Upgrade - 316: Why Tomorrow?

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Apple announced new Apple Watches and iPads on Tuesday, and here's our quick reaction to the news. Shockingly, we walk away feeling pretty good about… Apple's services? Plus: Surprise! Those operating system updates are coming sooner than anyone suspected!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 316 today's show is brought to you by mint mobile hover and matthias my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snow hello jason snow hello mike hurley we're back. We're back. It's a day after episode 315. It's our new daily podcast, Upgrade. Welcome to Upgrade Daily. This is, what would this be like? Upgrade Pro Max, I guess.

I have a hashtag Snell Talk question, and it comes from Josh. And Josh wants to know, quite simply, Jason, did you enjoy today's Apple event? I loved it. You know, the number one reason why is it only took an hour fantastic short one i i actually am a proponent i know it's more work for everyone else but i would much rather apple hold an event every month or two and roll out a product or two then have them hold a bunch of products and then just you know give us a barrage of products over two hours you know and

then go away for six months you say it's saying you say it'd be more work i actually think over time it wouldn't be more work because we'd get used to it and it'd be less of an a quote-unquote event i i think there's a cost that apple has in building it and that we have in covering it but i'm thinking of apple i i do think it's more work to do two product launches than one because you have to contact all your you know press people and brief them and all of that and and set it up not just once but then set it up again like i think there's more work involved in doing two than in doing one but i think it's better for for us certainly to have more to talk about spread out and i liked i liked how it was snappy it was an hour we were uh we were out of there i mean we weren't in there to begin with because it's all certainly, to have more to talk about spread out. And I liked how it was snappy. It was an hour.

We were out of there. I mean, we weren't in there to begin with because it's all virtual, but you know what I mean. Yeah, I mean, usually there could be a wonder, like, will the episode go longer than the keynote or not? Who knows? This one, most definitely, yes. If you would like to send in a question

to start off a future episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk or use the command question mark SnellTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. Jason, I would like to spend a moment talking about our wonderful friends over at St. Jude. Throughout September, we are raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Did you know that in the US, more than four out of five children with cancer survive? But in many developing countries, more than four out of five of these children will die. The St. Jude International Outreach Program is a global initiative for St. Jude to develop one-on-one relationships with 24 hospitals in 17

countries in low- and middle-income areas like Mexico, Haiti, and the Philippines. St. Jude is leading the way that the world understands, treats, and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases and St. Jude will not stop until no child dies from cancer and we will be alongside with them continuing to raise money like the rest of our wonderful community has been doing. Donate today at stjude.org slash relay. You can support St. Jude kids from around the world during Childhood

Cancer Awareness Month. Once again, that is stjude.org slash relay. A couple of big notes on this, right? We mentioned yesterday that we'd passed the half a million dollars total raised over the last two years. Well, now for this year's campaign, for the 2020 campaign, we have, as of today, passed over $200,000 raised, which is absolutely unbelievable. And we're going to top it all off this week with Podcastathon 2. 2 to 8 p.m. Eastern Time, Friday, the 18th of September,

twitch.tv slash RelayFM. It is going to be a six-hour charity event benefiting St. Jude. We'll be doing everything on video. We've got a bunch of fantastic segments planned, a wonderful set of RelayFM guests. So from hosts and guests, we have excellent interviews with people that are involved with St. Jude, people that work at St. Jude. We've got so much stuff planned.

This is going to be bigger and better in every way from last year. And Jason, I am very excited to have built the balloon room. I have erected a gazebo inside of Mega Studio that I will be filling with balloons. I'll put a link in the show notes to a video I made today where I put the first 100 balloons in the balloon room. Throughout the evening, we need to decide the exact amount, so amount TBD, but basically we will be setting a donation amount that every time someone donates x amount of dollars another balloon will go in the balloon room with the hope of filling the balloon room the goal of filling the balloon room throughout the evening and i will be broadcasting live from

inside of the balloon room so that that is just my one of the little hijinks steven's been building something oh man steve steven has been working hard on something that we cannot reveal that will be amazing so for basically it will be the the steven's version of what i'm doing but obviously in a very steven way um so you can tune in for those and we're going to be doing challenges uh we're going to be doing so much stuff jason has been putting together an absolutely epic game show featuring a bunch of relay fm hosts i think i think there's nine total relay fm hosts in that in that that set of segments that i did with uh that we finished uh recording yesterday so that there'll be some game show shenanigans happening so don't forget 2 to

8 p.m eastern time uh in the show note the tweet that i've linked of mine has the times in a bunch of different time zones i guess considering i'm only going to mention it for the last time here now on this show i'll say it now 11 to 5 11 a.m to 5 p.m pacific 1 p.m to 7 p.m central 2 to 8pm eastern, those are US times 7pm to 1am in the UK and 8pm to 2am in I think it's central Europe is the time zone so it's giving you a much better set I think of time zones

twitch.tv slash relayfm, tune in for all of it tune in for some of it and bring your wallets to donate I am so excited for Friday I am very concerned about the amount of work to do between now and then but it's going to get done and i'm very excited so thank you.org relay busy busy week uh okay before we get into talking about the apple watch and ipad updates that we got today. I guess we,

I suppose we have to score the draft. Jason. I was so frustrated. This one, this was, this was a real rollercoaster. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. As, as in one hour, we, we took a ride with the, with our draft picks from yesterday. Also, I think it feels different having only made the picks a day ago to

watch them go up and up in flames than it does if you've got a week to sit on them or usually like the day of the draw a day of the event i'll go through the draft document again and score it based on how i think it's actually going to go i looked at it today and was like i can't score it any differently to yesterday in my mind um basically this was a tie and jason won by the tiebreaker i would to lose on the tiebreaker oh the worst yeah six six six tie well and i mean it could have been worse mike it could have been an 89 minute long event that's because the type the tiebreaker was will it be over or under 90 minutes and it was 60 minutes so at least it wasn't close on the tiebreaker um but the rest of it's i we had

scored six six do we need to we should we should go through it really quickly just to satisfy everybody so you had a low priced apple oh no sorry you didn't get the low priced apple watch replacement that was when you need to mention this to mention this. So they announced the new Apple Watch SE, and I flipped it over to Blue, and I was like, got it. And then they said, oh, and by the way, the Series 3 is still there. And the way I picked it, and I shouldn't have phrased it this way, was low-priced Apple Watch replaces Series 3. Should have just said introduced. Said replaces Series 3. And so that went from blue to red in the scoreboard. And that point came off the board, which was brutal.

But I did get low-cost watch omitting always on display. Now, there's a little bit of a debate about this. There is. We could have phrased it better, I think. But it was considered valid. So if you couldn't ever possibly prove a negative we probably shouldn't have phrased it this way but the idea is that the low-cost watch they did not announce an always on display because it doesn't have one and that was what i was getting at yeah this was a bit not good from

apple though right because like the reason that there was question is like oh it's the same display as the series six like it's not is it and also they they kept talking about the always on altimeter yeah it's like that's not that's not the right thing and i guess i guess the argument that that apple would probably make and you know it's fine this is it but it's not in the spirit the way people think about it it's actually the processor that allows for the yeah but anyway it doesn't have an always on display so so so it does that that is a thing that they left off of that new uh apple watch se and um and the one that honestly i i took a shot in the dark in and i was choosing between a bunch of things that didn't happen and this one and i picked this one

which was new watch body color and yeah there's a blue aluminum and there are a bunch of them and there are a bunch of colors. There's a product red. Yeah. So I got that one. You also got all of your iPad picks. So edge-to-edge screen, second-gen Apple Pencil, and surprisingly, I think, Magic Keyboard. But we'll come to all of that in a little bit. And you also got iOS or iPadOS 14 release date announced.

