Upgrade - 242: Myke and the Modems

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

What's next for macOS and iOS? This week we discuss all of last week's reporting by Guilherme Rambo about the future of Apple's platforms, from Find My Friends to support for external displays and pointing devices, to the complicated future of automation on macOS. Jason also extolls the virtues of the Kindle, Apple and Qualcomm come to terms, and YouTube goes back to basics.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 242 today's show is brought to you by borrow text expander and moo my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike i brought the lasers we are ask upgrade already what's happened nope i just had some extra lasers there yep oh okay good well should we just should we start where we normally start with a hashtag snow talk question oh well i was i was tempted to say why don't we do the entire show backward but let's not let's start with uh let's do it the normal way i will say that is a tantalizing prospect for me summer of fun yeah can you write that one down? I want to do a backwards episode. Backwards episode.

It's downgrade. Oh, there it is. We're working this out on the show. We can't give away all of our secrets. Summer of fun is coming. Summer of fun is coming. Soon. Sooner than you may think. Our hashtag snail talk question today comes from Jim, and Jim wants to know, Jason, how is your life with your leaf going?

Better, worse, or as expected for range and practicality? Worth noting, a Leaf is Jason's electric car. It's an electric car, the Nissan Leaf. Yes, I bought a, for those who don't know, so excited about the prospect of getting an electric car, but I'm cheap. And so I bought a used, that Nissan Leaf had come off a lease that somebody had had it on for three years or something like that and so it's older and it doesn't have much range and i love it um it is a it doesn't have much range it the bottom line is you cannot drive it very far but we bought it as uh as a as much as i hate to say this third third car because my daughter basically has one of the cars and

she drives around with it and that's great. And we thought that this, originally this was going to be the car that we let her use and we were going to get rid of the other car. But quite honestly, we love the car so much that that wasn't going to happen. So Jamie drives the Civic around and Lauren drives the Leaf every day to work. She works in our town. And so the range doesn't matter. We take it whenever we can. So within our county or like into San Francisco, we can take it. I will take it longer ranges if there's charging on the other end that I can count on. So I take it up to Petaluma for TWIT because there's an electric car charger across the street from the Twit offices that I use. It's fun to drive. It's fun driving an electric car. I enjoy driving an electric car. And the only challenge with it

is because we were cheap and got an electric car for cheap, it doesn't have much range. And so that does limit us. That's why we still have the minivan. The minivan doesn't have much range. And so that does limit us. We have, that's why we still have the minivan. The minivan doesn't get driven very much anymore. But it gets driven when we need to take lots of people somewhere, or we need to load a bunch of stuff in the back because the seats fold down, or if we need range, and then we take the minivan. But otherwise, it's the electric car. It's great. I want all my vehicles to be electric, but that's not going to happen for quite a while, probably. But for now, I think it was a very, very good move to buy this used electric car because it gives us kind of the goodness of the electric car without a big cost. And at a weird time when we have this kind of with the extra driver in the

house. And also it satiates some of my desire, some of my fascination with other electric cars. It would have been like last year when they started aggressively marketing like the Tesla 3 and a bunch of things happen with the different rebates and things like that anyway there were several times where i thought to myself you know if i didn't have an electric car i would be uh buying an electric car right now and i was i'm quite happy to have uh gone the cheaper route and got the got the discount all right if you would have found it difficult to resist at that point. Well, those cars are all like $30,000, $35,000, $40,000. And we bought ours for like $8,000 or $9,000.

So, yeah. Yeah, this is smarter. Thank you so much to Jim for sending in that question. If you would like to help us open a future episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk and your question may be considered for future use. We should move on to some follow-up. On Photoshop for the iPad, which we spoke about in Ask Upgrade last week, where is it? Well, we heard from UpgradianJ, who says that his team was told at Adobe Max that it's looking like a

fall 2019 release for the program, which we'd also kind of speculated as a possibility, right? That it would be released later in the year, post iOS 13 coming out, right? Because it's like, oh, I bet there's some stuff in there that would be super useful to Adobe, but they can't release it yet because of it.

So, or maybe that's it, or maybe Adobe's just taking their time. But yeah, Adobe seems to be telling people if they ask at Adobe Max at least the fall of the of this year sounds good Jason you reviewed some new Kindles and I wanted to ask you kind of like one I don't know anything about these new Kindles what makes these new Kindles new. And these things just appear on six colors and I never feel like I heard them before. And then I wanted to kind of understand from you,

considering there are a couple of new Kindles in the lineup, what you recommend to people now as like the Kindle to buy for most people. All right, so the super short, the TLDR Kindle segment here. I like the Kindle because it's a unitasker. It just is for reading. I don't get any push notifications. I don't have the temptation to swipe over and check out Twitter.

It is really great in bright sunlight. They all light themselves now, so you can also read them in the dark, and that works too. I think it's a great product. I love it. I'm not interested in reading on my iPhone or my iPad. I will do that if I'm somewhere without my Kindle, but otherwise I won't do that. The new Kindles are the two lower-end models. The high-end Oasis remains and will presumably be upgraded at a later date. But the two new models, there's a new $90. That's the new base price. It's up from 80 Kindle, but the new base model Kindle is the first base model to have. It's not backlighting.

It's lighting. It's like side LEDs on the sides that kind of shoot out and light it because these are reflective screens. They're like ink on paper. And so you can't shine something from the back, but you can shine something from the sides and it works pretty well. And this is big because up to now the base Kindle, the cheap Kindle couldn't light itself. And, um, it's been like seven years since they added that feature to the first paperwhite. And, um, it's really dumb

to have a, an electronic reading device that you have to clip a book light to in order to read it at night. That's it's silly. So that's over now, which makes that base model, I think much more capable. Still, you know, it feels cheap, it's cheap, and yet more expensive than it used to be. But if you're somebody who is kind of mildly interested in having a Kindle to keep around, or, you know, take on a vacation or something like that uh this is the casey list test i would say this is i always think about casey because he's like well i'm interested in kindle but not most of the time just occasionally on a vacation or something at least that kindle that cheap kindle now um will light itself which i think is a big plus it's not waterproof though

i find in my life filtering a lot of my questions around what would Casey want helps me. What would Casey do? Yeah. So the Kindle Paperwhite also got an update. It's $130. So, you know, it's $40 more than the base model. And what you get with that is a much better screen. The base model Kindle's got like a 160 DPI screen or something like that.

It is. In my review, you can see it. Like, it's lower contrast and it's the text is more jaggy um the paper white you get uh basically retina level text resolution uh higher contrast it's backlighting or side lighting is better it's waterproof um and it's uh it doesn't have any um bezel stuff uh where where like the bezel is it's's like on the cheap model, the screen is sunken beneath the bezel. And a lot of like detritus, like a lot of dust and crumbs and junk get caught in the corners. And the paper white is flat all the way across now, which is really nice.

That's a nice, much nicer feel. So it's nicer. much nicer feel. So it's nicer. And if you love, love, love, love, love, love Kindles, then spend almost twice as much and get the Oasis because it's great. It's just way more expensive than the Paperwhite. And I think most people should buy the Paperwhite if you're in the market for a Kindle because it is with the waterproof and the flat front and the better backlighting and the better display. I think it's still the sweet spot and it has been. However, that cheap Kindle is, I think there's a much better case to be made

for the cheap Kindle than before, even though the screen isn't as good, the resolution isn't as nice. If you don't care so much and you just, you're either not gonna get a Kindle or you're gonna get the cheapest one around, I'm more inclined to say that people can get that one now that you can also read it in bad lighting or in the dark.

That is a big improvement. That's kind of a huge improvement. That's the number one, I think, required feature of a Kindle. So I'm glad they finally added it. I recently watched a video about e-ink, which I found interesting. I learned a bunch of stuff about e-Ink that I didn't know before. It's from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections which is a channel that Marco recommended

which I do really love. So if you are interested in learning more about E-Ink in general I'll put a link in the show notes. It's an interesting video. The guy who hosts this channel Technology Connections I actually don't know his name.

