Upgrade - 263: Extra Professional

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

This week Upgrade turns five and we're waiting for our new Apple hardware to arrive. But there's still time to reflect on last week's announcements, deal with a flood of Apple TV+ news, ponder Apple's fragmented OS release schedule, carefully examine expensive Apple Watch materials, and prepare for the arrival of iOS 13.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 263 today's show is brought to you by linode express vpn and doordash my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley what a busy time it is it's the most wonderful time of the year we have a hashtag snail talk question that comes from tom and tom wants to know jason can you describe your ideal apple watch face oh boy apple watch face apple watch face which way do you say apple watch face or apple watch face you see what i'm saying apple watch face apple watch face um i want a uh i want analog hands and i want numbers in a circle like you can actually say california or utility was the classic one it looks a lot like watches that i used to wear

but i want the modern large complication circles on it. So with California, you can get a little bit of that. But it doesn't have the circles on the inside. They're on the outside. I think actually the California face, which I changed to just be Arabic numerals, it's got a circle complication. Oh, I should also say 1 through 12. I don't need the seconds or the minutes or whatever. And I also don't like it when it's just like the 12, 3, 6,

9. I want all 12. All the numbers. I want that look. I have a little circle complication above it which is my carrot weather and then you've got the four corner complications. That works really well for me so I've actually been using that. The California face is, there's so many different options you can have with the California face.

So you can have corner complications on that face, yes you can because i've been um i've been uh spending some time on the apple watch website for no reason just playing around with the configuring thing because it's due diligence as a uh podcaster to play around with the configuration thing so i've been doing that and And the ceramic watch, which I've been looking at for no reason, just I've been looking, you know, like I've been looking at all of them. The white ceramic watch

looks really good with the California face. It's the face they use to show that one off. And the white and black California face, it looks really good. And I just wanted to say, you know, just for the sake of saying it, because I've been playing around with it, the white ceramic with the black, what is it called, the link bracelet? Yeah.

It is a bold look. It's a very stormtrooper-y look. It is a very, very expensive watch. We're like in a little parenthetical bubble here inside Snell Talk, but I'll share it with you that because I write about this stuff, I tend to be getting a new Apple Watch every year so that I can write about it. So I'm always reluctant to get anything but the cheapest Apple Watch. But I will tell you...

Oh, the titanium i'm looking at it calling you huh yeah well the stainless you know it's kind of heavy and although there is the stainless black because i've been looking at the titanium black and the stainless black and all that it's like i you know if i was just a consumer getting a watch that i was going to use for the next few years, that would probably be what I would do. I'll probably just go aluminum, space gray. As always, I've already got my order in because, you know, I spend too much money on Apple watches because I need to do it for my job. But I will admit to looking at that titanium, not the ceramic so much, that doesn't really do it for me. But the titanium one and thinking, yeah, it it's pricey but it's also pretty and if you've been buying the aluminium ones

going to the titanium is like a 400 jump but if you've been buying stainless steel it's a hundred so like it's it's another option to look at then i think at that point but i agree like it is a very very different uh very different calculation if you're going to that level but I'm just saying the white ceramic I'm just saying here I love it I adore it I feel like the California face is is a great having only used watch os6 intently for like a week I feel like that face is really great because it's so flexible, because you can change what it does in so many different ways.

And that means that it's one face, but it can look dramatically different based on what you do. My only complaint about it, and this is what keeps it from being my ideal watch face. It's very close, Tom. It's very close.

Is the color issue where California face, unlike other Apple apple watch faces doesn't give you the option to set the color of the watch face uh in a mode that allows the complications to be multi-color right it's monochrome only yeah so i like the black watch face not with a white dial i like the black dial so it's basically white on a black background. And the only complaint I have about it is that I would actually prefer my complications to be in color. And they're not. They're monochrome.

But other than that, that actually lets me – it's flexible enough that it lets me get very close to my Apple watch face. I have to be honest. This last year, I've spent a lot of time using Infograph Modular. And while it is incredibly functional, so before I had a series of essentially Swiss Army watches that looked very much like my ideal Apple Watch face with the kind of tasteful sans serif numbers one through 12 around the dial, and I had one that was metal, like brush metal. And before that, I had one that I actually got when we got engaged. It was a nice, again, not expensive, but a nice watch. Before that, I had, you know, a nerd watch.

I had like a Casio calculator watch at one point. And Infograph Modular is like the calculator watch of Apple Watch faces, where it's like, it's super nerdy, but super functional. And I have been using that a lot the last year, but I, in this last week, have been using that California face and I like it a lot better. I really do prefer having the watch hands

and the complications. And I, you know, it's just, and the complications around the side does mean that you don't have the watch hands moving in front of your data. Certain times of day, you're like, I can't see this button right now. That's not great. So around the edges is a little bit better.

But again, I would really like it if I had the option to make those complications in color. But otherwise, it's very, very close. So thank you so much to Tom for sending in that question and allowing us to go on a wild couple of tangents there. If you would like to send in a hashtag Snell Talk question to open a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with that hashtag and it may be included. As we are recording today, it is September 16th, 2019. 2019, which means that depending on what time zone you're in, either today or tomorrow, September 17th, is five years of upgrade. It's five years of upgrade and fiveyearsofsixcolors.com, September 16th. And the embargo on my iPhone review was late in the day.

I think it was like 5 p.m. or something. It was not in the early morning. It was late in the day. I think it was like 5 p.m. or something. It was not in the early morning. It was late in the day. And as a result, the RelayFM CMS is in GMT. And so it's dated September 17th in the CMS, but it was actually simultaneous with more or less with the launch of Six Colors. I mean, Six Colors had soft launched just so that it was there and ready to go but i wasn't pointing people to it until my review stuff dropped and yeah so so five years right right now five years basically so we talked about it two weeks ago right we talked about it or three weeks ago before all the madness of a draft and then an iPhone event. But so you can go back and listen

if you want to hear us reminisce about that. But yes, thanks to everybody. It's been a great five years. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and you can join St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and RelayFM this September, along with organizations such as the World Health Organization who are committed to transforming cancer care with the goal of curing at least 60% of children

worldwide with six of the most common cancers by 2030. With your support, you will help St. Jude stay true to its life-saving mission, finding cures and saving children. Donate to support childhood cancer around the world at stjude.org slash pineapple right now. That is stjude.org slash pineapple. The last week has been absolutely unbelievable. We had a fundraising goal of $75,000 for St. Jude. We are at $131,740 right now. That's $131,740 right now. I want to thank everybody who's donated and everyone who continues to donate. I want to thank all of our podcasting friends here at RelayFM and elsewhere,

like the wonderful guys over at ATP did a wonderful job of talking about this. Going into the podcast-a-thon, which is this Friday, September 20th, from 4 to 10 p.m. Eastern, to be close to doubling our original goal is an incredible feeling. I want to double it and then some now, and that's what I really hope can happen. We're only halfway through September, and we're going to keep talking about this all September. I want everyone who's listening to this to join us on Friday 4 to 10pm Eastern, you can find some time in there, we've got some wonderful hijinks planned, we've got some really great stuff that will work

and we're very excited about it, Jason's going to be there, Jason's actually put something together for us which will allow me and Stephen to take a bit of a break which is awesome and you're going to love it we are just absolutely blown away by the support of our wider podcasting audience here. You're all unbelievable. Please continue to give. Go to stjude.org slash pineapple to do that.

You are actually not just making us feel happy for raising this money, you're making like a real effect. Like this is this amount of money is making a real effect to St. Jude now. And that is absolutely unbelievable. So thank you for your generosity. Now, I like the fact that, you know, some people look at this and say, well, come on. They're so far above their goal. That was obviously a low goal. And then they were planning on it being more than that.

And that's a fundraising technique. It does happen. I can exclusively report here that although you guys both told me that you expected to exceed your original goal, you had a second goal in mind that you could unveil and probably have that on the podcast-a-thon. And I'll just point out that you're way over your second goal. So this is a legitimate taken by surprise, blown through the goal kind of thing. We hit the $75,000 goal and then hit the $100,000 goal that we had in mind the same day. So, or like within 12 hours.

So, you know, at this point, we're absolutely blown away, but please continue to give. Let's just keep doing this. There's no harm in that. It's only good. Thank you. That'll be great, that podcast-a-thon.

I'm looking forward to seeing that. It's iPhone unboxing, Apple product release day, basically. So that's actually a pretty great time to do it. We'll be unboxing a phone on the stream. We have some guests planned. We have some games planned. We have some games planned. I have a very nice jacket.

