Upgrade - 232: De-emphasis on Trees

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

It's been reported that the iPad's home screen will be evolving in 2019, but what form will that evolution take? Myke and Jason make a wish list, and also discuss Angela Ahrendts's departure from Apple Retail, Spotify's investment in podcasting, and Apple and Disney's latest streaming-media moves.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode two three two today's show is brought to you by express vpn pingdom and hello my name is mike hurley i'm joined by mr jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley uh two three two it's a palindrome yay gary wants to know for our hashtag snell talk question this week jason what is a fandom or hobby that you never never thought that you'd be into growing up that you are now a fan of um i like this question a lot i've been thinking about it um i i my initial thought was i was going to say um role-playing games was like dnd yep but the fact is that when i was uh a teenager um i don't know i mean maybe slightly pre-teen like when i was like 11 12 13 i was obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons and I read the books and uh I was you know the

monster manual and the dm guide and the player's handbook and all of that and I never played Dungeons and Dragons never never didn't have I mean I lived in a rural area uh there weren't enough kids who were interested to get a game together there wasn't a knowledgeable person around and it so it just never happened because it was hard to get to people's houses and things like that um but and i play it now but i was interested in then so even though i i have only actually played dnd like in the last five years it was actually something i probably would have thought was something i would eventually do at least when i was 12. my answer is actually going to be beer that That's my answer, is never particularly interested in drinking in alcohol of any kind as a teenager or even in my early 20s. And it was only in my late 20s that I tasted a beer that was not disgusting. And that led me down a path that means that now, yeah, I like to have different kinds of beer and like to go to microbreweries when I'm in different towns and stuff like that. So I would say that one is probably the most surprising to me because that was not a thing that I was remotely interested in until I was in my late 20s.

That is interesting. Yeah, because I guess you are a microbrew fan, right? But I don't really ever know you to drink any other alcohol. No, I mean, I don't. Yeah, I don't drink. I don't drink hard alcohol at all. I will drink red wine. It makes my tummy hurt, but it is good.

And beer. And that's about my limit. I just, the hard stuff doesn't. I have lots of friends who enjoy uh mixed drinks of various kinds and are very sophisticated with their interest in mixed drinks and it's just or just straight up uh hard alcohol and it's just not for me it's not i don't like the taste of it i don't like the smell of it it's just that that is i think i think the truth is that i never really liked the the hard stuff and the first time I tried beer, it was really bad, bitter, awful, American, mainstream, lousy beer.

And that turned me off of the whole thing for a long time. So I didn't drink at all until I had a very nice beer at 28 in Denver, Colorado at the Breckenridge Brewery. The Breckenridge. I remember the beer. You remember it well. Oatmeal Stout. And I said, wait, they make chocolate beer? I will try that. And the

rest is history, friends. If you would like to submit a question to open an episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk, just like Gary did. Thank you, Gary. Great question. Jason, I wanted to know, because you sent me a picture, that you have bought the Clear Look stand,

which I decree is, I think, the best iPad stand available today of all the ones that I've tried. I bought it while we were talking about it two weeks ago. So I wanted to know, what do you think of it? I like it. I actually use this as, it was my pick on MacBreak Weekly last week.

I was a guest on MacBreak Weekly. Very cool. My understanding is that it may have sold out briefly at that point, because I think that a lot of people saw it. I like it. The thing I like about it the most is that it's tall. Like you said, it goes up way taller. So if you are working in a standing position at an iPad with an external keyboard, you want to get that thing higher up and in your, in your field of vision for proper ergonomics. Um, and so I like that about it. I, uh, I prefer the, like the look of the clamps and stuff on the look and feel on the, uh, the viazon tablet or tablet case that, that one that I was the first one that I was really using. because I, uh, this one, it's got kind of like these, I don't know, silicone padded hinges with some, uh, you know, they're, they're, I don't know,

they, they're, they're fine. They're not bad and they work just fine. I just, I don't love how they look. Uh, but I like that it's a lot taller and, and that's really good for the ergonomics. So, um, I'm using it and using it and I've kind of like stashed the others away and I think it's going to be my primary stand from here on out. It's good. Yeah, it's not attractive, but none of them are. And in my opinion, really, I think they're all just a mix of silver, aluminium and white plastic.

I like the Viazon one because it's stealing the Apple industrial design of the iMac stand, the iMac foot. And i like that about it but it's too short like the bottom line and i know why it's too short because with that stand design any higher up with a heavy ipad and it'll topple over this one's got a nice kind of weighted base and then it goes uh you know the pole goes straight up i have some concerns about in the long run whether um you know if i use it for a long time if that if it's gonna hold or if that thing is gonna because it's not like you kind of screw it into position it's like tension fit isn't it it's yeah and i i i'm not sure i trust that in the long in the long haul or not but it's it's good it's um i like it

i like it a lot so i'm using it now yeah my thinking is like i i kind of think the same like eventually that's gonna it going to start to go down like a cheap office chair, right? But it's $35. So if I had to replace it every couple of years, I think I'd be fine with that, right? Like that's kind of my feeling on it. I mean, we're talking about a device

that I replace every year anyway. So I would replace the stand if it was worth it. But yeah, i really like this thing i think it it's my definitely definitely my favorite so i'm pleased you like it too and you're a taller person than i am too so that if you're standing and working on it it's even it's even a bigger deal but i think even sitting um yeah you can have this issue with these ipod stands where there are ipad stands where they're just too too short ipod stand looking down feel like a pointless oh you could probably fit an ipod in there that'd be great probably could They're just too short. iPod stands. Looking down. iPod stands. A pointless endeavor.

You could probably fit an iPod in there. That would be great. You probably could. iPod touch. You probably could. That's good times. Good computing. Oh, so I also want to mention some follow-up.

If that's okay with you. Of course. The Spotify, and they bought some of podcasting, the podcasting industry, last week. In case you don't know, in case people don't know, they bought both Gimlet Media and previous RelayFM advertiser Anka, who are like a podcast production slash hosting tools company. And they have suggested in the press that they're not done, that there is more acquisition. Yeah, it's probably about half of the money that they have to spend but not necessarily half of the companies yeah that they're going to spend um 500 million dollars in total on podcast acquisitions and this is uh this is about half of that so big story i can also understand why you and steven might be uh pondering

your feelings about this or reluctant to speak in public about it because you are owners of a podcast network. And it could be awkward. You could get quoted or misquoted. I don't want to speak about it extemporaneously. And we also have had a business relationship with one of the companies that's involved. So, you know, know i am i'll say i'm intrigued i am a healthy dose of nervous and interested i think is probably my my top level feeling on it because you never know how these things are going to go uh it could be really

interesting it might not be you know i can one thing that i do want to just put into perspective i know that you've spoken about this in a couple of places as well, and you're going to talk about those, but a lot of people are saying, right, like Spotify is the second biggest player right now, but from all statistics that seem to be available from large data sets, whilst they are number two, they are number two by a very, very, very, very big margin. Like Apple is significantly ahead of everybody.

