Upgrade - 266: Two iPads in a Sandwich

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

macOS Catalina has arrived and Jason's got his full review, plus we dig into the new multi-screened mobile device announcements from Microsoft (and what they might mean for Apple), and put on our swea...ters to talk about Deep Fusion photography.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 from relay fm this is upgrade episode 266 today's show is brought to you by the fine people over at bombas squarespace and direct mail my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley you're very energetic this morning. Well, it's a big day, big show. I'm very excited about today's topic. There's a lot going on this week. Yeah. A lot going on. Including happy birthday, Jason Snell.
Starting point is 00:00:32 Oh, thank you. That was, yeah, it's all in the past now. Apple provided you with a gift. We're actually going to eschew regular format and do follow-up first before we do hashtag snow talk because i've realized the gift apple gave you we heard from many upgradians that apple sent an email to iphone upgrade program subscribers of last week encouraging them to upgrade with the tagline this upgrade goes to 11 they finally did the spinal tap joke yeah you know they did a spinal tap reference a couple
Starting point is 00:01:02 years ago in a slide that was a goes to 11 and i don't even remember what it was about and um people told me about it and my my concern now honestly is that nobody even realizes it's a spinal tap no it's it is a reference but it is popular culture yeah um yeah it goes to 11 it's like it goes way beyond what you'd expect because it goes to 11 instead of 10 which i mean that is the joke so yeah yeah no it's uh it's good how could you not with the iphone 11 make a joke about how it goes to 11 so i'm glad to hear there's some somebody in apple's email marketing um is making a spinal tap reference bless you whoever you are. Yeah, they finally did it, though. They did it.
Starting point is 00:01:46 You did it. We did it, everybody. Yay! So, happy birthday, Jason Snow. I'm never picking Spinal Tap reference again. I mean, there is always the possibility of Mac OS 11. That can always happen. Oh, man, you're right.
Starting point is 00:02:01 It could. One day. You're right. Okay. All right. Spinal Tap forever, then. And I feel like Federighi would do it, but we also felt like that was why I was 11, but he didn't. All right. So let's do our hashtag Snell Talk question. Considering that we are preparing
Starting point is 00:02:12 ourselves for another macOS release, I'm going to go to a question from Such who asked, Jason, what is your favorite state or national park in California? Well, I mean, I have to say Yosemite. It's the obvious choice, but it's also the right choice. Yosemite National Park is spectacular. If you haven't been, you should go sometime. I should probably do it sometime, right? It's like three and a half hours from San Francisco.
Starting point is 00:02:38 It is not close, but it's great. And then you can make a side trip to the town I grew up in, which don't bother. It's not that interesting. Is it closer to San Jose? No. Oh. It's about the same. It's about the same.
Starting point is 00:02:52 Because you have to go east. You have to drive east to get there. But it is spectacular. And I was just there, in fact, a few weeks ago. And I love it. It's wonderful. I will also put a shout out to the Point Reyes National Seashore, which I love. And I was just there about a month ago. And that's my favorite beach.
Starting point is 00:03:13 I like that. Shout out to Point Reyes. Yeah. Shout out to the seashore. Yeah. That's a tongue twister if you say it too fast. Shout out to the seashore. She sells shout outs to the seashore.
Starting point is 00:03:24 Yeah, exactly right. And historically, I will say shout out to Columbia State Historic Park, which is basically where I grew up. And it's an old gold rush town that is intact. And you can go visit it and take a stagecoach ride if you really want to. And yeah, that was my childhood at the State Historic Park. So there you go. Three parks for one Snell Talk question. Wow.
Starting point is 00:03:47 Who could have imagined such a thing? I could keep going, but I'll stop there. It's probably best to stop. I'm going to suggest that we- Hashtag Park Talk. That'll be our follow-up. Yes. No.
Starting point is 00:03:59 Thank you so much, Saj, for that question. I've been sitting on that one for a while, waiting for the next Mac OS release. So then here we go. This is, see, there's like a whole content strategy when it comes to Snell Talk. I don't just like pick these things at random. I have questions that are years old at this point and I'm just waiting for the right time to use them. So if you've ever sent in a question and thought,
Starting point is 00:04:20 oh, I didn't pick mine, that doesn't mean it's not going to get picked. So you don't like print out the Snell Talk questions on a piece of paper and put it in a big plastic globe that has air blowing through it and then reach in and pick one out? You don't do that? The fix is in? You've just got a whole system of Snell Talk collected questions?
Starting point is 00:04:40 Personally, I would call it more... They're not chosen randomly. They're hand-selected by you, they're curated by you. Yes, they are curated by me. Every single episode, they are curated. There is no... There's somebody out there now who's very angry that you're unfairly...
Starting point is 00:04:55 I think it's the right move. No, I think it's actually fairly doing it, because I'm picking based on what could be the most interesting thing to ask on this episode. Or I just... I mean mean some of them are just like oh i like that question i'll ask it but uh that that's not necessarily how it works so thank you so much if you ever want to send it just as i said hashtag it's not a question just send out a tweet and yours may be included in a future episode who knows when that's not how
Starting point is 00:05:22 it works uh i don't know what else to say other than aloha uh okay so we're gonna talk about deep fusion this was the um camera feature that's going to be coming to ios later on this year uh it was has been dubbed by many sweater mode because it was the if you remember during the iphone presentation iphone 11 presentation phil schiller showed off a weird photo of a man in a sweater um and was talking about how much better the photo looks uh there's some press last week and now the 13.2 beta is out um and we now have explanations but much better explanations which obviously have come from Apple via, we got a great article from Matthew Panzarino,
Starting point is 00:06:07 and I'm going to put in the show notes a link to Jonathan Morrison, TOD Today. He did a great YouTube video about this too, kind of just like in more clear terms, explaining what this mode of photography will actually be able to do for you as an iPhone 11 owner. In essence, much sharper photos in okay lighting. So basically, deep fusion kicks in if it's not a night photo and it's not a smart HDR photo.
Starting point is 00:06:40 That is when it will kick in. So it's when lighting is mostly okay. And what you get at the end of it is a much sharper image that is in essence what's going on here so it's got to be well lit sort of evenly lit because if it's i think this is what happened with me because i tried this a bunch and i couldn't see any difference and i think it's because i had shots where they were brighter and darker parts and i think what's happening is it's saying i'm going to use smart hdr for this image because i want to be able to get the brighter and darker parts rather than using uh deep fusion the the issue is
Starting point is 00:07:13 there is no way of knowing when an image has been processed right this is a marketing feature and i i get why they're like oh no no we don't we don't it's just you're just taking a picture right like smart hdr it's sort of like you're just taking a picture. Don't worry about it. On the other hand, I'm a little surprised that because it's a feature that matters enough that they're marketing it as deep fusion, that they don't have, you know, a little DF or just a little star, a little daring fireball star. They could just toss that in there if they want to. But something to indicate that this is going on because at least all of us are kind of scratching our heads about is it working but you can you can tell when it is I've shot a couple of them that I think are very clearly deep fusion because of the detail that I'm getting that I wouldn't
Starting point is 00:07:56 otherwise be getting and I've seen some like videos and stuff that like you can see when it happens if you're very quick if you take a picture and go straight to the camera roll the picture changes like the processing is complete yeah because it's it's still processing um also we'll put a link in the show notes uh your uh your friend uh henry casey owns sweaters and tom's guide had him bring in his sweaters and there's a story that is actually a really good example of this but they they picked up from Apple's sweater photo. And there are pictures of Henry wearing three different sweaters. Henry's wearing a lot of sweaters there. Good work, Henry.
Starting point is 00:08:32 And there's a little slider. So you can compare the non-Deep Fusion sweater to the Deep Fusion sweater. It's actually pretty good. So if you like pictures. You know, the day this came out, I was wearing a sweater. Of course. Everybody has to. I'm like, God, boy, perfect synergy.
Starting point is 00:08:47 There is a weird thing with this, which is frustrating to me. It's the new feature, the overcropping feature, right? So like the automatic capture outside of the frame. We've been talking about this a lot. The idea that like take a picture with the regular wide lens and the ultra wide lens captures some data. And then using AI AI it can bring people into the photo that you cropped out
Starting point is 00:09:08 Deep Fusion doesn't work with this and if you have that feature turned on Deep Fusion will never work which is probably why this feature is turned off by default but it's very frustrating I think and it's super weird that they've got two
Starting point is 00:09:24 new features for the camera and they 100% conflict with each other to the point that you can't use them both. I'm a little surprised that there isn't a way, with all of the intelligent stuff that they're doing, I'm a little surprised that there isn't a way for them to detect which feature is better in a given moment. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:09:41 And if it detects, because the way that the outside the frame is apparently working is it's not capturing that. Okay. We don't really know. It may be capturing the wide and the narrow, you know, the wide and ultra wide, let's say every time. But what it's doing, whether it captures it or not, is it's seeing if there's something
Starting point is 00:10:03 off the edge of the frame. So I guess it's capturing it and then looking, it's using machine learning to say, is there something around the edge of the frame that is cut off that might be worth saving? And if it is, then it keeps it. So it's not keeping every single image. You can't just go out there with this feature turned on and take a picture and then go to the crop tool and then uncrop it. That actually won't work, which I kind of would like that feature, but Apple has decided that's not what they're going to do. What they want to do, and video works much the same way, is they're using their machine learning to say, oh, there's a person right on the edge of the frame or right outside the frame or an animal or something like that. And that's a shape that is something that we think might have value. And so we're going to
Starting point is 00:10:50 keep it and we're going to make a smart crop or make it available to smart crop. What surprises me is that they, I'm sure there's a very specific technical reason that they don't have the ability to say, what do I want to do? Oh, they press the button. What do I want to do? And determine whether based on what they see, they want to go ahead with deep fusion or they want to go ahead with the crop outside the frame. But they apparently can't do that. So it's too bad because that would be the best thing here is like, hey, camera, figure it out.
