Upgrade - 279: I Predict It Every Year, Why Stop Now?

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

With a new year come Jason's predictions for Apple in 2020. How varied can the iPhone product line get? Will Apple make its most interesting laptop yet--and will it run macOS or iPadOS? And how can Apple double down on the success of AirPods? We also discuss the new Brydge Pro+ iPad keyboard with trackpad, there's a bumper crop of Upstream news, and we dream about a future where smart home devices are all compatible with one another.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 279 today's show is brought to you by doordash squarespace booze allen and kiwi co my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley how are you i'm very good. No mystery drama, no award ceremony. We're back to regular old Upgrade today. Yeah, a lot happened while we were doing off-format episodes, so we have a lot to talk about. I have many, many, many things that I want to talk to you about today, but we start off Upgrade as we start off every episode of Upgrade

with a hashtag SnellTalk question, and Phil wants to know, do either of you use an electric toothbrush? Yes. I feel like you got to these. I mean, you know, I use an electric toothbrush. I use like a Philips one. The Sonicare something, something, something. They've changed it a bunch, but like

it's good. I have the Braun Oral-B, but yes, it is, and I have four ages, and you should probably use an electric toothbrush they're better they're more they're better at their jobs yeah i i feel like i'm like an animal as john syracuse would say when i use a non-electric toothbrush now i i travel without you know it's it's i don't have a travel electric toothbrush or something like that and uh and uh it does feel really weird and feels very nice to return to the electric toothbrush

oh mine comes in like a little box and like a little carrying thing, which also has a charging port in it, which I like. So you can plug in like a mini USB cable or something into the toothbrush case and it charges the toothbrush, which is nice. It's a Philips one. They have a bunch of them. You can find it like it's great. But one of the things that

i like about using an electric toothbrush is it will keep going until it should be time for me to stop you know right like i don't have to think how long have i been brushing my teeth for it will do it for the amount of time they're supposed to do it so i'd like that if you would like to send in a question to open an episode of upgradegrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk, and it may be included for a future episode. Because we have not done a regular show for a couple of weeks, there is no follow-up today,

but what I do have for you, Jason, is a lot, a lot of upstream stuff that I want to talk about. So, I wanted to just state for the record that I was very, very happy with the way that both the morning show and For All Mankind ended. I was really pleased with the ending of both of those shows from a show quality standpoint. I've heard mixed feelings from people about the ending of the final episode really gave a satisfying ending that made me want more of the show.

So I am genuinely very much looking forward to both of those shows coming back. For All Mankind was the best Apple show that I've seen so far. It was kind of incredible. Quite dark at the end but still very very very good yeah i i love the end of that show that was a uh that was a great one um and i think it's interesting too so apple did this weekly release schedule and we spent a couple years questioning how they were going to do a release and they they they are doing both they are doing some drop two or three episodes and then release weekly and they're also dropping some as complete seasons yep and i've been thinking

this fall as we've had a real and now winter the the bounty of of good tv that's been out there with watchmen um the mandalorian the for all mankind show, these other Apple TV shows, that what I've noticed is that first off, a lot of shows are being discussed week to week, like in the old days, where you really can obsess about what happened in this episode and wonder what's going to happen next. And I've said it before, but I want to say it again because I think this is a perfect moment to illustrate this. I think binge dropping a show is a mistake for most kinds of shows. If you're a streaming service, I think Netflix does it mostly because they have so much content that they don't want to promote a show week to week. So they want to do a single launch like it's a movie and then they want to walk away to the next thing but i don't don't think it serves the material for people to have there are spoiler issues so that some people will

spoil it for everyone other people will not say anything for fear of spoiling it it's very hard if you are a tv critic or a recapper or a podcaster or whatever to deal with these shows that drop 10 episodes at once and so you you, maybe you don't at all, or maybe you do it week by week, but it's kind of like your audience is all over the place because some of them have seen it to that point and are going back and some of them haven't seen it yet. And it's just, I, it's one of those things where I get why it's done. I also get why people like binging TV shows. But again, my argument here is once it's rolled out you can binge it like dropping it in a in a bunch with 10 episodes versus letting it roll out over 10 weeks

or eight weeks you know the apple tv stuff was mostly in eight weeks uh because they dropped three um and and week one i think that works really well and then it's all there for you if you want to watch it all at once so yeah i think binge mentality though it also ties in with being impatient oh for sure for sure but i i think there is uh i guess what i'm saying is i think there's great power in in making you wait and that i think i just think it's a mistake i think um i think the the conversation online about a show that's ongoing is not only really fulfilling as a viewer but i think is a way to build word of mouth about a show and i think like if baby yoda would baby yoda have been a thing if they had just dropped every episode of the mandalorian maybe but i think it would have been a thing that blew

itself out um a lot faster because there wasn't this chance for the conversation to kind of like continue as there was more of it every week place everyone discovered baby yoda exactly time only if you're in the united states of flipping america of course or the netherlands or canada but not the uk anyway so my point my point here is i like that um that apple is doing this hybrid model where they're giving you kind of like a big a big kickstart and then they're rolling out more episodes later i think that some of these as much as i like getting to the penultimate episode of a season on on netflix or amazon and being able to

just plow right straight into the finale because of the narrative momentum i do love that moment i find that that's when i watch two in a row is the last two episodes because i get to the next to last episode and i'm like oh i don't want to wait i'm going to keep going but i just finished watching the expanse which dropped in december and the other point I'll make here is it felt less necessary for me to watch it. And I still haven't finished all of Mrs. Maisel. It felt less necessary to watch it because it was all there and I could get to it whenever. Whereas when The Mandalorian dropped, or when For All Mankind dropped and on Sunday nights when Watchmen dropped on HBO, I was there because I wanted to see the next episode.

And some of these binge shows, it's like they're not going anywhere. So they're not as much of a priority because I will get to them eventually. So I think that works against them too. So if you like binging TV shows, I don't have a problem with it. I get it. I. So I think that works against them too. So if you like binging TV shows, I don't have a problem with it. I get it. I just don't think that that's the rollout strategy that is right for a lot of stuff, especially scripted, dramatic, with cliffhangers

and you want to have conversation about what's going on. I think those work better with a little bit of scarcity. That's all. So I will say like to build on your point like for myself i think that this type of uh roll out like the give us a couple of episodes you can have a mini binge and then you go week to week is really good for thoughtful drama shows because then you have the time to kind of for it to sit with you and you think about it but like light-hearted comedies just binge the whole thing that's my feeling on it there's also a tv critic thing

where um that i think apple is smart with although ironically you know they didn't get a lot of love from the tv critics but one of the problems that tv critics note is the pilot episode the first episode is often a setup episode to introduce you to characters. And, you know, this is for logical reasons, but like the pilot episode is never representative of the series as a whole because it's the introduction episode. And what you really want to see to judge a show as a viewer or a critic is what does the show look like when it's up and running? What is every episode of the show going to feel like? And episode one never does that. So I think it's smart for Apple to say,

we're going to drop three because then yes, if you want to really dig down deep into it and episode one, what's your appetite? Well, try number two. And if episode one, you're like, I don't know. I mean,

I can't tell you how many times I've recorded. I've set up like a season pass for a TV show on traditional TV and watched episode one and like never gotten to episode two because it's like not it's fine maybe i'll get back to it and then i never get back to it and i think there's something to be said for having episode two queued up so if you're unsure about episode one you can just roll into episode two and see if if uh it continues to work for you and i think that's a good like way to sell your series episodes not one episode exactly which means you get a better sense of what the show actually will be week to week so you know i don't know there's no right answer here but what i guess what i'm saying is i think there's a right answer which is what apple is doing which

is uh so and what disney is doing um roll roll some of your drama stuff out week to week. I think it's better. I know why Netflix doesn't do it, but I don't think it's as good. So there were no Golden Globe wins for Apple. No, Tim Cook was there though. Tim Cook got a nice plate of vegan entree and some wine to sit there next to Jennifer Aniston.

And my understanding from reading reports is that Ricky Gervais roasted him, right? Like I have no time for Ricky Gervais anymore. I just can't. But whatever. To each their own. It's just not my style. In my opinion, the morning show was the wrong choice for the Golden Globes anyway.

It should have been for all mankind. I don't know what the process is to have a show nominated for a Golden Globe. If it's chosen by a committee or if the studio puts it up. I don't know the the process is to have a show nominated for a Golden Globe, like if it's chosen by a committee or if the studio puts it up. I don't know the way it's done. It's all a sham. This is what I'd assumed. It's the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. No, it's not quite that, but it's not a real thing.

Yeah, but my feeling is that maybe apple had some hand in like what goes up or whatever but like you know um you put it up for contention it's put up for contention in some way and i could see why you would have put the morning show here because it feels like it is playing to the people within the bubble right but i think that for all mankind had a better story better payoff and better uh actor acting performances across the board than the morning show did even though the morning show i still said i still thought it was very good i think the parts that apple actually had a nominations for with the morning show they have better options with for All Mankind. Like, you could have picked literally anyone

to win the best supporting or best actor role from For All Mankind, like, in my opinion. Because the performances of all of the cast, nobody faltered. Every single one of them was fantastic. So, you know, that's my feeling on it.

