Upgrade - 297: Factual Controller

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

This week Jason and Myke ponder the mysteries of the 13-inch MacBook Pro(s), including why the Touch Bar is frozen in time and whether there's a bigger change coming to Apple's laptop line. Also Jason makes another IKEA order, Myke shares some knowledge about unusual BBC job titles, Jason's iPhone X battery fails at an inopportune time, and WWDC gets a new date and format.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 297 today's show is brought to you by pdf pem from smile pingdom and door dash my name is mike curly i am joined by the intrepid jason snow hello jason snow intrepidly yours mike hi. Hi, how are you? I am very well, my friend. Very well indeed. Big show. Action-packed, as they say today. Can we start? Yeah. As we always do, we have a hashtag Snell Talk question,

and this one comes in from Chris. Chris wants to know, Jason, while you're working in your office, do you ever open the garage door for an open-air Hawaiian Lanai-style vibe? This is very descriptive. I enjoyed this one you know yes uh the answer is no if i want to work outside i go outside right ah yes don't bring the outside to you jason go to the outside right because i still have like curtain and a giant set of metal shelving between me and the outside so it's not even if i move the curtains and stuff it's like it's not super pleasant um i have opened the garage door and and worked before but it's mostly because it's intolerably hot if it gets intolerably hot in here and it's cooler outside

i will sometimes do that the problem is when i do that then there's bugs in my office for some unknown amount of time because and in the house because then i'll open the door to the house and uh when i'm done even after i've closed the garage door but the bugs will come in here and then they go in there and then there's like flies and stuff around as we know bugs bugs in your office can lead to repairs required do you remember the spider the spiders are always with me no please don't but't. But anyway, if people don't remember, Jason wrote a great article once. I'm sure we spoke about it on the show too

when you had a spider stuck in your screen. Yes. Tiny one. Tiny one. Yeah. Yeah, I had to do an IMAX screen replacement.

No, the spiders, I mean, there are going to always be spiders in my office, but like flying bugs and stuff come in when the garage doors open. It's no good.

So no, I don't generally do that. That's a good question because I do have, unlike many most people, my office place has a giant roll-up door to the outside world. It's true. But it's not as great as it sounds. It's not as spectacularly fantastic as it sounds to have a garage door in your office so i just go outside sit in a chair if it was nice out we'll talk about those chairs a little bit later on in the episode fun times if you would like to send in a question to start off the show just send out a tweet with a hashtag snell talk and it may be considered for a future episode

um i wanted to provide a little bit of follow-out, more about RelayFM membership. We've got a lot going on right now. We published, I don't like the phrase like open letter, but I can't think of another phrase. Like basically we wrote something that we want you to read about. We're calling it Moving Forward here at RelayFM. Basically, we spent a lot of time

over the last month or so thinking about our membership program because we are in a time where businesses need to adapt their business models and so we want to be able to do that and so one of the things that we're doing is doubling down on our most important thing which is our listeners like we are here and jason pointed this out when we were talking about this with them while working on this letter right like RelayFM is here because of you the listener and the strong connection that we have with you so we want to continue to put more focus on providing an even better experience for those of you who decide to support us directly basically if you not only decide to support us with your

time but also your hard-earned money we want to be able to give you more for that and we're working on lots of really great ideas like i am actually very excited about this uh we started late today because me and steven we have a call on mondays which i always have before recording upgrade and we were late today because we will work i was late for upgrade today because we were working on some great stuff and steven my co-founder made the point that we haven't worked as hard or as like frenzied right now as we have since the beginning but it's great like i feel a renewed sense of excitement for what relay fm can be because of this like this doesn't have to be a bad thing because the world's changing around us. We're going to use this as a time to make everything better. That's the plan.

So the first step of our renewed membership focus is we have created a Discord server for RelayFM members. This is a private community where like-minded people can come together in a safe, moderated environment to talk about the things they love and to make connections with other people like them. So right now, we are streaming this show live, as we always do, at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern, every Monday. And we have a live chat. And now the live chat is also occurring in the Discord, and that's where I'm looking at it. But there are lots of wonderful topics to talk about.

We have nearly 1,000 people in there already. So if you are a RelayFM member, you should have gotten an email about this. So all existing RelayFM members, look out for an email, or you can contact us if you need to. But basically everyone who is a member can get access to the discord server if you become a member you'll get an email about it when you sign up so you can join basically we want to create something which is fun and moderated that's why we use discord over slack slack has no moderation tools at all right because it's a it's a workplace tool you're not supposed

to mute um or ban ban people in your office. I've spoken for years. People have asked us for years about having a community. And when we were first launching the membership, I wasn't comfortable with the tools out there. Discord then didn't have as great tools as it has now. And basically, that's the reason, because Discord realized, I assume,

we can't compete with Slack. Let's make a product which is similar but focuses in different areas. And they've really focused on having communities. So we have a team of wonderful moderators there. And we're building something I'm super excited about. It has been a wonderful weekend. We launched this on Friday. And it's been amazing to watch this thing grow.

So it would mean a lot to us if you signed up to become a RelayFM member, especially, I'll speak for me and Jason, if you choose to support upgrade with that membership, there is a link in the show notes to do so. You can just click that. You support upgrade. You give us some money every month. You get a bunch of great benefits.

And now access to the RelayFM Discord server, or you can go to relay.fm membership to learn more. Thank you for this time. I say yeah yeah and it's uh we do we do some extra stuff during the year and uh our planning what we're going to be doing next so you get some podcasty kind of bonuses to listen to yeah as well as the the community and i've i've been i've had little communities for uh six colors members and uh incomparable members for the last couple of years. And those have actually turned out to be pretty great spaces. And the Relay Discord is looking like it's going to be that too.

Yep. Very, very, very happy with it so far. Should we do some more follow-up, follow-out, Jason? Yeah. I mean, this is the time for it. If we don't do it now, they're not going to let us. The podcast police aren't going to let us do it later. I know that you put in here that there was a great interview on App Stories

with Craig Federighi joining Federico, Federighi Federico Part 2. They spoke last year at WWDC, but now they spoke prior to WWDC. And the focus of the interview was about the cursor support in iPadOS. Yeah, it's the... I like this interview. And what I was thinking while I was listening to it is, you know, there's the group of us who write or talk about these issues.

And we spend all our time thinking about issues involving Apple and products and their product philosophy and stuff like that. And Federico and I talk about iPad keyboards and mice and things like that. And we, you know, back and forth. And there's a group of us. But the thing is, there is this other group of people who spend all their time thinking about this. And they never talk about it except amongst themselves.

And we never get to talk to them. And that's the people who make this stuff at Apple. And they do carefully consider a lot of the same things we're talking about, they talk about and consider. And so this is a great breaking of that wall where Federico and Craig got to talk to each other, and it's very clear from that conversation just how much they considered all these issues before making their decisions.

