Upgrade - 346: Float It Like a Hologram

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

It’s a big news week! Myke and Jason break down Tim Cook’s podcast interview with Kara Swisher, and discuss some big changes at Apple Arcade. There’s also WWDC 2021 and Apple’s rumored augmented-reality headset to talk about.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 346 and today's show is brought to you by memberful pingdom and pdf pen from smile my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley how are you i am Mike Hurley. How are you? I am very well, my friend. How are you? Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy. You are on secret assignment this week, which I'll mention because otherwise people will ask why Jason sounds different, which happens every time. I'm in a slightly different place with a slightly different microphone.

There you go. I have a hashtag Snell talk question for you from John, and John wants to know, Jason, did you ever have a conversation with Steve Jobs? If if so was there anything specific that you took from his experience um I talked to him once for on the phone as an interview for the 20th anniversary of the Mac and what I took away from it is that Steve Jobs doesn't want to be interviewed okay do you think that somebody was in that room and he didn't want to be there and he was on the phone with me for less than five minutes i would say and uh yeah it was we we spent months trying to get apple to agree to do an interview with steve for the 20th anniversary

and um we were we had to have all sorts of conditions about steve doesn't want to look back steve doesn't want to talk about the past. Steve can't talk about the future. And we're like, well, what is left to talk about? And the answer was a very short interview. We ran almost every word he said on the interview in the magazine because he said so little that we had to make the most of it. And when the conversation was over, I felt kind of like i'd been hit by a truck it was like what just happened but uh that was it so yes i got the the distinct sense that

he didn't want to be there somebody had talked him into it maybe katie cotton that it was worth doing um and he wasn't interested in talking about the past and he wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible there's something kind of funny about like okay steve's gonna join you for this interview which is an anniversary celebration of the mac but he won't talk about anything that happened before today yeah that was it's very difficult to have a conversation about the 20th anniversary of the mac when one of the ground rules is don't talk about the past. There's some kind of Fight Club joke reference to be made in there, right? I think he, when they were wearing him down to do it, he said, okay,

I'll do it, but I don't want to talk about the past. And they're like, all right, great. He said he'd do it do it yeah that's the win they were looking for really and then now it's your problem jason it's not their problem anymore you have to come up with the conversation i found that that was a the whole thing was an unpleasant experience uh he didn't want to be there i kind of didn't want to be there either we made the best of it uh it was brief and then uh and that was it and then beyond that uh my only interactions with him was i asked a couple of questions at back when they did press conferences at media events which did happen occasionally um but uh those are not quite the same right just shouting this was a direct one-on-one jason yeah it was situation it was i mean obviously it was being monitored by all of

his his minders who called afterward, right? Like, they were clearly listening to the whole thing. But yeah, it was... I wouldn't say it was my finest hour, but he was also a pretty tough person to talk to and didn't want to be talking to me. So, yeah. We're going to be talking about a Tim Cook interview later on in the episode. Have you ever spoken to Tim? I have not spoken to Tim, I think, at all. I have been near him in the hands-on area after, but there's a...

Here's a funny thing about these events. Hopefully, they'll come back at some point in some form. You're out there in the hands-on area, and there's a lot of people, right? There's a lot of people in the Steve Jobs Theater, let's say, and then there's a lot of people in the hands-on area, which is sort of the lobby to the Steve Jobs Theater. And you sense a certain amount of hubbub around you because there's so many people. But then it's like a wave kind of swelling. Suddenly, you just sort of sense that there's more. And there were a lot of people around you,

but now there's a lot, lot. And the sounds change and everything's just a little bit more intense. And that's when you turn and realize, oh, Tim Cook's right there. Because there's a bubble of people taking pictures and people wanting to talk to Tim and Tim interacting with people. And he's sort of holding court a little bit, moving from station to station, usually with a member of like a high visibility media kind of in tow. But it's sort of Tim's appearance. And I've gotten caught up in that a couple of times just accidentally because I'm just trying to hold the phone and see what it's like. And then suddenly hubbub happens around me and, oh, there's Tim over there. And if you're really

lucky, you'll occasionally get in the photos of the event the next day on wire services and stuff like jeff carlson the writer and photographer um he was in he was just happened to be next to tim when every like major organization shot their best pictures from that event and so jeff was in he was photo bombing tim cook for uh for the next day's uh newspaper coverage and and you and websites and stuff like that. But no, I haven't had any direct interactions with him. I imagine they'd be pleasant because he seems like a pleasant fellow. And I'd probably try to work college football into the conversation because I know he likes it.

And I like it too. You know, saying about the getting in the images thing, that was what happened with the Connected artwork when Connected was featured in the Apple Watch presentation at WWDC a few years ago. And that was the Getty image, was Tim standing in front of the Connected artwork. So it was on all the newspapers and stuff

were picking up that one image of him. So that was really cool because then not only did we have our artwork behind him it was then on the front of the newspapers uh or whatever you know like in the newspapers uh yeah that was that was next next level right it's like not only could you take a screenshot of your artwork on the on the live stream but it turns out that um they had taken a bunch of photos of Tim on stage with it in the background that's just like extra bonus

I bought the Getty image and made a fresh out of it I got it on my wall so I was very thankful for it if you'd like to send in a SnellTalk question to help us open the show just send in a tweet

with the hashtag snell talk i'll use question mark snell talk in the relay fm members discord we spoke about it last week and it happened i think the next day wwdc has been announced it's going to be june 7 to 11 all online format yep we made it happen we did it mike we did it you and me we made it happen everybody can thank it, Mike. We did it, you and me. We made it happen. Everybody can thank us. Somebody did on Twitter speculate that somebody at Apple was listening to Upgrade, and they're like, oh, did we not? So what do you think? I mean, this is obviously what we expected.

I'm happy that it's earlier in the month again rather than later in the month, because that would suggest, hopefully, that we will have a more normal uh time period um for the beta so basically the full three months rather than the compressed pretty much two and a bit months that we get right it's the for me the traditional last week of school uh inconvenient time of wwec a little less a little less of a problem this year but um uh i think it's uh i show it shows something right that this is their preferred time and pace for the summer and for releases and things like that which is good and you know they touted how great last year was because so many people could quote unquote attend and that they're going to keep doing more this year to expand that we don't have particular

details yet um but it seems like that they might be looking at doing something else. So do you have any particular thoughts on that at all? It's kind of what we expected. There's not really much else to it, right? Yeah. No, I think we covered it last week. It's pretty much what we expected. As coverage goes, like doing my job goes, I find this format vastly superior to being in person only because I can sit at my desk instead of either staying in a hotel or an Airbnb and, you know, working from unforeseen circumstances or, you know, driving more than an hour to San Jose. And I can sit there and with all the videos that are posted, I can watch those videos kind of at my leisure and in my living room or at my desk. And I can take notes and I can write articles about them. And it's great. Obviously, what you entirely lose is the personal side of it, which is why I did go and why I find that incredibly valuable. There's the social aspect of seeing all sorts of people who are interesting and you never get a chance to see. So I miss that. But I'm excited about the event because this is the official start of the next calendar year, essentially, or not calendar year, the Apple calendar.

or not calendar year, the Apple calendar. It's the start of the Apple year because it sets the positioning for what the OSs are going to be and everything kind of follows from that and the iPhone follows from that and then we go through the year. So it's always very exciting. We learn a lot that really is giving a sense

of what the next year plus is going to bring from Apple. And I expect it will be, at least for us, for observers it might be different if you're a developer but for observers I expect it will be very much like it was with last year's which was great

We have a year's experience of this type of WWDC now which I'm thankful for and will be planning better my approach for this year According to Mark Gurman in a newsletter that he wrote for Bloomberg, Apple is planning to announce an event for its mixed reality headset product within the next few months,

but they're currently holding out to have an in-person event with members of the media. This is what I expected, right? I mean, I think I've said this on the show before, not at WWDC and to have a separate event because it feels big um the in-person part i think makes a lot of sense right like why they would want that well right this is why do you do in-person media events and the answer is not because that's the only because you want an an audience for a video live stream, right?

Like that's not the answer. The answer is you want people in influential places to get their hands on, or in this case, maybe their heads on, whatever the product is, right? Like you want, and that's the thing that I miss the most from like the iPhone event last year

is that I didn't get a chance to hold the iPhones in my hand. And so then it's like, well, what are the iPhones like? It's like, I don't know. Everybody knows as much as I do because we all just saw a video and that's all we know. So having people there to have that experience is good. It's helpful. And could they roll something like this out? The problem is, if it's a pre-announce and it's going to be months before it ships, then you can't do the trick that they've done with a lot of products, which is put it under embargo and mail it to people's houses, right? You get the FedEx box, don't open this. There's an iMac inside, right? You can't do that if it's pre-release hardware in a tightly controlled environment right you you really they're not going to let a prototype product put it in a FedEx box and ship it off and hope everything goes well it's not like you know

we've seen it in the past I think it was I think if I'm remembering rightly it might have been the original Apple Watch demo you can maybe tell me about this. In the hands-on, you weren't allowed to touch it, but people were showing you basically a demo loop, which was surely all that could be done. There were watches that were running the demo loop. There might have been a watch that was not running the demo loop, but it was, again, on the arm of an Apple employee, and you could look, but you could not touch.