Some games that people on the stream can participate in. Having done some of those over on The Incomparable, there's going to be opportunity for audience participation at points. We hope so. It's very fun. Yep. So we're really, really excited about it. Okay.

Let's do some reflections on last week. There's always a little bit of information. I had mentioned on the show about not liking the black crown on the white ceramic watch. Many people pointed out to me that this is probably for the ECG. So it needs to be conductive and it's probably a piece of metal. I still say I wish they could just find a way to make it white though right right i feel like there must be a way and i would prefer if they'd done that but but i will say the more that i've been pairing it with black watch bands the more i'm like oh it's actually quite interesting you can make it work but i still would have preferred to

see that white you're just doing your due diligence just my due diligence yeah it's it's it's my job to research the apple watch configurator so I can report on it on the show. I appreciate your commitment to your subject matter. I really do. And I at least feel that my accountant once told me that as long as I talk about it... That's right. It's a business expense now.

We've done it. Good job, Mike. I think that's how it works. Jason wrote a great article about the U1 chip, which goes into depth about the possibilities of this technology. So this is, I think that's how it works. Jason wrote a great article about the U1 chip, which goes into depth about the possibilities of this technology. So this is, I think we touched on it last week. This is a chip that is in the iPhone, which uses ultra-wideband technology, which unlocks a bunch of capabilities

that Apple did not touch on in the keynote and is probably the technology that would underpin an Apple tag product. So this like tile or tracker like replacement. And you had a great article, which included a bunch of quotes as well. So I kind of wanted you to talk about that a little and then maybe share some of your excitement about this technology, because you do seem pretty, as Tim would say, pretty bullish on it. Well, I mean, the potential is enormous and talking so i knew a little bit

about it last week when we talked but then i talked to this guy who's the i think director of marketing for this for decaway which is this chip maker that has been um making and pushing uwb for a long time and you got the sense i got the sense talking to him that that there was like this almost celebratory moment of like even though their chips aren't going in the in the iphone they're like oh it's going to be in every iphone because what's going to happen their feeling is like apple puts ultra wideband in the iphone it means everybody who all these other phone makers like google and samsung and htc like all these phone makers are on these consortium panels that are pushing this tech forward and have been for years.

So it's not like this is an Apple thing that Apple invented at all. But once it's in the iPhone, I mean, what he said is it feels to him like the moment when they put Wi-Fi in the iBook, which was like, oh, this is a thing now. Everybody's going to want Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is going to be a thing. And what's really interesting is unlike most technologies that are standards based where Apple kind of gets to them when Apple thinks the time is right, 5G would be a good example of that. Apple is the first company to ship smartphones with ultra-wideband. They're first out of the gate. And the technology is amazing.

Like I said last week that according to the bare hardware specs of ultra-wideband, you can use ultra-wideband to determine the location of a device within 10 centimeters, which is about four inches. location of a device within 10 centimeters, which is about four inches. What the guy from DecaWave told me is that's the bare raw. If you do some extra work, it can be precise down to a couple of millimeters. So the idea that this tech, not only does it do data transfer that's faster than Bluetooth, it's slower than Wi-Fi, it's faster than Bluetooth though. Not only does it do data transfer that's faster than bluetooth it's slower than wi-fi it's faster than bluetooth though not only is it more secure because it can't be spoofed by amplifying a signal because the it's all based on the speed of light in a round trip so a lot of a lot of hacks of like bluetooth proximity stuff is you you get the uh you get the transmission from somebody's phone like in the restaurant

and then you transmit it to a relay basically that's close to their car and the car unlocks because the car is like, oh, you're close. So I'll unlock. Whereas if it's measuring the bounce time of the packets basically, the bounce time at the speed of light of the radio waves, it knows

that that that key is not close so it's more secure um it's it's precise in a way that bluetooth le is not because it's it is all about that um that strength of signal and so then there are all sorts of applications because you know my door lock is a smart door lock and it's Bluetooth LE and it will sense when my phone is near the lock and it unlocks. But the way it has to do that is arcane because it has to, and follow me here, it has to have location services on on my phone in its app. it has to see me exit the area around my house and then see me return and get the Bluetooth signal. And then it unlocks the door. And the reason is, otherwise I'm always just around my house and it's like, oh, you're here. And how does it know to unlock your door? So it actually has to watch you leave and then watch you come back. And it's because, you know, Bluetooth is limited in what it can do. With ultra-wideband, you know, theoretically, it could actually see you

walk away in detail, but it also knows literally when you're standing in front of the door on the wrong side of the door. And then potentially, if you come in and close the door, it can see that you're now inside the house. And so now it knows you're home

and not on the wrong side of the door, and then it can lock the door. And that's just one example. Whole home audio is a good example where, you know, imagine a future world where when you walk from room to room in a house or an office, the, you know, the audio you're listening to follows you because it knows exactly where you are, as opposed to now where it knows sort of like vaguely where you are. Or smart home stuff where it knows that if you're in this room, it's going to prioritize the temperature in that room or it's going to turn on the lights in that room. And, you know, the home automation can be as complex

or not complex as it needs to be. But what you don't have right now, unless you're rigging some occupancy sensors, and even then you don't know who it is. You just know that there's somebody there. So there's a lot of potential for stuff like that, that it's just precision AR stuff where you can know exactly where objects are

if they've got these chips in them. That's another thing with huge potential. So it's just a lot of stuff like that. It's very exciting that this stuff may come to be. And the guy said, he thinks it's a no-er that it will be in the Apple watch eventually, because ultimately what you want, especially if you're tracking people around a house is real kind of biometric, uh, assuredness that the person is where they say they are. We leave our phones behind, but we don't, you've got a watch on your wrist. They know where you are exactly.

So yeah, it's really interesting. Has a lot of applications for stuff like that. If the simple version of it would be kind of imagine that it's very close pinpoint kind of GPS, especially inside where you can't do GPS. So yeah, I think it's really potentially great technology. And the reason that I'm more enthusiastic about it is that Apple is apparently all in on this.

And that's really interesting because that means that they have evaluated it and found it useful for their purposes. And Apple is a great popularizer of technology like this because once Apple's got it, everybody's going to want to have it. I mentioned the Apple tag a moment ago, like this product that's been rumored a bunch.

And I saw you tweet the other day that you had a pet theory that it's because of air power is one of the reasons they may have delayed the launch. And I liked this theory and wanted you to expand on it a little bit well i my gut feeling and this is just a you know it's it is like i said on twitter right pet theory is this is so there are lots of things where they're like oh this os feature got delayed

this os feature we're going to pull out and it's going to be later this year. We have a whole topic later on talking about exactly those things, right? Right. So they did that. So how does that square with this feeling that the keynote was a little short, that the U1 chip only got mentioned in marketing material and not on stage, even though it's this brand new chip from Apple. And we know how Apple likes to boast about its prowess in creating new chips with clever names that are a letter followed by a number. And none of that happened. And so it's very easy from that to go, you know, I bet the tracker thing just got pulled out at the last minute. And that's why it didn't get talked about. Because this would have been the perfect time to talk about the U1 in the context of the tracking thing. And my pet theory is that the difference is that's a hardware product.

And for some reason, they were not 100% confident that they should announce it at the Apple event. And I think it comes back to air power. I think they all had a conversation, you think, a little more than one, about what happened two years ago when they announced a product that was a piece of hardware that they thought was ready but was totally not ready. And I think maybe everybody agreed that if hardware is not ready, don't announce it. And that's my pet theory about air power, that they thought, or not about air power, but about a tracker is that air power was the lesson. And the tracker is the manifestation of that lesson, which is, you know what? If we're not a hundred percent confident, if it's not ready, if we've got some issues, if it's not, we're not sure about it, don't announce it. We can announce it next month at our event that

we haven't announced or we can do a press release or we can push it off till next year but don't announce it and um you know it it gives them the option if like what if this fails what if the u1 doesn't work as well as we think it's going to what if they're having some serious problems with the radios or serious problems with the tracker or the battery life of the tracker or the chip itself in the tracker maybe needs to be revised. I mean, there's lots of reasons why it's not quite right. All the way to the point of them never releasing it and saying, well, we never said the U1 was going to be anything other than point-to-point airdrop for now. So never mind. They could do that.