You know, Glybsibson who we use as a host they predict their statistics say that apple has 60 of the market and spotify has six percent of the market um i reckon spotify's pie is probably a little bit bigger than that but one thing that's interesting about spotify and i know this uh even from our own uh test spotify because really fm shows are available on spotify you can you can get them if you want them that way um the audience the type of person that listens on spotify is significantly different so yeah our shows that are popular on spotify are not necessarily our most popular shows elsewhere but it's very interesting it's very different so i think

they are adding to the market uh as opposed to capturing the market. That's my gut feeling is that what is good about Spotify, and I'm not talking about these acquisitions. I'm just talking in general. Good about Spotify embracing podcasting. There are a lot of good business reasons, by the way, for it. Ben Thompson wrote a good piece last week. I think his free piece was about this, about how if you think about it, music, every music play, Spotify has to pay somebody because that's how music licensing works. And basically all music

is everywhere, which means they can't do exclusives. That's not how music streaming works. Podcasts, first off, you pay to make them if they're custom and you don't pay anything if they're just open podcasts. Every minute that a Spotify user spends playing a podcast is a minute that Spotify is not paying music royalties. So it's better per minute per user than music for them. And it allows them to do exclusives. Like Gimlet is going to make Spotify exclusives. There will presumably be a bunch of Spotify exclusive content.

And they're by far not the first to do exclusive content everybody's done that but it gives them some leverage to spend some money to make exclusive content to drive people into spotify as spotify user and the fact is you know music basically is not they're not playing that game you don't have a fractured music market that's like the video streaming market where certain artists are only on certain services because in the music business, they want to be everywhere. Largely, maybe there's some little exclusives, but it's nothing big and podcasting. They can do that. So a lot of good business reasons, but I think ultimately by being motivated, however they are by business reasons, it's good for podcasting, I think, in general, because I think they're going to be evangelizing podcasting to people who don't listen to podcasts, but are comfortable with Spotify. And Spotify is a very successful company that has a lot of people who use their product. And Spotify is going to really be pushing podcasting on those people. And the result is going to be new podcast listeners. And I think that's good. And they won't just be listening to Spotify's podcast. They will probably be listening to other podcasts and

growing the size of the podcasting market. And I think that's good. We talked about this, since Mike is not a dear listener, super comfortable about talking about this right now, extemporaneously, I will say, I talked to Natalie Jarvie on download last week uh we we're tinkering with the format over there was a really good episode we yeah if you haven't listened to download before now could now would be a really good time to jump in because steven and jason are doing some really interesting stuff yeah and that was a good episode where we actually had two uh separate guests we're bringing on guests now to talk about areas of specific interest for them. And Natalie Jarvie is the digital editor or digital reporter at The Hollywood Reporter,

which means she's covering the upstream segment here, basically, is her beat. And she was really interested in the Spotify news, and we talked to her about that. And then, of course, Marco arment you know he writes a podcast app he was an investor in gimlet so he has things to say about it yeah he has he has things to say so uh atp episode 312 last week also has a segment an ask atp segment hashtag ask atp segment i wonder where they got that idea about the Spotify acquisition. That's right. It was such a good idea. So people can check

that out too. I jumped immediately to that chapter of ATP. Yep, me too. One last thing I will say. With a lot of stuff people tend to just jump to a Armageddon doom and gloom scenario when big shifts in any industry happen.

I've been in the podcasting industry for nearly ten years. I've been a professional in it for five years. And over that period of time, I have lost count of the amount of Armageddon scenarios that podcasting has been through. And by and large, nothing bad has happened, ultimately, like the industry is growing. And, you know, like, for example, it was Armageddon two years ago, when Apple introduced the statistics, you know, like the analytics that they added, because everyone was sure that nobody was listening to the ads, but that just wasn't the case, right? Like, it fit with about as many

people as we naturally expected would listen. You'd be surprised at how few people actually do skip ads, right? So it's like, we keep going through this stuff, and the industry comes out of it, and it's mostly based on the open standard that underpins everything, I think. And also the people like us. And fundamentally, a big player is willing to spend half a billion dollars to invest in podcasting. I think that is going to ultimately be good. Yeah. I could get into this for days, but I'm not going to.

But we're not going to. Of course, also as well, I don't think it's that interesting to most people. For me to start talking to you about the inner workings of advertising agencies, I just don't really think anybody's that interested. Should we go through some upstream headlines? It's a natural segue. Sure, let's do it. Apple has bought its first movie.

It's Sundance. It's called Hala and is a coming-of-age movie that follows a 17-year-old girl who's raised in a conservative Muslim household in in the u.s it follows her story as she develops feelings for a classmate and how this fights against her kind of her upbringing and this movie is executive produced by jada pinkett smith uh pinkett smith is the i think the biggest name attached to this project um and this is apple's first sundance pickup which basically means movie was taken to sundance which which is the independent, one of the biggest, if not the biggest kind of indie movie showcase. And big companies can come in and buy the distribution rights to these projects.

Netflix have done it before. Amazon have done it before. This is Apple's first time. This is Apple signaling that it is playing. And they already made their movie deals with some other players, but this is their signaling that they're going to be a player in buying movies. And I think it's more newsworthy really

as Apple bought a movie at Sundance than the specifics of this particular movie. It's just, it is a sign of part of what Apple's doing here because the streaming service that Apple's doing is going to have movies on it, not just TV series. Former Netflix executive Terry Wood has been hired by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions to head up their content for Apple at Netflix.

Terry Wood was part of the team that worked on Jerry Seinfeld's comedian in Cars Getting Coffee, Chelsea Handler's Chelsea, and David Letterman's My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. So she has a good set of content kind of to her name. And apparently as well, she worked for Harpo in like the 90s or something

and then left, has gone around, has come right back again. So she's going to be working on the content for Apple. I was surprised to see this because I would have assumed it was in the workings already. So we'll see what that means. I don't know what that means yeah i don't know this is the only thing that apple has specifically announced that they're doing but terry woods like terry woods history is also like she helped dr phil get to air what it sounds like considering who she is her history this feels like a talk show coming to apple streaming service it does because the three big things that she worked on at netflix were talk shows and she has a history

of talk shows for oprah as well so like i assume this is some kind of talk show which is super interesting to me to think that apple's going to do stuff like that too but if you're going to oprah is definitely the person to work with yeah um captain marvel will be the first marvel film to only be streamed uh on disney plus that's where the distribution will be for this movie so we knew from before that if you wanted to watch these things in 4k hdr digitally it was going to be disney plus and we had assumed that um that disney would stop doing deals of netflix and stuff like that well yes yeah they're. I think their Netflix deal lapsed and the current stuff that's rolling out is it. That's it.

And the line is drawn with the release of Captain Marvel. Disney currently makes $140 million a year in licensing of these types of movies. They have told their investors that they can expect to see this stop as they're winding down those deals to plump up the subscription service. This is during Disney's earnings call that they gave this information, along with saying, Bob Iger noted, during the earnings call that every major brand that Disney owns will be creating content for the service, including Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

And of course, we can expect the same for 20th Century Fox as well to be producing this type of content for Disney+. It's what we expected, but they're saying it, so. And I have another interesting data point, which is news that actually just broke right before we started recording today, which is Variety reporting that recording today which is a variety of reporting that marvel is producing four animated tv series using marvel properties aimed at adults so these are not kid shows these are aimed at adults

including howard the duck and a uh what tigra and dazzler who who are two female superheroes from the sort of second list. I love the Dazzler. I think Tigra is Andy and Iko's favorite superhero. And some other MODOK series, basically these four series that are intended for adults for Hulu. And that is to me the most interesting part of this because we've been talking about how Disney is really interested in loading content into Disney+. This is an example of Marvel, which is part of Disney, building some content for Hulu, which Disney owns when the Fox deal closes.