It's tomorrow. It's tomorrow. Again, we're going to get to that in detail later on. I thought that we were just going to give those to ourselves because they're like, oh, it ships next week. But no, literally at the end, they were like, no, we're going to spend time talking about that. So I got a watch gets a new health focus sensor,

an Apple Watch model gets extended battery life. I cannot believe i didn't get the hand washing one jason that felt like a lot to me but nevertheless new non-pro ipad gets flat edge design and touch id and also um i got the apple fitness workout service introduced and watch os 7 release date announced yeah no, I think you did that wrong. You didn't get extended battery life and you did get the services bundle. Oh, my apologies.

My apologies. I marked that incorrectly. Yeah, yeah. So I didn't get the extended battery life. I got the flat edge design, Touch ID sensor, fitness service, watchOS 7,

services bundle. They were my six. So just to be clear here, I beat you on Apple Watch 2 to 1 here i beat you on apple watch two to one i beat you on ipad picks three to two but on our our needs a new name free picking round you you cleaned up in the free picking area three to one but that left it six to six which left the tie breaker to over or under 90 minutes runtime which both of us thought was a perfectly fair yep way to divide it and it was 60 minutes minutes, 60 minutes and out. So I will take

this on penalty kicks. Another draft one. And I continue my streak of never winning in September. Maybe there'll be a second September. Probably not. Well, you never know. Probably not. I'm still going to try and get one mercy victory before the end of the year. I'm going to try very hard. I'll probably have at least one more shot. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Hover, one of Real AFM's longest-running sponsors. When you have that one big idea, where do you go?

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So let's talk about the Apple Watch. Yeah. Tim set it out at the start that there were two product lines to talk about today, Apple Watch and the iPad. So whilst not saying we're not going to talk about the iPhone,

they at least made it clear at the beginning. So you mentioned, we kind of touched on it already we've got new colors so we have a blue and a gold um and that gets a yellow gold uh so like you'd see they've actually brought back something that's more looks a little bit more like the addition uh it's a yellow gold stainless steel option and a new dark gray called Graphite Stainless, because I guess we need another different dark color name in Apple products.

And also the first product red Apple Watch. They are losing the ceramic edition and keeping titanium. Big news for titanium fans out there. I'm just so happy that Apple seems to be embracing the anodized colored aluminum thing again. Like they go back and forth on whether they want to have colored products or whether they want them all

to just be various metallic grays. And that red is going to work for some people. For me, I looked at the blue one. I was like, oh God, that blue one is gorgeous. I love it. Love it. Yeah, I'm disappointed about this uh i really love the ceramic apple watch i have the ceramic series 5 and it's a shame like i love the all

white and and it's a shame for me to lose that one um i mean maybe i'll just say it right now it's like i don't think i want this apple watch yeah um so i'm not too fussed and like maybe i'll get what i want for the series 7 and they'll bring the ceramic back again who knows um so i'm not too fussed and like maybe i'll get what i want for the series seven and they'll bring the ceramic back again who knows um but i do agree with the churn of of uh materials and colors i think apple should be doing this um they should be putting new colors into the line even if so you end up catching people who think they might otherwise want their watch for another two years you know maybe people that have the series four like i don't know and then they see the blue one then like oh i would love a blue watch and then

they go with it you know the major new feature um it's a health feature is the blood oxygen sensor this is something that we were talking about yesterday. So basically, this is a sensor that reads periodically your blood oxygen level, or takes 15 seconds to do a reading. And I watched the keynote, I've read the website, and basically what I can see is it's about understanding the oxygen levels in your blood.

But honestly, having consumed the video and read the website, I don't know why I want this. So it is actually a medical thing, and they have you check your blood oxygen. And there's a little device that if you're ever ever at the hospital they just clip this thing on your finger but you can even buy them and they're little battery operated things and you clip them on a finger and they give you the percentage of oxygenation in your blood and it is actually a case where in covet 19 what they were finding especially in the early days was that there were people who didn't who didn't understand that they were compromised in terms of their lungs um and they were by the time they got to the hospital their um oxygenation was really low

and this is an example where if you had one of these devices on you can actually check your and i'm sure there are some people who've got various uh like asthma, other conditions involving bringing in oxygen into your body where you need to check and see that your oxygen level is above a certain threshold. And then this will also apparently warn your various, although that's a different feature. That's your oxygen uptake for workouts. So it is actually a really relevant thing.

Well, there is the later this year, they said they would be able to give you notifications like they do with the heart monitoring stuff. I actually think that maybe Apple didn't get the approval they needed in time because they really didn't talk, in my opinion, very much about the health benefits of this in the same way that they did with the ecg i feel like the ecg presentation was much more impactful than the blood oxygen sensor because you've done a better job of explaining to me why i would want this sensor than i think the presentation did and yet they said that they are doing like an asthma study with UC Irvine. And so they are working on some of this stuff. Those studies don't mean anything to me, right? They're like, I can't use them. And it doesn't

tell me why it's helpful to me. I think this is one of those examples where they did an hour-long presentation and they were a little more ruthless in going going into the details of it but you're right there's possibly a regulatory thing too although i think if it's in the product they've had to go through regulatory stuff about it i think it's interesting that it doesn't do it the other thing it doesn't do is it doesn't do it constantly they've built it into an app and you open that app and then it runs and in 10 seconds it gives you a number well no they did say it does periodic readings too sure sure but it's not gonna it's not doing it all the time it will do it periodically just like if you're not doing a workout it will do your heart rate periodically so it's just adding it to that level the way it works is kind of amazing right it's but it's the

way all these sensors work they believe it or not shining a light down onto your skin and measuring the color uh tells how much um oxygen is in your blood it's pretty wild but this is uh this is what we can do and now the apple watch will be able to do that too yeah i i get the feeling from from you and from the just as many people in the discord telling me now about all the benefits like i can see that this is a good sensor to have i just really feel like it wasn't i didn't get it from what they were telling me basically and maybe that there's something missing but i didn't get it you wanted more about why why the oxygen sensor is relevant for you i i understand that yeah my um my dad had uh essentially umPD, basically emphysema breathing thing,

and he had to have his little blood oxygen testing thingy. And so this is one that's just in your watch. There is the S6 chip inside of this. I noticed Jeff Williams referring to this chip as Apple Silicon, which I didn't know. I've not noted Apple mentioning that phrase before. So I guess they will call all chips they make Apple Silicon now. I guess, unless there's going to be another brand for it,

it sounds like Apple Silicon is going to be the way they brand across all of their processors. Interesting that that's a kind of effect of the Mac transition, but now they're talking about it for the Apple Watch and presumably we'll do the same for the iPhone. In a nutshell, this enables a better always on display. It can be two and a half times brighter outdoors now is one of the things they were talking about. Yeah, I like that.

It seems like that's the main benefit. One of the word clouds of the uh word clouds the visual word clouds noted that this watch has a u1 chip yeah it's ultra wideband support so this is that thing that that we talked about a lot for the the last round of iphones that gives you um precision location and it was only in the iphone and so it was sort of like one iphone could find another iphone yay but in the long run this stuff has impact for lots of other things including next generation um car uh using your device to open and run your car like the first generation of those is using near field stuff but um the next generation of that and probably you know basically starting in

a few years all cars will have ultra wide band as as how you uh you know use your devices to open them and start them and this apple watch has that now also the rumor about um you know air tags and things like that the idea that this is a precision location thing. So where is my, where's my Apple watch? You should be able to do a find my on your Apple watch and find exactly where it is because of the ultra wide band stuff that's in it. So that was a little subtle thing just mentioned in passing, but you know, that stuff's going to be in every Apple mobile device before too long. Apple is still quoting 18 hours of battery for this watch there's no change there they had lots of new watch face designs um some of these you have to help me with this jason i believe all of these seemed new to me like i don't remember seeing these for watch os 7

and this is my question i think is is apple limiting some of these things to the new watch or did apple hold back some features from watch os 7 in order to show them off at the apple watch launch event right i don't i don't know the answer but it strikes me that some of these features are i mean there are definitely features in both iOS and watchOS that were announced today. Even though WWDC was in June, they announced these features today. And so they clearly have held back. So our old theory, which is, well, you know, they announced most everything at WWDC, but they hold back some features that are integrated with the hardware. That's not really entirely true this time. They held back some features that are integrated with the hardware. That's not really entirely true this time.