But anyway, they didn't win. Which is a shame for them. It would have been really good if they could have brought one home but they didn't they'll survive they'll cry into their money Apple would have really loved it it would have been very good for them to come away with a Golden Globe

we won an award not very prestigious award I guarantee though that they didn't win because of who they are, right? Like, it just wasn't going to happen for them this time. Like, Hollywood's not behind them. All right, but we have some information about some new shows coming, because it's a bit of a quiet time for Apple TV Plus right now,

but it's about to kick off in February. So Apple TV Plus will be getting a five-part documentary series exploring the LGBTQ movement in television. This is coming in February. It's produced by Wanda Sykes, among others, and the show will investigate the importance of TV as an intimate medium that has shaped the American conscience

and how the LGBTQ movement has shaped television. Obviously, that's a quote from press releases. All five episodes will debut on valentine's day they're going to feature voiceovers and interviews from people like ellen's generous anderson cooper rachel maddow and more um this show is one of the very few i think is in a very rare club of shows that have been first announced via an apple press release most other stuff was leaked out right because they're much longer lead times and stuff like that but a documentary series also yeah it's a doc so there's no set and there's no yeah it's it's a different

and just less excitement supply chain right i expect overall but it does come from the very fun url apple-tv-plus-press.apple.com which is a fun just like a fun little website that apple built which is just like it's a it's a specific newsroom just for press releases of apple tv plus i think this is also where you can log in and get uh if you are a member of the media i think and get uh screeners and stuff i think i've seen this i don't know maybe rob mccallany's comedy series is going to be debuting on february 7th this is the show that focuses on a video game studio which i believe activision is involved with which is like super weird it's it's uh yeah ubisoft ubisoft that's the one thank you

thank you yeah it is it is so it's rob mccallany and charlie day from it's always sunny in philadelphia and it the series is produced by lions gate okay right three arts entertainment all right makes sense and ubisoft because it is a video it's about a video game studio and they're produced it's fascinating to me uh february 7th and their and their binge check here it is it's a sitcom it's a it's's a nine half hour episode comedy and they are dropping all nine episodes. So I also remember that Charlie Day was involved in this. He's not anymore. He's not listed

as... Oh, yeah, it's actually from him, but he was originally going to be in it, but he's not in it anymore. Ah, interesting. That was how I remember it. Producer credit. Yeah, or at least it was the case of when it was announced people assumed right like because it was just like from mcclelland and charlie day from it's always sunny right and you just assumed they would both be in the show but charlie day is not in the show rob mcclelland is in the show i think he plays like the lead

character in the show he is the creative director of the fictional company um so i'm actually really excited for this because i'm super keen to see what this show is going to end up being from an outside and inside part right like i'm interested because i like rob mcclennie but also like this one seems so weird with the ubisoft involvement that like i can't imagine them being actually focusing on the real issues that exist within video game development. I can't even imagine them touching on it. It does seem unlikely that this will become

a Silicon Valley-style brutal satire of the game industry if a game company is producing it. But then you look at Rob McElhenney, and that is his bag to do that type of show which is why these two things seem so like out of whack of each other so i mean maybe yeah what what is the nature of that ubisoft uh producer relationship and is it they're a consultant and they generate some of the i don't know it's fascinating we'll see we'll see i'm... I don't know. It's fascinating. We'll see. We'll see. I'm interested.

I don't know if I said the name. The show is called Mythic Quest Raven's Banquet, which I love that name because it sounds like a ridiculous video game. So the name is very funny to me. And I'm wondering if there is going to be some kind of fictional world within this world. I'm keen to see this one this is the next apple tv show

that i will be checking out immediately i think that's that's kind of where i am with that one i'm excited for this one because i like the people that are involved the rumor became true ex-hbo boss richard plepler will make content exclusively for apple tv plus in a five-year deal between apple and plepler's company eden productions it will encompass television series documentaries and movies um i think that this could end up being i'm not alone in this a very big deal for apple in becoming like a key player in the streaming wars like it feels like so far their goal has been quality over quantity and this could bring good quality. So who is Richard Plepler?

He ran HBO for a long time and is the guy from HBO who stood up on stage at an Apple event and talked about how they were bringing HBO, now I want to say their over-the-top version, to Apple TV, to the Apple TV platform. So he has somebody who had a relationship with apple when at&t took over uh hbo and warner media um he left and there's a big new york times article about him he talks he clearly has signed a non-disparagement agreement with at&t as part of his severance or departure because they ask him about it a lot and he basically declines to say anything other than you know a new company or new a new we had a new owner and it felt like a time the right time to leave um which is is funny uh I've kind of been

there oh so I get it and and what's interesting is that apparently Eddie Q called him up after he left HBO and was like, could we get into business with you? So this is one of those things. We spoke about this on Connected a long time ago about the idea of people always think that Eddie Q is useless and should be fired and is pointless. Eddie Q is not pointless. Eddie Q brings home deals like i we have seen this time and time again that he is like mentioned in this and from reading the new york times article it genuinely feels like without q this would not have been done like this was the deal it's possible but clearly that was the personal connection and i do think that that is the thing that Eddie Q has turned out to be best at, is that he is a schmoozer and he has personal connections.

And this clearly he had some sort of personal connection with Richard Plepler. Then they get him in touch with, you know, Zach and Jamie who are running Apple TV Plus. And, uh, basically this seems it's interesting because it seems to be that what Richard but he didn't want to do it where he was completely boxed in. What's interesting is it sounds like, you know, this is a five-year deal. So like Apple, unclear how exclusive it is, or if it's first look, or if there's a certain amount, there's lots of different ways this could go. But instead of him being hired by Apple, his company has basically been hired by Apple to produce premium HBO style content, which is totally, I mean, this is Apple's game, right? Apple is playing the HBO game, which is funny because HBO is not playing it anymore. you know, they're going more broad for HBO Max. But Apple TV is going to have a smaller number of shows and they want them to be perceived

as high quality and prestige. And that is what Plepler's HBO did. So, you know, they're going to be a supplier. And from Zach and Jamie's perspective, it's like, you know, who knows what it's like behind the scenes or if they're like, is he kind of verging in on our territory here?

Or is it more like, great, you know, they're're gonna provide more content for us but i think overall for apple um it's a it's another stake in the ground about how they want to be hbo and so apple's adding stuff other companies are losing stuff uh we knew this was going to happen it's now happened now the year's ticked over friends is currently unavailable to stream anywhere in the US. It's left Netflix and will be coming to HBO Max sometime later on this year. And there was a report from a few places. I have one site from Polygon that there are some movies that are disappearing from Disney Plus already, including Home Alone, one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and Dr.

Doolittle. This is because of some crazy licensing agreements is what people have worked it out and from what sources are saying. Disney are not commenting on this yet. It's also likely this could happen in the future. There are some reports suggesting that movies like Black Panther could

end up back at Netflix in 2026 because of some weird deal. There's an additional window that they have later on so we knew the streaming wars were going to cause complexities and it's already happening but it's a surprising thing for disney plus like it hasn't been around very long and some movies are disappearing and home alone is particularly funny because they are developing a new home alone

for disney plus so it'll be weird if the movies aren't there right that like they are developing a new Home Alone for Disney+. So it would be weird if the movies aren't there, right? That they're creating a new Home Alone, but the old Home Alone, they're gone. And the funny thing is, they're gone, but nowhere else. They're not showing up. No one's found where Home Alone lives right now, but it's not on Disney+. Yeah, it's going to happen for a while too, right? Because these are contracts that were signed in the last decade that are still playing out when the strategy changed, but these contracts are still there. So it's going to be a little weird for a little while.

This is also why you create originals, right? Ultimately, this is why you have to create originals. It's why Netflix spends billions on creating originals and has spent tens of billions in the last decade to create original material that they have complete control over because that stuff will never leave Netflix, right? That's why they do that. And that's why everybody is doing that because these other things, movies and catalog shows and all of that are all just kind of licenses and they can come and go. And we're in this really weird period now where they are. They're kind of coming and going. And, you know, The Office will be the same way, right?

The Office is going to vanish at some point and go to Peacock, which they launched. NBC actually launched Peacock as a social media presence yesterday during, and this is, I'm not making this up, and this is I'm not making this up during a football game between the Eagles and the Seahawks because they thought a bird themed event would be hilarious for the launch of the Peacock social media presence

I'm not going to lie Jason if I was head of marketing for Peacock this is what I would have done maybe that tells you something hey it's birds let's do it I don't know if it's the right move for you but there you go all right today's show is brought to you in part by squarespace make your next move with squarespace they will let you easily create a website for your next idea or project you can get a unique domain name award-winning templates and more

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site so we heard about a while back the bridge pro which is the keyboard for ipad which makes sure ipad look like a macbook pro like a laptop it's like a stick is a clamshell design kind of thing but the bridge pro was coming uh we heard about this first from like a lawsuit that bridge had with another company yeah because about their hinge design um but there's no point focusing on that for now. They have officially unveiled their iPad Pro keyboard, including a trackpad. It is going to be taking advantage of the assistive touch accessibility feature included in iOS 13.

The product is called the Bridge Pro Plus. It's available to ship starting February. The 11-inch model costs $200. The 12.9-inch model costs 200 the 12.9 inch model costs 230 pre-orders begin on tuesday january 7th at 11 a.m pacific jason you've had one of these right you've you've got a prototype unit yeah i had one it's actually before that other uh keyboard people are like oh they're angry because this other company got to them got to the market of a keyboard and trackpad combo unit first. It's like, well, first off, Bridge had a Surface keyboard and trackpad a long time ago because Microsoft Surface is basically a PC.

But I was testing a prototype of this before that other company announced their product. So Bridge has been working on this a long time. That other company announced their product. So Bridge has been working on this a long time. And part of the challenge is, like we talked about with iOS 13, what exactly is supported in iOS? Because this is an accessibility feature called AssistiveTouch that will let you use an external pointing device. And, you know, over the summer, we're like, is this going to get any better? And it got a little bit better, but not a lot better. And it's definitely a virtual finger that is there for accessibility purposes and you

can use it, but it's not, it's definitely not what I'd hoped for. And for me, the number one thing is that even though there is a text editing cursor in iOS that you can control, you know, on the iPad, you put two fingers down on the keyboard and you can move around a text editing cursor. That's not connected at all to assistive touch. And for me, that was going to be the big benefit of adding an external pointing device was being able to edit text and Apple just didn't provide that. So it's been disappointing to me having this. It's just not, it's great that that feature exists, but it is not as functional as I, as I had hoped. And we don't really know what Apple's plans are. Apple could say,

solved it, right? Done. We're done. Good. Or they could say, wow, this could be a lot better. This is, there are a lot of people out there who want to use these pointing devices and we need to do a better job and we'll wire in the text ending cursor and we'll change how we're doing it. And we'll, we'll, if it's connected, we could wire it into Safari so that we could support mouse over events and things like that. And it's like, there's a lot of things they could do, but are they going to do any of them at all?

