Upgrade - 294: The Phone Was Full of Sawdust

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Apple tweaks the Mac's battery settings, a new iPhone SE arrives, the first reviews of the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro are in, and Apple's over-ear AirPods seem to be creeping closer.

for relay fm this is upgrade episode 294 today's show is brought to you by linode doordash and express vpn my name is mike hurley i am joined by jason snow hi jason snow hi mike hurley another week down you know that doesn't work as well when you don't know how many weeks are left. Fun. It's strange. It's just another one down. Another, yeah. Oh, it was definitely down.

Yes. It's like you can mark it on the wall, you know, that the week is done and you can put your little line. Yep. Get ready to cross off the next one. In fact, I believe that was week five. So we got to finally, after making four scratches downward on our wall, we now make one across.

Excellent. We have a hashtag Snell Talk question from David, and David wants to know, Jason, you're a sports fan. Are you watching any sports replays since there aren't any live games on right now? Oh. You know. There are no podcasters I feel more sorry for than sports podcasters. Oh, yeah, right.

And I feel bad for sports writers. And yeah, so that's rough. Like that is rough. Because your whole subject matter has ceased. Like if Apple came out and said, oh, no, we're just going to we're going to skip this year out. It's not we would be in trouble. I don't think we would be, though,

because people would still be using their technology every day to do their jobs this is like what if all computers just turned off yes for a year i mean we don't have no one could use them in regards to podcast distribution but yes i get your point indeed but so sports writers that i've seen have been uh pretty they're trying to be really creative and and that's great and coming up with you're talking about history and interviewing people and doing profiles of people who are up with you're talking about history and interviewing people and doing profiles of people who are like how are they staying in shape and what are they planning and a lot of speculation but it's really hard because that is a whole industry that is shut down and if you cover that industry that's really rough um i have watched one uh sports

replay a couple weekends ago i put a world World Series game, a Giants World Series game from 2012 on in the background and just kind of, it was nice to have the rhythm of baseball and baseball announcers and stuff happening. But that's all that I've done, mostly because I've just had other stuff to do. And I might yet do that again, just to get that feeling because this is, you know, baseball is my favorite sport. And a couple weeks ago, we should have started again after the whole winter of offseason. And instead, there's no baseball and there's no sign that there will be baseball anytime soon. And it's really depressing, honestly. But I haven't yet rectified that with uh with very many replays um i have some radio some old

radio broadcasts from the early part of the the previous decade when the giants were in the playoffs and the world series and all that and i've been thinking about playing those because then they can just be in the background and like the tv i'm not sure a replay of an old sports uh game or match or whatever is holds my attention enough for it to be on tv if that makes any sense like if it's playing out in real time and i know what happened and i'm just watching like that's a level of focus that i don't think i could provide so putting it on the background if i'm in a scenario where i could have it on the background but not super paying attention to it i might do that and radio similarly uh is actually pretty good at just having it on the background and getting the sort of pleasant vibes of the sport going on even though it's not without right focus because i'm not going to spend three hours

focusing on a baseball game that i know everything that happened in it what's gonna happen next yeah it kind of takes it out a little bit exactly like there might be a couple of games that you you know like really important games to you that you might want to watch that way so that's i did i did one of those and actually there was another game that i watched of some of i watched some of the last two or three innings of and it was a it was a world series game that was very dramatic and and teams were on their like last strike to win the world series and then saved it and then came back. And it went back and forth.

It was in 2011. And during that game, that was game six of the 2011 World Series, I was doing a podcast. And so I'm just doing a podcast with the TV on in the background, silent. And every time one of these incredible swings in in in fate happened i couldn't react right so i'm sort of silently going yeah while we're having a talk about like uh i don't know a science fiction novel or something like that for the incomparable and uh i had never watched that game other than in silence while recording a podcast and so i did actually watch the last three three innings or whatever of that, just to see all of the drama that happened and actually

hear the announcers talk about it. Cause I'd missed that. So that's two, but, but in general, it's, you know, I like the idea of reliving past sort of sport things, but it doesn't, it doesn't really work for me because, uh, I want to focus on it i can't focus on it because it's there's not enough there for me to to apply my focus to so i'm trying to you know consider ways of using it as just just background sound to make it feel a little more normal yeah this was the first year that me and adina were gonna get into f1 seriously after watching the excellent netflix documentary drive to survive um obviously f1 got cancelled but something that's happening in f1 is a lot of the racers like the the actual formula

one drivers are racing in the formula one video game and streaming it and so like that's happening in a lot of different sports where like the actual people that play the sports are playing the video games of the sports which is also kind of funny because some of them are good but some of them are not right yes and so you get this like one of you know some of the best formula one race drivers cannot play the game and and it adds it like kind of messes things up a little bit which is fun yeah that's that's good they're doing that with um major league baseball is having baseball players play the um mlb the show video game and uh similar thing i'm not watching that but i'm seeing some highlights of that that i think are kind of fun and in the newspapers i should also say the newspapers and and like local sports websites around here um there are a few different

sim seasons going on where like the san francisco chronicle is using a uh a baseball game uh and who is simulating their they're simulating the entire season as it was originally scheduled and so they will every day have a little report about what happened yesterday and what the current standings in quotes are um which i think is another fun it's a fun idea um and they've even had a couple of things where they've had uh the local broadcasters broadcast kind of the they're they're calling the video game as if it was a real game which is kind of fun but again it's not that fun like i get it and it's a nice idea and if you want to hear those voices and all that, but it's not the same. It's something fun to tide you over if you're looking for it,

but I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily then be like, oh, I won't find something else to do with the time I was going to watch baseball. And so it's nice to have the option. By the way, if you're missing racing at all, then there are hours of Gels Mar gels marble runs on youtube for you to watch have you seen gels marble runs i have seen those yeah they're the best it is the best because it is everything that is true and not true about sports um because you watch it's great the

announcers are great they just had a new thing where they have a partnership with an auto race circuit, which is what, Formula E, I think. And what I'll say is you'll find yourself telling stories and narratives about the grittiness of the competitors and getting really excited when one competitor does well and really excited when another competitor fails. And the other part of your brain is saying, but they're just marbles. They're not real. They're not people. This is amazing. They're literally just... They're calling them Marbula One.

Marbula One, yes. They used to have the Marblelympics, but they had to change the name because the Olympic Games didn't appreciate it. But the Marblelympics are also great. It's just people, if you haven't seen Gels Marble Runs, just go watch it if you miss sports especially because it's it's truly amazing um it yeah i love it and

yes they are just marbles that's part of the fun of it is that you get really into it and then you and and the announcer will say things like oh really smart move there by so and so and you're like it's a marble that's great okay that that seems like a lot of fun i'm gonna have to find one of these all right so uh thank you so much to david for sending in that snell talk question uh if you would like to send in a question to start the show just tweet with the hashtag snell talk it'll be included in a list for future consideration. On last week's show, you mentioned that rumors were making you feel some sort of sense of normality, because

the rumor mill continues to move on, and it is moving on further. So I wanted to give some additional details and corroborations that came out after Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu's iPhone 12 article from last week. There is a YouTuber, EverythingApplePro,

who has shown off a leaked schematic of the upcoming iPhone 12 Pro Max. This is expected to have been generated sometime in January and was kind of leaked out of Foxconn and given to a case manufacturer. It was then soldered on. So it corroborates a lot of the rumors that we spoke about last week. So we've got the flat sides of the iphone 12 pro max but the actual device will be thinner down from uh like it's like a to 7.4 millimeters from 8.1 millimeters but the screen is bigger so there will be significantly reduced bezels on the next phones like a% reduction based on these schematics, which is really interesting.