They held back some features that every device is going to get, but they wanted to make the big splash with them as part of a larger story today. And I guess stuff like watch faces, I mean, they don't really need to be in the developer base, right? They,

that Apple's made them. They don't need testing as such. Yeah. So one of the watch faces that I am excited about is a GMT watch face. And a GMT watch face typically means tracking multiple time zones on the same watch face. Like I have a World Timer GMT timer on right now. It's obviously not an Apple watch. And I like that style of watch personally.

So I'm intrigued to try that out. There is a face called count up which is for like timing for interval training i think there's a typograph uh they call it watch face which i like the look of um an art watch face they worked with an artist to create a face which is a face which is a face a human face yeah um and then also memoji faces uh watch face they have a stripe one which is great because the stripe one basically allows you to create flags these could be country flags pride flags football team soccer team baseball team flags i thought that was a very good idea letting people create their own watch face there really um so yeah i'm i'm intrigued to

see if they all come i believe they do and and i want to try those out a little bit um myself especially that gmt face they mentioned um the watch face sharing in watch os7 did you catch what jeff williams kept saying during this segment yeah there's a face for that there's a face for that now in case you don't remember that their campaign was there was an app for that. There's a face for that. Now, in case you don't remember, their whole campaign was, there was an app for that. Right.

Well, and they're conflating a bunch of things here too, which is there are watch faces and there are also complications that come from apps, but they allow you to build a watch face around. It's an interesting idea because it's like,

it's not the watch face necessarily. It's a watch face with a complication from a particular app in it, which is kind of broadening the definition of what a watch face with a complication from a particular app in it um which is kind of broadening the definition of what a watch face is uh in that way but i thought that was clever yeah and you know because this is that like a complication thing but it's a whole combination as you say right that they're really letting people kind of build and share the whole thing right so the apple watch series 6 starts at 399 and this can be pre-ordered now it ships this friday along with the apple watch se which effectively looks like the series 4 it has the s5 chip it comes in LTE versions. It starts at $279.

They also pointed out $12 a month on Apple Card, which is a new thing they're doing. $279 feels higher than what I thought this watch was going to be. Yes. Yeah, that was surprising. It is basically... So our thought was to replace the Series 3. And the idea is it's the Series 4 with some upgrades in it to make it a little more current. Because the Series 4 went away, right?

They kept the Series 3, but the Series 4 went away. And so they've essentially brought it back as the SE, but couldn't get the price down with, again, with the margins that they want, low enough to remove the Series 3. So we're in a situation now where there are essentially three watch generations for sale at one time. You've got the SE, which is a hybrid of the Series 4 and the Series 6, essentially. And then you've got the Series 3 still kicking around. I was very surprised about the Series 6, essentially. And then you've got the Series 3 still kicking around. I was very surprised about the Series 3. Yeah, me too. It really felt like not the plan.

It didn't feel like what I thought the plan was, right? That it's like we now have these two models, that's it. And every year or every whatever, we iterate on them. But then keeping the S3 around, I mean, for developers, it's like, well, now them but then keeping the s3 around i mean for for developers it's like well now they've still got the older watch around with different screen size different screen sizes yep i i think i you can see the trajectory here right probably next year the series 3 goes away um but they didn't want to because you know part of the story here is apple

wants to have the apple watch start at a really low price, and the Series 3 gives them that. And the Apple Watch SE, although it's designed to provide some price range, they obviously, I mean, they didn't want to spec it down to the point. There would be no point in speccing it down to the point that it could replace the Series 3, I guess, because at that point it would be a Series 3. So they decided to make it better than that. would be a Series 3. So they decided to make it better than that. My initial reaction when this happened was, I actually said this to you and Steven in Slack,

which is they're good better besting this thing, which is they're going to keep the Series 3 around in order to say, look at Apple Watch, it starts at $199 or whatever. But you're going to get in there and then you're like, yeah, but the SE is way better. That's buying psychology 101 right is you offer good better best and you get a lot of people who were thinking of good good gets them in the door and then they buy better or they're thinking better and they get up

sell to best right those are the options there but i'm not sure how many people are going to actually buy the series three it's still a pretty good deal for that price but here's the se it's a little you're getting a lot more for that price difference so i think they'll also get a lot of people in the door for the uh for the base model and then they'll they'll sell them up to the se the se is missing always on it's missing ecg and it's obviously missing the blood oxygen sensor. Right. Kind of like the big things that it doesn't have that the series line does have. And I guess over time, it's going to trickle,

all of these things will trickle down. I guess the expectation now is there will be, I would now assume there will probably be an Apple Watch SE every year and they will do this like the iPhone line. I don't know about every... I mean, I think the Apple Watch SE is here to stay, but I imagine that it will just be on sale for a couple of years at least.

I don't think it's going to change next year. I think it's going to sit here. I think the Series 3 has made me question it. We'll see. Yeah, I think the Series 3 will die next year or the year after, and the SE will soldier on. And then at some point, they will have to upgrade the SE because it will be too long in the tooth.

But for now... And it's funny, they chose SE, which goes with the iPhone thing. I think it's interesting. They had an opportunity to create an Apple Watch Sport brand that really was for this, but I think they don't want to do that because they like the idea of saying the Apple Watch is what you want it to be. It can be a fitness device, or it can be a health device, or it can be whatever you want it to be. So why brand it?

SE doesn't mean anything, essentially. We have new watch bands. There are two models of a loop design that have no clasp of any kind you basically just slip it over your wrist and it's like stretchy comes in many sizes because obviously there needs to be many sizes for a product like this because you have to um get it to be exactly what you want they're calling it the solo loop and they do it in a rubber and a nylon i think it's like a woven fabric yeah it's like polyester and and uh and and silicone woven together really kind of feels like something you want to try on huh yeah right i mean that was my immediate thought was like this is the perfect thing to sell in a store which makes it

kind of a tough sell now and i know that you can like print out a thing and wrap it around your wrist or whatever but like you'd really want to try it on. And this seems like exactly the wrong time for this kind of band to be out there, the non-adjustable band. But this is what Apple has decided to focus on this time. They look great. I mean, there is the argument that why do you need an adjustable band if your arm is always really relatively the same size? Although that's not entirely true like

depending on even the time of day your wrist can be um bigger or smaller i wouldn't want to be taking my watch off by stretching it over my head every day no i wouldn't want that either no these didn't really appeal to me at all but that's okay because i mean there are lots of different watch band styles at this point yeah i, I could imagine people wanting this who are maybe doing some kind of sporting activity and are uncomfortable with maybe the watch getting caught and being pulled off, right? Like I can see uses for it,

but this is not a band style that I would like. But what I do love is that Apple continue to iterate in this area. I think it's really cool that they keep doing things that are outside of what I normally see in the watch world. You know, they do these peculiar things, which I think is the right thing for them to do because the Apple Watch really continues to look like a product not from the watch world. And I mean, it's fine. It's totally fine. I think the Apple Watch is continuing to look better and product not from the watch world and i mean it's fine it's totally fine i think the apple watch is continuing to look better and better all the time so i figure continue to keep pushing things forward with the watch bands and not just in color because they could just keep making different colors of sport bands forever and people keep buying them but if

you want me to keep buying the bands every year give me new things new features new functionality i think it's cool they mentioned family setup which is encompassed some stuff that we already knew about but added some stuff that we didn't this will effectively allow for you to with one iphone maybe you as a as a parent be able to set up multiple watches, maybe two for kids and maybe one or two for some grandparents, all with one phone. And they have a selection of family-focused features, like you can specify certain contacts that can be reached, location alerts, that kind of thing.

