Upgrade - 337: No Appreciable Gates

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

It's now February 2021, but before we turn the page entirely it's time to look back one last time at 2020. Apple had a record holiday quarter with growth across the board, and Apple watchers filled out the annual Six Colors Apple Report Card. Spoiler: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 337 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile bombus and microsoft lists my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by Jason Snell. Hello, Jason Snell. Hello, Mike Hurley. I have a hashtag Snell talk question for you. Ooh, okay. So it comes from John and John wants to know, what is the first app that you open on your iPhone every morning? Does it change depending on the day of the week or other circumstances? Interesting question that I have a frustrating answer for, which is I don't open my iPhone every morning. I don't unlock my

iPhone. I don't sleep next to my iPhone. My iPhone is in the kitchen. So I reject your premise, sir, but I do open my iPad every morning. It doesn't change based on day of the week because I am a person who lives in my home, works in my home, never leaves my home. I work for myself. So all the days bleed together. Sometimes I work on the weekend. Sometimes I work, don't work on the day, on the weekdays. I don't know. It's just all blurred together.

So it's pretty much the same every morning regardless. Right. Um, the app i open on the ipad is either it's usually slack because i want to see what uh what the people i know are talking about and what's going on and there's usually an alert where somebody has direct messaged me on Slack or oftentimes I'm awakened to Steve and Hackett posting a funny post from one of the various ebook bots that speak in our voices, which is hilarious because they make no sense and are funny. But I will usually do that because first thing in the morning,

the last thing I want to do is check Twitter immediately and have everything that's terrible in the world reflected to me. I usually wait for that a little bit. So Slack is mostly the answer. Sometimes it'll be Twitter or a news app or Net Newswire or something like that. And it doesn't change based on day of the week. And it's not on an iPhone. It's not an iPad. My iPhone just sort of sits there unless there's something very specific that I want out of it. I don't use it routinely. I mean, if I leave the house on an errand or something, I'll take it with

me. I don't even take it when I'm exercising outside because I just use my Apple Watch. So yeah, the iPhone, it's just kind of parked on its little MagSafe charger. I did think that that was your answer, but I seemed to remember that you were a phone not in the bedroom person, but I wanted to use this question as a way to confirm that and then see where you were going with it. For me, typically, I guess the first app that I would tend to open is the clock app to turn off my many alarms once I'm awake. But the real answer that people are looking for is, I guess,

um but the real answer that people are looking for is i guess i look at my notifications and see yep what is the most important thing from those to deal with that's the real answer for me too is that is that i see notification center on the lock screen face id is usually fired and i am tapping on an alert from somewhere so it sometimes that'll be a text message that came in overnight or it's a Slack DM or it's a headline from a news source or it's an email and it catches my eye and I'm like, oh, and it ends up being, there's somebody at Apple working on Notification Center who's like, yes, yes, that's the right answer. Finally, I get the Jew that's the right answer. Finally, I get the Jew that I'm looking for.

If you would like to send in a Snow Talk question to help us open an episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snow Talk or use question mark Snow Talk in the RelayFM members Discord and it may be included. Jason, you have been doing

something with the 20 Max for 2020 feed. You said to listeners, to upgradians, not to unsubscribe from that feed, even though the 20 Max for 2020 program, I think, what would we call it? Series? There we go. It's over. I love program. I love you saying that because I know you're saying it with the extra M-E at the end of it because it's British and it makes me feel very special. It's English. And so you have actually gone ahead and used the 20 Max or 2020 feeds and are going to for some additional commentary and deleted scenes. Yeah.

I was not lying when I said I didn't know what would go in it, but that people should keep it around. And I didn't have any plans. I didn't have any plans. But somebody asked, and I was thinking about it too, like, I have all of the interviews I did that were the source material. And while they weren't intended to be released as complete things, I think they're interesting. And I didn't use most of the material. I did a lot, many, many hours of interviews, and only portions of them are in the show. all the interviews are worth it because a lot of them are really much like I say the name of a computer and somebody talks about it for five minutes and it's not a conversation, but I have a few of them that are more like podcasts. They're more like conversations. And the longest sessions I did for the whole project were my conversations with John Syracuse. And so I talked to John and I

said, would you be okay with me releasing the raw conversation? He said, as long as there isn't anything, you know, anything bad in there. So I gave, I I'm, I'm listening to them and taking out the parts where his dog starts barking and stuff like that, but otherwise it's fairly unedited. And I did four interviews with John during the course of the project. One was sort of like a follow-up where I wanted to talk a little bit more about multiprocessing and all of that to get a little more raw material for a very particular episode. But I have four hours of John Syracuse and me talking about old Macs. So the first hour plus of that is in that feed for members, for upgrade members and Six Colors members. And it will reach the public feed at some point in the next couple of weeks and then there'll be a couple more hours of john syracuse released beyond that i don't know i've got to look at what else i've got and if i think there's other stuff

in there worth uh worth going through and getting out into the world and i'll check with the people involved to make sure they're okay with that. And maybe there will be some more of that. So it's very much an appendix at the end of the project. But, um, when I was looking at the stuff that I was doing with, uh, with John, I thought this is basically a podcast, like what people will really like this. And, and I can, I can get it in a, in a, in shape where it's, even though it's literally just talking through number 20 and then number 19

and then number 18, but with asides and tangents and all sorts of stuff in there. So it's fun. The first one's out now. There are two more episodes to be prepped and posted with John. I don't know when,

I don't know what the schedule's going to be, but if you deleted that feed and you're interested in hearing kind of this extra stuff, get it back. You can log in to your account at Relay if you're an Upgrade member or at Six Colors if you're a Six Colors member. I also put a link in the show notes that you can just tap it and just log in and you'll be able to go to the feed. Fantastic. Is he releasing the snail cut? Is that what you're saying here?

Is this the snail cut that you're releasing? No, this is the raw footage. Right. It's just the raw footage. It's not a re-edit or an expanded version or anything like that. But with the scripted style journalistic podcast format, which is what 20 Max for 2020 was,

even when I let John Syracuse talk, I'm letting him talk for a minute. I'm letting him talk for 40 seconds. I'm letting him talk for a minute and a half. And he might've talked for 20 minutes about that particular Mac, but I only use the parts, you know, it's, it's, it's meant to be just the little highlights and weaving it together and telling a story. And, and and yeah so some people i hope will find it fun and if you're on the regular feed and not the member feed that's fine just uh keep it around and or subscribe back to it and it'll pop up there eventually too so we have a ton of stuff to get to today uh lots of information. Q1 2021 earnings, six-college report card. So why don't

we take our first break now and then we can jump into talking about the Q1, the bumper Q1 earnings that Apple just posted last week. This episode is brought to you by Bombas. They make the most comfortable socks in the history of feet. They've rethought every detail

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Go there right now. That's bombas.com slash upgrade. Our thanks to Bombas for their support of Upgrade and RelayFM. All right, so Q1 2021 earnings time, Jason Snell. All right, so Q1 2021 earnings time, Jason Snell. We touched on this last week because it was coming up. We were both surprised by it. And one of the reasons I brought it up was that it was expected that Apple would cross $100 billion in revenue,

which was higher than any possible guidance and would be the first time that they've done it in history their previous largest quarter was 91.8 billion which was the last quarter right like that was q4 2020 um and not only did they cross 100 billion uh they left it uh in sorry it was q1 2020 was the 91.8 billion holiday 19 last year's holiday quarter calendar 19 that was always their biggest yeah that was that was that was 91.8 and they went to 111.4 so almost 20 billion dollars more revenue than the year really wild quarter yeah like i was i was digging around today but the date would have been too far

back for me to to find something relevant like i was wondering like when was apple's last 20 billion quarter right you know what i mean like just like they did an entire quarter's worth of jump over the last previous quarter um 28.8 billion dollars in profit But just to underscore, $111 billion is absolutely obscene. Like, it's obscene. It's an obscene amount of money. But they did it, and there's loads of reasons. Like, it doesn't really seem to be one reason. So the Mac saw $8.7 billion in revenue.