So never mind. They could do that. So that's my theory is that I wonder if this is Apple being careful about product announcements for hardware that they're not ready with because they got so burned with air power. It would not surprise me. I wanted to touch on Apple Arcade really quickly. I just noticed on someone just sent to me that it looks like apple has just had an embargo go out for apple arcade so some youtubers and such got brief in time and now they're talking about apple arcade so that's the thing that's happening uh but i wanted to give some follow-out to uh another show that i do here on relay fm called remaster which i host

federico vittici and shid Kamalamad, and we did a deep dive into Apple Arcade, kind of what we think about the games that have been announced, some thoughts on some of the developers that have been announced to be involved, and then also, as we usually do on Remaster, which is what makes

the show, I think, a little bit unique, because Shahid worked for PlayStation for so long and basically worked on projects exactly like this for playstation he brings his industry knowledge to talking about this stuff as to why a company might want to go into a deal like this and if and kind of like talking about does he actually think that it will be effective uh overall for the developers so that's remaster episode 80 if you want to listen to that then you can yeah it's uh yeah we will probably be getting since this was a a noon eastern embargo it would not surprise me if we're about to have the roll rolling embargo

uh festival this week where there's a new embargo drop at 9 a.m every day this week leading up to the phone release watches watch iPhone 11 then iPhone 11 pro you know all that there will be separate embargoes I'm sure uh so that's that's going to be a whole thing there was some stuff like entertainment weekly had a big like they had a bunch of previews as well so uh there's there's been a bunch of stuff going up and this week is probably going to be a lot more. So that'll be fun. All right. But we have a lot of stuff to get to on today's episode.

So let's take our first break and thank our first sponsor of this episode, which is DoorDash. Whether you're super focused at work, having a chill day, or you just forget to do your meal prep this week, you still need to eat, right? And why not get something great? Because with DoorDash, you can have dinner from your favorite restaurant delivered right to your door. Ordering is easy. You just open the app, choose what you want to eat, and you have your food delivered to you wherever you are. Your favorite pizza place is probably on DoorDash because there are over a quarter of a million restaurants in over 3,000 cities. That is door-to-door delivery in all 50 states of the U.S. and Canada as well.

So you can order from your local go-tos or choose your favorite national restaurants like Chipotle, Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, Cheesecake Factory, many, many, many more. Jason, have you used DoorDash? I have. I used it with our local Indian place, which was, which is great, but we weren't going out. It was actually, my wife was working and so it was my kids and me and we didn't want to go anywhere and we didn't have any food in the house and we hated everything. And we're like, well, what are we going to do? And I said, I know, let's use DoorDash. And in fact, it was the first time I used this, it was in the afternoon. And that was a nice feature is we ended up having a conversation. This was before summer vacation was over about what we were going to do for dinner since it was just the three of us. And we did that in the afternoon. I was able to go to DoorDash's website on my Mac and pre-schedule our order and say,

we all agreed on when we wanted it delivered. It's like, let's have it delivered at 6 p.m. And I put it all in and then just forgot about it for the rest of the afternoon. And at six o'clock, there was a knock on the door and there was our hot Indian food and we had dinner. So it was super convenient. Right now, listeners at this show can get $5 off their first order of $15 or more

when you download the DoorDash app and enter the promo code upgrade. That is $5 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app and enter the promo code UPGRADE. That is $5 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app from the App Store and enter promo code UPGRADE. So download it right now, start planning your dinner, and get that $5 off your first order with the promo code UPGRADE. Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. We have a lot of upstream news.

We have some headlines, and then we have some big stories around Apple TV Plus as well. We will start with a cancellation. So do you remember that weird sounding drama TV show that Apple bought the rights to, which Richard Gere was going to be in, and it

was him and another actor, I don't think they're named yet, who played elderly Vietnam veterans who hated millennials. And they had a woman that they were both in love with who died. Yeah, I remember us being puzzled by that premise. It was based on an Israeli TV show. Yeah. So this show has been canceled because of undertones of vigilante justice.

So it turns out that the plot is them going on a shooting spree. Like, that's the plot. I can't believe Apple bought this show now. I'd never seen that part mentioned until the cancellation. But Apple wanted the show to focus on the relationship between the two veterans. But the show creators and showrunners wanted to focus more on the anger and violence. The show has now been cancelled because apple doesn't want to make a show like that yeah this is one of those things where apple had given

a commitment so apple has to actually pay a uh pay a fee uh penalty to abandon the show but i could see why they would not be want to be involved in that show yeah that's this is one where it's like you know what maybe that's not the right type of tone you want to be setting i get that one and that was their note to the producers and the producers like no this is what we want to do creatively and apple's like well we're going to walk away here's your money we're walking away but they're making more deals joseph gordon levitt will create and star in a drama for the service it is said to follow an elementary school teacher grappling of adulthood in la that's what we've got for that one but it's another series coming from a well-known name um who's has a good track record and they've also acquired the rights to a documentary that has been completed from

bryce dallas howard uh it's called dads and it will feature a quote light-hearted look at modern parent uh modern paternity around the world revealed through anecdotes and wisdom from average dads and celebrities like Will Smith, Jimmy Fallon, and Neil Patrick Harris. What is it? You don't sound too happy about this one. I don't know. I mean, this is not for me

because I looked at this and I thought this description gets worse with every word. Okay. It's like, okay, it's a documentary about, lighthearted documentary about dads featuring celebrity dads. Okay, great. It's being produced by Ron Howard. Well, that's appropriate, right?

Appropriate. Bryce Dallas Howard's thing about dads is being produced by dads. Sure. Apparently, a theatrical run for this documentary is also being considered and it's being shown off a film festival uh let let me recommend father's day let's just go lean all the way into it all the way so this is just something they've picked up i'm not sure why they did that but we'll find out movies that's something that you and i have talked about a little bit which is this is not all tv shows right it's they're gonna have they're gonna

movies but it's not gonna be like a catalog of old movies as much as it is that they're going to put their money in for movies that are either going to premiere on apple tv plus or are going to go to theaters and then will be exclusive to apple tv plus after that and so they're you know they're they're trying to find ways to plump up the relatively meager catalog of Apple TV+. Yeah, it's probably going to be a lot of documentaries as well. I reckon they're going to be the movies because this happens quite a lot with documentaries, right? Somebody makes them and then shops them around and somebody buys them. For sure.

I think there's an accurate feeling. It's entirely accurate that people don't go to see documentaries in movie theaters very much, but they do watch them on streaming. And so that's where they go now. Yep. That is a very, very good point indeed. What else have we got? Apple TV Plus is going to have a web app.

So we'd wonder what Apple would do in the sense of if you can't get to it from whatever device you want to get to, right? Like maybe you're on an Android device or maybe you've got a TV that Apple isn't supporting, but it has a web browser. Well, there's going to be a web app. This is kind of putting to rest as well, the idea of Apple's content and whether it's going to be family friendly. Remember we were talking about that, right?

A long time ago, like, oh, they're going to make everything family friendly and everyone's pointing to the stuff that's been canceled and it's like oh it's all going to be just for kids well a bunch of expensive nbc right yes that was the idea network television well many of the shows uh carry tvma which is mature audiences or as i saw here in the uk the word caution on them which i find much cuter really uh but that's so we know that now see uh the morning show for example they're both uh tvma what that means you know whether it's going to be violence or nudity or language or a mix of all of them or whatever it's going to be but these shows are meant for

adult audiences so they are going to have that mix my guess is and i heard from some people who are like really disappointed by this because they were hoping that the nbc's or see i did it again expensive nbc's brand apple's brand was going to be expensive nbc it was going to be well these are these are family friendly uh at least to a point it's not going to be really hardcore i think the truth is first off it's not entirely true right like network standards are not what they were 20 years ago and there's more stuff you can show on network TV. Not every network TV show is appropriate for young audiences, even though there are limits to what they will show. But more than that, my guess is that Apple has its own idea, and you look at it with something like them killing the show about the angry veterans who want to shoot at millennials.

like them killing the uh the show about the the angry veterans who want to shoot at millennials um i think they've got an internal idea of what their standards are and they with the tvma or caution i think what you're really going to see is um failing failing to see them so far we're going to have to just guess but my guess is going to be there's stuff that they're not going to allow, right? But there's other stuff they are going to allow. And so if you're in these kind of ratings boxes that currently exist, something like TVMA, my guess is there's stuff that is traditionally thought of as TVMA, that is mature audiences only, that Apple is okay with and that other stuff they're not okay with. And so it you know, it's a very blunt label. But if you were believing that everything that Apple was going to show was going to be sort of PG, then that's not the case. No.

