Upgrade - 317: Upsettings

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

Has Apple set off an iPhone home screen aesthetics revolution with iOS 14? We talk about our favorite widgets, Widgetsmith's journey to the top of the App Store charts, home-screen customization, and what this might mean for Apple's iOS feature priorities. Also, Myke evaluates new watchOS faces, Jason seeks home remedies to fix his terrible Apple Watch battery life, and we both speculate about whether Apple might sneak a Touch ID sensor into the iPhone 12 after all.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 317 today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile express vpn and hover my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snow hello jason snow hello mike hurley You survived a big week last week. Yep. Big week. We both did. It was a huge week. We'll talk about that as the episode goes on. We are back to normal now. This is our first regular episode.

We are in what I have dubbed, but it's not like official like Summer of Fun. We're in the fall of content now. It's before the winter of discontent. We're in the fall of content. Fall of okay before the winter of discontent we're all of content all of content yeah that's that is how it works and we have a hashtag snell talk question today's question comes from paul and paul wants to know jason when typing on your mac do you mistakenly type in a double space hoping to create a period like you would on your iphone no interesting what about i have a secondary question for you.

Secondary question for you. Okay, all right. The reason I included this, because I knew you were going to say no. I think my brain on a touchscreen on the iPhone or iPad software keyboard is doing something very different than if I'm using a traditional keyboard. You do use the double space for period in the, I will say, by the way, I have to change now. Paul says period. I say full stop. So I'm now going to switch back to my native tongue hello governor uh you use a full stop when you're cleaning the chimneys no when you're on the iphone and on the ipad software keyboard you use the double tap the space bar for a full stop um i think i do it on the iphone a lot because on the iphone i'm definitely

in the mode of just mashing the keys and hoping that autocorrect figures it out and and the double tap on the spacebar is part of that is it a full stop bar mike no it's a spacebar it's just a space bar okay because it doesn't make it doesn't make the full stop unless you press it twice then it's a full stop exactly then it's full stop bar and stop unless you press it twice. Then it's a full stop bar. Exactly. Then it's a full stop bar. And the British word for space is space. So I have another question for you. And is enter and return, are they the same thing? I don't know.

Anyway, they're shaped different. I think so. Anyway, so when you're on the iPad and you're on the software keyboard on the iPad, do you do it then? I think it varies right um and that's because um i have a couple of different ways of typing on my ipad i would say when i'm like holding my ipad in two hands and sort of thumb typing i'm treating it like an iphone and i'm just trying to get the words out and hope they autocorrect to the right thing so i don't have to go back. But sometimes I've got my iPad in my lap and I'm using like many fingers to type

and that's different. Then I'm sort of in keyboard mode, like a physical keyboard mode because I'm actually pretty good at typing on the iPad if it's laying in my lap and I've got my two hands down on it, I can go pretty fast and I'm pretty accurate. It's just that most of the time I'm not doing that. That's more like I don't have a keyboard around and I need to do a bunch of text. So I'm

going to lay the iPad down on my lap and, you know, go to town on the keyboard. But most of the time I don't do it. Most of the time,'m i'm holding it and with two hands and kind of just trying to get the the words out okay so i do it on all software keyboards on my ipad you i've turned on the setting there is a setting in the keyboards for like hardware keyboards yes um that you uh if you double press a space bar on a physical keyboard of any kind attached to an iPad, it will add the full stop. This is something Apple puts into the software to allow you to do it. And I also have a text expander shortcut on my Mac to put two spaces as a full stop. Wow. I've just gotten used to it, and I like it.

I don't like it. And let me tell you, let me share with you what my hardware keyboard settings are on my iPad. Yes, I know, I know. Everything off. Everything off, including the capitalization. I don't want capitalization. I don't want correction. I do.

Because with auto-correction, when you're writing on an iPad, as people who work on their iPads, right? You're writing on an iPad and you post a story and people are like, why did you use this word? And I'm like, and then I immediately turn off all the auto-correction because that's a thing that really happens is auto-correct corrects the word you meant to a totally different word. And as a writer, can't happen, just can't happen. So all that

stuff is off, all of it. One of the funny things about I mostly pay attention, pretty much only pay attention now to the live stream chat that we have in the Relay FM members discord and you know something contentious is happening when it says several people are typing like it does in Slack and as soon as I

said about what I do in the keyboard settings, it immediately turned into several people are typing for about 25 seconds. So I have no doubt that we're going to get a lot of follow-up about this. But you know what? Here's the thing. You can get upset as me, as you like, but Apple put those settings in.

That's why they have settings. Why would people get upset? I don't use your settings, but that's the beautiful thing about settings is that I can have it the way i want it and you can have it your terrible way and it's all fine we could maybe even call these ones up settings if we wanted to uh new segment of settings eventually upgrade will be all verticals that's all verticals if you would like to send in a question for a future

episode of upgrade to help us kick off a show like Paul did, just send in a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk or use question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members discord. I'd like to take a brief moment to once again remind you all about why we are supporting St. Jude here at RelayFM throughout the month of September, because you can join us and help support this incredible charity of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which runs throughout September. St. Jude combines the very best in personalized care with one of the most technologically advanced treatment clinics in the world.

It's called the Red Frog Therapy Center, and it is the first proton therapy center in the world dedicated solely to children with cancer with the ability to kill and shrink tumors while keeping healthy tissues and organs safe. And the donations of people like you allow St. Jude to afford this incredibly cutting-edge technology. St. Jude will continue to research the use of proton therapy, preventing the growth and spread of tumors while reducing the risk of treatment-related side effects. And again, one of the fantastic things about St. Jude is that it is a research hospital. So what they learn from treating their patients, they share with the world.

Donate to St. Jude today at stjude.org slash relay to support the advancement of childhood cancer research. Again, that is stjude.org slash relay to donate today. Last Friday we had the second ever podcast-a-thon, which was our six-hour event that we streamed. If you've missed it and you want to watch it, we've put it on YouTube and we've posted the audio in our kind of live

event feed, which is called Departures. I'll make sure both of those are in the show notes. The second podcast-a-thon was an absolute resounding success in every single measure. It was a lot of work from a lot of people, and we got it all together, and we made it happen. And we not only raised a lot of money, we raised $100,000 during the event, which was just unbelievable. Because of those incredible donation amounts, we actually hit our goal for the entire month. So we'd set $315,000 as our goal as a community to raise throughout the month of September. And as I'm

currently recording, we're at $336,000 raised for St. Jude's. So I just want to thank everybody that has donated. An incredible extra thank you to everybody who watched the podcast at home, donated during the podcast at home. But there's still a lot of September left, so let's just continue to push that higher and higher. And again, thank you to everybody who played a part, including Jason, of course, for the wonderful

game show that you put on, which is available for people to watch on the YouTube there as well. Two segments of it. You can check it out. It is based on the great British game show... Taskmaster. It's called Hostmaster, where I am

the hostmaster and I force Relay FM hosts to do silly things. And it's wonderful. For charity. And it was a lot of fun to put that together. But that was another one of the things that was happening last week while everything else was going on. I had to furnish you with 40 minutes of a game show that I had to edit together. That was a lot. One of the things that struck me,

and it struck me last year too, but even more this year, is how packed the podcast-a-thon was. Other than your personal exhaustion, and I think maybe if you bulk up for next year, if you cross-train or something, I felt like it was really cramped. I think you guys could have gone for eight hours

or 10 hours in terms of the material. We did seven hours in total, which was wild because we were only scheduled to do six. And we even cut content, and we're going to be doing additional streams now throughout the rest of the year. The thing was, Jason, we had planned to do eight hours this year. That was what we were going to do as the extension.

But then we had to do it all remotely. It was like why don't we just uh scale it back yeah and also the longer we went the later it got for me right so like right well that's true uh like i think 20 to 2 in the morning i think was when we ended up finishing uh but the final hour was i mean we ended up going an extra hour because it made us push to reach the goal. And there was a special surprise guest in the last hour because there was literally there was follow up. And of course, it's follow up from something that had just happened in the segment where Quinn quizzes you and Steven. And I'm not going to give anything away for people who haven't seen it yet. You should go watch it.