I didn't really think about the iPhone getting reduced bezels. It's a thing that's happening by other manufacturers, but this wasn't really something that I considered. So I'm intrigued to see what that's going to end up looking like and how that's going to be usable, if this is the case.

Changes to the camera bump. So instead of it being that like multi-tiered thing right now where you've got the square and then the lenses that stick out on the top that's just going to be flat um and then also something that's intriguing is that the sim card tray is apparently moving to the other side and there's some kind of connector of some description that appears to be on the other side of the device. Some people are saying it's a smart connector. Some people are saying that it isn't, but it's just intriguing to see this device. I think the thing that's the most, I'm most excited about here is like the physical changes. So it gets this one, which is the ProMax

getting bigger and thinner and the bezels, like i'm really intrigued to see what that ends up looking like yeah i i think like we talked about last week the shape of this is exciting right and there have been people have done 3d mock-ups of it was like okay so take the ipad pro design and make it a phone and what does that look like and the answer is it looks great it looks great let's do this so i'd like to see that it's moving ahead here and global economics aside which they kind of can't be put aside right like nobody really knows how this is going to go but this is the kind of thing in the before time that we would have looked at and said this will also drive a big spike in ip sales because it's a substantially new looking iPhone. And a lot of people wait to buy a new iPhone until there's a new looking iPhone that just new specs

don't matter to a lot of people. They want one that looks different from their last one. And this is that, which is exciting if there are people to buy iPhones, right? Like that's the big question mark. But normally you would look at this and say, this is the kind of iPhone release that drives sales spike from the iPhone line. I think it will. Like people have been saying about this design, and it's interesting because I wouldn't have even, as I said, I didn't consider a lot of these changes that it will make the iphone look even more modern because it will have that really thin bezel design which is

appearing all over the smartphone market right now right so that is an intriguing thing at least to think that maybe apple is continuing to push the design language right like if the notch gets smaller and if the bezels get smaller the screens get bigger the phones get thinner like this is gonna be this could be a very big year for the iphone or not like i mean that's the thing right yeah it does sound like it it sounds like in terms of progression of the iphone that the iphone 12 that we're gonna just, so iPhone SE came out, right? And we'll talk about that. But that is a 6, 6S, 7, 8 phone. And then we've got the 10, 10S, 11 Pro design.

And this is going to be, if these rumors are all right, like that is an era. And then this is a new era where they don't look like that. So we're moving. Every time that happens, it's a big deal. Yeah. And that sounds like, you know, and then, yes, there's also the XR11 kind of style that continues to exist. And it sounds like will continue to exist. And it sounds like will continue to exist, but they're iterating, uh, and, and moving us away from the iPhone 10, we could call it style. Yeah. And that's, uh, that's

a big deal because that doesn't every year people expect Apple to do it, but Apple doesn't do that every year. Apple does that every three or four years. And this would be, I think like more iteration than the iPhone six design got, right? Like I think over more iteration than the iPhone 6 design got. I think over the life of the iPhone X design, it feels like it might go through more iterations that way. So that's intriguing. I think from my perspective, they're moving to a different physical design and an adaptive physical design quicker than I thought they would have

when the iPhone X was first introduced. There was also a report from Gurman & Wu at Bloomberg about Apple's high-end headphones, the upcoming headphones, the HeadPods. And apparently they're going to include interchangeable parts. So a quote from the article, the earpads and headband padding attach to the frame with the use of magnets, so they can be replaced by the user. Prototypes of the headphones have a retro look of oval-shaped ear cups that swivel

and a headband connected by thin metal arms. The arms stem from the top of the ear cups rather than from the sides. This is not the design language I was expecting, but now I've heard it it makes more sense i was assuming that it would be plastic that these headphones would be plastic to match the kind of airpods style but then when i now i think about i was like oh no they will look like beats and apple probably doesn't want to do that So this is going to be a very different looking thing with more metal in them than I would have expected,

at least exposed. There is expected, there is predicted to be two models of these headphones, one with premium fabrics and one with lighter breathable materials for sports. But you may be able to kind of Apple Watch style buy these interchangeable parts and just swap them out for what you're doing so this is a this is becoming a more interesting and uh i think advanced product than i was expecting it to be based on this report

yeah i mean i don't know i'm kind of proceeding under the assumption now that we're watching Apple take any multi-stage process to, with the success of AirPods, to basically say, you know, it's time to make a line of headphones branded as Apple and then Beats can go away. You think that they'll have Beats go away? Ultimately, I do. I think it'll take time. Ultimately, I do. I think it'll take time.

But I think step one is, can the Apple brand handle its own headphone line? Because the AirPods, as we've talked about before, the AirPods has been so successful. It's one of their most successful products. Why would you not put your foot to the gas there and say like more, do as many as we can? But I think if they can do that it does call into question why the beats line exists because they could just integrate the same kind of product

line um you know maybe maybe not but in the long run apple has not shown that they're uh really great at maintaining a you know a parallel brand that's not an apple brand but is owned and operated by apple especially if apple also makes products in that category. I just don't see how that can withstand in the long run. But again, it doesn't have to be this year. It could be a few years down the line as they, you know, the right way to do it would probably be to just grow the Apple headphones line

to the point where the Beats line doesn't make sense anymore. Instead of having people sort of be sad that it's gone, they won't care because all the Apple products are there. Yeah, I think they will probably keep Beats around until that point, right? But they're not going to keep that brand around if it's being absolutely, you know, eaten alive by the AirPods and AirPods products, right? Like that line of products or like, you know, all the other things that moves around it.

So like the headpods and potentially sport versions of all of those devices. Because, you know, as you say, if Apple's onto a winner, they'll just keep pushing it and see how many types of headphones they can make with this technology. Because the brand is so strong that it's almost iPod-like, right? With how strong because the brand is so strong that it's almost ipod like right with

it's with how strong the airpods brand is they just keep they'll keep pushing it i mean i would be i'm intrigued to see what they will actually call these overrears like i don't know how they would include an airpods name into them but it wouldn't be surprised if they did right yeah no i think i think it's most likely just because the brand name is so strong that there'll be you know apple you know airpods complete or airpods x or airpods plus yeah i mean that's what it'll be yeah and people be like well wait i thought airpods meant uh little things you stick in your in your ears and and apple will say not anymore it means whatever we want it to yeah because that's

the truth of it right is people be like well actually we define airpods as being and apple be like no and then everybody else will be like all right i guess that's not what it means anymore it's their word it's their product if they redefine it people will just go along with it like i mean it's not they couldn't they're not going to make over your headphones and call them like Mac Pro, right? That, okay, that would be silly. But to say these are also headphones, but they're different and they're also AirPods because that's the product line we have,

people go along with it. It's not a big deal. All right, this episode is brought to you by Linode. Whether you're working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's infrastructure, Linode has the pricing, support, and scale that you need to take your project to the next level. Linode have 11 data centers worldwide,