And I think that not only is it fun to see that interaction, but it's also a reminder that it's really easy to see Apple do something and say, I can't believe they didn't think of or this is so lazy or whatever. And that is almost never the case. lazy or whatever. And that is almost never the case. It's more that they made a decision you disagreed with and they have their reasons or because some other circumstances going on. But it's hard to listen to Craig Federighi and not get the sense that there are a lot of people at Apple who are very carefully considering all of the issues involved in doing something like adding a pointer to iPadOS. Yeah. and I really like what you said there about there are people that are thinking about this so much because they're making it,

and it can be very helpful to just hear people, these people talk about their thought processes that lead them to this. Also, I really liked the conversation they were having about how the trackpad could change pro apps and federighi was talking about the fact that like yes maybe but they want all apps to be considered to be usable in every mode right like they don't want uh like photoshop to have such tiny icons that only the cursor can use them, right? And so it was useful to hear that because there may have been some people

that were starting to potentially go off on a road like, oh, I'm going to make an app that's just for cursor support. It's like, don't do that, right? Like you should make an application that's useful in all modes. You know know maybe it works better in one or the other but should be usable everywhere yeah yeah no it's a it's a a great conversation that what i really liked about it is it reflected a lot of the stuff that we've kind of reverse engineered out here on the outside about the ipad is a flexible thing and it's touch first but you have to have these other modes and that's one of the values of it is you can mode shift and all that. And so to hear Craig Federighi talk about it,

it's like, yes. Okay. It's like, they thought about it. We thought about it. We're thinking the same things like that. It's reassuring in some way that these things are happening in parallel

because it means that our read on it about how this product is being used and how we're using it. Cause all we, all we can base it on is what the product is and how we use it and our desires for it and they on the inside have the ability to steer it but they have to have those discussions about where they want to steer and what is their guiding philosophy and i was encouraged by the fact that it seems that um that apple views the ipad at least based on federighi's comments in a very similar way to the way that people like me and uh and and federico view it which is good

just take your minds back to october 2018 oh no where good time we were outside we were asked what i liked about the i just i opened the link here to add it to the show notes in the beginning of the description for the episode of Upgrade that we're about to refer to, 213, was this week Jason and Mike discussed where the iPad Pro might go next, including whether it's a primarily horizontal or vertical device and if adding a USB-C port makes sense. The answer is yes to all of that.

I'm just going to assume that we were very prophetic in that episode i'm sure but the most important thing that happened in that episode is that i told the story about not getting a bunch of stuff from ikea for my outdoor furniture which is you know similar in its in its uh kind of idea to the drobo discussion last week yeah yeah it was in in that i got to start talking and you got to go like pour yourself a cup of tea i'm always here jason i never sweep the floors and just do whatever else you needed to do and i'm listening you know and i'm pondering never leave just makes it sound like i do leave i literally never leave all right okay you just you can kick back yeah i knock my like chair down if like you know you've got like the the height adjustment the angle adjustment and lock that down a couple of points so I can lean back and just go for it.

Yeah, it's like the chair equivalent of loosening a tie. Yes, exactly. You're like, I want to settle in here for this story. So go listen to episode 213 if you haven't. You can hear us talk about the iPad Pro. Maybe we were right. Maybe we were wrong. And you can also hear about my adventure with Ikea where I didn't get all the cushions for this.

And the people told me online that I could, or told me I could go online, people at the store, and fill the rest of my order, which turned out to be a horrible lie. And so I had furniture that didn't have cushions on it or was missing cushions. And in the end, it all worked out in the sense that a listener in norway found the cushion covers because i had the cushions but not the covers for them and i i sent him money and he sent me norwegian ikea cushion covers the best ones in all of this i got a ten dollar credit from ikea apologizing for the fact that they took my order and claimed that it was about to ship and it spent an entire summer not shipping because they didn't actually have it um and uh it turns out i was still short one pillow and one cover from 2018 there was one i didn't buy enough of the pillows of the cushions

so last year went by and i just forgot and never bothered to check but But this year I thought, oh, let's see if a Frozon, because this was Frozon Quest 2018, if a Frozon cover and a Dov Holman cushion are available on ikea.com because we're locked down. I'm not going to go to my local Ikea. And they were, and I ordered them.

And I found in my email the gift card code from Ikea from Frozone Quest 2018 and I placed an order and that was April it showed up yesterday two boxes with the Frozone

and the Dov Holman and so now I have a slightly darker final piece of the puzzle cushion slightly darker because the other ones have faded in the sunlight in the in the ensuing year but um but i'm i'm at full power with my backyard furniture and i thought everybody should know so there you go frozen quest 2020 not as exciting i placed an order and it showed up yeah it's not really so much of a quest, really.

It's just frozen expected 2020. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, IKEA has nothing else to do right now than fulfill online orders, but they did. You say that though, but they're still not very good at it. I've received similar credit. Oh, no. I've received similar credit in the past.

Not recently. Not recently. No, they're terrible at it. And I'm not going to go into the details other than to say that, I mean, I did wait a month with minimal... We're so used to... This was the point of Frozen Quest 2018. We're so used to Amazon telling you every step of the process. And I think that's up the game for a lot of e-commerce vendors.

Ikea is still like, got it. And then there's just silence. And then a month passes and you get an email that says shipped it and that's it that's all they do so that that month of silence passed but they to their credit they actually had the thing they claimed they had and they shipped it to me and now i have it so no norwegian imports required this time wonderful we can entertain in our backyard now oh oh no i have one other tale a mini miniature tale of woe to share with you okay so i bought the iphone 10 as we all did in the fall of 2017 remember it came out after the iphone 8 but it came out and we placed our orders and i believe

i actually placed my order on the east coast um so i had to get up at 5 a.m or whatever like or at 8 a.m no it was the luxury or no it was stay up till 3 a.m that's what it was back then i guess i was punished for being on the east coast and all the east coasters laughed at me and said see what it's like and then they changed it so it's 5 a.m pacific so i get to see how it's like every time anyway um this weekend so i i rolled that down um i have i bought uh an 11 pro so my wife has the 10 that i bought and um so she and my daughter left the area for the first time in nine weeks to go pick up my daughter's stuff which is still sitting in her dorm room we had a deadline of like you need out um and it's about an eight hour drive up there so they drove up there eight

hours went to the dorm packed up the stuff slept moved the stuff to the car and came home it was a you know a whole operation on the drive up literally you know the first time she's been away from home at any length for uh you know for all this time she notices that the uh the screen has basically popped out of the iphone and apparently the battery in the iphone 10 uh swelled it did one of those things like a like a star that's gonna go supernova where it's just like, I'm going to just start getting big. I'm going to puff up big. It's Liftoff podcast. Read all here.

Listen all about supernovas on the Liftoff podcast. It's bad. It's bad, right? And what the timing of it. Like literally any other day in the last eight weeks, it would be fine. But she's driving away from home. So my daughter's got her phone because she's 18. So she's got a phone. It's fine. Um, but, uh, so I, what do I do? Well, I've got,

I can't help her. Right. She's like, what do we do? I'm like, nothing. It's I, I can't, there's no buttons to push to make the battery deflate. It is broken now so i did get ahead on the on the replacement so i i uh went to apple i actually did their text uh tech support oh right the business no this was like their web interface okay uh the worst one yeah yeah the worst one yeah the worst one um and they wanted like the serial number and the imei number which i was able to look up on apple id.apple.com which lists all of the phones that are logged in with a particular ID. They needed me to erase the phone and delete it from my account in order to basically turn off Find My because they want that off. And of course, the phone wasn't with me, but I was able to do that remotely.

And then they asked me if I wanted to bring it into a store. And I said, those stores aren't open. They're like, ah, yes, we have no way to tell when stores will be open. So you can just mail it. We'll send you a box and you can mail it in. I'm like, all right. So they're apparently sending me a box. And they said, we'll send you an email with details about payment, which I thought was

interesting, a way of phrasing it. Like, they're not going to make me pay on the text chat they won't tell me what i need to pay and i'm sitting there thinking why am i paying this seems like a really bad battery problem that i know it's out of warranty it's a it's a two plus year old phone two and a half year old phone but your battery should probably not explode like it's dangerous like they've yeah it is dangerous created like an explosive device that is just being driven around california not not too explosive because they're willing to have me put in a box and put it through the mail but still it's it's it makes me uneasy anyway it doesn't matter because i got the email like an hour later and it said uh basically you don't have to pay for this just put it in the box

and we'll so you know anyway it's funny because that that uh two and a half years since i i bought that iphone and and one day it just decided to its battery just decided to swell and expand i'm intrigued to see what that timing box looks like that they send you uh yeah i'm i'm i'm looking forward to it i'm sure people who've done um mail repairs have seen this before. But it's going to be an empty box with padding probably and a label that you stick on. And it's resealable and a label you stick on the outside and then give it to your UPS guy when he comes by and he takes it away. We'll see.