They were showing you what to do. I tried to touch the Apple Watch and they're like, no, no. You're going to get me in trouble. Nobody touches the Apple Watch. Get out of here. That's the rationale. Listening to Mark Gurman talk about this, I think it makes sense. I think they could do it. Obviously, they could

do whatever they wanted, but I get the desire to have people actually try it and that that kind of needs to be in person. Whether it's the event or whether it's in like a briefing kind of thing, it does require some personal contact, which would be something that they haven't done in more than a year.

If they do it as an event, my guess is that it's going to be a low invitation, probably US only, maybe even California only with a briefing in New York for people on the East Coast, and probably

requiring proof of vaccination, or at the very least a negative COVID test. But probably, which I think if you're talking about summer, late summer, in the US, everybody who wants to be vaccinated should be vaccinated by late summer. In fact, sooner than that, by early summer. So it's not unreasonable at all to think that they could actually pull this off. And it sounds, I think it's perfectly reasonable to see that Apple is grappling with like, one, an event that really needs it in a way that some of their other events don't.

And two, figuring out that at some point we got to come back to doing some personal interaction. And we may be able to do that this summer because hopefully virus level will go down and people will be immunized and it won't be a problem. So I think it's interesting to hear the rumblings that they're kind of struggling with this. I think they could definitely make it work,

but there are a lot more challenges. Also, let's not forget that if this is something you're putting on your face, then they're going to have to sanitize it. if this is something you're putting on your face, then they're going to have to sanitize it. You're not going to have 50 different people rubbing a thing on their face. You can't do that. So there's some challenges there. But it makes sense that they would want to do it this way. I'd be game for it. I'm up for it. This just feels like a product that needs, if you want press to talk about it afterwards,

which they obviously do, it needs a demo, right? They can do a video, like I thought potentially what we could see is, bare minimum, they do a video presentation like we've seen, and then as soon as the video presentation is over, an embargo lists on people that have had private um demos over the week prior to right right but that and that's sort

of what i was saying is you can do it that way but you're still doing in-person demos yes right like you can don't you don't need a live event but they're much more controlled and stuff like that right but you need you need people to do And so, yes, they could do it that way. They could have people in New York and maybe people in Cupertino and do some briefings that way and then have it be under embargo. Although, again, brand new product,

never been seen before, seems unlikely that they would have things under embargo in advance of it, right? They'd instead want to do their own thing. You know, worse comes to worst i have a hard time believing that they would show people a product that they had not announced that was a major new product under embargo because that is there's too much risk of all the details leaking in a way that uh you know if they keep it stuff a leak but like that's not been

their pattern at all. So I think it's less likely they'd do that. But this is definitely adding to my consideration that WWDC wouldn't be the time for anything like this because I don't think they can show off anything software-wise

without showing the hardware like tip in their hand there. And this really feels like something that if they feel like they've got something which is good and better than what currently exists, they need to have press and people in the media, YouTubers, talking about this product like it's special, right? Tim Cook's not going to say, you know, this thing's kind of good. It's a little bit better than the Oculus, right? He's not going to say that. So what you want to hear is people like

you, people like MKBHD, you know, people like Nilay Patel saying like, all right, we had a chance to try this thing and it's next level for these reasons, right? Like that's what you want. And I almost feel like it's worth just delaying the product and its announcement until you can get that, because I think that's what it's going to need to really land with people. That's the decision I would make anyway, if they were asking me. Well, they need developer support for it, which means they ideally, like with the Apple Watch, they really need a run-up for it. And that makes me interested in the developer conference as a tie-in.

But the fact is, Apple has said repeatedly that AR is a focus. There's AR in their devices, in the iPhone and the iPad. At this point, Apple could go in their videos at the developer conference and say, we got a whole bunch of great AR things to show you and talk about them. And everything would be in the context of the iPhone and the iPad, but we'd all know what they really mean.

And so it wouldn't preclude them from evangelizing developers at the developer conference. Which they've been doing for years anyway, though, right? Right. Without announcing the product, knowing that they're going to announce it a month or two later, at which point developers know more about what's going on, and they've still got time to develop apps for it. I think they can finesse it. They can make this work. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by our friends at Memberful. Memberful allows you to

build and diversify sustainable recurring revenue. It is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web. Maybe your business's financial situation has changed over the past couple of years. Maybe now you want a proven solution that's quick to launch so you can stabilize your business and grow. Memberful handles the hard stuff so you can focus on what you do best while earning revenue quickly and comfortably. It has everything you need to run a membership program of your own, including an optimized checkout, Apple Pay, easy member management, dashboard analytics, free trials, gift subscriptions, and so much more. And Memberful seamlessly integrates with

the tools that you already use, including lots of fully managed integrations with the most popular services like WordPress, MailChimp, Discord, and loads more. They also have an API as well. And I know this because Memberful is what powers the RelayFM membership program. We've worked with Memberful for like five years. But then last year, we changed a lot of our membership program. We started adding more content and specific membership shows. And we were only able to do that because of the integrations that we could use with Memberful. And the RelayFM members Discord, that's also powered by Memberful as well.

And it's fantastic because it's a direct integration. So when someone becomes a member, they can sign up for the Discord. If their membership stops, then they're removed from the Discord and we don't have to do anything. Memberful's API and their integrations do it for us. And really it was was we started to look at changing our membership program because things seemed really uncertain last year. And I mean, still have some element of uncertainty to them, right? Like things haven't returned to normal. And having the membership program there for us has been fantastic. And that really is because of Memberful. So they're a fantastic company we love working with them

you can get started for free for yourself right now at memberful.com there's no credit card required that's memberful m-e-m-b-e-r-f-u-l.com go there and check it out and see what it could do for your business our thanks to memberful for their support of this show and relay fm we spoke about this change a while ago which is john John Ternus becoming SVP of hardware engineering. John is now listed on Apple's leadership page, which is nice for John. Sure, congratulations. To him. He may have had a hand, well, we know he will have a hand in the next IMAX. There was a report from the, quote, credible leaker this is from mac rumors uh

mac rumors was reporting the quote credible leaker with the twitter account love to dream which is an account that i see pop up every now and then it does seem to have a good track record i trust mac rumors to keep track of the track records more than me uh they have suggested that the next imac will quote have a screen that is really big, bigger than the biggest one. So the Pro Display XDR goes to 32 inches. It's huge. Could you imagine the iMac being pushed to that kind of level? Well, first off, I will say one of the brilliant things about being a credible leaker on Twitter is that there's no narrative and there's no context placed around anything that they have to say, which is why they're not Mark Gurman.

Because all Love to Dream has to say is one fact, which is, oh, yeah, bigger than the current iMacs. And they're gone. And we don't need any anything but the fact is there's been a rumor that they were going to make the 27 inch iMac into a 30 inch iMac and the 21 and a half inch iMac into a 24 inch iMac that's been out there for like more than a year now so I just look at this and say uh yeah that's what that is that's what this person is talking about i think the pro display xdr is enormous and it's probably unlikely that it's quite that big but um larger than 27 keeping in mind too that i think that these imax are going to have way smaller frames around them way smaller bezels and as a result they're not going to seem as huge i mean jeez if they keep these bezels and make the screen bigger

they're going to do the ipad pro thing or i mean they're gonna they're gonna keep these bezels and make the screen bigger. They're going to do the iPad Pro thing. I mean, they're going to shrink the bezels and make the screen bigger. And hopefully, the actual device will not seem that much bigger, but it'll just be all screen. So I think that this is just in line with that theory. But that theory is that the 21.5 is going to become a 24 and the 27 is going to become a 30 and um that sounds sounds great um i honestly i feel like the screen on my imac pro is almost too big like i like a 27 inch screen and all but like the stuff that's out at the periphery you could just forget that it's out there i hear people with a pro display xdr talk about it and it's the same story right which is you put stuff kind of off on the side and it's out at the periphery, you could just forget that it's out there. I hear people with a Pro Display XDR talk about it and it's the same story, right? Which is you put stuff kind of off on the side and it's like you're consulting. It's like you're pulling out something out of a filing

cabinet or something. It's way over there. It's, oh, that window. That window's off to the right. I haven't seen that window in years, right? It's not ideal for most uh ways that i work i i like to work in the center of the screen and i find that even on the 27 inch imac stuff that's parked on the left side of the screen on the right side of the screen is kind of awkward um so but some people love it and you know there will still be choice it seems like between a super big imac and a smaller iMac. And that sounds good to me. I have a 32-inch monitor at the studio. It's an LG one that I really like. And it is massive, but I do love it.