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Can you explain what this is all about? Yes, I won tech meme, Mike. I, yeah, it was kind of weird. So yeah, there was a minor, let's back it up. Apple put a new feature in Mac OS, but they put it in the developer beta the second developer beta of 10 15 5 but i'll tell you apple has gotten a lot more savvy about accepting the fact that when they do a a secret feature in a developer release everybody will know about it immediately like the final release is not the time if you want to break the news. So they broke the news alongside the developer preview release of 10.15.5. Also, the other piece of this puzzle is

if you recall back a few years, Apple got in a lot of trouble by making changes to the way batteries work on the iPhone and not telling anybody. Yep. And then people noticed things were different and they started asking questions and it became like a little mini scandal. And then you had to do all the battery replacements for like super cheap. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. So I think Apple learned the lesson there that you should be pretty transparent about making changes that involve batteries. If they hadn't learned that lesson, something terrible would happen, right? Like, it seemed pretty obvious that that was something

they should pay attention to for the future just because of how much... It really played into the idea, right, of Apple making your devices worse, that is like this conspiracy theory that people have that they believe there's that planned obsolescence thing and that real that that story really fed into that didn't know oh those people are still like the the conspiracy theories are still out there but anyway so what apple did was apple released to this developer release and um

alongside it they briefed some people including including me, about what was in it. And what was in it is a new feature called battery health management. So essentially, what they've done is they've changed the default charging behavior on MacBooks that have Thunderbolt 3 ports. So it's Touch Bar Era MacBook Pros and the Retina MacBook Air. So you don't have to have a touch bar on your macbook pro it could be the macbook escape that didn't have one but it's that from that era forward and the retina macbook air so you've got to have thunderbolt 3 ports and uh all of those now have a totally different uh charging algorithm basically and they're looking at the temperature of the battery and they're looking at your temperature of the battery and they're looking

at your history of like when you charge it and how uh deep you deplete it when you're using it and i the way i read this is um they were unhappy with the way mac os handled laptops sitting in a semi-permanent uh plugged in, right? Which a lot of laptops do. They're sitting on your desk and they're always plugged in and occasionally you'll disconnect it. And when you do, you disconnect it and you use it somewhere and you drain it 5% or 15% and then you plug it back in. And batteries, although we like to think of computers as these wonderful binary devices, batteries are messy chemistry. And that kind of cycle is really bad for the battery chemistry. So what Apple has done is in those kinds of scenarios, when it analyzes the battery use it's changing the battery charging system

to not charge that battery as aggressively to full um and this is not anything new i mean if you've got i have an electric car it very clearly says that if you want the battery to last a long time charge it routinely to 80 and not not 100%. Also, if you have a MacBook Pro that you charge up and then you take and use and deplete its battery and then bring it back and charge it up again, the battery health management system is going to look at that and say, that's fine. Keep doing what you're doing. But in these certain circumstances, it's going to try to optimize the long-term life of a battery in a mac laptop by not as aggressively charging it to full when it's sitting there right and by the by the way

the iphone does this now uh to a certain extent like uh even when you see it at 100 it's not always actually at 100 and that's because it would be terrible for the battery if it charged it to 100% and then just kind of left it there and kept pushing it up to 100%. So there's a range at the top of the battery scale where Apple will let the battery deplete a little bit and then we'll recharge it in order to keep the battery life better. But the challenge is that from the user's perspective is like, but wait a second, I want 100%. Why is it not fully charged after it sat on the charger all night?

And the answer is because you can't do it that way. And ideally, you've got some intelligence in the software that says what you want is for it to be fully charged in the morning, and we'll charge it then, but we're not going to keep it fully charged all night because that's really bad for the battery. So, um, that all said, uh, on the Mac, the Mac has a lot of preferences, so you can turn it off. And so if, if you are uncomfortable with this idea, or if you're at a moment where you're like, yeah, but I really need it to be at a hundred percent tomorrow. Cause I'm% tomorrow because I'm going on a long trip somewhere. Let's imagine, won't we? Imagine going on a long journey somewhere.

It'll happen again someday. You could turn this off and then it'll charge to 100%. But by default, this feature is on on these particular modern Mac laptops. And what Apple says is the whole idea here is just to make the battery last a lot longer. And the conspiracy theorists will say, oh, well, this is just Apple saving itself money because it's not going to have to replace those batteries at the cost of the user's battery life on their computer.

I don't think that's really accurate because when you talk about long-term battery life, you're talking beyond the warranty period of a laptop. So I think what Apple's really doing is saying, we don't want to get a reputation of our laptops' batteries dying after three or four years when they really should last five or six years. And the way we do that is we need to charge them better in the meantime. So I don't think this is a big conspiracy where Apple's saving itself warranty replacements on batteries. Because if your battery needs a replacement in your MacBook's warranty, something is wrong with your battery.

That shouldn't happen. But I do think that this is, I mean, Apple's not acting entirely altruistically here because it's a big corporation, but I think it's more about the product should have a longer life than it does, that they're not making their money. Any money that they're making charging you for an out-of-warranty battery replacement is not going to offset people being unhappy with their product experience because they had to do an out-of-warranty battery replacement. And I think that's what their rationale is behind the scenes here. I expect that this thing is becoming more of a concern or like a thing that Apple feels

the requirement to address because of Thunderbolt. Because if you plug in a lot of devices now, it will charge your laptop, right? And that's the thing. If you have your monitor powered and then your Thunderbolt cable comes from the monitor to your laptop, it's also going to charge the laptop,

and that may not have been the case before with just a monitor cable. I don't think people generally are driving an external monitor from their laptop without plugging in their laptop. I think that they were always plugging in their laptop. But I do think this has always been an issue. And I think Apple, seriously, I think what happened is normally this would just be a different algorithm that they'd put in, macOS. They'd be like, we're going to change it. They wouldn't tell anybody.

They'd be like, hey, the guys over at the battery department have figured out this better way of doing this so we're going to roll that into an update and after what happened a couple years ago with the whole kerfuffle about the iphone battery they can't they can't do that anymore they don't feel like they can be safe because the conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork right they? They have to announce it. So they announced it. But on one level, it's really not that big a deal. Is Apple tweaking its charging system? It does that. It does that all the time. I mean, maybe not all the time, but it's done that a lot over the course of the life of Mac OS X. But this one they're announcing,

and it does have one pretty notable effect, which is if you leave your laptop plugged in all the time and you expect that the moment, the rare possibly, but the moment that you unplug it and walk away, it will be charged 100% so that you can get all of that life out of it because you really need it. It won't necessarily. That's the big change. And there's a box you can check. I wish there was even something simpler that Apple doesn't seem to have built in, but that probably a third party will, which is more like what I have on my electric car, which is you press the button and say, this time I want it to charge all the way. And then you unplug it and you walk away. And the next time you come back, it's back to the old behavior. And Apple hasn't set it up that way. You basically have to turn this feature off. I understand more why you would definitely want to override that of an electric car,

because it could be much more problematic for you if you can't have the battery at full, right? Like if you're going somewhere and you calculated, right? I need the battery full to make it there and back. But I think it also would be good to be able to more easily do that, right? Like in the menu bar or something to just hit a button next to like the battery percentage to say like charge me to 100. next to like the battery percentage to say like charge me to 100 but maybe that's more like meddling than most people need i think apple doesn't want that because apple wants you to just leave it on but i can see the appeal of saying can you fill the battery up this time and then

i'm gonna walk away because i'm going on a trip or something and i want to leave it i want to leave it uh overnight to charge fully so that in the morning i can put it in my bag at 5 a.m. and go to the airport and it'll be charged 100%. But I get the idea that they want this thing on by default. It's a little like natural scrolling too, which is like, we've completely changed the way your mouse works. And it's the right way. So it's on by default. Right. But you can turn it off if you want to do it the wrong way.