It's like we just, for Connected, our member special, our Relay FM member special just posted. We watched the Steve Jobs movie, the Michael Fassbender movie. And that's like rated R. But it's just language. There's nothing else in it. And I know that language can be difficult for people. I understand that. But I think when people see this,

they think, well, this is just Game of Thrones. But it doesn't mean that... Jennifer Aniston is not going to behead Steve Carell. That's not going to happen. Probably not. If she does, it'll be like we won't see it. It'll be off camera. But there's definitely going to be some some adult oriented themes at least in those shows i'm sure so and i and i get if you if you if you're not cool with it but i personally

am happy to see that they're going to have a range because that's what i want i want a range i want to be able to pick in my content right disney plus is up and running in the netherlands now yeah how about that congratulations to the netherlands who is getting a weird like test run of disney plus new zealand is usually the place that games companies pick for stuff like this but disney has picked the netherlands uh right now the application is available and it's in the free trial period and there's some articles and i'll put a tweet in the show notes which has a video kind of showing the interface the interface looks really nice but there's been stuff about that before there's a lot of like interesting ways

they're categorizing things like a darth vader collection the stuff um yeah it's all back catalog right now none of the original content is in there yet that's still coming in november so there's a lot of there's it's cool that they're doing it because we'll get to see it but uh and it would be even nicer if you know i could get it but i won't still won't be able to but this also explains why they made that announcement that it was going to be available in like the us canada and the netherlands on day one i thought that netherlands right it was like this Yes, yes. They are using it as their test market, and so that's where it's starting.

Yeah, it definitely felt weird at the time, but now we get it, right? Now we understand. Netflix, fighting back, they picked up a sword and have swung it at the competition, so they're losing the office, they're losing friends,

but in 2021, they get Se worldwide streaming rights seinfeld's on hulu now i think in the u.s but they're they're picking it up and they're picking it up worldwide which is very interesting because i don't think it streams anywhere else hulu has this weird deal that they get all the rights i believe but like But you can't even... It's difficult to even buy digitally in other places. It's really limited. But now Netflix have picked it up, streaming worldwide 180 episodes.

That's a big get. So they're not giving in for as much as they're losing stuff. They're still fighting. And this is it. You may be asking yourself, well, what's the difference between Friends and The Office and Seinfeld that those are leaving Netflix and this is coming to Netflix? And the answer is Friends is owned by Warner Brothers, Warner Media now. The Office is owned by NBCUniversal.

Seinfeld is owned by Sony, which doesn't play in the streaming wars right now, really. And so on one level, this is great because it's like, oh, well, we can be a free agent. We can sell this to the highest bidder. Netflix can roll in and do it. On the other hand, I'm just going to point it out now and we can file this away for an episode of Upgrade in 2021. Whoever buys Sony's entertainment business is going to be so angry that they've given seinfeld away to netflix but oh well that's uh right because we've seen so many of these deals where everybody they sell streaming rights away for some long period of time and then they have their own aspirations and they have regret it's crazy it feels like this may be like yeah because

this means sony's like this is a crown jewel and they're going to get a lot of money for it, which is great. But what does it say about Sony's aspirations? I think it says that Sony's current management doesn't really 160 million dollars a year for Seinfeld I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix were going to be paying upwards of 200 because they had to wrestle it away right because who wouldn't want to grab this because it's the only show that anybody can buy

right because the rest of them of this type of caliber the rest of them were all locked up. I bet they paid a lot of money for that. I bet they did. And I'm interested to see, because I don't think Netflix have said yet, how long that deal is for. Forever.

Disney CEO Bob Iger resigns from Apple's board. It seems about time. You may remember Eric Schmidt was once on apple's board too that's true it gets to the point where like there's probably no love lost but they're in direct competition now like he can't continue to sit in good faith on that board they all made the right noises about this they said you know we love bob he's great we expect to apple i think said we expect to continue to have our great relationship with disney and abc and all of that like they're very positive about it um and so it may be bob eiger uh wants to take that step back in general what happened to steve jobs's shares did they go to the estate or did they go to apple

because that was a whole big thing for those were his that was his personal share so no laureen powell Jobs may still be one of Disney's larger individual shareholders. I don't know if she's divested of them or not. Because I remember that was a big thing for a long time, wasn't it? That wasn't a corporate relationship. It was Steve Jobs was on their board. But Disney has been very supportive because of the relationship, especially between Disney and Pixar. The relationship between Bob Iger and Steve Jobs was strong and they would make deals with Apple. They were, I think, the first on board with some of the TV stuff was ABC stuff. So it's a longstanding relationship,

but it's true. They are less aligned in some ways than they used to be. I don't think anybody really considers Apple playing the same game that Disney Plus is. And in fact, they will probably be partners more or less on the fact that they're tying into Apple's data in the TV app, and they're going to be on Apple's platforms and stuff like that. But yeah, I think there comes a time where you say this is weird enough, and I'm going to need to recuse myself from this portion of Apple's business, that maybe it's better that we go our separate ways and just be kind of partners being partners business partners where it makes sense is a lot different than having your ceo on the board of somebody who you compete with in some areas so it makes sense

all right so what else do we have aha this is an interesting story apple tv plus the year that everybody gets for free, and services revenue. So there's two parts going on here. First is an article that you wrote, which was really useful, and little did we know we'd need it a couple of days later. So you were kind of thinking about what is going to happen,

because I think we'd even touched on it in the show, right? Like on last week's episode. What is going to happen to services revenue as apple gives away this year and then what happens the year after when they in theory pull it back right so everybody then has to start paying right so you kind of went digging and noticed that apple changed how they account for services and hardware being bundled together and what happens in the revenue reports yeah i noticed this because it broke all my charts because they had to they had to restate their earnings for one previous year which also meant that all other previous years were no longer using that technique

it's very frustrating and it's it means that my charts my beautiful beautiful charts don't work as well as i wish they did but it it twigged something in me when this came up i was like oh you know they did just change that to take and it's weird right so basically um they have decided and i think this is a due to like it being good accounting practice is what you're supposed to do is if you include services with hardware you should not allocate all the money to hardware because you're bundling services in and they're part of the value of the phone. And so what Apple did was they classified some value for the service of providing maps, Siri, and that five gig free iCloud account. And they amortize that over some period of time. That's the life of an iPhone and include that in services.

So there, when they restated their earnings, what it ended up doing was shift the services revenue up and the hardware revenue down a little bit, because basically, if you think of it this way, if you buy an iPhone for $1,000, over the course of time, I don't know, $40 of that or something is considered services revenue. I don't know the actual number. And I don't think Apple's disclosed it. It goes to services. That revenue goes to services instead of hardware. It's not a pure hardware revenue when you buy an iPhone, because some amount of the content of it is considered services. Now, those are on all the time.

So you wouldn't do that with something like the Apple TV thing. But I would imagine that they would transfer some revenue to the services line. You have to sign up for it. It's one per family. sign up for it. It's one per family. So it's only a percentage, a limited percentage of iPhones sold that will sign up for the year of Apple TV Plus. And those are the only ones they're going to count. And I'd imagine that it will be discounted. I don't know that for certain, but I would imagine they're not going to say, well, it's $4.99 a month times 12. And let's deduct that from the iPhone revenue for this iPhone. I imagine they have a bundle price or something that's a discount, but still that they're counting

it against it. But even if it's the full price, it's going to be for a small percentage of iPhones that are the ones that sign up for the service. And that'll go towards services revenue. So in the end, what will happen is the per unit sales of iPhone will go down a little bit in terms of revenue per unit, which is another thing we don't know because we don't know how many units they sell. And the services revenue will go up a little bit. And it'll just be a little tradeoff that they they it will be accounted for, I guess, is what I'm saying. Because before the weird thing happened, after I wrote the story, what people were really asking was, what does this mean in terms of next year? Like Apple's deferring services revenue for a year because they're going to get no revenue from all these free accounts. And is that bad for services revenue in the short term?

And my answer was kind of not because there'll be some allocation for it. It actually might be worse in the long term than it is in the near term, right? Because this is what I was talking about last week of like, you do this for the first year, you put a bunch of money in because everyone's jumping on that year free. So you're like, okay, we're going to take the money from the iPhone, put it into the services bet, right?