Starting point is 00:11:24 Like, figure it out. Do I do smart HDR? Do I do i do night mode do i do deep fusion do i do crop outside the frame give me both like give me two images yeah i think they can't i i actually think physically they can't just too much processing i think that whatever they're doing it wouldn't surprise me if because this feature exists and it's turned off that they they thought they could get that auto detection to work and they couldn't would not surprise me if that's actually the story behind the scenes is like they really thought they could auto detect it it may be that later on they do right it could be it could also be just the complexity of it that led deep fusion to be in a later beta it will be something that they could fix later but i wouldn't bet on it it feels to me
Starting point is 00:12:05 like they they ran into a roadblock here but because yeah you shouldn't have to toggle a setting and that's a that's a really cool feature that's turned off which is really too bad yeah so i hope they can fix it in software but it may be that they can't i don't know if you are interested in learning very minute details about capture outside of the frame federico went into a lot of depth on this and connected last week and you can hear me just becoming more and more confused and then he and then we get to the resolution of it it's a very confusing topic it's wacky like like the video capture what it will actually do is like if somebody walks off the edge it will be like oh there's a person walking off the edge of the frame i'm gonna hold on to that
Starting point is 00:12:49 person like and that's machine learning that's like there's a person or a cat or whatever there's a an object and i think it's important and that's how it's doing it and it's doing it so that you don't lose that moment because that person is outside of the frame what it's doing it. And it's doing it so that you don't lose that moment because that person is outside of the frame. What it's not doing is just capturing two videos and saying, which one do you want to use? So there's a lot of wacky, it's pretty wacky. And we, as commentators about this stuff, are trying to understand it and explain it to people who want to know how it works, where Apple is really thinking of the vast majority of iPhone users who don't want to know how it works and don't care how it works and are not going to change the settings. They're just
Starting point is 00:13:28 going to press the button. And that's what the feature is built for. It's literally built. It's better this way, I think, is the argument is that most people will never go consult the second video and recrop their video. But if the machine learning algorithm can see that your kid was just outside of frame and put them back inside the frame automatically, then you win. That's the best scenario for most people. But for us, we're trying to figure out like, how does this work? What is it doing? How do we control it if you do want to take more control of it? And it is kind of fascinating to see how many different things are going on inside the camera app. Like Apple is doing a lot. They're being very aggressive about this. Oh, by the way, I want
Starting point is 00:14:14 to mention pet hair. And I mean, I think hair in general, it's not just sweaters. There's lots of detail. But one of the things that I've seen, like I have a black cat and, um, I don't know whether it's all deep fusion or whether it's also some smart HDR, but what I've noticed is, um, I have been able to take way better pictures of my cat than I used to because black cats are very hard. They're, you know, they're reflective and dark and like, they're just really hard to take pictures of. And, uh, with deep fusion,, I think, again, I'm not sure, but I think it's Deep Fusion. I've been impressed with the pictures I've been able to take that I haven't been able to capture of him before.
Starting point is 00:14:55 So for what it's worth. So this is in beta. It will probably be out probably in a couple of weeks for everybody to try. I haven't put the 13.2 beta on my phone. I'm just going to wait for that one. The mid-cycle the 13.2 beta on my phone i'm just gonna wait for that one the mid-cycle betas i never put on my phone i actually didn't even put 13 on my phone this year i just waited uh because things were so difficult right but yeah but uh i'm not you know so i'm kind of i'm kind of just waiting my time on this one uh i noticed on twitter jason that you
Starting point is 00:15:22 uh said that you got a bunch of NFC stickers. And I'm assuming that they're for shortcuts. And I'm wondering if you can just give us an idea as to what you're using them for. Sure. So thank you to Matthew Casanelli, who recommended where he got. He handed me an NFC sticker at WWDC, anticipating that this would happen. But it was enabled, the use of an NFC sticker to trigger a shortcut was enabled in iOS 13.1, which just came out. And I thought I wanted to play around with this. And so I bought on one of his recommendations that he posted on his blog,
Starting point is 00:16:03 and we'll put a link in the show notes to what I bought, a roll of like 10 NFC stickers from Amazon. They're just white stickers. You can order, you know, you could order 50 custom printed RelayFM NFC stickers if you want to. But I just got these little white stickers and they've got a little NFC chip in them. And basically, think of it like Apple Pay. If you wave your phone over it, it detects that it's there. And the way it works with shortcuts is you open a shortcuts automation tab and you add a new item and the automation trigger is an NFC scan. And then you tap on that and it says, okay, scan the sticker and you have to tap and then scan it, scan the NFC code. Amiibos work for this too.
Starting point is 00:16:50 They do. Anything with an NFC sticker will do it. So you do that and then you build your shortcut. has to be on. I think it can't be sleeping, but it doesn't have to be unlocked. And you tap it on a sticker and the shortcut fires. So that's pretty cool. So I thought I want to experiment with this and I only have the one sticker and I want to sort of try it out where I can actually just buy some stickers and stick them places and see if I use this. So I stuck a sticker on the post by my mailbox at the front of my house with the idea that if I'm coming home in the evening and it's late and I can't see the walkway to the front door clearly, I can actually scan that
Starting point is 00:17:40 sticker. As I go by, I tag that sticker and it will turn off or it will turn on the light at the front door and unlock my front door. So I'm trying that one. And then I have in our back bedroom, it gets really damp in the winter. So I have a dehumidifier on a smart switch and I had that running on a cycle. But there are times when I'm back there and I think I really need to turn on the dehumidifier and I have to, you know, open up the home app and go find the smart switch and turn it on. I guess I could use Siri for that too. But what I'm going to experiment with is now I have a sticker on the dehumidifier. And if I tap that with my phone, what it will do is turn on the dehumidifier and actually turn on the ceiling fan to circulate
Starting point is 00:18:25 the air in the in the room and that's just a single shortcut and i'm probably going to stick one in the kitchen somewhere that will take whatever i'm playing on my phone and send it to my home pods because that's a scenario i have sometimes where i'm listening to a podcast and then i want to transfer it to the home pods and it's usually when i'm in the kitchen doing something and i want to get it on the big speakers. And so I can stick that sticker somewhere and just do that. And then I don't even have to go to Overcast or whatever and fiddle with the HomePod.
Starting point is 00:18:53 Because that is currently a missing feature from iOS 13, right? Yes, the tapping it on the HomePods to transfer it over, right? Which is, I think, a very similar kind of thing, but I don't think is there yet. So that's a way to do it. And I've heard from people that that's a that's a pretty popular one is these kind of airplay directive on a sticker so that if you were in a context you know you walk into a room and you want to put it you know put the audio on the speakers that are in that room you can actually just tag the nfc sticker. And Android's had NFC stickers for a long time that the OS has been able to access
Starting point is 00:19:29 and do stuff with like connect to Wi-Fi and all of that. But really for iPhone, it has taken until user automation has access to it, which is with 13.1. So it's been fun. Is it practical? I don't know. I mean, that's kind of why I bought the stickers
Starting point is 00:19:43 is to find out. That's my job, right? My job is to live with it and find out if it's practical and come up with some ideas of how it might be practical and then disseminate that to all of you. And then you can make your judgment about whether it's a dumb idea or whether it's a good idea or whether you already bought stickers because it was so exciting. Those are the three, I think, options there. The only one i've
Starting point is 00:20:05 have right now i put a nfc sticker on my carry-on suitcase uh right now all it does is turn on low power mode but i'm thinking about what else i can add to that as like a you're traveling now thing like i might want to turn on the uh like the hue scene that i have that cycles the lights right that kind of stuff so i'm working out what to add to that and it can be literally any shortcut that's the thing that's really amazing is that you can have it be something incredibly complex that is going to a web service and you know like all of these things that it can do. It's just a matter of what's practical. Because again, that's something you could do, but what's the scenario there? But yeah, setting a scene, anything like that totally makes sense. So I think it's a fun idea and we'll see where it goes. And
Starting point is 00:20:58 I've been spending some time with that and also with the shortcuts that are in the Home app automation, which are limited in what they can do but i've been playing around with those too so it's been it's been kind of fun today's episode is brought to you by bombas if you can't remember the last time you refreshed your sock drawer maybe it's time for an upgrade bombas socks are made with comfort innovations like arch support, a seamless toe, and a cushioned footbed. And that is all sock speak
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Starting point is 00:22:34 that's b-o-m-b-a-s.com upgrade for 20 off go there right now bombas.com upgrade our thanks to bombas for their support of this show and all the RelayFM. Socks. I love socks. More socks sponsors. Can we just go all socks sponsors from now on, Mike?
Starting point is 00:22:50 I'll do whatever I can, Jason. Okay. Thank you. What I can do there is not a lot, but I will try. All right.
Starting point is 00:22:58 Well, I'm very excited, as always, to get socks. Be sponsored by socks. I'm wearing socks right now. Good. Good.
Starting point is 00:23:04 That's always good news. Jason, I am That's always good news. Jason, I am very excited to talk about Microsoft. I know. Are you feeling okay? I'm feeling very okay, my friend. I am also excited to talk about Microsoft because Microsoft did some stuff last week
Starting point is 00:23:20 that's really interesting and I think very clever. And I will now point out at this point that the last time microsoft did something that i thought was really interesting and really clever it failed miserably so i'm not sure it's gonna succeed but i i am the all the metro stuff they did where they were like and doing a touch interface that had touch apps and all that and i was like we were excited about the uh the surface studio was it called the studio we were excited about that too yeah that too but but like and well that hasn't failed as much as the metro stuff failed but anyway this stuff is
Starting point is 00:23:55 fascinating and i think it's interesting on its own and i think it's interesting in the context of what apple is uh is thinking of doing in the future too they had a huge event they had a bunch of updates we'll talk about a few of the things that future too. They had a huge event. They had a bunch of updates. We'll talk about a few of the things that are releasing this year in a little bit. But I want to talk you through kind of my thing with this last week. So I was recording a show. I just finished recording the show
Starting point is 00:24:13 and I went onto Twitter and I saw that they were having an event and people were like, oh, this is a really great event. So I was like, all right, I'll tune in. I tuned in five minutes before they showed off the Neo, right? And it's like, oh, okay.
Starting point is 00:24:27 Thank you, Microsoft. So what we're talking about mainly today is two devices that are coming next year holiday 2020 that microsoft have created that are dual screen devices so the first is the surface neo which is the first one that they showed off it has two nine 9-inch screens that have a hinge down the middle. It's a 360-degree hinge, which means it can basically go from a book, so the screens are on the inside. You can fold it all the way back around again, so you have screens on both sides. So you can fold it out and on itself.