That's fine. And it's a very Apple kind of, and I appreciate that, right? Because the alternative is that they don't give you the choice. Yeah. So I appreciate that in a sub window of the energy saver system preferences pane there's a box that is battery health management and you can say no apple do not manage my battery's health and the feature gets turned off and it reverts to the old behavior so when people upgrade to 10 15 5 when that comes out it will change it will enable this by default for everybody okay yeah so it's it's in the developer beta now we'll roll out in the public beta and then there will be a 10 15 by default for everybody. By default. Okay. Yeah, so it's in the developer beta now.

It will roll out in the public beta, and then there will be a 10.15.5 update for everybody using Catalina, at which point this will become your default, and then you can turn it off. Does the system notify you about this change? I don't know. My guess is not.

My guess is that it will not notify you beyond saying in the change notes that they've added this feature which is probably why they spoke to people like you right because the people that are more likely to be upset about this are also the same people that would be paying attention to the media the technology press right like so then you may as well get the message out now so like you have the opportunity to have learned about this otherwise you probably won't ever notice it right and i think also that's why it's the default is apple strongly feels this is the right way to do it and so they're going to turn it on and if you don't care and you don't

notice and whatever it's just going to be there and your battery is going to last longer and that's what they want so that's that the story here. It will be interesting to see if somebody gins up a YouTube video or something about the horror of, I charged my MacBook all night and then I walked away and it only had 80% battery or something like that.

Well, that happens anyway, but it's all about whether those things or anybody cares about them if we already knew about them. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that is the advantage. And this is, I think think the ultimate lesson learned by apple about the battery scandal with the iphone was that was that the name battery gate it's i don't know band scandal gate battery scandal gate apple scandal battery gate

gate gate i don't know it the names are dumb but the lesson learned is you know how you stop um the conspiracy theorists and the ugly reveals and the class action lawsuits and all that you can't stop them how you minimize them is you be more transparent i mean that's the answer is if you don't tell anybody because you don't think it's a big deal and then it turns out it's a big deal or even a minor deal, then it blows up in your face. But if you just talk to a few journalists when your public beta or your developer beta comes out and say, yeah, we changed the battery setting and it gets to, you know, top of tech meme and they say, see, there it is. Then when somebody else there's like no benefit to breaking that story later because it already broke. Like this is the way it is now.

And people can debate it, but it's not the same as a secret being revealed. And the fact is Apple needs to do more of their defensive PR because people are on the offensive trying to find those things about Apple and Apple's decisions. And so I take this as actually kind of a good sign of that because we can talk about the defensive PR and people being on the offensive

trying to find things that are wrong with Apple. But if you're a user of the products, Apple being clearer about what they're doing, I think it's good. Like that's good. Yes. Tell us you made a change. Tell us why you made it. about what they're doing, I think it's good. Like, that's good. Yes. Tell us you made a change. Tell us why you made it.

And better yet, give us a box to turn it off, and we move on with our lives. Great. Before we take our next break, I have a few headlines about Apple and COVID-19. So remember the face shield design that they made, like that face shield apple has now actually published the design and specification of this face shield for other manufacturers to make

but there it's full of want this page is full of warnings basically saying unless you are a professional unless you have professional level expertise in manufacturing please don't make this so i think what they're saying is if you have a 3d printer don't do this right or like don't try and cut this out with a piece of plastic right this is for they have published a reference design for other manufacturers to make if they haven't already made a design of their own right which is like a great thing to have it's like look we did this we know it works if you have the tools you can take our design and make it rather than also needing to test and that kind of stuff. So that's available. Apple is publishing anonymized data displaying how its users are using Apple Maps.

They're publishing trend graphs of navigation requests by walking, driving or public transport. So you can go to this website, which I'll put in the show notes. It's apple.com slash COVID-19 slash mobility. And you can enter in your city and you can see on a graph how these requests are changing. So it was like fascinating for me to go to this website and type in London and see the like huge decline in requests from the baseline we're like minus 87 transit right now now of course what apple's doing here is like the best thing that they can do without there being privacy issues which is to not be tracking people right so it's like they're not tracking who's using maps just in general or tracking people as they're moving around. It's just like requests for navigation.

So the data isn't complete, right? Like you're not getting in that the people that are traveling by train every day or car every day who know their journey, right? That aren't needing to check how to get to a place. But you're seeing a lot of people and it gives you an idea. It's just like an interesting thing to have. They're also offering this data for download if you want to analyze it and use it in other forms, which is interesting.

And finally, Tim Cook recently held a virtual meeting with Apple employees to update them on how the company is dealing with all of this. He stated that while this will affect Apple financially, they see no long-term concern for the company, obviously, because they have all the cash in the world. They are continuing to heavily invest in research and development during this period of time. And Cook says he doesn't know when Apple employees can return to offices, but when they can, he will be checking – not he. I don't know.

Maybe Tim will be at the door. I don't know. I'm Tim. I need to take your temperature. that's what they'll be doing checking temperatures and mandating social distancing your ceo if you're the company that employs you this tim tim is my stand far away from me and stick out your tongue yeah i have a this is not a gun this is a uh i'm doing bill clinton now it's not a gun this is a temperature uh taker from remote distances and yeah you're fine move along this is tim i'm tim by the way we're all gonna have to start getting used to Clinton now. It's not a gun. This is a temperature taker from remote distances. And yeah, you're fine. Move along. This is Tim. I'm Tim, by the way. We're all going to have to start

getting used to having our temperature taken at weird places and weird times, right? I think, well, the problem is that with the asymptomatic nature of this, I'm not sure temperature taking is going to be the solution. I do wonder if what they're really going to end up having to do is do antibody screenings, basically. And say, you know, we checked

and you've got the antibodies or you or whatever it is to let people go back it's it's hard yeah this is a hard one because like just taking a temperature is not necessary it could be something but it may not be sufficient so and then apple's got this beautiful new campus which is huge but also is like giant open plan and all of that so you know how do they mandate social distancing and are they going to set up like little uh desks out in the inside of the ring like out in the in the fields out where they have that rock concert are there people going to be out there in like little tents weather's getting nicer so yeah they could they could it's

it's going to be a real challenge when they do come back. And it is very much, Apple's a rich company. They have lots of money. Investing through a downturn is a thing that they do and they have done. And they have an advantage over some other parts of the market in that they can just keep spending money at a time when other people are not spending money and they can turn it to their advantage. People are not spending money and they can turn it to their advantage. That said, this is going in some weird ways and it's going to interfere with a lot of their culture. And so that's a thing that they're really going to have to manage.