It's Mr. Connections. Mr. Connections. Technology to his friends. He does an incredible job of making what should be incredibly boring things really interesting. He's got a very, very good presentation style. That is an important skill. Yeah, because the stuff that he talks about, right? Like if you just look at his channel should be really boring but he does it he just presents everything in an incredibly good way

like he just did like this did this whole massive series about how the laser displays work it's just like uh i don't know how much you could get out of that but really really entertaining yeah and the ink is a fascinating thing because it is not like any other display technology it is it is really emulating ink on paper yes it's not just a funny it's not just a funny name it is it is and that's why it works the way it does where it's reflective where it is like the light comes down and hits the surface and reflects back in and that's how you see it as opposed to oled or or backlighting where the light is coming out of the display at you instead of and originating in the display instead of sort of bouncing off and coming up to your eyes. And that's one of the things I like about it. I think the e-ink displays are great for reading text on a page, which is what I use a Kindle for.

Apple and Qualcomm had been in some kind of legal battle over patents and payments and all this kind of stuff for a while and chick fried chicken don't forget fried chicken yep and this is not a thing that we tend to cover on the show i mean mostly because i don't think so i never put it in the show because i don't think i can make an interesting discussion out of that type of stuff so that's why we don't talk about it but they've settled now i think we may have talked about it at one point just in the idea of like is 5g going to come to the iphone and when is it going to come to the iphone because there was a whole period there where they're like they flew they flew journalists out to like hawaii yeah and did this whole demo of 5g you know i actually think we have yet to speak about this yeah Yeah, and I might have

talked about it on download. I wrote a piece about it a while ago for Tom's Guide, too, where I said essentially, I wonder if I talked about this with John Syracuse back in December. I wonder if I did that when you weren't around. Mike's gone. We can talk about modems. That's when it's been spoken about on this show. You spoke a little bit about it. Never.

And I have notes. Never mention modems to Mike mike i want to talk about 5g on this show so because everybody uh welcome to our new segment mike and the modems where every week we're going to talk about modems with mike hurley i hope i i'm hearing that mike hurley has just left the show oh well um anyway the important point here is that um apple has has been in a patent dispute with qualcomm for a long time. And last week, they settled. And nobody really knows why, but it has to do with Intel. It sounds like either Intel said, we're not going to be able to do 5G modems anytime soon.

It keeps slipping. You're probably not going to be able to ship it until 2021. That's a long ways away, right? Like 2021, we're not talking about this fall's iPhones. We're talking about next fall's iPhones not having the 5G networking because of Intel. It's also possible that what Intel said was, hey, we have a new CEO and we've looked at this business and it doesn't make any sense to have you as a client. So go get your modem somewhere else.

We're going to shut her down, right? We don't know which order maybe that happened, but regardless, it's sort of about Intel's either unwillingness or inability to ship these modems. Intel shut down its modem business last week in the aftermath of the Apple Qualcomm settlement. Again, these things are not unconnected, but we don't know necessarily all the deals. They will presumably come out in time. But a trial started in San Diego. They got through a morning where there was a labored fried chicken metaphor about how patents are like fried chicken.

I don't really want to get into it. It was hilariously weird. And then suddenly they settled. And so it sounds like in the background, Apple has been negotiating for a little while with Qualcomm about a settlement, which usually happens before the trial starts. But it actually happened on day one of the trial. I would expect that everybody had the conversations. Apple knew what Qualcomm wanted. Apple weren't happy, but they knew the terms. And then when Intel, my expectation is that Intel said to them, we can't do this.

So then Apple were like, well, damn it. At least we know what qualcomm wants yeah well there's that fast company story that mark sullivan wrote a little while ago that was pretty good that basically said um apple's between a rock and a hard place here because they're not talking to qualcomm and intel's dates are slipping and you know beyond a certain point intel is saying we can't get you a modem for the iPhone in 2020. And if you're Apple, you're like, this is not going to work. Because essentially, you know how Apple hates being tied to one supplier for anything. Because of their dispute with Qualcomm, they only have one

supplier, and it was Intel. There was a quick solution there, which is to settle with Qualcomm, and then you've got the patent holder and also the supplier of the modems that everybody else is using, more or less. And so they made that deal and they paid them money and they licensed their patents and Qualcomm is going to supply modems for future iPhones. Probably not this year, although it's not entirely impossible, but probably next year for a 5G iPhone. The 5G tech is also really early and not rolled out very many places and it's going to be a long rollout so i don't my tom's guide piece a few months ago was basically like it's not a big deal if the iphone doesn't have 5g in 2019 it's sort of like like how the original iphone didn't have 3gs like it was

early days it wasn't a huge deal um going going into 2021 still not having one not so great right just i mean it will become a marketing liability if nothing else. So this gets them in, you know, with the patents of Qualcomm and working with Qualcomm in the short term. And presumably in the longterm, Apple's plan is still to build its own modems, but it will have access to the patents. You know, it will have a licensing regime for Qualcomm's patents that they would use in building those modems. And I've even seen speculation that it's unclear if perhaps Apple might be interested in buying some of the assets from Intel since Intel is getting out of the modem business and Apple is getting into it. But I think that's just been speculation but uh so anyway basically what this

means is that apple is returning to the premier provider of modems in cell cellular devices and they've settled you know for huge amounts of money they have settled all of their lawsuits against one another that they have been you know they had a long falling out that is now over but probably the most important part of the settlement is that apple have a patent licensing agreement so at some point they will be able to make their own chips if they want to right i think that's like the key part of it which they do well in the short term the key part is that they're going to be able to use qualcomm yes exactly but like if you're looking at the long game yep yeah it's true and i just as a little aside here boy intel right like oh what are you doing man you know they missed the boat

on mobile they've missed the boat on modems that you know they're they're they're still shipping things for for pcs uh but you know they're they have issues on pc they have issues with gpus they're like it's um you know it's it's not a great time. This is the kind of thing that happens where very slowly over time, the previously impossible to stop monolith in some industry becomes mortal. And they made a series of bad steps that the new CEO has inherited and is trying to trying to fix. And that's why I am, you know, I think it's entirely possible that this all started with the new CEO saying, look, we're not going to do this. We give up because we're not just going to, you know, Apple's business isn't big enough to keep us in this business. And we have bigger fish to fry, honestly, somewhere else else because they're in trouble on a lot of fronts yeah because it's worth remembering like if you don't pay too much attention to it like whilst with our apple computers intel is the only supplier for the chips that we use in them that is not the case in the pc world right like you can get an amd processor or they have actual competition credible competition on the other side of things and

they're starting to fall behind in a bunch of different ways for the future it's like um it's like a way people will talk about microsoft and i've spoken about microsoft for years right microsoft are perfectly fine where they are right now but they're not at the forefront of anything and that's a problem yeah except that they are making headway in in cloud services stuff yeah i mean like i'm thinking maybe more kind of sorry i should have rephrased that a little bit a little bit more before sachin adela's time right where like yes yes you know yes we're still big in our old thing but where do we go from here and there are no there are no answers and microsoft has managed to

navigate that and that does feel like that's kind of where where intel is but there was a time when wintel was impossible to stop right but yeah time moves on anyway that's mike at the modems everyone's favorite news segment um now we will move on to everyone's actual favorite segment which is upstream where we look at news and streaming media and have a couple of things for you this week jason uh hulu has bought back at&t's 10 stake in the company now this is kind of confusing it took me a minute to get my head around this so hulu the company has bought back 10 that at&t owned in it yes these shares now need to be divided between disney and comcast who own hulu and that has to be worked out between disney and comcast how that 10 is going to be split up yeah. And that has to be worked out between Disney and Comcast how that

