Upgrade - 244: Push All the Sales Buttons

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

Apple's financial results lead us to discuss the company bringing a new focus to iPhone sales and throwing Intel under the bus. Then Mark Gurman of Bloomberg swoops in with a huge collection of new and slightly used macOS, iOS, and watchOS rumors for us to dissect.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 244 and today's show is brought to you by borrow fresh books and ero my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snell hi mr jason snell hello mr mike hurley it's good to talk to you again, again, again. We've been spending a lot of time together over this past weekend. We'll talk about that in a minute. But first, we have a hashtag Snell Talk question, which comes from Eric this week. And Eric wants to know, Jason, with one month to go until WWDC, what non-Apple-related thing are you most looking forward to? So none of the announcements. Like, what is the thing that you're most looking forward to that is is about wwdc but is not anything that would be in the keynote itself

you know i this is cheating and stupid and yet it's absolutely true which is it's the post keynote upgrade that's the answer because i am you know let's assume that I get my invite and I go to the event like what happens next is an adrenaline fueled fast walk to a hotel yep or Airbnb or whatever

it's been a hotel the last couple years and then you know you're there with the microphone set up and we're like alright and maybe a sandwich that's microphone set up. And a sandwich. All right. And maybe a sandwich. That's our new innovation is also a sandwich so that I don't collapse because it's already past lunchtime and we're going to talk for two hours. But that is really exciting.

And we swamp the live stream, which reminds me we got to get the live server moved over to a better box before uh before this happens so that it can withstand more power that that's the most exciting thing because that's the like quick hit you know and everything's out there at that moment and you've you've found out things that i don't know because i'm in the keynote bubble that's a that's the greatest moment of the week it's the best show of the year me it's the best show of the year like it's my favorite show of the year I absolutely adore that episode of Upgrade like it's just wild and everything's happening

and as we're recording more is happening because we have no idea about it it's great it's a really good time and yeah I would agree with you actually that is definitely one of my key, key highlights. Thank you to Eric for the hashtag Snell Talk question.

If you would like to submit a question to open a future episode of Upgrade, just send in a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and it will be maybe included in a future episode. We have a, I think this will probably be the last warning for Dongletown Surf Club merch. Go to upgradeyourward wardrobe.com to get our wonderful summer themed merchandise summer of fun is fast on its way so you've got to go down to the beach and join the dongle town surf club pick up a tea or a tank top we have tote bags and the dongle

towel yes a dongle town beach towel which everybody wants you can wrap up all of your dongles in a towel and like tie them on a stick and go walk out you always know where your towel is everybody wants you can wrap up all of your dongles in a towel and like tie them on a stick and go walk out you always know where your towel is yeah or you can just buy a tote bag and put them all in there that's completely up to you whatever the dongle tote we also have the original dongle town t-shirt on sale as well it's available until may 13th and should hopefully arrive before wwdc for us buyers's just one week left. Go and pick them up at upgradeyourwardrobe.com. I was very excited over the weekend because I got to make my debut appearance

on The Incomparable. How did I do, Jason? You did just fine. Although I did, while editing it back, notice what you pointed out after we recorded, which is that at the beginning of the show, you sort of thought it was Mike at the movies. And then you realized there were like 10 other people on the podcast. I kind of monopolized the beginning of the show, you sort of thought it was Mike at the movies. And then you realized there were like 10 other people

on the podcast. I kind of monopolized the beginning of the episode. I'm very used to talking to you in a very specific way. And I think like you asked me a question and then we just had a conversation. And then I had to remember, oh no, there's other people here. But then what happened to me later on in the episode

is i had that thing that everybody mentions where i didn't talk for like 15 minutes because i was just listening to the incomparable so you know it works in both ways really there was almost like oh i'm on this episode i'm not just listening to it so i it's uh so if you are keen to know my and jason's opinions about aven Endgame, there is episode 458 of The Incomparable. There will be a link in our show notes as well, so you can go and listen to that.

I was, you know, I feel like at this point in my podcasting career, I have got to live out all of the little goals and dreams that I have for myself at this point. Like I've been lucky enough to like hit them all off. This was one of them, Jason. So thank you for having me on the show, because I've been listening to The Incomparable for so many years, and I've always wanted to be on the main show. And we finally found something that, one, I cared about enough,

and I had something to say on, and two, it was recorded at a time that I could do. Not recorded at 7 p.m pacific time in other words while you're as fast as very asleep at that point so yeah very very much so that's yes 458 san francisco rat is the title those of you who have seen endgame know the uh no spoilers but a rat from san francisco saves the universe that's all i'm gonna say anyway it was a it was a good episode uh it was really fun over the week to see the clips that people were pulling from the episode from Overcast's new clips feature. Turns out lots of people like to understand how lasers are made. Yeah, that was probably among the silliest moments in that episode.

And I think we passed the test, which I knew we would pass, which is that are people going to clip the important thoughts that we have? Are they going to clip the ridiculous things we say? And it was very clearly going to be the latter. And it was. So now we know what the good lasers sound like and the garbage laser sound like. And I feel like we learned a lot. And those moments come completely unplanned too, which is part of the joy of them is you just kind of do a podcast and then afterward people are making clips and you're like, oh yeah, that didn't we all right it was funny though because i think we both expected uh that people would be clipping the the batman uh comment right like batman joining the marvel universe that was fun i like that part that was very funny but yeah the lasers part was very

good i did enjoy listening back to it so again thank you to everybody who is sharing clips of the show um and also thank you to everybody that included us on that because i think that's really nice to see it's just a nice feedback mechanism for me um to know what people like about the show so it's great um in the ongoing saga of photoshop for ipad i got an email i'm not sure why i got this email. I assume I must have signed up for a mailing list. Yeah, I got it too. Okay, so there must have been like, I don't remember. I think...

Let us know. Let me know if you have more to announce about Photoshop on the iPad or whatever. That must have been it. Well, on May the 9th, Adobe have a little conference, I think, in New York. And they're doing a presentation about Photoshop for iPad on May the 9th. So we're going to find out more then this week,

just a couple of days, about what's happening in Photoshop for the iPad. So still very much a product in Photoshop's lineup. Yeah, sure. And Brendan wrote in, along with many others, but Brendan was first to recommend a website, that rewind.website. They have a feature called Cast Rewinder as an option for Jeff, who asked in the Ask Upgrade last week

about a way to create, basically to take a podcast that you want to listen to from the beginning and be able to listen to it from the start. Well, this website, you can feed it an RSS feed and it will generate a new RSS feed for you that will basically publish an episode for you on a timeframe.

So it will basically help you publish episodes as if they were new again so you could go back to i don't know episode one of uh hello from the magic the adventure zone or the adventure and then they would pop up for you uh on an interval so this is a really cool feature uh a really cool thing but would still be brilliant to have in all the great podcast apps. Yeah, it's a nice hack, but I would much rather have podcast apps support this. And I would like to just provide one last piece of follow-up

from number one Upgradian, Casey, who, we had the summer of fun. Casey recommended The Autumn of Awkward, which I think is brilliant, so we're going to have to take that one. So thank you number one Upgradian, Casey. Yes yes we'll put that in our pocket and deploy it when necessary and that might be this year only uh but as you said it's gonna get real weird this this year and the ultimate awkward is

what we will be going into after the summer of fun i i realize we've um by the way just to forward promote our summer of fun because because Mike and I are both putting lots of items on, you put items on the calendar and you start to think, oh boy, like this is going to, if you're in our business, it's like, this is going to require some scheduling because I'm going to be out here and you're going to be out here and we're going to do this thing and all that. And so we started planning this year, like a month ago, a summer fun document with our ideas for the kind of off format episodes we want to do during the summer of fun and when it when that starts there's nothing

in it right like when it starts it's like one dumb idea for a draft of something and then that's about it i feel like in the last week week and a half um we have gone now i haven't i'm at the point where i have more summer of fun ideas than there are weeks in the summer of fun this is good which is perfect that's what we want because that means we get to pick the best of the best for exactly because they can't all be gems right no so you got to pick the winners they can when we do them because we pick only the winners all right all right let's move into a couple of upstream uh pieces of news There are a lot of, this is some news in streaming media. There were a lot of upfronts last week, which is when the TV networks start showing off what they have to advertisers.

