Upgrade - 283: The Anger of the Panel

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

It's time for our annual dive into the Six Colors Apple Report Card, as Jason and Myke interpret the scores and comments of 65 Apple-watchers and add their own views on where the company is succeeding--and where it's not.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 283 today's show is brought to you by pingdom squarespace and kiwi co my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley how are you i am fine and dandy my friend fine and dandy indeed but i have a hashtag snail talk question for you okay this comes from james and james wants to know if you're out on your own while traveling in a new city what is your favorite kind of snack or meal to seek out in different places um it's a fun question i'm not on my own traveling in a new city very often i'm generally with my family or or I'm with friends doing like an event of some kind. But it does occasionally happen, did especially when I was working at IDG.

I'd have to go to some thing like IDG thing somewhere. And it's like, okay, I'm in Copenhagen. What will I do? In Copenhagen, what will I do? And so my historical answer is I would like to find a place that is really good, that serves local beer is my answer. I have been to such a place with you in Dublin? Yeah, sure. It was in Dublin?

Yeah, in Dublin. dublin yeah sure it was yeah dublin yeah in dublin there was the there's the microbrewery there where like everything is just guinness everywhere but you could go to the porterhouse in uh temple bar i think is where we went and and they have like micro brews from ireland and elsewhere and it was recommended to me by a by a waiter from the guinness storehouse which is oh the irony of that it's like if you like beer you should try beers that are not Guinness. Don't go to this place. Again, this is fine, but that was good. Yeah, and I did that.

I went to, I don't know where I went, but in Copenhagen, I had a Mikkeler beer that was really good. Yeah, and now, of course, I'm not allowed to drink regular beer, so sad. And now, of course, I'm not allowed to drink regular beer. So, sad. But that's my answer. That was always my thing, was seeking out new local beer in wherever I was. Was that the night where me, you, and James Thompson found ourselves in a very small Irish pub? Yes, that we did end up in a very small Irish pub.

That was right sort of down by where we were staying. And, uh, I, I discovered that place, uh, when I was there with IDG, cause it was just down the road from the place we were staying for the IDG meeting in Dublin. And I thought, I thought, oh my God, this is like, perfect. This is exactly what I imagine an Irish pub to be in that it was very small, completely packed, everybody talking. And then you, you and James and I did the same and it was exactly the same which i loved it that was great it was one of those places where you walk in and the music stops kind of thing right and everyone looks at you right that that was kind of what this place was like well i i ordered a guinness i remember the first time i was there and they're like oh

american and and they said from you know from looking you, you might as well be Irish. And it's like, well, it is genetically, that's about right. So, but I thought that was a funny moment of like, yeah, I fit. It's like, if I had not opened my dumb American mouth, no one would have known. Whereas you, an Englishman in Ireland, would have, you're lucky that you left with your life. On that note, if you would like to send in a Snell Talk question to open a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk

and it may be included. Thank you to other James for sending that in. Yeah, that was great. But I'm just saying that there are statues all over Dublin of people who killed English people.

It's amazing. Anyway, Thanks. Should we do... Just watch your back. Don't try to take over when you're in Ireland. That's all. Now I'll just be begging for citizenship, Jason. That's where I'm going to be.

Yeah, you're going to have to show, you know, do your proper entry procedures now, but we don't want to talk. Now we really don't want to talk about that. Not now, but maybe at some point. We have a packed show today, but we want to talk about that. Not now, but maybe at some point. We have a packed show today, but we want to talk a little bit about Fantastical 3, right? You want to touch on that today?

It's kind of like follow-up. We got an email from a listener that I thought was, that he made a nice point. Yep. And I wanted to just mention, so Fantastical 3 came out last week. I wrote about it. Federico Vittici wrote about it.

Other people wrote about it. They prepped us. We got the beta in advance and all of that. Yep. Got a lot of nice new features. I'm very impressed with the new features. I love it. It's really great.

Yeah. It also adds a subscription model, which everybody, everybody knew would be controversial because every time there's a subscription model, people are angry because a lot of people don't like subscription software. And so it's, the way they did is really interesting they released it the new the new app is an update for version 2 it uh so if you paid for version 2 you get all the features of version 2 for free um and the new features are under the subscription model, which is $40 a year. Now, I have some criticisms about this.

First off, a lot of people are like, well, why didn't they release it as a new app and leave the old app there? And they could have done that. I'm not sure that would have been better because what it would have meant is that that old app was just going to sit there and rot and you know they could have like pushed a notification or something that there's a new version and gonna get it i think there would have been a lot of problems with like allowing the

upgrades from the previous version it would have been a choice they could have made i i don't know why they didn't make that choice but i think it's complicated it's more complicated than like oh well they just could have done that and they didn't make that choice, but I think it's complicated. It's more complicated than like, oh, well, they just could have done that and they didn't. That was dumb. I think there's a maintaining thing that's an issue, right? Like with this model that they have right now

because of the way they've developed and implemented it, they can still maintain and update what is effectively the free version, right? For people. So you can still get updates. It will still work with future versions of ios where if you'd stayed on two maybe it wouldn't right also uh sipping a fruit cider in

the chat room james thompson points out that uh you lose your search visibility when you have a brand new app um you break you break continuity right and then you've got your existing app that's still floating around unless you hide it and then you've lost it too it's my point is it's complicated and there are a lot of people who are very easily like well they should have just done this and like they're not really necessarily considering all of the issues involved because the thing is with it with a situation like this with the market that we're in right now, I will tell you there is literally no good option. There is just options with varying levels of bad and you choose your bad. That's the bottom line here is all of this is precipitated by Apple's policies being bad, right?

Like this is Apple not allowing a sensible upgrade policy for software and it has driven everybody to subscriptions because Apple wants to report subscription revenue. Apple wants everybody else to report subscription revenue that goes into their subscription revenue. It is, it is something that the developers are trying to find a way to build a sustainable business with their software and releasing a single app for a single purchase. And then you walk away forever is not sustainable,

especially if you've been paying attention to iOS releases, how every iOS release like breaks apps and apps have to. So like you can't just take the money and walk away and never update the app. Imagine you buy an app and then Apple releases a new version of iOS and the app breaks. Are you going to be mad at Apple or are you going to be mad at the developer? Well, you're probably going to be bad at the developer. And at that point, you have an expectation that the developer is going to continue to maintain this software to keep it running for you, except you haven't given them any more money and they still have to eat. So I, you know, I think,

I think it's, it's a, it's a difficult situation that Apple has made largely itself, but that developers are trying to find ways through. Now, you know, so what Fantastical decided to do was release a new version with a new code and give everybody who bought Fantastical 2 the features for the new code. This is Mac and iOS and Apple Watch, actually. I would say, you know, there are things that I want to criticize about their rollout I feel like they they have a little too they're a little too pushy in terms of sort of nagging you and saying oh that's a thing you can't do unless you pay us for a new feature I feel like a way to silence that a way to say yes I get it don't show this to me again like there's literally some views on iOS where if you tap or slide a divider it throws throws up a thing that says, oh, this is a premium feature.

You can't do that. It's like, that's, it's a bit, it's a bit much. You should just be able to say, okay. And then don't show that to me again. So it's a little overzealous. They didn't come out with a family plan. So basically if you've got two, let's say a couple who wants to use Fantastical, they're like, well, that's $80 a year, which I don't know. I mean, if they want to do that, that it's fine, but that seems more like a, like an error. If you've got your kids that you also want to share calendars with, and you know, you, you could share calendars using a different app, but it just seems like maybe there's a missed opportunity there to be, to sort of like for your existing customers to allow them to add users. Or a team not this family yeah yeah yeah it's just uh

so so that's that's i know and i know that's complicated but it seems like that's something that they they could have given more time to before launch they have a new account system which led to a lot of confusion and basically what they're trying to do is be able to pass uh your like metadata around and also be able to create kind of helper services. So things like they do meeting scheduling, and the meeting scheduling is in the cloud. So you need to be logged into the Flexibits account to do your meeting scheduling in the cloud. And it's good. And they promised that part of this whole subscription thing is they're going to roll out new cloud-enabled features to users as well.

They're able to do app development and cloud development now that they're going to have a subscription base. The challenge is the confusion, which is, first off, people are like, well, wait a second. Why can't I use this app unless I subscribe? And the answer is, well, signing into making a new account is not subscribing. They're separate, but that's complicated, right? Like, and then there's another confusion, which is, wait a second, they have a cloud account now. Well, I have my work accounts in my calendar and if, and I can't give my work calendar

credentials to a third party that would be insecure. So I can't use this product, which is not true because the calendar stuff still happens on device on the app. It has nothing to do with the cloud service, but that's complicated. So it's one of those things where I know why they did it and I'm not sure how much better they could have done it, but it is extra layers of confusion with people who are already kind of on edge. I also noticed this week, a lot of people complaining about, because people were going,

if you wrote about Fantastical like I did and Federico about because people were going if you wrote about fantastic out like i did and federico did people were like doing twitter searches and finding you and then just replying the same reply to everybody it was just this outrage machine that cranked up which you know i get being outraged i'm not interested in your spam um but and i did things like wow this seems like a nice update and somebody's like the subscription is so right i said well you know my story says you have to decide if this is worth it for you it's right there but i think the features are nice um i did notice a trend where a lot of people remember having features that they didn't actually have before this is outrageous i i you know i used to rely on calendar calendar

sets on my ipad and now it's a premium feature it's was like, I don't think there were calendar sets on the iPad before. So that's interesting. So here's what listener Nathan said. Listener Nathan wrote in and that prompted this mini topic follow-up is, I'm passionate about tech and I want to use the best possible apps and tools in my personal life, but I don't feel like getting enough value

out of subscriptions like this for what I see as quite limited use. And I think that's a perfectly valid feeling this is you what listener nathan is describing is i like nice things but sometimes nice things count cost more than i would like to pay yeah and i think if i'm i think it's the same person nathan was saying that they would love to use this stuff for work but they can't like this is just not the type of thing that they're allowed to do because of all these security procedures and i know that there's

like you don't have to give them the account stuff but then you also don't benefit from some of the features that you're now paying for sure sure but and i think flexibix could be more clear about that but again all the calendar data stays on device. Unless you give them, because you can now choose to give them API access to calendars. Yeah, but you have to do very specific things in the cloud that are not required. Yep. So, again, there's nothing groundbreaking about this comment that I like nice things, but some of them are too expensive for me. That's life.