10% is going to be split up. Yeah, I assumed that it would be this thing where it would be proportional. And what that would mean is that Disney owns two thirds of Hulu and Comcast owns one third. But in talking to people who are more closely reporting on this, what I have heard is that it's a little more complicated. That seems the most logical logical outcome but it may be that there are actually rules in hulu's um you know rule book for investors that provide like one of the investors an option to buy you know buy that out um and the other ones to choose so there may be a choice involved like so for example um comcast could say we because they have the smaller allotment we want the whole 10 or maybe it's that disney gets to say no no no we're going to just put in and we're going to take this whole 10 or maybe it's just a very simple kind of like we bought it back it's

a share buyback uh that 10 disappears and you go from owning 30 to owning 33.3 percent and you go from owning 60 disney to owning 66.6 but regardless it means there are now only two players this was this this at&t thing was this weird outstanding bit yep it was inevitable that it was going to happen it was just about when and how because they don't they it's not part of their strategy at all whereas comcast it's unclear um what i've what i've heard the analysis that i've heard is that uh although it would seem obvious that that uh disney would buy out comcast share in hulu and just take it over completely that disney can't by having a seat on the board even though they're not the majority stake the way that Hulu's bylaws are written, Comcast gets a say in how Hulu is run,

which is interesting. It means Comcast gets a view into Disney's streaming business at Hulu, which is also really interesting. So there's this question of like, at what point do they want to not be in bed with Disney, their arch competitor anymore? And until that point, do they want to keep Hulu because it already exists? You know, it's where their shows are. They, you know, it's part of their strategy too. And they

can kind of watch Disney at work in the meantime, but it's hard to believe they're, they said they're going to launch their own streaming service in early 2020. It's hard to believe that in the long run, Comcast is going to want to stay with hulu because they're going to have another service that they want to feed content into and this one they're a minority stakeholder to their arch rival i i really i mean just my take on it which is based on no real knowledge it just feels to me it's like comcast will run this out until they can get the most money out of disney possible because as this continues like everybody knows disney's plans for hulu and right because disney's told people what their plans are and i feel like that disney will not be able to live out their real vision for hulu as a service

is this is where we put all the stuff we can't show to kids uh i think that they want it but if you're nbc universal and you've got your catalog of content and you are launching your own streaming service at some point the pressure to leave is that you need to get your stuff off of hulu and put it on your own thing at&t leaving made a lot of sense because they're doing their own thing and they also need the money because at&t have a lot of debt and that's basically what they've said they're going to use the money and they're just going to pay off some debts with it and also like at 10 they had no real say and you're just going to have these two big huge companies disney and concast probably fighting for the next five years it was probably worth at&t's time to just

take the money and run while it was valuable um but yeah this is like it's very clear that disney wants this this is this is another step in making it easier for them but they do not have an easy road ahead because comcast is giving no indication that they want to sell so it's a it's a it's a negotiation i think that that is happening and whether it's active or not that is basically the idea is like how much is it worth to disney how much is it worth to comcast um but i i do think disney knows that there's a ticking clock because Disney knows that Comcast needs to launch its own thing. And Disney is willing with all the stuff that they've bought from Fox.

They have so much content that Hulu has to exist for them. Comcast, it's not really in that same situation. They're going to launch something that is appreciably similar to Hulu and they're going to need content for it. So, uh, you know, Disney Comcast wants to escalate in terms of the price that it gets out of Disney. Uh, and Disney knows there's a ticking clock and we'll see who blinks first. In some, I think fantastic news, uh, YouTube has ordered the retro tech series from Marques Brownlee Brownlee. After a successful pilot, which featured Marques looking at the Game Boy on the Game Boy's 30th anniversary,

which is actually available, you can watch it right now on MKBHD's YouTube channel, they have gone ahead and ordered a season of this show, it was basically a pilot, in which he will effectively unbox and review classic technology products. The show is being produced in collaboration with MKBHD and Vox Media and will debut in 2019 on MKBHD's YouTube channel. Even though this isn't a YouTube original series, it is not going to be a part of any of YouTube's premium efforts. This will just be on MKBHD's channel. But this is a restructuring of what YouTube is doing in the original space. They've basically gutted YouTube premium of the content that they were making and buying.

They're keeping around some successful stuff, and they're putting more money into education and music. I am pleased that this is a sign that YouTubers realized what their actual asset is, which is YouTubers, not celebrities. Like this is a, I think, positive sign because I would have been very happy as a YouTube premium subscriber to pay for this, like to have this show. It's like, or I would have signed up for MKBHD show if I hadn't already. So it's interesting to me that they are making it available for free when it clearly would

have been a good show that people would want it available for free when it clearly would have been a a good show that people would want to pay for but i am just pleased to see youtube going back to realizing what they actually have that other people don't have yeah imagine youtube paying money to youtubers to make more content for their youtube channels can you imagine instead of you know paying well scripted tv that's behind it yeah yep yep so i think it's great plus i love mkbhd and this series mkbhd is great and i just want to see him succeed because he's so cool and i'm a big fan of his and so yeah that it was just great i loved the the thing because he'd never he'd never played a game he never played the game boy before uh which is just wild to me so yeah i

think it's really cool it's a very very good um very good video lots of like interviews and stuff it's really well we're really really well made and it's kind of funny to me because like i look at it and it's like i bet they did and youtube didn't even need to spend that much money on this because he already has all the setup right sure he may as he makes these incredibly well like he you know i'm sure that i would like to think that he got a good deal out of it but it's not like they needed to hire a specific crew i would assume right or like they didn't need to build sets because he has it all it's just like this is what makes sense right if you're youtube this is way cheaper than cobra kai

is right and probably is going to do better for you in the long run so I'm pleased to see this this is what it started as and then YouTube got high on its own supply and thought that they could be Disney or whatever like oh we'll just pay a bunch of celebrities

to make a bunch of stuff and we'll buy movies and it didn't work so I hope that this will work for them and this is like a refocusing of what they of what they're doing in the space today's episode is brought to you by moo an online print and design company that offers a variety of premium print products including business cards postcards notebooks and more and they deliver to happy customers all over the world. Networking is an incredibly important part of any career. Whether you're a designer, a novelist, a podcaster, a writer,

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last week when we spoke about Guilherme Rambo's leaks about iOS 13, little did we know on Monday that it was going to start a weeks-long set of stories? So not to reveal too much behind

the curtain, but after our episode dropped I got a Twitter DM from someone who is not Guy Rambeau who basically said, oh, just wait. I will say I tip my cap to

Guy Rambeau and 9to5Mac for doing this. I think this was genius. It would have been very easy for them to write a huge whiz-bang story with a bunch of interesting layout, right? And be like, oh, look at this. We have all the details. But instead, they have just been pumping out stories.

And it was like, I think there was still one yesterday. I don't think there's been anything today. Maybe that's it. Last time I checked, maybe it's every day between now and wwdc i don't know it's just like a little tidbit eventually they just start publishing one word a day as we get into june and then you can just build up to a big story um but so what we're going to do is i want to touch on all of these stories just so everybody we've got like a full complete system with some of them we're not going to talk about in detail because they're effectively a week old. You've heard them in other places, but there might be a few things we want to touch on within them. And then there is

some stuff which I don't think either of us have had the opportunity to talk about at all yet. So I think we're going to go chronologically with these. And we'll start with a Find My Friends revamp. So creating a new app to merge Find My iPhone and Find My Friends to put them all into one place. Apple will look to increase the app's overall functionality. Makes sense, I think, to have all of this stuff in one place. I didn't realize that it was weird that they weren't until I saw this story. It's like, oh, they probably all should be in the same application right yeah yeah it always feels weird to me when um we have something that's like where is this particular device located and i have to open find my phone

because um i usually you know we use find friends to keep track of like our family members and other people um but find my find my friends there's a primary location device that is attached to each apple id whereas find my iphone is device based so one of the things they'll have to do if they merge these together is kind of create the scenario where you've got like a person and where they are and then also like within that where you're if it's one of your people where the devices are so there's complexity here because they were really made for two very different reasons but i agree that it's dumb to have two different things that are doing largely the same thing with you know there's reasons why they're they are the way they are but i having it all in one place makes sense because it is very weird i used to find my friends so often and it

is very strange to be like oh i need to find where my wife's ipad is right and that's not her primary location device so find my friends isn't going to do it but for my find my iphone i can find the ipad's location i can you know lock it i can send uh you know make it make a loud noise so that we can find it which is the killer feature there um and uh so that'll all have to get kind of like that'll move together apparently but in this report it also mentions the possibility of apple creating a bluetooth enabled tracking device like a tile so like these are these little it's a little called tracker they're like these little things are basic keyring size that have got bluetooth low energy chips in them so you can help find your devices um so in theory you could attach the apple version of this

to anything any product and then it would be showing up in this application do you think that this is a product that Apple would actually make? I'm wondering if this code name is referring to an internal device that they but if they're not going to make airport-based stations, why are they going to make NFC, Bluetooth, LE, TAGs, right? Like, wouldn't it be better to have a certification program and some hardware partners?