I'll keep you updated. But it was just the timing of it and the fact that a relatively young iPhone had this battery. I've had this in laptops before, but I've never seen it in an iOS device before. Yeah, it's not good. Not good. Don't like that. Don't like battery swelling. That's not my favorite.

No, it's really disturbing. And, of course, they're in the middle of a long drive, and I'm like, well, I hope it doesn't – if it explodes, roll down the window. If it catches fire, roll down the window and throw it out of the car i guess but like yeah and they'd be easier to return then you know it'd be a burnt out star at that point they did start asking me as a part of this like is there any water damage is there actually the first question was is it damaged in any way and i said well the screen got pushed out by the swelling battery. And they're like, other than that. I'm like, no.

And then they specifically asked, is there water damage? I said, no. Like, all right. I said, I sent you a picture of the swollen battery. Like, all right. Okay. It's going to be okay. But what the time?

Any, literally any other day out of the last nine weeks. Maybe that's what it was, you know. It was just like oxygen or something. I was thinking, what is it? It left home and it had to use the battery. Although they're in the car with a charger and all that. I don't know. I don't know what did it. It's just bad luck.

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Apple's been doing more content deals. So they have three. They have a two-year content deal with Annie Weissman. Weissman. I'mman worked on Desperate Housewives and is also the creator of the upcoming TV Plus show Physical. So Weissman has been working with Apple already, and there's actually a couple of these. And it's like, oh, now we'll just sign you up for a few years. Another one of these is Kerry Aaron, who is the showrunner for The Morning Show. Aaron has also signed a multi-year overall content deal with Apple. So that's like locking up some more people that they've worked with.

They think they're great. So it's like, all right, you're going to stick around. Apple have also hired Alison Kirkham, who is the quote-unquote factual controller at the BBC, which is a very strange way to say that Kirkham was in charge of commissioning documentaries. Did she battle the forces

of confusion and delay? Was that what she was doing on the railroad? Possibly. I mean, I'm not... Factual controllers. This is the thing about... It's the fat controller. It's her topham hat. It's her topham hat. I want to go back to that again you are causing confusion and delay factual controller like this is one of those phrases that shows how old the bbc is right and they just never changed the name it's such a strange way of saying like documentary commissioner

but uh factual controller uh the new this factual controller has now moved to uh apple instead which i guess is just key to say that apple wants to do more documentaries and and like uh non-fiction i guess did we have a title for her is she going to be the factual controller at apple from everything that i've read that there isn't like that doesn't have a title but like we'll be working on that type of content that right like that it's she's going to be joining the global team at apple tv plus and we'll be reporting into the european director but basically it's going to be unscripted original series of films. Okay.

And people can tune into that B-side episode that we'll put a link to in the show notes where we discussed in detail the history and naming and family of Sir Topham Hatt from Thomas. It's four minutes of fun.

From 2015. We're really just reaching into the archives today. We are. This is a retrospective episode as we move toward episode 300 the oscars is being forced to adapt as much as it can possibly resist at the same time so because movie theaters are closed uh oscars consideration this year will consider movies that haven't played in theaters but that movie must prove that it had a planned theatrical release so there you go it's just like drag like just being dragged kicking and screaming the film industry uh into the future but that's how they're going to deal with the oscars this year i'm expecting there will be no oscars as well right i don't know how they're going to

deal with that part yet like there's not going to be a event like yeah i don't know there might be but it may be you know a a uh limited we'll see who knows what the world's going to look like next march right we have no idea but it's possible that they will have a socially distant oscars um to honor the eight movies that came out last year right the three movies that made it into cinemas yeah that's right it's uh the oscars in 2021 are going to be the fun part right it's gonna be like people's home movies because there'll be no movies it's no movies it's tiktoks mostly it's ts. Alright, let's talk about Apple and COVID-19. They have awarded $10 million to a company called Copan Diagnostics.

This money has come from their Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which, if that rings a bell, it is the same fund that they gave a bunch of money to Corning, the Gorilla Glass people. So basically, Apple set up a fund that they were going to be giving to companies to help them with their manufacturing. And also, in the case of Corning, Apple would also significantly benefit from that arrangement, that Corning make the glass that goes on the front of their iPhones. Now, this one is obviously, I think, a little bit more altruistic because Copan Diagnostics, their whole thing is to work on sample collection kits

in the US. So basically for testing, right? They create testing materials, like medical testing. So obviously this is going to be used for, and Copan stuff is already being used for coronavirus testing, but Apple is going to be able to help them ramp up from producing thousands of kits a week to over a million a week by July, which is a very, very steep curve. I want to give a quote from the press release.

Apple is sourcing equipment and materials for Copan diagnostics from companies across the US, and then including equipment that Apple is helping design as well. I read an article from John Gruber linked to this during Fireball and basically pointed out that possibly the operational assistance from Apple is worth more than the $10 million, really, right? Interesting. So this is, if we remember, cast our minds back a few weeks ago to when Tim Cook said that Apple would do the things that it's best at. This is probably one of those things, right? Like they can help here by helping a company that is needed for testing ramp up their production because Apple knows how to produce stuff. to produce stuff yeah i i'm it's an interesting one and i do keep coming back to you know there is some altruism in it there is some positive pr in it i do wonder if there is also some angle i

mean because you know apple apple wants to do good but apple is also a huge profit-driven corporation um i my gut feeling is that this apple wants to be a major player in health right the the apple watch has led them to be very interested in being a major player in health and pushing technology and their technology into the health industry in order you know they will say to improve people's health right and the Apple Watch has been very successful at that. And I wonder if that's also part of this is being a good member of the health industry means doing things like this. I'll be honest, like I haven't looked into Copan enough to know if they have like other arms of their business that would be more helpful to Apple. But the main thing that they seem to be known for is their physical testing abilities. But you're right, it might be that either A, there's something about that

company that can be useful for the future, or B, that they want to be seen in the global health community as a company that can be trusted, a company that is serious. And as a leader. Yeah, and as a leader. That's a very good point. There is still a lot of uncertainty around the exposure notification API adoption. So this is contact tracing. I don't want to get into all of this, but basically to say there are many countries that agree it's an approach that they may consider,

Apple and Google's joint effort. There are countries pushing ahead with their own options, just completely ignoring it. Some of these countries like my own say, or there are reports that they're looking into switching to Apple system anyway, even though they're developing their own system. They're like feasibility studies being done. And there are some countries like Germany that have already adopted Apple's approach and have an app in development, and they're going to be pushing it out as soon as it's available.

approach and have an app in development and they're going to be pushing it out as soon as it's available one of the things that i have learned looking into just this stuff today really i mean i've been paying attention to it but just reading the links i'm putting in the show notes is that there's a lot of politics wrapped up in this oh yeah and i think we're gonna have to see how this fares over the next few months my read on this is a lot of the countries, including my own right now, that are saying they're going to do their own thing will change course. And I expect it's going to be at the second stage of the API when it's built into the operating system. Right.

If you remember, there's the first stage, which is you have to have an app and then the API will be able to talk with the app and then the apps can exchange their identifiers. And then there is the second stage where the identifiers are being drawn anyway, and then you can download an app later and put in your symptoms and say that you've been tested or whatever, and then it can retroactively alert people, right? There's this two-stage approach. So I expect that by that second stage, I would really expect most countries to have moved to the Apple Google system, because there are going to be significant issues of any application that is trying to do this Bluetooth exchange stuff without Apple and Google's blessing.

And the UK government is saying a lot of interesting things about the way that their app's going to work in ways that seem to be counter to what i believe how i believe ios works so we're gonna have to wait and see about all of that um but yeah i think that this is still a really like moving thing. It is in a lot of flux. And honestly, if you think, as of right now, the first stage of this is not even publicly available anyway. They're beta testing it. It'll be out soon, the first stage.