And you get like a bunch of, like a services part and you get like a spike of revenue, but then a bunch of people don't take it for the second year and then it goes down again, potentially. Right. Apple, I guess, are hoping

that with a combination of A, it doesn't cancel automatically. Look, they made that choice. All right, look, you can say what you like about Apple being the perfect company. You wish they always were. They made the choice. this is a renewing subscription

if you take that year free. So they're hoping that some people just let it roll in. Or two, that they will have a compelling enough slate of content by that time that people will want to pay for it. That's the hope that they're going to make. But if a bunch of people do cancel, then it was an interesting and maybe risky thing to do. But we'll have to wait and see on that one.

Yeah, somebody at Goldman Sachs kind of went a little bit berserk and issued a note in fear of this whole thing, saying that if they do, I like this word, amortize the revenue, the ASP, the average selling price of their products, is going to see a significant fall and therefore expected to see a significant fall and therefore expected to see a 26% decline in Apple stock. There is a lot of massive assumptions made in this note. And I know that these investor notes are always big assumptions. But this is probably doing what you said we would not do, right?

Which is take $4.99 a month and multiply it by 12 and take that off the price of the iPhone for five years, which would be a large hit to ASP, but they're not going to do that, right? Anyway, Apple issued a statement refuting this claim, saying that Apple TV Plus will not have a material impact on ASP. Clearly, Apple knows what amount they can swallow, right? They are aware of this, and they make the decision.

The existing services thing, I looked it up. The average, because they restated their 2018 figures, I think, you could actually compare it to the previous figures that were not restated. And my calculation was that basically on average iphone revenue was reduced by one percent so one percent of iphone revenue was transferred to services revenue yeah and it's not going to be that amount again it'll be less than that yeah yeah i would imagine. So on a $1,000 iPhone purchase, $10 goes to services and $990 goes to phone revenue. Of course, this is not even accounting for the fact that the ASP may have changed anyway, right? Like Apple might have efficiencies.

Yes, because of one of the margins. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Yes. For example, there's no 3D Touch on these models and that had a specific cost that is not there anymore. And we don't know any of those details. So yes, right. Like, I cannot imagine that Apple is doing a clever end run here to gut iPhone revenue to blow up services revenue right we're talking about small numbers and it is bananas that uh goldman sachs wrote what it wrote and then also had to refute that apple's stock price at the moment is largely tied to changes in services revenue yeah right the the analyst uh at goldman sachs who wrote this note uh is on the call, the analyst call after the results come out. That's how I recognized his name. And I thought, oh, you're not getting invited on that call this time. You're not going to get a question in this time, Rod Hall. You're

not going to get a question in. There's another level of weirdness that you may be thinking to yourself, where do I know that name Goldman Sachs? They're Apple's partner on Apple Card. Yeah, they're independent for financial analysts and all that but it is weird isn't it i know i know that that stuff doesn't overlap but it does it just adds another level of weirdness to the whole thing right where like that analyst has got a call and it's like why'd you do this someone from an interdepartmental memo so You have really given me a bad day. I have complained about... So IDG's parent company owns an analyst firm, IDC. And we criticized IDC's forecast.

By the way, IDC's forecast is the one where they announced sort of in the early part of this decade that in two years, Android would have like 70% of the smartphone market and Windows Phone would have 25% or something like that. And the iPhone would have 5%. It was one of these, or it was actually more egregious than that. It was one of these things where it's like, it's over for the iPhone, Windows Phone is going to take over and share it with Android. And it's even, maybe it was was even kind of down on Android. It was going to be like 50% Windows Phone, 40% Android, 10%. And at the time, it was ludicrous. Anyway, we would occasionally refer to some dumb prediction that IDC would make.

And would I get a call occasionally from someone higher up at IDG or from someone over at our colleagues at IDC complaining about us beating them up in public? Yeah. Yeah, that would happen. So I'm sure Rod Hall got a call from somebody, but he's going to say what I said, which is, you know, we're independent. We get to say what we think. And even in this case, even if it may be, it was kind of dumb. It was pretty dumb. So, yeah lots lots of stuff happening in streaming media and it's and we're entering like the season of it right like this is where it's all going to start pretty soon it's all it's all going to be

dropping it's all going to be happening are we going to talk? Does Upstream become TV reviews in November? I don't know. I was just about to ask you this question. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess this is, it's terrible to ask for a straw poll like this. I don't really know. But like, do people want us to do that, right? Shall we review shows? I think first reactions of some of these shows might be worth it. I don't think we need to go in depth, but I some first reactions would be good i am hoping and he doesn't even i think know this yet but i am hoping that steven hackett will join me for a series of tv podcasts over at the incomparable about for all mankind because it's a space show yeah i hope that you talk with him about that even if you just do it on liftoff but like whatever like at least i'm really keen to hear you guys talk about that tv show right right because it's i i think that one i think of all of the tv shows

that i've seen that one has the most interesting premise to me the premise is really really good um right i i mean i've heard a lot of people like even after last week i still like the premise of c like i that it's still i still find it like intellectually very interesting uh but for all mankind has the most compelling one i think of all of the ones that i've seen this is the show in case you need a refresher uh where the russians get to the moon first and the space race doesn't end that's that's kind of in a nutshell that's the show so yep is that the ron howard one no it's ron moore right that's the ron moore who did battle star galactica yeah yep so great great name tied up behind that

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So we mentioned last week that we would talk about this this week, and that is Apple software release schedules, because they kind of gave a very brief overview and then everything became a lot clearer later on. So I'm going to link to a post over on Mac Stories. John did a great job of putting this together to have all the release dates. I'm very quickly going to give an overview of what we're going to be seeing over the next couple of weeks. So iOS 13 drops this week on the iPhone on September 19th. iPad OS and iOS 13.1, it is assumed but not known that these are the same thing, drop on September 30th. tvOS 13 is on September 30th. WatchOS 6 is on September 19th if you have a Series 3 watch or later.

If you have a Series 1 or 2 watch, it's coming some point later this year. HomePod software update is on September 30th and macOS Catalina is in October. Now, if you remove macOS Catalina from this, because macOS tends to come a little bit later anyway and has done for the last few years it was probably expected that ios ipad os tv os watch os and the home pod update were all supposed to drop on the 19th but we all saw throughout the beta cycle which was

rocky at best uh they split it right this is the first time Apple's ever done this, and they started beta testing 13.1 before 13 had even reached GM, the Golden Master. And I believe as well, so I've had people ask me this question, if you are running 13.1, you can actually upgrade to 13 on the GM? Like that it will be possible to do this. That is my understanding.

I don't know the method in which you have to do this you may have to do it on a mac but you don't have to is my understanding i need like i haven't had this completely confirmed but my understanding is you can upgrade to 13 without needing to wipe your phone so okay that is a possibility that i have heard. But this, you know, this is where we are. There are lots of features being pushed 13.1. There's some features that we're expecting for 13 that aren't even in 13.1. And then you look at stuff like there's new cross-platform features. If you look at reminders and Apple arcade,

right, these are supposed to be cross-platform. They're not going to work everywhere on day one. Reminders is even more tricky because you have to upgrade your Reminders database to take advantage of the new things, which then means Reminders won't sync. So all of your iOS 13 devices will sync, and all of your non-iOS 13 devices or before Catalina devices, they will sync, but they won't sync together. I tested this myself today. I have Rem have reminders running on 13.1 on my ipads and i have not upgraded my phone yet the reminders databases they have completely

different tasks they are not seeing each other and then you look at apple arcade right the idea of one of the ideas of apple arcades you can play these games everywhere but it's only going to be on the iphone for the best part of two weeks so armchair analysis time let's get the nightmare this year right like this is one of the worst for releases now it could be and i'm sure it is that they are doing this to maintain stability across all these devices which is great right like you are better to delay and make it stable than you are to release it all at the same time and it be an absolute nightmare for everybody. But we're assuming that these are all going to be stable when they come out, right?

Because not a lot of people are really even getting to touch the 13 GM right now because everyone's on 13.1. I've been running 13 on my iPhone this last week. I actually didn't update it until the the 13 gm came out the most golden master and uh that's the one i'm running on it and it's fine it's fine i mean it feels i think pretty stable it's good it's weird that it is missing all these things that are in the betas but it's uh it's been fine for me and the gm of watchOS 6 too, actually. I wonder if 13, straight up 13, is going to ship on the phone.

I don't know. I mean, they have a 13 GM and they have builds of it for all the different phones. So I would imagine that everybody on an iPhone will get the 13.0 build on Thursday. But has it changed the camera app? You know, I don't know.