So there was a bunch of news, a bunch of shows being displayed. There are a couple of things that were interesting to me because we've touched on some of these themes in the past. So we may remember that the Obama family was creating a production company for Netflix programming. The production company is called Higher Ground and they debuted Desolator programming for Netflix. It is a selection of scripted and unscripted

projects. There are seven in total that have been announced which will be released over several years. The two that were highlighted specifically were, one was called the fifth risk which is by michael lewis michael lewis is responsible for the books moneyball and the big short so it's an adaptation of another one of michael lewis's books yeah it's a it's a book about kind of horrific things involving uh government things you don't understand that government agencies do and how they do

things to protect the United States and humanity from terrible things and how dysfunction in those agencies can put people at risk. And it was, I think, initially a long form magazine article and then adapted into something larger. And if you've read that article or that book, you realize why the Obamas might have wanted this to be something on their slate. Because it kind of fits in with their thoughts about responsible government and is pretty much pretty much a direct like the lewis book anyway a direct uh shot at the way the current administration has handled government agencies so it's not it's it's it's political although they are definitely spinning it as being kind of like more it's a about the people everyday heroes who are in the government trying to take care of us

if i'm remembering rightly wasn't didn't they say they didn't want to be political well it's right it's yeah but except it's not like explicitly political but i mean if you sign obama i mean you're not signing the obamas if you're netflix in order to get like an action movie right yeah you're expecting some some political leaning stuff yeah but but trying to kind of like have it be like well we're rising above it though higher ground and talking about like important issues that everybody should care about is sort of the the pitch i'm gonna say i really rolled my eyes when i saw the name of the production company this will be a tv series though it's not going to be a movie

um yeah so i i like i mean i love moneyball and the big short so you know i mean i know that they're great movies because they have great actors and great directors and that sort of stuff but like obviously the source material is super interesting as well so yeah that could be really interesting as they also focused on a world war ii period drama called bloom it will be focusing on the barriers faced by women and people of color around this time um but it's super interesting thing is it's being written by uh callie gurry who won an oscar for thelma and louise so big names behind some of this stuff and they have a bunch of like there's some children's stuff and some scripted unscripted stuff so there's a lot of projects from the higher ground production company.

And Hulu is getting some Marvel TV shows. Adaptations of Ghost Rider and Hellstrom will be live action shows launching in 2020. Hulu has, there's been an announced slate of animated shows, Marvel shows for them in the past. um animated shows marvel shows for them in the past uh but it seems like this is where all the netflix style live action violent stuff is going to go to hulu now instead of disney yeah there's some interesting uh quirks about this so the disney plus stuff is being produced by marvel studios which is the movie studio and it's the first time that really the movie studio with the movie studio actors is doing tv the uh the hulu shows are being done by um marvel tv which is not the movie studio and it's run by a different group of people and it will be you know like the ghost rider show the guy who's going to star in that was ghost writer on agents of shield right on abc so um this is this is the

split that's that i find interesting is that they're kind of saving their super high gloss movie actors stuff for disney plus but there are other marvel properties that they can produce uh that can go somewhere else and most of that is probably going to go to hulu now i do i do want to point out let let's see. So Runaways is already on Hulu. That's a Marvel show. And Cloak and Dagger is on Freeform, which is a cable channel owned by Disney. So there may be other places that Marvel property is kind of slot.

But I think we've seen a demarcation here where the like super prestige, you know, these people from the movies, direct spinoffs from things that are in theaters is going to go to Disney+. And other cheaper Marvel content will go to places like Hulu. That's my guess. And maybe other more adult adaptations like Legion is a good example, which is wrapping up on FX. That's a show that is not cheaper. It's actually kind of prestige TV, but because it was X-Men related, it was on a Fox channel and all that. But now Disney owns all that stuff. So we may see in other outlets too, other Marvel stuff, but it is a fascinating division where the TV people are doing kind of like this stuff over here and the movie people are doing this stuff over here for Disney Plus.

I can imagine logistically it making sense, right? Like if it's all the movie actors, let's just keep them in the system that they're already attuned to rather than moving all this stuff over to there, right? And there's corporate politics involved here too, because like Kevin Feige, who runs Marvel Studios, used to work for Ike Perlmutter, who's the head of Marvel. And by many accounts, an awful human being. And finally, and he didn't want to do that anymore. And they're like, you know, you've made billions of dollars for Disney. We're going to move you under the head of motion pictures for Disneyney instead and out of marvel but what that means now is that there are basically two different uh chains of responsibility inside disney for marvel filmed content and uh

so they probably have some various you know sort of dividing lines about who just runs corporate politics of marvel must be immense at this point i don't i don't entirely understand why ike perlmutter who is the guy who you know his claim to fame is basically that he bought marvel and and took it out of bankruptcy and um when he sold when they sold it to disney i kind of expected him to walk away and he won't go away like he's still he's still there and so now i kind of feel like the the conditions of the sale must have included that ike gets to run Marvel for as long as he wants. And he's an older gentleman. As long as he wants is going to have its limits. But now I'm starting to feel like he's just he's not going to let go of Marvel until he's unable to do the job anymore, which is just I find that so bizarre and that people really chafe under him and he's notoriously cheap. I hear from people who've worked for Marvel that despite all that money from Disney and all of that, Disney doesn't run Marvel as a, it doesn't spend money on it to

have it be like this generator of intellectual property. Instead, they run a really tight ship and they're super cheap, which I find, I mean, I get it from a business sense of like, well, we're not going to fund this thing and have it lose lots of money because it's a business. But on the other hand, it's sort of like, yeah, but it's generated tens of billions of dollars for you in terms of the intellectual property it's generated. Maybe you could just use it for that and it can lose a little money in the comics business, but you're going to make it all back in the movie side but that's not how they run it and that's definitely not how ike perlmutter runs it so yeah it is it is so that the idea that there are these two completely different groups making filmed entertainment under the marvel banner and

that somehow they have to differentiate like who gets what right like i assume kevin feige can say like i want this character hands off and he apparently was like yeah you can have ghost rider you can have hellstrom whatever you've got to imagine that's the case right that like if feige wants someone wants to make a movie about a character right well that's that's just his prerogative you've got it you got to think that so now that they've got all the the x-men and stuff like that you presumably i don't think there's a draft right i don I don't think there's a draft where Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter or Jeff Loeb, who runs Marvel TV, sit down and it's like, okay, well, I got Wolverine. They're like, damn it. Okay, I guess I'll take Storm, right? I don't think that's happening. I imagine that they go through all the mutants and are like, okay, we're taking all these mutants and you can have the rest uh marvel tv i don't know it's weird corporate politics are strange even at disney it's super strange today's episode of upgrade 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 it is even better when you have a

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And with Burrow, you don't have to have these kinds of worries, which is really incredible. If you're in the market for a new sofa give your living room an upgrade with borrow that's set you can get 75 dollars off the new sofa and free one week shipping by going to borrow.com upgrade that is b-u-r-r-o-w.com upgrade for 75 off your order a thanks to borrow for their support of this show and relay fm mike i'm my mind is still spinning about the idea that that uh there should there could be a draft between marvel studios it's a future and comparable episode there so just um i'm writing it down writing that one down well only if you do it where somebody gets to be kevin feige and just basically gets all 12

picks first and then everybody else picks the rest that's true that would be that would be less entertaining than sectioning up mutants one by one to see where they go next let's talk about apple's q2 results more corporate politics well sort of kind of sort of let me give give some brief overview to some of the highlights, and then we can dig into some more of the interesting details. Apple achieved $58 billion in revenue, which fell within the guidance. Congratulations this time for doing that. Revenue is down.