See? And I just like the idea of having the big iMac get bigger, that they have the freedom to do that by making the space around it go away. And there's also a question of what the screen looks like and what the shape of the iMac is, right? Because the iMac right now is taller than its display ratio because it's got the big chin at the bottom. And so there's a question there too.

If you eliminate more of that chin, your diagonal is going to get larger, even if it's not much wider. So I guess we'll see, right? But I feel like this report is in line with what we've already heard, other than the sequencing of it, which is everybody sort of assumed that the smaller iMac is going to hit first and be with a lower end chip. And then later in the year, they're going to do the high end iMac, and that'll be big, and it'll have a new, previously not seen Apple Silicon chip in it. And those are some assumptions made on some reports. And saying the next iMac screen is really big, is this person thinking about these iMacs both being released now, or is this person, you know, thinking about just the next big iMac, which is, you know, maybe sequenced after the smaller iMac? That part,

I don't know. But otherwise, it seems like this is just sort of coloring in some of the margins of what we already knew. If the big one went to like 30, 32, something like that, would you think you would consider the smaller one, provided you could spec it the way you would want? Well, if we assume that the smaller one gets bigger and the smaller one's a 24-inch, I would consider it. I would. That said, coming from an iMac Pro,

if they come out with a 24-inch iMac that's running on an M1, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, I would be inclined to wait at that point, right? Thinking, I could get an M1, but the 8-core iMac Pro is as fast or faster than the M1. The M1 is very impressive, but this is a $5,000 computer, pro computer. I'll wait on that one. pro computer i i'll wait on that one but if they can get me an imac that is um that is faster than the m1s it will be appreciably faster than my imac pro and then i'll i'll consider it so if all other things being equal i there was a 30 inch imac and a 24 inch imac would i consider the 24 inch imac i would i would like if i could get it with the power of the 30 inch iMac I'd like to see them right and I fear that I am even

though I complained about the 27 inch screen being big that I would feel cramped in a smaller screen at this point because isn't that how that works once you have a bigger screen you can never have a smaller screen again you just expand to the space that you're given

which i think is a similar thing for why people that i know that have the pro display xdr their complaints about how big it is don't last for very long and then they just get used to the size and then that's the size of their monitor you know you then going back to smaller would be will want them i would seriously consider it though because i do have a feeling like my imac is a little bit that screen is a little bit too much for me most cases not always if i'm doing like live streaming video or something like that suddenly it's not big enough but most cases it's not then it's like exponential how many more monitors can i well i want to oh i mean when i do live streaming of dnd i have to put it in um more space mode where everything gets smaller

because i don't i don't in that case sidecar for something like that you know like throwing some windows off onto the ipad you don't use that no no if i wanted to do that i mean in most cases i would just put the i will do that actually when i'm doing the dnd stuff i'll have my ipad there but i just have my iPad doing iPad stuff. I don't need to do Mac stuff. That makes sense. Last week, Beta 6 of iOS 14.5 came out. Yes, it's still swimming around there in Beta. Basically, at this point, it's almost like 14.6

because it just keeps adding more and more stuff. I think 14.5 was supposed to come out a while ago yeah it's obviously picked to a hardware release that it that hasn't happened yet and so they just are are continuing to spin it just keeps it's like um a snowball kind of thing and it's just the further it's going along it's just picking up more thing well like a catam catam catamari anyway um so in this most recent beta apple announced that a selection of new siri voices in various english-speaking regions would be added and also i think in all regions they have removed the default that like siri having a default voice so in america it was traditionally the female voice.

In the UK, it was the British voice. In different areas. The British male voice. British male voice, I should say. It's a British butler in the UK. Yes, the British male voice. So in different regions, they've had a default Siri voice,

which my understanding was it was because it was, at that time, the best that they had in kind of the way that the voices sounded. So they just defaulted to whichever one was best for them. And now they have done two things. So they're adding more voices and they're more realistic. I've heard some samples of them and they do sound really, really good. But I think the bigger news, though, is that they have decided to remove the defaults and they've also removed the naming.

So now all of the voices have just numbers by the names rather than male and female or gendering them in any way, which I just think it just makes more sense and it just lets people choose whichever Siri voice they want and that's what you do on set up. You just choose which Siri voice you want. So I think this is a better way of doing it. Hi, I'm Siri.

Choose the voice you'd like me to use. Hi, I'm Siri. Choose the voice you'd like me to use. Hi, I'm Siri. Choose the voice you'd like me to use. Hi, I'm Siri. Choose the voice you'd like me to use. The second one and the fourth one sounded like the new ones to me.

The second and third. Oh, okay. That was 4-3-2-1 that I played there. voice you'd like me to use the second one and the fourth one sounded like the new ones to me uh the second and third oh i went four three that was four three two one that i played there okay and two and three are are new and they do sound more realistic which i think is good i'm not sure how i feel if i want it to be more realistic. But the bigger story here is removing the defaults, I think. Yeah, I think so. Having people pick, you've got more choices, which one sort of speaks to you more. It's fun.

I've had a British butler on my HomePod for a while now. But it's nice to be able to choose. I have a couple of upstream pieces of news for you, Jason. One, which is Jason Sudeikis won another award for Ted Lasso last night. Outstanding performance by a male actor in a comedy series at the

Screen Actors Guild Awards. They lost the Ensemble Award, which is the big one to Schitt's Creek, which is not surprising because everybody expected that. But he won the uh the male actor award and there's also a very nice video that they posted um that was sort of like made for the sag awards with the team in the locker room that was obviously shot as their shooting season two um that's got some very funny uh bits in it about the other there's the, we're facing tough competition here and they put up all the other nominees.

And there's a, there's a very funny joke at Jason Sudeikis' expense because he was at the Golden Globes and he had a hoodie. Yeah. And so in the video that they posted, Jamie Tartt walks in wearing a hoodie and it's like the same hoodie as Jason Sudeikis. It's probably literally the same hoodie. And somebody says who wears a hoodie to an awards show?

If you know the reference it's really funny. Alright, I haven't seen that. I'm going to have to watch that. That looks really good. I think I found it. It's on the Apple TV Twitter account, right? It is. I'll put that in the show notes too. And this one i just was excited about it netflix have paid 450 million dollars for the rights to knives out two and three

ryan johnson will direct and daniel craig is reprising the role of benoit blanc so they're trying they're setting a they're trying to get another franchise going franchise we we have said repeatedly one of the challenges Netflix has is it's got to build franchises. It doesn't have going for it what some of the other services do with owning existing franchises. And so here's an interesting example.

Because they're doing that other spy one, right? With Ryan Gosling. Oh, the one that they want to be there, James Bond? Yeah. Well, you can see they're doing it. And it's funny because they're doing this as movies and not a series. But out was great and the idea of telling more mystery stories i feel like um ryan johnson doing more stories with daniel craig is great i feel like

there's even more though to knives out they could do more they could they could tell some other mystery stories i i kind of want this to turn into not not Daniel Craig because he's a big movie star but like I would like to see the Columbo version of Knives Out where they do six of them a year 90 minutes long with some other actor perhaps from one of the cops from Knives Out or perhaps it's somebody who worked with Benoit Blanc and just tell these kind of mysteries because they're so fun. Knives Out was so much fun and they don't make them like this anymore. And they're actually, I think I would like to see them. So this is cool. That's one of my favorite movies I've seen in years. And I was just,

I'm just super happy that they're doing more of them because it was one of the things where I was like, this was so successful. How could they do more? Like I wasn't sure what they would do. But this just makes a lot of sense, right? We just follow Benoit Blanc to his next crime to solve, right? Like, it's kind of...

Yeah, when he's a... He's kind of like a reluctant participant in Knives Out, which I kind of like the idea that, you know, that's a classic mystery thing, right? Where it's like the detective who comes is like, oh, I don to be here this is accidental it's like all right i i guess i'll i'll figure it out and the cops are like oh no this is our job and it's like yeah well yeah but i'm i'm the one who's going to figure this out i love it and you know i would also like to see um because there is an element of very gentle spoilers for knives out there's like elements

to the movie where we don't actually really see his dire like detective prowess because things just happen luckily for him in a way and i would like to see a movie where we see more deduction from him you know because he does a lot of uh in the first movie, applying pressure. That's the thing I appreciate about that, is that it's almost like a martial arts kind of approach where he doesn't need to barrel in there. He just needs to apply some judicious pressure in a few places and everything starts to fall apart, which gives him his answer. Yeah.