This makes a lot of sense as a HomeKit product to me right like that you would say to companies like tile you can keep doing your thing but you can also integrate with us now and then you're going to do have all the features that a home kit app well a home kit thing would get um but i don't know i don't know uh for this thing specifically i don't know exactly what gui Rambo knows, right? So like in the report is the company is working on a new hardware product known only as B389

by the people involved in its development. Catchy. Catchy name. But I don't know what that means, right? Like, yeah, they could actually be working on a new hardware product, but it doesn't mean that it's ever intended to ship unless he knows that that's the case. But if if he does he does not state that in the article right

like there is no definitive thing of whether this does or does not exist for the public and or what the the potentially what it will be for you know he references what the product is yeah but i could i can read this in a couple of different ways it could could also be that they, I think two possibilities here. One is they've got a hardware partner and it's a little bit like how there were those Logitech things that came out for the smart keyboard on day one. Or the pencil thing, the crayon. Yeah, exactly. So there are companies where Apple has worked with them in advance with technology, right?

Like it's not the case that new tech from Apple is always just unveiled with nobody knowing about it. That does happen, but it doesn't always happen. And you would expect Apple has their own hardware team that works on that alongside the external partners as well, right? I also think that it's not impossible that sometimes, and I don't know this for a fact, but I'll just throw it out there, that sometimes Apple builds a reference piece of hardware. It would not surprise me if they handed that to a partner and said, look, we built what we think is the fundamental hardware for this product. Here, we don't want to make it. You make it. But you can have this.

I don't know whether they literally hand a product to Logitech and say, if you want to make this, But you can have this. this product i think the question is is there a standard here or is this just going to be like it only works with apple products because if there's an existing standard sometimes they could use that and kind of subvert it i think bluetooth it's using bluetooth le right presumably to do all of this has to yeah yeah so the other big thing about this is that you remember from like tile and things like that like the idea that you want to have it so that if other devices see the id of the tag yeah uh like if you lose your your bag at the airport but somebody else is there with with the tile app or whatever it is it can see it and then it uploads it to the server and says oh i saw that thing here at this time that's like building this big mesh network basically so even if even though it's like by bluetooth right in theory you can still

find the device if you're outside of range right and it still could be privacy because it's like you know it's just a an id i spotted it at a place it gets uploaded to a server and then only the people with that id can see that information but uh you know if you sell a few thousand of something that network isn't is super spotty and not very good. And it's like, you got to be really lucky. But if every iPhone running iOS 13- If you have a billion devices- Then you don't need GPS on these things, right? Because the iPhones that have GPS will see them, log them, and send them back,

and suddenly you'll know where your device is. That's really- That competitive advantage is a reason for them to make it. Right. And it a new idea at all but it's an idea that works way better if you're apple than if you're a little scrappy third party yep because you would assume these little things start screaming in bluetooth language to anything around them right and then it can pass the information back to you somehow like that but my gut feeling is that apple's not going to make this thing right like i just i i feel like why would they do it they'll they'll they'll say hey it uses the spec here's how you build these things here's our hardware partners good luck

that makes way more sense to me but but we'll say i mean it's a product that they would easily be able to sell to pretty much every iphone owner i mean i don't know right like this is this is that question of like is apple in 2019 exactly the company we think they are because yes it feels like that they wouldn't make that but they also could make that if they wanted to make a bunch of money from people i could make the argument that it's primarily a feature to find apple devices and only secondarily is it a feature for other things so what they do is they build this thing and say well look, look, using all of this tech, including Bluetooth LE on our, you know, on AirPods and on all of our devices that we make, we have the ability to do this. And if some other products or whether they're like other products,

like headphones or whatever, or whether it's a thing that you stick on something, if they want to follow our rules, it will also work for those, right? Where the primary goal is to make it better to find your AirPods. But the secondary goal is you can use this tech with partners to find other things. That sounds like a way that Apple might differentiate it and say, like, we don't really want to be in the business of selling little Bluetooth tags and supporting them and all of those things, but we want it for this and this enables that so the other thing was lunar display like functionalities and it's the headline code name sidecar this mac os functionality would allow for a user to be able to quote send any window of an app to an

external display the external display can be an actual external display connected to the Mac or even an iPad. So this would be built into the existing maximize button on macOS, the green one, to basically you would get a new view to either send an app to full screen to tile it, so you could split it up over apps on the Mac or send to an external display.

Lunar display is a thing. Okay, probably should say here, Luna Display, existing sponsor of RelayFM, future sponsor of this show. You know, like, just make that point abundantly clear. I feel like, for me, this is an easy way to describe it. I don't think it's going to be like Luna Display. Where, like, a Luna Display is mirroring a display. I don't think it's going to be like Luna Display. Where like a Luna Display is mirroring a display. I don't, it doesn't feel like that to me.

To me, this feels like if you make a Marzipan app and you can, it's like beefing up continuity in some way that you can send the window that you're looking at to another device. But I don't feel like it'd be mirroring it. Like you would just send it there. I don't know. What do you think?

Tell me what you think. So the way Luna Display and a lot of these other screen sharing apps work is that they're emulating a monitor. They're emulating an external display. And so, you know, like I've got one running right now, actually, and I've got Audio Hijack and Skype on my old iPad. But I've got it on the left side. I can't put it on the right side because that's where my dock is. And it would affect the geometry of my of my desktop setup. And it can't it can only be in horizontal, it can't be in vertical, because Luna display doesn't support that. There's like all of these little quirks

about it, some of which are because it's a full on emulated display, the Mac thinks another display hardware display is attached, which is not quite it. So what I when I look at this, I think,, well, this is interesting because this is maybe what Apple is going to do is take macOS and sort of abstract the concept and potentially iOS too, I will say. Abstract the concept of external view ports from the base concept of a plugged in external display or at least change the way it it handles that stuff this is sort of how i read this like the idea that you're sending a window like i can drag a window onto an external display and hit it into full screen today so i'm sort of viewing this as being something like yeah like you said continuity like using things like continuity to make it easier in the u, however it's implemented behind the scenes to say, hey, this audio hijack window, send it over there or this Photoshop window,

send it to that iPad, and then I can draw on it with my Apple Pencil. And I'm not running Photoshop on the iPad, I'm running it on the Mac. And that's what Luna Display was built for, it's built out of a company that was the whole idea there was to make uh you know use these great high resolution touch devices with stylus support functional with mac software so i it feels like you know maybe that's what it's going to is just like how can we make this experience better with external devices with the idea being that an iPad could make a great companion for a Mac. But right now, it's a mess, because you have to add third party software and sometimes hardware. And, you know, then you're in this situation where the Mac thinks it's a whole monitor,

which is probably not the fundamental use case where you just want to send a window. So I mean, we'll see. The devil's in the details here, but it sounds like what bottom line is Apple is trying to make an effort to make it easier to push bits of the Mac out onto external displays, including iPads. And that, I think, is great. I do too. Also, from a Sherlocking standpoint, I wanted to mention, a lot of people are like, oh, watch out, Luna Display. It's like, I don't know. You know, the history of Apple doing features like this is that they have a core feature that they want to hit that they think will appeal to a larger mass of people.