Profit is down because the iPhone is down 17% year over year. Services are up 16%, sitting at $11.4 billion in revenue now. Other products, the category other products. Well, it's not other products anymore, right? It's wearables and home and accessories. That's it, thank you. They rebranded it. It's a much more exciting brand now.

It's not other. Nobody is excited about other getting bigger, but wearables, they're very excited about. Very excited. iPad is up 22 percent year on year and doing great especially when you consider this is just ipad pro this is not count the airs and the minis so we're hoping for they came in very very late yeah and that's that's the biggest single uh growth year-over-year boost in six years six years for the ipad mac is

down five percent we'll get to why in a bit because it actually gives some interesting details on that. Q3 guidance is between $52 to $54 billion, which is just about where they were last year. So it is possible that Apple could beat the current trend and go up

year on year slightly in Q3. So that would be good for them, right? To not have three quarters in a row where they're down revenue. So we'll see about that. And Wall Street hates surprises. So that's the thing about guidance, why we talk about guidance and why even though revenue was down, profit was down, iPhone sales were down, the stock didn't fall apart. In fact, it went up. And you're like, why would they do that? The answer is three months ago, they gave guidance and said, we think we're going to fall into this category in terms of our revenue next quarter. And so they told everybody that.

So that's priced into the stock. That was priced into the stock. And they landed it, right? They landed at the high side of their guidance. So Wall Street doesn't like being taken by surprise. They like not being taken by surprise. They like not being taken by surprise. And so when Apple announced these results, even though they're not very good by Apple standards, Wall Street was like, great, you did it. You did what you said. You're back in control of your own story here.

And then their new guidance is even better. And then some of the things we'll get to, they were very positive about. So it is kind of kind of funny though to see a story where apple uh you know had a quarter where the iphone went down 17 year over year and the stock went up but it did but like this was why when apple had to do that adjustment it was such a big story because they got it wrong that's right and that's right that's don't surprise wall street yeah don't do it surprise not good they will not be happy right because this is you know we talk about this every single quarter right like this is what it we talk about this every single quarter right like this is what it is it's about hitting the numbers you were supposed to hit and yep and then

that's where that's what that's the game that is being played so as you can imagine apple i'm very happy about all the things that are going right so uh ipad growth it's uh hit an all-time high in active ipad usage this is just great news for me. I mean, we'll get into later on like a little bit about how iPad and other stuff compares to the overall business. But as we are moving towards a WWDC where we're hoping for more iPad changes, this is the type of stuff as an iPad user

that you want to see. That like the product itself is doing better because it must reinforce the ability for advocates inside of Apple who are working on and care about the iPad to be able to get the development resource that they need to improve it if the product itself is getting better. Right. So the growth is good. It's been mostly growth. I think it's six out of the last eight quarters it's had year over year growth. They talk a lot

about iPad usage being an all-time high. It's the strongest quarter in six years. And as we said earlier, iPad Pro is the bulk of this. They cited that. They said the iPad Pro is really what's driving this. We did release a new iPad Air and a new iPad Mini late in the quarter, but it was late in the quarter. And most of what you're seeing here is the iPad Pro. And I think that's great because not only is there room for those other iPads to continue to lift the boat here, but it is a good sign that iPad Pro sales continue to be strong. And the wearables home accessory group is clearly driven by AirPods, which is a product that is going for a renaissance. I think the Apple Watch, they said they had its best non-holiday quarter.

I always parse what Tim Cook says about Apple Watch sales because they don't reveal Apple Watch sales. And they don't reveal any sales now, but trying to get a handle. They never revealed Apple Watch sales, did they? Exactly. But AirPods is the one where, again, huge demand, couldn't fulfill it. It's definitely a hit product, driving a lot of the sales in that category. Yeah, and also doesn't include the new ones, I guess, right?

Or would it just? Or just late in the process. Again, it's one of those things where, yeah, they're in there, but they weren't in there for all three months of the quarter. And, of course, they're very excited about services services growth and we're talking a lot about future offerings um the services growth is great i mean it's continued 16 is huge and it's you know especially when nothing changed right like in that quarter in q2 there were no new services offerings that apple was selling right right but it just continues to grow the beauty of services is uh it doesn't have uh peak quarters it's not seasonal because you just sign up for a service and you keep paying every month

or every quarter or whatever um and then it's additive because you keep adding new people paying for new services and it keeps going up so services has grown for uh like every quarter basically in the last five years or something like that let me ask you a question within a reasonable period of time maybe five years or so do you think that apple could be making most of their revenue from services well so this quarter was interesting in that services hit 20 of of revenue iphone is because iphone's been going down it is now uh around half yeah the revenue but services is at 20 i don't know i i think i i think the first the the first uh 10 going from 10 to 20 might be the easiest for services. But they're trying, right?

They're trying. They're launching all these other services. So I think it's a really good question. And I don't think that's likely, but there is a real good question to say, like, in five years, what percentage of Apple's revenue portfolio is services? And is it more like 30 or 40%? Because I can imagine there being some quarters where it's the most. Because as you say, right? Like it doesn't go down.

It's not seasonal, right? Like once people are in, they're just in. And you just keep adding more people. Like I could imagine at least a quarter, like if there was a bad iPhone quarter or whatever, it's just like a quiet quarter. It's like, oh, it took over. like it doesn't seem like an impossible thing to me especially when like you know apple haven't been focusing for too long on services in a in a way

that they'd be able to make meaningful change but they have three monthly payment services debuting this year, at least. So if you can just keep capturing those people, getting them to give you more and more money, you can see why they're doing it, basically, is what I'm getting at. Because this is just money on the table for them. There's a quote about Apple TV+, that I know you found particularly interesting. So Tim says, We think that most users

are going to get multiple over-the-top products, talking about TV subscription services, and we're going to do our best to convince them that Apple TV Plus products should be one of them. One of them. This is Tim setting... This is Tim. This is Tim.

This is Tim setting... I think setting expectations for Apple TV Plus saying look we want to be in the mix. He's not saying well we think that people are going to pick our offering because it's the best and this is what they're going to use to watch TV. They're like look people are going to subscribe to a bunch

and we want to be one of them. That's all he's saying here. I'm so happy that they're talking about it this way because otherwise they're going to get ruined. If they want to roll in here and be like we have the best one everyone should just get ours like that's not gonna work well it's it's impossible because that's not the case and so so seeing reality it's a good sign it's a good sign and um the thing that definitely got around there was like a misquote that got around on twitter a little bit which was like people are going to buy multiple ones and we want this to be

one of them. And people are like, aha, there's proof that Apple is going to sell this because there's this debate of like, will it be free? Will it be in a bundle with something or all that? But that was a paraphrase and it was not accurate. He doesn't say buy, he says going to get. And he thinks people, he wants people to get Apple TV tv plus so if you have that pet theory that they're not going to charge for this which i just don't see i think they'll charge for it but i think that they'll you know make it worth your while to have a bundle with other things um but you can you can keep saying that because tim didn't say we think they'll buy ours he just said we we think they will get ours along with some of these others. Well, we can do upgrade conspiracy theory time.