And I guess what I would say is I get not, I want a Tesla and it's too expensive for me. That's life. And I guess what I would say is I get not, I want a Tesla and it's too expensive, so I can't buy it. Right. And it's like, I'm not mad at Tesla for not making their car cheaper. I want a nice thing, but ultimately, look, if FlexiBits priced this wrong, their business will not work, will not succeed. If they overpriced this and they lose all their customers to other products, they made a mistake and they priced it too high. That said, if they price it right and some people opt out because it's too rich for their blood, that's fine. That's okay. That's an okay outcome. Not every product is going to be bought by everybody. Sometimes the product is too expensive. Serving the largest number of users is not

Flexibit's goal. Their goal is not the person with the most users wins. Making their business sustainable is the goal. And we've seen this time and again with software development on Apple's platforms, especially, which is there are always people who are up in arms who think the customer is always right. And the solution is you should please everybody. And the truth is pleasing everybody cannot be the goal. And there's some business models where it's all about scale. But for the most part, pleasing everybody is not the goal. Getting a customer base willing to pay you an amount of money where the customer base

is large enough and the amount of money is large enough and that it's sustainable, which means it needs to happen over time. That's the goal. And sometimes, especially because of the way Apple structured the app store, things like this will happen. There are subscription apps that I look at and I go, yeah, like that, that looks like a fun app. Um, and I wouldn't mind having it around like this just happened to me for the tool I make. We're going to talk about the Apple quarterly results in a minute. The tool I make, I used to make the transcripts of that, just switch to a subscription model. And so I used to pay like $15 or $20 per quarter to do that transcript. As of later this year, I'm going to have to pay $60 to do it because they've switched

to a subscription model. Their lowest price is $60 a month. So I'll have to sign up for a month, do all the transcripts and then cancel. I don't love it. I will consider alternatives. I will consider the value that it provides to my business. And, you know, if I abandon it, then so be it. Like, I feel it.

We just had this with our QuickBooks Online account for my business. I've had that for apps like Ulysses, which is an interesting app that I try from time to time, but I came to the realization that I probably shouldn't subscribe to it because I don't think I would use it. I've had that same thought about drafts. I did actually buy a year of drafts, but I may not renew that. Everybody has to make their own decisions here. but I may not renew that. Like everybody has to make their own decisions here. And Flexibits could have done some things better.

But in the end, while I have sympathy for people who are upset that this app that they like is going to a place that they don't want to go, calendaring is standard. Every Apple device comes with a calendar app. If you paid them for Fantastic Cal 2, you get those features on version 3. Hopefully they'll make the nags go away. Like in the end, if you want nice things, you should be willing to pay for them. Otherwise, you'll just have to make a decision about whether it's nice enough for you to pay.

And it's okay for you to say no. And if enough people say no, the business will hear it and realize they made a mistake. But there is a situation here where you leave, some people stay, and the business is happy because, again, their goal is to be sustainable, not to have the maximum number of customers possible. And it stinks to be on the outside of that, but sometimes that's how it has to be because everybody has different priorities. You have one upstream headline you wanted to talk about today right uh yeah so i forcibly added upstream to this episode just to say hulu's ceo is out uh a guy named randy freer he's the ceo of hulu and he's out and the reason that this is news is mostly because he's not being replaced hulu's senior staff will report to disney and this is the most hulu's in a weird place because it's technically still not entirely

owned by disney although it will be but it is operated by disney and eventually the other partners will drop out and it will be completely subsumed by disney but for now, at least, Hulu still is kind of Disney, kind of not. But this is the final shoe, essentially dropping of Disney taking control. The CEO has left. He's not being replaced. Hulu will report inside Disney. So I just think that that's worth noting

that our conversations about Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, worth noting that our conversations about disney plus and espn plus and now we've got hulu um as the third leg of that sort of streaming strategy and hulu is where they can place content that maybe is a little more edgy and outside of the bounds of the disney brand in disney plus well that's what's happening also this company that's got a little streaming service um named apple did had a pretty good quarter apple's q1 2020 results so remember q1 2020 that means well you would think it would mean calendar as we're in but it doesn't mean that it means no the sales of the fourth quarter of 2019 this is the holiday quarter the big quarter first fiscal quarter of 2020 yeah

a big quarter it is the biggest quarter ever in both revenue and profit i'm just gonna say i think that slightly came out of nowhere uh if you just think about the way that the last year or so was gone i know that we had guidance but like it i i don't think i was personally expecting such a runaway success for this quarter. Well, they beat their guidance. I mean, that's the thing is they talk about being conservative with guidance, but they beat their guidance. They really did.

Oh, boy, did they. And they had what turned out, it was like probably going to be a record quarter. Their previous record quarter was two years ago, actually. Last year was down a little bit. But if you look at their growth rate the last four quarters, year over year, it was like down 5%, down 5%, up 1%, up 2%. Apple's revenue this year has been kind of same as last year. And they were up 9% year over year, the holiday quarter. And obviously, they were up a little bit from two years ago where they had that record quarter.

So it's a little bit out of nowhere. It's sort of like they beat expectations to have their best quarter ever, which I feel like there was a period there where we were doing that every year. And then we skipped a year, but here we are again, the holiday quarter. We're back to... Here we are again, the holiday quarter. We're back to... And also, I'll just point out there, $91.8 billion quarter means that probably in the next few years, we are going to see Apple have a $100 billion quarter,

which is bananas. I'm just going to say it's going to be Q1 2021. Maybe. Who knows? It's either 2021, 2022, but I reckon it will happen. I think so. I think you're right. Profit was $22.2 billion.

The big story here is that the iPhone's back on top and back on top in a big way. $56 billion of revenue. It's up $4 billion year over year. This is the second largest quarter for the iPhone ever, which is, again, a big surprise, I think, because the big story from Q4 2019 results was that the iPhone dipped below 50% of Apple's overall business, right? And we were talking

about it. There were lots of articles about it, right? We were entering this new world where this is going to be the way that Apple's going to be, but now it's 61% again. So we can forget that new world. If you look at the percentage numbers, the holiday quarter always tips toward iPhone. People buy iPhones that quarter. It makes sense. That's the new iPhone quarter. It's not just the holiday.

We focus on the holiday, but it's October, November, December. It's the new iPhone quarter. And it's always over 60% iPhone. And it is again. According to Apple, the iPhone 11 outsold the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max every single week of the holiday quarter. So the plan worked. Rebranding the XR to become 11 was a clear strategy from Apple to drive the price of what seemed to be the standard flagship phone down when really

what they were doing is making a cheaper version of the of the phone you know so if you had the the 10 right for example the 1010s you could see that the 10r was the cheaper version of that because it came afterwards it had fewer features but then with 11, they introduced them as like, here's the 11 and then we have these other ones as well. They have very similar features across the board, right? Like it was a very different pitch

that Apple gave. So what they ended up was to create a strategy where the 11 was the entry point, where I think previously, like the 10S was the entry point. And then maybe you would go down to the 10R.

But I think Apple put together a really compelling strategy for this holiday season, which has ended up working in their favor. You pointed out in the article that you wrote, which I will definitely agree with, that if you combined the Pro lines, it probably beat the 11. But just from a pure handset sales,

the iPhone 11 was the was the most uh probably more successful i know that the the 10r had had previous like great success but i think it was considered differently i feel like the iphone 11 was really just considered differently shown to be different and there's been less conversation i think about like it being the cheaper phone it just is the standard phone and lots and lots and lots of the reviews uh for these these these models were just saying that like there isn't really much need to go to the pro like you don't have to do that you really should start at the 11 and so i think it ended up working out well for them yeah if you view this as a multi-year kind of repositioning of the entire iPhone line, which we're probably not done with even now, it's probably going to

continue next year or this fall. Well, all of the rumors say that we're going to four phones, right? Exactly. Right. Four plus possibly an SE, right? So if you think about that though, but think about the old model. The old model was 6S seven you know 6s and 6s plus 7s and so it's now then they added the 10 and then there was this kind of like well 10 plus the 10 pro max but also the 10r and like how are we going to all do this and this year we got it like no no no now we've redefined it again like that 10 that was high end and and yet was also kind of mainstream is now firmly high end. And like, it's fascinating to see them do this

because this is a high wire act, right? There, this iPhone is everything. So you don't want to mess it up, but it seems to be working and the iPhone did pretty well. Yeah, I think it is pretty clear at this point that the X was a misstep in some ways especially around the way that apple positioned it in the lineup you know we often make the joke about like remember the iphone 8 right it's just like the forgotten iphone right which was just because we have a new iphone but you don't care

about this one because we have that other one but oh but by the way that's too expensive i know they they sold a lot of 10s though and that was the record quarter so i think i don't know if i would say it was a misstep i think i think it was a gamble and it didn't you know and it kind of paid off but it did require them to do a lot of cleanup afterward and we're still kind of in the cleanup now yeah i think they reeled a bit though right which is like they had that big quarter i agree because people were excited about that but i think it didn't do so well for them after. But anyway, we don't need to get into that now. The numbers speak for themselves.