Disney owns the majority of Hulu. They don't own all of it. NBCUniversal owns some of it, and there's another they will outstanding it's just a matter of time they probably will but this this is the hint of a future content strategy for disney because we've talked for a while about the challenges of some of the edgier content produced especially by fox being available on disney plus which is a disney branded service which means it's got sort of an implication that of some of the edgier content produced, especially by Fox being available on Disney+, which is a Disney-branded service, which means it's got sort of an implication

that it's not going to go above a certain audience-appropriate level. It's not going to be, you're not going to have hard, you know, MA kind of content on there. So where does that go? And the assumption has been that it will probably just go on Hulu

since that's a place that already has a lot of that been that it will probably just go on Hulu since that's a place that already has a lot of that content. There's already Marvel content on Hulu. And that's what makes it different from Netflix, where the Netflix Marvel relationship seems to have been severed because of the other stuff Disney's doing. Here we have an example of new products in development for Hulu. So I think it does signal that Disney is going to be channeling a lot of their stuff onto Hulu

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If you love it, you keep it. If you don't, just send it back. Our thanks to Holo for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Jason, last week we spoke about the Mark Gurman report of Bloomberg detailing iOS 13, and one of the things that was mentioned in that report, which was written by Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu, was the idea of the iPad getting a home screen refresh. So we were kind of, I think, at the time, and I still, I think we both struggle to really think like, what is this going to look like in its entirety? But I know you've been spending some time thinking about it in a bit more detail, and you wrote an article over at Macworld.

And I wanted to go through the things that you discussed because I think we could maybe try and unpack them a little bit more. Yeah, this is one of those, I mean, taking one little fragment out of this story where everybody is like, oh, iPhones for the future, iPhones in 2020. And I'm like that's the most interesting thing to me is i was like ah i would love a new home screen on my ipad like i would like it to do more um and so yeah that's that's that's what we've got here so if you look at the i mean what we've had it's been around for like eight nine years at this point nine years i think it just the ipad just saw its birthday and in that entire time the home screen has been exactly the same just a very very stretched out version of the iphone right you can get more app icons on it

they rotate in a weird way and it's just more space in between it really has always felt it's always felt kind of strange i honestly think that you know the the the people used to say back in the day it's just like a big iphone it was purely because of the way the home screen looked i think it's like oh well it looks like just a stretched out iphone it's very strange yes and it feels like wasted space and we and a lot of us were like oh well surely that's temporary surely they will figure out a new approach to that and then you know nine years pass and you may think to yourself hang on didn't wasn't we talking about this last year maybe because the rumor was this was going to happen last year kind of around this time of the year i think that that was when the rumor was ios

12 was going to see a refreshed home screen for the ipad um and as well as some other ipad pro features and then there was the whole secondary news story that broke that Apple was putting everything on hold to focus on performance and stability, which pushed off a lot of the iPad functions to this year. So I'm hoping that not only do we see them, that they're really good because they've had more time to work on them than they expected. I think that's fair, right? Like, I can just say that.

We'll see. We'll see how that ends up going. But you've touched on a few things and the icons is one of them. So what you've referred to as higher density for your interface of the apps. What do you mean by that? Yeah, well, so how do you quantify it? I think when I look at the home screen, the first thing I think of is it's spaced out.

It is the iPhone screen just kind of stretched out, and it's a low-density interface. There's not a lot there. You've just got a grid of icons. And I feel like any redesign of the iPad home screen needs to have at least the ability to put more information on it in general. Now, you know, my gut feeling is that the right way to do this is to provide a widget somewhere that provides a list of all the apps in alphabetical order, kind of like you can do on the Apple Watch or on Android, quite frankly. And then the home screen is a place where you put apps that you care about. And right now, every app you install has to be somewhere on the home screen. So we added folders at some point. Yes, you could have the icons be closer together,

but I feel like there needs to be something probably more conceptually here. I like the idea of divorcing your list of installed apps from what you put on your screen and ideally where you put them that you would be able to maybe freeform it a little bit more than is currently available where you're going, you know, from top left to bottom right in rows. Yeah. It stops to stop snapping to a grid. Like, let me put them wherever I want. Yeah. Or maybe it's a grid, but it's a pretty tight grid and you can put it anywhere on the grid instead of just in that, you know, scrolling like a piece of text in a, like a typewriter, you know, basically is what it is right now. And that's not great. So I like the idea of having the ability to get to a master list, whether that's via sort of like the spotlight window or whether there's a button, you know, some sort of icon.

You could put it on the dock. It's like all the apps. That's where you could put it on the dock. There's lots of places you could put on all the apps. That's where you could put it on the dock. There's lots of places you could put it. But I don't think it needs to be, I don't think every app needs to be on the home screen. One thing that I would like to have here, I mean, I don't really know what multitasking is going to look like,

but the ability to have app pairs tied together in a little button I can press. This is something that we spoke about all the way back with iOS 11, right? Wouldn't it be nice if we could just press a button and I could have Google Docs and Google Sheets just open up next to each other? Yeah, imagine the ability to save a view of apps or depending on how they do it,

I mean, if it's a tab interface, which is one of the rumors, like basically say, save this workspace as a as an icon like i just imagined like i would have a little upgrade icon on my ipad and i would tap it and it would open like the the exact google notes document that i want the exact google sheet that i want and my apple notes right like they're all there because i've got all the tabs because i can save them all out individually right because they're all these that's how you end up with multiple instances of applications because they're broken down to these tabs because tabs are instances, that kind of

thing. I would love, oh my gosh, I would love that. Right. I mean, there's, this is not easy stuff. This is, we're, we're spitballing about this, but this is the sort of thing where, you know, if you're a, uh, an interface designer at Apple, you've been sweating this probably for years now about how to get this right. But it is something that I think leads to examples like what you said, which is, and Microsoft has been experimenting with some of this stuff in Windows. or even in a side-by-side kind of interface group. And then if you have the ability to save that as a setting so that you can launch into that view whenever you want, that's really interesting. So that's definitely possible. Shortcuts has gotten me close to the type of thing that I want, right? Where I have a shortcut that I can tap,

and it asks me what show I'm doing, and it will set a timer for when I'm preparing for the show and then it opens the Google Doc that I want. What I really want to do is tell shortcuts to open two apps at once and then I would be set, right? So like then again, like imagining all of that tying in together

and then just adding that shortcut to the home screen would be perfect because then I could like put music on if I wanted, you know, like to have in the background and I could set all my toggle timers and all that kind of stuff. Like that's what I really want. And I feel like we're getting I do feel like we're getting closer to that world. And whilst I have been struggling to conceive of what a tabbed interface means, I think like that that wording is just, it's very misleading.