Get is the wording that Apple uses for free apps in the App Store. So, you know, it's free. Okay, start your conspiracies then if you want. Let's talk about the iPhone. I want to give a quote. This is from you. You wrote a really good piece on Six Colors about this. Apple is now turning around iPhone sales

by being more active when it comes to selling those iPhones to customers. What does this mean? Yeah, the iPhone, and I try, you got to word it the right way. So I struggle with this a little bit. The iPhone has sold itself. And I don't mean to say like,

Apple has done nothing for, because Apple has made the iPhone and they've made this thing that everybody has wanted and it's sold a lot. And it's not as if people aren't trying to sell the iPhone, but like the impression I get is that Apple's approach in retail, for example, has definitely been,

hello, we do have the iPhone and that's it. Like, well, yes, there is the iphone would you like to buy one we cannot make enough of these right and my impression now in in in talking to people who work or know people who work in apple retail is last fall as iphone sales were falling off the charts, Apple said, oh, okay, I guess we need to push this. I guess we actually need to push the iPhone. And this wasn't just like be more aggressive about closing the sale if you're standing at a table with a customer who's looking at an iPhone. It's also things like if you're leading like a photo walk for one of these Today at Apple sessions, take out, give everybody an iPhone XR to take their pictures and then come back in and say, yeah, did you really like the XR? You know, you could upgrade.

You could do a like, like really wrapping converting customers in the store into new purchases of iPhones strategically in a way that, believe it or not, they didn't really do much of before because they didn't need to. And I think that what has happened is that Apple has built this immense business on the iPhone without pushing a lot of the buttons that you usually push to sell products. And now they're pushing those buttons because it's time. And it seems to have had an effect. So it is, Tim Cook went into it in the call, they are doing trade-in stuff, they're doing installment stuff. Different programs work better in different markets. They talked a lot about how installments were working well in China. But trade-ins is a way to make this work as well. Thinking about what motivates buyers in these different markets in order to get, in the end, to get a new iPhone sale.

And I'm not saying that there was none of that going on before, because of course there is. But it seems to me like there was a top-down review at Apple of how do we goose iPhone sales. And according to Tim Cook and Luca Maestri, the CFO on that call, they seem to believe that this has worked and continues to work. And they talked a lot about, which I thought was good, about learning about how we tried this out. And we're like, we've learned a lot about how in these markets, people like this, and in these markets, people like this, and we're trying things we've learned a lot about how in these markets, people like this and in these markets, people like this and we're trying things. You get the sense that Apple is like motivated now to figure out the best ways to sell the iPhone to customers,

not worldwide even, but like in each market. And they're going to try a bunch of different stuff and learn from it. And that's just a level of active selling of iPhone products. This is what companies that have products to sell do. Like this is how they sell a product. This is what companies that have products to sell do. This is how they sell a product. Apple has just had the luxury over a 10-year span

to not have to worry about this because it was just an incredibly desirable product. The iPhone remains to be desirable, but the market in which the iPhone is sold has changed around it. We've spoken about this.

The increasing price of smartphones is is one thing as well as the uh removal in a lot of territories of subsidies and yeah and the slower pace of innovation too like you know in the early days of smartphones to a two-year-old three-year-old smartphone was horrendously out of date and that's not really the case anymore. And so you've got to give people reasons to upgrade, and there was a time when they didn't. And also, Apple's competitors are making more and more interesting products. Sure. They have competition, and when talking about the innovation, there is competition there now in a way that there wasn't for a while, I think.

So they are having to actually sell their product. And so it's just a different situation. They seem to be very happy with the trade and stuff, as you said, right? Like they were talking a lot about that. And clearly that's something we're going to see more of. This is just where they are with the iPhone now. Yeah, yeah, no.

And it's a tremendous luxury for them to have those buttons to push, right? I would imagine in lots of markets you know all the buttons are pushed immediately right like you you you you do everything you can to sell the product and then they somebody comes to you and says we need to sell more and you're like i don't even know what to do now we're doing everything all options right and uh that hasn't been the case for apple um they they did say something and this is like a larger picture iphone thing too but i think it's related to their efforts on this side, which is what the story that Tim Cook was telling is that iPhone, everything is broken up quarterly on these financial reports. And they wanted to kind of drill down a little bit and express, give some more color, as they always say, about the sales

trajectory. And what they said is that November and December were actually the worst for iPhone in terms of like their projections. And that March was the best. And even like the last couple of weeks of March was really promising. So what they're saying is, I know it looks like we had a bad quarter followed by a bad quarter, but what we really had is two really bad months and then have been recovering and we continue to recover. And that's why they said, some analyst that was really smart, I forget, maybe it was Shannon Cross, said usually your year over year, usually your quarter, when you go from the second to the third financial quarter, you go down by, I don't know what the number is, like 12% or something like that. And you're only saying you're going to go down by 6% or 8%. percent or eight percent basically usually the next quarter the spring quarter is uh worse than the second quarter by a lot right just in the seasonality like holiday is big next one's lower next one is lower than that and then it kind of goes back up and then it then it spikes again

and and what she said this analyst said was but this time it looks nicer. It looks like you're not going to take as much of our revenue drop in the next sequential quarter. And they said, that's because we see the iPhone turning around. We think the worst of it is past, and now we're in a positive trajectory again. And you can't see it in the quarterly data, but we see it in the week-by-week, month-by-month data. And that's interesting because, again, they can say that and make it up.

It worries me. But then they go to jail. So they – and that's why their guidance is what it is. That's why their guidance is a little bit better than you might expect. So they feel like they've – and by turned around, I don't necessarily mean that suddenly iPhone sales are going to shoot up. But I think it may mean that their expectations are out of the woods they're getting back over to sort of flat year over year instead of down 20 or 15 year over year that's a big difference i hope they're right i mean like you know i know these people are super smart but like the confidence

is rocked when they messed it up so bad for right for q1 um was it q1 that i mess it up for i think it was yeah it's a holiday quarter but that's their first financial quarter and it's just like i hear something like that and they're like oh no no we've had a good month so we're gonna be good again it's like i really hope you're right like let's not get this wrong again um i wanted to ask you one question about the retail stuff right the trade-ins and the subsidies and the pushing in today apple do you think this might be why angela arents left i don't know it seems like that somebody may have gone to retail and said we're gonna do a bunch of stuff now and it isn't what you wanted to do and it may have been a situation where she was like that's not what I want to do anymore. Yeah, I want to rethink the retail experience.

And you want me to start being a more aggressive seller of widgets. Right. She comes up with today at Apple, which is this education program. And they're like, perfect. That's how we're going to sell to 10R. they shift the purpose of those stores from, oh, kind of touchy-feely, holistic, Apple just needs to be present and then everything will be taken care of.

And all of a sudden it's like, no, we need to push all the sales buttons. Like this feels, having worked in retail for some time, this feels very clear to me now as to what happened. Like they were on a route to create an experience that was not supposed to be a store she was actually transitioning apple stores away from even being called stores right and now they're like well yeah but now we just want you to really push the products and that that clashes with the position that aren't started to build so i wouldn't be

surprised if then it was just kind of like i don't want to do that and they're like okay then we need to get somebody who will and then maybe they parted ways amicably because of that like it just came to a point where everybody decided yeah what you need out of these stores is not what i was hired to do so so i don't want to do it anymore. I don't know. When I hear them talk about it in these ways, it seems to make a little bit more sense to me as to what happened and why it happened so quickly.

Certainly there was a big change in what Apple was doing on retail. And I can tell you from the people I've talked to inside retail that last fall was a big change. Like they really changed how they approached everything.

And last thing I want to talk about is a quote from Luca Maestri about the Mac. Maestri says, Mac revenue was $5.5 billion compared to $5.8 billion a year ago with the decline driven primarily by processor constraints on certain

particular models. So I popped in after I transcribed this, I popped in because I was in the midst of writing my articles to the, I went to the Relay Slack in the general channel and I pasted in that quote and I said, it's just me or did they just throw Intel under the bus? And people haven't made as big a deal out of it as I think maybe they should have. I'm a little bit surprised. John Gruber posted about it on Daring Fireball, too.

Yeah, so I mentioned it in my Macworld story, and John posted about it on Daring Fireball. But I looked at that and said, this is... They didn't call them by name, but by basically saying the Mac went down because of Intel. They are, and it's not the only one.