Because stuff like the way that you take video by just pressing on the camera shutter, I can't imagine that that's just for 11 and above because it's not. Well, my guess is, and I don't have my phone here to check, my guess is that the 13 build on the new iPhones might have a different camera app enabled than the 13 build on the new iphones might be have a different camera app enabled than the 13 build that's on everything else and maybe that's a 13 one feature for everyone else i don't know possibly yeah but uh yeah this one has been it's been a bit standout for a lot of the wrong reasons this year yeah well this is this is we we talked about a couple weeks ago but it's the idea that ideally everything apple ships in the fall ships at once because you do have these interlocking services.

You do have the reminders stuff, for example, where you need to be on all of them across the board. But you can't ship, or if you're Apple, you can try, but it's very, very hard to ship every single operating system on the same day. Plus they learned their lesson that like that breaks stuff on their servers. So they want to roll it out over time anyway. And I think that there's a level of maturity in them saying, you know, the iPad thing's not ready and we really need to get the phone thing ready. So we're going to push the iPad back a little bit. So it's one of those things where I feel like they're being grown up about this

and saying, look, we can't do it. And we can complain like, well, you should be able to do it. Maybe they should. But I also kind of like the idea that they're saying, we know we should, but we can't. It would be irresponsible for us to ship what we've got.

So we're going to make some choices and we're going to roll this out over time. I think the next shoe to drop is don't conceive of something like Reminders that requires everybody to be on the same version. You need to build that feature update so that there's some level of compatibility if you're going to stagger your releases. That's the next step is don't make assumptions that the releases are not staggered if they are. And reminders is the perfect example of that, which is like literally, if you get this on your iPhone and you press the update button, your iPhone and your iPad, and you're not on betas or anything, when this release comes out, your iPad and iPhone no longer talk for reminders if you press that button. And if you don't press

that button, hey, reminders is here, it's new. Don't press this button because it's not on your iPad yet. It's not ideal. And I think that maybe in the future, they will, I think that's the next stage here is not, first step is admitting that you have a problem,

which is that you can't ship everything at the same time. Step two is no longer building your software with the plan that everybody's going to get the update at the same time because they're not. And as Mac users, we know that lesson because the mac hasn't been getting those updates at the same time at the same time as ios forever now but ios 13 does have a lot

of features in it that are really great we've both been using it for a period of time and i wanted to focus on a couple of things about that we're excited about i want to talk about some things that are in ios 13 but i haven't got to use yet and then we're gonna then you're gonna talk about some of the things that you have enjoyed using most already in ios 13 um so i have a small list of stuff apple arcade i cannot wait to see these games jason i am the closer we get the more excited I'm getting because it seems like Apple, surprise, didn't do a great job of talking about the games that they have on their service.

I think a lot of it may have been in their defense. I think maybe a lot of games were like waiting to be completely finished or they're rolling out like a couple of days later or for whatever reason, they went with what they went with. Their press release that they sent out was pretty good. It had a good list,

but they're still like, it seems like there's going to be an Us 2 game. There's Creators of Monument Valley coming later this week, right? They have like a game that nobody has seen anything about that's dropping as part of Apple Arcade. I am really excited to dig into some of these games.

I keep seeing teasers. There is a Twitter account called, I think, Killer Cow, who has been compiling all of this stuff. If you're interested in seeing the games, they used to work at Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer. If you are interested in seeing some of the games that are coming to Apple Arcade, that is the Twitter account to follow

because they're doing a good job of compiling all of those. But I am really excited to get my hands on this. And it seems like just the more and more I find out about it, the more and more I stand firm in my assertion that this is the best value stream, like subscription service that Apple has. So I'm really excited about that. Multiple Windows support on iPadOS.

This is something I haven't really been able to play with very much because most of the apps that I would want to use multiple Windows with, they obviously don't have iOS 13 builds yet. So I'm really keen to try it out. I will get ready to start the clock on Google Docs and how long that's going to take to update.

But once all those start coming out, I'm really excited about that because I think it's going to be a great way to change some of my workflows on iOS. So I'm really excited about that. Sign in with Apple seems keen, like something I'm really keen to try. Joanna Stern did a really good article about that.

It seems like she got some access to some Sign In with Apple apps. And also as well I saw that Apple had clarified a little bit. They've reduced some of the restrictions on Sign In with Apple to make it more

comprehensive for applications that shouldn't be blocked by it. They've done some work there, but I'm really keen to be able to use that feature for some stuff that I'm not massively keen on giving some of my information away. That's going to be great. Dark mode in more applications.

I absolutely love iOS dark mode. I will leave it on all the time. I love it on my iPads. I'm going to turn it on on my phone, leave it on all the time because I always choose if an app has dark mode, I'll put it to a dark mode. So I'm really excited to see that Apple

is kind of popularizing further this idea and giving people more tools to enable that. So I'm excited about that. I've been using that in timing mode where it's sunrise, sunset, basically, is dark mode comes on on my iPad. Because I don't use dark mode at all on my Mac. And I've liked it.

I've actually liked it. So I think that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to have it be in the daytime. It's light mode and at night it's dark mode. That works for me. And also reminders. I haven't really given reminders a fair shake yet because I've not had iOS 13 on my iPhone, but I want to see if it's possible for me to move from todoist to reminders oh yeah i want to give that a really good try i am very keen with the features that

apple has been adding um and i'm i'm really excited to one read federico's chapter in his review on that um and two uh so i could really get the full deets, because I think he's been using it, like he's been like really using it and has moved to it. Of course. So, you know, because I know he always tries stuff out, but I actually don't know this for sure. But from the hints that I've gotten from him is he has moved to Reminders. So I'm willing to give that a go as well, because I don't use, over. I have I use less and less of the kind of power user features of Todoist. And I think reminders might be able to do what I want. So I'm keen to try that out.

I will have the problem of not wanting to have an issue of not wanting to upgrade my Mac. But that's just the thing I'm going to have to deal with. Right. Like, I don't mind. I mean, really, all i ever do on my mac is mark off a task but i never i'm never at my mac without an ios device being around so i don't think it's going to be a problem we'll find out maybe that will be the thing that makes me move to catalina we'll see but uh i am these are some of the things i'm excited about

jason yeah sounds good those those are all you know i'm I'm excited about, Jason. Yeah, sounds good. Those are all, you know, I'm not as excited about those things as you, but I am still interested in them. I'm very interested in Apple Arcade and multiple windows. I have yet to actually find a scenario where I really embrace it, but that's partially because some of the apps

that I would use in that scenario aren't updated yet. Exactly. One app that I've seen that looks really interesting in that regard uh again i've i've only seen like videos of it is drafts right uh so the the drafts app um the the like text app uh there's a lot of interesting stuff that agile taught us the developer seems to be doing with multiple window stuff like you can i Because I didn't even know you could do this. You can press a button in

the app to open a second window, which I straight up didn't know that you could do that. And then you can have live markdown previews alongside your text. So I think this is one of those things where I'm very intrigued to see what developers are

able to do with the multiple Windows support. Like, are there weird and wonderful things that I hadn't yet considered? So I'm excited about it. So we started doing a, we put our list together, me and Dan Morin, of our features that we were excited about and rolled it out as the beginning of a series on six colors. That's the 13, 13 features of ios 13 because what we're not going to do is write um tens of thousands of words about ios somebody else is on that one and uh good someone's got that covered he's got it covered i don't need to do that not going to do that um and i decided rather than writing like a mega review of ios 13 again, somebody else has got that covered. And I wrote down all the features off of all the marketing pages and everything of all the features in iOS 13 and iPadOS 13. And there's so many, so many. And I decided, you know what, I can't do this. I'm going to triage this. I'm going to pick some features that are my favorites, and I'm going to write about those. And so we're going to do well, let's see if we get to 13. We should it's called that we can find 13 features that we like the 13 features of iOS 13. So first one I

wrote about it's already up is shortcuts, which is just the shortcuts updates are great. And they're going to get even better. Like shortcuts in iOS 13. They make more sense visually because they're sort of phrased like sentences. So you can see sort of like what a block in shortcuts is doing and where it's getting the information from, which used to be implied, but not explicit. And it also allows you to replace that, you know, what it's using as its input. it used to be since it runs, shortcuts run from top to bottom. So it's sort of like this step, then this step, then this step, then this step, it used to be, the assumption was, it was always taking from the previous step. And if that's not what you wanted, you wanted to grab something from somewhere else, you had to like insert

another block and say, No, no, get this thing. and now use it. And it was really messy and frustrating. And with this new approach, you just change the part of the sentence that says what it's getting and pointed at some other thing, which is super helpful. And so I like that a lot. I like that it's not quite a shortcuts feature, but shortcuts are in the share sheet now as individual shortcuts, and you can edit the share sheets to put your favorite shortcuts up at the top, which means that now it's like one very easy tap to get to your most important shortcuts, which makes them way better. Likewise, the widgets on the home screen on the iPad, it's so much better. I put shortcuts widget on the home screen and I can just run some shortcuts from the home screen and I don't need to open up shortcuts

and find that shortcut. It's in the widget. I tap it, it runs and we're done, which is really great. There's other stuff going on too. There's automation stuff coming in iOS 13.1 that has the potential to be a pretty great and that you can key off, uh, NFC tags or times of day and run, uh, run shortcuts at certain times. There's a simplified version of that that will run on your home kit server, basically your Apple TV or your iPad that's acting as your home kit server in the house for home automation stuff. That's a little more complex than what's currently there.