But the segment where Quinn quizzes Mike and Steven about Relay led to a very particular thing being discovered. And sure enough, not long after that, the person involved with that appeared for some official John Syracuse-approved podcast follow-up. It was amazing. I really think you should watch it,

even at least skim through it. But the final, I think, maybe 90 like that that's maybe really worth watching yeah there's some really good stuff in there so yeah it was you know we're already planning for next year we're gonna obviously gonna do it again because we've continued to to raise so much money for a cause that means a lot to us so thank thank you to everybody that was involved in any way for the podcast. We have some follow-ups. So on the last episode,

obviously a lot of the episode was taken up by talking about iOS 14 dropping within 24 hours of Apple's event. And one of the questions we had is, will there be any apps? And there were. So kind of anecdotally, it kind of seems like a lot of developers were still able to make day one releases for applications. It seemed like AppReview moved

pretty fast for a lot of developers. So if someone could get Xcode downloaded and could get a build submitted, it seemed like AppReview were moving fast in some instances. Of course, this could not and was not the case for everybody. But there were many developers that I saw commenting online that they did get approved in time. I think maybe you could make an argument that it seemed like developers that have been around for a while got their apps through, which you can see some sense in that, right? Like maybe established developers of companies that are large, but even independent developers. It seemed like a lot of people in our circles got their apps approved pretty fast. This obviously doesn't change the fact that they had to scramble. And I don't know about you, Jason, but I've seen an awful lot of bug fix updates for apps that had to get through the

first hurdle over the last few days. So, I mean mean i would assume at this point that apple have heard the concerns of the developers in the community about like the the sheer amount of issues of doing what they did here and i would hope that they won't do this again yeah i think they didn't intend to do it right i i do think somebody asked me this um on twitter and it's like i think this was a chain of events where they made some decisions that didn't expect it to go this way and then they made some other decisions and then things changed and everything kind of cascaded to this point i don't think they intended to give the developers no time but then they felt they had to stick with this timeline. I'm sure it will

be even more clear. I will note that it seems like AppReview was very much aware of what was going to happen and that they did expedite these AppReviews and they had reviewers ready to go. So clearly as this, and there were some theories that maybe they had originally intended this thing to happen last week. And for some reason it got delayed. Um, I don't know, but, uh, in the end, I, I think Apple probably didn't want it to go this way. And I think even more so now I would hope they would look at it and say, oh yeah, you know, this is not ideal. Um, I'm glad they stepped up on the app review side. Cause one of my least favorite things about

Apple is when Apple makes one of these decisions that is frustrating and kind of walks away and leaves everybody else to deal with the fallout. And that happens sometimes when they release an app that makes, that competes with other apps and it drives those apps out of the platform and then they never update it. And it's like, well, wait a second. If you're going to do this, you should follow through. You should have that follow through. And I will say, this is a bad situation that I hope is never repeated. I am glad that Apple very much knew it was a bad situation and really geared up app review to try and get the backlog through as much as possible again it's not what you want but i like because there's another scenario where apple does this and then app

review still takes days or weeks and this was the thing that i really wanted to follow up on right it's like whether app review were very aware or whether it was jumped on them it doesn't matter right like they made it work right like? Like that part of the team, because, and the reason I say that is we know that Apple is secretive in, even in itself, right? So like, who knows if the app review teams, the app reviewers knew, even knew that they were going to be dealing with what they dealt with. But nevertheless, like that part of the organization made it work because there were applications that had ios 14 features available on ios 14 launch day because i personally was genuinely questioning as

to whether that would even be the case um so they whatever it is they they did they made it work and you've got to assume that even inside of the company, people were making the argument like, we can't do that again. That was a bad idea, right? And like, it's normal that point releases when there's hardware, this can happen, right? Like I could imagine them saying like, we have a new iPad, it needs iOS 14.3 and it's coming out tomorrow.

That's one thing, but an entire OS version is too much and xcode right because that's the other part that didn't get as widely understood is like they were where there's some stuff where you need to compile it with the the final version of xcode in order to submit it to be on the ios 14 train and when they made the announcement and even as they were pushing out the GM, Xcode wasn't out yet, right? So they couldn't. No. They could submit an iOS 13 version, but they couldn't actually. You could feel like your app was done and ready to go, but you had to download Xcode first and compile it through there.

Here's the thing. Here's the thing about why they will. I'm not going to say this won't happen again. I'm going to say that Apple doesn't want this to happen is any developer will tell you and you can look in the app store today and see all of those like great with ios 14 apple especially on the on the marketing side loves developers who embrace new os features now those are the people they hurt, right? Because I saw a couple of people were like, well, what's the big deal? Why not just wait?

And the answer, well, one of the big deals about being there on day one is that Apple markets your app heavily. If you're there on day one with a feature that takes advantage of the new features of their operating system, because that's good for Apple, because it allows Apple to say, see all the great things we did with iOS 14 and include all the apps. Because saying here's a great API as you do at WWDC doesn't matter to an end user. You need to say, see this app, which we're going to talk about some of them. See this app that lets you put widgets on your home screen, right? So Apple wants it to be this way.

But in the end, the needs of marketing are not going to override some big engineering problem that happened, which probably happened here. There is continued weirdness, though, which iOS 14.2 is currently the version of iOS 14 available to developers. So if you were on the developer train, you've gone from 14 straight to 14.2. There's lots of tweaks, lots of fixes here and there. But yes, you are hearing me correctly. 14.1 is lost somewhere. Now we can all make the natural assumption as to

where iOS 14.1 is living. 14.1 is a very special build. Yeah, 14.1 is a very special build of 14.0 that includes all of the special features that are only available in the new iPhone hardware. That's it, right? That's got to be it. And there are features, there are new pieces of hardware. I have a theory too, which is part of me thinks that Apple has gotten more careful about stuff like this because of Guy Rambeau and Steve Tratt and Smith. Well, you see, so I am agreeing with this here, which is why we then go back to why did they do a 24-hour release of the Golden Master? And it's like I think that there is a potential here that it was Apple's intention to never release the golden master until 24 hours before so people because it has features that were announced in the keynote and they knew and this is the frustrating thing is they knew since it was a gm that those features

had to be baked in there and they would be found out right people would find them out and so they just didn't put them in there it's frustrating The solution would be to give them a few days and then have it drop on Friday instead of have it drop on Wednesday. But yes, I do think it's at least possible, maybe very possible, that one of the reasons Apple is doing some of the things it's doing and being a little more careful with its OS releases is because it got tired of being burned by people looking at their code. Now, I would say the real solution is to not leak stuff in your code, but I can also see how something like a GM version that is final, it's the GM version. You can't not have the features in the

GM version that are going to ship, or it's not a GM version. So I can see if you're going to roll some new features that previously have never been announced into your announcement then which you know this is why you don't do that this is why ideally you don't do that but they did it so it's it's frustrating and and 14.1 you know i'm sure first off i would bet you that there's going to be something in 14.2 that leaks that is like, oh, this is proof of this. Right. I still don't think there. It hasn't yet.

I just maybe they've gotten it right. Maybe they got their story right. But 14.1, obviously, if you've got a brand new X in the iPhone, you know, one of the iPhones doesn't even need to be all of them. Then you need the software to support that. Yeah. And then if you release that as a beta, somebody's going to find it. So they're just not going to show it. Yeah, but I understand this idea.

But if the way that you get around people finding stuff in the GM is to never release a GM again, I think you maybe need to go back to the drawing board on that a little bit, right? Like there is some logic in this approach but you can't take this approach of like we value secrecy over even allowing for our development partners to have access to the code that they desperately need like that there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere also the gm um deprecated some stuff i saw that from a couple

of developers that there were there were things that they that they were working on and the gm was like that's not in the final build it's like but uh and it was not not like critical but like there's like a new logging api or something that they just pulled out and people were using it and they're like okay right like it seems basically the rule should be a GM needs a little bit of time for the developers to get it and test it and get the new final Xcode and submit it. And if you can't release it in advance because you're making secret surprise announcements in your event, then build more time in on the back side right make the event tuesday release the gm right after the event yep and then give yourself a couple of days and then push out

the final release i mean friday thursday right like just wait just wait last piece of follow-up it's actually an upstream follow-up. Billy Crudup picked up an Emmy for his role as Corey Ellison on The Morning Show. So this was Apple's first Emmy. It was their only win of their 18 nominations, but a win is a win, and this is a good one for them. And in a high-level category, a high-profile category. Sporting actor, yep.

In the drama. But of course, the best thing that happened in the drama so but of course the best thing that happened in the emmys last night was the clean sweep of uh schitt's creek in the comedy amazing which was just i watched all of the um the acceptance speeches this morning and it was it was just for a show that i absolutely adore uh it had such great messages to it just watching the them win win after win, and you could see the tension building as it looked like they were going to sweep it.