We heard from somebody on Twitter who I think was talking to us or a group of people we know and said that they work in doing IT in a company that has Dell computers and that Dell shipments were slowed down because of Intel availability. So Intel is kind of like not doing a good job

in certain processor shipments across the board. But like from Apple's perspective, it's like we could have sold more Macs slowed down because of Intel availability. So Intel is kind of like not doing a good job in certain processor shipments across the board. But like from Apple's perspective, it's like, we could have sold more Macs and you didn't let us. And for them to call it out on the call and basically blame someone else, blame a supplier for a failing of one of their product categories where they felt they would have been up, but they were down. That is a sign that Apple has had enough with Intel and that this is we're just waiting for the body to hit the floor right like this relationship is over it's it's going to continue but it's it's i it cannot be saved especially because it's been recorded like it's well

reported that qualcomm looks to make between 4.5 to 4.7 billion dollars of revenue in the coming quarter because of the settlement of apple like and not all of that is real mad right yeah i mean not not all of that is necessarily due to intel's failings because there was the overarching patent question and apple was going to have to pay patent fees to qualcomm whether or not they used Qualcomm's processors. But the fact is, it was all precipitated on the fact that they did not have a viable competitor to Qualcomm because Intel couldn't deliver. And we know our Mac project has been reportedly worked on for a very long time. But I look at this where this is Apple saying, without saying it, they are saying to the world, the Mac is being held back by Intel.

That is what they're saying here. The Mac would be growing, but Intel can't get us chips fast enough. And what's the next step? The next step is that Intel won't be supplying the chips. That's what that means. How soon? Undoubtedly. Like, undoubtedly.

It is not saber rattling for the new ceo of intel this is apple saying you know what's holding the mac back intel we're gonna have to solve that one yeah i bet i bet you are do you think this changes the timeline uh i think that timelines are too complicated i i think it may indicate that the timeline is uh is happening sooner than some might expect because you would think if they were still comfortable enough? Two to three years away, they might not want to say stuff like this. Look, they're still reliant on Intel

for processors for Macs, like in the intervening time. But like if they are already, especially if some of the leaks have been maybe from the Intel side, who knows? Because Apple does need to start to make deals with Intel in terms of like,

here's how many chips we're going to buy and when and where and what kind. And at some point, the writing is going to be on the wall, right? Where Apple is going to say, we don't anticipate buying chips from you at this volume in a year and a half or whatever. But yeah, it feels to me like this is going to happen sooner than we think. But I don't think it's something where they can say, oh, let's put our foot on the gas now, because we've really got to get out of Intel even faster. I don't think that's possible. I think they've got their plans,

and they're planning on executing them. I think it's more likely that they're ready. They know how soon they're going to start making a transition, and so they're more comfortable throwing Intel into the bus for max sales and saying it's their fault, not ours. There's some wild stuff in this one. Right? I mean, for a boring set of charts and graphs and a boring hour-long phone call where it's like a 40-minute monologue followed by 20 minutes of strange questions from financial analysts, this is why I do it, Mike. This is why I make charts,

and this is why i do it mike this is why i make charts and this is why i do the transcript the quarterly earnings are always a dry topic super dry this year particularly has been really interesting because it's weird yeah and i think there's always stuff the reason i put the effort into doing the transcript is there is always something to be gleaned from that transcript nothing is said by accident. No, no. Like literally you can hear when somebody, so they read, the way it works is they read a prepared statement at the beginning. Tim reads one, Luca reads one, and then they open the call to questions. And by the way, it's interesting when they have a bad quarter and they don't have things to talk about, they open the call for questions very late. They did it a lot earlier

this time. Last quarter, it was like 10 minutes of questions. They're like three questions. They're like, we don't even want to hear it. We don't want to talk to you. We don't want your questions. Ask a question. And if you ask a question we don't like, you're never being invited back on the call. So make sure that they're okay questions. This time, they asked a few more questions. But every time they ask a question, you can hear in the background, and it's a much higher quality. It used to be like a speakerphone, but now it's like a high quality microphone setup. It's like a more of a podcasting setup. I wonder if they use the same.

Anyway, there's a, I wonder what microphones they use. Anyway, they, you can hear the papers, Mike. You can hear. Oh, really? You can hear when somebody's asking a question, you can hear the shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh,

as they move the papers around of like, what's my prepared answer for that? And sometimes they don't have it or they have it partially. And what you get from Tim Cook in those scenarios is like, well, you know, as we said this fact that I already said, that doesn't quite answer your question. And, you know, in general we think, and you can see that they, he's not, he's not making up an answer there. He is parsing what he's, what they've agreed that he's willing to say. So, so yes, this was, and this was in the scripted part, like throwing Intel under the bus was in the script. So there, there we are, there we are.

We are at the point where Apple is more or less openly hostile to the provider of processors on Macs. And we all know where this goes next. Today's episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. If you want to save a bunch of time as a freelancer, somebody who's self-employed, and you don't want to have to deal with the mess that is invoicing anymore, FreshBooks can help you. With their wonderful tools, they have drastically reduced the time that it takes for over 10 million people to do their paperwork. And they give you tools that take so much of the hassle out of the invoicing process. With their simple cloud accounting software, you can do tasks like invoicing,

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So we spent the last couple of weeks talking about Guilherme Rambeau's reports of what we're going to see at WWDC over on 9to5Mac. And we were wondering, is that going to be it? Are we going to see anything from Mark Gurman? And yes, we did.

A huge report this morning, Monday the 6th, as we are recording this episode. Lots and lots of little details that we're going to get into. So Mark did what Mark has done for many years. And I was wondering, did Guilherme get it all? He didn't. So iOS 13. So what we're going to do, I'm just going to run through some of this stuff. We're not going to go through everything because it's too much. But I've picked out some of the things that are most interesting to me. So iOS 13 is going to continue focusing on performance and stability. That is not a surprise, and I'm pleased to see it.

I think everyone seemed to be really happy with that, right? Yeah. With iOS 12. Yeah. It goes back to Apple's point that they have made a few times now, which is that iPhone, especially sales, the sales cycle is widening, and they want to make sure that uh if you if you have an older phone that it still works well and they're so they're trying to make sure that they

can have ios still run well on old systems i'll say this benefits apple too because if apple's trying to get people to upgrade through trade-in what What happens to the traded-in phones? Well, the answer is they get refurbished and they get resold either to customers or to businesses, but they get reused. And so then Apple needs the value of those older models to still be reasonable. And that means that they need to run the current version of iOS well. So it's not surprising, but it's good. It's good. It means if you hold onto your phone for three years, you can update it to the latest iOS and it's going to work well. And that's how it should be.

There seems to be some visual changes to iOS kind of a fundamental level with what is being referred to as new animations for multitasking and opening and closing apps. This is one of those things where it's like, we don't know what that means yet. And there's no more detail in that. And it feels like maybe it's something to do

with whatever's happening with iPad, I think. It's like, there's going to be some wild stuff. So the animations need to change somehow. And apparently widgets in Notification Center will look different too. Right, which also makes me wonder if that's tied to iPad. Sometimes with these reports, you get the details, but you don't get the interconnectedness of it. It's the,

I always talk about the parable of the blind man and the elephant, which is like you start reporting individual features. And, uh, but it's when you finally see it revealed that you're like, Oh, right. I see. So like the, do changes to widgets and notification center imply something else for where widgets might appear? Do they they will widgets appear in other places on the ipad interface but they look different in notification center on the iphone we don't know we you know that all we all we have are uh i think if mark german knew more he would say yeah and so you know he's he gets some bits of information that he has to phrase in a certain way because that's all he knows there'll be a dark mode which we knew already but you'll be able to switch on with control center there'll be a toggling control center

which is perfect lovely that's what you want from that um something that was referred to as being in testing there's not many of the these features that are referred to as this which means that mark is probably not that sure on it but a swipe keyboard coming to ios i use swipe keyboard of g board all the time and i love it and and i would coming to iOS. I use swipe keyboard of Gboard all the time, and I love it. And I would love to see Apple implement their own version of that. There will be a new health app in iOS 13, and there's also going to be some stuff

in Apple Watch that we'll talk about how these ties in. Hearing health is going to be one of the new things added, as well as an overall redesign, and more comprehensive menstrual tracking, which I know is something Apple were really, really behind on when the health app came out.