I think the kicker is that this requires a cell model. Yeah, because they get their own phone number assigned to them and they need to stand alone. So you need to be able to have them be their own thing and be on have a network connection all the time because that's the that's the point of them is you know your kid is wearing it you know where your kid is and they can call for help and all of those things my hope would be that they will be able to work with the carriers to create these basically like pooled plans and that you're not going to need to get like four different cell plans because that would kind of

suck generally the carriers will offer an apple watch you know and it's literally it's just add this person to your plan for an additional i think in the u.s it's ten dollars a month for at least for my for my at&t plan it's ten dollars a month to add my apple watch to my my shared plan yeah but you see that's like but then if you add four and then you're paying forty dollars a month more yeah you know where like what i would like is you know you pay twenty dollars and everyone gets this pool of data and it's shared but the thing is that might be what it's like in america it's going to be different in all different countries different everywhere and any carrier can change it right like there may be a carrier who wants to create like in the u.s maybe t-mobile says well we're going to give you for 15 a month you can uh pair as many apple watches as you want on the plan

and and then that'll be an interesting way that they compete yep and which would be perfectly within their rights to do so, right? Like this is basically just a choice that the carriers will make. And that's that. They will be removing the power brick from the watch boxes. So it still ships with the cable. I went through the checkout process to see if they had any process for this. There was no alert for me to say that it wasn't going

to have the brick in the box and it wasn't shown to me as a thing that i should have added in which when we were talking about there's a conversation a little while ago about the iphone doing this and i think it's pretty clear that the iphone will do this even though the new ipads do still ship with the brick in the box yeah Yeah, but that's different. That's a USB-C charger. Not everybody has a USB-C charger. Good point. Yeah, good point, good point, good point. But a regular USB-A style, relatively low, you know, like, yeah.

That, yeah. But I was surprised it didn't say, like, hey, do you want this? You know, I thought that it would do that. At least at the current checkout process, it doesn't do that. No, apparently you have to go somewhere and then say you want one and then pay an extra 15 bucks, I think. It's on the accessories page that they throw you to,

you know, like you add something to the cart and they're like, you want one of these accessories? But it's way below like all the bands and stuff. And this is the part that bugs me is Apple gets to do what it wants here but they're they know that people are going to complain about this and are going to be surprised by it but they buried in the environmental thing they they mentioned that it's it's really everybody's got them already so we're just going to leave it out and uh but you if you want one

you can buy it for 15 and you know my feeling is if you wanted to come across as truly caring about the environment, you would offer it to people when they bought the product as an option for free. But when you charge $15 for it as an accessory and all your prices essentially stay the same, what you're really doing is saying we just want to you know whatever it costs like we're basically leaving something out that costs x and keeping the price where it is and generating a new revenue stream of 15 dollar uh chargers it the environmental message falls away a little bit and it seems more like they're nickel and diming you and unfortunately that is what apple did here i hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah, that's a good point. I wonder what they're going to do with the iPhone

when it comes to this, like how they're going to do that messaging. If they're going to, if they will say like, hey, do you want this in the box? It is a more expensive product. They could probably afford to offer the charger as an option for free or for like $5 or something like that.

If they, when you buy it, which is the way that I advocate is like, I don't want them to give this away for free, but I think when you buy an $800 phone, if you do want the charger, you should just get it and not say, well, that's a $15 upsell in order to get that charger that we used to give you for free. And I think the truth is that most people don't need those chargers because there are so many charger blocks that you've already collected that are USB-A on that end, or you've got a charger, a travel charger that you use. There are so many, I don't need any more of them, but that's not going to be true of everybody. So I would like for them to, on the iPhone,

make that something that's a relatively inexpensive option. I can see how maybe the margins on the Apple Watch are a little bit less and they're a little hesitant to do that. But I'm a little disappointed that Apple doesn't just offer it as a throw-in at point of purchase. Not after that, but at point of purchase.

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Go to matthias.ca slash upgrade slash UK, and you can get that too. Our thanks to Matthias for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, so shall we talk about... Actually, before we go onto the ipad let's stay in the fitness realm and talk about fitness plus an apple created fitness service they did it watch i will say jason of everything in this presentation this was the one that impressed me the most i think because as a product offering i'm impressed with the most, I think, because as a product offering,

I'm impressed with the iPad Air, right? But like as a product offering, Fitness Plus really ticked all of the boxes I expected. And then they had that additional like Apple level of implementation that lifted it a gear. So like, for example, what you have now is a fitness app on your iPad, your iPhone, or your Apple TV that adds instructional videos. They have new workouts every week. They have a team of instructors, right? They have like, they have hired a bunch of instructors. They will be putting out new workouts every week. They have tons of different workout types at first, like they have rowing and they have treadmill stuff, core, high intensity training. They have yoga, so many, loads, right? And they're going to be adding other ones. I think they had a dance one too. When you start one of the videos, say on your Apple TV, on your iPad,

it starts a workout on your watch that correlates to the video that you're watching. And then on the screen, so on your iPad screen, for example, you see live the metrics from your watch. So like your heart rate, you see that there, the timer, you see that there, it's like overlaid on the screen. And if you like hit one of your activity goals for the day it fires off and tells you you can get and and one one thing i love they said like if they want you to be like hey like keep an eye on your heart rate they like make that bigger on the screen for you i thought that these little

details were very well done yeah i we expressed a lot of skepticism about this. It's like, oh boy, it's another Apple service. And what I think is really interesting is that it's not Peloton. Like people are like, oh, it's Peloton. For people who don't know, Peloton is this company that has a bike that has its own software on it

and its own service and its own instructors. And it's all kind of integrated together. And it's not cheap, but it's all integrated together. And by all accounts, it's a kind of integrated together and it's not cheap but it's all integrated together and by all accounts it's a pretty great product um apple fans should appreciate a company that is integrating hardware software and service into one thing right yeah this is this is different it's not peloton because it's approaching it with different pieces of hardware and a different hardware software services integration and the difference is peloton is a bike, right?

And there are other services that are like Peloton, but they're like, it's a bike or it's a treadmill or whatever. And here it's Apple Watch and a display that's either a phone or an iPad or an Apple TV. And you can use hardware with it. So you can get on an exercise bike or a treadmill, but you can also use weights. You can also just do yoga or have nothing and just be jumping around and doing whatever you need to do. And that because it's on your wrist and then you've got a display where they're talking to you you've got um you you get this right you get

you get it in a different set of scenarios and that's different and it's not fundamentally i think better or worse but it's different and i think one of the places that they will get pick up for this that they wouldn't the barrier to getting a peloton is enormous because of the price plus i don't like stationary cycling, so I would never get one. Right. So you wouldn't get one. But the barrier here is none other than signing up for the service, and everybody's going to get a month for free, and anybody who buys a new Apple Watch is going to get three months for free. But they have beginner-level stuff.

You don't need any equipment. They've got an absolute beginner's mode, which I love, which is like, hey, if you are nervous about this, like if you've not trained in a while, like we have a program for you. And I think that that is such a nice entry point, right? Like, and I think that's super cool. I will say that one big comparison to Peloton that this, I don't believe this service does.

