cute? I think it's adorable. I stuck a,

an incomparable robot sticker on it. Perfect. Just cause it's our robot. I think it's adorable. I have had many, wacky moments with the Roomba already. Like, and you probably had similar moments.

So every now and then I, when I first started out, I was not quite sure about what areas in my house it was going to stumble on. And so I had a moment where I had sent it off and I had been doing other things and then I got the push notification that said that it is stuck.

Yes. And I had no idea where it was and my house is not that big. Yep. And I found it under my son's- Did you get stuck on a ledge? Have you got stuck on a ledge yet? That's funny's funny because there are no ledges in my home yeah this was uh he it got trapped in a um in my son's uh charger cables yes yeah and i was like all right the

charger cables okay and so it's like i'm gonna i'm gonna either clean this up or i'm gonna put the close the door so it can't go in there. And we'll handle with that. But the best one is when it feels like it's getting away with something. So one time I came out into the kitchen and the robot darted by me trailing a napkin. Like it had hooked onto a napkin and the napkin was like its superhero cape trailing behind it. And I'm like, what are you doing, robot? What is happening here? it and i'm like what are you doing robot what what is happening here and another time i came into our bedroom and i found the robot in there right at the foot of the bed on the floor with a pair of

shorts and the little drawstring on the pair of shorts had wrapped around its little flippy brush thing and so it was it was kind of trapped with these with these shorts and and it couldn't go and it was spinning it was flipping the shorts around but it couldn't go and it was spinning, it was flipping the shorts around, but it couldn't go anywhere. And the best part was that standing on the edge of the bed, looking down on the scene was my cat. And I thought, oh boy, again, robot, what are you doing? And obviously the cat was thinking,

what is wrong with this thing? Why is it doing this? It was, it's so several interesting interactions with the dog and the cat and the robot. They don't hate it, which is funny. That's good. They don't like it, but they don't hate it. And they just sort of watch it as it bops around. And every now and then, like, my cat was sitting on our couch,

and the Roomba, you know, barreled into one of the legs of the couch, and the cat, like, got up and was like, what's happening? I'm like, it's just the robot. Calm down. But we're adapting to it yeah like so every time i talk about roomba i i get this feedback and it's fine like that there are other companies that do this stuff and those other companies have different pricing sometimes they're cheaper sometimes they have more features i went with the roomba probably for the same

reason that you went with the rumor they are the established brand yeah yeah i i saw the wire cutter pick for a different brand and what they said was it's uh harder to repair and replace parts but it was cheaper and i was like yeah you know i'm gonna i'll go with the room but i've also i mean that is the truth of it is that i've had this dream of like one of these days i'm gonna get a room but for so long now that it's very hard to not get a room but that was a big thing for me too it's like i really want a room but one day and like it's i don't you know it's funny really that um so in the uk we call vacuum and hoovering right yeah because hoover the brand just became synonymous with the activity and it's funny that roomba is the same deal right the robot vacuum everyone just

calls them Roombas and I just think that's kind of funny like even if you don't have one we just all collectively know what Roomba is and that even if you do have the U5 robo vac I'm sure most people probably just call it a Roomba yeah well in the UK there's very little uh acknowledgement of trademark law clearly no but that's the Kleenex situation. Yeah, it's the Kleenex situation. It's exactly right. Exactly the same. So I will say, as much as I'm enjoying the Roomba, I am starting to rethink my wisdom in buying the one that does the random walk.

I'm actually kind of fascinated by the random walk, fascinated by this algorithm that it has where it bumps into something and it turns a seemingly random angle and then attempts to go forward again and the idea there is that there's actual math involved in this the idea there is by doing the random walk it will eventually cover everything um that said there is a part of me the control freak part of me that thinks uh you know it's probably it's probably missing things it's probably not getting everything um and i know that they make those other robots that do more kind of like home mapping and so that they try to be more uh vigilant about it i'm not entirely convinced that the home mapping isn't kind of a placebo to just make you

feel better about the the the robot and where where it's going uh but i i don't know there there is that moment i am delighted that it finds its way home most of the time that's also pretty great that it's got this little charger with its presumably little infrared beacon on it that it spots and goes, aha, now I can go home. And that's, yeah, it's been fun. And yes, by all accounts, by what's in that tray, it is doing its job, which is the most important thing. I have it set to go during the day too.