And they've added some stuff over time. But this is going to be a much, much more comprehensive system, it would seem. And again, there's some stuff with the Apple Watch that ties into that.

A new reminders app. Mark describes the app as being divided into four sections. Today, so what tasks you have today, all of your tasks, your scheduled tasks, and your flagged tasks. Seems interesting. I mean, a new Reminders app is a long overdue thing. And it would be, you know, I've spoken about this, I would love to see apple do to reminders what they did to notes right where they actually make it a compare like a competitive simple version of what it should be and reminders has kind of not been that for a while it's not going to pick up all

the features that its competitors do but it could do potentially a better job than it's done i i i laughed at this because i use reminders as a really stupid list app. And I look at this and I'm like, oh man, are you going to make it good and complicated and stuff? Because I don't actually want to use it in that way. I just want it to be a place where I can put story ideas. I only put my story ideas there and it's just a dumb list. That's all it is. It could be a text file, but I put it in reminders. I don't know why. Anyway, I think it's just a dumb list that's all it is it could be a text file but i put it in reminders i don't know why maybe anyway i i think it's good but i did have that moment of of thinking oh i i rely on the stupidity of reminders well maybe that'll have to change but that's okay i

think it's good that apple apple should provide base a base feature set for apps right and sometimes it feels like they do a very simple feature set and then time moves on and the base the bar has been raised and they don't go back and raise the bar in their apps and you mentioned notes is the perfect example where the bar was raised and notes went to that level right they they did enough that notes is not putting other notes apps i think out of business but it is a more functional app because the truth is 95 of the people will use the built-in apps and it makes the iphone or an ipad experience better if those apps are better new screen time features to allow parents to restrict the times of day that apps can be used seems like a natural extension and actually

something that that um i struck me that i could have used a lot, which is limiting who can be contacted at certain times of day. I think that's a kind of interesting thing of like, you know, we're going to lock down how your iPhone gets used after a certain point. But if you need to call us, you know, your parents, you can do that. That sort of thing is apparently going to be in there. Some changes to iMessage or messages to make it you know Apple have kind of referred to on and off of like messages as like a social network and some apps like WhatsApp allow you to set profile information like an image for yourself and stuff like that apparently this is coming to messages along with what is referred to Jason as

a dedicated menu to send sticker versions of Animoji. Jason, I think they're finally making Bitmoji. Yeah, good. I wanted this, right? I want my Animoji in environments like how I use Bitmoji every day. I don't also want to be making a face every time. Exactly. So once they know what your animoji looks like they can put your animoji in different sticker situations right uh the dedicated menu thing again it's like that sounds like one that's just it's an iMessage app surely like i i don't really know what that would mean but i i would be super excited to get that yeah i have some questions about iMessage applications and if you know are we still doing that um well and if we are i mean they keep adjusting the interface i wonder if they're

going to adjust the interface to the point where it doesn't wreck it doesn't look anything like uh it does now but i guess we're still doing that so okay the home pod to get multi-user support be interesting yeah yeah that's uh that's a big one right i my home pod is much less i've said this on this podcast before my home pod is much less useful because um like we still do all of our um grocery list stuff on our amazon echo yeah and the primary reason is that although i can tie the grocery list stuff to the home pod if my phone leaves the house, that functionality ceases to function because it has to be tied to my phone. And what you really want is multi-user support so that you can either link multiple phones to the HomePod or you can just link multiple Apple IDs to the HomePod. So let's

hope that there's a lot of good stuff there. A downloads manager in Safari. Yeah, on iOS. isn't that isn't that wild oh uh this you know i could only imagine the excitement for federico fatici when he read that like that is just like yes it should 100 be there um and again that's like that is a strong indication of better understanding of the way the files are used on iOS. Right? Right, right. What, you mean getting a modal dialogue anytime you tap on a file in Safari in iOS is not the right way to do it?

I want to read a quote directly from Mark's report. The iPad is getting some unique features, including an updated interface for multitasking, tweaks to the Home app, and the ability to cycle through different versions of the same app. tweaks to the home app, and the ability to cycle through different versions of the same app. So we have yet another way that multiple instances is being described, right? Now it's the ability to cycle through different versions of the same app. Yeah, I assume that that's what that means, is that you can have the same app doing different things either in multitasking or in full screen in different places uh which is just like another way to describe it which doesn't really help right like and i looked at it and it's like okay i don't like version 5 let's go back to version 4.5 like nope i don't think that's gonna be it either uh yeah and tweaks to the home screen which we've talked about before uh what are

those what are those like that has been out there for a long time now for a year uh plus where that was going to be in ios 12 and it didn't happen like how did it how does apple re imagine what the ipad home screen looks like uh mark german also confirmed some nine to five reports basically using the ipad as the second screen it sounds actually just like that with the way that marks's described it, which is surprising to me. It wasn't what I was expecting. There being updates to Mail and Find My Friends to be updated and merged with Find My iPhone. So that's all in there as well. So we move to the next version of macOS. So obviously MarsBand running iPad apps on the Mac.

Mark did talk about the fact that developers will need to also submit their apps to the Mac App Store, which is interesting, but sure, right? They're not universal yet. So like, sure, right? It's not the same store. Yeah, so you have to do

a separate process. Yeah. You know, again, confirming other reports that Apple will be bringing more of their own applications like podcasts to Mac. And then one

which is curious i can have a quote there will also be a new apple music app which is being developed as a standard mac program now there's a few things here program is hilarious uh what what does this mean okay so the best i can i can can get from this and from other things that we've heard is that apparently Apple has been working on a transition of iTunes on the Mac to Apple Music for a while. Uh, and apparently that's where they're going, at least in the short term is ripping a bunch of non-music stuff out of iTunes and calling it Apple music, but having it be the music app that is, that we've been using all this time and not the iOS version. I, I find this kind of bizarre. for Mac users in the short term, because it means that you, that we would be able to theoretically keep all of our precious, uh, advanced iTunes features that the music app on iOS doesn't offer. But it is weird from the sense that like, okay, Apple, you gave us a new app using your classic development frameworks when you're in the process of moving all of these apps from iOS and you've got this app on iOS. So I look at this and I think this can't be for the long run. Like maybe, maybe they're not going

to bother turning music into music on iOS and the music on Mac via Marzipan this time, because they don't need to, they've already got this other project where they're going to simplify iTunes and make it the new music app. But that can't, you know, be for the long run, right? Like surely, eventually, that is going to transition. But then again, you can look at this and say, this is Apple saying, not every app is going to be marzipan, that there will still be apps that are running the old AppKit approach to apps, and that's fine and so maybe if you if you want to view it this way that apple's not not saying you know look out five years and everything runs in marzipan that maybe they're saying no no you know some things on the mac will will use the old

methods now i look at this app and i think why this app though like what why i final cut i get it right like i get i get it but this app really yeah okay it's interesting right because it's like you can get it right it's like oh okay so they've broken up itunes and then like podcasts and books they become marzipan apps because that's where that fits and you'd be like okay but music is more complicated so we had to make it as a standard mac app but like why is it more complicated though right like that's what i'm interested as you said like but why i think i think um you know if if they built a brand new app from scratch as uh as app kit that would be wild right but that's not my understanding and i'm you know i'm not gonna i i have heard through the grapevine, right? Not directly, but my understanding

is that this is not that. My understanding is that this is iTunes with pieces ripped out of it, but who knows? That's all secondhand, thirdhand, who knows what. These are all rumors at this point, but based on Mark Gurman's report, what is this? And maybe that's it. Maybe that there was already a simplification plan underway, or they said like, you know, I think you were getting at, um, we can bring over these, these purpose build apps from via Marzipan. So you don't need to do that in iTunes anymore. So tear that stuff out. And we, you know, because if you've got a TV app and you've got a podcast app, um, and you got the, you don't need those parts of iTunes anymore. So rip them all out,

app and you got you don't need those parts of itunes anymore so rip them all out simplify itunes make it music again and even though it's still really itunes um well and we'll rename it because apple renames has been renaming all its mac apps to parallel ios for years now um yeah so we'll see also any bets i'll say as a sidelight any bets to when system preferences is going to get changed to settings? I'm surprised it hasn't been changed already. Me too, because they've been trying to standardize all this language. But anyway, that sounds to me like the most likely scenario is there were a lot of simple unitasker apps on iOS that they could bring over to Marzipan. And then they looked at iTunes and they're like, yeah, we can't do that.