So, you know, there's a lot of really good stuff in shortcuts. I'm very happy to get an update for that one. Yeah, I've yet to really dig in to the shortcut stuff. Because again, I've been waiting to see the applications that I use, what they're going to be doing. This is the thing. Potentially the single biggest thing that's happening in shortcuts is something that you can't see until the apps get updated because apps can now it used to be everything that you did with app automation was

from the clipboard or from a url that had a bunch of data inside it and now in ios 13 apps can actually you know pass data and ask for what what do you want and give me this and I'll give you this back. And they're building out the foundations of a completely native way of apps passing data around instead of the old way of cheating by putting it on the clipboard or in URLs. But to really take advantage of that, you need to have your key apps be updated to support it. And that may not come right away either, because we know a bunch of app developers where this summer has really been a sprint to sort of like, get their existing apps to work right in iOS 13. And that's step one. Step two is add some features that are from iOS 13. And then the step after that is look

at Catalyst. So just as this has been an interesting summer for Apple and its beta release cycle and all of that, I think not all the apps that we want to have fully supporting every new feature of iOS 13 are going to be there at launch day. I think that a lot of developers are trying to make sure that their apps run fine on iOS 13 as step one. And that's the right call. What else? A lot of changes in the Photos app that are really good. A lot of new editing features in the Photos app. It's not quite a match for the Mac version, but it's getting close. I don't know why they don't have a retouching brush in there.

It drives me crazy. You have some kind of device on the iPad that could let you do retouching really easily. Right. What would that be like? Pixelmator Photo will do it.

Pixelmator Photo, if people don't know this, it's amazing. I'm going to write this up at some point. I think that it has not been uh learned it has not been noticed by enough people application not only is it great but you can you so you take a photo in photos and you share it to pixelmator photo and you edit it and then you go back to the share menu in pixelmator photos and one of the items is put this back on top of the existing photo in your photos library, which I didn't even know was an API, but it is. And it works. And so you can, most apps, the way they work with photos is you share a photo out and then they'll add it as a new photo in your photos library. But Pixelmator Photos will actually add it as the new latest

version of your existing photo that it's based on in your photos library. It's so good. And it's got that retouching brush so that it'll do some pretty amazing work. It is unbelievable. Quickly removing people from scenes and stuff like that. Like I have straight up removed complete people from photos. It does this like machine learning retouching. By just drawing on them.

And yeah yeah it's great so i you know why is that on the photos app i don't know but there's still a bunch of good stuff in the photos app and i'm looking forward to the uh changes in the cameras the camera app that are happening with the new phones as well um you know my other stuff i have a lot of ipad stuff like the files app and the pinned widgets that i mentioned with shortcuts like i i really like those those are ipad features The desktop browsing and Safari, the mouse support, which I have some caveats about. Safari's so good, Jason. Oh my god.

Safari's so good. Yeah. It's not perfect, but it is a real transformation of the iPad experience to have more desktop-y Safari. I like Find My. I like the Find My app. I like having Find My Friends and Find My iPhone, both of which are apps that I've used in one place in that. And I think that they did a good job. I think it's a good app. I like it. There are some quirks about it that I don't like, where it takes me away. Like when I'm looking at the map and I want to see who's around me and then it's like, nope, now I'm going to take you away from that and show you nothing.

And I'm like, come on, come on app. So there's some things to be worked on, but I think it's good to have that there. CarPlay, this is a thing that now it's on my primary iPhone that I can use a little bit more is the new CarPlay is so much better than the old CarPlay, especially the dashboard appearance where you can see the map and you're now playing. And Siri doesn't get in the way of everything else. especially the dashboard appearance where you can see the map and you're now playing and like it's and Siri doesn't get in the way of everything else that like there's a lot of upgrades to CarPlay that if you use CarPlay every day upgrading to iOS 13 on your iPhone will be a really nice

experience because CarPlay is better it's like a major update for CarPlay and then the swipe typing I know that you can swipe type on third party keyboards and have been able to do since they introduced third party keyboards, but there's a lot of stuff that you need the Apple keyboard for. The Apple keyboard as the first party keyboard is the one that, you know, you keep coming back to the Apple keyboard because it is the one that Apple demands in certain circumstances. Apple assumes that it's there. And all of my attempts to use Gboard, and I have used it a lot over the years, but to get that inside of the standard Apple keyboard is very nice.

It took them a long time to get here. But they did a good job. I think the implementation is good, and it's good to have swiping on the uh default still still missing one feature to bring me back from gboard and that's emoji search i can search emoji in gboard can't do that on the apple keyboard so i'm even though i am so happy because swipe typing there's two things i love about g well three things i love about gboard swipe typing emoji search and a better autocorrect um or like at least a dictionary i find it to be much more relevant to what i need a lot of the time but uh

yeah it's just a shame that they've not done anything on emoji search i don't i feel like at this point it's going to be a one more thing like i can't even imagine what's holding them back i think they believe that the quick type thing where you type the name of the emoji and it gives you it as an autocorrect option, they think is emoji search. Unacceptable. Because like, I get what you, I get that point. But like, if I type in Gboard a word, it will show me like 10, 15 suggestions sometimes depending on the word that I've typed. And also Google is very good about assigning alternative

meanings to what an emoji is, right? And so yeah, and Apple's not so good at that. So I would love to see that. But anyway, iOS 13 coming this week. I would expect on next week's show we will have a little bit more to say about it when

we finally get our hands on apps that can support it. As well as talking about our new iphones and maybe apple watches who knows so i'm very excited about next week's show who knows depends on how diligent we are about you know our professionalism so professional this week's episode is brought to you by express vpn when you're preparing to travel abroad over the summer there's a lot of things that you need to have on your checklist. But there's one very important thing that could be missing. And if you're not doing it, it is missing. One app that's going to keep you safe and secure online while you're away, and that is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN doesn't just encrypt your data when you surf the internet on public airports or in hotel Wi-Fi. It also lets you stream and access content

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It just gives me that little bit of peace of mind, and I'm happy. Don't travel this summer without downloading ExpressVPN. Protect your online activity today and find out how you can get three months for free at expressvpn.com upgrade that is e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash upgrade for three months free of a one-year package go there now it's one thing off your summer checklist at expressvpn.com slash upgrade our thanks to expressvpn for their support of this show and all of relay fm and it is time for some hashtag Ask Upgrade Questions. And we start with Nicholas. Nicholas wants to know, do you think the LTPO, which is the new Apple Watch display,

the LTPO display, will make its way into the iPhones maybe in 2020? I mean, it's a much larger display and there are so many other issues. I feel like the way I'd phrase this is Apple is always trying of variable frame rate and then that was something that they had a skill in and that perhaps aided them in building the apple watch display so i'm sure their display people um push this stuff keep in mind they have to work with partners on the panels as well and you gotta have a panel that's large enough for this but yeah i i think apple's goal is to make displays use less power and uh maybe that will i mean also if you had a variable frame rate iphone display a promotion iphone display which we still don't have um that does work both ways they could crank it up to super smooth but they could also crank it down and save a lot of power and this technology leave the light on more yeah help them go further like to 120 hertz like there there are phones out now that do that so mkbhd just did a review of the new razor phone which is a phone

with a 120 hertz amoled display and he says it's just absolutely unbelievable um and it's doing some stuff like you can change some of the refresh rates and stuff, but a screen that can really completely adapt in this way could allow Apple to do that without needing to change too much about the phone. This is a thick phone. It has a massive battery in it, and it will last for days.