And including how do they get people back in their buildings or do they? And how does that work because apple's so committed to having people work to a fault i would say and having people work locally at places like you know at apple park and infinite loop and places like that and um do they rethink that or is this all just a way to get everybody packed back into those spaces because that's the way that they think it has to be to be at their best i don't know i think a way a lot of companies could do this and may and apple could be one of them is like well everyone's working at home now which means you can't do that so just have like half of the employees come back you know and then then you have the space right to to to have everyone be further apart from each other so you just bring back the people that must be in the office to get their work done effectively

and keep everybody else at home. And that will give you the space inside of your buildings to make sure that people are spaced out from each other a little better. Right. It's going to make meetings really weird, though. Yeah, it could also be a, you know, this group comes in Mondays and Wednesdays. Yeah, hot desk. And this group comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays. And this group comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays. And so the groups can be near, but not too near, each other who work together and need to see each other. And then these other groups, it's not ideal. I keep thinking know, they're not going to get 30 kids in a classroom. That seems unlikely to me, but I could see them having half the kids come in on two days a week

and the other half come in the other two days a week. And that's not great, but like, I feel like that those scenarios are all going to be in play. All right. Today's episode is also brought to you by DoorDash. Between never ending laundry cycles and incoming emails, you've got plenty on your to-do list. Give yourself one less thing to worry about and let DoorDash take care of your next meal. DoorDash is the app that brings you food that you're craving right now, right to your door.

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And there are all sorts of options there. And then somebody just comes to your door and drops off food and then you have food. Pretty nice, right? Yeah. Right now our listeners can get five dollars off their first order of fifteen dollars or more and zero delivery fees for their first month when you download the doordash app and use the promo code upgrade

that's five dollars off your first order and zero delivery fees for a month when you download the doordash app from the app store and use the code upgrade download it now the promo code upgrade for five dollars off your first order from door dash our thanks to door dash for their support of this show and relay fm iphone se so this uh appeared last week um and went up for sale pre-order i should say i think they start delivering at the end of this week i'll give a very quick rundown of the headlines of this device and then we can talk about our thoughts on it in a little more detail. So it is a 4.7 inch display.

It's the iPhone 8 design for the iPhone SE now. There was people wondering if this was going to be called the iPhone 9 or if it was going to be some kind of different design. No, it is the iPhone 8 with a new name. It comes in black, white and red and product red donations from the red model are now going towards coronavirus, is the iPhone 8 with a new name. It comes in black, white, and red. And product red donations from the red model are now going towards coronavirus, which is interesting.

It's been AIDS research forever, right? Product red. But right now, it's going towards tackling coronavirus. This phone obviously features Touch ID. It has a single 12-megapixel rear camera that now has portrait mode. The previous SE did not. One of the really interesting things about this device is it features an A13 chip,

which is the same as in the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. It features haptic touch, not 3D touch. It features dual SIM support and starts at $399. I would say this is the SE that we thought it would be. I want to say that at some point I landed on that it would be called the SE and not the 9, mostly because the 9 sounded like going backward. And literally, it is the iPhone SE playbook. It is what they did four years ago with the iPhone SE, which is, all right, we are still selling a low price phone down at the bottom of our price line.

That's an old model. It's too old. Now the processor is too old. It needs a spec update, but we don't really want to put a lot of effort into this because it's this old design and we're so proud of our new designs. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to take the old design and we're going to stick some upgraded hardware in it, including the most recent, the current processor. And then that one will sit there for another four years and be our low priced phone. And they did

it. That's exactly what they did four years ago. That's what they're doing now. And it means that right now the iPhone SE is an incredible value. It will be less of an incredible value in three years when it's the exact same model that they introduced last week, still on sale. But right now, and if you're on this cycle, if you're on the kind of SE cycle, which there almost is now, we've seen it twice, this is the perfect time to buy this phone because for what you get for $399 it's a spectacularly uh good deal um and this is one of those cases where i've seen a bunch of videos from people who cover all the phone market and they look at this phone and say it's kind of hard to believe because this is such a great deal there are other

android phones that are like premium with a but for a good price kind of phones and it's like but then there's this thing which is uh you know good camera does single camera portrait mode um it's doing it's got the same chip as the 11 it's got touch id for people who don't want to go to face id like there's so much to be said for it it's no it's not it's don't want to go to face id like there's so much to be said for it it's no it's not it's not the cutting edge phone at the top of apple's product line that a lot of our listeners are going to buy but i would wager that a lot of our listeners know people uh who would really love this and and think that this should be their next iphone my dad texted me last night and told me that he bought one there you go so he

was on the se before and like he is a carpenter and so his phone was just full of sawdust it was so sad he couldn't take pictures because the camera was just completely full uh and in he uh he told me oh i got it for £17 a month from Apple for two years interest-free credit. And that is an unbelievable deal. So for two years, he's paying £17 a month. People that buy the iPhone SE will keep it for two years. For sure. He's had his for three or four years now.

£17 a month like he got the 64 gigabyte because he's fine with that right also he didn't consult me on any of this uh but he got the 64 gigabyte which is great he is a big ipad pro user my dad which was a big surprise to me when he bought one of those like just out of the blue uh he calls it his pad my dad's not very technologically savvy which is why anytime he makes any of these decisions on his own it's always a surprise to me because like i also just don't know where he's getting this information from uh but like 17 pounds a month for two years interest free like that is 2020 apple in a nutshell right that they have options on price for the iPhone and you can get them direct from Apple

on these discount deals, right? It's like, you know, you could go to buy any new Apple device now and the first question is, are you trading one in, right? Like this is the new Apple, right? This is the post Angela Arendt's Apple, which she was, you know,

because it was kind of dictated that we have to change because the iPhone sales were down. You know, we've spoken about this a million times on this show. I'm sure we're going to have a great time talking about the next earnings, which are in a couple of weeks, right? These are going to be fun ones. But I just found that value, that $399 price, it's a big deal.

It's a big deal. It's a big deal. I saw somebody say on Twitter, for $750, you can get one of these and an Apple Watch Series 3 and a pair of AirPods. Yep. Like, that's pretty incredible. I did a chart last week on Friday that was the currently available from Apple iPhones. And you can see the, you know, there's the SE

and there's the XR, which is still for sale. And then there's the 11 and they kind of escalate. And then there's this big gap. And then there's the 11 Pro and the 11 Pro Max. And that's Apple, you know, knowing who its different audiences are and making phones available for all of them. So you can just kind of go through the price line up to a point and then there's a big leap.

And literally at that point, it's would you like a $1,000 phone or is that ridiculous? And if you say, well, what's in the $1,000 phone? Well, they got you. But a lot of people be like, no, no. What do you have for $400? ridiculous and if you say well what's in the thousand dollar phone well they got you but a lot of people be like no no what do you have for for 400 it's like well we got this one which keep in mind a few years ago would have been the top of the line iphone and has the top of the line iphone processor because it's the only processor that they're putting in all of those phones so it's yeah yeah so i think it's a pretty great deal i'm pleased to see that they're putting in all of those phones so it's yeah yeah so i think it's

a pretty great deal i'm pleased to see that they've done it like i know that there are people that were in the se lifestyle that are not getting what they wanted which was a small phone like it is the smallest phone but it is not a small phone anymore um but this is unfortunately like the march of progress i guess like if there was a big enough market apple would would cater to it i mean i think what it just shows is like that their data makes them believe that they should just keep making phones bigger right um but we'll see i mean there's there's rumors of different lineups this year, right? And size-wise. But overall, all of the phones that they release will be bigger than the old SE.