That was the best part of the Emmys. I think it may be the first show, comedy or drama, to sweep all seven major categories, which is unreal. And it's unreal that it's this little Canadian show that did it. But it's worth it it's this little canadian show that did it but uh that was that was fun um yeah they did they did a good job with a zoom based uh tv show i thought a large award givers was weird though it was weird but i liked it i thought it was good weird and i liked

the i liked the um automated uh boxes oemi that happened in some places like john oliver had the exploding confetti box with his M.E. in it. I thought that was... I didn't see that. Oh yeah, that's... Like everybody got a box, but only one of them had an M.E. in it, and it was John Oliver's. And the box opened and confetti blew out, and a mechanical

hand holding an M.E. was released. That's fun. It was pretty good. That's better than the hazmat suits was a little too like... But That's better than the hazmat suits. The hazmat suits was a little too weird. But there were tuxedo hazmat suits? Did you see that? I like that even least.

It was weird and creepy, but also I thought very 2020 and I like the approach there. Yeah, it was weird. But anyway, so Apple, as we've said here, one of the great things, and I know we all think the giant tech companies are are um cold unfeeling monsters and all they want is more money and

more power right but there's something else that cold that the cold unfeeling monsters want they want love from the academy it's validation of what they do and uh apple got one with the billy crudup uh emmy got one with the Billy Crudup Emmy, which is honestly Billy Crudup's performance in The Morning Show. I don't love The Morning Show. I liked it. I didn't like how it ended. His performance is really good.

He's a good actor. I like him. That performance is so strange because he starts out so weird and slimy. And yet over time you kind of get, you stop rooting for him a little bit. Yeah. He's like, yeah,

he's a slimy executive, but he's our slimy executive. It's, it's, yeah, it's a legitimately good performance. Great performance maybe from a very good actor. Also,

I want to point out that, um, the actor who played, um, uh, Cal in Watchmen, uh,men uh how shall i phrase this the actor who played cal and watchmen won uh for best actor in a limited series which is fun and or best supporting actor in a limited series anyway um and he's great he's from oakland he went to cal go bears um

but this means that that he and billy crudup won awards last night which is funny because and i'm again i'm not going to spoil watchmen for you we'll say that everybody everybody should go watch hbo's watchmen it's amazing but i'll just say that that that actor uh yeah yeah and billy crudup um have played the same character in the past and so i found that highly amusing anyway. Um, but Watchmen won a bunch of awards and people should check it out. Watchmen is one of the most relevant shows you'll ever see. And as I said on Twitter last night, it, it's not a show about superheroes. It's a show about, uh, police abuse and white supremacy in America. And, uh,

it is as current as you could possibly get yeah and it's a piece of brilliant art um and then chase that down with chernobyl which is about systemic failures in a society that lead to a lot of deaths and just you couldn't get more 2020 than that so anyway awards validation the cold unfeeling monsters just want to be loved. This episode is brought to you by Hover, one of our longest running sponsors here at RelayFM. Hover has been with us since the very beginning. And when you have that one big idea, where'd you go? Well, your business should start with a domain name.

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Make a name for yourself with Hover. Our thanks to Hover for their support of this show and continued support of RelayFM. So today we are obviously going to talk about iOS 14 because that is what's happening right now. iOS 14 is available. You know, we've been talking about some of its features throughout the year. And our usual episode would be to talk about, kind of run through some of our favorite features. And we're

going to do that maybe over the next couple of weeks. But what we're going to talk about today is how iOS 14 is affecting customization of people's iPhones in ways that I don't think we would have, not don't think, in ways that we definitely did not expect to occur. And so I think one of the things that we really need to talk about is widgets. And if we're going to talk about widgets, we have to talk about WidgetSmith, which is a very good friend of the show,

David Smith, underscore David Smith, created an app called WidgetSmith, which was based on an app that he made called WatchSmith. And WatchSmith came out, I think it was earlier this year. And it was an application which was built to help you create complications for your Apple Watch with varying data.

And you could set them on schedules and stuff like that. And David put an incredible amount of work into building this application. And then when Apple introduced widgets, the new widget system, David was like, well, this naturally,

with the work that I have done with Watchsmith, I could move over and create a new app called Widgetsmith, doing similar kinds of stuff. And I had been on the beta for the app for a few months and was giving lots of feedback to David, and I know that you were too, Jason, and we were, you know, kind of helping him work through some of the widgets we'd like to see. Then on Friday, WidgetSmith truly went viral. It was appearing in various TikToks and YouTube videos. I saw the phrase WidgetSmith trending on Twitter at one point, and it has been the number one free app in the App Store pretty much worldwide since Friday. Because what happened was people wanted to customize their home screens

and David includes in Widgetsmith loads of options to add images, to add text, and to do lots of color customization to them. And it turns out this is something that a lot of people, especially young people, want to do. I will include a link uh to a verge article because

it's like the thing now everyone's writing these articles the reason i'll put this one from the virgin is they uh link to a lot of tweets and stuff that people have been doing to make really weird home screens like that look like windows 98 or look like the animal crossing uh nook phone and stuff like that now what has ended up happening is people want to this is more than just widget smith and we'll talk about the icon stuff in a bit but basically what's happened is people want to customize their home screens much more basically theme them and apps like widget smith are allowing them to do it. Yeah. It could be a simple,

I mean the one, the TikTok video that really went viral. I mean, literally it's things like I can put today's day on a window in a nice color. And with a nice font because it seems like the one that people really love is Apple's new New York font, which is a serif font yeah rather than san francisco which is a sans serif yeah and you know it's this is a lesson that apple learned a long

time ago on the mac right this is in the early days of the mac especially like people customize their macs this is why john syracracuse keeps needling case lists on ATP about naming his hard drive something. Because when I first got into the Mac, like, everybody had, like, extensions that made different sounds, and everybody had a different background image,

and they had, or pattern, and you name your hard drive something and you put a custom icon on it and you put custom icons on folders. And like all of these things are about making the Mac feel like it's yours and not just like a cold, unfeeling computer that was sent to you by the computer company. It's no, this is mine.

It has a name. It has an icon, whatever it is it's yours and ios kind of apple lost the plot on that a little bit right like at some point they they added um wallpaper and you can move the icons around but like something as fundamental as custom icons or icon themes or color themes that exist on android all this stuff and on the mac ios was just like i mean i think part of this is that apple because they were focused on other things and they just didn't prioritize it i think the springboard in general the home screen just didn't get a lot of attention i think that was sort of why it led this way but like you can see it so

the moment that uh you can put widgets on the home screen this it's like a damn burst yeah and somebody on twitter said to me the other day or yesterday um isn't this just a fad and it's like well is it a fad yes in in the sense that there's a new os version and everybody's going to do it and a lot of people are going to get tired of it like yes but it's also i think a super valid impulse that people have it is a it is a decades old user impulse to make your device your own what is more personal than a smartphone right our smartphones are our whole lives they're encompassed in there it is our communication it can be our business or our school it's our friends it's our entertainment why would you not want to customize it and apple And Apple, with this one feature, just cracked open a little bit of it. It was just enough.

And you can see, and it's like people are thirsty. Like they desperately want this. And so they rushed into this. And it's great for David Smith. He's a beneficiary of this. But you can see the user desire here. And I know that David in day one is like, oh, I need to give more fonts and more color options to these people because they really want that. I hope somebody at Apple is looking at this and going, oh, huh.

Because we talk here about the emoji effect, right? Which is that people update their os because they want the new emojis that that's a real thing that happens and it doesn't happen in the dot o release it happens a little bit later in the fall yep um people are updating their os for widget smith like people are updating their os to get this and so if i'm apple i look at this and I go, oh, okay. That's another way like emoji releases to get people to update. So we should, you know, if I can, I hope, and I can only assume that somewhere deep inside Apple, as they're desperately trying to put together whatever version of iOS runs on the new phone and all of those things, there is somebody who has taken their priority list and put user customization up i will make a long-term prediction now jason and say that

we will get home screen themes before we get watch faces yeah sure and i think it's going to become a thing now just because this is look the idea of being a fad it means you're not going to still see people posting about this on twitter in the the what with how they're doing right now like with the the veracity that we're seeing right now in six months time no but people will be used to this being a part of their operating system and will continue to tweak and share it um but like i don't think that this is like something people are going to forget about, because they're setting up their home screens now, and they will know that their phone can do this. And it looks like this, right? Right. The funny thing to me is, you know,

I was testing Widgetsmith, and I was super focused on utility, utility, utility, right? When the things I was asking for, it's like, I want this time zone thing, and I want it to work this way. And I want a step counter on I want it to work this way. It never occurred to me at all that people would use the cosmetic widgets that he included. I never used any of them. Um, like, and I have only really thought about having the, the photo widget that he has, the one that shows photos from an album. I put that on after I see so many people doing it. It's like, oh yeah, I can do that. Like I want to take a quick sidebar here

and just talk about how unbelievably thrilled I am for David. Like the past few days have just been a joy for me as I am watching all of the press that he's getting, seeing his app number one in the app store. Like David is one in the app store. David is one of the very nicest people that I've ever met in my life. And he was also one of the hardest working. And to see him getting what is not just... I don't know anybody that has achieved this level of mainstream success.