They didn't talk about it. I don't think it does. And what's something that people love about Peloton is the live sessions, right? So like you can be on a peloton bike with 100 people from all around the world you just are on at the right time and the instructor is actually talking to you and other people like will address you by name and people really love that and i get that right it's like a spin class but at home or whatever and well give it give it time if this is a wild success then they do that it wouldn't it wouldn't it time if this is a wild success. I bet they do that at some point.

It wouldn't surprise me. But Peloton also do recorded classes that are like these, right? So that's where these things overlap. But as you say, you're not paying. I mean, the Peloton monthly, like the digital plan, I think is like $13 or $14. It's already more expensive. But anyway.

And you've bought an expensive bike in order to buy into it, right? So the idea here is that this is a different approach. It's similar, but it's different. And if you're somebody who is who does not have equipment, and wants to get in better shape, it will actually help you do that. I think this is all really interesting. The one thing that that I thought here, maybe they just thought people don't need this. But as somebody who's been running lately, I look at this and I think, well, you know what I would like? I know there are apps that do this, but they should have a running workout that's not a treadmill, right? Like they should have something that is on the Apple Watch and maybe they will at some point where I can go for a run with my phone

or with my Apple Watch and have it monitoring my health and playing music and talking to me and doing whatever. But the primary mode, at least at launch for this, is it's a video program while you're exercising. So you watch it, you see your stats, and you exercise. And so therefore, I'm not going to be watching something while I'm running out in the world. But I can see places that this could go. But where it's starting, I think it's very smart. I think it's very smart. Looks really interesting. Will it succeed? I don't know, but I think it is a perfect fit

for one of the ways that Apple has positioned the Apple Watch. They integrate with Apple Music. You can choose the style of music that you want. And if you're an Apple Music subscriber, you can get the playlists, which is fantastic, right? You're like, oh, I love that playlist. Oh, I love that one song. What was it? it's all integrated um i think this is super compelling jason like i really

think they've done a great job here um i i i know personally like i'm someone who enjoys yoga and so like i i will give it a go i want to try the yoga workouts out. I would also quite like to just see what their beginner thing is all about. Like, I want to just go through that. I didn't, I was interested in this, but I didn't think that they would sell me on it necessarily. But I feel sold on it. Like, I want to give it a go.

Plus, it will be included in my Apple One bundle. By the way, they didn't announce an actual date. This is coming by the end of the year. By the end of the year. And in fact, although one of the things that I was complaining about, I wrote a Macworld column about this at one point, is my frustration that a lot of the Apple Health features are not on the iPad. One of the things they announced here is you have to be able,

they're like, you could use your iPad. And I'm thinking, how is that going to happen? You could use your Apple TV. How? The answer is that workouts app, which is now called a fitness app will be on the ipad and it will be on the apple tv but it's not like on the gold master of ios 14 or ipad os 14 it doesn't exist right this is later this year by the end of the year it's like they will roll out another update that includes this app and then they'll launch fitness

plus but it is not happening quite yet yeah and i imagine that the fitness app on the ipad won't sync with an apple watch or whatever right like it's it's like directly it's not going to be like the one on the iphone i can't imagine that it will pull data in in the same way i show it to you in the same way our friend uh kyle's the same way. I don't know. Our friend, Kyle Slagray, who himself has been in an Apple Watch video, an Apple event, points out Gym Kit. He mentioned Gym Kit, and it's something that I wanted to mention, which is there is a path forward here for Apple that makes them take on things like Peloton a little bit more. But I don't think Apple is going to be manufacturing exercise equipment, right? But Apple has already shown with some of the gym stuff that they've done, where they're having it so that Apple devices can connect to gym equipment and read data off of them. And I feel like this is a direction that Apple will go even further in, right? Because

Apple ultimately is going to want, they don't want to build exercise equipment, but they want to participate and are already starting to participate in standards that are supported by exercise equipment so that they can read data and potentially even adjust the settings on that equipment during a guided workout. And that's, you know, Apple doesn't have to build a bike. Apple just needs to continue to work with exercise equipment manufacturers to talk to their equipment and then they can do things with those as part of fitness plus yeah like peloton they earlier this week introduced a new bike that integrates with the apple watch it's called the bike plus so like you know you're right right like apple don't need to do this they can just keep providing the functionality and let other people pick it up

and then they also have their own stuff. So yeah, Apple One, the services bundle is here. They barely spent any time on it. There are three tiers. There's the individual tier, which is music, arcade, TV Plus, and 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage. It costs $14.95 a month.

You save $95 a month. You save $6 a month if you pay for it this way. There's the family tier, which is music, TV+, arcade, and 200 gigabytes of iCloud. It's $19.95 a month. You save $8 a month, and this is the one that would be in the family plan. The $14.95 a month you can't share with your family plan. Then they have another one called premiere and now they've announced it I understand

what it exists music tv plus arcade news plus fitness plus two terabytes of iCloud the website says share with up to five people which was peculiar because it doesn't say family plan like I assume

that's what it means although i don't know whether you i i don't know i i i struggle with this too because it's like i should probably add my mom to my family plan because she's paying 99 cents a month for icloud and it's like does she want to be in in the i mean she's in my family but is she in my apple icloud family it's like i don't know but it's surely family sharing but it's just the way they said it was weird to me yeah this is 29.95 a month you save 25 a month because fitness plus is 10 bucks right so yeah um now this plan only exists in countries where all of those services exist and all of those services news plus fitness, do not exist in every country that TV, music, arcade do. Right.

So you can't get the Premiere plan if you are in many places in the world. Yeah, I think it's going to be like six countries or five countries that will have the Premiere plan. But I did the math because I currently pay for two terabytes of iCloud for my photos and my device backup. That's $10 a month. I pay for arcade. That's $5 a month. I pay for music family plan. That's $15 a month.

I will soon be paying $5 a month for TV+. That's $34.87. So right there on the stuff that I'm already or about to be paying for, I've saved money. I've saved $5 a month. And I get News Plus, which I don't think is worth paying for, but I tried it. I went back for a month and I found, oh, you know, there's a bunch of paywall stuff that I hit that I don't hit with News Plus. It actually, it's not enough for me to pay for it monthly, but it has some value if I get it thrown in. And then Fitness Plus intrigued me, and I thought,

do I want that or not? And I look at Premiere and I think, oh, well, I'm just going to get it because I'm already saving $5 a month, and I've rolled in two more Apple services that I might've been on the fence about. So it's not for everybody, right? Like I, I look at the iCloud numbers, the sizes of those iCloud bundles at the individual and family level. And I think they seem awfully small. You can add more storage and pay a little bit extra to expand your iCloud storage beyond that on top of the bundle. But it does look, it's a little scant, the iCloud storage

at both of those levels. I wish they had thrown in a little bit more storage there. But as somebody who's already paying, you know, $30 and it's about to be $35 a month to Apple for existing services, I look at this and I think this is great because it's going to save me money. And if you're in, and I think a lot of our listeners probably are, depending on what you're in already in a position where you're paying Apple 20, 25, $30 a month for services. Then you look at Apple one and you're like, well,

I just saved money and got more. It's not for everybody, but I mean, that's the beauty of a bundle is that they're not making you buy a bundle. You can buy them individually, but if you're interested in enough of them to make it worth it, you can, you can either save money or pick up some services that you didn't really want, but you wouldn't turn away if they gave it to you as part of the bundle.