Starting point is 00:25:01 It's all the way around. It runs a new variant of windows called windows x which is very confusing to me when i see it but it's called windows x it's actually an x it's like windows 10 but with an x i honestly feel like they're just trolling at this point but i love it these these devices need developer support to work um the sa3 i said 360 degree hinge has pen and keyboard support now they had some really cool videos i'll include those in the show notes including some like hands-on stuff that like diverged it but like the product videos are really nice uh this is one moment in the product video which i my mind exploded right where it's like the it's floating
Starting point is 00:25:42 in the air and it opens up and then they have this sound like as a keyboard flips around and magnetically attaches to the bottom screen when that happens you get a touch bar which is but what i want to be clear here it doesn't actually float no no that's true and it doesn't actually go but if it did it'd be even better uh but yeah so if you put the keyboard on the... So you're folding it like a laptop, right? So you have one screen on the bottom, one screen in front of you. You put the keyboard on the bottom screen.
Starting point is 00:26:13 You have a touch bar above it. If you move the keyboard up, you get a trackpad below it. Very clever. Like, very... Just really smart. It looks like it's been... Like, the things that they're showing
Starting point is 00:26:23 seem really well thought through about the way that people might use these devices. So they showed this one off first. Yeah. Can we talk about that now? Or do you want to go on to the next one? I think we should. I think I want to just introduce both of them and then we can talk about them both. Is that fair? Because there's a lot of overlap, I think, between the two. Sure. That's fine. So everyone's minds are blown by this right like people are going crazy right as you would imagine like microsoft have like they've shown us something and it's like seems really exciting and panos panay by the way their chief product officer he is a showman very very good at displaying products right like probably one, if not the best out there right now. Like I've only seen a few of his stuff, but like this, the way he demoed all of these products and spoke
Starting point is 00:27:11 about them, very good. I like their staging. Everyone's low down. He's walking up and down the aisles like that. Microsoft, they've been putting some thought into this, right? Like we've all been sleeping on them a bit but they've been moving forward so everyone's minds are blown by the neo's introduction it seems like panos pene is wrapping up like he's going off stage like puts one finger up in the air and he's like ah but i'm not done and then they roll a video and it looks like another demo video of the surface neo you have an individual and they're walking along and they have the the neo and they close it up and then something starts ringing and then they pick a smaller one out of the bag it's a small one it's a phone dual 5.6 inch displays
Starting point is 00:27:52 on the surface duo uh there you go uh it is uh unfolded it is an 8.3 inch tablet right if you unfold the two which is interesting um it is a smaller dual screen device it runs android and uh microsoft don't want you to call this a phone they want to they want to kind of move away from that but it is something to replace your smartphone so holiday 2020 yes let's be clear here this is a product that isn't going to come out until the end of next year yes these two products if they if they do come out it will be the end of next year now again it's like a lot can change in a year but they are going the right way about this when they talk about why they're doing it because they want to get these into developers hands
Starting point is 00:28:38 in like within a few months time and they because both of these devices are going to require developer support especially the neo which is the the windows x version because that one could just straight up fail right if developers don't get on board while the other one is an android phone sure right right and in the android space already there is already a lot of these types of devices developers are getting on board of it microsoft and google are working together but google had already started to push towards this anyway so there is there is more of a story there um but the the it seems a little unclear to me at least like what is needed for a an app to run on windows x like do you have to start from the beginning like will will things run at all microsoft's not saying a
Starting point is 00:29:33 ton about windows x right now other than it's going to need buy-in from the developer community so yeah go ahead i i if you've got more to say, it's fascinating. But the fact that it's like a lot can change in a year, but I think they're doing this in the right way. They know that they're showing their hand way earlier than they should, especially because in a lot of the coverage, they're saying a lot of the details of this device might change. They haven't even decided if it's going to have a camera on the Duo.
Starting point is 00:30:04 They've not made a decision yet this is a fundamental difference between microsoft and apple right because apple could literally have something in their lab that they are planning on releasing at a special event in october of 2020 and that that product if it existed would ship before these products right like and they wouldn't need to do the developer like let's come on bring you around we're gonna apple doesn't need to do that in fact i would say this is one of my thoughts about this is when you look at something like the surface neo which is something that we've kind of talked about in the context of the ipad yes uh or in context of the macbook we've talked about the idea that apple's ideal laptop is probably two screens where you could type on one or use
Starting point is 00:30:46 it for other things and then another one that's sort of like the the alternative screen and that that is a product that we both laugh about because it's like finally no keyboard travel at all hooray we win and um and yet i think also kind of is a possible future direction for them and you look at the surface neo and that's basically what that is. But if you think about iOS and multi-window and all of that that they put in iOS 13, you could do this basically today, I think, on iOS if you had a product like this, because iOS apps now can support running in multiple spaces, essentially, and across two screens would presumably be one of the things that it would be capable of doing.
Starting point is 00:31:32 So that's kind of fascinating, the idea that this could potentially be a direction that Apple could go with the iPad or with a product that is also an iOS product but is not quite an iPad. I think what I would say about both of these is, I know how much you love foldable phones and how fascinated you are by them. I think what's interesting here is that these aren't that quite. These are dual screen devices, folding dual screen devices, which is not the same. There's no continuity between the screens. Well, there is. No, because you pop
Starting point is 00:32:08 the screens open and it's two screens. There's a gutter between them. There's bezels between them. You've got two screens. You can use them both and they can both work together. But what you don't get that the folding phones are trying to give you is the illusion that it's...
Starting point is 00:32:24 Or even not illusion, the illusion that it's or even not illusion the reality that it is a single screen this is not what microsoft is even attempting to do here i think maybe that's a smart move because the folding screen tech is not ready yet no no i see what you mean like when you said continuity like you mean like physical well like i think of it as more using these screens together. And really, like... Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm more interested in devices that change in their form factor
Starting point is 00:32:54 than I am in purely foldable phones as we've seen them now. Like these devices excite me as much, if not more, than like the Galaxy Fold does. Because what i really love about the way that they're building this device is what they keep referring to as postures and you can see it in a bunch of the coverage right that there are so many ways you could use this device you can hold it like an open book you can flip one screen around on the back and just use one screen you can set it down and use it like a laptop with one screen on the bottom and one screen above. Or like one that I absolutely love in some of their videos.
Starting point is 00:33:30 You can stand it up horizontally, slightly bent in, right? So it's maintaining itself like you're standing a book up on a table. And then use the keyboard in front of you. And you have two large screens that you can use. Like personally, like I understand there's a bezel. But I would accept the bezel the bezel doesn't would not bother me because i'm able to use these two screens like it is very adaptable i agree i just want to make it clear that this is the difference between these and what the samsung's of the world are trying to do which is like and then you open it up and
Starting point is 00:34:01 it's a tablet oh it's like microsoft saying, yeah, that stuff isn't ready. And we want to have a solid hinge on these things. And we think that there's a lot of value in having two touchscreen displays in terms of all the different things you can do with them. And I think, again, I want to think that they're right. I am fascinated by this. We have talked about this in the context of the iPad, you know, slash a laptop from Apple. And yeah, I mean, there are studies that go back decades, like three or four decades about how people are more productive with multiple displays, especially in the era of small displays on computers. And I look at this and I think, OK, you've got a lot of different things you can do
Starting point is 00:34:45 with the neo especially if we think about the bigger one that's basically two ipads in a sandwich um hinged you can that's a two-screen ipad you lay flat on a table or sit it upright like you said um but if you put it in a laptop configuration you've got uh you got a horizontal and vertical surface. You can snap that keyboard on it, and now you've got a physical keyboard and a touch bar. And you pop it off. You could also just use it as a software keyboard. There's so many different things that you could potentially do with that, postures, as they say. And I think that's very interesting. The open question is, And, you know, I think that's very interesting. The open question is, what are the use cases?
Starting point is 00:35:38 And will there be ones that are so compelling that it's worth, you know, the expense of having a two touchscreen kind of device? But as an iPad user, I look at this and I think, wow, it would really be nice if I could have that laptop-like typing plane instead of having... I mean, I already have that with the bridge keyboard, right? But this would be a physical keyboard and a touch bar, and I could take it off, and now I've got two screens, and I can have the bottom screen doing something and the top screen doing something else. There's a lot of potential here. And then for the small one like there's it is there's a lot of potential here and then for the small one i think similarly there's a real question to ask which is is a two-screen device that you open like a clamshell device that you open um a more natural and appropriate feeling device than a foldable phone like we've seen from the companies that have
Starting point is 00:36:28 announced these foldable phones. Is this actually just as productive or more productive to have this kind of like, I've got stuff on the left and stuff on the right kind of approach, and then I can flip it sideways and it's like a little tiny laptop? And I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems very practical and very realistic in a way that the folding phones still seem like wacky ideas that are not for most people. Like Microsoft seems to have done a lot more thinking about what is practical to build. And I think that's their credit. I'm sure Microsoft would love for this device to just be one piece of glass, right? That still can fold the way it folds, right?
Starting point is 00:37:06 Like that's the ideal, right? That there isn't a hinge. Like there is a hinge, but there's no gap between them, right? Like imagine such a beautiful idea of technology, but we're not there yet. We may never be. We're not sure. And I would say that the problem with that continuum is that there's one scenario for that, which is it's either
Starting point is 00:37:25 open or it's closed because yeah you could make a laptop with a continual screen but isn't that a little bit weird like and is it really necessary that you've got kind of like the the curvy part that curves up to the top part of the i think there's an argument to be made that having two discrete screens in a lot of cases is fine and in a laptop configuration is maybe better. I don't know. It's an argument that could be made. I feel like that Microsoft decided that they will make this device as it is now,
Starting point is 00:37:53 like I think as great as it is now, to push their software forward until there can be more advanced, even more advanced form factors in the future, right? That's kind of my thinking on this. Like Samsung have had a lot of trouble. Huawei are having a lot of trouble. Microsoft have decided to make something that many people will call compromise
Starting point is 00:38:17 because it doesn't look like those devices. But I believe will actually be a more successful device for now, right? It's because it's going to work. Let's talk about Microsoft and Google, Microsoft and Android. So I want to read a quote from Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, right? Remember that as I say these words, the operating system is no longer the most important layer for us. What is most important for us is the app model and the experience. How people are going to write apps for
Starting point is 00:38:47 Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app, because it's going to be about the Microsoft Graph. This is from a Wired article. Isn't that bananas? You know, if you've been watching how Satya Nadella has been
Starting point is 00:39:03 managing Microsoft and the path they've been taking, it's not surprising. If you're thinking about the grand context of Microsoft. In history. And its history. Yeah. And how its executives have, the relationship they've had with Windows over the years and the power it's gotten from Windows. It's staggering. It's mind-blowing but in terms of where they've
Starting point is 00:39:27 been headed like it's it's not like first off what else are they going to do they don't have a a small device operating system and and for a long time now satchin adela has been saying how what microsoft's goal is is to have mic Microsoft's services across all platforms, right? They want to be on Mac and Windows and iOS and Android, and they want to be in the cloud, and they want everybody using OneDrive and Office 365. And that is their vision, is Microsoft stuff everywhere, not just on Windows. Windows. And so knowing that it's not, it's reasonable that, that Microsoft would actually release a piece of hardware that doesn't run their own operating system. And yet, wow. Like, like, I mean, this is walking the walk, essentially, this is them saying, yeah, we know we
Starting point is 00:40:22 don't have it. We don't have it. And if we had it, you wouldn't want it. And so we're just going to work with Google and put it on Android. Because in the end, what's going to make this the best product? And, you know, it's going to be tailored to all of the stuff that Microsoft cares about. And Microsoft's customers are going to be the ones looking at it. And Microsoft is going to use its apps to help push this as a good shape for that kind of product. going to use its apps to help push this as a good shape for that kind of product but still what a change from the era of steve ballmer where windows was the most important thing just it had to be about things running on windows yeah and they are skinning android a little bit right like
Starting point is 00:40:59 it's not just and they're not going with stock android they're not going wild with it like they're working with google because right now like google is and has for a while been actively discouraging too much customization of android and like with their biggest partners like samsung getting them to scale back the wild stuff and make it look more consistent so there is a part of that going on but but microsoft is going to be making changes changes and integrating with their services a lot more. But I really like, so again, I want to point people to an interview that Panos Panay gave to The Verge on The Verge Cast. And he's just like, look, we want people to be where they want to be on the operating systems that they use. It's wild for us to try and bring people to something else when
Starting point is 00:41:47 on these types of devices they want to use the apps and services that they know and they're on Android. They know they can't try and build something again like Windows Phone because it failed horrifically. Which is why I think actually Windows 10 could be a
Starting point is 00:42:04 risk depending on how difficult it is to make apps work like i wonder why do you mean windows x what did i say windows x well windows x iphone just ruined me uh windows x could be a risk um because of that right i i wonder why they didn't just go with android on both of these devices but they decided not to i mean they do feel that this other device is a convertible it's a tablet it's a laptop it's it's it's the classic device that windows excels on um it gives me the heebie-jeebies a little bit because i'm thinking back to when they made those bold moves back in the day to do the metro interface and say we're gonna we're gonna do the first interface and say, we're going to do the first surface,
Starting point is 00:42:48 and it's going to have a touchscreen, and it's going to have touch controls, and it's going to be great. And I sat there thinking, oh, my God, here comes Microsoft, they got it. And then this is the first demo. And then late in that demo, they say, also, we have this compatibility mode where you can plug in a mouse and just run Microsoft Office, and then it just looks like a PC and you don't use any of the touchscreen features. And I thought, no, no, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're undercutting yourself already. I think it's a great tragedy that Microsoft had the ability to build something, the vision to build something like that, and then internally, politically, did not have the confidence to step away from Windows. What concerns me about the rumors about Windows X
Starting point is 00:43:26 is that originally the idea was that it was only going to run these kind of like new app paradigms and it wasn't going to use old Windows stuff at all. And by the time it got to ship, or not ship because that's 2020, it got to announce period, the story was that your Windows apps
Starting point is 00:43:44 would run in a compatibility box. And I had that moment of just like, I, like, I get it. Yeah. And we'll see how it works, but it also feels like we, you know, once again, our hedging, um, because we have this huge install base that exists and we're afraid that they won't come with us unless we bring the old apps along and maybe it's the right decision but i think um it it made the other product back in the day fail because you didn't have to use the new thing and developers didn't need to build for it so we'll see i think i think windows x is the devil's going to be in the
Starting point is 00:44:23 details and it's going to be in the developer story. We talk a lot about how developers on Apple's platforms feel about Apple and how they can often get frustrated about Apple. But Apple is so lucky to have so many developers who are excited about building for their platform and adopting whatever the next thing is that Apple's doing that they announced at WWDC. Because with Microsoft, you can see how it can go the other way, which is Microsoft wants to drag its developers and its users forward. And they have a very large base of developers and users, and they don't want to go. And this is time and again,
Starting point is 00:44:58 this has been like the problem with Microsoft is they've got all of this success but they can't pull their user base along and i think it's hurt microsoft over time so we'll see how windows x fares but you know i think it's a i think it's a cool idea so microsoft also announced updates to its other product lines for this year and including is the surface pro x which doesn't run windows x uh but the reason i want to mention this is it features microsoft is that a certain is that surface pro x or surface pro 10 i think i think maybe it's surface pro 10 uh i think it's x i think it's x i don't remember now but it's it's the capital letter x I'm pretty sure it's X. But anyway, whether it's X or 10, I don't know. Surface Pro capital letter X. It runs a Microsoft-designed ARM chip,
Starting point is 00:45:51 which is very interesting. Right? They worked with Qualcomm. How about that? They designed their own chip, and they're putting it in a product that they're calling for like their you know their most power usery uh customers and this is very interesting because this is microsoft making
Starting point is 00:46:15 their own chips right this is why we say apple stuff's so good because they make their own chips well microsoft's doing it too also they had some surface laptops come out revised surface laptops they were taking shot after shot at apple about the keyboards and that kind of stuff kind of funny uh 13 and 15 inch the 15 inch has amd chips inside uh on the verge cast it was very fun to hear panos panay dance around these ideas saying that intel is a wonderful partner they're working on really great things but it's clear that microsoft also want more flexibility with their own hardware so so they're literally their announcement encompasses something they designed um qualcomm intel and amd they're all involved
Starting point is 00:46:59 in some way which is fascinating right like microsoft's just like, we're maybe agnostic on processors right now. It's, I think it's another good lesson maybe learned from what Apple has succeeded doing, which is not necessarily you need to become your own chip designer. I'm not sure Microsoft's really gonna go down that route, although, you know, who knows? But I think it does say something that they, you know,
Starting point is 00:47:28 there's value in not being entitled or indentured to one supplier and, like, lashed to Intel in the way that they used to be. So, yeah, really interesting. So I'm keen to see what the Surface Pro X ends up being like. There's some stuff that they're saying which is kind of wild. I'm keen to see what the Surface Pro X ends up being like. There's some stuff that they're saying which is kind of wild. 13 hours of battery life, and it has a fast charge built in which can get you in an hour to 80% battery. That's crazy.
Starting point is 00:47:57 So I think that this might be one of the first examples of what would it be like if Apple went to ARM. I'm keen to see how this product ends up reviewing when it comes out soon but so that's microsoft microsoft wow they're doing some stuff over there yeah and i think what from a perspective of an apple user because i i if you listen to some podcasts like atp and all, they say this and I think they're exactly right, which is there are people who do not care about what operating system they're using. There are, they are called windows users.
Starting point is 00:48:33 Oh, burn. Um, uh, for me, I look at this and I say, well, this is great,
Starting point is 00:48:40 but it runs windows and I'm not interested. Right. Like, I mean, that's the bottom line is that I think their hardware is really good. And then I think about running windows and, uh, you know, well, this is great, but it runs Windows and I'm not interested, right? Like, I mean, that's the bottom line is that I think their hardware is really good. And then I think about running Windows and, you know, not small part of me dies inside for a moment and then I move on. And I think that's never going to happen.
Starting point is 00:48:54 Come on, Apple. What I want, and I hope happened a few years ago, and we will start seeing the fruits of it now is I want Apple's laptop and maybe iPad designers to look at what Microsoft's doing and have somebody there say, why aren't we doing better than them? Why is Microsoft doing better stuff than us in hardware design? Why is that happening? How is it that we've allowed them to creep ahead of us in all of these different areas. And how do we fix it? Because I think the truth is that it's very easy for Apple to get complacent. And they were, in terms of their laptop design, they set the standard for a long time.
Starting point is 00:49:37 It is not a surprise why most successful premium laptops look like Apple's laptops. It's because Apple did it right. And everybody else is like, oh my God, we need to just do that. Let's just do what they do. But Microsoft has pushed past them. There's just no doubt about it. I have quibbles with some of their design decisions and I hate kickstands on the surface.
Starting point is 00:49:58 I hate kickstands. But I sure hope Apple is taking this as a challenge and that we're going to see the MacBook designs and maybe even iPad designs step up because of it. That would be really nice. All right, we're going to take a break and then talk about macOS Catalina. Big episode today, Jason Snell.
Starting point is 00:50:17 Today's episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. They will let you easily create a website for your next idea, project, event, or maybe to your next store. It doesn't matter what type of website you want to build, they give you all of the tools that you need. You can register a unique domain name. You could take advantage of and customize award-winning templates and so much more. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that will let you put anything online that you need. There is nothing to install or
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Starting point is 00:51:20 past, you should give it another go. Go to squarespace.com slash upgrade. You can sign up for a trial. You can go around. You can get access to all of the editing tools. You can make your website. And then when you're ready to publish it to the world, you sign up for one of their plans that start at just $12 a month. If you use the offer code upgrade, you will get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain
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Starting point is 00:52:03 Yeah, it should be. I mean, as we're recording this, it's it's 10 as we're recording this it's just after 10 a.m pacific so presumably it is rolling out um now my my embargo dropped as you were reading that ad so uh it's out in terms of apple pr as far as they care it's out yeah so we're gonna talk about it so um people should go and read your review it's very good i actually really enjoyed it uh i've read it i read it in two different states but it's been read by me but i want to break down a few key questions that i have for you and then maybe we can talk about those in a little more detail for as much as you can sum up what should people know
Starting point is 00:52:44 before they upgrade to Catalina? Wow, a lot, a lot. And that's, I think, what makes this release so different from a lot of the recent releases. This isn't an easy, just press the update button and forget about it kind of release. This is an end of an era and the beginning of a new era. And it's an era that we knew was coming for years now, but it's here now. And I think if you're not paying attention, you may not realize it,
Starting point is 00:53:07 but this is one of those updates that will break by design, will break lots of stuff. So I would recommend that nobody upgrade to Catalina until they have done the investigation of whether their apps that they rely on will still work and that their
Starting point is 00:53:28 peripherals that they rely on will still work. And that's because with Catalina, Apple is removing all the 32-bit support from the operating system. And what that means effectively is stuff compiled for 32-bit, stuff compiled, built using Carbon, which was essentially the compatibility. This is going back a long way, but it's the compatibility layer for the old macOS APIs, the classic macOS APIs. That's how they got apps over to Mac OS X from classic Mac OS. And those apps will no longer function, as well as more modern apps that are not recompiled for 64-bit will not function. And so if you've got some old app that still worked, even up to Mojave, like our friend James Thompson is a great example. His app Drag Thing, which has been around
Starting point is 00:54:26 for decades now, 25 years. It's so old that not only is it written for the Carbon APIs, but James actually had to make a bug fix last year, and he had to build it in an emulator. Where you position that sounded like a playground
Starting point is 00:54:42 taunt. Your app's so old yeah you're so old that you've got you've got to make your bug fixes in an emulator of an old version of mac os it's true right it's true it didn't run the tools to build it didn't even run on his current system and uh you know because he makes his money from pALC and DragThing hasn't made money in a long time, there's no way and he would need to completely rewrite it because it was based on Carbon. He just put it to sleep. He announced that it was not going to be updated and it really hasn't been updated in years other than a couple of very minor bug fixes. And there are going to be apps like that that you're like, but what do you mean?
Starting point is 00:55:24 I'm still using it. Like we, James may know, for example, that his app is essentially untouched for years and can't survive. But if you're just a user and you're using it and it works fine, you don't know that. And that is one of the very important things to know about Catalina. I've had, and I don't have all the answers here, but like, are there 32 bit drivers for USB peripherals? Or what about print drivers, printer drivers? Like, it's one of those things where you should do your due diligence because once you're on Catalina, that old stuff, if it hasn't been updated, will just not work. It's not like you can do a clever thing where you hold
Starting point is 00:56:05 down control and say open it like no it will break um all the quick time stuff uh the old quick time was all 32-bit and it's all dead so there's the the quick time player x or 10 or whatever it is and all of that stuff still works but the old quick time player 7 and everything that was behind that that was generating uh dot movs for Recorder used it, like all of these things, it's dead. So all of that software has to be updated. So Call Recorder, which is a tool we use to record our podcast, that got updated in the last, you know, over the last year, they've updated everything they do in order to make it work. everything they do in order to make it work um but this is my warning is what if you have a tool that you use and works fine but unbeknownst to you perhaps that developer is not planning on updating it uh can't update it won't update it doesn't make financial sense
Starting point is 00:56:58 for them to update it this happens a lot i'm especially worried about like weird usb like scanners and document scanners and things like that, where the company that made it has moved on five models since then, and they're not going to go back and fix the drivers, and they just stop working. And if there's nothing you can do in the system, maybe there's a compatibility mode that lets image capture use the scanner without any drivers, great. But check. You like, check. You need to check because, you know. Well, so some of it is hard because you're gonna have to ask the developers. One thing you can do is Sinclair Software
Starting point is 00:57:35 has a piece of software that we'll put in the show notes that is called Go64 that will scan your computer and show you all of the apps that are either 32-bit or are 64-bit but have some 32-bit stuff attached to them. But really what you need to do is look on the websites of the developers of the stuff that you rely on. stuff that you rely on. Or, you know, if you want to go this far, install Catalina on an external drive or something and boot into it and see if you can do your job with it. But I would be really cautious because stuff's going to break and it's going to break for a good reason, which is that this stuff is really old and Apple needs to move on. And it's given everybody a lot of time. And the developers have been aware of this for a long time. But as a user, the fact is,
Starting point is 00:58:25 if you still rely on it, just don't update until you can find another solution. And in fact, I would even go so far as to say the recommendation I would make is if you know that there's something you rely on and it's going to die in Catalina, stay on Mojave or High Sierra or wherever you are and start shopping around for replacements because the replacements will run almost certainly, unless it's a catalyst app, will run pre-Catalina. And you can maybe build a new workflow up on your previous version of Mac OS to the point where you're comfortable and like yeah okay this is working now and then update to catalina and do it like that rather than update to catalina have everything break and then slowly put your life back together yeah but you do need to start looking
Starting point is 00:59:13 for that replacement because eventually you will have to upgrade because this is the thing is you can hold out i mean nobody's going to make you upgrade but at some point the security updates will stop and at some point you're probably going to want to buy a new Mac and the new Mac won't run anything but Catalina. Or further. Or further ahead, right? A new model. And the new Mac hardware released after today will not run 32-bit apps ever, right? Like that's, I will also say if you have you have an app, that's just an app you use occasionally, that you need to run, you can emulate Mac OS. So you can emulate High Sierra
Starting point is 00:59:51 or Sierra or Mojave in a virtual machine and VMware or parallels or one of these things that it is legal to emulate Mac OS on Mac hardware. And so you could do that. And you know, that's the example of like, if you've got Adobe Illustrator CS5 and you need to open it three times a year, then you could probably suffer through a slow emulation and run it in a virtual machine on your Mac, running Catalina, running High Sierra inside. inside. You could do that. That's a possibility too. But I want to warn our listeners and I want to actually suggest our listeners warn their loved ones and their friends that this is a big one and that people shouldn't just dive into it. It's not like it doesn't have a bunch of new features and it's interesting and it's a place Apple needs to go. I think those are all true. It is also a bit buggy and sitting out a 0.0 release anyway is a good idea. But with this one, the bar is higher. This is a new era. A lot of old stuff is breaking by design. And if you're still using the old stuff, that's fine, but you can't go. You won't get Catalyst apps,
Starting point is 01:01:02 You won't get Catalyst apps. You won't get Apple Arcade. But you will be able to use your stuff. And that's the most important thing. So that's my warning, is that this is a big one. And you should proceed with caution. So let's say you've run Go64. You're all good. You've checked that all of the devices that you need have drivers that will
Starting point is 01:01:25 have been updated right like you're all good and you think to yourself right i want to upgrade to catalina now somebody does this what makes it worthwhile for them like what are the features in catalina that you think are like stand out they're like these are great additions to mac os and makes this a worthwhile upgrade well oh so apple arcade is there one so if you want to play the apple arcade games for mac os and there are a lot of them um i don't know if they're up yet but they're they um my beta i can see them so i think that they're all rolling out now um uh catalyst the fact is there are going to be apps that come out for the mac now that will require catalina um there'll be a bunch of them and the reason that they require catalina is that they're catalyst apps mac catalyst which is this technology that lets developers you take their ipad apps and put them on the mac can i ask you about this because in your review you call it
Starting point is 01:02:23 mac catalyst all the time yes that time. Yes, that's what it's called. That's the marketing name for it. If you look on Apple's webpages, Mac Catalyst. At some point in the last few months, they have changed it from Catalyst to Mac Catalyst. I wonder if there was a trademark or something. Somebody has a trademark on Catalyst and they had to change it to Mac Catalyst.
Starting point is 01:02:40 But that's what they're calling it. Can we just one word that? Mac Catalyst? We'll just work with that? Because it's easier to're calling it can we just one word that my catalyst we'll just work with that like because it's just easier to say uh we can so let me let me ask you actually before we dive into mac catalyst is there anything else like so you've got apple arcade i guess apple tv will be part of it right when that when that launches it's it's for certain models and i think it's like 2018 and later macbook pros and imax um for those models and you know like t2 processor um coprocessor devices uh you get 4k hdr video for the first time on the
Starting point is 01:03:18 mac where even though you've got 4k and 5K displays on all these systems, the copyright holders didn't want computers to be able to play back 4K video for fear of piracy, which is stupid because piracy happens anyway. But I think it's all getting channeled through the T2 with DRM. Genius. looking at what their restrictions are, I suspect that that is the deal they made with, uh, the, the content holders that Apple licenses the content from for the movies and TV shows that you buy or rent on, on, uh, iTunes or Apple TV, I guess we need to start calling it now. So, uh, but it is there for those systems. So some systems will actually with 4k displays, we'll actually be able to watch 4k video, which is nice. Um, so that they broken up systems. So some systems will actually with 4k displays will actually be able to watch 4k video, which is nice. So that they broken up iTunes. So there's the music app, which is not in Catalyst, but is it looks very much like the Catalyst apps. There's definitely this
Starting point is 01:04:15 sidebar main bar style app thing that Apple's going for that they think is like, this is what apps should look like on the Mac. It's simplified. Some of the features that I used in the music app or in iTunes are gone in the music app, which kind of bums me out. And they kind of rearranged all the like play controls. They're all in different places now. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe there's consistency with iOS they're looking for, but it still does what it does. And you can play, you can still play music on your hard drive if you've got a big collection of MP3s, but it is a little more Apple Music Forward by default, which is probably the right thing for them to do.
Starting point is 01:04:52 TV app is what we've expected. It is very similar to what we see on iOS and on Apple TV, right down to the watch now pane. The big difference is that watch now on iOS and Apple TV, they've got this thing where it's linked to other services. So you can like, you know, if you watch something on Hulu, it knows that you just watch that on Hulu and it'll say up next is the next episode on Hulu.
Starting point is 01:05:18 And there's nothing like that on the Mac so far as I can tell, because there aren't those apps on the Mac. And I think those APIs aren't there on the Mac. And so it just doesn't do that. It's just sort of promoting the stuff that you're doing within based on what you're doing inside Apple's TV app. That's all it really knows about. But, and there's a podcast app. Yay. Because the podcast support in macOS before was made in like 2005. And it was all in iTunes. In iTunes. And while it worked, it was not great. And now it is literally the podcast app from
Starting point is 01:05:46 the ipad it's a catalyst app and it's it's fine they have over the summer they did a bunch of stuff to make it a little more mac like it's still kind of weird um like i was trying to delete an episode a download and i was trying to click on it and i realized i needed to like control click and select delete and then confirm the delete and And then I accidentally moved my fingers right to left on the trackpad. And it did a swipe to delete and deleted it immediately. And I thought, Oh, okay, I accidentally deleted something. But it turns out that that was the fastest way to delete something was to swipe on my trackpad to delete it. It's a very iOS thing to do. And not sure that's a very Mac thing. But I think we're going to be getting used to a bunch of weird app behaviors now with Catalyst.