They're not going back to that size anymore. I think I saw some developers as well saying that they were so happy to see this going away because just developing and keeping in mind that tiny screen is really difficult now, right? If you're developing an keeping in mind that tiny screen is really difficult now right like if you're developing an app in 2020 for the 2020 phones and still needing to support the iphone sc screen size things get really complicated to do so they kind of kind of moved that stuff on yeah the whole operating system has moved on and the third-party development has moved on listening

to to developers we know talk about it like it has to go away because the range of screen sizes is so broad and it's very difficult for developers to fit things on that screen and also have good UI in all of the larger screens. And it's a diminishing size of the market. So it's like there's only so much effort they're going to put into how it looks on those screens. So it kind of has to go away. When Apple put up the pre-orders for the iPhone SE or the page itself when they announced that the product was live, they also put up pre-orders for the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, which is many weeks ahead of when we were expecting it.

This was supposed to be a May product, but it will now be, for many, an April product. Unfortunately, they are arriving with people today, but neither me or Jason has one. Mine is going to be here sometime this week. I think yours is arriving sometime within the next couple of weeks.

Who knows? It's a very wide window. I woke up and saw that it had been turned on for orders and ordered one, but who knows when's a very wide window so i i ordered i woke up and saw that it had been turned on for orders and ordered one but who knows when it will show up but they're arriving now there's been some reviews um mostly from video producers i haven't seen anybody who doesn't make video not have one of these which is you know like i haven't seen any purely written reviews of this product there seems to be video all over the place. And they're also arriving with customers as well. So there's a bunch of details.

I cannot wait to get my hands on it because even in the details that we're getting, I still feel like I can't understand exactly how this thing will feel until I use it myself. But the general kind of consensus is that it is well built, that it is a very serious piece of equipment like it does not flex it is heavy heavy so the 11 inch is 600 grams the 11 inch

keyboard so to put this in perspective the 11 inch ipad pro is 471 grams the 12.9 inch version is 710 grams compared to the ipad which is 641 the package of the 12.9 inch magic keyboard and 12.9 inch ipad pro are heavier than a macbook and approaching 13 inch macbook yeah now i want to i just want to say this because people like oh it's as heavy as a laptop uh it's the same thing with the bridge keyboards that we've been talking about for years now. And my point with the bridge keyboards, and I'll reiterate it now, is it's not a crime to turn an iPad into a laptop and have it weigh what a laptop would weigh. Because at that point, it's a laptop. would weigh because at that point point it's a laptop and you know and let's not also leave out that there's also a lighter keyboard cover that apple makes that's not as heavy as a laptop if you want that and it's a compromise in terms of the experience but it's uh better in terms of

the weight so you can make a decision there but it's not because what really bugs me is there's this, uh, max chauvinism that the, the, they believe that the only reason you would use an iPad is because it's lighter than a laptop because otherwise, why wouldn't you just use a laptop? Laptops are fundamentally better. The only reason that you're using the iPad is because it's not a laptop and that's not true. Uh, when you're using the iPad as a laptop, if it weighs as much as a laptop, that's fine.

I don't mind that my iPad and bridge keyboard put together weigh as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro because it is a 13-inch laptop at that point. Of course it does. And also there's just the physics of having to keep it all from flopping over backward. The keyboard has to weigh more. So I don't think it's that big a deal. And the clincher is, of course, you take one hand and you pop the iPad off and you walk away and now it doesn't weigh what a MacBook Pro weighs, whereas you can't tear the screen

off a MacBook Pro and use it. So people are going to be hysterical about this. I'm not surprised at all. These are heavy. I'm especially not surprised because Apple won't talk about how heavy they are. They don't want to talk about it. But of course they are. When you attach an iPad to one of these keyboards, you're making a laptop. You're making an 11 or 13 inch laptop and it weighs what it weighs. But what you get for that is all of these features. And if you don't like that, you know what? They make the smart keyboard folio that's a lot lighter. Or you don't use the keyboard at all if you don't want to use a keyboard with it. Or you attach a USB keyboard in a stand. The beauty of the iPad is that you can choose all of these different scenarios,

but there hasn't been a first-party scenario, and there hasn't been a first party scenario and there hasn't been a good scenario with a pointing device before now. And so this product fills that gap. So the more I read about this, the more I think this is exactly what I've been using the bridge keyboard to do, which is in certain circumstances, like when I'm traveling or I'm going outside or going to other places, which, again, remember that? Remember going to other places? I would use this because I wanted a writing tool. I wanted a laptop.

And then the beauty of it is then you take it off and it's not that anymore. And this seems to be pretty much the same thing. It transforms your iPad into a laptop for as long as you need it to be we have been talking on this show for a while about knowing that this had to be a heavy product otherwise it's not gonna work as advertised right like and we know this from having used as you say like products similar to this one for quite a while right like and it is exactly that idea that it needs to be heavy because i want it to be a laptop like that's the like that's the point like that's that's kind of what i'm trying to make it like i want the laptop form factor and i want everything that gives me that's why i would say be skeptical um about anybody who looks at this product and starts talking about how the iPad shouldn't be a laptop or stuff like that because that's wrong.

That's wrong. The idea of the iPad is it can be what you want it to be. And one of those things that some people want it to be sometimes is a laptop. want it to be sometimes is a laptop and this is as far as i can tell having not used one it looks like it might be the best way ever to use the ipad as a laptop and that's great so the the one of the things that we've all been i especially been wondering about is how much adjustability is in the design right like how far can i turn like can i push it back and forward and it basically seems like you have the range of from about 90 to 130 degrees in angle most people are saying that practically it goes back as far as the old smart keyboard folio did right

like that's kind of the maximum like like how far it will go back but what you do get which you don't get with the with the current products is anywhere from 90 to that level you can adjust so you can adjust it to be kind of as you want it to be i personally was hoping i think for a little bit more than that right i wanted it to go back further um so that that is it's a disappointment for me on paper but i still need to try it it is higher up so it's not just about the angle it's also about the height and the height makes the angle a little bit more acceptable but yeah it turns out we're gonna have to get this and and try it because i know that people have been frustrated by the lack of adjustability of the smart keyboard folio. The fact that it only has two angles, one of which is not acceptable for anything except watching a movie, at which point, I mean, I guess if all you have is that case, then that's what you have to do in order to watch a movie. And then the other one is okay, which is the other angle, but it's the only one that's usable. So you use it. It would be nice to have a wider range. And although it has a range

where you can adjust between those two points, we'll see if somebody, I think it was Dieter Bohn at The Verge said that if you're the kind of person who opens your laptop and pushes the angle of the screen way back, you are going to not get that experience from this. And I understand why in terms of just the physics of the weight of this thing, but it's adjustable only to a point. And that's a fair point. Yeah, like in Deeds' review,

he compares it to the surface. And it's like, well, the surface goes all the way back. And he likes that because i think he uses it on his desk a lot but in sarah teach's review she says well you know you you have more adjustability on the surface but it's horrible to use in your lap it's like uncomfortable because kickstands stink yeah so like there are pros and cons depending on how you're using it like if you're just using it on desk and desk like environments then the surface is more flexible and don't buy this product if you're if you're just using and

and we talked about it here mike and i get it upgradians get it if you're just using your ipad on a desk get a get a stand yeah you shouldn't be using it and get an external keyboard and get a magic trackpad too and you're done you don't need to make it into a laptop. You should make it into a desktop if you're using it on a desk and then just pop the iPad out and walk away. That's what you should do. But Sarah's video made me feel very happy because she handles this device the way I would handle it.

Like she just picks up the keyboard part and just like picks it up from the table. And it's just like walking around holding just the keyboard portion. And the whole thing stays together. And that's something that I want. Because that's how I carry laptops around, right? Like I just pick it up from the keyboard part, right? And then it's all stable, right? Rather than like needing to pick up the screen part.