So I get this thing from Bridge while iOS is still, I think in beta even. And I had it for a week. And what I learned was I was very excited to get it because it's like yes keyboard i wanted this keyboard with trackpad so now like my ipad can be a full-on like laptop laptop mode device when i want it to be and then i pull it out and then it's back to being a tablet um and what i learned was in a context of a macbook you really do expect the trackpad to be of macbook trackpad quality and apple's trackpads are real

good like they're really good and uh this isn't that's the bottom line it's fine but like in that context where you expect it to suddenly you're like i'm using a laptop and now i'm gonna reach down to the trackpad and i'm gonna do something something. And it's like, no, like the gestures aren't really there. And the scrolling isn't very good. And what you're capable of clicking on in iOS, you know, with this virtual finger is not as good as what you really want. You end up kind of doing this click and push in order to try to scroll some things. It's just not, it's just not not great it's got its moments for sure but um you know the issue here is that it's not it's not as good as what it feels like it should be because it feels like you're using a macbook and you're not and the os is the reason it's not the hardware

it's the os it's just not made to be used with a trackpad like this. Plus, by the way, there's no trackpad support is my understanding in iOS. It's a mouse that's supported. So trackpads have to emulate a mouse, which is, I think, very common on the PC side too. But Apple's Magic Trackpad, this is why Apple's Magic Trackpad basically doesn't work on iPads because it's a special pointing device. It's a track trackpad it's got a totally different kind of set of characteristics and as a result you know bridge is doing their work to emulate a mouse on top of trackpad gestures but it's not as good it's not as good that's wild though right like i'm i can't get my head around that properly yet that they built a trackpad that

works like a mouse not a trackpad like do you know what that actually my understanding is that this is at this is not uncommon on in terms of like track pads that aren't like the magic track pad that are like lower quality external pc track pads is you you know you move the finger and it says okay that's the mouse moving up just like it translates that into a mouse movement set of data and pushes that to the computer and so the end result is you move your finger up the cursor moves up like all right that's that's that's it but what's really happening is that and not like i got a multi-touch trackpad and i'm gonna do four finger gesture here and i'm gonna do like it's not that sophisticated and my understanding and talking to people at bridge is that's the challenge here is that

apple didn't implement you know if ios implemented the trackpad whatever software that is on the mac on ios as part of assistive touch then presumably you could pair a magic trackpad with it and it would work really well and that bridge could do something like that too but um you can't you it's just bluetooth mouse basically that you get so it's got some limitations there. Bottom line is it's a really neat piece of hardware. And I think maybe for some people, it will be exactly what they want. But I think I want to just be in, I want to strike a note of caution because I feel like this is a product that is not for most people, that most people will probably be frustrated by it because iOS isn't there yet. And I am always reluctant to tell anyone to buy a piece of hardware

hoping that the software will improve later. Because guess what? Most of the time, the software doesn't improve later in the way that you want it to. So to buy this now and say, but I'm sure for iOS 14, it'll get better. Are you sure? Don't be so sure.

Don't count on it. So I don't know. It's a really interesting product and i think the reason that that bridge has been so careful and they they know that there's an audience for this and they want to bring it out but at the same time i do get the the real sense that they're concerned that this is the kind of product that could be oversold um and that people would get will be disappointed when they see how assistive touch works because we we know we've been talking about it for the last few months but like if you don't know and you're like oh now they've got a an ipad

with a trackpad that'll be great and then you get it and you say oh it's not great it's weird and that's not a great experience yeah i feel like you should only buy this if you've tried the current assistive touch feature and you're okay with it. Yeah, get a Bluetooth mouse and try it out and see what all the issues are. A wired mouse, any mouse will work. Just try it out.

I'm very sure that many people have access to one of those, right? Like a mouse with some subscription in their home. You might need a dongle if it's not your SPC. I'd buy one, but yeah one but yeah and give it a go uh bridge have actually also made a standalone trackpad for ipad os now because they did all the work so they now sell just a trackpad if you want that um yeah i wanted to talk about this a little bit because i am personally very excited about this because i use pointer mode, the cursor mode in iOS 13, basically every single day. So I am very excited for this product because what I do now, if I'm sitting down to do

any amount of work, I want to have an ergonomically sound environment for me if I'm going to be using my iPad. So I use my ClearLook stand and I use either my bridge keyboard or another keyboard. I have a WASD mechanical keyboard that I like, or also coupled with a Logitech MX Master mouse. This is what I'm using right now. Mouse is by Bluetooth. Then I plug the keyboard in via USB-C. I'm ready to go. And then I get like a great set up. The ClearLook stand has the iPad at eye height I have a desk which is all set up correctly I have my chair which is set up correctly so I'm able to work with the operating system that I want to use that suits me better with ergonomics in

mind so now I also want a trackpad on my bridge keyboard for the times when I am in laptop mode rather than desktop mode because I'm getting very used to using an iPad of a cursor. And I know, look, okay, if you are opening Twitter right now to tell me to use a Mac, close it, because I do not care about that response, right? Like, I'm not even going to bother getting into it right now, right? Yeah, I have a Mac. I'm talking into it right now. Typically, when I'm using my iPad in that mode, I'm at a second desk I have in my office. My Mac is behind me, right? I could get to it if I want to.

I don't want to. I'm actually still planning on working out a permanent station in my office. I want to have a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and a hub that works all of it together so I can just like plug one cable into the ipad and it's always ready to go um i am taking recommendations from anybody if they can recommend good monitors for ipads and good hubs like i want to know if anybody's using these um i know that john vorhees has done some stuff with this federico's done some stuff

with some mac stories but I just want recommendations from people if they're working in this way. But I really like it. It lets me use the apps that I use in a way that I'm familiar. I think that the cursor mode is way better implemented than I would have expected it to be based on being somebody who's used Apple Pencil for so long

for interacting with UI because Apple Pencil could never operate any of the kind of operating system layer stuff. So you couldn't pull down notifications. You couldn't adjust anything in split view. None of that can be done with the Apple Pencil, but you can do it with the cursor. So you can like, basically you are mimicking a finger, which I know can be frustrating in places,

but gives me way more functionality available than I can just using the Apple Pencil to use the UI. So then you also have, you know, the MX Master has a couple of buttons on it and you can program what those buttons do. Right. So like, yeah, I really like it. It's working great for me. And it gives me more flexibility when it comes to using iOS, because then I can also just pop that screen right out of that system and take it with me and I'm good to go. Right. Like and it's my iPad again. But other than that, it is like a, it is a focused work device, right? Which is how I'm using it

for the rest of the time. So I am very happy with the situation, like the whole like setup that I've got right now. But I want, I'm keen to see what it would be like to use this device, like a laptop,

like an actual laptop with a trackpad i'm keen to see what that ends up looking like yeah i i have to be honest i i might be more interested in the standalone trackpad just because i could position that next to my keyboard when i'm working on the ipad in a stand and um and use that instead of the weird Bluetooth mouse. Because basically I don't like mice. So I'd rather not. I might use that more. I might not. I don't know.

We'll see. But yeah, this has potential. And I think if you've used it in that mode like you have, you understand its strengths and weaknesses. But it's great. There are a lot of speculation about this too. When this got announced, a lot of conversations about it. The question is like, what will it take for Apple to make this mode on iOS more,

and really on iPadOS better? And one argument is they won't, because just never bet against Apple considering something that they just worked on done and leaving it on the side of the road for a few years. That happens a a lot so i think that's actually the most likely scenario is that nothing will happen they could make it better as an accessibility feature they could decide to make it a more mainstream feature and wire it into more stuff and that would be great i am deciding to hold out positive hope for this that like the amount of people and the amount of buzz that there has been about this feature could lead to it becoming a thing but that is my own hope

so here's here's what i'm getting at is oftentimes what drives the software side is the hardware side so what when and we're going to get to this uh in our next segment when we talk about my predictions for 2020 because i wrote a bunch of articles about what i think is going to happen in 2020 or what i hope is going to happen that delightful combination of prognostication and wish casting that happens this time of year um but one of the things that i think is what are they going to do with the ipad pro like how do you how do you do an update? Is it just going to be, oh, well, the processor's faster and there's this, you know, depth camera housing thing on the back that's like the one that's going to be in the iPhone this fall. And that's the rumor. It's like, okay, like, all right. But the last time it was, this is as powerful as a laptop and we've got USB-C and now we're serious.

And I thought, I'm not sure we're going to see a dramatically different iPad Pro because it's the second revision of this version of the iPad Pro. But I did have this thought just in the back of my head, which is, what about accessories? What about more Pro accessories? What if there's a new smart keyboard, and one thing that could drive, whether it's in addition to the existing one

or or they just take the existing one away and replace it with a new one but what if they could do a pro smart keyboard that had the function row maybe at some point you know it could actually have like a magic keyboard set of keys on it would be heavier i'll grant you but it would be nicer keys and the big one is what if it also had a pointing device that would drive they would have to make the cursor support way better if they did that i'm not saying they will but i'm saying i part of me feels like the only way we're going to get really good cursor support in ios is if apple has a product that uses it otherwise it's going to kind of be off on the side. So I think you got to pin your hopes on having some sort of a an Apple

pointing device accessory and smart keyboard with with either a trackpad or with that thing that they that they patented where you just move your fingers over the keys and it's like a trackpad like I would I might take that if I could put two fingers down, like I do on my software keyboard and I could actually use it on the smart keyboard to move a cursor around. That would be interesting. So I don't know. It is. I do think that though,

sometimes that for this quantum leap in terms of the quality of this feature, you almost need Apple to say you have to make this feature internally because we're building hardware that uses it. Fingers crossed. Yeah. All right. Today's episode is also brought to you by KiwiCo. If you have kids, you know how great it is when you find something for them to do that's actually educational as well as being fun. But coming up with ideas and planning out these projects can take a lot of time. And if you're a parent, you're probably very busy. WakiwiCo creates super cool hands-on projects for children to make learning about STEAM, that's science, technology, engineering, art and math, not just hot water, makes us really