It was the second largest quarter in history for the Mac, with the last quarter of 2020 being the biggest one before that. We'll dig into some more of this in a bit. The iPad saw $8.4 billion of revenue. It was the largest iPad quarter since 2015. The iPhone saw $65.6 billion in revenue, making it the largest iPad quarter since 2015. The iPhone saw $65.6 billion in revenue, making it the largest iPhone quarter in history. Wearables and Home was at $13 billion,

another largest quarter ever. Services was $15.8 billion. The services quarter is always the biggest because of the way services works, but it was the largest year-over-year increase since 2018. And just as a data point, because we're going to dig into some of this in a bit there was 57 year-over-year growth in china for apple yep after a couple of years of no real china and a loss last quarter so yeah it's a big big up in china for sure and we're back to uh 59 of the revenue generated by the iphone that had been shrinking uh a little bit um but now big you

know it makes sense for a bunch of reasons like the iphone story is an interesting one uh because look all of the iphones all the new iPhones were sold in one quarter, which certainly helps not only the iPhone year over year boost and making it the biggest iPhone quarter ever, also helps as being a decent reason new models, starts in the previous quarter and then is also in their holiday quarter too. As well, they'll see the majority, but it's not all of it. And that has definitely been a contributing factor this time, right? Yeah, this is an extreme quarter, but it's not a bad thing to point out that if you put the Mac and the iPad together and more than triple it, it still doesn't match the iPhone revenue. So just as a reminder why Apple is so focused on the iPhone, that's why. Yeah, because it's... It's not that the Mac and the iPad are not great, huge businesses, but the iPhone generates just an enormous amount of revenue for Apple.

Now, there's some intriguing stuff about what's going on here. So Apple said that there was a very high level of interest in a new lineup, especially the pro phones. What did you think about that? Yeah, so we had these stories about how Apple was cutting back, and somebody actually said that that wasn't accurate, which I thought was interesting. Cutting back on production of the iPhone 12 mini, and everybody who likes small phones was like, oh no. And, you know, the Macalope was very upset and all of those things, right? They did that with the iPhone 10. I mean, they didn't abandon the notch.

It also doesn't mean it's selling badly. It means it's selling lower than expectation. And it's a question of whether that's actually true or not. I thought it was interesting, though, that Apple said at multiple points in their call, the pro phones especially, they kept saying that. Now, part of that may be talking to financial analysts. They want to make the, now that they've taken the unit sales out of their reports, we don't know how many they sold, right?

They hide that now. All we get is revenue, which means that you can't actually construct what we used to be able to construct, which was an average selling price, the average price of an iPhone, which tells you something about, was the average iPhone down in the iPhone 12 mini range or was it up in the pro max range? Like what was it? Was the average selling price of an iPhone $900 or a thousand dollars? It makes a difference. And we don't know. There are analyst firms that estimate, but we don't know. And I think part of what Apple was doing here was sort of sending that signal without giving out any details that they said ASPs were up.

The average selling price went up, but they said especially great demand for the pro models, which are more expensive. trying to tell all the investors that even though they make these cheaper phones, the non-pro models, that the greatest demand was for the pro models and that they were like pumping it up. Like the pro models are great. Like they're really fueling increased average selling price. And that means more profit for Apple and Yippee, right? I think that's what they're doing there. It strikes me that's interesting also because when people were talking about, well, you know, maybe the 12 mini isn't selling that well. It's like, well, nobody said that about the 12 and the 12 seems to be the mainstream phone. And you would think that the 12 would probably be the best seller of all of them, but Apple didn't pump up the sales of the 12. It pumped up the sales of the 12 pro and pro max,

the pro models. I don't know what it means, but it gives me pause, at least, that maybe some of our assumptions about how we think the spread of sales of these products needs to be recalibrated because Apple was very much saying that the Pro models were the ones that were in the greatest demand. And maybe it's just trying to tell everybody, yes, we make cheaper iPhones every year now, but trust us, more people want the pros. And that's a good message when you're not releasing your average selling price anymore, because all we know is revenue. We don't know units. And so they're saying, no, no, we sold those expensive ones. Those are the ones we sold. And so they're saying, no, no, we sold those expensive ones.

Those are the ones we sold. And I'm sure that having more choice than they've had maybe ever in the iPhone line has helped. And, you know, they may have over-forecast the iPhone 12 mini, but I can't imagine that they would can it in one shot i don't i don't either and i think it's because of people trying to attach old behavior on a new situation if that makes sense i think the mini the 12 mini exists in a in a universe where there are four or five iPhones. Right? Not every iPhone. First off, not every iPhone literally can be the best-selling iPhone. Right?

Like, the more iPhones you make, some of them will sell better than others. That's how it works. The mini exists in a world where Apple is making enough phones that they can afford to sell a phone to a niche market. That's the whole point of selling five brand new iPhones, which they released five brand new iPhones in 2020. If you can't throw in the second generation SE, right? Five brand new iPhones in 2020, four new iPhones in the fall of 2020. It's not meant to... Now now maybe it's a total flop and they're like, well, why are we even bothering? But I don't think so.

I think it's that they want a product line. They want a range and they want to let people, it's not like, it's a different size, but the internal components are the same. It's the same stuff that's in them. components are the same. It's the same stuff that's in them. And I also do subscribe to the view, let's say, that first off, a lot of the pent-up demand for a small phone was bled away by the release of the SE second generation in the spring. And those people, if they had not had that release, they might've waited around and gotten the 12 mini. And two, the 12 mini people are probably, as the 12 people actually, the non-pro buyers, probably not as likely to be the buyers who rush in first thing a new iPhone is put on sale and buy

the iPhone, if that makes sense. The pro buyers are the real phone nerds, I would say. Again, not everyone, but I think more of a tendency to be the tech nerds i would say again not everyone but i think more tent more of a tendency to be the the the tech nerds who are like they want the latest and greatest and they want the pro and i would probably guess that the 12 and 12 mini will sell better in the next three quarters compared to the pro models than they did in this first quarter if that makes sense and the mini especially like i think people who are going to buy that phone they're not like not even going to look for a new phone until spring or summer or something like that they're gonna be like oh look there's a little iphone great and and so i think you know take it easy uh pent-up demand for people

who are like the most enthusiastic iphone buyers not the whole market. And having four or five phones available means that some of those phones aren't going to sell as well. So I think that it's possible that the Mini is just a dog and nobody likes it. But I think it's far more likely that it is exactly what we think it is, which is a niche product that is not ever meant to be the best-selling iPhone. But it's an iPhone in a larger collection, and it has appeal to a certain market. In his daily update last week, Ben Thompson focused on China with the iPhone a lot, suggesting that this could be where a lot of the growth happened. So we have a couple of key thoughts around that, which makes sense to me.

Apparently, 5G is much more prevalent in China. It's more built out. So a 5G iPhone is something people would want more, maybe, than in other markets. If that's true, which I believe it is, I didn't know this was the case, right? I can understand maybe why 5g was given the prevalence for apple that it was if like they had a hint right which you would assume that they did

that like if we that 5g would get them a lot of sales in china like right and everybody in america and europe kind of roll rolling their eyes a bit at the 5G stuff, especially Europe is, my understanding, is even slower at this than the U.S. is in terms of 5G. It depends. And we all look at each other and are like, and it's like, well, no, but it's China. It's all about China. Like every phone in China is a 5G phone and they've had a big 5G rollout and people really want 5G and it's going to be a driver of demand. phone and they've got had a big 5g rollout and people really want 5g and it's a it's going to be a driver of demand and there are iphone users in china who are holding out because they want the 5g phone which means there's pent-up demand in china they're going to sell a lot of these phones

and then you throw in the fact that it looks different which has been something we've talked about uh again and again which is you change the look of the iphone externally and it sells better, especially in China, but really everywhere, because then it's sort of like, oh, it's different. I can get the new iPhone look. And that's a factor. And you put those two together, and Apple releases phones that are 5G and look different. And look, China revenue shot up by 50 plus percent. There you go. There it is. It's not a surprise, I would say. Not really a surprise.

Ben also mentioned something that I hadn't thought of before, which is this is the first big notched phone with a new design. Because the XS Max existed, but it was just a bigger version of the X visually. And so bigger phones tend to sell better in asia and this is a bigger phone the biggest phone and it looks new would drive a lot of upgrades and ben also mentioned something about huawei which is very interesting so huawei you know they are you may not have known huawei were the biggest uh manufacturer of phones in the world up until a couple of years ago.

They were selling more phones worldwide than anybody. They took over Samsung, then Apple, or Apple, then Samsung, whatever way around it was. And Huawei being restricted from using Android has significantly hurt their market. Yeah. hurt their market yeah and so it seems like potentially apple is taking up room left by huawei as well in china so it's a lot of interesting indication that apple is literally um eating some of huawei's market in china that literally there's a transfer going on to a certain point. And that's, you know, that's a, that's a recurring theme in the results and in the conversation they had with

analysts, which is okay. I talked about it here before, you know, we all know the effect where Apple comes out with record results and their stock goes down and people complain about why, why is the stock going down? And it's all about what Wall Street values,

right? What Wall Street, all our expectations are already baked into the stock value. So when they do something we expected, it doesn't go up because that expectation was already baked into the stock. But what a lot of people won't notice is did they make a forecast for the next quarter and was that down? They've stopped doing forecasts during COVID because they're like, this is too uncertain and we don't know. And I also think Apple doesn't like doing forecasts and this is a good excuse to not do a forecast.