But yeah, there'll be another update that has to happen after that for it to be at the OS level. I saw a note this week that made me scratch my head a little bit where somebody said um apple and google's effort here is an attempt to impose american values on the rest of the world those values being privacy and security and and their argument was look if the government wants to know everything about you and where you go and what you do in the middle of a public health crisis, you should just give it to them. And as an American, I think, no, but yes, you're right. In a way, they are imposing American values over other cultures and countries that might have values that don't include the privacy of their, of their people. But, you know,

the truth is that they are also imposing their corporate values. And, um, I, I guess I would say this is one of those cases where I'm glad that the companies that run the dominant, um, smartphone platforms on the world care about this stuff.

They, they care enough that they want to build a system that does both contact tracing data, background data for contract tracers and keep it private and not make it a surveillance tool. But I can see the other side, which is, but it's a crisis,

make it a surveillance tool. And that's my point here is that although I found that statement bizarre, although accurate in a way, right, that it is sort of one of our values, I think, of a lot of countries, not just America to say, oh, you know, people have rights and should have a right to privacy, but even in a health crisis, but we also need to solve the health crisis. But it shows you just how much politics, and it's individual politics. The reason the UK is doing what it's doing has a lot to do with the dynamics in the UK and UK politics. The reason the US is doing what it's doing or not doing, as the case may be, has a lot to do with internal politics.

So that's the other challenge with a global threat like this is that everybody's reacting differently to it. And that includes their reactions to Google and Apple. And I understand like it is difficult. I'm sure it's very difficult as like world leaders to accept Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai to tell them what to do. Right. is to accept Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai to tell them what to do, right? Like, it's counter to everything that they have believed in leading up to the point that they became the politicians that they are, right? That no corporation's going to tell a country what to do.

But, I mean, I think we both agree that it's probably the better way to do it. At least it's the way I feel more comfortable with. I don't feel completely comfortable with the government running this system and well first off yes i i actually trust the tech companies to build a system fast over a giant government bureaucracy but also it's not an either or proposition and that's part of what bugs me about some of these debates about this is Apple and Google want to do something that gives everybody useful data and is private. It's not. And you get the sense. Okay, maybe I'm projecting here, but I get the sense that some of the people who are arguing for expediency don't really mean it because they're making this kind of false case, this false choice, which is, well, you could have privacy or you could have public health, and you have to choose. And what I appreciate about the approach Apple and Google has taken is that they're trying to say, and it may not be the right approach, and there may be technical details that are problematic, and we'll see how they roll it out. But what they're trying to do

is say, you can do both. We can keep it private and help it contribute to public health. And you don't need to turn into a surveillance state where every single phone is tracking everybody's location and everybody they interact with in order to protect the public health. And I appreciate that because I don't like the idea of having to choose between privacy and public health because that's a very hard decision, right? And we've seen it in the past. You give away some of your rights in order to protect the public good. I would also argue that if this kind of stuff is seen as a mass surveillance tool, you're going to lose a percentage of the population

who will refuse to do it, at which point it's no longer a public health tool anyway, because you need a certain percentage. There were some stories that I read that suggested that you really need this on the operating system turned on by default, because you need to reach a very high percentage of people who are using it for it to have any effect at all that is substantial. So I appreciate that Apple and Google are trying to make this both so that somebody who says, you know, oh, well, you have to choose one or another. They can't make that argument because Apple and Google have chosen both. Apple have announced WWDC is going to begin June 22nd and through the week. It's a tragedy for upgrade because that,

that week was going to be episode 300. We hadn't planned it. It was just luck. It's a bounty for connected because uh you guys skipped some episodes and uh episode 300 will be that week for you guys so yeah i i got two chances to win yeah you got two tickets i got two tickets and so yeah i think we're gonna be at like episode 303 or something uh is gonna be wwdc uh week um we'll obviously be drafting our predictions on June 15th, which I'm, of course, extremely excited for.

We don't have any details. The press release basically just said June 22nd, and they announced the student challenge. So it's like a student challenge every year where students would get a free ride to WWDC if they would complete something and i'm pleased to see that they're still doing something here and it was the thing that needed to be announced first because that's the only thing this year that has to happen in advance

nothing else needs to happen so i had i parsed there i did my little apple chromonology thing and i looked at their release and the two things that struck struck me were, one, it's a week-long event. It seems like they are going to stick to the concept of a week-long event. I imagine they're going to have follow-ons throughout the summer, but that the primary stuff is going to drop that week, and it's going to be this week-long event. And then, of course, the promise for more information as we get closer basically but that that is a little placeholder for phil schiller basically to say we're going to make more announcements we just haven't made them yet so which is great right like because we were talking about this i think maybe last week or a couple of weeks ago that they have to announce

a date so people could prepare their lives because people aren't traveling but they do need to free up time to consume and learn and also to start setting development schedules in place right because from now like we have to still assume that this is coming in september ios 14 but we have to make that. We can't make any other assumption until Apple tell us otherwise. So people need to work out what their development cycle is going to be. So they needed to start announcing a date so people could, I believe,

so people could start working on that. So I think that's great. June 22nd, you know, I think this is obviously later in the month than it would have been. I feel like it probably would have been much earlier in the month, but they've given themselves some leeway. Is it the last full week of June? Yeah, it is. It's the last full week of June. So otherwise, it would have moved into July.

And the only other thing I guess we can assume, even though I haven't been told, it's just because logistically, I don't know how else it would work, that the keynote will be on the morning of the 22nd. Because you can't do anything else. That's literally what a keynote is. You've got to kick it off. I imagine that would be exactly what we expect, where there will be a keynote, and there will probably even be a deep dive OS session that happens thereafter. Now, the question is, when you're not tethered by reality of people having to get lunches in boxes

and reset the room and all of that, will they, you know, how much time do they leave between streams? Are they going to leave us enough time to record upgrade? I mean, it's a, it's there's,

there's a lot. It doesn't matter as much, you know, our typical issue with when we record upgrade was there were like physical movements that needed to occur. They aren't happening this time. So we'll just record it whenever right like or like we have a live show to go to like we're not doing any of that this year so we'll just record it as soon as we can after the keynote but the the the typical constraints that we have aren't this aren't going to be the same so yeah we'll'll see. I'm excited, though.

This is Apple's opportunity to rethink WWDC, and as somebody who's been going for a long time, it's a fun event, but you're always going to... I mean, being forced to re-evaluate it and rethink it is going to lead to some cool stuff that would never have happened. If the circumstances hadn't occurred,

it doesn't mean that the circumstances are good, but it is challenging Apple in a way that, um, I think they're going to do some interesting stuff. And I do think that it will have a lasting impact on what we think of as WWDC. Even if there is a real event in the future and this doesn't go virtual only, I think that they're, they're going think that they're going to rethink it. And I think we're never going to go back to an era where this event is primarily for participants in person and only sort of secondarily for everyone else.

I feel like from now on, they really are are going to say this is a global event that we that we beam out and then maybe there's also a physical event but we'll see what they do i'm excited to see all the are we have to throw the old playbook out the window we used to know sort of exactly what apple was going to do and really we don't know so um i'm looking forward to it the one thing that i expect to be different from whatever is the morning announcement, the keynote, is I expect that the production values will be much higher because

I just expect things to be produced differently like the little video that they did for the magic keyboard was a very high production value video that Craig did I expect stuff like that when I say higher production values it's like more than a person standing on a stage with slides behind them you know like i i think it will be more visual than it typically is yeah it wouldn't surprise

me if the whole thing is a uh pre-recorded uh you know video extravaganza right it is not going to be live why would you have it live you have the advantage of pre-recording yeah i guess what i'm saying is is you could do it plausibly live uh like live to tape but i don't think they will no i think it will be more like the rollout video that they did for the ipad pro and the and the macbook air? Where they were at Apple and, you know, having a whole like, look at this, like, you know, here's Craig working on the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard somewhere in Napple Park, right?