So I will suddenly hear sounds of a robot coming from the next room while i'm working it's pretty hilarious yeah oh don't worry about the fact that you feel like that there might be one that you want differently because i do too like i got the i think the 960 which was i think it was kind of like one of the top ones at the time because it had like smart home stuff right so i can tell the echo let me tell the echo and do it and it it does room mapping in the sense that like again as you say like it tries to understand where it's going to clean and it shows you a map at the end to show you where it cleaned but then the one feature that i wanted got added to the brand new expensive ones where you can say like hey roomba go clean

the kitchen and it knows where the kitchen is it goes and cleans the kitchen so i am pleased they added this because whenever we do upgrade our roomba in the future right like that this will be a thing that will be even better by the time that we want to do it because we'll probably get like the second or third iteration it does the the mapping stuff but like that is the one thing that i wished it could do that like if i dropped a bunch of rice in the kitchen i if i want the room but to clean it now i kind of have to do this thing where i stand in the room as way until i've like like kind of like a matador you know have you used the the uh targeted cleanup because that's something that we've actually used now which is you you

pick up the room and you carry it to in our case in front of the cat's litter box and then you press the little target button i have not even looked at oh yeah yeah you put it at a place where you want it to clean and you press the little target button on the top and it makes a spiral and it spirals out from that location and for a while button is and then it spirals back to the center and it's like a it's like a spot clean huh where you can you can make it clean an area so you could take it into the kitchen and press that button that's awesome kind of adorable little spiral i don't know why i'm how i missed this but that's great because that honestly that solves a lot of the issues that i have but again it is way nicer to just be like hey computer go clean the bathroom right yeah

they've got all all sorts of advances that are very clever. They've got their new base that will empty your dustbin. Yeah, that one doesn't excite me so much because you just have to empty it less because you still have to empty that thing, right? It's just less frequent emptying. It's just less frequently, yeah, exactly right. But it's fine.

I'm in the robot world now. I have a robot it lives in my house it is a Syracusian robot this has been established John Syracusa has said the most basic of robots is the Roomba so it counts

it's a robot I have a robot in my house I'm very excited and the floors are cleaner do you know what episode of Robot or Not the Roomba is discussed? sure well I have to look it up

because I don't know put it in the show notes in case people want to check it out. It's episode 8. Oh, wow. That's really early on. Okay, so you can go check that out. Because that's like, isn't like Roomba one of the defining principles of robot or not? Like it's as simple as it can

get kind of thing? It's the simplest one that we have yet discovered although the robotic pool cleaner that follows similar rules to the Roomba is also, I think, in that category of it's autonomous simplest one that we have yet discovered although the robotic pool cleaner that follows some similar rules to the Roomba is also I think in that category of it's autonomous um you don't you don't really tell it what to do it just kind of like goes around and does its thing and then and then returns home it's like John thinks that's the the bare minimum definition of what a robot is all right it's time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions before we get to that let

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and I was astounded by how fast ExpressVPN is compared to other providers. Like it's never exactly the speed that you're going to get without a VPN set, right? For good reason, because there's stuff going on. But it was getting me like two thirds of my usual speed. And other providers that I've used are lucky to get like a fifth. ExpressVPN is super quick and it keeps your data super safe. Protect your online activity today by going to expressvpn.com upgrade. If you don't want your online history in the hands of your internet provider or data resellers, ExpressVPN is the answer. By going to expressvpn.com upgrade,

you can get three months for free with a one-year package. Once again, that is expressvpn.com slash upgrade for three months extra free with a one-year package. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, Mr. Jason Snell, should we do some hashtag ask upgrade questions? I think we should. now should we do some hashtag ask upgrade questions i think we should capilla wants to know do you think apple will make an android app for their video content i'm gonna say nothing's off the table right like yeah i think i think nothing's off the table i'm gonna say probably not their priority um because i think apple's priority is getting it on tv sets