I think I would also like to see a move like maybe another one in in this these movies where we don't know the answer because we're shown the answer right like that's part of the movie like very early on we know what happened and i would like to also have one of these movies when it's not the case so we'll see okay but i'm excited those are two different kinds colombo always showed the crime knives out it takes you a while to figure out what actually happened um um there's there's different kinds but you know i love a good mystery doesn't they don't all have to be just like on pbs from the bbc they can especially when they're this good right yeah like worth it out of nowhere apple

expands apple arcade they're bringing 30 new you have brought 30 new games to the platform with some more on the way this now brings the total of games available on apple arcade to over 180 and they are now categorizing apple arcade games into one of three kind of buckets. We have Apple Arcade Originals, Timeless Classics, and App Store Greats. So they brought in some new games, like some original games, like stuff we've seen in the past where they're working with companies to produce a game for Apple Arcade. But the thing that has really excited me and caught my eye the most

with this announcement is that they have added a selection of successful and critically acclaimed ios games from the past to the service so for example mini metro fruit ninja flip-flop solitaire monument valley and threes just to name a selection i mean this selection is like five of the very best ios games ever made and there's more there as well all of zach gage's games are there right yep i think spell tower is there now too and he's the best i'm really bad and all of those games are there um this is such a great idea i i feel like Apple has recalibrated what it wants Apple Arcade to be. I also feel a little bit like Apple Arcade as a standalone service versus Apple Arcade as also being part of a bundle allows Apple to kind of reconsider what they want in terms of making Apple Arcade feel worth it, right? Because you're not necessarily selling a $5 a month Apple Arcade subscription. You're just accruing value to the bundle.

And that might be a little bit different. And the idea of taking apps that have maybe outlived, not their usefulness, because these are games, right? It's outlived their novelty and their revenue generation in the App Store. And in some cases,

it's apps that are maybe doing fine in the App Store, but have sort of had their day. And there are other apps that are like gone or have no reason to be updated for the App Store. And giving them a new life as a, it's almost Apple's version of, you know, what the console makers do where they kind of have a classic games from

previous consoles. Yeah. I would like to see more of this. I would really like to see Apple give a bunch of classic app store games from history that have kind of faded away. Give those developers a reason to put work into them, to make them work on modern devices and that's they're going to be an apple arcade whether they that's because they're going to get money from apple

arcade for use or whether apple just writes them a check and says update it here's your money put it in the store uh but it's a there's some work to do they've got these um the ones that are already in the store are like doing these like plus versions that are essentially the same app except on apple arcade it feels very much like that has to go away at some point uh it makes much more sense if an app is available on apple arcade and uh in the app store at large that you would have an interface that says something like you know 4.99 or free on apple arcade or if you're an apple arcade user it would just say you get this for free with apple arcade instead of having two versions of mini metro and it's like which is what happens mini metro plus which as far as i can tell is not actually any different from mini

metro some of them might be different in that they've got in that purchase turned off but for the most part it's just the same thing with a different app id and that's a little bit silly they need to they need to clean that to work that out this feels very much like a driven by the product manager type thing where they haven't necessarily gotten resource to do it differently and what i mean is like you know the appleade team have had this idea and they are now working within the confines of the store. If you're in management, they're like, we've got this idea.

But to get this, and we've talked to the App Store, and to get them to change this, it's going to be iOS 15. It's just, we're not going to get this now. And the manager's like, let's just do it call it put a plus on it get it out there right and i think that's the right call like get it out there

get it out there now don't wait around for the engineering on it but i would prioritize that i would say that's that's on our wish list we would really like to have the ability to have a game that lives in apple arcade and in the app store with different behavior for both of them. We would like that to exist. And it gets on the priority list for whoever's working on the App Store. But yeah, I actually kind of like the idea that it's the people who care about Apple Arcade who are finding a way to work within the system to make what they want happen in terms of the content in their service. That's good. To save follow-up you know you mentioned about bringing back old games there is a company and service called game club which is a subscription service um i think it's run by one of the people who used to work at touch arcade or

founded touch arcade where effectively they say hey developers that don't want to continue updating your games anymore, let us do it for you, and you will get money for the subscription. So like games that aren't on app stores anymore, because they haven't been updated for new screen resolutions and stuff. GameClub's whole thing is they will do that for you, and it's a part of the service, which is interesting. But I also want to see Apple doing it this way, because I just think this is really great. I think what we're seeing here,

well, what we are clearly seeing from Apple is a change in strategy because platform exclusivity was one of the requirements of Apple Arcade. You could not make your mobile platform exclusivity, you could not make your game available for Android, and you also couldn't make it available for any other subscription service. So you could go to Nintendo Switch, or you could go to Xbox, but you couldn't be an Xbox

Game Pass. Now, they still have the classification of arcade originals, which I assume is this, and maybe you get a bit more money, right, as part of the deal. But some of these classics and greats, games like Threes and Monument Valley, they're on lots of other platforms. Right. So there's clearly been a change here,

which I will remind everyone, back in June of last year, there was a Bloomberg article that was talking about cancelled contracts and Apple shifting focus on Apple Arcade. And I'll give you a little quote from the article. This is the quote that everyone really focused on for when a couple of weeks we're talking about this.

An Apple Arcade creative producer told some developers that their upcoming games didn't have the level of engagement Apple is seeking. Apple is increasingly interested in titles that will keep users hooked, so subscribers stay beyond the free trial of the service, according to the people. Now, when this report came around the first time, it didn't sit right with me, because it just didn't feel like that was what Apple would be wanting

to do with the service, and it maybe felt like this was the experience felt by some people who had their games cancelled. Because I just didn't buy that Apple wanted to have these high engagement games. They weren't looking for new Candy Crushers for Apple Arcade. It just didn't make sense to me. And it kind of felt like that maybe some people got their games cancelled for some reasons but the idea that they were going to change apple arcade to be basically in-app purchase games about the in-app purchases that just didn't seem right and i think this has

shown it i think that back in june they did change what they wanted to do and they wanted to do more stuff like this and that there were some games that didn't make the strategy change right use some of their budget that they were going to make on originals to instead fund some of these other streams and get them up and running i think it's also weird that they that producer complained that it was just expensive nbc strange that's a reference yeah anyway but it's the same kind of thing right who was complaining yeah again, this is what we spoke about and we continue to talk about. Where is the report? Where is the rumor coming from? If it's coming from someone who's upset, it might be a little harsher.

So look at what our initial response to Apple Arcade was, which is it's going to all be about the exclusive games, right? They're going to live or die based on the exclusive games. And Apple probably had some struggles where they have some successes and some failures. And somebody inside Apple Arcade says, you know, what, maybe what Apple Arcade should be is a bunch of things, exclusive games, classic games that you don't have to pay for that we're, you know, that we're bringing back and the best of the app store that you just don't have to pay for. And you, right? Because that's essentially what they're doing is they're saying, we're bringing back and the best of the App Store that you just don't have to pay for.

Right? Because that's essentially what they're doing is they're saying, we're going to pick games out of the App Store and give them to you for free. And now Apple Arcade is not just a subscription service for exclusive games. Now it's a curated game service

where you pay once and you get exclusives and you get classics that have been brought back just for you and you get the best i mean i'm using the marketing language here but this is how they would say it and then you get some of the best stuff that's in the app store without having to pay for it that's more compelling as a product it's that's a better product and you know people some people might not like it, and some people might find it less compelling, but I think it speaks to a broader audience. And it also, I would say, personally, as somebody who plays games in Apple Arcade and buys games on the App Store, eliminates maybe some of the dissonance that people feel with games that,

like, I'm paying for Apple Arcade, but I'm playing games that I bought on the App Store. And it's like, well, why am I paying for Apple Arcade if I'm playing Good Sudoku all the time? Well, Good Sudoku is now in Apple Arcade. And I mean, I already paid for it, so it's too late. But you get that for free. And what I will watch is,

I wonder what Apple's's gonna do in terms of approaching people to make these plus versions for apple arcade because it could get really i don't i don't think they're gonna do this but it could get really interesting where apple approaches almost everybody who's high profile who's putting games into the app store who has a business model that's a little more maybe a little more independent minded and said and say to them up front well you know we're not gonna we didn't pay for you to develop this for apple arcade but we will pay you to put it in apple arcade for free for our subscribers and we'll kick back this amount of money to you and you

can still sell it in the app store i wonder if they'll do that or experiment with that a little bit because that does give them the option like it's not it's not all games on the app store are free but they could start depending on again how the app store back end is structured and all those things and right now it's they have to make a duplicate version of the app and so this might take time but you could see a scenario where all sorts of games go on the app store and if you've got apple arcade they're just free yeah because you've got apple arcade which i love that as a strategy i think it makes more sense and i am very encouraged by the fact that they have done this i think this is great this is exactly the kind of thing they should be doing which isn't always what we get right But I think this is the way to do it. It's

better for everybody. And I'm just super excited about the fact that Forensic is coming back as part of Apple Arcade. Forensic by the Icon Factory. I've forgotten the Icon Factory made this game. The original Forensic was one of my favorite iOS games ever ever made and i am so excited for the new version it's called forensic overtime i don't know when it's coming but it's coming soon i saw that you say that you played it and i'm so jealous of you i've been playing it since thanksgiving basically and uh yeah it's good if you like a an intense i was talking to lauren about this because she doesn't she likes puzzle games i was like uh this is a puzzle game, but there's a time element. She's like, nope, forget it.