And everybody else who has particular needs will be dissatisfied with it and will go on using third-party versions. Like, that seems to be what always happens. seems to be what always happens. And in my mind, it's like one of the key differences is I expect you would be using it like an app at a time from Apple's feature where on Luna display, you could just make it look like a completely external display. I would be surprised to see Apple be like your iPad is now just an external display for your Mac. Cause I feel like from Apple's perspective, they may consider that of like devaluing the iPad. Right. But you can send a document or an app or to it. Also, and I mentioned this when I said maybe from iOS too, and this came up in the chat room as well, like the logical extension of this,

and this isn't in Guy Rambeau's report, so maybe it's something that doesn't happen for a while yet. But if you think about somebody like Federico Fatici, who has that 4K display that he attaches his iPad to, this tech would work on the iPad theoretically too. The idea that you could take an app and say put that over on that screen, which is weird. And if it's not a touchscreen, there's questions about how that would be supported, although there might be some answers there. But it's possible that you could get something beyond mirroring from iOS as well, or even if you've got two iPads, I don't know, right? Like, why would you do that? I don't know, I'm just throwing out there that this might everything, every Mac feature we hear about now, I feel like we have to say, this has got to be the equivalent of an iOS feature down the road,

because that is where Apple's coming with this. And the idea of sending things to different screens and stuff, it actually lends into something that Federico spoke about on Connected last week, which is that he had heard that Apple is looking to potentially bring some way to support mice input, like cursor input on iOS, and that there's been some evidence of

this there are actually some devices some accessibility devices that can already do it but making this basically available to anyone if you can connect a mouse that ties in here right like imagine if you would send uh your ipad screen to an external display more easily you should be using a mouse you know like i've seen federico use like he sent me videos and stuff and he's put these in articles of him using his iPad with the external display support that it has. And it just, it doesn't seem like, you know, like for me, you're still having to look down at the display. Yeah, you can, you can, you can write on it, but then the moment you need to interact, you have to interact with the iPad laying in front of you instead of the screen that you've been looking at all along. instead of the screen that you've been looking at all along.

And yeah, that's the, yeah, Federico, that was a nice little bit of knowledge that he dropped after kind of holding it in reserve for a while. The idea that it might be an accessibility feature, which would be, I've said all along, like the people who want this really want it and you don't have to force it on anyone else. And I don't think Apple ever would be like, well, we've got mouse support.

So now everybody must use a mouse. That's not going to happen. So one of the great ways to do it is to say, well, there's an accessibility feature. And if you plug in a mouse, you'll get a little prompt that says, do you want to turn on this feature? But nobody's going to use it, or most people aren't going to use it. And everybody else will be like, I'm turning that on right now, and the people who care. And it's fine. Having it be not the default and that you have to flip a switch to make it work i think everybody who's ever said i want external device pointing device support is happy to flip a switch in settings somewhere to do it like it doesn't need to be something

that everybody is uh is given as a default it just needs to be available and then yes then you send things to a big screen you attach a big screen to an ipad and you can have that um you can have that context switch plus if this feature were there you could still like have a little like have your twitter on your ipad and then have the thing you're working on on your 4k display and that would actually work which is fascinating. So we'll see. Strange times. Apple Watch authentication enhancements. There aren't too many details in this report other than to say that you'll be able to do more with the authentication of the Apple Watch on your Mac.

It's referred to as other functions. I kind of wanted to ask you, Jason, if you, from your knowledge of if you use this, and I saw that on Six Colors, you were saying that, you know, you do use this feature. Where is the, where is it lacking that Touch ID can currently do? And like, do you imagine Apple bringing those two things closer together? I think the way to think of it is where does Touch ID work now, if you've got a laptop with Touch ID? Because I don't, well, I do. I have, there are a couple of MacBook Airs in the house and Lauren uses hers and the other one I use and the kids use a little bit.

And Touch ID is great, right? Touch ID is the best. And I think it gets lost with, Touch ID kind of came out at the same time that people were getting the new keyboard and they were getting the Touch Bar and those are both very controversial. But Touch ID on the Mac, it's great.

It could be better, but it's great that it's there. I love being on a MacBook Air and going to 1Password and just using my finger, right? Like all that biometric authentication stuff is great. But on desktop Macs or Macs that don't have Touch ID, it's, you know, it's not that great, but I can use my watch to do Apple Pay and to wake my iMac from sleep without a password. So there's a little bit there, but what it doesn't do is extend to all the things that Touch ID can do. So the way I read this report is, well, what if there was an alternative authentication mechanism? What if the Apple Watch stuff and the Touch ID stuff were maybe like put together on the Mac where there's just biometric authentication. And you can do it with touch ID sensor, or you can do it with your Apple watch.

So on my iMac pro, I would say 99% of the time when I wake up my iMac pro it, you know, from sleep or from, uh, from screen lock, you know, my, my watch just taps me and it's open. It's great. Apple pay is less reliable. Sometimes I authenticate by double tapping on my watch and it sits there for a very long time and then gives up. Other times it doesn't even try.

And it says, I'm going to need your iPhone, which is hilarious because it's not even in the room with me. And I have to go get it and bring it back. It's like, well, this is super convenient. So there's some work to be done there. But I would love it if every time I unlocked one password on my iMac, it knew that I was wearing my watch and it was unlocked and it just unlocked one password and gave me a tap like when I wake up my screen.

That would be amazing. And if I need to double tap or something like that on the watch, that would still be better than typing my password every time. Not as good as laying my finger on the keyboard, but pretty good. And since there are lots of Macs that have external keyboards and things, and there is no face ID for the Mac, and lots of us don't have Touch ID Macs, this is a very smart way to add some more biometric stuff to the Mac. Today's episode is brought to you by Borrow. There's nothing quite like getting home after a long day and collapsing onto the sofa to relax. And that feeling is even better when you have a Borrow, the luxury couch for real life.

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More iOS features coming to the Mac, including Screen Time. A welcome feature for me. I would love to have access to the full picture. I like Screen Time on iOS, but it doesn't give me everything I want to know. I'm hoping that the Mac version will be able to do this, but I am concerned that it won't be able to track everything. I don't know.

I mean, yeah, this is a question. I would hope that it would, but it goes back to what i said earlier which is i think what we'll get is something that is basic tracking and that if you want more you should still use a time tracking app um we've had one that uh timing that has sponsored this show in the past but um you know they're it's always going to be the case that apple is going to try to give you uh you know, they're going to bite off a certain chunk and they're going to say, this is what we care about. And there will be lots of things at the edge.

So maybe it doesn't measure which websites you go to or whatever, but it says you're in Safari. But being able to run all that stuff together, because I spend so much time on my Mac during the day. And so my screen time really doesn't reflect my device use. It only reflects my iOS device use. screen time really doesn't reflect my device use. It only reflects my iOS device use. So having it be part of the pool and being able to see that as part of the big picture, I think that's great.

It would also bring app limits, which is a funny thing for me to think about, like app limits on the Mac. But I guess it's because I don't use the Mac for apps that I would want to limit, right? But other people do. Parental controls on the Mac are terrible. They are so much better on iOS.

And so what I'm hoping this might mean is that the parental control stuff is going to get better because they'll have to implement screen time, which means they're then going to have to implement a more granular parental control system. So it would be, cause that's what I have for my kids is I have a, you know, I have a bunch of things and I can administer them all remotely from my iOS

device, which is another thing that you can't really do on the Mac. You've got to be on the Mac and with your administrator password. So I have my kids with like, you know, you can't use your device in the middle of the night. You need to go to bed and then you can't use your device. First thing, you know, if you wake up a little bit early, you need to know just sleep, you need to sleep. And then I will send some time limits on some of the apps that they use. And, you know, on the Mac, like my son also has a MacBook Air, and it has the basic limits of saying after a certain time, you need to not use the computer anymore. But that's about it. So this could mean, if it's implemented the way it is on iOS, it will mean much better parental

control features for for the mac and that's great but then i also think of marco's app quitter right like there are people like he thought about this for himself on his on his mac a while ago of closing down apps that he was wasting time on but it's just so like people do feel like they would also need this the same as screen time on ios it's just it doesn't match with my brain because i don't ever really feel like i'm wasting time on my mac like when i'm at the mac serious stuff is happening but there's a lot of yeah there's a lot of uh people who do like distraction based stuff so being able to say like during a certain time