and viewable on their devices i i think that may be where they have drawn the line it's possibly it's possible that that's not true it's possible that they will do it everywhere um and they'll make apps for everything i i wouldn't put a you know i think it's i think it's almost a coin flip but my gut feeling would be that their their priority is tvs and so they're going to start there but um but yeah would not shock me if they did it yeah i i agree with you right they want to be on the large screen platforms ideally first right um to make sure they have that presence locked down so televisions and stuff like that but maybe you know maybe they would do it because i would see the things there aren't a lot of android tablets right like tablets would make the most sense to me over phones

you know of course it's great to have it on phones but they just aren't they own the tablet market so i could see it getting left off but it would surprise me oh in the long term if they didn't have an app because they have people building apple music for android so you've got to assume it's it's similar in some instances right like so there could be some overlap there so you know i also wouldn't be surprised if they just bundled music and tv up into one android app right like and that's just a keeps it a bit simpler for them. Who knows? Similar vein, Chris wants to know, do you ever imagine Apple bringing iMessage to other platforms, even if they ask for people to pay for it? Yeah, that's that was going to be my answer here, which is I can't imagine Apple bringing iMessage for free to other platforms. I do wonder sometimes if part of Apple's prime whatever that they might do, a subscription service, might include access to iMessage on other platforms.

But I don't know. It's a weird one. I think there are lots of reasons for Apple not to do it. are lots of reasons for Apple not to do it. It is one of those cases where it really does help their ecosystem and their lock-in to have it without it being particularly detrimental to the rest of their business. So it's not a bad thing to have. But if they do move it to other platforms, they would need to have a real motivator for that. And maybe people giving them money and extending the footprint of Apple for their existing customers who happen to have, you know, extending the footprint of Apple for their existing customers who happen to have,

you know, they're not all on Apple's platforms, you know, making it an argument for that, I could see. But I wouldn't, I feel like the default is very easy, which is just to not do it. They would need a really compelling reason to do it. Yeah, I think that that is like a break glass in case of emergency, we need more services revenue type move uh because it really

i think imessage is a is a really good platform incentive for apple and i think personally i mean this is just based on my own gut feeling of this i think imessage is more likely to get somebody to buy an iphone than they would necessarily be to be like, I'm Android and I want iMessage. You know what I mean? I feel like it is actually a selling point of Apple's devices and would be more beneficial to them in the long term that way than it would be to get some small hike in services revenue. You know, like the actual difference it could make in the long term.

I think the Blue Bubble Friends is an actual real thing. It's very meme-able in the same way that AirPods are meme-able. There's this meme over the holiday season of having AirPods and no home button. It was like that was what you wanted, right? Because if you had a cable or a home button, then you weren't with the times. There's things that mean something something especially to young people austin asks do you think the 2018 9.7 inch ipad will be the last newly introduced ios device with a home button huh interesting interesting this is a tricky one right because there's rumors of the ipad mini again And I think if they do another iPad mini,

it's not actually going to change form factor at all. Yeah, I'm going to say no, because I think it's going to be a little while. The only question would be if they just keep the 2018 iPad around for a long time and never update it. But I feel like there's more, it just seems a lot less likely

that those lower cost iPads are going to get Face ID, right? Like, it just seems much less likely to me. Yeah. Yeah, at least for a while, right? The open question is, again, yeah, would they just not update it for three years and then replace it with a Face ID model later? And the same would go for something like on the iPhones. Like, are all the new iPhones going to be this? Well, probably.

But what if there's an SE revival and would that have a home button because it would be cheaper? I don't know. I don't know. That's why this is a hard question is Apple may just kind of like keep selling these old models for a long time, but all the new models would not. But I don't know. I would go on the side of

there'll probably be something that's updated that still has a home button um because it's it's just cheaper to do that right now gareth asks gaming has never been apple's focus but the growing use for gpu acceleration in professional and research applications will we ever see a mac with a powerful powerful enthusiast or professional grade gpu built right in something like you know the nvidia gtx or rtx lines so i've been thinking about this because i have like thoughts from both sides of this right it's like professional and gaming so i'm probably i mean i'm have i'm confident in believing that this is going to be a part of the mac pro right like that there will either be more powerful options or the ability to use kind of more powerful cards that you can just buy, right? Like there will be cards on the market that are used in other machines that you could