No, I don't want the pressure of it. But for some people who are super into that, like you, I think, yeah, you're matching colors and shapes and orientations of the shapes because you're kind of filling up. It's almost like a Trivial Pursuit piece. It's got a little pie piece with wedges. And then there's a whole bunch of other... There's power-ups and there's a couple different puzzle types and the art is good and

the sound effects are great and it's a lot of fun. They're doing that. When I started beta testing it was just, we are working on a new game from the Icon Factory. And then at some point a few betas in the Apple Arcade screen appeared and I was like, oh, I see what's happening here i can imagine that this is a result of one of the like when they said hey

pitch us i can imagine the outcome factory i mean you don't have to say but i can imagine them being like we have a game we would like you to pay us to make it you know like we made it was successful in its time because this isn't one of those like it doesn't bring the old game brought back it is a new interpretation of an older game yes i'm excited about it this episode is brought to you by pingdom from solar winds if you have a website what purpose does it serve whether it's driving sales of your products collecting sales leads for your business or providing customer service of a contact form. When these critical transactions fail, you lose out on business, not to mention the bad experience for your users. But there's a solution, transaction monitoring from Pingdom. Starting at just $10 a

month, transaction monitoring runs checks 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and will alert you when cart checkout forms or login pages fail before they affect your customers and your business. Pingdom will notify you the moment there is a failure over SMS, email, or via your favorite apps like Slack, Ops Genie, and PagerDuty. Depending on what's being monitored or the severity of the outage, you can customize who's alerted and how they get the notification. Don't let your users discover a problem on your website before you do. You should be the first to know, and it's super easy to get started.

Just go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now for a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. Then when you're ready to buy, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get a huge 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. So this morning as we were recording Tim Cook

appeared on Kara Swisher's podcast Sway, which is a New York Times thing, but it's Kara Swisher's podcast. And it's like a 30-something minute interview. I think maybe you'll agree with me here. I think the whole reason that this interview was set up

was to talk about app tracking transparency in iOS 14.5 and to kind of get the marketing machine rolling on that. But they also touched on some other areas as well. But it definitely felt like the part of the interview that was the most polished on Tim's part was talking about that kind of stuff. And so this is, in case you need a brief refresher, because this news has been going on for months and we haven't really spoken about it very much, but this is about the idea of from iOS 14.5 and on, if an application wants to track you using uh advertising identifiers

they have to notify you and so they put up a little uh system notification that says hey this app wants to track you across the web and you can ask it not to track or you can say yeah go ahead and track me that's basically the the notification that's popping up. And this has started a bit of a war of words between especially Facebook and Apple. There are lots of companies that will be affected by this in some way. Google, I'm sure, will also be affected by this. Anybody that runs an ad network will be affected by this.

But Apple and Facebook have been the ones going at it the most. And so that's kind of a lot about what this conversation is focused on uh tim cook does say that ios 14.5 is a few weeks away this this definitely made me think that there is going to be an event like this continues to be the will it be an event, will it be press releases, event, press releases. I think a few weeks away suggests event to me. What do you think? I don't know about that. There's something coming. How they do it is up to them. There are lots of different ways to slice

an event, but a product announcement of some kind seems like is inevitable. A product announcement is definitely, but I'm just holding by i still think they're gonna have some kind of event all right uh a quote all we want to do is supply a tool so that the person that should make the decision can make it that's apple's whole like boiling it down they think that users should be able to decide what happens to their data and

that larger companies shouldn't be able to make that decision for them which is hard to argue with they think they have a winning argument here right and uh i i was impressed because kara does say like well the end of their argument is it's going to hurt small businesses and all that and and what Tim says is actually really good and smart. And yes, like you said, he's well-versed and honed on his message here. But what he says there is they do this a lot. People who want more information will claim, oh, without this, we can't do X. We can't do this. You're going to decimate small businesses. There's no other way for them to do this. And it's never true, right? These things keep happening. There are always arguments. And I would say, he didn't say this, but I will say it. This goes across so many different

industries where there is an extinction level event that's going to occur if this thing happens. And then the thing happens and guess what? Things stay the same or they get better. happens. And then the thing happens, and guess what? Things stay the same or they get better. And so his argument here is, when Facebook holds small businesses hostage and says, they will die if you do this, they're not telling the truth. They're saying it because it's self-serving and that small businesses can find all sorts of ways to reach people using the miraculous world of social media and internet media in general without requiring this level of tracking. And again, as he pointed out, tracking that is allowed if the user approves. But we could also argue just even if they don't approve,

will small businesses still be able to find uh targeted uh audiences for their products yeah they will they will so i i liked i appreciated his very quick response that um these arguments are disingenuous and they've never they always make these arguments and they never pan out i think there are some shades of gray but it's not worth getting into for today's conversation. Cook says that he believes that individuals should have control over who has their data, which is definitely the case. And he also says, which is something I wholeheartedly agree with, if you were starting from scratch today, this is how it would be designed.

If we were starting from scratch, if these things hadn't creeped over time everybody would have more control of their data and who has it what it's used for because we would be starting with this in mind but we've had this slow creep over the years of what is expected by companies for what they are allowed to have of us and it's gone too far definitely and it has to be brought back facebook was built with the door wide open and if you remember when facebook started adding uh security and privacy features and i i remember this very distinctly um the first time they did it that it was kind of painful to even get to the preferences. And then there were lots of them and they didn't make a lot of sense.

But this is the example of Facebook built a wide open thing. And everything that it's been added has been added sort of kicking and screaming. And you're right, and Tim's right too, a product like this today would be built with a privacy policy and with defaults and would not be wide open and would be built also around a model that considers what level of data they're going to be able to get and what they can ask for consent to to get and uh but this is not the world we live in. We live in a world where Facebook is huge and has a lot of data. It's a complicated issue.

I appreciate that Tim Cook has got it down. This is what they say. This is what they're going to say in Congress and what they're going to say in court and what they're going to say in court and what they're going to say in interviews and like this is they've they've thrown this around and they clearly think they've got a very strong hand here that facebook is trying to scare people and apple gets sort of calmly just sits there and says well this isn't true you should have the right to do this and you should have privacy as a human right and they obviously think that that is a message with resonance

there was a thing about the privacy policy that annoyed me he was talking about the privacy nutrition labels thing and was talking about how privacy policies have become unreadable and that's why they're doing it and i was just reminded of every time i set up an apple product the absolutely behemoth privacy policies that i have to agree to and that kind of annoyed me because i mean i would love to see them give me a privacy nutrition label version of the privacy policy before I agree to it.

But it just kind of felt a bit rich to make that claim of like, oh, privacy policy is not even written in plain English. But yours isn't either. I find that stuff annoying. Yeah. Are you thinking of privacy policies or are you thinking of software licenses? Software licenses. A lot of the stuff you agree to is the licenses which is not the same as privacy policies.

But the point is the same though, right? I mean, I don't know what I'm agreeing to in that document. Who reads them? Maybe that should be Facebook's counter. Well, what about let's do clear labels on software license agreements. I agree those are full of lawyer speak and

if you look closely a lot of stuff gets copied and pasted from other lawyers and other agreements. But yeah, okay. All right. I think it's a different argument, but sure. The line that keeps getting quoted a lot today is, you know, he says, I am not focused on Facebook. Which, you know, it's a pretty badass line, honestly. Because it's just like, oh, yeah, Facebook's saying all this stuff about you. It's like, I'm not focused on them.