Starting point is 01:06:29 And then the Finder has device support now. So that's another. iTunes exploded and it left all of its stuff in four different places. And Catalina is basically what happened. And the stuff in the Finder, again, it's fine. It's basically the stuff that was in iTunes, but now it's in the Finder. You plug in an iOS device and it shows up in the sidebar and you click on it and you get all the settings.
Starting point is 01:06:51 And if you sync stuff, you can do it there. And if you transfer files, the files interface is there. Although strangely, it doesn't show the same exact list of files that are in the On My iPad, On My iPhone folder in the the files app on ios i don't know why but it's very weird like some of them are there but some of them aren't there um it seems really inconsistent um and i i'm you know honestly one of the my favorite features is uh find my because uh find my friends has not been very, you could get to it, but in very limited ways on the Mac before.
Starting point is 01:07:28 And now the full-on Find My app from iPad is on Mac as well. Okay. I want to ask you about Catalyst then. What has happened with this over the summer? have you had any chance to try it out do you feel like there has been any advancements here like what what has been your kind of feeling is it as as rosy as we hoped it would be a situation at least well i'm looking forward to see what catalyst apps get released this week yes because that's gonna that's gonna be interesting and what the quality is of
Starting point is 01:08:11 them i suspect that a lot of the first catalyst apps we're going to see are going to be uh that there's going to be a collection of them that are are ones where apple aided the developers to have showcase apps and those are the ones that apple's going to point to and say look at this app that that was look how great it is and it's going to be behind the scenes that they've got like a lot of help from apple but there are also a lot of independent developers who have been spending the summer building catalyst apps and those are going to come out and and we're going to get a sense of what the strengths and weaknesses are of this. Talking to developers over the summer, the feeling I get is that there are lots of limitations. There are lots of things that Catalyst can't do.
Starting point is 01:08:55 There are lots of things that Catalyst apps can only do by basically bridging back to AppKit, which is what Mac apps use. And it's allowed. You can do it you can actually go back and say i need to do a thing over here using the mac stuff um that isn't gonna help an ios developer who's coming to the mac for the first time because they don't know those tricks and they don't know that stuff and that's part of the appeal of catalyst is that you can bring your, your iPad app over and it'll work, but there are workarounds. So I think, um, the, the sense I get though, is that developers are, um, the developers I've talked to are disappointed in how inconsistent and frustrating Catalyst is. And, um, and that developers I've talked to who have both a Mac and an iOS app don't feel
Starting point is 01:09:45 like they could, uh, reduce their workload by just developing one app right now because their Mac app would regress because their Mac app wouldn't be able to do what it does now because of the limitations of catalyst. They would turn it into a catalyst app and it would lose features. And I think the developers I talked to are not wanting to do that to their Mac users, right? So, you know, I think it's a work in progress. I think the developers will learn more about it. My big open question is what does Apple think of it? Because we know, you and I talked about it, Apple spent a lot of
Starting point is 01:10:21 time on stage talking about SwiftUI and not a lot of time on stage talking about Mac catalyst. And when developers got catalyst, it's got all these kind of missing pieces and things about it that are not that are frustrating. A lot of limitations. You can't choose to have it be in the same app store ID as your iOS apps so that your customers who bought it on iOS just get it on the Mac. You can't do that. You literally have to charge them again. A lot of little stuff like that. It doesn't do full screen. It doesn't let you hide the cursor. I was talking to Steve Troughton Smith about this over the weekend. Even for games, it's not really good because you can't do a lot of things or media playback because you can't do the things that you really want to with media playback so my big overarching question is how committed is apple to making this better because it does feel like this is kind of the future of a bunch of mac apps and the livelihood of the mac and the
Starting point is 01:11:15 and the uh the mac app store kind of depend on these apps existing and being good. But it's clear from what developers are saying, saying that it's not good enough, needs to be better. And my question is, how is Apple going to make it better? And how fast are they going to make it better? Are they going to be making it better throughout the year? Are we going to have to wait a year for it to be better? And will it be better in a year? Because you know, the catalyst apps that Apple released on Mojave, they're not a lot better this year. They're, you know, they're, you still have that date spinner in the home app. Like there are improvements, but they're really not that much better. So, um, so yeah, I think the jury is out on Catalina. I think that's the simplest way to put it is it's a work in or on
Starting point is 01:12:01 catalyst. It's a work in progress and apple needs to do more ball is in their court on that one but in the meantime we will get some interesting apps that are coming from ios that will finally run on the mac and that's a good thing it's just that they may be a little bit weird and it may take longer and they may not be as good because catalyst is not quite as far along as we would like i think really if you say right like the proof will be in the pudding on this one over the next few weeks what actually happens right like does anything happen right like we don't we don't know yet right like what is it gonna what is it gonna end up being what apps are we going to end up seeing? And I think we're just going to have to wait and see, right?
Starting point is 01:12:49 Like, we have no idea. We have no way of knowing right now. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Steve Troughton Smith's Twitter feed, he asked people to share their Catalyst apps that they were working on. And there are some that are pretty ambitious. You know, they're multi-window, kind of complex, more productivity focused. And I look forward to trying those out and seeing how those feel and i'm impressed i mean never underestimate apple developers to figure out ways clever ways to get their software to do what they want and it
Starting point is 01:13:18 seems like i have not heard a lot of stories where apple has come back to them and said you know you shouldn't you know, you shouldn't, you're cheating. You shouldn't really use app kit there. Like Apple wants these apps to be good too. And so I think Apple is letting a lot of stuff go because like they're being clever and they're making the best of this and Apple benefits from having good catalyst apps. So I'm really looking forward to it. I honestly think the question mark is how how good are the apps how good are the apps going to be and when are they going to come out and are we're going to get a shower of apps on launch day but then there are other apps that are not going to come out and uh what happens to those developers
Starting point is 01:13:54 why you know there's not a ferrite and there's not an overcast on day one because this summer has been so fraught with bugs for developers that a lot of developers are focused on getting their apps working on iOS 13. And that's number one priority. And the number two priority might be to update their iPad apps to be ready for Catalina and Catalyst. And then number three is Catalyst. So after the flurry of apps, the first week or two, what happens after that? And is there nothing? And when the apps continue to trickle onto the store, are they good or are they not?
Starting point is 01:14:30 And none of that is something I know right now. Nobody does, right? No, I mean, I don't know. Maybe Federico has everybody sending him Catalyst apps. It's possible. But I think we don't. I think the apps are going to tell the story is there any other feature that you feel is worth spending some time discussing
Starting point is 01:14:54 today i know we've got stuff like um screen time sidecar those kinds of things yeah i want to i want to talk about sidecar um but before i do that i want to mention we talked about this a while ago this summer about um security and how apple has cranked up the security even more in catalina and um that's still true so another warning i will give people is um you will get more dialogue boxes in your face about your apps asking permission for stuff. You will get a flood of notification center approval requests when you launch Catalina for the first time. When you launch a bunch of older apps, you're going to get, can I look at the desktop? Can I look at the documents folder? A lot of permission requests
Starting point is 01:15:40 are going to happen. It's annoying. I'm not sure Apple has struck the right balance between annoying the user and making the user so frustrated that they ignore what the security dialogues say. We'll see. It frustrated me during the beta. We'll see how it does in the final. And they've mandated notarization, which is this process where an app developer has to upload their app basically to Apple for an automated process to give it a stamp of approval and then kick it back to them before that they can release it. And it's not like an app store process where they're being looked at by a person, but it is a quick scan and then a little bit of an approval from Apple. And if an app you're trying to run doesn't have that, it basically will bring up a box that says it can't be opened because Apple can't check it for malicious software.
Starting point is 01:16:37 This software needs to be updated. Contact the developer for more information. Yeah, I remember you were very upset about that. Yeah, it's a it's a little bit too scary like using malicious in that box when it's really just something that apple hasn't looked at it's out of apple's control i don't love it um the good news is this is gatekeeper which has been around for a while it it uh scans um not just on first launch now, but it will scan multiple times. So if an app gets altered later and its signature changes, it can stop it and say, wait a second, something's
Starting point is 01:17:14 wrong with this app. But because it's Gatekeeper, you can also do exactly what you did before, which is if you control click on the app and choose open, instead of it having the options, okay, and show and finder, it also has the option open. And once you open that app, it just opens after that, just like before. So, you know, somebody stood on stage at WWDC in June and said, we will not prevent you from launching software that you want to launch. And that seems to be true. What Apple's really doing is getting in your way more and saying, you know, you really shouldn't launch this.
Starting point is 01:17:51 And I think by default, that's a good thing because defaults should probably be locked down. And the good news is that the bypass switches are still there for users who want to do that. We can talk about sidecar. i'm gonna be honest i don't get it i don't get it it doesn't i have tried to use sidecar it's well implemented you can put an external display you can i mean i think the best part of sidecar is that literally you can from about 10 different places in the system, take an iPad that's near your Mac and say, I want to use this as an external monitor. And it just does it. It's like an AirPlay display, basically. And suddenly, boom, you've got a nice Retina display external monitor attached to your Mac. You can drag files over to it,
Starting point is 01:18:39 Windows over to it. It's got a second desktop. like great but all of these uses that apple has for it that are like well you can use it to mark this up and you can use it with this mac app and you can draw something on it almost every time i tried to do something in sidecar i thought to myself why don't i just do this in ios like and this is how i felt by a lot of these kind of like screen on an ipad solutions for the mac where i felt like why like oh i could put my twitter client over there or i could literally just run my twitter app on my ipad right so for me i i really feel like the ipad is best as an ipad and not as an external display and if there is a specific scenario where there's a mac app and you have to use the mac app there's no iPad app. And you want to use especially with pencil
Starting point is 01:19:28 input, you want to draw or illustrate. And you can use this to do that with your iPad and it and get access to the pencil, which is something that you can't do on the on the Mac. Great. It's a very specific niche. And for more broad purposes, I just think, I mean, it's fine, but I really struggled to find ways where it was better than just using my iPad as an iPad, where then it's purely completely native and running on my iPad. Also, by the way, you don't have to be within 10 meters of the Mac because that's a limitation of this. It's not like screens or Luna display where you can go anywhere and you can initiate control from the iPad. You have to be within 10 meters because it's a handoff. It's one of those kind of features. And you have to initiate it from your Mac. And so, you know,
Starting point is 01:20:22 it's a nice feature to have. It's nice that iPads can automatically get turned into external displays. I think there are a lot of good uses for that, especially if you're on a laptop and you want a second display and you're working somewhere where you can just rig up your iPad and set it next to your laptop and now you've got a second display. That's great. But even in those scenarios, a lot of the stuff I would want to do on the second display, I could just do on the iPad Can I mirror my entire display to it or is it only as like a second?