And I think it does make a lot more sense to me if you assume that, if you just replace the word instance with tab, I think it starts to make a lot more sense to me that you end up with just everything is treated as a more like a document than it is an application, right so like you end up treating the google drive document like a google drive document as opposed to something that only lives

inside of the siloed version of the google docs app which could then for all we know i'm just talking now i can't stop it that could be what the um the improvements to file management could also mean right that like yes like google drive if you downloaded the Google Drive app on your Mac, it treats everything as if it's a document, but they're actually just the Google Drive web pages, right? They're not actually documents, but they look like they are. So, you know, there is precedent for something like this. I would love to see that. Like that would is precedent for something like this i would love to see that like that

would be perfect for me like well there's you already have file manager plugins you could have it be that apps could present their documents as uh to the system as documents i'm hesitant to what i'm not trying to say here is i want to Finder, right? Because I don't want the Finder. No. I want, and this is what you and I, when we went back and forth about the idea of Windows on iOS, and you're like, I don't want Windows. I want something that lets me work with different documents at once. But it doesn't have to be Windows.

In fact, the Windows is a very, you know, 80s metaphor that we're still living with. And what would be the modern take on that? You know, it's tiled interface or something like that. This is like that, which is, I want the finder. But, and I don't want to break the app-centric nature of iOS completely. Because it is, I think, important that iOS is app-centric. That iOS's home is a list of apps, whereas the macOS's home is a list of files. I think one of the things that makes iOS more comfortable for a lot of users is that they're not opening Windows and managing

files. There's a files app now, but it's a separate app and it's not the core part of the experience. That said, I feel like a redesigned home screen probably should take files and file systems into account to a certain degree. You know, maybe it's just integrations that lead you ultimately to the files app, or maybe the files app becomes less relevant because you can put your Dropbox, you know, and yeah, you put Dropbox app there now now but the idea of putting like your dropbox or your shared folder or your iCloud and being able to get into it and manipulate it and and have it be all sort of happening where you're or putting shortcuts to things or putting the files themselves if that's the metaphor but having views into into your files as well as into your apps in this

screen and I'm being very vague here because I'm not trying to say this is how they should do it. I just, I just get this feeling that if you've got the file access needs to be better. And Mark Gurman does say they're working on a bunch of file improvements as well. And I just feel like these have to work together. And you know, that if I am document centric in some way, if I do have a document or a folder of documents that I live in, having that be part of the home screen experience is probably a good idea in some way. And beyond that, I can't say. But it struck me that files were not part of the conception of the original springboard right and if we're revisiting it for today and for ios and especially for the ipad pro

that i think you need to take into account the fact that files are part of ios now yeah i i agree with you like i don't think that the idea here is that you completely fundamentally change what ios is about like to make it like the Mac, which is more file based and app based, right? Like just kind of like fundamentally with the way that user behavior has been trained. But I think that if you are trying to position the iPad Pro, especially as you say, as a professional piece of equipment, the ability to make that choice is important right that if you are a file first thinking person working across multiple applications that you should be able to have a little bit more of that flexibility which 100 started with files right like it 100 started there and my hope now is that

files and everything that apple has done to kind of make people think more in the files way, like, you know, how you open some applications and you're actually just taken to files now as like the way that they launch, right? Like that is becoming more and more of a thing, which Apple is encouraging. Every time I launch Numbers on iOS and it just basically says, okay, here's your iCloud drive. It is literally the files interface inside Numbers because they know that you want to open a file so you know the jig is up there and also like that recent documents thing which never really took off because it's a super awkward

gesture to to like where you kind of have to like long tap but not not too long to bring up that little pop-up on the app icon the little my hope would be stuff like that was like laying the seeds for a more file-based version or a more file-based option for ios which i think would be would be really cool yeah as a way to kind of push it forward and i want to reiterate that um what i'm not saying is that i want apple to go down a route where everything has to be dense and there have to be files i want there to i would like it so that if you are just using your ipad you've bought the low-end ipad and you just want a couple of apps and to watch you know videos and stuff yep that it should be just as easy

easy to make it simple and low density and not do all the rest of this stuff that's the flip side of this is that if you have the ability to load the information into onto these screens or this screen uh depending uh that you should also be able to unload it and probably that's the default is something more simple and then people who want more complexity can add it but right now we can't add it so it's like that's part of my hope i feel like many people i've i've heard complain that like I the iPad's multitasking is too complicated for like someone to just stumble upon. But I actually think that this is a can be a good thing, because if you just want to use your iPad like an iPad, like you open the Netflix app or you open the Safari and that's it, then none of that none of that multitasking stuff gets in your way. and that's it, then none of that multitasking stuff gets in your way. And I actually think it's kind of amazing how they built this complex,

like, featured multitasking system, which is, you know, compared to the original iPad idea, does a ton of stuff. But if you don't want it, it never bothers you. You can just keep using your iPad like the consumption device that they used to be and I find that kind of amazing and I hope that they're able to continue pushing the idea forward

because if they're going to keep putting the same version of iOS on the entire iPad line especially with the rumors of more, like the iPad mini coming back again or whatever, that you've got to be able to kind of run these two things in parallel for the pro user and the regular user,

the more just like consumption user. So that'd be interesting. Today View Widgets is another one. This seems like the easy one, right? It's a no brainer, right? Yeah, because it's like you've already got them. They already exist. So, you know, they've been put into other places of iOS already.

They're incredibly capable. Yeah. And, right, like people who haven't tried some of the modern Today View Widgets, like they're interactive. They're, you know, you can, James Thompson's got, like you can calculate in pCalc in the widget. If you do shortcuts, you can put like questions in there. Like when I post a podcast on six colors that I'm on, like this episode of Upgrade, I actually often do that from my phone.

I literally swipe to the Today View with shortcuts and I run the shortcut from there and that's it. That's all I do. And it does it all in the, uh, in, in the, the widget and ask me which podcast and I tap and it goes great. And then it goes and it does it, um, really powerful, but they're in this separate view that's walled off. You have to swipe from the first page of the screen, or you have to go up to notification center and swipe over. It is not where your other stuff is. And I think that makes it out of sight and out of mind. And I think the best place for these widgets that are now so powerful would be to let you put them on the home screen proper. Because I want one place, I want my home screen to be a home screen, not an app launcher. I want it to be where the most important stuff on my device lives. And I want to be able to see it all at a glance. And

no, yeah, this can be overstated because people have been talking about like Android has the ability to drop widgets on the home screen. And having used Android a little bit, that gets overhyped because they're big. They take up a lot of space on the home screen. A lot of them don't impart very much information. You might end up with one or two, or maybe one on a page and one on another page. I've had as more screen real estate, so it's more relevant there, but like, I don't want to overhype it, but there is something to be said for being able to say, this widget is really useful. It's part of my universe, this file, this widget, and these apps, It's part of my universe, this file, this widget, and these apps.