And Tim also said that he's shocked there's been so much of a pushback, which I don't believe. Right? They must have known that companies would be upset at them for doing this. Right? Come on. Yep. So as well as the app tracking transparency thing,

they did touch on a bunch of different areas. So they spoke about Apple's decision to remove Parler from the App Store. And Cook says he hopes that Parler would be able to do what's necessary to come back to the App Store in the future instead of more social networks is better. it is Apple policy that developers who are kicked out of the app store for violating the, the guidelines are welcome back once that they, once they fulfill the guidelines again. But as Kara Swisher had a followup about parlor, not wanting to do or not and have any control over what said and all of that.

It was one of those moments of like, well, yeah, but they're not going to do that it's like this is nice it's nice for you it's rich for you to say oh yeah we'd like to have them back if they'll moderate their content um knowing that they won't uh they touched on the legal fight with epic so they're going to be in court next month i believe it's an in-person trial with some Apple executives, some Epic executives. Personally, I'm looking forward to this. Cook basically was painting the

picture that most developers do not pay 30% to Apple. He was talking about free apps, subscription apps, and the 15% cut for small businesses. It says that over time, Apple's cut is just going down and the 15 cut for small businesses and says that over time apple's cut is just going down and the rules are applied equally this still stings with me i still don't like this part well and this is why apple has made some of the changes it's made is so that he can say this

yeah you're right actually that's right like we they made those changes and we're like oh they're making these changes because they're anticipating scrutiny and trials and and uh regulation and you know then it it enables tim cook to go out in an interview and say well look we're you know we all the price just keeps coming down we're we're you know we're we we don't do this in fact i was thinking um listening to your summary of it um more than when i heard the actual podcast i was thinking what could apple do to make epic even more angry than they already are and i thought i wonder if at some point apple will say first purchase of apps is 15 and the only thing we're going to do at 30% is

consumables, is digital consumables. I mean they could do that. Just to be like we're going to just focus it so no our rules are applied equally the only rules are about what this business, this one particular business model does. Because it's like

Kara brings up Amazon Prime Video right and about them always particular business model does because it's like cara brings up um amazon prime video right and about them always again 15 it's like oh yeah all of our video apps are 15 and she's like oh like netflix yeah i love that it's like yet the rules are applied equally but the rules aren't a natural being you make them right and you just arbitrarily decided that video streaming services would be 15 always you decided that so you could make any decision yeah the amazon one was it's like oh no there's no special case for amazon that's just a policy we made about video streaming services that applies largely just to amazon but other video streaming services could do it too these rules are equally applied to amazon

it's like okay the app store is an economic miracle that was quite a quote like well they have been beaten that drum for a long time right like there's always the there's the novelty check to developers on stage at the developer conference there's the press releases about this app thousand million sale and there's the press releases about economic impact and the number of people who are part of the app economy and like this is i'm not saying it's not true but this is a narrative that apple has been pushing for a long time and again one of the reasons it's doing that so that tim cook can say this and i am not doubting the massive change that they made right like the app store brought like i think it could be argued quite handily without the app store i wouldn't be doing what i'm doing right like it's not even just developers It's like the cultural change that apps

and the app store brought upon the world and all the different types of careers that it enabled. But just that phrase, I like bumped on it a little bit. I was like, oh, that's quite pompous. Like an economic miracle. Okay. We got some interesting details, though, as well. So every week, 100,000 apps go to app review,

and 40,000 of them are rejected. And one of the main reasons for this is that they either don't work or they don't work like they say they would. 40% of applications are rejected. Would you have expected it to be that high? I can't even judge these because we don't know what the details are.

Are these different apps or are these submissions? Are there 100,000 app submissions and 40,000 of those are rejected? I know plenty of app developers. They get things rejected all the time, sometimes for no good reason. And then they resubmit and then it gets approved, sometimes for really dumb reasons. Yeah, it'd be good to know how many of those 40 percent are reversed

what is the the like the secondary uh part of that you know what are these rejections actually permanent rejections or are they just like oh i had to change some of the metadata in the description i just don't i literally don't know what they're measuring here so i don't think i have much of an opinion't, I literally don't know what they're measuring here. So I don't think I have much of an opinion about it because I don't know what they're even claiming here. Other than to claim that you, what they're really saying here, the story is, well, I know you hear stories about bad things in the app store, but suffice it to say that we are exerting a lot of gatekeeping in order to curate the App Store

and make it safe for our users. And just look, 40% of the whatever this is are rejected. So look at the power of our creation. I'd say that kind of sidesteps the argument that they allow stuff into the App Store that they shouldn't. And it's unclear what they're even claiming here. But I think that's the case he's trying to make

is just to remind people that this is why Apple does what it does is it's protecting you from these apps that are bad or don't work or are lying to you. I recommend that people do listen to this interview if they haven't. And one of the reasons I would recommend this is for the little segment where they talk about future products. Because, I mean, I don't know about you,

but I felt like Tim wasn't totally solid here and stumbled in a couple of ways that if you looked into them enough uh it was kind of interesting like just the so basically they're talking about ar and he says that he's very excited about ar cara i love her confidence just starts talking about the mixed reality headset like just talks about it as if we all know it's happening and then tim starts talking about ar and saying like if we're in this conversation right now uh we could also see some charts and imagine if your listeners could see them as well and i'm kind of like see them tim where huh where am i seeing them they're doing they're doing a video chat right they're on um uh webex because our podcast

interviews we're seeing them on video and they're seeing us too right that's what they do um but it is a weird thing knowing that it's a audio podcast using that as an example is a little bit strange. What I love about it is Tim Cook, the very serious businessman who runs Apple, talking in an interview says, okay, like in a video chat, think it's like a FaceTime, right?

They're like, yeah, Kara, you and me, I see you, you see me, we talk, it's great.

But you know what would be greater? Is if I could wave my hand and put up a chart. Really, Tim? A chart? That's what he wants. It's just a chart. Let me show you the customer sat on the iPhone. Look at that.

Look at that number now. And he waves it away. Now it's gone. Like, I just, I love this little example as a, know it's probably not but like as a peek into tim cook's mind whereas like reality would be so much better if we could call up charts and have them float in the air around us while we're talking to other people i think i want to believe he thinks that i want to believe that that that is that is what the world needs to be is you know bring your data with you in fact

float it like a hologram that's what i want to see it it just felt to me that the discussion around this part was really i don't know like it just felt like it was really kind of to me anyway leaning a little towards this idea of like we're what we're working on something where you'll be able to see something right like it's this is this is where we're going now it didn't feel so much the usual like hey we don't talk about products in our future and who knows what the future may hold it seems a little bit more now like they are lifting the lid on this yeah i mean he's talked about it before but this is the thing it reminds me of and and you know everybody remember before the apple watch came out tim talking about how the wrist wearables is a big thing and the wrist is an area of particular interest like yeah this is what apple

does when they are when when there's talk in the market about what their product strategy is, but they haven't got anything to announce yet, they start to acknowledge their interest in a category. Because it doesn't give anything away about what the product is, but it does sort of acknowledge the fact that this reporting is going on and essentially that it's accurate, at least in the broadest sense, which is, you know, and this isn't new. He's been saying for a while now, of course, AR is an interest. And he was even, I would say, clearer about it here where it's very obviously there. They've got a product and he's not ready to talk about it, but he's ready to talk about all the reasons why AR is great. And then also the car.

A car project. So references he has respect for Tesla as a company. And then says, Carl's questioning him about cars, autonomy. And Tim says, we investigate many things internally. Many don't see the light of day. We'll see what Apple does.

Yeah. I like this because the context he's putting on the car project is, of course, we're looking at a car. Everybody knows we're looking at cars. But we don't always make products where we're looking at something in that area. It doesn't always turn into a product. And that's how he's setting the expectations about the car is he's not saying they haven't looked at and aren't looking at cars and she says you bought a an ai driving startup like come on and i appreciate that he doesn't really deny it he's like we look at lots of stuff it doesn't mean it's going to be a product and i honestly the impression i get is that's sort of where this product is, that the AR product is coming.

The car, they're working on it, but it's not at a point where they're certain that they're going to do it. And I think that is Apple's process. They're not even ready to be secretive about it yet. They're so early. They're willing to say, I don't know, maybe. And what's the, I think, Apple's famous secrecy, right, is about product detail and product secrecy. I think this is an acknowledgment just as that Apple Watch statement about the wrist being an area of interest was an acknowledgment that Apple is happy to talk about areas that they're enthusiastic about for the future.

That might be areas Apple's interested in. Like, it's willing to go that far, which is not something that was necessarily true before. I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think Steve Jobs said to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher on stage at the D conference back in the day, oh yeah, a bigger iPhone would be interesting, wouldn't it? You know, yes, tablet computing, very interesting.