don't let me access twitter or something because i need to be writing or something like that either there are those whole apps that like turn off your networking so that you have to you have to just focus on your job so i think people could use it and it would be great because the the options on the mac right now are limited siri shortcuts this is difficult this one's very complex all right so let's let's see if we can try going on i i wrote a post that parsed it and then dr drang wrote a post that everyone's trying to parse it everyone's passing so let me try and parse it so gee's report says that according to his sources there is a likelihood of the shortcuts app making its way to mac os as there is a strong suggestion of siri shortcut actions making their way into mac os themselves so this is the idea of like you would be able to ask siri to i don't know use like we could set up

a shortcut to open a specific find my friends window or whatever, right? And you can get those like one little actions that the system recommends to you, or you can create them yourself. Or, you know, you have an app like, for example, with Overcast, right? So Mark was just talking about Marco. So with Overcast, I have some Siri shortcuts set up on my iPhone. So I can say, oh, hi, telephone, resume Overcast. And it will do that, right? Like, and because it's just like a one thing i haven't built that with the shortcuts app this is just something the system can do so it is again we're not 100 sure how much information is known how much information is being extrapolated but i think what's going on is the idea is like if siri shortcuts exist on the Mac, then surely shortcuts will come too. Yeah, it may be a matter of time, but there's this lack of clarity about Siri shortcuts

versus the shortcuts app. Because yeah, the report basically says Siri shortcuts will come and presumably shortcuts may come or something like that. And it's like, okay. And then details about how shortcuts will work. And it's like, do you mean Siri shortcuts? Because it says shortcuts will only work with Marzipan apps. It's like, do you mean Siri shortcuts? Because it says shortcuts will only work with Marzipan apps. It's like, do you mean Siri shortcuts?

Do you mean the shortcuts app? Surely there will be a shortcuts app at some point. Or will Siri shortcuts on the Mac let you launch services? Because, or whatever they're called now, I forget, they changed the name of them. But they added those things that are still in the services folder, but they changed the name in Moj in the services folder, but they changed

the name in Mojave. That's a possibility, right? It's a possibility that they could bring the shortcuts app to the Mac. It's also a possibility that they could not bring the shortcuts app to the Mac and just attach Siri shortcuts to services, which you can build in Automator, which they did. I know it sounds weird, like why would they dust off Automator, which has been largely untouched, but if you look back at Mojave, the one thing that they've done in the last few years with automation on the Mac was to brush off that whole services idea

and use it and you could like put it in the touch bar and you can put it in the finder. And it's this whole new way of accessing the stuff that's been on the Mac since the very beginning. And so it just occurs to me, it's possible that they could do something like that, where they're like, well, we got Siri shortcuts on the Mac, but they're not really the same as iOS. They're just letting you use the automator stuff that they that they did i i hope that what we see at least at some point is a new version of shortcuts for the mac because you get that sync between ios and mac in terms of you know even if the shortcuts don't all work the same way uh that you have the same app on both and that you learn it on one and you can kind of figure it out on the other and then you can basically build an automator replacement on the Mac by using shortcuts.

Also, the report of Marzipan apps only is really disturbing to me because if it's accurate, what you're going to have is like two totally different classes of app on the Mac that can do different things and are controlled in different ways. And as Dr. Drang pointed out in his blog post, what if you rely on standard automation for a Mac app, and then the new version of Mac OS uses a Marzipan app instead and all your automation breaks and you can't have access to it anymore because Marzipan doesn't do that. That's also a concern. Although my gut reaction to reading the story was, well, you say marzipan only. Surely part of what Apple would do is say to classic Mac app developers, here's how you implement this. Yes, it is the assumption. It is an assumption to make that an application that uses this technology has to be an iOS app through and through. has to be an iOS app through and through. Like that it,

I don't think it would be impossible to assume that this is like a selection of APIs that people could kind of use and you could be a more classic Mac app and still use some of this functionality in some way. That doesn't seem impossible to me. Right. I mean, this is how it's worked for years on the Mac is there have been new APIs

that old apps have been able to take advantage of. And it basically is like, yeah, you're going to have to learn how to do this thing that requires things that are iOS-based or Marzipan-based in some way and put them in your Mac app. because you'd want, you know, I would be okay with the idea that like you don't pick it up for free if you want to do this because that happened in the Mac OS X transition. It happened, this has happened before where you're like, all right, you're going to have to learn something new

to get this new feature. Yeah, like if you want to stay in the AppKit style, you want to stay as a regular Mac app, you can integrate with some of this stuff, but it's not going to be as easy if you're bringing over an iOS app, right? Like bring over an iOS app, a lot of this stuff is just ready to go for you. Yeah, you get it for free. But a Mac app, you need to add this iOS thing to your Mac app, and then it will just work.

And that's really a writing on writings on the wall moment for Mac developers, right? Which is, hey, we're bringing new features to Mac OS, they will require you to write things that are basically iOS APIs that you will now need to support because guess what? Now they're Mac APIs too. But that's the way I would imagine that that's the way that Apple will pitch it is this is a new API for Mac OS and, and Marzipan apps get it for free, but you can get it by doing this thing and not saying, sorry, Mac developers, you don't get this new basic core system functionality. That seems weird. So I'm going to be optimistic about that.

By the way, the name of the automator thing that I was mentioning, it's called Quick Actions. They renamed it in Mojave, Quick Actions. It appears in Preview. It appears in the Finder. It appears on the Touch Bar. So that was one thought I had is what if they don't bring shortcuts to the Mac yet, but they want to do Siri shortcuts equivalents on the Mac. And what they do is they trigger it all off of quick actions.

And then or quick actions plus apps will have registered like they do on iOS, and those will come over. There are some different ways that they could do that. So it's all what I'm saying is it's kind of a mess because you've got the old way of doing automation on the Mac, and then you've got a potentially new way of doing automation on the Mac. And they don't really connect now. Siri doesn't do quick actions on the Mac even now, which is weird. So they got to clean this up. And my gut feeling is it's not going to happen this year, right? My gut feeling is that they may do some stuff this year to get them in going in the right direction. But it's probably a multi year process of basically sort of saying Apple script automator,

that's all kind of like going away. And shortcuts is coming in. And we're going to use shortcuts for everything. And you know, if you're an old Mac app that's sticking around, you need to support shortcuts, which works this way. And that, you know, over the course of two or three years, all the old stuff is going to get deprecated. And at that point, my only request, and this is something that Dr. Drang brought up too, is on the Mac, you have this incredible power of going to Apple Script or JavaScript or to running shell scripts. And most of my shortcuts that I've wired up on my Mac that save huge amounts of time for me are some combination of shell script or AppleScript, sometimes embedded in Automator and kicking off those quick actions, those services.

So what happens there on the Mac? Does shortcuts get more capable on the Mac? Or is this a way for Apple to kind of like pull some power user automation out of the system? I don't know. I hope not. In my mind, in my dream scenario here, shortcuts, the shortcuts app could be like a poster child for what I consider the perfect way that marzipan will work

in that for shortcuts to exist on the mac it has to bring with it a lot of ios conventions and a lot of ios things so like for shortcuts to exist if apple want that to occur they have to bring siri shortcuts to the mac right which makes the Mac better because now the Mac has more functionality. Siri becomes more of a level playing field amongst devices, right? And also by bringing shortcuts, it can enable more automation, which will be easier for more people because most people like myself find the existing ways of automation on the Mac to be much more complicated and harder to understand. but in wanting to make shortcuts truly useful on the mac they have to integrate with a lot of mac like stuff which then if you

make shortcuts that powerful on the mac some of that power can find its way back to ios right so like that's why i think of it of like an app like shortcuts could really be the perfect example of what we want this project to be, where it makes both systems better. Now, I know that I am drawing a real dream scenario here, but that is my dream scenario. Well, the way I have thought about it is what would happen if shortcuts was on the Mac? I think the way it would be built is something like, um, cause the question is like, well, how can you do shell script if iOS doesn't have a shell? And the answer is you make do shell script something that is tied to the terminal app. And the terminal app, because the way shortcuts works even now is if you don't have the right apps, you can't do those things. So some apps are only on