Hilariously, the pounds prices are the same. It's $14.95, $19.95, $20.95. So I'll basically be paying about $40 a month for this. But that's what Apple does these days, Jason. They just swap out the currency symbol. If the American dollar is good enough for us, it's good enough for you, I guess. No, because if I was paying the American dollar, Jason,

I would be saving money. No, I'm just saying that it's worth $30. It's worth $30 American dollars, and therefore it's worth $30 everywhere, except in Canada where it's worth $30 American dollars, and therefore it's worth $30 everywhere, except in Canada, where it's worth $35. iPad 8th Gen. Super boring. Yes, yes.

Look, look, the iPad 8th generation, like the 7th generation before it, it exists to be sold for $329 or $299 for education. It exists to have a cheap iPad. It exists so Apple can stand on stage or in a video and say, we now have an A12 Bionic in this. So again, it's a couple-year-old processor. But as they pointed out, it's still way faster than most Chromebooks and tablets and stuff that it competes with, especially in education. And so it's a boring, it's the old classic iPad. And it's just got a newer chip that's still two years old, but it's newer than what it was.

And it exists. It's going to be boring. It's always going to be boring, but it's super important for Apple. Remember when Apple was really dinged because the iPad was too expensive and there were a bunch of cheap tablets? That doesn't happen so much anymore because Apple has a cheap iPad now, and it's this one. And we're all bored by it, but it's super important that it exists.

Yeah. Look, it is an important product in the lineup, I don't deny. Look, it is an important product in the lineup, like I don't deny. But this is one of the things that if this was a more combined event, like maybe this would have been, I don't think this would have made it in to the event, right? Like if iPhones were coming then and Apple decided they also wanted to show off iPads and watches in the same event as an iPhone, I don't think this one would have either A, been in it,

or B, got as much time as it did. But they may as well put it in while they're talking about the ipad sure before we get into the ipad air real time follow up from friend of the show mark german uh that the titanium apple watches and ermes apple watches keep the power adapter in the box therefore really just underlining what you were saying about it being cost-saving measure because yeah what is it like titanium apple watches like bought by people with more carbon offsets like what's the thing no people who buy titanium apple watches are just well known to not have power adapters they just don't have them who knows why they don't have them who knows why but they don't they need them every time the ipad air basically an ipad pro and in some ways even more pro than the current ipad pro the design it has the liquid

retina display so it has that edge to edge display the flat sides but it comes in some colors as well as the regular colors colors green blue and rose have green, blue, and rose gold. Funnily enough, Jason, the blue is a different color to the blue of the Apple Watch, and the gold is a different color gold to the Apple Watch, which makes me think if I was going to thumb in the air, I bet the iPhone 12's colors match the iPad Air, and the Pro colors match the Apple Watch Series 6.

Oh, interesting. That would be my thinking on that. Could be. I just, again, you know, I'm giving a slow clap to Apple for putting colors in their products. iPad Air, you get a blue iPad Air, great. I want to get a color in the Pro line.

I will at least, like, say, you know what, fine. Like, if you. I want to get a color in the Pro line. I will at least say, you know what? Fine. If you don't want to do it in Pros because Pros are too serious in your mind for some reason, then you should at least do it here. And they have. And the colors look great. I really like the green one. I think the green one looks really nice.

Green one looks really good. No, it's great. I'm just so happy. Apple just goes back and forth on colors but i'm very happy that they did that and this is something that we talked about yesterday and have been talking about for a while apple's been super aggressive at taking ipad pro features and pushing them down to the other ipads apple is not afraid of moving those pro features down after a couple of years and here you have it right the ipad air is essentially a

a low-end ipad pro at this point it's missing some of the features of the ipad pros but it's picked up apple pencil 2 uh support for that magic keyboard which you doubted yesterday and i thought would happen and it's this thing is the same size as the small ipad pro and so uses all the same stuff including that magic keyboard so it's got a lot of those features it doesn't have pro motion it doesn't have the sensor stack for you know for face id oh face id and lidar yeah and a slightly smaller screen it's like 10.9 instead of 11 right doesn't have the two back cameras or the lidar but it's but you know it's like 10.9 instead of 11 right doesn't have the two back cameras or the lidar but it's but you know it's close and then it's got they've got a brand new first time seen touch id sensor

on the power button yeah and the touch id sensor you know they're using the power of the a14 which we'll get to in a minute and and they're scanning that finger and you're training it you know you move your finger all over like you do when you train Touch ID. People who have Face ID for a while may have forgotten this. And then even though that is a smaller surface area than usually for Touch ID, it's scan that whole finger and it can take a cross section, whatever cross section of your finger lands on it and fairly quickly wake it up. And in fact you can there's two different ways to do it you can like push the button in and then uh after you pushed it in you rest your finger on it for a moment and it pops open and unlocks or you can actually tap

the screen because it's got the tap to wake on on the ipad air so you can tap to wake and then just just tap your finger on the on the home screen or the home button for a moment, and it unlocks. So that's really exciting. Whether Apple will bring a Touch ID button to other products in its mobile product line remains to be seen, but I think it's really cool that they did that here. I guarantee they will, but it won't be this year.

That would be where I'm putting my money. This is the thing. Yeah, I think if I had to bet, it would be that Apple's kicking themselves that they had this tech and that they that they couldn't get it in the iphone because the iphone lead times are too long but they do have it and so i would almost make a bet now that in the long run every iphone will have a touch id button on it just for convenience why not right which why not um like authenticate me in whatever way you can get to me first based on the way that i've

i've taught like you interacted with the device yeah um so i would say like you know i agree with what you're saying right that like we spoke about this that it is the right move to bring all of these features they've just done it faster than i expected right like i did not expect that that was the magic keyboard was the big surprise to me because it really felt like the differentiator. And now it's got USB-C, this thing, too. It is, I think, a very difficult... If you want to get the regular-sized iPad right now, I don't really know why you'd get a Pro. The only real thing that you could benefit from is the pro motion display but honestly

i mean a face id i do like face id on my ipad i will say that but if you've not had it on an ipad i don't think you'd you would you'd feel like you were missing it right like you because the touch id and the power button is a nicer place i think than the home button so yeah if you're coming from an iPad Pro, but nobody's coming from an iPad Pro to an iPad Air, right? Like they're coming from the previous iPad Air or from the iPad. And so they're going to be so blown away

by the things that did come from the iPad Pros, I don't think they're going to cry too much about not having Face ID. Yeah, and again, like Emma's saying in the chat, the speakers are different. Of course, and the speakers on the iPad Pro is absolutely fantastic absolutely fantastic but so there's there's four speakers in the ipad pro there are only two speakers in the ipad air but they are side by you know they're on the opposite sides now so you do get the stereo kind of effect so it's better not the same so it's like

again like if you're coming from anything other than the current ipad pro i mean but look there is an argument to be made for some people that they might want to go from the 2018 Pro to this. Sure. Because this has the A14 Bionic chip, the first Apple device to get this chip, which is fascinating and shows you

the weird time frame, like the weird, like wibbly wobbly time that we're in because I guarantee you this was not supposed to be the first product of the A14. It's the first time since the ipad 2 that an apple chip family has debuted in something

other than an iphone and for it to debut in the like like and i know it's like the ipad 2 was obviously a consumer product but like it was different now right but the idea is like if this had debuted in an ipad pro first if we would have got this chip in the 2020 ipad pro we wouldn't have really batted too much of an eye at it right like it's like okay of course right but the a14 bionic chip has is a five nanometer chip it is six core cpu which is 40 faster a four core gpu which is 30 faster two times faster neural engine 10 times faster machine learning accelerators this thing is a beast yeah and and it's funny because they did do a little chip presentation but i suspect that they held a bunch of hype back because they're going to want to hype it again when the iphone comes out and explain again just why the