I don't think he went even that far right um but tim cook's willing to go to that point but no further and i think this car statement is very much in line with what we think we know about this which is they're working on something but it's not really close and they're probably not even sure if it's a real thing yet he also said that he won't be ceo in 10 years time which is when you hear him say it it's like whoa hang on but then think 10 years is a long time right yeah he's this year is tim's 10th year of being ceo in august of this this year would have been 10 years. And so it's kind of like surprising and not surprising at the same time. Yeah, well I looked it up. He's 60.

And you're 60, you've been CEO of Apple, the world's largest in some measures company for a decade. And I think what he said was, the end isn't in sight. I don't have any immediate plans of any kind, but 10 years is a long time. And I'm thinking, and you're 70 in 10 years. And although 65 isn't the retirement age that it used to be, at the same time, he has obviously made a lot of money in a very high-stress job. I do wonder about his personality,

if he's really going to be able to retire, or if it's more like, just take a step back, do some corporate boards, do some philanthropy, and stop grinding quite as much. But he seems like a grinder. He'll probably be a grinder forever.

He would probably be on the board at Apple for as long as he's alive. Would not surprise me, right? Look at Bob Iger, right? That kind of thing, where there's a take a step, CEO, longtime CEO takes a step back, but is still around, at least for a while. That wouldn't surprise me.

But at the same time, yeah. I mean, does he want to be 20 years CEO of Apple and still working at Apple when he's 70? My guess is uh is no and it seems very clear that like that's he he doesn't know when he's gonna leave and it's not soon but he can't see him being there in 10 years and that's yeah you're right i i think i share what surprised me is that he didn't hedge about it no oh at all. That was the surprise. The surprising is not what he said, which is 10 years, essentially when I'm 70,

nah, I'll be retired by then. I'm surprised he said it. Instead of just saying, well, you know, you never know. I'm committed here. I think I'll be here for many more years. I don't know how many. I love my job. Who knows?

Right, but instead he was sort of like, yeah, I can't see it in 10 years. That's probably too much. And he did do the whole thing of like, you i i love it i can't this is again i understand from here it's like i just i love it so much here and i can't i don't have anything else i want to do and i can't imagine what else i would do and you know it's in the same way that like i could imagine someone like him still being ceo in 10 years time because if you're an ambitious person he's reached the top. There really isn't much further for him to go. There's nowhere to go from there.

Except politics. I was going to say unless he wants to be the Secretary of Commerce or something. Actually what I envision is he says, but imagine if we were in augmented reality I could bring up a chart about the average retirement age and how it's changed over time but I can't what a shame but you know I was like

I'm intrigued I mean you know Apple obviously has this history which is odd right their CEO ship as a company it's just been a very strange path to this point that was they just turned 45 apple as a company i think yeah sounds about right which means that tim is fast approaching like a quarter or whatever no it's not fast approaching but kind of in or

around and you know you look at what steve did and he stepped down as ceo i mean he was in ill health but there is at least that idea of he tim could one day just stop being ceo and just be involved in the things he wants to be involved in which i imagine him doing uh i think maybe sooner rather than later who knows we'll see Because how long do you want to do one job? You know? Right. With the same set of responsibilities. Ten years is a really long time. And I'd imagine if you add in the time when he was a COO and operations guy, like he's been grinding. The truth is, he is a grinder. It's always going to be a part of him.

But he's been grinding for a very long time and you know does he deserve the ability to step off the treadmill at some point not literally he'll always be on the treadmill because he's so but like the the work treadmill a little bit you know go to more college football games uh make some charts and show them to people in reality like He just becomes head of customer satisfaction. It's like his dream job, but no one would let him do it before. That makes sense, right? I think

you want a little reward after you've reached the top. I think it's not unreasonable at all. I'm just surprised that he said it out loud because it will begin a larger conversation about succession planning and Apple and all that. But I do appreciate that he said, you know, nobody get excited. It's not going to happen soon. I just, you know, 10 years is a very long time, and I don't see myself doing this job in 10 years.

Yeah, if you imagine people like the aforementioned John Tarnas listening today, People like the aforementioned John Ternus listening to the interview and being like, oh, yes, I'll take it. Because he was one of those people referencing that Bloomberg article, right? It's like this guy could be the CEO one day. Today, the executive web page. Tomorrow, the world. This is a short interview, really, considering the amount of stuff covered. It's like 30-something minutes. I will say it's one of my favorite tim cook interviews because it it was much more

conversational and plus kara swisher knows what she's talking about where tim is usually in environments where it's more mainstream media and she presses him in just the right way to get some of the answers that she wants so So I really liked it. I really recommend it. She's the best. And they have a rapport. They've talked a bunch at different times and different venues. Reference having lunch one day, right? That was like a cute little

thing. That's a good, they have a rapport. Yeah. And she's a really good interviewer. And I would say, I think Tim Cook has gotten so good at this stuff that he wasn't 10 years ago. So, yeah. This week's episode is brought to you by PDF Pen from our friends at Smile.

Does your PDF editor allow you to secure documents? Do OCR scanning, so even images become readable and searchable? Does it let you fill out and sign forms? Does it allow you to do all of that whilst also on the go and at great price? PDF Pen does all of this. PDF Pen is the all-purpose PDF editor that allows you to improve your workflow and productivity, add signatures, text, and images, make changes, correct typos, and so much more. If you work at all with PDFs, you need PDFPen.

You can also keep everything in sync because PDFPen and PDFPen Pro on the Mac also work with PDFPen for iPad and iPhone for seamless editing across devices of cloud services such as iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and more. This is something I do all the time. No matter what device I'm using, I can sign contracts. I sign contracts on my iPhone sometimes using PDFPen Pro, just using my finger. Super

easy. I can zoom in and out. I love it. I have been a big fan of this product for years. I deal with PDFs a lot, lots of contracts and stuff like that that we need to deal with. And I would be lost without PDFPen. One of the things that I really enjoy is if you add in some text and you're dragging it around, it creates these automatic guidelines to match up with other signatures on a page or lines on a page. Like it's because it's using the OCR to work out where to line things up, which is really easy. So you can just add text in and it will help you line it up. It's really, really cool. You can learn more about PDFPen and PDFPen Pro at pdfpen.com slash podcast. That's pdfpen.com slash podcast. A thanks to PDFPen from Smile for their

support of this show and RelayFM. Let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to finish out this week's episode. And the first comes from Chadwick chadwick says on last week's episode jason referred to inserting a quote bunch of tks when writing to remind him that he needed to check something before publishing what does this mean um that was a little easter egg for people out there and i i phrased it in a way that you didn't need to ask, but I guess people asked. In journalism, it is common for a whole bunch of things that are used by journalists to mark stuff as not being for public viewing. And I believe the tradition is they're all misspelled. They're all things that don't come up in actual language very often in English anyway.

And the idea there is if you write, so like my, uh, the year after I left, it wasn't on my watch. My college newspaper had, uh, they were laying out their sports page and they had a bunch of fake headlines.

And the headlines read like real headlines. Like, I believe the one that was particularly bad was track pulls up lame. But they're all joke headlines. Because the stories weren't in yet. And what happened is the stories came in and I think they even updated the headlines. But there were two versions of the page. There was the page that had the bad headlines on it and the page that had the real content on it that wasn't fake and just placeholder stuff. And the person pasting up the page couldn't tell the difference and thought that the fake one was real.

This is why you don't do that. This is why you have your headlines have TK in them, or question marks, or other things that are misspelled. And so a tradition in journalism is you put these markers in that everybody knows means they're not real, and don't send that to the internet. Don't put that in the paper. Don't do it. TK stands for, I believe, to come, except with a K. Why? Because TK is not a letter combination that is common. And it became a standard thing to refer to missing information in stories. So you might be writing a story and you need a comment from somebody.

And when you're writing on your story, it says, you know, company comment TK or name of person TK. Or sometimes I have this happen where I'm writing on my iPad and there's a thing I need to look up on the Mac. I need to very specifically say like, use this menu to go to this thing,

to go to this thing. And I'm not on a mac right then and i'll just i don't want to break my writing flow and i'll just put in like menu mac menu tk um other things the journalists do headlines are often referred to as heads h-e-d uh the secondary headline is a deck d-e-k and the lead the first paragraph is lede paragraphs by the way are graphs g-r-a-f these are all journalism terms but they're also misspelled intentionally so that when you see them you know don't print that so that so the tk's thing is like literally uh it's it literally, this isn't done yet. This isn't ready.