put in the new Mac Pro if it is as modular as we would hope it to be. But for gaming, right, if you then want to use it for gaming, it still requires developers to enable their kind of high-profile AAA games to run on macOS, and if these games require the high-powered GPUs and the Mac Pro is the only option for that, it doesn't feel any more likely to happen for gaming specifically. I could imagine Apple allowing for more powerful gpus to be added to their machines in general for creative professional focuses but i honestly like i think if the mac pro remains the only one that can can get with like the times on this stuff the scope of it is going

to continue to be pretty limited i think because i don't imagine the imac getting the most up-to-date powerful nvidia cards like it just doesn't seem like a thing that's going to be because you can't swap them in right so like what you're going to do buy a new machine every time you want to have a more powerful card yeah my my feeling here is that apple uh will care about this for the mac pro maybe somewhat and that for everybody else it's going to just do what it has been doing and say if you want more get an e-gpu and then just walk away that just seems like that's apple's approach at this point because really what apple should be building with the mac pro is a machine that is intended for somebody to

buy and keep for a long time right like i think that's that's the the intention for this machine that's who it should be for and also for their perspective is like this is the last mac pro they ever make right and they keep it around for 10 years or whatever right and the enclosure at least and like the like how they've been in the past right and the the reason they can do this is because you could just up update the parts on your own. It's a little wish-casting for me because this is what I want them to make for my own purposes. But I would be, I think, along with a lot of people who follow this stuff, really surprised if that wasn't what they made.

Like if they didn't make something that could be user-upgradable with a lot of different parts that are kind of a little bit more readily accessible on the market, I'd be a big surprise, I think, because otherwise, what are they building here? Right. And finally today, Jonathan asks,

I'm looking for a Mac that I can store my entire library on, some photo and video editing work maybe, and basically be used as a server for Plex. What do you guys recommend? I mean, there is one machine, right? Yeah, it's the Mac Mini that's the answer you could get an iMac but

really yeah the Mac Mini is made for this this is what it's for especially for the Plex stuff because you can have it running without needing to be a monitor on and stuff like that right and you can over configure the Mac Mini.

That's the other thing. I had a back and forth with somebody, it might have been Jonathan, about this, that you can over-configure it. I think that the internal storage is very, very expensive and external SSDs are readily available and small and quiet. So you can add to your storage that way. And if you need enormous amounts of storage, you can also throw up, you know, a big disk or a big array on and do it that way. So there's lots of different options there. So I think even the, even the base would be powerful, but if you upgraded a little bit and

a little more RAM and use the i5 processor and all that, like photo and video editing, you know, yeah, I mean, it's a very capable system for all that stuff so i think that might be the way to go and if you want to know more about the mac mini uh episode 465 of mac power users um the second episode with steven is all about the miami mini i'm working through it now because i want to put my mac mini to more work i do love it though i love my little mac mini just sitting there being all professional in its space gray it feels so professional just sitting there being all professional in its space grey. It feels so professional just sitting there doing its thing all the time.

Being ready to be used as an app on my iPad at a moment's notice. I do love my Mac Mini, Jason. It's a great little machine. Great little machine. If you want to find show notes for this week's episode, relay.fm slash upgrade slash 228 is the place on the

web to go, but it should be in your podcast app of choice. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer at the end of the show, hashtag askupgrade. Please continue sending those in. Love working through those every week and hope that we continue to provide entertainment and information for you on a weekly basis.

If you want to find Jason online, sixcolors.com is the place to go for his writing about Apple and other related technology. But both me and Jason host many shows over here at Relay.fm, relay.fm slash shows, where you can find this and many more. I'm sure there'll be something else to tickle your fancy. And if you're looking for some pop culture in your life, go to theincomparable.com, where you can find more of Jason's work and of many other wonderful creative people who make shows over on The Incomparable. Thanks again to our sponsors this week,

PDFPen from Smile, ExpressVPN, and Lunar Display. We are both on Twitter and Instagram. Jason is jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. I'm iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye.