Upgrade - 241: The Tweaky Features

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

Disney finally unveils its streaming service at a price that makes us wonder just what game Apple thinks it's playing; we get a sneak peek at some possible new iPad features for iOS 13; and Jason and Myke ponder the major changes due for the Mac this fall with the departure of iTunes and the arrival of Marzipan.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 241 today's show is brought to you by kiwi co luna display and squarespace my name is mike hurley and i'm back and of course jason snell is here hi jason snell hi mike hurley welcome Upgrade program. Thank you. I would like to thank John Syracuse for filling in last week. I always enjoy listening to Upgrade. Upgrade's a good podcast, so it's sometimes nice when I get to just appreciate it as an Upgradian instead of a... How'd I do with the

theme music last time? It felt pretty right to me. I tried to emulate the Mike Hurley creative choices with the theme music last week. Well, what i would say is i didn't start it and think oh jason so you must have done the right job right because usually you'll put in like variant b or something right so i appreciate i appreciate uh that but nobody cares about this literally except for me and you so we should go into hashtag snell talk and we

have a question from dylan and dylan wants to, Jason, what do you prefer, day travel or night travel? I prefer flying early in the morning. And getting up is terrible, but I can do it. It's fine. I don't like getting up at four in the morning or whatever and going to the airport, although there's no traffic four in the morning and the lines are not terrible four in the morning.

But I prefer to do that for a few reasons. One is I live on the edge of the Pacific ocean, which means almost all of my travel is to the East. And, um, the later you travel, the later you get there, like leading to the fact that if you travel too late, you are getting, it's an overnight flight, it's like a red eye, and then you're getting there the next day. And the problem is I don't live there. And you don't,

flying a red eye when you don't have a destination where you can just kind of go home is not good because then it's 6 a.m. and you're on the streets of Boston or wherever and you can't go to your hotel your hotel won't take you in for another um you know eight hours nine hours yeah you're just and so just a zombie with a suitcase wandering the streets i've done that it's not good um and so the red eye is not really practical for me, for something other than, I suppose,

like if we came back from Hawaii on a red eye, which I've never done, that might work. The other big thing is that if you go in the morning, the planes generally, with the exception of red eye flights, generally the airlines reset their planes in the morning and the plane has been sitting overnight at the gate or in a hangar or wherever, but it's ready to go. You haven't had a chance for your flight to get delayed because the plane that your flight is on is delayed somewhere else in the country. It's already there, which means that early in the morning, there are fewer delays and it's more reliable to fly in the morning. So I generally try to fly first thing in the morning if I can manage it some jason snell travel hacks right there that's oh yeah oh yeah

deep deep stuff so the people tune in for i very quickly when i'm going to america i like to leave early in the morning when i'm coming home i like to leave late at night i fly overnight to europe yeah overnight to europe from the west coast it's such a long flight that it's really the only only way to do it and because it's I know that's a red eye, but because it's an overnight flight to Europe, by the time I get to Europe, it's already in the afternoon most of the time. I did once fly in to London and we got in at 6 a.m.

Again, no place to go, just a zombie. Not good. Don't want that. So this actually ties into a programming note. We're going to be a day late next week because Jason is traveling. Nothing's happening. There's no... Well, we don't know of any big news.

We're not holding the episode because there's a new iPhone. No, there are no embargoes that I can... If I have an embargo... No, here's the thing. If I have an embargo, if I have something that is secret i can't say that i have it it's like the canary clause in one of those contracts where like if you stop talking about it then maybe it's true um but if i don't have one and i say i don't have one i'm not lying because i wouldn't lie i would deflect or something right but i wouldn't lie

about it i don't have anything do i have to ask you the question? Is that how it works? I'm going to a wedding. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm going to a wedding on Easter Sunday, basically, and I'm not getting back until Monday afternoon. And so we're going to do the podcast on Tuesday morning and release it afterward. So just one day late next week, is what I'm saying. It'll be very similar to the one last week where we had to record late and released it late. In this case, it'll be a day late.

It'll be okay. It'll be a good episode, though. I'll be awake, which I wouldn't be if we were recording it the day after a wedding while in a hotel room. So that's why we're delaying it. We're delaying it because we care. Yep.

If you'd like to send in a question like Dylan did to open the show, hashtag Snell Talk is the way to do that. We use Google Docs here at the Upgrade program. And as I look at it right now, the ghost of John Syracuse is hovering over this Google Doc. So it can only mean that it is time for follow-up. Do you see his little face there up in the corner?

Yeah, I do. He's hovering over us now, which is terrifying. What's exciting, Mike, is that means that we're in one of his 1000 open tabs yeah yeah i feel like i need to start leaving him some little messages or something i don't know um you've uh published your imac review we've spoken a ton about this imac over the last few weeks but i just kind of wanted to get the sense from you like i have two little questions for you one is do you recommend this this imac after having using it and two um i've heard you mention this in a couple of places you mention

it in the article too about the and i've heard this said in other places as well like the idea that there is a potential logic that a bigger change is coming to the iMac which is why this one has mostly remained the same except for some of the internals. I just wanted to test the water of, do you think that there could be any wishful thinking in there? So there are my two things. One, would you recommend it to people?

And two, do you think a change coming soon could be a little bit of wishful thinking? So the review is, I mean, it's almost like an essay, especially since I wrote about some of the performance stuff on Macworld before. It's kind of like an essay on the state of the imac right now more than it is anything else um i do think that if you are torn between the base model imac pro

and and specking up a high-end imac that unless you have some very particular need for some aspect of the iMac Pro, you shouldn't get the base model. I feel like the high-end iMac is so much cheaper for basically the same performance. Even if you put in the RAM and the SSD and everything and the high-end video card and all of that, you're still going to save $1, dollars, $800 over the iMac pro. And that's real money for the differences being like, unless one of those differences really matters to you. So I feel like what this really has done is, is kind of pushed the iMac pro. Like if you want to an iMac pro and are going to spec it up to the, like the 10 core model or one of the even more expensive models, then yes, of course, get the iMac Pro.

But if you're just thinking, well, maybe I could eke out the $5,000 model, I think you should seriously consider not doing that. Now, I have the base model iMac Pro, and I'm happy with it. But part of that is that I do podcasts, and the fan is silent in this. And that's sort of reason enough for me. But even so, it would still be a harder decision. Plus, if you don't need the RAM, you can actually buy less RAM because the base model iMac comes with 32 iMac Pro. And I think the iMac, you can spec lower than that.

So there's other ways to save money as well. And it comes with a terabyte SSD in the iMac Pro, and I think the iMac, you can spec lower than that. So there's other ways to save money as well. And it comes with a terabyte SSD in the iMac Pro. And if you wanted to save money, you could do that and save even more. I think my larger view of these iMacs, and we have discussed it at length here, is this is the 2012 design. Something's got to give. The fact that this is the last new Mac without a T2 processor in it suggests to me that this is, I mean, I feel like it's inevitable that there will be a new iMac that will be very different technically. And it's unclear when that will come. And will that be, will this just continue to be an Intel Mac until Apple switches to ARM? Or will there be a new generation

that is an Intel iMac that has presumably smaller bezels and a rethought cooling system and no spinning hard drives and stuff like that? I feel like that change is inevitable, that this is the end of the line and that this feels like

modern processors in old tech. And, you know, that's fine. It's a really good computer and very powerful, and you can spec it up to a lot. And if you need an iMac, I'd say go ahead and get it. But at the same time, I do look at it and think it's kind of an outlier at this point. It's not a modern Mac in some senses. In some ways, that might be good. There are probably going to be things, to be things several years out from now. There are going to be things it

can't do because it doesn't have a T2 processor. There's probably going to be things that it can do that modern Macs are shut away from because Apple's like, no, no, no. You can't, I don't know, running old operating systems and things like that. I don't know. It's a quirky thing where it's not what you expect from a brand new Mac in 2019. But that said, a lot of that stuff is for the future and is charting Apple and its general direction with computers. And it doesn't take away from the fact that it is, you know, they have great screens. You can power up that 4K iMac if you don't need a giant screen in your face. That 4K iMac can be made pretty powerful too, including having powerful graphics and not the super high-end ninth generation Intel processors, but a pretty powerful processor in it. So, you know, they're good. I just think on the larger story, this is Apple kicking the can down the road a little bit and

i you know i'm a little frustrated by that but i am you know i don't think it really affects whether it's a good computer or not i just i'm a little frustrated and it makes me wonder why they're doing it and it may be as simple as they have other mac stuff that they're working on and the imac sells pretty well as it is. And they don't want the iMac to maybe get painted in the corner like the MacBook and the MacBook Air, where the added expense of a brand new iMac without spinning hard drives as an option would mean that the whole iMac line got more expensive and that they would be, you know, I think they're price conscious with the iMac because they sell a lot of base model iMacs.

It wouldn't shock me if they take the 27-inch and do a new version of that in the future that is modern. Isn't that how the Retina started? Yeah, the 5K came in 2014. I'd forgotten this because I bought the 5K iMac and it's right when I started as an independent. The next year, the 4K iMac, the 21.5 got Retina. So that may happen again where we see a totally brand new 27-inch iMac or other dimension, who knows, and that the 21.5 can stay down there in the price line with the non-retina version and even a retina version with spinning discs. And that'll be a cheaper one. And that will allow them to price up the big one. I also guess in a funny way, the iMac Pro is kind of like that too, right? Where it's just like, it's the very top end,

like size-wise, the most expensive one. And they did a bunch of weird stuff to it, which will eventually, some of it will find its way into the product lineup, you'd assume, right? Looking at the way that things have gone in the past. I would assume. Although it's weird because I feel like the iMac really needs an external redesign. And maybe it doesn't.

Oh, I agree with that. But it's seven years old, right? And we live in a world where everybody's pulling in the bezels. And the funny thing about the iMac Pro is internally, I think it is what Apple wants Macs to be because it's got the T2 and it's SSD only. Externally, it's just a space gray version of the 2012 design. So it's not there either. But it's possible that, yeah, it's possible that we don't know the final fate of the iMac Pro either, right?

Like it was designed in a world where there was no Mac Pro, but there is going to be a Mac Pro. So it's also not impossible that the iMac Pro is a one-off. Yeah, one and done. They do a new iMac 27 that has the ability, maybe they even design it so that they can sell a, you know, a high-end thing that's even more high-end than what's in the iMacs today. And they say, beyond this, you should just get our external display on a Mac Pro, because the need for the iMac Pro goes away in that scenario. On last week's episode, you noted a Ming-Chi Kuo report that suggested that the mythical 16-inch MacBook Pro was delayed. It turns out that report was incorrectly translated.

It turns out that report was incorrectly translated. The report was mostly about the external monitor. And when it was originally translated from Ming-Chi Kuo, it was believed that he was saying that the MacBook Pro was coming later, but it's actually not mentioned at all. So there is currently nothing to suggest that the MacBook Pro is going to not meet its original timeframe, whenever that may be. So basically, the idea of it not coming out this year, there's nothing to say that now.

Right. That was a, we mentioned it very briefly last week in that interim where there were these initial reports saying that he said it wasn't going to happen. And then we got a better translation it said that's totally wrong and that's not what it says at all and last piece of follow-up uh we'll talk about this more over the coming weeks for sure as of this morning jason's uh 2018 ipad pro bridge keyboard arrived yeah bridge sent me one that they say is one of the first ones off of the final remember i, a couple months ago I had a prototype.

They say the final, and they're producing them, and they're going to start fulfilling orders. It looks like it's going to happen in early May. I think if you order now, it's coming for May, but I believe they originally said that some would start shipping in April, which seems possible. Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. I think that it's all going to be shipping in early May.

And it looks good so far. Although, again, I ran a little typing test on it and I typed it at full speed and it worked. But I want to live with it for a while. I will say that having the old bridge on the old iPad Pro, it kind of ruined me to the point where I am in those situations now with the smart keyboard. And I'm like, OK, I'm just not super enthusiastic.

And the smart keyboard's fine, but I find myself longing for the better keys of the bridge keyboard. So I'm looking forward to trying it out. And I'm very excited about that. It's getting a little warmer weather, doing doing more work outside in the backyard it's very nice to have that set up with a with the bridge keyboard so i'll report more as i use it all right so let's talk about disney plus so uh there was a investor meeting this past week where Disney gave a bunch of details about Disney+.

So I'm going to run through a bunch of these and then we can kind of wrap it up a little bit just to keep everyone on the pages of what we do here in the Upstream segment of Upgrade. So it's going to be launching in the US on November 12th. It will cost $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, which is a really nice price. By the end of year one, there will be

7,500 episodes of TV shows. Some that will be currently on-air, some off-air, so like some effectively vault stuff. There will be 25 original series, all by the end of the first year. And one of the key things I think that brings that

total number up to 7 500 is all 30 seasons of the simpsons will be on disney plus um there will be 400 movies on the service as well 10 will be original again all within the first year it's ad free so that that price that's 699 a month that's all it is there's no ads they're putting it everywhere they can smart tvs games consoles it's on the web it's in apps according to bob eiger they're going to put it on apple platforms probably the apple tv but we don't know how much it will be yet international rollout is going to be happening steadily they're going to be hoping to be doing west europe and the asia pacific also in q4 because uh so by the end of the year

and then Eastern Europe and Latin America in 2020 but the reason that they're staging it out a little bit is they need to wait for rights to expire in those regions as expected they're locking up the big movies so you're only going to be able

to stream movies like Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4 Avengers Endgame and Frozen 2 on Disney Plus, it's the're only going to be able to stream movies like Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, Avengers Endgame, Frozen 2, and Disney Plus. It's the only place you'll be able to stream them. And they previewed a bunch of original programming, including some new stuff. So the things that they spent some time talking about was Jon Favreau's Star Wars series,

The Mandalorian. There's a Rogue One prequel, starring Diego Luna. A Clone Wars series, a Monsters Inc. series called Monsters at Work, and then there's a bunch of Marvel stuff, including a Loki TV show, a show called WandaVision, which is Wanda and the Vision,

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Hawkeye. And those four shows all include the A-list movie actors replacing their roles. Yep. Pretty big, right? They're not kidding around pretty good i i should say for for clarity's sake that when we say um you can only stream them on disney plus my

understanding is that you know they're still gonna sell you know you still be able to go to it's not the only digital place you'll be able to get them and rent it and all that stream them you only have a streaming service it'll be they going to wait for all the Netflix contracts to expire and things like that and then they will disappear from Netflix. And Captain Marvel is the first

where they, it is the first movie that is not touched by their contract on Netflix. So it will never go to Netflix and all the rest of them will slowly just drip off of Netflix and disappear.

And I imagine, you know, the same thing is going to happen to all of the Disney animation stuff and all the Pixar stuff. It's all going to drain out of Netflix and then reappear on Disney Plus, along with all those movies that Disney puts in the, you know, the vault where they don't sell them for a while. Those are all going to be on this service. But the big thing here is the price, right? Like this is a super aggressive price. It's way less than other services like Netflix, especially charge. It's way less than anybody really expected Apple to charge.

And Apple has no catalog and just some originals that are not tied to these mega brands that Disney owns. And I talked about this with Tim Goodman last week on our TV podcast that we do. And, you know, he believes, and I think he's right, that this is a real wake-up call, if they didn't expect it already, for Apple, that it's hard to imagine how Apple can come into the market with something at $9.99 or $14.99 when all they have is originals. And it's starting to make me reconsider. Not sure I believe the people who are like, well, the only way they need to do they just need to give it away for free. Like, I'm not I still don't believe Ben Thompson wrote about this today. Like that Apple's business

model is, is like Amazon's is really to kind of like build a nice home where they can resell all of these other streaming services. And I, you know, that's true, but they also want to make money on their own service. I do think that this makes it harder. Now I, I just, I don't think Disney, I think Disney cares so much about this, that they're willing to take a loss on this in the short term in order for the larger benefits. i would put money down that in five years disney plus costs a whole lot more than seven dollars a month yeah yeah but to go out with that not say it's introductory but they'll raise the price in two or three years right not say it's an introductory rate because it's technically not they can just they'll just have to raise the price later but with this so aggressively with so much content um that i think i saw somebody say if you're a

child or were once a child this is this is for you and they had slides in their presentation showing the demographic reach in in terms of age and gender of their properties and they're like here it is for disney here it is for pixar here it is for marvel here you know and they went through them here it is for star wars and then they for marvel here you know and they went through them here it is for star wars and then they did the final overlay which is like so here is our demographic reach for the service as a whole and that slide was basically like it's every everybody are you are you alive then we are gonna hit are you getting it yet this isn't just one demographic reach yeah so i do think that in in to put it in apple terms if i'm apple um there's no way there's no way that i can price my service above disney plus and expect it

to be taken seriously um they might still do it but like i i feel like they're gonna have to dig deep like if they want to grow i also also think, and Tim mentioned this last week, I also think if I look at this, I think Apple really does. If Apple is really in on this and truly wants to compete with Disney, with Netflix, with Warner Media, if they want to be at that level,

and I'm not sure they do, maybe they do just want to be a little more and i'm not sure they do maybe they do just want to be um a little more like amazon and create an ecosystem that's got some originals and resell channels and just kind of be that but if they want to be more if they really want to want to up their game and compete at this level they're you know tim's point and i agree with him is they're going to have to start buying um companies that have intellectual property, right? Because Apple is making deals with companies that have intellectual property like Amazing Stories or something like that. And with stars, not stars, the cable channel, stars like Reese Witherspoon, to make shows.

Disney owns Star Wars and Marvel and the whole disney intellectual property catalog and and it makes you it makes me think that if apple really wants to play at that level they're going to have to start buying entertainment companies with with catalogs with with back catalog content and intellectual property content but let me ask you though jason what's left there's stuff out there um you know it's not you you know, I think they could potentially make a move for Sony. I'm not an industry, you know, entertainment industry business investment expert here. But like Sony is a weird thing where Sony says they're committed to it, but it's sort of like a very weird business. CBS and Paramount, the whole Viacom stuff um they could they could

swallow that if they if they wanted to like they've got the money to buy some of these companies that are not if it's not owned by disney or warner or comcast i'd say it's kind of up for grabs yeah i guess there's stuff out there it does you kind of get what i'm saying it's not a lot it's not necessarily the blue chip stuff right and we and we when i mentioned warner like uh i had this discussion again and blue disney has a lot of the blue chip stuff but warner if it wanted to for its streaming service it has batman it has harry potter oh warner have an incredible like honestly i said this before you put harry potter in this conversation and we're talking a different game now because that is a massive franchise and

and i don't know who i need to talk to at warner to convince them to make a harry potter tv show uh but they gotta do it at some point i think right right for streaming and and the same is true for like i mean game of thrones that has been the HBO strategy, but that is a Warner property and they could do some other stuff with that too. So they've got them. And that's the power of it. So for Apple, I'm not sure they want to play at this level and I'm not sure they want the overhead, the burden of owning a whole studio. owning like a whole studio and i think this is going to be a real test of what apple really wants to do here yeah because there's there's two ways well there's three ways for them to go one way for them to go is to be like look this is really just a hobby and we just we're going to make some shows but it's not uh you know it's not a major tentpole of our business and it's just part of part of our thing i i think i think you're right but that's the that's the kind of option zero option one is we're gonna be doing this resell and also a bunch of originals

and we'll build a catalog up over time but what and we're gonna be you know in playing in that game with the kind of niche uh streaming channels as well as our own reselling of other people's stuff and that's what we're gonna do which might be okay but it's never going to set the world on fire or they need to load up and say well we're in this we're in this to be an entertainment powerhouse and because the fact is the entertainment giants are enormous now and they have gotten bigger. Disney's buying Fox, most of Fox. Comcast buying Warner. They are huge with deep pockets. And they have intellectual property. And they know that they need to win the streaming wars or they're in deep trouble.

And so if Apple wants to be in that fight at that level, they can do it. But they're going to have to spend billions on intellectual property. They can't make it work by just licensing some stuff here and there. So if they wanted to buy a bunch of loose studios that are out there, then they could do that. If they want to buy Viacom and CBS, then they can pick up Star Trek and they can do that. I mean, you can already see CBS on its own is sort of like, we're going to build a whole streaming service on the back of Star Trek. And even though there's only one show there now, they're like five shows in development. And that is not as effective for CBS because they've got nothing else in that vein anyway.

else in that vein anyway they're trying um whereas disney can say we've got star wars and marvel and pixar and disney and net geo right so uh it's a it's a challenge for cbs as a smaller company and and viacom it's sister company basically um and they're they're floating out there and i think it's going to be what we are focused on apple here so we talk about like apple needs to decide if it wants to step up if i'm um anybody else so justin marks who is the uh showrunner of counterpart uh one of my favorite shows of the last decade uh two seasons on stars and then canceled and he was tweeting about this because it you know nobody could find his show nobody Nobody knew about his show. It wasn't really marketed very well. Nobody could see it. You have to sign up for this totally separate thing. And so he was coming from that perspective when he said, if you're one of these small players

without the money to put in the game, forget it. He said, maybe I'm a little bit better, but forget it. And I think he's right. i think um rightly or wrongly and i don't think it's great if you're if you're a a niche player in like a genre like um like shutter for horror or brit box or am or acorn or crunchy roll um maybe right because that is it you're you're feeding a very specific audience but if you're sort of like stars and you're like oh we just do shows that people like i don't know i don't know if in the long But if you're sort of like Starz and you're like, oh, we just do shows that people like, I don't know. I don't know if in the long run if you're going to be able to make that work. So that's part of this.

And Starz is, I think, Lionsgate. So there's just a real question about, like, if these small entertainment companies are going to have to, if there's going to be a run of purchases or mergers or something in order to give them the scope that they need uh or if they're going to get picked off by the other big fish in this which could also happen amazon and apple yeah but also you know comcast and netflix and uh and disney and warner those are all out there too i think that maybe it's because of stuff like this why we didn't find out any pricing information about Apple TV Plus. It wouldn't have been the only reason, but I reckon

there's a reason. I'm also starting to adjust my thinking on this. I don't think that Apple TV Plus will be straight up free, but I think you will get it with any other service you pay for so like if you pay for apple music you'll get it or if you pay for apple arcade you'll get it

i think that's the most likely scenario honestly if i if i had to pick one scenario right now i would say that apple video apple tv plus will cost something like 9. or $799, but it will really not be that if you buy any other Apple service. That'll be either free or it will be almost nothing, but maybe even free just so, you know, Apple Music subscribers get Apple TV Plus. And that fits, actually it fits both models right because it fits the people who say they're going to give it away and it fits the people who say they can't give it away they got to charge for it well they'll do both they'll give it away essentially give it away i don't think no i i agree i agree so they will charge you for it if the it's literally

the only apple service you want they will charge you for it i think that's the most likely scenario but that they will either deeply discount or give away if you are an existing subscriber to something else or maybe just like music or something like that and this is it puts the uh hulu deal that spotify made into some extra context right yes where if spotify's biggest competitor is starting a TV service that they may give away for free with your Apple Music subscription, they can differentiate, right? Because you can't differentiate on a music catalog. You can only differentiate on other stuff like premium TV shows that are exclusive or podcasts that are exclusive for Spotify's side. podcasts that are exclusive for Spotify side. And they made the deal with Hulu where they're, you know, if you're a Spotify member, you can get the ad supportive version of Hulu, which still has a charge for free. And I write it like, that's the kind of way to survive right now

is you gotta, you gotta do that because their competitors totally going to do that. So it's, it's very interesting, very interesting stuff. It is going to be a wild ride, So it's very interesting, very interesting stuff. It is going to be a wild ride. But I think Apple, I think we need to watch Apple and see what their, you know, what level of player do they want to be here? Today's episode is brought to you by KiwiCo. When you're looking for fun activities for kids, it's a bonus if it's something that they can learn from as well.

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which is for everyone from ages 14 to 104. So when I say kids for all ages, I also mean people of my age too. But Jason, I know that you got a KiwiCo crate. I want to know what crate you got and what you thought of the pieces and the projects and the instructions and that kind of stuff. So I've got the Tinker Crate here, which is for teenagers and up. And I am up. And it is a kit for a walking robot.

And it's very cool. So it's got an electric motor in here, in the packaging, electric motor with a battery so it's got an electric motor you can hear the packaging electric motor with a battery um it's got a bunch of little gears and little parts and it's got some cardboard uh pieces for particle board maybe pieces for the legs and the idea is you get a little assembly project where you uh where you put the guy together uh piece by piece and you know attach it all and you've made something and then you turn it loose in your house and it terrorizes your cat. I think that's pretty much the plan. And I haven't assembled it yet, but I suspect I will be doing that this week. And it's

adorable. And if you want a head, you can use basically provide your own spherical object. So like stick a tennis ball on the top or the head is not functional the head is to just make it more uh personified so you can use a uh you can use a tennis ball or a balloon or something and give yourself a a terrifying robot face or a happy robot face depending you can change the way your kids play with kiwi co go to kiwico.com slash ahoy and get your first crate free now let me spell that for you that is k-i-w-i-c-o dot com slash a-h-o-y k-i-w-i-c-o dot com slash ahoy it's a great way to encourage learning in a way that your kids are going to enjoy our thanks to kiwico for their support of upgrade and all of relay fm so i every morning, every Monday morning,

I sit down and I plan out what we're going to talk about and I take a look at the things you recommend and I take a look at the news and I had a whole document ready. And then a couple of hours before we recorded today, friend of the show, Guillaume Rambeau, who's at 9to5Mac, published a, I'm going to say,

German-like report about iOS 13. This is a very interesting report. I'm going to say German-like report about iOS 13. This is a very interesting report. It's full of tantalizing information. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Guillermo Rambo and Steve Troughton Smith have made their name by analyzing things that have been,

that have been like sent out from Apple accidentally or hidden in places. That may be true here. He's not revealing how he got this information, but it says, according to people familiar with the development, which makes it seem like these guys have stepped up their game or people inside Apple have noticed them. I am expecting it's a combination of all of that. Knowing the way, because steve tratton smith is credited with helping uh gear with the article and knowing how they work

and the fact that he is now part of nine to five i expect it as a combination of all of that like that there is some code mining there is some sources and that kind of stuff um but this is a we're going to go through all the kind of the major things that i mentioned in this article but just at the top level this feels like a very complete list of things like the the stuff that we're going through i can imagine apple standing on stage and saying this is ios 13 and that being it and that's when i say it's almost like german like in that it reminds me of the way that mark german has done stuff in the past especially at nine to five mac he would write lots of reports like pretty much just like this one right and this is not to um belittle anything that's been done here but it's

just i think it's actually a uh a compliment because you know mark german kind of owned this space for a very long time and i think it's interesting to see um somebody else uh other people kind of stepping up and putting their name on this stuff and again we will see what happens right like we will see how right or wrong this ends up being but i feel like this is a this feels like a list that i look at and be like, yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, I think the only question I've got, I tend to believe what they're reporting is probably true again with the caveat. And we mentioned this last week,

the caveat that things can change, right? Like there's intent for this to be an iOS 13 doesn't mean it will because something could happen and they could decide not to ship something. It's entirely possible that things will fall out. But I'm inclined to believe that this is all real. I'm also inclined to believe that it's not necessarily everything. So I don't view it as maybe like a complete list,

but that it is a list of things that are currently planned to be in iOS 13 when we see it at the announcement at WWDC. When I say it's a complete list it's like you could show me this and i would be content with it but like i i expect there's more because plus there's pieces that are completely missing from like there's nothing here about shortcuts and i'm expecting that they will do something with that right you know there's nothing here about marzipan and that's going to affect the ipad in other ways but just as like a here are your tempo features for ios i can see some of this stuff being the majority of it.

So let's go through it. System-wide dark mode, including a high contrast option similar to macOS. So there's two parts of it here. System-wide dark mode, that's amazing. High contrast is an option in macOS display settings, which basically puts big thick lines or thicker lines around a lot of things. I actually use high contrast um because i like the way it looks right you know this this to me feels like two things you have a dark mode for people that want to use it and then high contrast which is another accessibility

option that is added in to go along with the dark mode um system-wide dark mode is something people wanted for a long time it feels like something it feels like it's something that's difficult to implement but feels like a low-hanging fruit right it feels like something that make a lot of people very happy and would make your products look amazing on the oled screens that they have yeah also the since mac and ios are going to share apps and mac has a dark mode this allows the dark mode stuff to be equivalent across yep which makes perfect sense right like it's like when you start tying you know you feel like um you know the meme of charlie day from always sunny with the string in the room right and like you're just tight putting all the stuff together but when you start when you think about um when you think about marzipan and then you think about all of the other things that can can come away from that if you start thinking

about there has to be a bridge between ios and the mac stuff like this starts to fall out it's like well what do you do about dark mode well you have to have one is what you have to do. So I think that's really interesting. I'm excited for a dark mode. So this is one that is, okay, multiple windows on the iPad. So this is something that Mark Gurman has been talking about for a while, like windows on the iPad. Now I'm going to need to just read this quote verbatim from the article because i can't i don't think i can do a good job of summing it up right so i'm just gonna read it each window will also be able to contain sheets that are initially attached to a portion of the screen but can be detached with a drag gesture becoming a card that can be moved around freely similar to what an open source project called PanelKit could do. These cards could be stacked on top of each other and used as a depth effect

to indicate which cards are on top and which are on the bottom. Cards can be flung away to dismiss them. So I took a look at what Rambo referenced PanelKit. And the way that I would describe this thing is, you know, when you're in an app and you get a little pop over. So maybe you type in the search field and you get a little pop up and you can see the results falling down into it. Imagine being able to tap that and drag it away. Right. So now it becomes its own little floating window over the top of the application. And I will put a link in the show notes to the GitHub project panel kit, which has a little animated GIF, which can show, which shows you what it looks like. And it might give you an idea for that. The thing that confuses me though, and there still isn't really any kind of, um, explanation for like, what do windows mean? What does that mean? Right. And, and, uh, I feel like

nobody really knows yet. Right. Like it's like, oh, there's going to be Windows. Yeah, but what does that mean, though? Like, that's the key part, that right now it feels like nobody's seen it, but people are talking about it. Yeah, our chat room is pointing out that the guy who built Panel Kit works at Apple now. Hey-o, hey-o.

Which is funny. So, yes, we had this conversation a while ago about like what does a multi-window world look like it's presumably not the mac although one of the things that this enables is a conceptual window like which is uh i don't know what that is but the idea is that you say okay my app has a window and it's a marzipan app um it doesn't necessarily mean that that window behaves the same way on the mac as on ios potentially right like on the mac it might be a window like on the mac right because windows windows could just be the renaming of what we

currently have right they could just call every section in multitasking it's just its own window right like it doesn't mean free floating with open closed dialogues like it's you know i think more likely it means something that's more like what we think of as ipad multitasking where you've got uh tiles of of instead of different apps you've got tiles of different windows um it's possible that it's it's tabs that would be another way to do it i just cannot imagine right which is what people think. There is a way that you could see an iPad app in front of your desktop, like in front of your home screen. I just can't imagine that.

And I think that's what people's minds jump to when they say Windows a lot of the time, right? Well, sure, people are thinking about the Mac or Windows. And I think this is much more what is the iPad, what's Apple's conception for a next generation kind of like flexible interface? And why do you need windows in an app? And the best example, and Safari does this now, but the best example is what if I have a text editor with two documents I want to have open, three documents I want to have open. You can't really do that. You can switch among them, but it's like not, the system doesn't let you do what you can do on the Mac, which is just have multiple documents open. And they could be in a picker, they could be in tabs, they could be Yes, they could be in overlapping windows. And I would be surprised if Apple says, Sure, just make a bunch of windows and have them overlap. I doubt that is going to be the approach. But the the little floaters that have taken the popovers and dragging them out is interesting because that is going to create a layered interface potentially,

but you would have to want to do that to yourself. And in some apps that would be super convenient because you, you want a floater that you can refer to or tap on, but you want to be able to kind of move it around where it needs to be. So it isn't obscuring content in other places. And it would then also be analogous to the to a floating palette on the mac which would be a positive new undo gesture so this would be a three finger tap onto the keyboard and then sliding left and right to undo undo or redo

now okay okay okay all right. No, all right. All right. I'm unhappy with this because what do I do when I need to undo something that's not text? Right. Now, this is a great idea for text. Like, yes, brilliant. But this doesn't solve the problem, right?

Like, the problem is not solved here. You've just augmented the issue. If there's no keyboard, you still have to shake to undo, presumably. The thing I use shake to undo for the most is misfiling or misdeleting an email message in mail. Yeah. Where I swipe the wrong way and I'm like, oh, no. And then I have to shake my ipad which is ridiculous i'll also point out there's already an undo button on the keyboard on the keyboard yeah it's already in the little quick bar i don't understand i don't

understand this i don't really know what i don't think it's solving the what i will say is i have like i had like a whole big thing I wanted to talk about, this undo thing at some point, and I haven't got the energy for it. But I think that the undo situation on iOS is more of a perceived problem than an actual problem. I think people think it's an issue more than it actually is an issue because it is possible to undo text with the keyboard, right? But people know that the shake to undo exists.

So they're like, oh, shake to undo. That's ridiculous. It was like, yeah, but like, what do you do, right? Do you want to put in control center? Like, where are you going to put it? Now, if you have a keyboard, you can use command Z most of the time, but there has to be some kind of like system-wide way of doing it. This still isn't that.

This doesn't solve the problem. It's nice to have more ways to do it. It's nice to do more like trackpad-like things with iOS, but this is not a fix to undo, which is probably not too big of a problem in the first place. I mean, I know that shaking your iPad is silly, but it doesn't bother me that much, in all honesty. But that's my feeling on the whole undo situation.

But I don't think that this gesture fixes what people want fixed, because for the keyboard, it's redundant, right? Like, it's a redundant thing. It's a button, which is way easier than a gesture anyway. And it's also, now we have a three-finger gesture. That is a very even if they they say oh well they'll put up a thing that teaches you how to use it like still counting the fingers it's kind of a power user gesture yeah there's already the two finger put on the keyboard

to move the cursor around the screen so now we're going to add a three-finger gesture that will let you undo back and forth rather than just tapping the undo button. It does. I mean, again, maybe it's the way that this has been reported. And then when we see it, we'll say, oh, that makes much more sense. But it's like, oh, it's actually system wide, right? Like you can do it in any app and it will work, right? Like whatever, we'll see. But even then it's an obscure, you know, multi-finger gesture.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Safari to automatically request desktop websites in quotes when necessary now this is a feature we have both really wanted but i am really keen to see what the details are of that like how does it know yeah is there is there a list of sites like youtube where it's like no no just always do it that Apple provides. Or what I've wanted for a while is what Safari on the desktop has, which is a whole bunch of per domain settings that you can change. And you can say, don't autoplay video on this site and all of that.

And that's what I'd really like to see in Safari on the iPad so that I could say, always load the desktop version of this site, block, you know, don't autoplay video on this site and all of that stuff and have it all be available on a per site basis. Because that seems to make the most sense, right? Is that you get frustrated that a site keeps pushing you into mobile view and you just say, don't ever do that again. Well, here's what I would like.

I would like that so I could tell it, but I want Apple to use their differential privacy data to know if people are doing this and then just do it. Oh yeah. That's, that's nice. If, if some, everybody forces it into desktop mode, we're going to just make it a rule that that gets forced into desktop mode. So then for most users, they never need to set the, uh, set the websites themselves, right? Because it should just be doing it on its own yeah because it'll learn from user behavior and i that would be uh fantastic it's a question about uh ios productivity right that's one of the big things here and there's a bunch of stuff we've already spoken about here which will make huge you know they're like they're big points and there was some stuff about like

trying to come up with collaboration systems so that like third-party apps can can have better collaboration within them font management is one of these things like custom keyboards that i never thought i would see in ios yeah you can do it now but you have to install a profile that contains fonts which is bananas and they say that there's just going to be a setting and you're going to have a be able to have a font picker and there'll be links to it and you can you'll be able to install custom fonts this will make me so happy jason because like i have you know i deal with a lot of paperwork and i like to use custom fonts and i have to install these like 10 individual profiles

using like an app like any font every single time i get a new device and i always forget and it takes forever and it's just like the worth i hate it i only do it like once a year but i put it off for like six months right yeah and so i will be very happy to be able to do real font real font management on ios see finally you'll be able to do real font management but like i am genuinely excited about it um upgrades to mail including smart categorization features and a read later queue who woke up at apple and decided that they were going to try and make an actual like 2019 mail app what is going on like this is wild to me i'm i'm very pleased about it right like so smart characterization would be like this is a newsletter this is important right that the stuff that you see in gmail the stuff that you see in lots of third-party apps read later is snoozing right but these types of features coming

to mail that is really exciting because do you know what everybody all mail applications are bad and apple could make theirs a lot better than it is already and and a lot of us just use mail on ios right a lot of us do not chase the endless trying to find the ideal mail client and i i just use mail and it's not very good and i would love for it to be better and this this is the type of stuff they should be. These are like table stakes for making a modern mail app is using smarts and adding features. So very excited about that. New gestures to allow for the selection of multiple items in collection and table views. Basically, this means a gesture which is similar to clicking and dragging.

So like if you're in like numbers or whatever, you click and drag. So it looks like they're trying to create gestures to make that sort of stuff easier and being able to drag and drop that around i like the sound of that right like let's try and be a bit more nimble here and and we have 10 point devices i know that this stuff gets complicated but these are power user features for work stuff so i think that sounds fun uh redesigned reminders app new volume display ui which is brilliant so no longer that big square in the middle would hope or maybe it's just a bigger square we don't know right like maybe maybe the volume thing is now just the entire screen who knows uh so yeah they're kind of i think the big things to take away from guillermes uh brilliant

report i would say yeah the redesign reminders app he also throws in is going to be on the mac too which makes me believe that that'll be a marzipan app um this fall which is i'm gonna miss when they give this an actual name i like marzipan as a name unless it never has a name i mean it's possible that it'll never have a name and it'll just be you know ui kit on mac right but then that's what we'll have to call it right like eventually over time we'll just start calling it ui kit on the mac and move away from marzipan but i do i do love marzipan yeah but jason is there anything missing for you from this report is there stuff that you think you should have seen but didn't i was gonna say and some of this has to do with the nature of their sources right like

they are detailing some very specific system level things. However, I will just point out that this report doesn't seem to mention anything about changes to the files app, to how the iPad accesses files, to if we're going to see the iPad Pro with that nice USB-C port have more ability to access USB-C devices, including devices that have file systems on them. One of my pet peeves about iOS right now, and I just noticed it's not here, not mentioned at all. Not mentioned that it's not coming, just not mentioned. So I'm just going to put it out there that that's one of those areas, file stuff and USB-C in general that, you know, audio

stuff goes in there too. How do they handle microphones and other external devices that are sort of handled in a very simple way now because of the assumptions made in the early days about an iPhone OS that are maybe not as valid with the iPad. I'm just saying it'll be really sad if this all comes out and I'm'm gonna have to wait another two years or forever two years and up in order to uh do what i want to do with my ipad i'm gonna choose to believe that there are lots of files changes and they just got missed in this report because i can't i can't conceive of there being no updates to that system because it needs them. It desperately needs them.

There are just bugs and weirdness in it, and it could be and should be and needs to be a lot better. It's just a fundamental... I'm not one of these people that feels like they have to fundamentally rethink the way that files are. I don't think you need to go to a file based structure completely. Right. I don't mind the hybrid system that they've got right now.

Like sometimes you think in apps, sometimes you think in files, because that's how my brain thinks. Maybe because I've just gotten used to iOS, but they're just the files that needs a lot of work. And I want to see Apple work on that. But I will say this report is making me very excited for June. There's a lot of stuff in there that I think I'm going to have a lot of fun playing with, so I'm really excited. For sure.

Yeah. All right, today's episode is also brought to you by our friends over at Luna Display, the makers of the hardware solution, the only hardware solution that can turn your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac, meaning you'll have a second display that is mega portable with basically zero lag and stunning image quality

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I use it to help me jump over hurdles that sometimes iOS falls down on, and it's become an indispensable part of the way that I get my work done. I'm so, so happy with it. And they're always updating it. They're doing a bunch of stuff like the new Liquid Video Engine, which brings significantly reduced latency and a faster screen refresh rate as well. Listeners of this show can get an exclusive 10% discount on Luna Display. If you go to lunadisplay.com, that is L-U-N-A-D-I-S-P-L-A-Y.com and use the promo code UPGRADE at checkout, you will get that 10% off. That is lunarDisplay.com and promo code Upgrade at checkout

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Jason, I want to talk to you about iTunes. This has been the talk of the town over the last week. We all kind of figured this was coming. It even came up on the show last week, right? Hence the title of the whole episode, kind of being about iTunes and QuickTime and all that sort of stuff. But then there was another report at 9to5Mac by friend of the show, Guillaume Rambos.

This is the Guillaherme Power Hour today on Upgrade. The next major Mac OS version will include standalone music, podcasts, and TV apps. We knew the TV app was coming. Books will get a major redesign. There's some basic details in there, plus some icons as well. Kind of just like, more

kind of like fuel for the fire that something like this is going to be uh happening which means the breakup of itunes a thing that we've spoken about forever um there was a very good debate i think uh on atp this week um with a sentiment which i can totally understand from marco of you don't know what you've got until it's gone about itunes and i've been thinking this myself a little bit recently where it's like when it when it's dead what actually happens and we spent some time talking about this last week on connected as well where you know like me and federico we just use apple music right and right if there's an apple music, it's going to be better than the really bad Apple Music support that iTunes has.

Right. Because it's very bad. It's super weird in places. The searching is terrible. The way that you browse feels it feels like it's loading a web browser inside of iTunes, which I'm sure is what's happening. Like it's it's a nightmare, not a nightmare it's it's not nice right and for me as just a complete apple music user i would quite like apple music the ipad app on my mac but i understand so you've got people like steven and then people like marco people like john i don't know how much do you use like these types of features of like the more typical itunes features adding in your own music, doing more categorization, looking at more information, like all that kind of stuff. And so the idea over the last few years of it's time to break up iTunes was build an actual new music player, right? Like that's what this has always been for the last few years.

Like pull the music features out of iTunes, pull the podcast features out of iTunes, make apps for them. pull the music features out of iTunes, pull the podcast features out of iTunes, make apps for them. It wasn't until now, because now this is what's probably going to happen, is let's just have the iOS app. Like no one was thinking that because that wasn't a thing we thought about

until last year that this would even be a thing. So now when the conversation is iTunes is going to get broken up into a bunch of distinct applications, everyone knows what that means now. What that means now is we're getting the iOS versions. I think at the core of what Marco talked about and what John also talked about, and I like what John had to say. I thought that was – I was building up all sorts of comments while listening to Marco and then John said them all.

So I was like, all right, okay, then we're good. I think the reality, right, reality hits here. This is the cold reality of it's not going to be some idealized, brilliant new Mac app that set of Mac apps that Apple is writing. It's going to be Marzipan and it's going to be maybe new updated versions of what's in iOS 12, but that's what it's going to be maybe new updated versions of what's in iOS 12, but that's what it's going to be. And you get that reality and suddenly it's not your ideal dream app. It is what you already have been using on the iPad all along, if you have an iPad. And I think at the core of it, if I'm going to dissect what Marco and John were both saying, especially. It's a lack of confidence in Apple in terms of Apple's interest in building apps that have depth for users who demand more depth than the average user.

Is the way I would maybe put it. Like that Apple in the past designed apps that were for the masses, but also had tweaky features for the power users. And that Apple of the last decade feels much more like an Apple that is not interested in the tweaky features or is too overwhelmed with whoever is building their apps

to devote time to that, that they struggle to update and build their apps as it is, which I think I agree, actually, I think is actually high on my list of my problems that I have with the way Apple is run today is that they seem to not be as focused

on their apps as they should be, that the apps they provide are not as good as they should be, and that they could be better. And it's not the fault of the people working on them. I get the distinct impression that there are not as many people working on them, and there's not as much attention devoted to them as there should be at a top level priority level. But I see that point, which is Apple partly distorted by the fact that Apple making decisions because Apple's been focused on mobile and it comes from that root decision of the iPhone OS is where iOS came from. It came from the small screen iPhone and Apple shifting its philosophy because the user it was trying to reach in 2000 is not the user it's trying to reach in 2019 or even in this decade.

And something like smart playlists feels like a last decade Apple to me, which is that Apple seems to have decided, regardless of the iPhone thing, that it doesn't want to focus on tweaky user features. It wants to keep things super simple. Apple don't make products for the crazy ones anymore. They actually make them for everybody.

Yeah, I mean, this goes back to something that we've talked about a lot, which is the Apple of today is reaching an audience that is massively larger than the Apple of a decade ago and even more so of two decades ago and i i think the problem is that that means i don't i don't think the size of the power user base has changed accordingly i think that as a percentage it keeps getting smaller and there's a really strong argument to be made that um that the tweaky stuff shouldn't be prioritized because there's so many other

things to do that aren't the tweaky stuff the problem is if you're one of the people who uses the tweaky stuff it's frustrating which is totally get it and a lot i am one of those people too right we all do and as well like i want to say i just wanted to add on this as well right like because there is like this i i was talking to atp as i was listening to it because yeah me too i agree i actually do agree with the majority of what marco was saying but the the power user stuff exists in the same way on iOS. Like the way he is describing himself being a power user on the Mac. I feel that way about iOS. Like I know the things you do that aren't shown.

I know the keyboard shortcuts that exist that people don't think exist. Right. I know keyboard shortcuts that exist that people don't think exist, right? Like I know the way that you would do a specific drag and drop to get this to work. Like I know how to get shortcuts to work the way that I want, right? It is nowhere near as complex. It is nowhere near as surfacable as well. Like the power user stuff is easy to find on the Mac. But there are those types.

It's not gone from iOS. It's just very different. But there are these types of power user features because I'm using them. Yeah, yeah. They're different and they don't go as low level as some of this stuff does. I mean, Marco does a lot of his work

and I do a lot of my work with shell scripts and things that are running that iOS doesn't do that. And that's frustrating because you do hit a wall. But you're right. There are power user features. And the proportions are very different, right? The proportions of power users in the Mac is way higher, which I understand. But I think the core problem here is Apple's philosophy of what its apps should be. And the fact that Apple is also a, you know,

as a company, kind of a control freak, which means they spent a lot of time talking about it wouldn't be a problem if any app could have access to the Apple Music Library, because then you could just write an app that was better for power users that would tweak it. And that would be an alternative. But there isn't an alternative. And the thing you've got is sanded down to this amazing smoothness, but it also means that it's like a featureless surface and you can't get a toehold. You can't get a grip if you're somebody who's trying to do something a little bit out of alignment with what they envision the use of their app as being.

And I can see that. At the same time, and this is me being a little optimistic here, but Apple has spent the last 10 years building a, or 15 years really almost, behind the scenes, building a completely new operating system, a completely new app platform. Modifying that operating system to work on larger screens with the iPad. Dealing with the early days of the smartphone era where it was a huge arms race in terms of feature development. And now it's more mature, but back then it wasn't. And they've got all that going on, and they need to write versions of their apps for this new platform, and they're maintaining the Mac. And is it any wonder that the Mac stuff got left by the side of the road, largely? It's not. But we live in an era now

where the arms race for smartphone stuff has lessened, that Apple is aggressively moving toward this single app platform across its operating systems. And I think that's a real opportunity. I think that's an opportunity for Apple now to invest more effort in its apps in general. And because of Marzipan, that means that it's able to invest that effort

in stuff that will be seen on the Mac and the iPad too, in a way that maybe it didn't do when it was so focused on keeping the iPhone pushing forward. And I think that could benefit Mac users and iPad users. And we'll see, right? It could be the same old story, but I feel like there's at least a ghost of a chance that now that Apple doesn't have to either implement the same feature twice in two different code bases or somewhat shared code bases. But you get my point, like, oh, we need to update this feature for the Mac and for iOS. And sometimes they're like, forget it. And they just wouldn't do it on the Mac. With Marzipan, this era, that ends.

That ends. And instead, whoever's in charge of reminders writes one app. and that deploys on the mac and it deploys on ios and and for apple music i think you know like john and i talked about last week ipad users benefit because a lot of the stuff the mac metaphors will be extended to the ipad as well when we talk about tear off popovers and things like that and the ipad will become more capable too because now you're able to target two platforms now if you like you're thinking, I might write an iPad, I might focus on the iPad version of my app, or this is an app that really requires the iPad. You're like, eh, iPad, I'm not really going to go there. But if suddenly you can write that app and you can target the Mac and the iPad simultaneously, that's a way bigger market. And I feel optimistic that developers of these kind of apps are going to look at Marzipan and say, oh, this is great. I can make an app that runs on the iPad and the Mac. And no, it may not feel like a classic Mac app, but it may get more better apps on the platforms. And that part is good. So, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, people who use Apple Music on the Mac this

fall are not going to be like, ew, gross. What is this thing? It's totally going to be a bumpy ride, even if they add features to it. But in the long run, I think that there are a lot of positives from the Mac. I don't disagree with Marco that one of the great concerns here is that the Mac just becomes an operating system that it doesn't have any of those features that appeal to people who want to dive a little deeper. And I hope that Apple will take this opportunity now that they've rejiggered their app platform to let Mac and iPad users who want a little bit more get a little bit more out of it.

Now that they're out of this decade-long period where they've been building a second operating system and a second app platform and in this huge arms race with Android, that starting from now, they can actually put a little more time into that stuff. It would be just a great waste and a shame if effectively the Mac becomes just a different screen size target for iOS, right? Like that would just be a waste. I agree. It would be a waste.

Like I agree. Although I will say, I will say that, that as the owner of a 12.9 inch iPad pro, I also think it would be a shame if the power given to a user with a 12-inch macbook air was not given to me oh 100 you mean you know i'm coming at it from that point jason i said i care about the most right and that's why i am excited i'm in the club of people who are excited about the possibility of marzipan because of what it could do to my ipad right like Like all of this potential in new applications and in power, I could have stuff that I'm used to using on my Mac,

on my iPad and vice versa. And that is incredibly exciting to me. Also, by the way, we're talking a lot about iTunes and Apple Music, like the podcast app on the Mac is going to be way better than the iTunes podcast experience,

in my opinion. Yes, that's why it doesn't get brought up. But you won't have to use it because Marco is going to be way better than the iTunes podcast experience, in my opinion. Yes. That's why it doesn't get brought up. But you won't have to use it because Marco's going to do Overcast, presumably, in Marzipan if he can, and that will be even better. But like, there are lots of other benefits here. I do think there's a lot of mystery about what happens with device sync and does that go away.

What I would like to see, I mean, obviously iTunes is going to stay around hidden in a folder somewhere for a while or downloadable or whatever it is but like what i would like to see i think there are some fairly basic things that apple could do in ios and mac os to make all of the things that currently exist in terms of all or almost all of the things that exist in terms of device management um that that people might want could just be taken out and put in the OS. Like in terms of maybe you get file access, you know, if they really do have the ability to like share files, so I could see the contents of my iPad and drag a file into it. Do I need iTunes to do that? Or could these devices just talk to each other? And you can airdrop now,

but I wonder if there are some other ways of doing things just to keep them in sync. So there's other stuff they can do. I don't think we're rid entirely of iTunes. Windows is still a big question, is what are they going to do on Windows for this? They could just keep iTunes for Windows around forever. I don't know. Or they could go to a web interface for most of it and reduce the Windows app to a device syncing app. There's some details here that we're going to have to deal with. But there is a lot of potential benefit. But there's no doubt, you know, anytime you go through a change like this, there's going to be a huge set of feature aggressions. And I think it's interesting that John Syracuse in that ATP episode came down basically the same place I've come down on uh iTunes match or people who don't subscribe to Apple Music which is I don't see how it's a

it's actually a big progression for iOS as well to let the music app accept audio files and put them in the library and then upload them if you're using iTunes Match or Apple Music, and add them to your collection. That's not an earth-shattering UI change to do to that app. And then you've got the ability to open a Mac with the music app and add your library and have it just work as if you had synced it using iTunes for people who don't use Apple Music. I feel like that's a feature that if it's not there this fall, will probably be there eventually. And then, and that's an example of something that presumably would come over to iOS and would be a benefit for if you've ever bought like an indie album on Bandcamp or something and gotten a zip file and been like, uh, what do I do with this on ios and the answer is there's nothing you can

do with it you can unzip it but then you've just got some mp3 files you can't get them in your music library that from that direction it would be nice if that was that was a uh new feature of ios that would be a good thing i know that this is going to come up a lot like this isn't the last time we're going to talk about this because it's's actually, it's not about iTunes, right? We all see this, right? Like this is nothing to do with iTunes. In microcosm, it is the story of what's going to happen this fall. Yeah.