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I'll spell it out once more. K-I-W-I-C-O.com slash upgrade and get your first month for free our thanks to kiwi co for their support of this show and relay fm so predicting apple in 2020 uh there's a series of articles that you wrote but you started out with grading your 2019 predictions i just want to give a rundown of some of these so uh you were correct that the mac pro was expensive and modular but there was only one display option you'd hoped like many that there would be more than one um yeah it still doesn't make sense to me maybe still 2020 we'll see uh there was some laptop satisfaction in 2019 uh you got some but you were hoping for

more so the 16 inch macbook pro exists but that was kind of it uh that was made people really happy anyway like the the macbook air was a good uh revision but not perfect there was an iMac update but it wasn't as significant as you hoped it would be uh catalyst was ultimately a bust and you thought it was going to be a big deal Jason you were correct that the starting iPhone prices were brought lower. The iPhone 11 was not only like the position taking the role of the XR, it was also cheaper anyway. And there were improvements to shortcuts and you would hope to then and

prognosticated that I, the iOS on the iPad would become more powerful where Apple introduced an entire new operating system, as they call it, iPadOS. So that is that. We're pretty much going over just your predictions this episode. If you're intrigued in my predictions, these are not my full predictions,

but you can listen to episode 275 of Connected, where we do what we call the Rickies, which is a pick-based episode. There's a lot to unpack there as to why it's called that. I recommend just going to listen to that episode where me, Stephen and Federico make some picks for the year. And there are lots of ramifications around our picks for the year. So let Jason, let's look at these, right? So we're going to start with just a few different categories. We'll start by looking at iPhone, the ipad and wearable devices so we're talking iphone size

changes this is like a big thing that's been uh rumored what's going on here yeah the the rumors right and we had to start with the with the supply chain rumors because that they tend to be accurate and so i feel like that's the base of it and what it looks like to me is that we're going to get the base of it. And what it looks like to me is that we're going to get essentially five new iPhones in 2020 based on these rumors, which I do believe are probably accurate. But they're, you know, new in quotation marks, because I think that there's only one that would really be considered new. And this seems to be Apple's kind of relentless sort of year after year, adding more variations to the iPhone so that their customers have more options. Because more options are good.

And I think Apple has come to realize that. So based on the rumors, there's going to be a new iPhone SE that'll be out this spring that's basically the iPhone 6, 6S, 7, 8 size. And that will be the, you know, so you want this cheaper, phone here it is and then the other rumors are that they're going to be four iPhones in the fall right so there'll be a new

11 pro and 11 pro max that the 11 pro or so the 12 let's say pro max will be bigger even bigger that the 10r slash 11 that there will be a 12 let's say of that just again um the rumor is that they're they're going to add this big depth sensing thing on the back but the one that i think is most intriguing is that there would be like another 10r class phone that's small. That's the rumor. That's much smaller than the iPhone X style that we've been using for people who never really got used to having a phone that size. And potentially, that's going to be the lowest priced of the main line of iPhones. of the main line of iPhones.

So you did something that all wild Apple people, Apple Watches do. You tried to give your guests on the names. I'll point out, by the way, making up names about Apple products today is really easy because people will be like, no, no, they'll never do that. And you say, won't they?

Like, I don't show me show me the evidence that they won't have totally wacky names for their products because that's been the last couple of years so to name them all going from uh price is iphone se iphone 12 iphone 12 max iphone 12 pro and iphone 12 pro max, that seems like a lot, right? It seems like a wild thing to do. It does. Unless you think about the last couple of years, right? And look at their competition. I mean, we live in the world of Pro Max.

We are in the Pro Max era. And you look at the competition, right. So if we think about that, right, one, they want more iPhones at varying price points to appeal to more buyers because they need to do that now where they didn't before. The other thing is, now there's been a lot of rumors around this, and I think it could make sense. Two release schedules. Samsung do this.

The S lines come out in the spring, and the Note lines come out in the fall. And there have been some rumors saying that Apple is going to split this line. Now, imagine if the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Max came out in March and the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max came out in September. That would be, in theory,

a smarter way to run their business because they don't have to pack everything into one time. It makes a lot of things very different about like, what ios anymore like when does it come out what does it focus on right like there's like weird things to do with that unless they're also you know many people have been saying we want a roadmap maybe this is a way to do that so i i actually think that the case for this and i i'm not i didn't predict this but i think

it's possible is the case for this is you put out your high margin expensive cutting edge product in the fall and that's the pro model yep um you could leave the iphone 11 kicking around right and update it the next spring uh you'd still release ios in the fall ios first version would be, again, for the cutting-edge phone. It would be focused on the cutting-edge features of the cutting-edge phone. And by the time the next iteration of the phone came out in the spring, it would be settled a little bit more. So that's the argument. The counterargument is, are people going to be as enthusiastic about buying an iPhone 12 three, six months after the 12 pro has appeared or not and i guess

you could look at you could ask that question about about samsung right are they the the note and the regular galaxy at different times does that make a difference like do they interpret this as one product or two products what way you do it right because samsung introduce all the new stuff first and then the expensive line gets all of that and a few more things so like apple could start they could have an event like in april or march and we get the iphone 12 like it right you know and then they do the 12 pro later in the year like that could i mean that's the way that competitors do it lots Lots of other companies work this way.

And then the 12 would run iOS 13 and iOS 14 would come out alongside the Pro in the fall anyway. And then iOS 14 could be like, all right, and now we're going to release these features in September

and these features in March, right? Like, and they just lay that out and that's how they go for the future. I don't feel like that's necessary for them to do it that way though they don't they could use their existing annual cycle they don't have to do it but they've been doing it by accident over the last few years so they may as well just like do it right yeah i don't you know i wouldn't want to put those two things together because i think that's a separate argument and it's not necessary and i also

don't think they're going to do it. Yeah, they don't have to. They could. They don't have to. It doesn't mean they will. But I am on board with the idea of splitting the iPhone line. It would add maybe a little bit more steadiness to the earnings as well, potentially, right? Like rather than one big spike quarter,

the spike may be smaller and that the other quarters might level out a little bit more because of this. It also could add just a little bit more breathing room for Apple and their industrial design and manufacturing teams that they don't have to do everything

at one time, right? That they can let things spread out and breathe a little bit more. For sure. There are a lot of merits to this. We'll we'll see what there's five five i've owned models is a lot right it's a lot if they're gonna do five they shouldn't bring them all out at the same time if they're gonna do four they shouldn't bring them all out at the same time right here here's the other here's the other thing i want to mention too which is um for those who watch the apple financials like you can tell like the longer

an iphone design has been out the less exciting it is to a portion of the market because it's the same old phone and i'll just point out that with the with the pro iphone and pro max like the max getting bigger at least gives it a little bit of a differentiator. But like that iPhone Pro model was the iPhone X, it was the XS, and then it was the 11 Pro. So if there's a 12 Pro this fall with a different camera on the back, that's the fourth iPhone X. And with the XR and the 11, an iPhone 12 would be the third iPhone 12. an iPhone 12 would be the third iPhone 12. And I'm just saying that's a lot of iterations on a single design. And that's not great for sales.

It's just not. No matter what they put on the back, if the rumors are true, that product is a lot less is going to, it's not going to be a lot less interesting, but it's just fundamentally less interesting because it's the fourth iteration of the same product doesn't mean that it isn't better on the inside doesn't mean it means it looks more or less the same do you think and that's not great for sales do you think the 12 line will look different i don't i don't see i mean there are no rumors to that degree that would be great right if it picked up the it would be very dramatic and interesting if they picked up the design language of the iPad Pro, let's say. But I'm not sure I believe that.

But they're not necessarily coming from the places you would expect them to come from. They're not coming from the really reputable sources right now. It would certainly help if they had a look refresh. It would certainly help because when you're going into year four of the iPhone 10, iPhone 10 is great, but it's year four regardless. And if you suddenly said, oh, no, it looks totally different. It's a totally different looking kind of thing that people who care about that stuff would get excited. And there tends to be a sales bump there. They may not feel they need it if they've got a Pro max that's bigger and then they've got this smaller mainstream phone like those are the two new models and then the other

ones just kind of motor along and then the following year there's a bigger change that may be what they're thinking i would be very surprised personally if they introduce new sizes to the line but the phones will look the same still that would be a surprise to me because i can't think of another time that apple have done that like change the physical dimensions and kept the look the same and kept the look yeah i mean adding the bigger phone is a you know this is a 10 but it's also big right the 10 plus which is yeah 10 12 pro max 11 pro max but still i would expect to see some change but it doesn't have to be i'm very intrigued about this lineup no you're right you you look at five phones in 2020 and you're like really you know really are they going to do that but the last couple of years

have told us that every time we get an iphone rumor that we've said really to yeah the answer has been yeah really yeah you predicted some other features i reckon these will probably just be on the pro models but 5g and a faster refresh rate on the screen for for the overall smartphone market in 2020 these feel like table stakes like if you if you pay attention to everything you got a phone called a pro right you got to have features on it that are pro you've got to and and if the the rumors are true about oled coming down into the lower end models you really have to find something right something so if it's that if it's the 3d camera stuff on the back and it's uh 5g and it's promotion and the other one I threw out there, which, again, is more wish casting,

but it's like every time Apple comes out with a larger phone, I have to say Apple Pencil Support? Apple Pencil Support. Because there's an argument to be made that the iPhone Pro is the Galaxy Note, right? Yes. Like that's what it is. And if you're thinking of the Galaxy Note as like one giant phone, it's like the Galaxy Note's Notes align now. I get very

confused. There are Galaxy Notes that are not that much different in size than the Galaxy? What's the difference? The S you're thinking of. They're all Galaxy. This is so confusing. They're all Galaxy, right? But they aren't as clearly differentiated as you might think. They overlap a little bit. In 2019, Samsung made their lineup significantly more complicated. Really, between the Note and the S11+, the only difference is one has a stylus.