And I want them all in one place, not in separate places. Because it's less brainpower required if I can see it all at once instead of having to sort of chase it around. And I don't like that idea, too, that when I'm in the widget view, I can't see anything else. I'm out of my apps and I'm out of my home screen i don't like that either yeah and also that that part of the ui on on the ipad is is not good it like just is that single column right in the middle it really does feel at this point that it's like it's not supposed to be there and everybody knows it but they just have yet to integrate into the home screen you know this this is one of those things where we're going to look back and be like aha now you know they they invested all of this effort

in making these widgets great and now they're bringing them out and putting them front and center. And I hope that's the case. It's like I use a lot of these widgets every day. Like I use shortcuts, I use widgets for my time tracking,

I use widgets for my calendar and Todoist and for time zones. I use those like these five widgets multiple times a day, every single day. I would prefer them to just be on the home screen. They're just there. It's always one tap away as opposed to two. And then I have to kind of wait for it to load a little bit. I would just like them to all be integrated

because this is stuff that I'm using all the time. And I would like to just have better access to it integrated more with the operating system than it currently is I think it would be awesome I would love it I think it'd be really great and I feel like it would boost the usefulness of them in general because it would give a new new lease of life to these widgets even though as you said they're being advanced and are getting better and better over time. And part of this came, I think, from there was a version of iOS, I don't remember which one, which added them on the iPhone to 3D Touch.

Like if you 3D touch an icon and that app has a widget, it loads there. So just as like another way to show you that information, I think that that helped even further to push the development of them but it could be more and the last the last thing that i wanted to touch on that you mentioned in your article was basically a menu bar but for the ipad now the idea there is that the status bar is just very small it's that simple it's like the status bar is designed for the iPhone, which has a small screen, and it's just that little bit of information up there. And the iPad's got a bigger screen, right? Like on a 13-inch or 11-inch or 12-inch MacBook, you have the whole menu bar, whereas the iPad has this little tiny sliver. And I keep thinking you could put more up there, whether it's a menu bar, or whether it's a status bar, that's a little bit heftier, it's got more bigger icons that are

easier to tap, maybe, you know, maybe you're pulling down notification center or control center from that from the status bar, rather than sort of from the invisible space above the status bar. And you can see status at a glance or maybe tap on different icons. I don't know, again, the details of this. It was just a thought that occurred to me. I am not an interface designer. The thought occurred to me that there's no reason for the status bar

to be so limited and small other than the compatibility with the iPhone. And if they're building a new home screen design for iPad, that's one of those assumptions that they can throw away. Most definitely. I would love to see the ability to be able to just, I don't know, again, can't help myself, but put a shortcut up there.

Let's put shortcuts everywhere. You know, like you just add a couple in it'd be lovely wouldn't it just happen from wherever you are in the system it doesn't do oh man i just wanted shortcuts all over the place just like can't even move for tripping over them so the ipad please give us give us some just give us some that's what we ask for i i'm not greedy right don't want everything to some of this stuff would be really lovely and we're only a few months away i think from finding out right just a few months away yeah can't wait should we take a break jason yes good idea all right today's show is also brought to you by our friends over at pingdom the company who make website performance monitoring super easy everybody loves a fast website and pingdom

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code UPGRADE at checkout to get 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. So last week, last Tuesday, it was announced that Angela Ahrens is leaving Apple in April and Deidre O'Brien will be taking her place.

Deidre will now be adding retail to her existing role as SVP of People. I wanted to know what you think about this, Jason, especially now that we've had about a week to kind of think about it and to hear opinions and to hear reactions. The reaction, I think, overall

was surprising to me. I think people seem to be more down on Angela Arons than I was expecting, like, I feel like there wasn't a lot of like particular displeasure in her until it was announced that she was leaving Apple. And then everyone was talking about all of the things that they don't like.

So I wonder what your thoughts were. Cause I don't really, well in public space, I know that listeners of the secret podcast may there are six color subscribers may have gotten a bit of this but i haven't seen you talk about it too much yet yeah i think the problem here is that it is i mean last week on connected federico put it perfectly which is it's a rorschach test it is it says as much, and I am writing a piece about this, but I just, it has been hard to kind of put it all together. Um, but I think that Federico is right. People put their own experiences with the Apple retail store positively or negative and their feelings

about Apple in general, and they put it all together and they kind of use it as uh to judge angela errantz and you know people are funny like that um it's just like anything you know an air an airline wrongs you and you're like i'm never flying them again yeah they're the worst yeah the other airlines are also bad or a hard drive dies and you're like i'm never buying a western digital hard drive again. It's like, well, all of the hard drives fail.

Somebody else is doing the same thing about Seagate. That's just, people are funny that way. And if you have a bad experience in an Apple store and then the head of Apple stores leaves, you're like, aha, take that victory for us.

You have been defeated. But I think the reality is just super complex. First off, I think last year was almost a lost year in Apple retail for the sole reason of the battery upgrade thing, the battery replacement thing. All of the people I've talked to who worked in Apple retail have said it was a nightmare because they weren't staffed to handle the enormous flood of battery replacements that were going on. And from a customer perspective, it was really frustrating because they were standing around the Apple store forever or told to come back in order to get their iPhone battery replaced.

So it was bad. It was bad on all counts. And I think that's not a simple story because I think it's a corporate Apple making a PR decision that ended up having this huge ripple ripple into retail. And then retail was responsible for making it work. And you know, I short of inventing a new way or more machines or whatever, or, or hiring more staff to do battery replacements. Um, but that's a hard one. And so service suffered and people's happiness with getting that battery replacement were tempered with long lines or long waits or frustration where they'd go in and they'd have to leave or come back later or something like that. from being perceived as being an outsider because she comes from fashion and not from technology and i think that that hurts her um i don't think i haven't sensed a lot of sexism in the criticism of her i feel more like i'm getting the vibe of people who care about tech and and now that she's

leaving they feel comfortable saying she was never one of us after all i think i'm getting that vibe more yeah but you've nailed it like i couldn't work out what it was because it didn't feel like i don't know right like and me and you are not necessarily the right person to 100 judge this but it didn't necessarily feel like people were attacking her because she was a woman because i feel like i haven't seen a lot of that in the yeah in the first place um and and if anything was in at least in our part of the community was really strongly welcomed because she was a woman on the apple executive team right like that was a great thing to see uh but it does feel more like and i'm really pleased that you vocalized this because i couldn't get i haven't been able to get my head around it, but it feels more like, oh, you're a fashion.

You're not tech. Yeah, you weren't really one of us. You didn't really get Apple. And I think the truth is that she was hired specifically because of who she was by Tim Cook, who also hired the guy from Browett from the bad uh bad uk tech chain right and that was a bad cultural fit it was tim cook's first big hire and it was a bad one and they had to they had to cut the cut that guy out and get rid of him and then they brought in angela hired who was a ceo right so they bring in her uh to do this she was a ceo at burberry but they're but like running apple retail you know, and I've had

people say, well, yeah, but Apple is huge and they paid her a lot of money. I said, well, yeah, but she's also not the CEO anymore. And that is a big step to not career-wise too, to go to a bigger place, but to take a lesser role. Once you've been the boss. It's hard to go back, right? But she did it. And I believe firmly that she did. This is my simple line here, my TLDR about Angela Ahrens' tenure, which is I think she did exactly what she was hired to do. I think now we can debate what she was hired to do, but I don't think she came in and said, okay, well, now that I'm here, this is what I'm going to do. I think that the conversation that she had with Tim Cook

was very much use your fashion industry knowledge. We need a refresh here. We've got a demoralized retail chain that had this bad hire in charge of it. We are expanding. We need to rethink our flagship stores. The Apple Watch is coming and it's going to have a fashion element, which kind of went away, right?