I don't know anybody personally that's done something like this before. mainstream success like i don't know anybody personally that's done something like this before right like number one in the free chance in the app store for like four days like that is next level right and like i'm seeing i'm seeing widget smith like just everywhere right and and i'm just i'm so so happy for him because i know how hard he works. I'm looking forward to his discussion, presumably on Under the Radar, about the business side of this too because the thing is the reason that it is trending, it talks about

how App Store economics work in a way. Widgetsmith is trending in part because it's free. Yes. So anyone can try it and anyone can get it. And so congratulations underscore Underscore, you have just sold a bunch of free apps. Here's your no money, right?

And your enormous, by the way, support cost now because he's got all of these people asking questions about Widgetsmith. So the other part of this is how does he convert this? Because he is a solo developer, right? With other apps. How does he take advantage of the fact that he has a huge user base and find ways to make money? Not only because he needs to support himself and his family,

but because he has a greater support burden now on the users. So I'm curious to see, you know, is it just as simple as a certain percentage of free users are going to buy the in-app purchases for things like the weather and tides and stuff like that, that he's got in the app? Or does he now think of customization packs kind of things that are more designed to appeal to this aesthetic audience, you know, and do an in-app purchase for stuff related to that. These are decisions he has to make. But, you know, in the end, it's great that he has the number one free app all over the world,

but number one free app doesn't get you anything because it's a free app. It's what you make of it and what you make of the user base. And I'm curious to see how his approach to the app changes because I think this changes where he was going with the app, right? Oh, surely. The users have steered this in a very different direction. So how does he adjust and how does he find a way to make the app still popular and and usable but also actually making money and does he need to adjust his plan there as well yeah i mean i will also be very interested and we've had some some basic conversations about it but like i'm i'm super interested to see what it ends up doing for him right because there is already a subscription method in there but as you say like the things that it is offering

will maybe or are not the things that people now seem to be wanting they're functional right and he was good about that he's like these are the ones that cost money to do which is you know a weather api costs money the tide api costs money so i'm going to charge for these and now he may want to change to you know i'm going to create these themes or these colors or whatever. Or he may not. He may just figure that it actually works as well as it does with the current system because people are going to love these widgets and then they're going to want the weather widget. But, you know, he's competing with other apps there. And I don't know.

It's a tough one. But, you know, he wants to make the most about this. He doesn't, I'm sure he doesn't want to be the guy who, who sells everybody a free app and then does a bunch of jerky things in order to make money off of it. Right. But at the same time, he needs to make money because he is a solo developer. So that'll be fascinating to watch. But I think again, if you're at first off, I mean, every other app developer is now going to try to attach to this market, which is going to be funny. But if you're Apple, you've got to look at this and say, we need to do more to enable stuff like this. Whether it's in the system, in the OS, or in APIs that app developers can use, or both.

You've got to think that we're going to go there. But I'm very happy for him, and I hope he makes the most of his top of the charts uh time of course the other part of this is the app library because now people can hide their icons right they're using shortcuts to create custom icons which is super janky but it. You can make a shortcut that is open this app, and then you can save a shortcut to the shortcut, an icon of the shortcut that launches the shortcut to the home screen. And that can contain a custom icon. You can paste in a custom icon there. And then when you tap on that icon out on the home screen what it does right now is it opens shortcuts and then opens the app you want

yep which a lot of people have said hey apple maybe you should just uh let this let this pass through but there's a security issue there right because theoretically and whether this is a real important security issue i don't know but theoretically you could create an icon that looks like a legit app but is not and and you wouldn't know that you were tapping a shortcut to somewhere else unless it gave you some sort of indication. So there are some issues here, but it's amazing that you can do this and people are doing this, right? That's the other part of this is not only can you have that icon,

but you can hide the old, you know, dumb app icon away because you can hide home screen pages now. You know, obviously this isn't the only thing that widgets are for. And I i mean i don't know about you i'm not i'm i don't have a a widget smith widget that tells me the current date in a nice color on my on my home screen um i i'm using widget smith widgets in other ways but like the more of the ways that i'd expected so i wanted to talk a little bit about widgets and how we're using them and it's been interesting as i'm now getting access to more widgets as they're being released I'd expected. So I wanted to talk a little bit about widgets and how we're using them.

And it's been interesting as I'm now getting access to more widgets as they're being released from apps that I'm used to. What I'm realizing is like there has that there is a barrier or like a bar for what an application needs to provide me for me to want to have the widget. Like, for example, an app that I use every single day is due. and it reminds me of certain things throughout the day. But I don't need to have the Due widget on my home screen telling me about the things that are going to come up later on because I'll just get notified about them at the time. But I do want my calendar, Fantastical's widget, right, so I can see my events.

So, like, it's kind of interesting. There are applications that you use every day that are fine to just, the information to just stay in the app i don't need a widget for them and and it's about kind of like a combination of what does the developer offer plus what how important is that data for me to have constant visibility to and kind of working out for yourself which ones make sense there like do i need to see my task list on my home screen? I don't know if I do. But I do want a quick way to add a task, right? So like, there's like different functionality requires that kind of visibility for me. I've also found

out that widget design, I think, is more important than a lot of developers have given thought to like for example I use dark mode all the time but it doesn't mean I want all my widgets to be black and that's what a lot of developers seem to have assumed but I still want color on my home screen but I don't you know but like I just don't want everything to be white so like there's a there's an element there of like I think, I really like the widgets that they default to the dark mode but allow me to customize them. So I've really liked that because I still want color. Just because I don't use light mode doesn't mean I want everything to be all black all the time.

I just don't want all white all the time, right? And also, I mean, I'm sure this is the same for most of our audience. I do feel like I need to make some sweeping changes to the way that my home screen works, but I feel like I'm still waiting on a few more widgets to appear and then work out which icons are going to go away. Like, I feel like I maybe don't need my Fantastical icon on my home screen anymore if I'm used to having the widget there. But I still need to work out how and what's going to show and where you know have you

found that like there needs to be some change here but you're just not sure what it is yet yeah and the um one of the challenges is the iphone and the ipad are different because the ipad it's you know you've got the one screen that has everything yeah it is frustrating to not be i mean it's i mean we've been saying this the whole time but it's still incredibly frustrating to to have all of the widgets locked away to that bar on the side yeah it is so it's um but at the same time i'm happy that they're there and they're very nice but it's kind of not necessary um i'd like more if I could. I'd like more functionality. I get why it's not there.

You have to rethink the grid and all that. I see why they punted on this one and said we'll deal with it next year maybe. But yeah, I have a lot of pondering to do about how I use widgets and what information I want. And I'm experimenting, but I'm kind of starting slow because I think what I've decided is on my iPhone, I don't use my iPhone as much as my iPad since I rarely leave the house. I was using the iPhone a lot more this weekend because we were traveling.

And it's actually kind of a push and pull between the fact that I can hide all of my extra pages of apps and have a much simpler interface and adding widgets where it clutters it back up, but with widgets. And I think I'm appreciating the simplicity more than I'm appreciating the clutter. Um, but we'll see. I mean, the number of, I have a small widget stack on my page one of my iPhone home screen. And that's it. And on page two, I'm experimenting with some widgets. There's actually no icons on page two. It's just widgets. And I'm trying some different stuff out there, but I'm not sure I actually want anything more than

page one and nothing else and have it be super minimal. But it's really too early to tell. Like, it's fun to have the options. I'm not sure. Every time I try something out, I'm like, whoa, that's kind of a lot. And so it may be that I end up much more minimalist and not doing as much with widgets as I maybe thought on the iPhone. On the iPad, you know, definitely it's nice to have, I've got, you know, I've got a couple small widgets and a medium widget stack with Fantastical and the weather forecast. And that's all been good. with Fantastical and the weather forecast, and that's all been good. Yeah, some of my favorites so far is Fantastical.

I use one called Event List plus Calendar. Carrot Weather, super good, the forecast widget. I think Carrot Weather's widget is my favorite widget. My time tracking app, Timery, the widgets are in beta right now, but there's some good ones in there. I use a bunch of the shortcuts ones for different shortcuts. Apple's photo widget is super nice.

It's actually, they've done a really good job with that widget. I recommend everybody like to at least tries that one out for a while, like leave it on your home screen because I didn't use it at first and then everybody was telling me to try it. So I did and it's really nice. And then of the Widget Smith that we were talking about earlier, I use photos in album to select photos just from a specific album that I love. I use the Step Count widget and the Time in Locations, which is the time zone widget.