So I kind of like that because it's like that's how I want to carry my iPad around when it's in this form factor so like i'm excited for that i do feel though like after watching these reviews and reading like what lots of people are saying about this product who have used it this feels like a very personal opinion type of device for sure sure because it is because at its core it is the challenge with reviewing something like this is you're not reviewing like you review a laptop you're reviewing 100 of the laptop experience maybe you're not reviewing like what it's like if you attach an you run a lid closed and attach an external keyboard and mouse and stuff but at that point what's what's what are

you even reviewing it's like not even there but a laptop the whole laptop experience is in the laptop with the ipad this is an accessory to a central product so like it's not for every use case it's like aggressively not for every use case so what you really need to do is kind of look at it and say like like i just said about if you're using it a desk don, don't use this. I mean, maybe you can, but if all you ever do is use it as a desk, why? You could save a lot of money and get a better experience using something else. It's for a particular use case. And what that means is it's just like when we would talk about the bridge. It's like people would not get why we had that product. And the answer is because we had a case where it made sense,

but not everybody does. Right. And there are a lot of people who probably looked at this product and thought, Oh, this is really exciting. This is awesome. I'm going to get one of these. And it turns out may not be for you. It doesn't mean it's not a bad product for what it's for, like what it's meant to do, but it's not for a lot of cases a lot of use cases the smart keyboard folio is better or an external keyboard in a stand is better or a bridge keyboard maybe even i don't know not the one with the trackpad though not with the not the one with the trackpad though no um there was two last things i wanted to mention on this before we move on for today, feature-wise, is the one-handed removability is a thing.

Like, I've watched people do it in videos that you, like in the marketing video, that you can just pick the iPad off the keyboard without touching it, which, you know, we're all wondering, like, obviously it's going to be heavy to allow that, but is it even possible, or is that just a cool marketing thing? But no, you can just pick the iPadad off of it really easily which is great and the trackpad is a physical click but it works across the entire trackpad it doesn't work just like in on the bottom area and there's two parts of that like one i'm really pleased that's the case because i would have been really upset if like it was only clicky in the bottom. It was the diving board thing, yeah. I was expecting it would be a force touch trackpad anyway.

I don't know if I was wrong to think that, but that was just what I expected it to be. I just think it's interesting that Apple's making a trackpad in 2020 that clicks physically, but I guess it's just really difficult to do in the form factor that they have but nevertheless i'm happy that the entire thing clicks because then i'm probably not going to notice any difference to my usual trackpads right um and oh i did want to say i just i saw steve

trout smith he tweeted he has his and it's like the perfect review for me so it says uh they say magic keyboard micro review if this is the accessory you've been waiting for it's perfect if you're somebody trying to force an ipad into your life when you don't need or want it to be more than a netflix player it's not going to do a lot to solve your problems yeah he also went on to say something that very much like what we just said which is baffled by people by people complaining about the 12.9 inch magic keyboard plus ipad weighing as much as a 13 inch laptop making it equivalent to a laptop is kind of the point yeah yeah even more so than any

other keyboard right like if the smart keyboard folio made it weigh as much as a laptop i would maybe raise an eyebrow but this thing has a trackpad in it as well like it is a laptop now that's what it's for this is this is the, first-party, complete, your iPad is now a laptop product that Apple has done. And it's telling, in fact, that the smart keyboard folio is still available, right? That's Apple saying, you know, not everybody wants the big heavy keyboard with the backlighting and the and the and the magic keyboard with the moving keys and the trackpad and all that's like not everybody needs this that's why you also could get this other thing that's a lot thinner and lighter i bet you i'm super excited to get mine and yeah you could expect us to be talking about this thing a lot more i think other than it's coming weeks so we've been waiting for this product for a long

time a long time and we've been trying to find ways to to make this lifestyle for ourselves and it's apple's finally made the product that will do it so that's the thing that's the thing that really hits me more than anything else is i've written a bunch of columns about using the ipad in different ways for six colors and the eyebook and exactly and i keep coming back to that idea that, you know, is Apple ever going to embrace the idea that the iPad can be used as a laptop with a pointing device and build its own thing instead of us, you know, doing things like the bridge keyboard? Build its own thing and say, yes, you can use an iPad as a laptop. And honestly, I wasn't convinced that was ever going to happen in a short period of time, in a few years' time. And that's what this is. So I'm excited.

So hopefully that they arrive and we can talk about them. Fingers crossed for them to come in tomorrow. All right. should we do some hashtag AskUpgrade questions before we finish out today? Yeah, let's do it. Alright, today's episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. Working from home, you may not be thinking the same about

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Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we have some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Graham wants to know, my partner is looking to buy an Apple Watch and is debating between the Series 3 and the Series 5. In your opinion,

is the Series 5 worth the extra money? That's a personal question. And I know that sounds like a cop-out, but what's it worth to you? Because the Series 3 is great. It's older, but it's a great value at that price. If you haven't had an Apple watch before or your partner hasn't had an apple watch before and you know that probably implies a reluctance to get into the

apple watch um the price the low price of the series 3 may be a selling point that it's not um you know it doesn't have the big screen that's really nice. The bigger screen is really nice. I like a lot of things about the Series 5. I'm happy I have one, but the Series 3 is a pretty great device on its own and is an excellent price. Like we were talking about the iPhone SE. So I think that's a real question is, is your, you know, when you're thinking about the money your partner is willing to spend or you're willing to spend for your partner about this that to me is the question because do you go for value or do you go for let's get something really nice because it's like or i think for this between this three and the five the I think the main differences are aesthetics.

Right? So if like if you, you know, I much much prefer the design of the Series 4 and the Series 5 to the Series 3 and before. And you've got the always on display now. I mean, Series 3 had LTE, didn't it? So you've got that

still. I think that's probably the main differences. So I think really, if you look at the Series 3 and you're like, I like the way this looks, and if you don't care about Always On, then you're good for it. I agree with what Jason's saying. It is very much a

personal decision. I don't know. You know what I was just about to say? Just go to the Apple Store. You can't do that. You can't try them on. This is more difficult to make these decisions now, right? If you're just using the web? Yeah. Hmm.

In my opinion, the Series 5 is worth the extra money for my own tastes, right? Because, I mean, I skipped the Apple Watch for a while, stopped wearing it, but the Series 5 gave me the reasons to come back because I liked the way it looked. I liked the options that you had in materials. And I also liked that you can always have the always on display. So as Joe in the chat room says, good point, you can still return them. So, you know, you can make your decision that way, I guess. You can try it out. If it doesn't work for you and you feel like you would want the other one,

you can still return the products. Will wants to know, what are your favorite HomeKit accessories this many years into the system? I have one, which is the Hue bulbs, and I love them. But that's the only HomeKit accessory that I have. I haven't looked. I mean, honestly, every now and then, I look for HomeKit plugs.

I don't want to replace the plug outlet, but look for the ones that sit in the middle. I can never find anything in the UK from a company that I feel like I can trust. Belkin products are completely gone here like you can't find them which is really weird like so i don't really know what's going on with home kit but i do hope that they are getting ready to change it in some way because it's not good yeah um i have a bunch in contrast to mike's uh sadness um the i love the lutron casita switches because one of my great complaints about home kit stuff is you end up with smart bulbs and

stuff and then you've got these light switches where it's sort of like, no, don't touch the light switch. If you turn off the light switch, the lights can never come back on automatically. That's the power to the smart bulb. And then the smart bulb, you have to turn off separately and you can't use the light switch to do that.