a14 is so great but they did sort of split the difference here and do the A14 launch now and talk about why it's so great. It's, you know, it's got the four performance cores and two energy efficiency cores and all that, you know, it's a six core processor. It's got a bunch of machine learning, like you said, accelerators. And the idea here is that it's much more efficient at machine learning. And this is obviously something Apple cares about across the line. And let's say it like, not only is this the first product to carry this generation of Apple Silicon in it, and it's an iPad Air, and the iPhone will follow. But let's just say it like, this is also almost certainly the generation of chip that will go in the mac for the first time and here it is on the ipad air it's funny funny how life comes at

you fast sometimes yeah i uh i am really excited to see the benchmarks on this thing i really want to see the benchmarks from this thing um to really just truly understand what are we dealing with here because it feels like this is very powerful and i wonder like is will we see this year an a14x in another product or will we wait i don't know i don't know i don't know i i think the ipad pro has to have the equivalent of an a14x in it we've debated whether you could do a low-end mac like a macbook using just the a14 and get away with it and the answer is maybe i reckon you could i reckon you could maybe and so that's apple's plan then maybe they would

need that but i feel like the ipad pro chip is going to be in most of the macs that they release so whether that's this fall or next spring we'll see do you think we're gonna see another ipad pro this year like where did i go now with the iPad Pro? I think that's the real question is the iPad Pro is on the clock, right? There are so many. It makes sense for Apple to do this and pull Pro features down to the iPad Air. I think it's great. I think it makes sense. But it also implies that they've got a next step for the iPad Pro, which honestly.

It's got to be mini LED, right? This year is very middling, like not an update update for the ipad pro also actually strongly suggests that there is a much bigger update coming yeah but it's not it was not ready yet so maybe that's early next year um and and yeah does the display technology change what other stuff are they doing in that product in order to vault it further because although i think apple is comfortable having the low-end ipad pro and the ipad air be where they are now i would say in the long run they're too close for comfort um this is this is that moment when they're close but then the ipad pro is going to get a boost and then be appreciably better in a whole bunch of ways that it isn't right now

but what those ways are remains to be seen. I don't know. It sounds like the rumors suggest that this is a more of a next year thing than it is. And I would believe that if for no other reason than Apple bothered to do an iPad Pro update this year. And that suggests that they needed some time before the next iPad Pro was going to be ready to go. Yeah. In addition to doing USB-C, that means that it does 4K video out. So that's yet another thing that it's got going on. So it's got USB-C and that means all the video out you'd expect. So it'll do a 4K video out just on an iPad Air for starting at $599, right?

So bringing down the iPad Pro price, a lot of these features now come down to $599, which is, Apple's been doing this for a few years now, when they finally kind of got the iPad product line where they wanted it. And this is just, you know, the machinery continues to spin and those features keep coming down in price as time goes on. So here we are. The 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $ at 799 but that is for 128 gigabyte so that 599 model is i think somewhat unfortunately a 64 gigabyte model yeah but it's 599 i mean again i know i know i know but it's that's super such a super small amount and this tops out at 256 gigabytes at 749 uh is where the ipad uh where the ipad air tops out at 256 gigabytes at $749 is where the iPad Air tops out. But again, fantastic product.

It gets all the incredible accessories available to it. Really, the Apple Pencil 2 is just an absolute winner. This is an absolutely fantastic product. If someone came to me today and said, I want to get an iPad, which one should I get? This is my current recommendation to people. Even if they were saying, I want an iPad Pro, I would say, look at this first because it's cheaper.

You get all of the features pretty much that you're most likely to care about and it's going to last you maybe a little bit longer because the chip is newer. I think Apple figures that the people who are buying the ipad air are people who are upgrading and getting new features and are probably not ipad pro buyers i think that they they figure like the ipad pro buyers know who they are and they're self-selecting and the ipad pro buyers are not buying ipad pros right now so like they're fine and then throw in the magic keyboard right i mean that is not a cheap keyboard but at least it does work with this thing that starts at 5.99 and that means that apple's apple's complete

ipad argument just got cheaper right like here's our answer to um other laptops is we've got an ipad plus a magic keyboard that's got keyboard pointing device and an ipad all in one and that just came down in price by a couple hundred bucks and that's that you know and apple like i said yesterday happy to sell more magic keyboards to whoever wants one for the, you know, price and the profit margin they're getting from that thing. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Breaking up your old wireless provider just got a whole lot easier thanks to Mint Mobile. They were the first company to sell premium wireless service online only, and now Mint Mobile is introducing their unlimited data plan for just $30 a month.

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the option to move your existing phone number over or app and you put in the number and you can have the option to move your existing phone number over or have them generate a new phone number for you. And that's it. Like I didn't, this is very key for me. I didn't have to talk to anybody. I didn't have to call somebody. I didn't have to do any of that.

Just popped in the SIM and did what I like to do, which is put my finger on a phone screen and nothing more. Break up with big wireless and switch to Mint Mobile's premium unlimited data plan for $30 a month. To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just $30 a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com upgrade. That's mintmobile.com upgrade to cut your unlimited wireless bill to $30 a month at mintmobile.com upgrade. Our thanks to Mint Mobile for their support of this show and RelayFM. Now, iOS 14, iPadOS 14, WatchOS 7, tvOS 14. They're coming tomorrow, Jason.

Big surprise. This one uh the golden master releases are out now this is uh this is this is surprising what this tells me personally is um apple's timeline never changed because this is when it would be coming out right like in a normal set of circumstances we would be getting ios 14 basically now and we are so even though wwdc came later apple stuck to their timeline right does that make sense what i'm saying like this is we in in uh 2020 version b the the iPhone would have been announced last week, probably on Wednesday, and then Wednesday of the following week, which it is,

is when iOS 14 would have dropped. And that's what's happening. But typically, when a new version of iOS comes out, we get a weak notice. They say, hey, developers, here's the golden master. Submit your apps. Yeah, it's not just here's the Golden Master. It's here's the Golden Master.

Here's the final version of Xcode. Yep. Here are all the things you need to submit your apps so that they can get approved, so that they can be ready when the new version of the OS ships to people so that people don't update, and then your apps are weird,

and then they complain to the developer that their apps are broken. Because let's make it clear in case you're not that familiar with this. No developer could submit their application for iOS 14 for review until today and iOS 14 comes out tomorrow. So that means for any app to be available with widgets in, for example, in the App Store, they have to have been approved between now and maybe at this point 12 hours from now.

Seems unlikely at best. And I find that peculiar. I asked our friend of the show, James Thompson, I asked him to censure check that for me, and James says it depends on how long AppReview is going to take for iOS 14 builds. Sometimes in the best conditions AppReview can be the same day but I doubt that it will be

right now. I think it's almost impossible but James said that he will try and get something in tonight and see what happens and I have been seeing James along with many other developer friends fighting with Xcode like Xcode's not working. There seems to have been an issue. This is very peculiar to me.