But one of the things you also have to know when you look at this stuff is that the primary factor, the lens through which Wall Street investment in general looks at companies is growth, right? It's not how big are you, how much profit are you throwing off? That's great. They throw out dividends. You get cash back if you own an Apple stock. That's great. But growth, where's the growth come from? And Apple's gotten beaten up over that for a while now because of course the iPhone growth was just exponential for a while, just enormous. And everybody loved Apple. And then after the iPhone 6 cycle went, and everybody did that, because that was a very brand new and

big phone, and that was their biggest phone launch ever. And then the numbers came down. And everybody's like, oh no, the iPhone isn't growing anymore doom for apple and of course the iphone just had its record revenue quarter so it is growing again but it had a peak and then it kind of tailed off and it's growing slower and slow growth and all that happen again next year like next year's exactly results are not going to look like this they just exactly so apple is trying to talk more about what its growth opportunity is because i think apple realizes apple executives realize that they've gotten beaten up a little bit the last few years where people look at 110 plus billion dollars in revenue and say how can this company grow more like how is it possible that apple can grow more? It's so huge and successful and one of the

biggest, most successful companies in the world. How can it grow more? And so, especially this time, there was a lot of effort made, I would say, on the part of Apple executives to talk about growth opportunity. And I thought that was one of the fascinating things they said. So you mentioned Huawei and how that's a growth opportunity. Tim Cook said, look, in most of these markets, we do not have an enormous market share and iPads, are new to the platform. That's growth, right? They've started talking about their installed base, which is like active devices in use. The idea there that if you buy a new iPad, but you hand down the other iPad, there's one more iPad in use. It's a net gain of an iPad. So they're rolling all of that stuff together and then what i thought was really interesting um which which is about the mac so we should talk

about the mac a little bit more is he very specifically said uh tim cook said um the m1 and apple silicon essentially gives us a new growth in personal computers and if you look it's very subtle again very tim cook subtle uh but very clear what he was saying which is if you look at our market share in personal computers it's not very big and we think that apple silicon gives us a new trajectory there isn't that wild in 2021 we're going back he's saying essentially apple silicon is so good that if you think the Mac is just going to have

9 or 10% of the PC market, we think we can do way better than that because our chips are so much better than what is available on Windows. That's what he's saying.

And I just, first off, I laugh at that because it's like, oh yeah, get them, Tim. Get them. But it's true. You know,

Apple is profitable and successful as it is. In very few places does it have even greater than 50% market share, right? It's taken a lot of the profit share of all of these markets. But is there room for Apple to grow? They're making the case that there is. And it's certainly debatable. But I think it's funny that Tim Cook actually goes out and calls out the pc market and says now that we've got apple silicon and the mac we're gonna kill it on the pc market too so watch out that's what he's saying it's just wild to me that in 2021 we're now talking about mac versus pc market sharing like this isn't a bad thing like the reason is good but it's just so wild to me that we're back here but it is a huge growth area because you know not it's not complete as a complete one-to-one

but for as many people as have smartphones in the world there are computers too right like it's not one-to-one and different parts of the world have a different makeup of this but there are lots of computers in the world right that are used by people there's a lot of potential market there like a massive potential market there in personal and business use if you want to grow the company i mean look you're not gonna you're not gonna uh find 80 like 60 billion dollars right like you're just not going to find that it's too much but they could find two two three four times the amount that they're currently doing yeah and i think their argument is ipad growth and they talk about that a lot that there are a bunch of people who are new to iPad.

They've had great success in getting iPad into the enterprise, into large companies that want to have a simpler device in a way that's easier to maintain, but that they can use. So that's part of their strategy is to replace PCs and businesses with iPads and not necessarily Macs. They can do that. So like iPad has a lot of room to grow. The Mac has a lot of market share could take away from Windows. The iPhone still in a lot of markets is not particularly strong. They were talking about how in India they had, I forget what it was. They had a really good quarter in India and it's still like not a druster drop in the bucket of what's available. And they said there are a bunch of other developing

markets that are like that. So that's a growth opportunity for them. And services continues to grow and they keep adding new services. And wearables has done really well and continues to grow. Plus they've got whatever they're spending all their money on in R&D, right? And they are putting together... Now, again, I'm not saying this is all true or at least all going to happen the way they think it's going to happen. But you can see that Apple is very strongly saying,

we have a growth story and it's all over the place. It's iPhone growth. It's iPad and Mac growth in businesses and in consumer. It's growth in developing markets where we aren't very good right now. And it's new products that we aren't going to talk about, but we're spending a lot of money to research and we're going to grow there too. And the reason they're doing, and again, you could look at Apple's numbers and say, why are they even talking about growth? They made $111 billion in revenue and generated

$28.7 billion in profit in three months. And the answer is because they're a publicly held company and growth is the language that the people in the investment world speak so they need to talk about growth but uh they do make a strong case it would be it's a harder case to make if you're um like people talk about facebook and and how facebook's growth is constrained by the number of people on planet Earth. Like, literally, you can only be everywhere. It's that kind of thing. If Apple had 90% of the smartphone market worldwide, it would be hard to talk about growth. But it doesn't.

So they're making the case. It's really interesting. And yes, Mac versus PC is part of the case because of Apple Silicon. Now, a cynic would say that the way that Tim Cook finally got excited about the Mac is that they put the iPhone processor in it. But a more nuanced view is that Apple Silicon arriving on the Mac really does give them an advantage over the competition that they couldn't have as long as they were using the same chips as the competition it could you know it could be argued that put in the iphone chip in the mac because what has

finally made the mac comparable and better than what is available hardware-wise from the PC space. Yeah. Well, I mean, comparable is a funny one. I think the problem with having Intel in the Mac was that it was too comparable. It was too parallel. Because it was the same. They were the same chips. Literally the same. Whereas even with just the M1, which I'll remind everybody, it's the low-end Apple Silicon processor on the Mac. These are the low-end models. These are the slowest Apple Silicon computers ever to be released. Okay? And even they kind of blow away a large part of the PC market.

That's where their confidence is coming from. And that's something that they couldn't do as long as they were on Intel. Because literally, you could look up the part number and say, well, that part number is also available on this PC from Dell. And now you can't. And whether they're right or not, and I think there's an interesting question of who buys Windows PCs and why do they buy them? And Apple has been saying for a long time that a huge percentage of the people who buy Macs in Apple stores are new to the Mac. So there's been some flow in that direction. Is Apple Silicon something that changes that dynamic

in a way that drives a lot of Mac sales? Is it something that we might not see now because it's selling a lot on MacBook Airs, but that we might see in the next round when selling a lot on macbook airs but that we might see in the next round when the macbook pro that's got you know some serious power more power behind it tempts more people i don't know but um apple's talking a good game that this is this is going to change the dynamic because they're no longer going to be able to be compared you know and be saddled with the intel processor that makes them look like just another pc they're no longer going to be able to be compared and be saddled with the Intel processor that makes them look

like just another PC. They're not that anymore. iPad and Mac sales, they continue to grow and grow fast because of COVID work school changes. It's accelerated trends the pandemic has. Both of these product lines were seeing signs of improvement before 2020 and the m1 max would have always been a help you know i i think it's fair to say that

last quarter would not have been the biggest quarter ever that this quarter would have been more likely to do that um if in a no pandemic world right because there wouldn't have really been a reason why uh the third calendar quarter would have been as big as it was right well i think that yeah that's the feeling is that the last two quarter mac quarters which were both great and and that last quarter was the biggest quarter ever um were driven by sales of people who either needed a computer at home because of the pandemic or an additional computer at home because they got multiple people who need to be on their computer or they had an old computer and they needed to replace it and it kicked off this replacement

cycle in advance of the release of apple silicon which is interesting and and yet still and with that in the supply constraints on some apple silicon, Apple still had the second best Mac quarter of all time. So it's back to back the two best Mac quarters ever just now, which again, Mike, I have to stop us and say, you mean the year 2020 was the best year the Mac has ever had? Yes. Yes, it was. Year 2020.

This computer that's been around for all this time and it's like, no, but in the year 2020, it was the best for the Mac. And the message seems to the headwinds, whatever financial sector phrasing you want to use, is that they discharged a bunch of that pent-up demand because of the pandemic. And that Mac sales and maybe computer sales in general will be suppressed for the next couple of years because in 2020 everybody bought a laptop or an ipad or both or whatever and it was really good for 2020 but going forward um we're gonna have a lull because the replacement cycle won't begin for another two or three years that's the counter argument and and we'll have to see what happens in 2021 i'm i'm guessing that what apple's doing on the mac is going to manage to keep the Mac doing really well and above its previous level.

Whether they're going to hit $9 billion again in the Mac, I don't know. That's a tough one. That one really might be a severe outlier. We'll just have to see. But just keeping in mind that previously, Apple was doing, you know, $7 billion in back-to-school and holiday quarters and like five or six in the other quarters. And that's my question is, will they go back to that level?

Will they go below that level? Or will they end up above that? Will they have pushed the average Mac mac sales number higher we'll see last thing guidance for 2021 is a little over the place like it's too it's there's a lot of tough i mean apple's not tough compares yeah apple apple's not giving any guidance at all it's like yeah covid we don't know we don't know what know what's going to happen. But you're right. The phrasing that they use is the tough compare. And there are going to be some, right?

They're going to be good. The downside of having a good year is that you have to follow it up the next year and you're comparing against the year ago quarter, which means you have a really great quarter. The next quarter, if it's good, is going to look down because it wasn't great. It was only good. So Apple has had such a great 2020 calendar-wise, which again, every time they talk about it, they're very kind of embarrassed. And they're like, we know it's very hard out there and it's very bad. And we feel for everybody in our communities and everybody who's suffering because of the pandemic. And it's really bad. By the way, I said all that while I was rolling in money. They're embarrassed about it, but that's the fact. It's like 2020 was a spectacularly good financial year

for Apple. And yeah, 2021 is going to be harder for them when measured against growth, right? Which is, again, that's the story here is what was it versus the year ago quarter. And if Apple next holiday quarter delivers a hundred billion dollar quarter, people are going to be disappointed because it's going to be down year over year. So that's what they're up against. And we'll have to see, given that there's probably not a new buying cycle, given that there's not going to be a new

iPhone design and, you know, pent up demand for 5G and all those things that happened with the 12. They're going to have a challenge to meet up, you know, to meet what they did in 2020. I could argue, you know, the counter argument, which is that for everybody who rushed to buy technology in 2020, because they needed it, there are also people who probably deferred buying because they didn't have money, because their financial situation was questionable, because they felt like they could get by with what they already had, because they weren't going anywhere. So they didn't need a new phone. And that if in 2021 things open up a little bit more, the counter argument is that some people actually deferred their purchases in 2020 and might pick them up in 21. That would be the counter argument if you're looking for a case for. But I think it's going to be like the year after the iPhone 6 a little bit where the numbers are going to come out and they're going to be down year over

year a little bit. And people are going to be like, oh, what's going on with Apple? And the answer is going to be really Apple still at a really high level it's just not 2020 because of all of those extenuating circumstances but who knows yeah like if you compare them if you compare 2021's numbers to 2019's numbers ignore 2020 that can be an easy a better thing to do which is what we were doing in 2017 or whatever that's that's what we had to do is like is is is the trend up if you take out this kind of aberrant spike is are they still moving upward generally is the tide generally lifting and that's something you can get you can try to get an eye on because that's the difference between is apple after the iphone 6 the question was is apple over right which people always want to have.

Is it peak? Are we at peak Apple? And it's just going to go down from here. And if you, if you looked at the data and you kind of like just ignored that spike in 16, the trend for, for 17 versus 15 was up the quarters,

the, the versus the two year ago quarter, everything was up. And so what you end up saying is that's a one-time aberration and that the the the tide is going to keep rising and that was absolutely true so that's something to look for as well as is how aberrant was was 2020 i'm gonna i'm gonna guess it's not peak apple because it's never peak apple it seems but uh it'll be a tough compare in in 21 this episode of upgrade is brought to you by microsoft lists your smart information tracking app in microsoft 365 keeping track of information is something that's in

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Everybody likes getting a report card. Oh, I'm being informed that some people didn't like getting a report card. Well, yes, i have compiled my annual list of i want to make this clear again i don't vote in the report card it's not my opinion it's the opinion of 55 people who i asked what their opinion was of apple as i do every year i take a group of people developers writers podcasters, stuff like that. People involved in discussing Apple and technology and ask them to vote, rank from one to five,

how they think Apple is doing in a bunch of categories. And then we talk about it here on Upgrade. This is the sixth time that this whole process has happened. This is year six, which I got a very nice text from John Gruber the other day who said, I can't believe it's six years for the Six Colors report card.

I still think of Six Colors as a new blog. I was like, well, compared to Daring Fireball, it is a new blog, John. But yeah, this is year six. So this is a project where how many people on the list?

You said 55, right? 55 answered the call this year some people didn't it was 2020 mike some people are like i can't do it this year and and that's i i understand that it's funny because i really only just want their numbers they don't have to fill out the form with all their commentary but people do want to do that so some people didn't do it this year and that's fine the number went down a little bit but i'm always adding people to the distribution list and then it's just up to them if they want to, I give them a couple of weeks, very late December and early January to fill out the form and tell me what they think. Cause I want to measure. So the goal here is to

measure sentiment about Apple and compare it to previous years. And, you know, I think it can be misunderstood as being like, are we trying to say Apple is good? Are we trying to say Apple is bad? I'm trying to find out what the, for lack of a better phrase, what the vibe is about Apple in various areas. What's the kind of, and it's an average, so it is conventional wisdom. And somebody who thinks that Apple is terrible and somebody who thinks Apple is perfect are going to be outliers and they're kind of kind of wash out and we're going to end up with a narrower range of scores, but I think they can be informative, um, both as a snapshot of sentiment, uh, at a particular time. And also by looking now at the trend over six years, a sense of how people's mood about various categories has changed over time.

So that's why I find it valuable is it's really like getting the mood in the room for what Apple is doing good and bad and what things pop up as sore spots and what things pop up as being viewed as successes in a given year so we're gonna uh i'm gonna go through all the scores and we'll touch on them and expand on them a little bit because i am also keen because you don't add your commentary i'm keen to see uh if there are any scores that that go against in any way what you would and what you would have expected or what you would score yourself. The highest scorer is the first category this year, which is the MAC, which got 4.7 out of 5,

up 1.1 year over year, which I expect is probably one of, if not the largest year over year change probably in the scorecard's history. It might be. I didn't check that. It's the highest score any category has gotten in the history of the of the report card yeah and 4.7 i mean you who couldn't have guessed that right surely right well actually that's one of the things that that surprised me about it is that i think i think a lot of people if you if you read the verbatim

comments about the mac what you find is that a lot of people gave apple silicon so much credit that they couldn't bear to downgrade it for big sir but that people still expressed their discontent in some of the design changes especially and some of the security changes in big sir it was definitely there was definitely an undercurrent and you saw it come out more in the software quality category than in the mac category but there was this undercurrent that was sort of like all right apple silicon yeah but and then the butts were uh but but big sir and also but apple silicon came at the end of the year and before that it was rougher. And basically what they were doing is replacing the bad keyboard with the better keyboard. But they did replace it.

So that's in the end, the Apple Silicon just kind of won out. So there's a lot of like an undercurrent of, but I've got some issues. I just, if I had to predict, I think a lot of people voted five out of five and then said, this isn't actually a perfect score, but Apple Silicon. And I think that that is why it got a lot of people voted 5 out of 5 and then said, this isn't actually a perfect score, but Apple Silicon. And I think that that is why it got a lot of 4s and an awful lot of 5s to get a 4.7 rating. So that's what they were going for. Yeah, it's funny, really, that the M1 atoned for any of the problems of Big Sur. tone for any of the problems of Big Sur

because there are complaints about Big Sur in the report card in the Mac column. I would like to personally I'm not asking you to change this. I would love to see how things score if people were just doing

hardware and software separately. It's like what do you think about mac hardware and what do you think about mac software what do you think about iphone hardware iphone software that kind of thing i think it'd be intriguing but i understand the the thinking behind bundling them together into one package but in the comments there are a lot of people that are frustrated with things in big sur but ultimately the quality of the products this year the hardware products and the the jumps that we've seen there is what's pushed the mac up as high as it is yeah and i mean you can see the reaction in people buying rushing out to buy m1 Macs, right?

Is, well, because they, just keep in mind, they all run Big Sur. People are like, oh my God, I got to get an M1 Mac. I love it. It's the best. It's like, and it's running Big Sur. So clearly, that's just how people experienced the whole Mac equation is like, yeah, we can quibble about Big Sur, but oh my my god have you seen this m1 macbook air and that's that's 2020 in the mac yeah in a nutshell uh and there's a lot of optimism as well right like similarly to you know apple thinking they're going to sell well people

are thinking that this is like uh if you are a person who loves the mac which is i'm sure pretty much everybody on the list you know to varying degrees but I can't imagine there are, like, a lot of Mac haters here. There's so much optimism going into 2021 and beyond, like, over this two-year rollout now of, like, wow, you've really set the stage. And we imagine we're only going to be further, like, more impressed as time goes on so it's an exciting time the iphone scored 4.3 which is up 0.3 year over year um overall people were happy with the choices in the lineup uh the new design ticked a lot of people's boxes and magsafe as well people loved widgets and ios 14 but as we expected for people in the us and europe 5g was basically seen as a bit of a dud yeah i mean we all felt it right um the

5g thing was sort of like uh you know it most people didn't get excited about that. The redesign people really did like. The fact that it's got the flat sides and that you've got the larger phone and the little phone and all of that. And after a year where, to talk about the trends, because the Mac, I didn't even mention the Mac has been trending up since 2016. 2016 was the sort of the depths of that disastrous design of the MacBook Pro with the butterfly keyboard and with the USB-C only and all of that. And the Mac score has gotten better every year since then. So it's sort of like Apple. You can see Apple trying to work its way back from that kind of disaster. The iPhone last year kind of was flat.

And this year took a bump up. So definitely sentiment was more on Apple's side this time than last year kind of was flat and this year took a bump up so definitely sentiment was more on apple side this time than last year the iphone's kind of like sure right like the score of that is like yeah i mean new iphones uh new designs uh i'd say it's a good it's a good score but i think also it was not a completely you know super, super enthusiastic like the Mac. I mean, it's hard to compare it to that Mac score. That Mac score is the best score ever. So yeah, people are really hyped about the Mac.

But the iPhone had a solid year and it increased in the panel's estimation. And I think that's meaningful. The iPad scored 3.7 down 0.2 um it seems like really that this this item was saved by the magic keyboard and cursor support for the most part the new ipad air is a favorite as well i would say the ipad because the ipad score um shot up in 2017 with the introduction of uh new ipad pros and and and new iPad models and all that. And it's been drifting downward, but good scores,

but drifting downward. And I would say, I'd almost flip around what you said and say the cursor support and the magic keyboard made people really enthusiastic about the iPad in 2020. Yeah. But, and the, and the new iPad air that's got iPad pro features, but there's confusion about the iPad line because what about the iPad in 2020. Yeah. But, and the new iPad Air that's got iPad Pro features,

but there's confusion about the iPad line because what about the iPad Pro? It's so close to the iPad Air. And there's this feeling that the iPad, despite getting that accessory that was good, that it's just sort of drifting a little bit otherwise. Like it had its one big hit,

but beyond that, you know, the iPad Pro is an open question because it got a lackluster update. Like the 2020 iPad Pro with one more GPU core and LiDAR scanner. Like everybody knows that wasn't really a new iPad Pro. Really? And so that's the mixed message, is I think people were really excited about the cursor

support and the Magic Keyboard, and that that made a big difference. And I suspect if that hadn't happened, this number would have been way down, because again, the iPad Pro update just wasn't that great. And everybody really expects there to be one, and that there needs to be a substantial one because the iPad air really just brings it all into, into focus. Like, well, wait a second.

If this is the iPad air, what's the iPad pro supposed to be? I was also really disappointed with iPad OS 14 overall. Yeah. I was hoping for more there. The, the fact that the widget stuff all happened on the iPhone, the redesign of the home screen and all that. And the iPad just sort of got new widgets in the old column on page one of the screen, and that's it.

It definitely burned a little bit. And let's also say there was definitely a trend in the conversation about the M1 Macs, that the developer kit for Apple Silicon was the A12Z. So it was the iPad Pro processor. And the M1s are based, are essentially an A14X. You know, they're more than that, but that's basically what they are. This is the same class that we would expect in the iPad Pro of processor. And what it does is it makes you look at the iPad and say, well, wait a second, if this iPad is just as powerful as these other devices are, why can't it do what they do? And it just brings the focus back to iPadOS, right? All the limitations of iPadOS that are even more visible now. And definitely there was a trend, and some people said it where you know people who bought ipads and were trying to use them more are now just uh buying m1 macbook airs or macbook pros

and saying i'm just going to use this again because it gives me all the you know all the new power and battery life and things like that and i i don't i kind of don't make i kind of don't understand that because i think choosing to use an ipad is about ipad os but i totally understand the idea that when you can see what an Apple Silicon Mac is capable of and what an Apple Silicon iPad is capable of, it's very clear what the difference is. And the difference is that iPadOS

just doesn't do a whole bunch of stuff. And I think that's fair. And I think that that is one of the sources of disappointment on the ipad side for 2020 even though i think it gets a big boost if i were to vote i would definitely give it a big score boost for the cursor support and the uh and the magic keyboard because those are those are big watch was 3.8 wearables 4.0 down 0.3 and 0.6 respectively um my feeling i mean i was pretty down on the apple watch this year i don't really you know i spoke about this a bunch of times on the show i

don't really think that apple did a good job selling the apple watch and many people said that it seemed like it was most like a treading water year with very small changes in watchOS 7 as well. When it comes to wearables, the main new product released, I guess, would be AirPods Max, and people like them, but they're expensive. Yeah, and this is a category where I originally made this an Apple Watch category,

and then I've been transitioning to a wearables category, so I'm asking both numbers. So I've got some history here. Yeah, Apple Watch, it was not much of a year, right? They just sort of pushed everything forward. One new sensor, as you pointed out during our show about it. You know, the explanation of how the blood oxygen sensor works has never been particularly strong um at the same time wearables you know apple is doing really well with airpods but um

some people you know took their votes after the airpods max came out and were skeptical of airpods max and all that this is a category where apple's still doing pretty well, but definitely I think it shows slippage for the last couple of years, and I think the panel is restless for something more exciting here, for sure. The Ted Lasso category, aka services, got four, up 0.3 year over year. Yeah, all I thought you were going to say Apple TV is the Ted Lasso category. Well, I think people were referencing

from at least the comments. You're right. Apple TV Plus is not Apple TV. Apple TV Plus is services, and the services scores were up. This is the best score for services ever. It was four out of five. Everybody mentioned Ted Lasso in passing, by the way. And I don't know, I think it's really interesting that Apple, something we didn't talk about in the analyst call, is that Tim Cook described Apple's method of creating products. And what they said was a slightly different spin on what they usually say. You know, usually it's like only Apple can make the synthesis of hardware and software. What Tim Cook said is we look for products that have a unique synthesis of hardware, software and services. I was like, oh, there it is. Apple feels at this point like services is part of their secret sauce. And the fact is, if you look back to how terrible Apple was at services and about like dot Mac and mobile me and all of that, like they've come a long way.

Is there more to be done? Yes. Are their services perfect? No, they're not. But they have gotten better and they have gotten more successful. And the bundle happened in 2020. And the Apple one bundle, I think, has a lot going for it. They rolled out Fitness Plus.

Like there's a bunch of stuff that they're doing. And yes, Ted Lasso also came out. So it was a pretty positive category. It was, like I said, the best that services has ever done in my survey. It also makes sense too, right, that over time as they're adding to it if they're doing the right job this score should continue to increase right like this is a growth area it's an area that's still being established it makes sense that it's getting better over time and you want to see that happening for them uh you did mention apple tv apple tv got the lowest grade i think it's

lowest grade anything's ever gotten yeah it was the was the lowest score, averaged a 2.1. The median score was a 2. It's an F, basically. That's what it is. It's an F. It's because they're not doing anything with the hardware. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

The hardware is unchanged. It's still overpriced. But the hardware is unchanged. It's still overpriced. Apple has undercut the value of the hardware by making its content and even AirPlay available on other competitor devices. And the question remains, like, what the heck is the Apple TV 4 and where is it going and what is it doing? And we got no answers in 2020. And so the score just continues to drop. HomeKit got 3.1, up 0.3.

My feeling on the HomeKit thing, the reason it gets better is as people add more things to their homes, they prefer it more. I know my feeling on home kit continues to improve because i'm finding more devices that are home kit compatible and when the more devices i have in my home that work with home kit the happier i am with home kit right and in theory that should continue over time but there are also calls for and i understand this and agree with this that

the home app could do with some work oh yeah the home app is really bad i wrote a thing about a mac i bought a mac uh piece of mac software last week and i wrote about on six colors that is uh does all these things that the home app can't do i can't couldn't even script the home app i couldn't automate it in any way and i finally found an app that lets me like use keyboard shortcuts to turn devices on and off in my home which is amazing i love it and you can choose from a menu as well and you can script it and like it's great but like why is that not on the mac and the answer is that apple doesn't care about home kit on the mac enough to do anything but just port over the

ios app and it's not very good the ios app isn't that great it's not that good no app and it's not very good. But the iOS app isn't that great. It's not that good. No, it's not. It's just worse on the Mac. HomeKit score has gone up every, well, last year it went, it was basically flat. It went down one tenth, but it's been on a trajectory upward. It started at 2.1 out of five and is now at 3.1 out of five over the course of this time. So HomeKit has gotten better very slowly.

It's a slow build. However, I think a lot of people pointed out there is this HomeKit, or not HomeKit, this smart home alliance that is, what do we call it, chip? Chip. Or Choi. Choi, but the connected home. Choi.

Something Choi? Yeah. I don't know what it is. That's what, just it's connected home over ip so like puck joy okay that i think is some people pointed out that maybe what's going on here really is that apple is not making a lot of moves on smart home right now because they're gonna come out with the spec that basically unifies all the smart home devices into one standard that everybody uses. And they'll support that and then they'll move on with their lives.

And HomeKit isn't a thing anymore at that point. It's just smart home tech on Apple platforms. That's when they will have to do even more work on making the home app good. Right, right. And I think that that would be one theory about why the smart home stuff seems to have stalled is that they're not going to put more effort into HomeKit when the new thing is coming. But that home app really isn't cutting it.

So like Dan and I were talking about this last week on Six Colors. My HomeKit interaction is almost entirely through control center on ios oh yeah me too i don't i don't want to i don't want which is great right i don't want to use the home app and part of that is because the home app isn't very good um but putting in control center is great it should be in control center on the mac by the way um and it will be the automations really easy to make home automations in the home app but like the home screen the of the home app is just badly designed from a from a usability perspective

i think it was fine when it was simple but as more stuff's being added to it it's creaking quite quite quite significantly yeah speaking of things creaking, things that aren't, hardware! Hardware reliability 4.5 up 0.6 it's because they fixed the keyboards and there weren't any notable hardware issues, new ones anyway I feel, in 2020.

There weren't any gates of any kind. No appreciable gates. Yeah, everything seemed to kind of move along you got to see the the chart on on six colors for hardware reliability it's pretty amazing um it starts out at 4.4 in 2015 and then it's down and then down and then down. And then down. Reaching its bottom at 2018. And then perks up a little bit in 2019, as I recall, because they replaced the butterfly on that one laptop. Yeah.

It seemed like the end was near. And then it is shot up to 4.5. This is, and again, we can argue whether Apple should be rewarded for releasing something that was bad and then replacing it with something that was not bad but the fact is the butterfly keyboard being gone was a big part of this you can't complain about the butterfly keyboard anymore the m1 max you know are it's almost too early to say if they have uh generational problems but they seem pretty positive for now and several people called out that apple did a good job with the AirPods Pro recall or replacement program, the rattling sound in the AirPods Pro that people reported that although that's annoying because it was a failure of the product, I had several people in the comments point out that getting them replaced was really easy and fuss-free.

And you basically say, Apple, I have a problem. And they're like, great, we'll send you new ones and send those back in. So that's not a reliability. It's a reliability problem, but it's mitigated by the fact that they had a good response. And it's nice. The butterfly keyboard is no longer a part of the conversation going forward in this category software quality is at 3.5 which is up 0.8 this makes sense ios 13 and cantalina were really buggy and annoying um and 14 and big sir

i mean big Sur is opinionated but from a quality perspective from a reliability perspective seems to have fared better and iOS 14 especially yeah I can't decide whether that's just because Catalina was so painful and the iOS 13

beta was so painful and a lot of these people are working on betas either as writers or as uh as developers 13 13 was bad at release remember it was like they didn't come out and then it was only on the new phones for a bit it was but the beta was the beta was also extremely painful so it was an entire summer of pain before it even got to customers yeah and i think that that makes a difference whereas the big sur stuff was again i think not great, but it was a better experience. And people still have their complaints about iOS 14 and about Big Sur.

But I think the general trend was that people felt that it was better. I keep likening Catalina to the bad cop and Big Sur to the good cop. And it's like, are they pulling a fast one on us a little bit by getting the bad one out and then going to the good one? I don't think intentionally, but I will say Apple very clearly has a tick tock process for software updates where one year they make a whole bunch of things that break and everybody is miserable and screams bloody murder.

And then the next year they're like a little bit apologetic and try to fix stuff and try to make it not as bad. And you can see that. The reason that I say that is you can see it in the sentiment numbers for this category. Literally every year is up, down, up, down, up, down. That's how it goes. It was up in 16, down in 17, up in 18, down in 19, up in 20. Unless Apple changes its approach,

be prepared for disappointment in 21 because that's how it's gone up to now. So unless Apple, you know, with the next version of macOS and the next version of iOS decides to take its foot off the gas a little bit and do something different, we're actually up for another bad year

because that seems to be how this thing bounces around and then we have uh developer relations 3.1 down 0.3 i can't believe this didn't go down more um maybe it's just it wasn't starting from a great place. But I think 2020 should have... I feel like it should have been a harsher hit than it was. I think Apple maybe got a bit of a ride here because of the small business program. A lot of people like that. But really, that just felt like a band-aid

over a terrible injury. Because, you know, antitrust, mistrust, problem after problem after problem for like six months with developer relations. It feels like

this is one of the worst years in modern history to my memory. You were among the most negative comments about this category. Yeah, I know. You printed them. So you, yep. So you saying that, I'm not surprised.

I think that in general, what people saw was the small business program, which helped a lot of developers by giving them a pay raise, or as our British developers say, a pay rise. The hay thing, Gruber makes the point about the hay fiasco, he calls it, is that you could see it as an example of everything that's wrong with the App Store. You could see it as the system working because Apple made a mistake and then it corrected it. It corrected it under withering feedback from the outside. Never run to the press. Never run to the press. I think it's complicated and and so developer relations went down from three four to three one so they gave they cut the take for anybody who's under a million dollars in app store revenue in half a thing that people have been

asking for for a long time and the number still went down so i think that that speaks to what you were talking about which was there's a lot of tough stuff going on apple's under a lot of scrutiny there's a lot of controversy um and that um there's a lot of praise for virtual wwdc by the way and that they pulled that off well and that the virtual labs were actually good if you signed up and got to talk to somebody. So it's a mixed bag. And I think the fact that the score is 3-1 and that it went from a B- to a C is an indication of everything you said. And it's only really mitigated by the fact that they did the small business program. Otherwise, it would have gone lower because this was a tough year for developer relations in a lot of ways.

But you should look, this isn't a surprise to listeners of this show. For me, how I feel about this, like it's been a real sticking point for me for most of 2020 because I was just becoming increasingly more frustrated with the thing after thing after thing you know yeah

it was it was a lot too it was definitely the knives were out yeah and uh and i'm gonna well maybe it happened in the water blood was in the water the knives came out in the water i don't know um but right like the moment that you're like oh there's regulatory scrutiny and this vendor is speaking up and now this company is going to speak up. And then it's like Apple started enforcing in-app purchases on companies trying to transition in the pandemic. As you and I talked about, so much of this, not all of it. I mean, okay, you could argue that everything here is caused by Apple because of Apple's policies. But I would say there's Apple's policies that it has very carefully considered. And then there's the

stupid stuff Apple or people at Apple did that brought more controversy on them that was totally unnecessary. And that's the stuff that was, oh, some reviewer at the app store misinterpreted or interpreted properly a mention from a higher up that they really want to squeeze more money out of businesses that are built on free apps. And so that they're going to start shaking them all down for cash. And I'm still unclear whether that was, well, I think it was a policy. I don't know whether it was a policy from the top or whether there was somewhere kind of down in the chain who decided that that was going to be the policy. But that's what led to all of these companies with free apps being told, you need to offer an in-app purchase. And again, I'm still not clear on whether that was you need to offer an in-app purchase or whether

they thought they were being helpful and saying, you know, you could offer an in-app purchase or whether they thought they were being helpful and saying, you know, you could offer an in-app purchase and wouldn't that be nice? But because of Apple's heavy-handed reputation and the fear of Apple rejecting their apps, that people take it as a threat or whether it was actually intended as a threat, it doesn't matter. And it was a dumb thing for them to do that they seem to have backed off of to a certain extent now. But that's the fascinating combination of what happened in 2020 is that some of it was the natural outcome of some of Apple's longstanding app store policies and approaches to having its own controlled environment. And some of it was super dumb stuff that they did that brought more scrutiny and more attention on their practices at exactly the wrong moment to do it. And that's 2020 right there. We'll see what happens this year, but it has emboldened others to use those arguments to buttress their own arguments. So with Facebook, what you see

now is that Facebook, because of Apple's attempt to change its privacy policy for apps in iOS 14 that's coming up, this tracking limitation that they put off for a long time, but they're putting into effect now. This is why Facebook is in a very public spat with Apple about this, that we haven't talked about a lot and we're going to have to talk about next time. this that we haven't talked about a lot and we're going to have to talk about next time um it allows mark zuckerberg to use the specter of ooh bad apple being mean to developers and say see they're being mean to us too and i would argue that that's completely bogus and it is a political trick that zuckerberg is pulling to wrap himself in all the other developers that are put upon by apple and say we too are a put upon developer when they're not but the fact is

that's how it works that's how politics works is they open the door apple open the door with a bunch of dumb moves and it lets facebook press that button. And they're pressing it because they're trying to get every advantage they possibly can in fighting Apple's new privacy and tracking policy. And environment and social issues. 3.7 up 0.4. They did a lot during the pandemic. Lots of masks, lots of masks also donations they worked with google on the exposure notification um charges this is like i expect good and bad depending on

where you come from right that it's like there there could be an environmental impact we're told there's an environmental impact um but obviously some people would take it as a frustrating point because apple didn't really seem to do anything for the customer in the removal of these things. Because it definitely seems like they may have saved some money here. And there are a lot of, I think here more than anywhere else, there's a lot of questioning around Apple's reliance on China and how it relates to its privacy stances and stuff like that in these columns, which is a fair criticism to levy of them. And this is the place to do it. Well, I think so. This number went up.

And I think, yeah, it's a mixed bag. That's the bottom line is it's a mixed bag. I think people were impressed by the fact that I mean, OK. So Devendra Hardawar from Engadget said what I think is maybe the perfect encapsulation of this complexity, which is, he said, it's hard to praise any tech company when it comes to social impact these days, but I appreciate Apple is still holding strong when it comes to consumer privacy. And I thought that was good. That is basically saying, look, there are lots of issues with tech companies and how they affect our society. And we can praise some parts of what Apple's doing while criticizing others. And I think if you read these comments,

you will get all of it. It's great that Apple is standing up to Facebook in terms of privacy. It's great that Apple has green initiatives. I got, there were, there were comments about that, which, which happen every year that they're going to have green power and they're investing in solar and they want everything to be recyclable.

And they're trying to find ways to reclaim more of the material so that they don't have to be mined. And like, they're doing a lot of stuff like that at the same time. It's, they're very reliant on China. Um, they,

uh, you know, it's a dictatorship. It's an authoritarian government. They have issues in other countries where they follow the laws of those countries, but their laws put into effect by authoritarian governments in order to control their population. There are lots of other issues involved with Apple's place in the world and it's complicated. So, so like you can, you can praise their, uh, Oh, I should mention, uh, several people mentioned that they took the charter, the charger out of the iPhone box as a, as a positive, like everybody thought it was the

end of the world and then Apple did it and it wasn't the end of the world. And now everybody else is going to do it. And that is a net. Yes the money as you said but it's a net environmental gain i i like it's it's all this stuff the truth is that there are like 50 different things happening inside this category and i just i when i started this survey i got pushback from people who are like why is that a category in the survey and it's like well because apple talks a lot about this stuff. And I think it's worth analyzing how they did. Positive and negative. Apple is a huge company. It has an impact on the world.

It fancies itself as a company that has an impact on the world. So let's look at that. And the comments in this category are always the kind of messiest and most all over the place. And I love it. I think that that is, I think it's interesting every time.

I think it's always an interesting read. So that's the report card for the year. That's it for 2020. Finally, I think we can put 2020 away. Goodbye. Out. Get out. This episode of Upgrade is brought

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johan asks do you use twitter lists oh what a setup i love this question yes i do you do i love them i use them all the time every day okay uh this is actually one of the things i love about twitterific on the ipad is that it's got a sidebar with all your safe searches and your lists in it and you can actually assign lists to icons to the navigation scheme so i have lists in my nav i have like the main timeline mentions a search and a couple of lists in my twitter twitterific interface um i have a list for sports stuff so i use lists basically as alternate timelines um because i don't want them all mixed in my same timeline and And the ones that have really stuck, sports is the big one.

All the sports writers and stuff that I follow, there's a sports list. If I want to see what's going on in sports stuff that I care about, I look at my sports list. I also have a science list. That's where all the scientists and space people are. I follow a few sports people and science people in my main timeline by following

them, but I have a larger group in those lists and I use those lists all the time and I love it. I feel like I wish lists were a bigger part of Twitter because I feel like Twitter is better when you create a bunch of different timelines by subject matter than it is when they're all poured into one thing because like i could not have all the sports writers and all the scientists and all the space people and everybody else in my main timeline it would be too much and i don't check the sports list like i check the main timeline but a few times a day, I will go and say, what's going on in sports? And I will switch to the sports list and see the links and all of that. And it's great. So yeah, I'm a big fan of Twitter lists. So these are mostly people you're not following. It's almost entirely people I'm not following. That's the whole point is I don't want them in my timeline. I want them in my list timeline. So it's like, I would say it's in terms of Twitter, I'm not

following them. I would argue that, um, you should think of your follower list as a list and that you've got a bunch of different lists. You've got your main list that is people you follow, and then you've got other lists. But I think that it's the same concept. I think I've got my timeline list and my sports list and my science list and a couple other lists. That's really how I use it. In fact, at one point, I decided my timeline was way too full. And while there were a bunch of people who I liked seeing their tweets sometimes, but

it was just the volume of tweets in my follow list was too great. So I unfollowed about like 100 people and put them in a list of other people, interesting people. Because I couldn't handle the volume, but I didn't want to just say goodbye to them and never see them again. But I couldn't handle the volume in my main timeline and so i just made a list that's like the um again you could argue that means they're the like they're the b team but i think i call the list something like important people don't feel bad don't feel bad you're on a list um and i know it's confusing because i will respond to people and who are in my list and and they'll i know if they look, I'm not following them. And that's weird. And that can be a negative signal. Sometimes

somebody who's not following you replies to you and you're like, Oh boy, what's this going to be? But, um, I am, they're just, they're in my list instead of in my main timeline. I love it. Interesting. Okay. So, cause I know some people do what you're doing and then only live in lists, but you have like a regular timeline and then move around. That's the other way to do it. I've been using Twitter so long that that's just sort of where I am. But yes, that would be the other way to do it is follow. Some people definitely do this, right?

Follow 1,000 people, 5,000 people. And how can you use Twitter that way? And the answer is, well, they don't. They either aren't looking at Twitter broadcast only, or they're only looking at their curated list. And I could do that. I just haven't for whatever reason. It's been a subject matter stuff. I curate my follow list more

as that's the main thing that I look at. And I could make that a list, but I don't. I don't use Twitter lists at all. What you are saying sounds great. Well, you know, one of the problems is that Twitter started with lists, and then for a while they're like, nope, lists aren't good, and it looked like they were maybe going away.

And then recently they seem to have gotten the list religion a little bit and are kind of back on that a little bit. Yeah, the official app has proper support where you can like switch between timelines from list to list so yeah and list that's why i like lists is because i like having i mean it is true you now have multiple views of twitter which is like oh boy now i've got now there's two twitters now there's three twitters i know all i would be doing is increasing my twitter usage. Twitter overheads. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and the way I viewed it is, again, it's almost like a newspaper or something like that, right? It's like, I have my sports writers list and it's great. Like, if there's something, an event going on, a sports event related going on, I pop into that list all the time. It's so great. And when I don't want to see it, it's just I don't look at it.

And then I go back there later and say, well, what's going on? What happened in the sports list? I haven't been using Nuzzle for a while, but Nuzzle is this service that basically aggregates all the links in your Twitter timeline and creates a list of links. It's almost like turning your Twitter timeline into an RSS feed. And it uses lists as well as your main timeline. And that's great because I end up with this incredible curated science links list and curated sports links list that are separate from my main timeline

that I can read all the articles that just kind of flow in there. So it's great. But yeah, if I'm watching, it's baseball season and I'm watching a baseball game or it's a college football season, I'm watching a Cal game, something like that. Get a sports list up there and it's great. And then I can go back to my regular life and not check the sports list for a while. I love it. I used to use Nuzzle, but I used to have this like weird issue with it.

Because like I follow a lot of people at The Verge and Polygon. So those all float right to the top. So basically all just be cons like you know if they have a big story or whatever loads of the people there will will share it but then it just meant that like if you follow a bunch of people who work at the same outlet you end up just having nuzzle completely monopolized by one outlet and then that that becomes tricky zach asks rosetta one stayed in mac os 10 for five years by that time it seemed like most of the apps have moved over and it wasn't a huge loss for the platform what about this time how long do you think apple are gonna

keep rosetta 2 around and do you think it has going to keep Rosetta 2 around? And do you think it has the potential to sting more than last time when they eventually remove it? I kind of want to predict that it's not going to go away for a long time. Because there's so much Intel stuff now, including command line stuff. And although it will eventually all get rebuilt for Apple Silicon, I feel like, I don't know my hope. Okay. Let me back up. One of the challenges with, with Rosetta, the original was that people were making the move from PowerPC to Intel.

And they wanted to provide a spur for people moving from PowerPC to Intel by saying at some point, your old PowerPC apps just won't work. With Catalina getting rid of the 32-bit stuff, so it's only 64-bit. And with, I think, the uptake of Apple Silicon apps being pretty good already, I think that Apple is going to have less of a motivation to protect or to spur the laggards to update. They really had to push people. They did. They did to go from power pc to intel and and they're not in that position now they're they're just not rosetta 2 could just be a part

of mac os like basically indefinitely at this point yeah you know and i and i keep thinking about like well if all they're running is 64-bit apps because catalina made deprecated all the 32-bit intel apps like i feel like they could do that for a long time and say look if an app was was Catalina made deprecated all the 32 bit Intel apps. Like, I feel like they could do that for a long time and say, look, if an app was, was current enough to get to 64 bit, then probably the overhead of running it is not as bad.

That's why one of the reasons they cleared out the 32 bit apps. And also, again, I just keep coming back to the fact that there's probably an advantage in having an Intel compiled binary for some obscure, something just work on Apple Silicon. Like you don't even have to worry about it. Like if you want to do that and I get that at some point,

Apple is going to want to say, we need to stop updating this and we really need you to build your stuff and we're going to break compatibility. And that's going to force these people to build for Apple Silicon. I get it. And it will happen, but like, I don't know.

I don't see the need for aggression on that front. Um, in the end, it's gonna, it's gonna happen that somebody in a year or two is going to look at what's going on with Apple Silicon and Intel and make a judgment about like, do we even need to bother? Or is this just pointless because everything is compiled for Apple Silicon now. And at that point they absolutely will remove it. Um, And alternatively, if they say, oh, we need to provide a spur to some laggards and get them off, you know, it's more important for us to sort of force them to get on our platform than it is for us to coddle them with Rosetta 2, then maybe we'll get there. But I don't know. It's just my gut feeling. And I have nothing basing this on other than sort of like my

gut feeling is Apple's in a different place where it doesn't need to work as hard to spur people along and that they won't necessarily need to give Rosetta to a natural death. They can just sort of let it die through irrelevance over time. But I don't know. I don't know. Rajiv asks, would you have any interest in an iPad or Apple Watch annual upgrade program? If something like that was to exist. Well, I use the iPad Pro. It doesn't get updated every year. So, no.

That is presumed. I guess we have to presume some kind of, say like an 18-month cycle or something or whatever. I would be inclined to do this for the iPad just because it's an expensive, it's a more expensive purchase, you know? So I would be more inclined to do it for an iPad than an iPhone even for me.

But yeah, because like the iPhone is kind of something where I'm always going to get it and they have really good resale value, and there's always people in my family who need a new phone or whatever. But I don't feel the same for, say, an iPad or iPad Pro. I would be maybe a little bit more inclined to get an iPad Pro with AppleCare and all that kind of stuff on a monthly thing like they do for the iPhone. I think that would be the product of all of them

that I would be the most inclined to want to go into something like that for. Yeah, I'd be intrigued. I'm intrigued in general by the idea of paying an annual fee and being able to upgrade with a lot less pain at regular intervals. But the question is, what are those intervals and do they match? Um, I know cause I don't do the iPhone upgrade plan, but I know that some people really like it because it means that they don't have to, they don't have to either hand down or resell. I hand down my iPhone.

So actually I find it valuable to just buy a new one and hand the old one down. But I know there are people who don't do that and, and you end up having to resell it. And with a Mac that it's like that, like I'm thinking they do a new iMac. Do I get rid of my iMac pro? And it's like, well, reselling the iMac pro is what I should do. But reselling a computer is such a pain, right? Um, the upgrade program, it's all built in. You return your old one and you get a new one and you pay another fee and it's regulated over time. I think for a lot of people that makes sense. I'm not sure it makes sense for the way I use my Macs. I'm always wanting, this is the key, right? I am always wanting the best iPad Pro,

right? Give it to me, give it to me the best iPad pro. So if I could be on some sort of cycle and they were committing to every 18 months or two years or whatever, giving me the latest and greatest, and I, and I could pay a fee and I return that one and I get a new one, I'd be interested in that. Um, he also mentioned the watch and that's a case where I think maybe I would be interested in that. Um, because I use my Apple watch a lot and they come out with it every year. And so I would be, I would be interested in that. I just get the, you know, the sport level. And, and so I look at that and think maybe that would work, would actually work for me,

that I would just be guaranteed that every year I get the new Apple Watch and I use the new Apple Watch for a year and then I send it back and get the new Apple Watch and I just pay a monthly fee for that. I'd be interested in that, maybe the most of any of them. So I think it's funny that Rajiv asked. I think maybe more because I don't hand down my Apple Watches. Lauren uses an Apple Watch, but she uses the smaller model. Right. So I don't and my son doesn't use an Apple watches. Lauren uses an Apple watch, but she uses the smaller model. So I don't, and, and my son doesn't use an Apple watch. So I, I don't have a hand-me-down issue there. I just,

I really kind of want to get rid of my Apple watch and get the new one. And so I'd be intrigued by that. I think Apple should do this. I think Apple should be much more aggressive in sort of like putting people on, on, uh, upgrade plans because it's uh it's it's you know you don't have to do it but it is convenient in a bunch of different ways and i think it's good for apple too and yes look i know we both know you can buy apple products on credit and they have all these things but the upgrade program the iphone upgrade program is a very different thing in terms of additional benefits and this would be expanding that product offering to other products. It's not just about buying something on an interest-free credit plan.

The upgrade program gets you, like you get the new one as soon as possible. They even open up specific stock for you. You get AppleCare. You get more in the whole package. And by taking your old phone back you know that that is built into the cost and you end up spending this sort of and for a lot of people having a regular look there are people who've got money in the bank and buying a phone for a thousand dollars is not a problem and there are other people who are like that's a

lot of money and i don't necessarily have that in the bank at any one time and there is something to be said for regularizing your out your output right amounts of ten dollars a month can be way easier to swallow than yeah and i get i get that if you do the math and you do the work and you're like i have the money in the bank i can resell or hand down the other phone and that's a better deal for me it is it's not true for everybody. Not true financially, not true in terms of like mental energy and stress about getting rid of an old computer or phone. So, you know, I think I would not ever advocate that Apple drop direct sales of devices and only go to a subscription model, right? Like, no, that's no. But I do think that there are places, and the watch for me is the one where I actually am like, actually, that, because of the way I use the watch

and I like the watch, they do an annual cycle and I don't hand it down. That one hits me kind of in the right spot where I'd be like, maybe so. Maybe annual watch plan would be something I'd be interested in. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade

or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord. You can get access to the Discord and to the pre-release versions of 20 Max or 2020 if you are an Upgrade Plus subscriber where you get Upgrade with no ads and additional content, just go to getupgradeplus.com to find out more and sign up. Thank you to our sponsors for this week. Smile with PDF Pen, Microsoft Lists, and Bombas. If you would like to find Jason online, you can go to

sixcolors.com, and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L, and I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.