So I think there's an aspect of that. I think ultimately she did what uh what they wanted she turned over the today at apple program they have a whole new curriculum that doesn't get widely talked about but they basically have a whole new curriculum of classes across all the apple retail stores um there's a question about why apple is putting so much effort into classes at apple retail instead of selling products and doing support. That is a philosophical thing that clearly Angela Ahrens and other people at Apple feel like that's part of the retail experience at Apple is, like she said, we're a town square and everybody made fun of her. But the idea that it is a third place, it is not home or work, but it is another place

you go like a starbucks or a library or something you go to the apple store and you hang out and you learn things that may be fantasy um but that is definitely seems to be a fantasy that apple has had it feels like a very um tim cook's apple thing like not just an angela thing like tim has put a lot of time into general curriculum which is put into schools. And this kind of like technology education, like even within Apple, right? Like Apple University is a thing. Yeah, Apple wants to be seen as more than just a seller of tech products.

I think it's important to the people at apple and is you know it's kind of an ego trip on one level where it's like we we don't want to just be seen as as a purveyor of of software and hardware we want to be seen as something greater like a force for good right yeah it's part of their brand image it's part it's just and and again you can judge that accordingly but i do think it's a thing that they feel about it. Her leaving, nobody except the people involved know for sure. My gut feeling is that she was doing what she was brought in to do, and that sometime in the last few years, what Apple and Tim Cook want out of retail and maybe want out of the larger corporate strategy is not what she was brought in to do.

And I think it's a perfectly reasonable place to land. It may not be true. We don't know. But a perfectly reasonable place to land is that Apple's been recalibrating its strategy. The iPhone sales flattening is probably part of it. recalibrating its strategy the um iphone sales flattening is probably part of it uh realizing that fashion is not really the primary goal of the apple watch might be part of it um because that was a skill that she she had and is not being able to put to use as much um and then they end up in a point where she's been there five years presumably she's got a lot of stock that's vested um they

feel like they want to take the stores in a new direction it's not really the direction she was brought in to do and it's not a direction she's maybe thrilled about and both sides are like this is a good stepping off point she's also mentioned she her kids live in london uh they're a little bit older but she misses them and she's been you know she had to move back to to uh the u back to the US and be in California, which is, as you know, far away from London. So I think it's a complex story with some complex reasons that it's happening. But I do believe that Apple is doing some rethinking about retail. I have definitely heard that maximizing iPhone sales is on the agenda for Apple retail now in a way it wasn't before.

And that's not surprising, right? Because of the shortfall that they had last quarter. So I would not be surprised if what we see over the next couple of years in Apple retail is a re-emphasis on sales and support and maybe a little de-emphasis on trees and classes and things like that but I don't know that's just a that's just a guess so who is Deidre O'Brien I feel like I didn't really know a lot about Deidre O'Brien but I saw a tweet from Ryan Jones came by my radar a couple of days ago. That kind of gives a brief overview of her time at Apple. She's been with Apple for 30 years.

She was responsible for launching. And was responsible in the efforts of launching the original Apple store. And the original online store. She worked in product launches for 20 years. She was the VP of operations. And she became the VP of people. Which is effectively human resources, 18 months ago. So, I mean, I knew that she'd been in Apple for a long time, but I wasn't

that familiar with her path. But it feels like a path that makes sense for why they've given the role to her as someone who can do things in this role and the operation stuff seems really interesting to me because it's like i mean and i don't know if this is the case but like maybe you know that like the adage of like uh when you're when you're a hammer everything you see is a nail it's when you're an operations guy everything every problem is an operations problem to fix and maybe maybe tim is like well i know that deirdre knows how to do ops and maybe she can help us fix the apple store the the sales issue uh if you know if retail covers the online store which we believe it does as well as the

apples like the the physical stores maybe this is why right like we have a problem maybe deirdre can help us fix it in the time that it might take for us to find somebody more permanent i i don't believe that the merging of people and retail is a permanent solution is a permanent thing yeah it feels to me like they didn't want to replace angela right now with a new hire, right? So they go to Deirdre O'Brien and they say, here's what we're going to do. We're going to add, you know, most of our employees are retail employees anyway, and you're in charge of people. Why don't you take this too? And presumably all of Angela Ahrens' people are reporting to Deirdre O'brien so in some ways it's um angela is leaving but we want you we want to you know keep this going and not stop and search for a new leader yeah in the long

run they may they may get a new leader or they may get a new people person, right? Like they may, it's unknown what part of the organization would stay with Deirdre. Like it depends, right? But right. And, and there may be that there's just no clear successor to Angela Arons at the, at the next level down in retail right now. And that who knows, maybe it is Deirdre O'Brien's job to do that job. Maybe it's her job to find the successor and identify them.

Unclear, but there are a lot of different options potentially going on there. I would imagine that part of this is also going to be, and again, it's so easy to look at people changes and say, well, this is when the policy changed. And I don't think that's necessarily true. I've heard a lot of people complain about Angela Ahrens and say, I hate that there are no registers and that the Genius Bar top is gone. And all these things that predate

her, they were doing weird things with lines and not having lines in the Ron Johnson era. That was not an invention. There's lots of things that she gets accused of that are... was not an invention there's lots of things that she gets accused of that are it's it's a little a little apologies for this uh political sidebar but it'll be very brief which is i find that a lot of people blame obama for policies that actually came from his predecessors it's like um you know it's very easy to to blame the last guy for everything that's ever happened in history but it's not always true and i think in angela aaron's case she gets uh you know some of the weirdness and i agree like i hope apple is looking and again my sources within apple retail and they know who they are um

are uh they're out there um and i i do i know people who work in apple retail i talk to them occasionally and and my impression is that like they're well aware of the issues with you make an appointment and it takes too long or they shuffle you off to a bench and you sit there for a while. They are well aware of walking into a store and feeling like you don't know where to go. I've noticed in the last year that they put more of those people at the door, those door maitre d' type people who are like, hello and welcome. And what would you like? Ah, yes, go over there or go over there. I will call a person for you in order to make that better. So I think they're aware. So I also would caution against saying, well, aha, now that Angela Ahrens is leaving, everything's going to be different because I don't think that's true. I think that there may be some changes in the works, but unless she really was legitimately an impediment to Tim Cook doing or other people

at Apple doing what they want with the retail store, and she was told, do this or get out, and she said, I get out or you can't fire me, I quit, which I don't know. My gut feeling is that that's not what it was, but I don't know. My gut feeling is that that's not what it was. But I don't know. So we'll have to see. But I'd imagine that if the Apple Store is changing, Angela Arendt's leaving may be a symptom of the Apple Store making changes and not the reason that the changes are happening. So, it is at least interesting, right? In the sense of like, well, that was a surprise.

It did really seem like it came out of nowhere. There were a lot of, I mean, who knows, right? But I feel like that there may have been a lot of wheels in motion. And as you say, this iPhone thing really took Apple by surprise. And it may have been a case that like part two of a 12-part plan to try and improve iPhone sales includes a complete overhaul of some of the retail initiatives.