So they're some of my favorite ones that I've used so far. But I'm still waiting on what I expect, like a bunch of apps that I use to update with widgets in the not-too-distant future. Yeah, I'm also using Carrot Weather widget, which I really like. One of the things I'm really liking is these apps that offer

a whole bunch of different options. Like, because especially some of the Apple stuff, but also some of the old style widgets that we used to have were like one size fits all. Like here is the widget or they were configure the widget in the app

to be what you want it to be. And what seems to be happening with iOS 14 is you just have so many different widgets to choose from sort of pre-formatted. So like Carrot is a great example where as I scroll through, they have snark widgets that say the forecast and also one of the funny lines that the app says. They have forecast widgets that show the current forecast.

They have hourly widget that shows the hourly forecast and a daily widget that shows the daily forecast for the next few days. And they have, if you're paying them a tier three membership, a weather map that will show you the local radar and stuff stuff like all of that those are just pre-formatted so you just choose and you can choose multiple ones and put them in a stack and all of that and like what i wanted was the the daily forecast i want to see what's happening the rest of the week and so that's one that i've got on my ipad screen i really like uh what they did with that what i like about the the carrot one they have one that i'm using it's just called forecast and what it does right what i love is in the morning and most of the day it shows me hourly but in the evening switches to daily

and i really like that smart because in the morning and through the day i want to know what it's like for the rest of the day but in the evening i don't care i just want to know what the rest of the week is like so i really like that it does that switching on its own and when i um am right being in california i don't really have to think about is it going to rain later until basically november i i so yeah the carrot one also that she's set in a bunch of, um, additional data points and I have precipitation, uh, percentage chance, of course. Yeah.

So that'll all be more relevant. I may actually find value in an hourly in a little bit, but, um, not, not quite yet. Um, the, the one that I'm using the most is scriptable and I know this is wacky, but, uh, so scriptable is an app. It's kind of like shortcuts, except the way what it lets you do is run JavaScript scripts. And you're saying to yourself, why would there be a widget for that? But the new version of Scriptable lets you write your own widgets in JavaScript to do anything. Anything you want. So I have written, based on some code I found and modified, and then people have contributed to it.

And I wrote about this on Six Colors a little bit. But like, I have a widget on both my phone and my iPad that literally just talks to my weather station and tells me my home weather. So it's not something that I can distribute to anyone else because it doesn't make sense for anyone else. It's not following an API. It's not talking to a weather.

It's literally talking to my server. And it's got the current temperature, the high and low. Is it warmer than it was or colder than it was yesterday and what's the trend over the last hour and it's great and i and it's like it's green when it's cool and red when it's hot it's great um and then i also wrote um in a bunch of different forms including in scriptable this air quality widget because we've had the fires in the west and so you kind of need to know is it is the air breathable outside or not essentially and that has been a lot of fun and um that one i posted the code for because you can literally um put in a the code of a purple air air quality station near you and then it works That one is relevant for people who are not just me. It's not hard coded to my local air quality. And, um, and I don't know anything about JavaScript,

but I kinda, uh, I used, there was a script that I used as the basis that did some basic stuff. And then I, I changed a bunch of the math and then somebody who saw my article about it threw in this like sort of theme approach where you could have a color gradient and then i modified that so that like the light colors have a have dark text and the dark colors have a light text on the and it's been a lot of fun but it's also been super useful especially right now to know what the current temperature is and to know what the air quality is so um if you know a little you know enough j enough JavaScript to be dangerous, I would recommend trying it out. Also, because the great thing about things like JavaScript is it's all open code.

You can see all the code. And there are lots of examples. Automators Forum. That's a spinoff of the Automators podcast on RelayFM, where it's a bunch of examples of widgets written in Scriptable. But I just, I love, and there is a similar project that's trying to get widgets in shortcuts. It's a little more complicated that way. But if you think in terms of shortcuts, you can do that too. And I love this, right? I love the fact that if there's not a widget out there that does exactly what you want, like my personal weather, like there's a, there's an app that, um, that does air quality called air lookout, and it will look at purple air stations near you. And there is a widget, right? So there is an app that does that. Um,

it didn't do that when I started writing mine, but it does that. But like for my personal weather station, like there is nothing and I could get one that like looks at my weather station through an API or something, but like, I just, I just wrote it and it works. And I love that, that, that you can write your own widgets if you want to. So most of my widget time has actually been inscriptable of all places yeah i i don't know uh i know so little javascript that i would be dangerous right like yeah well i i know very little of it too but i know enough it's how i learned all of my scripting languages is i looked at the existing code and i was like, oh, so that's how you do that.

And then you take it and then every now and then I run into something where I'm like, I literally don't know what I'm seeing here. And then I have to Google it and all of that. But it's actually been kind of a fun experience to do that and see what code is similar in JavaScript to PHP to, you know, Apple script and what, how they're different and all of those things. It's actually been a lot of fun. This episode is brought to you by Text expander from our friends at smile text expander removes the repetition from work so you can focus on what matters most

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By the way, if you are wondering about the hand washing feature, it's actually off by default on watchOS 7. You have to go and turn it on. And I did that in the settings on my watch. I don't know why that is. Maybe it's a functionality that maybe they're not comfortable enough is working correctly. I know a lot of people in the base saying that it was firing off at random times. I haven't had that yet. I did kind of have some thoughts on some of the new watch faces. That's the thing that I care the most about because I don't use

all of the functionality of my Apple Watch but I do like the faces sometimes. Well, I have a love-hate relationship with the watch faces. I really like the typograph face but I find the process of picking colors to be annoying because some

colors change the background color, but some don't, and I can't choose what I want it to be. I can just choose from the preset colors, which is weird because Apple has now created the stripes face, which does allow you to choose the colors arbitrarily, but there are some faces where you have to go with the ones that Apple's picking. The same with the GMT face. They give you preset colors that Apple say match, but this is a similar thing to what we were talking about earlier. Why don't you let me choose the colors that I want exactly, rather than choosing from ones that you've told me and ordained are okay. But I do like the look of the typograph face. I was using the California face before, so it was purely aesthetic, no function, and the typograph face is similar um although the the one that i like which is just the three very

large numbers um the four very large numbers it's actually quite hard to tell the time on that face because they're so large where it's it's much easier when if you just have a watch face that has four numbers on and they're kind of sized correctly you can you have a better approximation of where the hands are pointing uh but i just like the way this one looks, which for me is an important thing about watch face design anyways, is design. I like the GMT face. I like GMT watch faces. A GMT face, basically in a nutshell, is it allows you to tell two different times for different time zones at the same time. So you have two hour hands on a watch face. One is your local time, and then it's like typically an hour

hand in a different color, which is set to a different time zone. So I would typically, and the reason it's called a GMT face is you would set it to GMT. So you would always know what this kind of standard time zone is. Setting a GMT time for me is mostly pointless for half of the year because it's the time zone I live in. So I always set, and I have another watch face, which is a world timer of a similar idea. I set it to New York time, to Eastern time, because that works great for me because from Eastern time, I can approximate the rest of the time in America. And I like this watch face, but it's, it has the infograph style in like the four corner complications, which is a very, I find that to be a very messy, very loud layout. And I, I want to do some like tweaking with that to see if I can pick some complications

that I actually like in those corners or otherwise I'm just going to turn them all off. I find that design, I understand why it's useful, but I really do find it to be quite a lot, I'll say. It is a lot, although I use that. I use the California face and I have the four corners and it's because I like, because of how I use the watch, honestly, because I have the activity shortcut and overcast shortcut and my rings and the weather.

If I used the Apple Watch every day, I would be using more of the functions of the Apple Watch. So I would also imagine myself doing this. Here's my frustration with this, which is a lot of these faces, Apple has decided they're monochrome faces and so you can pick a color so on california you can pick the color of the disc behind so you can make it orange or you can make it gray or you can make a white or you can make it black the problem is or one of the many other colors that are available there are lots of colors in ios 7 or watch os 7 so here's the thing um what it enforces is monochromatic monochromicity so if you choose orange it uses orange as a highlight color on all of your complications and if you choose green it makes green all of your complications and what i really want is i want a setting because I use it with a black background.

I just want an option to say, show the colors on the complications because the complications have colors, but on monochrome faces, they're drained out. And it just frustrates me to no end that like, I would be happy. I would like my little running guy to be green on that face. He's not, He's white. Because no color. Only gray, except for the second hand, which is red. But if I choose orange, then they'll be orange.

But they'll all be orange. And if they were different colors, you can more easily pick out visually what you're looking for. Exactly. I don't mind. If I'm going to have the four corner complications, I want a mode that lets me say, just draw the complications with color. I want a separate switch that basically says mono or not for complications.