Like, I think it'll be more like that. But, you know, there's an argument about like emulating the Apple Keynote style and I'm sure they've had that discussion but uh is it worth it to make it feel comforting like an apple keynote or is it better for them to just blow the doors off of it and make it something different i don't know today's episode is also brought to you by pingdom from solar winds today's internet users expect a fast web experience. No

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Right. And obviously, you know, the main thing that we spoke about hooray keyboard right and we all know that you've reviewed them now there's no surprises right the keyboard is what we wanted it to be it's the one we want so excellent yeah there's that's that's the thing about it that is a killer from a uh writing perspective our reviewing perspective is the most important feature by far is a thing we've already talked about twice right like it's the 16 inch macbook pro keyboard we talked about it a lot then talked about it again when the macbook air got revised and now here it is on the 13s i mean we even spoke about it with the ipad pro

right like we got the magic keyboard there too right like it's the keyboard you know and love right we know what this keyboard is and now it's everywhere um but then okay fine but it's a new computer what about the rest of it and the thing that i emphasized and it was really funny to hear other people talking about the same thing last week the that it's two of them and that's my real question is there's two 13-inch macbook pros and we treat them like one and we shouldn't because for a few a few years now there's really been two models with the same name and it's the two port version and the four-port version. The two-port version used to be the Escape

back when it didn't have a touch bar, but then it got a touch bar. So really, Apple's always differentiated them as two versus four Thunderbolt ports. But the truth is like they did update the two-port one last year a little bit to give it sort of the new materials keyboard. And I think they did a little processor processor update but basically it didn't get touched other than the

keyboard this year yep the four port one got new processors it's still just kind of a speed bump but they did get some other spec things well the graphics you know like that the better graphics are only in the new one well it's it's it's their intel embedded graphics so it's a function of it being a 10th generation intel it's an ice lake processor so that's why the graphics are better and in fact that's uh the focus of that generation is improved uh embedded graphics so the graphics support gets a lot faster the truth is if you're coming from a an old macbook pro with the old keyboard and you've been holding out all this time it's going to be a huge performance jump regardless because you're getting a modern computer but i i have some ongoing questions about what about the weirdness

of that two port 13 inch um which is it just it feels a little bit strange to me and then there's also the issue that they didn't do a rethink of the whole product like they did for the 16 inch macbook pro and that that's other than the fact that there were some rumors that they were going to do that and it didn't happen this is a pretty standard speed bump and that's fine but it does make you wonder like the 16 inch got a whole rethink with smaller bezels and a bigger screen and the better sound system, input and output, and the 13-inch didn't, not even the four-port model.

And that's, so those are the two, beyond the keyboard, the two kind of overriding things that I walked away from my review. I got the four-port one to review. So the two-port one, which is fine because there's nothing one to review so the two port one which is fine because there's nothing but the keyboard in the in the two port one that was different but i think it's uh you know it's it's the last part of this transition the the fact that they've gotten the butterfly keyboard out of all their laptops is the big story here but i do still think that this is a weird laptop line for Apple because they've got this low-end 13. And I was asking the question last week, and I asked it in my review, why does this product exist?

And I know why it exists. It exists to hit some price points that Apple doesn't have for other products. It is more powerful than the Air. Not a lot, but it is more powerful than the Air and it has a better cooling system. And there are reasons you would get it. Although I kept coming back to the thought that if you really need a Pro, you should probably, if you can at all afford it, buy the four port model. And if you are price averse, you probably should just buy an Air. I'm not sure that two port model is a great buy because it's last year's processor update and appreciably less than that two port model i get why it's there but it still also feels like a function of the original sin of the macbook escape of like thinking it was the

air replacement and it really wasn't and then they brought the air back um and it feels to me i don't know about you mike but it feels to me a little bit like apple is doing kind of like the keeping everything going uh but maybe a change is in the offing, right? If the ARM processor rumors are true, why revamp your product line now when you're going to revamp your product line in a year? And I guess... All right, so let me put a pin in that second

so I can come back around to it from what I was going to say, which is that the macbook pro branding is a mess right now it's a mess because there are three laptops that are very very different but they're all named macbook pro right the 16 inch macbook pro may as well be a different computer like it is as different to the other macbook pros the macbook air is to that right like they are shared things but it's got a completely different internal architecture. It has a bigger screen for its body, right? Like that is a modern,

that's the most modern laptop that Apple makes. But then there's another MacBook Pro and another MacBook Pro and they're all different from each other. And one of them is closer to the MacBook Air. And so like the MacBook Pro branding is messed up right now. But that comes back to what you were just saying, right?

Like, well, what if there isn't... Well, we know that the ARM transition is coming. We don't know where it's going to start sitting, right? Like, what products are going to be affected? So you start looking at what's available, right? And you think to yourself, well, we all come around to the idea that, oh, they'll keep the iMac Pro

because the iMac will become ARM, right that seems like a possibility and then there'll be a laptop we expect it to be like a MacBook Air right like a cheaper laptop but what if there's a MacBook Pro that's ARM powered and it's going to be different to the 16-inch and the reason they updated the 16-inch is because Apple want to have, for their Pro customers, their most powerful machines and architecture they already know. So the iMac Pro stays Intel, the Mac Pro stays Intel,

and the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which is always going to be the most powerful one, stays Intel. And that's going to be a longer period of time. But everything else moves to ARM in 2021.

So if that's the case don't blow your new designed macbook pro 14 inch on the intel chip wait and do it on the arm chip maybe could be could be but it does it does feel like there are too many products that aren't well differentiated there are too many macbook pros and they're all too different and it's a mess, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. I do wonder about the MacBook Air only because it's a very popular computer. And so you would think that an ARM MacBook Air would make a lot of sense. I also watched as Apple tried to kill it and failed and it came back. You would think that they could make a thin light

macbook style 12 inch macbook style laptop on arm and it would be great but that laptop didn't didn't sell so well and they brought the air back and so i'm not sure they're going to do anything other than keep the air around whether it's arm or not whoever's in charge of this my arm laptop would be macbook air because when i when apple make the move to arm this isn't like a test this is the future right like they will go into this and they will go into it hard because they want to move everyone so you put if you're gonna really like put all your chips on the table, you do it to the MacBook Air because it's the machine that sells the most, assumably, right?

I don't know if we noticed, but we assume, right, that the MacBook Air is Apple's best-selling Mac, probably, right? It's either that or the 13-inch MacBook Pro. But let's just assume amongst their non-Pro customers, people will buy MacBook Airs, lots of them. Otherwise, why else is that branding still existing? So if you really want to go heavy, you put the ARM chip in the MacBook Air because that's the one everyone's going to keep buying.

So then you can convince your Mac developers to say, well, you really should support our ARM computers now because the MacBook Air has it and you know how many of your customers use that. So that might be the idea, right? I think it would be not good to have another laptop that is the ARM laptop. I think that's just going to make things super confusing in a way that was proven with the MacBook's existence didn't help anything to have like here is our fifth laptop option for you and this one has a different chip inside and you shouldn't have to worry about that like i don't know if

that's a good idea i could imagine the macbook like look at this new macbook air it has 20 hours battery life and it's thinner and it's lighter and it has a nicer screen and like you know what i mean like i can imagine that kind of thing for it but i don't know the thing that seems interesting to me because again like i was talking about this last week i am trying to work out what laptops will be right for our family right like i need a new laptop it needs a new laptop we've been waiting until apple turned over the whole line before we made our decisions so i started pricing things up and it starts getting really weird when you start comparing some of these machines yes i heard you do this on on connected a little bit where yeah you can make a very expensive macbook air at which point it seems weird but that's kind of my point though

is you can make a macbook air that's so expensive that you might as well get the four-port base model of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. But that's kind of my point is, but there's also another laptop in between those two. That's weird. But, yeah, you're right. It's kind of all over the place, and you've got to make some decisions. And, you know, somebody might choose the two-port model of the 13 inch uh for good reasons but i look at it and i think that's a pretty narrow window and that and you probably need to either firmly commit to the high end or you need to just say you know the macbook air

because i had a couple people on twitter last week say well yeah but you know you use the macbook air for video editing or audio editing or development, and it's low-powered and the fans have to run and it can't take it. I've edited video. I've edited 4K video on a MacBook Air. I've edited podcasts on a MacBook Air. I've edited 1080p video on a MacBook, 12-inch MacBook. It can be done.