And maybe it just meant that it just didn't fit anymore. And then it wasn't something that everybody wanted to do. What I don't like is the idea that iPhone sales are flat because of very big global reasons. And you lash out. This is a little like me saying saying if you think a recession is coming in your Apple what you don't do is lay off people in order to prove that you care that you're worried even though you should really be hiring people it's a little like that which is you are you are probably making a giant tactical mistake if you completely try to transform your retail operations in order to goose iPhone sales

a little bit when there are huge global reasons why iPhone sales and category reasons, right? Market reasons why iPhone sales are what they are. And it probably isn't underperformance in the stores. But that said, I do think that maybe when Angela Ahrens was hired, Apple felt like the purpose of the retail store was as much brand extension as it was a revenue generator. Because they made, you know, at that point they were already, I think number one in sales per square feet in retail.

Like they were already a huge success in terms of retail. And so you're like, we're already making money hand over fist in retail. We also want it to be a brand extension. This is what we can do. And that now five years later, maybe the feeling is no you know actually sales are are really more important to us than we were saying and we aren't going to take them for granted like we were taking them for granted five years ago and that i think that that that's realistic i just don't want it to be uh panic

about iphone sales in one quarter uh because that would be the wrong move to make and it's not the move that i hope and it's like if you imagine that they sat down and they were like all right we have these initiatives and we believe these initiatives will either stabilize or increase iphone sales in the stores and it's about kind of let's go community first and it turns out that that doesn't work right and like oh it hasn oh, it hasn't helped. And at the same time, things are going in a place that we don't want. Maybe we need to start to shift some of this strategy or add a new strategy that doesn't meet with the kind of the goals and objectives of our current retail leader. So it's less about her and more about, well, this stuff's happened.

This plan didn't work in the way that we exactly expected or you know the situation has changed then it may mean that it's combined with a bunch of other factors just time for angela to move on maybe maybe maybe or maybe it's all doom and gloom jason and we mean you were are just far too optimistic. Well, there's no way to know. That's the real chance here. And that gets back to what I said at the very beginning of this segment, which is, in the end, you can put whatever narrative you want on this, because the information that we've got is very limited.

And so I feel like our approach to this and trying to make guesses about it is pretty good. But in the end, we don't know. Only Tim Cook and Angela Ahrens maybe know for sure. Maybe we'll find out in 25 years. There'll be a book. Maybe. The Great Tell-All book.

Maybe. Maybe. Let's do some hashtag askupgrade questions. But before we do, let's thank our final sponsor for this episode, and that is ExpressVPN. Data. Data is being sold at an alarming rate. You can't get away from it now. Online security breaches.

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David wants to know, do you think there's room for a streaming service version of audiobooks? I'm surprised that Amazon or Audible haven't tried such a thing as part of Prime. When I read this question, I was like, oh yeah, why isn't that? My only thinking, Jason, could be that there must be some kind of issue with book publishers. Because this seems obvious to me yeah i thought there were some audible things that are in prime that it's like you get some credit library right there's or there's like there's a small amount like rotating group of audiobooks that's in there

i think it's not i'm a prime person i've never used this service uh so i don't know i think i think the answer is you and you said it mike audio books are uh profitable right they're not cheap they're expensive to produce and they they're and they sell and they sell well and it is a big part of it. Amazon also doesn't have, you know, they have prime access to some books. But again, it's a very limited number of books that you can do with the prime reading. And then they've got that separate Kindle Unlimited, which is a larger group of books. And then there's the broad spectrum of books. And it's the same story, which is, I think publishers would rather get your money to buy it directly from them and pay them a lot of money to buy it. And they will fight hard against being part of a, you know, rental streaming kind of model for books. And they, so far they have succeeded. You can also go to your local library and get audio books and regular books for free. And some of them even use like Overdrive where you can check them out your local library and get audiobooks and regular books for free and some of them even uh use like overdrive where you can check them out digitally and listen to them and

then return them so there are some options at the library even though the options on amazon are limited yeah it was just a surprise to me it's like yeah i think you can get some stuff here and there with with prime but audible is trying to be a streaming service in a way right audible's entire setup is to make you you sign up for a monthly plan and you get credits so it's really a purchase system but they want you to feel like you are paying once and you can you know depending on your how many books you read you can get these books and you're paying with credits and you know that's what they're trying to make it feel like is like Netflix for audiobooks, even though it's not quite.

So that's definitely what Audible's whole marketing strategy is. Like how we were talking about Spotify earlier, they do original content too that you can only get there by and large. So they're like, whilst it's always been that thing of like paying and you get the credits, now they are also adding a bunch more other stuff right and audible has experimented with things that are like podcasts um that are audible originals and those i think you can listen to as a prime customer for free that's part of your prime just not the books because those are the things that are commissioned by audible so they have kind of rights over those that they don't have to compensate a publisher for in the same way.

Nguyen asks, the reported Samsung S10 screen is being considered by many as a much better and more reasonable alternative to the notch. So if you don't know what this is, I'll find some stuff and put it in the show notes. This is what is being referred to as the hole punch display, where instead of a notch, there is just a circle for the camera and that's it um so new and continues i know many uh non-techie folks who think the notch is too big or ugly um and it seemed but it seems like on the iphone the notch is going to be around for a while do you think that this move will end up being a disadvantage for apple as more screens are shaped in different ways by different providers? You know, in the long run, maybe. In the short term, I don't think it's that big a deal.

I'm sure Apple would tell you that they are more concerned with getting the screen to the edges as much as they can. with getting the screen to the edges as much as they can. And they want the advantage of the, you know, that whole setup that they've got with the camera and all the sensors and the dot projector and all of that. And that that is, those features, Face ID and the rest, are worth the space. I'm sure they would tell you that. I'm also sure that Apple's ultimate goal

is to make that stuff as invisible as possible and that the notch is what it is now because that's as small as they can make it. So if they can make it a hole punch in the corner, I'm sure they would love to do that. But I think what they would say is that Samsung is compromising elsewhere by minimizing it there and that in reality, the notch isn't a big deal. And as somebody who's been using the notch for a year and a half now, it's not a big deal. But, um, and I, I, I question whether there are a lot of people out there who are holding a Samsung phone and an iPhone next to each other and saying, I don't know which one, which screen looks better. That's the one I'm going to buy. Maybe there are some, I don't know. I think in the long run,

Apple, if every other phone has uh done away with this stuff and apple still has a really big uh notch on their screens it might hurt their perception but i feel like that is a long-term question not a not a short-term thing yeah i think there are some other parts to this as well where it's like if we think about the notch right so like the notch is what it is because the face id and yeah i wonder if in the short to medium term if like face id harms apple over a fingerprint based system where you know it seems like everybody else is probably sticking with it most android manufacturers still use uh some kind of some kind of fingerprint processing as well as some kind of

typically more basic uh facial recognition but that is just like another element of like i don't know yeah i think it's more likely that they would come up with a new face id approach that requires less hardware to to do it than that they would back off of face id i know i don't think apple's backing away from face id but like i just wonder if like what the general market feels about facial recognition over fingerprint recognition uh i i don't feel like i don't understand that element yet but i think that it's like an interesting point of difference um i did see today too that uh samsung so they have their event in like next wednesday on the 20th right where they're going to show off the s10 oh boy get ready for some

awkward presentations oh yeah they are heavily teasing uh their foldable display oh sure so i don't know if they're just going to show it or if they're going to actually have it for sale, right, or if it's going to be a tease. But I'm really intrigued to see what that's going to look like because we've been talking about those foldables. All right. Our next question comes from Eric. What do you use to keep your screens on your devices clean? I find that the iPad Pro in particular is incredibly good at collecting a large amount of finger grease.