And progressively, but the big blow is going to happen this fall when a new version of macOS ships and it's got a whole bunch of apps that come from iOS and they're not going to be, you know, even if they kind of look like macOS, they're not going to be the same. They're going to be of look like Mac, they're not going to be the same.

They're going to be really different. You know, I don't want to have to keep reiterating this constantly. This is so much more than all of that. Like, this is the future of Apple, one way or another. Because, like, we believe, right, it starts here, then we get ARM Macs.

Then what happens? And, right, you know, there's that german report a few months ago where he spoke about like it's ipad this year but then next year it's iphone and the year after that is universal applications right like this this starts now it's you know it's kind of started last year right we started to find out about it but now it's like okay we're building up to like everything changing in june good and bad so whilst we are talking about itunes specifically it's so much more than that and there's gonna be a lot of like people's identities being challenged yeah yeah for sure this is going to be in fact and and and for i know um so many of our listeners it's great by the way i am you know teenager and up right i'm up um this is going to be like the os 10 transition was in a lot of ways where in a two, three year period, the Mac of, you know, before and the Mac of after is almost unrecognizable.

And when you're in that and then you get past it and you're like, oh, yeah, this is my Mac now. But when you're in that period, it's weird and it's rough and it does challenge your identity because you're like, I always do it this way. Like there were so many people when Mac OS X came out that they're like, why does the Apple menu not show the contents of a folder or an alias that I put somewhere in the file system? And like as an OS X user today, you'd be like, that's bizarre. I don't even know what you're talking about. Why would the Apple menu do that? I have no idea what you're talking about. But that's what it did under classic Mac OS.

And people were really bent out of shape about it. And it's going to be, I mean, that's just a silly example. But like, yes, it is your identity as a person who is confident with your technology, who has spent maybe years bending the technology to do exactly what you want to do in the way you want to do it. You've bent it. It's bent you a little bit. You have come to a comfort level. And then Apple is going to roll in over the next two or three years and make you really uncomfortable. And, you know, again, I think there will be good and I think there will be bad. And I think there will be a lot of frustration.

I think the good news, and I got to say this based on my history in all the chip transitions and the OS transition that have happened on this platform, on Apple's platforms in the past, the good news is if you can learn to balance your enthusiasm for the new, you've been accustomed. I mean, maybe you've already taken a hit with the MacBooks over the last three years, but generally you're accustomed to this enthusiasm for the new. Oh, I want to get the new. I want to get the latest and greatest. If you can temper that a little bit, you can survive a transition because nobody's making

you move. And that's an important point here is that if one of the things that happens in these transitions is people stay behind for a while. And I would not be shocked if that happens here where people are like, you know what?

I'm going to keep my old iMac that still runs Mojave and I'm going to stay there for a while with my 32-bit apps and with my stuff that isn't from iOS and with my iTunes. I'm just going to hang out here for a while with my 32-bit apps and with my stuff that isn't from iOS and with my iTunes. I'm just going to hang out here for a while. And that happens in big transitions.

And that's okay. Like, I, you know, we had devices running classic Mac OS for years at Macworld because we, like, they were where our page layout got done. And they just didn't want to move because, like, the software wasn and they just stayed there and we made it work and then eventually they came across and it was a funny moment where the editors had been living on os 10 for like four years and then the production team moved to os 10 and they're like how does this work and we're like oh yeah let me tell you all about it because we had been living it. That's going to happen and it's going to get frustrating. But if you can learn to temper your desire to push forward and use the latest and greatest, it can serve you well in transitions like this. If you've got something vital that you do and it's jeopardized by the new way, the solution is not to use the new way. And you'll be able to

do that for a while, I think. So something to keep in mind. I don't know how this transition is going to go exactly, but having been through a bunch of them, it's something to keep in mind. Like I know we all as tech enthusiasts want to push forward and use the latest and greatest. There is no harm in stepping off the carousel for a while and and and letting it turn a few turns without you but and i will say if you do want to stay on the carousel the best thing you can try and have is an open mind yeah that's always the case right like like things will be you know again it's gonna get weird it's gonna be it's gonna get weird there are gonna be things that are great and they're gonna be things that are terrible that's gonna happen they're gonna be things that you're like why did they do this why like the number picker right one of the things that

happened on twitter is that guillermo rambo posted a tweet or or maybe steve trotten smith did and he uh replied to it but it was one of these things was like wouldn't it be funny if marzipan didn't shake that change that number picker from mojave, where you've got the iOS thing with the spinning things that you have to use a mouse to like click the spinning things to set a date? It's this ridiculous thing that should not be on a Mac. And the strong implication there is that maybe it's still there. And we're going to have stuff like that. We're like, why would you do this? And that's going to happen. There are also going to be things where you're like, oh,

this is really cool. And that's going to happen too. It is going to get weird. You are absolutely right. And some patience, open-mindedness, because part of this is you've got that way that you've bent your tech to your will, and it's bent you to it a little bit and you found this comfortable place to be there is a new there may very well be not 100 guarantee there will be a new place to be it's not going to be like your old place though it's not going to work the same and getting there is frustrating now first off you don't have to go there right away like i said but um but it can be frustrating to build up that new thing. And then once you build it up, you're like, oh, what was the problem? Seriously, OS X did that to so many people where OS X,

the rules are totally different from classic Mac OS, but there were lots of benefits and there were some things that really lagged behind and we all found a new equilibrium. And I think that will happen with Marzipan and potentially with ARM coming down the road as well. But it's going to be weird for a while, for sure. And there's going to be frustration and that's okay. Like, and so I heard that from Marco, like, I get it. And he's not wrong. There's, I think there's some good and there's some reason to be optimistic, but there's going to be stuff that's really frustrating. And I, my honestly listening to Marco, my core worry, and I do actually have this as a concern. My core worry is that where Apple's going, Apple is so unconcerned with the needs of power users that in the end, if you want to be an old school computer user with all of these things that are features that you expect from your desktop or laptop computer that in the next decade there will come a time when apple even says yeah if you want to do stuff like that you should just buy a pc but how how do you balance that worry of what apple's going to do with the same company who bent to the will of the pro user to create a new Mac Pro, an iMac Pro, and to, we believe, based on rumors, fix the MacBook Pro?

That is the reason for optimism, is that whoever got, while this marzipan stuff is going on, some group within Apple made the decision that they actually need to serve pro users. And that gives me hope, right? Because that Apple doesn't want to send power users to Windows. That Apple wants to keep them on the Mac. And as long as that Apple has a say in what happens on the Mac. And maybe it's outside marzipan, right? Maybe marzipan is just the, the, uh, marzipan. It's maybe it's like the frosting on a cake. Um, maybe it really is. And that underneath on the Mac, they have all the other things that you expect in the Mac and they don't go away and they do get improved. Maybe that's the case. Maybe that is their strategy is marzipan is for everybody, but the mac is still going to have the power underneath and i hope that's the case because i don't want apple to drive power users

off of their operating systems because i am one and i don't want to go i'm not interested in like all these people talk about the macbook keyboards and they're like oh i could just go to windows i'm like yeah that's a deal breaker i'm not going to do that i'm not interested in that but it doesn't mean that i'm not frustrated by the current state of affairs. Today's show is also brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace because they will let you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain name, award winning templates available to you and so much more. They are the all in one platform that will let you put your next project online. No matter what type of website you want to create, Squarespace have all the tools.