Let's just use the Mac app and take that stuff out and that'll be okay for now but i have a hard time believing that's a long-term solution screen time stickers in messages coming to mac os and also and the adding to the confusion as mark calls it, the integration with the Siri shortcuts app. Again, hasn't helped. Don't know what that means. That doesn't help. Nope. Nope.

Don't know what that means. Doesn't help. So the root of this and the mystery is we don't know whether adding Siri shortcuts to the Mac is a thing or whether they're also adding the shortcuts app to the Mac with Marzipan and what that means in terms of automation. It's unclear and it continues to be unclear. Maybe the Siri team is better at keeping secrets than other parts of Apple. I don't know. And the Apple Watch. Apple Watch is going to get an app store.

You say, but the Apple Watch already has an app store. It's on my phone. Yeah. Now it's going to be on the watch. Yeah. Now it's going to be on the watch. Yeah. On one level, it makes sense, right? Because what you want is you want to be able, I've had those moments where I'm like,

oh man, I don't have this app. I didn't sync it over or whatever. And I'm on my Apple Watch. I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to have to go to the phone and all that. So on that level, like making the Apple Watch more independent makes sense to me.

But then I try to imagine like, what does an app store on the watch look's gonna be it's gonna be very difficult but like you over time you have to increase the independence of the device and i agreed putting an app store on it for as peculiar as that may end up being is something that eventually you do need to do i mean remember when the iphone wasn't standalone Like it was not that long ago when the iPhone had to tie into a computer and they made great efforts to make that not the case anymore. And the iPad too. And I think the Apple watch, although it's still, you know, fundamentally very tied to iPhones, making it more independent, especially now that you have a cellular model that does not have to be anywhere where the iPhone is. So if I'm out and about with only my watch and I want to do something on an

app that I didn't sync to my Apple Watch, being able to say, hey, watch, download this app and bring it up in the App Store and have me install it, that's great. great also there's some weirdness in the fact that the apple watch app store is kind of just a weird subset of the app the iphone app store and maybe there's a better way to streamline that where it's you know it's kind of treated as its own thing um i don't know uh interesting move but i think the right direction so there's going to be some new uh health apps for the apple watch one is is called Dose inside of Apple, whether that will be the actual name or not, which is a pill reminder application,

which I would greatly benefit from because I always forget to take my pills. And another one called Cycles, which is to track menstrual cycles on the Apple Watch. So these are a couple of additional apps that will be added that tie back into the health-focused stuff we were talking about earlier. James Thompson's in the chat room, probably uh they're gonna make a calculator app for the apple watch apparently and people said that he was unreasonable to put a

calculator on the apple watch people called him uh one of these wacky developers who which he is because he does put everything on every platform there is a calculator for apple tv too it makes so much sense there are calculator watches right like that's that's a thing that exists right yeah i had one absolutely so it is about time that they do it but i bet it won't have bananas and 3d about screens probably Probably not. Probably not. Unless those are the things that you need to have a calculator on the Apple Watch. Like that's part of what you actually need,

but we'll find out. Voice memos, that should already be there. And a books app. I read that, I was like, wait, what? It's like, oh, for audio books. You're just sitting there, reading War and Peace on the Apple Watch. No, audio books, like syncing books, makes sense.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Because it's an audio-focused thing, and people will want it in the same way you'd listen to podcasts. You know, I know that Marco talks about how one fraction of 1% of people use the Apple Watch app with playback for Overcast, but I use it all the time. Every time I walk the dog, I just don't take my cellular Apple Watch. I am.

It surprises me because I leave my iPhone behind. I go walk the dog. I've got my AirPods in. I listen to podcasts on my Apple Watch. And it's great. So I'm surprised that more people don't do that. But the Apple Watch is a product with very specific appeal in some ways. And it's also super early, I think, even now in the lifecycle of a product like this.

It's still a very primitive device in a lot of ways. As advanced and amazing as it is to have a computer on our wrists, it's still super early days for the Apple Watch. Especially when you call it what you just called it a computer yeah i mean yeah it's and again to take us back to the iphone like the early iphone had lots of places where it was just kind of non-functional you're like oh a device like this should be able to do this and the answer was well yeah but not yet we're not there yet and apple watch is still there for a lot of things there's still a lot of big chunks that every year they can kind of like tear off of like oh yeah finally the apple watch does this and i feel like we're we're still there and we're

going to be in there for uh for years yet and several new watch faces so these are listed gradient the face that makes a gradient color uh extra large shows jumbo numbers california is a dial name which is a classic watch face style which mixes roman numerals and arabic numerals so regular numbers and roman numbers right like as you would see them a redesigned solar analog watch face that looks like a sundial and an infograph sub-dial watch face that includes larger complication views like a stock market chart or the weather i think that this says that still no third-party watch faces yeah this so the problem i have with this is that okay new

watch faces that's great but the thing that last year was very clear to a lot of us who watch this stuff is apple has not spent enough time on its old watch faces and making them better and so they have like all sorts of faces that don't have functionality that the new like they're my go-to face i can't put on my current apple watch not well i can but i can't do anything new with it because they didn't update it it's just it's dumb so uh new watch faces is great but i'm still going to be disappointed if they haven't uh really shown that they're going back and they're updating the existing watch faces to make them better um i don't need third-party watch faces that would be fine and all but what i really want to see is that if there aren't going to be third-party

watch faces apple needs to be better committed to keeping their maintaining the existing watch faces so we'll see yeah we will see uh and also last part that i wanted to just call out because it's like thrown away in there but it's important to many people listening to this show for this year apple has been considering debuting a revamped mac pro desktop computer it's also readying a new external monitor codenamed j290 with high dynamic range support so colors look much better okay maybe maybe mac pro right maybe yep maybe if there's a lot of stuff in here i mean yeah if we get to be big it's gonna be big big old wwdc especially when you think like marzipan is one bullet point on this but that is going to be a huge huge part of the presentation right yeah i mean. I mean, the fact is that one of the truths of WWDC keynotes is sometimes they'll spend

five minutes on a feature that nobody ever talks about again. And sometimes there'll be one little item on a slide that's got 100 items on it that will change the face of how millions of people use their devices. Yeah. And in the moment, sometimes you can tell, and sometimes you can't tell. Like, sometimes it's just sort of like, wow, look at this new feature, and then we never talk about it again. So that's one of the great things about WWDC, and I'm looking forward to it. All right, so we should do some hashtag AskUpgrade questions before we wrap up today.