Starting point is 01:20:50 Nope, you can mirror, it's an external display, at the root of it there are a bunch of things to like send a window over but at the base of it it's just a second display you can do everything you could do with another external monitor including mirroring So it's like basically how I've been using the Luna display was to...
Starting point is 01:21:10 Well, I guess the problem is, for me, I can't initiate from my iPad, right? Yeah, that's the thing. Nor can you roam further than 10 meters. But yeah, also, I mean, I will say I like that they've got the little strip of things down the side in Sidecar. Like a little touch bar, right? Yeah, so down on the bottom, the touch bar is there. Yeah. Also, I mean, I will say I like that they've got the little strip of things down the side in Sidecar where it's got like your... Like a little touch bar, right? Yeah. So down on the bottom, the touch bar is there. So if you've never had a computer with a touch bar before, Sidecar will give you that.
Starting point is 01:21:33 And then on the side, there are controls to bring up the keyboard and also like the modifier keys. So if you need to do a control click and you're using an app, you can tap, you know, the control symbol and then tap with your Apple pencil and it will do a control click. So, um, and it's got like control option, uh, command shift, and then it's got little shortcuts at the top to like, uh, it'll do it's contextual, but it's things like show or hide the doc, show or hide the menu bar. Um know, a lot of nice things. I think the challenge for me, the challenge is that is doing this better than just doing it on the iPad. And I'm sure there are scenarios where it is. But even something like Photoshop, like apparently Photoshop's coming this year. They've said last year it would be for iOS. Like Even something like that, perhaps you'd rather just run Photoshop on your iPad
Starting point is 01:22:25 rather than run Photoshop in this window on your Mac. So it's not a bad feature. I think it's pretty well implemented. I appreciate all the work that they did. I just try to think of scenarios where I think it is useful and I'm having a hard time. and I'm having a hard time. So I think it does do what we thought in that it basically kills the Duet display and Lunar display for what they were initially made to do.
Starting point is 01:22:55 For what they were initially made to do, which is that you wanted to have sort of Apple Pencil access to your Mac apps. Or just a second display on an iPad, right? Like, you know those those kinds of things but what some people like me do which is to use it to like go into basically to have a mac that has no monitor on it and just jump into it replacing something like a vnc application basically exactly it does like screens one which i also use. Both of those, it doesn't replace those. It is literally a second display apart from your Mac within 10 meters.
Starting point is 01:23:30 That's what it is. But it does do more than I initially thought it would do. Because I don't know if this was the way it was pitched initially or if I just misunderstood. Was that all you could really do was take a window of an app and move it. But you can actually have like a whole mirrored display to it, which is great. That is really great. But it depends on what your use case is for a software product like this.
Starting point is 01:23:53 I would say if you've never done that before, like you've never had a Duet display or a Luna display, this is a cool feature that you could maybe get some use out of to have another desktop whenever you need it but i am i think in pretty much agreement with you the idea of like but if you're going to be using a mac version of an app you should probably just use the ios app yeah that's the thing is there was a there was a time when i i really liked the idea of iPad as external display for your Mac laptop when you're traveling somewhere but so often first off if you're bringing an iPad with
Starting point is 01:24:32 you you're obviously an iPad user and so many of the things I wanted to put on that second display were things like Slack or Twitter which I could just run on the second display. It was very rare that I found like, oh, I can put this over there and that will improve my productivity because I'll have these two documents that I'm editing side by side. That is a use case. And that's great. I just feel like the iPad is so strong and the apps on it are so good that it takes away a lot of the use cases for why I would want to use it as a second Mac display instead of just as an iPad running next to my Mac doing
Starting point is 01:25:07 iPad things. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So that's Catalina then download it. You're on peril. Yeah. Handle with care.
Starting point is 01:25:19 Watch what other people say. Make sure your peripherals, like if you've got a document scanner and they're not going to support it and it doesn't work, you should know that this really feels like for most people you should sit down and like make a list like look at the use go 64 look at the apps you use then sit and look at your desk like what do you have plugged in like make sure you know if you have a big enough external hard drive the right thing to do is probably to clone, use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner and clone your drive to an external and upgrade that drive to Catalina and see what happens. That's most time intensive and requires external hardware.
Starting point is 01:25:58 But that will tell you, like, can this ScanSnap scanner still scan things? Oh, no, right? Or, oh, I didn't even think of this app i didn't know that this app was broken let's contact the developer does that developer still exist who knows like that's the the scary thing and um one of the funny features it's a good feature that apple has added in catalina is this rollback feature where if you install a software update for like 24 hours it keeps a an apfs snapshot of pre-update so if you do an update and it breaks your stuff you can actually roll back to before the update unfortunately it requires catalina
Starting point is 01:26:35 so you know you were saying earlier and i agree right the idea of like you know make sure you tell people like the more regular users in your life, think about this. But me, as I would consider myself a power user, I have no idea if my Wacom tablet is supported on Catalina. I don't know if my Epson printer is supported on Catalina. I don't know. I would have to check all of that, right? And that is something that people,
Starting point is 01:27:02 you were right in the caution, like people need to check this stuff beforehand. Because if my Wacom tablet did not work with Catalina because like Wacom are taking time getting their drivers ready, my computer is basically unusable to me because that's how I use, that's how I interact with my Mac.
Starting point is 01:27:19 So I would need to know that before updating. So think about it, everybody. Make sure you know. Yeah, and there's cool stuff in here. I'm not saying that this is a bad update. I'm saying that... And Apple aren't doing this to be mean, right? No, and they've given developers a lot of time.
Starting point is 01:27:37 You've got to advance. This is the truth. You've got to advance the platform eventually. The fact that James, to bring up our friend James again, had a piece of software that basically was just using Carbon. It's essentially classic Mac OS software, and it still ran on Mojave. That's amazing, right? At some point, you do have to clear up the old software and the cobwebs. You need to clean up your code base. You need to stop supporting ancient stuff so that you can move ahead. A lot of theories out there about how this may also be one of these things that if you're going
Starting point is 01:28:07 to do a processor transition, that you got to find the stuff that can't make the processor transition and deprecate it. Maybe that's going on too. But just this is how it happens with computers. And Apple's 32-bit stuff had a really good long run. But at some point you do need to do that. And Apple did everything right. They warned everybody way in advance. They have spent, actually they put it in not even Mojave, in High Sierra, if you had a 32-bit app, starting in the spring of High Sierra, not right when it came out, but in the spring with High Sierra of last year, it would warn you and say, this app is going to need to be updated
Starting point is 01:28:47 because it will not be great in Mojave, I think, but it will really not work in 2019 with what is now Catalina. And then Mojave, the whole time when you launch something or even have it, it's been peppering little alerts when you start up your Mac or when you launch an app saying,
Starting point is 01:29:04 this app is not going to work soon. So Apple's done everything it can. But the fact is that if you're a user and you rely on that stuff, it's now on you. You need to not update until you're certain. Apple can't do any more than what it's done. And if you need to step off the update cycle for a while in order to get your tools to be what you want them to be, now is the time. And this is not a warning that I really needed to give for Sierra or High Sierra or Mavericks or, you know, right? It doesn't happen that often, but this is one of those times.
Starting point is 01:29:39 Okay. All right. Let's do some hashtag askupgrade questions before we round out today's bumper episode and we'll thank direct mail for their support of this show direct mail is an easy to use email marketing app that is designed exclusively for the mac to help you create and send great looking email newsletters email marketing is still an incredibly cost-effective way to reach your customers and grow your business and for the past years, Mac users around the world have trusted the Direct Mail app to handle all of their email marketing needs. It is designed for the Mac, which means it's fast and easy to use and works great
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Starting point is 01:31:08 upgrade and you will get 10 off when you opt for a full feature plan as well when going there that is directmailmac.com upgrade our thanks to direct mail for their support of this show and all of relay fm so we have some hashtag ask upgrade questions. We have two here from Johan about the AirPods. So Johan wants to know two things from us. First is, do you ever use just one AirPod?
Starting point is 01:31:36 Oh, almost never. The only times I ever do this is when I'm on a long haul flight and the AirPods start to die die I'll take one out and charge it then after a little while put that back in take the other one out charge that and then I've got both back running again it's the only time I ever use one airpod yeah I I'm trying to think of a scenario where I would use it and I don't think I can
Starting point is 01:32:03 because one of the things about like using one AirPod is when you take one AirPod out, it pauses, right? So it's not like the old days where like you'd pop one of your earbuds out and maybe then forget to put it back in again. And the audio would keep playing. Now,
Starting point is 01:32:17 when you take one out, the audio stops playing. And the way you resume it typically is by putting it back in again. So very rarely, I guess I would be, it would be a scenario where somebody was going to be talking to me occasionally and i needed to hear them but it would be so distracting that i generally in those scenarios i won't use the airpods at all like if somebody's gonna if i need to listen for something i'm not going to be using the airpods so
Starting point is 01:32:38 so no no and what are the double tap settings on your airp? So mine is the right one is a skip and the left one is a play pause. Okay. I have both set to play pause because I don't think I would be good enough to remember the differences between the two. So I just, I do it wrong. I do it wrong all the time, but there are scenarios where I don't want to take an AirPod out of my ear and hold it. And so I want to have a play pause, even though I know I can take it out of my ear and hold it and so i want to have a play pause even though i
Starting point is 01:33:06 know i can take it out of my ear and that works too i found because i used to not have that as a gesture and i found that there are lots of scenarios where what i really want to do is tap it and keep it in my ear because my hands are messy or because i'm doing something that requires my hands and i don't want to hold the airpod and I don't want to put it down somewhere. So, but I do enough of, I don't like this. I want to skip it that I want the skip function on there. So I have it on my right one. And that's just mostly, it's a skip.