That's kind of where they are with that now. And so this is my point is differentiation can be good and you can see what samsung does and i look at this well we're going to have this iphone 12 pro max that's got an even bigger screen than what's in the 11 pro max um apple pencil it's right there you did all the software work uh some people would love it and it's not a mandatory feature and why not you got a giant screen on this thing. Why not do it? So I'll throw that in there too. But I do think that that is an ongoing challenge is you want to roll these really great features down into your mainstream models, but how do you keep the pro model actually a pro model? How do you do that? You've got to have new stuff pouring in that people are going to want and that think is cool and cutting edge i would really want to see them make a pencil that is scaled to the phone size though i wouldn't want the current apple pencil i mean it wouldn't work anyway because it couldn't charge right like that's that's the difference between pencil one and pencil two

like pencil one you could still charge it the same way. Pencil 2 won't work in that regard. Unless they had a new design with the sides and magnets. Wouldn't it be weird, though, to have a pencil that's significantly larger than the phone attached to it? It would be. It would be very strange. It would be. It would feel to me that they would need like a golf pencil or something to put on there. I think that would be sweet.

It would be like a cute little thing. And let's talk about the iPad Pro. What do you think is going to happen to the iPad line in general this year? Well, they turned over so much of it in 2019, but not the Pro. So I think the Pro is where the interesting thing will happen.

And I mentioned it earlier, which is having just put out a new iPad Pro in the fall of, of 2018, it's version two. You're generally not going to do anything dramatic with that. They, there is that rumor about the cameras on the back, the new camera stack that they want to do.

That's better for AR and depth perception and things like that on the front. You know, what do you, what do you do to change it? I don't know, which is why I I kept coming back to accessories, that if the knock on this was like the software was holding it back, well, the software's better. It's not perfect, but iOS 13 did enable more pro kind of functionality on

iPadOS. So how do you take it one better? And I keep thinking about like accessory related stuff like you're not going to completely redesign the ipad pro but you could design a new accessory that uses the the smart connector on the back to create a you know maybe a more laptop like keyboard as an option in addition to the existing smart keyboard that would be one way to go i mentioned it earlier you could have it have a trackpad if you added that as an iOS feature. If you did that, you probably wouldn't ship it until the fall when iOS is out. But you could do that. Or it could just be a beefed up smart keyboard.

Give people two options. They can get this thicker, heavier keyboard that feels more like a laptop. That would be pretty sweet. And then I threw in the SD card slot. I know it seems silly, but it's a pro iPad. Photographers love it. It's great for photography. It's got you can have a huge storage in it. It's got that beautiful screen. Maybe in addition to the USB port, which people said, oh, well, I never put USB on an iOS device. And they did. maybe you do put like an SD card slot on it and say this is great for photography because it tells a pro story and they've got three, four other iPads

that don't tell the pro story. Can you imagine the outrage if Apple put a SD card on the iPad and not on the MacBook Pro? I can. So like that's what gives me pause on that one. I agree with your thinking, but you could make the same argument

for the MacBook Pro as it being a great photographer device. Yep. And they haven't got one on there. It's true. And yet, I don't know. I think that you and I are in the, essentially we're in the meeting for this product

when we're talking, which is what do we do to make this more pro? We're not going to do a complete industrial design refresh on it, but what can we do to push this forward? And I'm going to be in the corner going, well, I got some accessory ideas. We could do a second smart keyboard that was smarter and more pro since every, again, talk about differentiation, like every iPad basically, except the mini, can do keyboard stuff now and has a smart keyboard or has pencil support.

Like the amount of differentiation we have across the line, it's getting kind of weak. So we need some new things. So a really pro keyboard attachment thing for the people you've seen all, you know, I would say to these imaginary people around this table at Apple, you know, there is the bridge keyboard. People talk about it. It's not for everybody, but it's out there. We could do a way better job if it was a first party keyboard and we could still sell the smart keyboard to most people, but this would give us a pro message. It would help us differentiate. And then I would bring up the SD cards and probably be laughed out of the room.

But I would say, you know what? Let's forget about the Mac. Let's focus on this product. Do we know that a lot of photographers use this? Do we sell this as a great ultra mobile photography studio? Could we put an SD card slot next to the USB-C? It would be very tiny and it would be another way to differentiate differentiate it and say this is the one that pros need to get and then they would say please leave your badge at the front desk on your way out we've told you time and time again jason you won't listen

insert your badge in the sd slot at the exit and then leave get out what about so you also reference the apple watch 6 and the airp AirPods 2 as products that will exist in your expectation. That seems pretty set. Do you have any real thoughts on what these could feature? No. I mean, so this is the thing. AirPods, new AirPods, we have them. So they're probably not going anywhere.

I think the only thing that we might get is the rumored AirPods over ear stuff. Oh, okay. Headpods. Because, yeah, headpods. Because that would allow them to apply that to something that isn't a Beats branded thing, but uses noise canceling. And I think we've seen now Apple's interest

in expanding AirPods beyond the original. They did the second generation they did the airpods pro i i feel like you have such success in that area why would you not carry it through and i know that they have beats as well but like but still apple branded over ear headphones i think apple if i was in charge of airpods at apple, I'm sitting at a table. They've given me my badge back. SD card slot. Yeah. I would say everything we do here is successful. Let's do more. There are other areas in this market that we can attack with an Apple, with white Apple branded things. Let's keep rolling, right? There's no reason for us to stop. Let's do headphones. I know we'll also no reason for us to stop let's do headphones i know

we'll also still sell beats headphones i want apple headphones that are apple branded that people can wear around and then they'll have their white headphones with them i also think see you mentioned white headphones a few times i think if you want to do something with the airpods you could do some new finishes different colors you could do that and that would be a we have nothing he's gone we don't just need to do them in white anymore but i just feel like we you know it's like you say we're back we're back in that room again and we're the airpods team we have nothing to give to the airpods from a technology line because we also don't want to encroach on airpods pro what can we do to refresh them to get them back in stockings again next year yeah we'll put them in some colors we talked to our plastic guys and the plastic guys say we can we can get you

colored plastic for next fall and they're like whoa and then they do it yeah yeah then they're like the like the ipod nano right we've got our serious white uh awesome pro headphones here and then we've got our fun colors for the the lower end model yeah nanochromatic jason i like what you're saying you're you're you're hired early you're hired for apple watch i have one thing which is uh i'm gonna i'm gonna just say sleep tracking again yeah because i feel like they'll do some more battery things that they it's it's a logical place for them to do uh a health update and i think wear your watch overnight and it tracks your sleep and it's like you can already do this and then charge it like when you have breakfast or are in the shower in the morning

uh and i feel like it's just it's right there so if if i had to guess and that's a combination of the hardware improving and also the software um supporting sleep tracking stuff but i feel like that has to be where they where they go next didn't they give an award of some description recently to a sleep tracking app yeah it's funny right because it's there but it's not like blessed by apple as something to do with your apple watch and apple owns you know bed it which makes it like a sleep sensor you put on the bed but i feel like having having a a scenario where it's tracking your sleep and then it's also able to give you like uh wake up alarms on your wrist yeah and even they could potentially even do that thing

where it's like we're monitoring whether you're sleeping deeply or lightly and we can we can have that adjustable alarm that wakes you up when you are surfacing instead of as you dive back down for more deep sleep because we know when you need to wake up. I think I can see a sales pitch around that. They didn't give an award. It was in their press release when they were talking about their awards. They also spoke about the highest selling apps

and games of the year. Oh, that's it. It's from that episode of Connected where you guys talking about like what exactly is apple doing with its marketing and one of the highest selling like the biggest selling apple or apple watch apps is a sleep tracker it was like it was it wasn't an app it was in the apple watch but it was in the kind of apps of the year was an app that was just an apple watch sleep tracking app so that is like which is a wild thing to consider um i cannot find that that app right now but i i know it exists somewhere i think it was like uh auto sleep i think it was auto sleep um but yeah i just think that that was like a wild thing that it was for the Apple Watch,

but it was in the top paid apps of the year. So like you look at that data, Apple must surely be working on it. You'd be wild not to, right? Like if people are buying these applications, wouldn't you do it? Nothing sends a better signal than seeing incredible success in the App Store, right?

I mean, this is the thing that Apple gets accused of all the time is, oh, they took my idea and they integrated it, which has happened forever. And that's just, if you're a platform owner, you find out, it's one of those, I see those stories and I really roll my eyes. It's not that I don't feel bad for the developer who comes up with a great idea. And then it's in the software. But at the same time, can you imagine a world where the platform owner is unable to develop any new features if they exist in a third party app? It's like you can't live like that as a platform owner. So you have to look at the signal from the app store and say, Oh my god, our customers want sleep tracking. It is so clear.

Plus it's health, which is perfectly aligned with what we're doing. Let's make it happen. And I can only assume that the reason that it hasn't happened yet is that they're worried about the kind of battery issues with that, especially since they added the always on display and that hits their battery, but it's gotta happen.

It's gotta happen. I remember there was a story recently that detailed that apple had a team that looks for trends in the app store and then they talk about them right as if like these are these things that we want to do and it's like of course you know like of course they would have that you'd be wild not to um i can't find for sure the name of that app i'm looking i think they may have changed the press release to remove that information i don't know like there was a previously an apple press release and it also said these were the the most uh downloaded apps of the year but i know it was in there i

believe it was auto sleep but that's besides the point should we talk about the mac yeah let's do it a third another macbook pro update for the current 13 inch lots of people are hoping that they will make a MacBook Pro, which is like the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Do you think that will happen in 2020? Yeah, I feel like the easiest prediction to make at all is that they will do a revision of the smaller MacBook Pro and that it will include the new keyboard.

I think that's a gimme. That's a layup. That is the easiest one. I think the hard a gimme. That's a layup. That is the easiest one. I think the hard one is the MacBook Air because, again, differentiation. Having the Magic Keyboard on the Pro model and not on the Air, you can make an argument, is differentiation. This is not an argument I want to make. I'm just saying. I'm trying to think like Apple here. That said, and when I wrote this article, i said was it really depends on

how confident they feel that this you know bad pr aside that their new materials version of the butterfly keyboard actually solved the problem and given that you and i have a friend mr steven hackett who has a 2019 macbook pro 15 so it's the new materials keyboard that is supposedly better at resisting and that he's got like a crunchy delete key he had a completely stuck delete key yeah last time so so that it didn't fix that kind of that kind of data point that kind of anecdote makes me think oh it no they've got to get rid of it on the macbook air too but i i feel like if i'm apple and i've gotten beaten up especially by the pro users about this um but i feel like again pr aside i feel like if I'm Apple and I've gotten beaten up, especially by the pro users about this,

but I feel like, again, PR aside, I feel like I actually did solve the problem with the Butterfly keyboard and it's not a problem anymore. I can make the argument to keep it on the MacBook Air. If it's still a problem, you just got to get rid of it. And, you know, so I don't know how they feel about it internally because it would be a differentiator. But my hope is that the next MacBook Air will also just have the Magic Keyboard. And that, in fact, that the MacBook Air was built during a time when they built this new MacBook Air, the Retina MacBook Air, during a time when they knew they would be doing a keyboard transition. And so it's engineered so that they could put in the new keyboard instead.