I have been thinking about this for the last couple of hours. I can't work out why they needed to do this, right? So they have to have watchOS 7 and iOS 14 available for the watches, right? Yes. And the watches ship on friday there yes why do they need to ship on friday why don't they ship next friday or why didn't they a week ago say here's the gm i don't know i can't think of any i can't find logic in this jason it's a very very weird thing to do because it's like at a time where

many developers not just indie developers many developers across up and down right company sizes are feeling frustrated at apple they do this and it's like i there's no i can't find a logic to it because you could say like oh apple wanted to get the Apple Watch sales in on this financial quarter. It's not going to make a difference to what's going to be a dismal financial quarter because there's no iPhones in it. Two weeks of Apple Watch sales is not going to make that much of a difference, regardless. It's not going to pick up more than, like, a single percentage point. My guess is that it was a chain of events. It was, you you know we're gonna

declare this a final so that we can ship it so that we can we're gonna bring the apple watch forward and we're gonna bring the ipad forward but that means we need to ship them which means we need to ship the os at which point we need we might as well build that version for the new phones when they come and then they'll just update when they get there okay i get all of that but you're right that the next question is thursday or friday if you have to do it this week why put ios 14 out tomorrow and why not release a gm last week right and i think maybe the answer there is some of the things that we found which is there's things in the in the gm that weren't in the betas because apple made some announcements and maybe there's stuff in there that wasn't in there before right but then put

those in ios 14.0.1 ship that day one in date for the new products right like yeah i i yeah i just this this is so weird to me given given how i mean developers yesterday were reading the tea leaves and being like whoa you know there's there we've had these updates coming fast and furious um and that this is a sign that maybe they're about to go golden master i mean like that was out there but not having a gm not having the final x code like this is this is took, it took a lot of long time Apple developers by surprise because this is not, it's not just that it's a surprise. It's that if you want to submit with a new version of Xcode, you need to like get it and then submit it.

And then literally if it comes out tomorrow, people are going to be updating tomorrow. And you're, you know, if you're really quick about it, you'll have submitted. Will it be approved? And it just, I come back to your thing, which is why did it need to be this way? And I don't know. We don't know all the details. And maybe the answer is it wasn't supposed to be this way. And then they had an issue. And then, so it slipped, but they knew they had the hard deadline because they were going to have this event and they were going to announce the watch and the iPads. And so therefore they need to have it. I don't know. That's my best guess is that this isn't malicious and this isn't uninformed by people at Apple,

but more that something happened that compressed the schedule beyond what they would have liked. But the end result is that developers are kind of freaked out and it's unfortunate. I can follow all of that, but you could have put the gold master out yesterday and you could have iOS 14 come out Thursday. You could have given more than less than 24 hours notice because people will update to iOS 14 and they're going to have no widgets. Yeah, and they're going to have apps that are that are weird and uh maybe don't work right and yep so like apple is is inconveniencing their own customers their own customers will have a bad experience even if you remove our developer like leaning right like we lean towards developers because lots of our friends are developers many people in our community and listeners are developers so we are very developer focused but if you just look at

the customer side of it people that pay attention to this are going to be like where are all the widgets that i was promised where are all the app clips yeah where's all this stuff why aren't you doing widgets there's nothing the answer is just wait and i just i find it i just find it very this is really weird to me um it's it's strange so overall i have a question for you looking at everything that they announced did this event have a reason to exist? Should it have been? What do you think? Oh, I mean,

it didn't have to exist. Like I said at the top, I like it because it's short and then more events, shorter events and more of them. I kind of like the idea. Certainly didn't have to. Apple could have delayed all of these too. I think Apple at some

point said, okay, well, the phones are delayed. So we're going to delay the announcement of the phones, but we're right on time with the watch and the iPad. So we might as well just go ahead and announce them. And we have too much embedded in, especially the watch with the fitness plus service for us to launch it with a press release. We really, wearables is very important to us. We need to not let that go by, but we don't want to wait and hold them up for the iPhone. So let's do it. Like that was obviously a decision that they made that they didn't want to wait. They didn't want to hold them up, but they didn't think that this was, it was more important than not having an event. And also, I think it's a question of like,

could Apple call more events? Like why not just do an iPhone and Apple Watch event or an iPad and Apple Watch event? So they did. So it didn't have to, but Apple decided why not do it? Why make them wait for the iPhone? I would say, you know, this is all about what's available to ship when I'm always struck by the fact that Apple watch in this case, Apple watch and iPad have, have essentially nothing in common. It's literally, we're going to talk to you today

about two things that have nothing in common except Apple. And if you were planning this in advance, as opposed to what this is, which is we've got the products that we've got and here they are, I would put the iPad with the Mac, right? As they've done in the past, not with the Apple watch. It's a weird, like iPad doesn't even talk to the Apple watch. It can't, it can't even talk to the whole health API stuff. It's just, it won't. My complaint about it is I think that's dumb, but it doesn't do it. So they press them together because that was what they had. And I'd say, thematically, it's not the best fit, but they are the products that they have

and they didn't want to wait. So I think that's it. I think maybe it's that simple, which is, if we're not calling people in person to an event anyway, and we're just making a video, why don't we just make an hour-long video about these two, get them out of the way? And potentially the other part of that story is we know what we've got along with the iPhone for later, and it's a lot. So we'll give all of that room to breathe and get these things out of the way when they're ready to go. And I think that's probably part of the truth is they're looking at what one event would be like with everything that's on their plate and saying, that's not a good idea. That's too many things. And so if we're going to break it up, why don't we just do an event in the traditional mid-September slot for products that are ready to ship and get them out and ship the OS and then do

a second event later. So it didn't have to happen, but I understand why they probably did it. It is a little bit weird thematically. It doesn't really link up. They don't have one story to tell here. It's really like two stories to tell, neither of which is the iPhone, which is the story everybody wants to hear. you know again i don't mind that it's a different kind of apple event it's not earth shattering a lot of the criticism will be literally that it's not earth shattering it's like that's okay that's okay personally are you looking are you interested in in any of this hardware for the snow household i think i think probably not i'm i'll be as always i'll

be tempted in the apple watch be tempted by the apple watch a little bit just because i do use my apple watch a lot and i'm you know and i'm very excited about the colors honestly the colors excite me but probably not this is probably not an event that's going to generate a lot of uh hardware sales in our house i'm i have no hardware i'm gonna get all uh i'll sign up for apple one and we'll yeah well i'll be i'll be in the bundle and i will try out the fitness stuff for sure so the serve on the services side ironically after all of that and all our complaints about apple and trying new services, the services is the stuff that you and I both walk away from this event saying, oh, I'll try that out. Yep.

Don't forget, Friday, 18th of September, 2 to 8 p.m. Eastern Time, twitch.tv slash RelayFM for Podcastathon 2. Be there or be square. And please donate at stjude.org slash Relay. If you'd like to find links and more about this episode you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 316 we'll be back next week as always and

I assume just one episode next week but who knows Jason who knows we could be back tomorrow but we probably won't be I hope not but we could be for who knows like haha not, but we could be. For who knows? They are like, haha, surprise, we're doing an event on Thursday.

But there is still a lot to come. Maybe next week we'll talk a little bit about that. I'm sure next week we'll be talking a bunch about iOS 14, tvOS 14 and all that good stuff. And I'm sure there will be a lot of drama between now and then, Jason Snell. Real-time follow-up, our friend of the show, James Thompson, has submitted Dice by Peacock to the App Store for reviews.

Well, congratulations. So I hope that James will be able to get that app out on day one. The Dice by Peacock widget is one of my favorite widgets. It's absolutely beautiful, James. It's really good. You did a wonderful job with that. If you'd like to check us out online go to sixcolors.com where jason will be i'm sure putting up a bunch of stuff um sure a question for you uh you're gonna have an

ios review i mean in yes there will be one i mean it's not going to be tomorrow is my assumption but like i assume you're working on something nope i'm not okay that's fine so i apologize dan wrote a piece about ios when that went to public beta that i imagine that he might adapt and turn into a piece that's a review um and i wrote about ipad os a little bit and i will probably do a version of that at some point right but in terms of the advanced work that i've done on ios and ipad os in terms of writing um no none fair enough fair enough fair enough um i'm sure there's a lot of stuff still going on out there though you're going to find jason online at jason o jsn e double l i am at i-K-E. And we'll be back next time.

Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Mint Mobile, Matthias and Hover, and to our members who support the show. If you want to become a member, go to getupgradeplus.com. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody. See you tomorrow. No, don't say that.