Mac and iPad saw declines year over year. I'm reading some quotes out from some articles that you wrote on Six Colors and Macworld. Both products had a difficult year over year comparison due to the launches of MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and iPad Pro during the December quarter a year ago, which is what Apple said is the reason for this that's the that's the old tough compare argument tough compare tough compare i don't yes tough the compare i feel like this tough compare is a tough compare honestly because we had a 16 inch macbook pro and a mac pro like and i feel

like that should have helped balance out a little bit i think mac pro is insubstantial because it shipped very late if at all in the quarter and is a low volume product i do think 16 inch macbook pro there's at least a little bit of an argument there um but that said huge pent-up demand for the mac mini and enormous pent-up demand for a retina macbook pro and i do i do so i do buy a certain degree of this tough compare but it's an excuse and on the ipad side i actually do agree that that new ipad pro came out and people were really waiting for it and everybody loved it and they sold a lot of them and this year kind of nothing happened i get that i see it with the ipad for sure i mean because there was a lot of movement

in ipad last year um there was a new ipad mini there was a new uh like the the ipad air and the new ipad right all of those products came out in that year so there would have been focus on the holiday quarter to replace some of those there was nothing there was there was barely anything that we got uh especially around the pro line in 2019 that could have pushed that so i see it with the ipad more than i see it with the mac but there is a thing where it's like whilst the macbook pro is a highly desired machine is probably apple's best-selling laptop at this point maybe maybe maybe apple's best-selling laptop i think it could vary between the air right but we know it sells well but the thing is it was the larger model and i reckon they sell more 13s than they do 15s or 16s i think that's i think that's probably

true they're mostly going into business right and i assume people had already made purchasing decisions like it's going to take a while to move back to the 16 like that's going to slowly turn over. Wearables up 37% year over year to $10 billion. This is the now 12th straight quarter of over 20% year over year growth, which is just

absolutely bananas. I know we spoke about it last week and we've been speaking about it like last week i've been speaking about in the weeks before both wearables and services it is easy to pay attention to what we always think about right iphone mac ipad but these growth levels are absolutely insane and are going to continue to significantly change apple's product mix because when you are seeing areas of your company growing 37 year over year you are on to something so you have to keep focusing on it

did you see the roger quo rumor of the headpods it's ming chi quo codename roger only a codename roger but yes uh the headpods the uh that Ming-Chi Kuo, codename Roger, only a codename Roger. But yes, the headpods, that there's another Apple over your headphones coming out. And we talked about that, like, how could you not look at this category and say, because Tim Cook said, AirPods were a record. Apple Watch was a record in terms of revenue. And I think two interesting points. One is they couldn't make enough AirPods Pro. And they asked him, as the analysts always do, I love it. They're like, when do you think you're going to get in balance with the AirPods Pro? And Tim said, I don't know. Like literally,

we can't make them fast enough to sell them. And then the other thing that was an interesting tidbit is also in this quarter, they couldn't make enough series three Apple Watches because it turns out you sell an Apple Watch for $199. People get really interested in that Apple Watch who maybe didn't do it before, which is probably one of the reasons why 75% of Apple Watch purchases in the quarter were to people who had never had an Apple Watch before. That's wild. That is a wild statistic. That's pretty good for them. Yeah. Yeah wild statistic. That's pretty good for them. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Keep in mind, they're almost certainly in the Apple ecosystem because you can't buy an Apple Watch without an iPhone. Although Tim Cook did say he has some suspicion that at least some of the people who are buying into the Apple Watch, they're doing it as a, I want to get an iPhone so that I can get an Apple Watch.

I'm sure there is a little bit of that. But there are so many iPhones out there that there's a huge group of iPhone users who Apple can still kind of finally break down the barriers and sell them an Apple Watch. And the fact that I'm sure the Apple Watch Series 5 did well, but the fact that the Series 3 that they did not anticipate its demand, he said that one is back in balance or they think it'll be back in balance this quarter. They'll make enough of them. But what a great sign that is, right? That Apple didn't expect the demand.

And $199 or $299 for cellular, but let's, I mean, I imagine the bulk of it is the $199. Having a cheap Apple Watch, it's a big deal. I would also say, well, I don't think this would be such a huge driver, but I bet there was definitely a difference because of the amount of variance Apple offered in the Series 5 with the different materials.

They were able to maybe cover a larger market for price. Yeah. Right? Yeah. No, that's it. That's exactly it. This is the Tim Cook strategy, right, which is let's leave that older model around at a low price so that people have a way in. And I think it works.

And honestly, that Series 3 Apple Watch is great. What you're missing is you're missing the bigger display and the always-on. And yeah, there's some other things, but it's really great. And for $199, yeah, that's actually a great deal. And you're in Fitbit territory then, which is good for Apple to be down there. So it's no wonder that it did well. But then for people that won it, you can go up to $1,000 or more. Exactly.

And they have more options there now than they did before. Totally. And then on the AirPod side, what we said before, if you're Apple and you're looking at this, how could you not be like, let's pour as much. This is hot. Let's do as much as we possibly can because we have struck on something with this stuff. And people make, you know, sometimes people roll their eyes about services, which we're going to get to because services is sort of not traditionally Apple. And it's sort of like selling more things into existing apple customers but i think wearables which has actually been growing faster than services because it's starting from a lower point but growing faster than

services for the last two plus three almost years um these are apple products right these are core apple products apple doing what it does well and having them be received well in the market yeah and you gotta you gotta right we all have our fiefdoms right you know you're a mac person or ipad person or whatever your fiefdom ends up being but both services and wearables made significantly more money this quarter than both of those products right like apple probably made more money in wearables than they did in iPads. Like, sorry, in AirPods than they did in iPads, right? Like $10 billion they made

and they made like six on the iPad and seven on the Mac. Like these are not just growth areas. They are areas that are actually making them more money. Like, you know, and if you're thinking about like a fiscally responsible company, like a company responsible to its shareholders, keep doing it because as well, we're going to talk about the Apple report card

later on as well. Apple's customers, including people that are like critically thinking about Apple, people that are really tied to their fiefdoms, the areas that are scoring like to their fiefdoms, the areas that are scoring like the highest on the report card is like wearables because the products are so good. So why would you not continue to pour money into that? So I think we're going to obviously going to continue to see that. Plus services up 17% to $12.7 billion. It now accounts for 14% of Apple's overall business,

which is more than any other product line except for the iPhone, of course. It's twice the size of the iPad, almost twice the size of the Mac. Apple's gross margin on products, so their physical products that they sell is 34.2%. Its gross margin on services is 64.4%. So they actually make more profit on services as well. Yeah. Twice as much. A dollar for dollar.

Yeah. Which is, you know, look, you got to think about what this company is now. This company is an iPhone company that wants to give you headphones and have you watch their TV shows. This is primarily who Apple is now and that's totally good games right like totally good but but it's just worth remembering um there were this is this

is a wild one to me all this growth it came from outside of asia which is not what we've seen when apple's had big growth in the past you know big growth in the past you You know, big growth in the past, you can tie it to Asia, but they were actually flat year over year in the Asian territories. A lot of growth in America, growth in Europe and elsewhere. But that was a surprise to me when I was looking through the results. And I think probably Apple's pretty happy about that

because they've been able to show that they can turn growth, they can turn the key to make their products better, to make people want them, not just because they've been able to show that they can turn growth, they can turn the key to make their products better, to make people want them, not just because they tap into markets where there's lots of people who don't have their products. Right. So I think that that was,

this is probably a good shackle for them to, to shed in this quarter. And then, I mean, they did turn around. They actually showed growth in China, which is, which is, they were down the last few, few like last year, um which is they were down the last few few like last year

plus they were down um they were down in japan which is weird because that's one of their stronger markets there was a question in the analyst call about that and it sounds like japan just went through a big phone unbundling like um like the u.s did a few years ago where you can't there's only so much the carriers can embed. And then beyond that, you have to buy it. And what Tim Cook basically said was, you know, that means that there's sticker shock and we have to put in the trade-in programs and people are going to hold their phones longer and then it's all going to work out. But he said, you know, Japan's a great market for us. And then like China, not only did the iPhone kind of come back in China, but Apple is,

we talked about in the early days of the iPhone, the halo effect from first off the iPod, but the iPhone about people getting into Apple through that product and then buying Macs and iPads. That's happening in China still. Like he said that they are selling a huge number of Macs and iPads, like records in China. huge number of Macs and iPads like records in China. And that's because Apple, you know, is there with the iPhone and that iPhones were all among the like top six sellers in China in the quarter of phones that it's benefiting their other products. So they're, they have lots of positive stories in a bunch of places. But yeah yeah um japan they definitely took kind of a whack but

yeah us and europe this was by far just like a way way better quarter than they've had in a while estimates for q2 are between 63 to 67 billion uh which would be the largest ever q2 in revenue be another be another record if they did it. Now, it's a wider guidance than they normally do because they're a little concerned about the coronavirus, especially given their operations in China. They decided to be a little more conservative there and provide wider guidance.

But they're guiding, and this is, I've said it before, every three months we say this, this is what the Wall Street people look at. The Wall Street people are good to have their confirmations or or to find out if apple over or undershot for the holidays but what they really want to know because the stock prices are all based on the future is what does apple think they're going to do in the current quarter when they report it in three months and they said yeah it's going to be a record and they're going to they're going to grow. They're going to have another growth quarter after this one.

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invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, it has happened again. Jason Snell has compiled and published the Six Colors report card for what is, I was surprised to see, the fifth year that you've been doing this?

Is that right? Yeah, well. That was a surprise to me. It's the fifth year we've been doing this too. I know, but I didn't remember. I knew that, but I didn't remember that the report card has been going for this period, for that amount of time too.

So it was a really great idea that you had. It wasn't my wasn't my idea it's koi vin uh the designer who said i've been looking for a sucker who thinks that this is a good idea and we do it every year and i was like well i just started my site let's try it and uh so now i have to do it every year which is fine it's good well it's a good thing but i'll say you were a smart man for taking it because this was one of those things that now like people look forward to it um and it always generates you know i think probably quite is quite successful i always see people talking about and publishing yeah people talk about it it was on tech meme which

is kind of fun and uh there's always at least one person who thinks all of the quotes in it are me so they send me their comments about the things that i said that i didn't say because why do you say that it's hilarious every time also i would say for those who haven't read through it, I tried to intersperse. My panelists said some funny things. So there are some laugh out loud moments in there. I laughed many, many times in the compiling of it. And thank you to CGB Gray for the funniest moment

in the entire thing. Give me a book, I'll read it. I don't want to find out which one that is. So you send out this survey to a vast group of individuals and commenters in the apple community you ask them to grade apple in a series of areas on a one to five scale uh then you take in all of that so as we do we typically will go through the report card well we have gone through the report card every year on the show so it's also become like a little tradition here too i broke from tradition this time uh in the past i have never given you quotes for the the report card this time i did uh you didn't do anything with them but uh i will now read them

all to you on the show i gotta reword the thing i put a thing in about like whether you wanted to be quoted or not and you check the box of don't quote me so i didn't quote you so yeah we'll have to work on that for next time well that was that was my fault then, wasn't it? Because I did not want that to be the case. But what I did was I knew that no matter what, right, you're not going to use everything I say verbatim. That's hilarious that I took that box. But because I will now, I will read them to you

along with giving my personal scores and I want to get your scores as well. Okay. I also didn't vote or participate so this will be new so that's why i want i want to get the the raw jason snell scores on this this episode so we'll go through each category i've picked out a few uh the comments that i think sum up a lot of the views that people had um and oh i just thought were interesting um so we can talk through any of those if you want to. And then I will get your scores, your comments,

and then I'll give my score and my comment as well for each category. So we'll start with the Mac. It scored 3.6 out of 5 overall, which is up 0.2 from last year. The new keyboard in the 16-inch was praised, I think, because people are happy, but there are still reservations held by the community about this. So, for example, Christina Warren said they should

have sorted the keyboard out faster and also should have been more transparent about the issue itself. And John Maltz, I think, put it quite nicely. You shouldn't get that much credit simply for fixing your long-term mistakes. I thought they were very succinct there and it made a lot of sense to me. There were a lot of people, a lot of people in the hardware category, which we'll get to. This was, this was a theme, which is a lot of my panelists were like, I'm glad that they fixed the butterfly keyboard on that one MacBook pro, but do I really want to grade them up for fixing a problem that they should have fixed several years ago? And it's still in the other laptops that was sort of a so it's like everybody's optimistic about it and saw it as a good sign but it's not sure they want to give them a lot of credit for it because it was

lingering the whole year i do give them credit but we'll get to that in a bit uh john syracuse says the mac pro is a bright spot in apple's 2019 a long expected party for high-end Mac users. Apple has listened to its customers that can always use more power and expandability and are willing to pay for it. And John Gruber says, I don't know a single expert Mac user who is not seriously annoyed by the heavy-handed security design of macOS Catalina.

So Jason, I would like to know your score out of five for the Mac and any comments that you have for it. Well, I'm just making it up now because I literally don't vote. I think I'm going to score now. I want you to give it to me now. Yeah. Yeah.

I, I'm going to give it a three. So I'm going to, I'm going to score it lower than the, than the average. For, for, so here are the reasons. The MacBook Air and the 13 inch MacBook Pro continue to ship with the butterfly keyboard. It's great that they fixed it on the one. I am not going to give Apple credit for fixing something that was a mistake they made more than two years ago and that have failed to rectify over all of this time. That has tarnished the brand of the MacBook and Apple and made a lot of users really unhappy. We're going to come to it later with software,

but like Catalina difficult beta when it ships, you know, the 32 bit apps are away. Catalyst has been a disappointment. You know, I, all I can say is it's great. I think they're positioned well for next year,

but I can't give them credit for turning it around in the last couple of months. The Mac Pro is great. I'll also point out that although John Syracuse is right, there's a party for high-end Mac users, he's also right when he says it's long expected. Apple promised that Mac Pro more than two years ago, and they shipped it on the last month of 2019. So I'm not going

to give them a lot of credit for that. I'm glad they finally did it, but that took forever to come out too. So yeah, that's, I give it a three. I'm going to be harsher than the panel, I think. I'm kinder than you and the panel at large. I give the Mac a four this year. Honestly, for me, if Catalina wasn't what Catalina was i think i would have scored it well i definitely would have scored it higher than a four sure because you know i feel like that this wasn't good like catalina overall wasn't good there were a lot of issues with it and again we will actually touch on this again in a little bit uh but and i just feel like it really kind of sucked the air out of the room with the Mac this year. I agree.

I think that Apple have done a really great job with Mac hardware this year. I will give them credit for fixing the laptops. I mean, I'm not going to punish them for not fixing them, but I'm also not going to give them credit for fixing them quite yet, because they're not all fixed. That's the other problem is they're not all fixed. We make some assumptions, but I really want to see that keyboard out of all of the laptops in 2020.

I am some assumptions, but I really want to see that keyboard out of all of the laptops. I am making assumptions, but basically my feeling is that I would not have been surprised if Apple never fixed it, because they may have never considered it quote-unquote broken. Well, that's why they get a 3, and if they don't fix it next year, that's why they'll get another bad score, and the anger of the panel. And I also do rate them for the Mac Pro. I think that that is really incredible hardware. And I know that they, you know, I know what you're saying about

it was promised a long time ago, but that was, but I also feel like they deserve credit for that even because they told us basically when they started the project. So that was like a good thing to have done then and i think honestly like i know people don't like the price and i get it but people that are interested and are and or willing to pay the money for this machine

they're getting like one of the best macs maybe ever made for what it does right like it's incredibly powerful and incredibly expandable like i i am genuinely very excited about that computer like it maybe maybe like if i wasn't such an ipad person now there may be a mac pro sitting under my desk like if i was as heavy into the mac as i used to be i think that i would struggle to have resisted it right like in the same way basically what happened to steven hackett uh let's talk about the iphone overall four up 0.1 federico verdici says the iphone 11 pro camera has made me fall in love with taking pictures on my iphone all over again carolina milanesi says the strongest portfolio yet i particularly like the iphone 11 being their mass market option

aimed at younger users as well as more price conscious ones and steven hackett says i'm not sure what lessons apple needs to learn over the release of ios 13 but i hope that we won't see another cycle like this one jason what is your score and comments please yeah i'm gonna give it a four um and for the same reason said i think that this is an incredibly strong hardware line i really like the iphone 11 um my my daughter took one off to college it's great and she still loves it um the camera stuff was really great they did what they needed to do to upgrade the camera and this would be a five but for the debacle of ios 13 yeah i'm a four and basically for the the same reasons this is the most compelling lineup of iphones since they changed to the design model.

And I say this in such a way, it's like, well, yeah, of course it is. But I don't, you know, looking back, like the XS wasn't really that much more over the X, really. You know, but like the 11, I think has really stepped up. Like whilst looking the same, I think is like maybe more than many phones in a long time has actually really

earned its number change like i i understand that people think of these designs as incremental changes but the increment quote-unquote incremental changes that they made to the camera and the battery this year were huge like really big like changes the way i use my phone kind of changes and they don't come along very often like just the battery alone the way that it changes how i use my phone is really amazing for me so i give it a four it would have got four marks if ios 13 wouldn't have been so buggy if ios 13 would have just come out and was as stable as it should have been this would have been a four marks from me um but because the ios 13 itself i don't have any problems with i had problems with how bad it was right from a from a quality perspective when released so move on to the ipad overall 3.9

down 0.1 year over year davindra harwa says the new ipad is a tremendous deal it's getting to a point where every gadget geek should own one. This is like the regular iPad. Casey List says iPad OS is definitely a step in the right direction. And David Sparks says we just need Apple to keep the gas down on iPad OS improvements. John Gruber says to say that I am not a fan of iPad OS is an understatement. Getting the split screen and slide over stuff to work is utterly unintuitive. It's madness. And Federico Vittici says,

there's still plenty left to address, from refinements to multi-window and the files app to bigger questions that are looming large over the iPad's role in Apple's ecosystem. What have you got, Jason? I'm going to say four again for a lot of the same reasons. By the way, John Gruber,

over the 10th anniversary of the iPad, he wrote a lot about the iPad stuff. And it's funny because I hadn't seen much of that before because it was his submission. And then he kind of like riffed on it. And I ended up coming up with this after the fact. put those two quotes from gruber and vatici together because there's somebody who doesn't get the ipad and doesn't like it and there's somebody there who loves the ipad and uses it all the time and people are always like oh you guys should argue about the ipad like well john and federico not basically agree i mean federico puts a more positive spin on it but like they both are saying there's more work to do here and as as David Sparks said, you named this thing iPadOS, so now are you going to keep the improvements coming rather than taking another year off? And that's my concern. But this year they did add a bunch of improvements that I wanted.

I think it could be better. I'm looking forward to a new iPad Pro. Their hardware lineup for the iPad is spectacular. We talk about the apple watch and and uh having a low-end product and a high-end product and having a little bit of a range the ipad has a better range than any product line i think that apple provides it's you know that that cheap ipad um like one of my panelists i didn't put in the in the uh the story but one of my panelists says, you know, we bought a couple of iPads, low model iPads for

cheap at Costco. And it's like, that should be an option, right? Like you should be able to go from that, an iPad at Costco, all the way up to the iPad Pro. So for almost five, I feel like iOS 13 and the fact that some of the iPadOS quirks are still there. There were some letdowns. The file stuff that got introduced is still not really consistent, which is frustrating. I was just trying to connect to my local server via SMB today, which is a feature of iOS 13. It just didn't work.

So there's more work to be done. But otherwise, know generally super positive and four out of five yeah i give it a four two i'm happy that ipad os exists and cursor support has been huge for me this year i'm really really excited about it i'm so happy they added that feature um that's something i've wanted for a while and it's made big changes for me this year i think multi-window is the worst part of iPadOS because it just isn't implemented properly. And I want to see them do the tweaks to that that they have done to multitasking.

I understand that people don't like multitasking, but I kind of disagree with a lot of the criticism. I feel like all computer systems are unintuitive until you learn them. And it's just like a general feeling about how you learn them and what it's just like a general feeling about how you learn them and what works for you and what doesn't. I think that, honestly, I think it is a little harsh to just blanket call it unintuitive. I don't think that's accurate to just say it as a

fact. I feel like it's better when these things are placed as opinion, because I use my iPad to great effect every day and find it so much easier to use than the Mac. I'll give you an example, Jason, that just like in a general, like how frustrating is this to use? I'm using my MacBook Pro today and I wanted to have two Chrome windows side by side and I had to like sit and drag each one of them until I could get them at the right sizes to fill up half of the screen, right? Because's just like window management stuff you should use moom by the way for many tricks right but that's the thing what so i have to install third-party software to get split screen to work properly like this is just a i feel like this is a you either comment it one way or another

yeah and you have different and because everybody understands things they'll use these things differently but i don't i have not not enjoyed the rhetoric of the last week where there is just iPad is a failure. You're an idiot for using it. And everything they do is wrong. And I just feel like this is the perception that is then whipped up, right? And I just, I don't agree with it

is basically what I want to say. Yeah, I think that's, I don't entirely agree with it, but I think there's plenty to criticize. I agree that there is want to say. Yeah, I think that's, I don't entirely agree with it, but I think there's plenty to criticize. I agree that there is plenty to criticize. And as you said, I think it's also true that if you've ever looked at somebody who's a novice computer user using Mac,

you'll see just how unintuitive the Mac is too. Everything's got their issues. I had a back and forth with Dave Naney and software developer yesterday where he basically said, if I had all my Apple devices, the one I'd give up is the iPad. And I said, that's funny. I did give up my laptop. But the point that I thought was good that came out of that was the Mac is built around multi-window, lots of things floating in your face, multitasking. And that's the primary use of it ever since they introduced multitasking on the Mac.

And really since they had multi-window from the beginning. And the iPad is fundamentally, its default is a full screen. And I think Mac full screen is actually really weird and bad. And I think multitasking on iPad is weird and sometimes very frustrating. And I think we can all say that.

Like, they're different. They're different. How about that? Yeah, I think that the bones of multi-window are there, but they need to do a better job of making it more intuitive. Like, the multi-window stuff was not implemented very well. But multitasking, the bones of iPad multitasking, I think are there and all they need to do is just refine on it.

It is by no means a solved issue, like all of the multi-app stuff on iPad. But I think that where they are right now is more than usable. And the reason I know this is because I use it every day to run my company. Me too. Yep. Anyway, Apple Watch. than usable and the reason i know this is because i use it every day to run my company so yep yep anyway apple watch overall 4.1 down 0.2 uh lex freeman says i love the apple watch series 5 so much my favorite feature is the time it tells me the time all the time which is just a very great

lex quote but like just really perfectly says why why the best feature of the Apple Watch Series 5 is the always-on display. And as Dan Provost says, the significance of the always-on display cannot be overstated. Stephen Hackett says, the always-on display has brought me back to the Apple Watch. It fundamentally changed the way I think about the Apple Watch for the better. Carolina Milanesi says, Apple owns the smartwatch category. Apple Watch is no accessory. That is no accessory. That is very true.

I mean, and Carolina, very smart analyst, and has said that. And then we come to the earnings report, and then Tim Cook saying, yeah, people buy iPhones because of Apple Watches. So she nailed that one completely, right? Like, it is not an accessory. It's actually a driver for them for some people now. And CGP Grey says about the Apple Watch,

let's not even talk about apple watch faces five years on and nothing really actionable is being done with all the health data that it has as well so gray is complaining about watch faces and health data what if what where are you with this jason um apple watch i you know, I never give the top rating to anything because you can always be better. And you've seen that cause I keep giving things fours. So, uh, you know, I kinda, I'll say four again. I, I, I really like Apple Watch series five. I think they ticked the last box in terms of like the features that they needed to, that they needed to do that, like fundamentally make this product what it needs to be.

Plus, the Series 3 is still available at $199, which is pretty good. Watch OS update. All the OS updates were a little bit shaky, and we'll see where it goes from here, but I think it was a good year for the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch achieves one of my lower ratings. I give it a three.

The Apple Watch achieves one of my lower ratings. I give it a three. The Apple Watch hardware is incredible. So the Series 5 hardware is absolutely fantastic in the way it is built, the options that they have for it now. And I have the white ceramic, which I love that thing just to look at it. And the always on screen is the only reason that I would consider ever wearing an Apple Watch.

And just as an update, I wear it. So I tend to rotate my watches that I own. I own four watches now, including the Apple Watch. And I wear them like a week at a time. I just will leave one on for a week unless I want one for a specific reason. And my Apple Watch is still in that rotation. I will wear it, and I'm very happy to wear it.

But the watch faces are just poor still, right? Like I'm not happy with the customization ability of the Apple watch face when it is a computer. In theory, you should be able to do a million things with it, right? Like I feel like they are not giving enough customization to what could be very customizable. Notification preferences are still a nightmare

to the point that I think Apple's never going to do anything to really make the best that they can of granularity of notification on that device. And they should have added sleep tracking by now, and I honestly can't believe they haven't done that. So I think watchOS, I think, is pulling, and it has pulled the Apple Watch down for me. I think they haven't done enough on watchOS.

I think they're putting a lot of really great resources and time into the hardware, and the major watchOS features that are being added are necessary for their hardware improvements. I don't think they're doing enough about the actual operating system itself and the fundamentals of it. So that's where I am with Apple Watch. Okay. Wearables is a 4.6 overall, and you added wearables as a new category this year, right?

You split it out from just Apple Watch. Yeah, well, wearables is now a category in a way that it wasn't when I started the survey, and I have never changed a survey category before, but what I decided to do is add in wearables with an eye toward possibly removing apple watch at some point and using the historic data from wearables but in order to keep that uh data continuous i need to kind of have them both live there for a while so

i think it makes sense to have them separate honestly because like i don't think of the apple watch as wearables in the way that apple does i know that's how they count but yeah um but like i i do think of it as different because like none of the other wearable products have an operating system that developers can make apps for yet right so like i i feel like that adds a different area to this but so wearables got a 4.6 um josh centers says i think it's impressive that apple is selling out of the 250 wireless earbuds that they make uh steven aquino says that airpods pro are without a doubt his favorite apple product of the year and christina warren says the airpods pro are an incredible upgrade in almost every single way and are a great example of quintessential apple refinement what is your score for wearables? I'm going to give it

a five. I get that. Me too. Five. Like there's not, there's nothing else to say. I'll say I gave the four to the Apple watch and you know, you throw in the AirPods and let's just round it all the way up to five because the AirPods are great. And we have talked about them at length here. The original AirPods were the most kind of quintessentially Apple product, as Christina said, in a long time, and the AirPods Pro kind of continue that. And the fact that they're both out there, and so they've got, again, a range. You can get the cheaper product. You can get the higher-end product with the noise canceling. More, please, right? Like for people who want over-ear headphones, let's do that. Let's see what that product looks like. But they're firing on all cylinders. They're

really good at this. It makes me really curious and a little bit trepidatious about what they are thinking about augmented reality, because that's a wearable too. And part of me thinks I don't entirely understand what that product is going to be and how it would be rolled out whenever it might be rolled out. And part of me thinks, well, they are doing a really good job with wearables. So maybe they've got this down. I don't know. they are doing a really good job with wearables so maybe they've got this down i don't know and then apple tv uh overall 2.7 which is up 0.1 from last year adam angst says talk about

ignored technology marco ahmet says the tv app changed but still an unintuitive buggy mess designed like a magazine instead of usable software fitting in nicely with the rest of tv os Yeah, I'm going to give it a three, but that's because I like what happened this year where Apple rolled out the TV app on other platforms. I feel like I'm starting to define what the Apple TV category is a little differently and have it include not just the hardware. I think looking at the results, there are two ways to view this. And one is to view it as a question about that little black box.

And another is a question about sort of like Apple as a TV platform. And Apple as a TV platform came a long way because they're on other devices for the first time, because you can get access to your Apple streaming service, but also like your iTunes movies and like all of that stuff is available on all sorts of TVs and other streaming boxes. And I think it's a big deal. The Apple TV itself is fine, but it's not great. The remote is not great. I don't have as big a problem with some of the interface stuff as other people do. I think it's a perfectly fine thing. Somebody in the survey said, it's the Apple product I use the most. And I hate it. Basically, I had two panelists who said that the Apple TV feels like something

Amazon would have shipped because it's all about selling you other things, which is, I think, a really good burn that both Rob Griffiths and Josh Centers came up with. So, you know, it's mixed and it's overpriced. Like, that's the other thing of the hardware, the Apple TV hardware. I understand maybe having a premium product like that, that provides premium features if you want to spend more money. I'm unclear on how premium it really is. It doesn't seem like it does a whole lot more other than giving you access to Apple's app ecosystem. Then, I mean, I bought a 4K Amazon Fire Stick for like 25 bucks for my daughter's room for the TV that we put in there now that she's not in there most of the time.

And, you know, 25 bucks. And is it as good as the Apple TV 4K? No, but it was $25. And it has an Apple TV app on it. So, yeah. Yeah, it's a tough one. I think the hardware I'd rate a lot lower, but I do like what they did with their approach to apps

with getting them on other platforms. I gave it a three. I had no comment. It's just like what it is what it is a three with great reservations and uh yeah this is one of those categories it's very much like everybody kind of went like just yeah i should have graded it lower but i kind of was just apathetic to it rather than annoyed if they hadn't rolled out those apps on other platforms i probably would have called this two but um or one but i i like that i like that apple broke out of right now this was a year where apple said

apple tv is not just gonna be inside that little black box yeah and i and i am happy that they made that decision because you know it would have been ridiculously stupid to do this any other way right like apple tv plus will not work if apple locked it down to their hardware like it never would it never will never succeed that way right um and i was pleased that they had the forethought to break from their traditional ways of doing things to embrace making applications for other platforms like you know we've seen apple do this in the past when it benefited them. iTunes is a great example. They put iTunes on Windows because they wanted to sell iPods.

They put the TV app on TVs and other devices because they want people to watch their content. And it's the only way they can get the world to watch their content is by making it available to everyone, in theory. So I'm pleased that they did it all right let's take a break and we'll continue with the report card this episode is also brought to you by kiwi co if you have kids you know how great it is when you can find something for them to do that is educational and fun which is a difficult balance to make coming up with

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project of all of the supplies that they need to challenge themselves creatively their crates come with everything that you need all of the supplies for that month's project detailed easy to follow instructions written for kids and an educational magazine to go alongside it i recently built one of these uh kiwi co crates with a little person in my life and we had a fantastic time we built this like grabber thing which is still kicking around at home which is just like fun i see this thing you could just pick stuff up with it the instructions are really well done i was very impressed with the way that they implement things like using stickers to mark out areas and giving you these little templates

so you can make sure you get things positioned in the right ways i could really feel when going through this like the level at which they had created the instructions it rivaled like lego like they felt better than even lego instructions because it felt like they had been tested and tested to the point where they have foreseen some of the issues that you might have when putting it together. Really cool. I was very impressed. KiwiCo is a convenient, affordable way to encourage your children to be anything they want to be. There's no commitment. You can cancel any time. Monthly options start at $16.95 a month, including shipping. You can go to kiwico.com slash upgrade and you'll get your first month for free.

That's k-i-w-i That's kiwico.com upgrade. Every day counts when it comes to making a difference, so don't miss out on this opportunity. That is kiwico.com upgrade to get your first month for free. Our thanks to KiwiCo for their support of Upgrade and all of RelayFM. So we now move into services. Overall, 3.7, up 0.5 on last year. Carolina Melanese said that the weakest link in the services portfolio is Apple News+.

John Gruber says that they mostly nailed Apple TV+. The one-year free promotion is just what the doctor ordered for a new service with a very limited library of content. James Thompson says Apple Arcade is an aggressively priced service with significantly more good games on it than I have time to play. And Dan Morris says, Apple Card has been fine, not as revolutionary as could have been hoped, but also about what was expected. Jason, where are you on services?

So Apple Pay and Apple Card, yes. Apple TV Plus, yes. As everybody pointed out, Apple News Plus, no. No. Flop. Yeah. Bad. Apple Arcade, yes.

So, I don't know. I'm going to say four. Four. I feel like they're doing a good job with most of their services, with the exceptions of free five gigabytes of iCloud backup and Apple News+, which was a joke. Yeah, for me, I actually give it a five because I'm ignoring Apple News+.

I'm just ignoring it. Honestly, I just don't even think that it counts. Okay. I know that's a peculiar thing to say, but it's just like the rest of their portfolio is so good that I feel like it outbalances Apple News+, in my opinion, because TV Plus has delivered

two of my favorite TV shows the last year, and Apple Arcade has an incredible lineup for such a low price like i really feel that these two services met and exceeded my expectations uh in a way that i thought that apple services overall lineup this year is one of the most compelling things that they've done uh and i think is is going to set them up really well. So I was very, very proud. I'm very, very pleased, I should say, with what happened there and so I would rate it that highly. Alright. So going to HomeKit and Home. Oh, everybody's favorite category. This is not good, this one. It's overall

down 0.1. It's at category. It's overall down 0.1. It's at 2.8. So 2.8 out of 5. Marco Womack says the Home app is still an over-designed, form-over-function, unintuitive mess. Marco's not pulling his punches on this one. And Stephen Hackett says HomeKit

continues to move at a glacial pace. I tried HomeKit's secure video and it is nowhere near ready. Yep. Yep. I mean, I think Apple has progressed with HomeKit, but they're doing it incredibly slowly. Glacial place is about right.

They are finally opening it up. They've got the new standards body that they're trying to build with their competitors. Was it CHOP? CHIP. Connected Home over IP? Chip and Chop? Yeah.

Chip Chop. So, yeah. Joy? That's good. The Home app is a mess. There are incredible inconsistencies if you try to use it. There are features it has, but they're really inconsistent. It's very weird.

There's just... It's... I want to like it and I use it, but using it makes me like it less and less through time. So I think there's some signs that they may have finally figured out the right way forward here. But this feels like one of those areas where Apple had big plans

and then just had no follow-through. And we're all left kind of hanging. So two. I give it a two as well. Poor design, poor device offerings overall. Adoption is super slow. Nothing significant has been added. And anything that has been added this year

has not worked out very well. And we passed the year without any router companies adopting the secure router router project even though multiple companies said that they would like we we went the entire year and none of that happened uh and the video secure video stuff seems to have been a bit of a disaster honestly so the intentions are there but they are not delivering and i do hope that uh choy will change that for them yeah in the future but they're also going to need to upgrade their HomeKit game.

I've gone into it, I think, on this podcast, but I've spent some time the last couple of weeks tinkering around with my HomeKit to try and make it smarter. And all I'm finding is that it is super inconsistent and frustrating and things that it says that it does, it kind of doesn't do. And, you know, it's, yeah, I want it to be it does it kind of doesn't do and you know it's uh yeah i want it to be better than it is but they're going to need to improve the home features themselves in the operating systems to do that and that's that's the real mystery is are they really committed to doing

that or do they think it's good enough because it's not. Overall hardware reliability gets to 3.9, which is up 0.1 from the year before. Steve Trouton-Smith says, with the Mac keyboard issues addressed properly, I hope things are going to trend upwards. And Alex Cox says, there are still going to be butterflies flying around for far too long.

Yeah, another place where people are pointing out that, although it's great that Apple fixed this, that they still ship two laptops with the butterfly keyboard. It's not really fixed. And they're going to sell those laptops through at least part of 2020 because they're already out there. I think Apple's hardware in general is really good across the line. That's a black mark,

the keyboard on an otherwise i think pretty solid set of hardware so i'm gonna give them four out of five mostly out of spite for the keyboard but um i'm pretty happy with happy with the hardware or to put it another way hardware is not apple's problem right now i gave it a five sure i don't think about the keyboards as much as everybody else is a butterfly keyboard a little bit like apple news plus to you you're just gonna what no i don't know what you're talking about my feeling is my feeling is they've they've shown that they have it in them to fix it we haven't heard of any significant i don't think there's significantly widespread problems with the last version of the butterfly keyboard well i mean didn't steven hackett lose his delete

key he had problems yes but i said widespread like all right steven's the only person that i've seen that has had issues with that the fact that we know somebody who had problems with the new materials butter i know it makes me really worried about maybe i just don't trust steven's like laptop he needs to stop eating saltines right over his laptop but let me tell you why i come from where i come from with my five i'm thinking of the products apple released this year right so of the stuff that they released in 2019, I feel was very good. That's how I feel, right? Like, the iPhones were fantastic. The Mac Pro seems to have been great.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro seems to have been great. They released a series of products this year which were all solid. So that's kind of where I'm coming from with this one. People take it differently, right? They look at the overall category, but like if they didn't release any new laptops this year other than the 16-inch MacBook Pro, right? New materials, MacBook Pros in the spring.

Yeah, but I mean like new, new, but anyway, yeah, so get your point. But I feel like for me- And the i get your point but i i i the i max those fat the speed bar speed bump of the imax the new mac pro yeah i feel like i feel like of the stuff that was released in 2019 it was excellent also it's hardware reliability it's hardware so it's like also it's the iphone and the ipad and the apple watch and like they're killing it on all of those fronts yeah yeah and that's that's where I'm coming to it from like my personal outlook is like no I think they did a really good job this year so because there was no like widespread issues with the iPhones right people

are always looking for them and there wasn't one this year which is a big surprise overall software quality is 2.7 down 0.7 CGP Grey says it's been a brutally buggy year renee ritchie says ios 12 should be the new normal laurie gill says this year shows an example of how it's better to ship late and ship right than to ship on time with the risk of a poor user experience and james thompson says something failed significantly in apple's software engineering process this year, and I hope lessons have been learned. Jason? Yeah. I mean, it's hard not to argue.

This is my feeling, is the software. Apple is a company that is, in many cases when you look at it, appears to be incredibly well optimized and organized. to be incredibly well optimized and organized. They buy components in advance based on the projections for the availability of those components. They have factories that they've got a shipping setup. They are so, their supply chain for hardware, their hardware design stuff, you know, occasionally there's a thing like an air power, but although that's more of a mistake of announcing a product before it was ready. But so much of Apple we look at and we think, this is a really well-run company making great products, and that's why it makes a huge

amount of money. The software group, as anybody who's a keen observer of Apple will tell you, as anybody who's a keen observer of Apple will tell you, seems like it's a complete mess. And I know it's hard. And we've talked about reasons why. I suspect that at its core, part of what's going on here is that Apple is bad at hiring and that they're understaffed. One of the other lines in the story was Dr. Drang, who said,

from the outside, it looks as if the Apple software team just keeps running from fire to fire, an understaffed group barely able to take a breath between crises. And that rings true to me. Anybody who knows people who've been approached to be hired by Apple or has gone through an Apple hiring process, it seems super long and inefficient and slow and confusing. And I think Apple is still running itself like it's got the ambitions of 2009. And what we said earlier about HomeKit, that line about how it's a question about like, did they just kind of build something and then think it's good enough and run off to the next fire is really, I think, endemic within a lot of Apple software where it feels like there's nobody. They build something.

It's buggy. It's got problems. And then they just walk away for a year or longer. And it's hard to tell when you're on the outside looking in because it is kind of a black box, which is why I like James's quote, which is something failed significantly. And I hope they learned their lesson. And that's kind of all you can say. I don't want to provide a prescription because I don't know the details,

but I will say that if I had to list like all of the portions of Apple's business that I can view from afar, one of them seems to be broken. And it's software. And it's all software it's operating systems it's it's the apis for developers it's the user features it's the beta process it's their third party apps there's something really wrong there and whatever it, I hope they fix it. But more than that, I hope they don't fix it for a year and then break it again. Because one of the most mind boggling statistics in this entire

thing is software quality over time by my panel. Because they got a 3.4 in 2016, and it dropped precipitously to a 2.7 in 2017. And then it went up to a 3.4 in 2018, and then dropped back down to 2.7 for 2019, which means we've done this twice now where they've had a good year and then a terrible year. And there's been a huge swing. And the lesson here is getting us a good year is not good enough. You need to be consistent and Apple is unable to be consistent with software quality. So, two. Yeah, I completely agree with everything that you said.

I give it a two as well. It has been a very bad year. I feel like it has been plagued with problems and what has actually been shipped by and large, even if there weren't problems wouldn't have been that incredible like you look at catalina catalina's problem was not that it was full of bugs its problem was that like that some of the steps that apple have taken

it's just not good right like a lot of security stuff it's just like really frustrating and very difficult right and it's not been great for users and it seems like it's very good for some of the stuff apple wants to do in the future but that doesn't always translate to being a very nice user experience and ios 13 on the iphone didn't really get a lot i mean dark mode's great i'm happy to have it like i really love it but in regards like new features for ios there wasn't a ton and they didn't really deliver on any of them in a stable way so you know i i can't help but agree with laurie to just be like you know i understand why you have to ship on time, but really Apple should have a better fallback mechanism.

You know, isn't that the famous thing about like, you can have it like you can have a cheaper, good or fast and you can choose to pick two. Yeah. Because I mentioned, I don't think they have enough developers. And some of that is also their policy of like so many things they want core in Cupertino

and it's very expensive to live in the Bay Area and like their cultural issues that I think that they could address to have a bigger and perhaps more distributed set of teams working on their software that Apple culturally has been reluctant to do. It's not that they don't do it. Steve Jobs was very reluctant to do it, as we know from him telling James Thompson to move to California or leave. But it's not just that. And I think there's probably some management and some processes. But the third part of that, of the choose two is time, right? And that's what Lori's quote is about, which is part of the problem here is Apple's annual schedule, where everything has to happen, announce in June, betas over the summer,

ship in September with the iPhone, and then Mac and ship a little bit later, but not too much later, because the features are all tied together. And that's the other part of this is like, can we blame the developers who might know exactly how buggy their software is, for their management saying it doesn't matter, you have to ship it. Like i i don't think you can so it's all of these things and i don't know like what's easier for apple to do change their entire shipping concept change what they put in releases and slow down the pace of releases which requires them to really swallow their pride about um rolling out new features that are going to blow people away

um so like hire more people, slow down the releases, uncouple themselves from this annual calendar that they built up for themselves. They can do these things, but what do they choose to do? Or what I fear is the case, do they choose to just kind of fake it and apologize and slow down for a year? And then everybody forgets that they slowed down and say, well,'s been two years now we need to push it again and then we have another bad year because that's the cycle they're in now is good year bad year tick tock it's not it's not appropriate it's bad yeah it's just like maybe if they had a way to somehow release ios 13 like three or four weeks later things would have been way better but

they couldn't do that because they had the iPhone but then that begs the question of should there have been a better contingency plan than the one they had which was release a buggy version of iOS 13 which was so buggy that they actually didn't release it to everybody right like we're not going to release the one that shipped on the iPhone and then alert people to some of the updates, right? Because they didn't want people to install them. It's like, if that is your contingency plan, I'm sure you have seen now that you probably need a more full contingency plan, right?

Like, maybe when this wasn't a problem before, then your contingency plan, which is the one that they seem to roll out this year would be fine but then when you actually put that contingency plan into effect you realize that it's not great so maybe you need something more developer relations 3.4 it's the same

didn't change Casey List says Apple's documentation is insultingly bad and or non-existent if apple wants third-party developers like myself to embrace new technologies the answer can't be watch a wwdc video then get out a divining rod and hope for the best they need to provide documentation for all of these new apis no excuses and paul kafasa says notarization of mac os apps has thus far worked out better than I would have expected. So long as Apple uses a very light touch with this, it can be a win for users and developers.

Nevertheless, I live in fear of a capricious use of this to kill something legitimate that Apple simply dislikes. Yeah, this, when we launched the survey, there were a lot of really big app store and app review complaints, which got addressed. And so the survey started at its low, which was a 2.2. And the average has gone up to 3.1 and then 3.6. And now it's been sort of leveled out at 3.4 for the last couple of years. So this is one of those things that I'm not sure I would have put on the survey if I was creating it this year. But it was a real pain point back in 2015. creating it this year, but it was a real pain point back in 2015. And I think the answer is Apple's doing better at this, but there are still issues. It's not quite the house is on fire like it was, but there are still a bunch of issues. Casey's thing about documentation. Steve Trout

and Smith talked about how perhaps governing bodies really do need to regulate the app store and, you know, and set the rules so that Apple has to change its behavior in times of killing apps or categories of apps. Yeah, I think I'll give it a, I'm not a developer, so I should probably even not answer, but from the outside, I would say I'll give this a i give this a three like there are issues but also it's not a mess like it was a few years ago i gave this a four i feel like i maybe graded it too highly the reason i gave it a four is because i don't have any personal attachment to this one right like i don't get frustrated because of my lack of relations with my developer rep because i don't have one because i don't need one um and i kind of based it on the fact that like i can't recall any scandals in 2019 right like that there

are these as we have you mentioned and seen in the past right like these big problems that had occurred that sort of stuff has mostly gone away and it's frustrations now i would maybe if i look like thinking about it now reading the comments from the report i would maybe grade it a three after getting like information from people that care right like after reading the opinions of others but i originally graded it four but i would amend that to a three i think just because it's like things seem fine but there's still work to be done and the work that needs to be done seems to not be being done, and is only causing more issues, stuff like the documentation. They've been talking a lot about that on ATP over the last month or so,

and I kind of didn't really know how bad of a situation that was until I heard people talking about it. And we're at the final category now, which is societal impact. This is overall 3.3, down 0.4. I have quite a lot of comments here because there's a lot of areas that this touches on. So Philip Michael says, I hope Tim Cook likes being featured in Donald Trump re-election ads

because footage of him standing next to Trump in an Apple factory heaping praise on the economy is going to get replayed roughly a billion times between now and November. Carolina Milanesi says, I really expect more from Tim Cook than letting himself be manipulated into an election campaign photo moment.

Christina Warren says, I was personally disappointed by Apple's decisions to bow to China a few times this year, especially in regards to the Hong Kong protests. Stephen Aquino says, In terms of accessibility, Apple continues to push forward both product-wise and in general advocacy.

The introduction of C is at the forefront of this. It is very much representative of the company's institutional love for accessibility and the disabled community. Aline Sims says, Apple is, as always, stellar at accessibility. Voice control introduced with iOS 13 enables people with disabilities

to do more than ever before. I'm still not impressed with the diversity and inclusion statistics. Jim McDonald says, I'm glad to see Apple promoting its second year of entrepreneur camp for companies with women founders, CEOs, and lead developers. Yeah, this is a category that has, it's an empty vessel into which the panelists pour their sentiment

about whether Apple is lifting up to its own lofty goals as a corporation, its ideals, right? And what it's about changes every year. I think when we started, it was about environmentalism and also the conditions in factories in China. That was a hot topic. And it's been about green power. It's been about diversity and inclusion. It's been about accessibility. It's about anything. It really is. But this year, it's been about diversity and inclusion. It's been about accessibility. It's about anything. But this year it's about politics. Yeah.

And this year it's not just about that, but that was the one that bubbled to the surface. I think two big issues, because it really is about is Apple living up to its ideals because Apple says it is a company and promotes that it is a company that wants to be good and change the world and leave the world a better place. And so this is sort of holding them to that.

And the two trends in the comments this year were, first off, working with Donald Trump and the American government and, or as what James Thompson said, you know, authoritarian and corrupt governments. Read that to refer to whatever governments you prefer. governments read that to refer to whatever governments you prefer um that that was part of it and trump going to that factory that wasn't actually an apple factory and having that photo op with tim apple um that was a thing that came up again and again um and and working with china and suppressing that app in hong kong and then the uh other thing that uh that came up was privacy and security and things like encryption and being an advocate for user privacy and user encryption and things that will allow people to keep their phones as a relatively private space that they can use to communicate with other people and not be viewed by their government or other governments and have their private things brought out into public knowledge or at least into government knowledge. And Apple is generally seen positively in the one light, the last one. And in the first one, it took a hit this year. I'm going to give it down the road. My score would be probably a three

because I think there are areas where Apple is living up to its promise and there are areas where it's falling down. And so sticking it in the middle is probably the right way to do it. I think as we've said on this show, Tim Cook basically has to be a diplomat. He has to deal with the government of China and the government of the United States. He literally has to be a diplomat to the two most powerful governments in the world who have their own desires. And he has to try to walk a line so that he can continue to have his company stay in business. And the challenge is sometimes that pragmatism leads him to make decisions that make a bunch of people feel like he's letting us down and he's letting Apple's overall values down. And this is the, I think, inherent contradiction in any corporation talking about their idealism is that it's great for corporations

to have idealism and belief and want to leave the world a better place. But they're also publicly held profit-driven corporations owned by shareholders and the shareholders want profit and growth. And it's easy to have ideals when they don't conflict with profit and growth. But when there's that moment where it's like, oh, no, what happens if we are cut off from the Chinese market? The answer is they will make decisions to not do that. And those will not necessarily be in line with their ideals as tim cook has talked about he said we think it's better to be in the country and involved than to turn our back on it but i think there's a real strong case to be made that's the other direction so i'm just going to park it at three and say um it's a mixed bag it's a mixed bag i gave it a three i would usually want

to give it much higher and like i really struggled over this because I have very, very strong opinions in this area. As like listeners of this show have definitely heard over the last few months, but I struggled to grade it much lower because like Apple is, their environmental stuff is so good, right. Compared to other,

to a lot of other companies. And I also struggled because I appreciate the situation that Tim Cook is in to a point. He is a world leader without a world to lead. He is effectively as important as the prime ministers, the presidents of countries, in his importance to the world as it stands right now, because Apple is so vast.

Their influence is so great but the way that he has handled has had to handle himself this year has been embarrassing right like the mac pro and trump thing it's very embarrassing the hong kong china stuff is just like really out of the character that he seems to have set for himself he is appears to be a very principled person but has the importance of world leaders but i feel like he is letting some of that like his political standing win out in favor of his principles. And that is changing a lot of the way that we see him. And it's for the sake of the shareholders,

right? Because he seems to have, he is very outspoken in places that he can be where it's not going to have too much of an impact on the company, but there are places where he could be more out like he could have been way more outspoken in regards to the uh donald trump stuff which would make sense for his like what seems to be his political views to be more outspoken but he is not being because of how difficult it will make other like the tariff stuff for him where it's

like well apple also could have even could have taken a smaller profit margin right and just ate the cost of the tariffs if they wanted to but that affects the shareholder stuff that affects the stock price it affects revenue and profit so they didn't do that it's like well okay so where where did it where are the lines drawn for tim cook and his principles and i think this is the thing that we're all struggling with this year and I am struggling with because it's this duality that I can't

reconcile myself with properly yet so that's kind of where I am this year with this stuff so that's the report card I think that you know there's lots of frustrations there's nothing hugely monumental this year so like the the variances are small like the things that the software quality taking a dive is really the story yeah of the whole thing even the dive that it took was not absolutely massive right well in terms of this survey, it is.

The survey doesn't change by, and I'll say services up by half a point is on average is actually also a fairly large thing. Moving by five to seven tenths of a point is big in terms of the survey. So the software quality going down is big and the services going up is big.