That's my hope. it's engineered so that they could put in the new keyboard instead that's my hope if it helps apple if you update the macbook air to include the magic keyboard the holy household will buy two of them oh look at that well maybe that will help tip it over the edge for you but like sold both me and adina are looking for updates like she has like a macbook pro the last MacBook Pro 13-inch before the keyboard change, right? So it's one of the thicker ones with the scissor switch keyboard, right? The ones that were considered to be gold dust for a while because people hated the new ones. And her battery is just like, it just doesn't run very well.

It's just not running very well anymore. And I have the first MacBook Pro Escape key version with no touch bar. And we want to replace both of those who MacBook has, but I'm not doing that until... I'm not doing it until Apple change it. If they revise it this year and it doesn't include the Magic Keyboard,

I may still get at least one of them i'm just waiting to see what they move like how they move right because if they don't do it it means they may never do it um and then you know then we'll all we'll work all at that point we may go with 13 inch macbook pros again right but i want to see what they do because i would prefer a macbook air to a macbook pro because i just don't need a macbook pro um but but we'll see what about the imac do you think you're going to get the revision to the imac that you want so i think that the imac is i mean it's ripe right it hasn't changed its look in more than a decade but

so my prediction is this which is are you gonna join the club of the imac pro is dead because i'm in that club i think marco's now in that club i think that the imac pro is gone i was already in the room and you guys walked in um All right. The iMac Pro was conceived as a replacement for the Mac Pro and then they decided they needed to make a Mac Pro. So here's what I think. I think they're going to use the iMac Pro design, which is an internal redesign where it gets rid of spinning hard drives and it puts in a much better cooling system. I think they're going to use that as the basis for a new, and there's no rumors here. I'm just making this up, but this is what I think. I want to predict something. Here's my prediction. They're going to use that

as a basis for the new version of the 5K 27-inch iMac. So the big iMac will get the new cooling system, will no longer offer any spinning hard drives, and will have the fastest available core processors, but not Xeons. Which already, if you look, those core processors are very fast. Like the modern, I believe the modern iMac at the high end is faster than my base model iMac Pro. Now, not at the high end of the iMac Pro, Pro. Now not at the high end of the iMac Pro, but if you're at the high end of the iMac Pro, there's a really strong argument that you should just get a Mac Pro now that the Mac Pro exists. So I think it would be logical to say, look,

we're going to take our high end iMac, our 5k iMac, and we're going to basically it's going to be the iMac Pro, except we won't either we won't put Xeons in there or we will put Xeons in there as an option. But we're not going to even call it the iMac Pro. We're just going to call it the iMac. And then we're going to keep the 4K and non-retina low-end iMac kicking around using the existing technology that's been there forever. Spinning drives are available. Fusion drives are available. And that's going to let us hit lower prices. And we're going to continue to sell those.

But on the higher end with the big iMac, we're going to fold the iMac Pro into the big iMac. That's my prediction is that I don't think they're going to take the iMac Pro effort that they did in engineering and throw it away. But I kind of have a hard time seeing them keeping it around. I hope they do, but there's like three products in two slots right now. Like the iMac Pro is kind of both an iMac and a Mac Pro. And I don't know if they need that computer. I think that they could do with a really capable uh thermally controlled high-end imac that can go up to a pretty powerful processor and then that will go high-end enough that beyond that point you say now you need to go to the mac pro i think the imac pro as a line doesn't need to exist

it can just be the highest end imac that replaces it as you say and if you really need more go to the Mac Pro like I think that what they should do is what you said right like a new iMac that if you spec it up right to the top it's like super powerful so then the iMac Pro just doesn't need to be there anymore and that's why we've not seen it because because honestly as anybody who's used those uh modern iMacs like last year's iMacs, will tell you, oh, if you get a high-end processor, like those fans go on and they go on loud because the old iMac thermal system

is not, it's struggling at the edges of that. And the iMac Pro does not have a problem with it. But what you give up is the spinning disk stuff. And I think, yeah, so an iMac with a T2 and a great cooling system and SSD only,

like the time is here and that product's already been designed and it's the iMac Pro. So why not just use that as the new iMac and say, hey, that iMac Pro, that's what the iMac is now. And there can not be Xeons in it and it's fine, it's fine.

I would like to see a refreshed industrial design yeah i just i feel like maybe they're never going to do that i i or not do that anytime soon i don't want to say never because there's always something but i feel like they must be comfortable with it i would love to see less bezel on the imac and maybe they they'll do that but yeah i don't know. I don't know. You can make the screen a little bit bigger. Reduce the bezels, make the screen bigger. I would like that. I would like that. That'd be nice. What else on the Mac? Do you think Catalyst is going to Phoenix its way out of the flames?

I would like... What I would like is for Apple to get it together and improve Catalyst and keep pushing Catalyst ahead so that in the OS release that happens in the fall, Catalyst is that much more good and able to make good Mac apps. That's what I would like.

Do I think that's going to happen? I see very little evidence that it's going to happen. So I think we will see more Catalyst apps in 2020 because I think one of the reasons that Catalyst is not as big as we thought it would be is because of its limitations. But I think that it's also that the developers are just too busy with everything

else. Like the apps that I expected to be using on my Mac that were from iOS, to my knowledge, are basically not even being developed right now for Catalyst. And it's because iOS 13 was, you know, compatibility updates were hard and then new feature updates are hard. It was a tough summer. And then you look at catalyst you're like well i'm not prioritizing that right now right so i i don't know i i so i would like to see more catalyst improvements but i i don't think i could predict it uh what about arm i predict arm max every year. Why stop now? You would think that if they introduced an iPad Pro in late 2018, that was faster than 90 plus percent of all laptops released that year.

That Apple, and I did have a friend of mine say that, it's a friend of a friend thing, say that he talked to this guy who was very technically knowledgeable who said oh making a mobile processor is easy making a computer processor is hard and they're not you can't you know so when people say apple's going to make their own arm processors for their for the max that's not going to happen it's much it's much too hard and it's like i i see the argument from a uh especially like across the entire product line perspective, I see it. But I look at the processor that's in the iPad Pro and think that could be in an ARM MacBook. And it would be probably faster than the MacBook was. So I feel like it's an inevitability that Apple's going to use their own processors on part of the Mac line, at least. But when, uh, again, I just put it out there for this year.

Cause it didn't happen last year or the year before the year before that. And I, I keep predicting it, but I feel like there's a hole in the consumer laptop. You know, the, the MacBook air has arrived, which is great, but they have one consumer laptop you know the the macbook air has arrived which is great but they have one consumer laptop wouldn't it be nice if they had another they did that thin and light an unbelievable battery life laptop story again but this time it was with uh an arm laptop so sure i'll predict it but i've been wrong every year since i started predicting it so we spoke about catalysts. What about software in general across Apple's platforms? Do you have any key themes that you think Apple

are going to focus on in 2020? Themes. It's good to have themes, isn't it? Themes for the year are pretty good, I've heard. I got to think that after iOS 13 and after Catalina, that there's going to be some stability across their platforms. On iOS, I will put in my wish for more shortcuts stuff because I think that that gets Apple. Building a structure in which third-party developers and users can build their own stuff so you don't have to build it for them is something that every computing platform really needs to get to at some point.

And it takes the burden off of you as a platform developer to say, look, we gave you the tools to automate this, to add these features yourself. We're not going to do it. iOS isn't there yet. So they've got more work to do. I think the share sheet, they've been refining it.

That needs to keep getting better. It's still kind of messy, but I think it's a good direction where you get a menu of items and it's items from the app and from other apps and suggestions. I like continue to refine that. And then let's throw in the cursor support. I would really like to see them go further down that route for iPadOS. And more broadly, they named it iPadOS last year. So I would like to believe that that means they will have to add some iPad-specific features. There's no option. In a way that they otherwise have not every other year for the last six years. This is not a question in my mind anymore this is a necessity there has

to be features to ipad os specifically you have to do it it has to get it stage time and you do it because otherwise what was the whole point right like you give tv os time every year even if you only had a little you give watch os time every year even if you only had a little ipad os needs its time and you give it something. It could be anything, but it's got to be something and it has to be iPad specific. Otherwise, there was absolutely no point in calling it iPadOS. You may as well just kept it as iOS. No one was like, well, okay, I say no one in inverted commas.

Nobody was really asking for iPad to be spun off off in this way like right we were mostly fine like you know there was thoughts of like wouldn't it be interesting or wouldn't it be nice but like no one was like you must do this apple everybody just wanted features but you decided apple you took the step to call it a separate operating system uh you know again it's not separate but they market it differently it has a separate set of features that means you have to commit otherwise there was no point do you have a wild card i know you do i've read the articles but can you please tell me your wild card pick for 2020 um the dream that will never die speaking of the arm mac which is really like always the wild card

never the card something like that yeah uh never chosen as the card um ipad os laptop like i know it's i know it's not going to happen almost certainly but like all the pieces are there they could do it if they want to if they want to iterate on the i on the ipad and ipad os in a way that they've expanded the iPad line. I talked about how there's clearly some interest in people in using iOS in a laptop sort of shape. If you couple that with improvements, again, improvements to cursor support, I don't know, they could make an iPadOS laptop that would be what we've already described, which is why don't we take this thing that is a very functional operating system and

getting better every year and put it in a laptop shape for people who want a laptop shape. I don't really want this product because I like using a tablet. That's why I use the iPad the most is that I use a tablet. But I do know people, and I think people people exist who would really love the idea of using ipad os as a laptop and maybe it folds over and maybe it's convertible or something like that but i don't know i think this product could exist and it's a question of uh does apple want it to exist i think all signs point to them not wanting it to exist but i gotta make a wacky pick this is my ricky pick

mike oh thank you they made a video ipod you know who wants one of those things we made one so right right i just i the the this is like the flip side of the coin that i'm flipping for my arm mac which is an arm laptop would have very long battery life. And the apps on iOS are very capable. Most of them, not the Google apps, but like Microsoft Office. And like there are very capable apps. You could, as somebody who uses an iPad as a laptop, sometimes you could totally do it. Even without a trackpad, you could totally do it. So, you know, it would be a little more like a Chromebook. It would not have the full Mac experience, but it would have the full iPad OS experience. I could sit in that room before being escorted out. Who is this guy? He doesn't work here. Get him out. And make that claim, which is, okay, we're not confident in making an ARM Mac OS device right now.