It's the worst. And the Lutron Casita switches are light switches that are smart home light switches. So I have a couple of these and I have them in my living room. My living room lights are on this. And it means that I can adjust my living room lights, turn them on and off from my iOS devices,

from my Logitech little smart remote. It will talk to them using voice assistants and using a physical remote control that comes with the Lutron switch. Or you guessed it, on the wall, it's a switch. It's real with real controls and you can just turn it on and off by pushing the buttons on the wall because it's controlling. The light bulbs are dumb. The switch is smart and it's way better that way so that's my favorite um i also have done most of the lighting in my office now is is smart lighting so i've got a smart switch for my floor lamp i've got some light strip

phillips hue light strips around the windows on um on my side wall um and for when I do video, I actually have two TV lights, two LED lights, and they're up mounted on the ceiling and attached to a smart switch. So I can just, with the Home app, I can just turn those on when I need to be well lit for video

and then turn the back off, which is pretty great too. So my garage lighting is second and I have a lot of lamp that I can turn on just for fun. But the Lutron Casita stuff is the stuff that I really love because it feels much more appropriately integrated into my home to not have smart bulbs, but instead to have smart switches in the walls because they function as light switches and they're smart and that's way better i've never lived that lifestyle but it's interesting like i get it like i liked what one of the things that we do like about the hue bulbs though is the color changing abilities

which i guess this can't do unless you have bulbs that do it right like but yeah i mean this is a case of taking existing things and fixtures and making them smart well right i could make my smart i could make the living room bulbs smart but then i would have a light switch that had to stay on all the time and you couldn't actually touch it or you would break everything and i don't like that there are uh companies that make smart switches that cover up your light switch you you rewire it to stay on all the time and then you put this over it and it's a smart switch. I actually have one of those in my bedroom because we put in a smart ceiling fan that's also an overhead light. And the problem there is sometimes you press the button and nothing happens because for whatever reason, the smart home network didn't get the signal or something. Whereas if you flip a light switch, the lights come on. So I'm not, I get the appeal of like the color kind of stuff, but.

Ours are all in lamps, which is helpful because there isn't that like break of a light switch. You know, like the lights that we have, the actual light fixtures in the house we turn on by switches but we actually use the lamps more in the rooms so but yeah i get it makes sense i would like to one day change our actual light switches to something like that just so we have the additional flexibility of also having them controllable via the internet but i just haven't gotten around to that yet partly because i'm a little bit scared about doing that wiring this is daunting to me did you find did you do it yourself or did you have somebody do it i have done it myself and i've also had other people do other switches i've done i've done both i i like being able to do it but i get my wiring in my house is a

lot of it is old and so i get really frustrated and and it starts to get confusing about what switches what and that's when you bring in the electrician yeah chris wants to know which current or former apple executive do you hope writes a tell-all book which story do you want to hear the most i say phil schiller only because he's been there um phil schiller has been there i feel like we answered a version of this question before but i'm going to throw out phil schiller because he's been there a long time so he can actually talk about jobs returning and about lots of different product rollouts if he were to ever write a uh a tell-all book, he knows where all the bodies are buried and for a long stretch of Apple history.

And that's why I'd want to hear from Phil. I, for some of the same reasons, want it to be Ive. Because Johnny was there for, again, for a lot of Jobs' time. But I also want to hear about the design aspect. Also, I'm interested in his life as somebody who grew up in the UK and all that kind of stuff.

I would love a book from him at some point, but he doesn't seem like the type of person to do it. I would expect more that schiller would than i've would even though i don't think either of them will no but it feels more likely to me that schiller would do something than i would just because i've seems so very private um i can't imagine him sharing any stories really right uh kaylon goes so asks do you think that the pandemic could finally push apple to break its pace of new software versions every year um i i'm gonna say no i think i mean for mac os um i think it possible, but my short version is no, I think it'll, I think it will instead

push them to make smaller revisions and make them throughout the year and be a little less ambitious in what rolls into a particular release. But I think they, you know, anything is possible right now, but i think that they're probably more inclined to continue rolling out versions every year even if they're less ambitious and the new features are broken up across the whole year instead of just all dropping in a lump in the fall they've already been moving in that direction and i think following that um that kind of plan gives them the flexibility to adjust when something like this happens and say, well, you know, we're not going to get this. This year is going to start out.

The successor to Catalina is going to be later and it's going to be a little bit quieter, but then we're going to roll out some other features in the spring. And I think that's a more likely scenario than just, nope, we're not going to do an OS update. Because if you watch, they're still doing OS updates throughout the year. It's, you know, so in some ways, it's just where the milestone release happens. And I think that they find value when having a milestone release more or less every year. It doesn't have to be a massive release

and they can trickle those features out later. And finally, James asks, do you think AirT tags would be a subscription product like or service i i don't i just think that apple has not gone so far around the bend that they look at a new piece of hardware and say this is actually a service um and i don't think find my other comment would be that find my is not a service, right? Like Find My on your existing hardware from Apple, you don't pay for that. You get that just with your product.

You can find it. And so I don't think, I think Apple will view this as you buy the AirTags and then they're on Find My until they die. Yes, I hadn't thought of anything like this until i got this question and i was wondering if like there could be different levels to it but i'm not sure how that would work even like or if it could be somehow attached i mean it's obviously going to be attached to icloud, but it just seems like too complicated to be like you have to be a paid iCloud member to use more than two of them or something. Like there is a product here because other companies do it. So like Tile and Tracker have a, you buy the thing and you can track it, but then they have like plus models, right, where you pay and you get more features.

But I think for this particular product, I think Apple is looking for more of like overall ecosystem lock-in than subscription lock-in. Like if you were thinking like, what's the business angle behind this? It's like making it more desirable to be in the Apple ecosystem in general by offering this product

than it being a, we want to get more revenue per user on a recurring basis when this product people will buy them over and over again which is different to typical products like as in the amount that a person could have could be like five, which is different, right, to a normal Apple product. Like most people do not have like five iPods or whatever. Well, that's true, but they do have multiple Apple products. And then every one of these that you buy, you're giving Apple more money for them. And I'm not sure there's any overhead there.

And then they're not going to last forever. No. And they keep you in the Apple ecosystem. So, I think I hadn't thought about it either, and I think it totally could. But I don't think they will.

If you'd like to send in a question for a future episode, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade, and it will go into a list and could be picked later on. Thank you so much to everybody that has and does keep, please keep sending them in. We'd love to get your questions. Uh, thanks so much to express VPN, door dash and Linode for their support of this show. And thank you for your support as well. If you listen, if you're a relay for member, we really appreciate that. If you want to support this show as a link in link in the show notes where you can just sign up and support Upgrade, and we'll greatly appreciate

that. Or you can go to relay.fm membership to learn more. There's a bunch of great perks available to RelayFM members. We do stream this show live too, 9am Pacific time, every single Monday at relay.fm live. if you want something to listen to while you're working at home right now you can do that we also have a schedule of all of our live shows at relay.fm slash schedule if you want to find Jason online you can go to sixcolors.com

and he's at jsnl jsnll on twitter I am at imyke thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade, and we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jace Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.