Okay. All right. Should we do some last upgrade to wrap out today's episode great idea all right let me thank squarespace for their support of this show you can make your next move with squarespace because they will let you easily create a website for your next project or idea you can grab a unique domain name customize award-winning templates and so much more giving you an all-in-one platform that will let you put any project that you want online

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next website. Okay. The first hashtag askupgrade question of today's show is from Graham. Graham says, if you had Apple's money, is there a company that you would buy just for the fun of it?

Well, for the fun of it, if I had Apple's money is a real great question does that mean what would i like apple to buy or what would i buy as a person with apple's money i'm expecting it's like you are in charge of the money at apple what would you do with that money i'm jason apple at that point apple yeah okay all right well well i mean first and this is kind of breaks the entire premise is i'd spend like a billion dollars on the incomparable incorporated and pay myself that. And then I would, but if that's not allowed, cause I'm already working at Apple, apparently. Um, the one I came up with is Viacom CBS. I think Apple should buy some

content companies with, with content libraries and build out Apple TV plus to be more than just their originals. Now they, they seem to be going down a direction where they're happy to be HBO because HBO isn't anymore or isn't going to be anymore and just do like premium originals. But I feel like one of the challenges is that they don't have franchises. So they could buy like MGM maybe,

they could buy Viacom, CBS. There's some, they could get some stuff. And not only would they have catalog for their streaming service, but they would have franchise stuff that they could get some stuff and not only would they have catalog for their, their streaming service, but they would have franchise stuff that they could build out. So imagine, you know, having the daily show and having star Trek and, you know, having, if they buy an MGM, you know, having James Bond, um, and not just the archives, but maybe there's a James Bond, uh, series on Apple TV plus like to do that stuff,

they're probably going to have to buy some of these smaller companies that are going to get swallowed up by one of the big companies in the media space. And the nice thing is that Apple is not Disney or Comcast or Warner Media. It doesn't have an existing equivalent of this. So we could probably collect some of

these small players and build something. So if I had Apple's money, that's what I'd do. I mean, I've seen people say, oh, or you could just buy Netflix. I'm like, yeah, I don't think Apple wants to do that or would do that. Although that would be interesting if they had the money to do that. But I think they could buy ViacomCBS and MGM and Sony Entertainment maybe and make themselves a media giant by doing that. Put Spider-Man on Apple TV+. Yeah, well, I mean, but Disney. Disney, so they'd have Sony but not Disney, and so would they?

I don't know. We'll see. Dropbox. Yeah. Because I want both iCloud Drive to be better at what it should do and dropbox to be better or i want it to do so i would like to see apple buy dropbox and use all of their good technology and integrate it better and get rid of the stuff that i don't care about okay for fun for fun and for my own usefulness. Sure. Sarah asked a question building on a question from last week's episode.

So Sarah says, may I ask, what is the benefit of using 1Password over Keychain built into iOS and macOS? I've used Keychain for a while and I'm wondering if it would benefit me to switch to 1Password. So I feel that Keychain has gotten way better, right? Yes. On iOS especially, a lot of the stuff, like the recommended password stuff, and that's been really great. Actually, one of my favorite features of iOS 12 and 13 is all of the improvements they're doing to password stuff,

especially with Keychain. But I know I'm speaking for you too, in that my one password usage predates these improvements so i have years and years of information in there that's not in keychain but also you can save more information so notes but i also have banking info and stuff and you can't you can save cards in keychain but you can't save the verification numbers so you still need those right but dropbox you can save all that stuff and pre-fill it and have it filled for you.

But you can also save like bank account numbers and stuff like that. OnePassword is also cross-platform. So if when I use Windows or Android, I can also get to OnePassword, which I can't with Keychain. And I also find OnePassword nicer to navigate. I've heard many say this before and I agree.

Apple should make a keychain app now. It's becoming more and more useful to be able to look at keychain and you have to go into multi-levels of settings. They should just make their own version of 1Password at this point I feel like.

You could save more information into it if you wanted to but just having a passwords app on the phone, I think would be nicer. Yeah, I agree. Have I given enough there? Yeah, I think that's solid. Right. There's, I've always got that question. Like, would I use 1Password now if Keychain was as full featured as it is now? I think you should start with Keychain, but 1Password does have some other stuff. And if you're cross-platform, you need to use 1Password. But keychain has gotten so much better that yes i have had those questions

myself of course now you can set one password to use the autofill api and turn off keychain so you can get those features within one password so you can choose yeah that was built like you know i know some of the people on that team um so I feel like I can say this from a place of authority, that was built by people who care about people's security more than how good their own features are. Because that is such a good feature set to be able to just pre-fill all those passwords. Apple could have just kept it for themselves,

but opening it up so other companies can do that with the quick type keyboard thing is really awesome and i'm so pleased that they did that because it does promote better security like i have more um secure passwords now than i ever have before because i can just pre-fill them with keychain and it's easy for me to to get to them that way right like for for like if i buy something from some website that I've never used before and may never use again, but I set up an account,

usually I'll just throw in some like standard password or whatever. But now I just have randomized huge passwords for them all because it's so easy to do. But then I can also very easily using the same system, pull up my one password stuff.

So I'm very happy that they implemented it that way. Yep. Fuzan says, if you could bring any Apple product feature to the entire 2020 lineup from watch to Mac Pro, what would you choose and why? This can be new feature, old feature, whatever you want.

I have so many things that I want to do. So I'm going to do the classic technique of talking about three things, but only picking one of them. That's good. That's good. So you cover all your bases. Yeah.

So OLED on the iPad Pro, that would be beautiful. Yeah, because then it would, and then I guess the Mac as well, right, would be also what you'd be getting out of that if you're bringing it to the entire lineup, because it'd be nice to get all those screens on the Mac. Why not? I guess, yeah, I guess is the is the tricky thing here um multi-touch because it would go on the mac okay um apple pencil i'm thinking more about iphone

but why not apple pencil on anything whatever apple pencil on a big trackpad or on the screen right it'd be nice and um scissor keyboard and that yes that means the ipad pro yes yes it does and the i just all scissor keyboard on the mac well you it would be an option you can get a scissor keyboard and attach it to the iphone but i wouldn't recommend it but if i had to go across the entire line instead of tactically yeah i might say oled i might say uh apple pencil yeah i would like high refresh rate displays great answer promotion yeah everywhere all the things i really desperately want that for the 2020 iphone i'll be super i was willing to let it go with the 2019 phone but like that ipad that ipad pro motion display is so good yeah i'll be so disappointed if

they do not put that in the iphone this year uh and finally today today asks which apple executives tell all book are you most excited to read and this is assuming that they will obviously write them but let's just assume that from this question that every apple executive ever is going to write a tell-all book which book do you want to read most you go first i want johnny ives book i think he has the most interesting story to tell right like we still want stories about steve and we know he has stories that nobody else has right like you just know that because he was his closest collaborator right like he has stories about steve jobs that i want to hear but nobody in you know has had the kind of history at apple that johnny's

had you know like he's been there for so long and he was there since it was failing. And I know you've got people like Phil Schiller who have been there for the same period of time. But the impact that Johnny and I have had, the way that you could tie so many of... Well, you can tie basically pretty much all of Apple's success to him in some way because people love Apple's design and he

did it. I want to hear the story of iOS 7, right? Like, what was that like from his perspective, from being given the task to do it, doing it and how it went? Like, what was it like building the campus? Like, I want to know all of that from him. You know know why did he never want to go on stage i want to know what he has to say about all that stuff i would love love to read his book i'm gonna say phil schiller just because i mean johnny i've i absolutely agree i would love that although you know what johnny i've tell all book will be it's just going to be pictures with no captions hey as long as the pictures are detailed enough as long as the pictures are detailed enough, as long as these pictures can tell all,

I have no problem on that. Yeah, it's like that Apple history book that they released. That's just pictures. But I'll go with Schiller because Phil Schiller's been at Apple a long time. Phil Schiller was very close to Steve Jobs. He's a marketing guy, but he's more than a marketing guy. But he is at the heart of everything that apple has done over the last 20 years i would want to read schiller's book to find out

why his actual job is right because his job title at this point doesn't make sense but it feels like it's never really made sense like you say, it feels like he is involved with everything. Well, marketing means something different at Apple. It does. To a certain degree. It was embedded into their entire company, right? They are a marketing company. I do have one additional one to throw in here.

Scott Forstall. Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, I think Scott Forstall's tell-all book would be fascinating, and we might get that if he wants to do it, since at some point he'll be presumably contractually free to say whatever he wants about what happened at Apple. I really want them all to write books one day. I agree. For history's sake, right?

It would be nice to know what actually happened at Apple. I was going to mention maybe Johnny Sruji or somebody involved. I want somebody involved in the chip thing. I would love to hear the story of PA Semi being bought by Apple and how Apple became the preeminent mobile chip maker in the world. I would love to hear that story. And again, these don't have to be tell-all books, but those are the best chances to get them right. Because otherwise you can have a journalistic book about it, but you're going to need lots of people to talk who are your sources, and that's always hard. So that would be the other way to view this is, I don't necessarily need it to be a tell-all book, but I want more views into the history of a lot of different things that Apple has done over the last 25 years.

And we've only gotten a handful so far, but you got to think there will be more at some point we could throw like john rubenstein in there too i think his his book would be fascinating because then he went to palm and that all kind of fell apart and like i think that would be i think ruby's book would be an interesting one too i want autobiographies of all of these people like i want i want autobiographies i don't want biographies right like or like official isaacson books like i want johnny ive for as much as it is him writing his own book and telling me everything like that's what i want i'm probably of everyone i don't think he would do it i feel like there are many other executives that would be more likely to do it i don't think he would do it because he seems so private right like i just can't imagine him doing it, although

I would love it. Alright, that wraps up this week's bumper episode of Upgrade. If you want to catch our show notes, go to relay.fm.com. You can find Jason online at sixcolors.com, theincomparable.com. He has many shows here at

Relay.fm, as I do. You can go to relay.fm.com to find out more about the product offering that we have for you. We'll all score five out of five on the RelayFM report card. Jason is at Jason L on Twitter. I am

I'm Mike. I am YKE. Thanks so much to Pingdom, KiwiCo, and Squarespace for the support of this episode. Most of all, thank you for listening. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. I give you a five out of five as a co-host, Mike. Oh, thank you.