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And it's on HomeKit and it's got its own app. And I had that moment where I thought, right, I need to make sure that my Wi-Fi reaches that area because it's like back, it's outside behind our bedroom. And but Eero's got it covered because we have three different Eero devices in three different places. And as a result, we've blanketed the entire, our entire lot with Wi-Fi. So I can sit in the backyard. Now that it's dry season, it's also warmer. I can sit back there. My Wi-Fi is fast. My camera that is in the driveway, it gets a solid Wi-Fi signal. And of course, the side yard with the sprinkler controller is solid, which means that I can just use that app to set up when I'm watering the grass and it's all taken care of. And I didn't even have to worry about

it because everywhere that I have this house has Wi-Fi now because of Eero. Everywhere I have my house, I have the Wi-Fi. All. Everywhere I have my house, I have the Wi-Fi. Yes, all the places I keep my house and my yard have Wi-Fi. Never think about Wi-Fi again. Get $100 off the Eero base unit and two beacons package and a year of Eero Plus by going to Eero.com slash Ahoy and at checkout using the promo code Ahoy. That's E-E-R-O.com slash A-H-O-Y

and the code Ahoy to get 100 off the era base unit and two beacons package and one year of era plus so thanks to ero for their support of this show and relay fm and jason snail give me some good lasers our first hashtag ask upgrade question this week comes from lonnie. How do you clean your AirPods? It feels like an impossible thing, honestly, especially the case. Like, you know. I have a little cleaning loop that I got with my

fancy headphones, and it's like a little, very tiny little loop of metal, and you can use it kind of as a scraper. So I will do that occasionally or like a thumbtack like a pin i use just try to scrape on that it's not it's hard or you blow blow and i use a sim ejector tool to try and get like the lint out of the case you know like those things they're pretty good yeah it's a little pokey thing yeah it's hard it's hard but i do

try to do that um every now and then when then when I see that they're kind of dirty. I do that all the time with my in-ear headphones that I use for podcasting for obvious reasons. And so, you know, I do think about it for the AirPods from time to time. It hasn't been a big problem though. AirPods are the grossest Apple product I've ever made. They just get gross. There's nothing you can do about it. And we didn't even mention that story that I think is probably fake about the guy who swallowed an AirPod.

Don't want to talk about it. And after it came out the other end, it still worked. Don't want to talk about it. I just want to say that's one of the greatest headlines John Gruber has ever written. Because basically he said, this is why you can never use used AirPods. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Personal devices. Personal electronics. Steve asks, if you could pick one company for Apple to purchase to beef up its content for Apple TV+, who would it be and why? I want to give this a slight twist, Jason, because I know we've spoken about the fact

that there's not a lot. In this instance, I will allow for you to be able to pick anything that might be bundled into some other company, right? Like, you just imagine apple could go in to any company and pick out any piece they wanted who would it be oh well i i'm i'm just gonna say apple will buy um the combined cbs biocom company which is you know they're not they're separate but they're they have the same owners um i think

that's i think that's one of the largest swaths of content that currently is out there not run by an enormous company where apple could just pay cash for them and they get a lot of content they get a huge catalog now they're going to own a tv network at that point which i imagine they will sell off to someone like a disney this is something I was thinking about, I'm sure, but Disney just sold off all the Fox Sports stuff. All the Fox Sports stuff. Well, that was mandated by the government.

That's a trust, right? But they also let Rupert Murdoch and his family keep the Fox broadcast network. And I would imagine the other way to do it, either if Apple bought CBS Viacom, either they would leave the network behind and that would be sold somewhere else, or they would leave the network behind and that would be sold somewhere else, or they would take it and then immediately sell it off. Sort of depends on what

the negotiation was. But I feel like that gives them a lot of content and studios, and that's what they want. They would pick up all of the Comedy Central and Adult Swim. I mean, they would get a bunch of content. They get Star Trek. They get CSI or whatever. They get all those shows. They get lots and lots of content that they could put up. And I feel like it's between that and Sony Pictures Entertainment are the two biggest providers of content that are just sitting out there, probably too small to fend for themselves. Yeah, I think Sony's an interesting one too though right like that that would be kind of cool but they have less now which is the problem right yeah but they still

i mean they still have a whole studio you know they've got they've got tv and movie studio um and a lot of content and that would be that's another you know additive purchase that would be you know would be okay of course at that point apple would own if apple bought sony they would own the um like the spider-man movies and things like that which like okay apple's gonna release spider-man movies now but maybe maybe sony would be trickier i reckon for them to try and pick up because like what is sony pictures even separated from Sony? No, Sony would have to sell it.

Yeah. Sony would have to want to sell it. In a way that with Viacom, National Amusements, I don't know what the deal is with Sumner Redstone's family and all that, but I think that's one of those things where I imagine that Apple would come with a bag of cash and they'd be like, okay, good, done, sold. Martin wants to know, Jason, are you using the new reading list feature in marvel unlimited i am not what is it i i don't i don't know okay i'm not using it all right i'm not using maybe that's maybe that's a thing that lets you uh add uh items like in a queue or something like that i tend to just go in marvel unlimited and

flip around and find new things that i want to read and that's what i how i use it or i search for a character or a series or something that strikes my fancy i i i don't have my comic reading um organized that well to be honest and i kind of haven't been reading a lot of comics the last few weeks so i've kind of let it slide so i don't know what series are you enjoying right now though i have been enjoying the uh the buffy the vampire slayer reboot that boom studios is doing where they're basically retelling buffy the vampire slayer in the modern day which is fun because it's a remix basically of buffy for the present which is uh it's just kind of fun to see somebody who obviously knows the source material and loves it and then is trying to adapt it for what life is like in the 21st century instead of in the you know the late 90s which was when buffy

was was set um and let's see i we just did a incomparable episode a few weeks ago about paper girls which is a really good comic that has a little apple some apple references in it that are kind of wacky and fun and it uh And the pitch is that it's an 80s, it's almost like an 80s movie. It's almost like the Goonies or something like that, where it's a bunch of girls who have paper routes and it's the 80s. And it's like the night after Halloween. And then some very, very weird things happen. And I will say that if you expect it to be an 80s nostalgia trip comic, it very rapidly becomes something else. And that's all I'll say.

But there are like five trade paperback versions of that. So Paper Girls is another one people can check out. And finally today, a question from Nate. How often do you charge your iPad? The more I find myself using mine as a laptop and going to it instead of my iPhone where I can, I find the battery drains way faster than I would expect it to. I unplug my iPad in the morning when I get up from bed or when I don't, when I start reading in bed in the morning before I go and get my tea and all of that.

And I don't plug it back in until the end of the day. And I haven't had any problems. I would say with my iPad Pro, it's like every day and a half, right? That I'm plugging in. I don't plug my iPad in on a schedule the way I do my iPhone. I just wait until it gets low and then I plug it in. I do a daily schedule, but I will say, and this is probably to Nate's point, if I'm using the ipad all the time through the day which i'm not uh yeah it might get i might notice that it gets low and i might

plug it in at that point but i don't i don't generally use it all the time all day because i have my um imac that i'm sitting in front of for a big chunk of the day like i am right now yeah but i would say the ipad pro it gets what it says it gets. That 10-hour battery life, it gets that for me. And I feel like the iPad kind of always has, and they don't seem to want to change that, and I'm fine with it because that's more than enough. All right, don't forget, upgradeyourwardrobe.com. This could be your last chance to get your hands

on some Dongletown Surf Club merchandise so you can be the coolest person at the beach this year. I'm saying, I don't know if it's cool, but we like it. I think the design's great. I'm really, really happy with what we've been able to do with this stuff. So you can go get yourself some t-shirts or some tank tops, tote bags or towels. Tees, tanks, totes and towels over at upgradeyourwardrobe.com.

You can find our show notes this week at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 244 or in your podcast app of choice you can find Jason at sixcolors.com and he's at jsnl on twitter jsnll I am at imyke I-M-Y-K-E thank you again to our sponsors

the fine folk at Eero, FreshBooks and Borrow but most of all thank you for listening if you'd like to send in a question for us to answer at the end of the show hashtag askupgrade is the way to do that and if you want to help open the show

hashtag snelltalk is the way to do that we'll be back next week where we're probably going to talk about keyboards so I know that a lot of you

like that so we'll be back next week until then say goodbye Jason Snell choo choo choo choo choo We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow.