Upgrade - 318: Four Weeks Out or Tomorrow

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

This week widget mania sweeps the nation, Jason goes to an Apple Store to buy a Solo Loop, and Tim Cook ponders Apple's work-from-home culture.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 318 today's show is brought to you by pingdom and ero my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello hello hello mike how are you? Hmm. Governor? I don't know. Did I tell you that somebody got mad at me because I said Premier League? Because they want me to say Premier League like a fancy English person. I'm not an English person. I'm American.

It's Premier League. Or a French person, I guess. Premier. Premier. Premier. That is actually how all football fans say it uh in england is a premier league i didn't know that is what they say yeah the premier uh we have a we have now upset everyone in england and france so yeah that's what i was going for good work on us hashtag sell talk question comes

from tim this week and tim's asks what image Jason, do you use for your user login profile on macOS? So when you go to the login screen, if you use the login screen, I'm assuming that you do, and you put your password in, you get a little image that pops up there. I think you can also see this image somewhere in system preferences. Yeah. I don't remember where, but what is the image that you use in users? My Mac auto-logs in, so I don't see it. It only sees it when I wake

it up and it's coming back. It's a picture of me taken by John Gruber at WWDC in San Francisco seven years ago or something that got stuck on there and has never been replaced. that's it

so you do use a picture of yourself yes interesting yeah so do i uh and i had to just go and check that so i think it uses my icloud picture now though i don't think so because my i believe my icon in the chats that i've got in messages are not that but i don't know i think i have what do i have set for you as a message let me see there is a picture of you uh looking inquisitively uh using a microphone which i think was from one of our live episodes oh Oh yeah, that's from one of our, yeah, that is, that is, that is, no, that's my Apple, that's the one it's using.

That's my Apple ID image. Right, that's the one that it shares. So when I open system preferences, that's the image of me that displays. But if I click on users and groups, it's a different picture. There you go. If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question

to help us open a future episode, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snow Talk or use the command question mark Snow Talk in the RelayFM members Discord. We have some follow-up. You wanted to talk about your Apple Watch stand rings. But actually, before

we do that, final call for St. Jude donations. We are now rounding out September and I just wanted to thank everybody who has donated to our St. Jude campaign here We are now rounding out September, and I just wanted to thank everybody who has donated to our St. Jude campaign here at RelayFM over the month. We have currently raised over $367,000, absolutely smashing our goal of $315,000. So we are all so incredibly thankful for your support in helping St. Jude ensure that no child dies from cancer. That is what your donations go towards.

So thank you so, so much to everybody that's donated. If you have been waiting for some reason, you still have a couple of days left, go to stjude.org slash relay, and next time you hear about it on this show will be next year. So thank you so much for your donations. It's been really incredible over this month so tell me about your apple watch uh yeah so i uh this is just a piece of follow-up we got from a lot of people which was last week we complained i complained about how i felt like

the stand ring calculation is not the, however, it's using its sensors to determine how you're standing or not standing, that it's super ineffective, super inefficient. I stand all sorts of times and I'm told you should stand. Yeah. I get really angry at that. It's so interesting that the sensors in the apple watch are so um they're so advanced in certain ways like the hand washing one for example like it really does know when i'm washing

my hands but yet still after all this time continues to have issues with whether i'm standing up or not yeah this is my point is that i made last, is the hand-washing thing, they did a machine learning algorithm, which I think is super clever, and this is what machine learning is good for, right? Which is you measure what the watch measures when people wash their hands, and you feed that into the algorithm. feed that into the algorithm and it learns how it builds up a model of understanding what it needs to see in the sensors because you know the apple watch isn't a person it doesn't can't look around and say oh look you're washing your hands it's just got its sensors but if you can say these are all the times that you uh wash your hands and these this is the sensor data, you can train it to be pretty smart about like, this person is washing their hands. I don't think they did that or did that properly for the stand algorithm.

In fact, my guess is that the stand thing hasn't been touched in years. And that's what I was saying last week is do that. Train, use some advanced machine learning to do a better job of understanding when people are standing or not. And I say all of this because we got a lot of feedback from people who said, oh, Jason, it's really easy. If you want to trick your watch into thinking that you're standing, you just make sure you hold your arm straight up and down, like just put it down at your side for at least a minute, and then it'll trigger it and it'll give you credit, for at least a minute and then it'll trigger it and it'll give you credit, which I appreciate the help, but my goal here is not to cheat, nor is it to hold my arm at a weird angle

that is uncomfortable just to trick the stupid Apple watch into thinking that I'm standing whether I am or not. My point is I want my Apple watch to understand what I'm freaking standing. Like I don't want to trick it. I don't want to have to hack the stupid thing to know when I'm standing or not. It should know when I'm standing. So that's my point. I appreciate all of the help of people who apparently just sit on their couch and let their arm dangle down for a minute every hour and are killing it on the blue ring.

Also, I heard from people who don't see this as a problem. And I think the answer there is their body motions obviously work with whatever algorithm is in the Apple Watch now. And mine obviously doesn't. I guess when I'm standing, I'm not letting my arms dangle by their sides or my left arm or my watches. I don't know. We've all seen you. I've seen you. When you stand, you stand perfectly still, right?

And we've all seen Jason do this. I do, because the aliens hunt based on movement. That's what you are. So if you stay still, the aliens slash dinosaurs can't see you. Exactly. But I want my Apple Watch to know that I'm still standing and give me credit for it. We started talking about widgets last week, and I think it's going to be, I will say, before we get into talking about widgets this is kind of the point this has been one of those very rare features

that ends up being a bigger deal than we thought it was going to be when apple announced it and that's definitely the case of widgets and not just because of everything we were talking about last time you know with like uh there'd be all the customization everything going on with WidgetSmith and all that kind of incredible stuff. But also just my daily usage of widgets is higher than I would have expected it to be. Because one of the things that we were talking about at the time was when we found out that these widgets were non-interactive, right? That you couldn't have buttons.

They would always open an application when you tapped them, no matter what it is that you're doing, that kind of stuff. And there was a concern that it's not going to be as good as it used to be. But I think that what we have seen now is it was the best case scenario that I had posited at the time,

which was what we lose in functionality, we gain in general design, the ability to place them in more circumstances, in better orientations, especially on the iPhone where you can put them anywhere on your home screen and they're in different sizes and the overall visual design improvements of widgets. All of that, I think, has come together

to create something which is so much better than what we had expected it to be and developers continue to do really cool, weird, fun fun useful things with this technology so and i think i think apple will make widgets more functional over time i 100 guarantee that ios 15 will have much more features for widgets because it's been such a smash sure however i will say that that that some of the stuff they took away

in going from the old-style widgets to the new-style widgets is, I think, a philosophical decision, which is Apple feels like widgets aren't apps, right? That widgets shouldn't be a thing that you entirely, like, tap a bunch of different buttons and get an answer and stuff, like the pCalc widget, right? Like, I think Apple feels like that was not what their intent was, that they want widgets to be glanceable or very simply interactive that said i look at what the limitations are on

widgets now and i think they could be more interactive than they are and i think that will come next year uh but they they do philosophically they don't want it to be a replacement for an app they want it to be a very simple kind of interaction but yeah so unexpected uh that like i didn't expect that i would create a github project for the first time but here's that's where i am because i i wrote that article about using the air quality the purple air air quality network to make a widget saying what my nearby air quality was and i i pasted it into gist which is part of github and i had like multiple people like make code contributions and say, oh, I changed this to add a gradient.

And I added, I moved this into a subroutine and here's what I did. And I realized, oh, this is like a project with contributors. So I actually will put a link in the show notes, but I actually put it up. So it uses the Scriptable app. And actually the version that's up there link in the show notes, but I actually put it up. So it uses the Scriptable app. And, and actually

the version that's up there now uses the beta, the new beta of the Scriptable app, because the developer of Scriptable keeps adding new features. But yeah, I posted that. I mean, like, I wouldn't, you would never have. I would never have bet that that something like that would happen. But I wanted that widget because we've got like wildfires and stuff this season and the widget seemed to be a really useful way for me to do that. And other people seemed to want it too and it just sort of snowballed.

So I'm not a developer and yet I have a GitHub project now. I told Casey Liss immediately that I had a GitHub project because he is into that sort of thing. And within five hours, I had somebody asking me for a whole bunch of features that are beyond the scope of the project, which I feel like is, it's almost like a light

goes off somewhere and they say, okay, there's a new, a new project that from somebody who's never had a project before it's time to haze them. So why don't you ask for a scope creep and a whole bunch of features that are not relevant and see what he says. And what I said was, again, within five hours, I said, well, if you want those features, you should just fork this project and do it yourself because I'm not adding it. So I truly am now a developer of software, apparently, on the internet. Congratulations. Yeah. Oh, boy.

It's great. But the fact is that widget that I built is way better now because of the contributions of people who actually know what they're doing. So that's awesome. By the way, did you know that we pre-announced software last week? Yeah, I felt pretty bad about that, to be honest. They were nice about it. So we mentioned how great the Fantastical widget is.

It wasn't out yet. No. By a couple of days. mean it was it was luckily it was it was super super close to being to being released yeah uh it's uh they were they were nice about it and they're like oh it's all part of the marketing i guess but uh people are like you mentioned these widgets and i don't see them and it's because the version of fantastic out we were using is the beta and it wasn't out yet, but it is now, uh, people were also confused about something. I think you said about the carrot weather widget. And, um, when we say people, I think, I mean, primarily our friend, Todd, friend of the

show, Todd, listener, Todd, uh, but Mr. Carrot, Mr. Brian Carrot, uh, explains what's going on there yeah so i'd mentioned that the widget that i was using for carrot weather was changing throughout the day to appropriate weather conditions and people thought that i was using multiple widgets but i wasn't there is a widget type that and i I think that the Carrot Weather developer, Brian, has added some features into the most recent update, which will let you control this a little more. But basically the medium size versions, this came from Brian, of the snark and forecast

widgets that I was using, and I'm using the forecast widget, automatically switches between hour and daily data throughout the day so if you put the hourly and daily widgets into a stack though they would automatically rotate hourly you can do either one you can put two widgets in a stack and they'll rotate or if you put the for the for the hourly and daily but if you put the snark or the forecast they change their time horizon so that they're telling you what happens that day early in the day and then late in the day when it's not relevant anymore they'll tell you what happens the next few days and furthermore that forecast widget will give you uh rain information if rain is happening yeah so it's

a fantastic implementation of a widget like this is uh one of my favorites so far because it is so smart it feels like it has a brain of its own, which is kind of a wonderful thing. Like it feels like it is one of, I've seen a few things like this, but this widget for sure feels like it's doing more than I thought could be done. And this is one of those things where the widget is updating information

throughout the day based upon what seems to be logical for the time that I need it, which, I mean, I know that from an underlying perspective, it's like that's what the widgets are supposed to do, right? But I don't think I've seen an implementation of this kind of logic as good as the Carrot Weather widget, which, frankly, I'm not surprised about

because Carrot Weather is a truly fantastic application. We've said it many times on this show. It is one of my very, very favorite apps on iOS. And the widget has just made it even better. I will also throw in another app that I was trying, which is Weatherline, which I know a lot of people like. And they don't even have an iPad app. It's just an iPhone app. But its widget is really nice because the way it presents the weekly forecast with the little line that goes up and down. So I've been trying that out.

I never really used it before, but I like its widget. So I added the app to my iPad and then I added the widget. And again, it's an iPhone app. So the app is terrible on the iPad, but I don't use the app. All I'm using is the widget and it's a beautiful widget so i'm using the weatherline widget now on my ipad so uh that's a pretty cool thing where the you know you can have an app that is bad on the ipad but their widget is still great because widgets are widgets wherever they live i think widgets are widgets wherever they live wherever

they live there's a it's a there's a children's book coming it's jason snell's widgets are widgets wherever they live. Wherever they live. There's a children's book coming. It's Jason Snell's Widgets are Widgets, an iOS 14 story for children. Oh, dear. This episode is brought to you by Pingdom. Hey, do you have a website? Does your website have a shopping cart, registration forms, or contact us pages? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need Pingdom. Nobody wants their

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and you'll get a huge 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason, today as we are recording this, Apple and Epic are back in court to argue over whether Apple can legally keep Epic out of the App Store. So if you remember,

there were some temporary injunctions put in place about Apple not getting rid of the developer account that was to do with the Unreal Engine, if you remember just a few weeks ago. Well, they're back in court today to make this permanent. So there will be a final ruling from Judge Rogers as to whether Apple will be able to revoke this developer account. And also they will be talking about

whether Fortnite can come back to the App Store or not. Of course, the judge has already, I think, made it pretty clear that she's not going to allow this to occur. I would be surprised unless Epic somehow have got this incredible argument that we've not yet seen from them uh it seems very unlikely however the reason i want to note it is because if for some reason the judge decides that apple has to reinstate epic or fortnite into the app store it would set a precedent for third-party payments because that would be the assumption right that they will keep using their third-party payment method and a court said that it's okay.

So there will be some interesting discussion, I think, to come out of this. But I believe it starts today and I think will be over the next couple of days, I believe. But we'll see. Meanwhile, there is, of course, more PR battles, but this time not just from Apple. Epic have joined up with Basecamp, the Match Group, that's the Match Group is, you can assume like Match.com,

Tinder, companies like that. Spotify, Tile, and many more to create the, quote, coalition for app fairness. They have a big 10-point plan of the things that they want to see changed, but they all, these points all coalesce around three ideas.

They want to fix anti-competitive policies that have been occurring, the 30% app tax, and no consumer freedom. So this is basically them railing against Apple mainly, but Google also. I actually saw a report a couple of days ago that Google is actually trying to get more

of their 30% out of people than they have been in the past. So no doubt to combat all of this, Apple has created another new selection of web pages that explain the benefits of the App Store and what they give to developers. These pages are funny to me, right? They don't need to exist because Apple has to sell itself to developers, right? Like that job has been done. It's purely to counterbalance a lot of these discussions, right? Like this is Apple's side of the PR piece

where they're trying to say, look how amazing we are. Look what we give everybody. Because, you know, these pages, if you looked at them without knowing any of this information, they look like, oh, we're trying to convince you to develop for our platform. But that's clearly not something

that Apple needs to do, right? Like people want to make iOS apps. It's a very smart business to be in if you want to be in any kind of app development company or app development business. But they're doing this, I would assume,

as a way to try and say like hey uh we are not so bad i guess yeah it's an interesting i mean this is an extension of the thing that they always do which is like look at how much money we bring into the economy and look all of these businesses that we help enable and all of those all of those stories that they tell so there's a they're fighting a pr this is the pr battle right there's a, they're fighting a PR. This is the PR battle, right? There's the Epic creating an organization full of the usual suspects of companies that have had run-ins

with Apple and Apple posting a bunch of stuff on their website about how great they are and how good they are to developers. It's, you know,

the story will continue. It most definitely will. I think we said this a while ago, but like this will continue to be probably the story of the year. Like it would just keep on rolling,

especially now as a lot of these companies are starting to band together. This was when the epic thing started. This was the big question. Like, will other companies start to get together on this? And if they do, what happens? Now, at the moment,

just creating a coalition where they just make some noise is not really that effective the effective part is if any companies follow in what epic tried to do and really kick up a storm but we'll see yep so i have some upstream news for you jason it's actually all focused around apple today uh so there's been some new content signings um apple's partnership with the development company A24, the film development company, will be bringing a new original movie to Apple TV+. It's called The Sky is Everywhere and stars Cherry Jones, Jason Segel, and Grace Kaufman. So A24, this is a deal that Apple done a long time ago with them. And it's basically to help

them do this, right? Develop movies and other TV shows and stuff like that. Apple has also announced a deal with Patricia Arquette and Ben Stiller to create a new comedy show. High desert. Arquette will star and produce and still will be producing and directing some episodes. This is being produced by Apple studios, which is why this is one of the rare press releases that was on Apple's website as opposed to Deadline of Variety.

Apple's weird, totally separate TV PR website, right? Yeah, at least it's now at apple.com slash TV. TV-PR. Because for a while it was like apple.tv. it looked like a fake website right yeah it was very weird um but at least they've they've tightened that one up now uh this is the second project with uh our cat and stiller attached to it they're also working on a show called severance which is a thriller series for apple and it's it's kind of interesting because they don't own a production company together stiller does and it's his production interesting because they don't own a production company together.

Stiller does and it's his production company and Patricia Arquette seems to have a working relationship with Ben Stiller because they seem to keep executive producing shows together. But this is notable because this is one of the few so far projects that are being produced by Apple Studios directly and that's obviously going to continue as time goes on. Apple have also required the rights to a movie called Cherry, which is a Russo Brothers movie. They directed the Avengers movies, the last two Avengers movies. It will star Tom Holland and Clara Bravo, or Chiara Bravo.

Apple reportedly paid over $40 million for this drama movie. It focuses around heartbreak, drug addiction, and crime. They're kind of the main themes. So it's a gritty movie for sure. And it made me think again about the expensive NBC comment. Because I started watching Ted Lasso. If you're sick of everybody telling you how Ted Lasso, how good Ted Lasso is, I'm sorry.

I'm going to tell you now. It is absolutely fantastic. I think we're four episodes in. But even with that show, so much cursing, which really works for the show, but is way more than you would find on a network television. It's more HBO, really. It reminds me of Veep.

Like, Veep has a ton of curse in it. Yeah, that's why it's not expensive NBC. But there was an angry, for those who don't remember, there was some report that they were basically, the Apple TV Plus shows were all going to be expensive NBC. A lot of money, but they want to have control over the content. And that was very clearly from a producer who basically got fired off of a show

or their show got killed or something like that and they had an ax to grind and they had had a bad experience because of what was being asked of them they assumed that was being asked of everyone it wasn't it was just them uh but they ran to the press about it and uh and yeah ted lasso is uh it's great you know you know where uh because his team is AFC Richmond, right? They're in the Ligue des Premiers. In the show, yes. In the show, because they're not in real life.

They're made up because they're sort of Crystal Palace, but Crystal Palace also exists in the show, so it's very confusing. I actually think it was a good move. I called it soccer too. Soccer, soccer, soccer too soccer soccer soccer soccer soccer soccer okay it was a very good move i think to um create a fake team and i will say uh as a british person they do a very i mean it's clearly got british writing in it like it clearly has been written by people that are very familiar if not our british are very familiar because it's

it fits everything fits really well none of it seems out of place like what people say the words that they use that kind of stuff you know like it it feels like a british comedy show to me yeah it's not it's got americans running it but it's shot in england and and americans starring in it but it's shot in england and i'm unclear whether they had english writers or whether they had the english some english people do a pass on it to make sure that but you know i'm glad to hear that you it felt authentic to me i'm glad you feel it it seems authentic to you authentic in the sense of britishisms i mean it is a the show itself the premise is kind of ludicrous but it doesn't matter because it's great yeah and and what i

like about what we've seen so far as well is i like shows that that they seem to be following conventions and then just don't and i like that kind of stuff especially in comedy shows like you're like oh i can see where this is going and then it doesn't go to that place so i like that kind of stuff yes um apple has also acquired Scout FM, which was a startup that creates radio stations for podcasts. This was a cross-platform application. Basically, you pick a topic and Scout put together a playlist of podcasts for you. This isn't something that you can currently get anymore. The app has has disappeared i don't know really who was using this i i i cannot i under look i've read the use case i can understand what they are saying

i don't know who wants this i yeah i mean my initial thought was oh boy just what podcast needs something that makes it more like radio which is why people listen to podcasts is they don't want radio. Here's my theory. My theory is they like this technology and they want to do a better job of building a podcast recommendation engine based on listening history. Yes, that makes more sense, too, because that's one of the ways that they were doing it. Like, basically, the stuff that you seemed to engage with and say, you know, people who like this podcast liked this other podcast or people who liked, you know, what you like also like these other things and try to say like, rather than it being like, here's an endless podcast playlist, you just press play and we pick whatever. Maybe they tweak it so it's more like,

are you looking for more podcasts here are some that we think you will like but who knows i mean who knows what their philosophy is i'm not a believer in um in trying to genius playlist trying to to you know radio eyes podcasts because podcasts are like they're longer than songs for one right so like you listen to something for an hour and then there's sort of like here's a random podcast for another half hour or whatever i they're not easily split up in that way and i think people you know i think the challenge is more about discovery and finding things that you might like and that that makes sense for this technology and if apple can go in that direction that's great yeah yeah i don't know it seems really weird to me like there are people in the discord saying

like maybe this is the type of thing for new users but that doesn't make sense to me either because like if you're a new user it doesn't have any information on you so it's basically just the same as doing a search by a topic and just playing whatever's popular. This really feels like I can see how somebody came to the idea. I can see how somebody get investment for a project like that because if you invest to people that understand what radio is,

they're like, yes, podcasting needs to become more like radio. So it gets more listeners for some reason that people think that it needs and then you get investment and then it becomes a project. I think the goal is somebody sends you a link to you know hello from the magic tavern and you're like okay i'll listen to that and you listen to and you're like oh this is great and then if if and this is why you scout fm isn't the right answer it's it's a vehicle to

be acquired by somebody who has a lot of podcast listeners like apple perfect match whoever made that company i think this is probably what their ultimate goal might have been to get bought by Apple. Or a company, right? Or a company. But it allows Apple to say, hey, new podcast person who's never listened to a podcast before and listened to Hello from the Magic Tavern.

If you like that, here are like five podcasts that are just like that. And maybe even five podcast episodes you could listen to, to try to find something else. Cause the goal is to increase engagement, I would assume, and like not lose that person where they listen to one. So it was funny, I guess, but I don't know where I go from there and say, Oh, I can tell you exactly based on our algorithm, where to go from there for whatever it is that you happen to, to like. And then if you're a, again, we're all kind of intense podcast listeners, I think here, but, um, there are also people who they like

podcasts, but they only have a handful and they don't know where they go from there. And maybe it's a big mainstream podcast. Like, you know, it's a, they do a sports podcast and it's able to throw them to a bunch of different kinds of sports podcasts from which they find something a little more obscure, but that's a good fit for them. Like there are, you know, I like it as that. I think better discovery in podcasting is a good thing. And I hope that that's what it is because the, you know, just press play on sports and give me a lot of sports podcasts back to back that nobody wants that and it's also like you know you just go and press play and then you're given something that's 10 minutes and then

something that's two and a half hours like it's just i just don't think it's the medium you know it's it i just don't think the medium is is created for that you know it's like yeah i don't know it just doesn't work. Anyway, moving on. Exposure notifications are now supported throughout the United Kingdom, Jason. So Scotland was turned on a couple of weeks ago. Now England and Wales are too. The NHS, the government and the NHS have released their application. I had previously said that I would not use the app, but I am using the app.

Oh. Because I went and took a look at it. And also there's some other features that the application has in it, which are kind of useful for stuff that's going on right now. So all the app does is asks for your postcode. Huh. But like only,

so our postcodes are like four characters and three characters. And the four character thing is the general area. And then the three characters narrows it down to where you are more exactly. And all the app wants is the first four characters. So basically like what town do you live in, right? And then from there,

it gives you based on the town that you're in, what your kind of threat level is basically, right? Like what is the, how bad is the virus where you are? And this is the England and Wales app. Scotland has its own app. And one of the other things that the application does is has a QR code scanner in it. So if you go to public places like restaurants, cafes,

that kind of stuff, any retail business now has to display a QR code on the door that you're supposed to scan before you go in. So it's effectively helping with the test and trace type stuff, right? Like that's the thinking to it. So I use the application. I've had it on for a few days. I haven't had any kinds of

notifications yet i know that there's like a system-based notification that tells you hey you're fine uh i haven't had one of those yet either i think it's after a week or something alert alert alert nothing to report yeah it's a super weird thing but look i'm this is a long-term follow-up this took longer than it should have because the government made a stupid decision in trying to make its own application first but But frankly, I'm just pleased that it does exist. So yeah, there we go. I just wanted to follow up on that. All right. That's good to know and report back. I mean, I know you're staying safe. I would imagine that if there's like somebody who's got it who is riding the same train as you or something like that, that would

be where you might get a notification saying, oh guy across the the train from you had it and you're on the train for 15 minutes something like that i think that that's possible like that would be the most possible for me yeah um because that's the only time that i would be in contact with people for that or like time or like a lift driver or something yeah yeah like a driver or um or or in public basically transport transport is my main risk vector personally right because you're just going from where you live to where you work and back but the good things that we have is one if we do take taxis like you know i've seen some science in this i don't know but i've seen stuff that made me feel better like you've opened the windows which they recommend that you do like that airflow is really good yeah my understanding is that the

ride sharing companies in the u.s have basically mandated that the windows be rolled down it's the same yeah yeah yeah before you take an uber here you have to like there's like this extra screen now which is like you need to agree to doing all of these things, right? It's like wear a mask, wash your hands, open the windows, like all that kind of stuff. And with the trains for me, I can stay pretty far away from people. Like I haven't had too many instances where I've been around too many people. So, you know, it's been fine for me so far.

But I will report back if I'm self-isolating at any point because the app told me to. If a podcaster self-isolates, does anyone notice? Oh, nice. Nice. Probably not, actually, unless they tell you. Tim Cook says he has been, quote, impressed by employees' ability to operate remotely and predicts that some new work habits will remain after the pandemic. This is a report from Bloomberg. Cook said he doesn't believe Apple will return to the way we were because we found that there are some things that actually work really well virtually.

This is a very surprising thing. You know, if you've paid attention to Apple for long enough, you will be aware of the fact that they are very hesitant, almost allergic to homeworking or kind of like telecommuting, right? Like that basically, if you want to work for Apple, you have to move to be near whatever place is closest to you. So whether it's Cupertino or whether it's like a place in London or whatever,

like you have to be able to go to that office because that's where you work from. And this isn't just because of a secrecy thing. It's basically every part of the company. If you are in a head office function, you have to be in the head office. So I think it's really refreshing. You know, Steve Jobs didn't like telecommuting and really bought into the concept that you had to have people in person in order to have magical collaboration and all of that, which, you know, I don't want to be too cynical here. It does happen.

It doesn't, it is not, uh, the only way that those things happen. It's like, I'm a big supporter of remote work and I, I hired a lot of remote work people when I was a manager of a, an editorial organization at Mac world, we hired lots of remote people because they were the best people and they were great. And the issue I have is this kind of myth that the only time you get collaboration and magic serendipity happens is when people are like waiting for the toaster to toast a bagel in the lunchroom or whatever. It's not you bump into somebody and there's that magical moment. I'm sure that happens, but I think that there are lots of other ways to facilitate stuff like that that don't require every single person that you have to be in an office together. And my experience is when they were staffing up App Store Editorial, Store editorial, a bunch of people I know were contacted by Apple about those jobs.

And what I found fascinating was that it was an in Cupertino job. Literally, you had to be in Cupertino every day for that job. And it was no different from the Macworld jobs that we all had, where you could have somebody at their house. Because literally, it's like writing words. And you're not even dealing with the developers. The developers are all remote. So it's really just you and your fellow people who are doing App Store editorial. And I had this moment where I just couldn't process it. It was like, this is so ingrained in Apple's culture. I think because of not just Steve Jobs putting it there, but also this feeling of control that a lot of people want over their employees where I want to see them. I don't believe that they're working. And maybe some of that has been removed now that you can't see them and yet they do their jobs. How about that? Isn't that amazing? So I hope this continues and I hope Tim Cook is serious about this.

I'm skeptical. Corporate culture is really, really powerful at resisting change. Even if everybody agrees that it should change, a lot of times the change just doesn't happen. It's amazing how corporate cultures are designed to resist change because it's in many cases that's helpful, but in other cases it's really bad. So I hope this is true because there are so many stories of people. Imagine the people who would be great contributors at Apple, but they're not going to move to a big city and they're certainly not going to move to the Bay Area with the cost of living here. And I'll footnote James Thompson's famous story where Apple was told move in the early days of Steve

Jobs return. If you want to work on Mac OS 10 and the finder, you have to, you have to come to Cupertino and he was in Ireland and you know, he left Apple because he wasn't going to move to California. It was that simple. And Apple still has that attitude, not everywhere and not for everything. But I think companies, I'm not saying that having offices isn't good and that it can't be good and that there aren't some jobs where it's necessary, but it's very frustrating when there are jobs that I know for a fact aren't necessary to be in person.

And the company line is, no, you have to be in person. That's it. We all have to be here. It's dumb. So I hope that changes at Apple because it's wasteful and they're not hiring good people because those people don't want to either move to or commute to Cupertino. Yeah, I think at this point, there will be very few companies that can truly believe that the adaptations that they've had to make during the pandemic won't remain in some form. Because for many, it's going to be a long-term change by the time there is any point that we can go back.

And that's how you make cultural change, right? Yeah. If you do anything long enough, it becomes the culture. That's the way we do things right we were um so so my wife went back to they have a new schedule at the library she's a librarian and they're still just doing the people aren't in the library they're just doing curbside service but they're on a new schedule where she's in um every other friday and then and then two other days in the week and so she worked her first three consecutive days in the office last week.

And it was one of those things where she used to work five days a week, right? But after a few months, you're like, oh, wow, three days in a row. And like, that's the thing is that you get used to the new thing after a while. And then going back to the old thing is no longer back to normal.

Now it's back to a weird thing that I don't do right now. And that's that moment of opportunity. So I hope Tim Cook seizes it because it definitely has been going on long enough now that they should see, one, that it's just a lie that these jobs can't be done remotely. And two, it's already changed the culture, even if they didn't plan it just because of circumstance. Currently, just 10% to 15% of Apple's employees are back at Apple Park with the expectation that more will be able to return next year at some point.

Because look, this is the thing. For some people, it is better to be in the office. I do, whilst I am obviously a large proponent of remote work, I do understand the benefits of being able to be in the same place as people. Like it's something that I would try and do every once in a while, you know, go to a different place, be with friends, that kind of stuff. And you could have a more collaborative working environment. There's no one size fits all to this.

That's the thing. Every job is different. Every person is different. And we should mention, I mentioned this before when we talked about this. Also, it's not, we've all hit this with COVID-19. It's not fair to expect every employee to have their own workspace available to them. Some people don't have a place to work at home and you and now you can't go to a co-working facility right those are are not inbounds for the same reason

so there's lots of issues here or even just a coffee shop you can't go and work in a starbucks anymore like you just can't do that and there's a gray area here too, which is like Apple Park is a good example. Do they, when they come back, do they all come back full time? Or do they come back with a mix where everybody gets a little more space and people are there some days, but not all days. And they're home some and together some. It'll be interesting to see how that all pans out. But never bet against corporate culture reasserting itself, though, I would say. So I'm glad Tim Cook is talking about this, because

maybe that means that they've really had some moments of realization that they don't need to be quite as hardcore with this, where like, oh, this person is brilliant, but we're going to make them move to California and they won't move to California. So we're going to hire this person we don't like as much. Like that's a net loss for Apple. Hiring a person you don't move to California, so we're going to hire this person we don't like as much. Like, that's a net loss for Apple. Hiring a person you don't want to hire instead of a person you do because of your demand that they be in California if it's for a job that they don't actually need to be in California. That's the kind of stuff that I hope they're rethinking.

Yeah, and as a company that is openly trying to improve diversity of hires, having a reason to exclude people, you know, it doesn't help with that, right? Like, as you say, like you might end up finding the right person for the job, but they don't want to move to where you're telling them to move

once they've asked them. Right, because eventually being in Silicon Valley becomes a huge liability because the requirements, if you're not sort of in your 20s and willing to share an apartment with eight random people, like if you're somebody with a family and you're not in Silicon Valley and you look at it, you think, oh my God, where are we going to live? And how much is that going to cost? And how long is my commute going to be?

And that becomes a major source of a brain drain within all of the companies in silicon valley so uh this this is an opportunity if they seize it but they got to go against some of their existing corporate culture in order to do it i mean unless you're getting a really good job at apple you can't afford to live anywhere near right well that's i mean those editorial jobs, I mean, we're talking about jobs that I will grant you pay better than working at an independent publishing editorial organization, because of course they do. It's Apple versus IDG, right?

Apple's going to pay more, I would hope, right? But still, it's not like that much more that, you know, Apple doesn't pay every employee, even though they're the richest company in the world. In some ways, Apple, believe it or not, Apple does not pay its employees, uh,

you know, a million bucks to start like that doesn't happen. And that becomes a serious issue. If you're, um, not an executive and you're trying to find a way to live, uh, with a family in the South Bay and not have

an hour-long commute. Yeah, this is going to be a big change. The working environment stuff is going to continue to be a really big change. And if you're Apple and you invest in Apple Park, you're like, oh, they spent billions of dollars on this thing. I think the answer is going to be, don't feel bad for Apple for Apple Park because Apple Park will fill to whatever capacity they choose for it. My understanding is they were already over capacity before i opened yeah like that will up more property in the surrounding but let's say yeah let's say apple doesn't want to bring everybody back or bring everybody back full time what will happen is apple park will fill up infinite loop will fill up But maybe that old and kind of decrepit office building that's on the border of Sunnyvale and Cupertino that they have now because they're desperate. But when they have some people work from home, it's like, oh, we don't need to pick up the lease on that building and that building and that building. That's, I think, when you'll see it. Their core campuses are going to be full, as full as they want to make them. Because Apple

is in this case where Apple Park is only a small percentage of the total Apple workforce, even in Cupertino, believe it or not, for people who don't know about the size of Apple and the size of that area. So they'll always be able to fill up Apple Park. So that beautiful thing they spent a lot of money on, it'll get used. The question is, you know, does there end up being some kind of crappy office space somewhere in Cupertino or Sunnyvale or San Jose or somewhere like that,

that Apple dumps, you know, the lowest stuff, the worst stuff, because those groups don't need to be there anymore. Today's episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Eero. These days, your house isn't just your home. It's an office, it's a school, a movie theater, a restaurant. All of these activities put more strain on your Wi-Fi, especially as many of us are at home more, again, to use it. It is not good enough if it's only in a room or two. You want great Wi-Fi in your whole home, right?

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Our thanks to Eero for their support of this show and relay fm all right mr snell let's uh talk about you this is you wouldn't usually think that this is worthy of discussion but we are in 2020 you went to an apple store yeah breaking news breaking. Person goes to store. Yeah, so I bought a Solo Loop. I wanted to try on the new Solo Loop and I was clicking around on apple.com as you do and looking at the colors and thinking about if I could get one because I don't want to get a new Apple Watch.

I don't have a need for it. Mine's fine. But I was curious about the Solo Loop and I thought I could maybe write about it, which it did. So I'm looking on Apple.com, and what I see is that the Navy Solo Loop is... I'm trying to find one that's available quickly, and most of them are not. Most of them, the online orders are out in October or November. And then the Navy Solo loop, it says,

or pick up tomorrow in Corte Madera, which is my local Apple store. I thought, oh, so it's four weeks out or tomorrow. And I haven't been to that Apple store since, you know, the pandemic. So I bought it and I have it so i went to an apple store and i got uh and i got a solo loop the solo loop is nice um it's weird but i i've kind of gotten used to it it's weird because you expect i've been wearing the sport band for so long that i don't like i keep looking for the the the little dots or the

it's the it's that you know where's the rest of me kind of moment of like where is the why is it does it keep going and it doesn't have got the dots robbery one the nylon one okay yes it's the sport d solo loop the apple watch names are so confusing now i think by all rights this should be now. I think by all rights, this should be called the Sport Loop. Yeah, by all rights, this should be called the Sport Loop, but they already made a Sport Loop, so they can't call it that. So this is the Solo Loop, like Han Solo, I guess. But pulling it on and off is weird. It's kind of rubber bandy, but it feels nice.

Pulling it off is a little bit strange, but it feels nice and it is snug but it doesn't feel like it's cutting off circulation in my arm. I used John Gruber's chart and we'll put a link to it if you haven't seen it. He took a picture. He basically mapped the dots on the sport band

to sizes of the loop Yeah, because Apple make a chart that you can print out that we spoke about but it seems like that people's experiences in using the chart and ordering have been a little bit all over the place as to what they actually end up receiving. Right. How it ends up fitting them, I should say. Yeah, I think there's issues with measurement, maybe issues with your printer scaling the file when it prints it. I don't know what's going on there,

but John figured out because he's got them. Cause he got them with his reviewer package that they map pretty directly to the number, the dot number on the sport band. So if you have a sport band and you know what dot you usually use, which I imagine anyone with a sport band has noted that they're on like four or five or whatever for me it was always like four or five um you can get your size from that and so i did that's how i picked my size is i used gruber's photo and uh

i am completely baffled why apple doesn't offer that like it's such a smart thing to say do you already have an apple watch with a sport band? You could figure out based on why would you not do that? I understand why you might want to create something for people that it would be their first Apple Watch. Yes, of course. But also why not do this

and avoid a bunch of returns? Avoid the returns by offering this as an option. I don't understand it. I think they just, you know, this was a concept from a different time and they expected people to try this on in stores and that's less of a thing right now. But still somebody should have said, we can map this to the sport band size and solve this for a lot of people because the base model, the sport band is probably by far, by far the largest percentage of the existing Apple Watch population.

So anyway, my size does alternate. I will use the fourth dot or the fifth dot in the sport band. But I went with a smaller one because I figured it's a stretchy material. And also with the fifth band, the fifth dot, it would rattle a little bit and not always make a contact with my wrist for like the heart rate monitoring. So I figured, okay, go with the smaller one because the band will be stretchy, but I also do want it to not rattle around on my wrist and I want it to make contact. And it feels pretty good. Like if I put it in the wrong place, it is a little too tight. But if I wear it sort of where I'm supposed to wear it, it is solid and

it doesn't bother me. And it's not for everybody. I love the Sportband, which is funny because if you go back to early days of Upgrade, you'll undoubtedly hear me talk about how I just, we all, I think, maybe assume the Sportband was cheap and crappy and it's not, it's great. It's the material, that fluoro elastomer, whatever. It's really good. And I like it a lot. So there's a high bar for this thing to clear and, um, it's pretty close to clearing it. It's, it's really pretty nice. I'm not sure it's necessary in life. Like my sport band was fine, but this is definitely kind of simpler and cleaner and um it looks nice um so so yeah it's i i tried it so definitely endorsing john grouper's uh map of the dots on your sport band to the loop if you want this and i bet the one that's fabric that

costs 99 bucks which is one of the reasons i didn't get it plus it's hard to find availability i bet that's nicer like i bet that's a lot nicer than this but this is nice i like yeah if i was gonna get one of these i would get the braided one because i think i think it adds something so because what i was thinking for me personally, the, the rubber, the silicone sport loop, the solo loop. Oh my God. I don't. Yep. I don't see why anyone would want this product for typical usage because it

seems way less convenient to me than, than putting the watch on and with the clasp, because surely that is easier or more comfortable to do i would say relatively hairy man so and there's it doesn't i am too and that's not an issue it's actually not an issue it's very easy to put it on i i think within apple and perhaps within the watch world marco catellis um there is this feeling that sizing your watch band is a hassle. So it's like the, um,

the, the sport loop, right. With the Velcro, you, it's like, this is great. You just put it wherever you want it.

And, and you don't have that hassle of like getting which, which band, which dot fits you. You just fit it to exactly right. And then it's, and you don't have to worry about it. Yay.

And I always thought like, and I don't really, I have one of those of those i don't i don't wear it and i don't wear it because it ends up being so fiddly like is this too tight is this too loose is this too tight it's this too loose whereas i know it's number four on the sport band i count it yeah but there's somebody at apple who's like you don't want that cognitive load of having to count four holes in your watch band every morning no that's too much so we want to make it infinite like i get that there's somebody there who's saying that that said this gives me the feel of the sport band without having to do anything except just slide it over my wrist and that's kind of cool but but again it's marginal like it's marginally uh better i would say if it is better at all it's just different

but um but it's not bad i i was worried that it would be a really awkward experience putting it on taking it off and it's not it's easy you get used to it you see because i understand what you mean about the sizing thing but like it just seems like such a pain in the butt to actually get the right one in the first place that's that's true but once you get it but this is this is the fascinating thing right is like there is definitely somebody at apple who's like oh well you know what the perfect thing is to have the perfectly sized watch band and never have to uh size it and never have to hassle with it and never have to check the velcro or to count the dots it's just perfect and we're going to do that by making 13 different sizes for both of the size watch classes and then people have to

measure their wrists and it's like okay you just lost it right it was perfect except for all the things that make it more complicated but if you get one and it's the right size it's uh it's it's nice it's nice yeah you see i liked having the ability to change the the where the how my watch is buckled i like that personally because there'll be different times where I'll want it tight or looser. Like that's just like a personal preference thing of mine. But so my point is like the regular rubbery one, like for me, the way that I look at it, I don't see why I would want that

over the typical sport loop because I like the sport loops. I wear the Nike pride sport loop on my Apple Watch and have been for a while. With my Series 5, I've only worn sport loops with it because I got the edition one, the white one. So I was wearing the white one that had the matching ceramic pin on it because I really liked that. And then when they brought out the Pride Nike one, I was like, Oh, I like that too. Cause it's also white. So I've been wearing that, but I would consider the braided solo loop, um, because it looks nice. Right. Uh, so I think it is a good looking band. I actually would really like them to make that with a buckle on it

personally. Um, but I would consider it consider it but like i'm not in a rush uh and i'm not going to buy one of the braided solo loops until i could try it on and that's not going to be any time soon that i will want to try one on but i do i like the colors um there were people in my apple store. It seems as if, if I can give my report about that, I showed up, there's a line of people that is like the line to see where you,

who you are and why you're there. And that was very short. And I said, I'm just here for pickup. And they said, go stand over there. There was a separate line that was like for people who wanted to go in the store. And it seems like everybody

who went into the store was escorted by an Apple employee to wherever they said they needed to go to do whatever they needed to do so they could get in, ask their questions if they needed to, get in, get out. And they take their temperature before they go in and stuff like that. Yeah, but surely one of the things that you're not able to do right now is try on a band. I don't know. It would be interesting to see. I bet you could.

I bet you could say, I want to buy a Sport Loop, but I don't know what my size is. And I wonder if they would be like, we can do that. We can make that happen. I don't know what level they are. But there were people in there. That's the thing that got me is like, what are they saying? Are they saying, I would like to look at an iPhone? Is that it? I would like to look at an iPad. Can you show me an iPad? Okay, sure. Wait over there and we'll usher you in. Because there were people in there. There were probably 15, 20 people in the store with Apple employees. So it was super, it looked busy in the context of mid 2020, but empty in the context of before March of 2020. So it was fascinating to see that, but it was super efficient for me because I was doing in-store pickup. So they literally had me wait on the side and then brought me the thing and I showed my ID and then I left. I didn't have to set foot in the store,

which was just fine with me because they don't need me in there and I don't want to be in there. So the veg in the chat is saying that you can do it and they will sanitize the watch bands for you. There is a difference between Apple doing it and me wanting to do that. And I don't want to do that. I see.

Right. But they are going to do it. If you're so keen on your Apple Watch sizing that you want to go to an Apple store, they will let you do it. Everybody's got a mask on. They'll show it to you and all of that. So it's your level of comfort. But they seem to be up and running for that. And then we have somebody else, maybe Carter in the chat room saying in their Apple store, you just need to be accompanied by a specialist at all times, which is definitely what I saw is it's a one to one, which is great, except it's not scalable. So I think it's going to be interesting to see how Apple handles this. If, you know, as we get more toward the holidays, are they going,

is there going to be more demand? Are there going to be longer lines? Are they going to have to change their policies? How are they going to deal with the iPhone? That's what I'm interested in. I don't know. How are they going to sell the next iPhone? Will you be able to buy it in a store?

If you can, what does that look like? Because, you know, we've all been in lines at apple stores on iphone day at some point in our lives maybe you haven't actually but most most people have been i have oh yeah you have i have okay um but those lines are long and they are crammed so if you want to put a bunch of distance between every person in that line, I think you could line up the entire of the United Kingdom on iPhone day. You could just say all the lines will just start meeting with each other at some point. I don't really know how they're going to manage that. I also personally would love to just run by an Apple store and just pick one up real quick, like how you did on iPhone day, because I hate waiting for the delivery truck.

But that, you know, I would really want to know what their process is before I would consider that. I think it's going to be interesting to see how that one all goes down. Yeah, well, we'll keep watching it. This is among our list. I feel like upgrade has formed its own little identity over time. And like we're interested in the rise of streaming media and the streaming wars. We're interested in Apple retail and sort of like what their strategy is there. Like we have these little areas that we're interested in. So we'll keep our eye on it.

Yeah. Hey, Upgradians, if you're out there, if you no longer want to listen to ads on this show, get some extra content and support Upgrade, you should sign up for Upgrade Plus. It's just $5 a month or $50 a year, and you get loads of benefits just for being a RelayFM members, and also access to our members' Discord, which is a wonderful community with loads of conversations going on at all times and a really wonderful way to listen to our live streams as well.

As an Upgrade Plus member, you'll be supporting the show and becoming part of the secret society of Upgradians. You'll get what I mean when you see the show artwork for Upgrade Plus. Go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up for $5 a month. Or if you go to relay.fm upgrade,

you can sign up for our annual plan, which is $50 a year. We've been really enjoying the additional content that we make available for Upgrade Plus subscribers. It's fun, relaxed, and can let us be creative in different ways. There's a lot of stuff that is behind the scenes type of conversations

that we have as well. So like around the draft, we were talking about like kind of the meta draft and then talking about how we think we're going to be able to do the drafts in the future as the rest of the year runs out. So you can hear us talk about stuff like that. And there's also sometimes just content that is really fun and different, but it didn't have a place for the show. And now we actually get a place to put that, and that's in Upgrade Plus. So yeah, there's a bunch of stuff in there. So you can get this and so much more

by becoming a member today. Once again, that is getupgradeplus.com. It is time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions. And we'll start off with Molly's question. It says, what is your favorite widget right now on your ios devices oh oh that's so hard it's tricky right i have lots though so i mean a lot of them are pretty similar to what i was talking about last time So I think I'm going to have to go with three. Okay.

No, four. Jason, I'm going to do four. I'm sorry. I can't help it. I can't help it. The Carrot Weather widget that I mentioned earlier, the forecast one, I think it's fantastic. I really love the Fantastical widget,

which is called event list and calendar. And they have a feature that i wasn't sure about at first but i've tried out and it's called to show heat map which basically highlights in color how busy your day is on the calendar and i wasn't sure about it at first but i've actually come to really enjoy getting that like bird's eye view of what my week looks like. So I like that and I stuck around. The time zone widget in WidgetSmith, I really love that, especially because I've been able to make it look really nice and aesthetic, as the kids say. And also there's an upcoming widget for Timery, which is my time tracker. And I think it's coming pretty soon.

It's called Time Tracked, which is basically a widget that shows me my total time tracked throughout the day and a little graph that shows me what I've spent my most time on. And also when I'm tracking something, which like I am right now, the time is ticking up

on the widget in real time, which I think is fantastic. It's really, really great. So they're my favorites. I do like the Fantastical widget a lot. I don't have it with the calendar. I don't like the calendar. I like the straight up event list because the calendar is tiny and I don't need to know

all the things that are in there. So I, although one of the things that's nice is you can set those widgets to have different calendar sets. So one of the things that I'm impressed by is you can have like, I can have my family calendar in a widget that is not my normal calendar set. But in a widget, I can see what the family calendar is telling me, which is pretty cool. My favorite widget honestly is Scriptable because my two favorite widgets are these widgets that I built for myself that use my local data to tell me the weather or the current temperature and the high and the air quality and stuff like that.

And I used to hit my little weather server webpage all the time, and now I don't because I have it in widget form, which is better. So Scriptable, it's great it's awesome i saw somebody posting uh and i believe that uh simon i believe is the name of the simon uh he posted scriptable somebody somebody posted a a scriptable uh script for a widget that ended up creating a transparent background because you use a screenshot of your home screen. It's wild. Yeah, so it takes a screenshot. It figures out what your wallpaper is

and then it uses that and your location of your widget and it basically runs that in the background so it looks like it's transparent even though widgets don't apparently support like an alpha channel. So it fakes it. It's very clever.

And there's going to be more stuff like that. Also, I could say, hey, widgets supporting alpha channels is a good idea. Also, it's fascinating to be on the test flight for Scriptable because he keeps thinking of things that he could add to it as he goes. So like now you can do a a grid so you can do um stuff that's placed horizontally within a widget whereas previously was just sort of a stack

vertically um so there's always new stuff and he did an auto resize thing which i actually added to my widget so that you can set a uh if if you have text that changes like the air quality you can set a font size for it but now you can set a minimum scale and it basically makes it smaller until it fits which is really great because some of the descriptions are long and some of them are short and i want it to be big and i was previously doing that manually i was like if it's this word make it this size if it's this word make it this size and now that's all back out because he added this thing that lets it just automatically scale so um yeah he's it's fun to see developers like widgets it's not just users who are figuring out what widgets are for the developers people

like simon people like david smith are figuring out what widgets are for too as they go which is fascinating alex asks would renaming the low cost 329329 entry-level iPad to be called the iPad SE help define the line of iPads in your opinion? I like this suggestion. I think it would help. It would help how we refer to it, right? Because there'd be the iPad SE, the iPad Air, and the iPad Pro rather than the iPad that's just the iPad. Like we have to explain that iPad is also a product. It's a product line and a product.

It's confusing. So I would say in that sense, yes. In another sense, I don't know. It's an iPad. It's the classic iPad. I kind of like that it's still just the iPad, but it would be much less confusing if it was the iPad SE.

At this point, I think it's the only product that still maintains the name of the line there isn't an iphone called iphone there isn't and there isn't a macbook watch there's no macbook but even that i'm like not mac right like there's no problem yeah but it's not mac that's true so i think a name for that ipad would be good an ipad se totally works because that still looks like the really old ipad which is like that's the iphone se so i think that's a smart idea but as we know you cannot rely on apple's naming you just can't even even if something seems like the logical thing it doesn't mean that they'll do it. Luke asks, Jason, we're going to go back to stand goals again.

You mentioned that you lowered your stand goal from 12 hours to eight. How did you do that? Go to the activity app on the watch. This is a watchOS 7 feature, right? This is a new watchOS 7 feature. So on the watch, you go to the activity app and scroll down to the bottom and there's a button called change goals. Did I just blow your mind?

And you change your goals. And you say, you know what? I don't want to stand for 12 hours a day with your stupid thing that can't detect when I'm standing. Let's shoot for eight. And it'll say, okay. So that's what I did.

I would like to air a frustration. Why? Like there are some things that you can do on the watch and some things you can do in the watch app and some things can only be done on the watch and some things can only be done in the watch app and it is impossible to try and understand there's no logic to which can be done where so So I find that very frustrating. I know that's a constant frustration for me, the idea that you have these two devices. I ranted about this a few years ago about my Amazon Echo Show, which has a touchscreen and it has a settings menu.

And there's certain things that you can control from the settings menu. And there's certain things that you can control from the settings menu and there are certain things that you can control from the alexa app and they're totally separate and and and like so you'll be like well why can i do this and the answer is oh i think what i was doing is i was complaining that there was something i couldn't do uh and somebody was like oh you do that on device in the settings window. And I'm like, are you kidding me? So it is a problem

that a lot of these little satellite devices have where they're like, well, we have an app over here on your smartphone. But also there are some settings you set on the device. And sometimes it's only on one or the other and it's very frustrating. So yes, in this case, I can't find any way to do it in the watch app on the iPhone,

but in the activity app on the watch, you can set it. Andrew says, iOS 14 now has a visual indicator in the operating system for when the camera is being used. There's also one for the dictation too. I think that one's orange. The camera one is green. Do you think this could come to the Mac, perhaps allowing our Macs to drop the little light next to the camera?

They could. I think the little light is great because the little light is wired into the hardware. And literally, you can't turn that camera on without turning the light on in software. Yeah. Because it's hardwired. And I think that's the best practice, is to make it something that's not hackable by software to give the highest level of reassurance. And I like that they're in, you know, Apple could say, well, it's so locked down that we control it all now. And it goes through the T2 and it's fine.

And the T2 controls that. But, you know, if you're just displaying something in the Mac interface, it is theoretically something that could be hacked. it is theoretically something that could be hacked whereas um something on your screen or the actual light you would need to with hardware like cover or break the light in order for that to not happen and i think that's better so i i don't see apple backtracking on that they could if they want to cheap out and not have the light there anymore and just have it be in software but i think in terms of a commitment to security and privacy it's better to just keep it the way it is. And Chris asks, is it a bad time to buy AirPods Pro?

This one was tricky because my gut says, no, you're fine. Yeah. But don't buy something. Don't buy anything. When we're maybe like two weeks away from an apple event like just if you can wait two weeks just wait if you can if you can wait until the apple after the iphone event i guess you could i i don't think it's a bad time to buy airpods pro

because they're great right and what if like they show off the new airpods studio the headpods and then chris is like oh, you know what? I would prefer those. Well, if you would prefer a different product to the AirPods Pro, then now is probably not the right time to buy the AirPods Pro. But if you want AirPods Pro and you're just worried that they're going to be replaced by a second generation, not only do the rumors not really suggest that, but if there is a second generation, I have a hard time believing that it's going to be anything that isn't pretty incremental sort of like with the original airpods so i wouldn't sweat it too much unless as mike said you are thinking of your options and there might

be a better option and apple's got an event probably coming in the next few weeks so why not wait yeah i think it's if you are desperate for a product of some kind you get it now but if you're just interested or like you just really want it don't just wait it's like a couple of weeks and then you'll know uh i'm putting uh my money down personally now on october 13th by the way for the for the next apple event i think that's the best guess, is October 13th. But we'll see. I was thinking last week that it might be the 6th, but now I've changed my bet and I'm sticking with this one.

I reckon it's going to be the 13th is going to be our next Apple event, which means that we'll probably be drafting again on the 12th. I don't think we're going to get two weeks notice. Who knows? Maybe they'll give more notice for the iPhone event, but I doubt it. I doubt it. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, you can just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members

Discord, which is something that is available. People that sign up for upgrade plus, you can go to get upgrade plus.com and you can support the show, get more content and hear no ads. If you'd like to find Jason online, you can go to six colors.com and he is at Jason. Now J S N E double L. I am at I Mike, I M Y K E.

Thank you so much to Pingdom and Eero for the support of this week's episode. And of course, thank you for listening. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Early.