So I think there are probably cases where the MacBook Air is inappropriate. That's why they make pro laptops. But the MacBook Air, the current 2020 MacBook Air is very capable. It's a very capable machine. So I think you downgraded it at your peril to say that people who are even doing things like editing video and audio can't use it. So I think it's a very capable computer, at which point, if you need more than that, you probably should shell out for the 4 port 13. I like your theory, by the way. I keep thinking about the MacBook, the 12-inch MacBook, and wonder if there isn't room in the ARM laptop line for a tiny fanless laptop. Although at this point,

given what happened before, I don't know, maybe you call that the 12 inch MacBook air or something like that. And like pair it and have two MacBook airs and two MacBook pros or something like that. I don't know. I mean, this is why the,

I mean the people at Apple, this is why they get paid, paid pretty well is these are hard decisions to navigate uh what the products are and at what price points and you can see what happens when you get something a little bit wrong because i think that's why that two-port macbook pro exists is that they kind of made a mistake and are still paying for it yeah and it's like they doubled down on it in weird ways like giving it the touch bar which is super strange. Like, Oh, you made the computer more expensive and made it harder to differentiate from the others and gave it a feature that has the apples not seem to believe in

enough. So this is, this is another thing that I ranted about on this show. I remember it. So you can go back and listen to, I don't know what was that one? Maybe when the 16 or maybe it was last summer, but I have,

I've done a touch bar rant before, but every time I get one of these, so I don't own a computer with a touch bar. We got a lot of MacBook airs in this house. I don't own a computer with a touch bar. So every time I get a review unit, review unit from Apple, I do one of those.

Let's check in on the touch bar. And it's never any different because over the course of all this time, since they introduced the touch bar and it's never any different because over the course of all this time since they introduced the touch bar which was years ago now multiple revisions of mac os they've done nothing to improve it they there are a couple minor changes that you would not even notice if you came forward in time from when they introduced it it's basically they've done nothing and to your point it is a little bit baffling about doubling down like, no, we added the touch bar to this model too, when Apple is acting like it's confident about the touch bar and yet has apparently given no real software backing to it. And I know that there are things like better

touch tool. There are tools that you can kind of use to hack the touch bar to make it more useful but every time i get a touch bar laptop i am shocked at how poorly apple software supports it like there's no third-party access to the control strip you can't do sort of global stuff the limit they're obviously developer limitations there are some great examples of the touch bar fully formed but a lot of apps just don't have any proper touch bar support. BBEdit is the one that I was playing with my favorite Mac app, basically. And it's got three touch bar buttons in its editor and there to show the side bar, which I hate and I keep closed and to move between items in the sidebar. It's like, there's no way for me to add my scripts on there,

my filters for me to do, like, I can't do anything with it. And, you know, yes, that is to a certain degree on bare-bones software for not doing it. But also, like, if you were them, would you prioritize the touch bar? I mean, there's a chicken and egg thing happening there too. But if I could, like, if I could have a keyboard maestro with direct access

to the touch bar and program it to do stuff in a certain way, that would be different, but it doesn't work. And the third party stuff like better touch tool is hacky enough that it works, but like they're working hard to work around Apple's limitations because Apple's done nothing. There's my mini touch bar rant. Every time I get one of these touch bars in my house, I use it thinking I'm going to find something different, and I never, ever find anything different, which I think makes me ask the question, is it really a dead product? Is it really a dead product and they couldn't walk away from it? No, I don't see how you could. I know you're a believer in this.

Well, they could. No, it's not even about my own opinions on it. I think it would be really difficult to add a little screen to a keyboard and then in the next revision, replace it with keys again. What if it was a whole new product because you were doing a processor transition and you kept it on the high-end laptop that's going to stay on Intel and stay around for a while? Maybe. I just don't know how...

I'm not advocating for killing the Touch Bar, by the way, but I am advocating for Apple, if it's going to have it, it needs to put effort into it. I agree with that. There should be more there. It feels like, for me, the Touch Bar is really loved by the hardware team because it was something that maybe was really hard to do. And so they put it on all the hardware they can conceivably put it on. But the operating system team doesn't care about it. Yeah, they did the obligatory amount to get it launched.

And then they've let it sit there by the side of the road. And it's like, again, I rarely see this level of dysfunction from Apple, where from the outside you can say, it seems clear that you don't have alignment in your teams about this product. Like you literally, one group is really hot on this feature and the other group doesn't want to have anything to do with it. And everybody can tell because they've done nothing. They've made no effort. It's either that, or they've decided internally that it's a failure and they're going to kill it as soon as they can, as soon as the pride permits them to kill it. And in the meantime, they're not going to put any effort into it it's one of those two things either it's a badly managed product where some part of apple

just doesn't want to do the work there are more important things to do um or i guess or they're deluded and they think that there's literally nothing they could ever add to it to make it any better which is totally wrong or they've decided it's a loser and they're not going to waste their time on it and they're going to get rid of it as soon as they can but it's so frustrating every time i see it because it's a cool idea and i'm not opposed to it in general and yet in in specific when i try to use it it doesn't do anything i wanted to do and i can't edit it to make it do something i want to do because that's not possible i was listening listening to Dithering, which is Ben Thompson and John Gruber's new show, which I really enjoy. And they were talking about this and they were

actually praising your review. And one of the things that John was saying was comparing the touch bar to the introduction of the iPhone in the sense of like, there's no buttons on the iPhone because if you have a, if you, you can't ship a new button, that was Steve Jobs's idea, right? Like once you put the buttons on the phone and the phone is in people's hands, you want to change something in the software, you can't send them a new button to do something new. So they decided to have a complete touchscreen. So the buttons are all software. You can do whatever they want with them. That idea should

have made it like should make the touch bar a great thing right like you can't ship new buttons to a laptop right buttons are already there but you got a screen you can put any button you want it could be any interaction method you want that's the promise of the touch bar but it feels like it hasn't been realized yet and the what i have used i enjoy it from a basic level but also i want more because i like it right like i want there to be more in it because there is you know if we've made it work with ios right with like buttons then you can make it work with the touch bar. There can be more there, it just has yet to be seen. But I liked the comparison of the original iPhone there, right? You make more with having a screen. The buttons can be anything, they can change.

They can change in the next software update. You can do whatever you want. You add more functionality to your software that wasn't there when the computer shipped well now you don't that doesn't matter because you can do whatever you want with it right like it's it's available to you so and things that things that are our key proxies and things that are not at all key proxies that are whole little uis on there like they've done in logic and final cut and all that and that's fine and we can debate the finer points of like do those interfaces work and is that the right place for it and it should even be there but if we accept the idea that the touch bar is an interesting interface element

replacing a bunch of keys that aren't that interesting why has it not evolved i macOS, every time they do an update, there's a hundred new features, a thousand new features about this and that thing. And they tweak this and they tweak that. They have this brand new interface element. Anyway, you know, I've said it before. It's just, it really disappoints me. It baffles me.