ARM macOS device right now. Why don't we make an ARM laptop? And it's just the same internals, more or less, that are going in the iPad Pro that we're doing, except it's attached to a keyboard. Again, if Apple was not as conservative as they are in terms of what products they release, if they were more like Samsung, it's like, sure. Or even Microsoft, let's put it out, see what happens. I think we would already have seen it. But I think that Apple is always reluctant to release a product if they don't think that there's an enormous market for it. And I think there's a real question about whether this would be an enormous product. That said, as part of a product line that includes the iPad Pro and the iPad and the iPad Air and the iPad Mini, maybe.

So that's Jason's 2020 predictions. I look forward to reviewing those. Lay it back in 12 months, folks. This episode is brought to you by DoorDash, where if you're super focused at work, having a chilled out day, or you forgot to prep your meal for the evening, you still have to eat, right?

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indian food in the early afternoon and i actually went on DoorDash and picked everybody's orders and set it to a time and said, deliver this at 5.30 or something like that. Sometimes it is a good idea to not order when you're hungry, right? Yeah. You ordered before because otherwise you just order way too much. And I already know, and I would never call a restaurant and say, can you make this order for me in four hours, right? Like I would never trust that. But with DoorDash, you're using the DoorDash infrastructure, and you're just basically timing your order. It's like, send this order in when the wait time is going to correspond to, and they use their kind of computer stuff to do that.

And at the end, I say, I want it at six, and they will send in that order at the time that they estimate it will be here at six. Like that. Yeah, super convenient. And then you're just going about your life, and somebody knocks on the door, and it's like, oh, it's the time that they estimate it will be here at six. Like that. Yeah, super convenient. And then you're just going about your life and somebody knocks at the door and it's like, oh, it's the food that I asked for five hours ago. So there's a little pro tip. Or you can just say, give me my food now.

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$5 off with the promo code UPGRADE off your first order from DoorDash. Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason Snell. Hi, Carly. Can we talk about the best thing, well, best named thing ever,

Project Connected Home over IP. This is a terrible name for a great thing. This was announced a few weeks ago and I really wanted to talk about it. I didn't want to let it go. Basically, all of the major smart home tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, along with a selection of accessory makers makers are joining together to create an alliance called the connected home over ip this has been given various names i like the name chip i think you like the name chop right chop

yeah it's very nasa to to go the other way and say it's uh the over is what counts and then we ignore the i and go to the p because nasa nasa does stupid stuff like that all the time when i've changed my mind and i want to call it choi like ch-o-i so i'm gonna go with choi yeah but the the fact that the press release doesn't give it a name that's cute and clever suggests that that's not going to be the name i like that all of the names you're proposing at the end of the article like smart home Home Everywhere or AnyTech Home Hub, like just like some stupid name that they're going to give it. But look, the naming doesn't matter

because what has happened is that these companies have announced plans to create an open source protocol for all of their devices to work together no matter who makes them. This is a quote from the website. The goal is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief

that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, which is great. This is just great. This is exactly what you want. You never thought you're going to get it, right? Because it doesn't make sense when you think about how Apple, Google,

and Amazon specifically work. Like why on earth would they want to work together? We'll maybe get to that in a minute, but it just doesn't seem like it fits with the company's overall plans. After the announcement of this, Apple open sourced some parts of their HomeKit accessory development kit so people can play around with what they do and how they could maybe interact with them. These are now available on the Apple developer site. how they could maybe interact with them. These are now available on the Apple Developer site.

The real likely outcome of this is that a company could more quickly tinker around to see if they can realistically make something before getting certification. I reckon that the certification is going to change. I feel like the MFI certification that people still need to go through is not going to be the same because of this new well for home for home kit stuff i i would assume that this organization will have a

certification system that's fairly straightforward yeah we'll just say works with whatever we call works with chop joy joy works with works with uh any tech home hub right so dream life spot home smart life future whatever it's gonna be but like you you expect that it will change in some way but i think it's cool that like apple immediately did something where they're like all right so now this is open source go wild right like which is a great way to stir up a bit more excitement in this community can i read a quote from you jason oh yes in your article about this please my quick hit reaction to this is that we're so far down the smart home path that the major players have realized none of them have dominated the initial land grab and now all of them face a barrier to growth because of the incompatibility of the

different smart home tech approaches so basically as everyone's doing their own thing there's a bunch of stuff out there none of it works together and now maybe people aren't adopting it it used to be our way to grow is to dominate and make everybody be inside our silo and now we've reached the point where they all look around and say our growth is being limited by this silo it's like yeah it is nobody won nobody completely blew out everyone else and brought them to their knees. Everybody's in their little silos. And the third party developers when the open path here is going to create more growth for them than control over a silo. And, you know, you would think Apple would be the last to do that. But I would argue that Apple's been down this path for a while now ever since it realized that it had to stop enforcing its hardware encryption and things like that apple has been

backpedaling on the you know how porous its silo is for a while now because they weren't getting people to use home kit and apple have the least amount of products available out of those three companies, right? Like Google and Amazon both make more than just the talkie hub thing, right? Like the thing you talk to. Apple only make those products and then everything else has to be certified. The rest of the stuff, like so the other companies, they're making other stuff. When I look at this whole thing, I feel like the fly in the ointment was Amazon. Amazon got in early and established this market, got a lot of product into a lot of homes, right? The Echo seems to be a pretty popular thing because they sell it so cheaply, right? You can get into that ecosystem. But then Amazon couldn't capitalize because they don't have the rest of the

ecosystem, right? They don't have phones and tablets that people are really buying en masse and using. So they got out there, started integrating with anyone in any way they possibly could and probably made it harder for a Google or an Apple to really own it because people were already using the Amazon devices.

And basically no one's been able to create a full solution, which seems obvious now when you look at it, like no one was ever going to be able to do this. And I expect that some stuff started happening where companies like Philips were going to the larger companies like to Apple and being like, look, you are this percent of our market now. We are not interested in going through a certification review anymore because if

we just go with the other guys it's easy right like i imagine stuff like that started happening so then these companies started bounding together or it might have been a case of like again a company like a phillips like a large company going to all of them and being like we're not going to do this we don't keep playing this game right, why don't you integrate with us now instead? How about that? You know, I reckon that what we're going to end up with here is something akin to Bluetooth in the sense that like, so AirPods,

they are Bluetooth headphones and they will work with any Bluetooth device, right? You can just pair them. But when you pair them to an Apple device, they have extra features. And I reckon that what will end up happening is yes, smart home devices work in the overall thing. And you can use this product with this company, this company, this product, this company. But if you get like these like ordained pairs, they get additional features, right? So like, you can use Nest with the HomePod, but if you use Nest with Google Home, it gives you a little bit more.

You know what I mean? maybe three little wireless things that are attached to my network at home that are separate from my wifi network in order to talk to specific devices that I have in my home that are smart home devices, right? Like I've got a Phillips hue hub. I've got a Lutron casita hub. I've got a, uh,

uh, an Arlo camera hub. And they're each doing, Arlo is actually doing Wi-Fi. But it's like its own, the others are internet protocol, so that there's interoperability. I think that means that in the long run, use it so like in my example i think if this all comes to pass i wouldn't have needed to buy two or three different little wireless bridges for specific kinds of tech, right? There'd just be like, get a wireless bridge or don't use one at all because we're using Wi-Fi.

And that would be a huge thing because it's ridiculous that you're like, oh, I'd like to buy this light bulb. But in order to do that, I have to buy this plastic box and attach it to Ethernet and plug it in. And it's like, no, no one wants to do that. Yeah. In our home home we have like the basics at this point like because for this reason like the more i got into it like this is

just becoming so much more complicated than i wanted it to be but we are also in that boat of like we have the home pod and i use uh the home pod to do like to control our lights and stuff. But we also use the Echo for that. And the Echo is used more in our home. We had it first, so we trained ourselves to just say the Amazon wake word and ask it to do things. But also, the Echo works with some other products in our home, and the HomePod doesn't. So we have a Dyson fan that you can control, and our Roomba you can control with the Echo.

So we're never going to leave that because we have some benefits there. And honestly, the HomePod, we don't use a ton for the smart home stuff because we would have to be using both of them. we would have to be using both of them. Yeah, and this is where if anybody has used Homebridge, which I use, which is like a piece of software that you can run that it does what it says. It connects these different things. It's basically

HomeKit. It's a HomeKit bridge that takes things that aren't HomeKit compatible and puts them on HomeKit. And it's great, but really what it says to me is that's what the future needs to be. Which in theory is, right? Everything should just work together. Because I'm using HomeKit, I'm using an Apple device and I plug in a Google device, it should just show up, right?

It shouldn't be like, oh no, I don't work with HomeKit. I only work with Google and Amazon. That's so frustrating. It's so annoying. So I think it also means that you could probably, there'll be like a bridge product that will backward compatibility everything, and it will probably be based on HomeBridge. But that would be nice, right? To not have, we will, it's going to take time, but we will ideally, and I think this is going to happen. I'm not too skeptical about it. I think it's going to take time but we will ideally i and i think this is going to happen i i'm not too skeptical about it i think it's going to take time and you're going to have old products that you're going to have to replace and it's going to be annoying but i do think we're going to reach enter this second phase where um everything's just going to work on everybody's

home systems that's interesting because i had thought to myself like backwards compatibility is a very important part of this. Now, they're going to be, you know, I don't think they're going to say, oh, Philips, all their old light bulbs now will just show up on HomeKit. I'm like, no. I mean, that may be a bad example because they actually do work with HomeKit. But I think you're going to have orphan products that won't get a firmware update or something to work, right? They're not going to work. It's going to be a new standard and new things are going to be certified. And the stuff that is new-ish at the time that it all gets worked out will become compatible.