the Mac. And so some functionality will only be on the Mac. And I'm okay with that, right? I'd love to be able to run shell scripts on iOS, don't get me wrong. But lacking that, that would be the next best thing is just let the Mac users do that stuff and go to town with it. And then they would just not work. Those workflows, those shortcuts would not work on iOS. And that's fine. But you're right. A lot of what we talk about, about iOS infiltrating the Mac and changing it, is funny from the perspective of somebody who uses iOS for so much stuff now, because I view it the other way too, which is some of this stuff is like the Mac is so much more demanding and the users require so much more. And as an iPad enthusiast, I look at that and I'm like, this is great because this forces Apple, you know, in bringing this stuff over to do a far better job with real important features that they've kind of done halfway or if at all on the ipad

and presumably a lot of that stuff gets reflected onto the ipad too which means as i said i think last week um i really am loving this idea that there's this virtuous cycle that nobody really wants to write a pro app for the iPad because there are only so many iPad users and nobody wants to write a brand new pro app for the Mac because there's only so many Mac users. But now I could write one app and iPad users and Mac users both get it. And it's like, you know, that is,

you're doubling the addressable market of iPad and Mac users when you do that. And so I think that's the other fun thing is that this is not... A lot of Mac users are like, oh boy, they're going to ruin the Mac by making it like iOS. And I think, well, it's going to be different, but you know what else is going to happen is that the Mac is going to have an influence exerted on iOS. It's going to exert its influence back, I think. That is the thing that excites me the most. I remember sitting in a hotel room at WWDC last year

and looking into your eyes and saying, I'm so excited for what might happen to the iPad because of this. That's the thing that's always made me so excited, for my iPadad to get more mac like like so ios becomes more powerful and i think it's good for the mac i agree with you like i think over here on upgrade we are big proponents of the best timeline of this of like that it will actually be ultimately good for everything um but time will tell uh and the final report as of pub as of our recording time right now,

is some information for developers. So new Siri intents, including media playback, search, voice calling, event ticketing, message attachments, and travel information. So these will be things

that developers can plug into to be more attached into Siri. I don't know what this is going to mean yet. Like media playback, does that mean that Spotify will get what they want? Maybe. i don't know what this is going to mean yet like media playback does that mean that spotify will get what they want like maybe we don't know and this is the thing where like i don't even really want to talk about this so much because siri intents i think have been mostly disappointing so far like so media playback and search what what this reads to me and again we we are often guilty of sort of like taking the optimist view here, but what media playback and search imply to me is a dictionary that is

broader than what is resident on the device. Right. Yeah. Like one of the things about this has always been like, well, how could you really do a Spotify control because they don't have access to like your catalog. And so everything's going to have to go to the cloud and be interpreted.

And, you know, it doesn't know the names of all the musical artists. And so what's going to happen? And like search is the same way, right? Like search is arbitrary string of text. And then you kind of like send it out there. So I look at this and I think, yeah, maybe this is Apple saying, we're going to open this up now where we're not worried anymore about having to preload a universe of text. Our text recognition engine is much better now and just throw anything at it and we'll search for it or we'll play back that music. And, you know, we're, because I do think that was part of their reluctance to open this stuff up was just a reluctance that it would be able to figure out what you were

saying. And maybe they're over it. I mean, they should have been over it years ago, but maybe they're over it now. Some information about Marzipan. So there will be APIs for the touch bar, the menu bar and keyboard shortcuts. So you're bringing over an iOS app, there will be APIs to plug into all of that, which is brilliant. Multiple windows on the Mac. So this adds to the idea of everything that's come before, you know, like what we were talking about last week, there's multiple instances on the iPad. The fact that you will have APIs on multiple windows on the Mac probably means if you have multiple windows on iOS as as well right um right apps that use split view multitasking can be resized this is interesting to me jason because if this is the case

why is there this whole thing that mark gumman was talking about about iphone apps coming next year if you can run these apps in skinny size which is what we're expecting here like you would you'd be able to like just drag the the window and make it smaller so it'd be effectively iphone column size here is the reason the reason is that if you're an iphone only app you don't have the capability to go up to a bigger size well yeah i guess i'm thinking of it from the wrong side aren't i right it wants the it wants only apps that are like resizable which means they need to be on the wrong side, aren't I? Right. It wants only apps that are like resizable, which means they need to be on the iPad

and they need to work in all the different views. If you're just a single thing, what they don't want, and I'm going to pull a John Syracuse here and throw out some old Mac knowledges,

what they don't want are desk accessories, DAs, which was a thing that we had back in the old Mac days, which were little tiny apps like the calculator was a DA. And you launch them

from the Apple menu and there were these teeny tiny little windows. And they were single window apps. They were iPhone apps before there was an iPhone by decades. And that's what iPhone apps would look like. They'd be unresizable, little tiny things on a Mac screen. And I feel like maybe this is not a technical limitation, but it's Apple kind of saying that's not a good experience on the Mac to have a non-resizable phone-shaped window. And so if you want to be on the Mac, you're going to need to do better than that. And then maybe we'll give you what you want next year, but for now you aren't going to get it. So that's my guess is that this is all about apps that are capable of resizing dynamically. And then on the Mac, logically, you'll resize your window.

Hey, look, it resizes dynamically because it's made to do that. Quote from the article, enabling Mac support for an existing iOS app is as easy as enabling a checkbox and the target settings in Xcode, much as you would to add iPad support to an iPhone-only app. Yeah, we've seen some developers who've basically said, this makes sense. Because first off, you already are building Intel versions of these apps, because those are what the simulator builds are. And if Marzipan is all, you know, the whole idea of Marzipan is you're not supposed to have to change your code very much. Now, this is not the same as saying... You don't need to design it you need to design it all these ways that you can make it a better mac app but imagine that demo at wwdc maybe in the keynote maybe in

the state of the union where they take an ios app in xcode and check a box and run it and it runs and it looks fine and then definitely in the State of the Union and in follow-up sessions, they'll say, all right, here's all the things you have to do to make this better. But please don't do that. Right, right. But it's like, that's the start is to get over the hump.

You don't have to change 20% of your code. You check this box and you're running on the Mac, but you can be a lot better and pick up all these features that by the way, are also in iOS 13 on the iPad by doing this. And then that's the next step. I think that's, I, that feels like a hundred percent certainty to me that that's what they're going to do because it makes so much sense. Like you can check the box and get something really weird and generic, but it's fine and it runs. And then let me show you all the ways that you can make this better. And some notes on AR.

Quote, brand new Swift-only framework for AR and a companion app that lets developers create AR experiences visually. So this feels like some kind of like... When I look at this, I'm i'm like oh that sounds like playgrounds like yeah playgrounds but for ar so like you can create a visual experience and then you can have it into the real world so maybe it's a like a toolkit like that like playgrounds is um ar kit will be enhanced to detect human poses this is interesting to me i don't 100 know what we would do with that but like maybe that you would be able to project something onto someone which is kind of an interesting that could be or or have people have people play a game in part by you know moving i don't know support for controllers

with touch pads will be added uh this definitely means more than just for ar i'm not really sure where this is in the ar section um this sounds like something that they're going to need for some of the games that they showed off with Apple Arcade, that you might need to have some touch support, especially if you want to play some of these games on Apple TV. Could mean a new remote. Right, but also if you're thinking about VR, you do need the idea of you need a controller

to move and stuff sometimes. Right, but there already are controllers. about VR, you do need the idea of you need a controller to like move and stuff sometimes. Right, but there already are controllers. They don't necessarily need touchpads. Like the touchpad thing is an interesting addition. But the report also references stereo AR headsets. I do not know what they are. Yeah, somebody was like, oh, well, Apple AR headset confirmed.

And my thought is, well, Yeah, somebody was like, oh, well, Apple AR headset confirmed. And my thought is, well, it could be that Apple is going to make a developer AR headset, you know, something that's expensive and it's for developers and it's for them to build the next generation of augmented reality. um it's also i think most likely that they're talking about uh some and i don't know this market enough to say but like some third-party headset basically that i guess what stereo means is stereoscopic right so like yeah right no it's it's it's depth you're you've got a different slightly different image in the left and the right and it gives you depth perception and that's what it's talking about here but like ar heads headsets, like is that an Apple AR headset that they're going to work on? That seems premature as possible,

but it seems more likely that what they would do is say, hey, we now have support for these stereo AR headsets and here's what they are. Here's the third parties that have this. So that's it. We're all up to date.