I use the sleeve of my hoodie. That's it. The only other thing that I will use, because I'm a glasses wearer, is the microfiber cloths that you use to clean eyeglasses. They're the only other things. like the microfiber cloths that you use to clean, uh, like eyeglasses. Sure. I don't use any kind of like screen cleaning solution or anything like that. Yeah. I don't do anything like that.

I have a little spray bottle that actually came with my glasses that my eye doctor gave me. And I, of, of, I think it's just pure water or something, but I, I will sometimes spray that on there with a little eye glass cleaner, but generally,

and that's usually if I'm like taking a picture of it for an article sure but generally i'm i'm just pulling up my hoodie sleeve and rubbing it that's about it because i just feel like that they these things get so dirty so greasy so oily so fast any kind of like involved cleaning process it's just going to be frustrating because you're going to be doing it all the time, right? Because you could clean an iPad screen in 10 minutes, it's going to have fingerprints all over it again. That's just how it goes. Chris asks,

do we have any thoughts on when or if an Apple TV dongle will be likely to come out? Chris just got a new TV and doesn't want to spend $180 for an Apple TV 4K right now. Well, the report about this was that Apple was considering it, not even that they were designing it. So I think it would likely not come out for a long time.

I think the thing to watch for is to see if AirPlay or Apple, you know, access to Apple's TV and movie library gets added at some point to a Roku or Amazon products, because then you could go that direction and just see. But I think it's an open question about whether Apple will ever do a stick kind of product for Apple TV. And I wouldn't hold my breath for it because there are no legitimate rumors that it's actually happening. Yeah, there could at least be some pricing change for the Apple TV along with the streaming service. Like that could also happen.

Yeah, but it's never going to be the price of an Amazon or Roku, right? But I would say that if you are able to wait on buying an Apple TV, it's not massively important to you right now. wait on buying an Apple TV. It's not massively important to you right now. I really, really believe there will be an event in the spring and if they're going to do anything, they're going to do it then.

If any changes to the Apple TV in models or pricing is going to happen within the next 6-12 months, it will happen when they announce the tv service would be my expectation at least um but yeah but we'll see so yeah if this is this is you know we'll give the advice that we always give when it feels like that there's something looming and if you're able to hold off then you should and right now of everything in apple world that

is looming like if anything's going to occur before WWDC, it's the TV streaming service. And so then that would be the most logical time for any hardware that goes along with it. So if you can wait, wait. And finally today, Jared asks, Jason, what are the rules for Apple review units? I hear people talking about how some keep them for a long time,

some turn them back right away. Can it be used as a personal device? Some inside baseball here today. Yeah and I don't know how much. I don't think I'm under any restrictions. So basically the rules are complicated. There are. You get units.

Well different models are different. The iOS devices. have different timing than max um sometimes the loan periods are long and i think to myself i don't want to keep this thing that long right and i'll send them back uh so it can really vary i I do have like Macs. They always want back within a very short period of time. So I had, you know, I had a MacBook Air for a while and a MacBook for a while. And it's one of those things where it's like, Oh, I'd really like to have one so that I can write about the, like,

have a MacBook Pro so I can write about the touch bar or have a, have a MacBook Air so I can write about touch ID. And but they want it back and I don't want to buy one. So I just sent them back. I'm like, oh, well, I bought Lauren a MacBook Air. So we actually have a MacBook and a MacBook Air in the house right now in use, which is one of those funny things where as somebody writes about this, it's like, well, you can use this and that'll be great. And also it'll be around in case I need to write something about it, which is, it pulls double duty a little bit in this house. iOS devices are a little bit different. You can, there's a short loan period, and then you can ask for an extended loan, which tends to be for a longer period of time. They

still want them back eventually, but sometimes I will take advantage of that because I want to have a product around for reference, especially like the next time that product gets updated. So I have a, I think I have, do I have a seven and an eight? I have some, I have some older iPhones in a drawer that I pull out when it's the new iPhone comes out and I want to take a picture of all the different models or I want to compare the cameras or stuff like that. I also save almost every phone that I buy and every iPad that I buy for that same reason, which is I want to have some old models around that I can compare. Can it be used as a personal device? around that I can compare. Can it be used as a personal device? Well, while you've got it, you can, although, you know, don't give it to a friend because Apple will want it back. I sent them a box of stuff in December full of different phones and iPads and stuff that were on the

extended loan. It's still a loan. They still want it back. So it's complicated and kind of boring. But it is basically, you know, you get to keep them for a while, I still have the 10R, because I don't have a 10R in my family. And they, they I reached the end of the loan period. And I said, Can I extend on that one? Because I don't have one. And if accessories come out for it, you know, or if I want to take some pictures comparing it to the XS, I want to have one around. And it's also well on their rights to say, no, we really need it back. And sometimes they're like, yeah, okay, hang on to that. And so I've got it in its box in a drawer where it sits. And occasionally I'll take it out and pop my SIM card in it and use it for a couple of days. So it's boring and complicated, but it is one of those things that is more of a challenge

for me now because I can't buy every product, right? I can't afford to buy every product. I buy, I still buy a bunch of stuff. Like I got a loan on the, on like product A and then I had to buy product B, like because they, they're like, like when they do iPads,

they don't give you both sizes to review. They give you one size to review and then I buy the other one and then I end up with having bought two iPads instead of one because I need to have both. And I do that sometimes, but I can't afford it. At Macworld, we bought everything. And now I can't afford to buy everything. So sometimes there are holes in my collection. Like I don't have a touch bar Mac in my house right now. And sometimes I've got some review units that are extended. And sometimes it

is stuff that I've bought and put into use in our household that is there for both personal use and also sort of on call in case I need to run a speed test on it or take a picture of it or something like that. All right. If you would like to send in a question to be answered at the end of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade, and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can. We've got a good list building up for future episodes as well, so please keep sending them in, hashtag AskUpgrade to do that. If you want to find our show notes for today's episode, relay.fm slash upgrade slash 232 is the place to go,

or they should be in your podcast app of choice, but if they're not, they're always on our website you can find Jason online in a bunch of places he's on Twitter he's at jsnow he's jsnow on Instagram as well if you want to see Jason's pictures of his wonderful animals which get posted every now and then dogs cats sporting events occasionally food

yeah all the great things you can find Jason at the incomparable dot com where Jason is a host of many wonderful shows about beautiful pop culture things. But Jason also hosts many shows here at RelayFM as well. Like I do, you can go to Relay.FM slash shows to find this and many more podcasts

about technology and the worlds that connect to that. You can also find Jason's work at SixColors.com as well. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E, on Twitter and Instagram. Thanks again to our sponsors this week. Hello, Pingdom, and the wonderful people at ExpressVPN. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.