And the stuff that already worked with all of them will stay. But I'm sure that if you've got some, you know, smart thermostat that only works with Alexa and Google Home, let's say say and not home kit um and then they do this thing it's not going to get a software update to work with home kit i don't think that'll happen so like you're like your first generation nest thermostat that you're still using that doesn't work with home kit unless you use homebridge like it's not going to get a software update that's never going to happen you're going to need a new thermostat whatever it is though i'm excited for choy because i think that this is needed to to continue the advancement of this type of technology in the same way that wi-fi

was needed right like and we got that so well bring on on Smart Life Home Hub Tech Bot Plus. Plus Pro. Smart Home Plus Pro. That's what we're going to call it. Everyone loves pluses and pros. This episode is brought to you by Booz Allen. Modernizing for the future is a challenge, especially for large organizations.

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Integrate, innovate, get it done with Booz Allen. Learn more at boozallen.com slash at BoozAllen.com slash Relay as BoozAllen.com slash Relay. Our thanks to Booz Allen for their support of this show. It's time for hashtag Ask Upgrade, Jason Snell, as we round out this big bumper episode. Ian asks, Mike, you previously mentioned

that you like white text on a dark background. Does this preference carry over at all to pen and paper? Not at all, because and paper not at all because white ink on black paper you could do it how much black it could be uh but i am not interested in in doing that i like colored inks like i like lots of color in my ink oranges and greens and purples and red also that's that's not how it that's not how it works like it's it's like they don't they don't make a a flash dark that shines dark where you point it like it only works the one way you can you cast light you don't cast dark out and you get you don't put light ink on no that's not how it works

aloha hello that is a joke from the Flophouse. I just wanted to just, for the sake of, the Flophouse episode. Let's do it. About the, Rise of Skywalker. The Rise of Skywalker is so good.

Yeah, it is. It's an absolute classic. I have not listened to the Flophouse for a while. Like, it just fell off my radar for a bit. I'm so back in now because I remembered exactly

why I love this show and that was it it is absolutely fantastic if you liked the movie you might not be a big fan dylan asks do you have location services turned on for camera and photos do you camera and photos do you yeah yeah that's how you search your photos from where they were taken yeah for sure i do and as well like i mean i understand some people may not have in case like when sharing images it would have location data built into it these days these days almost everything has a don't share location data feature that I think is turned on by default. And also they added an iOS feature that I really like where when you go into

the share sheet, there's a little text button that says options where like, if you're sending an image to somebody, you could choose to remove it for that image, which like that wasn't the case before. Like if, if you text me or airdropped a photo to me, it would have all the data in it

um you can now turn it off and you can also like with live photos you can also turn off the live photo data in that screen i really like that i think that was a nice little addition that apple made uh with ios 13 um but yeah like you right like sometimes i can only find an image because of the location no the user benefit to have the, you know, find it on a map or search for a particular place and have it turn up is far too great. And, you know, I don't think there's an issue here. I would have an issue sharing a picture with location data of like my house or my kid's preschool or something like that. But that is not yeah for most it doesn't really happen like i i feel like we've come far enough that i'm not paranoid about this as concerned as i am about

privacy this is not where i'm concerned right but yeah but like in the same vein like it's just a kind of a thing if i don't take i don't share pictures of my house yeah well that's true too you know but like but yeah i don't know you just shared that picture of your uh your ipad with the keyboard and all of that i know but when i share images like that online jason i meticulously look through every op sec yeah sure yeah it doesn't have like your neighbor's street signs and things like that no i also as well like i check like what are the names of my widgets what are the i just oh yeah sure because it's you know you're gonna get you're gonna get questions uh like this one from johan what is the first app on your home screen

geez top left what is it i couldn't i couldn't tell you um you don't know you don't have your phone there you got your phone there? You can open it. Messages. Messages, top left. Top left. I have the RelayFM app there. I never listen to our shows live

because I'm usually the one doing the live thing, but I just really like having my company logo on my screen. And I find the top left, especially if you're a pro Macs user like me, it's the hardest app icon to get to. Yeah, it's very far away. It's kind of like the data. Didn't messages always used to be top left?

Is that why yours is there? Like that's how the original iPhone shipped. I feel like it might. Yeah, that might be. That might be. I don't know. I have messages in phone. They're cuddling up there.

The green boys, they're cuddling up there. Big cuddly up there the green you have the green boys they're they're cuddling up there big cuddly green boys benjamin asks we're coming up on five years since the launch of live photos has live photos and the introduction of that changed the way that you take photos on your iphone it's changed photography for me in the sense that um i turn it on and then i'm sharing a photo and it gives me the little icon that says do you want to share the live photo and i go ugh no i don't and i have to turn it off because mostly i don't there are moments where i've captured video and i'm very happy that i've gotten it um mostly not i would say the thing that would really push live photos

over the edge for me is i'd like it to take a little bit more video than it does. And I'd like it to grab more photo quality stills than it does. Yes. So that I could also scrub through and say, like, that's actually the still I want. It is awesome, but they're frequently too low quality. It should be capturing more photos which you can dump get rid of the photos after a period of time if you want to sure i would like that too that's a good one i'm gonna say and i and i said i think i've said this before i stand by it live photos

is one of my favorite additions to ios that's ever been added uh i love live photos because it makes scrolling my photos more engaging. I love it when you're scrolling through and there's a little bit of movement to it. It's like I'm in Harry Potter or something. It helps to add content to the videos that iOS generates for you, right? You know those little videos that photos just sometimes gives you? There can be sometimes like movies in those because it's pulling them from live photos. There are times where I take photos specifically because they will be good live photos and then i also like to use the like the bounce

and loop effects that you can change in the photos app to create some fun animations i really love live photos like there are some photos that i have that some of my favorites because they're great live photos so including that one of me and you where the flash happens right like well that is capturing a moment like that is amazing yeah and so like i have a few like that that are just really great and then i like i like pairing these two questions together stewart asks how many slow fees did you take this year i completely forgot about this until apple made an ad recently they're trying to make slow-fees happen again. Yeah, I genuinely feel like I wished I'd used this more

because it could be fun, but I never think to use it. I forget that... I completely forgot that the selfie camera could take slow-motion video. So... Because I find slow-motion video is usually really low quality. I understand why, but it makes me hesitant to ever use slow motion unless I'm in really good conditions, and then I usually don't remember to do it anyway.

And finally today, Tony asks, I have yet to see even one sign in with Apple button out in the wild. Jason, have you seen any? I haven't seen a single one. I have seen one in one app called Tripsy, and I use it for Tripsy. Now, I looked into this because

my expectation from WWDC is like, not only were they going to be here, Apple was going to enforce it with an iron fist, right? So, some of the rules changed during development, and it's starting off much more slowly this was an example of apple listening to feedback clarifying the apps that

had to use it and adding some exceptions and being a bit more gentle about it so there are a bunch of application types which is defined in the the guidelines now to like you don't need to do this like if your app is an app for a service right like if you're making a twitter app you don't need to have sign in with apple it doesn't make any sense because like you need twitter or like if you're a corporate app and stuff like that so they made some changes there which i think is really great they also extended the deadline date for existing apps to update. So if you create a new app that has these sign-in buttons, you do have to add this now. But if you are an existing application that has sign-in with Google, sign-in with Facebook, April 2020 is now the

deadline date. So they moved it, which I think is is great they gave people more time they made some clarification stuff so it is still happening but it's taking a bit longer than as originally suggested yeah this is funny this is a thing that apple has done in a few places because um they also announced that they were going to require notarization of mac apps outside of the mac app store which notarization is basically uh you're a third party developer who's got a Mac app that you're not selling in the Mac app store. And to notarize it, which you upload it to Apple servers and they have an automated like scan and check and then they cryptographically sign it and they send it back to you. And that is like a, so you have an Apple developer account and you've had it signed by Apple. And this is their way of putting a level of security on stuff that's outside the app store. And it's not a formal approval process, but it's this sort of robot approval process.

And they said that you would basically get rejected. Your app would be rejected by the launch demon in Catalina if it wasn't notarized by a certain date. And they pushed that date back, I think maybe a couple of times. I think it's coming up. It's January now. I think it's coming up now. But they pushed that back because they got feedback that it was too fast and that the developers needed more time, et cetera, et cetera. So they've shown some flexibility about this. And by the way, if you hold down control and click on the app and choose open from the pop-up, it will let you open it anyway. If you change your security settings, this is all by default.

open it anyway. If you change your security settings, this is all by default. So it's not completely locked down, but it's way more locked down than it used to be by default. That if a random app on the internet is not by a registered Apple developer and has not passed through Apple servers to be approved by default, it won't open. It won't open anymore. You can get it to open by changing your settings, but it's not going to open by default. That's a big thing. But they did push that back as well. So I think that's a good sign. Like we can debate whether these things are good or bad, but definitely I think it's a good sign that Apple has heard feedback. They make these big announcements and then people try to implement them or think about implementing them and say, this doesn't actually make sense. And that Apple's like, you're right.

We're going to adjust this. We're going to delay it a little bit. So some of that is going on inside Apple. They're not just a cold, unfeeling black box that makes deadlines that you have to follow all the time. Just some of the time. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade, please send those in

because we've not been doing that for a couple of weeks we don't have so many so send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade if you have a question you would like us to answer because my backlog is getting smaller on those thanks so much to our sponsors this week, that's DoorDash, Booz Allen KiwiCo and Squarespace

you can find Jason online at sixcolors.com, and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L, on social media platforms. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. You can find show notes for this show, including lots of links and information in your podcast app of choice,

or at relay.fm, slash upgrade, slash 279. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jasonason snell let's do this again in a week this time all right okay there might be something a little bit different next week but like we'll work to that but we'll be back