Is that all? There's a lot of stuff. I mean, I, again, That's it. We're all up to date. Is that all? There's a lot of stuff. I mean, again, I will tip my cap to Guy Rambeau for this mammoth amount of information. Huge data dump

from somewhere. From somewhere. It's come from somewhere. It's definitely, I mean, I feel like we spoke about this last week too, but I feel like especially as the week has gone on, it's come from somewhere um it's definitely i mean i feel like we spoke about this last week too but like i feel like especially as the week has gone on this definitely feels like a combination between people and actual information um so i'm really but i think that that uh he has reported on this in a very clear and concise way and i like the way that it's been broken out um it's made it exciting you know it made it it was you know it's kind of like when apple

releasing products every day for a week until they stopped um i like that uh nine to five mac went further they they did a whole six seven releases so really it's like a really great uh way to get this information out and i am super intrigued to see just how much he got right yeah yeah it feels like a really accurate thing but of course it's also april and this is going to happen in june that the announcements are going to be made and so stuff can drop out stuff can get knocked out as a part of the development process so that may happen with some of this stuff. But it is one of the things I like about this. We've been talking about this from a few different angles over the last year.

And the more information we get, the more it becomes clear that this is not a Mac strategy. This is not an iOS strategy. This is an Apple strategy. Apple is trying to build changes to how apps are built that will benefit the Mac and iOS. It's one story. And the windowing is a good example of that where it's like, well, you can build windows in your iOS apps when they're on the Mac but also you can do this on iOS that's different

but it's the same. That kind of thing is happening now. This is one story. It's not two stories. Are you getting it yet? This is one story. Yeah. Today's show is brought to you by text expander from our friends at smile text expander will let you quickly insert longer chunks of texts with a quick search or abbreviation the brand new text expander 6.5 is now available for mac os and text expander 2 is available now on windows both new versions are sporting a new visual editor for snippets. This editor makes it easier than ever to see and create and edit your snippet fill-ins

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for their support of this show and RelayFM. Should we do some hashtag ask upgrade questions? Sure. I've got more lasers. This comes from SM. There are tons of movie and TV streaming services that are looking to launch over the next 12 months. In five years time, which of them do you think will still be around or which

do you think will be the top two in terms of subscribers? Oh, wow. Top two. Well, top two, I think it'll be Netflix and Amazon. Oh. wow. Top two. Well, top two, I think it'll be Netflix and Amazon. Oh. No, Amazon. Yeah, Amazon, I think there's huge numbers of Prime users, right?

Like a huge percentage of the United States has Prime. So I think that counts. Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't know if the top two in terms of subscribers of the things that are going to launch. Disney is number one. Like of the new stuff, Disney will be the biggest. Because it's not just that it's Disney. They also just have an incredible amount of content.

They have done a lot of work by buying all the shows to make it work for them. And it's stuff people actually want to see as well. It's not just, oh, they have so much stuff, but it's so much good stuff. And out the um others that have that are launching over the next 12 months i think number two i'm gonna say will be the warner media streaming service because

they're gonna roll together all the stuff that they own and they own a lot of stuff including hbo including dc comics they'll do some originals harry potter this is yeah right i mean harry potter tv show make it happen. Batman, like another straight up Batman TV show. Don't get coy and hold Batman back for the movies and make these like Titans and Gotham where it's like, it's almost Batman, but it's not really Batman.

Like, no, just do it. It's time. Just do a Batman TV show. Do a Superman TV show. Like get all of your intellectual property and bring it to bear. And they have so much of it. They're not Disney, but I think that Warner Media, with their

new hires, with the changes they're making, it's going to take them a little time, but I think they're coming to play. I think they're going to be fairly successful. Of the new ones, I think. Disney clearly will be the most of the new ones. I didn't mention Apple.

Yes, unknown, right? not in the top two that's what i'm gonna say but we'll see uh sakaris asks can we get an update on hashtag roomba life are you both still satisfied customers i am i my roomba runs most every day and uh only occasionally sends an alert that it's eaten something i'll stock on a cliff still my jamie said uh jamie said your robot ate my shoes that's true and it's wound up one of her uh one of her shoelaces because i guess she took her shoes off after i had cleared the area because that's the thing that i try to do is clear the area you gotta make the advance of uh of the roomba launching but uh wedges in the doors pick up the rugs you know i got my little yeah i got my little uh my little beam that i put in

the hallway so that it doesn't go past a certain point or i close certain doors and uh and get the house ready but you know it fills up that little dirt container with just huge amounts of dust and and pet hair and stuff like that every time and so it you, it's not just a noisemaker that roams around my house and disturbs the dog and the cat. It is actually doing something. And so I think it's great. I wish when this one dies, I will,

I will seriously consider upgrading to one of the ones that like completely maps your house because I can see the appeal of saying, Hey Roomba, go clean the hallway and have it just pop off its perch and go where it needs to go and run there and then go back home. I can see the appeal of that.

But as a first, it's like, this is a nice bookend for the electric car thing. Like, I got a starter Roomba. It's good. I like it. And same for you? Same for you? Oh, 100%.

We love our Roomba. We use it all the time and you know it's an it's a real nice to have it is not an essential thing in a home but it is a real nice to have it is a is a lovely luxury well i'm just not sweeping the floors every day and i'm sure if i swept the floors and vacuumed the rugs every day i wouldn't need it but i do not do that so and and i am here when the rest of my family is not so even though i have it on a schedule that one of the nice things is i can go out there sort of before or after lunch and i can move all the stuff around and and sometimes

i even just press the button right then and run it because i'm out here it's in there with nobody but the dog and the cat who are not thrilled but they have learned to deal and it does its work and the house is cleaner. So it's good. John asks, what do you use to make the Robot or Not theme music, Jason? This is not John Syracuse. Robot or Not, we've been going through a lot of themes that are by listeners. So I don't know. They send in weird Robot or Not music and we use it.

The original theme and the end theme are by Lex Friedman. I think he did it all in GarageBand. I did a theme a few weeks ago that i did and i used logic for it um but it's it's from all over the place but i'm pretty sure that lex's version is just garage band and finally today phil asks nowadays basically on all of the ipads do you think that apple will bring some version of pencil support to the iphone i don't. I don't because I think that they brought it to all the iPads and that Apple is considering the pencil and iPad differentiator. It would require them, I think, to design a new pencil, which they've already done, that is not as long because that long pencil is kind of really awkward to use with a, I would

think, with a small phone. So I think I'm'm gonna we we expressed our hopes about this a while ago but i think i'm gonna i'm gonna change now having seen what apple has done with the ipad line that actually makes me think it's less likely that it'll come to the iphone i'm still holding out hope not based on any reason that i think it will happen just because i want it just for hope yeah all right just for hope for hope for hope's sake you know that'd be cool that'd be cool it's all there they could do it they could do it and like we said about adding a mouse to ios like it doesn't have to be a mainstream feature it can be something that the people who really really want it you give it to them the software is there on on ios already because it's there for the ipad so you could put

it in there and not have it be you know a banner feature but like yes if you have an apple pencil you can use it with the iphone too that's fine i i think they could do it but i don't know my guess now is no all right that's it for this week's episode of upgrade i would like to extend my thanks to gimme rambo for filling up an entire episode for us much appreciated guest gee rambo thanks so much to text expander, and Moo for their support of this episode. You can find show notes and information about today's show over at relay.fm slash upgrades slash 242.

You can find Jason online at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. Jason is the host of many RelayFM shows like me. You can go to relay.fm slash shows and find the stuff that myself, Jason, and many other talented individuals put together on a weekly basis for your podcast listening enjoyment. We'll be back next time. Until then, follow Jason online

at Twitter. On Twitter, he's at Jason L, at J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. But we'll be back next week. Hashtag AskUpgrade for questions at the end. Hashtag SnellTalk for questions at the beginning. Until next time, Jason. Say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Goodbye, Mr. Hurley.