Starting point is 01:33:36 You go forward. And so I have it on my right because I go from left to right. I will do, I will actually add a third question in on this one bonus question uh-oh we just we just introduced the new thing okay um do you uh ever do you have a high telephone turned on um you know i don't know if i do because i've never used it okay maybe if you've never used it maybe you have it on yeah maybe i have it on i left it on because i do actually find it useful if it's on
Starting point is 01:34:15 by default then it's on but i don't i don't know if i've ever actually triggered ahoy airpods because i will use my airpods when i say, washing the dishes or whatever, right? So having access then is really useful because then it also stops the HomePod from jumping in. Huh? Yeah, I don't think I've done it. I'm a bad AirPod user. You really are. Warner
Starting point is 01:34:37 asked, I've upgraded from an iPhone 8 to an iPhone Pro for both me and my partner, but we're both noticing vibrations are noticeably weaker on the iPhone Pro. My wife and my partner, but we're both noticing vibrations are noticeably weaker on the iPhone Pro. My wife depends on the sound of vibrations on the desk at work, curious if this is a change or is a bug. So my belief here, Jason, is that going from the 8 to the Pro, you will have gone from the vibrate motor to the haptic motor. That's what's going on because the haptic motor is quiet, right? But it's more fine control, but it's quiet.
Starting point is 01:35:10 Yes. So you can feel it differently. I actually feel like it's much better making the effect that you need. And also there's a much more control over it. Apps can use different types of vibration, but it will be quieter. So it's not a bug.
Starting point is 01:35:27 It is just, I believe, different hardware. So I have a couple of recommendations for Warner and his wife, Mrs. Warner. First is you can make custom vibrations in settings. And so you could actually try to make one that's more noticeable it just goes like a pattern you can just pattern tap that thing so far and it just goes bananas you could do that yeah so you could try that and the other thing i will say and i know this sounds dumb but sometimes the dumb things work which is if she's depending on the sound of vibrations on
Starting point is 01:36:01 the desk at work look at what the alert sounds are on the phone. And if those are too annoying, you know, you can actually, and you're going to have to look it up on the internet, but you can make custom tones on iOS devices. Maybe you should make a custom tone that is subtle and maybe even sounds like a vibrating phone and use it as her alert tone so that she can get a sound. Because obviously she's using sound. So you should be able to use a sound to alert her, even if it is not made by the vibrations from the Taptic Engine. So it's just another thought,
Starting point is 01:36:36 is that you could make a subtle sound that is not a beep-boop-boop kind of thing. A subtle sound. If you still have the iPhone 8, just i don't know put a nice microphone record your old iphone vibrating yeah sure i mean there's a lot what i'm saying is maybe there's another solution here to get a sound that tips her off that is not uh based on the vibrating engine in the device so the iphone 8 did have 3d touch which meant that it probably had a taptic motor but what but my expectation is and i well i know they've changed it over time and they've made it better so my expectation is in making it better they made it quieter and that or at least the way
Starting point is 01:37:17 it's done is the way it will vibrate the body of the phone will be different um and over time it's gotten maybe more nuanced so it's probably less noisy on a desk that's what's happened try try custom vibration but and that's a note for everybody like if you rely on vibration patterns on your phone did you know you can make custom vibration patterns and tie them to people so that you can like literally if you're just listening to your phone vibrate on a desk or you've got in your pocket and you're feeling it you can literally tell who's calling or texting you based on the vibration pattern you can do that you can set custom vibrations for everybody and you can record your own vibration patterns plus you can do custom tones and set those so there's a lot you can do there to a
Starting point is 01:37:59 nine to five mac article that explains exactly how to do this fab and there's a top tip right there jeff wants to know is there a special invocation to get siri to respond and answer a question specifically via voice for instance if you ask siri in the car for the weather siri gives a spoken weather report via voice but if asked on the watch or on the phone siri will respond via a graphical interface like saying like here you go and we'll show you the weather report. Now, my understanding on this, Jason, and you can correct me if you know differently, is that Siri will respond depend on state.
Starting point is 01:38:33 So if you are asking Siri a question and a screen is off, right, when you're asking the question and maybe you're using a high telephone, it will respond with voice because you're not looking at it and that's the same for the car because you shouldn't be looking but if you ask Siri and the screen is on or then it will give you a visual indicator because
Starting point is 01:38:56 the phone or the device assumes you're looking at it yeah I think that's right I think that the idea there is if you're doing a hoi telephone and your telephone screen is off it should respond with voices and not show you a picture but i don't i haven't tried that lately so i don't know but that's the idea is that it's supposed to be contextually aware and and speak things if it thinks you can't see the screen. Same for AirPods. So that should happen, but I don't use Siri enough
Starting point is 01:39:28 in these contexts to know for sure. By the way, I used CarPlay and iOS 13 extensively this weekend, and we don't have time for it now, but we should talk about that sometime because I got to spend a lot of time with CarPlay. And I think it's pretty good but it's got some weird things about it too. But we'll save that. We'll save that for next time. Alright, so topic idea. Jason has thoughts on CarPlay that has been added to my
Starting point is 01:39:56 Apple Note for it. Great. Stay tuned for that. It may never happen but it might happen next week. It's like Kindle. I have a whole Kindle topic. I deleted that. I deleted that this morning because it's too late. Oh, goodbye, Kindle topic. You've been removed forever, it would seem. Yeah, the Kindle topic and the HomePod pricing topic
Starting point is 01:40:15 that have been on our document for six months. We both have two of them now. We both like it. There's the topic. It's snuck in. There's that topic. Done. Check.
Starting point is 01:40:22 I'm glad I deleted it now. Kindle, good e-reader. Software sucks. Yeah. Topic not good. There's that topic. Done. Check. I'm glad I deleted it now. Kindle. Good e-reader. Software sucks. Yeah. Topic done. Get the paper white. There you go. Kevin asks, 11 days into iOS 13 and the devices asked me if I want to continue to always allow
Starting point is 01:40:38 Google Maps, Waze, Carrot Weather and other apps to my location three times for each app. Well, I keep getting this message every five to six days. Now, I can't talk for the frequency of what's going on here to you, Kevin, but this is something that is in iOS 13. So devices that are asking in the background for your location, there will be different situations that are going on. I think one time it'll ask you if the app is checking a bunch in the background, it'll ask you when you're on the home screen. And I think when you open the app, it'll ask you if you want to allow it to keep asking when you're if the app is checking a bunch in the background it'll ask you when you're on the home screen and i think when you open the app it'll ask you if you want to allow it to keep asking when you're using the app for the app to have your location my expectation is once you've answered
Starting point is 01:41:13 these questions per application it will stop asking you that is what i would assume should be happening yeah i don't know what is going on i mean i we know what's going on which is the idea is apple wants you to be aware of apps that use your location. And so what it's doing is a multistage process where it asks first, like, do you want to allow it? And then it shows you that it's going in the background on a map of where you've been and says it knows you've been these places. Are you OK with that? Or do you only want this to be when the app is open? want this to be when the app is open and if you're using an app that needs to be know where you are all the time so it can notify you like a weather app or my uh my smart lock app needs to know that
Starting point is 01:41:50 because it needs to know when i leave home and then when i return then you have to say yes i like that it educates you about like did you know that this random app knew all of these places that you've been um but at some point it needs to stop and i think that this is really the core of the question i don't know the answer i haven't been tallying like how many times has it asked me about dark sky but um it should stop right it should do that once and i say yes and then it should go away and never ask me again yeah and i don't know if there's a bug there or if that's intentional for it to keep bugging you, but it should not keep nagging you about an app
Starting point is 01:42:29 after you've said, yes, I really do want carrot weather to know where I am because I care about the weather. So I've included a link in the show notes to Federico's section in his iOS review about this. And it is supposed to automatically kind of change and re-ask you after a period of inactivity. But I don't know what's exactly happening with Kevin's situation here.
Starting point is 01:42:55 But I will reiterate, I think this is a really good feature and I'm pleased they did it. I think they tried to do it in iOS 12 and got a lot of pushback from developers and changed it. But now they have actually gone ahead and added this feature. I think they made it less aggressive. Do you remember it had that blue bar that used to pop up?
Starting point is 01:43:13 But I really like the map. It shows you the map. And I like that I'm changing my settings a lot in applications. Like I'm opening an app and it's like, this app wants to know basically all the time where you are. And I'm like, but I don't need that. So I'm going to say no. And you'm like, but I don't need that. So I'm going to say no, and you can only know when I'm using the application.
Starting point is 01:43:29 And I've been perfectly fine with that. But then there's been others where I'm like, no, I do want my home security system to be able to use my location all the time because it's an important part of the feature that it knows when I'm coming home and that kind of stuff. So I like that it's giving you the ability to fine tune it. So probably worth something keeping an eye on, I guess, if it seems like it's wild.
Starting point is 01:43:51 But I would not be surprised if there was some kind of bug in iOS 13 because there's been a few of those. All right. So I think that wraps it up for this week's episode. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, you can always send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade and it could be included for a future episode. Thank you to everybody who has done that. If you want to find Jason's work online, go to sixcolors.com. That is where you can go right now to read Jason's wonderful
Starting point is 01:44:16 review of Mac OS Catalina, which I was about to call Mojave, Jason. That was the problem. I was going to call it Mojave, and it's not Mojave. 7 000 words about no s you should be a little scared of but that's why there's that many words i bet there would have been like 5 000 if you should have been less scared of it yeah actually that's probably that's probably true yeah like i genuinely like i enjoyed reading the review because it was not cut it's not cut and dry, Catalina. Yeah. And there's more of a story in there rather than just here are the features, right?
Starting point is 01:44:49 Like there's more of a story that you can sink your teeth into because there's some weird stuff going on. And as we have said in this episode, and you'll get from the review, you need to think about this one. You can also follow Jason. He's at Jason now. I am at iMike. I am YKE.
Starting point is 01:45:03 Thanks to Direct Mail, Squarespace, and Bombas for their support of this show. And we'll be back next time. Maybe. I might not be here next week. It depends on if there's an Apple event announced between now and our next episode. Who knows? Who knows? Nobody knows.
Starting point is 01:45:19 It's the great upgrade mystery. Maybe there's a draft next week. Maybe there's a guest next week. You'll find out next Monday. Something great is happening next week, Mike. Something unusual. We just don't know what it is yet. Something awesome will happen. It may or may not include me. Until
Starting point is 01:45:36 then, goodbye everybody. Goodbye!

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