And it doesn't offer that to me. And it's annoying because it's not like the Apple Watch doesn't have that functionality because one of the infograph faces has multiple color options, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So it's frustrating. I have to try some of the new watch faces.

I could get to the utility face, which is still my favorite, but of course the utility face is one of those faces that was designed for the small screens and doesn't support any of the big, modern complications, even though I have a big screen, which is also a frustration of mine

because I love that face, but it's an old face that they haven't updated. And so I only have little tiny complications that I can put in the corners, which is not what I want. Yeah. I also saw on Twitter you've been having some battery life problems. Yeah.

So this happened last year. Remember Casey? Casey had big problems. Yeah. So I have an Apple Watch Series 5. I've had it for about a year since it came out. And so it's been running WatchOS 6. And I've never, maybe once, but I think basically never had that thing where I'm sitting on the couch at the end of the day and I get tapped on my wrist saying, you're at 10%.

Do you want to go in battery reserve mode? At the end of the day, I get tapped on my wrist saying you're at 10%. Do you want to go in battery reserve mode? Maybe it happened once after I did a long like if it happened, you could probably point to a reason, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was weird. It literally I think if it happened at all, it happened one time and it would have been where I was like, oh, yeah, I did have the workout on for a long time or I left the workout on when I got home or something like that. There was a reason, but it was literally once in 300 plus days so i update my apple watch to watch os7 on wednesday um and wednesday it goes into power reserve thursday it goes into power reserve

friday it goes into power reserve okay now saturday it goes into power reserve. Friday, it goes into power reserve. Okay, now there's a problem. Saturday, it goes into power reserve. Day one or two, you can let go, but past that, something weird's happening, right? I was like, every day. It either went into power reserve or it was offering to go into power reserve. And I was like, I'm just going to let it run out because I'm going to go to bed in half an hour or something. So I didn't bother. But basically, after not running out of battery for every day for a year, every day it ran out of battery. And I mentioned this on Twitter and people are like, oh, well, you know, you change your habits or whatever.

I was like, no, no, literally no change in anything I do except the OS update. And then people were like, oh, it's hand washing. Turn off hand washing. And I've heard that works. And it becomes like the home remedies. Like everybody's got to draw a chalk circle and stand inside it. If it is hand washing, well, that's watchOS 7 killing battery life then, isn't it? Because that's a feature added.

Like that would be point proven, even though, as I've said a minute ago, it's actually off by default. But even if you had turned it on and it was now killing the battery life, well, that's showing that watchOS 7 is killing the battery life, which is bad. It doesn't matter how you fix it. The point that the operating system has been updated and it's now destroying the battery, well, that's an issue. Yeah, if they have a new feature and it's turned on and it kills your battery, then that would be a problem. Anyway, I did finally one of these home remedies, you know, kill a chicken, hang it upside down, whatever. All these home remedies that you've got for Apple Watch battery fixes. I had two people say to me, have you tried unpairing and repairing your watch?

Because, of course, what would be better than turning it off and on again is unpairing and repairing. Now, anybody who has an Apple Watch knows unpairing and repairing, it's not that simple. Isn't that basically a factory reset? Yes. It's like reinstalling macOS or something. It's close. It's not reinstalling mac os it's close it's it's not re it's not reinstalling the data it's reinstalling the data but not the os but it is and you have the option of like not

unpairing your cellular which is good because then you'd have to re-enable your cellular and go back to your carrier and all of that and it you have the option to do that but it is it is a bit of a thing because you've got to put your Apple Pay back on. So you've got to put your card codes in for all your Apple Pay credit cards. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you have to do. But you can do it. It does a backup of your watch before you undo it. So I did that.

I actually did that in the hotel room on Saturday night after we moved my daughter in to her apartment. And I was like, so tired. And yet the battery, I'd actually gone into power reserve, charged it while we were unpacking her stuff for about 20 minutes, put it back on, and then it died again. I was like, this is ridiculous. So I did it. And then I used it all day yesterday. And guess what, Mike? and then I used it all day yesterday, and guess what, Mike? I went to bed, and there was still like 30% battery.

Huh, okay. Again, nevertheless, even though you fixed it, that's something in WatchOS 7 killing battery life. I think what it is, is something in a watch that is updated to watch os7 some watches that are updated to watch os7 from watch os6 are getting in a state where they are running some process is running and they are and it's freaking out the uh the watch and it's draining the battery. And apparently the way you stop that from happening is by unpairing and repairing. So it's a bug, but it strikes me as being a bug about doing an update to an existing, right? Like it feels like that's really the bug here.

If you can unpair and repair and then it works fine, it's not quite the OS. It's the act of the OS being updated that's triggering something. And my guess is it's a data thing where it's trying to update an app from the phone or it's trying to do something. And it's in a state where it's confused about what state it's in. And it continues to churn and it kills your battery. But it was remarkable, and I only have one day as a data point so far, but let me tell you, yesterday, the watch was fine. So I guess if you're having these problems, try that. Try doing that, yeah.

Yeah, but this is a bug, and Apple needs to address it because it's super annoying. For all the reasons that we said on that, that, that iPhone show we did like upgrading your, your watch to a new version of watch. Oh, I should be a delight, right?

You should be like, yeah, new features, new faces. It's great. And not a, a, oh,

it does. You just ruined my, you ruin this OS that I can't revert has ruined my watch. Cause it like literally ruined my watch. My watch could not get through the day. It was, it was super sad to have this watch that I've been using and using a lot over the last year,

suddenly not be able to get through dinner. Yeah. I am 54% right now and it is is 6.37 p.m. I put the watch on probably about 10. I mean, I don't know if that's good or bad. I mean, you can kind of maybe... I'm just saying that as a way for people to judge it by their own benchmarks for the watch.

I don't do enough with mine, I think, that I've ever really had battery issues. So I'll let you know. I've just said I'm going to wear the watch a little bit more now uh because i want to try out watch over seven and see see what else is going on there uh there's a couple of more things i want to touch on uh from last week's event one of them was the a14 uh you wrote a great article about the debut of the a14 and i also um john siracusa made some points on the last episode of ATP, which lets me just want to make a correction from stuff that I was saying last week. And plus, because it taught me

something that I didn't know. So when we were talking about the gains in the speed of the A14 in the iPad Air, these gains were over what it replaced in the iPad Air. I thought they were saying, look how much faster the A14 is to the A13, but it wasn't that. It was how much faster the A14 was to the A12, which is what was in the iPad Air before it. So those 30%, 40%, you know, double speeds and all that kind of stuff

is for what it is in the iPad Air. And whilst this is a super powerful processor, it still needs to be benchmarked against the A12Z to see if it is in fact more powerful than the current iPad Pro, which is something I know I've said, right? That like the A14 is more powerful and I don't know that's the case. Here's the thing though, and none of us know because Apple is talking about the a14 is more powerful and we and i don't know that's the case here's the thing though and none of us know because apple is talking about the a14 but nobody's actually used it is and i can tell you this with some certainty um the a14 in single core is going to be faster than all the a12s right because it's it's a new it's a new core and it's faster the a12z is multi-core it has more

cores right then it's probably yes it's more cores so if you're doing multi-core tests because it has more performance processor cores it will probably be faster but i think we can say with some certainty that if you compare the A14 to the A12X or Z, there will be places where one of them is faster and places where the other one is faster. And that is a weird kind of place we're in right now where the iPad Pro doesn't have the 14 architecture that's coming out now. Now it will probably pretty soon because otherwise they wouldn't have done what they did as we talked about last week. But yeah, I feel pretty confident that the A14 is definitely going to beat out all the A12 based stuff and the A13 stuff in some ways. It's just that we don't know because nobody has got their hands on an A14 iPad. And I think that's in part because Apple is saving, as my article goes into, it's kind of saving some of the hype for the iPhone.

Because, like, it is this new processor, 5 nanometer, and they could not talk about it. And they did talk about it, but I feel like they've saved some of the hype. They only are comparing it to the previous ipad air not to the a13 so you have to kind of extrapolate how much faster it is than the last chip generation because apple doesn't want to talk about that yet they will talk about that next time when they compare the new iphones to the previous iphones yeah i just i got sucked in by the marketing and assumed it was faster than anything but was not paying attention to what they were actually saying. Yeah.