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you just sign up one of our plans to start at just $12 a month but if you use the offer code upgrade you will get 10 of your first purchase of a website or domain and show your support for this show that is squarespace.com upgrade and the code upgrade for 10 of your first purchase our thanks to squarespace make your next move make your next website let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to round out this week's episode. First one comes from MT Walker and they want to know, should I

hold out for the mythical, magical, modular Mac Pro or should I settle for an iMac Pro? I'm currently using a 2013 Mac Pro with 12 cores, 64 gigabytes of RAM, and a D700 GPU. I don't know what some of that stuff means, Jason, I'm not going to lie, but in

Matt's tweet, they posted an image of an activity monitor, and it was doing some Adobe Media Encoding stuff. It looks like they're a Premiere Pro user, and it seems like basically they need all the power they can get. Yeah, I...

It depends, as it always does, on how long you're willing to wait because i think at this point we're two months out from possibly hearing more details about the macro at least understanding a little bit more about what it might be and you might not want to make your decision it might be that you see that and you're like no the iMac pro is probably good for me and and then you go for it um but you know leading from what I think you were going to say I wouldn't unless you are having significant issues I wouldn't want to move right now yeah I think that's right that there there is um there is a thing coming in a couple of weeks a couple of months that may tell us more

and so that more information is good also the iMac pro yeah you know hasn't been updated since December 2017 when it was released which means I don't think there's new stuff for it but it means that if it's going to be updated, presumably that would happen at some point, and it hasn't been. So keep that in mind, what I said earlier about how the high-spec iMac will kind of reach the low-spec iMac Pro. That said, iMac Pro is great. It will. You can buy it with lots and lots of cores and lots of RAM, and that's all good. I think you could get it.

I think the other thing to keep in mind is what your feeling is about monitors because all the rumors are that the new Mac Pro will come alongside a new Apple monitor that will be presumably newer, bigger, sleeker, more beautiful. And if you want that monitor, then wait, because you can you'll be able to get that with the with the the Mac Pro, although presumably a modern iMac will drive that

monitor to just fine as a second monitor. So there's a lot of stuff going on here, I would say if you can afford to wait and find out what the deal is with this Mac Pro, and then make a judgment then. Go ahead and wait. Because I think the iMac Pro is great, and it will serve you well. But if you can wait a couple of months, wait and see, because that may answer your question. And it would be a shame to commit now to buy the iMac Pro that's been sitting out there for more than a year, when in two months, you'll know, hopefully, a little bit more about whether the Mac Pro will suit you. Here's an interesting question from Eric. What's happened to Photoshop for iPad? We haven't heard about it in a while, and we're a third of the way through the year.

Two thirds of the year remains. all they said was 2019 yeah i would not be surprised if this is a wwdc thing uh it might not be it could come out any day or it could come out uh at wwdc it could come out announced for ios 13 yep it's for as we kind of said at the time i think still might need some stuff that's not in ios yet right like that they know is coming because they're working together right like we that was very clear from the original announcements that like apple and dobi working very closely together on some of this stuff and i think helping push each other forward in for this stuff um yeah i agree like it is strange that we haven't

heard about it at all for a while right like there's not really been anything else it came out with such a bang and it was all this like it felt like for a few weeks always getting this information and then it stopped and you know i can understand what has been the avenue like where would they have what was the outlet for showing it? Or maybe there just isn't much more to show. So I understand where it's like, huh, what happened to that? I always thought it would be out by now. Like my mind, I don't remember the, offhand, I don't remember that if they gave any kind of timeframe, it was probably just 2019. But I always kind of thought, oh, well, if they've announced it in like August, September, we'll have it by the end of Q1. But that didn't happen.

And I think that, you know, probably a lot of people like me thought that, right? Like they're announcing it like six months early and we'll get it. It's definitely happening. You know, like we've had quite a few versions of this question asked to us, Jason. And many of them are kind of like it's obviously been canceled. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is happening because it's too important for both companies now. Not only did they announce it, but like there's a reason they're doing it in the first place.

And that hasn't changed. But, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if, like you, we get more about it in June with a date for when we're likely to see it come out for the iPad. Daniel asks, Do you know of a way to transfer music from an iPod Touch 3rd generation to a MacBook Pro? I've been trying to figure out a way to transfer my mom's music from her old iPod Touch to her iPhone 7 plus. I think about this one.

I have a couple of options. And I think they'll work. And maybe you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. There are apps like I Explorer, which I haven't used in a long time. This is one of those applications that like, will let you get in to anos device and kind of tinker around and you never really know what to think about with apps like that but i have used this one in the past for similar kinds of things where it's like well there's a thing that i need and i need to do and i haven't got any other way of getting to it or doing it like messages backups or whatever right right um but my other thought was if you signed up for iCloud music library wouldn't that just do it i don't think it'll upload from the iPod touch really okay i don't think so because i was wondering i don't know maybe would it merge

the the libraries but then i was worried about like oh but what if it then just deleted it all so um things like i explorer like i explorer has a trial uh i would give that a go and see if that will do it if that doesn't do it maybe look into something like high cloud music library but proceed with caution i think would be would be my thought on that one this is a tricky one i mean another one that i thought jason was like if you did an itunes backup would that carry over possibly the question is can you then back up an old old ipod touch to a brand new iphone or will there be a you know will that work where you can just restore the backup even though it's from the older operating system? It's possible if it's...

Depends on what those files are and where they're from. Yeah, yeah. So this is a very interesting question. But I don't know the answer, but I know of a couple of ways to do it. There's another app which has been recommended by Justin in the chat room called iMazing. iMazing, yeah.

I don't remember which one of these I've used, honestly, but they seem to be by and large the same kind of thing. But again, these apps are doing weird things, so always proceed with caution on that. That would be the upgrade recommended use. Mihir asks, did you get your Avengersgers end game tickets i'm wondering if there will be a following monday uh mike at the movies special what did you get your tickets jason i haven't bought any tickets but that's not going to preclude me from being able to see it i don't

live in a place where movie theaters sell out and you get reserved seats so okay i did and i get to see it on the 25th of april because tax cuts uh for disney means that uh a lot of these movies are shot in the uk which means that they uh either premiere here or they come out a little bit earlier um so i'll be seeing it on the 25th uh in the afternoon like it comes out midnight 25th here right but i yeah i don't think i could do a midnight a midnight stream a midnight three hours it's a three-hour movie mike yeah i'm not keen not keen on that so i'm just gonna go see it on the 25th which i'm very excited about yes i i will see it that weekend too so we're not going to be doing Mike at the Movies about it on this show. That's true, actually.

We aren't. No. We aren't. And the reason we aren't is because, you know, you never know. But the plan is that the following weekend's Incomparable episode will include one Mike Hurley. On his first ever main and comparable show appearance, which I am so very excited. And for a reason I can't describe really nervous about. So that's going to be a whole thing.

It doesn't really happen to me anymore, Jason, but like that's a different arena. It's like more Mike's weird movie opinions guide him through the show. Only you can find out. So that that's going to be, is that that? Is it that weekend or the next weekend? I don't remember.

It's the following Saturday. Great. So you will have a week to think about it, ponder it. It's very possible I'll go see it again. And maybe see it a second time. Yeah. And finally, Daniel wants to know, I want to get a new Mac Mini. Do you think it will be able to drive the new Apple monitor

at full resolution and frame rate, or should I wait until it's announced to be sure? I think it will. Yeah, I'd be super surprised. I'd be super surprised. Look, I think there's a reason that they colored that Mac Mini space gray. It is more focused as a Pro machine. I mean, they really kind of did say it as that,

and the laptops will be able to use that thing i would be i would be flabbergasted if there is a mac that is released right now that that can't power it because that just seems wild to me so yeah i mean keeping in mind that that mac mini can drive um a pretty powerful display, right? It can drive, it's rated for 5120 by 2880 resolution. So yeah, I would be shocked if it can't. I can't guarantee it. It can do like a couple of monitors, right, as well. Like it's, you know, it's got some real throughput.

Yeah, it can do up to two displays where one of them is 5120 by 2880 and the other one is 4096 by 2160 that's a lot of pixels so to you know is it going to be able to drive via thunderbolt 3 uh this thing i i i've got to think it will. If you would like to submit a question for a future episode, you can send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade and it will be included into our document and maybe we'll answer it on the show.

Thank you so much to everybody that has sent one in. Thank you to Squarespace, Lunar Display, and KiwiCo for their support of this week's episode. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to find Jason's work online, you can go to sixcolors.com or theincomparable.com. Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. And this show is a part of RelayFM, where you'll find many shows, some I am on, some Jason's on, and some are hosted by neither of us, but by equally talented, if not more talented individuals.

We have many wonderful shows at RelayFM. If you only listen to Upgrade, or maybe listen to Upgrade and one other, go take a look, because I bet there's something else that you would love. We'll be back next week. Remember, we're going to be recording and releasing on Tuesday for no reason other than travel. Yep. No conspiracy theories, please. You can make them, but understand that they are uh they're not true it's just a regular episode i'm going to travel for a family wedding

that's what they want you to think goodbye everybody say goodbye jason snell goodbye everybody the black dog barks at midnight. Wink wink.