I want to like the touch bar more than I do. And it's not because I've decided I hate the touch bar. It's that every time I bring one of these in, it's an opportunity to see it anew because I don't live with a touch bar on a Mac in my house. And then I'm immediately reminded that it hasn't changed and is just disappointing

and there's nothing I can do to make it better because it's not customizable in any real way. And yeah, anyway, it's a mystery. And among mysteries, the big point is that all the butterfly keyboards are gone, right? Like that is, we can talk about all these other issues because the truth is we've said all we can say about the keyboard. They fixed the keyboard. This is a much better keyboard on this laptop. If you've been waiting five years for a 13 inch laptop for 13 inch macbook pro go buy it it's it's here for you now it's just all the details that make me wonder wanted but couldn't get for a few years right like yeah i i would wager there are lots of people out there with like 2015 macbook pros who have been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting

for the butterfly keyboard to go away so they could buy another one. And they probably already purchased these, right? They probably already have. But that is the number one thing that is going on here. And it's a good thing. I have an Ask Upgrade question, which is just building on this a little bit uh so we'll we'll kind of finalize our thoughts on whether or not you should buy this and from from what avenue coming from after this break where we thank our final sponsor which is our friends over at smile and i want to tell you

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I was talking to my friend Federico Faticci about this today because he was mentioning an app that he wished to support and a feature that PDF pen does, which is in iOS, it's called Open in Place. So this is the idea of being able to edit a document without creating a new version of it. And this is something that a lot of apps do not support very well on iOS,

but PDFPen does. So I can open, I can use PDFPen, I can open a PDF that is in Dropbox on my iOS devices and sign it and it just gets saved to the file. It doesn't create a duplicate file that I have to override. So I really like that about PDF pen. It's just like a little thing, which they added, but to people that use this stuff a lot, it makes a big difference. But anyway, the big new release is PDF pen 12 for the Mac. Go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast right now.

If you do any work with PDFs, you should check out PDF Pen. Our thanks to PDF Pen from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM. So Jason, beginning our hashtag Ask Upgrade questions today is a question from David. David says, I have a 2013 13-inch MacBook Pro. It's old, but I was determined that I would skip the butterfly keyboard. Congratulations, David, you did that. Now, finally, I can can replace it except maybe i want to wait a little bit longer for a possible 14 inch update maybe with an arm processor should i wait or pull the trigger part of me wants to say you've waited this long you just you could wait forever the other part of me says no you've done your work you've done more than your work um i would not wait i would not

have waited this long quite frankly but i would not wait any longer yeah i think you can wait forever yes you'll wait forever the big the big gating issue which was the keyboard is gone for you now so i would just do it there will always be new stuff in the future that will be better than what you're currently buying and you could wait forever. So I'd say you've reached your reward now. Your seven years in the wilderness is over. Because it's like, yeah, there will be ARM laptops at some point, but you don't know about the potential downsides of them right now. So don't wait for something that is really unknown. So that would be my thinking because if it takes another year well now

you're using a 2013 laptop in 2021 right it's just like that's you know that's just going to keep getting worse and worse for you and as jason mentioned if you have something like a 2013 macbook pro and you move to a 2020 macbook, either of those are going to feel amazing. Especially if you go for the correct one, which is the 4-port. You're going to have a whale of a time. You're going to be great over there. It's going to be amazing.

I think now's the time. You're probably good to move. PianoJunkie asks, probably a fan of pianos would be my expectation. Have either of you guys had problems with your AirPods Pro? Both the right and left of my AirPods have been replaced by Apple about six weeks apart due to a rattling sound when any movement is present. Curious if anybody else has had this problem.

I want to talk about this, Jason, because I'm sure like me, you've had many people contact you and say, why aren't you talking about this? Of course. They usually send a tweet and they include me and Gruber and Rene Ritchie and often Marco Armand all in a big group like CC everyone. Why aren't you talking about my problem? I'm on those tweets too. That's what I'm saying. Oh, good.

Enjoy. I wanted to talk about this because it does seem to be a widespread problem, but I don't even know what a rattling sound in my airpods pro would be like i have no i mean there are it may be that there's like a little thing in there that gets that can come detached and all that it sounds like this is a problem with a widespread is what does that mean it sounds like this is a problem with some airp AirPods Pro and you report it and Apple gives you a new one. Yeah, when I say widespread, it is a problem enough that Apple have made a support document for it.

So it isn't just like a very small thing. Like it's happening enough that they have created some steps that you should take. And it seems to be that the problem is mostly with noise cancellation. Now I use noise cancellation on my AirPods Pro all pro all the time so i've not had this issue me too one thing i have had recently is bluetooth connection problems with my ipad pro so when i'm using them connected to my ipad pro i can hear that like i can't explain it it's not rattling but it's like pops right and i know that's

a connection problem. This is only happening when I'm using my Logitech mouse, which makes sense because there is a warning in the Bluetooth settings that say, quote, using the MX Ergo, which is a Logitech mouse that I use, may affect Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. So that is happening, right? But I don't, I'm not going to write to Apple support on that because they've already told me it's a problem.

And if I connect, if I can then connect my AirPods to my iphone instead i don't have this problem so like there is a an issue about mouse there like whatever i like using the mouse if the problem also persists i could just turn off the mouse and use the trackpad but i mean the bottom line is if you have a physical problem with your airpods you should contact apple and talk to them about it and you know i i guess we could write stories saying some, it's the usual thing. I've talked about it here before. It's very hard to get a sense of whether you, if you make millions of something, some of them are going to be bad. And the thing is if it's a flaw and app I'd say contact Apple support because like some products are going to be flawed and presumably if it's a physical flaw they will

send you new ones and if it's a software problem maybe they're working on it I haven't seen any reports that Apple says it's not a problem and is ignoring it, which would put my attention more to it. Like all these people are having problems with their AirPods and Apple denies that it's a problem, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening. I haven't seen anything like this. I did have my AirPods completely ceased to function this week and it looked like they were out of battery and they wouldn't charge so i ended up plugging them in to um they wouldn't charge wirelessly so i ended up plugging them in directly holding down the button doing the like the restart the complete reset thing i did that twice and then when they came back it came back with uh the battery at 0% on the case and on one of the AirPods, but not the other one.

And then they repaired and they charged and then they were fine. But that was a weird thing that I experienced where it just got really confused. And the battery wasn't dead or shouldn't have been dead. I think something very strange happened and it went out of control and it discharged and it was bad but i haven't i haven't heard the rattling problem but it sounds like some people have and um apple support is the place to do this because if this is a physical problem i i'm very confident that they will replace your your earbuds which is like with this stuff like i think it's very clear that we tend to talk from

our personal experience and it's very hard to talk about a thing that has happened or is happening if it hasn't happened to me like sure i don't know what a rattling sound is and and again if 40 like because when when these things happen i'm not saying this in particular but when stuff like this happens they will always point you at a bunch of apple support forum posts and say see this is a huge problem and they'll link to like four threads where eight people said that they had the problem it's like i can't tell if it's these eight people or 80 people or 8 000 people or 80 000 people i just there's no way to tell the internet doesn't let us do that so it's very hard because you could write a story. I'm sure some site does write a story about every single one of these, but like it's hard to tell. And in this case, it's a potential hardware product, hardware problem on a product that's so new that if you have a problem with it, the manufacturer, which is Apple is going to fix it because this is a new product and it has a physical problem in some small percentage presumably of these so yeah there it is

all right our next question comes from holmes uh while sleep tracking for apple watch has been heavily rumored do you think that if it will materialize as an announced feature for watchOS 7 for all watches or an exclusive feature for the Series 6 watch? Depends on the hardware, right? I think it's going to be a watch Series 6 thing. This is

like the always-on where the question is, is it special hardware that enables it or is it really just the battery life pushing it across the finish line? Because I feel like Series 5 could probably do this in terms of battery life, but it may be that they've got some special features in the Series 6 hardware that enable it to get through the night, and for me, I think it comes down to that. I don't think Apple, Apple might withhold this feature, but more likely what happens is this feature has