No, they, they have scrupulously avoided comparison. There is one because the, some of the machine learning stuff basically didn't exist. Yeah. In the a 12. So they compared that to the a 13,

but otherwise they are scrupulously avoiding talking about it. And, you know, as I say in the article, like I get the argument that you want to compare like to like, and the iPad has its own thermal characteristics and, you know, it's going to, it's going to behave in a certain way. And so you compare an iPad Air to an iPad Air, and it would be different on an iPhone. I get that. And yet at the same time, it kind of feels like an excuse,

because really the A14 performance is what it is, whether it's in an iPad or an iPhone. It's not that different, and I think it's an excuse for them not to talk about it, because they want to save that for the iPhone, because they're not happy about the fact that they had to announce the A14 with an iPad Air. They want to make the big deal about their 5-nanometer chip and the great new thing, and this is going to be the A14 with an iPad Air. They want to make the big deal about their five nanometer chip

and the great new thing. And this is going to be the generation that essentially this technology will probably power all the iPhones and iPads and Macs, even no matter what they call it, it's probably based on this generation of processor and Apple Silicon, right?

They wanted to make a big explosion about this with their biggest event of the year, which is the iPhone, and it didn't work out. So they're saving their powder a little bit, some of it, some of their powder for whenever they announced the iPhone. And so, you know, you end up with this reluctant debut that's like, it's the A14. Okay, we'll be back later with more. And I also wanted to talk about um i let i don't want to touch on the blood oxygen sensor again um because this was something that i've i was really banging a drum on this last week of like i don't know why this isn't like apple and again i said i think i

think apple did a bad job of selling this to me. And you linked to a Verge article on Six Colors written by Nicole Wetzman. And it says, give a quote, the Apple Watch's blood oxygen sensor is in a medical device and won't be able to diagnose or monitor any medical conditions. The company says the feature is simply there

to help users understand their fitness and wellness. And I've been seeing a lot of people use the phrase wellness a lot over the last week. I've seen people talking about language changes on Apple's website. I've also had many friends over the last seven days attempt to tell me why the blood oxygen sensor is important. They all did a better job than Apple,

but everybody falls into the same trap, which is explaining a lot of things that a sensor like this could potentially tell me, but no definitive answers as to what it can do or what apples can do, and especially nowhere near as definitive as what the heart rate sensor can do for me. And I think that's the thing here.

The blood oxygen sensor seems like a nice thing to have, but a sensor as important as the heart rate sensor, it is not. So I think Nicole Wetzman's story gets to the heart of why that presentation seems so weird, which is Apple can't market this for medical things. It can't it has no authorization to market this as a medical sensor so it can't talk about it in that form and you saw what they did which is sort of say oh we've learned a lot about blood oxygen sensors from covet 19 and then they move on and then they say oh we have a blood oxygen sensor yeah uh it's great for runners and then it's like and then they're doing a bunch of surveys are you getting these people for these

reasons for yeah we're gonna do some medical studies we also have like it was they were all very um it basically like and i think what this all boils down to is because of these reasons it was not a cohesive presentation for this feature, which is very un-Apple. And I think that was why I struggled for it to attach. And it's because their lawyers won't let them do that because it's not legal for them to make those claims. I'm sure what they want is to say, in the age of COVID, it's really great that we now

have blood oxygen sensing on the Apple Watch because what we found in the early days of covid is that a lot of people had very low blood oxygens and didn't realize it and they got to the hospital and they were really really sick and a lot of them died because they didn't realize how sick they were and if they had had the apple watch six maybe they wouldn't have died because they would have gotten a warning about their blood oxygen. That's what they want to say. And they can't. Because, one, they're legally prevented from saying it, and two, because it's unclear if the Apple Watch really

would work in that way, because it hasn't been scientifically tested. So, they can't say that. So instead it's like, oxygen, right? Right? Yeah, I've also had some people say to me that like a sensor like this one it would be too late for you right like at the time that it would alert you to how bad it could potentially be this is not it's not actually if it works like

a lot of these things work um based on the early days of covid it would actually um get you to get you to the hospital sooner. Yes, it would. Because all these stories are about people who seemed fine, they felt fine, and they felt a little sick, and they came in and it turned out their blood oxygen was ridiculously low,

where they were not getting enough oxygen, but they didn't feel it. And the theory is that you monitor your blood oxygen for COVID because when it starts to fall down, you have a warning to go get help sooner. That's the theory. Again, the problem is that that's a narrative. And what is the science? And that Apple doesn't have that. Now, I'm sure Apple wants that and wants to get that, but it doesn't have that now. So it can't market it this way. And my guess is that they put this in to the Apple Watch, very much thinking of a medical device approval. And it may be that COVID has actually thrown the medical device approval stuff completely out of whack, because presumably the sensor was in planning long before COVID, right? But this has added this whole layer of complexity to this issue. And so what I'm saying is I know why Apple didn't sell it properly. I understand that. I also kind of understand why

that's a good thing because I'm not sure they've got the backing to make that kind of claim, but it ends up being the sensor that's kind of a medical sensor except not really and you're right what does that mean what what is why why do i care if i'm not an elite runner why do i care about this oxygen sensor and the answer is because it ends up being the point like all right they got a better altimeter in there as well right well i don't care about that because I'm not going on high elevation. So this is like the watch series six is not really interesting to me

except the only thing that, if I wore the Apple Watch every day, the thing that would make me consider buying it is the brighter always on screen. But because I don't wear it every day, like that's not enough for me. And that's why the colors came in here too. They're pitching in a whole bunch of different features

because this is a pretty incremental update. So it's like, you know, it does this and this and this and this, huh? And some people will get that. But the truth is that most of the people who are going to buy the Series 6 anyway aren't upgrading from the 5. They're upgrading from a lot beyond, you know, way back.

And these are just more added features. If you are like a 4 or a 3 or a 0 or whatever, like this one's great, right? It's fantastic. Because I think the Series 5 is great. Like it does a great job at what it does. And so the 6 is better

than that in certain ways. But if you're coming from something before the 5, you'll be very happy with this update. But if you're coming from something before the 5, you'll be very happy with this update. But if you're coming from something before the 5, the SE might be enough for you anyway. Yep. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. If you're a fan of The Office,

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hashtag ask upgrade questions to round out today's episode and the first question this week comes from Ryan and Ryan wants to know, so now that we've had time to think about it and lust after it, do we think that the iPad Air's Touch ID sensor will make its way to the iPhone 12?

I'm really going back and forth on this one a lot, Jason, honestly. Because, like, I want it for sure. And you can say, like, oh, these things take a lot of time. It might not have been in their plan. We don't know it wasn't in the plan, right? Because people saying that like, oh, you know, they want Touch ID back in the age of COVID and stuff like that. And yeah, that's true.

But the thing is, people wanted Touch ID back before we in the West were wearing face masks, because in Asia, they've been wearing face masks a lot. And we spoke about on this show, because I remember it, because I remember doing some prep for a show after the iPhone 10 came out. And we were talking about the fact that I read a report somewhere about face masks being an issue. And the reason I remember this is because of how stupid I felt because I was like, wait, what? Face masks?

I was thinking about like face masks that you put on for like exfoliating, right? That was my, what? Because that's what that phrase meant to me at the time. And I felt like an idiot when I then had the realization, no, they mean like face masks you wear when you're sick, right? Which is a thing that I know

people have been doing forever in Asia or for a long time because of the original SARS, which is, by the way, I will continue to wear face masks here forever now. It's just a part of my life, right? This is a thing that I will continue to want to do. So this is a thing that Apple has been aware of for a while. it is not impossible that they had always planned for this to be in the iphone 12 it is also not impossible that they made this decision back in february to add it these phones will be eight months later than that i know that people say this stuff takes a long time i know it takes a long time but i'm sure a company like apple can move heaven enough with their manufacturing partners to add a feature.

So what I'm saying is difficult, yes. Impossible, no. Which is why I am not sure what I think about this happening. Yeah, I don't have any inside knowledge about Apple's hardware approach. Apple's hardware approach. Everything that we've heard and read suggests that every iPhone and every other Apple product is really designed multiple years in advance in that pipeline that Tim Cook always talks about. It's a long pipeline. It's like a year's long pipeline. Okay. I will accept that. Of course it is. they are planning stuff out way in advance i get it you can't just slap a bunch of stuff together and say here's the iphone right you can't so you've got

to plan i will accept that but i don't know if i accept the idea that apple this is one of those things of like oh apple just can't do it because we hear that a lot like people who are convinced that everything Apple does is right but that everything Apple doesn't do is because they just couldn't do it like they are the most powerful and

rich company on the face of the earth and this is their most important product do you think that given that they have a touch id sensor that works in a power button for the ipad which means that already i'm starting to think maybe they didn't just engineer that for the ipad right like maybe they already are thinking about the iphone as a potential for that and if they didn't put it in the iphone 12 and then covet happens they're like oh wow the whole world is wearing masks now are they surely a company as resourceful as Apple, who knows how important the iPhone is to their business, would say,

at the very least, could we do this? Could we, at the last minute... I mean, we've definitely seen them swap things out at the last minute based on reports, where it's like, well, this thing was in all the DVT versions of the phone and it isn't there. And you can see on the logic board where it was, but it wasn't in final production. And I know it's easier to remove than to add. But is it not possible that in March or April, somebody at Apple said, could we use that sensor, that Touch ID sensor we're working on? Could we swap that in to some of these iPhone 12 models? And maybe the answer was no, right?

Maybe the answer is no, it's just too far along. Or the placement, it has to have this stuff behind it it and that's already locked down in terms of the design. But I choose to believe that Apple is more flexible and has more capability and isn't just one of these, well, what you're going to do, check back in two years kind of companies. And I would say that, honestly, as an operations guy, if Tim Cook looks at this situation and says, how can we not react for a year and a half to something that happens? How can we not react faster than that? I would consider that a problem of my design and production system that you can't change on the fly in case something like huge like covid happens so

to bring it back to ryan's question do i think that the touch id sensor will be on the iphone 12 i don't know flip a coin i i will say i'll be disappointed if it's not because it should be yeah it should be and they've had i know not years of warning but they've had a long time since the world changed to make this change and if they fail to do it i don't think you shrug your shoulders and go well what you're going to do everything's done years in advance i think if you're inside at apple you're like we shouldn't be able to get caught flat-footed like this again, right? Like wrong-footed. We should not be put in this situation again.

Because, I mean, Face ID is a liability in an era where people are wearing masks. So if the iPhone 12 comes out and it has only Face ID, it's a failure. It's a failure on Apple's part. And they've had months to figure it out. So I don't know if they'll do it, but they, they should have done it back in April. They should have done it.

I agree. Like if I will, if it hasn't happened, I will understand that they, for whatever reason, didn't do it, but I will still say that it is a failure that it didn't happen. Because I get it, right?

I can understand how it can be difficult to do it. Or I can understand that maybe they couldn't fit it in, right? Like you said, it just wouldn't fit. And what they couldn't do was redesign the entire phone. But I will still be disappointed about it. And I will still say that I would consider it a failure because I want it to be in there. Like I want it to be in there.

And it will be great if it is. They have the technology. Like the technology exists. It's worse, right? Like if the iPad Air didn't have that feature, I would be more willing to accept it. But Apple are now shipping a product before the iPhone 12 that includes this technology.

So I now want the technology in my phone. Yep. Kibi asks, if you could add one new feature to the Apple Watch, what would it be? This is an easy one for me, Jason. I would like to see an Apple Watch with a round face. I just want to see what it would look like.

I want to see what they would do. I think it would look nicer, personally, for my own tastes. So I would like a round face Apple Watch. I think we're reaching the time where that's going to be a thing that Apple needs to do is provide at least a variation, physical variation on the Apple Watch. Like, it's been a while. It's been six years.

It's had one design, right? Like, their other products don't do this. They have, you know, I know that they have different sizes, but like whatever. But like there's only been one design really and they've made some tweaks to it. But, you know, like if you imagine what's a,

what is an iPhone 10 like redesign for the Apple Watch? It is a new physical shape. That's what we're talking here. My new feature is going to be an OS feature.'s it doesn't have to be in the hardware although if the hardware can add some you know more machine learning sub-processing that would be great too which is use machine learning to properly detect when i stand up uh okay right because i never i i never get credit for standing up um except sometimes i get credit when i'm not standing up for standing up but i feel like whatever model they're using to determine based on their sensors what i'm doing they need to retrain their model to be better because it

doesn't it's great that it can detect hand washing but it can't detect me standing up and cooking for an hour in the kitchen um that's ridiculous so that's that's going to be my my thing is is please do a better job of sensing my emotions and giving me credit for it i actually turned in in watch os 7 you can reduce your goals and increase them but let's focus on the important part which is you can reduce them and i've reduced my stand goal because it wants me to stand 12 hours a day and I don't get credit for a bunch of times that I stand. So I've reduced my stand goal to eight hours because I'm tired of it. I never meet my stand goal and it's not because I'm not standing. So and I've done the thing where I stand and I wave my arms around and I move around and all

that and it like I just so that's what I want is I know it's hard you've got a limited set of sensors in there it has to guess what the humans are doing maybe you can use some of that fancy machine learning to retrain this thing to figure out better what is going on on the outside Elray has asked something that I've had many people ask over the last week. Has anything been said about how the Apple One Bundle will work if you have separate iTunes and iCloud accounts? So this is, there are some people that have an iCloud account and then they have an iTunes or an App Store account that they use for purchases and they're on different Apple, they're on different email addresses. So like you have your Apple ID address and then your purchaser's address.

And how is this going to work for the Apple One bundle? Now, whilst I do not have details for you here, Chris Espinosa, who was employee number eight at Apple. Seven, eight, something like that.

Yeah. Chris's bio on Twitter is eight. So I'm assuming that's what that means. He replied to a tweet from Christina Warren and says, and I quote, it manages that. I just double checked. Now, we're going to have to see what the details are, but it's not there's not nothing, which is what I thought.

I thought it was going to kind of just be like, oh, you're on your own here. Merge, right? But it seems like there's going to be some kind of way for Apple One, the bundle, to work out how this is all going to work together. I do kind of feel like if you're doing this, it might be time to try and find some way to merge it. I don't know how you do it, but I can't imagine that this functionality is going to continue to give you issues into the future i'm sure it's like i always worry i have a at mac.com email address right which was at mac became mobile me became iCloud and i'm always concerned that that's gonna that that uh the whatever they're doing to make sure i still get my email is gonna break one one day. And Noah asks,

we're going to finish and start today with things that I'm sure are going to be contentious amongst our listeners. So I picked this one particularly. Noah asks, what fingers do you use to press command space on your keyboard?

I had a contentious discussion with some co-workers about the quote unquote correct way. Personally, I use my right thumb and left thumb for command and space respectively. Personally, I use my right thumb and left thumb for command and space, respectively. Jason, what do you do? Let's start with you.

I want to know what you do. So I had to monitor myself today, right, to make sure how I was actually doing this. Of course. I kind of have two options here. Sometimes I use my left ring finger for command and left pointer for space. That is my typical one. So I don't know why, but the middle finger just gets completely left out of this.

So I do left command with my left ring finger and then the space with my left pointer. Or sometimes I use both pointer fingers. So pointer on always left command on my left hand, and then my right pointer finger on the space bar. Does that make sense? Wow, so you're spacing with your fingers. Yeah, it turns out. But not when I type type just when i do this

when i type i use my thumbs to use space but when i use this shortcut these are the two ways that i do it it is always left pointer finger on left command no wait it's not is it it's always left i'm always using left command sometimes it's with my left ring finger, sometimes with my left pointer finger, and then it's either the left pointer on space or right pointer on space. Okay, so when you're issuing, not typing, but issuing a command space, you're using your left hand exclusively

and putting one of your fingers on the command key, on the left command key, and one of your fingers on the space bar. Fascinating. Now, I'll just say again to Noah, correcting quotes is good. That's, again, the reason we do have keys the way they are is that everybody can choose their own way to press the keys. And there's no right way or wrong way.

But that said, I do it exactly the same way noah does left thumb and right thumb all thumbs all thumbs all the time so you use left thumb for command and right space at right thumb for space yep you never do right on the command no no i never use the right command key ever ever ever and i don't know what keyboard broke me of using modifier keys on the right side of the space bar but i never use the right the modifier keys on the right side of the space bar not even for like command p to print which you could normally do with one hand i don't my left thumb does the command key and one of my right fingers does the p i use the right command if i'm doing like command return or something i use the right

command yep never never never so you could just you could just reprogram that key for something else huh absolutely absolutely could interesting if you would like to send in questions, I love these questions, by the way. So if you have stuff like this, I always want it. So you can send in questions, hashtag AskUpgrade on Twitter. Or if you're in the Real AFM members Discord, you can use question mark AskUpgrade for that to join the Real AFM members Discord

and get access to Upgrade Plus, which is a longer version of the show with no ads. Go to getupgradeplus.com and thank you to everybody that is an Upgrade Plus subscriber. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week. That is the fine folk over at Express, VPN, Smile, and of course our friends at Hover as well. If you want to find Jason's work you can go to

sixcolors.com and at jsnell on twitter Jason hosts many shows here at RelayFM as well as The Incomparable as well I am iMike I am YKE and you can find my shows here at RelayFM as well and again if you want to donate to St. Jude

go to stjude.org we're continuing to raise money for St. Jude, go to stjude.org. We're continuing to raise money for St. Jude up until the end of September. So you've got just over a week left to go on that. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.