It's another thing, but Apple probably doesn't want to make a phone that's this thick but the ltpo display or that technology could help them in the future i do think that the there is a probably a goal ultimately to letting your iphone be on all the time too right on the screen at least have the clock there right and then you know exactly and stuff that and maybe some very you know having the notifications there in a very kind of like power friendly way and And they're not there yet. That's a big screen and the tech is complicated. So, you know, 2020 iPhones, I doubt it, but you never know.

And I'm not sure there's a one-to-one there because the Apple Watch is a very different thing. But I would say that Apple's always learning from the requirements of one of Apple's products will often feed into knowledge that allows them to do something similar on their other products because a lot of their goals are aligned, right? Like having better screens and having better battery life and using less power. And all of these things are the same, even though some of the details per product are different. So, you know, I'm sure it has informed them and that we'll see that elsewhere. formed them um and that we'll see that elsewhere james asks will the iphone 11 pro clear case fit the iphone 10s i want a clear case but not planning on upgrading this year jason i did some field research oh good good boy you are so professional this week i know it's amazing i mean not like you aren't otherwise you've got the extra mile you've gone the extra mile this week so i have okay so i have. I mean, not like you aren't otherwise, but you've gone the extra mile. You've gone the extra mile this week.

So I have, okay, so I have let everybody down a little bit. I couldn't test this on a XS. I tested it on a X. So Adina has an iPhone X and the clear case because she's going to be getting an 11 Pro. And this is really weird.

It fits, but the buttons have moved. So the buttons, so the sleep-wake button and the volume and all the ringers, on the case, they are, I think, a little lower down. So while it fits, all the buttons are being pressed. So, no, it kind of doesn't work because siri is constantly trying to be activated also as well you have the huge camera hole on the back uh james other companies make clear cases you can if you really want one that bad i recommend you get one that's actually made for your phone

yes but yeah i was surprised about that the button placement appears to have changed from the 10 10s uh to the 11. For some reason, I never thought that that stuff changed. Well, I mean, when the camera bump changes as much as it has, I think they feel free to make other changes. Yeah. But it's just kind of one of those things that maybe it changes more often than I think it does. And I just never noticed because why would I know?

But those buttons have moved. Well, the 10 and the 10S, the bump moved very slightly because I remember putting a X case on the XS and thinking, it's not quite, like you could kind of force it, but it wasn't quite right. I think it was a little bigger, I think. Yeah.

So yeah, it was possible, but this is even less possible because your volume buttons don't work anymore. That's not good. Not good. Peter asks, the new iPhones don't have the word iPhone on the back. Is this the first step to changing the name? No.

But I do want to mention this because this is one of those things where it can be slightly different depending on regulatory bodies. The backs of the iPhones in europe are not clear they have they still have regulatory symbols on them interesting so it's just a shame because i would love there to be nothing uh i am a little bit upset that they moved the apple logo down because that's exactly where my pop socket goes so i don't know what i'm gonna do about that jason so the um the short answer is no. The long answer is if Apple wants to change the name of the iPhone,

what it puts on the back of the previous year's iPhone will have no bearing. Agreed. All right, our next question comes from Andrew. What are your current odds on a new Apple TV being unveiled in October? Well, there are some rumors out there that there's new Apple TV being unveiled in October. Well, there are some rumors out there that there's new Apple TV hardware. So I would say, yeah, it's a very slight update to the Apple TV.

So I'd say, I don't know, 50-50. I doubt, here's the thing, I doubt it's something you want to wait around for. I can't imagine what they're going to add, which is going to make you like like i don't think they are i think the rumor is it's a very very mild upgrade where they're upgrading some of the internals but it's not it's still just gonna be a literally a black box it's still just the apple tv 4k that's it so i i i would say that there's a decent odds that there might be a new one but the odds

are very low that you're gonna care yeah okay i guess this is one of the things where it's like if you can if you can wait then wait but don't worry about it at the same time i think it's kind of what like you know what i mean like if you if you don't have one and you don't need one immediately just wait until the tv shows start popping out because they won't release something after that and like it's not going to be like november 5th there's going to be a new apple tv they'll do it before tv plus so if you can wait then wait that would be my my feeling on this robin says will i be able to use reminders on ios 13 reminders on Mojave

even if it's not the new reminders? We were talking about this earlier. No. You can't do that. Bear that in mind before you upgrade. There's a compatibility mode. Apologies, yes.

But you don't get the new features, right? You lose some of the new features right you lose some yeah so you can you can use it you're gonna have a little button that says upgrade or whatever it is every time like our show except i don't think it says that because i would be very excited if that's what all the places to promote the show remind us is weird but like we'll go for it we'll take it we'll take it um but uh you'll be you'll be being bugged to upgrade to the new feature for a while and that will be annoying, but you can do it. Uh, and you get to use some of the features of reminders before you move over, but basically, yes, you, you can. Um, you will just keep getting bugged because Apple can't assume that everybody who's got a new iPhone is running the latest version of their OS everywhere else.

And so they can nag you about it, but that's all they can do. Joel wants to know, are you getting a green iPhone Pro? You got to read the second part because it's a joke. It's a real Slophy's choice. Yeah. Joel, I don't even want to answer your question because you said Slophy's Choice, and that's a bad joke about a bad word. And the answer is no. No?

Not only is green not a color that I'm very good at among the colors, but I'm kind of a blue guy. If it was a midnight blue iPhone, I would be all over it. But instead, I am getting a space gray and putting it in a midnight blue iphone i would be all over it but instead i am getting a space gray and putting it in a midnight blue case so uh michael stieber of nine to five mac uh kind of put put like a mock-up of a blue i know did you see it like what a blue iphone pro would look like i want it yeah it makes me so sad uh no i I'm going for gold, as I always do. That's going to be my color. Go for the gold.

Go for the gold. Mike Hurley going for gold. And Idina is getting space gray again. She's all about just keeping it simple. My daughter's phone is ordered. Her college, going away to college, get a new phone phone. Very exciting. Her first new phone ever.

It's not a hand-me-down. Oh, yeah. And it's an iPhone 11 in purple. Ooh, that's a good color. I was poking around at those. Like, if I was going to buy one, what one would I buy? And purple is the one I would go for out of the colors and finally today devin asks what is the over under on there being a future or current iphone cameo in c the tv show it seems incredibly unlikely to me because it's basically a post-apocalyptic setting so i don't think they're going to have phones but this did make me want to ask the question what is apple product placement going to

look like in its tv shows i would not be surprised if everybody in apple's tv shows uses iphones and macs that's actually not surprising because i mean maybe not the russians and for all mankind uh yeah maybe okay what about like like the morning? Like are they all going to be using Macs? Yeah, they're all going to have iMacs and stuff. Do you think? I don't know. Why not? I mean, I know a lot of TV shows use Apple products anyway, right?

Yes, that's what I was going to say is that this is actually not unusual. Lots of shows have an Apple product placement thing where they get promotional consideration furnished by Apple. Like I'm re-watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine at the moment and that's always at the furnished by Apple. Promotional consideration. Like I'm watching Brooklyn, we're watching Brooklyn 99 at the moment and that's always at the end of every episode. Yep. Yep. They use the iPhone a lot in that. Well as well. It's one of those TV shows that actually understands how phones look when you use them.

Right? That when you're on a phone call to somebody you're not looking at the lock screen. Right? Right. They do a pretty good job of like trying to actually show what phones really look like in that show and when you hold the phone to your head it is not lit up

exactly if you would like to send in a question for a future episode hashtag ask upgrade to do that once again do not forget September 20th from 4 to 10pm eastern live on twitch at twitch.tv slash RelayFM. The podcast-a-thon, the first ever six-hour podcast-a-thon featuring me and Stephen Hackett

and many RelayFM guests. We're really looking forward to this. Please, please try and join us for some of that while we are attempting to raise money for St. Jude. If you would like to donate to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, go to stjude.org slash pineapple, and you can do that. Find our show notes today at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 263. You can find Jason at sixcolors.com.

I'm sure there is a lot of wonderful work being published over at Six Colors over the next week. Would I be right in thinking that? Yes, I'm sure. I'm sure that we'll be continuing to do wonderful work this week uh and a lot of it many words all the great words follow jason on twitter he's at jay snell i'm at i mike i am yke and we'll be back next week big show next week get ready for it until then say goodbye jason snell

always believe in your soul mike you've got the power to know, because you are gold. Gold!