been crafted for the hardware, right? Like it is, it is more likely that Apple has built the feature with the hardware in mind and the hardware with the feature in mind than it is that it's just a software thing that they didn't get to that now they've gotten to. Because, you know, you could do either one. And that's why I'm not putting out the possibility that they'll say, yeah, Series 5 can really do this too. So we put it in both of them. But it may be that the reason Series 5 doesn't do this is not that they hadn't gotten around to it. It's that they weren't satisfied with the performance of sleep tracking on the Series 5 and they made changes in Series 6 so that they could launch that feature. And if's true then it will be limited to series six

yeah i agree with you but i also do feel that like at a certain point you need to come up with new features to sell watches and so sometimes you might want to just restrict the software feature to it even if technically another watch could do it yeah it's funny really it's it's features like this and it's sensors right because like the the series 5 really only had the difference of the always on but that was such a huge feature that that was a big differentiator how do you sell a series 6 watch and i think i think you're right you have to say now with sleep tracking or you know now with this new sensor like there has to be a thing uh and maybe like this is the thing i would actually like to file a complaint at this point about the always on okay watch face yes defaults to that

like digital basic digital face when you have an app open far too quickly so like i've been using a workout app like a third-party app but it's got like a remote for moving through the exercises and i so often have to tap it and then tap it again oh that's annoying so i feel like it's not you know the i i'm not getting the promise of the always on face like i think they need to do something for third-party developers to be able to kind of have not an always on face, but like an always on app. That like it's always ready. Right, because the workout app doesn't do that,

but that's their app. Exactly. And I want there to be something. I don't know what, but I feel like it goes to that. I mean, all apps that you use, right? Like it defaults to that ugly, just blank screen with a digital time readout in the top right-hand corner

and the screen is kind of semi-translucent. It goes to that very quickly. And I would prefer if they could find some way to just show me the app UI instead of when I have an application open, then that clock so or like if you're gonna force me to to have to look at something show me my actual watch face that i chose rather than this weird one that you're showing me instead so it's just an issue i have with the watch face because really like if you remember the pitch was like oh people are working

out and they have to tap it with their nose. Ha ha ha ha ha. Right. I'm still having to do that when I'm working out. Right. Because you're using a third party workout app and it's, and it's screensaver is not the information you want to see. And Apple's workout app can't give me what I need in that moment.

Right. So I would like to see some more there. Uh, John asks, do you think there will be a face mask emoji option in iOS 14? I feel like to see some more there. John asks, do you think there will be a face mask emoji option in iOS 14? I feel like it should be added before. Like, embrace it.

You know? This is a thing that people are doing now. Put face masks in them. Right? I feel like it's a thing. I feel like they should just do it. Yeah, sure. Why not? And it's also, it's an emoji... There's an emoji face mask. Yeah. So, why not? I feel like, really really it should have been an option before now right like this is one of those maybe us-centric ideas right that they didn't do

it before now but they had other types of like accessories last question comes from andrew andrew asks what is the worst apple product that you have ever owned? You go first. The 2013 Trash Can Mac Pro. I owned one of those. Oh, right. Remember? Yeah, and you had actual technical problems with it where it behaved weirdly and restarted and stuff. It would lock up when I was recording

sometimes. It was like a... This was one of the GPU overheating issues is what it ended up working out to be. It was like a GPU issue. And so I would be recording, say, with Jason. It happened a lot when recording with Jason. And the machine would just lock up. And all I could do was turn off the machine.

And sometimes I would lose audio. I would lose some of the recording. I would have to piece it together via various backup means. And it was such a nightmare, such a pain. And it was something that happened frequently, but inconsistently, which is like the worst kind of bug, right? All the time, but you can never predict when it's going to happen. And it just made it that like, I was always under so much stress while trying to do my

work because I was just waiting for the inevitable lockup of my machine. I was so happy to get rid of that thing. Sold it on eBay. Nice. Told the guy that was buying it about the problems. They didn't mind. They needed it for a specific reason, and it was the machine that they needed. So they went for it.

Target practice or something? Who knows? Who knows? Just just fancy i don't know maybe like a stephen hackett type person needed it for a collection i don't know but yeah i was so happy to replace that thing with the imac the retina imac that i replaced it with that was such a mistake buying that computer but i had no way nobody knew at the time how much of a mistake it was going to be right but it was terrible so if you thought of something yeah the third generation ipod which one was that one so this is the one where apple's war on buttons uh and moving parts meant that they decided to do an interface where instead of having the buttons around the scroll wheel they put four touch sensitive buttons across the top right under the display okay yep which was one generation and you talk about apple like sticking to their technology even after it's clear that nobody likes it that was gone immediately just like the no the no button ipod shuffle where it was one generation

they're like nope and they went back to the old design. This was like that too. It was so bad because if you're operating your iPod on feel, which people did, like that was the whole point is it wasn't like a computer you wanted to use. You really wanted to just, uh, you know, uh, pause it, pause the track. You couldn't operate this thing on feel because the buttons, if you touch them to get the feel, they would activate. And it was so frustrating. And this was when my kids were little. And I remember very much, I had a bunch of times where there was a bedtime and I would read to them and they would fall asleep. But you had to wait for them to completely fall asleep before you could leave the room, or they would wake up. So you're putting them to bed.

There was a period where you just had to sit there. And I would use my iPod, and I would listen to music, or a podcast maybe, I don't know, maybe not, on my iPod. Probably too early. On my iPod to pass the time before they're super asleep. And it's dark in the room and I can't see the iPod.

And it would always just get screwed up because I would touch a button and be like, no, I didn't mean to touch that button. And it's just the accidental button presses, but they're not even presses. Literally it was capacitive. You just brush against one of them and it's like you push that button. It was terrible.

It was such a bad idea. And the previous iPods were so good. And the successive iPods, the subsequent iPods were all good. That one is a loser. Yeah, I don't like that one. I don't like that the lights were red. I don't know why they choose red as the illumination because they didn't match anything else it should have been blue if anything

right to actually match the color of the screen it's like this was the the one where it was in between so the this first and second gen the wheel was physically moving right and then they went to a solid state wheel but four solid state buttons and then the fourth gem which is the where they actually perfected it was the scroll was touch but then you could click on the four like up down left and right to do things like that was like a trackpad kind of almost and then it never changed on any ipod any ipod that had the wheel it had that wheel but like that ring around the wheel was great like the first generation the wheel spun the second generation the wheel was like touch but it felt like it spun even though it didn't but the ring around the wheel so you could orient like up menu down you know button in the center pause or button at the bottom pause whatever like you knew them and you could do it all by feel so

you could carry it in your pocket and you could just reach in and go and and do whatever you need next track play pause all of that got moved on to those little touch sensitive buttons and it was garbage if memory serves on an episode of flashback i believe steven said that he loved this ipod i think it was his first one and i was upset then and i'm upset now it's not a good it's just it's the worst ipod like it is of the classic It is the worst Apple product I have personally owned. Wow. Take that, Hacken. I guess.

I'm just answering Andrew's question. Stephen's in the Discord answering live. Yep. It was his favorite. No, he was agreeing with me that it was the worst Apple product ever. That's what he was doing I'm sure okay yeah I'm sure we'll save that for another time

if you'd like to send in a question to help us close out an episode of Upgrade no matter what question you have hashtag ask Upgrade and it may be included in a future episode again if you want to become a Real AFM member support the show and get into the Real AFM members discord you can there's a link right at the top of the show and get into the RelayFM members Discord.

There's a link right at the top of the show notes to support Upgrade or you can go to Relay.FM membership to learn more and sign up. Thank you so much to everybody that does that. Really, really, really means a lot to us. Thank you so much for your continued support. Also, thanks to Smile, Pingdom, and

DoorDash for their support of this show. Thank you again for listening. Thanks to Jason for joining me as always. You can find Jason's work at sixcolors.com. Jason is at jsnow, J-S-N-E-L-L. Social media, Jason also produces many shows here at RelayFM, as well as on The Incomparable. You can go to

incomparable.com to find more there. I'm iMike, I-M-Y-K-E, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye Jason Snell goodbye Mike Curley