Fill this in later. And it also has become to mean, I think for a lot of journalists over time, it's funny because one, it's your own personal struggles of, oh boy, I haven't finished this thing yet. I still got all these TKs in there. And also, if you've ever worked with somebody who's a procrastinator or is very late with their work or misses deadlines, it can become a kind of rueful joke about that. We had a person who blew all their deadlines in journalism school, and we had a going away thing for our professor who was leaving the journalism

school at the end of the semester. And one of the jokes in the thing that we made for him was that there was a whole little box that was by one of our fellow students who was always late with their work. And the box had a big headline and a picture and then a large space for a story. And it just said, story TK. And we all had a good laugh. And I remember it all this time later

because it was pretty funny. Anyway, that's the story of the TKs. It just means it's a placeholder. And before I worked in my college newspaper, I would do it with pretty funny. Anyway, that's the story of the TKs. It just means it's a placeholder. And before I worked in my college newspaper, I would do it with question marks. I just have a bunch of question marks. Because again, very clearly, not a thing. But TK is what is just generally used culturally.

I also use brackets a lot. I put three or four brackets around a note to myself as a way of like, I'm not going to miss. I've seen this. That there's you know i'm not gonna miss this that there's the minute you've seen this because you've read my drafts yeah i'll often like do multi brackets and notes to myself and that's because that part is um it will jump out at me there's there's no mark down for four brackets it's just like hey uh this part's not done the more you need to remember, the more brackets there are.

Yeah, exactly. 20 brackets. Eight brackets, 20 brackets. Oh boy, that's a bad one. I guess TK is particularly useful because it's easier to search too, right? Like if you're searching a document. Yeah, well, that's it. It's an uncommon letter combination

and that's part of the reason that that exists. Mikal asks, last week you were answering the question of which iPad Pro somebody should buy, but you didn't consider the iPad Air. Was there any reason for that? It was an oversight. I mean, I was just thinking about comparing the iPad Pros,

because that's usually the way that you would compare the iPads. But of course, the iPad Air does fit more in the iPad Pro bracket at the moment. You know, we spoke about this when it came out. I want to give just a quick overview again for like why you may or may not want to consider the iPad Air instead of an iPad Pro. So looks very similar, right? Has very comparable specs.

It has in some ways a more modern processor. The design is great. It has magic keyboard capability, compatibility, I should say, and works with all the things you would want. It has the cool Apple Pencil 2 charging on the top. It lacks ProMotion, which is the high refresh rate display.

It has two speakers instead of four. Touch ID instead of Face ID. That could be a pro or a con. I would say having used the iPad specifically, the iPad is best for Face ID. Face ID works better on the iPad than on the iPhone for me. The iPad Air starts at $599

instead of $799 like the iPad Pro. But that $599 is for 64 gigabytes of storage, which I think is unacceptable on an iPad. It maxes out at 256 gigabytesabyte of storage which is then 150 cheaper than the 11 inch ipad pro rather than 200 so it's a good deal not a home run uh but yeah they asked about comparing the ipad pros which is why we compared the ipad pro the ipad i was gonna say yeah a much shorter answer which is but they didn't ask about the iPad Air. I know, but I answer your question. I do wish I

would have at least brought up the iPad Air as another consideration. For me, the iPad Pro is still a better device, and I think worth the $150 premium because the $200 difference, I don't think people should be buying a 64 gigabyte iPad. I just

do not. I think you want to put video on this thing eventually when you're going somewhere and you're just going to run out of space so fast. So I think that you would want to look at the 256 and then you've got $150 difference. And I think for me, the speakers, the ProMotion display and the Face ID warrant the premium. But it's up to you

rajiv asks do you think that apple should revert the ios 14 method used to input and adjust time and go back to the scroll wheels wow i don't think i have much of an opinion about this i think it's a little clunky. I think they did it for compatibility reasons on the Mac, but on a touch device, I thought the wheels were actually pretty good. And I have run into that thing where suddenly instead of picking from a calendar picker, I'm typing dates into a date field.

That's no good. So I don't know all the details here. It doesn't come up with me a lot. I haven't formed a really deep opinion about it. But whatever they did isn't better. It's just different. And I think they did it primarily because they wanted some compatibility across devices. But it's a lesser interface if

you're on a touch device i guess i would say i my preference is the current version i okay i much prefer i like being i like being able to type the time in um and i like getting the full date picker so i can swipe through months and hit the date that i want and also see dates what day they are in the week and the calendar view rather than the uh tumble rolling things you can again i know you know this but i will just say before we to to alleviate the follow-up it is kind of possible to scroll the current version but it's difficult it's nowhere near as comfortable to do i do do it sometimes um but i will typically type the time so here here's my answer for rajiv do i think apple should revert no i don't i think they should make it better but i don't think they

should revert it and go back to the old way no i think refinements of the current version will be better than going back to the old version because I think, honestly, I'd never really thought about it. But as soon as those spinning, tumbling things were gone, I was super happy because they're so clunky and old and they should think of new ways to do things. Whether this current way is the right way or not is up for debate. But that is like one of the oldest paradigms of ios design that's still stuck around we just um blew the minds of people in the discord which is i think one of my criticisms of the design is that although you can spin those numbers it's so easy to tap in them and then you're doing text entry which i think is not the best although people can differ about that um so one

of the things i would say is can we make that more discoverable yeah it's not not very discoverable at all and stitch asked what is a feature that apple could put on the new ipad pro that will blow you away thunderbolt ports on the side instead of the bottom um or bottom instead of the side depends on your orientation i guess but like more horizontalness is that a thing um blow me away i don't know you've got something in the doc that i have to i mean look if we're looking for blow me away right let's blow me away which is yeah what if what if they did like like classic in mac os 10 where you could sort of like run a mac in a you know just to have a mac view that's like mac os right so mac os 10 where you could sort of like run a mac in a you know just have a mac view that's like mac os right so mac os blow me away is mac os support right that's that's part one uh blow me away part two is a full external display mode that uses windowing for ipad os apps

oh windowing yeah so i think that's my number one wish feature is proper external display mode, however it is formed. That's the one. I'm not sure that's really enabled by hardware, really. But it might be a new feature of an iPad Pro, though. You know what I mean? And that's fine with me. Yeah.

Which I think that if they do a full external display thing, they will do it. It's like, hey, this is part of the new iPad Pro. And the windowing thing was something that I thought up today of like, I was thinking about the external display mode and was thinking if I would kind of want to be able to take more advantage of a much larger screen. And I don't think just making single view iPad apps full screen is what I want because I don't like full screen mode on the Mac. Whilst I also have mentioned before, I find Windows to be a bit messy.

It is better than on a large screen than just using one app at a time in my own personal experience. Yeah, we argued about this a long time ago on a previous episode where you basically said windowing feels old and they should come up with something different. Yes. i'm not entirely convinced that the reason we haven't gotten proper external display mode on ipad os is not that they have been struggling with finding the right way to handle ipad os apps displaying on a very large monitor right like how do you do

that in a way that makes sense and it probably requires if not pure windowing some sort of snapped or tiled you know if you can imagine fitting two or three different ipad apps on that external display do they appear as little windows that are literally just the screen size of an ipad um and do they kind of like magnetically snap together and things. It's a hard problem. And, uh, getting an external out on an iPad is actually not only can you do it now, but I'm sure they could do it without mirroring now. I'm sure they could, but what goes on that screen? And right now it would be one or two apps at full screen and it's no good.

Like that's no good. That's not good enough. And so I think that's where the hurdle is, is the UI in the software for how you manage apps running on a big external screen. But that would be my number one too. Although running macOS on an iPad is hilarious. And yes, that would be awesome.

Sure. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the episode, just send out a tweet with the hashtag askupgrade or use question mark askupgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you get access to if you sign up for Upgrade Plus, where you will also get longer ad-free

versions of every episode. Just go to GetUpgradePlus.com to find out more and sign up. Thank you so much if you do. I would also like to thank our sponsors for this week's episode. That is the fine folk over at PDFPen from Smile, Pingdom, and Memberful. Jason, before we go, would you like to tell our listeners about another RelayFM show?

Yeah, you should check out Top Four. This is hosted by the Arments, Tiff, and Marco. You may know Marco from being Tiff's husband. And they make Top Four lists of just about anything. I've been on a few times. We did a member special where we listed our top four salad items, items that go in a salad. We did a classic one where Lauren and I joined Tiff and Marco,

and we tasted at the time every flavor but one of LaCroix seltzers. Oh, boy. There was a lot of burping after that. It's a really funny, fun thing listening to husband and wife trying out all sorts of strange things and then ranking them in a top four list that is often not for long. That's part of the joy of it. So indulge in the sheer randomness of top four. Check it out, relay.fm slash top four. it out relay.fm top four it's fun it's fun and don't you need more fun in your life or just search for top four wherever you get your podcasts if you want to find jason online you can go to sixcolors.com and the incomparable.com and jason

hosts many shows here on relay.fm as do i jason is at jay snell online i am at imike i am yke and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. This is me saying goodbye with a chart that also says goodbye in augmented reality.